At the Saltgrass Steak House, a favorite stop on any cross-country drive that takes me through Amarillo, Texas. Just across the way is a Country Inn that has smoking rooms and good wifi.
I was served by Kelly, an adorable young lass who was working her first night as a waitress, hoping to land a permanent position at the restaurant. When I told her she was doing a great job she pumped her fist and said, “Yes!”
Texas.
Just Texas . . .
The room and the wine are cheap, the French fries are cold — trouble is my business.
A dream . . .
The painting above lives in the New Orleans home of my friends Adrienne and Bill. It’s by Rebecca Rebouché, a Louisiana artist:
I got to meet her on my recent visit to New Orleans and see more of her work at the Jazz Fest, where she had a booth.
You can see a selection of her work at her web site — Rebecca Rebouché. It uses folk motifs and surreal juxtapositions to create an eerie combination of the whimsical and the mystical. It’s sweet, with dark and unsettling undertows — like flowers found deep among the twists and turns of a haunted bayou.
It’s all quite wonderful, but Spoon Dress is the one that stayed with me most insistently on my journey home, mixing with the memories of my magical time in The Crescent City — the girls in their summer dresses dancing to sinuous swamp music, a spoon breaking the crust of the legendary bread pudding soufflé at Commander’s Palace.
[All images © Rebecca Rebouché]
I feel giddy already.
The greatest, or possibly the dumbest, road movie ever made . . .
This is not one of the great Hollywood epics but, boy, is it fun. If you watch it on a decent-sized TV in the Blu-ray edition by Twilight Time, the lunatic spectacle of it all will carry you comfortably through its general silliness. You can bask in the technical virtuosity of the 20th-Century Fox studio at its zenith, marvel at director Michael Curtiz’s elegant professionalism, and gaze in awe at what stars could do with less than stellar material . . . and at how non-stars, like the ill-chosen leading man Edmund Purdom, could be given a kind of imputed charisma by their surroundings. The whole thing is just a hoot from start to finish.
Elsewhere on this site Paul Zahl (of The Zahl File) has written a more sympathetic evaluation of the film — Walking In Memphis — with some fascinating observations on Jack Kerouac, who saw it when it first came out and hated it!
[Let me take this opportunity to apologize for the erratic formatting of many old posts here -- the unavoidable by-product of a switch to a new blogging platform. I am trying to regularize the formatting of these old posts to the degree that it's possible, but it will take me some time to get around to all of them.]
Kendra Elliott and the three Js take a superficial look at deep focus . . .