Author Archives: Lloydville

About Lloydville

I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from.

LOS ANGELES NOIR

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My hatred of modern-day “L. A.” (as some people like to call it) is equaled only by my love of Los Angeles (with a hard ‘g’ please) before my time, the 1950s and earlier.

From Bryan Castañeda comes a link to the wonderful footage above, apparently filmed to be used as process shots for the 1948 movie Shockproof, directed by Douglas Sirk.

In the early days of cinema, itinerant cameramen would have collected footage like this as “actualities” for exhibition to audiences spellbound by the sheer beauty and fascination of tracking shots depicting their own or distant cities. By 1948, the spell of such shots was broken, at least as a stand-alone commercial product, relegated to material for back-screen projections, but the footage recorded is just as beautiful and fascinating as that collected by the cinematographers of the Edwardian era.

IGOR

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Igor Stravinsky liked to present himself as an arty, classical dude, but he was totally funky — as out there as Smokey Robinson or Bob Dylan.  He was always looking for the groove.

AN ODD TRADITION

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I attended a venerable New England prep-school (above) called St. Paul’s. It numbers among its graduates several famous people, among them John Kerry and Gary Trudeau, but the graduate I most admire, from the class of 1877, is Owen Wister:

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Wister, who was from Philadelphia, went on to attended Harvard College, where he befriended Theodore Roosevelt, and like Roosevelt he traveled about on the Western frontier and became enamored of that region.  Also like Roosevelt, he became a friend of Frederic Remington, the Western artist.

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In 1902, Wister wrote what is now considered the first classic cowboy novel, The Virginian — probably the most influential work of Western fiction ever published.  It introduced the line “When you call me that, SMILE” as well as a host of other Western scenes and themes and types that would become clichés in time.

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It was enormously successful commercially, and remains readable today — an extremely entertaining work of popular fiction which helped fuel the craze for all things Western that gripped America around the turn of the last century.  It preceded by only a year The Great Train Robbery, the one-reel movie that almost singehandedly established the story film as a viable commercial form, helping to create the genre of the movie Western in the process.

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St. Paul’s is not the sort of place you’d think of as a breeding ground for authors of Western fiction, but every century or so it produces one — like the author of Fourteen Western Stories, now available in a paperback as well as a Kindle edition.

CANNED GOODS ON THE FRONTIER

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Underwood Deviled Ham, which has been around since 1868, was a popular item on the Western frontier, along with many other canned goods.  In 1902, in his novel The Virginian, Owen Wister wrote:

The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth.

RIDING POINT

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LloydReadsHisBook

Sorry — I mean reading proof, for the forthcoming paperback edition of my book.  It’s sort of the same thing.

Meanwhile, a new customer review of the Kindle edition on Amazon:

Mr. Fonvielle’s characterizations in “Fourteen Western Stories” people a world that is uncannily life-like, yet they are drawn from the edges, the strange and fragile limits, of human experience, and they seem to hunger for an escape from shadow, for a return to times and days that, for them, seem to have never existed.

Characters drive these stories

Click on the image to enlarge.