Author Archives: Lloydville

About Lloydville

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

SPOON DRESS

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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]

THE EGYPTIAN

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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.]

ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE

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The first time I ever heard Levon Helm’s voice was on a jukebox in a bar in New York City in the summer of 1968. That voice took me home, back to the South, where I was born. The song was “The Weight”, and I’d never heard anything quite like it. My friends and I were startled by it, put another quarter in the machine and played it again. The record sounded like roots music, sort of, like Dylan, sort of — like the past and the future tripping off in a graceful dance, in perfect harmony with each other. You got used to surprises in 1968 — but hearing this record was one of the most delightful of them. It made me think, “America is going to be all right.”

And maybe some sweet day you will walk that Milky Way . . .

Goodbye, Levon, and thanks.

MONO+MONO

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Behind this intriguing facade in New York’s East Village my friend Jae Song discovered an even more intriguing establishment.  He writes:

I was in a real bad mood the other day.  My motorbike broke down and I had to get it towed — AGAIN! — and it’s costing me a pretty penny.

I didn’t want to do anything but stay home by myself and watch a movie but I forced myself out to a birthday party — it was at a place called MONO+MONO . . . a Korean-ish restaurant (owned and run by all total hipster Koreans) that also only plays analog music (thus the name.)

It’s ALL VINYL — they have 30,000 vintage records — they take up the entire wall, up to the 20′ high (or more perhaps) ceiling of the place, behind glass.  Only the DJ can access them of course.

And the spicy fried chicken . . . it is . . . insanely crazy good.  It’s not fried chicken as we know it — it’s that super lightly buttery double-fried Korean style chicken . . . outside layer that is impossibly thin and crunchy and juicy inside — and it’s dry to the touch yet has tons of saucy flavor, tastes like it’s dripping with sauce.

I have to say the music was great all night long.  You see people moving in their seats — if they had a dance floor everyone would have been dancing by the end of the night — warm fun upbeat jazz on vinyl, coming out of tube amps, I suspect (they had old tubes as decoration.)

So . . . I was glad I went out — it made me happy.

DUET

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Peggy Lee lived near Frank Sinatra in Hollywood and, according to Sinatra’s valet, would come spend the night with Sinatra when she was feeling down.  Sinatra was not that attracted to her, again according to the valet, but felt that making love to her was a form of service to a friend.  Nice work if you can get it.

You can sense the intimacy in the televised performance above, which is kind of sublime.  Lee and Sinatra were both brilliant at subtle off-beat phrasing.  With Sinatra it was usually in the service of the lyric, its meaning and emotion — with Lee more often in the service of a cool attitude, a hip style.  It’s wonderful to hear them playing off each other in the clip, each trying to anticipate and complement what the other is going to do.  It’s a bit like jazz improvisation, or good sex.

(Clip via Facebook friend Jerry Rosenblum, dish via George Jacobs, the valet . . .)