Leaving so soon?

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El Cortez crop

This card, found in Lloyd’s apartment — along with a staggeringly diverse collection of books, manuscripts, DVDs, BluRays, laserdiscs, vinyl, paper ephemera, action figures, his Western saddle and the bust of Elvis, among much, much more — is a nice reminder that when Lloyd first moved to Las Vegas, he stayed for a considerable time in the El Cortez. He loved that it was the oldest casino still operating in Las Vegas, in all its dingy glamour, its façade unchanged, the first casino Bugsy Siegel owned.

The card of course also reminds us that Lloyd did leave too soon. Perhaps we can extend his stay here on mardecortesbaja. Please feel free to suggest in the comments how best we could try to do that.

For starters, here’s a link to the precursor set of his on-line writings, Nowhere Confidential, dating from his 2004 arrival in Fabulous Nowhere into 2006, as he was about to start mardecortesbaja, and containing links to even earlier collections of posts, among them the Report from Gotham and the Report from the Beach, when he was living in Ventura, California.

6 thoughts on “Leaving so soon?”

  1. Love this! Thanks, Cotty. Link to Nowhere Confidential is particularly cool.

  2. I would love to buy some of his Bob Dylan records if they are for sale.

  3. I stayed at the El Cortez a couple years ago and loved it too. By coincidence, a picture I took there is currently my computer desktop. It’ll be even more meaningful the next time I drop by there.

  4. A while ago, I sent Lloyd a description of a cartoon in The New Yorker of two angels heading for the next cloud, where another angel in a fedora is singing with a band. One angel en route says, “I never in a million years thought I’d hear Sinatra singing “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Here’s Bob Dylan in his Sinatra mode, singing on the penultimate Letterman show last night. Lloyd never sold me on Bob Dylan’s Sinatra record. But he was right! Check out the following clip of Dylan on the penultimate Letterman show last night:
    http://www.rollingstone.com/music/videos/watch-bob-dylans-rare-late-night-performance-on-letterman-20150520

  5. Correct punctuation: “I never in a million years thought I’d hear Sinatra singing ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’”

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