Greenville, Mississippi, Eats

The Daughter and I spent a night in Greenville, MS, last month. It took us 3 hours to get down there and we would only be there a day, but during that short time we experienced some fun food. The night we got there we ate at Frostop because I remembered the Frostop that used to be here in Memphis:

photo from OvertonHighSchool1965.com

The one in Greenville is a combination of Frostop and Pasquales:

We each ordered a calzone:

and it was the largest calzone I'd ever seen! Much too big to eat, even though it was very good. If we are ever there again we will order the burger that Frostop is more known for.

The next morning we ate the free breakfast at the hotel. The Daughter was involved at a work event over lunch, so I was on my own for that meal. I found Jim's Cafe, an old-fashioned diner downtown:

I had the Thursday special, which was a wonderful tuna salad on lettuce with pickle and tomato (see my coffee?):

I took a photo of the front and one of the back of the menu:

Yelp gives it 4 1/2 out of 5 stars with 3 reviews. Trip Advisor gives it 4 out of 5 stars with 5 reviews.

There was street art around this restaurant:

On our way out of town late that afternoon, my daughter treated me to dinner at Doe's Eat Place:

I had driven past it and had no idea this would be anything other than fun local color. This was the interior viewed from our table in the back of the restaurant:

It turned out that this place specializes in expensive steaks. Very expensive steaks. There's no hard copy menu, and the waitress listed the offerings and prices for us, adding that it was permitted to split any of the entrees. We split their smallest steak (a 10-ounce filet) with iced tea, and then we had cheesecake and coffee for dessert. The total was almost $78, not counting the tip. Wow! But now we know how steak is supposed to taste. The restaurant is famous and has won awards. There's a Wikipedia entry here that discloses the history, including why you enter through the kitchen.

Trip Advisor gives it a score of 4 out of 5 with 151 reviews, with dissenting reviews focusing on the steep prices and rough neighborhood and lack of fancy decor. Some people don't appreciate atmosphere. Yelp gives it 4 1/2 out of 5 stars, and bad reviews here also focus on the restaurant's "shabby". atmosphere. RoadFood.com says,

Located on the wrong side of town in the back rooms of a dilapidated grocery store, Doe's does not look like a restaurant, much less a great restaurant. ...the steaks are some of the best you will eat anywhere. 100% Approval Rating

Visit the Delta has a 3-minute video showing the owner cooking steaks and greeting customers in the kitchen:

I got a big kick out of all of my Greenville dining experiences.

Bleubeard and Elizabeth's blog is having a party to celebrate 2 years of T Stands for Tuesday gatherings. I've been researching Artist Trading Cards all week, reading web sites and watching youtube videos, and I have made a few ATCs so I can participate in the trade. Elizabeth may have created a monster, though. These little pieces are fun to make!

Shake

Shake:

sung in 1993 at the Porretta Soul Festival in Italy by James Govan, who died last year on July 18th. He was a regular performer on Beale Street for many years.

Sound of the Mountain

Sound of the Mountain, adapted from the novel by Yasunari Kawabata, is a 1954 film directed by Mikio Naruse and starring Setsuko Hara. The story is of a man whose daughter's marriage has failed and who sees his son's marriage also failing, both due to infidelity. Japan has such a treasure of directors with such consistently good movies. Here's yet another film worth watching and then watching again.

Subscribers can watch it on Hulu. I watched it when they offered it free to everyone, but they don't offer them free longer than a week or so. I can't find a trailer or even a short clip online, which seems a shame. There's nothing like seeing a bit of a film to make you want to see the whole thing. I found this picture on Instagram:

Senses of Cinema says it is "possibly Naruse’s most perfect entry in his preferred genre of shomin-geki (films about the daily lives of the lower middle-classes), possessed of a measured pace and a melancholy, lyrical undercurrent." Slant Magazine says it's the director's favorite of his films. Rotten Tomatoes doesn't have a critics score, but the audience rating is 94%.

Top 100 Movies of All Time

Cahiers du Cinéma (via Open Culture) has a list of the Top 100 Movies of All Time:

1. Citizen Kane – Orson Welles
2. The Night of the Hunter – Charles Laughton
3. The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) – Jean Renoir
4. Sunrise – Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
5. L’Atalante – Jean Vigo
6. M – Fritz Lang
7. Singin’ in the Rain – Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
8. Vertigo – Alfred Hitchcock
9. Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) – Marcel Carné
10. The Searchers – John Ford
11. Greed – Erich von Stroheim
12. Rio Bravo – Howard Hawkes
13. To Be or Not to Be – Ernst Lubitsch
14. Tokyo Story – Yasujiro Ozu
15. Contempt (Le Mépris) – Jean-Luc Godard
16. Tales of Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari) – Kenji Mizoguchi
17. City Lights – Charlie Chaplin
18. The General – Buster Keaton
19. Nosferatu the Vampire – Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
20. The Music Room – Satyajit Ray
21. Freaks – Tod Browning
22. Johnny Guitar – Nicholas Ray
23. The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) – Jean Eustache
24. The Great Dictator – Charlie Chaplin
25. The Leopard (Le Guépard) – Luchino Visconti
26. Hiroshima, My Love – Alain Resnais
27. The Box of Pandora (Loulou) – Georg Wilhelm Pabst
28. North by Northwest – Alfred Hitchcock
29. Pickpocket – Robert Bresson
30. Golden Helmet (Casque d’or) – Jacques Becker
31. The Barefoot Contessa – Joseph Mankiewitz
32. Moonfleet – Fritz Lang
33. Diamond Earrings (Madame de…) – Max Ophüls
34. Pleasure – Max Ophüls
35. The Deer Hunter – Michael Cimino
36. L’Avventura– Michelangelo Antonioni
37. Battleship Potemkin – Sergei M. Eisenstein
38. Notorious – Alfred Hitchcock
39. Ivan the Terrible – Sergei M. Eisenstein
40. The Godfather – Francis Ford Coppola
41. Touch of Evil – Orson Welles
42. The Wind – Victor Sjöström
43. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick
44. Fanny and Alexander – Ingmar Bergman
45. The Crowd – King Vidor
46. 8 1/2 – Federico Fellini
47. La Jetée – Chris Marker
48. Pierrot le Fou – Jean-Luc Godard
49. Confessions of a Cheat (Le Roman d’un tricheur) – Sacha Guitry
50. Amarcord – Federico Fellini
51. Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) – Jean Cocteau
52. Some Like It Hot – Billy Wilder
53. Some Came Running – Vincente Minnelli
54. Gertrud – Carl Theodor Dreyer
55. King Kong – Ernst Shoedsack & Merian J. Cooper
56. Laura – Otto Preminger
57. The Seven Samurai – Akira Kurosawa
58. The 400 Blows – François Truffaut
59. La Dolce Vita – Federico Fellini
60. The Dead – John Huston
61. Trouble in Paradise – Ernst Lubitsch
62. It’s a Wonderful Life – Frank Capra
63. Monsieur Verdoux – Charlie Chaplin
64. The Passion of Joan of Arc – Carl Theodor Dreyer
65. À bout de souffle – Jean-Luc Godard
66. Apocalypse Now – Francis Ford Coppola
67. Barry Lyndon – Stanley Kubrick
68. La Grande Illusion – Jean Renoir
69. Intolerance – David Wark Griffith
70. A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne) – Jean Renoir
71. Playtime – Jacques Tati
72. Rome, Open City – Roberto Rossellini
73. Livia (Senso) – Luchino Visconti
74. Modern Times – Charlie Chaplin
75. Van Gogh – Maurice Pialat
76. An Affair to Remember – Leo McCarey
77. Andrei Rublev – Andrei Tarkovsky
78. The Scarlet Empress – Joseph von Sternberg
79. Sansho the Bailiff – Kenji Mizoguchi
80. Talk to Her – Pedro Almodóvar
81. The Party – Blake Edwards
82. Tabu – Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
83. The Bandwagon – Vincente Minnelli
84. A Star Is Born – George Cukor
85. Mr. Hulot’s Holiday – Jacques Tati
86. America, America – Elia Kazan
87. El – Luis Buñuel
88. Kiss Me Deadly – Robert Aldrich
89. Once Upon a Time in America – Sergio Leone
90. Daybreak (Le Jour se lève) – Marcel Carné
91. Letter from an Unknown Woman – Max Ophüls
92. Lola – Jacques Demy
93. Manhattan – Woody Allen
94. Mulholland Dr. – David Lynch
95. My Night at Maud’s (Ma nuit chez Maud) – Eric Rohmer
96. Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) – Alain Resnais
97. The Gold Rush – Charlie Chaplin
98. Scarface – Howard Hawks
99. Bicycle Thieves – Vittorio de Sica
100. Napoléon – Abel Gance

Wow, quite a list! I've seen the ones in bold print and have some of the others on my to-be-watched list. This list would make a great to-be-watched list on its own.

Rock House Cave Paintings

They promised us cave art, honestly they did, but we were blind to it. We saw graffiti aplenty, and it left us wondering how old graffiti must be to qualify as "art". 1954?

1929?

1916?

It'll have to do, because we never saw the drawings illustrated on the display. We enjoyed the walk anyway.

I thought the turtle rocks were interesting:

The Younger Son saw a copperhead snake on this hike, and all I saw was another blue-tailed skink and some birds. I was jealous!

Rogue Island

Rogue Island is the 2010 Edgar Award-winning first novel of Bruce DeSilva. You can read a sample chapter at the author's web site. This was a fast, fun, easy read. I enjoyed the writing, which I found reminiscent of some of the older hard-boiled crime fiction I've read, but this had a lighter touch and a great sense of humor without detracting from the crime and corruption.

from the back of the book:

Liam Mulligan is as old school as a newspaper man gets. His beat is Providence, Rhode Island, and he knows every street and alley. He knows the priests and prostitutes, the cops and street thugs. He knows the mobsters and politicians —who are pretty much one and the same.

Times are changing fast. Corruption runs amok, and what a reporter has to do in the name of competition is becoming laughable. But when Mulligan realizes someone is systematically burning down his old neighborhood, he ignores his bosses and his budding relationship to try to figure out the firebug's identity. People he knows and loves are perishing in the flames and the public is on the verge of panic. With the whole city of Providence on his back, Mulligan must weed through a wildly colorful array of characters to find the truth.

favorite quotes:

As my favorite philosopher, Kinky Friedman, once said, "In the sky of every love affair are little tickets to hell, falling like confetti from the stars."

...

Preachers say forgiveness is good for the soul. That it does more for the person who forgives than for the one who is forgiven, cleansing the mind of anger and resentment. What a load of crap.

...
Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and The Washington Post have positive reviews. NPR has an interview with the author.

Petit Jean Park Cedar Falls Overlook

There are two ways to get to the overlook. One is by way of a boardwalk from a parking lot off the park road and the other is a 1/2 mile round-trip hike from Mather Lodge. We tried both ways, and I enjoyed each perspective. From the boardwalk:

From the trail:

I've heard some people have been disappointed in the waterfall depending on what time of year they've gone. It's definitely recommended to go in the spring or fall when there's been rain. Our early June trip gave us a wonderful experience.

The Younger Son took some video from the boardwalk:

Qahwa Coffee Bar

Qahwa is a coffee shop on the ground floor of the historic Claridge House Hotel (now condominiums). The Claridge House was built in 1924, closed in 1968, and didn't re-open until 1980 when it was renovated and turned into apartments. It was converted into condominiums in 2004, and there are a few units available if you'd like to live there. Located in downtown Memphis on N. Main Street, we could see the plaza fountains from our table:

I had a double espresso and a banana nut muffin, and The Daughter had an Americano and a chocolate muffin:

It was quite good, and the inside was fun:

You can sit at a table that's inside a safe:

Yelp gives it 4.5 out of 5 stars. Urban Spoon gives it a score of 94%. Trip Advisor has 4 out of 5 stars.

We lingered over the coffee a bit and then walked next door to see the QuiltSurround installation at City Hall:

The panels are made out of recycled city signs and hide City Hall's heating and cooling system.

I'm linking to other posts at Bleubeard and Elizabeth's T Tuesday gathering.

Tryin' to Love Two

Tryin' to Love Two:

by Memphian William Bell, who will be celebrating a birthday on the 16th.

Summertime

Summertime is a 1955 film directed by David Lean and starring Katharine Hepburn, Rossano Brazzi, and Darren McGavin. Hepburn plays an "old maid" secretary from Ohio who finds romance on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy.

via Internet Archive:

Empire Online gives it 4 out of 5 stars and concludes, "Not one of his best but as the personal favourite of director David Lean's outstanding back catalogue, this is well worth a look." NPR says, "Whatever the film's subtext, Lean intended it to be an affectionate portrait of the city. He became so intoxicated by it that he made it his second home." TCM has some information. Rotten Tomatoes has a critics score of 93%.

America America

America America is a 1963 Elia Kazan film loosely based on the life of the director's uncle, who struggles and sacrifices to leave the Greek and Armenian subjugation by the Turks in Anatolia to immigrate to America. It is very long at 2 3/4 hours, but is an inspiring film.

Trailer:

It's on Martin Scorsese's list of films you need to see to know anything about film. Slant Magazine concludes, "America America is a revealing work about the American dream because it doesn't envision it as a noble enterprise, but rather a painful and seemingly never-ending process." Senses of Cinema calls it an "epic, physical, elemental, almost monomaniacal film". Time Out calls it "one of the peaks of Kazan's career". Rotten Tomatoes has a critics score of 67% and a higher audience rating of 89%.

Faux Bois Bridge

This concrete sculpture was in a field close to the Visitor Center of Petit Jean State Park. It is a work by Dionicio Rodriguez (1899-1955), whom I recognize from his extensive work at Memorial Park Cemetery here in Memphis and from The Old Mill in North Little Rock. I was delighted to see another work by him.

We saw a lot of animals at the park but didn't get photos of most of them. We saw deer, box turtles, gray squirrels, birds of several kinds (especially hummingbirds, buzzards, bluebirds, herons, and crows), blue-tailed skinks, snakes, lizards, and tadpoles. We decided Arkansas is a hotbed of raccoon suicides, where they throw themselves in front of cars. Dead raccoons littered the highways. The Younger Son got a few photos of wildlife:

My favorite, though, may well be this jackalope: