Robert Lloyd

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Teen Spirit

Robert Lloyd
Ben Kweller is 20 years old, looks about 10, and made his major-label debut at 15 in a baby grunge trio called Radish that was the subject of a substantial New Yorker profile and the kind of industrial hype that practically yells “kick me”; the critical backlash set in before......

Bugged

Robert Lloyd
The ants are back. A little early this year, and not yet in the expected crowds, but definitely back. Up until a few years ago, the ant world showed no interest in darkening our door, or crossing our sill, or finding its way through the odd crack in the plaster......

Boy's Life

Robert Lloyd
Illustration by Hadley Hooper THE OTHER MORNING I WENT TO WATCH MY 9-YEAR-OLD FRIEND Alexander play baseball -- I mean that he is 9 years old, not that I have known him for 9 years (though, come to think of it, I have). The game consisted mostly of walks and......

The Binge

Robert Lloyd
Not so very long ago, around the time I stopped watching television for a living, I began to read again, compulsively. Read books, I mean. There are plenty of other things in the typographical world to peruse: magazines, recipes, free alternative newsweeklies whose ink comes off on your fingers, badly......

Not I, the Jury

Robert Lloyd
I receive a jury summons. In the past, I‘ve always claimed financial hardship by virtue of self-employment, and they have been content to leave me alone. But something about this notice feels different. Its use of the intimidating color red, the naming of an exact time and place for me......

Hills

Robert Lloyd
Aldea Hill, as it was and may still be known to the little children of Encino Village, is where the street I grew up on rises steeply to meet Burbank Boulevard, across which superannuated character actor Edward Everett Horton (Top Hat, F Troop, Fractured Fairy Tales) in the days of......

The New Mall

Robert Lloyd
Photo by Bill SmithI have before me a picture post card — really I do — dated September 4, 1942. One of those old-fashioned cards, with bright basic colors painted over a photograph to make the physical world seem even better than it is. It shows Hollywood Boulevard, seen from......

High Fidel

Robert Lloyd
With Showtime‘s Fidel, Fidel Castro finally has his biopic. Compañero Che Guevara got his all the way back in 1969 -- a real Twentieth Century Fox Hollywood production, too, not just a TV movie. (All right, miniseries.) But Che was dead and handsome and hanging on the walls of ten......

Snowflake-Special

Robert Lloyd
Photo by David Zeiger Senior Year is the latest in a spate of teenage institutional documentary series that has included American High (canceled by Fox, picked up by PBS) and Freshman Year (from HBO Family, also currently showing a program called Middle School Confessions), as well as the Disney Channel’s......

Not the Real World

Robert Lloyd
Photo by Jay Maidment/HBO Though in no sense “best,” the television event of the year was certainly the destruction of the World Trade Center, which annihilated regular programming on broadcast and cable networks alike; swept commercials from the screen (it was an event impossible to sponsor, unlike, say, the bombing......