Deep Fried Kudzu

Current Affairs Magazine has a piece on Kenny Hill’s art environment in Chauvin, Louisiana

A Vanished Artist, a Disappearing Coast, and the Garden Left Behind

Kenny Hill walked away from his extraordinary sculpture garden 26 years ago. Today, the Louisiana community that saved it is fighting their own battle against disappearance.

This is the one I think of every day. Every single day. My favorite. We were just there earlier this year — some pics from that and other visits we’ve made over the last almost-twenty years:

From the article:

Then, one day, when Errol was driving Andrew back from school, they spotted that faded yellow firefighter jacket bobbing down the road. It was Kenny, carrying only a rucksack on his shoulder.

“My Dad pulled over and asked him what was going on, and he explained that he’d been evicted,” Cuneo recalls.

He told them he was heading to Arkansas, where his brother lived. They offered to buy him a bus ticket, or even help pay the rent, but he refused, promising to send a letter when he arrived. It came in the mail two months later: Kenny had made it, over 300 miles away, on foot. That was the last they ever heard from him.

Almost all of my Chauvin Sculpture Garden pics are here.

Through the end of August, The First has Tate, UK, International Surrealism from Tate: Fifty Years of Dreams on. Some highlights:

Jean Miro, Women and Bird in the Moonlight

Paul Delvaux, Sleeping Venus

Salvador Dali, Autumnal Cannibalism

Mark Rothko, Untitled

for the Anila Quayyum Agha: Interwoven exhibit (also on through the end of August), there was this room for All the Flowers are for Me (red). The red in this particular cube is to reference South Asian wedding dresses, tied in with Agha’s narrative about the maginalization of women worldwide.

above, Intersections (Gold), which is encaustic and thread on laser-cut paper

A Flood of Tears (Gathering Storms), made of upholstery needles, bugle and hematite beads, braided cotton, wool, steel, and glass. From the label:
The materials in this monumental installation are socially coded and suggestive of women, craft, and the handmade. Each one is meaningful. Take, for example, the needle. Primarily used for sewing, it is a tool that can create and mend but can also hurt. Through hundreds of hanging needles and threads, Agha evokes the pain of women whose art and labor have long been considered inferior.

People are naturally so drawn to her light/shadow works that are best suited to display in a room with nothing else on the walls, but A Flood of Tears was really so much more powerful for me. There’s something about the uniformity, the spacing, the monolithic look that is so many individual pieces forced into similarity. All the stories.

Years ago, if you were to call Eudora Welty, chat about the weather, what’s on sale at the Jitney (Jitney #14), mention the state of the garden or an offer of lunch at Bill’s or the Mayflower…

and you dialed that number today, someone at the Eudora Welty House and Garden would pick up.

It’s the same number, still.

Made a trip up to Nashville for no particular reason (usually the best way to travel) — got to have lunch at the Michelin-recommended Lunch in Sewanee, which was pretty good:

BTW, Lunch isn’t the only Michelin-recommend in town from this past year — Judith was the other.

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We stayed at The Thompson, which we’ve been to before, and besides that we really like the in-hotel restaurant (Marsh House), we absolutely l-o-v-e D.S. & Durga, and they have the DS&D Bowmakers as the bath amenities.

Fort Lonesome Logo by LAND print (check out Ft Lonesome’s stagewear)

Marsh House for breakfast:

peaches on a blueberry waffle, but we did a little better last time when we chose the eggs benedict and went all-out with the cast iron cinnamon roll

Since indie bookshops are one of those things we automatically search out when traveling, I was thinking of specifically author-owned bookshops. I mentioned a little bit about Ann Patchett’s Parnassus Books in Nashville:

and I was in Key West two or three years ago, but I just never made it over to Judy Blume’s Books & Books.

Here’s a list of some others:

Louise Erdrich, Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, a Native‑focused independent bookstore and cultural space.

Larry McMurtry owned Booked Up in Archer City, Texas, and it’s online-only now

Jeff Kinney owns An Unlikely Story in Plainville, Massachusetts

Emma Straub = Books Are Magic in Brooklyn

Wendell Berry co‑founded The Berry Center Bookstore in New Castle, Kentucky (and it looks fabulous)

…and that’s not all; looking these up, I came across a Mental Floss list with some others. Enjoyyyy.

I’ve been enamored with the Mooresville, Alabama post office for a while now — it’s the oldest in the state, opened in 1840 and that actually means it’s one of the oldest in the nation, too. The hours are short, only something like 8-10a M-Sat (but absolutely double-check before you run over). I like to buy stamps there just as an excuse to go inside. Pics from a couple of different visits: