Month: November 2008

If we were in New Orleans this weekend…we would definitely be at the Po Boy Festival! It’s in its second year. Tom Fitzmorris wrote about it this past week in his daily email (you can sign up for the more thorough five-star edition like I get for the dollar amount it’s worth to you – it’s no set amount) and mentioned how there are more good po boy shops now than ever before.

This is a Ferdi special from Mother’s that we had last year:

…and this is an oyster po boy from Acme (my favorite). The nice thing about this is – this is the pic that MasterCard contacted me about using in 2006 for their priceless.com promotion, because it’s also Peyton Manning’s favorite food:

And guess what? Food Network is coming out with their own magazine – they asked me about using one of my pics from Camp Washington Chili in Cincinnati but said they didn’t have any budget and couldn’t pay my usage fee (which…they are a Hearst publication and surely to goodness they have money to spend on photography to put out those first issues, right!? And seriously I wasn’t charging a fortune, but anyway…) so they instead went with a stock photo from the restaurant itself. I still can’t wait to see the issue that Camp Washington is in. I wonder if it’s in this first one, which is supposed to be out right now…hmmm…

Back in the 1970s, the B’ham Public Library secured a grant and hired John Reese to go to Gee’s Bend and photograph the people there, just as Arthur Rothstein had done for the FSA back in the 1930s.

The FSA’s photographs taken by Arthur Rothstein aren’t under copyright (which is how they’re available to be published, like above) but the ones that John Reese took for the library are under copyright, under Title 17 – except for private use. A catalog of those images can be viewed here though.

Kathryn Tucker Windham talks about John Reese and the photographs here.

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Yvonne Wells is not one of the Gee’s Bend quilters – she’s from Tuscaloosa – but there’s an MP3 of a recent interview with her about some of her story quilts here.

Today and tomorrow is the first Fruitcake Festival in Monroeville. This is how the organizers are describing it:

The event is a celebration of Truman Capote and the holiday dessert immortalized in his enduring holiday classic, “A Christmas Memory.”

The festival includes fruitcake sales and auctions, recipe exchanges, Capote-related Christmas gifts and even a fruitcake toss on the courthouse lawn.

As a special treat, Academy Award-winning actress Patricia Neal and Broadway actor Joel Vig will present a dramatic reading of ” A Christmas Memory” Friday, Nov. 14, 7 p.m., in the courtroom. Tickets for the reading are $35 and include a fruitcake reception with Miss Neal. To purchase tickets, please contact our friendly staff at (251) 575-7433.

I read that the festival is to help “return the fruitcake to its rightful place as the Queen of the Christmas dessert table”. There’s a recipe for Sook’s fruitcake in Sook’s Cookbook, which I have – the pic of it is above, it’s the first edition from 1989 and is pretty hard to find – but it was reissued in September of this year by LSU Press. It includes the recipe for Sook’s fruitcake. There’s another book that Marie Rudisill wrote with other fruitcake recipes (she was Truman’s aunt – she was 13 and living with Jenny Faulk in Monroeville when he as an infant came to live there also – Marie was best known as the saucy “Fruitcake Lady” on The Tonight Show).

There’s a great article the St. Petersburg Times did back in 2000 with Marie Rudisill about the family. Here’s part:

“Jenny took care of the whole family because not another member of that family worked,” Rudisill says. “None of them. She was mean as she could be, but she was a remarkable woman.”

In Haunting, Rudisill describes Jenny: “She had frosty blue eyes, hair the color of red oak leaves in autumn, and skin like a china doll, translucent in its dazzling whiteness. Her hands were strong and squarish with faint freckles, like a pear ready to be picked. She was born as stylish as a tomcat with white paws and waistcoat. She was on the short side, but her sharp tongue gave her added stature.”

She rented rooms above the store. Those who fell behind on their rent, she yelled at “so all the town could hear.”

Once, Jenny disapproved of a suitor who came to call on Callie. “He pulled up in a buggy to take Callie for a ride,” Rudisill says, “and Jenny went outside and grabbed a horse whip and horse-whipped him right there in town.

“She was a holy terror, I’m not kidding you. She controlled the whole family. If it hadn’t been for her, I don’t know what would have happened to us. All of us.”

Capote came to Jenny Faulk’s house as an infant and lived there until he was 7.

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“Truman always claimed that every story he ever wrote came out of his head,” Rudisill says. “Well, that’s a damn lie. The stories that came out of Truman’s head were stories that were based on his childhood in Monroeville, Ala.”

Sook figures prominently in Capote’s short story A Christmas Memory and is the model for Dolly Talbo in Capote’s favorite story, The Grass Harp, about three whimsical characters who escape to their own reality by living in a treehouse on the edge of the woods. Verena is the spitting image of Jenny. Collin Fenwick is a self-portrait of the young Capote; Catherine is based on the family cook.

“That’s the No. 1 book as far as I’m concerned,” Rudisill says. “That’s the book he loved the best.”

—I knew I wouldn’t be able to put any new posts up with the new baby home, so I did a few before the new baby came, using Blogger’s feature to publish posts automatically for a date in the future. ((Just so you aren’t wondering how I am able to do this with a newborn!))—

I wanted to have a bulletin board in Shugie’s room, but I didn’t like the idea of using thumbtacks in there – so I made a ribbon bulletin board. The intersecting ribbons give all the pictures a place to rest.

Supplies:
bulletin board
fabric to cover the front of the b/board plus enough to wrap about 4″ all the way around
ribbon
scissors
heavy-duty stapler, staples

Directions:
This is just a regular bulletin board from Target:

I got some nice seersucker fabric and wrapped it all around the front, and made giftwrap corners on the edges – then stapled it all in. If you use a striped fabric like this, you have to be careful that no areas are stretched any harder than others or else it will look wavy on the front:

Next, I stapled the ribbon in at each corner:

I’ve had ribbon bulletin boards before where the whole thing makes a diamond shape, but I wanted something a little different this time so I added some vertical strips of ribbon too:

Here it is!:

I got an email yesterday with a link to New York Times’ review of the William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 exhibit that’s on now at the Whitney in New York.

 

Thirty years ago photography was art if it was black and white. Color pictures were tacky and cheap, the stuff of cigarette ads and snapshot albums. So in 1976, when William Eggleston had a solo show of full-color snapshotlike photographs at the august Museum of Modern Art, critics squawked.

 

It didn’t help that Mr. Eggleston’s pictures, shot in the Mississippi Delta, where he lived, were of nothings and nobodies: a child’s tricycle, a dinner table set for a meal, an unnamed woman perched on a suburban curb, an old man chatting up the photographer from his bed.

 

That MoMA’s curator of photography, John Szarkowski, had declared Mr. Eggleston’s work perfect was the last straw. “Perfectly banal, perfectly boring,” sniffed one writer; “erratic and ramshackle,” snapped another; “a mess,” declared a third.

 

Perfect or not, the images quickly became influential classics. And that’s how they look in “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008,” a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art that is this artist’s first New York museum solo since his seditious debut.

Okay, so it’s a little off-topic and I am being much-much too sensitive about this, but I cringed when I read the part where the author says Eggleston’s subjects were “nothings and nobodies”. Nevermind the inherent beauty of everyday objects – like the tricycle in Eggleston’s “Memphis” photograph above…who really thinks that people can actually be labeled “nobodies“?! I guess I know what the author is trying to say but haven’t most of us sat in a pew somewhere and heard a sermon probably every Priest, Preacher, and Rabbi has given about this?

Anyway.

The 150-photograph exhibit is open today through January 25, 2009 at the Whitney then goes on to Munich.

What I thought was so interesting was that this is Eggleston‘s first show in NYC since his one-man debut there at MoMA in 1976. And a first edition of the book that went along with the show, “William Eggleston’s Guide” now sells on Amazon and eBay for hundreds and hundreds of dollars (there’s even a signed one on eBay for $1750, obo).

The NYT has a slideshow of photographs from the show here.

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Oh! And am I so happy that I took a look at the NYT Eggleston slideshow because I found that the paper did one for the “Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2008” (it’s here) and one is called “Wabi Sabi” by Mark Reibstein. Wabi Sabi is this Japanese word(s?)/concept that I’ve been in love with since I heard of it a few years ago. It means…well…I think of it as appreciation for what’s beautifully imperfect (like that Amish quilt I bought a few months ago, for instance). Here is a much better definition though, from the review that the Times did:

As Reibstein puts it: “Wabi sabi is a way of seeing the world that is at the heart of Japanese culture. It finds beauty and harmony in what is simple, imperfect, natural, modest and mysterious. . . . It may best be understood as a feeling, rather than as an idea.”

This is something I want the boys to grow up with – that what’s “simple, imperfect, natural, modest, and mysterious” is beautiful.