Twenty-plus years of documenting the South's vernacular art, visionary environments and traditions….plus modern art exhibits, Faulkner and Eudora, and This Week's Various. Welcome.
The Alys-Stephens Center in B’ham as announced their upcoming season, and part of their “World on Stage” festival will be Common Threads “when quilt makers from Gee’s Bend in West Alabama meet mud cloth makers from Mali in west Africa” from November 7-11. Plus, it’s free. In conjunction, they add, “ArtPlay: Weave your own story with those of your neighbors with the ALABAMA STORIES COMMUNITY QUILT PROJECT. Send us a quilt square that represents something from your life and our local Quilterin-Residence will connect the pieces during this residency to bring all of our stories together into one amazing quilt. Plus, sign up for a quilting class at ArtPlay this fall!”
— Last week I took a class about raising backyard chickens (we’re only interested in four or five tiny little quiet bantam hens for eggs, and feathered pets for the boys). We are looking forward to one day building our own “coop deville” or “poulet chalet” one day — while looking at coops I found this model for $3500 (!!) which made me wonder why Ikea hasn’t issued their flatpacked design yet.
— Anthony and Gail Uglesich will be cooking with Joel Miller, the Chef/Owner of Oxford’s Ravine restaurant to benefit the Oxford charity, More Than a Meal, on Thursday June 2nd. Tickets are $75 pp available by contacting Ravine.
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Tuesday evening, 5/24, on PBS’ Independent Lens (if you love documentaries too, this program should be on your Tivo’s Season Pass), they’re airing “Welcome to Shelbyville” about an estimated 1000 Somali refugees making Shelbyville, TN (pop. 45k) their home in the past few years, and all the cultural, religious, etc issues that arise from that. The Commercial Appeal in Memphis wrote in part:
Welcome to Shelbyville, whose bucolic hills and valleys are home to the Sharpie marker, the Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration — and scores of Somali Muslim refugees who have resettled here, mostly to work at the Tyson Foods poultry processing plant.
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Shelbyville isn’t the only Middle Tennessee community grappling with Islam.
In 2008, a mosque in Columbia was burned. Attempts to build new mosques in Brentwood and Antioch have been stopped. Opponents of a new mosque in Murfreesboro have staged protests against it and gone to court to try to stop it.
Last year, failed Republican congressional candidate Lou Ann Zelenik called the Murfreesboro mosque part of “a political movement designed to fracture the moral and political foundation of Middle Tennessee.”
Earlier this year, two Middle Tennessee legislators introduced a bill that would have made it a felony to follow Islamic teachings, including praying, fasting and almsgiving — all part of Shariah or sacred Islamic law.
…
Taylor, who is giving the new immigrants lessons in speaking English and being Southern, said much of the anxiety about the Somalis is the product of a culture gap.
“A lot of people here think the Somalis are being unfriendly or even rude,” Taylor said. “They don’t look at you or speak to you in the grocery store. They don’t shake hands or hug. But in Somalia, Muslim women are taught not to do those things as a sign of humility and respect. We like to hug, but they don’t even hug other women.”
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“Our small community is changing each and every day and we can either resist it or embrace it,” he said.
“We can wall ourselves off, become defensive and rigid and hardhearted. We can exclude those not like us, who don’t look, sound, speak and worship like us. Or we can listen to the word of God and through our faith embrace the stranger and learn from them and them from us.”
Last month, we took Melissa, one of Av’s friends from high school — she’s an artist that has gotten all kinds of recognition for her sci-fi art, but I have to admit that what I really-really like is her children’s art — out with the boys to lunch at Bailey and Cato’s, and to play at the Opryland Hotel. We’ve stayed at the Opryland Hotel several times, but this was the first time for either of the boys to see what it was all about. They loved. it.
— How sweet that I was invited to the opening of the newest 20k house by the Rural Studio (I need to send them a thank you note) but the pictures of it are now on their website. Nice!
— In my family, we believe birthdays deserve a doberge — either picking it up in person in Metairie at Gambino’s, or having FedEx bring it to the front door. There’s a newer company called Debbie Does Doberge which does mini doberge — so cute. But they don’t ship yet.
We had the tornadoes, and now the flood. And my beautiful friend Anna Kline wrote a song, Flood Waters, she performed with her band (Anna Kline and the Grits & Soul Band) just very recently — and it was featured on WLBT in Jackson this morning and again during their 5:30p newscast — it will also play on NBC affiliates across the South and the nation. *So* proud of her!
— Artnet Magazine just ran a piece entitled ‘Art & the Apocalypse‘ — since that Judgment Day ad ran in USA Today and other billboards, etc recently — in which they mentioned several artists (including Howard Finster, Keith Haring, Henry Darger) and the work they had done depicting that sort of event. One artist they mentioned was:
Chicago Imagist Roger Brown, who was raised in Alabama in the Church of Christ, referred to Biblical imagery in his art often enough. His An Actual Dream of the Second Coming (1976), for instance, transports Revelations’ doomsday vision to an urban setting not unlike Brown’s adopted city, filled with sinners lost in fiery despair while the faithful ascend to heaven.
Anyway, Roger was born in Hamilton and raised in Opelika. He moved to Chicago for college and became a founder of the Chicago Imagist movement. That’s how he’s best known. His Kissin’ Cousins (that he produced after he found out about being related to Elvis (he was also related to Tallulah Bankhead)) is at the Ogden.
Does anyone know if the Roger Brown Rock House Museum in Beulah, AL is open now? I know he was working on it when he passed away in 1997 and it was open for some time, but what’s its status currently? Please contact me if you know — thanks!
— Thanks to my friend Nancy for letting me know about the ‘mystery house’ on Wichita Street in Houston that’s on the market now.
Swamplot says: “After the Orange Show, the Beer Can House, and the Third Ward home of the Flower Man, probably no Houston home has accumulated more outsider-art street cred than Charles Fondow’s decades-long transformation of a former Riverside Terrace daycare center into a bubbling stew of half-timbered gables, turrets, and towering rooftop decks.”
So you might think that the interior would be full of happy, boundless excess, but not really. It’s absolutely very nice but not creative overload. And it’s only $325k.
— The old Hopkins House boardinghouse / restaurant in Pensacola, which is a residence now, is also for sale (even the Sterns wrote about the restaurant in Gourmet, in 2000):
For almost 50 years, the Hopkins boardinghouse in the North Hill district of Pensacola, Florida, offered the best deal in town. The price for a room was always right—but what made this address so extraordinary was that the rent included meals. Spectacular meals. Platters of fried chicken, hot biscuits, sweet-potato soufflé, and other Dixie specialties fairly flew from hand to hand at the crowded communal tables. Extra helpings were never discouraged; when the serving bowls got low, full ones replaced them. Best of all, boarders weren’t the only ones privy to this amazing bounty. Outside diners with good manners and enough change in their pockets were also welcome at Ma Hopkins’s tables. And they still are.
— For those of us from, shall we say, less sociable areas of the country, the friendliness at these tables can come as a shock. Instantly, you are dining with folks who feel like cousins, aunts, or uncles, chatting about where you’re headed and where you’ve been, and how about more chicken and who took the last corn muffin? The family feel is enhanced by the maternal propriety of the dining areas. The walls are decorated with souvenir plates; white lace curtains hang at the windows; and in the vestibule, where people wait for a seat to open up, signs advise, “NO HATS WORN AT THE TABLE…TANK TOPS, UNDERSHIRTS, AND MUSCLE SHIRTS ARE NOT PERMISSIBLE.”
After the restaurant closed, it was purchased for $340k in 2005 and is now on the market for $689k.
I think there are some recipes from the old Hopkins House in the Pensacola Junior League cookbook, Some Like it South.
…I stopped by Page and Palette, a bookstore around since 1968. The store displays a full case of Fairhope authors, many recognizable from the bestseller list or airport newstands: Jimmy Buffett, Fannie Flagg, Rick Bragg, Andy Andrews, Winston “Forrest Gump” Groom.
“The amount of literary people here just blows your mind,” said Mac Pulitzer, great-grandson of the legendary newspaper publisher. “Per capita, this is probably the highest in the country.”
Pulitzer hopes to contribute to the town’s literary prominence with the Pulitizer Hotel and the first-ever Pulitzer Library, both scheduled to open next spring. He plans to fill the repository with more than 2,000 books, including every Pulitzer prize winner from nearly a century plus the classics. He will also reserve shelf space for local authors. He might need to build an additional wing.
“I think Sonny Brewer was right when he said, ‘We have more published authors and writers than we do readers,’ ” said Karin Wilson, president of Page and Palette.
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The AP ran a story verifying that Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman is undamaged after the tornadoes.
— The beloved GooGoo Cluster has gotten some attention: “Its makers, Standard Candy Company, have upgraded the candy bar’s ingredients, changed the way it’s manufactured and redesigned the packaging.” I love GooGoos. I love getting them at the Opry and even the cheesy part when everyone yells during the broadcast “gotta getta GooGoo”. The price of a GooGoo has almost doubled but the amount I want to have one has also doubled now. And I’m loving the retro goodness of the redesigned website too.
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A family in Tuscaloosa filmed the tornado coming right at them. Pretty amazing, especially beginning at the one minute mark. It really would have been more important to be hiding in your “safe place” – in the bathroom or closet in the middle of your home, though, right?
Last month for Av’s birthday, we knew we wanted to wind up in Cragford, Alabama for Av’s birthday supper at Red’s Catfish, so we went the *really-really* roundabout way and went through Rockmart, Georgia. It’s a town that was founded around a quarry and rock market, so many of the buildings have this great look by virtue of being made out of local slate and brick:
Right next door to the main sanctuary of First Baptist:
Church of Christ:
Presbyterian:
The Post Office has a Section (done during WPA projects) oil by Reuben Gambrell entitled “Kiln Room, Cement Plant”:
Downtown is the really great 1941 West Theatre:
A little out of town is the historic 1846 (or so) Van Wert Methodist Church:
The church looked like this (scroll halfway down) in 2005 and like this in the 1920s.
Pretty.
Nearby Cedartown is the hometown of Sterling Holloway, which I only mention because if you close your eyes and think of Winnie the Pooh’s voice…that’s Sterling Holloway’s voice.
On our way back through for supper, we stopped at — I know it sounds so strange to say this but — one of my favorite cemetery monuments. It’s the B.O. Dawkins monument close to Cragford:
He was 24 and died in 1918 during WWI. A Private in Company E of the 306th Engineers.
Today at 3p, the first marker of the Mississippi Freedom Trail will be unveiled at the site of the Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money, in memory of Emmett Till. This is how the building looked when we were there in 2005:
The place where so much began. This store. In 1955 when 14-year-old Emmett Till came to Mississippi from Chicago to visit family, he had no idea what was to come.
This is a small excerpt from an article in the Missourian, from an event in Columbia where two members of Emmett’s family, a first and second cousin, who were with him that day at the store, spoke last month:
“I have a story to tell,” Wright said. “I am an eyewitness.”
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Coming from the North, Till did not know the social customs of the South. One day, Till, Wright and Parker Jr. visited Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi. When he came out of the store after shopping, Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman and co-owner of the store with her husband, Roy Bryant.
“When Emmett whistled, it was like an alarm. We couldn’t believe that he did it,” Parker Jr. said. “Still, it’s not something you should get killed for.”
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“We don’t tell these stories to start up any animosity or bad will,” he said. “We tell these stories to tell history and the truth.”
“He didn’t die in vain because we are here because of him,” he said.
Wright began the night saying that he hoped the story would make the students in the crowd interested in practicing law.
— “It didn’t start the civil rights movement. It transformed it,” Wright said. “It brought white men, white women, Jews and Gentiles together.”
This atrocity had major repercussions. Years later, Rosa Parks said it was Emmett Till she thought of when deciding to keep her seat on the bus in Montgomery.
— This is how the Bryant store looks now — we were just there about ten days ago:
The first five Freedom Trail markers, beside this one in Money, will be at Fannie Lou Hamer’s gravesite in Ruleville, the Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman), Medgar Evers’ Home in Jackson, and the Greyhound Bus Station in Jackson. A little bit more about that here in the CL. The Return of the Freedom Riders 50th Anniversary is scheduled to stop here next week. We’ll likely be at some of the events. More later!
The day that I went up to Huntsville to visit Wade Wharton, we drove together down to Arab to visit his friend Tat. Wade told me that I would *love* Tat, and how special and creative and just one-of-a-kind he is. I asked how he met him and he told me that several years ago, the Huntsville paper had written this nice long article about him, and when Wade read it he just knew that he and Tat would be friends. Well, sure enough.
And not only had Wade called Tat after the article, Kathryn Tucker Windham had too. She sent him a letter and a signed photograph. She and Tat already had something in common. But more about that later.
Tat built his place all himself — he has a thing for rocks (yes)…and Sacred Harp (he named his place ‘Singing Hills’)…from the home with the pillars out front to the arches over the driveway:
…he built onto a log cabin that’s been in the family since it was first built in 1860:
…and a wishing well:
…has a rock in the shape of Alabama:
…and if you’re wondering how this can get any better, he built his own covered bridge:
…which he purposefully built listing a bit to one side because he wanted it to look as though it were man-made (which it is) rather than perfect-perfect. Wabi-sabi.
Oh yes.
Well, we hit it right off. And here we have two of my favorite men, Wade on the left and Tat on the right:
Tat’s niece and caretaker took me all around the house and I saw all of Tat’s masonry work, the beautiful floors he’s laid, the furniture he’s made, all kinds of amazing things. She said I *had* to see what everybody is always so interested in downstairs. I had no idea…okay…so…
Right. Essentially he’s built everything. Those clothes hanging up to the left is what he’ll be dressed in. And those six hammers on top will be used for the final nailing of the lid, and each person that does that task will have his own hammer to keep. He’s even recorded certain songs for the funeral from a Sacred Harp singing – Saints Bound for Heaven, this one that begins with Amazing Grace, and Journey Home.
The article that ran in the H’ville Times mentioned his preparations, and KTW read it and sent him a letter about the fact that she also already has her coffin made too:
Oh, and Tat is known by that name, but his real first and second name are — well, his daddy was a baseball fan — Tyrus Cobb. So on Tat’s front door:
After the tornadoes of last month, Tat was without power for a while, so I came up again, and brought him groceries and visited (he also got a new walker from the VA that I picked up for him from the hospital) for a while. He was so tickled with the walker that he insisted we go out to the front of the house and have our pictures taken looking through the small arches. So we did:
Last month I got to visit Wade Wharton in Huntsville again, and we even went to visit one of his friends in Arab who has an also-fascinating home (which I’ll post later this week). Here are some of the things I photographed on this visit:
Pickle jar pyramid:
Bottle trees forever:
This is one of his newer pieces — a tractor made from an old sewing machine:
Mr. Wharton loves visitors to his home/art environment in Huntsville — I can give you his phone number if you’d like to call first — just contact me.
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