The Georgia Trust has put out a Request for Qualifications and Proposals for a Paradise Gardens Site Management Plan. Restoration goals are found in this PDF and a draft for National Register of Historic Places registration is in this PDF. One part of the registration mentions that Paradise Gardens fits the criteria of national significance in the area of art because of its direct association with Howard Finster (of course) and goes on to quote Art Rosenbaum that Finster “emerged from the rural Appalachian culture of northeast Alabama and northwest Georgia to become one of America’s most important creative personalities in the last quarter of the twentieth century.”
The application also lists five other visionary art environments on the Register: Pasaquan, Watts Towers, Forestiere Underground Gardens, Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village, and Ed Galloway’s World’s Largest Totem Pole & The Fiddle House. Also listed for whatever reason are other environments not on the Register: Charley’s World of Lost Art, Edward Leedskalnin’s Coral Castle, Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Fred Smith’s Concrete Park, Salvation Mountain, and Nit Wit Ridge.
—
I am so sorry to report, if you haven’t heard already, that Dean Faulkner Wells passed away this week. This is an interview she did with Southern Living not too long ago. In the C-L here. A remembrance in the Oxford Eagle here.
—
The “I hate Auburn” t-shirt guy at SEC week had Nick Saban speak against the shirt’s message, and said, “It’s like I went to church and G-d told me He didn’t approve.”
—
The NYT has an article this week about the Frank Gehry-designed Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi — that “the museum is almost out of cash, hurt by fewer visitors than it had hoped for, higher operating costs than it expected and less city support than it had counted on.” And there’s no Bilbao effect going on, either. Not good.
—
Oh, Georgia. The NYT reports, “South Carolina has shipped out more than twice as many peaches as Georgia so far this summer. And it has been that way for years.
It gets worse. At the end of July, the University of Georgia will officially close its peach program. The head peach horticulturist left the job a couple of years ago. When budgets tightened recently, university officials decided to simply eliminate the position altogether. (Programs for blueberries and vegetables had to go, too.)
And if that was not enough, last week Georgia’s premier peach farmers had to head across the state line to South Carolina for a regional peach conference.”
—
Ooooh I wish I had caught this in March, but Scott Peacock spoke on The Splendid Table about his ‘Alabama Project’: he’s traveling around the state interviewing the oldest Alabamians he can find asking them about their earliest food memories. One of the clips is him speaking to a woman who was friends with Scottie Fitzgerald (Zelda and F. Scott’s daughter), and even had Zelda’s signed copy of The Joy of Cooking. The interviewee thinks cheese straws are vastly overrated (oh, for shame, someone speaking against the blessed cheese straw, a welcome guest at any good wedding, funeral, and every other get together!).
—
The food in ‘The Help’ reported on in the C-L.
—
Roger Stolle (he owns Cathead Music in Clarksdale) is working on a new documentary, called ‘We Juke Up In Here!’.