Month: November 2011

The Slotin Folk Art Auction is this weekend (lots 1-824 on Sat, balance on Sunday).  The catalog can be viewed here.  Online bidding is easy, easy — I’ve done it.  Will the Bill Traylor Black Dog go for its auction estimate of $35-45k?  I still miss not getting (and not having the $ to) that Eli Whitney cotton gin they auctioned last year.

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The Ogden has a new director, William Pittman Andrews, and he’s from Starkville (has been Director of the University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses before now).  And of course half of the ‘historic houses’ part of that title comes from Faulkner’s Rowan Oak.  WPA also happens to be an artist himself.

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I should have mentioned this before, but since he passed away, the B’ham Museum of Art has put together an exhibit of Chris Clark’s works, called Celebrate Life: The Art of Chris Clark.  It will be up through March 4, 2012.

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Pecan Festival this weekend in Harahan.

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As the Decatur Daily put it, “What do you do if you are a book lover and your number of volumes exceeds the space in your house? Larry Brown resolved that predicament by building a library next door to his double-wide on Depreast Road in the Rock Springs community, about seven miles west of Hartselle.”  Love it when people do their own things.

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Another thing catching up on: the owner of Famous Joe’s Pizza in Madison AL, Joe Carlucci, is someone I’ve seen on Food Network and other places — he’s the world’s fastest pizza maker (seriously) as this summer he won the competition in Naples.  For the third time.  And he has a Guinness record for highest pizza toss.  Pretty mixed reviews on Yelp, though.

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The Chicago Tribune wrote yesterday about an exhibit of Howard Finter’s works called the Howard Finster Vision House Touring Exhibit that’s made up of over 200 works, organized by David Leonardis who has worked on restoring Howard’s art environment in Georgia.  David Leonardis says that Howard’s widow told him to buy the ‘vision house‘ at a tax sale, which he got for $1479 (and now says he has over $100k in it).  The touring exhibit, which the Tribune wrote about, includes “more than 200 paintings, drawings and pieces of paraphernalia.”

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The International Quilt Study Center and Museum is in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the paper there just did a piece about Yvonne Wells and her story quilts, which are on exhibit there until February 26.

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Thanks very much to Jonathan for sending me a link to the piece in London’s Daily Mail entitled, ‘Life in hard times: Dreamy images document misery and merriment during the Great Depression in the South‘ about the ‘Signs of Life; Photographs of Peter Sekaer‘ exhibit at the International Center of Photography that is on  through January 8, 2012. *Wonderful* that the paper ran so many of the images, too.  From the press release:
The Danish documentary photographer Peter Sekaer (1901–1950) was one of the key contributors to U.S. government photographic projects during the Great Depression. Sekaer photographed alongside Walker Evans in the American South during the Farm Security Administration years, and photographs by the two are sometimes indistinguishable. But Sekaer, who was a painter and who made a living as a sign painter, was an accomplished and prolific photographer who combined a strong sense of advocacy with a highly attuned graphic eye. 

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Hobo nickles?

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Floyd Shaman sale of art and personal effects last night and weekend.  I did not realize that his wife passed away last year.  We have one piece of his here in our home (bought it for $50 seven or eight years ago from someone who had no idea and didn’t care who Floyd Shaman was); I first learned of him in Southern Living when they did a feature on their B&B in Cleveland MS and I fell in love with the watermelon bed.  Pics of some of his other art here.

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Do you know what a murmuration is?  It’s something wonderful.

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The documentary about Amos Kennedy Jr., Proceed and Be Bold! is today’s Prescreen selection.  Yes, yes, yes.

Used with permission for media, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Norman Rockwell, Rosie the Riveter, 1943, Oil on canvas, 52 x 40 in. (132.1 x 101.6 cm)
Roy Lichtenstein, Outstanding Explosion (Red), 1966, Porcelain enamel on steel
Kerry James Marshall, 

Walton Ford, 

I made a care package from home for our Little Brother who is at college at Troy right now, and one of the things I put in were brownies. This recipe makes two 8″x8″ pans, so of course the recipe is easy to half if you don’t need quite as much, and these turn out *so* good!

Ingredients:
2 sticks butter
2/3 cup smooth peanut butter
2-1/2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1-1/2 cups flour
1tsp baking powder
4 tbsp cocoa powder (Hershey’s is fine)
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350*.
Butter, and place a sheet of parchment paper in the bottom of two 8×8 baking pans.

Make the chocolate layer by melting one stick of butter in the microwave, then in a larger bowl, mix together the butter and 1-1/4 cup sugar. Now mix in two of the eggs, then 1/2 cup flour. Add the chocolate chips. Pour evenly into each of the baking pans, carefully making an even layer from side to side.

Make the peanut butter layer by melting the rest of the butter in the microwave, then in a larger bowl, mix together the butter and peanut butter. Now mix in the rest of the sugar, then two of the eggs, then the rest of the flour and baking powder.

Pour this peanut butter layer evenly over the chocolate layer in each pan. If you like, you can mix the peanut butter layer and the chocolate layer together gently using a spoon or butter knife (to make swirls) but I really think these taste better as two distinct layers.

Here’s another set of barber shop pics I took, this time in West Point, MS.  The owner’s keeping it vintage in the front:

I thought you might like to see this picture.  This gentleman is a sofer (pr. “so-fair”) — he’s examining the eleven Torah scrolls at my synagogue.  Part of it is checking the scroll’s physical condition (as they are written on hides) and also checking the text to see if there are any cracks, flakes, or missing parts in any letters — and there are 304,805 letters to check.  You can see from the picture above that the scroll isn’t even unwound half-way.  That’s a lot of reading!

One of the reasons that Torahs are checked so meticulously is that if you’re reading a Torah, and you find a missing or incomplete letter, you must put that Torah away and not use it until it is corrected.  

Torahs are written by hand by qualified individuals, meaning they have years and years and years of experience.  There is a special ink that’s used and a special type of quill that makes the letters.

Each Torah contains the entire text in Hebrew of the first five books of the Bible (Genesis – Deuteronomy) which we know as the Five Books of Moses because it’s tradition that Moses wrote these at G-d’s instruction.  Part of the tradition holds that even though the last verses of Deuteronomy discuss Moses’ death, Moses even wrote those, crying.

As you can imagine, Torahs cost many tens of thousands of dollars to commission.  The Torah that you see above is over two hundred years old.

At each Shabbat Saturday morning service, and a couple of other times during the week at minyan, and other holidays, we take out the Torah and read it from a special table at the front of our sanctuary.  The congregation follows along in a book that has both the Hebrew, and English translation.  My husband and his brother are both good Torah readers (I am not.  At all.).  During the course of a year, we go all the way from the first verse of the Torah to the last.

This Torah below is in a special case at my synagogue.  It’s known as a ‘Holocaust Torah’ because the Nazis collected a great amount of Judaica and stored it in Prague for what they figured would be a museum to the extinct race.  There are about 1800 Torahs from that stash that have been permanently loaned to congregations around the world as a way to commemorate the Holocaust.

If you look closely (and can read Hebrew) you can see that it’s currently open to the ‘Song at the Red Sea’ which is in the book of Exodus.  This is what the Israelites sang after escaping the Egyptians.

The NYT has a nice piece about FLW works in Wisconsin, with slideshow.  And speaking of FLW, this $2.4MM home in Huntsville was built by someone Av knows, and went to a party there once, telling me he could not believe that I didn’t go, especially since it was so FLW-reminiscent (the inspiration for the house was the Rosenbaum home in Florence).  In 2006, the home was listed at $14.4MM.

Also for sale in Huntsville right now is the Albert Erskine home (he was president of the Studebaker company).

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The Russian Food Festival is this weekend at St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Brookside, AL.

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The Lost Art of Buying From a Butcher, with pics, recipes.

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Mirliton Festival this weekend in the Bywater.

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The Fleisher/Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia is putting on an exhibit of the Philadelphia Wireman’s works.

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The Times-Picayune shows the pieces that make up Prospect.2 (turn your volume down for the first few seconds of this):
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

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Gypsy/Roma caravans for sale.

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When we were in Nashville last weekend, we had lunch at Bobbie’s Dairy Dip and I had the vegetarian black bean burger (ohmygoshamazing):

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Last week in Atlanta, we had lunch for the first time ever at Flying Biscuit (which I’ve heard about forever and now I have to admit I just don’t get what the big deal is):

…a tall biscuit with sugar on top?  Eh.

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There is a bottle tree now at the B’ham Zoo. Yay!

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33rd annual Peter Anderson art festival this weekend in Ocean Springs.

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The James Eastland Federal Courthouse in downtown Jackson was sold for $1.45MM and plans are to repurpose the “115,000-square-foot space into a privately funded university-level arts institute.”

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Meant to show this before: the post office in Ruleville MS is named for Fannie Lou Hamer, reported to have said, ““If I fall, I’ll fall 5 feet 4 inches forward in the fight for freedom.”