Month: July 2012

A *fantastic* series of images from the Washington Post on the journey via where the Keystone Pipeline could/would go.

—
Uncle Lionel’s Second Line map here — tonight.

—
National Geographic wonders who will save Salvation Mountain.

—

The Bolivar Commercial reported (and AP picked up) that there’s a plan in Mound Bayou to build:
“Cotton Pickers of America Monument and Sharecroppers Interpretive Center”…

“This project is a way to recognize the people who prospered from the early cotton industry and to honor the people who planted, chopped and picked cotton,” said Turnipseed.

Khafre, Inc. has secured two plots of land, or approximately 20 acres located on U.S. Highway 61 in Mound Bayou, for the statue and museum project and expects groundbreaking to begin sometime within the next year.

“The plan is to have a monument erected that will stand between 25-30 feet tall,” continued Turnipseed. “The statue’s purpose is to increase awareness, knowledge and appreciation of historic sites, structures and landscapes relating to the cotton industry and sharecroppers experience.”


Love this.  

—
Barbecue in Europe, from the WSJ:
Since March, Londoner John Labate has been on a culinary mission to cook the perfect ribs. On the weekends, the 38-year-old advertising executive dons his chef’s cap, fires up his £900 Green Mountain Grill “Daniel Boone” pellet smoker, sits back with a beer and then just waits and waits. His beef brisket and his pulled pork marinated in chipotle, paprika, garlic and onion rub is something of a hit with his friends. But the holy grail of proper American barbecue remains ribs, and he is still trying to get those just right.

          …

At Evans and Peel Detective Agency, a new speak-easy in Earl’s Court, entrance is gained via a secret bookcase and bar stools come in the form of antique tractor seats. One of the first things the bar installed in its small kitchen was a bespoke Cookshack smoker imported from the U.S., which also cold smokes—a process whereby smoke is cooled as it is piped from a fire chamber, infusing the food with a smoky flavor without cooking it. Virtually everything on its menu is smoked, from the pulled-pork sliders—for which the shoulder of pork is cooked with hickory wood for 14 hours—to the goats’ cheese for the salad, to the cheesecake.


…and the NYT reviews Hill Country Barbecue on W 26th, where they import 1500 lbs/week of post oak from Texas.

…and the Brisbane Times from Australia does 24 hours in Memphis, and can you believe, they don’t even mention barbecue.

—

(this is a pic I took of it just a few days after Katrina)

The new director of Beauvoir?  Jeff Davis’ great-great grandson.

“We’re going to make this a destination, not only for the Gulf Coast, but the South and maybe even national,” he said.

Two more replica cottages will be built to house a banquet hall and a catering kitchen and they have plans for a spectacular Christmas.

Beauvoir has a $500,000 grant to recreate Varina’s large rose garden and vegetable garden in the original spot behind the house beginning this fall. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History is overseeing the project.

—
The Mississippi Craft Center now has a third gallery — the newest one in Biloxi.

—
Four of the eight murals that some had considered controversial and had been removed from the Georgia Department of Agriculture’s building in Atlanta last year will be on display at the Georgia Museum of Art UGA from August 1 to January 7.

—
Mr. Imagination’s memorial celebration in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

—
In Vicksburg, the Cedar Grove Inn is on the market for $2.9MM.

—
One of my great honors last year was being asked, and serving, to adjudicate individual artist applications including the folk art fellowship, apprenticeship, and roster for the Mississippi Arts Commission.  In a lovely article by the Clarion-Ledger:
Arts funding to the tune of $1.5 million across the state through Mississippi Arts Commission grants signals a steady level of support, even in the face of government budget cuts and strains in private support, the state arts agency announced.

The funding for fiscal year 2013 will be granted to 183 organizations and schools and 39 artists in 45 Mississippi counties.

Grants range from hundreds of dollars for workshop attendance to tens of thousands for some operating grants.

—
For those of us who grew up with, and loved, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood  (we watch it via Amazon Prime on our Roku) — a sweet element of it is coming back — Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood is an animated series beginning on PBS this fall.  Yay!!  Nifty-galifty!
…based on the legacy of Fred Rogers. Its cast are the children of his original and much-loved Neighborhood of Make-Believe characters. A young Daniel Tiger is joined by his friends O the Owl, Katerina Kittycat, Prince Wednesday, and Miss Elaina. Together, through imagination, creativity and music they learn the key social skills necessary for school and for life.

—
LA Times did a small piece on an Etsy shop of a gentleman who does illustrated posters with author quotes. Two of the ones they feature are Faulkner (“Civilization begins with distillation”) and Capote (“That’s not writing, that’s typing”).

—
A great reason to go to the Atlanta airport, other than going somewhere else? Their plan “to spend nearly $4 million on a single art installation in an underground airport walkway.”

Hartsfield-Jackson officials plan to spend $4 million on an art project that has been on hold for nearly a decade and has more than tripled in cost since conception. The project — which needs approval from the city council — was first proposed in 2003, with a cost of $1.3 million, what would have been the airport’s most expensive art ever. But then the airport learned it would need another $2 million in electrical work for the project, and that the total cost would be about $4 million. Plenty of passengers wouldn’t even see the art unless they use the underground walkway between Concourses A and B. The work by Chicago artist Steven Waldeck would be a “living forest” with a canopy of trees, chirping birds and other sensory experiences.

—

—
Archinect shows Gehry’s Make It Right home.

—
Jack Lacy Jr, who successfully prosecuted a man in the 1966 killing of a sharecropper passed away in Brandon MS.  The NYT ran this:
Prosecutors said Mr. Avants and two companions had offered Mr. White $2 and a soda to help them find a dog that was lost in the woods. Mr. White, who had no connection with the civil rights movement, was driven to a national forest, shot to death and dumped in a creek bed.

Prosecutors said Mr. White was killed to lure Dr. King to Mississippi so the men could assassinate him. Dr. King did not visit Mississippi after the killing. He was assassinated two years later in Memphis.


When Mr. Avants died in 2004, Mr. Lacy said the death “closes a chapter on one of the most horrific events” in Mississippi history.

—
From NPR: Beyond the Music in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2.  Ernie K-Doe said “only three songs would stand the test of time: “Amazing Grace,” “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Mother-in-Law,” because, as he put it, “There’s gonna be mothers-in-law until the end of time.”

—
Linda Green, the Yakamein Lady, won a New Orleans-centered episode of ‘Chopped’ on Food Network.  NO’s Fireman Mike Gowland won the All-American themed episode, too!

—
The famous-famous Lindy’s cheesecake recipe?  It’s right here.

—
I think my genealogy chart has some pretty terrific, famous, important, and interesting people in it — but the Telegraph reports on a Scottish man who, through genetic analysis, is related to ‘Eve’:
They told him his mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), passed through the female line, was 30,000 years old and only two genetic mutations removed from the first woman, while most men have a genome with around 200 mutations since the earliest humans.


Alistair Moffat, the historian and rector of St Andrews University, who was involved in setting up the DNA project, said: “It is an astonishing result and means he could have been in the ‘Garden of Eden’.


“It is further proof that even white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are descended from a black Eve.”


—
From the Jackson Free Press:
The pastor, still dressed as Elvis, continued with the service, explaining that he would have to lift his sunglasses occasionally to read from the book as the lighting wasn’t that good. He delivered his homily and pronounced the vows. As I watched the ceremony, I found myself listening to the pastor/Elvis and it occurred to me that the pastor’s dignity and earnestness was carrying the day. Who would have thought that a middle-aged man wearing an Elvis costume could perform one of the most important rites of passage in a person’s life? This had not turned into a spectacle—it was a teaching moment for all of us. This man connected with these young people (and the congregation), making himself vulnerable to derision as he did so. No one in that church that night will ever forget it.

—
NPR has done a big piece on the Highwaymen: Art, Race, and Murder: The Origins of Florida’s Highwaymen.

—
Lifetime is remaking Steel Magnolias.  I didn’t think that it needed to be remade either — but check out this cast — it may be fantastic (and the person that wrote the piece in the WP is one of my friends!):
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1

I found this in Decatur, Alabama:

Staggs (Stagg’s? Staggs’?) Grocery in Florence is one of those old little hamburger shops that all lucky small-towns have.

Forget those plastic tables and peer upwards to that fantastic pressed ceiling:

We forgot those straight-from-Sam’s tables and chairs too, and had lunch in the car while viewing gorgeous Florence.  That hamburger?  Verrr-verrr-good.

…and extra points (even though it wasn’t served just-out-of-the-oil hot) for having fried pies.  And extra-extra points for supporting Grandma in Phil Campbell, who, as it turns out, makes a pretty good fried pie.  Boo to all those hamburger places who have the good sense to think of selling fried pies like this but instead place orders with Sysco or some other of that ilk and dole out nasty rectangular, prefab bricks.

—
Smashburger is a new chain to Alabama; their first store in Madison was just written up in the H’ville Times for developing a burger called the ‘Dixie’ with a regional specialty spin — white barbecue sauce: “In addition to the white barbecue sauce, the burger comes with shredded leaf lettuce, fried green tomato, mayo and Swiss cheese on an egg bun.”  (I bet it doesn’t need that extra mayonnaise, though, and I wonder why they used Swiss.)

—
There’s a new-ish magazine called ‘Eat. Drink. Mississippi‘ based out of Monticello.  The latest issue had a feature on Slugburgers — I’ve waxed poetic about them before — and mentioned that slugburger mix is available to purchase, Suitor’s at Gardner’s Supermarket in Corinth, and their own mix at Rickman’s Meat Market.  The hamburgers at Staggs are beef, but the hamburgers at some of the older places, like CF Penn’s in Decatur, are meat + extenders: an extender being something like flour, soy protein…

Oh — and CF Penn does a food challenge, giving people an hour to eat ten of these. If Joey Chestnut ate the 72oz steak meal at the Big Texan in fewer than nine minutes, he could do this in one!

It’s “Helen-uh” not “Huh-Lee-nuh”.  Then you can say you’ve been to “Helen-uh – west Helen-uh” altogether because that’s the area.  After that, it’s beautiful homes:

…then, the downtown, which is fighting against empty storefronts with completely charming shops (one with a planted old Kelvinator wringer washer out front) and murals, and ohmygosh yes a real old Buster Brown neon sign at a shoe shop:

This Thrive is ‘design in rural America’ — a non-profit design firm where they help entrepreneurs, go about promoting area arts, and provide affordable design for others:

And one day I’m going to start a Tumblr for salons with glory-based names:

As always, unless otherwise noted, all images here copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Ask me before using in any fashion. Thank you.

The July Anthropologie catalog = New Orleans.  And it’s fabulous, of course.

—
Pie week on NPR Morning Edition.  Winning recipes here, more here.

—

The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis will open the balcony at the Lorraine Motel site for visitors to the museum while a renovation, beginning in November, is going on.  From the AP:

Museum president Beverly Robertson told The Commercial Appeal (http://bit.ly/O6Ebu6) that officials didn’t want to deny visitors the opportunity to see the room, so while it isn’t accessible from the inside, people can view it from the outside by way of the balcony.


She says a tunnel with information about the civil rights movement will lead to the steps of the balcony, where a museum worker will stay to ensure the site is admired properly.


“We need to make sure there is great respect for this space,” she said. “Because that is the whole power of that space, that balcony and that room where Dr. King spent the last minutes of his life.”


Museum founder D’Army Bailey called opening the balcony to the public an “excellent idea.”


“I always felt the balcony should be shared with the public,” Bailey said. “That’s an experience that is rare anywhere in the world.”

—
The 1830s Ceres Plantation home in Warren County, MS is being dismantled.

—
The Sound and the Fury in 14 colors; as Faulkner had envisioned.  From the LA Times:
It begins in the voice of Benjy, a mentally disabled man whose perception is jumbled, immediate and distinctly hard to parse.

One of the reasons Benji’s narrative is hard to follow is because it jumps around in time with little indication of the change, other than italics. But when Faulkner was working on the book in the 1920s — “The Sound and the Fury” was published in 1929 — he imagined a way to make the section clearer to readers. “I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink,” Faulkner wrote to his editor, “as I argued with you and Hal in the Speakeasy that day.”

“I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up,” he added, inadvertently launching a challenge to future publishers. Nine decades later, the Folio Society took it up.

…
The color edition of Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” is being published July 6 in a limited edition of 1,480 and is priced at $345. One thousand preordered copies have been sold.

—

Commemoration later in July of the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, from the AP in the WP.

—

The AP on engineers and mechanics working to restore Vollis Simpson’s whirligigs.

—
A beautiful piece on Louis Michot, Song Man With a New Métier, in the NYT by Michael Tortorello.  Michot has founded the Cultural Research Institute of Acadiana.
…“Then it became a mansion, because he met a woman,” Mrs. Michot said.

On their very first date, she recalled, he asked her to pick him up at a gas station in Milton, La., a rumor of a town largely defined by having a gas station. “He said his truck was in the shop,” she said. When she pulled up, “he was on his bike with a six-pack of beer, eating a boudin breakfast” (a pork sausage).

They drove off to collect a song from an old Cajun sorcière, or medicine woman, named Ethel Mae Bourque, who had recently sung it to her dying father as a kind of musical palliative. Mr. Michot ultimately gained a few important things from the visit: a wife, for one; a collection of field recordings with Mrs. Bourque; and a pile of cypress beams that now run through his house.

With $100,000 to spend, and some sketches on graph paper, Mr. Michot was already imagining a different kind of house: a piece of bayou bricolage made from sunken cypress logs and salvaged shacks, architectural heirlooms and family junk.

And all that Spanish moss…

Slideshow here.