Month: April 2013

From a visit I made to Charlie Lucas’ environment in Pink Lily:

Another article in the NYT yesterday was by the same author as I mentioned yesterday, the gentleman who called me when he was here on assignment.  Originally we talked about art environments around Alabama — I encouraged him, in addition to visiting Joe, to see Tom Hendrix’s wall/monument at the Trace, W.C. Rice’s Cross Garden, and others — but at a certain point he told me he thought doing a piece only on those by one race would give the piece more focus.

Thus, the name of the article, ‘Yard Shows’ Are Becoming Harder to Find.  In part:

On a recent trip to Alabama, I’d hoped to visit the artist Charlie Lucas and his rural art environment at Pink Lily, near Montgomery. But the 61-year-old metal craftsman and painter was busy showing at a juried art festival. And besides, he had moved to Selma almost a decade ago and now worked in a warehouse studio.

I had heard conjecture that Joe Minter’s African Village in America might be the last “yard show” in Alabama. At least it seemed to be the last of these African-American art installations to remain inhabited and undisturbed. If that claim were true, I wondered, what had happened to the rest?

The art was never easy to find, materializing like night blooms in the woodlands and graveyards of rural black communities. Vaughn Sills, a Boston-based photographer, learned to look near historic downtowns, on the black side of the railroad tracks. And yet, she said, she had put perhaps 3,000 miles on rental cars in order to find 150 traditional African-American yards and gardens…

I don’t think of these as a phenomenon in context to only one group of people as was done in this particular article.  The construction of these environments are made by all flavors of humankind, all over the world (see my friend Henk in Amsterdam for European sites) and — as I do, as someone who has seen something wonderful in a front yard, stopped the car suddenly, and tapped blindly on front doors — you never know who’s on the other side…what the color or background behind that magic might be.  I just wish that this article would have been broadened to include more people, more sites.

P.S. No way, no way, no way is Joe the last with a ‘yard show’ in Alabama.

So proud to say that my beautiful friend Joe Minter was the subject of a NYT article today about his art environment.  I knew this was coming as the author spoke with me about Joe and other subjects when he was here back in late February, but it was so nice to see the recognition.

In part:
One obvious exception would be what Mr. Minter calls the African Village in America, and the amazing fabrications he has raised to fill almost every square foot of his consolidated half-acre holding.

It is, by some reckonings, one of the nation’s most extraordinary and least-known sculpture gardens. Here’s a room-size re-creation of the Birmingham jail cell that held Martin Luther King Jr., surrounded by six concrete Dobermans…

A slideshow of his art is here at the NYT.

Once seeing this, I looked it up. From the Anniston Star ‘Jesus Saves, We Buy Guns…‘:

Glennray Tutor, at the Mississippi Museum of Art. I was so happy to see this one in their collection, and take a pic of it. He is amazing.

From the Oxford American, and excellent: Our Revisionist Nostalgia:
How are we so imbued with nostalgia for a moment, a story, that isn’t our own? We want our jams hand-jarred and our chocolate in wrappings reminiscent of Victorian wallpaper, but we’re children of the late twentieth century. We didn’t grow up eating in fields. Yet this pioneer narrative is so apparent, so moving, that we adopt it in unquestioning rapture, a bunch of hungry Whitmans cooking (and tweeting and tagging) the songs of ourselves…

…Perhaps the appeal, to us twenty- and thirty-somethings going about life like it’s one long home-ec class, is that georgic chores like composting food scraps or butchering pigs are just beyond our memory’s reach, but not so far beyond it that we can’t imagine them. The distance makes them perfect focal points in our digitized pastoral—learning how to distill whiskey or pickle okra in a Mason jar is at once old-fashioned and modern, comforting and adventurous, nostalgic and novel. It feels familiar, even if we’ve never done it. (And it doesn’t hurt that these activities are tactile antidotes to the inevitable emptiness of ordering dinner online and liking status updates.) Besides, making mayonnaise sounds more fun when buying a jar of Hellmann’s remains an option. Culinary nostalgia, like any nostalgia, is borne of romance and distortion…

…We live in an inauthentic time, Davis said, and these are authentic experiences. And comforting ones, at that.

True, true, true. My great-grandmother, MawMaw Polk, was a terrific cook and I have the most beautiful memories of sitting at her heavily laden table of scratch-cooked fare (oh, if only there’d been Instagram when I was four…), but a generation later my grandmother, Nanny, embraced the conveniences and can-opener of her day.

Which do I long for, and try to emulate? Doing things long-handed, like MawMaw did. Nostalgia, however revisioned, re-envisioned…  Needing to learn how to *do* things again.  Yes.

It’s me, in an elevator, going with my babies up to our room at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville.  Kisses, world!

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An Ordinary Hero: the True Story of Joan Trumpauer Mulholland making the film festival rounds (and you can get it at Amazon too). Going to be very, very good.

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PimentoGate. The Masters have someone new behind the pimento cheese sandwiches in Augusta, and they’re not getting it right.

I am fine with adding the female members, and I am tolerating the belly putters,” fan Paul Jones said, “but changing the pimento cheese recipe is taking change too damn far.

The WifeSaver owner, whose services weren’t requested this year, isn’t giving up the secret ingredient (that he himself had to figure out when Augusta took the business away from Aiken’s Nick Rangos). He sells the ‘original Augusta recipe’ at WifeSaver restaurants.

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The kudzu-eating goats have been put back to work in Athens at UGA.

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The National Park Service has lesson plans for teachers to use, and one is relating to the Natchez Trace for Eudora Welty’s A Worn Path.

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What else to make with Pimm’s this summer.

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From the AP: Olen Burrage, who was acquitted in the case of three civil rights workers killed by Ku Klux Klansmen in Mississippi in the 1960s, has died. He was 82…

…After learning of Burrage’s death, Ben Chaney told the Clarion-Ledger newspaper, “I am disappointed. Wow! I’m very disappointed.” 

 …U.S. Attorney Doug Jones of Birmingham, Ala., who successfully prosecuted the 1963 church bombing that killed four girls there, told the newspaper authorities need to quickly assess this case and other civil rights cold cases. “The window to true justice in these cases is closing,” he said. “Today is just another example of one who escaped justice…

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Tumblr: Installator, which = museum installers installing installations.

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This pic above is from 2005 when Av and I went to find CoRd 515, Rock Cut Road in Neshoba County.  It’s at this intersection where the caravan stopped and murdered Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman.

Sad: Jerry Mitchell from the C-L reports that the Emmett Till historical marker in Money has been shot up, and someone actually ripped out the Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman marker in Neshoba County.

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The Slotin Folk Art Auction is this weekend, and you can bid online…

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The recipe for Bill Smith’s (Crook’s Corner) Atlantic Beach Lemon Pie (saltine cracker crust) here, from NPR. Think I’m going to make his ‘frozen mint julep’ — mint sorbet with a shot of Rebel Yell this summer.

Also, on the cocktail menu: Seersucker Martini (a Plymouth Gin and Dolin Dry Vermouth Martini w/house made watermelon Bitters). And Rebel Yell’s site has a recipe for the Rebel Slush which sounds pretty great too.

If I remember correctly, Bill Smith’s cookbook, Seasoned in the South, includes a recipe for honeysuckle sorbet (yes! Just found it online from NPR here).  ‘Tis the season.

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Eater becomes the last (because everyone else did this three years ago) food-centric site to ponder if the cupcake craze is over, because of the WSJ article this week on the crummy outlook for Crumbs. Yes, Eater, retail-wise, it’s over. Cake pops died a long time ago too — they’re the spinach and artichoke dip of the bakery world.  Although: maybe there’s a cycle for these things because it took 20 years for frozen yogurt to come back around…

Meanwhile, we’ll keep making them at home because a.) they’re easy and fun, b.) who doesn’t have a soft-spot for retro cupcake toppers, c.) ‘in’ or not, they’re yummy.

And: no matter what, this is kinda cute.

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Someone wrote a song referencing Margaret’s Grocery, here on YouTube.  And yes of course he referenced how Miss Margaret got herself a castle.

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Louisiana’s red snapper season in federal waters is only going to be nine days this year.  Alabama and Mississippi will still have a 28-day federal water season.

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The government is considering selling the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Bloomberg can’t help itself: ‘Why Privatizing the TVA Would Be a Dam Shame‘. If you have a great-grandmother who lived in the Valley, she might be able to tell you about all the changes once TVA was established (washing machines, electricity in general = a big plus, and they’re happy to tell your kids about it too).

Plus: TVA has its own Zombies.

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That’s a great return (ahhh, if only we’d had millions back in 2005) — Dahomey Plantation is on the market for $55M, all 9875 acres.  In 2005, it was on the market for $20MM.  Granted, it has had a lot of improvements, but that’s quite an increase.

At one time, it was the largest cotton plantation in the world.

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From CristilMethod: This Davis Wade Stadium groom’s cake is the standard by which all future groom’s cakes will be judged.  Indeed.

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Chris Lilly from Big Bob Gibson is working on a new cookbook (first one here).

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The NYT reports that Breyer’s has moved beyond (actually, below) ice cream partly because they think the public actually prefers them to use corn syrup. Breyer’s is now selling frozen dairy dessert because some of what they’re now distributing doesn’t fall under the FDA’s ‘standard of identity’ as ice cream.

Just for fun…some Southern real ice cream flavors:
Sweet Magnolia Ice Cream from Clarksdale, Miss in muscadine, or banana pudding…
High Road from Atlanta in bourbon burnt sugar, brown butter praline…
New Orleans Ice Cream Company in brandy milk punch, cafe au lait and beignets, lemon doberge, satsuma…

And as of this week, the Attorney General in BR decided that a NY company can’t sell wine ice cream in Louisiana.

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  Photographer Timothy Hursley and the silo he owns and photographs outside Greensboro, Alabama.

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There will be a celebration of Medgar Evers’ life, at his 50th yahrzeit, this summer.

From the Memphis CA:
During a press conference at a Jackson library named for Evers, Evers-Williams and daughter Reena Evers-Everette announced the details of the weeklong celebration. The first event, a memorial service, will be held June 5 at Arlington National Cemetery, just outside Washington. Evers served in the Army and fought at the Battle of Normandy. A symposium at the Newseum in Washington will also be held on June 5. 

On June 10 and 11, there will be tours of civil rights sites around Jackson, a civil rights film festival and a day of learning and dialogue for young people in collaboration with the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. June 12 will mark an international day of remembrance, including a celebration at the Mississippi Museum of Art, the chiming of bells and a tribute gala.

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The just-launched Digital Public Library of America is going to be wonderful.

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Yes! Vidalias are in!  If you’re from Texas, the 1015s are in! If Vidalia or 1015 doesn’t ring any bells, they are sweet onions, the likes of which you could eat ‘straight’ like an apple because they’re so sweet.

This week I took my first one of the season and sauteed it until the pieces were golden brown and rich, then added them to coconut milk with green curry (and a couple of other things) and made the Vidalia-est Tom Kha soup. Delicious.

Texas Monthly includes a recipe for chili onion rings this month.

BTW, if you’re a hardcore Vidalia fan, you might plan to buy some at the very end of the season and stuff pantyhose with onions, in your basement.  Seriously.  They last for months that way, and you’ll feel *so smart* cooking with Vidalias during the December holidays when everyone else is making do with some sad old travel-weary orb from Peru.

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MoMA intends to tear down the former American Folk Art Museum building, and Vanity Fair among so many others is asking why it is so “Dead Set on Perpetrating a Hideous Act of Architecture-cide?“.  And yes, there is a Change.org petition.

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A little bit about Grapico at Serious Eats.  I manage about two a year: each time we eat on the picnic tables outside Archibald’s in Northport.

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The Faulkner family v. Sony Pictures trial over the use/misuse of Faulkner’s ‘past is never dead’ quote will be April 7, 2014 at US District Court in Oxford.

UVa is getting a grant from the NEH to “map and study the imaginary county in William Faulkner’s fiction writings.”

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Wince.  The actress playing Daisy Buchanan in the new Gatsby movie says our Montgomery belle Zelda is like a K——–n, in Vogue.  Ouch.  And wrong.

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The Austin Chronicle wonders if $280 was fair for admission to the Foodways Texas Symposium.

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Governor Bentley signed the Scottsboro Boys Act this week. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who worked on this.

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A building that the Civilian Conservation Corps built at DeSoto State Park will become a museum to the CCC.

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Reason #1567250478 I love living in the South would have to be that some sweet creature who read this book previously used pink post-it notes to censor it.  I picked this up at the library, a book called ‘How to Live Like a Lady‘ (I have a soft spot for references on manners and good etiquette.  Can we ever know enough about those subjects, gentle reader?).  I didn’t expect a guide to this particular subject matter to be included, but I hope you enjoy the same smile I got, that a true lady went to the trouble to not expose another to what ladies should never concern themselves with in the first place.  I really do love this in the sweetest possible way:

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Google Street View allows people to walking tour of museums, and here is the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Larry Harris: thank you for sharing this with me!

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Another very good doc from a grad of Barefoot Workshops in Mississippi, and Chandler, yes! one day I am going to do it!  Seriously, I need to and I will.
Bad Apple Blues from Barefoot Workshops on Vimeo.

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(this is a pic I took at the original Billy Reid in Florence)
There’s now a Billy Reid Outlet shop at Silver Sands in Destin.

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What I’m reading this week:
The Little Paris Kitchen (this cookbook is great!)
Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words
The Message and the Book: Sacred Texts of the World’s Religions

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XOXO everyone. We sure should spread some extra sweetness this week.