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.
No trip to McComb, Mississippi goes by without a visit to The Dinner Bell, one of the only round table restaurants still operating. The first of these Av and I ever went to was Walnut Hills in Vicksburg, and we were instantly smitten.
Who can pass up sitting down with twelve or fourteen people and almost an hour later likely leave with exactly that many friends? Sign me up. And we haven’t even gotten to the food yet.
Just before we’re all seated, the food is placed on the lazy susan (oh! can you see that picture of Jerry Clower on the other side of the curtain?). We have been here so many times for dinner/lunch and it is always, always fabulous.
There was rice, sweet potato casserole, green beans, limas, kidney beans, cabbage, rutabagas, squash, chicken and dumplins, fried eggplant, peas, rolls, fried chicken…maybe a half dozen other dishes. Oh that chicken is so good. The fried eggplant recipe is a secret — so much so that they don’t include it in the restaurant’s own spiral-bound cookbook.
— If you know of any additional (I think the Round Table in Waynesboro has closed, and the Mendenhall Hotel Revolving Tables has been gone twelve years now) please contact me, but I think the list of round table restaurants in the South is now:
Family style (sit with others, pass the food to the person on your right): Mrs. Wilkes’, Savannah GA Miss Mary Bobo’s, Lynchburg TN (their site at the JD site as they are owned by the same entity) Monell’s, Nashville TN The Smith House, Dahlonega GA Dillard House, Dillard GA (used to be family style but I really think most everyone gets their own private table now)
This summer we stopped in at The Tomato Place in Vicksburg — this was the part of summer we were at Jacobs Camp. The giant bottle tree beckoned:
Green plums (unripened plums, perfectly sour and dipped in salt, or pickled):
…and that looks like quite the BLT, too:
It’s fruit stand in the front:
with coolers loaded with essential fruity goodness for smoothies, soups…: …lunch counter in the back, where among other items you can order a BLT, po boy, or slice of tomato pie. Oh — and they make bagels, which aren’t anything close to best-on-earth Montreal bagels, but are pretty good on a summer day in Vicksburg.
The 1790-era Whitney Plantation house in Wallace, Louisiana is being restored, and the emphasis is not on the finery of the mansion. From the NYT:
When visitors pass through the house, perhaps for 10 minutes at most, antique bells, up to 30 inches wide, will toll outside in tribute to the slaves.
“The whole time you’re in there, you’ll hear the bells,” Mr. Cummings said. “It’s a constant reminder of who built that place.”
An outdoor maze of black granite walls will be etched with the names of thousands of Louisiana slaves. Reading from a few walls during a preview tour, the Whitney Plantation’s academic director, Ibrahima Seck, a scholar from Senegal, explained the likely origins of some of the slaves and their descendants, with names like Santiago, Jolicoeur, Susu, Cupidon, Kiamba, Cinigal, Nard and Banning. “I will sit here late at night and maybe I will hear them talk,” Dr. Seck recounted.
“This art wasn’t created to entertain people or to sell to rich people,” Arnett went on. “It was created to commemorate the culture itself, so that it could last, so that grand- mama could tell grandson, ‘This is what we’re about, child.’ ” He looked pained. “Art in America has been removed from all that. It isn’t relevant to anybody walking down the street. It’s relevant to a handful of wealthy people who don’t even collect it — they accumulate it.” He added, “I’m trying to create some documents to leave behind, so that when the system changes, just a little bit, somebody will say, ‘Wow, you mean we had this going on in America in the twentieth century?’ That’s all.”
“It’s like a transformer,” said Nathan Purath, co-director of the Coleman Center for the Arts in York. “It looks like a house when it’s in its dormant stage, and then it unfolds into stadium seating for 100 people that can be used to do all kinds of things.”
Conceptual artist Matthew Mazzotta created the “Open House” as part of the artist-in-residence program through the CCA. The stadium seating faces a raised earth stage that has played host to concerts and movies since the opening on June 15.
Across the street from the town’s main grocery store, the property was the location of a decaying pink house before “Open House” was built.
“Basically, I’m using the concept of transformation,” Mazzotta said. “I wanted to show how something that doesn’t look like it’s going to be much could be something if you have the right kind of attitude towards it, if people are willing to put the energy to it. … I guess it’s the ugly duckling turned into the swan. Here we have the abandoned house turned into another house, then this house has this secret of being able to transform into a theater.”
McClure’s Barbecue opens Uptown (among their sauces, Alabama white), from Gambit: During its pop-up run, McClure’s served barbecue and side dishes family style in more-or-less unlimited portions. The restaurant will recreate that service style on Tuesday nights, with a pay-one-price deal (the amount still to be determined). “We’ll push all the tables together and throw food at people until they cry mercy,” McClure says. From the NYPost (this is the part where we pause judgment, and consider all the machinations that make this possible): What is “the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history” Hint: It has 390 calories. It contains 23g, or half a daily serving, of protein, plus 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and so on. Also, you can get it in 14,000 locations in the US and it usually costs $1. Is this a let’s-see-if-this-sticks idea?
Bone Lick Barbecue in Atlanta now has a ‘redneck charcuterie’ plate which consists of homemade Velveeta cheese, homemade coca-cola jelly, pimento cheese + jerkies…’. Didn’t realize anyone had ever consumed unheated Velveeta before.
And Popeye’s is now serving ‘chicken waffle tenders‘ with ‘chicken and waffles in every bite!‘. NPR gently put forth chicken and waffles, a dish/combination restaurants in NYC claim, as an example of Southern food earlier this year in a piece about a different subject overall (that really could/should be addressed because what people call our food and what our food really and traditionally is/are = two different things but nonetheless…) and their follow-up that Southerners had their hackles raised about the dish being called ‘Southern’ because of ‘talking about somebody’s mama‘ was flippant and weak.
— The Nashville Parthenon‘s exhibit, ‘Paul Lancaster: A World of His Own’ is open. N’ville Scene just reviewed: The first time Paul Lancaster went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he stopped in front of a painting by the 19th century Post-Impressionist master Henri Rousseau and remarked, “This fellow paints kind of like I do.” …But unlike Rousseau, Lancaster never received formal training. The 94-year-old artist taught himself to paint as a child in the 1930s and ’40s, and he continues to work from his studio just outside Nashville — several of the paintings in A World of His Own, the current exhibition of his work at The Parthenon, were created within the past 10 years. …If only every artist was playful enough to have a collection of such childlike elements in their oeuvre, Lancaster might not be seen as “naive,” but instead as trailblazing. Also must-see in Nashville — the Bruce Munro LIGHTS exhibit at Cheekwood each Tuesday evening in September and some October dates.
— (above, a pic I took post-K in which people had stuck little love notes, asking Camellia Grill to reopen, on its front)
— My beautiful friend Amy was featured in the news. She truly is ‘The Egg Queen’. Ah, this article needs a slideshow of two thousand of her beautifully decorated eggs (not just Easter eggs!). She is amazing. Proud of you, Amy! Mwah!
— From The Verge: Much of the world’s great artwork is tightly controlled, but the Getty Museum just announced a significant initiative to open things up — its new Open Content Program has made some 4,600 pieces of art from the museum’s collection free to use. Users can visit the Getty Search Gateway to browse through the entire collection of high-resolution images, and they can all be used for commercial and non-commercial purposes so long as they’re properly attributed to the museum.
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A judge has dismissed the suit brought by Faulkner heirs against Sony for the version of “the past is never dead” quote used in ‘Midnight in Paris’.
— Padma’s Picks just started on BravoTV.com — 10 New Orleans chefs compete (this is showing online only) to be the one representing the city in the latest Top Chef, which begins airing October 2. I think I got to see some of the season being filmed earlier this year, and I’ll post those pics later.
— The Marion Greenwood social realism mural at the University of Tennessee has been removed and is being restored in Oak Park, IL for display next summer, although where the mural will be displayed next is in question. It has been mostly hidden by the university for decades due to — as the slideshow puts it — a ‘controversial face’ (can be seen at 1:13):
— Feast the eyes on the wonderfulness that is the work of Charles Dellschau, art undiscovered until decades beyond his passing in the early 1920s. His notebooks were found in a junk shop.
— The Rise of Self-Taught Art in The Atlantic. In the U.S., outsider art had a different trajectory. Ground zero wasn’t the psychiatric wards, but rather the South. One of the first American self-taught artists to reach star status was William Edmondson (1874–1951), the son of former slaves, who, after losing his job as a hospital orderly in Nashville, had a vision that set him on his course: “I was out in the driveway with some old pieces of stone when I heard a voice telling me to pick up my tools and start to work on a tombstone,” he recalled. “I looked up in the sky and right there in the noon daylight He hung a tombstone out for me to make.”
— Gold stars for everyone who embraces vulnerability. Sweet Antoinette Tuff, a school clerk, shared her own story with a would-be shooter and saved an elementary school in Georgia this week. Via NPR.
— When the time comes that the boys get ready to start playing baseball, we’ll take them up to Louisville and go to the Slugger factory (we believe in Nokoma ball gloves too — American made for an American game). The recent WSJ slideshow in ‘My Old Kentucky Home‘ is making me ready to go now. And The 21C needs to be my address there (and I didn’t realize they have a 21C now in Bentonville — perfect for that Crystal Bridges visit).
And: the Crystal Bridges logo looks like three yarmulkes. Just can’t hold that observation in any longer.
— Publisher’s Weekly reports that the new Southern Literary Journal, China Grove, lands August 28 with an unpublished Mark Twain Letter, and that the journal will be published twice in 2014 with each issue featuring an ‘interview with a renowned Mississippi author’.
— Like so many other festivals, the newish Athens, Alabama Grease Festival will be crowning a queen. But perhaps sensing that not too many of us would want to go around as ‘grease queen’ they’re going to be doing it this way: Hollman said Athena of Greece was known as a wise goddess who loved and protected the City of Athens, could be a warrior, had a creative side and had interest in the arts, crafts and agriculture. Organizers are looking for the Alabama version, a Limestone County woman who is involved in the community, such as volunteering within the city through non-profit organizations, serving on city boards, supporting environmental projects, working with youth or supporting the arts.
“Since this festival is about honoring how Southern mothers and grandmothers made cooking an art form, Athena, Grease Goddess should be a good cook, and since this festival is about honoring how our Southern mothers and grandmothers made cooking an art form, our Athena, Grease Goddess should be a good cook,” said festival chair Betsy Hyman.
— Lonnie Holley’s album, ‘Keeping A Record Of It’ will be released September 3.
— Above: half ‘Meat Packing District’ and half ‘South Street Seaport’: old bay bechamel, provolone, mozzarella, crabmeat, shrimp, and crawfish tails pizza from Sal and Mookie’s in Jackson, which was a terrific pizza.
— And: I was one of the hostesses for a baby shower earlier this month — the theme for the nursery is owls, so I made this owl out of egg salad (egg, olive eyes, carrot ears and nose, lettuce for wings, cucumber slices for tummy feathers, later on I added pretzel sticks for the nest):
…and I made this roasted salmon nicoise platter (went with asparagus rather than haricot verts), verrry inspired by this recipe:
If you’ve known me for a while, I set my friend Jeff (best friend from 6th grade on) and my friend Leslie (best friend since 1998) up on a date about three-four years ago, they got married, and they’re now expecting a little girl!! Aunt Ginger = super happy.
Lucy Hunnicutt will debut her “A Brief History of the Blues” art series at Jeanine Taylor Folk Art in Sanford, Florida on 8/23 with a 6-9p reception. There will be live blues music by Jim Mahoney and The Angels of Mercy — and I hear someone is bringing their mama’s pimento cheese. Oh, what I would do to be there! Thanks, Lucy, for sending these images of the work that will be featured. Fabulous.
It’s actually setup as a buffet but once you see it, those ‘eh. a buffet.’ feelings disappear. So not all of this was finished, but there were tastes of blackeyed peas, roll, green beans, cabbage, fried squash, grits, succotash, turnip greens, and of course, their famous fried chicken.
Oh that was good! And dessert just automatically comes with your meal, so they brought out a choice of bread pudding and peach cobbler, so a taste or two of this also:
This is the view up the street, of the capitol. Next time, we’re getting it to go and making a picnic on the lawn here. Nice:
In Utica, Mississippi, we found this monument to Frost J. Kelley, 1870-1909, and besides the beauty of his dress and detail of the likeness, the quote here — and on the monuments of his extended family — extraordinary:
‘He was an honor to the earth on which he lived, and worthy of the heaven to which he has gone.’
The overall base would suggest that plans were for his wife, M.J., to have stood here beside.
The monument for their daughter, Julia May Kelley:
‘Oh rain! Fall softly, lightly, above these little heads, oh angels! Spread your sheltering wings above these narrow beds.’
This little lamb for the son of what was probably Frost’s brother, Graves D. Kelley, 1859-1902 (above, ‘His many virtues form the noblest monument to his memory’). Graves Davis Kelley Jr. was born July 5, 1896 and passed away September 4, 1897:
‘Sleep on sweet babe and take thy rest. G-d calls away when he thinks best.’
The tragedies that must’ve befallen this family. Graves’ mother passed away August 1, 1896, less than a month after he was born.
‘It was an angel that visited the green earth and took a flower away. How many hopes lie buried here.’
I tried to find a little bit about the Kelley family, and came across this page of (terribly interesting, sometimes funny) recollections by Richard Powell, who was born in 1919 near Gallatin, Mississippi: After the boll weevils destroyed the cotton crops, my grandmother sold the Ringgold Plantation to Mrs. Frost Kelley of Utica, Mississippi. Mrs. Frost Kelley’s husband owned a furnishing business in Utica, Mississippi and Mr. D. C. Simmons went to work there as a young boy, as a bookkeeper. When Mr. Frost Kelley, Mr. Simmons took over the business and that is where he made most of his money furnishing the farmers of the area with things that they needed to run their farms. My Grandmother was kin to Mrs. Frost Kelley. When Mr. Frost Kelley died, Mrs. Frost Kelley had a life size marble statue made in Italy of Mr. Frost Kelley and it stands today in the cemetery in Utica, Mississippi.
Selz Royal Blue Shoes ghost sign in Columbus, Mississippi.
If you’re interested in ghost signs around Birmingham, my friend Charles Buchanan has written ‘Fading Ads of Birmingham‘ and sells his block prints of well-known area features here.
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