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.
The beautiful thing about having beautiful, creative friends is that they have beautiful, creative friends.
From sweet Wade Wharton, the Huntsville artist who has become my very good friend for several years now, I got to meet his friend, Bill Wilson. Actually, before I visited his home, I had seen Bill’s art at the Monte Sano Art Show:
Bill passed away in July and I’ve just been putting off writing this post as I just did not…did not want to acknowledge in my mind that Bill was gone. Bill was not only a pique assiette artist, he was a great storyteller, who among everything else had great stories about moving to Huntsville from Memphis, back when Werner von Braun was running things in Huntsville and needed people proficient with computers. Bill came. It must’ve been just an incredible time to be working in rocketry.
Some of Bill’s pique assiette:
‘Pique assiette’ is the term for taking broken plates and such and putting them back together in pattern or design. The ‘father’ of pique assiette is Raymond Isidore (my friend Henk has a post about him here at his fantastic European art environments site, and there’s more at the end of this post in a nice video).
Beatles on the left:
…and this is what Bill called his ‘American Sampler’ made from coffee cups:
Along with everything else, Bill was a poet:
I just have to mention this, too: Bill was blessed with incredibly successful children (each of them an artist). One is Emily Wilson. Terrific.
— Last week, the world lost Tat Bailey. Oh, this hurts! Tat was over 100 years old. I was lucky to know Tat and to have visited him a few times, including one particularly memorable one in which we ate groceries I had brought from Birmingham in the log cabin on his property because the power was out for days due to the April 2011 tornado outbreak. If I remember correctly, some things we heated on the grill and others in the fireplace just like ‘in the old days’…
Tat was one who built things. He built his place all himself, and had a special love for working with rock:
…he built onto a log cabin that’s been in the family since it was first built in 1860:
…and a wishing well:
…and he even built his own covered bridge:
…which he purposefully built listing a bit to one side because he wanted it to be wabi-sabi.
Wade on the left and Tat on the right:
Tat’s niece and caretaker took me all around the house on my first visit, and I saw all of Tat’s masonry work, the beautiful floors he’s laid, the furniture he’s made, all kinds of amazing things. She said I *had* to see what everybody is always so interested in downstairs. I had no idea…
Tat built his own coffin. Those clothes on the left were bought at Hammers for that day. Those six hammers on top will be used for the final nailing of the lid, and each person that does that task will have his own hammer to keep. He’s even recorded certain songs for the funeral from a Sacred Harp singing – Saints Bound for Heaven, this one that begins with Amazing Grace, and Journey Home. The article that ran in the H’ville Times about Tat and his work mentioned his preparations, and KTW read it and sent him a letter about the fact that she also already had her coffin made too:
(He loved KTW!)
Tat is known by that name, but his real first and second name were — well, his daddy was a baseball fan — Tyrus Cobb. So on Tat’s front door:
From another of my visits — we wanted to take pictures of each other in one of his arches:
Only once have I ever gotten in a bidding war with someone on eBay. Ten years ago or so, someone put up a copy of the 1963 ‘What’s Cooking with the Millstein’s’ (apostrophe error, I know, but there it is on the cover), a Jewish cookbook from Natchez and I just had to have it. From the foreward: “…a collection of favorite family recipes. “Bloods” and No-Bloods” alike have generously given their most guarded, secret concoctions…”
‘
There are old-country recipes and old-South recipes (everything from ‘Rumanian putlejola’ and ‘ptcha’ to ‘shrimp dip’ and ‘white fruitcake’). The Tante’s Honey Cake recipe is one of my favorites, and now this kugel recipe, which is pareve (neither dairy/milchig nor meat/fleishig). I served a variation on it at Rosh Hashanah:
12 oz wide egg noodles
1/4 tsp salt
1/3 c vegetable oil
6 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 c sugar
1 small can (8oz) crushed pineapple, mostly drained
Preheat the oven to 350*, Boil noodles to 90% cooked (they will finish in the oven). Drain, let cool a bit.
Prepare a 9×13 baking dish — I line mine with parchment paper so nothing sticks.
In a large bowl, combine the noodles with all other ingredients. Mix well. Pour into prepared pan and bake for one hour (check at 50 min, but you can also let this go over an hour if you like the noodles more brown).
—
I think of kugel as Jewish macaroni-and-cheese. Serving a traditional meal and want a pasta dish? Kugel.
If you’re serving dairy, you can make it with cottage cheese and you get that whole casserole feel with the creamy texture. If you’re serving meat, you can make this kind above with no dairy at all but it’s still smooth and comforting.
Lunch at SoBou — it opened last summer, and from the Tom Fitzmorris review: SoBou represents either the vanguard of a new era in dining out, or a phase we’ll laugh at in twenty years. In either case, it’s decidedly pitched at younger (thirty-ish) customers, who seem as delighted by the freewheeling format of the place as older customers are puzzled by it. The center of gravity is the bar, where an intensive program of developing cocktails and custom ingredients for them rules. And it’s a Brennan family restaurant (think Ti/Alex/Brad, plus Tory McPhail of Commander’s) so I don’t even have to consider the food — it’s just going to be somewhere between very, very good and mind-blowing amazing. It’s located in the W French Quarter on Chartres.
This was not my intention. It looks like more than it was (since I didn’t finish the julep or the other cocktail). And what is that knife doing there?
One of the drinks was water.
One of them was a mint julep, made with crushed ice like a snoball. I do like a mint julep. It was really good but I didn’t get anywhere close to finishing it — here’s why…
I was thinking about how one of the specials at SoBou — they do this and practically give away martinis at Commanders and some other places too — is the $.25 martini special with lunch. I’m going to say that this was a ‘pink elephant’, but I can’t promise that’s correct.
I grew up in a dry county, and never developed into the kind of person who regularly has anything other than water or milk (seriously) with a meal. I had my first sip — and I do mean sip because in my mind it was made up of equal parts guilt, and fear for breaking the rules! — on a high school trip to Panama City Beach. Oh.
Really the funniest part of that high school trip was that my best friend and I met this super-cool guy who introduced himself to us on the beach, and told us he drove a ‘vette. We thought: Corvette. Turned out to be: Chevette.
And suddenly he wasn’t super-cool any more. We were nice girls and weren’t going to go riding with him but did want to see that car! Was it a new Corvette? Red, maybe? Bonus points for a convertible! So cool to be our age and have a ‘vette!
We laughed and laughed and laughed about that forever.
Back at lunch, Abigail was trying to devise something good for the upcoming Tales of the Cocktail (ToTC), so I wound up with this, complimentary. We worked on naming it, but I don’t know what she finally decided on.
No problems on walking home because I only had a taste:
So that looked like a lot of drinks in front of me, really it just amounted to a water, a martini plus one drink of another, and half a julep. See me explaining? Ohmygosh, I still have some dry-county guilt!
Lunch arrived and it was just terrific. This lighting really does nothing at all for the image, but this is a ‘crispy oyster taco with compressed pineapple ceviche, mirliton, and Cajun ghost pepper caviar’. It was a little crunchy and a little smooth and all fresh. It popped. Delectable. Oh that was good.
— Tales of the Toddy is later this year. This is how it’s described:
Making Spirits Bright 8th Annual Tales of the Toddy® Thursday, December 19, 2013 5:30 pm – 8:30 pm Generations Hall 310 Andrew Higgins Drive New Orleans, 70130 Tickets on Sale – Monday, October 14, 2013 In a few short months the holidays will be upon us once again. And nothing goes better with all the wassailing, mistletoe and good tidings than great cocktails. On December 19th, Tales of the Toddy returns for its eighth year to help everyone get into the holidays spirits. Join us for the most spirited holiday party of the year with expertly crafted yuletide cocktails, excellent cuisine from local restaurants and live music by Mississippi Rail Co. that will take a contemporary spin on the carols we know and love. To get the competitive spirits flowing, we’ll be pitting the city’s best bartenders against each other in a holiday cocktail shakedown. Teams of five will compete in one of four categories—nogs, ciders, chocolate and toddies—for bragging rights of being crowned the Tales of the Toddy champions! So get your tickets and get into the holiday spirits at Tales of the Toddy 2013. A portion of the evening’s proceeds underwrites educational programming for the United States Bartenders Guild.
This William Dunlap piece — it’s actually 14 68×94″ panels — was on display this summer during my latest visit to the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. The top half depicts winter…Antietam battleground…while the bottom half, summer in Virginia. Dunlap was commissioned to make this in 1984 with the idea that it would be installed in the rotunda at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. The label states, “what he created was a contemporary response to the historical cycloramas of the nineteenth century, such as ‘The Battle of Atlanta’…or the immense cycloramic painting at Gettysburg…”.
Av and I like to go just for the pie (and really, for the pie only. Thing to do is to eat at Parlor Market on the same block, then head down here for dessert):
We were in Kosciusko, Mississippi this summer and went back by to visit the Laura Kelly monument. It was vandalized sometime in early 2011 — the hand had been broken off. It was repaired last summer.
Laura Kelly passed away in 1890 and her husband commissioned an Italian sculptor to memorialize her likeness, in her wedding dress. The story also goes that the husband had a third story built on to the home that was under construction when she passed so that he would be able to easily view her monument.
I like to study these types of monuments in particular, with the subject in (obviously) period dress. Here are some others I’ve found:
Victor Valentine Manfredo (d. 1912), Elmwood Cemetery, Birmingham
Col. William C. Falkner (d. 1889), Ripley MS — he was William Faulkner’s (they spelled their surname differently) great-grandfather
— The original 1927 Westminster Presbyterian Church in New Orleans has been converted into a home and is on the market for $2.5MM.
— The Texas State Fair opens September 27; the fair’s “Big Tex Choice Awards” have been made, and one of the nominees was deep-fried King Ranch Chicken Casserole in the shape of Texas. Another entry was ‘Fried Thanksgiving Dinner: Imagine everyone’s favorite meal — turkey, stuffing, gravy, and all — mashed together, whittled down to the size of a softball and tossed into the deep fryer, cranberry sauce on the side’ which won the Most Creative award. Oh! And yay, the new Big Tex will be unveiled on opening day.
— From the DMOnline — John Currence is taking on a really great, charitable project in Oxford: Now, Currence has taken on a new project in the form of Lamar Lounge. A very different set-up from Currence’s other restaurants, Lamar Lounge is a barbecue-vending townie bar.
More important than the new type of restaurant or the exciting new menu options, however, is that Chef Currence will be using this restaurant to give back to the Oxford community.
“A not-for-profit restaurant,” Currence called the project. “We will identify a new Oxford children’s charity each year to receive the profits we make.”
— This little boy recites the books of the Christian Bible at his preschool graduation and then…sweet thing! Look beginning at :40:
BTW, George Strait announced the last dates of his ‘The Cowboy Rides Away‘ farewell tour this week.
— Painfully obvious these pics taken with my iPhone in dim lighting, above is supper from Ollie Irene in Birmingham. Included: ‘cheese and crackers’ with Stone Hollow goat cheese, sweet and sour pepper relish, pickled okra, their crackers (goat cheese, jelly, okra terrific but crackers were boring), boudin balls (not terribly good, every single Chevron station in Acadiana has better boudin balls), sausage with red onions and toast (pretty good), ham plate with melons, mint, and pecans (okay but terribly boring). You know what would have made this marginally better? If I had never been to Root where every single thing from even the most uncomplicated idea is interesting, interesting, interesting. And delicious.
— An Ode to Okra in the September D Magazine. A friend once told me that his mom carried Marlboro Reds and Virginia Slims in her purse. He knew what kind of mood she was in by which pack she was smoking. We didn’t always have okra at Sunday supper, but everything else on the table tasted better when we did. Okra was the Virginia Slims of my Sundays. This week, the Brennan’s name came off the big pink building in the Quarter.
The AP reports that NOLA Brewing is being sued by the Japanese company that owns the rights to Godzilla, claiming that NOLA’s MechaHopzilla ‘infringes on its copyrights and trademarks’.
Batch Nashville sends subscribers ($25/mo, 3-mo) boxes of Nashville-based goodness. The September box had granola from Haulin’ Oats, coffee from Garage Coffee Company, banana strawberry bread from Dozen Bakery, honey from Trubee Honey, and Sunday Morning Pancake Mix. Okay, who wants to start this in Bham with me?
It sounds so not-at-all delicious when they put it that way: Smithfield is being bought by a company in China, and the stockholders here will vote on it in a few days. Meanwhile, the CEO in China told the media, “This transaction will create a leading global animal protein enterprise.”
I knew we could get Whataburger (I left Alabama and lived in Texas for two years in elementary school and called it Waterburger for whatever reason) ketchup and mustard at HEB, but had no idea that earlier this summer HEB started carrying…Whatafries.
The last day for Hansen’s Sno-Bliz this season is October 1.
— The teaser trailer for James Franco’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Child of G-d’ is here. Moviefone wonders if he took a higher-learning Southern Gothic Lit class lately considering he’s done Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’ plus this McCarthy work, and next back to Faulkner with ‘Sound and the Fury’. If he can pull off ‘As I Lay Dying’ he can probably do just about anything.
— Lee v. Pinkus, 13-cv-03000, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York — the lawsuit brought by Nelle Harper Lee against her former literary agent regarding royalties for To Kill A Mockingbird, has been dismissed.
— Groundbreaking will be October 24 for the Mississippi Museum of History and the accompanying Mississippi Civil Rights Museum on the Old Capitol Green.
— Billy Bob Thornton’s new film, Jayne Mansfield’s Car (which thankfully really has nothing to do with the aforementioned), is released this week — set in Alabama, 1969:
…but I think this trailer is better/more interesting:
As the NYT review put it, Behind the clunky machinery is a lyrical meditation on life, death, heroism, regret and forgiveness written in a florid style that might be described as Tennessee Williams on testosterone.
— The city of Selma via/and a group of volunteers are running the historic St. James Hotel now. There was a lot of talk about it possibly closing and the city’s agreement with an Atlanta-based management group finished, but it seems as though things are going well. They are looking for an outside interest to come in with a plan for taking over the hotel.
— PBS’ Mind of a Chef Season 2 debuts this month, and Sean Brock is one of the two chefs featured. This clip shows him going to Prince’s Hot Chicken in Nashville and ordering the extra hot.
Proud to say my husband has eaten the extra hot and survived!
BTW, if like my PBS, yours is not airing the series, you can still view some of the episodes online. Really liked the conversation Sean had about peanuts. Boiled peanuts are one of our original street foods.
***And I was so tickled that they talked about Lawson and Bradford watermelons, and how Bradfords are coming back now (you can read those stories here at Slow Food Southern Region). We planted rattlesnake watermelons here at home one year and they nearly took over our whole house! Had to keep the windows closed so the watermelon vines couldn’t get us! Next year: going to order Bradford seeds. This is what Anson Mills is doing right now with Bradfords.
Speaking of shows on PBS, ‘A Chef’s Life‘ set in NC premiers this month also.
… wrap the real Saturn V rocket in Huntsville, Alabama with inspirational quiltwork that students and individuals from all over the world have, and are, making.
— #CookClub sounds like all kinds of fun — from the Tampa Bay Times: I love to cook and I know lots of other people do, too. Still, transforming raw ingredients into breakfast, lunch or dinner can be a solitary event, just you, a hot stove and your pots and pans. Oh, and a lack of time and fear of failure. What if you were in #Cookclub — sort of like a book club — where you could share your culinary triumphs and travails with people just like you? (Or people whose culinary know-how will improve yours?) Consider this your formal invitation to join #Cookclub. You don’t have to RSVP or pay dues, just get into the kitchen and cook the recipe I provide every other week. And take photos of what you’ve made (don’t you already?) and post them on Instagram (don’t you do this, too?) with your comments about the recipe. We’ll get them to Pinterest and share them on Twitter. For #Cookclub, we want experts and novices; adventurers and picky eaters. The more variety, the better. — There will be a workparty in October to help Salvation Mountain maintain. Here’s a bit from what happened last month with the rains:
— Rural Studio has had its fall convocation and they will be finishing eight 20k homes, finishing up three projects in Lions Park, a Boys and Girls Club in Greensboro, and a library in Newbern.
— Best thing for lunch this week: Persian piadine (one of my three usuals) at Bottega. And guess who else was there for lunch on Wednesday? Ted Koppel.
Root in New Orleans is the most interesting and fun place we’ve dined this year.
Without fail, every single thing brought to the table was beautiful, delicious, interesting, and unexpected in some way. This is the juniper cured duck proscuitto board. Each bite of this was amazing.
Here, the Louisiana pickled shrimp with lemon, stuffed eggs…
Av had the fish and chips, and for dessert we shared the Yorkie: “chocolate covered peppermint pattie, mint chocolate chip ice cream, coco puffs, and minted milk”. Nice, nice, nice:
…and the music was so good, I even had to SoundHound a couple of times. Let’s do more of this.
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