Month: September 2013

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.

This from the Valley Planet in Huntsville, with reminiscences of Bill from other friends.

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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:

What a sweet, special man.

More of Tat’s work here.

Found in the Quarter:

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…”

‘

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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.

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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…”.

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WILLIAM DUNLAP, The Painter’s Landscape. from Yellow Cat on Vimeo.