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.
Established 1832.
Home of the Mount Willing Quilting Bees, where every Thursday about a dozen sweet ladies between the ages of 65 and 90 gather and sew. Each year, they make about 50 quilts each year, donating them to charity. They’d like to teach others to quilt. More here.
Here in the Bywater, unless you specifically knew these were Andres Duany designs…
They completely fit in the neighborhood. That’s the whole idea, and Duany did this well. The cost to build was $186k for 1400sqft, not counting the cost of the lot. I think they’re being rented right now. According to Zillow (which has some interior pics), this yellow home was only listed for sale once.
Duany is best known for his New Urbanism work (think: Seaside, which he worked on — he founded Congress for a New Urbanism). From this quote in the NYT, it’s apparent why his opinion of the work Brad Pitt with Make It Right has done in New Orleans is not particularly complimentary:
As for contemporary architects, Mr. Duany said they were welcome in New Urbanist communities, but only for public buildings like a town hall or library. “The star architect is confined to the civic building,” he said. “The civic buildings are free of any constraint.” Frank Gehry isn’t designing any homes in a Duany neighborhood. The New Republic even ran a piece last year, about how the Make It Right project has its issues. Who didn’t expect that, on something this scale? Even so, if you ever visit that neighborhood in the 9th Ward, it’s a contemporary mish-mash of styles that’s interesting but not cohesive, whereas in the example above, it’s less *wow* but certainly more comfortable.
Also, in this piece Duany wrote, Restoring the Real New Orleans, I can see him and Eugene Walter (who said Mobile was the “northernmost station of the Caribbean … North Haiti, not North America.”) in complete agreement about towns on the Gulf coast:
…I remember specifically when on a street in the Marigny I came upon a colorful little house framed by banana trees. I thought, “This is Cuba,” (I am Cuban). I realized in that instant that New Orleans is not really an American city, but rather a Caribbean one.
Looking through the lens of the Caribbean, New Orleans is not among the most haphazard, poorest or misgoverned American cities, but rather the most organized, wealthiest, cleanest, and competently governed of the Caribbean cities. This insight was fundamental because from that moment I understood New Orleans and began to truly sympathize. Like everyone, I found government in this city to be a bit random; but if New Orleans were to be governed as efficiently as, say, Minneapolis, it would be a different place – and not one that I could care for. Let me work with the government the way it is.
It is the human flaw that makes New Orleans the most humane of American cities. (New Orleans came to feel so much like Cuba that I was driven to buy a house in the Marigny as a surrogate for my inaccessible Santiago de Cuba.)
When understood as Caribbean, New Orleans’ culture seems ever more precious…
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Also: I can’t decide if living in Seaside would be dreamy (crazy-cute, beachy) or annoying (tourists) but here’s where we dream.
I haven’t made it to any exhibits this year, but last year, this (and I foolishly didn’t take a picture of the label, and can’t find the name of it at the website, although I have to point out that the name of another, After You’ve Been Burned by Hot Soup, You Blow in Your Yogurt is terrific and just so…well…exhibition-ish) was up at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans:
The CAC is one of the venues for Prospect.3: Notes for Now which will be going on all over the city from October 25 to January 25, 2015. From the press release, in part:
Franklin Sirmans, the Terri and Michael Smooke Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), is serving as the Artistic Director for “Prospect.3: Notes for Now.” The three-month exhibition will showcase the work of more than 50 leading and emerging contemporary artists from around the globe. Founded on the principle that art engenders social progress, the biennial and all related events will be free and open to the public.
Each artist will be offered a dedicated space to exhibit at one of over 15 venues, with a number of artists commissioned to produce site-specific projects. Many projects engage in some way with the Crescent City’s unique culture, and offer distinctive interpretations of the city, both past and present.
…Guided by several curatorial themes, P.3’s exhibitions, site-specific installations and new works will address: The New Orleans Experience, Seeing Oneself in the Other, The South, Crime and Punishment, Movie going, The Carnivalesque, Abstraction, Visual Sound, and will seamlessly tie together the largesse of the show through commissions by several artists under the moniker, All Together Now.
We’ve gone to the have-to places: Mary Mac’s, Fox Bros, Flying Biscuit, The Colonnade, The Varsity… We’ve searched for Peter Chang, had boxtys on Peachtree, and the freshest pitas on Buford Highway. From the summer of college I lived in Norcross, we’ve there are dozens of places from that experience that we’ve kept…among them, Your Dekalb Farmers Market, our ‘Jewish Kroger’, and Bagel Palace.
The bakery looked wonderful, and they even came around with dessert for us just as a nice surprise:
A really good experience. Especially for these pita-lovers:
Part of the restaurant is set aside as a small grocery. Label goodness:
Yogurt drink:
Dry Foul? Dry Foul beans:
Next door is Spices Hut — rice and flour:
Little balls of chickpea flour for snacking:
I’ve always heard about the Hawaiian penchant for Spam, so I got the Spam Musubi. So, yeah, it’s a sushi roll with Spam and a sweet sauce inside. Meh. 
http://player.theplatform.com/p/PHSl-B/yT7k3t_YLXoZ/embed/select/iTPYxFP9qul8
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