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.
When he died in 2010, he named Lovest and 12 of her daughters and grandchildren as the main beneficiaries of his will. He left hardly any cash, but he did leave 1,884 artworks. Lovest assumed a sale would eventually be arranged and her family given its due. So she was surprised in 2018 to learn that a judge had let lawyers take all of the art to satisfy a half-million dollars in bills racked up on Young’s behalf. Her family hadn’t gotten a cent — or a single painting.
and
A Cuban Santeria priest named Silo Crespo acted as Young’s manager. According to Moos, Crespo told her that Young deserved a $30,000 or $60,000 base salary, plus commissions. When Moos balked — Young’s pieces sold for a few hundred or few thousand dollars, which she shared with the artist in an industry standard 50-50 split — Crespo put Santeria curses on her family. She hired a priestess to remove them: “I had to have the gallery cleaned. I had to do all this voodoo stuff with a cut chicken head.”
It’s easy to let legends slip away and become just that — an accumulation of stories that paint a two-dimensional portrait of a person who, like all people, was more complicated. But to fully appreciate Chase’s legacy, let alone learn from it, we need to keep in mind that her independent spirit was the bedrock of who she was.
The ‘Modern Southern’ meal at the James Beard House on Jan 24 by Jim Shirley of Gulf Coast restaurants Great Southern Café, The Bay, Farm & Fire Southern Pizzeria, North Beach Tortilla Co., The Meltdown On 30A, and Ji Shi Kitchen, Seaside, FL will include, just in part:
Black-Eyed Pea Hummus with Smoked Choctawhatchee Bay Mullet Dip with Chicken Skin
Heritage Pig Cheeks-in-a-Blanket
Smoked and Fried Apalachicola Oyster with Chicken Fat Bread and Collard Green Aïoli
Blood Orange Pie with Cornbread Pudding
A short Various this week. I guess we’re all just starting to get back in to things for the new year. BTW, my older son broke his arm in two places this week during PE, so would deeply appreciate some sweet thoughts going his way. Lots of love! xoxo!
We visited the H.D. Gibbes & Sons store in Learned, Mississippi in 2017, and have been meaning to get back since. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, they serve supper (steaks, seafood — on paper plates, and they just take cash or check) and six days a week they’re a regular country store. The food there is supposed to be amazing and I am all about it. It’s on my list to finally do for supper in 2020.
St George Temple
1877
This is the third LDS temple, but the first one in Utah — the oldest still used by the Church (though closed currently for renovation)
St George UT, 2017.
Where He Is Now: Donating works, even phony ones, to museums without any financial incentive, it turns out, is not against the law—so Landis never actually saw any consequences for his deceptions — though the costs of his donations to museums cost something to the tune of $5 million. In 2014, Art and Craft, a documentary about his life, came out, and museums have made an effort to expose his works. That said, Landis seems undeterred and has attempted to donate dozens more forgeries even after his story was exposed.
Also: some of the aforementioned have already been made into docs/films but every one of them is A+ material for one or more.
A still I took from Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors, from its stop at The Frist in Nashville. I loved this experience so much I cried.
above: the thermostat at the Hyatt French Quarter. I set it to 45* before bed, and we woke up to…I don’t know…something approximating 45*. HyattFQ: you rock.
Super random: The Atlantic on Your Bedroom is Too Hot (the temp) — and fam, it is a glorious 60*.
Via Hyperallergic: Among the rolling green hills and grey-brown trees in winter, a rainbow of colors and patterns cropped up in Fort Smith, Arkansas. As part of a collaboration between Spanish street artist Okuda San Miguel, global creative house Justkids and 64.6 Downtown, a nonprofit focused on revitalizing the area, an uninhabited house received a fresh makeover into a “Rainbow Embassy,” welcoming visitors far and wide to the neighborhood.
one of Butch Anthony’s Intertwangalisms that hung in Balise
“It would certainly be the greatest literary discovery of the 20th century,” one expert told The Los Angeles Times. So revered was the novel that another expert likened its discovery to “the British finding a working manuscript of ‘King Lear’ or ‘Hamlet.’”
Harlan Greene, author of “Mr. Skylark: John Bennett and the Charleston Renaissance” writes the Post and Courier about the beliefs behind haint blue ceilings.
Elizabeth Spencer, author of, most famously, “Light in the Piazza,” has passed away. Her obit was in the NYT:
Old enough to know ex-slaves and Civil War veterans, Spencer chronicled her complicated affection for her ties to tiny Carrollton, Mississippi — her determination to honor them and to leave them behind. Like her predecessor and fellow Mississippian, William Faulkner, she was an author praised by strangers and shunned by acquaintances.
Via artnet: It comes from the personal collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, who was gifted the work by Steven Spielberg after filming wrapped on the movie adaption of her novel, The Color Purple. Walker, speaking to the Wall Street Journal, described the artwork as “a gift from someone I consider a genius with soul,” but ultimately explained that “my spirit tells me it is time for it to find a new home.” (She went on to explain that wildfires in California have made her nervous, and happy to have the Traylor find “a safer wall than mine on which to hang.”)
But last year, an unlikely group of renegades — suspender-wearing luthiers from the Appalachian Artisan Center here — embarked on a novel approach to the hopelessness of addiction called Culture of Recovery, an apprentice program for young adults rebounding from the insidious treadmill of opioids and other substances. Participants, about 150 so far, learn traditional arts like luthiery — the making and repairing of stringed instruments — under the tutelage of skilled artisans.
“If you start throwing little box traps at them because they’re cheap, you might catch four or five and think you’re doing good,” he says. “Well, if there are fifteen pigs out there, you just educated the other ten. There’s only one thing worse than a feral hog, and that’s an educated feral hog.”
hot fire chicken with pickles at Compere Lapin. Was great.
Esquire’s 40 Most Important Restaurants of the Decade which, how can you even, really (like most of these genre lists)? Nothingggg against these, but we’re missing just a lot of representation from <$$$ restaurants here. Among those listed:
Catbird Seat, Nashville
Compere Lapin, New Orleans
Curate, Asheville
The Grey, Savannah
Husk, Charleston
Knife, Dallas
Little Jack’s Tavern, Charleston
Nancy’s Hustle, Houston
Seven Reasons, DC
Turkey & The Wolf, New Orleans
I’ve only been to Las Vegas three times — once around 1999 for a work convention, once in 2015 with my bestie (both those stays were at the Mandalay) and in 2017, at The Cosmopolitan. By far — by faaaar even though the Mandalay is nice, the Cosmopolitan is my favorite. In fact, they renovated last year, so the rooms have been updated since these ’17 pics. But this was a beyond-fab room:
What’s got me thinking about this is that the boys are asking for a big trip, and this might be fun to do with them — I’d love to take them to some Cirque du Soleil shows (my faves are O and Beatles LOVE). And staying at the Cosmopolitan puts us on the right ‘end’ of the Strip so walking anywhere is a lot easier.
Sidenote: the room had fun wallpaper, including Piero Fornasetti’s Tema e Variazioni design, inspired by the Italian opera singer Lina Cavalieri. Fornasetti’s site is great, btw.
I’m not a wallpaper aficionado but really enjoyed the designs they had in the room — I was wondering if maybe this one with the birds was Cole and Son, but I don’t see it on their site.
and this one below is a more interesting pattern than is immediately obvious — see the girls/women?
Anyway, our balcony room was beyond fab — we spent all kinds of time on it, taking in the Strip and especially the fountain show at the Bellagio.
The boys would eat that up. Lots of great restaurants I’d like to take them back to (Le Cirque, Lotus of Siam, Nobu, and Wing Lei are some of our faves). Staying at the Cosmopolitan also makes it crazy easy to go to the in-hotel restaurants we enjoy, like:
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