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Nashville, 2019.
AN Interior’s Top 50 List this year includes:
BLDGS — Atlanta
Faye + Walker — Austin
Low Design Office — Austin
Max Levy — Dallas
Marlon Blackwell — Fayetteville
Norman Kelley — Chicago & New Orleans
Silo — Cleveland, Charlotte, Fayetteville
Trahan — New Orleans
Also: Nashville’s tallest tower is coming about due to the YMCA’s plan to build a 60-story residential tower on its property on Church Street
Dooky Chase’s, from a 2012 visit.
Produced by Resy and presented by AmEx, the Classics Remix series for New Orleans will do a “Nina Compton x Dooky Chase’s” event the weekend of November 11; dine-in and take-out is $55 and includes Creole gumbo, fried jerk catfish, coconut-braised collard greens, rum & raisin bread pudding with dulce de leche, and a specialty cocktail. Tickets on sale now.
Square Books, 2017.
The delightful Lee Harper will appear on Thacker Mountain Radio, October 28 6p, Live at the Old Armory Pavilion in Oxford
Her Tiny Oxford series began as an homage to Oxford fixture Ron Shapiro’s long-defunct Hoka Theatre, a pre-Starbucks coffee shop fondly remembered by generations of older UM students…led to a string of commissions and explorations of the places that give Oxford its historical local flavor — from architectural gems (both stately and homespun) to the family-run businesses that shaped life for generations.
Her Tiny Oxford, Vol. 1 is available here at Square Books
Flannery O’Connor reads “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” and she starts by saying to the class, “any fiction that comes out of the South is going to be called ‘grotesque’ by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it’s going to be called ‘realistic.'”
Seriously, the Flatwoods Monster helped save West Virginia’s Blenko Glass.
Hokus Pokus Liquor, Alexandria LA, 2013.
The Driest State (Arkansas) at Bitter Southerner
— and at Garden & Gun, Dispatches from a Dry County, The daring and danger of living under lingering Prohibition restrictions
…This is a genteel way of saying that, in the largely dry Alabama counties of the Tennessee River valley, the twin crimes of possessing and hauling were made universal. Each drinking-age member of a family—including many scions of staunch dry-law supporters—became what I’ll call a “citizen bootlegger.” Doing the run entered the vocabulary. We all memorized the county roads through the cotton and the various cuts and feints.
Mount Zion Methodist Church Cemetery, Cullman AL, 2021.
Super random.
At the Clarion-Ledger: Is Tea the South’s next Lucrative Crop? These Family Farms have Mastered the Centuries-Old Art
Wes Anderson designed a train carriage in Britain, and this is beyond
Artist, professor Julie Green passed away earlier this month; she did The Last Supper series of final meal requests
People who go to space seem to have such a clarity about the smallness of things we get caught up in here on earth. Shatner: “I’m so filled with emotion about what just happened. It’s extraordinary, extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this… It’s so much larger than me and life. It hasn’t got anything to do with the little green men and the blue orb. It has to do with the enormity and the quickness and the suddenness of life and death.”
When the Times Book Review Panned the Classics
Susan Spicer’s sweet potato pie recipe, with a praline sauce // Lemon-blueberry griddle cakes from The Blackberry Magazine // whiskey smash
Still completely in love with this house, on the market in York, Alabama
New Orleans, 2017.
Texas Monthly gives this chili history lesson:
The Texanist would further remind you, while we’re momentarily paused here on canned chili, that Wolf Brand has stood the test of time. Before your fellow Corsicanan Lyman T. Davis opened a meat market and began selling his chili under the brand name Lyman’s Famous Home Made Chili in (the Texanist checks his notes) “brick form,” and before he began canning the stuff and rebranded it as Wolf Brand Chili in honor of (the Texanist checks his notes again) a pet wolf who went by the name of Kaiser Bill, he was selling his meaty concoction for a nickel a bowl from the back of a wagon on the streets of your hometown way back in 1895.
Faulkner, with this guide on how to pronounce Yoknapatawpha
Our 2015 Greenberg’s Thanksgiving turkey.
Greenberg’s Turkeys is back after last year’s fire.
Lesley Dill, Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, through January 2, 2022. …a new body of work drawing on language, the written word, and the investigation of divinity and devilry during the wilderness of Early America. Her pieces take the forms of long thin figures that wear the strength of the words of the people they represent.
Handley’s Western Wear and Work Boots, Jasper AL
Well, this is… let’s remember this (above) is a 1935 March of Time newsreel about John Lomax and Lead Belly, in maybe the earliest footage there is of him playing. Below, from the Smithsonian:
Seems early for egg nog. Winn-Dixie, Birmingham AL, this week
Gov Guy Hunt Library and Museum in Holly Pond, Alabama
…if you’re thinking: “are those his insoles?” yes, those are his insoles.
And #funfact: for a while when I was in high school, his maid also worked for us — I noticed on the days she worked at our home, the intricately-folded notes to and from my friends weren’t exactly where I would leave them, and they weren’t folded back exactly correctly, either. XD
Pumpkin patch, Cullman County AL
Graceland, from a 2002 visit
Norbert Putnam’s We Had it All, from a 2013 Oxford American:
I felt a certain sadness as I drove home that Friday evening. Usually, I was relieved after a week of grueling Presley dates, but this time had been different. I felt I had been an honored guest at the King’s court, one of only four supporting actors playing along in his simple charade, all for the express joy of his Queen. It was an honor I would never forget. That night I took a silent vow to never tell this story, but many years have passed, and of course, the King has left us.
…on the life and work of Randy Wilson in Hindman, Kentucky:
O How Lovely is the Evening from Alexander Udis on Vimeo.
Zelda.
It’s finally cool outside. For a couple of weeks now, the new (now teenage/young adult) chickens have been living in the big coop with Tallulah and Zelda. Tallulah tells them how things are going to be, but they all get along. They all especially love the little cherry tomatoes that come off the tomato plant that I didn’t even plant this year — it just sprung up on its own outside the run. They eat their regular food along with a ton of herbs we’ve grown plus kitchen vegetable scraps, and the occasional bounty from a bag of carrots put through the Cuisinart for them, and for the worms that we keep downstairs, who also are champion kitchen scrap recyclers. Hope your pets are doing great too, that you’re enjoying the cooler weather, and that your high school football team is also destined for the playoffs. xoxo!