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freezer photo by William Eggleston, 1960, from a visit to the Ogden Museum in 2017
At Bitter Southerner, My Cousin Bill: A Conversation with William Eggleston, with Maude Schuyler Clay, from the mid-90s
That is one of the things that the photographs accomplished. I really didn’t think of them so much as the last vestiges, but they were.
puffy taco at Ray’s Drive-In, from a 2016 visit
Texas Monthly with the San Antonio Taco Trail and rightfully, on Ray’s Drive Inn:
Now the space is chock-full of decades of amassed memorabilia, including a 1926 Ford Model T truck. There’s also a makeshift altar packed with prayer candles and religious objects. The latter is fitting. Eating at Ray’s Drive Inn is tantamount to going to church. The restaurant is hallowed taco ground. History and tradition and community intertwine to create an uplifting experience in which to enjoy wonderful puffy tacos (see “Puffy” in the Tacopedia). Crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and impossibly light, they are pure joy.
Susan Berger’s 2015 “Quiet Streets,” a set of photographs on different cities’ Martin Luther King Jr Ave or Blvd, at Oxford American
Casey Cep at The New Yorker writes The Real Places that gave Rise to Southern Fictions on Tema Stauffer’s collection of photographs, Southern Fiction. There are the images one would imagine: visits to Rowan Oak (the kitchen curtains), Welty’s kitchen, the muddy drive up to Mt Zion in Rodney, town murals, country churches, the occasional gin or gas station with the scrolling numbers…
In 1914 there were 182 ice factories in Texas. Every single one of them was EXTREMELY welcome in whatever town they were situated. 😀 This photo Charlie Thorn carrying a 300 .lb block of ice was taken in 1926 by the great Basil Clemons. More here: https://t.co/VS501KkOh7 pic.twitter.com/qOUAQIBTos
— Traces of Texas (@TracesofTexas) January 29, 2022
An album with never-before-released music by Son House is scheduled to be released in March, and will include”Empire State Express”:
Super random:
Taschen has issued a reprint of Dali’s Les diners de Gala, with recipes from Paris restaurants like Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent, and of course, his art
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Florida experienced a midcentury modern awakening of its own, at Architect’s Newspaper
The aromatic cheat sheet from Williams-Sonoma
Anyway, I want to do this
A Personal Catalogue of the World’s Most Storied Bookstores at LitHub
Nelle Harper Lee’s NY apartment is now (finally, really) on the market
Christie’s New York presents Outsider Art on Feb 3; included in the sale:
…Henry Darger, Bill Traylor, and Martín Ramírez among others. The sale includes a fantastic selection of work from private collections sold for philanthropic initiatives; including property from the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation, sold to benefit the Foundation and the Harlem Children’s Zone, and property from the Collection of William A. Fagaly, sold to benefit Prospect New Orleans’ William A. Fagaly Memorial Fund for Social Impact.
An interview with Jake Xerxes Fussell at The Guardian
…he began to realise he had little to guard, because the musicians he respected never meant for their work to be sealed in amber. He recalled meeting members of the Skillet Lickers, a venerated Georgia string band formed in 1926, at a Georgia folk festival in the 90s and understanding they were more than a static stereotype. “They weren’t wearing string ties,” he laughs. “They were wearing windsuits and puffy Nikes. That’s what folk singers wear.”
from a visit to Sunray, Texas, in the early aughts
On the 60th Anniversary of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, another writer makes her own trek across Texas at Texas Highways
In an effort to reconnect with “regular people,” Steinbeck did what anyone would do: He got a lucrative book deal and commissioned carpenters to transform a GMC pickup truck into an elaborately outfitted camper van that he named Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s trusty but haggard steed. It came complete with maple interior, double bed, four-burner stove, and refrigerator.
The Houmas House Plantation and Gardens‘ new Great River Road Museum, with wax figures from — I’m almost positive — the shuttered Musee Conti in the Quarter
Found in a Walker County, Alabama cemetery:
“The greatest man G-d ever made lies here resting in this grave
to most he was family to all he was a friend
we just can’t wait to see him again. EBK”
The Old Courthouse Museum in Monroeville, Alabama, from a 2015 visit
An interview with Mary Badham, who played Scout in TKAM, here
osage orange, Grand Gulf MS, 2005
The Quirky History of the Osage Orange, Texas’s Ugliest Fruit: Once eaten by woolly mammoths, and later used by Indigenous Texans and settlers for its sturdy wood, this strange plant has spread from Texas across the country.
And beyond the nostalgic value, Lipscomb told me, there’s something to be said simply for the Osage orange’s aesthetic qualities. “I think a lot of people love the look and feel of the tree,” he says. “It’s kind of like a beautiful mesquite tree—they have ambience, they have character, they have style, and wonderful bois d’arc trees are in that same category. They just look cool. They have beautiful bark, they branch beautifully, and they live to be a long, old age.” The average lifespan of these trees ranges from 75 to 100 years, though their maximum lifespan is estimated to exceed 300 years.
Hi friends! Hope you’ve all been hapily busy or maybe comfortably resting. Keeping warm either way, right? We’re doing a lot of cooking and some tiny home improvement projects and making plans for nicer weather. Shugie got second place in the district spelling bee! Shug had a couple of really terrific holiday choir concerts. One of my friends moved their business which was a pretty big undertaking, and I sort-of inherited from that a really great french-door fridge for the garage which…can’t even say how happy it makes me to have extra room now for cooking for others and Passover. We ‘adopted’ for winter break a couple of the international boarders and went on a terrific holiday trip that I’ll post about next week. On January 1, I became president of a really big volunteer org here and wowwww he have so many terrific projects going on. Lots to look forward to and I imagine you’re doing the same! xoxo!