Month: March 2022

from a 2018 visit

Later this spring, Nashville’s 70+ year old Ernest Tubb Record Shops will close. Just a couple of years ago, the owner of Robert’s bought it and said:

“The city is going through a lot of changes, and someone has got to hold the torch for old-school Nashville,” says Jones. “Robert’s is the undisputed home for traditional country music. Having been on the side of traditional country music, which made Music City, it just makes sense to continue that tradition by my buying the Earnest Tubb Record Shop business and building.

“My purpose is to protect, promote and preserve this great history,” he continues. “So this just made sense that Robert’s and Ernest Tubb be strong, be one and be family to perpetuate the tradition. Ernest Tubb Record Shops will be here for another 52 years, if it’s up to me.”

At Terzo Piano Gallery in DC, Andrew Christenberry: To the Inquisitive is on exhibit through April 10. And if you’re thinking Andrew, as in William Christenberry’s son, yes.

The gallery has this interview:

…and Mark Jenkins at the Washington Post wrote about it late last week, including mention that:

The younger Christenberry makes mostly wooden sculptures that sometimes resemble his father’s work, and in a few cases refer directly to it

and that his “Landscape for WAC Jr features a model of the Sprott Church, an image of which his father made internationally famous

This sculpture, a tornado table, is cast bronze. It can be viewed below in Andrew’s current exhibit, and was also on exhibit at the Mobile Museum of Art in 2017 in their Christenberry: In Alabama exhibit, and I took this pic there:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Terzo Piano (@terzopianodc)

In 2006, I took a pic of the Sprott Store, and made this comparison with Walker Evans’ 1936 image, and how I found the building, on the right, in ’06.

From Laura Roulet’s essay at the gallery site:
Building for WAC Jr. and Landscape for WAC Jr. replicate miniature variations of the Sprott Church, first photographed by Walker Evans for his classic WPA-era collaboration with writer James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In style and direction, Evans had personally encouraged Bill Christenberry to take the Alabama countryside and culture as his lifelong subject. Floating on a mirrored, wax-dripped surface, or over red dirt, the church appears to hover in time. The black encaustic covering both simple forms, alludes to his father’s surface treatments and Jasper Johns’ use of this tactile, matte material.

(easy to view those and other pieces at the price list)

Warning
Bees
Cemetery, Pontotoc MS, 2009.

Heard some really terrific news — The Cake Bake Shop in Indianapolis — a place I only got to visit for the first time this summer — will be opening a third location at Disney World’s BoardWalk in 2023.

But really, I just want to show you so many pictures of the inside of their Carrollton Avenue Indianapolis location because it is positively *dreamy*

From the outside, it’s just a cute cottage

and it is a WONDERland inside

brownies, above

From their site, the cake above, Gwendolyn’s Famous Earl’s Court Chocolate Cake: Named after the Earl’s Court Convention Center in London where Gwendolyn received awards for ‘Best Chocolate Cake’ at the London Cake & Bake Show in 2012…

Lemon blueberrry cake is: Lemon zest cake with fresh blueberries. Filled with lemon curd and lemon buttercream. Topped with lemon buttercream and fresh blueberries.

above, the chocolate chip cookies include French & Belgian chocolates and topped with fleur de sel. The middle are ‘magic bars’ with a graham cracker crust and a sweetened condensed milk middle with butterscotch chips and Belgian chocolate, with walnuts and toasted coconut. On the right, a raspberry jam bar with an all-butter European shortbread crust, topped with their private-label raspberry jam and light brown sugar crumble

cookie dough cake

pixie fetti cake has three layers of vanilla almond confetti cake with almond buttercream and topped with sprinkles

gluten-free mint chocolate chip

above and below, the apple crumb pie

above, lemon bars

above, red velvet cake

At that time, we weren’t eating inside restaurants, so we took a slice (most cake slices are $15-16) to our hotel

a little jostled around, but the chocolate cake was just terrific in every way

The owner, Gwendolyn Rogers, has a limited-edition cookbook coming out this spring with 25 of her recipes

Bridge
Oxford AL, 2009.

EZ Monee Grocery Store
Pontotoc MS, 2009.