As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
Affiliate links are sometimes used. That means that if you purchase something via one of the links, it costs you nothing extra, but may generate a commission, offsetting the cost of DFK… e.g. as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Also: remember that Bookshop is fab because they’re giving orders to indie booksellers. Grateful for your support. xoxo!
It’s been a bit since I’ve been posting — committing to post here regularly, each week. Missed it and you!
We saw the Museum of Design Atlanta‘s Level Up! Pixels, Play, and Progress , which will be on exhibit through January 14, 2014
At The New Yorker, The Puzzle of Putting Video Games in a Museum: After years of neglect, art institutions are coming around to games. Can they master the controls? with a look to MoMA’s “Never Alone” and others.
What ties it all together is a slightly pixelated notion of interconnectedness. “Whether Zoom video calls or Fortnite battles royal,” Glenn Lowry, moma’s director, writes in the catalogue’s foreword, digital interaction served as a “social adhesive” during the pandemic, “when so much threatened to pull us apart.” Paola Antonelli, the exhibition’s lead curator, has explained its deeper rationale in interviews, saying that she wanted to consider games “not as art, not as film” but as a “crystal-clear example of interaction design . . . like New York’s MetroCard machines.” Games, in other words, cannot be judged solely in terms of their scores, stories, scenery, and other constituent arts. If we want to understand what makes them unique, we must study their mechanics.
Obituary for a Quiet Life at Bitter Southerner
What I’ll miss most is the sound of his voice, cooked up in the North Carolina mountains out of remnants from across an ocean. There always thar, fire always far. I loved the phrase ever which a’way but loose. Loved how things liked to happen. How hello was what do you say and how being still meant setting awhile.
Even his voice was quiet, throaty and clipped in the way of men in these mountains — a voice meant for conversations beyond a crowd, meant for the group of men eyeing the door, aiming to be outside where it’d be easier to talk about nothing or just as soon not talk at all.
Kinda hurts my heart that someone would think Eggleston is boring, but:
Taxidermied ivory-billed woodpecker on display at the Anniston Museum of Natural History, from a 2008 visit
There’s so much so tiny that suggests that the ivory-billed woodpecker may not be extinct after all. And there’s Lost by Marybeth Lima in the current issue of 64 Parishes.
from a previous visit inside the Alabama
Urban Archives Chicago has an original set of 8x10s of A.C. Keily prints of the Alabama Theatre in Birmingham
Super random
250yo unopened love letters to French sailors
From The Art Newspaper: Venice Biennale 2024: all the national pavilions, artists and curators announced so far
1500+ Van Gogh works online here at the VGMuseum
Pepperoni roll, Graziano’s Pizza, Charleston WV from a visit in 2022
How pepperoni rolls in WV got so popular, from WV Publix Radio
Lucchese is taking orders for its limited edition — 140 pairs — The Bluebonnet boots, at $15995/pair. They come with a packet of seeds.
Square Books has an event with Ana Reyes on her new A House in the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning, with Ralph Eubanks, on November 14. I just started listening the audio version.
Atlanta got its first Michelin Guide
Juliet Gordon Low (think: Girl Scouts, Savannah) will be on US quarters in 2025 as part of the Mint’s (ha) American Women Quarters Program.
The story of Prospect Hill in Lorman MS and the dig: “We want to understand more about the lives of the people who never went to Liberia and also the ones who later became the first American LIberian settlers.” Whitaker said. “We’re hoping to follow up this excavation with a second one, maybe one or two years from now, to map the material culture in Mississippi to the material culture in Liberia.”
Through this mapping, they aim to uncover aspects of ancestors’ lives in Mississippi that were carried with them and trace the changes in the social lives of those same people.
from a visit to Benton’s in 2017
If the mainstream, mass-produced bacon from your local grocery store is a box of White Zinfandel Franzia, Benton’s bacon is a Melchizedek-sized bottle of Dom Perignon.
The Chattanooga TFP goes into where to find Allan Benton’s bacon around town, and ends with how Allan likes to best enjoy his: on a blt.
…not in the same league, but red/white/blue 4×4 in Woodville AL, from 2020
Zach Helfand writes for The New Yorker: When Trucks Fly: Monster-truck tires are at least sixty-six inches high—the height of the average American. When the trucks leap fifty feet in the air, a crowd’s reaction is almost religious.
Rosenbush Building, from a 2005 visit
Mary Louise Rosenbush, who with her late husband Bert z”l owned Rosenbush Furniture Co. in Demopolis, Alabama, donated two more works by Theora Hamblett to the University of Mississippi Foundation, which has the largest collection of Hamblett works in the world. Theora Hamblett and Mary Louise Rosenbush were second cousins.
At the NYT, Lindsay Zoladz writes in the Amplifier, a subscription-only newsletter, ‘The Ultimate Tammy Wynette Primer: Hear her biggest hits, deeper cuts and tributes from disciples.‘:
Throughout this year, Wynette has been materializing in pop culture in all sorts of unexpected ways. First, Jessica Chastain played her — garnering an Emmy nomination — in the Showtime limited series “George & Tammy.” In May, the critic Steacy Easton published a rousing little book called “Why Tammy Wynette Matters,” arguing that Wynette deserves — but has not received — as much modern recognition as her peers Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. And earlier this month, Lana Del Rey made headlines when she performed a slyly reverent cover of “Stand by Your Man” at an Arkansas concert.
Zoladz also wrote ‘Are We Finally Ready to Take Tammy Wynette Seriously? The unsung godmother of so-called “sad girl” music — and one of pop’s most wrenching chroniclers of feminized pain — has long been misunderstood.’ for the NYT Critic’s Notebook.
At Artsy: The Late Mississippi Painter Dusti Bongé Is Finally Getting Her Due
Behind the scenes in regards to the Met’s acquisition of “Bélizaire and the Frey Children” (attributed to Jacques Amans known as “a French portraitist of Louisiana’s elite”) whereby the family depicted gave the painting to the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1972. The museum kept the painting in storage, and John Bullard, museum director from 1973-2010, explained that the painting had not been in exhibitable condition and that since the museum has a large number of works that they can’t possibly exhibit, they deaccessioned it, selling it at auction as is practice. More in this video from the NYT. Here’s the Met’s press release, though they don’t give a date as to when they will have the painting on view.
The trailer for the Sofia Coppola ‘Priscilla’ movie, out now:
Among the NYT’s 12 Grammy Nominees You Need to Hear, Jason Isbell’s and the 400 Unit’s ‘Cast Iron Skillet’ (in American Roots Song). Their ‘Weathervane’ is up for Best Americana Album
Blind Boys of Alabama are up for Best American Roots Performance for ‘Heaven Help us All’ and Best Americana Performance for ‘Friendship’ AND Best Roots Gospel Album for ‘Echoes of the South’ — fun fact: ran into them one day at Fife’s in downtown Birmingham.
and just check out the Best Regional Roots Music Album nominees:
“New Beginnings,” Buckwheat Zydeco Jr. and the Legendary Ils Sont Partis Band
“Live at the 2023 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival,” Dwayne Dopsie and the Zydeco Hellraisers
“Live: Orpheum Theater Nola,” Lost Bayou Ramblers and Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra
“Made in New Orleans,” New Breed Brass Band
“Too Much to Hold,” New Orleans Nightcrawlers
“Live at the Maple Leaf,” the Rumble featuring Chief Joseph Boudreaux Jr.
and oh wow I’ve been listening to NMH forever and “The Collected Works of Neutral Milk Hotel” is up for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package okay and since NMH is Louisiana I just want to mention that when I saw the article at the Times about the man who was bitten by an crocodile and survived in part by biting back, I was sure we were talking somewhere in Louisiana and really about alligators but no, it’s Australia, and when a crocodile management expert was consulted about that tactic he said, “They’re not clean animals…That’s a good way to get a stomach virus.” And I just want to submit that if a croc or gator has you maybe catching a stomach virus is the least of your worries.
In the NYT’s Black Folk Musicians Are Reclaiming the Genre, East Tennessee State grad Trey Wellington (and the NYT mentions ETSU’s renowned Bluegrass, Old-Time and Roots Music Program) is interviewed. Here’s his “Black Banjo”:
Glad to be back to DFK! Posting much more regularly starting this week. xoxo!