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.
Montreal! Oh it was so great to see women in pretty dresses again. And the men were so stylish too (skinny pants cut a bit short). I guess I was out of place because I live just almost exclusively in Lilly all spring/summer and then it’s back to vintage J. Crew for fall/winter — just believing in a look makes things easy, I guess. People were dressed so beautifully in Montreal. They really made an effort. These people are not slouching in athleisure like I do on a Whole Foods visit.
Total sidenote already: we were coming in from driving through New England and that look was everythinggggg in those areas. People in some towns looked like they were cosplaying prep to absolute perfection. Nantucket Reds. Needlepoint belts. Madras. You know. And ohhhh the facade of this shop — Royal Male in Newport RI which is all about English brands. When I can have more than one life at a time, I’m totally using one of them to run some sort of ultra-curated shop in a little town and it’s going to look like Chelsea Flower Show on the front all year. The Churchill Arms will be taking notes.
and before we move back to talking about Montreal which is not New England fab but something else wonderful altogether, if you miss vintage J. Crew, there’s the still new-ish 40 Years coffee table book from Assouline (I haven’t seen it but it sounds like chinos, chinos, chinos) and the lostjcrew insta among others.
I love to walk everywhere so we somehow — now I haven’t even been to Montreal in yearssss — but the Marriott Chateau Champlain was the perfect location last time (Metro stop downstairs too!) and it was perfect this visit too.
In 2005, the rooms looked like this — this year of course they are straight Marriott corporate you-guessed-it with the all-white linens and straight-forward look. Did I take a good picture of that? Absolutely not.
edit: oh wait. I did
And the view?
yeah. So we’re Titanium, so we had concierge lounge access, and we — meaning Shugie especially because teenage boy appetite — enjoyed that for a couple of small plates.
There was a good amount of walking — and so many terrific things we were close to which was easy too.
As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
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Pepperoni rolls have been enshrined as part of West Virginia history through their connection to coal miners. They’re absolutely a favorite and available almost everywhere, but that wasn’t always true. How pepperoni rolls became a statewide convenience store staple might have less to do with coal mining and more to do with lunch ladies in Kanawha County.
Goshamighty. The Crystal Grill in Greenwood closed this month.
We’ve eaten here many times, most memorably at Rosh Hashanah lunch one year with Joe Erber (subject of this well-known photo by our friend Bill Aron). Last time, one of the boys had a shirt with Hebrew on it, and ran into someone from Israel. In Greenwood.
Okay you know how we can tell how bad a hurricane has been by whether the Waffle Houses in that area are open — the Waffle House Index? People in Houston were using the Whataburger app as a power outage tracker since the electric company didn’t provide one.
Object & Art did a piece on 12 African American Artists You Should Know More About, and one is James Washington Jr. (1908-2000) who was born and raised in Gloster, Mississippi. He put on a WPA-sponsored exhibit of Black artists.
In a house in Cleveland, Mississippi, Curtis would write in Dixie, “I witnessed a scene stored, like treasure, in my mind for more than thirty years.” There, Kennedy watched a child in soiled diapers crawl across a dirty room, eating crumbs of cornbread from the floor. In his article the next day, Curtis wrote:
Flies were swarming. Kennedy knelt by the child and gently stroked his face for about two minutes without saying a word. The boy just looked at him with wide eyes.
“It was a very moving experience in retrospect,” Curtis says. “It was a defining moment in his pilgrimage from working for Joe McCarthy to marching with Cesar Chavez.”
Here’s Curtis Wilkie and Tom Oliphant:
Especially like Jason Holley‘s magnolia artwork for that article, too.
TVA Wheeler Dam, Tennessee River, 2021
The TVA has a map of trails they manage — 180+ miles, and 16 of the trails run through nature preserves which they call Small Wild Areas.
Imperial Hotel | Jack Hadley Black History Memorabilia. | Capital Project | Thomasville, Georgia
Pierce Chapel African Cemetery | Hamilton Hood Foundation | Project Planning | Midland, Georgia
Unita Blackwell Freedom House | The Lighthouse | Capital Project | Jackson, Mississippi
Alonzo Chatmon’s Juke Joint | The Mt. Zion Memorial Fund for Blues Music and Justice | Project Planning | Water Valley, Mississippi
George W. Hubbard House of Meharry Medical College | Friends Of Hubbard House | Capital Project | Nashville
Simms/Gray-Lewis Cottage | Rutherford B.H. Yates Museum | Capital Project | Houston
The Pine Grove Washington-Rosenwald School | AMMD Pine Grove Project | Project Planning | Richmond, Virginia
Claude B. Dansby, Benjamin G. Brawley, and John H. Wheeler Halls at Morehouse College | Morehouse College | Project Planning | Atlanta
Kenneth G. Neigh Dormitory Complex at the former Mary Holmes Community College | Dream Center Golden Triangle | Project Planning | West Point, Mississippi
Universal Life Insurance Company Building | South Memphis Renewal Community Development Corporation | Project Planning & Limited Capital | Memphis, Tennessee
Azurest South, Amaza Lee Meredith Home and Studio | Virginia State University Alumni Association | Project Planning & Limited Capital | St. Petersburg, Virginia
architecture friends: is Azurest not Streamline Moderne enough that people are calling it that? I get that it has severe angles, but I’m feeling it from some of the windows and the ‘portholes’
Eater New Orleans with 20 Restaurants where dessert steals the show and tickled that I’ve been to nearly all the places listed — especially going to agree with Saba. They don’t mention this dish and I’m not sure if it’s on the menu right now, but their warm chocolate babka with hazelnut gelato and blackberry sauce was one of the best things I ate in all of 2018.
The fig blondie at Coquette was one of my fave things from 2016!
They mention the bread pudding at Commander’s of course but I like the one I make here at home better (and so often I’ll use the recipe from the old Dreyfus Store — contact me if you’d like it)
and the mile-high pie at Jack Rose is yes yes yes (though this pic is from Caribbean Room, before it turned into Jack Rose)
Was Brennan’s bananas foster on the list? Of course.
And Antoine’s baked alaska — Antoine’s made one for Shug’s first birthday cake!
This is the second year that we’ve spent time in Philadelphia — we went over the holidays last year too. Shugie attended a week-long program geared for high school students at Temple University, and when picking him up for a few more days there and the New England trip, we did some fun things including a great visit with family in Bryn Mawr, some time with Eli’s gf and her family and a nice Independence Day party, and a visit to Weitzman and the Barnes Foundation, a museum I’ve wanted to see forever.
little display cabinets for Estee Lauder items (below) and on Steven Spielberg and others
pretty sure Shugie and I liked the political section best
And the Barnes Foundation. The Barnes!! Gorgeous. And of course the interesting-interesting thing about the Barnes is that it’s by order of the Foundation’s trust that the displays not be rearranged from Dr. Barnes’ instructions. When the museum moved to downtown Philadelphia several years ago:
The court order allowing the foundation to relocate the collection to Philadelphia specified that the pictures were to be hung exactly as they had been in suburban Merion, in galleries that had to duplicate the configuration and the proportions of Paul Cret’s.
The entire museum isn’t just made up of those rooms one thinks of as the Barnes — it’s a nice-size building, and there’s traditional exhibit space, including the one going on through September 8, 2024, Matisse and Renoir: New Encounters at the Barnes
Even though the men were about 30 years apart in age, they had a great friendship. Some of the paintings featured in this exhibit:
The Barnes is home to one of the world’s greatest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modern paintings, with especially deep holdings in Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. Assembled by Dr. Albert C. Barnes between 1912 and 1951, the collection also includes important examples of African art, Native American pottery and jewelry, Pennsylvania German furniture, American avant-garde painting, and wrought-iron metalwork.
The minute you step into the galleries of the Barnes collection, you know you’re in for an experience like no other. Masterpieces by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso hang next to ordinary household objects—a door hinge, a spatula, a yarn spinner. On another wall, you might see a French medieval sculpture displayed with a Navajo textile. These dense groupings, in which objects from different cultures, time periods, and media are all mixed together, are what Dr. Barnes called his “ensembles.”
The ensembles, each one meticulously crafted by Dr. Barnes himself, are meant to draw out visual similarities between objects we don’t normally think of together. Created as teaching tools, they were essential to the educational program Dr. Barnes developed in the 1920s.
Since there are no labels, the Barnes uses catalogs in each room diagramming the works, and guests are encouraged to use an app with a camera function that pulls up information about each piece
Another fun part of the Barnes is that you’re likely to see several pieces you know already — that sweet “oh I know that one” feeling…and there you are, with the original right in front of you.
Portrait of a Man Holding a Watch, Frans Hals
Vincent Van Gogh, The Postman
Bouquet of Roses, Peirre-Auguste Renoir
The Card Players, Paul Cezanne
Girl with a Polka Dot Blouse, Amedeo Modigliani
Vincent Van Gogh, The Smoker
Portrait of the Red Headed Woman, Amedeo Modigliani
We were so so so very glad to be back at Bob’s Clam Hut in Kittery, Maine — I’ve only been here maybe three or four times now but it’s so good that while we were on our way up to Montreal so we couldn’t take her, Suzanne was making plans to meet us and drive up the approx 1:15 from Cambridge.
The last time I took a trip this way and spent a few days with Suzanne, we drove up here too, and stopped at Woodman’s of Essex (since 1914!) in MA for clam strips as a little appetizer for our Kittery lobster rolls. That was just an terrific little vacay for us — we did so many wonderful things around Boston & environs that year including the JFK Library, incredible food (esp incl Aquitaine and Giulia plus treats from Tatte), antiquing, and an incredible-incredible visit to Martha’s Vineyard.
Bob’s isn’t very large and the idea is to enjoy the sunshine by eating at a picnic table. Ordering is dairy-bar style: order at a window, listen for your number and pick up at a different window.
A few things here are market price, and on this day I think we paid right at $30 for lobster rolls. I usually get mine with mayonnaise, but this day I did the melted butter and I’m maybe never going back.
Also, this is the best tartar sauce I’ve had in my liiiiiiife.
The recipe for that is a secret, but the owner gave tips on frying clams (and omgggg their clamssssss) here.
So a lobster roll is kinda…Texas toasty.
Mayonnaise version:
Melted butter version:
Not the same, but lobster rolls are apparently the kind of thing you can just pop into a Maine grocery store and take home already prepared — for $10 right now.
Any of you done a New England fall-is-in-the-air kind of trip? Please message me if you have some fun ideas about the best things to do or way to go about it (hotels/transportation/restaurants/etc). xoxo!
We’re in the midst of college tours for Shug, and as part of our New England trip this summer (Shug’s now overseas for the summer and we have Shugie here a bit longer before he leaves the country) wanted to show Shugie some of the big universities in this part of the country.
And lunch! New Haven is famous for a certain coal-fired pizza like at Pepe’s
They had a nice-size queue outside too
but we decided to have lunch at Zeneli’s Pizzeria e cucina Napoletana further down Wooster Street. We ate outside and the weather was terrific. Shugie gets all the credit because he picked Zeneli himself (here’s a piece about them from CT Insider)
above, we started with the ricotta e miele
the meatball appetizer was my dish
and the tre carni pizza with spicy salami, proscuitto cotto, sweet salami, and basil got a great reception too
Shugie spotted Libby’s Italian Pastry Shoppe across the street so we hopped over
and this was the selection — a peanut butter cheesecake, a peanut butter cannoli, and a Heath bar cannoli.
And next we were off to Cambridge, where one of my besties works at Harvard. My sweet-sweet Suzanne showed Shugie some of the oldest parts of the school (and he did a good walk too) and we were really taken with the newer buildings:
It was great to see my niece-doggy Tulip, and we had a terrific supper at Waypoint
oysters
Shug’s Jonah crab angel hair pasta
salt & pepper soft shell crabs
fish & chips
BTW, we happened to drive by the Julia Child home in Cambridge — it’s a private residence, so there’s nothing to stop for. If you visit the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, there’s a replica (down to things placed *exactly* as she had them) of her kitchen. Some pics from my last visit in 2020:
Julia Child: A Recipe for Life is on exhibit through September 2, 2024 at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture in Richmond.
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