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.
I visited a newer bookstore earlier this month: Blue Apple Books in Madison, Alabama — it’s in the more historic part of town, with other shops with lots of extra character around. This is it, below:
A while ago, I looked for a good list of independent bookshops and couldn’t find a great one. I liked the idea of a map so I could see if I was close to something great, and wanted to filter out the ones that were, say, dedicated to trading paperbacks.
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Poppies, Frist Art Museum, Nashville TN from a visit last year
The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts has on exhibit through June 1, 2025 Zelda Fitzgerald’s Paper Dolls. Even if you’re a Zelda fan (like me) this is maybe not the exhibit you’re jumping for, but we get so little, we take what we get. The ones pictured at the MMFA were donated by Scottie.
The overview from the site:
Montgomery native Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was the wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as a creative artist in her own right. Collections of paper dolls are a part of her artistic legacy, the earliest made for her daughter Scottie in the 1920s. Much later, in the early 1940s, she created a series of characters from fairy tales and a group drawn from the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. She approached a publisher in New York, saying she intended these for a publication to be used and enjoyed by children.
As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
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Yellow magnolias at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St Louis, from a visit earlier this year
Cafe Mado’s chef, Nico Russell, is preserving the flowers in sour honey. He plans to serve them in a dessert with buttermilk and local strawberries when the latter is in season around June. The restaurant’s bar team is working on a nonalcoholic cocktail that combines amazake, a Japanese fermented rice drink, with magnolia tea. Wong also provides the buds to Flynn McGarry, the chef at Gem Home in NoLIta and the forthcoming Hudson Square restaurant Cove (scheduled to open this fall). He’s been soaking the petals in vinegar and plans to serve them “like pickled ginger,” he says, with crudo at Cove. The Brooklyn-based chef Hannah Musante collected her own flowers from a friend’s backyard, then stuffed them with sourdough toast ice cream. She covered other buds in sugar to create a syrup, and used the leftover macerated flowers to fill a tart shell that she topped with crème fraîche and dried thyme flowers.
And if you’ve ever wondered why the gas station next door has been restored and not the Bryant store where the Emmett Till story begins, this was covered in the Fall 2017 Southern Cultures:
In July 2011, Annette Morgan and Harry Tribble won a Mississippi Civil Rights Historical Sites grant for the restoration of Ben Roy’s Service Station. Because Bryant’s Grocery was crumbling and because Ben Roy’s had a covered portico, the Tribbles reasoned, the gas station had become a default lecture site from which tourists could gaze at the grocery and learn their civil rights history. The application put its case for civil rights dollars like this: “It is very likely that the events that transpired at Bryant’s Grocery … were discussed underneath the front canopy of the adjacent service station.” And, with nothing more certain than the possibility that Till’s murder was discussed from the adjacent [End Page 55] building, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History gave $200,000, earmarked for civil rights, to the restoration of Ben Roy’s.
From a visit to Antoine’s in 2016
Someone paid over $2100 for the opportunity to have a party of four dine at Antoine’s during Super Bowl weekend. Now there’s a bill in the Louisiana legislature to stop that kind of thing.
George Jones Jr. carries on his great grandfather’s broommaking tradition on family land: growing and harvesting broomcorn, hunting sticks, hand tying, and winding brooms on 19th century equipment. Over three decades, George has evolved in his craft: blending conventional and new elements, realizing broommaking as an art, and relying on it in difficult times.
Create Birmingham & such great news: thanks to the Mellon Foundation, we are now working with Joe Minter and LaStarsha McGarity, Legacy Museum Conservator and Co-Director at Tuskegee University, to ensure its conservation.
The trailer for Lilly, the story of the Alabama lawsuit leading up to the US Supreme Court and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay act of 2009. The movie is in theaters as of May 9.
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