Gentle Thrills
Canoe the Sequatchie
North Alabama, 2011.
Sinclair
Pontotoc MS 2008
Hwy 280 2006
2020
Winchester TN, 2013
Buck & Johnny’s, Breaux Bridge LA, 2021
The Lucky Rabbit, Hattiesburg MS, 2021
Updated Peppermint Bark
updated the peppermint bark recipe
Reflection
Barber Shop
New Orleans LA, 2014.
This Week’s Various
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!
At CNN: The Japanese photographer celebrating community in rural America
“Many people, including those who live there, sometimes associate the South with poverty and rural blight, and while it is undeniable that those things exist, what I found in Walker County was beautiful, charming and full of love.”
Instead, “Dora, Yerkwood, Walker County, Alabama” examines the human condition, employing the camera as a device to witness moments of joy and celebration, as well as quiet and tenderness. “This project changed my life and the way I see things, and this book is my love letter to the community,” asserted Nagasaka, whose care and warmth for the people she met is plain throughout.
The Lusco’s sign is down in Greenwood, but only because it’s being refurbished for the restaurant’s upcoming move to Plein Air in Taylor, Mississippi.
not included, but this is Housetop Variation with Postage Stamp Center Row by Irene Williams, on display at Newfields, from a visit last year
The Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy – Gee’s Bend Quilts Auction is going on through December 13.
some of Lonnie’s work in Birmingham, 2021
Art Basel with Lonnie Holley on Making Treasures from Trash and he tells the story about getting started with tombstones for family:
‘I didn’t set out to make art. I didn’t know what art was. My first pieces came about when I made a tombstone for my sister’s children, my nieces who died in a fire in 1979. My own mother had 27 children. I found some sandstone, which the iron foundries in Alabama used to make molds for metal piping, in another of my sisters’ front yards. It had been buried there, in big pieces, as landfill. It was fragile but firm enough for me to be able to work with: I used a crosscut saw that was among my grandfather’s tools to cut it down to where I could manipulate and shape it with a knife, fork, and spoon.
Chip Carter’s eulogy for his mother Rosalynn; her grandson Jason told about how she would bring a loaf of bread and Tupperware container of pimento cheese and hand out sandwiches on Delta
At the NYC: ‘Southern/Modern’: Rediscovering the Radical Art Below the Mason-Dixon Line — In the first half of the 20th century, socially conscious artists in the South were great innovators, reflecting on race, progress and the disappearing plantocracy. on the Southern/Modern exhibit going on now at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens. There is so much incredible content in this NYT piece — links back to Black Mountain College, Caroline Durieux (who must’ve lived next to Faulkner on Pirate’s Alley) and her work with radioactive ink, the Southern Agrarians, the Dixie Art Colony,
Absolutely loving the Carroll Cloar “A Story Told by my Mother” that’s included.
Georgia Museum describes the exhibit:
“Southern/Modern” will be the first project to survey comprehensively the rich array of paintings and works on paper created in the American South during the first half of the 20th century. Featuring more than 100 works of art drawn from public and private collections across the country, it will bring together a generation’s worth of scholarship. The exhibition will take a broad view of the South, considering artists who worked in states below the Mason-Dixon line and as far west as those bordering the Mississippi River. It will be structured around key themes that cut across state lines and will take an inclusive view of the artists working in the region. It will also include a number of major artists from outside the region who produced significant bodies of work while visiting. “Southern/Modern” will provide the fullest, richest and most accurate overview to date of the artistic activity in the South during this period and illuminate the important and hitherto overlooked role that it played in American art history.
Those of us who miss it at Georgia will have another chance as the exhibit moves to Nashville in January. The Frist will have it on from January 26 – April 28.
Fellow S Town listeners: Tyler Goodson has passed away.
Nudie and the Cosmic American at Oxford American (from 2016) — only the front of the suit Nudie designed for Gram Parsons, “the Sistine Chapel ceiling of cowboy attire,” is shown but here are more pics. It’s part of the Suiting the Sound exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame site.
At the Mississippi Museum of art in Jackson from 2011: Freedom Riders
This is back from Spring ’20 Panorama: The 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders’ Mugshots: A Visual Intervention
At the NYT: Mellon Foundation Doubles Funding for U.S. Monuments, Pledging a Total $500 Million — The philanthropy will add to its ongoing initiative to tell diverse stories with new monuments in public spaces over the next five years. Featured in the piece is the Memphis monument by Theaster Gates in honor of Tom Lee, who in 1925, rescued 32 people from their overturned boat in the Mississippi River.
Sending lots of love your way for a happy holiday season! xoxo!
Colors
Downtown
Yazoo City MS, 2019.
The Girls
From this summer, that’s Ruth in the front, then Zelda, and Reba, Dolly, and Loretta hiding somewhere
Mystery and Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art from the American Folk Art Museum
On view through December 10 at the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock, Mystery and Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art from the American Folk Art Museum. I saw it earlier this year at the Huntsville Museum of Art (it closed there in June) and if you have the opportunity to see it in LR or elsewhere, it is not to be missed.
AFAM describes it this way:
Mystical, evocative, and sometimes simply strange, the art of fraternal practice is rich in symbols that are oddly familiar yet strikingly uncommon. Through arcane and alluring artifacts, Mystery and Benevolence brings to light the histories of the Freemasons and the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows, two fraternal secret societies with deep roots in American history. The over eighty carvings, textiles, sculptures, and adornments that constitute this exhibition were used from the late eighteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, and retain their clandestine allure to this day.
Fidelity
Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Friendly Lodge
Independent Order of Odd Fellows initiatory degree scenic backdrop
Independent Order of Odd Fellows Tracing Board
Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Ark of the Covenant
Modern Woodmen of America Lodge Goat
Independent Order of Odd Fellows ‘Bury the Dead’ sign
All Variety Salads
All variety salads
pasta salad, broccoli salad, chicken salad, grape and nut salad, macaroni salad, ambrosia salad, pistachio delight, egg salad, pimento cheese, mustard potato salad, American potato salad, baked potato salad, shredded cole slaw, Tahitian mist salad, mandarine orange salad, Watergate salad, and others
Warehouse Discount Groceries
Hanceville AL, 2023.
This Week’s Various
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!