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.
But a few years ago, I noticed my teeth were getting more crowded. Not crazy, they just weren’t as straight as they used to be. My dentist said it’s something that just happens sometimes. So before it gets out of hand, I asked for an Invisalign consultation.
Here you can see they are getting a little crowded right in front:
For whatever reason, it was really getting in my head. No matter how perceptible it really was (and thanks to sweet friends who said “braces? why??”) it was something I was still thinking about a lot. A lot a lot.
Turns out, I was a good candidate for Invisalign, so my doctor and I talked about my goals — I’m simply thinking goals? nice straight teeth again. Then I asked her — she’s a dentist so she has what I think of as ‘magazine mouth’…perfect teeth/smile — what she’d do if it were her. See the corners of my mouth, how there’s a little bit of shadow on each side? If you have a nice, wide smile, there isn’t so much of that shadow in each corner. If you’re going for a more cosmetic look other than just ‘please fix my teeth’ — that’s something to think about too…making your smile wider. Okay, that sounds good.
Also: I remember growing up hearing how expensive my friends’ regular metal braces were and how long they had to wear them — Av was in orthodontia for years — that I was mentally preparing myself for thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars and…I don’t know…at least 18 months in braces.
We sent our wishlist to Invisalign, and they come back with little movies of how everything is going to get moved around:
Another consultation was done right after these movies came in and we went back to Invisalign asking for a little more adjustment for a wider smile (I didn’t record the movies of those).
I’ll be in my braces for 10 months total, getting new trays every two weeks, so a total of 20 sets of trays.
Today I went in and got my first set of trays. I have several tooth-colored bumpers now placed on my teeth that help get everything into position, so if you look super-close you can see those, but otherwise, they aren’t too bad.
A tiny bit worried about pain, but otherwise looking forward to it — and with any luck, I’ll be out of them by my birthday next year. If I can get things together, I’ll make a series of pics with each new tray to show the transition at the end of the ten months. Hopefully this will be like when I had my LASIK surgery (thank you Schaeffer Eye Center and Dr. Woolfson!) — I went from wearing -6.25 contacts and not wanting to get out of bed without my glasses or contacts to having 20/15 vision and thinking why did I ever put this off!? Yay!
When Av was about eight years old, he was swimming in the Gulf of Mexico on a trip with both sets of grandparents. He saw what looked like a baseball floating in the water and reached out to grab it.
Jellyfish.
Huge mistake.
Av’s dad took a trip to Palau this year and I was expecting another batch of ‘wow’ photographs:
…but like so many of his scuba trips he’s taken (a la, not sure exactly where Truk Lagoon, Micronesia is without Google) I hadn’t realized where exactly he was going. Palau is home to ‘Jellyfish Lake’ which I’ve seen on National Geographic — the saltwater lake in which jellyfish have lost their sting. Could not believe he was in one of my dream places!
//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js A JL Nipper porcupine at Main Street Gallery in Clayton, Georgia (we have one of JL’s armadillos, but love what he did with this!)
Every visit to camp in north Georgia, we try to visit Main Street Gallery in Clayton.
They’ve also had pieces by Richard Burnside, Lonnie Holley, Chris Clark, Cornbread, Woodie Long, Peter Loose, R.A. Miller, Annie T, and many, many others. Always love the pieces they have by OL Samuels and Don Bundrick. Nice inventory.
Gallardo is affiliated with something called the Extension Service, an institution that dates back to the days when America was a nation of farmers. Its original purpose was to disseminate the latest agricultural know-how to all the homesteads scattered across the interior. Using land grant universities as bases of operations, each state’s extension service would deploy a network of experts and “county agents” to set up 4-H Clubs or instruct farmers in cultivation science or demonstrate how to can and freeze vegetables without poisoning yourself in your own kitchen.
State extension services still do all this, but Gallardo’s mission is a bit of an update. Rather than teach modern techniques of crop rotation, his job—as an extension professor at Mississippi State University—is to drive around the state in his silver 2013 Nissan Sentra and teach rural Mississippians the value of the Internet.
— Louise, Mississippi, a town of ~200 people, passes a resolution in support of Syrian refugees, which I’m only bringing up (I don’t do politics here) because Channel 15 went to Belzoni to speak with Ethel Wright Mohamed’s daughter (if you’ve ever heard of ‘Mama’s Dream World‘ — that’s the house in Belzoni that serves as a museum for Ethel Wright Mohamed’s memory pictures that she stitched), Carol Mohamed Ivy, on her take, as Mr. Mohamed was a Syrian refugee who came to this country in 1911.
Turducken Sausage at Dog Haus: Created by Dog Haus’ culinary team and mastermind sausagemaker Adam Gertler, the flavorful holiday link is made with turkey, chicken, duck, fresh herbs, whiskey soaked cranberries and yams. It’s then grilled and topped with sage gravy, a Brussels sprouts and bacon slaw, and crispy onions.
Then he sportingly offered to take a cell-phone shot of me, although he confessed he didn’t know how. After a little explanation, he figured out my cell phone’s push button and took one picture, scarcely glancing through the lens.
The difference was laughable. Mine were just the usual snapshots, while his was a single, masterly composition of someone seated amid the day-for-night kitsch of El Quijote.
Now, Geechie Boy Mill farmer Greg Johnsman brings a crop that industry insiders think could install just as much fervor — Jimmy Red Corn, also know as James Island Corn. Johnsman spent the past eight years cultivating the almost-extinct variety of kernels on Edisto Island. Slow Food USA calls the crop, “… one of the most interesting and talked about Southern heirloom corn varieties …”
“Crab claws. Crab meat. And shrimp and oysters,” he recited, “We don’t do much turkey.”
Though turkey may still be the star for many Thanksgiving feasts, shrimp and crab and oysters will play strong supporting roles on local holiday tables.
“Everybody’s making their fresh gumbo. Peeled shrimp and head on shrimp and crab meat,” said Andrew Gunkel, with Quality Seafood. “Oh yeah, and don’t forget your oyster dressing. Everybody loves their oyster dressing.”
The official grand opening and dedication of the Rural Studio project Newbern Library happened last month. The 17th Rural Studio 20k house, Geraldine’s House in Newbern has been completed.
— Had double date supper with best friends at Hot and Hot (Hot and Hot Fish Club) this month, and while it was good I still stand by the maxim that you really only eat there if you can confirm that Chris Hastings is there. But he wasn’t.
Here, the tiny Hubert Richter Chapel in Cullman, Alabama
The smallest church in America, in Townsend, Georgia, was destroyed by fire this week. There were seats for 12 (the same number as the disciples) and was deeded to Jesus by the woman who had it built in the 1950s.
I love the mountain churches along the Georgia-Alabama line, love the hard-rock preachers in their Conway Twitty sideburns who fling scripture with the force of a flying horseshoe at congregations who all but levitate in the grasp of the Holy Ghost, and every old woman’s purse in every pew smells like a fresh stick of Juicy Fruit. —
These two amazing women, Janice Axelrad Rosenbloom Riddler and Gertrude Kisber, were the inspiration for a cookbook celebrating the congregation’s 130th anniversary — along with many of the other women who cooked up Jewish life, commerce, and cooking in Jackson, Tennessee. The stories of the dishes these women prepared live on today in the cookbook our congregation now shares. A former rabbi paid one of the women featured in the cookbook, Mrs. Gold, quite a special tribute by saying, “her soup was beyond compare as her secret seasoning was to ‘sigh into the pot,’ flavoring its golden droplets with two thousand years of Jewish hopes and dreams.”
— Munchies’ BBQ Road Trip Part Two is here (part one was London) and this time they visited Tennessee, going Nashville to Memphis. At Scott’s Parker’s (think: Ruth’s Chris) in Lexington, the host meets Zach Parker who is still cooking whole hog, a 23-24 hour process.
“That’s what my dad strived on. And I do a lot of things based on the way he would do them. He tried to keep it old-fashioned. That’s what this area grew up on. And that’s the way I want to keep it. If I had to quit doing whole hogs, I’d quit in general. It’s whole hog or nothing. It’s not a job to me. It’s an art. I get to pour all of my love and heart and blood and sweat into it.”
— Bill Murray, Sean Brock, and Anthony Bourdain sit down at Husk in Charleston, and Bill Murray apparently likes CHS so much, “the standard of food here is so high,” he doesn’t want anybody else to move there.
Complete aside, though, the presentation of the last dish in this clip — with the server touching half the meat with his hand — needs to be thoroughly reworked.
A big deal was made of Bourdain’s new appreciation of Waffle House. What I thought more interesting was that Sean Brock mentioned he was obsessed with Waffle House as a child because it was the only place at which he could actually see people cook, how the atmosphere of it all really helped him fall in love with cooking.
When I was old enough to think seriously about what kind of man I wanted to marry, what character traits and so on, I knew I wanted someone who could recite Maimonides’ Eight Levels of Charity as well as the entire heirarchy of ordering hashbrowns at WH: scattered, smothered, covered…
At the end of the WH segment, Sean says, “you don’t come here expecting The French Laundry. You come here expecting something *amazing*.”
To which, Bourdain answers (mouthful of pecan waffle): “This is better than French Laundry, man.”
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— I found out that next month I’m going to an event with Sara McDaris of Grunches and Grins which ran on Alabama Public Television from the mid-70s to mid-90s. This intro was my 3-year-old jam:
I wanted Miss Sara and Mister Rogers to get married.
Bless Mrs. Sanders in Hartsville, South Carolina for the etiquette class she gives at the high school there, from the NYT:
First period Monday morning this week was no different. Desks had been pushed together to make tables. Her family silver, including her late mother’s silver goblets in the Francis I pattern, was laid out in proper formation. Place cards were read. Napkins fluttered to laps. The 29 students spent the next hour eating turkey and making polite conversation.
“It’s a lost art we must carry on,” Mrs. Sanders said as she made last-minute adjustments to butter knives and plate chargers. “There’s got to be civility.”
— The Advertiser reports that 39 of the first Acadians, who were buried from July to November 1765 along along the Bayou Teche (now Loreauville) will be exhumed as part of the New Acadia Project, a ‘multidisciplinary research effort designed to systematically locate, identify and investigate the 18th century homesteads and unmarked gravesites of Acadian exiles — the first Cajuns.’
Yahoo Travel decided to tackle who made the best pie in each state, and for Alabama, Pie Lab was chosen. Shugaree’s in New Albany (and their pretty chocolate meringue) won Mississippi.
“I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force,” Faulkner wrote later. “Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first words, I knew what the last word would be. … Before I began I said I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again.”
— //embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js My refrigerator right now: That Green Sauce from HEB. BTW, yes all those things are on a lazy susan, and yes one day I will license the idea to some huge appliance company and make a zillion dollors because yes, it is a great idea (and I’m sure a zillion other people are doing it too!)
And GLO-ree Hallelujah, HEB is shipping online orders! That means my Texas-shaped chips, Whataburger ketchup, and ‘That Green Sauce’ (oooooh the green sauce) is a click away. YESSSSS. Now if Buc-ee’s would just send me some fresh Beaver Nuggets…
STANDOUT SHOW. BLW/JW: We once curated a show here in the gallery of the late blind sculptor Hawkins Borden of Memphis, Tennessee. We draped the gallery with black plastic to create total darkness, filled the space with Bolden’s haunting masks composed of hole-pierced pan sculptures and allowed people to feel the sculptures before seeing them.
ON THE IMMORTAL BEAT WRITER WILLIAM BURROUGHS. BLW/JW: Yes, we first did an exhibit of William Burroughs’ artwork in 1994 as our inaugural exhibition in our current building … William’s paintings and Bill Daniel’s photos of train-car graffiti. We met William and asked him what he thought of having a show in Waxahachie, Texas. He said, “It’s as good a place as any.”
— A short film called ‘Central Texas Barbecue’ was published on Vimeo this week, featuring Kreuz, Louie Miller, Davis Grocery, Taylor, and Black’s.
“…our family, we say barbecue, but that’s family, that’s what that means. And for someone who’s not from around here may kinda, that’s kinda weird, put religion, politics, and barbecue up there, but barbecue’s family, I mean everyone knows that.”
Bruns uses a wooden rake to gather finished salt crystals into a pile. Her company will produce about 10,000 pounds this year to be dried, sorted, put in small jars and shipped out to top restaurants like The French Laundry in northern California, Husk in Charleston, S.C., and Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore.
“I think of salt as like wine, so the minerality of our salt is different from the minerality of any other salt, kind of like a pinot noir grown in California is different from a pinot noir grown in France. Could be exactly the same vine but because of the earth that it’s grown in it gives you a different flavor,” Bruns says.
At Ninfa’s on Navigation (the original and the best)
When is Tex-Mex No Longer Tex-Mex: Could the answer lie in a puddle of chili gravy? at Houstonia:
And it occurred to me then: could good chili gravy be the lynchpin of “real” Tex-Mex? I scanned my memories for all the terrible Tex-Mex meals past, eaten in places like Rochester, New York and Manchester, England. What did all of those meals have in common? A distinct lack of chili gravy.
Hope you had a great Thanksgiving! We made 38 this year: pumpkin, chocolate, chocolate pecan — although I saw the Guardian disapproves of the concept — plus chocolate, chocolate meringue, and chess pie! Av and Shug dropped the pies off where we donate them (a church that feeds the hungry in its neighborhood) and then turned right around for a one mile fun run that Shug did *great* in!
— I found this too late for this year, but love the idea and effort and would like to do something similar myself to share for another holiday: The Thanksgiving Reader.
— This Week’s Various (and regular postings) will be back on Sunday. xoxo!
Not long after it opened, so I’m months behind in posting it here, we dined at Shaya on Magazine in New Orleans. There’s hardly a food award of note Alon and his restaurant haven’t won this year: James Beard Best Chef South, Eater Awards National, Esquire’s Best New Restaurant – lots of other honors.
and one of the best things I’ve ever eaten: curried fried cauliflower with caramelized onions and cilantro. How can one say that hummus of all things is one of the best things ever? Because this one *is*: //embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js
Perfection. The space is clean lines and comfortable — not staid — and children welcome (it was Shug who scarfed down the matzah ball soup and both boys (of course) inhaled every last crumb of pita). Best to order several items here and eat family-style so everyone can share. And we did. Delicious.
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