Deep Fried Kudzu

The Georgia Trust has put out a Request for Qualifications and Proposals for a Paradise Gardens Site Management Plan. Restoration goals are found in this PDF and a draft for National Register of Historic Places registration is in this PDF.  One part of the registration mentions that Paradise Gardens fits the criteria of national significance in the area of art because of its direct association with Howard Finster (of course) and goes on to quote Art Rosenbaum that Finster "emerged from the rural Appalachian culture of northeast Alabama and northwest Georgia to become one of America's most important creative personalities in the last quarter of the twentieth century."


The application also lists five other visionary art environments on the Register: Pasaquan, Watts Towers, Forestiere Underground Gardens, Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, and Ed Galloway's World's Largest Totem Pole & The Fiddle House.  Also listed for whatever reason are other environments not on the Register: Charley's World of Lost Art, Edward Leedskalnin's Coral Castle, Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Fred Smith's Concrete Park, Salvation Mountain, and Nit Wit Ridge.

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I am so sorry to report, if you haven't heard already, that Dean Faulkner Wells passed away this week.  This is an interview she did with Southern Living not too long ago.  In the C-L here.  A remembrance in the Oxford Eagle here.

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The "I hate Auburn" t-shirt guy at SEC week had Nick Saban speak against the shirt's message, and said, "It's like I went to church and G-d told me He didn't approve."

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The NYT has an article this week about the Frank Gehry-designed Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi -- that "the museum is almost out of cash, hurt by fewer visitors than it had hoped for, higher operating costs than it expected and less city support than it had counted on."  And there's no Bilbao effect going on, either.  Not good.

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Oh, Georgia.  The NYT reports, "South Carolina has shipped out more than twice as many peaches as Georgia so far this summer. And it has been that way for years.


It gets worse. At the end of July, the University of Georgia will officially close its peach program. The head peach horticulturist left the job a couple of years ago. When budgets tightened recently, university officials decided to simply eliminate the position altogether. (Programs for blueberries and vegetables had to go, too.)


And if that was not enough, last week Georgia’s premier peach farmers had to head across the state line to South Carolina for a regional peach conference."

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Ooooh I wish I had caught this in March, but Scott Peacock spoke on The Splendid Table about his 'Alabama Project': he's traveling around the state interviewing the oldest Alabamians he can find asking them about their earliest food memories.  One of the clips is him speaking to a woman who was friends with Scottie Fitzgerald (Zelda and F. Scott's daughter), and even had Zelda's signed copy of The Joy of Cooking.  The interviewee thinks cheese straws are vastly overrated (oh, for shame, someone speaking against the blessed cheese straw, a welcome guest at any good wedding, funeral, and every other get together!).

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The food in 'The Help' reported on in the C-L.




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Roger Stolle (he owns Cathead Music in Clarksdale) is working on a new documentary, called 'We Juke Up In Here!'.

A couple of weeks ago when I came to Huntsville to visit Wade Wharton, he wanted me to meet a couple of his artist friends.  One was the pique assiette artist Bill Wilson, and the other was John Farrer, who does silkscreen and paints:



sculpts wood:


does inlaid wood:


carves stone, including Minnesota soapstone (flat on the table):

sculpts metal:

makes assemblages:

...and does *all* kinds of designs for residential, commercial, and public projects.  High profile pieces.  This was a gate that was to be at the Alabama Veterans Memorial:


...here he is showing Mr. Wharton a model of the sculptural piece designed for the memorial:


...and today I saw it in person.  Wow.  It makes the space.:

Nice.

Looking up from the base:
Architect friends, art friends: send me an email for his contact information...

(found this sign a couple of weeks ago, just outside Geraldine, Alabama)

Three years ago at the Monte Sano Art Show in Huntsville, this was a work that everyone, it seemed, stopped to take in:

It's by Bill Wilson, who came to Huntsville from Memphis, back when Werner von Braun was running things in H'ville and needed people proficient with computers.  Bill had some great stories.  It must've been just an incredible time to be working in rocketry.

Mosaic work - and pique assiette -  is what Bill does now:

'Pique assiette' is the term for taking broken plates and such and putting them back together in pattern or design.  The 'father' of pique assiette is Raymond Isidore (my friend Henk has a post about him here at his fantastic European art environments site, and there's more at the end of this post in a nice video).

Beatles on the left:

...and this is what Bill called his 'American Sampler' made from coffee cups:

Bill will have some of his work (ooooh this is such a tiny-tiny sample, and I should have taken a thousand more pictures but it was so good just listening to him) at the upcoming Monte Sano Art Fair in Huntsville, which is always on the third Saturday in September.

Oh!  And he's also a poet.  Yes, yes, yes:



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This is a video of the pique assiette home in Chartres, France by Ramond Isidore. Wow.


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Bill is blessed with incredibly successful children (each of them an artist). One is Emily Wilson. I promise, this is crazy-great art.  Yesssss.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has just been promised approximately 190 works of self-taught art by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, collectors with what is considered one of the nicest groupings of that genre.  In the spring of 2013, the museum will have an exhibition and catalog of the works.

...focus on American artists active between the 1930s and 1980s, many of whom are African American, and will feature works by such iconic figures as William Edmondson, Bill Traylor, and Martín Ramírez, as well as by somewhat lesser-known but widely respected artists such as James Castle, Howard Finster, William Hawkins, and Elijah Pierce.

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Among the highlights of the Bonovitz collection are six works by William Edmondson (1874-1951), including the stone sculpture Horse. A retired janitor from Nashville, Tennessee, Edmondson took up carving tombstones and outdoor stone ornaments in his mid to late fifties, sometime in the early 1930s. Over the next decade and a half he filled his back yard with small figures of birds, animals, and people, which he sculpted from found chunks of limestone using an old railroad spike for a chisel. Masterful in their simplification of form, pared down to the barest essentials, minimally articulated as to surface and texture, and almost geometric in their near abstraction, these works are today considered among the finest achievements of self-taught art in the United States.

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Bill Traylor’s works consist of flattened, simplified, and silhouetted images that are drawn with great skill and ingenuity on often-irregular paper or cardboard surfaces, as seen in House with Two Men, Dog, and Bird, one of a dozen superb works by the artist in the collection. People, birds, and animals are in constant action in Traylor’s work, running, climbing, shooting, fighting, yelling, drinking, poking, chasing, pointing, or sitting, often within or on top of strange, unidentifiable geometric structures. Born a slave, Traylor (c. 1853-1949) spent most of his life as a farmhand; however, for a few years in the late 1930s and early 1940s, homeless and in his late eighties, he drew pictures in pencil, colored pencil, and poster paint on found pieces of cardboard, making his art on a sidewalk in downtown Montgomery, Alabama.

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...said Sheldon Bonovitz. “With our gift, we are helping the Museum build recognition across a wide audience for the remarkable contributions of self-taught artists. We thank the Museum for recognizing the importance of self-taught artists within the broader field of contemporary art and hope that it will encourage other donors to help us further this important mission.”

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Do you watch Ted?  At least once or twice a week, I try to go to their site: 'Riveting Talks by Remarkable People, Free to the World' and watch something that winds us as always entertaining and makes me feel a little bit smarter.  This week, algorithms are *so* interesting.  Seriously.


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Oh the deliciousness that is architecture in Treme, and the T-P gives us more pics than usual.  Also lately in the paper: smothering (food) = flavor, and 'Organ and Labyrinth' -- interesting!

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How do people change in twenty years, living in the same town?  Oxford Project.

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CNN hosts a religion blog, and one of the best posts lately has been: 'Actually, that's not in the Bible' -- like "cleanliness is next to G-dliness" and "G-d works in mysterious ways".  One passage from the post:
“Most people who profess a deep love of the Bible have never actually read the book,” says Rabbi Rami Shapiro, who once had to persuade a student in his Bible class at Middle Tennessee State University that the saying “this dog won’t hunt” doesn’t appear in the Book of Proverbs.


Earlier this year Av and I went to see Joel Hoffman give a speech at Southside Baptist in conjunction with TEE in B'ham about Bible translations (he's written several books and his blog is called 'G-d Didn't Say That'), and that was fantastic.  This is his latest book.

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It might be a good time to start growing pecans.

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This song is on repeat in my head:


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Most I've been entertained by a non-family member all week:


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The NYT tells people 'You Are Making Your Biscuits Wrong' and gives two recipes, but neither recipe is the one I've had with best results -- dropped by spoon in a super-hot, preheated cast iron skillet (see pic above).

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Friends, I must pray twenty times a day.  Sometimes purposefully at a set time and place, and sometimes just a tiny, tiny message, a sentence, to the Almighty while walking down the hall or setting the table.  If you can make one more prayer tonight, will you please do it for this sweet three year old boy, grandson of someone I know?  Thank you.
(Donations: Fifth Third Bank, in the name of Jamie Wynberry or Keaton von Buchler Memorial Fund)

Av and I used to have a...well...'pet' possum.  Before one of the hurricanes took our peach tree, "Jeeves" would come almost every night in the spring and summer and feast on whatever fruit was to his liking.  At other times of the year, he would visit the backyard, snooping around for who knows what:



At one of our themed parties, we recognized Jeeves in cupcake (red velvet, of course!):


Back in April when we were on vacation, we drove through Wausau, Florida where they have erected a monument to the possum:

Kudzu, brought to this country from Asia as an ornamental, was developed near here in the early part of the Twentieth Century and given to the world as a soil-saving, high-protein forage plant by Mr. and Mrs. C.E. Pleas. The fast-growing, deep-rooted leguminous vine has been widely grown in the United States as a drought-resisting, erosion-controlling plant that compares with alfalfa in pasture and hay-making values.

In the nearby cemetery are Mr. and Mrs. C.E. Pleas, with 'Kudzu Pioneers' on their shared monument, and each of them have a bit about their role in popularizing kudzu on each of their stones:

More about them here.

Of the many, many, many, many tamale places we've been to in the Delta -- best goes to Hicks' in Clarksdale.  Hicks' forever:


Shug loves the hot tamales at Hicks' (they were a little too spicy for Shugie) -- but they both agreed that Chamoun's Rest Haven has great coconut cream pie:

...and since it was going to be late getting back home, we picked up a few little goodies to tide us over during the night drive at Delta Donut:


Other restaurants in Clarksdale include Madidi (Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett's finer dining restaurant, where we had an awful experience), Ground Zero (MF & BL's idea of a juke joint, which we've been to and was okay), Rust (that I really want to try next time), Abe's (not a fan), and Ramon's, the Ranch, and Delta Amusement (also want to try that next time).

After a day full of doing fun things with the boys, we drove over to Greenwood for supper at Lusco's, another of our favorite places.  We thought they would get a big kick out of the private tables behind a curtain, where if you need a waiter you just ring your own buzzer.  It's more private and somehow more fun.


Well, Lusco's didn't work out (we should have known: Saturday night + no reservation = one awful table in a 150db room and leaving before even ordering so as not to endure the noise).

We figured Giardina's (love it) would be similarly busy and Crystal Grill (oooh those pies!) was too...so supper was a grilled cheese in Winona!

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An article in last month's Chicago Tribune mentions the city's 'barbecue renaissance' and attributes part of it to a style popularized in the Delta, with reference to aquarium smokers.  If you can think of someone in the Delta using an aquarium smoker, please email me.  Thanks!

Not all my family is Jewish -- one line of my grandparents lived for a very long time on Sand Mountain -- before Alabama was a state -- and many of them are buried at a church cemetery in DeKalb County that includes a large number of folk monuments (all of my family in this cemetery have the usual, traditional ones, but these folk ones are the most interesting).

In the middle, a hand-drawn weeping willow:


A couple of these mention when people were "bornd":

John L.A. Brown -- he was a schoolteacher.  Wonderful:

The WSJ ran an article this weekend about the $20k houses the Rural Studio is designing and building:

For many people with modest incomes, trailers are the only real option for home ownership. But trailers deteriorate quickly and depreciate over time. Six years ago, the Rural Studio, a program based in western Alabama and run by Auburn University's architecture school, launched the $20K House Project, with the goal of producing a model home for $20,000. (At that cost, the resident's monthly payment would be about $100 under the federal Section 502 Direct Loan program.) Last month, a team of four postgraduate students completed the latest home, the 10th one developed by the project.

Slideshow here.

Found this in Collinsville, Alabama this weekend...

The residents of Phonehenge, in California's Mohave Desert, have been told to move after twelve misdemeanor building code violations last month.  Apparently the '70-foot tower, a replica of a Viking house and other esoteric creations the self-taught builder put together over the years out of mainly scrap materials' is a hazard according to inspectors.

Image used courtesy BeFrank under Creative Commons license.  Thank you!

More here from the AP, and here from LA Weekly.  The builder/self-made architect/visionary of Phonehenge, Kim Fahey, has been arrested, but SPACES is going to help him with representation.

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Some things to consider in regards to shelter for the poor:
'How can organic, self-built slums be turned into livable housing?
What might a house-for-the-poor look like?
How can world-class engineering and design capabilities be utilized to solve the problem?
What reverse-innovation lessons might be learned by the participants in such a project?
How could the poor afford to buy this house?'
Can it be done for $300 USD?  The NYT ran one opinion here, and a rebuttal was printed in the Harvard Business Review.  Well, there certainly were a lot of submissions to the team who began this project, and the winners were announced today.

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The Fawcett House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is on the market.

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Toast embroidery, and Oreo cameos.  And the not-so-secret lives of mantises.

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(above: a Frank Fleming animal totem I saw in the RSA Building in M'ry)

It was published in 2008, but the Alabama Masters piece put out by the State Council on the Arts is wonderful.

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Cheerwine + Krispy Kreme?  Yes!  For a limited time, not in all markets.

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Lightning bugs on the rebound.

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The Kohler Foundation will be restoring S.P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden art environment in Lucas, Kansas.  Much more about it here.

Wednesday I spent the day in Huntsville -- had lunch with a couple of girlfriends, then was off with Wade Wharton and another friend on an incredible tour...maybe we should call it a wonderfully informal 'open house' with two of his artist friends (oh I cannot *wait* to show you all that next week!), and then finally we visited Wade's newest exhibit, at the main branch of the Huntsville Public Library:


He had his gourdwork there, this metalwork, his paintings, his sculptures, his assemblages, wood carvings, you name it...and had the very nicest comments from the public in a notebook that had been provided there at the atrium art gallery.

The exhibit is up through July 31.  This is how the the exhibit is described:

We are thrilled to display the work of innovative Huntsville artist Wade Wharton. His artwork is currently on display in the atrium of the Main branch of the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library until the end of July.


Wharton “recycles” found objects into artwork. A shovel scoop becomes a flower petal. A transmission flywheel becomes the face of a flower blossom. A Volkswagon fender becomes a man’s leg. Since 1990, he has been transforming the house- interior and surrounding yard- into a showcase for his whimsical artwork: stained glass, paintings, wood carvings, metal works and sculpture made from discarded materials. The 122’ x 112’ yard is a jungle of foliage and art, featuring flowers fashioned from scrap iron and a Japanese-inspired bridge made from trampoline parts.


Wharton points to an accident that severed nerves in his right hand and, he feels, impairs its dexterity. His graceful wood sculpture belies any disability. Wharton began whittling after the accident and now skillfully creates wood carvings and 3-dimensional sculptures, a number of which have mechanical moving parts.


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Wade loves company, and encourages people to come see his art environment around his home there in Huntsville.  If you're interested, email me and I'll be happy to share his contact information.