Deep Fried Kudzu

Weekly notes on Southern art, architecture, food, and travel

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!

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Hunt Slonem’s Abstraction with Birds at the Dayton Art Institute, from a 2022 visit

The latest issue of Veranda features Hunt Slonem’s Massachusetts chalet which includes mention of his furniture by New Orleans’ Henry Siebrecht, including a Gothic Revival sofa and twin Siebrecht armchairs, the only matching pair Hunt says he’s ever seen.

I found a trade handbill of Siebrecht’s listing ~1853 that he was an upholsterer and furniture manufacturer at 41 and 43 Royal Street — that’s right there at Canal, in the stretch that was known as ‘Furniture Row’ — and he advertised pieces he had coming in from Paris along with curtains, curtain trimmings, and paper hangings (wallpaper).

At the bottom, the sheet mentioned that he stocked mosquito bars (canopies), bedding, spring mattresses, hair and moss mattresses, and carpets.

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Brennan’s, from a 2015 visit

Poppy Tooker on 80 Years of Brennan’s

BTW, a Homeworthy from this week in Madison, Georgia (home of the owners of Boxwoods Gardens & Gifts in Buckhead) had big Brennan’s vibes in one of the rooms:

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A visit to Parnassus Books in Nashville late last year

From Literary Hub, A Bookstore Boom in a Time of Literacy Decline

Sarah Arnold, at Parnassus Books in Nashville, offers what I find to be the most humanly persuasive explanation for why people are flooding into bookstores even as reading scores fall: loneliness. “Technology and social media promised to bring us together,” she told me, “but more often it feels like they siphon each of us into a solitary lifestyle, and it’s hurting us.” Bookstores are filling a social void. People can come to Parnassus on almost any given night for an author event or a book club meeting, or simply browse and strike up a conversation. This helps explain how the bookstore boom and the literacy crisis can coexist.

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Tintypes at The Met, from a visit last year

The Long Exposure, about modern-day tintype photographers in Mississippi, at Country Roads

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xoxo!

There’s social media, public meetings, traditional media, email/mail, and then there are (sans-) arrow signs
Cullman County AL, 2023.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a post on lovely Victorian bas relief cemetery monuments in Alabama. There are so many in this category, and truly so pretty, so interesting, that they deserve another set.

Here, from Hopewell Baptist Church Cemetery in Danville:

Magnolia Cemetery in Mobile:

At Oakview Cemetery in Lowndesboro:

Church Street Graveyard in Mobile:

And I have to mention this one, from Old Aberdeen Historical Cemetery in Mississippi.

It’s for Mary Points, who passed away in 1852 when her skirts caught fire. This pic of mine was used in the Association for Gravestone Studies quarterly a few years ago. One interesting thing is that in this same cemetery, there’s a person buried sitting in their rocking chair.

It’s Alice Whitfield, and the story is that she passed away in her favorite rocking chair, knitting, so it was decided — well, it was her request obviously beforehand — to bury her in that same fashion. Et voila. And if you’re thinking of others, there’s the story of Mary Chambers Bibb at Maple Hill in Huntsville AL, and Grancer the Dancer, said to be buried in his feather bed in Kinston AL:

Weekly notes on Southern art, architecture, food, and travel

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!

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from a 2016 visit

At Southern Cultures, The Buford Highway Farmers Market by Diamond Forde

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El Agave in Clanton AL, 2023

The documentary, Slice of Life: The American Dream. In Former Pizza Huts. was mentioned in this NYT article.

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Leiper’s Fork, from a 2023 visit

The South’s Best Music Towns: Where to Find Your Groove at Garden & Gun includes Lafayette LA, Florence AL, St Augustine FL, Clarksdale MS, Kerrville TX, Bristol VA/TN, Greensboro NC, Macon GA, Asheville NC, Leiper’s Fork TN, Owensboro KY, Nashville, New Orleans, and Atlanta

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Tee Eva’s, 2017

At Country Roads, NOLA ‘Nacular: Anthony DelRosario’s crusade to preserve New Orleans’s vernacular signage

They are almost always an advertisement, but sometimes a plea or reminder that Jesus Loves You or an idea: Cell Phone—Modern Ear Ache? When we talk about the local color of New Orleans, these hand-painted signs, which DelRosario describes as vernacular art, are part of the tapestry. In this instance, vernacular refers to “a language that is not standard or official, but instead specific to a particular community or culture.” I mean, you already know. Who dat, your mom ‘en ‘em. Making groceries, snoballs. Ain’t dere no more. The sign painters go a little further; their art is often the voice, or font, of an entire neighborhood.

and a reminder that Lester Carey’s lettering is available here, free, as a font.

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Coquette, 2016

Coquette in New Orleans is closing after 18 years.

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A visit to L.V.’s, 2009

The L.V. Hull Home and Heritage Center in Kosy has opened.

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xoxo!

I’m putting Holiday Inn Holidomes — that terrific mix of motel atrium/pool/fernglade — and a community college museum with a bit of a wonky collection of porcelain together today.

The Evelyn Burrow Museum at Wallace State Community College in Hanceville, Alabama, mostly made up of the namesake’s porcelain collection, isn’t a particularly rare grouping of items that’s going to make anyone who knows the finer points of Meissen and Sevres skip a heartbeat, but it is reflective of a real person’s real passions, which is plenty, and in certain ways, adorable.

What ties everything together today is Evelyn Burrow, hometown hotelier, who was known for

“opening one of the most successful Holiday Inns in America,

which held a Top 10 spot for years

and attracted such guests as Ethel Kennedy.”

The takeaway being Ethel Kennedy sought out and stayed at a Holiday Inn in Cullman. So many of us are now one degree of Kevin Bacon closer.

So yeah. Now, was the Cullman Holiday Inn an official Holidome? The old postcard of it I found on eBay doesn’t say specifically. But the wording on the verso, ‘dining room overlooking indoor pool with underwater music,’ is Holidome if not in name then in spirit.

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This is undoubtedly the low-rent version of Proust and madeleines, but I can look at that picture of the motel pool and smell the chlorine and feel that heavy wet air hanging in the atrium’s atmosphere. It had such a density that almost added to gravity.

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Anyway, Burrow’s collection of porcelain, crystal, and figurines eventually found a home at Wallace State, forming the nucleus of this small museum.

When I stopped by in April during the ag department’s spring plant sale, the featured exhibit wasn’t porcelain at all but the work of the late Brother Jude Johnston, a monk at St Bernard in Cullman.

I’ll only put a few pics here, and found a few of his pieces troublesome — with works like one called “Christ of the Holocaust” and another, a sculpture concept elegizing children who died in the Holocaust. It was…upsetting. As a Jewish person I may see this in a different light than the general public though.

You know I love to love things but this was not it. There’s a terrible part of me that thinks this is evocative of an old Packard Bell with a glitchy version of Windows 3D Pipes screensaver.

and there was this kind of thing.

and this.

The simpleton in me said “Magnatiles, but make it paper”:

But yeah, I get it – math.

You know, maybe it’s his Holocaust pieces that put me in a bad mood and sour about his other pieces. I really, really did not like those. It was hard to shake off.

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Actually the last time I was here, the “Cultivating the Dutch Tradition in the 21st Century, Jane Jones” exhibit was up, which was much more agreeable.

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Yet this exhibit from 2015 of Mose T works was absolute ragebait.

Y’all, the paintings were in frames. Framesssssss.

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Actually, you know, this museum is great.

I bet they have a terrific relationship with the community and it’s super approachable for someone to come by and say “maybe we could do an exhibit with this.” That kind of accessiblity is everything. This world needs more of that.

Really, we need more democratization of wonder (I’m going to have to do a deep-dive on if Martha Nussbaum would go along with this the way I’m thinking of it right now), but certainly a collection/something/anything shouldn’t and doesn’t need to be rarified to be appreciated.

I like thinking about what Evelyn Burrow must have been like…how when she wasn’t running a Holiday Inn **with, hello, a pool that had underwater music** she was thinking about her pretty collector plates.

Maybe she giggled to friends that she was a Capodimonte girl. That is sweet. That’s the magic, really: not the objects themselves, but the person behind them. And it was kind of her to have them so others can enjoy.

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BTW, I did a little search, and there are people still really into Holidomes (same.). See what you think.

Plane Store
Vinemont AL, 2023.