You know it, you love it, you wait for it every year in your mailbox…The Oxford American Music issue. Then every year some goose steals the magazine, or you leave it in a rental car, or the subscription your old boyfriend gave you runs out just before this issue. (That weasel.) Now ten years of the best writing around is available all in one place. Just in time. Wish they had the CDs, too. Click here to buy it straight from the source.
It’s been awhile since I spent Friday night at a high school football game. But I did it last weekend, and it was good for the soul. This is a blog about the culture of our place, the American South, and I think a section on offbeat high school mascots is in order. If you know of a good one, please send it this way. And now, here to kick this off, the one, the only, the inspiration for it all….the Pine Bluff High School Fightin’ Zebras!
Filed under Arkansas, high school mascots
Disfarmer is going to blow your mind. I can’t help but wonder about his subjects’ lives and relationships. All the little details…the bandage on the lady’s leg in the second picture, the way the couple in the fourth picture holds each other and her shoes and twisted stocking, the tough little blonde and the mother’s deeply tanned arm in the last picture…To see the full collection (you can buy prints) and read more about this 1940’s Arkansas photographer, go to www.disfarmer.com
Filed under Arkansas, art, outsider art, photography
Home Place, Richard Stephens
My mother and I stumbled on a Richard Stephens exhibit yesterday at The Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas. Stephens’ color palette is really unusual, the colors never muddy, and he has the ability to make structures, such as old shrimp boats and industrial buildings, look lively. His talented use of plain white portions of the canvas is impressive. We especially like the chunky brush strokes and colors in Home Place, above, even though this picture doesn’t do it justice. www.raswatercolors.com
I think this sounds grand. American Dream Safari tours leave out of Memphis daily in a restored ’55 Cadillac, and include: Delta Day Trip (“Highway 61 blues and blacktop”); Yards, Gardens, and Architecture (in Memphis); Juke Joint Full of Blues (good way to hit the town and cut loose, fee includes entrance to three clubs); Drive by Shooting (not a funny title, but allows one to pretend to be William Eggleston for a day); Road Therapy Tour (if you just need to get away and cruise through the Arkansas countryside); Gospel Church (fee includes tithe and lunch at the fantabulous Gus’s Fried Chicken); and Tupelo Day Trip (to you-know-who’s house.) You just hop in the car and the driver whisks you away. Perfect.
American Dream Safari; 9am – 5pm, 7 days a week; tad@americandreamsafari.com; 901.527.8870; PO Box 3129, Memphis, TN, 38173; www.americandreamsafari.com
Filed under Arkansas, art, blues, food, gospel, history, Mississippi, museums, music, outsider art, people, restaurants, Tennessee, tours
Cabinet of Seeds 
