Photo Essay: Things We Do at Home

Franke's


Dillard's


Friends


Catfish


Community Bakery


Sweet Babies


I-40

Happy Thanksgiving!

The day is nearly, or even just now, past, but the weekend rolls along....I made my first solo pan of dressing today (see photo, left). I am used to being the assistant on this type of project, but I muddled through alone and produced something quite tasty, even though I forgot the eggs. And, it was not dry in the least! The dish has come back home about 2/3 empty, so I guess even though my in-laws didn't seem to know what it was or what to call it, somebody at the table took a liking to it.

Even better, I have a third left all for myself. Whee!

ps -- Whooooooo........Pig! Sooie! (see photo, right)

In Search of Q

A couple of weeks ago, on my birthday, I developed a craving for some barbecue. Out here, "barbecue" is a term loosely used, pretty much covering anything cooked outside. Maybe even some things cooked inside, such as Korean barbecue. It can even refer to the event or act of cooking itself. Where I am from, we refer to most of this type of food as "grilled" (and to the event as a "cook-out") because it is cooked directly over the heat source at high temperatures for a short period of time. Barbecue (or BBQ for the spelling-challenged) is an altogether different thing, not so much an event as a particular substance.

It requires a smoker (or other indirect-cooking contraption) and lots of time. Folks often think it is all about the sauce, but here they are wrong—good quality meat should be used (either pork or beef, depending on one’s regional proclivities), and the sauce or marinade should serve to compliment, not mask it. Spicy and sweet, smoky, or vinegar-tangy, again depending on regional preferences, the sauce should work its way under your fingernails and puddle in the corners of your mouth, providing a few hours or days of lingering stain and smell (wet naps are useful here). Its richness and fat are best alleviated by cole slaw (some put it directly on their sandwich) and iced tea.

So, because of the non-specificity of this term "barbecue" in the West, my search was not an easy one. I was not helped along by the birthday-cake malaise that set in, so it wasn't until last weekend that I ventured forth to a spot near the Culver City gallery district called JNJ Burger Shack. Despite the name, this place serves up some mighty 'cue and is one of the few places in town where you can eat on site. M and I both ordered pulled pork sandwiches, with orders of potato salad (which was perfect, made with mustard and sweet pickle like my Aunt Inez does) and beans on the side. Also a slice of sweet potato pie and lemonades (iced tea and cole slaw were not on offer). The sandwiches arrived, meat overflowing buns, dripping thick, black-peppery sauce; we tucked in and cleaned our plates. We did not eat for the rest of the day.

The proprietor of JNJ Burger Shack is from Louisiana. He wants to retire back there one day for some peace and quiet. But I hope he sticks around for a little while longer -- I'll be needing a few more of those sandwiches.

New starter

With a new year always comes new resolve: to be better, to do more, oftener. So here I am, crawling back to the dusty blog. Since I last posted, I have: been home (back to Little Rock) twice, via the bedraggled and unloved American Airlines system; started working as a glorified docent at an art museum (MOCA, in fact); moved out of my studio; had the starter in my car replaced after nearly getting stuck; and rented a new place to live that includes a beautiful little red barn I will convert to a new work space. I feel that these new developments bode well for 2008.

The new year also brings hoped-for victories and meaningful food. Yesterday was not a good day for the teams I shout at on the television (Arkansas, Illinois, and Hawaii all lost, and looked bad doing so). Even so, I cooked up big pots of black eyed peas and collard greens, well seasoned with salt pork and pepper sauce, complimented by a pan of cornbread. These foods are meant to bring me good luck and good fortune for the rest of the year. Remember that next time, tribes and hogs.

Southern Art Thoughts, poorly written

Why do Southern artists continue to employ stereotypical/clichéd images of our region?
-Randy Wray (bottles, moonshine, flag)
-Kara Walker (sort of Southern, images of slavery, the antebellum, physical stereotypes)

I could name a host of others, but they wouldn’t be as prominent or well known and/or I am lazy. You’d think we would want to leave these things behind, or show folks something else about ourselves. But instead these are what we cling to, against perhaps better judgment.

[ASIDE: Really interested in Randy Wray, in his sense of decay, the macabre, and its gross-but-funny potential. Kind of Eudora Welty/Flannery O’Connor (I always get them confused)—that old Southern Gothic feeling rearing its head again.]

I was hanging out with my friend K from grad school on Memorial Day. Though she went to the U of I with me, she is from LR too. And though our work looks very different, we have a lot of the same concerns, and we both attribute these concerns to where we are from: a feeling of longing for something we cannot get at or even name; the need to feel that feeling of longing; an equation of traditional “women’s work” with feminist art practice; a deep feeling of resonance with old objects, people, places, and things. Also, I think we would both agree that, during our time in grad school, various professors and other students attempted to exorcise those feelings/interests out of us, almost by shaming us into making us feel those feelings were inappropriate.

I heard Roy Blount, Jr., interviewed on the radio recently. He said that to be a Southern writer, you have to have left the South but still be writing about Southern things. It follows that art making would be the same, and we cling to these images, concepts, accents, and flavors of our home places, we wave them around like battle flags, so that we never get accused of forgetting who we are, so that we will always be outsiders, so that we can continue to conjure up those old longing feelings, and then get our work done.

Punctuation Demonstration

I have recently been the recipient of some emails, penned by a Californian, that included the word “ya’ll” in their salutation line. I believe/hope that my correspondent was trying to type “y’all” instead. Now, I have no problem with non-Southerners using my native region’s preferred version of the second-person plural (although I wish they would not do so ironically, while wearing trucker hats, nursing a Dixie, and listening to Hank Williams in their old F-150’s). After all, it is kind of elegant in a way and doesn’t have that gender-specific, too-nasal hitch present in the Northern/Midwestern “you guys.” But I would ask that y’all-sayers first take a stab at understanding the etymological/linguistical/grammatical underpinnings of it before doing so.

“Y’all” is a contraction of the phrase “you all.” Again, this construction fills in a gap in English; we don't have an official second-person plural like "vous" in French or "ustedes" in Spanish. Its apostrophe replaces the O and U of “you”, so it must fall between the Y and the A. Any other position seems to result in a misspelled or anachronistic contraction of “you will.”

In addition, I’d like to remind any readers I may have of a couple of other common shapes that “y’all” can take:
-it can be possessive, as in “Y’all’s mail has arrived.”
-it can be quite expansive, when one needs to refer to more people than one has previously been speaking to, as in “All of y’all are invited to come.”
-it can take on ritualized significance, such as when the woman who minds the till at the Catfish Hole asks, while ringing up your dinner, “Y’all get enough to eat, Honey?” If you don’t hear it, you probably didn’t.

More on this subject here: http://4weddingsandafuneral.blogspot.com/2007/05/hey-yall.html
(Sorry, haven't learned how to make pretty links yet!)