Kickstart my hiatus!

Southernist has gone on hiatus. In the meantime, be sure to check out my favorite site in the whole wide world (and on world wide web) Kickstarter for tons of cool projects happening all over the south!

Louisiana
Georgia
Tennessee
North Carolina
South Carolina
Kentucky

Oh! Did I ever tell you that one of the Kickstarter founders is from Virginia??

By for now,
Sweet Tea

Trouble The Water

Tomorrow night on NatGeo:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/trouble-the-water-4249/Videos#tab-Overview

Big Freedia the Queen Diva @ PS 1

New Orleans bounce artist Big Freedia is performing at PS 1's Warm Up tomorrow (8/28). It's gon' be Azz Everywhere y'all!

Well, it's shaping up to be Katrina week....

Out now via Creative Time:

WAITING FOR GODOT IN NEW ORLEANS: A FIELD GUIDE
EDITED BY PAUL CHAN

The final installment of Creative Time's multi-part Waiting for Godot in New Orleans by Paul Chan, A Field Guide brings together a rich collection of primary ephemera, photographs, articles, and essays that explore the project's unique community-centric process from conception to completion. Divided into eight sections—Remember, Picture, Relate, Organize, Appear, Play, Film, Reflect—the book centers around Creative Time's production of Samuel Beckett's classic play over two weekends in two New Orleans neighborhoods—the middle of an intersection in the Lower Ninth Ward, and the front yard of an abandoned house in Gentilly. The production re-imagines the post-Katrina landscape of New Orleans as the setting for the 20th century's most emblematic story of waiting, and in doing so, illuminates the personal and political conditions facing the people of New Orleans and the evacuees in surrounding cities. (source)

One Block

Photographer Dave Anderson’s recently released book One Block: A New Orleans Neighborhood Rebuilds is a powerful portrait of post-Katrina New Orleans as seen through the prism of a single city block whose residents are attempting to rebuild their homes. Using portraiture and still lifes, Anderson explores the very nature of community while testing its resilience. (source)

Citizen Gulf tonight in NYC

Tonight (8/25) – in conjunction with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina – there will be a series of CitizenGulf meet-ups across the country to fundraise and benefit fishing families affected by the oil spill. At the #citizengulf NYC meet-up, you make a step towards actionable change. Held at the Village Pourhouse in the East Village, special guest speaker is Erik Proulx, executive producer of Lemonade, the movie, will be joined by social media voices like Damien Basile, Anna Curran, Nicole D'Alonzo, Erica Grigg, Geoff Livingston, Richard Laermer, and Greg Verdino. Social Media Club is a national partner for this event. Register: http://citizengulfnyc.eventbrite.com/

Please tweet about the event:

Join @SMCNYC on 8/25 for #CitizenGulf Fundraiser RSVP http://citizengulfnyc.eventbrite.com/ pls RT

(source: smcnyc)

Katrina Ballads @ (Le) Poisson Rouge

Tonight (8/24) @ 6:30PM at (Le) Poisson Rouge:

Ted Hearne's KATRINA BALLADS featuring René Marie

KATRINA BALLADS, recipient of the 2009 Gaudeamus Prize, is a collection of songs by Ted Hearne. Featuring five singers and a band of eleven instrumentalists, it is set entirely to primary-source texts from the week following Hurricane Katrina - including everything from testimonies of survivors and relief workers to the words of Anderson Cooper, Kanye West, and George W. Bush's infamous "heckuva job." Like American music and New Orleans itself, Katrina Ballads is an omnivorous and multi-stylistic work. It is rhythmic and dramatic music, with an edgy post-minimalist drive and a deep jazz influence. With new work from renowned filmmaker Bill Morrison, Katrina Ballads calls us to reflect upon our own very recent history.

Katrina Ballads was premiered to rave reviews at the 2007 Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. It has since been seen at Chicago's Fine Arts Building, at the New York City Opera's VOX: Showcasing American Composers series and at the 2009 Gaudeamus Festival in Amsterdam. This performance commemorates the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and accompanies the release of the studio album, produced by Lawson White, on New Amsterdam/Naxos Records.

To stream audio: http://www.newamsterdamrecords.com/#Album/Katrina_Ballads

To read an interview about Katrina Ballads: http://www.indigestmag.com/hearne1.htm

(source)

Also tonight:

Spike Lee revisits New Orleans five years later with "If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don't Rise" tonight on HBO.

Citizen Architect tonight!!

I've been waiting months and months and months and it's finally THE day! Citizen Architect is airing tonight on PBS. What's all the fuss?

Hale County, Alabama is home to some of the most impoverished communities in the United States of America. It is also home to Auburn University’s Rural Studio, one of the most prolific and inspirational design-build outreach programs ever established. Citizen Architect is a documentary film chronicling the late Samuel Mockbee, artist, architect, educator and founder of the Rural Studio.

Citizen Architect explores Mockbee’s effort to provide students with an experience that forever inspires them to consider how they can use their skills to better their communities. Revealing the philosophy and heart behind the Rural Studio, the documentary is guided by passionate, frank and never-before-seen interviews with Mockbee himself. (source)

Brand new Flavor in your...eye!

NY Mag recently did a wonderful piece on Flavor Paper's move from New Orleans to Brooklyn. Here's the back story:

Founded on the Oregon coast by a guy named Ted, this small handscreened wallpaper company flourished in the Age of Aquarius.

Many years later, some young designers seeking striking wallcoverings discovered Ted’s greatness- just days before the designs and equipment were to be destroyed. Knowing what had to be done, these young designers headed west to save Ted’s legacy…

Relocated to the Bywater District of New Orleans, Flavor Paper continued to print using Ted’s traditional printing methods and vacuum table, but with greatly increased accuracy and detail. Contact (them) in (their) new Brooklyn, NY Flavor Lair to see samples of fine handscreened wallpaper designed in Ted’s days or fresh from the next generation of Flavor Paper designers.(source)

And, yeah, that's scratch-n-sniff wall paper above!

Neshoba: The Price of Freedom

Opens today (8/13) @ Cinema Village:

Neshoba: The Price of Freedom tells the story of a Mississippi town still divided about the meaning of justice, 40 years after the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, an event dramatized in the Oscar-winning film, Mississippi Burning. Although Klansmen bragged about what they did in 1964, no one was held accountable until 2005, when the State indicted preacher Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old notorious racist and mastermind of the murders. Through exclusive interviews with Killen, intimate interviews with the victims’ families, and candid interviews with black and white Neshoba County citizens still struggling with their town’s violent past, the film explores whether the prosecution of one unrepentant Klansman constitutes justice and whether healing and reconciliation are possible without telling the unvarnished truth. (source)

Deerhunter @ Pier 54

Atliens Deerhunter rock the river tonight (8/12)!

"Musically, Deerhunter is, and has been, many things – ambient punk, noise rock, art rock, shoegaze, post-punk and plain pop. Their second and third albums Cryptograms and Microcastle were ranked by music critics and aficionados alike as among the best albums of their respective years – and the latter ranked among the best of the past decade. " (source)

@ Pier 54

2 more Parking Lot Movie days!

The Parking Lot Movie Trailer from The Parking Lot Movie on Vimeo.

The one week run of The Parking Lot Movie ends tomorrow (8/12) - catch it if you can:

Yo La Tengo bass player James McNew used to work there, as have grad students, overeducated philosophers, surly artists, middle-age slackers and more from the fringes of Charlottesville, Virginia. Irreverently but warmly celebrating a brotherhood of eccentric attendants who man a unique two-acre lot from the most ramshackle booth ("like something you might discover in Albania at the border"), THE PARKING LOT MOVIE humorously reveals class warfare within its blacktop microcosm. SXSW 2010's "most feel-good film" (The Wrap) makes its New York premiere with a week-long engagement, August 6 - 12.

Three years in the making, director Meghan Eckman's documentary portrait shows how certain details and themes gain profundity through the daily scrutiny of these parking lot attendants: car culture, capitalism, entitlement, fury and justice, public drunkenness, spiritual awareness, societal frictions, and other existentialist cries from the service sector. If the intersection between the status quo and the quest for freedom is their ultimate challenge, could a slab of asphalt be an emotional way station for The American Dream? As one part-timer laments, "We had it all in a world that had nothing to offer us." (source)

Rosanne Cash @ B&N

Tonight (8/10) at Barnes & Noble - Union Square:

Singer/songwriter Rosanne Cash will perform selections and discuss her new memoir, Composed: A Life, in an on-stage interview with journalist Katherine Lanpher. (source)

Bessie on the Hudson...

Thanks to Film Forum, you can catch the only big screen appearance of blues legend Bessie Smith tomorrow night (8/10) .

This conjures my own memory of Bessie...and the photo I took, during a road trip thru the MS Delta in 2001, of the room where she died.

I'll drink to that!

Southern Comfort will donate up to $250,000 to the Gulf Relief Foundation to help the fishing community and support wetland preservation in Plaquemines Parish. Plaquemines Parish is the location of the famed Woodland Plantation appearing, until recently, on the Southern Comfort label. Created in New Orleans in 1874, Southern Comfort is kicking off the effort with an initial donation of $50,000 while raising the additional $200,000* through a Facebook initiative and a donation per bottle sold campaign.

On the Southern Comfort Facebook page, Southern Comfort will donate $1 each time a friend sends a virtual gift to a friend**. Southern Comfort will donate $0.25 for every bottle purchased until the end of October when the Voodoo Experience music festival takes place in New Orleans.

“With Katrina, we waited, we waited and we waited, but we don't wait anymore," said David Freedman, general manager of WWOZ radio station and a member of the three-person foundation board. "We really appreciate the support we're getting from Southern Comfort in helping us reach out to the folks who need help right now.” (source)

Is that Alabama in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

Peep the Field Notes "County Fair" collection. You get a 3 pack of each state...but I wish you could mix & match 'em:

For Summer 2010, FIELD NOTES COLORS celebrates the 50 great U.S. states with COUNTY FAIR, our seventh quarterly installment. Each COUNTY FAIR 3-Pack highlights an individual U.S. state, with one memo book each in the colors of 1st, 2nd and 3rd place County Fair ribbons; blue, red and yellow. They’re printed on 100-lb. linen cover stock and all three feature metallic gold printing and 48 pages of graph paper with light blue/grey lines inside. The back covers feature a bevy of meticulously-researched state facts and figures. (source + buying info here)

20x200 Love!

20x200 made this dreamy print available a week or so ago:

Midway, Neshoba County Fair, Philadelphia, Mississippi
by Mike Sinclair

ARTIST STATEMENT:

The Neshoba County Fair is different from the county fairs we have in the Midwest. It has most of the things you usually find: livestock judging, a beauty pageant, horse racing and a midway. The unusual thing is that it has over 600 one- and two-story cabins, called fairhouses, arranged into streets and neighborhoods on the fairgrounds. People own these cabins and live in them for the seven days of the fair. They are highly prized, handed down from one generation to the next. For the visitor, it gives the place a strange feeling: you are not sure if you're in a public or private space. When I was there I remember feeling like I’d come upon some extravagant neighborhood block party and it was obvious—at least to me—I was from another block.

The question of being on the inside or outside of a group is something I think most photographers think about. Do we photograph the familiar or the exotic, are we reporters or memoirists? If I went back there this July, twenty years later, what pictures would I take? (source)

SONG: Dr. John 8/2 & 3 @ City Winery

That's pretty much all you need to know. Go here