We've Moved!

Literally and literally. Southernist began as a way to document southern things happening in New York City. We'll be staying on the Georgia/Alabama border for the next two years so Southernist will now be used to document our time living in Dixie. Hopefully you'll redirect by clicking on www.southernist.com and continue to follow along on our adventures. Stay sweet, y'all!

GEORGIA PLACES IN PERIL: Call for Noms!

DUE MONDAY 6/28:

Georgia’s Places in Peril 2011
Do you know of a special irreplaceable historic building or site that is highly threatened by demolition, neglect, inappropriate development or other threats? If so, this is your opportunity to help save it. The Georgia Trust’s Places in Peril program seeks to identify and preserve historic sites threatened by demolition, neglect, lack of maintenance, inappropriate development or other threats. The 2011 Places in Peril list will be announced in October 2010.

Visit: Georgia Trust

Alice Walker @ 92nd St Y tonight (4/13)

Georgia native Alice Walker is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, anthologist, teacher, editor, publisher, womanist and activist. In 1983, her novel The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Walker the first black woman to win. Walker was also the first black woman to win the National Book Award. Her new book, Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters "the horror" in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palenstine/Israel is Walker's reflection on recent trips she took to Rwanda & Eastern Congo and to Gaza. In her inimitable way, she takes on not just the politics of each place, but our necessary response and responsibility as human beings to the violence she witnessed. (source)

Booksigning for Overcoming Speechlessness to follow the event.

Just something I like and feel like sharing

Jasper Johns

Map

1962

In 1960, artist Robert Rauschenberg gave Jasper Johns mimeographed maps of the United States that inspired Johns to begin working with the motif; he ultimately made three large Map paintings in addition to smaller paintings, prints, and drawings, sometimes rendered directly on the mimeographed sheets. During this time, Johns was beginning to employ monochromatic gray or blue palettes and, in 1962, he rendered Map almost entirely in shades of gray. Of his work of this period, he insisted: “My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterward—by those who look at it.”

Jasper Johns (b. 1930, Augusta, Georgia; lives and works in New York)
Map, 1962
Encaustic and collage on canvas
60 x 93 in.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Gift of Marcia Simon Wiseman

ART: R.I.P. Jake McCord

Photo: Mike's Art Truck

Jake (JT) McCord passed away September 1 at the age of 64. Funeral services were held at Zion Baptist Church near Lincolnton, Georgia. A native of Lincoln County, where he picked cotton as a child, McCord moved to Thomson as a young man and worked for the city for over 40 years.

Jake will be missed by many. He was a soft-spoken gental soul, despite his tragic and abusive childhood. Jake became famous for his paintings on plywood, which he would nail to the walls of his porch. He called this his gallery and said he put them on his porch, so the town children could come by and see his art.

His paintings were usually children playing with their pets, cats, dogs and animals from the farm. He had a unique vision using bold strokes and bright enamel paint. The McDuffe Museum will reconstruct the front porch of Jake's home and display his art as he did for years.

One of his paintings of his home church rested against his casket, during his funeral service. Henry Drake, a longtime friend of Jake, said during the service "I was always glad to see J.T coming to see me. Sleep on my friend J.T. and save a seat for me."

(courtesy of Ted Oliver, Oliver’s Folk Art. REPOSTED FROM DETOUR ART TRAVELS)

SOUNDS: Zac Brown Band

Zac Brown serves a little chicken fried to NYC tomorrow night (10/24) @ Terminal 5.

BOOK: Traveling With Pomegranates

"In this wise and intimate dual memoir, Georgia-native Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Lives of Bees) and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, chronicle their travels together, and offer their distinct perspectives as a fifty-something and a twenty-something, each on a quest to redefine herself, and rediscover each other." (source)

Sue and Ann read from Pomegranates tonight at Barnes & Noble Union Square @ 7PM.

St EOM's Pasaquan is open for visitors tomorrow (9/5)!

I built this place to have somethin' to identify with, cause there's nothin' that I see in this society that I identify with or desire to emulate.

Here I can be in my own world with my temples and designs and the spirit of God. I don't have nothin' against other people and their beliefs. I'm not askin' anybody to do my way or be my way.

Although, when I'm dead and gone, they'll follow like night follows day."

St. EOM to his biographer, Tom Patterson, 1985

Pasaquan is located in Buena Vista (bit east of Columbus, GA) and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Eddie Owens Martin died at Pasaquan in 1986 but his legacy and visionary environment lives on. You can support this project by visiting, volunteering, joining the Pasaquan Preservation Society and/or buying a copy of "the book."

EAT: Tuesday Dinner with the Dawgs

The Georgia Bulldog NYC alum are getting together tonight at 7PM at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Harlem for their monthly “Tuesday Dinner with the Dawgs.” Stop by for dinner or a drink!

When: Tuesday, August 18th @ 7pm
Where:
Dinosaur BBQ
646 W 131st St
New York, NY 10027-7948
(212) 694-1777

For more information please contact mandymirvin@gmail.com

ART: GA Alum Laura Loving tonight...RSVP by noon today

*** NYC DAWGS ART EVENT ***
Laura Loving at the New York Mercantile Exchange

When: Thursday, August 6 5pm-8pm
Where: One North End Avenue New York, NY

Join the NYC Dawgs for a night of culture to celebrate the art of a UGA Alumna and fellow New Yorker, Laura Loving. Laura will have her art on display and for sale at the New York Mercantile Exchange downtown. She is known for her Pop Art works on New York landmarks and people. She has now also created a special collection on Athens and UGA. All will be displayed at this reception.

Because of security at the NYMEX, you must RSVP to this event so your name can be passed along. Please RSVP on the Facebook page for the event (log in first and then enter the address).
You can also navigate there from the "New York City Dawgs" group page under events. If you are not a member of Facebook, you can register through the University Alumni New York page.

RSVP Deadline is 12-Noon August 6th, 2009

SOUNDS: Patterson Hood in NYC 6/23 & 24

Patterson Hood will release Murdering Oscar (and other love songs) today on Ruth St. Records. The second solo record from the leader of the Drive-By Truckers has been 15 years in the making. The album was produced by Hood and long-time DBT producer David Barbe (Sugar). Most of his DBT band mates join him on the album as well as Don Chambers, Will Johnson and Scott Danbom from Centro-matic/South San Gabriel. This is also the first time Hood’s father David Hood, famed Muscle Shoals bass player, joins him on a record.

The album was recorded at Chase Park Transduction Studios in Athens, GA and will also be released on 180 gram vinyl. The vinyl release will include three exclusive bonus tracks. An a cappella version of “Range War” will also be available exclusively with iTunes. “Pollyanna” and “Pride of the Yankees” are available to preview on his Myspace page.

Hood and the Screwtopians will start the first leg of their tour in Nashville and end with a headlining slot at AthFest in Hood’s hometown of Athens, GA. Joining Hood on tour will be Brad Morgan (drums), John Neff (guitar/steel), Scott Danbom (keys/fiddle), Will Johnson (guitar) and David Barbe (bass), who has not toured since his days with Sugar. Will Johnson will open the shows. (source)

Patterson Hood plays the Music Hall of Williamsburg in BK tonight, and Bowery Ballroom tomorrow.

READING: Warren St. John @ McNally Jackson tonight

In Outcasts United New York Times reporter (and Alabama native) Warren St. John tells the story of a group of refugee boys from all over the world (Sudan, Congo, Kosovo, Liberia, Iraq, Afghanistan….) who all play on the same soccer team, The Fugees, in Clarkston, Georgia. The story of the boys, their Jordanian coach, and the reluctant refugee haven of Clarkston itself form an unforgettable picture of community and identity.

St. John reads tonight at 7PM @ McNally Jackson Booksellers in Soho.

SCENE: Save Dorchester Academy (Midway, GA)

Dorchester Academy in Midway, GA has been named to the National Trust for Historic Preservation's 2009 "11 Most Endangered" list.

"The story of Dorchester Academy, one of the earliest schools for African Americans in the state of Georgia and a National Historic Landmark, is forever linked to the cultural and political forces that shaped our nation's history. Founded in 1871 as a school for freed slaves, Dorchester started humbly in a one-room schoolhouse with a student body ranging in age from eight to 80. As the school grew, boarders joined day students, many of whom walked miles to fulfill their dream of learning how to read. In later years, the school played a pivotal role in voter-registration drives and as a center of activity for the civil rights movement. " (source)

ART: Ulysses Davis @ American Folk Art Museum

Now thru September 6 @ American Folk Art Museum: Ulysses Davis (1914 - 1990) was a Savannah, Georgia, barber who created a diverse but unified body of highly refined sculpture that reflects his deep faith, humor, and dignity. His carvings were featured in the seminal 1982 exhibition "Black Folk Art in America, 1930 - 1980" at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where they were applauded as important examples of African American vernacular art. Because he wanted his work to stay together after he died, Davis rarely sold his sculptures. He said, "They're my treasure. If I sold these, I'd be really poor." As a result, the carvings have had little exposure outside Savannah, particularly since his death, and Davis is little known outside folk art circles. In 1988, Davis received a Georgia Governor's Award in the Arts.

Photo: Peter Harholdt

For the more than three hundred carved wooden figures, furniture pieces, and reliefs he created during his lifetime, Davis used shipyard lumber, pieces donated by his friends, or wood he bought at lumberyards. He almost never made preliminary drawings or models but reduced the mass with a hatchet (and, later, a band saw) before refining the form with a chisel and knives, many of which he fabricated himself. To add textural detail, he sometimes used tools of this barbering trade, such as the blade of his hair clippers. Davis's sculptures, which range in height from six to more than forty inches, can be divided into major categories: portraits of American and African leaders, religious images, patriotism, works influenced by African forms, fantasy, flora and fauna, love, humor, and abstract decorative objects. The exhibition includes the group regarded as the artist's masterwork: a series of carved busts of forty U.S. presidents. (source)

SCENE: ST EOM's Pasaquan OPEN this Saturday, May 2

photo Bombsite

St EOM's Pasaquan re-opened for the 2009 season on April 4 and will be open to visitors the first Saturday of each month thru November. Next up is this Saturday, May 2.

"I built this place to have somethin' to identify with, cause there's nothin' that I see in this society that I identify with or desire to emulate.

Here I can be in my own world with my temples and designs and the spirit of God. I don't have nothin' against other people and their beliefs. I'm not askin' anybody to do my way or be my way.

Although, when I'm dead and gone, they'll follow like night follows day."

St. EOM to his biographer, Tom Patterson, 1985

Eddie Owens Martin was born at the stroke of midnight July 4, 1908. His father was a Southwest Georgia dirt farmer, an uneducated sharecropper whose only apparent interest in his son was as a farm laborer who could toil without payment in producing the annual cotton crop. Eddie, however, was "different" from the other five children in the family. Secretly assisted by his mother, he learned to read. He soon contemplated an existence far beyond that of the backbreaking day labor in the fields of Marion County. At fourteen, following an incident during which his father cruelly killed a puppy that Eddie had received as a gift from a neighboring black family, he left home. After wandering around Georgia and Florida for several months as an itinerant fruit picker, young Eddie drifted north. He eventually found New York City, where he stayed until the mid-1950s.

At a time in the late 1930s, during an extended and fever-ridden illness, Martin experienced the first of a series of phenomenal visions that would prompt and continue to drive his artistic efforts for the rest of his life. In the initial vision, he was confronted by a trio of extraordinarily tall personages who identified themselves as people of the future -- special envoys from a vaporous land called Pasaquan, a place where the past, the present, the future, and everything else all come together." He had been chosen by them, he later reported, to delineate an understanding of the peace and beauty that the future might hold for mankind, if mankind would take heed. On that day, Eddie Owens Martin of Marion County, Georgia, became St. EOM -- the one and only Pasaquoyan of the Twentieth Century.

The empowered visitors in his vision offered him extensive instructions on how to ritually prepare for the proper conduct of his personal daily existence. They revealed how he was to communicate with and receive cosmic instruction from the energies of the universe, and how to follow a course that would enable him to artfully render the futuristic world of Pasaquan in paint and pen, metal and concrete. The most compelling instruction that he received from them was this: To "return to Georgia and do something." That is precisely what he did -- for over thirty years.

The result is St. EOM's PASAQUAN. (excerpted)

Pasaquan is located in Buena Vista (bit east of Columbus, GA) and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Eddie Owens Martin died at Pasaquan in 1986 but his legacy and visionary environment lives on. You can support this project by visiting, voluteering, joining the Pasaquan Preservation Society and/or buying a copy of "the book."

SCENE: Hostel In The Forest

Photo: Arjun Mehta

Earth Day Pt. 2 - I stumbled across a link for the Hostel In The Forest during an online visit to Lafayette, LA's Blue Moon Guesthouse. Sleep in a treehouse for just $25 per night!

"The Hostel in the Forest has operated as an International Youth Hostel for 32 years. We are world renowned for our geodesic domes and 9 tree houses, which were built and have been sustained entirely by volunteers. Hundreds of loving hands have gone into making the Hostel what it is today, a fact that is evident as soon as one steps on the property.

The Hostel sits on 120 acres of forest and wetlands, 2 miles from H.W.95 in Brunswick, Georgia. It is located short distances from the famous 'Golden Isles' of St. Simons Island and Jekyll Island. There are also many pristine coastal barrier islands including the famous Cumberland National Seashore close by.

The area is unique in every way, with lush, dense sub-tropical forests containing palms, saw palmettos, magnolia, cedar, holly, pine, and myrtle. Huge live oaks draped with moss contrast with the broadleaf evergreens that are the dominant trees of the forest. Well over three hundred species of birds visit this coastal region annually and dozens of species of reptile and amphibian make this their home. Contrasting the forests and the coastal savannahs are the wetlands and swamps where alligators, river otters and wading birds are prolific."

The property also has a bunch of gardens and a sweat lodge. The Hostel is hosting a yoga retreat May 1 - 3. For more info click here. Namaste!

BOOK: Outcasts United by Warren St.John

The extraordinary tale of a refugee youth soccer team and the transformation of a small American town. (source)

Clarkston, Georgia, was a typical Southern town until it was designated a refugee settlement center in the 1990s, becoming the first American home for scores of families in flight from the world’s war zones—from Liberia and Sudan to Iraq and Afghanistan. Suddenly Clarkston’s streets were filled with women wearing the hijab, the smells of cumin and curry, and kids of all colors playing soccer in any open space they could find. The town also became home to Luma Mufleh, an American-educated Jordanian woman who founded a youth soccer team to unify Clarkston’s refugee children and keep them off the streets. These kids named themselves the Fugees.

Set against the backdrop of an American town that without its consent had become a vast social experiment, Outcasts United follows a pivotal season in the life of the Fugees and their charismatic coach. Warren St. John documents the lives of a diverse group of young people as they miraculously coalesce into a band of brothers, while also drawing a fascinating portrait of a fading American town struggling to accommodate its new arrivals. At the center of the story is fiery Coach Luma, who relentlessly drives her players to success on the soccer field while holding together their lives—and the lives of their families—in the face of a series of daunting challenges.

This fast-paced chronicle of a single season is a complex and inspiring tale of a small town becoming a global community—and an account of the ingenious and complicated ways we create a home in a changing world.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Warren St. John is a reporter for The New York Times and the author of the national bestseller Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer.

On October 17th, 1982, St. John visited the set of “The Bear Bryant Show.”

In Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, he recalls the event:

“My father asked Bryant if he wouldn’t mind posing with me for a picture. Without so much as a word, the Bear put his arm around my shoulder and forced an unconvincing smile. We stood there in front of the Coca-Cola sign in this uncomfortable pose as my father fiddled with his camera, stalling in the hope that Bryant might loosen up. After forty-five nerve-fraying seconds, the Bear leaned over to me and thundered, “Son, I don’t think your father knows what the hell he’s doing.” We both laughed and in the photo that now hangs on my office wall we look like old cronies sharing an inside joke.”

St. John has also written extensively for The New Yorker, the New York Observer, and Wired. He went to Columbia University and lives in New York.

SCOOP: St. Patrick's in Savannah? by Meryl Truett

Photo by today's guest blogger Meryl Truett!

St. Patrick’s Day is bigger than Christmas in Savannah, Georgia. Everyone who’s anyone takes the day off and heads down to the Historic District for the parade. More than 400,000 visitors are expected but here’s the low down on how to get around and make the most of what our hostess city has to offer during this festive weekend.

When I moved to Savannah 12 years ago, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” was at the height of its popularity. The movie came out in 1997 and yes the party scenes are true Savannah. On St. Patty’s Day, Bloody Mary’s and green grits are served on verandas all over town starting at 8AM. Just the thing to put spectators in the correct frame of mind for the big parade. If you don’t know anyone throwing a morning party, then stake out a seat on one of the twenty-one oak tree laden/Spanish moss dripping historic squares that local floats and marching bands wind their way through the parade route or just travel along the sidewalks maneuvering your way through the costumed revelers and souvenir vendors. Watch out for the “Kiss me I’m Irish” crowd or you could end up smothered in red lipstick.

So here’s the inside skinny………..

Stay: award winning Thunderbird Inn Motel just on the edge of the historic district from $99.00 a night 866.324.2661.

EAT:

Wall’s BBQ

Leopold’s Ice Cream on Broughton Street on the parade route 912.234.4442

Local 11 ten at the south end of Forsyth Park 912. 790.9000

SHOP/ART: ShopScad on corner of Bull and Charlton…….very cool store selling the unique wares of student, faculty and alumni of Savannah College of Art and Design Pick up a copy of my book Thump Queen and Other Southern Anomalies, a collection of eccentric southern images exploring the world of Thump Queens, Velvet Elvises, Soul Palaces, and Bad Antiques…….

Jepson Center/Telfair Museum of Arts- 207 West York……permanent collection (recent acquisitions include large scale photographs by Meryl Truett) and traveling exhibitions plus a fun to browse museum shop.

The café on the second floor is a lovely spot for an upscale lunch.

Meryl Truett is a fine art and editorial photographer. The second printing of her book Thump Queen and Other Southern Anomalies is available through Amazon. com.

SOUNDS: The Music of REM @ Carnegie Hall 3/11

Photo by Anton Dee/Flickr

The Music of R.E.M.
Music Education Programs for Underprivileged Youth Benefit Concert

@ Carnegie Hall - Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
TONIGHT - Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 8 PM

Featuring: Throwing Muses with Kristen Hersh, Kimya Dawson, Ingrid Michaelson, Glenn Hansard, The Apples in Stereo, Tommy James and the Shondells, Jolie Holland, Keren Ann, Guster, The dB's, Bob Mould, Vic Chesnutt & Elf Power, Rachel Yamagata, Calexico, Patti Smith, and others

SOUNDS: Allman Brothers Band @ Beacon Theatre

2009 marks the 40th Anniversary of The Allman Brothers Band who celebrate by hitting NYC for a 15 night stand @ the Beacon Theatre - March 9-10, 12-14, 16-17, 19-21, 23-24, 26-28!

The Allman Brothers Band is one of the most influential groups in America, redefining rock music and its boundaries. The band has a long tradition of blending the new and the old while mixing blues, country, rock and jazz to deliver their signature powerful extended on-stage jams.