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| A Tennessee trail |
At least every two years, my daughter Stephanie and her
husband Brad come up to The Mountain at Sewanee for a tour of Tennessee,
preferably Nashville, as Brad is a guitar enthusiast and likes to visit the
guitar shops. Stephanie is a big country music fan so we spend Saturday evening
at the Grand Ole Opry. En route to Nashville, we veered off course at Bell Buckle,
moon pie capitol of Tennessee (and probably the world!) to eat lunch at the
famous Bell Buckle Café in a town that boasts a population of nearly 400 people.
It's also known for the famous Webb School, which has turned out a passel of
Rhodes scholars.
My godfather, Markham Peacock, attended Webb School during his
high school years under the supervision of founder "Sawney" Webb and
traveled from his home in the Mississippi Delta to Bell Buckle on a train that
was called "The Dixie Flyer." After lunch when we continued our en route
search for serendipity, Brad went into the Gallagher Guitar shop, home of world
class guitar makers, which is housed in a nondescript brick building on the
main street of Wartrace, (population 600). As we wandered around the
"hub" of this small town, I noticed a sign labeled "The Dixie
Flyer." It was located trackside on CSX's Nashville-Chattanooga mainline
where 25 trains whiz past daily. I'm an inveterate train lover and lingered in
five rooms containing operating HO, N, and O gauge model trains and railroadiana where I discovered a framed
photograph of the old Dixie Flyer on a wall in the front room of this shop. It rode
on the seat beside me while we toured Nashville every day!
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| Herons by Chihuly installed at Cheekwood |
For starters, the Nashville visit centered on the Grand Ole
Opry, but we stepped into another culture when we toured Cheekwood Botanical Gardens
and Museum where we viewed a fascinating display of contemporary Japanese
Bamboo Art organized by the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture and
International Arts and Artists. The exhibition contains 38 works of 17 contemporary
bamboo artists and masters of woodblock printing. The selections in the
woodblock display were from the era of shin
hanga, which focused on the images of
fashionable women, sometimes depicting them in landscape scenes. Shin hanga was an artistic form used in
Japan from the 1800's until the middle of the 20th century, and the
Bamboo Art Exhibit rivaled the Chihuly glass sculpture outdoor exhibition we
had viewed at Cheekwood several years ago.
For me, the highpoint of the Nashville visit was the Frist
Center for the Visual Arts, which occupies a historic landmark—Nashville's
former main post office built in 1933-34. The Frist Center is housed in a
building reflecting classical and Art Deco style architecture and was constructed with a
goal of providing permanence and stability, but the construction was streamlined
with cast aluminum doors and grillwork, colored marble and stones on the floors
and walls. The old post office, built during the administration of Herbert
Hoover, was purchased and restored during the 80's through the efforts of the
Metropolitan Nashville government and Dr. Thomas Frist, Jr. The majority of it is
rented to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, which opened in 2001.
The exhibits we viewed included Steve Mumford's War
Journals, the work of a New York-based artist who visited occupied Iraq and war
zones in Afghanistan, capturing in drawings, watercolors and journals the
figures of Allied soldiers and people living and working in that area of the
Mideast. He spent ten years recording life in a war zone, and some of the
renderings show wounded civilians and soldiers being treated in the Baghdad
Emergency Room or receiving therapy at medical centers in the U.S. The sketches
of war zones are stylistic, personal renditions that extend to images of the
prisoner detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, including the abandoned Camp X-Ray
where prisoners were subjected to interrogation techniques such as
waterboarding. The entire exhibit was a haunting depiction of war and its
horrors. We also saw an exhibit of Francisco Goya's 81 prints depicting the
Peninsular War of 1808-1814 between Spain and Napoleonic France—etchings that
focused on the negative effects war has on ordinary soldiers and civilians.
Although Marty Stuart is known as a country music star—one
that I enjoy—he has been photographing people and places in the South since he
first toured with bluegrass performer Lester Flatt at the age of 13, and the
third exhibit we saw contained photographs that reflected his surprising talent
for visual art. Perhaps the most arresting photograph was the portrait of
Johnny Cash shortly before his death, a portrait that portrayed the icon of
country music with a dignified expression on his battered face much like that
of a Puritan preacher.
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| 79 is fine |
On May 18, we celebrated my 79th, compliments of
Brad and Stephanie, at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, but we all agreed that although
Tennessee offers premier steak and barbecue, its bread pudding couldn't equal
Cajun country's version of this dessert!
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