Start your BBQ odyssey with Barbecue Crossroads

James Beard Award-winning author Robb Walsh and acclaimed documentary photographer O. Rufus Lovett plunged into an epic road trip from East Texas to the Carolinas to produce Barbecue Crossroads: Notes and Recipes from a Southern Odyssey. Armchair travelers will enjoy the enlightening journey as well as experience their discoveries through gorgeous photographs and mouth-watering recipes picked up along the way. True barbecue pilgrims, however, can also retrace their steps and find their own barbecue revelations with the Google map below.

This first leg of the journey covers barbecue locales in Texas and Arkansas, hitting legendary joints that have already received national attention and spotlighting some unsung heroes of the rapidly disappearing traditional wood-fired pit.

Disclaimer: The route linked below maps the odyssey Robb and Rufus traveled in the process of writing Barbecue Crossroads. To get the most out of this journey, we recommend buying and reading the book in full before embarking. Enjoy!

Access the Google map here: http://goo.gl/maps/5ooTi

From the book:

Our smoky pilgrimage began on a Tuesday morning in August. At our rendezvous point and first stop, my wife dropped me off and I loaded my luggage into Rufus’s Honda Element. In anticipation of the mess I would make while eating barbecue in his car, Rufus had draped a beach towel over the passenger seat. The rear of the vehicle was packed with photo equipment and lighting apparatus. After squeezing in my suitcase and laptop, I kissed my wife good-bye and the work began.


Rufus and I introduced ourselves to Jeremiah “Baby J” McKenzie, the proprietor and pitmaster of Baby J’s Bar B Que and Fish, in Palestine, Texas. But our trip got off to a strange start when he told us, “We’re out of brisket, pork, and ribs. All we got is fried catfish.”

Baby J’s had been written up in a Dallas newspaper over the weekend, and the meat had sold out. When the restaurant reopened on Tuesday morning, all they had left to serve for lunch was crispy fried catfish. I rationalized that we were going to be eating plenty of meat on our travels, so a little catfish might be a pleasant prelude.

“Believe it or not, fried catfish is pretty common in African American barbecue joints,” I told Rufus. We placed our order for fish and then went outside to visit with Baby J and look at his various cooking rigs. Baby J’s started out at a small location in Elkhart and moved to its current site on the edge of Palestine a few years ago. The restaurant building is located on a vacant lot under a water tower on the unpopulated outskirts of town. Its only neighbor, besides the giant steel ball full of water, is a fireworks stand.

A large, baby-faced black man of thirty-nine, Baby J spoke quietly, and his words conveyed a sense of wonder. I was surprised to discover that Baby J recently celebrated his tenth year as pastor at the One Way Apostolic Church of Palestine.

“I started cooking for our church suppers. Everybody at the church loved my barbecue, and they kept saying, ‘You should open a restaurant.’ So I did. I started with those catering trailers,” he said, pointing at several big barbecue trailers spread around the grass like wrecks in a junkyard. “That one caught fire, and I have to sandblast it out and start over,” he said, pointing at one giant rig with three steel doors cut into the vertical steel cylinder that constituted the pit.

He climbed the stairs to enter a larger, enclosed trailer and invited me to join him. Baby J opened the steel door of the rig and cut off a few slivers of the brisket that was cooking so I could taste his spicy seasoning. When we reemerged, a friend of his pointed out that the wooden deck on the front of the trailer was on fire. Baby J asked him to take care of it, so the man fetched a plastic bucket and nonchalantly poured water over the burning deck.

….

After our catfish lunch at Baby J’s, Rufus and I got out the map and talked about where we were heading. Rufus worried that not getting any barbecue at our first stop was a bad omen. I figured it was more a reality check. Although we had made only one stop, I could already see that it was going to be impossible to squeeze the complicated story of barbecue into the chronological account of a single road trip. There were going to be some return trips. And the narrative would require a lot of detours and flashbacks. We would follow the route traced on the map, but our explorations of barbecue culture and mythology would end up being part road trip and part mind trip. 

From Barbecue Crossroads: Notes and Recipes from a Southern Odyssey by Robb Walsh with photographs by O. Rufus Lovett (Copyright © 2013).

Senior Farewell

The fact that I’m a Zeta alumnus is unfathomable! PC09 was officially welcomed into the alumni world at our senior dinner on April 29th, and we graduated from UT on May 18th. These are epic moments which I never thought would actually happen to me. As a baby faced, chocolate milk loving kid at heart, I never accepted the fact that I would eventually have to leave this university utopia. After living at the Zeta house the past two years, I took a grown up step by signing an apartment lease in Dallas this week, all while dragging my feet. 

The senior dinner took place on the last Monday of the school year. Everyone was overwhelmed with projects and tests, but we made the event a priority. Our pledge class has always been particularly close, so this was a special occasion we looked forward to celebrating. We had a delicious entrée per usual, followed by a scrumptious dessert. Next, the last few senior grams were read. These letters are written by the parents of seniors as their final sendoff. I had the pleasure of reading Emma Weiss’s letter. She has been one of my best friends since the summer after freshman year, and was one of my roommates in the Zeta house this past year. Not only is she a brilliant, pre-med/business major, but she’s also one of the most caring, hilarious people you'll ever meet. I’m not much of a crier, but the thought of leaving her actually made me shed a few tears while reading her sweet letter.

Finally, the alumni led us in an oath as we committed to joining them in the alumni world. As I gazed around the room, I saw the bright beautiful faces of all the people I’m so proud to call my sisters. Women who are going to teach our future generations (Anna, Jordan, Kelli, Mallory, and Megan), our future business/technology leaders (Alex, Bailey, Bonnie, Chelsea, Gabi, Hollie, Kate, Katie, Kim, and Stacey), those who will redefine the future of medicine (Allison, Elena, Elizabeth, Emma, Heather, Jessica, Kayla, and Melissa), our future lawyers (Amanda, Ashley, Emily and Leah), our future leaders in politics (Audrey, Hilary, and Madi), and women like Anna and Erika who will eventually have their own book or TV show. I could go on forever, but blog posts are supposed to be brief from what I'm told. I am incredibly proud to enter the alumni world with these lovely ladies by my side. The memories have just begun. I have no doubt that we will all remain close friends until we’re on our rocking chairs reminiscing on how we truly did change the world….

Texas PBS Online Book Club Features Let the People In!

This month, Texas PBS, a non-profit association of the 12 Texas public television stations, will launch a new online book group devoted to Texas history. The first book chosen for discussion is UT Press’s Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards by Jan Reid.

The group will be a reader-led experience, with Texas PBS bringing in authors/experts and documentaries/artwork to create a multifaceted, educational, and interesting experience for group members. A new book will be selected each month.

Mr. Reid will join the book club for a live web chat from the Bullock Texas State History Museum on Wednesday, May 29, at 8 pm. Find out more information about this special event at www.texaspbs.org/texasourtexas/.

The book club is a part of Texas, Our Texas, a new online initiative by Texas PBS that celebrates, as their website states, “our shared history as Texans by exploring the events, cultural groups, communities and individuals that have come together over the centuries to create the state we live in today.”

 

Author David Greven's Must Watch Hitchcock

With the new series Bates Motel airing on A&E this spring, Hitchcock's seminal film Psycho is re-emerging in popular culture. The show follows a young Norman Bates and his mother in a 'contemporary prequel' to the horrific Psycho story. David Greven's Psycho-Sexual charts canonical Hitchcock films as precursors to 1970s New Hollywood films like Dressed to Kill (De Palma), Cruising (Friedkin) and Taxi Driver (Scorsese). Get your DVD players ready, because David Greven gives us some 'must see' viewing and insightful commentary to accompany his new book.



'The Essential Cold War Hitchcock'

by David Greven



Alfred Hitchcock directed, according to IMDB, 67 titles (including episodes for his anthology TV series). Narrowing down a list of the “essential” Hitchcock is an impossible task given how substantive the director’s body of work remains. So, here is a list of films that are particularly germane to the questions I raise in my book Psycho-Sexual. My thesis in this book is that Hitchcock’s films from the Cold War era onward thematize an emergent form of American masculinity that will prove to be crucial to several directors of the 1970s (in a period usually called the New Hollywood) and beyond. This Hitchcockian masculinity is defined by a tendency toward voyeurism, a push-pull attraction to the homoerotic, and an attitude toward sexuality that can be best described as pornographic. The current fascinations with surveillance in our culture—the spycam-sensibility of the present, the fears over identity theft—have their roots in the Cold War paranoia Hitchcock depicted.



Rope (1948). Two young men, lovers who share a swanky New York City apartment, kill one of their friends and stuff his body into a long, rectangular chest. They then host a dinner party, serving food on the chest with the dead body in it; the guests include the dead man’s father and the killers' former headmaster, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart). Hitchcock’s film is an acute analysis of homophobia, masculinity, women’s ambiguous relationship to gay subculture, fascist ideology, and the director’s own career-long fascination with food-sex-death imagery.



Strangers on a Train (1951) and I Confess (1953). This pair of films thematizes the “open secret” of homosexuality, simultaneously unspeakable and nearly explicit. In Strangers, Bruno Anthony’s desire to kill for Guy Haines, and to have Guy kill his father, emerges as an allegory for homosexual courtship. In I Confess, the priest (Montgomery Clift) bound by the secrecy of the Catholic confessional, is hounded by the murderer, who confesses to the priest but then proceeds to hound him for his own crime. In a culture that increasingly viewed relationships between men as suspect, these two films show a culture of repression at its breaking point.



Rear Window (1954). One of Hitchcock’s most famous films, Rear Window indexes his major concerns: voyeurism, male-female relationships, and the potential for murderous violence that lurks within the banality of everyday existence. Watch the film this time for its depiction of relationships between men—the protagonist Jeff (James Stewart) and his uneasy interactions with his war buddy Tom, now a police detective, and Jeff’s strange similarities to the villain, Thorwald, who murders his wife. Grace Kelly’s Lisa is much more than simply the girlfriend—she is a complex character in her own right who typifies the frustrated yet resilient woman of Hitchcock’s films of this period. Jeff is an early version of the pornographic male spectator that has now become so familiar; he turns the neighbors in his apartment complex into objects for his voyeuristic gaze and derives a sadistic gratification from observing them.



The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) Hitchcock’s remake of his own 1934 British original about a family on a holiday whose child is kidnapped to prevent the couple from revealing what they know about a political assassination plot is one of his most important and underrated films. Doris Day’s Jo McKenna, a famous singer now married to James Stewart’s Midwestern doctor Ben McKenna, emerges as the chief protagonist of the film—her resourcefulness, ingenuity, and courage being central. The “sedative scene” is one of Hitchcock’s most emotionally wrenching. The film responds to Cold War paranoia that the straight American male could be corrupted by foreign agents by depicting its stalwart American hero’s uneasy fascination with the seductive French male spy Louis Bernard, which arouses Jo’s suspicions. The film dismantles the Cold War culture of homophobia and redomesticated femininity (making women newly wife-like and motherly after World War II) while critiquing the dominant image of the stable, happy American family.



Vertigo (1958). Voted the greatest film ever made in Sight and Sound’s latest poll, this film needs no introduction. If you watch it with an eye on the Kim Novak character’s experience of the narrative, the film becomes even richer, deeper, and more painful to watch. What is also fascinating about the film is the protagonist’s growing obsession not only with a beautiful, mysterious, seemingly doomed woman, but also with another man’s ingenious story about this woman. No other film so acutely thematizes our willingness to be seduced by narrative.



North by Northwest (1959). It’s easy to classify this wildly entertaining movie as just that, an entertainment. Yet it is one of Hitchcock’s most moving and probing films. The hero, Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant), a 50s era ad man whose personality is as blank as his middle initial, which stands for nothing. The espionage plot in which he, mistaken for “George Kaplan,” becomes embroiled allows him to find an authentic identity, ironic given that Kaplan does not exist at all. Thornhill learns to care for someone else, the double agent Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), and in the process develops a human identity. Queer theorist Lee Edelman reads the character of Leonard (Martin Landau), the henchman of the urbane villain Vandamm (peerless James Mason), as the embodiment of the queer death drive. But the real drama here is Thornhill’s identification with the endangered woman.



Psycho (1960). Hitchcock’s film is many things, but it’s perhaps especially acute as a portrait of modern despair and isolation. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) attempts to buy a marriage, stealing $40,000 to rid her lover of the debts he claims prevents her from marrying him. The sensitive, handsome young man she meets on her desperate journey turns out to be anything but her salvation. Of particular fascination in this film is Hitchcock’s doubling of masculinity—the “straight” Sam Loomis (John Gavin) and the “queer,” mother-obsessed Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). With their dark looks and builds, the men are meant to be polar opposites but are presented as eerily similar. The split masculinity of Psycho will prove to be a definitive, influential concept for the directors of the New Hollywood of the 1970s, in particular Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and William Friedkin. Norman’s voyeuristic peeping on Marion as she undresses for the shower is the defining moment of cinematic modernity, the moment in which the male gaze as such becomes explicit film text. Less explicit, and certainly less obvious, is what motivates and results from Norman’s looking—what does he see when observes Marion undressing? What is Norman’s desire? The blankess of the male gaze in Psycho will transform into an entire body of paranoid, violent, and anguished cinema in the 1970s.



David Greven is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His previous books include Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush, and Men Beyond Desire. 

Sigma Chi Derby Days 2013

It’s that time of year again! As spring semester comes to a close, it doesn’t mean that the fun has to end. From April 22^nd to the 27^th, the Zetas put on their game faces and participated in some friendly competition during Sigma Chi’s 3^rd Annual Derby Days.

Derby Days is a philanthropy event put on by many Sigma Chi chapters across the country to raise money for the specific chapter’s charity of choice. The event originated at the University of California – Berkeley (Alma mater of our very own university president Bill Powers) and it soon spread to other campuses. This year, there were many events laid out for 13 Panhellenic sororities to participate in to work towards the ultimate goal of being Derby Days champions.

To kick off the competition, each sorority was given a wooden board to paint on a design that incorporated the theme of Derby Days while also promoting the Paul Wall charity concert that was being put on at the end of the week. Even though we got off to a late start, the Zetas were still able to pull off an eye-catching board that featured Paul Wall wearing a crown and representing Zeta and Sigma Chi across his knuckles. Competition was tough but we pulled through and we were awarded 3^rd place for our board. That didn’t get the girls down because by the time Saturday rolled around Paul Wall had caught a glimpse of the board and requested it to be on stage with him while he performed! Go Zetas and special shout out to Sam McClendon and Alex Flowers the awesome artists who designed and worked hard on the board!

The events continued in the week with a picture taking contest where points were awarded to those with the best overall picture, most Sigma Chi’s in a picture, most girls in a picture, craziest photo, and any picture that really stood out. Zeta pulled off that last one by scoring a picture with The University of Texas’s president, Bill Powers! Wednesday’s event got the competitive juices flowing for many girls when the task was to steal as many hats possible from the Sigma Chi’s. Our girls pulled through again receiving third place in the event. The first round of volleyball was also on Wednesday and our players shined and proved their skills, letting us move on to the Friday tournament.

Thursday night brought on the brother auction. The Derby daddies, other brothers, and some special guests including UT basketball player going to the NBA, Myck Kabongo, were auctioned off to the various sororities, which gained the girls points along with it being the night that raised the most money during the whole week. The boys put on their best moves while strutting down the catwalk while the crowd hooped and hollered for all the guys. On Friday, the Zetas wrapped up volleyball by winning their first sets but playing back-to-back games tired us out. There was no time to nap though, because it was formal night! As the next morning rolled along, even with our fun formal the night before, the Zetas still showed up to play on the decathlon day. From the obstacle course to the Tahoe pull, the girls did not back down and fought until the very end. The day wrapped up with Paul Wall performing and the crowd going crazy to “Grillz” and enjoying the end of all the fun events.

Although we came in 10^th place, we still had a great time and cannot wait to participate again next year. In the end Sigma Chi raised over $30,000 throughout the whole week, which was a huge jump from last year’s raised funds of $12,000. The money is split where $15,000 goes to Sigma Chi’s national philanthropy, The Huntsman Cancer Institute and the remaining get’s divided amongst the winning sororities. Derby Days is a fun-filled week that raises money for a good cause while getting so many people involved. Thanks Sigma Chi for including us and we can’t wait to bring our A-game next year! 

April News

The Art in Public Places Lecture Series is still being planned. Our April event with Mary Zlot is postponed until we can find a date that works!

Upcoming Percent for Art Projects are making progress and will be posted as soon as possible.

Mac Whitney, Carrizo, 1992;
Conservation in progress, March 2013.

Care of existing artworks is in full-swing at UNT, including the newly painted Carrizo by Texas sculptor Mac Whitney, on the south side of the UNT Art Building. Carrizo was donated to UNT by Mrs. Lucille Murchison to commemorate the 1992 reclassification of the Department of Art in the College of Arts and Sciences to the School of Visual Arts, which would go on to become in the early 2000s the College of Visual Arts and Design. New landscaping will be installed around this sculpture over the summer months.

Plan a visit to campus to see what we're up to and walk the UNT Art Path. Map brochures are available in the Art Building Dean's Office and the Gateway Center.

Please consider creating a free profile on the UNT Artist Registry, and stay tuned to the UNT Art in Public Places blog!

Color Run

This past weekend my big, Lauren Fugitt, and I decided to do the color run. It had always been something that we have wanted to do but now we finally got the chance. We drove to the Austin Rodeo grounds and were in awe at how many people were there. Tons of people drove in from cities all around and everyone was so energetic and lively even at 8:00 in the morning! The atmosphere was so fun and we were so excited for the run to begin! We picked up our shirts and bibs and lined up in the huge crowd at the starting line. The buzzer went off and it was time to run! The fun thing about this race is that it is not very serious and everyone does it just to have fun but also it raises money for cancer. It was a 5K but it did not feel long at all because at every kilometer or so you would run through different tunnels where people covered you in color and it was always exciting to see what color was next. The race was tons of fun but after there was a DJ playing music and a huge crowd where everyone threw their colors and danced. Lauren and I had so much fun and hope to start going every year. We want to make it a tradition where we take our littles.

ZL, Aubrey Crenshaw PC'12

                                                              

Publicity Round Up

We'd like to share a few recent mentions of UT Press books in the news:

Bruce
Jackson’s documentation of prisons and the death penalty in the US
contributed to France abolishing capital punishment 30 years ago. To
recognize his work, the French government recently awarded Jackson L’Ordre National du Mérite (National Order of Merit), the country’s
second-highest honor after the Légion d’honneur. Last month, Mother Jones featured Bruce's book Inside the Wire in a slideshow:

• Jeremy Lybarger of Mother Jones says of Inside the Wire,
  "Although many of the men pictured were convicted of brutal crimes,
  Jackson imbues them with dignity, or at least a degree of stoicism." View the slideshow on motherjones.com>> 


• Donna De Cesare's Unsettled/Desasosiego also graced a slideshow on Mother Jones. View the slideshow on motherjones.com>>


• MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell featured Michael Kamber's Photojournalists on War in an interview. Watch the interview on tv.msnbc.com>>

Eric
Draper's Front Row Seat and Robb Walsh's Barbecue Crossroads continue to receive attention:

• Politico interviewed Eric Draper. Watch the video at politico.com>> 


• Fox News Insider featured the book. Watch the video on foxnewsinsider.com>>


• Draper's photos from the book were featured on Time's Lightbox blog. Read the post on lightbox.time.com>>


• The Washington Post published a review and slideshow, saying "the book presents a body of work that can’t be found anywhere else." Read the review on washingtonpost.com>>


• Robb Walsh appeared on Ann and Peter Haigh's On the Menu. Listen to the interview on onthemenuradio.com>> 

Mother's Day Gift Ideas

We here at UT Press hope all of your mothers are book fans, because we have some fabulous selections to recommend as Mother’s Day gifts. (Mother’s Day, in case you haven’t noticed, is coming up soon on Sunday, May 12!). Our classic recommendations for Moms cover the domestic gamut – cookbooks and gardening guides – but we’ve also got a few titles that go a little bit deeper.

Food

Oaxaca al Gusto by Diana Kennedy
Certainly not another collection of casserole recipes, Diana Kennedy’s magnum opus of Mexican cuisine truly delves into the cultural gastronomy of the diverse and remote state of Oaxaca. Organized by regions, these three hundred plus recipes will provide your Mother with an almost guru-like knowledge of the three pillars of Oaxacan cuisine —chocolate, corn, and chilies.

The Herb Garden Cookbook by Lucinda Hutson
Long before the urban farm and DIY foodie movement, Lucinda Hutson published this book, which provides both helpful gardening tips for growing ingredients for your kitchen, and plentiful recipes to test out your skills. Lucinda provides artful guidance for menu planning and creative recipes for exotic herbs, as well as practical advice for harvesting and storing them. 


Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins by Ellen Sweets
Everybody’s mother is capable of putting someone in his/her place, or should be. Molly Ivins was no exception. Although she had no children of her own, she played surrogate mom to her friends’ children. As the witty political reporter, her scathing Texas Observer pieces put untrustworthy politicians in their place. Longtime friend and fellow reporter Ellen Sweets shares Molly’s recipes (traditional Texan and fine French cuisine!), escapades, and inner strength.

Memoir/Nonfiction

Let the People In by Jan Reid
As one of the ultimate inspirational but real women, Ann Richards changed the face of her state as the first ardent feminist elected to high office in Texas. The Texas State Historical Association awarded author Jan Reid the Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women for this absorbing biography of a mother who balanced the pressures of government, overcame her personal demons, and raised four children while remaining a funny, unique, and beautiful public figure.

Welcome to Utopia by Karen Valby
This book by Karen Valby, a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly, is a no-brainer in terms of gifts for Mom. Quintessential American stories of family and community are tenderly rendered as Valby saw them play out in the small Texas town of Utopia. The book’s real life protagonists and their stories are very moving, revealing just how much they affected Valby in light of her original assignment: to find an American town without popular culture.
 

Gardening

Texas Gardening the Natural Way by Howard Garrett

If your mom has a green thumb, no matter where she may garden, Howard Garrett’s complete organic gardening guide is the end-all, be-all for conscientious gardening. Covering everything from trees, soils, design, shrubs, annuals and perennials, herbs, grasses, fruits, nuts, and vegetables to organic pest control and plant diseases, all fully illustrated with 833 full-color photos.



Additional recommendations:

Dear Dirt Doctor by Howard Garrett

100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda

Don’t Make Me Go to Town by Rhonda Lashley Lopez