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Archive for the ‘In print/published’ Category

09.11

2009

Inshow-o-rama: check it out

Since mid-summer, I’ve been collaborating on a project with Stitch Design Co., and the first pieces are now in print and online. The materials are for the 2009 InShow, the AIGA of South Carolina’s annual design awards. The website is up, and this week the printed call-for-entries was mailed to designers across the state.

We’re having a lot of fun with this project. Everything has a retro-grocery look, and the remaining pieces include an invitation to the Grocer’s Gala in November (the awards party). I’m hoping there will be dancing in the aisles.

Inshow-o-rama

– Sandy Lang, September 2009

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Art, Craft, In print/published

08.19

2009

Carolina drive time

Summer Drive, G Magazine, South Carolina

For the current issue of G Magazine, I wrote about a summer road trip across the upstate of South Carolina. With photographer Peter Frank Edwards, I met fishermen and fiddlers, tasted local wine, and waded into mountainside swimming holes. PFE’s hound, Sparky, rode along in the station wagon. I love this kind of travel, and this magazine always does a beautiful job with design. The feature runs eight pages. Here’s an excerpt:

SUMMER ROAD: Following the Cherokee Foothills Scenic Highway

When the teenage boy walked up and eyed the slippery rock made smooth with algae and the current of mountain water going downhill… well, that’s when the show began. It was mid-morning on a sweet, early summer day at the shoals, and up until then, there’d been only quiet sunbathing and wading by the small crowd gathered there. Then, without a fuss, the kid in cut-off shorts took on the wet slope standing up, all the way down, surfer style – even spinning around backwards for part of the ride, slipping past the boulders and trees that line one side of Little Estatoee Creek, the sunbathers on the other. He didn’t fall. He didn’t even make it look like it hurt. (Other sliders who make the ride sitting down or on their stomachs confirm that a few scratches and bruises are usually the worst damage.)

The stunt was part of the June scenery at Long Shoals Wayside Park a few miles east of Keowee-Toxaway State Park – where everyone from miles around knows that just beyond the woods at the parking lot’s edge is a path to the naturally-formed waterslide. The sliding possibilities and sights there are just one of the wonders along this part of the upstate arc of Old Highway 11, the Cherokee Foothills Scenic Highway…

Summer Drive, G Magazine, South Carolina - 2

– Sandy Lang, August 2009

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In print/published, Travel

07.01

2009

Singing on St. Helena

St. Helena Island, SC - Peter Frank Edwards Photographs

In a white-painted, one-room building on St. Helena Island, Joseph “Rev.” Bryant was singing “Oh Lord, come by here.”  His voice filled the spare, shed-sized structure, with its benches of narrow boards nailed together, one bare bulb in the ceiling. After the spiritual, Rev. got back to telling stories – talking fast, mixing in Gullah-Geechee pronunciations. He told of moral lessons and Gullah traditions, of plucking fiddler crabs from the pluff mud as a child, and of “sour sally,” the red flowering sourgrass weed “that you can suck on when you’re walking and thirsty, but it’ll put a real knot in your face… more sour than a lemon.”

Describing himself as “the real deal,” Rev. is a one-man tour business, the kind where he’s a passenger in the tour-goer’s own car, giving directions and pointing out sites on St. Helena and nearby sea islands, all within about a 75-mile drive south from Charleston. Along the way, he tells stories and describes the scenery he knows so well from driving a local school bus for many years – the family and community names (often from former plantation owners), the Reconstruction-era houses that are still standing, the cottage that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used as a writing retreat, and the dirt road through the pine woods that you can follow a ways to see a 19th-century cemetery.

An ordained Baptist preacher and Navy veteran, Rev. Bryant fell into song that morning when we stopped inside one of the community praise houses, where, he explained, the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans still meet between church services to share information, pray, sing, and shout. As I sat and listened to his claps and choruses, I let the sights and sounds sink in as much as I could. Glory be.

Joseph “Rev.” Bryant, photo by Peter Frank Edwards

The storytelling, singing Joseph “Rev.” Bryant, above. The copy is an excerpt from an “On the Road” travel feature I wrote for the July 2009 issue of Charleston Magazine, just published.

– Sandy Lang, July 2009 (Images by PFE.)

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In print/published, Lowcountry S.C./Charleston, People, Travel

06.14

2009

“Cypress” is a beauty

Water Born, Garden & Gun Nov. 2008

This is so cool… an article I wrote last year for Garden & Gun was read by a filmmaker who says he was inspired to create a short film.

On Friday I had the chance to talk with Tim Sutton, who’s an art director with Getty Images and a good friend of G&G editor Sid Evans. Tim’s five-minute “Cypress” shows a visit with Aaron Wells, who lives near the Suwannee River and builds kayaks and canoes out of narrow strips of cypress. The film takes me right back to Aaron’s workshop, to the North Florida blackwater scenery. It was shot and edited by cinematographer Chris Dapkins, with music by Moondog.

You can see “Cypress” here, on the Garden & Gun website.

Besides his work with Getty, Tim has directed music videos for The Raconteurs, Brendan Benson, Sam Prekop, and The Sea and Cake. I love this one for The Sea and Cake’s, “Weekend.”

– Sandy Lang, June 2009

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Art, Craft, In print/published

06.04

2009

Barbecue backroads makes G&G cover

barbecue road trip Garden & Gun

The open-spoke steering wheel is as wide as a bicycle wheel in my hands, and I’m cruising – floating almost – on two-lane asphalt in a tar-black Chevrolet, passing pine tree rows, tobacco barns, railroad crossings. Pulling up in a bare-ground parking lot, I see the woodpiles, the smoke rising, and I walk inside, smelling the fire…

Photographer Peter Frank Edwards and I set out this spring to find old-school barbecue parlors in eastern North Carolina. He shot film and Polaroids along the way, and somewhere east of Greenville, we found the great old Chevy. The story is in the latest Garden & Gun issue, which is just off the press and set to be mailed out this month.

There are more images in print and the entire piece is online at Garden & Gun.

Garden & Gun June 2009 cover

– Sandy Lang, June 2009

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Food, In print/published, Travel

05.30

2009

Guerrilla Bite

Back on the covert dining beat, I wrote this Quick Bite feature for the May 2009 Charleston Magazine, the arts issue with the Shepard Fairey cover. I’m a fan of street art and underground supper clubs, so it was a great fit.

Shepard Fairey cover, Guerrilla Cuisine

A year ago this month, the e-mail arrived on a Saturday night with details about where to be the next evening, at 6:00 sharp. Directions were a bit cryptic, mentioning a street address “a few doors down from a favorite local meeting spot… the Wild Wild Joker. Bring yourself, a sense of adventure, and don’t forget to BYOB.“

The message was sent only to the 40 or so people going to another sold-out Guerilla Cuisine dinner, part food exploration, part art show. Begun in the fall of 2007, the underground dining group’s founder is a local 30-something known as “jimihatt” who’s worked in kitchens from Med Deli (the 1990s version) to McCrady’s. He and fellow chefs, mostly from Charleston restaurants, do the cooking for the clandestine, monthly dinner. And like a party or a rave, each meal is different, some better than others.

Walking up on the steamy May night to the Heriot Street address, guests could see crawfish being skewered onto sticks, prep cooks firing up grills on a line of tables outside. That dinner was held in a warehouse of glowing light and long tables, with art lining the walls… most of it by local artists, and for sale. There was a deejay playing house mixes, wait-staff in black-and-white costumes and face paint, and a drummer from Ghana. Guests chose their places at the snaking tables, and course-by-course the meal was served… mako shark and venison chops, roasted quail with a quail egg cooked inside, buffalo carpaccio with onion, and the fire-grilled crawfish. The 20-something to early 40-something crowd tasted, talked, and shared their wine.

A few months later, at another Guerrilla Cuisine dinner, guests sat on the floor of an otherwise empty, mid-century house off of Highway 17 South in West Ashley. Boxy, foot-high “tables” held the place settings that night, when every meal course featured hot peppers. It was all part of Guerrilla Cuisine’s nod to cooking what’s local and in-season.

The mystery and momentum of changing chefs, locations and art continues. Potential guests can sign up anytime for e-mail updates, www.guerrillacuisine.com.

Guerrilla logo

– Sandy Lang, May 2009

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Art, Craft, Food, In print/published, Lowcountry S.C./Charleston

05.18

2009

Mr. Biggerstaff and his honey

Mr. Biggerstaff

His business cards read, “Honey is my hobby,” and 72-year-old Robert Biggerstaff isn’t kidding. Since 1967 he’s been building bee boxes, tending hives and collecting honey – all under the oak trees in his sideyard that backs up to a tidal creek off the Stono River on Johns Island.

“The Bee Man,” just published with images by Josh Zoodsma, is one of several pieces I wrote for the 2009 issue of 5757 Palm, now in print. Click here for an earlier post about Mr. Biggerstaff and his bees.

– Sandy Lang, May 2009

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In print/published, Lowcountry S.C./Charleston, People, Wild animals and places

04.08

2009

Southern supper clubs in new G&G

G&G cover, April 2009, Supper Clubs

The rabbit – from the ranch of a Frenchman-turned-Texan named Sebastian – was fried in just-rendered pork fat. “That’s better than any vegetable oil,” said Jesse Griffiths, who’d rounded up ingredients and was doing most of the cooking that night.  His plates of creamed kale and of fried rabbit were going fast – passed from person to person down one long table set in a Texan pecan grove.

It was a sultry evening on a four-acre urban farm in Austin, Texas where 43 people sat at mismatched chairs for a family-style dinner of eight courses in the lamplight. An old door turned over on sawhorses was the prep table, and Griffiths cooked mostly at a table-height iron grill with a bottom tray that – by consensus of several supper guests – was once a feed trough.  (“Probably was,” said Griffiths, who recalled paying $50 for it, and claims it’s the best grill he’s ever had.)  The fryer – a large cooking pot over a portable propane flame – was behind him. And the whole set-up was under the porch roof of a farm shed. He’d been cooking like that for hours, handing plates as soon as they were ready to his small crew, including his wife, Tamara, who wore an embroidered summer dress, her brown hair in pigtails. A few yards from the long table, he cooked up pan-fried red peppers as big and sweet as strawberries, home-made jalapeno sausages, and smoky Gulf shrimp wrapped in grilled allspice leaves – all of Texas ingredients.

This was a food-loving crowd, and they were eating it up…

That’s the opening couple of paragraphs of my story in the new issue of Garden & Gun. (Actually, the print version is slightly edited… check out a PDF of the G&G layout by clicking below.) The feature is about one hell of a delicious night in Austin, and other stories of new supper clubs in the South, some public and some semi-secret… including Dai Due and Supper Underground in Austin, the Four Coursemen in Athens, and Guerrilla Cuisine in Charleston. Thank you to everyone for the great interviews… would love to cook and eat with any of you, anytime.

SupperClubsGarden&GunApril-May2009

– Sandy Lang, April 2009

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Food, In print/published

03.05

2009

Charleston’s history, and mine

For a couple of sweet years, a few years ago, I lived in downtown Charleston on Archdale Street on the third floor of an over-sized single house, circa 1812. My kitchen door opened to a wide piazza, a courtyard below. From my attic bedroom, I was eye-level with two 19th century church steeples… one so close you could pitch a penny to it.

I walked everywhere. Or pedaled the Canondale bike I’d bought from a College of Charleston kid, and never did peel off any of his band stickers. For Attache Magazine (the then in-flight magazine for USAir), I wrote a batch of stories about Charleston, including a block-by-block tour of some of the sidewalks, alleys and cemetery gardens I would walk through the most. A few months ago, I was asked to dust off that walking tour article and revise it for the first issue of 2009 for G Magazine, with new images by Peter Frank Edwards.

Walking Tour, Charleston, page 1

I am still, as ever, enchanted by our city. Click below to see a PDF file of the six-page story.

Walking Tour, Charleston

– Sandy Lang, March 2009

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In print/published, Lowcountry S.C./Charleston, Travel

01.30

2009

Murrells Inlet, again

Murrells Inlet, Russell’s signs

Back in September I posted a preview of my food-travel feature about Murrells Inlet… it’s now in print, in the February issue of Charleston Magazine, earned a mention on the cover.  To read a version online, click here.

 – Sandy Lang, January 2009

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Food, In print/published, Lowcountry S.C./Charleston, Travel

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