Text 27897, 94 rader
Skriven 2012-08-03 10:44:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: July wanderings 67
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Cheekwood - Tex's - Frist Center
When on food tour, I plead with my companions not to have
breakfast, but free has its charm. I acquiesced in joining
Lilli for the Hampton offering, as I needed a banana for the
potassium and some juice for the pills. The bananas were
unripe so I took one for later; made my quota with a couple
bowls of really good fruit cup. Lilli was enthralled by the
waffle machine, as was some kid we'd met on the elevator
the night before - between floor 1 and floor 3 we'd
discovered that we'd been born in the same hospital, only
about 45 years apart. The meat and egg offerings - poultry
sausage and hard-curd scrambled - were eschewed by all.

Our sightseeing destination was Cheekwood, the home of the
Maxwell House family, now turned into an arts center and
public gardens. The gardens are pretty nice and manageable
in size; currently installed there are a project of artists
and architects reimagining the concept of the treehouse,
resulting in six or eight thankfully temporary buildings
ranging from the whimsical but dated to the outlandish but
dated to the just thrown together for the sake of getting
grant money. On the whole fun but nothing your kid couldn't
design with some sheets of kraft paper and some Crayolas.

I liked the Japanese garden best, though I didn't see much
Japanesity about it.

The sculpture garden, well, whatever its appeal might have
been was lessened by it being in the mid-90s with similar
humidity numbers, and our tour of it was truncated
accordingly.

I thought the permanent collection sort of worthwhile, with
the most interesting bits being a room of Red Grooms
paintings (apparently Nashville's most eminent artistic
citizen) and the Jamie Wyeth and Andy Warhol portraits of
each other, with Warhol clearly seeing Wyeth as a young
god and Wyeth seeing Warhol as a confused and dirty old man.
There's an atypical Inness and a very atypical Sargent also
- the latter brooding and rather disturbing; also in severe
need of cleaning. The contemporary gallery in the next
building had an exhibit of photos of trees in danger mostly
from urbanization. It was all in all a good way to spend a
couple hours mostly away from the oppressive heat.

We could have gone to lunch at the Loveless again, but it
hadn't earned that kind of love, so we found a Q place on
Lilli's Garmin to go to. It was an empty shell. Tex's didn't
seem too out of the way, so we went there - an authentic-
looking shack with a smoky smell about it. I asked for a
pound of moist brisket, and the counterman said "all our
brisket is moist" and promptly gave me a pound of pulled
pork (which I didn't notice until we sat down). I inquired
about beer and discovered that Miller Lite was all there
was. And so it was. When I discovered about the meat, I
moseyed back and asked for a small sample to see what we'd
missed. It was okay, but in fact the pulled pork was both
cheaper and better. A slice of pretty standard pecan pie
rounded out the meal.

Frist Center is a peculiarity, but a creative one. Housed in
the former main post office, it has no permanent collection
but rather hosts eminent traveling exhibitions. On display
now were some really cool folkish stuff I was unfamiliar
with - Gee's Bend quilts and the multimedia work of Thornton
Dial, as well as works by artists I'd heard of - Bill
Traylor, the self-taught ex-slave who became one of the most
appreciated (but not by me) primitivists; Edward Burtynsky,
the environmentalist photographer, in a sadly circumscribed
mini-show; and a stunning set of Constables from the V&A.

We decamped to the Sheraton Music City, where we split a
corner "junior" suite on the 31st floor - it could have
slept 5 easily though technically was one big L-shaped room.

The club lounge seemed a little below average but worth
maybe another visit later in the evening. I had a couple
mini-empanadas to tide me over; they were not bad for having
come from a freezer. Lilli had some cheese that could have
been made fresh yesterday.

I'd sort of wanted to go to Jack's, said by many to be the
best place for brisket in the city, and who can resist the
appeal "Pick any four of Jack's bar-b-que famous sauces and
get a free hand rub!" But we weren't at all hungry, and
instead we dined on a bottle of the Woolundry Rd McLaren
Vale Cabernet 2010, a plum bomb that Parker rated as one of
the bargains of the year; aside from its being a tad sweet,
I enjoyed the licorice-plum-spice combined with just enough
wood to make it interesting.

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