This, the final Best Of Baltimore issue, sure does make the death of the Baltimore City Paper more palpable, doesn’t it? Our last big-deal issue—the one that even the people who really, really hate us pick up. That said, one of my many flaws as an editor—and as a human being, probably—is a profound...
Earlier this year, "Rat Film" director Theo Anthony appeared on the local podcast "10 Frames Per Second," co-hosted by City Paper Photo Editor J.M. Giordano. The conversation circled around Anthony's film, which screens at the Parkway for two weeks beginning Sept. 15, but it also touched on, in...
"Rat Film" is a Gothic horror story about the way our government aided and abetted housing segregation in Baltimore via redlining. It's also about rats. "It ain't never been a rat problem in Baltimore, it's always been a people problem," says impossibly zen rat exterminator Edmond, for whom rat...
A view of our city through profiles, poetry, and prose from Writers in Baltimore Schools A view of our city through profiles, poetry, and prose from Writers in Baltimore Schools (J.M. Giordano/City Paper) This year, Lisa Snowden-McCray and I attended two days of Writers in Baltimore Schools’ Summer...
Because of last week's holiday, Murder Ink ran online only. It is published in this week's paper along with this week's Murder Ink. Monday, Aug. 28 9:48 p.m. Carlos Jones, a 27-year-old African-American man, was near the intersection of Mount Pleasant and S. Highland avenues when someone shot him...
The tents may be gone, but the Tent City movement pushes forward
Baltimore went two full days without a murder last week, but another 15-year-old boy was gunned down in Upton, and three people were killed in separate incidents on Friday. Tuesday, Aug. 22 12:30 p.m. Police who responded to a car crash on the 3700 block of Fleetwood Avenue found Jeremy Hall, a...
↑ Tent City The 10-day encampment in front of City Hall organized by Southern Christian Leadership Conference, homeless activists, and a number of other groups ended last week when Mayor Catherine Pugh asked that the tents be removed and gave 55 of the tenants housing in the former William Pinderhughes...
↑ CASA de Maryland Last week, right as an eager Attorney General Jeff Sessions—a longtime opponent of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program—announced Trump's decision to repeal DACA, which temporarily protects people who arrived in the U.S. as children, CASA de Maryland and other immigrants'...
A week after the mayor and police commissioner said violence reductions would not come quickly, 12 people were killed in Baltimore City, including seven over the Labor Day holiday weekend. There was one double homicide and 15 non-fatal shootings in the eight days since Aug. 25. One of the murdered...
Another week, another seven murders, although one of the victims counted in this week's column was stabbed last September and died in March. There was also a mass shooting Monday in the Park Circle neighborhood which left three people injured and one man dead. Monday, Aug. 14 12:30 p.m. Terrence...
The political heat of 2017 has finally boiled all the political chants down to their essence: "Fuck that shit!" More than a thousand juggalos—fans of the horror-art rap group the Insane Clown Posse (ICP)—chant this perfect refrain for our insane era in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday,...
Outside Dovecote Café in Reservoir Hill, Isabel Antreasian is in the middle of a sale. She hands a brown lunch bag to a man who had driven up in a truck marked with the Baltimore City seal. Her "store" is parked next to her: a red, three-tiered cart on wheels attached to a bicycle. It's stocked...More
A school of golden fish swims across the ground floor windows of the 2 East Wells apartment complex, luring diners to Minnow (2 E. Wells St., [443] 759-6537, minnowbaltimore.com), the latest culinary venture by Ben and Jake Lefenfeld, the brothers behind Meadow Mill's La Cuchara. The theme here...
A quick history lesson: The line of particularly colonial looking structures that sit on the first uphill block of Old Columbia Pike just off Main Street in Ellicott City is locally known as "Taylor's Row." While the neighboring Tonge Row once served as rowhomes for 19th century millworkers, these...
'Pennsylvania Avenue Hustle,' off Todd Marcus' upcoming album, "On These Streets," an album powered by living and working in Sandtown-Winchester, is a manic tune that opens with foreboding cymbals and a running saxophone, and then dives into a frenzied, buoyant piano solo, soon sprinting, even...
Kung Fu Kenny, the 5-foot-5 giant and hip-hop's resident Vitruvian Man, awoke from his sleep to deliver us his fourth studio album back in April—"DAMN.," a proper follow-up to put detractors of 2015's "To Pimp A Butterfly" back in their cocoons. "DAMN." is a 14-track, 55-minute cathartic therapy...
Jason Isbell's "The Nashville Sound" is the summer soundtrack for those of us who fled small towns because of the sexism or the racism or the lack of opportunities, only to see all of those things amplified with the election of Donald Trump, rendering our hometowns almost hostile to our very existence....
City Paper’s Big Music Issue I’ll level with you: This year’s Music Issue is a rip-off of the New York Times’ feature “25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going,” a very neat thing that paper has done over the past two years, offering up some great song recommendations and music writing along...
On Horse Lords' cover of 'Stay on It,' a composition from noted '70s and '80s New York composer Julius Eastman who innately bridged disco and classical music, drummer Sam Haberman aggrandizes the rhythmic punctuation latent in Eastman while Andrew Bernstein's wailing sax feels like vicarious liberation—the...
By the time Robert Altman has dumped '50s leftover Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) into the '70s, the utopian dreams of the '60s are on the last legs of their own long goodbye. Hippie communalism has given way to new age self-help. The discourse of civil rights is being co-opted by institutions...More
"Damn, where'd you come from," a man who just walked out of the Baltimore City Detention Center back in early June asked as he filled a plate with pit beef, watermelon, and vegetables and then—"Thank y'all, bless y'all." "We're doing like Jesus did," activist and chef Duane "Shorty" Davis, who...
Few things are as satisfying as a slow-motion shot of a bladed weapon cutting through a hanging pig carcass—the scccclk sound that comes as steel carves through flesh. This revelation comes via "Forged in Fire," History Channel's competitive reality show in which bladesmiths try to make the sharpest...
1. I have a scratchy stick-and-poke on my arm that reads, "they drew first blood, not me." It's what John Rambo (played with Marlon Brando-esque mumbling aplomb by Sylvester Stallone) says toward the end of the 1982 movie "First Blood," once he has been chased into the woods by longhair-hating...
As artist Stephen Towns was heading south to watch the solar eclipse in South Carolina last month, pondering Nat Turner's epiphany which came to him during an eclipse in 1831 in Virginia, some of Towns' paintings that were inspired by Turner's rebellion were causing a stir at Goucher College. Now,...
The Sondheim finalists, reviewed—and inching toward an art practice based in resistance
Gloria Garrett is moving her hands. She is moving her arms in wide circles. She is pacing, gesticulating, dancing, and talking. Gloria Garrett talks loudly: "Those dolls are made from old sheets! You cover them with wax paper and then iron them. That wreath is made from a hanger. This is the picture...
In his essay 'Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,' James Baldwin writes about how the "American ideal" of sexuality and masculinity "has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies" and other such archetypes, resulting in "an ideal so paralytically...
A line spirals out from the fountain and wraps around the interior perimeter of the "Brutalist donut" that is the Hirshhorn Museum, spilling out onto the plaza beside the National Mall. Several hundred visitors are here—foreign tour groups, art students, tourists with selfie sticks, families with...
I. The river Amazon is a river. It is an extremely long and voluminous river. Passing through areas of bio-diversity, it is a good name for a company which sells books and diverse other products, this river. -Leontia Flynn, 'Jeff Bezos names Amazon,' from the collection "Relentless: Poems by Jeff...
Visual Merchandising: "The Ground" takes on origins, labor, commerce, and legacy at the Hutzler Brothers Palace Visual Merchandising "The Ground" takes on origins, labor, commerce, and legacy at the Hutzler Brothers Palace by Rebekah Kirkman I.The river Amazon is a river. It is an extremely long...
Think about the light that illuminates your community and how it makes you feel. When you see red and blue flashing lights, do you feel calm or anxiety? Do the light poles in your neighborhood bear blue flashing surveillance cameras? Have you noticed these cameras as you drive through other communities?...
The 2017 Fiction and Poetry Issue Edited by Rebekah Kirkman Saida Agostini Olu Butterfly Woods Janea Kelly Charlie Jay Anna K. Crooks Suzanne Doogan Sharea Harris Grace Davis Maya Martinez Alain Ginsberg Lily Herman Caitlin Goldblatt jessica hudgins Ellen Paul Aurora Engle-Pratt celeste doaks Evan...
Much as the Parisian bourgeoisie of the late-19th century lived in an era of the novel, we are living in an era of the rock 'n' roll memoir. In the past six months alone we've gotten self-penned accounts by Bruce Springsteen, Robbie Robertson, Johnny Marr, Maurice White, Phil Collins (his sadly...
This has not been a banner year for most inhabitants of Earth, and the idea of blasting off and relocating to another planet grows more appealing each hurricane-pummeled, over-populated, heat-index-rising, tyrant-governed day. That sentiment could not be more true for the Baltimore Rock Opera Society,...