Hoop dreams often incubate in dim, cramped gyms, much like the one at the Mount Royal Rec Center. On a Wednesday night in May, eight or so kids from the 12-and-under Mount Royal Eagles haul ass to loop back through passing and layup lines and take orders from Coach Carlton Carrington, a volunteer...
Elon Musk, former PayPal exec with possible young blood enthusiast Pete Thiel, seller of electric cars to the 1 percent, tech bro evangelist, and aspiring star boy, caused a minor stir in Baltimore last week when he tweeted that he received "verbal govt approval" to build a Hyperloop connecting...
I'm smoking a bougie apartment complex on the edge of the city with hella amenities; I'm smoking a charming supporting character with a mysterious past from an '80s soap opera; I'm smoking a third-tier metal band signed to Metal Blade that opened for Fates Warning in 1986; I'm smoking Gray Haven,...
Another week for Baltimore at the one-murder-per-day pace. Oldest victim: 97. There were also 18 non-fatal shootings this week and 12 gun arrests. Monday, July 17 7:00 p.m. Maurice Finney, a 22-year-old African-American man of the 800 block of Stoll Street, was on the 3200 block of W. Baltimore...
Carmelo Anthony adds to his Charm City legacy as host of The Basketball Tournament
Putting together the country’s largest free arts festival seems a formidable undertaking to say the least, and hats off to the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts for pulling it off year after year. That said, there is room for improvement—case in point, the themes. This year, it’s “Camp Artscape:...
FRIDAY Amirror Don’t miss Baltimore singer, City Paper Big Music Issue honoree, and fabulous colorful wig wearer Amirror at Artscape this year. In that issue, CP contributor Nia Hampton said she first heard Amirror at a Kahlon event during First Fridays in Station North, and the performance brought...
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...
Four murders a week, for Baltimore, is actually an improvement over the normal pace. And it's just luck: There were 20 non-fatal shootings reported last week, including one to which homicide detectives were called, another in which a man was shot in the throat, and one that police encountered because...
Baltimore officials, philanthropists, and the business elite packed a new community room at the Western District Police Station today to hear Scott Plank extol the renovation his company did, apparently using $4.5 million in charitable gifts. "We've done police station fitness facilities in two...
⬆︎ Ryan Dorsey and Brandon Scott Using the City Paper's Facebook page as a platform, District 3 Councilman Dorsey roasted a comment about cops being the "people who take care of this city." Eighty percent of Baltimore police officers live outside the city, Dorsey said, and the taxpayers who fund...
One good thing about the week is that there were no homicides over the weekend. This was remarkable because seven people were shot between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. So if you happen across a trauma surgeon or an off-duty EMT this week, buy them a drink. They probably need it. Monday,...
Because of vacation and a holiday, this week's Murder Ink covers three weeks from May 30 through June 19. The first two were quiet weeks, by Baltimore standards, with several murder-free days. Last year by this date there had been 129 murders, 31 fewer than this year. Young people continue to commit...
↑ Pride This year Pride move to the Station North/Old Goucher area and felt more alive, exciting, and inclusive. Mount Vernon still got a glimpse of Pride thanks to the parade—shout out to, among others, the Baltimore Transgender Alliance and the Answer Coalition for decorating a car with signs...
↑ Md Attorney General Brian E. Frosh Frosh and D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine are filing a lawsuit against President Donald Trump, saying that Trump is in violation of the Constitution's Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses. Those rules were put in place to keep the president's financial...
Medea Benjamin, the firebrand activist and author of a dozen-odd books, looks surprisingly small in the midst of the lunchtime crowd jostling one another in the basement cafeteria of the the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Her pale face is framed by straight-cut bangs that are pretty darn close...
After some three decades, the venerated Charles Village liquor store and bodega the Schnapp Shop closed on July 1. A note left on the door of the store, nestled in the ground floor of the Peabody Apartments on E. 30th Street, read: "THANK YOU!! To All Of Our Friends + Customers For 30 GREAT YEARS!!...More
Every adult you've ever met named Andy made a decision at some point in their young lives to be taken a little less seriously. Many Andrews do a childhood stint as Andy and then let the name expire around high school. Some Andys do their time before promoting themselves to the sexier, team captain-sounding...
When McCabe's suffered a fire in December 2014 that ended up closing the restaurant permanently, it was a loss felt keenly in Hampden. Sure, there were (and are) plenty of other taverns and restaurants just blocks away. But McCabe's had its own particular casual vibe, one that drew patrons from...
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...
Big Freedia's voice is steady, strong, and commanding. It is powerful even when she isn't yelling out instructions on how and when to shake your ass in her songs, or showing up in Beyoncé's 'Formation' ("I did not come to play with you hoes," she exclaims as Bey, dressed all in black, nods her...
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...More
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...
"It Comes At Night"—the sophomore release from "Krishna" director Trey Edward Shults and reliable indie production company A24—opens with a scene horrifying in its mundanity: The son-in-law and grandson of an elderly man infected with an unknown contagion euthanize and dispose of their family member....
“It Comes At Night”—the sophomore release from “Krishna” director Trey Edward Shults and reliable indie production company A24—opens with a scene horrifying in its mundanity: The son-in-law and grandson of of an elderly man infected with an unknown contagion euthanize and dispose their family member....
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?...
Artist duo Daniel Wickerham and Malcolm Lomax were all of six years old when Odell's closed in 1992. The North Avenue dance club, opened in 1976 by Odell Brock, became Baltimore's legendary hot spot of the disco and house music eras. Brock hired DJ Wayne Davis to keep the dance floor moving, and...
David Gessner, "Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth" (Riverhead Books) A sprawling memoir and charting of one semi-toxic male's evolution as viewed through the oft-derided, but very popular and high-impact sport of ultimate frisbee, "Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My...
1. Heather Ann Thompson, “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Aftermath” (Pantheon Books) In September, Red Emma’s was packed the night Heather Ann Thompson came to talk about what happened at the Attica Correctional Facility in 1971, when a takeover of the prison by...
At the corner of North Avenue and Charles Street, on top of an abandoned bank building, there is a gray billboard with large black letters that read "Whoever Died From A Rough Ride." Below, in smaller letters: "the whole damn system…" Despite spending a good deal of time in Station North and that...