"Why do you want to win?" Victor "Slangston Hughes" Rodgers, 33, asks an eager group of five young poets at the Edward R. Murrow Park in Washington, D.C., back in July. He has been coaching youth poetry teams for the last five years, but this team, the sixth Baltimore Citywide Youth Poetry Team...
Oh, Paulie Gee's (3535 Chestnut Ave., pauliegee.com/hampden), what took you so long? For months—nay, years—Hampden has been waiting for your wood-burning ovens, your Cinderella-like makeover of the Hampden Republican Club, and yes, your pizza. We wondered, Would you ever be ready for hungry guests?...
"I got back to Baltimore four months and started back up [using heroin]," Holly Botts says. She is strolling purposefully along the paved pathway of Carroll Park, with maybe 100 other walkers and a few runners, past an equal number of support people volunteering and/or working for the city's drug...
In City Paper’s annual Best of Baltimore issue we offer up our most sustained burst of enthusiasm for the city. It’s a detailed (although not comprehensive) list of what caught our attention this year, whether it’s performances, products, or politicians. The paper is full of the things we really,...
It's hard to square the notion of so-called “millennial apathy” with the wave of headline-making activism by young people around the country that we've seen over the past few years—especially on college campuses, where groups of students organize to protest racism and police brutality, among other...
It's hot and sunny in McKeldin Plaza at the Inner Harbor on a summer day between the mid-morning and late afternoon thunderstorms. Traffic slides past the plaza on three sides: at Pratt Street in front of us going east, on the left headed south on Light Street, and on the right, cars are peeling...
This year, City Paper decided to do something different with its Fiction and Poetry issue. Instead of soliciting reader submissions, we invited local fiction writer Susan Muaddi Darraj to guest edit our feature well of stories and poems. Darraj, fiction editor of Barrelhouse Magazine and former...
Most scientists don't include personal stories in their research reports, but for John Lilly, personal experiences and science experiments were the same thing. His ears, eyes, mouth, and nose were calibrated probes. His mind was the unbiased observer, the ideal model for dispassionate inquiry....
In addition to 11 non-fatal shootings (one a double), one barricaded suspect (arrested without violence), and a fatal hit-and-run on a pedestrian, which does not count as a murder even though Anthony Wayne, 39, was killed unlawfully, there were six murders last week. Another person, who died in...
↑ Brandon Scott Kudos to Baltimore City Councilmember Brandon Scott, who showed up at last Monday's city council meeting sporting a Colin Kaepernick San Francisco 49ers jersey, and bowed his head during the Pledge of Allegiance. Kaepernick has been taking a knee during the playing of "The Star-Spangled...
The city's arena soccer team, the Baltimore Blast, will return to the Major Arena Soccer League, ending a bid to create a separate league with a different structure. As City Paper detailed in a cover story earlier this year on the team in the midst of its most recent championship run, owner Edwin...
Jason Hill and Nic Thornton are planning to get married on Oct. 1. In December they plan to close the purchase of their first home, on the 300 block of E. Lanvale Street, a block north of the Copycat building. But now they're $10,000 short. "We're going to have to either get a second mortgage,...
Nine more homicides were added to the roster since last Wednesday afternoon, including a 3-year-old boy. Most of these cases resulted from injuries inflicted before last week. There were 32 murders recorded in the past month, and Baltimore is still slightly behind last year’s record killing pace,...
This week’s count extends a day and is published late because of the holiday. Baltimore went five days without a murder last week, while police made four murder arrests and three arrests for attempted murder. A police officer shot a man who had allegedly broke into a person’s house and assaulted...
Police arrested a man and charged him with murder. They arrested two others and charged them with attempted murder. Last year as of this date Baltimore had 225 murders. Monday, Aug. 15 11:30 p.m. Bruce Hamilton, a 17-year-old African-American boy, was shot in the stomach in the BP Gas station parking...
Dwight Whitley is better than this. His connections used to mean something. Back when George Winfield ran public works, Whitley would meet him at home after work and hang out. "His wife was a sweetheart," Whitley says. "He'd come in and say 'why'd you let this nigger in here?'" He laughs, remembering...
Returning from three days of camping at Fields Fest, I needed some serious hangover food. Not for a booze-induced hangover per se (though that was certainly part of it), but more like the in-need-of-relief-from-living-off-Cheez-Its-and-dried-salami-and-getting-four-hours-of-sleep-a-night kind of...More
For the most part, the weed hasn't been working this summer. Even endless eighths of A.K. 47, an alarmingly pleasant strain with a sour, plain yogurt-like flavor and a high that really encourages lots of darting around, deep thinking and chatting, can't quite quell my ennui. Mostly this has to...
Judging by Gunther & Co.'s (3650 Toone St., [443] 869-6874, eatgunther.com) Instagram account, there are three things people already love about the three-month-old Brewer's Hill restaurant: cleverly named cocktails (a Meet the Beet-alls or a Rye'n Gosling, anyone?), oysters all ways, and the 16-foot...
Highlights Bobbing around in the pool on Friday night with just about everyone; sipping the Champagne of Beers; the spontaneous whirlpool someone started; the line of beer cans and empty cups around the pool's perimeter that created an ephemeral and interactive installation; the security guards...
Charlie Parker, born 96 years ago on August 29, was from the landlocked state of Kansas and he spent some of his worst years in sunny California (including a six-month stay in a mental institution), but Pontella Mason's 2008 mural "Bebop: Charlie Parker and Bettie Carter," painted on one of the...
Baltimore club music seems to be constantly in a state of resuscitation, but Hands Up! is eager to breathe new life into the genre. A collaboration between the ubiquitous club music DJ and producer Mighty Mark and new-to-us skilled studio engineer and producer Michael J.R., Hands Up! just released...
The absence of West Baltimore's Lor Scoota, who was shot and killed in June, and East Baltimore's Young Moose, who is currently in jail, were palpable last Saturday at the Royal Farms Arena where Baton Rouge's Lil Boosie and Washington D.C.'s Shy Glizzy came through for their "One Bad Azz Summer"...
When I first walk into Red Emma's to meet with the organizers of Fields Festival, the multi-day arts festival and camp-out that brings the best and weirdest parts of Baltimore's DIY arts scene to the middle of the woods, they are in a conversation with someone at a nearby table who has an idea...
In the fifth grade, my lips were chapped and 50 Cent's debut album "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" spun feverishly in my Walkman. I was finally able to shoot free throws without having to jump and I started to figure how to effectively use curse words. Allen Iverson was the face of the NBA in Michael...More
The physical attrition of flesh and bone colliding with canvas is no longer a part of legendary pro wrestler Jake "The Snake" Roberts' performative repertoire, but the iconic grappler's seated storytelling show is no less a grind. If, in the past, seeing Roberts live meant watching him abuse his...
After the poorly titled misfire of "Star Trek Into Darkness," one could be forgiven for assuming Paramount hiring "Fast & Furious" vet Justin Lin to direct the follow-up was the worst kind of Hail Mary. Diehards already quibble over J.J. Abrams realigning Gene Roddenberry's cerebral brand of science...
A few weeks ago, a friend arrived at a late-night party with a strangely dystopian anecdote. While looking up transit directions to the venue, located near the intersection of East 25th Street and Harford Road, Google Maps warned him that he was entering a high crime area. We laughed at how odd...
You are a square if you're in Baltimore and don't know Larry Luv.Thanks to his addictive Sunny Day parties and the whirlwind of high-energy designs flying out of his Huey Brand flagship store, the Douglass Housing Projects native has crafted a simple yet complex cocktail of innovative fashion and...
In a 2011 video interview with PBS's "Craft in America," Baltimore artist Joyce J. Scott talked about how she confronts race in her work. "I do have anger about [racism] and one of the great ways I deal with it is to make artwork that allows, in fact beckons people, to come to it," she said. "I...
"What could it look like?" This is the eternal refrain of Jess Solomon, the interim director of the Bromo Arts District, which is hosting two upcoming "community visioning sessions" this month, so that those within the district can sit down together and actively imagine how to improve the community....
Jackie Milad chases something personal in the 12 mixed-media-on-paper pieces in her solo exhibition, "Pyramids Fall Too," at Phoebe Projects. The intensity of that pursuit hits the eyes immediately upon entering the gallery. Black, the absence of visible light, dominates her compositions. The chief...
Kaita Niwa recalls one of her earliest memories: playing dress up with her sister and cousin, wearing Singaporean silk dresses and nail polish. "I was like any other child playing with their favorite toys or reading their favorite book, gleaming with joy," she writes to me in an email. But then...
There are signs that warn you, before entering the gallery that houses FORCE’s Monument Quilt installation, that there’s work in this space that addresses sexual violence. But I knew that already—I knew that FORCE, as a group, is a Sondheim finalist; I have seen pieces of the Monument Quilt before...
The man in the photograph has collapsed to his knees and holds his head in his hands. He leans onto a folding metal chair, his Bible resting in the chair. Titled 'The Prayer,' the photograph, taken by Baltimore photographer Kenneth Royster in 2000, captures a man utterly overcome. "That's from...
In the middle of the large back room in the former Peale Museum, there is an old stack of brown paper or cardboard, bound with twine. The stack is smushed, water-logged, and anonymous, label-less. It's a relatively small detail; the floor is covered with stacks and spread out sheets of large, wrinkled,...
My hand is holding an object that looks somewhat like a bar of soap: smooth and pink, but not waxy like soap is. Pressed into it, like a brand, with haphazard letters and pieces of plastic broken to look like letters, are the words "CLEAN 5UM." I take the cord coming out of one end and plug it...
Norman Mailer, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968” (Random House) Random House couldn’t have chosen a better time to reprint Norman Mailer’s account of 1968’s political conventions than in the current 2016 election season. We’re...
Flipping matching card pair after matching card pair onto the floor from a brand-new deck shuffled by a volunteer, Maxwell Fink spits, "You can't win if you play with me." Why? Because he's not just a magician, he may be the devil. Lights dim to the candy pop song 'Sh-Boom (Life Could Be a Dream).'...