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 the way.
For thousands of years people all over the world have used materials sourced from the earth to record and grapple with cultural histories, memories, and identities in the form of masterful ceramics, tiles, and tools. Baltimore Clayworks' latest exhibition, "People of Color. People of Clay.," features...
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...
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...
In 2016, 27 transgender people were murdered, making it the deadliest year on record for transgender Americans. Twenty-two of these individuals were trans-identified people of color. Crystal Edmonds was number 22. Growing up in Baltimore, I'd seen Crystal around a few times. Her family and friends...
In 2016, 27 transgender people were murdered, making it the deadliest year on record for transgender Americans. Twenty-two of these individuals were trans-identified people of color. Crystal Edmonds was number 22. Growing up in Baltimore, I'd seen Crystal around a few times. Her family and friends...
↑ 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...
Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, poet and provocateur Ed Sanders shouts "Out demons, out!," his arms raised in clenched fists above his head, a computer bag hanging from the shoulder of his powder-blue sports coat. With a wild halo of white hair exploding from his balding pate, small...
↑ Creek Boyz Woodlawn rap group Creek Boyz, consisting of J Reezy, Turk P Diddy, Young Fedi Mula, and ETS Breeze, have been slowly gaining interest for a few months now thanks to their touching, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony-esque song, 'With My Team.' You've no doubt heard it on 92Q and playing off kids'...
For seven weeks running, Baltimore has averaged more than one murder per day. By the 149th day of the year, the city had notched 143 homicides, a rate of killing that is unprecedented in the city’s history. Chicago, with more than four times Baltimore’s population, had 246 as of the same day. It...
One of this week's victims was a 17-year-old girl who was shot when someone fired into a crowd. Baltimore had 32 fewer murders by this date last year, and 32 fewer in 2015 as well, a year that ended with a record 344 homicides. Baltimore has never had a year with 400 murders. If nothing changes,...
⬆︎ "The Marc Steiner Show" "The Marc Steiner Show," which has been on the air in some form for 24 years and is a friend to City Paper, will be going off the air at the end of July, according to Steiner and WEAA. The end of the Steiner Show is a bomb to Baltimore radio: Steiner has undoubtedly informed...
Five people were killed on Saturday, May 6 alone this week. There were 37 murders in the previous 30 days, pushing the city's rate to nearly one murder each day. Police made several arrests and seized some guns from men in cars and on the street, but the killing rate accelerates as the weather...
On this week’s episode co-host Baynard Woods talks with Baltimore City Paper editor Brandon Soderberg and Center for Emerging Media's Imani Spence about the charges against journalist Aaron Cantú stemming from the black bloc actions on Inauguration Day. Democracy in Crisis is a weekly podcast hosted...
The sounds of a hammer slamming nails into the frame for a new fancy DJ booth and power saws slicing through wood battle the humping beat of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 'Relax' at G.A.Y Lounge about a week before Pride and just a couple hours before the new Mount Vernon polyglot queer spot opens...More
When you think of farm-to-table restaurants, Canton Square, with its slew of sports bars, isn't exactly the neighborhood that comes to mind. And if I'm being frank, the term "farm-to-table" itself has become as ubiquitous as "hipster" over the years, used, more often than not, as a branding tool...
Politicians in suits and brewers in T-shirts sat side by side in a conference room on the Johns Hopkins University campus, beckoned here by Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot. "We've got some stiff competition," Franchot told the group in his opening remarks, "in Virginia, in New York, and all...
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...
The first time I ever went to Texas was on a bus with curtains draped over the windows. I just joined the military and got shipped off to basic training in San Antonio. I didn't see much when I stepped out, because I had an armed soldier in my face telling me how much of a bitch I was even though...
At Maryland's music mega-fortress, Merriweather Post Pavilion, 17-year-old Lindsey Jordan yells at concert rabble-rousers in a heavy, stern voice: "Sir, don't stand on that chair! . . . Sir, put that out!" She has been laying down the law and holding doors for bands backstage as a Merriweather...
Kleenex/LiLiPUT, "First Songs" (Kill Rock Stars) The cover of Kleenex/Liliput's compilation album "First Songs," released last December as a double LP with their music from 1978-1982, features three of the band's female members in cardboard, vaguely crustacean-inspired costumes, a la Dada daddy...
Nearly half a century after gay Marxist atheist Pier Paolo Pasolini shocked Italy by delivering a version of St. Matthew's Gospel that played the story relatively straight, director Joao Pedro Rodrigues offers a film about another saint, this time Anthony, though it's more in line with Derek Jarman's...More
An almost queer'd May-December semi-romance about two tough guy assassins, "The Mechanic" is like '70s action as plotted by Jean Genet. Here Arthur Bishop (Charles Bronson) is a mostly silent and hyper-efficient assassin and Steve McKenna (Jan Michael-Vincent), a younger, less-grizzled cutie who...
Like "The Goonies" or Claude McKay's "Home To Harlem," Sean Baker's "Tangerine" is pretty much a frenzied remix of "The Odyssey," though here, a journey-back-to-a-partner tale is bent into a picaresque sprint through Los Angeles with fresh-outta-jail trans woman sex worker Sin-Dee (played by Kitana...
It's 1981 and Rainer Werner Fassbinder doesn't look well. He's in a cheetah print suit but he wears the sweat dripping off his bullfrog face way better. As the star of Wolf Gremm's baffling sci-fi noir "Kamikaze 89," he's got to run around and bust bad guys as some kind of cyberpunk Sam Spade and,...
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...
I put on the headphones that are part of Joyce Yu-Jean Lee's 'Red vs. Blue Polarity,' in the group show "Whatchamacallit" at Gallery CA, and a noisy barrage of cameras clicking and flashes flying is the only audio accompanying a video of Donald Trump at a press conference, gesticulating as he does...
She reclines on a low-rising sofa upholstered by a hodgepodge of vintage textiles: gingham, groovy waves, florals and leaf patterns that echo the ficuses and ferns and cheap fake flowers that surround her throne. On the coffee table, a basket of gold fruit; on the floor—a small, frenzied ocean...
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...
"Our tour is on its very last legs," says a mortified actor, oddly dressed in a burglar costume and dinner jacket, as he dodges the interruptions of backstage spats. He notices a whiskey bottle lodged in the cushion of a nearby chair, and as he inches toward it, he bids the audience: "Ladies and...