Baltimore City Paper

The Bell Foundry tagged with "$HAME 100," graffiti artist says it's aimed at building owners, city

Democracy in Crisis Episode 13: Imara Jones on Disarray At 100 Days

Charm City Bluegrass Festival offers the entire spectrum of string-band music

Lor Scoota's murder case has been closed; final mixtape "Live From The A" now streaming

Uneven Dinner and a Movie: Scarfing down pan-seared salmon during "Fate Of The Furious" at the Rotunda's CinéBistro

A few years ago, Hampden's Rotunda was a nice divey way to spend an evening without breaking the bank. The underground mall resembled a kind of post-apocalyptic fallout bunker with a cozy cluttered comic book shop and a three-screen movie theater that offered cheap tickets on Tuesday nights. In...

Death By Southwest: Kim Chase's death raises more questions about the Southwestern police precinct

Kim Chase, a 52-year-old African-American woman, died on April 20 after collapsing in the Southwest District precinct, where she was brought by officers. Chase is the second person to die after being hauled into the Southwest in the last three years. In 2014, Tyree Woodson died after officers said...

Baltimore City Power Rankings: Juan Dixon, Elijah Cummings, Under Armour, MTA, more

⬆︎ Juan DixonIn an emotional press conference, Baltimore native, former University of Maryland standout, and seven-year NBA veteran Juan Dixon was introduced as the new men's basketball coach at Coppin State. Among the noteworthy attendees: two of Dixon's former coaches, Maryland coach Gary Williams...

The Travel Issue

City Paper's Travel Issue

Travel To Toke: How to indulge out-of-state and overseas

In 2011, the great writer John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote an essay for the New York Times Magazine about, among other things, sneaking away with his old buddy to smoke a joint while shepherding their families through Disney World. His friend had found a forum with a "fiend's guide to Disney World....

I'm From West Baltimore—I Can Live Anywhere

I got my passport the summer before my junior year at Baltimore City College High School. Studying a foreign language was mandatory after completing ninth grade Latin. I chose Spanish because my dad was from the Bronx and after his death, I became obsessed with creating a persona for him and thus...

Murder Ink 5/3/17: 7 murders this week, 108 murders this year

Another evil weekend followed a relatively calm week, with six murders from Friday morning through Sunday night. The citys murder rate so far this year has far surpassed all records. Last year at this time there were 87. Two years ago, 75, and that year ended with 344. The good news: Federal prosecutors...

Murder Ink 4/25/17: 7 murders this week, 101 murder this year

Police made arrests in two homicides this week, including a man who detectives tracked to Vernon, Connecticut. Besides the seven homicides, Kim Doreen Chase, 52, who city police took into custody on April 9 on a Calvert County warrant, died on April 20 at St. Agnes Hospital. She suffered an illness...

Forgive Us Our Trespasses: Restricted protest and property rights at Standing Rock strikes a chord in Baltimore

The trespassing arrests of Dakota Access Pipeline protesters in and around the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota remind me of how African-Americans are levied with the same type of charges in urban public housing projects throughout the country. An eerie similarity exists between the way...

Baltimore City Power Rankings: Up for poet Mohamed Tall and the Tubman House, down for Pugh's confused Civilian Review Board, and more

⬆︎ Mohamed Tall City Paper has previously written about Mohamed Tall, the poet who is just one of several great young writers to come out of the city's burgeoning poetry scene. Last week, Tall won a competition to become the city's Youth Poet Laureate. His winning performance included a poem about...

Murder Ink 4/19/17: 8 murders this week, 94 murders this year

Democracy In Crisis: Republican dirty trickster disses square A.G. Sessions' outdated take on toking

Baltimore City Power Rankings: Up for Peter Franchot for helping out brewers, down for warmongering Trump, and more

Don't Bogart That License: How state lawmakers ruin pot in battle over money

Murder Ink 4/12/17: 7 murders this week, 86 murders this year

Baltimore subtracted a murder from the count this week, as a March stabbing was ruled self-defense, but the weekend saw four murders, including a double-homicide on Saturday, keeping the annual killing rate at a record level. Suspects were arrested in two separate murder investigations as well....

Baltimore City Power Rankings: down for Trump, up for Future Islands, more

↑ Judge James K. Bredar Judge James K. Bredar stiff-armed the Justice Department's attempts to delay progress on the consent decree between Baltimore and the D.O.J. "The time for negotiating the agreement is over. The only question now is whether the Court needs more time to consider the proposed...

Murder Ink 4/5/17: 4 murders this week, 80 murders this year

Four murders is a light week for Baltimore, and the police reported another homicide arrest, a sign of progress. But the last year Baltimore saw 80 murders before April 1 was 1998. In 2015 there were 52 by this date. Last year there were 59. This is a crisis. Tuesday, March 28 2:45 a.m. April Ellis,...

Democracy in Crisis Episode 3: Immigration Crackdown Special--Aura Bogado & City of Immigrants

Democracy in Crisis: Steve Bannon is not an intellectual powerhouse

Democracy in Crisis: Books Trump Should Read: "The Emperor," by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Democracy in Crisis: Against Normalization—journalism in the ages of Hitler and Trump

Like Fine Wine: Terpenes are what's next for weed

Steve Herin, a pot farmer in Pueblo, Colorado, who has won two Cannabis Cup prizes, can recall the first time he tasted good pot. As it happens, he says I sold it to him. This was more than 20 years ago in South Carolina, and though I don't recall selling him any, I know exactly what he is talking...

How to make caramel edibles and some cosmic cannabis oil

At this year's Cosmic Cocktail, an attendee handed me a caramel edible that was so potent its smell filled the AVAM elevator as I headed upstairs. It also kept me high for the whole evening. It wasn't only how stoned it got me but the whole presentation—it was wrapped in parchment paper and it...

We're late to the party but Gnocco in Brewers Hill is pretty much flawless

The Smell: Blacksauce Kitchen makes the jump to a brick and mortar location

Ate Dat: Abdu Ali muses on food as self care

Bongs Don't Cry, Except When They Do: Wildhoney release a weeded collection of solo tracks for Record Store Day

The Cure was kind of a great "stoner" band. No, it didn't have the guitar-noodling tropes of the '70s bong-rattling rock, nor a '90s grunge baked guitar fuzz and apathy. Robert Smith and the rest of the Cure focused more on Big Emotions: misanthropy, death, loneliness. His weren't just loves, they...

Wild Heart: On Stevie Nicks and her dogged tenderness

At Royal Farms Arena a couple weeks ago, CP's Performing Arts Editor Maura Callahan and I are standing among a swarm of people who all look like vaguely different amalgamations of a certain type of person I have known throughout my life—people I grew up going to church with, people I worked for,...

18 digressions about Hans-Joachim Roedelius

1. Diagonal composer Hans-Joachim Rodelius plays the Creative Alliance on Sunday night, part of a lineup that's a testament to the West German art rock subgenre "krautrock" and its influence on Baltimore. Also on the bill are drum-and-synth minimalists Wume (named after Wümme, the city where clamorous...

Caleb Stine and the Revelations brings country rock and quiet resistance

Remington gem Caleb Stine's country-folk at Trinacria Italian Cafe on Friday, Feb. 24, was full of moments that threatened to take one's breath away with their sincerity and craft, rousing a crowd into hoots, hollers, and claps over pizza and pasta. With the help of a six-piece dubbed the Revelations...

Lions, Tigers, and Blood: Garbage classic and John Waters favorite "Roar" mixes melodrama with real life massive scalp lacerations

It's not a good sign when your film opens with a title card proudly informing the audience that it is "with great pride that we display the seal of The American Humane Association. Although some scenes appear to show animals being injured, they were never actually hurt." Over the course of the...

Cool Story Bro: "Austerlitz" looks at Holocaust tourism amid endless self-documentation

Sergei Losnitza's "Austerlitz" takes a look at clashing forms of documentation—historical and social. With survivors dying, the Holocaust will soon live on as a scattered assortment of testimonies and artifacts, an undeniable record that nonetheless has to reckon with a rising tide of revisionism...

Total Entertainment Forever: Viewing "Videodrome," which screens at the Charles April 27, amid the end of net neutrality and right-wing Twitter

With grotesque, memorable imagery, David Cronenberg's "Videodrome" illustrates the ways in which media is used to gain power, wield influence, and even ruin lives. Much like the anchor of any noir film, Max Renn (James Woods) has questionable morals and his story involves a series of shadowy machinations...

Devin N. Morris creates imaginative spaces and softens structure in solo show, 'In A Dignified Fashion' at Terrault Contemporary

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...

Selfie Obliteration: On Yayoi Kusama's "Infinity Mirrors" and radical self-awareness

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...

"The Ground" takes on origins, labor, commerce, and legacy at the Hutzler Brothers Palace

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...

"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 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...

Mondawmin residents reflect on illumination and safety with light sculpture parade

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?...

Wickerham & Lomax remix and reimagine stories and styles from Odell's nightclub

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...

Group show at Gallery CA explores the many facets of identity

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...

As photographer and curator, Mickalene Thomas redefines the artist's muse

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...

Summer Of The Slam: How two fearless Baltimore poetry slam teams took over the nation

"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...

Jane Jacobs tells us a lot about cities, but a new biography "Eyes on the Street" doesn't tell us much about her

Mikita Brottman's "Maximum Security Book Club" offers a surprising look at the classics—and prison life

A new book about Adnan Syed delves into Baltimore's racial and religious divides

Suzie Doogan's experimental, experiential poetry spirals around overconsumption, grief, the internet

Everyman's ambitious new musical "Los Otros" brings import to isolation

Annex Theater draws noir mystery out of Baltimore in "The Shattering Frame"