The happiest man in the Western hemisphere is swaying unsteadily on the corner of Coastal Highway and 56th Street in Ocean City, yelling at the occupants of a black Honda Accord that is crawling through jammed traffic six feet in front of him. "DO A FUCKIN' BURNOUT!!!" he bellows at the laughing...
When Sheila Dixon calls me a little after 9:30 a.m., the day after she announced she was bringing her failed run for mayor back to life, she is leaving one interview and being driven to another one. She doesn't have a lot of time to spread her message. "My commitment is to the people of this city,"...
One of the most appealing aspects of the American Visionary Art Museum has been the way it has democratized art. Here was a museum saying you didn't need art-school credentials to make legitimate art—you could be a prisoner, a mental patient, a homeless person, a retired manual laborer and if your...
I finally got called for jury duty. This was my second summons in Baltimore, but the first got called off due to that most Baltimore of reasons: a broken water main downtown that closed all the courthouses for days, including my big day as a juror. Most folks would be excited to get to knock out...
This year's State of the Arts issue focuses on artists who are inclusive, daring, and ahead-of-the-curve—not comfortable sitting on the curve, or even man spreading on the curve, as so much oft-praised art in this city tends to be. In our cover story, “Balti Gurls on the Guerrilla Girls,” Balti...
Baltimore Beer Week begins on Friday. In its eighth year of “celebrating all things beer in the land of pleasant living,” the event sends you all over the city and beyond to try new beers, talk beers, honor beers, and all the rest. There's almost too much to preview (check baltimorebeerweek.com...
The sinkhole has been there so long it is hard to remember a time before the road caved in and the army of robots took over Centre Street, or what was left of it, in what came to seem like a titanic battle with the very earth itself as engineers in white hats stood and stared into the abyss, backlit,...
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,...
A baby who died last month after being beaten in May was ruled a murder, making nine for the week. Seven of the remaining eight homicides were committed in daylight. Two were double-shootings. There were 18 more murders last year by this date. Police arrested one murder suspect in New Jersey. Monday,...
When it comes to alcohol, there is a strange puritanism that sometimes sweeps through the city like a witch-hunt fever as well-meaning people—usually progressives—attempt to shut down bars or liquor stores. Sometimes, as in the plan to eliminate the licenses of liquor stores in "impoverished" neighborhoods,...
A new Baltimore City water billing system will save the owners of vacant properties more than $2 million annually, and other customers will have to pick up the slack. The windfall for those who own vacants—their water bills will be reduced by more than half—is a side-effect of Baltimore's new BaltiMeter...
"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...
↑ Ruby Grantees The Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance announced the nine recipients of their Rubys Artist Project Grants for literary and visual arts, and we here at City Paper were pleased to see some familiar names, including Susan Muaddi Darraj, who this year released the excellent short story...
Six murders is a light week in Baltimore these days. We're about 20 behind last year’s record pace. Monday, Oct. 3 1:56 p.m. Ricardo Goods Jr., an 18-year-old African-American man, was on the 2600 block of Robb Street in the Coldstream Homestead Montebello neighborhood when someone shot him multiple...
Baltimore was heading for a light murder week as the weekend ended, but then three people were killed on Sunday afternoon into Monday morning to keep up the vicious pace. This week, police also arrested a man for the May murder of a homeless Northern Virginia man in West Baltimore. Monday, September...
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...
Making beer is an art of compromise and tough decisions. One of the first big decisions Volker Stewart and his partners had to make, as they prepared to open the Brewer's Art, was cutting up their brand new 10 hectaliter, steam-jacketed, two-vessel brewhouse, a showpiece which they had bought in...More
I'm a regular at Broadway Diner (6501 Eastern Ave., [410] 631-5666, broadwaydiner1.com), the silver, shimmering restaurant at the corner of Eastern Avenue and Kane Street. It's a large, classic American diner with all the traditional food and a variety of options. This is a place made up of the...
For those who haven't had the pleasure, a Lime-A-Rita is a mix of Bud Light beer and, according to the Anheuser-Busch brewing company, "exciting margarita flavors." They come in tall, white cans and are decorated with an illustration of a cold, refreshing margarita. In addition to the more traditional...
I will preface this live review of The Insane Clown Posse at Baltimore Soundstage on Sept. 24, 2016, by confessing that, yes, I have dabbled in Juggalism. One Halloween a few years ago, I donned a Philadelphia Eagles jersey and a camo jacket, stuffed a pillow under my tank top, painted my face...
-Ami Dang, 'Sublimate' On this rugged pop track from her latest, "Uni Sun," Ami Dang, an Indian classical sublimator (she dubbed her approach "Bollywave" in a Tedx Talk back in 2013) crafts curly-cued, post-Timbaland, meta-orientalism—a more mindful and just plain valid version of the "Eastern"-tinged...
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...
As we crept through the woods behind the deactivated Granite Nike Missile Base in Baltimore County, Joe and I stopped for a noise—a rifle firing in the distance. For the first time on our two-day journey, I felt a pang of real, instinctive panic in my gut. Something bad could happen to us here....More
In "Blair Witch," Adam Wingard's sequel to "The Blair Witch Project," everyone's a cameraman. Literally: most characters are outfitted with cameras as mounted earpieces, allowing their perspective in a given scene to become our perspective. Not only is this extremely apt at a point in time where...
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...
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...
How do you sum up the pervasive, seemingly inescapable system of gentrification by means of abstract visualization? Can any work elicit the violence of gentrification—the lasting impact that loss of community has on already marginalized communities? With her solo show "Occupational Hazards" at...
I met with artist Malcolm Peacock at Druid Hill Park—the site of his piece "Let the Sun Set on You," happening this Monday, Oct. 3, at 6 p.m. sharp—to discuss his work, and we could not stop talking about death. Earlier this year, in his final undergrad semester at VCU, Malcolm sent a brief, cryptic...
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...
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...
"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...
"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...
"Wet Moon: Feeble Wanderings" by Sophie Campbell (Oni Press) Set in Savannah, Georgia, at an art school, graphic novel "Wet Moon" is a sprawling millennial soap opera (that's a good thing, by the way) that began in 2004 and consists of six volumes and a few hundred pages so far (this recent reissue...
When David Bowie and, more recently, Bradley Cooper took on the role of "The Elephant Man" on Broadway, both celebrities knew the weight of being stared at by the masses. Audiences gawked at Bowie and Cooper much like Victorian gawkers gathered to stare at one of history's most famous sideshow...