April 2008 Issue

april 2008 issue no. 46

The Secret Lives of Screen Painters • Identity Politics: What You Should Know About DNA Sampling

THE PRIVACY ISSUE

Exclusively at

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Living in decision. is th e d ou ma ve that y lo d ltimore’s n a e ar t of Ba outsid e p h te e s th to oing being in You’re g ast e means u V e on the e h T s r r te o n e a c n n urban 0 Alicea growing t s ts, either 85 te s fa the restauran f o e it e r n o o v is your fa ast. This n walk to a Harbor E c uth u o y ere Pazo, So h t: w s e d b o o e h Only th neighbor t’s here? a ’s coast, a h W . s ovie s, Fleming y m o e R , th e n tr e a v ark The ps and e ds, Landm ’ll o retail sho o F le o side, you Wh in , e d c n y o A J . s y the wa der, Jame more on n Moon Un e You v e ’s e ther menities. , a e s r m u iu o c m of pre AC. Of nd plenty a and the M , s g in il center. high ce indows, the sales w y b e g p r to la s enjoy online or ll us, go a c o s y in toda can move

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[

INSIDE THE CITY

]

360 o waterfront and skyline views

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green

Fresh, locally roasted coffee, loose leaf teas and brewing accessories.

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Our bark is as good as our bites.

“Local, fresh, healthy gourmet food.”

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Eco-Friendly, Fair Trade Global Gifts for you & your home!

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We provide efficient, professional natural hair services in a clean, holistic, and relaxing environment with use of natural or organic products.

Phone: 410.889.0287 www.naklecticnaturalhair.com

Recycle your newspapers, magazines, old mail, catalogs and mixed paper at the green and yellow bin. We pay you for the paper that is collected.

Stephany Porter, N.D., FABNO Licensed Naturopathic Doctor Healthy for the environment.

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Your only chance to tour a wide range of environmentally friendly homes! Learn what’s on the market now, and how you can turn your dream home into a healthier, more sustainable place to live.

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urbanite april 08

place baltimore greenweek

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We celebrate the traditions and ingredients of the Chesapeake region by cooking the best and freshest produce, meat, and fish we can find.

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Performing Home Energy Inspections© to improve home comfort and health while reducing costs and environmental impact.

bluehouse is your source for modern, green, and healthy furniture, flooring, housewares, gifts, and more. Located in stylish Harbor East near plenty of parking.

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Saturday, April 26th Buses Leave at 12:30 and 2:30 from EcoFestival Tickets are Free, but Space is Limited!

Register at www.BaltimoreGreenHomeTour.com or 410.889.3191

EcoFestival 2008

Offering an amazing selection of beads, silver, tools, chains, gemstones, books, classes & crafts.

Druid Hill Park by the Reservoir Saturday, April 26th (raindate – Sunday April 27th) 12 noon – 5pm

“Where Beads & Inspiration Meet”

Baltimore Green Week kicks off with the EcoFestival, an inspiring and enlightening Saturday festival for all communities in Baltimore. Entertaining events and resources that promote sustainable living are emphasized. Shuttles to the festival will be available from the Woodberry Light Rail stop.

Baltimore Green Week is a weeklong program comprising of community events, forums, lectures and hands-on activities throughout Baltimore city.

Our mission is to further the voice of organizations that promote a healthy living environment, and in turn healthy city and people.

For details: www.baltimoregreenweek.org

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Paul Strand. Edward Weston. Alfred Stieglitz. Weegee. Edward Steichen.

Man Ray. Dorothea Lange. Gordon Parks. Iconic. Timeless. Moving.

Through June 8!

See more than 150 striking vintage photographs at the BMA. Free!

Man Ray. Tears. 1930 negative, printed later.

The Baltimore Museum of Art, BMA 1988.421. ©2008 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris

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This exhibition is generously sponsored by the n ChArLeS & 31ST STreeTS

PnC Foundation.

443-573-1700

ArTBMA.org

Live Green at Overlook Clipper Mill.

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Jones Falls Expressway (I-83) south to Cold Spring Lane, exit 9A. Make a left onto Cold Spring Lane, a right onto Falls Road, a right at Union Avenue, a right onto Clipper Road and a left onto Clipper Park Road.

a special thanks to our project participants and sponsors.

the

project

Project Participants: Vic Frierson, Bruce Willen, Nolen Strals, Ivan Leshinsky, Baltimore School for the Arts senior Photo II class, Merlyn Rosenberg, Julie Gabrielli, Joshua Schwartz, Ellen Silbergeld, Peter Doo, Dana Reifler Amato, OluwaTosin Adegbola, Leon Faruq, Jann RosenQueralt, Mario Armstrong, Bobbi Macdonald, Aaron Meyers, Mina Cheon, and Markand Thakar Sponsors:

for more information on the 2008 teams visit www.urbaniteproject.com

The Associated, McDaniel College, Provident Bank, Rubeling Associates, Spectrum Enterprises, Center Stage, Taste, and Georgies of Canton

GET $3000 TOWARD THE PURCHASE OF YOUR NEW HOME IN BALTIMORE CITY FREE ADMISSION • Choose from four different tours and view sample homes for sale.

• Preview listings of homes or sale in the Western region of Baltimore.

• Participate in homeownership and renovation education sessions.

HOMEBUYING FAIR & NEIGHBORHOOD TOURS OF BALTIMORE’S WESTERN REGION

SATURDAY, MAY 10TH, 9AM – 2PM

• Meet with knowledgeable exhibitors.

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410.637.3750 OR WWW.LIVEBALTIMORE.COM , Pre-register online for this free event at www.LiveBaltimore.com/bibwest

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urbanite april 08

c o n t e n t s

f e a t u r e s

april 2008 issue no. 46

52

keynote: the watchman interview by joab jackson

video surveillance expert frank baitman has a clear view of a future with too few privacy protections.

58

the test by deborah rudacille

maryland law enforcement is poised to expand its use of dna sampling, part of a national movement to turn genetic information into a powerful policing tool. can technology correct the biases of the criminal justice system, or make them even worse?

52 62

the painted veil by david dudley

john oktavec’s grandfather painted screens to keep prying eyes out of east baltimore rowhouses, passing the gift of turning windows into works of art down to his son and grandson. but the city that john remembers has changed, and so has john.

64

double exposure local photographers take a second look at the greatest images of 20th century photography

62

d e p a r t m e n t s

64

on the cover: john oktavec created this image of a traditional “red bungalow,” the iconic baltimore painted-screen subject.

21

what you’re saying

25

what you’re seeing

27

what you’re writing

31

corkboard

35

have you heard

wanna bet?

a streetcar named nostalgia

secrets: the cyber-confessional, falling for the enemy, and it came from the deep

this month: black history, british song, and new orleans jazz

touching the void. plus: flashlights, timber, and a miami-inspired lounge

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E PR

E PR

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L SO

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L SO

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Alex Cooper The Most Trusted Name Since 1924

real estate saleS real estate auctions antique auctions gallery of rugs 908 York Road • Towson, MD

410.828.4838

alexcooper.com

c o n t e n t s

41

baltimore observed starting small

can micro-loans lift americans out of poverty? by lionel foster

april 2008 issue no. 46

45

deadwood where baltimore’s trees go to die by greg hanscom

47

a grand old party a bar turns back the clock for ronald reagan’s birthday by michael anft

49

group therapy six recovering addicts find a natural high by robert c. knott

68

fiction refuge by jane delury

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70

space

special delivery an old postal sorting station gets a new lease on life by marcus charleston

73

living in the past rowhouse as live-in museum by marianne amoss

77

eat/drink

cold comfort you: on a raw food diet by martha thomas

73

85

reviewed: tapas teatro and ra sushi

87

wine & spirits: the cocktail that saved the british navy

89

art/culture

the fast and the furious baltimore club music has spread the city’s beat around the world by stephen janis

97

the geography of community turning neighborhood residents into cartographers by greg hanscom

plus: shining lives, tingling spines, the color of freedom, and more

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110

eye to eye urbanite’s creative director alex castro monkeys around this month online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com: video: the baltimore station band sings the blues interview: a conversation with author jane delury photos: see the bma’s complete looking now exhibition of photography and tour brian jensen’s old goucher rowhouse food: raw food recipes from the yabba pot’s skai davis w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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Issue 46 April 2008 Publisher Tracy Ward Durkin Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com Creative Director Alex Castro General Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com Editor-in-Chief David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com Managing Editor Marianne Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com Senior Editor Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com Copy Editor Angela Davids Staff Writer Lionel Foster Lionel@urbanitebaltimore.com Contributing Editors Karen Houppert, Susan McCallum-Smith Editorial Interns Charles A. Hohman, Rebecca Messner Design/Production Manager Lisa Macfarlane Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffic/Production Coordinator Bellee Gossett Bellee@urbanitebaltimore.com Designer Jason Okutake Staff Photographers La Kaye Mbah, Jason Okutake Production Interns Ashley Kimbro, Bob Myaing Web Coordinator/Videographer Chris Rebbert Senior Account Executives Cathy Bowen Cathy@urbanitebaltimore.com Janet Brown Janet@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executive Michele Holcombe Michele@urbanitebaltimore.com Advertising Sales Assistant Carol Longdon Carol@urbanitebaltimore.com Sales/Accounting Assistant Iris Goldstein Iris@urbanitebaltimore.com Marketing Kathleen Dragovich Kathleen@urbanitebaltimore.com Marketing/Administrative Assistant La Kaye Mbah Administrative Assistant Lindsay Hanson Founder Laurel Harris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050.

Subscription price: $18 per year.

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2008, Urbanite LLC. All rights reserved.

Urbanite (ISSN 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. If you know of a location that urbanites frequent and would recommend placing the magazine there, please contact us at 410-243-2050.

Postmaster: Send address changes to Urbanite Subscriptions, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211.

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The new pretty. romantic style reinvented

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Patrick J. Byrne, M.D. FACS Director, Division of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery

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urbanite april 08

contributors

editor’s note

photo by La Kaye Mbah

courtesy of Frank Klein

courtesy of Joab Jackson

At what point

Joab Jackson is a senior technology editor for Government Computer News, where he covers how federal agencies use emerging technologies. A former tech columnist for the Baltimore City Paper, Jackson also contributes to the online news site of National Geographic. For this month’s “Keynote” interview (p. 52), he spoke with surveillance industry leader Frank Baitman. “I think we all have a deeply ingrained belief in the idea that progress can be advanced by shiny new gadgetry,” Jackson says. “The real usefulness of video surveillance cameras will become evident when the hype goes away. No one debates the usefulness of mailboxes any more, but they are everywhere.”

Frank Klein is a contributing photographer with City Paper and Johns Hopkins Magazine. His Urbanite debut appeared in May 2005 when he captured images of Baltimore’s Latino community in Fells Point. For many years, Klein has volunteered and worked for peace-building organizations in Sarajevo, Germany, Kosovo, and Baltimore. Through his photography, he aims to “get little slices of culture and society people don’t generally get to see, portrayed honestly.” His nighttime image of a throng of dancers accompanies this month’s “Art/ Culture” feature on Baltimore club music (p. 89).

Editorial intern Rebecca Messner is a senior at Johns Hopkins University, where she is set to earn her bachelor’s degree from the Writing Seminars in May. Originally from Summit, New Jersey, Messner has also written for the Johns Hopkins News-Letter and Time Out New York. In this month’s “Have You Heard” department (p. 37), Messner profiles Baltimore Chop, a bookstore, cafe, and live music venue that, like Baltimore itself, she finds delightfully unconventional.

did human beings, the planet’s most social animals, decide that we wanted to be alone?

The need for solitary contemplation seems an odd evolutionary appendage: Alone, we are weak and slow and easily devoured. How did our ancestors who strayed from the tribe evade the carnivorous emus and survive the Stone Age? Obviously some did, because we are a society obsessed with privacy. Some call it a right, but it is more like a precious commodity—one purchased by a privileged class at the expense of those who must live their lives in public. Personal space is also one of the many resources with which Americans tend to be uniquely profligate. The average home in the United States tops 2,400 square feet now (it was less than one thousand square feet in 1950), even as the size of the American family shrinks. We seek to live more alone than any other people on earth.

Social scientists and anti-sprawl advocates scold suburbanites for this land- and energy-sucking retreat from their fellow humans, but it’s hard to fight a force—that Westward Ho! quest for more elbow room—all but enshrined as a national virtue. Combine that axiom with a trend toward urbanization—a slim majority of people worldwide are now city dwellers, and in America the wealthy gravitate toward a few urban centers—and you get a curious disconnect: concentrations of increasingly isolated people, struggling to redefine private and public lives.

Fresh out of college, I lived in a classic Baltimore rowhouse—a dwelling that, unlike the teeming multistory tenement, can shelter large numbers of people in relative comfort and privacy. It was a narrow slot of a home on a busy street, and during the day, neighborhood teenagers would sit on its stoop to eat, yell, and do whatever else teenagers feel they can do in public but not at home. I was working from home (OK, unemployed) in those days, and to me these afternoon step-loiterers represented an unbearable violation of the thin line between street and house. They might as well have been on the couch, which was only about three feet away. Raised in the splendid isolation of the American suburbs, I couldn’t process this in-your-face infringement of my private domain.

It wasn’t until I spoke with Maryland folklorist Elaine Eff recently for a profile of third-generation Baltimore screen painter John Oktavec (“The Painted Veil,” p. 62) that I understood the proper historical relationship between rowhouse and city. Instead of retreating from the living room or shooing the kids away, I should have planted a big fat armchair in front of the window and surveyed the streetlife from behind a painted screen, which renders the occupant all but invisible to passersby. Keeping an eye on the community to which you belong is not only a foundation principle of a healthy neighborhood, it’s a sociologically correct way of realigning the watcher and the watched.

In our era, technology is getting in on this act, offering rubbernecking opportunities that John Oktavec’s grandfather never would have imagined. It’s a process that Deborah Rudacille explores in her sobering inquiry into the expansion of DNA sampling in the criminal justice system (“The Test,” p. 58). The balance between security and privacy, among the consuming dilemmas of the post-9/11 world, led to this month’s “Keynote” conversation with surveillance industry leader Frank Baitman, who ponders the implication of a future in which we are all, rich and poor alike, living in the public eye (“The Watchman,” p. 52).

Appropriately, perhaps, Urbanite is supersizing its own abode this month—we’ve knocked out a wall and built an addition onto the magazine’s “Space” department (p. 70), which will now comprise two stories. We’ll offer glimpses into private homes, take stock of new public buildings, and generally roam the region in search of compelling human environments every month. Think of it as another opportunity to peer through your neighbors’ windows, from the privacy of your own home.

photo by Sofia Silva

—David Dudley Raised in Argentina, award-winning photographer and artist Sofia Silva (www.sofiasilva.com) has been living and working in Baltimore since 2001.

Her photos have appeared in such publications as Baltimore magazine and Photo District News (PDN). You can see Silva’s work in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Looking Now: BMA Digital Photography Project, in a solo show at Baltimore’s C. Grimaldis Gallery beginning April 2, and as part of this month’s feature story “The Test” (p. 58).

Is it safe?

Coming Next Month: Violence in Baltimore: A special issue with guest editor Phil Leaf, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence

www.urbanitebaltimore.com

F O R

B A LT I M O R E ’ S

C U R I O U S

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LAKEFRONT LIVING HAS NEVER BEEN SO AFFORDABLE SO WHY WAIT? BEAZER.COM

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what you’re saying

Bad Bet I found your article about the potential financial windfall from casino gambling in Baltimore (“Place Your Bets,” March) to be misleading. Your portrayal of the benefits Detroit derives from its three casinos lacks critical context.

While the casinos may indeed boost gross revenues, Detroit’s steep economic decline continues unabated. The city’s tax collections are up only 1.9 percent from 2000 to 2005 (hardly keeping up with the 13.5 percent inflation rate over that period), while the city’s debt obligations reached $931 million. And far from making Detroit “more livable,” the casinos and their massive parking garages have only added to the dead spaces in the downtown area. Yes, tax collections would be lower without the casinos, but there is little evidence that suggests that the city overall has or will reap any substantial benefit (and this is before any social costs have been weighed).

Let’s be clear: Detroit is one of the only large American cities underperforming Baltimore. While elected officials may hunger for Detroit’s casino revenues, it is hardly “forward thinking” to present such a simplistic view of the city’s economics. As you describe, “the liquid nature of the city’s casino cut—the city receives its share daily share at 3 p.m.—makes [casinos] especially attractive.” This doesn’t sound attractive to me; it sounds like an addiction.

—Daniel Campo is assistant professor in the Institute of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

All Ears In the March issue of Urbanite, a letter to the editor

by Adam Milam (“Moving Up, Moving Out”) questioned whether anyone was paying attention to the lower-income residents who may be displaced as a result of the redevelopment of east and west Baltimore. In Baltimore’s New East Side, East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI) is doing just that, and has worked closely with neighborhood residents to ensure that staying in or returning to the community is possible for anyone who wants it.

We conduct responsible relocation for those who leave the community. Homeowners have averaged $153,000 in relocation benefits and renters an average of $60,000. An independent survey conducted by ABT Associates (view on our website www.ebdi.org) found that 90 percent of relocated households were very satisfied with the relocation process and 80 percent believed they were better off than before. EBDI will very soon offer fully rehabbed homes at sale prices affordable to current residents.

Ashland Commons is the second apartment building to open in the new community. Designed for working families, rents for the seventy-eight units range from $620 to $1,020 per month. The first building is a seventy-four-unit apartment building for low-income seniors.

The answer to Mr. Milam’s question is “yes”— someone is paying attention.

—John T. “Jack” Shannon is president and CEO of EBDI. Bittersweet Symphony In order for an audience to judge the caliber of a live performance of great music—whether symphonic, operatic, or chamber—the audience must have some

familiarity with the symphonic repertoire and consider great music a valued component of a civilized society. Listeners so engaged can determine whether a performance has earned a standing ovation or should receive mere polite applause. An audience that rises to its feet at the conclusion of a technically accurate but subjectively empty interpretation of symphonic music is cheering the team and its quarterback (the conductor), not the musical performance.

Here, then, is the root cause of the demise of the symphony orchestra tradition in America (“Downbeat,” February). The great musical compositions of Western civilization cannot be turned into populist, insta-fluff entertainment. They ask for a long-term relationship between the composer, performers, and listeners. Not being ephemeral, they will not take hold in a culturally ephemeral society.

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V

CityLit Festival

Celebrating the Literary Arts in Baltimore

ELItE

Dan Fesperman, The Amateur Spy

Saturday, April 19 1 p.m.

Three bestselling authors from Baltimore read and discuss their new novels. Hosted by Tom Hall, Culture Editor, Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast, WYPR

Laura Lippman, Another Thing to Fall

Central Library Wheeler Auditorium citylitproject.org or prattlibrary.org

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Most symphony orchestras in America will find themselves performing more Santa Claus Specials, more Star Trek Spectaculars, and a lot less Beethoven, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky. Eventually, they will reach the point where they are symphony orchestras in name only.

—Clifton Bunin lives in Mount Vernon and has been attending BSO concerts for decades.

Mr. Wigler seems to think the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra need not be a culturally relevant institution (“Downbeat,” February). That it need not worry about its viability. And that the community should try very hard, somehow, to become “savvy” listeners who tend to grow into the arrogant, dying minority that falls asleep in the expensive seats.

If Mr. Wigler had listened to recent BSO performances with a clear, non-pretentious perspective, he would have heard many examples of “rubato” (tempo flexibility). I heard it many times during both performances of the CSI: Beethoven series, but I somehow doubt that that makes me a “savvy listener” in Mr. Wigler’s opinion (even though I have a bachelor’s degree in music), since I heard the rubato when he did not; loved the populist, television twist on Beethoven; and love what Alsop is doing with the BSO overall. It is no exaggeration to say that the two 11-year-old boys I took to CSI: Beethoven events were quiet and on the edge of their seats. That may not be savvy enough for Mr. Wigler, but it is a critical step for future generations to become passionate about music. That should make the BSO excited and proud, no matter how many critics complain.

Mr. Wigler seems to represent the old guard: arrogant, out-of-touch, and scared to have “lay people” like orchestral music. My advice to him is, If you don’t like it, stay home, while the rest of us—including my non-savvy 11-year-olds—make repeated visits to the BSO to listen to and learn about great music.

mances at the very highest artistic level with a relevance to the community in which we live. Filling the hall and maintaining financial solvency are consistent with these primary objectives. In Marin Alsop, Baltimore and Washington audiences are fortunate to have an artistic leader who is passionate about the future of the art form and its place in people’s lives. As a first-class conductor, an innovative programmer, a gifted communicator, and a visionary in her field, she possesses qualities that are to be applauded, not denigrated.

Mr. Wigler is naturally entitled to his opinion, but quality journalism should make clear distinction between personal views and fact. Furthermore, in this instance, some perspective and fact-checking would have been in order, and to that end there are several points made by Mr. Wigler which warrant amplification or correction. We encourage Urbanite readers to read the unabridged version of this letter at www.urbanitebaltimore.com for clarification regarding the BSO’s current season programming.

The BSO remains committed to developing new audiences for classical music in Baltimore and beyond. Our new music director Marin Alsop has drawn well deserved attention from around the world to classical music and to the talents of the Baltimore Symphony.

Going forward, it is our hope that Urbanite will support this positive momentum and what is clearly a new and exciting artistic era in Baltimore. Regarding the BSO’s accessible ticket pricing and programming for next season, we hope Urbanite readers will check out our 2008–2009 season announcement, which can be found on our website (www.bsomusic.org).

—Paul Meecham is president and CEO of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Michael G. Bronfein is the BSO’s board chairman.

For a longer version of this letter, and a re sponse from Steve Wigler, go to www.urbanite baltimore.com.

—Jeff Trueman is an attorney, and the drum mer for Baltimore band Donegal X-Press.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was greatly disappointed to read Steve Wigler’s recent polemic in Urbanite (“Downbeat,” February), which, in our view, is a misleading attempt to take the pulse of the BSO’s current programming and performances under the leadership of new music director Marin Alsop. Mr. Wigler does raise a fundamental question for the modern-day orchestra and its leadership: Should orchestras be art-driven or commercedriven? Of course, the answer is, both. The BSO’s mission is to consistently deliver perfor-

Elizabeth Dubin, member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities; Marshall Clarke; Youthlight student Marcus Ross; and First Lady Laura Bush

courtesy of President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities

update

In January, Urbanite contributing photographer Mar shall Clarke received the prestigious Coming Up Taller Award on behalf of the Youthlight Photography Project and the Hampden Family Center. This national award for outstanding after-school arts programming is awarded to only fifteen organizations in the U.S. each year. Clarke founded Youthlight, a thirty-five-week after-school photography program headquartered at the Hampden Family Center, in 2001 with the help of an OSI Fellow grant.

—Marianne Amoss Marc Steiner is down but not out. Steiner, the longtime host of WYPR’s noontime public affairs talk show (and August 2007 Urbanite guest editor), got his walking papers February 1, much to the surprise of listeners and some staffers. Station management cited Steiner’s declining ratings and what they called overly Baltimore-centric content, but they got an earful from more than three hundred of Steiner’s fans who turned out for a February 20 meeting of the station’s community advisory board.

The outcry convinced the station to postpone its winter fund drive (cars in the parking lot sported “No Marc = No Money” bumper stickers) but not to give Steiner his show back. Five days after the meeting, longtime Sun columnist Dan Rodricks debuted a new show, Midday, in Steiner’s old timeslot. Meanwhile, Steiner, joined by his former WYPR producers Jessica Phillips and Justin Levy, has turned his energy to his nonprofit Center for Emerging Media. Their first project is a series of podcasts about The Wire. “We’re just trying to get our sea legs and get back on track,” Steiner says. “We definitely want to get back to talking to all the folks who used to listen to us.”

Check out marcsteinerblog.wordpress.com.

—Greg Hanscom

We want to hear what you’re saying. Email us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211.

Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. You can also comment on our website (www. urbanitebaltimore.com/forum).

More tiny, lovable, and all-but-bomb-proof Katrina Cottages may soon be sprouting along the Gulf Coast.

(See “Little House on the Bayou” in Urbanite’s January 2008 issue, or go to katrinacottagehousing.org.) The Federal Emergency Management Agency vowed in February to redouble its efforts to find new living quarters for the thirty-eight thousand families that have been living in government-issued trailers since Hurricane Katrina. The announcement followed revelations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that many of the trailers contain dangerous levels of formaldehyde.

—G.H. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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what you’re seeing

The end of the line at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum on Falls Road. It's a shot that appealed to me for its melancholy sense of a past era.

—Steve Sullivan

The “What You’re Seeing” department is the place for photography that captures the true spirit of Baltimore. Urbanite staffers will choose our favorites to publish in the magazine and on our website.

Along with your photograph, please include a brief description of the image and your contact information. Go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com/ wyseeing for more information on how to submit your photograph. Photos can be e-mailed to wyseeing@urbanitebaltimore.com.

PLEASE NOTE: By sending us a photograph, you are giving us full permission to publish the image in its entirety. This permission extends to the models and/or subjects in the photograph. It is essential that all people in the photograph be aware that the image may be published. Please read the limited license agreement on our website, www.urbanitebaltimore.com/wyseeing.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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PS-2008 FL Urbanite 2-28.qxd

2/28/08

9:47 AM

Page 1

We invite you to visit your child’s future.

May 15 at 9am.

• “Take a First Look”—a spring open house, First-year Kindergarten to Grade 12, Thursday, May 15, 9-10:30am.

• Meet the educators—dedicated to teaching children how to think, not what to think.

• Tour the campus—classes, science and math wing, arts center and theaters, athletic center, sports fields, and ponds.

“Take a First Look” First-year Kindergarten to Grade 12, Thursday, May 15, 9-10:30am.

Reservations required, 410-339-4130 admission@parkschool.net

• Ask questions concerning academics, arts, athletics, SATs, college admission, and long-term outcomes.

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Baltimore Yoga Village Open House Celebrating our first anniversary!

April 6th 9 a.m. - 7 p.m.

Enjoy healthy refreshments and a Traditional Indian Art Show

FREE Trial Yoga Class

9:15 a.m. (Beginner) 10:45 a.m. (All Levels) 2 p.m. (Family Yoga all ages) 3-7 p.m. Open House, View Traditional Indian Art

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Baltimore Yoga Village promotes peace in our hearts and in our city.

We offer... ~Walk-In Yoga Classes 7 days per week ~Therapeutic Massage by appointment ~Yoga Vacations and Healing Retreats ~Arts Programming for all ages

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what you’re writing

photo by Branden Rush

secrets I got a crape myrtle

seedling last spring from a friend who did not need another tree on his already lush lawn. It was a wonderful gift.

I’m not a gardener, but I transplanted it carefully in my Northeast Baltimore backyard, and padded out to it every day with nurturing words and a bucketful of water. To my surprise, it sprouted from knee-high to waist-high in just a few months, and even flowered a bit. I was in awe of the hot pink buds that burst from its spindly limbs.

On a cold day in early January, I went out to check on my fledgling tree. Something was very wrong—all that was left of my crape myrtle was about ten inches of the central stalk. The rest of that stalk—about twenty inches—and all of its skinny side branches were completely gone. Someone must have cut them off, with what may have been a pocketknife.

As crimes go in Baltimore, this unfortunate mystery is insignificant, warranting little more than a tsk-tsk. And I say a prayer of thanks that it wasn’t a car tire (or me!) at the sharp end of that knife. Still, it’s disheartening to see this sweet, spunky crape myrtle hacked down to a very forlorn-looking stick in the ground.

Why would someone so viciously attack that tree? I simply don’t know. All I know for sure is that the culprit is left with nothing but a sad secret.

—Louis Balsamo writes from the attic of a Formstone house in Hamilton.

Most Saturdays, our neighborhood group went to a matinee at a local movie house. We either went to the Avalon on lower Park Heights Avenue or

up the street to the Uptown, which was across from the Pimlico library. On this particular afternoon in 1955, the five of us—Billy, Bobby, Jim, Jimmy, and myself—went to the Uptown to see Creature from the Black Lagoon. I knew it was really scary because my brother had seen it, and he had repeatedly frightened me with his description of the creature. By the time I entered the Uptown’s darkened theater, I was more than nervous.

After the cartoon—during which Bobby threw all of his green Jujyfruits candies at the screen—and after the coming attractions—when the angry people who got hit by green Jujyfruits finally settled down— the main attraction began. Right away, the spooky music was enough to make me hold my hands over my ears. Shortly thereafter was a scene that caused me to bury my head in the theater’s seat: A beautiful woman sat dangling her ankles in the lagoon as the

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creature swam underwater toward her.

Later, as the creature began stalking its victims on land, it all became too much for me. I told the guys that I was going to the candy counter. After buying my Tootsie Rolls, I was still so scared that I left the theater and went to the library. I calmly read and kept an eye on the time. When the movie ended, I met the guys on the sidewalk outside the Uptown.

I fibbed that, after buying my candy, I sat in the back row. My buddies never questioned my explanation, and to this day none of them knows my secret.

—Phillip F. Lieske is a part-time math adjunct at Carroll Community College. He lives in the Prettyboy watershed area of Baltimore County with his wife, three cats, and one horse, and is hoping to one day publish a book of original jokes.

Connie stuck out her pinky finger and waited for me to hook mine to hers in a swear to keep my mouth shut. Since that wasn’t enough to totally convince her, I offered a swear on my mother’s life. We were 10 years old, sitting in the alley next to the hopscotch. It was late August.

“I don’t know. Are you sure you won’t tell anyone? Promise,” she said.

Geez. I stood up and crossed my heart and hoped to die.

“Okay, okay,” she said. That was enough. I positioned myself a little closer to her and tried not to appear eager, like what she had to say was no big deal, but my mind raced through the guesses of what the secret could be. When she finally spit it out, I was speechless.

“I like Doug. I mean, I really, really like him. He is so cute. Don’t you think he’s cute?”

I was positive she could see I was repulsed. Connie and I had been battling against Doug’s brutality since we were 4 years old. Yesterday, he hurled quarter-sized pieces of concrete at Julie simply because he wanted her fried bologna and ketchup sandwich, sending her screaming into her house with the sandwich clutched so firmly in her hand it oozed between her fingers like white Play-Doh. In my mind, all I could see were the blue-eyed stares and plastic smiles on the faces of our Barbies that he had dismembered and tossed into nearby trees. Some were still hanging by their hair. I remembered the taste of the dry dirt that quickly became mud in my mouth as he forced me into a face-plant during a game of King of the Hill, how angry I was to

have to sit out while I picked the blades of grass out of my braces.

Truly disappointed, I said, “I think I hear my mother calling me,” and got up to leave before she could catch the look on my face. I knew she was my best friend, but I found myself sorry I had wasted all those swears on her.

—Melinda Pedone Cianos is a student at CCBC and a mother of three. She lives in Towson and plans to continue her education at College of Notre Dame in the fall.

“Shandi’s got a secret,

Miss Heather.”

“Oh yeah?” I was used to this game. The girls would use it to evoke some sort of response from me. They liked feeling like the power was theirs. Like the ball was in their court. The secret was only a secret from me. Their teacher, seemingly powerless, was the recipient of many such secrets.

Jamal like Lakeisha. Kent not in school ’cause he got ringworm. My aunt say you think you all that because of your blond hair, Miss Heather. My mom and her boyfriend were doing the nasty in her room, that’s why she locks the door.

Without any sort of prodding on my part, it was pretty much inevitable that within a matter of minutes the secret would be let out. I looked over at Shandi. Surprisingly, she wasn’t a part of the gaggle of girls surrounding me at my desk.

It was 2:55. The day had been a good one. I smiled at my students. After all, they were just being gossipy girls. I couldn’t help but adore them and their unavoidable pre-teen tendencies. I gave them my attention.

“It’s real secret, Miss Heather.”

I nodded and tried not to smirk.

“Shandi’s havin’ a baby.”

I looked over at the little girl at her desk. She was a baby. My mind took me back to yesterday, when I knelt beside her desk to help her with long division and noticed the silly pink feather atop her pencil that danced with every number she inscribed on her paper. It took her longer than anyone else to learn, but she refused to give up.

That was yesterday, when her biggest obstacle was overcoming long division. That was yesterday, and today her pink-feathered pencil was gone.

years ago. In that time, she has found her niche: writing, teaching, playing, and loving life in Charm City.

Earlier this year, a friend told me about the website Postsecret.com, a blog that asks people to send in postcards with their deepest, darkest secrets.

Every Sunday, the blog displays twenty new secrets, all anonymous and highly scandalous. I spend half of each Sunday in front of the computer, checking every ten minutes for the secrets to go up, just so I can see someone’s private life posted on the Internet.

I wonder if anyone sits in front of their computer wondering if one of the secrets is mine, just like I spend every Sunday wondering if one of the twenty secrets belongs to someone I know.

—Carson Satterfield enjoys playing the guitar and writing nonfiction. She lives with her family in northern Baltimore County, along with her donkeys, goats, cats, dogs, and many, many secrets.

“What You’re Writing” is the place for creative nonfiction from our readers. Each month, we pick a topic. Use the topic as a springboard into your own life and send us a true story inspired by that month’s theme. Only nonfiction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We reserve the right to edit heavily for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. Due to libel and invasion-of-privacy issues, we reserve the right to print the piece under your initials. Submissions should be typed (and if you cannot type, please print clearly).

Only one submission per topic, please.

Send your essay to Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 or e-mail your story to WhatYoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore. com. Please keep submissions under four hundred words; longer submissions may not be read due to time constraints. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned.

Topic

Deadline

Publication

Keeping Score Theft Saying Yes

Apr 4, 2008 May 2, 2008 June 6, 2008

June 2008 July 2008 Aug 2008

—Heather Fleming found herself in Baltimore accidentally on purpose about two and a half

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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Westminster,

maryland

s e n s e t h e

engage yo u r s e n s e s .

At McDaniel College you will develop new t a s t e s , both in and out of the classroom.

You will learn to s m e l l the difference between fact and fiction, and to form opinions in grounded logic. You will f e e l the challenge of academic rigor, as well as the comfort of belonging to an authentic community where students come first. You will begin to h e a r your inner voice—and trust it. At McDaniel College you will discover your future through numerous research, travel, and internship opportunities. Come s e e for yourself.

www.mcdaniel.edu/admissions T wo College Hill wesTMinsTer, MD 21157 800-638-5005

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urbanite april 08

d i f f e r e n c e

CORKBOARD CORK Preservation Hall Jazz Band

Apr 8, 7 p.m.

For forty-seven years, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band—named after the 258year-old edifice in New Orleans’ French Quarter—has served as an ambassador of New Orleans’ raucous, swinging sound. Touring behind its recent CD/DVD box set, Made in New Orleans: The Hurricane Sessions, PHJB stops in Annapolis for one night only.

Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts 801 Chase St., Annapolis $30, $25 for MHCA members 410-280-5640 marylandhall.org

24th Annual Black Memorabilia Show

Apr 12, 10 a.m.–7 p.m.

Black history comes to life at this one-day event, with books, figurines, stamps, toys, paintings, jewelry, and other artifacts available for viewing and sale. The show includes special exhibits on Buffalo Soldiers (black Army soldiers who participated in America’s westward expansion) and the Black Panther Party, plus autograph sessions with Negro League baseball players.

Montgomery County Fairgrounds 16 Chestnut St., Gaithersburg $6, children 12 and under free 301-649-1915 johnsonshows.com

King’s College Choir

Apr 13, 5:30 p.m.

Although Britain’s 567-year-old King’s College Choir is arguably the standardbearer for the British choral arts, its primary function is to sing daily Mass in its home chapel in Cambridge. Baltimore hosts the last performance of the choir’s spring 2008 U.S. tour. The repertoire includes medieval, Renaissance, and modern works.

Cathedral of Mary Our Queen 5200 N. Charles St. $33, $17 students 410-516-7164 shriverconcerts.org

Remembering the Riots

Apr 15, 5–7 p.m.

Forty years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the Jewish Museum of Maryland remembers the subsequent riots that broke out in Baltimore, leaving six dead, dozens injured, and thousands arrested. Jessica Elfenbein, professor and director of the Center for Baltimore Studies at the University of Baltimore, leads a discussion about the Jewish experience during this tempestuous time.

Jewish Museum of Maryland 15 Lloyd St. $10, $5 for JMM members 410-732-6400 ext. 14 jhsm.org

5th Annual CityLit Festival

Apr 19, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

This year’s CityLit Festival is an embarrassment of riches: Speakers include Dr. Ben Carson, director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital; Manil Suri, novelist and professor of mathematics at UMBC; crime writer Laura Lippman; former Sun reporter Dan Fesperman; and Caldecott honoree Carole Boston Weatherford. Urbanite is a sponsor of this event.

Enoch Pratt Free Library 400 Cathedral St. Free 410-396-5430 citylitproject.org

Baltimore Green Week

Apr 26–May 2

The eco-friendly organizers of Baltimore Green Week present a diverse lineup of events for consumers, the civic minded, children, and families. On April 26, the daylong EcoFestival will bring together more than one hundred vendors and exhibitors in Druid Hill Park. Other highlights of the week include a Green Job Fair and talk by environmental justice activist Van Jones; a discussion by Mayor Sheila Dixon of her ongoing plan for a cleaner, greener Baltimore; and a tour of a trash interceptor in the Inner Harbor.

Call 410-225-0330 or go to baltimoregreenweek.org for dates, times, fees, and locations of events

Photo credits from top to bottom: no credit; courtesy of Bert Orlitzsky; no credit; Baltimore News American Photograph Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries; courtesy of CityLit Project; no credit

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The Residences at Oella Mill—Unique Apartment Homes on the Patapsco River.

The Genuine Article.

Incredible views of the wooded hillsides gaze through huge, factory-style windows.

Classic exposed-brick walls complement state-of-the-art appliances. At Oella Mill, the beautifully preserved historic industrial structure stands in sharp contrast to run-of-themill apartment buildings. And it’s your one-of-a-kind opportunity to live in modern luxury with genuine historic ambiance.

Studios, 1- & 2-bedroom apartments & lofts and 2-level apartment homes priced from $1,227.

888-715-5401 | oellamill.com AMENITIES: MILL RACE LOUNGE | 3-ROOM FITNESS CLUB (WITH GYM, CARDIO THEATER AND A STUDIO) | LIBRARY | MILL RACE HIKING TRAIL | KAYAK AND BIKE STORAGE | CONCIERGE-STYLE SERVICE | PARKING (COVERED AND OPEN) | SCENIC OBSERVATION DECK | RIVERSIDE OPEN-AIR PICNIC AND PARTY ROOM FEATURES: ALL UTILITIES INCLUDED (INDIVIDUALLY CONTROLLED) | DESIGNER KITCHEN WITH CUSTOM CABINETRY | TOPBRAND STAINLESS STEEL APPLIANCES AND KOHLER® FIXTURES | HUGE, FACTORY-STYLE WINDOWS | CLASSIC EXPOSED BRICK WALLS IN MOST APARTMENTS | WASHER AND DRYER IN EACH APARTMENT | INCREDIBLE RIVER AND WOODED HILLSIDE VIEWS | PET-FRIENDLY COMMUNITY | 24-HOUR MAINTENANCE GUARANTEED

simply stone with a personal touch

kitchens and bathrooms: granite • marble • soapstone • silestone • caesarstone • zodiaq

Spring Special $55 per sq. ft

Call today and receive $250 off

(offer expires 4/30/08)

(any work of 40 sq. ft or more. Offer expires 4/30/08)

410.526.ROCK (7625) WWW.SIMPLYSTONE.BIZ w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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Be stronger than your excuses.

Let’s make a deal: you motivate yourself to show up, we’ll motivate you to exercise.

We never run low on inspiration: over 100 group exercise classes, 4 saltwater

pools, new cardio equipment with personal viewing screens, and lots of other fun amenities will keep you moving. Still not convinced? Try our Results Guaranteed Weight Loss Program—watching the pounds melt away is very motivating. Visit macwellness.com today—stop dreading exercise and start looking forward to it.

Join any MAC and get one month FREE.*

4 saltwater pools : over 100 group exercise classes : weight loss programs : Results Guaranteed : over 160 new cardio machines : 3 clubs for the price of 1 Timonium: 110 West Timonium Road, 410.453.9111 | Harbor East: 655 President Street, 410.625.5000 | macwellness.com

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*Offer expires April 30, 2008. urbanite april 08

have you heard

compiled by lionel foster

Bienvenidos a Miami

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Any number of bars and rehabbed industrial spaces can help you shed the cares of the workweek in a beer-soaked throng, but sometimes you’re not in the mood to play gladiator. Enter Canton’s new Pür Lounge (2322 Boston St.; 443-865-5635), owned

by Marty and Doni Mason and Antoine Richards.

Open since January, the Miami-themed club’s decor is sparse and clean, from the all-white tables, sofas, and bars to three indoor waterfalls (one fourteen feet tall) set throughout the building’s three stories.

On the main level, thirty live Japanese fighting fish stand watch, each in its own jar; tranquil busts of Buddha, another nod to the calm, Far Eastern aesthetic, decorate each floor. Upscale dress is required, and there’s valet parking on weekends. Open Mon– Thurs 6 p.m.–12 a.m., Fri–Sun 8 p.m.–2 a.m. Happy hour Mon–Thurs 6 p.m.–9 p.m. $10 cover after 9 p.m. on Fri and Sat. —Lionel Foster

Eco-VIP year), and you may be able to justify the expense.

And the icing on the cake: The city has reserved prime parking spaces in downtown garages for hybrid-driving pass-holders. There are spaces reserved for carpoolers, too—regardless of what fuels your car. For monthly passes, call 443-573-2800.

—Greg Hanscom photo by Bob Myaing

Jonesing for an eco-groovy hybrid car, but brought up short by the fat price tag? The Baltimore Parking Authority has a new program that may help.

The city has cut the price of a monthly parking pass nearly in half for drivers of fuel-efficient hybrids.

(Sorry, if you don’t get at least twenty-nine miles per gallon, you don’t qualify.) Depending on where you park, you could save more than $1,000 a year. Toss in the federal tax credit for hybrids (up to $1,050 this

photo by Michael Pohuski

Into the Wood For those unschooled in the subtleties of textures, grains, and lusters, shopping for wood can be a baffling endeavor. FreeState Timbers (9572 Deereco Rd., Timonium; 410-561-9444) is a haven for both novice woodworkers and master contractors. Owners Edward Slater and Josh Nozick boast decades of carpentry experience, and they pride themselves on offering the sort of individual attention that eludes massive chain stores. “Folks walking in here are not going to be sold something that isn’t right for the job,” Nozick promises. The store’s easily navigated racks contain

more than a hundred world-spanning varieties, from local favorites like sycamore and black walnut to imports like Rhodesian teak and Phillipine mahogany.

FreeState’s website (freestatetimbers.com) itself is a useful accessory, featuring a stock catalog and glossary of woodworking terms. The proprietors encourage all wood-related queries, and special orders are welcome. Open Mon–Fri 8 a.m.–5:30 p.m. and the month’s first and last Saturdays 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

—Charles A. Hohman

Have you heard of something new and interesting happening in your neighborhood? E-mail your news to staff writer Lionel Foster at Lionel@urbanitebaltimore.com, and you may see it in a future issue.

REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT • CONSULTING • PROPERTY MANAGEMENT • SALES • LOANS

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Proper investing is a key to financial freedom.

We recognize the importance of maximizing cash flow and profitability in your real estate endeavors.

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Brownesville: The Jewish Years

A Lecture by Author Sylvia Schildt Visit our new ROLL WAREHOUSE stocked with quality rolls of upscale broadloom all offered at special value prices!

To the Trade Flooring Showroom Full-Service Workroom • Binding Serging • Taping • Sewing

Sunday, April 13 at 2pm at BHU. Register at www.bhu.edu/schildt.

BALTIMORE HEBRE W UNIVERSIT Y

410.561.9200 2147 Greenspring Drive • Timonium, MD 21093 • www.greenspringcarpetsource.com

BHU is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the Maryland Higher Education Commission and the Ministry of Education of the State of Israel.

Whiten your smile and brighten a child’s life!

Professional Tooth Whitening for $285.00 until June 30th

100%

goes to children’s charity.

Call today for an appointment.

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urbanite april 08

Sedation Dentistry Sweet dreams.

$100 off your Comprehensive New Patient visit.

Offer can be shared with family and friends. Please present offer at time of visit.

Used in conjunction with dental insurance. Not valid with any other offer.

DENISE M. MARKOFF, D.D.S., F.A.G.D.

835 Light Street, Baltimore, MD 21230 | 410-727-3388 | www.FederalHillSmiles.com

have you heard Chop Shop

courtesy of Baltimore Chop.com

The Orioles developed the “Baltimore Chop” hitting technique during baseball’s dead ball era of the early 1900s. Now the term also evokes espresso and singersongwriters. Baltimore Chop Books, Music, and Coffeehouse (625 Washington Blvd.; 410-752-4487; www.baltimorechop.com) in Ridgley’s Delight began life in 2003 as an online bookstore specializing almost exclusively in baseball titles. About a year ago, owner Andy Rubin expanded into the brick-and-mortar world, and now the store is an independent, general-interest bookseller—the only one downtown—that carries titles ranging from What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Horst Werner’s Fetisch: Latex Girls. (And New York Times bestsellers are 20 percent off, every day.) The comfort-

able, quirky, living room-like space also hosts folk/rock/ indie/jazz gigs from national artists, with Charm City talent woven into the mix. On April 9, the Chop brings Nashville’s Justin Townes Earle (son of alt-country legend Steve) to celebrate its one-year anniversary, followed by folk-rock band Bears on the Run on April 15 and Paris/New York’s Charles Theodore Zerner with singersongwriter Chris Volpe on April 16. Open Mon–Fri 6:30 a.m.–9 p.m., Sat–Sun 6:30 a.m.–5 p.m. (The Chop is often open later than its posted hours, like when the Orioles have a game or when the employees “feel like it.”)

—Rebecca Messner

When an unexpected blackout happens, you reach for your flashlight—which probably has been sitting around since the last blackout, with ancient batteries in it that no longer work. Texas-based company SunNight Solar has introduced a solar-powered LED flashlight that provides six to eight hours of continuous, bright light after an eight-hour sunbathing session. You can either purchase a flashlight for $12, or, if you’re feeling philanthropic, do what the company calls “Buy One, Give One.” Pay $25 for a flashlight for yourself, and SunNight

will send one to a person in a developing country and also donate $1 to a SunNight charitable partner. So far, 35,000 lights have been donated. By providing safe, clean light for reading, working, and navigating after nightfall, these flashlights can improve the quality of life for many people. Go to sunnightsolar.com to purchase a flashlight and learn about bulk sales.

—Marianne Amoss

courtesey of SunNight Solar

Lights On

Sight Unseen As far as the cosmos is concerned, we are all blind, or nearly so: Much of the interesting stuff going on in the universe happens outside the visible light spectrum and can only be seen by instruments that detect radio waves, gamma rays, infrared and ultraviolet energy, and X-rays.

Noreen Brice, an astronomer at the Museum of Science in Boston and member of the National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore, has made a side career out of creating astronomy books for the blind that use raised lines to trace the constellations and galaxies. Her latest, Touch the Invisible Sky (Ozone Publishing), written with fellow astronomers Simon Steel and Doris Daou, focuses on images of celestial objects taken by NASA’s orbiting

architecture

1208 Light Street Baltimore, Maryland

Great Observatories—not just the familiar Hubble Space Telescope, but also the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope, which can see the infrared energy emitted by distant stars and molecular clouds too dim to be seen by optical telescopes. The book’s twentyeight tactile, color images of nebulae and colliding galaxies are accompanied by both Braille and traditional text, along with pictures of the instruments that captured these remarkable scenes of the unseen universe. To purchase a copy, go to ozonepublishing.net.

—David Dudley

interior design

CL Design Studio LLC 410-244-0360

planning

www.CLDesignStudio.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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SUMMER AT FRIENDS FRIENDS SCHOOL OF BALTIMORE

Camp for boys and girls ages four to thirteen.

Day camps, Technology programs, Spanish, French, Dance, Drama, Music & much more! Full-day camps include swimming, lunch and snack. Extended hours available from 7:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

June 16 – August 8, 2008 5114 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21210 410-649-3218 or 410-649-3209 www.fscamp.org

GERSTUNG INTER-SPORT SUMMER SPECTRUM Excitement, adventure, and age appropriate learning for life begins at the Gerstung Center.

Programs for ages 3 1/2 - 12 with very attractive sibling discounts. Visit www.gerstung.com for full program overview.

BALTIMORE

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u r b a n i t e af epbr ir lu a 0 r8y 0 8

1400 Coppermine Terrace Baltimore, MD 21209 410.337.7781

BALTIMORE COUNTY SAILING CENTER A PROGRAM OF THE BACK RIVER NECK RECREATION & PARKS COUNCIL

Located at Baltimore County’s Rocky Point Park in Essex, MD, the Sailing Center offers a variety of sailing programs for all ages.

Baltimore County Sailing Center One & Two Week Day Camps Offered For Info & Registration: 410-391-0196 www.bcsailing.org

CAMP MILLDALE

Music and Dance for Infants to Adults June 20-August 2, 2008, Registration begins March 31 Summer camps in voice, strings and dance. Private and group classes in music and dance for children and adults, beginner to advanced. Downtown, Towson and Annapolis campuses.

21 E. Mount Vernon Place, 1st floor, Baltimore, MD 21202 410-659-8100, ext. 1130 or prep@peabody.jhu.edu www.peabody.jhu.edu/prep

SUMMERTIME AT ROLAND PARK COUNTY SCHOOL

Located in a bucolic setting, Camp Milldale's program is woven with Jewish values, Israeli culture and environmental activities. Day Camp, Arts, Sports, Nature, Adventure, and Sleep-a-Week camp available.

June 16-August 29 Day Camp, Theater and Arts Camps, American Girl Camp, Circus Camp and more! For information or to receive a catalog call: 410.323.5500 x3091

Camp Milldale Mt. Gilead Rd., Reisterstown, MD 410.356.5200, x339 www.campmilldale.org

5204 Roland Ave., Baltimore, MD 21210 www.rpcs.org

'08 GILMAN SUMMER SESSION

June 23-August 1 The Gilman Summer Session provides academic enrichment and skill building for students from grades 3-12. Courses include SAT prep, Driver's Education, U.S. History, Creative Writing, and Foreign Language tutorials.

For ages 2 to 13.

Contact Bryan Powell, 410-323-3800 ext. 459.

Session 1: June 16 - June 27 Session 2: June 30 - July 11 Session 3: July 14 - July 25 Falls Rd. & Greenspring Valley Rd., Lutherville, MD 21093 410.321.8555 www.montessorischool.net

Gilman Summer Session 5407 Roland Avenue Baltimore, MD 21210

A nurturing, non-competitive learning environment in a unique farm-like setting.

Recreation, Sports, Games, Nature, Music, Computers, Cooking, Arts & Crafts.

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3600 O’Donnell St. Baltimore, MD 21224 Office 410-814-2401 Cell 443-277-7614 Ari@TeamOneBaltimore.com “Team Leader”

TeamOneBaltimore.com

Outstanding Agents, Outstanding Results

Todd Nemeroff • Helen Dellheim • Erin Fallon • Ari Gerzowski • Trent Waite

Todd@TeamOneBaltimore.com • Helen@TeamOneBaltimore.com • Erin@TeamOneBaltimore.com • Ari@TeamOneBaltimore.com • Trent@TeamOneBaltimore.com

New Construction Contact Ari Gerzowski 443- 277- 7614

cannery square - canton. starting in the high $400's 2700+ sq ft of living space in Canton’s newest and most exciting new construction subdivision. Get up to 1 yr mortgage payments FREE with only $1,000 dollars due at settlement! This special is for a limited time only. Homes are being brought to you by Stavrou Communities. Homes will feature gourmet kitchens, hdwd flooring, 2 car side by side garages, some even have a 17x20 front yard!

307 eaton street, nicole place - highlandtown Get in on entry level pricing in Highlandtown’s newest and greatest town home community. Homes starting in the mid 200’s featuring off street parking, large room sizes, gourmet kitchens and more! Please call Ari directly for pricing, plans and a site visit.

the moorings waterfront . offered at $739,000 4-lvl townhome w/ 2 car garage & 6 spots total. 4th flr is master suite!

Hardwd, granite, marble, stainless Steel. Steps to the water. 2900 sq ft.

Contact: Todd Nemerhoff 410-409-0450

14 north chester . offered at $399,000

A classic Butcher's Hill home with new kitchen, orig. h/w floors, 2 working fireplaces, 2 decorative fireplaces, & landscaped backyard. Enjoy the city views from the 3rd fl Great Room & rooftop deck. Over 2100 sq ft of living space. Close to Hopkins and Patterson Park.

Contact: Trent Waite 410-627-4591

9 n curley . just offered at $224,900

Cutest rehab with finished basement! Perfect starter home or great for roommates. Light filled 2 BR, 1.5 BA home. Only 1 block from Patterson Park!

Contact Erin Fallon 410-218-7548

WORKING TO BE BALTIMORE’S PREFERRED LENDER The Richard Early Team Richard Early 1-800-930-7153 themtgman@msn.com

fast decisions . creative programs . common sense underwriting 40

We prefer to look at your mortgage experience as the start of your financial plan! urbanite april 08

photo by Jacek Gancarz

baltimore observed

Small business, big dreams: Microcredit helped Miami truck driver Jean Bonaney build credit and start his own business.

out there

Starting Small One day in November 2005, a truck driver named Jean Bonaney walked into the office of an organization called Acción USA in Miami’s Little Haiti community. Acción has offices or affiliates in eight states, and its parent organization, Acción International, operates in twenty-five countries, but the Little Haiti office has just one staff member, Joann Milord, who greets clients in the Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center.

Bonaney wanted a loan. His wife wasn’t working, so his job driving a cement truck was the only income for his family of six. Their budget was tight. “Sometimes we couldn’t get clothes,” he remembers. At $16 per hour, his takehome pay varied with the number of shifts he was given. During a good week, after a few 3 a.m. wake-ups, he might clear $800.

Bonaney had dreams of running his own concrete outfit. He’d studied business at a local community college and with the help of the Enterprise

Bonaney had a decent job but no credit history—no mortgage, no auto loan, nothing. With a credit score of zero, he couldn’t even get a department store charge card.

Community Center he’d written a business plan for T.J. Concrete of Miami. The idea was to run a smaller, nimbler operation that could pour high beams, slabs, and driveways in areas that larger trucks, like

the one he drove every day, couldn’t reach. When shifts at his day job were scarce, he could fill in the gaps with his own jobs.

With no savings to tap into, Bonaney needed access to credit. He had a decent job but no credit history—no mortgage, no auto loan, nothing. He’d been turned down for every credit card for which he’d applied—seven, by his reckoning. With a credit score of zero, he couldn’t even get a department store charge card.

He hoped Acción could help. The organization provides small, short-term “Credit Builder” loans designed to help people get a foot in the door. At a 17.5 percent annual interest rate, they beat many credit cards and the typical “payday lender,” which extracts triple-digit rates from borrowers who fail to repay loans by their next payday. Acción gave Bonaney

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Homes of Distinction. Agents of Integrity.

Brandon Gaines Bob Merbler Cindy Conklin Michael Yerman Georgeanna Garceau Marc Witman

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OPEN SUN 12-2

STONE HILL WALK

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42

10 elegant new town homes offering up to 3450 square feet of living space.

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143 W. Montgomery Street - Not a cookie cutter renovation!

Just off Sharp St. on quiet section of Montgomery, this home is LOADED with charm! Wonderful, bright LR with 18' vaulted ceiling, FP & skylight. Comfy kitchen w/beamed ceiling & exposed brick walls, huge loft-style MBR plus 2nd BR and den/office. Great blending of old and new! Wood flrs thruout. Fenced courtyard w/koi pond and 3rd flr 12'x8' deck w/awning! TED STEWART 443.632.0780

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Historic triple-wide detached home on one of the best blocks in Federal Hill. 3 bedrooms and 2.5 baths, 2 private patios and 3 working FP’s.

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CINDY CONKLIN 443.629.0152 TIMMIE TAFF 443.226.3223

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BRANDON GAINES 410.583.0400

1113 Light Street, Baltimore MD 21230 � 1425 Clarkview Road, Baltimore MD 21209 � 303 S. Main Street, Bel Air MD 21014 ywggrealty.com � conklinmerbler.com urbanite april 08

baltimore observed

a $500 loan, and, after he paid that off, a second loan for $750. As Bonaney paid the monthly $100 installments, his credit score improved. In 2007 he graduated to Acción’s small business loan program and borrowed $3,000 to cover the cost of insurance for T.J. Concrete and repairs for one of his cement pumps. After about a year working with Acción, he says his credit score reached 700, what many lenders consider the low end of the high-score range, and this January T.J. Concrete opened its first office.

Bonaney is what many people refer to as a microentrepreneur, a small business owner employing one to five people. And Acción USA is a microlender providing small loans to current and would-be entrepreneurs, who, because of problems with credit or low income, might otherwise be turned away by banks uninterested in lending such small sums.

Microcredit gained international attention in 2006, when Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work fighting poverty with small loans. That same year, he told Time magazine that microcredit could “halve total poverty by 2015.” Global poverty will become so uncommon, he said, that “we’ll create a poverty museum in 2030.” Yunus’ Grameen Bank has continued to have dramatic success in the developing world, and Grameen America opened its first office in Queens, New York, last fall. But there are many questions about the future of microcredit in the United States, specifically whether the Grameen model or something like it can work in this country.

Yunus got his start in 1976 when he lent a group of subsistence basket weavers $27 out of his own pocket. Within a year each had paid him back and he was borrowing money to help others. In 1983, special legislation designated Grameen as an independent bank. Since then the bank has distributed approximately $6.5 billion to more than 7 million borrowers in 81,000 Bangladeshi villages. Grameen reports a 98 percent loan recovery rate, which compares well with the recovery rate for personal loans in the United States. It took its last donation in 1998 and is now a for-profit enterprise owned predominantly by its borrower members.

Part of Grameen’s success is due to the way it has positioned itself within a country full of tightknit villages. Ninety-four percent of Grameen’s recipients are women, many of whom have used their newfound access to credit to raise their own social status and better care for their children. Borrowers must be part of a group of typically five people. No collateral is required, but anyone thinking about defaulting on one of the weekly payments, often delivered during public meetings, has her reputa-

tion to consider. Lastly, a Grameen loan is not just about the money. Grameen is also the hub of a social movement. Borrowers are strongly encouraged to adhere to “The Sixteen Decisions,” a manifesto that, along with guidelines on basic public health measures and nutrition, includes pledges to maintain small families and spurn marriage dowries.

It’s difficult to imagine such a system succeeding in the United States. Indeed, it hasn’t. As recently as December 2006, there were 133 million outstanding microcredit loans worldwide, accord-

Ninety-four percent of Grameen’s recipients are women, many of whom have used their newfound access to credit to raise their own social status and better care for their children. ing to the Microcredit Summit Campaign, which tracks the industry. But the industry’s footprint in the United States is still microscopic: Less than one-tenth of one percent of those loans were in North America and Western Europe combined. In Maryland, Urbanite could find only one domestic microlender—Maryland Capital Enterprises in Salisbury—and a handful of county-run small business loan funds.

“I don’t know of anyone in the United States who’s reached scale,” says Gary Woller, a microfinance expert and president of Woller and Associates, a development consulting firm in Sandy, Utah. “Scale” is shorthand for the large volumes of microcredit borrowers that would increase returns, decrease the average cost of servicing each loan, and make microlenders less dependent on charitable donations. (In the United States, microloans can vary from as little as $100 to several thousand dollars.) In 2003, Woller and fellow researcher Mark Schreiner published a paper in the journal World Development that laid out a number of impediments to America’s microcredit industry.

For starters, while some low-income Americans are denied access to mainstream credit options such as bank loans or even credit cards, so-called predatory lenders often fill the gap. Creative lenders continue to find ways around a Maryland law that puts a 33 percent cap on the annual interest for loans of less than $2,000. There’s also the question of motivation. In countries like Bangladesh, the alternative to starting a small business might be starvation. In the

United States, wage jobs are much more abundant, and even a low-paying one can, at the very least, help a person pay for necessities. Factor in welfare and unemployment benefits and it means there’s more of a cushion between America’s poor and absolute destitution.

These differences may explain the contrast between Acción’s success in Latin America and some of the challenges it faces here. Acción International made its first loans to small-scale entrepreneurs in Brazil in 1973 and saw such a large and steady return that, in 1992, it helped found Bolivia’s BancoSol, the first commercial bank in the world devoted solely to microenterprise. It came to the United States in 1991, when it began a pilot project in Brooklyn, New York. But fifteen years later, Acción USA counted only 6,049 active borrowers.

Alternatives to entrepreneurship leave organizations like Acción USA a smaller pool of potential clients than their developing world counterparts, and within this pool, lenders have to choose carefully to ensure a decent rate of return. To make it work in the United States, Acción has had to alter at least one aspect of its approach, and this change has shut out some of the most needy. Acción USA requires collateral, or, at the very least, a co-signer for each loan.

Jean Bonaney leveraged the pickup trucks he used to transport cement as collateral when he applied for his small business loan. Loan officers also ask for a bank statement and home utility bill as some indication of a borrower’s cash flow. Such requirements would not be onerous for most people, but they can represent too great a hurdle for anyone without a steady source of income and a fixed address. Even Credit Builder loans require proof of income. “We look for low-to-moderate income entrepreneurs,” says Elizete Groenendaal, Acción USA’s vice president of marketing. “We need them to have some kind of credit established.”

In Acción USA’s case, as with other domestic microlenders, most of the clientele are immigrants.

“A lot of people come from countries where the bank system isn’t stabilized,” says Acción USA’s Joann Milord. They may not even have a bank account. So microcredit is, for many, an introduction to mainstream U.S. financial services. And this may prove to be one of the industry’s main functions in the United States: Microcredit might not turn America’s most destitute populations into business owners, but it could help set people like Jean Bonaney and those once considered un-bankable on a clearer path to financial security. ■ —Lionel Foster

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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urbanite april 08

baltimore observed

sustainable city

Deadwood Riding the Light Rail one day, I glanced out the window and saw mountains of dead trees. There, between Mount Washington and Cold Spring Lane, sat a log yard. I’d spent a decade as a reporter out West, and I had fond memories of kicking around log yards, talking shop with the guys as we watched logs roll off incoming trucks. But the yard out the window looked abandoned.

“This is not rocket science.

This is not something that Buck Rogers invented,” said Dan Rider of the Maryland Forest Service. “Wood has been used for energy for five thousand-plus years.”

I mentioned the logs to Guy Hager, who looks out for trees and streams at the Parks & People Foundation. “Oh, the elephant cemetery,” he said. When city crews cut trees from parks or sidewalks, Hager told me, they dump them there, in a corner of the Cylburn Arboretum. And there they rot.

Hager’s nonprofit organization had done some research, but concluded that the flow of logs to the cemetery wasn’t steady enough to sustain a business, and the wood already there was rotten beyond use. Besides, Hager said, urban trees are often full of nails and other junk that can destroy a sawmill blade or worse, injure a sawyer. There was some talk of burning the wood to heat buildings or generate electricity, he said, but nothing had come of it.

Still, many of the old trees lining Baltimore’s streets would have to come down in the not-toodistant future, and the TreeBaltimore initiative promised to plant thousands more. There might be an opportunity there. Hager suggested I talk to Stubby Warmbold, the proprietor of a greencertified company called CitiLog. “I’m Canadian. We’re either lumbermen or hockey players,” Warmbold told me. He pulls trees from Pittsburgh, New York City, and anyplace else within five hundred miles of his log yard in central Pennsylvania. His sawyers scan each log with a metal detector, and remove or work around anything embedded in the wood. He can afford this micro-management because he’s not selling twoby-fours: His Amish woodworkers make furniture, cabinetry, and flooring—which are often sold right back to the original owner of the tree. “We call this full-circle recycling,” he said.

Warmbold told me about New Jersey Forest Service Chief Ed Lempicki, who was happy to give me the full sales pitch on urban wood salvage. Because city trees aren’t competing for sunlight in a crowded forest, he said, they tend to be shorter

and stouter, producing higher quality wood than forest-grown trees. He pointed me to a U.S. Forest Service report full of examples of people turning “waste wood” into lumber and furniture, stakes and pallets, heat and electricity. Lempicki wrote a stepby-step guide for getting this type of enterprise off the ground called Recycling Municipal Trees.

After a few calls to Baltimore City offices, I learned that I wasn’t the only one looking at the elephant cemetery. “It’s kind of a hot item these days,” said a Recreation and Parks employee. A staffer in the mayor’s office explained that there had been much debate about the logs over the years, but the city hadn’t been able to decide what to do with them. Both asked not to be identified, but encouraged me to poke around.

The media relations people at the Department of Recreation and Parks promised to figure out who could talk to me about the issue. In the meantime, the owner of a local lumberyard gave me another lead on “the stump dump,” as he called it. He sent

me to a retired pediatrician and amateur woodworker named Bill Waldman. In the 1990s, Waldman said he discovered that the city was paying roughly half a million dollars every few years to have a private company grind the logs into mulch. Meanwhile, city staffers bought wood for construction projects.

Waldman found a sawyer who could mill the logs into lumber for city construction projects. A Timonium lumberyard would sell what the city didn’t need, returning the profits for tree planting projects. But Waldman said city officials couldn’t decide if the wood was a “resource” that he needed to pay for, a “waste product” that they should pay him to take, or “surplus” that they should just give him. The project died on the vine.

Waldman told me to talk to Calvin Buikema, Baltimore’s former superintendent of parks. Buikema told me that the city once made lumber from its best street trees at a sawmill at Liberty Reservoir, but metal-riddled logs destroyed the equipment. (Metal detectors like the one Stubby Warmbold uses today w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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were apparently not available in the 1970s.) Crews piled the trees in the back of Druid Hill Park, where they set them ablaze. After the city banned open burning in the 1960s, Recreation and Parks built an incinerator. “The thing malfunctioned,” Buikema said. Next came a contraption called a Vermeer Log Grinder, but that, too, eventually broke down.

When thousands of trees killed by Dutch elm disease threatened to bury the Druid Hill yard, the city moved the operation to the stump dump, officially called “Camp Small” because it was used as a campsite during the Civil War. The city hired a private firm to grind up the logs a few times, and residents cleaned out the camp for firewood in the 1970s when heating oil prices shot through the roof.

But otherwise, the logs piled up.

By the early 2000s, Camp Small contained 30,000 tons of wood, according to Dan Rider of the Maryland Forest Service. Rider says most of the wood at Camp Small, and numerous other dumps around the state, could be used to generate electricity—a process that he says is cheap, clean, and dependable. The Eastern Correctional Institute, a 3,400-bed prison in Somerset County, creates its own electricity with local wood waste, then uses the steam from the power plant to heat the entire prison campus and run the kitchen and laundry facilities.

It has been doing this for two decades. “This is not rocket science. This is not something that Buck Rogers invented,” said Rider. “Wood has been used for energy for five thousand-plus years.”

The Recreation and Parks people arranged a meeting with Chief of Parks Chris Carroll, who assured me that cleaning up Camp Small was part of the mayor’s Cleaner, Greener Baltimore initiative— an area, he said, where “the city is putting its money where its mouth is.”

For the details, I spoke with engineer Ferdinand de Lara. Mr. de Lara is the lone employee in the city’s Energy Conservation Office; his three co-workers went to work for the state, and the city has not replaced them because of a hiring freeze. The city, he said, has hired a company called Energy Systems Group to study using the wood to heat a municipal building. I asked when he thought such a facility would be operational. “Maybe some time next year, I guess,” he said.

The first challenge would be to select a suitable building—something that was proving problematic, he said. Then he ran through the timetable: “The phase two audit should be in by June … Once we receive the proposal, we usually do an in-house review, or send it to another consultant to review the cost estimates … Two months for our approval process …

Once it is approved, Energy Systems Group has to get bids for the design … Then there’s the construction …”

He paused, running the numbers in his head.

“Yes,” he said, “it should be up and running by the end of next year.” ■ —Greg Hanscom

photo by La Kaye Mbah

baltimore observed

One for the Gipper: The faithful gather annually in a South Baltimore bar for Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

encounter

A Grand Old Party A tobacco-toughened voice booms across the old oak bar, then bounces off the mirror with the “What Would Ronald Reagan Do?” T-shirt taped to it.

“What I want to know is, why isn’t Ronald Reagan’s birthday a national holiday?”

The nation may not formally recognize the Gipper’s February 6 birthday, but the starboardtilting Ropewalk Tavern in Federal Hill makes sure that he gets his due. The bar’s annual bash— this year’s observance, the thirteenth since the bar opened, marked what would have been Reagan’s 97th birthday—is billed as the state’s largest party for the fortieth President of the United States. There’s gratis food said to be based on some of Nancy’s recipes (baked ziti, meatballs in barbecue sauce, some kind of gigantic pot pie), documentaries on Reagan’s life on the bar televisions, trays of jellybeans, and drafts at the almost-’80s price of $2 per pint. As night falls, Ropewalk co-owner and general manager Marc McFaul wheels out a cake decorated with an icing likeness of the Great Communicator.

Since Reagan’s death in 2004, the event has acquired a kind of poignancy, something akin to praying for a saint, even as you sip a fresh pint of beer—an Irish wake for the man called Dutch.

But the tone falls far short of somber.

Unless, like many patrons, you’re bemoaning the state of the GOP. The present crop of presidential candidates isn’t evoking many positive comparisons with tonight’s honoree. That attention-stealing voice, deprived of her “right to light up” a few days earlier by the state’s new smoking ban, belongs to 32-yearold Dawn Bruce, who grew up in the shadow of the South Baltimore docks and the Domino Sugar plant.

Wearing a “Romney for President” hat and a “Speak English Here” button, Bruce intersperses digs at Governor Martin O’Malley with swipes at John McCain.

A few days hence, McCain will be anointed the frontrunner in the race for the Republican nomination.

(Her man Mitt will bow out shortly thereafter.) Bruce has few kind words for the Arizona senator. “He doesn’t have any spine—his immigration stance is way too weak,” she says. “If he makes Mike Huckabee his running mate, I will go ahead and vote for Hillary.

I mean it.”

She is asked the question on the T-shirt behind her.

“What would Reagan do? If he came back, he’d say: ‘Wise up, people. Support Mitt Romney. Don’t discriminate against him because of his religion.’”

Ignoring the famous proscription against discussing politics or religion in bars, “Bowtie Bob” Nelson, a dapperly attired car leasing agent from Carney, takes up the faith angle. “I don’t think Reagan even went to church, but he made you feel like you had to,” says Nelson, 62. “But he had that sense of humor.

When he died, he had this huge reception. I don’t see Hillary being liked like that, or McCain getting that kind of love.” w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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baltimore observed

“Reagan did great things— he ended the Cold War and didn’t give in to liberals, who aren’t Americans even though they say they are.”

So, why Reagan? Why not a bar honoring Honest Abe Lincoln, or a watering hole decked out in praise of the quiet, stalwart career of former Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois)? Might a less divisive GOP mascot be better for business?

“My dad said the same thing, but I think everyone liked Reagan because he was genuine—a straight shooter,” says McFaul. “Even [Democratic House Speaker] Tip O’Neill said that about him, that he could be trusted. He worked to make the country strong and spread the belief that the government isn’t the answer to our problems—people are.”

Marc and brother Bill McFaul opened Ropewalk twelve years ago, taking over the space once home to Paulie’s Bar. The pub lies deep in a neighborhood dominated by Democratic machine politics and legendary city Dems like powerful state senator Harry “Soft Shoes” McGuirk. The Stonewall Democratic Club, once the city’s largest, sat right across South Charles Street. (It closed in 2005.) “We jousted with a lot of Democrats to get this place up and going,” Marc McFaul says.

Not surprisingly, he admits, some would-be patrons in the neighborhood would rather lose the Gipper than win one for him. “There are people who won’t come in here because we celebrate him,” says McFaul. It probably doesn’t help McFaul’s cause among local Democrats that he’s planted a handful of statues of Reagan (one of them life-size) at strategic points in his two-story saloon, or that he named the dining room for Republican former governor (and Ropewalk regular) Bob Ehrlich. But the Reagan fandom isn’t just show: He’ll donate the night’s proceeds (he won’t say how much) to the Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, in Simi Valley, California.

Given the general lack of enthusiasm for the GOP’s then-presumptive presidential nominee, that Reagan has been consigned to history might be depressing to the faithful gathered here tonight.

Indeed, Dawn Bruce seems to recognize the limits in casting her lot with a charismatic leader who happens to be dead.

“Reagan was great for the time,” she says.

“He did great things—he ended the Cold War and didn’t give in to liberals, who aren’t Americans even though they say they are. But we can’t continuously hang on to people who have passed away.”

Well, maybe just tonight. ■ —Michael Anft

photo by Cory Donovan

Nelson also has some advice for the other Democratic candidate in the hunt. “I’d tell Obama to look hard at Reagan—because Obama’s a blank slate—and I’d tell him, ‘This is what you should be looking to be.’”

Straight men: The members of the Baltimore Station Band, who met in a residential addiction recovery treatment center

lives

Group Therapy On a Sunday afternoon in January, in Saints Stephen and James Church, singer and guitarist Jerome “Bo” Bullock steps to a microphone: Gold Coast slaveship bound for cotton fields Sold in a market down in New Orleans.

Scarred old slaver knows he’s doin’ alright Hear him whip the women just around midnight.

The newly formed Baltimore Station Band is rehearsing in the basement of the South Baltimore church, which explains why the Rolling Stones’ raunchy romp “Brown Sugar” is booming through a house of worship. There, amid the folding chairs and Formica tables, Bullock and his bandmates are working the kinks out of their set list for their first real gig. As the song winds up, the sun shines through a large stained-glass window bearing the image of Christ holding a lamb.

The band members’ ages span three decades; their racial makeup is African American, Hispanic, Native American, and Caucasian. They have one main thing in common: Each is a recovering addict. Bullock, Brian Hankins (drums), Ed “Cherokee” Elliott (fiddle and guitar), John Tucker (guitar), Everett “Mudbone” Walker (harmonica and percussion), and Archie Williams (bass) met at the residential recovery and addiction treatment center for homeless men from which they take their name, the Baltimore Station.

The Station’s associate director, Woody Curry, struggled with substance abuse and homelessness himself after two tours of duty in Vietnam. After stints in short-term recovery programs, he broke free of his addiction at Baltimore Station. “What we do here is different,” he says, standing outside the organization’s South Baltimore facility, a converted West Street fire station. Curry presses his clients to express themselves creatively. “We tell our people that they have the freedom to be who they are," he says.

The band members credit the Station’s emphasis on creative expression with their success.

It’s a curious reversal of the rock-and-roll cliché. “I’m sober today because I’m playing in this band,” says drummer Hankins.

Tucker says that the band is really a support group. “This band is real important to my recovery, and my recovery is real important to the band.”

It all started one day when Elliott, a longtime professional musician (he once roadied for the Allman Brothers, he says), brought his fidddle to the Baltimore Station; Tucker, who had played guitar for years, struck up a conversation about music. They soon learned that others living at the facility played instruments, and the band took shape soon thereafter. The one-day-at-a-time mentality of rehab fits the life of a part-time musician well: Building a repertoire and securing gigs takes time, money, and patience.

On a Friday night a few weeks later, the Station Band files into Bedrock, a downtown club. Row upon row of liquor bottles are displayed against a backlit wall behind the bar, and as the night wears on, the room fills with cigarette smoke (this is pre-smokingban Baltimore). Are the band members anxious about venturing into an atmosphere like this? “We’re tickled to say that we’re musicians and we’re sober,” says Elliott. “It’s kind of a bragging right.”

The band takes the stage and launches into “Battle Station,” a wistful instrumental featuring Elliott’s seamless violin lines and Walker’s soulful harmonica playing. After a tentative start, they overcome their opening-night jitters to demonstrate some formidable chops, climaxing with a rousing cover of the blues standard “Big Boss Man:” You got me working, boss man.

Working ’round the clock I want me a drink of water.

You won’t let me stop.

It's a song about oppression, and the power to beat it back: Big boss man, can you hear me when I call?

Oh, you ain’t so big. You’re just tall, that’s all. ■

—Robert C. Knott The Baltimore Station Band will perform at Bedrock, 401 West Baltimore Street, on April 11 at 6 p.m. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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The Watchman Frank Baitman, president of Petards, Inc., on living in the age of surveillance I nte r v i e w P hot ograph

b y by

L

ook over Baltimore at night and you’ll find it sparkling with flashing blue lights: a cool sheen from the housings of the 225 video surveillance cameras mounted on light poles. The police program, which was started in the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods in 2005, is now part of a network of 350 security cameras around the city.

That might sound like an impressive number of prying eyes, but it’s nothing compared to the unflinching gaze of the more than four million closedcircuit television (CCTV) cameras now in place in the United Kingdom, a country that embraced the principle of video surveillance decades ago. London alone is saturated by more than half a million CCTV devices. Many of those cameras were provided by Petards Group, a British company that sells video surveillance systems to casinos, prisons, and local governments in more than forty countries. It’s one of the largest and oldest such firms worldwide, and its U.S. subsidiary, Petards, Inc., moved its headquarters to Baltimore in August 2007. “We wanted to be closer to where we believe many of our customers are going to be,” says Petards, Inc. president Frank Baitman.

In February, Baitman wrote a Washington Post op-ed that argued— perhaps counterintuitively—for more federal regulation of video surveillance and other forms of electronic oversight. “New surveillance technologies ... are emerging at a dizzying pace. The blurry videotape scenes of convenience store robberies are rapidly being replaced by crystal-clear video digitally recorded on computer hard drives. As the number of cameras watching us grows, the surveillance industry is wrestling with the emerging problem of an overabundance of images and properly controlling their distribution.”

Voicing concerns about too many security cameras might seem an odd role for a man in the security camera business, but Baitman has a far-thinking resume. Prior to joining Petards in January 2007, Baitman was the research director of the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto-based think tank that helps large business clients such as Procter & Gamble find ways to use new technology. He holds a master’s of public management in international affairs and national security policy from the University of Maryland, College Park, and lives in Roland Park with his wife and son.

Q A

So does video surveillance fight crime or just displace it?

My personal feeling is if it is done properly—and I think you’d hear this from authorities here in Baltimore—I think it can reduce crime. Video surveillance helps catch the worst of the bad. To have a judge or a jury looking at a video, the guy sitting there can’t say, “I didn’t do it.” Or, “I was at my brother’s.”

We had our own little experience [here at Petards]. We’ve had some problems recently with the cleaning crew. We noticed that we had crumbs [and suspected that] people weren’t vacuuming. As you could imagine, we use our office to test a lot of equipment. So we have surveillance running twenty-four hours. Well, guess what? One of my techs ran [the footage], looking for when the cleaning crew was in last night. Lo and behold, he found one of the crew sleeping for an hour in one of the desk chairs.

j o ab

j ack so n

Marshall

Clarke

Q

So the message here is that if I’m in a cleaning crew, I wouldn’t want to get your building on my regular beat.

A

No. So we took the video to the management company and the manager was speechless. What can you say? There it is. There is the evidence.

Q

Video provides irrefutable proof against the tricks of memory and deceit.

A

It does. It’s not perfect and there still can be misinterpretations, but it goes a long way toward dealing with the ambiguity or the uncertainty.

Q

But back to the argument that it just moves the crime around ...

A

The question ought to be about what is going to be done with all the video being collected. After the initial objective has been satisfied, my personal feeling is that those images ought to be destroyed.

There’s no question that it displaces crime. The police know where the crime is. They leave a camera there for a week and they get all they’re going to get before they displace the crime. And then the police pull it down.

The interesting thing is that these are not small cameras. You can look right up at them. But criminals will go on about their business anyway, and get caught. It’s amazing. We’ve put cameras up in places where there is illegal dumping going on, in England. You see someone pull up, look around, pull some garbage out of a truck, and drive off. I mean, it’s not like we’re hiding the thing. In the case of the Scottish bombers [who ignited a vehicle loaded with gasoline canisters at the Glasgow airport] last summer, it was actually a license plate recognition system that identified them for the police to make the final arrest. God knows why these guys, in probably the most surveilled society in the world, didn’t try to change the license plates.

If the technology is well designed and implemented, dealers shouldn’t be able to work directly underneath the camera. You should have mobile cameras. There is some great video technology out there right now that can look out 360 degrees all at once.

Q

If I’m a resident of a city whose local government is investing in video surveillance, what are some of the questions I should have for my city?

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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A

Why are you putting it in? Why are you spending my tax dollars?

There ought to be reasons other than just, We need a new toy. When you have such a reason, that should also influence the design of the system. It’s not simply, We need cameras and a recorder, but Where are those cameras going to be located? Do they have to be day/night cameras? What sort of resolution? How high will they be? Up on lampposts? Do they need evidential-quality video that will stop crimes, or are they trying to manage only access control—see who is at the door at a municipal building before opening it. You need to understand what the objective is.

The next set of questions ought to be about what is going to be done with all the video being collected. After the initial objective has been satisfied, my personal feeling is that those images ought to be destroyed. If you are using the images for access control, then all you need the images for is to decide if that the person is the right person for entering the building. If no crime has been committed and seven days have passed, then that image should be erased.

Q A

How long should police departments hold on to their video?

Typically, it’s fourteen to thirty days. Sometimes the police don’t know about a crime immediately. Or a crime has occurred somewhere else, but the video captured something that would help you understand that crime better. And that just takes the detective process a couple of weeks to satisfy.

But, honestly, any video older than a month does not have tremendous value.

It also drives up the cost for the municipality to buy the system, because of the storage.

Q

Does having a video surveillance system in place require more police support? Are there human beings actually watching the footage?

A

Some systems that we put in require live viewing because the customers need to see things happening as they are actually happening. In casinos, you want to actually stop a con at a blackjack table as it is in progress. Another environment is prison. You want to prevent a stabbing or whatever while it is in progress. In public surveillance situations, you’re more likely to look at the footage after the fact. It’s more likely to be used to solve crimes.

One reason is simple cost. You can have only so many people sitting there watching those cameras. And secondly, people really need to be trained to watch these cameras and stay focused on them and know what to look for. In some communities, the public can be trained, so they can go into these surveillance rooms and help the police watch these feeds.

Technology is helping to solve that problem too. There’s something called video analytics, which is basically software that looks for patterned behaviors in the images. If you instruct it to look for X, and something that looks like X happens, the feed will flash in front of the observer. It will allow the individual to focus on suspicious behavior rather than try to find it in seven hundred cameras.

The system we installed in Minneapolis has analytics. It can look for, in one case, people walking onto the platform with luggage but getting onto the train without that luggage.

Q

Petards wasn’t involved in Baltimore’s blue-light video surveillance system, but do you have any opinions on how well it functions?

A

I’ve talked to a few people who’ve been involved in the project here.

I think one of the challenges that Baltimore has with the blue-light cameras is that they run on digital video recorders that are resident within each camera. So you need to actually take a cherry picker to pull those DVRs out and put new ones in, whenever you need the footage [for evidence]. That’s a huge amount of manpower, and costly. Wireless has become far less expensive since those were installed, so wireless should certainly be considered as an option.

Q

Many people are still squeamish about the Big Brother aspect of video cameras—that they will be spied upon by the government offi cials, or—even worse—footage of them doing something foolish will end up on YouTube. How would you allay these fears?

A

Video images are part of the times we live in. But we need to do something to ensure that people respect the technology and appreciate it, rather than fear it.

I wouldn’t just focus on cameras—I’d focus on technology. Technology is becoming more pervasive and networked in our society. And the question is, really, how do we see technology in the future as individuals?

You don’t know what is happening with your image now. But if Congress took action and said, “This is how we’re going to handle video surveillance in public places going forward,” that would actually make everyone far more comfortable with the government undertaking video surveillance.

There is an interesting conundrum that we have in America. Whether the country actually is or not, a lot of us think of this as a laissez faire society. But, when it comes to regulation of information, the country’s very unwillingness to legislate reduces our individual rights and strengthens the hands of government and business.

Q A

What sort of legislation would you have in mind?

I think we need to begin to think of what the worst-case scenarios are. We really need to think about people who can’t make decisions for themselves, and by that I’m referring to the issue of privacy for children.

Q

The idea of putting cameras around schools seems like it could be both a good and a bad thing.

A

A lot of us think of this as a laissez faire society. But, when it comes to regulation of information, the country’s very unwillingness to legislate reduces our individual rights.

My son goes to public school in Baltimore City and I would have no problem with the school district putting cameras on his school. But I’d also want to know what that school is going to do with those images of him.

When you talk about children making decisions [in the electronic realm], they will usually make decisions that will disregard their privacy. We shouldn’t put them in the position that would force them to make that decision. It’s another reason we need government to act on privacy.

Q A

What else do you see coming down the road?

We’re going to see more and more information being collected about us without our knowledge as business models are designed to capture information about consumers. We’ll get to the point where facial recognition allows me to recognize that you have just entered the Giant food store. We know you’ve been buying the regular milk, but you show an inclination for organic products, so we should target you for organic milk while you’re here. I’m not sure you want that.

I’m not sure society is going to be comfortable with technology knowing that much about you.

It really comes down not just to collecting information in one facet of your life but collecting it in many different facets and putting it all together. When you begin to mix those databases together, you learn things about the individual no one wants known. That’s where is the real threat is. ■

—Joab Jackson wrote about the closing of Blob’s Park in the December Urbanite. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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photo by Jason Okutake

the test Is the movement to sample the DNA of everyone arrested in Maryland a crime-fighting revolution or a civil liberties violation? b y

De b o r ah

The Maryland State Police Forensics Laboratory in Pikesville is oddly quiet on a Wednesday afternoon in February. A single researcher in scrubs and a facemask pads around one of the labs where DNA is extracted, purified, and analyzed. Otherwise the rooms full of gleaming lab benches and new equipment are empty of both scientists and dog-eared photocopies of Far Side cartoons—a usually reliable indicator of intense scientific activity. Forensic biology manager Daniel Katz directs a staff of twenty-one, but on the day I visit, the two-year-old lab has the look of a model home or a stage set—beautiful but empty.

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r uDacI lle

The lab may be jolted out of its torpor soon, if state legislators pass one of two proposed bills authorizing police to create genetic profiles of people arrested for felonies, burglaries, and some breaking-and-entering crimes.

Right now, Maryland—like forty-four other states—takes DNA “fingerprints” of those convicted of violent felonies and links them to a national database, but mass DNA sampling of those arrested on suspicion of committing a wide range of crimes, from misdemeanors to murder, is a national trend. Since Virginia passed the first arrestee-sampling law in 2003, ten other states have followed suit.

Advocates of such expansion, including Maryland governor Martin year was “well into the six figures.” Worldwide, the company’s sales topped O’Malley, hail it as a powerful tool to fight crime. In testimony submitted $60 million. “It’s like a mass production line,” he says. to support the bills debated in Annapolis in February, O’Malley cited the By contrast, the state police lab in the Pikesville facility “performs case of a career criminal arrested sixteen times since 1976 for crimes rangstrict quality assurance,” according to Katz, running controls and reviewing ing from attempted murder to robbery. “Had we been able to take a DNA data produced by the commercial labs. In his 2009 budget, O’Malley allofingerprint at the time of those arrests,” O’Malley said, “we would have been cated $1.3 million for additional forensic science equipment and staff. Katz able to charge him with murder and rape years earlier—and at least one of hopes that those funds will help his lab take over much of the work that is our neighbors would have never become a victim.” (At press time, the bills currently contracted out. “This is a premier facility,” he says. “There’s no had not been scheduled for a vote.) reason we can’t get a high-throughput system going here.”

Civil liberties advocates have a host of concerns about the coming exKatz explains the molecular biology behind the DNA fingerprint in the pansion of DNA profiling. Some are purely practical: The sharp increase in simplest terms. “Each DNA molecule is made up of repeating subunits of the volume of arrestee profiles will overwhelm an already sluggish system four nucleotide bases—A, C, T, and G. And what you see at each location struggling with backlogs in the processing of crime-scene DNA, which is on the DNA molecule is a sequence composed of those four bases repeated arguably more useful in solving crimes. But others revolve around concerns over and over again. Within individuals, the number of times that sequence that arrestee-sampling laws can deepen racial bias in law enforcement. gets repeated at each loci differs.”

Given the demographics of the state’s The reason the sequence differs is because criminal justice system, the great majority of each person gets half of their genes from their arrestee DNA samples will come from African mother and half from their father; therefore, American men living in urban areas, a group the combination of alleles—alternative forms “Basically what we are with a lifetime risk of arrest of more than 50 of a gene at a specific location—is unique to doing is gathering more percent. Even if never charged nor convicted the individual (save for identical twins, who of a crime, once an arrestee’s DNA profile is share exactly the same genetic code). incriminating evidence from archived in the FBI’s database, that individual Within families certain sequences are people of a specific racial becomes—in the genetic sense—a perpetual shared, which explains why DNA testing is suspect. It’s the equivalent, says Maryland used to establish paternity—and why some class,” says bioethicist ACLU legislative director Cindy Boersma, of law enforcement agencies have used “fa“putting the African American community unJames G. Hodge Jr. “Yes, milial” DNA searches to try to track down der genetic surveillance.” criminals. Forensic scientists can generate a we may be able to solve The only way to avoid that problem? Even list of possible relatives of suspects by looking the playing field by sampling everyone, creating for partial matches between crime-scene evimore crimes in the future, a universal DNA database. dence and offender profiles, or by searching but it will only be crimes the database for rare alleles identified in DNA recovered from crime scenes. Close relatives committed by certain groups In 1990, the FBI launched the Comof the individuals so identified are then asked because that’s all the bined DNA Indexing System (CODIS), a nationto provide a DNA sample, which is compared al database of identifying genetic information. to the forensic evidence. data we have.”

Fourteen states agreed to share DNA collected Certain repeating sequences are shared from convicted felons and at crime scenes. The not only within families, but also within popugoal of the program was twofold: to get violent lations, where thousands of years of interoffenders off the streets and to solve cold cases. breeding create a characteristic DNA profile Four years later, Congress passed the DNA shared by the members of that group. This Identification Act, which formalized the FBI’s explains why a swab of your cheek can reveal authority to expand CODIS to include to all national, state, and local datawhere your ancestors came from—the DNA inside your cells contains bases. Since then, more than fifty thousand suspects have been identified nucleotide sequences resembling those of other people who share a simithrough matches between offender profiles and crime-scene evidence. lar genetic history.

Improvements in technology have made the process of obtaining geThe more locations on the genome are tested, the more unlikely it benetic fingerprints from subjects far easier in recent years. “All we’re dealing comes that any two individuals—even those from the same background— with is a swab—a big spongy swab sort of like a lollipop,” says Katz. Techniwill share all of those sequences. And the chances of a coincidental match cians scrape the swab against the inner cheek of the subject, the cheek cells shrink with each additional loci tested. “Basically, there is a chance that are transferred to a special type of filter paper, then the sample is sent to a two people might match at two or three or even four locations,” says Katz. lab. Technicians extract DNA from the sample, purify and amplify (or copy) “But when you get the number of tests up higher—and we do thirteen loci, it, and tag fragments of genes at thirteen locations along the strand of DNA which is overkill—it’s virtually impossible.” with an array of fluorescent dyes.

Still, bioethicists point out that “match probability” requires determinThe sample is then run through an electrical field where a laser beam ing how commonly various alleles occur at the analyzed loci. Ideally, this picks up the wavelengths of light emitted by the DNA fragments—called probability would be determined by analyzing the DNA of the entire popushort tandem repeats (STRs)—as they migrate through a polymer. Shorter lation who could conceivably have left DNA at a crime scene. Because such fragments move faster than longer ones. Computer software quantifies a blanket analysis is impossible, forensic geneticists typically use reference the data, and the end result is a pattern of glowing bands of varying size databases categorized by race and ethnicity to calculate probabilities— and number that represent data peaks. This is the DNA “fingerprint,” leading to a kind of genetic racial profiling. which is uploaded into CODIS, where it is compared to DNA collected at Neither bioethicists nor scientists foresaw this unintended consecrime scenes. quence of what seemed at first a grand slam for public safety. Not long In Maryland, as in most other states, DNA samples are not processed after University of Leicester genetics professor Alec Jeffreys created the in government labs like the gleaming new state police forensics facility in first DNA fingerprint in September 1984, police asked his lab to perform Pikesville. Instead, states bid out the work to commercial testing outfits a DNA dragnet to help solve a local murder. The first DNA-based criminal like Princeton, New Jersey’s Orchid Cellmark, which have the kind of audatabases quickly followed. Initially, few expressed much concern about tomated “high-throughput” equipment that allow them to process a huge the privacy rights of murderers, rapists, and other evildoers. But over the volume of biological material. “You need scalability to do this work costpast fifteen years, state and local police departments have started sampling effectively and efficiently,” says Orchid Cellmark CEO Tom Bologna. He says people convicted of a wide range of misdemeanors, and a growing number that the number of DNA samples processed in Cellmark’s four U.S. labs last of states—twenty-eight at last count—now sample juvenile offenders. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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photo by Sofia Silva

CSI, Pikesville: The Maryland State Police Forensics Lab may be a busy place soon, if the state expands its DNA sampling policy.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which safeguards “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” is one of the hallowed principles of American civil liberties. It is also the legal crux of the argument against DNA sampling of arrestees, according to those opposed to giving the state the authority to conduct “searches” of a person’s DNA without probable cause.

Law enforcement agencies already have the power to collect DNA from people who are arrested on suspicion of committing a specific crime.

“We have no problem with that,” says Tania Simoncelli, research fellow at the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project. What she calls “intolerable violation[s] of our civil liberties” are DNA dragnets and random database searches for hits between crime-scene evidence and the DNA profiles of

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people arrested on the mere suspicion of having committed some crime, somewhere, sometime.

Such DNA dragnets are increasingly common. In February, for example, police in Daytona Beach, Florida, pulled over “persons of interest” during traffic stops, using portable DNA kits to swab passing motorists in an attempt to locate the serial killer who had murdered four women in the area.

Former Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Kenneth L. Johnson, who practiced constitutional law before serving on the bench from 1982 to 2001, says that he is personally opposed to arrestee sampling. “It violates the presumption of innocence,” he says. “DNA samples should be taken only after a person is con-

Daniel Katz, forensic biology manager of the state police DNA lab, says that the chances of a coincidental match between two people shrink with each location on the genome tested. “When you get the number of tests up higher—and we do thirteen locations, which is overkill—it’s virtually impossible.”

photo by Sofia Silva

Twenty-five states proposed arrestee-sampling legislation similar to Virginia’s in 2007, with four passing laws. Most target individuals arrested on suspicion of committing felonies, but some cast a wider net. The Arizona bill, for example, authorized sampling of anyone arrested after January 1, 2008. “It’s a small step from a universal DNA database,” says Gary Sweeten, assistant professor of criminology at Arizona State University, “given that the lifetime risk of arrest for a non-traffic offense in the United States is now around 30 percent, with males as high as 50 to 60 percent.”

In 2006, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair proposed just such a universal database, sparking a storm of protest in the U.K. The Daily Telegraph warned of the “sinister plan to make every Briton a suspect.” The British have long been world leaders in DNA databanking: Every individual taken into police custody has his or her DNA profile entered into the U.K. National DNA Database, which now holds more than four million profiles.

Five-hundred thousand arrestees who were never convicted remain in the system, including one-hundred thousand under the age of 18.

Proponents of mass sampling argue that individuals who haven’t done anything wrong have little to fear from having their genetic profile databanked. After all, the system scores a “hit” only when an individual profile matches DNA found at a crime scene. “Victim’s rights advocates and others in society may view these laws as powerful ways for government to solve crime,” says James G. Hodge Jr., associate professor of Health and Public Policy at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“The ethics question is at what cost—the most significant being potential privacy abuses and racial disparities. That is, until the databases eventually include everyone, which is not something that anyone is proposing, at least not in this country.”

victed, unless that person has been arrested for a crime like murder, rape, or child molestation, and has a prior conviction for a similar offense.”

Convicted felons, he points out, have already forfeited some of the protections guaranteed by the Constitution, and though testing their DNA is in some measure a violation of their privacy, the need to catch serial rapists or murderers justifies the intrusion. But for individuals who have been arrested but never tried nor convicted—especially in jurisdictions prone to mass arrests for often negligible crimes—he says, DNA sampling is a clear infringement of constitutional rights.

continued on page 100

photo by Jason Okutake

As an African American growing up in Jim Crow-era Mississippi, Johnson has a personal perspective on the issue. “I witnessed the wholesale violation of civil liberties, with no presumption of innocence,” he says, recalling how black Mississippians were treated by law enforcement. “That was mirrored when I came to Baltimore, though on a lesser scale.” History, he says, makes him especially sensitive to ongoing racial bias in the criminal justice system, and to policies and practices that appear to disproportionately target African American men.

Department of Justice statistics cited by the ACLU show that nonwhites are arrested at three times the rate of whites for crimes of violence.

The racial disparity in arrest rates extends to misdemeanors: In Maryland, African Americans are arrested for possession of marijuana at up to five times the rate of whites, even though studies have shown that marijuana use tends to be higher among whites. Higher arrest rates for both felonies and misdemeanors have contributed to the lopsided composition of the state’s prison census, which is 72.3 percent black, though African Americans comprise just 27.9 percent of the state’s population.

These racial disparities in arrest rates add a critical social justice component to the debate about broadening DNA sampling to arrestees, says bioethicist Hodge, who studies the convergence of public health law, ethics, and human rights. “Basically what we are doing is gathering more incriminating evidence from people of a specific racial class,” he says. “Yes, we may be able to solve more crimes in the future, but it will only be crimes committed by certain groups because that’s all the data we have. It’s not to the advantage of society, many would say, to simply gather more and greater potential evidence from one racial group.”

Nonetheless, laws mandating DNA sampling of arrestees have survived constitutional challenges in Virginia and other states, he points out, though the Minnesota Court of Appeals recently overturned that state’s law and the conservative governor of South Carolina recently vetoed broad arrestee sampling on privacy grounds.

Some civil liberties advocates have also charged that the genetic information stored in CODIS ultimately could be used for other types of research likely to target minority populations—seeking a genetic basis for a predisposition to crime, for example. The ACLU’s Simoncelli argued in a paper prepared for the American Constitution Society that “an association found between a genetic mutation and violence—whether real or perceived—could be used as a means for attempting to screen out violent offenders before they strike.”

It might sound like something out of a science fiction novel, but there’s an ugly history of scientific research performed on people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and mental institutions. The long shadow cast by the 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which 399 black men were denied treatment for forty years so researchers could chart the natural history of the disease, continues to serve as a potent reminder of scientific malfeasance.

Both Katz and Hodge say that some concerns about genetic research using the CODIS databank are based on a misunderstanding of the technology. A DNA fingerprint is basically a snapshot of thirteen locations on an individual’s genome, not a complete genetic portrait of that person. And the portions of the genome analyzed are non-coding—or “junk DNA”— which do not express proteins and thus are not associated with any particular trait or disease.

“The type of DNA profile acquired in these CODIS systems doesn’t describe one’s health status,” Hodge says. “All it tells us is that this DNA profile is a match for somebody previously convicted, or—if Maryland's bill passes—somebody previously arrested. It’s a limited amount of data and not equivalent to a full genetic sample or a full genetic test run on that sample.”

It’s worth pointing out, however, that most states, including Maryland, save the original DNA samples after the DNA fingerprint is created.

Just because full genetic analysis of those samples is not carried out now doesn’t mean that it won’t be someday, if someone decides the data is worth further study. Some states already permit such uses: Alabama permits its DNA database to be used in educational and medical research; Massachusetts allows the disclosure of DNA records for “advancing other humanitarian purposes.”

The standards of informed consent applied in all other types of genetic research—in which study subjects must explicitly approve specific uses of

Swab Story A Short History of DNA Science and Crime 1953: James Watson and Francis Crick discover the three-dimensional structure of the DNA molecule—two parallel chains of nucleotides forming a double helix running the length of each chromosome. A set of twenty-three human chromosomes has about 3.1 million nucleotide pairs.

1964: Werner Arber isolates restriction enzymes, which cleave DNA into fragments.

1984: Alec Jeffreys uses restriction enzymes to cut human DNA into different-sized pieces. Using radioactive labeling to identify base pairs, he is able to create a visual representation of an individual’s DNA code in specific locations on the genome—a DNA “fingerprint.”

1985: Kary Mullis invents the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method for replicating strands of DNA. Starting with a small number of cells, PCR “amplifies” segments of broken strands, creating more than one billion copies of any desired segment.

1987: British police launch the first “DNA dragnet”—requiring more than five thousand men to give blood samples to help solve a rape/murder case. But it takes a tip to lead police to baker Colin Pitchfork, who is arrested after his DNA confirms the match.

1990: The FBI establishes the Combined DNA Indexing System (CODIS), selecting thirteen loci to be used as the standard for DNA fingerprinting.

1992: Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld found the Innocence Project to work for post-conviction DNA testing to exonerate those wrongly convicted.

1993: Marylander Kirk Bloodsworth becomes the first man on death row to be released when a comparison of DNA found at the crime scene fails to match his DNA fingerprint.

1994: Congress passes the DNA Identification Act, which formalizes the authority of the FBI to expand CODIS to include national, state, and local DNA databases.

1995: The United Kingdom establishes the National DNA Database and begins sampling everyone taken into police custody.

2000: Congress passes the DNA Backlog Elimination Act, providing funds to carry out post-conviction forensic tests in cases where upgraded methods of DNA analysis might result in exoneration.

2003: Virginia passes the first law in the United States authorizing DNA sampling of arrestees.

—D.R. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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it is so quiet in John Oktavec’s upstairs studio that sometimes all he can hear is his own heartbeat. Sometimes he’ll listen to classical music up here when he paints at night; sometimes there’s just the tinkling of a neighbor’s wind chimes to keep him company. This is, mostly, the way he likes it.

“I ain’t saying I’m a loner, but I know to be alone when I paint,” he says. “It’s my escape.”

Oktavec, who is in his early 40s, lives by himself in a small white bungalow in Riviera Beach, a few blocks from the Pasadena waterfront. His black easel is set up by a window covered by a curtain—one of the simple ones his mother makes for him, replacing it whenever it gets covered in paint. He is a sign painter by trade—he works for a sign company in Arbutus—and a tinkerer by nature. His house is full of whimsical inventions, such as an off-the-grid LED light contraption that will run off a pendulum, like a grandfather clock. He fixes cars for a little extra money.

But by blood John is a painter of window screens. On the wall next to the easel is a triptych of photographs: John’s grandfather, William; his father, Richard; and himself, all at work on painted screens. The scenes they paint are all variations on a theme: vaguely Alpine rural landscapes crowned by a sky of billowing clouds, with a red-roofed cottage in the middle.

Oktavec recites the rules he learned at his father’s side. You can’t put greens over blacks. The white highlights come last. The brush must be stiff. Oktavec jabs his brush, poking the paint into and around the tiny holes of the wire mesh, so the screen doesn’t clog. Sometimes he takes a breath and blows sharply into the screen, clearing a paint-clogged hole, or runs a thumb along a too-defined line, muting the color. “My dad used to say leave it so the birds can fly through the branches—don’t make it too solid.” he says, daubing a line of green blotches that resolve into a stand of trees. “It’s like he’s sitting on my shoulder. He pours out of my hands.”

the story goes

that William Anton Oktavec, Czechborn grocer and aspiring artist, conjured Baltimore screen painting more or less single-handedly in the hot summer of 1913. The elder Oktavec painted a picture of some produce on the screen door of his grocery at the corner of North Collington and Ashland avenues in East Baltimore. A woman next door, noticing how the painted scene made it difficult to see through the screen, asked Oktavec to paint one for her front window to keep men from peering into her living room. He did, copying a greeting-card image of a red-roofed mill. Other neighbors soon clamored for their own painted screens, and by fall Oktavec had sold some two hundred of them.

Within a few years, there were thousands of painted screens on the streets of East Baltimore. Most depicted that same iconic subject—a storybook cottage in a sylvan glade.

Elaine Eff, the Maryland Historical Trust folklorist who is the planet’s reigning scholarly expert on Baltimore painted screens (her 1984 Ph.D. dissertation for the University of Pennsylvania devotes 412 pages to the topic), estimates that during the art form’s pre-war, pre-air-conditioning heyday, the rowhouses of Highlandtown, Canton, Fells Point, and Little Bohemia were decked out in more than 100,000 painted screens. It was not uncommon for every window of every house in a row to be decorated with scenes turned out by a host of itinerant neighborhood artists— most either inspired or directly employed by William Oktavec and his family, who opened an East Monument Street art shop in 1922 that became the epicenter of the trade. Screen painting was seasonal work, offering extra money in the summer months, and dozens of underemployed East Baltimoreans tried their hand at it. The Oktavecs, however, were the masters. “Everyone went to William to learn,” Eff says.

“The art shop was the shrine, the Mecca, the Oz.” A colorful collection of Oktavecs populate the tale that Eff, a Mount Washington native, has been painstakingly piecing together since her research began in 1974.

When William died in 1956, sons Al and Richard picked up his unfinished commissions. The brothers Oktavec introduced variations on the everpresent red-roofed bungalow—they painted local scenes, historical and patriotic images, religious portraits. “My dad and Richie, they really perfected it,” says Chris Oktavec, Al’s son, who now runs the family’s church restoration business in Baltimore.

Richard was the youngest son, and he took to the trade enthusiastically, painting screens in a room above the East Baltimore art shop or in a basement continued on page 102

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the

by DavID DuDley

PhotograPhy by jason okutake

painted veil John Oktavec is the last member of his family to continue the celebrated Baltimore folk art that his grandfather invented. So why doesn’t anyone know who he is?

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Erik Whipple, Rust #533 (right). Shown with Mountains and Sky, Lake George by Alfred Stieglitz (1924).

©2008 georgia o’keeffe Museum/artists rights society (ars), new york

“Stieglitz’s photograph of clouds displayed that emotions could be communicated through abstract compositions of shape and light. To make Rust #533, I explored the moods of lines, textures, and colors in commonplace items around me. The discovery of this subject struck me in a visceral way. The twisted metal seemed to transform into the delicate vapors of clouds, or the feeling of holding one’s breath.”

©2008 Man ray trust/artists rights society (ars), ny/aDagP, Paris

double exposure double exposure

Ken Royster, untitled (left). Shown with Man Ray’s Black and White (Noire et Blanche) (1926).

“For the past fourteen years I have been photographing African masks in an effort to explore some of the human-like qualities inherent in these magnificent objects. Man Ray’s image juxtaposes (white) model Kiki de Montparnasse’s head with that of an African mask, while my image compares an African mask and an African American woman, albeit tongue-in-cheek.”

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Christopher Meyers, untitled This photo is modeled after Bill Brandt’s 1953 photo East Sussex Coast, a distorted image of a nude lying on a gravelly beach.

Myers went so far as to hand-make a lens and aperture for his 4x5 camera, just as Brandt had: “Technology is seen as an ‘improve all.’ I say getting your hands dirty, developing unique processes, and leaving something to chance yields a more fulfilling and complex body of work.”

With Looking Through the Lens:

Photography 1900–1960, the Baltimore Museum of Art delves into the wildly fecund world of early 20th century

photography. The spring exhibition of 150 rarely seen vintage prints—

including Margaret Bourke-White’s exacting photojournalism, Alfred

Stieglitz’s soaring landscapes, and Man Ray’s avant-garde shadow images—

boasts a unique local element, dubbed

Looking Now. During the winter, a team of three artists (including Urbanite

creative director Alex Castro) enlisted

nineteen area photographers to create new images inspired by those in the

show. It’s a diverse collection that offers a contemparary take on what BMA

Director Doreen Bolger calls “the most pivotal period in photography, when it

became fully recognized as an art form.”

In these pages, you can get a glimpse of what the photographers came up

with, accompanied by selections from

their artist statements. (The full Looking Now gallery is available online at www. urbanitebaltimore.com.)

Jennifer Bishop, the wish This photograph was inspired by Margaret Bourke-White’s portraits of families in their homes, taken for Life magazine in 1937. “I shot many frames this night, using family and interior, trying to capture a sense of how we live ... and the mystery is that this one shot spoke above the others ... as if all objects and movements in the frame had conspired to come alive and reveal a sense of suspense.”

After shooting these homages to photography’s early masters, the

participating photographers then

joined forces with the next generation

via the Youthlight after-school program.

The results of this collaboration with

Michelle Woodward, Back Alley Garage, Baltimore

a digital gallery at the museum April

This image was a response to Berenice Abbott’s 1936 photograph Court of the First Model Tenement in New York City. “How does the photographer make the ordinary extraordinary?

She can capture the transformative effect of light and shadow. When even the most common object is illuminated or silhouetted it can take on a quality otherwise lacking. In Abbott’s photo of the backside of a tenement, the undershirts glow and appear celebratory.”

Baltimore teens will be on display in 23–June 8. You can also submit your

own photos inspired by the show to the museum’s website, www. artmba.org.

Looking Through the Lens: Photography 1900–1960 will be on view through

June 8 at the Baltimore Museum of Art,

10 Art Museum Drive. Admission is free.

Museum hours are Wed–Fri 11 a.m.– 5 p.m., Sat and Sun 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

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Lynn Silverman, untitled “When printing this photograph, I was reminded of several images from Robert Frank’s 1958 book, The Americans. (The 1955 image Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey is in the show.) As a foreigner from Europe, Frank noticed the ubiquity of the American flag throughout his travels across the country.

The flag, a potent symbol of identity, is caught up in a gust of wind, complicating the relationship between local and national identification.”

Dan Meyers, Istanbul, Turkey 2007 This image recalls Robert Frank’s 1956 photograph Car Accident, U.S. 66, between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona, which shows four people standing over a blanket that appears to shroud a human body.

“The isolated mystery preserved in a photograph intrigues me. It makes me think about intent and motivation, provokes me to respond to what is known and unknown, to scrutinize the stillness in the picture.”

Cory Donovan, Self Portrait “In my self portrait, I am responding to the unique perspective of Bill Brandt, the simplicity of Harry Callahan, the strange reality of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and the sculptural form of Edward Weston. My image is a photograph of a reflection in Mylar, which can be bent to create a result reminiscent of a fun-house mirror or a birthday balloon.

Through photography, these reflections create something far more peculiar.” ■

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Refuge

BY JANE DELURY P H O T O G R A P H B Y D AV E H A R P

S

tanding in Molly and Riordan’s bathtub, waiting for Lucas to leave, Tess thought of the Delmarva squirrel that she had found one afternoon, suspended by its paws from a lower branch of a loblolly pine.

She was 10 or 11 years old, on her way to catch the school bus and had, as usual, cut through the patch of woods behind her house. She knelt in the dead needles and watched the muscles strain in the squirrel’s shoulders— she had never thought of squirrels as having shoulders before. To hang from a branch like this was not usual squirrel behavior, and when an animal acted strangely, Tess, like all of the island children, knew not to approach.

Later, coming home from school, she hoped to see the squirrel still hanging on, but instead she found it stiff on its back, its paws clutched around the absent branch.

She had been in the tub long enough for her skin to dry and break out in goose bumps. Long enough to notice the constellations of mildew on the hem of the shower curtain and the rings along the rim of the tub, rings, she supposed, from the products Molly had put away before Tess and her family

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arrived for their week on the island, replacing them with a dollar-store soap, still in its wrapper, and a half-used bottle of salts. Did Molly expect her to soak in the tub? Or did she want Tess to think that she herself had time for such things? The house seemed this visit, more than the others, to be setdecorated: black-eyed Susans in the vase on the kitchen table, the carpets cut through with lines from a vacuum cleaner. Molly had made apple fritters and hot chocolate for their arrival the night before, and Tess could smell the breakfast cooking downstairs.

She peeled back the shower curtain. Lucas, Riordan and Molly’s 4-yearold son, still crouched under the bathroom sink, tracing the pattern on the linoleum with his thumb. He had been there when Tess had turned off the shower and first pulled back the curtain—completely, as one does. She had asked him several times to leave, firmly, then cajolingly. Now, as before, when she said his name, he glanced at her, then went back to his tracing.

“Okay, have it your way,” she said. “I’m getting out. You put your hands over your eyes.”

Downstairs, she found her daughters at the kitchen counter, eating pancakes with blueberry eyes and banana-slice noses. Her husband, Glen, and Molly’s husband, Riordan, sat on opposite sides of the table, reading different sections of the newspaper: Glen, business; Riordan, sports. She leaned between the girls to kiss them before heading to the coffee pot.

“Thanks for braiding their hair,” she said to Molly, who was wiping the stovetop. “Glen lets it pouf up all over the place.” She took a sip of coffee, then stirred in two spoonfuls of sugar. “And look at that breakfast. You’ll spoil them rotten.”

“They’re sugar pies,” Molly said. “I could eat them alive.” She swiped a smear of bacon grease off a burner. “Everything’s cold. You can nuke it if you like.”

“No thanks,” Tess said. “I’ll stick to coffee.”

“Right.” Molly tossed the sponge into the sink. “How else would you keep that figure?”

Tess took her mug to the table. She wished Molly would stop playing the fat girl. Back in high school, Tess had been skinny while Molly already had the start of a double chin and thick legs she hid under skirts as long as those worn by the Mennonite tourist girls. Tess recalled Riordan telling her, as they sorted oysters on the boat their fathers co-owned, that Molly was the type who would look like her mother before she was 25. Their bodies, though, were not so contradictory anymore. They just stored their extra pounds in different places, Tess in her hips and Molly in her upper arms.

“Thought you weren’t going to wake up,” Glen said to Tess when she sat down.

“It’s the sea air. I sleep better here.” She took a piece of bacon from his plate. “Did you get up early?”

“The girls did. Molly and I took them out to see the sun rise.”

“It was beautiful,” Molly said. “Even Lucas thought so, didn’t you honey?” Tess had not noticed Lucas, cross-legged under the table. Molly reached down and patted his head. “I asked him, Isn’t it pretty, and he said yes, didn’t he Glen?”

“Sure did,” Glen said, without looking up from the paper.

“If we’re going, we should go.” Riordan pushed his chair from the table.

He was wearing what Molly called his uniform: a pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt. It had been Molly’s idea that Riordan take the day off from fishing so that they all go together to the beach. Tess took his lack of bathing suit as a sign of resistance.

“Afraid of catching a cold?” she asked as he walked by.

“He’s got his trunks on underneath,” Molly said. She cleared the table, clinking the dishes one on top of the other. Tess followed with Glen’s plate and scraped it clean into the trash.

T

ess and Riordan had grown up a short stretch of dunes apart on the windy side of the island. Their fathers co-captained a fishing boat; the Roving Jack hauled in oysters from the Pocomoke Sound and when those started to dry up, bass and tuna from deeper waters. Their mothers used to joke that Tess and Riordan were refuge animals because they spent all of their free time on the barrier island connected to their own by a bridge built by the park service. One summer afternoon, the year they entered high school, they found a snowy egret tangled in fishing wire at the edge of a marsh. Tess would always think of her friendship with Riordan as before the egret and after, not because together they had freed the bird, but because, as they walked home over the bridge, Riordan put his hand on the small of her back.

Molly had lived in a lilac Victorian on the edge of town, where her parents owned the hardware store. By junior high, she was working afternoons behind the counter and had the pale skin to show for it. When, two years after Tess left for college, her mother called to share the rumors circling town, Tess had said, “Of course, he isn’t. Not Molly.” Leave well enough alone, her mother told her, but when Tess’s father took up the phone he ended the conversation by saying, “There’s still time.”

On their third date, at a pizzeria just off the College Park campus, Tess

told Glen about Molly and Riordan. By then Riordan had called Tess in her dorm to tell her himself. “I feel sorry for him,” she said to Glen. “She won’t understand a thing about his wanting a life on the ocean.”

“Like you, then,” Glen said, for Tess had told him about her and Riordan ending things the previous summer when it became clear that he would not leave their fathers’ fishing boat for the green lawns and shady streets of College Park.

Soon after Tess and Glen married, Riordan and Molly followed suit, the former a small ceremony under the pagoda of Baltimore’s Patterson Park, the latter an elaborate affair in the Island Methodist church with Molly in a bellshaped white dress, net bags of birdseed on the tables and pink balloons lost in the rafters of the church hall.

“Riordan would much rather have gotten married on his boat,” Tess told her mother when they walked into the church. “He once told me so.” She was pregnant with the twins and bursting out of the bridesmaid dress that Molly had mailed to her with a note saying that Riordan wanted her to be part of the ceremony. Tess’s mother sat down in a pew. “You’d see they were happy if you ever came home,” she said, and Tess wondered what exactly her mother wanted since she was the one who had encouraged Tess to leave the island in the first place.

The next time Tess stepped into the church was for her mother’s funeral, followed several years later by her father’s. At her father’s wake, Molly, herself now pregnant, told Tess that she and Riordan would like to offer her room in their house during the summers, now that Tess was selling her parents’ home to pay off their debts. “You’ll want to come back now and again,” she said. Later that night, Riordan told her with tears in his eyes—only the second time that she had seen tears in his eyes—that the ocean would never look the same without her father on it, and she started to cry and let him put his arm around her.

Riordan didn’t say everything would be all right because he, unlike Glen, didn’t say that kind of thing, had never said much of anything at all, a trait she had once held against him, along with his not wanting to go to college, or travel, or live on dry land.

B

y four o’clock the sun had retreated behind swarming gray clouds and the beach was losing the few visitors who came to the island this early in the season. The girls had dug up mole crabs and flown their kite and were putting the last turrets on a sandcastle. Tess and Glen lay on towels, he with the crossword from the newspaper and she with a mystery. Molly sat a towel away from Tess, keeping her eyes on Lucas, who kneeled between them and the water, dragging a plastic rake in a circle around himself. In the barbed waves bordering the surf, Riordan swam toward the horizon.

“He’ll catch his death out there,” Tess said.

“He knows what he’s doing,” Molly said. “He won’t go by drowning. Fishermen die of cancer and heart attacks now.”

Molly was the one who had encouraged Riordan to swim. She said that he wouldn’t get a chance like that for a while. But she had been watching him from behind her sunglasses, from under the brim of a wide straw hat.

“I think I should tell you,” Tess said, “this morning, when I was in the shower, Lucas came in.”

“He does that. He likes the sound of the water.”

“He sort of caught me off guard.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Molly let out a short laugh. “You don’t have anything he hasn’t already seen.”

“Next time prop a chair against the door,” Glen said. “That’s what I do.”

He rolled the newspaper into a tube and added it to the bag of soda cans and water bottles that he would drop off at the recycling center in town. “Pack out what you pack in,” he’d say if Riordan noted that half of the plastics didn’t get recycled anyway.

The ocean slipped higher up the silt, curling around the base of a tower.

The girls jumped on the sandcastle as if to preempt the waves.

“We should take the girls back,” Glen said.

“They’re fine,” Tess said. continued on page 103 w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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Step by step: A digital rendering reveals a cross-section of the apartments’ innovative “cascading loft” design.

SPECIAL DELIVERY

b y m a r c u s c h a r l e s t o n

p h o t o g r a p h y b y a n n e g u mm e r s o n

The building’s original entryway was preserved, says project architect Chris Parts, but the beautiful end-grain wood floor, which was covered by asphalt during the city’s tenure in the building, was beyond salvaging.

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Each level is a half-floor higher than the one before it, and the third-floor bedroom has interior windows to allow in light. Rents for apartments range from $1,275 to $2,350.

space

courtesy of Hord Coplan Macht

From mail sorting station to loft-style apartments, the Railway Express building is no dead letter office

Adorning the front of the Classic Revival-style building are eight pilasters, each topped by a medallion featuring a bald eagle encircled by a wreath. Above the doorway is an image of a mail plane typical of the late 1920s.

When architect Edward M. Hord talks about windows, he always describes them as “wonderful”—at least when he’s talking about the Railway Express Lofts, one of his latest projects. Hord, a senior principal at the architecture firm Hord Coplan Macht, is so thrilled about the successful conversion of the former Parcel Post Station on St. Paul Street into a light-filled, mixed-use building that his family’s been ribbing him about it. “My daughter keeps giving me a hard time because I hang out there too much,” he says.

Built in 1929, the former mail sorting station stretches along the length of the 100 block of Mt. Royal Avenue, with stately pilasters and tall, paned windows along all four exterior walls. “It’s great architecture that’s built to last,” says Marty Azola, president of Azola & Associates and the operating member of Railway Express LLC. “It’s designed to make a statement of stability and permanence.” The city bought the Classic Revival-style building in 1973 and for years used it as a maintenance facility for the housing authority.

In 2005, Railway Express LLC submitted a successful proposal for development, and in December, the building reopened its doors after a whirlwind nine-month-long, $19 million renovation.

Although quick, the rehab was not without some unique challenges. The two-story building is perched twenty-two feet above the train tracks on concrete pillars—in fact, it was the city’s first air rights building, which meant the original builder had to purchase the right to construct the building above the privately owned tracks. In order to develop the building, Railway Express LLC had to clean up environmental contamination on ground level. Because the building is on the National Register of Historic Places, the exterior of the building had to be preserved in a specific way. Plus, electrical wires and water had to be run across the Calvert Street bridge, and work on the belowbuilding parking deck required periodic closures of the tracks. “It was quite a coordination effort with Amtrak,” says Azola.

The first floor of the 77,000-square-foot structure is divided into thirteen commercial suites custom designed for its tenants, including Doracon Contracting, the nonprofit Healthy Teen Network, and the Cafe Mocha eatery, which relocated from Howard Street. The second level contains thirty residential units, sixteen of which Hord calls “cascading lofts”—deep units, sixty feet from front to back, that boast seventeen-foot ceilings and three levels that stair-step down from back to front (see rendering at left). Each apartment has its own window, and even the rooms toward the back of the unit get an abundance of natural light. “On a day like today,” Hord says one particularly gray and rainy afternoon, “you can go up in that bedroom [on the third floor] and you don’t need to turn the lights on. It’s amazing.”

Gavin Hamilton, an internal medicine specialist who moved into a unit in December, appreciated the design immediately. “I like the open layout with long sightlines to the outside from anywhere in the loft,” he says. “My apartment faces south, and even in the winter the light pours in.” Hamilton, who travels to New York City once or twice a month, also likes the building’s proximity to Penn Station, and the fact that the many attractions of Mount Vernon and the arts district are within walking distance.

Azola, a historic builder who recently worked on the conversion of the Bromo Seltzer Tower into artists’ studios, shares Hord’s excitement about the project. “The truth is it’s one of the finest monumental buildings in town and will play a key role in the development of the Station North Arts and Entertainment District,” he says. “[There’s a] good feeling you get as a rehab contractor, polishing up these old buildings and bringing them back to life.

They are often difficult jobs, but when you step back and look at the finished product, you get the warm feeling of accomplishment.” ■ —Marcus Charleston lives in Mount Vernon and produces Midday, heard on WYPR.

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THE VALUE OF CHARM

All of the Towson charm and all of the Baltimore lifestyle.

Featuring ample parking, convenient shopping and fine dining all just moments from a vibrant downtown.

NEW CONDOS 1 Bedrooms from $244,900 | 2 Bedrooms from $314,900

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ss pp aa cc ee

Full house: Brian Jensen’s dining room, decorated in the Anglo-Japanese style popular in the 1880s, contains a Mason & Hamlin organ from 1860 and a breakfront that Jensen rescued from a vacant house in Washington, D.C.

Living in the Past history repeats itself in brian jensen’s lower charles village rowhouse

BY MARIANNE AMOSS P H OTO G R A P H Y BY J A S O N O KU TA K E

B

rian Jensen’s house on East 21st Street is rarely silent. A multitude of clocks tick and chime on the quarter hour; classical music plays quietly in the background. And sometimes there’s the tinkling of tiny bells—old servants’ bells that ring in the basement kitchen. Like many of this house’s original features, Jensen restored the bells and now uses them, ringing down to the kitchen from “Mr. Jensen’s Room” on the second floor during parties—although, instead of a fresh cocktail, he usually receives only a resounding “Get your own damn drink!”

Jensen’s three-story rowhouse is stuffed with such bygone-age ephemera, from the Latrobe stove he’s set up in the living room hearth to the working theater pipe organ installed in the second-floor “Gothic room.”

He’s spent the last thirty years honing his antique-hunting skills and restoring and repairing his finds, which include ornate Victorian furniture and eccentric kitchen appliances from the early to mid-1900s. He does much of the restoration work in his basement workshop. “I find it satisfying to work with my hands,” he says. “When I finish a room, I want to go on to the next thing.”

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At the corner of Boston and Conkling Streets

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

BALTIMORE’S Located in the heart of Baltimore’s dynamic Canton neighborhood, historic Brewers Hill

dogma-life with your pet.

5 Guys Burgers and Fries Dunkin Donuts Baskin-Robbins Pasta Mista PNC Bank Development Design Group, Inc. Bravo Health Met Life RE/MAX Sails Keystone Realty Company Exit 10 RM Sovich Architects Ontology Works Congruent Media Friday’s Child “K” Line Shipping Petards, Inc. Countrywide Home Loans Occupational Medical Services Canton Self Storage Obrecht Commercial Real Estate Kettler Cooperative Services, Inc

has sweeping views of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and city skyline.

Brewers hill offers Class-A offices, retail shops and restaurants — ushering in a new, vibrant lifestyle option for Baltimore.

TOP OF THE HILL »

EASTON TOWN CENTER, COLUMBUS, OHIO

brewershill.net

3600 O’Donnell Street Baltimore, MD 21224 | 410.327.4040

Developed and Managed by Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse and Obrecht Commercial Real Estate.

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DDG is an international architecture, planning and graphics firm specializing in award winning retail, entertainment, graphics, planning, town centers, residential and mixed-use projects.

Development Design Group, Inc. 3700 O’Donnell Street, Baltimore, MD 21224 USA tel | 410 962 0505 fax | 410 783 0816 www.ddg-usa.com | web

space

Jensen’s job dovetails nicely with his historical bent: He’s worked at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for the past three decades, mostly in the exhibits production lab of the American History Museum, where he creates mounts for displays. Perks of the job include handling one-of-kind artifacts—the ruby slippers of The Wizard of Oz, Lewis and Clark’s (still-working) compass—and even taking home things that the museum can no longer store, such as the red velvet drapes that now hang in the living room (they originally decorated an exhibit on the First Ladies). “I’ve always been into old stuff,” he says. “Working in a museum just furthers the sickness.”

The house doesn’t have the time-capsule air of an exhibit hall, though. “I have been in other houses of collectors in which there’s sort of a macabre feeling,” Jensen says. “There’s a certain melancholy

Mirror, mirror: Brian Jensen says his living room mirror took eleven men to install.

“I’ve always been into old stuff,” he says. “Working in a museum just furthers the sickness.” about it, a Miss Havisham thing.” Not so here: Jensen gives his venerable appliances a regular workout.

He plays his extensive collection of 1920s and ’30s dance music 78s on a 1940 Caphart phonograph, which, he says, cost the same as a Buick—$1,000— when it was new. During power outages, Jensen says he turns on the gaslights and plays records on his hand-cranked phonograph, a pre-WWII machine with a striking red speaker horn that blooms from the base. (Sometimes he’ll even cart a portable phonograph to the beach.) During parties, a baby-grand player piano provides live music, or he’ll play a number on the theater organ.

There are a few concessions to the 21st century, including a new flat-screen television that Jensen plans to cover with a tapestry when it’s not in use.

And although he normally uses a modern-day coffeemaker, Jensen occasionally fires up his circa-1920 Perc-O-Toaster, a combination coffee percolator and toaster. “I was using it at lunch today,” he says. “It’s not automatic, so I’ve burned a lot of toast.”

—Marianne Amoss is Urbanite’s managing editor.

Brian Jensen’s home will be one of the houses open to the public during the Old Goucher Historic House Tour on April 27, noon to 4 p.m. Tickets are $10 and are available the day of the tour at Lovely Lane United Methodist Church, 2200 St. Paul Street. ■

Web extra: See more photographs of Brian Jensen’s rowhouse at www.urbanitebaltimore.com.

Two for one: Called “as beautiful in appearance and finish as it is efficient” by ads from the 1920s, Jensen’s Armstrong Perc-OToaster is joined in the kitchen by such other rarities as a stainless steel dishwasher from 1948 and a 1934 refrigerator. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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eat/drink Salad days: Martha Thomas surveys the raw food movement and survives seven days of no cooking (p. 79).

79 Cold Comfort

My week on a raw food diet b y Ma r th a T h o m a s

83 Recipe

The Raw Deal: Spinach curry salad and nut "mylk"

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Tapas Teatro and Ra Sushi

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Wine & Spirits A salute to the gimlet

photo by Jason Okutake

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Uncooking school: Chef Skai Davis of the vegan restaurant Yabba Pot promotes a twenty-one day “raw food challenge.”

Cold Comfort

A week of eating in the raw

By Martha Thomas

On the third day of my raw-food diet, I am reminded of the scene in The Wire where an editor gets on a reporter’s case over syntax: “You don’t evacuate people. You evacuate a room or a building.”

I beg to differ.

I can feel every piece of food inside me: every lettuce leaf and shred of lemon-soaked chard. The raw cashews and almonds, the avocados and apples.

Nothing glutinous or fatty to hold it together in my belly. It isn’t hunger, but awareness of what I’ve eaten.

“I know what you mean,” says Skai Davis, my mentor for this undertaking. “You can feel the food, but you don’t feel full.” Maybe that’s because it doesn’t stick around too long. You are evacuated.

Davis, who owns the vegan Yabba Pot restaurant at 2431 St. Paul Street, has been promoting a periodic twenty-one-day “Raw Food Challenge” on yabbapotcafe.com. She’s had a decent response— about five hundred people have signed on in the past three years, with about half that number completing the endeavor.

I once attended a Franklin Covey productivity seminar, where they give you a thick binder filled with calendar pages, to-do lists, and charts for longand short-term goals. About the only thing I remember was the instructor saying if you do something for twenty-one days it will become a habit; on day twenty-two, if you skip it, you’ll feel like something’s missing. I am not ready to make eating raw a lifestyle, so I settle on trying it for a week, which is longer than I filled out the pages in my Franklin planner.

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Raw food proponents claim that food is best consumed in its natural state, pointing out that humans are the only animals that cook what we eat. Heating above 118 degrees Fahrenheit, they say, decreases the efficacy of nutrients and destroys the enzymes that help with digestion.

Scientists aren’t so sure: They can point out that the way humans have evolved (smaller teeth and jaws, weak stomach acids, even our transition from nomadic wandering to creating communities) came from our discovery of cooking. Humans can’t digest many plants in their raw state, and cooking softens them and releases nutrients; other foods, such as potatoes, grains, and beans, have more digestible calories when cooked. Dogs and wolves have powerful stomach acids that destroy the bacteria in raw and spoiled meat. Grass-eating animals have extra stomachs. Humans, by contrast, are pretty wimpy when it comes to digestion. That’s probably because we’ve been cooking, by some estimates, for almost two million years.

Nevertheless, raw foodists—who, like vegans, don’t consume any animal products, including dairy—are adamant that eating raw is good for the body and the environment. Fans now include the actor-activist Woody Harrelson and celebrity chef Charlie Trotter, who teamed up with restaurateur/ raw-food pioneer Roxanne Klein for a cookbook called Raw in 2003. Roxanne’s—Klein’s eponymous restaurant in Larkspur, California—closed in 2004, but she recently launched a line of “living foods” sold at health food and grocery stores in California.

New York City now boasts several raw restaurants, including Pure Food and Wine, Caravan of Dreams, and Quintessence (whose founding chef was later arrested for exposing himself on the R-train, adding a perverse twist to the notion of raw). Locally, the

Everlasting Life Cafe in Washington, D.C., specializes in raw foods, and in Baltimore, there’s the Yabba Pot. So far, the restaurant’s raw offerings are limited and fairly straightforward: salads, chopped vegetables, marinated kale, nut “mylk.” Davis doesn’t embrace the kind of elaborate transfiguration that fills raw “cookbooks”—intimidating and labor-intensive instructions for layered vegetable “lasagna,” nutmeat “bread pudding,” and the like. “Most people don’t have time for all that anyway,” she says.

Nevertheless, she is supportive of her raw-food acolytes. She even offers a meal plan where you can pay to pick up plates of prepared food each day. I have proposed trading food for labor, and I spend a morning working in the Yabba Pot kitchen. Under

One thing I can't let go is my morning coffee, even though it's taboo for pure raw food eaters.

Davis’ direction, I make a simple spinach salad with green apples and curry dressing, taking some home along with some sliced avocados, my new best friend.

My diet for the week is mostly salads, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. For breakfast, I favor a dish of sliced bananas with a handful of almonds and cashews and a drizzle of maple syrup. Though it is made by boiling sap, syrup is generally approved by raw eaters. (It must retain the karma of something unprocessed.) “I use it in very small quantities,” says Davis.

I’m not concerned about portion size: I generally have lost interest with the food before I feel full

anyway. Somehow, cold and crunchy don’t lead to cravings for me. Instead, I crave some of the pasta with pesto and steamed broccoli I prepare for my daughter. She was nervous about how my raw-food kick would affect her, until she realized I’d let her eat a low-labor diet of pasta and frozen pizza all week.

One thing I can’t let go is my morning coffee, even though it’s taboo for pure raw eaters. I figured my response to caffeine withdrawal would muddy the experience. But I do drink it black or replace the cream with nut milk, which is a treat that makes me feel that this raw thing isn’t so bad after all. I’ve handed over bags of raw almonds and cashews to Davis, who puts them in the blender with lots of water and strains off the meat. She’s also added a handful of blueberries and suggests that I blend the milk with frozen bananas. On its own, the drink is creamy and sweet, better than a Frappuccino, but it doesn’t work in coffee: I can see little flakes of nut floating around, and I can do without the banana flavor.

During the week, I stop in at the Yabba Pot nearly every day. One fellow regular is Yul Hicks, a 47-year-old medical supply salesman who has completed the twenty-one-day challenge twice. Hicks describes his former diet as “typically American”— heavy on meats and processed foods. He became a vegetarian three years ago, after working as a surgical assistant in a hospital. “I worked with a doctor who didn’t eat meat. He was never tired, never had a bad attitude. So I started to watch what he ate.” He also started noticing, he says, “who we were cutting open and why,” in the vascular surgery department.

Hicks cut out dairy products, began exercising, and lost sixty pounds.

He’s been surprised at how balanced his body feels when he goes raw. “I think a lot about early cultures,” he says. “I’d be eating the greens and fruits,

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EAT/DRINK

On Day Four, my friend Christine asks my boyfriend, Dan, and me to join her for a birthday dinner at the Chameleon Cafe in Lauraville. We ask the waitress for something raw, and she brings a beautiful plate with colorful root vegetables: slivers of parsnips, carrots, and watermelon radishes, with greens dressed in hazelnut oil. She also recommends an organic wine. When we leave, chef Jeff Smith tells me he’s never had a request for a raw dinner, though he’s heard of the idea. If he knows in advance, he says, he can scour the farmers’ market for the best of everything. “The quality of the ingredients is even more important when you’re eating something in its purest form,” he says.

The Chameleon Cafe is one of a growing handful of restaurants in town devoted to the principles of local eating. On the menu tonight are local fish and lamb, root vegetable pot pie, and butternut soup. And I can’t eat any of it. If I were in California right now, I could enjoy local strawberries, avocados, and spinach. But in mid-winter Baltimore, I find myself buying pineapples and oranges at the Safeway, and nuts that have traveled from some rainforest, or at least from Georgia. How can this kind of eating be good for the planet?

I also wonder if it’s doing any good for me. With my stomach all talkative, I call a gastroenterologist at Hopkins.

Dr. Gerard E. Mullin, director of integrative GI nutrition services at Johns Hopkins Hospital, confirms some of what raw proponents say. Cooking destroys some vitamins, like the B vitamins, as well as some digestive enzymes in foods. “In a society where food is so highly processed, raw is the best way to ensure you get complete nutrition from food—as long as your digestive system can tolerate it,” he says. However, he would more likely advocate “a periodic cleansing than a sustained diet,” he says.

By the end of the week, my sinuses are completely clear, and, usually allergy-prone, I feel as if my breathing is better than it’s been since I moved to Baltimore. I haven’t lost any weight, but cravings for baked goods and sugar have pretty much disappeared, and once I’m back on cooked foods, I tend to reach for a fistful of nuts instead of Trader Joe’s sandwich cookies to stave off afternoon hunger pangs. I might revisit raw for a week once the summer produce starts rolling in, and I know I will incorporate some of its tricks on a regular basis.

Ultimately, I conclude, eating raw food is a great way to remind yourself to eat real. ■ —Martha Thomas wrote about baker Dale Dugan in the January Urbanite.

Raw Deals

photo by Steve Buchanan

whatever was available around me.” Hicks has no plans to become a full-time raw eater, but says that it’s a great reminder of what’s essential. “You eat to live instead of living to eat.”

A new leaf: Curry powder and whole cumin seeds add punch to a spinach salad with blueberries.

Spinach Curry Salad 1 lb fresh baby spinach 1 pint blueberries 1 Granny Smith apple, cut into matchstick pieces 1 bunch scallions, thinly sliced 2 to 3 tsp minced garlic 4 tbs curry powder 2 oz safflower oil Sea salt Cumin seeds In a large bowl, toss spinach, apple, scallions, and blueberries.

Mix oil, garlic, curry powder, and sea salt (to taste) in a small bowl until it is the consistency of a wet paste. Mix dressing into salad with hands, ensuring that all leaves are coated.

Garnish with cumin seeds.

Skai’s Easy Nut Mylk You will need a cheesecloth and a good blender.

Soak 4 cups raw nuts overnight. (Brazil nuts work best, but you can mix cashews, almonds, and macadamia nuts.) Strain. (If you are not using them immediately, store them in a colander in the refrigerator so they don’t get slimy.)

In a blender, cover 2 cups of the nuts with water to double volume. Blend on high speed until the nuts virtually disappear into a whitish opaque liquid. Pour into cheesecloth and strain liquid into a bowl by squeezing tightly with your hands. Repeat with the second batch.

Return the mylk to the blender with vanilla essence, a banana or two, and a pinch of nutmeg and/or cinnamon. Blend and add water until you create the desired liquidity. Sweeten as desired. (Skai Davis prefers maple syrup; raw foodists may use powdered or liquid stevia or raw agave nectar.) Store in the refrigerator for up to four days.

—Recipes by Skai Davis, adapted by Martha Thomas Web extra: For another raw food recipe, go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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This bar/restaurant adjoining the Charles Theatre credits itself with bringing tapas to Baltimore in May 2001. It’s a claim that is at least spiritually correct: While a handful of local Spanish restaurants offered tapas-like appetizers, Tapas Teatro was the first that seemed to grasp the metaphysics of the culinary tradition—an open-ended parade of boldly seasoned snacks that keep the mouth entertained during pre-dinner drinks and conversation. The Spanish are a garrulous people, and tapas function best as punctuation marks for an evening of gab, which makes this genre an apt fit for the art-house crowd: The flicks provide conversation fodder, and the late-night kitchen (the bar serves cold tapas until the 2 a.m. closing) allows one to approximate the Madrileño dinner hour amid a cosmopolitan crowd of black-clad Almodóvar fans.

Most important, Tapas Teatro gets the timing right. Servers don’t dump a heap of plates on the table at the meal’s onset; rather, they choreograph a steady procession of dishes. The menu is uncomplicated, lusty, and convincingly Iberian: meaty, thumb-length boquerones (white anchovies) draped atop

reviewed

Tapas Teatro shavings of lemon-dressed red onion; skewers of tender grilled lamb; a plate of nutty Serrano ham with mellow Manchego and ripe Cabrales cheeses. The folks in the open kitchen largely avoid the temptation to gussy things up, and the best dishes are effective, one-note blasts. Grilled shrimp, served headon in their fire-blackened shells, look daunting—all singed limbs and feelers—but the creatures themselves are big, sweet, and briny, a perfect foil for a cold fino sherry or a glass of Albariño drawn from a mid-priced wine list of mostly Spanish and Portuguese bottles. For dessert, split a satiny, nutmeg-scented flan.

If the restaurant’s couple-heavy demographics are to be believed, all this makes for a good date-night scene. The shared dishes conjure a festive intimacy, the glamorously lit exposed-brick space feels effortlessly cool, and the scent of butter wafting over from the lobby popcorn machine mingles alluringly with all that garlic and smoked paprika. (Dinner only; closed Mon. 1711 N. Charles St.; 410332-0110; www.tapasteatro.com.)

—David Dudley

Dinner and a movie: Tapas Teatro’s executive chef, Antonio Baines

Ra Sushi wasabi mashed potatoes instead of rice and drizzled with a sweet glaze. Even the sashimi, traditionally pure and simple raw fish, is dressed up here: Slices of tuna and avocado are fanned around a small dish of ponzu dipping sauce. And the cocktail menu— designed for the young urbanites expected to occupy the Eden apartments upstairs— further strays from the traditional, with its Saketini and Ra Pleasure (vodka, sake, and a variety of fruit juices).

And you can forget those gummy mochi rice cakes that serve as sweets at more authentic Japanese establishments. At Ra, desserts range from fried ice cream or crème brulée to a fried banana stuffed with chocolate and lavished with Kahlúa caramel sauce—far from Japanese, but at this point, who’s paying attention? (Lunch and dinner daily, bar open until 1 a.m. 1390 Lancaster St.; 410-522-3200; www.rasushi.com.)

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Sushi stateside has come a long way from those serene enclaves with tatami floors back in Japan. Witness Ra, which recently opened in swank Inner Harbor East. The Baltimore franchise is number seventeen in a chain owned by Benihana, Inc., and the first in the Northeast. Like its cleaver-wielding, flamethrowing parent, Ra is all about theater.

The interior is redder than a lacquerware bowl; the huge, apparently Viagra-enhanced “special rolls”—some filled with mango and roasted peppers, some dipped in batter and fried tempura-style—are served up by young waitresses in black tank tops to the beat of loud rock music. Nearly half of the rolls contain cream cheese, that very un-Japanese ingredient that gained a foothold back in the days when sushi bars sought to seduce New Yorkers raised on lox and bagels.

But once you’re over any purist illusions, there’s a lot of fun to be had with Ra’s menu of East-meets-West hybrids. The whimsical apple-teriyaki salmon is presented like a giant piece of cooked nigiri, draped across a bed of

—Martha Thomas High roller: Ra Sushi’s non-traditional rolls pile on the theatricality.

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A lime-green salute to the gimlet, the cocktail that conquered scurvy

By Clinton Macsherry

Ernest Hemingway had his share of problems. Whether it was a cause or an effect of these ills, I’m not equipped to say, but he was also a legendary drinker.

In the 1920s, he and fellow expats of the “Lost Generation” glugged their way around Paris and through much of Europe. With Prohibition in full swing stateside, the continent’s relaxed attitude toward alcohol was one of its attractions.

From there, in fact and in fiction, associations with booze followed Hemingway around the world—which did nothing to hurt the persona he cultivated for himself.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always liked the way cocktails work their way into Hemingway’s stories.

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” a tale of sexual politics and a fateful testosterone rush on safari in Kenya, offers a prime example. In the opening scene, as the hunting party returns to camp, the title character orders a round of gimlets. The “justcool lime drinks” are poured from “bottles out of the canvas cooling bags that sweated wet in the wind that blew through the trees that shaded the tents.” That’s probably the most refreshing drink I’ve ever read.

Hemingway doesn’t say that the gimlet is made with Rose’s West India Sweetened Lime Juice, but he doesn’t really have to. As Gary Regan writes in his indispensable compendium, The Bartender’s Bible, “Since the Rose’s product has had such a long and impressive history (which predates the gimlet), I am inclined to think that Rose’s was the ingredient that invented the drink.” I’m tempted to add “accept no substitutes,” but I don’t believe there are any: Rose’s makes a gimlet a gimlet.

The history Regan alludes to dates to the 1865 founding of L. Rose & Company by Scotsman Lauchlin Rose. At the time, Great Britain ruled the seas, but British sailors suffered from rampant scurvy. Caused by prolonged vitamin C deficiency— the seafaring diet ran short on perishable fruits and vegetables—scurvy’s symptoms include painful gum inflammation, bleeding of the mucous membranes, and loss of teeth. Untreated, it results in death.

In 1867, Rose patented a process for sweetening and preserving lime juice. That same year, Britain passed the Merchant Shipping Act, requiring all ships to carry rations of lime juice for their crews.

Rose’s sales soared, maritime scurvy was largely eradicated, and the world was bequeathed the enduring epithet “limey.”

Rose’s bottles retain a classic packaging motif of embossed limes and leaves, which is sort of nice. But the glass is also annoyingly prone to stickiness, and the tin bottle caps grind a bit after sugary residue solidifies along the screw channels. The sweetness comes with the territory, though. Rose’s signature lime-marmalade flavor requires it. In a pinch, I’ve made my own version—a simple syrup of fresh-squeezed lime and confectioner’s sugar—but Rose’s patent is safe.

Gimlet recipes vary mostly in the proportion of Rose’s to gin, or vodka if you must. The most extreme I’ve seen is the half-and-half gimlet Philip Marlowe drinks in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, the thought of which makes my teeth hurt in a non-scurvy kind of way. Conventional recipes call for one part Rose’s to three or four parts liquor, shaken with ice, strained into a martini glass or a tumbler, and garnished with a lime wedge, slice, or twist. (I always splash some fresh lime juice into the mix, which puts me in the minority.) A bartender at the Marlin Moon Grille in Ocean City served me one in a snifter with the thinnest imaginable circle of lime afloat on the surface. It’s an image that never fails to remind me that it’s five o’clock somewhere.

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Kids on the Hill presents

Sounds of HOPE and CHANGE: Celebrating Diversity Through Music Sunday May 4, 2008 Come hear the fabulous sounds of the soulful Lea Gilmore, croon to Charm City Klezmer, jam to Korean drumming and experience the flow and funk of beat box performer Shodekeh.

Also featuring the charismatic Joyce J. Scott as our queen of inspiration and mistress of ceremonies.

Tickets available online at www.kidsonthehill.org For more information call 410-383-7200x1

Celebration concert 2:00pm Beth Am Synagogue 2501 Eutaw Place Cost: $25 for adults $10 for students $5 for children under 14 Fundraiser Brunch 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.

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art/culture The Fast and the Furious Is the homegrown hip-hop hybrid called Baltimore club the perfect dance music for dangerous times? by stephen janis photograph by frank klein Straddling the corner of Saratoga Street and Park Avenue, just a stone’s throw from Lexington Market, sits International Fragrance, a quiet little scent shop filled with the musky aroma of African soaps and sandalwood incense. There’s little evidence that, nearly a decade ago, this quiet space served as ground zero for one of the city’s biggest musical exports—the streetwise hip-hop/house fusion known as Baltimore club.

“People tell me all the time this used to be a record store,” International Fragrance owner Sweety Rahman tells me. “I don’t know anything about it, though.”

From the mid-1970s until 2003, this was home to Music Liberated, a record-strewn hole-in-the-wall presided over by owner Bernie Rabinowitz. When I was the distribution director for the local punk and indie rock label Morphius Records, I used to be a frequent visitor to the store, stacks of vinyl twelve-inches in hand. Producers, DJs, and assorted acolytes of Baltimore club music would gather in these cramped

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magazine

Martha Thomas on These Shining Lives

and The Color Purple

Violet Glaze on Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story

Michael Paulson on Meatpaper

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art

Greg Hanscom on

Maps on Purpose

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Crossover: In recent years, Baltimore club has migrated out to new audiences.

books

Literary editor Susan McCallum-Smith keeps it short

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K-12 Math Education Forum

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Thursday April 24, 2008 5:00pm—7:30 pm, event at 5:30pm At Port Discovery Children’s Museum Light refreshments will be served Seating is limited. Registration is required.

Register: http://bcp.eventbrite.com/, e-mail bcpinfo@baltimorecp.org Larry Schugam at 410-675-7000 x17.

Panel: Dr. R. James Milgram is a Stanford University mathematics professor. He served on the National Board for Education Science and serves on the NASA Advisory Council. Dr. Milgram is one of the authors of the California Mathematics Framework.

Dr. William H. Schmidt is a Michigan State University Disinguished Professor. He is co director of the Education Policy Center and oversaw U.S. participation in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study.

Dr. W. Stephen Wilson is a Johns Hopkins University mathematics professor. He is one of the authors of the Fordham Foundation’s 2005 The State of State Math Standards report and has served as the Senior Advisor for Mathematics in the U.S. Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Mr. Alfred R. Berkeley III will moderate the forum.

Mr. Berkeley is Chairman of Pipeline Trading Systems and from June 1996 until August 2003 served as President and then Vice-Chairman of The Nasdaq Stock Market. He is a trustee of The Johns Hopkins University.

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The Leading Minds series invites national leaders in public education to engage local stakeholders in a discussion of controversial topics that have direct relevance to improving K-12 education.

This series is hosted by The Baltimore Curriculum Project, a nonprofit organization that transforms underperforming, high-poverty schools into highperforming charter schools. (www.baltimorecp.org) Sponsors:

Children’s Museum

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confines to trade mix tapes, wheel-and-deal with Rabinowitz, or get an inside beat on the week’s hottest club track while a DJ stationed in the back of the store spun dance records. “Bernie’s store was everything to club,” recalls Mike Sky, head of A&R for Liaison Records in Laurel. “That was the place; he was the man.”

Rabinowitz died in 2003, when his car flipped over on I-83 on an icy January evening, and much of the store’s inventory of twelve-inches was sold off to Dimensions in Music, a record store across the street. But Baltimore club has lived on, and even thrived. No longer limited to mix shows on 92Q and inner-city clubs, the music has become part of the city’s cultural currency, in part because of its association with The Wire. Listeners curious about this intensely regional subgenre, once distributed mainly via homemade vinyl records or mix tapes, can now find Baltimore club on HBO or Amazon.com: Club tracks appeared both on the The Wire itself and in two recent soundtrack CDs: The Wire: “...and all the pieces matter” and Beyond Hamsterdam: Baltimore Tracks from The Wire, which focuses specifically on local artists. The show’s creator, David Simon, says that club makes the perfect sonic ambience for his gritty urban drama: “It has a chip on its shoulder.”

The thread that binds Baltimore club to its place of birth is similar to one that guided the show to such acclaim: a trenchant take on crime, corruption, and the city’s inclination for picking at its wounds with a switchblade. And, like The Wire, club music now serves as a hard-hitting missive to the wider world from a city that just can’t get its act together.

“I get calls from Paris, London, Frankfurt, Brazil, and Japan,” says veteran club DJ and producer Rod Lee; his “Dance My Pain Away” is a Beyond Hamsterdam highlight. “I deal with cities that I’ve never heard of before. It’s everywhere. It’s worldwide.”

Producer and promoter Shawn Caesar, coowner of Unruly Records, agrees. “We’ve been to Amsterdam and London several times, and we’re scheduled to go back and DJ in Amsterdam again,” says Caesar, whose label has released many of the genre’s best-known hits. “Everywhere we go, people have great respect for the music, and they want to know all about Baltimore.”

The steady rise of club music represents a triumph of sorts for a city that has had mixed success exporting homegrown hip-hop or R&B artists. In recent years, club has been covered in everything from Spin and the indie music website Pitchfork to the New Yorker and the academic Journal of Popular Music Studies. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and now this happened,” says Caesar. “I’m kind of shaking my head.”

“I never thought I would leave Baltimore City, let alone go to another country,” says Caesar’s partner Scottie B, a production legend in his own right.

Understanding how this uncompromising form of house music made its way across the ocean and

illustration by Bill Geenen

art/culture

Radioactive: These Shining Lives dramatizes the lives of “radium girls”—watch factory workers exposed to lethal radium during the 1920s.

theater I Am Woman These Shining Lives at Center Stage, Apr 24–June 1 The Color Purple at the Hippodrome, Apr 29–May 18

When Melanie Marnich’s play was chosen for a staged reading during the 2006/2007 Center Stage “First Look” series, she thought it was “done-ish.”

These Shining Lives, opening in the Head Theater on April 24, has come a long way, baby.

First Look is an opportunity for playwrights—some seasoned, some just starting out—to develop their scripts through public readings and workshops. Six plays incubated in the program have been produced at Center Stage, says resident dramaturge Gavin Witt.

“It’s easy to perceive us as the big institution in town,” he says. “This is a way of expanding our identity for those who see us as staid.”

These Shining Lives is based on the true story of women—mostly immigrants—who worked in watch factories in the 1920s and ’30s, painting the faces of timepieces with glow-in-the-dark radium. As the shocking effects—including anemia and disintegration of the jaw—of their practice of dabbing paintbrushes against their tongues began to surface, a group of women rose up in protest. Eventually, the workers, from factories in Chicago and Ottawa, Illinois, inspired a class-action lawsuit and workplace safety legislation—although not until a terrible price had been paid.

After working with the actors and Center Stage staff, Marnich says the play “evolved and

deepened.” Witt says that Marnich’s re-working included “elaborating and complicating various relationships within the play, clarifying the narrative throughline, and balancing the play’s use of documentary history.”

Another tale of female empowerment, The Color Purple, which ended its two-year Broadway run in February, will stop in at the Hippodrome beginning April 29 on its U.S. tour.

Produced by Oprah Winfrey (who appeared in Steven Spielberg’s movie adaptation of the Alice Walker novel), it’s a story of Celie, an African American girl in 1930s rural Georgia who overcomes years of abuse by her father and husband to forge bonds with the women around her. In the last year of its Broadway run, the show had an influx of stars: 2004 American Idol winner Fantasia took over the role of Celie, and Chaka Khan and BeBe Winans joined the cast just before the show closed.

At press time the cast was undetermined, but this story of healing and hope—told with music inspired by jazz, pop, and gospel—will uplift the audience no matter who steps into the roles.

—Martha Thomas

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into national magazines requires an appreciation of how pain and suffering can lend an irresistible authenticity to even the most rote musical forms.

A ferocious hybrid of house, hip-hop, and techno, Baltimore club has—like the city itself—adopted a scavenger’s edge. Vocal snippets are bent, twisted, and thrashed through layers of sound; tracks are threaded with samples from popular hip-hop songs, mashed by offbeat timing and unsettled phrasing.

“People don’t want soft music anymore, just like women don’t want to be made love to soft anymore—they want it hard,” says Lee. “Baltimore club is hard. It’s harder than anything else out there because of how we live.”

Lyrically, Baltimore club is limited by the imperative to simply move the crowd, but it’s more topical than other house-infused genres, and its best practitioners use that rhythm to drive themes as culturally resonant as the savviest hip-hop. Club is also infused with a stubborn sense of hope and pride, a spirit that cannot be ignored by anyone who seeks to understand Baltimore or call it home.

Few agree on who produced the first club record, but DJ Frank Ski of 92Q Radio is often credited with the first Baltimore club hit, a syncopated concoction released in 1991 called “Doo Doo Brown” that grafted the vocal musings of salacious Miami beat master Luther Campbell onto a rhythm so unrelenting it became notorious for busting speakers with the low-frequency pounding from a whiplash bass sample.

Other essential early ’90s club records, such as Caesar’s “Yo Yo Where the Hos At” and Scottie B’s “I Got the Rhythm,” were set apart by austere production, fast-paced rhythm (club occasionally reaches the upper end of the house-music spectrum of 130 beats per minute), and hip-hop attitude. “It was like fast hip-hop, with the intensity of rap but the movement of house,” Caesar says.

Unlike traditional house, built on the ecstasy of orderly repetition, club DJs coil samples and beats in a frenzied narrative, with jagged stops punctuated by a booming kick drum—stabs of a knife into the guts of the song. Club producers often mashed their beats with over-the-top samples, giving the music a dark, absurdist wit. A tide of discs have followed: “Watch Out for the Big Girl,” Tapp’s “Shake that Ass Girl,” Miss Tony’s “What’s Up What’s Up,” Rod Lee’s memorable hit “Feel Me”—all powered by foul-mouthed samples set to the rhythm of a city in post-industrial withdrawal. “There is something in the city of Baltimore where we say, ‘F--- you, we just do what we want.’” Lee says. “We just do things our own way, and you can hear it in what we do.”

Indeed, club’s lyrical treatment of city life is typically direct: In his classic “Git Pumped,” producer DJ Class invokes the city’s topography by rattling off a dozen Baltimore neighborhoods in a kinetic battle cry. Rod Lee’s paean to the city’s misery, “Dance My Pain Away,” recounts the difficulty of making a living in town beset by poverty:

photo by Steve Granitz/Wireimage

art/culture

Schlock treatment: Jeffrey Schwarz’s William Castle doc is a Maryland Film Fest highlight

film Scare Tactics Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story and My Effortless Brilliance at the Maryland Film Festival Readers old enough to remember matinees at the Waverly Theater at 32nd and Greenmount will be familiar with the nervy oeuvre of William Castle, the breathless showman responsible for peppering each performance of his 1950s and ’60s B-movie horror films with special-effect “enhancements” unlikely to win any technical Oscars. But younger theatergoers unfamiliar with the magic of “Illusion-O” (peer through a pane of red or blue cellophane to make the movie’s ghosts appear and disappear) or “Emergo” (an inflatable skeleton dangles across the theater ceiling at the movie’s climax) can content themselves with Jeffrey Schwarz’s fantastic documentary Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, screening at the Maryland Film Festival.

Castle’s best gimmick, for the 1959 film The Tingler, was “Percepto,” his deluxe term for wiring select theater seats with joy-buzzer-style vibrators. At the movie’s climax, when the escaped Tingler (a lobster-caterpillar that attaches itself to people’s spines) escapes into a movie

theater, the film suddenly appears to melt in the projector and the seats start zapping patrons while an announcer bellows “Scream! Scream for your lives!”—thus triggering giddy, fourth-wallbusting bedlam.

For festivalgoers with more subtle tastes, there’s also My Effortless Brilliance, a superunderstated comedy about an effete, Dave Eggers-esque literati (Sean Nelson) spending an awkward vacation with his rugged friend (Basil Harris) in a backwoods Washington log cabin, where the hazards range from a cougar on the loose to vicious uncomfortable silences.

The tenth Maryland Film Festival runs May 1 through 4 at various locations in and around Baltim—LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE TINGLER IS LOOSE IN THIS ISSUE OF URBANITE! ANYONE TOUCHING THESE PAGES MUST SCREAM! SCREAM FOR THEIR LIVES! —Violet Glaze

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art/culture Have to file bankruptcy Need some help from somebody?

Doctors keep adding up I’m desperate to make a buck “It’s just reality, the reality that you feel every day in this city,” Lee says.

Club’s migration into punk clubs and hipster bars in recent years has marked a turning point—a music that had been evolving underground for more than a decade was suddenly exposed to a new and very different set of fans. “When they put a club record on at the Ottobar, people actually started to have fun,” recalls Lisa Fritsch, a former buyer for Morphius Records. During my three years working at Morphius, I helped set up a division for urban music under the guidance of Morphius CEO David Andler, signing the hip-hop MC Labtekwon and releasing a single from go-go/hip-hop artist DJ Kool. A twelve-inch release of “Git Pumped” by DJ Class was our first venture into club, but it was Fritsch who suggested bringing club into the fold by distributing a full-length CD by Lee protégé DJ Li’l Jay. “Punk kids just started blogging about it,” Fritsch says. “It’s a world they want to understand but can’t, so they try to get at it through the music.”

“It’s like there are two audiences now,” says Caesar. “There’s still the traditional club inner-city audience, and then there is the hipster from all over the world.”

Even with this new renown, the future of the music might lead back to a familiar corner. Rod Lee has just signed a lease on a retail space two doors down from the old Music Liberated. He plans to open the space soon as a record and DJ-supply store.

It will also be the headquarters for his label, Club Kingz, and perhaps the next nexus for Baltimore club’s evolution.

Crucial to the music’s growth, says Lee, is local control—an independent economic infrastructure to allow artists to keep the sound intact while promoting it to a larger audience. He’s not interested in a watered-down, mass-market version of the city’s signature sound. And unadulterated Baltimore club may prove to be too hard for the pop world beyond the city limits: Ultimately, club may be fated to be as entrenched and steadfastly local as go-go music, the Washington, D.C., funk hybrid that enjoyed a brief flirtation with national fame in the early 1980s.

Lee, for one, feels confident he can take Baltimore club to the next level by himself. “A lot of rappers come up to me mad that Baltimore is known for club, not hip-hop,” he says. “But it is what it is; we give it to people the way we feel it. If someone can do better, then let them. I’m just going to keep working.” ■ —This is Baltimore Examiner reporter Stephen Janis’ first story for Urbanite.

Well done: Meatpaper magazine ponders the way of all flesh.

magazine Where’s the Beef?

Meatpaper In a city with neighborhoods like Pigtown and Butchers Hill, a publication like Meatpaper fits right in. Editors Sasha Wizansky and Amy Standen describe Meatpaper as “an investigation into what we see as a growing cultural trend of meat consciousness,” driven in part by the recent explosion of interest in local food economies and the environmental impact of industrial livestock production. In the first issue, the editors say this San Francisco-based quarterly magazine revolves around the apt neologism fleischgeist: the spirit of the meat.

What follows is a delicious, bloody romp.

The winter issue (number 2, if you’re counting) is a smorgasbord of carnivorous delights, opening with an illuminating interview with a meat inspector (and no, even after witnessing all manner of violations, he hasn’t sworn off the stuff). Other pieces include a cinematic survey of animal flesh in film, a Slow Food advocate’s quest for a more humane slaughterhouse, and one chef ’s paean to the joys and benefits of eating the heart (plus one

of his recipes: Grilled Beef Heart with Roasted Golden Beets and Horseradish). But the fun hardly stops at the written word. Meatpaper contains a trove of high-protein art, including graphic forays into butchers’ counters, kitchens, and bizarre Rockwell-like dining-room tableaux of families and their meat.

Fortunately, what could easily become a kitschy stew of words, images, and irony stays true to its founding premise: an honest appreciation of and inquiry into meat and our complex relationship with it. Whether you’re into overstuffed corned beef sandwiches or tofu and sprouts, Meatpaper offers plenty to chew on.

—Michael Paulson

The spring issue of Meatpaper is available locally at Harbor News (1010 Aliceanna Street) and Barnes & Noble bookstores.

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I used to flash gang signs at the bowling alley.

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photo by Dan Meyers

art/culture

courtesy of Newberry Library, Chicago

The geography of community: The Harlem Park map (above), a giant mosaic of fabric and paint, charts the neighborhood’s abandoned and occupied homes. It is based on the Hull House Maps (right), which documented household earnings and ethnicities in 1895 Chicago.

art Uncharted Territory Maps on Purpose at the Walters Art Museum In an era when MapQuest and Google churn out precise, digital maps like McDonald’s does hamburgers, the community arts program Art On Purpose has turned cartography into a slow, thoughtful, and somewhat epic affair. The result is “Maps On Purpose,” a local element for the Walters Art Museum’s historic exhibition Maps: Finding Our Place in the World.

Art On Purpose artist and director Peter Bruun and his staff of four started work more than a year ago, enlisting leaders from twenty-three Baltimore neighborhoods. Each leader recruited citizen mapmakers and asked residents what they thought was worthy of inclusion in a community map. Then, paired with artists hired by Art On Purpose, they set to work. Over the course of about two months, hundreds of community activists, school kids, and ordinary citizens gathered for mapmaking sessions.

They met in art centers, schools, and churches. (And sometimes right outside my door—Art On Purpose shares Urbanite’s office space in Clipper Mill.) These were democratic and downright messy affairs:

Participants worked with paints, photographs, silk screens, and fabric to create intricate, brilliantly colored, often mural-sized maps, each of which has ties to a map featured in the Walters show.

One mapmaker from Oliver produced two small maps, one showing the neighborhood as it is (vacant houses, painted gray, mingle with occupied ones in red), the other as it might someday be (all the houses are red, including a new senior apartment building). The inspiration came from the map of the Aztec capital that Hernán Cortés sent to the King of Spain in 1524. The Remington map, in which colored lines connect residents with the places they frequent on foot, was inspired by a map of the London Underground subway system. The Hollins Market/Union Square cartographers charted the neighborhoods’ population growth and decline—a nod to Charles Joseph Minard’s famous graphic of Napoleon’s invasion of, and subsequent retreat from, Russia.

True to the message of the Walters exhibition, the maps did more than trace local geography.

“These maps are catalysts for conversations about neighborhood issues,” says Bruun. Cecelia Mckenzie, a community activist in Oliver, says the mapmaking workshops attracted people who rarely participate in community activities—young men in particular.

“People came out religiously for eight or nine weeks,” she says. “It brought us together.”

Art On Purpose has arranged for buses to bring people from participating neighborhoods to see the maps, which are taking turns on a wall at the Walters. On May 10, the group will host a symposium aimed at creating map-based Web “portals” into Baltimore neighborhoods. And the project may not end there: Baltimore’s new army of citizen mapmakers won’t let it. “You can’t just start this and then not do it again,” says Mckenzie. “Tell them to start another one this summer.”

—Greg Hanscom

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books Short Cuts

art/culture

by susan mccallum-smith

illustration © Charles Burns, courtesy of Fantagraphics Books

include a tail. The infected, ostracized by the community, flee to the woods, where murder stalks, by persons or things unknown.

This Armageddon unfolds with barely a parent or a doctor in sight. Left alone to deal with the hormone-churning misery of adolescence, the teenagers act in predictable fashion, through selfabsorption (“All I ever talk about is me, me, me …”) and escapism (“All I wanted to do was get loaded …”).

Getting drunk, stoned, or laid is the order of most of their days.

Burns’ craftsmanship is showcased in the larger-scale graphics: Chris lying in bed surrounded by the detritus of hobo-teenage life: Marlboros, Tampax, a gun; Jimi Hendrix’s hair aflame in a poster hanging in the drug dealers’ living room; fractured images of nightmares and hallucinations jostling for interpretation. Indeed, the whole book is slashed through with these metaphorical cuts (recognizable to anyone familiar with the floral art of Georgia O’Keefe)—cuts that encapsulate adolescence as concisely as that delicate compound adjective: c--t-struck.

N

ot Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure (2008), edited by Larry Smith and Rachael Ferschleiser, has received a lot of press lately. It’s a witty premise, true, but is its success reflective of our ever-diminishing attention span? Given that book columns are being squeezed in newspapers from coast to coast, could this be the dawn of the sixword review?

“All I talk about is me.” (Black Hole by Charles Burns; Pantheon, 2005) A cult classic for graphic-novel groupies, Burns’ ten-years-in-the-making Black Hole has (almost) overcome my resistance to cartoons pretending to be novels. Reading it is a tactile experience, from its lipstick-red cover to the needlepoint-precise illustrations on paper so black you swear it’s going to stain your fingers.

Black Hole is an allegory of teenage angst masquerading as a horror flick. A sexually transmitted disease menaces a 1970s suburb, with symptoms unpredictable and gross: boils, dismemberments, embarrassing new appendages, and, most frequently, strange fissures in the skin that split and yawn. One horny teenager after another succumbs, including Keith and Chris, often difficult to tell apart because of their identical part-n-curl bangs. Keith suffers unrequited love for foxy Chris but consoles himself with the bootylicious Eliza, whose many charms

“ For love of God and Country.” (Bringing Vincent Home by Madeleine Mysko; Plain View Press, 2007) Kitty Duvall’s life changes irrevocably when her son returns home from the Vietnam War with burns over 36 percent of his body. She spends weeks at an Army hospital in Texas while Vincent hovers in critical condition before beginning his torturous journey to recovery. Kitty’s vigil tests her faith as she is forced to reflect on her actions (and inactions) regarding the war and her failed marriage.

Local writer Madeleine Mysko has written an assured and deeply moving first book, anchored by a complex and empathetic main character. Kitty Duvall is old-fashioned, believing her role and responsibilities lie safely within the remit of the home, as wife and mother. Her abusive husband, who left long ago, has sobered up and met someone new, and now clamors for a divorce. Kitty refuses him, perceiving it as a betrayal of her Catholicism.

Our feelings for Kitty alternate between frustration over her political naiveté and stubborn marital martyrdom, and enormous compassion for her decency and circumstances.

Kitty’s patriotism and faith are put to the ultimate test on those days when Vincent is taken to “the tank.” The doctors submerge him in fluid to loosen any dead skin prone to infection and then literally peel it off. Vincent’s sobbing during treatment echoes down the ward, while his mother sits, helpless, haunted by the old soldier’s song, “Hail Mary, full of grace … box me up and send me home.”

Kitty is joined in her vigil by her feisty daughter, Mary Kate, an antiwar activist who tries to goad her

mother into political action, and by Major Trainer, the Army Chaplain. Slowly, tentatively, Kitty realizes that happiness may be more important than religious perfection, and that our leaders are no less fallible than ourselves, no less prone to errors of judgment, that even “my own beloved country, the strong and valiant United States of America, might be careless with its boys.”

“Some bad shit happens in Arkansas.” (Arkansas

by John Brandon; McSweeney’s, 2008) Swin, a biracial, bookish gym-junkie, drifts into a crime partnership with the thuggish Kyle, an angry young man with melancholy foresight. They work as drug-runners for a crime boss called Frog, who provides cover by installing them as the management team of an obscure national park in Arkansas. After an unfortunate mishap with a middleman, Swin and Kyle keep the business going without telling Frog, spending their days weed-whacking, replenishing birdseed, and hollering at visitors to stick to the trails, and their nights doing deals all over the South in a cornucopia of tacky cars.

John Brandon’s first book is, at first glance, easy to like. “The groggy plains of Arkansas, the flatlands, where there’s no place to hide” provide a perfect backdrop for casual crime, and Swin, Kyle, and Swin’s sensible, homey girlfriend, Johnna, are oddly attractive. “Arkansas had a cozy, tucked-away quality,” Brandon writes, and this cozy quality pervades his tone. The author seems almost as surprised by the twists and turns of the plot as his characters. At one moment, Swin pauses and asks himself (like the Talking Heads), well, how did I get here?: “[A] mobile home, a refugee dog, a redneck nurse, a deranged white boy, and a shithole park with a Jewish name.

Seemed like a good book, but right now Swin was living it …” Yes, Swin is living it, and we’re reading it, but none of us is feeling it.

Brandon tends to overdo the details. A minor character is “allergic to olives and gum;” another has a girlfriend who “wears high heels that are too big for her and sprinkles glitter on her arms and shoulders.” Such touches bear witness to Brandon’s limber imagination, but the exhausted reader constantly files data away, thinking it may be important. (Do I need to remember that this gal digs glitter? Should I be spooked if a bowl of olives appears one hundred pages from now?)

“You have the eerie feeling of being in a movie,” Frog thinks at one point. “You don’t know your lines.

You don’t know what happens to your character.”

Precisely. Reading Arkansas is like watching a Coen brothers film: I have affection for these folks, but when really bad shit happens to them, I just shake my head, snicker, and go and get another beer from the fridge. ■ w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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their DNA and can withdraw from a study at any time—are entirely absent in forensics. Only one state, Wisconsin, mandates the destruction of original samples. In other states, people have had to sue to retrieve their tissue samples. The bills proposed in Maryland this winter would permit an individual to petition the court to request expungement of their DNA samples and CODIS profiles, “if the conviction that resulted in the record or profile’s inclusion in the database meets specified expungement criteria.”

Katz says that the original tissue samples used to create DNA fingerprints are saved purely to ensure accuracy. “Whenever there’s a hit, we need to go back to the original sample to make sure that the analysis was correct.” The Pikesville lab does a “100 percent review” of all the analysis that is done off-site, he says—both DNA fingerprints and biological samples collected at crime scenes.

Advances in technology over the past decade have made it easier to test smaller and smaller traces of crime-scene DNA. “As the technology advances, so does the quality assurance associated with it,” he says. “You’ve got to be fully aware of all the possibilities when you are dealing with smaller amounts.”

It’s critical that all DNA samples, whether from individuals or crime scenes, be handled and processed with the most exquisite care to prevent contamination. DNA is easily transferred from person to person or from person to object, and because of the sensitivity of DNA testing, even a single copy of stray DNA from someone else could muddy the integrity of a sample.

One of the major weaknesses in the State of California’s case in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, for example, was the mistake made by a laboratory worker who spilled some of Simpson’s blood on his latex glove before performing tests on evidence taken from the crime scene. He threw away the glove but, because he failed to wipe down the area where the spill occurred, the defense was able to cast doubt on the DNA results that showed Simpson’s blood was present at the crime scene.

Forensics labs in Texas, Oklahoma, and Virginia have also been charged with mishandling DNA evidence. A teenager named Josiah Sutton was convicted and jailed for four years on a rape charge after the Houston Police Department matched his DNA with crime scene evidence. When a local television station ran a report on sloppy evidence handling in the lab, Sutton’s mother contacted reporters, who in turn forwarded information about his case to DNA expert William Thompson, who had been a member of Simpson’s defense team. A new round of DNA analysis showed that Sutton’s DNA did not, in fact, match DNA extracted from semen recovered from the victim, and Sutton was freed.

Critics say that human error in the laboratory and the potential for malicious contamination of evidence by both criminals and law enforcement point to the need for stricter standards for forensic labs, governmental and commercial. “It’s an essentially unregulated science or industry,” says the ACLU’s Boersma. “It doesn’t subject its work to any sort of peer review. The accrediting body is an organization of forensic lab directors, so it’s the fox policing the henhouse.”

Maryland recently became the first state in the country to enact a crimelab oversight system. Though it has yet to be funded, “within the next five years crime labs will have to be licensed and audited by the same entity that does clinical labs,” Boersma says. “That’s a good thing because the people who do your cholesterol lab tests operate under much more stringent standards right now than forensic labs.”

On CSI, it looks easy. Beautiful forensic scientists swoop down on a crime scene, pick up cigarette butts and coffee cups, scrape up specks of blood or bits of tissue, take them back to the lab, enter results into a computer, and bang, the perp is caught and put away within the hour. The Hollywood version of forensics has led “to a terrible CSI effect in Baltimore,” says Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office spokesperson Marty Burns. “Jurors anticipate that it will be like those crime shows, but it’s not.”

Even when a perpetrator leaves biological evidence of his presence—blood, saliva, cells, semen—that doesn’t necessarily mean that conviction is assured.

“DNA evidence is not always as clear and convincing as some politicians and legislators want the public to believe,” says Burns. “Just because you get a hit won’t necessarily result in a successful prosecution and conviction of a violent crime.” She recalls a triple-murder case in Baltimore three years ago, which ended in a hung jury even though the DNA evidence against the accused was clear and convincing. Querying members of the jury after the trial, prosecutors

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discovered that “jurors were overwhelmed by the presentation of the science of DNA,” Burns says.

The second time around, prosecutors scaled back the level of scientific information, she said. “We made a determined effort to make the science easier to understand, and actually lessened the amount of science” presented to the jury. That case resulted in a conviction. State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy has since appointed a prosecutor who specializes in DNA evidence and set up a graphics department that uses illustrations and PowerPoint presentations to illustrate the forensic evidence.

Even so, Baltimore juries are reluctant to convict on the basis of a DNA match if supporting evidence is weak. “You can have cases with a ton of DNA evidence,” Burns says, “but it’s not something our jurors will rely on alone. They want a healthy dose of witness testimony and evidence of a relationship of some kind between the victim and the accused.

We’ve had cases that were well grounded in terms of the science but juries have chosen not to convict because of questions regarding testimony— several over the past year. So a little bit of DNA is not necessarily going to convince them.”

Edgar Koch, chief of the Baltimore City Police Department’s crime

Forensic DNA labs are “an essentially unregulated industry,” says the ACLU’s Cindy Boersma. “The accrediting body is an organization of forensic lab directors, so it’s the fox policing the henhouse.”

lab, predicts that entering Maryland arrestee profiles into CODIS will be “a great thing for police departments,” mentioning the sixty-six cold cases solved in Virginia in the first year after that state passed its arresteesampling law. In his February testimony for the expanded DNA sampling law, Governor O’Malley also pointed to Virginia’s success rate, noting that the proposed legislation “is supported by virtually every police chief in every town and county in our state. It is supported by virtually every prosecutor, every State’s Attorney in Maryland.”

But according to Burns, city prosecutors aren’t all convinced that sampling arrestees is going to produce more convictions. “It’s being oversold as an answer to public safety,” she says. “We’ve had less than ten murder cases over the past couple of years resulting from CODIS hits and the outcomes were nothing to write home about. The sentences in general were very modest. DNA is more important in ongoing cases, where there needs to be evidence to build a prosecution.”

What prosecutors really need, she says, is higher-volume, faster turnaround in the analysis of the DNA collected at crime scenes. “There is a tremendous backlog in terms of what prosecutors need and the capabilities of the Baltimore forensics lab,” says Burns.

Should an arrestee law pass, there will be a four- or five-fold increase in the number of DNA samples sent to labs for analysis. According to the Maryland General Assembly’s Department of Legislative Services, the approximately 15,000 DNA samples collected each year from people convicted of felonies, fourth-degree burglary, or breaking and entering a ve-

photo by Jason Okutake

The Test continued from page 61

tists construct a rough profile of a suspect’s ethnicity, appearance, and health status. Both sex and race can be pinpointed fairly accurately from a small number of DNA markers; other loci can be screened to predict hair and eye color.

Genes associated with particular diseases can also be screened and matched up with suspect’s medical records. Within five to ten years, it will be possible for police to construct a complete physical profile of a suspect—height, build, skin color, and general facial features—from DNA extracted and amplified from oils secreted by a suspect’s fingers at a crime scene.

But no matter how advanced the science, the social issues surrounding proposed uses of DNA databanks are likely to remain ethically vexing—one reason the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute set up a bioethics arm to address the ethical, legal, and social implications of genetic research.

Too often, bioethicists say, the mere availability of data and technology, rather than ethical considerations or social needs, drives its use.

Scientific tools have a way of escaping their makers: Think of physicist Robert Oppenheimer, famously contemplating the Bhagavad Gita (“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”) as he watched the detonation of the nuclear device he had helped create. In 2004, British geneticist Jeffreys, the

Former Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Kenneth L. Johnson says that he is personally opposed to arrestee sampling.

“It violates the presumption of innocence,” he says.

“DNA samples should be taken only after a person is convicted.”

photo by Jason Okutake

hicle will jump to more than 100,000 per year (at a cost of $3.7 million) if the state begins sampling people arrested on suspicion of committing those same crimes. U.S. Department of Justice statistics on the number of people arrested in the state each year for violent crimes peg the number much higher. “It could be up to 300,000,” according to the ACLU’s Boersma. “We have called for years for funding to improve the volume and quality of the analysis of crime-scene evidence,” she says. “We’re not disputing the accuracy and comprehensiveness of DNA. We’re just saying test the crime-scene evidence you already have.”

Long lag times in the processing of DNA crime-scene evidence is a national problem. A report issued by the National Institute of Justice in 2003 estimated that more than 350,000 DNA samples from rape and homicide cases remained untested. In February 2007, a criminal justice commission in California reported a backlog of approximately 160,000 untested DNA samples in the state’s lab. But instead of providing more funds to speed up the analysis of crime scene evidence, the state passed an arrestee-sampling law that will come into effect in 2009, dumping an estimated 450,000 samples per year onto the pile.

Simoncelli points out that the growth in the number of offender profiles stored in CODIS has not been matched by a similar increase in the number of forensic profiles. Forensic DNA profiles—evidence collected at crime scenes—currently number less than two-hundred thousand, compared to more than five million offender profiles. “The number of crime-scene evidence profiles in CODIS is still quite low,” she says, “because crime-scene DNA is much harder to collect.”

Unlike the DNA extracted from cheek swabs in a controlled lab environment, crime scene DNA is often highly degraded. “It’s not uncommon for us to get [crime scene] samples that are pretty tough to work with,” says Orchid Cellmark’s Bologna.

Pouring more resources into the analysis of DNA evidence from crime scenes would not only help put more criminals behind bars, but would also help release the ones who don’t belong there. Groups such as the Innocence Project have successfully employed post-conviction analysis of DNA evidence to exonerate innocent convicts, but CODIS has not been much help, says Boersma. “Less than a handful of the more than two hundred DNA exonerations are related to DNA in a databank,” she says. “Exonerations are based on comparisons with crime-scene evidence, and in most cases people have had to fight law enforcement every step of the way,” to compel re-analysis of old crime-scene DNA. She cites one celebrated local case: Marylander Kirk Bloodsworth, the first person to be freed from death row by DNA. Convicted of the rape and murder of a 9-year-old Rosedale girl in 1985, before DNA evidence was used in criminal trials, Bloodsworth was essentially liberated by advances in technology. In the same year that Bloodsworth was convicted, scientist Kary Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method for replicating strands of DNA. Starting with a miniscule number of cells, PCR “amplifies” segments of broken strands, creating more than a billion copies of any desired segment.

The discovery not only gave all of molecular biology a boost, but also handed law enforcement a way to make use of scarcely detectable trace amounts of DNA left at crime scenes. Bloodsworth’s attorneys fought for years to have prosecutors release crime-scene evidence in the case so that an independent lab could carry out DNA tests on the victim’s clothing. In 1993, those tests—and an FBI follow-up—showed that Bloodsworth’s DNA did not match the DNA present at the crime scene, and a Baltimore County Circuit Court judge swiftly ordered Bloodsworth’s release from prison.

It wasn’t until 2003 that this crime-scene DNA made its way through the forensic profile backlog and was run through CODIS, revealing the actual killer: a man named Kimberly Shay Ruffner, who was already incarcerated for a rape and attempted murder in Fells Point that occurred weeks after Bloodsworth was arrested in 1985.

It’s a case that reveals both the perils and the promise of DNA technology, which—if used responsibly—should condemn the guilty and free the innocent more often than not. However, the growing precision of genetic tools will surely pose new temptations. While the DNA profiles stored in the CODIS database can’t reveal much about a subject, the DNA samples themselves can. A few cells are enough to help scien-

father of DNA profiling, was asked by the Observer newspaper to ruminate on recent developments in the field he invented. He told the newspaper he was “very nervous.”

Jeffreys expressed some familiar concerns. “For a start, we are now putting not just criminals but suspects in our database, and that is clearly very highly discriminatory,” he said. As in the United States, most of those taken into police custody in the United Kingdom are members of minority groups— in this case, blacks and Asians. Police would soon have the ability—and certainly the desire—to construct DNA profiles with additional information on a person’s ethnic origins, medical history, and appearance. Jeffreys proposed a solution that would not exactly stuff his genie back in the bottle, but would limit its power—a universal DNA database that includes every citizen’s DNA fingerprint, but only that. Police would be denied access to genetic information predicting race, appearance, health, and other factors. The push by law enforcement to gain access to such information was “thoroughly dangerous,” Jeffreys said. “Imagine DNA details about racial groups falling into the hands of some governments or organizations. It is not a pleasant prospect.”

Such concerns are likely to be echoed in Maryland as a revolutionary technology confronts thorny realities of race and resources. “There’s been a lot of hype,” says Marty Burns, “but it’s more complicated than the public has been led to believe.” ■ —Deborah Rudacille wrote about the biochemistry of love in the February Urbanite. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 8

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The Painted Veil continued from page 62

studio at his house in Pasadena. As a child, John remembers prepping screens for his father, painting the sky-blue primer and practicing on clouds, leaning on his dad as he worked. Richard died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1979, when John was 15, and the burden of filling screen orders fell again to Al. Meanwhile, in the 1980s and ’90s, screen painting enjoyed a cultural renaissance of sorts, fueled by Eff ’s advocacy efforts. She produced a pair of documentary films and, with screen painter Dee Herget, founded the Baltimore Painted Screen Society in 1985 to unite the surviving practitioners of the ebbing East Baltimore folk art and encourage them to pass on their skills via community college classes and festival workshops. Screen painting was celebrated as indigenous city kitsch, akin to Formstone and beehive hairdos.

But John kept his distance from all this. He’s never met any of these other screen painters, and he seemed to take his time picking up the brush and fulfilling his family destiny. Indeed, the native community of the art his family invented had become unfamiliar territory: Oktavec says that he hasn’t ventured into Baltimore City since 1979, the year his father died. He is prone to panic attacks, he says, and tends to stick close to the Riviera Beach home in which he’s lived for the last fifteen years. “I’m not much for crowds,” he admits. “I don’t think I’d make it in the city.”

there’s a kind of cosmic irony in the plight of John Oktavec, a screen painter who has become allergic to the city. He is a third-generation practitioner of a distinctly urban artistic tradition, one “created and consumed by a single community,” Eff says. And, of course, the screens he creates are themselves tools of privacy, born of the cheek-by-jowl built environment of rowhouse existence, where living room and sidewalk are separated only by inches. People forget that painted screens actually work: A rowhouse fully outfitted is open to light and breezes but visually impenetrable, at least by day. (At night, when the interior of the home is illuminated, the one-way-mirror effect disappears.)

In the days before air conditioning, when windows were cracked wide open from May to September, the bit of eye-fooling camouflage offered by the red bungalow scene was the only buffer against the tumult of the street. “You can see out—they can’t see in,” read one 1950s painter’s pitch line. And looking out the window was a key pastime in East Baltimore. “Painted screens were for that person inside, sitting in the oversize chair by the window,” Eff says. “In the pre-TV era, the show’s outside.”

In her dissertation, she devoted pages of analysis to the complex social statement made by painted screens, which both invite passersby to stare, and rebuff their advances. “The screens are a wonderful veil. They say, someone who cares about home lives here. But you can only look so far.”

Screens were also expressions of community solidarity that reflected the era’s ethnic homogeneity and seemingly limitless capacity for household decoration, the same forces that fueled the Formstone boom. Once a few homeowners put up painted screens, whole blocks would fall in behind. “The whole point of rowhouse living was you didn’t want to stand out,” says Eff. “You did as much as you could to conform, not because you had to, but because you wanted to.”

This was the East Baltimore of John Oktavec’s father. John, who grew up in Pasadena, remembers visiting his father and uncle at the art shop on Monument in the 1970s and can summon forth the city with photographic precision.

“I see it like it’s yesterday,” he says: looking up at the Shot Tower, setting up a screen-painting demonstration with his dad in Fells Point, seeing the lights of the Domino Sugar sign from a family member’s bedroom window. He hears menacing stories about the city—the old neighborhood is now full of drug dealers. “I like to keep it in here,” he says, tapping his head. “The way it was.”

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Al’s son Chris Oktavec, John’s older cousin, says he was surprised when John turned to screen painting a few years back; as a teenager, John was more interested in playing drums or airbrushing flames onto his guitars than painting cottages on window screens. Today, John’s personal artistic tastes are not the folk-art norm.

He’s a massive Star Wars fan, for one: He builds startlingly realistic R2-D2 models, some life-size, and sells them on Craigslist for hundreds of dollars.

His favorite artist, he says, is H.R. Giger, the Swiss surrealist who designed the creatures of the Alien franchise.

But little of this makes its way onto the thirty or so screens he paints every year. “I can paint crazy stuff, but I try to stick to the originals,” he says.

Business is slow, which is how he likes it: Except for a Craigslist notice he posted a few months back, Oktavec doesn’t advertise his services, and he doesn’t participate in the public events that the Painted Screen Society organizes. Eff sends a few commissions his way, more than enough to keep him busy. And he gets jobs the same way his father and grandfather did: word of mouth. “Sometimes I think it’s dead and forgotten,” he says. “But then someone stops me and says, ‘I remember your father.’”

In May, Eff is organizing a weekend of painted-screen events at the Creative Alliance and the American Visionary Art Museum dubbed “Rowhouse Rembrandts.” Eff calls it “a celebration of the rowhouse arts”—marble-stoop scrubbing and tire planters and Formstone and stained-glass door transoms.

But the key event is a screen painters’ reunion party on Friday, May 9, which she sees as an opportunity to take the pulse of the art form. “There are more painters we don’t know about,” Eff says. “Part of what we’re trying to do is find out how many. We’re trying to bring them back home.”

It would be a coup, of course, to convince the only Oktavec currently active in the trade to stop by. And you can tell that John is thinking about it.

He’s heard that they’ve got those full-size rowhouse facades at the museum, with some of his screens mounted in the windows, and he’d like to see that.

But he’s not making any promises. More likely he’ll paint a screen and donate it to the auction. “If I showed up at that thing, they’d all flip,” he says. “It’d be anarchy.”

It takes John maybe an hour and a half to paint a screen. His grandfather once did one on a TV show in fifteen minutes, but John takes his time to get the details right. He’s faithful to the template that William Oktavec established: the two swans meeting bill-to-bill in the brook, one slightly larger than the other; the red-orange tint to the roof; the foliage that nestles around the corners of the white cottage. “My grandfather always covered up the corners of the house,” he says. “It’s a feng shui thing.”

The almost pathological persistence of the red bungalow image confounds painted screen historians. In her dissertation, Eff posited that it may be “a remnant of a universal quest for peace and comfort,” and even unearthed a photograph of William Oktavec’s birthplace in Kasejovice, Czechoslovakia, for proof that the cozy woodland home represents the urban immigrant yearning for the rural idyll of childhood. The house back in Bohemia was indeed a quaint peaked-roof cabin, but the theory, the Oktavecs all said, was bunk: The image was copied from a greeting card, and that was that.

Still, later in life William Oktavec did trade the clamor of East Baltimore for a bungalow on Bodkin Creek, and here is John, painting that deathless scene in his own little white house by the water. The finished screen looks like it could have been painted fifty years ago.

Sometimes, John says, the people who come by to drop off screens for him marvel at his age. “They ask me, ‘How do you know about this? You’re too young.’” And I say, ‘Well, I know. I know.’” ■ —David Dudley is Urbanite’s editor-in-chief.

For more information about the “Rowhouse Rembrandts” exhibit and events on May 9 and 10, go to www.avam.org.

Refuge continued from page 69 “They’re getting tired.” He stood up. “You don’t have to come.”

“I’ll go with you,” Molly said. “I need to get that roast in the oven.”

Glen curled his hands into a megaphone and yelled that anyone who could get to the car in the next five minutes would have ice cream on the way home. The girls pummeled the sand on their way past Tess.

“Thanks,” Tess called to Glen as he set off after them. “I can finally finish this book.”

Molly took the rake from Lucas’ hand. He hooked his fingers into a claw and combed the sand. She pulled him to his feet. His knees were scraped pink. After brushing them off, she knelt in front of him and turned his chin with her index finger so that his eyes lined up with hers.

“We’re going home now,” she said. “Back to our house.”

“I’m still making cobbler for dessert,” Tess said as they walked by, Lucas stumbling behind his mother. “Don’t you bother.”

“I won’t,” Molly said. She tugged at Lucas’s hand. “Tell Riordan I put his keys in the pocket of his jeans.”

Tess looked out at Riordan. He was swimming to shore. The skin of her inner thighs tightened.

Behind her, the car kicked up oyster shells and sand. She watched it disappear, too fast, from the lot, leaving behind a swarm of dust.

Riordan staggered up the beach and sprawled out on Glen’s towel. “Who wanted to go back?”

“The girls were having a meltdown. They decide everything now.”

“Their mother’s daughters.” He started to towel off his chest. Tess could see the glint of a bald spot on the top of his head. She reached out and covered it with her palm. He put his hand over hers.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go to the lighthouse.”

They loaded the truck quickly before driving off the sand onto the road that split the marshes.

Riordan kept to the twenty miles indicated on the park signs. His truck let out a low rumble that blocked out the sounds of the birds, so Tess opened her window to hear their distant chitters and high calls. Under the low-hanging sun, the water was turning to slate, all the blue soaked out, but the green grasses were still bright. Snow geese floated in the distance. A cormorant threaded the water with its beak.

“I never come out here anymore,” Riordan said. “Just when you guys come to visit.”

“You should,” Tess said. “I would. I would every day.”

“Looks better than it is. The crap from Ocean City floats all the way down here now.” He looked past Tess, out her window, then back at the road.

“Molly thinks she ate too much tuna when she was pregnant with Lucas.”

“That’s silly,” Tess said. “I ate tuna salad all the time with the girls.”

“Well she’s got it in her head. And there’s nothing for Lucas here. Look how long it took to get him diagnosed. Doctor didn’t know au-

tism from an ear infection.” He laughed, but his knuckles were pale on the wheel. “Molly wants us to move to Pittsburgh near her sister. There are therapists there, people who could help him.”

“Pittsburgh?” Tess turned to look at him.

“What would you fish? River trout?”

“I might go back to school. Do something with computers.”

“You couldn’t. You can’t be away from the water.”

He shrugged. “You don’t know what you can’t do until you try.”

This would be the last time then, Tess thought. There would be no meetings in motels halfway between their separate suburbs. They weren’t those kinds of people, cheating people, capable of complex arrangements and drawn-out deception. Sex with Riordan wasn’t like anything she would have thought of as a girl: adultery, love, passion. It was more like finding an old coat at the back of a closet and feeling grateful that it still fit. She hadn’t missed seeing him naked—the wide spread of his shoulders, the clotted hair on his chest—until the night that he took her out in his new boat while Glen went bike riding with the

This would be the last time then, Tess thought. They weren’t those kinds of people, cheating people, capable of complex arrangements and drawn-out deception. girls and Molly cleaned crab for dinner. They were well into their second visit to Riordan and Molly’s house. When Riordan asked if she wanted to see the hold she knew what he meant and had not hesitated. They had found other places the next summer, the lighthouse her favorite, because it seemed so brazen to pay the two-dollar entrance fee as if for a cheap motel room, and up there she could see the whole town and everyone in it, but none of them could see her.

As they turned a corner into the forest, Riordan slammed down on the brakes. The seatbelt caught Tess, burned the side of her neck. A fox lay on the double-yellow line in the middle of the road. A trail of blood ran over the asphalt to the embankment. Tess and Riordan got out of the truck. The fox raised its head and studied them with its gold eyes.

“Poor thing,” Tess said. She had never been this close to a fox before, although she had spotted them often in the woods. A streak of burnished fur, a flicker of a bushy tail and they would disappear.

“Some tourist asshole,” Riordan said. “They never follow the limit.”

He moved closer. The fox pushed itself up, and took a wobbly step. Blood matted its left haunch. The skin hung down over its paw.

“Get a towel,” Riordan said. As Tess walked to the truck, a van drove by, the driver slowing down

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so that his family could peer out. Tess waved them away. Riordan crouched down in front of the fox and cocooned its body in the towel.

“I’ll hold it,” he said. “You’ll have to drive.”

“Where are we going?” Tess asked. Would they leave the fox with the old woman at the bottom of the lighthouse? Or would they carry it up the two hundred metal steps and let it limp around the walkway as they fucked against the glass?

“Where do you think?” Riordan said with the first smile he’d broken all day. “To the station.”

He shifted with his free hand while Tess pressed down on the clutch. On his lap, the fox squirmed but Riordan kept its muzzle clamped shut.

“It might be all right,” Tess said as she turned the truck onto the main drive. “It might look worse than it is.” Riordan tapped the back of her hand and he shifted into fourth gear. “I should have taught you to drive stick way back when,” he said.

“I’ll hold it,” she said once they’d parked in front of the station. “You go ahead and let Matt know.”

“He moved away a couple of years back.” Riordan kicked open his door. “This is some new guy, commutes from Berlin.”

The ranger was a tall, stooped man with fading hair and a potbelly. He looked wrong to Tess, as if he should be in a suit behind a desk like one of the men at Glen’s office. He laid the fox on a metal table in a back room and unwrapped the bloodied towel. Riordan stayed in the doorway, but Tess moved up close. She could see the sharp gleam of the fox’s teeth in the dark cave of its mouth. She tried to make her face look reassuring as she did with the girls when they were at the doctor’s office waiting for the nurse to give them a shot.

“Leg’s broken, isn’t it?” Riordan said.

“It’s hemorrhaging from somewhere.” The ranger held the towel out to Tess. “You want this back?”

Tess shook her head. She felt as if she might vomit. She could see the gray, wormy insides of the fox behind the curtain of skin.

“The animal biologist will be here in the morning,” the ranger said. “But I’ll take care of it now.”

“No,” Tess said.

The men looked at her; their faces shared an indulgent, tired expression. She was conscious that she was about to create a scene. She turned to the door. “I’ll wait outside.”

The afternoon had drained away. The air smelled swampy and old. After a few minutes, Riordan came down the steps. “Why didn’t we just leave it?” Tess asked him. “Or help it into the forest so it could die there?”

“Then it wouldn’t be counted,” Riordan said.

He opened the truck door. “It’s a refuge. They need to keep track of these things.” As he started the engine, Tess noticed the blood that had crusted on his lap where he’d held the fox.

“We should get back,” she said. “It’s late.”

“Lighthouse closes at five anyways.”

They drove in silence out of the forest, over the bridge and on through the town, past the row of flickering motel vacancy signs, and the diner where they had sat Friday nights in the booth by the window years ago trying to figure out how to make things work with her off at school and him at sea. The buildings changed to houses, the distance between the streetlights grew and between them rose the cannery, where Tess had worked summers alongside Riordan, sorting oysters and mussels, vowing to get away from that slimy, stinking place. If she had stayed, she told herself as Riordan pulled onto the byway, she would be

Tess leaned over and watched them breathe, feeling, as she felt sometimes when they were outside playing on the swing set, or when they climbed into her and Glen’s bed in the mornings, that really, this should be enough. like Molly, cooking macaroni and cheese with breadcrumbs on top, making the beds with military corners. If she had stayed, she would have wound up meaning nothing to Riordan. And he would mean nothing to her. She knew that when she got back home, she would grieve, just as she grieved every summer when she returned from the island. This time would even, perhaps, be sweeter because it was a true end, not one of the phantom endings of before.

At the start of the road leading to his house, Riordan pulled over. He reached behind his seat and took out a duffel bag.

“You moonlighting as a traveling salesman?”

Tess asked when he unfolded a clean pair of jeans and a pair of boxers.

Riordan unbuttoned his fly. “Molly doesn’t like me to come home stinking of fish.” He bucked up to slide the jeans down his legs. “I don’t want her to see the blood. She cries over the smallest things now.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

When Riordan started the truck again, Tess pulled his face towards hers and gave his mouth a dry kiss.

“It wasn’t right anyway,” he said.

“What’s right?” Tess said. “What’s fair?”

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They drove up to the house. Shadows pooled in the gables, and in the lattice above the porch, where Molly and Glen sat in wicker chairs. Glen had been drinking. Tess could tell by the squint to his eyes. Molly had changed into a black sundress that fell to her ankles. Lucas was on the other end of the porch, moving back and forth on a swing.

“You finish that book?” Molly asked Tess.

“Yes,” Tess said. “Where are the girls?”

“They conked out in the car,” Glen said. He looked over at Riordan, who had lit a cigarette and was leaning against the porch rail. Tess felt as she used to feel before a storm on the island, when the air went thick and metallic, a smell she’d thought as a child came from the clouds but knew, at this moment, was the smell of her own fear.

“I’ll go kiss the girls goodnight,” she said.

In the guestroom, the girls were asleep in their bed, still in their bathing suits, curled up against each other as if trying to stay warm. One at a time, Tess peeled the suits off their shoulders and down their legs and fished two T-shirts and underwear out of the suitcase. Their eyes still closed, the girls raised their arms to her, then one rolled onto her stomach, the other onto her back.

Tess leaned over and watched them breathe, feeling, as she felt sometimes when they were outside playing on the swing set, or when they climbed into her and Glen’s bed in the mornings, that really, this should be enough.

Glen said her name from the doorway. When she turned, he was gone. She tucked the covers tight over the girls and crossed the hall to Riordan and Molly’s bedroom. Piles of sea glass had been pushed to one corner of a shelf filled with books on autism. The sea compass collection that had belonged to Riordan’s father hung over the bed.

Glen sat at the foot of the mattress. He was holding his hands together as he did in church, as if he were crushing something.

“I hit a fox,” he said. “Back there at the refuge.

I kept going so the girls wouldn’t see.”

Tess wanted to run from the room. She sat down next to him. “It happens,” she said. “My dad hit a deer once. Those forest animals get too used to cars.”

Glen kept his eyes straight ahead. “I can’t stop thinking about it. What’s a fox anyway? More like a squirrel than a dog. I wouldn’t think twice about hitting a squirrel.”

“You couldn’t have done anything,” she said, putting her hand on his knee. “You shouldn’t feel bad.”

Glen looked down at her hand, his jaw pulled so tight that she could almost hear his teeth crack. Then he unclasped his hands and plucked her hand off, held it suspended for a moment as if he didn’t know what to do with it before dropping it onto the bed.

“Nothing happened,” she said.

“He changed his jeans,” he said. “That’s what Molly told me to look for. That’s how she can always tell.”

Tess closed her eyes and opened them again.

She had imagined this conversation happening, but not here on the island, rather back in their living room on the couch under the window that looked out on the swimming pool. Glen would cry at some point. He would not look like this, resigned and tired. And she would feel relief, not this numbness. She remembered how, that morning in the bathroom, Lucas had watched her step out of the shower, how his gaze felt on her naked body—a breeze, a shadow, unsubstantial and indifferent.

“How long have you known?” she said.

“Since sunrise. Molly walked us out to the meadow, sent the girls looking for dew bugs. She’s been on to it since last summer. Said she couldn’t stand the smell of you on him anymore.”

He smiled then, a tight, mean smile that flickered on his face then disappeared.

Tess stood up and tugged out the crease her body had made in the bedspread. “Anyway, they’re

Glen looked down at her hand, his jaw pulled so tight that she could almost hear his teeth crack.

Then he unclasped his hands and plucked her hand off, held it suspended for a moment as if he didn’t know what to do with it before dropping it onto the bed. moving away,” she said. “We’ll have to find somewhere else to stay when we come back.”

She walked to the door, but stopped on the threshold and turned back. “What do you mean she can always tell?”

In the dim light, she couldn’t see if he was going to cry or laugh; his face appeared split between the two.

“He’s a sailor, Tess. What do you think all those songs are about?”

“Don’t say that. My people were sailors.”

“Your people are gone,” Glen said. “You have new people now.”

Tess took the stairs slowly, her hand on the banister. In the living room, Lucas was turning a toy car around in a circle. Tess walked right through it, but he didn’t look up. ■ —Jane Delury’s stories have appeared in publications including Prairie Schooner, The Sun magazine, and StoryQuarterly. She holds an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and is on the faculty of the University of Baltimore’s MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts program.

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Collect them, trade them!

Lillian Bayley Hoover

Baltimore artist Lillian Bayley Hoover is interested in monkeys. More specifically, she wonders “why humans are fascinated with making these small creatures ride on other animals,” she says. “I spent more than eight months digging up hundreds of examples from around the world, including but not limited to Japan, Egypt, Europe, and the United States, over a timespan of more than 2,000 years.”

And now, thanks to foresight and community spirit, they come to us on collectible trading cards. No longer trapped in the gallery, they are now free to go with us wherever we please.

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