August 2012 Issue

Dan Deacon’s America

Making sense of the Farm Bill

august 2012 no. 98

Urbanite’s summer

Stories Issue

Library Chic

Baltimore Campus at Inner Harbor 17 Commerce Street • Baltimore, MD

Follow Your

Passion!

Serving degrees in Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management

888-345-9048

www.Stratford.edu/Urbanite *Contact Admissions for degree availability at each campus. **Disclosure statements available at www.stratford.edu/disclosures

4 august 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

this month

#98 August 2012

features 28

28

fiction The Very Practical Tits Lessons

by Joanna Guldin

about the cover: Illustration by Kristian Bjørnard; Book Spine photo

by Andy Mangold flickr.com/photos/ andymangold/4891598935/ “Missing from the digital library landscape is one of my favorite parts of a book: the spine. I’ve always gotten a minor thrill from wandering through bookshelves and pulling something with an enticing title or clever little design nuance—things that catch the eye or make you say, ‘interesting.’ In the Amazon or iTunes bookstores that opportunity is pretty much lost. I find that sad. Of course, I totally judge books by their covers—in a digital world that’s become increasingly hard to do.”

departments

30 nonfiction Love Letters Local writers on books they’ve adored— and hated

by Cathy Alter, Marion Winik, Susi Wyss, and Nik Korpon

7

Editor’s Note 9 What You’re Saying 11 What You’re Writing 15 Don’t Miss 17 The Goods —— baltimore observed

21

Big Food

by Rebecca Messner Making sense of the Farm Bill

23 Update 25 People 26 Voices

—— space

37

This Old House

by Andrew Zaleski In Bolton Hill, two homeowners give a red brick Victorian a different sort of facelift.

—— 37

food + drink 41

Homegrown Hops

by Mary K. Zajac Gardeners and homebrewers alike are becoming fans of growing hop vines in the backyard.

44 Dining Reviews 45 Wine & Spirits

—— arts + culture 47

On the Spot

by Marianne Amoss Learning to think fast and say yes to everything with the Baltimore Improv Group

50 Music 50 Visual Art

web extras

more online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com

—— 51 The Scene —— 54 Eye to Eye

on the air

Urbanite on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM August 15: Zeke Berzoff-Cohen and Breonna Rogers on Baltimore Intersection August 23: What does the Farm Bill mean for Baltimore?

Urbanite #98 august 2012 5

issue 98: august 2012 publisher Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com executive editor Rebecca Messner Rebecca@urbanitebaltimore.com guest editor Marianne Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com digital media editors Andrew Zaleski Andrew@urbanitebaltimore.com Cassie Paton Cassie@urbanitebaltimore.com editor-at-large David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com online editors food/drink: Tracey Middlekauff Tracey@urbanitebaltimore.com arts/culture: Cara Ober Cara@urbanitebaltimore.com, proofreader Marianne Amoss

Become a teacher in less than a year Get inside a classroom quickly with one of Notre Dame of Maryland University's fast-track programs.

contributing writers Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Michael Corbin, Heather Dewar, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Mat Edelson, Lionel Foster, Brennen Jensen, Michelle Gienow, Clinton Macsherry, Richard O’Mara, Robin T. Reid, Andrew Reiner, Martha Thomas, Baynard Woods, Michael Yockel, Mary K. Zajac editorial interns Lawrence Burney, Rebecca Kirkman, Anna Walsh production manager Belle Gossett Belle@urbanitebaltimore.com graphic designer Kristian Bjørnard production intern Vanessa Reyes staff photographer J.M. Giordano Joe@urbanitebaltimore.com photographer intern Leah Daniels

Accelerated Certification in Teaching • Part-time, designed for busy professionals and career changers • For women and men with nonteaching degrees • Complete in three semesters 10-month Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) • Full-time, designed for recent grads and career changers • Fast-track to an MAT and certification in 10 months • Includes school-based internship

For more inFormation ndm.edu/schoolofeducation 410-532-5500 gradadm@ndm.edu scan to see all the programs offered in our school of education

AwArd-winning TeAChers In the past five years alone, 12 Notre Dame graduates have been named Teacher of the Year.

school of education 4701 north charles street | Baltimore, maryland 21210 | ndm.edu 6 august 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

senior account executive Freda Ferguson Freda@urbanitebaltimore.com sales marketing associate Erin Albright Erin@urbanitebaltimore.com sales/marketing intern Laura Klipp bookkeeper/distribution coordinator Michelle Miller Michelle@urbanitebaltimore.com creative director emeritus Alex Castro founder Laurel Harris Durenberger — Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, 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 share 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 2012, Urbanite llc. All rights reserved.

Urbanite (issn 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. To suggest a drop location for the magazine, please contact us at 410-243-2050. Postmaster: Send address changes to Urbanite Subscriptions, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, md 21211.

Urbanite is a certified Minority Business Enterprise.

bottom photo by; Middle and Marianne amoss Photo by Leah Daniels; top photo by Becky Guldin

contributors

editor’s note

Originally from Jonestown, Pennyslvania, Joanna Guldin, winner of this year’s Pratt Contemporaries Fiction Storyteller Award Competition, teaches high school English in Baltimore. She holds a B.A. in English from Penn State and an M.A.T. in Secondary English Education from Johns Hopkins. She is currently training for the Baltimore half-marathon and patiently waiting for her fiancé to return from his deployment in Afghanistan. Her story “The Very Practical Tits Lessons” appears on page 28.

Production intern Vanessa Reyes, who worked on this month’s layout and designed advertisements, is a senior graphic design major at Towson University.

Inspired by the ability to incorporate many kinds of media in design, Reyes is interested in the process of designing magazine layouts. She enjoys working at Urbanite because it allows her to experience “the inner workings of a magazine.”

Mary K. Zajac, who has written for Saveur, the New York Times, and City Paper, explores the growing trend of homegrown hops in this month’s issue (p. 41). “They seem to be almost the ideal urban crop,” she says of hop vines. “If you’re in a row home, you can just put them in a 5-gallon barrel, and they’ll grow straight up.” Zajac is the restaurant reviewer for City Paper and tries to keep a low profile because of it—hence the absence of a photo.

marianne amoss

when i was growing up, summer vacation meant reading. My mom would shuttle my older sister and me back and forth to the Parkville library, where I’d check out an impossible number of books, piling them so tall my skinny arms could hardly hold them all. At home, I’d stack them next to the armchair in the living room and choose one, then settle sideways in the chair, my legs across one arm rest and my back against the other, and dive in.

Those days, I’d lose hours to books, becoming completely engrossed in the stories. My tastes ranged far and wide, everything from the great young adult novels—Jacob Have I Loved, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Where the Red Fern Grows—to Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy and Tib series to Victoria Holt romance paperbacks (and, embarrassingly, The Baby-Sitters Club series). My sister and I shared a love for fantasy and adventure stories, passing back and forth John Bellairs novels and The Dark is Rising books.

I remember vividly the moment when I finished Philip Pullman’s masterpiece, The Golden Compass, and realized to my dismay that the next two books in the His Dark Materials trilogy hadn’t been published yet. How long do I have to wait? I wondered in my attic bedroom.

These days, it’s more likely to be a magazine article or nonfiction book that inspires such a reaction; for the adult me, journalists are the great storytellers. But every now and then, I find a novel—The White Tiger, Song Yet Sung—that I just can’t put down, and I’m that 12-year-old up in my room again, head over heels for a story.

This issue, Urbanite’s annual fiction issue, is a tribute to that feeling.

Four local writers have written heartfelt odes to the written word, exploring book-reviewing for a living, what books meant to a homesick Peace Corps volunteer, and a mother’s love for romance novels (p. 30). They accompany the centerpiece of the issue, the winning story from this year’s Pratt Contemporaries fiction competition. Written by high school English teacher Joanna Guldin, “The Very Practical Tits Lessons” (p. 28) is about a group of girls struggling through that most confusing of times, the beginning of growing up.

The fiction writing theme extends to Baltimore Observed, where Bret McCabe talks to local novelist Michael Kimball about how his books explore death and the living’s response to it (p. 25). Elsewhere in the issue, food writer Mary Zajac takes a look at the new phenomenon of growing hops in the backyard, being embraced by both homebrewers and gardeners (p. 41); Executive Editor Rebecca Messner takes on the task of decoding the mammoth Farm Bill (p. 21); and Digital Media Editor Andrew Zaleski explores a historic Bolton Hill mansion that’s been painstakingly renovated, gargoyles and all (p. 37). We’re sad to announce that this is Andrew’s last issue at Urbanite—he’s taking his wordsmithing and Website-wrangling skills to online pub Technically Baltimore, which is lucky to have him.

Speaking of comings and goings, I’m happy to be serving as guest editor for this issue, somewhat reprising my role as the magazine’s managing editor. Working with people who love words is one of my favorite things to do, and it’s been a complete joy to help put this issue together. Here’s hoping you can’t put it down.

Coming next month

is everyone here?

A look at truancy in the Baltimore City public schools

Urbanite #98 august 2012 7

8  august 2012  www.urbanitebaltimore.com

the polye ster of brick july 2012

must we fear glut en?

what you’re saying

the coiff ure proje ct

no. 97

You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman Re: “A Woman’s Hair is Like Her Helmet,” July ’12, about natural, African American hair: i totally agree! We as real black women need to remember where we come from, instead of letting the chemicals and weaves un-identify who we really are, and allow our inner beauty to identify the real women we were born to be! Beautiful, black, and bold! Keep up the good work!

—Tanya Solese

nice article! The natural hair movement is big nationwide! I stopped perming and am loving it. Although, yes, it took a minute to find the right products for me.

Coconut oil is my new best friend.

—Sandra L. Crockett

thank you for your recent article about the Mount Vernon Place Conservancy and their vision for the future for Mount Vernon Place. Our community advocated for many years for the formation of this conservancy and have encouraged them to think as big as this important place rightly deserves. Those of us fortunate to live near this special space must be mindful that in addition to it being a neighborhood park, it is also a national treasure, and one that has suffered from years of deferred maintenance, with no significant infrastructure improvements in decades.

Community-based studies over the past ten years have highlighted some of these deficiencies and suggested other areas where Mount Vernon Place could be improved. We are pleased that the Conservancy has folded these many ideas into a plan that will ensure the long-term sustainability of this important asset—one we believe can be a world-class attraction if a long-term view is embraced.

that new @UrbaniteMD magazine with @RyeRye @DJCLASS and @iamKingLos is sick. #ReppinBMore #BMoreForLife —Jack Callahan (@SympulJack)

Place Matters Re: “Forest for the Trees,” June ’12, about the new plan for Mount Vernon Place:

—GreenChipJeff

The Sounds of Summer Re: Urbanite’s summer music playlist, June ’12 free music downloads make me happy. Seeing David Ross, Femi the DriFish, Wendel Patrick, Tiffany DeFoe, and Alan Munshower all assembled on Urbanite magazine’s list of summer jams makes me even happier— congrats you guys (and gal!). I’m downloading now!

—Amy Genevieve Kozak

—Jason Curtis, President, Mount Vernon-Belvedere Association

Parking Problems Re: “Baltimore, Unplugged,” June ’12, about the electric car in Baltimore: it would seem to me that one reason electric vehicles [EVs] might not be selling well is that many Americans live in urban areas, and most urbanites do not have what seems to be a requirement of the breed: an electrically equipped, drive-in, attached garage. Where are apartment-dwellers, rowhouse-owners, and the like expected to plug in overnight? I literally never see this problem addressed in stories about EVs. —Lynn Williams Jensen

Hip Hop Nation Re: Urbanite’s July hip hop issue, featuring the cover story “Represent the World Town,” about the success of Baltimore-bred artists Rye Rye and Blaqstarr:

behavior. Any time you ask the consumer to do something differently, it is a monumental task.

Yet more than 500 percent more units of the Nissan LEAF were sold in year one, compared to the Toyota Prius in its debut. Today, Toyota has sold more than 3 million of that particular vehicle. Just something to consider.

for the sake of clarification, I would argue that electric vehicles are NOT failing to catch on. At least when you consider how the numbers stack up compared to previous disruptive vehicle technologies.

When Toyota first launched the Prius hybrid in 1997, the Japanese automaker sold only 3,000 units worldwide. Nissan, however, sold more than 20,000 units of its all-electric LEAF in its debut year. Also worth noting is that the LEAF carries with it the issue of range anxiety—something Prius owners never had to deal with. So essentially, we’re talking about a vehicle that requires the driver to make some pretty major changes in operating and fueling

Check(-in) it Out! The Great Baltimore Check-In, Urbanite’s Foursquare-powered scavenger hunt with local radio station WTMD, was recently featured in AdWeek as an innovative way to capture advertising dollars. In the article, “Foursquare Helps Magazine and Radio Station Sell Ads,” Urbanite publisher Tracy Ward said, “It’s really helped expand our relationship with younger readers. It fits nicely into our mission, which is to foster dialogue in Baltimore and get people out of their silos.”

Here’s what the Twitterverse had to say about it: attention newspaper revenue departments: THIS is a great idea. (Also, @UrbaniteMD is a great magazine!)

— @eclisham

cool idea, & of course retailers like foot traffic.

—@Chris_Heine

bmore represent!

—@digimatized

Join the conversation. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@UrbaniteMD). E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Urbanite #98 august 2012 9

Buy Local

advertising section

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45+ wines by the glass artisan beers on tap classic cocktails 400 hand selected wines, beers & spirits wine friendly snacks expert wine advice Belvedere Square Market 527 east belvedere avenue baltimore, md 21212 410.464.1944 www.grandcrubaltimore.com

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10:50 PM

what you’re writing

photo by J.M. Giordano

falling in love is not so good for your nerves, especially when you’re a lesbian, barely out to even yourself, and in high school in the 1980s. You may or may not actually be in love, but at the time you certainly think so. As far as your nerves are concerned, love or crush, it’s all the same.

Once, during fifth period senior year, I felt so sick I thought I was going to toss my lunch.

By now, my nerves were shot 24/7, and I hated, more than relished, that my desk was next to my crush’s. No one, and I mean NO ONE, talked about gay and lesbian youth back then.

I barely understood what I was feeling. I just

knew that if I were a cartoon character my eyes would have big hearts in them.

All my disproportionate fondness and aches and pains struck me as disease-ridden, as transgressions gathering more and more speed to take me on a one-way trip to Hell.

Forget about the fact that my crush probably thought I was a complete moron because I couldn’t form complete sentences around her, that I probably scared her with my puppy dog attention and conviction that the sun rose and set by her.

That day, at that moment, I willed myself not to throw up. I willed myself to forget everything, all sound, all smell, and just be.

A gentle voice to the right asked, “Are you OK?”When I turned, my crush’s eyes showed concern. She was kind and caring with everybody so that didn’t surprise me. But I didn’t want her to notice.

I just nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

My hands betrayed me. They had started shaking and just when I thought I wouldn’t make it, the bell rang and I knew I’d be OK—for now. It wasn’t the first and it wouldn’t be the last time I’d feel that way around someone I really liked.

—Name withheld

Urbanite #98 august 2012 11

Buy Local advertising section cont.

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12

what you’re writing

the “swoosh” of the girls’ bathroom door cued me to drop the cigarette and flush.

Feet padded into the adjacent stall; a zipper whispered down; a stream hit water. Jostling toilet paper for cover, I waited for her to leave.

She flushed, ran water, pumped soap, dried with a towel, exited. It was 1:10 p.m.; in five minutes, lunch over, I’d be off to Biology.

Just as I pulled my lighter out, the door opened, and feet went directly to the sink. Oh no—a primper! Would she apply a swipe of mascara, or would she tease and spray her hair? That might gobble up all remaining lunch period minutes, meaning no second cig. Comb raked through beehive; this girl was in for the long haul. Damn! I wanted another smoke.

Nicotine called louder than good sense; I lit a Marlboro. Inhaling my first puff, I heard the hairspray can lid smack off and the spray buzz.

The hairspray’s white noise drowned out the crucial sound of the door opening. Next thing I heard was high heels, BB pellets on linoleum, clicking in. “Don’t flush that toilet!” As those words left the teacher’s mouth, my cigarette sizzled; I coughed and jammed the handle.

“I know you’re smoking. Come out of there,” Mrs. Anders said. I edged into the room. Feigning interest in her primp job, Beehive watched in the mirror. Was her smirk my imagination?

“Let’s see what Assistant Principal Talley says about this.”

I dreaded Talley; he knew something Anders did not—that the music teacher had already reported me on Tuesday. I was in for it.

My biggest fear might be realized: Adding two and two together, Talley might figure out my secret. I spent every lunch period in the girls’ room not simply to smoke; I was there because I had no friends.

Eyeing her watch, Anders said, “I’ve got a faculty meeting; this is your lucky day. If I don’t catch you the rest of the year, I’ll forget this happened.”

Relieved, I headed to Bio. I stopped smoking during school. Nicotine cravings are hard on the nerves, but being exposed as friendless is excruciating. Seeing pity on the faces of wellmeaning adults was more than I could take. If someone else knew, I could no longer pretend that hanging out alone was a life choice.

—As a writing instructor at Towson University, Joan Woytowitz now views life from the other side of the stall door.

she was 15, a shapely sophomore at Western. I was 17, a scrawny, baby-faced senior at City. Our friendship grew while working at the Govans McDonald’s. The sunny,

blossoming beauty and the stoop-shouldered sufferer of what I now think of as Ralph Macchio Syndrome (in honor of the actor whose general lack of masculine development allowed him to convincingly portray the original Karate Kid until he was nearly 30) shared many laughs in the subterranean break room. I felt a debt to the fast food gods for bringing her into my world, for exposing me to the irresistible dimpled smile that inflicted sweet cruelty on my emotions.

She always worked the register, ringing orders and politely declining male customers who requested her phone number. The varied duties of my grunt work included working the giant grill, wiping down the often filthy dining tables, and cleaning restrooms that seemed to suffer from a plague of blind customers.

During one fateful fifteen-minute break, my pretty new friend asked if I had a date for my senior prom. I nearly dropped my gratis Big Mac while confessing that I didn’t. “You better hurry up and get a date,” she said. “Girls need time to get ready for those things.”

Her well-meaning words tormented me for the next few days. I decided that I’d ask her, but as a long term sufferer of RMS, my confidence wavered between little and none at all. About a week after her original question, we exchanged our customary “Hey-Hi” greeting while punching our timecards. She asked about my date status again, smiling and shaking her head after I answered in the negative. I summoned all the courage I could manage as I confronted the steaming hot grill, determined to overcome my fear of rejection. Sweat beaded on my forehead as she joined me in the break room a few hours later. Before she could manage a nibble of her double cheeseburger, I blurted, “Would you like to be my prom date?”

That’s how I found my senior prom date, the lovely young lady who would become my first real girlfriend and my first true heartache.

She was 15, a shapely sophomore at Western. I was 17, a scrawny, baby-faced senior at City.

—T.R. Braxton is an educator with Baltimore City Public Schools and author of the novels Dirty Hands and The Coming.

standing in that dark room, fully clothed, behind a podium, I had never felt so naked. The air-conditioning that poured from the vents didn’t seem to help my body temperature. I wondered if the audience could see the sweat on my brow. I immediately blamed my anxiety on the single yellow spotlight that flooded the stage. It acted like a microscope, highlighting every facet of my insecurity.

It was this aspect of writing—presentation—that I had never warmed up to, or never had the chance to, really. I was always perfectly content with closing the door, hunching over my desk, and writing what I wanted to, without any concern about distant words like “audience” or “publishing.” I was shaken into reality last summer when I realized that reading your work is the next natural step.

Onstage, I wished the warm air would melt me into the platform I gripped, so I could mix in with the dark swirls of wood and disappear. I held on so tightly that I feared my hands would leave finger-length indentations. My mind began to wander. Maybe the sweat of my palms and shaking arms would move my flesh to be transformed. Maybe I’d grow halfway into the wood. Maybe I’d be stuck and wouldn’t be able to leave. I’d remain here, paralyzed. Eyes would be transfixed on me for the rest of eternity, ears open for whatever blubbering might come out of my lips, my cheeks permanently stained red.

I’d run out of poems to read, out of stories to tell, out of courage to even speak.

Now, however, was not the moment to decide whether I’d be able to move once it was over. My reading couldn’t end until I began.

With that spark of motivation, I opened my mouth to read my poetry.

—Caroline Orth is a 16-year-old junior who will be attending Carver Center for Arts and Technology in the fall. She enjoys creative writing and watching Doctor Who in her spare time.

“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 previously unpublished, 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. Only one submission per topic, please.

Send your essay to Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211, or e-mail it to What YoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore.com. Submissions should be shorter than 400 words. 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 Turning Point Aug. 13, 2012 Oct. 2012 Out of Breath Sept. 10, 2012 Nov. 2012 Warming Up Oct. 8, 2012 Dec. 2012

Urbanite #98 august 2012 13

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images (clockwise from top left: Photo by Ryan Clark; no photo credit; photo by Shawn Brackbill; courtesy of Asiantiques; A Wild Boar Hunt, Indian (ca. 1675); pigments on paper; The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; (F.349); © Maniapixel | Dreamstime.com

don’t miss 1

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3 August 8, 6:30 p.m.

Literature

1 August 2–5 Dance

Movement theater group Quarry Theatre digs into the mind of one of American history’s most infamous figures in its new performance, The Booth Project. Set in Greenmount Cemetery, this movement performance takes the audience on an experimental ride through the mind of President Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

General admission $15; students and seniors $10 45 W. Preston St. 410-752-8558 www.theatreproject.org

2 August 6 Music

Jack Tatum released his first album, Gemini, under the moniker Wild Nothing while he was still attending college in Blacksburg, Virginia. His second album, Nocturne, available in the U.S. on August 28, promises to contain more of the same ‘80s-inspired indie-pop that made Gemini one of Pitchfork’s favorite albums of 2010. Catch a preview of Nocturne during Wild Nothing’s show at The Ottobar. $10 2549 N. Howard St. 410-662-0069 www.theottobar.com

Join local poets Michelle Antoinette Nelson (pictured), better known as LOVE the poet, and Linda Joy Burke as they perform their own work and discuss the differences between poems on the page and poems performed onstage. Burke is a Maryland State Arts Council coordinator for the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Competition.

Nelson, who is a musician as well as a poet, has performed at the Smithsonian’s Martin Luther King Family Program and at college campuses nationwide.

Free 400 Cathedral St. 410-396-5430 www.prattlibrary.org

4 August 11 Visual Art/Community

The Walters Art Museum, for their Public Property exhibit, conducted a “Wiki <3 Monument” photo scavenger hunt, in which participants took pictures of various monuments and public art installations around the city in order to create an online archive of the pictures on Wikipedia. To celebrate the close of the exhibit and the scavenger hunt, the Walters is hosting a Wikipedia Upload Party, at which participants can share their photos, have a drink, and watch a movie chosen by participants.

600 N. Charles St. 410-547-9000 www.thewalters.org

5 August 18–19 Community

Load up on cannolis, wine, and pasta as Little Italy celebrates the end of summer with the Feast of Saint Gabriel. Hosted by St. Leo’s Parish, the festival will include live music, games, and dancing—all for merely a dollar entry fee. $1 Stiles and S. Exeter sts. www.littleitalymd.com

6 August 23–26 Community

Antiques aficionados, rejoice: The Baltimore Summer Antiques Show, billed as the largest indoor antiques show in the country, is back for its thirty-second annual with more than 500 vendors. The Convention Center will be stocked with more 200,000 antiques from a variety of genres, ranging from Americana folk art to Asian antiquities. The event will also include the Antiquarian Book Fair, as well as a series of free, educational lectures.

1 W. Pratt St. 561-822-5440 www.baltimoresummerantiques.com

For more events, see the Scene on page 51.

Urbanite #98 august 2012 15

c r MSTaEINER

THE

Photo by Michael Cantor

16 august 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

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the goods

what ’s new in style, shopping & beyond by anna walsh and j.m. Giordano

man up

Photos by J.M. Giordano

For friends Kristie Noel and Margot Elizabeth, getting dressed for work left them feeling more drab than dapper. They decided to fix that problem themselves in February by founding Beth & Noel (www.beth-noel.com), a line of professional accessories for women. It features affordable ties in seersucker, pastel stripes, and polka dot prints, with custom cufflinks to match. The most popular tie so far has been the Colonel—available in bold patterns and rich colors for around $30, the Colonel proves that women can put their own feminine twist on the classic suit-and-tie ensemble.

snap judgement

paper folio

The world of digital camera sales may be dominated by the Internet and discount retailers, but there are still some advantages to brick-and-mortar specialty camera stores. For one thing, “you’ll get a lot of expert instruction and guidance, and that’s what people seem to need more than ever,” says Burke Seim, president of Service Photo (3838 Falls Rd.; 410-235-6200; www.servicephoto.com). Service Photo has been owned by Seim’s family for more than sixty years and carries a variety of used and new cameras, including Leica cameras, which Seim describes as “the pinnacle of European optical precision and style.”

Old and new technology combine to create the letterpress designs at Almanac Industries (2210 Old Court Rd., Pikesville; 410-807-5992; www.almanacindustries.com). Whitney Cecil and her husband, Jacob, hand-draw the designs, tweak them in the computer, then print them out and use a hundred-year-old press to create the final product. The couple also makes custom-order, handmade books, journals, and notepads ($20–$45), from such materials as surplus military reflectors and cowhide.

Urbanite #98 august 2012 17

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baltimore observed

urbanite project / update / people / voices

big food

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by rebecca messner

Break it down now: The Farm Bill, which will spend over $1 trillion over ten years, affects all American citizens — not just farmers. The majority of spending (73 percent) is allocated to food stamp and nutrition programs, with most of the remaining money going towards income and price supports for commodity crops like corn, wheat, and soy, (about 22 percent) and conservation incentives (about 6 percent).

every five to seven years, Congress comes together to vote on the Farm Bill, a monstrous, 1,000page piece of legislation that determines what Americans eat, where that food comes from, how it is grown or made, and how much it costs.

Here’s why you should care about it, even though you may not have ever set foot on a farm: Despite its name, the legislation doesn’t just affect famers—it affects just about everyone in America. “It really does impact all of us,” says Rebecca Klein, director of the Public Health and Agriculture Project at the Johns Hopkins Center for a

Livable Future. “It dictates what’s grown, how it’s grown, sometimes how it’s processed, and how it’s transported.

All of that affects us—from greenhouse gas emissions to fertilizer runoff to increased use of pesticides that not only harms farm workers but also can harm our health.”

The bill—which is seen as a largely bipartisan piece of legislation—will also cost the federal government $1 trillion over ten years. It is estimated to be one of the most expensive legislative fights in recent history, with more lobbying money spent than either the health care law or the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.

Urbanite #98 august 2012 21

速

urbanite project / update baltimore observed Klein, a humble expert on the farm bill, sat down with me to explain a few key elements of this legislation, now that both the Senate and the House of Representatives have passed their own versions of the bill and it moves (slowly) toward final approval.

H UB IT OUT

The Farmers Market and Local Foods Promotion Program adds a new element to the Farm Bill’s support of farmers markets and community supported agriculture (CSA). Called “aggregation points,” Klein refers to them as “food hubs” and says they’ll be instrumental in establishing a food system that props up local and regional farmers. “If you want the Safeway downtown to start carrying local foods,” she says, “they can’t have fifty trucks come downtown to their store every day.” Food hubs would be storage buildings outside the city that collect deliveries from local and regional farmers, so that fresh, local produce from a variety of farms can be delivered to grocery stores in one trip.

update Photo by J.M. Giordano

S N AP BE N EFITS — T H E GOOD

At a few farmers markets in Baltimore (see “Oh, Snap,” July ’12 Urbanite), Maryland Hunger Solutions, using grants from private foundations, offers Baltimore Bonus Bucks— meaning Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) users get double their money to spend at the market. It’s an effort to encourage low-income residents to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables. The Farm Bill’s Hunger-Free Community Inventive Grants, costing $100 million over the next five years, will offer similar incentives for SNAP recipients in farmers markets across the country. This, Klein says, will help build demand within the community for healthy, local food.

S N AP BE N EFITS — T H E BAD/UG LY

Spending on federal nutrition benefits currently makes up over 70 percent (that’s $470 billion) of total spending on the farm bill. It’s currently under threat of being cut, however.

The Senate version of the bill cut $4.5 billion— this is estimated to reduce 500,000 families’ benefits by $90 per month. The House version of the bill proposes cutting snap by $16 billion. Currently, 200,000 families in Baltimore receive federal nutrition benefits.

H OW ABOUT T H EM (ORGA N I C) APP L ES

Today, organic farmers can buy crop insurance, which protects their farms in case of natural disasters and other threats, but they have to pay 5 percent more for that insurance than conventional farmers do. Also, when they get reimbursed, farmers are compensated based on the price of conventional produce—and we all know organic apples cost more. There’s a

provision in the Senate version of the bill, says Klein, that would make sure organic farmers are reimbursed for the estimated price of their organic produce.

Update

by Rebecca Kirkman and Anna Walsh

C O N SERVATIO N N ATIO N

To cut costs this year, the Senate has proposed cutting back on subsidies called “direct payments” in lieu of other crop insurance subsidy programs. An inadvertent downside to this is that direct payments used to stipulate that farmers implement various environmental compliance programs—you get the money if you protect your land. Now that direct payments are gone, Klein and her colleagues at the Center for a Livable Future are advocating that land conservation measures be linked to other programs like crop insurance subsidies, which help farmers pay for crop insurance. Either way, Klein says, it’s absolutely essential that we continue to give farmers subsidy payments.

“Farmers need a safety net of some sort. It’s very risky. It’s not like a factory where you can just turn off the widget maker when nobody’s buying or when a disaster happens,” she says.

“They need some sort of support.”

DO N ’ T H ATE T H E C OR N FARMER , H ATE T H E GAME

But speaking of subsidies, what about all those subsidies for commodity crops, like corn, that, when turned into high fructose corn syrup, are making all of America obese? The subsidies granted to farmers of commodity crops are not to blame, according to a 2011 report by Food & Water Watch. Rather, the culprit is deregulation, which let commodity crops grow out of control in the 1980s and ’90s, driving the price of those crops down and resulting in cheap, calorie-heavy, processed food at the supermarket. This is a system that’s been created over decades, and taking subsidies away from farmers now will not solve the problem, says Klein.

Her solution? “We need to simultaneously deconstruct the industrial system as we build up the local and regional infrastructure,” she says. That means creating demand on the consumer side for local, organic produce through programs like the Hunger Free Community Incentive Grants and supporting systemic infrastructure like food hubs.

W H AT N OW ?

Read something that riles you up? The farmers market motto “Vote with your fork” rings true: “I think that it’s going to require public awareness,” Klein says. “There’s a certain amount of trust—oh, it’s in the grocery store, it’s food. But it’s not, necessarily.” And, says Klein, nothing can be more effective than calling or emailing your representatives.

For more information on how to contact your representatives, visit bit.ly/FoodFarmBill

don’t call it a comeback For the first time in a century, the 2011 Census shows U.S. cities growing more quickly than suburbs. Baltimore, however, is shrinking, despite development across the state that’s happening at a rate three times faster than its population growth (see “The Era of Suburban Sprawl Has to End,” April ‘12 Urbanite). The city lost 1,500 people between April 2010 and July 2011, according to a census estimate in the Baltimore Sun. Once the nation’s tenth-largest city by population in 1980, Baltimore now ranks twenty-fourth, as more and more Marylanders move into the suburbs surrounding Washington, D.C. —R.K.

spare care The Supreme Court’s ruling in late June to uphold the Affordable Care Act, which requires every American to purchase health insurance, will bring care to about 750,000 people in Maryland living without health insurance. As part of that effort, the Evergreen Project aims to make mandated coverage affordable for low- and middle-class families in Maryland by merging the health care insurer and provider into the same organization (see “Change is Brewing,” July ‘12 Urbanite). Championed by Howard County’s Health Officer, Dr. Peter Beilenson, and a team of colleagues, the Evergreen Project is made possible by a provision in the law that encourages the formation of these health care co-operatives.

—R.K.

all aboard Last summer, the National Endowment for the Arts gave Station North a hefty $150,000, one of fifty-one Our Town grants distributed across the nation (see “Grand Central Station,” August ‘11 Urbanite). The grant was intended to increase the livability of communities through collaborations with local artists and arts organizations.

Since receiving the grant, Station North has grown and introduced events like Final Fridays, a monthly public block party. Now, another arts organization has joined the neighborhood. D center Baltimore, a nonprofit that works to foster design-oriented thinking and to advocate for the role of design in the region, moved to Station North in June from its previous location on the west side.

—A.W.

Urbanite #98 august 2012 23

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people baltimore observed

Death Becomes Him Michael Kimball and mortality

photo by J.M. Giordano

By Bret McCabe

Death blindsided Baltimore-based novelist Michael Kimball the first time he had to look it in the face. His grandfather passed when he was a young teen, and when his parents took him to the funeral home and he saw his grandfather in an open casket, he was overwhelmed.

Sitting in a Charles Village pub, Kimball, now 45, can still vividly recall the moment. “It was this really shocking, emotionally disabling experience where I just—it was too much,” Kimball says. “And so I think from that point on it’s been something I’ve been working through.”

The way the living deal with death courses through Kimball’s four novels. His 2000 debut, The Way the Family Got Away, follows a father, mother, and the novel’s two narrators, a brother and sister, trying to make sense of what’s going on as the family drives cross-country following the death of their infant younger brother, whose embalmed body is packed in the trunk. Death lies in wait in How Much of Us There Was (first published in the U.K. in 2005, the novel was published in the U.S. in 2011 as Us), which heartbreakingly traces an older husband’s bedside vigil of his wife’s passing. Dear Everybody, Kimball’s 2008 epistolary tour de force, bounces from the bittersweet to the comic to the tragic as it collects the letters of main character Jonathan Bender, whose suicide opens the book. And death is the ineffable fact that changes a man’s understanding of the past and present when his father dies in Big Ray, due out in September.

“That formative experience with my grandfather was really a huge shock and sort of unmanageable for a kid,” Kimball says. “I think that comes out of a lack of understanding [of death]. Over time, as a human being encountering more of the world but also through writing about it, you come to a different sort of acceptance of death and, in particular, certain people. Big Ray, specifically, allowed me to come to terms with some of my difficulty with my father even though he wasn’t around to do that.”

That funeral theme is what gives Kimball’s stories their universal gravity; that he explores it in resonant, economical prose is what makes them so powerful. His novels are short, exquisitely patient, and meticulously layered constructions. Within the confines of limited space he invites his readers into the complex, often conflicted psychology of his flawed characters. In Big Ray, smells and sights trigger

a son’s memories of anger and fear of his departed father—sometimes simultaneously.

Writing is, after all, a coping mechanism— a way to take the raw materials of life and fix them on the page to see if they make sense. “I think it can be really difficult to keep all of that thought [about death] in just your head or to just try to say it,” Kimball says. “And there’s something about the writing process—putting it all down on paper, rearranging it, putting in some kind of order—that does create a cohesive narrative. It gives you a kind of understanding.”

Kimball delivered that kind of opportunity to people through his Postcard Life History project. At the opening night of the 2008 Transmodern performance art festival, he and Adam Robinson, the founder of local imprint Publishing Genius, were talking about what a writer would do as performance. Kimball mentioned that when people find out he’s a writer, they joke that they’ll tell him their life story if he wants a really good yarn. At home, he had recently received a batch of Dear Everybody promotional postcards. Why not write people’s life stories on postcards?

The next day Robinson, then one of Transmodern’s co-curators, informed Kimball he was going to be doing just that that evening.

Kimball set up a table, a local artist sat down,

and Kimball interviewed him for a few minutes before jotting his version of the artist’s life onto a postcard. By the time he finished, a line of people had already queued up.

He did this the entire night.

It was supposed to be a one-off performance.

“And the next week one of the people got in touch with me, and she said, ‘You took a dark and difficult time in my life and made it manageable for me,’” Kimball recalls. “It kind of broke my heart.”

He repeated the performance at another festival. He started the Postcard Life Stories blog.

The endeavor earned the attention of NPR and London’s The Guardian newspaper. And now he’s putting a book together of the best ones, to come out in early 2013 from Mud Luscious Press. “There were people who said simply telling me their story allowed them to process it,” Kimball says. “There was a man who grew up in a very abusive home who ended up reconciling with his family a couple of years after I wrote his [life story]. We’re still in touch, and he’ll give me updates and tell me how those things are going. Just having somebody he could tell those things to allowed him to move on with his life.

“Big Ray became that for me,” he continues.

“Even though it’s a novel, this was me retelling large parts of my life as a way to manage it.”

Kimball’s new novel paints a complicated portrait of a dysfunctional family in its compact two hundred pages. Told entirely from the son’s point of view, it jump-cuts through time to understand a father who emerges disappointed by the choices he made in life and shows how those disappointments continue to rattle his children. Difficult memories surface for the novel’s narrator—the first time his father physically attacks him, just what his father was doing with his sister in the bedroom when his mother wasn’t home—that turn Big Ray into part eulogy, part psychological retaliation, and an entirely devastating whole.

“I think when some difficult subject matter presents itself, I feel obligated to go as deeply into that as I can, even if I don’t want to, even if I’m afraid to,” Kimball says. “That’s what you have to do [as a novelist]. That’s the rule.”

Urbanite #98 august 2012 25

baltimore observed voices

Telling It Like It Is

Zeke Berzoff-Cohen and Breonna Rogers dispel the theory that Baltimore City youth are dangerous.

photo by J.M. Giordano

Interview by Rebecca Messner

26 august 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

voices baltimore observed

This spring, Baltimore County Delegate Patrick McDonough published a controversial news release in which he claimed that “black youth mobs terrorize Baltimore,” making tourist areas like the Inner Harbor unsafe. It’s this kind of attitude that Zeke Berzoff-Cohen and Breonna Rogers work to combat. BerzoffCohen, a former Teach for America alum who founded Baltimore Intersection with Yasmene Mumby and Matt Stern, works with city teenagers to transform their lives through community organizing.

Rogers, at 18, has attended more than seventeen schools and began working with Intersection when she was in eighth grade. With her fellow Intersection students, she has hosted a mayoral candidates debate and has successfully campaigned to pass a bottle tax that will fund improvements to city schools. She will attend college in the fall and currently travels with Berzoff-Cohen across the country to speak about her experience with the program.

URBANITE: What is the Intersection—what inspired the idea for it?

— zeke berzoff-cohen: I think the dominant narrative for low-income communities has been this whole idea perpetuated by folks like Delegate McDonough, that our kids are out of control, that they’re violent, that they’re running in the streets, that they’re going to harm us, that we should be afraid of them. I think that message is enforced through political elites like Delegate McDonough but as well through the media—through seeing images every night on the news of kids that look like Breonna killing other kids that look like Breonna. As well as our own public policies—when we invest so significantly in prisons and incarcerations but don’t invest in the types of services and the types of programs that would keep kids out of being incarcerated, I think it sends the message to our kids that they’re of a really low value.

And so the Intersection was about really transforming perceptions, beginning by transforming our students’ perceptions of themselves and then allowing them to drive this transformation within their own communities.

U: How did that happen with you, Breonna?

How did your perception of yourself change?

— breonna rogers: Living in my community, it’s not like we have somebody there teaching us or telling us, “This is the way you should go.” It’s not like we have a lot of positive role models that we see every day walking down the street, or in the media. We have these negative perceptions of ourselves—you feel as though the only way that I can be successful, is if I’m a guy and I go out on the street and I drug deal and I gang bang, or I’m a girl and I have to be a part of the drug gang, too, or if I have to prostitute, whatever the case may be.

And I was exposed to that growing up. I was exposed to prostitution, gang banging, and all of that. Even when I thought I was safe, I wasn’t. Living in a house with drug dealers, and out of nowhere somebody starts shooting in your house, and you got to do everything you can do to protect yourself. You have these adults in the house, but to me they felt like

children, because they’re not doing what they need to do to protect the kids.

What people don’t understand is that for us there is no other option. So I think that point in transforming was just realizing that. Realizing that, OK, in our communities we don’t have these positive role models, but it’s not like they’re not out there. I just got to a point where I was like, “Look, this is not what I want to do.”

I got connected to the Intersection, so I have the opportunity to really make something of myself and help other people.

It took time, but eventually I realized that I am that cycle-breaker, and it is going to take responsibility and it is going to take courage to stand up and say, “I’m not just another statistic.

I am going to become a great role model for my younger brothers and my sister.” And that perception of who I am is going to eventually change for myself, and once that happens, eventually for other people, their perception of me—and those other kids that look like me— will eventually change as well.

U: Let’s go back to Delegate McDonough’s comments. The timeliness of it in your life, Breonna, is significant. You’ve just graduated high school, you’ve made it through Intersection, and then he comes out and he says this thing.

Talk to me about your reaction to these comments after having made this tremendous effort to turn your life and your community around.

— BR: It was definitely an insult to me, because it wasn’t as if he was really saying it out of concern for him and his family. He said it because he’s just not a nice person. And just like him, a lot of other people have this bad perception of kids. When you look at how they portray us in the media—for example, anytime you turn on a news station they are talking about youth in the city, it’s always a black kid being arrested. I don’t understand why it’s so hard— when you have kids like us who are part of the Intersection and trying to make positive change—for us to really get that attention and really get our voices heard. I really thought it was a racist comment.

ZC: He sort of then did a dance of saying, “All I was saying was that the mayor needs to do a better job of providing opportunities, and what I meant was the harbor is out of control because the kids don’t have enough stuff to do.”

That’s nice, but you really don’t know these kids, you’ve never had a conversatoin with any of these kids,you’re just lumping them all together and really playing off of some of our city’s worst instincts. Playing off of fear, playing off of xenophobia and racism. And I think when you make a comment like that, you’re really just ginning up people who share your views.

BR: It wasn’t out of concern for us.

U: You mentioned fear, and I think that plays a huge role in it. In Baltimore, our neighborhoods are clustered into these groups, and there are demarcation lines that people are afraid to cross. How do you think that could change?

How do you think we could break down those barriers between neighborhoods?

— ZC: I think it just takes people like Breonna putting a different face on what it means to be an uban, black youth. I really think we need to change that perception—it’s such a key piece—so that when someone like Delegate McDonough says what he says, it’s looked at as crazy. Part of that work is taking a place like Douglass Homes where we worked last summer, and making it more inhabitable. Making the residents feel a greater sense of pride in their own community. Doing the work of creating a community garden instead of having a trash- and drug-filled lot. I think it’s really working hard on investing folks from low income communities in their own communities.

There’s this whole group of kids that want better for themselves and for their families, but for whatever reason that’s not the narrative that gets portrayed. The narrative that gets portrayed is roving mobs of black youth. It’s got to be some push and pull; it’s got to be a two-way street where folks that are middle class and not from tougher communities make the effort to see what’s really going on. It is one Baltimore; we are all in this together. You can talk about black, white, Hispanic all you want, but at the end of the day, we are all living together in this community. I just think it’s all about the city that we want to see and the city that we want to build—deciding what that looks like, whether it’s that we’ve got a really nice Inner Harbor that’s ultra-policed and looks great but then all of our neighborhoods are chaotic and a mess, or whether we want to really build all of our communities.

For an extended version of this interview, visit bit.ly/CohenRoger Urbanite #98 august 2012 27

fiction

The Very Practical Tits Less

by Joanna Guldin 28 august 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

sons

joanna guldin’s story “The Very Practical Tits Lessons” is the first-place winner of the 2012 pr att contempor aries fiction storyteller award competition. The contest was created expressly to promote the work of amateur Maryland writers and help them build their portfolios.

— second place was awarded to jo procter, for her story “Gertrude Stein and the Cabinet of Curios”; third prize went to madeleine thomas for “An Unspeakable Thing.”

— Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to all who submitted their work.

Also

love letters

photo by j.m. giordano

Local writers on books they’ve adored — and hated

sadie will lift up her shirt for a dollar so that you can see her tits. For two dollars you can touch them until she tells you to stop. Those prices are for the boys. For us neighborhood girls, it costs two and three dollars respectively. Girls don’t get to touch them for as long as the boys. Us neighborhood girls are interested because our chests are stone-flat. We don’t have tits—or at least, we don’t have tits like Sadie’s.

Urbanite #98 august 2012 29

nonfiction

fiction

By Cathy Alter

When I was 10 years old, I fell in love with the bodice rippers my mother read in the kitchen every night. Fat paperbacks with titles like Tender Fury or Captive Passions, their covers often had traces of Revlon’s “Love that Red” nail polish, evidence that they also doubled as a platform for her manicures.

The stories were all the same. The heroine, a changeling/gypsy/orphan who really comes from royalty, does battle with the ghosts/offspring/stepmother of her dark past, suffers/fights/enjoys a deflowering, and emerges with name/ wealth/heart restored by a stable boy-slash-Count with a similar history. The best stories spanned Tolstoy-esque generations, each one trying to avenge the last, and, come to think of it, are probably to blame for of my own psychological struggles with repetition compulsion.

I plowed through these books as quickly as my mother discarded them. I can still see the cover of Phyllis A. Whitney’s 1975 masterpiece Spindrift. A Bardot-haired woman runs through crashing waves toward the reader, a Breakers-like mansion in the background. She wears opera-length white gloves, a robin’s egg-colored dress, and a look of ladylike distress. “A headlong novel of romance, mystery, and suspense set in the fabled world of Newport where the very rich played at their very private games,” reads the teaser.

While my contemporaries were trading in Judy Blume, my understanding of sex was limited to the pages of these gothic romance novels. Here, the heroine, all flowing hair and heaving chest, pressed against a slab of throbbing manhood until she gushed forth like a raging mountain stream. When streams weren’t gushing, ocean waves were crashing, flower petals were unfurling, and honey was dripping. As a girl who once asked if making love felt like a back scratch, these nature-based euphemisms for orgasm were lost on me.

In lending me those purple pages, my mother was providing more than an unintentional lesson in the birds and bees. Through her guilty pleasures, she was imparting a true passion for reading. She eventually moved on to William Kennedy, Philip Roth, and Richard Ford—and I followed suit, devouring whatever she left scattered around the house like breadcrumbs.

The other day I treated myself to a professional manicure, a rare occurrence since becoming a mother ten months ago. It was that unmistakable smell of nail polish that made me think of my mother, who is now in the throes of a rare form of dementia that robs the afflicted of language. My mind instantly returned to that image of her in our kitchen, deep into a ripper, never realizing she’d one day have to fight her own savage battles.

— Cathy Alter is a Washington, D.C.-based writer whose articles and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Washingtonian, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, and McSweeney’s. She is the author of Virgin Territory: Stories From the Road to Womanhood and the memoir Up for Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over.

30 august 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

Sadie’s tits are big, fat tits because Sadie is a big, fat girl. Because she’s 12, her mom doesn’t believe in making her wear bras. She should at least wear a trainer bra, my mom says in disgust. More like an underwire, my mom says another time.

Sadie has bought a Walkman, Disney singa-long tapes, a beret, a New Kids On the Block lunchbox, Lisa Frank kitten stickers that she stuck all over her Walkman, and three Nancy Drew books. This is all with her tit money, she says proudly showing us neighborhood girls.

Someday, she says, you might have tits and be able to buy this stuff, too.

I ask my mom when my chest will grow in and she says, Hopefully never. I ask her again, and she says, When you’re grown. I can’t imagine that I’ll want Disney tapes when I’m grown, but it’s exciting to think that some day I can have a beret and a lunchbox and a Walkman, all bought with my very own tit money.

Other than her tits, Sadie isn’t much different than the rest of us neighborhood girls. Sure, the boys try to kiss her, while they try to hurt us by throwing baseballs at our faces or tripping us on the bus. It is hard to tell which feet, sticking out in the aisle, are dangerous and will tilt up to catch our feet, and which ones belong to other neighborhood girls who are too busy worrying about their own exit. Sadie is pretty much like us neighborhood girls except that she wears tank tops so you can see her sweating, fat tits. She wants you to see. And except for the fact that the older boys, us neighborhood girls’ brothers, want to kiss Sadie’s big, fat lips because of her big, fat tits. Because of that, Sadie sometimes gets to ride in cars that us neighborhood girls are forbidden to touch.

My mother shakes her head when I tell her that Sadie told a group of us neighborhood girls that she had been kissing Sammy’s brother in the back of his car. My mother says she will kill me and bury me if she ever finds out that I am kissing anybody’s brother anywhere.

Sammy’s brother is a real joke, though. A Class-A Loser is what Sammy’s father calls him.

I agree. A 16-year-old boy should be bored to tears by a 12-year-old girl, tits or no tits.

nonfiction

But all of us neighborhood girls want to kiss boys in the back of their cars, even though we turn up our noses at Sadie sometimes. So we take lessons from Sadie for fifty cents apiece. The first lesson she calls The Very Romantic Kissing Lesson. She gives us all pillows to learn how to kiss.

She stands in front of us with her pillow cradled just so in her hands, then she tilts her head just so and closes her eyes soft-like, and smashes her lips against the pillow. She shows us how to do that, and then she shows us how to wiggle our tongues out and kiss with them in the way. It gets slobbery.

We try to ignore the taste of dirty cotton.

Sadie says that sometimes boys will want to feel us neighborhood girls’ tits—but only when we actually grow them—and that we should let the boys do it if they give us something like candy, money, or rides in their cars. Us neighborhood girls stare at each other and think to ourselves how crazy Sadie is, and then we repeat her advice in our heads to make it stick.

Sadie has another lesson that she calls The Learn to Use Your Tits Lesson. She pins rolled-up socks on the inside of our shirts so it looks like we have tits, too. Look, I have sock tits, Sammy yells and wiggles her chest back and forth. I flick one of her sock tits. It jiggles and we fall over, giggling.

We laugh ourselves into tears, we die laughing. We are quite funny, Sammy and I. Sadie stares at the two of us all fallen over each other, snot almost running out of our noses, tears in our eyes. Her legs are like big, fat tree trunks, and she is rooted right into the lawn. She says, You are so immature.

Sammy and I stand up and readjust our sock tits. We try to stop smiling. We do after the other girls stare at us.

So immature, Sadie says. Tits are not a laughing matter, she says.

Sadie shows us how we should walk when we eventually grow our own crop of tits. She shows us how to make the boys look at our chests. We try, we try, we try, but the socks aren’t stuck right in our shirts and some of them shake loose and some of us neighborhood girls end up lopsided, the white lumps littering the dried-up grass.

by Marion Winik

For me, working as a book reviewer is like being paid to breathe. The hourly rate is unimpressive—on your average 1,000-page Stephen King novel or 9/11 fiction roundup, it hardly underwrites the Diet Coke—but, like breathing, I’m gonna do it anyway. Even at three bucks an hour, I can still whisper to myself in awe, I’m getting paid to read . However, there are drawbacks, besides the pay scale, to my vocation.

I have to read a lot of trash.

Have you read Snooki’s latest novel, Gorilla Beach? I have, and it was quite an eye-opener. From it, I learned to make a Verrazano (equal parts Patrón, Frangelico, and Red Bull) and adopted my personal goal for the summer of 2012: “Find a juicehead gorilla and smush it like it was the Mayan apocalypse.”

I’ve also read Breaking Dawn , the final volume of the Twilight series, which contained the most horrifying scene of childbirth in all of modern literature; lots of Jodi Picoult and Kim Edwards; The Obamas ; and tedious memoirs by Diane Keaton and Augusten Burroughs’ mother. I am also forced to read mountains of chick lit and spy novels every summer.

If it sucks, I have to say so.

As the exact wording of slams of my own work is etched in acid on my heart, I suffer greatly when I have to give a bad review. Well, not when making fun of silly books that will sell a million copies no matter what I say, and not when a book rubs me the wrong way really hard, either. I was sorry Joyce Carol Oates’ husband died, but I approached the write-up of her bloated, punctuation-spattered A Widow’s Tale with claws as sharp as those of a newborn vampire leaving the womb.

Most of the time, though, giving bad reviews is upsetting. It was hard to tell the truth about Anna Quindlen’s new collection of essays, not only because I thought she might see it, but also because I thought my review might seem snarky and jealous. What if I were just not the right reader for this book? What if I am snarky and jealous? What if I end up running into her at the AWP conference next year? This actually happened in 2010 with Joyce Carol Oates! I had to decide whether to hide behind Antonya Nelson or Myla Goldberg, who probably didn’t love what I said about their books, either.

At least you now understand why this profession is so well-paid.

— University of Baltimore prof Marion Winik reviews books for Newsday and writes a biweekly column for Baltimore Fishbowl. She is the author of First Comes Love and The Lunchbox Chronicles; a new collection of essays is due out next year. Info at www.marionwinik.com.

Urbanite #98 august 2012 31

nonfiction

fiction

by Susi Wyss

As a Peace Corps volunteer in the Central African Republic in the early 1990s, I had a rickety shelf in my hut with about a dozen books. Besides a Sango-English Dictionary, Lonely Planet Guide for Central Africa, and the Hesperian Foundation’s Where There Is No Doctor, it held tattered paperbacks that rotated among my fellow volunteers and I. I remember reading—several times over— Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Edwidge Danticat’s Breath Eyes Memory, and George Packer’s The Village of Waiting. These books provided me with temporary respite whenever I got frustrated, sick, or simply lonely at my post.

Once, when I accidentally self-treated a case of giardiasis with three times the recommended dose of Fasigyn, I went to bed and, half-awake, hallucinated that rabid rats were coming through my window and trying to crawl under my mosquito net. After I finally convinced myself they were figments of my imagination, I lay awake in the darkness for the rest of the night, terrified of whatever visions might come next. As my heart pounded to the sound of drumming at an all-night funeral, I even wondered if I might be losing my sanity.

By daylight, I was exhausted, so I stayed home to rest. I pulled a book—Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar—from my shelf and began to read. For most of that day, I was transported to Esther Greenwood’s world in New York and Massachusetts as she slowly loses her grip on reality and finally, tenuously pulls through.

When I reached the end and put down the book, I was back in Africa, sitting in my mud brick hut, the smell of my neighbor’s cooking fire wafting in the air, the announcer speaking in Sango on someone’s radio. Although it was evening by then and would soon be dark, somehow I felt ready to face another night.

Later, I would wonder why I’d reached for that particular book at a time when I—not yet realizing the overdose had caused my hallucinations—feared for my mental well-being. Shouldn’t it have scared me even more to read about a character who reveals how thin the membrane is that separates sanity from madness? And yet, it was that very thought that brought me comfort: At least I was not alone.

In the end, isn’t that the reason so many of us read—to be reminded of our shared humanity?

— Susi Wyss is the author of The Civilized World, a book of fiction set across Africa that was named a “Book to Pick Up Now” by O, The Oprah Magazine. She currently works for Jhpiego, an international health organization affiliated with Johns Hopkins University.

32 august 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

In the middle of July, in the middle of everything, in the middle of Sadie’s lessons when she is showing us neighborhood girls The Very Sexy Makeup Two-Part Lesson—how to put on lipstick and wear our smiles wide—a police car shows up at 1 a.m. with lights flashing hard against the side of Sadie’s house. That’s what Sammy whispers through the telephone the next morning. Sammy whispers that Sadie’s dad found Sadie with her clothes half-off with Jenny’s brother. That isn’t such a big deal, I say. Sadie’s clothes are almost always half-off.

Sammy tells me I’m not listening to her, I’m not getting what she’s saying. Sadie’s dad got his gun and shot Jenny’s brother in the leg, she says, and then he shot at Sadie and missed.

Sadie’s house is empty when we all walk across our yards for lessons the next day. We can’t get near the house; there’s yellow police ribbon all over the yard. There’s a police car in the driveway.

The cop sticks his head out the window and says, Get away from here, you hear? We look at our feet, and one of us says real timid, Sir, you know where Sadie is? But the cop doesn’t hear us or doesn’t want to hear us, and we figure that Sammy was wrong—Sadie really is dead. We stand there thinking that maybe the cop will forget about us, maybe we can go see if Sadie’s in her bedroom. Or at least see if her Walkman or her stickers or her lunchbox is there, thrown on her floor, like she’s coming back for them. We think how terrible it must be for Jenny, who stands in the back of the group with her head kinda down. I think that it’s a miracle Sammy’s dumb brother wasn’t the one who got shot. I’m glad I don’t have a brother, because apparently brothers are near to the stupidest things God ever created.

nonfiction

September comes. Sadie never comes to school.

Nobody tells us neighborhood girls anything—not one single thing—about Sadie. Sadie’s house stays empty and on a Saturday someone comes to move things out, but it’s not Sadie or her mother or her father. Three Puerto Rican boys are the ones who do it, and us neighborhood girls go to watch. It’s boring, like watching ice melt, but Sammy holds my hand the whole time and won’t let me get up and go home. She makes me sit there with all of the girls, sit there and watch the boys with their sweat-slick muscles and their sweat-slick foreheads. Sammy wears tank tops now, but there are no tits to fill it out, just flatness. That’s not attractive, I tell her. No one wants to see that, I say.

The Puerto Rican boys never look at us more than once. They have half smiles that I take to mean look-at-these-stupid-girls-sitting-in-the-heatand-watching-us-move-furniture. Sammy tries to do what Sadie taught us, but it doesn’t work. The rest of us neighborhood girls watch Sammy strut back and forth, back and forth across the thin grass, flinging her shoulders, trying to make the tits she doesn’t have jiggle. They don’t, of course, and the Puerto Rican boys don’t look, of course.

Sammy keeps at it and Jenny says, Oh sit down, you stupid craphead. Sammy does. I think Sammy’s embarrassed. She doesn’t say she is, but a line of sweat is across her forehead, right where her hair stops and her freckly forehead starts. Sammy doesn’t say anything. None of us neighborhood girls do. The Puerto Rican boys sing softly to music that’s playing from somewhere inside the house.

They grin at each other. They don’t grin at us.

We sit there cross-legged and red-faced on the lawn waiting for Sadie to come back like the queen of tits that she is, waiting for the Puerto Rican boys to put down the sofa, look at our boy bodies, and tell us where Sadie is, or at least where they’re taking the truckload of her things, waiting for Part Two of The Very Sexy Makeup Two-Part Lesson, waiting for our tits to grow in, us neighborhood girls.

by Nik Korpon

I really didn’t want to read it. I mean, there was NBA Jam to play and my friend had just gotten the blood code for Mortal Combat from his older brother. There were two skateboards at home I hadn’t broken yet. And besides, it was required reading. But I was at my step-grandmother’s house and my little brother was annoying me and all I had was my loaner copy of The Outsiders, so I sat on the heavily embroidered couch, the one that was actually for sitting, and toppled into a world more real than my own. In Ponyboy and Steve I saw my friends and me, listening to punk and grunge records in my basement. In Cherry I saw ____ ________ from the girls’ soccer team that I wanted to ask out but couldn’t because my hair was too long and my jeans had too many holes and I was chubby anyway. Discovering The Outsiders was that moment of revelation I wasn’t old enough to know was cliché because it was so visceral and vibrant and, even more than the years of punk rock that followed, showed me there were other rejects like me out there, and we were fine the way we were.

Skip ahead more years than I’m comfortable admitting: I’ve decided I want to devote my life to crime—novels, that is—but I don’t know how, and Tarantino is about the extent of my crime story knowledge. I’ve read Chandler, too, but all of it seems so safe, and none of it levels me like The Outsiders had years before. On a lark, I pick up The Postman Always Rings Twice.

There is no purging of teenage angst, but something about the way that first sentence—“They threw me off the hay truck about noon.”—bookends Frank’s plea to Father McConnell to help him and Cora end up together obliterates my contrived idea of crime writing. Postman is gritty and sexy, and the characters are, in the truest sense of noir, damned from the outset.

The amount of travesty per page is unparalleled. In everything I’ve written after reading Postman, I’ve been trying to recapture its sense of inevitability and the jagged emotion of that final scene in Frank and Cora’s car, her bleeding and him kissing. They’re damaged and doomed and painfully real.

Damn if they aren’t a beautiful sight to behold.

— Nik Korpon is the author of Old Ghosts, By the Nails of the Warpriest, Stay God, and Bar Scars: Stories. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and son.

To read more Love Letters, visit bit.ly/BmoreLetters all Illustrated titles by DJAMIKA SMITH

Urbanite #98 august 2012 33

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SPACE

This Old House In Bolton Hill, two homeowners give a red brick Victorian a different sort of facelift.

By Andrew Zaleski photography by J.m. Giordano

Urbanite #98 august 2012 37

Space

For more than four years, Kristine Smets and Michael Booth eyed the three-story, red brick house—with a pair of stone gargoyles standing guard atop a second-story bay—on the 1300 block of Bolton Street.

“We’ve been fascinated in this house since we moved to Bolton Hill,” says Smets, who had lived in the neighborhood with her husband since 1996.

But this was no easy love affair. A Victorian Gothic structure built around 1880, the grand house had fallen into disrepair. For one, a tree was growing out of a second-floor room. When Smets and Booth finally purchased the home in June 2009, it took several months for the Maryland Historic Trust to approve the initial renovation work to the house. After renovations started in December 2009, the roof leaked throughout the next year.

But Smets, a rare books librarian, and Booth, who works at Constellation Energy, were fascinated by the house’s historic integrity and convinced they could restore it to its original glory.

They enlisted the help of designer Christine

Occupy the nooks: In their linen closet, Smets and Booth decided to not plaster over the handwritten graffiti left by servants more than 100 years ago. The scribble at the bottom reads, “The prices are down below starvation notch, the bosses make all the money, and we poor suckers suffer for it. 1882.”

38 august 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

Calderon of local architectural firm Penumbra Design and Tim Horjus and Nicholas Cairns, each of whom has a background in painting but work now as historic home renovators under the name C&H Restoration and Renovation.

“We said we wanted to do a historic renovation,” says Calderon. “We became more dedicated to that idea as the process went on.”

For Horjus and Cairns, that meant spending a great deal of time labeling lengths of wood, flooring, baseboard, and window trim and stockpiling it in the event it could be salvaged and fit back into place. They had help in the form of local artist friends “with odd skill sets,” says Cairns, like faux finishing, tilework, and painting the ceiling medallions and walls.

“This renovation was very much led by the house,” says Horjus. “As we uncovered elements that had been covered up at a prior date, we were able to figure out original footprints and bring those things back.”

In the dining room and living room, the original pine flooring was refinished; singlepane glass windows, more authentic to the time period, were favored over double-pane.

The original pocket doors separating the

The suite life: While Smet’s and Booth’s daughter’s bedroom packs some flair — as any 12-year-old’s room should — t he original floorboards remain, gradually sloping downward about 2 inches.

Space

two rooms remain, as do the interior wooden shutters.

Where original elements of the house couldn’t be salvaged, replacements to match or antiques were substituted. In the foyer, master bathroom, Smets’ office, and along the steps is what Horjus calls “new-old wood,” milled from pine beams in North Carolina and stained to match the wood flooring (which dates to circa 1880). Antique lighting fixtures were affixed to the ceilings in the house’s more formal rooms, including the library that sits just to the right of the foyer. Old, push-button light switches were reproduced.

Sometimes original pieces from the house could be preserved but were impractical for household use. In those moments, Calderon applied her expertise and creativity; for instance, she came up with the idea to move a clawfoot tub from the second floor to the third-floor bathroom of Smets and Booth’s daughter, encasing it inside a deck. To look at it now, you’d never know it wasn’t there all along.

In the master bedroom, where the tree—and the neighborhood possum—had been, this marriage of original, reclaimed, and refinished

is especially pronounced. Water damage had destroyed much of the cornice molding around the ceiling, leaving Horjus and Cairns to create a plaster reproduction. The original stained glass panels that stretch horizontally above the window facing the street were all restored by Worcester Eisenbrandt, a Baltimore company that also restored the stained glass in Johns Hopkins University’s Gilman Hall. Perhaps most striking is the working fireplace: The firebox was rebuilt, and the hearthstone was replaced, but the wood mantel above is totally original—stripped down to the original wood, then refinished.

From the beginning, says Smets, that was the goal: restore as much of the house as possible back to its late 19th-century physical sensibilities, and ensure any new incorporated elements would be congruous with the old aesthetic.

“I think we always still wanted to know that we were living in an old house,” she says.

Gatekeeper: Two gargoyles decorate the house’s front facade.

Check it out: The books in the library are organized along custom-built mahogany shelves. The mantel over the fireplace, one of four in the house, is original; it was stripped down to the wood and refinished.

Urbanite #98 august 2012 39

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40 august 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

food + drink

photo by J.M. Giordano

feature / recipe / dining reviews / wine + spirits

Homegrown Hops

Gardeners and homebrewers alike are becoming fans of growing hop vines in the backyard.

i’m an alley walker. I grab the back door key and the iPod loaded with mystery novels and take off down the back corridors of Wyman Park, peeking into yards and gardens that reflect the personality of their owners better than the public fronts of our rowhouses with their identical covered porches.

The alleys feel weirdly secret and full of little details: the bubble of circulating water in a koi pond, the stray rose climbing over a high fence, the ivy that crawls up the corner telephone pole to hang like a green drape from the overhead wires. But what caught my eye early last summer were the hop vines, full of pale green cones and leaves that looked a lot like a maple’s, clinging to an inverted “V” made of heavy twine that stretched high over a neighbor’s backyard.

By Mary k. Zajac

Urbanite #98 august 2012 41

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feature / Recipe food + Drink

This summer, I discovered hops in two more backyards. There are more hop vines growing in nearby neighborhoods like Hampden (including in the backyard of Wine Source beer guru, Jed Jenny) and Woodberry. Could it be that growing your own hops is becoming as popular as putting in a backyard tomato vine, I wondered?

Well, maybe not—although it turns out that hops may be even easier to cultivate.

Certainly the number of folks planting hops has grown, if local sales of hop rhizomes are any indication. According to Chris Anderson, manager of Columbia’s Maryland Homebrew, which sells beer-making supplies, the rhizome business has grown steadily as the popularity of homebrewing shows little sign of slowing down. Maryland Homebrew began selling rhizomes—small roots cut from the root of a female hop plant—thirteen years ago, and Anderson estimates that sales have increased by 25 percent each year for roughly the last five years, this year numbering “several hundred,” she says.

“The homebrew industry is full of people who are do-it-yourself-ers,” says Anderson.

“They like to be able to have something from home to put in their homemade beer.”

Humulus lupulus is part of the family cannabaceae (which also include cannabis) and is the component in beer that gives it both bitterness and aroma. Certain cultivars, like Chinook and Nugget, are high in alpha acids and are known as bittering hops. Other cultivars, like Cascade and Hallertau, have lower percentages of alpha acids and are added at the end of brewing for aroma.

Each February, Maryland Homebrew receives a list of around a dozen available cultivars of hops from a supplier in Yakima, Washington. Anderson then distributes the list to her customers, who can place orders for rhizomes. “Cascade is the hardiest,” says Anderson. “We sell the most of that.” At $4.95 a rhizome, it’s a cheap investment.

The rhizomes arrive in March ready to be planted in the ground (or in a 5-gallon barrel if land is scarce) after the first frost. According to the instruction sheet Maryland Homebrew includes with each purchase, rhizomes of different hop cultivars should be planted 5 to 7 feet apart under at least an inch of soil that is sandy and well-drained with a pH of between 6.0 to 7.5. They also benefit from a fertilizer rich in potassium, nitrogen, and phosphate.

Once the vines are a foot tall, it behooves you to have a plan in place for training the vines—although even then may be too late, says Juliet Jones, a horticulturalist and Wyman Park resident. “Once [hops] start growing, you’re out of time,” says Jones, whose 2-yearold Cascade vines are zip-tied to her backyard fence as they climb up heavy twine held aloft

by a 10-foot copper pipe. “The vines can grow 6 to 12 inches in a day,” she explains. (Maryland Homebrew confirms this, although 2 feet per week is the average.) “It’s so amazing. You can sit there and watch them.”

Dave Gadsby’s Chinook vines are rooted in a raised bed and climb to the second story deck of his Wyman Park rowhouse. Gadsby received his rhizomes from a friend who also homebrews. “I just lucked out with them,” he says.

“I put them in the ground, and they started growing almost instantly.” Gadsby adds that the vines are “pretty aggressive and considered invasive.” In other words, be careful where you plant them because you may have them for a long time.

Gadsby uses his hops to make India pale ale; Jones, unlike most backyard hop growers, initially planted hops for aesthetic reasons rather than brewing ones. “They’re beautiful, and they create great shade,” she points out.

Jones received her rhizomes from another Wyman Park neighbor, Luke Ackerman, whose six cultivars I first noticed on my walk. Because Jones loves beer but doesn’t brew (yet, she says), her plan is to give Ackerman her hops cones in exchange for the beer he will make from them.

Ackerman started brewing while he was a doctoral student at Oregon State University in Corvallis, in the heart of the American hops world, but he didn’t plant his first crop of Centennial and Cascade rhizomes until 2008, when he moved to Wyman Park. Since then, Ackerman has added Nuggett, Willamette, Hallertau, and Fuggle to his compact, shady garden space in a spectacular setup: coconut fiber rope is strung from a pipe buried 2 feet under his vines, then looped over an aluminum wire that stretches from a second story awning bracket across the yard to a towering evergreen. “This is actually an incredibly tall setup,” he concedes. “But if I want any sunlight, I have to go up.”

For best results, Ackerman advocates would-be gardeners to have their soil tested and make sure it’s sandy enough and to add a good dose of compost in the spring. Still, he says, every grower’s experience is going to be a little different because of their existing soil, light, and growing conditions. In a good year, Ackerman says he’s harvested around 1¼ pounds of hops per plant in August through October (yields are considerably smaller the first year as the vine establishes itself). “They are so beautiful and taste so great,” he says.

“And they’re the one part of beer I can grow myself.”

Pickled Hops Although there aren’t many tasty uses for hop cones outside of brewing beer, hop shoots (also known variously as wild asparagus, bruscandoli, and jets de houblon) can be used in omelettes, risottos, salads, and soups (see Elizabeth David’s An Omelette and a Glass of Wine). Below find a recipe for pickled hops from Cascade Brewing Company adapted by www.tastingtable.com.

—M.Z.

ingredients

2½ lbs fresh hop shoots ½ bottle Cascade Kriek beer (or another sour ale) 1 clove garlic 1 red chile 1 tsp black peppercorns 4 c white vinegar

directions

In a large lidded container, combine all of the ingredients.

Cover and place in a dark, cool space for two weeks.

Serve immediately or transfer to the refrigerator for up to two months. Yield varies.

Hop to it: A painting of the common hops plant, or Echter Hopfen, Humulus lupulus (from 1796; figure 38 from Deutschlands Flora in Abbildungen—or, in English, Germany's Flora Illustrated)

Urbanite #98 august 2012 43

food + Drink dining reviews

Luigi’s Italian Deli

by Tracey Middlekauff

There is nothing off-puttingly self-conscious or ironic about the vibe at Luigi’s Italian Deli in Hampden. Rather, it is a refreshingly earnest and welcoming place, serving honest, homemade, and unpretentious fare. Since its opening in April, the pleasantly ramshackle space already feels like a neighborhood fixture.

The cold sandwiches are generously filled with all manner of goodies. Italian cold cut subs can often be nothing more than a messy pile of meats, but here nothing gets lost in the thoughtful composition of mortadella, salami, capicollo, prosciuttini, and provolone topped with olive oil, vinegar, field greens, tomato, hot cherry peppers, and grated cheese. The green olive spread in the Isabella—prosciutto di Parma, sopressata, dry cured coppa, Asiago cheese, and tomato—is reminiscent of a New Orleans muffaletta, which is always a good thing. The tuna sandwich had a nice salty tang, balanced nicely by sweet balsamic vinegar and hot cherry peppers.

Making great sandwiches with cured meats is one thing, but restaurants often fail in the flavor department when it comes to their vegetarian offerings. Thankfully, this is not the case at Luigi’s: the zingy Leonardo, for instance, a panino with marinated roasted eggplant, squash, red onion, roasted red pepper, creamy homemade mozzarella, pesto, and balsamic vinegar, in no way suffered from its lack of protein.

Make no mistake, with the exception of some of the antipasti dishes—a Caprese salad, a ceci bean salad—the food here is not exactly diet fare. Even the salad portions are rich and

generous enough to make a filling meal. The well-dressed field greens in the mammoth Italian chef salad are blanketed with composed curls of capicollo, prosciuttini, salami, and provolone, and covered with a dusting of grated cheese.

Of course a good homemade meatball is an essential menu item at any self-respecting Italian deli. Unfortunately, on one visit, in their unadorned state the meatballs were somewhat bland, with an unpleasantly mealy texture— surprising given the generous and balanced use of seasonings elsewhere on the menu. On a subsequent visit, however, they did not disappoint, stuffed as they were in Luigi’s mammoth meatball chub, half of an Italian loaf stuffed with said meatballs, marinara, provolone, and grated cheese. These moist and well-seasoned meatballs bore no resemblance to their bland brothers, and they nestled in just the right amount of tangy sauce. (Lunch and dinner daily. 846 W. 36th St.; 410-814-0652; www. luigisdeli.net)

The Fork & Wrench

By Martha Thomas

There’s a fervent enterprise to just about every aspect of the Fork & Wrench, a new gastro-pub on the stretch of Boston Street between Canton and Fells Point. The place is as ripe as a summer beefsteak with Portlandia-style earnestness—bar tables wrapped in sheets of zinc, randomly distressed with etched angles and numbered with brass tags, and the assortment of antiquated tools, pharmaceutical supplies,

Stuffed: Luigi’s sandwiches are generously and evenly filled with such Italian meats as prosciutto di Parma, sopressata, coppa, and capicollo.

44 august 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

Enchanting interior: The collected gizmos in the Fork & Wrench feel like they were collected from your grandparents’ barn or the back room of a 20th century apothecary shop.

and miscellaneous gizmos, like a metal cage on wheels sitting placidly in the second floor dining room. The interior gives you the feeling that you’ve wandered into the storage shed attached to your grandparents’ barn or the fusty back room of an early 20th century apothecary shop.

The food is going for the very same effect, painstakingly seasonal and locally sourced.

The waiter explains that lamb is no longer available because the spring lamb season is very brief—and we notice that our paper menu is date-stamped like an old library book, indicating that the summer fare may be somewhat overdue. The good news is, the food hits the bar—even between seasons.

A sous-vide chicken is tender and unadorned, in a stew of black-eyed peas and sautéed greens, a buttermilk corn muffin on the side, everything sweetened with a hint of honey. Sushirare slices of smoked salmon, crunchy and peppery on the outside, come with fingerling potatoes, capers and diced olives, displayed on a nest of arugula. The Butcher’s Burger is three cuts of beef: brisket, short rib, and chuck, with local chevre and greens. And there’s rabbit pie with carrots, as well as scallops with dill pesto and candied bacon.

The menu is arranged to ensure we know the provenance of each plate: Water, Flock, and Field—where both rabbit and chicken once resided; the beef, pork, and lamb come from the Herd and Pen section. There’s even a listing of “Jars”—proffering starters of white beans and chicken liver mousse.

The origin of dessert choices is announced by the waiter: roasted strawberries infuse a crème brulee; the cherries in the tart were picked this week. Indeed, the tart is filled with that luxurious sweet summer fruit, nestled

wine + spirits food + Drink

in the custard filling of a shortbread crust.

Topped with a dollop of cool vanilla ice cream, it’s an effortless ending to a meal that is clearly the result of a surfeit of inventiveness. (Dinner daily; brunch Sat and Sun. 2322 Boston St., 443-759-9360, www.theforkandwrench.com)

The It List

Restaurant wine programs that make the grade

photos by Leah Daniels

By Clinton Macsherry

Sometimes dining companions ask me to peruse a restaurant’s wine list and pick a bottle for the table. They rarely make that same mistake twice. Whether the list holds two pages or twenty, the possibilities can keep me engrossed until most people would have polished off their appetizers. Put a directory the size of Little Italy ristorante Della Notte’s in my hands, and you’ll have to check back with me around dessert. Still thirsty?

Every August Wine Spectator issues wine list awards, and although I couldn’t get an advance peek, Della Notte will likely remain one of few Baltimore restaurants receiving the magazine’s second-highest designation. Last year, the Black Olive and the Capital Grille achieved the same rank, with a handful of other Maryland establishments and 833 worldwide. Thirty additional Maryland restaurants numbered among the 2,827 earning WS’ basic award; none cracked the topmost third tier, which totaled seventy-four.

Putative prestige aside, WS awards carry some compromising limitations. It’s a pay-to-

play process—applications and renewals cost $250, which garners WS roughly $1 million annually. And WS admittedly inspects only the top awardees, which left it vulnerable to a nasty scam (or a nifty one, depending on your taste for malicious mischief). In 2008, wine writer Robin Goldstein submitted a fictitious list from a non-existent restaurant. Adding insult, Goldstein’s list included a “reserve” section of pricey wines previously trashed by WS reviewers. It won a basic award. Goldstein took elaborate steps to perpetrate the hoax, creating a fake menu, voicemail box, and website, even posting bogus reviews on Chowhound. Still, the incident raised serious questions about the integrity of WS’s awards.

That soured Tony Foreman, whose superlative wine lists for prominent local restaurants Charleston, Cinghiale, Pazo, and Petit Louis are conspicuously absent from WS’ rankings.

“After the scandal, you’d be a fool to submit to that program,” says Foreman. “They have no credibility at all.” List development “is always very personal,” Foreman notes, with wine and cuisine like “two dance partners … At Charleston in particular, as the cooking has evolved, I nod to things that [chef, partner, and wife Cindy Wolf] likes to drink with what she likes to cook and eat.” The other three restaurants have selections that mirror their respective emphases on Italian, Spanish, and French regional cooking. Because Foreman cellars more wine than he offers at any one time, he can revise lists weekly to reflect adjustments to the menus.

It might seem less likely that you’d find an admirable wine list at Bartenders, a corner bar-cum-pizza joint on Boston Street, but that makes the discovery more fun. In developing Bartenders’ list, co-owner Danny Coker “tasted hundreds of bottles” and “focused on wines with spicy, peppery flavors to go with red sauce. And we threw in some funky bottles just because we liked them. From the get-go, we wanted everyone to know we’d have an excellent wine list for a corner pub.” Every few months, Coker tweaks his inexpensive list of twenty-some bottles, most offered by the glass.

“I like to go off the beaten path, not just pour Kendall-Jackson,” he says.

Seldom-seen Basque white Xarmant Txakoli 2010 ($7 per glass, 11.5 percent alcohol), a Bartenders mainstay, pours pale brass.

Citrus leaf and wet stone aromas carry wisps of flint. Medium-bodied and faintly spritzy, its lemon-limeade and crunchy green apple flavors finish long and crisp. (August loves this wine.)

Pazo may be one of the only other restaurants in town featuring Txakoli, but Foreman and Coker share something else in common. Asked what makes a good wine list, both immediately give the same deceptively simple answer: “Good wine.”

Urbanite #98 august 2012 45

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arts + culture

photo by J.m. Giordano

Double trouble: Improv masters Mike Harris (top) and Prescott Gaylord perform together in the Baltimore Improv Group.

comedy / music / visual art / the scene

On The

Spot Learning to think fast and say yes to everything with the Baltimore Improv Group

By Marianne Amoss

on a sweltering saturday morning in June, the halls of the basement level of the Mill Center were filled with groups of people doing curious things. Some were miming throwing a giant knife back and forth. Some were shaking their hands and feet to counts of ten, nine, eight. Some were entering and exiting scenes seemingly at random, inventing characters, situations, and relationships on the spot.

Urbanite #98 august 2012 47

er T s g i ! isit ep r e n o Wtails, v.edu/pr e 0 r d hu l fo ody.j r cal 463 o b a pe 34 2 410

events

On June 21, Urbanite launched the 2012 Urbanite Project: Healthy Food Challenge Exhibit at Jordan Faye Contemporary.

Peabody P r e Pa r aT o r y fall 2012 sPring 2013 Early childhood, dance classes, and individual instruction in all orchestral instruments, guitar, harp, voice, and piano are offered at the Preparatory’s main campus in historic Mount Vernon and the Towson campus on Dulaney Valley Road, where Children’s Chorus is also available.

Early childhood classes and individual instruction in flute, guitar, harp, voice, and piano are offered at the Annapolis campus at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts. Individual music instruction and Children’s Chorus are also offered at Howard County locations.

The Peabody PreParaTory’s fall semesTer of music and dance insTruc Tion for all ages begins Wednesday, sePTember 5, 2012 48 Urbanite_0812.indd august 2012 1 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

6/29/12 3:27 PM

Learn more about the Urbanite Project at www.urbaniteproject.com.

See other Urbanite events, visit us on Facebook at

Urbanite-Magazine.

comedy arts + culture

At its heart, improv is about collaboration— doing what you can to help your fellow performers succeed.

It was the summer auditions for the Baltimore Improv Group (BIG). The auditions had drawn fifty-six hopefuls, and I was among them. Divided into groups of seven or eight, we had claimed parts of the hallways to warm up and get to know each other while waiting to be called in for our fifteen minutes of stage time.

I had just started studying improv and was hoping beginner’s luck would work in my favor, landing me a spot in one of BIG’s troupes.

Improv is just what it sounds like: improvised. Using only suggestions from the audience, or “inputs,” performers create stories with strong characters, nuanced relationships, and some very funny moments—all on the spot. Modern improv, the story goes, originated in the theater exercises conducted

by Viola Spolin with the children she worked with in the Works Progress Administration’s Recreation Project from 1939 to 1941. These techniques became the foundation of improv; Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, was a co-founder of the renowned improv-based sketch comedy group Second City, which has cranked out a number of standout comedic talents, including Gilda Radner, Tina Fey, and Steve Carell.

BIG was founded in 2004 by, as artistic director Mike Harris puts it, “Mike Subelsky, a bicycle, and flyers.” Subelsky, a local entrepreneur who’s also responsible for Ignite Baltimore, had done improv in San Diego while stationed there with the Navy. When he moved to Baltimore he wanted to start an improv group here, so he got on his bike and posted flyers inviting people to “play,” as it’s called in improv lingo. Since then, the group has grown to nearly fifty members, and BIG has become the biggest and best-known improv troupe in Baltimore. (There are smaller standalone improv troupes in the area that are unaffiliated with BIG but occasionally participate in BIG activities.)

BIG’s members are each in one of six “mainstage” troupes. Some are also involved in the nine special project troupes, which allow them to flex other muscles or try new things; some special projects incorporate puppetry, body painting, and other nontraditional additions. Nearly all of BIG’s troupes do longform improv, in which a narrative thread ties scenes together; in contrast, short-form improv is much of what you’ll see on the popular TV

show Whose Line is it Anyway? BIG members are busy: They give fifty performances a year, travel to other cities to perform, and teach six sessions of seven-week classes every year. Since 2007, they have also hosted the annual Baltimore Improv Festival, four days of performances and classes given by BIG and a selection of out-of-town troupes that draws more than 900 people. (This year’s festival takes place August 16–19; for more details, go to www.baltimoreimprovfestival.org.)

Harris gives former artistic director Prescott Gaylord credit for dreaming up many of the unconventional projects BIG has undertaken in the last several years, including Unscripted, a full-length improvised play, and Harris’ and Gaylord’s troupe, Evan the Loyal.

Gaylord originally conceived Evan in 2009 as a three-person troupe consisting of him, Harris, and a person pulled at random from the audience at each performance. Since then, Evan the Loyal has gone through several iterations—currently Harris and Gaylord are doing what they call Wordy and Wordless, with Harris narrating while Gaylord pantomimes, displaying his considerable physical comedy chops.

At its heart, improv is about collaboration—doing what you can to help your fellow performers succeed. Great improv performers master the art of the strong offer—supplying a strong character, situation, or relationship that their scene partners can build on. They also make a habit of responding with the famous “Yes, and” to everything and anything, so that the scene can advance; nothing stops a scene colder than a refusal. (“The Abominable Snowman is in my bathroom!” “No, he’s not.”

Cue awkward silence.) It’s related to but unlike standup, in which a single performer bears the burden of being funny; in improv, everyone pitches in.

“The great thing about being onstage with another person who knows what they’re doing is you don’t have the responsibility to make every interesting thing happen,” says Harris.

“Your responsibility is to listen, be honest, react honestly to the other person. When Prescott and I play, sometimes he comes up with the idea that, OK, boom, now we know this is what the next five minutes is going to be about, and sometimes it’s me, and it goes back and forth.

And it’s nice to know that you don’t have to come up with a brilliant idea all the time.”

Improv also depends on quick thinking and a willingness to go with the first thing that comes out of your mouth. It was hard to get the hang of at first—especially for a writer, who’s accustomed to reworking and fussing over words and ideas until the last minute. But I’ve learned there’s a great freedom in this kind of approach. And when it works—when the actors are in sync with each other and the scene is unfolding perfectly, as if it were rehearsed— it really works. Gaylord says it’s what keeps people coming back to improv. “That moment is what we chase. And if you get good enough, and the people you’re on stage with are good enough, you can have that, you know, six, seven times in a row in a show, that kind of magic this-shouldn’t-be-possible moment. … It’s a euphoric, fantastic feeling.”

At auditions, after a long waiting period, during which I took to pacing the hallway as more and more butterflies took wing in my stomach, my group was finally called in to the theater. At Gaylord’s direction, we jumped right into Freeze Tag, in which someone pauses a scene by yelling “Freeze!” and takes the physical position of one of the performers, then resumes the action but with an entirely new scene.

It’s a fast-moving game, and I only managed to jump in once. I had to lie on my back in what can best be described as dead-animal position, feet and hands up in the air, and come up with a response to the question, “Jezebel, what you doin’?” After a split second of panic—what was I doing?—I blurted out that I was grounding myself in preparation for the impending lightning storm. A roar of laughter came from the audience, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Later, when the callbacks list was posted, my name was on the list. But the long day and my inexperience worked against me, and by the time I had finished my second turn on the stage I knew I wouldn’t make it in.

But I didn’t mind. I’m looking forward to learning more about improv—and continuing to chase that moment Gaylord talks about, when everything will fall into place and we’ll look at each other and wonder, How did we do that?

Urbanite #98 august 2012 49

arts + culture music / visual art

Art Walk

Escape the heat (and discover the cool) with five of Baltimore’s newest art galleries.

By Anna Walsh

Cakewalk Gallery Purchasing fine art can be intimidating, but a new gallery is hoping to make the process a cakewalk. Cakewalk Gallery opened in April with the goal of making fine art more accessible. The gallery currently carries the work of mostly local artists and occasionally hosts events, including a wine reception every Friday evening. (1224 N. Charles St.; 410-332-8010; www.cakewalkgallery.com)

America the Beautiful

America by Dan Deacon (Domino Records, 2012)

by Al Shipley

Dan Deacon’s America begins on “Guilford Avenue Bridge.” That’s a literal statement about the title of his new album and its abrasively noisy lead track, but it could also be the subliminal message he’s sending out: The starting point for the Baltimore transplant’s vision of our country is his adopted hometown.

The track is instrumental, and throughout America, layers of effects and distortion tend to obscure the lyrics too much for the album to function as traditional protest music. But what does come through is that Deacon is a guy who loves his country, even when he thinks it could treat its citizens more equally and take better care of its natural resources.

Deacon graduated from the music conservatory at suny Purchase in upstate New York in 2004, at which point he relocated to Baltimore.

The Wham City collective, which he spearheaded out of the Copycat Building warehouse space on the north end of the Guilford Avenue bridge, quickly became a multimedia lightning rod, launching tours and festivals and bands, stage plays and comedians and dvds and, perhaps most significantly, Deacon’s recording career. His frenetic, inspired 2007 breakthough, Spiderman Of The Rings, was followed by the grander but equally idiosyncratic Bromst in 2009. Three years later, America arrives with no small amount of anticipation and aims to live up to it from the ambiguous, ambitious title down.

Dan Deacon’s music often resembles an unlikely pileup of indie pop, noise rock, and contemporary classical, one in which chiming melodies, harsh textures, and pulsing rhythm tracks collide in grandly symphonic compositions.

50 august 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

Most recently, that iconoclastic combination of traditional training and modern execution has led to a performance at Carnegie Hall and work scoring a Francis Ford Coppola film, Twixt, which has been screened in festivals and limited European releases over the past year.

Although early on Deacon primarily made music by turning knobs and pressing buttons, Bromst marked Deacon’s first significant work utilizing live musicians, and America continues in that direction, often with dazzling results. The standout track “Prettyboy” (another nod to Baltimore geography, Prettyboy Reservoir), starts off loud and synthetic but soon breaks into a gorgeous piano and vibraphone passage, then builds and collapses again into an even more beautiful symphonic coda.

Earlier this year, before announcing the title of his next album, Deacon performed at Occupy Wall Street’s May Day rally and told a Village Voice interviewer, “I’ve been shifting into this pro-America mindset.” The second half of America is dedicated to a four-part suite, and track titles like “USA I: Is a Monster” and “USA II: The Great American Desert” illustrate that Deacon’s Occupy-inspired idea of patriotism involves ambivalence—and a drive to make a great country better, to treat its citizens more equally. The largely instrumental suite remains more of an aesthetic statement than an explicitly political one, but the twenty-two minutes it spans represent possibly Deacon’s greatest work to date. It won’t replace “The Star Spangled Banner” anytime soon, but Deacon follows Francis Scott Key in the tradition of ambitious tributes to our nation that began in a small corner of Baltimore.

D center Baltimore While most galleries focus on art, D center Baltimore focuses on a different sort of visual rhetoric. This organization’s goal is to promote design, in all its iterations, as a way to innovate and create new perspectives in Baltimore. D center, which moved to Station North in June, hosts monthly Design Conversations at the Windup Space and exhibitions and events in the North Avenue Market. (www.dcenterbaltimore.com) EMP Collective EMP Collective is a group of young artists dedicated to making and promoting multimedia art, particularly with theater, music, and visual art. The collective runs EMP, a multi-use art space on the west side that hosts workshops, exhibits, and events. In August, the space will turn into a theater as the collective presents its original work Genesis, inspired by the first book in Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy. (306 W. Redwood St.; www.empcollective.org) ICA Baltimore When most galleries decide to showcase an artist’s work, they have a curator that assesses the art and decides how to put the artist’s exhibit together. At the Institute of Contemporary Art Baltimore, however, the artist is that curator. Once the gallery selects an artist, the artist gets to put together a retrospective that represents the span his or her artistic career. (16 W. North Ave.; www.icabaltimore.org) sophiajacob Founded in 2012, sophiajacob is a contemporary art space that showcases the work of both established and emerging artists through exhibitions and lectures.

Through August, the space will play host to curatorial project Szechuan Best, a collaboration between Baltimore artists Max Guy and Peggy Chiang. Szechuan Best will transform the sophiajacob storefront into the production set for Vampire Travel Agency (VTA), an imagined television sitcom, to explore the thesis that context creates content. (510 W. Franklin St.; www. sophiajacob.com)

the scene

this month’s happenings Compiled by anna walsh

ARTS/CULTURE

Cover image courtesy of Domino Records; Courtesy of Ryan Johnson

comedy

The Baltimore Improv Group will host a weekend of invented-on-the-spot hilarity August 16–19 during its sixth annual Baltimore Improv Festival. The festival at the Creative Alliance includes two days of improv workshops for students of all experience levels and four nights of comedy, featuring top local and regional performers. (3134 Eastern Ave.; 888745-8393; www.baltimoreimprov festival.org)

dance

More than a dozen burlesque dancers will perform at The Ottobar on August 7 as part of The New York Burlesque Festival Presents Star Search!

Watch the dancers flaunt their skills in front of celebrity judges with the hopes of earning a performance slot at the 10th Annual New York Burlesque Festival, the nation’s largest burlesque event. (2549 N. Howard St.; 410-662-0069; www. theottobar.com)

literature

Tana French blends police procedure and psychological thriller in her newest novel, Broken Harbor. When a man and his two children are found dead in a half-built estate outside Dublin, detective Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy thinks the case will be easy to solve—but there are too many inexplicable details complicating the case and entangling Kennedy’s personal life. French, who is also the Edgar Award-winning author of

the novel In The Woods, will read from Broken Harbor at the central branch of the Pratt Library on August 2. (400 Cathedral St.; 410-396-5430; www. prattlibrary.org)

music

Four-time Grammy winner Lyle Lovett will showcase his unique style of Americana at the Lyric on August 4. Blending elements of jazz, blues, country, and folk in his music, Lovett has released fourteen albums and sold more four million records throughout a music career that has lasted nearly three decades. (140 W. Mt. Royal Ave.; 410-900-1150; www. lyricoperahouse.com)

Carlos Hernandez is the son of a New York soul DJ, and those roots shine through in his six-member band, Ava Luna. The group will take its soul, noise, and punk-influenced music to The Metro Gallery on August 7; Baltimore-based bands Weekends and Lands & Peoples open. (1700 N. Charles St.; 410-2440899; www.themetrogallery.net) Cinderella is coming to Rams Head Live on August 17, but it’s a far cry from the fairytale princess. Cinderella is a four-man heavy metal band from Philadelphia that has been making music on and off since the 1980s. The band has only released four studio albums over the years, but those albums have sold 20 million copies worldwide, thanks in part to Cinderella’s frequent worldwide

performing and touring. (20 Market Pl., Power Plant Live; 410-244-8854; www. ramsheadlive.com) Sean Scolnick is the restless sort—the Pennsylvania-born, self-taught guitarist moved to Brooklyn at 18, got involved in the burgeoning punk-folk scene, then made his way to the west coast before going down to rural Texas in the summer of 2011 to work on new material with his band. Langhorne Slim and The Law—The Law being bassist Jeff Ratner, drummer Malachi DeLorenzo, and banjo player and keyboardist David Moore—will perform at The Ottobar on August 21 as part of a tour promoting their new folk-rock album, The Way We Move. (2549 N. Howard St.; 410-6620069; www.theottobar.com) Baltimore-born Sara Glancy may have have been born in the second half of the 20th century, but that doesn’t mean she can’t appreciate the music from before her time. On August 24 at Germano’s Trattoria, her new cabaret performance, “Songs From Before I Was Born,” which is dedicated to her grandmother, will take the audience on a journey through the Great American Songbook, with tunes from the ‘60s thrown in. (300 S. High St.; 410-752-4515; www.germanos trattoria.com) Frank Sinatra once described Baltimoreborn jazz vocalist Ethel Ennis as “my kind of singer.” Her August 25

performance, part of the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Jazz in the Sculpture Garden Concert Series, has already sold out, but if weather permits, the BMA will release an additional 150 tickets for sale on the day of the concert. (10 Art Museum Dr.; 443-573-1701; www. artbma.org)

theater

Drawing inspiration from Eastern philosophy, Cirque du Soleil’s new show, Dralion, fuses ancient Chinese circus traditions with the theatrical acrobatics that audiences have come to expect. The show’s name is a combination of the words “dragon,” which symbolizes the East, and “lion,” symbolizing the West.

The troupe will set up camp at the First Mariner Arena, August 22–26. (201 W. Baltimore St.; 1-800-745-3000; www. cirquedusoleil.com) In the early 1950s, “temperamental” was code for “homosexual” in an invented language of secret words that allowed homosexual men to communicate.

August 29–September 16, Howard County Community College’s Rep Stage will explore this secret world in Jon Marans’ play The Temperamentals, in which two gay men, communist Harry Hay and Viennese refugee and designer Rudi Gernreich, fall in love while building the first gay rights organization in the United States. (10901 Little Patuxent Pkwy.; 443-518-1500; www.rep stage.org)

Baltimore native and STOMP performer Ryan K. Johnson and choreographer Quynn Johnson have combined forces to create SOLE Defined. The performance, which will take place August 24 at the Creative Alliance, combines tap, West African, and house dance moves with body percussion—and promises to have the audience percussing along with the performers. (3134 Eastern Ave.; 410-276-1651; www.creativealliance.org)

Urbanite #98 august 2012 51

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the scene green/sustainable visual art

More than 100 of Baltimore’s visual artists will showcase their work at the 4th Annual Inner Harbor Art Festival on August 18 and 19. The festival will feature a wide variety of artistic mediums, including photography, sculpture, wood carvings, paintings, and homemade jewelry. (601 E. Pratt St.; www.artfestival.com)

COMMUNITY The International Festival returns to Poly/Western High School August 4–5 to celebrate the diverse cultures and ethnicities in Baltimore. Attendees will be able to taste international cuisine, watch cultural performances, and participate in the festival’s annual soccer competition. (1400 W. Coldspring Lane; www. baltimorecity.gov) The 8th Annual Maryland Fashion Week deviates from most fashion events in that it features not just petite adult models, but also child and fullfigured models. The weeklong event, which takes place August 5–12, draws talent from designers both inside and

outside Maryland and works to encourage the growth of the fashion industry in Maryland. (Clarion Hotel, 6400 Oxon Hill Rd., Oxon Hill; 301-780-8976; www. mdfashionweek.com) Even though the first modern World Series didn’t occur until 1903, baseball was still a competitive sport for much of the 19th century. In his lecture 19th Century Baseball Post Season Play on August 11, baseball historian Richard D’Ambrisi will describe the early competitive beginnings of America’s unofficial national sport. (216 Emory St.; 410-7271539; www.baberuthmuseum.com) The Baltimore Museum of Industry and the Antiques Automobile Club of America, Chesapeake Region, are teaming up to host an Antique Car Show in the museum’s parking lot on August 19.

Admire the club’s classic cars and see which wins the Sponsor’s Choice Trophy.

(1415 Key Hwy.; 410-484-1299; www. chesapeakeaaca.org)

Pitch in on farm work and discover land-based wisdom from a variety of traditions at Kayam Farm’s Interfaith Celebration on August 5. Kayam Farm, a Jewish educational farm at the Pearlstone Conference and Retreat Center, works to inspire ecological and social responsibility and has been named one of the nation’s fifty most innovative Jewish nonprofits. The Interfaith Celebration will be followed by a vegetarian potluck.

Register at teri@kayamfarm.org or 410429-4400, ext. 232. (425 Mt. Gilead Rd.; www.kayamfarm.org)

Libraries are usually more in favor of preserving books than destroying them, but on August 6, the Light Street branch of the Pratt Library will unveil the winners of its Altered Books Contest. Competition participants were encouraged to turn any book into a work of art—as long as that book didn’t belong to the library, that is. (1251 Light St.; 410-396-1096; www. prattlibrary.org)

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Urbanite #98 august 2012 53

eye to eye

imagine that your office cubicle is a living, breathing entity— created by nature, rather than civilization. What would you sit on? What would a voicemail from Mother Nature sound like? How would you get paid? For millions of years, the main occupation of humankind was “hunter-gatherer.” Now that we live in a world where the majority of us are employed in office settings, has our connection with nature been eradicated or simply altered?

“I am interested in comparing the psychology of the individual in contemporary culture with our ancestral primitive psychology,” says Lisa Dillin, a local sculptor whose Working in the Cloud was recently on display at the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Sondheim exhibit. From a distance, the wall relief resembles white, fluffy cumulus clouds, but up close, the cara ober arrangement of geometric boxes looks more like office storage cara ober is urbanite’s online arts/culture editor. to receive units, housing developments, and city neighborhoods. Despite her weekly e-zine, go to their downy shape, these clouds were designed for order, efbit.ly/ezinesignup. ficiency, and separation. To complete the effect, an artificial breeze emanates from computer tower case fans built into the structure.

“Why do we choose the word ‘cloud’ to describe online file storage?” Dillin asks. “Why do we use use the words ‘web,’ ‘mouse,’ ‘Blackberry,’ and ‘Apple’?”

Like many of the artist’s other works, Working in the Cloud is a curious hybrid of organic imagery and artificial materials. It manages to suggest the natural world, and man’s desire to connect with it, despite its fabrication from generic, processed materials. Whether you work in an office or not, this environment and its accompanying décor, supplies, and social conventions are now part of America’s collective unconscious. Dillin’s sculptural works expose the intrinsic conflicts of modern society, using arresting visions of “artificial nature” as symbolic manifestations.

54 august 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

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