December 2009 Issue by Urbanite LLC

F L I P P I N G T H E R O W H O U S E • O L D - S C H O O L S T O R E S • H O L I D AY E AT S december 2009 issue 66

W H EN

S R E P P SHO

! D L R O W E H T D E L U R THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF AMERICAN CONSUMERISM

Ring in the season and give a little jingle! Holiday Scratch-offs, priced from $1 – $10, are the perfect gift for everyone on your list. They’re fun, fast and one size fits all. Plus, they offer top prizes ranging from $1,000 – $100,000. Now that’s a festive fortune! Stop by your favorite Maryland Lottery retailer and pick up a stocking full.

The Maryland Lottery® encourages responsible play. Remember, it’s just a game.

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“Vivian’s generous spirit touches many lives.” A house fire made the holiday season tragic for one family with four young boys. When Vivian heard that they had lost everything, she asked coworkers to adopt them for the holidays. That year, they were able to enjoy an abundance of food, clothes and toys. And several years later, Vivian still touches this family’s heart each and every season by providing them with a Thanksgiving turkey to enjoy, with care and love.

Read more extraordinary stories at www.gbmc.org.

Vivian Hays

GBMA–Internal Medicine

putting your mind at ease

Sharing from the Heart

contents

december 2009 issue no. 66

features 36

keynote: the immaterialist

consumption critic annie leonard wants you to think about your stuff interview by marc steiner

no returns

it’s high shopping season, but a stubborn recession has got everyone on a tight budget. have we newly frugal americans really changed our spending and saving ways, or will we try to buy our way back to happiness again? by rob hiaasen

running for their lives

training for a marathon is hard enough. for a group of homeless baltimore men, it’s just another milestone in the long road to recovery. by amy reinink

departments 7

editor’s note

the man who has everything

9 what you’re saying military intelligence

11 what you’re writing

broke: a pizza a day, the goodbye girl, and sneaking in

corkboard

this month: a historic house tour, a monumental occasion, and a kid-sized new year’s eve

17 the goods: urbanite highlights area retailers that take the long-term view 31

baltimore observed dropping the ball when new traditions unite an up-and-coming neighborhood by tom chalkley

35 this month online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com:

by greg hanscom

dec 10: more on spending vs. saving during the holidays dec 15: the runners of back on my feet

eat/drink holiday on a plate sometimes the best gift is the one you cook

on the air:

dec 1: the full interview with annie leonard

space a narrow escape

living simply in a patterson park alley house

urbanite on the marc steiner show, weaa 88.9 fm

a local nonprofit helps the sightless thrive by andrew zaleski

recipes: more holiday gifts good enough to eat

seeing clearly

by rafael alvarez

reviewed: b&o american brasserie and henninger’s tavern

69 wine & spirits: deep thoughts on port 71 the feed: this month in eating 73 art/culture

last exit to pottersville

it’s a wonderful life as urban-renewal metaphor by david dudley

plus: yiddish theater, a new-music series, and this month’s cultural highlights on the cover:

illustration by dave plunkert

86 eye to eye

urbanite’s creative director, alex castro, on pamela phatsimo sunstrum w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m d e c e m b e r 0 9

Issue 66 : December 2009 Publisher Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com Creative Director Alex Castro Genera l Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com Editor-in-Chief David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com Managing Editor Marianne K . Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com Senior Editor Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com Literar y Editor Susan McCallum-Smith literaryeditor@urbanitebaltimore.com Proofreader Robin T. Reid Contributing Writers Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Mat Edelson, Lionel Foster, Brennen Jensen, Clinton Macsher r y, Tracey Middlekauff, R ichard Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Mara, Andrew Reiner, Mar tha Thomas, Sharon Tregask is, Michael Yockel, Mar y K . Zajac Editoria l Interns Amanda DiGiondomenico, Brent Englar Design/Production Manager Lisa Van Horn Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffi c Production Coordinator Belle Gossett Belle@urbanitebaltimore.com Designer K ristian BjĂ¸rnard Kristian@urbanitebaltimore.com Videographer/Website Coordinator Chris Rebber t website@urbanitebaltimore.com Production Interns Tyler Fitzpatrick, Kelly Wise Senior Account Executives Gwendolyn Bethea Gwen@urbanitebaltimore.com Catherine Bowen Catherine@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan Econ Econsusan@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R . Lev y Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executives R achel Bloom Rachel@urbanitebaltimore.com Cour tney Lu xon Courtney@urbanitebaltimore.com Adver tising Sa les/Events Coordinator Erin Albright Erin@urbanitebaltimore.com Adver tising Intern Shantez Evans Book keeping/Marketing Assistant Iris Goldstein Iris@urbanitebaltimore.com Founder Laurel Har ris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offi ces 2002 Clipper Park Road, 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050 ; Fax: 410-243-2115 w w w.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050. Subscription price: $18 per year. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2009, 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, 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211. Urbanite is a certifi ed Minority Business Enterprise.

urbanite december 09

editor’s note

photo by Kelly Wise

photo by Tyler Fitzpatrick

contributors Amanda DiGiondomenico joined Urbanite in September as an editorial intern. After a year at Maryland Institute College of Art, DiGiondomenico transferred to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she’s putting the fi nishing touches on a B.A. in English and writing for the student newspaper, The Retriever Weekly. In this issue’s shopping guide (“The Survivors,” p. 17), DiGiondomenico profi les the M.B. Klein model train store and Otterbein’s Bakery. “When I walked into the Otterbein office, it smelled like my grandmother’s kitchen at Christmas,” she says. Photography intern Tyler Fitzpatrick is a senior at Loyola University Maryland. He’s a huge fan of music and enjoys shooting concerts in the city in his spare time. His passion for photography developed while he was studying abroad in Ireland last spring. After graduation, Fitzpatrick hopes to move to Brooklyn and work as a commercial music photographer. His photos have accompanied the “What You’re Writing” department in the November and December issues (p. 11). Amy Reinink is a Silver Spring-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, Running Times, and Women’s Running. To report her story about the nonprofit Back on My Feet, which organizes running programs at homeless shelters (“Running for Their Lives,” p. 46), she awoke well before dawn to attend 5:30 a.m. group runs. During the Baltimore Running Festival, she ran 13 miles alongside program participant Arnold Shipman, who stars in her story. A few weeks later, Reinink ran the Marine Corps Marathon. Stomach troubles nearly convinced her to quit, but then she thought about Shipman, she says, and the odds he’d overcome. She fi nished with a time of 4:39.

Economic soothsayer Lucy Van Pelt, in A Charlie Brown Christmas, cor-

rectly observed back in 1965 that Christmas is a big commercial racket. So, with apologies to that unnamed Eastern syndicate that runs the holiday, is there really anything else to say about the consumerist orgy that is American life during the next four weeks? Apparently, yes. In Shoptimism, an exhaustive new taxonomy of the American shopper, journalist Lee Eisenberg traces the historic forces behind the postwar boom in mass consumption—the transformation of the United States into what historian Lizabeth Cohen called a “Consumers’ Republic.” Eisenberg writes, “In this new political and economic order, to be middle-class and white was to inherit a freshly minted unalienable right: the pursuit of stuff.” The subtitle of Eisenberg’s book (“Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What”) hints of where he feels this is heading: Despite current hand-wringing about the recession-era dip in consumer spending, the American will-to-shop is a resilient force. And it’s not a force for unalloyed good. If you watch Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff (or read Marc Steiner’s “Keynote” interview on page 36), you may well conclude, as she has, that Western-style consumer capitalism—particularly the supercharged variant practiced in the United States—is the economic equivalent of a mile-wide asteroid hurtling toward the eastern seaboard: If everyone else on Earth bought as much crap as the average American, Leonard says, we’d need five planets’ worth of resources. Ponder that physics lesson in the parking lot at Target this weekend. And yet, carping about holiday shopping has become almost as irritating a ritual as the shopping itself. It’s hard not to notice that most of the folks who espouse the Zen-like tenets of buy-nothingness seem to be drawn from a fairly privileged socioeconomic class, despite their self-imposed austerity. When simplicity is sold as a kind of luxury, one can’t expect much serious social change to come of the principled decision to change toilet paper brands or trade the H2 for a Prius. You’re just finding another way to use the mechanics of consumption to feel good. A friend of mine never misses the opportunity to gripe about how hateful he finds holiday shopping. This is what gives him joy, just as surely as the less enlightened will take pleasure in finding new Zhu Zhu Pets™ on Christmas morning. I hew to a middle ground: Holiday shopping, for all its folly and uselessness, at least forces gifters to briefly put the needs of others before their own (assuming you classify robot hamsters as a need) and is thus a worthy exercise, especially in a society that has elevated self-indulgence to something of an art. “When did shopping become so fraught with economic and moral consequences?” asks Rob Hiaasen in “No Returns,” his personal inquiry into the new landscape of post-affluenza America (p. 40). On the trail of Homo Economicus, Hiaasen ponders the ethics of impulse buying and concludes that the consumer of the future may indeed be a different creature than the devourer-of-worlds we have come to know. Elsewhere in our holiday gift grab bag, Rafael Alvarez makes a case for skipping the personal electronics section and cooking up your own gifts this year (“Holiday on a Plate,” p. 63), and I weigh in on It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s timely take on capitalist excess (“Last Exit to Pottersville,” p. 73). Here in the historic cradle of the enclosed shopping center, perhaps it’s appropriate that my Christmases past appear now as a series of scenes from checkout lines: There I am, maybe 8, begging my dad to stop at the drug store on Christmas Eve so I can buy a cheap brass flower vase for Mom (she still has it); there I am, in high school, sliding around town in a raging snow squall trying to score a hard-to-find Mojo Nixon album for my brother before the stores close (ditto). Buying last-minute junk is such an inseparable component of the season’s rites that I’m all but helpless to consider an alternative. But I certainly hope, for the sake of our collective Christmases future, that there is one to be had. —David Dudley

Why Not? Coming Next Month: The Breakthrough Issue, our annual look at the year in ideas. www.urbanitebaltimore.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m d e c e m b e r 0 9

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Short Haircut • Permanent Waves Hair Color • Highlights • Tanning • Waxing Massage • Extra Services Designed for Him

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what you’re saying

Base Motives

Time to Contemplate

Past Imperfect

My roommate and I relocated a little over a year ago and chose to live in Baltimore City, as we are both young professionals and thought that it would be the best way to meet new people. We love living in the city and have NEVER encountered the bad areas of Baltimore as portrayed by the individuals quoted in the story “Maneuvers” (November). We both feel that this was a great move and love the whole experience we’ve had. We have even just signed another year to our previous lease to stay put. Yes, Baltimore has its bad areas, much like any other major city, but if you’re smart about it, it’s actually pretty difﬁcult to ﬁnd yourself in the “’hood” as described in the article. I feel that the piece will actually scare people off from even thinking about living in the city. There are so many people at Fort Monmouth that are afraid to come down here because of things like this. I can’t tell you how many people that we work with down here at Aberdeen Proving Ground say they are kicking themselves for not considering Baltimore City for housing after they come visit us and see what it’s really like.

There’s another way of viewing the “white space” on the canvas of the city that is resulting from the dissolution of outmoded built areas and the “shrinking” population (“Let’s Get Small,” October). A principle of yoga is that the warrior sometimes retreats to reflect, to re-imagine, to hold the tension between current circumstance and vision. We can use this time of transition more wisely by seeing beyond statistics and exploring the contradictions between our human and economic needs. I hope Urbanite will continue to expand on the themes introduced in the October issue and deepen the conversation.

I read your article on abandoned mental institutions (“Ghost Hospitals,” October) with interest as I am a past employee of two of the hospitals mentioned, Crownsville and Springﬁeld Hospital Centers. I am commenting on your emphasis on the past conditions of patient care and lack of knowledge of current efforts to assist the patients to learn the survival skills needed to transition successfully back into a community setting. At Crownsville we provided training for computer use, literacy, and all the skills needed for life, while adjusting medications and supporting transitional changes. It’s sad that everyone thinks that there’s a pill to ﬁ x everything and dismisses the other needs completely. Your article was on the hospitals, but you also introduced a totally different topic and just touched the surface of it, leaving the reader to once again just see the bad side of mental illness. Yes, the pictures are stark reminders of the past, but the lives of people are nothing to be discounted.

—Name withheld by request. The writer is a serviceperson based at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

—Judy Mercier, Baltimore

We want to hear what you’re saying. E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore. com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

—Marsha Robinson, Baltimore

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photo by Tyler Fitzpatrick

what you’re writing There was a note on the table with my name on it. I was scared to read it, but I had to. I sat at the kitchen table with my elbows on my knees, water dripping from my hair onto the paper. With each page I fl ipped, I became shakier. She had written that she was still in love with me and it wasn’t about sex, but she didn’t feel like a lesbian anymore. She wanted to get married and have kids and live a life I couldn’t give her. I went to our bedroom and tore down the rub-on letters above our bed that read, “One lifetime won’t be enough for us,” which she’d bought me for Christmas just ﬁve months ago. I took off the promise ring she gave me for my birthday. I took all the pictures of us off the walls. I wanted to break the frames and cut the pictures in half. But I didn’t. I placed them in boxes and started to pack. She wasn’t coming back. She broke my heart.

Broke T

he deal was simple: My parents would send me to any college I could get into and they could afford—and when I graduated, their financial obligation was over. The Maryland Institute College of Art’s commencement in the spring of 1982 was a sunny outdoor affair. Mom and Dad drove down from western Pennsylvania to watch me get my diploma and that night took me to Haussner’s restaurant to celebrate. I didn’t know it then, but my stomach would not be as full again for quite some time. The world does not exactly fall at the feet of someone holding a bachelor of fine arts degree. I kept my rent paid by working a series of jobs, all part-time and dead-end. As my bank account dwindled, I began to cut out meals. Breakfast went first; later, lunch became a casualty. Eventually I settled into a routine of driving to the old Bella Roma pizza shop in Hampden for dinner every evening. I’d buy a large plain cheese pizza, eat half there, and take the rest back home. The next day I’d eat the remaining slices cold and return to Bella Roma that night to repeat the process. I kept up this schedule for weeks until I hit rock bottom: My car ran out of gas. Rather than fi ll it up, I’d go on foot. One day I realized I didn’t have enough cash for pizza, so I fi rst walked from my apartment to the Maryland National Bank headquarters downtown. Automated teller machines were brand-new back then. It was out of order, and a sign mounted on the wall said the nextclosest ATM was at Mondawmin Mall, 4 miles away. I walked it, then to Bella Roma, and then home—10 miles total.

Eventually things turned around for me. I’ve made and lost fortunes, found and lost loves over the years. But looking back through the amber of three decades I can’t help but smile. I don’t remember the hunger of being broke that ﬁrst summer on my own. What I do remember is how much fun it really was. But to this day I still cannot bring myself to order a plain cheese pizza, just on the principle of the thing.

—Katie Bennett recently moved back to her hometown of Bel Air. She’s a marketing specialist/technical writer for engineering firm Ross Infrastructure by day and a server/bartender at Bahama Breeze by night. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College, which she hopes to use one day to teach the craft to college students.

—Jim Burger is a Baltimore photographer and writer.

t was raining. Of course it was raining. I drove home from my serving job at the Olive Garden to what I knew would be an empty house, besides our beagle puppy, Gia. It was a Wednesday night. My girlfriend of nearly two years had left Monday morning to stay with a friend because she didn’t know if we were what she wanted anymore, if I was what she wanted anymore. I told her to pack her shit and leave, out of anger. I couldn’t look at her. She had slept in the guest room the night before. Tuesday morning she came to pick up Gia to take her to the vet. I asked her to get in our bed with me. We looked at each other and cried. “Are you not coming home?” I asked her. “I don’t know yet,” she said. Wednesday night I drove home slowly. The rain was so heavy I was scared to go fast. It was coming down sideways and hard. I opened the door and immediately rubbed Gia’s belly while she wagged her tail.

hat night was wretchedly hot—one of those stick-to-the-sheets, no-breeze, Baltimore summer nights. It was August 1984, and I was living in an un-air-conditioned apartment in Charles Village. Nearby, the Baltimore Museum of Art was showing foreign fi lms in air-conditioned luxury. I ambled over there, laid down my last six bucks, and planned to sit through two back-to-back screenings. The first fi lm was set on the French Riviera, with beautiful women in flowing gowns exiting long limousines, the perfect escape to fi ll my idle imagination on an empty wallet. But to my dismay, they emptied the auditorium between shows. Bored and broke, I was outside in the heat again, only to see that the once-empty BMA courtyard was now fi lled with beautiful women in flowing gowns exiting long limousines. I asked one of the passing women, “What’s going on?” “A charity ball!” she replied, smiling, the streetlight glistening off her low-cut sequined gown. Suddenly, I had an idea. I raced home and found some brochures from the BMA.

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land’s Mary ens n fine li for e sourc 26 e ov r . years

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If you think he loved the gift card, he will love what he can get with it even more!

Gian Marco Menswear 517 North Charles Street | Baltimore, MD | 410.347.7974

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urbanite december 09

JHU_congrats_urbanite.qxp:Layout 1

10/28/09

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I memorized the names of a few female donors, slipped into my Goodwill tuxedo, pinned on an obscure war medal from the flea market, and marched back into the hot night air. At the door, I was asked for my ticket. I launched into a charade of hand gestures and gibberish, sprinkling in equal measures of high school French, lyrics from an old Maurice Chevalier record, and the names of the women from the brochure—all accompanied by panicked looks and grand gestures toward the entrance. In a few minutes’ time, I managed to convince the gatekeepers that I was a French ambassador who had misplaced his ticket. They let me in. That night I spent a few hours in cool luxury, savoring a gourmet meal and dancing with a few of those gowned women before wandering back contentedly to my tiny, hot apartment. ■ —Glyndon resident Jeff Dugan still supports that charity in earnest and is directing an indie film called Dreaming in Baltimore.

“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, 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211, or e-mail it to WhatYoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore. com. Submissions should be shorter than four hundred 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

Creation Myth Dec 7, 2009 Best-Laid Plans Jan 11, 2010 Fired Feb 9, 2010

Congratulations. Your future has commenced. The Johns Hopkins Carey Business School salutes the Class of 2009 community college graduates. Your learning and accomplishments don’t stop here. Take your 60 transferable credits and apply them toward a B.S. in Business at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. Choose from concentrations in management, accounting, marketing, information systems, or finance. Daytime or evening classes offered in Baltimore and Columbia. Scholarships available.

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PAULA CREAMER,

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UNSTOPPABLE. PAULA CREAMER IS. So is her Citizen Eco-Drive.

Fueled by light, it never needs a battery.

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Lots of lovely and warm accessories for the Holidays!

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corkboard

A Monumental Occasion

Dec 3

The Washington Monument in Mount Vernon is ceremoniously lit up at this annual event, which includes live entertainment, refreshments, and a ﬁreworks ﬁnale. Make sure to bundle up!

Festivities begin at 6 p.m.; lighting ceremony begins at 7 p.m. Mount Vernon Place 600 block of N. Charles St. 410-244-1030 www.promotionandarts.com

Night of 100 Elvises

Dec 4 & 5, 7 P.M. – 2 A.M.

For the sixteenth annual Night of 100 Elvises (actually two nights long), Elvis impersonators (sorry, “tribute artists”) join local bands for both faithful and fanciful renditions of the King’s repertoire amid the splendor of the Lithuanian Hall. Drinks, Southern-style buffet dinner, and limousine shuttles to and from area hotels are all included.

Lithuanian Hall 851–3 Hollins St. $55 410-494-9558 www.nightof100elvises.com

Poinsettia Tour

Dec 5, noon–4 P.M.

Up to twenty historic Reservoir Hill homes (plus Beth Am Synagogue) that have been decorated for the holidays throw open their doors to the public for the self-guided Poinsettia Tour. The day kicks off with a celebration at the Emersonian, 2502 Eutaw Pl.; also promised is a holiday craft fair.

$10 www.poinsettiatour.com

The Stoop Extreme Holiday Show

Dec 14, 8 P.M.

By now, you know the drill: At the Stoop, seven storytellers get seven minutes each to tell true, personal stories on a theme. December’s topic is good, bad, and ugly holidays past. Special musical guests include Arty Hill, ellen cherry, and the Baltimore City College choir.

Center Stage 700 N. Calvert St. $20 410-332-0033 www.stoopstorytelling.com

Kwanzaa Family Day

Dec 20, 1 P.M. – 5 P.M.

The Baltimore Museum of Art hosts a family-friendly celebration of Kwanzaa. There will be art activities, a live performance and dance workshop by the Universal African Dance and Drum Ensemble, and a hunt through the gallery that can help children learn about the seven principles of the weeklong holiday that celebrates African heritage.

Baltimore Museum of Art 10 Art Museum Dr. Free 443-573-1870 www.artbma.org

New Year’s Eve, Family-Style

Dec 31

If some members of your household are too young to stay up past 8 o’clock, much less midnight, take them to a noon New Year’s celebration. The Maryland Science Center’s Midnight Noon includes a performance by kids’ band Milkshake, face painting and crafts, and a puppet show. At Port Discovery’s Noontime New Year, hosted by MPT’s Bob the Vid Tech, families can toast the new year with milk and cookies and take part in activities that celebrate the world’s cultures, such as calligraphy writing and “Spartan shield-making.”

Maryland Science Center 601 Light St. 410-545-5960 www.mdsci.org Port Discovery 35 Market Place 410-727-8120 www.portdiscovery.org

Photo credits from top to bottom: courtesy of Downtown Partnership of Baltimore; rendering by Kristian Bjørnard | orginal art courtesy of graphicshunt.com; photo by Ruth Eve; photo by Dan Kempner; ©iStockphoto.com | Steve Jacobs; photo by David Snowden

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lifestyle boutique for the socially conscious

Eyewear

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eye candy opticianry, located on the Avenue in Hampden, offers a large selection of artistically inspired and architecturally executed eyeglass frames for women and men. Prescription eyewear is filled with the most technologically advanced lenses and lens treatments housed in sophisticated and chic frames. These are not your grandmotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s glasses! Euro style with Baltimore charm. The collections include offerings from Theo of Belgium, Vanni of Italy, Markus-T of Germany and Kala of California, just to name a few. The shop is open Sun. 11-4, Mon. and Tues. 10-5, Wed. 10-6, Thurs. 12-7, Friday by appointment only. 900 W. 36th Street Cerrill Meister Baltimore, MD

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t he S R O V I V SU R

or a handful of businesses in the Baltimore region, this recession is far from the worst challenge theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve weathered: Try the Civil War, the Great Baltimore Fire, or the Great Depression. For this holiday-season edition of our thrice-yearly shopping guide, we highlight area retailers that have been in operation for a century, give or take a decade.

portrait photography by mitro hood

Mt. Washington

Fells Point

Joe's Bike shop mt. washington

5813 falls rd • Baltimore md 21209 • 410-323-2788

Fells Point 723 s. Broadway • Baltimore md 21231 • 443-869-3435

TOP TEN REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD BUY YOUR KID A BIKE THIS SEASON:

Something special is waiting for you...

10. a BiKe is easier to taKe Care of tHaN a PUPPy 9. it’s a Good way to Get yoUr Kid oUtside 8. Go GreeN!!! (start yoUr Kids oN a HealtHy lifestyle) 7. doN’t yoU rememBer yoUr first BiKe

Come see our wide selection of gently loved Gymboree, Crew Cuts, Polo Ralph Lauren, Janie and Jack, Mini Boden, Gap, Hartstrings, Hanna Andersson and much more.

6. it’ll Be tHe BiGGest & Best Gift UNder tHe tree 5. it’s Not a Video Game 4. ridiNG BiKes is sometHiNG tHe wHole family CaN do toGetHer 3. No assemBly reQUired (all oUr BiKes are assemBled By eXPert staff)

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Making Tracks In 1913, Morris Benjamin Klein opened M.B. Klein, a hardware store and locksmith that sold the occasional model train. His son, Ted, began working there full-time beside his father in 1953. “The calls [for trains] just kept coming in,” Ted says; by the mid-1980s, the shop exclusively sold model trains. In the 1960s, I-83 construction forced the shop to move from its original location at 206 North Gay Street down the block to 162 North Gay Street. In 2007, after an investor purchased the building, M.B. Klein moved to its current 14,000-square-foot Cockeysville location (243A Cockeysville Rd.; 410-229-9995; www. modeltrainstuff.com). The shop is stuffed wall-to-wall with a jaw-dropping selection of everything needed to build a model train layout: houses and trees, jails and municipal buildings, and bridges and tunnels, plus backdrops of mountains, power plants, and farms. And then there are the choo-choos: M.B. Klein carries miniature trains and tracks in a variety of gauges, including the popular HO scale—plus train-themed CDs and DVDs, T-shirts, and kid-sized conductor uniforms. (Everything that can be purchased in the shop can also be bought in the online store, which is updated in real time.) “Come to the store,” Ted says. “All our employees speak train.” —Amanda DiGiondomenico

Mark (left) and Chris Coleman

Ted Klein

Hot Rocks Nelson Coleman Jewelers is truly a family affair. Adolph Doederlein, a jeweler and watchmaker who was the royal “Keeper of the Clocks,” started the business in 1856 in Munich. His son, Ludwig, brought Doederlein Jewelers to the United States, establishing himself on East Baltimore Street in 1911. In 1939, Ludwig’s granddaughter married Nelson Coleman, who joined the business and took over in 1954. After nearly fi fty years at 333 North Charles Street (in the Woman’s Industrial Exchange building), Nelson Coleman pulled up stakes and moved to Towson in 2002 (307 E. Joppa Rd.; 410-494-0080; www. nelsoncoleman.com). Brothers Mark and Chris Coleman, Nelson’s sons, now operate the shop. A third of their employees are family members; many have been trained by the prestigious Gemological Institute of America. “That’s our point of view—family first,” Chris says. The one-room shop is fi lled with tantalizingly sparkly earrings, rings, necklaces, pins, and more—and there’s something here for every price range, from $20 bracelet beads to six-figure Hearts on Fire diamonds. Nelson Coleman also offers custom design, repair, restoration, and appraisal services. Those in the market for jewelry with a history can browse the estate section in the back of the store, several glass cases of elegant, old-fashioned pieces. —Marianne K. Amoss

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Fixer-Upper In the age of home-improvement warehouses designed to make you feel like a big-time contractor, it’s refreshing to walk into a hardware store where you can reach the top shelf without a forklift. Lombard Hardware & Tool Rental (1747 E. Lombard St.; 410-276-1294) in Upper Fells Point ﬁts the bill nicely. The business has occupied the southwest corner of East Lombard and South Ann streets since 1891, and it’s only on its third owners—Ken and Lillian Crowley, who keep the shelves lined with hand tools and paint and a thousand tiny wooden drawers stocked with plumbing and electrical parts, bolts, and screws. Ken also makes stained-glass transom windows for the neighborhood’s rowhouses; in his spare time, he refurbishes violins, cellos, and basses for city schools. Lillian, a former photography studio manager, creates mosaics from the stained-glass scraps. Just like the big box stores, the shop also rents a bevy of power tools, ranging from sawzalls to weed whackers, as well as hoses and ladders—including a 60-footer they call “the monster.” And while Lombard Hardware may be a throwback, it’s not above a little social networking. One of Lillian latest tweets: “There’s still an old fashioned hardware store in Baltimore.” Lillian and Ken Crowley

—Greg Hanscom

Sitting Pretty An unintended consequence of selling high-quality furniture: The stuff lasts. “I got some people who come in here—third-generation customers—and say, ‘We still have this, and we’re going to give it to our children,’” says Henry “Hank” Shofer, president of Shofer’s Furniture (930 S. Charles St.; 410-752-4212; www.shofers.com). “We’re selling the heirlooms of tomorrow.” Shofer’s has been a Federal Hill fi xture since Hank’s grandfather, Harry Shofer, first opened his doors in 1914 as a 17-year-old immigrant from Lithuania. Hank, who now runs the store with his father, Herbert, says he hopes to pass it to his own son, H. Andrew Shofer, one day. Today, Shofer’s occupies a former Hecht’s department store, with five floors and more than 70,000 square feet of traditional and contemporary furniture, from luxe leather chairs perfect for a study to sleek coffee tables. The clearance center, conveniently located across the street, carries heavily discounted items. Although the holidays are typically slow in the furniture business—“People usually aren’t looking to put a sofa under the tree,” Hank explains— Shofer’s also sells such decorative giftware as small sculptures, framed artwork, and lamps. —Brent Englar Henry “Hank” Shofer

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C is for Cookie Walk in to any Eddie’s, Graul’s, or local Giant and you’re bound to find Otterbein’s Cookies in their iconic red-checkered bags. In 1881, Adam Otterbein arrived in Baltimore from Germany and opened a full-service bakery and confectionary on Fort Avenue, crafting traditional German cakes, pastries, and breads. His sugar cookies were so popular with Baltimoreans that they eventually became the focus of the business. By 1996, the growth of supermarket bakeries started to squeeze independents like Otterbein’s out of the market. Mark Otterbein, Adam’s great-grandson, decided to focus on wholesale, a choice that has kept the business alive. The bakery is run today by Mark, with his wife, Jenny, brother Paul, and sister Joan; all baking and distribution is still headquartered right here in Baltimore— since 2004, in the Milford Mill area of Baltimore County (2603 N. Rolling Rd., Suite 309; 410-265-8700). One faithful customer dubbed the Otterbein’s line of chocolate chip, lemon sugar, oatmeal, and the originalrecipe sugar and ginger varieties “the working man’s gourmet cookie.” The thin cookies closely resemble homemade. “A lot of people call to say that they taste just like the ones Grandma used to make,” Mark says. Along with expanding distribution to Pennsylvania and Virginia, the family also operates www.otterbeins bakery.com, which offers cookies in special gift packaging, perfect for the too-busy baker. —A.D.

Mark Otterbein

Betty Yates Jacobs

Market Days Anyone who has wandered through downtown Ellicott City knows the 237-year-old Howard County seat is one of those rare communities for which the appellation “historic” is more than a marketing tool, and few shops in Ellicott City are more historic than Yates Market (8249 Main St.; 410-465-3222). Founded in 1885 by Samuel James Yates, who delivered groceries from a horse-drawn cart, the market moved to its current location in the early 1920s. Local shoppers can still arrange for home delivery. Inside, you can buy typical market fare—canned and dry goods, fresh cheeses and meats—as well as more idiosyncratic wares, including such books as Ellicott City’s Guide to Haunted Places and Baseball in Baltimore signed by its author, local journalist Tom Flynn. “Most everyone in town comes in, but we also get business from tourists who come to town for the antiques,” says Samuel’s great-granddaughter Betty Yates Jacobs, who has run the store for the past nine years. The holidays are especially busy, with customers buying homemade sausages and candy and fresh Pennsylvania turkeys. Yates Market is also one of the few retailers that sells the goods of another member of Baltimore’s business century club: Pfefferkorn’s Coffee (http://users.rcn.com/pfeffco), which was founded in 1900 and still roasts coffee at its Locust Point headquarters. —B.E. continued on page 27 w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m d e c e m b e r 0 9

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The Survivors continued from page 23

Helping Hand Contrary to widespread belief, the Woman’s Industrial Exchange (333 N. Charles St.; 410-685-4388; www. womansindustrialexchange.org) is open. The popular restaurant, famous for its tomato aspic and chicken salad, did close in 2002. (Recently, the Dogwood Café, which was operating in the back restaurant space, also ceased operations.) But the shop is still supporting local crafters by selling handmade items on consignment. In 1880, in the midst of the exchange movement (at its height, there were about a hundred across the country; now, less than twenty remain), local women launched the organization to benefit Civil War widows, who discreetly made embroidery, clothing, and needlework to be sold. (Male crafters are now allowed in, too.) Since 1889, the Woman’s Industrial Exchange has been located in its current location near downtown. They carry both old-fashioned items (smocked dresses and sock monkeys) and more modern wares (yoga bags and reusable coffee sleeves). Executive Director Mary McDonough says the current crafting boom has made the exchange as relevant as ever. “The zeitgeist of the past few years has been to say, ‘I want to know what’s in a cake I eat. We’ve valued handmade objects since we were founded.” —M.K.A. Mary McDonough

Lance Bendann

Every Picture Tells a Story At the dawn of the Civil War, photographers and brothers David and Daniel Bendann set up shop on West Baltimore Street to take portraits of soldiers on both sides. In 1874, David split off to create his own commercial painting and photography gallery, calling it Bendann Art Galleries . Through some twists and turns (including the loss of the gallery during the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, its reconstruction two years later, and the establishment of a second location in Towson), David’s descendents have run it ever since. In 1994, Lance Bendann, David’s great-grandson, closed the downtown location and moved to Lutherville (15 W. Aylesbury Rd.; 410-8250585; www.bendannartgalleries.com), where he sells paintings, appraises art, and offers custom framing, print and painting restoration, and portrait commissions, all by appointment from a space that he shares with the Zoll Studio of Fine Art. Customers—both individuals and businesses—can also have art custom-made to their specifications; Lance works with such Maryland-based artists as John Brandon Sills, Carol Lee Thompson, and Bill Schmidt to make it happen. “There’s a personal connection to art and art service that people might not have when they’re out buying a ﬂat-screen TV at Sears,” Lance says. “You’re really part of a triangle that’s kind of unique to our business: artists, collectors, and the gallery.” ■ —B.E.

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baltimore observed

CommunItY

Dropping the Ball Look out below: A New Year’s tradition in Arcadia reveals the inner workings of a community.

n the afternoon of December 31, 2008, a group of my neighbors paced around the intersection of Harcourt Road and Juneau Place, squinting up unhappily as high winds whipped the trees. The blustery weather threatened the scheduled New Year’s Eve celebrations—not only the Inner Harbor fireworks display, but also our own Third Annual Arcadia Ball-Fall in northeast Baltimore. My fellow Arcadians had already spent forty-five minutes struggling to raise the ball-drop pole, a reconfigured sailboat mast that we’d used the year before. The shifting breezes made an already awkward task much harder, shoving the big tube around like a wind-tossed treetop. Our community was counting on us to make a glittering orb descend from on high, precisely at midnight, without anyone getting clobbered by an unmoored 30-foot mast. People were bringing tables, food, hot drinks. The ball must fall—but how? The notion of staging a New Year’s ball-drop started three years ago with Gene Nuth, a past president of the community association who lives near the corner of

story and illustration by tom chalkley

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to their boyhoods in Belair-Edison. My wife and I were recruited to the area by friends who already lived here; we, in turn, have urged friends to relocate. Secondly, the area is populated by teachers, public servants, small business owners, nonprofit staffers, mid-level administrators, artists, and designers—creative, competent types. A lot of us are baby boomers whose children no longer need our micromanagement, freeing us up to meddle in public affairs. Most of us feel lucky to have found a comfortable and reasonably safe place to live within the city. In sum, we have resources, we have time, we have networks, and we have a stake in the place where we live. Such attributes are hardly unique to Greater Lauraville—nor do they guarantee a vibrant community. To catalyze these elements, somebody (or a small group of somebodies) has to decide that it’s worth the trouble. It’s not necessarily fun. Fifteen years ago, a very small group of neighbors persuaded Safeway to put a store on Harford Road, where a hideous old bus barn once stood. The process was extremely contentious—some of us still have scars—but landing the huge corporate grocery store paved the way for the small independent businesses that followed. It took years, but a new, selfconfident identity has emerged in the area, spawning further rounds of creative activity. By comparison, getting a ball to fall was ridiculously quick and easy. While Gene Nuth was rummaging in his garage, we found the perfect tree, an oak just 25 feet from the corner, with a stout horizontal limb about 18 feet up. Roger Trageser, the neighborhood electrician, went home, got his company van, parked it just uphill from the oak, climbed onto the van roof, and easily tossed a rope and a power line over the waiting branch. Meanwhile, Nuth emerged from his garage with some sort of improvised tool in hand and surveyed the situation with evident disapproval. “You guys went to Plan B mighty quick,” he said. That night, despite the weather, the orb fell on schedule. More than a hundred of us cheered, ate, drank, and made merry. The city’s official fireworks, meanwhile, had been cancelled. Later, Nuth explained that he wasn’t really annoyed at us for abandoning our struggle with the mast. The whole exercise was really just about getting people to collaborate and get a positive result. By those measures, the night was a success. “In the Middle Ages, after the harvest, they got everybody to help build the cathedral,” he said. “Once the process starts, it sucks everybody in. It’s the process of it.” ■ —Tom Chalkley

baltimore observed Put Out to Pasture: Baltimore’s antique horse-and-cart vegetable peddlers are once again on the verge of vanishing. (See Urbanite, July ’08.) On November 9, the city raided the largest remaining arabber stable, shipping nineteen horses to a rescue farm in Howard County. Health Department officials cited “severe disrepair,” “unsanitary conditions,” and rats at the South Fulton Avenue stables. Arabber Donald Savoy said the city was in part to blame for the conditions; the city set up the Fulton Avenue facility as temporary housing in 2007 after it condemned arabber stables on Retreat Street in West Baltimore. “They had put us in a swamp,” Savoy told the Sun. “The city and Sheila Dixon promised us a stable three years ago.”

u p d at e

Harcourt and Juneau. From his front walk, Nuth has an excellent view of the downtown skyline, 5 miles away. Every New Year’s Eve, a small but noisy group of merrymakers would gather across the street to watch the Inner Harbor pyrotechnics. Nuth’s inspiration: Invite the whole neighborhood. And drop a ball. He pitched the concept to Arcadia’s current and past presidents, who officially greenlit the project. Nuth made the first pole from PVC pipe; Bob Mayes devised a sphere of chicken wire and Christmas lights. Word went out via e-mail and by way of various local networks: the monthly women’s book group, the monthly sing-along group, the line at the counter at the Red Canoe book store. A crowd of about fifty turned out for the first ball-drop. The second year, maybe eighty came. The thing had momentum. The third annual event was confidently announced to the news media. Then came the fierce wind. I stood by, awaiting orders while the more senior male Arcadians wrangled good-naturedly. Let’s try this! Hold on a minute! I’ve got it! Look out! Somebody proposed hanging the ball from a tree. Nuth, an avid sailor, wasn’t ready to give up his mast. “I think I’ve got something that’ll help,” he announced. He marched off to his garage while several of us scouted up and down both streets looking for suitable branches. Arcadia, if you’ve never heard of it, is one of the eight neighborhoods that have recently branded themselves as Greater Lauraville. Our little ball-drop festivity is typical of this section of northeastern Baltimore. Various neighborhood institutions, celebrations, clubs, and enterprises proliferate here. The trend has accelerated in recent years as our main street, Harford Road, has sprouted new businesses, some of which have gained citywide followings. This past summer, the Lauraville-Hamilton Main Street organization initiated a weekly open-air market. Every Tuesday, neighbors of all ages and colors mingle on a former vacant lot, sampling fare from a half-dozen local eateries and locally roasted Zeke’s Coffee. When my wife and I moved to the area sixteen years ago, things weren’t nearly so lively. The commercial strip was depressing and dingy; most of the couples we knew were far too busy with small children to be organizing street fairs and such. By far the biggest neighborhood event was the Arcadia Yard Sale, another Gene Nuth brainstorm, dating back to about 1980. Our only “destination” business was Koco’s Pub, deservedly famous for its crab cakes. Many factors have contributed to the area’s surge in community life. For one thing, neighbors tend to know each other. Gene Nuth and Bob Mayes’ friendship goes back

Ribbon Cutting: On November 14, the nonprofit Newborn Holistic Ministries celebrated the completion of its new offices and art space on the border of SandtownWinchester and Upton. (See Urbanite, July ’08.) Once a derelict structure overlooking an open-air drug market, the building will now provide meeting space for community nonprofits as well as classes in pottery, painting, and dance. “Our neighborhood is struggling with a lot of things,” says the group’s president, Todd Marcus. “We want to provide alternatives to the dangerous street life.” Pirates Rule: Sometimes the best policy is no policy at all, or so says the Board of Regents of the Maryland state university system. This spring, the General Assembly ordered the regents to set a policy on the screening of pornographic movies on college campuses after State Senator Andrew Harris raised a stink over plans to show Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge at the University of Maryland, College Park. (See Urbanite, August ’09.) After months of deliberation, the regents demurred, citing concerns about infringing on freedom of speech. While the legislature may take up the subject again next year, Republican Rep. Christopher Shank told the Sun that the debate over porn became “a distraction,” adding, “We certainly have a lot of other issues to deal with.” Kudos: The 2009 “Outstanding Foundation of the Year” award from the Maryland Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals goes to the Baltimore Community Foundation (See Urbanite, December ’07.) And the Open Society Institute Baltimore has awarded a 2010 community fellowship to Johns Hopkins Ph.D. student Sarah Hemminger, founder of the Incentive Mentoring Program, which pairs “families” of Hopkins students with students at nearby Dunbar High School. (See Urbanite, June ’08.)

lunC h

D i n n e r.

Restaurants on Charles Street Ban Thai CazBar Charm C iTy C upCakes DaviD & DaD’s Joss Café & sushi Bar koffee Therapy LumBini maisy ’s miCk o’shea’s miDTown yaChT CLuB

Dine on

Charles street.

{ Between saratoga & Centre street}

For a complete list of restaurants all along Charles street, visit GoDowntownBaltimore.com

miLTon’s GriLL sasCha’s 527 sofi’s Crepes soTTo sopra Tio pepe

baltimore observed

Transformer

When Ernest Turner, 54, first arrived at Blind Industries and Services of Maryland (BISM) from New York last January, he hadn’t yet come to terms with his retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that causes loss of vision and, eventually, blindess. “When I first came into the program, I just considered myself having low vision,” Turner says. “I had to first accept that I am blind. It was a real big challenge.” Now, after nine months at BISM, Turner is one of BISM’s success stories: He can cook, clean, read, write, navigate an unfamiliar city, and operate a computer—all on his own, without the help of a sighted person. Founded in 1908, Blind Industries and Services of Maryland provides job and rehabilitation services to about two thousand individuals each year with either low vision or total blindness. The approach BISM takes is two-fold: BISM hires low-vision and blind workers to produce an array of products, including military combat uniforms, legalsized paper pads, and janitorial cleaning supplies, at its own manufacturing plants in Baltimore, Salisbury, and Cumberland.

photo by Kelly Wise

Seeing Clearly

Road to recovery: At Blind Industries and Services of Maryland, low-vision and blind people learn to live independently.

The nonprofit simultaneously offers job training and independent living courses such as CORE (Comprehensive Orientation, Rehabilitation and Empowerment), a nine-month, twelve-person residential living program. Participants live in apartments just minutes from BISM’s Halethorpe location, learning to master such daily skills as cooking, cleaning,

shopping, and managing money. They take courses in reading Braille, walking with a white cane, and operating computers. In addition, CORE participants attend a class two days a week to discuss popular perceptions about sightlessness. “We want students to think about how they feel about blindness,” says Brawyn Evans, an independent living skills instructor. “You have to challenge your core beliefs about blindness in order to develop the attitude and confidence to put the skills into practice.” To graduate from the CORE program, participants must travel independently to a U.S. city they’ve never been to, use three different modes of public transportation to visit several sites, and then travel back to Baltimore. Turner took his graduation trip to Orlando, Florida. “It was a challenge, because I’m used to things in Baltimore,” he says. “But that’s what I’m here [at BISM] for—to do whatever I want to do.” ■ —Andrew Zaleski Each month, Urbanite profiles people and programs that are transforming the city, one block at a time. To nominate a transformer, e-mail editor@urbanitebaltimore.com.

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For more information, contact an Academic Program Advisor today. 866-492-2435 • NationalConnectionsAcademy.com/urbanite w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m d e c e m b e r 0 9

keynote

The Immaterialist Trash-talking environmental activist Annie Leonard on reforming the throwaway society Interview by marc steiner | photograph by Dorothy Hong

nnie Leonard’s road to viral video fame ran through the planet’s garbage dumps: While working for Greenpeace and other environmental organizations during the 1990s, she traveled widely gathering intel on the First World’s habit of dumping its waste on the developing world. Along the way, she says, she became “a little obsessed with where all our stuff comes from and where it goes.” Armed with some nonprofit funds and a finely honed sense of outrage, in 2007 she made a twenty-minute film based on a series of talks she often gave about the life cycle of consumer goods. The movie, The Story of Stuff, used simple black-and-white cartoons and Leonard’s own narration to offer a brisk dissection of what she calls “the materials economy,” from resource extraction and production to consumption and disposal. The upshot: The massive wastefulness of Western-style consumer society is squandering the planet’s resources and hurling the global economy into full-scale catastrophe. She posted the film online at www.storyofstuff.com in December 2007 and quickly found herself a Web phenom: The film has now been viewed more than 7.6 million times. “We’ve been inundated with requests for a DVD from churches, from community groups, and from schools ranging from elementary schools all the way to Oxford economics post-graduate classes,” says Leonard, who is finishing a book based on the film that will be published by Simon & Schuster in March. Her proselytizing has not been without controversy, with critics objecting both to Leonard’s selective deployment of environmental statistics and her perceived anticapitalist agenda. Climate change skeptic Chris Horner memorably dismissed Stuff as “community-college Marxism in a ponytail” in comments to Fox News, and in February, a Montana school board voted that showing the film violated district policy after it was shown to a 12th grade biology class in Missoula. But Leonard is undeterred. She’s now started a nonprofit Story of Stuff Project to assist with producing study guides for schools and faith organizations: “We want to turn the movie into a movement.” In November, Leonard took a break from her globetrotting (she’d recently returned to the San Francisco Bay area, where she lives, from a trip to Egypt) to talk to WEAA’s Marc Steiner about waste, want, and what not to buy this Christmas.

You’ve received complaints from some school districts and parents that the Story of Stuff approach is anti-capitalist.

When I made this film, critiquing capitalism was nowhere on my radar screen. What I wanted to do was get people to think about where all their stuff comes from and where it goes. I wanted to talk about systems of production and consumption. In doing so, I talked about a system that prioritizes profit over public health, that values people based on how much money they have and how much money they spend, that allows toxic chemicals to be used in consumer products so pervasively that they’re even showing up in amniotic fluid and breast milk. You know, I described what I saw. And when critics came back and said, “That’s anti-capitalist,” I said, “Hmm, let’s look into that.” Are they saying that capitalism is a system that allows unborn babies to be contaminated with toxic chemicals? That capitalism is a system that prioritizes corporate profit over public health? If that’s what they’re saying, then I have to say, yes, they’re right. Capitalism’s not working, and I’m glad they pointed that out so we can talk about it.

In the film, you quote the economist Victor Lebow, who wrote a famous paper about the consumer economy in 1955. It’s almost the centerpiece of what’s happened to us. He wrote, “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the pursuit of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption … We need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an everaccelerating rate.”

I think that’s a really powerful quote, because it’s so true. This society is based on the ever-increasing flow of goods, and even more importantly, on that smooshing-together of our sense of self-worth with the things that we own—the fact that we’re trying to soothe our ego and feed our self-esteem through buying stuff.

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Those things have become so normalized we forget about them. It’s almost like it’s invisible to us; it’s so much a part of what society’s about. And one of the things I love about that quote is he’s just calling it out.

But you’re arguing that planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence is not something that just happened by accident.

Absolutely. Some of the viewers that have watched The Story of Stuff have criticized it saying I’m too negative about corporations, and I want to be really clear. I don’t think that every bad thing a corporation has done has been totally intentional and manipulative. But pursuing planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence absolutely is. Planned obsolescence is another word for “designed for the dumps.” It refers to when producers make stuff that is designed to be thrown away, to break, to be not upgradeable, to be useless as quickly as possible. Perceived obsolescence is when the same companies convince us that something needs to be thrown away, even if it’s still perfectly good, because it goes out of fashion or it’s no longer trendy. Promoting planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence is absolutely intentional, is absolutely manipulative, and I think is just totally evil. These companies are doing it because the economic system we have relies on continued production and consumption. But we all have enough stuff. We are stuff-saturated in this country. So the only way to keep us buying more and more and more of this crap is to make us keep throwing it away.

You say in the film that in America each of us creates 4 and a half pounds of garbage a day. But you also attack recycling as being inadequate.

I think that recycling is a piece of the solution; it plays an important role in a healthy materials economy. But there’s a reason that recycling comes last in that often-repeated mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle. In many ways, it’s an admission of defeat. It’s not the first thing we should do. Too often people rush to throw this stuff in the blue bin and say, “I’m an environmentalist now.” It’s encouraging us to keep consuming, because as long as you put it in the blue bin instead of that gray box, we feel like it’s perfectly fine to continue this unsustainable level of consumption.

But if your argument is correct—that this idea of consumerism and planned obsolescence is a thoughtfully created policy in America that’s changed the way we look at what what we buy, what we eat, what we consume, and it’s been around for sixty years now—then it has become a way of life. Changing that is the question.

That’s true, but we have two really big motivators. One is that we’re bumping up against the planet’s limits. Right now, globally, we’re using 1.4 planets’ worth of resources every year. If every country lived like the United States, we’d be using five planets. You can’t

keep this up indefinitely when you only have one planet. So change is inevitable. The question is, is it going to be design or by default? And if we change by design, it’s going to be hard work; it’s going to require some changes in the way that we run our society. But at least we can be compassionate and intelligent and intentional about it. If we dig our heels in and absolutely refuse to budge—if, as Dick Cheney and George Bush said, we say the American way of life is non-negotiable—we’re still gonna have to change, but it’s gonna be a lot uglier and a lot more violent. The other motivator is that the current system isn’t making people happy. We’re trashing the planet, and we’re not even having fun. More people than ever are going to bed hungry every night. Income inequality is increasing. Even in the rich countries we have rising levels of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, stress, anxiety. People are socially isolated. Half of the people in the United States say they don’t know their neighbors’ names. A quarter of the people in the U.S. say they don’t have a friend to talk to when they are having personal troubles. Socially, health-wise, environmentally, in every way it’s just not working. If you look at the evolving science of happiness and what really brings people happiness, it’s not the new designer jeans or the flatscreen TV. Study after study shows that what really brings happiness is the quality of one’s social relationships. It’s coming together with others around a shared goal. It’s having a sense of purpose beyond yourself. All of these things are what we’re going to get more of as we unplug from this consumer mania, this haste-makeswaste lifestyle.

You’re saying that we have more stuff, but our happiness has gone down and we have less leisure time now than in medieval times.

That’s right, we have less leisure time now than we did in feudal society. It’s interesting to look at leisure time in Europe and the United States. Both in Europe and the United States, there were huge increases of productivity during the industrial revolution. And the United States and Europe took different paths after this. The United States decided to trade their increases and productivity for more stuff. We work harder and longer hours than any other industrial country except perhaps South Korea. We work like dogs in this country. Half the country has one week or less of vacation a year. But we have gigantic houses and gigantic cars and gigantic televisions. Europe took a different path. They took a more socially oriented path where they decided to trade a lot of those gains in productivity for more social goods. They have smaller houses, smaller cars, smaller refrigerators. But they have two months of vacation and paid maternity leave. They don’t have to stress out about their health care and how to pay for college. They took what I think is a much more civilized route.

Do you take vacations?

Uh, not enough, but I do. But you know, for me, vacations are going to visit some dump in another country. I’m not a good role model on the not-working-hard part. continued on page 83 w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m d e c e m b e r 0 9

NO RETURN

D R A H HAVE D E L L I K S E T IM T A E R G E H T OFF N A C I AMER ? R E M U S N O C asen b hia by ro nkert id plu v a d on by trati illus

Why shop? What kind of treasonous question is that? Are we not hunters and gatherers? Are we not anthropologically predisposed to picking up a little something at Lowe’s or Best Buy even though our budgets are on the skids? Think about the GDP and unemployment. It’s our patriotic duty to go macro and funnel money into the economy—especially this month, shopping’s holiest time of the year. Then again, perhaps it’s our civic duty to curtail our discretionary spending or, if we can’t control ourselves, at least challenge ourselves to give more to charity or toward political action. Buy fewer gift cards this season and spend the money on a soup kitchen, elephant sanctuary, or some other philanthropic cause. Or maybe we should extend the spirit of “Buy Nothing Day,” an international protest against consumerism held at the end of November. Giving the gift of nothing might be the perfect antidote for what has been dubbed afﬂuenza, a socially transmitted disease brought on by gorging on stuff. Hold everything. When did shopping become so fraught with economic and moral consequences? Since shopping turned deadly when a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death last year during Black Friday, the ritualistic shopping frenzy held the day after Thanksgiving. Since the Dow, which plummeted last year, became our national EKG. Since unemployment hit double digits. In the old days—circa 2006—shopping seemed so simple and carefree. We bought and bought and went into debt and debt.

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Now the primal act of shopping comes with political, psychological, and, yes, ethical baggage (not to mention it always seems to cost money). Baltimore anthropologist Robbie Blinkoff, who has made a study of consumerism and the psyche of the modern spender, says that this change is nothing short of a cultural crisis. Last fall, his Context-Based Research Group studied spending habits and consumer attitudes in five cities, including Baltimore. The interviews and research revealed a tectonic shift in our consumptive ways. The American Dream was dead; people could no longer afford to lash their aspirations to a bigger house, a new car, a fat 401K. Blinkoff frames the issue as a before-and-after question: Why shop then? “I shop, therefore I am.” Why shop now? “I shop because I live in a consumer society and I need stuff, but it doesn’t define me.” “It’s a coming of age,” Blinkoff says. “People are understanding their lives as consumers.” This movement began last year, when the economy was in full meltdown. The Context researchers parsed this coming-of-age process into five grief-like stages, as “Homo Economicus”—a creature “consumed by consumerism”—was miraculously transformed into the more enlightened “Grounded Consumer,” who lives within his or her means and understands the concepts of debt and savings. In the third stage of this transformation, the shopper moves from “Me” to “We” consumerism, Blinkoff says, which emphasizes family and community relationships rather than just satisfies personal material whims. In the fourth stage, consumers begin to “un-stuff” their lives by selling off or giving away excess possessions. And how will these evolved beings behave when the mall opens on Black Friday? “December will be fascinating,” Blinkoff says. “People will be separating out their consumer side from their human side. They will stand back and say, ‘That is my consumer behavior. I understand it, and I can control it.’” So much for impulse buying. Shopping just isn’t the spontaneous, stress-relieving, status-building experience it once was. When times are good, “we get a little lazy and fat. We were living too high on the hog,” says Pam Danziger, who wrote Why People Buy Things They Don’t Need, among other books on consumerism. Danziger runs Unity Marketing, a consulting firm in Pennsylvania that specializes in tracking luxury consumers’ trends. According to her research, discretionary spending is not only down, but shopping behavior has also changed. Home-related purchases are up, given that we are spending more time there and not spending as much money on restaurants or entertainment. Hobby stores are enjoying renewed popularity, she says. People are making gifts. (See page 63.) “Tough times make you reevaluate your priorities. We are buying things we need, not things we desire.” But surely there’s something she pines for that she doesn’t need. “I want to buy a nice refrigerator,” Danziger admits. “I don’t have to go the Sub-Zero route. But a 36-inch fridge would be nice.” Not that buying a 36-inch fridge would make her happy. “Happier,” she says, “for a moment or two.” During the boom years, a number of observers noted how the American overindulgence in material goods seemed to make us less, not more, fulfilled. “A host of careful studies suggest that across-the-board increases in our stocks of material goods produce virtually no measurable gains in our psychological or physical well-

“December will be fascinating. People will be separating out their consumer side from their human side. They will stand back and say, ‘That is my consumer behavior. I understand it, and I can control it.’” being,” Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank wrote in his 2000 book, Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess. “Bigger houses and faster cars, it seems, don’t make us any happier.” Given the corrective powers of the economy, will the New Frugality last? Or will the big spender re-emerge when happy days are here again? A long with its other charms, the TV drama Mad Men allows time-traveling viewers to bask in the consumerism of the early 1960s. Materialism never looked hipper. Fans of the show remember ad exec Don Draper coming home one day with the ultimate attaboy—a fat-bumpered Cadillac Coupe de Ville. The purchase was a family event, a rite of professional passage. Today, Draper might come home from the hardware store with some new brass switchplates for the living room if he’s feeling financially frisky. Should he open his morning newspaper—excuse us, his laptop—he’d see such headlines as “Spend Less on a Bottle of Wine” and, brace yourself, Don, “The Fall of McMansions.” Present-time advertising revenues might send him over the edge. Forget the Cadillac: Automotive sales are one of the recession’s more high-profile victims. Some consumers are even said to be rethinking whether they need the darn things at all, what with bike commuting, car-sharing, and, God forbid, public transportation available. You call this America? “Frugality is chic,” insists Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, who has written extensively about the economic crisis. “A lot of what we bought was to keep up with the Joneses, but now we aren’t doing that, and it’s a relief.” The chic frugal shopper will have lots of company this holiday season. According to the National Retail Federation, more than 84 percent of those polled said they would spend less money this holiday season than they did last year. More than 70 percent of consumers said they will shop at discounters. Coupon-carrying hunters and gatherers will be out in full force, and they will not be denied their brand of retail therapy. “I get a high out of finding a bargain. I’m addicted to it,” says Lori Ferrogine, who works for an Internet consulting company in Annapolis. She has no plans to kick that addiction: She frequents consignment shops and eBay, and she’s a fan of Plato’s Closet, a nationwide chain of retail stores that sell “gently used clothing.” She can feel like a million bucks in gently used clothes. “I like fashion. I like shoes and accessories and handbags,” Ferrogine says, “but I would not spend thousands of dollars on these items.” If she did, would that make her a bad person? “If we’re talking about optional spending, I think you have to consider the moral obligations,” says Randy Cohen, who writes the column “The Ethicist” for the New York Times. From his Manhattan post, Cohen doesn’t have to look far to see morally suspect

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“The point of ethics is to maximize human happiness, and it’s a dubious way of living to think shopping turns out to make you happy,” says Randy Cohen, who writes the column “The Ethicist” for the New York Times. “Unless you want to get me a gift.” displays of materialism. He mentions the Bentley he just saw parked on West 46th Street (“Why not put a sign on your back that says, ‘More Money than Brains’?”) and the ad in his newspaper for $1,300 women’s boots. “If I bought those boots, I’d feel like a bad person.” But because he traffics in ethics (which often requires a cooling-off period before rendering judgment), Cohen checks himself before actually weighing in on the spending habits of others. “I’m not preaching an austere lifestyle. I’m not austere. I live in New York City in my comfortable apartment. Could I spend less money and use it for social good? Absolutely.” It’s a question readers often send him these days: Given financial pressures, what is someone’s obligation to charitable giving? Maybe, as Cohen says, the owner of the Bentley gives millions to charity. Maybe, in fact, he does have more brains than money. “What I am preaching is hedonism,” Cohen says. “The point of ethics is to maximize human happiness, and it’s a dubious way of living to think shopping turns out to make you happy. Unless you want to get me a gift.” He takes a 39 regular in a suit, he adds, something in a charcoal. Even ethicists get to joke, but Cohen does raise another point. Sometimes we buy things to look good. Call us shallow, call us human. Sometimes a person has to rebel against economic forces that are beyond them. “I usually keep my sprees to under $200,” says Adam Callaway, a single 27-year-old in Baltimore. “I’m on a tight budget. But shopping makes you look like you don’t care about the economy.” Callaway, director of development for the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation, faced a true shopper’s test this fall. “I was meeting a girl for drinks. I had some jeans on, but they were wrinkled,” he says. The woman was running late, so there was time. Suddenly a motivated buyer, Callaway hit up the nearest J. Crew for new jeans and a couple of shirts, including a purple dress shirt, although he already had a purple dress shirt. And how many purple dress shirts does one need? But that wasn’t the time for soul-searching questions. It was the time for emergency shopping. “I shop to buy things to make me look better, and I hope that translates into success in business,” he says. “You carry a little more of that swagger.” Again, the man is single and 27. He’s allowed to think in terms of swagger. Plus, it helps to generate some of that swagger when you’re scrimping the rest of the time and eating mac and cheese three times a week, as Callaway does. But has the economy really made him a fundamentally changed consumer? Many people who lived through the Great Depression maintained their frugal ways throughout their lives. But this is just a recession, not a depression, says Frank, the Cornell

economist. “You can see lifelong changes in a protracted downturn. I don’t think we are going to see that from this one,” he says. When income starts growing again, so will consumption. And the top consumers will again spend money, which will put pressure on people below to spend, he says. “It always depends on the context of where you live. People start asking themselves, ‘Is our house big enough?’ ‘Is our job interview suit nice enough?’” In other words, the Joneses will be back in town soon, and you better keep up, folks. “It seems like a psychological frailty, but if you don’t, it’s your kids with the below-average school,” Frank says. For Callaway, he doesn’t have to worry about schools just yet. But he wouldn’t mind a break from the daily procession of news stories about the country’s economic woes. “When the economic environment is no longer shoved down our throats daily,” he predicts, “then people will forget about frugality.” So, why shop?

As with other psychological and economic questions, there is rarely one incandescent answer that emerges from the fog of thought. Five years ago Patricia Dalton, a clinical psychologist in Washington, D.C., wrote in the Washington Post about the toll of materialist excess—rich kids shoplifting clothes, adults driven to bankruptcy by an addiction to “comfort shopping,” families torn asunder in the frenzy to maintain the accoutrements of the earnand-spend lifestyle. She now thinks something has indeed changed. “We’re learning to say no to ourselves, which we have found hard to do in American culture,” Dalton says. “We have some concept now of what is enough.” It’s a concept reinforced by her nephew. When he was 6 years old, he was asked what toys he wanted for Christmas. He told his aunt he had all the toys he needed. “Maybe we all do and don’t know it,” she says. But allow us one toy this holiday season. The plucky, four-stringed ukulele has become an unlikely feel-good purchase in these hard times. Billionaire Warren Buffett extols the “miracles of the ukulele” and can be seen playing the electric uke on YouTube (he taught Bill Gates how to play). Ukulele sales are up across the country. They are cheap (you can buy one for around $30) and relatively easy to master. Even in the hands of amateurs, the ukulele insists on producing a happy sound. If you’re on Robbie Blinkoff’s street in Rodgers Forge on certain evenings, you might hear the sound of a ukulele playing “Ode to Joy.” Toddlers, accompanied by their parents, have been known to waddle toward the siren call of the uke. Before the hometown crowd, Blinkoff plays with equal parts passion and splendid mediocrity. This is his reprieve from the fear and anxiety of a year spent worrying about money. People don’t want to feel that way anymore, he says. He’s prepared to add to his five documented stages of the grounded consumer. “The sixth stage is joy, “ Blinkoff says. “You have to be open to experiencing joy and understand it takes work and time—and faith, as well.”■ —Rob Hiaasen wrote about teenage conducting prodigy Ilyich Rivas in last month’s Urbanite. On the air: More about consumerism on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on December 10.

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RUNNING for their lives by amy reinink

urbanite december 09

photography by dennis drenner

For Arnold Shipman, a homeless former heroin addict participating in an innovative self-help program, the road to recovery is 26.2 miles long.

he road through East Baltimore is a ribbon of despair lined with ghosts from Arnold Shipman’s past. Tired-looking women sit on the stoops of run-down rowhouses, seemingly oblivious to the October drizzle. Men with missing teeth and ragged clothes smoke on front porches, staring as a long line of runners—thousands of them, many looking haggard themselves—shuffle up the long hill on Washington Street. Shipman is 50 years old, 18 miles into the Baltimore Marathon, and back in the old neighborhood. Shipman spent twenty years peddling and snorting heroin on these streets and others in neighborhoods like it. Now he’s running the 26.2-mile course that weaves through the city—and his haunted memories. Since the halfway point, he has struggled with the hills, letting himself walk up most of them, and this one on Washington Street is brutal. He jogs steadily, though, head bowed. Suddenly, a guy he knows from his junkie days spots him, points, and calls, “Arnold?” Shipman’s recovery has hinged on ditching the people, places, and things that once fueled his addiction; if he’d known that he was going to run into his old crowd, he might have stayed home today. But it’s too late for that. He nods in recognition, shaken. And then he bows his head and runs.

The long road: Near the 16-mile mark of the Baltimore Marathon, Arnold Shipman struggles to keep pace. A homeless recovering heroin addict, Shipman doesn’t know that the hardest moments of his race are fast approaching.

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n 2007, Anne Mahlum was a 26-year-old marathoner about to start a high-paying PR job in Philadelphia. She sometimes exchanged greetings with a few men at a homeless shelter she passed on her daily runs. One day she started thinking about how much running had helped her build self-confidence and discipline, and wondered: Could running help these guys, too? Mahlum asked shelter officials if she could start a running group. Within weeks, she had corralled funding, sponsorships from local running stores, and a small cadre of volunteers to help organize training sessions. The guys at the shelter told her she was crazy. But a few came to the first run anyway. Then a few more. Before the year was out, three of them had finished the Philadelphia Half-Marathon. Mahlum never made it to the PR job. Today, she is president of a nonprofit organization called Back on My Feet, which employs a staff of eleven, with more than eight hundred volunteers and 170 homeless runners from seven Philadelphia shelters. In March, Back on My Feet launched a Baltimore chapter, and it is in the process of expanding to Washington, D.C. Nearly 130 homeless people in Philadelphia have run a competitive race, with twenty-seven running a half-marathon and five completing a full. And their success isn’t limited to the racecourse: Thirty-one of the runners have found housing, forty-four have jobs, and twenty-nine have enrolled in job training programs or schooling. “Training for a marathon speaks to the heart of our program,” Mahlum says. “If you’re willing to put in that kind of work, you can go back to school. You can get a better job. It’s a great metaphor for what we’re capable of doing in life.” Runners are only eligible for membership in Back on My Feet after being sober, clean shelter residents for roughly thirty days, although exact requirements differ from shelter to shelter. The program wields a bevy of tools to keep members on track, starting with small rewards for attendance such as rubber wristbands and $25 Visa gift cards. After nine months with 90 percent attendance or better, runners are eligible for $1,250 in grant funding for education and housing. So far, the statistics in the Baltimore program look sunny. As of October, membership had swelled to forty-seven runners and 135 volunteers. Two members had obtained housing, six had secured jobs, and three were enrolled in job-training programs. Jeremy Jordan, an assistant professor of sport

Persistence: Shipman works out on a treadmill at the Maryland Center for Veterans Education and Training, where he receives drug treatment and housing.

and recreation management at Temple University who conducts monthly assessments of Back on My Feet, is a marathoner himself, and he knew team members would reap some benefits just from the endorphins. Medical research has long affirmed that exercise can boost mental health, reducing anger, anxiety, and depression as effectively or more effectively than medications. But Jordan was surprised to see the runners make gains “right out of the gate,” he says, with baseline surveys showing “attitudinal changes as soon as they become members of the program. “It’s clear the role of social engagement is key,” Jordan says. “It wouldn’t be as successful if they handed out training programs and said, ‘Here, run this many miles.’ Something’s happening in terms of their ability to interact with other members and the volunteers that’s really powerful.” Back on My Feet’s Mid-Atlantic Director of Operations Andrew Marr, who was one of the program’s first volunteers in Philadelphia, puts it this way: “Is it about running? Sure. But running is secondary to the camaraderie and networking. All of a sudden, this population that has been largely forgotten about has a group of young, professional people who are willing to give a damn about them.”

rnold Shipman found Back on My Feet only after he’d been thoroughly knocked off his. Shipman grew up in a comfortable middle-class family in northeast Baltimore. His dad worked long days at Bethlehem Steel. His mom, who stayed home to care for her six children, never missed a PTA meeting. Shipman was a good student. He had a paper route and mowed neighbors’ lawns for spending money. Tall and lanky, he was also a high-school cross-country and track star. He went undefeated in the 400-meter sprint at Northern Senior High School. After graduating from Northern in 1978, Shipman followed his brother into the Air Force. He performed well as a customs inspector and transitioned to the Army in 1984. But shortly afterward, his dad’s health started to fail. After Shipman returned from one especially difficult visit home, another soldier offered him some weed, kicking off a downward spiral that would end with Shipman’s early discharge two years later. Back in Baltimore, he found that some guys from the neighborhood had scored cars and apartments by selling cocaine. Before long, he, too, was peddling heroin and cocaine from Baltimore to the Badlands neighborhood

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“I saw how happy they were,” recovering addict Micheal Tate says of the runners. “I saw the excitement and the camaraderie, and something inside me just woke up again.”

of North Philadelphia. “I didn’t even need the money,” Shipman says. “I just couldn’t believe these guys were getting this money for doing basically nothing.” The arrests on drug charges began almost immediately. Shipman usually avoided jail time, although he did land behind bars in 1991 for fourteen months and almost a year in 1997. Shipman’s friends and family begged him to stop, but by that time, he had an addiction of his own to feed. Shipman never took to cocaine. Heroin, with its mellowing effect, was more his style. Shipman fathered two daughters during that time, Latoya in 1989 and Tania in 1993. He sent their mother money and talked to them on the phone, but wasn’t a father to them like his dad was to him. Rock bottom came two years ago. Shipman had lost both his house and his truck and had recently been arrested on charges of possession of heroin and a concealed deadly weapon. He had a court date and was trying to get clean. A couple he considers his second parents had taken him in. But he couldn’t handle the vomiting, the shaking, and the pain of withdrawal, and he took his friends’ car to go buy more dope. He never made the court date. Shipman skated by for months before he was pulled over for expired tags. This time, with an outstanding warrant and a long rap sheet, he landed in jail. When he went before a judge in December 2008, he begged for a break and said he wanted to get clean for good. The judge consented but warned Shipman he’d be back in jail if he didn’t check into the Maryland Center for Veterans Education and Training, which offers homeless veterans housing and substanceabuse treatment. Shipman showed up at the MCVET facility on North High Street in Old Town the next day. It was not long afterward that Shipman heard Back on My Feet would be holding an organizational meeting. Something about the group and its story, which circulated through the shelter in the weeks before the first run, captivated him. “Just the name,” Shipman says. “‘Back on My Feet.’ That’s exactly what I needed.”

onvincing a group composed largely of chain-smoking former drug addicts to wake up at 5:30 a.m. to go running can be a challenge. But the Back on My Feet volunteers, many of whom are amateur endurance athletes themselves, take up the task with the gusto of a cheerleading squad. Micheal Tate, 48, who arrived at MCVET after stints in prison for robbery and multiple failed attempts to get clean from years of alcohol and drug abuse, grumbled when he heard the runners “hollering outside every morning,” he says. A former high-school track athlete, Tate thought his running days were long gone, but the young volunteers didn’t go away. “Fine,” Tate thought one morning, and joined the runs, which leave from MCVET and three other Baltimore shelters three mornings a week. “I saw how happy they were,” Tate says. “I saw the excitement and the camaraderie, and something inside me just woke up again.” Weeks before Back on My Feet held its first official group run in mid-March, Shipman had started training on his own to get

ready, even managing to drop his 20year-old smoking habit. Over the course of the spring, dozens more joined the group, gathering in a parking lot in the predawn darkness before hitting the streets on routes ranging from 1 to 3 miles, with distance varying with each runner’s experience level. No one, no matter what pace, ran alone. After the workout, they would gather again to stretch and exchange high fives and encouragement, often parting ways before the sun came up. By late spring, the runners had learned the group’s routes by heart, and the hilly ones never failed to elicit good-natured grumbles. Shipman, though, liked the hills best. The routes around the Inner Harbor were pretty, but the hills tested him. He would hold a steady pace through the inclines, offering a constant stream of encouragement to fellow runners. Asked how he was feeling, he would unfailingly reply, “Faan-tastic!” But there were setbacks. In May, the team captain, the first runner to declare his intention to run the Baltimore Marathon in October, left the shelter without notice. “Everyone’s story is just so different,” says Baltimore Program Director Jackie Truncellito. “You think someone’s heading in the right direction, and then one small step, one small move in the wrong direction, and things change.” With several dozen runners still in the game, Shipman assumed the team captain post in June. At the time, he was training for the Baltimore Ten-Miler, but a Back on My Feet staffer convinced him to set his sights higher, and volunteer Lauren Lake, an 18-year-old University of Baltimore freshman who’d become his training partner, agreed to run the marathon with him. A marathon is a world beyond a 10-miler. Many would-be marathoners end up injuring themselves during training and never make it to the starting line. Those runners who manage to stay healthy can fall victim to burnout as mileage and intensity increase. Then there’s the physical and psychological challenge of the event itself. Distance running invites self-doubt in even the most experienced competitors. Even with confidence and solid training on his side, Shipman was in for the run of his life.

ace day arrives after months of buildup, with weekend training runs reaching as long as 20 miles. All four Back on My Feet Baltimore teams gather near the starting line at Camden Yards. Forty-five runners from the program will compete in events ranging in distance from a 5K to the full marathon. Passersby stare as the group of several dozen limber-looking runners, clad in technical T-shirts and expensive running shoes, circle up, cheer, and pray. From the outside, it’s impossible to tell which runners in the pack are homeless and which are volunteers. Shipman is quiet and thoughtful in the minutes leading up to the race. Last night, at a pre-race pasta dinner for all four Back on My Feet teams, volunteer Jill Raimato, a massage therapist who’s run four marathons, told Shipman she’d had a dream in which she saw him crossing the finish line. “That wasn’t a dream,” Shipman replied. “That was a premonition.”

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After hugs and pats on the back from teammates, Shipman and Lake disappear into the sea of runners at the starting line. They’ve set a goal of finishing in four hours—roughly nine-minute miles. The start is a cacophony of spectators ringing cowbells and yelling through bullhorns, complete with a puff of confetti showering the more than 3,100 runners. The pair starts strong on the long, steady climb from Camden Yards to Druid Hill Park, past McCulloh Homes, the housing project where Shipman was last arrested. Near the third mile marker, Lake asks Shipman how he is feeling. He hesitates. “OK,” he says. Uh-oh. It’s too soon to not feel fantastic. Lake suggests picking up the pace until the crest of the next hill, then easing back on the downhill. They play this game for a few more miles, with Lake quietly coaching Shipman. But their pace gradually slows as the pack heads back downtown via St. Paul Street. A few miles later, Shipman starts begging her to leave him behind. Close to the halfway point, near the Baltimore Museum of Industry, Shipman has to stop to walk. Lake walks with him, insisting that they started together and will finish together. It takes a couple more miles for Lake to tearfully pull away. By the 16-mile mark, Shipman is exhausted, walking up the hills and jogging on the downhills and flats. “Speed-walking,” he says as he shuffles up a long, steady ascent on Linwood Street. His four-hour goal is out of reach. “I’m going to finish,” he says, but his voice, winded and faint, betrays some doubt. Then, there he is on Washington Street with its haunted memories. The exchange with his old buddy leaves him rattled. He’d hoped that his acquaintances here would be sleeping off their Friday night binges and that no one would see him pass. Now he keeps looking over his shoulder, worried that his friend might chase him down, ask what he is doing, where he’s been. But his friend doesn’t follow, and Shipman makes it to an aid station where volunteers cheer him on. With Washington Street

behind him, things start looking up. At the 19-mile mark in Clifton Park, Shipman spots a guy he ran with in high school who’s struggling through the half-marathon. Shipman says hello and offers him some encouragement before running on. At the 21-mile mark at Lake Montebello, Shipman’s daughter Latoya and her own children surprise him with cheers and posters. Shipman still has to run west through Charles Village, then cover the long final stretch down Howard and Eutaw streets to finish at Camden Yards. It’s more than five miles. At this point, every step he takes is farther than he’s ever run before. Shipman resolves to not walk again until he makes it to the finish line. At the 25-mile mark, he speeds up to catch the five-hour pace group and hangs with them. His time: five hours, twenty-four seconds. Later, there will be hugs and high-fives from teammates like Tate, who has finished the half-marathon. There will be a happy reunion with Lake, who finished in 4:28—although Shipman will repeatedly remind everyone she could have gone faster had she left him sooner. There will be a celebratory cheesesteak and a selfdeclared day off from homework. But for now, it is only Shipman, sitting on the pavement with a mylar blanket wrapped around his shoulders, alone with his thoughts. He’s not thinking about how far he’s come since he sold heroin in the neighborhoods he just ran through or about how he’s amazed that his 50-year-old body, once ravaged by drugs, has just covered 26.2 miles. Like the hundreds of other runners stretching and resting in an endorphin- and exhaustion-fueled haze, he is thinking about the next race. ■ —Amy Reinink is a freelance writer in Silver Spring. This is her first article for Urbanite. On the air: More on this story on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on December 15.

Finish line: At the end of the Baltimore Marathon, a running career—and a life—are rekindled.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m d e c e m b e r 0 9

photography by anne gummerson

by greg hanscom

For a soul in search of simplicity, a tiny house offers more than enough space

A Narrow Escape

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The minute details: Angled walls, sliding “barn doors,” and metal studs left exposed at the top of the interior walls give the downstairs a sense of airiness. In the back, a folding Murphy bed allows the bedroom to double as an office (lower left). “It’s that European sense of multiple uses,” says homeowner Jan Angevine. “The kitchen becomes the bedroom becomes the library.”

hen a friend recently offered her a gleaming Oxo potato peeler, Jan Angevine had to think twice about accepting it. Angevine is a connoisseur of fine design and quality craftsmanship. She once worked for digital design pioneer April Greiman and avant-garde architect Michael Rotondi in Los Angeles. Today, she manages the office and marketing for Brennan+Company Architects in Catonsville and its eco-friendly building product store, Alterego. The chic, black-handled peeler was a fine-looking accoutrement. But when you live in a house that is little bigger than the standard McMansion-issue living room, you’re forced to make decisions. Thanks, she said, but I already have one. Angevine, a stylish 64-year-old with spiked silver hair, lives in a 10-foot-wide alley house near Patterson Park. Her whole floor plan covers just 660 square feet. They make motor homes with bigger footprints (the average American home is 2,400 square feet). When Angevine moved in from an apartment in Tuscany-Canterbury, she had to jettison almost all of her worldly belongings. The cramped basement provides enough storage space for her bicycle and off-season wardrobe, but a house this small simply doesn’t tolerate excess.

“It’s one of the best parts of this space: It constantly asks me what it is that I need,” she says. “I don’t have to have two sets of dishes. I don’t need three mixing bowls. I’m detaching from objects, and I feel much freer mentally and emotionally.” If this sounds a little Zen, well, it is. In a past life, Angevine was a mover in the world of politics. She ran U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski’s office in Washington, D.C., from 1992 to 1994 before moving to Baltimore to work for a U.S. attorney. But in October 1996, after seven years in the pressure cooker, she walked away. “I put a pack on my back and spent a year in Southeast Asia,” she says. She taught at a Baha’i school for tribal women, learned to meditate, and spent a month touring Sri Lanka on a rented motorcycle. She eventually jumped back into the American mainstream, but along the way, she spent several years at a Buddhist meditation center and a secluded retreat in the California desert. Angevine bought her house, tucked into a neighborhood once home to cannery workers, for less than $100,000 in 2006. With a $15,000 lead-abatement grant from the city, she gutted the entire space, leaving little more than the original stairway intact. Robert w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m d e c e m b e r 0 9

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A view of the city: “One of the words most shouted in this house is ‘Duck!’” says Angevine, walking through the 5-foot, 4-inch doorway that leads from the kitchen to the deck, which doubles as a dining room when the weather is good.

Brennan and his colleague Carri Beer then worked with Angevine to retrofit the tiny house into an environmentally friendly, modern monastic living space. The process was tougher than you might think, Angevine says: With a house this small, “You can’t goof off. It has to be planned like a little ship.” The microwave oven in her kitchen was made for a boat galley, in fact. The 23-inch refrigerator could probably fit in a boat. And both appliances are upstairs. “We took the first and second floors, and we flipped it upside down,” Brennan says. In the original layout, the living room and kitchen were on the first floor, with a bathroom in the back. Upstairs there were two small bedrooms. Today, the bedroom, replete with folding Murphy bed, is on the bottom floor. The living space is upstairs, with a small living/meditation room up front and a galley kitchen in back, where a door opens onto a rooftop deck. “This could be the new front porch of Patterson Park,” says Brennan, sipping a cup of coffee at the patio table. The neighborhood surrounding the deck is a jumbled, miniature cityscape befitting the French animation film The Triplets of Belleville: Knots of power lines braid through a hodgepodge of rickety remodels and stair-stepping rooflines. A dozen other decks perch atop neighboring houses, but Angevine says she rarely sees anyone on them. “There’s just no way to use the space,” she says. “If you want to use anything up there, you have to carry it all the way up from the first floor.” Angevine, in contrast, just steps out her kitchen door, breakfast in hand. Brennan, who took home several architecture awards for the redesign, calls Angevine “the urban roof pioneer.” When the deck door and front windows are thrown open on summer evenings, the wind off the harbor quickly cools the entire house, which has extra insulation in the exterior wall and a reflective “cool roof” that keeps the temperature down even on hot days. Angevine says her monthly utility bills in summer are just $50. In winter, they’re less than $100. Asked if she would change anything, Angevine says that the narrowness of the house is limiting. “The same space with a more generous rectangle would be much more usable,” she says. Still, she loves it—and even admits that, should she lose her resolve, there’s room for another potato peeler. Sliding open a rollout pantry cupboard in the kitchen, she says, “I have drawers I don’t use yet.” ■ —Greg Hanscom is Urbanite’s senior editor. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m d e c e m b e r 0 9

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Baltimore Main Streets

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City agency helps small businesses reinvigorate retail corridors Baltimore Main Streets is a commercial revitalization initiative of the Mayor’s Office that was launched in 2000. The program is run by The Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC). Based on a model developed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Main Streets works with small- and medium-sized businesses to re-energize commercial districts. And Baltimore’s is the second largest urban program in the nation. Currently ten Main Streets districts punctuate Baltimore: Belair-Edison, Brooklyn, East Monument Street, Federal Hill, Fell’s Point, HamiltonLauraville, Highlandtown, Pennsylvania Avenue, Pigtown, and Waverly. Below, BDC President M.J. “Jay” Brodie explains the program. Turn the page to read profiles of four exceptional businesses along Baltimore’s Main Streets.

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Baltimore Main Streets become part of the Baltimore Development Corp.?

A: Main Streets is

part of Commercial Revitalization. And that division—now part of BDC—was in the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development. It was Mayor Martin O’Malley’s idea that Commercial Revitalization would be better within BDC, because it would get more attention here and was related to larger economic development projects. So around 2000, nine people came over here from the housing department.

Q: The Baltimore Development Corp. is often known for its large projects. How do you support small business?

A: Most of what we do every year are small projects for small- and medium-sized businesses. We visit 150 to 200 businesses each year. We support them with below-marketrate loans, with the Main Streets projects, and with technical assistance. The complexities of city government are baffling to many small businesspeople such as building permits, zoning, and licenses. We see ourselves as the ombudsman for such businesses. With Main Streets, we try to organize merchants, and we do façade grants to help businesses improve their storefronts. We do below-market-rate loans, we help look for new tenants to improve the tenant mix, and we help market the areas. We’ve gotten streets paved and improved streetscapes, like the sidewalks, trees, and benches that you see in Hampden.

commercial districts can be revitalized. Retail has changed so much; there was once a shopping pattern of going downtown and to your neighborhood stores, and then came the regional malls, and then the big box stores, and then the Internet and eBay. While that competition has been difficult for the older areas, what hasn’t changed is people’s yearning for good-quality products and good customer service. We’ve tried to reinstill the belief that there are excellent values in neighborhood shopping.

Q: What is your vision for the Balti-

Q: What challenges does a small

A: We want to help develop more grocery

A: The competitive giants. The best way is to

more Development Corp. in the next five years, specifically as it relates to small business?

stores. For example, in Howard Park in northwest Baltimore, where they haven’t had a functioning grocery store in twelve years, we’re assembling a site. I’d also want to see more farmers’ markets: they’re blossoming. We have the one in Waverly and the one under I-83, and there’s another in HamiltonLauraville. I’d also see more nightlife–restaurants and bars with live music. Of course they’d have to be properly regulated, but I think we could move toward a more cosmopolitan Baltimore. Baltimore is continuing to revitalize itself. It has a great future, but not a guaranteed future. I’ve seen a study that said between 60 and 70 percent of new jobs in the United States would come out of small businesses. We’ve seen that we can manage ten Main Streets projects that are doing well. The last time we were ready to take on another Main Streets project, we had nine applications–all good. And we chose two.

business face in Baltimore? How does the Baltimore Development Corp. address those challenges?

have the public and private sectors working together. We’ve seen that work here.

Q: What are your favorite places to shop in Baltimore?

A: I go to Giant at the Rotunda or Whole

Foods in Mount Washington. We’ve also done Best Buy on Pratt Street, which is near my office. I go to Hampden for the restaurants and places like Mud and Metal. And I’m a regular shopper at Target in Mondawmin. For a special dinner, I might go to Chiu’s Sushi in Inner Harbor East, Crêpe du Jour in Mount Washington, the Chameleon Café on Harford Road, Germano’s in Little Italy or Tio Pepe’s. For crabs we go to Obrycki’s.

For more information please visit www.BaltimoreMainStreets.com or follow us on Twitter at BmoreMainSt.

Q: What are some of Baltimore Main Streets program’s greatest accomplishments?

A: A tangible one is Hampden, which gradu-

ated from the program. Tour buses now show up to bring people to eat at Café Hon and other restaurants and to shop. It’s a more interesting and more diverse place. Federal Hill, one of the ten current Main Streets projects, just won a national award. And we’re the only Main Streets program in the country that, with the city council’s approval, can acquire vacant buildings. The greatest success is more intangible, and that is giving people the belief that older

Program Statistics 2000–2009    : $1,186,951.24    : $6,312,185.81   : 334   - : 967   - : 540

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Do It All Without the Mall Vanessa White, Vanessa’s Vintage Treasures

Vanessa White opened her antique store in Federal Hill with garbage. Literally. The sisal rug on the floor of Vanessa’s Vintage Treasures was one she and her mother found in the trash, and the bookshelf she offered for sale was salvaged from the sidewalk. That scrappy, creative can-do attitude has helped White keep her shop running for 18 years. Inside the South Charles Street landmark is a world of jewelry, linens, pottery, kitchen accessories, postcards, and clothing from the past. “I just love old stuff; my friend says I was born in the wrong century,” the Federal Hill native says. “I’ve always been a collector.” White’s collection almost didn’t become a business. After she decided she wanted to open her own shop in the early 1990s, she had trouble getting a loan. After a series of lenders fell through, she found one friend who loaned her $100. With that small amount and some assistance from her counselor at the federal Small Business Administration, White was ready to gather inventory. “My brother and I went to the Goodwill and bought a table and china closet,” she recalled. “I gathered up a tiny bit of jewelry. After that I had $1 left.” To make her shop look fuller than it was, White divided the room with a curtain. She placed ads in the windows announcing the opening day. And she

waited for city inspector to approve her setup. The inspector failed her, however, because he said she did not have enough light in the store. So White adjusted her lighting fixtures. The inspector returned—at 10 a.m. on the day she was scheduled to make her debut—and he gave her the thumbs-up. “I love what I do,” White says. “I’ve scrounged old china closets from the junkman. I’ve taken the bus to some very scary places to find that perfect vintage piece.”

Claudia Towles, aMuse Toys

When you live in a small townhouse with a small child, you can get pretty particular about the toys you bring in, says Claudia Towles. And that is why the co-owner of aMuse Toys got into the business. Towles moved from the Washington, D.C., suburbs, to Fells Point several years ago with her young son, Sebastian, and husband Tom. A native of Colombia, she went to law school in Bogota. “Having a toy shop was the furthest thing from my mind,” she says. “I’d never worked in retail.” Finding safe, smart toys for Sebastian that were also attractive enough to have in the living spaces of the family’s tiny house was tough work for Towles. So she and her husband reinvented a toyshop in their neighborhood in 2005. Three years

aMuse Toys

Fells Point 1623 Thames St. 410-342-5000

Vanessa’s Vintage Treasures Federal Hill 1132 S. Charles St. 410-752-3224

Shops at Quarry Lake 2576 Quarry Lake Dr. 410-415-0000 www.amusetoys.com

later, they opened a second aMuse in Baltimore County. “We take play for what it is, which is fun,” Towles says. “But a piece of that should be in sync with what a child does at certain stages of development.” Finding such playthings involves a lot of studying. “We start out by asking, ‘Is this a cool item?’ Then we research our companies and how they do business.” What sort of paints are used on the toy, where do its components come from, and who makes it are some of the main things Towles wants to know before she places an order. “The toys have to have longevity,” she says. “What are we teaching our children if we are constantly throwing things out?” As a result of this thought process, aMuse carries very little, if anything, that one would want to toss. Tea sets made out of recycled plastic, wooden marble runs, Plan Toy dollhouses, and plush animals fill the floor-to-ceiling shelves in the Fells Point store. Books and Mad Libs are tucked in one corner. And in the back is a huge collection of small plastic knights, kings, queens, and farm animals. “If it’s an amazing toy that induces a thoughtprocess, we’ll carry it,” Towles says. “We truly believe in understanding what we stock.”

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Four Main Streets merchants bring good products—with good stories That owner is now Jenkins’s landlord. The café— named for the Curtis Mayfield song “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue”—opened a year later. Jenkins serves such Southern favorites as fried chicken and salmon croquettes. A steady stream of jazz plays in the background, and the work of local artist Mathew Rice decorates the walls. “More and more of a local scene is developing,” he said of Waverly. “Food and music can open the world, because everyone can agree on good food and good music.”

Brett Bixler, High Grounds

Coffee house owner Brett Bixler had his first taste of what would become his livelihood when he was a small child. “I was at Jojo’s reading the comics section of the Los Angeles Times, and my mother was feeding me spoonfuls of coffee,” the California native recalled. And now he’s surrounded by it—literally. Bags of beans are stacked throughout the back room of High Grounds, his Highlandtown shop. He roasts the beans himself in a large metal coffee roaster that absorbs about a quarter of the space. The results are then shipped to Whole Foods stores in Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, as well as several eateries in Baltimore. Some of the coffee goes to High Grounds’ front room for immediate consumption. Bixler gets his coffee from Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, Kenya, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Colombia, and

Rwanda. A graduate of the University of Southern California’s entrepreneur program in 1991, Bixler learned the ropes by working in the coffee shop where he used to do his homework. He worked his way up from washing dishes to helping the owners open ten stores. From there, he became a consultant for a family in Delaware that wanted to open coffee shops. “The East Coast was so foreign to me,” Bixler recalled. “It was a chance to experience a new culture. So I came out and wound up working for the family in Towson Commons.” He also wound up falling in love, marrying, and having his first child, Jacob. “We didn’t want to put Jacob in daycare,” he said. “So we decided I would open a coffee shop and raise Jacob myself. I was raised in the back of a store too.” While searching for a location, Bixler heard from the owner of High Grounds. He wanted to sell the shop; was Bixler interested? The rest, as they say, is history. Bixler roasts coffee about five days a week, handles the imports, and gets to know his regulars. “We’re trying to create community,” he said. “That’s what a coffee house is supposed to be.” Remember to shop and dine local this holiday season. Visit www.MiracleOnMainStreets.com for gift ideas and family-friendly events.

Darker Than Blue Café Waverly 3034 Greenmount Ave. 443-872-4468

www.darkerthanbluecafe.com

High Grounds Coffee Roasters Highlandtown 3201 Eastern Ave. 410-342-7611

www.highgroundscoffee.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m d e c e m b e r 0 9

photos by Christopher Graham

Casey Jenkins, Darker Than Blue Café

Chef Casey Jenkins’s first attempt at cooking did not go well at all. The owner of Waverly’s Darker Than Blue Café pulled a steak out of the freezer and plopped it right into a frying pan. “I was a sophomore in high school,” he recalled. “It was my first real cooking experience.” His next experience occurred when he was in the U.S. Marine Corps. The young recruit was helping to feed 3,000 fellow Marines. “I didn’t love it then, but when I got out, I realized I could actually get a degree in cooking,” Jenkins said. So, after looking around for schools, he found that one of the best—the Culinary Institute of America (CIA)—was near his hometown of White Plains, N.Y. “I thought I’d get an easy degree,” he said. “But then when one of the first questions in class was whether anyone knew what the five mother sauces were, I quickly realized it was not the Marine Corps.” After graduating in 1992, he worked for several high-end restaurants in New York. He then learned the business side of his chosen industry by working for Aramark and Sodexho; his job for the latter company brought Jenkins to Baltimore. By 2006, he was ready to open a place, with the support of two elementary school friends who lived in the Baltimore area. One day during the search for a location, Jenkins stopped in a coffee shop on Greenmount Avenue. “I liked the place,” he said. “So I went to the counter and chatted with the owner, who said, ‘You wanna buy it?’”

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This month in eating

Holiday on a Plate Searching for the perfect present? Look in the kitchen. by rafael alvarez | photography by l a k aye mbah “If we can’t eat it or drink it … we don’t want it.” —Sherry “Mrs. Turkey Joe” Trabert

ne of the Christmas stories told most often by people who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II, in the lean days before the electric-air-hockey and talking-baby-doll prosperity of the 1950s and ’60s, was waking up on December 25 to find the exotic yet somehow mundane gift of an orange in their stocking. Hard times have returned, for the third holiday season in a row: More than fifteen million people are out of work, despite pronouncements that the worst is behind us. Maybe the gift of an orange in the age of the organic supermarket seems quaint—even one stuck with cloves for an aromatic echo

of the Victorian pomander—but people are indeed making presents of food where just a few years ago they might have bought something less perishable and more forgettable. Every December, in good years and in bad, my brother Danny grinds and gives away about 25 pounds of Spanish chorizo, wrapping parcels of the spicy stuff up in brown paper and masking tape before scrawling our names across the bag in Magic Marker. It’s the one gift that everyone makes sure they haven’t left behind when the racket settles down from opening presents on Christmas Eve. A cousin is friendly with a couple who was next-to-broke last Christmas after the husband lost his job. To show people they still cared—that they may have been down but

they weren’t out—his wife made enchiladas from scratch and gave them out, frozen and foil-wrapped, to folks who savored the gift long after Christmas Day had come and gone. Frozen enchiladas. Feliz navidad, amigo! Liz Horne Smith, a private school teacher and urban farmer in Hamilton, is more of a gourmand than my cousin’s friend, but the sentiment behind her holiday giving is the same. “It’s better to say, ‘‘I made this for you,’ instead of ‘This is what I got on sale for you,’” Smith says. Her bounty—much of it grown in her yard at Carter and Bayonne avenues—is spread to friends, family, neighbors, her mail carrier, and the city workers who pick up the garbage. With two boys, a mortgage, and modest salaries (Liz’s

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urbanite december 09

EAT / DRINK Vegan Sea Salt & Chocolate Caramels 1 cup margarine* 2½ cups sugar 2 cups vanilla soy milk* 1 cup dark corn syrup 1½ tsp vanilla 12 oz vegan dark chocolate chips* 2 tsp Fleur de Sel or other large-grain sea salt

Season’s eatings: Liz Horne Smith whips up basketfuls of holiday gifts.

hands,” says Bickham, who uses a little hard stuff in her cake recipe when appropriate. “These gifts are the gifts that sustain us … gifts of human hands that enrich our spirit.” When their parents passed away, leaving behind a lifetime of furniture and books and clothes, Sherry Trabert and her IrishAmerican siblings decided they didn’t need any more stuff whether they could afford it or not. What they wanted was more of one another. “In early December my sisters and a niece come over to make chocolate almond toffee and stained glass candy—peppermint, anise, cinnamon, clove, and root beer,” says Sherry, devout gardener, Hamilton resident, and wife of fabled Fells Point barkeep emeritus “Turkey Joe” Trabert. “It’s very volatile work, with lots of rushing around with pots of boiling syrup, strong ﬂavoring oils, and jelly-roll pans of candy cooling on the back porch.” Which prompts the question, What most strikes your senses with the magic of Christmas: a gift card scribbled with a number and a dollar sign or the smell of peppermint and clove wafting through the neighborhood on a sharp December wind? The American truth is that peppermint doesn’t always win. Even in the Trabert home, store-bought gifts are still exchanged. “There is considerable backsliding,” Sherry confesses. “After all, it is Christmas.” ■ —Rafael Alvarez is an author and screenwriter based in Baltimore. His Highlandtown holiday story “Aunt Lola” will air on WYPR 88.1 FM just before Christmas Day.

RECIPES

husband, Kevin, is career National Guard), the Smiths are sharing dividends from the agricultural investment in the one-third acre surrounding their house. Some of Smiths’ gifts require the recipient to provide the rest of the meal, like her “Fruits of Fire” chutney—made with tart apples and two pounds of fresh peaches— and the spicy barbecue rub she concocts from kosher salt, brown sugar, and ground chilies grown over the summer: habanero, Caribbean coffee peppers, and heirloom fish peppers. Intimates may be lucky enough to quench the fi re with some of Kevin’s holiday homebrew—this year’s batch is a dark Belgian-style ale ﬂavored with ginger and honey. Next year, he hopes to incorporate honey from the Smiths’ new backyard beehive. (They also keep a pair of egg-laying hens named Sugar and Spice.) Giving food instead of stuff “is a way of extending the time we spend with our friends,” Liz says. “It’s a reminder of how fortunate we are.” And if the gift hits the right emotional note—be it a seed ball to hang outside for the birds or homemade toffee cracked with hammers and arranged in an old Esskay sausage tin—it will stay with the beneficiary as long as that memory of the bicycle Santa dropped off in the third grade. Case in point: During the recession of the early 1990s, Kathy O’Dell’s brother lost his job as vice president of a successful chain of national retail stores. How Jack O’Dell handled Christmas in the wake of his misfortune was a gift his kid sister remembers as “the best ever.” “He filled recycled glass jars with sugar and cinnamon for that great breakfast toast concoction we all remembered from childhood,” says O’Dell, an associate dean at University of Maryland Baltimore County who makes molasses cookies each year in memory of her late mother. “The image of my big, hulking, successful brother carefully sifting sugar and cinnamon into jars and attaching personal notes about how lucky we all were to be alive and healthy and family is a treasured symbol of humility and grace.” An offering of a full, free meal has taken place a million times at Viva House, the Catholic Worker kitchen and food pantry in Union Square. Literally: More than one million people have been served a free hot meal or sandwich with a bag of cookies since the soup kitchen opened in 1968. And still Willa Bickham, who founded the outreach forty-one years ago with her husband, Brendan Walsh, makes homemade food to give away to friends and family at Christmas. Her specialty is Irish Pudding Cake, the recipe adapted from one used at the Springhill Community House in Belfast, Ireland. “Christian liturgies often mention that bread and wine are the work of human

Line a 9-by-9-inch baking pan with parchment and spray with nonstick cooking spray. Place all ingredients except vanilla in a large saucepan, at least 4 quarts. Bring ingredients to a boil, stirring frequently to keep the sugar heating evenly. Once at a boil, reduce the heat to medium and continue stirring until candy reaches 245 degrees Fahrenheit on a candy thermometer. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. Pour into lined baking pan and let cool completely. Snip caramels into pieces using kitchen shears sprayed with nonstick cooking spray (or slice with a knife). Melt chocolate in double boiler, dip each caramel halfway into the chocolate, lay onto a fresh sheet of nonstick-sprayed parchment, and then sprinkle on a few fl akes of the sea salt. After fully cooled, wrap caramel pieces individually with waxed or parchment paper. * If desired, substitute butter for the margarine, whole milk for the soy milk, and regular dark chocolate chips for the vegan chips.

Sweet and Spicy Grill Rub ¼ cup dried ground chilies 1 ½ cups light brown sugar 3 tbs ground cumin 3 tbs coarse kosher salt 2 tbs ground coriander 2 tsp garlic powder Combine all ingredients. Store in an airtight container. —Recipes by Liz Horne Smith

Willa’s Viva House Irish Pudding Cake On the day before serving: Take one pound cake—homemade, preferably— and cut into quarter-inch slices. Set slices out fl at on a tray. Sprinkle with Irish whiskey or your favorite liquor (if desired) and let the slices dry in front of a clean window with bright sunshine pouring through. The following day: Make one package of “cook and serve” (not instant) vanilla pudding. Spread one medium-sized jar of seedless raspberry jam or preserves on cake slices. Drain one can of sliced pears and one can sliced peaches (or use fresh fruit, if available). Layer cake slices with pudding and fruit in a deep glass bowl. Refrigerate for a few hours, then top with real whipped cream and almond slices. —Recipe by Willa Bickham Web extra: More recipes at www.urbanitebaltimore.com

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photo by La Kaye Mbah

B & O American Brasserie

We got the beets: Roasted beet tartare at B&O Brasserie

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Henninger’s Tavern

Cheers: Henninger’s owner Kenny Vieth (left, with some regulars) celebrates two decades of drinking and dining.

Even as the recession grinds on, wellcapitalized restaurants continue to open, and diners continue to spend money in them. B&O American Brasserie has the weight of the Kimpton organization—the boutique hotel chain that transformed the former B&O Railroad headquarters into the luxurious new Hotel Monaco—behind it. The Gilded Age clubbiness of the place lends a feeling of permanence, as if it’s been here since the rail tycoons cavorted upstairs. You can almost picture them retiring to the dining room to repose in a high-backed leather banquette for a ribeye and a bourbon. Like many new restaurants, B&O has hopped aboard the locavore train: Chef Michael Reidt’s menu conspicuously emphasizes local and seasonal ingredients. He deftly juggles flavors even as he blends eras. Rib-stickers such as biscuits with ham and gravy, shepherd’s pie, and long-simmered pot roast might seem self-consciously retro, but here they fit the aesthetic. More au courant are such appetizers as a tartare of hiramasa (a kind of amberjack, reputably more sustainable than the usual tuna), served with quinoa on sweet potato chips, the shimmery fish balanced by a spicy chipotle sauce. Prices here are substantial, but so are portions: That pot roast, topped with sweet

High atop one of the walls of photos and vintage bric-a-brac in Henninger’s sits a yellowed “Best New Restaurant” certificate from 1990, evidence that frequent redecoration is not a priority here. The message is also still true, in a sense: This is the kind of under-the-radar place that gets periodically re-discovered as succeeding generations of Fells Point pub-crawlers venture north in search of fresh thrills (or parking) and stumble upon the funky little bar with the ever-present white Christmas lights in the window. Its MO is similar to that of Peter’s Inn, its spiritual cousin around the corner: an agreeably timeworn watering hole, liberally encrusted with character, that happens to hide a serious kitchen. Call it a “gastropub,” if you must. Owners Kenny Vieth and wife/chef Jayne, who bought the place from Chuck Henninger in June 1989, have barely tinkered with the formula over the last twenty years. Belly up to the tin-ceilinged bar for a neighborly pint (Pilsner Urquell is on tap, or you can drop $1.25 on Genesee Cream Ale) and a pulled pork or shrimp salad sandwich,

slices of mulled apples and onion, shares its casserole with a hearty pool of cheesy polenta and provides enough for leftovers. And two good-sized pieces of Arctic char, served with crispy skin on, come heaped with lima beans, dried tomato slices, and chunks of bacon in a roasted red pepper sauce. Those who don’t have the robber baron’s bonus will be happy nibbling on a flatbread with smoked shrimp and grilled corn piled with arugula or on such small plates as a shared skillet of braised meatballs. The B&O’s old/new conceit is reinforced by cocktails from the former Ixia barman Brendan Dorr, who concocts his own cola syrup from cola nuts, served plain or mixed into a “Hobo’s Bourbon.” The “Smokestack” is rye, sweet vermouth, and liquid smoke. Desserts nod to the seasons: In autumn it’s a sweet pumpkin bread pudding with pumpkin ice cream, or spiced plum cobbler. Chef Reidt betrays his New England roots with his “Wicked Pissa Cupcakes”—dense chocolate with Oreo cream frosting and dulce de leche. (Breakfast, lunch, and dinner daily. 2 N. Charles St.; 443-692-6172; www. bandorestaurant.com.)

reviewed

eat/drink

—Martha Thomas

or retire to the kitsch-laden dining room for more ambitious white-tablecloth fare. The New American menu changes a few times a year, but several items—mussels steeped in garlicky white wine, pan-fried oysters on a bed of wilted spinach—are time-tested standards. The oysters are good, although the bivalves themselves can get lost amid thick breading and Pernod-spiked fennel cream sauce. Better still is the Maryland crab soup—bright and peppery, with a deep tomato flavor and sweet lumps of snowy crab. Too-chewy braised short ribs missed the comfort-food mark on a recent night, but seafood is reliable Henninger’s territory. Sautéed grouper features a fresh and meaty fillet draped in velvety folds of saffron cream, plus a luxurious potato hash full of buttery flakes of crabmeat. One might legitimately call the combination gilding the lily—the culinary equivalent of an overstuffed Victorian parlor—but, on the other hand, maybe it’s just right. (Dinner Tues–Sat. 1812 Bank St.; 410-342-2172; www.henningerstavern.com.) —David Dudley

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n the Age of Sail, officers in the Royal Navy developed a (probably exaggerated) reputation as sadistic disciplinarians. Refractory sailors were flogged on the main deck, with the crew assembled to bear edifying witness. But when officers gathered below to share port—more refined stuff than the grog rationed to seamen— brutality yielded to gentility. Port-drinking customs observed today apparently stem from naval traditions. Decanters circle the table clockwise, port passing to “port,” the nautical left. Should it stall, a tablemate might ask, “Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?” If the clueless tippler replies no, he’ll be told, “The Bishop’s an awfully nice fellow, but he forgets to pass the port.” Contemporary landlubbers will most likely find port served with cheese courses or the kind of hearty desserts (think plum pudding) that accompany holiday feasts. Port, of course, hails from Portugal and takes its name from the city of Oporto. But port’s conventions have understandably British inflections. Conflicts between England and France in the late 17th and early 18th centuries halted Britain’s importation of French wine and forced merchants to seek supplies elsewhere. In the hot, mountainous region up the Douro River from Oporto, they found a source of dark, coarse wine the English initially called “blackstrap.” Following the practice of one particular Douro abbey, the English began adding brandy to unfinished wine, which both stabilized it for transport and arrested fermentation while keeping grape sugars high. The resulting “fortified” wine, sweet and alcoholic, launched an industry. Shippers with names like Cockburn, Graham, Osborne, Sandeman, and Taylor— many of whose brands and descendants still dominate the trade—built large “lodges” for aging and warehousing port in and around Oporto. Business flourished, and the drink’s popularity in Britain grew

to such a degree that port became known as “the Englishman’s wine,” imbibed “everywhere from gentlemen’s clubs to street corner pubs,” according to The Oxford Companion to Wine. Victorian men of station customarily laid down casks for their sons and godsons. (Unfortunately for me, this tradition was lost upon Irish-American fathers and godfathers of the late 1950s.) Over the past generation or so, consumption in other countries (including, ironically, France) has matched or exceeded England’s. But the British market remains central to the trade, especially for high-end ports. Port relies primarily on five grapes: Tinta Barroca, Tinta Roriz (the Tempranillo of Spain’s Rioja), Tinto Cão, Touriga Francesa, and Touriga Nacional. They grow on narrow terrace vineyards carved into the steep, stony lands along the river. For centuries, little changed in the laborintensive production of port, but recent decades have ushered in innovations. Laserguided bulldozers grade new terraces, notes wine-scribe Hugh Johnson, and in one of the last wine regions that employs humans for grape-stomping, robotic feet now do much of the work. Port comes in a confusing array of styles, with a heady-sweet profile the sole constant. Rough-and-ready rubies and tawnies account for the bulk of commercial production. Age-designated tawny ports mature in wood casks for longer periods and offer more of the nuances prized by port fanciers. Their label-specified age (usually ten or twenty years) indicates an average of the blend. Connoisseurs covet vintage port, made only from wines of a single year that producers have declared exceptional. After two or three years in cask, vintage port is bottled; it can— arguably must—age for decades to express its character fully. Late Bottled Vintage port (or “LBV”) combines methods: Wine from a single year sees four to six years in cask before bottling and is then usually ready for consumption. Other port styles vary on these themes. Limited amounts of quaffable white port are produced. Showing light, copper-toned ruby, Dow’s Aged 10 Years Old Tawny Port ($26, 20 percent alcohol) offers aromas of golden raisin, nectarine, plum brandy, and fig cake. Medium-bodied and savory-sweet, its light prune, orange peel, and toffee flavors carry hints of tobacco and Dr Pepper, finishing on a sherry note. The English, God rest them, have also given us Stilton, a magnificent blue cheese. Pair it with port to guarantee a happy Yuletide. ■

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m d e c e m b e r 0 9

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This Month in Eating Compiled by Martha Thomas A DICKENS OF A C AROL

DEC 1–20

The historic Belmont Manor House in Elkridge is the setting for an interactive re-telling of A Christmas Carol. Actor James Kinstle will take on the role of Charles Dickens, welcoming guests to the 18th-century house. The theatrics will be punctuated by a four-course dinner, featuring passed hors d’oeuvres, roast duck, turkey with chestnut risotto, and champagne in the ballroom. Tues–Thurs evenings $90, Sunday matinees $75.

Belmont Manor House 6555 Belmont Woods Rd. Elkridge 410-772-4300 belmontconferencecenter.com

GINGERBREAD HOUSE

DEC 5 –20

When Maria Springer’s son was small, he delighted in constructing and decorating gingerbread houses. So Springer added a gingerbread house event for children to the schedule at Maja’s Viennese Kitchen, her Phoenix cooking school. Participants can embellish their graham-cracker houses with M&Ms, gummy bears, mints, and more. The decorating is followed by tea served in china cups and treats—mostly savory ones. “By that time, they’ve had enough sweets,” Springer says. Sat and Sun, 12:30 p.m. $55 each child (ages 5–12) and adult pair.

For reservations, call 410-561-1157 or e-mail majaskit@aol.com

CHRISTMAS CHEER

DEC 12–13

The Engineers Club, generally off-limits to non-members, welcomes ticket-holders to performances by the Concert Artists of Baltimore. The pre-concert brunch for the holiday show is an extravagant spread with eggs Benedict, a wafﬂe station, and a carvery, along with salad, fruit, and decadent desserts. After the concert of holiday favorites, cookies, cider, and champagne will be served at a tree lighting and singalong. Sat brunch at 11:30 a.m., concert at 1 p.m.; Sun brunch at 12:30 p.m., concert at 2:30 p.m. $29 brunch and concert, $25 concert only.

Garrett-Jacobs Mansion 11 W. Mount Vernon Place 410-625-3525 www.cabalto.org

SOCIALLY UNCORKED CHAMPAGNE TASTING

DEC 15

Socially Uncorked, a group of young oenophiles who meet regularly at Petit Louis Bistro, will pop open the bubbly for a holiday tasting. “Everyone has been asking for champagne,” says organizer Christopher Vaeth. “In December, everyone feels festive, so it’s a good time to serve it.” The wet stuff will be paired with Petit Louis French fries and specially selected cheeses. Reservations recommended. 8 p.m., $20.

Petit Louis Bistro 4800 Roland Ave. 410-355-9393

NEW YEAR’S EVE WITH LIT TLE FEAT

DEC 31

This year, the Recher Theatre’s New Year’s Eve buffet will feature its traditional spread of hot and cold meats, salads, and appetizers—and the 40-year-old band Little Feat will rock the house with their blend of “California rock and Dixie-inﬂected funk-boogie.” Last we checked, Dixie Chicken was not on the menu, but a champagne toast at midnight is. 8 p.m., $60.

Recher Theatre 512 York Rd., Towson 410-337-7178 www.rechertheatre.com

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Hear the Voices of Baltimore’s Past In October, the Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers

Museum introduced a new exhibit that brings to life the experiences of Baltimore’s Irish immigrants whose lives were dominated by the Great Hunger. The state-of-the-art audio system allows visitors to hear historically accurate recreations of conversations, diary entries, memoirs, the sounds of a sailing ship at sea, the B & O Railroad yards and parish life at nearby St. Peter’s. Admission is free.

Re-Discover The Irish Shrine & Railroad Workers Museum 918 - 920 Lemmon Street (one block from B & O Railroad Museum)

www.irishshrine.org Open Saturday from 11-2. For tours to be specially set call 410-669-8154.

Visit the sites of work, worship and the market. Learn the glorious history.

Amhránaí Na Gaeilge (The Irishman’s Chorale)

A Baltimore City Historic District Listed on the National Register of Historic Places

art/culture

75 MUSIC

Brent Englar on the Evolution Contemporary Music Series

77 FILM

David Dudley on the Nineteen23 film series

77 THEATER

Last Exit to Pottersville

Martha Thomas on Mama’s Loshn Kugel

photo by Gaston Longet/mptvimages.com

What It’s a Wonderful Life is really telling us about American cities by david dudley

hy, exactly, does the 1946 Frank Capra fl ick It’s a Wonderful Life blanket American television screens like a new snow every December? Blame the lawyers from Republic Studios, who forgot to update the movie’s copyright protection when it lapsed in 1974. Local TV stations pounced on the royalty-free holiday fodder and put it into heavy rotation, and the rest is history. In case you have somehow avoided this three-plus-decade onslaught of seasonal redemption, here’s the précis: George Bailey, in the person of Jimmy Stewart at his most likable, reluctantly abandons his dreams of

adventure and fortune in order to shepherd his father’s two-bit building and loan business through the Depression and World War II, never leaving his dead-end hometown of Bedford Falls. Marriage, family, and middle age arrive in short order. After a financial disaster leaves George suicidal one Christmas Eve, dopey guardian angel Clarence intercedes to offer him a terrifying glimpse of what the world would have been like if he’d never been born. In its time, the movie was indifferently received, doing middling box office and leaving legendary New York Times critic

79 THE SCENE

This month’s cultural highlights

Bosley Crowther unmoved by Capra’s relentless sentimentality. But when Bedford Falls and its denizens were rediscovered by—or perhaps infl icted upon—mid-1970s viewers, the fi lm was reborn as a timeless holiday classic, a status that has only been burnished further since. This month, George and Zuzu and Clarence and the villainous Mr. Potter are as inescapable as ever. You can buy Paramount’s newly released two-disc Blu-Ray edition, which boasts a high-definition restoration of the fi lm in both color and glorious black-and-white. Or you can see a live stage version produced by the Fells Point Corner Theatre, which uses a mock-radio script to simulate a vintage wireless broadcast. Or, of course, you could just watch it for free on TV. (It airs on NBC.) Like many a cultural myth, Wonderful Life thrives by rewarding multiple interpretations. Me Decade audiences might have related best to the implicit tragedy of George’s thwarted dreams; in the greed-is-good 1980s, the film functioned as a rebuke of the more rapacious elements of Reagan-era capitalism. Modern social conservatives can enjoy the traditional family values and vigorously interventionist deity, while liberals are free to cheer George’s progressive lending policy toward Bedford Falls’ low-income immigrant population. But for any American who has grown up in a world that looks less and less like Bedford Falls, it’s hard not to see the movie as something else entirely—a cautionary fable about urban renewal and urban life in general. One of the fi lm’s most iconic scenes is the long tracking shot that follows George as he bounds exuberantly through downtown Bedford Falls on Christmas Eve. Having survived his noirish brush with the counterfactual bizarro-world of “Pottersville,” the garish sin city that would have come to pass had he never been born, George is delighted to see the place rendered decent again: There’s the one-screen Bijou movie house, once more showing The Bells of St. Mary’s instead of a

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live burlesque show; there’s the Bailey Building & Loan, for which George has traded his youthful dreams of escape. The disreputablelooking jitterbug emporium that took over the property has vanished. “Merry Christmas!” George shrieks, a man back in love with his crummy little hometown, and all it represents. Capra spared no expense creating Bedford Falls for the fi lm—the four-acre, threeblock-long set was one of the biggest ever built at the time. Full-grown oak trees were planted along the street that George runs down, to give the place some sense of authenticity, and the special-effects people concocted a realistic-looking detergent-based chemical snow to simulate upstate New York in wintertime. (The fi lm was actually shot on a studio lot in Encino in the summer.) Bedford Falls is as vital a character in the drama as West Baltimore is in The Wire. Indeed, it’s that trippy transformation to tacky Pottersville that sends poor George over the edge to pray for his dull old life back. Which makes sense: He is, after all, a housing developer, and Wonderful Life is a paean not only to the small-town virtues of family and community but also to actual small towns, or at least their design principles. With its walkable downtown and abundance of well-kept porchfront homes, Bedford Falls is the kind of city Jane Jacobs would have asked Santa for, a New Urbanist showcase of enlightened mixed-use planning. When audiences rediscovered the fi lm from the sunken living rooms of their subdivision ranchers, they saw a paradise lost of pre-suburban America. And George’s journey of redemption is also a narrative of his rejection of coldhearted modernity—he essentially turns his back on the future, choosing instead to cower in the cozy confines of the past. There are some rich ironies in this, as some critics have pointed out. George the frustrated architect dreams of designing bold new cities and building “skyscrapers a hundred stories high”; instead, he settles for creating Bailey Park, a low-income housing development of cookie-cutter homes carved from the outlying woods. (There’s no Smart Growth in 1946.) In other words, sprawlhappy George, even as he helps get a few people out of Mr. Potter’s slums, is unwittingly helping to plant the seeds of Bedford Falls’ eventual demise, if its demographic patterns follow the American fl ight-to-the-suburbs norm. Likewise, George’s commitment to the ownership society wouldn’t have saved Bailey Park from a wave of foreclosures when the economy tanked and the credit bubble burst. Bedford Falls is already shedding manufacturing jobs—George mentions that half the town is out of work since the old tool and die factory closed—and in all likelihood, downtown’s bustling sidewalks and thriving

shopfronts would be empty within a decade or two, barring further angelic meddling. As Gary Kamiya correctly noted in a clever Salon essay from 2001, Pottersville is more George’s kind of place anyway—at least, the adventure-minded young George. With its hoppin’ nightspots and permissive live-music zoning, it’s infinitely more interesting than suffocating Bedford Falls, where nosy neighbors lurk on every porch and George’s best suggestion for a wild night out with fl irty Violet is an evening hike up to Mount Bedford. (She blows him off.) Wendell Jamieson, in the New York Times last year, further advanced the theory—confirmed by an urban policy professor at NYU—that the town (in its guise as gambling-friendly Pottersville) would probably be in better shape economically had George never existed. “In the real world, Potter won,” as Kamiya writes. “We all live in Pottersville now.” The supposed model for Bedford Falls is the village of Seneca Falls in upstate New York. If you go there today, you can see the ghosts of Capra’s simulacrum in Encino: There’s the steel truss bridge that George jumps from; there are the grand Second Empire homes, dead ringers for the Bailey family’s drafty rehab. It’s a cute idea and a cute town—they hold a weekend-long It’s a Wonderful Life festival every December—but any number of nearby settlements, from Elmira to Waterloo, could stand in as well. This is the forgotten country depicted in the elegiac novels of Richard Russo, a brain-drained district of hollowed-out manufacturing burgs strung between stretches of rural nothing. The Bijou has been dark for a long time. Peter Bailey, George’s saintly dad, seems to see the writing on the wall, even as he battles mightily to keep the Potters of the world at bay. On the evening before he succumbs to his fatal stroke, he makes a half-hearted attempt to keep George around Bedford Falls instead of letting him go to college. “I couldn’t face being cooped up for the rest of my life in a shabby little office,” George complains. “I just feel like if I don’t get away, I’d bust.” The thing is, George is right—and indeed, he will bust, soon enough. Even the elder Bailey has to agree. “You get yourself an education,” he says, echoing the advice of many a parent in many a hard-luck town. “Then get out of here.” ■ —David Dudley is Urbanite’s editor-in-chief

It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play runs December 10–20 at the Fells Point Corner Theatre. For tickets, go to www. fpct.org.

art/culture MUsiC

Instant Classics

The Evolution Contemporary Music Series at An die Musik, Dec 7

Judah Adashi was thinking about music— not unusual, since he teaches at the Peabody Institute. He had noticed a lack of concert series and ensembles devoted to the music of living composers. “People are doing everything under the sun,” he says, “but if you go to a symphony concert probably one of the latest pieces you’ll hear is Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring”—which premiered in 1913. So in 2005, Adashi, a composer himself, founded a concert series focusing exclusively on living composers. The resulting Evolution Contemporary Music Series has featured an eclectic mix of up-and-coming and established composers, including those championed by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director Marin Alsop, whom Adashi praises for venturing into new repertoire. Each concert this season explores whether a composer’s national or cultural heritage leaves a discernable mark on his or her music. The series’ December offering, Across the Pond, features five composers from the United Kingdom, including Thomas Adès (whose compositions were dubbed “viscerally appealing and intellectually stimulating” by a New York Times critic) and Peabody faculty member Oscar Bettison, whose “Neolithic Airs” (a ten-minute piece for detuned violin) will receive its world premiere. “Does it matter that these are all British composers?” Adashi asks. “Is there something about the music that has an ‘Englishness’ to it?” Across the Pond will be followed by Finlandia in January and When in Rome in March. Last October’s concert, New Amsterdam, featured composers and performers based in New York City. “Their music has more pop in it,” Adashi says. “It’s a little more influenced by minimalism, the pulsing energy. Even if it’s not fast, there’s a beat.” Adashi’s main goal is to introduce composers and performers to audiences who may not be aware of the tremendous diversity of styles in contemporary music. “Definitely there’s some music that is atonal and complex, some that is conceptual and abstract, but there is lots of tonal music that is very melodic,” he says. “‘Crossover’ is a loaded word, with connotations of Pavarotti singing pop songs, but there is a lot of interesting stuff that happens between genres.” — Brent Englar For tickets, call 410-385-2638 or go to www.evolutionseries.org.

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art/culture

FiLM

Small Wonders

Nineteen23 fi lm series at 14Karat Cabaret, Dec 4

the man who saw tomorrow: doc prognosticator Orson Welles in Future Shock

The 16-millimeter film gauge was invented in 1923, but the heyday of the format was the pre-VCR postwar period, what one might call the Golden Age of the A/V Club. Every American high school had a few of those industrial-strength projectors in the closet, and educational producers, film students, and enterprising hobbyists cranked out umpteen reels of short films on every conceivable subject. Last summer, Baltimore’s Martin L. Johnson, a doctoral student in film at NYU (and an Urbanite contributor in December 2007) decided to open a window on this lost world of non-theatrical releases: He picked up a couple of old projectors on eBay and started

the Nineteen23 film series, which combines educational and industrial training films with avant-garde shorts and various arty obscurities, most exhumed from the vaults of the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Sights and Sounds Department and many unavailable on DVD. “The idea was to put together films that would definitely not be seen together,” Johnson says. Each evening’s program tackles a different theme. October’s “Automatic/Withdrawal: Machines in the Wilderness” mixed a General Motors factory film, a documentary about suburban development, and a Dadaist silent from 1924. This month, Johnson salutes the new year with films about rebirth and the

future, headlined by Future Shock, a 1972 doc based on Alvin Toffler’s pop-science bestseller. Starring a cigar-puffing, scenery-chewing Orson Welles in his voice-of-doom mode, the movie is also stone hilarious—a Day-Glo slab of grade-A ’70s techno-paranoia. As a Moog synthesizer throbs and Welles rumbles ominously about “the death of permanence,” we see jittery quick-cut montages of rioting hippies, sideburned scientists, and huge chattering punch-card computers (“This machine makes our lives move faster!”). Sharing the bill is New Architect in Town, also from 1972, an eight-minute experimental short from Baltimore’s own George Gipe and George Udel, set in the pre-Harborplace downtown. (“Final scenes of forgotten and neglected structures suggest a possible apocalyptic future,” says the Pratt catalog description.) Johnson’s got plenty more where that came from: There are more than 2,100 16mm films in the Pratt’s collection. “I’ve calculated that I’ve got ten years of material,” he says. “Easily.” —David Dudley For more information on Nineteen23, go to www.normals.com/14k.html

t He at er

Shtick

Mama’s Loshn Kugel at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore, Dec 13

The Folksbiene Troupe’s one-night performance at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore this month is Yiddish Theater 101, according to director Motl Didner. “But we don’t talk about it. We do it.” The six-person musical revue, called Mama’s Loshn Kugel (a play on words mixing the Yiddish terms for “mother tongue” and “noodle pudding”) is a hodgepodge of traditional and updated comedy routines with song and dance. Some skits will be familiar— bits involving bad telephone connections and husbands and wives arguing—reminiscent of the vaudeville and Borscht Belt humor that inspired radio and early television sitcoms. And some of the material dates back further, such as an adaptation of a short story written in the 1890s by Sholem Aleichem, whose work was the basis for Fiddler on the Roof. The piece, “A Restaurant in Kasrilevke,” follows a man as he gets off a train in a small, provincial town for something to eat. It slowly unfolds that the restaurant has no food. “I recently saw an episode of I Love Lucy that had the same plot,” Didner says.

Living history: the Folksbiene troupe brings Yiddish theater to Baltimore.

The troupe is the traveling arm of New York’s Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre; it’s the only professional Yiddish theater company in the country and, at 94 years old, the longest continuously producing Yiddish company in the world. The show will be performed in Yiddish with super-titles in both English and Russian. This, says Didner, is a feat, as the actors (all in their 20s and 30s) learned the traditional language as adults, and only one came from a household of Yiddish speakers. The language, he says, “is experiencing a revival. In my parents’ generation, being

a good American meant assimilating. But these days, people of our generation are picking it up.” And the material in the show, Didner promises “is very accessible, even beyond the Jewish community.” —Martha Thomas

For tickets to Mama’s Loshn Kugel, call 410-542-4900 ext. 621.

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U|ÄÄ|x [ÉÄ|wtç[Éâáx Help Support Baltimore's Jazz Legacy Donate to Billie Holiday House, Inc. a Baltimore-based non-profit created to honor & celebrate her legacy Your tax deductible contributions will enable our strictly volunteer organization to continue these projects: * Create a national/international traveling exhibit, The Many Faces of Billie Holiday * Establish the city-wide Billie Holiday Music Festival * Research and develop the untold story of Billie Holiday’s early life in Baltimore.

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the scene: december CLASSICAL MUSIC

Second Comings

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performs Handel’s Messiah straight up on Dec 4, then does the gospel/jazz/R&B/ rock version, Too Hot to Handel, Dec 10–12. (410-783-8000; www.bsomusic.org) If you feel the urge to belt out a “Hallelujah!” join voices with the Baltimore Choral Arts Society at their Dec 18 performance at Goucher College, 1021 Dulaney Valley Rd. (410-5237070; www.baltimorechoralarts.org)

on Dec 11. (410-704-ARTS; www.towson. edu/artscalendar/music.asp) CONTEMPORARY MUSIC

Hit Parade

New-music series Mobtown Modern takes to the streets for Unsilent Night: Participants will march from Penn Station to the Metro Gallery (the site of the afterparty, BOOM!), playing Phil Kline’s composition Unsilent Night on any number of boomboxes. Dec 12. (mobtownmodern. com/concerts/unsilent2009/)

OPERA

Top Girls

Acclaimed American soprano Renée Fleming –“the people’s diva”– gives a solo performance at the Lyric Opera House on Dec 17. Also at the Lyric, on Dec 19 and 20, is the Moscow Ballet’s spectacularly staged and costumed Great Russian Nutcracker. (140 W. Mt. Royal Ave.; 410-900-1150; www. lyricoperahouse.com) JAZZ

Feliz Cumpleaños

THEATER

Family Plot

Out of Sight is a one-woman show created and performed by juggler and theater artist Sara Felder. Drawing on shadow puppetry, circus tricks, and a “Jewish queer sensibility,” Felder tells the story of an adult lesbian’s relationship with her nearly blind mother. Dec 3–13. (45 W. Preston St.; 410752-8558; www.theatreproject.org)

Bad Santa

Legendary Latin jazz pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri celebrates his 73rd birthday with a performance at An die Musik, with Brian Lynch on trumpet and Luques Curtis on bass. Dec 18 and 19. (409 N. Charles St., second floor; 410-385-2638; www. andiemusiklive.com)

Center Stage associate artist Robert Dorfman stars in the 1996 stage adaptation of The Santaland Diaries, David Sedaris’ account of his unhappy tenure as an elf named Crumpet at Macy’s department store. Dec 8–20. (700 N. Calvert St.; 410332-0033; www.centerstage.org)

Jazz pianist and composer Larry Willis has worked with some of the biggest names in the industry: Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Jackie McLean. He performs at the Eubie Blake Jazz Center on Dec 20, which also happens to be his birthday. For tickets, call 410-922-0752. (847 N. Howard St.; www. eubieblake.org)

Strings Attached

Jazz Man

Bookending his residency at Towson University, jazz drummer and composer John Hollenbeck performs his original compositions, first with his Claudia Quintet on Dec 7 and then accompanied by a student ensemble

Vermont-based National Marionette Theatre–one of the oldest continuously running marionette companies in the country–brings the classic fairy tale Hansel and Gretel to Howard Community College (10901 Little Patuxent Pkwy.), via the Candlelight Concert Society. Dec 13. (410-480-9950; www. candlelightconcerts.org) DANCE

Group Project

For its winter concert, Transversing Time, Towson University’s dance company is joined by an all-star lineup of guests.

Community arts nonprofit Art on Purpose partnered with local organizations that serve Baltimore’s immigrants, refugees, and homeless for Twenty Years of Wandering. Developed with the exhibition Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece—up at the Walters Art Museum (600 N. Charles St.) through Jan 3—the show features artwork (including the pictured mural, painted by clients of Health Care for the Homeless) created by individuals who, like the Greek hero Odysseus, have experienced exile from their homes. Through Jan 3; receptions Dec 6 and 13. (410-243-4750; www.artonpurpose.org) Compiled by Marianne K. Amoss

Pieces to be performed include Shades of the Soul, with an original score by Jason Armstrong Baker and beatbox artist Shodekeh (see Urbanite, March ’09), and Legends … Volume I, choreographed by Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell, Vincent E. Thomas, and Runqiao Du to the music of James Brown and Michael Jackson. Dec 4–6. (410-704-2787; www.towson.edu/artscalendar/dance.asp) VISUAL ART

Mapmaking

Renee Van der Stelt’s paper creations employ pinpricks, lights, and graphite to capture bird and bat migration patterns and the movement of clouds and light. On view at Creative Alliance Dec 3–19.

Mass Appeal

The Cornaro Missal, an elaborate illuminated manuscript, contains the prayers and responses of the Roman Catholic Mass. Commissioned in the 16th century by Cardinal Patriarch Marco Cornaro and created by an anonymous Italian artist, the missal is displayed at the Walters Art Museum as part of the exhibit The Christmas Story: Picturing the Birth of Christ in Medieval Manuscripts. Dec 5–Feb 28. (600 N. Charles St.; 410-547-9000; www. thewalters.org)

art/culture ASAP

The Baltimore Museum of Art teamed up with the Baltimore branch of the 48 Hour Film Project for A Cinematic Celebration of Poe. Amateur and professional filmmakers got forty-eight hours to create short movies, using a character and a line of dialogue from a Poe story, plus one theme from the BMA’s exhibition Edgar Allan Poe: A Baltimore Icon, which runs through Jan 17. The finished films screen at the museum on Dec 4 and 11. (10 Art Museum Dr.; 443-573-1700; www.artbma.org) CRAFT MARTS

Made by Hand

Those looking to shop local and crafty have several options this season. Some highlights: Charm City Craft Mafia’s Holiday Heap at 2640 Space on Dec 5 (2640 St. Paul St.; www.charmcitycraftmafia. com); Maryland Institute College of Art’s Art Market, featuring fine art and gifts handmade by school students, faculty, and alums, Dec 9–12 (1300 Mount Royal Ave.; 410-225-2300; www.mica.edu); and School 33’s Last Minute Maul, featuring “locally crafted art no bigger than a fruitcake,” on Dec 13 (1427 Light St.; 410-396-4641; www.school33.org). LITERARY

FILM

Life Story

For Coming/Inside/Out, local filmmaker Catherine Pancake (see Urbanite, March ’09) screens four short videos inspired by writer Aldous Huxley (of Brave New World fame), one of which is the result of a collaboration with her fiancée, poet and medical student Miriam Stewart. At Creative Alliance’s CAmm A/V Cart through Dec 19.

Bunny Hop

Local small press Publishing Genius is releasing Baltimore bard Joseph Young’s new book of micro-fiction, Easter Rabbit, this month. There’s a release party on Dec 12 at the Hexagon Space (1825 N. Charles St.), where theatrical and musical pieces inspired by the tales in the book will be performed. (www.publishing genius.com)

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urbanite december 09

The Immaterialist continued from page 39

What do you think is the role of personal responsibility as opposed to social action in addressing all this?

I really am critical of the lists of the ten simple things you can do to save the planet, because what we need is not simple. I saw a book recently—How to Save the Planet Without Ever Leaving Your Desk. And I thought, That’s dumb. The first thing you should do is leave your desk. So I’ve resisted making lists of ten simple things you could do, although people ask me for this constantly. I did make the one list that’s on the website, but it’s sort of tongue-in-cheek, because it says yes, you should change your light bulbs, but then you should change your paradigms; yes, you should recycle your waste, but then you should recycle your elected officials. Of course individual actions are good and of course we should be responsible in our lives. But those kinds of things—recycling, changing a light bulb, carrying your own [shopping] bag and [water] bottle—are not political acts. Those are just things we should just do as a matter of course. It’s like flossing your teeth. Do them, but we don’t need to keep patting each other on the back. What you really need to do to make change is to come together with others and engage in the political process. Be a citizen, not just a consumer.

Do you have an optimistic outlook on where this is all going?

More than optimistic. I am absolutely confident that things are going to change. I think that people are basically smart and competent and good, and that as more of us wake up to the reality of what’s happening, which is increasingly hard to ignore, we’re going to do the right thing; we’re going to turn things around and create a sustainable and just and joyful planet. Everywhere I go there are people saying “Enough.” And there are more of us than there are of them. Now, getting corporations out of politics would be an enormously useful first step, but I think these things are related. I’ve come to see that in all of our identity, we have two different parts of ourselves. We have a consumer self and a citizen self. And that consumer self is spoken to and validated and nurtured from day one, so that muscle is really well developed. We all know how to be consumers; we know how to get online right now and get any product from anywhere in the world delivered to our door. And one of the things about familiarity is it can lull us into staying there. So we stay in this consumer realm. Meanwhile, the citizen part of our self, our citizen muscle, has atrophied. I really see this when I show The Story of Stuff at public events. Somebody will almost always raise their hand and say, “What can I buy differently to solve this problem?” And I tell them, You know what? You can’t. Because the solutions that we need are not for sale. Even at Whole Foods. ■ On the air: Listen to a podcast of the full interview with Annie Leonard at www.steinershow.org or tune in to The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on December 1.

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See short films created in a matter of days— each with a line of dialogue, a prop & a character from a Poe story for inspiration. Don’t miss this exciting evening! In collaboration with the Baltimore 48 Hour Film Project.

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Odilon Redon. Detail, The Eye (Vision). 1881. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Nelson and Juanita Greif Gutman Fund, BMA 1966.29 Félix Vallotton. Detail, To Edgar Poe. 1894. The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, BMA 1950.12.375

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Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum was born in Mochudi, Botswana, and grew up in Africa and southeast Asia. She came to the United States in 1998 and has earned degrees at both the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Maryland Institute College of Art. The work shown here is part of a series of recent collages that follow the mythical adventures of Asme, the artist’s alter ego, a heroine in search of place and self. As Sunstrum writes in an e-mail, “She can exist as a single body or she can replicate to become many selves existing in the same space and time.” And what of the Canada goose, with its reference to travel and migration, and of its entanglement with one of the characters in the foreground (one of the forms of Asme)? Are they about to migrate, to seek yet another level of place and self? Perhaps the tropical flamingos and the northern geese are also manifestations of the bond between the artist and her self-confessed search for those things that remain in flux in our lives—those things, as she states, that are “always shifting between boundaries, between cultures, between geographies, between histories, between bodies. These collaged landscapes, then, become re-imaginings of all of those places I have experienced growing up—cutting and splicing bits of landscapes I remembered, landscapes I still dreamed of, and landscapes that were total inventions.” —Alex Castro

urbanite december 09

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum We Wanderers 2008 Collage with drawing and glass beads 18 x 24 inches

I THOUGHT I’D HAVE TO DO THIS ALL ON MY OWN. I’m proud to be the first person in my family to pursue higher education. However, I didn’t do it alone. I had an immense amount of support from the university—my Graduation TeamSM helped me stay on track, my instructors were always available, and there were countless resources available on campus. I’m proud of earning my degree in business management and I’m grateful to those who helped me make it happen.

I AM A PHOENIX COLUMBIA • GREENBELT • ROCKVILLE • TIMONIUM 800.490.1627 • phoenix.edu/maryland UNIVERSITY OF PHOENIX IS A FULLY ACCREDITED INSTITUTION OF HIGHER LEARNING. © 2009 University of Phoenix, Inc. All rights reserved.

Clean Water is a Right Worth Fighting For. The Chesapeake Bay is a national treasure according to President Obama and many, many others. But, it is so polluted that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officially lists it as â&#x20AC;&#x153;impaired.â&#x20AC;? This is a national disgrace. There is a solution. In October, Senator Ben Cardin and Congressman Elijah Cummings introduced the Chesapeake Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration Act to put federal muscle behind the Chesapeake Bay section of the federal Clean Water Act. This important legislation would also add strong accountability, clear deadlines, enforceable penalties, and additional funds to reduce pollution. Make your voice heard. Learn more about the bills and urge your representatives for support. Join The Biggest Fight For Clean Water This Nation Has Ever Seen. cbf.org/fight

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