February 2012 Issue

DUSTIN WONG: CIRCLES OF LIFE · COLLEGE HOOPS · ON THE STREET WITH RAFAEL ALVAREZ february 2 0 1 2 no. 9 2

N I G N I K WAL E N O E M SO S E O H S ELSE’S

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this month

#92 February 2012

features 32

32

cents

feature

41

Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes

about the cover: Photo by J.M. Giordano “Shoes hanging from power lines are a common sight across Baltimore City,” says Art Director Bradley Hamblin.

“Why are they there? Who do they belong to? Some believe it’s a bullying tactic, while others believe they represent someone who has passed away in the neighborhood.

Others say they represent a place where drugs are sold.

Whatever they symbolize, it’s easy to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes that hang overhead [“Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes,” p. 32].

I liked the idea of the shoes because it holds conceptual meaning as well as a tangible quality you can connect with.

It’s a symbol that evokes emotions and challenges you to ask a question.”

Small Enough to Care

by Martha Thomas Many Baltimore groups believe the answer to some of our local problems lies in teaching empathy. The latest neuroscience research indicates they may be on to something.

21

by Michael Anft With a brewing zeitgeist against too-big-to-fail banks, many are turning to community banks and credit unions. Will local institutions reap lasting benefits?

departments 7

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

49

web extras

more online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com

on the air

Urbanite on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM February 9: East Baltimore native and poet Afaa Michael Weaver February 23: The John Carlos Story with sportswriter Dave Zirin

food + drink

21 Jumping through Hoops

by Jeff Seidel At schools like Coppin State and Morgan State, success on the hardwood can translate into free advertising that’s hard to beat.

53 The Biscuit Effect

by Michelle Gienow Blacksauce Kitchen takes Baltimore

23 25 27 29

——

Update Oracle of East Baltimore Building Blocks Voices

——

——

fiction

47 Jenny Jump Boseman

by Charles Talkoff

—— space

49 House Love

by Rebecca Messner How one couple undid a decade’s worth of frat-boy damage and found a haven for their relationship in a Charles Village Victorian.

57 Dining Reviews 59 Wine & Spirits

arts + culture

61 The Circles of Life

by Brandon Weigel For guitarist Dustin Wong, the magic happens when things come together.

63 Book 65 History 65 Visual Arts

—— 67 The Scene —— 74 Eye to Eye

February 28: The science of empathy—where is it being taught in Baltimore?

Urbanite #92 february 2012 5

issue 92: february 2012 publisher Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com general manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com editor-in-chief Ron Cassie Ron@urbanitebaltimore.com assistant editor Rebecca Messner Rebecca@urbanitebaltimore.com digital media editor Andrew Zaleski Andrew@urbanitebaltimore.com editor-at-large David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com online editors food/drink: Tracey Middlekauff Tracey@urbanitebaltimore.com arts/culture: Cara Ober Cara@urbanitebaltimore.com proofreader Robin T. Reid contributing writers Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Michael Corbin, Heather Dewar, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Mat Edelson, Lionel Foster, Brennen Jensen, Michelle Gienow, Clinton Macsherry, Richard O’Mara, Robin T. Reid, Andrew Reiner, Martha Thomas, Baynard Woods, Michael Yockel, Mary K. Zajac editorial interns Lindsay Bottos-Sewell, Anissa Elmerraji, Krishana Davis production manager Belle Gossett Belle@urbanitebaltimore.com art director Bradley Hamblin Bradley@urbanitebaltimore.com staff photographer J.M. Giordano Joe@urbanitebaltimore.com

real

production interns Sarah Thrower, Wen Xiong senior account executives Catherine Bowen Catherine@urbanitebaltimore.com Freda Ferguson Freda@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com account executive Natalie Richardson Natalie@urbanitebaltimore.com sales marketing associate Erin Albright Erin@urbanitebaltimore.com advertising/sales/marketing intern Adrienne Price

People. Results.

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bottom Photo by William Whear; middle .TOP AND Ron Cassie PHOTOS by Sarah Thrower

contributors

editor’s note

Rafael Alvarez spent twenty years working the rewrite and urban folklore beats on the city desk at the Baltimore Sun, experience that served him well as a staff writer on the HBO drama The Wire. In reporting the story on poet Afaa Michael Weaver, Alvarez was “thrilled to learn that there exists a place in Baltimore called the Apache Lounge.”

Ron Cassie

Jeff Seidel is a longtime contributor to the Baltimore Sun and MLB. com. What surprised him in reporting “Jumping Through Hoops” was how much just an appearance in the NCAA Tournament can mean to a state or regional school. “George Mason said it received over $5 million in free advertising during its surprising run to the Final Four in 2006,” Seidel notes. “[But] smaller, regional schools like Coppin and Morgan benefit from an appearance in the tournament, regardless of the outcome.”

Frequent contributor

Martha Thomas, who wrote this month’s feature story on empathy, has lived in Baltimore for a dozen years. Her work has also appeared in the Washington Post and Baltimore magazine. Thomas remembers, when her daughter was younger, being struck by her empathy. “Kids seem so full of natural empathy—just as they’re comfortable sitting cross-legged on the floor or hanging upside down on the jungle gym,” she says.

it turns out that “empathy,” the theme of this month’s feature story, is a fairly recent addition to the English language. Psychologist Edward Titchener introduced empathy into the English language a hundred years ago, translating the German term einfühlung or “feeling into.” At least that’s what the everhandy Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says.

In The Better Angels Of Our Nature, Harvard professor Stephen Pinker notes empathy is not just a new word, but that its definition has also changed over its (relatively) short history. Originally, empathy represented the ability to put oneself into the position of another—but only in a mechanical sense. For example, imagining the physical sensation someone else experiences as they put a finger into a candle flame.

Later empathy came to refer to our ability to perceive things through the eyes of another person and read their emotional state while responding out of altruistic concern. It’s ironic then, that while the word empathy is new to our language—recent neuroscience studies show the capacity to empathize (in its current understanding) is deeply rooted in the human brain and a millionsyear-old trait shared with common ancestors, like primates and rats. Yes, those much-maligned city creatures will help each other out of traps if given the chance and share subsequent rewards, like yummy sweets. That kind of empathy may go a long way toward explaining their ability—and ours—to thrive.

Contributing writer Martha Thomas tracks down research around empathy and also studies regarding the effects the Internet and computer technology may have on the development of empathy in individuals, particularly kids and young adults. She looks in Baltimore where psychologists, educators, pastors— even football coaches—now teach empathy development as a means to tackle such problems as juvenile crime and neighborhood conflicts. It’s work that may be needed more than ever as iPads, PDAs, and other gadgets continually compromise genuine face time.

Related to our empathy theme, we interview 1968 Mexico City Olympic Medalist John Carlos, who has published a biography with sportswriter Dave Zirin. With Tommie Smith, Carlos created one of the iconic images of the civil rights era, symbolically protesting discrimination and poverty on the medal stand after they finished first and third, respectively, in the 200-meter run.

Elsewhere, writer Michael Anft examines the locavore banking trend, as the big bank backlash takes hold here. In our “Baltimore Observed” section, favorite son Rafael Alvarez profiles acclaimed poet Afaa Michael Weaver, an East Baltimore native described as the African American successor to Walt Whitman. And Assistant Editor Rebecca Messner writes about a couple’s rescue and rehab of a beer-soaked, fraternity-thrashed, three-bedroom Victorian home in Charles Village that had been the bane of its neighborhood for a decade.

In terms of taste (that’s meant literally), turn to page 53 for what can only be called one of the most stunning portraits of a pork barbeque sandwich I’ve ever seen. Blacksauce Kitchen owner Damian Mosley not only creates great cuisine, but he’s got a compelling backstory, which writer Michelle Gienow traces from Virginia to West Africa, Brooklyn, and Baltimore. Along the same lines, in an almost spiritual portrait of a different kind of artist, writer Brandon Wiegel highlights the unique solo music of MICA-trained sculptor and self-taught guitarist Dustin Wong, formerly of Ecstatic Sunshine and recently defunct spazart-rock group Ponytail.

Finally, there’s also stuff about Chick Beer, Seed Bombs, and an eco-focused cookbook, Planet Kitchen Table, in our “Goods” section.

Overall, plenty in this issue to help us manage this month as the long winter sets in. And remember, we’re all going through this together. Empathize.

Coming next month

Charting a new Course Who are Baltimore’s changemakers?

Urbanite #92 february 2012 7

Y ECT · PAR KIN G MA DE EAS · THE FOU R SEA SON S EFF BAL TIM ORE ’S TOP CHE FS o. 91 12 issue n january 20

what you’re saying

JOB TOW N: GET TIN G A PIE CE OF D.C .’S ACT ION

or die?

Why do cities grow at It’s all in the m h.

I say, ‘DC is where the opportunities are.’ I have chosen to take the commute in pursuit of career advancement. However, my ambitions have come at a cost. I can no longer enjoy a watching the sunset from my backyard deck, help organize an afterschool PTA event, or meet friends for an early dinner in Canton.

Don’t get me wrong; I love my job and I am grateful to be employed. However, I wish there were more opportunities locally.

—Jennifer Williams

ve i l a e v i h e h t k e e ping A New, New Year’s Resolution Re: “New Year’s Resolution,” Michael Corbin’s final post on our online Crime & Punishment blog: Baltimore journalism needs more of @mrcx05’s critical writing and perspective

well, that it amazes me that that template isn’t followed. A lot of the issues are poverty, lack of access to services, a reduction in arts programs, and low-quality education systems that people think can be fixed overnight. I think, begin to fix those systems and the improvements will follow.

—Cherrie Woods

This article asks a good question about missed opportunities to bring more civil servant type jobs to Baltimore from booming DC. Unfortunately it seems not much time could be spent researching the subject, and the article ends with a few speculative arguments.

The article states the city is not aggressively politicking for more federal jobs. Why not? How about a follow-up article with more information about who the Downtown Partnership is, and what our elected officials are, or are not, doing in this arena and why?

—mje

Rather than try to be a suburb of DC, why not just slash taxes like DC has and grow our own economy?

—Not a DC suburb

—@RDFoxworth

Top Chefs Re: “The Young and the Restless,” Jan. ’11, about Baltimore’s vanguard of young chefs:

Is It Something We Said?

Re: “Our Better Half,” Jan. ’11, David Dudley’s essay about Baltimoreans who commute to Washington, D.C., to work:

hopefully now some of us young chefs will get exposed & recognized for not only cooking, but restauratuering

we know exactly what to do to fix 80 percent of Baltimore but there’s no will to do so ... and just as important: no money.

—@ajagtap

Fine Dining Re: “Waterfront Kitchen,” Jan. ’11, our dining review of the new restaurant on Thames Street: I had lunch there and the food is excellent … That place will be great this spring when you can sit outside.

—Wally Pinkard

—@jedweeks

It’s All in the Math Re: “C1ty by NuMb3r5,” Jan. ’11, about how we can grow Baltimore into a better city: This is a great article ... but it seems like the same conversation is had over and over and over again. There are so many examples of cities that were manufacturing-based that revamped themselves and are now doing

Without the “will,” the money is just wasted resources.

—@RDFoxworth

I am one of the invisible members of Baltimore residents who commute to D.C. via Marc Train and the Washington Metro system. The average cost of my monthly commute is $230, and [it’s] roughly two hours one-way, per day. People ask why I do it, and

Startup Love Re: “Parking Authorities,” Jan. ’11, about Baltimore’s peer-to-peer parking service, Parking Panda, and “The Young and the Restless,” Jan. ’11, about the city’s young chefs: Awesome to see @ParkingPanda and @ajagtap in Jan’s issue of @UrbaniteMD. Also, really dig the integration with Issuu!

—@MikeMakes

Join the conversation. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@UrbaniteMD).

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

Urbanite #92 february 2012 9

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what you’re writing

photo by J.M. Giordano

Selling Out

i’m picking up eggs, salsa, and AA batteries, which means I have to see those women in the checkout isle, the women on the magazine covers. The women being sold alongside cinnamon Altoids and travel-sized bottles of hand-sanitizer. The conveyer belt hums as it drags my few groceries towards a thick-necked clerk, his face ruddy and pocked.

He asks me if I have a club card, but I don’t hear him.

I’m fixated on the gloss of the magazine covers. It makes the women look even more synthetic. Each image has bleached teeth and surgically inflated lips and digitally expanded pupils, and they all look disturbingly glamorous. Inhuman. Photoshop has eliminated all of biology’s natural asymmetries. How do other people find them beautiful? These women have

been airbrushed into the uncanny valley. It’s disturbing.

The clerk asks a second time, “Hey, buddy, you got a club card?”

“No. I don’t have one.”

“You wanna just give me your phone number? I can—“ Before he can finish his question, I give him my number to save a few cents and I look back toward the women on the magazines. Each one laughing, pouting, lip-biting, tugging at her clothes, or tugging at her hair to present herself to whomever will see her. Personal authenticity for the adoration of strangers. I guess that’s the trade those women agree to, that’s their price. It seems cheap.

The clerk nearly shouts, “Hey, buddy!”

“Huh? Oh, right. Sorry.” I try to hand him my debit card, but he simply points to the scanner in front of me. “Ah. OK.” I swipe my card, embarrassed, and enter my pin.

“Some good-lookin’ covers this month, huh?”

The clerk tilts his head toward the magazines and a smirk creeps up the left side of his mouth.

I want to tell him how reviled I am by the distortion of beautiful people and the censorship of imperfections. But I don’t like confrontation.

And I should really be getting home, anyway. I blurt out, “Yeah, well, they’ve got good looking women.”

Avoiding eye contact, I grab my groceries and head for the door. Stepping outside, my feet hit the asphalt of the parking lot. I hear myself saying to the clerk, They’ve got good-looking women. Suddenly, in silence, I Urbanite #92 february 2012 11

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what you’re writing worry that I’m cheaper than the women on the magazine covers.

—Paul Harne is a 23-year-old graudate student in Towson University’s professional writing program. He grew up in the rural areas outside of Baltimore and recently moved into the city. This is the first piece he has submitted for publication.

“dear allan,” my letter begins, “This is to inform you of my intent to sell the house, due to the hefty mortgage payment that I am no longer able to sustain.” I set forth the timeline and assure my ex-husband that I will notify him of all matters related to the sale of the house.

Clipboard in hand, I walk from room to room, assessing the condition of the house, listing any repairs to be performed prior to engaging the services of a real estate agent. The walls need a fresh coat of paint. I seal the split in the kitchen floor seam. The decaying bay window façade was replaced last year. I have been careful not to allow the house to fall into disrepair.

The process of letting go is difficult—much more so than I had imagined. This house holds some bad memories for me. But it was also my dream house in the early days, a place of dinner parties and garden experiments, of space and nature.

“Be realistic,” the real estate agent says.

“The house has five bedrooms, a huge country kitchen, and a luxury master bathroom, but you have to recognize the shortcomings as well. It’s a large house without either a deck or a finished basement. Your gardens are lovely, but a winter market date eliminates that as a selling point.”

I load fresh film in my camera and capture the beauty of the backyard in autumn, the Bradford pear trees and crabapple trees with their deep-red leaves, the goldenrod dusting the hillside, and the perfection of the rose garden still blooming in early November. I select four shots from this final sentimental memorial to my home and set them on the kitchen counter.

—Lauren Beth Eisenberg Davis is coordinator of the Maryland Writers Association Nonfiction Group.

i made a promise that I wouldn’t move out until the plant touched the ceiling.

It was one of those $1 tropical-looking plants from Ikea, and after I placed it on the top of my bookshelf it really flourished. It probably had less than 6 inches to go before the pointy ends of its leaves reached the top of the room. I figured in the amount of time it would need to grow I would be married.

My plant didn’t stand a chance, although I gave it extra care in the hopes of speeding up its growth. Financially it made more sense to move, and no one seemed to understand my hesitancy to leave.

“You’re already engaged, so you know you’re going to be living with him for the rest of your life. Why not start now?”

“You have sleepovers all the time anyway.

What’s the difference?”

“Don’t you want to spend as much time with him as you can?”

“Think of how much money you would save to spend on the wedding!”

In the end, with a few inches to spare and feelings of regret, I gave in. I moved out, and I took my plant with me.

As a kid, my mom sat me down for a very serious talk about not moving in with someone until after the wedding. It stuck with me so much that if I were to walk back into the McDonalds where the conversation took place, I would be able to identify the exact plastic orange seat I had been sitting on. I was shocked to learn that my perfect Catholic mother had lived with my father before they were married.

As a teen, I was even more shocked to learn of my parents’ impending divorce.

Every night I say a prayer that my plant will forgive me.

box. Talk mostly was about the shortcomings of our parents and the inevitable justice that would crash down upon them. Credit would come due, cheap drywall would crack, Reaganomics would implode.

Our parents went from confusion, to concern, to fury. One chilly evening in the spring, we convened for a campout, minus one. When we’d stopped by to pick him up, his father answered the door, telling us Ted was not available though we could see him cowering in the shadows. Subsequent calls over the weekend were unsuccessful, blocked by his father. Ted was busy. Studying. In the shower. Out with friends.

It did not surprise us to see Ted in school on Monday wearing pleated khakis, a peachcolored Polo, and boat shoes. His hair had been snipped stylishly. He had two dark stitches in his bottom lip and a black eye. When we stood before him and wordlessly stared, he told us he’d fallen down the stairs. A girl with a blond ponytail came up and took his arm. We nodded and turned away, but felt Ted’s eyes on our backs.

—Merritt Pridgeon lives in Mt. Washington with her husband, son, and naughty cat. When she worked as an attorney and law clerk, she drafted briefs and opinions.

Her legal career now on hold, she enjoys writing pieces that require no citations.

—Name withheld

we despised our parents— how they longingly talked of the days of tie-dyed T-shirts, Woodstock, antiwar protests, JFK, and MLK, but now wore Polo, drove cars with leather seats, and had probably voted for Reagan. Just like everyone else in the 1980s, their wallets were thick with credit cards. The watchdogs had been tamed and were growing fat.

They pressured us to take SAT prep courses and wanted to hire tutors for us when red flags punctuated the pre-test results. On Friday nights, they encouraged us to go to the mall like other kids—shop at the Gap. They opened their finished basements to us to watch movies on the VCR. All these beige-carpeted caves had bars stocked with Absolut vodka. They fed us microwave popcorn.

There were eight of us. We’d been drawn together freshman year, each of us part of no prior group. We were a mishmash of camos, gothic black, army boots, political T-shirts, moccasins, unkempt hair, and patchouli. On weekends, we liked to camp out, though many of our spots were being cleared of trees for new McMansions with their sidewalk-less streets all curling into cul-de-sacs. We warmed our hands over bonfires and listened to the Doors, 10,000 Maniacs, and the Flaming Lips on the boom

“What You’re Writing” is the place for creative nonfiction from our readers. Each month we pick a topic. Use the topic as a springboard into your own life and send us a true story inspired by that month’s theme. Only previously unpublished, nonfiction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We reserve the right to edit heavily for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. Only one submission per topic, please.

Send your essay to Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211, or e-mail it to What YoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore.com. Submissions should be shorter than 400 words. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned.

Topic Deadline Publication Party On Feb. 13, 2012 April 2012 Bloom March 12, 2012 May 2012 Riot April 9, 2012 June 2012

Urbanite #92 february 2012 13

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1 February 2, 7–8:30 P.M..

3 February 10–12

5 February 24–26

ARTS/SCIENCE

COMMUNITY/ARTS/CULTURE

STYLE/SHOPPING

Strathmore, in its new lecture series “Arts and the Brain,” explores what happens in the nebulous gray matter of our minds when with the arts. In “The Mature Amateur: Creativity and the Aging Brain,” the series features Dr. Bruce Miller (pictured) and Gay Powell Hanna, executive director of the National Center for Creative Aging.

Just around the time we start to really hate winter, Area 405 gives us a reason to celebrate it. The Winter Festival of Wonders is “a three-day celebration of Wonder, Magic & Play,” featuring a Wizards’ Ball, live painting, belly dancers, a magic show, a juggling and tightrope workshop, and performances by ellen cherry and Telesma, among others.

The American Craft Council Show returns to the Baltimore Convention Center, presenting some of America’s highest quality handmade crafts. Peruse hundreds of booths offering goods from kaleidoscopes to handturned wood sculpture, with items ranging in price from less than $100 to more than $10,000.

$21, members $18.90 The Mansion at Strathmore 10701 Rockville Pike, Rockville 301-581-5100 www.strathmore.org

Free, nighttime events $10, festival pass $25 Area 405 405 E. Oliver St. 410-528-1968 www.wfow.info

2 February 4, 6 P.M.

4 February 16, 7–9 P.M.

$16–$3, American Craft Council members and children free, after 5 p.m. on Friday $5 Baltimore Convention Center 1 W. Pratt St. 410-649-7000 www.craftcouncil.org/baltimore

MUSIC/FILM

HISTORY/GREEN/SUSTAINABLE

In celebration of Bob Marley’s birthday, the Creative Alliance hosts an evening-long tribute to reggae. The night kicks off with the Baltimore premiere of Holding on to Jah: The Genesis of a Revolution, a documentary about the rise of reggae through the eyes of the genre’s musicians. Stay for authentic Jamaican cuisine and a night of dancing, featuring music by Proverbs Reggae Band.

As part of the Village Learning Place’s Baltimore History Evenings, join Nicole King, assistant professor of American studies at University of Maryland Baltimore County for “Mapping Baybrook: Environmental Justice in Industrial South Baltimore,” which will explore the history of far south Baltimore and the pre-industrial communities that once existed there.

$15, members $10 The Creative Alliance 3134 Eastern Ave. 410-276-1651 www.creativealliance.org

Free 2521 St. Paul St. 410-235-2210 www.villagelearningplace.org For more events, see the Scene on page 67.

6 February 24, 8 P.M. MUSIC/PHOTOGRAPHY

Soulful Symphony, the new residence ensemble at the Hippodrome Theatre, presents Evolution of a People, an evening of music and photography celebrating every facet of African American Culture. The vision of Artistic Director Darin Atwater, the score is complemented by a narrative of photos

by Ellis Marsalis III, son of acclaimed jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis Jr. $30–$65 The Hippodrome 12 N. Eutaw St. 410-837-7400 www.france-merrickpac.com Urbanite #92 february 2012 15

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the goods

what ’s new in style, shopping & beyond

Iconic Collage

anissa elmerraji

Photos (clockwise from top left): Photo by sarah thrower; photo by Dave Lewis ; no photo credit

Something clicked for Mark Cottman when, in 1999, he gave up a career as an architectural engineer and started painting full-time. The Baltimore native now runs the Mark Cottman Gallery (1014 S. Charles St., 443-872-0943, www. markcottmangallery.com) in Federal Hill where he showcases artwork like This is Baltimore!—a collage of local icons painted with acrylic in striking primary colors. Cottman describes the piece, which abounds with historical landmarks like Lexington Market, the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower and Fort McHenry—as a celebration of the city.

Curious about Cottman’s favorite Baltimore landmark?

It’s his gallery on Charles Street, where lithographs of This is Baltimore! are available for $25–$30.

One for the Ladies

krishana davis After Easton resident Shazz Lewis realized that none of the more than 400 different beers sold in her husband’s beer cooler catered to her as a woman, she decided to make her own. Chick Beer (www.chickbeer.com), a 97-calorie light beer brewed in Wisconsin, is now being served in Baltimore. The beer’s label shows a little black dress, with “Witness the Chickness!” printed at the bottom. Boasting to be “a beer created by a woman, for a woman,” Chick Beer will be available in more than a dozen states this year.

A New Fit

krishana davis Relocating in September from Lynne’s Gifts to its own storefront on “The Avenue,” K Staton Boutique (1007A W. 36th St.; 410-400-9113; www.kstaton.com) has become the “one-stop shop” for women with curves, says owner Jade Greer. With three times the space, Greer has incorporated jewelry and sexy, feminine intimates by Elomi, a UK-based brand. Last month, K Staton Boutique began offering three annual FIT 101 classes, designed to help plus-sized women understand their body types and select flattering clothing.

Urbanite #92 february 2012 17

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the goods

Good Graffiti

anissa elmerraji

Photos (clockwise from top left): photo by Brian Slagle; Cover Design by Martha Lucius, Landscape Photo by Eric Salsbery;

Is it still vandalism if you use plants instead of paint? That might be a question to ask painter and guerilla gardener Brian Slagle (www.etsy.com/people/Twinbees), founder of Lucy and Amelia, a Frederick company that specializes in Seed Bombs. The idea, says Slagle, is to fill spaces that need some love, like construction sites and abandoned lots, with bursts of color and life. Slagle mixes red powdered clay, organic compost, seeds, cayenne pepper (a bug deterrent), and water into a doughy ball that can be hurled over fences and into flowerpots and backyards. A few weeks later, life sprouts in the form of wildflowers, or—if you choose the Salad Bomb—lunch.

eCuisine

anissa elmerraji Author, food blogger, and cook Kerry Dunnington is best known for her cheese curry pâté with plum sauce, a decadent addition to baked chicken or broiled fish. The recipe, among other favorites, can be found in the Baltimore native’s second cookbook, Planet Kitchen Table, an eco-focused guide for making more than 200 recipes that is, fittingly, sold as an eBook only through www.smashwords.com and Amazon for Kindle ($9.99). Catering to audiences with all levels of cooking experience, the book spans every cooking category, including main dishes (curried carrot and peanut soup with coconut shrimp “croutons”) and sweet treats (mango and cardamom coffee cake with almond strudel).

Bags With a Purpose

krishana davis Sherry Wolf is back splitting time between Maryland and New York designing her eponymous handbag line (www. sherrywolf.com). She took a two-year hiatus after daughter Chelsea Rae Propper’s death following a reaction to a date rape drug. Originally launched in 2004, Wolf’s bags have been seen on such celebrities as Britney Spears, Oprah Winfrey, the Olsen twins, and Cameron Diaz. Wolf now dedicates one handbag from each collection in memory of her daughter, with sales proceeds going to the Bereaved Parents of the USA, an organization designed to help parents and families deal with the loss of a child.

Urbanite #92 february 2012 19

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Recognizing outstanding community leaders and organizations making a difference in the lives of young people.

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baltimore observed

sports / update / people / housing / voices

Jumping Through Hoops Photo by j.m. Giordano

Success on the hardwood can translate into free advertising that’s hard to beat for local colleges. But there’s potential pitfalls, too.

By Jeff Seidel

Hoop dreams: Coppin State University’s men’s basketball team has qualified for the NCAA tournament four times under head coach Ron “Fang” Mitchell.

it was more than a decade ago, but Kevin Paige, then Coppin State’s assistant director of media relations for athletics, still recalls the moment very clearly. The women’s basketball team was relaxing in the stands at the University of Louisville after losing to the Cardinals, killing time before the men’s team played in the second part of that night’s doubleheader.

Several Louisville fan eventually grew curious about Coppin State and wandered over, with one inquiring “Where’s Choppin?” After gently pointing out the school’s correct name, the women’s team explained the campus was located in Baltimore. Suddenly, the light went on for the Louisville fan: “Oh, you’re the school that beat South Carolina in the NCAA tournament in 1997.”

Paige still laughs when telling the story. “This happened all the time,” he says. “Whenever we went on the road, people always seemed to remember what the men’s team did against South Carolina. ‘Oh, OK, you’re the school that beat South Carolina in the tournament and almost beat Texas.’”

A No. 15 seed upsetting a No. 2 seed at the start of March Madness, then losing by one point to Texas a few days later—all on national television? Suddenly, the whole country wanted to know everything about Coppin State.

More recently, Morgan State enjoyed a similar blast of publicity when its men’s team qualified for the NCAA tournament in 2009 and 2010.

Next month, both of the schools’ men’s teams expect to be fighting for the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference championship, which results in an

automatic NCAA tournament bid. Both schools played tough on the road against bigger competition in this early in the season, with Morgan falling to the University of South Carolina by three points and Coppin keeping things close against traditionally strong Illinois well into the second half. Neither school realistically thinks of making the Final Four this year, but each would love to leverage March Madness and those fifteen minutes of fame again.

“There’s national exposure; [knocking off South Carolina and nearly upsetting Texas] was marketing of Coppin State that they couldn’t pay for,” longtime Coppin State men’s basketball coach Ron “Fang” Mitchell says. “We don’t have the money to market the school like that. That meant a lot. It might not have talked about the excellence in the classroom, but it showed the Urbanite #92 february 2012 21

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Sports / update baltimore observed

Update

by Andrew Zaleski

photos by J.M. Giordano

the new urban playground

fact that we were a quality, quality school. Coppin State and Mitchell have been to the NCAA tournament four times, while the Morgan State men have earned two trips in the past first five years. Morgan State’s recent NCAA berths earned it stories in Newsweek, the Sunday edition of the New York Times, the New York Daily News, ESPN The Magazine, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, and papers in cities like Orlando, Oakland, and San Francisco.

The publicity CBS and ESPN bring smaller schools during March Madness extends beyond hoops, as well. The networks want to know every detail about every school, and not just things that relate to basketball. Other local schools also have basked in the publicity that making the NCAA tournament brings. The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (2008) and Loyola University (1994) both made it once, and each school gained plenty of the same regional and national publicity. There was more for UMBC because the Internet age had kicked in.

Towson’s men won the East Coast Conference championships and made it to the NCAA tournament in both 1990 and 1991. Dan O’Connell, the school’s director of athletics media relations, has worked at Towson since 1979 and remembers what the school gained from the two straight NCAA appearances. “The biggest thing it did was it raised our visibility in the Baltimore area in a big way, and it got the campus excited,” O’Connell says.

Coppin State’s men’s and women’s teams’ success is also at least partially responsible for the construction of an approximately $125 million Physical Education Complex in 2009. The complex, which also houses the school’s sports management program, certainly serves an academic purpose as well, but Mitchell says, “Our past success didn’t hurt [in getting it built].”

UMBC economics professor Dennis Coates says regional-type schools can gain a lot from NCAA tournament berths, but it’s not automatic.

“It definitely depends on each school,” Coates says. “Does it translate into lasting benefits? Or is it curiosity and nothing else happens with it?

Most schools aren’t going to get a lot of national airtime, and this is the one instance where … [people] are actually seeing that institution on TV. It’s probably worth something.”

George Mason University, a state school in Fairfax, Virginia, did try to quantify exactly

what its series of upsets and surprising Final Four appearance in 2006 was worth to the school. It counted front-page cover stories in more than one hundred newspapers plus another six thousand radio and TV stories, and estimated the university received more than $5 million in free advertising. Sales in the school bookstore increased from $625,000 to $1 million the next year, and there was a 150 percent jump in hits on school’s website. Applications the following year increased by more than 10 percent—with out-of-state applications going up by 15 percent.

However, creating success on the basketball court for regional state schools and translating those wins and NCAA berths into media attention isn’t easy, and institutions can fail in the attempt. Towson University, for example, fired men’s basketball coach Pat Kennedy last season after the former Florida State coach arrived amidst high expectations. Kennedy compiled a 72-142 record overall, including a 4-25 mark in his last season. Earlier this year, Towson broke the national Division I record with its 35th straight loss. Meanwhile, a new $68 million basketball arena at Towson, scheduled to open next year, was launched under Kennedy’s tenure.

Morgan’s basketball team, as well, has brought the school unwanted publicity this season. Head coach Todd Bozeman, hired after his career at the University of California ended because of NCAA rules violations, remained suspended with pay as Urbanite went to print after he was accused of punching one of his players in the face during a game earlier this year. At Coppin, it’s obviously been a different story.

It’s now been nearly fifteen years since what Coppin State Sports Information Director Roger McAfee calls the “signature moment” against South Carolina, and people still bring up that game to those associated with the school on a regular basis—even to those who have nothing to do with athletics. Coppin State’s interim associate vice president for academic affairs, Habtu Braha, says he regularly gets comments about that one game from others in his field. Many people discovered Coppin State through that one contest. That’s how basketball success helps the entire school, he says. “Anywhere I go, when I go to meetings, conferences, they remember the South Carolina game,” Braha says. “That publicity goes on.It still goes on.”

In 2010, Howard County approved a thirty-year master plan that could dramatically change the Town Center of downtown Columbia (see “The Next ‘Next America,’ ” July ’11 Urbanite). Included are proposals to build more than 5,000 new housing units, about 4 million square feet of office space, and a million square feet for retail shops. In other words, suburban Columbia is retrofitting its downtown to mimic those of its more urban brethren. Now, bike sharing is on the horizon. In December, the Columbia Association, in partnership with Howard County officials, applied for a Maryland state grant to “evaluate the feasibility of providing bike rental kiosks, for short-term use, at various locations in Columbia,” according to the Baltimore Sun.

food poisoning After University of Delaware professor McKay Jenkins discovered a tumor near his hip, he embarked on a solo investigation to uncover the synthetic chemicals found in such everyday products as plastic bottles and cell phones (see “Protecting Our Bodies,” December ’11 Urbanite).

One chemical, bisphenol A—or BPA—has been used for more than forty years in various plastics and the metal linings in food containers, and is largely considered safe by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In 2008, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a petition asking the FDA to ban BPA; when the FDA didn’t respond in time, the NRDC sued the agency, according to the Washington Post. After a court settlement last December, the FDA now has until March 31 to decide whether to ban BPA outright.

busted According to the FBI’s 2010 Uniform Crime Report, more than 1.6 million were arrested that year for drug abuse violations, with a disproportionate amount—more than 700,000—arrested for possession of marijuana. In the U.S. today, more than half a million people are behind bars on nonviolent drug charges (see “Exit Strategy,” Mar. ’11 Urbanite). In Maryland, possession of one gram of marijuana can earn a person up to one year in prison.

But Baltimore state’s attorney Gregg Bernstein wants to change that. According to the Baltimore Sun, in 2012 Bernstein will seek to have legislation passed that will “reduce the penalty for possessing less than 14 grams of marijuana to fewer than ninety days in jail.”

Urbanite #92 february 2012 23

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People baltimore observed

Oracle of East Baltimore

Poet Afaa Michael Weaver made his way out of a tough neighborhood, but still feels a sense of helplessness when he returns home.

By Rafael Alvarez

Photo by J.M. Giordano photo

T

he question—naïve and whimsical, as though beauty really can save the world— floats around Afaa Michael Weaver and hard hometown facts at the corner of Lakewood Avenue and Oliver Street where he went to grade school.

What is the bridge that Weaver crossed to transform himself from a factory worker named Michael to a heralded poet, disciple of the Eastern arts—“I am bound by Taoist oaths”—and New England college professor named Afaa?

Honored as the black Walt Whitman of our age (he is lyrical, kind and gentle, even on bad days), Weaver grew up in “the Valley” in far northeast Baltimore where his kin owned a bar called the Apache Lounge.

The area was nice then, back in 1957 when Weaver was six and his steelworker father used union wages to buy 2824 Federal Street, around the block from his school, for $9,000.

Almost sixty years later—decades in which Weaver survived child abuse, three marriages, heart failure, profound depression, and a razor against his throat in a fight over a woman—the neighborhood is holding on but not so nice anymore. How did he survive Baltimore when so many of his family and peers—indeed the neighborhood itself in many respects—did not?

“Creativity,” says Weaver, who graduated at sixteen from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in 1968—the year he remembers a man running up Harford Road with a rowboat on his head, loot stolen from the old Sears at North Avenue and Harford Road during the King assassination riots.

“Knowing I could write poetry was the light inside of me … what helped me make sense of myself and what was going on around me—the hardest thing for me in Baltimore was cultivating and defending my imagination.

When I come back now, I see what I was up against.”

A professor of English at Simmons College, Weaver was most recently back home for his sixtieth birthday in November and again a month later to read at the Pratt Library in Highlandtown.

“After I gave the [Christmas] reading, someone told me that young people in town are teaching city kids mindfulness and none of those kids have dropped out,” says Weaver, first exposed to the thrill and discipline of martial arts by way of 1970s kung-fu movies.

“It’s all about the mind; you have to be able to have your own mind.

When Afaa (meaning “oracle” in Ibo, given to him by the Nigerian writer Tess Onwueme) was writing his way out of a South Baltimore soap factory thirty years ago, he wielded creativity against a manufacturing culture that allowed his parents to become homeowners.

“Maybe the price Baltimore paid for places like Bethlehem Steel was what factories do to people,” he says. “They stamp you into this numb sameness, a dull conformity.”

Baltimore’s creative class seems to be growing (when your college degree is worthless, why not throw paint against the wall and call it macaroni?) in proportion to the loss of jobs prevalent when Weaver worked at Procter & Gamble and Bethlehem Steel.

Once there was work in Baltimore and to be an artist was the lot of eccentrics.

Now to be an artist or poet in Baltimore— a weirdo, a drifter, a dreamer—is common, but good jobs are scarce.

Is it too harsh to say there is not a poem in the world that might do for Baltimore what Beth Steel once did. No, says Weaver, it is not.

“The American dream is a house, a decent car, and to be able to send your kids to a state university. My father was able to work overtime, and my Mom pinched pennies. That gave us a fairly different life” than what was and is common around many old Baltimore neighborhoods.

Weaver holds an endowed chair as alumnae professor of English at Simmons College, editing and translating poetry and prose both into and from modern Mandarin. In 2004 and 2008, he organized international conferences of Chinese poets at Simmons, the first held outside China.

In a telling anecdote on the mindset of the average Baltimorean, he recalls family members refusing to believe that he could speak the language of Yao Ming. To which he replied: “How would you know that anything I said wasn’t Chinese?”

Pushing into his seventh decade, Weaver is contemplating a memoir about the influence of Chinese culture in his life for an upcoming sabbatical. It would have long passages about the city he left at thirty-three, one of heartbreaking memories and geography he doesn’t quite recognize anymore.

“I feel a sense of helplessness when I come back home and I’d like to write something to help people understand how to have faith— how to break free of the things that keep you trapped,” he says. “The example of my life is what I want to give.”

Urbanite #92 february 2012 25

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Music and Dance for Infants to Adults

Summer camps in voice, strings, harp and dance.

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Whether your children want to learn more about the fine & performing arts, hone their athletic skills or bolster their writing skills, our campus provides the resources for success.

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June 18 - July 13, 2012 Summer fun for girls and boys in a variety of camps, including American Doll Pastimes, Girls Wanna Have Fun: Glee Edition, Babysitter Boot Camp, Little Grizzlies (Preschoolaged), and more! Extended Day available.

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Housing baltimore observed

Building Blocks

City nonprofit One House at a Time expects to play a bigger role in the city’s vacant housing plans.

By Baynard Woods

PHOTO BY SARAH THROWER

S

treams of rainwater leak through the ceiling of the cold gray basement beneath a four-story vacant building at 143 East North Avenue, near Calvert Street, at the edge of the Station North Arts District. It’s late November, and William Romani and Larry Grubb, respectively, the president of the board and the executive director of the nonprofit receiver One House at a Time (OHAAT), huddle in the doorway with waivers for anyone who wants to enter the basement to bid on the building.

It is the first of ten auctions OHAAT will hold today, and Romani and Grubb fear the rain will keep bidders away. Founded in 2003 out of the Community Law Center, OHAAT was designated by Baltimore City to be a receiver for vacant homes in 2006.

Since then, it has aided in the transfer of more than three-hundred derelict properties to qualified buyers, including forty-nine this past year.

Now a part of Mayor Stephanie RawlingsBlake’s administration’s Vacants to Value (V2V) initiative requiring property owners to bring vacant homes up to code—or face legal action to take those properties away—OHAAT Executive Director Larry Grubb expects the number of homes the organization transfers to double in coming years. Deputy Commissioner of Housing Michael Braverman is even more optimistic: “We hope to triple the number of properties put into receivership by next year.”

More often than not, just the threat of city action is enough to get a vacant property owner moving. According to Baltimore City data for the past year, seventy owners of vacant buildings responded to enforcement procedures by completing the work necessary to bring their property up to code.

T

he small condo project at North and Calvert is one of sixteen-thousand vacants in Baltimore City, a quarter of which are owned by the city itself (OHAAT does not deal with cityowned properties). Though Baltimore has had plenty of foreclosures over the past three years, most of this isn’t the fallout from bad lending practices and the national housing crisis.

“That doesn’t make a dent beside fifty years of

population decline,” says Cheron Porter, director of communications for Baltimore Housing.

“There are just more houses than people.”

For a house to be considered “vacant” by the city, it must be unoccupied and deemed inhabitable. As part of the V2V plan unveiled by Rawlings-Blake in late 2010, the city can issue a $900 fine to a vacant property owner in an area with some commercial demand. Sixty days later, another $900 fine can be issued, if no action is taken. A month after that, the property can land in Housing Court. If the court decides to put the house into receivership, One House at a Time or a for-profit receivership will sell it for the noncompliant owner to pre-approved bidders who have demonstrated that they have the skill and the finances to transform the structure.

The buyer then has seven months from settlement to make substantial progress on the proposed work, or the whole process can start again. In other words, “Lead, follow, or get out the way,” Braverman says. In areas where there is no commercial demand, the city can bypass the system of fines and go straight to the courts for receivership in order to allow nonprofits to rebuild entire blocks at a time.

The most important thing the city is doing, Grubb says, is focusing on specific areas to make the largest impact. Under V2V, OHAAT helped facilitate the transfer of twenty houses on two blocks of Jefferson Street to Habitat for

Humanity of the Chesapeake, dropping the vacancy rate there by 30 percent.

Butchers Hill, Baltimore-Linwood, and Patterson Place have seen similar declines in the number of vacant homes.

“If you target your resources on a very small area, once you get things turning around, the for-profit market will finish it up,” Grubb says. “It really has to be one block at a time.” As it stands, the City calculates, using permit data, that V2V—with the help of OHAAT—has brought more than $20 million in private investment to transitional and emerging neighborhoods.

However, the focused strategy is hardly a panacea for Baltimore. It leaves out the 65 percent of vacants located in areas without development demand. And Baltimore is not contemplating anything quite as drastic as Detroit’s plans to level entire sections of the city. At her inauguration, Rawlings-Blake made it clear that the administration thinks Baltimore should grow—not shrink—to greatness.

Still, Baltimore Housing demolished nearly 500 structures in V2V’s first year. “For the 10,000 where there is no market future, demolition is the ultimate solution,” Braverman says.

The administration’s efforts have drawn national attention. In August, Rawlings-Blake was called a “pioneering local leader,” when she spoke about V2V program at the White House. “Government can’t make investment happen, but it can support it,” she says of V2V’s mission.

The building at 143 E. North Avenue is type of transitional area investment that V2V and OHAAT are looking for. A previously abandoned development project had planned to convert the building into four condominiums, with commercial space on the first floor. Though OHAAT often works with smaller properties like rowhouses, the residential space could help the Station North Arts District flourish east of Charles Street and turn the whole block around.

(Two nearby properties were later auctioned) Still, on the day of the auction, there are few takers. “Our biggest problem is getting qualified bidders,” Grubb says. “A couple months ago, there was a house on a beautiful block, 80 percent home ownership, the only vacant on a quiet street, and we couldn’t sell it for $5,000.”

Ultimately, two people offer bids. The condominium project goes for $99,000— far more than most properties normally auctioned off.

OHAAT is auctioning off nine other buildings this morning, so everyone hurries out into the rain, hoping that one less vacant on North Avenue will push the block toward what Grubb sees as a tipping point: “If we do the first half right [selling strategic properties], then the values, investor interest, and safety will all increase.”

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voices baltimore observed

Taking a Stand

Making history: Gold medallist Tommie Smith, (center) and bronze medallist John Carlos (right) raising their fists following the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Olympics. Austrailian silver medallist Peter Norman (left) stood in solidarity.

Four decades after creating on of the iconic images of the Civil Rights Era at the Mexico City Olympic Games, John Carlos still has the big picture in mind.

John Carlos photo Courtesy Haymarket Books; Courtesy of Associated Press

INTERVIEW BY RON CASSIE

in his autobiography, The John Carlos Story, written with sportswriter Dave Zirin and published last fall by Haymarket Books, Carlos recalls the Olympic Project for Human Rights and the story behind the protest on the medal stand at the 1968 Mexico City Games. A longtime high school track coach in California, he remains steadfast in his ideals today. urb:

Can you describe the symbols that you and Tommie Smith wore on the medal stand in Mexico City and what they represented?

The button we wore was from the Olympic Project for Human Rights. Peter Norman [the white Australian runner who took the silver medal] also wore the button, which was very symbolic. The Olympic committee and media tried to present this as “Black Power,” but it was about much more than that. The black-gloved fist represented unity … we represented the plight of black people first—the plight of black people everywhere and the plight of people of color around the world. But we were proud to be Americans, too. The fist itself represented five fingers coming together… that people could do more collectively. Tommy’s black scarf represented black pride.

My black shirt over my uniform represented the shame of America, the racism, bigotry. The beads around my neck represented the lynchings that had taken place. The black socks with our pants rolled up were about the tremendous poverty many people faced in the country, kids walking 10 miles to school with no shoes while astronauts were flying off into space, to the moon. I opened my [USA team] jacket in solidarity of the working people in the United States, the people who worked the night shift.

Like my mother, a nurse’s aid, and never heard “Thank you.” And we were dignified. Our heads were bowed.

jc:

urb:

The presence of mind in creating such an indelible image, given that you and Tommie Smith were 23 and 24 years old, respectively, seems remarkable.

It was a very special thing. I think God told his angels to step aside, “I’ll handle this one.” It was the first time the games were televised on a universal basis and the first time in color. People didn’t realize, either, that Mexican students protesting before the games had been massacred. But we didn’t show up with bullets draped over our arms.

jc:

urb:

You faced death threats, hardship, and tragedy in the protest’s aftermath, including the suicide of your first wife. Did you ever have regrets?

We all are going to die. Whether you leave when you are young or live to be old, it’s what you do in between that matters. You have to think about future generations that are going to follow.

jc:

urb: Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo, for example, outspokenly supports gay rights, including same-sex marriage, but do fewer athletes today take civil and human rights stands?

When you talk about that time, you talk about Bill Russell, Lew Alcindor, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos, but it was still a small cluster, and there was a revolution going on. You don’t have a revolution today… I had a decision to make. There is no halfway measure. You were full in or not. Dr. King was not in halfway. Rosa Parks were not in halfway. Malcolm

jc:

X was not in halfway. Peter Norman was not in halfway, either. urb:

You attended several Occupy Wall Street encampments and were quoted as saying it was “ like coming home.” What did you mean?

It’s a younger generation, most were not born at the time of Mexico City, but it’s the same issues. I was in a small circle of primarily blacks, but now you see white kids, Asian kids. It’s not all middle-class and lower-middle-class white kids, either. There are kids from “the 1 percent” that are grateful for their education and their parents taking care of them financially, but disenchanted that so many have been left behind.

jc:

urb: What’s the reaction to image from people you meet today?

All I can say is what we unleashed in 1968, it’s still flying, it’s still resonates. So many people around the world find strength in it. I think it speaks to all people who are oppressed, whether it is by their government, or people who feel oppression or bias in other ways. It’s something everyone has seen in newspapers, on T-shirts, magazines, and television. We were saying something about what we were feeling, but other people feel the same thing. It’s spoken to people at the far ends of the Earth.

jc:

urb :

Are you frustrated many issues you addressed in 1968 remain soverwhelming problems?

jc:

It’s only been forty-three years.

For an extended version of this interview, go to bit.ly/carlos1968 Urbanite #92 february 2012 29

special advertising section

40 year s

Advancing Car eer s Sojourner-Douglass College cultivates community growth, self-determination, and prosperity.

By stephanie shapiro

Walter Toller had worked

for sixteen years as a licensed practical nurse when a friend told him about the great instructors and classes at SojournerDouglass College. Toller, eager to advance his career, took a look for himself. One year later, he emerged with a bachelor of science in nursing degree (BSN) and high praise for the educators who went “above and beyond” to make sure he and others understood every concept and remembered every fact.

BSN degree in hand, Toller was promoted to manager of a unit for acute-care patients on ventilators at a Baltimore longterm care facility. It’s an actionpacked, rewarding occupation.

If possible, though, Toller would like to reenroll at SojournerDouglass in the future. “I hope they’ll start a masters in nursing program,” he says. “When they do, I’ll be back.”

As a student, Toller quickly discovered that SojournerDouglass is far more than a school for adult learners. It is a community grounded in the

Walter Toller came away from Sojourner-Douglass College with a bachelor of science in nursing and high praise for his instructors.

principles of self-determination, where dialogue and practical experience as well as lectures and theory are valued teaching tools.

This year, Sojourner-Douglass College is celebrating the fortieth anniversary of its founding in Baltimore as a force for community rebirth. Today, the school’s commitment to education and social change is stronger than ever. “We have transformed thousands of families,” says Dr. Charles W. Simmons, Sojourner-Douglass’s first and only president. “We have seen parents get an education, develop in their careers, and set the same expectations for their children.”

Simmons has never wavered in the belief that educating students of all ages is the catalyst

30 february 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

for revitalizing families and their communities. “We serve an adult population and recognize that of all the measures of a child’s educational success, the most significant is the educational level of the parent, especially the mother,” Simmons says.

Begun on a shoestring budget with volunteer faculty and a handful of students, SojournerDouglass today offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in dozens of fields ranging from health care and early childhood education to business administration and criminal justice.

From its East Baltimore base, Sojourner-Douglass has expanded to include seven campuses—six across Maryland (Baltimore, Prince Georges County, Annapolis, Owings

Mills, Cambridge, and Salisbury, and one in Nassau, Bahamas— with a total enrollment of about 2,000. On each campus, administrators, faculty, and staff make every effort to meet the needs of students who have jobs and other responsibilities: Courses are small, and offered during the day, evenings and on weekends.

For parents, inexpensive daycare services remove a chronic obstacle to attendance. Other resources, including tutors and alternative curriculum tracks for students who need to catch up on math and other skills, also place a degree within reach for many who have been away from the classroom for a long stretch.

As technological advances, an aging population, and other factors demand new expertise of the country’s workforce,

photos by j.m. giordano

We have seen parents get an education, develop in their careers, and set the same expectations for their children.

— Dr. Charles W. Simmons

Sojourner-Douglass has responded with new and updated degree programs, including the BSN program and a bachelor of science degree in biotechnology.

Those programs have been built from scratch by dedicated faculty, such as Dr. Maija Anderson, dean of the school’s nursing program.

No matter the subject, Sojourner-Douglass College faculty and staff know that confidence is as important as knowledge.

When students, who range in age from their early 20s to early 60s, first enter Dr. Anderson’s classroom, they’re a bit insecure and hesitant to assume the responsibilities of their chosen field, she says. “But then they mature into nurses who are proud to wear a uniform, and to take on the mantle of being a nurse.”

About 178 students are currently enrolled in the nursing program. The BSN track was launched in March 2010. By the end of 2012, Dr. Anderson anticipates that sixty students will have graduated with a BSN degree.

Among them is Hattie Bellamy, a grandmother who has aspired to be a nurse since she was a little girl.“ Nursing was always a passion of mine,” she says. But “you know how you put things off and get a job right out of school, get married, have children, grandchildren and now I decided to do something for me.” Eventually, Bellamy plans to team up with her granddaughter, who wants to start a daycare center.

While the Sojourner-Douglass nursing curriculum prepares students to take care of very sick patients, lessons also stress the fundamentals of community health, such as healthful eating and regular exercise. A masters

program in nursing is in the early planning stages, as is the establishment of a neighborhood health clinic to serve residents in the surrounding community.

Sojourner-Douglass

College is also readying students such as Brittany Crowder for the biotechnology workforce. A self-professed “science and math fanatic,” Crowder was introduced to the field thanks to a collaboration between Dunbar High School and Johns Hopkins University. After graduation, though, college appeared “out of the question,” says Crowder, who had a toddler and full-time job. Two years ago, though, Sojourner-Douglass College’s convenient hours and childcare services caught her eye.

Now, Crowder, 23, is a junior in the school’s bachelor of science in biotechnology program and on her way to a fulfilling research career. She hopes to develop treatments for breast cancer, a disease that has struck down family members, or to create a genetically modified crop to prevent famines in developing nations. Supporting her all the way is Dr. Jayfus Doswell, director of the biotechnology program, whom Crowder calls “my mentor, my professor, and my moral support.”

What’s more, Crowder’s education is rubbing off on her 5-year-old son, who attends kindergarten at the charter school on campus, the college’s aftercare program,

Adult students receive individual attention in small classes.

and occasionally one of his mother’s classes. He, too, has the makings of a science and math fanatic, Crowder says.

“When we were coming here the other day, he said, ‘Mom, we’re going on a scientific adventure today.’ He’s absorbing everything I’m absorbing at the same time.”

And that’s exactly what Dr. Simmons has envisioned over

the four decades he has led Sojourner-Douglass College: “We know the impact we make when we educate the parents, but we also want to make an impact on children. We’re working to rebuild the community from both angles.”

Getting in to SDC: Admission to Sojourner-Douglass College is based on traditional and nontraditional measures. Motivated and mature students with a high school diploma or equivalent are eligible to apply for admission.

Here’s a sampling of the degree programs offered

by Sojourner-Douglass College: Undergraduate: Accounting Addiction and Substance Abuse Counseling Biotechnology Business Administration Gerontology Information Technology Social Work Licensed Practical Nursing/Bachelors in Nursing degree program.

Graduate: Urban Education Political Campaign Management Public Administration To learn more about the admissions process, financial aid, and course schedules at Sojourner-Douglass College, call 410-276-0306 extension 248, or visit www. sdc.edu.

Urbanite #92 february 2012 31

Many Baltimore groups believe the answer to some of our local problems lies in teaching empathy. The latest neuroscience research indicates they may be on to something.

By Martha Thomas photography by J.M. Giordano

arly one morning last July, Diana Bramble walked out of her

house on Patterson Park to drive to work. It was 4:45, the time

she usually leaves for her horticultural job in Washington, D.C. Only this morning, she couldn’t find her truck. The silver 1998 Dodge Ram pickup would be hard to miss, even in the wee hours of an already humid summer morning.

After futile trips up and down the block, she decided the truck must have been stolen. She called the police, filled out a handful of forms, and finally took a taxi to the MARC train. “I was really angry,” she recalls. “I thought, this sucks, what am I going to do now?” And she was three hours late for work.

Later that day, the police called Bramble with the news that they’d found three youths in possession of the truck.

According to seventeen-year-old Jamal Gambrill, he and two friends were just walking down the street when they spied the silver pickup. One side was bashed in and the passenger door sat ajar, he says. “Why not take it for a spin?” Gambrill recalls thinking, not stopping to consider who owned the truck, which, it turned out had been stolen and abandoned by a previous car thief earlier that morning. When the police appeared and accused him of being in possession of the truck, he says he realized that just the thought of taking the vehicle had been “a really stupid idea.” Gambrill had never done anything like that. Locked up at the juvenile detention center, he worried about being fired from his job as a server at Atwater’s in Belvedere Square, and how the felony charge would affect his career goals once he graduated from high school.

Just before Thanksgiving last year, Gambrill’s presiding judge referred the case to the Community Conferencing Center. There, Bramble, the owner of the truck, and Gambrill, along with family members and advocates they chose to invite, sat in a circle to talk about what had happened and come up with a plan to set it right. Indeed, Gambrill felt bad that Bramble had lost her beloved truck and worse that she’d missed work. He knew how hard it was to lose out on income. Bramble says she felt Gambrill was sincere in his desire to set things right. She was relieved that the “stupid mistake” didn’t have to cost the teenager his future.

In lieu of a trial, the two came up with a plan that included community service. He also offered to pay a portion of Bramble’s insurance deductible.

On your level: Kiaiza Jackson (left) and Terry Hicks (right) participating in a City Springs Elementary and Middle School restorative practice program designed to foster understanding and empathy.

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Neuroscientists found evidence of empathy-driven helping behavior in rats, according to a study published in Science in December 2011. Lab rats repeatedly freed companions from a restraint, demonstrating “the deep evolutionary roots of empathy-driven behavior,” says Jeffrey Mogil, of McGill University. t its core, the Community Conferencing Center encourages, indeed, relies upon, building empathy. “Something shifts in the room,” says Founder and Executive Director Lauren Abramson, when parties start to perceive the other side of the story, have a chance to climb into the other person’s skin, as Atticus Finch, the iconic lawyer in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, would say, “and walk around in it.”

Founded a dozen years ago, the Community Conferencing Center brings together everyone from school bullies and their targets to neighbors in dispute, and even murderers and their victims’ families. Today, an increasingly wide array of groups across Baltimore teach empathy as a means of engendering not just healing but transformative change. Abramson reports, for example, that in ten out of ten conferences convened with young girls to discuss a bullying incident, the girls who bullied end up in tears about the times they’d been bullied. And when it comes to crime, juvenile offenders such as Gambrill who participate in community conferencing have a recidivism rate 60 percent lower than similar cases that go through the court system.

Meanwhile, new neuroscience studies indicate that organizations such as the Community Conferencing Center are tapping into something deeply rooted in our evolutionary biology.

Empathy has been observed in primates—notably by Frans de Waal, a researcher at Emory University. His 2009 book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, asserts that empathy is a critical trait of human beings and “involves neural structures far older than our species.”

De Waal observed his subjects exhibiting empathic gestures that range from chimpanzees mimicking a peer engaged in a difficult challenge, to capuchin monkeys consoling their peers and preferring rewards that can be shared.

Similarly, University of Chicago researchers reported this winter that they found that rats would forgo treats in order to help a trapped peer.

Even more surprising, the helpful rat would then share his reward with his distressed friend. De Waal, perhaps only half-jokingly, commented that if empathy “resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats,” we should think twice before “comparing politicians to those poor, underestimated creatures.”

But while empathy may be alive and well in primates and rats, many researchers—like de Waal—worry that humans’ empathic impulses, particularly among kids and younger adults, are on the decline, and technology and the Internet may be a factor. Witness a University of Michigan study that found empathy among college students has dropped 40 percent in the last 30 years, with the steepest decline occurring since 2000.

In her meta-analysis of more than 70 studies since 1979, Michigan professor Sara Konrath showed a dramatic drop in students’ “empathic concern” and “perspective taking,” according to standardized personality tests. Some researchers point a finger at the gadgets that consume our attention and limit our face-to-face interaction.

“Part of empathy has to do with really concentrating on the other person,” says Clifford Nass, a Stanford University communications professor who studies the psychological effects of technology use. “If you are multitasking, you can’t do that.”

Nass is the co-author of a study on media use and emotional development among “tween” girls, due to be published this month in Developmental Psychology. The girls who are heavy online users, says Nass, “show less social emotional growth and development.”

“If you live in a world of Facebook, Twitter or texting, most of the emotions are happy,” he points out. “Empathy, of course, usually involves negative emotions.”

There are other theories to explain why reported empathy levels have fallen. An emphasis on self-esteem among baby-boomer parents, some believe, may have led to a generation of narcissistic kids. Psychologist Maia Szalavitz, author of Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential – and Endangered, suggests that children’s unstructured play declined by one-third between 1981 and 2003, thus depriving a generation of kids the opportunity to learn healthy interaction with their peers. Szalavitz, writing for PsychologyToday.com in 2010, also posits that the widening income disparity may play a part in empathy’s demise. If rich people are separated from the poor by gated communities and limousines, she reasons, it’s easy to caricature a poor person’s lot as being defined by bad choices and laziness.

Across the city at least one Baltimore public school uses a similar “conferencing” technique as CCC. Other schools and organizations employ a variety of means, including theater, visual arts, literature, athletics, K-9 training, alternative spring breaks, and sleep-outs with the homeless to foster empathetic development.

Purple pride: City Springs Principal Rhonda Richetta’s implementation of a restorative practices program has cut school suspensions.

Urbanite #92 february 2012 35

Face to face: City Springs students Breyana Wade and Arthur Laster talking one-on-one as part of the school’s restorative practice program.

While the word empathy may not appear in the mission statement of every local organization that embraces teaching the concept, similar sentiments—such as developing compassion, understanding, and listening skills—often do.

Abramson, for example, likes the term “perspective-taking.” But whatever you call it, says Abramson, also a bio-psychologist at Johns Hopkins Medical School, “all humans have the wiring for empathy.” Even so, the impulse requires nurturing. “We learn it by doing, by being in relationships with other people,” she says.

Joe Ehrmann, the 63-year-old football coach and former Colts defensive lineman, does use the word empathy—frequently. He describes the impulse as “a muscle that needs to be developed.” Teaching empathy, he says, is a cornerstone of his organization, Coach for America.

“There’s a crisis of empathy in this country,” Ehrmann says. “I call it empathy deficit disorder.” In his long tenure as a coach at the private Gilman School for boys, Ehrmann developed an approach to sports based on three tenets: “empathy, kindness, and service to others.” His preaching (literally, he’s also an ordained minister) about “transformational” coaching has garnered national attention, and Coach for America encourages giving young people the “permission to acknowledge their own emotions.”

Ehrmann’s greatest rival, he says “are the three scurious words: Be. A. Man.” Young boys, he says, “are taught to separate the heart from their head and deny their emotions. If you don’t understand your own emotions,” he wonders, “how will you understand those of another human being?”

Ehrmann encourages students to examine their inner impulses for empathy. “Take the story of the good Samaritan,” he says. “A man on a journey gets mugged. He’s on the side of the road crying for help. Two people walk by and make a decision to walk on the other side of the street.” Ehrmann will ask his football players to re-enact the scenario. Two boys walk by and “verbalize all the thinking that would discount any moral obligation” to the wounded man, Ehrmann explains. “They’d say things like ‘I don’t want to get involved’; ‘I have to get to school’; ‘He’s bleeding and might have

36 february 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

AIDS.’ ‘It could be a trap.’” Next, the Samaritan steps up to explain why he should stop: “Think about the times you’ve been hurting; this person may be a mother or father, may have children like you. They model it after their own experiences,” he says.

Author of the recently released book InSideOut Coaching: How Sports can Transform Lives (Simon and Schuster, 2011), Ehrmann is careful to differentiate between empathy and sympathy. “Pity is a defensive term. It tells you to move away from that person,” he says. “Empathy demands action.

You understand and then move into the circumstance.”

Along with training and mentoring through his nonprofit, Ehrmann is working with the Living Classrooms Foundation to transform a slice of East Baltimore along the East Fayette Street corridor.

“The idea is to provide every child born in that area with services so they can get through school, graduate from college, and enter sustainable employment,” says Talib Horne, vice president for Community Development for Living Classrooms.

Because sports are an integral part of the plan—the target zone contains several playing fields and community centers—Living Classrooms invited Ehrmann to participate in the ambitious endeavor. “Sports are a tool to helping these kids become responsible members of the community,” Horne says. Every coach involved in an athletic program within the target zone will be required to participate in Ehrmann’s Coach for America training.

Dr. Gary Small, co-author of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, reports as an individual’s Internet usage becomes protracted, that person’s anterior cingulate in the prefrontal region of the brain, which is linked to decisionmaking, emotion, and empathy, loses ground.

A principal at one institution within the target zone, City Springs Elementary Middle, a public charter school, has been encouraging students to tone their empathy muscles for some time. A decade ago, the school was one of Baltimore’s most notorious failures. But City Springs was taken over by principal Rhonda Richetta in 2007, and along with painting lockers, door frames, and her own office her favorite color, purple, Richetta instituted a program called Restorative Practices, used in Australian schools.

Similar to Community Conferencing, the idea is to sit participants in a circle and ask them to do what Lauren Abramson describes as something radical: talk to each other. The Restorative Practices model focuses on building understanding rather than blame and punishment.

Richetta recalls one of the first breakthroughs at the school, when a neighborhood rivalry between two groups of boys had been brought to school. “One boy had been told that he had to beat up everyone from a rival gang,” Richetta says. Though some on her staff told her that getting these volatile kids in a room together would be impossible, she persisted, and one afternoon, after a fight had broken out in the cafeteria, she gathered the boys in a conference room to talk about it. The boys were asked to answer such questions as what they were thinking about at the time, who was affected by their actions, and how might they set things right. “The boys ended up becoming friends—at school,” Richetta reports.

Though outside of school, they retained the tough demeanor required by the neighborhood.

“There’s a lot of stuff kids are exposed to today,” says Richetta. “It puts them in a place where they feel that life is about protecting themselves.”

This attitude, she concedes, doesn’t leave a lot of room for empathy.

Initially, kids were skeptical about the circles, says Nichelle Beasley, restorative practices facilitator at City Springs. But because every class holds a circle every day—whether to discuss a conflict, or simply to share feelings on topics ranging from an upcoming test to a death in a student’s family—they’ve become a norm. “Now kids, and even parents, are coming to us and saying, ‘We need a circle,’” Beasley says.

Not far from City Springs, at Collington Square, a public charter elementary/middle school with an emphasis on the arts, drama teacher and actor Koli Tengella has his own approach to empathy. Big in every way, with a deep voice that fills the room, Tengella’s gestures are broad, and he towers over the third-graders performing a skit about bullying on a recent morning.

The world in their hands: City Springs students pass around a ball, painted to resemble the Earth, as part of a daily group exercise designed to develop respect others and empathy. The students answer questions like, “What would you change about yourself?”

A recent Johns Hopkins School of Public Health study found that empathetic men make better lovers.

“Our hypothesis is that empathetic individuals are more responsive to a partner’s needs, and thus initiate a positive feedback cycle,” says Adena Galinsky, PhD, co-author of the study.

He directs one child to stand in front of the class, in the center, surrounded by three other students who are given their lines. “Ew, your breath stinks!” says one. “And you’re ugly,” says the second. “And your mama, too!” chimes in the third. The victim is directed to burst into tears as a little boy stage right speaks to the audience.

“I’ve been teased before, and it’s not right!” he says, stomping to the center, pointing an admonishing finger at the perpetrators. “You stop that!

How would you feel if someone was being mean to you?” Tengella repeats the scene with two more groups of students before asking them to intone the day’s lesson: “Empathy,” his voice fills the room, followed by the kids’ repetition, “is knowing how another person would feel.”

Tengella believes that the children he teaches are deleteriously affected by the wider world. “You see the incivility of our elected officials, the popularity of reality TV shows based on conflict over ridiculous, miniscule things,” he says. “Everything is competitive, and it’s all about not appearing weak.” In casting his classroom skits, he purposely chooses actors who might benefit by being on the other side. “I ask kids who tend to be aggressive to be in the vulnerable spot, so they can have some empathy for another child,” he says.

Locally, empathy development is in practice among adults as well. For example, the Maryland Humanities Council’s Literature & Medicine program facilitates staff reading groups at a handful of hospitals throughout the state.

Talking about literature with other hospital employees ranging from ward nurses and lab technicians to the top tiers of the administration, says Carol Rybicki, a chaplain at Mercy Medical Center, opens the door to discussions about their own experiences at Mercy. “People end up sharing stories about how they responded to challenging situations.” And sometimes participants—notably those in the administration who have scant contact with patients—“are amazed to hear about what’s going on here,” Rybicki says.

Urbanite #92 february 2012 37

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On the inside: City Springs restorative practices facilitator Nichelle Beasley (center) with students Destiny Williams (left) and Brandon Brown (right). Beasley says kids and parents now come to her and say, “We need a circle,” when a conflict arises at school.

First developed by the Maine Humanities Council, Literature & Medicine participants around the country have reported a 79 percent increase in their empathy for patients.

Many agree with Ehrmann that empathy is something that can be strengthened with practice. A study at the University of Luxembourg linked lack of empathy and cyber-bullying, and recommending empathy training for bullies to combat the problem.

While cyber-bullying is an acknowledged problem worldwide, the argument can also be made that the Internet and other forms of technology create a forum for empathic relationships by joining people who may be separated geographically but are connected in other ways.

The It Gets Better Project, started by a gay advice columnist and his partner, counts more than 23,000 videos on YouTube (including one from President Barack Obama) reassuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth that they are not alone.

In Baltimore, local writer Justin Sirois was so incensed by the attacks on Iraqi civilians in Fallujah in 2003, he began interviewing Iraqi refugees and launched the Understanding Campaign, an Internet-driven crusade to unite people by promoting the Arabic word for understanding. The swirl of script that spells out the word, to those unfamiliar with Arabic, possesses an appealing graphic element.

“I’m trying to promote it as a symbol, almost like a peace sign, to promote empathy,” says Sirois, who has printed the word on buttons, stickers, and T-shirts available at understandingcampaign.org.

Stanford’s Nass believes that as technology grows more sophisticated, people could restore nuanced contact, by communicating through platforms that involve the voice and the face. The good news, he says, is not enough time has passed from an evolutionary standpoint for humans

“There’s a lot of evidence that humans evolved to recognize and care about the emotions of others”

to lose something so ingrained. “There’s a lot of evidence that humans evolved to recognize and care about the emotions of others,” he says, pointing to Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, which argues that certain universal facial expressions and body language are linked to specific emotions. In the earliest studies of evolution, Nass says, empathy was considered.

The way to restore eroding empathy, he says, is with sincere, genuine, face-to-face communication. He recalls dinner with friends who crowed about the benefits of family meals on children’s emotional and intellectual development, only to find that “everyone at the table was texting and twittering.” The value of sitting down to dinner, he says, “comes from more than the wood of the table.”

Co-founder of the Johns Hopkins Civility Project, P.M. Forni, is author of a new book, In The Thinking Life: How to Thrive in the Age of Distraction (St. Martin’s, 2011). Forni devotes a chapter to thoughtfulness and consideration, qualities that he worries may be lost in our efforts to accomplish more in less time via our new technology.

Like other experts, Forni believes that while we may be born with a natural capacity for empathy, it must be developed and practiced.

“It’s like a bicycle,” Forni says. “We’re born with a sense of balance, but we have to be taught how to ride.” When it comes to empathy, “we need someone to train us in the carriers of goodness,” mainly “civility, good manners, and considerate conduct.

“It would be very welcome if empathy became a buzzword,” Forni adds. “But it takes time for these things to find their way into the national conversation.”

Urbanite #92 february 2012 39

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small enough to care With a brewing zeitgeist against too-big-tofail banks, many are turning to community banks and credit unions. Will local institutions reap lasting benefits?

By micHAEL ANFT ILLUSTRATIONs by KATE HABERER

Everything about banking is easy, or so we’re told. There’s easy checking and “fee-free banking.” Firms with names like BankSimple and Bank Easy. Easy overdraft protection and “no-hassle loans.”

Given that banks have ostensibly made the business of minding your money so stress-free, one would think that developing a happy relationship with a financial institution is a snap.

But few think that way these days. The very idea of breezy banking rankles; it creates cognitive dissonance. Dealing with major banks, after all, too often means getting roped in a thorny tangle of unexpected fees, usurious interest rates on loans and credit cards, and miserly returns on savings. Because of it, people have become mad as hell, and many aren’t going to take it anymore, to paraphrase news commentator turned outraged populist Howard Beale from the film Network, made on the heels of the mid-1970s recession.

Urbanite #92 february 2012 41

since the advent of several protests—Occupy Wall Street, the move-your-money project, Bank Transfer Day—more customers have fled the world of modern banking for something a little less onerous. In one week of November alone, deposits to the largest lending institutions in the U.S., those that are especially seen as being too big to care about small depositors and mom-andpop Main Street businesses, saw a $20 billion decline. Longtime bank customers bristled that the too-big-to-fail banks—the same companies that were bailed out by customers’ tax dollars during the financial crisis of 2008—were chiseling them with fees to make up for mortgage business that banks themselves had damaged through shady practices.

When Bank of America announced in October that it would be charging debit card users $5 per month, the blowback persuaded the nation’s big-

“

“So far, we’ve done very well by developing a niche made up of small businesses that don’t think they’re getting what they need from big banks,” DeAlmeida says. While expanding its commercial loan business, Hamilton Federal aims to maintain its personal touch. Without it, small banks would fold, DeAlmeida adds. “We have to be more relationship-based than bigger banks. We want customers to feel wanted here, to know that we’ll remember their names when they walk through that door.”

Bank analysts agree that the small-time feel of community institutions gives them an advantage, especially in distressing times. “Big banks don’t want small customers anymore, so they charge them more and more fees,” says Brian Casey, a bank consultant in Towson. “The fees large banks charge won’t work for small customers. People who are struggling in this economy should probably be doing their banking at Bailey Building and Loan from It’s a Wonderful Life.”

But communit y bank s aren’t the bunker-ish, bulwark savings and loans of yore. They have to be where their customers want them to be, which means providing them with mobile apps so they can scan checks and deposit them. Or more automatic teller machines.

Or the ability to use their laptops to move their money from account to account. Hamilton Federal recently poured $100,000 into improving its computerized offerings so its customers can remotely get to their accounts. “Technology is the great equalizer for us,” DeAlmeida says. Casey agrees: “It used to be that big banks had the technology to be more efficient and useful. But technology doesn’t cost as much as it once did.

Community banks can compete now.” Over the years, Hamilton Federal has struck deals to use the technology of others, such as M&T Bank, WalMart, and Target, so its customers can use ATMS there for free.

Those small-bank trends—more loan offerings, more wiring, and better access—are being mirrored by many of the thirty or so credit unions in the area. Unlike banks, which aim to earn profit for their shareholders, credit unions are non-profit, pooling their deposits to deliver better deals for their members. Because they exist solely for members, they often can offer better yields on certificates of deposit and savings accounts, and lower rates on auto loans and credit cards.

Like community banks, local credit unions have seen a bump in customers. Since October, the State Employees Credit Union (SECU) reports a 40 percent jump in new checking accounts and memberships over previous years.

“Usually, we have a drop-off overall during those months [in the fall], but this year has just been an explosion,” says Kristen Heerema, SECU’s

People are telling us they haven’t been happy with their banks for quite a while. They talk about prices and fees.

”

gest bank to drop the idea—and sent the anti-big bank movement into overdrive.

Instead of wielding pitchforks and torches, many customers now run with cash in hand to find a new, user-friendly bank or, perhaps, a local credit union where they can park their money.

Local, community-based financial institutions in Baltimore say they’re ready to take them on. In fact, many have already begun to woo them with more banking options, better technology links, and new types of loans.

At the six Hamilton Federal Bank branches in the metro area, checking account deposits had already risen 50 percent in October from 2010.

Some have already seen an influx of disgruntled, former big-bank users. “We’ve seen just tremendous growth,” says Robert DeAlmeida, the bank’s president, adding that the flow increased shortly after a move-your-money article was published in The Huffington Post in late 2010. (He noted that growth slowed down this past November.) New customers come in every week for various reasons, he adds, such as one who recently visited the bank’s Towson branch and complained that a big bank wanted to charge him $20 to cut a bank check so he could buy a car. Hamilton Federal charged him $1. “Our fee structure is much less than Bank of America’s and we still have free checking,” DeAlmeida says.

Even with new customers already streaming through the door, Hamilton Federal upped its ad and marketing budgets by $250,000 and hired a branding firm to get the word out about its commercial loan offerings. The bank targets companies with revenues of $20 million or less.

42 february 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

product manager for deposits. “People are telling us they haven’t been happy with their banks for quite a while. They talk about prices and fees.”

Unlike many other local credit unions, SECU— the state’s largest, with nineteen branches, more than 200,000 members and $2.2 billion in assets—does charge fees if account or loan balances don’t add up. “Still, our fees are lower than banks and we’re very clear about disclosing them up front,” Heerema says, referencing a complaint made against big banks by their customers. SECU offers online bill-paying functions, and SECU customers can use their iPhones or Android devices to scan checks and deposit them into their accounts. It will soon offer many of those services for Blackberry devices. To draw more folks in, SECU recently unveiled “Switch to SECU” ads on billboards, in print, and on the Web. Other credit unions have followed suit. “We do everything that Bank of America can do—loans, accounts, mobile banking,” says Genie Briggs, vice president of marketing at Point Breeze Credit Union, based in Hunt Valley. Briggs engineered Facebook and Google ads touting Point Breeze’s non-minimum-balance checking accounts, which have grown in recent months. The spots also herald a lack of debit card fees. “We tell people that outside of large commercial loans, we can do what big banks do,” Briggs says.

And they claim to do it for cheaper. A study by the 130-member Maryland and D.C. Credit Union Association, in Columbia, found that its credit unions saved customers $200 million, or $200 per household, either through lower or no fees and more in interest yields on savings and CDs, says Paul Rosenberger, the association’s chief services officer.

Credit unions across the country added 214,000 members and 400,000 new checking accounts in October. Nearly two in three of the 7,000 federally insured credit unions nationwide reported a surge in business after November’s Bank Transfer Day, says Patty Briotta, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Federal Credit Unions, in Arlington, Va. Mike and Stacey Phinney, of Reservoir Hill, left M&T Bank in 2010. A technical director at Voice of America in Washington, Mike switched his accounts to the State Department Federal Credit Union when M&T began to add fees to his old Provident savings accounts.

The second-largest bank in Baltimore, with 24 percent of the local market, M&T bought the former Provident Bank in 2009 for $400 million, and then absorbed Bradford Bank and K Bank when they folded. It now ranks as the 21st largest bank in the country “He really hates big banks,” says Stacey, his wife and a creative services manager at Laureate Education, Inc. “We’re both artists, the type of people who like to ride scooters around town and go to farmers markets. Big banks don’t fit with who we are.”

cents

crowd sourcing: Efforts like the Move Your Money campaign and November 2011’s Bank Transfer Day have helped convince many big bank customers to switch to smaller local banks and credit unions.

Outside of their distaste for outsized banks owned by out-of-towners and shareholders, the Phinneys were interested in getting better deals.

They switched their credit card from CitiBank to one based at the U.S. State Department’s credit union and lowered their interest rate from 19 percent to 6 percent. They opened checking and savings accounts at the credit union, which doesn’t charge fees.

“People need to do their homework on this,” says Stacey Phinney, who visited her husband’s credit union’s website to check on rates. “You won’t know how good it is until you look up what credit unions are offering, which is substantially better than most chain banks.”

But others say it isn’t easy to disentangle all of the facets of one’s financial life from one bank, and then package all those services together again in a new one. It can take two months or more to stop the automatic depositing of paychecks or the computerized paying of bills. And sometimes a good neighborhood bank, one that has branches in all the places you need them, is hard to find. Dismayed that M&T Bank was charging him $5 for each savings account withdrawal beyond four each month, Randy Hutter of Catonsville decided to move his money in December. Then, he got stuck. A lawyer for the tax division at the federal Department of Justice in Washington, Hutter had a hard time pinpointing community banks or credit unions that have a presence on each end of his daily commute.

“There aren’t many small banks that come to mind in Catonsville—the big banks have gobbled them all up,” he says. Even if he were to find one, he likely couldn’t find a branch in Washington.

And the Justice Department’s credit union has no branches in Baltimore.

Counter to what Hutter says bank representatives told him, M&T says it had no choice but to charge him “excessive withdrawal fees” because of federal regulations that discourage people from treating savings accounts as if they were checking accounts, says bank spokesman Philip Hosmer. Even though M&T took over $1 billion in federal bailout money, M&T shouldn’t be lumped in with too-big-to-fail banks, Hosmer says, because it keeps its fees lower than other big banks and encourages its local representatives to do everything they can to give customers free checking. The bank’s chief executive officer, Robert G. Wilmers, has written several op-ed articles decrying the concentrated wealth and power of big banks in the U.S., and urged the federal government to impose more regulation on banks to aid consumers.

“We look at ourselves as a Main Street bank— not a Wall Street bank,” adds Noel Carroll, M&T’s Baltimore-area senior vice president for retail. So far, Baltimore-area customers are treating it as if it weren’t one of the nation’s largest; account openings rose by 36 percent last year and did not diminish during the protest-charged months of October and November.

Though Hosmer calls the money-moving cause “unsettling from an industry perspective,” he says that M&T’s concentration on developing its core banking options has paid off. “We’re good corporate citizens,” says Carroll. “That’ll help us through this.”

Although large banks saw a drop of $18.2 billion in deposits during the weeks of November 2 and November 9, that figure represents only one-half of one-tenth of one percent of the $13 trillion in assets those banks hold and the big banks aren’t expressing any major worries. “It’s just not a concern for us at this point,” says Carol Kaplan, a spokeswoman for the American Bankers Association in Washington.

At the same time, Kaplan notes that small banks as a group have been gathering steam nationw ide. During the same week, small community banks saw $9 billion more deposits than the same period a week earlier. “We had already begun to see some changes in the industry before these protests,” she says. “This is a period of tremendous flux in the industry.” Because of changes in the fees banks charge merchants for credit and debit card transactions—changes mandated by new federal Dodd-Frank Act banking regulations— banks, especially larger ones, stood to lose $6.6 billion in revenue last year, Kaplan adds. Banks have to find that money elsewhere. Hence, the new emphasis on rolling out fees.

Smaller banks are affected by the DoddFrank regulations too. But because they are

under constant pressure to remain competitive, and generally have fewer shareholders to appease, they can keep fees to a minimum, at least in the short term.

“Perhaps a little too much credit is being given to mass protesters and not enough to ordinary market competition,” says Stephen J.K. Walters, a professor of economics at Loyola University in Maryland. “When one seller raises his price, consumers naturally migrate to lower-price sellers.”

But it could backfire on community banks as the Dodd-Frank regulations play out, he adds. “If it imposes added fixed costs to banks, consumers will find that bigger operations can spread these costs over more customers and offer lower prices, so ultimately that might tilt the playing field against smaller operations.” Or, one can imagine, toward credit unions, which aren’t subject to the same regulations as banks, and in many cases have loosened traditional membership restrictions in recent years.

At the headquarters of St. Casimir’s Savings Bank in Canton, the bank’s president, Ronald Jasion, wonders if moving money from big to small institutions is little more than a fad. And even with anti-big bank sentiment running high, he’s not sure there’s much of an opportunity for his bank to get bigger. With four branches, 4,000 customers, and a little more than $100 million in holdings, St. Casimir’s celebrated 100 years of smallness last August. It is fond of recalling its roots: Polish immigrant businessmen sitting in the back of a tavern would dole out mortgages to those newly arrived in America.

“We saw a lot of new customers back in the late ’90s, when people shopped for higher interest rates,” he says. “Later, we saw them come back in and close their accounts” when the stock market was in turmoil. “We’ll change when we need to—it’s worked for 100 years—but big banks are everywhere. If someone has a Bank of America

“Community banks that embrace change will be around for a long time” account, they know they can go anywhere and get their money.”

Whether the cultural change afoot at the moment turns out to be lasting or not, Hamilton Federal’s DeAlmeida believes adaptable small banks will always have a place—as will the big banks.

“Community banks that embrace change will be around for a long time,” DeAlmeida says.

“There will always be those people who like their local bank. But there are reasons why big banks are big.”

Urbanite #92 february 2012 43

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44 february 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

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cents

Community Banks in Metropolitan Baltimore Advance Bank 4801 Seton Dr. Baltimore, MD 21215 (and three other locations) Arundel Federal Savings Bank 333 E. Patapsco Ave. Baltimore, MD. 21225 (and five other locations) Back and Middle River Federal Savings & Loan Assn.

1520 Old Eastern Ave. Baltimore, MD 21221-3616 Baltimore County Savings Bank 4228 Harford Rd. Baltimore, MD 21214 (and sixteen other locations) Bay Vanguard Federal Savings Bank 921 E. Fort Ave., Suite 102 Baltimore, MD 21230 (and three other locations) Bohemian American Federal Savings & Loan Assn., Inc. 8056 Philadelphia Rd. Rosedale, MD 21237 Carrollton Bank 531 S. Conkling St. Baltimore, MD 21224 (and nine other locations) CFG Community Bank 3860 E. Lombard St. Baltimore, MD 21224-2400 (and two other locations) Chesapeake Bank of Maryland 2001 E. Joppa Rd. Baltimore, MD 21234 (and five other locations) Colombo Bank 224 Albemarle St. Baltimore, MD 21202 (and two other locations) Fairmount Bank 8216 Philadelphia Rd. Baltimore, MD 21237 Fraternity Federal Saving And Loan Association 764 Washington Blvd Baltimore, MD 21230-2332 (and three other locations) Hamilton Federal Bank 5600 Harford Rd, Suite 1 Baltimore, MD 21214 (and five other locations) The Harbor Bank of Maryland 25 W. Fayette St. Baltimore, MD 21201 (and six other locations) Hopkins Federal Savings Bank 134 S. Eaton St Baltimore, MD 21224

Homewood Federal Savings Bank

1st Alliance Federal Credit Union

3228 Eastern Ave., Suite 2 Baltimore, MD 21224

724 York Rd., First Floor Baltimore, MD 21204

Kopernik Federal Bank

First Eagle Federal Credit Union

2101 Eastern Ave. Baltimore, MD 21231

3910 Keswick Rd. Baltimore, MD 21211

Kosciuszko Federal Savings Bank

First Financial Federal Credit Union

1635 Eastern Ave. Baltimore, MD 21231

of Maryland

Liberty Federal Savings & Loan Assn.

401 N. Howard St. Baltimore, MD 21201 (and two other branches) Madison Square Federal Savings Bank 5415 Belair Rd. Baltimore, MD 21206 (and four other locations) Midstate Federal Savings & Loan Assn.

6810 York Rd. Baltimore, MD 21212 Patapsco Bank 821 W 36th St. Baltimore, MD 21211 (and three other locations) Rosedale Federal Savings & Loan Association 6708 Belair Rd. Baltimore, MD 21206 (and seven other locations) St. Casimir’s Savings Bank 2703 Foster Ave. Baltimore, MD. 21224 (and three other locations) Second National Federal Savings Bank 3240 Belair Rd. Baltimore, MD 21213 Severn Savings Bank 413 Crain Highway, SE Glen Burnie, MD 21061 (and three other locations) Slavie Federal Savings Bank 3700 E. Northern Pkwy.

Baltimore, MD 21206 (and one other location) Vigilant Federal Savings Bank 532 Eastern Blvd.

Essex, MD 21221

Baltimore-area Credit Unions

1215 York Rd. Lutherville, MD 21093 Johns Hopkins Federal Credit Union 2027 E. Monument St. Baltimore, MD 21287 Lockheed-Martin Federal Credit Union 101 Chesapeake Park Plaza Baltimore, MD 21220-4201 Members First Credit Union 535 Dundalk Ave. Baltimore, MD 21224 Municipal Employees Credit Union (MECU) 5910 Baltimore National Pike Catonsville, MD 21228 Oldham Family Alliance Federal Credit Union 8601 Honeygo Blvd.

Baltimore, MD 21236 Point Breeze Federal Credit Union 11104 McCormick Rd. Hunt Valley, MD 21031 Post Office Credit Union of Maryland 900 E. Fayette St. # 606 Baltimore, MD 21233-9810 Security Plus Federal Credit Union 2439 Frederick Ave. Baltimore, MD 21223 Self Reliance Baltimore Federal Credit Union 2345 Eastern Ave. Baltimore, MD 21224 State Employees Credit Union (SECU) 211 E. Madison St. Baltimore, MD 21201

As E Federal Credit Union

Note: While membership in many of the

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credit unions above is determined by

Central Credit Union of Maryland 8501 LaSalle Rd. Baltimore, MD 21286 Destinations Credit Union

how close one lives to a particular credit union’s headquarters, many employers and labor groups have more exclusive credit unions. Ask at work if your company or union has its own credit union, or access to a particular one.

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Urbanite #92 february 2012 45

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fiction Jenny Jump Boseman

By Charles Talkoff

jenny jump boseman played guitar and sang and she was getting somewhere touring months at a time and when I met her she had just more or less broken it off with the musician she had shared a place with in New York and she had recorded a song or two (it was not clear exactly) for a film coming out on an independent label and she sat next to me before the show and introduced herself and we talked and the next morning she smiled big said it was great here’s my number if you’re in the city by which she meant New York by which she meant I’d fuck you again she left in a rush of long flowing black hair rocket launch fast gaining altitude and gone she sent a postcard from Nashville and another from someplace in Texas called Pleasure said she’d almost broken her left wrist a near disaster that got her thinking about things like insurance and fate and asked me to write and I sent a short note and got a lengthy letter written on the road somewhere between Indiana and Colorado asking for something more than a short note so I wrote a long letter and told her the story of the night crossing from the Greek island on the Turkish ferry to Turkey to get my visa extended because I couldn’t find the chief of police on the Greek island who could extend my visa and how the shrew who ran a hotel on the island told me that I’d never be able to find him because he was interviewing the new girls and it took me a minute and then I understood the long chain of girls spilling out of and being pushed out of Russia gone finished into something else forming into another thing called Russia-remembered and she wrote back saying she was in Los Angeles beside a pool getting a tan being a happy cliché thinking of me her letter on hotel paper with three palm trees in a row on the upper left time elongated because in the letter it is the was then and perpetual now of the moment she wrote it and also then the later and now of when I read it and she spoke of her second guitar being stolen and the second time I saw her we were in a bar in Baltimore she’d asked me to meet her and she came at me fast from across the room big smile and the next morning I listened to her cd and it wasn’t bad at all and that night sitting on my stoop in the heavy slow heat of dripping undulating August a car rolled by top down a pretty girl in her summer dress listening to Jenny Jump Boseman live the crowd laughing then cheering the next song coming on from her performance at Runners Fast West in Los Angeles and she sent a postcard from Italy of all places saying she was there touring with a local band that did country-blues and sitting in a sort of club somewhere near maybe Modina she saw this guy she said he looked exactly like you and it got her thinking and she said I wish I could stop but if I stop I’ll drown and the next time I saw her she was on a late late talk show looking good she gave a big smile and she said the thing that helped keep her on the road was getting long letters from people she knew and then they chatted and she played another song and she was good really very good.

Urbanite #92 february 2012 47

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s IIouse Love How one couple undid a decade’s worth of frat-boy damage and found a haven for their relationship in a Charles Village Victorian

By rebecca messner

photography by J.M. Giordano

Urbanite #92 february 2012 49

Animal house: Before Tanner and Eicher moved in, the Victorian’s main dining room was the fraternity’s main party room—the fireplace had been ripped out, and the frat’s large Greek ensignia served as the room’s focal point.

T

here is a lot of love in Ron Tanner and Jill Eicher’s house. There are the small, seemingly insignificant details—the handturned balusters on the staircase, the art deco light fixture in their foyer (the third, and final fixture, they say), the shelves of antique Steiff stuffed animals in the second-floor study.

There are the real animals that run lovingly about—two dogs and two cats, including Cleo, a basset hound who, Tanner warns me, sometimes pees on the oriental rugs when she meets new people. And then there are Tanner and Eicher themselves, who, in addition to loving each other, love their three-story Victorian, that, when Tanner bought it in 2000, was the bane of the neighborhood and had been owned for a decade by a notoriously riotous Johns Hopkins fraternity.

Vintage Victorian: Eicher and Tanner scour estate sales and flea markets to find furniture that fits.

50 february 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

space space

It has taken eleven years for the couple, who moved in mere months into their courtship, to restore the house, and the damage seemed irrevocable. Tanner, a writer and professor at Loyola University, describes the process (both the romance and restoration) in his new memoir, From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story.

When Tanner began cleaning the house of garbage, he filled three 30-yard Dumpsters’ worth of trash and discarded furniture. There was a 5-gallon paint bucket full of excrement in the basement, and rat holes littering the backyard. “They tried to destroy it,” he says.

Walking through the house, Tanner describes what the place used to look like: The ceilings in the butler’s pantry had caved in; all the doors were hacked to pieces after having been used for years as knife-throwing targets; walls were thick with coat upon coat of paint and covered with graffiti like drawings of penises, fraternity insignia, and, on some shutters nailed over a broken window on the third floor, the phrase “Fuck this piece-of-shit house.”

Tanner has very strong opinions about fraternites, though he himself was never in one.

“It’s like Lord of the Flies,” he says. “Any time you get a bunch of boys together and there’s no one there to keep them in line, it’s not going to go well.”

The pain in Tanner’s face still shows when he talks about it—he deeply respects the house and takes the destruction personally. In From Animal House, he quotes Victorian-era art critic John Ruskin: “Our buildings are not ours.

They belong partly to those who built them and partly to the generations of mankind who are to follow us. The dead still have their right to them: That which they labored for … we have no right to obliterate.”

In his book, Tanner doesn’t sugarcoat the restoration process, and he doesn’t pretend that he knew exactly what he was doing. The couple’s trial-and-error methods of paint

stripping and floor finishing often proved disastrous, even dangerous. Eicher, whom Tanner lovingly chastises for refusing to wear work gloves or a mask, came down with a debilitating case of lead poisoning and was bed-ridden for more than a week. Tanner, desperate to get the house up to code in its first year, averaged four hours of sleep, often working through the night. “I was in a very bad way,” he says. “I nearly had a nervous breakdown.” The couple eventually became experts, and frequently update their DIY website, which they named www.houselove.org.

The book, out this February from Academy Chicago Publishers, is far more engrossing than you’d expect from a book about restoration—it’s less This Old House, more Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Our House.” The love story prevails, and the main characters provide almost uncannily suitable symbolism—Tanner, whose past romances (including two divorces) were disastrous and damaging, invests everything (blood, sweat, tears, and money) in the house, because “she wanted the house,” he says, “and I wanted her.” With a self-described history of instability, Tanner repeatedly forecasts how the house will give him roots and a purpose, and maybe even finally make his mother proud. The house and its restoration become a harbinger of the couple’s success in love (they even marry in it in 2003), and an insurance policy should things take a turn for the worse.

Restored, it is a haven for their relationship and an elegant reminder of how the houses we inhabit can be as meaningful to us as the people with whom we share them.

Devil in the details: To save money, the couple did most of the restoration themselves.

For more photos of Ron Tanner’s former frat house, go to bit.ly/tannerhome

Urbanite #92 february 2012 51

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While they’re hot: Damian Mosley, who studied the connection between racial identiy and food, infuses a lifetime’s worth of knowlege into the biscuits of Blacksauce Kitchen.

THE BISCUIT

EFFECT By michelle gienow photography by J.M. Giordano

Blacksauce Kitchen Takes Baltimore Blacksauce Kitchen owner Damian Mosley is chopping fresh rosemary and thyme, knife moving across the cutting board fast as lighting. A scant moment later, the herbs have been tossed with a large bowl of flour and he’s working a pound of butter into the mix with deft fingertips, a particular kitchen magic that transforms disparate ingredients into tender empanada dough. His hands never cease moving as he looks around his Curtis Bay commercial kitchen—and laughs.

Urbanite #92 february 2012 53

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feature food + Drink “Before I moved to Baltimore, most of my life was directed at staying out of kitchen work,” he says by way of explaining his amusement. Mosley describes the career trajectory that led him from his native Springfield, Virginia, to Brooklyn, New York. “I wound up in grad school primarily because a culinary internship that I did in Islamic West Africa— a peculiar, post-colonial place where the baguette and the traditional peanut lamb stew were never as diametrically opposed as they seemed—left me with a ton of questions about what food means to people in everyday life,” Mosely says. “In particular, I was interested in how cooking and eating food were connected to people’s ideas of race. When people are shopping for food, preparing it, ordering it, eating it—are they performing racial identities?” Seeking an answer to those questions, he joined the groundbreaking food studies program at New York University.

“When I first enrolled there in 2003, it was a one-of-a-kind program with an emphasis on food and culture, but it expanded to include food systems: the production, distribution, marketing, and systematization of food,” he says. As a doctoral student Mosely taught classes like “Food Issues in Contemporary Society” that were, he explains, “geared toward thinking about food in the context of race, class, region, gender, and the like.” He also began teaching vocational cooking classes at Kingsborough Community College that, he says, “gave me a fantastic opportunity to merge practice and theory … I was able to observe how people performed their blackness, Latin-ness, Europeanness, femininity, etc., in the more hands-on setting at Kingsborough.”

Even as he taught classes, day and night, at multiple facilities, Mosely was simultaneously conducting doctoral research on food and race.

“I found myself doing archival and ethnographic research in central Harlem, one of the most axiomatically black places in the American urban landscape,” he says, describing the pace of his life then as “hectic but exhilarating.” And then his wife, who works in medicine, took a fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, and the family moved to Baltimore in June 2008, an infant and toddler in tow.

“It was kind of culture shock—suddenly I was a stay-at-home dad—but also an opportunity,” he says. “All the time I was teaching, I had been talking about some day having my own operation.”

Mosley quickly incorporated himself into Baltimore’s food circles, consulting for the Highlandtown Farmers’ Market, then in the planning stage, and turning a guest-chef appearance at Patterson Park’s Three restaurant (now Bistro Rx) into a steady gig. “I mainly took the job there so I could use their kitchen off-hours for my own catering jobs,” he says, noting that he often worked after the restaurant closed midnight until 4 a.m. on personal projects.

From the start Mosely worked with a fellow food-freak friend from his Brooklyn years, Vesnier Lugo, who had moved to Rockville not long after Mosely’s relocation to Baltimore. The two worked tirelessly together at festivals, farmers markets and events until late 2011, when Lugo withdrew from Blacksauce partnership to

focus on growing professional responsibilities at his day job and to spend time with his newborn first child.

In July 2009 Blacksauce Kitchen debuted at the Highlandtown market, selling biscuits baked early each market morning and eventually to grilling meat on site—a combination that led to the invention of the Blacksauce biscuit sandwich, which by 2010 was quickly became the stuff of legend among in-the-know Charm City food enthusiasts.

Ah, the Blacksauce biscuit sandwich. Irresistably light and flaky biscuits in creative combinations like smoked garlic and rosemary or maple bacon, as well as melt-in-your-mouth-delicious duck fat, or just classic buttermilk. Split one of those and insert some of Blacksauce’s inventively smoked meats combined with artisinal toppings—we’re talking ancho chile and coffeeroasted chicken with scotch bonnet honey, or sage sausage with smoked apple butter—and words fail to adequately describe the deliciousness of the experience. (Fear not, vegetarians: you get to ride the Blacksauce wave enjoying one of the weekly meat-free offerings like grilled apples with cave-aged cheddar).

“Biscuits came about sort of unintentionally,” says Mosley, who is currently hand-making anywhere from 200 to 500 of them each week. “I grew up in a family where biscuits meant something, and when I started teaching I would end up making biscuits each first day of class … If it was a culinary class I’d be teaching them how to make the biscuits as well. So I didn’t realize it at the time, but as I went I was slowly perfecting my process.

“It’s a good fit for markets and festivals, because biscuits are a fairly universal food that cut cross cultural boundaries,” he continues. “Plus

they are also a naturally convenient hand food you can walk around with.” However, Mosley says, “I’ve tried to make sure from the very beginning that everyone knows we are not just biscuits: we actually make our main living doing catering.” So aside from catching Blacksauce Kitchen at your local farmers market, you can have Blacksauce Kitchen come to you -- for a formal seated wedding with 200 guests, or just a small family gathering with 20.

“It’s definitely about context,” Mosely says. “I try to produce thoughtful food. So when people ask me to come up with a menu, I start with the season, and the reason for the event, and ask what kind of people are coming to the event. So I think about who will be eating, what they’ll enjoy, and what ingredients are plentiful and at their best then. As for style, we do all kinds of food, so it’s tough to condense it down. But more than anything our food is rooted in the African diaspora and its legacy in the Caribbean.

Lots of slow cooking over wood and coal, lots of quickbreads.”

For getting those catering jobs, however, Mosley says, “Biscuits are a far better marketing tool than I ever would have guessed, as are farmers’ markets. We’ve been hired to cater by people that have only ever eaten our biscuit sandwiches in the street but want us to do the food for their wedding!”

In addition to its market stands, Blacksauce Kitchen recently acquired its own food truck.

However, the truck is thus far not operational; Mosley is still pondering the best way to fit it in with Blacksauce’s current work flow. He also says that he doesn’t want to get “truck dependent,” though he loves the idea of curbside dining. “Cooking on site is part theater; not that we are putting on a show, but people appreciate seeing you make their food. They really get into it, and at that point it becomes more about craft, and about connecting the maker with the eater.”

That said, has Mosley ever considered establishing a storefront restaurant? “People are always asking me this, and I can’t say it hasn’t crossed my mind, especially when you’re running 40 minutes late for an event and the generator just blew,” he says. “But right now I feel like we can be so responsive, doing different things every week and constantly changing up, keeping fresh, that tying down to one location doesn’t interest me. Besides, I feel like one of our strengths is that people can’t get our food every day.”

You can find Blacksauce Kitchen at the Waverly Farmers’ Market every Saturday—just look for the longest line—or at Zeke’s in Hamilton and Milk and Honey Market in Mount Vernon. Other, more ephemeral appearances are announced on Blacksauce Kitchen’s Facebook page. But wherever you go to seek the biscuits of Blacksauce, you should go early: Mosely routinely sells out of everything he makes.

Get Mosely’s recipe for cider-braised pork at bit.ly/blacksaucebiscuits Urbanite #92 february 2012 55

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dining reviews food + Drink

Bond Street Social

By Martha Thomas

photos by Sarah Thrower

T

he noise level at Bond Street Social is high, to be sure. It ricochets from the ceiling, with its wagon-wheel style chandeliers and bounces from the glass walls of the fireplaces that blaze throughout the restaurant on a chilly night. But it’s not a bothersome buzz. The vast restaurant, at the water’s edge end of Bond Street could be a ski lodge, filled with flushed and energized revelers at day’s end. It has a Colorado or Wyoming feel: oversized tufted dark brown leather banquettes and rough wood tables. The walls are a gravitydefying display of smooth stones held in place by wire grates, like the gabion used to prevent stream erosion. Hanging lamps look plucked from mine shafts.

Bond Street Social encourages its social mission by offering drinks in 80-ounce pours (that’s right, 80, with a zero, for 50 bucks, also with a zero.). Delivered to the table in oversized jars, mojitos, sangria, and bourbon with lemon syrup and mint can keep a table happy for some time.

The food fits nicely with the convivial atmosphere. Lately restaurants have embraced

Sharing is caring: True to its name, the food at Bond Street Social has a communal feel.

the small plates formula in what may be a ploy to extend grazing beyond happy hour, through dinner hour and into late night. And it works.

At Bond Street Social, you’re not committing to a whole sit-down affair if you order a plate of clam pasta to be shared: Here it’s three clam shells, each nestled on a bed of sea salt, each topped with a fork wound with an oversized mouthful of capellini, redolent of clam broth and a sharp bite of pepper. Three big bites of pasta, and you can move on to say, artichoke fritters, tangy artichoke batter-coated and fried,

with a squeeze of lemon.

The BLT salad is chopped romaine lettuce—easily eaten without fuss—with crisp bits of smoked bacon, bleu cheese, and cherry tomatoes. And the lobster roll sliders are two miniature buns, buttered and grilled, and filled with unadorned chunks of sweet lobster. Sliders are the only sandwich options on the menu, but can also be had as burgers, crab cakes, reubens, and grilled cheese.

There’s a section labeled “fork and knife,” with such options as lamb meatballs, grilled hanger steak, and fish and chips. But even these somewhat larger plates are sharable. The meatballs, a melt-in-your mouth blend that includes veal, pork, feta cheese, and preserved lemon, are served in their own sauce. The fried fish comes with a side of potato “tots” sprinkled in Old Bay, while the buttermilk-fried chicken is accompanied by citrusy coleslaw and a warm biscuit infused with cheddar.

Desserts continue the communal motif.

The brownie, for example, is three miniature, highly delectable bites, each topped with a swirl of milk chocolate and caramel mousse and shavings of sea salt. And if dessert isn’t social enough, there’s always the option of a chocolate or key lime pie martini, which you may just want to keep to yourself. (Dinner daily, brunch Sun. 901 S. Bond St.; 443-449-6234; www.bondstreetsocial.com.)

Lost in space: Lost City Diner’s jaw-dropping interior design evokes 1930s pulp magazines and comics.

Lost City Diner

By David Dudley

C

lub Charles impresario Joy Martin kept this sci-fi malt shop under wraps for so long that the long-gestating Lost City Diner threatened to become the Chinese Democracy of luncheonettes. But then the neon signs flickered to life in late summer, and now you can

actually stop in for a milkshake beneath the milk shake sign that decorated the corner of Charles and Lafayette since God knows when.

The restaurant’s jaw-dropping interior design signals that this is not a typical exercise in ’50s diner nostalgia: Martin’s aesthetic owes more to the 1930s pulp magazines and Golden Age comics, and stepping into the Lost City feels more like visiting a period art installation.

The walls are bedecked with improbable decopunk contraptions, a chrome rocket hangs above the entrance, and the servers are uniformed in snappy Eastern European military outfits, like crew members of a visiting zeppelin.

It’s a relief to open the menu and realize that the kitchen doesn’t really attempt to offer the culinary equivalent of this fever dream.

There are nods to the uncanny, as in the fried “Saturn rings” that turn out to be battered apple, served with creamy horseradish dipping sauce. But they hit roughly the same sweetsavory-crispy flavor notes as the standard onion variety and disappear just as fast. Equally satisfying is the grilled cheese sandwich, made with thick slices of buttered bread and bacon.

Vegan “bacon” is an option, and there are burgers aplenty, of the beef, turkey, and vegetarian varieties. A vegan-sounding entrée of roasted pepper stuffed with quinoa turned out to be a virtuous snooze—the peppers under-roasted, the stuffing dry and flavorless—but accompanying salads were abundant and full of funky greens that you’d be hard pressed to find in a real diner. (Dinner daily. 1730 N. Charles St.; 410-547-5678.)

Urbanite #92 february 2012 57

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wine + spirits food + Drink

Just Plains Folks

A Presidents Day toast to the Carters

A

By Clinton Macsherry

quest ion for in 1978 Jimmy Carter well-seasoned signed into law a repeal readers: What’s of federal restrictions on your favorite home brewing. memory of the Carter President Carter visyears? The “adultery ited Baltimore on Auin my heart” Playboy gust 7, 1979, hopping an interview? The swimearly Metroliner from ming rabbit attack on D.C. to Penn Station. the President’s fishing Energy angst ran high at skiff? Cardigans? the time, and he toured From a bibulous pera public housing unit on spective, the malaiseBiddle Street equipped addled zeitgeist of the with solar panels. After late 1970s offered little an address to a Sons of occasion to celebrate— Italy convention, Carter and Carter’s abstemiwent to lunch at Chiapous persona suited the parelli’s in Little Italy. times. Carter struck a For years, Chiapparelli’s displayed Carter’s sober tenor throughout table setting and other the 1976 presidential campaign, famously memorabilia in a plastic case. Now all that’s left railing against the “$50 are some autographed martini lunch.” In conphotos and a framed text, Carter’s criticism Evening Sun story near had more to do with tax the front door. According deductions than executive dissipation, but the to that account, Carter lunched on “chicken “three-martini lunch” cacciatore … the famous (as the phrase entered Chiapparelli’s salad … the lexicon) struck Glory days: Chiapparelli’s proudly displays proof of a visit from President Jimmy Carter in 1979. an anti-establishment and homemade red wine.” chord. Gerald Ford looked back light-heartedly By the time the photos were snapped, Carter had years later. “The three-martini lunch is the moved on to iced tea, but perhaps the wine had epitome of American efficiency,” Ford quipped. special appeal: Often incorrectly assumed to be a teetotaler, Carter in fact descends from a line “Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful, and of home vintners. He’s recently returned to the a snootful at the same time?”

Temperance carried over into the Carter hobby he practiced before his presidency.

White House. According to Time columnist Working with Georgian Scuppernong and Muscadine grapes, Carter produces 100 bottles Hugh Sidey, First Lady Rosalynn Carter said “she every few years, auctioning some at fundraisers really enjoyed seeing ‘people kind of squirm’ beto benefit the charitable work of the Carter Cencause there was no liquor served.” On the oppoter. “It brings several thousand dollars a bottle,” site extreme, back in Carter’s hometown of Plains, he told CNN’s Larry King in 2006, “so we feel Georgia, First Brother Billy Carter became somelike when we drink some … we’re drinking very thing of a beer-swilling folk hero. A gas station expensive wine.” Maybe it’s killer juice, but the owner and self-proclaimed redneck, Billy Carter auction value more likely derives from its pastwas also sharp-witted and well-read, with a keen president producer. Similarly, Billy Beer cans nose for publicity. With a mother who’d joined sometimes fetch hundreds of dollars from colthe Peace Corps at 68, a “motorcycle freak” sister, lectors of political Americana. another sister a “Holy Roller evangelist,” and a To toast the Carters, I raised a glass of 2011 “brother running for president,” he told reporters, Malbec produced by local deli owner and home“I’m the only sane one in the family.”

In 1977, he became the pitchman for Billy winemaking impresario Joe DiPasquale. Opaque Beer—“the best I’ve ever tasted,” Carter gushed purple with crushed black currant aromas overin an endorsement on the label. The brand was laid with youthful whiffs of yeast and paint-box, short-lived, partly because Billy soon became it was still rounding into form over the holidays. embroiled in scandal over business connections But deep flavors of black plum, boysenberry, and to Libya, and partly because, even by the unloam hold promise for the near future. Taste some for yourself at the Highlandtown Wine crafty beer standards of the day, it was god-awful.

Festival on April 22.

(Trust me.) Perhaps as an act of familial penance, photo by sarah thrower

Urbanite #92 february 2012 59

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Trefny Dix

For guitarist Dustin Wong, the magic happens when things come together.

By Brandon Weigel photography by Josh sisk

I

t was one of those moments where everything comes together, when the planets seemingly align. Dustin Wong, who was born in Hawaii but spent most of his life in Japan, was still fairly new to Baltimore when he was given a tour of the city by his grandmother—a tour that seemed surprisingly detailed. He didn’t know it before that day, but his grandmother had lived in the city for a period, and, as it turned out, on the same street, Cathedral Street, his house was on.

# Urbanite Urbanite#92 91 february january 2012 61

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Feature / Book arts + culture It didn’t stop there. He also learned his father was born in Baltimore, at what was once Hospital for the Women of Maryland. That building had recently been converted into student housing by the Maryland Institute College of Art, where Wong was beginning to study general sculpture. Just like that, their three lives intersected in an entirely new way, and in Wong’s view, this was not mere coincidence but the fulfillment of something.

A self-described reader of all religious texts, Wong says he has been greatly inspired by Buddhism and the beliefs of reincarnation and cyclical life. Each being, the arc of each life, can also be viewed through this prism. “It’s just circles overlapping other circles, and the collision of the lines is where the interesting parts happen,” he says. “Whether it be your circle and my circle or circles that we’re not even aware of.” That continuous motion, all points being equal with no true beginning or end, is something that has inspired his early art; his senior thesis at MICA was a video project correlating Pete Townshend’s windmill guitar strumming with the motion of the fighting windmills in Don Quixote and the orbit of the moon around Earth.

It was in music, though, that Wong, a selftaught guitarist, would make his mark rather than video or sculpture. He played in the psych-guitar duo Ecstatic Sunshine and later, in the lauded, recently defunct spaz-art-rock group Ponytail. Not until later, with his solo releases of instrumental guitar music, did he continue to explore annular shapes, and his new album, Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads, is a continuation of that examination.

Despite the confluence of events that brought him to Baltimore, Wong recently moved to New York, where he was getting more consistent shows. The move hasn’t been easy, with Wong characterizing the experience as “a test of patience” and citing friends who went to dark places with substance use. But, sitting at Kitten Coffee in Williamsburg for an hour-long interview over lemon ginger teas, it is apparent he is still intently fascinated with finding the collisions of those lines, the interesting parts.

In all of his solo work, songs don’t have verses or choruses, or much of any pop structure to speak of. Each starts with a melody that is looped, and then another melody is played on top of it. The melodies keep stacking, with an array of pedals being employed to tweak tones, shift octaves or add effects, until the song builds into a psychedelic swirl, a series of loops that overlap and crash together.

It may seem implausible as you see his fingers dart up and down the fret board with precision or hear the seemingly impossible progressions, but Wong is almost entirely selftaught. He started out with basic chords and learned the rest of the geography of the guitar, as he calls it, on his own. “I realized it was all

a puzzle,” he says, “and everything fits in these shapes in standard tuning.”

The songwriting process itself is very methodical, but it’s also more organic than Wong’s previous band. “Ponytail is about aggression, and I had to channel a certain aspect of myself that was real exhausting. If I kept doing that, I would have been worn out,” he says. “With this, it’s like I’m cultivating rather than channeling.

It’s meditating.”

And the results you hear, Wong says, are a series of “happy accidents.” He starts with a basic melody or idea before clearing his mind to let the building begin. Once he has that first loop, he makes an attempt to layer sounds and whatever comes out, comes out. In that moment when things fall into place, when the happy accident happens, he gets “carried away by [it]. Sometimes things happen unexpectedly, and it’s blissful. It feels amazing.”

Wong will record a song when he feels it is about 70 percent done, and that’s just so he can tinker and tweak it more, adding more pieces. Once he feels it’s complete, the idea for the next song usually comes from an element of the first, and he takes that one element and builds something new from it. So even though Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads, has 16 separate songs, they flow together as a string of interconnected ideas.

But the meditative quality to the methodology does not mean everything flows forth with relative ease. Naturally, there are times when things don’t work or come immediately, resulting in plenty of false starts. In some instances, there are far more intermediary steps from one song to the other than appear on the record. Normally, when he would get to the 70 percent recordings, he used to take substances to further guide the direction of the creative process—during these sessions he says he occaisonally smoked salvia when listening back to what he had recorded. Now, after the negative experience of seeing drug abuse among his friends, however, he says he is now much more content to drink the lemon ginger tea in front of him than take drugs or drink alcohol. Being sober is more psychedelic anyway, he says, “because you’re so much more aware.”

The reward derived from the music has never required artificial enhancement. When one of Wong’s songs builds to its climax, with so many ideas heaped together or working alongside each other, the temperatures and textures of the tones speak, he says, in an empathic way.

“Where like if somebody has a problem, the other person might say, ‘It’s OK,’” he says.

“That’s the kind of melody I want to play. That gives me joy. I guess kindness gives me joy.”

Sample some tracks from Dustin Wong’s LP at bit.ly/dustinmusic

The Straight Story

Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality by Hanne Blank (Beacon Press, 2012)

By Sondra guttman

I

s being straight a matter of what you do in bed? By who you do it with? By how long you’ve been doing it with whoever you’ve been doing it? If the answers to these questions are leading you farther away from certainty, there’s a good reason why. Heterosexuality, writer Hanne Blank argues, doesn’t exist in nature. Despite their best efforts, scientists find no difference between bodies that desire differently. It turns out that when we say we’re straight we mean only that we are “sexually normal.” And sexual normalcy, as persuasively shows, has become an increasingly complex and demanding business.

Blank, who lives in Baltimore, has been a scholar at Towson’s Institute for Teaching and Research on Women. Her book traces heterosexuality from its inception. Though men and women have been getting married, having sex, and raising children together for millennia, no word for these normal-sexual behaviors existed until the middle of the 19th century, when a gay German bureaucrat named Karl Ulrichs wanted to protest against a harsh law punishing sex between men. Blank’s book illustrates how the word Ulrich coined:“heterosexuality,” has policed the boundaries of unacceptable sexual and reproductive behavior in Western culture ever since.

The book touches on the shift from courtship to dating, the new expectation of romantic and erotic satisfaction in marriage, feminism, and recent changes in reproductive technologies that have broadened our notion of “normal.” In the course of this history, Blank also unmasks the “enormous cultural machine” of heterosexual privilege that has been manufactured over the course of centuries by characters and forces including the urban industrialist nineteenth century, early Evangelical Christianity, Walt Disney, and Sigmund Freud.

Blank’s style is clear, confident, and lively.

To translate her findings from the depths of academia, she offers a good teacher’s knack for clear comparisons and lucid explanation.

She’s also given to catchy opening sentences that send you racing ahead. “Around 1914,” she writes, “it became possible to go out on a date.”

The argument that the heterosexual is nothing more or less than a cultural tool for managing the ultimately unmanageable human libido might strike you as a little less than revelatory. However, the book’s real punch lies in the consequences: As sexual-normal evolves and expands, Blank speculates, will there come a time when we don’t need a term for it at all?

Urbanite #92 february 2012 63

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music / Theater arts + culture

Partying for the Past Baltimore Heritage’s Young Preservationist Happy Hour

BY Baynard Woods

Top photo by sarah thrower; illustration COURTESY OF Keith Perelli

A history of drinking: Eli Pousson of Baltimore Heritage hosts happy hours to attract a younger audience.

E

arly last year, Eli Pousson, of Baltimore Heritage, held the first Young Preservationist Happy Hour at the Owl Bar in the historic Belvedere Hotel. The happy hour was Pousson’s attempt to deal with what he sees as one of the main challenges facing the preservation movement: “Residents participating in civic life— and particularly preservation—in Baltimore City, are older than the general population and

Take Cover

Under Cover, at MICA’s Decker Gallery, January 27 to March 11

BY ANDREW ZALESKI

T

ake sixteen undergraduate art students, put them in a room, and tell them they have roughly twelve weeks to organize, on their own, a full-fledged art show, to be exhibited the following semester. If you’re feeling crass, this is about the time you’d start placing bets.

But that’s precisely what the Exhibition Development Seminar (EDS) at the Maryland Institute College of Art asks of its students.

Initiated in 1997 by MICA curator-in-residence George Ciscle, EDS is a year-long commitment that has students plan a professional, contemporary art exhibition, from selecting the artists, to drawing up contracts, to writing press material, preparing related programming, and everything in between.

This year’s seminar was atypical, for two reasons. Ciscle, now the director of MICA’s MFA in curatorial practice, passed his job as EDS instructor to newly hired professor Jeffry Cudlin. As a result, when class began, students discovered they had to decide on an exhibition topic—usually selected by Ciscle in advance—a process that took five weeks.

“It was not easy,” Cudlin says, laughing. “We had a pool of maybe twenty-some possible

also don’t match it racially or in terms of digital literacy,” he says.

Pousson knew a lot of people younger than 40 who, like him, worked for organizations with some interest in preservation. “They may not be the person in charge, but they were doing a lot of work,” he says. And yet there were few opportunities for them to talk about their common interests.

He was more successful than he imagined.

The Owl Bar was full of architects, developers, archeologists, archivists, professors, public school teachers, and representatives from Maryland Historical Trust and the city’s Commission on Historical and Architectural Preservation. Since then, Pousson has hosted bimonthly happy hours in various parts of the city. In March, more than seventy-five people attended the happy hour at the Alewife on Eutaw Street.

Of course, a skeptic might ask: “How does drinking beer save old buildings?”

“No one will feel empowered to work to save anything if they feel like they are alone,” Pousson says. “This is about building community and creating a deep bench for the preservation movement.”

Though the happy hours do not always coincide with tours of the areas in which they’re located, the location does tend to drive a lot of the conversation. The Alewife happy hour focused on the redevelopment of the West Side.

The last happy hour of 2011—held at Amour Baltimore in Hollins Market—was co-hosted by the Baltimore Red Line Community Liaisons and focused on transportation in the area.

On February 16, the Young Preservationist Happy Hour will celebrate the Bicentennial of the War of 1812 with the staff of Fort McHenry at J. Patrick’s in Locust Point. Around the same time, Baltimore Heritage will unveil a smartphone app that allows users to read about and see photos of historic neighborhoods or buildings in Baltimore— and, they hope, attract even more young people.

In a city that is nearly 70 percent African American, Pousson and Baltimore Heritage continue to try to increase the racial diversity of the preservation movement. As he has done in the past, he has also organized a number of walking tours around the West Side that resumed in January. The happy hours and tours are more diverse than one may expect, but they still have a long way to go to make the preservation movement match the city as a whole. Still, Pousson believes they’re moving in the right direction. “As your demographic gets younger, diversity increases. Trying to reach out to younger people interested in the history of the city necessarily means reaching out to a broader swath of the city,” he says.

show themes or topics until finally we had just three show topics. It just came down to the one that we could do.”

The one that they could do became Under Cover, an exhibit in which eleven artists

interpret shelter as both a physical and psychological state while simultaneously exploring the Orwellian concept of “Big Brother”—this idea that, in the 21st century, something overt, like a red light camera, and something covert, like GPS location on a Twitter account, is tracking your every move.

“Privacy is basically on the tip of everybody’s tongue,” says Tahira Christian, a MICA senior majoring in art history and painting with a concentration in curatorial studies. Christian, along with senior Logan Dixon, formed the curatorial team tasked with selecting or commissioning artists for the Under Cover exhibit.

While some of the work is more abstract, she says, other artists are “easier to understand.”

Seattle artist James Coupe uses five cameras placed in the center of the gallery to film the exhibit, but the images, displayed on televisions, filter out exhibit goers. New York-based artist Mary Mattingly’s sculpture is a portable costume that comes equipped with solarpowered GPS and can be worn individually or combined with other costumes to create an impromptu shelter.

“That’s always the challenge that a curator has—making everything make sense to everybody else,” Christian says.

For more information on Young Preservationist Happy Hours, visit www.baltimoreherigate.org.

Decker Gallery at MICA, 1303 W. Mount Royal Ave. Opening reception on February 2, 7–9 p.m.

Urbanite #92 february 2012 65

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Dates and Times: February 9

- 10:30am (Student Matinee) - 7:30pm (Preview) February 10 - 7:30pm (Open Night)

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Ticket Price: General Admissions - $25 Student/Seniors(60) - $20 Student Matinee - $10

Directed by Shirley Basfield Dunlap

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For Tickets call the Murphy Fine Arts Center’s Ticket Office - 443-885-4440

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February 12 - 3pm and 7:30pm

the scene

this month’s happenings Compiled by Anissa Elmerraji

ARTS/CULTURE

Effigy Bottle, Northern Highlands, Peru, Early Intermediate Period, 200 BCE–500 CE, Earthenware, slip paint, Height 28.3 cm, diameter 20.6 cm, Gift of John Bourne (2009.20.37)

film

Attention singles who despise a certain greeting-card-company sanctioned holiday: Celebrate your disdain for all things Valentines at Love is a Battlefield: The ANTI Valentine’s Video Party on February 14. Enjoy a series of short films like Bye Bi Love by Giovanna Chesler and the award-winning music video for Pat Benatar’s anti-love hit Love is a Battlefield. (3134 Eastern Ave.; 410276-1651; www.creativealliance.org)

music

On February 23 and 26, conductor Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra presents the Fifth Symphony by Sergei Prokofiev, the Russian composer known for scoring the classic children’s tale Peter and the Wolf.

Dubbed Carmen Fantasy, the night also features a “portrait” of Carmen played

by BSO associate concertmaster and violinist Madeline Adkins. (1212 Cathedral St.; 410-783-8000; www.baltimore symphony.com) Just in time for Black History Month, the Creative Alliance dedicates February 17 to honoring Jazz and Blues legend Nina Simone. The tribute show, Put a Spell on You!, features the artistic contributions of BMore & Dance, Wordslave, RaynFall Dance Company, Olu Butterfly, Dishibem Traditional Contemporary Dance Compnay, Bashi Rose, and Griot’s Eye Youth Media Group, under the direction of playwright Rosiland Cauthen.

(3134 Eastern Ave.; 410-276-1651; www. creativealliance.org) Help HopeWell Cancer Support, a Maryland-based organization dedicated to providing emotional support to cancer patients, when you buy a ticket for Concert for Hope. On February 11, this night of local music features bands Mr. Wilson, Gypsy Dawg, Stone Deaf, and Taken from John Bourne’s collection of ancient Mesoamerican, Central American, and Andean South American art, Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas contains 135 Precolumbian works dating from 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1530. On February 12, see what these works of art reveal about the ancient cultures of places like Mexico and Peru. The exhibition runs through May 20 at the Walters Art Museum. (600 N. Charles St.; 410547-9000; www.thewalters.org)

Worth Our While. A live auction follows with prizes including a Paul Reed Smith electric guitar. (512 York Rd., Towson; 410-337-7178; www.rechertheatre.com)

theatre

Catch A Skull in Connemara, Martin McDonagh’s comedic mystery set in the small town of Leenane, Ireland. The play follows a commissioned gravedigger who’s faced with exhuming the body of the wife he was accused of murdering years ago. See director BJ Jones’ rendition at Center Stage through March 4.

(700 N. Calvert St.; 410-986-4000; www. centerstage.org)

On February 24, John Pielmeier’s dramatic play Agnes of God debuts at the Spotlighters Theatre. Directed

by Allan Herlinger, the play tells the story of a young nun whose unexpected pregnancy—and the even more unexpected murder of her newborn child— makes her a source of uneasy intrigue for Dr. Martha Livingstone, a psychiatrist commissioned to solve the mysteries.

(817 St. Paul St.; 410-752-1225; www. spotlighters.org) Peabody alumnus and composer Dominick Argento created the score for Postcard from Morocco in 1971. Forty-one years later, it will open at the Baltimore Theatre Project on February 9. With libretto written by John Donahue, the

opera follows a cast of seven travelers including Mr. Owen, whose suitcase, we discover, is mysteriously empty. (45 W. Preston St.; 410-539-3091; www. theatreproject.org) Be serenaded by Sinatra classics during Come Fly Away, a Broadway musical from choreographer Twyla Tharp. Running from February 24–26, the show unravels the love affairs of four couples around hits like Fly Me to the Moon, New York, New York and Witchcraft. (140 W. Mount Royal Ave.; 410-685-5086; www. lyricoperahouse.com)

comedy

For the third year in a row, the Royal Comedy Tour brings back New Jersey actress and comedienne Sommore.

Funny men Earthquake, Bruce Bruce, Mark Curry, and Tony Rock join her on stage on February 17 at the First Mariner Arena. (201 W. Baltimore St.; 410347-2000; www.baltimorearena.com)

dance

Brazil comes to Baltimore during ¡Viva Brasil!, the Creative Alliance’s annual samba dance party and Carnival show featuring Samba Trovao and Rose Moraes. Don’t know how to samba? Learn how with a free dance lesson as you groove to the tunes of DJ Luiz Louco and DJ Miguel De Amor. (3134 Eastern Ave.; 410-276-1651; www.creativealliance.org)

visual arts

On February 21, catch the opening reception for an exhibition of work by painter and MICA professor Katherine Mann at McDaniel College.

Mann, a fellow in the Washington, D.C., So-Hamiltonian Fellows program, describes her paintings as “utter hybrids; man-sized fields punctuated by moments of absurdity, poetry, mutation, growth and decay.” (2 College Hill, Westminster; 410857-2290; www.mcdaniel.edu)

An innkeeper living outside of Paris, Léon Bonvin spent his time capturing his natural surroundings in watercolor.

Starting January 25, enjoy Near Paris, a collection of the highly detailed works of this self-taught wonder who tragically killed himself in 1866. The

exhibition runs through May 20 at the Walters. (600 N. Charles St.; 410-5479000; www.thewalters.org)

COMMUNITY On February 9, Think Big Baltimore— an organization that works to help Baltimoreans achieve the American dream—plans to discuss angel investing during Are There Angels Among Us? At this cocktail happy hour, the group will explore how to team-up with angels, or wealthy business investors, living in Baltimore. (801 Key Hwy; 410-205-9565; www.thinkbigbaltimore.com)

GREEN/SUSTAINABLE Become a steward of your environment when you attend Blue Water Baltimore’s Adopt-a-Stream Workshop on February 16. Once participants are taught everything they need to know about watersheds, they indefinitely “adopt” a section of a stream to monitor for restoration and cleanup opportunities. (320 York Rd., Towson; 410-254-1577; www. bluewaterbaltimore.org)

STYLE/SHOPPING Are wedding bells in the air? Then head over to the Baltimore Bridal Show on February 4-5 for all your wedding needs. The two-day event features runway fashion shows and displays to inspire brides- and grooms-to-be. (One W. Pratt St.; 410-649-7000; www.bccenter.org)

FOOD/DRINK Support Health Care for the Homeless during its annual Chocolate Affair on February 2, which features touching stories of transformation from staff and clients. Executive Chef Carlos Gomez of the Baltimore Waterfront Marriott Hotel is scheduled to whip up a decadent twocourse dinner. Plus, enjoy a generous selection of hors d’oeuvres and desserts from nearly twenty-five local shops and eateries including the Wine Market, City Café, Ma Petit Shoe, Raw Sushi and Moore’s Candies. (700 Aliceanna St.; 410-837-5533; www.hchmd.org)

Urbanite #92 february 2012 67

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eye to eye

in one glimpse, the marble steps, brick buildings, roaring buses, and pedestrian herds disappear into the horizon, replaced by a broad swath of calm blue sky. Like a living movie, the new landscape vacillates with the position of the viewer, rendering congested places into open panoramas, where empty space recedes far into the distance. Artist Skye Gilkerson creates the view-finders that make this visual transformation possible. Her wooden boxes, with diagonal mirrors inside, reflect the sky above and expand it downward, erasing mountains, forests, and cityscapes to convey, instead, the wide-open vistas of the Midwest.

Gilkerson conceived the project at Anderson Ranch cara ober Art Center, near Aspen, Colorado. “The mountains, while cara ober is urbanite’s online arts/culture editor. to receive undeniably beautiful, made me feel claustrophobic and her weekly e-zine, go to bit.ly/ out of place,” explains the artist. “I am from eastern South ezinesignup.

Dakota, the very flat and sparsely populated region that is often described using words like ‘nothing’ and ‘nowhere.’ The whole Midwest tends to have this peripheral status, and the part where I lived is like the periphery of the periphery.”

Described by certain politicians as “the Real America,” the vast, under-populated middle of the United States is often viewed as marginal by the rest of the country. By imposing a Midwestern landscape onto starkly different environments, this project questions commonly held social and political views, creating new perspectives for both sides of the divide. Regardless of the political implications, Gilkerson’s Portable Horizon literally illustrates the inherent subjectivity of any vantage point, but with a sense of visual wonder and humor, which unites rather than divides. All of us have been shaped by the place of our origins. We all feel a strong visual attachment to the place that feels like home.

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