January 2009 Issue by Urbanite LLC

The Foreclosure Crisis: Who’s to Blame? • Bard Wanted: Maryland Picks a Poet Laureate january 2009 issue no. 55

BREAK

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contents

january 2009 issue no. 55

feature 28

breakthroughs

what’s the next big thing, and where will it come from? we scoured the region to find the emerging ideas, astonishing innovations, and strange inventions that could change our world.

departments 40

editor’s note

what you’re saying

what you’re writing

corkboard

the goods

baltimore observed protect this house

consider the buggy whip a taxing complaint

invention: edible candles, the picture of health, and a beautiful mind this month: poe, polar bears, and remembering dr. king be the bay. plus: heavy lifting, indiscriminate fashion, and suburban mush

meet the bare-knuckle housing advocates who will fight your foreclosure by lionel foster

a light in dark times a writer searches for the father he never knew, who was murdered by the nazis by richard o’mara

screen dreams a caseworker launches a donation-only film series to benefit her aging clients by marianne k. amoss

space animal attraction pet hospital meets humane design

this month online at www. urbanitebaltimore.com: video: tom hasler’s journey into the past

by jessica leshnoff

a little italy favorite adds arts to the menu by martha thomas

more breakthroughs: local luminaries on what’s next in media, art, technology, food, and more poetry: a piece from outgoing maryland poet laureate michael glaser

eat/drink dinner and a show

plus: corks and annabel lee tavern, wine for hard times, and this month’s dining calendar

art/culture versifier wanted a new year, a new poet laureate by marianne k. amoss

on the cover: illustration

plus: a politics fix, hooked on classics, and this month’s cultural calendar

by Marc Alain

eye to eye: urbanite’s creative director, alex castro, on alyssa dennis

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Issue 55: January 2009 Publisher Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com Creative Director Alex Castro General Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com Editor-in-Chief David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com Managing Editor Marianne K. Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com Senior Editor Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com Staff Writer Lionel Foster Lionel@urbanitebaltimore.com Literary Editor Susan McCallum-Smith literaryeditor@urbanitebaltimore.com

Are we there yet?

Proofreader Robin T. Reid Contributing Writers Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Mat Edelson, Clinton Macsherry, Richard O’Mara, Martha Thomas, Sharon Tregaskis, Mary K. Zajac

Coming Next Month: Journeys, escapes, and going other places.

Editorial Interns Malene K. Bell, Salma Warshanna, Andrew Zaleski Design/Production Manager Lisa Van Horn Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffi c/Production Coordinator Belle Gossett Belle@urbanitebaltimore.com Photography Interns Aisha M. Khan, Shelby Silvernell Web Coordinator/Videographer Chris Rebbert website@urbanitebaltimore.com Senior Account Executives Catherine Bowen Catherine@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R . Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Lois Windsor Lois@urbanitebaltimore.com Advertising Sales Assistant Erin Albright Erin@urbanitebaltimore.com Marketing Coordinator/Staff Photographer La Kaye Mbah LaKaye@urbanitebaltimore.com Bookkeeping/Marketing Assistant Iris Goldstein Iris@urbanitebaltimore.com Founder Laurel Harris Durenberger �⁄�⁄� ⅔ P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

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Editorial inquiries: Send queries to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050. Subscription price: $18 per year.

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Urbanite

Urbanite (ISSN 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. To suggest a drop location for the magazine, please contact us at 410-243-2050. Postmaster: Send address changes to Urbanite Subscriptions, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211.

contributors

courtesy of Christopher Graham

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Baltimore native Malene K. Bell is an Urbanite fall editorial intern. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Master of Arts in Writing program, Bell has written for 13th Moon, Mosaic Literary Magazine, and the Baltimore Review. Next fall, she begins work on a Ph.D. in feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For this issue, she wrote about the Fells Point b-boy/skater clothier Pedestrian (“The Goods,” p. 17). “The manager was an entertainment promoter,” she says of Pedestrian’s Garth Young. “It seems like he’s trying to combine arts, events, and merchandise under one roof.”

Christopher Graham is the owner of Charm City Photography and a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Master of Arts in Digital Arts program. For this issue, he photographed subjects in the feature “Breakthroughs” package, including Ben Shneiderman, a University of Maryland computer scientist and a leader in the field of humancomputer interaction. As a photographer, Graham often wonders what makes for an eye-catching image, so he was fascinated by Shneiderman’s work tracking how our eyes scan information on a computer screen. “He’s just a brilliant man,” Graham says.

editor’s note

This month’s buzzword: buggy whip. Unless you are actually driving a horse-drawn carriage, this device now exists only as shorthand for obsolescence, the universal symbol of uselessness. When the automobile appeared in the early 20th century, the nation’s buggy-whip makers—apparently there were a lot of them at the time—found themselves sideswiped by innovation. The moral of this fable: Keep up with the times, or you, (insert your outdated industry here), are going the way of the buggy whip. There’s an irresistible symmetry here. Judging by the number of media pundits who have invoked the term over the last few weeks, the current favored candidate for buggywhip status is the American horseless carriage industry, currently rumbling toward what many feel is well-deserved bankruptcy after decades in the technological slow lane. The other buggy-whip enterprise that comes up a lot is journalism itself, or at least the institutions that have supported it for the last century or two. On December 8, the second-largest media company in the United States, the Tribune Company—owners of the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the Baltimore Sun, among many other holdings, including twenty-three television stations—filed for bankruptcy protection to allow the company to restructure its staggering $12 billion debt. The filing capped a year that many are calling the worst in the industry’s history, and not only for those long-suffering daily newspapers, whose circulation woes and serial layoffs have been well documented since the Web started stealing eyeballs and advertisers years ago. Joining the Trib in bankruptcy this fall was Creative Loafing, the country’s second-largest chain of alternative weeklies and the publishers of the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper. The non-dead-tree media are not immune, either: National Public Radio recently announced its first layoffs in a quarter century. Around the country, countless community papers, magazines, television and radio stations, and yes, even digital publications face declining revenues as the aftershocks of the global economic crisis spook advertisers and corporate underwriters alike. Where does this leave Urbanite? Well, like a lot of our colleagues, we’re adjusting to a local economy that has become, shall we say, less hospitable. Urbanite is a free publication that depends entirely on advertising revenue for its operating expenses, and when local businesses suffer, we do too. If you read the magazine and value a thriving independent local media, please support our advertisers, and don’t be shy about telling them why. And if you’ve been picking the publication up faithfully for years and feel guilty because it’s free, we won’t stop you from contributing directly to the magazine: Go to www. urbanitebaltimore.com and click on the “Donate” button on the top menu. Note that these contributions are not tax-deductible—Urbanite is not a nonprofit organization— but your support will be used to help writers, artists, and photographers continue to tell stories about our city and region. It’s appropriate to be bringing this up in this issue. In our cover package this month, we sample the innovative thinking going on in Baltimore—a trove of potential gamechangers in everything from nanotechnology to astrophysics. But, as the buggy whip warns us, in every breakthrough lurks the seeds of destruction for whatever preceded it. It’s tempting to look at the transformational tumult in journalism today and see an industry-wide collapse, the passing of an age as one technology supplants another. I’d prefer to see this anxious moment as an opportunity. In 2009, Urbanite will continue to publish in print—for my money, still the best way to present long-form narratives in words and images. But we’re also going to explore other forms of storytelling—online, in video, and over the airwaves as Urbanite partners with public radio stations WYPR 88.1 and WEAA 88.9 FM. Right now, all manner of visionary characters are scrambling to create new models to support good journalism in the future, in print and online, using elements of for-profit and nonprofit funding structures. If ever there was an industry due for a breakthrough, this is it. Urbanite will be around to participate in this adventure, and to continue to tell stories that—now more than ever—you can’t read anywhere else. —David Dudley

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what you’re saying lunches. His vision of bringing fresh produce and international food to the table, and his plan for involving kids with his recipe/menu contest, is sure to be a successful combination. As a student myself, I am revolted by the greasy, pre-packaged food I witness my peers consume daily. I would be elated if school lunches involved the recommendations of students and were fresher and tastier with a more global cuisine. —Molly M. is a tenth-grader.

photo by Chris Rebbert

Up the Right Tree

Going Down The logic of Stephen Walter’s argument is impeccable, and the shock and outrage of the mayor is stunning (“The One-Percenter,” December). Although you describe Walters and his partner, Steve H. Hanke, as rightwingers who write for the Op-Ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, I am a left-leaning progressive Democrat. In my extensive travels over a lifetime approaching its seventh decade, I have visited more than eighty countries. Baltimore is one of the most downtrodden, ugly, sorrowful places I have ever seen. It does not compare well to any city I can think of anywhere in the third world, much less Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or Japan. From people thinking of relocating to Baltimore, I have repeatedly heard two complaints. First is about the tax rate, which is obscenely high (especially when compared with the public services you get in exchange), and second is about the inability to move to a “safe” middle-class neighborhood. I am thinking in particular of that poor young man who was killed in 2007 near Patterson Park just outside his home in a newly rehabilitated neighborhood comprised mainly of middleclass young professionals (“Through a Glass, Darkly,” May). It is difficult in this city to find a neighborhood (with a few notable exceptions) in which you can totally relax if your wife walks the dog after dark. I am not alone in my thought process. Indeed, I suspect that I represent the vast ma-

jority of people who live in gentrified neighborhoods or who are considering the urban lifestyle. It befuddles me that the mayor and her helpmates are unable to comprehend anything as simple as the proposition that higher tax rates deter incoming residents who would otherwise pay lots more taxes and permit a richer Baltimore to develop itself rather than keep itself in the dumps. Lower tax rates will mobilize the engine of growth that will finally bring prosperity to this city. I grew up in New York City, so the smells, sights, and sounds of a bustling metropolis are music to my ears. Yet somehow the symphony falls silent in Baltimore. I dread walking a few blocks or letting my wife be out alone when light turns to darkness. The mayor must explain this tragedy that is now occurring on her watch. —Leigh Ratiner is a consultant based in Baltimore.

I’m a Baltimore City resident, but my mind and spirit are always out in the woods. I was very moved by the article “No Fear” (November) about tree climber Bob Mertes. While I enjoy climbing pretty much anything, I’ve always experienced a deeper draw from trees. I always thought tree climbing was something kids naturally engaged in while they were young and rambunctious, yet as I get older my love of trees and tree climbing has only intensified. I go out into the forest for some photography or to have a campfire, and I see a tree and I just feel that pull, that relentless voice saying, “Please, climb me!” I think it has something to do with the feeling of a living being hoisting me up from the ground, like the hand of some giant deity showing me a view that’s part of a very important lesson. After all, it’s an entirely natural experience. I’ve been in plenty of airplanes and tall buildings, and while that too can be exciting, it’s nothing like sitting way up in a tree and taking a breath and a look around. Old rock-climbing buddies of mine sometimes scoffed a little when I talked about climbing trees, so it’s just terrific to see that Bob and others are so engaged in the activity. Perhaps one day I’ll be lucky enough to take in a lesson or two. —Wilson Hill

Good Eats I applaud Rebecca Messner’s article “The Lunchroom Chronicles” (November) concerning Tony Geraci’s determination to transform school lunches from unwholesome to healthy and appealing. The article highlights a long-overdue recognition of the school lunch problem prevalent in schools throughout the nation. I am highly impressed by Geraci’s approach to changing Baltimore City’s school

We want to hear what you’re saying. E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. You can also comment on our website (www.urbanitebaltimore. com/forum).

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what you’re writing

invention

t t e m p t i n g to “fix” my son, I read book after book, trying to find a strategy or a behavioral technique that would ease him into normalcy. I was given so many diagnoses for him that they seemed to all blend together. He was so unlike me that it was difficult to understand how his mind worked. Adherence to order, inflexibility, and anxiety are all part of his psyche. I woke up to a jewelry box/pencil holder beside my bed one day. It was an elaborate two-tiered contraption made of paper, staples, and tape. Then came the hermit-crabhouse/slide/climbing-wall/food-storage-unit for his older sister. When we went to a store, he would pick up anything on the ground—paper clips, a fallen sequin, a hook, a piece of string. I would instruct him to go to the counter to return them. Reluctantly, he would present them to the sales clerks only to have them stare, confused at what to do with his sundry treasures. From then on, I let him keep them and have taken pleasure in the outcomes. The Invention Convention at his school offered him an outlet. It’s where the “Secret Beach Wallet”—a water bottle holder altered to include a hidden compartment that holds money and keys—was born. Small conflicts make him cry uncontrollably, yet he is able to focus for half a day on the most intricate details of his latest creation.

If his mind were wired differently, I know these masterpieces would not have occurred. Creeping upstairs to check on the kids, I find my two girls soundly asleep. I pass by his room and, without looking in, I know he is still awake; sleep doesn’t come easily to him. My assumption is confirmed as I climb into bed and drift off to sleep, lulled by the cl-thunk, cl-thunk, cl-thunk coming from his room. It’s a familiar sound; I make a mental note to make sure to buy more staples tomorrow. —Gretchen Zietowski lives in Marriottsville with her husband and three children.

When I

wa s years old, my mother was hopelessly addicted to alcohol and cough syrup. I would get off the bus after first grade every afternoon only to find her passed out on the living room couch. While she slept, I dreamed up an imaginary mom who would give me an afternoon snack and play games with me until my father got home from work. One day, my father arrived home and found his wife passed out, as usual, on the couch. He finally had enough. He threw some of our clothes in a bag, put us in the car, and drove my sister, brother, and me away from

my mother. I concocted a scenario that would help me sleep at night: My father and I were going on a long vacation and, when we returned from our trip, Mommy would be waiting for us, her arms wide open. As I grew older and unwittingly followed in my mother’s intoxicated footsteps, I found myself concocting imaginative scenarios in order to fine-tune my not-so-orderly life path. This enabled me to live below (or so I believed) the radar of my friends and loved ones. The life that I could not legitimately live, I just created. Plato coined the line “Necessity is the mother of invention” sometime around 400 B.C. My necessity (for better or worse) mothered my invention when I needed it to and, to this day, sometimes still does. —JC Lehman lives in Owings Mills.

a l l s t e m m e d from my 10th birthday party. Twenty candles were lit on a large sheet cake, ten on each side. My twin sister, Lisa, and I stood at opposing ends of the cake, arguing about who should get the first blow. As twins, we loathed the idea of sharing anything (including this moment), and as we yelled back and forth, the candle wax slowly dripped onto the cake. I thought,

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what if instead of wax, chocolate dripped onto the cake? The week after our party I went into production, crafting my creation for the fourthgrade invention fair. My mom helped me buy molding trays with different shapes and pictures. I melted white and milk chocolate in the microwave, carefully filled the trays, and stored them in the fridge. I then worked diligently to create a poster board that screamed how vitally important “Edible Candles” would be to society. The next morning, I headed straight to the cafeteria to set up my display. I stood there proud and anxious to share with my science teacher how rich I would be with my invention. Mrs. Gilly walked over to my board and closely examined the chocolate shapes I had laid in front. “Hmm …” she started. I filled in the rest of her sentence in my mind: This is the best project here. Everybody will want to buy these. Instead, she posed one simple question: “But where’s the wick?” ■ —Laura Panik will graduate from Loyola College this spring.

“What You’re Writing” is the place for creative nonfiction from our readers. Each month, we pick a topic. Use the topic as a springboard into your own life and send us a true story inspired by that month’s theme. Only nonfiction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We reserve the right to edit heavily for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. Submissions should be typed (and if you cannot type, please print clearly). Only one submission per topic, please. Send your essay to Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 or e-mail it to WhatYoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore. com. Submissions should be shorter than four hundred words. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned.

Topic

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corkboard

Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Celebration

Jan 7, 8 p.m.

New Morning for the World: “Daybreak of Freedom” is a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that combines the music of American composer Joseph Schwantner with excerpts from speeches given by the slain civil rights leader. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performs the piece in honor of King’s 80th birthday. Former U.S. congressman and NAACP president Kweisi Mfume narrates.

Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall 1212 Cathedral St. $15–$55 410-783-8000 www.bsomusic.org

Green and Natural Living Expo

Jan 10, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

Resolve to be green in 2009 by checking out the Green and Natural Living Expo. Designed for consumers looking to be more earth-friendly, this one-day eco-extravaganza features green products and services from retail and energy companies including IKEA, Chesapeake Solar, and Greenspring Energy. Vendors also hold educational seminars to detail how consumers can incorporate natural living techniques into their daily routines.

Crowne Plaza Hotel 2004 Greenspring Dr., Timonium Free 410-935-1950 www.greennaturalexpo.com

Russian American Kids Circus

Jan 11, 3 p.m.

Trained by former members of the famous Moscow Circus, the 6- to 16-year-olds of the Russian American Kids Circus have appeared on the Cosby Show, Good Morning America, MTV, and venues throughout North America. The kids juggle, unicycle, and contort their way into Annapolis this month.

Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts 801 Chase St., Annapolis Adults $26, children $17 410-280-5640 ww.marylandhall.org

Lacrosse Fan Fest

Jan 17, noon–4 p.m.

Home to lacrosse’s hall of fame and the team with the most NCAA Division I championship appearances (Johns Hopkins University), Baltimore has a solid claim to being the lacrosse capital of the world. You can become part of the country’s largest lacrosse exposition during the 2009 US Lacrosse National Convention’s Fan Fest, your chance to see the more than 140 vendors and live demonstrations during the otherwise membersonly event.

Baltimore Convention Center 1 W. Pratt St. $10 410-235-6882 www.uslacrosse.org

Edgar Allan Poe Bicentennial Celebration Jan 17, 18, 31, and Feb 1 As Baltimore squabbles with Philadelphia over its claim to the master of the macabre, this year’s 200th birthday celebration takes on even greater importance. The yearlong salutation kicks off with a birthday party featuring a Poe performance by actor John Astin, a rafﬂe of a Poe-inspired delicacy by Charm City Cakes, and a life-sized puppet show of his short story Hop Frog. (Go to www.nevermore2009.com for a complete listing of events.)

Westminster Hall 519 W. Fayette St. Go to www.poebicentennial.com for ticket information

Polar Bear Plunge

Jan 24

Over the past thirteen years, the Maryland State Police and Special Olympics Maryland have convinced thousands of people that hypothermia should never get in the way of a good deed ... or a good time. Take a dip in the wintry waters of the Chesapeake for charity or party in your parka from the shore.

Sandy Point State Park 1100 E. College Pkwy., Annapolis $50 pledge to participate, spectators free 410-789-6677 www.plungemd.com

Photo credits from top to bottom: photo by Michael Stewart; photo by Rafa Irusta | Dreamstime.com; photo by Maike Schulz; photo by Jim Boardman | Dreamstime.com; no credit; photo by Steve Ruark

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Dog Days

courtesy of Maryland Seld Dog Adventures

This winter, ditch the sled-and-hill routine for a serious Arctic-style excursion with Maryland Sled Dog Adventures LLC (443-562-5736; www.marylanddogsledding.com). Wanting to educate Baltimoreans about mushing while giving their high-energy huskies a much-needed outlet, Catherine and Eric Benson began running dog sledding programs on the Northern Central Railroad Trail in Hunt Valley two years ago. For $75, you can help harness the pups, try out the equipment, and take a short ride. Two-hour excursions are $200 per person (but, as the website says, doggie kisses are free). If there’s no white stuff on the ground, you can still go out in a wheeled cart. Training for novice sled dogs and other dog-powered sports (skijoring, anyone?), group programs, and birthday parties are also available. Call for reservations. —Andrew Zaleski

Off the Beaten Path

photo by Aisha M. Khan

Pedestrian is anything but (1707 Aliceanna St.; 410-534-7510; www.pedestrianbmd.blogspot.com). After opening a first location in Philly in 2006, this men’s boutique (call it PedX for short) with a hip-hop/skater aesthetic opened its doors in Baltimore last April. Although it offers the usual suspects— button-down shirts and tees, pullover fleeces and hoodies, and fitted hats—its shelves are also stocked with hard-to-find brands such as Reason, Milkcrate, Mighty Healthy, and the homegrown eponymous line. The store also hosts dance parties and displays urban-inspired art by local artists on the walls. Event and store manager Garth Young calls PedX a “lifestyle boutique,” because it goes beyond simply selling products to cultivating a community of like-minded people. —Malene K. Bell

The stenciled number 33 on the door gives passersby no hint of the creative disarray inside Full Circle, a photo printing and framing shop on the northern fringe of the Station North arts district (33 E. 21st St.; 410-528-1868; www.fullcirclephoto.com). But step inside, and you meet a life-size cardboard cutout of Albert Einstein, an eclectic collection of camera apparatus, and stacks of panoramic photographs, many of them the handiwork of the shop’s proprietor, Dave Orbock. A former physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Orbock captures 360-degree views of wild and urban landscapes that grace the walls of lobbies and boardrooms around the country. The shop prints and frames his and the work of other professionals, but its rates are very reasonable, and its exacting and friendly staffers don’t turn up their noses at amateur work or time-worn vintage photos, which they’re happy to shine up for your living room wall.

photo by Aisha M. Khan

360 Degrees

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Eco-Schwag

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Wear your love for the Chesapeake Bay on your sleeve—or neck, or head. Virginia-based Bethebay.com sells baythemed products such as T-shirts and hats emblazoned with images of blue crabs, rockfish-patterned ties, and recyclable shopping bags. There are also rain barrels, lunch kits, and a product called Wrap-N-Mat that’s like reusable heavy-duty plastic wrap. Ten percent of profits are donated to bay restoration efforts. Buy through the website or drop in to the brick-and-mortar outlet in Annapolis (149 Main St.; 410-216-9797). The website also includes tips for reducing one’s impact on the watershed, plus info about kayak excursions and restoration work conducted in and around the bay with the nonprofit group Chesapeake Experience. —Marianne K. Amoss

The world of men’s fashion is still so segregated that it’s nearly impossible to buy a suit and a nice pair of jeans in the same place. But one local retailer is integrating spiffy with sporty. Open since September, Benedetto Men (324 Park Ave.; 410-783-7848; www. benedettomen.com) offers Area Forte shoes, denim suits by Crème de Silk, and design-printed dress shirts by Angelino and Brandolini, plus jeans, luggage, outerwear, and more. Suits begin at $299, shirts at $90. For the truly adventurous, leather man bags by Dr. Koffer start at $195. Look for 20 to 30 percent off select items throughout January. —Lionel Foster

photo by Aisha M. Khan

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Work It

courtesy of Merritt Athletic Club

It may be a new year, but the 2008 version of you is still around—a bit bulgy in all the wrong places, and not inclined to brave the frosty temperatures to go to the gym and pump the same old iron. A newcomer to the workout scene called Kinesis might get you off the couch. Designed to improve balance, strength, and flexibility, Kinesis utilizes four “modules,” or vertical panels to which a system of cables and weights are attached. Participants perform familiar movements such as lunges while grasping the cables’ handles, taking advantage of 360 degrees of resistance. “The workload, or resistance, travels with you through all the planes and ranges of motion,” says Steve Ehasz, fitness director of Merritt Athletic Club (MAC) in Harbor East. According to him, MAC’s Harbor East branch is the only place for it in town. This month, new MAC members can waive the $149 enrollment fee—that’ll cover the additional cost for thirty-minute Kinesis sessions, which cost $25 a pop and come in six-week segments. With one Kinesis workout burning 30 percent more calories than a traditional machine, you’ll be heading for a beach body in no time. —M.K.A. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j a n u a r y 0 9

2009 Speaker Series: Greening Your Home Fee: $6.00 per lecture ($10.00 for non-members)

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April 16, 7p.m. Sustainable Design February 19, 7p.m. Green Home Remodeling From A Builder’s Point of View in your Garden, Zolna Russell, Hord Coplan Macht Polly Bart, Ph.D., Greenbuilders, Inc.

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aLso in b a Lt i M o r e observed: 25 A Light in Dark Times In search of a lost father

27 Screen Dreams A caseworker starts a ﬁlm series to help her elderly clients

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On a windy Saturday morning in October, more than 120 people filed into Gaare Auditorium on the northwest campus of Baltimore City Community College (BCCC). They came from other parts of the city, from surrounding counties, and from as far away as Virginia, and each had a story to tell. The lucky ones hadn’t yet missed a house payment, but, thanks to changes in their adjustable rate mortgages, or job losses, or both, they soon would. The lessfortunate borrowers were already past foreclosure, staring at an auction date. But help was on the way. A woman named Ashidda Khalil walked to the front of the room and uttered the words everyone wanted to hear: “We can help you restructure your home loan.” This was the Home Save workshop sponsored by the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA), a nonprofit mortgage broker and community advocacy group that helps low- and mid-income borrowers become—or remain—homeowners. The 20-year-old organization has forty offices in twenty-seven states, including one in downtown Baltimore. Khalil, the director of the Baltimore office, led the BCCC workshop, which, with its mix of rousing rhetoric and miraculous testimonials, often felt more like a revival meeting. One woman said a family member saw the payments on her interest-only loan drop from $4,000 to $1,100 per month. “Praise the Lord,” shouted someone in response. There were tales of auction dates cancelled at the last minute, foreclosure proceedings derailed, and homeowners re-financed out of predatory loans. When struggling homeowners heard what the workshop leaders hoped to win for each of them—a thirty-year mortgage fixed at 3 percent—half the room burst into cheers. “Everybody say ‘restructure!’” Khalil called. “Restructure!” These are busy times for NACA, which calls itself the “largest housing services organization in the country.” Nationally, banks filed for foreclosure on 765,558 homes in the

photo by Aisha M. Khan

Protect This House

Foreclosure averted: Bernard Porter says that the housing advocacy nonproﬁt NACA helped restructure his loan and save his house. Others blame NACA for contributing to the conditions that led to the national mortgage crisis.

third quarter of 2008, a 71 percent increase from the same period in 2007. Maryland fared better than many states, with just a 22 percent spike over the same period, but some jurisdictions are suffering more than others. According to Realtytrac, a California company that reports foreclosure activity, in October 2008 1 in 339 housing units in Prince George’s County was in foreclosure, a state high. “Clients are coming for help from D.C., Delaware, Pennsylvania,” Khalil says. Before the mortgage crisis set in, she estimates that 50 to 60 percent of people who attended a NACA workshop subsequently came in for a one-on-one consultation. She now thinks that number is closer to 80 or 90 percent. For the tens of thousands of people it has helped purchase and, more recently, keep homes, NACA’s take-no-prisoners advocacy efforts are a

godsend. But for others, NACA is a browbeating bully that helped push the U.S. mortgage market off a cliff. NACA got its start in Boston in the mid1980s as a housing trust funded by several hotels as a concession in a labor agreement, to help defray the high cost of housing for low-wage union workers struggling in Boston’s expensive real estate market. Soon it broadened its mission to provide housing assistance to low- and moderate-income home-buyers, regardless of union affiliation. Led by its fiery CEO, Bruce Marks, NACA also staged frequent protests against financial institutions whose policies it deemed exploitative. NACA encourages its clients, or “members,” to participate in five “actions and activities,” including protests, per year. The effectiveness of its tactics was demonstrated

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in the early 1990s, when NACA launched a multi-state campaign over what it considered predatory lending practices employed by a subsidiary of Boston-based Fleet Bank. NACA members crashed Fleet shareholder meetings with bullhorns and rallied outside the homes of bank executives. (Marks, who has famously referred to himself as a “bank terrorist,” once sported a T-shirt that read “Wanted: Loan Shark” with a picture of Fleet’s president.) NACA also worked with attorneys general and advocacy organizations in other states to file suits on behalf of Fleet clients, helped 60 Minutes report on Fleet’s lending practices in Atlanta, and testified against the bank before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. The campaign ended in 1994, after Fleet agreed to give NACA $140 million for its mortgage program. Other banks soon struck deals of their own: Today NACA can tap into nearly $10.5 billion in low-interest home loans underwritten by some of the largest lenders in the country. NACA owes some of that success to federal regulations inscribed in the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Passed in 1977 amid concerns over “redlining”—the practice of denying consumers access to credit because of where they live—the CRA mandates that banks meet the lending needs of the communities in which they operate, including borrowers in low-income areas. Banks receive periodic assessments of their adherence to CRA requirements, which regulators take into account when considering whether to approve mergers and acquisitions. A public campaign against a bank’s CRA compliance record could jeopardize multi-billion-dollar deals, and a bank’s decision to work with or directly through community groups such as NACA lend it a powerful ally. “Legalized extortion is what I call it,” says Thomas DiLorenzo, professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. Under the CRA, he says, “[community groups] can hold up mergers or expansions unless banks give them money and commit to making subprime loans.” CRA opponents say an amendment strengthening the act and other federal measures instituted in the 1990s forced banks to lend to unqualified borrowers, thus setting the stage for the current mortgage meltdown. “The mechanism government decided to use was lower lending standards,” says Stan Liebowitz, professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “Government tried to convince banks it was safe to lend with lower down payments and higher obligation ratios. They put pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make these loans. That whole ball got rolling because of it.” In 2000, Howard Husock, director of the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative at the

conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote an article titled “The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities,” cited by many CRA opponents as a prescient warning. “The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act … into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and ... a vast extortion scheme against the nation’s banks,” the article began. Of the groups leveraging the law, wrote Husock, “There is no more important player in the CRA-inspired mortgage industry than the Boston-based Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America.” Today, Husock remains a stout critic of NACA and its tactics, which he calls “outrageous. The extent to which they have person-

“People say, ‘these folks shouldn’t have bought those big old homes,’” says naca member Bernard Porter, “but that’s just a fraction of what’s taken place.” alized those protests to bank executives is unconscionable and irresponsible.” He also says that housing advocacy groups such as NACA aren’t taking their fair share of responsibility for the credit crisis. “I don’t think that advocates of the CRA are willing to reflect and say, ‘Maybe we played a part. Maybe we should insist that bank lending go to people with good credit scores.’” NACA, for its part, lays the blame for the meltdown on the greed of for-profit brokers and lenders, not homeowners or the CRA. “The CRA has helped a lot of people,” says Darren Duarte, NACA’s director of public affairs. “It does not force banks to lend to people who can’t afford loans.” He notes that NACA counsels prospective homeowners— sometimes for months—on how to manage their budgets before matching them with loans. Approximately 80 percent of subprime loans were written by institutions that were either not covered at all or not fully regulated by the CRA; of the tens of thousands of mortgages NACA helped process, fewer than half of one percent are in foreclosure. NACA member Bernard Porter is one distressed homeowner who’s happy with the group’s efforts, and he says his story proves there’s more to the mortgage crisis than poor people taking out irresponsible loans. “People say, ‘These folks shouldn’t have bought those big old homes,’” he says, “but that’s just a fraction of what’s taken place.” Porter, a sales manager for a company that sells software and office equipment, lives in a three-bedroom brick colonial in north

baltimore observed Baltimore that he bought for $104,500 in 1998. In a good year, after commissions, he might gross $120,000, more than enough to make house payments and take care of his 12-yearold daughter. But last year he was hit by a perfect financial storm: His sales weakened in the sagging economy, and his income fell more than 40 percent. High gasoline prices made driving to sales calls more expensive. At home, he faced higher homeowners insurance after a burglary, a spike in his water bill, and the added cost of taking over the care of his elderly mother. His monthly expenses rose $400. So in July, Porter joined more than five thousand people who attended NACA’s Save the Dream five-day homeownership counseling marathon in Washington, D.C. Housing counselors were on hand, calling lenders to secure restructured loan agreements. Within forty-five days, Porter’s lender, Citigroup, lowered his 8.75 percent interest rate to 3.7 percent. His monthly payments dropped by $431. Call it extortion if you want, but NACA leaders say that the group’s efforts get results. “Lenders tend to listen to us,” NACA’s Khalil explained to attendees at the BCCC workshop, “because they know we’re a thorn in their sides.” On October 29, NACA was again flexing its protest muscles, this time in front of Fannie Mae headquarters on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C. At issue was the government-sponsored mortgage giant’s policy for allowing its partner lenders to restructure loans—a standard that NACA insists is unreasonably punitive. More than a hundred NACA members and staff showed up to unload four U-Haul trucks filled with used clothing and furniture onto the pavement. “Fannie Mae’s policies are going to lead to thousands of evictions,” Khalil said, “so we’re going to show them what that will look like.” As police, security guards, and Fannie Mae staffers looked on, protestors walked up and down the sidewalk with signs that read “Fannie Mae is a Predatory Lender” and “Fannie Mae Destroyed My Family.” After fortyfive minutes, Bruce Marks pushed past the guards who blocked the driveway and waved his people in. Once gathered on the steps at the front entrance to the building, they shouted “We want Herb,” vowing not to leave until Fannie Mae’s newly appointed CEO, Herb Allison, agreed to meet with them. Allison did so, for an hour that afternoon, and for one subsequent meeting, according to Duarte. “[Fannie Mae] agreed to look at all those loan restructures they denied,” he says. “We’re confident that we’ll reach an agreement.” ■ —Lionel Foster

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

ULI - BALtImoRe DIStRICt CoUNCIL pReSeNtS:

A discussion on Sustainable Urban Development Creating sustainable communities is at the core of the Urban Land Institute’s mission. ULI Baltimore is honored to host a presentation by:

FRIDAY

JANUARY 30, 2009

Sheila Dixon

The Honorable Mayor of the City of Baltimore.

NETWORKING

Edward T. McMahon

PRESENTATION

Mayor Dixon will discuss her administration’s initiatives to make Baltimore a cleaner and greener city, the steps the City is taking to help make Baltimore a more sustainable City, and the benefits of a more sustainable Baltimore for the entire region. Ed McMahon will discuss topics such as the dollars and cents of sustainability, the business case for sustainability, the key to building sustainable communities, and leading examples of sustainability in practice. We hope you will join us for what promises to be an engaging and enlightening discussion.

7:30 - 8:00 am

8:15 - 10:00 am

Johns Hopkins Downtown Center 10 N. Charles St.

ULI/Charles Fraser Chair on Sustainable Development and a nationally-recognized expert on sustainability, land conservation and urban design.

at baltimore.uli.org or call 1-800-321-5011 Meeting Code # 8103-0916 For more information contact Pauline Harris, ULI – Baltimore District Council Coordinator at 410.889.4112

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Songs from the past: Tom Hasler is unearthing the history of his father, an actor and singer who perished in the Holocaust.

encounter

A Light in Dark Times Imagine, if you can, a frigid December night in 1941 at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. German soldiers haul an inmate outside. They strip him naked. They tie his hands. They douse him with cold water and leave him to die. This is how Tom Hasler imagines his father’s death. The Gestapo’s minions at Mauthausen entertained themselves by making such “ice statues” out of human beings. The practice was a new form of torture introduced in the fall of 1941, and while accounts of Karel Hasler’s death vary, most say he froze to death. Soon after, Hasler’s wife received from the Germans notice of his death—of pneumonia. A month before he died, his son, Tom, had been born in Prague. Tom Hasler now lives in Baltimore and has for the past forty years. For most of his life, he knew little about his father. He knew Karel Hasler had been an actor, composer, and balladeer. He had photographs, even inherited some possessions: handwritten music, cuff links, a cigarette case. Yet he remained ignorant of what the man stood for. Tom Hasler’s first attempt to learn about his father, in 1990, was disappointing. He was 49 when he sat down in a modest Manhattan movie house to see a 1927 silent film in which Karel Hasler played the role of an alcoholic lawyer approaching his end. Tom looked at the face of the man on the screen, his gestures, and saw no physical resemblance. But his late wife, Bonnie, did. “Bonnie said it was eerie,” Tom recalls.

The film offered Tom “no emotional connection,” he says, but that would come, and with life-changing force: Karel Hasler would reach out to his son through the medium that, more than any of his other talents, bound him tightly to the soul of the Czech people, enabling him to raise the spirits of his nation during the Nazi years. Tom and his mother fled Czechoslovakia’s stifling Communist regime in 1949, when he was 7—she with the words “Enemy of the State” stamped on her passport. The pair made it to Australia on a freighter and settled in Cowra, a town in New South Wales, where Lotte (Charlotte) Jurda found work teaching high school French, Latin, and physical education. Tom rejected everything Czech and remained, as a young boy, indifferent to his father’s legacy. “I ignored his memory as well as any appreciation of my homeland because I never expected to return,” Tom later wrote in the Czech-Slovak journal Slovo. He was ashamed of his country, so easily occupied by the Nazis, supine before the Communists. “I refused to speak Czech anymore,” he says. His resolve was so intense that he lost the language entirely. Tom and his mother reached America in 1958. He went to Hobart College in New York and, later, the University of Michigan’s journalism school. He was in Lebanon in 1968, an intern with the English language Daily Star, when two events changed his life. He met and married Bonnie Sether, a graduate student at the American University in Beirut. Then, as the Prague Spring bloomed in Czechoslovakia, full of hope for democracy, only to be crushed by Soviet tanks, his curiosity was briefly aroused by what was happening in his native land. In 1969, Tom joined Baltimore’s Evening Sun. In 1972, he visited Prague, still a bleak Communist state. This reinforced his longheld opinion of the place: “I found nothing there for me.” In 1975, he became an American citizen. His enthusiasm for the reporter’s life endured until 1984, after which he did research for a book on Germany and worked on a pre-Internet project combing newspapers and journals for policy information for business leaders. He later contracted with an international management consulting company. Tom’s reconciliation with his past didn’t come until 1993, when, on another trip to Prague, he watched his father perform in Balladeer, a 1932 film that told the story of his life. In it, Karel Hasler sang “Ceska Pisnicka” (“Our Czech Song”), one of his originals, which became the country’s unofficial national anthem when the Nazis banned the official one. It is probably the most beloved popular song ever to come out of Czechoslovakia. “The song went straight to my heart and soul,” Tom wrote in Slovo, “even though I didn’t understand a word of it!” It is said to similarly affect Czechs everywhere.

baltimore observed Bonnie Hasler died of cancer in 1995, followed six years later by Lotte Jurda. By this time, Tom had embraced his legacy. He began to gather and absorb as much information as possible about his father, the man, the performer, the agent of resistance to the Nazi tyranny who, it was said, helped people flee the country. Tom had once suggested that his mother write her memoirs, an idea she apparently rejected but secretly undertook. He later discovered and surreptitiously read her work. He learned more fully of his father’s immense public stature in Czechoslovakia, and his human side as well: Karel Hasler was a womanizer, a carouser, a sly teller of stories and jokes, a writer and performer of songs full of mockery of the Nazi occupiers and, before that, of the minions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A passionate, political man, he fell in love with a woman half his age—a German at that, during a time when marriage between Czechs and Germans was frowned upon by both sides. “This is a movie,” Tom said to himself. “This is a love story.” He wrote a film treatment of the story and has since talked to five directors about making a movie about his father’s life before the war that would illuminate the dynamic of “the Czech, German, Jewish environment in those years in Prague,” he says. In the meantime, he continues searching where he can, in Gestapo files when possible, for new information about his father while in Nazi hands. He has finished a documentary film of his father’s life and fate, with the collaboration of the Czech-Jewish author Arnost Lustic, who survived the death camps, and Lustic’s son, Joseph, a filmmaker. Tom expects to have his mother’s memoir published by the Franz Kafka Society in Prague. One of Tom’s goals is to stimulate interest in an aspect of the Holocaust that he believes has not received sufficient attention: the murders during the war of millions of non-Jews—gypsies, Poles, Slavs, union leaders, homosexuals, Communists, the aged, the physically and mentally disabled, and others who deviated from Nazi ideas of who should live and who should die. Karel Hasler was one of these victims, and in a way, so was his son. Today, Tom Hasler is a man invested with purpose. He is stocky, cheerful, and white-haired, with a rugged face, notably large features, and big hands. He speaks with a slight, squishy lisp. He projects the worn image of the old-fashioned cultural bohemian. Like most Czechs, he loves good beer and good talk, on any subject, especially about the father he discovered so late in life. ■ —Richard O’Mara

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Extra credit: Chris Muldowney, a caseworker at Family and Children’s Services of Central Maryland, started a donation-only ﬁlm series to beneﬁt her elderly clients.

transForMers

Screen Dreams Chris Muldowney has lived in the Lauraville neighborhood of northeast Baltimore for the last twenty-four years. She greets by name just about everyone who walks through the door of Red Canoe Bookstore and Café, where she’s sipping tea from a red mug on a sunny

fall morning. During the week, Muldowney helps fixed-income seniors as a caseworker for Family and Children’s Services (FCS) of Central Maryland, a private nonprofit that since 1849 has nimbly and creatively acted to help children, families, and the elderly live, as Muldowney puts it, “in a humane way.” On the weekends, she turns her attention to Lauraville, where she’s helped with cleanups and rallied support for closing a notorious local bar. “You don’t have to just accept things as they are,” she says. “You can make them different.” Muldowney’s latest success story is the Donovan Fund, created in the memory of two FCS clients, sisters Eleanor and Anne Donovan, who lived together in a small apartment near Johns Hopkins University. The sisters had no other family and relied on FCS for transportation to medical appointments and help with groceries. When Eleanor passed away in 2004, less than a year after Anne, she left behind a signed photograph of silent film star Ramón Novarro—and a humble bequest to FCS of $500. Moved by the photo and the gift, Muldowney started a donation-only film series to benefit clients such as the Donovans, who often end up on waiting lists for city services. Held in the back room of sweets shop Rock Candy at 4321 Harford Road, the monthly se-

baltimore observed

ries consists of vintage and recent Hollywood releases, such as the 1937 Cary Grant comedy, The Awful Truth (scheduled for January 17). Attendees range from twentysomethings on up, and Stevenson University assistant film and video professor Christopher Llewellyn Reed leads casual post-viewing discussions. Harford Road businesses have rallied around Muldowney’s cause, which has netted nearly $20,000 to date and assists between seventy-five and a hundred seniors each year. The Chameleon Café offers discounts to movie ticket holders. When Rock Candy temporarily closed during renovations, Will’s Hairstyling Shop held a fundraiser. And Grind On Café often serves dessert to moviegoers after hours. As Muldowney says, “It’s really neighbors helping neighbors.” ■ —Marianne K. Amoss Each month, Urbanite proﬁles people and programs that are transforming the city, one block at a time. To nominate a transformer, e-mail editor@urbanitebaltimore.com.

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 BREAK What’s on the horizon? Discover the homegrown innovations that could change our world On May 1, 1844, the inventor Samuel Morse told his partner, Alfred Vail, to undertake a flashy demonstration of their new device, the electric telegraph. “A good way of exciting wonder,” Morse wrote, would be for Vail to get news from the Whig Party’s national convention in Baltimore and then transmit the information instantly to Washington, D.C., in advance of the adjourning delegates on the afternoon train. Vail waited at the Annapolis Junction train station—the northernmost end of the still-unfinished telegraph line under construction along the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad right-of-way—and learned from the passengers that Henry Clay had won the presidential nomination that morning. He telegraphed this scoop to Morse, who was waiting in the Capitol. When the delegates disembarked at Union Station an hour and fifteen minutes later, they were surprised to be greeted by crowds of Clay supporters. News of the nomination was already in the papers. “When they heard the newsboys shouting their extras, and saw, in cold print, their supposed exclusive information, their astonishment knew no bounds,” Vail recalled in a letter, “for they had no belief in the ability of that little instrument they saw at Annapolis Junction to beat them in carrying the news to Washington.” A few weeks later, the first telegraph line was formally opened between Baltimore and Washington, with Morse transmitting his famously portentous telegram: “What hath God wrought.” What indeed. The story of America is the story of little instruments that turned the world upside down. We are—or were—the planet’s premier innovators, and Baltimoreans now live in a

urbanite january 09

THROUGHS Compiled by Marianne K. Amoss, Malene K. Bell, David Dudley, Lionel Foster, Greg Hanscom, Salma Warshanna, and Andrew Zaleski Illustration by Mark Alain

city littered with traces of that frenzy of invention, from the cornerstone of the nation’s ﬁrst railroad in southwest Baltimore to the Space Telescope Science Institute uptown, where scientists are now pondering the stuff of existence with devices that Sam Morse could not have imagined. Inside the region’s major research institutions, Maryland minds are dreaming and devising and cobbling together all manner of audacious contraptions that may or may not transform the 21st century. And we happen to be living in a century that is in serious need of transforming. A multiplicity of human woes, from bankrupt automakers to climate change to the subprime meltdown, demand the same remedy: Innovate your way out. There’s a strong case to be made that the current economic crisis represents nothing less than a collective failure of imagination, and it’s high time for American mindpower to offer humanity something more useful than creative credit-swapping devices and the world’s most realistic computer-generated dinosaurs. We took just a sample of what’s brewing in Baltimore’s brain—the emerging technology, paradigm-shifting notions, and weird ideas that we might all be taking for granted in a few years. We also asked a host of local luminaries to look down the road and offer their thoughts on the breakthroughs they see coming. The future, as we are learning, can be a disturbing place. But never doubt the possibility of waking up one morning to ﬁnd that someone, somewhere, has changed everything.

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Everyone’s a Scientist A computer pioneer calls for a revolution in scientific inquiry In March, University of Maryland computer science professor Ben Shneiderman published a brief article called “Science 2.0” in Science magazine. In it, he argued that the scientiﬁc method is overdue for a technology-enabled makeover. The traditional guy-with-beaker stuff? That’s so Science 1.0—a lone researcher testing and re-testing hypotheses in controlled experiments and writing up results in peer-reviewed journals. Science 2.0 will r Graham photo by Christophe

follow Web 2.0 principles of social connectivity, busting out of the lab and opening up the real world to real-time, networked experimentation. “The last four hundred years have been very successful for the observation and study of the natural world, and that will continue, but it’s time to make room for a new kind of science that has new methods,” Shneiderman says. “The traditional controlled laboratory experiment doesn’t quite work in the modern world of social complexity.” Instead, he calls for “collaboration-centered researchers” who might launch wiki-esque mega-experiments involving thousands of contributors. “We need to make a safe space for this new kind of science that blends technology with the social sciences.”

Collaborate or perish: Ben Shneiderman wants researchers to practice “Science 2.0.”

This was a bit much for a lot of colleagues, who greeted Science 2.0 with some skepticism (“idiotic pseudoscientific sloppy thinking bullshit that exemplifies the worst aspects of the intersection of the hard and soft sciences,” opined one commenter on a Wired blog). But Shneiderman, a pioneering figure in computer science who founded

It’s a Really Small World

As director of the Maryland NanoCenter, Gary Rubloff usually measures scientific progress one billionth of a meter at a time. But he’s confident that, in the next five to ten years, the research he facilitates will mean big news for the rest of us. “I will make a prediction that the biggest impact on the future of energy will come from the nanotechnology field,” he says. In Rubloff’s future, nano-sized particles will boost the amount of energy solar panels can absorb, enable a new generation of batteries to store ten to one hundred times more power, and convert the heat from a running car engine into usable energy. If he and other researchers are successful, “your gas station might look different in five to ten years,” Rubloff says. “You could drive into a gas station and fill your battery with electric energy in the same time it would have taken you to fill your [tank] with gas.”

College Park’s Human Computer Interaction Laboratory, sounds delighted by the response. “Anything sufﬁciently bold to be threatening is rejected,” he says. “There are those who say, ‘We don’t need any new science, and this stuff is soft.’ My response is that the hard sciences may be hard, but they’re also brittle, and they break down when they’re applied to the complexity of the socially networked world.” Understanding the rules that govern this collaborative world will be one of the fundamental jobs of Science 2.0, Shneiderman says. Just as Newton and Einstein pondered gravity and light, future researchers will unravel the relationships between the forces in the Web 2.0 universe, which he boils down to four keywords: trust, empathy, responsibility, and privacy—or TERP (get it?). So, what might a Science 2.0 experiment look like? Shneiderman cites one example from Web-based businesses such as Amazon.com and Netﬂix, which monitor how tiny changes to their website design affect user purchases. “They perform these experiments—I’d call them interventions—with the real world,” he says. “They perturb the world and then measure the response.” Similar interventional studies, on a much more massive scale, could be used to probe the intricacies of human collaboration. Lately, Shneiderman’s been demonstrating the potential of collaboration-centered research for disaster preparation: In 2007 he and several coauthors proposed 911.gov, a site that would connect citizens into a “community response grid,” using social networking tools to allow community members to share news and assistance during a crisis. He cites a smaller-scale example of Science 2.0 thinking: a website, www.watchjeffersoncounty.net, that functions as a community-powered virtual neighborhood watch for a rural stretch of West Virginia. Says Shneiderman, “It’s a breakthrough idea by any standard I know.”

urbanite january 09

Protein Power

The next big medical breakthough: mapping every protein in the human body

Remember the Human Genome Project? That effort to map the sequence of human genes cost $3 billion, maxed out supercomputers, and took teams of scientists spread across the globe more than a decade to accomplish. How quaint, says Dr. Akhilesh Pandey, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Medical School’s Institute of Genetic Medicine. Pandey is among a cadre of researchers who have set out to chart the human proteome. Where genome researchers decoded approximately 20,000 to 25,000 genes, Pandey and his colleagues want to catalog every last protein in the human body—a figure that may number in the millions. It’s a project, Pandey says, that “will never be done.” Genes, for all their usefulness, really tell only a fragment of the story, Pandey explains. The rest is to be found in the complex protein molecules that genes encode. What’s so great about proteins? They do the work in every cell in our bodies. Proteins fight disease, help us handle stress and exertion, and allow us to metabolize our food. To get a sense of what life would be like without proteins, says one microbiologist, imagine the cell as an office building. Now take out all the workers. And the concrete. Proteins are also the target of most modern medications. In theory, if we can boost photo by Christopher Graham

or disable specific proteins, we can treat just about anything. The problem is that, unlike genes, proteins vary from cell to cell—brain cells, for example, have a different set of proteins than heart cells. They also vary from person to person. Even in a single individual, proteins are in a state of constant flux. The proteins in your brain cells when you have a fever may be different than the ones in the same cells when you’re healthy. The implications of mapping the proteome are profound. For starters, Pandey and his colleagues are trying to identify “biomarkers”—proteins that appear in your blood or urine when disease is present. He foresees a day when we will have simple home tests that check for pancreatic cancer—a disease that can be treated if it’s caught early, but rarely is. And, Pandey says, “if we get a catalog of proteins, we can design better drugs”— drugs that are designed to go after very specific proteins while leaving others alone. Because of the scope of the project, researchers have broken it into bite-sized chunks. One lab is cataloging the proteins just in blood cells, for example, while others are working on the liver and the brain. But even with a relatively complete catalog of these proteins, medicine will be a moving target, says Pandey, because of the constant shifting inside every cell. “You can recognize what a marvel of a machine we are,” he says. “Everything is in some state of equilibrium.”

The Power Restructure By Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson One of the most pressing agendas for the American city in the coming decade is replacing crumbling infrastructure. With this great need comes an even greater opportunity: to redeﬁne the way our systems function. Imagine highways that generate energy via wind turbines, bridges that capture passive solar energy and feed it to the grid, and devices that can sanitize water anywhere. Rather than merely patching up aging systems, designers are developing ways to turn infrastructure into sophisticated machines that can produce and save energy. Ecological engineer John Todd, a

Map quest: Genetic researcher Akhilesh Pandey is on a mission to ﬁnd every protein in the human body.

t x e N s What’

researcher at the University of Vermont and a winner of the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, is cleaning sewer systems using “living machines,” sophisticated bioremediation systems that mimic the effects of wetlands. San Francisco-based architect Eric Olsen invented a portable tarpaulin that can sanitize dirty water with the power of the sun. (Imagine if we’d had an effective, off-the-grid method for providing drinking water in the days following Katrina or the Indian Ocean tsunami.) A West Coast design collective called Civil Twilight realized that streetlamps suck up nearly 40 percent of the electricity used for our lighting, so they created a lunar-resonant lamp that automatically dims when the moon

is bright, effectively reducing energy consumption in cities. In addition to innovative large-scale solutions, cities could beneﬁt by thinking small and encouraging inventive infrastructure systems on the block scale. We could see a day when neighbors in a rowhouse block share resources, such as tapping into a geothermal well for hot water and harnessing increasingly sophisticated nanosolar technology to light their homes. This is the future of infrastructure. —Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson is the former editor-in-chief of Urbanite. She writes about architecture and design for Architect, Metropolis, and the New York Times Magazine.

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Better Medicine School of Medicine

Advances in pharmacogenomics promise a personalized pillbox “Take two and call me in the morning.” It’s an old cliché that still aptly describes the one-drug-ﬁts-all approach of modern

sity of Maryland courtesy of Univer

medicine. Despite decades of advancement in pharmacology, millions of people with little in common apart from a medical diagnosis are prescribed exactly the same drug. And while the dosage and length of treatment may differ from person to person, until the patient improves—or worsens—a doctor may not know for certain whether what cures Peter might harm Paul. But thanks to advances in genetic testing and the mapping of the human genome, researchers in the ﬁeld of pharmacogenomics, more commonly called “personalized medicine,” are crafting treatments that better ﬁt each patient. “The notion that we are different from each other, and that that is based on our genetic makeup, has been with us for long time,” says Dr. Stephen Liggett, director of cardiopulmonary genomics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “Usually On call: Dr. Stephen Liggett found that beta blockers often failed to work on African American patients.

people talk about things like height, eye color, and skin color. I think everyone understands the outward appearance of being different. What was not clear to us until the 1990s was that critical genes that control heart and lung function [for example] were quite different from one individual to another.” In April 2008 Liggett co-wrote a study on differences in the effectiveness of beta

If the Shoe Fits

When it comes to women’s shoes, it’s either fashion or comfort. Baltimore-based Pique Performance Inc. aims to overcome that dilemma with an insole-like device that redistributes pressure to the middle of the foot and the heel, relieving the stress on the ball of the foot that comes from wearing typical high heels. Tested on heels measuring 3 and 4 inches, as well as stilettos, it’s not yet available on the market, as it needs to be incorporated into a shoe’s design—it’s what inventor Angela Singleton calls an “under-the-hood” technology. “Instead of putting comfort features on the exterior of the shoe, like a wider heel or a rubber outsole, can we put them inside the shoe so you don’t see it?” Singleton, who previously worked at Loehmann’s in fashion and merchandise planning and at Proctor & Gamble in product development, is creating the device with the help of mechanical engineers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Shoes with Pique technology could arrive in stores as early as this fall.

blockers, drugs often used to treat certain forms of heart disease, in African American and Caucasian patients. To their surprise, Liggett and his team found that, for many African Americans in their study, beta blockers had no effect at all, and this was likely due to a genetic variation found predominantly, though not exclusively, in African Americans. The variation in the gene known as GRK5 produces a molecule that acts like a natural beta blocker, thus nullifying the effects of the drugs. The results of this and other studies could be far-reaching. Pre-screening for genetic variations such as GRK5 could steer doctors away from prescribing expensive medications to patients for whom they would be less effective. Pharmacogenomics could also affect drug development. “The pipeline [of new drugs] is not very good right now,” Liggett explains. “I’m talking about really new drugs, not just minor modiﬁcations to older drugs. There are not a lot of them. We think that genomics will ultimately work their way in perhaps because of that dry pipeline.” For a long time, if a drug wasn’t shown to have an acceptable response with at least 50 percent of the population, it was shelved. Developing drugs for smaller segments of the population could mean fewer sales for individual drugs, but more drugs overall. When used appropriately, Liggett says, pharmacogenomics could fundamentally change the way doctors assess a patient’s risk of contracting certain illnesses, the effects of the illness on particular individuals, and their response to therapy. As DNA proﬁles and tests for particular genetic variations become more standard, doctors can make more informed treatment decisions. Foot fetish: UMBC engineers helped build a more enlightened pump. (Image credit: Pique Performance Inc.)

urbanite january 09

(Not) Seeing Things

A closer look: The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to watch distant stars being born. (Image credit: NASA)

Forward Into the Past!

Hubble, schmubble. With a primary mirror almost six times larger than Hubble’s, the James Webb Space Telescope should have capabilities light years beyond our current orbital observatory. Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt are leading the effort to create this $4.5-billion instrument, due to launch in 2013. Its eighteen hexagonal mirror segments will unfold in space like a flower, and it will be parked about 3 million miles away, at a “Lagrange point” in interplanetary space where gravity will fix it in the shadow of the planet. Scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore should able to use the telescope’s instruments to detect the infrared light from stars and galaxies that formed soon after the Big Bang—literally, the end (and the beginning) of the universe.

t x e N s ’ t Wha Emergence! By Klaus Philipsen

On Sunday, February 11, 2007, my perspective on the world changed. The science writer Steven Johnson was on National Public Radio, speaking about about slime molds, ants, and ﬁreﬂies, about the way many low-complexity agents could coalesce into a higher order. He was talking about emergence. Like many other concepts, emergence has been around forever; the innovation is human understanding of it. It has become a fashionable topic lately because of Johnson’s 2001 book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities. The idea of self-organization challenges the traditional Western view of the world as top-down, hierarchical, deistic, and teleological. Instead, it presents a bottom-up egalitarian system with many possible endings, a non-deterministic view without a spiritus rector, without a dictator, benign or otherwise, directing from above. All it needs is a large number of low-level agents—subatomic particles, cells, small critters, humans even—that get stimulated, provide feedback

Your jetpack may still be MIA, but there’s progress on the race to develop invisibility technology. In 2007, professor Christopher Davis, research scientist Igor Smolyaninov, and graduate student Yu-Ju Hung at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering created a functional invisibility cloak with “metamaterials” that bend rather than reflect light. The UM cloak uses a thin gold film coated with transparent plastic to bend plasmons (electron waves) around whatever is behind it. There are few kinks to work out before we can all try one at the office. For starters, the cloak is nearly twenty times smaller than a strand of human hair, and it’s twodimensional, so it can’t be wrapped around an object. Another con: An invisible man would also be blind, because no light reaches the cloaked object. But stay tuned; a team of Berkeley researchers claim to have created a nano-scaled 3-D cloak, and scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China have proposed a theoretical “anti-cloak” that would allow an invisible person to see out periodically.

Disappearing act: UM’s super-tiny cloaking device scatters plasmons around an object, making it invisible. (Image credit: University of Maryland)

to each other, and en masse transform into more complex patterns. Emergence may not explain the Big Bang, but it can explain almost everything thereafter, from how water turns into ice or how superconductivity is possible to how fireflies synchronize their flashing lights. It’s also the basis for game theory. The societal applications of the idea make me hopeful about the progress of mankind. A large enough number of participants is almost bound to get it right, provided positive feedback is possible and the feedback loops are not too small. This explains why a whole bunch of fairly uninformed folks making up an electorate eventually will get it right in elections. Emergence has incredible implications not only for technology but for management and organization. It can be applied to medicine, to traffic, or to regional planning, without the need for perfected closed systems in which all eventualities are pre-calculated and programmed. There is hope for open-ended systems that find their way “on their own,” getting progressively better by self-calibration and feedback. Google and Wikipedia have become classic examples

of systems that follow the algorithms of emergence. Understanding emergence can help us to emulate nature, which always seems to work with redundancy and selfadjustment, thus allowing failure, death, and error without collapse. Nature grows smarter from mistakes. Although scientists rightly frown upon quick societal analogies, the definition of emergence as a multitude of low-level agents coalescing into meaningful patterns invites comparison to market economics and democracy. Obama’s election was enabled by an army of low-level agents organizing into a nationwide complex. (He might become the first “open-source president.”) Sadly, human nature can also work counter to the benefits of potentially emergent systems. A relatively small group of greedy credit-swap investment acrobats ignored early feedback signals and ran the whole world into the current financial meltdown. It remains to be seen if the principles of emergence will get the upper hand. —Architect Klaus Philipsen AIA is a principal partner in ArchPlan in Baltimore.

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urbanite january 09

Paying for Nature’s Services

Bay banker: Eco-investor John Campagna

Can the free market save the bay? John Campagna believes that the key to saving the Chesapeake Bay isn’t a water scrubbing gizmo or new breed of super oyster. It’s the free market. Campagna is a green investment expert with Benchmark Asset Managers in Baltimore and an advocate of “ecosystem service markets.” You may not know the term, but you’ve probably heard about at least one of these markets—for carbon credits. Here’s how it works: You feel guilty about burning all that jet fuel to visit Tortuga, so you buy a photo by Christophe r Graham

few bucks’ worth of carbon credits online, which pays to plant enough trees to “offset” your share of greenhouse emissions. Buying into the carbon market is now voluntary, but if Campagna is right, such markets will soon be part of doing business, opening the door for a suite of market-based conservation strategies. “We’ll still need state and federal money, and charitable contributions,” he says. “But this will be instrumental in bringing private capital to restoring the bay.” The bay’s biggest problem is that it’s overdosing on nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. The obvious yet weirdly elusive solution? Stop dumping so much. Campagna’s model would accomplish that by setting a ceiling on the amount of nutrients that can be poured into bay-feeding rivers, and then steadily ratcheting that cap down. Polluters would be forced to either clean up or offset their pollution by buying water quality credits—credits that would, for example, pay farmers to restore streamside forests and wetlands to slow nutrient runoff. Set a cap, and a market is born. Who could set such a cap? The Environmental Protection Agency, for one: The EPA has a tool designed for such situations called the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) rule. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation recently threatened to sue the agency for failing to take a heavier hand in bay restoration. Capping nutrient runoff would be an obvious first step. In the meantime, the foundation is working with the free-market conservation group Forest Trends and the University of Maryland to create a market for water quality credits. The Washington, D.C.-based Pinchot Institute for Conservation is building an online marketplace called “The Bay Bank,” where polluters looking to buy such credits can hook up with landowners with credits to sell. Campagna believes that he can use these emerging markets to slow forest- and wetland-devouring suburban sprawl and its attendant lawn chemicals, leaky septic tanks, and stormwater runoff. He has teamed up with the Annapolis-based Biophilia Foundation to create the nonprofit Chesapeake EcoFinance Development Corporation, which is raising $10 million in low-interest loans to buy large tracts of land. It plans to sell ecosystem credits from the land to polluters or investors, then sell the land to the state for open space or to ecologically minded farmers at below market value. The sale of the land and credits would fund the next project, plus a modest profit to cover costs and pay interest on the loans. For this scheme to work, of course, there must be people who want to buy credits— and with a few exceptions, that is not yet the case. Nels Johnson with the Pennsylvania office of the Nature Conservancy says there has been a lot of talk about ecosystem service markets in the past decade, but not much action. One of the biggest challenges is figuring out what constitutes a service, who benefits from it, and how much it is worth—that is, slapping on the price tags. Biophilia is working on a regional system, and the Nature Conservancy has teamed up with the World Wildlife Fund and researchers at Stanford University to create a national system, but it’s a complicated proposition. Campagna pegs his hopes on the carbon market, which recently got a boost from the Region-

to reduce emissions or buy offsets. A national carbon cap may be only a matter of time, and investing houses are beginning to buy carbon credits, which now sell for around $1.50 for a metric ton of carbon dioxide. In Europe, where there are strict caps, credits fetch around $20 a metric ton. Around the bay, markets are emerging for forest protection, development rights, and wetland mitigation. The Nature Conservancy’s Johnson says “the jury is still out” on water quality markets, but the Chesapeake watershed should make good habitat for them: There are 17 million people living in the watershed, all of them potential market players, and plenty of pent-up frustration. “We’ve been spending a lot of time and money trying to restore the bay, and we really haven’t gotten very far,” says Johnson. “Governments and businesses are probably ready for some new ideas.”

A Whiter Shade of Pale

Albedo, the amount of solar radiation that bounces off a surface, is something that the Earth is losing a lot of in a hurry as the ice caps shrink. Enter a new acrylic-based roofing system that will turn the top of your rowhouse from a black asphalt heat sink into something more like an iceberg. “Cool roofs” use white goop to boost reflectivity, bringing the temperature of your roof down as much as 70 degrees on a hot summer day. The treatment costs between $900 and $2,000 for a rowhouse and comes with a ten-year warranty, says Kristin Richards of the nonprofit Civic Works, which installs cool roofs in Baltimore. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory say that if one hundred major urban areas swapped out dark roofs for more reflective ones, it would offset 44 metric giga-tons of greenhouse gases—more than all the countries on Earth emit in a year.

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Tomorrow’s turkey burger? That’s tissue-engineered turkey muscle. (Image credit: Doug McFarland)

Future Flesh

The global hankering for cheeseburgers isn’t just hard on the cows: It’s murder on the environment. Livestock generate more greenhouse gases than the transportation sector, and meat consumption rates are skyrocketing. Rather than try to convince the planet to lay off the stuff, Jason Matheny, a Ph.D. candidate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, founded a nonprofit called New Harvest in 2004 to help fund researchers studying how to make synthetic meat in vitro using animal cells. Cruelty-free “cultured meat” could be created in “bio-reactors” that grow muscle in a nutrient soup, and the tissue could be engineered to include heart-healthy omega-3 fats. “You could have a hamburger that prevented heart attacks instead of causing them,” Matheny says. We are probably decades away from a good synthetic pork chop, but test-tube ground meat could be on the dinner table in five to ten years.

By Russ Smith

Imagine a critter that can both clean up polluted water and power your car. Researchers on the Susquehanna River have been using algae to gobble up nitrogen and phosphorus that wreak havoc on the Chesapeake Bay. To date, the dead algae, also known as “biomass,” has been hauled off to the landfill, but technologies are in the works that will turn the biomass into ethanol and butanol, which can be mixed with gasoline. Patrick Kangas, an associate professor in the University of Maryland’s natural resource management program, says neither technology has taken off on a large scale, but he believes algae can kill two birds with one stone. “We call it ecological engineering,” he says. “We’re using an ecosystem to solve multiple problems.”

t x e N s ’ t Wha The Great Media Bloodbath

Green-ish Power

I’ve read newspapers, several a day, since the age of 5, which would be in 1960. So it came as a sudden shock about six months ago when I realized that’s no longer the case: in fact, as opposed to just a year ago, I don’t even go through the New York Times and Wall Street Journal online with the same eagerness. Usually, I log onto realclearpolitics.com and pick and choose stories that the site has culled from new and old media alike. It’s inevitable that 2009 will be a bloodbath for the media industry, especially weekly and monthly magazines. Every day, as people die, newspapers lose lifelong readers, and they’re not being replaced by those who are younger than 25. Second-tier papers such as the Baltimore Sun have been stripped to the bone, with nothing much left to pare. (And,

A New Old Age Home

Pioneering geriatrician William Thomas, a professor at UMBC’s Erickson School of Aging, Management, and Policy, is on a mission to change the culture of eldercare. He’s the creator of the Green House project, a radical re-imagining of the institutional long-term care facility. Each Green House serves as a home-like environment for six to ten frail older residents and is staffed not by aides but by “Shahbazim” (Farsi for “royal falcons”), specially trained certified nursing assistants who assist with cooking and housekeeping. Residents set their own routines and live in private bedrooms arranged around a common kitchen/living/dining area dubbed “the hearth.” In 2005, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awarded a grant to fund the construction of fifty Green House facilities across the country; Maryland’s first is slated to be built at the Stadium Place senior housing campus on the former Memorial Stadium site in Waverly. The nonprofit Govans Ecumenical Development Corporation, or GEDCO, is currently planning four Green House residences; construction is due to begin in the winter of 2010.

with capital at a premium in the worst economic climate in decades, who’s going to take the Sun off the Tribune Co.’s hands?) I think 2009 will be the year when behemoths such as the New York Times are either sold or drastically reduced in staff. Financial institutions fell one after the other in the third and fourth quarters of ’08, so the unimaginable—the Sulzberger family resigning themselves to a sale of the onetime “Paper of Record”—is not far-fetched. As for the once-fat monthlies—Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue, Esquire—their day of reckoning will come as well. As I write, advertising agencies are making their buys—or not— for the second quarter of ’09. The drop in advertising linage in those magazines is bound to be precipitous. Newsweeklies such as Time and Newsweek are already anachronisms and may go online-only, switch to a monthly schedule, or just fold altogether. Weekly newspapers, formerly known as “alternative”—fat with ads in the prosperous

1990s—aren’t much better off. That these papers haven’t made a successful transition to the Web will come back to haunt them. The fate of online media is up in the air as well, although their costs are lower and audiences are growing. Say, for example, the Times drastically reduces its budget and closes foreign and even some domestic bureaus: Where will the Huffington Post get material to ruminate on? The combination of an already awful climate for the media in general and a weakened economy will undoubtedly result in a forever-changed way to .find and consume news. What will the communications industry be like in five years? God only knows, but to anyone older than 25, my guess is that it won’t be pretty. —Russ Smith co-founded the Baltimore City Paper in 1977, the Washington City Paper in 1981, and New York Press in 1988. He is now the managing director of the website splicetoday.com.

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

Brain Rebuilder

Stroke is the leading cause of adult disability in the U.S., but a new device may help survivors regain cognitive and motor functions. Developed by women researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and local company Encore Path, Tailwind BATRAC (Bilateral Arm Trainer with Rhythmic Auditory Cueing) consists of two handles set on tracks. In response to audio cues, patients rhythmically push or pull on the device’s handles. Studies have shown that it can not only improve grip and shoulder movement, but it may recruit new neural pathways, further confirming the belief that the brain has neuroplasticity—it can reorganize itself based on experiences. Professor Jill Whitall, one of the inventors, says more studies are being conducted to figure out exactly how, and why, BATRAC works. “We’ve been doing this for eight or nine years,” she says, “and there are plenty of questions we haven’t been able to answer yet.” The device should be available to the public for home use in February.

The straight poop: No-ﬂush “mineralizing toilet” systems use bacteria to digest waste. (Image credit: Bio-Sun)

Beyond Compost Stroke of genius: The BATRAC device can help stroke survivors regain lost abilities. (Image credit: Encore Path)

t x e N s ’ t Wha The Breakthrough at the Bottom By Sherrilyn Ifill Like millions of others, I wept with joy on election night. I awoke Wednesday feeling as though I were in a dream. I felt joy and peace and a sense of rightness in the world. I felt vindicated for so many of the choices I’ve made in my life—to become a civil rights lawyer, to ﬁght for racial justice, to commit myself to ﬁghting for full voting rights and political participation, to believe that people, systems, countries can change. It was a new day. Then I hit downtown Baltimore. Jobless men and women milling around Lexington Market. A homeless man on Paca Street talking to himself, holding his pants up with one hand and wildly gesturing with the other. Young girls—too young—clutching the hands of their toddlers, talking into cell phones, walking determinedly down Martin Luther King boulevard. A man and a woman

cussing and hollering outside McDonald’s. Men with vacant eyes and grizzled jaws— surely not as old as they look—milling about outside the VA hospital. A line forming at a bus stop, with eight or nine would-be riders peering hopefully down Baltimore Street, looking for a sign that the 40 was coming, or up at a sky that was threatening rain. Nobody looked celebratory. Hadn’t they heard? It’s a new day! President Obama’s victory is perhaps the most signiﬁcant social and political breakthrough of the past forty-ﬁve years. But it’s also true that millions haven’t broken through. The work of achieving real gains in economic, social, and racial justice for the millions of Americans who live at the bottom and at the margins in our cities remains before us. For those people, “trickle-down breakthroughs” are likely to be as successful as “trickle-down economics” has been. That is to say, not very. Having achieved this enormous breakthrough at the top, I hope that more of us will turn our attention to achieving a break-

It’s almost as good as crapping in the woods: Pennsylvania-based Bio-Sun Systems Inc. has developed a solar-powered, no-flush “mineralizing toilet” that uses wild forest fungi and bacteria to digest human waste. An average home set-up will cost you $12,500—and there’s some assembly required—but the organisms that do the work “cost nothing,” says company founder Al White. High-capacity versions can handle five hundred or more daily “uses” with no water, no chemicals, and no clean-out required for fifteen years, and they are catching on with public agencies. The city of Baltimore, partnered with a volunteer group, is installing one at the new nature center in the Cylburn Arboretum this winter.

through at the bottom. This means fighting, with renewed vigor, for the adoption and implementation of new economic, criminal justice, health, and education policies that will really transform the lives of those who have, for the most part, been left out of the celebration this year. ■ —Sherrilyn Ifill is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century (Beacon, 2007). Want more ideas? Go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com and read what other guest contributors have to say about what’s next—or share your own predictions for the new year. And check out Ignite Baltimore on Feb. 5: Sixteen speakers each get five minutes and twenty slides to deliver a live presentation on the topic of their choosing. Go to www. ignitebaltimore.com for more information. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j a n u a r y 0 9

Animal Attraction the Pikesville animal hospital’s pet- and design-friendly facelift by Jessica Leshnoff

f you’ve ever taken your pet to the vet, you might know the look—the eyes get wide, the tail sinks down, the terrified trembling begins. Animal hospitals are not the friendliest places. The tables are cold metal, the cuddly-kitten posters are from the ’90s, there’s old wood paneling on the walls and tired tile on the floor. Not exactly good preparation for having your reproductive organs removed. When local vet Carey Zumpano was looking to branch out from the multi-vet Mount Washington Animal Hospital and start his own practice, he knew he wanted something different. Over his twelve-year career, Zumpano had visited animal hospitals coast to coast, and he’d always left feeling unimpressed. For the most part, they were purely functional. Last year, when he first saw the future home of the Pikesville Animal Hospital, a former dentist office nestled in an unassuming strip mall at Old Court and Reisterstown roads in Pikesville, he felt, well, a little sick. The walls were mauve and tan, and

the counters Formica. “Oh my gosh, it was so ugly,” he recalls with a laugh. “You had to see through the ugliness to what it could be.” Zumpano enlisted architectural designer Marybeth Shaw and architect Majid Jelveh, who make up the husband-wife team Shaw Jelveh Design. Based in lower Charles Village, the design firm does Web design and programming, branding schemes, product development, and architectural design projects across the country and in Europe. They’re known for a modern, fresh design sensibility, as seen in their line of translucent architectural resin panels, called Veritas, that can creatively divide up spaces while admitting light and air. (The pair had a little something extra invested in the project: Both of their toy poodles—William and the late Coco Violet— have been clients of Zumpano’s.) The notion of creating high-design animal hospitals is nothing new, according to Kristi Reimer, editor-in-chief of Veterinary Economics magazine, which runs an annual

Paint it red: The Pikesville Animal Hospital’s makeover incorporates rich colors, soothing textures, and spirited images of some of its four-legged clientele.

urbanite january 09

space veterinary design competition. She says some vets have even gone as far as creating separate waiting rooms for cats and dog. “It’s stressful for a lot of pets to be taken to a veterinary clinic. Animals’ senses are so much more acute [than humans’]. Their hearing and sense of smell are at higher levels.” Fido might not notice a sexy color scheme, but he will appreciate a calm environment. Inspiration for the Pikesville color scheme came in an unlikely form for Shaw: a small satchel she purchased years ago while visiting Switzerland. Constructed of a coarse Swiss army blanket, the bag is bordered with a strip of dark brown leather and emblazoned with the iconic Swiss cross—an internationally recognized symbol of health and aid. “To me, the richness and the rustic quality [of the bag] was very appropriate for a veterinary practice,” Shaw says. The result is a sophisticated interior design that utilizes clean whites and rich reds and browns to create an effect that is warm

and playful, much like the furry clientele. Patrons are greeted with whimsical, oversized images of actual dogs and cats—a tail here, a furry torso there—affixed to the white walls. A scarlet floor made of linoleum, a material that is both non-toxic and easy on human and animal feet, stretches throughout much of the facility. Exam room tables are topped with cheerful bright red Formica, not bonechilling metal. Natural light spills in through a series of windows along the front wall (“As a human, it’s nice to be able to get that sense of daylight,” Zumpano says), and interior windows in examination and operating rooms allow for seamless communication between staffers during procedures. Pet owners aren’t privy to the nitty-gritty (which is probably preferable), but the windows do impart a sense of openness and dependability. “In a subliminal way, the design tells [pet owners] that they’re welcome to ask questions,” Jelveh says. “Usually the back of an ani-

mal hospital is a mysterious door that closes and your animal disappears. Although there’s privacy [here], there’s always a peek into the back. There’s no mystery.” Peter Chomowicz, chair of the Maryland Institute College of Art’s environmental design program, says a design-conscious animal hospital is part of a larger movement: the convergence of design and business. “The trend we’re seeing is that design is playing a broader and increasingly important business role,” he says. “A company’s values and what they stand for should be exhibited in everything, and design is the easiest way to carry that message.” Shaw concurs. The hospital is “bright and clean and modern and you can have confidence in the practice based on the messages that you’re getting in the design,” she says. “I think it conveys that the animals are loved and taken care of there.” ■ —Jessica Leshnoff wrote about developers Karin and Peter Krchnak in the June issue.

courtesy of Shaw Jelveh Design

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

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urbanite january 09

Recipe Pumpkin Risotto

eat/dr ink

49 Reviewed

Annabel Lee Tavern and Corks

Wine & Spirits

The Feed

Drinking on the cheap This month in eating

Dinner and a Show Looking for fresh fans in Little Italy, a red-sauce stalwart tries some new song and dance by Martha thomas

photo by La Kaye Mbah

t’s a Thursday evening in an upstairs dining room at Germano’s Trattoria in Little Italy, and a 27-year-old singer named David Frankenberger is performing “Mister Cellophane” from the Kander and Ebb musical Chicago. The number—known as a “character song” in musical-theater lingo—is the comic lament of a guy who doesn’t get noticed, no matter what he does. For some reason, Frankenberger is also wearing a red rubber nose—an unnecessary touch, says Maris Wicker, a seasoned cabaret performer seated at a nearby table. “There’s no need to jump through hoops,” she says.

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Pumpkin Risotto with Sage and Roasted Garlic

photo by Aisha M. Khan

1½ cups Arborio rice Pumpkin puree (roast 1 small pumpkin without skin and then mash) 1 head roasted garlic Approx. 4–6 cups chicken stock ¼ cup white wine 2 tbs butter 6 sage leaves, chopped 1 onion, diced ½ cup grated Parmigiano cheese (or more to taste) Singing for supper: Sally Martin and pianist Ron Chiles perform at Germano’s Trattoria.

Cabaret, after all, is supposed to be about the performer, the audience, and the music. And—because this is Little Italy—it’s also about the food, a mix of tried-and-true Italian-American faves and some more modern variations: lasagna layered with red sauce, artichoke-stuffed veal scallopini blanketed in melted provolone, buttery lobster in homemade ravioli, crisp-skinned whole fish, a basket of chewy white bread, and Chianti by the glass. As the audience eats, the show goes on. With an enthusiasm that belies its staid guise, this 30-year-old restaurant in the heart of Little Italy has added something new to the menu: performing arts. In addition to cabaret, Germano’s is hosting singers from the Baltimore Opera, live jazz on Tuesday nights, theater from a forgotten Italian master, and even an occasional evening that gives student-performers from Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA) an opportunity to work before a paying audience, albeit one that may be more interested in their osso buco than in whatever’s happening on stage. The pressure for places such as Germano’s to stand out on the cobbled streets of Little Italy is palpable; diners these days are being lured to hipper spaces in Harbor East to the south and Fells Point/Canton to the east. “Germano has owned this place for thirty years,” says Cyd Wolf, referring to her husband and business partner, 61-year-old Germano Fabiani. “We asked ourselves, ‘What do we want to do with the next phase of our lives?’ And we decided to do this.” She envisions turning the restaurant into “a venue for emerging artists,” she says. “I gave Germano a plan, and he said, ‘Run with it.’” Donald Kennedy, Germano’s general manager for more than twenty years, describes the changes as a way to make patrons take a fresh look at Little Italy. “It’s challenging to maintain a dining public as these other neighborhoods with their own attractions

keep popping up around us.” Kennedy, who has a BFA in directing and studied acting at Northwestern University, had long wanted to bring theater to the space. “Over the years, Cyd and Germano and I had talked about doing something in the upstairs room,” he says. The idea also dovetails nicely with Cyd and Germano’s theatrical leanings: The couple’s older daughter, Alessandra, is a sophomore in the acting program at the BSA; current booking manager Juli Wolf, Cyd’s sister-in-law, has a daughter, Branda Lock, who has acted professionally since graduating from Susquehanna University two years ago. The restaurant’s Thursday evening cabaret series got off the ground first. In April, Juli and Cyd, who took on the role as executive producer, got in touch with Carolyn Black-Sotir, a singer who has performed cabaret-style shows throughout the United States and abroad—including the recent By George! By Ira! By Gershwin! honoring George Gershwin’s centennial, broadcast on PBS. “They asked me to come by and see the room,” Black-Sotir says. “There was no lighting, no sound. We talked about how things could be set up.” A small upright was purchased from Ron’s Piano Warehouse, and Black-Sotir, now the cabaret’s artistic director, went about booking performers. Cabaret is as much about the setting, where patrons drink and often eat, as it is about the style of music. But performers are not just background music. They demand more attention than, say, a piano player in a lounge or restaurant. Germano’s take on the genre is decidedly traditional, with most of its performers drawing from “the American Songbook”—lounge standards or chestnuts from Broadway musicals—and selling their songs with a mix of comedy, theater, and dance. “You engage

recipe

eat/drink

Melt butter over medium-high heat and sauté onion until golden. Add rice and stir well, coating grains with butter. Wet with white wine and stir until mostly absorbed. Stir in pumpkin puree, roasted garlic, sage, and 1 cup hot chicken stock. Lower heat and stir constantly over low heat, adding stock in ½-cup increments as needed. When rice is creamy and tender—about 20 minutes—remove from heat and finish with Parmigiano cheese. Serves 4. —Recipe adapted from Germano’s Trattoria

the audience in a story,” says Washingtonbased singer Sally Martin, “and in the process you reveal something of yourself.” Finding willing artists turned out to be easy. The Baltimore-D.C. area is crawling with performers who love the style but have trouble getting work, despite glimmerings of a cabaret renaissance in other American cities. In New York City, the elegant Carlyle, Regency, and Algonquin hotels still have regular cabaret performers, and there are a handful of Manhattan clubs, such as Michael’s Pub and Don’t Tell Mama, where the genre continues to flourish. But in this region, “it’s challenging to find venues,” says Martin. She has performed at the Corcoran Gallery, a cabaret series at the Signature Theater in Arlington, and at the French and German embassies. The Omni Shoreham’s art deco Marquis Lounge had been one of the few places for cabaret in D.C.; now it only hosts private parties, leaving area performers to cobble together their own gigs. Currently, Germano’s cabaret schedule includes a mix of experienced performers and those, such as the clown-nosed Frankenberger, in the early stages of their careers. The artists keep the $10 per person cover charge, which can be good money for novices (depending on the crowd—the room holds up to ninety w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j a n u a r y 0 9

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people, but rarely reaches capacity). The restaurant enforces a $15 food and drink minimum—inexpensive enough, says Cyd, for younger performers to invite friends, and a far cry from New York prices. (A couple could easily drop $1,000 for dinner and a show at the Café Carlyle.) “It’s great that they’re providing an incubator,” says Tim McReynolds, who accompanied Black-Sotir (on piano and as a fellow performer) for a couple of sell-out evenings last spring and will be appearing with her in February. “Some of the kids are amazingly talented, and this is a good place for them to test their wings.” In fact, part of Germano’s mission is just that: to give young performers a chance to stand in front of an audience. One Thursday each month, students from Baltimore School for the Arts take over the upstairs room. Along with acts by students interested in musical theater, says Donald Hicken, head of BSA’s theater program, the high schoolers have been performing ten-minute plays. It’s not quite dinner theater, where audience members finish their meals and settle in for a full-fledged performance. Here, the plays and the eating are intertwined, with servers patiently waiting for each short play to end before bustling to the table with a plate of

rapidly cooling manicotti or to refill a wine glass. Most of the paying guests appear to be beaming parents, so it hardly matters. And the experience, Hicken says, is good for the kids: “There’s a great deal of intimacy” in this kind of setting. “You have to scale your work to a small room. You can’t get away with too much when you have people 3 feet away from you.”

In a way, Little Italy makes an apt setting for this well-sauced mix of drama and dining. this is Baltimore’s most theatrical neighborhood. Theater in an even more obscure vein has been happening on Wednesday nights. For six weeks throughout the fall, Germano’s revived works by little-known 16th-century playwright Angelo Beolco, known as Ruzante. General manager Kennedy stumbled upon Ruzante, who influenced the improvisational drama known as Comedia dell’Arte, while researching short theatrical pieces. Germano’s

eat/drink friend Alessandro Olivi—also the chairman of the department of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Bayview—turned out to be a passionate Ruzante fan who grew up in Ruzante’s birthplace, Padua. Olivi translated some of Ruzante’s works, many of which were written in a tricky Paduan dialect, and also appeared onstage to introduce the productions. The Ruzante Project, as it was called, had minimal staging and the feel of a lavishly catered open rehearsal. While watching the monologues, diners tucked into crespelli—crabmeat wrapped crepe-like in pasta with tomato sauce and bubbling melted cheese—and chewy homemade ravioli stuffed with spinach and ricotta. In a way, Little Italy makes an apt setting for this well-sauced mix of drama and dining. This is Baltimore’s most theatrical neighborhood. Its narrow streets and dowager trattorias provide a fanciful stage for an oldfashioned idea of Italian cuisine. Served now with a little extra make-believe on the side. ■ —Martha Thomas wrote about the power lunch scene in the September 2008 Urbanite.

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

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eat/drink

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Unlike its poetic namesake, the Annabel Lee Tavern is very much alive (except on Sundays, when it’s shuttered because of a six-day liquor license). A sepulcher-shaped white rowhouse operation on a dark street in Canton, the often-packed little bar plays up its Edgar Allen Poe theme: A gilt-framed portrait and bits of the eponymous ode to the dead girl painted on the plum-colored walls serve as nods to owner Kurt X. Bragunier’s fondness for the writer. A former general manager of Brewer’s Art, Bragunier has successfully transferred the bar-with-better-than-average-food formula that makes his former haunt work so well. He’s also brought along some of the Mount Vernon restaurant’s signature beverages, including Resurrection Ale, a strong brew that Poe would have found effective for celebrating his 200th birthday this January 19. The menu’s scope rivals a Greek diner, with flavors and styles that careen from standbys such as crab cakes and pulled pork

on a chewy kaiser roll to more exotic fare: duckling in Jack Daniel’s barbecue sauce, a smoked salmon salad with sesame and pickled ginger. Chef Mark Littleton, who cranked out reliable bar food at Lulu’s Off Broadway, loves his cayenne and puts it to good use— mixed into a honey and brown sugar glaze on the sweet potato fries, for example. A recent special of duck stir-fry, however, was overwhelmed with heat, and its thickened brown sauce clogged up the vegetables. Stick to basics: succulent lamb sliders, fish tacos, baked brie en croute with brown sugar and pecans, or an oozing BLT with applewood-smoked bacon on Texas toast. Dessert reprises the Poe motif: a slab of dense dark chocolate with a white chocolate crust drizzled in raspberry coulis. It’s called “Edgar Allen Pâté.” (Dinner Mon–Sat. 601 S. Clinton St.; 410-522-2929; www.annabelleetavern.com.)

reviewed

Annabel Lee Tavern

—Martha Thomas

Poe faced: Annabel Lee owner Kurt X. Bragunier

The New Frugality has arrived, and it comes with extra cheese. Chef/owner Jerry Pellegrino, sensing a shift in the dining zeitgeist, shut down his 11-year-old Federal Hill wine bistro, Corks, this summer for a facelift and reboot that emphasizes more affordable fare. The space itself isn’t radically downscaled—a glowing backlit wall now greets arrivals at the entrance, facing the open kitchen—but there are signs, amid the new color scheme and freshened rooms, of a more casual vibe. (Underneath the fine stemware—paper tablecloths.) The big change is on the menu, which now emphasizes comfort food to soothe and amuse the fiscally anxious. There’s a long list of burgers and sandwiches (sorry, “thoughts on bread”) in the $10 range and a few larger entrees that manage to stay at $20 and under. Just as the wine list celebrates domestic vintners, the menu is now a hymn to the American cheesemaker. A display table of domestic artisanal products dominates the dining room, and there are four gourmet grilled-cheese sandwiches and a trio of fondue formulations. Several menu items find a way to integrate some of the stuff. Herbed ricotta is stuffed into small, spicy-sweet pep-

padew peppers; grilled flatbread, so thin as to be nearly translucent, gains body from dollops of goat cheese and wilted arugula; grilled Caesar salad, that 1990s refugee, gets a lusty dusting of Parmigiano shreds, along with white anchovies and a good, balanced dressing. Another appetizer of merguez sausage fried in a cornmeal batter makes an upscale corndog, complete with stick (it’s served on a bed of popcorn), and there’s more of that tasty batter on the flaky wedge of cod in the fish and chips. One senses that this serious kitchen isn’t particularly taxed turning out deluxe corndogs and cheese sandwiches (not to mention a “pbj” dessert of Nutella and preserves on sweet bread): This is a grown-up restaurant feeding its inner child. Those with both adult palates and pocketbooks might be drawn to the more challenging daily specials, which seem to reflect the restaurant’s pre-Crash sensibility. For the rest, dress down and give in to the simple, soft, and gooey. (Lunch and dinner daily. 1026 S. Charles St.; 410-752-3810; www.corksrestaurant.com.)

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Corks

Dinner on a stick: Gourmet corndogs at Corks

—David Dudley

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

and

Irish Pub

& Restaurant

Monday

$10 Fish & Chips, $3 Domestic Drafts Happy Hour from 3 p.m. until close!

Tuesday

$2 Tacos, $3 Coronas

Wednesday 1/2 Price Wine, $5 Small Plates

Thursday

Burger Night $7 for a 9 oz. Burger and a 16 oz. Beer

Friday

Live Music, $2 Domestic Bottles

Sunday Brunch 11 am - 2 pm $16.95 includes a delightful buffet and bottomless mimosas, bellinis and bloody marys

21 N. Eutaw St. Baltimore MD, 21201 410.837.2100

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urbanite january 09

eat/drink

Cheer up, America. Wine bargains are out there

composite photo by Lisa Van Horn

By Clinton Macsherry

A cheaper shot: The falling value of the euro might be a boon for local drinkers.

ime will tell whether the Crash of ’08 becomes the Crash of ’08–’09. Meanwhile, many of us born since the Baby Boom are facing the unfamiliar prospect of self-denial. If we’re fortunate enough to still have a house and a job, we’re probably looking to cut back on discretionary purchases. Some people might deem wine a “luxury” and quit buying altogether. Pity those who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Wine, along with coffee and water, constitutes one of the three essential fluid groups. Water makes life livable; coffee and wine make it bearable. Like Scarlett O’Hara at war-ravaged Tara, I intend to maintain the standard of drinking to which I’ve become accustomed. That’s why I’m pondering strategy. So, apparently, are other shoppers. I recently asked the owner of a North Baltimore liquor store what effect the recession is having on his business. Short answer: not a lot, although there are some differences. Customers buy less, but they shop more frequently. They look for discounts. And they pay more often with cash. Overall, the store’s sales volume was up 3 percent over the previous year. Given my Irish-German-Welsh heritage and my wife’s mania for clipping coupons, bargain-hunting comes naturally to my household. Let’s not put too fine a point on it—I’m cheap. The vast majority of my wine purchases fall well under $20 per bottle, and finding potables in that price range gives me an extra shot of pleasure. But the cheapest bottles on the

shelf don’t necessarily offer the greatest value. A couple years ago, when my consumer confidence level ran higher, I scored two pristine bottles of 2002 Chateau Latour—arguably the greatest Bordeaux of them all and the consensus “wine of the vintage” that year—for $130 apiece. (They’ll be snoozing in my cellar until 2020 or so, unless I have to sell them to make the mortgage.) I know, I know: That’s an awful lot of money for grape juice. By comparison, however, a lesser-rated Latour from 2004 sells for $500, while a bottle from the blockbuster 2005 vintage fetches $1,500. One potentially happy consequence of global economic meltdown—at least for American wineaus—is the declining value of the euro. For several years, a weak dollar has inflated the cost of European wines. But a stronger greenback (assuming it lasts) won’t pull price tags down immediately. The prices of international goods already pumped out of the pipeline typically lag behind exchange rates, for one thing. And many European wineries, desperate to retain U.S. market share as the dollar fell, slashed their profit margins. Our stickers got shocked, but not as badly as they might have. Now, facing their own economic pressures at home, those producers may have a tough time rolling back prices significantly. Even when I’m feeling flush, Barolo—“the king of wines and wine of kings”—flies above my budget for all but special occasions. From Italy’s Piedmont region, wines from Barolo and nearby Barbaresco constitute two of the boot’s three “killer B’s.” (The third is Brunello di Montalcino, from Tuscany.) Once you’ve been seduced by Nebbiolo, the grape from which Barolo and Barbaresco are made, its haunting perfume becomes addictive, and wines labeled Nebbiolo d’Alba, produced from vineyards just outside the Barolo and Barbaresco zones, offer an affordable alternative to the big-money B’s. Poderi Colla Nebbiolo d’Alba 2004 ($27, but I got it for $24.30 with a coupon) checks out at less than half the price of the same producer’s Barolo. It pours light, orange-tinted ruby and strikes an earthy profile—think wet strawberry patch—that slowly evolves into a penetrating scent of roses, red berries, and smoked meat. (Next time, I’d decant for aeration to help the aroma blossom more quickly.) Medium-bodied with handsomely balanced acidity and tannins, it combines dried cherry and tea flavors with an elusive savory note. If the recession puts wines such as this out of reach, I’m not sure where I’ll turn when I need a Nebbiolo fix. But my friend Mary offers sage advice for hard times: “Drink through it.” ■

wine & spirits

The Grape Depression

Next month: A look at some domestic value options.

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

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Open House

•

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Sunday, January 11 at Park School

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urbanite january 09

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e u l a V of

eat/drink

This Month in Eating Compiled by Martha Thomas KRAUTFEST 2009 Chef John Shields of Gertrude’s at the BMA has expanded his annual celebration of pickled cabbage to two nights. Attendees can sample the restaurant’s organic sauerkraut in a buffet of krautfriendly fare, from the expected (sour beef, borscht, local sausages from Binkert’s and Ostrowski’s) to the less so (“Carmelized Kraut Ice Cream”?), plus “Krautinis” at the bar and live polka from the big band Joy of Maryland. Tickets $30 advance, $35 at door. 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

JAN 9–10 Gertrude’s 10 Art Museum Dr. 410-889-3399 www.gertrudesbaltimore.com

TEA PARTY IN MINIATURE AMERICA Fowl is on the menu at ﬂag-maker Mary Pickersgill’s tea party, but not the kind you eat. Kids can play “Duck Duck Goose” and other 19th-century parlor games, sip tea or cider, and eat scones and other treats with re-enactors portraying Pickersgill and her daughter at a traditional tea party. Guests also get a demonstration of food preparation and a look at the curent exhibit of miniature dollhouse furniture. Reservation required; $10 members, $15 nonmembers.

JAN 10 Star-Spangled Banner Flag House 844 E. Pratt St. www.ﬂaghouse.org

KOPI LUWAK TASTING The hyper-rare Indonesian coffee Kopi Luwak is one of the world’s great delicacies—only about one thousand pounds are sold annually, and it can fetch $200 per pound or more. Why? Well, you have to pick the beans from the feces of the Asian palm civet. The small coffee-berry-eating mammal’s digestive processing renders a smooth, creamy brew that Zeke’s Coffee owner Thomas Rhodes calls “the best coffee I’ve ever had.” The Lauraville roastery will be serving three tastings at $10 per cup; 8 a.m., 10 a.m., noon.

JAN 18 3003 Montebello Terrace 443-992-4388 www.zekescoffee.com

SLOW FOOD WINTER NIGHTS AT THE MOVIES SERIES Slow Food Baltimore kicks off its ﬁlm series with a screening of The Real Dirt on Farmer John, a 2005 doc that tells the tale of cross-dressing Midwestern farmer John Peterson, known for his feather boas and leopard-print coveralls, who created a successful organic farm in the 1970s. Includes warm winter beverages, snacks, and discussion. $3 donation, 7:30 p.m. RSVP by Jan 10.

JAN 22 Baltimore Youth Hostel 17 W. Mulberry St. www.slowfoodbaltimore.com

CHÂTEAUNEUF-DU-PAPE TASTING DINNER From a medieval French village to you: Chef Cindy Wolf, known for her sophisticated updates on American fare, embraces the wines of Côtes du Rhône, speciﬁcally Châteauneuf-du-Pape, in a ﬁve-course tasting dinner at Charleston Restaurant. $199 per person, 7 p.m. Samples can also be sipped at nearby Pazo from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. for $39.

JAN 30 Charleston 1000 Lancaster St. 410-322-7373 www.thecharlestongrp.com

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

American Idol’s TAYLOR HICKS to play Feb. 3 - 8 Performances!

ON SALE NOW!

February 3-15, 2009 Hippodrome Theatre

BroadwayAcrossAmerica.com • 410.547.SEAT • Box Office (Mon-Sat 10a-5p) • Groups (20+) call 866.577.7469 To learn more visit myspace.com/BaltimoreHippodrome Due to the nature of live entertainment; times, dates and performers are subject to change without notice. All patrons, regardless of age, must have a ticket. No refunds or exchanges. Tickets subject to service charges and handling fees.

art/culture 57 bOOK

Andrew Zaleski on Brian Wendell Morton’s Political Animal

59 MuSic

David Dudley on the BSO’s new Off the Cuff series

59 thEatER

Martha Thomas on Undine and The Homecoming

61 bOOKS

Susan McCallum-Smith on regular folks

63 thE ScEnE

This month’s cultural highlights

Versiﬁer Wanted So, what does a poet laureate do?

by MaRiannE K. aMOSS illuStRatiOn by OKan aRabaciOGlu

ack in 17th-century England, where the first poets laureate took up their quills, the job was to pen verses to commemorate royal occasions. So when Michael Glaser became Maryland’s official poet laureate in 2004, he was a bit anxious about producing such “occasional verse,” which remains a small, sometimes dreaded part of the gig. “Whatever magical and mystical experience that enables one to do one’s art does not often come when someone says, ‘Will you write a birthday poem for my mother, or the opening of the legislative session?’” Glaser says. This month, Maryland names Glaser’s successor, its ninth poet laureate. The Free State has had a poet laureate since 1959; past office-holders are, in order of appearance, Maria B. Croker, Vincent Godfrey Burns, Lucille Clifton, Reed Whittemore, Linda Pastan, Roland Flint, and Michael Collier. Most states have had a poet on the payroll since an Oakland librarian and versifier named Ina Coolbrith was dubbed “Loved, Laurel-Crowned Poet of California” in 1915. There’s also a national poet laureate—California-based bard Kay Ryan got the job in July 2008—who serves a one-year term that roughly follows the academic schedule. The modern state poet laureate is charged with being the official bearer of poetry in his or her territory. Each laureate can define the job’s particulars, but the main duty remains to share and advocate for poetry. The artistic tension between fulfilling the duties of a government w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j a n u a r y 0 9

Highlighting Local Talent

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Join AIABaltimore (The American Institute of Architects, Baltimore Chapter) to hear from the main winners of the 2008 AIABaltimore Excellence in Design Awards program as they discuss their architecture firm’s design aesthetic and vision.

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1 +1

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Tuesday, January 13, 2009 The Johns Hopkins Downtown Center Auditorium Charles & Fayette Streets

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED www.urbaniteproject.com

Reception at 5:30 p.m. Lecture at 6 p.m.

‘09

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urbanite january 09

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appointment while satisfying one’s creative impulses and needs has at times flowered into public controversy, most notoriously in 2002, when Black Arts poet/activist Amiri Baraka—New Jersey’s poet laureate at the time—came under fire from the AntiDefamation League for a piece he wrote in response to 9/11 called “Somebody Blew Up America” (sample line: “Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day”). The governor of New Jersey tried to remove Baraka from the post, but found that the only legal option was to abolish the office altogether. (New Jersey still does not have a state laureate position.) Should Baraka have watched his words while he was a poet laureate? It’s a “hairy question,” says Glaser, a professor emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a twenty-year veteran of the Maryland State Arts Council’s Poet-in-the-Schools program. “I think part [of the role] of any artist is to provoke discussion,” he says, and Baraka certainly succeeded in raising the profile of the craft. “Amiri Baraka wrote a poem that mattered. When was the last time that someone wrote a poem that got that much attention?” But Glaser didn’t court such controversy during his own term. “There’s a certain obligation or responsibility not to compromise my integrity, but this is not a place for me to try to be asserting my politics,” he says. Dana Gioia, outgoing chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and author of the 1992 book Can Poetry Matter?, concurs: Being a state poet laureate comes with “all kinds of political and official requirements” that must be observed. “One of the most notable things that’s happened to poets laureate over the past ten years has been that they now have job descriptions—they have a minimum number of events they have to visit or perform at,” he says. “I think this is appropriate. If you’re going to give someone a public salary, they should have public duties.” (Maryland’s poets laureate only receive reimbursements for travel expenses.) Glaser says that during his tenure as poet laureate, he focused on sharing his love of poetry with the public. He and past laureates Pastan and Collier worked with the Maryland Humanities Council to provide copies of books or CDs by Maryland’s seven laureates to participating libraries as part of the “Poetry’s Here @ Your Public Library” program. He also gave public talks and readings, both of his work and that of others. (Among his favorite poets are Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, Mark Doty, and Naomi Shihab Nye, especially her poem “Wandering Around in an Albuquerque Airport Terminal,” which he calls “one of the most wonderful poems ever written in the English language.”) Glaser ‘s title was sometimes the only thing that prompted groups to invite him to speak—his impression

was they didn’t know what the term meant exactly—but the response he received was “heartening,” he says. “I found a real hunger from people in retirement villages to kids in elementary schools for the kind of dialogue, the kind of reflection that the kind of poems I was reading opened up for them.” And despite his anxiety about producing “occasional verse,” Glaser found that he usually enjoyed the process. He especially liked writing for the grand opening of the Music Center at Strathmore, a state-of-the-art concert hall and education center in Montgomery County. “The opportunity to try to capture the wonderful idealism of that place and wonderful technology and put it together in a poem to be read at opening ceremonies—I was very happy with what I came up with,” he says. (To read the poem, go to www. urbanitebaltimore.com.) Baltimore-based novelist Alice McDermott heads the current selection committee, whose eight members include working writers, teachers, and ex-laureate Collier. She says the job of the poet laureate is to “move poetry out of the doldrums in people’s minds.” Nominees must have a substantial history of publishing books and/or individual poems, and be willing and able to travel throughout the state to spread the good word. Last month, McDermott and her fellow committee members made three recommendations to Governor Martin O’Malley and his wife, Katie, who are to choose the state’s new poet laureate sometime this month. In Maryland, poets laureate serve four-year terms that may be renewed at the governor’s discretion. McDermott says O’Malley likely wants to incorporate poetry into public celebrations as seamlessly as music—“reminding all of us that poetry can be as much a fabric of our celebrations as the expected brass bands and fireworks.” The best candidates for the poet laureate position are those who possess both writing chops and the enthusiasm and energy to share poetry with many kinds of people in different places—those who can prove that poetry should and can be an essential part of the human experience. “I know I’m not the best poet writing in Maryland,” says Glaser, whose term ends with the announcement of the next poet laureate. “My first deep commitment for the last thirty-seven or forty years has been to my family and teaching. I’ve never really had time to see how good a poet I can be, and I look forward to discovering that.” ■ —Marianne K. Amoss is Urbanite’s managing editor.

art/culture book

Partisan Inﬂuence

Political Animal: I’d Rather Have a Better Country by Brian Wendell Morton (Apprentice House, 2008)

“There’s nothing wrong with America that everything right in America can’t fix,” says political columnist Brian Wendell Morton. It’s an attitude that has long fueled his weekly assaults on inefficacious public officials, local and national, in the Baltimore City Paper. Morton knives his way through the mire of the last fifteen years of American politics in Political Animal: I’d Rather Have a Better Country, a collection of published and unpublished columns from 1993 to the present. (Disclosure: As a Loyola College sophomore, I was on the project team for the book at Apprentice House, the school’s student-staffed publishing house; I did copyediting and designed the book’s jacket.) “I like to think that I can help people understand the machinations of what goes into politics,” Morton says. As Morton vents on the Bush/Clinton/ Bush years, one hears in his dispatches the cry of an optimist scorned. “Deep inside any political columnist,” he writes, “lurks an idealist who only wants things to be better—‘better’ meaning, of course, the way they’d like them to be.” An unapologetic liberal, Morton draws from what he calls his “limitless well of outrage,” arranging his columns by theme—“War,” “Religion,” “Drugs and Guns,” “Race”—rather than chronology. In “As They See It,” a 2006 rebuke of George Dubya’s interpretation of government, Morton wonders how the “executive branch of a constitutional democracy get[s] away with telling lawmakers that it doesn’t feel like being bound by duly enacted and fairly easy to understand laws.” In “The L Word,” published in 2004, Morton defends the liberal brand “because it stands for caring, and hope, and trust in your fellow man.” Morton has a split personality, though; if he’s Blue State in conviction, he’s Red State by temperament. “I enjoy red meat, fine wine, Cuban cigars, leather clothing, and big cars driven by other people,” he writes. His wit helps make Political Animal more than just a hair-pulling, chair-throwing read, regardless of which side of the aisle you sit on. Not that Morton doesn’t welcome your thrown chairs—anything for an engaged readership. “I would rather have a country that is reading and angry,” he says, “than one that is not reading and apathetic.” —Andrew Zaleski w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j a n u a r y 0 9

Increases volume.

Increases intelligence.

Listen. And learn. 88.1 (Baltimore/Frederick) 106.9 (Ocean City/Salisbury) WYPR.org (streaming online 24/7)

urbanite january 09

photo by David Dudley

Rediscovering the classics: The BSO’s new Off the Cuff series is aimed at non-expert listeners.

Music

Youth Movement

illustration by Bill Geenen

The BSO performs Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 at the Meyerhoff, Jan 10

Broken up: Fabulation chronicles the rags-to-riches tale of a down-at-the-heels Manhattan PR woman.

t H e at e r

Family Matters

Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine at Center Stage, Jan 28–March 8 The Homecoming at Fells Point Corner Theatre, Jan 16–Feb 15

Can the kids save classical music? This season, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra deploys a new weapon in its ongoing battle to arrest the aging of its subscriber base. The come-as-you-are concert series Off the Cuff features a number of tweaks designed to demystify the product and grow a few new orchestral music fans: Each of the four Saturday night programs focuses on a single symphonic piece, performed without intermission. The show starts early, at 7 p.m., and you can walk out the door no later than 8:30—useful for concertgoers with babysitters on the clock, or post-Brahms barhopping plans. And the performance is preceded by an informative introduction by music director Marin Alsop, who walks the less-than-savvy listener through the history and structure of the music to come. It’s Classical Music for Dummies, on stage—a bit of freshman music appreciation, some “Behind the Music” biography, and a Whitman’s Sampler of the composer’s greatest hits performed live by the BSO. The series premiere in November didn’t exactly have the demographics of a Kanye West show, but there were a few unlined faces in the crowd, and even the veterans didn’t seem to mind Alsop’s cheeky disquisition on Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6. Working without notes, the irrepressible maestra held forth for thirty minutes or so on the composer’s life and times, offering a movement-by-movement

Lynne Nottage has said that her play Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine was inspired by a New Yorker profile she read about Condoleezza Rice. It’s the story of a supersavvy and successful Manhattan PR professional who loses everything and returns, destitute, to her Brooklyn family, whom she hasn’t seen in several years. The title character, Undine, has believed until now that the only way to succeed in the world is to leave her past behind. “She’s lived a rags-to-riches life, and she’s back to rags,” says Faedra Carpenter, the dramaturg for the current Center Stage production. “By returning to her family, she has to re-examine her life.” Undine shares a name with the social-climbing Undine Spragg in Edith Wharton’s novel Custom of the Country, and the name also refers to a mythological water spirit who can only gain a soul by marrying a human. Nottage’s play, which won the 2005 Obie for best new play, is imbued with African and African-American folklore, from trickster stories to hip-hop renditions of Br’er Rabbit tales. “This is a comedy; it’s not a tragedy. There’s a lot of humor in the piece,” Carpenter says.

art/culture dissertation on the “Pathétique” and occasionally turning around to summon forth a sample measure of the passage in question from the musicians. “I’ll be really disappointed if you don’t applaud here,” she said, coaching the crowd through a climactic false ending in the third movement. When the big moment came during the performance itself, the audience dutifully responded with a lusty roar, and Alsop all but winked back. Will this crash course actually succeed in breeding more musical literates? Check back in a few years. For now, at least a few new concertgoers seemed willing to take another chance on the dusty core repertoire. Filing out, one young woman enthused to her companion, “Let’s do this all the time.” Next up on the syllabus: Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 on January 10. Elgar’s Enigma Variations follows on February 28, with Aaron Copland’s Symphony No. 3 wrapping up the series on April 18. —David Dudley For tickets, call 410-783-8000 or go to www.bsomusic.org.

In a similar odyssey, a philosophy professor from an American college returns to his North London home in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming at Fells Point Corner Theatre. Teddy, who has sought to sever ties with his working-class roots, brings his wife, Ruth, a newcomer, into a predatory household of men—his father, uncle, and two brothers. The play is Pinter at his best: seemingly simple dialogue becomes evocative and cruel, layered with metaphor and somehow poetic. Rather than running from brutality, Ruth seems to embrace it. “Each character has an agenda of taking control of the household,” says director Barry Feinstein. “The play is about the dark urges to control territory. [Pinter is] holding up a mirror to what we try to keep locked up in our subconscious.” —Martha Thomas For tickets to Fabulation, call 410-3320033 or go to www.centerstage.org. For tickets to The Homecoming, call 410-276-7837 or go to www.fpct.org.

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

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art/culture

books

Ordinary People b y Sus an M c C a l l um - S m it h Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk (Picador, 2006) The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker (Grand Central Publishing, 2009) Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out (Candlewick Press, 2008)

eing a bit of a nosy neighbor, I often wonder while walking my dog what is going on behind those cozy porchlights, knowing it is impossible to guess from without the domestic dramas unfolding within. Each of the young mothers in Arlington Park has made an uneasy pact with domesticity. Set during a damp day in a middle-class English suburb, Rachel Cusk’s brilliant, acerbic novel tarnishes the burnished myth of blissful Mommydom by dipping it in an acid bath of reality. It is possible—nay, probable— that you will love your children while also feeling stifled by them. After having a baby, one mother “couldn’t locate a continuous sense of herself. It seemed to lie all around her in pieces, like the casings of [her daughter’s] Russian doll …” Another woman, Juliet Randall, had been destined, she thought, for great things. “She had never expected to find herself here, where women drank coffee all day and pushed prams around the grey, orderly streets, and men went to work, went there and never came back, like there was a war on.” She imagines writing to her old English teacher, “Dear Mrs. Mountford … My husband, Benedict, murdered me.” Not literally, of course— but she’d assumed that Benedict would take a proactive role in the child-rearing, and he was acting precisely like her father. “It was all surprising to her, outrageous almost … she made the mistake of complaining to her mother. Oh, the joy, the harsh, vitriolic joy in her mother’s face!” Even though we may wish our daughters greater opportunities than our own, suggests Cusk, that doesn’t necessarily mean we won’t extract some pleasure when they fall into the same trap. Cusk is a fearless novelist; I flinched as I laughed—cackled, actually—like a tricoteuse enjoying an afternoon in front of the guillotine. When Juliet’s little daughter learns at kindergarten she is a girl and not a boy (“They had told her what she was, and now she knew”), Juliet wonders, in turn, how “to shield her from the bullet of an ordinary life.” Truly Plaice, the heroine of Tiffany Baker’s debut novel, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, would have happily settled

for an ordinary life. Her mother died in childbirth because Truly was a big baby—scratch that, an enormous baby. So enormous that Truly becomes both spectacle and outcast of the tiny upstate New York county, whose locals shun her because “bad luck slips off easy as soot.” When Truly is 12 years old, her father dies, and she is sent to live with Brenda and August Dyerson on their ramshackle horse farm, where she befriends their silent daughter, Amelia. Meanwhile her beautiful elder sister is ruthlessly courted by the local doctor Robert Morgan, the latest in a long line of Robert Morgans who have ministered to the health of Aberdeen County. When the marriage goes sour, Truly takes over the care of her nephew, Bobbie, “a will-o’-the-wisp,” shielding him against his cunning, manipulative “Ten Commandments kind of father,” who “laid down the letter and line of the law and didn’t seem too interested in any of the problems you had following it.” The Little Giant of Aberdeen County is a traveling-pants-practical-magic-sewingbee-sisterhood-y kind of novel, infused with herbs, threaded through with embroidery metaphors and dodgy Civil War ancestors, and peopled by kooky characters such as a witch-y great-great-great-grandma named (I kid you not) Tabitha. Following Arlington Park, it’s like gorging on cupcakes after vinegar. Still, when big-hearted, big-boned Truly reaps her just desserts and turns “the ordinary fabric of life into something wholly unexpected,” I emitted a sugary burp of pleasure. Consider me moved, but enough already: I hereby pronounce a moratorium on novels containing quilts. Living in the White House guarantees an extraordinary life, or at least an interesting twist on humdrum domesticity. “Children have been born there. Ideas have been born there. Momentous decisions wise and foolish have been made there,” writes David McCullough in his introduction to the engaging Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out, a new publication celebrating the story of the people’s house, with all royalties going to the National Children’s Book and Literary Alliance. Its occupants, I suspect, spin

dizzy, asking “How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house …” while still sitting on the loo and burning toast like the rest of us. The book meanders from the day in 1800 when President Adams moved in to find the “windows rattled in the wind. Wet walls reeked sour,” to the chilling factual extract from Vice President Dick Cheney’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Along the way, the British dropped by uninvited in 1814, pausing to polish off a banquet before torching the building as Dolley Madison took to the hills with a painting of George Washington. Charles Dickens was an invited guest in 1842; he shared his admiration for the beautiful ornamental grounds, “though they have that uncomfortable air of having been made yesterday,” and noted that President Tyler “looked somewhat worn and anxious, and well he might; being at war with everybody …” Humor is supplied by Marguerite W. Davol’s story written in the voice of Davy Crockett, “the Coonskin Congressman from West Tennessee.” He describes the “backwoodsmen, patricians, veterans” who swarmed the White House after Andrew Jackson’s inauguration. “Patent-leather pumps, alongside muddy boots, trampled the rugs. It was a right-smart rollickin’ ruckus!” But there is tragedy too, none more moving than “Mary Todd Lincoln Speaks of Her Son’s Death, 1862,” a poem by Paul B. Janeczko: “Gone. / The word was a thunderclap, / deafening me to my wails / as I folded over his body, / already growing cold.” Much of the book’s charm derives from the diversity and quality of its illustrations, from the detailed rendering by P.J. Lynch of Eleanor Roosevelt returning a little girl’s cat, to the brooding power of Hoover’s one term by Matt Phelan and the rambunctious energy of the Roosevelt brood hurtling downstairs as captured by Chris Van Dusen. Teddy Roosevelt seemed to be one of the few Presidents who actually enjoyed living in the White House, although, as he wrote in his letters, “until [my son] Quentin goes to bed the house is entirely lively. After that the rooms seem big and lonely and full of echoes.” It remains to be seen whether the domestic lifestyle of Obamalot will be as raucous as the Roosevelts’ (pet snakes in the Oval Office, Shetland ponies in the elevator). As we gaze up at the portico’s lanterns, we can only hope so. ■

OUR WHITE HOUSE. Compilation © 2008 by the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance. Illustration © 2008 Steven Kellogg. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.

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th e sc en e: jan uary VISUAL ART

Look and Listen

60 Objects/Countless Stories, the Baltimore Museum of Art’s new, free 90-minute audio tour, features informal commentary from the the museum’s curators plus art-inspired stories and poems from such Baltimore literati as Laura Lippman and Michael Kimball. Available from the BMA box office beginning Jan 16; free, open-to-the-public launch party also on Jan 16. Also at the BMA is the African Spirit Series, which includes African and African American art and writing workshops, a lecture on black aesthetics, and the African Film Festival National Traveling Series, featuring critically acclaimed movies by African directors, screened for free. Series begins Jan 17; film festival Jan 31 and Feb 1. (10 Art Museum Dr.; 443-573-1832; www.artbma.org)

Science Fare

The American Center for Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, exhibits the work of three artists inspired by subatomic particles, quantum physics, and chaos theory in a show called In formation. Through Apr 17. (1 Physics Ellipse, College Park; 301-209-3125; www. acp.org) FILM

Life and Times

In 1977, Harvey Milk—currently the subject of the Sean Penn biopic Milk—became the first openly gay man elected to political office in California. On Jan 3, the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library hosts a free screening of The Times of Harvey Milk, the Academy-Award-winning 1984

doc about his groundbreaking career and assassination. (400 Cathedral St.; 410-3965430; www.prattlibrary.org) CLASSICAL MUSIC

Club Hit

Peabody composer-in-residence Christopher Rouse once said that the title of his 1985 work Bump came from “dance floor bumping with the hips or buttocks.” It’s a dark, syncopated piece, and the Peabody Symphony Orchestra performs it Jan 31, along with Ernest Bloch’s 1916 cello and orchestra piece Schelomo and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93. (1 E. Mount Vernon Pl.; 410-659-8100 ext. 2; www.peabody.jhu.edu) NEW MUSIC

Hearing Is Believing

In its second season, the Mobtown Modern series continues to expose Baltimore to innovative, contemporary classical new music. Jan 28’s performance, called “More Than Words,” features five pieces that stretch the voice’s capabilities. Presented and hosted by the Contemporary Museum. (100 W. Centre St.; 410-783-5720; www.mobtownmodern.com) INDIE MUSIC

Listening Party

To celebrate its one-year anniversary, Baltimore-based music website Aural States is throwing a two-night party. Local bands Arbouretum, Wye Oak, Small Sur, and more play the Talking Head (203 Davis St.) and Sonar (407 E. Saratoga St.) on Jan 30, followed by a dance party DJ’ed by locals Cex and Craig Sopo at the Hexagon at 1825 N. Charles St. on Jan 31. (www. auralstates.com)

art/culture

COMEDY/VARIETY

Stagecraft

Local composer Lorraine Whittlesey and her co-conspirator, artist Joyce Scott, take to the stage of An Die Musik on Jan 10 to perform their latest installment of Ebony & Irony, a comedy and music show that tackles issues of race, gender, and politics. This one’s subtitled “Barack the Casbah” and promises to include a rendition of “Rock the Casbah” and other famous songs with new original lyrics. (409 N. Charles St.; 410-385-2638; www.andiemusiklive.com) BOOK TALK

Line of Fire

After Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal’s brother’s was killed at a U.S. checkpoint, he launched a performance called Domestic Tension: For a month, he lived alone in a prison-cell-sized room in the line of fire of a remote-controlled paintball gun; visitors to the gallery and a virtual Internet audience could shoot at him whenever they liked. On Jan 23, Bilal stops by 2640 to talk about his new City Lights book, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, which details this project and his life story. Free. (2640 St. Paul St.; www. redemmas.org/2640/upcoming)

Rain or Shine

Local performance artist Ric Royer, known for his macabre yet humorous narrative performances, heralds the release of his new book-length poem, The Weather not the Weather, at Load of Fun on Jan 4. (120 W. North Ave.; www.loadoffun.net) THEATER

Double Standard

I Am My Own Wife is a one-person show about real-life transvestite Charlotte Von

Mahlsdorf, who lived through the Nazi and East German Communist regimes. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning show is at Everyman Theatre, Jan 14–Feb 22. (1727 N. Charles St.; 410-752-2208; everymantheatre.org) EXHIBIT

One-Man Show

The exhibit One Night in ’64: AfricanAmerican Voices and Television in the Civil Rights Era centers on 75-year-old retired African American truck driver James Emory Bond, who in 1964 walked into the WBAL studios on Television Hill and ended up commenting on Baltimore’s crime problem and sharing his life story on prime time TV. The video and accompanying exhibit are up through Jan 20; Bond’s son, Frank, speaks after the movie on Jan 10 at 2 p.m. (830 E. Pratt St.; 443-263-1800; www. africanamericanculture.org) PHOTOGRAPHY

Yearbook

While an artist-in-residence at the Walters Art Museum, photographer Dawoud Bey worked with Baltimore teens to challenge youth stereotypes through portrait photography. See the fruits of their labors, interspersed with paintings and portrait miniatures from the Walters’ collection, in Portraits Re/Examined through Feb 16. Held in conjunction with the Contemporary Museum’s exhibit Class Pictures, featuring Bey’s portraits of young people from various American cities, through Feb 16. Bey and fellow photographer Carrie Mae Weems discuss their craft on Jan 19 in the Walters Graham Auditorium. (The Walters: 600 N. Charles St.; 410-547-9000; www.thewalters. org; Contemporary Museum: 100 W. Centre St.; 410-783-5720; www.contemporary.org)

Local artist Stephen Parlato’s dazzling collages, such as Flag Horse (pictured at left), grace the walls of Baltimore Pho in Sowebo until Jan 13. The revised first edition of his PBS-recommended children’s book, The World that Loved Books, is filled with more astounding creations. (1116 Hollins St.; www.soweboarts.org)

Compiled by Marianne K. Amoss w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j a n u a r y 0 9

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Drawing can feel so immediate and fresh even when the subject is complex and filled with ambiguities. Alyssa Dennis is a Baltimore artist whose work seems to be a kind of annotation. One can almost see her adding bits of experience to a work, a mix of things collected perhaps randomly on her journey. She states that her work has “developed from the perspective of a modern archaeologist.” The things that accrue on the page seem to have done so over time, each adding another layer of interest. According to Dennis, her quest is “to track the development of urban living systems, creating narrative meaning out of the collection of mounting experimental information about the human relationship to the built environment.” It is a very particular vision, one filled with small mysteries. Where do the doors lead? What do the half-drawn, half-erased images reference? What is going on in this strange space that draws us in and makes us want to investigate every corner? —Alex Castro

urbanite january 09

Alyssa Dennis Striped 2008 36 x 54 inches Graphite, ground pigment, colored pencil, and collage on paper

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