Book #6 of 2018

Reveals the dastardly machinations of an array of sordid operators who exacerbated and profited from racial divisions in Baltimore City and County. Political machines, bookies, loan sharks, hustlers, lawyers, accountants, future City Councilmen and even a future Vice President of the United States--all had a stake in stoking racial divisions for profit whether fiscal or electoral (or both). There was a lot of indignant embarrassment among residents of Baltimore County recently when Dallas Dance went down for corruption and covering it up. But read Pietila on the routine and profound corruption of Baltimore County leadership at all levels--on a level that even the City couldn't match at the time--up into the 70's and Dance seems a quaint and unworthy throwback to those good old days of truly astounding graft. It was the district where Spirow Agnew launched his political career after all...though most of the corruption was centered in the old Democratic Party machine.

The cast of characters is astonishing. Many are crooks and charlatans who have a genuine drive to desegretate the City by moving Black families into Jewish or white enclaves, but who profit heavily on "blockbusting" techniques while challenging redlined disctricts. Moral ambiguity abounds as some villains prove more empathetic than others.

But there is also plenty of downright acid racism and appalling degrees of hate, often saturating all local civic and public institutions, be they fiscal, secular, religious, cultural, or educational. This history is shameful but deeply fascinating in a city with a long history of economic, cultural, religious and racial diversity. Baltimore, as site of the first bloodshed of the Civil War, and as the hometown and burial place of John Wilkes Booth, serves as an interesting microcosm of the evolution of the civil rights movement and of racial attitudes and relations over the past 150 years.

The book is most entertaining as a rich historical record of race relations and realities in Baltimore from the industrial revolution on. Pietila tells good stories and evokes place and character well. It was fun to read his sympathetic and engaging accounts of people I knew little or nothing about and neighborhoods I know quite well. I recommend Not in My Neighborhood strongly as an indispensible work of popular history by someone with obvious expertise about the city,its past, and its national significance.

The Play's the Thing...

Water in a Broken Glass - Trailer from Lodge Street Films on Vimeo.


Last night Patricia and I went to the historic Senator Theater to see the premier of Water in a Broken Glass. We were invited because our home on Madison Ave in Baltimore was chosen as location for several scenes in the film. The director found photos of the house on AirBNB and immediately contacted us. She rented the bottom two floors for 4 days...our TV room became the dressing room/makeup room, our dining room was the mess area, our kitchen was the equipment space. And our living room and 2nd bedroom became a central character's house.

The opening was PACKED. I haven't seen the Senator that jammed with people since those midnight showings of the Lord of the Rings movies. They had the restored lobby bar open. Everyone was dressed to the nines and getting photographed in front of Art Deco fixtures and a giant vinyl wall hanging with sponsors' logos and the movie title in a repeating pattern.

A bit more than midway through the movie the main character pulls up to our house, parks next to our neighbor's VW, and gets out and knocks on our door. But we don't answer at "our" house. The "owner" lets her in.

It was a peculiar and mildly unsettling experience to see our house--our belongings, our furniture--on screen at the Senator. There was our art work--stuff by Matt Muirhead, Sogh, Lance Moore. There were my knick-knacks. My bookcases full of art books and history tomes, and objects from our travels. The Chinese papier-mache painted cabinet found in Singapore, the pottery from Honduras. The Ifugao blanket from Banaue. Our mid-century throwback SCAN furniture. And in the film none of it is "mine" or "ours," but rather "hers"--it all belongs to the character Satin, who owns a bookstore on "The Avenue," but not really on The Avenue. Satin "owns" our house. But Satin's house is somewhat different. She had rearranged some of "our" art. Satin had taken other works down and replaced them with her own. Our ironing board gets screen time. And (spoiler) Satin has sex in our bed, though at the time it was our AirBNB suite's bed..and after 3 three years of AirBNB and hundreds of guests, Satin was not the first to do so. The stagers replaced several ceiling bulbs with purple bulbs for the movie, and it looked kind of cool with the period Victorian wall colors. (I remember spending a Saturday replacing our stuff after the stagers from the film crew had mis-replaced a bunch of it).

Adding a strong nostalgic and somewhat melancholic tinge to the peculiarity of seeing our house and stuff associated with a film character on a big screen, was the fact that the house is vacant now and up for sale. All the colorful Victorian era wall paint is covered up in a generic bright gray, much of the furniture has been sold or donated, and we are currently preparing to sell, donate, and store even more of it. Last year we left that house and down-sized in preparation for an upcoming move. And seeing how beautiful our home looked on screen, and hearing people in the audience commenting about it, and knowing it is no longer like that at all--that the house which was real at the time it was used in this fiction, has in fact become past that only exists now in that film as "Satin's" house--it was all made even stranger by that reality.

The main character hangs out on a bench in Druid Hill Park next to cherry trees. That bench and those trees are now gone as the Park is being renovated substantially. So that Park is now also a fiction, or a past recorded in a fiction.

So while the date-movie love-triangle story washed over me, I was thinking about how happy we were in that place, in that neighborhood, and at that time. What a great palace we had. And Satin is lucky to live there.

Last summer, Single Carrot Theater did a show called Promenade. Patricia and our next door neighbor and several other people from the neighborhood participated in the creation of the show by telling their stories about Baltimore or their neighborhood. As these stories played on headphones, the spectators rode a bus around different neighborhoods in the City. The bus stopped several times for perfectly-timed, finely executed little vignettes to happen on the street. Several extended segments of the audio were my wife and my next-door neighbor telling stories. I heard the local rabbi telling a story. While I was listening to this I was in a bus next to my wife and the rabbi and our next door neighbor were on the bus as well. As I listened to them on tape--as all the spectators did--they also listened to themselves telling stories on tape as part of a performance. Outside the bus window, the City had become a stage where actors were performing on the street right next to "real" people, who often walked through a scene, or stopped to watch because to them there was no way to know this was a show with a bus-full of spectators watching from the parked bus. And watching my own shit on screen at the Senator in a setting which no longer exists was very similar to sitting next to my wife as we watched a theater piece featuring my wife speaking on tape while I was sitting in a bus with her going past our house where actors were acting outside...it all makes me wonder if any layer of this Philip K. Dick shit I experience all the time is actually real? At one point in Promenade the bus pulled into a vacant lot and a flash mob of green-shirted people wearing visors ran over and simultaneously washed every window on the bus while staring blankly into the eyes of the spectators. As if to say "this is not a stage, not a fiction, but perhaps you need to see more clearly what is happening."

"White" Heritage

A couple days ago Baltimore removed four statues honoring Confederates in the middle of the night. Last night a statue of Supreme Court Justice Roger "Dred Scott Decision" Taney was removed from its perch on the State House lawn.

As a student of History, as a teacher of History, I sympathize with those who say that removing these statues is white-washing or scrubbing History from the public sphere. We should be cautious in deciding which historical figures to celebrate on our public lands, and should be judicious when it comes to removing those previously honored. But while I might sympathize with them, I totally disagree with their conclusion. These statues SHOULD be removed and placed in museums or in Confederate cemeteries or on private lands where individuals so inclined can maintain them for posterity.

We don't have statues celebrating John Wilkes Booth all over the place for a reason, after all. And if you celebrate Jackson and Lee and their ilk--men who fought valiantly for a racist, cruel, and feudal society--you might as well celebrate John Wilkes Booth, who fired the final shot of the Civil War, and who was just as virulent a racist and traitor as the others.

As a "white" man, I can choose which representatives of my "heritage" to honor, or who represents my idea or ideal "heritage" as a "white" man. I can honor John Brown, who yanked a family of slavers out of their beds and had his sons and other members of his Free Soil militia dismember them with broadswords. I can honor Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy or Charles Manson. I can honor Hitler or Stalin as part of my "white" heritage. I can honor racists who were on the wrong side of History and claim them as my "heritage." Or, I can honor those who fought against racism and for justice and equality. Or, as a "white" man, I can choose to honor and have as personal heroes members of ALL races--and I can say all races are human and therefore my humanity is no different from theirs, and my heritage is shared with those who are Black, Red, Yellow, Brown, etc.

Mayor Landrieu explains the history of these statues well--these were not monuments "honoring" brave men who were part of "white" heritage. They were propaganda designed to create a false past, part of a white-washing campaign to make bigotry and vile racism into "states' rights," to make the North the aggressors and the South heroic defenders of an honorable tradition. If you read the reasons for secession as announced by the Southern States, and if you read the documents created by the founders of the Confederacy, this bullshit falls apart right quick. But this propaganda was also directed at African Americans: we might have lost the conflict, but things ain't changed for y'all, and don't forget it!

Stop pretending otherwise. If you celebrate these "heroes," then you believe what they stood for, which is a hateful, violent, racist ideology. And yes, it's hard to accept that you are a hateful racist, or that you were taught something that is hateful and racist was honorable and just. But facts are facts. Removing these statues does not scrub our History, it stops celebrating criminality and treason. As a citizen you have the right to celebrate whomever you choose, and on your private property you can fly the stars and bars or a swastika or whatever other emblem you believe represents your heritage or ideology--but you can't force the rest of us to celebrate it.

And I write this as someone who can see why Lee and Jackson are regarded as heroes--it's hard not to admire the way they were able to defeat much larger and better-equipped Union forces again and again through pluck and ingenuity. And I understand that their ties were to their home State more than to the Union, and that each man had complexities and ambiguities as all do. But the side they fought for was morally repugnant, and remains so.

Stonewall Jackson's great-great grandsons agree: Video.

A final note: White Pride is often a code word for White Supremacy.

Catharsis

A couple years back I read an interesting article in Harper's about some dude who was using ancient Greek tragedies to help soldiers with PTSD and addicts and communities of color following tragedies.

Last night we had the opportunity to see one here in Baltimore. Antigone in Ferguson was necessary medicine for a community still suffering following the Uprising. Paul Giamatti went deep and when I used the restroom at the end of the show he was in there bawling following his powerhouse performance. The discussion afterward was potent and honest, though a few speakers took too much time tooting their own horns. The panelists were wise and compassionate (even towards a poor young soul whose heart was in the right place but whose exasperation and "exhaustion" at having these conversations over and over was handled with care). And local activists and artists like Sonja Sohn and Adam Jackson and Kwame Rose and D. Watkins were in-house.

(sidenote: When we left the auditorium Rose and Sohn were outside. I thanked Mr. Rose for opening eloquently for Bernie Sanders at a rally at Royal Farm Arena last year, and Sohn yelled "Yes, if it had been Bernie we wouldn't be dealing with ANY of this BULLSHIT." We'd met Sohn at a Heather Mizeur event at Black Olive 2 years back).

What we need in the US is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, much like South Africa had after Apartheid. We need to bare our souls and concerns and guilts and fears in public, focused on ways to heal--otherwise we'll continue refighting the same battles. Because it is unlikely our dysfunctional public institutions will give us the opportunity to air grievances and mea culpas, the arts can help. Kudos to Bryan Doerries and his team for bringing Antigone in Ferguson to B'more.

The Wash, Rinse, and Repeat Cycle of Violence

David Cole, at NYR Daily:

But in this instance, it is the “war” on crime itself that is most to blame. More than any other nation in the world, we turn to the state-sanctioned compulsion of the criminal justice system to “solve” social problems, including mental illness, drug addiction, poverty, homelessness, and lack of opportunity. Our “first responders” are too often the police, bearing handcuffs and guns rather than public assistance or life support. We arrest and incarcerate our fellow citizens at the highest per capita rate in the world. And those targeted are disproportionately black and Hispanic men living in poverty-stricken inner-city neighborhoods. We can’t seem to find the resources to invest in those neighborhoods to support adequate schools, job training programs, after-care for children let out of school before their parents come home, or economic development. But we are more than willing to pay enormous sums for more police to patrol the neighborhoods and prisons to house inmates taken from these communities. Our prisons in turn are ruled by violence and the threat thereof, from both guards and fellow inmates.

Cole goes on to conclude: "As Americans we have been far too complacent in the face of state-sanctioned violence. As long as the guns are pointed at others, we turn our heads and look away. But until we begin to demand alternatives to state violence, the killing will not cease."

It's a point that others have made before. Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine connected the manufacture of nuclear missiles in Columbine and Clinton's bombings of Kosovo and Sudan to the mindset of people who shoot up schools or malls. Noam Chomsky has been saying for years that the best way for the US to end terrorism is to stop participating in it against others.

So read Cole's piece and meditate on it, then go read:

I thought I knew a lot about the history of our drug prohibition. But here are more valuable pieces to the puzzle beyond the Reefer Madness, chemical-company funded and racist Chamber of Commerce shenanigans which resulted in marijuana criminalization in the US. And the book is entertaining as hell on top of being contrarian and smart.

The Streets of Baltimore

Our City is burning. I have been up on the roof several times today. I watched the smoke from burned cars curl up and drift in slender tendrils just three blocks west of our house. Then a CVS was looted and burned at the same spot. CNN, MSNBC, and even Al-Jazeera were filming live a couple blocks away from our tiny back yard. The experience is surreal. I've thought a lot about saying something, but all I can manage is this: Today many white people felt terrified that they would be pulled from their cars and beaten (or worse) as they fled the City after work. And for no reason other than the color of their skin. If rumors prove true there were some cases of this today. I in no way condone the violence. I abhor it. But those white people who felt genuine terror need to remember the taste of that fear...being pulled from your car at any moment and beaten or worse for no other reason than the color of your skin...and imagine feeling that fear every day of your life. And imagine knowing your father, grandfather, and uncles all had endured it, and seeing no hope for your son to escape it. Wouldn't you want to burn shit down too?

The Innocents

I never shop at Barnes and Noble...well, almost never. Bad blood from the days I was a Borders employee? But B&N is still hanging in there, doing the brick and mortar thing. Even if their selection is shallow and even if it's hard to find books amongst the clutter of knick-knacks, iAccessories, board games, mugs, and Rosetta Stone stuff. But once a year they have a 50% off Criterion Collection sale. I allowed myself to buy six titles this year, the rule being they had to be films I'd seen once or twice and adored, and always thought about buying but never did. The first of my recent purchases in the Blu-Ray player was The Innocents. Henry James in his late phase loved to pull back the curtain a bit on the paranoid consciousness of authors--his own, in particular--the endless inferences and digressions and interpretations his mind took after an overheard snatch of dialogue at some society party feature prominently in all the late works, but most particularly in The Turn of the Screw and The Sacred Fount. The Turn of the Screw was turned into a wonderful screenplay by Truman Capote, and made into a delicious little film featuring fantastic sets and fine actors and truly remarkable cinematography. The Governess of course "writes" the entire story in her virginal, puritanical, repressed little mind. Capote has obviously read the scholarly debates about the story--whether James intended the hauntings in the tale to be "real" or not--and he comes down firmly on the side of--well, I'll leave it to you to decide. But all the clues are available to the Governess as she constructs her hot and steamy fantasy of demonic dead lovers attempting to take over the bodies of her innocent charges. It's a good time no matter which interpretation you prefer!

Outward Bound

Five days canoeing and camping along the Potomac River with my 8th grade Crew. I've known these guys since 6th grade and it was a privilege to share this Expedition with them. Our Outward Bound instructor was a former Marine and a current marathoner. He had us up at six daily to run and pump and dip (in the river). I lost 9 pounds and was pleased to see I can still run 7 minute miles pretty easily despite no cardio training in 2 years. The last morning we did a 5k and I ran it under 24. Not bad for a crusty old guy out of condition! We paddled 32 miles in five days, often moving down the river for 6 hours or more. The kids took complete responsibility for unloading boats, packing in to camp, setting up, preparing meals, getting a fire going, and organizing a pack line, then stowing the boats safely for the next day. In the morning after working out they would do the reverse. I helped them a bit day 1 after they were trained, but by the next afternoon I was refusing to help them and they were self-sufficient. They even navigated. My kids were amazing. Yes, there was drama, there was homesickness, there was whiny neediness, there was miserable discomfort, there was surly discontent. But these guys were gutsy and honest and stepping WAY outside their comfort zones with grace and perseverance. I had a joyous time--my best, most satisfying experience as a educator.

Work Exchange or Sanctioned Human Trafficking?

Over the past two decades I've noticed that all the restaurant and shop employees in places like Ocean City, MD have become East Europeans. I've been quite curious about how they were treated and the agencies which brought them here. Today we picked up two youngsters from Lithuania who are staying with us a couple nights via AirBNB. They were traveling down from Atlantic City NJ to Baltimore on Greyhound, and planning to do three days in DC and a week in New York before flying home. Via car-ride small talk I found out that M. and W. were guest workers for a casino hotel who did housekeeping over the summer. "It was terrible...not nice at all," W. said, twining her long Goth dyed red hair around a finger. A quick litany: The guests were disgusting and mean. The bosses were rude and intemperate. The dormitory was not secure and in the first week many students had their personal belongings (phones, laptops, passports) rifled and stolen while they were asleep or at work. When the students complained to the owner of the dormitory he replied: "At least you weren't shot or stabbed!" This sounds a lot less like a work exchange program and a lot more like officially sanctioned human trafficking. Is this the impression of the United States we want to send back with thousands of East European kids eager to practice English and get work experience? Why do we bring them here to expose them to the worst aspects of first-world capitalism and decay? Why should they go home and tell friends the USA is better than Russian dominance of Eastern Europe after their experience here? Even worse, lanky, athletic and tall M. told me they were supposed to work until yesterday but the hotel booted them out because it went bankrupt. Ironically I picked them up at the Greyhound station next to the shiny, new Horseshoe Casino in Baltimore City. I was very self-conscious about the appalling state of our roads and sidewalks and West B'more neighborhoods as I drove them to our house in Reservoir Hill. I remember back before the neoliberal revolution in the 80s when roads and sidewalks and public areas in the USA were pretty well maintained as a matter of course. I've driven on better roads in Honduras than we have in this City. How badly we've been derailed, and how hard it will be to get back...

7 Year Itch

I'm two weeks into my 7th full year as a middle school teacher in Baltimore City public schools. This will be my 5th full year at our amazing hippie dippie progressive school in Pigtown. I work with the best people ever, the smartest, the most genuine, the most creative, compassionate, supporting, selfless, innovative...OK, you get the picture. I'll not inflict any more adjectives upon you. (well, one more: they are also all sexy). Over the past seven years I've morphed from a Language Arts teacher to a Humanities Teacher, meaning I mostly teach Social Studies and History now. I think I'm getting the hang of it. I think my first two weeks of school were my strongest start yet. And judging by the ideas swirling around my brain I think this entire trimester may be my strongest yet! Now if I could actually get the plans down on paper, LOL.... I started the year in a dark place. I felt drained and detached, and that feeling had hit hard last January. I was BURNED OUT and summer did nothing to change that feeling. I've never had a job for more than 7 years, and I wonder if I'm experiencing that cycle again, the need to move on and try something new. Just in case, I've applied for a position teaching deployment kids in Europe for the Department of Defense. This is just a shot in the dark--but it would be nice to take a couple years off from Baltimore and teach in Belgium, Germany, or Portugal. But I would be an idiot to leave my school. It really is the best school in Baltimore City, and my wife often claims it is the best school in the state of Maryland. (She has been in LOTS of schools in Maryland, and she's an expert at what makes a good school.) The professional and personal relationship I have with my current supervisor has been the most fruitful and challenging and rewarding of my career. I know our kids and have taught little brothers and sisters of brothers and sisters I successfully got to high school. I was pretty instrumental in building the middle school, and I have a certain status in the building as a result. I can be very unorthodox and loose in a way that public school administrators find galling, and yet my bosses tolerate my quirks, foibles, and insanities because I find a way to deliver the goods, the goods being challenging, exciting content delivered in a way that gets the kids fired up and thinking deeply about issues. If I work anywhere else it'll be: "Follow the curriculum, update your Word Wall, have a detailed scripted plan hanging on your board for us to access when we do a compliance audit." That change would be difficult, to say the least! Other reasons I'd be a nut to leave: I can sit down with teachers struggling with an Expedition plan and just off the top of my head give them an angle or a barrage of potential objectives and connections regardless of the topic, and this school is the exact sort of environment where a weirdo like me can help the most. I have very strong emotional, personal, and professional bonds to my coworkers. I really love these people. We not only teach the kids, we continuously teach each other, and we always fill in for others and support each other through the rocky challenges of 180 days of hard core urban education. I feel in many ways that my best students at this school have been the administrators and other teachers I've worked closely with over the past half-decade, and I hope I was their best student as well. But I also never wanted to teach middle school--I was assigned to it by Baltimore City and became typecast as a middle school teacher over time. I would like to teach high school for a while. I also would love to live in Europe for a while (before I'm too old to adjust and enjoy it). So if DOD offers me a gig in Italy it would be really hard to say no. Perhaps I won't make the grade, and I won't have to make a decision at all?

life in the hood

came home from school today to a line of junkies and a crew slinging drugs outta one of the alleys. i don't even need to see the dealers to know what's up. i can tell because there is a lookout stationed on the corner of Whitelock and Madison and two decoy runners in the park across from my house. Bmore, baby!

Baltimore

We have an AirBNB guest this week who is an MD studying to be a forensic pathologist. She is doing an internship and interview this week at the medical examiner's office in Baltimore, a few blocks from my school. On Monday I got to hear about the autopsies she assisted on...the football player who died of heat stroke, the dude found in two separate bags, the gunshot victims. Monday was apparently a busy day even for Baltimore. While she told me about this stuff I cooked us a nice spaghetti dinner with veggies from the Farmer's Market. My city is a primary training ground for this kind of work.

Predatory Towing

Baltimore's got a problem with corrupt towing companies--sometimes in league with police officers--taking vehicles hostage and holding them for ransom. Last night we were hit by the car thieves at Quick Response Towing, based in Cherry Hill.

For our anniversary, Cha had purchased an evening adventure package via Living Social. We gathered in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart down by the Harbor and boarded a bus for a rope course. On the agenda? Nighttime navigation of high rope elements and ziplines, followed by Fed Hill carousing. It was a bit terrifying to be 25 or 30 feet up in the dark, hooking oneself onto safety lines by the light of a glowstick bracelet. But it was also great fun, especially the ziplining at night!

We were having a good time and had crossed three elements and a couple quick zips when word came to the woods that all the participants' cars were being towed. Because lightning had begun flashing around us, Living Social decided to cancel our event and take everyone back to Wal-Mart.

About a third of us had our cars towed before a Living Social rep called the police and showed them the signed contract for lot usage. Wal-Mart didn't request the towings, Quick Response simply took it upon themselves to remove a couple dozen cars. Living Social took us on the tour bus to the impound lot where we were forced to get $300 out of the on-site ATM and pay cash to liberate our vehicles. Quick Response knew they'd towed contrary to an agreement, but they didn't care. They rudely proclaimed that only a "supervisor" was allowed to release the cars without payment. Living Social pledged to reimburse our cost until they could collect from Quick Response.

What a joke. I'm writing to Senator Pugh and Mayor Rawlings-Blake about these clowns, but have little doubt they'll still be taking cars hostage. Although the police did stop the towing when confronted with the parking contract, they were reluctant to do anything outside jurisdiction to help citizens get their vehicles. But an officer did show up at the impound lot, obviously there to prevent an angry mob of night-time adventurers from tearing Quick Response's headquarters down with our bare hands.

MLS

Last year we played four gigs in five days on St. Patty's weekend. This year you have only one chance to see the mighty Move Like Seamus in March: this coming Friday at Mick O'Shea's Irish Pub. Get your Celtic rock fix starting @ 9:30!

Illuminoctem

When I saw "Eurydice" @ Single Carrot Theater, I thought, "Wow, that's going to be tough to top." And yet, given the streak Single Carrot is on, I knew they would out-do themselves again. I didn't expect it to happen so soon, however.

"Illuminoctem" is an exhilarating home-run. It's a myth re-cast as a short story re-done as a play and re-imagined by the Carrots as a wordless sequence of dance and movement vignettes, and it is AWESOME. It's like Einstein on the Beach meets The Enigma of Kasper Hauser mixed with Duck Amuck. I was totally blown away, and left thinking "I need to see that again."

By turns disturbing, erotic, and beautifully moving, "Illuminoctem" is another triumph. If you haven't seen a show at Single Carrot yet, then you are missing out. This play is a collaboration with many other local artists, including a crew of very clever choreographers, with a fantastic score and amazing light design.

Even the Sun gushed about it. Don't miss!

Summer in the city

Sometimes when I get very sick I get a feverish restless feeling. Like a Dostoevsky character I have to dash around doing things to disperse negative energies. What better way to burn off excess steam than to roam the City taking pictures on a beauteous September day? I should be doing homework, but, no. Enoch Pratt Library
Francis Scott Key Memorial--in the background just to the right of the spire is a corner of my school
Booker T. turret--our room is the second floor windows
Booker T. facade

Yum

Had dinner with Julio and Yo! Adrienne last eve at Iggy's. She gave me the above book for no particular reason--she just loves giving gifts! It's really great, with lovely 19th century images of gothic cathedrals and landscapes.

Iggy's is awesome too, but eating there is like eating in an airplane hangar during the testing of jet engines. You can't hear over the cacaphony. Great pie, though. The four of us ate three large and one small. I thought I was going to puke but couldn't stop myself--the slices are, after all, only wafer-thin!

Try the Alice, or the funghi with shrooms and goat cheese, or the exquisite anchovie, olive and capers.

Life on the Streets

A major premise of The Wire's first season is still a major problem in B'more.

Fodder

Fodder, originally uploaded by Blog-Sothoth.

Leesha instructs Chalupa about the defense of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. Chalupa seems curiously unimpressed by the caliber and range of the Fort's biggest guns.

Atilla the Hon (fest)

So Hon Fest is this weekend, and now that I live two miles away I have no excuse to avoid it.

Ellen Cherry is playing with her full band, and Yahtzee and I are going to meet up there for tunes and brews. It's a fun festival in Smalltimore because you're guaranteed to run into long-lost hipsters and other krazy kats from your distant past.

Cha is working Saturday for the State of Maryland, doing teacher stuff. On Sunday she will be selling hand-crafted goodies alongside Damnyelli. Come on down!

The Avenue in Hampden has good eats and antiques any day. It's even better during Hon Fest.