As Mr. Weeks notes (“New Beginnings”), this blog has recently awoken after a prolonged slumber (two words: bio statistics; if you understand that stuff you can also use the words together, and good for you). You may wonder who Mr. Weeks is. We wrote about him every now and again. Now he’s here to get things going again. On with the show.

While the blog lay dusty in a desk drawer, an episode of the celebrity chef program No Reservations re-energized debate about the city’s Wire-imposed rep.

In a whirlwind tour of the American Rust Belt, featured in an episode aired in late July, Anthony Bourdain touches down in West Baltimore for lake trout at The Roost, “football sized” crab cake at Moe’s and gossip with Felicia “Snoop” Pearson. Now a megarich globe-trotting chef-cum-memoirist-cum-reality star, he confides to Pearson that while living in Baltimore in the 80s, he drove to New York to score dope, not being savvy enough to find heroin here in the city where grandmas shoot up. On the show, Bourdain strolls with Pearson down a street lined with burned out rowhouses and abandoned couches. It could be The Wire’s Hampsterdam but that’s besides the point: it could be almost any block in East or West or South Baltimore.

While he tours Detroit and Buffalo, the Baltimore segment seems to have hit a sore point for Charm City locals, among them influential Baltimore Sun critic Dave Zurawik.

In a blog post, “Z” rails on Tony for “savor[ing] Baltimore TV stereotypes”:

Trying to match the profanity and hard-edged cynicism of the sensibility that permeated The Wire, Bourdain contextualizes his visit here several times by characterizing Baltimore as “one seriously expletived-up city.”

According to the Sun critic, Bourdain “ignored the rich cultural diversity” of our city in favor of TV that is not “socially responsible”. Besides the obvious point that TV producers don’t strive to help people -they sell advertising, or in HBO’s case, subscriptions -our city is not especially diverse, in fact rather less than many surrounding suburbs, not to mention Washington or other major east coast cities (possibly immigrants would rather not live near burned out rowhouses and drug slinging). And guess what? West Baltimore is Baltimore. The tens of thousands of abandoned rowhouses documented publicly won’t go away if you gut renovate another warehouse in Harbor East. Bourdain, a perceptive outsider, describes Baltimore in a frank (and poorly proof read) blog entry.

They scramble for cure-alls, something that will “attract business”, always one convention center, one pedestrian mall or restaurant district away from revival.

He points to New Orleans for an eccentric but beloved American city.

Oh, and another thing. The Rust Belt moniker of the show’s title has raised some hackles. Maybe it’s not geographically correct but the truth is Baltimore is littered with abandoned warehouses and populated with families struggling since the close of giant manufacturing plants. The Baltimore Sun itself rattled off closures in the past decade in a recent issue.

In the 1950s, a third of those who worked in the area used their hands to make cars and cans, soap and sugar, tools and spices. But that steel-solid manufacturing core was barely holding on by the dawn of this decade.

Sounds a lot like Rust Belt defined (from Wikipedia).

The name ‘Rust Belt’ came about due to the decline of industry in the 1970s, when many of the region’s factories had been closed, and the resulting shuttered buildings were guarded only by rusting gates

Let’s give Bourdain props where props are due. Whether in Sardinia or Sandtown he wears the social historian hat well.

Yesterday’s eerily foggy and rainy weather gave way to abundant sunshine this morning, and the Baltimore Block was there to greet the day in fashion.  Done up in our finest new clothes, we cleared the cobwebs off our lonely bicycles and made our way to the Abbey Burger Bistro for some early morning footie.  The Bistro, which is home to both the Charm City Gooners and one of the most extensive burger menus in town (plus some of the more intriguing milkshakes including the Berger Shake – ingredients = berger cookies, vanilla ice cream, stoli vanilla and godiva liquer), was surprisingly full for the 830 AM kickoff, and the Arsenal supporters left happy after a convincing 3 x 0 victory over an ambitious Aston Villa side who is poised to qualify for next year’s UEFA Champions League. 

Per the suggestion of the matron of the Baltimore Block, we next headed to Spoons for a bite to eat.  Fueled by coffee, Guinni (see this), bagels, and parfait, we made our way to Fort McHenry.  The blue sky looks expansive from the Fort’s grounds, especially on a cloudless day like today.  Some interesting tidbits about the Fort which we learned from the informative displays on site include that there are debates among historians as to whether Francis Scott Key, a lawyer (and amateur poet) from Georgetown who was sent to negotiate the release of the town physician of Upper Marlboro, Maryland who had been imprisoned as retribution for local resistance to the British Army, could have possibly seen the gargantuan  (30 ft x 42 ft) American flag being raised after the day-long bombardment that he described so eloquently.  The Fort has undergone many transformations throughout its history, and was the site of a Confederate prison camp during the Civil War that briefly housed Key’s grandson, a prominent Southern sympathizer in a town which had its fair share of them.  The guns which had prevented the British from launching an amphibious assault to take the fort were even turned on the city itself during the Civil War.  Although part of the fort’s grounds remains closed for construction, the site remains a must-see for history enthusiasts like myself. 

What remains to be seen, however, is whether the Port of Baltimore, which lies just across the water from the Fort, can be resuscitated as a result of a new deal whereby the Maryland Transportation Authority leasing part of the port to a private company.  The logic behind the deal, besides the temporary bump in construction-related jobs that the state expects the deal to generate, is that the private firm, Ports of America Group, will be better equipped (i.e. has the capital) to modernize the port in anticipation of the widening of the Panama Canal, expected to be completed in 2014, and the resulting increase in freight volumes.   There are already rumblings of discontent at the privatization of a state resource, and it will be interesting to track this story as it plays out over the next 5-10 years.

The Baltimore Block blog has been quiet of late. Let me tell you, the block hasn’t been on fire with late summer parties. What remains of the non migratory block population has been ensconced in the library, cramming for biostatistics. But an unseemly headline from the local rag B the Spot has roused us from self-imposed seclusion to revisit the blog waters.

The Monday, August 31 headline looked straightforward at first: It read, “Rye Rye’s Ready to Rumble — MIA Protege Busts Out of B-More”. Our first thought: Rye Rye is leaving Baltimore! Sad but predictable: Another awesomely talented Charm City music icon leaves urban backwater for the Platinum-paved streets of New York City.

The shocking disingenuity of the headline revealed itself when the reader turned to page 16 and read the heartbreaking update about the teenager who British pop star M.I.A. has sampled in chart-topping singles like the remix for Paper Planes. We’ve heard her distinctive girlish high toned raps pipe up in hipster boites here and overseas.

The story–penned not by B or parent paper The Sun but by the Washington Post’s Kate Kilpatrick–is about the trauma that makes kids in Baltimore “grow up fast” as the original story was subtitled in the Post when it came out on August 2 (what made B wait for 30 days to run this thing?).

Rye – Rye’s debut album on Interscope was scheduled to come out this year. Now, she’s preggers, due in October, and the record is on hold. She’s waiting to see if Interscope drops it (and her, as a client) like it’s hot.

But the story’s not only about her getting knocked up. That’s pretty routine for a teen living the projects in East Baltimore, where “.45 caliber bullets punctuate sultry summer nights,” as Post writer Kilpatrick puts it. Her baby daddy, Evan Battle, recently caught one of those bullets — well, actually 4. He was reportedly shot in the shoulder, back, arms, lungs and spinal cord. He’s now paralyzed from the waist down.

She was in Norway waiting to go onstage with M.I.A. when she heard her boyfriend was shot.

Standing by her man in Baltimore’s Kernan Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation center for spinal cord injuries, the 7-month pregnant would-be superstar told Kilpatrick “I’m not gonna leave him.”

So just to wrap up: B’s MTV-knockoff styling and “ready to rumble” headline has nothing to do with the story inside. “Busting out of Bmore” is not equal to “having baby, with boyfriend now paralyzed from stray bullets”. It’s a freaking shame that to sell a free paper the B editors would put something so misleading on the cover, on the most deadly serious subjects kids in Baltimore deal with.

Mad props to the girl for having the guts to open up about her life. Let’s hope Interscope sees the power of her message, and her raps, and rockets her to fame with the likes of the Black Eyed Peas, 50 Cent and Gwen Stefani. You go girl.

Thanks for listening. Now back to statistics.

This blog is on a summer hiatus. We are delta-bound again; back in August.
Happy Artscape Weekend!!!

Just do It

On the Urban Discoveries Blog, Matt Smith highlights a recent article showing Baltimore’s population is plunging by some 3000 people every year. He proposes 6 highly sensible ways to increase the population. Here are a few more, coming at you from the New York City Department of City Planning.

According to the census, the City of New York grew by 686,000 people between 1990 and 2000 — more than Baltimore’s entire population, added within 10 years. How’d they do it?

a. “Substantial natural increase” a.k.a., baby-making, so that more people were born than died. This is a scalable model we can adopt, no?

b. “Domestic migration losses offset by immigration.” White people moving to put babies in suburban schools were replaced (who needs ‘em anyway) by plucky immigrants. Let’s here it for the Koreans and the El Salvadorians, and their bim bam bop tortillas. Come all ye Vietnamese, Indians, Hmong, Liberians, Maoris.

c. Improvements in census methods. In New York’s case, the Address List Improvement Act of 1994 allowed local representatives to review and correct address lists for folks in their districts. More people = more government money. In Baltimore, our reps are busy.

d. Increased demand for apartments by professional in-migrants… to establish careers. Supposedly difficult to measure, this population pressure leads to “increasing numbers of individuals sharing apartments with non-relatives.” Hello, New Yorkers, you don’t have to do this in Baltimore. Like MS said, Spread the word. Let people know what Charm City living is like. Hint: In Baltimore, you won’t be wedging a loft bed copped off craigslist into a bathroom-sized space (hello, 2006), or shacking up with 5 people, 2 cats and an extended family of cockroaches to make rent (2004).

In short: We are faced with the thankless task of procreating in our spacious pre-war apartments. Except that pre-war isn’t even an real estate add-on here in Baltimore. Everything is a bloody historic landmark building here.

Hurrah for our de-populated, charming city life.

new album from Nickodemus

The 2009 installment of Artscape is coming up this weekend. At America’s Largest Public Arts Festival, there’s a little something for everyone (and we mean it, everyone and your mom will be there, all sweaty and eating funnel cakes).

We can’t wait to get Going the Distance with Cake,  Say A Little Prayer (or even better, have psychic readings) with Dionne Warwick, scope a 10-person bike ride with the New Shanghai Circus (coming to us live from Branson, Missouri), and jam with Robert Randolph’s family band.

And our homie Nickodemus is taking a hiatus from his usual gig with Turntables on the Hudson at New York’s always sizzling Water Taxi Beach to get Artscape’s afternoon crowd bumping from the Main Stage on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the Windup Space at 10 North Avenue has a DJ Culture program through the weekend. Which sounds quite high brow, thank you very much.

South and west on more low brow Franklin Street, the H&H Arts Building has three spaces going “full tilt” (thanks for the tip, Baltimore Sun)

Gallery Four (galleryfour.net) brings together work by Baltimore, Washington and Los Angeles artists in a show called Protocol:Syntax/Semantics through Aug. 29. The Whole (wholegallery.blogspot.com) addresses the theme of repetition in a 10-artist show called Radix; at Nudashank Gallery (nudashank.com), Where the Sun Don’t Shine explores a world without color as represented by works of seven artists in various media. Hike up to see these guys on the third and fourth floors of the H&H Building, 405 W. Franklin St.

Apparently there was a sustainable dinner series at the aquarium, which is super cool but disappointing because according to Black Coffee and a Donut, they just had the last one. The Fresh Thoughts dinners included dolphin shows and squid exhibits.

Out of this Mexico-themed shindig (guacamole, lime-cilantro creme, pepita seed salad) comes an interesting factoid.

Per the Black Coffee gals, who we recently bumped into at Joe Squared, the foodie mecca pizza joint (a rare string of words) on North Avenue, tilapia = Veganfish:

Tilapia, which is farm-raised in Maryland, “is an herbivore so it is low down on the food chain. Lower down on the food chain means fewer fish went into creating the fish you are eating … for every pound of tuna you eat (which is high on the food chain), that represents 10 pounds of squid.”

Not convinced? Peep this recipe for tilapia tacos

Scrooge from Ducktails

Baltimore City Police were watching a guy on Prestman Street in West Baltimore for a while. They figured Mr. Trenell Murphy was dealing, especially when he chucked a trash bag full of coke bags (or some paraphernalia) out the window of his truck. The plucky gumshoes assumed the truck was being used in a crime. But how did they finally make the bust?

The detectives got a lucky break. One recounted his discovery to the City Paper’s Mobtown Beat:

“He [Murphy] told me, ‘I have a spot up the street where I can take you to where there is 40 keys [kilograms] of cocaine’ He accompanied us to the truck and said, ‘It’s in there, it’s in the bed of the truck.’ “

Duh, isn’t it always in the truck bed?

The “historic” seizure in February is detailed here. The Biggest Bust in History–a stash valued at $2-3 million–was reported in the City Paper:

“After taking Murphy into custody, the detectives searched his black Chevrolet truck parked outside the house and in its bed found “approximately forty (40) wrapped kilogram-sized bricks of suspected cocaine,” the complaint states, which also describes them as being wrapped in newspaper.”

The paper also reported that, “Directly across the street from the house is a flashing Baltimore Police Department blue-light camera, a device meant to serve as an investigative tool and deterrent to crime.”

More importantly, what does 90 pounds of coke look like? Can you build a sandcastle with it? Can you make a fort with those bricks? Do you dive into snowy piles, like on Ducktails?

Sno Ball image courtesy of Urban Wanderer

It’s 4th of July weekend. America, our America, land of Stars and Stripes tees, anemic hot dogs in buns, pudgy dogs in red collars, porky men in too-tight shorts, yellow-haired children clutching glowing light sabers, whistling Chinese fireworks in the sky, and cold beer.

Top 10 ways you can tell you’re in Baltimore on Independence Day Weekend:

10)Cash-poor police department installs sobriety check on Interstate 395 to challenge all drivers entering Charm City.

9) Harbor water mysteriously turns color. Fishy-smelling grey is now fishy-smelling aquamarine.

Patriotic visitors strolling the harbor observe a 15-foot cell phone, supposedly the world’s largest, thanks to fireworks sponsor CricKet. Wild rock music plays, people are invited to make the “biggest call of their lives”

7) To witness the Harbor fireworks display, multilingual families camp out 10 hours before showtime on the lawn within ear blast by Poison from the Hard Rock Cafe loudspeakers. The saree-clad Desi camp settled in opposite the aquarium where bullhorns shepherded sunstroked parents and children through a multitude of lines.

6) African American Festival at M&T Bank Stadium features poetry slam, spelling bee, health education fair, and $5000 VIP cabana seats.

5) Fort McHenry revelers commemorate the day with fife and drum music, cannon-firing, poetry reading, musket salute for 18 states, period games, feasting and historic toasts… and hanging King George in effigy.

4) Crab permeates air, shards of claws appear in gutters, your neighbor’s fingernails are crusted with Old Bay.

3) Sno-Balls trump Bomb Pops. Souse that sucker in Blue Raspberry, Cherry and Vanilla.

2) The roofs in Fell’s fit together like jigsaw squares. From the ubiquitous wooden decks, roof hopping becomes a competitive sport (Ray Ray, the hahbor view’s better down here!).

1) It’s 3am and loud banging noises sound off in quick succession. POP POP POP POP!! Firecrackers, faulty wiring exploding, or semiautomatic weapons?

God bless America.

Foxy "stinkums" Brown was a stray in the Bronx

The dumpster divers on our alley have been appearing, of late, toting small stray pooches. I’m wondering, is it just Mount Vernon or is this a city-wide trend? Canine companions to the men sorting through the garbage are sort of middling height, with bushy fur and either furious barks or nervous pacing. The dogs are unleashed. It’s a good thing Baltimore has wisely reduced the off-leash fee from $1000 for first time offenders to $200.

Speaking of trash, can someone tell our neighbor to quit putting her old mail in our yellow City of Baltimore bin? It’s, like, begging these guys to sift through for forgotten checks and bank statements. Her stuff ends up all over the ground, strewn like snow in front of our door. Bills, class notes, practice tests, Kleenex. Our own middling stray, the Stinkums of the Block, wades like molasses sniffing through every morsel.

PS: You can feed a homeless person’s dog at this site.

PPS: Dogs can probably live on the chicken bones and rice scattered around this city especially at bus stops.