Even the witches and leather-clad cross-dressing she-devils need to buy mesclun sometimes…..Where else, in Baltimore, but the 32nd St. Farmers Market?
Photos by FERN SHEN, for Baltimore Brew
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Dean Bartoli Smith, age 10. (Photo by Dino Bartoli.)

When his parents split, a Baltimore boy relied on Brooks and the Birds to get him through. As the Orioles’ number 5 is honored at the Meyerhoff, the memories race back and a man gets to meet his childhood idol.

by DEAN BARTOLI SMITH 

     In my bedroom in Carroll Manor, I listened to the Orioles play the Indians in 1977 on my Panasonic clock radio. The minutes fluttered as they changed and I worked my algebra problems. It was early in the season and the game was close. It went into extra innings and the Indians took a two-run lead. With two on and two out in the tenth inning, Earl Weaver sent in a pinch hitter.

     Brooks Robinson emerged from the dugout. He was batting for the last time. Read the rest of this entry »

Baltimore from the air: so shiny, so....smart! (Photo by Greg Pease)

      No, no, we’re not murderous, we’re studious. We’re not kitschy, we’re brainy.

     That’s our shtick today, anyway, as The Daily Beast ranks America’s 55 biggest cities from most smart to least-smartest.

     Their methodology? They included educational attainment levels, percentage of eligible voters who voted in the last presidential election and ratio of educational institutions. They also used non-fiction book sales, courtesy of Neilsen Book Scan. (Why non-fiction? Apparently, reading Dan Brown makes you a lightweight, but Glenn Beck or Mitch Albom is the sign of high-order thinking. Go and figure.)

     Guess  which city was the smartest, which the dumbest and which Baltimorean was quoted in this salute to our towering intellects? Read the rest of this entry »

Could Elvis live again, at Nacho Mama's, in Canton?

     Now that the big pink flamingo is going back up at Cafe Hon  (the city roughly halved their $800 permit fee, owner Denise Whiting announced yesterday) some other business owners are hoping to use a similar approach and get a similar break.

     “I’m going to send a nice polite letter to (Baltimore Mayor) Sheila Dixon and say ‘Elvis is public art’ and ought to be allowed to return,” said Patrick “Scunny” McCusker, an owner of Nacho Mama’s in Canton, where a six-foot-tall wooden Elvis stood for almost 16 years until it fell to the city’s recent bout of code enforcement.

     McCusker said yesterday that he’ll note in his letter that more than 5,000 people signed a petition to bring the Elvis avatar (which he says bears an odd resemblance to Conan O’Brien) back to the street outside his Canton bar-and-restaurant. If the mayor is not moved by his gentle entreaties, said McCusker, who has consulted his attorney, he will turn to the Baltimore Public Art Commission and plead his statue’s case there.

     While McCusker’s reaction to the news out of Hampden was congratulatory (“good for her, it was flippin’ ridiculous what they were doing to her”),  hostile commenters on The Baltimore Sun website were, literally, incendiary. Read the rest of this entry »

"What I see before I go to sleep: A Night Visitor," Francesca Danielli

review by ANNA STEWART
     It’s easy to understand how Project 10 works as therapy: take 10 women living with breast cancer, give them cameras and let them make photographs following 10 directives: your face, something red, something you’ll miss, and so on.

     But how does Project 10 — a MICA student’s senior thesis that became a HopeWell Cancer Support program — work as art? We checked out the show (hanging now at Hopewell’s Lutherville campus) and were impressed by the range of imagery. Some of the photographs were straightforward and poignant while others were more complex and viscerally affecting.

       ”What I see before I go to sleep: A Night Visitor,” for example, was riveting. Read the rest of this entry »