by GERALD NEILY

It’s budget-crunch time, and the city and state are both looking for ways to save money and streamline services. They could both benefit by selling Sheila Dixon’s foray into free mass transit to the agency that is supposed to be running the bus system in the first place, the state-run MTA.

It’s too soon to say whether the city’s Charm City Circulator system is a success or failure. If it fails, it’s $8 million per year down the drain that the city cannot afford. But if it succeeds, the public and business community will clamor for more, which the city can even less afford. Why should it end at Penn Station? Why not run it up to Charles Village? Those folks pay taxes too! Read the rest of this entry »

John Waters and Costas Grimaldis at the opening, 1/20/10 (Photo by Elizabeth Suman)

By ELIZABETH SUMAN

In a new photography exhibit at Grimaldis Gallery (his first art show in Baltimore since 2002), John Waters juxtaposes images of the Palace of  Versailles with shots of the Versailles apartment complex in Towson, comparing the real deal in France with its suburban counterpart. Why? One reason, he told the Brew, is because the building makes him laugh.

The exhibit features a smorgasbord of photographs and sculptures Waters began creating as early as 1992, many of which comment on what Waters knows best: film.  A conversation with Waters opens up new layers of meaning in a show that can appear completely random without context.  One piece has a chillingly ironic connection to terrorism. Another elicits what is probably, it’s safe to say, one of the most exuberant and profound soliloquies  ever triggered by the title of an anal porn movie.

Here’s our Q & A. . . . . .

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A crowd of over a thousand at Cathederal of Mary Our Queen. Photo by Elizabeth Suman

By FERN SHEN and ELIZABETH SUMAN

What can religion do to fight violence in Baltimore?

An interfaith group of well over a thousand people came together last night to answer that question — an array of religious leaders and citizens of all ages and races, wearing saris and sweatshirts, blowing the shofar and chanting Vedic calls, reading from the Bible and from the Koran.

The size and diversity of the crowd assembled in the cavernous Cathedral of Mary Our Queen for the Baltimore Interfaith Coalition’s “Vigil Against Violence” — among them mayor-to-be- Stephanie Rawlings-Blake — made the moment feel as historic as speakers said it was.

“We have not seen the likes of this size of interfaith gathering since the civil rights movement,” said Eugene Taylor Sutton, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland.

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by ELIZABETH SUMAN and FERN SHEN

With Baltimore’s mayor-in-waiting Stephanie Rawlings-Blake proposing ethics reforms that still allow the mayor to stack the deck in his-or-her favor, here’s a look at five cities whose watchdog panels are set up so they might actually have some independence and backbone.

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Cars squeezing right to avoid Franklin Street lane closure.

    Motorists leaving Baltimore on west-bound Franklin Steet were still jamming on their brakes and swerving last week to miss cones the city set up more than a month ago to close off a lane near the Social Security Administration building.

Questioned back in mid September by Baltimore Brew (which received several complaints from irked motorists), city officials explained the reason for the arrangement: to make it easier for cars to get in and out of the SSA’s Franklin Street entrance while the Saratoga Street entrance is unusuable due repair work on a broken water main. They assured us they would look into complaints that the intersection was now unsafe, and said the watermain project was scheduled to be finished within a week or two.

Well, here it is a month later and the intersection is unchanged, brakes are still squealing and Saratoga Street is still closed. And what the Department of Transportation is now saying is not going to go over big with irritated commuters. Read the rest of this entry »