http://www.citypaper.com/arts Baltimore City Paper arts coverage en-us Copyright 2009 Baltimore City Paper http://www.citypaper.com/digest.asp?id=17312 Arts and Minds by Chris Landers: I just finished the World War Z audiobook I got for Christmas, and caught up with the latest issue of The Walking Dead, so I'm pretty psyched for the debut of Rigor Mortis a new local zombie zine from Davida Gypsy Breier, who garnered a City Paper Best Zine award 2003 for Leeking Ink and Best Local... Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17302 The Arts by Neil Ferguson: Ed Hamell has image problems. Hamell--Aka Hamell On Trial, the one-man wrecking ball-cum-manic and unholy combination of Elmore Leonard, the Clash, Joey Ramone, Charles Bukowski, Jim Carroll, Street Hassle-era Lou Reed, and Hunter S. Thompson all rolled into one savagely funny, profound-yet-prof... Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:00:36 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17272 Stage by Bret McCabe: By the time human powerhouse E. Faye Butler is choking back real tears and unleashing a lifetime of the title character's pain into a single song toward the end of the two-and-a-half-hour roller coaster that is Center Stage's heart-punching production of Tony Kushner's Caroline, or Change, you have... Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:00:16 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17252 Books by Tony Ware: In late '70s London, punk set out to bring rock back to basics after arena rock's excesses and guarded access. Along the way, it got a bit tripped up in its own identity, at which time Spartan skinheads rose in rejection of an exaggerated fashionable uniform. Over in Los Angeles, American hardcore t... Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:58:00 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17241 Stage by John Barry: When the money gets tight, operas, with huge production costs, and relatively brief runs, can be the canaries in the coal mine for the performing arts. Last week, the Baltimore Opera, $1.2 million in debt, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy and cancelled the last two productions of its 2008-2009 season.... Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:29:44 EST http://www.citypaper.com/digest.asp?id=17233 Arts and Minds by Bret McCabe: Earlier this week City Paper received an e-mail informing us that Terry Long, a longtime local theater presence, passed away last weekend. Today, Fuzz Roark, executive director at the Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre, sent out an announcement to the theater company's mailing list containing inform... Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17223 Art by Bret McCabe: A series of studies captures some of the most intriguing painting Baltimore artist Kate MacKinnon has exhibited locally in recent years. Five panels of layered brown paint hang on the long wall in the first-floor CaseWerks showroom that Jordan Faye Block uses as gallery space, and they differ from... Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:42:24 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/review.asp?rid=14240 Books by Raymond Cummings: As a literary genre, magical realism abhors mass specificity. Best to keep things fairly vague; all the better to present the story as a fable or allegory. Jose Saramago--Nobel Prize for Literature-winning author and octogenarian--knows this well. His 1998 Blindness and 2007 Seeing--his best-known n... Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:36:04 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/review.asp?rid=14239 Books by Heather Harris: The American Dream. Big houses. Big cars. Big careers. Big hallucinations. It's amazing this thing has been in existence for as long as it has. You'd think we were turds with feet the way we run around spewing our delusions while our reality is that little ol' Norway makes us look medieval, complet... Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:33:32 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17207 Art by Martin L. Johnson: IF THE RECENT HOUSING CRISIS HAS anything to teach us, it's that even the most permanent structures are simply accumulations of capital, prime for sub-dividing and recombining into ever-more complex financial packages. All our material and romantic attachment to our homes is for naught when the teas... Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:09:30 EST http://www.citypaper.com/digest.asp?id=17206 Arts and Minds by Joe Tropea: A mysterious press release came out of the state Department of Business and Economic Development Dec. 11 that's left some members of Baltimore's film community scratching their heads in wonder. The release, sent out by the department which houses the Maryland Film Office--the agency charged with att... Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17205 Stage by Anna Ditkoff: A couple years back Christmas time at the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival meant artistic director Jimi Kinstle performing the original one-man show A Dickens of a Carol by Kimberley Lynne, deftly combining the well-known tale of Ebenezer Scrooge with the story of Charles Dickens' life. Kinstle left B... Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:51:35 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17179 Stage by John Barry: On a rainy, late Monday night in the classroom of a Hampden charter school, Prescott Gaylord and five members of the Gus improvisational troupe are surrounded by a table loaded with handcuffs, chains, masks, swords, wigs, and other props. They've been through six months of rehearsals. They've got... Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:54:55 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17174 Books by Martin L. Johnson: For those who still marvel at capitalism, one of its most mysterious and beautiful processes is that of "creative destruction," whereby things fall apart only to reemerge, in new forms, emboldened by the failure of their ancestors. Creative Capitalism, a Baltimore-based loosely formed collective of... Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:44:30 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17139 Books by Geoffrey Himes: In Grace Cavalieri's latest book of poems, Anna Nicole (CreateSpace), the poems are delivered from the imagined perspective of Anna Nicole Smith, the tabloid celebrity known for her Playboy spreads, her marriage to a millionaire 63 years her senior, and for her own TV reality show. So it's appropria... Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:44:19 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17111 Stage by John Barry: Anton Chekhov always complained that the contemporary take on his work was a little too lugubrious--he would rather have the sense of humor that Wendy Wasserstein brings to the Three Sisters' scenario. While The Sisters Rosensweig isn't an adaptation, the parallels to his masterpiece are clear and... Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:46:07 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17110 Books by Violet Glaze: What's wrong with Bill Clinton? How could a successful, popular, shrewd, and intelligent president allow himself to be dragged into a sex scandal so notorious it would forever overshadow all the good his administration had accomplished in his double-term tenure? That's the question that nags at mo... Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:45:04 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17075 Stage by Bret McCabe: Barely 15 minutes into the third and final act of this brazenly DIY production of Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros, one of the cast members has shed his shirt, stepped off the stage, climbed over the first few rows of seats, handed me an ordinary beverage bottle turned into a bell-like noisemaker t... Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:53:10 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17068 Books by Chris Landers: The Baltimore Trust Company Building, at 10 Light St. downtown, was conceived as a temple to commerce--an Art Deco monument to all things capitalist and great. In the banking area, four murals depicting pivotal moments in Maryland and Baltimore history--from the landing of the Ark and Dove at St. Cl... Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:33:29 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17067 Art by Bret McCabe: The McDonald's storefront occupies an entire side of the Gormley Gallery on the second floor of Fourier Hall on the campus of the College Notre Dame of Maryland. And "occupies" is the operative word: the 18-by-42 foot large-form Xerox print covers the wall like a Mongol horde overrunning a tiny vil... Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:32:10 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17066 Books by Michael Pursley: The movies of cinematic occultist Alejandro Jodorowosky are ripe with mind-bending theology and volcanic beauty. Early '70s works such as 1970's El Topo and 1973's The Holy Mountain brought heavy doses of mysticism and the surreal to hosts of acid-bombed flower children, and the Chilean-born directo... Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:30:18 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/review.asp?rid=14166 Imprints by Joab Jackson: In retrospect, perhaps John Hodgman should have coached Sarah Palin for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric. With Palin channeling Hodgman, Couric would have been the dumbfounded one. The man has truly elevated the art of bullshitting to poetic new heights. More Information Than You Require... Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:28:43 EST http://www.citypaper.com/arts/review.asp?rid=14165 Imprints by Chris Landers: In June of this year, at an air show in Oshkosh, Wisc., a New Zealander named Glenn Martin strapped his 16-year-old son into what he calls the Martin Jetpack, and sent him hovering above the ground, restrained by two burly men. The much-hyped demonstration can be seen in videos, and at the end, aft... Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:26:55 EST