Around the house and garden this morning:
Unrelatedly, today marks 6 months since I quit smoking. To celebrate, I shall stop and inhale the scent of flowers deeply today, my nasal passages untainted by nicotine residue for perhaps the first time in my entire adult life. Yowza.
(aka "Bodymore, Murderland")
Unbelievably, these two stores exist side-by-side just down the road a piece:
Because there's nothing more patriotic than shootin' stuff. I mean, clearly.
Sadly, the recession appears to have hit the Killin' Things Industry pretty hard. Lawd, now where will I go to get my knives and "black powder"? ALAS AND WOE.
Marie Antoinette Head Pops? Check. 
Yet another reason to love my friend Joel? Check.
Diet sabotage lurking around every corner? Check.
Did I mention the store has wifi?
Man, I'm kind of doomed, huh?
Jamie was out of town this past weekend, so M and I spent our Easter morning at the Baltimore Zoo, enthusiastically participating in the continued enslavement and subjugation of our animal brethren FOR THE KICKS, BRO. Oh and while we were keepin' other species down, we also had breakfast with the Easter (totally fake, dude in a suit) Bunny, who is apparently in cahoots with The Man, and a traitor to his own kind. Bastard.
All told, it was a lovely day. And here's the photographic evidence to prove it:
Did your Easter involve animal oppression by any chance? Because I'm sensing a theme here.
Our good friend Justin was featured in this week's Baltimore Citypaper for his new book Secondary Sound. Well that and because he's just generally freakin' awesome, and has excellent taste in both clothing AND preschoolers. For that alone legions of journalists should write about him and sing his praises, don't you think?
Okay, clearly I'm biased. But this excerpt from the Citypaper article about his book objectively shows just what a rad, smartypants fella he is:
Communication--in language and ideas--is the medium and the message of Sirois' recently published book, Secondary Sound. In it, the narrator creates two peculiar lists. One includes "text, pictures, sound, video, liberation"; the other "development, marketing, immersion, adaptation, obsolescence, art." Sirois says these lists are stages in the development of new media and technology, and he admits to being fascinated by the paths they trace.
OW! MAH BRAINZ! Why you gotta be so smart, homeboy?
Anyway, I just wanted to give him a shout-out, and tell him we love him, cuz we do. ESPECIALLY a certain 5-year-old, who shall remain nameless.
PS: Psst! Buy his book on amazon here. okthxbai!
Listening to one of the, like, 50 NPR podcasts I currently subscribe to the other day, I caught a segment during which one of the disembodied voices whispering into my ear (from the radio! not mah crazy!) stated that “you can't truly appreciate life unless you spend a few minutes every day thinking about death.” I wish to god I could remember the context, but I can't, and it's beside the point, really. Because guess where I just so happened to be listening to this podcast? A cemetery! I believe Alanis Morrisette would say that's ironic, doncha think?
For a couple of months now I've been taking daily walks in a small, neighborhood cemetery about two blocks from our house in Baltimore. The entire plot is maybe as big as a football field, with a paved track-and-field-like oval-shaped circuit running through it and a small brick chapel in its center. It's like the Germans who founded my hood back in the early 1800s decided to mash-up eternal rest with the 400 meter dash. That's German efficiency for you: the place is the BMW of cemeteries. I wonder where the cupholder is?
The ever-so-slightly-phallic chapel
Initially these walks were undertaken with a Bataan Death March level of enthusiasm (HEALTH. IMPORTANT. MUST. KEEP. WALKING. BLAARGH.), but over time I've come to look forward to them. Getting out into the world and nature once-a-day and getting away from the hypnotic glow of the computer screen is good for my soul I've found, and I think there is indeed something to be said for standing before a silent field of gravestones every day. In fact, confronting my mortality daily hasn't been a bummer at all. Ridiculous as it sounds, when I'm walking the circuit of the cemetery I feel among friends, and at ease. It isn't spooky, or creepy, or disturbing in the slightest. It feels to me as though I'm visiting my neighbors, paying respects to those who walked the streets of my hood before me. Tipping my hat to my predecessors, as it were.
Let's just hope none of them come calling to borrow a cup of sugar.
What brings you a feeling of well-being or happiness that others might find, errm, odd?
I say that because my hometown paper, The Baltimore Sun, is the focus of the final season of HBO's The Wire, which premieres tonight at 9pm. And so I must take advantage of the synchronicity and use this opportunity to bludgeon all of you with my love for this show, which is fairly epic. Devotees of The Wire feel me in this, I'm sure.
Without overstating the matter (I swear!), it is perhaps the finest television show ever made -- complex and finely wrought, with characters so fully realized you feel as though they truly are real people. The Wire's stories of the post-industrial city and its inhabitants are always multi-dimensional and multi-faceted, expressing hard truths about our society -- and about humanity, broadly -- that don't have simple answers or neat conclusions. I deeply admire everything about the show, and hope this year will see it get it's due in the form of many shiny statuettes (hint, hint, Hollywood types).
You should so totally be watching, if you aren't already. I'd come over to your place and bring my DVDs of the first couple of seasons to convince you if I could, believe me.
/end obnoxious evangelizing. Go in peace, my bruthas and sistahs.
PS: I love this man. (Sorry, I couldn't resist a parting shot.)
I'll tell you all this right now: my husband is fucking insane.
He has... how shall I put this? A very on-again off-again relationship with reality. It isn't so much that he's lost his grip on The Real, but rather that he willfully chooses to ignore it, editing out select portions of The Truth Of How Things Are that don't exactly jibe with his wants and desires.
What do you call that? Selective Stupidity? What?
True, there's an incredibly charming side to this aspect of his personality, and it's definitely something that attracted me to Jamie when we first began dating. Because, quite often, this detachment from reality thing manifests as a kind of exuberant, ecstatic, seize-the-day attitude -- something that is difficult to argue with without feeling like a Scrooge and/or being overcome with self-hatred. I mean, he's right: OF COURSE we should jet off to Vegas for the weekend... and buy that really expensive Tiffany ring... and spend $300 on one meal. You only live once, right? RIGHT?
Sure, I participated along the way. Sure, I've reaped the rewards of living with someone who's knee-jerk reaction is to always say YES!, damn any and all consequences. I'm not denying that Insanity Has Its Benefits, and that I've enjoyed those.
But my willingness to stretch reality for shits-n-giggles has it's limits, folks. And they were recently reached -- nay, pressed beyond -- when Jamie began campaigning for us to buy an old $900,000 stone church.
I'll let that sink in for a moment. Do you need some smelling salts? Because I sure do.
Alright, so let me get this part out of the way: is the church awesome? Yes, yes it is. It's a mammoth stone-and-stained-glass relic of Old Baltimore, complete with a freakin' antique pipe organ. It's huge and beautiful and kick-ass.
It is also NINE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS. That's the number nine, with five fucking zeroes. In case that wasn't clear.
Continue reading "My crazy husband. Let me show him to you." »
This flyer was recently posted all over the Baltimore neighborhood of Hampden:
No, not lost. Just AWESOME.
Thanks to Sugarfreak!
Having a kid is totally cramping my style, that much is clear.
You may recall some recent mention here of my husband's well-deserved victory in our CityPaper's annual “Best of Baltimore” issue, a win that bestowed on us the distinct honor and privilege of gaining entry to their exclusive BoB party last week. And since I am sort of moldering in middle-age with a child strapped to one leg (they should make holsters) and therefore rarely (okay NEVER) cavorting about town with the cool kids, I was beside myself with excitement about attending. A party! With adult-type peoples! The cream of Baltimore's hip, insider crop, in fact! Oh, and did I yet mention OPEN BAR?
Huzzah! A drunken octopus on yon invite!
Yep, roger that. I'm all over that shit like a monkey on a cupcake.
Knowing that this party was coming up, I had to -- like most parental units -- jump through several flaming hoops ahead of time just to be able to go. First, I had to secure childcare at a friend's house. Second, I had to synchronize my watch by atomic clock to make absolutely certain I'd be on-point to retrieve our child at a reasonable time, or at least before she turned into a whining, flailing pumpkin and our friend was driven to unceremoniously toss her ass out on their back porch, like sack of potatoes FILLED WITH PURE EVIL (worse yet: PURE STARCHY EVIL!). Third, I had to dig through my wardrobe and find clothing that 1) was befitting a hipster gala in the year 2007 (umm, good luck with that! (snort!)), 2) was (relatively) clean, 3) didn't smell of some odd combination of Cheerios and Gogurt. YES, THE BAR HAS BEEN LOWERED. AGAIN.
Having settled those issues (well, to one degree or other), the evening of the much-anticipated party came. I was, in the words of Alan Greenspan, irrationally exuberant. I dressed with care, changing my clothing selections multiple times for good measure. I put on fucking MAKEUP, man. I applied goddamn hairspray, fer crissakes. And then I waited for Jamie to get home so we could go.
And waited. And waited. Aaaaaaand WAITED.
We'd planned to arrive at the party right when it started at 6:30pm, so I could cram in as much adult party time (see: BINGE DRINKING) as possible, figuring if I left the shindig by 8:30pm I could retrieve M and wisk her home and to bed before her personal witching hour of whining & flailing doom began. That would give me two full hours. Two full hours of blissful I'm not just a parent, I'm a hoooman beeeing! time. Oh joy.
Jamie called from the road around 6:15pm. He'd hit some bad traffic on the way home. He'd be late. He'd be very late.
I wilted.
All told, by the time we finally got to the party it was almost 7:30pm, meaning I had just enough time to slam down a single drink (weeps) and snap these pictures before I had to turn right around and get back into the stupid car. POINTLESS. FAIL!
Revelers beneath the ominous all-seeing Domino Sugars sign
Baltimore cityscape as Missile Command screenshot
The Baltimore Museum Of Industry: presently spotlighting our city's two main products -- Gang Murder & Crack!
Justin, Jamie, Lauren & delicious beers. You're winners, babies!
And sadly, that was it. I raced back to our friend's house and arrived just in time it seemed, as the tension-filled countdown to Preschooler Detonation had clearly already commenced. After putting my daughter to bed at home, I watched some TV. I had some snacks. And I tried very hard to weep quietly, so as not to wake up THE ADORABLE PIGTAILED MONSTER WHO HAS STOLEN MY LIFE FROM ME.
Oh, but I kid the life-stealing monster! Umm, I mean THE LIGHT OF MY GOT-DAMN LIFE.
So now, in an attempt to exhaust this topic fully and thereby purge the kernel of resentment that's taken up residence in my heart, here's a few other things that having a kid has unfortunately put the kibosh on for me:
I could go on and on, of course. But enough of my festering bitterness -- what's on your resentment-inducing MIA since parenthood list? And late at night when everyone else is asleep, do you lie awake thinking about these things, and do the tears come?
There there, dear.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Aside: I've decided to relocate my Daily Photo (I prefer the generality of Daily Image, honestly) Entry over on a dedicated page, so as not to clog the delicate pipes of mah index page. Please to enjoy (like, every day! DUH!)! I'm also working on a Song Of The Week page, and I'll let y'all know when that's fully operational and ready to rock. Song Of The Week page ahoy!
And a Note to the three of you who care: No, we haven't yet replaced Nemo (or gotten a tortoise, per Mrs. Kennedy's influence), and Jamie and I are still deadlocked over the convertible issue (though I believe the resounding chorus of “BAD IDEA!” from y'all might've swayed him ever-so-slightly away from folly... fingers crossed).
I've been remiss in mentioning that my supremely talented husband will be reading selections of his fine poultry tonight, along with several other NYC poetry-types, and you locals should show up! I'll be there -- once I get the youngin' settled in for the night and the babysitter adequately drugged.
Festivities commence at 8pm at Carriage House, 2225 Hargrove Street (between St. Paul & Calvert). BYOB MUTHAF*%KAS! More info about the reading series can be found here.
Hope to see you there!
Because I've been just ridiculously busy for the past week or so, I haven't yet gotten a chance to tell y'all about last weekend's exciting festivities, when our household was overtaken by foreign hipster invaders. (Quick! Hide the children! And that Best Of Hall & Oates CD!)
Our friend Raji -- who is a DJ and music promoter, among other enviable things -- came down to Baltimore from NYC with his pal Yuuki in tow, who was visiting from Tokyo. Yuuki was in NYC because his Mom is a filmmaker shooting an independent film in the city and needed his assistance, though he also happens to do promotion for the nightclub Womb in Tokyo. Raji and Yuuki had VIP passes (OF COURSE THEY DID!) to Virgin Festival that weekend -- which is sort of Woodstockesque in form and flavor, but without any socially constructive pretenses -- and since the festival was being held just a hop, skip, and jump from us over at Pimlico, they crashed our pad for the weekend.
In other words, I was totally and completely out of my depth.
We interrupt this hiatus to bring you breaking news of important awesomeness...
Pardon me whilst I get all artsy-fartsy on your asses for a moment:
Some of y'all are aware that my husband Jamie co-runs a small press -- Narrow House -- of which his weekly rockheals.com is a part. Well, Narrow House has just released a new CD and book from our dear friend Ric Royer, and its getting rave reviews like this one from the Baltimore CityPaper:
“There Were One and It Was Two: Annotated Artifacts from the Doubles Museum, a new spoken-word performance CD and book that's his first project with Narrow House Recordings and the local poetry publisher's most ambitious project to date. It's a funny, informative, and freakishly entertaining exploration of the concept of the double--as otherness, as twins, as pairings, as doppelgängers, and so on--in literature, in psychology, in epistemology, in nature, in mythology, and in the serendipitous collisions of all of the above. As with most of Royer's live performances, each of There Were One's 10 individual tracks takes the form of the narrative lecture, with sound accompaniment provided by local unconscious thought mover/shaker John Berndt. Don't misconstrue that setup, however: Royer and Berndt aren't tapping into some Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen hep-cat bop wonking. There Were One is one of the city's most genuinely odd cultural artifacts in some time.”
Also, there's a CD/Book release party (see flyer above) this Friday (err, tomorrow), so if you're local or Baltimore-bound, please to stop by!
And if you're not in the area but you'd like to snag a copy of your very own (for a measly $12!), please to click here to buy! And thank ye!
/end arty-fartyness
[x-posted]
They closed the schools here in Baltimore today because it rained! RAINED! Oh wait, I'm sorry, that was FREEZING RAIN. BRRR! COLD! I mean, how can anyone be expected to deal with all of that, umm, liquid precipitation? Precipitation bad! Everything must come to a screeching halt! Sure, the streets are clear now, and the temperature is *above* freezing, but lordy, at one point last night it was COLD! And it rained! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! SAVE YOURSELVES!
Bitter? Oh, a tad.
Dearest Interweb,
Fellow Baltimoreans and Real Life friends of Team Sweetney J. Robbins and Janet Morgan need your help:
On January 27, 2006, our great friends and Channels members J. Robbins and Janet Morgan welcomed their first child, a son named Callum. He was 8-odd pounds and 20-odd inches of wriggling, squirming, screaming joy, and the apple of his parents' eye.
...Sometime around Cal's 8-month birthday in September, J. and Janet took him to his pediatrician for his regular appointment. They knew from the doctor's grave tone that something was terribly wrong. Any parent — any human — reading this can understand the shock, horror, and pain that J. and Janet felt when they learned through subsequent visits with specialists that Cal was born with a genetic motor neuron disease called Type 1 SMA, or Spinal Muscular Atrophy.
J. & Cal, September 2006
Continue reading "This Is Callum Robbins. He Needs Your Help." »
1. Is it awful of me to say that I'm kind of happy to be back to the same-ol'-same-ol' weekly schedule? Yes, yes, I know its pedestrian and dull to the point of bordering on a kind of masochism of banality, but all this festive TOGETHERNESS and DISORDER doesn't jibe well when married with my Felix Ungeresque persona. Frankly, what jibes well is regimen meshed with seclusion, interrupted by occasional refreshing bursts of human fellowship. But this being around other people all the time thing? Why, that's just crazy talk. And stop touching me, dammit.
2. M's best buddy R was over yesterday, and the two of them produced together about twenty separate crayon-and-pencil scenes that each involved explorations of the destructive power of hot lava and the inability of living things to escape its furiously scribbled clutches. Kittens, flowers, Bratz Dolls, and, yes, even monkeys, all met similar fates, getting -- and I quote -- “Burnded up” by torrents of imagined magma. The bald-faced joy taken in all this death and destruction was, to say the least, rather unseemly.
Continue reading "Talking Points: Regarding Your Expected Update" »
That Tom Petty knew his shit, dude.
So here I am, waiting for a Baltimore Sun photographer to come take my picture (which is, uhh, sort of incongruous with reality as I know it), and I'm bouncing off the walls. I have a whole, long hour to kill. I have already primped and done what I can to be presentable. Behold:
The superfantastico people at Birds For Bulbs sent me my very own BFB bird last evening. It is SUBLIME (said in the voice of Will Ferrell doing James Lipton).
What I love about it is that despite its overwhelming, undeniable pinkness, it is a bird that looks poised to peck your motherfucking eyes out. And so resembles this very blog, no? YES.
I have a soft spot for the industrial edge of this city.
I'm not sure why, but I've always felt most comfortable living in cities like Baltimore, whose heart is steel and sweat and concrete, the bare skeleton of its manufacturing jetting out into the open air. To my mind, there's a kind of poetry in the angular bluntness of this city: a stripped-down, uncomplicated elegance in form that seems dignified somehow.
[Voiced in my best 12-year-old fangirl squeal:] Like, OH MY GOD you guys! I forgot to mention that I'm going to see Jon Stewart tomorrow night! He's flying me to New York to be on The Daily Show and so that he can make sweet, sweet love to me I'll be seeing him in concert with about 16,000 other lucky bastards. Woot!
You know what this means, don't you? Waxing! Photographic evidence and post-mortemy goodness ahoy!
(The pictures may be a little dark. And grainy. And taken from a great distance. AND FILLED WITH THE COLOSSAL MAGNIFICENCE OF MY LOVE.)
It was filthy. And kind of stinky.
On Sunday, the great and powerful Milkshake, as seen on Noggin, held a free concert in front of a local bookstore. M_ and I were in attendance. It was about 10 gazillion degrees outside. It was madness.
There were, umm, a few people there.
Continue reading "It Was A Fun Day. But Now Its A Done Day." »
My husband is a rock star, man. [From this week's Baltimore Citypaper]
And though you can't see it, he's wearing a SoaP t-shirt.
A few blocks from our house there's a strip of shops, and among them one of Baltimore's best restaurants, The Chameleon Cafe. The owners of the restaurant live above it, and their incredibly friendly cat, Mr. Moo, is always hanging around outside the joint, meeting and greeting patrons. M_ has, over the course of the past year or so, fallen completely in love with Mr. Moo. We can't drive by the place without her pleading that we stop to visit him.
It'll end in tears.
For your viewing pleasure, new photos over on yonder flickr from this weekend's first Rock-n-Romp of the season.
[The Materials]
Couple Arrested For Asking For Directions.
That's how we handle people who can't use a map round these parts, pardner. Now ya'll don't come back now, ya hear?
So my friend Amy, of Amalah fame, drove up to the fair Charm City on Sunday for brunching and what not. We'd been planning to meet for a while, and actually had made plans to hook up the weekend after Valentine's Day, but you know why those were foiled. The whole planning process was a perfect example of how difficult it is to negotiate a social life once you have a kid. Sure, we live only one hour away from each other, but who's gonna go where? And for how long? And are husbands available to watch children? And let's keep in mind that we can't stay out too late or drink too much, because to be tired and/or hungover the next day while attempting to navigate childcare and work-type duties would be unfathomable... and so on, and so forth. Its almost like we're fucking adults or something. [shudder]
As is (apparently) our way, we are presently stuck in Atlanta, waiting on a flight out to Baltimore at 12:15am (which has been delayed several times already, so 12:15am is really just an optimistic guesstimate at this point). Best case scenario, we get into Baltimore around 2am, which would put us home at 3am. But I'm not holding my breath for best-case anything, because, well, HA! Also, I am so tired at this point, I'm actually having out-of-body experiences with some regularity (this disembodied feeling may also have something to do with not taking my allergy medicine at the usual time -- since I fully anticipated being home by the usual time -- and the resultant clogged sinuses and pressure-y headache). And though I know too well that whining in and of itself isn't going to help anything, can I just say that I DON'T DESERVE THIS HELL. AGAIN. AND IT SUCKS. HARD. And seriously, poor poor innocent M_, who is currently flailing in some sort of Preschooler Existential Hell and rapidly reverting to pre-verbal pre-toddler behavior, emitting only the occasional shrieks of “NO!” to indicate her profound displeasure at all of this and our role in all of this. My god, she is doubtless thinking, just what kind of parents ARE YOU?!?!
I often ask myself the same thing, actually.
It would seem we're the kind of parents who are constantly stuck in airports, like great wads of human cholesterol adhered to the arterial walls of our flawed air transit system. It is apparently our fate. There's nothing to do but endure. God help us.
EDIT: Update on the pain: we got home somewhere between 3:30-4am last night. My body feels as though an entire convoy of trucks has run over it... and then flipped into reverse, backed up over it... then back into drive again... you get the idea. Its 11am the next morning and M_ is still asleep, having melted down at 1am in BWI in ways I thought only people professionally trained in the dramatic arts could. It was OPERATIC, my friends. Anyway, drama aside, we're alive and home, heads-up. I'll be posting some more pictures later today and FINALLY constructing some sort of narrative, as soon as this coffee I'm drinking reaches my synapses and gets them firing properly again...
i'm all about the pitchers today, peoples.
some shots from our morning at the neighborhood children's bookstore/cafe, where they have blueberry muffins that are infused with meth or crack or something, such is their addictive power.
chillin' at the bookstore.
my plan? knocking stuff over and breaking shit.
paper bag art.
HOLY CRAP, BOOKS!!!
oh tormenting busy box, i will master thee!
sucking up HARD to the bookstore owner.
i love this place. if they would adopt me and let me live there, i would.
my pal (and resident sounddude for RnR baltimore) mike is looking for “Recipes from the Baltimore Punk/DIY/Indie/Underground” for publication in a forthcoming zine. click here for large/legible version...
today was one of those days that starts off all normal-seeming and unassuming, and then in a single inexplicable yet nonetheless horrifying moment rears up its head and reveals itself to be wearing the face of almighty catastrophe.
which is the face of my daughter, in full-on epileptic-like hysterical seizure, turning various shades along the spectrum of red, wailing “BUT I DON'T WANT TO GO HOME!!!” full-force at volume level ELEVEN in the center of the otherwise respectfully silent echo-chamber that is the Baltimore Public Library's classically-styled grand entry hall.
i hate this part of being a parent, and i hate that it doesn't get any easier, and i hate that i reach those moments where something breaks inside me and i scream back. i consider myself a gentle parent, a thoughtful parent... yet there are those moments when, against everything i think i know and think i am, a wire somewhere in me that can be tripped only by her gets a good hard yank, and i'm sent instantly into the throes of rage.
[M_'s library selections.]
but no time for self-censure. its bathtime.
wink.
ham II.
at the bottom.
spiderman.
hi.
little baltimore.
number one on the threat-down? BEARS.
bouncy bridge
a quickr pickr post
I'm an imperfect Gen-X Parental Unit from Baltimore. I believe in early afternoon cocktails, the greatness of Jon Stewart, and that being a smartass is a virtue. More about me...
