Category Archives: Baltimore

Baltimore, F&F

hello august

I have been moving, and was without Internet for a bit. I am now installed in my new place in Charles Village, and am unpacking boxes.

The memorial service for my friend who died last month will be on Saturday. I and an old friend have been collaborating on compiling an email list of friends, to share the news and also to ask for memories of him. We met him at a summer program when we were sixteen, so there has been a group of 32 to reach out to. We found 29 of them. Not bad, after 10 years.

I find that every time I have to tell someone the news of his death, I relive the emotions of it again. So she has been helping me a lot. If it wasn’t for her, I doubt I would have tried to contact anyone. None of us can get through much alone.

Speaking of not being alone, my new roommates – all scientists – are a lovely group of people, and very passionate about their work. It’s great to put my head into the biology planet for a few hours.

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animation, Baltimore, film

the greatest city in America, indeed

Okay, Baltimore, you win. Having now watched THE LITTLE MERMAID, the first Ashman/Menken Disney collaboration, and all the special features, I can report something important: Howard Ashman, the brilliant lyricist of both BATB and TLM, was born in (wait for it)
Baltimore, Maryland.

John Waters is featured all throughout the TLM features talking about Ashman.

This means more to me than any other connection I’ve had with this city so far. Even Poe. There has to be stuff about him here: and I have to find it. As if this wasn’t enough, Ashman was Jewish – something else I just learned tonight.

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Baltimore

i hear the train a-coming

I am going to DC today to visit the Smithsonian museum of American Art, and to have lunch with an old friend I haven’t seen in ten years, who has been brought back into my life by the death of our other friend.

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Baltimore

That’s not an element!

Yesterday, I moved my boxes – all fourteen of them, containing everything I own – from the Calvert Street house to the Saint Paul house. I also put my rent and security deposit in the envelope with everyone else’s, and signed the lease. Now they’re going to have to work really hard to kick me out.

To celebrate, I joined three other students from my program at Trivia Night at the Wharf Rat in Fells Point. The WriSem team achieved victory, in the form of a refillable growler of Oliver ale, brewed on site. The only answer I knew was the name of the crystals that power the Enterprise* in Star Trek. And they knew it without me.

I did, however, provide moral support, and I won a tie-breaker in the second round with the aid of some skills I acquired from the ABF Drumz section of the LSJUMB. Once in the Band, always in the Band.

*dilithium.

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Baltimore, poetry, theater

Slampoonedicidecyclopsitalfringe

Yesterday, I took care of lots of business (mmm, health insurance!) and found out that I have been officially approved for my new apartment, near 30th and St. Paul in Charles Village, in the form of a lease in my email. HuzzaH.

I then went to see Single Carrot’s SLAMPOONED the second time, followed by a “slamback” where Baltimore slam poets, many of whom were associated with Baltimore’s long-running Slamicide poetry event, performed after the show.

Baltimore’s individual champion poet was there – they are trying to raise money to send him to the worlds in Berkeley. He performed a hilarious boy-meets-girl, boy-screws-girl, boy-breaks-up-with-girl-because-she-gave-him-an STD crowd-pleaser, entirely written in references to computer and Internet technology. I can’t remember the lines exactly, but it was like, “Baby, you cheated on me with a Mac?? And you didn’t use a firewall??” It was really good. I’m not conveying it adequately.

Slamicide is seeking a new venue – many of the folks at the show last night suggested the newly opened Cyclops Books down the street. Cyclops is a music, poetry, and bookselling venue at Maryland and North.

I stood outside their front door with a Louisiana musician who said his name was Traveler for about an hour before SLAMPOONED last night. He held the door for a stream of men with amplifiers, while, one hundred feet to our left, a sixteen-year-old girl was getting arrested. Traveler is on his way to Florida for awhile, to record a new album. We exchanged road woes stories and hoped the girl would get let go.

My favorite Cyclops dialogue:

A (to a large man wearing an undershirt): Are you with the band?
B: No, I’m with the strippers.

All this is to say that I think it’d be a great place for a Baltimore poetry slam…and conveniently located ten blocks or so from my new Appartement.

This Morning, someone outside my window is honking like they are getting paid for it. In a few hours, after the obligatory watering of the plants, I and friends are going to see Harry Potter (which Anthony Lane didn’t like, but I’m not going to let that stop me) and then road-tripping to DC for two Capital Fringe shows. It’s my first time in the nation’s capital. I do think it’s appropriate that all I’m doing is seeing theater. (I’m trying to send a message.)

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Baltimore, film, the chorus

In a wrestling match, nobody bites like Gaston

It has been raining here for the last two days. Not constantly, but violently and intermittently. I have my Poland gear with me all the time now – raincoat, umbrella.

Today, I learned more about a Hopkins program where graduate students tutor undergrads who are having trouble adjusting to college academic work. I saw a posting for it and wanted to check it out. Speaking of checkouts, then I checked my first book out of the library, with my now-working new ID card. It was the DVD of the Disney BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, which I have really wanted to watch for awhile now – and I wasn’t sure why.

Well, I watched it, plus the special features, and I learned the following things which I did not know when I was nine years old:

– Walt Disney tried to develop the story in the 30s and also in the 50s, but never got past the drawing board. (Hey, this is the context in which “the drawing board” is being used properly!)
– Jerry Orbach from LAW AND ORDER played (and sang) Lumiere, the talking candlestick. There was a great all-round voice cast, but that one really blew me away.
– The enchanted objects were thought of as, variously (and I am quoting people here): “having the audience’s experience.” “the interlocutor.” “A Greek chorus.”
– The art director pitched the design concept as “Bambi with interiors.”
– The composers, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, structured the songs and the music in the film “like a Broadway musical,” with turning points in the plot happening during songs.
– The lighting was consciously designed to be “theatrical.”

I have always felt a little self-conscious about the influence that LITTLE MERMAID and BATB have on my chorus stuff. I’ve been very aware of the animation in “Kiss The Girl” in particular. But now, with the knowledge that Menken/Ashman were thinking in those terms – and with more context for the way theater permeated those productions – it seems entirely appropriate. Henceforth, I will cite this movie as an influence without confusion or embarassment.

And then I wrote a poem from the point of view of the guy who runs the asylum where they’re going to lock up Belle’s father, just because he has the best line in the whole movie:

“I don’t usually leave the asylum at night, but he said you would make it worth my while.”

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Baltimore, yoga

hot yoga: check it and see: I’ve got a fever of a hundred and three

Baltimore is so humid that doing yoga, even at night with all the windows open and a fan blowing, is Bikram-style whether or not you want it to be. I have sweated so much every time I get on the mat that I can feel my brain contracting within my skull. I will say, though, that I do feel more limber in this atmosphere than I did when it was five degrees below zero in Chicago. Today, I was trying to do the wheel pose, and I realized I could almost keep bending my neck back to the point where my nose was pointing at the mat.

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Baltimore, poetry

Why does the gun you are mugging me with have an orange plastic tip?

Yesterday I went to a campus information session and tour aimed at prospective Hopkins undergraduates. I was the only person there who wasn’t either 16 or a mom. I then went to the program offices and met G, the graduate coordinator – she had two enormous Nortons for me with a Post-It with my name on it. We talked Poland for a long time – she and her family have background in Austria and the Ukraine.

I looked at one apartment, looked at another apartment, and met up with some people who may have a third apartment. It has now been explained to me that there is a safe and short way to get from campus to Hampden on foot.

Spent the evening watching IRON MAN for the 5th time on a outdoor screen, projected at Broadway Pier, with water all around us. After the Forever Cemetery in LA, I was expecting a really large and unwieldy crowd, but this was so nice. Only 200 people or so.

At the pier, I met up with J, who graduated from Hopkins last year, and his friends C and T, and their dog. J is the first poet from the program I’ve gotten to talk to in person.

We liberated an abandoned sign on the way home, talked poetry and visual arts (C, who works with textile arts, is moving to Chicago in November) and ended the night at the Charles Village Pub- my first time there.

C also shared her favorite Baltimore mugging stories, including being held up by a man with a BB gun in a parking garage. And I saw my first Baltimore rat last night, in a pile of recycling on 31st.

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Baltimore

early one morning, the sun was shining

..and I was on the phone with Aetna figuring out student health insurance. Today is a taking-care-of-business kind of Monday.

Last night I went to The Brewer’s Art, a local brewery across the street from the Belvedere in Mount Vernon, with B and G from Poland. We talked local theater, EURYDICE choruses, and beer. It was delightful. As B drove us back, he was debating the merits of Charles Village, block by block, intersection by intersection. I think one of the trademarks of a real Baltimorean is a microscopic knowledge of block ecologies. I was impressed. He was differentiating between the east and west sides of a north-south street in terms of safety and livability.

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