Olde Pigtowne

[oh, contentment]

Every Sunday during football season (starting this past Sunday, when the BlackNGold made the Browns look like the fools that they are), I go and watch the Steelers play at this bar that used to be called the Purple Goose, but is now called, ridiculously, YNOT Bar and Grill. I go there because it is the home base of the Pittsburgh Steelers Fan Club of Maryland, and we have a rowdy good time singing the Steelers Polka and reciting the "Chew Tabacca..." etc, etc...

All of this is sort of irrelevant. It's all leading up to the fact that until Saturday, I'd never gone to Pigtown, the neighborhood in Baltimore on the West side of MLK Blvd near Camden Yards, for any other reason that to watch Steelers games. Because that's where the Goose is (was).

















[generating collective memories]

It was the weekend of the famous Pigtown Festival, a sleepy little street fair in which several confused pigs are corralled from one end of Washington Blvd, Pigtown's main street, to the other, in an absurd "Running of the Pigs,"...

















[meh. meh. stop lookin at me. stop takin my picture.]

...while jerks like me eat pulled pork sandwiches off to the side...






















[you smell that, you filthy swine?]

...and Michael Sarbanes gets a chance to glad-hand one last time.

















[no, seriously, tell me the truth. does my breath smell?]

That is, by the way, Sarbanes, in the flesh, leanin' in on that guy. He's the man who, if all goes well, will be president of Baltimore City Council after tomorrow's elections. My friend Malka-Seltzer volunteers for his campaign. Kat thinks he's really hot, but I don't see it.

Oh, and my buddy Karla sang some jazz standards with her trio:






















[take my lips, i want to lose them. take these arms--i'll never use them]


and some happy-go-lucky caricature drawers sang along...

















[you on point, girl? all the time, robbie]

...and the hairiest O's fan around sat and drooled...

















[aroo?]

Pigtown, as the history books will tell you, is called as such because they actually used to run the pigs down the street, merrily on their way to the slaughterhouse. There's a similar place in Pittsburgh called Washington's Landing, where the boathouse I used to row out of in high school is located. During winter practice we had to run up this massive incline called Pig Hill, which supposedly the pigs had to run down on their way to meet their gruesome fates.

Now Pigtown is a middle-class neighborhood, very much mixed racially, but heavily populated with DC MARC-train commuters who walk to the nearby station on the Camden Line. It's a pretty nice neighborhood, very Baltimore with its dumpy rowhouses, but very clean and wide sidewalks. I shot a few street scenes:






















[waitin' for my man]

This one's totally Cartier-Bresson:






















[kickin' it on the corner]

KB and her two dirty cousins:






















[oink, oink]


The local house of worship...

















[new, solid, rock]

The local hair-cuttery...






















[most powerful man in the neighborhood]

and that's Pigtowne...






















[squeal!]

Friday Night Dance

[polishin' them floorboards]


"Tonight the dance will be held in the bumper car pavillion..."
- fridaynightdance.org

There is a light, my friends, at the end of the hellish tunnel they call the 'beltway suburbs' -- that horrible place where youth, spirit, and dreams go to die. Yes, I'm talking about the upper-crust townships and neighborhoods outside of Washington, D.C., with their fiendish-sounding names, like Cabin John, Alexandria, and Manassas. And that light is the Friday Night Dance, held weekly at Glen Echo Park, an old amusement park built in the 1950s (or at least it looks like that's when it was built) just west of Georgetown.

The last time KB and I went to Glen Echo, it was a Sunday night, and also a contra-dance, and we ran into my cousin Amanda, the short-lived Nashville songwriting star, and her husband Jorge, who knows every Mexican on the Rte. 15 corridor. The young and the old (but mostly the old) come here dutifully, every week, to entertain themselves with a tradition that I'm sure will be gone in a generation or two, but like clockwork, resurrected when the next folk revival happens. And you better believe I'll be on the front lines, baby.

What I'm talking about, of course, is contra-dancing...

















["okay folks, let's line 'em up for 'jim's reel'..."]

From what I've been told, the "contra" does not refer to the practice of making two parallel lines in which each dancer faces opposite, or, in latinate languages, contra their partner, nor is it the jitterbug of choice for Central American rebels. Rather, "contra" is a New-England corruption of the word "country," as in "English Country Dancing." Just imagine a pilgrim child tugging on his mother's petticoats, and saying "Maw, what sorta contra is this'un we here've run a-shore-a?"

Now if you really want to know all the ins and outs and boring details about what contra-dancing really is, there's a variety of places to start: grandiose, thorough histories, an online bibliography of sources, including works by Goethe, Homer, St. Augustine, and Henry Ford, of all people (who knew the ol' Jew-bater could cut a rug?), a history of the pastime, as passed in the Connecticut River Valley, or maybe even this incredibly confusing chart, which introduced me to the term "fancy-stepping"...

...But if you'll take my word for it, contra-dancing is easily understood like this: All white people in the history of the world, no matter what their culture or country of origin, have, since Christianity, been trying to suck the fun out of dancing (which is essentially a vertical, non-procreative representation of sex, as we all know) by making young men and women dance in time to music using very specific, very tame dance moves, instead of properly expressing our natural instincts. Contra-dancing is what happened when Irish ceili dancing, which involves choreographed figures and lively music, Scottish country dancing, and English barn-dancing (a very popular form of entertainment, by the way), merged in America, and people started having wild hootenannies in Appalachian villages. This is how anglo-celtic peasants get down and do their thang. Pretty pathetic, right? Well, maybe compared to James Brown, but the music -- old-time string band music played on fiddles, guitars and banjos -- is awesome, and contra-dancing is a lot of fun.
















[old-timey]

The band playing at Glen Echo this past Friday night was the New Southern Cowtippers, who make a lot of bad "no cows were harmed in the making..." jokes on their website, but who play a good dance. They were a little quiet for my taste, but maybe that's just because they only had a one-man rhythm section and the banjo wasn't mic'd very well.

















[wanna arm wrestle?]

We danced about four dances before we were spent, because contra-dancin' ain't no joke. Above pictured is a "turn-with-your-left," one of the many moves shouted out by the caller, who stands by the stage and shouts out the moves to the complex dances that we did together. Other moves include "do-si-do," "alemagne," "gypsy," "left-hand-star," "pull-on-through," "promenade," and the ever-lampooned "swing-yer-pardner." By the end of the night, KB was dancin' like a pro, and me? Well, I was just sweating. Gotta start jogging again.

Another perk to Glen Echo Park is that the carousel was open...
















[we've come a long way, my steed]

For just a dollar, KB got to ride a pretty pony called Winifred! Imagine that!





















[yee-haw. or is it hee-haw?]

And of course, the last dance of the night was a waltz. If they had contra-dance proms in Kentucky (which would be awesome), the slow-dance at the end would be a waltz. It's tradition, after all.

















[save room for god, kids]

Please Touch

[david and josie, washington square park, philadelphia, august 4, 2007]

Went to Philly last weekend to see my brother and his wife and my niece Josie and their new house. Philadelphia, which I hate, instinctively, from years of "Oh-you're-from-Pittsburgh? I-know-someone-in-Philadelphia" syndrome, grows on me every time I go there. Especially because David now lives in Queen Village, a neighborhood south of Center City that abutts the Delaware River and includes a lot of great parks, markets, restaurants, and an open-air Italian market. It's a bit like the Strip District in Pittsburgh, except with rowhouses and families and not so many warehouses.

On Saturday, I was charged with taking little Josie to the Please Touch! museum, some 30 blocks from David's house. She slept the whole way there in her stroller, but when she woke up, she was hot, grouchy, and had no idea where she ways or really, who I was, and the tears 'n squalling began immediately. I called Dave to come assist, but by the time he got there, Josie and I had gotten really into the boats-in-water play station, and she had calmed down.

The following are some photos of Josie from the museum. That's right just because she's cute. Not because this is really travel-related.


[art made with rice, glue, crayons]


[alternate use for rice]


[generosity]

There were lots of old SEPTA public transport vehicles parked in the museum, and Josie took the helm at driving several of them.


[septa bus]


[septa trolley]


[tractor]

Josie tried to give a play turnip to this little boy, but he refused, so she threw it at him.


[peace offering]

And these photos are from the farm room. The Please Touch! museum focuses on teaching valuable life skills, like motoring and agriculture. Here, little Pepita (which is Josie's Spanish name) is harvesting toy turnips and cabbages.


[agriculture]


[lift with your knees]


[paige, the turnip-crazed, big-headed playmate]

The day would not be complete without a hearty meal, so Josie demolished a bowl of matzoh-ball soup at Famous Fourth Street deli, which is the best Jewish deli I've been to in some time. I could barely finish half of my reuben, which is telling, given my appetite usually. I did have soup, latkes, pickles, and several Doc B's black cherries, too, though.


[hand-to-mouth coordination]


[mmmm!]

...and bedtime...


[tooth-washing]


[gum-scrubbing]


[pre-bed story: Mickey "In the Night Kitchen"]

p.s. bonus points for anyone who can tell me apart from my brother.

Pondsville Barns

Every time my family drives from Pittsburgh to Thurmont, we get off Rte. 70 at the Smithsburg-Boonsboro exit and drive east over the northern part of South Moutain and through some of the Catoctins, both of which are part of the Blue Ridge that sticks down from Pennsylvania into Maryland between Hagerstown and Thurmont. We always pass through this valley that my mom calls "My Valley" because it's so pretty -- just rolling hills and fields and old-school looking farms. So the other day we took a trip there to photograph the pretty old barns, and found out that the area is called Pondsville/Myerstown. The above barn is on a property that the owner told us dates to the late 18th century called Hewitt's Meadows.

Here's the backside of Hewitt's Meadows, with the cow barn, in the late afternoon light. Roy, who was shooting on his Dual-Reflex medium-format camera from the 1950s, told me that the following picture, which I took on his Nikon D-80 digital SLR, in fact sucks, because the sky is overexposed. You see, I'm learning, here, people, and that's what's important.



Here's another farm. Didn't get the name of this one, but the owner saw us shooting and accused us of terrorist intentions, at which point we had to explain to him the aesthetics of agricultural photography, which he didn't buy, so we had to leave Matt there as collateral. He's still working off the debt we incurred by trespassing. Whatever you're doing out there, Matt, we support you.


Happy farmer. Let's call him "Earl".



The Red Bridge farm. Right near the Pondsville Road.






Matt. Wishing you luck in your captivity as an indentured servant to the grotesque farmers of Pondsville. We'll try to break you out soon.

Thurmont: Pleasant Living

Perhaps not as much as today as in the recent past, visitors at the presidential retreat come to Thurmont to shop or to attend church. When they do, Thurmont townspeople treat them with a reserve that respects their privacy. Sometimes this has its problems as this story by Wireman tells: A man was late to church. Unknown to him, the President and his party were inside and already seated. As the tardy man pulled into the usual parking place, he was stopped by a Secret Service man who remarked, "You can't park here." - "I've got to park here," the man replied. "I'm late for church. I happen to be the minister."

- Paula M. Strain, The Blue Hills of Maryland: History Along the Appalachian Trail on South Mountain and the Catoctins

Right about now I'm living in Thurmont, Maryland, on the Whelan/McGill family property where my grandmother was born and died, where my great-grandfather Ernest McGill used to ride his horse between three Episcopal churches every Sunday morning, giving a sermon and singing mass at each. Where the food at the Cozy is almost as distasteful as the annual Klan rally on the corner of Main and Water Streets. The site of many a righteous Hopkins party, where Uncle Wake, my father's uncle, in the declining years of his reign here, demanded of my friend Paul, on the first day of their acquaintance, "Why don't you love me any more?" This and many other moments, from Wakey's senility to the hikes at Chimney Rock and the Presidential helicopter landing on the little league field on its way to Camp David in foggy weather, and many other happy, more personal memories color my love of Thurmont, a town that, without its connection to my family, may just be another vinyl-sided suburb of Washington, D.C.

I'm here because, between my 6 months in India and the real world, I have decided to have a little sojourn, do some writing, and take my time applying for jobs. In the meantime, Thurmont is very inspiring. The building in the first picture there is the Lodge, a one-room cabin that's been around since the 1890s, I think, and built by my great grandfather.

Here's what it looks like on the inside:




People keep coming, quite welcome, to visit me. Jake came and spent a whole day practicing Charlie Parker heads on his bass, in the Lodge...



Here's the mossy old plaque that declares the Lodge birthplace of my grandmother, Caroline Faries McGill...



These days, the Lodge is my writing workshop...



I try to write about 700-1,000 good words a day, in addition to the freelance articles I'm writing to keep my bank balance in the black. I'm basing my discipline model on Hemingway's while he was at Key West -- he used to deny himself his first drink of the day until he had written 700 words. Then he'd get smashed at Sloppy Joe's and go fishing then beat up queers in the bar all night. I'll not comment further on my own daily routine, but let your imaginations run wild, by all means. I don't like to say I'm writing a "novel" because it sounds obnoxious, so let's just say I'm working on a "long work of fiction". It's going okay. I hope to have 50,000 words by the end of the summer. You know, something to apply to grad school with.

So what else do we do at Thurmont? Here's the door to the main house, the Snuggery, where my grandma and grandpa lived their retired life-after-Baltimore...



Inside, Matty is working on a long silk-screening project. He works at the desk in my grandfather's old room, which has lots of pictures of my uncle Brent wrestling at Gilman. I'm sure Matty'll put up some photos of what he's working on, maybe on facebook or something...



We garden, like true country gentlemen...



We take art shots of glasses frames left in the algae-stained bird bath, probably left here by one of my friends, signifying the juxtaposition of the decay of an old Maryland family and its glory with the moral decay of 21st century hipster youth.



We play that old-timey music underneath the old maple tree...



I make guacamole,



Then we grill.



We admire the dusky Catoctins in the picture window of Wild Rose Lodge,a 1920's Sears-Roebuck pre-fab house filled with mildly onanist classical scultptures, where Uncle Wake used to live.



And gaze, with a snifter of rye, at the mountains themselves...