Cendrillon

[the girl, the legend, the phillipino burrito]

Yesterday I was in New York and I had the time to squeeze in a quick lunch with my friend Janki, before rushing over to the Waldorf-Astoria to interview real estate tycoon William P. Carey. We needed somewhere close to her SoHo office, so we chose Cendrillon, a Phillipino place that J. said she enjoys. That is she, above modeling the fresh lumpia, which is sort of like a Phillipino spring roll. This one was, well, lumpi. The Napa cabbage, mushrooms, jicama, and leeks all melded into a mushy, boiled, mash, all inside a purple yam wrapper (Phillipinos are wild about yams) and it could have been a bit more savory. It was bland.

I've been intrigued by vegetarian cooking lately. Not because I'm considering going fruity, but because I've had a lot of it lately that has struck me as very adventurous, and surprisingly, pretty filling. So I wanted to order something Asian and veggie, but there were only two veg items on the menu, and one of them looked gross, so J. got the mixed noodle bowl, with shiitakes, scallions, and an eggplant fritter that looked like a petrified duck:


[wading in the scallion sea]

And I got the "Phillipino fried chicken," with a potato salad made with (what else?) yams:


[old-fashioned, down-South Pacific soul food]

The noodle bowl was rather tasteless, I have to say. I was starting to see a trend of blandness, here. It kind of reminded me of when Indian people, when I was living in Bombay, would refer to any food that wasn't picante as "bland," which I objected to because I think "bland" means without taste, and not not-spicy. This was both tasteless and not spicy. It seems that Phillipino food is mostly about pork (like their Spanish colonial wardens) and sausage, and we didn't get any of that.

The potato-yam salad was just terrible. Undercooked, flavorless, boring.

The absolute salvation of the meal was this:


[babymomma coconut]

That's baby coconut cream pie with vanilla bean ice cream and a raspberry demi-glace. It was impossible not to eat quickly, and the baby coconut meat came in thick, fleshy strands. Very creative, very delicious.

Here are my grades, overall:

FOOD: C
Both entrees, and to a lesser extent, the lumpia, were incredibly bland. Very well presented, but essentially a flavorless waste of good vegetables. That pie, though -- damn.

AMBIENCE: A
We sat in the back under a beautiful skylight, and the place was mostly empty during lunch. A well-decorated, Asian-modern ambience with good lighting.

SERVICE: B+
Friendly server who was the only one on staff at lunch. She took a long time coming back to us at one point, but otherwise, was entirely satisfactory.

Oyster Flitters at the Wine Market

[front to back: wild mushroom fricassee, corn-meal battered oysters, fried green tomatoes]

"Such concoctions as panned and scalloped oysters have never been eaten in my time by connoisseurs, and oyster fritters (always called flitters in Baltimore) are to be had only at free-for-all oyster roasts and among the wharves."

- H.L. Mencken

Apparently it's been around for a few years, but KB and I went to the Wine Market in Locust Point for the first time last night. I had heard about it from someone I met through work, and apparently it's the pride of Locust Pointillists -- an upscale wine store with an attached restaurant serving delicious, inventive food. That's what it was, and it was really, really, tasty, but it was not a perfect dining experience. Before I get into that, thought, I have to explain that I was roped in because I read on their menu that they serve fried, corn-meal battered oysters, which are the closest things to oyster flitters I've seen on a menu in Baltimore. A bit more literary context from Mencken's essay "Baltimore of the Eighties" (that's the 1880s):

Oysters were not too much esteemed in the Baltimore of my youth, nor are they in the Baltimore of today. They were eaten, of course, but not often, for serving them raw at the table was beyond the usual domestic technic of the time, and it was difficult to cook them in any fashion that made them consonant with contemporary ideas of elegance. Fried, they were fit only to be devoured at church oyster-suppers, or gobbled in oyster-bays by drunks wandering home from scenes of revelry. The most celebrated oyster-houses of Baltimore—for example, Kelly’s in Eutaw Street—were patronized largely by such lamentable characters. It was their playful customer to challenge foolish-looking strangers to wash down a dozen raw Chincoteagues with a half-tumbler of Maryland rye: the town belief was that this combination was so deleterious as to be equal to the kick of a mule. If the stranger survived, they tried to inveigle him into eating another dozen with sugar sprinkled on them: this dose was supposed to be almost certainly fatal. I grew up believing that the only man in history who had ever actually swallowed it an lived was John L. Sullivan.

The Wine Market's oysters were deep-fried, not pan-fried, which KB was able to ascertain on her first bite (I had to ask the waitress), but they were dee-lish, all the same. Just a very murky, salty, savory seafood flavor underneath the batter, and they made you want to eat them in one bite, the way you slurp a raw one right out of the shell. I think I would have been more impressed if they had been battered then pan-fried, but KB had some theory about how doing that would make them limp, or something.

The mushroom fricassee ("just well-seasoned and well-cooked," KB pithily quipped upon tasting them) and the fried green tomatoes with a goat-cheese aioli -- our other two appetizers -- were excellent. Not the type of starters you can eat for a full meal, but substantial, tart, and food that wakes you up with riotous flavors.

We were drinking an Argentine Mendoza, because I thought it might go well with my next course (and because the only other cheap wine that looked was called a "Super-Tuscan," but was, inexplicably, from Umbria), this ribeye, which came with herbed compound butter (served on the side, when it should have been on top of the steak) and mini-Yukon Gold potato pancakes and hash browns and grilled beats, all in a thick jus.

[oh, gaaaawwwd]

This was a great steak, although it came out much redder than the medium-rare I ordered it, so I sent it back. But this thing I liked best about this entree was that it lined up a progression of flavors so complimentary, that I couldn't stop eating it -- I just had to have it, in that same order (steak-herb butter-salty potato-sweet beet-red wine) over and over again. I'm pretty sure I ate more than my share of half the plate before passing it on to KB and trading it for...


[mmmm....]

...head-on jumbo shrimp and grilled peaches served over some very cheesy (almost rissotto-like), very tasty grits. We were on the fence about this one -- KB wanted the seafood stew with fish and mussels, but I talked her out of it because I thought the side, olive crackers, sounded lackluster. And oh how right I was! This dish was brilliant, not only taste-wise, but conceptually. The shrimp-grits pairing gave it a very Southern, almost Cajun-style feel
to the dish. Enjoyed thoroughly.

Here are my grades, overall:

FOOD: A-
Fried green tomatoes are usually solid, and TWM was no exception. The mushrooms were nothing special -- just "well-seasoned, well-cooked," but delicious nonetheless. Oysters weren't mind-blowing, but damn good for the only place in town I know of to get flitters. Steak initially undercooked, but came back on the flipside. Shrimp and grits very creative, very good.

AMBIENCE: B-
We thought this place was going to be a big wine store with a cozy, charming little cafe tucked in the back. It was the opposite. A too-large dining room behind a surprisingly small wine shop. KB thought it was too loud and hard to have an intimate conversation, and the decor was bare-bones artsy-industrial, which I'm not that into because it feels too yuppy (it's why Tapas Teatro is more comfortable a restaurant than Pazo).

SERVICE: B
Both hostess and server were pretty stiff and awkward. Also, the waitress failed the "Which dish is better?" test by failing to steer us towards either of the seafood dishes we were conflicted about, claiming they were both equally good, and not helping at all on that one. I tested her again, asshole that I am, by asking her if the chef had put my whole dish, and not just the meat, back in the oven when I sent it back for more cookin', and she was not as obliging as I thought she'd be.

Baltimore Media Roundup 4/16: Taxes Paid

"i bet if we locked a bunch of monkeys in a room, chained to typewriters, we could come up with better crap than this..."

** So I've decided to include, on the blog, some semi-regular thoughts about local media outlets, because in this age of oh-no-newspapers-are-about-to-die, and nick-denton-is-selling-off-all-his-good-blogs, and why-are-americans-so-stupid-and-ignorant-of-current events, Baltimore actually has a pretty vibrant media scene, and it's one that's worth observing.

Is it just me, or is the Examiner's coverage getting better? First of all, they've re-done their website, although it takes an extra click to the "today's paper" page to actually see their local coverage, rather than sifting through dozens of crap links to stories from MSN and (bewilderingly) papers that they compete with. But I was impressed today with the following stories, at least for a tab that specializes in making up gruesome serial murders:

* The local NAACP takes on an attack of the fiendish, racist BLOB!
* Aaron Cahall, my development coverage counterpart at the E, clocks in rather late on TrendWatch 2008, but at least it's real news.
* And this article about the Columbia-India axis of entrepreneurship is great.

The print edition third issue of the Sun's new tabloid b continues the weirdness with its extensive, abrasive coverage of death, murder, rape, and prostitution, mostly in the form of syndicated Sun news briefs that lack the brilliance that can come with some of the Sun's better reporting, like this exciting play-by-play of a cop shooting in West Baltimore that happened yesterday. Damn, that article really put me in the moment.

But the most interesting thing about b is its main "columnist," Lori Barrett, who is apparently a "blogger," not a reporter, but I guess her work appears in print every day too? So like, I'm reading a printed column, on a piece of low-grade recycled paper, in a printed tabloid product, but just because it's called a "blog," it's supposed to be cooler to me? Because I'm of the internet generation and I don't have time for real columns -- just columns that are called blogs? Is that the idea?

Anyway, she got a lot of crap the other day for calling the Sun's crime reporting inadequate, with nasty comments from an anonymous forum-reader called "Sun crime reporter," and the ever-hilarious taotechuck, from Baltimore Crime, all of whom quite elegantly pointed out what I was getting at in a previous post about b -- that the Tribune company has so little respect for its employees that it fires the experienced, well-paid ones, and replaces them with cut-rate (literally) writers with little to no expertise, who actually rag on the reporters who are left over. It's nuts, I tell ya.

The other weird thing about b is the "heard" page (b doesn't do capital letters), which is usually somewhere around page 14, and includes "what you're writing"-style reader columns, and my personal fav, the "RANTS: READERS SOUND OFF" info-graphic, in which readers send 140 characters or less text messages about what they don't like about life, the city, people, their moms, whatever. Here's an example from today's paper:

"People who feel like they are entitled to things and get bossy and mean about them."

The thing that I'm confused about is, what is the question that prompts these sorts of responses? Is it like, "What kind of people bother you?" or "What do you think there should be a law against?" Because what kind of person is just feeling so damn mad at bossy, entitled people, that they feel compelled to text b about it? It kind of feels like they make up these "rants," the same way they make up the letters to the editor at Blender (and probably other music) magazines. Those magazines have 2.5 month lead times, and they go to print more than a month before they come out. Ever wonder how they got readers to read the previous month's issue and respond to its articles in time for the next issue? That's one of the valuable media lessons I learned while interning there. Hell, I even wrote some of those letters. It was fun.

That's all for now. I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Laurel, in between reporting assignments at Fort Meade and South Baltimore. PEEEEEEEEEEACE.

b-What?

Today is day #2 of existence for the Baltimore Sun's new daily tab, which is succinctly called "b," and has been appearing in orange boxes and the hands of orange-clad hawkers all over downtown. Yesterday and today both, I took copies of b from these folks and read them on my walk to work, which is probably sorta dangerous, but I've come out of it unscathed. I usually do the same thing on Wednesdays, walking to the Board of Estimates meeting at City Hall, with the newest copy of City Paper.

A little background about b. A couple of months ago I wrote an article about the Sun's latest round of buyouts (which you can read on my google pages), in which I reported the launch of b as basically just part of the Tribune Co.'s ongoing efforts to break the union at every one of their papers, especially the Sun. I got in a small bit of trouble over it, though, because the source of my reporting was the fact that b tried to hire me, at a significant pay cut, to write copy for them, and there were some questions about whether what was said to me about the job and the publication was said in confidence. Long story short, I beat the Sun to the chase, using what some considered to be shaky sources, in telling their own employees about b, and the union got mad, gave the business office hell, and they no longer will return my calls seeking comment.

Anyhoo, what I find interesting about the new tab's coverage is that I thought it was going to be a youth-marketed arts & entertainment publication meant to tout Baltimore as a place to live and work while exploring the news here. Instead, today's issue leads with a 2/3-page color photo of police searching for weapons in the weeds behind a rowhouse in Patterson Park, paired with the 42-pt bold headline, "Girl, 14, fatally shot," over a 250-word brief about a recent murder, with a heavily-featured pull-quote from a construction worker who was near the scene, that reads, "I'm done with Baltimore. I've seen more violence here than in New York, and I was there seven years."

WTF?

And it only gets worse. The next 8 or so stories in the first 4 or 5 pages of b are as follows:
* A bizarre "blog" entry by columnist Lori Barrett that veers wildly between details on her experiences working for the wasteful federal government, the ambiguity of Baltimore neighborhood designations, and the proclivity of crime news in local media outlets.
* A two-page cover feature written by Jordan Bartel, who is a nice enough guy and a friend of a friend who I've met a few times, back when he used to be arts ed at the Carroll County Times, about acts of violence posted on YouTube, and how they're just an extension of Jerry Springer style voyeur violence culture.
* The "60 seconds" news brief section, in which 3 out of 4 stories are on rape and murder.
* An AP wire item about tensions in the crabbing industry.
* A Sun short news item about a Parkville gun store that is responsible for selling lots of guns to bad guys who commit murders.
* Another Sun report about a shooting murder in Columbia.
* A Sun short item about last week's fatal West Baltimore crash that killed a 3-year old toddler.

WTF??

Is b obsessed with violence? Why do they think that young people really want to read about murder, rape, and death only? What about the pope's visit today to DC? What about the food shortages? Why do they bury all the A&E stuff (which is all metromix.com wires from Tribune affiliates, anyway) in the back? Is b piggybacking on the popularity of City Paper's "Murder Ink" column, or the snarky blog Baltimore Crime?

Does anybody have a clue about the editorial mission of this tabloid?

Painted Ladies

The neighborhood where I lived throughout college was called Charles Village, and some may even note that I have a sweet Charles Village neighborhoodie that KB got me for my birthday in 2005.

These two pictures are of the 3000 block of Abell Avenue in CV, home to some of the best painted ladies in Baltimore. I took these photos as samples for a book proposal I wrote two weeks ago for a tourguide book to Baltimore. Didn't get the job, but I like these photos.

Look for a bigger post tomorrow about West Baltimore's Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, and some writing I've been doing about it.

King's Legacy, King's Boulevard

"Today we celebrate a win-win-win situation. It's a win for our country, and a win for Baltimore city, and a win for the people who are going to live and work here...I remember when I used to serve on the Poppleton Board back in 1979. Back then the biggest fear was that the University of Maryland would come across Martin Luther King. But then there came some visionaries. And some of them are sitting right behind me. There are visionaries on both sides of MLK."

- U.S. Congressman Elijah Cummings, March 31, 2008

"If you find yourself on 'Martin Luther King Boulevard', run!...I don't care where you live in America, if you're on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there's some violence going on."

- Chris Rock

Last Monday, the University of Maryland, Baltimore, had a big, swanky catered event, complete with cheesy jazz-pop band and pesto-mozzarella finger sandwiches, to celebrate two things: the opening of Building II, and the groundbreaking of Building III at their new west side BioPark.


[breaking ground: mayor sheila dixon, elijah cummings, gov. martin o'malley, sen. ben cardin, and UMB president david j. ramsay]

I've been writing about these developments for the Daily Record, and you can see some of those articles here. But what I wanted to talk about here, on the blog, is a more abstract idea about city planning, and specifically, about physical barriers between people of different race and class, their intent, their development, and their meaning.

Specifically, I'm talking about Martin Luther King Jr., Blvd, a 2-mile, six lane artery that snakes its way downtown from the Mt. Royal cultural district, near the Lyric Opera House and the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, all the way to the area near M&T Bank Stadium, where the Ravens play, and where MLK blends into I-395 South and lulls you into a sense of false security and purposefulness as you drive towards the cesspool that is Washington, D.C.

To the east of this road lie a number of neighborhoods: Mt. Vernon, Westside, Downtown, Ridgely's Delight. To the west lies the vast tract of rowhouses and mostly-African-American neighborhoods known as West Baltimore (too many individual neighborhoods to name). It's the setting for HBO's The Wire. It's the neighborhood H.L. Mencken grew up in. It's where Baltimore's black cultural district once thrived along Pennsylvania Avenue.

The significance of the University of Maryland's hopping across MLK Blvd is that ten, twenty, thirty, even forty years ago (basically, any time since Brown v. Board of Education and white flight), such a thing would never have happened. West Baltimore is black, poor, abandoned, run-down, ghettoized, and full of crime and drugs (ever watch the Wire, anyone?). And MLK Blvd, according to Marxist historian and former Johns Hopkins professor David Harvey, "creates an easily patrolled line of defense between the mass of downtown buildings and low-income and largely African-American communities of West Baltimore.")


[west baltimore rowhouses]

One important piece of Baltimore history that allowed for the UMB BioPark project to go forward was the demolition of the Murphy Homes, a notoriously dangerous high-rise housing project near MLK Jr. Blvd and Franklin Street, which around there becomes MD-40 west, a road that goes through many of West Baltimore's trouble spots (Edmonson Village, Woodlawn) and continues out past the beltway on the Frederick.

Throughout the 1990s, the Murphy Homes were a total hotbed of criminal activity. I read a really interesting story about 'Itchy Man' in the Baltimore Sun, an alleged murderer and drug dealer who once scaled an outer wall of the 14-story project while running from the cops, then hid in a garbage chute for hours while more that 50 cops and FBI agents searched for him, unsuccessfully. But then again, that article was written by Jim Haner, who my boss here at TDR says was the basis for F. Scott Templeton, the fabulist reporter from season 5 of the Wire, which means that it can't entirely be trusted.

Another Sun article, from the day before the Murphy Homes were demolished in 1999, calls Baltimore's public housing "an idea for sheltering the poor born of utopian theories and segregation," citing Le Corbusier's idea of "the flattening of crime-ridden 'cities of horror' and replacing them with 'radiant cities' of high-rises with wide plazas and expressways between them."

MLK Jr. Blvd, and Route 40, for that matter, could definitely be thought of as one of those expressways.

David Harvey, in a discussion about MLK Jr. Blvd and its role as a "strong physical barrier between the University of Maryland medical campus and the tenements," dryly observed, "In a society that is officially against racial discrimination and for democracy, we're increasingly building isolated communities that are often racially discriminatory."

There are over 500 streets named after Martin Luther King Jr. in American cities, mostly in the South, and many of them go through predominantly black neighborhoods. Interesting factoid: Wal-Mart opposed the re-naming of MLK Jr. Blvd in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Another reason to hate Wal-Mart. If only their DVD players weren't so damn cheap...


[the site of BioPark building III, from a nearby parking garage]

What's going to happen, no doubt -- and I say this as a member of the real estate press corps, and it's based on a long period of monitoring housing prices in West Baltimore -- is that several neighborhoods around the UMB development will be gentrified. They include Hollins Market, Union Square, Poppleton, and Pigtown. It's already happening, and seems pretty inevitable, although in each of those neighborhoods there are barriers (bars of ill repute, open-air drug markets, bad schools) that need to be overcome first. The fate of the people who live their now is pretty up in the air. My personal, cynical view, is that it won't be the mixed-income paradise, white and black holding hands and planting community gardens in the medians, that the city wants. But it will likely be better, less violent, and cleaner.

But another issue to think about is the return of HOPE-VI housing, which I blogged about here. In the late 90s, Baltimore knocked down 4 large public housing projects using HUD money, with plans to rebuild them as the type of low-rise, mixed-income, old-fashioned housing personified by Heritage Crossing, the development that replaced Murphy Homes. If a democrat wins the presidency in November, it's likely that the HOPE-VI program will be revitalized, and this sort of thing will be happening more and more.

And so, a week after the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination -- What does it mean that the legacy of that great man's name is tied inextricably to an urban design technique that may, at one point, have been based on good intentions, but now is associated with segregation, ghettos, and poverty?

I don't really have the answer, but it's something I been pondering, y'all.

Cherryblossom Gals and Fluttering Kites

[jeffersonian.]


This past weekend was the optimal weekend to see the cherry blossoms that line the tidal basin in Washington, D.C.

It was, like, prime time to see them.

So lets call it Optimus Prime Weekend.



[blossomin']

It also happened that it was the 42nd annual Smithsonian Kite Festival and there were mad South Asians letting out string, staring at the sky, and generally having a South Asian good time.



[the answer is in the sky]

There were thousands of people swarming the Mall, but I must admit, the kites were not as spectacular as I expected. It did kind of remind me, though, of when we went to Jaipur, the pink city in Rajastan, where all the kids were flying kites from rooftops downtown. Except that wasn't a festival. That was all the time.




[kite sugarhigh]

A few of the kites were good, though.



[mask-kite]



[patriot kites]

And this old codger, who was engrossed, completely, in the Washington Post, while all the kiteness went on behind him.



[grimble grumble gramble]

From the kite thing, we headed over to the flowers, which were way too crowded, but definitely prettier than I remember last year.



[KB smirking]

There were even some very very glamorous people, with fancy cell phones and curled lips...



[ehhh....]

These young ladies, who were dressed like yellow bunnies, I guess? I don't know what they were up to. They passed by while KB and I were having some oat bread and havarti on a blanket by the water. Every dog that passed by wanted to try some of our bread.



[squeak, squeak, squeak...]

And a radiant Amy V-T



[blossom-eyed]

And the crew...



[in front of the ww2 memorial]

Death Set @ Lo-Fi Social Club

[stolenphoto]

Last Thursday night went with Joan, Jon (+1), Bagel, Matt, and L-Hill to the Lo-Fi Social Club, on Charles Street (near North) in Baltimore to see the Death Set play their last hometown show before they go on tour. Awesome, awesome show.

The band is three people (at least live), two of whom are from Syndey, Australia, who relocated some years back to NYC, and now Baltimore, where their style of hyperactive, sugar-rush punk have become a good example of how punk and dance music are becoming bosom buddies once again here in Charm City. The set began with a slow chanting, over a hip-hop beat, of the chorus from "Intermission," but a few moments in, they burst into "Impossible," one of their juvenile-sounding chant-rock songs, then the more hardcore and screamy, "Day in the Wife," and then a great version of "Intermission." They ended with two hit-and-run covers of Operation Ivy's "Bombshell" and Nirvana's "Territorial Pissings". The whole crowd was moving in one of those big sweaty masses of hipsterdom that you see at Floristree shows, or anywhere Dan Deacon or Double Dagger is playing. I was in that mass for a while. No one else had the guts to join me.

The highlight of the show, undoubtably, was the singalong version of "Negative Thinking," (Bagel and I are wild for this song. Wild for it!) and I'll leave you with the contrite, brilliant lyrics here. Check out the Death Set's forthcoming full-length, Worldwide, when it drops later this month....

If I felt cynicism,
I'd wrap it in a blanket of discontentment,
Fuck that!
I'd feel better knowing that I'd decided not to
When you were looking round
You veered to the right
Did you notice that?
And I feel better knowing
That I decided not to
In hindsight, I don't want
To be like the people I've liked.
Whoooo-oh-oh-ooooh....

MP3s of the whole show are here.

South By

[my lester bangs moment on 6th street]

"South By" is what the cool kids call the South by Southwest music festival/conference, or so I'm told. I got back just over a week ago, and thought I'd share some pics/words about it. Most of what I'm posting here already appeared on Baltimore City Paper's NOISE blog, tho I've added some more photos. K's

For me, this year's South by Southwest festival (my first) came with a high risk of terminal illness. Over the course of the two or three days prior to getting on that 5:30 a.m. plane to Austin, every time I looked at the schedule of bands online, I thought I was going to have a heart attack.

Eventually, my girlfriend, with whom I traveled to SXSW, and with whose friendly, boisterous Texan relatives I stayed, sent me this article, which is about how not to go insane when faced with so many really tempting options--for example, choosing your career, what to have for dinner, or whether or not you want to see TechN9ne, No Age, or Gil Mantera's Party Dream to close out Saturday night. That helped.

What we settled on was a roughly outlined plan to see a handful of bands that I had researched on MySpace, plus a few with legitimate buzz, based on a bunch of podcasts and SXSW survival guides gleaned from blogs, and a handful of bands that my girlfriend described as "pretty music," by which she meant bands that are less like the noisy punk bands I enjoy, and more like what would appear on the Six Feet Under soundtrack. Our rationale was, if we see enough of the over-hyped shows, but take in a few random ones as well, we'll be sure to have a good time, not miss out on some good stuff, and not spend our time seeing just one type of music or partying near one particular crew of people.

The plan worked. And I didn't have a heart attack. At least I was fine until I saw how many effing enchilada places and barbecue pits there were. Jesus Christ, Austin food is good.

[k in front of the texas state capital]

THURSDAY: We arrived at 11 a.m. in Austin, picked up at the airport by the first (of many) of my girlfriend's boisterous Texas relatives. We registered at the Convention Center; got press badges and large bags of useless crap, plus a pocket-sized schedule. We ate ribs and brisket at the Ironworks (see above), which were well-cooked, but not the meatiest of meats I've ever had--covered in thick, sweet, deep-South style sauce.

[vw]

That afternoon, we checked into the NPR VIP showcase party at Roux, because--well, because we're VIPs, of course---but also because Vampire Weekend, those reedy-voiced Columbia grads who love scarves, Afrobeat, and the Ramones, were headlining. The band was, in fact, unremarkable, and beyond a crazed look in the eyes of the bopping, smoking-jacketed bassist, its live show was like watching plants grow: entirely indistinguishable from the record. The openers were more impressive.

[bon iver]

Bon Iver, a three-man act led by bearded Wisconsinite Justin Vernon, played songs from For Emma, Forever Ago, a record whose story--he recorded the whole thing alone in a cabin in the woods! And got high and rode tractors all day when he wasn't jamming!--has outgrown the actual music on it, was surprisingly impressive. High vocal harmonies with a clear, icy sheen; strong folky shoegazer stage presence; even some stoner-rock outros that jolted the audience awake after all the prettiness. The ever dorky, ever hipster Swede Jens Lekman, surrounded by three blonde bombshells on cello, violin, and bongos--which added a strange, Warhol garage/ Project Runway type vibe to his show--played a few excellent songs from his upcoming album, Night Falls Over Kortedala.

[Jens Lekman]

Yeasayer, a Brooklyn band that I don't quite understand--is it trying to be TV On the Radio with native American music instead of soul?--sucked, and the Shout Out Louds were a little boring. We missed someone called A.A. Bondy because we went out for grilled avocado tacos at Torchy's on 6^th Street, which were delicious with the hot green salsa.

[green salsa]

That night it was Man Man, who played a packed outdoor show at Cedar Street Courtyard, with plenty of people hooting along with their weirdness, My Morning Jacket trying to be epic at the Austin Music Hall, and a guilty pleasure for me, Dallas's Old 97's rocking tracks from their forthcoming disk--which isn't that good--at Stubb's. Oh, and dinner was at the incomparable Enchiladas y Mas.

FRIDAY: I woke up full of meat and cheese. It isn't the first time, nor would it be the last of the weekend. The Boisterous Texans took us to Cisco's for some increíble huevos rancheros, and then it was off to Minnesota Public Radio's "The Current" showcase near Emo's on Red River Street. There, between annoyingly long sound checks and even more annoying intros by DJs from Public Radio Paradise, we heard a few tunes by M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel, known collectively as She and Him, and I can report that not only is the Elf starlet also extremely cute in person, but her Carol King vocals are like peas and carrots with Him and his lazy, reverbed slide guitar.

[she and him, and him, and him]

Darondo--a septuagenarian soul singer from San Francisco who once opened for James Brown--was an absolute highlight of the festival. The rumor about him is that he was once a pimp, and his gross, sex-crazed persona does nothing to dispel it.

[gross old man, so much soul]

Toothless and wrinkled, he writhed around stage, his pelvis pumping wildly to grooves by Bay-area funk band Nino Moschella, singing songs such as "That's How I Got Over," and "Didn't I?" from his 2006 reissue collection. By the end of it he was on his knees, his narrow chest heaving, and it was awesome.

[i'm more important than billy bragg]

Billy Bragg's solo show--his ninth of the weekend--with its tiresome anti-war protest songs and platitudes about his self-proclaimed "Johnny Clash" style, was enough to drive us over to a park near the Convention Center for the "Aussie Barbecue," which was conveniently without barbecue, but had plenty of free dark beer. We caught the Panics, a decent straight-ahead punk-rock band, and browsed the trade show, which was full of recycled air and Guitar Hero displays.

Dinner at Paradise on 6^th Street was awful, but we filled up on cheap Shiner, watched a bit of the Big East Tournament, and went to that same parking garage where music editor Michael Byrne caught Blaq Starr, Diplo, etc. We got there in time to watch two hairy dudes, who were obviously on happy pills, rubbing their necks all over each other in between spastic dancing to Simian Mobile Disco. Then, after some three-piece suit with a list refused to let us into Nylon magazine's VIP party with the Death Set and Scottie B, we decided that it was time to go see some screamo at La Zona Rosa. Chiodos told the moms in the audience, "I don't give a fuck who's here tonight, because music is music"--and then howled into the mic until half the 13-year-olds there were round-housing and smacking each other. Paramore headlined the event, which was sponsored by mallrat rock t-shirt store Hot Topic, and despite the music, which was predictably giddy and fun and loud, impish lead singer Hayley Williams managed to offend me by giving a bunch of stupid stage speeches about how being a rock star "isn't about acting cool all the time," and that you have to work really hard on things like, oh, I dunno, dying your hair orange.

SATURDAY: This was a day for kings. After watching Australian folkster Chris Pickering play an excellent set of Dylanesque tunes outside of Whole Foods, the Filter magazine showcase at Cedar Street Courtyard was brilliant. We saw Castledoor, an Arcade Fire knockoff from Los Angeles that was actually a lot of fun, then gypsy punk Devotchka rocked some tubas and indie rockers Sea Wolf played another highlight set. Dinner was a serious burger at Dirty Martin's, and then onto the DirectTV Live show featuring Carbon/Silicon, the latest venture from Clash guitarist Mick Jones. For some reason, our press badges got us backstage access to this show, but there was no beer--we heard later that Mick doesn't really party--and we got kicked out of the band's trailer, where we were playing gin-rummy and watching the live feed of Liam Finn playing some autoharp rock next door. Jones and the boys were great--just a really crunching set of cool garage rock that included "War on Culture," and ended with an extended version of their fist-pumping single "The News."

[dirty's]

After that, it was all Austin music, all night. Patrice Pike, who we were told is "the next Janis Joplin," was no such thing at Antone's, where she played a set of mom-rock straight from the Ally McBeal soundtrack. But over at Habana Calle 6 Patio, however, we made up for it with a three excellent local bands: Lemurs, Brazos and White Denim. The latter was a definite treat. Featured February in Rolling Stone, the trio plays a type of spastic prog-punk with looped, melodic guitar lines, tortured blues vocals, and really charismatic, thunderclap drumming from Josh Block. If it sounds just a tad like I'm describing Baltimore's own Ponytail, it might be because they reminded me of one another, only White Denim has less chirping from its singers and more Oi band shouting. I couldn't hear much by the end of it.

Before we left the city, we had burgers at Hut's, terrible barbecue at County Line, delicious "Elvis Special" enchiladas at Chuy's, superior ice cream at Amy's, the best barbecue I've ever had at Coopers (in Llano), and misread the schedule for a Wye Oak radio appearance on Sunday. Now if I can just confirm that I don't have colon cancer.

On a rainy Monday, we were lent an SUV belonging to one of the Boisterous Texan relatives and we drove out to Llano, home of Cooper's, George W. Bush's favorite barbecue joint.



[the pit at cooper's]

We had coffee then some meat with the mayor of Llano, named Roger and a boyhood friend of K's dad, a Texas native and Austinite at heart. Then we drove back to Austin by way of Castell, home of the Leifeste clan, from whose loins K sprang, generations and generations ago. Basically every street was called "Leifeste Lane" or "Leifeste Court," and we got to see the crossing on the Llano River where K's G-G-G-Grandfather supposedly baptized the Injuns into good Methodists. Most of the ranches down there had Leifeste signs up too, that looked like this'n...



["i'm going west, texas teardops in my eyes..."]

At the Castell general store, we bought postcards and stamps, but none of the taxidermed chickens or mesh baseball caps that we should have. Oh well.



[general store in trailer]

The Trouble in Mt. Vernon

[monument square's pride, held captive]

Hombre, I know it's been like 6 months since I last rapped at ya, but things have been busier than Eliot Spitzer on a Saturday in Amsterdam around here. I'm living in Baltimore now, have started a new job as a development reporter at The Daily Record, a small business/legal newspaper downtown, and I've been running around like crazy doing freelance, moving in/out of houses, traveling (Austin, Kansas City).

I'm going to try to write more on this thing, especially because I don't think I do enough writing outside of my regular dayjob work, and also because Carey has been bugging me about it. So for starters, here's an observation with some current events and personal relevance.

There's trouble a-brewin' in Mt. Vernon. That is, for the unanointed, the Mt. Vernon section of Baltimore, a beautiful, historic neighborhood in central Baltimore with a ton of pretty old rowhouse mansions, restaurants, apartment buildings, and centered around Washington Square, a big public park that runs in four directions out from the circular intersection of Charles Street and Monument Place. In the middle, of course, is the famous statue of George Washington, perched on top of a 178-foot Doric column. The surrounding four-piece park is filled with green grassy space, benches, fountains, and generally elegantly-designed public space where people walk their dogs, wait for buses, eat picnics, read, etc. In the summer, the local college radio station, WTMD, puts on monthly outdoor concerts there. When it's warm, a lot of homeless people sleep there. Or spend all day there.



[see it in the distance?]

Anyway, a few weeks back, as part of the Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square art project, a joint venture between MICA and the Walters Art Gallery, which is putting on a totally-sweet sounding exhibit all about MAPS, some MICA student put up a gold-painted fence all around all four public park sections, effectively barring entrance to regular park-goers.

This work of "art" has gotten a ridiculously hugely unnecessary amount of ink in the local media, and I don't really have strong feelings about it, because (a) it's only up until March 29th, (b) I think if the idea is to make people appreciate public space more than they already do, a less-used public space probably should have been selected, and (c) the weather's only been tolerable for about a week or so now, so no one is really using the park anyway, aside from the dogs and the bums.



[good fences make...]

But here's what's really astonishing: the retards who spend hours (and believe me, it's hours, because I asked them) protesting this project, on the grounds that it's "exclusionary," it's "rich-kid art," and that it's "shameful." Seriously, the other day, some guy was standing at the corner of Charles and Center streets during rush hour, which is a spot usually occupied by a guy dressed like and posing like the hooded torture victim at Abu Ghraib with a bunch of quaker peace protesters around him, holding a sign that said, "Shame on MICA and the Walters for this fence crap." People were actually honking as they drove by.




[fools gold]

So every day, when I walk from work to Washington Square to catch the Peabody/JHU shuttle home, I've been noticing the goings-on on Monument Place, and as much as I tried to resist it, the other day, I just had to talk to these fools. I mean, what are their lives like? Who has the time to daily protest an art project that has such miniscule impact on anybody's life? The conversation went something like this:

ME: So how many hours do spend out here, typically, per day?

GUY WITH SIGN: About an hour and a half, maybe two hours. As much time as I can, after work.

ME: And what does that mean, exactly, "Bad Art"?

GWS: Huh?

ME: Your sign says, "Help, I'm Being Held Captive by Bad Art." What is "bad art"?

GWS: It's art like this.

ME: No, I know you don't like the fence. But what makes art good or bad?

GWS: It has, you know, a bad aesthetic.

ME: What does that mean? What's a "bad aesthetic"? How is it different from a "good aesthetic"?

GWS: It's just, you know, my opinion.

There was this loud-mouth guy with his t-shirt tucked in and a cowboy hat walking around, yelling "As far as I'm concerned, this fence is vandalism!" over and over again and taking pictures of the guy with the sign. As I walked away from these two jokers, I heard the sign guy laugh and say, "It's funny to me how seriously people take this." And I thought, yeah, you're right, because I'm the guy who spends two hours in a sandwich, and not the one who just asked you what you mean by your protest. Oh wait, I'm not. That's you.

Some people. Just look at this blemish on the fine, fine, Washington Square landscape....



[first meth]