But who wants this town to look like the Inner Harbor?

Some thoughts from a write up in Esquire, which seems timely, since I am currently re-watching the Wire.

last of the tight wiggers

Come support your local white rap scene with at least a modicum of self-aware humor.



Mickey Free will be performing at hipsta-stomping ground, and home of the amazing Elvis pancake, Golden West Cafe tomorrow night.

ok

Not trying to keep Bmore bashing, it's just that I laughed so hard (out loud nonetheless) when I read this:



Surely we can do better than "a blank area in the national consciousness"?

on learning to cope with editorial input

An ego is a fragile thing.

But don't dish it out if you can't take it.

BaltiHate

I know this blog’s title contains the word reverie, which most English speakers consider to be a fairly pleasant, upbeat word, but today I want to talk about the darker episodes in which most of our lives are spent. The world is a nasty place kids, and we’ve all got to put up with the bad much more frequently than we get to enjoy the good, so today I want to talk about something we can all relate to in one way or another: Hate. But more specifically, I want to talk about the purple and orange tinted, natty-bo and crab cake flavored, chain smoking and damn hard working Hate, that permeates from every pore of this city that so loves to refer to itself as charming.



I want to discuss the sort of hate that makes it completely socially acceptable to loudly disrupt an entire bar every single time some man on the television running with a ball does something you deem worthy of shouting and pounding the table over. Because hey, it’s football season, and any body foolish enough to venture out to any bar should have heeded the warning inherent in the fact that there are NO BARS in this entire city without televisions. I’d like to talk about the sort of douchebaggery that causes astoundingly massive amounts of people who fail to notice that if they parallel park less than four feet away from the car in front of them, MORE CARS CAN PARK ON THAT STREET. I want to consider the sort of slow burning and misdirected rage that inspires an Olympic gold medal winning swimmer to think that a casual phone snap of his visage is grounds for threatening a girl half his height that he will “knock you to the ground bitch.” And let’s not forget the quiet seething that might cause a buzz-cut, and cargo-shorted, thirty something man to regale an audience with a tale of drunken bar brawling masquerading as literary finesse whose sole moral is to punch home the fact that all the “scenesters” running around station north today owe their brilliantly commercialized and soft existence to the original bad-asses who paved the way for the burgeoning Baltimore music scene by getting into knife fights with homeless men outside of the Ottobar. You know, before it was “cool and mainstream.” And of course there’s the sort of animosity that can only truly find its release in a crowded impound station after a Raven’s game and subsequent Fed Hill towing raid where self-proclaimed “hard working” denizens can lament how the whole unfortunate situation must have been caused by “the Democrats yo, they tax the air you breathe, man.”



I could go on, of course. I could go on until not one of you cared to keep reading, and I had exorcised myself right into a blackout over the insufferable and grotesque pointlessness of it all. But I’m not going to do that; not to you, my minuscule following of readers, and not to myself. Instead, I’m going to attempt to shake off this months-long avoidance party and do my best to find new things that aren’t hate-obsessed, or sports-related. And I’m writing about my aspirations here, dear readers, to attempt to encourage you to do the same. I implore you to find (or start) other Baltimore blogs that aren’t solely concerned with bashing anything pleasant or new or different in this town, especially non-locals. I encourage you to give Erik a break, and make comments on Midnight Sun that aren’t completely dumb (grammar, whaa?), irrelevant (Bad Religion has nothing to do with Matt & Kim), or spitefully humorless (anything anyone writes about Justin Beiber is meant to be somewhat sarcastic). Maybe if we started being slightly less knee-jerk defensive, and taking ourselves a little bit less seriously, others might be inspired to do the same. (...)



Well, maybe at least we can all feel a little better about the whole thing. I’m guessing on some level that’s all that really matters.

extracuriculars

Feel the Hate, Charmers.

I know I've been neglectful, but we've all got to start back somewhere. More on hate to come.

photograph locally

As I was too busy dragging myself through last Saturday's torrid heat on the Epic Misadventure that is apartment hunting in Baltimore (more on that later) to actually make it to Hon Fest this year, I was looking for a good source for a visual recap to quench my summer thirst for shticky trashiness. Luckily, a friend pointed me in the direction of glorious local photographer John Waire, whose pictures from Hampden last weekend made me simultaneously sorry I had missed the festivities, yet not actually feel that bad about it. Something inside me can't help but think these shots might be better than the real deal.