Opening day

Before violent (and then brisk) spring weather returned to Baltimore yesterday, nature bestowed a few short hours of warm temps to Camden Yards as the Orioles got off to a winning start in 2006 by defeating the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, 9-6. (As I have said for a few days now, the battle for fourth place in the AL East has been joined.) Twenty-two-year-old lefty phenom Scott Kazmir started for the Rays, impressing with his fluid motion, but labored through the first two innings, throwing over sixty pitches and opening the door for the hometown ten. O’s starter Rodrigo Lopez was typically erratic, struggling at times but pitching well enough for the win. God bless Melvin Mora, and sweet-swinging rookie Nick Markakis (who made a ninth-inning appearance as a defensive replacement in right field)—things may never look this rosy for the rest of the season.

In some parts of Mobtown, Opening Day is a traditional holiday, the kind where old (and not-so-old) ladies hang decorations on the front of their house, or in the workplace. So it’s not as unusual as it might be that, while walking through the union cafeteria on Monday morning—I work in a large aerospace firm with a manufacturing facility—folks were stringing up black-and-orange crêpe paper, as well as large baseball cutouts, from the ceiling; covering buffet tables in white paper; and preparing for mass quantities of hot dogs with all the fixin’s.

This also marks the opening of the 2006 season for ffactory, whose proprietor has been laboring under the thumb of the man for far too long. Play ball!

Bawlamer happenings

Connery and Hedren

A while back I wrote a little piece on Hitchcock’s Marnie, and how it was filmed on a little street in SoBo; in the comments, there was a short discussion on how parts must’ve been filmed on a sound stage, and other vagueries. Well, ff received an email yesterday from one Mark D. Phelps, who lived on Sanders Street when the movie was being fashioned. From Mr. Phelps’s note:

I grew up on Sanders Street in the 60’s and vividly remember the excitement of the filming. One time during the shooting I ran out of my house and up the street and was screamed at by the men in charge. We were all instructed to stay indoors and keep our front doors closed. Of the photos you published of the street, only one is the real street, the view from high up (filmed from the roof of a house at the top of the street on Riverside Avenue). The others are from a sound stage. How can you tell? Look at the steps. In those days the white steps were cheap wooden and hollow—you could crawl under them to hide if you were small enough. You can see the hollow area in the high shot. In the close-ups the steps are solid as if they were marble. … [T]he backdrop of the ship was totally fabricated and the subject of much consternation by the residents of south Baltimore when the film was released because it looked so fake. They covered up a dilapidated factory and a parking lot and inserted a huge ship at the end of the street.

(Thanks for writing, Mark!)

And then there’s this IM transcript, courtesy of a ffriend, reporting from his Hampden Estate on the goings-on in our little Appalachian burg.

Stalker: On Roland Ave, down toward 34th St., a couple of rednecks are dressing a couple deer. The skins are in bloody piles on the sidewalk.
honeyworsted: NO WAY!!
Stalker: The deer are tied to the fucking porch rails.
honeyworsted: FLICKR IT!!
Stalker: It's like the end times.
Stalker: They'll skin me.

honeyworsted: so are they like on their porch?
Stalker: No, they're standing on the ground, and the deer are hanging de-skinned from the white pickets.
Stalker: They're like flesh wreaths.
honeyworsted: wow
honeyworsted: wow
honeyworsted: we live in a city!!
Stalker: No, we live in Hampden.
Stalker: Fuck I'm gonna go see what I can do. Be back in 10 minutes.
honeyworsted: you should call the cops

Stalker: Well they weren't really friendly.
Stalker: I walked past and there were two little kids watching it.
Stalker: And I doubled back and stared at it for a second.
Stalker: One of the meat wreaths is now just a couple of leg shanks hanging from the railing.
Stalker: And one of the rednecks says, "Vegetarian, huh?"
Stalker: And his much taller and meaner seeming buddy laughed.
honeyworsted: hahaha
Stalker: And I said, "Naw, I just don't usually see things like that every day."
Stalker: And the taller and meaner redneck says, "You know, there really aren't that many rednecks in Baltimore anymore."
honeyworsted: couldn't they dress the deer in the woods??
Stalker: And then their "old ladies" came out on the porch.
honeyworsted: anymore??
Stalker: And I was outnumbered and outgunned.
honeyworsted: they sound kind of proud
Stalker: No, you bring the carcass back to your cave for dressing, unless you go to a dressing station out wherever you shot the defenseless fucking thing.

honeyworsted: fascinating!!
honeyworsted: bizarre!!
honeyworsted: so no pics huh?
Stalker: No, it's too dark, I would have had to have gotten along with them, but they were on the defensive. They're only done butchering one of them, if you want to go watch #2.
honeyworsted: does it look like they know what they're doing?
Stalker: Oh, they've killed and skinned before.
honeyworsted: isn't there some kind of law?
Stalker: I'll keep an eye out on Sundays and see if they do it again.
Stalker: I think it's disturbing the peace, maybe.
Stalker: It's gruesome as hell.
honeyworsted: there's got to be some kind of sanitation/health violation
Stalker: They got a hose!

Baltimore’s best bookstores

Woman with kangaroo, from the
September 1963 National Geographic

In our faire towne, there are too few bookstores to award the titular honor to any establishment—we need more, and better bookstores, dammit—but I wish to plug two local places that don’t get their fair share of praise: the Book Thing and Daedalus Books (in Columbia, but who’s counting?)…

A little over a week ago, I visited the Book Thing for the first time since their relocation in the spring to the former home of Micro Records Company, a microfiche storage service, at 3001 Vineyard Lane in Waverly. (To readers from outside of Charm City: the Book Thing is a clearinghouse for donated books, with an unusual wrinkle—they charge nothing for their wares.) The new, spacious digs make a BT outing much less frustrating than one to the old space on the alley near 27th Street; on the rainy Sunday I stopped by, some plastic and a few trash cans protected the bookshelves from a leak in the roof, but the place was open, cozy, and patronized by only a few browsers. I collected two medical books, several old Christian Science prayer books (with handwritten inserts and notations), and an armful of old National Geographic magazines, culled for unusual imagery (see sample to the left).

From Harold Lloyd's
Hollywood Nudes in 3D!

Daedalus has long been a personal favorite of mine; they specialize in quality remaindered books, and stock a great number of volumes from university presses at ridiculously low prices, usually at five to seven dollars each. In addition, there are any number of excellent visual sourcebooks, from the serious to the silly—on a visit earlier in the week, I scored codices ranging from The English Garden: A Social History to Harold Lloyd’s Hollywood Nudes in 3D!, a collection of color photographs snapped by silent film actor and amateur photographer Harold Lloyd, who had access to an early camera that took stereoscopic pictures (to make your own, go here). The coffee-table book comes with 3-D glasses that, aptly, look like Harold’s. A sample—from a series of models in Monument Valley (!)—is pictured to the right.

Baltimore cinema: Marnie

Hitchcock's much-admired Marnie (1964), starring Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery, was never one of my favorites, but when I mention it to Mobtown residents, I often get blank stares. Feast your eyes on these stills (courtesy of Hitchcockmania, an amazing font; the Marnies are here) for a rendition of SoBo and the harbor in the sixties. (It was filmed on block-long Sanders Street, south of Federal Hill and just to the west of Southern High.)

Cut

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.

—Hamlet, 1.5.76

I’m, alas, just about buried but not too far away from sending Cut—issue ten of Link—to the printer.

My fellow editors (Stephen Janis, Mark Durant, and Janet Little) and I have been dealing with the usual headaches that come from putting out a small, independent journal, but there are pleasures, too: this time, in the form of essays from journalist Eric Trump (on voluntary amputation) and medievalist Kerr Houston (on the cinematic grammar of jump cuts, and how they’ve been quickly absorbed into our visual culture).

I’ll have more to say about their work soon—I’ve been working up a piece on Houston, whose work will interest anyone reading ff—but, in the meantime, the issue previews at the Baltimore Book Festival over 23-25 September in Mount Vernon. Mark your calendars for that Saturday, 24 September, when yours truly and the rest of the gang will be hosting a launch party at the Contemporary Museum, downtown, from 9p until midnight. Alcohol will be served, a dj will be spinning, and Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture will still be hanging. I hope to see y’all there!

A visit to Greenmount cemetery

I seek out quiet, contemplative places in the city when I want to slow things down.

Henry Jacob headstone; other photos
from Greenmount to be found here.

As time passes, places that were once conducive to solace stop working (the Baltimore Museum of Art was once a quiet place to visit, a bit off the beaten track, but it is no longer as cozy, a requirement for peace; Pimlico racetrack used to be a favored place as well, but all romance is gone). A few current favorites:

• The pier southwest of Hendersons Wharf, on Fells Point: when the city is hot, so hot that it is impossible to get comfortable, I sit out on the harbor, away from the business side of the inn, to do a little bit of work, and catch the occasional breeze;



• Saint Casimir church, on Canton square: the cathedral is especially beautiful during evening services in the wintertime, when the electric halo of Mary is lit, but it is also peaceful on hot summer days, cooled only by the whirr of electric fans;

• The upper quadrangle at Johns Hopkins, in front of Gilman Hall: a function of the many years I have spent here throughout my life, JHU is familiar, comforting, and a little bit green, a rarity in Mobtown;

• The grass at Fort McHenry, another rare place where it is possible to remain cool on a hot day; and

• The upper floors at the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
  

(Larger image to be found here.)

Perhaps my favorite place, however, is Greenmount cemetery, located in a troubled neighborhood in east Baltimore. Yet it's resolutely safe, peaceful, and beautiful; a wonderful place to walk, look, reflect, or read. I uploaded a few snaps from my visit on Saturday (I napped under a tree on the beautiful spring day), and include a few links to other pictures, including satellite imagery (plus directions!), courtesy of Google; A. Aubrey Bodine's exceptional photo of the gothic cathedral overlooking the graveyard [inset, right]; a second image of the cathedral in the snow from the Maryland Historical Society; and an 1848 print of the pastoral Green Mount cemetery gate and environs, number 182 of the Pratt's Cator Collection of Baltimore Views.

Viral marketing

It began with the billboard in a rundown neighborhood on Greenmount Avenue

BovineUnite.com billboard, just north of 26th St.
on Greenmount Av. at the railroad overpass.
(For large image, click here. )

[inset] and the moneyed website (the splash demands to know whether visitors are cow or human; Homo sapiens are admonished to exit immediately). Then, stationed in front of the Fells Point post office on Tax Day, a costumed Holstein-Friesian was doling out Milk Duds (in something that looked like the old box, no less) to puzzled passersby.

The handsome constructivist-inspired site doesn't divulge what's going on, but promises news on the 5th of May: stay tooned.