The Mobbies Awards @ Creative Alliance Tonight

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Ye Ole Light for All is throwing its annual blog awards party tonight. While we sat out the contest this year we do want to take a moment to acknowledge that it’s a good, fun thing and the annual party is always a nice chance to come and talk face to face with a lot of local people who you maybe only know from online in their various capacities. Party starts at 6:30 tonight. Don’t be late because it only lasts a couple hours. Besides, if you are late you might miss out on an epic weatherman freakout or something.

Here at the Baltimore Chop we like to take Mobbies time as an opportunity for a sort of year-in-review. As we look back over previous Mobbies day posts, each one just seems to get a little more depressing and this one isn’t exactly happy. There’s no getting around it: 2015 has been a bad year in Baltimore. We wouldn’t presume to deserve a blogging award this year because we’ve barely even done any blogging. What writing we did do was overwhelmingly negative, and most of it can be found combined into one long super-post on Medium.

Tonight’s party has a Back to the Future theme, which is meant to tie-in with the recent buzz around the date portrayed in Back to the Future 2 rolling around on the calendar. When we think of the theme we can’t help but reflecting on the morbid return of the 1990’s and 300+ murders in the city. As the Sun reported recently, this represents an all-time high in the per capita murder rate. Sheila Dixon is running for mayor. The Red Line is history. Schools are closing down. There’s a giant scandal in public housing. Lawyers can’t convict dangerous gang members. This jail lawsuit is older than we are, and the jail is still terrible. Kendall Fenwick was murdered in cold blood in his own home by drug dealers bringing back memories of the Dawson Family. Dirt Bikes continue to be a menace to public safety. The number of vacant houses is actually on the rise. We could go on and on about Baltimore problems all day without even mentioning Freddie Gray and the rioting.

It seems to the Chop that almost all of our media consumption this year (which is a lot) has been about how terrible life in Baltimore is. Everyone seems to want to have ‘a conversation’ or ‘a dialogue’ about ‘how to start healing’ etc etc. Whether it’s print, radio, TV or digital all this talk about Baltimore’s troubles invariably falls somewhere between the somewhat dissonant to the dismissible-out-of-hand.

But today, on Mobbies day, the holiest day on the blogging calendar we want to focus on a particular hard-luck story which is near and dear to the Chop’s heart.

The New York Times and the Atlantic both have stories out this week about how banks in Baltimore City are much, much more likely to extend mortgage loans to white buyers in white neighborhoods. As the Sun points out in separate articles this is not the case in Baltimore County, and black homeowners locally fared much worse than whites during the explosion of the housing bubble.

Now, we all know that the city won a very large settlement from Wells Fargo over racist lending practices during the subprime craze. Rather than use it for mortgage relief for victimized homeowners or as a bulwark against further racist lending practices, the city wants to use that money to demolish vacants. While that practice itself is debatable, it is not debatable that deconstruction of vacants is a better alternative and that demolition does nothing to help homeowners affected by subprime steering.

And about those ‘further racist lending practices’ we just mentioned- the Times also reports this week that good old-fashioned 1939 redlining is still very much alive and well in the nation’s bank branches. Even M&T Bank, a name very well known here in Charm City recently settled its own racist lending suit.

M&T and Wells Fargo are certainly household names around the Chophouse. As we told you in the Spring, Wells Fargo holds the mortgage (for which we’re overpaying) and our experience trying to refinance through M&T was a months-long headache which ended with them sending a white home inspector into our black neighborhood and undervaluing the house by tens of thousands of dollars. (We also mentioned coming in for extra “random” scrutiny from Allstate which we believe was due to the home’s location.)

Since we last wrote, we’ve had the good fortune to be able to join a credit union, and so decided that we’d like to try once again to refinance our loan, this time with an institution that doesn’t have a long track record of screwing consumers, and especially poor and black ones. So on Tuesday we got all of our documents together. Oh, about 80 pages or so, you know, pay vouchers and credit card accounts and insurance documents and W2’s and all of that fun stuff. And we put on our little shirt and slacks and tried to look real nice, as one does when one goes to ask for a loan.

We get in the car and we go down to the Navy Federal branch in Glen Burnie. It’s our first time here so we stand near the front door and wait for the front desk man to direct us on whom to see and how to begin the process. We’re in line about 30 seconds when we see a guy come through the door in an oversized sweatsuit with the hood up and a cold-weather type ski mask. He stepped right in front of us and the front desk guy even said hello to him, to which he also replied hello as he looked at the floor and moved back towards the tellers.

“Why the hell is he saying hello to this guy like a regular customer?” we thought to ourselves. “He’s clearly about to rob this bank.” In the next instant we thought “Oh fuck! He is going to rob this goddamned bank isn’t he? Yeah, he is when he reaches the tellers in about two seconds. Right now would be a good time to walk out the door because once he pulls a gun out it’ll probably be too late for that. And hey, if we’re wrong we just come back in 20 minutes and do our banking then, right?”

So we stepped out the front door and went to sit in the car. And a couple minutes later here come the police. Lots of police. The guy did try to rob the bank, of course, and he was caught. Now as if we didn’t have enough headaches to deal with trying to finance a house in a black neighborhood in a racist system, we get to be recorded as a witness to a bank robbery as well. Paired with our neighbor attempting a murder and a gang of kids trying to jump us on our bicycle this is the third violent crime we’ve come in contact with in the last two weeks.

In 2015 when you go out of town or meet a visitor to the city they invariably ask “Is Baltimore really as bad as they say it is?”

Our answer now: “It’s worse.”

The Chop Gets a Car

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It was around this time four years ago that the Chop decided to ditch our car and get around exclusively by bike, bus, and any other method besides a privately owned car. When we wrote about it at the time we stressed that we were entering a period of being car-free and not car-less. Recently that period came to an end when we had the good fortune to inherit an old Honda Civic from a family member.

Now that it’s over, how did it go? Well, the results were somewhat mixed. In our case, we don’t have a regular 9-5 commute, or any commute at all to deal with. In four years virtually all of our trips were for pleasure or to run errands. For us the toughest reality of being car-free was regular grocery shopping, but this is a problem easily solved with the nearest supermarket half a mile away. Getting caught in the rain and flat bike tires are very real downsides as well, but are mitigated by certain hassles unique to car ownership.

Overall, getting around Baltimore by bike was not as bad as we thought it might be, and not as bad as we imagine most people believe it to be. We’re definitely going to continue biking to make in-town trips in good weather.

In four years of riding we’ve not been involved in any accidents, and have had very few close calls. We assumed that fighting with the drivers of Baltimore would be a daily occurrence and are pleased to report that it hasn’t happened on more than an occasional basis. Interestingly we’ve found that some of the very worst drivers with the least regard for safety are cab drivers, bus drivers, and other so-called professional drivers who seem to think they own the road because they use it so much. Oblivious suburbanites are out there as well, but they’re surprisingly easy to spot and avoid, and while obliviousness is dangerous it’s not quite as bad as full on aggressive malicious driving.

If you’re thinking about biking in Baltimore, we’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that There are some geographic limits on what makes for an easy cycling trip. The good news is that most of the city is within those limits. We’ve found that about 8 miles each way is the roughly the limit of what a normal person would want to ride to get somewhere. A quick-and-dirty guide for the limits of an easy/moderate cycling commute would be as follows:

North:Cold Spring Lane
South: Potee St. Bridge
East: Haven Street
West: Gwynn’s Falls Park/Leakin Park.

Of course, while it’s geographically possible to reach Leakin Park, there aren’t too many routes to get there that could be described as pleasant and fun cycling routes. Unfortunately we’ve found that people pose a much greater danger to cyclists than cars in Baltimore. We wrote in April 2014 about the assault on cyclist Michael Bowman, which we believe was at least in part motivated by race and class. If you ride a bike here, you are a target. period. A year and a day after we wrote that post Freddie Gray died in his hospital bed and race relations in Baltimore City have gone from bad to worse while violent crime and murder have spiraled out of control.

As we wrote this weekend on Tumblr we were recently chased by a group of black teens twice within a 24 hour period. In our case we were not caught, but nor were we surprised. Unlike Michael Bowman we are well aware that a group of teens is a threat and we were, and remain willing to fight back. While not a rich man, we routinely carry a new iPhone, a very nice watch, a wallet and the bike itself, which combined might cost as much as $3000 to replace, as well as a lot of credit which could potentially be compromised in a robbery. Knowing what we know and having what we have, we’re not going to be as forgiving as Bowman was- we’re going to fight pretty fucking hard pretty fucking quickly to keep what we’ve worked to earn.

Unfortunately, it’s become pretty clear to us over the last four years that the whole series of lifestyle factors and principles commonly referred to as ‘New Urbanism’ is mostly bullshit. They are nice ideas and all, and we wish that the world worked in such a way that we (collectively) could apply these principles to cities as a whole- but we don’t live in that world. We live in the real world where selecting a neighborhood checking all or even most of those boxes costs a shitload of money and is a privilege reserved for those making significantly more than the median income, at least in the long term. For the rest of us, the principles of urbanism take a back seat to the rules of the street which are the same as they’ve ever been.

Over the last year or so we’ve been taking part in a group bike ride on Thursday nights. We’re not going to be doing that anymore. Long rides are fun and we’ve really enjoyed the chance to meet other cyclists, but looking at it objectively it’s just too dangerous. You simply can’t find a route that covers enough miles without venturing into neighborhoods that are flat-out unsafe. Besides being chased last week, we had one cyclist blow a tire in west Baltimore. It’s not that no one would have stayed with him if he’d asked, but he did end up alone after dark on foot in an unfamiliar neighborhood. There were a few other things that night that gave us pause, including another dubious personal safety decision as well as a rider running a stop and nearly getting hit by a car. The last one we went on in the Spring saw a rider getting hit by a thrown object in Brooklyn. We’ve also heard of a few other incidents on the ride, and the crime problems and headaches associated with Baltimore Bike Party are well-known and ongoing. We gave up on that ride two years ago because of safety concerns and municipal hassles. We had thought about volunteering for Bike Party, but why bother? It’s just not fun to us anymore.

So no more group rides for us, and no more riding questionable routes on our own. The Chop’s neighborhood is bad enough, thanks. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Speaking of not having nice things, as you all know by now we’re not getting the Red Line built. Instead we’re getting an overhaul of the bus routes. We personally have absolutely zero confidence in Larry Hogan or anyone else in power or as a consultant to make anything resembling a decent system. As was reported recently, they want to cut the number 8 line, which is not only one of the city’s busiest, but also happens to run right by the Chop’s house.

We sat down this morning to take a full look at the new plan and what did we find on the MTA website? Just a little PR style copy and a few unimpressive static maps that are confusing and are a turn-off even to someone like us, who is genuinely interested in the changes. They couldn’t even get the online maps right, forget about the real-life system. But even though it’s bound to be a pointless headache for us we’re going to go to today’s 4:00-6:30 pm meeting at 201 W. Preston Street in room L1. Info on 7 upcoming meetings here.

(We want to pause here and say publicly that while the 200 Block of West Preston Street looks fine to the casual observer, it is in our opinion one of the very most dangerous blocks in the whole city. Here’s why- It is also at the nexus of some of our racial and class fault lines. Being in the middle of a large state office complex, after 5:00 there are very few ‘eyes on the street’ as Jane Jacobs and the Urbanist crowd like to say. There’s also a subway stop there, and a light rail transfer a block away. Anyone coming up out of this subway station is a sitting duck for criminals waiting to get the jump on them, who then have all of the worst of West Baltimore to escape into just one block to the west. Whether it’s the Rite Aid clerk who was shot recently, the jogger who was raped at gunpoint, this guy a few comments down in the thread on Reddit, or the other guy who was relieved of his wallet and phone at Symphony Center not long before that, this is a very dangerous area and fits what we see as an ongoing pattern of criminals moving between the ‘two Baltimores’ to find victims.)

We have our own ideas about how the bus system should function in Baltimore. For one, each line should have fewer stops. There’s no goddamned reason at all why, for instance, there should be stops on Charles street at 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, etc. Most busy inner city routes have a stop on every single fucking block. If you can’t walk half the distance between 25th street and 28th street you need to be using Mobility service anyway. Fewer stops would speed service, reduce wear and tear and fuel use, make stops safer, make stops cleaner and easier to maintain, and create more street parking.

Also, we should ditch the circulator entirely and replace it with a short-run system of MTA buses. These buses could run on the same lines as longer routes, but terminate at a certain radius from downtown and be marked as 1F or 3F or 8F, (as in 8Free) sort of in the way that route 12 duplicates service but terminates at North Avenue. The circulator is a money loser and this would provide much the same service with more flexibility among drivers and the fleet. There is also the perception that the circulator is a toy for tourists and yuppies, which isn’t entirely unfounded.

As long as we’re getting rid of entire bus systems, we should do away with the five or six different college buses clogging the streets. The Hopkins buses and shuttles are the worst of these, and have tried to run us down in a bike lane multiple times. If we create a new system of buses to replace and improve on the circulator, it’s not too much to ask Hopkins people to step outside of their precious bubble into the real world and do something as simple as ride a free bus up Charles street or across Monument. For those using shuttles at Loyola and Notre Dame, it would be easy enough to find a way to subsidize a monthly pass for their riders, as a free system wouldn’t likely reach that far.

But whatever happens, we hope the MTA will realize that the needs of everyday transit riders and the wants and wishes of the new urbanists are two completely separate things. The needs of everyday riders must come first in this process, because they are the ones who are stuck with the results. Riding buses in Baltimore has always been and remains by turns annoying, inefficient, unsanitary, unsafe and unpleasant. Our system is not even close to being in a position to attract so-called choice commuters, and we have no reason to believe it will be after an overhaul.

Now that we own a car again, our bus riding days are over, once and for all. Even as someone who is familiar with the whole system, knows how to get around and has a Charm Card to make fares easy, we won’t ride. If we’re going downtown to a big event we’d rather pay $20 for parking than ride a bus. If we blow a tire on the bike far from home, we’d rather call a cab than wait forever for a transfer. Hell, the last time we were on a bus it was so uncomfortable and exasperating we got off well before our stop and walked some three miles home. Why bother being crowded into standing room and lurching to a stop every block when we’ve got two good feet?

And that’s a problem not only for transit, but for every aspect of city life. Anywhere we see an opportunity to get involved, whether it’s today’s meeting or Bike Party or trying to clean up the liquor store on the corner or volunteering to build Kendall Fenwick’s fence. We’ve come around to a sort of fatalistic thinking summed up by the phrase ‘Why Bother?’

Why bother volunteering for a mayoral candidate when we don’t really believe that any of them will bring real improvement? Why bother building that fence or doing the 300 Men March when it’s entirely symbolic anyway? Why take the trouble to document specific complaints against the store on the corner when liquor license renewal season rolls around and we are out at sea and miss the chance to protest at the board? Why bother worrying about buses when we no longer intend to ride them? Why bother trying to make ourselves believe the city is on the verge of a breakthrough when even two more decades of gradual (realistic) improvements wouldn’t be enough to make city living what we wish it were?

Our time is better spent washing the car and fixing up the house to sell so we can move to the county which is the only place we can realistically afford a decent house in a safe neighborhood. As much as we love the city, our hometown, we no longer love living here. We’re starting to be of the opinion, like so many Baltimoreans before us, that over the long term no amount of arts and culture and restaurants and sports and festivals is worth it. The bad is outweighing the good in Baltimore City, and soon it will be time for us to leave for the suburbs in our brand new hand-me-down car.

Hurray For the Riff Raff @ Flying Dog Brewery Tomorrow

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Lately your Chop has been fully aware that we’re rapidly approaching middle age, if we’re not there already. No more have we got the patience to turn out and see club shows 3-4 nights a week. When we do get to a club show anymore, as was the case with Craig Finn and Heartless Bastards this week, it’s pretty plain that most of the crowd is couples with wedding rings, and most had hired a babysitter to get there. At 35, we’re turning our attention to music that sounds better played on a shady back porch than in a night club.

When it comes to music to play on the porch, there’s absolutely no better choice than New Orleans’ Hurray For the Riff Raff.

Their six releases, available on iTunes, are all the sort of recordings a listener can really spend some time with: play a HFTRR record more than once in a day and you’ll notice not so much that it changes each time, but that your own relationship to it is a fluid thing. Every chorus has a little less melancholy, a little more hidden meaning; each verse is more or less reminiscent of a place you’ve been or a person you’ve loved depending on whether you listen in the morning or evening- while you’re hopeful or feeling the blues.

The band’s career is this way too. Six releases would put most bands in mid-career territory, and many will have their best effort behind them at that point. In the case of Alynda Lee Segarra and Hurray For the Riff Raff, this hardly seems possible. 2014’s Small Town Heroes from ATO records marks the first release from a label, and is in many ways a debut album, a fresh start over. No Depression named the album as one of the best of 2014 in both its critics’ poll and readers’ poll, along with the likes of Lucinda Williams, Willie Nelson, Sturgill Simpson, Ryan Adams and Roseanne Cash… pretty good company to be keeping for a ‘debut’ record. You can read an exhaustive review of Small Town Heroes on No Depression’s site here.

It’s hard to find anything written yet about HFTRR that doesn’t go into some detail about Segarra’s personal background and specifically mention the song The Body Electric so we’re going to gloss over all that here except to say that her background includes an education in Punk Rock, and that song is as inherently political and Feminist as anything Bikini Kill ever put out.

To the Chop’s mind, this has a lot to do with what makes Hurray for the Riff Raff such a formidable band. The radical political nature of each song is so subtle you might not notice it at any given listen. But it’s always there. It’s almost as if when you play the record backwards you’ll hear a Howard Zinn lecture. In most of American music- the Blues, Folk etc, the singer is is either sad about a lover or some thing in their personal life, or mad at an unfair system or some injustice of some kind. It’s seldom ever both.

For Segarra though, who lives in the world as a full person and writes music that way it’s always both. If the song’s intensely personal then the backdrop of a latter-day Grapes of Wrath is the outer context. If the song’s about an unfair system, it’s a sad one, and it’s taken for granted that it’s impossible to be much of a good person in a rotten system- something Baltimoreans know all too well.

Another thing that sets Hurray For the Riff Raff apart from so many other bands is a gigantic surplus of natural talent. You don’t need us to tell you how magical Segarra’s voice is- that much is obvious the first time you hear her hold a note or go in on a door-wop Oooooh or even yodel. It might all make sense if the backstory had something to do with singing in gospel choirs from a young age or growing up around musicians, but this band is as self-taught as they come, and you’d never know it if so many music critics didn’t take pains to point it out. Take for example HFTRR’s covers record My Dearest Darkest Neighbor. Every bar of those classic songs sounds new and poignant. Each note stands on its own- played to spare perfection and the whole thing has a sort of Japanese mastery to it. You hear as much of what’s not there as what is. It’s no mean feat to take songs by George Harrison and John Lennon and make them your own, but Segarra even goes one better than that by out-singing the likes of Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch on People Talkin and My Morphine respectively.

But in the end we really can’t tell you ultimately what it is that makes Hurray For the Riff Raff such a great band, the same way no food writer can tell you what makes cheese grits or gumbo such a great dish. They’ve got It. The Thing. The Roux. The Essence.

Hurray For the Riff Raff has definitely been our own favorite band of the last year or so, and we’re pretty excited and grateful that our first time seeing them live will be not in some dingy club around midnight, but on a fine Summer evening on the green grass outside the Flying Dog Brewery in Frederick, MD. They play there tomorrow when the gates will open at 5:30 and a wide range of the brewery’s offerings will be available in casks, kegs and bottles.

Missiontix.com for more information or to buy tickets.

Baltimore’s Golden Rules and Hampden’s Curfew Protest

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Saturday’s curfew protest on Keswick Road in Hampden was a completely misguided and weak effort that should never have taken place. There was no possible way it could have ended well, and now that the curfew is over it’s still got people talking and has proven to be the absolute shitshow we knew it would be before it even happened.

The point of the Keswick protest was ostensibly to point out the racism that exists in the city, but does that really need pointing out? Did we have thousands marching all over the city because we were unaware of inequality and racism? Keswick organizers also wanted to point out the uneven enforcement of curfew violations, but this logic too is badly flawed.

The type of people out at Keswick were clearly of the ‘ally’ variety. They seemed to be the very people that we’ve been bitching about lately when we talk about the gentrification of Hampden. It’s clear that they don’t understand Baltimore or its police very well.

The first thing we want to get straight is that this week the corner of Penn and North was not indicative of ‘Baltimore’s black neighborhoods.’ It was ground zero for protests and was an entirely different scene than what went on in dozens of black neighborhoods throughout the city which can be described as not much at all. Many people in outlying neighborhoods both black and white who wanted to defy the curfew simply went out to the county quietly and without fanfare. As for the rest of the city, it’s not like there was a giant dragnet out to sweep up anyone caught in the street. From where we sit it seems like everyone arrested this week was either actively protesting or out committing crimes, such as in Brooklyn on Tuesday night. The vast majority of arrests for curfew violations were at Penn North and City Hall, and a couple other locations that were political hotspots like Greenmount near the jail. Many were professional activists and not city residents. If you can show us cases of ordinary black folks getting arrested for simply being in their neighborhoods, we’ll be happy to have a look. But why bother with us? Take it to CNN or City Paper or any other outlet who’d be happy to run with a story like that. There were 486 SOE-related arrests made last week, which is just under 100 a night. It sounds like a big number but it doesn’t leave a lot of room for ordinary folks getting swept up innocently.

There’s been much made of comparing the Keswick protest to the treatment of one particular individual at Penn North that night. It’s pretty clear that that guy, who showed up in a shirt emblazoned with FUCK THE POLICE in very large letters, was prepared to face arrest that night. It was day 5. He went down to the very center of the cop-national guard-media circus and stood around yelling obscenities at the cops. The unedited video is out there if you want to see it and you probably should, especially if you’re one of the people circulating the photo of his arrest. It was obvious he wasn’t going to leave without being arrested. Likewise many others arrested at the same time were activists who set out to cause trouble like the idiot woman who admitted on live TV she didn’t live in Baltimore and was ‘out gazing at the stars.’ (For the record: our position is to support amnesty for all arrested on curfew violations including and especially those arrested at Penn North.)

The truth is that Baltimore does enforce laws unevenly. That enforcement is underpinned not so much by racism as by The Golden Rule of Baltimore which is Don’t Be an Asshole! There’s a ton of disorderly conduct on the streets of Baltimore every day. The people who get charged with it are belligerent jerks who are causing a problem for someone else. People go around with open containers all the time, the ones who get charged with it are drunks who need to be off the street anyway. Loitering, littering, disobeying a lawful order- if you get charged with anything like that it’s a sure bet you’re an asshole who ignored a warning first.

Contrast that demonstrator’s actions with the behavior of the Keswick demonstrators. That protest was originally conceived as a picnic in Sherwood Gardens. How twee is it possible to be? It was then moved to Hampden (likely much closer to where the bulk of participants live) and billed as a silent protest- aka We’re just gonna stand here quietly and not give anybody any lip at all. But as amateurish as those demonstrators are, they’re still out to make a political point. They’re not ‘just ordinary folks going about their lives’ while they’re out there protesting. Showing up with signs that say “we’re not talking to the media” is in fact making a statement to the media, who were presumably issued an engraved invitation.

So the cops come and they tell them pretty nicely to go home. They let 10:00 pass and take a second and third warning and think they’ve made their point. It’s obvious not a single one of them were prepared to go to jail, and they all slunk away to their $2500/mo rowhouses Because they all need to go to their jobs and pay that rent on Monday morning. But what if they had been ready for jail?

There were cops in riot gear on Keswick. There was pepper spray and handcuffs at the ready. If those people had wanted to get maced, tackled and thrown in a van all they had to do was stand there another minute and start yelling fuck the police. It certainly would have happened. When you behave differently you get treated differently. That’s what we saw on Saturday.

We’re here to tell you that when a certain secret punk rock show happened and was white-attended in almost the exact same location the cops showed up a lot more quickly and ended it with much more urgency. People were not slinking home with their hands in their pockets that night.

But the Keswick demonstration was misguided in another way as well. It was pretty unanimously felt among city residents that a 7 day curfew was excessive and unjust and should never have been imposed to begin with. That Keswick episode was largely a response from younger politically-aware white people to the images floating around on social media of younger apolitical white people out drinking with their neighbors in gentrified neighborhoods.

Now, this is maybe a sensitive topic and perhaps one of the dirty little open secrets of white Baltimore but there is a huge divide between the yuppies of the harbor neighborhoods and the hipsters ranging from Mount Vernon to Hampden.

One of the biggest problems this week, as we’ve seen it, is everyone in Baltimore trying to claim the moral high ground in a time of crisis. That’s another golden rule of Baltimore: there is no moral high ground here and there never has been. We’ve been a part of hipster Baltimore for a long time now and we’re very familiar with its sins. They are the Chop’s sins too.

There are a lot of people who look at photos of the Millennials outside their houses past ten and want to decry the injustice of unequal enforcement without stopping to think that maybe it makes them so mad because they had something against those people before this week. And that something is a bit of class resentment. We’ve got it too, hence the Authenticity post.

The stereotype of the Canton Millennial and the Hampden Hipster didn’t come out of thin air and it’s not a stretch to say the two groups don’t rate each other very highly. But just because you live uptown and have good taste in music and art, work in the nonprofit or creative sector, and read Ta-Nehisi Coates and watch Melissa Harris Perry doesn’t mean you’re any fucking better than Fed Hill bros are. You chose to move to Baltimore, and to your very tiny affinity part of white Baltimore. Coming down on people who are simply sitting outside their houses in defiance of a dumb and unnecessary curfew is showing your ugliest side, the side that wants to see yuppies locked up just for being yuppies.

Because really, if the goal is for ordinary Baltimoreans to be able to enjoy their lives that’s exactly what those Milennials were doing. If their version of curfew defiance looks slightly different than yours or the version at Penn North- get the fuck over it. It’s still curfew defiance and that’s a good thing.

The coverage of curfew enforcement on Saturday looked a lot like this.

We’re not sure why Deray McKesson gets a pass on the curfew himself, but when he and others went to white neighborhoods to check on uneven enforcement it was an entirely false comparison. The idea was to hold quiet neighborhoods up to the yardstick of Penn North and Gilmor Homes, but to compare enforcement you’d have to go to quiet black neighborhoods as well. Did anyone in the media or social media go to Cedonia to check the state of enforcement? How about Belair Edison or Sharp Leadenahll or Walbrook? Were black folks getting yanked off their porches and unfairly arrested there? Of course they weren’t. Nor should they be. No one should.

The Derays and the Keswick allies of the world want to make things look a certain way, and want to reinforce their own political viewpoints. They want a piece of that elusive moral high ground and want to pat themselves on the back for exposing an injustice that’s not really there to begin with.

We’re not sure what it looks like to the rest of the Internet, but to anyone who actually lives in Baltimore City Saturday night was a smoke and mirrors shitshow that played out on two corners in less than an hour while 99% of the city got on with life as best they could. It was another embarrassment in a week where we’ve had too many of them.

Baltimore’s Golden Rules and Hamden’s Curfew Protest

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Saturday’s curfew protest on Keswick Road in Hampden was a completely misguided and weak effort that should never have taken place. There was no possible way it could have ended well, and now that the curfew is over it’s still got people talking and has proven to be the absolute shitshow we knew it would be before it even happened.

The point of the Keswick protest was ostensibly to point out the racism that exists in the city, but does that really need pointing out? Did we have thousands marching all over the city because we were unaware of inequality and racism? Keswick organizers also wanted to point out the uneven enforcement of curfew violations, but this logic too is badly flawed.

The type of people out at Keswick were clearly of the ‘ally’ variety. They seemed to be the very people that we’ve been bitching about lately when we talk about the gentrification of Hampden. It’s clear that they don’t understand Baltimore or its police very well.

The first thing we want to get straight is that this week the corner of Penn and North was not indicative of ‘Baltimore’s black neighborhoods.’ It was ground zero for protests and was an entirely different scene than what went on in dozens of black neighborhoods throughout the city which can be described as not much at all. Many people in outlying neighborhoods both black and white who wanted to defy the curfew simply went out to the county quietly and without fanfare. As for the rest of the city, it’s not like there was a giant dragnet out to sweep up anyone caught in the street. From where we sit it seems like everyone arrested this week was either actively protesting or out committing crimes, such as in Brooklyn on Tuesday night. The vast majority of arrests for curfew violations were at Penn North and City Hall, and a couple other locations that were political hotspots like Greenmount near the jail. Many were professional activists and not city residents. If you can show us cases of ordinary black folks getting arrested for simply being in their neighborhoods, we’ll be happy to have a look. But why bother with us? Take it to CNN or City Paper or any other outlet who’d be happy to run with a story like that. There were 486 SOE-related arrests made last week, which is just under 100 a night. It sounds like a big number but it doesn’t leave a lot of room for ordinary folks getting swept up innocently.

There’s been much made of comparing the Keswick protest to the treatment of one particular individual at Penn North that night. It’s pretty clear that that guy, who showed up in a shirt emblazoned with FUCK THE POLICE in very large letters, was prepared to face arrest that night. It was day 5. He went down to the very center of the cop-national guard-media circus and stood around yelling obscenities at the cops. The unedited video is out there if you want to see it and you probably should, especially if you’re one of the people circulating the photo of his arrest. It was obvious he wasn’t going to leave without being arrested. Likewise many others arrested at the same time were activists who set out to cause trouble like the idiot woman who admitted on live TV she didn’t live in Baltimore and was ‘out gazing at the stars.’ (For the record: our position is to support amnesty for all arrested on curfew violations including and especially those arrested at Penn North.)

The truth is that Baltimore does enforce laws unevenly. That enforcement is underpinned not so much by racism as by The Golden Rule of Baltimore which is Don’t Be an Asshole! There’s a ton of disorderly conduct on the streets of Baltimore every day. The people who get charged with it are belligerent jerks who are causing a problem for someone else. People go around with open containers all the time, the ones who get charged with it are drunks who need to be off the street anyway. Loitering, littering, disobeying a lawful order- if you get charged with anything like that it’s a sure bet you’re an asshole who ignored a warning first.

Contrast that demonstrator’s actions with the behavior of the Keswick demonstrators. That protest was originally conceived as a picnic in Sherwood Gardens. How twee is it possible to be? It was then moved to Hampden (likely much closer to where the bulk of participants live) and billed as a silent protest- aka We’re just gonna stand here quietly and not give anybody any lip at all. But as amateurish as those demonstrators are, they’re still out to make a political point. They’re not ‘just ordinary folks going about their lives’ while they’re out there protesting. Showing up with signs that say “we’re not talking to the media” is in fact making a statement to the media, who were presumably issued an engraved invitation.

So the cops come and they tell them pretty nicely to go home. They let 10:00 pass and take a second and third warning and think they’ve made their point. It’s obvious not a single one of them were prepared to go to jail, and they all slunk away to their $2500/mo rowhouses Because they all need to go to their jobs and pay that rent on Monday morning. But what if they had been ready for jail?

There were cops in riot gear on Keswick. There was pepper spray and handcuffs at the ready. If those people had wanted to get maced, tackled and thrown in a van all they had to do was stand there another minute and start yelling fuck the police. It certainly would have happened. When you behave differently you get treated differently. That’s what we saw on Saturday.

We’re here to tell you that when a certain secret punk rock show happened and was white-attended in almost the exact same location the cops showed up a lot more quickly and ended it with much more urgency. People were not slinking home with their hands in their pockets that night.

But the Keswick demonstration was misguided in another way as well. It was pretty unanimously felt among city residents that a 7 day curfew was excessive and unjust and should never have been imposed to begin with. That Keswick episode was largely a response from younger politically-aware white people to the images floating around on social media of younger apolitical white people out drinking with their neighbors in gentrified neighborhoods.

Now, this is maybe a sensitive topic and perhaps one of the dirty little open secrets of white Baltimore but there is a huge divide between the yuppies of the harbor neighborhoods and the hipsters ranging from Mount Vernon to Hampden.

One of the biggest problems this week, as we’ve seen it, is everyone in Baltimore trying to claim the moral high ground in a time of crisis. That’s another golden rule of Baltimore: there is no moral high ground here and there never has been. We’ve been a part of hipster Baltimore for a long time now and we’re very familiar with its sins. They are the Chop’s sins too.

There are a lot of people who look at photos of the Millennials outside their houses past ten and want to decry the injustice of unequal enforcement without stopping to think that maybe it makes them so mad because they had something against those people before this week. And that something is a bit of class resentment. We’ve got it too, hence the Authenticity post.

The stereotype of the Canton Millennial and the Hampden Hipster didn’t come out of thin air and it’s not a stretch to say the two groups don’t rate each other very highly. But just because you live uptown and have good taste in music and art, work in the nonprofit or creative sector, and read Ta-Nehisi Coates and watch Melissa Harris Perry doesn’t mean you’re any fucking better than Fed Hill bros are. You chose to move to Baltimore, and to your very tiny affinity part of white Baltimore. Coming down on people who are simply sitting outside their houses in defiance of a dumb and unnecessary curfew is showing your ugliest side, the side that wants to see yuppies locked up just for being yuppies.

Because really, if the goal is for ordinary Baltimoreans to be able to enjoy their lives that’s exactly what those Milennials were doing. If their version of curfew defiance looks slightly different than yours or the version at Penn North- get the fuck over it. It’s still curfew defiance and that’s a good thing.

The coverage of curfew enforcement on Saturday looked a lot like this.

We’re not sure why Deray McKesson gets a pass on the curfew himself, but when he and others went to white neighborhoods to check on uneven enforcement it was an entirely false comparison. The idea was to hold quiet neighborhoods up to the yardstick of Penn North and Gilmor Homes, but to compare enforcement you’d have to go to quiet black neighborhoods as well. Did anyone in the media or social media go to Cedonia to check the state of enforcement? How about Belair Edison or Sharp Leadenahll or Walbrook? Were black folks getting yanked off their porches and unfairly arrested there? Of course they weren’t. Nor should they be. No one should.

The Derays and the Keswick allies of the world want to make things look a certain way, and want to reinforce their own political viewpoints. They want a piece of that elusive moral high ground and want to pat themselves on the back for exposing an injustice that’s not really there to begin with.

We’re not sure what it looks like to the rest of the Internet, but to anyone who actually lives in Baltimore City Saturday night was a smoke and mirrors shitshow that played out on two corners in less than an hour while 99% of the city got on with life as best they could. It was another embarrassment in a week where we’ve had too many of them.