Tomorrow: Killer Angels Opening Reception @ Windup Space

Posted on May 21, 2013 by The Chop

Despite the title, this post is only halfway about the opening reception of Killer Angels: Faces of American Death Metal. It’s mainly a post about Future Islands, who we’re going to go see at Metro Gallery tomorrow. Naturally, it’s been a while since we’ve seen these guys since we’ve been busy On the Water. (Ha!) We weren’t sure we’d get the chance soon, because Future Islands often travels, and since the release of their last record in 2011 each member of this trio has spent increasing amounts of time on their various side-projects.

There’s Peals, of course, which we told you about last week, in addition to synth-man Gerrit Welmers’ Moss of Aura. Both of these are about what you’d expect, although frontman Sam Herring’s Hemlock Ernst is straight up hip hop, and he’s surprisingly good at it. One wouldn’t expect those kind of lyrical skills from someone who’s not immersed a little more deeply in hip-hop culture, but according to this video Sam says he ‘started whippin rhymes’ in 1999 after buying his first De La Soul tape, and that influence definitely shows up here.

So tomorrow’s show kind of took us by surprise. Literally. It took everyone by surprise since it was only announced a week ago and only took a day or two to sell out entirely. If you missed your chance at tickets- too bad, so sad. Perhaps you should sign up for the Future Islands mailing list so you won’t be fooled again.

killer angels: faces of death metal by JM Giordano

Killer Angels opens at Windup Space tomorrow. 6 pm-???

But if you can’t get into the Metro Gallery tomorrow (or even if you can), take heart. You can still enjoy the opening reception of JM Giordano’s new show of photography Killer Angels: Faces of American Death Metal at the Windup Space.

You know JMG. Even if you don’t know him, you know him because there’s a 100% chance you’ve seen his work before if you live in Baltimore. In addition to being responsible for most of the images in the now-defunct Urbanite as their staff photographer, he’s also a regular contributor to the Baltimore Sun and City Paper. You may have even seen his Big Girls installation of large-scale dressed/undressed women hanging from buildings in Station North during Artscape.

A preview of the show is available at jmgiordanophotography.com as well as representations of much of Giordano’s other work, which ranges from cupcakes and Pop-Tarts to transgendered prostitutes.

Killer Angels arrives just in time for the merriest and most holly-jolly season of the year. Maryland Death Fest begins on Thursday and runs until Sunday. The show features monochromatic shots of metalheads captured in their natural environment, the metal show. At 30 x 40″ these works are also nearly life-size.

And if nearly life sized isn’t good enough for you, stick around after 8:30 for some death metal bands that actually are life sized. Philadelphia’s Coffin Dust pair with Marylanders Part Death to round out the night with two sets of their most festive Deathmas carols.

Fa la la la la, la la la Death.

Spring Shoes

Posted on May 20, 2013 by The Chop

There’s a scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep gives Anne Hathaway a very cool and refined dressing down for her ignorance of how fashion cycles work. It’s pretty much all the average person needs to know about High Fashion, and it’s a lesson that we’d all do well not to forget.

She says in part “and then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers, and then it filtered through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin” We’re including a clip of it here, and we hope you’ll take a moment to check it out, or to re-familiarize yourself with it as the case may be.

The Chop went shoe shopping this weekend, and found this cycle of trickle-down fashion on prominent display in every store we visited. What was a current Spring trend several years ago among the moneyed fashion elites and their 19 year old boy-toys in places like the Hamptons and South Beach has finally found its way into the closets of regular old dudebros here in Baltimore, MD USA. We’re referring to the shark-jumped trend of brightly colored or two-tone and three-tone casual footwear.

You’ll also notice that this fad has gone so far that no shoe style is left untouched, from sneakers and espadrilles which we’re not even picturing here, all the way up to stiff leather oxfords.

And just as quickly as these shoes showed up everywhere they’re going to disappear. By the time the average guy has figured out what socks he should wear with these (and yes, you must wear socks) they’re going to be gone. Wear these out in Baltimore streets and soon enough you’ll have the fabulous gays of Mount Vernon rolling their eyes and clucking their tongues over a look that is ‘Ugh. Sooo 2013.’

Our advice to the men of Charm City, sit this trend out and stick to something more traditional. Let’s have a look at a few examples so that we know what to avoid, listed in order from haute to not.

From Neiman Marcus:

Tom Ford, $920.

Prada, $480.

Gucci, $430.

From Nordstrom:

Thomas Dean, $315.

Allen Edmonds, $260.

Cole Haan, $198.

From Macy’s:

Sperry, $85.

Tommy Hilfiger, $65.

Ralph Lauren, $57.99.

From Urban Outfitters:

Vans, $62.

Anchor, $29.

Fringe, $30 (2 for $40)

Tomorrow: Peals @ Baltimore Museum of Art

Posted on May 17, 2013 by The Chop

If you ever wanted to spend a nice, pleasant, relaxing day in Baltimore, tomorrow is it. For one thing, it’s Spring! The weather right now is glorious. It’s cool and warm all at once and everywhere there are trees and leaves and flowers and birds. For someone who’s seen little else but salt water and desert sand over the last six months as we have, just sitting on a patch of grass and staring at a tree constitutes a full day’s entertainment.

But fortunately for us we live in a place like Baltimore, a city that gives us what we need, and so much more on top of it. Tomorrow we’re not going to sit under just any tree, but a tree in the BMA’s sculpture garden, where we can enjoy not just all-day shade, but a view of some of the finest modern statuary. (And a view of Hopkins women in sundresses.)

Once we’re done doing our best Joyce Kilmer impression, we might just slide into Gertrude’s and match their premium whiskey flight with one of their house-made chipotle veggie burgers.

After we’re sated, we plan to take a spin through the current exhibition, Max Weber: Bringing Paris to New York which explores how two distinct art scenes communicated with one another when Modernism was actually modern, well before the Twitter and Tumblr era.

And finally, once we’re done staring at a bunch of dusty old paintings, we’re going to turn our attention to something brand new: Baltimore’s Peals.

Peals is Bruce Willen (of Double Dagger) and William Cashion’s (of Future Islands) new project, whose debut LP Walking Field is available this week from Thrill Jockey Records. A Closer Listen described Walking Field as ‘a warm and enveloping album… less immediate than their previous work but just as engaging.’

Speaking of engaging, we highly recommend a click over to Peals’ website where in addition to tour dates and contact info you’ll find players for 16 different .ogg files. William and Bruce invite you to play them à la carte, mixing and matching them, starting and stopping at will and playing as many simultaneously as you wish. Yes Choppers, thanks to the magic of the Internet, now you too can be an ambient music producer with just a few clicks of the mouse. It’s fun and surprisingly intriguing. Give it a try yourself, or leave it to the professionals this weekend at their free record release show with fellow Baltimoreans Romantic States.

Tomorrow: Cabin//Fire in Gwynn Oak

Posted on May 16, 2013 by The Chop

If you don’t know Justin Sirois by now, you certainly should. Not least because he’s a friend of the blog and a Baker Artist Award winner. We’ve already told you about his novel Falcons on the Floor and were especially interested in his serial, app centric follow-up So Say the Waiters, which cut a new path in digital publishing while telling the story of Baltimore punk life in a unique and authentic language.

Justin also founded Narrow House Press when back when. But he lives in a narrow house no longer. These days you can find him out at the western edge of the city in Gywnn Oak, where the biggest distraction a writer may face is a few pesky crickets, and not crackhead neighbors yelling and sirens wailing all night like you still see in our fair city’s arts districts. He’s even got land and trees and outbuildings and a fire pit by which to sit and contemplate the world about us.

Cabin//Fire takes place tomorrow. See website for details.

But to come to the point- Justin would like to share all of this with you. He’s begun a monthly reading series right in his own backyard (literally!) called Cabin//Fire, the next edition of which takes place tomorrow and features Mark Wallace, Laura Van Den Berg, and Mark Cugini.

You can check out their résumés on the Cabin//Fire website, or you can just take it from us that they are smart people who write interesting things that you would be happy to listen to. In fact, we’ve been out of town so long that this is one of those great things we missed out on that we didn’t even know we were missing out on. Until now. That little cabin has been a veritable powerhouse of literary talent for some months now, and we trust it will be well into the future.

Baltimore hasn’t had a high quality reading series to boast of for some years now, but it’s a credit to our city and especially to Justin that he’d put together one worth waiting for: one that’s at once of University quality and DIY ethos. This is a reading series where you don’t just hear high caliber literary talent read… you make friends with them and have a weenie roast and drink grappa and Natty Boh and enjoy the elemental pleasures of wood and fire in God’s green creation etc etc etc.

Bottom line: A series like this has the potential to be Baltimore’s own Algonquin Round Table or Exquisite Corpse. It’s just the right mix of academia, avant-garde, literary tradition and genuine hometown charm. Get in on the ground floor, before the cabin’s full.

The Top 6 Things We Missed in Our 6 Months at Sea

Posted on May 15, 2013 by The Chop

We’ve been out of town a long time. So long that we’re still not quite up to speed. It’s going to take your old Chop at least one day for every month away from Charm City to get back on track. As we said just the other day, a sailor leaves, comes home and strives to pick up just exactly where he left off. Now, it’s true that not a lot has changed. Six months isn’t really that long after all. But when you take as big a part in community life as we do, you’re bound to miss a few things.

Do you remember when that water main broke and flooded Charles Street with almost 3 feet of water? That was the day we left. November 7th. It’s basically the last thing we remember. So we missed out on a few things. Hell, we probably missed out on so much that there’s stuff that didn’t make this list because we missed it and didn’t even hear about it in the first place. But here are six things we did hear about, and are going to try to get up to speed on as quickly as possible.

6: The Bun Shop

It’s big. It’s decadent. It’s buns! We had heard rumors about the imminent opening of the Bun Shop but it kind of took us by surprise as we were walking into the Beatnik Barber Shop yesterday. That big, golden, glorious sign called out to us “Hey you Chop! Come in here and eat buns and drink coffee! You know you want to!” And we did want to… But we’d just been in Trinacria and were already full of foccacia and cannoli and also a little pressed for time. But since Donna’s burned down, Red Emma’s is moving, and our personal favorite Asquaal is RIP, Bun Shop is pretty much the instant go-to for coffee in Mount Vernon. (Sorry we’re not sorry City Cafe).

5: Secret Mountains, Rainer

Secret Mountains has been in our personal top 5 of local bands for quite some time now, and we’ve been waiting for a full length release for a long time. We should say that we’ve been waiting patiently, and we give SM a lot of credit for taking their time with it. Far too many bands these days take the Welp we’ve got 10 songs so let’s make a record now approach to music-making. Secret Mountains’ process was as deliberate as their songs, so we’re sure this has got to be an important and exceptional release. Plus, according to their Tumblr Kelly and Jake have left the band and the remaining members are carrying on, presumably as a four-piece, so they’ll never be the same again.

4: The Super Bowl

Technically we were here for this. As luck had it, while the Super Bowl was going on our ship was sailing up the Chesapeake Bay. We weren’t able to watch it, but we were able to follow along via the Ravens iPhone app and our twitter feed. When we docked the ship at 5:30 am, it was pretty obvious that the line handlers on the dock were still shitfaced drunk from the game. We were even more sorry to miss the victory parade, which we kept tabs on from our next dock in Wilmington, DE. That was pretty much Baltimore’s finest hour, and a nice middle finger to the rest of the football loving country.

3: WC Harlan’s

The Chop was a great fan of the short-lived Kitty Kat Bar, and heaven knows that Remington/Charles Village could use a low-key neighborhood bar that’s a step up from Long John’s or CVP (not that they aren’t beloved in their turn). The gossip that we’ve heard has it that this place is pitch-perfect, with some likening it to Rye in Fell’s Point. We can’t wait to get in there and warm a barstool ourselves.

2: Opening Day

As great and glorious as the Ravens’ Super Bowl victory and Ray Lewis’ last game was, The Chop is just not a true football fan and probably never will be. Hell, this blog is called The Baltimore Chop. There’s a reason it’s not called ‘Johnny Unitas’ Barbershop’ or some such footbally name. Opening Day is pretty much a genuine municipal holiday in Baltimore, and this would have been our first one as a season ticket holder, snagging good seats and enjoying the Orange Carpet benefits. And it being the first game after a playoff appearance made it just a little more special.

1: The Maryland Film Festival

So, technically we were here for this too, since it was just this weekend. But since we arrived home at 1 am Friday night we were certainly in no position to plan a weekend jaunt down to the film festival. Presentations by John Waters and Matt Porterfield, 12 O’Clock Boys, I Am Divine, After Tiller, Hit And Stay, I Used To Be Darker, and of course If We Shout Loud Enough, the Double Dagumentary. (Fortunately we’ve already secured and watched a copy at home.) All told, it was probably the best MFF yet, and probably our last chance to blog about Double Dagger, which if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time you know is our most favorite topic.