The Tyranny of Overrated Things

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Artscape is coming up this weekend. We might even bother to go to it.

Don’t get us wrong: Artscape is a great and wonderful thing and our heart floweth over with civic pride and our city is truly lucky to have a premier arts event that generates tons of commerce and community and culture and blah blah blah. The problem is that when you go to Artscape it’s usually just not that great.

Our typical Artscape experience has always gone something like this: First you have to walk there because the entire central part of the city is gridlocked or closed all weekend long. It draws more than 100,000 people a day and anyone who lives between Downtown and 25th street dares not move their car for 3 days. Horns honk. People are mad. By the time you’re halfway there you realize it’s hot as hell outside. You get to the festival and are overwhelmed by crowds. Children scream and cry for no reason. Woo girls woo. People stare at phones and are oblivious to everything. Everyone is sweaty and gross.

Howard St Bridge

You already want to get a cold beer or a lemonade or something because you could use some refreshment, so you wait in line for 10 minutes and pay $10 for a Miller Lite or a Bacardi and Coke or whatever the festival booze sponsor is. Then you spend 10 minutes looking for a map or schedule to see what’s where and who’s when. Once you find it you realize that the most interesting things either just happened while you were buying beer or won’t happen for 7 more hours.

So you walk around aimlessly and see what there is to see. Craft junk. Yarn bombs. Watercolors of beach scenes. Tacky Afrocentric stuff. Someone doing caricatures. You’re not impressed so you think you might get some lunch, but with all the traffic and congestion you realize that restaurants are out and nachos and fried dough or whatever are your only real option. So you get nachos and fried dough and think you’ll go get a good spot for one of the slightly-better-than-mediocre musical headliners and eat on the hill, but everyone else had the same idea and you can’t see the stage very well and you say fuck it I’m hot and tired and you walk home.

It’s not that Artscape is bad. It’s that it’s overrated. People esteem it very highly and its marketing is fairly grandiose and it would be hard for any event to be in real life what Artscape is on paper. It’s why people come back from Disney World and say “Well, at least the kids enjoyed it.” or why people watch the Olympics and say “Well, there isn’t much else on I guess.”

The older we get and the more we move through the world, the more we seek to identify and avoid overrated things. “Prime” baseball games, very fancy restaurants, bands on reunion tours… they’re all good things, but not as good as they’re made out to be, and not worth the trouble they take.

Pasties of Perversion @ Windup Space Tonight

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Every city has its own fun little games that the locals like to play. Buffalo has ‘Spot the Canadian.’ Boston has ‘Get wicked drunk and yell in the street all night until someone picks a fight.’ LA has Breast Implant Bingo, and in Baltimore we have the grandest game of all… The John Waters sighting game.

Everyone loves the John Waters sighting game, but if you’re new in town here’s how you play: go about your daily life until you see John Waters. When you see him, play it cool. Don’t fawn and gush and ask him to sign your vintage back issues of Stallion Magazine. Then when he goes in the other room or whatever you freak out and blast it all over Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and text all your friends.

You may be able to spot John Waters at the Windup Space tonight. 9 pm.

You can spot John Waters just about anywhere. Atomic Books, the Ottobar, or even at a CVS or Wawa. You might even pick him up on the side of the road someplace. But an especially likely place to spot him would be at the Windup Space tonight.

Baltimore’s Gilded Lily Burlesque has put together a star-studded tribute to John Waters called Pasties of Perversion that will take the stage tonight.

Performers from up and down the East Coast will be performing routines created especially for the occasion and based on Pink Flamingos, Crybaby, Female Trouble and the rest, along with live music by Garage Sale and vending by Hampden shops Sugar and the Bottom Drawer.

We can’t say for sure that Waters will be in the house, but if someone were throwing a burlesque tribute to you, wouldn’t you at least show up to watch it?

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Windup Space is located at 12 W. North Avenue in Station North. Doors at 8 pm, show at 9:00. $15.

Flicks From the Hill: Spaceballs @ AVAM Tonight

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It feels like we’ve been waiting for this since about the first day of April and it’s finally, finally arrived. Flicks From the Hill Kicks off on the side of the American Visionary Art Museum tonight, and we’ll be showing up early and picking out a prime viewing spot.

If there’s anything better than a free movie, it’s a free classic movie screened outdoors and watched on a blanket with a date, a sack of Utz and a six pack of canned craft beer discretely tucked away. It’s so great in fact that Travel and Leisure ranked Baltimore alongside such metropolitan global capitals as Paris and Pismo Beach when they declared Flicks From the Hill to be among the World’s Best Free Stuff.

Tonight’s movie is Spaceballs. Spaceballs rules.

But wait! There’s more! this being the first film of the Summer and all, there’s a grand kick off party in the works before the show starts. The museum and sculpture barn will throw open their doors for free, and the folks from Max’s Taphouse and Two Boots pizza will be on hand providing beer and pizza respectively.

A $10 donation to AVAM gets you all the beer you can drink and all the pizza you can nosh from 7 pm until 8:30, and the film is scheduled to begin just after dark at 9:00.

We’re going to go ahead and mark out the next six Thursdays on our calendar, because this year’s schedule is about as good as it gets free movie-wise.

We suggest you do the same. But do us all a favor please: leave your cell phones and crying babies at home this year.

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AVAM is located at 800 Key Highway in Federal Hill.

Weight of the Nation @ Creative Alliance Tonight

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For those who don’t already know, Baltimore’s Urbanite Magazine is currently in the middle of its 2012 Healthy Food Challenge. The Project is an ongoing and multifaceted effort which includes a request for grant proposals, magazine articles, food policy themed events and more.

It’s pretty interesting stuff. When they screened Food Stamped at the library last month, we had quite a lot to say about it. Tonight, they’re screening the HBO documentary Weight of the Nation at Creative Alliance.

We’ve got surprisingly little to say about this film, except that it’s probably interesting and important and you should go see it.

It’s running in conjunction with a gallery exhibition which is on view for one week only and runs through July 13.

Tonight’s screening is free and begins at 6 pm, although if you can’t make it you can also watch the entire film in four parts on Youtube, or presumably whenever they feel like showing it on HBO.

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Creative Alliance is located at 3134 Eastern Avenue in Highlandtown.

The Summer of Good Canned Beer

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As we mentioned yesterday, Baltimore is smack in the middle of a long and miserably hot Summer. Temperatures have often been in the triple digits lately, and a Baltimore Summer being what it is almost every other day has found us on our way to a house party, cook-out, DIY show, festival or BYOB something or other. And this summer more than ever we’re showing up with a six pack of cans in hand.

Like most people, we’ve never thought much of canned beer. It had its place, and was usually drunk more by necessity than by choice. When Oskar Blues caught on in 2002 with its flagship Dale’s Pale Ale in cans, we thought “Hey, that’s great, but cans are mostly for hot weather, and this is a heavy goddamn beer to be drinking in the sun.” So that was that.

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For years Oskar Blues practically stood out like a sore thumb on the can shelf among so many Buds, Millers, PBR’s, etc, but in the last two years or so the availability of good beer in cans has grown exponentially, with more craft brewers embracing cans all the time.

Most articles you’ll read on this phenomenon will have one or more very lengthy, very boring paragraphs comparing the merits of cans vs. bottles. As we’ve said before, we are not a beer snob. We don’t care at all about storing beer in our cellar or the possible effects of bisphenol-A. We just want to buy some beer that’s pretty good and drink it.

In this blog’s opinion, there’s now enough evidence to declare that there was never anything wrong with cans in the first place. It was the shittiness of the beer that made the beer taste shitty. Not the can.

Much like its counterpart good boxed wine, cans are cheaper and easier to produce and ship, making them less expensive to buy at the store. It’s safe to say that we’ll be drinking canned beer for the rest of the Summer, and probably long after as well.