It used to be hard to discover new music. Back when underground music was, um, underground- hell, back when you could use the term ‘underground music’ without sounding like someone’s dad it took a lot to discover music that wasn’t on the radio. It usually involved knowing someone who was cooler than you were, stocking up on 6 packs of blank cassettes and scrupulously reading and cross referencing the band names being dropped in MRR and Heartattack.
Ironically, now that all the music in the world is published on the internet and can be streamed any time anywhere, it’s actually almost harder to discover new music. There’s a paralysis of choice. recommendations carry less weight and with the advent of taste algorithms any new music you do discover tends to blend together and fade into the background just as fast as you can play it.
Cheap Girls plays at Golden West tonight.
Take Cheap Girls, for example. Here’s a band that we’ve been dimly aware of for quite awhile. They’ve got a few good records out. They’ve toured with Lemuria and Against Me. They have a Bandcamp page and some write ups on Punknews.org But they’ve remained ‘in our queue,’ so to speak.
So tonight we’re going to head out to Golden West and discover Cheap Girls the old fashioned way. Live. And what are we going to discover when we see them? A band that sounds like Buffalo Tom. A band that sounds like Buffalo Tom if they’d just finished listening to a Dinosaur Jr. record. A band that sounds like that and likes to drink and misbehave. We like them already.
As a bonus, we’re stoked to see a full set from DC’s Max Levine Ensemble. They played the Kind of Like Spitting show we wrote about last month, but since our Zipcar was due back at midnight we only got to catch a song or two. The band with a jazz-band-sounding name has been around for more than a decade now, and has often drawn comparisons to the Ergs, but we’re going to go on record and say we like them better than the Ergs because they’re not as cute. Pop punk is already inherently cute, and these guys avoid the trap of making songs that are too cute by half.
Crimes isn’t cute. Crimes is Westminster from somewhere around here. Crimes is loud. Crimes is one of the Baltimore bands you need to know about this Summer. It would be a crime to miss out on them.
As human beings trying our best to live in polite society, we like to think that we’ve pretty much got it all figured out. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve barely got anything figured out. We may not want to admit it, but we’re pretty much just making things up as we go along.
Our habits and folkways aren’t set in stone, but are instead more like raw clay, being constantly turned and shaped to suit our needs. This is true in all aspects of life, and of course of life in the tavern. Once upon a time in this country there were plainly stated rules covering things like unescorted ladies in the bar, the proper use of spittoons, and general public speaking. Nowadays we let women come freely, and let the TV do most of the soapboxing. We’ve adjusted to the times.
Stop it. Just stop it.
We’re still adjusting. Twenty years ago there were no sort of rules in place for cell phone conversations. Nowadays everyone fully understands that the right thing to do when taking a call is to step outside, or at least into a secluded corner, and to keep calls quiet and brief. Hell, most people in this day and age have come to prefer text messaging to talking, and the problem has almost solved itself.
Although we’re talking on our phones less and less, we seem to have them out more and more. And why not? Smartphones are great. They’re like miracles! Bars used to carry newspapers for the news and Guinness record books to settle bets and Mr. Boston guides to reference drinks. Now we can do all that on a phone. Not to mention talking to every friend you’ve got simultaneously via Tweetbook Plus, seeing where they actually are on Foursquare, and maybe even convincing them to use the internet to buy you an IRL beer via Beergivr.
But we’ve got to draw the line somewhere. And we’re drawing it here.
Listen Baltimore. Listen, Maryland. Listen up good and goddamn close, America. Stop bringing your laptops to the bar!
A bar is not your ‘other office.’ It’s not where you go to catch up on emails or work on your term paper. Keep that shit at Starbucks. A bar is a bar. It’s for drinking. Drink. Hey, we get it. We have a blog and pretty much stay online all day every day. We’ve come to a point where the internet and ‘real life’ are almost entirely integrated. But you know what? The bar is where we go to get the fuck off the internet for a while.
Laptops are becoming smaller and lighter every year, which means they’re turning up in more places than ever before. We’re making a rule: No more laptops in the bar. They don’t belong there, and if you can’t tear yourself away from your computer for an hour, then you don’t belong there.
Just because your Macbook is the size and weight of a place mat doesn’t mean that it is a place mat. We come to the bar to drink, and if we trip over your stupid power cable on our way to the head or spill a beer on your $2000 notebook, it’s your own goddamn fault. You’ve been warned.
As a lifelong Orioles fan and a big league bon vivant, we were incredibly excited to hear that former 3rd baseman and long-beloved legend politely tolerated player Melvin Mora would be opening his own restaurant here in Baltimore.
We were sad ambivalent about seeing Mora leave the Orioles, but of course we’re happy to see that he continues to live in Fallston, and has decided to follow in the footsteps of greats like Gino Marchetti, Rick Dempsey, Boog Powell and Ray Lewis and open up his own restaurant. Naturally, we had to review it for the blog.
When we heard that Mora’s new bar was going to be located in the ground floor of the Four Seasons hotel, we thought that was kind of an odd location for a sports bar. We love hotel bars, but this place is fancy-schmancy Hon. We gotta admit that we felt our Dundalk showing a little bit when we walked in there in a Wieters jersey and our best Bill Hagy straw hat, but whatever.
It’s not just that Wit and Wisdom is more skybox than bleachers though, it’s that once you sit down and get a beer you start noticing things. The first thing you notice is that for a sports bar, there’s not really even a lot of memorabilia around the place. It’s uncanny. All they’ve really got around is these funny looking giant electric candles or whatever. That would make sense in a Thomas Edison themed bar or something, but for a baseball bar we just don’t get it. Melvin should have gone down North Point Flea Market and got some old pennants and jerseys and stuff. Make it like Nacho Mama’s. Now that’s a class joint.
Melvin hardly even put any TV’s in there! How are we supposed to watch the O’s and the Terps, and deal with all these bandwagon Caps fans that are suddenly all over everywhere when they’ve only got like 2 little TV’s and they’re practically hidden behind the bar???
But then we got it. Mora’s probably been talking to Rick Dempsey, like consulting and stuff. And Rick probably told him to play up the whole Latin American/caribbean type thing. Wit and Wisdom is right on the water and there’s a big ass sun deck patio thing, so Dempsey probably told him to make it more Kettle Hill and less Rick Dempsey’s Brew Pub.
That must be it, because at this point we were getting tipsy and slipping into Bawlmerese and the waitress was ignoring us, but it all made sense: This is a Venezuelan Place. She probably no habla the Ingles. That’s cool though. At least we could get some chimichangas or gorditas or maybe even a Doritos locos taco or whatever they eat in Venezuela. So after about 15 minutes of “Hola! Hola, Chica! Yo quiero comida! Mas comida por favor!” we finally got the menu.
And what do you think we found? Nachos and emanadas? Hell no… that menu didn’t make any sense at all. The chicken soup has frog legs in it and the porridge has duck tongues. The corn dogs have lobster in them? Melvin! No me gusta amigo! We get that Giselle Mora has to be handy in the kitchen to feed six little chirrens, but whatever happened to good old Rice-a-Roni and Esskay hot dogs?
This Tavern by Melvin Mora is an okay place to drink beers since it’s on the water and close to the stadium, but it’s impossible to have a really good sports bar without a bunch of TV’s and junk food and stuff. We had to give it one out of four on the cartoon bird scale, and we’re not in any hurry to go back.
It can be difficult to write about events like tonight’s screening of Food Stamped at the Pratt’s Central Library Branch. Typically, we write posts about things we like, explain why we like them, and why you, the internet-reading public should check them out for yourself.
The problem is, we don’t like Food Stamped. Which is to say, we don’t dislike it either. We’ve got some very mixed feelings about these sorts of things.
A bit of background: the Food Stamp Challenge is an idea that was conceived by food policy advocates in the mid 2000’s, and has been promoted by food banks and nonprofit organizations ever since. Participants budget the equivalent of a food-assistance program payout (about $31 a week), and attempt to plan and eat meals on that budget for 7 days. The Challenge is mainly aimed at legislators, and first made national headlines when Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm took the challenge while in office. Through the years the idea has also been picked up by reporters, bloggers, students, and a host of others. Celebrity chef Mario Batali recently garnered quite a bit of press when he and his family took the Challenge for a week.
So far so good.
The Food Stamp Challenge ought to be a great way to raise awareness of hunger and provoke thought about our food distribution system. The first problem is this: Awareness, as a concept, is fucking worthless. Is it supposed to come as a surprise that eating on $3 a day sucks? It’s not a surprise. It doesn’t take a genius to know that that’s hard to do. You don’t need to get sick to know that cancer is terrible, and you don’t really need to eat beans for a week to understand that cutting your food budget to nothing will cause you to eat poorly.
We’re all for understanding and compassion, but one major problem with the Food Stamp Challenge is that it’s seldom taken on by those whose minds it can change. It’s wonderful that people like Chris Van Hollen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz have tried it, but they’re not the plutocrats trying to grind the impoverished under their boot heels. Don’t expect Mitt Romney’s picture perfect family to try this any time soon.
As publicity stunts go, the Challenge is a pretty good one. The problem is that it’s not anything more than a publicity stunt. Eating on a budget might give someone a good idea of what it’s like to eat in poverty, but it can’t give you any idea at all of what it’s like to actually live in poverty.
Take the filmmakers cum subjects of tonight’s film, for example. Here we have a married couple of artist/intellectuals that typify to the point of cartoonishness the Berkeley Nouveau Bourgeoisie. We’re sure they’re good people. Hell, we’d probably get along famously with them and we are glad that they chose this topic for their film and etc etc. But are they heavily degreed swells who enjoy a lot of privilege and keep their lips firmly pressed around the teat of Corporate America? You betcha!
Families like the Potashes and the Batalis have some very specialized skills, connections and resources on which to draw. They want not to eat on a food stamp budget, but to eat well on that budget. The thing is this: Shira and Yoav Potash are a nice young couple very much in love. They look cute feeding each other tomatoes in the shopping cart, don’t they? You could almost picture yourself going over to their house for a pleasant dinner. They’ve done us all a disservice by turning the camera on themselves. If they had really wanted to raise awareness, they’d have let someone who actually cooks on a food stamp budget be the star of their little cooking show.
Stories of the Food Stamp Challenge variety, like this one from Baltimore City Paper, usually follow a predictable path: the subject does quite a bit of hand wringing about giving up organic produce and specialty desserts, gets hungry and frustrated for a few days, begins to take meal planning seriously, and with the help of a farmers’ market or CSA figures out how to make serviceable meals before they finish the week just barely under budget.
Every piece of journalism we’ve ever seen on this topic has mentioned farmers’ markets and/or CSA’s. That’s great if you’re a chef or writer or nutritionist with a lot of trunk space in your car, but it doesn’t take into account the fact that many SNAP recipients live in food deserts. For good food to reach people below the poverty line, it needs to be accessible to them, and that means being available more often than Saturday or Sunday morning and only accessible by bus. People eat chicken boxes because chicken boxes are there when they’re hungry. We must also take into account that not everyone can cook as well as Mario Batali. Cooking well is just one of many life skills that people in poverty often lack.
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When Tracie McMillan went on food stamps for real, she may not have had the cash at hand to buy whatever groceries she’d like, but she still had endless advantages over people living in actual poverty.
McMillan is one of an increasing number of (ahem) entitled assholes who don’t land their dream job after college and choose to take food stamps and glorify squalor in the name of personal ideals and professional ambition. In this article from Gourmet last week, she talks freely about how she knew no one was going to pay enough for her book to be published and she went ahead and spent 80 hours a week writing it anyway. We hate to break it to you, Princess Tracie, but there are lots of people who want to be writers. You know what they do? They get a fucking job and work on their books in the evenings. McMillan may just be too good for that though. She knows how badly low wage work sucks, because slumming it as a Wal Mart employee happened to be the topic of her book.
Believe it or not, there are a lot of people in this country for whom a job at Wal Mart or Applebees isn’t some see-how-the-other-half-lives fodder for a book deal… it’s something they aspire to. So many SNAP recipients not only lack the skills to write a book or make a film or even cook a healthy meal, they also lack the skills to actually land a job at Wal Mart, assuming one were available. McMillan’s own bio is quite the exercise in white guilt, admitting privilege and then quickly glossing over it to focus on the hardscrabble life of a freelancer with phrases like “cobbled together” and “wrangled a job.”
Unfortunately for all of us, McMillan is hardly alone. A May 2012 NPR feature details a rising number of people with advanced degrees who in general spend the first half of their lives in Academia and then are shocked to find they can’t meet their own earnings expectations. One of the PhD’s interviewed in that piece admitted making up to $32,000 a year and taking food stamps. Fuck him. We live in the real world, and made significantly less than that last year, and are unemployed 6 months a year. Yet we own a home and live comfortably and are not missing any meals. Something that all these commencement speakers who make the rounds at graduation time ought to be hammering home is this: If your degree doesn’t pay, go do something that does.
The other interviewee in that story participated from Baltimore, which lest we forget is becoming something of a mecca for this newer, hipper breed of Welfare Queen. Our city is a virtual perfect storm of systematic poverty, academic entrenchment, low-rent hipster playground and bastion of urbanistic idealism. As someone who grew up working class and remains working class, the idea of taking food stamps to throw a dinner party and using what money you saved to spend on a 12 pack of Boh is revolting and disgusting.
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‘Welfare Queen’ is a terrible term. Leaving aside all of its racist implications, (and whoooo-boy! is it EVER racist) it’s a term that’s meant to explicitly shame those most in need. We truly believe that food is a human right, and that one of the most basic and important functions of any government- from a tiny tribal council to our federal bureaucracy is to see that its people do not starve. This requires Policy.
The overwhelming majority of Americans are thoroughly clueless about what Policy is or how it works. That’s understandable, inasmuch as dealing in policy specifics is the stuff of committee hearings and law libraries and is some of the most bone-dry work in Washington. At its very core though, Policy is about our most basic values. Are we going to drug test welfare recipients because we believe using drugs means you deserve to starve, or are we going to stop fingerprinting people on food stamps because we realize that it’s dehumanizing and absurd and that just because someone is hungry doesn’t mean that they should suffer indignity? Can you imagine if our corporate tax policy involved fingerprinting shareholders before dividends could be paid?
People who hold degrees from Hopkins and MICA and other schools are clearly smart enough to understand Policy. They comprehend that who qualifies for food stamps is an income-based formula. Federal policy such as it is is an actuarial numbers game, and doesn’t consider who your parents are or what your degree is or what your prospects are or whether your income translates to actual need. They just understand that federal law entitles them to benefits and that the benefit of their everyone-gets-a-trophy-we’re-not-keeping-score-you-can-be-anything-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up childhoods entitles them to never feel ashamed of taking food stamps.
For those who actually live on food stamps, there is humility. For kids claiming free or reduced school lunches or mothers who have overrun a monthly allotment, they’d prefer to remain unseen. For people like McMillan, who was hipped to food stamps by her bartender, or Batali (though he does a lot of substantial charity work in addition to the challenge), who can literally eat any food he wants in the world in any quantity, there’s a gross narcissistic element of appearing on camera or in print to draw attention to what amounts to little more than America’s latest fad diet.
We’re glad the Potashes made their film, and we’re glad that the Pratt is going to screen it. Whatever you may think of them, or Batali, or anyone else mentioned here, or even of this blog, you should see the film tonight. Whatever you may think, you’re going to be thinking. And after all, that’s the point.
Food Stamped screens at the Enoch Pratt Library’s Central Branch in the Wheeler Auditorium at 6 pm with a discussion to follow. 400 Cathedral Street, Downtown.
As most of you already know, we’ve been participating in an ongoing contest in which we’re blogging about redesigning our living room. The whole thing is sponsored by local retailer Su Casa, who informed us that our couch has in fact been built and shipped, and is right this very moment on its way to us from California.
Most of the furniture we’ve added so far has come from Su Casa, although the sofa we ordered is coming from their sister store across the street in Fell’s Point, Pad. While Su Casa’s stores hew to the contemporary with heavy doses of eclecticism, Pad is a bit more sophisticated with an overall modernist aesthetic.
Looking over some of the other contest entries, it appears that we’re the only blog that chose a piece of furniture from Pad. If those other bloggers didn’t check out Pad we’d say they missed the boat, and while we wait for our couch to arrive we’re going to take this opportunity to show them the view from the deck of that boat.
The first thing in Pad that’s going to catch your eye, maybe even before you make it into the store, is the Mood Rocking Bed. As ecologically friendly as it is visually stunning, this bed is available in sizes from twin to king and in a variety of metal finishes. Designed for indoor/outdoor use, it also comes with rubber chocks which hold it stable in a flat or angled position. Since we’re not shopping for a bed, we resisted the temptation to lie down and start rocking, but for anyone who wants to give it a try, Pad is happy to accommodate.
The bed is so stunning, in fact, that it’s easy to overlook the modernist light fixtures hanging directly above it. Our hands-down favorite is this one, made from reused bomber bottles. Hanging lamps like these are more often found in upscale restaurants and lounges, and bring instant cosmopolitan cred to any kitchen or man cave, or even work in a sunroom or creative space.
Now that we’ve got all of our larger furniture pieces bought and paid for, we’re starting to be on the lookout for things like light fixtures and the other finishing touches we’ll need to round out the space. This Geometric floating shelf is very high on our list and would allow us to sneak in a little book decor, which is one of our favorite things. At only twenty bucks, the shelf is a steal.
While you’re in there testing out the goods, be sure to set a spell on the Barcelona chair. We’ve got a good friend who owns one of these, and we can vouch for its comfort and function in a real life apartment. Of course, it doesn’t need us to vouch for it since it was designed by Mies van der Rohe for the Queen of Spain and won a Museum of Modern Art Award and became a modernist icon and etc etc etc.
But that’s not important right now. What’s important is that Pad has the chair on sale. In fact, when we were in there last week there were quite a lot of items marked down on sale. If you buy the Barcelona chair though they’ll give you the matching ottoman for free. They’ll also deliver it and haul away your crappy old chair for free, and donate it to charity, although that’s not part of the sale. It’s just what they do for every customer every day.
The truth is that there’s more fascinating furniture on display in Pad’s showroom than we can possibly feature here. From the bedroom to the kitchen to decor items and even monthly displays of original artworks, anyone visiting Fell’s that doesn’t pop in for a look is definitely missing out. We’re incredibly excited to take home a piece from the store, and can’t wait to put our feet up on our new sofa.
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Pad is located at 1500 Thames Street in Fell’s Point. (410) 563-4723. You can read the rest of the posts in this series and see the progress of our living room design here.
