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...

Back in June certain corners of the Internet went into a minor frenzy for about a week when NPR published an article by one of its 20 year old interns about how she owns tens of thousands of songs and didn’t pay for any of them and wants instant access to everything ever recorded for...

Yes, Choppers, it is here once again. That magical time of year when for two weeks we generally pester the hell out of your for votes in an online contest so that our modest little blogging hobby can receive a tiny bit of validation from the media establishment. Voting officially begins today...

Last week over on the Baltimore Brew local architect Klaus Philipsen offered a defense of the Mechanic Theater and made the case for its historic preservation. This blog, however, remains unconvinced and today we say that that ugly, useless monstrosity should be torn down immediately. It is...

See how lucky you are to live in a city like Baltimore? We have 3 good shows tonight. Some crummy cities don’t have any good shows. Go to the good shows and enjoy your Summer. Charm City Art Space. Golden...

In a previous post we laid out our philosophy concerning art collecting, and featured the first painting we’ve purchased for the house. Basically, that philosophy is that we’d rather keep our walls blank until we can afford to buy genuine work that we’ll truly appreciate,...

Maybe it has to do with the coming of Spring and the warming of the weather lately. Maybe it has to do with us waking up earlier and actually leaving the house before happy hour once in a while. Maybe it’s just a natural rise in general douchebaggery. For whatever reason, we’ve...

It’s that time of year again, Baltimore. The time when we bother you as much as we possibly can without completely alienating you so that you’ll vote for us in the Baltimore Sun’s Maryland’s Outstanding Blogs contest. Voting begins at 8 am today, and runs through...

So, at the moment we’re basically an unemployed schmo who sits around watching TV and fiddling with the internet all day. We’re not very rich and we’re not very important. You wouldn’t know it judging by what we see on a daily hourly basis though. Lately, flipping on...

Now that a whole weekend has elapsed, this is probably old news already. With gossip moving at the speed of broadband these days, we’re probably not the first to tell you that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are getting a divorce. Then again, perhaps you haven’t heard. They decided...

We’ve got a new website! This will be the last post on thebaltimorechop.wordpress.com. Thebaltimorechop.com is now live, and all of our posts, past and future can be found there. Let this post serve as the official announcement. The new site is light years ahead of the old one...

Well Baltimore, the heat has finally broken. The cold has snapped. The mercury is beginning to drop. Very soon the trees will be bare of leaves, the woodland creatures will burrow in, and birds will fly south for the winter. There’s also another species whose ranks are about to be...

There’s going to be some changes here at the Baltimore Chop. One of the great things about blogs as opposed to some more traditional forms of media is that evolution comes much more naturally. Any blog that remains static for too long will inevitably become stale. Seeing that...

It’s said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and this is true not only in our culture, but in our countercultures and subcultures as well. Your Chop is 31 this year, which makes us just barely old enough to remember the best of the early Nineties. It also means...

Most of you probably well remember the Great Hontroversy of December 2010, in which Denise Whiting trademarked the term “Hon” in various forms, and crowed about it in the media in an attempt to drum up publicity for her newly opened tacky souvenir shop, just in time for stocking...

Now that Memorial Day weekend has come and gone we’re officially in the midst of another Baltimore Summer, and all that that entails. As of now, and for the next three months or so we’re going to see all the hallmarks of Summer in the streets; packs of dirtbikes, open fire...

For all the reputation this city carries nationwide as being rough or gritty, we don’t exactly pour on the hatred the way we pour Natty Boh. Living in a place like Charm City, you learn to put up with a lot, and Baltimoreans sometimes even exercise more patience than we ought to. There...

Okay, so we’re going to rant a little today. Just at tiny bit. We have to, because the topic we wish to address is such that the only way you can approach it is to rant anonymously on the internet. There’s no laws on the books about it- no signs posted, no accepted protocol. So...

If traffic has seemed to move faster and parking spaces have become more available in the last 24 hours, it might be because Baltimore City sent some obscure bureaucrat out onto the streets at lunchtime yesterday, a day after this article was published, to shut down the ever-growing fleet of...

Hey, you all know by now that we’re pretty liberal. We’re all about Human Rights and respecting sovereignty and due process and all that jazz. But our country just shot Osama bin Laden in the face and you know what? We couldn’t be more pleased about it. Cause seriously, fuck...

Whenever we travel anywhere outside Baltimore, we can’t help but notice the differences and similarities Charm City has to whatever city we’re in. When we went to New York to visit a friend last week, we noticed plenty of both, including one difference in particular that struck a...

It doesn’t matter who you are, you’re going to grow out of hardcore. It happens to all of us sooner or later. Even the legit, bona-fide True Til Death types among us will eventually stick with the records they grew up with, and turn out to shows less and less often. There’s...

Most of you may remember that there was a torrential rain about two weeks ago. It rained hard for 30 hours straight. It was the sort of Baltimore downpour where Thames Street threatens to flood, gutters back up with Utz bags and hair weaves, and broken umbrellas are forsaken all over city...

When Martin O’Malley declared Baltimore “The Greatest City in America” most outsiders were derisive and dismissive. Even some longtime City residents were somewhat dubious of the claim. But those of us who truly love Baltimore thought “Why not?” Seriously…...

People from Boston are great… …until you get them talking. People from New York are interesting… …until you get them talking about food. People from New Jersey aren’t as bad as all that… …until they start talking about New Jersey. People from...

We told you earlier this week about our New Year’s resolutions, but honestly, that was mostly all stuff we were resolved/planning to do anyway and New Year’s day was just a good excuse to blog about them. The truth is that we resolve stuff all the time, and although the results are...

We’re forgoing any Christmas decorations this year. Call it an austerity measure. Call it Grinching. Call it (most accurately) laziness. With the amount of traveling we do every year, and not knowing when we’ll next be home for the holidays, it didn’t seem prudent to invest...

Remember the first time you read The Catcher in the Rye, Baltimore? Remember when you put the book down and said to yourself “Holy shit! He’s right. They are all a bunch of goddamn phonies? Remember how you were about 14, and you finally learned to begin to spot the differences...

You already know that The Chop Approves of Brunch. How could anyone not approve of brunch, really? In an age when most breakfasts consist of things like Nutri-grain bars, cereal, frozen waffles and drive-thru fare, it’s nice to sleep late once a week and wake up to eggs benedict, French...

Some of you may know this already. Some of you may be scoffing and cluck-clucking and clicking away from this page. Still more of you may be shocked. What’s the meaning of this? Voicemail is alive and well. I just left a bunch of them this morning. Well, people still play vinyl records...

Year in and year out, we’re always surprised that people don’t just take the easy way out and dress for Halloween in a giant Summer’s Eve box, because there’s no shortage of douchebags running around Fells Point, Federal Hill, etc. When Batman came out, you all had to...

We’re going to let you in on a little secret of etiquette, Baltimore. When an invitation says something is optional, that thing is damn well mandatory. A good host or hostess will be reluctant to push their guests around, even on paper. There are firm conventions in place though, and if...

The Director is in town. More than a year ago, the Director decided he was sick and tired of using his film degree to edit bureaucratic training videos and pick up a little freelance wedding work and he took himself out to Hollywood to pursue his art and seek his fortune in the movie...

Oh Monday. It’s been a long and busy weekend in Baltimore. Everyone’s tired. Most people are sunburned. Some of us are still hungover. With everything that’s gone on over the last 60 hours or so since everyone quit the workweek, it makes sense that no one feels like doing...

We know you like to eat, Baltimore. We know you like to eat well, too. You’re all about your farmers’ markets and your new restaurants and your local, sustainable, seasonal ingredients and everything else. We like to eat as much as the next armchair gourmet, but even more than...

The Business is coming to Baltimore tonight. We should be excited about that. We should be dusting off our Doc Martens and brushing up on the finer points of football hooliganism. We should realize how lucky we are to get a chance to see one of the greatest hardcore/punk bands of all time, and...

Brace yourselves Baltimore, for the Chop is about to take another potentially unpopular position. Today we’re coming out against food. Did you know that your own humble Chop has been a vegetarian lo these 15 years? Of course you didn’t. We never mentioned it because we’re...

You would think it would be a natural fit, right? Foursquare lets you know where everyone is and what they’re doing. That’s also the sole purpose of this blog, to talk about the things we do and the places we go every night. But alas, you will not find the Chop on Foursquare any...