Baltimore, my hometown–and the place I’m currently about six hours away from–is like all cities, way more than the stuff “outsiders” know it for: Home of The Wire, crab cakes, murder-rates and blah blah blah. Towson Town Center, a mall in one of the wealthier, douchier parts of the county has a kinda new hipster skate type shop in it and on the dressing room doors are pseudo-graffiti done with marker; one says “Charm City” and one say “Bodymore” both done with the same aplomb.
Art school kids—including members of Bmore-repping Wham City—list their location as “Bodymore, Murdaland” on their blogger profiles and drink National Bohemian (Baltimore’s beer) forties; a kind of novelistic detail of appropriation and misunderstanding: Is anything lamer than a 40 ounce of beer, not malt liquor?
Of course, it’s that stuff too. Every city’s really dumb and that makes it great too. But Baltimore seems really weird or like, especially weird. Or so I’d like to think.
More than the psychedelic vomit crayola Dan Deacon weird, it’s blue collar bars full of rich assholes, poor whites and blacks, and totally-out gay people all bitching about their work day together weird. As weird as lo-fi spastic club music that the hardest, thugged out dudes go buck wild over. As weird as this video shoot I covered in the spring.
The video was unfortunately aborted, but the day in a basement club that was kinda actually nice and Tony Montana garish too was beautiful for the lack of tension as well as the plurality of people just hanging out.
A dude my girlfriend complimented for his De La Soul NIKEs smiled and immediately admitted they were fakes. Baltimore hip-hop stalwart Sonny Brown, who suffered a stroke earlier in the year and was nursing a bum leg, raced around a bar announcing to anyone and no one how hopped-up on Red Bull he was. A couple a skinny Baltimore hipsters were part of the video’s crew. The video’s dancers taught the kids of rappers and hangers-on some simple dance moves. A crew of goofball rappers stopped by a liquor store at noon then circled the block to hit-up the Starbucks at the other end of Charles Street soon after. That’s Baltimore weird. (Click for the songs!)
Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader?
extremely useful material, on the whole I imagine this is worthy of a book mark, cheers
tablet or laptop
19 Jun 12 at 2:56 am