Baltimore folks?

colin meeder used to live there but now lives in germany

places to hang? or people into music, yeah... I like Balt... but dont know anyone

Gareth- it depends on where you stay.. if you were looking at the Inner Harbor...then yeah it can get "expensive" (which is relative anyway)...there are other areas however...

when are you coming down? do you know where you're gonna check out?

i leave washington on the morning of tuesday the 8th, and had planned to check into philadelphia on the afternoon of the same night. the plan was to head into baltimore on the monday (7th) and come back to washington in the evening. the baltimore youth hostel shut down didn't it?

miscellaneous reasons I love Baltimore: the Sound Garden (definitely stop in there while you're in town), the cobblestone streets in Fells Point, walking the dog in Patterson Park (which has gotten really cleaned up in the past couple years), Baltimore club music late nights on Q92.3 and X105.7, our gradual invasion of hip hop radio (Mario, B Rich, Nature's Problem), the Senator Theatre (as featured in the Mario video!), Cex, Lake Trout, Charm City Suicides, Oranges Band, Slow Jets, driving/walking around and recognizing stuff from Homocide and various Levinson or Waters joints, parking garage rooftop soccer, getting away with saying "hon" on a daily basis, Camden Yards (got hooked up with amazing seats on Sunday...game wasn't much but the view was gorgeous), Dung How, Brick Oven Pizza (my pops lives in Fells Point, can you tell?), driving around with my dad and hearing all about his history with the city, High Zero Festival (was last weekend, a hoot as usual, highzero.org) blah blah blah I know I'm forgetting so much.

Thanks Al, all that stuff, well I know about.. and I agree that those are some of the things that make Balto a nice place.. I was at the game on Sunday as well.. (but being from NY, well you know;)

Gareth: Mondays can be kind of tough for nightlife/entertainment, and some of the cooler daytime attractions--like the American Visionary Art Museum and the American Dime Museum--are closed that day. If you just wanna shop, I'd recommend Sound Garden for CDs, Normals for books and records, and Music Liberated for Baltimore "club" music, if you wanna be the first on your block when you get home. And it's hard to go wrong with dinner at Peter's Inn in Fells Point or dinner at Zodiac and a drink next door at the Club Charles, a pan-generational hipster boite/Baltimore institution near the train station. As far as I know, the hostel remains shuttered though local folks are trying to get it open again in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, cheap places to stay are few and far between.

By the way, I never saw the previous Baltimore thread or I would've been happy to weigh in. What else do you want to know?

http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2014/02/20/baltimore-sun-to-acquire-city-paper.html

Baltimore City Paper bought by Baltimore Sun, layoffs at Baltimore CIty Paper expected...

oh hey

I guess it will take awhile to see how this plays out

nah I think it will play out pretty quickly!

Ugh, sorry everybody. Al, are you full time at the City Paper or a freelancer?

oh man, whoah

sorry to learn of this

I am pretty sure he's a freelancer

Apparently the former owners first put the City Paper up for sale last summer according to that article. Did not know that

I used to for a weekly that was owned by the same company that operated the city's daily, and that arrangement really doesn't work well. It lends itself to all sorts of coverage conflicts and brand confusion and not-great marketing/sales tie-in ideas, etc.

yeah I'm a freelancer, as I have been for the last 9 years, and will be until I can't or it no longer exists. I was offered a full-time position once -- the offer was rescinded a week later when the previous ownership decided the position no longer existed.

no idea what this means yet for me, although i'm already an approved freelancer for the Sun, so it can't hurt to have an in on both sides of the thing. the Sun has been dying for a long time, but it's been dying slowly, so that's something.

Heard a little WAMU radio story on the purchase this morning. The Sun says they will somehow keep the CP and the Sun separate to avoid the conflicts that Evan mentioned. Feel bad in advance for City Paper fulltimers who will apparently be let go.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-02-20/business/bal-baltimore-sun-media-group-to-buy-city-paper-20140220_1_alternative-newsmedia-baltimore-sun-media-group-city-paper

inevitable…

Ha. I not only forgot about this thread, I forgot that I had posted on it under a now-dead login more than a decade ago (and I never knew that I knew some dude).

I left CP a couple of years ago, but it just this morning occurred to me that those freelance assignments I had lined up for April maybe aren't happening anymore.

Of course, a bunch of my friends/former coworkers may be about to lose their jobs, so my problem is pretty minor as problems go.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/21/newspaper-firing-staff-baltimore-city-paper-fired-staffers-acquisition-sun_n_4832788.html

Reportedly fired everyone but told them them they could reapply.

DLee = Lee G, right? hey dude!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/02/20/baltimore-city-paper-reporter-on-sale-this-is-the-only-thing-ive-ever-done/

Heya. I mostly lurk these days, but I hadda step in on this.

Right now everything is mere speculation. I believe the CP staff is supposed to find out more about what's going on, and who still has jobs, later this week.

http://blogs.citypaper.com/index.php/the-news-hole/layoffs-hit-city-paper-2/

http://www.baltimorebrew.com/2014/02/28/under-pressure-from-advertisers-baltimore-city-paper-spikes-a-review/

I think the Travis Kitchens review of Jason Aldean/Florida Georgia Line was pretty dumb in a rockist/pure country authenticity way, but yea it was too bad they had to give in to advertisers and pull it.

http://www.savingcountrymusic.com/scathing-jason-aldean-concert-review-censored

what i've heard is that the alleged threatening sponsors buy full page-ads and their business is practically worth somebody's salary, so it's not the kind of problem easily dismissed in the name of principles, i'd imagine. i'm surprised this happened in that if it was going to happen, it seems like it should've happened to me or someone else a lot sooner -- i write concert listings every week and at one point wrote 50+ concert reviews a year on the CP site and never held back on negative opinions (nor have most of CP's other music writers for as long as i've read it). Lupe Fiasco said "fuck you" to me on twitter recently, but i've never gotten an advertiser to threaten the paper.

I think the problem isn't what he wrote about the performers, but the crowd. Most college papers wouldn't let a writer get away with capturing "rednecks" in such broad, ugly strokes. Imagine if he wrote about the crowd at a rap show that way.

He lamely defended using "rednecks" because he said Aldeen did a shoutout to "rednecks" and much of the crowd responded favorably, so that made it ok for him to say it.

http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/baltimore-s-city-paper-and-me

That's very nice.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/05/opinion/are-alt-weeklies-over.html?emc=edit_th_20140305&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=31119931

Baltimore City Paper's Baynard Woods defends alt-weeklies

"Terrible, more of a slam piece than a review..."

And, of course, the article gives more "authority" to this promoter than he deserves. People who read reviews LOVE stuff like this - when deserved. I think the promoter is one of those people who has never read a negative review In a mainstream publication. I mean, something is wrong when a critic can't even take on American Idol.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/04/15/frederic_nauczyciel_photographs_voguing_communities_in_his_exhibition_the.html

Photos of Baltimore voguers now on exhibit in NYC.

Nauczyciel was in Baltimore on a grant from the French government in 2011 when he stumbled across some voguers performing in a parking lot. He posted photos of the event to Facebook and quickly found himself flooded with new connections in the ballroom scene. “Before that, I had maybe 50 friends on Facebook. Suddenly I ended up having 200 friends—voguers from Baltimore and New York,” he said.

Nauczyciel stayed five months in the city, intrigued by the themes of race, gender, and performance that are embedded in ballroom culture.

I guess that's a different scene than what Some Dude is gonna chronicle in his book?

i'm not aware of much crossover between those scenes (other than Miss Tony, who was kind of a singular figure), but i'd definitely be interested to find out

http://bandwidth.wamu.org/towson-glen-arm-freakouts-baltimore-music/

Mike Apichella was a teenager in Baltimore County in the ’90s. Early in the decade, he and his pals formed a loose music and art collective named Towson-Glen Arm after their hometowns. They rallied around a love of art, activism and the avant-garde, bridging the silly and the sincere; Towson-Glen Arm kids wrote poetry about social issues, but they also formed bands with names like Spastic Cracker and Lesbian Chicken Maggot Blasters.

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/850-op-ed-white-privilege-and-black-lives-in-the-baltimore-music-scene/

Lower Dens singer editorial piece.

One nitpick---But what about Some Dude, who has written about more than Baltimore indie rock

bump

Need to check twitter and see what Baltimore folks thought about this

everyone i've talked to thought it was a great piece and v accurate. so do i. there was some dissent from a local promotor the day the piece ran - that abdu ali was (paraphrasing here) "making his relative lack of success about racial inequality, not the fact that his music and attitude both suck" - and he was just absolutely roasted online

One nitpick---But what about Some Dude, who has written about more than Baltimore indie rock

― curmudgeon, Friday, July 31, 2015 6:35 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol well i'm not exactly the only exception. but i did rant on twitter about how it is frustrating to write for 10+ years about black musicians doing DIY things in Baltimore and be continually told that doesn't exist or just started, or have Pitchfork of all places point out that gee only white indie bands from Baltimore have a national profile how weird.

it was a very good piece tho.

I saw Dwarfs of East Agouza (Sublime Frequencies label band led by Alan Bishop once in Sun City Girls) at the Compound on Kirk Street in Charles Village area sorta near North Ave in a former car repair shop looking place, where you had to enter in from a hard to find entrance in back in an area of Baltimore with warehouses and just a liquor store nearby selling single cheap beers. The crowd was standing and some dancing and enthusiastic. Maybe some were there to see the members of Animal Collective (Deakin & Geologist) who opened, but they mostly stuck around for Dwarfs. Plus since Baltimore gets less events than DC, I think that helped draw more people too. Ian Nagoski who runs Canary Records was there, Tonal Park Studio in Takoma , MD guy too

So more of a white diy event obvs (if one is looking at earlier 2015 posts above)

Glad The Compound is still kicking. Last time I was there was for a packed out Halloween party/show several years ago with Dan Deacon (who iirc was painted yellow and dressed as Homer Simpson lol) and several others. Was a fantastic night.