July 29, 2005

20 Favorite Jazz Albums

Django Reinhardt, “Best of Django Reinhardt”
Sarah Vaughn, “Sarah Vaughn” (1954)
Thelonius Monk, “Best of Bluenote” (1947 – 1958)
Sonny Rollins, “Saxophone Colossus”
Miles Davis, “L’Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud” (1957)
Miles Davis, “Kind of Blue” (1959)
Miles Davis, “Sketches of Spain” (1960)
Max Roach, “Percussion Bitter Sweet” (1961)
Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto, “Getz/Gilberto” (1963)
Eric Dolphy, “Out to Lunch” (1964)
John Coltrane, “A Love Supreme” (1964)
Herbie Hancock, “Maiden Voyage” (1964)
Wayne Shorter, “Speak No Evil” (1964)
Krzysztof Komeda, “Astigmatic” (1965)
Miles Davis, “Miles Davis Quintet: 1965 – 1968”
Cecil Taylor, “Conquistador!” (1966)
John Coltrane, “Interstellar Space” (1967)
Miles Davis, “Bitches Brew” (1969)
Tomasz Stanko, “Leosia” (1996)
Tomasz Stanko, “Litania” (1996)

Music | By Citizen Baba | 2:38 PM | Comments (1)

July 28, 2005

The Corporatization of the Charles Theater?

Recently, I went to see the Enron movie at the Charles Theater last weekend. It was great to see the place packed on a Friday night with the new Baltimore social set. I remember the "dark ages" when the place was one nappy screen on a sketchy barren street. Now, it has five screens, (gasp!) weekday matinees, and is on a thriving block. Although I have no love for the owner of the theater (I had a really bad experience with him once), the Charles is a great Baltimore institution. If we are going to shell out public monies to private businesses to increase the "public good" they provide, the renovation of the Charles is as worthy of an investment as they come.

But has the facelift of the Charles gone too far?

About a month ago, I was happy to find on the theater’s website that the latest film of the great Senegalese director, Ousmane Sembene, would soon be appearing. (The movie had been out for a year with no showing at a Baltimore theater or festival.) The date for the movie’s opening came and went. The film was relegated to “To be announced” status and then dropped altogether. The Sembene movie, like “Hotel Rwanda”, would have brought in more African Americans in the theater, a demographic poorly represented in its customer base. (The city is two-thirds black, remember, while a back-of-the-envelope estimate tells me those going to the Charles are maybe 5-10% African American.)

Now, I find “Batman Begins” will be opening there a week from today. What the hell happened with the Charles? I have no problem with the theater expanding to a less “cultured” audience, but a Batman movie represents a new low-water mark, one, in my view, they shouldn’t have crossed.

I think the Charles is drifting towards crass commercialization. This underscores a basic problem with the new money and people pouring into Baltimore. Surely, I’ll never pine for the days when the city was losing nearly a thousand people a month. Yet, do we really want the Harbor Place-ization of the whole city? Do we desire to live in a city that is a corporate post-modern no-place with prettied-up historic architecture? Didn’t many of us escape the suburbs for this very reason?

Local Issues | By Citizen Baba | 10:17 AM | Comments (3)

July 27, 2005

Zodiac Restaurant

The once desolate block on Charles street anchored by the the Charles Theater is now happily booming. There are now three dining options on the block. The booth-size crepe place offers promising, but oddly tasting crepes. Tapas Teatro is nicely decorated, but expensive and always crowded. After seeing the penuin movie, R. and I decided on the old kid on the block, the Zodiac.

The Zodiac is joined like a Siamese twin to perhaps my favorite bar in all of the city, the Club Charles, and is owned by the same people. The dim reddish lighting is much like that in the Club Chucks, but seems better suited for sipping drinks in an arty bar than eating at a restaurant. In as much as I've thought about it, I've always wondered exactly what the giant wizard in the Zodiac was supposed to represent. Next time, I'll have to ask the attractive, mostly friendly, black-clad waitstaff.

About a year or so ago, I remember having gotten a quite tasty entree at the Zodiac. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember exactly what that entree consisted of . Anyway, since then I'd been a couple of times and had mostly unmemorable meals. Saturday night's meal was par for the course.

I got an appetizer special of halibut over fresh greens. The greens, arugala with a vinagrette dressing I think, were fine. The grilled halibut was dry and tasteless. For the main course, R., being a vegetarian got some putridly sweet smelling -- a smell I just couldn't place -- rice with vegetables dish. Among the vegetables were some weak-looking artichoke hearts and baby corns. The latter are almost always canned, so I wondered why a relatively pricey restaurant would choose them over some sort of fresh vegetable. R. didn't eat much of it, claiming it was served way too hot (the whole think looked overcooked), but ate finished it at home in a couple of tries. My main dish, a Po' Boy oyster sandwich, was fine, but unspectacular.

I think I'd vaguely remembered the server from previous visits -- staff continuity in the restaurant business is a rare thing. She was pefectly attentive without being annoying.

In sum, the meal at Zodiac, like most I've had, was just so-so, and not worth the final sum (including tip) of close to $50.

Next time, we'll hit Mt. Vernon before or after a movie. Here's hoping they do something nice with the former Charleston restaurant on the block.

Food | By Citizen Baba | 12:37 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2005

Sinclair's Faulty Logic

Close to Baltimore we are, er, fortunate to have a large media company. Sinclair Broadcasting, which is located in Hunt Valley, owns a heap of television stations across the country in small and mid-sized markets, including our very own WNUV TV 54 and WBFF Fox 45 (thanks Clinton and Congress for relaxing media-ownership laws.)

The company's mission is to blast news with a slant somewhere to the right of Bill O'reilly. It is best known for their plan to air a documentary giving credence to the claims of the Swiftboat Veterans (ultimately, it wasn't aired) and their refusal to play on its member stations an edition of Nightline in which the names of dead servicepeople in Iraq were recited.

Anyway, the state of local television news in this country is one of an endless river of slick crap. Baltimore is no exception. So, not having cable, I often watch the Fox 45 10pm news for laughs. It's funny how they tilt their stories. "Has political correctness gone too far in a local school?" was the headline of a story dealing with a white working-class kid's refusal (put up to it by his xenophobic father) to stay in the room while the Pledge of Allegiance was read in other languages during multicultural week. "While our soldiers are dying in Iraq!", exclaimed the witless kid.

The highlight of 45 Fox news is undoubtedly the editiorial segment (as if the whole program wasn't an editorial) "The Point." In it, the stern, militaresque Mark Hyman gives us "common sense" conservatism. In reality, the segment is filled with illogic, half-truths, and using the most extreme people and events from the left to anecdotally represent the "problems" with "liberal" thinking in general.

Before we knew that Sandra Day O'Connor would retire from the Supreme Court, and Rehnquist would not, "The Point" in the same report claimed it would only be fair to replace Rehnquist with another conservative, while the replacement for the moderate O'Connor merely deserved a speedy vote. Make sense? Of course it doesn't.

A few days ago, the following was one of the "points" of the day:

"How quickly they change their positions. Last month Madeleine Albright attended her 50th reunion at the exclusive Kent Denver School. She told classmates that the bloodshed in the Sudan was a "rolling genocide" and she urged the U.S. to get involved. But she had a different view when she was the Secretary of State for Bill Clinton. In a 1999 meeting with Sudan aid worker Eric Reeves, Albright declined to refer to it as "genocide." She dismissed the tragedy telling Reeves, "The human rights situation in Sudan is not marketable to the American people."

Although I have no love for Madeleine Albright, what Albright AND the Bush administration are now calling a "genocide" is the situation in Darfur. That situation begun in 2003 -- long after Albright left office. This is just out-and-out propaganda.

I'm all for broadening the array of angles in the news media, but outright willful lies and distortion can hardly be called a step forward in the way we obtain our news.

And that's the point.

I'm Citizen Baba.

National Politics | By Citizen Baba | 12:31 PM | Comments (0)