NEWS
By Michael Sragow | July 24, 2009
Viewers coming together in an adrenaline rush or an aesthetic high as they soak in pristine images from a beautiful big screen. That's been the promise of American moviegoing as a major piece of our culture - a promise that the Senator Theatre has fulfilled year after year. The good news from Wednesday's auction is that the Senator won't become a church hall or a college auditorium. But it will take ingenuity and commitment on the part of movie lovers and arts funders to see that the bad news doesn't come.
NEWS
By Julie Bykowicz | July 20, 2009
Yes, that was a pack of Samurai strolling down Howard Street near the Baltimore Convention Center. But that giant marshmallow? That was actually "Happi Paper," a giant dancing roll of toilet paper "with a simple heart and a kind soul." Such characters convene each year in Baltimore for Otakon, the largest anime and Asian culture convention in the country, which ended Sunday. More than 25,000 people - many dressed in full cartoon costume or sporting punky hairdos or wielding enormous cardboard swords - attended this year.
NEWS
By David L. Ulin | January 18, 2009
Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation By David Denby Simon & Schuster / 144 pages / $15.95 God save us from Gawker's world. The New York-based media gossip Web site, which launched in 2002 and has distinguished itself by, among other things, attacking writer Neal Pollack's young son, Elijah, is generally regarded as the prototype of a new style of cultural discourse: dismissive, superior, jaded, marked by what David Denby, in Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation, calls "false knowingness," a way of pretending to be more clued-in than it is. Denby quotes Gawker founder Nick Denton: "The ideal Gawker item is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head, and it's 100 words long, 200 max."
NEWS
By Jonah Goldberg | December 26, 2008
Does anyone know what we're supposed to call this decade? Is it the 2000s? The twenty-ohs? We're coming up on the last year of it, and I still have no idea. Personally, I always liked the "oughts," as in, "Back in ought-six, I ate a brick of cheddar cheese in one sitting." But perhaps the best reason to call it the oughts is that one is left with the sense that this decade ought to have been about something, and yet it really doesn't feel that way. As flawed as the American habit of dividing our history into decades may be, it's always made at least some intuitive sense.
NEWS
By Raymond Daniel Burke | September 26, 2008
Kenneth N. Harris Sr. could have very easily taken a different path. He could have been like so many other children of 16-year-old single mothers in Baltimore's forgotten neighborhoods, and taken the route that eschews education and accomplishment for the lure of streets ruled by violence played out amid a cancerous drug epidemic. He could have spurned responsibility, assumed the mantle of a victim of limited opportunities, and fallen in with the crowd that wallows in nihilism. But he did not. And so he did not allow us the luxury of ignoring his murder, as we do so many other acts of violence that are more commonplace than we wish to acknowledge.
NEWS
By Mary Carole McCauley | September 5, 2008
The Bangarra Dance Theatre, which has been described as "Australia's most sensual performing arts troupe," strives to fuse modern movements with elements of Australia's native culture. In Awakenings, which will be performed this fall in Washington, the company examines the symbolism of 40,000 years of Aboriginal life - and how those ancient rituals both collide with and inform modern culture. The troupe was formed in 1989; it gets its name from the word bangarra, which means "to make fire" in the Wiradjuri language of New South Wales.
NEWS
By Michael Sragow | April 4, 2008
Shine a Light has two maestros, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, and once they begin to mesh, around the third or fourth song, they put on a display of showmanship that erases the line between art and entertainment. The great rock and roll bands of the 1960s and 1970s did so much to define popular culture and youth culture that pundits and critics tend to burden the few survivors with unfair questions. Have they reinvented themselves? Can they embody rebellion and effrontery as middle-aged or old men?
NEWS
By Michael Hill | March 15, 2008
Many middle-aged American Jews have identical memories of Yiddish - the language their parents spoke when they didn't want the children to understand. That's what Gila Haor remembers from her childhood in upstate New York. But at 33, she's trying to change things in her Pikesville household by speaking Yiddish as often as possible to her three daughters, ages 3 to 8. "It would make my grandparents - they are gone - so proud to know that I am speaking Yiddish," she says. Enthusiasts like Haor are few and far between.
NEWS
February 6, 2008
Little generosity in Bush's budget The column "Treatment, not talk" (Opinion Commentary, Feb. 3) expresses the logical view that President Bush's "personal struggles against alcohol addiction" would lead him to advocate "generous and caring policies." Unfortunately, as the column points out, that hasn't been Mr. Bush's record. To understand this point, you need only turn to page three of the same paper to learn of Mr. Bush's proposed 2009 budget, which squeezes funding for education, health, housing and anti-poverty programs while maintaining tax cuts for big business and the wealthy ("President's budget comes under fire," Feb. 3)
NEWS
By C. Fraser Smith | November 23, 2007
Standing before the bar of justice to answer for his crimes, former state Sen. Thomas L. Bromwell was accorded a stature he never quite attained. He was hailed as a mighty poobah, one of the "most powerful," a lion of the legislature whose wish could not be safely ignored. Those who watched him in General Assembly councils remember a somewhat different figure. He was a bar owner who flaunted his rough edges. He was a big man with a dark, wavy forelock. He laughed a little too loudly.