Archive for January, 2007

Short list

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

All dressed up and no place to go? Allow me to suggest the following activities taking place this week in and around Baltimore:
+ Meet the Artist: Matthew Barney: The acclaimed artist and filmmaker best known for The Cremaster Cycle, and more recently for his collaboration with Björk in Drawing Restraint 9, will be at the […]

Bring the noise

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

Last night was rock night at the Red Room with two extremely divergent but complimentary takes on the music. Up first was Kioku, a sax-percussion-laptop trio from NYC, performing “traditional Asian folk music within a new context of collaborative experimentation and improvisation” and more than a touch of funk and free jazz. Central to the […]

Read: The Discomfort Zone

Saturday, January 27th, 2007

I had planned to start this little review like this: Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone is a rather unmemorable collection of personal essays dealing with and recalling, among other things, his relationship with his parents, adolescence, birding, and Snoopy, and is much less focused than his previous book of essays How To Be Alone. Then […]

SLN turns 2!

Friday, January 26th, 2007

A belated birthday greeting (one week off the mark) from SLN. Thanks to all our readers.

Read: How To Be Alone

Friday, January 26th, 2007

Franzen’s wonderful collection of essays tied together by the themes of privacy and how to be alone in a world of unparalled media saturation (and his search for the meaning of writing the contemporary social novel and whether or not anyone cares). With so many media options and outlets vying for our attention and for […]

Story telling

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

Shortly after Joan La Barbara delivered the closing line (”The old man lives in concrete”) in Robert Ashley’s new experimental opera Concrete on Sunday night, I was reminded of a favorite phrase that Don Sinta, my teacher and mentor at the University of Michigan, would produce when I had the gall to inform him that […]

No love for the MoMA

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

I’m temporarily blacklisting the MoMA (no link = no love). I deliberately made a late train reservation back to Mobtown so that I might be able to catch a glimpse of Doug Aitken’s sleepwalkers, which was going to be showing on (yes, on) the MoMA beginning at 5pm. A little before 4pm, I decided that […]

A celestial excursion

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

I’m off to NYC to catch the final performance of Robert Ashley’s new opera tonight at La MaMa E.T.C. Report to follow.

Read: White Noise

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

DeLillo’s irony-clad postmodern critique of consumerism, media saturation, conspiracy, the potential positive effects of violence, and mortality. Written in 1985, there are times that the book is eerily prophetic: the pronouncement that in times of disaster it’s the lower class people who are forgotten sounds a lot like what happened in the wake of hurricane […]

Baltimore restaurants

Friday, January 19th, 2007

I’m fond of saying that Baltimore, the Greatest City in America (formerly, the City That Reads), Charm City, Mobtown, has something for everyone—and restaurants are no exception. I’ve sampled my fair share of the city’s eateries and have put my experiences to use in the form of a map that records my adventures, both good […]