I Come From Far Away
Lura at the Baltimore Museum of Art,
Oct 4 at 3 p.m.
A world apart: Cape Verdean singer Lura brings the lush sounds of the former Portuguese colony to Baltimore.
In 1988, a 47-year-old singer from a little-known chain of islands off the coast of Senegal traveled to France to record her first album. Since then, Cape Verde's Cesaria Evora has introduced millions of international listeners to the archipelago's signature musical style—the morna, a slow, sweetly tragic form that many compare to the blues. Evora's success opened the door for an entire generation of Cape Verdean musicians, including one of her former background singers, Maria de Lurdes Pina Assunçao—better known as Lura—who is scheduled to perform at the Baltimore Museum of Art on October 4.
The Portuguese-born Lura is not a native Cape Verdean, although she is connected to the country both by blood—her mother and father come from the islands São Nicolau and Santiago, respectively—and by her own musical curiosity. Now, just as Evora has popularized the morna, Lura has adopted two styles from her father's island as her own: the accordion-propelled funana and the call-and-response folk form called batuku. She employs each on her two North American releases, 2005's Di Korpu Ku Alma (Of Body and Soul) and 2007's M'Bem di Fora (I Come From Far Away).
Lura's mastery of these musical dialects seems to have taken place during the two years that divide these projects. Up-tempo and down, the songs on each album are full of nimble guitar playing and intricate drum work. Both recall the joys and pains of life on an enchanting, if impoverished, island. But on M'Bem di Fora her singing is the real difference: Instead of marching through the lyrics with a studied seriousness, her quick, hushed tones skirt between guitar, accordion, and drums. Fortunately, you don't have to speak Creole to appreciate the significance: She sounds, at last, right at home.
—Lionel Foster
FILM
Memory Block
JCC CineFest at the Gordon Center for Performing Arts, Oct 27 and 29 at 7:30 p.m. and Nov 12 at 7 p.m.
When "never forget" is the rallying cry of Holocaust remembrance, it's bold for the JCC CineFest—a joint venture between the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore and the Senator Theatre—to kick off its third season with Fugitive Pieces, a film about how clinging too fiercely to the past can strangle the future.
Jakob Beer (Stephen Dillane) was a happy child until the Nazis murdered his parents and sister, leaving him to flee for his life into the woods of Poland. Forty years later, he's a lonely and obsessive Holocaust scholar who complains in his journal about his ex-wife (Rosamund Pike) and how her effervescent love and attention prevented him from wallowing in the self-imposed misery he deemed necessary to remember the little things about his vanished family—how tea was always served with lemon, not milk; how uncooked pie crust felt between his fingers as he watched the women bake; or how his beloved sister, Bella (Nina Dobrev), would finger a silent rendition of Moonlight Sonata on the kitchen tabletop. Is he unable to move on? Or simply unwilling?
If Jakob sounds like a drag to be around, you're right—and the movie drags considerably when he's on-screen, especially when he's reading his overwrought poetry or refusing to notice how friends and loved ones have rejoined the business of living without sacrificing their integrity. But glowing scenes from his childhood as a refugee living in Greece skitter like a water strider on the surface of the film's bigger question—one asked not only by those struggling to comprehend the looming presence of the Holocaust in their own lives, but also by anyone suffering from catastrophic loss: When is it OK to forget?
After Fugitive Pieces screens on Monday, October 27, the festival continues on Wednesday, October 29, with Someone To Run With, an Israeli movie about how a lost dog leads to a journey through Jerusalem's underbelly, and concludes November 12 with A Secret, a French film about a young boy uncovering his father's wartime indiscretions in occupied Paris.
—Violet Glaze
Admission is $9 per person, per night; tickets are available at the door a half-hour before each screening, or in advance at the Rosenbloom JCC in Owings Mills, 3506 Gwynnbrook Avenue, and the Weinberg Park JCC, 5700 Park Heights Avenue. A guest speaker follows each film. Go to www.jcc.org for more information.
BOOKS
Showtime
Paper Kingdom, edited by Elena Johnston(self-published, 2008)
Paper Kingdom, edited by Elena Johnston (self-published, 2008)
Baltimore as art gallery—it's an idea that sparked a book project for Elena Johnston, a 2006 MICA illustration graduate. The Philadelphia native had collected lots of homemade posters and band flyers for Baltimore shows, and she felt they were more than just pieces of paper stuck to walls and front windows. So in August she released Paper Kingdom, a self-published compendium of posters culled from both her own collection and that of friends and acquaintances. The posters were created by familiar Charm City characters: artist Shaun Flynn, typographers (and 2008 Urbanite Project participants) Nolen Strals and Bruce Willen, musician Tonie Joy, Ace of Cakes cast member Katie Rose. Johnston also interviewed musicians, including electronica star Dan Deacon, Justin Lucas of instrumental group Madagascar, and Victoria Legrand of the dream-pop band Beach House. The posters range from the black-and-white photocopies of the '90s to the vibrant, colorful screenprints popular these days—all in all, a proud collection of Baltimore music-scene souvenirs. To order your own copy ($45), go to paperkingdom.blogspot.com.
—Marianne K. Amoss
BOOKS
Local Heroes
by Susan McCallum-Smith
Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire
(Illustration copyright © 2007 by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden, from Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Random House Inc.)
Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden (Bantam Dell, 2007)
Beowulf, verse translation by Seamus Heaney (W.W. Norton, 2000)
The Blue Star by Tony Earley (Little, Brown and Co., 2008)
"He must be on the threshold of Hell …" Yes, it's election season in America. Sorry, I jest. He is our hero Lord Baltimore, a survivor of the First World War whom God has honed "with hammer and anvil, a blacksmith at the forge" to scourge the world of a plague of vampires unleashed by this epic bloodshed. (Odd—it still sounds like election season in America …)
Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden's adult fairy tale, Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, is illustrated in menacing black and white by Mignola, best known as the creator of Hellboy. Its elegantly tuned gore is heavily influenced by the subversive children's author Hans Christian Andersen, that manic-depressive who delighted in denying the happily-ever-after.
Three men gather in a dirty tavern in a no-name town, summoned by the mysterious Lord Baltimore. While they await their host, they exchange news about villagers controlled by a devil-puppeteer, about a Chilean lake infested with evil, about a soldier who transforms into a grizzly bear at nightfall and devours his buddies. And they talk of Lord Baltimore, who, after waking up in a corpse-plugged trench to the sound of slurping and munching, swears to do battle with the vampire leader of the Red Death. He travels dressed like a morbid tinker, jury-rigged with daggers, pistols, and scabbards, and hammers a nail using an axe handle into his wooden leg after each vampire culling in a perverse blend of home- and self-improvement.
Baltimore's camp melodrama, religiosity, and Hammer horror movie dialogue completely titillated my inner Goth. And by the time I read this, in Beowulf—"it would come: the killer instinct / unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant"—I'd pinched the dog's collar, black-lacquered my nails, and fashioned curtain hooks into nipple rings.
If Baltimore is an anti-hero, then Beowulf personifies the pure-hearted, Arthurian-Wagnerian, bicep-bulging, blond-locks-a-flowing mythical hero. The Nobel-Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney has transformed the original Anglo-Saxon text, written between the seventh and tenth centuries by an unknown author, into something utterly modern and relevant.
Beowulf tells the saga of a Scandinavian prince who saves a nation—not once, but thrice. First, Beowulf slaughters the man-eating demon Grendel, "this corpse-maker mongering death" who had been treating the country like a larder. Then he takes on Grendel's revenge-hungry mommy, a battle that leaves behind a considerable amount of "wound-slurry." Thirdly, he slays a dragon, but in doing so receives a fatal wound.
Heaney's language throbs with muscular punch and kick-ass alliteration: "greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men / from their resting places and rushed to his lair, / flushed up and inflamed from the raid, / blundering back with the butchered corpses." In his introduction, Heaney explains that he based the poem's sound on his Irish relatives, those "big voiced" men whose words carried a "weighty distinctness," and who had a kind of "Native American solemnity of utterance." Contrasting with this abundant testosterone are moments of gentle lyricism. Beowulf talks of having "wintered into wisdom," and on his death, "The prince's spirit would spin free from his body." And who could read the following description of a grieving woman—
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement
—and not think of Darfur (or Georgia)?
Jim Glass, the hero of The Blue Star, Tony Earley's follow-up to Jim the Boy (2000), is more like the rest of us—flawed, hapless, doing his best despite the circumstances. In 1941, the year before graduating high school in tiny Aliceville, North Carolina, Jim "didn't know how it was possible that he loved Chrissie Steppe, only that he did." His passion is mighty inconvenient, given that Chrissie is his buddy's gal and that her family's disreputable past, bone-crushing poverty, and Cherokee ancestry churns up mixed feelings in his guts. Furthermore, Jim has just ditched his longtime sweetheart, the know-it-all Norma Harris, who "actually had a picture of Abraham Lincoln" in her bedroom—not that Jim has ever set foot in her bedroom—and his mom, his three uncles, geez, the entire town is miffed, being the kind of folks prone to start quilting the moment a boy throws a girl the wink.
Indeed, these are the kind of folks who find copperheads in potato holes, wear their paws off playing fiddle, and say "y'all" and "daggum." Yet Earley turns this borderline hokey material into something profound, and the scenes of Jim and Chrissie's courtship often resemble the swooningly pitched duets from La Bohéme. "Being in love is like getting run over," says Jim's Uncle Zeno, sentiments that were shared, I'm sure, by Maestro Puccini. "Sometimes it kills you and sometimes it don't." After Pearl Harbor is bombed you can pretty much guess the rest of the plot of The Blue Star, but you don't care because Earley's story of the down-to-earth heroism of everyday decency has you scrambling for your hankie, dagnabbit.
Share your thoughts at www.urbanitebaltimore.com/forum.
Lura at the Baltimore Museum of Art,
Oct 4 at 3 p.m.
click to enlarge
- Ernest Collins
- A world apart: Cape Verdean singer Lura brings the lush sounds of the former Portuguese colony to Baltimore.
A world apart: Cape Verdean singer Lura brings the lush sounds of the former Portuguese colony to Baltimore.
In 1988, a 47-year-old singer from a little-known chain of islands off the coast of Senegal traveled to France to record her first album. Since then, Cape Verde's Cesaria Evora has introduced millions of international listeners to the archipelago's signature musical style—the morna, a slow, sweetly tragic form that many compare to the blues. Evora's success opened the door for an entire generation of Cape Verdean musicians, including one of her former background singers, Maria de Lurdes Pina Assunçao—better known as Lura—who is scheduled to perform at the Baltimore Museum of Art on October 4.
The Portuguese-born Lura is not a native Cape Verdean, although she is connected to the country both by blood—her mother and father come from the islands São Nicolau and Santiago, respectively—and by her own musical curiosity. Now, just as Evora has popularized the morna, Lura has adopted two styles from her father's island as her own: the accordion-propelled funana and the call-and-response folk form called batuku. She employs each on her two North American releases, 2005's Di Korpu Ku Alma (Of Body and Soul) and 2007's M'Bem di Fora (I Come From Far Away).
Lura's mastery of these musical dialects seems to have taken place during the two years that divide these projects. Up-tempo and down, the songs on each album are full of nimble guitar playing and intricate drum work. Both recall the joys and pains of life on an enchanting, if impoverished, island. But on M'Bem di Fora her singing is the real difference: Instead of marching through the lyrics with a studied seriousness, her quick, hushed tones skirt between guitar, accordion, and drums. Fortunately, you don't have to speak Creole to appreciate the significance: She sounds, at last, right at home.
—Lionel Foster
FILM
Memory Block
JCC CineFest at the Gordon Center for Performing Arts, Oct 27 and 29 at 7:30 p.m. and Nov 12 at 7 p.m.
click to enlarge
- Sole survivor: Stephen Dillane (right) and Ayelet Zurer in Jeremy Podeswa’s Fugitive Pieces, part of the JCC CineFest
When "never forget" is the rallying cry of Holocaust remembrance, it's bold for the JCC CineFest—a joint venture between the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore and the Senator Theatre—to kick off its third season with Fugitive Pieces, a film about how clinging too fiercely to the past can strangle the future.
Jakob Beer (Stephen Dillane) was a happy child until the Nazis murdered his parents and sister, leaving him to flee for his life into the woods of Poland. Forty years later, he's a lonely and obsessive Holocaust scholar who complains in his journal about his ex-wife (Rosamund Pike) and how her effervescent love and attention prevented him from wallowing in the self-imposed misery he deemed necessary to remember the little things about his vanished family—how tea was always served with lemon, not milk; how uncooked pie crust felt between his fingers as he watched the women bake; or how his beloved sister, Bella (Nina Dobrev), would finger a silent rendition of Moonlight Sonata on the kitchen tabletop. Is he unable to move on? Or simply unwilling?
If Jakob sounds like a drag to be around, you're right—and the movie drags considerably when he's on-screen, especially when he's reading his overwrought poetry or refusing to notice how friends and loved ones have rejoined the business of living without sacrificing their integrity. But glowing scenes from his childhood as a refugee living in Greece skitter like a water strider on the surface of the film's bigger question—one asked not only by those struggling to comprehend the looming presence of the Holocaust in their own lives, but also by anyone suffering from catastrophic loss: When is it OK to forget?
After Fugitive Pieces screens on Monday, October 27, the festival continues on Wednesday, October 29, with Someone To Run With, an Israeli movie about how a lost dog leads to a journey through Jerusalem's underbelly, and concludes November 12 with A Secret, a French film about a young boy uncovering his father's wartime indiscretions in occupied Paris.
—Violet Glaze
Admission is $9 per person, per night; tickets are available at the door a half-hour before each screening, or in advance at the Rosenbloom JCC in Owings Mills, 3506 Gwynnbrook Avenue, and the Weinberg Park JCC, 5700 Park Heights Avenue. A guest speaker follows each film. Go to www.jcc.org for more information.
BOOKS
Showtime
Paper Kingdom, edited by Elena Johnston(self-published, 2008)
Paper Kingdom, edited by Elena Johnston (self-published, 2008)
Baltimore as art gallery—it's an idea that sparked a book project for Elena Johnston, a 2006 MICA illustration graduate. The Philadelphia native had collected lots of homemade posters and band flyers for Baltimore shows, and she felt they were more than just pieces of paper stuck to walls and front windows. So in August she released Paper Kingdom, a self-published compendium of posters culled from both her own collection and that of friends and acquaintances. The posters were created by familiar Charm City characters: artist Shaun Flynn, typographers (and 2008 Urbanite Project participants) Nolen Strals and Bruce Willen, musician Tonie Joy, Ace of Cakes cast member Katie Rose. Johnston also interviewed musicians, including electronica star Dan Deacon, Justin Lucas of instrumental group Madagascar, and Victoria Legrand of the dream-pop band Beach House. The posters range from the black-and-white photocopies of the '90s to the vibrant, colorful screenprints popular these days—all in all, a proud collection of Baltimore music-scene souvenirs. To order your own copy ($45), go to paperkingdom.blogspot.com.
—Marianne K. Amoss
BOOKS
Local Heroes
by Susan McCallum-Smith
Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire
(Illustration copyright © 2007 by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden, from Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Random House Inc.)
Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden (Bantam Dell, 2007)
Beowulf, verse translation by Seamus Heaney (W.W. Norton, 2000)
The Blue Star by Tony Earley (Little, Brown and Co., 2008)
"He must be on the threshold of Hell …" Yes, it's election season in America. Sorry, I jest. He is our hero Lord Baltimore, a survivor of the First World War whom God has honed "with hammer and anvil, a blacksmith at the forge" to scourge the world of a plague of vampires unleashed by this epic bloodshed. (Odd—it still sounds like election season in America …)
Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden's adult fairy tale, Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, is illustrated in menacing black and white by Mignola, best known as the creator of Hellboy. Its elegantly tuned gore is heavily influenced by the subversive children's author Hans Christian Andersen, that manic-depressive who delighted in denying the happily-ever-after.
Three men gather in a dirty tavern in a no-name town, summoned by the mysterious Lord Baltimore. While they await their host, they exchange news about villagers controlled by a devil-puppeteer, about a Chilean lake infested with evil, about a soldier who transforms into a grizzly bear at nightfall and devours his buddies. And they talk of Lord Baltimore, who, after waking up in a corpse-plugged trench to the sound of slurping and munching, swears to do battle with the vampire leader of the Red Death. He travels dressed like a morbid tinker, jury-rigged with daggers, pistols, and scabbards, and hammers a nail using an axe handle into his wooden leg after each vampire culling in a perverse blend of home- and self-improvement.
Baltimore's camp melodrama, religiosity, and Hammer horror movie dialogue completely titillated my inner Goth. And by the time I read this, in Beowulf—"it would come: the killer instinct / unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant"—I'd pinched the dog's collar, black-lacquered my nails, and fashioned curtain hooks into nipple rings.
If Baltimore is an anti-hero, then Beowulf personifies the pure-hearted, Arthurian-Wagnerian, bicep-bulging, blond-locks-a-flowing mythical hero. The Nobel-Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney has transformed the original Anglo-Saxon text, written between the seventh and tenth centuries by an unknown author, into something utterly modern and relevant.
Beowulf tells the saga of a Scandinavian prince who saves a nation—not once, but thrice. First, Beowulf slaughters the man-eating demon Grendel, "this corpse-maker mongering death" who had been treating the country like a larder. Then he takes on Grendel's revenge-hungry mommy, a battle that leaves behind a considerable amount of "wound-slurry." Thirdly, he slays a dragon, but in doing so receives a fatal wound.
Heaney's language throbs with muscular punch and kick-ass alliteration: "greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men / from their resting places and rushed to his lair, / flushed up and inflamed from the raid, / blundering back with the butchered corpses." In his introduction, Heaney explains that he based the poem's sound on his Irish relatives, those "big voiced" men whose words carried a "weighty distinctness," and who had a kind of "Native American solemnity of utterance." Contrasting with this abundant testosterone are moments of gentle lyricism. Beowulf talks of having "wintered into wisdom," and on his death, "The prince's spirit would spin free from his body." And who could read the following description of a grieving woman—
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement
—and not think of Darfur (or Georgia)?
Jim Glass, the hero of The Blue Star, Tony Earley's follow-up to Jim the Boy (2000), is more like the rest of us—flawed, hapless, doing his best despite the circumstances. In 1941, the year before graduating high school in tiny Aliceville, North Carolina, Jim "didn't know how it was possible that he loved Chrissie Steppe, only that he did." His passion is mighty inconvenient, given that Chrissie is his buddy's gal and that her family's disreputable past, bone-crushing poverty, and Cherokee ancestry churns up mixed feelings in his guts. Furthermore, Jim has just ditched his longtime sweetheart, the know-it-all Norma Harris, who "actually had a picture of Abraham Lincoln" in her bedroom—not that Jim has ever set foot in her bedroom—and his mom, his three uncles, geez, the entire town is miffed, being the kind of folks prone to start quilting the moment a boy throws a girl the wink.
Indeed, these are the kind of folks who find copperheads in potato holes, wear their paws off playing fiddle, and say "y'all" and "daggum." Yet Earley turns this borderline hokey material into something profound, and the scenes of Jim and Chrissie's courtship often resemble the swooningly pitched duets from La Bohéme. "Being in love is like getting run over," says Jim's Uncle Zeno, sentiments that were shared, I'm sure, by Maestro Puccini. "Sometimes it kills you and sometimes it don't." After Pearl Harbor is bombed you can pretty much guess the rest of the plot of The Blue Star, but you don't care because Earley's story of the down-to-earth heroism of everyday decency has you scrambling for your hankie, dagnabbit.
Share your thoughts at www.urbanitebaltimore.com/forum.
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