MUSIC

No Straight Lines
Private Eleanor
The Beechfields, 2005

When Baltimore native Austin Stahl created Private Eleanor in 2001, he was the sole member of the band and was relying on his own recording prowess to put out albums. (In 2000, Stahl started his own record label, OTPRecords, and put out his own work, plus recordings of New York's Standish Arms and Baltimore's The Seldon Plan.) For Private Eleanor's latest album, Stahl decided to deviate from his usual lo-fi four-track experimentation and make a studio recording featuring a full-scale band.

The album, No Straight Lines, features Maryland musicians Marian Glebes, Isaac Gurfinchel, Chris Merriam, Bruce Sailer, and Drew Stevens. They are joined by several guest artists, including Michael Nestor of Baltimore's Pupa's Window, who is also the owner and founder of The Beechfields record label, located in Towson.

No Straight Lines offers stark acoustic rock—it is a marriage of folk rock and early 1990s indie shoegaze with pop overtones. The band's sound is not altogether unfamiliar, as it rings of a softer, less depressing Bright Eyes.

The energy of No Straight Lines waxes and wanes as each song builds off of the previous track's emotion, until the sorrowful "I'd Have Been a Sign Painter" climaxes with sentiments of anguish and affliction. The album is full of joys and woes: It seems to tell the story of a just-beginning love affair, complete with the second-guessing and self-deprecation usually found in pop punk or emo lyrics. Though his voice lacks refinement in places (and often sounds strikingly similar to Elliott Smith's), Stahl's words are sincere and honest, and sometimes very sad; in "Flowers Might Die," he sings, "I just wanted you to be the one thing I'd figured out, for once in my life." The one surprise here is the clearly antiwar "On Our Side," in which Stahl sings, "And may God condemn their souls when we smoke 'em from their holes. Moral authority is mine, 'cause God is on our side."

With the success of his record label and Private Eleanor's fall tour (plus a duo tour with new band member Glebes), Stahl is happy to be part of a network of independent musicians around the country. Producing under his own (or, in this case, a friend's) label offers different freedoms with music and, according to Stahl, "the ability to capture a sound, change it, build on it, and ultimately create something new."

No Straight Lines is available at Sound Garden (1616 Thames Street, Fells Point), The True Vine (1123 West 36th Street, Hampden), and Atomic Books (1100 West 36th Street, Hampden). Check the band's website (www.privateeleanor.com) for winter tour dates.

—Edwina Rodgers


CULTURE

Crowd of the Person
Contemporary Museum
Through January 14

Boarded up and seemingly abandoned, the Contemporary Museum on Centre Street in Mount Vernon now resembles so many East Baltimore rowhouses. The exhibition begins outside the museum, with the main entrance obscured by panels of spray-painted wood. Inside, Crowd of the Person, the multi-month exhibition organized by curator Cira Pascual Marquina, is equally disarming. Four distinct projects address, in Pascual Marquina's words, "the idea of self-organization and emancipation."

In one such project, (Re)living Democracy, four artists have transformed the museum space into a political platform. This is hardly your run-of-the-mill museum show—there are no art objects present in the traditional sense. Printed information regarding the seizure of land and homes in East Baltimore is coupled with a multimedia installation that records the lives of residents living through the upheaval of urban redevelopment. Residents' drawings, audio recordings, photographs, and letters voice displeasure about the use of eminent domain by the City and, more specifically, Johns Hopkins University. This exhibition demands much of the viewer: active participation, interaction, and consideration of the very real social issues at stake, as well as one's own responsibility to them. But that, says Pascual Marquina, is her goal. "My curatorial practice tends to be socially engaged," She explains, "which means that I'm drawn to interventionist practices."

Crowd of the Person 's other three components, while overshadowed somewhat by the scope of (Re)living Democracy, are still engaging. What all the video and photography/audio pieces have in common is their evocation of similar themes: the relationships between the body and the political spaces around it, held up against cinematic narrative.

In addition to the exhibition itself, the artists behind (Re)living Democracy worked with the Rose Street Community Center and the museum to organize public programming, including a community forum that will take place January 7. All events are held on site at the Contemporary Museum and are free. For more information about the exhibit, visit the Contemporary online at www.contemporary.org or call 410-783-5720. For information on events and related activist art, visit www.campbaltimore.org.

—Lauren Bender


BOOK

Gone to New York: Adventures in the City
Ian Frazier
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005

Longtime New Yorker contributor Ian Frazier knows that city living is about accumulating things—history, people, buildings, bottle caps, and plastic bags. The essays in his new collection, Gone to New York: Adventures in the City, provide a close look at both iconic landmarks and the everyday sights of New York City streets. What Frazier finds there is sometimes uniquely New York, and often broadly urban.

The essays in the collection will be familiar to some readers: Gone to New York pulls from Frazier's previously published work in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines. Frazier's deft descriptions, insights, and sense of humor make him a trusted guide on unconventional explorations of things like how the side of a highway looks different when the viewer is on foot instead of in a bus or a car, and the process by which a city dweller gets rid of trash too large for regular collection.

" Canal Street," a standout essay, weaves elements of autobiography into a narrative about the avenue, from Brooklyn to the Holland Tunnel. The reader is swept along in the crush of traffic along Canal Street and is taken into a store to meet Frazier's landlord, whose name changes depending on who's asking. To the landlord's delight, a burglar has foolishly stolen only the left-foot boots from the pairs in his storeroom. Above the store is Frazier's apartment, part of a former candy factory; when he moved in, he found hundred-pound bags of imitation coconut. The essay winds up with a detailed history of the Holland Tunnel's storied and dangerous construction and the man for whom the tunnel is named. By street's end, Frazier demonstrates that, block-by-block, a city street contains layered histories of industry, immigration, and everyday life.

Readers of the essays will note the ways that Frazier's own relationship with the city changes. First, he navigates through New York City after living in a small Ohio town. Then, as he gets older, marries, and has a child, he eventually moves across the river to New Jersey, from which he has a view of Manhattan. These shifts in the author's life provide context for many of his explorations of the city included in the collection.

Glimpses of Frazier's youthful antics are present, as are later flashes of what it is like to raise a child in the city or commute from a suburb.

The essays in Gone to New York, which mix curiosity and humor, encourage readers to pay close attention to the jumble of things that make city living worthwhile.

—Jenny Wierschem


BOOK

Don't Know Much About Mythology
Kenneth C. Davis
HarperCollins, 2005

"If I believe it, it's religion; if you believe it, it's myth."

So says Kenneth C. Davis in the latest addition to his best-selling Don't Know Much About series. Davis writes that modern society often dismisses the beliefs of so-called "primitive" civilizations with this biased distinction. Yet myths are sacred stories that convey essential truths, he writes. As vessels of our value systems, they are as important and prevalent in the world today as they were thousands of years ago. Myths attempt to explain the inexplicable and, when combined with worship and ritual, give birth to religion. Mythology and religion, therefore, are two sides of the same coin, which is why Native Americans still fight to protect their sacred landscapes from desecration by rock climbers or tourists, even though no rational individual would consider scaling a church or a mosque for sport.

Davis contends, like Homer, that "all men have need of the Gods," and his survey of ancient civilizations includes the usual pantheons—Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Mesopotamian (modern-day Iraq)—along with a welcome review of the Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Pacific, and Native American.

He asks some ticklish questions: Why is there an Egyptian pyramid on the U.S. dollar bill? Do all little boys want to kill their father and sleep with their mother? Did Adam have a wife before Eve? What did Confucius say? And what's Moses doing in the Koran?

The world's cultures are woven together in a fascinating tapestry of relationships. Davis tugs at a thread linking the first superhero, Gilgamesh, to the European feudal tradition of droit de seigneur and the plot twists in Braveheart. He tugs at the stitches binding Homer's Iliad, Joyce's Ulysses, and the movies O Brother Where Art Thou and Cold Mountain. And, as for Wile E. Coyote? Tug, tug … here's the Native American trickster god. Bugs Bunny? Tug, tug … there's Bre'r Rabbit, knotted to the clever African hare.

Over the centuries, myth has collided, most controversially, with religion. Whose truth is the truth? History's battlefields are strewn with victims of the "my god is bigger than your god" debate.

Furthermore, myths (like religions) have always been manipulated for political gain. It proved easier for Pope Julius I to convert the pagan Romans to Christianity if he didn't mess with their biggest party date: December 25. Hitler appropriated Wagner's operas as propaganda for the Teutonic race, and Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War II believed their emperor was God. And for centuries, the prevailing legend of the colonization of the New World conveniently ignored some facts. For example:

a) the Vikings probably got here first;

b) John Smith was a mercenary;

c) Pocahontas was ten years old;

d) colonization triggered one of the greatest ethnic cleansings in history.

A Native American school principal noted that Disney's movie Pocahontas "was the equivalent of teaching the Holocaust by having Anne Frank fall in love with a German soldier."

Winners not only get to write history: They get to mythologize.

This book is a provocative and entertaining introduction to mankind's bumper crop of stories. It inspires the reader to dig down deep, without judgment and without prejudice, to find a bedrock of truth about the human condition, however hard it may be.

—Susan McCallum-Smith


BOOK

The City as Suburb: A History of Northeast Baltimore Since 1660
Eric L. Holcomb, with a foreword by Kathleen G. Kotarba
Center for American Places, 2005

Ever since the poet Horace wrote about the city mouse and country mouse in ancient Rome, Western culture has recognized a strict division between the rural and the urban. This dichotomy shaped Europe's landscape for centuries before traveling to America, where it persisted through the 1800s. In Baltimore, wealthy merchants used to split their time between townhouses within the city and sprawling country villas located on the city's fringes—perhaps the most notable example being Clifton, a vast 500-plus-acre spread with an Italianate mansion, the retreat of businessman and philanthropist Johns Hopkins.

Then along came the suburb, changing the American landscape forever. In The City as Suburb, Eric L. Holcomb, a Baltimore City planner who specializes in historic preservation, describes how the advent of this new community model galvanized development in northeast Baltimore, especially during the period from 1918 (the year northeast Baltimore was annexed by the city) to 1940. "The change was phenomenal," Holcomb writes. "In 1898, only 279 dwellings were located in northeast Baltimore. By 1940 there stood 14,343 dwelling units—a 5,100 percent increase." New neighborhoods off the Harford and Belair roads mixed the trappings of the countryside—grass, trees, and cottage-style houses—with essential urban amenities, like a sewage system and good roads. This is Holcomb's definition of the city-suburb, an inspired hybrid of the picturesque rural ideal and the services and social fabric that, pre-World War II, only a city government could provide.

The roots of neighborhoods such as Lauraville, Arcadia, and Frankford (formerly Gardenville) were in fact far more rural than urban, as the name Gardenville suggests. These communities sprang from Baltimore's old "truck farms," which supplied vegetables and dairy products to the burgeoning city to the south. As the farmers prospered, their crossroads villages thrived. One or two generations before, however, much of the northeast land had been owned by a few gentleman-merchants who exercised their creativity here, designing elegant mansions for themselves and dabbling in agriculture.

While Holcomb's account will be of great interest to residents of northeast Baltimore, it may disappoint readers looking for broader insights. The city-suburb is held up as this book's theme, but really, Holcomb does not discuss it or other key concepts with much analytical rigor. Rather, The City as Suburb is an exhaustively researched volume of standard local history. It is replete with all sorts of gleanings from archives: newspaper articles and advertisements, letters, estate inventories. Black-and-white photos and maps are plentiful. For those who love delving into historical minutiae, or who want to know more about the origins of their neighborhood, Holcomb has performed a valuable service.

—Amanda Kolson Hurley