By Robbie Whelan

"We have a rock set, and a country set," says Billy "Haywood" Tiedeken just before his band, Among Wolves, takes the 8x10 Club stage in late August at the CD-release party for their self-titled album. I stop short of asking him which one he's got planned for tonight after I glance at the stage. There's a lap steel and several other guitars favored by country musicians (Fender Telecasters, a Gretsch Country Gentleman, a Martin dreadnought). And it's Thursday, which the 8x10 has lately dubbed "bAlt-Country Night" once a month and booked accordingly.

Haywood and fellow Philadelphia transplant Jimmy Cahill started Among Wolves as a two-man lo-fi project in 2001. They recently added Jason Butcher and Dave Godman (all are multi-instrumentalists) to record their fifth album—their first on The Beechfields independent record label, based in Towson.

The record itself contains a little bit of both rock and country, with many very strong songs. Among Wolves does a very capable job of being imitative—aping Wilco (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-era on "When We're Dead," and pure Summerteeth on "Bottle"), Ryan Adams ("The Weight"), or the Beach Boys (unashamedly, on "Baltimore"). But the band is at its best when at its most original, and coincidentally, most country. Tunes like "Hard to Die" and "Seems to Me" are driven by free-and-easy backbeats and textured instrumentals from the lap steel and banjo. And even though the coarse flashiness of Haywood's delivery and the droning, stoner-rock guitars of "Black Eyed Susan" recall Yo La Tengo, the song explodes nicely into three shout-n-clap-along choruses.

It's easy to feel the common indie-folk threads that tie Among Wolves to two other bands on The Beechfields: The Chris and Joylene Show (recently re-dubbed The Honest Mistakes) and Pupa's Window, a pseudonym for Michael Nestor, the University of Maryland School of Medicine neuroscience Ph.D. candidate who started the label. In late spring, the two groups released Family Portrait, a thirteen-track split album, which is as precious as its title. It represents what is becoming The Beechfields' signature sound: a stripped-down, folky type of alt-country with a freak factor provided by plenty of echoey production, a few odd instruments and sounds, and tape-loop tinkering.

—Robbie Whelan wrote about Eva Castillo for the July issue.


ART
By Marianne Amoss

A small knife is the unlikely genesis of Broadcast, the latest exhibition at the Contemporary Museum (100 West Centre Street; 410-783- 5720). In 1972, performance artist Chris Burden held this weapon to the throat of a television host in his piece "TV Hijack." Four years ago, curator Irene Hoffman encountered Burden's knife in the collection of the Orange County Museum of Art (where she was former curator of contemporary art) and began formulating what would become Broadcast, which runs through November 18. The show surveys the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have intervened in and critiqued systems of broadcasting, thereby obliging us to take a closer look at the impact radio and television have on our culture. Broadcast includes video, sound, photography, and interactive projects by artists from across the globe, among them Burden and German artist Christian Jankowski, who in 1999 called Italian psychics on live television to ask how his artwork for the upcoming Venice Biennale would be received. Go to www.contemporary.org for information on related events and workshops at the museum.

—Marianne Amoss is Urbanite's managing editor.


THEATER
By Marianne Amoss

In November 2002, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog, decided to write a play every day for a year. The resulting work, 365 Days/365 Plays, is a testament to discipline and a meditation on the day-to-day artist's life. Consisting of plays both short and long, the work gives new meaning to the word premiere. Rather than debut the series of plays on one major stage, Parks has designed a system in which theater companies, arts organizations, universities, and other groups each produce seven plays, one for each day of the week. Some weeks in the cycle are produced simultaneously, such as Week 42, which premiered in August in both New York and Baltimore (at Run of the Mill Theater). More than seven hundred companies organized under sixteen regional hubs are taking part in this national event. This month, Towson University's MFA program in theatre jumps into the ring with a performance on October 27 at the Tractor Building in Clipper Mill (home of Urbanite's offices). Call the Center for the Arts box office at 410-704-ARTS for free tickets.

—M.A.


LITERATURE
By Susan McCallum-Smith

"Small men with small dreams didn't interest him," says one character of another in Richard Russo's new novel, Bridge of Sighs, "even when their dreams demanded enormous faith and endless forbearance." They are, however, of central concern to Russo; in an America obsessed with the rich, the famous, and the powerful, he spends ink on the dreams of ordinary people.

Bridge of Sighs covers some of the same territory as its predecessor, 2001's Empire Falls—the economic disintegration of a small Northeastern town and the joys and disappointments of those who live there. Much of the book unfolds through the viewpoint of Louis Charles "Lucy" Lynch, whose father takes over a corner store in upstate New York during the 1950s after losing his job as a milkman.

The shop scenes conjure up John Updike's classic 1961 story, "A&P," in which a lusty checkout boy narrates a visit by three bikini-clad customers. Unlike Updike's hero, however, who tosses his apron aside and quits, Lucy avoids worldly temptations and determines to mind his father's store indefinitely, "meandering hopelessly in the labyrinths of what should be, a world where milk still comes in bottles, where meat's still wrapped in butcher paper, not cellophane, and tied off with string."

Although the Lynches begin their journey in the lower class, they always identify with those who rank above them. "You make your deals, if you can, with those who have more, because you hope one day to have more yourself," Lucy's mother explains. "Understand that … and you understand America."

Both Edwidge Danticat's father and her beloved uncle, Pastor Joseph, had believed in America—but America lets them down. Her new memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, memorializes the lives of these two extraordinary, ordinary men whose faith and forbearance were anything but small.

In 2004, in the United States, Danticat's father is diagnosed with terminal pulmonary fibrosis on the same day Danticat discovers she is pregnant with her first child. Meanwhile, the political situation in their native Haiti has deteriorated into violent clashes between machete- wielding gangs of Macoutes and government forces, despite the presence of United Nations peacekeepers. This unrest threatens the safety of Pastor Joseph, who played a significant role in raising Danticat as a child. Joseph boards a plane for the United States, where his valid visa should have ensured him legal entry and the chance to see his brother before his death. Tragically, events at U.S. Customs in Miami spiral from comic to horrific, and the 81-year-old man is led to detention in chains, only to die in prison a few days later. Brother, I'm Dying pays homage to a remarkably functional family living through remarkably dysfunctional times.

Whether George Singleton believes in the myth of America or not, he sure celebrates the individuality of y'all. "Now, it's no secret that DNA disasters run rampant in parts of the South," says Harp Spillman, hero of Singleton's new novel, Work Shirts for Madmen. "If it's not relatives coupling, it's tainted groundwater, lead in the moonshine, syphilis, adult chicken pox, uncured ham, toxin-bloated fish and/or plain bad luck."

Given that Harp's mother suffers from "a postmenopausal syndrome akin to Tourette's" and his father dresses like a "wild-eyed scout leader" willing to "lead his troop over Niagara Falls in barrels for a made-up badge," Harp is remarkably well adjusted for a drunk. True, his habit has impaired his career as an avant-garde welder and forced him to take more lowly commissions ice-carving memorable Republicans for local political fundraisers.

His wife, Raylou, a stoic goddess in overalls, makes a living as a potter of jugs that resemble the faces of "one buck-toothed miscreant after another," a description that could as easily be applied to the Elbow Brethren, the motley interventionists she enlists to wean Harp off his liquid diet. Vollis, Kumi, and Brinson have voluntarily fused their arms straight to hamper their affection for the bottle. They initiate Harp into their rehab group, the Alcohell Club, where he excels at Drunken Jeopardy, much to the chagrin of the fans of his competitor, who call out, "Go to the moonshine questions. Give Stew a chance."

Work Shirts for Madmen is like a humdinger of a yard sale: snickeringly enjoyable, crammed with tchotchkes, completely lacking narrative cohesion. Still, complaining about a Southern book being too Southern is like complaining that your catfish and hush puppies arrived with grits. The novel is saved by Singleton's affection for us ordinary folks, whose superficial quirkiness often clothes intelligence and decency; just because something is a stereotype doesn't necessarily make it untrue.

—Susan McCallum-Smith is Urbanite's literary editor.