By Robert C. Knott

"It's hard for Baltimore bands to break out," says John Irvine, the singer/songwriter and guitarist of local music veterans The Jennifers. "The clubs are always dodgy. As soon as a good one gets going, it closes. And since most national bands play in Washington, D.C., not Baltimore, a local band often needs to go outside of Baltimore to make a name for itself."

Irvine knows of what he speaks. The Jennifers, whose members also include Skizz Cyzyk (drums), Joe Stone (guitar, vocals), and Joe Tropea (bass), have been one of Charm City's best pop outfits for a decade and a half without ever making a splash outside of their hometown. The band did experience a fleeting whiff of glory when, in 1995, they won "Best All Male Band" in an MTV contest. Alas, their video was never broadcast on the cable channel.

 A thinking-person's garage band, The Jennifers marry the songwriting influences of Robyn Hitchcock and XTC's Andy Partridge with the interlocking guitar work of Television and My Bloody Valentine. Throw in the occasional twang of surf- guitar legend Dick Dale and you have a strange, which is to say intoxicating, brew that sounds like few other bands, local or otherwise.

Colors from the Future, The Jennifers' latest release, marks the band's artistic highpoint. "Mrs. Gray," the uptempo opening salvo, waxes humorously about a modern-day Mrs. Robinson in this, the age of cosmetic surgery: "Mrs. Gray, you look so surprised. With all that work done to your eyes I'd think you could see the light. Mrs. Gray, you're looking younger than you should. You've got a husband with a practice, he snips the skin fantastic … ."

Other highlights include "Great War," an infectious romp that sticks with you hours after you last hear it, and a spirited reading of Robyn Hitchcock's "Queen of Eyes." No less compelling is the album's coda, "Saturday," in which Irvine and Stone, true to their influences, weave a melody that no one guitarist possibly could. For their part, Cyzyk's and Tropea's driving backbeat infuses the album with a live, kinetic energy. 

The bottom line: Colors from the Future is a very good album. If they hailed from Greenwich Village, many in Baltimore would nevertheless be hip to The Jennifers. Conversely, because the band makes its home in Baltimore, precious few audiophiles in the Big Apple are likely aware of them.

Meanwhile, Irvine is realistic about the future of The Jennifers. "We have no delusions we're going to be rock stars. But we also believe a lot of people will like our music if we get it to them. We don't want to make a huge career of the band, but it's our job to get the music out there."

ART

By Kerr Houston

Michelangelo reportedly said that Lorenzo Ghiberti's Florentine Baptistery doors, cast between 1425 and 1452, were worthy to be the Gates of Paradise—but, happily, you don't have to travel to either Florence or Paradise to gain a sense of their power. Since 1879, the Peabody Institute has housed a half-sized copy of the gilded bronze portals. The copy stands in the anteroom entrance to the lovely Leith Symington Griswold Hall. Look closely, and you can see where years of students about to take the stage for their final recitals have rubbed one of the male figure's noses for good luck. And, if the copy leaves you wanting more, you're in luck: Three of Ghiberti's original panels are currently touring the United States.

FILM

By Anne Haddad

During the Maryland Film Festival, I always wish I had one of those devices you see only in movies—a magic, manipulative clock that would allow me to watch one film, then roll back time to watch another one that was showing down the hall.

The next best thing to magic is going to the shorts. Short films, that is.

A film festival is practically the only place to see a short film at all. I realized this when I went to Video Americain a few months ago and asked for the DVD of my favorite short film from last year's festival, Have You Eaten? Video Americain, which has never not had a movie I wanted, did not have this one. Shorts, the staff told me, are shown at film festivals, and that's about it. Some get collected and put on DVDs, but not many.

"Short films have been the orphans of the film world," says Jed Dietz, director of the Maryland Film Festival. "There's a whole lot of interest in YouTube and other sites that show some short films, but nobody has figured out a way for short films to make any money."

And so the Maryland Film Festival organizers decided in 2004 to embrace the short film, and to celebrate it in a big way.

"We have devoted our opening night to shorts, which no other general film festival in the country does," Dietz says. "Typically, a festival will have some extravaganza on opening night with major stars. We just saw an opportunity to do something for short films that nobody else was doing."

This year's opening night shorts program features a pair of pretty big names: Nathaniel Kahn, whose Two Hands was nominated for an Oscar this year in the documentary short film category, and Leon Fleisher, the famed pianist and Peabody Institute professor—and the subject of this 18-minute film. Fleisher, at the height of his career, lost the ability to play with his right hand, and regained that ability decades later.

You can scour the festival program for other shorts whose directors or cast members you will recognize. The 2005 festival opening night featured a short film directed by Aaron Ruell, who played Kip in Napoleon Dynamite. But don't overlook the films made by the not-so-famous. That same festival included a film I now wish I had gone to see—West Bank Story, which won the Oscar this year for best live-action short. It's a musical comedy take-off on West Side Story, about an Israeli soldier who falls in love with a Palestinian beauty while their families run feuding falafel stands.

Director Ari Sandel's acceptance speech acknowledged that most people watching the awards show don't know what short films are. A lot of short films "are made by directors who are trying to get noticed," Sandel said. "And it relies on perseverance and stick-to-it-iveness and hustle and dedication and loyalty from a cast and crew who are doing it for pennies—if not for nothing."

Shorts do, of course, appeal to the adventurous who are willing to take a look at something new. Yes, some of these films will miss the mark for you. But they are shown in groups of about three to six or more, and chances are that at least one will be unforgettable. I have gone to the comedy shorts presentation, watched the first half, and then walked over to the animated shorts, and watched a few of those. You will have to buy two tickets, but look at it this way—it's one of the few things that you can do to show your support for these filmmakers.

To view the schedule for the 2007 Maryland Film Festival, go to www.mdfilmfest.org.

LITERATURE

By Susan McCallum-Smith

I found the following lines in the indispensable new Collected Poems by W. H. Auden: "Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, / And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; / He knew human folly like the back of his hand, / And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; / When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, / And when he cried the little children died in the streets." Written in 1939, "Epitaph on a Tyrant" captures in a single stanza the theme unifying this month's selections: the terrible consequences of wars fought in the name of ideology, waged by those unfettered by conscience or empathy.

Our libraries weep with books about Vietnam from the point of view of Americans who fought there, but Tom Bissell's masterly 2007 memoir, The Father of All Things, may be the first to consider its effect on those born to its veterans, on those who sat down with Dad and Vietnam every evening at the dinner table.

In 2004, Bissell traveled to Vietnam with his ex-Marine father to trace his father's tour of combat and visit the location where he was injured by a roadside bomb. Part travelogue, part history, all memoir and all heart, The Father of All Things is anchored by an expertly researched primer on the causes and progress of the war, including whiplash accounts of the fall of Saigon and the My Lai massacre. Bissell's frightening intelligence is leavened with a self-deprecatory humor and emotional honesty—the reader scrabbles for a hanky as often as she scrabbles for a dictionary—as Bissell and his decent, damaged, taciturn father dance around the issue of personal responsibility.

Soldiers are sometimes seduced by war, explains Bissell; it makes civilian life feel suffocatingley banal. The "olfactory orchestra of the jungle itself, the warm buttery smell of a cleaned M14" make you "long for Vietnam … in Vietnam you never lost your simple human awareness of being alive. It was a young man's land covered in a dew of terrifying possibility." Will anything ever again be so immediate, so tangible, and, yes, so exhilarating?

The worst wars are the sectarian wars, and the one in Northern Ireland has commonly been referred to by the ironically understated "the Troubles," as though it were the equivalent of an upset tummy. Louise Dean's wonderfully even-handed This Human Season (2007) dramatizes the "dirty blanket" protests in the Maze Prison outside Belfast during 1979, through parallel narratives from each side of the political divide.

Kathleen Moran, a housewife with three kids, smuggles notes and tobacco to her eldest son, incarcerated in the Maze. He is on the blanket: refusing to wear the prison uniform, to shower, or to use the latrines, in protest at the withdrawal of special privileges that had given the IRA the status of political prisoners. Meanwhile, John Dunn, an Englishman and former soldier, starts his new job as a guard at the Maze prison, tempted by the high salary.

Then, prison guards begin to be assassinated; John's son arrives from England, baffled by the conflict and indiscreetly curious; Kathleen's youngest follows his brother's violent footsteps; and the prisoners' protest develops into a hunger strike. Through it all, Dean manages to mine humor and humanity from cell walls streaked with human excrement.

"It's not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who will conquer," says a Maze inmate (quoting Terence MacSwiney of the IRA), a fact proven in Vietnam, in Northern Ireland, and in Russia, where the Bolsheviks triumphed despite fewer numbers and the intervention of foreign powers. The Russian Revolution provides the backdrop in James Meek's The People's Act of Love (2005). Russian in sentiment and location only, its style is the antithesis of torpid Dostoevskian prose. (I'm going out on a limb here, if you'll pardon the pun, to declare that Meek's yarn about castration and cannibalism will come to a cinema near you.)

In 1919, in a small village in Siberia, a dispirited brigade of Czech troops is trapped between the advancing Bolsheviks and the White Russian army. A stranger arrives in town, the enigmatic Samarin, who spins a tale about escaping a penal colony and being stalked by a cannibal. Toss in a horny widow, a psychopathic military commander, and a religious visionary, and you have a recipe for gory goings-on.

The rapid-fire action nails the reader's attention, and despite its violence, it is often funny. Admittedly the humor is of the Gogolian variety, a humor derived from chasing sables, punning about missing appendages, and being able to respond when you are told you are eating cat for dinner, "Thank God for that. I thought it was horse."

Despite its historical adventure trappings, Meek's book is a meditation on terrorism and our post-9/11 world. Samarin sacrifices others for a political ideal, the visionary sacrifices himself for a religious ideal, and both believe their actions to be entirely motivated by love. 

Be wary of those who are single-minded in their pursuit of ideological perfection, these books warn, echoing the sentiments of Auden; those who profess to be on the side of the angels often take demonic form.