By Robert C. Knott

It's not easy being a Ryan Adams fan. After leading the alt-country outfit Whiskeytown, Adams emerged as a solo artist in 2000 with the roots-rock gem Heartbreaker. Critics and fans alike embraced the album; it distinguished Adams as a top indie talent, yet set a standard he has since failed to consistently maintain.

Part of the problem is that there isn't a creative moment that Adams hasn't captured in song: He has released nine albums of original material since 2000. Adams' prolific output makes yard-sale scavengers of his listeners, requiring them to sort through the many throwaways to discover the keepers. 2005's Cold Roses, for example, is a good double album that could have been an outstanding single album. Adams' uneven output has been compounded by his well-chronicled drug addiction, which was on display when he performed in June 2005 at Baltimore's Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Adams acted so bizarrely that the members of his band, The Cardinals, literally shrugged their shoulders and filed offstage in the middle of the show.

All of which brings us to Adams' new release, Easy Tiger. Its title suggests that Adams finally recognizes the need to adopt a more measured approach to both his life and music. Now drug-free, he wastes no time announcing his new outlook, singing "good morning sunshine, a new day begins" on the album's first cut, "Goodnight, Rose."

Easy Tiger is Adams' most focused effort since 2001's Gold. "Two" is Adams' "Heart of Gold"—an instantly memorable, mid-tempo number that features the background vocals of Sheryl Crow. (Crow is this generation's Linda Rondstadt, who, along with James Taylor, lent her background vocals to the Neil Young classic.)

"Halloweenhead," the album's only rocker, features an infectious barre chord progression, while "Pearls on a String" is a bluegrass pleasure that wouldn't sound out of place on a Del McCoury album. Other standouts include "These Girls," "The Sun Also Sets," and "Everybody Knows."

Easy Tiger isn't without its weaknesses. "Tears of Gold," while mildly appealing, is wholly derivative of Gram Parsons—even for Adams—and the album's coda, "I Taught Myself How to Grow Old," is simultaneously melodramatic and anticlimactic. Still, for those who have grown weary, or gone broke, trying to keep up with Adams' rapid-fire releases, Easy Tiger is a compelling reminder of why you took to him in the first place.   

—Robert C. Knott wrote about the Baltimore band Thrushes in the June issue.

ART

By Jack Livingston

After a successful two-year stint producing exhibitions for Goucher College, Jackie Milad recently signed on as program coordinator for the Union Gallery, a small gem of an exhibition space at the University of Maryland at College Park. Milad, a Baltimore artist and curator, is a founding member of the now-defunct CHELA Collective artist group and gallery and a cofounding member of Baltimore's Transmodern Festival, which brings innovative performers and artists to the city every year. With an international perspective and an interest in collaborative community-aimed projects, Milad has made captivating curatorial efforts that feel fresh and inspiring. Under her auspices, the gallery promises to be a vital creative laboratory for the artists, the university, and the community at large. Opening September 20 is the first exhibition of the season, and the first that Milad is managing: The Georgic Odyssey—Where your food comes from. The Agricultural Photographs of Edwin Remsberg.

—Jack Livingston is an artist, critic, and arts activist living in Baltimore.

MAGAZINE

By Michael Paulson

Baltimorean William P. Tandy's zine, Smile, Hon, You're in Baltimore!, turns out Baltimore-related writing and images several times a year. Occasionally, Tandy publishes a special themed installment of Smile, Hon; the most recent, called "Criminally Yours," is a collaboration with The Mobtown Shank, the e-zine of Atomic Books and Atomic Pop co-owner Benn Ray. (Previous special issues include "Infestation!" about the city's rats, and "Show Me Yours, Show You Mine," about scars.) The issue contains true stories of Baltimore crime written by twenty-nine area contributors. The tales range from the petty to the macabre: In one piece, a Charles Village resident steps inside for tongs only to discover upon returning that the rack of ribs he left on the porch grill has disappeared; in another, "Johnny Law" describes life at the police academy and the process of breaking down recruits to "weed out the weak-hearted and eliminate the quitters." These short vignettes sometimes lack polish, but the honest and simple eloquence of the writing perfectly conveys the ethos of living in a tough yet forgiving city.

—Michael Paulson teaches English at the Friends School.

FOOD

By Kerry Dunnington

In Baltimore, stellar new restaurants open up almost weekly. But the city is also filled with tried and true eateries that have served us delicious dishes for years. This month, I raise my glass to three distinctive restaurants in the Tuscany-Canterbury neighborhood in North Baltimore, all run by brothers Kehar and Binda Singh.

Ten years ago, Kehar and Binda opened the Ambassador Dining Room (3811 Canterbury Road; 410-366-1484). Since then, they have expanded their empire to include the Carlyle Club (500 West University Parkway; 410-243-5454), a Lebanese eatery that opened in 2003, and the Spice Company (4 West University Parkway; 410-235-8200), which opened in 2006 and serves American food. The flagship restaurant, however, is still the Ambassador, an elegant purveyor of royal Indian cuisine.

When they first saw the Ambassador Dining Room in 1997, with its diamond-paned windows and canopied terrace overlooking a garden, the brothers Singh knew they had found the perfect space in which to open an Indian restaurant. The Ambassador occupies the ground floor of a prewar apartment building. Kehar, who took charge of the decor, used the existing Tudor-Gothic architecture to create a clubby wood-paneled echo of British Empire India. In warmer months, diners bypass the inside tables for seats on the outdoor terrace.

Visit the Ambassador for their lunch buffet, or take in some of the classic Indian cuisine on the dinner menu. Some dinner standouts include the onion bhajia appetizer, thinly sliced onions mixed with a chickpea batter and deep-fried to golden brown, accompanied by a tamarind dipping sauce; the palak paneer entree, creamed and pureed spinach topped with Indian cheese; and Goa Fish, a whole rockfish pan-fried and topped with roasted garlic, tamarind, and scallions. Be sure to order poori, a deep-fried whole-wheat bread that comes hot and puffed; it's paper-thin and delicate-tasting. The experience is complete with cardamom ice cream for dessert.

All three restaurants are located within walking distance of each other, and all have become regular haunts of neighborhood residents. "Owning these restaurants is like having friends in for dinner every night," says Kehar. As for when they might open their fourth eatery, Kehar says they don't have any plans to expand … "at least not now."

—Kerry Dunnington is the author of This Book Cooks and is passionate about all things food.

LITERATURE

By Susan McCallum-Smith

Throwing a book out shows contempt for an effort of the spirit," writes Lynne Sharon Schwartz in her 1996 memoir, Ruined by Reading. I bet the six hyperactive personalities who are helping us move house wish I were capable of such contempt. One tatty paperback did end up in the trash but, like Schwartz, "the thought of its mingling with chicken bones and olive pits nagged at me," till finally I wiped it off and boxed it with the rest.

Ruined by Reading would never be pulped. Schwartz, a lover of the classics and a fearless critic, writes, "Current books are modishly sleek inside and out, low-fat, low-cholesterol, sort of like Lite beer—not bad on a hot day yet hardly the thing for a seasoned drinker." Furthermore, (authors take note) she writes: "Some have lost faith in language altogether and use as little as they can get away with."

Fewer words would please the movers, though, whose dismay over the Manhattan of boxes precedes events that spiral into sitcom excess. A toilet overflows, the air-conditioning dies, and my husband yells from the kitchen that my purse is on fire. I escape into Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Nigerian-born Achebe has just won the Man Booker International Prize, and his best-selling 1958 novel showcases his Shakespearean concerns with the intersection of fate and human nature.

Set during the colonization of Nigeria around the turn of the twentieth century, the novel tells the story of powerful Igbo clansman Okonkwo, who is forced to choose between adhering to tribal tradition and losing face. A young boy has come to live with him as compensation for a crime committed by another tribe, and their relationship has grown akin to that of father and son. However, custom now demands that the boy be executed, and although Okonkwo's peers would excuse him from the slaughter, he feels duty-bound to take part in it. "Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak." In the end, Okonkwo's pride wreaks havoc for himself and those he loves.

The suppression of the indigenous Africans is not presented as an Eden being pillaged by the ignorant white man, but rather as a tragicomedy of mankind stubbing its toe against a mirror. The two societies reflect one another across an unnavigable cultural and religious divide—both equally capable of committing great good and appalling depravity.

It's late afternoon; the movers look parched. The trot from the van to the loft has wilted to a dither. I uncork flagons of Gatorade to rev them back up to the pitch of adolescents with ADD so they can return to fumbling the china like footballs and pitching it to touchdown in the wrong rooms.

Rupert Thomson's new novel, Death of a Murderer, offers some sanctuary from the mayhem, albeit a haunting one. It is set against the historical backdrop of England's most notorious trial, at which Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were found guilty in 1966 of the murders of several children. "No one who had been alive at the time could ever be entirely free of it," he writes. "It was one of those rare news items against which you defined yourself." So true: I grew up in a Britain where Hindley's infamous police mugshot—"the sixties beehive hairdo, the sullen, bruised-looking mouth and, most potent of all, that steady black stare, so full of defiance and hostility, so empty of regret"—inspired Warhol-style art and punk-rock tributes.

In Thomson's novel, it is November 2002, and Myra Hindley has just died in prison, having failed to ever secure parole. Policeman Billy Tyler is assigned to the morgue to guard her body against journalists and souvenir hunters. Over one long, eerie night, he reflects on violent incidents in his own past, his problematic marriage, and his fraught relationship with his demanding daughter, who suffers from Down syndrome. He also wrestles with his lifelong obsession with Hindley, who haunts his consciousness like barely suppressed guilt. The public loathed her so much, he believes, because "she had shown them what a human being was capable of. She had given them a glimpse of the horrific and terrifying acts that lay within their grasp." 

Thomson dissects specific human relationships in order to uncover a universal truth, unlike Ann Packer's Songs Without Words, her second novel after her enthusiastically received debut, The Dive from Clausen's Pier. I crack its spine as the satellite TV guy gathers his tools and leaves.

In Songs Without Words, Liz and Sarabeth have been friends since childhood. Now in their forties, Sarabeth is a bohemian single who makes lampshades and flits from affair to affair, while the matronly, married Liz mothers everyone around her. The women natter at lunch dates, slightly jealous of each others' lives, yet secretly relieved about their own: "I'll trade you, Sarabeth used to say. You couldn't stand it for more than a day. Which was true, of course."

Then tragedy strikes Liz's family, and Liz, "surrounded by the vast ocean of her guilt," needs Sarabeth's support. But Sarabeth fails to come through for her, even though "Liz had saved her, saved her a thousand times over—it was the central truth of her life." Yet, "She could not see Liz that upset. She couldn't."

Packer understands the complex nuances of friendship, yet I can't get over this book's essential ordinariness. Ordinary events (because difficult teenagers, uncommunicative husbands, and suicide are, sadly, ordinary events) need to be written about with resonance; they must become singular and extraordinary. Unlike Achebe and Thomson, Packer seems to lack not talent, but courage—the courage needed to extrapolate her story from the physical and into the metaphysical, from the here and now to the everywhere and the end of time.

The movers have abandoned us in our debris. None of the lids have pots, none of the shades have lamps, and if we don't find clean underwear soon our new neighbors will whip the welcome mat out from under us. But I've just closed my new study door, and here are my precious boxes—my ruin and my refuge.

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