MUSIC
by: Robbie Whelan

When Brooks Harlan, front man of the now-defunct Texas band Sand Which Is, moved to Baltimore with his bandmates in 2000, Shawna Potter wasn't far behind. The bundle-of-energy lead singer of the Nashville-based band Fair Verona (and sometime Sand Which Is touring buddy) joined Harlan's band in Charm City in 2002. The new ensemble practiced and played out as Sand Which Is for several months, but by the end of 2002, they decided that their new songs and style also warranted a new name.

In 2004, the four-piece band released their first full-length album under the moniker Avec, If I Breathe I Fall Asleep. Since that record, the dominant dynamic in the band has been between Harlan and Potter, who, in addition to taking turns singing lead and playing complementary punk-crunch guitar parts, back each other up with clear-as-day vocal harmonies.

On Avec's sophomore release, Lines, put out in September by Civil Defense League/Doghouse Records, the musical relationship between Potter and Harlan is palpable, sometimes as experimentally fertile as spouses Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth (as in "House" or "Beautiful Veins") and at other points as cleanly and preciously platonic as Ben Gibbard and Jenny Lewis of indie band Postal Service (see "Hamartia"). "Everybody likes to guess which boys in the band I've kissed," sings Potter on "In Character," and given how tight her dueling leads with Harlan sound, one really does wonder.

Musically, Avec's brand of punk-driven pop-rock is frenetic and passionate, but also unconventional in its composition. The songs "Dysplasia" and "Albina Krobot" bookend Lines with off-putting, stop-and-start phrasing; and the ominous, minor-key instrumental "Ageyeva" incorporates a muffled radio sample. "Man in Space" changes character completely over the course of its three-and-a-half minutes, starting as a bubbling punkabilly shake and ending as a dish of half-speed, heavy-metal drudge.

Harlan and Potter's stinging guitar lines and scrunch-faced vocals mesh together with an urgent, hard-rocking accord, and it's tempting to imagine that Avec's songwriting charisma is a product of the couple's personal chemistry. But for listeners, it's enough that these two musicians have found their musical foils.

—Robbie Whelan wrote about Among Wolves for the October issue.


MAGAZINE
by: Marianne Amoss

When the new issue of Gutter magazine comes across the Internets, twentysomethings of Baltimore take notice. "Gutter caters 100 percent to the MySpace generation," says photographer (and occasional Urbanite contributor) J.M. Giordano, who cofounded the monthly online-only publication with website designer Tom Doxanas. Quirky and bold, Gutter has quickly made a name for itself with strong fashion photography; commentary on city issues and culture; and its reliance on local models, artists, photographers, and writers. "We want to focus on people in the city who don't get recognized in other publications," says Giordano, "to get new faces and new talent out there." To subscribe (for free) or read current and back issues, go to www.guttermagazine.com.


ART
by: Jack Livingston

The spare white-box format employed by most art institutions exemplifies a belief in cool tidiness as de rigueur for high art. Denise Tassin's hyper-dense installations, showing November 7 through December 1 in the Amalie Rothschild Gallery at the Creative Alliance, challenge this staid notion—her signature style, an everything-
but-the-kitchen-sink approach, results in dynamic, highly complex presentations. Here Tassin presents an exhibition made up of five mini-installations containing a mix of old and new work. The ephemera she collects en masse—materials such as paper dolls, candy, paint samples, stuffed animals, plastic bottle caps, games, and psychotropic medications—are methodically reworked and altered by the artist, all becoming part of her ongoing opus, The Museum of the Mostly Unexceptional. Volume and strategies aside, the real power of Tassin's art springs from her working-class roots in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Some of her hometown relatives have become her collaborators, augmenting her powerful southern-gothic-meets-John-Cage
autobiographical style.

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


LITERATURE
by: Susan McCallum-Smith

When faced with a chore as awful as ironing, I pop in a DVD of The Thin Man and enjoy the capers of detectives Nick and Nora Charles, that wisecracking marriage of equals on which I my husband and I try to model our own, though with a gag on martinis before noon. How we do like to turn crime into entertainment!

Accomplished Norwegian author Karin Fossum serves up her crime over-easy. The Indian Bride is her fourth novel featuring the taciturn, sensitive Inspector Konrad Sejer. (I like to picture him as Viggo Mortensen in a cable sweater and an anorak, like an advert for a Nordic knitting pattern.) Sejer investigates the murder of an unidentified exotic-looking woman, whose body is found outside the small village of Elvestad. The village reeks of "onions and leeks, or the rank smell of manure in spring and the sweet smell of apples in autumn;" it is peopled with local farmers and salty with gossip, boredom, and xenophobia. Fossum follows the classic psychological thriller format, but she denies her reader a tidy resolution, concluding with the realistic if unsettling insinuation that criminals do not always get caught. At the novel's end, two villagers in the local cafe wonder if the guilty may still be among them, then they "fell silent once more, staring out the black window, but they found only each other's faces in there and turned away."

Dana Kollmann's insights into crime are of a more pungent variety. In her recent memoir, Never Suck a Dead Man's Hand: Curious Adventures of a CSI, she dishes about her decade as a Crime Scene Investigator for the Baltimore County Police Department. "We were the condom collectors, the vomit samplers, pubic pluckers, the semen swabbers, and the dumpster divers of the department," she writes, noting that it was not uncommon to end her shift scraping "mung" (human remains) from her boots and flicking maggots out of her bra.

Kollmann's memoir is eye-opening and informative, often funny, and persistently gruesome. Although she apologizes many times for her gallows humor, Kollmann consistently poaches her style from the cynical noirs of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett without taking into account that they were peddling fiction while she is peddling fact. The off-color banter between Kollmann and her law enforcement colleagues is understandable given the unenviable nature of their tasks, but her flippant descriptions of her daily interactions with human misery risk giving readers indigestion. Referring to a witness as a "thing" may be funny during an off-duty yarn in a bar, but in print it reads as derogative.

Kollmann successfully debunks the glamorized soft-focus mythology of those CSI dramas pockmarking our TV lineup. With admirable frankness, she admits her work's emotional toll in the final chapter. Too late—she has written the book in the tone of the woman she was while doing the job, not as the wiser woman she purports to be now.

No one could accuse David Peace, who prefers to serve up his crime scrambled, of having a sense of humor. You can tell he takes things seriously by his glowering photograph on the back jacket flap of Tokyo Year Zero, his intoxicating, infuriating new release. Postmodern in style, Tokyo Year Zero traces the existential journey of Detective Minami as he struggles to catch a serial killer while wrestling with memories of his military conduct during the Second World War.

It is 1946 and Japan lies in ruins. "Everyone is talking now about the one million unclaimed ashes of the war dead, the four million repatriated soldiers and civilians … the piss and the shit in the rivers, the cholera and the typhus … about purges … about trials." Among this bedlam, the brutal murders of several young women almost pass unnoticed.

Peace uses a subject-verb sentence construction with metronomic persistency, interspersed with the italicized thoughts of the conflicted Minami. "Night is day. I open my eyes. No more pills. Day is night. I can hear the rain falling. Hide from sight. Night is day. I can see the sun shining. No more pills. Day is night. I close my eyes. The corpses of the dead. Night is day."

After a few pages had beat my brain to runny yolk, I gave up and vaulted over the italics like a steeple-chaser and found the going considerably smoother. Peace's ending, like Fossum's, may not satisfy every reader, but it is entirely appropriate given his ironic intent—to explore our contradictory relationship with atrocity and violence, how sometimes we commend acts committed during war that would earn the gallows in peacetime. Tokyo Year Zero is a darn good book, darn it, ruined by style.

The reader is always party to the confused thoughts of Detective Minami, whereas we never know what Dashiell Hammett's characters are thinking. In Everyman Library's new collection, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories, Hammett serves up his crime (here it comes!) hard-boiled, and although we hear his characters talk and watch them do, we are left to imagine their intent. This is a world where, as James Ellroy writes so eloquently in his hip, staccato preface, Hammett's "workmen heroes refuse to soliloquize or indict—they know the game is rigged and they're feeding off scraps of trickle-down graft."

"I can stand anything I've got to stand," says Ned Beaumont, the "hero" of The Glass Key, the second and best of the two novels in this edition. Beaumont works as a sort of hired goon for an up-and-coming politician in a district outside of New York.  Summarizing the convoluted plot is beyond me, but his daily rounds appear to consist of committing random acts of violence, suffering random acts of violence, drinking, and seducing women with his rough-and-ready charm ("‘You can't go by my manners,' he told her. ‘They're always pretty bad.'").

Hammett's get-it-done, dialogue-driven prose masks his genius. "The door was opened by a gray-haired bespectacled man. His face was mild and grayish and the eyes that peered anxiously through the pale-tortoise-shell-encircled lenses of his spectacles were gray." The subtle repetition in this section is perhaps what Peace was striving for, but executed with greater finesse.

What did our local-boy Hammett make of The Thin Man movies, of Hollywood's whimsical adaptation of his unsentimental soul? And what does watching such movies say about people like me, who live in a crime-infested city yet like their noir served sunny-side up, where the hero is morally unconflicted, "mung" isn't spattering from the ceiling fans, and no one weeps for the dead?

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


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