Tao’s 2 Cents

We apparently picked an excellent time and place to move to Baltimore. Every year the city throws a free festival about 3 blocks from our new apartment. There are all kinds of booths for artists to sell their work, stages for dancing, short films, experimental music, cultural music, main stream music, etc. It reminded me of South by Southwest in Austin to some degree, except it was free.

Artscape goes all weekend and we walked over early Friday afternoon just to get an idea of what was going on. We stopped by several booths and talked with a number of artists. I was struck by the capacity of human creativity, its startling and gives me hope for the future in a lot of ways. There was one artist making pictures completely out of wire, he told us that making the intricate frames actually takes longer than the image inside. One person was making purses from old book covers, another was making mirrors surrounded by a monster’s mouth to give the impression you were being eaten.

I met one guy who used to be a machinist but now makes jewelry by welding and bending all kinds of normal things. He makes rings out of forks, bracelets out of bent wrenches and welded nuts and bolts. It was a little too mechanical for my tastes, but it looked good and on the right person could jive well. He told me the story of how he got started. Apparently he won a another man’s girlfriend in a game of double-or-nothing pool and since it was double-or-nothing the girlfriend asked if that meant they were getting married. Well the next time he came to the bar he’d made her a ring from a bent and welded fork. She loved it and showed it around to all of her friends and pretty soon orders started coming in. I don’t think he actually he ended up with the girl, he simply said “she’s still around”.

All of the art and jewelry were nice but I thought the photography was really superb. There were several booths that I thought every single photo was amazing. There was a sort of experimental photographer who has developed a way of taking a flat picture of a 360 degree environment. He wouldn’t say how he did it, I suppose that would be like a magician giving away his secret but I imagine he had the camera set on a tripod and simply took a picture at set intervals in a circle then overlayed them in Photoshop. Of course, the trick isn’t all that’s important. He had some great pictures of a subway, the Korean war memorial and ground zero among others. I don’t think a lot of people sold much of their work but this guy had most of his small prints sold by the end of Saturday it looked like.

Apart from the standard art there were bizarre sculptures scattered all around the festival area and actually around downtown as well. There was a crazy zombie squirrel sculpture with sharks teeth and blood all over the mouth and a number of other indescribable creations. I personally thought the Prayer Booth one was particularly amusing. It also seems that at any kind of eclectic event the crazy guys with their “art cars” show up, so there was a section set aside for them to show off their rides.

I wasn’t too thrilled about seeing any of the dancing performances but Christine insisted so on Friday evening we saw Culkin’s Irish dance school perform on an outdoor stage. I’ve seen Irish dancing before at a pub in Mississippi but it was a little less professional(I assume the kids here weren’t drunk at the time) although everyone was involved at the pub and made for a really fun time.  Anyway, these kids did a great a job and I really enjoyed their performance.

Afterwards the group invited people from the audience to learn a new dance. Most of the group Irish dances I’ve seen have seemed pretty complicated and I didn’t know how they planned to teach a group of random people how to do one in just a few minutes. Christine volunteered herself and I decided I’d just observe. I could tell by the blank expressions that a lot of people had no idea what they were talking about as they explained the moves. As I expected it was chaotic to say the least, but they did a little better than I’d expected.

There was live music all 3 days at 3 different stages. We spent Friday and Saturday nights on a hill by the main stage. Friday night we saw The Isley Brothers who got people groovin’ in their seats. I wasn’t sure which songs they’d sang but you knew them once they started. I couldn’t get “shout” out of my head for the next few days.

Saturday night we came back and watched Lupe Fiasco and Keyshia Cole. I like Lupe Fiasco’s music, but it appeared to me that they were just singing over the CD in the background. Christine has it right that generally hip-hop isn’t that good live. There’s too much studio post production and not enough actual musicians playing instruments to put on stage. I’d never heard of Keyshia Cole but everyone else apparently had and she definitely had a voice on her.

On Saturday we also went to see another dance performance. It was supposedly the highlight dance event since it was produced by the guy who does Stomp. We got there early and got good seats and the dancers were good and most of them seemed to really be passionate about it but it’s just not my thing. Christine said that the theme was good versus evil which seems a little overdone, either way I couldn’t tell what the “message” was if there was supposed to be one at all.

All in all it was an excellent event. There was a huge variety of people in the crowd and I think I got to see a decent cross-section of Baltimore’s population. There was a very relaxed atmosphere, all of the artists were professional and each booth had something different. The musicians and dancers were from every different genre and culture imaginable and there some moderately big name performers there for a free performance. If you want to see more pictures click here.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 11:12 am and is filed under Community. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.