a pocketful of baltimore
i've been to baltimore maybe a bajillion times but this time i truly fell in love. not in an "i could move there" way, mind you. my heart goes out to martin and drew matmos who are stuck there for the foreseeable future. may they find lots of places like this:
this house belongs to francois' & brezel's friend dan. he bought it many years ago for ten grand and later bought the house next door, too. they are skinny and small but also four floors tall. and stuffed to the gills with junk. rad junk.
and rabbits.
i can't explain how homey and comfortable it felt, nor can i explain how gracious a host dan was. last time stereo total visited, he took them out on his homemade canoe down canals that cut thru rusted factories and out into the bay to the blue island, an island of blue glass that was created by industrial dumping. we weren't so lucky this time, but he did cook us some mean snapper.
yumsers!
then he took us out to his backyard (i wish i had pictures!) and beyond that to the stables. imagine a totally ghetto-fied city block with rowhouse after rowhouse and then tucked behind all of them, totally hidden from the world, was this place.
apparently the stables have existed since the late 1800's and these are the last ones still standing in baltimore, thanks in part to dan who set up a nonprofit to keep it going.
this fellow, whose name i forget, makes the wagons from scratch, and then some other fellows get produce from the wholesale market outside of town and then some other fellows take the food all over baltimore where, believe it or not, proper grocery stores still do not exist. it's a pretty rad little operation. unfortunately, all of this excitement was followed by an hour long slide show of last year's burning man festival...