When I heard last week that Richie Havens had died, I went back and listened to an interview I’d conducted with him in 2008. Speaking (ostensibly) of the George Washington Bridge and him home in NJ, he said, “It’s quiet on this side, and not so quiet on the other side.”
I hope he’s raising his voice and breaking the quiet on the other side right now.
“YOU can look far and wide, but you’ll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style,” John Waters once noted about his hometown. Maybe that’s why Baltimore’s trumpeted glass-and-steel Inner Harbor development, with its chain restaurants, neon-loud amusements and brand-name shopping, feels so counterintuitive as a symbol for the city. But walk in any direction and the city’s charm reasserts itself. Indeed, Baltimore’s best draws tend to be left-of-center: offbeat theater, grandly decrepit neighborhoods on the cusp of gentrification, a world-class museum devoted to outsider art and a dive-bar culture that must be one of the nation’s finest. via New York Times
(Source: garrott)