MD Day 3 - Outsider Art, Indoor Markets, and Hipster Shops (They can't all be alliterated)
I spent the majority of today exploring Baltimore. It was basically just like this:
Okay, so I didn't ease racial tensions in the sixties with my powerful voice and positive attitude and I didn't see John Travolta in drag, but the land of John Waters did not disappoint in quirky charm.
I started by getting coffee at a cafe/ anarchist bookstore called Red Emma's. The coffee was very good (though a little overpriced), but the book store was super cool. They had lots of local self-published comic books and manifestos. The thing I thought was coolest is that they had actually well done children's books to help parents talk about race, gender, and other complicated social issues with their kids. Sometimes I really like the world we're in.
From there the life affirmation continued with a trip to the Museum of Visionary Art, highlighting the offbeat, grand, and genre-eschewing works of several outsider artists. The museum has two buildings connected via a sculpture path, and their were impressive works everywhere. In the main building the theme of every exhibition was around the idea of mystery. My favorite pieces were sculptures by a deaf woman with Down syndrome,a collection of artistically rendered postcards from anonymous strangers with their biggest secret on it, Edgar Allen Peep (a statue of Edgar Allen Poe made entirely out of peeps), a series of automated wooden cabaret figurines, and a mixed media installation of glass work, collages, and sounds dedicated to farts. My favorite fact is that one of the artists lost a foot to diabetes and had another artist friend make his prosthetic look like a lion's foot. My favorite individual piece was a painting done by the guy the movie Quiz Show is about, James Franklin Snodgrass. The painting is massive and from a distance it looks like a reclining woman, but it's actually made of thousands of intricately drawn smaller figures. It was really weird and beautiful, and the fun fact about its creator was a nice extra. The favorites are right below, but everything was great so those pictures will be at the very bottom.
After the museum I went to historic Lexington Market, a giant indoor marketplace filled with good, cheap local food, and vendors. My friends from the area said that Faidley's in the market has the best crab cakes in Maryland which is saying something because this is a state that loves their crabs. It was gigantic and had the best ratio of crab to cake I've ever had (mostly pure high-quality crab meat) and it was really really good. The other Maryland tradition I was told to try while I was there was a Berger cookie, which is a type of cookie that's covered in a particular fudge and is also just perfectly balanced between cookie-ness and cholate-ness. I was still a little hungry at this point so I couldn't resisit the deal of getting a big tub of malaysian shrimp fried rice for $3 (the shrimp was sizable too not those tiny frozen buggers you normally get) and an ice coffee (Malaysian Iced coffee mixes tea and condensed milk with coffee). Everything was delicious, it's a cool place to hang out, and my wallet was happy too. All three of those things happen so rarely!
After lunch, I went to the Baltimore Museum of Art, which is free! The museum also features a gallery called the Cone Collection. Two wealthy sisters, Claribel and Etta Cone, bequeathed the museum with their hundreds of collected paintings from incredible artists including Picasso, Monet, Gauguin, Cezanne, Rodin, and Matisse. In fact, they have the largest collection of Matisse's work of any single public location. It was truly incredible. The rest of the museum had some cool International and American Art from prehistory up to the modern day, but the Cone Collection was definitely the highlight. In the modern section were some works by Andy Warhol, and I had forgotten that he was actually a really good painter and the mass produced prints were more a statement than a reflection of his full artistic capabilities. Similarly, the Cone Collection had a pre-Cubist Picasso, and while I love his weirder stuff, I was just blown away by how beautiful his more representational art could be. My favorite thing in the whole museum though was a statue made by the surrealist Rene Magritte.
After the museum, I did some shopping in Baltimore's hip Hampden neighborhood. I went to a shop called Bazaar, which specialized in oddities and curiosities, ranging from taxidermied animals to vintage posters and zines to absinthe drinking kits to baby faces with tentacles in their mouth (your guess on the last one is as good as mine). I next wandered into an ice cream shop that's supposedly one of the best in the city called the Charmery (apparently Baltimore had a town meeting to come up with a nickname to improve their image and they landed on Charm City, which is actually really charming. So that's why a lot of shops have charm in the name). They had a lot of funky flavors including Old Bay caramel and strawberry lime mezcal, which I sampled but I ended up getting a cone of Malty Vanilla Chip because it's hard to go wrong with a classic. As I walking back to my car, I got intrigued by a big "Voted Best of Baltimore" sign so I went to investigate and discovered Ma Petite Shoe Shoes & Chocolate. I don't know what the connection between those two is but they had very creative examples of both and little tags highlighting local and woman-run businesses which I thought was really cool. I ended up buying an orange vanilla almond tea infused chocolate. It was weird but very tasty.
I ended the day by going with Scott and his coworkers to Trivia at the Ram's Head Tavern. During the night, I tried one full pint of beer and a sampler from the place itself which is partnered Fordham and Dominion Brewing in Delaware. The full pint was the Sweet Baby Jesus Porter from Duclaw Brewing and it was as tasty as its name is ridiculous. For the sampler, I got the seasonal oktoberfest, the barrel aged stout, the pilsner, the light ale, the amber ale, and a lager. The Dilute Pupilz Pilsner and the Oak Barrel Stout were definitely my favorites.
The trivia was also really fun, and the team came in third overall. I knew eventually my knowledge of the Incredible Hulk's villains would come in handy, but I didn't realize it would be so soon!
Favorite Random Sightings: A big billboard that said "Mattress Stores are greedy!"; Rogue Catering; Little Shop of Hardware; Bumblejunk Garbage Truck
Regional Observation: Maryland loves Old Bay, a kind of spice consisting of salt, pepper, paprika, and mysteries. It's good, but Old Bay ice cream might be a bridge too far
Albums Listened To: Everything Goes Numb by Streetlight Manifesto; Everything Playing by The Lovin' Spoonful; Everything Will Be Alright in the End by Weezer; Evil Empire by Rage Against the Machine (I really have a tough time listening to a full album by them, but they do have some good basslines); Evildoers Beware by Mustard Plug (just Box and Go)
People's Favorite Jokes:
"My sense of humor is more people falling down"
Me: Do you know any good jokes?
Cashier: Oh yeah, I work with a few of them.
Song of the Day:
Some of the lyrics are pretty silly, but damned this is a great verse: "And then I'll know that all I've learned my kid assumes/
And all my deepest worries must be his cartoons/ And still I'll try to tell him all the things I've done/ Relating to what he can do when he becomes a man/ And still he'll stick his fingers in the fan"
