Flickering Treasures

Amy Davis (Johns Hopkins University Press) 

In Baltimore, we don’t have to look far to find vestiges of cinema’s golden age—venues like the sparkling Senator or the majestic Parkway that remind us of a time when all our problems vanished with a night by the big screen. What we might not realize is how many more of these cinemas once existed in Baltimore, and that’s where Davis comes in. She photographs old movie houses—both those that are decayed or have been repurposed and the ones that remain grand and glorious. Juxtaposing current conditions with historical photos, Davis shows how much time has altered the face of our city. Her book is a comment on this transition, and a reminder that change is the only constant.

A Saturnalia of Bunk

H.L. Mencken, edited by S.T. Joshi
(Ohio University Press)

There’s a reason Henry Louis Mencken is called the Sage of Baltimore. His sardonic wit, explosive exuberance, and wry critical eye shaped the spunky attitude of our city. But while many in Baltimore know Mencken for his newspaper column “The Free Lance”—which he wrote six days a week for The Baltimore Evening Sun from 1911 to 1915—few have actually read them. In this collection of those columns, we get a sense of the issues that defined Mencken’s voice—freedom from censorship and battling against temperance and other moral reform movements among them—and the passion behind a man hellbent on ridding his community of, as he writes, “stupidity, flapdoodle, and buncombe.” 

When The Sun announced its purchase of the alt-weekly City Paper in February, it felt like when a major label scoops up your favorite indie band.

Launched as City Squeeze in 1977 by Russ Smith, who grew up on Long Island reading the Village Voice, and Alan Hirsch, who worked with Smith at the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, the paper’s mission initially was to stay afloat. But it was also personal and City Paper’s modus operandi—harsh critiques of politicians, vigorous arts coverage, narrative storytelling—grew out of Smith’s contrarian nature. “I didn’t want my stories cut by editors who didn’t know what I was doing,” says Smith, who sold City Paper for about $4 million in 1987 and also launched the Washington City Paper and New York Press. “[I] wanted control of how a paper looked.”

Now that control is up in the air, as City Paper editor Evan Serpick (a former Baltimore senior editor) admits, “We don’t know exactly how this will play out.” The early signs are mixed. Staffers were at least buoyed by the fact that Jennifer Marsh—a Sun niche products director, who worked for decades at City Paper—has been named the publication’s general manager.

But, the first changes came a week after the deal’s announcement, as eight City Paper employees were fired, including creative director Joe MacLeod, who worked at the paper for 25 years. Then came a censorship blowup that played out in the national media after City Paper’s previous owners, Times-Shamrock, spiked several stories. Still, Tiffany Shackelford, executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, says all is not necessarily lost with the purchase of an alt-weekly by a city’s major daily. She points to the Chicago Reader, which was purchased by the Chicago Sun-Times and is thriving thanks to additional resources.

Smith, however, true to form, remains skeptical: “There’s no best-case scenario, save for the people who at least get to keep their jobs.”