click to enlarge PHOTO PROVIDED Annalisa Barron. Her current art series is called “Place Projectors. Its first element is a projector, fashioned out of very Victorian-era-looking elements. If you found one in your grandparents’ attic, you might think they had been working on a time machine. And the second element is a place. A place which Barron studies closely, weaving pieces of it into a visual treat. Her next “Place Projectors” project will be presented 7 p.m. Friday at The Spirit Room. As we emerge from the past year of pandemic, there will be a live audience. But the event will be also presented live on YouTube.
The north section of the Inner Loop looking south from the Market View Heights neighborhood. Norman Jones is old enough to remember the Inner Loop being built more than half a century ago.
“I have a clear memory of that machinery,” Jones said. “When you’re 4, 5, 6 years old, and you see big trucks and the excavators, you go, ‘Wow.’ When you see it all moved around, you just thought it was the coolest thing, and probably everyone else thought it was the coolest thing.”
The 63-year-old commissioner of the city Department of Environmental Services keeps two outsized frames hanging on the wall of the agency’s conference room at City Hall that act as his guides when he considers the future of the sunken expressway.
Whether you say yes or no to the power of the Ouija board, there s no dismissing the legacy of this supposed spirit communication tool that inspires intrigue and amusement and sometimes fear.
For more than 125 years, the Ouija has been an all-American invention that s alternately viewed as a practical way to reach out to the beyond, a slumber party game and a great narrative device in pop culture. Some even see it as a negative creation and a potential gateway for the nastier denizens of the spirit realm to enter our turf.
Regardless of the Ouija s power (or lack thereof?), it is an undeniable part of our nation s history. That history was honored on Oct. 14 when the Talking Board Historical Society led by the world s leading talking board expert, Robert Murch worked with the City of Baltimore to install a plaque commemorating the location of an April 1890 séance where the board was named.
Did you hear me? I’m at your house. Clean your fucking attic!!! Jack Froese
Jack Froese had been a close friend of Hart’s since their teens. A few months earlier Froese and Hart had been up in Hart’s attic at his home in Dunmore, Pennsylvania. Jack had teased him then about how messy it was; now, it seemed, he was doing it again.
Except Jack was dead.
That June, Froese had died suddenly of a heart arrhythmia, at the obscenely young age of 32. Months later, he started emailing people. Those who replied to these emails never got a response, and the messages stopped as abruptly as they began.
PHOTO COURTESY CHOCOLATE CHIN PRODUCTIONS Austin and Brendan Lake in A Pharaoh s Lonely Ego. In the past several years local musician Austin Lake has built a name for himself, with his flashy and genre-bending solo project Aweful Kanawful. Lake is now translating that aesthetic into filmmaking with his quirky and zany feature-length movie, “A Pharaoh’s Lonely Ego,” which will be available to stream for free starting Sunday, Feb. 14. Filled with surreal imagery, cheeky humor, and fantastic original music, this indie flick is a bizarre and paranoid fever dream with absurd one-liners and seemingly irrelevant characters, filler, and subplots that flesh out the chaotic world Lake has created in his music.