Since Isabel Mercedes Cumming became Baltimore’s Inspector General in February of 2018, she has responded to over 400 complaints, hired 9 new investigators, located over $1 million in wasteful spending, and seems to have gotten at least two agency directors canned. 

Those are major strides for The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) which didn’t issue a single report in 2017 and lacked a permanent director for 18 months prior to Cumming’s appointment.

In nearly twenty reports, Cumming’s revived office has hunted down pork spending and called out rule-breaking with stringent, even prosecutorial zeal. She previously worked in Prince George’s County heading up the Economic Crimes and Police Misconduct division, and before that had a stint in Baltimore City as an Assistant State’s Attorney going after white-collar crime, which was satisfying, important work, she said.

“When I was doing Juvenile and District court and some people have lives you can’t even believe. And nothing’s justified, but you kind of get it more. White collar? You’ve had the best of everything, you’re at the top, you just wanted more,” Cumming said. “And people don’t learn that, when enough is enough. So, it’s very fulfilling and usually they’re ripping off the people that need it [most], so that’s why I really do love what I do.”

June has been a busy month for Cumming and OIG: A few weeks ago, Cumming revealed that a manager in the Baltimore City Department Of Transportation was caught driving for a rideshare service while on the clock—really long rides, too—“outside of the Baltimore metropolitan area”—and as a result of her findings, has been fired. And just yesterday, OIG revealed that two city employees who relocated—one on the West Coast, one in Europe—were still being paid to work remotely while receiving benefits and improperly using sick leave.

That case, Cumming said, originated with a hotline complaint: “The OIG appreciates the citizens and employees that turn cases like this in—they are making a difference,” she said.  

Hanging up in Cumming’s City Hall office is a framed newspaper from 2003. The paper’s headline reads “The Wrath Of Isabel,” referring to the hurricane that devastated Baltimore County but given to her by her detective as a way to praise of her skills weeding out corruption.

“I’m not a political person at all. I can maneuver through politics but I’m not political, in that I just want to get my job done. If I start getting political, then I’m not doing my job,” Cumming said. “So I just try to keep it to the facts, the situation, and let the elected officials do what they’re going to do.”

The OIG was created in 2005 via executive order by Martin O’Malley and it reported to the mayor. Last winter, Baltimore voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative making it an independent city agency that no longer reports to the mayor (the initiative also gave it subpoena powers). It was a change championed by councilperson Ryan Dorsey. 

“[The OIG reporting to the mayor] by all accounts led to every previous IG either not doing the job as it should be done or doing the job and getting pushed out because of it,” Dorsey said.

Currently, Cumming is investigating former mayor Catherine Pugh’s “Healthy Holly” book deals, a situation that would have been fraught under the old setup, where the IG could be fired by the mayor at will. The last IG was allegedly fired for looking too closely at top city hall officials. Robert H. Pearre was forced to resign in 2016, after there was a pushback against his investigation of wrongdoing by the city’s Chief Information Officer. Pearre later told the Brew that he was warned by former Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s Deputy Chief of Staff Kimberly Morton not to investigate any more “senior” officials. He also alleged that Pugh (the incoming mayor at the time) gave the order to have him fired.

Cumming’s revived investigations have already prompted two “senior” officials to resign. DOT director Michelle Pourciao stepped down in April amid an IG probe into “morale” in her office, which saw numerous top staff flee and included an allegation of “bullying, intimidation, and outright harassment, originating from the highest levels of leadership.” And last summer, Human Resources director Mary H. Talley resigned just two weeks after getting the heads up that Cumming was investigating allegations of leadership “ridiculing and demeaning” employees.

That investigation began somewhere else though. With multiple complaints about the high price tag of the job fair “WorkBaltimore.” And it turned up odd tangents such as the city spending $26,000 “conceptualizing” two anti-smoking mascots—Smokey Crush and Leaf, a crumpled cigarette and frowning tobacco leaf respectively, who post up at various events and lead group line dances and tell kids not to smoke. 

It also appears, from this video of Rawlings-Blake dancing with them, that they commissioned original music. It is not clear how much this cost or who made it. After Cumming’s report, Smokey Crush and Leafy were no more (their instagram survives, however).

“Sometimes little things end up being huge things,” Cumming said. “Sometimes it’s the tip of an iceberg, or it’s something that has really bothered a citizen.” 

Still, Cumming’s reports occasionally seem like small potatoes, especially when they’re focused on workers rather than management. One might wonder, for example, whether casing a DOT employee’s house to see if they’re going home early is a good use of time and resources.

Cumming admits that her public reports can appear nitpicky and sometimes they’re even shrugged off by department heads as overzealous. One from last August soberly titled “Abuse of Authority by the Director of the Municipal Phone Exchange” chewed out (but didn’t name) Simon Etta, who oversees the city’s phone systems for buying an iPhone 7 ($220) with city money for “personal” use. His boss at the Comptroller’s Office didn’t seem to think it was a big deal and argued that he needed it for “legitimate business” stuff—but made him pay the $220 back anyway, a victory for Cumming.

“Sometimes it’s the level of who the person is. If their responsibility is to monitor how much money the city is spending on phones, and they do something and cut themselves a break…it may look like you’re nitpicking,” Cumming said. “But if the watchdog is the one that’s abusing the system, what else could they be doing?” 

Wasteful spending is both a crusade for Cumming, and also a red flag that often indicates further wrongdoing. Early in her career, she prosecuted Comptroller Jacqueline Mclean, who was indicted for paying $25,000 to a made up employee and abusing her position to obtain a permit for a property in Federal Hill.

“Following the money is what I’ve always done,” Cumming, who began as an account 35 years ago, said. “The only thing I really liked about accounting was finding fraud. The rest of it was god awful.” 

The OIG has its limits, however. Because Baltimore’s police department is a state agency, it’s not under the OIG’s purview, and Cumming’s office has yet to publish any investigations. Excessive overtime and outright overtime fraud has been an ongoing problem in BPD as evidenced by the Gun Trace Task Force Scandal or even, the recent charges against Sgt. Ethan Newberg, who upon his arrest was revealed to be earning  $243,000 per year, mostly due to overtime.

There is a Memorandum of Understanding—established under IG David McClintok, who resigned in 2013—that allows for BPD to voluntarily cooperate with investigations. Cumming would not say if there are any ongoing investigations into BPD, but said they have given her all the information she’s asked for so far. 

Cumming, who sees the worst of city governance every day, has every right to be cynical, yet she challenges claims about Baltimore being somehow uniquely corrupt.

“I’m here because I believe in the city and I believe we can make things better,” Cumming said. “Everyone has their own problems, we just need to keep moving forward and try to change the culture that has existed.” 

When Cumming meets with new city employees during their orientation, she gives them her card and tells them to call if they see anything that doesn’t seem right.

“If people tell you when you’re asking a question about why something is done and they tell you, ‘Because it has always been done that way,’ that’s not a good enough answer,” Cumming said.

The post Wrath Of Isabel: Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming on going after waste and fraud appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Acting Commissioner Michael Harrison stood before the Baltimore City Council’s Executive Appointments committee Wednesday night, promising to “revamp” the beleaguered Baltimore Police Department, create “systems of accountability,” and institute a sweeping culture change, if he is confirmed at next Monday’s vote.

“The culture is really what’s allowed by supervisors and management that allows officers to think that they can do things or fail to do things and get away with it,” Harrison told the committee. “And it really is about changing that culture of holding people accountable.”

Harrison was all big promises last night, and many of them were ones commissioners hoping to get the top cop gig have declared over the years—though Harrison has more community support than most, and is highly regarded in New Orleans, where he rose through the ranks to Superintendent over his 28-year career.

“The experiences I bring are very parallel to what’s happening [in Baltimore] with violent crime, and in a major city dealing with a consent decree,” Harrison said.

He was thoughtful and composed on Wednesday, expressing confidence that Baltimore’s problems could be solved by building an “organizational culture,” instituting “performance metrics,” and “developing positive relationships” with community members.

Harrison’s confirmation vote next Monday seems all but certain—council seems relieved to have a competent candidate and fear who Mayor Catherine Pugh might pick next if Harrison is not confirmed. Still, correcting a department plagued by corruption scandals, lawsuits, and most importantly, an intensely fractured relationship with Baltimore’s residents will not be easy and it sometimes seems as though Harrison is its last hope.

Two high school students reminded Harrison of the lack of trust citizens feel toward the police.

“Commissioner, we don’t hate the police, we react to the police,” one student said. “Meaning, we give what we get.”

Only one speaker (out of seven) got up to oppose Harrison—Jason Rodriguez, founder of the Baltimore chapter of Copwatch. He argued that because Harrison is not from Baltimore, he can’t fix its unique problems.

Other speakers were cautiously hopeful but wary.

A lack of transparency and a disinterest in community engagement hobbled the mayor’s previous nominee, Joel Fitzgerald, who cancelled plans to fly in for a weekend of meetings, one of which saw 48 people stand up to testify against him, before withdrawing his name. Fitzgerald cited a medical emergency—his son having brain surgery—in his announcement, though community and council opposition was already high when a personal emergency befell the Fort Worth commissioner.

Councilperson Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer attributed the evening’s small community showing as a “positive testament” to the Mayor’s office community outreach this time around: Harrison met with residents in each of the city’s nine police districts last month.

Harrison referred to the BPD’s organizational problems as an “infrastructure gap,” and stressed “technological” and “personnel” solutions.

“Right now we are actually building a machine,” he said. “So the machine is not yet able to produce a lot of outcomes because we’re still building it. But once you build it and turn it on then it’s able to produce outcomes.”

Harrison’s calm, technocratic positivity belied the extent of systemic corruption he’s up against. Just in the past two days: a federal lawsuit, another indictment, and four more suspensions.

Hours before Harrison spoke at council, Jerome Johnson who was wrongfully imprisoned for 30 years for a murder he did not commit filed a federal lawsuit against the BPD, claiming detectives withheld key evidence, pressured a witnesses to change her story, and “systematically suppressed” evidence that would have exonerated him over decades.

On Tuesday, the department announced that four officers – Ryan Guinn, Adam Storie, Carmine Vignola, and Robert Hankard – had been suspended and were under Internal Affairs investigation for, according to Harrison, “knowing about” a 2014 incident in which a BB gun was planted on a man another officer had run over (Guinn and Storie were present at the scene). The man who brought the BB gun was Sgt. Keith Gladstone, a retired sergeant federally indicted on Tuesday and the officer who drove over the man, Wayne Jenkins, is currently serving 25 years for his involvement in the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) scandal.

Councilperson Zeke Cohen was one of many council members who brought up the GTTF, calling them a “stain” on the city. Harrison promised to implement “strong but fair” policies and stressed training and punishment for “bad behavior.” Other committee members asked how he would address the BPD’s lack of transparency and seeming indifference to council oversight.

“My general sense is that this stems from the department being very aware that it is established as an entity of the state not an entity of the city and that it has no statutory obligation to respect this body in any way,” said Councilperson Ryan Dorsey, who said he has had an “incredibly difficult time” getting basic information from the department in the past.

The BPD has been under state control since 1860. Regulatory changes, even ones as simple as redistricting, need to pass through the general assembly in Annapolis.

“What’s missing is a system and a set of protocols,” Harrison said, promising to create a “systematic” and “standardized” exchange of information with council.

Dorsey stressed that what he was hearing from Harrison while encouraging was pretty much what previous commissioners had said only to “then follow through with no communication whatsoever.”

There are reasons to be concerned about Harrison’s tech-adjacent “best practices” rhetoric.

Under his leadership the NOPD piloted a secretive “predictive policing” program developed by the data-mining firm Palantir Technologies that operated for six years without the knowledge of New Orleans’ city council. The program ended last March after The Verge reported its existence. Predictive policing, an emerging technology which uses data from social media and crime mapping to predict where crime will happen and, more importantly, who will commit crimes, is controversial among legal scholars who worry that it replicates racial bias and unconstitutional policing practices.

Harrison cited his record of success in reducing high homicide and crime rates in New Orleans, where he also managed the early stages the city’s 2013 consent decree, which is now approaching compliance.

He pledged to clarify misperceptions about the consent decree, which councilman Eric Costello also noted is frequently invoked at oversight hearings as a reason why the department can’t make certain changes requested by council.

“When I talk to the officers, they will tell me what I think they’ve told you, that the consent decree keeps me from doing certain things. No, it absolutely does not,” he said. “It just makes sure we do our jobs in a constitutional way.”

In a recent unscientific survey of 362 officers by Councilman Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer, 44 percent of BPD respondents said they do not “fully understand” the consent decree and 77 percent said they feel “restricted” by it.

Harrison expressed a measured willingness to engage with new policy ideas related to civilian oversight and deprioritizing drug arrests, as well as treating opioids “as a public health crisis,” though he avoided specifics.

On cannabis possession—which State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby recently announced her office would stop prosecuting—Harrison acknowledged that its a “dynamic happening across America.” He also said officers may continue to arrest for possession and use it as probable cause to conduct searches, a position similar to that of outgoing commissioner Gary Tuggle.

“Our policies align with the law, and the law didn’t change but her policies changed,” Harrison said. “And I made that clear [to Mosby], circumstances may from time to time necessitate an arrest—although our priorities are to move away from arrests—on simple possession of marijuana.”

He added that although marijuana is a nonviolent offense, “it doesn’t always mean that a person caught with simple possession of marijuana is a nonviolent offender.”

Like other past commissioners, Harrison stressed a focus on violent offenders, and argued we should move away from valuing statistics, which incentivize officers to make unnecessary stops, to valuing “relationship building.”

It’s not exactly clear how he still succeed where others have failed, however. Building relationships is one thing, destroying them is another. As the still-growing GTTF scandal plainly shows, BPD brass have been all too willing to cover for officers who rack up arrests and confiscate guns, who not only do not prevent crime but perpetrate it themselves.

“Who by far is the better officer: the officer who can arrest the most people or the officer who can prevent the most crime?” Harrison said, letting a question with an obvious answer, that recent commissioners have all asked but failed to effectively act on, linger in council chambers.

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The post “We Are Building a Machine”: Harrison promises technocratic culture change at BPD appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

I don’t know if Disney Jail is a real thing or not, but I am convinced there’s a hidden sadism gurgling below “the happiest place on earth”—both because I’m a degenerate who feeds off disparaging things that normal people enjoy, like family fun, but also because America is full of lies and violence and greed, and it’s often those pushing wholesomeness and positivity that are doing most of the bullshitting and violence and greed.

Both of those guttural impulses animate Lucas Hnath’s new play “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About The Death of Walt Disney,” being staged at Single Carrot Theatre, which takes us behind the scenes of Walt’s life as a businessman, a (mostly shitty) father, and (at best serviceable) film producer in the process of expanding his successful film studio into a media empire.

Hnath’s play dirties the Walt Disney story in exactly the opposite way that Disney sanitized the gory folk tales that inspired films like “Cinderella” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” It also takes some poetic liberties with his life story.

“The Death of Walt Disney” is presented to us as a table read of Walt’s (played by Paul Diem) own autobiography-screenplay, a rich guy memoir written with the most masturbatory of intentions (think George W. Bush’s “Decision Points”) and formulaic plotting (“scene two: unions!”). Walt is not a great writer. Walt’s brother Roy (Mohammad R. Suaidi), his unnamed daughter (Meghan Stanton), and her husband Ron (Eric Poch)—the only other characters—are handcuffed to the table, perhaps metaphorically. There’s a requisite bottle of vodka on the table too, a playwright’s requirement if one wishes to write about troubled genius.

Walt aspires to greatness in the abstract, the kind where you put your name on things and take credit for other people’s work, as Walt frequently does to brother Roy, his closest business associate and chief lackey. As Walt puts it, “What’s the point if you’re not one of the most important people who ever lived? Most people—not important!”

And important people watch his movies, he’s quick to point out. “FDR saw my movies,” Walt humble brags to whoever will listen (usually brother Roy). “Jerry Lewis, Groucho Marx—fans. Senator McCarthy—friend. . . . Mussolini took his kids to see my movies. All of them—big fans!”

Films or plays about powerful men are often epics themselves. From “Citizen Kane” to “There Will Be Blood,” directors fashion elaborate productions to the oppressive scale of the their characters’ own egos. Hnath’s script instead opts for the smaller moments that betray Walt’s essential qualities, which are almost all bad here: insecurity, megalomania, lack of empathy—the usual tycoon tendencies.

Walt is quickly becoming a sick old man, however, a fact we’re clued into by his spontaneous bouts of coughing up blood. The fact that he has cancer is about the only thing that provokes us to feel sympathy for him.

Perhaps Walt’s most damning routine is his constant beating down of brother Roy, who takes the fall for Walt’s mistakes and abdicates the credit for his own successes.

Women especially are made invisible in Walt’s autobiography script. His (again, tellingly unnamed) daughter is given little time to speak, and Walt, in a pathetically misconstrued attempt to leave a romantic phone message for his wife (who is never on stage, and never heard offstage) says this: “I liked how you were working for me when we met. I liked how you’d draw the things that I thought up.”

All the film language (Walt says “cut to” when we move to a new scene) makes me wish “The Death of Walt Disney” was a film—I flip through the cinematic possibilities in my head: Walt, in a limousine, busting through his employees’ picket line; armies of underpaid sweatshop illustrators, scribbling furiously to create millions of Mickey and Goofy frames in a smoky, sun-drenched Los Angeles warehouse; cranes clawing mud out from backwater Florida marshes; dusty old reels of crude, retro Mickey Mouse cartoons.

By the nature of how Walt’s screenplay is framed, we’re given unencumbered access to his psyche. We are so inundated by Walt’s perspective that it’s almost like a one-man play where Walt’s id is our narrator (“close up on Walt” is a common phrase). The result is that the play focuses almost exclusively on pathologizing Walt, excavating his vanity, cruelty, and neuroses rather than telling a story about what he actually did in his life.

Co-directors Genevieve De Mahy and Matthew Shea’s minimal staging, consisting of a table and some scripts, keeps the focus on the dialogue and performances, of which Diem’s excitable, misanthropic showman Walt is particularly convincing.

“How come you never name any of your sons after me?” Walt abruptly asks his daughter. “What’s up with that?”

Her reply is the emotional peak of the show, the only moment where truth is ever spoken to the irascible Walt, who is accustomed to the absolute subordination of his employees and family. She says that she could never name her son Walt, because the resentment she feels toward him would reproduce itself, and the son would know he was loved less for bearing relation to his cursed grandfather.

“I’ve seen how you fire people,” she tells him.

“The Death of Walt Disney” is about death only in the sense that all of life is leading toward death. Walt, like so many egomaniacs, is singularly driven (perhaps by the very fact of death) to amass power so great that physical obliteration cannot erase his footprint. And it’s about death because, well—and this is only a spoiler because Hnath’s version of Walt earnestly pursues cryogenically freezing his body (Disney didn’t freeze himself in real life, we know because he was cremated, nor is there any evidence that he pursued it, but hell, maybe he still wanted to)—he dies at the end.

In his last moments, a sputtering and half-frozen Walt Disney imagines his family’s grief at his own death. “Close up on daughter,” he announces. “She cries. Ron Cries. Everyone cries.” The company will collapse too, he gleefully predicts (proof of his own inimitable leadership).

“The whole world has stopped and is waiting for me to return,” he says, “to defrost and show them all the way.”

“The Death of Walt Disney” continues through Feb. 25 at Single Carrot Theatre.

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Artists-tenants at the Post Office Garage studios are being given two more days to remove their belongings from the now condemned building, Kathleen Byrne, a code enforcement lawyer for the Baltimore Department of Housing and Community Development, told The Baltimore Beat over email.

“It is never the City’s desire to displace tenants without ample warning, particularly during cold weather,” Byrne writes. “We absolutely sympathize with the artists who work there, and we immediately began working on some remedies that we hope will help.”

On Monday, Fire Department officials issued a “temporary evacuation” of the building at 439 E. Preston St. after artists called about a busted pipe. Officials cited the lack of water in the sprinkler system, missing information about the date it was last serviced, standing water in the building with electrical cords running through it, and “large metal grates not attached properly to the ceiling and bowing walls.”

The problems identified, Byrne says, were deemed an “imminent threat to life and safety.”

After observing “severe stress cracks in the front exterior wall,” a building inspector posted an “emergency condemnation and demolition notice,” and the building’s artists were sent scrambling for their cars and given until 5 p.m. to get out. Amy Bonitz, president of Baltimore Arts Realty Corporation (BARCO) and chair of the codes and regulations work group of the Mayor’s Safe Arts Space Task Force, lobbied the DHCD to give the artists more time to retrieve their belongings. The DHCD granted the artists a two-day window at a time to be scheduled later.

“I’m hearing a million different stories from all of the artists who are on site about all the different things that they think are happening,” says artist Marian Glebes, who was on hand Monday, helping artists pack up and move their belongings. “A lot of the conversation was people not knowing where they could go, or when they could get a studio again.”

Since November, Glebes has worked with Bonitz as the art space technical assistance program coordinator for BARCO. Her job is a manifestation of the goal of the task force, which was to act as a liaison between the city and artists working in vulnerable spaces—and to avoid kicking artists out of their spaces when the code issues are non-life-threatening.

On Monday, artists at the Post Office Garage were confused about when they’d be able to return—if ever. As the Beat observed, the situation was not unlike the shuttering of the Bell Foundry: a building deemed unsafe and the artists that used it quickly kicked out with little information provided in the middle of winter.

“This action taken by Fire is a temporary evacuation to protect the public until we can make sure the building is safe to occupy, not an eviction,” Byrne wrote. “This kind of action is standard procedure when buildings are deemed to be in this type of condition. In other words, our choices were to get people out as quickly as possible to keep them safe, or give them more time to evacuate and risk lives.”

Glebes says that some of the harm in a crisis does comes down to “good intentions but miscommunicated impact,” adding, “there needs to be a clear answer . . . a lot of the story, when you’re experiencing a traumatic event, [is] not clear.”

An evacuation can seem like an eviction.

“One of the things that folds into that is the kind of constant disconnect or mistrust between an arts constituency and a non-arts constituency, and the different languages that can come into play there,” Glebes says, adding, “we need some sort of formal liason on the artists’ side.”

For now, Baltimore’s artists have stepped up to help out.

“There’s been an outpouring of individuals volunteering space for the artists,” Glebes says.

The post Artists given two more days to get belongings from condemned Post Office Garage studios, Housing says building had to be evacuated appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Artists with studios in the Post Office Garage building at 439 E. Preston St. were evicted by the city today after a pipe burst inside the building last night.

The artists at the Post Office were told this morning that they had until just 5 p.m. today to remove their possessions, and a notice was plastered on the wall stated that the building was to be condemned.

As it began to hail this afternoon, artist James Bouché scrambled to carry his canvases along the sidewalks, which had completely iced over from the spill, into a car.

The pipe began pouring water onto the floor that then flowed out the door and down the sidewalk, says Joe Clancy, who has maintained a woodworking studio in the building for 8 years. There was no way to shut off the water.

Clancy says it’s been incredibly hectic trying to move everything out in such a short time.

“They gave us five hours. Like, ‘here’s five hours, move all of your creative endeavors,’” he says. “I have 22,000 pounds of equipment in the shop. And I have stuff that won’t fit out the door.”

Inside, the water on the floor had frozen, leaving swaths of ice around the space.

Multimedia artist Paul Taylor left the building last November after working there for five years, but was there today. He says that after the owner of the building, Mike Stallings, died, the building  hasn’t been as closely tended.

“If today had happened while he was around, he would’ve been here,” says Clancy. “He was the kind of guy who, you knew he was gonna help you out, and you knew he wanted people in the building like this. . . . He was working towards fixing the problems in the building, no question about it.”

Clancy knew about issues with the building, and had it checked out independently, and brought the issues to the attention of the current landlord, Stallings’ wife, Jill Stallings.

After shutting off the water, the fire marshal issued citations to the building for not having an occupancy permit, as well as for a large crack in the front of the building. When the Beat called the fire department for more information, we were directed to call housing, who did not answer.

In 2016, the Baltimore Brew reported on the structural problems of the building and nearby 428. E. Preston St.—the building’s damage included exterior problems, floor sloping, and water flooding the basement—and suggested it may have to do with “sewer outfall, another utility pipe, unstable fill or a combination of issues.” The building was “deemed safe” by the Maryland Department of General Services, the Brew reported back then.

The Post Office Garage building is near the Station North area—the location of the Bell Foundry, whose artist-tenants were evicted in Dec. 2016 and the building condemned following the Oakland Ghost Ship fire. The Bell eviction led to a mayoral “Safe Arts Space” task force that affected many DIY spots in the area such as the Annex and the Copycat. While the task force resolved not to evict more spaces, safety issues with the Post Office Garage were determined to be dangerous enough to merit. Under an executive order signed by Pugh on April 4, city officials were directed to allow art spaces with code violations to stay open so long as the conditions “do not represent an imminent threat to life or safety.”

Still, there are echoes of the cruel, efficient eviction of the Bell Foundry: artists kicked out right away in winter and given just a few hours to remove all of their possessions including art, materials, and equipment.

Unlike the Bell Foundry and other arts spaces, the Post Office was only used as a working space and not a living space as well—there were occasionally open studio events there where visitors could view illustrations, paintings, sculpture, prints, woodwork, furniture, and more from the artists using the space.

As the five o’clock deadline rapidly approached, Clancy acknowledges there simply won’t be time to collect everything.

“[The tenants] are donating stuff to Open Works, they’re just getting stuff out any way they possibly can,” he says, adding he has “no idea” whether he will be allowed to come back for the rest of his stuff.

“I’ve never been able to get an answer from people about that,” he says.

On Tuesday, Jan. 9, Amy Bonitz, chair of the codes and regulations work group of the Safe Arts Space Task Force and and president of Barco said that the tenants would be given two days to retrieve their belongings.

Additional reporting by Brandon Soderberg.

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Almost exactly one year after the eviction of DIY space the Bell Foundry, Mayor Catherine Pugh stood alongside the co-chairs of her Safe Art Space Task Force on Dec. 20, touted the “economic value” of artists, and praised the potential for vacant properties to be turned into venues, among other recommendations that are supposed to “create a citywide network of safe, cost-effective, contemporary, living, live/work, studio, and performance space for established and emerging artists,” according to the task force’s website.

Task force co-chairs Jon Laria, a real estate lawyer, and Franklin McNeil, a banker, were joined by a handful of task force members including Jeannie Howe, president of Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance (GBCA), and Amy Bonitz, president of Baltimore Arts Realty Corporation (BARCO), both of whom chaired task force working groups.

Pugh was particularly excited about the idea of repurposing abandoned school buildings into art spaces. She wanted to explore “some of the schools that we’re giving up,” she said, as a result of the vote last week to close five underperforming and low-enrollment Baltimore City schools and redistribute the students to other nearby schools.

The idea of repurposing abandoned schools was floated in the task force meetings earlier in the year and was met with skepticism from some.

“In theory that could be cool,” artist Vin Seadler, who maintained studio space at the Bell Foundry for two years, told me back in June. “But it’s just like why don’t we just make the schools fucking work, because the children are our future and that’s more important than my band being able to play somewhere or have a show.”

Laria talked about the progress the task force had made since it began meeting in January, shortly after the abrupt eviction of residents of the Bell Foundry, which was followed by a flurry of inspections of other DIY venues around the city and nationwide. At the time, the task force was criticized for not including anybody from the Bell Foundry, and nobody from the Bell was present on the stage on Wednesday, and Pugh, Laria, and McNeil made no direct reference to the space, which is now for sale for a million dollars.

“[The task force] has responded to owners of art spaces both who came forward voluntarily, as well as in response to reports,” Laria said.

One of the art spaces that came forward “in response to reports” is the Compound, a DIY live/work space that the task force has worked with since a city inspection found code compliance issues early this year. Much of that work—providing technical and legal assistance to art spaces like the Compound about things like zoning requirements and building codes—has been done by BARCO, and specifically Bonitz, who has acted on behalf of the task force as a sort of liaison between art spaces and the city.

The press conference was initially scheduled to take place at the Compound and was later moved to City Hall, and only two of the Compound’s residents were present at Wednesday’s press conference. Despite winning a $200,000 state grant that was unrelated to the task force, the Compound’s fate remains unclear as it continues to face serious fundraising challenges in order to get the space up to code. CORE, a separate state grant the Compound applied for but did not receive, averaged $600,000 based on figures for 2018 awardees.

“Technical assistance to artists and art spaces is probably the thing that came out most in the process,” Laria said. He also stressed that funding would be necessary for “gap financing,” meaning existing spaces like the Compound that must make structural improvements in order to continue living at their spaces.

When the Beat asked if the report recommended that the city commit public funds to art spaces that want to get up to code, Pugh redirected to private funding, one of her frequent talking points. She mentioned the $5 million donation given by Bloomberg Philanthropies earlier this month for crime fighting technology as an example.

“The city can’t solve all the problems financially,” she said. “But we certainly have the capacity and ability to reach out, and we will continue to do that, and we’ll look to see what we have in public funding as well.”

No specific funding sources have been identified for any of the recommended programs.

While the recommendations implicate DIY spaces and the things they need to escape the fear of closure, they don’t move the needle on any of the intractable language barriers between the DIY art community and city government. What was lost amid the rhetoric at the press conference and in the task force’s recommendations—a focus on assisting the already existing work of local artists, whose living and studio spaces are in very real and vulnerable situations.

Many of the recommendations presented at the press conference were similar to a list provided to me by the mayor’s office in October. These included the recommendation to “fund or seek third party funding” for a technical assistance program that would help art spaces “navigate what is a complex regulatory process,” plus offer design resources and advice for grant or loan applications, Laria said.

Another previously released clause recommended the creation of an inter-agency art space resource team (ARTeam) that would “inventory current issues and art spaces now in need of assistance,” according to an email from the mayor’s office.

Laria also said the task force had also “identified several” code and regulatory changes “that will facilitate the creation of mixed-use art spaces,” meaning live/work spaces.

The task force also recommended explorating the creation of new arts districts, such as one in the historic African-American cultural district along Pennsylvania Avenue in Penn-North.

Other recommendations included developing a “business plan” to make city-owned property, especially “vacant and underutilized spaces,” available for development into art spaces, as well as to “promote and link artists to already existing resources and databases,” including the GBCA’s SpaceFinder and Art in Sacred Places.

After speeches from the co-chairs, Pugh thanked the task force, then gently chastised them for delays.

“I was wondering when y’all was gonna get it together,” she joked to Laria in a loud-enough quasi-whisper.

The recommendations, however, have been largely in place for months already according to task force members and chairs.

“We’ve all sent our recommendations in for the draft,” Howe, chair of the Artists’ Needs work group, told me in June. In early September, Bonitz told me that the recommendations had been “fully vetted by city agencies and presented to the mayor,” and task force members confirmed that they had sent their final comments in around that time as well. In late September, Pugh’s spokesperson Anthony McCarthy wrote that the mayor was “looking forward to receiving a report,” and when pressed for clarification wrote that, “the report is in its final stages of production.”

When I spoke to Laria and McNeil a few weeks ago, they said that the delays were due to back and forth with the mayor’s office, and not an indication of neglect by the mayor’s staff.

“We want more emerging artists in Baltimore,” Pugh said. “We want the art community to feel more than welcome to be a part of our city, and I’m really excited about just my preliminary look at the report.”

At the presser, Pugh also noted that she had not yet read the Safe Art Space Task Force’s report.

The post Pugh and Safe Art Space Task Force crew tout recommendations, sans artists appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The first act of Anne Washburn’s “Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play” sounds a lot like conversations I had in high school in my friend Dan’s backyard over a few joints, half a dozen or so of us with nowhere to go because it’s the suburbs, inevitably rehashing our favorite moments from TV shows with varying degrees of theatrical panache.

At the core of human mythmaking, argues “Mr. Burns”—a self-consciously post-modern grab bag of a play currently being staged by Cohesion Theatre Company under the direction of Lance Bankerd—is collective nostalgia for popular culture. When we meet our survivors of some vague apocalyptic disaster (played by Jonathan Jacobs, Meghan Stanton, Hannah Fogler, Christine Wells, and Matthew Casella) we’re to assume that they’ve moved passed shock, trauma, horror, depravity, or any other plausible emotional response to the widespread destruction of planet Earth. We skip right to the part where they sit around a campfire with some beers going “oh and doesn’t he, doesn’t Sideshow Bob have ‘die Bart die’ tattooed on his chest?” (“Cape Feare” is the episode they’re describing). Occasionally a stray noise in the forest snaps them back into survivor mode, and they each tense up and grab their weapons.

The understated, downright banal writing and performances in this act are a reminder that life or death situations still unfold in real time—unlike on television or often, on the stage—with plenty of waiting, watching, and milling about.

At one point, the collaborative re-telling of an episode where Springfield Nuclear Power Plant goes haywire blurs hazily into a description of the actual apocalypse event itself, merging Simpsons with real life and juxtaposing the two styles of conversation: “What was it that Mr. Burns said to Smithers?” quickly becomes “Didn’t the power lines go down before the fire?”

I think then about the way “The Simpsons” (the actual show) deftly caricatures the borderline apocalyptic potential lurking under the surface of everyday American life, even in boom times. A perfect satire of the Reagan administration, the old “Simpsons” episodes manage to take on new life under Trump, when it feels like everything is perpetually on the edge of total destruction; Homer is every Trump appointee, sitting with his finger on the nuclear button and accountable only to an even more maliciously uninformed force (one imagines the president telling Jared to “release the hounds”).

In act two of “Mr. Burns,” seven years later, the same people have managed to survive and an informal society has rebuilt itself on the ruins of America. More importantly, though, our heroes have gathered their meager resources to stage a touring theatrical production of Simpsons episodes. The scripts are cobbled together around lines that the group buys from people who solicit them with pitches in a competitive marketplace with other theatre troupes. From what was once informal fandom, now a whole “Simpsons” economy has arisen.

Why their main concern is the quality of the show when lawless roving militias are robbing people at gunpoint and basic goods are in scarce supply (a long and granular back-and-forth about the nationwide supply of Diet Coke feels like off-brand Tarantino dialogue) is unclear. Digressions abound, and the rehearsal that takes up all of act two soon descends into a referential flurry of brand names, hot takes on wine, and other random factoids of life.

I want to read all this as a dig at the hyper-fetishization of pop culture, but “Mr. Burns” doesn’t quite achieve the critical distance or humor to feel like sly satire. Washburn’s commentary is just a bit obvious.

It’s now 75 years later and the “Cape Feare” episode has become the basis for a religious cult ritual—replete with robes, masks, beating drums, chanting, singing, and reverent lines like “if only we could return to Springfield, night glittered as bright as day” and “Cowabunga!” Amidst a manic and dissonant arrangement of the “Itchy and Scratchy” theme song, a masked Mr. Burns, aboard a yacht and festooned in a tattered green goblin suit, sings “we’ve got to rouse love, wake love up!” and any concern I had about not ‘getting it’ yielded to the frustrating fear that there was nothing to ‘get.’ Each character says their most recognizable thing in a stream of consciousness procession. “I’m Troy McClure, you may know me from . . .” and other stray catch phrases trail off into slam poetry-inflected references both biblical and pop-cultural, but all low-hanging (“Jacob!”, “Lot’s Wife!”, “The Kardashians!”)

Cohesion does everything humanly possible to enliven Washburn’s text, and the elaborate, hyper-saturated choreography that features everything from devotional dances to light saber battles is a real accomplishment. But “Mr. Burns” suffers from a script whose novel idea becomes absurd and incomprehensible—though that very well may be the point.

The post “The Simpsons” as Scripture in “Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play” appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

“Slap me if it’s painful,” the nurse says, and this gets a laugh. She knows how to keep a casual but not glib demeanor in situations like this, because mostly the women that sit across from her are overwhelmed, and very often they’re scared too.

Across from her is a 19-year-old woman, and this is her second pregnancy. She is skittish at the recommendation—which is to get an IUD to prevent further pregnancies—and looks down at her feet, around the room, rubs her wrist. Her mom told her not to get one, she says

“Your mother is not gonna give birth for you,” the nurse retorts.

She’s charmingly pushy—and that’s a pretty good barometer of the vibe at the Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital in Manila, documented extensively in Baltimore filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz’s film “Motherland,” which returns to the Parkway next week after it screened at the Maryland Film Festival back in May, and at taste-making festivals like the Berlinale and Sundance.

“Motherland” patiently and earnestly follows a few days in the lives of women who give birth at one of the busiest maternity wards in the world, where the staff delivers about 60 babies a day.

Prior to an executive order last year by President Rodrigo Duterte mandating free contraceptive access, the Catholic Church and anti-abortion interests had been largely successful in restricting access to contraceptives and abortion procedures. According to a 2013 report by the Guttmacher Institute, more than half of all pregnancies in the Philippines are unplanned.

Women seek out Fabella because it’s cheap. The patients come from some of Manila’s most impoverished populations, where information about reproductive health, let alone preventative or prenatal care, is not widely available. Most of the women here already have multiple children whom they can barely afford to support.

The ward is basically one cavernous hall, with white concrete walls and aging equipment. Diaz’s camera tracks down an endless row of mothers and babies, two or three to a bed, attempting sleep amidst a symphony of squealing infants—it’s grandiose, in a way, spare yet crawling with the endless around-the-clock vitality of kicking and screaming human fucking life; this is actually the most glorious yet impersonal shot of the film, as it frames the women and children into grand cinematic spectacle.

Lerma, a regular (this is her sixth time here), is uniquely boisterous, almost glib when she talks about having babies and getting by in Manila. She lives in a squat and “sells cigarettes and eggs by the station,” she declares to the others.

“The children come one after another,” Lerma says. “I don’t have enough love to give all of them. I should have more love to give. But they came one after another. I can’t give enough love.”

Lerma’s confidence is clearly soothing to the others, and slowly, they start to feel comfortable opening up—about their families, their husbands, what they don’t have, what it’s like to give birth. They share food and make jokes, sometimes sardonic and dark ones about how crazy the shit they deal with is. .

Mostly we learn about the lives of these women though their paperwork as they are questioned by nurses filling out forms. The film is contained completely within the hospital grounds, and omits any omniscient narration or text explainers. Rather, Diaz uses camerawork and editing alone to guide to story, allowing the experience of the place to speak for itself.

A pan around the waiting room reveals the check-in desk, where a woman with a microphone announces when mothers may meet their husbands in the lobby (visitors are not allowed into the ward, “to avoid infection,” and the fathers wait in a single file line that stretches outside and down the block) or when they get to go home. When to leave can get dicey, and a plotline about one mother’s headstrong will to leave early despite her baby’s illness (she has three other infants at home, she argues, and thus needs to “go to HAMA,” or home against medical advice) loops in her feckless husband. The two have a marital confrontation in the lobby of the hospital, and she calls him an idiot, and this is all ignored amid the everyday commotion of the hospital.

Diaz is incredibly attentive, and her camera lets life play out as it is without poking or prodding. It’s clear that these scenes were accomplished by sitting in one place for hours on end, just waiting for life to happen. This patient method allows the film to focus on the remarkable strength of the mothers, rather than dwell on their circumstances.

The hospital, and maybe birth itself, becomes somehow both a vortex of the anxieties that drag on poor women in developing countries and an extraordinary haven. It’s an all-woman space where men are, at least for a little bit, not in control. It’s a space where women are in charge of their own decisions, where they nurture and comfort each other.

The woman working the front desk—who frequently takes the microphone to deliver pep talks, gentle scolds about cleanliness, and stand-up jokes—observes that there is so much socializing between the mothers that they’re sticking around even longer than they need to.

“Some of you are here even after you’ve been discharged,” she says. “You are vacationing here. Go home. Go on a real vacation. This is not a hotel.”

This gets a laugh from the patients. And again, briefly, life isn’t so scary.

“Motherland” opens at the SNF Parkway Theater on Dec. 1. There will be a Q&A with director Ramona Diaz on Dec. 2 following the 7:15 p.m. screening.

The post “Motherland” finds sisterhood in an overcrowded Manila maternity ward appeared first on Baltimore Beat.