Baltimore has its head screwed on right. There is no better evidence of this than the naming of their home team and many roads after native son E.A. Poe's "The Raven," and most recently the pride in acknowledging its own Frank Zappa as deserving of his bronzed head on a column outside a library in east Bmore.
From the LA Times:
“The spirit of Frank Zappa is alive and well in Baltimore,” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.
“He’d be wildly amused by this, because of the absurdity of these guys in Lithuania coming up with this phenomenal sculptor who normally does busts of Stalin,” Gail Zappa said.
"Baltimore is the kind of the city that resonates with Zappa's work," he added, citing another iconoclastic Baltimorean, journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken. The ceremony came 25 years after Zappa appeared at a Senate hearing to rail against censorship of rock lyrics and calls for an album rating system.
Then today at the Baltimore Book Festival, I happened to root through the precise bin containing a book called Viva! Zappa by Dominique Chevalier, a collection of photos and details of his work. Maybe I have an even better idea for a Halloween costume...
And speaking of genius rock stars, David Byrne did something a few years after I was born that I wish had been a part of my life forever. Take a look at this clip from his musical featuring John Goodman, True Stories:
On the whole, I found it visually stunning and sensibly baffling. Which is to say it finds a good home in this little heart, being of the Sundae variety. The songs are kind of hit-or-miss, for instance when the witch doctor is performing the ritual to make John Goodman not humiliate himself onstage. But watching Byrne deliver his lines deadpan and detached is a treat not to be missed. You'll like the fashion show too, when the little girls are dressed like inanimate objects and there are whole families decked out in clothes made of fresh-cut lawn. A few spoonfuls of the absurd never hurt anyone, after all.
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