Last Thursday, Wham City kicked off its comedy tour at the Bell Foundry. It’s a two week affair, west to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, through Toronto, and back down the East Coast.
All this for a dozen or so performers, doing loosely constructed stand-up and sketches with the general purpose of making you laugh.
The Bell Foundry is another one of those very Baltimorean [non-]institutions — an old auto shop (like Remington’s Open Space) presumably emptied by whatever mysterious, invisible hand that left 80 percent of North Avenue vacant. They are why Baltimore has the upper hand on other comparably populated cities arts-wise, because artists can live and do art for dirt cheap, and mostly nobody’ll give them a hard time about it; I guess in a city with one of the highest murder rates per capita in the country (thankfully on the decline in recent years) the cops have bigger fish to fry (for the most part) than a couple hundred kids being noisy in a warehouse.
And though Baltimore has its broad pre-Wham City history in the arts and idiosyncrasy (such as John Waters, High Zero and Lungfish), Baltimore’s pre-eminent arts/music/whatever collective is in a lot of ways responsible for most of what a kid of a transient and heavily insular college population is going to glean in his first few years in this city.
Wham City is basically a group of artists (Dan Deacon, being the most famous, is the one you’ve probably heard of if you haven’t heard of Wham City) — doing video, comics, music, theater, etc. — that used to live in an undisclosed-to-me warehouse somewhere in Greenmount West, I think (this is stuff you should read up on if you want to know this city; the ethics of not getting acquainted with the people/place you live in is for another time, but you can probably guess my stance). Now they seem to inspire, if not directly influence, a good deal of the art that happens here in Baltimore.
It’s a delicate thing to give credit, but it’s probably fair to say that a big reason Baltimore got Rolling Stone’s “Best Music Scene” nod in 2008 has a lot to do with WC’s hyperactivity and unique vision of what a post-industrial city could be.
To be clear, I’m not trying to make any big important blanket statements here. Wham City is important to Baltimore, is all.
But “importance,” especially when you’re talking about artistic ventures can be a finicky thing. Yes, there’s been some prolific output by the group proper, but maybe more than that is how they’ve seeped into a part of the notion of what Baltimore aesthetically is. Or maybe Baltimore seeped into them. Probably both.
Maybe it’s not all that important who did what when. Who’s doing stuff now is what I’m trying to talk about. And what it means for myself (and us as Hopkins students, I guess).
So, back to the Wham City comedy show. You walk into the Bell Foundry, if you can figure out which door to knock on (yes, it’s locked) and give a man five bucks, walk down a hall of what looks like closed doors to studios or bedrooms (my guess would be both) and down a railing-less flight of steps into an authentically-defaced concrete basement filled with wooden risers set up with about a hundred chairs, and a makeshift stage at the front. There are a couple of stage lights and a beautiful fabric banner displaying, of course: “WHAM CITY.”
If you’re a Hopkins kid, you’d be lucky to recognize two or three others out of the hundred and fifty people (yeah, standing room only — the show sells out, but if you’re not a jerk, the door guy will probably let you in), but there are plenty of kids your age. They’re MICA, UMBC or maybe Goucher kids — probably not Loyola, from the looks of it.
It’s impossible not to crane your neck and look at who’s here, who’s not, what people are wearing, etc. and equally impossible not to feel superficial and self-conscious about all of that.
But it should be noted that this is not unique to Wham City or “hipster”-ish (the term would be accurate if it meant anything anymore) endeavors. It’s just part of being in a room full of strangers for the same reason: to send off the Wham City folks on their first comedy tour.
But it’s hard not to also see the tour as a delegation, like bees pollinating, or maybe more appropriately, like birds dropping seeds out their cloacae, spreading the joy that is the Wham City aesthetic — which is to say, quite roughly, some mush of gross-out scatology (there are at least two exposed buttholes before the night’s up), 80’s and 90’s revivalism and nostalgia (the tour is, loosely, an homage to Home Improvement), cartoonishness (listen to any Dan Deacon song, at least before Bromst), and that post-millenial blend of the ironic and the sincere.
As I stood there in the Bell Foundry basement, watching Ed Shraeder perform stand-up as David Bowie, or Dan Deacon and Connor Kizer do an apparently improvised slo-mo yin-yang dance (this is as good a description as any), it was hard not to see myself as a cultural tourist, just barely coming into my own as a Baltimorean and am a student (a Hopkins student, at that, with all the isolationist, willful unknowingness that title brings with it),
When people on the Wham City website chat box rail against “county kids” at Whartscape, what part of me can justify not feeling like a part of that outsider, voyeuristic subset?
Just like any “scene,” it seems like there are those who have done their time and those who haven’t, and being a member of the Hopkins population, I (we) necessarily haven’t. But then, Ponytail was just a bunch of MICA kids.
So, what’s taboo about being from Hopkins and going to a house show, or watching Egg Schrader (yeah, not Ed — this is Pete O’Connell, punk guitarist extraordinaire, dressed up like an egg, punning his heart out) perform? Why do we have to feel excluded when the whole thing is totally open to everybody, just “No Jerks”?
It seems different, more marked, than the normal feeling of exclusion, and maybe because it’s a pull rather than a push.
That is, for the most part, nobody gives Hopkins kids the stink eye at Floristree or the Annex, even if only for the very important fact that nothing outright marks us as Hopkins kids.
It’s just easier to stay in Charles Village and drink every weekend than it is to bike or catch the JHMI or a five dollar cab over to Guilford and E. Oliver and see if there’s anything going on.
The fact is that there is, in maybe a lame, overwrought way, room here for trailblazing, something kids as privileged as a good deal of us here at Hopkins don’t usually get to participate in.
But I guess it’s really less about being welcomed into a more communally engaged subset of Baltimore, and more about wanting to become a part of one.
