Why Baltimore Persists as a Cultural Beacon
'The city (population 600,000) has produced an eclectic variety of artists, including John Waters, Joyce J. Scott, David Simon and Abdu Ali.
“HEY, WHERE THE [EXPLETIVE] are we anyway today?” asks one of the troupe members of Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions in the opening moments of John Waters’s raucously disgusting 1970 film “Multiple Maniacs.” The answer was the front lawn of Waters’s parents’ house in the Baltimore suburb of Lutherville, Md. Much of the film, like many in Waters’s oeuvre, spills out across the streets of Baltimore; the final sequence recalls the gleeful opening of “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964) turned on its head, with crowds of young people charging down city blocks in flight from the rampaging drag queen Divine. (Just before this, Divine is sexually assaulted by a giant lobster, one of the more disturbing non sequiturs in a film that consists of almost nothing but them.)
In the world that Waters established in “Maniacs,” and deepened, if that’s the word for it, in “Pink Flamingos” (1972), “Female Trouble” (1974) and many more, Baltimore is an unfathomably weird place: aggressively grotesque, sexually abject and cheerfully violent. It is a city where anything — see: lobster attack — can happen. One watches his proudly queer, exhibitionistic stock company the Dreamlanders in these early films (a contemporary review of “Maniacs” in the Baltimore Sun notes that the “heavily Baltimorese” accents are the funniest thing about the movie) and cannot help but wonder admiringly, and at times nervously, about the psychology of the city that produced it.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/t-magazine/baltimore-artists-art-culture.html?
