Entertainment : Buzz

Did you ever watch an episode of Ace of Cakes and think "hey, I could do that?"

Well it's now time to put your hubris to the test. 

The so-called bad boy of baking Duff Goldman is opening Cakemix in Los Angeles. It's DIY for the bakers, the Los Angeles Times reports. 

"Cakemix is for anyone off the street who wants to go wild with a tube of buttercream. By decorating a cake, that is," the Times writes. 

You get to choose between a 6-inch or 9-inch cake and then get fondant, buttercream, edible spray paint and the help of an on-staff decorator. 

Cakemix is opening this month next to Charm City Cakes West, his L.A. outpost of the Remington bakery featured in the Food Network show.  

You can read the entire story here. 

Andrew Zimmern spent three days eating through Baltimore’s finest fare for his Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods America this week.  Baltimore will be a part of the show’s seventh season, which begins airing sometime this fall.
 
Zimmern’s Baltimore stops included Chap’s Pit Beef, Hollins Market, Lexington Market, the Arabbers' Carlton Street Stables, and Woodberry Kitchen. He also spent time on the Eastern Shore and in Baltimore County, where he tweeted that Ellicott City restaurant Shin Chon “is one of top ten Korean BBQ experiences in America. A must for anyone who loves food. Major discovery.”
 
Read more about Zimmern’s in the Baltimore Sun story.

Ten years after HBO first aired The Wire, Funnyordie.com brings us The Wire: The Musical. This musical parody turns the gritty show about inner-city Baltimore into a laugh-inducing musical.  

The voice over boasts, “Experience The Wire’s realistic portrayal of America’s decaying inner cities through the magic of song.”
 
The Wire: The Musical brings back many actors from the series including Michael Kenneth Williams, Sonja Sohn, Andre Royo, Larry Gillard Jr. and Felicia “Snoop” Pearson. The video has gone viral with more than 400,000 views.

Broadway World describes the latest Everyman Theatre play a "hit in every way."

The last play of the season, "You Can't Take It With You," is a Pulitzer-Prize winning play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. It tells the story of a "bohemian household where fireworks are made in the basement, one daughter (Essie) dances in her tutu all over the house taught by her Russian ballet teacher Kohlenkov (the magnificent Nelson)," Broadway World writes.

The play runs through June 17 and is the last show Vincent Lancisi is directing at the theaters spot in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. It moves to downtown Baltimore's west side spring of 2013.

Broadway World praises the detailed period set and the all-star cast. You can read the entire review here. 

Open Walls, the innovative mural art project in Station North, is getting more love. 

This time it's from the Huffington Post, which recently featured several photos of the murals and interviews with organizers, including street artist Gaia.

"From March to May the neighborhoods of Station North and Greenmount West have played host to internationally known Street Art names of the moment like Vhils, Sten and Lex, Swoon, Jaz, MOMO, and Interesni Kazki getting up on walls alongside a list of local and regional talents," the Huffington Post writes. 

The director of Hairspray and Pink Flamingos apparently enjoys hitchhiking and is now making his way across the country, according to Baltimore Fishbowl. 

John Waters "has hitched halfway across the country over the past week — yes, he started out in Baltimore — and, last we heard, is currently somewhere in Colorado," Fishbowl writes.

The movie director camped out in an indie rock band's van in Ohio, according to DCist. The blog cites live Tweets from band members of Here We Go Magic. 

Then a middle-aged couple drove him through Kansas. 

"We suspect that Waters’s Kansas hosts may have been less hip to his work than the indie band was, but they still knew they had a national treasure in the car," Fishbowl writes.

You can read the rest of the story here. 

Baltimore independent filmmaker Matt Porterfield has had another honor bestowed upon him. 

The Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University has selected the Putty Hill director for its 2012-2013 Artist Residency Awards.

"The Artist Residency Award program offers significant resources for innovators across all creative disciplines, selected each year by the center’s curators and director," Broadway World writes. "These unique residencies include considerable financial resources, along with the technical, intellectual, and staff support, along with (mental and physical) space in which to develop new work and engage with Ohio State classes and the Columbus community."

Porterfield and the three other selected artists/organizations will receive $200,000.

He plans to use the resources to work on another film, Broadway World writes. 

Porterfield has also won the Sonheim Prize and was included in the Whitney Biennial. 

 A number of cities, including Baltimore, are planning events commemorating the 200-year anniversary of the War of 1812.

The celebrations are featured in an AP story that the Wall Street Journal ran this month.

"The War of 1812 inspired Francis Scott Key to write The Star-Spangled Banner after soldiers at Fort McHenry in Baltimore raised an American flag to mark a victory over the British on Sept. 14, 1814," the Journal writes.

It goes on to note that the original manuscript for the song will be part of a War of 1812 exhibit at the Maryland Historical Society. You can read the rest of the story here.

Meanwhile, the New York Times wrote its own piece on the festivities.

"In Baltimore, as part of a festival from June 13 through June 19 known as the Star-Spangled Sailabration, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will debut a new composition inspired by the conflict," the Times writes. "And 20 tall ships and schooners, many modeled on period vessels, will drop anchor in the harbor for tours."

You can read the rest of the story here.

Baltimore is catching onto the fact that the Station North Arts and Entertainment District is enjoying a renaissance of sorts. We at Bmore Media documented a number of favorable developments in this article by Cassie Paton.

Now the Washington Post has even caught onto the charms of the neighborhood that features the Charles Theatre and the Windup Space. The paper even went as far as dubbing Station North an "it" neighborhood.

It cites Open Walls Baltimore, a mural project led by artist Gaia, as the element that is making the neighborhood a real scene for emerging artists and hipsters.

"Charm City is an especially fertile ground for street art, considering its multitude of abandoned buildings, its quirky character, and its generally permissive attitude toward street art, which some cities treat as destruction of property," the Post writes.

You can read the story and the accompanying slideshow here.

Sean Lennon, the son of late music legend John Legend, recently paid a visit to a Hampden store Charlotte Elliott. 

Lennon was accompanied by his model/actress/musician girlfriend Charlotte Kemp Muhl, writes Baltimore Fishbowl.

"The pair showed interest in an antique rug, on which [Owner Charlotte] Hays Murray’s father Fred Hays, her co-owner, offered the young man a great deal," Fishbowl writes. "His girlfriend picked up a cookbook penned by Vincent Price."

You can read the rest of the story here. 

Charm City residents know that Baltimore gets a bad rap on the small and silver screens. 

But someone who writes for a national newspaper and doesn't ?live in Baltimore has come to the city's defense. 

Joe Queenan cites numerous examples of Baltimore's harsh treatment, starting with the most recent, The Raven. Starring John Cusack Edgar Allen Poe, the movie depicts innocent Baltimoreans getting murdered in the most gruesome manner. 

"Can the entertainment industry please stop picking on Baltimore?" Joe Queenan writes. 

Shows like the Wire and Homicide didn't do the city any favors either. In fact, the only time the city ever gets a break is when John Waters shows off the city's quirky characters, Queenan writes. 

The writer takes a yearly day trip Baltimore to visit the National Aquarium in Baltimore, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the National Museum of Dentistry (hey, wait, we've never even been there) and other sites. You can read Queenan's entire ode to Baltimore here. 

The Boys of Baraka, a movie about inner-city kids in Baltimore sent to a boarding school in Kenya, played at the Maryland Film Festival seven years ago.

It once again is in the spotlight, however, as the filmmakers are featured in a New York Times story on the creative tension between documentary film partners.

""Disagreements are an inherent, and productive, part of their working relationship," Grady tells the Times. “You’ve got creativity, money and ego involved.”

The two will feature their work again at the Maryland Film Festival this year with their movie Detropia. 

Is John Cusack really the best person to play Edgar Allen Poe in The Raven? 

We have no idea. Go read Entertainment Weekly. 

But we do know that the macabre Hollywood flick is set in 19th century Baltimore and it says so in all the movie reviews you read about the movie. 

Nice PR for Baltimore from a dead author!

The movie opened nationwide last weekend and is now No. 7 at the box office, according to the Internet Movie Database. It pulled in $7.25 million. 

Maryland's largest slots casino, developed by the Cordish Co., has set a June 6 opening date. Restaurants at the 4,750-slot-machine venue will include Bobby Flay's Burger Palace, the Prime Rib and Philips Seafood.

"State analysts project that Maryland Live!, once it is fully operational, will generate more than $400 million a year in slots revenue — nearly half of which would flow to state education programs under current law," writes the Washington Post. You can read the rest of the story here. 

"Veep," the HBO comedy starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus that was filmed in Baltimore, had a red-carpet premiere earlier this month, writes the Huffington Post.

The show, which airs April 22, is about a female vice president. Maryland film officials credit the state's expanded tax credits for convincing producers to let Baltimore be a stand in for the nation's capital.

But I guess, when it comes to the red carpet premiere, they had to choose the real deal, eh? You can read the story and some pics from the event here.