Cylburn Park is a text movie in two acts inspired by and edited from a Baltimore neighborhood’s Google Group daily feed and the media’s coverage of it (below). The texts scroll by at a quick pace as if on a teleprompter screen and include lively exchanges over ducks and racial profiling, offering different perspectives from “bitchy” indeed to high-minded and deeply moving. Cylburn Park is relevant today in Baltimore and beyond as communities struggle to keep it together.
BEST SOMETIMES-RACIST GOOGLE GROUP
“For cringe-worthy entertainment, nothing beats reading the daily feed from the Mount Washington Google Group, the provenance for overly educated people with too much time on their hands and axes to grind. Aside from the mundane stuff—free kids’ toys and recommendations for dentists—the group’s archive of bitchy exchanges over whether to allow ducks to live in the community garden nearly brought some residents to blows. The Group’s Greek chorus really pulls out all the stops when teens from the Pimlico neighborhood are spotted in Mount Washington. Accusations of racial profiling are never funny, but you’ve gotta roll your eyes when Mount Washingtonians call each other ‘moron’ and ‘ass’ as they try to sidestep their own prejudices.”
City Paper’s “Best of Baltimore 2013”