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Two barricades surround the remaining base of a statue commemorating the number of retired Orioles great Cal Ripken Jr. The No. 8 statue was stolen overnight from in front of the Camden Yards baseball stadium, and Baltimore police said they have arrested four men who were spotted driving with the statue in the open bed of a pickup truck on a downtown street. (Baltimore Sun photo by Amy Davis / September 9, 2009) |
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At first, it seemed unlikely to provide much inspiration - a drunken prank in a city where there's usually much better fodder for the man I've come to think of as the Bard of Baltimore Badness.
But I was wrong. Even so amateur a crime as the heist of the Cal Ripken Jr. No. 8 statue at Camden Yards - conducted right under a security camera by hapless perps who would be caught almost immediately - managed to serve as muse for the master. Soon, we had an addition to his ever-growing canon, the always expanding compendium of his art.
Call it the ineffable poetry of Frederick H. Bealefeld III.
We may know him today as Baltimore's police commissioner, the white-haired, dark eye-browed, Bawlmer-accented cop's cop. But surely future scholars will come to appreciate his unrecognized literary genius, the found art of his pronouncements, the lyricism of his inadvertent verses.
Called on almost daily to comment on whatever mayhem is playing out on Baltimore streets, his interviews avoid the usual bureaucratese of city officials and, with his impassioned, staccato delivery, enter the realm of the spoken word performance.
Sometimes I think he should travel with a back-up band, musicians to play a cool-cat, jazzy tune, while the commish, preferably wearing a porkpie hat and a pair of shades and snapping his fingers, riffs on the day's miscreants.
Who better, after all, to write and perform beat poetry than a former beat cop? Take what he said Wednesday on WBAL-TV about the No. 8 rip-off:
At the end of the day
It's a bunch of drunks
You know?
It's dummies
Coming into downtown
Coming around the stadium
To do something dumb
Don't come to Baltimore
To act like a moron...
I think that's like
An affront to all of us
Right?
Sometimes, though, Bealefeld's words call for more of a rap beat as an accompaniment, to go along with the trash-talking that he indulges in when he's dissing Baltimore's criminals. Or, as he's more likely to call them: morons, maniacs, jerks, skunks, cretins, idiots, cowards, fools, knuckleheads or, simply, bad guys.
But I was wrong. Even so amateur a crime as the heist of the Cal Ripken Jr. No. 8 statue at Camden Yards - conducted right under a security camera by hapless perps who would be caught almost immediately - managed to serve as muse for the master. Soon, we had an addition to his ever-growing canon, the always expanding compendium of his art.
Call it the ineffable poetry of Frederick H. Bealefeld III.
We may know him today as Baltimore's police commissioner, the white-haired, dark eye-browed, Bawlmer-accented cop's cop. But surely future scholars will come to appreciate his unrecognized literary genius, the found art of his pronouncements, the lyricism of his inadvertent verses.
Called on almost daily to comment on whatever mayhem is playing out on Baltimore streets, his interviews avoid the usual bureaucratese of city officials and, with his impassioned, staccato delivery, enter the realm of the spoken word performance.
Sometimes I think he should travel with a back-up band, musicians to play a cool-cat, jazzy tune, while the commish, preferably wearing a porkpie hat and a pair of shades and snapping his fingers, riffs on the day's miscreants.
Who better, after all, to write and perform beat poetry than a former beat cop? Take what he said Wednesday on WBAL-TV about the No. 8 rip-off:
At the end of the day
It's a bunch of drunks
You know?
It's dummies
Coming into downtown
Coming around the stadium
To do something dumb
Don't come to Baltimore
To act like a moron...
I think that's like
An affront to all of us
Right?
Sometimes, though, Bealefeld's words call for more of a rap beat as an accompaniment, to go along with the trash-talking that he indulges in when he's dissing Baltimore's criminals. Or, as he's more likely to call them: morons, maniacs, jerks, skunks, cretins, idiots, cowards, fools, knuckleheads or, simply, bad guys.
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He is no Hyman Pressman.
Earlyriser (09/13/2009, 11:11 AM )