Picture this: It’s a cool, crisp night and you’re cruising north up Interstate 95, with the city of Baltimore rising up before you. The image of a metropolis can rise and fall with its skyline and its immense iconic representation of the city’s civic aspirations.

Much of Baltimore’s story is written in its skyline. There’s the urban renewal that spawned the National Aquarium and the twin stadiums of South Baltimore, for instance. The city’s history is also etched there in places such as the famous and distinctive Emerson Bromo-Seltzer Tower, which was built in 1911 at the corner of Eutaw and Lombard Streets.

Kelley Bell ’06, M.F.A., a graphic designer and professor at UMBC, was recently given an opportunity to transform the city’s skyline by creating art within the tower’s distinctive clock faces. Her exhibit is based on the renowned astronomical clock in Prague, and features the sun, the moon, and planets and stars circling in orbit around the tower. Bell even did careful calculations to ensure that her representations of heavenly bodies synched up with their celestial counterparts.

Bell moved to Baltimore in 2002, and quickly fell in love with the local art scene. “People are willing to share ideas and collaborate, and that’s an integral part of the work I do,” she explains.

Read the full story in the Winter 2012 issue of UMBC Magazine.

Brian Lamb, our man in Washington

The civic-minded and intellectually curious among us catch some of our biggest waves while channel surfing on C-Span.

The nonprofit cable network provides us with great roaring riptides of polite Q&A sessions and dramatic wipeouts of the congressional legislative process.

On Sunday it was announced that C-Span founder Brian Lamb would be stepping down as chief executive of the network he founded in 1979.

Besides their meticulous documentation of Washington goings-on, C-Span has trained its eye on writers, critics, and public intellectuals with programs like the interview show Booknotes, Lamb’s pet project that he will continue to host in his reduced capacity.

The idea of making the most basic workings of government visible and audible to everyone seems like such an obviously good thing — something really necessary for a free democracy. It’s actually extraordinary it took until 1979 for something like C-Span to exist.

You learn to appreciate Brian Lamb not because he’s unafraid to “tell it like it is” but because he’s completely comfortable showing it like it is and keeping his mouth shut. As an interviewer, Lamb demands your respect for what he doesn’t say: the joke left unmade, the rear orifice left unripped, the guest’s revealing comment left hanging in the air without mercy.

Brian Lamb is one of the few thoroughly good guys in the media. While his belief in journalistic professionalism and objectivity seem cute by today’s standards of fair and balanced shouting matches (in which everyone involved is equally, objectively moronic), you have to respect a prominent television personality who basically denies his own personality.

The guy has never even said his name on the air, for crissakes. Never could there have been a “Brian Lamb Factor” or a “Countdown with Brian Lamb.” Whether he would acknowledge it at this point or not, the entire federal government is “The Brian Lamb Show” — he just turns the cameras on.

The American people pay for all this that goes on in this town. It’s always been my contention — and it’s not a sophisticated, intelligent position, it’s just a gut reaction — that if we pay for something and it’s the public’s business we ought to be able to see how it’s done. It’s just that simple.

Fans of public radio will no doubt have heard by now the thunderclap of self-administered face-palmings going on at the studios of the popular documentary radio show “This American Life” at WBEZ in Chicago.

The facts: In January of this year, an episode of “This American Life” featured segments of a performance by a chap named Mike Daisy of his one-man show, called “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” about his visits to factories in China where Apple products are manufactured by headless orphans paid in Monopoly money, etc. (Daisey didn’t actually claim that last part, but you know how those factories are. Or not, actually. But keep reading.)

Listeners flipped. The episode became the most downloaded in the history of the show, which has had a standing reservation at the top of iTunes podcasts for forever. But a fellow public radio correspondent in China who began to investigate the story’s accuracy didn’t have to look very far; he practically tripped over evidence that contradicted Daisey’s story, and soon enough the crew at “This American Life” found themselves with part of an apple and half a worm.

Some of the show’s most dramatic moments were outright lies. Like this account from Daisy about when he showed a functioning iPad to an assembly line worker who had (allegedly) lost his hand in an accident at the factory:

He’s never actually seen [an iPad] on, this thing that took his hand. I turn it on, unlock the screen, and pass it to him. He takes it. The icons flare into view, and he strokes the screen with his ruined hand, and the icons slide back and forth. And he says something to (the interpreter)… “he says it’s a kind of magic.”

Daisy defended these fabrications saying he does theater not journalism:

I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity . . . . What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism.

The folks at This American Life responded with vigor.

They did exactly what you would expect people in public radio to do: They got a little mad, drank a little Raspberry Zinger to mellow out (maybe), then they made a radio program rebuttal. That episode, it will be heard, turned out to be not just credibility-saving but credibility-enhancing.

“I think you can trust my word in the context of the theater,” Daisey told Ira Glass in a post-blow-up interview featured in the new episode. In Daisey’s world, the accounts of visiting the factories weren’t true true. Not true like fact-true. Is that good enough? Not for National Public Radio, dammit.

“This American Life” fell for the oldest trick in the book (the book called How to Tell Unbelievable Stories).