John Waters' Hairspray featured in Oct. 11 Charm City Cinema screening

This year's Humanities Symposium, "Urban Spaces, Urban Voices," in conjunction with The Year of the City, is presenting the Charm City Cinema, a series of Baltimore-based films. The series continues on Oct. 11 at 9 p.m. with Hairspray, a 1988 film directed by John Waters. Waters made his bid for PG respectability with this enjoyably trashy comedy about the racial integration of a teen dance show on Baltimore television in the early '60s. Waters, as always, makes a virtue of junk culture and the powerful emotional forces it can represent as kids vie to get on the show. Meanwhile, a parade of former stars (Pia Zadora, Debbie Harry, Sonny Bono) and pseudostars (Divine, Ricki Lake) cross the screen, playing freakish characters absorbed by thoughts of fame. Waters himself turns up as a weirdo psychiatrist. The screening takes place in the 3rd Floor Reading Room.

The Humanities Symposium, an annual program designed to draw students and professors of many disciplines together in examining a single text, will this year consider Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This 1961 work discusses how cities function, what makes them safe and why so many attempts at saving them have failed. The book is considered by many to have transformed the fields of urban planning and city architecture.