Cabildo Quarterly.
Issue number ten! Fall 2016. Pittsburgh PA; Cape Cod. They’ll crucify you, you’re not part of the establishment.
Dance to the Music an excerpt from Medication Time: An Epic Poem by Kat Georges The local college bar deejay plays the current hits including one dubbed in a review that went viral as “kinda rape-y.” Kinda rapey. The uncensored version of the video featured naked young women in heels dancing with men in suits. “Nightclub lotharios.” The song used a riff ripped off from another song popular in an age where no songs were dubbed “kinda rape-y.” A women at a college bar who had read the “kinda rape-y” review informed the deejay playing the song that hearing it made her “uncomfortable.” She suggested that he stop playing it immediately and instead play more pleasant songs, aligned with her identification of the bar as “a safe space.” Safe. A bar with 20 shelves of liquor filled with men and women eager to drink, get drunk, have sex, and sleep in late the next morning. In another era, the leader of a popular band was quoted as saying, “The purpose of a bar band is to make people relax on Friday nights, dance and drink, and feel so happy by the end of the night that they just want to go home and screw.” The purpose of a bar. A band. Music. Kinda rape-y. The deejay told the woman that he refused to stop playing the song. The woman complained to the bar owner. The dee jay was fired that night. Word got out online and soon the name of the woman did too. She was condemned. Vilified. Shamed and called filthy names for years. The deejay remains unidentified. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? We keep pointing fingers at each other these days while the real villains stare down at us from afar, chewing gum and handing out pills. Medication time. Time for a change. Medication time. Spit it out. Then run like hell. KAT GEORGES is the author of Our Lady of the Hunger and co-director of Three Rooms Press, a fiercely independent press inspired by dada, punk, and passion. She lives in Greenwich Village, NY.
Karl Berger, Ingrid Sertso, Ken Filiano an exceprt from The Other Night At Quinn’s by Mike Faloon
“Sarcasm is the week at work. Snarky shouldn’t even be a word.” —Minus 5, “Sweet”
*** I have a morning flight out of LaGuardia. It leaves too early to take a train to the airport and a taxi would cost too much. My friend Pedro has been working near LaGuardia for the past several weeks. He usually leaves for work long before sunrise. He offers me a ride and before I know it his headlights are gliding up the driveway at half past four. I offer him money for gas, but he declines. I’m extremely grateful and tell him numerous times. He politely changes topics. He’d rather talk about the Mets. *** Vocalist Ingrid Sertso gestures, places her fingers to her lips, like a chef who’s found the right blend. Karl Berger’s glasses rest on the tip of his nose as he moves to his left, dances behind his vibraphone. He finishes a run, then bounces, skips, back to his right just in time to reel off the next one. Sertso pauses, tunes into Berger’s vibes, and lets her fingers move across an imaginary keyboard. Between them sits bassist Ken Filiano, tethering the lighter-than-air sounds of his bandmates. *** I arrive at the airport to find that my flight’s been delayed, which puts my connecting flight in jeopardy, which makes me wonder if I’ll be able to contact the friends picking me up in L.A. I’m tired and hungry and growing impatient. I’m starting to feel the day slip away when I drop my water bottle and accidentally spray the woman standing behind me. I kneel down to clean up and notice that her bag is wet too. Before I can apologize she’s handing me a tissue. Then she takes out one for herself and asks if I got any on me. First Pedro, now the water bottle lady, at every turn the day is marked by uncommon generosity. Even the book I’m reading, Mike Sacks’ Poking a Dead Frog, fits the profile. Much of the book is devoted to young writers and performers. It could easily slide into a series of chats with the self satisfied, but his range of subjects and ever-present curiosity are too great. He interviews sitcom pioneer Peg Lynch, 96-years-old and still writing each day, about Ethel and Albert, the radio and TV show she created, wrote, and starred in back in the ‘40s. Later, when he references old television shows, he provides bits of context (“Taxi (1978-1983)”) rather than presume he’s preaching to the converted. *** Sertso sits on a stool. A black scarf rests around her neck, a half a dozen bracelets on each wrist, her purse hanging from a music stand. She often sings with her eyes closed, like the notes are there to be sensed, felt more than seen, found rather than created. She guides the lyrics, shepherds language into the world. Her lyrics are unflinchingly earnest but the rhythms consistently connect. “Time is in this Time is in Time is Time Is” She loops back to the first line and repeats the sequence: “Time is in this Time is in Time is Time Is” Seeing that pattern on the page reminds me of a computer class I took in high school, probably ’85 or ‘86. Dave Finney and I were trying to skate by. We typed up a list of our favorite groups, including his band: 10 Kinks 20 Yes 30 Minutemen 40 Moody Blues 50 Milk Cow Pumpkin 60 Traffic 70 Eric Clapton 80 Black Flag 90 Monkees 100 Go to 10 Run It seems that we spent all of our class time running that simple program, watching the names scroll over and back across the green-on-black screen, then adding more band names. This is the future, we thought dismissively, distracting and fun and useless. (If only we’d started developing apps.) *** After each song Sertso, Berger, and Filiano grin at each another. They reach out and clasp hands, call out each other’s names. My old punk bands used to exchange looks of pleasant surprise whenever we ended a song in unison. But this trio has been active for decades, landed thousands of songs, and yet each one still merits a momentary celebration. They are uncommonly generous and supportive. Tonight it’s not about bending time signatures or displays of virtuosity. It’s not about venturing into the unexpected. It’s about reframing the expected. *** During my layover in Dallas I step aside to charge my phone. Still no word from my friends in L.A., but fate insists on reiterating its “People are inherently good” theme for the day. As I’m checking the phone’s progress I hear a gentle voice over my shoulder. “Excuse me, am I in your way?” I turn to see an elderly woman’s kind face. She too is holding a charger. Hers is attached to a portable respirator. A few minutes later, walk-
ing away with her family, wheeling her respirator, she stoops over to pick up a candy wrapper that someone else has carelessly dropped. *** Sertso and Berger, synch up, voice and vibes. They match rhythms but it’s the combination of their timbres that floats to the foreground. Meanwhile Filiano thumps along, a sound so sweet and reliable and there, always there, providing the fulcrum on which everything balances. Their music is light and breezy, yet grounded. It’s like seeing my kids fly kites on the beach last summer. Watching from a distance the kite string was invisible, as if their hands alone maneuvered the kites. They sprinted across the beach, kicking up puffs of sand, working like mad to keep those flimsy plastic sheets aloft. The whole thing seemed magical but it was sweat and exertion that yielded that beautiful sense of verticality and stretching, that sense of trust and release. *** “The joy is in the existence / To know love is to know” Taken in isolation, Sertso’s lyrics give me pause. Combined with the bass and vibraphones, though, they yield songs that stimulate rather than numb. In lesser hands they might tumble into the ravine of hippy naivety. But there’s something wiser, time-tested that keeps them on terra firma. I see another glimpse of this after the show. A fan approaches Sertso to buy a CD. She says the disc costs $15. He has a twenty. He waits for her to offer change. They chat a bit, chanteuse and fan, and moments later he’s saying “keep the change.” “Are you sure?” she asks. He is now, and glad of it. It’s not a hustle. Not a mind trick. Just part of the routine for a seasoned performer. The exchange doesn’t detract from the band’s idealism. To the contrary. Moments like these provide contrast, round them as people. *** I arrive late in Los Angeles. My friends were stuck in traffic so they’re late, too, just pulling up when I get to the curb. My worrying was for naught. They ask if I’m hungry and minutes later we’re in a burrito joint in East L.A. They let me pick up the tab and I’m finally able to return a favor. MIKE FALOON is the author of The Hanging Gardens of Split Rock and the co-editor of Fan Interference. He has contributed to Cashiers du Cinemart, Razorcake, Submerging Writers, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. His next book, The Other Night at Quinn’s, is due out next year.
Impulse by Katelyn Kenderish
Voice can be the fact of structure. Cell by cell, trees know to elongate, replicate and stretch so leaves unfold. Chlorophyll knows nothing but thirst to turn light to sugar that surges down, while roots braid thicker, spin thinner at the tips, netting ground. Urge built by unconscious calculation, signals determined by need, measured by intensity of hunger for change. Branches arch towards the lightest sky. Filament roots plunge to stratospheric substrate, recognize in the place to pause its total rest, relief of cool damp. KATELYN KENDERISH lives in Seattle, writes, and collects images and stories about earrings at the Lost Earring Archive.
Closure by Robert Walicki
A tiny lobe crusts, stuck with a prick of metal. Little hole on my left where I kept diamonds stainless studs, then I let them close up, waited for a bus to sell my my Thompson Twins and Dead or Alive’s for five bucks. New Order and Joy Division for in store credit. I checked the display case for my reflection and rare Bowie bootlegs, cut my hair and washed the color from my face, The ghost in me, breathing. “I want everything you’ll give me for six Erasures and The Smiths”. “Do you have anything harder?”, I say, “Something loud. I want it to hit like a fist” Something to turn me into a man. ROBERT WALICKI’s work has appeared in journals in print and online. His latest chapbook is The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet Press, 2015).