FBR Reports, Fairs & Festivals

It is after 1 am on Friday night when I finally pass through the arched portico of La Setima, the famed 7th Avenue stretch in the heart of city, where the wooden cigar-making cottages of the early twentieth century now house bars, nightclubs, and the occasional tattoo parlor. Above the iron balconies that overlook the Avenue, strings of white Christmas lights hang from one side of the street to the other, recalling the cables of

streetcars and trolleys that still operate during the day. I cruise down La Setima, moving slowly past the lines of club-goers gathered behind velvet ropes and large, imposing bouncers; voluptuous girls in brightly colored tube dresses, young men in black blazers and Cuban straw hats. The sounds of salsa music mingle with the smell of tobacco. But I can think of one word: SLEEP.

Saturday 9/27/08

It is just before 10am when I arrive at the corner of Palm Avenue and 14th Street—Deep Carnivale ground zero. About a dozen vendor tables are lined up around the Hillsborough Community College courtyard where a band of teenagers are setting up their instruments. The trellis above them is draped in purple fabric and decorated with paper flowers. There are a few dozen people shuttling around the courtyard as the band, Next Exit, starts to cover Tom Petty’s Free Falling. The vendor tables sell books by local writers, HCC publications and baked goods. I grab a Cuban favorite, papa rellena, a potato stuffed with savory ground beef. Belly satisfied, I cross the street and enter the historic Circulo Cubano. A nearly 100 year old neo-classical building of ionic columns and marble staircases, it served as the Cuban Social Club and remains the oldest building of its kind in the country. Five of the six Deep Carnivale stages are set up in the various rooms of the Cuban Club.

I head downstairs to the Cantina to see—or rather to hear—a sound installation entitled “Wall of Voices.” The cantina is a large sunken ballroom with round tables set up as if for a party. The walls are decorated with pictures of infamous gangsters—Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel and Dutch Schultz. The room is empty and dark; only the landing at the bottom of the dual staircases I’ve just descended is lit up. I hear the voices, a polyphony of them repeating the same sentences over and over. I look around for the speakers and find them embedded in the walls. The walls are actually talking. I try intently to listen but I can only make out bits of sentences, “people of color,” “get out, get out, get out,” “…sat down…” It’s

as if I were in a crowded room trying to listen in on conversations. I look around feeling a bit lost; it’s because of the dissonance between the empty room and the cacophony of voices. There is mic tapping and later, a high-pitched singing. Still, I cannot make out any more than a word here and there. Perhaps the decision to place “Wall of Voices” in the Cantina is meant to conjure the sound of the many parties once held there. But more than the effect of conversation, the voices convey deafness. They are not in truth speaking to one another; the words don’t correspond. They cannot hear each other any more than I can hear them. The exhibit suggests something about the importance of listening to understanding.
The Cuban Club Ballroom is on the fourth floor and has been set up with art exhibits literally made out of words. There are crumbled up newspapers on the wooden floors, works on podiums throughout the room and in the center, a giant ring of books suspended from the ceiling. Beyond the book circle is a stage where poet Lori Karpay is reading poems from her new CD, “Three or Four Cuckoos.” With titles like “A Bevy of Blues” and lines like “fists are a-shaking,” Karpay’s poetry blends Seussical style with political sensibility.
The next poet is Wayne Totin. “There’s no escape from polka music,”

he reads, “even if you try.” Totin’s poems begin light and comical, compelling the reader to listen on. But along the way, they become scathing indictments of American culture. You start out enjoying the sinful pleasure of bad movies and polka dancing and before you know it, you’re a “drenched rat, rapidly descending in a bucket of piss.” The poems toss you up into the air, let you float for a moment, then enjoy watching you plummet. Totin laments the unfairness of our world and makes us complicit in it. “We live in a world where Jesus failed, Marx failed, Spinoza failed,” he points out. “But where Sirhan Sirhan and Mark David Chapman are a crack shot.” After the reading I ask Totin what he has against polka. He tells me he was exposed to it by his grandmother at too young and age and that the music really evokes dark memories for him. I ask what polka has to do with politics. “We do the same, strange, convoluted dance every four years,” Totin says. “Polka has become politics.”
There is a different author or performer on each of the six stages every half hour, which means that every choice I make on which reading to attend requires that I reject five others. It also means that the audience at each of the readings is painfully small. I am about to leave the Ballroom when spoken word poet, Moe St. Evergreen takes the stage. Evergreen has straight, dirty-blonde hair halfway down his back. He has a John the Baptist beard, and dons a green Indian-print dress,

gold gladiator sandals and a pink plastic cross on a cord around his neck. There are four of us in the audience—my boyfriend and I, and Karpay and Totin who have stayed to watch Evergreen. I remain seated out of principle. When Jesus speaks, I listen. Evergreen sings about the best potatoes being baked potatoes, noting that despite their rough skin, potatoes are not so tough inside (the oven). This is followed by a show-tune about a very handsome man who gets tapped at under bathroom stalls. Scandalous! And it’s not even noon.
The highlight of the day comes when I head back down to the Cantina for the midday film premier of “The Ladies of Brick” by Tampa Poet Laureate, James Tokley Sr. The film flashes through images of Ybor City, the brick facades of cigar factories, and lovely flamenco dancers while over a subtle melody, the poet’s voice breaks in a staccato like the clicking of castanets. He summons the patrons of Ybor’s old social clubs, calling them by name—Lozano, Fuente, Gonzalez—asking permission to dance with their daughters. The images alternate between color and black and white, the poet between Spanish and English, as if to bridge the distances of time and culture and resurrect the heyday of old Ybor. He calls out to that past filled with brick-strong fathers, “senoritas dressed in bricks,” “brown arms and legs” filling the dance halls; he summons that past to dance. “A gathering before goodbye. To live again and then to die.”
On the main floor, in the club theater—a terraced auditorium with room for several hundred—I join a small group gathered to hear Karen Brown read from her collection of short stories, Pins and Needles. She is

followed by New York Times best selling author, James Reese, whose newest book, The Dracula Dossier, is due out October 7th. The last big headliner, John Capouya, takes the stage back down at the Cantina at 3:30pm and reads excerpts from Gorgeous George, his biography of 1940’s wrestler George Raymond Wagner, released earlier this month. The day is almost over and I have missed staged readings of plays, several student open mics, and nearly all the outdoor music. In short, 58 events have taken place and I have made it to only nine. One of my complaints about the festival: there is too much to do, spread out too thinly throughout the Club. And another: nonfiction (my very own genre) is underrepresented among so many poets, playwrights and fiction writers. I leave just before the crowning jewel of any proper literary festival: a reading of Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl.” I’m hoping there are still brownies and snow cones at the HCC table, or maybe a fire sale on the last of those papas rellenas . . .

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