ben
tapeworm’s
almanac

April 2025

show notes

They played songs from Appalachia, mostly. “The Wild Goose Chase,” “Sally Ann,” “Jenny Put the Kettle On,” things like that. Cleek Schrey on fiddle and organ and Nora Brown on banjo. “That was beautiful!” exclaimed an older British woman after the first song. “That was beautiful again!” after the second. The rest of the audience shifted and groaned but she was right. No need to stop saying it. The music had that glint of genealogy, in the sense of stewardship rather than inheritance. The songs like old apple cultivars, still around to taste. Cleek said he’d learned one tune from a man who was born in 1920. After they played that one, no one said it was beautiful, not out loud at least, but it was.

The stage was small and set up in the front of the venue, the rest of the hall obscured by a thick black curtain. There were seats put out and people standing, people leaning on walls. I sat on the cold floor, my back against the curtain, which whipped and billowed about me as wind blasted through the side exit. Almost every song had a different tuning, so a good portion of the set consisted of listening to the musicians pluck and modulate their way toward the next number, which was a kind of music itself. It made me think of astrolabes, of dowsing rods and carpentry, of the parameters that must be set before things can be done or known or made.

When they played “Sally Ann,” I heard something squeaking and shuffling right behind me, on the other side of the black curtain. It took me a few seconds to realize it was dancing. Someone who knew what they were doing, too, matching the verve of the music. It was just sneakers on concrete, but it was the loveliest thing I’d heard in a while, part of the music but apart from it. The spirits of bygone audiences, perhaps, wondering how we could all be sitting still.

(And how to describe the longing to pull the curtain aside, knowing somehow that the dancers would not even be there, that the whole scene would go out like a candle, that the night would collapse, the lights cut out, the music vanish, the chairs evacuate, the banjos pile up like umbrellas, the room fill with nothing but the sound of feet on floor, dancing to no music, lit only by the City’s motto glowing red above the doors—EXIT EXIT EXIT ?)

The dancing stopped and the set ended and the musicians bowed and we all clapped and spilled outside to grab a drink while we waited for Brìghde Chaimbeul to come on. Eventually she did, holding what looked like an ancient puppet made of wood and leather, the size of a large duck. The sounds it made seemed like they were a thousand years old, and by some reckoning may well have been. At some point, someone closed the side-exit door, becalming the black curtain’s surface.

After the show I saw someone I knew. I made smalltalk at the CitiBike dock. Jenny, put the kettle on, and I’ll take tea. The first person is not a stake but a pivot, a point in time, one peg on an instrument that must be constantly retuned.

ben tapeworm

ben tapeworm’s almanac is amateur apocalypse pamphletry.

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