Editor’s note: Dante Cimadamore is a Bristol born musician, recording artist, and award-winning writer for the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History. You can find his music online under the moniker Give Me Motion. He currently lives in Los Angeles and writes from his great-great grandparent’s Forestvillian antique kitchen table when he’s not on the road as a touring musician.
By Dante Cimadamore
Today I walked through the hot gray blocks of Salt Lake City to find a little a pop of color at a community cafe and book shop. I have to get there first, though.
I take escalators up & down, up & down. I get lost in a labyrinth of gaping vacancies, soon-to-be overpriced fusion food factories. I want to go one way, but I am awkwardly funneled down a path created by a commercial developer with something else in mind.
Yes, this is par for the course in the city by the Great Salt Lake. You can feel well-intentioned urban planning create more “bars” to more “cages,” traps really, keeping you in line.
So, I’m happy to finally make it to this cafe. Its interior speaks of freedom of spirit and art that aligns with my experience on this planet.
It is colorful, loud, unpredictable. A space for people not easily contained, not easily labeled.
I get it.
To be loud is a way to be heard when you’re penned into a corner. It’s a single flare into the sky after a lifetime of asking to be unseen.
I might not have realized it when I started out on this trek to a cafe, but I do now.
After 15 years of meeting people in small towns and big cities across several continents — after seeing the many different ways people can construct a public space, how a public space can change overtime, I see how people need places to be themselves.
Every time I step foot into a cafe like this, I am surrounded by the echos of my experiences of my human kin that have had questions about their culture.
Given the context of SLC’s culture I’m like, “Wow, I am thankful this place exists for whoever needs it,” and I think if I was teenager now this place would be cool to frequent and it houses some exciting ideas, political or otherwise.
It strikes me as a place where a person might deal with years of being talked over at the holiday dinner table when you are 14 and your thoughts are forming, and the others at the table are in their fifties and they’ve ‘seen it all and they know it all’ and they’ve barely left the home.
This loud cafe is open and accepting in a way that I don’t recall Bristol being in my youth.
Perhaps there was a colorful corner like this all along and I was just too young and bathed in the monotone of cool kid high school culture. I spent a lot of time in the theater and music wings, and we were never as expressive as this.
Once, my friends and I had John Bale Book Co. in Waterbury, but it never beamed as brightly as this. And many spaces like it gone have the way of game shops with game nights where people can commune around a common goal.
My preference is books and beverages, though, and I love finding these outposts where we have the opportunity to write new stories about ourselves and the world we live in. I hope there is a place like this in Bristol now.
Here’s to more colorful common places.
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