Seeing a new part of town is always exciting. It embodies the word "hopeful" in a way that seems real rather than superficially optimistic. Discovering a new side of town is not unlike meeting (or finding out about) someone in town that you have lived near for months, probably crossed paths with a hundred times, and never met. Chris, who was the first to rub salt into the last Disaster show's openoffice impress slideshow disaster was more helpful this show when he mentioned that a women named Colleen who works at the Cinemat owned a projector that she seemed excited to lend to community members interested in spreading art and film and just general creativity. Later, after eating some beet dumplings at Kevey's, he told me that it would be much faster if I took a different route back to Miles Away. "Its the no-hills way," he said. "Just go down Adams right past the Crescent Donut and that first gas station - through that old warehouse part of town. It will take you out past Rogers and South Madison where Corinna and Mary live. Then you'll just get dumped on South Walnut right by the Movie Gallery". Riding back that way, it really was faster, and there weren't any hills. A white car honked behind me and then flew through the curves ahead. I was a little scared, but I would have taken the dark, empty roads at speed if I were in a car too, I suppose. I rode past this huge glowing pharmaceutical company headquarters. Surely this must be what they talk about when Monroe county is mentioned as a hotbed for Indiana's future as a center for the biotech industry, but I had never actually seen the concrete reality of all the hype. It looked a little crazy, but didn't seem too sinister in the night, its giant parking lot completely empty save for two lonely barricades. I hit South Walnut, rode past the strip club and the high school and was home in a few minutes, cold but excited from having seen some new streets. I've heard, in a few places of late, mention of a man who walked every street in New York city. A really interesting guy named Jim writes of a similar experience in RVA in his zine Ride On. The feeling of finding so many new places, just a few miles from the ones that have become part of your routine must be amazing, but what do you do once you've seen it all? Move?
Update: So, the reason I call this blog the reality tunnel is because I often write about different ideas that suddenly seem to coalesce or become part of a collective consciousness among my peers. As I was writing this post, I remembered a Love and Rockets comic about discovering new routes. In this story, Maggie, one of the characters, is told by a friend to take the "Horror Highway" home as it will save her half an hour's drive. Contrary to my positive experience, discovering a new road proves to be a trying experience for Maggie, and one where she has to confront fears that are a combination of personal history, genuine concerns that many women face in contemporary society about men and violence, and her own neurosis. Its pretty awesome.
Lately, I've been reading the few volumes of Love and Rockets collections that I own. I've had them for a while but, unlike most books, I can always enjoy re-reading them. Their short, serial format, makes for good bedtime reading as I can read a few pages, or one story, and then fall asleep when I'm too tired to take on weightier or lengthier literature. That doesn't mean that there's anything simplistic about these books, or comics in general, for that matter. I've always found Love and Rockets compelling, and as I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate it as a really accurate, kind, and intelligent look at race, gender, sexuality, romance, and relationships. What was sort of exotic and foreign to me a few years ago, now almost reads like useful advice, or at least gives me some comfort in realizing that some of the stresses and difficulties that seem so new and unique to me are neither new nor unique.
To make another reference to an idea or conversation I've had recently, I was talking with a friend about how it was interesting that hadly anyone involved with the film Brokeback Mountain, be it the writer of the short story, the director, or the actors, identified as queer, and how the director, who is not American, could largely succeed in creating a very American narrative. Love and Rockets is written by three brothers who are Mexican-American and come from the punk rock subculture in southern California. They write about both these subjects in their comics, but also have many characters who are female and queer. I don't know how the brothers identify in terms of sexual orientation, but I've always been impressed how they've been able to write challenging, interesting female characters.
One final interconnection: One of the Love and Rockets collections I've been reading is called Locas in Love. I had always thought that "locas" meant a crazy woman, which is sort of the literal translation, as far as my knowledge of Spanish gets me, until I was looking up information about a film called Uuchitan: Queer Paradise that had screened recently at Bloomington's PRIDE film festival. The film was originally realeased with the spanish title Juchitán de las locas. A little quick web searching shows that the word "locas" is the Spanish equivalent to "queer", which adds a little bit more context to the title. I wonder if the word "locas" started as a prejorative and has been reclaimed, much like the term queer. The ambiguity of the word works well for the Hernandez's characters because the young women they portray do live crazy, reckless, confused lives in some ways, so the literal translation seems appropriate, but ultimately the characters and their lives are endearing, exciting, and sincere.
