Indy Underground Reading Series

Do you live in, or near, or have means to travel to the greater Indianapolis area? Then you should come to the Indy Underground Reading Series next Wednesday, June 30. It's going to be fantastic.



Writers, rock and roll, and Sun King beer. Eight o'clock at the Irving Theater, a great place to see a show. I can't remember if it was there or at The Emerson, but it makes me think of when I saw Social Distortion in the early '90s and was nearly trampled in the mosh pit. I didn't intend to be in the mosh pit: the lights went down, the music started, and all of a sudden I was riding a wave, then I was under it. A burly flannel-clad early-90s lumberjack picked me up and set me down outside of the pit. (This a story I drag out as an attempt to seem less lame to my students. Likely I seem lamer when I reveal that I had a cardigan tied around my waist when I inadvertently moshed, and all night I watched it sail from one side of the room to the other. Also: my friend's dad - a wonderfully patient man, a military man - waited outside for us the whole time. In a minivan.)

The '90s! Suddenly I want to be back in high school, being angsty about boys at the all-ages show.



(but only for like five minutes. and then I would like to get back to the garden and my book, mmmkay.)

The last person on Earth to see Avatar

That would be me. And I somehow rounded up three other people who also had not seen the Movie Everybody Else in the World Had Already Seen to watch it with me. (The same group, incidentally, that gathered to watch "The Hurt Locker" earlier in the spring, a film which beat "Avatar" for Best Picture at the Oscars.)

I did not want to like Avatar. I'm not a contrarian by nature, it's just that the movies getting all the hype are generally disappointing to me for predictable reasons: behind all the style, there's no substance. Nothing to sink your teeth into besides popcorn, nothing to leave you thinking. And besides predictable reasons, these movies are predictable in and unto themselves. Man fights great battle, enemy vanquished. Blahdy blahdy blah.

But I DID like Avatar. Kind of a lot. For one, the style was innovative and cool enough that the lapses in substance were forgivable, though still worth noting. Mr. James Cameron beats the viewer about the head and chest with his anti-war message: Humans who've ruined their planet head to the lush and magical Pandora, light years away, and are miffed when the blue-but-sexy natives reject their advances. Turns out there's a load of highly-prized "unobtanium" under their sacred tree that the Americans - I mean, humans - want to swipe. Yes. UNOBTANIUM. And the humans go so far as to create avatars that look just like the blue n' sexy folk, complete with a sick hip-to-waist ratio, so that they may infiltrate and propagate. Until, of course, somebody gets a conscience. "This reminds me of 'Dances with Wolves'," said one of my astute movie companions. Or '"Last of the Mohicans." Or fill-in-the-blank. We all agreed, my movie-watching companions and I, that while the "The Hurt Locker" wasn't perfect, it portrayed war as complex, not good/bad or black/white.

And still, the movie unexpectedly made me think. Among the native Na'vi people, they respectfully address someone before speaking by saying, "I see you." Such a simple and beautiful gesture, to acknowledge that one has been seen, made visible, that a person is worth noting and recognizing. I see you. You exist. Your matter matters. This was a small part of the movie, but perhaps my favorite part, aside from being on another freaking planet for nearly three hours (what is watching a movie but being an avatar, getting to walk around in another life, another place?) and the floating jellyfish-thingies and flowers-but-not-flower thingies and the flying quasi-pterodactyls. And the humans who'd seal themselves in a pod at their space station and mind-meld into their avatars, being able to see through new eyes and run on new legs.

Perhaps it'll look dated in a year, but all things do. And maybe should.

It turns out I'm not the Last Person in the World to see this movie. When I mentioned my theory recently, none of the five people I was hanging out with had seen it, either.



And because I would now like to beat you about the head and chest with this word, let's say it one more time: Unobtanium.

It's not like you don't have a calendar

One of my favorite books that I read last year, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, has an entry about days of the week, and the importance of not stating the obvious about Fridays (yay!) and Mondays (boo).

I originally started writing this on Friday, in one kind of mood. And now it is Monday, and I'm in another kind of mood.

It is important not to state the obvious about these moods. Hence it is worth reporting that I am maybe feeling the opposite about Friday and Monday at the moment. This seems like a landmark happening, as if my mental outlook has realigned in some fundamentally important way. But maybe it just means that it's summer and my calendar is all whopper-jawed.

Por ejemplo, as we say en espanol: Last Friday I wrote, then spent five hours in a school-related meeting, afternoon into the evening. By choice. And enjoyed it. And today, Monday, I taught, will soon write, and am strangely motivated to cross items off a list I compiled a month ago.

Whopper-jawed for sure. Or maybe I've just got a close eye on the calendar, and I know this summer won't last forever. Deadlines, people. Things to write. Items to cross off lists. And days of the week that I will neither complain about nor celebrate, that merge together to a point where I realize that I'm doing what I want to be doing.

Now, the trick: how to turn summer into the rest of the year. I'll get back to you on that one. (I suspect it will involve alchemy. And a chalkboard full of formulas.)