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YOU ARE HERE: Find your way to Christine's Motion Picture
(at the southwest corner of Park and Ninth Street), where a new
journal of creative geography, You Are Here, celebrates
its premiere issue with a reading featuring Alison Deming,
Ofelia Zepeda and Kathleen Veslany from 7:30 to
9:30 p.m. Thursday, April 30. Christine's grand gray structure
is properly located at 187 N. Park Ave., and if you don't see
those enormous block letters--painted red, no less--it's time
to hand over that Arizona driver's license. Especially if you
have one of those "new" ones that has a half-life rather
than an expiration date. And don't get so intent on finding the
place that you fail to notice that's next Thursday, poetry
fans. Otherwise you'll be there, but without You Are Here,
and perhaps feeling neither here-nor-there as a result. If that
happens, have a piece of birthday cake, which Christine's serves
every day. Because she's right: Every day is somebody's birthday,
and therefore cause to celebrate, even without poetry or photography.
But come back next week.
You Are Here is published by graduate students in the UA Department of Geography and Regional Development, and offers readings from 3 to 5 p.m. the last Sunday of every month at Aroma Café, 346 N. Fourth Ave. So you can check them out before the big debut with a reading by K.M. Kore Salvato and Rita Magdaleno on Sunday, April 26. Magdaleno is an Arizona Commission on the Arts poet-in-residence who travels to public schools statewide to teach her craft. She also teaches at the University of Arizona's Writing Works Center, and her poems and stories have appeared in anthologies including last year's Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poetry, as well as magazines and literary journals. Salvato is a Tucson poet who edits, teaches and writes here for most of the year, and in the summer works in a private archive near Paris. A New York native, her short story "Salvage Yard" was featured in the anthology Southwestern Women: New Voices (1997), the promising first book by local publisher/editor Caitlin Gannon. For further information on either event, call 626-8136. SAINTS ON PARADE: All this hubbub about the Virgin of Guadalupe in the bark of the Kirberger's tree on Easter weekend gave us pagans something to be grateful for, too. (The Arizona Daily Star seemed to be quite taken with the one-and-a-half-inch image, which they plastered in full color on the front page of the Metro section on Monday, April 13. They weren't the only ones, either. Headlines on the subsequent trio of Star stories, which ran April 14 through 16, appeared as follows: Crowds flock to Virgin's 'image' in bark of tree; Visiting hours set for Virgin image; and 'They just keep coming.') As media types, it got us thinking about what a stroke of marketing genius it was way-back-when for the Church to merge its saints with the local gods; and what a different world it would be today if the ol' engine was just revving up. If some colonizing empire discovered America today, PR firms would be jockeying for position. We'd have people flocking to the desert to see the image of St. Nike on a Hopi mesa den; or doing "Hail Pepsi's" for penance; or crossing themselves with holy Evian water. Don't even get us started on the Taco Bell dog, who'd surely give even the beloved Virgin a run for her money. So to speak. "Our father, who art in Heaven, Have a Coke and a smile. Thy Burger Kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is on television." Now go in peace, my children. May the bounty of your purchases overflow, and your iconographic visions be free and plentiful. We've got an empire to run, here.
AND SPEAKING OF TELEVISION: If you haven't already seen
it, tune in to KUAT-TV, Channel 6, any weekday morning
at
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