gardner vega

The images, ideas, sounds, and scents that abound in this phantasmagoric sideshow are provocative and powerful: the mournful cries of celestial travelers cast out cruelly into a vast, empty space of stars and blackness; the sight of grey dust settling over a forgotten outpost on a road that leads nowhere; the pungent odor of Jupiter on a returning father's clothing. Here living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled by the good life and the glad hand, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets.

Up from Adams Street recounts a boy's coming of age in a whistle-stop town in Illinois. He is the favorite, of whom much is expected, naive to a fault, decked out in high school football gear, dreaming of glory, all 120 pounds of him, perched on the roof of a freight car hurtling toward a bridge over the Mississippi, and into jail for a night. He falls for a girl, becomes the inevitable star-crossed lover, and discovers that the life he wants to live is the life he's living. Isn't it?