hyper-real

the face of the day on the daily dish today was from this great photo-feature on 6 artists working in fantastic photorealistic/ hyper-realistic sculpture. some of these pieces are deeply… freaky. i love it.

i quite possibly shared some of these images from the contemporary art floors of Denver’s DAM in October ’08. they have some great sculpture, including hyper-realistic, not all of which could be photographed, including a Ron Mueck head sculpture if memory serves…

more sculpture photos after the jump note: there’s one sculpture of a boy some folks may be uncomfortable with, (involves nudity).

creepy tales

darkness of a whole different kind…

Joel recently found himself driving alone with an almost empty tank, close to lost, in the middle of the night, on the back roads of the wonderfully appropriate Barren County, Kentucky. no wonder then that he tried to dissuade me from listening to The Old Road, the final episode in series 2 of The Man in Black on bbc radio 7. as he no doubt knew i would, i ignored him. and i’m glad. this is radio drama at its best.
also worth hearing is Angel in Disguise and the particularly gruesome, Flesh.
it’s all a superb take on the tradition of the classic, “spooky story” in contemporary settings… you know the inevitability of what’s coming and yet it doesn’t spoil the listening… one can’t help but grin… 

the tradition of scaring ourselves around campfires and by torchlight with stories of strange happenings and things that go bump and growl in the night are our way of dealing with our fears and the real darkness we face… a curious form of entertainment and yet somehow telling creepy tales pushes back the world and those real fears… as host Mark Gatiss would likely concur, there is comfort in knowing after all, that it’s only a story…

isn’t it?

LB

what is coming…

it’s the first Sunday in Advent.
it seems strange to be marking the beginning of the season of light incoming when the news is filled with so much dark talk of the child abuse history of the Catholic Church in Dublin.

Which drew me to turn, as I have done before, to these words of Buechner,

“Give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility: that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal.”
All the paradoxical themes of Advent are compressed into that handful of words: Christ coming at Christmas time in great humility and again at the end of time in glorious majesty – Christ coming as a child to save us and as a king to judge us – mortal life, immortal life. They clatter against each other like shutters in the wind with all their points and counterpoints. They all but deafen us with their message at one and the same time of sin and grace, justice and mercy, comfort and challenge. “Cast away the works of darkness,” they say, and put on “the armor of light.” Maybe those are the words that best sum up the paradox of who we are and where we are. Somewhere between the darkness and the light. That is where we are as Christians. And not just at Advent time, but at all times. Somewhere between the fact of darkness and the hope of light. That is who we are.
“Advent” means “coming” of course, and the promise of Advent is that what is coming is an unimaginable invasion. The mythology of our age has to do with flying saucers and invasions from outer space, and that is unimaginable enough. But what is upon us now is even more so – a close encounter not of the thrid kind but of a different kind altogether. An invasion of holiness. That is what Advent is about.
What is coming upon the world is the Light of the World. It is Christ. That is the comfort of it. The challenge of it is that it has not come yet. Only the hope for it has to come, only the longing for it. In the meantime we are in the dark, and the dark, God knows, is also in us. We watch and wait for a holiness to heal us and hallow us, to liberate us from the dark. Advent is like the hush in a theater just before the curtain rises. It is like the hazy ring around the winter moon that means the coming of snow which will turn the night to silver. Soon. But for the time being, our time, darkness is where we are.

– Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992

and so it is that we wait.

LB