Advent Calendar 9

Faith.  A good thing that this calendar doesn't require tangible objects - for faith, all you can do is symbols.  A cross, or a candle, or a St. Bernard.

As a term, it's kind of religion-lite, at least in some contexts.  Faith-based initiatives.  A Sunday radio program, Speaking of Faith, now further secularized into a show called Being.  Communities of faith.  

But what interests me is the intersection between faith as another name for belief, and faith as in something you keep.   One has to do with a willing suspension of rationality and the other with steadiness.  In the searching-for-a-deity context each meaning makes sense.  And so, but maybe less so, when it comes to loyalty in the way partners, loved ones, and persons with government power treat their partners, lovers, and the governed.

Advent Calendar 8.

Literally out my window, the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi.

It's a famous bridge in engineering history, completed in 1874, still there, still in use.  I'm looking at it now, late afternoon light, a blue bowl of sky over it, the flat midwestern horizon behind.  This afternooon (not this picture) there's even the moon, about 7/8 full.

Eads's drawings are here at Washington University and they are as amazing as the bridge.

But there is nothing quite as amazing as James Buchanan Eads himself.

Advent Calendar 7.

And now a commercial.

Go see or go rent Margin Call.  It's brilliant.  Most of the stuff I've posted has been on my Facebook page but Strays is also here to promote it...

What a script, what direction, what a cast.

Advent Calendar 6.

Open the window
and there's another window
though which you see another window
and another, and so on, shrinking,
regression down to a point.

Bam.

Advent Calendar 5.


A baseball.  I can't think of a more American symbol.  If there were a board game where the players were countries, and you needed a piece to represent each, ours would be a baseball.  (Except that it rolls, and pieces need a flat side to stay put.)

Stitched cowhide, with printing to tell its pedigree, rests perfectly in your hand, weighted and built to be thrown.

Each one is hand made.  Last I saw, in Costa Rica,  in conditions that are pretty tough.

Red waxed thread, white hide, blue printing.  We should change "American as apple pie" to "American as a baseball".

Advent Calendar 4.


And some days you forget to open.

Yesterday - a brick.  St. Louis is a capital of brick, so prized that people from New Orleans drive up here, find falling-down houses, load them up and take them home to help gentrify.  An interestingly symbol-laden area of commerce that combines the urban attributes of theft and beauty.

Advent Calendar 3.

When you do advent calendars, the whole thing is cardboard, you pry open the window, sometimes corners tear.  I wonder if there once were wooden ones, brought back year to year.  Or big ones, with a real candle behind each window.

Today's opens and there is, indeed, a candle.  A strange hybrid of utility and history and art.  We light them now for the table, because of their flattering light.  Once they were lit because they were the only light you could get.   So at night  everyone was candlelit. As in a Kubrick film that most people don't remember, Barry Lyndon.  I have never forgot the candlelit interiors.

Now we are lit by spirally fluorescent doohickies that, if they fall to the floor, make a toxic pile of glass and chemicals.  Drop a candle and your house could burn down.  But probably not. Usually there's just  a beautiful little puddle of wax.