With Halloween fast approaching Saturday, sources of gruesome and frightening displays are in great demand, and the University Museum is willing to supply.

The museum’s exhibition “The Expanding Eye” features pieces of art inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The art is meant to emphasize Poe’s craving for knowledge of creativity and the world beyond tangible reality. With 19 pieces of work, the showcase managed to surpass all my expectations, and it puzzled, horrified, enthralled and chilled me every step of the way.

In a synopsis of the display, Stephen Margulies, the museum’s volunteer curator, wrote, “Each shock, sometimes horrible in itself, opens up huge psychological or spiritual territory.”

Each piece of art portrays the artist’s interpretation of one of Poe’s stories or poems, and Poe himself is even featured in one piece by Félix Vallotton. I found, however, that the art was significantly less inspiring than the writings they embody.

Nathan Oliveira’s collection of black and white lithographs supposedly combines the physical and metaphysical aspects of Poe’s work, incorporating whirlpools, saving angels and blindness. In all honesty, I felt blinded as I scrutinized these pieces, though not because that was necessarily their intended effect. I looked from up close, far away — I even did the retrospective look with my hand on my chin — and yet I couldn’t derive any sense of the artists’ messages from the paintings. I can understand how one picture depicted a giant whirlpool and I could even make out the white angel beyond a pit of darkness in another. Such abstractions — I suppose — I simply cannot fathom, however, because I derived little from the images other than black and white blobs.

Not all of the featured works are abstract, though. Illustrations for Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Masque of the Red Death” were included, as well as James Ensor’s depiction of Poe’s unsettling story “Hop Frog.” In Ensor’s The Vengeance of Hop Frog, the singed corpses of a king and seven nobles dangle from the ceiling amid a throng of spectators. Though I had never read the story, I understood clearly the gruesome spectacle of death, and it even had me thinking back to my old high school days of reading “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” as they share similar references to torture, death and revenge.

Many of the other paintings are similar in their grotesque distortions of human suffering, no doubt reflecting Poe’s preoccupation with beauty that meets a premature death. Although not all of the art was to my personal tastes — I’ve always been a fan of vibrant colors — it definitely was time well spent. If you’re interested, the exhibit will be open through Jan. 3.

Note: The author does not assume responsibility for any lost or damaged limbs, minds or souls in the promotion of this exhibit.

A couple weeks ago news networks reported that 6-year-old Falcon Heene was trapped in a balloon traveling high above the ground of Colorado. The story captivated the nation for about a day, but audiences were shocked when it was later revealed that the event was a hoax concocted by the boy’s father, Richard Heene, who had hoped to secure … a reality TV show.

The Heene family had been featured twice on the ABC reality show Wife Swap. Heene, however, had wanted to create a show focusing solely on his family and its daily inner workings.

While it is definitely not worth trampling your family’s name and humiliating your loved ones, reality TV has become a cornerstone of television programming. Networks such as VH1 and MTV are the “leaders” in reality television, spitting out a couple new ones every few months.

Many of their shows are centered around a bunch of drama queens locked inside a house having “reality TV moments.” The common way of getting the “reality TV moments” out of a show is for the producers to tell a cast member to do something that will outrage another person in the house. This occurs, cameras roll, ratings go up and money is made. Rinse, repeat and you’ve got a hit.

Most of these shows usually focus on the negative side of life, elevating these “classic” moments of frustration and anger on a pedestal. While I understand that sex, lies and violence get ratings, there’s a certain amount of moral accountability that has to take place on the part of any network. I mean, some of these shows make you lose faith in humanity (The Real World *cough*). Are they entertaining? Absolutely, but so are tabloids. Most of that stuff isn’t true either — I just have a problem with people calling the shows reality.

There are plenty of reality shows that deserve recognition for benefiting our culture while still entertaining. For example, American Idol captures several of the nation’s hearts and minds every season, letting us see men and women who have true talent strut their stuff and get a chance at fame. Simon Cowell’s commentary isn’t boring either. For example, I’m from Richmond, and when Elliott Yamin started gaining momentum on the show, the city went nuts. Everyone in the 804 was hit with Yamin fever. Although he didn’t win, people saw his talent and he still makes records and sings around the world.

Another show worth noting is Jon and Kate Plus Eight. Though it started off as a boring show about a couple with eight kids, it has now become a show based on a family going through a divorce. The show has been called “therapeutic” for many families who are going through the same crisis.

So, the question remains: Will the Heenes get their own show? Sadly, they probably will. Whether it’s like the VH1-MTV trashy-reality Real World or like the emotionally captivating American Idol, reality TV has definitely made its mark and is willing to make anyone famous, no matter the cost.

If you haven’t been writing your life away the past few weeks, we here at tableau don’t really know what you’ve been doing (unless you are in the E-School, in which case we have no clue what you are ever doing). It seems that as professors continue to raise the bar on acceptable amounts of paper-writing required per semester, internships and extracurricular clubs also have started upping the ante on how much written work, articles or memos they’d like to see from you. Or maybe, we University students are finally nearing the ceiling on just how overworked we can be and still physically function.

We’ve all done it: the all-nighters, the one-night-stands with our textbooks in the steamy stacks of Alderman, the shots of espresso and Red Bull we throw back to keep it up just a little bit longer and push just a little bit harder. It’s exhilarating, it’s breathtaking and it’s becoming more and more necessary to keep up with the workload we pile on ourselves. Perhaps we’ve become numb to the higher and higher amounts of work we take on because it just feels so good to stay addicted rather than face caffeine withdrawal or — gasp! — have to spend an afternoon just doing nothing. But maybe we should?

Maybe we should all learn a small lesson from our dear old friend Ferris Bueller and take a break to look around once in a while and take in the sights and sounds of fall in Charlottesville before winter and exams take control. Maybe we should take a page from Edgar Allen Poe’s book and chill out before mystery ravens begin to haunt our psyche at night.

On second thought … all those examples can been seen as just another person relentlessly pursuing excellence in their field. Poe probably wrote and drank himself to death and Bueller would stop at nothing to have the perfect day off. I guess if that’s the case, we should just carry on. See you in Aldy.

—stephanie garcia

Language of Angels is an intriguing piece of experimental theater that’s rather hard to describe — think Final Destination, only with interpretive dance. The play follows the story of a group of nine teenagers linked together by the disappearance of their friend, Celie, somewhere in the labyrinthine tunnels of an underground cave in rural North Carolina. After she disappears, the others are killed off one by one, whether it be by suicide, accident or “natural” causes — and it is left to the audience to decide whether their deaths are caused by a curse, revenge from beyond the grave or something altogether stranger.

The plot is far more than a simple ghost story, and the characters are far more than throwaway roles from a teenage horror flick. Through a series of scenes and monologues, we hear the voices of the teenagers from the past, present and future — their faded memories, doubts and guilt told in rustic dialect that is strangely, brusquely poetic in its inarticulateness.

The play’s most notable feature, however, is not its plot, but its unique, surreal style that puts you in a trance and doesn’t let you go until the applause startles you out of it at the very end. The stage is minimalist, nearly bare — it consists of only two platforms: a ghostly, semi-transparent tunnel and a tree. The characters’ passionate, dialectic monologues are interspersed with silent, surreal scenes of dance and synchronized movement set to eerie music. Apparitions walk across the stage, angel feathers rain from the sky and supernatural elements are included so subtly that the audience is not sure what they have seen, only of the effect it has had on them. The style was inspired, according to the director’s notes, by Japanese Noh theater, and one would never think that rural small-town American slang — as western as it gets — could blend successfully with the lyricism of classical Eastern theater. But, somehow, the play’s odd dynamic seamlessly fuses colloquial storytelling and the poetic physical movement of Noh theater. The result, for better or worse, is something wholly original.

When the trance ended, I left the theater unsettled, but thoroughly unsatisfied. Although the answer to the mystery of the girl’s disappearance is eventually revealed, the audience soon gathers that this is not the point of the play — this is not Clue, and solving the mystery does not signal the end of the game. I left the theater perplexed, wanting to know more about each of the characters whose thoughts the audience was allowed only to briefly glimpse, wanting to know the explanation for all of the supernatural elements left ambiguous. Although frustrating, I believe this aspect was intentional, allowing the audience to identify with the characters’s confusion and to come to their own conclusions — and that’s one thing you can’t say about Final Destination.