An Inferno for the 21st Century

We’re all familiar with Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy — at least insofar as we know he wrote it. Many of us at least know the first few lines: “When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray.”

Most of us (including me, until recently) are not familiar with Sandow Birk, a Californian artist known for a series of paintings in which Los Angeles and San Francisco go to war against one another, and a collection of idyllic landscapes — of 33 state prisons.

A few years ago, Birk partnered up with writer Marcus Sanders to translate the Divine Comedy into modern language, changing the Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven of Dante’s day into a reflection of urban life. Here’s how those same first few lines read, for example: “About halfway through the course of my pathetic life, I woke up and found myself in a stupor in some dark, unfamiliar place. I’m not sure how I ended up there — I guess I had taken a few wrong turns.”

Since Birk and Sanders completed their version of the trilogy, they decided to take it a step further — postmodern puppet theatre.

If that’s not the coolest thing you’ve seen already, then know that Scott Adsit from 30 Rock does some of the voices, and the head puppeteer is Beakman himself, Paul Zaloom.

They’ve taken it along the festival circuit, but I don’t think it’s coming for South by Southwest. On the bright side, it seems that a DVD release is imminent. Here’s hoping.