Editor's Picks

ARTS AND CULTURE

Faeriecon

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Oct. 8, 2008

Pixie mix: Play dress up at Faeriecon this weekend.

� WHIM and Bear it

Faeriecon

Fri., Oct. 10-Sun., Oct. 12. $12-$88. Pennsylvania Convention Center, 11th and Arch sts. 215.785.3979. www.faeriecon.com

It's possible to see modern America as a patchwork of overlapping medieval fantasy cults. The medieval fayre-ists, the Dungeons and Dragonistas and--of course--the thousand of twunts who run around the countryside every weekend, roaring cod-Shakespearean gibberish and hitting one another in the helmet with foam rubber-covered edged weapons. And it's tempting to see this retreat into a sanitized Disney version of the grim old days (whither smallpox, tapeworms and the plague?) as a puerile rejection of all aspects of modernism, including democracy. Where then to fit the faerie fantasists who for a second year have settled on our fair city? Are they some strange new age deviation from mainstream mock-medievalism? Or are they just a bunch of folks who get their rocks off by donning wings and posh frocks and acting out the hallucinatory fantasies of ancient European peasants who wolfed the wrong mushrooms? Every artist, writer, sociologist and anthropologist in Philly should be in attendance studying these faerie fans, for--by their very existence--they're telling us something profound about the state of modern America. (Steven Wells)