the fantastic culture

I haven't posted much in the last couple days, and the next month may be spotty as well, for an order was placed at my job for 700 pairs of faerie wings. Which is an outstanding number, considering they are needed by mid-February. Even stranger is that they were ordered by a company doing a promotion for the new Barbie:Fairytopia movie. Now I am a bit leery of large corporations and the insiduous image standards public icons like Barbie represent, but this excess of faerieness seems to mark another step on the growing trend in the cultural imagination (as well as allows me to eat next month and pursue my other job as a circus performer). She may have just gotten a bit funny since her divorce with Ken, but I believe Barbie (and the Mattel Corporation) are hopping on the increasing attention our culture is paying to tales of fantasy and magic these days.

The Harry Potter novels had been out for a while, but it wasn't until the new Lord of the Rings movies got hyped that I first noticed how much the fantastic is coming back into the popular imagination. The fact that J. K. Rowling managed to write such powerful and well recieved children's stories about magic and independence still shocks me, because I don't consider our culture of religious dogma and ideological control one so accepting of those themes. But maybe that's changing...

For my own part I am glad this is so, because stories of fantasy and magic encourage people to think outside their fostered conceptions of reality and act beyond their wildest dreams; and that idea seems just as likely to change the world as a revolution, if not more so. Which is one of the only ways that I can justify contributing to the amount of 'useless' stuff in the world by working this job. That and it gives me a lot of free time to pursue my own interests while paying the bills.