>Hoping to get a good lot of writing done for monstrous media/spectral subjects conference in July.
Myself and Stuart Nolan are presenting a paper and performing around the subject of bizarre magic.
Stuart has started a thread at Magic Cafe, but it seems to have moved on to talk about gothic youth culture, rather than the gothic.
The Thread can be found here:
http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/viewtopic.php?topic=318667&forum=14&17
Believe it or not this was my first post on Magic Cafe!
As a fellow presenter and performer at the said conference, I though I’d chip into the thread. (And as my first post)
I think it’s really important not to blur Gothic (youth?) Sub-culture with Gothic (literature based?) themes. Yes, you can argue for a cross-over, but the themes of excess /transgression/the sublime should be separated for the purposes of analysis.
The meta-language/meta-narrative dramaturgy of the bizarre performer is perhaps the most complex in magic, but it simultaneously and delightfully simple.
The construction of the performance text of the bizarre magician, in my mind has very little to do with the construction of the performance text of a band like the “Sisters of Mercy” (Who are the best and only true goth band ever
)
But inevitably going back to Goth (youth?) culture and ‘embracing the butcher’; this died as soon it became commercial, in much the same way as punk. So-called Goth bands borrow more freely from a wider circle of themes derived, in the main, from commercial sources.
Yours being delightfully ambiguous and circling my arguments,
Nik
