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Text by Iphgenia Baal written to accompany Midnight Candy at Arusha Gallery I asked him had he ever seen the faeries, and got the reply, 'Am I not annoyed with them?' The Celtic Twilight, W.B. Yeats What with things being as Apple Mac/Harry Potter as they are, it comes as no surprise that magic — like feminism/homosexuality/counterculture, and other previous unfathomables— has been gentrified. To conform magic with consumer values required a tidying, a softening re-appropriation. This was primarily achieved though a co-opting of magical vocabulary for bourgeois ends, e.g./i.e. to sell cars/ mortgages/art/coffee... Sprite is lemonade, Elf a petrol station, Nike no longer the winged goddess of victory! Versace has graphic-designed Medusa beyond recognition, as have Starfucks the double-tailed mermaid. Call me paranoid, but I’m gonna go with this blitzkrieg being a deliberate attempt on the part of our arch-overlords (you know who you are!) to make it harder, but at once more important than ever, for folk to occupy a position of radical fantasy. Harder but not impossible... for myriad occurrences — the dawn chorus, a supermoon, twilight, for example — prompt revellers to pause in their stumble, holiday-makers to miss folk back home and newborns to bristle with excitement. Us few wild children, alert and cautious, hip to how urgent and how tangible the occasion is.