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By Root 1259 0

off in an agony of euphoria. Rock shows took on the attributes of ancient and medieval community festivals. The music is emotional and dramatic. People take drugs. There are outfits to wear. There is darkness and spooky lights. There is often reference to death. Performers and spectators alike wear religious signs. There is opportunity for primal scream, trance, or sexual interaction. There is imagery of devils and of flames. Individual fans hold up a flame.3 As in the ancient world, it is mostly the women who scream, but anyone may dance alone or with others, as wild as they want. At goth shows, anyone may arrive wearing makeup and in costume; at all shows people wear garments naming favorite performers. Many concertgoers will sit still and watch the show, but many will move a bit, yell song titles, and show enthusiasm when they hear a song they recognize. Opera also has mythic stories, disguise, darkness, violence, sex, and costumes, but most of it is onstage.

Sometimes television fandom reaches levels of festival experience. The TV show Star Trek ran from 1966 to 1969. It was a fantasy adventure about space exploration, set in the future, but marked by the “sixties” idealism of its moment, and the secular humanism of its founder, Gene Roddenberry. Its fans, often called Trekkies, gather at conventions, where they dress up in character costumes from all over the universe. Denise Crosby’s Lieutenant Tasha Yar was one of the original crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first remake of the classic show. Crosby left before the end of the first season, but she made an impression on viewers. Yar was a well-developed character: a women in a traditionally male job, head of security, she was short-haired and curt. She had gotten that way because she had grown up in a devastated place, scavenging for food and dodging rape gangs. Also, in her few episodes, Yar had sex with Data, an android. Soon after, Crosby’s character was killed off. It is a much more mythic and memorable backstory and narrative arc than most of the show’s characters have, and fans grew attached to Yar, especially after she was dead. When Crosby first appeared at a Star Trek convention, the admiring response surprised her. She had not realized that she (the actress and the character) had become a legendary figure in a strange midsize polis.

Crosby has since produced and hosted two terrific documentaries on the subject, Trekkies and Trekkies II. They offer keen evidence of how people negotiate our fractured, overpopulated, commercialized culture. Star Trek conventions create something like an Old World village, thick with midsize associations and personal interactions. There are huge merchandise rooms where people exchange Trekkie products and banter about them. Strolling the convention hall, they see friends, acquaintances, and group heroes such as “Commander Bobbie,” who made the national news for wearing her Star Trek uniform while she sat on a real-world courthouse jury. There are memorabilia auctions, where you get to show people what you like. Publicly handing over fourteen hundred dollars for a Klingon forehead prosthetic worn on the show vividly enacts the group’s values. It is roundly applauded. The highlights of the Star Trek conventions, of course, are the lectures and interactions with the show’s stars. Many of them have individual fan bases. There are Spinerfems: women who adore the actor Brent Spiner, who played Data (a character who is sexual, but explicitly not a man), a very nonthreatening imaginary boyfriend to choose. Then the fans publish their own scripts and stories, especially now, on the Web. There are thousands of such fanzines. In them, there is much reference to Klingon fighting sex, and also much reference to the sex between Data and Yar. The show did not harbor much genuine darkness. What darkness exists is mostly cosmopolitan pain: Spock’s Vulcan/ human origins, Deanna Troi’s Betazoid/human origins, and Worf’s Klingon biology and human upbringing. There is no shadowy worry of meaninglessness, and little real angst over our