There is a Fringe Festival on in Adelaide but I have not explored many of its earthly delights. It's been too hot, as a heat wave as enveloped Adelaide, and the temperatures have been in the high thirties all this week and will continue all next week. It's night time work only:

I did venture out to see to see the Northern Lights last night but I was ill-equiped to take photos. Others did though. I'm not really grounded in my own city.

The fringe is represented as a playful, alternative culture-- a network of diverse groups, both antagonistic and submerged, which reinvents the feast of foolsd￩tournement, in which the artists often appropriate tools of the "oppressor" and then resituate these tools in a disturbing and disorienting fashion. We participants are left with the lingering image of grotesque ugliness, whichhaunts us.This festival draws upon traditional folly, but appearing in a disenchanted post-modern society, the concept of The Fool is resurrected, challenging and satirizing oppressors in order to cause reflection on their positions, attitudes, and worldviews.

When we play The Fool, we are The Other, strangers who are in this world but not entirely of it. The "freedom of the fool" reminds us that in a moment of ecstasy we can sweep away the illusion of so much of what we endure. To counter the oppressive and ubiquitous corporate monoculture that is so prevalent in late capitalist society, culture jamming through performance may well be the only solution to facilitate critical reflection on our mode of life.