I went to see Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen yesterday. Yes, yes, I know. Now stop giggling and read.

Our main character, Lola, is a pugnacious little fifteen-year-old with a penchant for melodrama (note the title) and a lust for acting. Also, updating classic plays to suit modern style is an affrontery to her dramatic self-respect. Needless to say, she jumps at the opportunity to act in a chic, New York Pygmalion, anyway.

This reminded me of my recent trip to see Jesus Christ Superstar, which, instead of portraying Jesus appropiately as a droopy-eyed Flower Child touting peace and love, we got a khaki-panted urban rebel. From hippie to yuppie, along with storm-trooper Jews sporting swishing leather capes. Did the musical gain anything from this “hip” reskinning? No. Did it lose anything? Yes: how about relevance?

I cannot understand this obsession with rereleasing classic theatre and cinema with a sleek guise that’s apparently more appealing to narrow-minded Gen Yers.

It’s all over the place. There’s a new movie coming out soon called 13, Going on 30. The synopsis? Think Big, but with a female. Mona Lisa Smile? Dead Poets Society, but with a female.

The Prince and I? Coming to America, except, you know, not funny.

The problem is, I’m sure these movies are all very well written, and I’m sure (for the most part) that the actors do a fine job. The problem arises because there’s no originality, nothing we haven’t seen before. All our new cinema emerges from market-tested formulas, tweaked to appeal to a demographic not tapped by the last incarnation of that particular script.

It’s almost as bad as Ted Turner colourising old black & white films. The bastard.

Mmmm…. Logitech speakers….. my old Creative Labs speakers gave up the ghost last week, so I ordered the 6-piece Logitech Z-640. Currently, I’m listening to a mix of Sarah McLachlan, The Mars Volta, and a band I just recently discovered called Sleeping at Last (from Wheaton, Illinois, even). In my mind, they fall halfway between Radiohead and Pinneapple Thief. They pull it off well, though.

Unfortunately, while I was installing them, my optical mouse happened to break. It was a cheap thing, anyway. My father got it and a keyboard to match my Thermaltake case for Christmas. I thought they’d be good equipment, but the keyboard was full of useless buttons (mostly for Microsoft Office Suite, but I use OpenOffice), and was arranged in a way that was not at all conducive to gaming. So I’m using some plain black keyboard (I think it might be a Compaq) that works well. Now, of course, my mouse broke, so I’m back to using a plain black Belkin roll-ball. *sigh*

Allison has tomorrow off (but I don’t), so she was free to hang out today. We ended up taking her dumb (I use the term affectionately) dog for a walk (Look! Poop! It’s d—- hey! more poop!), drove to Kohl’s to buy socks they didn’t have, and ate dinner at Panera Bread (I also needed to get my sister a gift card), and cuddled while watching Law and Order.

I need to be working on my accounting homework. Also something for an essay on quantum physics. Instead, I think I’ll make something to eat. First things first, after all.

I’m a liberal idiot. Yes, that’s right. My mother impressed this upon me this morning as we were arguing about gay marriages. John Kerry came on the news and was speaking about the issue. John Kerry, for those of you who don’t know, is not for gay marriage, but believes that the issue should be left up to the states. Essentially, however, any one state legally granting gay marriages essentially forces the others to recognize said matrimony. Regardless, Kerry’s about as much of a friend in high places as homosexuals have. My mother’s response to Kerry any time he comes on TV (even when she can’t hear what he’s saying) is “Shut up, Kerry.” I imagine this alone is almost enough to make him stop compaigning.

My mother’s masterful political rhetoric more or less solidifies the conclusion I had already drawn: she knows little to nothing about politics. She likes George Bush because he’s a Republican (and she, like her parents before her, is a die-hard supporter of the G.O.P.) and he’s a dutiful Christian (ditto), and his gross misconduct following the attacks on the World Trade Building apparently played to her easy nationalism. Moreover, Bush is trying to introduce more and more religion into secular government, which is fine by her. Nevermind that theocracies in the past have been utter failures. What we need is some is some God in our government! [sic]

She said that gay marriage should be illegal because it’s a sin. Also that it’s tantamount to abortion (which, remember, is out and out murder in her mind). Yes, you read that right: two adults of the same gender engaging in a private consensual relationship is on par with infanticide.

At that point, I realised that this was not a fight worth having.

What is particularly saddening about all this is that my heresy is quite grievous to my mother, who, no matter how often I voice these opinions, is taken completely off-guard by the idea that her son would break away from his parents’ beliefs and be a…. liberal. Shh! Don’t tell anyone!

The damnedest thing is, I can’t otherwise figure out why she likes Bush. After all, his tax cuts left us choking on dust, his economy is hurting her three children entering or soon-to-be entering the job market, his environmental plan will give said children hell, and given that she was valedictorian of damn near everything, his stuperous ignorance should be a severe turn-off. But no. In her middle years, my mother has softened, pampered by the luxury of remoteness from things that affect her. What does she care about a war in Iraq, or civil rights (she’s kind of a bigot), or anything particularly topical? She just votes Partisan and goes to church, and anything that doesn’t fall in to said categorisation must not be particularly important.

I can only hope, when I am her age, that I’m not afflicted with the same kind of languor. I may be dispassionate, but I’m also concerned about what the crazy world is going to do within my lifetime. We don’t need any more presidents straight out of the 1950s (“Everybody’s out to get us, there’s nothing wrong with the environment, and family life that doesn’t resemble Leave It To Beaver is scandalous”), especially greedy corporate bastards like George “W is for Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth” Bush.

My mother watched Gladiator for the first time recently. I had to laugh when I saw her during the final battle, hunched over on the couch, wrapped up into herself, disturbed to the point of discomfort. NBC had excised the part where Russell Crowe was stabbed in the kidney before the final bout, so she was confused as to why he was staggering around like a drunkard. When I informed her, she assumed an expression of abject horror, even moreso when I clued her in to the fact that he dies at the end.. At that point, she claimed resolutely that she didn’t want to watch the end (she did, anyway).

She made a comment to the effect that people shouldn’t make movies that are so sad and disturbing. This is a woman who could barely sit through the first 15 minutes of The Mask of Zorro (“Is the baby going to be alright? What’s going to happen?” *fidget fidget*). On their 20th anniversary, she and my father saw Forrest Gump and they had to go straight home (rather than to dinner) afterwards because she was bawling like a colicky baby. In short, she likes her movies fluffy, inspirational, and nonconfrontational. To her, cinema is a form of entertainment, rather than the artistic medium that it really is. Outside of Hollywood, anyway. That she ever made it through Schindler’s List is a monument not so much to her resolve but her morbid curiosity.

No, I wouldn’t call Gladiator a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I found it a wooden, plodding chore to watch. Crowe’s acting (as always) was about as expressive and convincing as a grade school play. But that’s beyond the point.

Several months ago, I scanned in a rather ponderous article for a philosophy professor, which praised tragedies to the sky. It was about six times too long, but its basic gist was that tragedies force readers into inspiration and revelation, that they are the supreme art form.

Still, why subject ourselves willfully to despair? Is that the only way to learn the lessons inherent to loss and suffering? I say yes. Discomfort is a sign of growth. As I’ve written of such stories as “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” tragic tales expect readers to consult their own tables of values, and, if they don’t exist, (re)create them.

Some people don’t like to do this. My mother doesn’t. In her mind, religion has given her the only morals she will ever need, and she severely dislikes it being challenged. My brother used to confront her about church and Christianity, and she would always become flustered, either admitting that she couldn’t answer the questions, or blathering on about something with no pertinence to the conversation.

People in general dislike being challenged. Myself, I’m philopolemic— I love to argue, and general, I argue so well that my ideas aren’t critically threatened, but that has happened in the past. In fact, prompted my current agnosticism (to be technical). It wasn’t pleasant.

Truth, however, is a bullet sloughing off its sugar, traveling inexorably into the base of the brain. Recently, I ranted and raved about the gay-marriage furor in California. I believe that, sooner or later, the silly twits that comprise the conservative opposition in this country will have their beliefs challenged to the point where they must accept progression, distasteful though it may be to them.

Our history has proved time and time again that the advancement of humanism continues unimpeded, from women’s suffrage to the civil rights of blacks (included, as Gavin Newsom points out, the fight for interracial marriages circa mid-century). In fact, the only group that we have fucked over and continue to fuck over is the American Indian, which in part has to do with the fact that the demographic has dwindled so much that marginalising it is a matter of passive ignorance over active persecution.

I am a cynic. I will defame human beings until the day I die, but I do believe that we have some capacity for humanism and passionate logic. Our bullet, in more ways than one, will continue inexorably until we either accept or destroy ourselves.

[If you're wondering why I've titled this blog "Goatsong," it's because the word "tragedy" is a Greek words which means, literally, goatsong. They sacrificed a goat when they would stage these tragedies in their theatres.]