Happy birthday, damurxac :P

[thanate]

So, in honor of my only sibling's birthday (said sibling, who, one might note has completely failed to respond to either of the e-mails I have sent him regarding my impending wedding-- not that this is at all surprising, as he makes rather a habit of being oblivious to things that don't directly interest or concern him) I went to work, glued lovely broken things back together, held a light while they were photographed, and then took them apart and put them away again.

And then, as I was driving home I noticed a sign for a theatrical production at my old high school. It had a marvelous title: "The Rimers of Eldrich" which I was apparently not quite capable of resisting (or at least, it was that or have no excuse at all for not going to fencing again...) and I was terribly disappointed. With a title like that, it could have been anything, but it was another of those edgy dramas about a derelict midwestern town full of discontented people who back each other into bad situations. And ok, they're high school drama students, but *why* is modern drama all supposed to be about challenging our comfort zones?

Maybe this is just me. But I have a thing about uncomfortable, theme-driven fiction. There's a whole genre of anti-soviet/communist/cold war mentality/etc fiction-- everything from Animal Farm to Ayn Rand to just about all the early sci-fi I've ever read. Not that I've read much early sci-fi, because I really hate the message. I needed to hear it roughly twice for everything else that (in my head) falls into the same category to become trite, overdone, and a complete waste of my time. (For the record, Fahrenheit 451 was the only one of these I thought worth reading. And I'm totally watching the iPod craze of seashell people and waiting for them to start playing Denham's Dentrifice or whatever it was on the metro...)

"Modern Drama" (<--imagine 1950s radio announcer voice here) feels the same way to me. There is some stylistic common thread between, say, "12 Angry Men", "Death of a Salesman" and "Angels in America" that prevents me from seeing any of them, or new similar things, as being either new or inspiring. There's the occasional scene or character that's pretty cool, but in general I'm not at all interested. If I want bad news, I can listen to the radio; I don't need to pay to go see someone else's invented wasted lives. It's stylistic copying of a style I don't appreciate; I fail to understand the interest in reveling in the ghastliness of the mundane.

Comments

[the-impassive.livejournal.com]

My own fiction is dystopian satire couched in horror, I think. Disgust and disappointment inspires me to write. Yet films like "Kids" and "Requiem for a Dream" strike me as exploitative and voyeuristic, giving audiences the frisson of seeing folks fucking everything up. I HATE those movies. I also hate "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

And I'm totally aware of the hypocrisy, there.

I'd have gone to that play, too, and been disappointed.

[laeticiav.livejournal.com]

See, the title of the play made me think of the Philip K. Dick novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and some riff on that set in a midwestern town could -- just possibly -- be totally insanely brilliant. I'm all independent theatred out after some years spent in Austin going to too many plays to be supportive of friends. To be fair, two of them were good. (Then there was the one about a woman who posed as a young girl online to trap creepy web pedophiles and ended up meeting one of her correspondents at the mall to confront him and then resigned herself to developing a romance with him. Much of the dialogue was sung in webspeak (imagine lol etc. sung). The redeeming feature of this depressing spectacle was two people in turtle suits demonstrating sweet slow turtle lovemaking. In retrospect it does sound better than the play you went to.)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

OMG *turtle* suits? LOLZ!!!

sorry, couldn't resist. I fear that I got put off Philip K Dick after Do Androids Dream... which fell heavily into the above shove-a-moral-down-your-throat sci fi category, and I only read because a) I quite liked what they did with the movie, and b) a friend of mine who doesn't read at all (who does that?) had actually liked the movie so much he read the book and liked it, too.

The play I went to was well-constructed, and quite well acted; I just didn't like it. Although there was a fantastic semi-prescient old lady who had poetic bits about how the old mining town was falling to pieces, and how all her little pets died and she planted them in her garden and decorated their graves with flowers (when she remembered) and then the flowers died, and she felt like she ought to bury them, too.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm just the ultimate escapist reader/writer... I've got no problem with underlying thematic ideas, but if I'm reading a story, it's because I want a good story and not to be lectured at. And to me a good story means characters I like and not crippling them entirely by the end. And with my bad habit of saying, "yeah, yeah, I've seen that already; it's so trite," what it boils down to is that I read mainly fantasy and pre-20th century historical fiction, and get sick of things like vampire novels really quickly. Oh well. :/