Pristine Angie’s Good Homemaker Adventures at www.d332.com

I almost don’t want to post again (ever) because the picture of Olivia Newton-John looks so good up there, but answering the call to evolve and forge ahead in every organism’s evolutionary duty, I will grudgingly put another entry.

Tribute, cover, remake, revival, retooled, retelling. A large selection of words to colorize what is essentially no selection.

The current arts and entertainment roster in mainstream culture is completely OUT OF ORIGINAL IDEAS.

An endless parade of thrice told songs, stories, sequeled/prequeled movies and plays, books litter our cultural wasteland.

There turned Xanadu into a Broadway play? Grease, I can almost see, as it was one of the highest grossing musical films. But Xanadu? Is there no shame? Surely Waterworld: The Musical cannot be far behind. Now you line up the mind-boggling list of remakes in pop radio (usually a flat, characterless, female voice (undoubtedly eye-candy) doing anything from Katrina & the Waves’ Walking On Sunshine (Aly and AJ) to American Pie (American deserter Madonna)).

Or in the case of trickle-down mediocrity, there’s Racey’s Kitty, that was remade by Toni Basil into Mickey, then parodied by Weird Al in Rickey, before being covered by Lolly, then again by B*Witched.

No matter how badly you want to laugh at the eighties (and I laughed/cried pretty hard about those big shoulder pads, horrendous makeup, and big hair), at least they had original songs.

I’ve heard many theories as to why there’s such a dearth of original ideas in the arts. They range from extreme (”all the creative minds have died of AIDS, and the straight people don’t know who to steal from any more”) to a business proposition (royalties based incentives). I’m of the opinion that the latter is pretty accurate. I have known people who do nothing but bid, buy, and resell a catalog belonging to a songwriter, publisher, or record label. Once someone purchases the publishing rights, they can remake as many versions as they want without paying anymore fees to the creator of the work. When these catalogs get purchased by a entertainment group, they can relicense the song and collect 100% royalties.

And another artist, who had original ideas, is once again, left to drive a taxicab to fend for him or herself.

So I suggest this, if you absolutely must have a remake. Download it. The folks who remake a piece of work may be under pressured by the record label to include a viable proven song in their album to support their other original songs, but it’s time that consumers make a stance and show they won’t stand for mediocrity. Save your money to go out on a limb and explore new artists with new original ideas. Make the slightest difference by showing your willingness purchase original new music and support original new movies with new storylines.

How else can art evolve if we don’t forge ahead and leave remake wasteland to a quick effortless extinction?

ONJ in wistful ribbons and ruffles in Xanadu.
Someone once told me that when she took a ride on a hipster friend’s car, she snuck a peak into his glove compartment. Underneath the piles of awesome rap cd’s and cool remakes, was a lone ELO cassette.That story got me thinking about one of the major figures of my childhood: Olivia Newton-John. I’m probably one of the four people left online who unashamedly admit my love of Olivia Newton-John films and Electric Light Orchestra. Like the films of my beloved actress, Audrey Hepburn, ONJ films have a transformation motif in them.

Sandy Olsson was a prim-and-proper high school girl (ONJ was thirty when she pulled this off - fantastic!) in Grease. By the end of the movie, she’s a hot rod greaser chick (which I have only heard about as I usually take to my heels before the amusement park finale begins). The teased hair, spandex panted sl**ty girl scares me to this day, frankly. I still think Grease would have been so much more interesting if Sandy remained her squeaky clean self instead of caving into Travolta’s needs.

All my gay and hetero friends adore the prim Sandy in Grease.I know of only one person who likes the scary Sandy.

When it comes to ONJ films, my heart belongs to Xanadu. Under the expert guidance of ELO’s Jeff Lynne, who forecasted mash-ups and 90s NYC avant-garde Zorn eccleticism in the soundtrack of Xanadu, the movie also contains the most wistful ELO song: I’m Alive. What can you say about a band composed of “intimidating pale white British men with gigantic afros playing electric violins and cellos while laser beams shoot all over the stage?” (The best description of ELO, furnished by a previous friend of mine).

I remembered watching Xanadu dreamy-eyed- cuddled up with all my stuff animals- in one of those gigantic Laserdisc players my mom bought me, while my classmates were out about terrorizing the town listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd. (Did I even spell that right?)

Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu and my childhood Presbyterian pastor’s daughter (the little sister of my piano teacher) were the two biggest influence on my seminal conception of what it meant to be a girl: Sweet, adorable, kind-hearted, and full of ribbons and ruffles. That is one thing I’ll always remember when I think about Kira in Xanadu. ONJ looked so adorable in her pretty ribbons and rollerskates (she pulled this off at 32!) singing “Suddenly” together with Cliff Richard.

It gives me hope to think that I too, won’t feel out of place, being in my thirties, wearing ribbons, being prim, sweet, kind-hearted, and adorable (well… trying anyway).

I’ve been thinking about this fascinating guy George Plimpton lately. It seems there are so many caricatures of obnoxious Americans, the ones who define the great American can-do spirit are all but overshadowed. (I’m not sure it’s any coincidence that the clouds are usually cast by the sarcastic cynical Brits with their can’t-do superiority complex.)

George Plimpton certainly can and did do much in his lifetime. He wrote for literary magazines, books, articles, went to school on both sides of the pond, dabbled in boxing, gambling, golf, football, hockey, was a stand up comedian, acted in movies and television, set off fireworks, hosted Mousterpiece theatre and Mattel commercials.

Plimpton pulls all this off with a quiet style that makes me honestly proud to be part of a country that sprung Kerouac, Whitman, and CarrotTop.

I recently saw him in a short interview about Edie Sedgwick in Ciao Manhattan. A friend of the Sedgwick family (which is certainly a topic many mudslinging gossipers will not be able to resist), Plimpton manages to tackle Edie, her family and Warhol without saying one bad word. What panache!

Thinking about George Plimpton also made me think about evolution. Working among college graduates, I often hear about a degree not only as an achievement, but as a step up in the evolutionary ladder (”my parents didn’t attend college”).

I do wonder why people often only consider institutional learning and book smarts a step up from street knowledge. I have never to date heard someone say “my dad held three Ph’Ds, but I can manually snake a sewage main from the trap without chipping a nail.” Or “My mom was a clinical psychologist who studied under Jung, but she never made falafels in Marrakesh for a year and took board as pay.”

Who decided that book smarts and institutional learning is the ultimate achievement? I’ve always thought the whole point of education was the joy of learning, not merely learning what was respectable. If we all look to institutional learning as the only pillar of wisdom, how do we communicate and survive when we have to cross all the dividing lines in our society?

I asked myself this when I went to a garage last week and the throngs of intelligentsia stood around looking absolutely helpless as the mechanic exercised his turn at literary greatness, improvising a litany of problems with their Volkswagons as his audience of evolved protozoa held an expression about as complex as a New York cabbie calculating Quantum physics.