Say something new, I dares ya

Is originality dead? This is my premise for my first Zachrilege in a while. I can't even spell the name of my own blog so that might need to be dealt with.

I went to a bookstore recently, and what I noticed besides that there are a lot of books out there is an interesting trend in popular culture. We are treading over familiar territory. There are metric tons of vampire fiction out there. Is this a new idea? I admit that the writers of this stuff can come up with new wrinkles on the subject, but there's a lot of standing on the shoulders of giants, or just a lot of normal-sized people.

And don't get me started on movies. We just survived a summer in which nearly every movie was a remake or a sequel. Even bad movies get sequels now. And bad sequels, like Sex and the City 2, will probably get even more bad sequels. I was disappointed that the remake of Red Dawn didn't come out. Maybe it did and I just didn't notice.
My favorite music download of the year is "Strange Arrangement" by Mayer Hawthorne. It's a throwback that sounds like it was recorded in Detroit in 1963. As a derivative, it's a pretty good one.

And we finish with this weekend's Restoring Honor rally in Washington. Having it on the anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech made it kind of a super derivative. Say what you want about the Beckster, but if you can get a really big football stadium full of people to watch you speak, you're doing something right. Let's not pretend that he's saying anything dramatic or new.

Perhaps that's the key to this seen-this, done-that popular culture. The Emmy winner for best dramatic series is Mad Men, and that's a big time throwback show. There's nostalgia and familiarity wrapped into one. We have an instant emotional attachment to the familiar. It keeps us coming back for more.

This doesn't give me warm fuzzies about the manuscript I'm working on. That's right. I'm crafting what could become a novel some day. There is almost zero nostalgia involved. It's about a year in the life of a fantasy football league. I'll be posting regularly on my progress. I'm already 100+ pages in, and I would say that at least 20 are good.