Category: Culture

I finished the second season of Gilmore Girls this weekend, and feel relatively well-qualified to comment: to discuss. Lots to talk about. (Does that mean there’ll be more of these lengthy posts? Maybe! Obsessive now.)

But mostly… I’m thinking the Nip/Tuck boys need to stand down, and our favorite morticians should get accustomed to being second-best. Lorelei Gilmore (elder) has got to be the most messed up, fascinating, conflicted character on my television screen. (Vic Mackey lost his edge somewhere in the third season.) What a total piece of work she is.

And I can’t figure out if it’s intentional on the part of the writers or not. On the face of it, she’s a simple sympathetic character. There’s a DVD extra on the second season set, all about translating the show into other languages. Amy Sherman-Palladino, the show’s creator, throws a cute little fit about people messing up her precious jokes. Too cute by half, really — I kind of wondered why, if it was such a big deal, she didn’t look into the situation herself? The answer, of course, is that she knew full well that the rapid-fire pop culture references weren’t going to translate exactly, but thought it would be fun to throw a cute little fit on the DVD extra anyhow. So we all know how committed she is to her funnies. Um. I digress.

Anyhow, in the course of the extra, she says that she thinks the show has international appeal because it’s about the universal topic of the pure love of a mother for her daughter. Possibly that’s another thing she’s just saying for effect, but I kinda thought she believed it. I think she thinks she’s writing a show about the best mother-daughter relationship ever, and just about anything Lorelei does is justifed by the purity of her love for Rory (aka Lorelei younger).

Lauren Graham gets it, though. I’d bet on it. You can see it in her eyes every time Lorelei has to decide whether or not to rant. She puts the deliberation right out there on her face, each time, right before Lorelei goes into Luke’s diner or the headmaster’s office at Chilton. Lorelei knows that she’s beautiful and impressive and she knows — this is the thing that lifts her above the rest of television’s conflicted characters — that she is smart. She knows she can out-talk people. She uses her brilliance as a weapon.

Which is not to say she doesn’t use her brain for things other than banter. You know how — maybe in college, maybe in high school — you used to just blaze through term papers at the last minute, because you were smart enough to get a B+ or an A- even if you wrote the paper at 2 AM the morning it was due? Yeah, you, there in the back. Lorelei doesn’t do that. She’s going to business school, she runs an inn more or less by herself: all very impressive.

When it comes to human interactions, though, it’s all emotion and flattery and flirtation. She doesn’t much try to talk to people; she doesn’t much try to explain things. Even when she’s dealing with Rory, her putative best friend, it’s either whimsical back and forth or “I am your mother and that’s all there is to it.”

It’s a natural and unsurprising outgrowth of her relationship with her parents. Her mother has never been upfront with her once that I’ve noticed; it’s all games and emotional appeals and putdowns. (Hm. Maybe the writers know what’s going on after all.) Lorelei has clearly learned that lesson and uses her skills ruthlessly when interacting with others.

So OK; how does this make her more interesting than other flawed characters?

Welp, I’ve watched two seasons and I haven’t actually seen many signs of, you know, growth. Rory’s growing up and changing. Lorelei’s parents, Emily and Richard, they’re learning things about themselves. Or anyhow Richard is. Lorelei hasn’t yet been forced to confront her issues, because she’s so damned smart and attractive that she can dance circles around anyone who might press the issue. “Mom, Luke’s in love with you.” “Oh, you’re just my daughter, who I am not currently thinking of as my best friend because I don’t want to hear that.” (Not a direct quote.)

It’s a weird setup for a dramatic show, this basic lack of change. Two years in and she’s still single, still working at the same job, having the same issues with her parents. It works because she’s the axis around which everyone else revolves — she’s the Bronze, if you will, or perhaps more accurately she’s the basic cosmological fact that the Slayer is threatened by vampires. I’m gonna wind up watching third season and everything! Will! Change forever! — I’m sure of it — but right now, man, she’s got really solid walls protecting her from any alterations.

I don’t know that I’d want to hang out with her. It’d be an interesting ride, but I can’t imagine trusting deep emotional interactions with someone like that.

Paul Thomas Anderson just announced his next movie. (Link will age out eventually.) It’ll be an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil, a book I know nothing about. I’m still excited. California, corruption, sprawling story — sounds perfect.

This is to blame.

She was:

• Working next to me
• A rare thing
• Fine as:
  • a bee’s wing
  • so fine a breath of air might blow her away
• A lost child
• Running wild
• Sleeping rough back on the Derby beat
• Even married once, to a man named Romany Brown

I was:

• Nineteen when I came to town
• In love with a laundry girl

We:

• Busked around the market square
• Picked fruit down in Kent
• Could tinker lamps and pots and knives wherever we went
• Was camping down the Gower
• Was drinking more in those days

They were:

• Burning babies
• Burning flags
• Calling it the Summer of Love
• Hawks and doves

She said:

• “As long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay”
• “You wouldn’t want me any other way”
• “Young man, oh can’t you see I’m not the factory kind”
• “If you don’t take me out of here I’ll surely lose my mind”
• “Oh man, you foolish man, it surely sounds like hell”
• “You might be lord of half the world, you’ll not own me as well”

I said:

• “We might settle down, get a few acres dug”
• “Fire burning in the hearth and babies on the rug”

If I could:

• Just taste all of her wildness now
• Hold her in my arms today

I wouldn’t:

• Want her any other way

A while ago, some of my friends were bandying around the idea that 1999 was the best year for movies in our generation. Others agree.

I had this entry going where I was trying to contextualize M.I.A. and talk about influences and stuff, but screw it, truth is I don’t know about about the British music scene to do that. So here’s a 17 meg QuickTime video. Square-wave synth beats — very video-game — with a melodic poppy rap going on over them, and a tribal chorus that takes over the song by the end. The imagery is pop violence; her father is (to some unspecified degree) connected with the Tamil Tigers. Careless appropriation of terrorism chic? Conscious rebranding? Damned if I know.

I sort of think conscious, though. The music’s too pop culture literate for this to be accidental. She name checks Jimi Hendrix and the Clash, and the whole thing is primitive sophisticate: raw talent filtered through limited resources. One Roland synth is all she needed, plus tri-continental influences and bam, there it is. There’s an interview somewhere, I can’t find it again, where she’s talking about her clothing and how in Sri Lanka people just make what they need. That seems to be to be both very true and a very conscious statement about her music slash image.

Insert obligatory Gibson reference here. Seriously, though, this is what he was talking about.

She has a Web site which is huge Flash that takes over your screen. But there’s more music there if you don’t feel like downloading 17 megs. Now, if only the big MP3 archive of her mixtape would come back…

Addendum: there’s a nifty Bollywood/Galang mashup here.

Sure, you can listen to a lot of interesting singles by way of MP3 blogs — but SXSW just published a BitTorrent torrent containing 2.6 gigs of music from bands which will be playing at this year’s SXSW. That’s 713 songs and almost two straight days of music.

Boston locals who want a copy of it without the 1+ day download period should get in touch with me.

If you are a mad Aimee Mann fan like myself, you will want to know two things: first, that she has made a concept album and it is available for pre-order beginning March 9th for delivery beginning May 3rd. March 9th is tomorrow, not today, no matter how often I check the date on my computer. Second, the first three songs on the album are available for streaming on her website.

“Dear John” is much like an Aimee Mann song, but it has more aggressive rock tendencies than most of her recent output. “King of the Jailhouse” is slower, near to lugubrious, very orchestrated. “Goodbye Caroline” is driven by a fairly meaty rhythm section, with drugs — and the guitar has a bit of fuzz to it, which is nice. I’m cautiously optimistic for the entire album, which is I suppose the intention of such a preview. I think she’s been in a bit of a rut lately, and I miss the sparse distortion of I’m With Stupid. The Forgotten Arm isn’t a return to that, but it’s also not placid. Is it May 3rd yet?