Happily, since there’s a new car in my life, I am driving hither and dither, near and far once again. However, this new car only has a CD player, which means I am rummaging through my past, my big folder of mix cds and actual cds and music that can’t even be played anymore because it’s too scratched up.
I am learning some things.
For one: remember The Shins? They were awesome! They totally changed my life way before Zach Braff ever thought of it! (Funny enough, I wrote something about Oh, Inverted World for Popmatters during an end of the year thing and wrote - this album will seriously change your life…but what I meant was “it will change your life because it’s like a gateway drug for Beach Boys melody aficionados.” God, nearly ten-year-old earnest writing. It’s the worst.) And that’s because “Know Your Onion!” was on the official Gilmore Girls soundtrack in late 2001/2002. From that, I started listening to Oh Inverted World, saw James Mercer play the second album’s tracks solo in a tiny club, and generally relied on The Shins to soundtrack my fall. An ex of mine pointed out a fine fact - if Oh, Inverted World is an album, of a piece, all the songs melting into each other excellently, then Chutes Too Narrow avoids the sophomore slump by having Mercer write “his Kinks song, and his song that sounds like the Beach Boys,” etc. It’s a really strong theory! And it’s why the album works. And it was made in a vacuum, really.
But then there’s Wincing the Night Away. The album after you get “big,” particularly that weird sort of big that involves some movie namedropping you and your music as something that will “change your life.” And to be frank, I blame Garden State for ruining the Shins. Wincing the Night Away has sweet songs and a good sense of melody…and it means nothing. It’s whiny. Mercer always had a petulant streak in his songwriting - remember that track on Chutes Too Narrow where he’s like, sorry baby, I’m a musician, this bird has to fly? But on Wincing, it got self-righteous. Just start with the title! And then there’s that song directed at the Shin who left, who wasn’t in the band anymore. Mercer actually wrote, “I’M A VICTIM TO THE IMPACT OF THESE WORDS.” Seriously?
This AV Club article sums up how Zach Braff changed the Shins’ life quite nicely, I think. I remember the first time I heard Wincing the Night Away; it was playing in the bookstore after Liz Gilbert read from Eat, Pray, Love in paperback. How was I to know that’d be quite the symbiotic pairing? (Although I hope and suspect that Gilbert - a fantastic journalist, whose work put me on the path to being a writer - will bounce back and keep going post Eat, Pray, Love-stuff. But, god, Committed was such a self-conscious piece of work!)
I also rediscovered my guilty pleasure band, Cold War Kids. I had one song, “We Used to Vacation,” on a mix. It’s a song about ALCOHOLISM with self-consciously poetic and literary lyrics. I really liked the lurch and rumble of the drums and piano, the weird voice of the main guy. I never listened to the lyrics. There’s one point where he tries to shoehorn in “I’m an honest man/provide for me and mine/I SEND A CHECK TO TAX DEDUCTIBLE CHARITY ORGANIZATIONS/TWO WEEKS PAID VACATION/won’t heal the damage done.” The awkwardness is quite funny - they’re trying for a specific milieu, and I’m sure they’ve read the poets I love, but in no way does that line work in the context of the song! One thing I’ve always loved about Okkervil River is that Will Sheff can rattle off a poetic line with ease, but he knows when the song needs a short cliche to go with the music. Because the music can do the work, not the words.
Elisabeth Donnelly
I am a writer living in New York. @heydonnelly on Twitter. Get in touch at firstname[dot]lastname[at]gmail[dot]com.
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Rory Gilmore's Early-20s Crisis
I feel sick to my stomach to hear about the Boston Phoenix closing immediately - it’s terrible news. Like countless others, it’s one of the first places to publish and take a chance on me, and thanks to them I had adventures like Bowling with Franz Ferdinand and getting to peek behind the scenes during an MTV reality show. It was a great place to get started as a writer and so many talented people have come out of it - on tumblr, in the newspapers, everywhere you read words. Here’s a link to one slim piece that I wrote on Gilmore Girls’ season 6 premiere; basically how it was a proto-Girls-like “quarter life crisis.” Remember those, pre-Recession?
Oh, and I’m pretty sure if it wasn’t for a very early-on mention of Grizzly Bear upstairs at the Middle East where the writer (by Simon Vosick-Levinson, I think? I have a weird memory for this stuff) mentioned their “four-part harmony,” and if I didn’t go to their next show at TT the Bear’s with a notebook in my hand, I would’ve never met the guy in a band who invited me to the party where I met the guy who changed my life. So thanks again, Boston Phoenix!
ETA: An hour later, still gobsmacked. How sad! It hits a variety of different emotional points involving journalism and the ways that Boston’s changing as a city (everything alt and fun from high school/college is GONE now in a way that suggests total obliteration). And reading that someone like Susan Orlean got her start there, and that people could go from The Boston Phoenix onto bigger and better publications, was a big part of the reason I always wanted to write for them. Ugh. -
Feel like pop culture needs more Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight references; but that’s how I know we’re in a patriarchy. Hashtag rap with Gaslight shoutouts for 2013, ladies!
Brilliant idea of the day: Rap Genius needs to branch off and have Gilmore Girls Genius, where every reference per episode is explained. -
So obviously Lane Kim, goddess, got the shaft when Gilmore Girls got older, ending up with a dolt of a boy who wasn’t Adam Brody, and heading towards some townie future that was the exact opposite of golden girl Rory’s charmed life. It didn’t seem right or fair to the character, really.
One thing, however, where it felt like the writers dropped the ball was with the parallels between Lane and Lorelai: the yearning for freedom, the overbearing mother, etc. I would’ve liked to see a million more episodes with Lane and Lorelai where Lorelai serves as a mentor or something and Lane figures stuff out, instead of becoming a, what, 20 year old bride? So she can have sex? But then that one time sucks and she ends up with twins? (Gilmore Girls and sex is its own essay - but my conclusion is that Amy Sherman-Palladino is a joker, and sometimes she sacrifices character for goofy, funny weirdness probably stemming from network mandates: i.e., “I had sex, so now I don’t get to go to Harvard.”)
The other great Gilmore Girls in-joke that I only recently understood: actresses from Twin Peaks kept popping up as Luke-and-Lorelai roadblocks. Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn, the incomprehensible Anna), Shelly Johnson (Madchen Amick, pregnant Sherry), and Lucy’s sister (Kathleen Wilhoite, who played Luke’s sister Liz), irrepressible sirens, the lot of them; they kept getting in the way. Definitely a shout-out and kind of a hilarious joke - you imagine Lorelai getting obsessed with Twin Peaks when it originally aired, yes?
Both shows are all about diners, pie, and coffee, too. -
Remember when Oscar nominee Melissa McCarthy had a plotline on an episode of Gilmore Girls that involved her character, Sookie St. James, getting super mad at Norman Mailer?
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There’s a part of me that thinks Adam Brody is basically a star.
And - look at this speech! It’s incredible. It basically could’ve gone straight in a John Hughes film with ease. Good writing. -
The live action version of The Tick is now on Hulu. Patrick Warburton’s greatest performance ever. Comic gold. It may be my favorite superhero story, and I swear it’s etched onto my DNA - watching it, I realized that a giant project I was working on was very much Tick-inspired. Rushmore and Gilmore Girls, too. But they were all subconscious inspirations and that’s what made it spooky.
Internet research reveals some things: Colleen Atwood, Academy Award winning costume designer, made this iteration of The Tick’s costume. Ben Edlund calls the show “a superheroic portrait of genuine human lameness,” which is funny. (He works on Supernatural now, I guess?) After listening to Fresh Air’s replay of a 2002 interview with Tom Waits, I’m pretty convinced he is The Tick. But that is a whole other post. He at least talks in Tickisms. -
Gilmore Girls fans, let it be known that Luke’s Diner exists: Elmer’s Store, a general store/delicious breakfast joint, in Ashfield, MA, is nearly spooky. And totally delicious. I am going there this weekend and I can’t wait! -
Terrible lyrics
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Grant Lee Buffalo
“Mockingbirds”
Live on French television, 1994
I can’t help but feel that if Grant Lee Buffalo’s Mighty Joe Moon album came out in the past three years instead of 1994, it would’ve gone over much, much better. It is undoubtedly one of the great overlooked masterpieces of the era, released when it was either just a bit too late or ahead of its time. What a handsome voice, too — it has a heroic, “leading man” quality you don’t get too often these days.“Mockingbirds” was used really nicely in an early Gilmore Girls episode, too.
The town troubadour thing in Gilmore Girls is worth parsing out, I’d suppose - when the Palladinos left the show, they left it with a Very Special Episode that had Sonic Youth, Joe Pernice, Sparks, and other bands all guesting in a goofy bit. I think because the music picks on Gilmore Girls were very specific to the taste of the people making it, they’re going to age nicely. (Whereas Veronica Mars - with its “new hot bands on the WB label coming out COPORATE SYNERGY” music picks, is really just loaded with generic pop and nothing sticks.)
