High Fidelity (Ep 2.21)

After two extremely depressing books, it was actually a welcome relief to get my hands on a laugh-out-loud (albeit in a sarcastic, subtle British way) humour.

Am sure a lot of us have read it/watched the movie. Or watched the movie based on Nick Hornby's other book, About a Boy. Similar stuff.

Rory goes to see Jess in New York after missing Lorelai's graduation day in, well, Lorelai's Graduation Day. Jess shows no surprise at all in seeing Rory there (I still wonder why) and proceeds to take her to a record store which he claims to be "right out of High Fidelity".

The book is the story of a record owner, who runs the above-said record store in Holloway, London, and his love life (which, in short, is miserable). The Championship Vinyl is apparently a store that sells punk, blues, R&B, a bit of ska, indie stuff, 60s pop and everything else (the story is from 1995). It exists, to quote Hornby, "because of the people who make a special effort to shop here Saturdays - young men, always young men, with John Lennon specs and leather jackets and armfuls of square carrier bags… young men who seem to spend a disproportionate amount of their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and 'ORIGINAL, NOT RE-RELEASED' underlined Frank Zappa albums".

I don't think I got a visual strong enough for my liking at this point - so I cheated by watching the movie which was conveniently playing on Sky Movies. HD. And that made me understood what Jess was talking about - it almost looked like an exact replica of the record store set from Gilmore Girls. Dirty and dingy, with rows and rows of record stacks (from the 60s and 70s I imagine). Jess was obviously referring to the movie High Fidelity and not the book one, for a change! The movie was a great late 90s reminiscence movie as well, from the world of mix tapes, bulky CD players and no mobile phones. I just hated the fact that they changed the setting to Chicago for the movie, destroying all its essence, in my opinion.