Powet Alphabet: H is for High Fidelity.

Since the alphabet is the building block of our language, the Powet Alphabet is the building block of what makes us geeks.

Top 5 reasons High Fidelity belongs in the Powet Alphabet:

5. The Book by Nick Hornby
I know we usually don’t celebrate books that can’t teach us how to be better dungeon masters or don’t have accompanying artwork of heroic acts, but this is a great novel. Originally published in 1995, its about a poor sad sack named Rob Fleming who owns a record store in London. He works with with 2 part time clerks who have nothing better to do and end up spending their entire day, every day, at the store. Rob’s girlfriend leaves him, and it sets him off on a spiral of reorganizing his life and considering past loves. Its funny modern literature littered with musical references, that pretty much any guy (or any girl who dated a guy) should be able to appreciate and relate to. It became a movie and a musical, but the book is where it starts.

4. Mix Tapes Are Awesome
In High Fidelity, as in life, the best way to impress someone is to spend a few hours carefully crafting track lists to fill up a 60-90 minute tape. This practice is sadly absent in modern day, with burned CDs being created in seconds from a play list of existing music on your computer. But Rob works a record store and used to be a DJ and nothing gets more thought and consideration than how 2 songs go together.

3. Jack Black
What truly separates the book from the movie are the performances. The setting was relocated to Chicago, but the dialogue was largely unchanged, and the story was the same. And while John Cusack, Tim Robbins, Catherine Zeta Jones, and others are memorable; Jack Black became the reason people loved the movie.
He was certainly in movies before this, like the time he got his hand blown up by Bruce Willis, but this was a true star making turn. The Washington Post called him “a bundle of verbally ferocious energy. Frankly, whenever he’s in the scene, he shoplifts this movie from Cusack.” It would be a little while before Tenacious D hit the mainsteam and Jack became a Kung Fu Panda, but this was a great introduction. The role of Barry seemed tailor made for Black, and he owned it as much as it owned him.

2. Loving Your Work
High Fidelity has a couple of great inspirational messages, which is why its such a favorite. Certainly the most effective is “Its not what you like, its what you are like that matters” as its the whole reason any of the characters get anywhere by the end. But at the opening of the story and at the end one thing remains true: love your work. Rob, Dick, and Barry didn’t have much luck with money or girls, but they got to go to work every day and do exactly what they’d spend their free time doing anyway.

1. Its About Geeks
… and even though it casts a harsh mirror onto ourselves, the fact that Hornby got our obsessive and eccentric personalities down so well, we can’t help but love him for it.