Short Takes

TELEVISION

Return to Lynchville

HAS TV DOMESTICATED DAVID LYNCH? IT was looking bad for a while. After giving the medium a jolt with Twin Peaks, he let the series run too long on circuit overload. His next show, On the Air, was a heavy-handed TV satire just slightly to the left of WKRP in Cincinnati. But the old, weird Lynch is back in HOTEL ROOM, an HBO trilogy of stories, two of them directed by Lynch from scripts by Barry Gifford. A hooker (Glenne Headly) is caught in a psychological sparring match between a seedy customer and his mysterious friend; a husband (Crispin Glover) tries to rescue his bereaved wife from madness during a power blackout. The dialogue has the evocative spareness of Pinter, and Lynch's control of mood -- menacing, mesmerizing -- has never been more sure.

CINEMA

Fight to the Finnish

FINLAND'S MOST DISTINGUISHED WRITER-director is named Aki Kaurismaki. That statement is true and probably funny -- like his THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL, a comedy so dark that some viewers take it for tragedy. This sly parable starts with a brisk documentary on the transformation of a stick of wood in a box of matches, then spends the rest of its 70 minutes on the transformation of Iris (Kati Outinen), the stolid young woman on the assembly line, into a keg of emotional dynamite. Kaurismaki's almost-silent movie features a cast of rats -- mother, stepfather, brutal beau -- for whom rat poison may be the best antidote. And for U.S. viewers, Match Factory is a splendid introduction to a world-class (no joke) filmmaker, with a wit as dry as kindling.

BOOKS

Great Speculations

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF YOU COULD ride on a light beam? Albert Einstein posed himself that playful question; his answer was the special theory of relativity, which utterly changed how scientists see time and space. Writers have tried to explain relativity ever since, but Alan Lightman, who teaches physics and writing at M.I.T., has an entirely new approach. EINSTEIN'S DREAMS (Pantheon, $17) is a novel, an impressionistic look at thoughts the great physicist might have had while concocting his theory. We are privy to musings about worlds where time runs backward or branches into diverging streams. The writing, beautifully simple, conveys better than most texts the strangeness of Einstein's ideas.

MUSIC

Passion Play In Three Acts

EXTREME HAS FOUND A LARGER FOLlowing beyond the MTV set with acoustic rhythms and four-part harmonies that downplayed its heavy-metal heritage. Now that fans are hooked, though, the group is upping the dosage of metallica. Its latest album, III Sides to Every Story (A&M), not only reminds listeners that guitarist Nuno Bettencourt is a mean riffer but also harks back to the roots of rock opera, taking on epic proportions in the process. Divided into three acts, the album is full of social commentary denouncing war in cynical, hard- cutting tracks. One standout: the haunting Rest in Peace, which knocks flower-child cliches such as "Give peace a chance" and "Make love not war" as hypocritical euphemisms.

MUSIC

Female Fare

POLITICALLY, 1992 MAY HAVE BEEN THE Year of the Woman, but musically we're still in the era of the Dead White Male. Which is why the Bay Area-based WOMEN'S PHILHARMONIC, an all-female ensemble conducted by Jo Ann Falletta, is important in our collective consciousness-raising. On an eponymous new CD (Koch Classics), the group unearths a splendid Overture by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (Felix's sister). But the real pleasures are in the Concertino for Harp and Orchestra by Germaine Tailleferre, perhaps the least known of Les Six, and in two pieces by Lili Boulanger, Nadia's sister. Boulanger's D'un Soir Triste, 12 minutes of heartbreaking pathos, ought to be in every man's repertoire.