7) "Lesley Gore: It's Her Party," on "Biography" (A&E, Dec. 7)

When I tried to tell people how good this program was the day after it ran, everyone I spoke with had already seen it, sometime during the night. "I could have gone back to school," says the pre-Beatles hitmaker (four straight in the top five in 1963), "and become a lawyer or a doctor" -- that's not how the rock 'n' roll story goes, and this is a rock 'n' roll story. Quincy Jones is part of it, from "It's My Party," the No. 1 first record, to today, speaking as if this nice Jewish girl from Tenafly, N.J., is his god-daughter. The nice Jewish girl who could have become a lawyer gets cheated out of all her royalties. The girl who couldn't be stopped becomes a woman no one wants to hear. The edge in her voice -- no metaphor, but a physical grate, something that scratches at the listener -- and the real misery she put into high-school lyrics turn a teenage girl into Miss Lonelyhearts, as people with problems that cannot be solved write her for help. You can see it all in her face, now, and you break when she tells her sweetest, most hurtful story: that when her "You Don't Own Me" was used in the 1996 "First Wives Club," Gore would time her daily walks so she could pass by a theater where the movie was playing, so she could hear people singing the song as they came out.

8) "Vanilla Sky," directed by Cameron Crowe (Dreamworks/Paramount)

What's most creepy about the scene where a hologram of John Coltrane plays at Tom Cruise's birthday party -- before the morally vacuous hero is sent on his journey of discovery -- is that you suspect whoever came up with the idea was wondering if he could afford something like that for his own birthday party. And now he can.

9) "There Is No Eye: Music for Photographs -- Recordings of Musicians Photographed by John Cohen" (Smithsonian Folkways)

I shouldn't write about this, because I wrote the introduction to Cohen's photo collection, which carries the same title. But nobody else is. There is a lot here that shouldn't get lost -- but what, before now, was barely found is the great folklorist Alan Lomax's 1967 recording of "Love My Darling-O." Lomax's earlier field recording of the tune, as sung by a prisoner named James "Ironhead" Baker, is described as a "Negro version of a Scots ballad"; in Lomax's hands it's a dangerous song about adultery sung to the tune of "Which Side Are You On?" Lomax is partly Burl Ives here, part Jean Ritchie; his tone is plummy. But he lets the song take him, until he is as much the sort of coal miner or holiness church member he himself would record as he is a member of a collegiate folk trio with matching madras shirts. The mystery of his performance, its timelessness and its depth, is precisely its inauthenticity.

10) Overheard in a hospital waiting room (Palo Alto, Calif., Dec. 4)

"As a former Deadhead -- " "Is there really such a thing as a former Deadhead? Shouldn't it be recovering Deadhead?"

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