The scene in the movie where lightning hits the band's plane and guitarist Billy Crudup happily starts singing "Peggy Sue" is fine; so is the whole crew picking up "Tiny Dancer" on their bus. But the acting by heroes Patrick Fugit and Kate Hudson is excruciatingly self-conscious -- and so, in a way, is the script. That a midteen Cameron Crowe was able to chronicle the adventures of musicians so vividly that many of them refused to allow coverage by Rolling Stone unless Crowe was the writer is remarkable; the notion that Crowe did it by means of warts and all is absurd. Crowe's ability to convincingly portray rock stars as thoughtful, honest, fun-loving, caring, decent -- and nothing else -- had a great deal to do with changing the magazine he worked for from a journal that could throw the realities of Altamont in the faces of both its readers and its namesake to a magazine that would let cover boy Axl Rose pick his own writer and photographer. I don't doubt that Crowe wrote what he saw -- or, rather, that he wrote about what he found most real -- but there's more to reality than the belief that, as Anne Frank didn't put it, people are basically nice.

6) John Mellencamp, "Gambling Bar Room Blues," from "The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers -- A Tribute" (Egypt)

Top performances come from Dicky Betts, Iris DeMent and liner-notes essayist Bob Dylan (it's his label), but John Mellencamp is in another country, where the song is sung as if for the first time. To the inexhaustible melody of "St. James Infirmary," a road bum in a good mood revels in cynicism, in a belief life doesn't get any better than this even if anybody else would call this shit. With an amazingly loose, '20s street-blues arrangement and cracked fiddle from Miriam Sturm.

7) Tom Perrotta, "Joe College" (St. Martin's)

After the perfect-pitch "Election" (forget the bludgeoning movie version), this coming-of-age novel, set in 1982, is a trifle -- and no novelist, no matter what age he's coming of, can be allowed to present "If Ted and Nancy were a plausible couple, why not Polly and I?" as if it were English. Still, there are moments when the reflections of the working-class Jersey-Yalie narrator turn him into someone you'd like to meet: "I remember watching the debate between Reagan and Carter and feeling a huge abyss open up at my feet when the commentators began declaring Reagan the winner, even though he'd seemed to me to have performed a fairly plausible imitation of a twinkly-eyed village idiot. I wondered if it was Yale that had made me such a stranger to my own country or having smoked too much pot as a teenager. In any case, it was unnerving to find myself dwelling in a separate reality from the majority of my fellow citizens, my parents included. I was enough of a believer in democracy -- or maybe just safety in numbers -- to not be able to derive much comfort from the stubborn conviction that they were wrong and I was right."

8) Hooverphonic, "The Magnificent Tree" (Epic)

The insinuating, vaguely diseased moods that singer Lieske Sadonius brought this Belgian techno-exotica combo caught the nervousness that lay beneath the earliest Paris new wave movies. With Geike Arnaert in front, they've moved on to catch the very essence of the cheesiest "La Dolce Vita" knockoffs, which is to say Italian vacation films.

9) ® ™ ARK, "Biotaylorism" at "Picturing the Genetic Revolution" (as above)

A hilariously detailed, deadpan video heralding the application of Frederick Taylor's principles of modern industrial organization to bioengineering -- but ending with a brief prescription for sabotage, notably sneaking into toy stores and attaching warning labels to Barbie dolls regarding the cosmetic and genetic surgery those adopting a Barbie self-image might face somewhere down the line.

10) Speaking of "Yazoo Street Scandal," a correspondent writes:

"I was playing some music for my 9-year-old daughter the other day: 'Lo and Behold,' 'Yazoo Street Scandal,' a few other lo-fi favorites. 'These sound like they were recorded in somebody's house,' she said. 'Yes,' I told her. 'A pink house. On a tape recorder. In the basement.' She pondered this and said, 'This music sounds so good. Why does Britney Spears spend so much money getting everything perfect-sounding in the studio?'"

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