(1) Worst News of the Month: crime leaders kray twins schemed to take over as the beatles’ managers (Entertainment Daily, June 21). The scheme the Krays supposedly hatched was simple: instead of cutting up Brian Epstein with swords, threaten to expose him as homosexual—never mind that Ronnie Kray was gay himself. You can imagine that John Lennon might have found the prospect of being managed by the scariest people in London cool beyond cool—for about five minutes.

(2) Ettes, Do You Want Power (Take Root). With guitarist Coco Hames in front, drummer Poni Silver in back, and bassist Jem Cohen in the middle, this is a punk band—and depending as much on your mood as on their intentions, you might pick up the swooping grandeur of the Adverts’ “Great British Mistake,” the speed of the Clash, the distance and space the Rolling Stones found in rhythm and blues. Songs can take off so fast they all but leave you behind. But the oddest notes might be the most compelling, a few months or years down the line: the way the I-Can-Wait-Forever Appalachia voice of “O Love Is Teasin’” or “The Cuckoo” winks out of the verses of “While Your Girl’s Away,” the Cheshire-cat smile in “Keep Me in Flowers.”

(3) Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, directed by Werner Herzog (Saturn Films). Nicolas Cage’s lieutenant walks into a surveillance room across the street from a house detectives are checking out, hallucinating his head off from crack and coke. “What are these fucking iguanas doing on my coffee table?” he says, as one of the lizards only he can see begins to rotate an eye while Johnny Adams’s New Orleans version of “Release Me” comes out of its mouth—or its nose, or whatever it is that iguanas sing out of.

(4) Nicholas Rombes, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, 1974–1982 (Continuum). You can’t use this for reference, and not because there’s no table of contents. Jumping all over the place is too much fun. A typical entry is the faux-referential “Ongoing force of me, the,” which cites a 1987 Johnny Rotten response to an “interviewer’s statement that there had not been anything as revolutionary as the Sex Pistols”: “There has been something as revolutionary as the Sex Pistols. The ongoing force of me.” You might laugh as you skip backward or forward to Dhalgren (1975 novel by Samuel R. Delany, news to me) or “Punk, influence on something other than music or fashion”; you might also be stopped in your tracks by phrase-making I doubt could have been produced by anyone else on...