(1) Gossip, Music for Men (Columbia). After years living off the novelty that singer Beth Ditto is bigger than female singers are supposed to be, this trio has produced an album as cool and impassioned as anything since the heyday of Book of Love. Everything that might get in the way of put-you-on-the-spot vocals and slap-back rhythm has been pared away; the songs breathe and snap. That you might hear Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug” or Fine Young Cannibals’ “You Drive Me Crazy” in “Heavy Cross” doesn’t mean the band is recycling someone else’s hits; the musicians have a jukebox in their collective head, just like anybody else. That turns up an “I Heard it through the Grapevine” quote in “Love Long Distance” so graceful it can almost make you doubt you’ve heard it before—and even if you know you have, the Bronski Beat beat, thin, clean, and swirling, will make you forget. With “Spare Me from the Mold,” as strong an image as you can ask from a song title, they head out into a rave-up so hot they can turn it into a breakdown with the twist of a neck. Sometimes craft gives as much pleasure as vision; sometimes vision sneaks right out of craft.

(2) Dion, “Daddy Rollin’ (In Your Arms),” in Big Fan, written and directed by Robert D. Siegel (Big Fan Productions). Near the end of a film that in the pitch meeting you can see Siegel trying to sell as a cross between Buffalo ’66 and The King of Comedy (“What about The Fan?” “It’s ‘Big Fan,’ and who remembers The Fan anyway?” “Me?”), there’s a no-ambient-sound slow-motion bar scene where the hero, the schlub “get a life” was invented for, walks through the place like Robert De Niro in his Mohawk, all sorts of conflicting and repressed desires flooding him like a bad cold; the only sound you hear is the flipside of Dion’s 1968 “Abraham, Martin & John,” the most threatening record he ever made. Somebody knows their stuff.

(3) Bill Pullman, curtain call for Oleanna (John Golden Theatre, New York, October 20, 2009).  Immediately after the final, violent “cunt” scene, Pullman, the professor, and Julia Stiles, the student, the only characters in this revival of David Mamet’s 1992 play about sexual harassment and feminist conspiracy, return to the stage with copious distance between them—“the curtain call is as directed as anything else,” said a friend—and he looks haggard, confused, shaken, as if he truly has been somewhere else and isn’t back.

(4) Catherine Corman, Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City (Charta).   It...