Media Nugget

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead

Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead
1967

Thirty years before he helped pen the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It re-imagines Hamlet through the eyes of two minor characters who, despite a hilarious examination of destiny and free will, cannot escape their titular fate. Guildenstern sums up their dilemma, and perhaps our own, when he cries, "But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!"

The Road To Ensenada

Lyle Lovett
The Road To Ensenada
1996

Songwriters fall in love and lose their edge and get it back with interest when the romance is over. Lovett's breakup with Julia Roberts was civil, even according to the one-sided story he's telling: she was lovely, he was charming; she was sweet, he was a gentleman; she said things, he said things; that was that. Funny, oblique and still audibly heartbroken -- like the man says, "It ought to be easier / To leave when you know that you have to go."

The Mysterious Stranger

Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger
1916

This is Mark Twain's unflinching attack on the hypocrisy of organized religion -- the "moral" order that protects power, wealth, and the status quo of human misery and oppression. A princely young gentleman named Satan appears in a remote Austrian village in 1590 and performs a series of magical feats. Lives are changed and mayhem follows -- witch trials, mass hysteria, and radical redistribution of wealth. Satan exits with a brief explanation, "Your universe and its contents ... are so frankly and hysterically insane ... a grotesque and foolish dream."

Two Cents Plus Tax

Versus
Two Cents Plus Tax
1998

NYC's Versus play electric guitars and sing--just like a million other rock bands. But they play their guitars and sing unlike anyone else. They haven't found a new form of music, merely breathed life into an old one. Mixing infectious sound and gorgeous songcraft, Two Cents Plus Tax will make your head spin like a new love.

Hideous Kinky

Gillies MacKinnon
Hideous Kinky
1999

Lovely Kate Winslet plays Julia, a sad, irresponsible, English mom, broke in Marrakech with her two unnaturally precocious daughters. (Think Eloise in a hashish hotel with an absent hippie mama.) Indulging in her own spiritual and sensual adventures, Julia misreads her children's self-reliance and trouble inevitably follows. Relish the exquisite North African scenery backed with a soundtrack that mixes spicy Moroccan folk music with nostalgic late-Sixties road rock.

True Zero Hook

Small 23
True Zero Hook
1993

Small (they tacked on "23" to avoid a lawsuit) elegize the Chapel Hill Sound with this album's impossibly wise "Chopsocky." Fun, with moments of drama, and drenched in catchy but not obnoxious guitar riffs, True Zero Hook offers a club band at their peak, pausing to look back.

McSweeney's

Dave Eggers
McSweeney's
quarterly

Intelligent. Funny. Printed in Iceland. Dave Eggers' white perfectbound magazine is quickly becoming a literary juggernaut, gaining popular and critical momentum with every issue. And while the printed version has an online companion, well worth a daily visit, you just don't get the same depth. So check it out online, then head down to a McSweeney's-friendly bookstore to pick up a copy. The current issue includes fiction from Steve Amick, poetry from Rick Moody, essays from Lawrence Weschler, and the oddest bits and pieces you've ever laughed at.

Jesus' Son

Denis Johnson
Jesus' Son
1992

In Jesus' Son, Denis Johnson offers an interconnected series of ten stories that will make you anxious and strung-out and sleepy. Your heavily medicated host, Fuck Head, carries his troubles from a rain-slicked freeway overpass to the rehab ward at Seattle General. "Car Crash While Hitch Hiking" has my vote for the best short-story title ever. Make sure you read this book before the movie comes out.

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall
1887-1985

Recently, I saw a Chagall painting in person for the first time. It wasn't one of his more famous paintings, yet the moment I recognized the bold colors and distinctive figures, my heart started racing. Feelings echoed or perhaps at least hinted at by the following scene from the 1987 movie Moonstruck, starring Cher and Nicolas Cage:

Loretta: What's that?
Ronny: This was done by Marc Chagall, and as you can see, he was a very great artist.
Loretta: It's kind of gaudy.
Ronny: Well, he was having some fun.

Psychocandy

The Jesus and Mary Chain
Psychocandy
1985

It's time to relive those heady days when you styled your badly dyed hair with egg whites, you understood the beauty of distorted guitars, and you knew you were cool.