IT ISN'T FAIR. IT ISN'T NICE:  What A Straight Man's Favorite Musical Says About Him, for McSwys, by former child actress Mara Wilson.

WOOD DRAMATICALLY UNDERESTIMATES whether you want to see Steven Hyden analyze who out-acted whom in a certain Good Will Hunting scene, though no one would blame you if you skipped this link. No one would blame you. No one would blame you.

IT'S A GOOD TIME FOR US TO TELL OUR STORY:  I'm not sure if this will be the best movie of the summer or the worst (and it may be both), but the first trailer for Straight Outta Compton is out. (NSFW, of course, with ample language, nudity, and usage of Paul Giammati.)

THESE SONGS OF MINE, THEY'RE LIKE MYSTERY STORIES, THE KIND THAT SHAKESPEARE SAW WHEN HE WAS GROWING UP:  Bob Dylan's MusiCares speech from Friday night, transcribed:

All these songs are connected. Don't be fooled. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. It's just different, saying the same thing. I didn't think it was anything out of the ordinary.  

Well you know, I just thought I was doing something natural, but right from the start, my songs were divisive for some reason. They divided people. I never knew why. Some got angered, others loved them. Didn't know why my songs had detractors and supporters. A strange environment to have to throw your songs into, but I did it anyway. 

Last thing I thought of was who cared about what song I was writing. I was just writing them. I didn't think I was doing anything different. I thought I was just extending the line. Maybe a little bit unruly, but I was just elaborating on situations. Maybe hard to pin down, but so what? A lot of people are hard to pin down. You've just got to bear it. I didn't really care what Lieber and Stoller thought of my songs. 

MUSIC SCENE IS CRAZY; BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY:  Kurt Andersen argues in Sunday's NYT that the 1990s were the Greatest Decade Ever. Some of the argument is political, but also:

In feature films, it was the decade of “Pulp Fiction” and the indie movement, thanks to which idiosyncratic, more-commercial-than-art-house masterpieces like those by Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater became plausible. It was also the decade in which traditional Disney animation came back from the dead and in which Pixar, with the first two “Toy Story” movies, reinvented the form magnificently.

THE digital age, of course, got fully underway in the ’90s. At the beginning of the decade almost none of us had heard of the web, and we didn’t have browsers, search engines, digital cellphone networks, fully 3-D games or affordable and powerful laptops. By the end of the decade we had them all. Steve Jobs returned to Apple and conjured its rebirth. 

And it was just the right amount of technology. By the end of the decade we all had cellphones, but not smartphones; we were not overconnected or tyrannized by our devices. Social media had not yet made social life both manically nonstop and attenuated. The digital revolution hadn’t brutally “disrupted” whole economic sectors and made their work forces permanently insecure. Recorded music sales nearly doubled during the decade. Newspapers and magazines were thriving. Even Y2K, our terrifying end-of-the-millennium technological comeuppance, was a nonevent.

SECRET'S IN THE SAUCE:  Dallas' NPR affiliate sits down with Texas Monthly's Barbecue Editor for an hour-long discussion of all things barbecue, including what sides are appropriate, and how much Texas barbecue owes to traditional Jewish cuisine.

THIS IS THE THEME TO GARRY'S SHOW:  Beloved vintage TV DVD releasor Shout! Factory (who's done most excellent Sports Night and My So-Called Life box sets) has launched a new, free, streaming website, including such things as It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Weird Al Show.