(Photo: Lesley Leslie Spinks (Shakespeare’s Sonnets); Paramount Pictures/Photofest/Courtesy of BAM (Saturday Night Fever); Patrick McMullan (Betty Who); Brad Harris (Allan Smithee Directed This Play); Courtesy of Tribeca Film (Starred Up))

Pop Music
1. Hear Betty Who
Big voice, bigger possibilities.
With her platinum pixie cut and soulful early singles, the Aussie singer has often been compared to Robyn. On her major-label debut�Take Me When You Go, out the day before this show�Betty Who’s ambitions seem even higher: synth-tastic anthems like �Just Like Me� encase heartbreak in epic Katy Perry�ish pop.
Irving Plaza, October 8.

Books
2. Read The Bone Clocks
In and out of life.
David Mitchell leads a generation of novelists thriving at the intersection of the personal and cosmic, and Holly Sykes is his guide from Thatcher-era Kent all the way to 2040s Ireland. The other players, many borrowed from his earlier novels, expose a vast cosmology that has a lot to say about our own little world. —Boris Kachka
Random House.

Theater
3. See Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Not quite like a summer’s day.
Shakespeare’s poems were never intended for the theater. That didn’t stop the master of super-stylized performance, Robert Wilson, from staging them, with a team well matched to his transfixing vision: Rufus Wainwright, who wrote the dark score, and Brecht’s own Berliner Ensemble, which will perform it.
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, October 7 through 12.

TV
4. Watch You’re the Worst
L.A. story.
A sitcom in which awful people (a writer and PR executive, mostly) are very funny, with a heavy dollop of SoCal real-estate porn.
FX, Thursdays, 10:30 p.m.

Classical Music
5. Hear Claire Chase
First flutist.
Every once in a while, an instrument is blessed with a performer who radically redefines what it can do and how it sounds. At the moment, Claire Chase is turning the flute into a modern multitrack tool and converting composers to its virtues. The result is her album Density, which she performs in a solo concert: just Chase, her silver tube, and lots of electronics. —Justin Davidson
The Kitchen, October 2 and 3.

TV/Video
6. Stream Gilmore Girls
Where they lead, you will follow.
All seven seasons, finally. Commence binge.
Netflix, October 1.

Movies
7. Hear Paul Thomas Anderson
Speaking at the New York Film Festival.
Off the release of Inherent Vice, his film of Thomas Pynchon’s beach-noir, Anderson will review his own work as well as his influences’. This is a rare one: He keeps live appearances to a minimum.
Alice Tully Hall, October 5, 12:30 p.m.

Movies
8. Attend Retro Metro
Stand clear of the closing doors.
The bad old days of the subway weren’t pretty, but it sure made a great backdrop. So let’s give a Bronx cheer to �Retro Metro,� a sixteen-film local to the past, especially the opener, Walter Hill’s 1979 The Warriors, with its punks�meet�West Side Story stick fights. —David Edelstein
BAMcinématek, September 26 through October 5.

DVD
9. Watch Seizure!
Oliver Stone, v. 1.0.
Oliver Stone’s first feature, a low-budget 1974 Canadian picture in which a writer of scary books for kids experiences hallucinations that come to life, like a spidery psycho played by Hervé Villechaize. Stone was ashamed of the film�but how is it? Not terrible. At times enjoyably perverse. Dig it with or without illicit substances. —D.E.
On Blu-ray.

Books
10. Read Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
A train wreck named desire.
John Lahr’s 15-year project has produced a new biography of Tennessee Williams that is as staggering in its depiction of a neurotic genius as it is sadly convincing. The heart of the compulsively readable tale is a series of tortured relationships: some personal (Frank Merlo), some professional (Elia Kazan), all ruined. —Jesse Green
Norton.

Opera
11. See The Difficulty of Crossing a Field
David Lang, getting there.
Lang has always been more comfortable with static ritual than with hectic drama, and his 75-minute opera from 2002 combines incantatory syllables (�Hurray hurray! The hole’s a who�), courthouse talk about slavery, and a slo-mo score for string quartet and singers. —J.D.
Roulette, September 28.

Books/Theater
12. Read American Musicals: The Complete Books and Lyrics of Sixteen Broadway Classics
Words without music.
As Dorothy Hammerstein complained, Jerome Kern wrote only �Dum-dum-dum-dum�; her husband wrote �Ol’ Man River.� Proving that a musical is not merely in the notes, this collection of libretti from Show Boat through 1776, edited by Laurence Maslon, is not only witty reading but a sidelong history of American art. Nicely made, too, in two slipcased volumes plus a set of postcards. —J.G.
The Library of America.

Art
13. See Mac Conner: A New York Life
Illustrative.
He never got as famous as Parrish or Rockwell, but the illustrator Mac Conner spent the ’40s through the ’60s doing great work for magazines and ads. It’s craftsmanlike vernacular art, shrugged off a generation ago but now remarkable and rare�and, at 100, he’s here to see it appreciated.
Museum of the City of New York, through January 19.