NUMBER EIGHT: "If you think that Mick Jagger will still be doing the whole rock star thing at age fifty, well, you are sorely, sorely mistaken."

NUMBER EIGHT: ALMOST FAMOUS

There's so much about this movie that gets it just right.

The traveling circus environment that lives around a live show going from town to town. The beyond insane obsession that some fans come to own and live as they follow the music. And the bizarre relationship between reporters and artists under uncomfortable and unnatural setups that result from story assignments. Most of all this movie speaks to the love of music and just how much fun it is to be around other people who happen to love the same music.

For me the setup here works for a lot of obvious reasons. There's an innocence that happens when you start to dig any art form and when you start to make your way to your own art/career. Our main character is "deflowered" on a number of levels but his first moments backstage remind me of my feelings about concerts before the evil ticket-pricing scandals of the last few years and my belief in journalism before I had to scream at some a$$hole in payroll to get paid for a freelance assignment.

Philip Seymour Hoffman turns up at just the right time to foreshadow all these trials. His world-weary rock journo reminds me so much of the guys at the Houston Chronicle when I interned there. The guys were genuinely amused when I came in all freshly scrubbed and ready to blow the lid off the new album by Morrissey. They both kept telling me not to stop loving the music when the musicians or the business of music disappointed me.

Thanks to that advice, I still love film and music equally if differently. Cinema may be the world's dominant art form but music is its hippie, drop-out, butterfly-tattooed sister. More ephemeral. Harder to pin down. But she can smoke you out - literally or figuratively.

I've always thought live music - the kind with a huge stage show and some over-the-fucking-top production values - does what religion keeps claiming it can do. It brings people together for a positive, common experience. It creates a sense of community and sometimes even purpose. And the amount of the requested donation continues to go up at a near inexplicable rate. But mostly it's the first two things.

And I consider myself quite the lucky kitten to count so many music lovers amongst my peeps. There will always be something fabulously covert about either being hipped to a new artist by someone or doing the hipping yourself. I love that so much I married someone who had larger CD collection than mine and then asked if he could be the one to maintain, buff and Goo Gone it.

Lucky me.

I'm really so much better with the TicketMaster.com thing and talking security into making an exception than with putting CDs back in their place.