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For weeks, all of the indicators, measurements, polls and calculations have pointed to an Obama victory, even an overwhelming rout. But while I read the polls many times a day and half believe them -- believe them all, the poll that has Obama leading by 15 as much as I believe the poll on the same day that has him leading by 2 -- I also believe absolutely none of it. My whole life, my upbringing, education, travel and talk, from working in Congress as an intern at the height of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s to every election in which I've ever voted, makes it all but impossible for me to believe that, on Tuesday, a single state will turn its face toward the face of a black man and name him president of the United States.

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I'm going to start out today by going back just over a month ago. It's Sunday night, April 16 -- the sixth episode of the sixth season of "The Sopranos" is on. Vito Spatafore -- the most reliable and loyal captain in the New Jersey crime family run by Tony Soprano -- is on the run. The story is out -- Vito has a wife, two kids, the requisite mistress, but he's been seen in a gay bar, dressed like the biker in the Village People. The other mobsters want him dead; he's dishonored them all.

Heading north, Vito's been on the road for hours. His cellphone rings; he throws it out the window. He has no idea where he is. His car breaks down. He makes it into the next town, finds an inn, puts his gun under his pillow.

The next day he wakes up in a little New Hampshire village, where gay people walk the streets without fear. In a diner, looks pass between Vito and the counterman. A male couple comes in, sits down, and begins speaking a language Vito has never before heard in the light of day, only in the dark. He's confused: What does it mean to be in a place where, for the first time in your life, you might feel at home in your own skin? Could that even be right?

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Before my turntable broke (the vinyl version was all I could find), this sounded like the Detroit guitar-and-drums combo's "Rubber Soul" at least as much as Pussy Galore's "Pretty Fuck Look."

2) "The Murder of Emmett Till," directed by Stanley Nelson, written by Marcia A. Smith and narrated by Andre Braugher (PBS, Jan. 20)

This documentary on the 1955 lynching of a black 14-year-old Chicago boy near Money, Miss., opened with a lovely shot of the meandering Tallahatchie River -- where Till's body, weighted down with a cotton gin fan, was dumped after he was killed for supposedly whistling at a white man's wife. Later there were images of a bridge, and I couldn't help thinking of Bobbie Gentry's 1967 "Ode to Billy Joe." A girl tells the story of how her boyfriend, Billie Joe McAllister, jumped to his death from the Tallahatchie Bridge, into the Tallahatchie River -- and how, her family has heard, she and Billie Joe were seen throwing something from the same bridge, into the same river, just days before. What was it? Bobbie Gentry has never said, but isn't there a memory of Emmett Till's murder in whatever it was?

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"SEATTLE -- A Florida man has been arrested and charged with murder after DNA linked him to the death of rising punk-rock star Mia Zapata in 1993, police said.

"Police said Jesus C. Mezquia, 48, was arrested late Friday in the Miami area. His DNA profile matched a sample taken from the crime scene more than nine years ago, police said.

"Zapata, the 27-year-old lead singer of The Gits, was last seen alive July 7, 1993, in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Her beaten body was left on a street curb more than a mile away. She had been strangled with the drawstring of her Gits sweatshirt.

"Police had no leads in the slaying. The Seattle music community -- including its biggest names, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden -- raised $70,000 to hire a private investigator, but eventually the funds dried up."

2) Donnas, "Spend the Night" (Atlantic)

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Aren't tribute albums terrible? This one is really terrible -- and the Atlanta band's view all the way into one of Costello's greatest recordings ranks with Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and DJ Shadow's "The Private Press" as the most undeniable sound of the year.

Maybe it was always obvious that the song is about the gang-rape of a local girl at an army base, with the woman looking back: "The soldier asked my name and did I come here very often/ Well, I thought that he was asking me to dance." Maybe the song was always about the woman cherishing his death when his company's transport vehicle is blown up: He's getting the sleep of the just, all right, the big sleep. In Costello's performance, though, the beauty of the composition makes the story into a fable, and the people in it float like ghosts.

Shannon McArdle is all flesh, still trying to wash off the stains after all these years. She makes her voice small and flat for the difficult shifts in timbre, removing any hint of professionalism. She's as off-the-street as the woman in the middle of the Human League's "Don't You Want Me," and the naturalism of the performance -- carried from the beginning by a solemn church organ that is even more damning when it plays pop changes -- is almost unbearable. The woman has her satisfaction over the soldier's death, but that's all she has. He and the rest took everything else.

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For years, the same voice has opened every show with the same phrase, squashing the name at the end into one word: "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Columbia recording artist, BOBDYLAN!" Last Aug. 9, though, a piece appeared in the Buffalo News in anticipation of a Dylan date in Hamburg, N.Y. It led with a paragraph recapitulating Dylan's career. As print it was boilerplate -- but to hear that paragraph now, appropriated as Dylan's official new introduction, was pure media shock. It's the displacement that takes place when the conventions of one form are shoved into the conventions of another form: "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock 'n' roll. The voice of the promise of the '60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in the '70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to find Jesus, and who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late '90s. Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Dylan!"

2) "Masters of War" (MSG, Nov. 11)

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The picture is alive to Eminem's presence, and he is alive to the picture, seeming to withdraw from the camera even as he pulls its eye toward him. Taking the viewer through a few days in the life of a white Detroit rapper in a black milieu -- the adventures of a young man whose attempts to step out of oblivion are at best wary and at worst, and most believable, terrified -- Eminem gives a performance that is all gravity. When the movie ends, there is a sense that it has, in fact, ended -- that the movie has caught its own story.

Then "Lose Yourself" begins to play under the closing credits, and in an instant it blows the film away. The music dissolves the movie, reveals it as a lie, a cheat, as if it were made not to reveal but to cover up the seemingly bottomless pit of resentment and desire that is the story's true source. Again and again the piece all but blows up in the face of the man who's chanting it, Eminem lost in his rhymes until suddenly people are shouting at him from every direction and the music jerks him into the chorus, which he escapes in turn. The piece builds into crescendos of power, climbing ladders of refusal and willfulness step by step, rushing nothing, never reaching the top because it is the music itself that has put the top so high.

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McGee (1894-1975) played guitar with Uncle Dave Macon in the 1920s, with Fiddlin' Arthur Smith in the '30s and '60s; in this 1964 recording he blows holes through the idea of "country music," the "breakdown," the "guitar solo." Long, thin notes stretch into the air until you think you can't hear them anymore, but you can; bass strings swoop down to rescue the melody from the silences that are almost left behind. It's a workout, a cutting contest -- but more than anything an acting out of the pioneer spirit, of America as experiment, as, "Hey, there's always something better over the next hill," but deep down not really caring if there is or not, not if to get from one place to another you can move like this.

2) Don DeLillo, Belknap Lecture, Princeton University (Oct. 16)

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Swinging east on their 25th anniversary tour, the old punks added a special show by popular demand -- "a concept," singer and guitarist Jon Langford said from the stage, "with which we are not that familiar" -- at 6 p.m. Noting that one fan praised the idea as "a Mekons dream come true -- home by 9!" Langford announced the door policy to the crowd already crammed into the small room: "Nobody under 40." Nobody left. The band, from accordion on one side to fiddle on the other, ranged from the primitive rant "The Building" to singer Sally Timms' dreamy bombscapes of a ruined London, but it was when various members began to read from the group's just-published "Hello Cruel World: Selected Lyrics" (Verse Chorus Press) that the performance transcended the night. Elegantly printed, illustrated with photos and Blakean cartoons, the book doesn't read like a conceit -- that is, you actually can read it -- but that was no preparation for what happened when the words were read out on stage. The idea seemed an utter contradiction: Why have someone step out of a band and read song lyrics when the band was present and ready to play them? In truth, the first reading, Langford with "Funeral," came off as a clichéd political speech. But then the lyrics truly began to change shape, to lift off on such flights of rhetoric they became unrecognizable as songs. When non-singing drummer Steve Goulding stepped to the front of the stage and raised the book, the words rang like Shakespeare.

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Movie logic: At the end of "Igby Goes Down," Jason Slocumb Jr., played by Kieran Culkin, visits a catatonic man in a mental institution: his father Jason Slocumb. It's Bill Pullman, who we've seen in flashbacks willfully driving himself out of his family, out of society, out of his mind. The Western-hero face was still there, some years back, the features sharp, but even then this once-strong, silent man was silent because he had nothing to say. It's one bad step past the familiar: The father's sardonic smile, when he still recognized his son, is from the chump Pullman played in "The Last Seduction," the deadness in his eyes now from the terrified man he played in "Lost Highway" -- it's as if he's stepped out of those roles only to complete them.

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"Los Angeles, CA -- Celebrated recording artist composer Warren Zevon, one of rock music's wittiest and most original songwriters, has been diagnosed with lung cancer which has advanced to an untreatable stage." Playing: "Mohammed's Radio," the churchy live version from the 1982 "Stand in the Fire" ("Even Jimmy Carter's got the highway blues"); the delirious rising in the 1978 "Johnny Strikes Up the Band"; the regret in the melody of "Looking for the Next Best Thing" in 1982; the shared dread of "Run Straight Down" in 1989; the delicacy of "Suzie Lightning" in 1991 and "Mutineer" in 1995. From 1976, when he went public with "Desperadoes Under the Eaves" on the album "Warren Zevon," it has been more than a quarter century of gunplay and bravado, not for a moment concealing Zevon's loathing for his own betrayals and those of the world around him. "I was in the house when the house burned down," he sang in 2000. From afar he has been a good friend.

2) Music in Balthazar (New York, Sept. 5)

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On baseball's new labor-management agreement: "At the news conference, ever-hip Commissioner Bud Selig quoted the Beatles, saying of the negotiations, 'It's been a Long and Winding Road.' And as the Beatles noted in that song, 'We've seen this road before.'

"Unfortunately, Selig did not quote from the Beatles' tune 'Money (That's What I Want).'"

2) Holiday Inn School of Hospitality and Resort Management, University of Memphis (Aug. 16)

A blond woman approached the desk at this training hotel: "I'm checking out: Linda Evans." "Linda Evans?" said a man standing next to her. "From 'Dynasty'?" "A long time ago," she said. "But I killed all my husbands."

3) "Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs," conceived and organized by Alice Rose George, Gilles Peress, Michael Shulan & Charles Traub (Scalo Books)

A compendium of more than 1,000 pictures drawn from the evolving downtown exhibition that, beginning about a week after last year's terrorist attacks, opened itself to photographs from professionals and amateurs, until it seemed everyone in New York was taking part. Some 5,000 photos were scanned, filed and printed, and, within the limits of the makeshift space at 116 Prince Street, hung like laundry.

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After dismissing the notion of the teenager as "a marketing construct" and seemingly regretting that, at 58, he ever was one, rejecting all forms of youth culture as manipulations, frauds and posing, O'Neill hits the clincher: "The anthems of the '60s anti-war movement have killed more of us than the war itself." Inarguable, of course, but we need details: How many people did Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" kill as opposed to Freda Payne's "Bring the Boys Home"? Country Joe and the Fish's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" vs. Edwin Starr's "War"? Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" vs. Sgt. Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets"? Oh, right, wrong question, that was a pro-war song -- how many lives did it save?

2) Bruce Springsteen, "The Rising" (Columbia) It's too long -- at 72 minutes, longer than the Rolling Stones' storied "Exile on Main Street." The poorer songs -- "Into the Fire," "Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin)" -- seem to go on forever. The set may well be what the film critic Manny Farber defined as "white elephant art": as an indirect but inescapable picture of the world in which Americans have lived since a New York headline proclaimed "U.S ATTACKED," it is certainly "an expensive hunk of well-regulated area."

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Son House (1902-88) was the most melodramatic of the great Mississippi Delta blues artists, and when he sat in New York City in 1965 to record "Death Letter" for the first time, he pulled out all the stops -- just as he'd done with the sardonic "Preachin' Blues" in 1930, when he first recorded. In 1965 he wasn't the musician he'd been as a young man, but the drive to thread a song through six minutes or more was still there. The guitar playing is splayed, but it cuts to the bone; the man recalling the death of the love of his life takes satisfaction from the fact that he will never get over it.

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"He had a great pair of eyes. They say he could watch a 78 record go around and tell you what's on the label." Normal people can't do it with a 45.

2) Jill Olson, "My Best Yesterday" (Innerstate)

The jingle-jangle of the Searchers in the guitars, their "Needles and Pins" bite in this young woman's voice, a warmth and a feel for loss that the Searchers never got around to -- and a sense of place that makes Olson, who sings far less convincingly in the San Francisco country band Red Meat, at once familiar and someone you haven't yet met. "I hope these pop tunes remind you of the sounds that might have blasted from the radio of a brand-new 1966 Ford Ranchero," Olson says, "way back before you were born." Or perhaps before she was.

3) Subway commercial for Dijon Horseradish Melt (Fox Sports Net, July 13)

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Not that the actress who once noted that the real message of the posters for "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" was "I Know What Your Breasts Did Last Summer" is playing off her body or anything. To start off this co-written single, the Queen of Televised Adorableness moves into a melody seriously picked out on acoustic guitar, then twists a line just like Sheryl Crow: "Didja ever have that dream where you're walking naked down the street?" Another terrific moment: "Didja ever feel so deep that you speak your mind, you put others right to sleep?" sung matter of factly, like someone shaking hair out of her face, and then a chord change hands the number over to the Britney factory. The song fights back, but it never gets out of that hole. Or that cloud. Or whatever that prison of vagueness is.

2) Nicolas Guagnini, "30,000" (1997-2000), in "Ultimas Tendencias" (Latest Directions), Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (June 16)

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With a picture of Berlin dadaist John Heartfield shouting on the cover, you might think the Leeds righteousness brigade would be back with another set of finger-wagging dark prophecies: Even their 1997 get-drunk, get-really-drunk hit "Tubthumping" was about how getting drunk only postpones a confrontation with hegemony. That's certainly what the sleeve notes offer, carefully explaining which particular social injustice each song addresses. The performances, on the other hand, are rich, layered, musically finished, emotionally unresolved. Often built around tiny vocal samples from U.K. folk musicians -- the repetitions are like bird calls, or sounds in a dream that you can recognize but not name -- the best numbers seem to float back to a time when their promises were made, to escape our time, where everyone knows the promises were never meant to be kept. That sense of regret, or damnation, is never erased; it's suspended. The longing from the late Lal Waterson in "Salt Fare, North Sea" is about betrayal, but also about a refusal to give up; "All in Vain" is about defeat, but too beautiful to be final. All across this record, the band sets snares for itself, but the musicians, whom they have appropriated to valorize their quest for what Berlin dadaist George Grosz called "the big no," refuse to let them step in their own traps.

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