7. Paula Broadwell: He had her, right there in front of him, the woman who helped bring "King" David Petraeus' military and political career to an ignominious end. But he, too, like the mainstream media, seemed too busy having sex with Petraeus' exalted mythology. Sure, that legend was obviously more full of holes than the Bush administration's shifting rationales for bombing Iraq, but Stewart and Broadwell's awkward interview was nevertheless well-stocked with the same mini-legends making their way through the mainstream media's complicit coverage of Petraeus' bankrolled rise: his insane work ethic and meteoric popularity, his fairy tale meeting with Broadwell and their, ahem, scholarly research for her unfortunately titled book "All In."

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The situation became less clear after a recent investigative report from D.C.-based nonprofit Environmental Working Group explained that California has experienced 60 unregulated years of widespread fracking, whose technical methods and geographical locations in the seismically active state exist outside of the public purview. It got darker after Gov. Jerry Brown's administration wiped the state government's Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) website of fracking fact-sheets and documents. Good luck finding anything about fracking on the governor's official site either.

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Few are those souls who seek to document and transmit the routinized pain and addiction of these worlds -- worlds filled with everything but Cristal Champagne, Hummers and supermodels. Rather, they are the scenes of unending wars whose only victory is another fix; once each fix is achieved the whole process starts over again like a nightmarish rerun. So it should come as no surprise that those who journey into the hearts of darkness that pump lifeblood into these circular hells might know their way around a war zone.

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"It's the old cliché about grabbing the bull by the horns," Campbell says. "There is no mystery to it, just an incredible amount of elbow grease, and most people just aren't built for that."

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From natural catastrophes to mind-numbing death counts, it seems like the Lord is trying to tell us something. Too bad I don't believe in him. I like to keep some distance between the doomsday predictions of everyone from Seoul Methodist ministries to the Landover Baptist Church who believes that the tsunami was God's punishment to heathen Indonesia for its disbelief in Jesus. But with Bush's recent appointment of Bible-thumper extraordinaire Claude Allen as his chief domestic-policy advisor, it's getting harder and harder to be an infidel these days. Everywhere you look, state-supported religion is making a comeback, sometimes to the tune of millions for those lucky "faith-based" screw jobs out there.

Woe to you atheists who used to love America for its eroding freedom from religion -- we are fast becoming the minority round these parts. It's God's country; we're just mining it for the black gold.

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Unless it's about Texas, where fragile egos bruise -- a tad hypocritically, I would argue, considering all the trash they talk -- at the slightest joke. That's an angular jab at those who didn't approve too much of my disappointment -- OK, outright disbelief -- over Don DeLillo's archival papers getting shipped to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Katherine Pelletier, the archivist who worked hard to get the "White Noise" author's goods to Austin, even wrote politely to inform me that no one in New York, DeLillo's hometown, stepped forward to claim the author's miscellany as its own, letting me know along the way that I unfairly "obliterate[d] the difference between those who treasure the lessons of history through art and literature and those who may wreak havoc on our culture." And I thought no one read my column!

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But that's far from the end of the story, one that stretches across decades and is still unraveling, like the great domestic mysteries that have sustained literary culture for millennia. Shakespeare already knew what Los Bros. Hernandez figured out two decades ago, when they threaded their deeply personal tales of racial tension, alternative sexuality, punk rock, familial drama, sci-fi and much more into the dense, magical-realist master narrative known as "Love & Rockets." After all, the Bard never wrote a play without a family firmly embedded in its middle. He well knew that there are few grander, more compelling narratives than those born out of friendship and kinship. The ties that bind us normal humans -- those who can't change into a cape and tights at the first sign of trouble -- are those we sometimes tighten or tear to pieces on the way to discovering who we are. And who we are is often all that we have.

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America recently decided -- and on this point, let's be crystal clear -- that it indeed wanted another four years of George Bush. And even if my man Greg Palast is utterly convinced that the 2004 election, as in 2000, was decided ahead of time by pervasive voter fraud and election commission corruption in more than one state, this election shouldn't have been close at all to begin with.

Bush is, without a doubt, the worst president America has ever had, something it should have been able to figure out if it weren't so deeply involved in the alternate reality fed to it by the scandal-ridden New York Times, bankrupt network television, MTV, and so-called news outlets like CNN, MSNBC and Fox. He should have had his ass handed to him in a gold-encrusted box with a forwarding address in Crawford, Texas, plastered across it.

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Tired, indeed. Charles Thompson has been a busy man, ever since he picked up a guitar and dreamed up the fantastically twisted tales that lace the Pixies catalog like so much lyrical cyanide. Not only did Thompson, whom fans know as Pixies frontman Black Francis, churn out five commanding albums with his high-impact modern rock quartet -- including two efforts, 1988's "Surfer Rosa" and 1989's "Doolittle," that are regarded by many as two of the finest rock albums ever -- but he's averaged around an album a year during his solo career as Frank Black, including his latest from SpinArt called "Frank Black Francis."

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-- Brooklyn, N.Y., rapper El-P

Art Spiegelman's works, especially the groundbreaking Holocaust comic "Maus," have always been as much about phenomena occurring outside his vertiginous comic strip frames as about the events within them. This is because the world around the famed comix lifer has always seemed on the verge of annihilation -- as he confesses more than once in his sprawling, sharply satirical "In the Shadow of No Towers," a collection of strips built by Spiegelman over the last three years and finally published by Pantheon Books just before the third anniversary of 9/11.

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Meanwhile, the Republicans have responded by trotting out a policy Old Faithful -- the criminalization of homosexuals -- and trying to pass off criticism of their botched reign as, no lie, "pessimism." Talk about a loser's strategy; I haven't seen anything as hilarious as that since Lakers coach Phil Jackson inserted Slava Medvedenko into the NBA Finals in hopes of stopping the Pistons juggernaut.

But does the left (and middle) need to tear down Ralph Nader, a guy who has spent his entire life championing the disadvantaged and dispossessed, to compensate for its own self-made shortcomings? Look, the guy might be getting money from right-wingers and/or suspicious donors, but that would put him entirely in line with the rest of America's political machine. To argue that he must hold himself to a higher standard just to get his name on a ballot with the Republicrats is hypocrisy. Let's not be Pollyanna about this -- politics is a dirty game, as Nader has proven over the decades. Let's just suck it up and move on.

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-- Don DeLillo, "White Noise"

"The whole thing is a movie," says Alan Moore. The comic-book visionary behind such epoch-changing works as "Watchmen," "V for Vendetta" and "From Hell" is actually talking about the war in Iraq. But the statement could sum up his view of the ceaseless complexities of 21st century life, where reality TV and celebrity culture have usurped individuality, and the human body has become not much beyond more information needing to be assimilated.

Every once in a while we are horrified by a beheading (albeit one seen only on videotape) and human culture remembers that it is not much more than a vulnerable collection of flesh, bone and nerve endings. "This is what wars are; it's not Hollywood," Moore cautions. But ultimately we return to the womblike safety of our media universe with its push-button wars and Internet porn, where sex and death are hidden behind splashy corporate graphics.

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To which I answer that you need only take a hard look at the world around you to understand that fiction is the sociopolitical currency of the moment. Whether it always has been is a question for the philosophers and marketing agencies of the world. But a cursory listen to the findings of the 9/11 commission and the Bush administration's response is instructive -- to mangle John Lennon, fiction is bigger than Jesus right now. Lies are too: As Gabriel García Márquez famously said, "Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale."

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And another quick note before we get this bookworm party started. While this column is oriented toward the latest in indie publishing, my personal definition of what exactly that encompasses is probably a bit broader than the one offered by the excellent Punk Planet. For me, "indie" sometimes connotes a particular state of mind, usually one involving bizarre experiments and risky brilliance; sometimes I can find that confluence in a major release (Jonathan Lethem's latest comes immediately to mind, and not just because he's the finest writer working today). But the majority of the time that will simply not be the case.

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-- Philip Larkin

The votes have been cast and the results are in -- hip-hop is now the preferred entertainment medium for the next generation. Hip-hop sales make up a larger and larger proportion of the pop-music universe every year, and even when it does not thoroughly dominate, its styles are forming the backbone of whatever does, whether it happens to be bubble-pop, electronic music or rap-rock. You need look no further than Eminem's Oscar win for "Lose Yourself" to know that, like it or not, the form has arrived in mainstream culture and isn't going anywhere.

Along the way, it has made capitalist kings out of Russell Simmons, Jay-Z, Rick Rubin, LL Cool J, Ice Cube and countless others. Simmons alone is now a cultural force to be reckoned with, and his "One Mind One Vote" campaign hopes to pull millions of nonvoting young African-Americans into the 2004 election.

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In other words, there is a brave world to explore once you put down that volume by Ann Coulter (or even Al Franken). It's all in the margins, sometimes known as independent publishing, other times known as under-the-radar circulation. And although right and center fields are dominated by the major publishing houses, some of their releases have underperformed compared with their indie counterparts, a few of which are greater in substance, enjoy much longer shelf lives, and are -- every so often -- more lucrative to boot. So throw away your pretensions and burn your bestseller lists. They never did that much for you anyway.

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Mortensen has been a busy man since his debut in Peter Weir's 1985 thriller, "Witness." The New York native, who just celebrated his 45th birthday, has put together a series of compelling roles in films by auteur types like Gus Van Sant ("Psycho"), Sean Penn ("The Indian Runner") and Jane Campion ("Portrait of a Lady"), as well as a couple of blockbusters ("Crimson Tide" and "G.I. Jane") from the Bruckheimer and Birnbaum wing of Hollywood. He's spent years in Southern California's arts scene, whether participating in poetry readings at Venice's Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, jamming with Buckethead and other fixtures in L.A.'s sonic landscapes, or exhibiting paintings and photographs in well-established galleries.

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You might not know it from the mania surrounding thug lifers like 50 Cent, multi-genre salesmen like Ludacris or crossover marketing dreams like Eminem, but George Clinton's fingerprints are everywhere in today's hip-hop landscape -- and everywhere in pop culture. (Consider acts as diverse as Prince, Primus, Lenny Kravitz, the Roots and Public Enemy, to name just a few.)

Created by the mercurial Clinton (who also went by the name Dr. Funkenstein, among others) and rounded out by the irrepressible Bootsy Collins on bass and the amazing Bernie Worrell on keyboards, the Parliament-Funkadelic monolith -- three of whose timeless '70s classics, "Up for the Down Stroke," "Chocolate City" and "Mothership Connection," have recently been reissued on CD by Universal Music -- birthed a heady mixture of party music, democratic optimism and prodigious technical skill that reshaped the consciousness of generations of pop acts and pop fans. And to get specific, next to James Brown, P-Funk's collection of funk classics is by far the most sampled catalog in contemporary hip-hop.

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Rather, pretend we're witnessing a bizarre discourse on popular culture, fictional systems (including their explosion) and psychosexual norms. Because it is then that Larry McCaffery's theories on metafiction and intertextuality -- the mechanisms of postmodernism outlined in his seminal work of literary criticism, "The Metafictional Muse" -- come into play. If, as McCaffery argues, "we inhabit a world of fictions and are constantly forced to develop a variety of metaphors and subjective systems to help us organize ... experience," then metafiction is the pomo tonic for our time, a Derridean (the name-dropping will end soon, I promise) playfulness that "becomes a deliberate strategy used to provoke readers to critically examine all cultural codes and established patterns of thought."

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