…“One Day Left” sermon, addressed in segments to new voters, non-voters, Nader voters, disgruntled conservatives, and dissatisfied lefties.

…a similarity between the already-infamous White House snub against “the reality-based community” and an Orwell line about “Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth.”

…the Des Moines Register has an editorial comparing Bush’s war talk with language George Orwell’s characters might have used.

Old semioticians never die, they just deconstruct.

…wrote a letter to the editor of his local suburban paper, with elequant verbiage about the continuing war:

“…But this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.He does not mourn. He doesn’t understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.…”

…offers tips for the aspiring journalist on how to televise yourself in a hurricane.

…the rest of the election cycle will be a two-month-long version of Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate.”

Today’s batch starts with the big alterna-comix emphasis at this year’s festival, which culminated in a rather rambling panel discussion among our ol’ pals Harvey Pekar, Peter Bagge, Gary Groth, Jessica Abel, and Gilbert Hernandez.

Back when I was a grunt laborer for Groth, I quickly learned that cartoonists seldom speak in the taut word-balloon language in which they write. They ramble. sometimes they get to their intended point; sometimes (particularly in the case of the beloved Mr. Pekar) they end up somewhere else entirely.

So I wasn’t surprised when the conversation wandered off topic often. Still, the panel made several cogent statements. It concluded that after many years of bitter struggle, “graphic novels” (whatever the heck that term means) have gained a foothold in the mainstream book biz. Of course, that just means there are more of those titles out there, which means a lot more chaff (repackaged superhero crap, comics written to be sold to the movies) as well as a little more wheat.

Artis the Spoonman is now also Artis the Slam Poet, ranting about five centuries of oppression against the true human spirit.

I didn’t get to a lot of the great bands that played over the four days, including Aveo, the Killers, the Girls, and Drive By Truckers. But I did enjoy the thoroughly rockin’ sets by the Witness (above) and the Turn-Ons.

My sometime alterna-journalism colleagues in Harvey Danger have re-formed, and played their first all-ages gig in five years. Sean Nelson, bless him, still looks like a journalist, but his singing voice is stronger than ever.

From the above image, I won’t have to tell you that wristbands for the nighttime stadium rock show were gone within an hour and a half on Monday. Built to Spill singer-songwriter Doug Martsch (below) sounded more Michael Stipe-like than ever.

The reunited Pixies, however, sounded just the same (marvelous) as they ever did. They played all their should-have-been-hits and then some, in a tight hour-and-a-half show. Few singers can make me so happy, singing about such bleak topics, as Mr. Black and Ms. Deal can.

One more set of these pix to come.

…”found” concrete poetry based on junk e-mail headlines? A similar premise drives “Spamusement!: Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!”

Yr. obt. cor’s’p’n’d’nt is once again providing freelance book reviews to The Seattle Times. The first of the new batch is out today, concerning Chuck Klosterman’s essay collection Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto.

…has nice things to say about palatial PoMo architecture.

David Neiwert, a local author who specializes in investigating hate crimes and other examples of rabid nonsense, has issued a “Media Revolt Manifesto.”

Like many of us, Neiwert’s mad as hell at the GOP cheerleading and pundit-blather that passes for “news” in today’s US mainstream media. Thankfully, he wants us to get beyond just complaining and protesting about it.

He sees rescuing US journalism as a multi-faceted, multi-fronted task. At the center of this new media paradigm will be the so-called “new media”:

“Blogs… can and should play the role abdicated by the mainstream media both in monitoring their own behavior and ethics, and in providing enough diversity that a wealth of viewpoints are given fair treatment, as in any healthy democratic society, and the public properly served.Blogs will not and cannot do the job alone, of course. The whole purpose of the revolt is to foster an environment in which mainstream journalists, from the lowly ink-stained wretch to the well-coiffed network anchor, are both allowed and positively encouraged to provide truthful and meaningful journalism that provides vital information to the public and does it responsibly and thoroughly. So that will mean recognizing and positively celebrating when superior journalism does its job well; such reporters and truth-tellers should be lauded, promoted, and in the end well remunerated for their work. It will mean channeling the marketplace to reward organizations that do their job well, too.

Finally, the Media Revolt will tap the energy of the citizenry through traditional means as well: Letter-writing campaigns, voting with our pocketbooks, organizing politics and funds on the ground — without which, in fact, anything that occurs on the Web may prove meaningless. The idea is to turn from simply critiquing the media to taking concrete action.”

Of course, some of Neiwert’s goals are easier to accomplish than others.

He’d like to see more websites that don’t just rehash or comment upon stories from the traditional media. He’d even like to see “the creation of viable newswire services beyond the current Asssociated Press monopoly.” But he acknowledges the difficulty of funding original reporting, particularly on the web (Salon’s bleeding red ink, and Slate survives as a Bill Gates vanity project).

So he also calls for a mass groundswell of support for breaking up the media conglomerates, bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, and otherwise reshaping the media we’ve already got from “a press corps addicted to trivia and inanity” into something that actually serves the needs of an active democracy.

“I think the tools for serious change are finally within our reach,” Neiwert says. Can it happen? Only if we all, those of you who read news and those of us who write it, do our part to help make it happen.

…to “Bloomsday,” the centennial worldwide celebration of the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place. The hereby-linked Village Voice article even includes a photograph of Joyce that’s not the one you always see.

…and congrats to fellow Stranger refugee Charles D’Ambrosio, who appears in the current New Yorker with a short memoir about hopping freight trains. It’s a fun, beautiful essay. Read it now.

The NY book-biz buzz this spring has apparently been about the much-hyped rise and spectacular thud of something called “Lad Lit.” It’s apparently supposed to be publishers’ dreams for a male-oriented counterpart to the “Chick Lit” novels of the Bridget Jones flavor. The much-advertised premier titles of the would-be fad have apparently flopped in the stores.

I’ve only seen one of the buzzed-about titles, Scott Mebus’s Booty Nomad, and can easily see why it’s not a bestseller. Mebus’s antihero isn’t a character, he’s a demographic marketing fantasy. The protagonist is essentially Maxim magazine’s target reader; which is to say a dumbed-down boorish stereotype of bad behavior. It’s hard to imagine female readers (the overwhelming majority of fiction buyers) could fantasize about a guy like this, even to dream about civilizing him. (As for male readers, the book biz still expects them to only care about violence/action stories.)

It is possible to write compelling tales of adult male characters imbued with intelligence, human emotions, and romantic confusions. Writers have done this for centuries. You don’t need a goofy promotional handle for it either.