Negative Outlook?

New York Times Magazine: How did you feel when you heard that Buckley died this year?

Gore Vidal: I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.

Well put. Coincidently I recently saw Jeff Garlin's documentary John Waters: This Filthy World which was hilarious. Waters is a unique guy.
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and the singer ... rams Buddha down the throat of a giant silver dragon

There's a high you get from the classic 1970s "art-rock" of Yes, Genesis, or King Crimson-- and when it hits, there's nothing like it. I'm not talking about the way other music peaks, like a dance track where the beat kicks in and the crowd goes berzerk, or metal music that gets louder and louder until your skull caves, or gutbucket singers who can make your heart jump out of your chest. With art-rock, there's a lot of mumbo-jumbo and funny time signatures, and sometimes there's like 10 or 15 minutes of really boring shit (see: Yes, "Awaken"). But when the "good part" hits? Holy shit-- the band crescendos and the singer, smooth as silk but loud as God, rams Buddha down the throat of a giant silver dragon. If I sound like I'm growing a mullet, I've done my job.

Speaking of which, Stereolab has a new album dropping on August 18th, then a tour of the States this fall.
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Oops

Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the top civilian commander and the top general in the Air Force over "Atomic errors."

The inquiry involving the Air Force was an effort to determine how four high-tech electrical nose cone fuses for Minuteman nuclear warheads were sent to Taiwan in place of helicopter batteries. The mistake was discovered in March - a year and a half after the mistaken shipment.

Mr. Gates made clear that most troubling was that the inquiry showed how little the Air Force had done to improve the security of the nuclear weapons infrastructure even after it was disclosed last year that a B-52 bomber had flown across the United States without anyone’s realizing that it was carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles.

Some had said that the bomber flight was consciously done as a warning to Iran. I didn't find that persuasive at the time and especially don't find it persuasive now that NATO-ally Turkey and Iran are coordinating attacks on Kurds in northern Iraq.
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