Take Your Medicine And I Won’t Ask Where You’ve Been

There are times when one really should’t write a word about an album, because one is too busy drooling over it and far too likely to produce a meaningless string of gushing adjectives. That’s me with Black Sheep Boy by Okkervil River right now. Oh, the lyrics! Oh, the sound! Songwriting! One of the best albums of pop songs I’ve ever heard, listen to it front to back, its all connected, its all brilliant and its all about relationships and pain and living and all that other good stuff. I’d quote lyrics, but I’d end up quoting the whole thing, and they really only mean as much as they do set to the music. It’s not simple stuff, it experiments with dynamics, all sorts of instrumentation, but its so confident and shockingly sucessful. Look, I went and wrote about it. Believe me, I’m holding most of it in.

I hate to post one track to the exclusion of the others I love (which is pretty much all of them) but this one struck me as perfect for today’s “I love pop songs” theme. The opening is pop brilliance, the backup singers, oh isn’t it wonderful?

The Latest Toughs by Okkervil River

I can’t think of a better bit than this song’s “let’s pause and add our own intentions.” For those of you who missed it, the music gets all quiet, and we hear “I don’t know what notes you want to hear played/I can’t think what lines you’d like me to sing or say/and I’m not sure what subjects you want mentioned/So pause and add your own intentions…” and then the gently pulsing music grows, and grows, and here comes that fantastic hook… This invitation to make the music your own always reminds me of Gregory, my fantastic former yoga teacher, who would always open by inviting us to set an intention or a dedication for the practice.

This music is supposed to be about our lives, and in our lives, its written for people, and to people, and Okkervil River seems to understand this better than most. They call themselves a “folk punk” band, which I find really endearing, and although I rejected the description at first, its an interesting way of seeing their sound.

Now that I think about it, I usually write about music by stringing together hyperbolic adjectives. I’ll try to work on that. Get all mean and critical and whatnot. I hear that’s where the money is.

A Hand Me Down Dress From Who Knows Where

I played this cover for a friend, and she was disappointed. She said it sounded the same as the original. She explained that she really liked when covers do something different with a song, give it a different mood, set it somewhere else.

Well, I was planning to say the same thing, and then give this Iron & Wine cover of The Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties” as an example. But although I’m sticking to my guns on the quality and coolness of this cover, I have to admit that the tempo and mood is similar to the original. I still think removing the buzzing, electric stuff, and exchanging the weird robotic delivery for silky harmonies, and draping the whole mess in acoustic guitars was change worthy of notice. And I have a theory that the vocals have a lot more dynamic variation in the cover. But maybe I’m just feeling defensive.

All Tomorrow’s Parties by The Velvet Underground
All Tomorrow’s Parties by Iron & Wine with Calexico

Speaking of pop music, I’ve been listening to Velvet a lot recently, and although the rock-snob importance they come shrouded in is off-putting, when you actually hear the music, its a joy. Especially the “Loaded” album. “Sweet Jane,” “Rock n Roll,” and “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’,” are just great. And I want the bossa nova “Femme Fatale” to play every time this one girl I know walks into the room. “Here she comes/you better watch your step…”

Try To Dream Again

Isn’t spring beautiful? I’m going to keep tonight’s posts short, because they’re gonna sound ridiculous. I’m currently in love with the pop song- this may turn up in one of the reviews soon to be delivered, but I consider “the pop song” to be something akin to “the novel” in its beauty, possibility, simplicity, and ability to endure – even though pundits declare both these formats dead and outdated every single year, every single year they get it wrong. There’s a lot that exists outside the pop format, and some of the most exciting current music falls into that category, especially new genres of dance music. But let’s turn to this creation of ours for a moment and give thanks. With a melody, a beginning middle and end, verses and a chorus, and lyrics built on the rise and fall of the music – oh the places we can go. Songwriting never ceases to amaze me.

The Talking Heads gave a live concert that was produced as a film (directed by my neighbor Jonathan Demme) and an album which includes a handful of the greatest celebratory pop moments I own. I recommend blasting it, beginning to end, while driving. Let it transport you as only effusive pop can. The greatest song on this album of great songs is, of course, “This Must Be The Place,” which ranks as one of the top five love songs ever written, and is a heart-wrenching hymn to homemaking to boot. Take it out for a spin:

This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)

This live version is the best recorded. At full volume, and at the right moment, it brings tears to my eyes. How can something so full of cheesy 80s synths sound so timeless and elegant? How can anyone be so happy? I’m so grateful this exists.

I feel a little guilty putting this next to “This Must Be The Place,” which to me is a revered, eternal, awesome thing, but “Hey Now Now” is a recent and quite excellent example of a well crafted, light, fluffy pop song. See why we need music like this? See why we need the Beatles? Can you imagine living before this stuff was invented? No wonder everyone used to think life was defined by suffering. Let this in, brush it off, keep it in your pocket, its nothing if not fun:

Hey Now Now by The Cloud Room

For those of you who want the whole story behind this song (who are you people?) check out the lengthy piece The Smash That Wasn’t. Purchase the album here.

Word Of The Day: ROENTGENIZDAT

“The ebullient rhythms of Bill Haley, originally pressed into the vinyl of Decca records, eventually turned up on an X-ray of a fractured skull in Moscow; the immortal voice of Elvis Presley lived for a few months atop a broken ankle or elbow in Yerevan; the rollicking rhythms of Little Richard were captured on a shattered rib cage in Riga or Tallinn.”

–Rock Around The Bloc by Timothy Ryback, page 32

Roentgenisdat is the creation of illegal records pressed into the emulsion on the surface of X-ray plates. “Produced by the millions,” Ryback explains, “these records became the common currency of the Soviet-bloc rock scene in the late 1950s.”

I love how ingenious and successful people are at pursuing their own happiness; I love how important music is to people’s lives, how hard they fight for it; I love how technology circumscribes a state’s power to restrict the production and enjoyment of art; most of all I love this image of Little Richard pressed onto an old X-Ray picture. Reading Ryback, I have to stop every two pages to catch my breath: people being beaten, given hard labor, or sent to prison for recording, listening to, or even financially supporting the production of music just seems unreal. And untenable. Which, as the book makes clear, it was.

Soviet popular history is really inspiring – the spread of music and popular dances and illegal ideas speaks of a popular spirit that is truly inspiring, and in the face of hideously anti-human governance – but the actions of these governments keeps shocking me. Did you know the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia? Twice? I know I learned this in high school, but I’d forgotten. Oh thank the lord all that is over. This history should be learned and re-learned; for those of us who didn’t get around to political theory and real familiarity with current events until the middle of the 90s, it can be all too easy to forget exactly what Stalinism meant. They were even anti-jazz! It’s really the intrusions into every day life, more than the headline-generating political acts, that gall me about communism. People were told what to listen to, how to dance, what to think and who to be. And they thought they thought this would last. And they thought they were right.

I was considering making magnitizdat a word of the day too before realizing that would exceed my allowable dosage of Soviet-themed ranting for the week; that one refers to the underground recording, copying, borrowing and lending of audio recordings on cassette tapes (“the electronic sister to the underground publication samizdat“) that took off in the mid-1960s when significant quantities of tapes first became available and recording equipment became cheap enough. That’s advancing technology and human freedom two, evil bureaucratic empire, zero. Let’s add to that my favorite moment so far from Bloc: the twist breaking out en mass in front of the Kremlin. “The police were kept busy late into the night dispersing other spontaneous groups of twisters in Red Square and the surrounding streets” after May Day celebrations, 1967.

The book is fascinating in many ways: rock is always equated with war by state propagandists, the state-sponsored alternatives to popular dances never catch on, and a lot of the time rock comes off as an escape from politics instead of a challenge to the establishment. When young people get angry, the authorities become more lenient about rock and roll, and dancing takes the place of revolution. Pete Seeger’s tour of Eastern Europe and the rise of political protest folk music in the Soviet bloc in the 60s is also covered, and contrasted with “beat music,” as rock was called, folk seems to be the real threat. The chapters on the Beatles are wonderful (“with their straight, dark hair, their average stature, and their simple collarless blazers, the Beatles could be imitated by central European youths with little difficulty”) and eye-opening. It’s wonderful to complicate our basic historical narrative with this kind of alternative perspective; each familiar cultural moment from American history is both shared with and experienced completely differently by those on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Always, the communists are on the defensive, culturally. Always, technology further empowers the individual over the state. Always, people find a way to make their lives worth living. Its quite a story. And its all the better for knowing how it ends.

More here and here.

It Takes Two

I recently realized I’d put these two songs next to each other on a mix I’d made, and they happen to be among my favorite songs ever. I also really enjoy how sublime and ridiculous it is to hear them next to each other. I suppose if I were forced to supply an organizing theme to this post, I could say that it includes the most offensive and the least offensive song you could sing to a loved one that I own.

First up, “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails.

The secret of “Closer” is that it’s really two very different songs. Those famous lyrics that make the song so readily identifiable, so disgusting, and so easy to write off as a novelty (or heresy), don’t have anything to do with what makes this track one for the ages. The first half of “Closer” is an evil pop song, complete with disco hi hat and wild funk bassline, which proceeds orderly from verse to chorus to verse to chorus. Yes, the lyrics are absurdly angsty teenage poetry, and yes, he sings “I want to fuck you like an animal” a couple times like the attention hungry rock star he is. It’s a curiosity, a well produced but over the top hymn to some intentionally melodramatic and laughably self-serious sexuality.

After the third minute, “Closer” is a whole different animal. Feel free to skip forward to hear what I’m talking about. Virtually instrumental from here on out, it builds with purring, fuzzy guitars and then sharp fantastic synth blurps and beats, a mean, tight, low rhythm section, some kind of electronic funk, industrial funk, metal funk, ahh there are no words for how tight this is. Notice the chorus of the first half never even threatens to rear its head past the three minute mark. Soon we get these insistent piano chords, Depeche Mode in a bad mood, and if you listen Reznor’s production here is really astounding, especially the guitars that sound like motorcycles. There’s still that funk smack on the bass, it’s never gone away, and then at 4:47 the track grows even further with higher synth lines, and then at 5:07 some crazy smacking drums come in alongside humming, sneering, distorted gutars, and then 5:30 or so the drums just go apeshit, step right up to the edge of godliness, for a brief few seconds standing on top of a monument of sound as sexy and insane and powerful as anything I’ve ever heard. A tiny little descending melody is precariously placed on top of all these layers, and that theme (which isn’t heard once in the first half – nothing so tender or vulnerable made its way into that section) is what I always think of as the “Closer” melody. Notice also how Reznor is so confident in this monstrous creation of his that he doesn’t repeat it, not once, he gives it no time to sink in, to convince you – we get literally twenty seconds of it.

The second half is slightly over three minutes, outweighing the dry pathology of the first half, and is (I humbly proclaim) a crowning achievement of popular music. The desperate lust that the first half makes laughable is expressed elegantly, powerfully, and nearly transcendently by the second half. It’s a shame they’re buried behind three minutes of calculatedly offensive, really bad poetry.

If you didn’t quite get what was so fantastic about that second half, turn up the volume, close your eyes, and try again.

Next up, “Every Morning” by Keb Mo.

Our friends at Pitchfork would probably describe “Every Morning” by Keb Mo as MOR. I readily admit I had to look this snarky acronym up; turns out it stands for “Middle Of the Road,” which they consider the ultimate end all and be all of little nasty things to say about an album they don’t like. Well, hell. A great song’s just a great song. This one’s a simple, bluesly pop number, and it’s a love song, only not the kind of love song Pitchfork writers like; it doesn’t apologize for or cover up for the fact that it’s a love song, or make ironic reference to the fact that it’s a love song, and the fact that everyone writes love songs, and that they’re cheesy and silly but we have to keep writing them because that’s just what love makes us want to do. It’s not embarassed about being simple, or lovely; it revels in it. This is why we invented music, it says, remember? This is what music can do. Yeah, we can provide a soundtrack to pain and worry and hearbreak and anger, to politics and drugs and sex, we can glorify anything you think is worth glorifying (and a few things you don’t) and get down on tape a million things that make you uncomfortable, that push that poor, endlessly abused envelope. But dear god in heaven look what music can do with love. Look what it can do with tenderness, with happiness, with uncomplicated caring between two people. I can’t help but think we should be able to produce pop songs as uncomplicated and as appealing as those pleasant, formulaic, clever love songs in the 30s and 40s, the ones pumped out by Gershwin and Berlin, even if that exact format is rightfully over. Humanity, and our art, can’t really be shackled by irony, its much too powerful for that. We can do this, make beautiful unembarassed music. We can. Maybe the best of the cheesy Latino pop ballads achieve something similar. I don’t know..

The great thing about “Every Morning” is that it sounds like love. It’s not just the hallmark lyrics (“when I’m with you it feels like heaven, you’re an angel holding me, you’re sweet sweet loving it sets me free”) that let you know, but the lovely guitar, and the lovely voice. There is a hint of sorrow to his love, in the lyrics (“in my wildest imagination I could never imagine you loving me as much as I do you”), in the aching blue notes the guitar introduces, and in the gentle, sighing melody. But that’s love for you. And I’m damn proud of him for capturing it so well.

“It may be winter it may be fall/I might have plenty or nothin at all/but baby I’ll be there whenever you call.”

The blues has always worn simplicity well; although in the hands of an amateur it can sound cheesy and trite, successful blues singers make it crystal clear that just a few words can say volumes, and they make this come true through the sheer power of their confidence in what they’re singing. Sometimes things can be expressed better in a few words than in a million (cough this post cough). There is a lot of beauty that has been found by experimenting with the blues, by electrifying it and embellishing it and warping and distorting it, and thousands of musicians have followed this course. But there’s something about the acoustic blues that nothing can touch. It’s the foundation, the heart, of all modern popular music, but it achieves something direct and true and beautiful that all its descendants only very rarely create. The blues is also just fantastic as popular music, as something everyone recognizes, anyone can pick up. Its just so obvious, so simple, so easy to do, and so hard to do well. Keb Mo reminds us what it sounds like when done well.

“Every morning and every evening/every day I think of you/the way you love me through and through.”

And now, for your listening pleasure, lust, love, and the fantastic range of popular music on display:

Closer
Every Morning

These juxtapositions are one of my favorite ways of enjoying music, and finding ways to see old music in new light. It’s not my phrase, but I love to think of these posts as “tiny little mixtapes.” Expect more of them.

Through The Badlands Of Wyoming

I try to stay away from blogging about my life, but Wyoming was so insane, and I’ve been away for so long, that I thought you deserved a quick description of what I was doing.

Cross country skiing is sometimes like downhill skiing, sometimes like Nordic track stuff, those exercise machines, sometimes like ice skating, sometimes like normal walking, sometimes like walking with cement blocks on both of your feet, and occasionally like walking down a slight incline with a cement block on one of your feet, which really sucks. I put “Separation Sunday” by The Hold Steady on loop, got through it twice before we even got to the base of the mountain, and for that first stretch I was so wired, so high, which due to a combination of endorphins and the biggest, grandest, most joyful, most badass rock and roll ever. Then came five more hours of slogging up a mountain.

We slept in a yurt up on the ridge and came down the next day, which was another four hours of skiing. I got a sunburn, a fever, lost my glasses, and was soon wandering around the Salt Lake City airport in a daze in the middle of the night. But I had my music, and my books, and my friends, and more pamphlets about Mormonism than I will ever need. I survived.

Forgive me for being slow getting back to the blog, for my delayed return to productivity and sanity. I’m doing my best. And things are looking up: yoga classes resume tonight!

This post’s title brought to you by Springsteen’s Nebraska. Check that one out. Working class, rural American emo. Great stuff. Brought to you by a Jersey boy who’s been a musician his whole life.

Welcome Back And Welcome Back

Hey HEY hey. Lots of fantastic stuff going on. First up, the Sons Of Pitch won Best Performance at the Battle of the Acapella Groups on Thursday. So there. Check out that link, it’s got a bunch of great pictures, including one of the Sons where my cheek is kind of visible. We’ll now be adding “best acapella group on campus” after our name every change we get. We sang “Hallelujah I Love Her So” by Ray Charles, an original song by our very own Nick Trimmis, and “Black Baloon” by the Goo Goo Dolls. Wore ties and everything.

I’ve been away for quite a while so there’s lots to catch up on. I have a huge amount of bus and airplane travel, and a grueling trip to the top of a mountain in the middle of Wyoming, under my belt. I’ve been reading a lot, especially one book about the story of rock music in the soviet bloc and that essay “The Case for Contamination” I mentioned earlier; I’ll be posting about all of it in the coming days. I’ve also listened to a lot of music – leaving the vault at home and taking a few records out on the ipod gave me the chance to really get to know “Loveless,” “Separation Sunday,” “Kid A,” and recently “Black Sheep Boy,” rather intimately. I’ll be posting reviews of three of the four on the right; I’m almost done, I swear. Check them out.

Also in heavy rotation: “Tender Buttons” by Broadcast, “Live at Earl’s Court” by Morrissey, “Beauty and The Beat” by Edan, and “You Forgot It In People” by Broken Social Scene. All highly recommended.

Until The Real Thing Comes Along

A Joyful Noise has been up for five weeks now, and posts have been really long, had multiple topics, and (I freely admit) have been absurdy and conusingly titled. It’s not something you’d want to scroll through.

For the week I’ll be away, in an attempt to make it easier for you, I’m leaving this summary at the top of the page. A Joyful Noise has featured:

• random and amusing tidbits from our amazing internet here, here, here, and here

• long artist introductions here, here, and here (music posted)

• tiny little mixtapes / some of my favorite songs here, here, here, and here (music posted)

• covers with originals here and here (music posted)

• thoughts on politics, current events, and culture here, here, here, and here (this last one being incredibly long and unbearably pompous; reading only points 4 through 7 would be advisable)

• an attempt at an actual essay here

• a neat find I’m very proud of here (music posted)

• and what is still my favorite posted track so far here (music posted)

Have a wonderful week. Leave comments on the individual posts (by clicking at the bottom on “Post A Comment”) or send general inquiries and responses here.

Try Thinking More, If Just For Your Own Sake…

Read Andrew Sullivan’s take on our current abortion politics here and my previous post on the subject here. Sullivan, as any libertarian conservative gay Catholic should be, is anti-Roe and pro-choice. Confusing, ain’t he? Seriously, for those not familiar with the idea that you can be against criminalizing abortion and for overturning Roe v. Wade, the essay linked to above is a great place to start.

Sullivan’s blog is linked to on my sidebar; he is inconsistent and has some serious weaknesses but overall I can heartily recommend him as someone who (usually) will hear both sides of an argument, who will admit mistakes and change his mind, and who I happen to agree with on a handful of major issues. He is also someone who will link to fun and entirely random things.

I first got interested in Sullivan a few years ago after reading his essays on gay marriage, hate crime laws, testosterone, “the end of gay culture”, and especially one called “We’re All Sodomists Now” which can’t be read for free online anymore; the first third, which includes his central claim that sodomy has historically been defined as “simply non-procreative sex, whether practiced by heterosexuals or homosexuals” and furthermore that a taboo against homosexual sex but not other forms of non-procreative sex is indefensible, can be read here.

I don’t have the space or the inclination to talk about all his policy positions – he’s opinionated about and writes intelligently on a much wider range of issues than the essays above indicate. Needless to say, he gets many things wrong. I will always feel some warmness towards him, however, for being one of the first important voices in my world to confidently and proudly express combinations of opinions about policy and culture that don’t at all fit into the inflexible, dogmatic, and severely limiting left and right.

A greater gift cannot be given by a political writer.

Yesterday I head a friend of mine express what used to be a very familiar frustration for me: how can you figure out what the truth is when all news is “spun” one way or the other, everyone seems to have an agenda, and everyone claims to have numbers that incontestably prove they’re correct? It was a nice moment, because I realized that this uncertainly doesn’t paralyze me the way it used to. My advice: read people who disagree with each other. Then, as the Beatles said, think for yourself.

Sullivan may not impress you, but the last few years of his blog have helped me towards thinking for myself an enormous amount. I’d welcome recommendations of writers you trust to tell you the truth, even about the weaknesses in their own arguments. And of course I’ll strive to do the same.

You Know You Can Lean On Me…

Some of last night’s highlights. A mix I’d put together a while back was playing, and the evening (the weather’s been wonderful lately; ditto the company) just strengthened my love of these songs. Enjoy them.

Protection by Massive Attack
It Can’t Come Quickly Enough by Scissor Sisters
Enjoy The Silence by Depeche Mode
Wordless Chorus by My Morning Jacket

A recipe for a mellow, spring evening.

They Can Feel It All Over…

After today, I’ll be away until Monday (the 20th). I may or may not be able to get some writing done in the yurt (don’t ask), but I’ll be back blogging by Tuesday at the latest.

I’ve had a fantastic weekend, and it’s been filled with music, but I’m starting to realize what an expansive and unwieldy subject that is. I’m trying to find a way to write about recorded pop (I’m listening to You Are The Quarry, which I’ve been dipping my toes into for months but am now really starting to love) and connect it with all the ephemeral, intensely personal, completely unplanned musical moments that populate our lives. Buzz about new music, catty music scene gossip, sweeping generalizations about musical history and “sounds like x crossed with y” is all well and good. But the way we really experience music is harder to put on paper.

For example: yesterday, on a long car ride, I sang “Bohemian Rhapsody” (including the guitar solo!) with friends at the top of my lungs. Which was famously done in a certain movie, which my brother really likes, but which I had not yet seen when I did the same thing on a bright yellow bus during a chorus field trip in high school; I also remember downloading that song from Napster way back in the day, when it was free. This long car ride also included us slipping easily into harmony during a rendition of “Down By The River To Pray,” as I’ve done so many times before, and our recitation of cheesy folk songs learned in elementary school (if your elementary school didn’t teach you cheesy folk songs, you really missed out).

I was again blown away by the deceptively simple and the eternally lovely workings of music in out lives. Our respective record collections were only part of the baggage we brought into the car with us, alongside our radio listening habits, our parents’ record collections, whatever recommendations or trashings we’d overheard, which elementary school we went to. Add to that the fantastically complex way we tie certain songs to certain moments in our lives, to certain memories, and to certain people, and you’ve got a subject worth celebrating but intensely difficult to describe.

This, the powerful, pervasive, yet undirected and chaotic effect recorded music has on billions of individual lives, is the only reason it’s worth anything. Collecting and compiling information about recorded music is a pretty empty persuit unless you can translate that into real life moments. We all get lucky sometimes. “It Can’t Come Quickly Enough,” which I found at the back end of an album that enjoyed a faddish popularity last year, idly added to a playlist about a month ago, and then played last night for friends, became one of those moments that make all the hours hunched over my laptop fiddling with itunes worthwhile. That’s what this is all about. Better living through music.

Remind me to do a whole post on the Scissor Sisters one of these days.

We Will Always Be Around…

For my Stars fans: A remix of “Ageless Beauty” (that’s the song playing on their homepage) that I think is a lot better than the original, and their (surprisingly) really sucessful cover of The Smiths’ “This Charming Man” off Nightsongs. Incidentally, when Death Cab for Cutie covered “This Charming Man” on You Can Play These Songs With Chords, it was crap.

I also have Stars performing “The Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues if anyone wants it. I don’t think it’s a very strong song. Maybe I’ll post it at Christmas.

Ageless Beauty (Most Serene Remix) by Stars
This Charming Man by Stars
This Charming Man by The Smiths

Ok. That’s enough Canadian indie rock for now.

I’m Afraid Of The Dark Without You Close To Me…

“You won’t be happy with me, but give me one more chance. You won’t be happy anyway.”

Nothing sums up the Magnetic Fields better. Mopey, absurdly in love, absolutely lovely, this strange, impish band has been making strange, impish music for more than a decade. It’s all good. Check out their ambitious, ridiculous, fantastic “69 Love Songs.”

I Went Out To The Forest And Caught 100,000 Fireflies

This perfect little number (put it on all your mixtapes!) is from “The Wayward Bus/Distant Plastic Trees.” You’re welcome.

All You Fascists

Time to brush up on your classic economic literature. Hayek explains in the illustrated and abridged… well, the cartoon version of “The Road To Serfdom” how to go from New Deal style government to Fascism in 18 easy steps!

Consider yourself warned. By cartoons.

The Future, Wouldn’t That Be Nice?

Will advancing technology reshape abortion? I’m a little tardy in blogging about this piece – its been up a week at least – but the linked William Saletan column summarizes ongoing and pending legal challenges to Roe and then wonders if we aren’t now in a position to move beyond it. Clearly a moral quandry created by technology, abortion may be rendered far less necessary and far less common by further advances.

It can feel unwelcome, but scientfic and technological progress now drives most moral and cultural soul-searching (and has for some time… now there’s the seed of a great essay). The intense focus – by both religion and science – on a precise definition of life’s boundaries simply wasn’t part of humanity’s vocabulary until technology brought it up (when does it begin? when has it ended? what permutations and modifications are allowable for something defined as human?). Everything from bodybuilding, prosthetic implants, steroids, transplants, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research, and the prospect of cloning spurs us to better understand and even to transform our ideas about what is natural and what is human.

Saletan’s Human Nature column does a fantastic job of exploring this intersection of science, technology, and culture. He’s a great guide through current events that highlight the choices and challenges we’re now faced with.

Tangentially: I once read a fantastic Stanislaw Lem short story – I can’t remenber its name – which featured a bunch of sentient, religious robots existing in a future where no one believed in anything supernatural anymore. They explained exactly how rationality and technological control over biology had encroached bit by bit on the divine, and then came to a puzzling and intriguing position on what could be left over for believers in a world conquered by technological prowess. I’m not explaining it well. I promise to find it and quote it extensively. But what an idea, right? What will be the future of belief, of knowledge? I have so many thoughts about this. I’ll save them for another time.

Summarily: The future is such an exciting and scary place. I recommend spending some time with these issues, so you don’t get completely blown away a few years down the road. This is uncertain terrain, and while I trust humanity to find its way through (trial and error, baby. its never failed us before) I sure as hell have no idea how we will. Anway, here’s hoping that abortion soon becomes a thing of the past. By choice.