Entries from September 2006 ↓

Justin Timberlake is on a mission. He’s bringing the sexy back. But he’s picked an odd way to do it: he’s released a track that could have been — and probably will be — written by our robot overlords.

The song is inescapable. It’s called SexyBack, and it goes like this:

I’m bringing sexy back
The motherfuckers don’t know how to act
Girl let me something something lack
Cause you’re something that sort of rhymes with back

Yeah, I don’t know the words, which is odd because I’ve heard it about a thousand times over the last couple of weeks. Even so, I don’t get the impression that Mr Timberlake has spent a great deal of time honing his message. I’d call these lyrics dumb and execrable, but that’s missing the point. It doesn’t really matter what he’s saying. It’s the sounds he’s making when he’s saying it.

Which brings me to the point: the music, the noise of this thing. It’s electronic, but it’s not electronica. It’s beat-heavy, but it’s not hip-hop. It’s flighty and ephemeral, but it’s not pop. There’s something overwhelmingly synthetic about the whole thing. I don’t mean artificial. I mean synthetic, as in not crafted by nature. This isn’t the self-consciously artificial bleeps and bloops of the electronic wing of the music industry. This is something post-human.

There’s been a lot of talk in scifi about the “singularity” — the moment in time when the machines we’re creating start creating themselves, and then use their enhanced capacity to create even better versions of themselves, and so on, until our toasters become small metal gods perched on our kitchen counters, wielding absolute authority over the pathetic little scraps of sentience that once used them for warming bread.

Sexyback is the kind of song that our toaster monarchs would write. It’s a distillation of our recent musical history, disparate pieces fused expertly together, shot through with Timberlake’s highly morphed voice, which resonates with a kind of mechanized, nebulous yearning. It’s an artifice, constructed by a new kind of being, a thing just recently born and without any sort of cultural history of its own: and so forced to mine the culture of its progenitor/thralls, and use that material to assemble something of its own. Derivative, yes, but unmistakably new.

That’s what Sexyback is. It’s the first tentative artistic efforts of the machines, post-singularity. Which raises some troubling questions. Have we reached the singularity already, or are we just bumping along on its shoals? If neither, do we have some sort of foreknowledge built into our DNA, prepping us for the coming baton-passing? Or is this God easing us into the transition?

And most of all: why can’t I can’t stop listening to this damn thing?

Postscript: If you’ve somehow managed to avoid hearing this song, you can listen to it here. Warning: the track starts as soon as you load the page, so avoid this link if you have any Timberlake allergies.

Andrew Sullivan weighs in on Bush:

The serenity may also come from his own fundamentalist psyche. There’s a reason fundamentalism is popular. Unlike other forms of faith, it relieves the believer of almost all responsibility for any of his doubts, it surrenders everything in a person’s psyche to God’s will, it appeases all anxiety and reassures away every question. And so, in many cases, it can be a source of great goodness, unleashing compassion and service and amazing resilience. Look at how fundamentalism created, say, the Salvation Army. But in others, it can become the constant absolution and rationalization of almost any action. It can justify torture. It can legitimize all sorts of ugly means because the motive is deemed pure … The combination of that psyche with naked political cunning is one of the most dangerous combinations there is. We are looking at a man who absolutely believes he is right; and that he has a large majority of the cards.

Ok, I lied. He was actually talking about Mahmoud Ahamadinejad, Iran’s crazy insane terrifying fundamentalist president. Uncanny, though, isn’t it?

In 1992, I decided that I needed sunglasses. Not the cheap-ass sunglasses I’d been pulling off the racks at Target every couple of months or so. I needed quality sunglasses this time around. Cool sunglasses. Yes.

So I went to Sunglass Hut in the mall and picked out the biggest, plastic-est, whitest sunglasses I could find and plunked down an exorbitant amount of money and walked out of there feeling pretty damn hip (PDH).

Let me just pause here, then, to summarize:

1. These sunglasses were white. Very white. Celebrity teeth white.
2. I thought they were pretty damn hip (PDH).
3. I am male.

And so, equipped with my white sunglasses, I ventured out into the world. And there was much merriment.

None of which I noticed, of course. I don’t usually notice very much. And besides, the PDH don’t notice things; things notice them.

I got my first inkling of the true state of affairs a couple of days later. I was in the car with my friend J. I reached into the glove to pull out my shining alabaster sunglasses and put them on.

There was a silence. It was a very heavy silence, fraught with something I couldn’t quite identify. I looked over at J, who was looking at me with an expression so rich with emotion that it reminded me of the pattern of some fantastically complex Persian rug.

I frowned. “What?”

More silence. Then, very quietly, he said: “What the hell are those?”

“What are what?”

“Those things on your face.” Still calm, reasonable. No more than mildly inquisitive.

“Sunglasses,” I said. “They shield my eyes from the sun.”

“They’re white.”

“Yeah.” My PDH-based obliviousness filters started to strain a little. “So?”

“White sunglasses. That you’re wearing.”

“I like white.”

More silence. We drove on. Then: “It’s possible to like white without wearing white sunglasses.”

“Lots of things are possible.”

“They are. Let me restate it, then. It’s probably a good idea to like white without wearing white sunglasses.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Let me restate it one more time. Are you out of your fucking mind??!?“

“You don’t like my sunglasses.”

“Dude! They’re white!”

“I like them.”

“Take them off. Please.”

“No. What’s wrong with white?”

“Seriously. I have a reputation to worry about. What if someone sees you and then sees me? I’ll be the guy who hangs out with the guy who wears white sunglasses.”

“Look, I can’t be held responsible for your narrow fashion sense.”

“I’d say you were committing social suicide, but that would be like telling a corpse it’s committing real suicide.”

“Ha.” I looked over at him. “Ha.”

“Come on, man. Think of the children.”

I stuck to my guns. The sunglasses stayed on.

They came off shortly afterwards, though, when my then-fiance came back from Peace Corps, and saw them, and threatened pre-marital divorce.

They’re in a drawer, somewhere, to this day, gathering dust, waiting for the fashion world to wake up to the indomitable hipness of white.

This is how you lose you soul:

Mr. Bush on Wednesday acknowledged the use of aggressive interview techniques, but only in the most general terms. “We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking,” Mr. Bush said. He said the C.I.A. had used “an alternative set of procedures’’ after it became clear that Mr. Zubaydah “had received training on how to resist interrogation.

“These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations,’’ Mr. Bush said. “The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.’’

It’s not torture, because we say it’s not torture. I mean, it’s not like we didn’t ask oursevles. We did. And we were told by ourselves that it was cool.

Mr Bush isn’t just the decider, it turns out. He’s the definer. He’s not deterred by mere words, like “torture”, or “cruelty”, or “morality”. If those words mean don’t mean what national security requires them to mean, then god damn it he’ll change them. This is the mark of strong President.

I took three semesters of calculus in college, from which I learned three important lessons:

1. Isaac Newton was a genius
2. Numbers make me cry
3. If my life ever depends on calculus skills, I will die

I purged all of that toxic shit out of my mind a couple minutes after the last exam of my last class, but nevertheless come away with some tiny seeds of admiration for calculus: the precision, the ingenuity, the satisfying sounds that mathematical gears make when they meet and mesh and crank out answers. Calculus kills ambiguity like Raid kills roaches.

Not so for moral calculus. Notwithstanding CS Lewis’ claim that humanity has a built-in moral sense for Right and Wrong, that we instinctively know bad things when we see them, there’s an awful lot of carefully thought-out, rigidly considered, meticulously argued bullshit out there in support of various brands of sin and murder.

The mind is a rationalization machine, remarkably versatile. It can takes facts and organize them into conclusions — or it can flip the process around and assemble facts around predetermined conclusions. This isn’t as easy as just making stuff up: fact-based lies are like found art, carefully chosen tatters of truth Frankensteined together into some horrible perversion of reality.

There’s a lot of this in the various justifications for the war in Iraq, naturally. But recently you find the best specimens of this degenerate art in the opinions of people who take the side of Israel in the recent war in Lebanon. William Arkin’s column from today’s Post is a fairly typical example of the breed, though perhaps a little more contorted than most:

So here is the truth: Israel did not do anything close to what it was capable of doing. Hezbollah did all it could.

---

Because of Israel’s means, thousands of apartments are gone, selected and meticulously excised by a high-tech military force. Only a very short drive from the neighborhoods of southern Beirut though, you are back to bustling boulevards; a few neighborhoods over and there are luxury stores and five star hotels. Beyond the “Hezbollah” neighborhoods, the city is normal. Electricity flows just as it did before the fighting. The Lebanese sophisticates are glued to their cell phones. Even an international airport that was bombed is reopened.

An accurate reading of what happened and what south Beirut means might produce a different picture. Israel had the means to impart greater destruction, but that does not mean intrinsically that it is more brutal. If Hezbollah had bigger rockets or more accurate ones, it would have done not only the same, but undoubtedly more.

So the argument, as far as I can tell, is that Israel is not really at fault here, because they didn’t kill everyone. Hezbollah managed to murder far fewer innocent Israelis, but are more evil because they couldn’t have possibly killed more. This isn’t just a “down is up” argument. This is more “down is cranberries.” Just completely batshit insane.

There aren’t any answers here. You can’t flip to the back of your moral calculus textbook to check your solutions. Everything is contingent, nothing is absolute. Fine, granted. Nevertheless, there are a couple of questions that have the same answer 99% of the time.

• When is it ok to kill innocent people?
• When is it ok to scatter unexploded cluster bombs throughout villages and farmlands?
• When it is ok to destroy the infrastructure of an entire country in an effort to spook a couple hundred terrorists?

This stuff is pretty clear-cut, which is why the people writing these columns have to twist themselves into such interesting and alarming shapes when they try to argue against them.

But they keep trying, bless their souls. You’ve got to admire that.

I come out of the office at nine o’clock, stumbling away from the deadline that’s been looming over me like some kind of Mordorish evil eye, casting a dank, gritty pall. I’m numb and tired, which is a little disappointing: I’d expecting elation, a seratonin spike that would just sweep away the months of stress-horde in one stroke.

But no. Just numb.

DC is DC on Thursday night - pretty young people in ties and heels walking purposefully along or sitting together over drinks in little scrums of laughter and conversation. The darkness, still in its infancy, settles comfortably over the diffuse people-light of early night. I was hoping for calm, a sense of well-being, accomplishment.

But no. Just numb.

Down the escalator, through the turnstiles, into the retreating rush of the train I’ve just missed. The platform is empty for a while, but fills slowly with officepeople clutching briefcases or blackberries or sheaves of powerpoint printouts, looking blank, defeated. Numb. The curved walls are honeycombed with square recesses lined, in turn, with spongy white somethings that absorb and dampen sound. The lighting is indirect, coming up from fixtures on the edges of the platform floor, the tracks. The effect is supposed to be calming, pleasant, but really it just feels like purgatory, a listless waiting in the gloom.

The train stops at American University on its way north. This is something to look forward to. The kids who spill in aren’t your normal blank-stare Metro-drones: they’re alive with a kind of indefinable, unmistakable vibrancy, not so much a lust for a life as an acknowledgment of its possibilities, and everything that acknowledgment brings you.

Two minutes of news in the car. Bush crowing over the transfer of 14 people he’s finished torturing, Pakistan snapping back to its pre-9/11 relationship with the Taliban, Rumsfeld calling dissenters cowards, traitors, worse. I stab at the radio until that fucking noise goes away. Gnarls Barkley instead. I must be crazy.

Taking care of your body is easy. All you need to do is put food in the machine and exercise it and keep it out of traffic and hope it doesn’t fail you too soon. The ghost life, though — the thing that attaches itself to all of that rank biology and hangs on until the machine stops ticking — that’s harder to figure. It’s more fickle than the machine, harder to please, harder to understand. It doesn’t tell you what it wants, not directly, and it doesn’t tell you when it’s dying. No hunger pangs if you don’t feed it: no parched throat: no illness. Just a slow ailing, a gentle withering, and then, quietly, when you’re not looking, gone.

Never again. Never again.