Current location:	class
Current mood:	thoughtful

tintinnabulations
Woo! one paper down and one revision, pop quiz, final exam, presentation, and final paper to go! then the semester is over and I get to experience relief similar to being rescued from under a 500 pound rock after 30 hours.
My ten page paper, which I wrote this morning, went off without a hitch. Legible, organized, and on fucking time above all. So now I'm in class, posting in the middle of a slow, scholarly, studdering guest speaker on Socrates, with no syllabus other than answering our questions, of which I personally have none, because I just spent 5 months researching the man myself for a good grade.
Karla's opening goes up soon, and amon tobin willl be here sunday, every self-respecting electronica enthusiast should be there, with or without knowing his work, but knowing no more than he's a major, intellectual, pioneering, hybridizing digital composer... so delight your ears!

An abridged theory for you:
So there's more than one dark age in written history. In fact, a dark age is a period where we have no idea what's going on, what happened, and why because all the archeology of the period has disappeared almsot completely. No graves to dig up, no wall paintings, no stoen carvings, no account for the sudden silence. They happen in every lineage, and our history is too short to short to say so yet, but I think it happens on a regular basis.

We're due for one.

Let's look at antiquity for a moment. The earliest dark age I know of is somewhere around 2700 BCE (Before Common Era) and the next one is from 1200-800 BCE. so they're about... a millenium and a half apart, but as the gap between evolutions grows shorter, and the last darkage in western history was what... 900 CE (Common Era) I forget the years. Anyway, the high classical period is named such because it was birth and zenith of much of modern society: democracy, art, philosophy, science, mathematics, etc. These people had drills they used on marble without electricity. They built temples a hundred feet high without cranes. They calculated the density of silver without calculators. They wrote encyclopedias without paper, they had indoor plumbing without pumps, without generators, without purifiers... they mapped the galaxy without satellites, they moved an endless ton with rope and pulleys, Athens had a pure near 100% democracy, they put human conciousness on the map! So far, we haven't added a whole lot other than stylistic additions to what they've already provided for us, like electricity, plastic, the internet, nihilism, and nueroscience.

This isn't exactly possible becuase of the sheer population of earth, but it's fun to think about:

We are becoming so specialized, we will soon be helpless. How long before mechanics are people who learn the menus of the computers that fix cars, and know nothing of cars themselves? how long before people can't parallel park a car made in 2000, because all cars newer come equipped with rear cameras and laser measurement tools? how long before we cannot sew together our clothes, we cannot grow our own food, we cannot treat our own symptoms, we cannot read a map??? That's an important one. I mean, what would happen if we lost the art of preserving food, long enough for it to conveniently arrive in the corniacopic phenomenon we call a gorcery store, we'd all be fucked! Farmers would suddenly be thought of as wise, powerful men, and not uneducated social throwbacks. Our history could easily become entirely electronic. Our information and resources could be entirely virtual, things that would be artifacts centuries from now will be invisible, spread over thousands of bits of untracable fiber optic pixels. Our schedules, our bank accounts, our letters, or emails, our journals... all will be lost when our fragile electro-ecosystem, based entirely on a corporeal one, fails, and we have no experience with unvirtual life? isn't that what a dark age is?

Believe you me, it is abridged.

shmoodle