TheNamelessThing.com

Wind whistles. A dust devil rises, sputters out. A lone tumbleweed blows across the forum... wink

I will pass by your tirade about the megacities of South America because it took as its incipit your mistaken assumption of the derivation of my nick. I have time to address only your most egregious assumptions and assertions.

No species is allotted any timespan - the point of probability is that it is blindly statistical
and any range of probabilities will have distant outliers - even the Baynesian probability from which these timespans are derived is subject to that truth.

We do not live at the North Pole and in the Sahara without technological assistance, I admit, but the peoples who lived within the Arctic Circle and on the edges of deserts for tens of thousands of years did so without "jet-fuel, metals, synthetic fibre and communications technology", but with the technology they extemporised themselves from hides, bones, stone, or ice and with their hard-won wisdom. I do not deny that we have placed extreme stresses upon the ecology we inhabit, and that would make it hard to return to even a sub-inuit or sub-bedouin life-style or technology. That is why I said that if we survive this it will be because we use more technology - and more advanced technology - not less.

As for your contention that I cited (not "alluded to") things that were copies of great art, not great art themselves, I'm not sure I know what point of mine you're referring to: the availability of books, CDs, DVDs and the like, or the actual art I cited, be it the "Quixote" or "Six Feet Under". If the former, the observation that a CD/DVD/Book is a copy is so banal that I hope it is not what you meant; if the latter, I observed that the larger part of innovation is selection, blending, and melding. Beyond that, at what level would you have me cite, the meta-level of the invention of the novel separately by the Chinese and Europeans perhaps?

You ask me to name a true recent musical innovation. I can speak with knowledge only about western music and there, at a popular level, there hasn't been a significant one since the one I mentioned, which was the melding of European, African, and east European Jewish influences in the very early 20th Century. You could cite rock music itself, but that in itself is just a subset of this melding. At the level of Art or "Serious" music there have been a number of recent innovations of varying success, from early twentieth century 12 tone and serial music through mid-century aleatoric music and electronic music to the various versions and offspring of systems or minimalist music from the early 1960s onward. This last has influenced modern dance music from the late 80s onward, from techno, through ambient trance to grime stopping at all stations in-between. You are correct to think I am too intelligent to quote Kurt Cobain as an innovator. All he did was use a simple trick of "quiet verse loud chorus" - a trick even more basic than switching from a minor to a major key - using a variety of Punk/Metal-style blues chords detuned. It's innovation but not major innovation. It produced a handful of good pop tunes, which is all that one could hope but still far more than most of us achieve in a lifetime.

That said, even western popular music has been more innovative than it ever was before. Previously it was little more than reiterations of the same local words and music, very rarely heard outside its own local area, or at best its national borders, century after century after century. I suspect you are looking more locally in time and for a higher level of innovation than is realistic.

Nearly all western popular music sticks to a strict 4/4 time signature with the odd adventure into 2/4 and 3/4 time. Sub specie aeternitatis the only great innovation of the past two millennia has been the introduction of polyphony in the 11th Century AD.

Most of the memorable composers of the last century have not been great innovators at all. I suspect you have little interest in what used incorrectly to be called classical music, if so, I recommend you lend an ear to Stravinsky’s Firebird and Rite of Spring, Sibelius' 5th Symphony, and Orff's ever-popular "Carmina Burana" as an examples of where minor innovation and major talent to meld and select beats the arid innovation of the likes of Stockhausen, Boulez, and Cage.

If you want a truly new artform I return to computer games. I would place them as being the early representatives of a blossoming that will be create microversal simulacra of the multiverse itself.

As for fashion innovation, sportswear or no, the greatest innovation of the last 200 years in the West is without doubt the gussetted brief, panty, or knickers that replaced the crotchless underbreeches previously favoured by euro-american women, leading to a near pandemic of thrush and unneccessary fishy odours, proving the open style the better and healthier one.

As I said most innovation is not innovation, it is blending and melding, as Goethe, Shakespeare, and Cervantes show. And you will find different levels of innovation depending on the timescale at which you choose to look; it's effectively fractal like so much else.

First, I find it ironic that you go by a moniker from Latin America (I know you call yourself Santiago on other forums), home of the single greatest cluster of megalopoli, including Mexico City (the world's largest metropolitan area), Sao Paolo, Rio, and a bunch more gigantic atrocities. These cities may be exciting places to visit and gawp, but the reality for the denizens of such places is having to construct ramshackle houses, often on the slopes of the steep geologic basins many of them threaten to outgrow, running rivers of sewage, uncontrollable violence among drug gangs, not to mention the daily horror of having your child sent to America with a belly full of cocaine or heroin-packed condoms. I don't wanna come across as an enviromnmental doomsayer here, that is not my intention, but facts are facts, and anybody familiar with current scientific methodology and results knows that the planet's systems are being placed under novel stress in a novel time-range. That is to say there are two chief patterns in which living dynamic systems organise themselves and behave. 1) Homopoeisis; the fluctuating, constantly shifting forces that maintain a dynamic disequilibrium about a FIXED point (i.e. temperature variations for a region or ecosystem, or ocean levels and their associated microbial and nutrient transport and consequent complexations, such as typhoid or cholera epidemics in Bangladeshi deltas caused by transport of microbes within the bodies of dinoflagellates driven high into inhabited villages during monsoons, themselves driven by lunar phases [and sparking astrological cults as predictors of plagues thousands of years ago in Asia], and 2) Homeorhesis; the fluctuating, constantly shifting forces that maintain a dynamic disequilibrium about a MOVING point (i.e. planet-wide climate change that causes completely novel conditions in both marine and aquatic systems, bringing intercontinental species migrations perhaps never before seen, as not just microbes, fungi, animals, protists but even plants seek greener pastures in locations previously off-limits to them due to tolerance margins preventing colonisation. Humankind has evolved with a predictable suite of natural interfaces between themselves and the wilderness from which they emerged, but never before have they been exposed to the possibility of novel new species, as you yourself describe them, assaulting them from a new angle. It is entirely feasable that some hitherto harmless species of tree, long sequestered in some distant forest, may come to be our nemesis. It is all probabilistic mathematics, and any species is allotted a certain time on this globe, before some irresistible force knocks it out like an antibiotic. You say we are still here after all we've been through, but that just means the odds are stacked even more highly against us, and now we have induced homeorhesis we are making the bed in which we surely must soon lie. We are sawing off the bough upon which we have stood for millions of years - the very condtitions in which humans evolved. We are not cockroaches or bacteria, and despite our fabled intelligence we are subject to the tolerance margins of our own physiology. Yes, we can live in the North Pole and the Sahara, just like the hardiest microbes, but they live there because they can EAT that environment, thanks to enzymes they secrete and have done for billions, not millions, of years. We live there because we have jet-fuel, metals, synthetic fibre and communications technology, all of which are immensely more complex and fragile than a simple enzyme that emerged many eons ago, probably independent of life, as life had not yet itself emerged.
As for the great wealth of cultural experiences available to us today, I think it's now your turn to be "happily" wrong. All of the artefacts you alluded to were in fact COPIES of great art, great literature, etc. What I am talking about is not the mass-produced replicant offspring of a great idea, I am referring to the frequency of the birth of those ideas themselves. When was the last time somebody came up with a truly new musical form (do not say Kurt Cobain, you are too intelligent for that, and semantics was never your thing, I suspect)? The fact is, that many of the most gifted and creative of indigenous societies were the ones we exploited first, as they were the most attractive and interesting to us. What we have left are the assorted also-rans and other losers in the advancement of technology and environmental exploitation; the Amazonian tribes that exhibit less proficiency at throwing a spear or using a blow-pipe than the average frisbee-playing American schoolkid; the shanty-town inhabitants of Latin America (your neck of the wods, Santiago) and Africa, who emerge from their corrugated tin shacks wearing plastic imitations of Adidas sneakers that themselves are poor imitations of the real ones manufactured in Europe until the mid-80's when Adidas and Co. moved to the sweatshops of the Far East. It is not just the brown people who're getting screwed here, Santiago. Just as the Bedouin now wears New Balance as he treks across the desert on his camel, and his elders bemoan the death of the old traditional sandals that were so much better suited to that life (no longer available due to overkill of whatever beast the leather came from), so do young men in England bemoan the fact that Adidas are a piss-poor version of what they used to be, back in the 1980's, the heyday of the designer culture. Culture, culture,. culture, where did it all go????

photo-endyscopic-transubstantionalism, (lawson 2003. et al) the central tennet of lawsons argument hinges on arkwrights opiatt conjecture.