Esnesnon 12-10-09

Hey.

Harboring general madness, learning intensively (but not at this very moment), dancing internally, disturbing teachers, dreaming of black curtains, being rather clumsy in French and Italian, blogging, escaping notice, ignoring fashion sense, searching for contact, singing softly, wasting time but using it extremely well, missing foreign places and loving the direct environment, stopping random writings for food.

I don't use twitter. I am old-fashioned modern. (By the way, who was the idiot who decided that we live in the 'modern' age and that we used to make 'modern' art in the freaking past so now the time of 'post-modern' art has come? Does this mean we are at the doorstep of the 'post-modern' age? What kind of extreme Zeerust is this, a world where modern has become a thing of the past, where modern is passé? There is no way in which I'm the only one who thinks this is crazy. You know what, never mind the first bracket, I'm going to continue this point all alinea. A decent definition of modern: "Pertaining to the current time and style." According to some folks modern also refers to a bunch of stuff that happened more then a century ago, or perhaps even several centuries ago. I believe that the moment a new art movement appears it is allowed to be named 'modern,' at that one should find a new name for the previous 'modern' movement. Calling something 'post-modern' is awfully pretentious and reeks of stupidity. Post-modern would imply that it's art that does not pertain to the current time and style, but that it eventually will. And it won't. Imagine how historians, art historians and wikipedia editors in the twenty-second century will feel. "Somewhere near the end of the twentieth century humanity collectively lost their minds as they decided their contemporary school of thought and newest art styles were too special to 'just' be called modern, so they called them post-modern. Halfway the twenty-first century, we had no choice but to invent post-post-modernism, and we all got rather confused when books with the title "Modern Age" got so damn heavy we had invent the "Post-modern Age," to mark the period in human history where we stopped basing political ideologies on oral literature over four-thousand years old. Then, when the human race finally stopped letting itself be ruled by the people with the biggest smiles and the fanciest speeches, putting all power in the hands of computers instead, and people were finally capable of spending their lives on art and historiography, pursuing their hart's desires while society was operating flawlessly, we had to think of a new way to the contemporary time period. We tried Modern Age 2, and Modern Age (but this time for real), The Revenge of the Modern Age and The Return of the Modern Age, but nothing really worked. Eventually we went with Post-post-modern Age." All because of those idiots in the Modern Age.

I don't use twitter because blogging worked fine two years ago and nothing significantly has changed since then so there is no reason blogging has lost it's positive points. Twitter is newer, but that's all. There is no inherent quality connected to the youth of methods for transmitting of thoughts and opinions. It's not like methods of communication start to smell after a while, except for pigeons and horse heads. If you leave that part out of the comparison, then what makes twitter different and why would it be an improvement? (I don't know anything about twitter apart from some things I vaguely remember hearing or reading about it, maybe I should point that out first.) Twitter can be used to convey short messages, people can sign themselves up for notifications of updates, and you use it to tell others what you are doing at that instant. Well, blogs can do that, but you can also use them for more then that. Since twitter doesn't seem to add anything and only narrows the possibilities down I hereby declare it is infinitely inferior to blogging. You know, history exists to allow people to make mistakes once. History enables people who have shining new ideas to find out someone else has had a better idea already. By taking note of all things of the past and present, good and bad, historians offer a nice alternative to empirical learning method of trial-and-error, which is terribly time and energy-consuming. Par example: in the third century AD a man with a name I instantly forget when I read it had his army burn down the library of Alexandria, destroying a shitload of works of classical science, like books about blood circulation and the human nerve system, discoveries which would slumber for more then a millenia until we had finally reached the level to do it all over. He did it because he knew a book which was supposed to hold all relevant knowledge. Any information not in this book was false and had to be destroyed, any information already present in this book was irrelevant and had to be destroyed too. After all, the contents his special book were made up by an invisible superior entity, whose existence could not be proved, who could not communicate or be communicated with, except for a few lucky, dead people who everyone has to believe unconditionally. None the ideas in the book needed argumentation or proof. Since the rebirth of science and the ways of thinking associated with it life expectancy has improved a lot. On one hand, we have the man who believed we were done improving, on the other hand we have the people who enabled improvements to the quality of life on earth by believing we weren't done. The former belongs to a category I'd like to call modern. The latter belongs to a category I call awesome.

The morale of the story is that historians of all sorts, both amateurs and people who should know better, have succumbed to extreme arrogance, naming all things in the universe from their perspective and implying or claiming history has ended. Of course I'm allowed to say such things about others, since I'm a perfect, virtuous flowerchild with love and care for all God's creatures, in case I had forgotten to mention that.

Hugo Maat.