The 30′s and 40′s, oh là là! How glamorous. It was all about gangsters and European snobs who really knew how to dance and enjoy life in Côte d’Azur.

The 50′s were the last decade of the past. Then, everything turned into a rollercoaster.

The 60′s and 70′s changed the way we perceive the world: music, rights, people’s power and art. From Jean Luc Godard to Andy Warhol, from Woodstock to the Moon.

Then the 80′s (what a strange decade, wasn’t it?) and the 90′s, where everything was about repetition and imitation but with a particular sense of style. And, yes, MTV and the indie film revolution (thank you, Harvey).

The 20th century was a century. This may sound as an obvious remark but what I mean is that it was built upon decades. Every ten years, everything changed. Every new decade, a new generation was born, claiming for new rights, dressing new fashion clothes, cutting their hair with a different style. The babyboomers, generation x, generation y, and so on, they all had a full decade to spot what was new upon the early adopters, criticize it and then adopt it as religion. To build their own zeitgeist.

The other day I realized, all of a sudden, that we were in 2012. The 20′s all over again. But what happened between 2000 and 2010? Can you name a musical style that belong specifically to that decade? A clothing style? A new slang?

Decades are not decades anymore.

The world turned into a giant Tumblr. A mix of styles, from Shangai to Maui. From LA to Tahrir square. From the hipsters to teenagers making real money on Youtube. Camhores and 4channers, desintermediated musicians and low-cost-filmmakers. Football holligans and apple fanboys. Suicide girls. Douglas Coupland. Lana del Rey (bluff or genius?). All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

I look throughout the window of a train that has been moving forward for too long now and I see a series of neatly parked garbage trucks and I think of Tokyo (“Stay here with me. We’ll start a jazz band”).

Moby plays a private concert inside my three-hundred-dollar-noisecancelling-earphones and I remember a post I read from Nacho Vigalondo where he challenged the reader to imagine a scenario where the world ends in calm, without big catastrophes, explosions and waves. Just… well, ends. With the sun going down the horizon line, melting. In calm and silence. Without drama.

The pictures of such an apocalypse will probably be taken on Instagram and uploaded in real time.

So decades are not decades anymore. Now we have a collage of things. Five year decades. Two minute decades. Your 15 minutes of fame and the perfect age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin, sorry pal, you didn’t mean Warhol, you meant the Internet.

  1. The emptiness of such a loaded decade. And still… we, the youngsters. The ones taking the world by assault. The redefined beatniks. We have tons of love to give away (nicely packed in colored MDMA pills ready to deliver).

My feeling is that time is collapsing. The past is not the past anymore. Neither the future. Instead, everything works at the same time now. The past is half an hour ago. The future is a couple of minutes away from this moment (“The future is now” slogan printed in a giant Blade Runner billboard reminds us that we have to just do it. Impossible is nothing. Have a break. Have it your way. Do you like to drive?)

We have the world in our hands for the first time in History. We can do everything we want to. We can be whoever we want to be. Or not be at all. What are we gonna do with all this? (with great power comes great responsibility Spidey).

Truth is… the only thing I want right now is to see you underwater. Take a picture. Post it on my Tumblr. Have another aspirin. Eat that toast. Drink my coffee. Enjoy my Sunday morning.

http://open.spotify.com/track/19PyAMqWjKGfRf6oxm0a5h

Nicolás Alcalá