Monday, September 7, 2009

The new world...

The plane is taking off from Santiago, Chile. I am surrounded by loads of Canadian people, tanned in a funny way after their ski holidays. Right in the moment of take off a guy in his thirties next to me plugs his earphones on the ipod and starts to listen to his favorite music. Me, already tired of listening to the security instructions in English, Spanish and French for the second time today, I start to heat up. The thing is that if there are still morons that will use phones, cameras or whatever, why do we have to listen to that boring shit every time we travel?


The thirty year old moron is now drumming on the air and finally clapping his legs to a rhythm that a washing machine could certainly outbeat. (He is wearing his sunglasses in the plane) One part of the story is that this ‘new’ generation of human beings can often lack any sense of social consciousness and a psychologist could make a 5 page list of problems that such an attitude may reflect. On the other hand, if you let each of these guys touch you, you are going to have a real hard time living in this world.

Solution: You detach…. You assume that you and this guy have nothing in common and you have solved the problem. After you may even start chatting with him and you may even have fun, at the most extreme scenario start to like him somehow (and in a detached way… now he is drumming on the back of the sit, while half of the people in the plane are asleep, including the user of the seat…).

Old fashioned societies were full of codes of behavior oppressing peoples’ personalities towards ‘what was the right thing’ and this could be very boring. Everybody would turn out to be similar; while good and bad are not so easily defined anyway. Then came the 60s and people made this breakthrough and managed to establish a more liberated way of seeing life. In my soul the feeling of rock and roll is the one of freedom and this is part of the heritage from this era. Being as you want in order to feel the moment, open, not taking anything for granted and aggressive in some sort. But there is some big misunderstanding while this guy tries to carry exactly the same breeze of ‘I am what I am and I don’t give a shit..’ He totally neglects the fact that the people who showed him that way had actually read Guevara’s political speeches; while he has his picture in his underwear. They were seeking everywhere around them for inspiration to do the change, while he is downloading the inspiration form itunes. Style and manners came long after a change inside, while in our era style is hopeless to pass any message through, being so exhaustively sold…

Anyway we are supposed to have passed this phase on sociological evolution and now assume that everyone is capable and thus responsible to figure out right or wrong. Another question is on which criteria this will be done and education is supposed to also ensure some standards. Education is what we learn at school, but more important is what we experience in our lives and there for me lies a big growing problem.

2 hours ago the plane was landing in Santiago and one of the most amazing sceneries I have ever seen in my life was unveiling itself through the window. A golden band of setting sun, under purple, gray, magenda painted clouds, were filling the sky. In the meantime, granite, steep, rocky mountains, were standing right in front of me with their tops all white with snow and all these colours were reflected at small ponds scattered around the grass fields of the arid Chilean landscape. At the same time, in the plane we were all watching the documentary on Flying saucers which was apparently beating Planet Earth’s unrepeated beauty. And that’s a serious part of the problem… The sun is setting in Santiago, you are hanging hundreds of meters above the earth and you are concerned about whether Flying saucers were extraterrestrial means of transport or military test models. The link with reality has broken as a screen is sucking your existence…

And this is happening with increasing frequency and intensity to all of us. First was TV, then computers, after internet, iphone, ipod, blackberries and who knows what follows next. This is why everywhere in the world people listen to music composed several (TV-free) decades ago, or at least this music remixed. If you look carefully it feels like we are not living in this world anymore in order to be inspired and create out of it… There is absolutely no problem, since life will never stop and we are always acting somehow... Even though we are not sure if many things that are defining us and the others are actually happening, or not… This is not something new; David Bowie came up with the Ziggy Stardust persona decades ago. A possible problem is that our current virtual reality may not be so cool or in style, while at the same time Ziggy actually selected space while we think we are still here!

I left home (currently Portugal) to visit New York, Buenos Aires and now Tokyo, under the terror of the swine flu. Listening to the media I was aware that I was doing something REALLY dangerous, but I decided not to change my plans… What I saw wasn’t at all what I expected… EVERYTHING WAS ABSOLUTELY NORMAL! (I don’t need to describe more, as normal is the probably what we know better… no change at all!) But this flu mania will affect our minds, attitudes and life like so many things that do not really exist. And we will continue to live even though we will be far from real world again. How, why and with what purpose they are trying to spread to flu terror is another big discussion, I have to say only one thing… There is something fishy and we have to start to seriously turning out back to mainstream media. That was too sloppy to pass unnoticed.

Anyway, I do not intend to write the perfect essay, neither to come up with any solutions. I am reviewing this text after having landed in Tokyo and I can tell that here people wear masks! They are also thin and many (too many) on every square meter… I had my visa taking instructions in 3 languages from a screen, while the girl on the desk was looking with dreamy eyes in my passport and visa declaration. I guy behind me on the queue was watching cartoons on his ipod, while I was counting how many girls had mentioned something about their lesbian ex-girlfriend the past 45 days. Flying saucers were finally man made, the Big Lebowski soundtrack is almost as cool as the movie, while trains in Tokyo are definitely fast. Japanese people look detached staring either at their iphones or on the empty space; they seem prepared for the future whatever that may be. As far as I am concerned, I think I will need some extra time!

Besos tangeros a todos!

3 comments:

sandra said...

http://vimeo.com/6790193
you may find this interesting .. :)
X

sandra said...

http://vimeo.com/7298827 with UK subtitles

Nobody said...

How, why and with what purpose they are trying to spread to flu terror is another big discussion, I have to say only one thing… There is something fishy and we have to start to seriously turning out back to mainstream media.

There is nothing fishy about it. This is what people like. Never seen people scaring each other with doomsday scenarios over a glass of beer?