"LIFE ETC."

Ruins of the Crash

Let's imagine a horrible scene: what if women start to wear 1980s jackets with padded shoulders again? No! No, this is way too horrible to imagine! Let's pick something more tolerable… A railway crash for example…
If the souls of different decades of recent history are to be the different cars of a train, it seems like we've crashed into a very strong wall where all of the cars are compressed together, and there's no chronological order anymore. You can sit in a 50s style coffee shop while listening to Indian music that is 7 centuries old from an already dead singer, sipping your coffee from a 18th century style mug. You might look out of the window and see a revised edition of the Volkswagen Beetle (1938) parking by a revised edition of the Mini Cooper (1961). There might even be some masks from African tribes hung on the walls of the coffee shop next to the re-production of a 5th century Chinese drawing. This is 2006, or, if you like, "the non-existent present time," as I call it.

Remember the different clothing styles that emerged in 20th century from the 1920s women in loose dresses to the mini skirt trend of the 1960s? From the longhaired men of the 70s wearing patched jackets to the extremely tight jeans combined with sweaters and white tennis shoes in the 80s?

When compared to the cool and suave styles of the previous decades, it looks as if people were unconsciously expressing their panic throughout the 1980s. They were meaninglessly over-using some elements or trying to combine irrelevant things for no reason. Skirts had huge buttons; belts had huge clasps. Women wore aerobic tights during the day. Every song had synthesizer partitions regardless of the genre. People were dancing like robots, painting themselves silver. They probably felt the train was about to crash into the wall but they were helpless. When it crashed, we entered the 1990s: no style or character. Complete amorphousness.

Hence, it would be interesting to ask whether our train crashed into the Berlin Wall and destroyed it in 1989. The Chernobyl Disaster in 1986 brought the realization of the possibility of losing your life regardless of any "evil" enemy. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought the destruction of the existing definitions and conceptions about the world and in 1990 the World Wide Web came online giving birth to a substitute for reality. And the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to global shock as "game over" blinked on the global screen. These may all be taken as symbols of the end of the known order. If the ability to attribute different styles to different dates is a sign of order, the end of aesthetic order can be placed around 1990*.

It is not that hard to decide when the Amorphous Decade (1990s) ended and the Chaotic Decade (with no negative attributions to the term “Chaotic”) began if you know when the World Trade Center fell. My dubbing this decade "chaotic" has no direct relation with terrorism. The term chaos here stands for the loss of meaningful limits. In the Chaotic Decade, for instance, two high school students can buy rifles via Internet and shoot their schoolmates. If they are not mad enough, they can shoot their virtual friends online. In this decade, people blow themselves up in the middle of a western metropolis. A "communist" country takes its place in the global market. And the world's only super power is nearly 10 trillion dollars in debt. Everything is possible. And nothing is questioned as long as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's little baby is healthy.

We crashed into the wall, and the ruins of the train are telescoped together. Will the Chaotic Decade turn into the Chaotic Century? Or will we regain our 'rationale' back? We will see…

*This is why I find it very interesting that there is a book called "Chaos/Xaoc: Soviet-American Perspectives on Non-Linear Science" published exactly in 1990.