Here, now and so

During the last five years, the advent of summer was not marked by Ana Obregón's pose on the beaches of Mallorca (boomer), the dreadful San Juan firecrackers (X-er) or the opening of the Primavera Sound and similar catwalks (millennials and so on). In Catalonia, nowadays, summer is official when Estrella Damm publicists shoot a feature film that has translated into images the reasons and justifications why –despite the economic crisis and the post-procés depression– Catalans could still be motivated to pack our bags, travel to Formentera and down some beers surrounded by fresh meat and some dreadful group of Nordics with enough musicality to create a worthy summer song. The Estrella ad was an idyllic refuge that everyone knew was false, sweetened and corny, but it still had the grace of weaving the hypothetical and feasible dream of a good party without a hangover.

I was very surprised that the new ad for the nostrada beer (a product, by the way, watered down like most beers made in this country) has garnered so much criticism, because it is an exact portrait of the tribal zeitgeist. Currently, that is, here, now and thus, Catalonia is a semi-posh guy nearing forty, tired of his insubstantial life, and foolish enough to believe that an improvised bike trip will fix his first world existential problems. Whether we like it or not, we no longer have enough energy to go out and party, and xerinola bores us; we are this, an individual who sends himself a voice audio because there is no one to listen to him. We are that bicycle, that fake and showy departure from the city, that absurd tent and that bear that emerges from the trees simply to become material for a nice anecdote at future dinners.

Our country has chosen to have mountaineers as heroes; our aspiration is to emulate Kilian Jornet and prepare to act like a fool in the mountains. The only possibility of liberation we can afford is a little rural getaway with the safe-conduct of keeping the flat in Gràcia in case the adventure fails. Our radicalism is the pedal, the possibility of meeting two friends on a path and ending up having a threesome in a caravan; we are this mystique of eating spaghetti boiled with river water and no sauce, our hope is to hitchhike and be picked up by a sixty-year-old widow who has made up for lost time reading Kierkegaard in the mountains and rejuvenating her existence and skin through lads who could be her son. This absolutely prefabricated escape, the pose of showing one's buttocks in the forest, is the most painful portrait of a people who no longer even have self-destructive glamour.

Catalunya is a semi-posh guy nearing forty, tired of his insubstantial life, and idiotic enough to believe that an improvised bike trip will fix his first world existential problems.