In Los Ageless, the winter never comes

In Los Ageless, the mothers milk their young

But I can keep running

No, I can keep running

The lost sages hang out by the bar

Burn the pages of unwritten memoirs

But I can keep running

No, I can keep running

How can anybody have you?

How can anybody have you and lose you?

How can anybody have you and lose you

And not lose their minds, too?

St. Vincent, Los Ageless

During the second half of the eighties, tens and then hundreds of parabolic antennas began to pop up in the patios and roofs of my hometown. Bogotá, accustomed for decades to three TV stations, suddenly began to receive transmissions from several satellites. For a while my neighborhood friends and I stopped going out to play and devoted ourselves to decipher and memorize the new programming. There was much on offer: Disney Channel had the Mickey Mouse Club, first in black and white and then a revamped version with a lot of soon to be stars like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Ryan Gosling. We discovered Disney also produced an assortment of cartoons, live actions movies and TV shows we had never heard of; a welcome change when Hollywood movies took about a year to be released in Colombia. And then there were movie channels like HBO and Cinemax and the Pay Per View channels you could only see glimpses of, in bright solarized colors, by quickly switching between channels. A new media layer, way more alluring than the one already in place, had settled down on my country’s collective mind. A new episode of techno-colonialism was on the airwaves.