Intermission

Last night, I arrived back from a whirlwind tour of Argentina in which my family and I ventured into the jungle, the mountains, and the pampas. Iguazu, featured in the last post, is spectacular, and yes, was the setting for the Robert DeNiro-Jeremy Irons film "The Mission". On the Bariloche area, less than two hundred kilometers north of El Bolsón, I've already gushed enough, but suffice it to say that the scenery is just as mesmerizing there even if the town is a far cry from Bolsón's behind-the-beat charm.

Rosario, Argentina's second city, marked the end of our trip. It's a tranquil and pretty town that feels both refreshingly slow paced and a little barren. I love peaceful little villages, but I like my cities with a little more propulsion.

Today, I'm off to northeastern Uruguay for what promises to be an adventure. To get to the beach where I'll be camping, I need to take a boat, two coach buses, and then walk for 5 kilometers. The journey will take about 14 hours in total, but should be rewarded by a beautiful beach and the cooking of my friend Diego, an Argentine chef whose "private" restaurant in Buenos Aires is one of the very best places I've eaten down here.

A little extra:
My friend Adam Bloch—a sportswriter, jazz aficionado, and leading expert on subjects as diverse as New England beer and Alfred Hitchcock—has just released a feverish howl into cyberspace in the form of his Knicks blog "Isiah-in-Wonderland". The blog has been up for only a week, but Adam has already authored 12 passionate and hilarious posts. He's an excellent writer, so whether or not you're interested in the unending whimper that has been the Knicks' lot since Zeke took over, IiW is definitely worth a look.

Over at Destination: OUT, they're ringing in the New Year by reposting their 10 most popular tracks of the year. Number one is an exuberant and relatively accessible tune by the very strange Japanese pianist Masabumi Kikuchi. When I heard Kikuchi play with Paul Motian and Chris Potter last December, he croaked like Golem as he played his sparse piano. Call me small minded, but I draw my limit at Keith Jarrett's whining.

The Falls

A brief update

I haven't updated the blog for close to two weeks and while I don't have a story of mountain conquests or blazing jam sessions, I think it's only fair that I give a brief update.

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for Iguazu Falls in the north with my family on a vacation that will take us through Bariloche as well. Then I'll be off to Uruguay until the 3rd of January at which point the blog should return for a more frequently updated form.

Bad Plus pianist and excellent blogger Ethan Iverson is scaling back in the new year. I'm planning to expand with the possibility of guest writers, article links (hopefully), and maybe even some fiction.

For now though, just a favorite quote from Tennessee Williams: "Make voyages, attempt them, there is nothing else."

Happy holidays, I miss the snow.

On Air

Two weeks ago, I met a young Cuban, currently residing in Brazil, named Gabriel Rio Cabo. He’s been on a six-month odyssey through Brazil, Uruguay, and now Argentina, and his stories are a tremendous whirlwind. I imagine he’s writing them down, and that they’ll be published in the near future by a small Portuguese-language press, undoubtedly under a pseudonym—such is his mischievous wit.

On Saturday night, a friend of Gabriel’s whom he had met in the street a few days earlier, invited him onto Argentine National Radio. Gabriel generously extended this invitation to me as well.

We arrived at a seemingly closed downtown office building at 11:30 p.m., but a security guard finally arrived, and we were ushered into the studio of Argentine National Radio 1050, where Gabriel’s friend Rochy has a late-night show from midnight-6 a.m. I’ve had some experience on radio as of late, appearing for an extended segment on Greg Kress’s “Neon Jazz Train,” and, more recently, on WGN Radio in Chicago on the “John Williams Show.” Yet, those appearances were in my cozy mother tongue, this was in Spanish.

Let my appearance on Argentine National Radio not fool you—I’m conversant, but hardly fluent in Spanish. Luckily, instead of waxing on about the jazz club Small’s or Oprah’s potential presidential candidacy, all I had to do was praise the porteño streets in my funny gringo accent. I was on two segments (as was my Cuban compadre Rio Cabo), and managed to get in a plug for my roommate’s restaurant, California Burrito Company, which will net me three free meals. (I’m perfectly willing to shill for products on this blog too, especially if I get free food.)

Gabriel has not only invited me onto Argentine National Radio, he’s also turned me on to the work of the great Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. To be fair, it was my dear friend, leading football expert, and avid and incisive Type and Tonic-reader Adam Bloch who first alerted me to Bolaño. But it was Gabriel who gave me a copy of Bolaño’s “Estrella Distante” (Distant Star) a disturbing, brilliant gem of a novella, which I devoured like no Spanish-language book I’ve read before. I’d highly recommend it to anyone, and it’s readily available in English. I’m now on to “Llamadas Telefónicas,” since Adam recommend the Bolaño short stories—so far so good. I’m not quite ready to tackle Bolaño’s two big novels “The Savage Detectives” (just named a top 10 book of the year by the NY Times) or “2666,” Bolaño's 1000+ page opus, but I’m sure they’re more than worth a look.

Where I'm Calling From

Before I returned the camera that my friend Olivia had generously lent me, I decided to take a few pictures of my Buenos Aires apartment. A look at the place where I hang my hat:

The view from my living room:

The Festival

The El Bolsón Jazz Festival was a musician’s event through and through. I’ve always liked going to jazz gigs where musicians are in the audience. For a non-musician like myself, it gives the show a stamp of instant authenticity—this is what the people who really know are checking out. In El Bolsón, nearly every musician went to every show, both as an act of mutual support and as a sign of genuine interest.

There was never more than one show going on at a time in El Bolsón, and the festival's vibe was that of a migratory herd rather than a sedentary audience. At 12:30 p.m., the first gig of the day would start at the outdoor garden of a grill called Tsunami 70. Not everyone would show up right on time, but by the end, the space would be packed.

Part of this communal spirit was purely logistical. Everyone, including yours truly, was fed by the festival, and if you wanted a free lunch, you had to show up to Tsunami by about 2. Yet, there were other shows with nothing to do with free meals that drew seemingly every player that had been invited to the festival.

Not only did musicians support each other by sitting in the audience, they often played with each other too. Bands invited the members of other bands up onto the stage with them, adding funky horns to afro-peruvian rhythms, or beefing a trio up to a quartet or quintet. (The festival’s most able pianist, a really good guy named Ariel who bore a striking resemblance to Levon Helm, played in three different groups, even though he only came with, and presumably was only paid by, one.)

Both Saturday and Sunday night ended with jam sessions that stretched into the early morning. I’ve been into jazz since I heard Kind of Blue when I was 12-years-old, but I’d never been to a real jam session. It was a lot of fun. The sessions amplified the intermingling of the festival, as a musical chairs of players carved through Blue Note-era standards like “Canteloupe Island” and more standard standards like “All The Things You Are.”

Most of the jazz at the festival was innovative to the point that Eduardo, the bassist of the Ale Dimogli Trio, said to me, “this is a jazz festival sin swing.” He didn’t mean that as an insult or a compliment, just as a statement, and it was dead on. Few of the groups, and none of the best groups, were fully straight-ahead. Everyone was trying for a new sound, which surprised and excited me. I’d worried that Argentine jazz might be stuck in a bebop, or worse, high-school “jazz combo”, tradition. The best Argentine bands are doing what the best American bands are doing, pushing the music in different directions, which is what the best have always done.

The jam sessions though, were a refreshing return to jazz’s swinging roots. Guys who were trying out new things with their own bands, showed that they could still blow over changes. Hanging out with these guys until far into the madrugada was a pleasure, and I relished my totally alien, but totally comfortable, position in the festival—a newbie gringo, seven weeks off the plane, somehow hanging out in the Patagonian Andes with a bunch of musicians from Buenos Aires.

A few short videos from the festival:



Levas Cruzadas, a jazz-funk outfit who wear hazmat suits when they perform, was one of the most exhilarating bands at the festival. They're all very young—between 25 and 30—and they're full of energy and swagger. The guys in Levas caught every show and were all over the jam sessions.



My friend Ale Dimogli with his trio + the aforementioned pianist, Ariel. Ale is a virtuoso on guitar and his band was one of the most rooted in the jazz of the moment. They could easily be playing a fine gig at Small's or the Jazz Gallery. Ale and his group were also big at the jam sessions. Ale went to Berklee College of Music and lived in the States playing with people like Richard Davis and Bob Moses, and he's clearly very comfortable in a jam session setting.


If there was a star of the festival though, it was Los Negros de Miércoles. They're an Afro-Peruvian band not a jazz band, but they're energy and charisma were extraordinary. They closed out the festival with a raucous midnight show on Sunday which saw the first few rows of chairs cleared out and transformed into a make-shift dance floor. This video shows them at their outdoor show earlier in the day, and unfortunately doesn't do them justice.

Up the mountain...

I needed to climb Piltriquitron. The big mountain looming over the small town (El Bolsón) beckoned me, if for no other reason than its proximity. Its snow-capped peak offered a further remove from the world of Buenos Aires. Flee the city for the mountain valley and it’s only natural that a trek up the mountain should follow.

It was no easy shakes to get there. My romance with Huara Viajes, the touring company I mentioned in the previous post, lasted about four hours. I walked into their office on Thursday morning not knowing if I’d have to pay for any excursions and unclear as to whether they’d even know who I was. Two hours and a few of cups of mate later, I knew I wouldn’t be paying a dime and plans were made for an excursion to a small organic farm followed by whitewater rafting. The trip to the farm was fine—nothing too special but a choice spot to be sure—but it dragged on too long and I missed my rafting trip. To make up for it, Huara took me out to a lunch that proved long and boring. It started out well enough, but when the head of Huara arrived it turned into a drawn-out affair, focusing on the impact of the weakened US dollar exchange rate on the travel business. I had mistakenly thought that any Spanish was good Spanish. I know now that I was wrong.

The next day, Huara totally dropped the ball. They couldn’t reschedule my rafting trip and when I said I wanted to go up to Piltriquitron, they farmed me out to another company. When I arrived at that company’s office, they told me that the people who I’d trek with wouldn’t arrive in El Bolsón for another couple hours and I wouldn’t be able to leave on the excursion until at least 4:30 p.m. Fuck that shit. Life’s too short. It was 11 a.m., I had money in my pocket, and a burning desire to get to the summit. I decided to pony up for a taxi to the trailhead and just do the damn thing myself. Best decision I’ve made in Argentina.

I’d been told that the summit was anywhere from 2 to 3 ½ hours from the refugio and that an entire day needed to be set aside to reach it. The refugio was an hour stroll from the trailhead and the guy working there cast a skeptical eye on me when I mentioned the summit. “Do you have boots?” he asked. I clearly did not. “No.” “There’s a lot of snow,” he said. “Okay. I’ll just climb for a while and when I need to turn back, I’ll turn back.”

We both knew this was a bald-faced lie. He told me what he needed to tell me, and I proved that I’m my father’s son by giving lip-service to his advice and then doing what I knew I could. (Please take this as a compliment, Dad.)

I was very close to being wrong.

As the hike began, I felt vindicated—a stroll on a mountain, a little snow, sure, but it was hard and my shoes barely sunk in. Even as I began to make the ascent up the back of the peak, and the snow got deeper and more difficult to avoid, I kept up a chipper mood. I’ll show them, I thought.

However, there was another thought that began to creep more and more into my mind. This is how people die on mountains. The sun doesn’t set in El Bolsón until after 9 p.m. this time of the year and I knew that daylight wouldn’t be an issue. Yet, I didn’t reach the refugio until after 1 p.m., a very late start for a summit push by any measure. I also was well underdressed, had no equipment (rain coat, hiking poles, etc…) save a water bottle and a camera, and was full of hubris. My thoughts turned to cocky Americans dying on Everest in Into Thin Air. Oh, did I forget to mention that as I marched towards the icy winds and deep snows, I was completely alone.

About two-thirds of the way up the mountain, I ran into a well-equipped Argentine hiker. He couldn’t hake looked at me with any more disdain. Here I was, dressed in a green herring-bone sweater, khaki shorts, sneakers, and aviator sunglasses, close to 6,000 feet up on a windy, snowy peak. I was dressed for yachting or golf, certainly not mountain climbing.

To his eyes, I could not have been showing any less respect for the mountain. He was right—up to a point. Piltriquitron is not K2, and I like to think that what I lacked in equipment, I made up for in experience. A thin excuse, not doubt, and were I in his shoes, I would have looked with equal disdain on such a preppy chump messing around in a serious game.

I repeated the same lie to him that I had told the guy running the refugio. At this point, though, my intentions were even clearer. His disdain and his warning about snow, ice, and freezing wind pushed me decisively toward the “I’m going to die on this mountain” strain of thought.

For some reason, I carried on. Now, I started lying to myself. “I’ll just climb until it seems like a very bad idea to continue.” When I reach the ridgeline, I told myself, that’ll be it. It’ll be almost as good as the summit. I didn’t have to traverse much snow to get to the ridge, and while the wind was picking up, I felt like I could make it. Sometimes crawling on all fours to get across the scree and snow, I finally made it to my goal.

Then I saw it. Tantalizingly close, with a stack of bricks clearly marking it, and an unrivaled position that would offer a complete panorama of the area—it was the summit. A lot of snow and a short, but steep, climb lay before me.

I didn’t get up to the ridge to turn back now. The wind is gusting; it’s not very strong, but it’s cold. I can see those bricks getting closer with every step. The rocky outcropping that is the summit is going to be the steepest part of my climb. It’s also covered in snow. I slush through it, my feet are getting cold and wet, and soon I’m back on all fours, clawing my way toward those bricks. No more than forty feet away now.

I’ve never been on a summit like this before. Usually the summit of a mountain isn’t appreciably higher than it’s surroundings. The summit of Kilimanjaro, for instance, is a letdown. The view walking towards it is just as good as the one found on the summit.

The summit of Piltriquitron is a pillar of rock, hovering 300 feet above the rest of the mountain. Once I reach the summit, there’s no question that this is the highest point. Off to sides, the mountain plummets hundreds of feet. I clutch the bricks as I look over the precipice. A few false steps—fin.

I do a quick photo session at the summit before thoughts of warm pizza and homemade beer at the refugio lure my down. I want to descend by skipping or jumping, or better yet dispense with the descent altogether and just beam my way back down—maybe parachute off one of the cliffs.

Every mountaineering book I’ve ever read harps on the dangers of the descent. On a serious mountain, this often has to do with storms that tend to come later in the day, but more than anything, I imagine it’s complacency and carelessness that kills the cat. The descent is an invitation to be sloppy and let your mind drift—all the things you shouldn’t do on a mountain.

Thankfully, I was aware enough of this that I spent most of the descent thinking, “careful, don’t screw this up.”

Even with my relative care, it was a quick descent, and I arrived at the refugio, beaming. The place was full of an English-speaking crowd (Americans, Scotsmen, Swiss) who were merrily drinking, adding to my spirits. They all left shortly after I arrived, and I spent the rest of my time on the mountain eating and drinking with Nacho, the steward of the refugio.

As soon as I’d walked into the refugio, Nacho asked me if I’d reached the summit. On the way down, I’d thought about lying to him since he’d strongly advised me against it. His tone when he asked, though, said, “Did you do it? I sort of hope you did.” So I told him the truth.


A little extra:

My opinion of refugios is generally very high. I’ve never met someone who runs one that I didn’t like. Running a refugio and scouting in a fire tower (not sure that anyone does this anymore, or has for about 40 years) seem to me to be related pursuits. Yet, there’s no comparison as to who has the better gig.

Read Kerouac’s Desolation Angels about his experience on Desolation Peak, and it’s all boredom and depression, even if you get some holiness thrown in. Running a refugio you still get plenty of solitude on the mountain, but you also get a lot of visitors from around the world. It’s like operating a mom and pop restaurant in New York by day, and living in a wilderness paradise by night. No doubt, a naïve and overly romantic opinion, but suffice it to say, I know which I’d choose.

Escape from B.A.

Buenos Aires is an uncompromising city. It doesn’t offer many of the escapes from pure urbanity that other cities do. It has some parks, sure, but they’re a far cry from Central Park or anything in London or Paris. It has a big body of water right next to it, but the city is built away from it, as if the water were something to be avoided. There aren’t many trees in Buenos Aires either. In short, it’s nearly devoid of anything that might come under the broad umbrella of nature.

B.A.’s all-encompassing urbanity had me looking at my trip down to the Patagonian Andes with an extra dose of excitement. My eager anticipation proved well placed.

From the moment I arrived in Bariloche, merely a stopover between plane and bus on my way to El Bolsón, I was full of energy and delight. I’ve heard Bariloche described as crass and touristy, but the little I saw of it was a marvel. The mountains are formidable, rising to snow-capped heights, but also stretching across the horizon. It was their girth that impressed me most.

The lake near Bariloche was equally impressive, dark blue with white caps slashing through the surface.

I viewed all this from a place that in most cities is the second only to the sewer system in terms of smell, vista, and ambience—the bus terminal. In Bariloche, however, the bus terminal sits next to overgrown train tracks on which a few old cars lie forever fallow. While I sat there, a few gaucho-looking types rode by on horseback. El Sur, here I come.

After a spectacular bus ride through the Andes, I arrived in El Bolsón, which I’ve heard described as the Woodstock of Argentina. It’s not quite that hippie, but it has a stout bohemian spirit and more natural beauty than it knows what to do with.

I was in El Bolsón for the El Bolsón Jazz Festival, an event I heard about through my friend, jazz guitarist Ale Dimogli, who was scheduled to play with his trio. I’d paved the way for my arrival by getting on the press list and talking with a travel company about the prospect of doing some trekking and/or rafting. Yet, I didn’t know quite what I’d find. My agreement with the jazz festival was that I would get press credentials but nothing else—no free meals, no hotel discount, etc. The travel company sent me back a decidedly ambiguous response when I asked if I might be able to do some activities for free as a journalist working on an article.

So when, on Wednesday night, my first in El Bolsón, I was essentially adopted by the jazz festival administration, it was a surprise. Now that I’m back in Buenos Aires, I see my trip as the tale of three adoptions: first, by the jazz festival administration; then by the touring company; and last by Ale and his band, of which I became the de-facto fourth member.

The jazz festival administration adopted me because I was the first person to arrive and I was alone. Viviana, a violinist who ran the festival with her guitarist husband Alejandro, picked me up from the center of town and brought me to her house, which had been transformed into the festival’s office, brain trust, and war room. For six hours, I hung out, drinking mate, listening to a series of discussions about everything from who was picking up which musician to the possible liability implications of having a touring company as sponsor (if someone where to get hurt, could the festival be sued? In the States, I’m pretty sure the answer is no, but someone could try. In Argentina, I can’t imagine anyone ever wins a lawsuit or even that anyone ever bothers with one).

The people running the festival were musicians, artists, and teachers, and were all kind, casual, and bright. The festival didn’t have a lot of money, but thanks to them it more than made up for that in spunk.

The festival organizers had a great communal vibe. A bunch of friends dropping by, cooking homemade pizza, drinking much better beer than we have in Buenos Aires, and welcoming, with open arms, a castellano-mangling, reporter-wannabee, twenty-two year-old gringo stranger. Not only that, but as the festival progressed, my deal (remember, pre-arranged as just press credentials) improved dramatically. The festival paid for my lunch and dinner every day, and I discovered that my hotel room (in a pretty Bed & Breakfast near the center of town) had been steeply discounted by virtue of my reporter status. It was almost as if the festival organizers wanted to check me out first, make sure I was okay, and then upon discovering that I was (I think they thought that at least) they rolled out the red carpet. I owe them tremendous thanks.

Live from Patagonia

I've been writing fairly lengthy entries about my trip to El Bolson in a notebook, and I'll get those up on the internet as soon as I return to Buenos Aires. For now, though, a quick summary of the key points.

-The town is incredibly beautiful. It's not much more than a little road with some restaurants, shops, and a Mormon church, but the landscape is dominated by Piltriquitron, a massive mountain that looms over us. El Bolson is so close to the peak that I want to say we're literally in the shadow of Piltriquitron, although that's not quite true since the mountain is to our east, and we're only in the shadow of Piltriquitron very early in the morning.

-I haven't paid for a meal yet. The first night, I hung out with the people running the jazz festival, a kind and casual bunch, and ate their homemade pizza while getting the inside scoop. Yesterday, my only real meal was lunch, this time courtesy of the tour company that I've used to arrange some activities. I think everything is going to be free as a result of my journalistic credentials, but our arrangement is a little unclear, so I will be surprised, but not shocked, if the company presents me with a bill at the end.

-The festival starts tonight. There will be a press conference (a far more informal affiar, no doubt, than the press conference I attended on Tuesday. That was a the Center for Israeli-Argentine relations, and announced the launch of Operation Last Chance, the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation's program to track down Nazi war criminals living in the Southern Cone. I'll blog a little more about that when I return to the more ample internet access of the federal capital.

That's all for now, and apologies for no pictures...although I've borrowed a camera so will be featuring original photos for the first time on the blog when I return.

The 100 word assignment

I wrote yesterday that my emails to DownBeat and the JazzTimes had gone unanswered. I sent those emails to the generic editor @ address, and thought that a response would be more than a long shot. Imagine my surprise when I returned home last night to find an email from an associate editor at DownBeat asking me for a "nice photo and paragraph caption" about the El Bolsón Jazz Festival. The paragraph, later clarified as 100 words, isn't quite the assignment of a lifetime, but I'll be thrilled to get on the board as a freelance writer for a US publication.

This also will be a really tough assignment. There's no guarantee, of course, that DownBeat will print the photo/paragraph, and two obstacles stand in the way. First, I don't have a camera down here. I imagine I'll be able to borrow one, but people are, understandably, very protective of their photo-taking babies. The more interesting challenge is how to summarize the festival in an interesting way in only 100 words. No doubt, those will be 100 words over which I'll agonize and rewrite several times. That said, I believe brevity is a virtue and I'll be happy to condense a weekend of music into a piece that will be less than half the length of this blog entry.

Hopefully, the first of five easy pieces before the symphony.

More Jazz

With last Thursday's promising start in the Buenos Aires jazz scene, I'm upping the ante and hauling down to the lake district for the El Bolsón Jazz Festival. The festival takes place next weekend and features a variety of acts from the straight-ahead to Andean flutes and a Hungarian Ragtime revival band. I'll be blogging every night from the festival as I put together a travel piece on El Bolsón for the Argentimes. I'm also hoping to get a review of the festival into a jazz magazine, but so far my emails to Downbeat and the Jazz Times have gone unanswered.

In addition to featuring vistas of a bucolic valley and the regions august peaks, El Bolsón is very close to the small ranch that was home to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when they fled the Pinkertons to Patagonia. It might be worth a look...

New Jazz Beginnings

I made my debut on the Buenos Aires jazz scene on Thursday night, catching the Ramiro Flores Quintet at Thelonious, an elegant second-story club in the tony Palermo barrio. I didn't know quite what to expect going in, and I was pleasantly surprised at how inventive the music was. The instrumentation and sound (on some of the band's songs) brought to mind the Dave Holland Quintet (although the Flores Quintet certainly isn't anywhere close to matching that supergroup's cohesion and individual virtuosity). They also sound like they've listened to artists like Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer who have brought techniques from Hip-Hop including improvising over sampled musical and vocal tracks into mainstream jazz. One of the night's best numbers, a celebration of Bolivian folklore's equivalent of a faun, pitted Flores's agile horn against a crackling vocal track that was meant to conjure up the spirit of the mythical beast.

I was also impressed with the club, a narrow hang-out space that put everyone close to the music and invited the band and the audience to mingle at the bar. I'd worried that jazz in Buenos Aires might be fetishized as a nostalgic American experience, and that the clubs would be more like The Blue Note than The Jazz Gallery. Thelonious isn't quite the Gallery, but if Thursday night is any guide, it's an intimate space where creative, demanding music gets played.

Update: My hot water heater was fixed this morning. Now the water in the entire building is off. I still wait for the hot shower at the end of the tunnel.

Addition: I stumbled upon an excellent blog last night which I've added to the links section. It's called Destination: OUT, and is a streaming mp3 site that features rare, mostly free jazz, tracks and pithy commentaries to boot.

High and Dry

The last month has been the first time I’ve lived alone in my life. My roommate returns on Sunday, so the experiment will be ending soon, but I’ve learned a thing or two from it. During my two years living in a student walk-up apartment in Chicago everything pretty much worked. The worst that ever happened was the Internet went out a few times—a pain no doubt, but nothing very major. (I should note, for the record, that last winter while I was away our apartment was robbed and my desktop computer, an extraordinarily solid and fast machine named Big Blue, was stolen. That sucked, but it didn’t require any sort of maintenance issues since one of my roommates was on the scene long before I returned.)

The last month in my Buenos Aires apartment has been as eventful in maintenance issues as my two years in Chicago were not. My sink stopped draining about two weeks ago and resisted the best efforts of Drain-O, a plunger, and the building’s porter. On Monday, I finally decided this needed outside help, and I got the porter to bring in a plumber who unclogged the pipes with a strange machine that was basically an outboard motor with a metal coil threaded through it. The clogged drain was a nuisance, but even when stopped up, the water would drain eventually and I really only noticed it when washing dishes.

It paled and continues to pale in comparison to this fact: I have not taken a hot, warm, or even lukewarm shower in two weeks. Shortly after the sink clogged, all of the hot water in the apartment stopped. I was extremely lazy about this, putting off talking to anyone in the hopes that it would somehow fix itself. (My discomfort in speaking Spanish is a very good excuse to justify inaction.) Since I finally decided to address the issue, the porter has been up here several times with no luck. He has, however, finally made a diagnosis: the water heater is clogged, impeding the flow of the water through it. Another plumber was supposed to come last night, but he didn’t. I was in the office all of today and couldn’t be at home. Hopefully, tomorrow the problem will be fixed. For now, another cold shower and dreams of savoring my first warm shower, hopefully, maybe, possibly tomorrow night.

Benjamin in Buenos Aires? Skiing in Mexico?

Last year at a party in Chicago, I was relating my Fulbright proposal to a graduate student/screenwriter whom I knew somewhat tangentially. When I told him I was planning to go to Buenos Aires to study psychoanalysis, he said, “that’s crazy! Studying psychoanalysis in Argentina is like trying to learn to downhill ski in Mexico.” He was actually quite wrong. Bs. As. is probably the world capital of psychoanalysis at this point, but the quote still stuck with me as a worthy, if misguided, jab. (On a side note updating a recent post, my left jab is getting a lot better.)

While studying psychoanalysis in Bs. As. might not be like skiing in Mexico, it’s quite possible that studying Walter Benjamin in Buenos Aires is. And yet, that’s exactly what I found myself doing tonight: sitting around a wooden table in the back room of a bookstore in Palermo Hollywood in a seminar on the German critical theorist.

I’m a little surprised I ended up going. I even made one abortive attempt not to go, walking back to my apartment after I’d walked two blocks toward the subway. I’ve been taking an informal class on Borges on Monday nights. It’s a bunch of people sitting around a kitchen table, mostly listening to the teacher—a young “tipo” named Marcos—lecture in machine-gun-cadence about the magic and genius of the great porteño author. It costs 10 pesos a class (about 3 US dollars), and befitting its kitchen table style, its really just a bunch of friends hanging out, drinking mate, and gushing about their favorite author.

The Benjamin class promised to be a far more intimidating affair. For one, it’s much more expensive (an unfathomable 7 US dollars/class) and is taught by a philosophy professor from the University of Buenos Aires. I found out about the class from a proper Oxford man who said he’d be there, but ended up being absent. So it was ten Argentines and I, sitting in the back room of a bookstore, listening to a professor gush about Walter Benjamin.

I didn’t make that sound particularly wonderful, but in it’s own way it was. First, there was the realization I came to about twenty minutes in that I was actually participating in a seminar on Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School in Spanish and understanding about 90% of the material. Then, there was the fact that I actually was able to learn something through Spanish that had nothing to do with learning the language itself. Finally, there was the pleasure of being the only Yankee in the room. (I also managed to stay completely incognito by virtue of not speaking. To be fair, not many people spoke, and I did laugh in the right places and appeared to understand the material. Thus, my ability to blend in was, in equal parts, based on circumstance, accident, and a dab of language shyness.)

This class doesn’t have quite the vibes of the Borges get together, but hopefully through the two of them, I’ll meet enough Argentines to go a bit more native. Next up, submerging myself into what my friend Gabe Arce-Rollins once called, “the jazz hipster elite.” Or something like that…

The Sweet Science

Boxing has appealed to me for a while now. I don’t have any desire to step into a ring and slug it out—getting the shit beaten out of me doesn’t sound like all that much fun—but as long as I’m going to do some exercise, I’d prefer it dingy and old-school, not sleek and modern. I think of boxing as sort of the anti-yoga, a vestige of a bygone era when the Derby winner, the heavy weight champion, and the center fielder for the New York Yankees were the unquestioned kings of American sport.

So imagine my delight when I found a gym down here that is, well, perfect. It’s run by the building workers union and features plenty of amenities—three pools; a fully-equipped, but decidedly antique weight room; and lots of gym space for private classes—more importantly, it includes a boxing gym that offers classes three times a week.

This boxing gym is everything I’d expected it would be—peeling paint, a full-size ring, heavy bags, speed bags, pictures of famous fighters taped up on the walls. My first two classes have been appropriately exhausting. I didn’t touch a weight or a glove during my first class, instead going through a series of what were basically jumping jacks and arm circles for the better part of an hour. Calling it a class wouldn’t be quite accurate, because that conjures an image of a peppy teacher in front of twenty or so people in spandex doing step aerobics. This “class” consists of me walking into the gym and Pedro—from the looks of some of the pictures on the wall, a trainer for some small-time pros—sticking me in a corner by the ring, handing me a jump rope, and saying “diez minutos.”

Perhaps this doesn’t sound so wonderful, but it’s excellent exercise and nourishes my jazz-tinged, 1950s nostalgia. That said, after finally putting on gloves at the end of the second class, it’s clear that Dempsey I ain’t. My left jab is uncoordinated and weak, and my left hook is downright embarrassing. I have to say though, I’m pretty fond of my right cross. (I just learned this terminology this morning from a little online scouting. A cross is a straight punch thrown from the back-set hand. It should be stronger than a jab since a jab is thrown from the front hand without much aid of the hips, whereas the cross lets you unwind and wallop.)

It’s the most excited I’ve been for a workout in a long time.

I'd like to thank those who've written to me about the blog. Your comments have been warm, astute, biting, and altogether very thoughtful.

Also, I turned in four articles to my editor at the Argentimes last night, so if I can convince her to update the website (we're still on the July 28th issue), then I may actually have something to post that's not self-published.

Xul Solar: Mad Genius of BA

I read Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote” when I was in my second year at the University of Chicago, and from then on I was hooked. Literary forgery is one of my favorite genres, and I feel a deep affinity for it, having perpetuated one of my own in 5th grade. (We were given an assignment to create a poster documenting the achievements of a famous person we admired. I chose the completely fictional George Marlinette, a famed car designer responsible for all of the Ford and Toyota SUVs that were advertised on the back pages of National Geographic.)

It was with a lot of pleasure, then, that I discovered the work of Borges’s close friend and spiritual brother, Xul Solar—an Argentine painter, astrologer, numerologist, and inventor. Solar’s artistic output was never very popular, and there’s never been a huge market for inventions like panajedrez (a modified version of chess in which each player has 30 pieces marked with characters of kabalistic and astrological significance) or his new piano (a radical modification of the keyboard allowing for the simpler playing of scales.) Yet, Solar was the spiritual leader of the 30s and 40s Buenos Aires avant-garde, organizing frequent meetings at his Palermo townhouse where discussions ranged from literary classics, to metaphysics and spirituality. The august guests were the cream of the crop of intellectual BA—Borges, Bioy Casares, the Ocampo sisters, among many others.

Solar’s most distinctive works, however, were the two languages that he created—neocriollo, a Spanish-Portuguese hybrid meant to unify South America; and pan, a mono-syllabic language meant to do nothing less than undo the work of the Tower of Babel. If you’ve read any Borges, you can see how these two would have gotten on swimmingly.

Since 1986, Xul’s Palermo home has been preserved as a museum housing the vast majority of his paintings, many of his inventions, and ample information on pan and neocriollo. On Thursday, I made my way to the museum for a guided tour—a Spanish-only affair of which I somehow managed to understand the vast majority. I was certainly helped by the fact that I was on the tour with a group of 20 or more elderly women who barked whenever the tour guide started to speak too quickly. (This was sort of the linguistic equivalent of lions hunting wildebeests on the savannah. If you’re a largely incompetent wildebeest, as I am, it’s safer to stay in a herd of sluggish, aging wildebeests. You’re much less likely to get picked out by some fast speaking castellano predator and made to feel like a complete ass.)

Unfortunately, the museum does not allow visitors into Xul’s preserved residence, although, according to one of the Museum’s directors, there are plans to do so in the future. Xul’s library was one of the finest in BA, much admired by Borges (who often borrowed from it), and is preserved in its entirety. At a later date, I may be able to get special permission to tour the residence, although it would certainly help if a major American publication wanted a story on Solar (if any prominent magazine editors are reading, feel free to drop me a line.)

My favorite anecdote from the museum, however, doesn’t involve Solar, but rather Oliverio Girondo, a friend of Xul, whose work is being shown in the museum as a special exhibition. Girondo was primarily a poet, and his work, like that of his friend Xul Solar, had something less than mass appeal. However, he had the audacity to publish 5,000 copies of his collection “Espanta Pájaros,” at which his friend Xul Solar scoffed that Girondo would be lucky to sell 1,000. Girondo, obviously as good a promoter as a poet, constructed a 12 foot tall papier-mâché of the scarecrow on the book’s cover (it actually looks a lot more like the monocled “dandy Eustace Tilly” who graces the cover of the New Yorker’s anniversary issues than does it resemble the typical bundle of hay scarecrows), and paraded it through the streets of Buenos Aires on a horse-driven cart. The figure created such a stir that Girondo sold all 5,000 copies within a week.

More on Museo Xul Solar for the December 7 issue of the Argentimes (yes, working for a fortnightly “mas o menos” publication causes one to plan ahead)…

(Images courtesy of Mueso Xul Solar)

Funky Buenos Aires

Wednesday night saw me covering my first concert for the Argentimes, the homecoming of a Buenos Aires–born, Miami–based guitarist-producer named Diego Jinkus. While a full review of the set and Jinkus's recently-released album will have to wait until the November 23rd edition of the Argentimes, I can tell you that Jinkus plays a rich blend of musical idioms that is equal parts funk, soul, and salsa. He played mostly originals off his album on Wednesday night, but he did throw in a few covers—a wonderfully explicit D'Angelo classic that I last heard performed by Yaw, a Chicago–based R&B singer, and a famous funk anthem whose name is perpetually on the tip of my tongue but never makes it any farther.

It's a song that I mistook for Stevie Wonder’s "Superstition” as it opened, and have at other times in my life mistaken for "Play That Funky Music White Boy." The song has no real chorus, which is at the root of my problem—the singer doesn't repeat the song's title seventy times at the music's catchiest moments so I can never remember it's name.

If anyone has an idea what the title of aforementioned song could be, I'd be very grateful to hear your thoughts. More important than that title, however, is the fact that the search for that song has lead me to some great performance videos on YouTube, none better than the incomparable Stevie Wonder playing "Superstition."

La Presidenta

On Sunday, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was elected president of the Republic of Argentina, succeeding her husband, current president Nestor Kirchner. I’ve received a number of emails from friends and family in the States wondering if the election of a female president has been greeted as some kind of breakthrough in Argentina—a cause for rejoicing at the land of silver’s progressivism. The answer, at least in the Federal Capital of Buenos Aires, is an unequivocal no.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (widely abbreviated as CFK, which I originally, and perplexedly, read as KFC) placed second in Capital Federal, and, while she won Buenos Aires province, she did so only narrowly. She and her husband (whom the press calls “los pengüinos” alluding to their pre-presidential home in the southern Patagonia province of Santa Cruz) are viewed by many here as lucky recipients of a booming economy that has gone through an inevitable period of post-Crisis growth. The skinny of Nestor Kirchner’s administration is that it’s been passive, ineffective, and corrupt. Cristina’s presidency, it’s feared, will represent a continuation, and likely a worsening, of those policies.

My favorite quote that I’ve heard about Cristina came from one of her dozen opponents, the smug governor of San Luis, Alberto Rodriguez Saá. “Cristina has lots of handbags, and few ideas,” Saá said in an interview with La Nacion, Buenos Aires’ broadsheet daily. It would be easy to label Saá’s remark as misogynist (although to his credit, Saá lauded Elisa Carrio’s courage in the same interview), but Cristina’s public appearance—coiffed, always dressed to the nines and, indeed, often accompanied by a designer handbag—seems to bring on comments like Saá’s. This brings me back to the piece I wrote this summer for the Chicago Tribune advocating Oprah as the best presidential choice for the Democrats. I thought, and continue to think, that the press and the public tend to have two categories for famous women: hyper-masculine ice queens (Merkel, Thatcher, Clinton), and flighty, emotional babes short on substance (Royal, Kirchner, although this category tends not to apply to female politicians who, by and large, feel it's better to be feared than loved). How appropriate then that Ségolène Royal was present at CFK’s election night party at the Intercontinental Hotel in Buenos Aires—two women whom the press never quite took seriously, although the penguin triumphed while the Parisian went down in defeat.

And what was Buenos Aires like on this momentous election night? My friends and I, used to the party-all-the-time spirit of the city, expected to find demonstrators at the Plaza de Mayo, a rabid crowd outside Cristina’s bunker at the Intercontinental, and a buzzing energy or edgy anxiety on the streets. Instead, there was only silence. No one cared. “It’s Sunday,” repeated a few cops, security guards, and pedestrians. Of course, it’s really about the tortured relationship between Argentina and its politics—an institution that let’s people down everywhere, but takes special pleasure in crushing the hopes and dreams of Argentines.

Now, the magazines are asking, “how will she govern?” CFK seems to want to spend more time out of the country—especially in the US and Europe—and is less enamored than her husband of Chávez and his policies. Indeed, Cristina reported that the most popular man in Latin American, George Walker Bush, has invited her to the White House.

If she’s as short on substance as many porteños say, then Argentina’s best hope is that she can schmooze up foreign investors abroad, while a few good cabinet appointees manage to guide Argentina through the looming inflation crisis. No one here is jumping for joy, but maybe it’s time the country had a little more luck than otherwise.

Yo Hablo Español?

One of the main reasons that I departed U.S. shores and made my way down south was my desire to speak fluent Spanish. A lot of Americans have this ambition at one time or another, and my reasons (like those of most, I suspect) veer toward the romantic rather than the practical. It seems rather clear that I could remain in the U.S. speaking only English and live a rich and fulfilling life. Anyone with whom I'll ever need to communicate will either speak English or be able to quickly find someone who speaks English to intermediate. It's unlikely that I'll ever work a job in which Spanish is required, although knowing Spanish could certainly be a bonus. Yet, there's something almost magical about being able to speak another language of which I very much want to be a part. Maybe it's the idea that knowing two languages places your thinking somehow outside of a linguistic prison. You're free to jog back and forth between tongues, and you become aware that thinking is possible outside of English.

I'm not sure if any of these things are true, because at this point my Spanish is conversational, not conceptual. My biggest fear from my first week in Buenos Aires is that it will stay that way.

Walking around the city the other day, I realized that an English speaker moving to Buenos Aires to learn Spanish, is not that different from a Spanish speaker moving to New York to learn English. (Socioeconomic differences clearly excluded. The dollar goes far in Argentina, and it would be preposterous for me to claim that my experience was like that of a Central or South American immigrant to New York in anything more than language acquisition.) In New York, a Spanish speaker can insert himself into a well-trodden part of society in which he will never need English to get by. A Spanish speaker could easily eat at restaurants where language would be no impediment, live with other Spanish speakers, and work in a job that required no facility in English.

Adjust your gaze south to Argentina, and I'm living with an American, working for an English-language newspaper, and while I have yet to speak English to a waiter at a restaurant, ordering food hardly constitutes fluency. I've just churned out a couple hundred English words in this blog entry, keep up with sports and news in English, and chat online with friends in English. To say this is no way to go about learning a language would be a gross understatement.

The only way out of this English vortex seems to be a couple of Argentines whom I've met, who speak limited English, and seem very willing to engage me in Spanish—the more of them the better. Before I left the U.S., I resolved to remain away from the States until I felt that I was fluent in Spanish. Let's hope that Theodor Herzl's famous Zionist rallying cry, so memorably echoed by the great Walter Sobchak, will prove a truism in Argentina—"if you will it, Dude, it is no dream." Otherwise, this may be a long exile...

The First Night & Airline Foibles

After a nine hour delay and an unexpected visit to the Ramada Inn at JFK, I've reached the promised land of Buenos Aires. Having arriving a mere three hours ago, I can't speak much to the city—San Telmo, the neighborhood in which I'm staying has pretty buildings; narrow, poorly maintained sidewalks; a lot of trash; and a very good, English-style pub.

However, after nearly 24 hours in the airline ringer, I feel more than qualified to give those guys a few ideas about how to run things. First off, American Airlines is something of a disaster. When I flew Virgin America out to California a week and a half ago, I was pleasantly surprised by the excellent personal entertainment system and the mod purple and red lighting, which was a nice contrast to the death white glow of most carriers. It almost made me forget that the air conditioning went out for most of the trip from LA to New York.

American, in contrast, flies a rickety old 767 on their New York–Buenos Aires route that's full of that death white glow. We were delayed because the plane we were supposed to take "broke"—yes, that was the official reason—and the new plane they brought in 9 hours later was not much better. The bird could fly, but instead of personal entertainment systems we got alternating episodes of Cheers and Fraiser played on small communal screens. How much Kelsey Grammar can one take?

Entertainment systems, though, are a very small part of flying. How an airline deals with the unexpected is much more important. On this count American failed miserably. Once the "broken" plane proved irreparable, American delayed the flight until they could get a new plane in, which wasn't 7:30 a.m. the next morning. They had 250 or so pissed off Argentines and Americans on their hands who all needed a place to stay until the plane could get off the ground.

American chose a classic queue system to solve the problem. Everyone on the plane exited the gate area, lined up at the main ticket counter, and waited on line as American handed out vouchers for a night at the Ramada Inn, and two meals. Had I been one of the first to hear about the delay, I could have rushed to the front of the line and been in my hotel bed by about 10:00, I suspect. As luck would have it though, I was watching the Yankee game at an airport bar, and discovered the delay only after almost everyone on the flight had already left the gate. I wasn't the last in line, but I was certainly in the later half, and it took two hours from the time I entered the line to my tired flop into the creaky Ramada bed after midnight.

The line at the airport took about an hour and fifteen minutes, and when I arrived at the Ramada I was, unsurprisingly, greeted by another long line that took nearly half an hour. As a University of Chicago man, I feel a certain affinity for the free market, even if I'm often skeptical about it's applications. In his justly famous Intro to Micro Econ class at Chicago, Allen Sanderson likes to recount an airline example of why an auction system works better than a queue system for allotting goods. It has a lot of resonance with last night's case.

Until fairly recently, Sanderson recounts, airlines dealt with overbooked flights by merely kicking off the last few people to check in. If the airline booked 260 on a flight of 250 and you were number 251 to check in, you could start making other travel arrangements. This probably pissed a lot of people off. "Why me?" I was delayed in traffic, I just got in from another flight that was late, etc. The system wasn't making people happy, and unhappy people don't make good costumers. So the airlines wised up and switched systems.

Instead of apportioning seats on a first-come-fist-serve basis, the airlines offered a reward for giving up your seat. Through a sort of reverse auction, the airlines found the people with what economists would call the "lowest opportunity cost," in other words, the guy who would give up his seat at the lowest cost to the airline. The people who took the deal got something out of it, and the airlines could run their operation efficiently. As a good Chicago economist would say, they introduced choice into the equation and the system became more efficient.

Now, for my suggestion for long flight delays and cancellations. Don't make people wait in line for well over an hour just to send them all to the same hotel where they have to wait in another long line. That's bureaucracy at its worst, and it's plain un-American. Here's what the airlines should do. Figure out how much they're willing to spend on a passenger and just give them that money in cash. When I finally got to the front of the line, I was told that I needed to hurry because there were only 29 rooms left. I don't know if everyone on that flight ended up getting a room. I suspect not. But it didn't have to be that way.

I, along with many other New York–based passengers, would have gladly accepted, say, $100 to take a cab home and get some sleep. I didn't really want to sleep in the Ramada, but I didn't want to spend over $100 on cabs just because the airline couldn't get its act together.

I suspect others on the flight, and I would have been tempted to join this group also, might have just pocketed the $100, forsaken the five hours of Ramada Inn sleep and dreamed of just how much steak $100 could buy them in Argentina (I haven't been to a steak house yet, but my impression from the tour books is that it could buy between 7 and 10 good steaks). The Ramada room shortage would have been solved, and handing out $100 to every passenger would have been much simpler than ordering up three separate kinds of vouchers while worrying about placing families together, etc. American could have sent a bunch of workers home sooner and would have had happier customers. Of course, they could have solved this whole problem in the beginning by having a plane that didn't "break," but problems do occur in the airline industry, and this is one way they could solve them more artfully.

I don't imagine that many entries to Type and Tonic will read as much like pseudo-Freakonomics, but I figured that I might as well rant on this while it was still current. More from el Sur later on in the week.