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.