Dog Days bring lethargy, strikes, and a site update

Buenos Aires is hot these days—stifling hot. Last week, temperatures rose perilously close to 100 degrees and power outages plagued large parts of the country, although here in San Telmo the fans kept on running. These are the kind of heavy-aired days that keep you in a constant state of discomfort. Sleep promises only drowsiness and sweat, and moving around knocks you into an unhappily lethargic state.

Luckily, a big storm on Thursday night cut the temperature by close to 20 degrees farenheit, but the city remains sticky and, in some neighborhoods, close to abandoned. (Searching for an open restaurant last night in the upscale Palermo Chico district turned into an hour-long odyssey that netted me four empanadas and an upset stomach.)

Aside from dealing with the heat, I've begun to take Spanish classes three hours a day, Monday-Friday in the hopes of reaching my goal of fluency more quickly. I'm the only American in a class of fourteen which boasts representatives from South Korea, Austria, Brazil and many other nations in between. The multinational, multiracial dynamic of the class is unlike any of which I've ever been a part—a Buenos Aires equivalent of movie depictions of English classes for US immigrants. (I'm thinking right now of Harold Ramis's class at the beginning of "Stripes".) Our lingua franca is Spanish, not English, and while I'd be lying if I said the language level of the students was especially high, it seems like a serious group that genuinely wants to learn.

At the Argentimes, I'm in the midst of the lead news story on the turbulent first month of Buenos Aires' new center-right mayor Mauricio Macri. Macri has opened his tenure by taking on the unions and state health care, he's overreached (strikes and anti-Macri demonstrations have broken out all over the city), but last week he negotiated a very favorable (for him) truce with the biggest city workers union and looks to be well on his way to realizing the first wave of his plan to "modernize" the city government. I'll post the article here as soon as it's gone to press.

In other Argentimes news, the site has finally been updated. I have articles in the PDFs of issues 28, 29, and 30. If you don't want to sift through three issues of content in search of my byline, I'd direct you towards my page 3 news story in issue 28, which gives a summary of the Argentine presidential elections. It's not a dazzling or original piece of work, but I think it does a fine job of distilling the always topsy-turvy political life of the country.

If you're looking for the best story we've published, I'd direct you towards the feature article in issue 29, in which the prodigiously talented Kate Granville-Jones delves into madness, mental health, and state prejudice through the lens of a weekly radio show in which patients at the city's oldest mental hospital air their hopes and frustrations.

And while I know I've plugged it a bunch already, let me say that if you are at all jazz-inclined I cannot think of a better place to get into new music than Destination:OUT. Geri Allen's rendition of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Women" is a quietly smoldering revelation, and the year-end sampling platter of ten tracks is uniformly excellent.