Type and Tonic: An American in Argentina

June 9 is...Guillermo Klein Day

2008-06-09T07:24:00.000-07:00

A quick post to let T&T readers know that not only has my interview with Argentine pianist and band leader Guillermo Klein been published at All About Jazz, but also the site has taken the opportunity to assemble an entire Guillermo Klein Day. Accompanying my interview are John Kelman's review of Guillermo's new album, Filtros, which will be released tomorrow, and a free MP3 download of the opening track, "Va Roman."

Guillermo and his band, Los Guachos, open tomorrow night at the Village Vanguard, where they'll play through Sunday. If you're in the New York area, I strongly recommend a trip.

El Padrino

2008-06-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

Today, All About Jazz published my interview with Dino and Jose Saluzzi, a father and son musician team whose work straddles jazz, tango, folklore, and classical music. Dino, at 73, is considered by many to be the world's premier bandoneonist (the bandoneon is the large accordian used in tango) and has a recording contract with the immaculately tasteful German label ECM.

My friend Ale Demogli told me an anecdote about Dino that has prompted Ale and to start referring to him as "El Padrino" (The Godfather). Ale, Jose, and Dino went to a computer store to buy Dino a Mac. Ale and Jose arrived early and started to question the salesperson about what computer would suit a 73-year-old not particularly computer literate world-class bandoneonist. Then, the great man himself arrived and made his request: "give me the most expensive!"

This isn't to say that Dino is some kind of materialistic snob; rather, after a long career of serious artistry he enjoys his role as patriarch. I think some of this comes across in the interview, which is filled with Dino's thunderous and insightful pronouncements.

A note on ECM: I started working with ECM three years ago when, as a green college jazz writer, I requested the then-upcoming Lovano/Motian/Frisell release I Have The Room Above Her. Not only did I get the CD, but I was placed on the official "journalist" list by the company's director of US publicity, Tina Pelikan. Tina is, by leaps and bounds, the best in the business that I've encountered. She's a professional in every way, seems genuinely excited about the music, and doesn't seem to care if you're a sophomore at University of Chicago or Nat Henthoff. I think largely due to Tina's work, ECM gets a lot of love in the jazz press, especially from less mainstream outlets like All About Jazz.

Trying to get a CD from Blue Note is like pulling teeth, involving phone calls, unanswered emails, and a endless stream of publicists and outside media consultants. In my experience, Blue Note CDs arrive about half the time, and often late.

ECM also may be the only record label in jazz today that has a distinct sound and style. ECM records are tranquil and pristine in their fidelity, and searching and open in their musical approach. If you're looking for bebop fire, ECM is definitely not your place. If you're more into Kind of Blue with an international slant, then ECM is chock-full of offerings.

I'm generally attracted to jazz that's a little hotter than a typical ECM album, but through the tremendous access I've been given (as a perk of being on their "journalist" list, I can download legally every new ECM release) I've come to have a deep respect for what they do. There's a lack of personality in much of the contemporary jazz world: Mainstream publications are sterile; labels are a hodge-podge and have lost a lot of their status; and clubs often lack a coherent program. People responsible for promoting jazz (the press, labels, clubs) would do well to make their marketing of the music shine with as much spunk as the music itself. ECM with its hip black and white photographs, minimalist style, and distinctive sound does this; and, for that, deserves a lot of praise.

Lunching with Carrizo

2008-05-31T15:42:00.000-07:00

It took me about thirty seconds to realize why Antonio Carrizo had become a star. At 82, Carrizo is still dressed to the nines with charisma, from his omnipresent beret to the rye smiles and winks that he uses to color his thoughts on everything from the mastery of Joyce to the
genius of Argentine striker Carlos Tevez.

Antonio Carrizo is one of Argentina's most famous radio and television personalities, an interviewer-gentleman who probably finds his closest American analog in Charlie Rose. I shared lunch with Carrizo and several other members of my Borges class earlier today (as well as last Saturday) to discuss a project in which he has asked us to participate.
Over his career, Carrizo interviewed Borges twenty five times, and compiled the interviews into a book a few years back. Now, he wants to release a new edition that uses transcripts of the edited radio segments instead of the raw unedited conversation. Carrizo has asked the 12 or so members of the class to do the transcription work.

Transcription is a real pain of which I've had plenty of experience over the last two months while preparing my articles for All About Jazz. (Speaking of which, since my last post, AAJ has published two more. You can find them here and here.) Sharing lunch with Carrizo, however, was a pleasure.

In the great tradition of autodidacts, Carrizo never finished high school, but has a razor sharp mind and command of seemingly every subject. During an impromptu lecture on Joyce, which was a sidebar from a discussion on the campo crisis, Carrizo managed to simultaneously watch a match between Racing and Independiente, heckling one of the waiters at a missed goal opportunity. He's not the kind of celebrity that prompts people in the cafe to stop what they are doing and gawk, but as he walked out and chided a group of Racing fans, I heard a few emphatic whispers, "that's Carrizo!"

Babel

2008-05-13T17:59:00.000-07:00

Today, I had the most linguistically bizarre conversation of my life—and it was wonderful. On one side sat Wilson Garzon, the publisher of the Brazilian jazz website Clube de Jazz, who speaks only Portuguese. I sat on the other side, speaking my still-in-development Spanish. Wilson and I spoke for an hour and a half about jazz in Brazil, jazz in Buenos Aires, and quite a few other things that I didn't quite understand—at one point, I think he explained the organization of the municipal government in Belo Horizonte, but I'm not really sure about that.

Regular readers of Type and Tonic will remember my dour post of a few weeks ago, "The Language Issue, Revisted." This conversation was the carnivalesque satire of everything I wrote. Suddenly, I was the Spanish expert, and I was competent enough to understand at least the gist of what was being said in a language that is similar to, but decidedly not, Spanish. Suffice it to say, I've never felt more confident in my Spanish ability than I during that hour and a half and the glow that followed. I'd never realized before that as a side benefit of learning one language, I was gaining at least a base-level comprehension of another.

More Jazz Sharks

2008-05-12T15:12:00.000-07:00

All About Jazz has published my profile of Pipi Piazzolla, drummer, bandleader, and sometime shark fisherman. I saw Pipi play last night with the 18-piece Inmigrantes Big Band, and he was incredibly on point—definitely a guy who could go toe-to-toe with a lot of American jazz heavyweights.

Pipi was a big help as well, in putting me in touch with Guillermo Klein (pictured), an Argentine pianist living in Barcelona and an international jazz star. Klein will be playing at the Vanguard next month with his powerful ensemble, Los Guachos, and will also be featured at the Newport Jazz Festival. I had the pleasure of talking with him last week, and an article will be forthcoming—likely pegged to Klein's New York appearance.

Right now, I have a backlog of interview material that I'll arranging into articles over the next week. "Tango Town Swing" is due to pick up some steam...

Long in the fang

2008-05-03T23:34:00.000-07:00

I've heard it said that meeting writers is often a disappointment; the charm and eloquence that they possess on the page frequently doesn't translate to the physical world. I didn't meet Tom Wolfe this afternoon, but after listening to him talk for an hour, I'm not sure I want to.

I haven't read much of Tom Wolfe's work, but what I have—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and parts of his first collection Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby—I've really liked. I hear The Right Stuff and many of his shorter non-fiction pieces are exceptional. Last spring, I took a course with the non-fiction writer Ron Rosenbaum in which a number of guest writers visited to talk about their craft. When people in the class asked Ron or the guests which current writer they thought was really exceptional, Wolfe was always mentioned first or second. When it came to a writer with chops, someone who could seduce you to keep turning the page, whether that page was about the Bauhaus or the space program, Wolfe was the man.

What a disappointment then, that Wolfe might have been the least seductive speaker I have ever heard. A speech like a piece of writing, needs to keep you interested and involved. Wolfe's delivery was plodding, his organization meandering, and I got the feeling not so much that I was listening to a brilliant and incisive writer as I was to an unprepared, pretentious, and out-of-touch man ramble on about his view of America.

Many of Wolfe's statements rang false as well. His first whopper—one I think I'd read before in the press around I am Charlotte Simmons—was that in American universities fellatio is not considered a sexual act, rather it's akin to kissing. Really? I know the University of Chicago is known as the school where "fun comes to die," but even so, that sounds like the gross overstatement of an isolated old man wagging his finger at "the youth," rather than anything that has to do with the truth.

Tom Wolfe has a very personal relationship with fact and history. He chastised New York and San Francisco intellectuals for forgetting god and the solid values of NASCAR-loving Southern folk. (Wolfe also called stock car racing, "the biggest sport in America." I'm not sure what measure he was using, but I'm pretty sure you'd have to play with the numbers for a while to come up with that conclusion.) He spent five minutes praising America's forgotten ethnic group, the Scotch-Irish, who, according to Wolfe have been the key fighters in every American war from the Revolution to Iraq. He called Thomas Jefferson's campaign against aristocracy, the most important moment in American history.

Responding to a question about racial issues, Wolfe said that America had had an apartheid, but that it had ended shortly after World War II. I'm not sure what he considered the end of that era: Brown v. Board of Ed, maybe? The Civil Rights movement seems a little too late to be considered "shortly after World War II," and regardless, how could a responsible speaker not note that while conditions have improved markedly, a gulf still exists between much of Black America and much of White America.

I knew before the speech that Wolfe was a conservative. What I didn't know was how uncritically he thought about the world. Appearing at the invitation of the US Embassy, Wolfe seemed like a caricature of the worst of the Bush administration's talking points. I'm a pretty unabashed fan of the United States, but if your central worry about the country is that there's too much oral sex on college campuses and that the urban elites are losing their ties to religion, then you're not looking very hard.

Tom Wolfe is famous for being a phenomenal writer and reporter. He implores young writers to get out and see the world, and stop writing self-indulgent works about the miseries of growing up in the suburbs. Yet, I think the America that he sees is a country that exists for only one man. If Wolfe looks at the world anymore, it's just to confirm his simplistic view of it. The intrepid reporter has turned in his pen and paper for a sheltered and lofty existence of white suits and well-earned celebrity. I would be fine with this, the man is 78 after all, if he wasn't so deluded to think that he still had a pulse on what was going on in "the Real America."

I would have been very excited to hear Wolfe talk about his craft, reminisce about Ken Kesey and Chuck Yeager, or wax on about the differences between writing novels and non-fiction. Instead, Wolfe fell into the trap of celebrity in which a famous person becomes an expert on all things, and turns form a sharp thinker into a blowhard.

A few more thoughts: Listening to Wolfe was pretty excruciating, but it paled in comparison to the introductory remarks delivered by the US Ambassador to Argentina, Earl Anthony Wayne. It wasn't anything Wayne said, rather it was the way he said it. Wayne speaks Spanish very, very poorly. It wasn't just his pronunciation. Reading from a prepared statement, it was clear that he didn't grasp the basic fundamentals of the language. Is it possible that in a country of tens of millions of Spanish speakers, the State Department couldn't find an equally qualified person who spoke at least passable Spanish?

The Language Issue, Revisited

2008-05-01T18:47:00.000-07:00

I just reread my second-ever Type and Tonic post, "Yo Hablo Español?," and, being in a reflective mood, want to, well, reflect.

More than anything else, the slow-and-painful process that is learning another language has been my obsession and my cross in Buenos Aires. In my "Yo Hablo Español?" entry, written in October 2007 during my first week in Buenos Aires, I realized that my vision of a quick and painless immersion in the language—which would result in total fluency—had been a pipe dream. Working at an English-language newspaper, as I realized immediately, is not a very good way to learn another language. You're surrounded by the mother tongue, your friends are native English-language speakers, and you end up speaking mostly English. Yes, the paper is also a community that reaches Argentines—all my non-jazz-related Argentine friends come from offshoots of this network—but you have to work against the grain to make real inroads into their worlds.

Buenos Aires, like any other big city in the world, is filled with a lot of busy people who have scant time to take a Spanish-mangling foreigner under their wing. I've heard many people who travel say things like, "oh, the people are so friendly," "it's so easy to get to know people there," and other smiley phrases that make the residents of a given place seem like happy-go-lucky idiots who have nothing better to do than to stop their lives for the benefit of the eager American or European backpacker.

I should soften my last sentence. First, away from cities, people do tend to be friendlier and more welcoming. (That is unless it's one of those towns where no one "from away" is welcome.) Second, if you're just traveling through, it's easy to put up with you for a night; if what you want is a more lasting friendship, than that's an issue that takes time and sacrifice and interest and many other things. I don't think anyone owes anyone else friendship, and frankly the people of Buenos Aires are probably more open to befriending a foreigner than the people of New York would be. What I want to say is, in short, that believing I could just move to a place, immediately make local friends, and learn to speak the language perfectly in the space of a few months was impossibly naive.

What I have gotten has taken time. There's no doubt my Spanish has improved. I feel like it flows now. When I speak it, I speak it without translation. Yet, I'm also aware that there are many nuances to this thing called fluency. I am now regularly interviewing people in Spanish, I live with an Argentine, I carry about most of my daily business in Spanish, I am researching two (hopefully) feature-length articles in Spanish. However, it's not natural, and I don't think it ever will be. When I read literature, I'm reading the dictionary constantly. When I hang out with a bunch of Argentines, I get lost when they speak to one another. I could get past these obstacles eventually, but I'd need more time than I'm willing to spend. I'd need there to be a more compelling reason for me to be here than simply learning the language. I'll try my damn hardest for the rest of my time here to keep advancing, and I'll leave fluent but far from perfect.

Because learning the language is such an important part of my life here, I get irrationally offended when anyone maligns my ability to speak and irrationally happy whenever anyone compliments it.

On Monday night, I was in a bar in the oh-so-trendy Palermo Hollywood neighborhood of Buenos Aires and almost lost it. I was sitting at a table with one of my roommates and started to order, when the waitress said, "I can speak English," to which I replied, "bueno, prefiero hablar castellano." Now, the waitress was polite about it and spoke with me in Spanish, but the damage was done. I've been in this country for six months, and this woman was demeaning my ability to do something as simple as order food. The bar was loud and packed, and I can see how a waitress might tire of a yankee accent in that setting—but it ruined my night. I was ready to pull a Jack Nicholson-in-Five Easy Pieces, and throw everything off the table as I sneered, "between your knees."

Those are the worst moments I have in Buenos Aires—even writing about it now makes me feel bad—because they seem to undermine everything I've done here. It's as if she said, "the last six months of your life were spent in a worthless pursuit and the longer you stay here, the more worthless it will be. Go back to New York, pretend you never came here, and don't come back again."

Learning a language is humiliating, especially when you care deeply about succeeding at it. I look back on the many fits and starts of learning this damned thing, and I have regrets. Why didn't I spend a summer when I was younger in a Spanish speaking country? Why didn't I take a year in college and study abroad in Spain, where I would have been surrounded by other students and could have integrated into Spanish-speaking life much more easily?

These regrets, luckily, are passing. I wouldn't go back and change much. It's just up to me now to keep plugging along at this involving, ever-so-frustrating process.

Update: Immediately after posting, I was surfing the web and suddenly had a desire to hear what David Foster Wallace sounded like (I've read some of his stuff and seen his pony-tailed image, but never heard him). That took me immediately to this video which has Wallace addressing the humiliation that comes with not knowing the native language. (My humiliation has more to do with failure at learning it, but the themes resonate nonetheless.) I think I'll resolve from now on, as Wallace quotes Beckett, to "fail better."

Where I'm Calling From: Part II

2008-04-27T10:35:00.000-07:00

On Friday, I packed my bags and moved from San Telmo to my new digs in Colegiales, a residential neighborhood in the north of the city. I live on the second floor in an annex to the larger house downstairs, basically a nice shack on the roof that offers privacy and a big rooftop outdoor space. I'm thinking that I should follow my pugilistic forbearers Malloy and Tyson and start keeping pigeons...

The door on the left is my entrance

My sun porch

The shack on the roof

Tango Town Swing

2008-04-22T07:04:00.000-07:00

Sooner than expected, All About Jazz has published my first column, "Friday Night at Thelonious," in what will, hopefully, be a long and fruitful series entitled "Tango Town Swing."

As the April entries can attest, jazz has become the central part of my life here. Between going to shows, listening to albums, transcribing interviews (by far the most time-consuming), and writing articles, I'm immersed in the music like I never have been before. That said, I'm happy to report that my boxing career is still flourishing, I'm cooking more than ever (I even made a loaf of bread on Saturday), and am putting together an article of a very different sort that hopefully will find a taker...

All About Jazz

2008-04-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

Well, the smoke has cleared for the moment and it's a idyllic sunny and 72 degrees. Not a bad mid-autumn Sunday...

Today marks the beginning of my stint writing for All About Jazz. My decidedly mixed review of the Charles Lloyd New Quartet's late March concert in San Francisco has been posted, and seems to have already gotten 127 hits (not bad web exposure). My first piece on the Argentine jazz scene should be coming soon, to be followed by an interview/profile of drummer Pipi Piazzolla, tango master Ástor Piazzolla's grandson and one of the leading lights in contemporary Argentine jazz.

In more terrestrial news, I'm moving. San Telmo was a great place to cut my teeth, but I'm ready for a change. I'll be relocating to Chacarita, a more residential barrio in the north, where I'll have a patio and considerably easier access to jazz clubs.

The Days Buenos Aires Stood Still

2008-04-18T10:34:00.001-07:00

For the last two days, Buenos Aires has been inundated with smoke. Massive brush fires in the Tigre Delta to the north have put the city under a smelly, irritating haze. Life continues to go on—and the smoke is supposedly non-toxic—but everything feels a little off. The streets are less crowded; the traffic is moving more slowly; the domestic airport has been shut down; many highways in and out of the city have been closed.

The smoke has also changed the days into a perpetual dawn. Even at noon, the light has the soft orange tone of sunrise and sunset. At night, the smoke makes Buenos Aires look like London on its foggiest nights. It's all very cinematic, but unpleasant to live in. BBC Mundo reported that by Monday, we should be back to the promised good airs.

Jazz Sharks

2008-04-15T19:58:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't say I'm the toast of the Buenos Aires jazz scene quite yet, but I'm making headway...

On Friday, I spent an hour with Dino Saluzzi and his son, José, talking about musical education, improvisation, and the future of Argentine music. (For those who aren't up on their tango-folkloric-jazz fusion, Dino Saluzzi is the world's reigning bandoneon master and probably second only to Ástor Piazzolla in his influence on the course of Argentine creative music.) Dino and José were generous and insightful. My interview with them should be up on All About Jazz sometime in May.

Yesterday, I spent part of my afternoon with Pipi Piazzolla, the grandson of the aforementioned Ástor and a top-notch musician in his own right. Pipi is the drummer and leader of Escalandrum, one of Argentina's most decorated and prolific jazz groups. They have a dark tango texture amidst some really sharp, rhythmically complex jazz playing.

The band's name, Escalandrum, does not come, as I had thought, from some conjunction of Escala (scale in Spanish) and drum, but rather from a conjunction of escalandrún and drum. What's an escalandrún, you ask? Why, it's the Argentine name for a sand shark.

And why would you name a band after a sand shark?

Pipi said it had something to do with not being able to go shark fishing with his father the year he started the group (the Piazzollas are big shark fishermen) and, no doubt, also because sharks are bad ass. Pipi proudly showed me a picture of his father and him posed next to a ten-foot sand shark that they bagged off the coast of Mar del Plata. If I unexpectedly end up staying in Argentina through the next austral summer, shark fishing with the Piazzollas will be of the highest priority.

Between interviews, I caught two excellent shows. The first, a Friday night gig at Thelonious with Ramiro Flores's Quintet, a group that has already gotten some love on this blog. The second, a Sunday night trip to the nearby city of La Plata, to see my friend Ale Demogli play with his quintet and a dynamic Brazilian saxophonist named Marcelo Coehlo.

My first article for All About Jazz, a review of the Charles Lloyd New Quartet's San Francisco concert is slated for publication this Sunday, and my first dispatch from Buenos Aires has been submitted as well...

Argentina: Part II

2008-04-08T14:12:00.000-07:00

It's not a very good sign when every other post on this blog begins with something like: after a long unannounced hiatus, Type and Tonic is back and better than ever. Granted this hiatus was announced—I was in the U.S. for the last three weeks—but if I'm going to keep this blog up, I need to be significantly more prolific. A limited output may be a virtue in film directors (see: Kubrik vs. Woody Allen), but it certainly isn't in bloggers.

I also need to get this back up and running because now I'm really out on my own as a writer. I've left the Argentimes editorial team and am hoping to strike out a path as a freelancer, jazz columnist, and amateur pugilist. (The pugilism is by far the most promising at this point.)

My web presence has expanded since last I was in Argentina. Through The Tube, a new website by the graphic designer Joshua Goldfein, is posting a lot of content that originally ran in the Argentimes. My articles currently on his site are a travel piece on El Chalten, and a news analysis/interview on corruption in Argentina. There's word that my Nazi hunting story will run on the site in the near future.

Through The Tube is a very polished site and is a major boon to the Argentimes. Finally, you'll be able to access our articles online without downloading an entire PDF of the paper.

I've also taken on a new job as Argentina columnist for the web's biggest jazz site: All About Jazz. My first article, a review of the Charles Lloyd Quartet's San Francisco concert, has been submitted, and should go up next week. My column will start soon, with an introductory summary of jazz in Buenos Aires to be followed by a string of articles on tango-jazz and folkloric-jazz in Argentina.

As a final note, I've just bought Brad Mehldau's new double album, Brad Mehldau Trio (Live), and I'd recommend that if you have an inclination for the jazz piano, you do the same. Carla Mazzio, a U of C English professor, once told me that the font size of a title was inversely proportional to the quality of the work. In Mehldau's case, there must be an inverse relationship between quality of title and quality of playing.

BMT (Live) is sensational. I'd begun to lose some faith in my favorite jazz pianist after a string of fairly ho-hum studio recordings. This is his best album since Art of the Trio, Vol. 4: Back at the Vanguard, and may be his strongest recording to date.

Beyond showing that Mehldau is still at the top of his game, this album raises the question: should Brad Mehldau ever enter a recording studio again? His live albums are so much richer than what he does in the studio—the extended form of live performance documents his tightly-controlled virtuosity in a way that has never really come across in the studio. Removed from the tightrope sprint of live performance, he tends to sound disappointingly restrained.

Take it as a sign of my enthusiasm that I bought not only the album, but also the complete recording of the Friday night sets (over three hours of music) from the Nonesuch website.

You Grooving?

2008-03-09T20:18:00.000-07:00

So I was asked by the saxophonist Dave Liebman before his concert tonight in Buenos Aires. After learning that I was from New York and living in Buenos Aires, he wanted to make sure that my time here was living up to the jazz ethic. I told him it was.

Courtesy of my friend, the guitarist Ale Demogli, I had full run of the theater where Liebman was playing and was able to chat with him for a bit before the show. Way back in November 2000, I went to a jazz club for the first time and saw Liebman playing with his big band at the Knitting Factory's Old Office. While my friends (fellow travelers of the spaceways and waterways Greg Kress, Dude Friedman, Zach Seward, and Dan Hemel) and I liked hanging in a real live jazz club, we certainly didn't get the music.

Tonight, I introduced myself to Liebman by telling him that he was the first musician I ever saw play in a club, omitting the fact that I didn't really like what he'd played then. Since that fateful night in 2000 (earlier in the day, Dalton football had won its first championship in 20 years in an epic 14-13 win over Horace Mann) I hadn't heard Liebman play live, so my view of him continued to be of an eccentric and inaccessible performer.

What a difference seven and a half years makes.

Tonight's concert was one of the finest I've seen in a long time. I don't recall ever hearing a saxophonist that was more powerful than Dave Liebman was tonight. In his hands, the soprano sax, an instrument with a proclivity for Kenny G sacchrine, was a flame thrower. On tenor, he evoked the spirit of Coltrane more earnestly and powerfully than any other player I've seen. Liebman's originals were stirring, but the concert reached a new level on his ten-plus minute solo on 'My Favorite Things'. The man had the gall to poach directly from the Coltrane cannon, perform a sheet-of-sound attack solo, and come up with something ferocious and new.

The last show I saw that reached this kind of level was a August 2007 concert at Blue Note in New York of Don Byron's Ivey Divey Trio. That night, I left the Blue Note and needed to walk the streets of Greenwich Village for an hour just to process what had gone on. Take this gushing missive as the digital equivalent of that bewildered and awestruck stroll..

The Return

2008-03-09T13:18:00.001-07:00

It's been a long, unannounced hiatus for Type and Tonic, a fact due to my week and a half trip to the South, my final weeks at the Argentimes, and, most importantly, my mind being occupied with the big queston of what next.

First off, a brief and incomplete recap of what's gone on.

My good friend (and guest blogger) Adam Bloch and I spend a week in the spectacular lake district of Argentina around Bariloche and El Bolsón. Longtime readers of Type and Tonic will be familiar with El Bolsón as the place where I both made my fateful Piltriquitron hike and where attended the El Bolsón Jazz Festival.

On my second visit, the town didn't disappoint. In late summer, it was a little more lively than it had been in early December and its laid-back hippie spirit was fully on display—most colorfully when a Carnaval parade of school kids and eccentric old men made its way through the town plaza.

Blocho's and my consensus from our time in the region was that the two highlights were our trip to Cajón del Azul and our brief achievement of human flight. I wrote an article on Cajón, which will be coming out in the next issue of the Argentimes. The place was as idyllic a spot as you could dream of—a quaint mountain cottage set between two mountains and above a river canyon. The proprietor was a wizened mountain sage named Atilio Csik who drove a tractor around the premises and declined to sell Adam a t-shirt, because he "didn't believe in that sort of commerce."

Human flight took the form of paragliding off my old friend Piltriquitron. If you ever have the opportunity to go paragliding, do it. You stand on a steep slope on the mountain looking down at El Bolsón's bucolic valley when, suddenly, you're told to start running and soon after find yourself taking steps in thin air as you rise up on the thermal drafts. Flying a hundred feet or so above the the trees and following the contour of the mountain as it descended toward the valley floor, I got as close as I ever think I will to being a bird.

Other highlights of the last month include the discovery of an underground, Friday-night only jazz club where Adam and I attended two jam sessions. The first featuring the powerful bebop quartet of my friend, the saxophonist Leonardo Paganini, the second showcasing an precise sax trio that played a faithful Ornette Coleman tribute set.

I have also recently ended my tenure on the editorial team at the Argentimes. An excellent experience, and a great place to start my Argentine odyssey, but I'm now ready to try my hand at more freelance journalism and, while nothing is set, there have been some rumblings from promising corners.

Tomorrow, I'll be setting off on yet another journey, this one back to US shores for the first time since October. It should be a very full slate with the Winnebago alumni reunion scheduled to bring a motley crew to New York in time for my return, and a trip out west to the mountain home of Paul "The Dude" Friedman for some early spring skiing.

When I return in April, I'll be moving in with two Argentine friends, hoping that some of the freelance leads will pan out, and attempting to get a job at a Spanish-language publication. A lot of uncertainties, but a lot of possibilities, which is why in the end it seems like an adventure worth taking.

Not sure how much blogging there will be from the States, but will certainly return to Type and Tonic in April...

Roll Over, Plimpton (Blocho blogging)

2008-02-12T13:50:00.000-08:00

First of, despite what Tanto Gusto might claim, El Gordo Magnifico has not adopted mate. But he's trying, he trying real hard, Ringo, to develop a taste for the bitter concoction.

Now on to the matter at hand, which includes two experiences with Argentina's sporting scene. The second event took place yesterday, and if I had to write a lede for it, it would probably go something like this:

BUENOS AIRES - El Gordo Magnifico arrived at the boxing gym in Barracas with high hopes and a thirst for the ring. An hour later, he departed after many pains and no accomplishments. In between, he lost his lunch and a couple pounds of bile.

Not bad, huh? George Plimpton, the hero and creator of participatory journalism who once climbed into the ring with the pros and even had a tryout with the Detroit Lions, probably rolled in his grave. Boxing, it seems, is a bit of a barbaric sport, and there was nothing sweet about my experience.

A mediocre lunch of a chicken and mayo sandwich was partly to blame, as was the extensive pre-hydration provided by Coke Zero and agua con gas. And after about 30 minutes of jump rope, some bizarre arm exercises and even weirder calisthenics with a wooden bar, I staggered over to the stairs and got no farther. Thankfully, Tanto Gusto was Johnny-on-the-spot with a mop bucket, which quickly became the home of my half-digested lunch.

The important thing is that Tomas, the boxing coach, was more bemused than angry. And I remain unbowed. EGM intends to return on Wednesday.

Now as for the other scene of athletic endeavor (and a far less indigestible one), TG and I made a trip to the Hippidromo Argentino on Sunday, where we met Gabriel and Manolo Rio Cabo for a day at the races.

Gabe - hereafter referred to as El Flaco Insuferible - had just returned from a trip to Brazil for carnaval, and I hadn't seen him in more than three years. We got reacquainted during several hours spent staring at the finest and swiftest steeds Buenos Aires had to offer.

The Hippodromo had an impressive setup, with several stately, almost regal, buildings providing the framework for the stands and track. TG, EFI, Manolo and I fell into a steady rhythm of visiting the paddock to inspect the ponies pre-race, placing our bets and then retiring to the stairs for a view of the race.

Manolo, relying on decades spent at various racetracks around the U.S., quickly established his bona fides as a handicapper with some astute picks. Tanto Gusto won the first race, and I managed to pick up a pair of wins by betting on horses names Es Huma and Grigoriy. My net take was -7 pesos, a fair fee for an afternoon of entertainment. El Flaco Insuferible suffered the most, failing on all his bets.

The experience was an overall delight, from the loud yells of joy or anger at race's end, to the old-fashioned scoreboard used to announce the official results.

Nazi Hunters and Mate Lovers

2008-02-11T12:06:00.000-08:00

First off, an update that I should have posted last Wednesday. My feature article on Nazis in Argentina is in the current issue of The Argentimes. It was a bit of a rush at the end to get it done—not all that atypical of journalism, I suppose—but I'm pretty happy with the finished product. (I say that, although I haven't yet had the guts to actually read the article in print. I think I'll do that this evening.)

Second, my good friend Adam Bloch has arrived for a three-week stay in Argentina, and, as loyal readers will know, has already authored a post on Type and Tonic. Adam correctly noted that Big Night takes place in New Jersey, and while I haven't seen Dinner Rush, his pick for quintessential New York restaurant movie, he's been recommending the movie to me for years and I'll be excited to see it when I return to the States.

In his guest post, Adam also railed against mate, the jet fuel-like tea that powers Argentina and Uruguay, and to a lesser extent, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Chile. Mate is an acquired taste, it's bitter, grassy, and strong. You have to learn to like mate, just like you have to learn to like good-life staples like coffee, scotch, and truffles. I'm proud to say that Adam's learning curve has been rather steep. In fact, I have to end this post now because he's come back to the apartment and is hungering for his mate fix. As a mate lover myself, I have to join in...

El Gordo Magnifico (Blocho's Blog)

2008-02-09T12:32:00.000-08:00

You are now reading Blocho, guest blogger for Eric Benson during these next three weeks. And Blocho's got a bone to pick.

First, before I even delve into my many adventures since my momentous arrival here late Thursday night, I've got to respond to the "Big Night" heresy propagated by Benson in his most recent post. First, while Timpano is undoubtedly a great dish, I actually have had it. I ate a timpano at Centolire, that quiet outpost of relaxed, sophisticated old world Italian dining on Madison Avenue. I highly recommend the place. Second, as any person who has seen "Big Night" knows, the film takes place in New Jersey, not New York. So yes, it may be the quintessential New Jersey restaurant movie. And let's hope the two locations never get mistaken again.

For the quintessential New York restaurant movie, I recommend "Dinner Rush," starring Danny Aiello. A fascinating amalgam of a mob movie and a family drama set against the background of haute cuisine and changing times in New York, the movie is supremely rewarding with its panoply of characters and interconnecting vignettes. It was also filmed inside Gigino, a lovely trattoria in TriBeCa.

Now let's get back to the BA, where El Gordo Magnifico (my Argentine alter ego) has been holding court over the past couple of days. In between ravenous visits to local steak joints, adventures at underground jazz jam sessions and a brief interlude at an Armenian Cultural Center, EGM has managed to penetrate the ex-pat journalism community and travel much of the city by foot and bus.

But all this was secondary to my first experience with mate, that soulful beverage that represents all that is true in the Argentine soul (you know, because I really understand the Argentine soul after less than 48 hours here).

Benson, who I will refer to as Tanto Gusto from now on, prepared a mate concoction yesterday, carefully pouring the yerba into his meticulously cured gourd and then going through a labyrinthine process of preparation. One of the tasks included was carefully heating a kettle of water not to boiling but rather to 80 degrees celsius. And how does Tanto Gusto know when he has reached this point? The great mate connosieur (aka addict) can feel it in his tailbone - and sometimes in his ankles.

All this was secondary to the insertion of the bombilla (pronounced bomb-ee-sha), the metal straw/instrument of torture/filter through which the mate is imbibed. My first taste of the fabled elixir was redolent with wonder and thorough disgust.

"How can something smell so good and taste so shitty," I inquired, to which TG laughed heartily, or perhaps ominously.

A mate and bombilla

Second and third tastings were no better, and I yearned to know what attracted the hordes to this bitter syrup. Was it good for the soul? Did it contain antioxidants? Was it fabled to cure ailments both small and deadly? Did it evoke the spirit of Wynton Marsalis? Would your ancestor float out of the gourd and dance in the aromatic air? Did the drink stir intellectual explorations? Would I yearn to know the Pampas? Would I find my SudAmericano soul? Did it increase virility? Would I grow stronger or more determined?

No, mate did none of these things. It just tastes bad.

Big Night

2008-02-04T14:19:00.000-08:00

I made my debut on the Buenos Aires restaurant scene on Friday night, and it very much lived up to my expectations of exhaustion, controlled chaos, and reward. Before I go any further, you need to understand that the restaurant, Casa Felix, owned and operated by my friends Sanra and Diego, is a private restaurant in their home that hosts 14-18 people in one seating with a set menu. Because it's in someone's home—although in the summer months (now) they serve in their patio—people assume the demeanor of house guest and much as client. They expect good food and service, but they're also respectful of the people who are hosting them in their home for dinner.

So yes, Casa Felix may not share a lot with the high stakes world of a trendy New York restaurant, but it is a business, it does have patrons, and at the end of the day it either works and succeeds, or doesn't and folds. With this in mind, it was quite kind of Sanra and Diego to let a totally novice like me crash their kitchen for a night. It turned out, as none of us knew at the time, to have been a very good night for a novice, or really any extra set of hands, to be there.

The night started off normally enough. I did a lot of chopping, some juicing, and prepared a sauce for the appetizer course, an incredible ceviche. The diners arrived, and Diego and Sanra schmoozed with them overing drinks in their courtyard as Emi, the assistant chef, and I finished the preparations. In a restaurant like this, most of the work is done before the diners come, so as I put the finishing touches on the tomato and fig garnish for the main-course ricotta and squash tamales, I figured my work was nearly done.

It would be an exaggeration to say that then it all nearly fell apart, and in truth, I'm sure they could have managed just fine without my help. The fact is though that Diego called me the next day and thanked me for saving his business, and when I got home after my work at the restaurant, I slept for ten hours—this might have also had to do with little sleep, my final UBA test, and a generally busy day, but let's just say it was all the restaurant.

What did I do, you ask? I washed dishes—lot's of them. In and of itself that would not have been much, I expected to wash dishes. No, it was the fact that midway through the meal, Diego suddenly felt very sick and had to leave the restaurant, leaving only Sanra, Emi, and me. Sanra was waiting tables, Emi was cooking and waiting tables, and I was left to help prepare food and wash lots and lots of dishes relatively quickly.

Casa Felix has plenty of dishes but depending on the meal, some of them have to be washed, dried, and reused later on. That was the case that night, as I tried to get dishes ready for Sanra to use, and generally clear out the kitchen so it wouldn't be a complete disaster after the meal.

Now, had I not been there, it would have been easy enough just to stack up a lot of dirty dishes, wash the few that were needed, and wait until later or the next morning to clean up. The restaurant would have done just fine. What I did though, was save a mess and save a lot a dish washing. For that, I was perfectly happy to help. And for that, I received a free meal.

Quick notes:
If you haven't seen Big Night, perhaps the quintessential New York restaurant movie, check it out. It features an incredible Tony Shalhoub performance and teaches you all about the greatest dish you (or I) have never tried, timpano.

Amazon.com emails recommending purchases work (in their seductive and slightly evil way). I'm really happy they do. Check out the Vandermark 5's new album, Beat Reader. The V5's albums are all of a similar aesthetic, but this one has connected with me more than most. Maybe it's Fred Lonberg-Holm's cello (an improvement over Jeb Bishop's trombone), the more chamber new music sound of the group now with a cellist in full employ, or just plain and simple Chicago nostalgia. If you don't know the V5, this isn't a bad place to start either.

The Argentimes—Updated!

2008-01-26T07:23:00.000-08:00

The new issue of the Argentimes is out on the streets and the web. I have five pieces running: a page 3 article on Buenos Aires' new mayor and his problems with the unions, a page 8 article on corruption, a page 12 article on a controversial song, a page 26 travel piece on El Bolsón, and a Supplement page 7 interview piece with jazz guitarist Ale Demogli.

The next issue will see my debut as a Spanish writer. It should come out February 7.

DHQ

2008-01-26T06:24:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday evening brought the incomparable Dave Holland Quintet roaring into Buenos Aires for a big gig at the Teatro Coliseo. The Quintet has had the same personnel for the last ten years—except for drummer Nate Smith, who has only been there for the last four—a rare phenomenon in today's jazz world which makes the group really shine. When I saw DHQ for the first time in Chicago, the amount of duets within the quintet setting really struck me. In Buenos Aires it was even more evident. On "Soul's Harbor," a new Chris Potter composition, there were a few such duets, including a moment in which Potter and Holland riffed off each other as the rest of the band walked off stage.

Every member of DHQ is a master, but increasingly, it's becoming Potter's band. The BA crowd burst into joyful uproar every time he finished a solo—solos which seem to be longer, knottier, and deeper than in early years—and as the crowd poured out, the buzz was that Potter had been the star. He's on the cover of this month's Down Beat, has his own major band, Underground, and seems to be omnipresent on the New York scene. In the last year or so, I've seen him with Holland, Jason Moran, Paul Motian, and his own group. He's always one of the very best parts of the night.

The saxophone is a crowd pleaser, certainly more than the trombone or the vibraphone which have a less showy intensity. Steve Nelson, Holland's vibraphonist, is the group's mad scientist, conjuring Monkish dissonance and spontaneity. When I've seen DHQ previously, always at Chicago's Jazz Showcase, Nelson has felt like the most important member of the group, the unpredictable spark who keeps everyone on their toes (fulfilling a similar to function to what drummer Paul Motian brings to his current groups).

Robin Eubanks is one of the best trombone players I know, but paired with Potter on the front lines, it's often tough for him to stand out against the saxophonist's dazzling fluency. Eubanks, it should be noted, is one of the group's main composers, and his theme, "Metamorphos," is my favorite DHQ tune.

As for drummer Nate Smith, well suffice it to say that he's brings a palpable sense of joy to the band that has made them even better than during their years with Billy Kilson.

Then there's the matter of Holland himself, who, to my mind, stands as an ideal of dignity and generosity in jazz. I've never met Holland, although all indications are that he's a thoroughly good man, but I see him as, if you'll allow me this ridiculous flight, the Gandalf of the band. Content to lead and bring out the best in others, he stands in the background and allows the music to flow through him. This isn't to say he's not active, he plays constantly, but he never calls attention to himself—the consummate teacher guiding his pupils toward the stratosphere.

But like Gandalf, when the time comes, he can kick serious ass. In Chicago, I once saw Holland burst into one of the most intense expressions of feeling I've seen in music. The notes were getting quicker and darker, when Holland slammed his foot down on the floor (an honest-to-goodness slam, shaking the club) and let out a tortured moan. Holland is an Englishman and a restrained (but certainly not repressed) sort; and when he bares himself so powerfully it means a lot more than it does for musicians who expose their depths with every solo. This deep exposure is present in every Holland solo, but rarely realized. He's the far better player for his refusal to be showy and his insistence on being honest with every note.

The following week should see a couple other jazz posts, with planned trips to see Levas Cruzadas on Sunday, and another show on Wednesday. I will also be making my debut on the Buenos Aires restaurant scene on Friday, where I'll be wielding a cooking knife at Casa Felix...

The Sweet Science: Part II

2008-01-17T08:37:00.000-08:00

From the moment I arrived in Buenos Aires, everyone kept telling me about January in the city: “It’s a ghost town,” “The city gets abandoned,” “There’s literally no one here.” While that’s a little overboard, the city does feel noticeably vacant. For me, the most important consequence of the January flight is that it forced me to switch gyms. My old gym, Suterh, has shut its doors for the month, but by god, that doesn’t mean there’s no boxing to be had.

The coach at Suterh, the boxing guru Pedro Cabrera, has his own gym in the neighboring barrio of Barracas. It’s a basement affair that’s bigger, better equipped, and almost as charmingly dingy as the Suterh. I’ve also been training with a new coach, who while shorter on boxing mystique than Pedro, is more willing to give serious instruction to a gringo who isn’t going to be contending for the cruiser weight title anytime soon.

I don’t begrudge Pedro his laconic nature (or at least laconic attitude toward me), but I’ve been making bigger strides under the tutelage of my new coach, Profesor Tomás. One of Tomas’s somewhat loopy, but incredible, training methods is to have me work out without shoes. He told me it’s so I don’t rip up the floor, but that’s just him being cagey. After two days in a row of jumping rope, hitting the heavy bag, and shadow punching with my bare feet, my calves have never been so sore.

Down Beat

2008-01-15T12:04:00.000-08:00

While it's unlikely to lead to a major book deal, it's never bad to see a piece of yours in print. My short write-up of the El Bolsón Jazz Festival, the subject of the earlier blog entry 'The 100-word assignment' has made it into the February issue of Down Beat. What's more, the story was published on page 19. For those readers who grasp the significance of that fact, let's just say that it opens up the possibility that the Chicagoland-based jazz magazine may have an uncredited Rockville, VA-based paginator.

I don't expect the piece will ever be available on Down Beat's website (they publish excerpts of the main stories and leave the rest to paying customers), but if you're dying to see my name in a glossy, you can certainly hike down to your local bookstore and browse the magazine section. If you just want to read the content and see the accompanying picture—yes, I'm now a published photographer as well—I've posted it below:

FESTIVAL IN ARGENTINE ANDES PUTS JAZZ ON HIGH PLATEAU

Staged in a picturesque valley in the midst of Argentina’s Patagonian Andes, the seventh annual El Bolsón Jazz Festival brought some of the country's best players to this bohemian mountain town from Nov. 30—Dec. 2, 2007.

The festival, directed by local guitarist Alejandro Aranda and drummer Juan Merlo, was heavy on community spirit. Students packed the late morning clinics with some of the festival’s best known stars; fans, festival organizers, and musicians ate together at daily barbecues.

Veteran trumpeter Roberto “Fats” Fernandez, the festival’s honoree, held court for the first two nights. But younger artists like the jazz-funk pranksters of Levas Cruzadas, the guitar virtuoso Ale Demogli and the charismatic Afro-Peruvian collective Los Negros de Miércoles provided the fiery improvisations that sparked the festival to life. Every night, open-to-the-public jam sessions roared until dawn, joyfully blending straight-ahead rhythm sections, African percussion and brash young horns.

—Eric Benson

Dog Days bring lethargy, strikes, and a site update

2008-01-12T10:29:00.000-08:00

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.

Uruguay

2008-01-04T05:35:00.000-08:00

Here’s the key moment from my Uruguay trip; the moment in which the trip became something of an adventure:

It’s 4:45 a.m. and I’m lying half-asleep on a coach bus winding its way along the Atlantic coast from Montevideo. I’ve been told that the bus will arrive at Fortaleza Santa Teresa, my destination, at around 7 a.m. and that I’ll have to walk five kilometers once I arrive until I hit the camping areas by the beach.

So when the bus stops at 4:45 a.m. I think to myself, there’s no possible way this could be Fortaleza, but an extra-cautious spirit propels me to ask, and turns out to be well heeded. So along with two other people, I’m dumped out on a traffic circle in the middle of what I’ll find out later is a national park, with an 8 a.m. rendezvous at the area’s one restaurant being my only instructions for finding my friends.

They’ve told me in which campground they’re staying though so I ask for directions from the other people who’ve been dropped off with me, and start what I assume will be a five kilometer walk. Five minutes later, without finding any campgrounds, I’m on a barren beach—stars glistening, waves breaking. I walk up a few of the paths that spread over the dunes, but they lead to nothing more than a “No Pasa” sign and a lot of dead-ends.

Realizing at this point that the directions might have been wrong, I trudge back up to the traffic circle and start following the road signs which lead me in an entirely different direction, and have me in the middle of a sprawling camping area within minutes. My hope had been to surprise my friends, find their tents, and ideally have them wake with me sipping a mate while sitting besides the perfectly smoldering cooking fire I’d have made for breakfast. The darkness and the scope of the campsite, though, rendered this fantasy impossible.

So with nothing to do and exhaustion setting in, I decide that I’ll sleep for a couple hours and that the beach is a far better place to do that than the concrete deck of the restaurant. (I should add at this point that I had some fears that I got off at the wrong stop even though all the beach names were the ones I expected to find and the restaurant was right in the traffic circle, as I’d been advised. Those facts added up, but the length of the bus ride and the fact that I never had to walk anything close to one kilometer much less five left me wary.)

As I walked toward the beach, a trickle of drunks were rising from the just-closed bar and after walking a suitable distance away from the few stragglers, I laid down my pack, took a moment to savor the surroundings, and fell asleep. I woke up about an hour and a half later with the sun rising in my eyes and sand flies pecking at my legs. Rising to walk back up to the restaurant and the traffic circle, the drunks had all vanished and had been replaced by a grandfather and grandson out of an Uruguayan Norman Rockwell painting, carrying finishing rods down to the rocks.

I met up with my friends as planned, had a wonderful three days on the beach complete with roaring campfires (the last of which was my attempt to challenge Final Campfire) and excellent food (crab meat tamales were a special highlight). If you ever have the opportunity, do as I did, and go camping with a chef.

A couple extras:

My New Year’s resolution is to drink more mate. I don’t have a mate gourd and have at this point relied entirely on Argentines for my mate consumption. I’ve been here for three months now, it’s high time to get right this essential part of Argentine life.

I didn’t bring my camera to the beach, but I happened to be there with a number of very serious photographers. I’ll get their pictures and put them up within the next couple of days.

Intermission

2007-12-29T05:47:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-28T17:53:00.000-08:00

A brief update

2007-12-21T19:06:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-09T19:58:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-06T13:42:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-05T05:58:00.000-08:00

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...

2007-12-04T08:48:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-12-04T06:15:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-30T05:11:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-21T18:24:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-20T10:17:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-17T07:33:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-14T12:40:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-11-13T17:37:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-06T14:55:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-03T11:09:00.000-07:00

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

2007-11-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

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

2007-11-01T15:32:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-08T19:30:00.000-07:00

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.