On Air

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

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

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

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

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