Play of the day
Posted: May 10, 2011 Filed under: Plays of the days, Wandering in the city Leave a commentThe short and sweet play of the day, folks, was the sighting of a strange, somewhat dishelved old man who I passed on my walk home this afternoon.
He stood, distractedly gazing into the window of a clothing store in Barrio Recoleta. He held a grocery bag and in it I spotted but one item: an old, pink toilet seat.
My insomnia may be deepening my appreciation for the bizarre but it was oh-so-nice to be met in the outside world with a vision not altogether unlike those I might encounter were I to have the pleasure of sleeping, perchance, to dream.
Of cafes and minor thievery
Posted: May 5, 2011 Filed under: Food, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
This afternoon I went with a few classmates of mine to a well-known cafe in San Telmo called La Poesía (pictured above). It’s a typical porteño cafe, on a corner. Big windows with two-person tables lined up out front on the sidewalk. Inside, one can sit and chat under the swinging fiambres and feel, well, literary. (Most of the tables at La Poesía are adorned with tarnished metal plaques indicating the great writers who might have sat in your very spot, composing their master works while sipping cortados or tragos into the wee hours).
Buenos Aires has a strong cafe culture–not unlike Paris. During rush hour the tables throughout the city fill up with cigarette-smoking locals and guide-book-toting tourists alike. They drink coffee or order liters of beer and chat until the traffic subsides or the dinner hour arrives. Also, as in Paris, the cafes are fantastic locals to eves-drop on debates about literature, foreign policy, local politics, or anything else people are talking about. And any time you’re wandering the city, you can’t go more than two blocks without finding an open cafe–no matter the hour.
What’s more: The city has developed a list of ‘cafés y bares notables‘ all of which hold some kind of historical or architectural significance. The bureaucrat who had the job of selecting these places is one lucky bastard. As is the one from the Ministry of Culture who chose all the pizza joints in the city-sponsored book, “Pizzerías de valor patrimonial de Buenos Aires.”
If you, dear readers, can keep a secret I’ll tell you something: I like to steal the tiny espresso spoons from the restaurants and cafes I go to, here or anywhere. I snuck one from La Poesía into my boot and hobbled home, a good two miles, with the thing pressed against my ankle. But don’t worry. I always leave a good tip.
Of pirate radio, building nodes, squatting and maté
Posted: April 22, 2011 Filed under: Food, Technology, Wandering in the city 1 Comment
Oh, my dearest of readers. This, dare I say it, was a productive week. Much of which I spent in ‘the field,’ as it were. My fields this week, as foretold in the previous post, consisted of the Once Libre rooftop and a house in one of the city’s villas. That house, as it turns out, doubles as a pirate radio station. What you see in the image above is Vampi trying to fix a computer rescued from the garbage heap by the pirate station. That very lovely lady in the background is one of the station’s co-founders. They’re planning on building a node in the autonomous network, the previously mentioned Buenos Aires Libre, along with some stronger antennas to broadcast the station beyond its current radius. At this point they’ve only got coverage for about a ten blocks.
It took a good hour to get to the house. A train out to the Liniers station, then two collectivos (buses, that is) to the neighborhood. A gloriously sunny day meant there were tons of stray dogs napping in the streets, kids playing on the sidewalks, folks milling about and greeting their passing neighbors with kisses on the cheek.
The house, like all those in the villa, is ramshackle–put together with found materials. Corrugated metal roofs serve as general protection but the elements easily pass through. Brick walls are cobbled together (and in this particular house, are covered with radical graffiti). Tarps and blankets separate space. Infrastructure exists, though it is not provided in any regular way by the city. The ceiling was hung with a mesh of plugs and wires, pulling power from some invisible source somewhere down the block. They get water, but I don’t know from where. It isn’t ‘running’ certainly. The house may be on the small side, and the modest side, but its residents were extremely welcoming.
Our hosts prepared a big feast for us–rice with vegetables and tuna, garbanzo beans, a salad, bread. We drank juice out of glasses made by cutting the tops off of beer bottles. The couple’s three kids ran in and out and were not particularly phased by our presence. Even mine–the obvious American with the weird accent.
We were given a tour of the station, which they built on the roof of the house–a kind of second-floor shack. The vast majority of their equipment is found, donated, or homemade. They built their transmitters, for example, themselves.
Needless to say I was very pleased with this little adventure.
Later in the week I helped the BAL folks post the antenna for the node at Once Libre. Pictures of that space will follow. I also learned that those running the place are essentially squatting. The collective occupies the third-floor of a city-owned property that had been vacant for some time prior to the Once Libre takeover. At any moment, though, this sweet subcultural meeting place could be found and destroyed by the municipality. Here’s to hoping that the notoriously slow bureaucracy in this city continues in its typical manner, ignoring, avoiding, or just not bothering with such spaces.
Both of these days of field work were closed by the standard afternoon maté ritual. I learned a few things. One: you can say ‘thank you’ when the maté cup is handed to you, but if you say it when you finish sipping and hand it back to whoever is refilling the hot water, you won’t get any more. Second: you have to make sure each person in the circle gets their maté in order. If you cut in line (colarse is the verb for this unholy act, and porteños really believe in lining up for things), you’re committing a grave offense.
Why, you ask, have I paired all these little field experiments in a single post? Well, if you’ll permit the radical in me to be a little cheesy, I’ll tell you. All of it–the pirate radio station, Once Libre’s squat space, the node-building and computer-recycling, even the maté–is about linking-in to the community around you and equitably sharing whatever it is you have. I know the cynics among you are rolling your eyes. Heck, I’m even rolling mine. I have lost a considerable amount of faith in the human race in recent epochs of my life. But still, it’s nice to know some people haven’t. Some people really do use their time, their skills, their general goodwill, to help whom they can. So, for a second, I’m just gonna settle in and like the idea. Maybe even believe in it.
The great thing about the true radical is that she doesn’t separate herself from others to be a leader or a solitary genius or a star. She just throws together whatever it is she has and offers that thing, or herself, or her maté, to her family, her friends, her lovers, her neighbors. And, best of all, she offers what she has to complete strangers. Even to tall, American strangers with funny accents.
Play of the day
Posted: April 18, 2011 Filed under: Plays of the days, Technology, Wandering in the city 1 Comment
I spent a very productive Saturday in a dilapidated building on Puyerredón in barrio Once. It’s a kind of awesome hipster hangout/artspace/greenspace/organization headquarters. Amazing folks, all–as far as I could tell.
I was there visiting a workshop for Buenos Aires Libre. They are a group of technophiles and generally interested parties building their own autonomous network–apart from ye ole interwebs. All who care to participate can put up their own node in the network, or link in, or just generally support as they are able. Among the activities on Saturday was a little how-to demonstration on building your own directional antennae out of recycled materials, a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of an autonomous network in the urban environment, and the activation of a site specific node.
It was a glorious day for many reasons: One, I was mistaken for a journalist. Two, I showed-up the Canadian fellow who was there (and also writing a thesis) by speaking Spanish–said Canadian didn’t even try to understand or utter a word in the local language. Three, I was invited by a few senior members of the group to help put up a node in one of Buenos Aires’ villas this week. Villas are the porteño equivalent of favelas. They are extremely impoverished neighborhoods lacking in basic infrastructure and, if my experience in this city serves, are generally ignored or avoided by the better-off classes. Even the cab drivers will tell you they’re dangerous and not worth visiting. Without this organization or, at the very least, a local resident to guide me there is no way I could wander in and explore such neighborhoods. I am very much looking forward to this iteration of the BAL (and my own) project.
I can’t say it didn’t help to be a particularly anti-capitalist, American woman in the exchanges I had on Saturday. Nor would I say that they weren’t pleased with my (only mildly successful) attempts to use the local dialect. But hey, in field work, one takes the advantages one has access to.
Hopefully all of you, dear readers, will benefit from these newly made connections. The longest-standing member of the organization, who goes by ‘Vampi’ and very much looks the part, advised me to bring, albeit discreetly, a camera to the visit.
So: onward goes the exploration. Wish me luck. Pictures soon if all goes well.
Of la despedida
Posted: April 3, 2011 Filed under: Wandering in the city 1 CommentLa despedida is a particularly porteño phenomenon. These are all-night bacchanalia of sorts, send offs for anyone departing the city. I attended a fine and merry despedida this Friday for one John “cara de pollo” Thompson. Normally I would change the name to protect his anonymity but he has, excluding the little known “chicken face” middle, so common a name as to make a pseudonym unnecessary.
This was my second official despedida since my arrival here. It was held in Casa Pasco. Crowds of people hung around, laughing on the terrace, smoking cigarettes. They swapped stories around the coffee table or huddled by a kitchen counter-top and picked through bottles of fernet, coke, beer and malbec. Occasionally (this is a habit that seems typical to all peoples of the world when they drink in groups) they would break into song–either on their own or to accompany the music playing.
The guests do a lot of hugging and petting and kissing of the person in whose honor the party is held. Some tears are shed. Friday night’s gathering for our very much loved Johnny boy was no exception.
These tend to be wonderful parties, if my limited experience gives me any sort of expertise on the matter. And, lovelier still, they last all night.
I myself couldn’t manage to make it to the dawn on Friday. Around 3 a.m. I offered my own tearful farewell and headed home. (A small group of young men looking for a bar outside my apartment building commented that I must be getting old if I was off to bed at such an early hour.) The rest of the party, though, went from the house to a bar in another part of town. And on and on, I assume, went the singing, the smoking and chatting, the drinking and (a little) weeping. And now, dear readers, John is somewhere else, wandering away in the world and forward in his life.
You sort of wonder if these parties are more about the people who have to stay than the guests of honor. They mitigate for those who remain the truth that something is being lost. “Things fall apart,” after all. “The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world.”
Yeats might have hated that I’m using his poem to talk about all-night send-off parties in Buenos Aires. But hey, what’s he gonna do about it? He’s dead. And while he may have been thinking about war and God when he wrote those lines, he must have too, at least a little bit, considered the often painful fact of the ephemerality of human communities, human connections.
Luck or geography or family or sheer coincidence brings us together, for a time, and then something else tears us apart. It may be the only true thing about us. Everything, always, changes. The order-less universe just works that way. When you wake up the day after la despedida the world is not the one you knew the night before. Sooner or later, your own despedida even arrives and poof, you’re off to someplace else entirely, you’re off to be someone else entirely. The center, as it turns out, never really did hold.
I am not a woman who is unusually averse to change. I love a melancholic goodbye as much as the next gal. Maybe more. But I do think that la despedida is a fabulous phenomenon precisely because it asks the change to wait just a little bit longer, just until the dawn. It admits that history marches forward but none-the-less playfully resists this very fact. ‘Onward, time, if you must,’ it says, ‘but tonight you won’t yet scatter us. Tonight we drink and laugh and dance in the streets. Tonight we are friends, together in this city, and filled with an impossible love for each other. So there.’
We forget again, after the hangover fades, that more still will be lost (if also gained) as we move toward that big fat final despedida mandated for us all. It’s nice, though, that these small and futile ways to rebel are still allotted us foolish creatures. And that sooner or later we will again remember and make good use of them. Anarchy be damned.
Play of the day
Posted: March 27, 2011 Filed under: Plays of the days, Wandering in the city 1 CommentA play of the other day, really, what follows is the story of the thirty minutes I spent helping a nice, old porteña lady walk to her apartment.
In order to alleviate the terrible suffering caused by a day spent trying to write something to elicit funds from the impoverished California University system I left the building for a walk. It was a holiday so the streets were relatively empty but as I turned a corner I noticed a gang of young men hanging out on a stoop a block ahead. I, despite my striking beauty and stylish manner of dress, don’t get a lot of piropo (or cat calls) here• but during my years of urban travel and residence I have developed the habit of avoiding such groups. I crossed the street so as not to walk through this small crowd of rat-tail sporting boys. Just as I stepped onto the sidewalk on the other side, an old lady asked if I might accompany her a few blocks. She was having considerable trouble walking with her cane and I agreed. When she realized, rather quickly, that I was foreign she looked a little startled but once she could see that I speak Spanish she relaxed, grabbed my arm, and (very, very slowly) off we headed together towards her apartment.
She told me about her grandchildren, about the other foreigners she’d met. She asked me about Obama and lamented the bad deeds of the Bush administration. She complimented me on my Spanish and talked a little about lunfardo. It was a pretty great little break in the day and I can now say, officially, that I’ve helped an old lady cross the street. Several streets, actually. And, better still, that I did it in a foreign city and spoke to her in a language that isn’t my own. Not bad for a day’s work. One question: can I put that in the ‘service’ section of my C.V.?
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*This was the cause of some anxiety a few days ago when the subject of Argentine piropo came up in my Spanish class. The professor was quick to tell us that while foreign women are sometimes offended by the catcalls, porteñas feel ugly or fat if a day goes by that they don’t receive a few objectifying shouts from male passersby. Um, so, how should I feel about the fact that the only men who’ve cat-called me during my time here have been in their late sixties, obese, and very obviously drunk? It has happened a total of three times in the two and a half months I’ve been wandering around Buenos Aires. What, prey tell, could this mean? In order to avoid a potentially disastrous crisis of confidence I choose to believe that the lack of overt, public flirtation directed my way is due entirely to my devastating good looks and general self-confidence. The poor souls are merely intimidated by the spectacular phenomenon that is me.
Of the wonderous phenomenon of temporary living spaces
Posted: March 26, 2011 Filed under: Wandering in the city 1 Comment
I have spent a handful of late nights sitting, along with a crowd of others, around a long, low, wooden coffee table in a place fondly referred to by residents and visitors as Casa Pasco.
Casa Pasco is a sort of half-apartment, half-hostel. Owned by an Argentinian young man it’s really two, very old French-style brownstones which share a large terrace. What you see above is the glorious view you get if you look up from the terrace at night. The place is pretty run down and dirty but entirely functional and the mild disrepair contributes to its charm. The ashtrays on the coffee table are always over-flowing. There are empty liters of beer cluttered together on the floor and the counter tops. Dishes are often stacked in the sink. The tile on the floor is badly scratched but I think original. My guess is the place was built sometime in the early 20th century. French doors, balconies, marble staircases.
I don’t really know how many bedrooms there are in Casa Pasco, but I’d venture somewhere around ten, plus three kitchens and a few common areas. The bedrooms are rented by travelers who plan to spend more time in Buenos Aires than would merit hostel accommodations but less time than a traditional lease would require. The residents come from all over the place. I’m never clear, when I’m sitting around the aforementioned coffee table at some odd hour of the morning, who actually lives there and who’s just present for the party. On an average Friday night there are usually at least three languages spoken. The crowd is often composed of a handful of Americans, some French women, a Brazilian or two, an English man, a Bolivian, four or five Colombians, three or four porteños and two cats. The make-up can always change though because Casa Pasco is, more than anything, a meeting place for the young, itinerant population of Buenos Aires. This makes it a kind of magical place, a weird sort of liminal space in which time dissipates slowly in the air, mingling with cigarette smoke and late-night laughter. (I am aware of how ridiculous and trite this may sound, but can think of no other way to describe it.) I love Casa Pasco. It is the sort of spot where you are distinctly aware of the temporary, the ephemeral; where the energy and absurdity of youth and travel serve as a constant milieu. Its a no-place, which makes it the perfect place, to sit around a coffee table in a smokey room and talk about anything or nothing into the very early hours of the morning.
Of Tigre and river deltas in general
Posted: March 17, 2011 Filed under: Wandering in the city Leave a comment
I took a little trip, before the cool set in on the city, to Tigre. It’s about 40 minutes outside of Buenos Aires, a river delta where houses on stilts dominate much of the landscape and there are restaurants and little ‘corner stores’ that you can get to only by boat.
The water is muddy, coffee-colored, and when it’s hot out there, all you want to do is jump in.
Tigre is a favorite summer getaway for porteños, and has been for a very long time. Were it not for the stilts and the commerce, I’d think of it something like Rio Chama in northern New Mexico.
I once spent an immensely pleasurable afternoon knee-deep in the mud-banks on Rio Chama and had I the ability to drive a boat or the money to rent somewhere to stay on stilts, you can bet I’d be spending more than an afternoon floating around in Tigre’s waters.
The Klee-esque argentine painter, poet and creator of languages Xul Solar had a house in Tigre. The red door to it is now in the museum in his honor in Buenos Aires. He was a good friend of Borges and, seeing Tigre, you understand a little better why he and his friend were so truly odd, and so truly wonderful.
Solar in particular believed in all sorts of things that we might call, for lack of a better term, ‘new age.’ He developed not one but two languages which he thought might unite all of Latin America and, eventually, the world in peace and mutual understanding. He designed and built a board game whose point is not to win but only to play. He’s weird and lovely and was more interested in color than any painter I know of. If you travel along the canals in Tigre you start to get the sense that this might be as much a result of geography as of fantastic imagination.
Maybe it’s just my limited experience, but it seems to me that river deltas can do a lot to a person. Think of what the Mississippi delta did to Blues. Think of New Orleans and jazz. Think of the long and fascinating history of the Nile. Maybe its the combination of warmth and water and the occasional but deeply felt sorrow that can accompany floods. Maybe it’s the weird way the water changes the way you have to get around or farm or live. Whatever it is, Tigre is an example of the magic of such geological phenomenon.
Of plants and living in a strange land
Posted: March 12, 2011 Filed under: Mishaps, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
I have done so many, many thrilling things in the last two weeks thanks in large part to a visit from my mother. And soon, my dearest comrades, I will recount to you all the glorious highlights. But as my dear mother has just headed out for the airport to return home, I wanted first to post a little musing on my basil plant. The link will become clear shortly:
Living here has meant, for me, spending lots of time alone. Sometimes days go by and my only interactions with other human beings are commercial in nature.* While solitude offers a lone traveler much needed time for reflection, reading, writing and and the like and while it verifies a number of annoying clichés (whose capacity to irritate me, in fact, causes me to omit them here) it also is sometimes the cause of a gnawing loneliness.
How does one remedy this occasional suffering? Well, basil. Obviously.
A few weeks after my arrival I bought a little basil plant. During my mother’s jaunt southward I harvested most of its leaves for a (delicious) dinner we made. In the hopes it would continue to grow, we went to one of the city’s very common street-corner flower vendors and bought a little bag of soil and a bigger pot into which to transfer it.
As of today, the sad day of my mother’s departure, it is flourishing. Lots of little new leaves at its base. It seems happy. And here’s why it matters: that little basil plant is a good fellow to talk to in the absence of human beings. It responds to me when I feed it. It’s always willing to stay for dinner. It’s green and alive and it might die on me (hey, anybody might) but it certainly isn’t going to tell me it doesn’t understand my Spanish or that it needs its freedom or that I should get out more. Sweet, sweet Señor Albahaca. I love him.
So those of you lone travelers out in the world, wherever you are, know this: plants rule! In a really nice, unpretentious, non-megalomaniacal kind of way. They are also poly-lingual. Or at least they listen in all languages. And if they stop listening? Eat them.
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*This can be extremely liberating. I am particularly fond of flirting with the kioskeros, the young gentlemen who work at the 24-hour corner stores, selling cigarettes, candy and soda. There is zero risk of rejection; they always have to sell you your gatorade anyway.
Play of the day
Posted: March 6, 2011 Filed under: Plays of the days, Wandering in the city 1 CommentMy mother and I spent an hour or so this afternoon walking around this famous B.A. cemetery in Recoleta. It’s where the rich of the city have been buried for a long while. The corpse of Evita eventually found its way here, as did that of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and a good handful of other well-known Argentines. It is gorgeous and bizarre and all things great about death and wealth and monument and the city. We spent our time wandering through the the place and talking about (well, predictably) death and dying and funerals and graves. Above are a few of the highlights.
Itinerant Me 