faces, eyes, memory

Corner somewhere off of Corrientes, one of the longest avenues.  Colored tiles, easy to walk over and miss.  Gives name of person, date of their kidnapping, of their disappearance.  I think of disappearances as these strange moments in which someone is dragged into world of horrors, but from our side, the side from which they have been dragged, they are ghosts in their absence and presence, ghostly before they were ghosts in their ability to be so easily taken from the visibility of the cotidian.  It's out of a horror movie, but it's more mystical than that.  It is about the power of people to bring others out of the world of the visual.  Bodies becoming part of the invisible wind, the wind of certain type of progress, like the wind the Angel of History resists as it propels him into the future.   Pretentious sounding, I know, but what a strange thought, to be picked out of reality, out of sight, but to be absent in your present.  Ghosts are here, they are a strong political force, they are used, they are signified by the white kerchiefs of the Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Las Abuelas, Hijos, in speeches in monuments, in monuments as small and flat and hard to miss as a collection of tiles to commemorate the space between empirical and mythicized reality.  I was at the MERCOSUR anthropology conference.  Went to a round table about visual anthropology, it's rise after the last government dictatorship.  The eyes emerging after an age of disappearance, of darkness, a renaissance after a dark age, knowledge after fear.  There was a project on these tile memorializations, and then you see that which is memorialized twice, once through the "monument" and then through the visual anthropology project which films the reactions of people that walk over these tiled creations.  The researcher is part of the memorialization, both of the artist's project, and of what the artist is memorializing/representing through his/her art.  

This is a city filled with pictures of people you may not know, but are being told you should.  There are a thousand memorials everyday, here, and you see one image one morning, and the next day someone has already placed one on top that contests that which it hides.  You become familiar with those you do not know, but are made to through pictures.  To be a good politician is to be able to manipulate and use images well, and I feel that it is at an intense level here.  I have a keychain that I bought because of it's absurdity (always a fan of the absurd).  It's El Che, and I know it is meant to be him, but it actually looks nothing like him, it actually represents the etching of a chimpanzee.  And how has such an impassioned symbol of freedom, of violence, become a picture on a key chain that is next to other key chains with Argentine flags to be sold, often times to tourists, because this controversial figure is a commodity, it is emblematic of "Argentina", but it doesn't even look like him, and it has become this harmless everyday item.  Eva Perón looks different so many times in one day.  So many images of her have been doctored, she is an image, a representation of the figure, no longer an individual but a thing, just as Guevara.  She is everywhere.  She is so white, so fresh, so young, so elegant, so natural, she is nothing, she is everything, she is wonderful, she is awful.  I see her being sold at news stands in Centro and once news stand has her looking three different ways.  Memorialization is such a strange thing, and something you encounter everywhere in Buenos Aires.  Often times people thing of time in reference to big past, horrific events:  Military governments, economic crises, the Malvinas.  Timelines of one's own story revolve around a historical event.  "El Secreto de Sus Ojos" has been nominated for an Oscar, it is an incredible film, and it haunts me since watching it.  It is love story, oriented around a specific past and horrific event, that is also connected to the history of Argentina in the last (less than) four decades.  I believe that this film does great things with illustrating the process of remembering, but also puts it in a specifically Argentine context and, I believe, uses an very specific way of viewing the past and present that is very much alive here. Of course these are images, or signs, that are re-configured to win elections, or to elicit a response in the here and now.  These moments, these people, or at least pictures of and stories about them, are haunting, they are everywhere in the now.  "El Secreto de Sus Ojos" emphasizes eyes, the intensity and truth they have to them, how to look into somebody's eyes is not to simply notice a physical aspect, but is something much more profound.  But eyes are also to see, to experience the world through vision, to experience it through images.  I walk down a street and have so many eyes looking at me, many from the past, many to remember something horrific, or just to make you remember, because Memory is key to everything.  And I am looking right back at them from a Buenos Aires street in 2009.  We must remember, we must, we can't help but do it, or, like me, you aren't familiar with these images, so you do basic research or ask someone, and you learn and it is relevant to you in the moment.  You here so often from some people that it is better to forget, that to talk about the past is too painful.  I saw that in the anthro documentary when bystanders were asked about their reaction to the subtle street installation.  I have often felt that I am in a place far too much obsessed with the past, thought that it was sometimes celebrated as a mythical non-existent past, when it was idealized, or as a manipulation of emotions by political parties to instill fear and anger about the disappeared.  But it is not just talking about then, it is very much now.  If an image has power now, it is also of now, it is using a past story or figure and instilling it with present relevance.  I wouldn't be so intrigued/obsessed with being in this city, talking to its inhabitants, walking down its streets, if it weren't so magical, such a different way of experiencing time and space, so haunted.   On one street maybe you see the same person once, maybe you just see a political message, no picture, maybe adds, but the pictures are incredible.  Now, after the passing of a government sponsored media bill, there are pictures of the presidential couple doctored to like they are in a reality show about their extravagant lives.  There is wit or sadness or anger and an image that is obviously doctored, or an Evita that is the picture, because, to be honest, I have no idea which one really is "her" (whatever that means).  

sloppy notes on storytelling...ideas running w/o organization en la cabecita

My latest fascination, although one that has been brewing for a while, is the circulation and construction of stories. Freud's idea of the talking cure, in which the patient overcomes the silence of trauma through speech, spoke more to me about the power of the hysteric, in his Studies in Hysteria, than the doctor...Or, at least the therapist cannot be seen as the only magician in the equation. It is so cliché to study anthropology and relate everything back to spirit mediums and ghosts, but I don't think it always has to be an oversimplification or an easy go-to. In the case of hysteria, I read the hysteric as somewhat like a spirit medium, that, as an empty vessel, resembles the magician, or the shaman, who mediates that which is larger than his or (in the case of Freud and Breuer's cases, and importantly so young) her, the telling of the trauma itself. A true storyteller is a spirit medium. The "hau" of the story only appears in the circulation of the story, the circulation, the constant movement and evolution, imbue it with power, it is not the story as a stagnant unevolving object that can be so easily contained and defined away. Stories, as most things (without confining things as things to demystify them, as things are magical in their very existence as things), move on their own. The hysteric is the storyteller that is occupied by word-images in the process of talking about trauma.

I am obsessed with stories because I am surrounded by them, but told in the most fantastically ironic ways. The melancholy is tinged with a humor that is self-deprecating, either to the nation, the city, the citizens. Arrogance and pride are juxtaposed with a self-critical introspection.

The art of storytelling is never lacking in Buenos Aires. Right now there are countless old cafes with booming voices that crescendo at the perfect booming moments of high drama. Thinking about all of the amazing stories being told in this very moment, in this haunted city filled with ghosts and cinematic scenes of characters so surreal, but are simply the woman who serves you coffee in her rundown cafe, an extra-ordinarily ordianrily extraoridinary individual, or the old man who patronizes to get drunk alone and will talk to anyone close enough for him to excitedly tap/hit on the shoulder when the most unbelievable or incredible moments of his narrative. People are extraordinary in their ordinary jobs, yet they are comical/tragic characters that will talk to you for hours and become more than just the person you are paying to give you food, but the giver of unsolicited advice and political and social commentary. Often, what are the results of the climatic narratives, these unbelievable moments, are perfectly delivered wrapped in a coating of brilliant irony that is regularly employed to indicate that what is the unbelievabilty of the unbelievable, is that it is to be expected. Afterall, as I remember often, this is a cynical wonderland (which Lewis Carroll´s certainly was for he himself was quite a craftsman of irony). I stepped through the looking glass, both transcending and self-reflecting, as the double allows for motion, and landed in this overy stimulating world of words that circulate as they did in pre-modern times. Marcel Mauss said that the magician derives his power from the doubling, through an emptiness of body and a motion. The stories are magical as they circulate, and the stories that intrigue me most are about the most magical of all modern ideas, so spectacular, and so theistic. The stories of economic crisis, the failure of capitalism, the failure of circulation, literally, which was so powerful in the moment and continues to be. It is made even more present by the stories of ransackings and kidnappings told in the present tense and circulating as stories, as things that move on their own. These are things circulating about a literal crisis in circulation. There was the trauma of the myth of neo-liberalism shattering after a guilded ´90s and the power of the storyteller, who, with the same power as the hysteric, is using a type of talking cure by constructing a narrative and mediating a story bigger than he or she is as an individual. It is a story about being Argentine, about being of Buenos Aires during 2001 and 2002 with so many presidents so quickly in and out, like a Lewis Carroll chapter that parodies the most ridiculous of theaters-politics, they are bigger than a person yet tinged with the personal as the universal tragedy is told in a dark cafe by one unforgettable drunk.

I have heard from many (of course Argentines) warning me about the lying ways of this country, as if speaking anything but the truth were not only a political game, but one that extends to intimate social settings. Everything is viewed as a game, how to live by the rules of breaking the offical rules (the laws), how to work, but en negro, which is so very widespread here. I know so many people here who refuse to work in a legal manner. The manner of telling stories, with the Italian intonation of Argentine castellano, the dramatic hand gestures and facial expressions, the aggressive directness of eye-to-eye contact and no attempt at gentleness, is a drama which is meant to convey a drama. In other words, there is the the theater which is performing a dramatic event (or at least it is being presented as dramatic). The narrator may begin the story in the past tense, but soon switches to the present, so that everything that is beign narrated about this past experience is now in the present. Stories do what Walter Benjamin calls ´blasting´moments out of the ´continuum of time´. This collapsing of time within the space of the story is so very powerful. Suddenly the words take on much more import, as they are no long a re-telling, but a simultaneous interpretation.

I have talked about fear before. Paranoia as form of talking about fear and using fear to place the unknown within the realm of the known, but never stripping the fear away. Is it a way of using terror-being terrificly terrifying--to cut through the terror that causes fear. I have heard endlessly scary things, but often in the "I know a friend" or even farther removed narrative, which allows an eery distance from the victim, a space that lacks explanation, and within what is unknown, as the ´friend of a friend´ is not there to ask, emerge visions of horror, of the outside world beyond this conversation as filled with situations and people waiting to do you harm.

really two posts in one: I. the weather and cultural identities II. fear and storytelling: fear to provoke and to heal fear (paranoia)

It has been a winter of record cold and heat. Traditionally the weather is filled with highs and lows, it is like that every winter, autumn and spring. I remember that last year there were strangely warm days in the middle of the moist winter cold. Winter is relatively short here, and not so cold, but the humidity really makes it feel like the cold is absorbed into the bones, so that if, like me, you live in a colonial house without heat, it seems to be an inescapable and uncomfortable cold. We passed through two weeks of record cold earlier in the month, followed by an almost 20 degree (celsius) increase for the next two weeks and then a ten degree decrease for a week after that. It has been a particularly unstable winter. There is the colonial belief that geography affects evolutionary development. Here is the saying that the people are like the weather, bipolar in their manias and depressions. Many Argentines tell me that people here are completely crazy because their mood reflects the climate. A friend of mine, V., who must travel often for her job, commented on her disdain for Brazil. From everything I have ever heard about Brazil, it sounds incredible. V. told me she dislikes Brazil and Brazilians because to her it seems unnatural that people are happy and open all of the time. She used the Brazilian climate to explain their constant celebratory mood. She then explained that Argentines are inconstant because the weather is unexpected, one day bright and warm, the next cold and gray. Looking at Brazilians from the perspective of someone subject to consistency of inconsistency, constant happiness seems disingenuous and unrealistic and unreflecting of the difficulty of reality. It is as if being around Brazilians provokes a condescending animosity in her, a tone in her voice that suggests that their is a lack of intellectual depth and reflective capacity to people that are living in an illusion of happiness. 

LOSS OF SELF THROUGH MOTION

There is samba every weekend in my neighborhood.  You here its rhythm climbing towards a climax.  It is just rhythmic, no melody.  The dance is all about hips, about circular motion.  There is the overt sexuality of shimmying and shaking everything from the bottom down to emphasize the femininity and power of the curves formed by the meeting of the thighs and the butt and the lower-back.  The first time I saw the samba dancers I was sitting in the main plaza of San Telmo with a friend of mine.  She told me that she had heard that many of the Argentines found the samba dancing and music distasteful, vulgar.  It is a dance of seduction, just as tango is, but it is forthright.  Whereas tango is angular and smooth, samba is about constant motion undulating to a music that is not about being lovely or melancholically poetic, but rather rhythmic and meant to strike at the gut.  It is a rhythm that is felt, it hits you hard.  You are transformed in the moment, there is no anxiety about feeling your partner's weight, in fact there is no need for a partner at all.  Nothing is subtle, everything is about the body.  Everything is literally incorporated.  As the night falls in San Telmo the people join in and dance with cigarettes and liters of beer to join into the orgiastic celebration of nothing; it is the anti-Sunday evening.  The ground is hit hard by feet and the weather is always warm.  You are with strangers and you are with the familiar faces you see every Sunday.  I remember feeling that one evening I was healed.  I went from a state of unhealthy neurosis, to the melancholy of insufficiency to the ecstatic sense of the collective; he loneliness of the porteNo is silenced by that which is inescapably and honestly seductive.  There are no games of temptations or steps taken in response to someone else, everyone is conversation with each other and with the music.  There is the Afro and Native American influence that is so Othered here, and yet so much a part of this openness, this constant summer inside of the mass of drummers and dancers.  I remember reading a book by the dancer Maya Deren in which she goes to Haiti to observe Haitian voodoo dancing/rituals.  The dances mediate between the human and spirit realm, humans become the bodies that spirits inhabit and dance through.  You dance and are transformed.  After being inhabited by a spirit, she leaves the circle and smokes a cigarette.  I always found that striking.  Rituals so often use incense or some sort of smoke, and yet she grounds herself with the cigarette, as many people do when they are overtaken by stress or have an intense experience (the cliched post-sex cigarette).  People on hallucinogenic drugs often smoke a lot while having their "trip".  The samba is akin to the Deren and the intoxication; it is about being no longer just an individual through a ritual that is very much about the body.  Deren's experience is connected to a dancing in a part of the Americas with a strong African influence, something that samba has.  I have heard that in the parts of Brazil where there are larger population of Afro-Brazilians, in the north, there are similar dances that commune the individual to a higher power through a communal effort.

I wonder what a jolt the Argentine ego the recent influx of Brazilian tourists, signs in Portuguese and the emergence of Brazil as an important global player (one that overshadows Argentina) must feel like.  The "Europeans" are serving the constantly summery people their coffees, or seeing people with darker skin with more purchase power.  The sounds of Argentine Spanish, at least in BA, has certain sounds of Brazilian Portuguese.  There are now a collection of CD's of different types of music re-interpreted as samba (e.g. The Stones as samba [actually really good]).  There is the fact that Argentina is right next to a place of such diversity, in fact is not all so white after all, but there is a struggle between a European identity, a sense of privilege based on a past of economic and regional political power, and a reality that in some ways is leaving this country behind.  V.  sees Brazil and Argentina as opposites.  They are and they are not.  They have so much commerce between them.  So many of my students vacation in Brazil or constantly go there on business;  some love it some hate it.  I have heard that it is more dangerous, but that Argentines make is sound much worse than it is, that the paranoia people feel in BA does not exist in Rio.  

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PARANOIA AND FEAR AS THE STORYTELLER'S AUTHORITY

Paranoia is a contagion, it can be a poison, or it can be a way to assume a storytelling identity with authority because it owns fear and therefore is best at warning against it or telling tales of it.  I have become paranoid despite all of my efforts not to succumb to it.  I see houses that are obviously expensive with windows that look right into their living rooms and think that their owners are stupid, that I would never feel comfortable in such a place.  Inequality doesn't just make me uncomfortable because it is disturbing, it has started to make me uncomfortable because I recognize it as a source of danger.  I was explaining this to my friend who was telling me she could never live in a place where it seemed that everyone was so closed off in their craziness and she told me that she could never want to live in a place where you had to be so careful.  I realized, in that moment, that I had started to become someone that I would mock in my head, someone warning somebody about a danger that was exaggerated.  I had become the storyteller, a convincing one, because I was letting fear speak through me in an expressive and controlled way.  I was letting the inexplicability of paranoia (as it is to ridiculous extents here, at least still not with me) take on its own narrative with a sinister tone emerge from my mouth.  There is a real culture of fear here.  The fear of the unknown (violence, robbery, corruption, they have names, but it doesn't mean that despite our resignation we are not also shocked [sometimes by that very resignation in the moment]) has a life of its own.  It moves by itself, so much so that this fear is discussed as something that is discusses in terms of a real and present danger.  It is pretended to be known, it is dressed up in explanations that, when thought through, seem quite irrational.  They often place so much knowledge in the hands of these unknown forces out to harm us, that know how to because they already know about our lives, when we are alone, what hours of the day the house is occupied or unoccupied, things that only a paranoid imagination could invent.  Paranoia could, perhaps, be a way of controlling fear.  The Storyteller, as Walter Benjamin says, derives his power from death.  Death is what we are all ultimately afraid of, of a violent occurrence that puts our lives in danger (or at least that is in the darkest depths of our fears, behind the fear of robbery or kidnapping).  The paranoia provokes stories that label our fears, domesticates them, uses fear to combat fear by becoming a part of a cycle that promotes fear, yet attempts to contain it;  that uses Freud's talking cure outside of the realm of the psychoanalyst's office.  By defining it, describing it, labeling it, we use a backwards logic of provoking an often irrational fear in ourselves and others to reassure ourselves by making it recognizable.  

short notes on music, national identity

A few times I have walked through the center back home at night.  It is quite a safe walk, and no more than 2 km, I would guess less.  I work most of the day in Centro, but at night it is a completely different place.  Sometimes I find that I have bought into the collective paranoia, in fact I know it.  Sometimes, at night I follow no order or plan with how I navigate the blocks, but create my own labyrinth through the downtown streets.  It is not a particularly attractive part of Buenos Aires, but it is the center of mania, anxiety and frustration during the workday.  At night it is desolate.  With the exception of more active streets with a lot of bars and restaurants, there are few people on the s  and it is dark.  Many of the few people in Centro in the night hours are tourists going to overpriced tango shows that are choreographed demonstrations of acrobatic motion; all flare and for show, missing something genuine and sensual about the dance in its more "real" form.  For me, the "real" tango is what I see when I cross Plaza Dorrego near my house and see elderly couples, young couples, old and young dancing together, displaying a an elegant grace and understated passion that, for me, has the potential to elicit sincere emotion.  This is an example of tango in its truest form-improvisation.  Tango has steps that can are complicated, but they are not, at least not in the context of a show, planned ahead of time.  The lead gives his partner cues that indicate responses.  It is about feeling each others weight, which is a whole other way of knowing somebody.  It is a dance in which bodies resist and follow each other.  

Tango is ubiquitous.  During the day, Centro is filled with small CD stores, open in the front, blasting tango;  the electric modern interpretations to the easily identifiable Gardel.  The "authenticity" of tango has, for many, become non-existent (if authenticity really means anything it all), reduced to a parody of Argentine cultural origins; that is to say, nothing of substance.  It is a tourist attraction; a Disney Buenos Aires.

Perhaps my sense of what the music scene is like here is completely distorted because I live with a jazz musician.  From my experience, jazz seems to be popular with many young musicians that I have come into contact with.  The look down on tango because of its magnetic effect on tourists.  It is a very condescending attitude towards the dance, the music and those that participate in either.  It is considered so "other" to many Argentines of my age.  Jazz, is a high art form of musical improvisation, like tango, an artistic incarnation of spontaneous expression.  Buenos Aires is noticeably racially homogenous.  Jazz is mostly being played by the whitest of the whitest.  They come from a city in which families proudly flaunt their European last names to link themselves with Europe, to differentiate themselves from their South American neighbors, who are often darker in skin.  You find people from such a city, idolizing an art form with its origins in resistance, protest songs of abstract song.  I know many musicians who realize how they are discursively contextualized in terms of their own cultural identity, an identity that is used to other oneself from the Other by removing one's cultural ascendancy from Argentina and defining oneself, rather, as European, understand the history of jazz with the States as coming from the Other, and that they understand the history of jazz in the States.  However, I wonder how many of these people, who are part of a culture that prides itself on its European ascendancy, understand that in their self-identification within Argentine, (or really Buenos Aires) society, they are engaged in an othering discourse very much tied to a colonial mentality about race, and yet playing the music of the Other as a form of rebellion against such an exclusively bound social structure.  

encounters with the ultra-right, perverse tourism, a criminal inequality

Went to birthday two weeks ago. It was in Barracas, a residential neighborhood, but filled with either older people that probably aren't rich and working class families. It is very close to my house and quite nice. Very comfortable, not too dangerous, but it is close to my neighborhood, which is relatively safe, but five years ago was not, and two neighborhoods that can get quite rough. One is La Boca, with the famous football team, the origin of Diego Maradona, a national hero. La Boca, during the day, is filled with tourists, but not really the part where people actually live, one street that is like a Disney World attraction. La Boca is actually quite poor and not very safe. You go on a tourist bus, are charmed, and the tour guide talks about how lovely it is and quickly throws in, but in a grave voice, that it´s not a place for after 6pm. A recent trend, from the last few years, are the villa tours, which take you to different villas (slums) where you can taste hearty authentic locro (a traditional Argentine stew). How charming! I remember being on safari in Kenya and feeling such a visceral reaction by talking to an English tourist that expressed her complete lack of interest in leaving the hotel to be around people. In other words, her only interaction with Kenyans was to be with those dressed in suits and obligated to call her ma´am. A way to live like a colonist would have, assigning the people roles in which they are servants, or simply part of the background, while running to one side of the bar to see a baby cheetah in the distance. At least a villa tour obligates a the tourist to at least see how many people here live. Then again, there is a perversity to a tourist who is dressed well, will go shopping in Palermo tomorrow, and is having the 'authentic' experience of trying locro in a slum. I wonder how much they realize that it is a luxury for the people that live there, that their experience is really not authentic at all, that it is rare, because they are trying something for the first time and eating probably as much as they want. It is exoticising poverty and turning something quite horrific into a peverse voyeurism that plays on pity and romanticizing. I have admittedly never been on any of these tours, but I can´t imagine ever doing one, except to observe the people taking them more than the probably unreal framed reality that they are depicting.

Interestingly enough, although I thing all Argentines I know would find the villa tours ridiculous and perhaps offensive, the person who brought up the topic, to ask me what I thought of it since I was the only foreigner at the birthday party, was the first self-proclaimed fascist I have ever met. Someone told me it was part of having a ''a more complete latin american experience'' to meet an ultra-right winger from a military background. I have met very conservative people here, some that are from military families, maybe even proud of their family, but very cautious about bringing up their background. In a coutry with such a painful past associated with a military government, especially that only ended in 1983 in which maybe up to 30,000 people were disappeared, it is not a popular side to be on. It was fascinating to meet someone who bragged about being the son of a military father, who definitely served during the dictatorship. It was a parody of ultra-right nationalism, yet cannot be simply reduced to parody, it is a strong reality in this part of the world. There is a dark history which is not condemned by everyone. This was a young guy. I would say between 30 and 34. He had a bracelet that was the color of the Argentine flag that said Malvinas. In my experience, most younger people don't really feel any emotional connection to the Malvinas/Falklands, it is the generation before that actually has very vivid memories of the war. This guy kept getting drunker and drunker and talking about how he was a fascist, how the last military leader of state was a real man. He did so knowing that everyone else in the room strongly disagreed with him. He went on to talk about how the people that live in La Cava, one of the poorest and most dangerous parts of Buenos Aires, a part of provincia not to far outside of the city, choose to live a specific lifestyle. I was there for a party once, but I was with a large group of people.  I was both scared and intrigued.  The province of Buenos Aires, in general, is much poorer and less secure than Capital Federal (mostly the parts bordering the city).  Provincia is a contradiction within itself.  Right next to La Cava you have San Isidro, a very exclusive and posh gated-community like neighborhood.  Since I have arrived in Argentina I have read countless stories of families that are robbed and killed, often by criminals as young as 14.  These young men tend to be from La Cava.  Lack of security is less connected to poverty than to inequality.  People don't necessarily kill because they are poor.  I can never assume to know what it means to kill, but I can only imagine that the desire to be violent, as some sort of cathartic experience;  literally having the ability that is the most godlike--to take life, arises from a frustration that borders on a frenzy madness.  Perhaps it is like some sort of sacrificial ritual in the modernity of socioeconomic inequality.  La Cava is a huge center for narcotics trafficking, specifically paco (a cheaper equivalent of crack consisting of the processing chemicals to cut cocaine, supposedly effectually burning the brain), and there is obviously a huge relationship between taking a drug that increases the likelihood of a "frenzied madness" and erases the ability to understand or care about consequences and the potential to inflict some seemingly pointless harm that hits any human being as atrocious.  It is a catharsis that comes out of fear and inflicts more fear, so that the world of economic insecurity breeds one of social insecurity.  It is not easy to grasp that a young adolescent kills a man for 10 pesos, but there is no truth or insight to be found placing such acts in the discourse of common sense.  After all, common sense fails us so very much of the time.  However, as a human being with some sort of common sense, I could never say that anyone chooses to be from such a place as La Cava. And, if one is from there, growing up there, how many choices do they have to create such a distinct life for their families when they are older?  How can we expect such sector of society to overcome so many countless injustices?  Argentina, in terms of natural resources, is very rich country.  The Pope recently spoke out against the "scandal of poverty" in Argentina.  In a country so rich, there is nothing more criminal than having 40% of the nation's population living under the poverty line, with a government denying this fact.   There are so many people living on the streets in Capital, and we passed for a few weeks of record low temperatures.  How much can people choose?  No one would reasonably choose to live in poverty, which is the greatest crime of all, a true terrorism inflicted by the State.  Is that not the most atrocious crime?  To have a government that uses rhetoric that supposedly supports the workers and the less well off, but that has seen it's poverty rate increase greatly in less than a year? This has all occurred during the two Kirchner presidencies in which their income has increased to almost three times more than that with which they entered office (according to one news agency, though all numbers are politically motivated, so perhaps I'm reading a number an opposition that may not be any better).  For someone to be proud of being connected to such a dark shadow on Argentina's history, to condemn those that have nothing as "horrible" when he comes from one of the most upper-class parts of BA, strikes me as perverse.  How can such atrocities as fascism and classist contempt not exist without living and breathing individuals that you can encounter at a party?

Walter Benjamin, Borges, Freud, The disappeared on newsprint

I don't have Walter Benjamin in front of me at the moment. Illuminations is on my bookshelf, but I'm not there, so everything that I can say about him is coming out of memory at the moment. In Illuminations there is part called "On Storytelling" or "The Storyteller" in which Benjamin, who celebrates Kafka for this, explains that the true storyteller derives his power from "death". I don't think that in such a context the word "death" is so simple. It is, afterall, the inexplicable and human unknown that is the source of all fear and power. That which we do not know scares us, and yet it is the most mythologized and the center of religion, if you look at different religious perspectives as all finally helping the human psyche try to make reason out of the ureasonable. To approach the unknown without explaining it away, to approach that which scares us to give us power, rather than disguise it so as to push it away (which, according to Freud, only haunts us even more as the inner and outer spheres of being can collapse in one moment and create a trauma that is rooted in our archaic fear of death, which we have sought to overcome through modernity [the Uncanny]), is to become the storyteller. I was thinking about how this connects to how Borges, who is the Argentine favorite son of literature, or at least the most internationally known, and his obsession with The Double.   I have long felt that his poetry is never emphasized enough, or at least not as much as his essays or stories.  Some of them are not of a great poet, but others are truly beautiful in their darkness and ability to convey the atmosphere of Buenos Aires, to translate his sensory experience into words.  Death is a central theme to many of his poems, and he draws death into the realm of the Buenos Aires, or perhaps I have it backwards.  The Buenos Aires of Borges is inhabited by death, and by ghosts and meditations on a seemingly mystical realm of myth.  

In "Remorse for Any Death" ("Remordimiento por cualquier muerte" I find a resonance with Benjamin's discussion of the proximity of the storyteller to death.  

Free of memory and hope,

unlimited, abstract, almost future,

the dead body is not somebody:  It is death.

Like the God of the mystics,

whom they insist has no attributes,

the dead person is no one everywhere,

is nothing but the loss and absence of the world.

We rob it of everything,

we do not leave it in one color, one syllable:

Here is the yard which its eyes no longer take up,

there is the sidewalk where it waylaid its hope.

It might even be thinking

what we are thinking.

We have divided among us, like thieves,

the treasure of nights and days.

The dead body stands it for the concept of death, it is the sum of that which it represents.  The individual is no longer important, he is the nothing more and nothing less than a mystical phenomenon that haunts us with its darkness.  The corpse is "abstract", "unlimited", and full of future possibilities.  It is closer to life than the living; it holds more potential, more power.  The dead person, or Death itself, is ubiquitous:  "the dead person is no one everywhere".  It is the "loss and absence of the world", yet it is full of contradictorily part of this absence and the possibilities of the future.  In my opinion, the robbery, at the end of the poem, is really the robbery of the dead body, or Death itself, of its proper and mystical place.  It is robbed of its "treasure of days and nights", for it is truly the underlying power to everything, the light and the dark, the loss of the world and its future.  It is like the underestimated "God of the mystics". 

Perhaps to understand the melancholic part of the Buenos Aires air, is to see the city as largely inhabited by ghosts.  To revisit my last post, the mournful resignation, or perhaps even indignation, towards the present, is the presence of ghosts, either from a past or a constructed past (are they ever really so different?).  There is a newspaper, Página 12.  It is very much government propaganda, although the quality of writing is extremely witty and often is accompanied by a literary supplement.  Everyday there are, I guess what you could call adds, put in by families to mark the anniversary of their loved one's disappearance.  You are reading these beautiful little boxes with a photo and a strong message from the family that demands that justice truly be sought, that the perpetrators not be pardoned.  Sometimes you realize the young age of this person, who now would truly be in adulthood.  It's when I look at the date and feel this collapse in time that occurs in which years matter, to see that each year goes by since a family has lost their loved one, and to think that in the mundanity of my everyday activities there are several memorials on paper in front of me,  that I feel that there is nothing more powerful than the death I am witnessing (in memorial form) in front of my eyes in newsprint.  These are both tragic stories because they are individuals, but also part of this Death energy, that encircles me as a reader.   These "adds" are so very close to the storytelling in which Walter Benjamin finds authenticity, truth, and yet they are not even really "stories" or "vignettes".  They are photographs with a small note to a disappeared loved one, a note filled with anger and passion, that will never be read by the individual it addresses, but which also is meant to address all of us.  There is an authentic type of storytelling here, it collapses space and time, it is about absence and the unlimited future.  And this all provides frustration and catharsis simultaneously.  

memory, resignation, passion, frustration, nostalgia, national identity

Someone told me that I sound angry from my posts.  I don't mean to convey that all.  Frustration perhaps.  I feel like no one is neutral about anything here, which puts me in my element because there is are strong opinions and a passionate tone used to assert them.  This forcefulness is juxtaposed an imposing sense of resignation.  There is joke that there is a protest everyday in Buenos Aires, which shows that there are people who want to march and bang pots and pans about something, but it is mundane and nothing out of the normal.  A protest doesn't shock or even necessarily draw attention.  I'm still slightly frightened when I hear the small fireworks commonly set off during protests here, loud noises have always made me a bit on edge, but the most elegantly dressed of people can walk past a group holding banners with Lenin's face and the sound of something potentially dangerous without so much as a bat of an eye.  Everyone seems quick to complain, as if complaining is some way a manner of working through the hardship of living in a place that seems to be both fantastically exciting and overwhelmingly chaotic.  The chaos and excitement are one and the same, it depends on how you choose to look upon it in any given day, or perhaps in an singular situation.  Just walking through the business district yesterday I laughed as I heard a Guia "T" (the essential guide to the buses that everyone needs to get around) salesman suddenly shout "Que país este!"  I have no idea what provoked this comment, but it something commonplace to here, and yet never ceases to entertain me.  I have come to say such things about the States when I have to explain certain things to Argentine friends about how our health system works, or how, of course speaking in generalizations, the progression of politics works.  When it seems so strange to a someone that we do not have a public health care system, among other things, I have to resort to "I come from a very strange country."  Yet no one inside the States, with the exception of few, would say that we are resigned to something in the States, but we invoke it's identity as a beacon of liberty.  I can't think of a single time I have heard someone have a simple interaction on the street during the day and say, in a resigned and tone, as if speaking of the condemnation we are fated to by living in our country, "What a country we live in!"  We here our politicians make such statements to talk about how great we are.  Our national identity is not used as an explanation for how things are not working efficiently or how people treat each other without respect.  When someone is rude the nation is the scapegoat.  A population of people who talk about how awful their home is, their politicians are, the citizens are.  It is more complex than any one line explanation.  I was discussing these kinds of comments with an Argentine friend who gave me an answer I think is worth sharing, maybe not as an answer that explains away the question of why people blame Argentina or Buenos Aires (often with a shout and smile simultaneously), but as a possible window into a mentality that many people her do have.  He said that such expressions of frustration are a result of a population (talking only about BA) that wants to think they are first world, but is, more than once a day, coming up against reminders that they are really third.  I am not saying that I feel we the terms first or third world should even be used anymore or ever, but this explanation made me think about how the sometimes flippant or humorous reference to how broken the country or political system is is often is followed by what seems like an eagerness to say that we are in the third world.  Comments that draw this geographical space into a geopolitical one identified with under-development, are often coming from people of the middle-class, not from people starving on the streets.  My friend made reference to the European architecture that makes the city different from La Paz or what is universally identified as a poor country (poor Latin American or South American city) and the contrast with a change system that actually impedes one's ability to travel through the city.  So, according to his theory, you have a group of people that want to believe they are European, but are reminded that they are in, what they themselves are so quick to label, the third world because they experience an inefficiency that would be an absolute absurdity in a city like New York or Paris.  It's a desire to be somewhere else or a part of BA from a more economically sound past, probably never actually experienced by this individual, that turns into a frustrated resignation with a daily and simple undertaking (in his example needing coins to get on a bus).  Nostalgia, a memory of mythical past (a memory that is only mythical for those that reminisce about an experience that they feel they belong to without having actually lived through it), and the frustration with a far inferior present.  A "European Elsewhere", as Michael Taussig would call it (see The Magic of the State);  a South American country that could be many places, but I think is a fitting analogy for Argentina.  Taussig does not give the name of the country on which this ethnographic work is based on, I will not disclose it here, mainly because his theory is to be applied to not one specific nation-state confined by fixed borders, but a concept of such a nation-state that exists strongly in this part of the world (perhaps even in other continents).

looking towards my homeland, las venas abiertas de américa latina, la gripa porcina (oink, oink, fever)

To begin with: Sarah Palin.  The drama with this crazy continues.  She has become this cultural symbol.  I hear her with her accent out of Fargo and I realize how strange my country can be, how strange that such a personality could attract such strong feelings ranging from religious fervor among her supporters, and those who cannot stop reading about her or watching her even when it gives them a sense of disgust.  I belong to the latter group.  I can say that during the end of the election season, I had a mixture of feelings watching her interviews.  I wanted to simultaneously laugh (at her stunning lack of intellect) and cry (how could the part of the public rally around this horrifying person?).  I know that I irrevocably lost my respect for John McCain.  I highly recommend the Vanity Fair article that is in the August edition.  It is very well written and reads like a drama out of a movie.  I have to say that after her selection as a vice-presidential candidate, watching the election from here was like watching the strangest movie you could imagine unfolding.  And then again it's not so shocking. She is more than a person.  She is the apotheosis of a political trend that selects people like Bush.  It is a politics of personality that shuns all that is intellectual.  What a strange trend fora country to have.  The idea that those that read and are somehow out of touch with the reality of the country.  How can the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world promote such values that reject erudition or a type of elitism based on one's intellect.  Bush is the epitome of the Fortunate Son, and Obama, who had to live part of his young life on food stamps, is an elitist.  This bizarre mentality brings me to my next theme, one which I cannot stop thinking about:  Honduras.

Last Thursday I went to a protest outside of the Honduran consulate.  It was incredible.  People of all ages and all classes (although those of the higher classes are more likely to not care about the coup, or even support it.  Excuse the awful generalization, but sometimes awful generalizations have truth to them).  I was playing a bit of devil's advocate with my very leftist friend, F.  He expressed his disappointment with the fact that Obama has not said enough.  Obama did actually call what happened, as of yesterday, in Honduras a coup.  But what actions will he take if any? I felt that I should defend Obama, even though I'm mixed about how much I believe what I said.  I do to some extent, but just reading websites like Huffington Post and seeing how little attention the coup is getting in U.S. news as compared to Iran or Russia is such a disappointment.  I am not geographically closer to Honduras, but it is all over the news here.  It should be in the States, too.  The U.S. is part of the Americas and needs to give its fellow American nations airtime.  In response to the accusation that Obama is making a mistake by not commenting enough or doing enough, here is my response:  Those of you in the States are well aware of the fact that Obama is on a bit of a publicity tour to garner support for his health care plan.  He has already been called a socialist during the campaign and even more so now.  He cannot lose sight of the prize.  I dream of being a citizen of a country that finally views healthcare as a human right.  I selfishly really want that to pass, and perhaps any distraction loses that possibility.  The label of socialist will catch on even more if Obama is on the side of Chavez.  Obviously it is being on the side of what is right that really matters, but the States is a strange place.  I think for the first time those that have too often voted against their economic interests because elections have often become culture wars (I think Sarah Palin is someone who symbolizes this type of political strategy), are realizing that they have been denied their right to healthcare for too long.  It has taken a long time for a Democrat to sine their support, and being linked with Chavez could destroy it.  Secondly, Obama, as demonstrated in his speech at Cairo University, is an insightful student of history.  He understands how the States is viewed in many parts of the world, and knows that Latin America has too often been treated as the States' backyard, and knows that it's citizens don't look at the U.S. as having altruistic aspirations in the region.  

I have to say that on many news blogs I have been horrified by some of the comments I have been reading.  Yes, Zelaya did something illegal, but it is more complex than simply discussing the law in simple terms.  A correspondent for The Economist, no left wing publication by any standards, said that Zelaya broke the law, but the constitution does is not clear enough that it states any manner of having a non-binding referendum legally.  This is an extremely important point.  Illegality means something a bit more blurry when there is no legal route provide.  As I have said previously, it was a non-binding referendum to see if the public would allow for the possibility of having more than one term per president.  Honduras is the only country in the Americas that limits presidents to one term with the exception of Mexico, and Mexico has six year terms, not four, as Honduras does.  Anyone who has said that the military simply followed the law by arresting Zelaya is mistaken.  This is a coup, I'm watching it on television.  The Honduran constitution does say that the military is under the president's control and cannot depose elected officials.  The government in Honduras is in no way legitimate.  It is barely a story on the U.S. news.  I watched as the constitutional president tried to return to his country by airplane yesterday.  Before his arrival the military turned on the protesters.  It was a fiery group, but non-violent.  I saw bursts of tear gas and heard gun shots...a lot of them.  At least two teenagers were shot dead.  HufPo said that the presidents who wanted to enter Honduras with Zelaya decided to go to El Salvador because they were scared for their safety.  Probably, but their supposed fear comes out of the last minute retraction of the permission to enter the country initially granted by the military government.  I saw awful violence against protesters, blood, ambulances, soldiers in combat position on the international airport's runway ready to shoot and kill whoever tried to get closer.  The military blocked the runway and Zelaya could not land.  As he approached you could hear the cheers.  He was threatened with military interception upon an attempt to land.  It was an unsuccessful return.  He had to go to Nicaragua, and then perhaps to El Salvador to speak with those who had volunteered to accompany him.  His country has been suspended by the Organization of American States.  The best clips have been of people saying they did not vote for him and never would, but cannot sit as their country is seized by the military once again (by generals trained in our very own School of the Americas).  These are not necessarily marches in favor of Zelaya, but a public outcry against an act completely contrary to the concept of democracy.  Right now I hear voices yelling "asesinos" at the military during a protest/march of mourning for the two young people killed yesterday.  I had the conversation with F.  before the violence.  The States must say something after the violence of yesterday.  Chavez (surprisingly complimentary of Obama) had said that no military government could assume such power and ignore the international community without the support of the "imperialismo yanqui", but said that Obama had nothing to do with it.  Unfortunately, anything could be possible.  I would not be too surprised if a reaction to Zelaya's turn to the left, which has become anti-business, had not angered some of those from the U.S. doing business there.  The U.S. is the number one trading partner of Honduras.  Maybe all of this becomes so much harder and yet disgustingly fascinating from a country that sees itself as part of an American community, one which is quite opposed to the States and shares the common history of military dictatorships.  Probably I also feel the need to deal with some sort of self-loathing that comes from being from a country that is responsible for so much damage.  I haven't supported it per se, but I have benefitted from it.  I was not alive at the time that Kissinger and the CIA helped orchestrate the coup in Chile that did away with Allende and replaced him with Pinochet, but it was out of business interest that the States did so, and have I not been able to enjoy a standard of life that derives from a capitalist society that goes after its own business interests without the regard for democracy, human rights, etc.?  Maybe I am so fascinated by this coup because maybe I perversely feel that by caring, or reading about it, I will somehow excuse myself for my nationality.  People from the States, for the most part, are not thought of well in Argentina.  There is a Buenos Aires arrogance that has no problem stating that.  My best friend's mother (Argentine), told my father, when she first met him, and without intending any defense, that for years the States just didn't exist on the map for her, that she didn't want to see it on a map!  This is a particularly stubborn individual, but she is not so unique in that sentiment.  When I lived with my Argentine cousins they commented on how smart I was for an estadounidense because I knew who Louis Pasteur was (said with a sense of humor).  I am not at all offended by these comments because I understand them.  The only time I was ever incensed, and I mean truly disturbed, was when a comment I made was dismissed with the line:  That's so something that someone from the U.S. would say.  It was coming from an ignorant person (I say that not based on that comment, but on knowing him) and it was in response to a comment I had made about a subject I knew about more than him, and I'm not ashamed to say it.  It was a dismissal that made me so very angry, the sentiment behind does not, but I want to have an intelligent conversation.  If someone does actually take their time to speak to me they may be surprised be some of my convictions, especially as someone coming from the Hand of Imperialism.  I had a friend profusely apologize to me when she sent me a text message she intended to send to her friend to invite her out to have a drink with us.  The message said she was going to have a drink with the yanqui.  I was not offended at all.  I found it endearing because I understand the intent of it, which was in no way malicious.  I have fun with it sometimes, I comment on my long expired visa and how funny it is to have a North American illegal in the South.  

I think that it's worth mentioning the swine flu outbreak in Argentina.  I do not think that panic is necessary, although the media here is great at playing on the paranoia of its citizens.  If you're not naturally a paranoid person, I recommend watching the news in BA.  It really seems like they just want to create a wave of panic.  

I knew that there would probably be a lot of la gripe porcina when the first cases arrived in April or May.  It's a situation that does not have to be as bad as it is, and I get angry just thinking about how it has gotten so bad in Argentina.  I am well aware that it became quite an issue in the States, but Obama talked about it early on and there was a lot of information that recommended basic but necessary steps.  None of that happened here.  There is a president who cared more about paying attention to the elections than to any health crisis.  The issue of health was ignored and the flu was treated as no big deal until two weeks ago, or right about voting time or after.  The situation was left completely uncontrolled.  The numbers of the dead are unknown and rival politicians have varying statistics.  The information about using alcohol and washing your hands constantly has only recently been publicly encouraged, and that's after thing have gotten quite bad.  A lot of the people that have gotten sick, or died, are poorer and from the province.  They were simply ignored and no one cared enough to tell that their symptoms were of something much worse than they seemed.  If they had gone to a public hospital they might have been treated, but no one goes to the hospital when they think the have a seasonal flu.  I am outraged that elections took precedent over the health of a population.  It's quite criminal, which is something that many people are saying quite strongly.  As my boss told me in response to a comment I made in relation to the government's responsibility for how bad the flu has gotten (as representative of the imperialismo yanqui I feel a bit guilty making such a comment):  "The problem with Argentina is the government."  Now people feel helpless and overly paranoid.  No one should fear leaving their home to walk on the street.  I still take public transportation and so far none of my students have had there work cancelled.  However, it is funny that certain companies have made it a policy to stop doing the traditional salutation of the kiss on the cheek.  It's like being a cold New Yorker again.  There's a moment of hesitation when you say hi to someone now.  Do they want the kiss, do they not want it.  After having had to get used to embracing and kissing to the left of a stranger's cheek, it's difficult to have such distance between humans again.

Last thought:  Death of Robert McNamara.  I recommend "The Fog of War" to anybody, but there was the last part of it posted on the bottom of the short article you will find through this link to The Huffington Post. The article is no great shakes, but the five minute clip from the movie is, especially when he quotes T.S. Eliot.  I think what makes the movie so hard to watch, besides the theme of war, which is really the theme of often preventable death and destruction, is that it makes this easily hatable person too human for us, too frail.  The last minute or so are just incredible.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/06/robert-mcnamara-dead_n_226043.html

after mid-term election, turtle necks, planting leftist pine trees, central american coup,more bus rides

So, unlike the States, people vote on Sundays and it's a legal obligation.  Some people have never changed their residency from when they last moved and don't travel from BA to the interior to vote (although a lot of people do travel election day weekend so as not to break the law, or, I don't know, a sense of obligation to your nation).  Bars cannot be open after 8pm the Saturday before, and I believe that places stop selling liquor at that time or a few hours earlier.  On Friday I talked to a cab driver, as I often do, about his sticker for Pino Solanas (my personal favorite).  He must have been a fiscal (don't know how that would translate in our system), so he had the ballots for Pino in the taxi with him.  Each party has fiscales in different districts who are responsible for distributing the ballots for their party.  The candidates are not all on one list.  You enter the voting place (usually a school, like it is for us) and wait on line.  You are handed an envelop and you go into a room where each party has their own ballot that has their list on candidates.  You choose one paper and put it in the envelop (which has been officially signed, so it can't just be some envelop you snuck in with).  The ballots can be cut in half.  One half of the ballot has the list of candidates to be national representatives for the autonomous city of BA on one side, while the other half has the list for the representatives on the provincial (in this case local BA city) level.  You therefore have the option of choosing one party on the national level and another on the local.  I've heard that this is rare.  If, for example, you want to vote for Pino, you go the table with the ballots for his party (Proyecto Sur).  The ballot has the name of the party and down the middle a dotted line indicated where to cut if you so wish to do so.  You can only cut in half, though, so when you cast a vote on the local or national level, you are voting for a list of people.  Pino debated with three other candidates, each from a different party, and depending on the percentage that a candidate wins, they select a certain number of people from their list to take sits in the legislature with them.  So the ballot has Pino's name in large letters, followed by another known name is slightly smaller font, followed by a longer list in what is probably the equivalent of type 14 Times New Roman.  It is the same on the right side, except with the list of those running on the local level.  Pino's name is the largest of all the names on the entire ballot, although his real first name, Fernando, is in about type 14 also above where it says Pino Solanas.  Nobody knows him as Fernando, and he has been around for years.  He has been making documentaries for a very long time, and no one, as far as I have heard, has referred to him as Fernando.  Pino is the word for pine tree,a nd you would see small Proyecto Sur posters that said:  Pino se planta.  I thought they were so witty.  Plantarse can meen to plant, as in a tree, but it also means to stand firm, as in against larger forces or for a cause.  En serio, Pino se plantó.  Until two weeks ago he had not a chance in hell, on Sunday he came in second.  Everyone knew Gabriela Miccheti would come in first, but she did by far less than expected and Pino's not-too-far-off second place through everyone off.  Gabriela gets five seats in the national legislature, Pino gets four, the Radical candidate Alfonso Prat-Gay three and the Kirchners' candidate, Heller, one.  A student of mine told me it's called the Dont system (that's how he spelled it), which just speaks for itself in more ways than one.  This outcome is remarkable.  Pino is of the left and Capital can tend towards being quite conservative.  What is more interesting is what the election really means overall.  The Kirchners lost...by a lot.  The husband/ex-president came in second in the Province of BA, which is quite the upset.  The interesting aspect to all of this is, although the Kirchners are quite fake leftists, they provoked such strong feelings of disdain that the country has really shifted to the right.  I had gotten all caught up in the frustration with CFK, too, but what has this reactionary approach left Argentina with?  I was happy to see her husband lose because I think Kircherismo needs to die off, but or that to have happened, someone to right of him had to beat him, and that is exactly what came to pass.  Maybe it can also be read as giving a truer left a the voice of real opposition.  If the country is moving to the right, the more conservative politicians can no longer play the victims and Pino, as he is already trying to do, can build a coalition of opposition that brings together a real left that will actually reinforce public hospitals and education.  It's very interesting to watch all of this with quite a militant socialist.  My friend F.  was a fiscal for La Frente Izquierda, which had no chance of really making any impact percentage wise.  The candidate was from the PTS (Partido Trabajadores Socialista), which my friend is a dedicated member of.  He goes to meeting about four times a week.  For him, Pino is from the center, but he was very happy about the outcome, although a bit hesitant to show it.  He pointed out that usually first and second place winners are not so different in their convictions, but the first and second this time have almost nothing in common.  He also pointed out that Argentina went the way of Europe, pointing out how the country has moved to the right significantly, but that mainly people voted against "the couple" and that was how they thought about their vote.  I was thinking about how much CFK and her husband have discredited the left with their words and by using that language.  

Back to the cab driver:  He gave me some ballots because, as he said, there is always fraud, always good to have extra.  It's true.  Often times ballots of one party are stolen.  Each party also has to pay for their own ballots, so a party like the PTS doesn't have nearly as many as any of the main contenders.  As a result, I have four Proyecto Sur ballots.  I got to see a whole pile of F.'s ballots, and from what I can tell, all ballots are printed on what is the equivalent of poor quality paper towels from public bathrooms.  I kept joking that I wanted to use my four votes.  When F. had to return to help supervise the counting of ballots (part of the job of fiscales is to prevent fraud, although it's quite relies a lot on trust), he told me that the person who is supposed to monitor everything as a non-partisan supervisor passed by less than twice every hour.  It would be very easy to commit fraud.  I had explained to the cab driver that I wasn't Argentine, but he told me to take them for my friends who were, in case they showed up to vote or Pino, but there were no ballots for him.  That is how I came into my four authentic mid-term Argentine ballots.  I was so tempted to throw them into F.'s pile, but his sense of humor would not have extended to that theme.  I joked about committing fraud all day and then, as I was reading, I overheard on the news how a group of people up north, indigenous and some barely able to read, had their national ID cards seized.  They were told to go to a certain place to retrieve them and were told to vote for a certain (I believe government, at least Menemista [from the Carlos Menem branch of Peronismo]) candidate upon arriving.  The man who was calling into the news to expose this incident explained that perhaps many of the people involved didn't realize they were being made to vote.   I have used both the words Kirchnerismo and Menemista in this post.  Peronistas, those who follow the the political ideologies of Perón, and a broad group.  So broad, in fact, that when I have asked (as I have done so several times) that a student mark political parties, or just peronismo, on a line that ranges from left wing to right wing, they immediately tell me it is impossible before even trying.  As a result, people claim branches of peronismo and we are talking about a cult of personality that is interpreted in many ways by different people or political moments  The man himself ranged from left to right.  He was a revolutionary for sure, but he is either so demonized or deified that he never seems to be humanly depicted in a conversation.  As one incredible human being told me, who also happens to be a student, he/she is not against peronistas per se, nor necessarily all of what Perón did, but he/she hates what peronismo has done to Argentina.  A fascinating statement, and said inoffensively and directly.  I'm sure some people would be outraged by such a comment, and for that I will not assign this paraphrase to a name. You can be a peronista and you could be from the left, right or center.  In a documentary, not meant to be comedic, about Argentine history, Perón is talked about as being inspired by Trotskyite socialism, Franquismo, Mussolini, the USSR and the Catholic Church.  Enough to make your head spin around ten million times.  

On Sunday there was also a coup in Honduras.  Here, probably for having had to live under a military government (more than once), such an event strikes a chord.  I was reading comments from readers on Huffington Post and was shocked by how people were actually defending the removal of an elected leader by the military.  The most common point made in defense of the military's removal of Zelaya is his relationship, or even similarity to, Hugo Chavez.  I don't have the exact quote, but thank you to the comment that basically said:  I don't care if he was friends with Charles Manson, militaries don't choose governments.  On BBC  many Hondurans talked about supporting the military's actions.  I think it's important to imagine the class of people who have access to BBC online in a poor country.  He was taken out of power after he declared that he would hold a public referendum to allow him to run for re-election.  It is also interesting to know that there are people who have lived under a military dictatorship and yet still support a military that is so powerful that it, within days, deposes and appoints a president.  When I explained this to my Spanish teacher, he said, you just don't understand the Latin American mentality.  Zelaya is not really even that much of a leftist, but when people feel that their interests are at stake, they will accept any action that makes them feel like that immediate threat, perhaps to their pocketbook, is removed.  I respect my teacher immensely.  He is great intellectual, and also the only person I really know who is honest about having voted for the kirchernista Heller in the last election and who openly agrees with CFK, even about how she dealt with the farmers.  I respect that he is honest about liking la presidenta when obviously in one moment many, even a few from Capital, did, but, like with Bush, all of sudden people pretend they had nothing to do with the person who is really screwing up (or at least you know that's how everyone else thinks, so you pretend to be in agreement).  I was so shocked when he told me he was going to vote for Heller and how he felt about "the couple".  He is not in love with them, but he does at least like CFK, which is rare for Buenos Aires and also shows an independence of thought.  Also, like Pino Solanas, and many Las Vegas 70's lounge singers before him, he has a proclivity for the turtle neck.  

One day I will write a book on Buenos Aires buses.  I'm not sure how to organize the chapters. I don't know if I would do it by bus line or hour of the day, maybe even by the music the driver chooses.  Different lines certainly have different characters (both the feeling of the bus and the literal meaning of the word character when used to describe its passengers).  A bus at rush hour can be a dreadful thing.  Last week a woman, well-dressed and with all appearances of decency, shoved me out of the way to get on the 22 ahead of me.  She prevented me from stepping onto the bus so that the could pass me.  

I must be off.  I have to write about plastic bags, must remember that I must share a conversation I had about that with my PTS friend.  

I am not proofreading anything I'm writing.  Sorry, but after Columbia I just don't want to care so much and let it flow.

mothers of the disappeared, OHB's inauguration, I'm from an empire

With very few exceptions, I have guessed who most of my students are voting for.  It's been an interesting set of conversations.  On the whole, unlike in the States, Argentines don't find it inappropriate or rude to talk about politics.  There are protests all the time, which is an interesting juxtaposition to resignation, or even apathy.  The apathetic individuals shock.  In the States I'm unfortunately just very used to it, but there isn't the kind of constant political mobilization going on.  For example, Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, who are a group of mothers of the disappeared who march around the the plaza every Thursday at 3:30.  The Kirchners made them part of mainstream political culture by inviting them to the Casa de Gobierno (aka Casa Rosada, trans.:Pink House)  during the husband's presidency.  When I went to go see them for the first time, with Ben Lieberman, it was a mixture of many different and strange images:  There were these old women circling the plaza with signs.  Some were selling crafts, including mates with the organization's symbol on it (I have a keychain), memorialization, ghosts, grief and politics.  After the marching, one of the mother's made a speech.  It was  the Thursday after Obama's inauguration.  The mother giving the speech, I believe her name is widely known, as the group has become associated with a left leaning ideology.  I would love to learn more details about the group.  Perhaps a future post.  During the inauguration, CFK (Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner [I live with a Cristina, I need to be careful about being clear about who I'm talking about]) was in Cuba and a made a point of giving a speech at the University of Havana the same day.  She was obviously trying to make a political point, but I don't know if she realizes that most people in the States don't know she is, she is not necessarily the most popular head of state even in this region, and even the people in the States who might know who she is probably didn't care.  I didn't.  I remember the inauguration so well, it was a beautiful day, I didn't care where Cristina was, she is always traveling anyway, and as much as I think the U.S.'s policy towards Cuba is ridiculous, that day was electric for me.  I have not been exactly over the hill about many things the Obama administration is doing/not doing, but it was a beautiful day in BA and it was an amazing moment.  Ben and I watched it dubbed over in Spanish with two friends we made five minutes before.  Two people, who live us, could not fit into a place that was holding a watch party, and ended up in a psychedelic cantina-esque place (acid drip colorful and more oddly decorated than my Mom and Stepfather's apartment on the Upper-East Side) with two middle-aged people, a man and a woman, all of us, except for Ben and I, previously strangers to each other.  We begged the owner to let us watch the inauguration, which was on Argentine news.  She agreed, but we had to watch it on low volume so that it wouldn't drown out the loud salsa music.  One of our new friends bought champagne and bread.  He had us eat bred together as a sign of friendship, and given the early hour for drinking, we were all pretty buzzed.  The simultaneous translation was hysterically monotone and non-dramatic, which was made funnier by the profundity of Obama's facial expressions and the droned out sound of his miraculous speaking voice.  

Then we are at Plaza de Mayo and the mother giving the speech said that he seems like the "best of the worse," which was meant as a compliment.  Ben turned to me and said something like:  "They really do hate us don't they."  "Yeah."  It's not an insult about Obama, it takes living in another country to see how the States is seen in the world.  I've had that experience numerous times before, but it's different to be really living in another place where the public attitude, in general, is quite negative of my country.  I share almost all of these views, I'm even more critical of the States than some of my students.  Many times I doesn't bother me when I receive the criticisms directed at me because I'm from there, mainly because when I give my opinions I'm not what they assumed me to be.  But there are always a few who manage to get under my skin.  I can only think of no more than one or two examples.  Cases when it was someone who was saying something about the States to sound smart or cool, but actually knew nothing about.  It's easy and popular to criticize certain places or people, but I need more than just a categorization without a real discussion, otherwise I find that I'm not intellectually engaged at all.  I'm not much offended as someone from the States, but as a person, for having to have heard something that was said just to offend a person they don't know personally and to feel intelligent for doing so.  I make negative generalizations about my own country all the time, and I don't mind if Argentines do, I mind when they assume what my own political convictions are without asking.  Even reflecting on this subject makes me see how hypocritical I'm being, but I'm not an ambassador, and sometimes I'm put in that position.  I don't even want to defend the States.  My country is responsible for such awful things during Bush, but it would be naive to pin it all on that.  The States has not been such a power for good here.  It has supported some awful, awful political leaders, it has overthrown democratically elected ones who did not want to support our business interests (i.e. Allende in Chile).  The States, at least at some point, aided the last military gov't here, responsible for possibly "disappearing" 30,000, mostly young people.  Disappeared could involve torture, though not all that were tortured were disappeared.  People disappear when they are picked up in bottle-green Ford Falcons and thrown out of airplanes over the ocean.  

And you see these mothers, that come out every Thursday, and they seek justice.  Part of their speech was all about how great Cristina was, and you realize that besides the oddity of the souvenir table, there is a very uncomfortable politicizing of the movement.  It is not simply left, but it is tied up with this specific gov't in power now.  That's very much understandable, to feel affection for a gov't that brings these women into the spotlight, but I question the altruism of the intentions and reduce it cynically to politics, the type that helps you win public admiration and elections.  Ben and flipped through a book on the souvenir table called Nuestros Hijos filled with hundreds of pictures of the some of the disappeared with dates of when they were last seen and paragraph of biography.  Ben said he didn't want to look at it anymore, I couldn't decide whether I felt the same sort of terror, or if I wanted to continue looking at the faces of these young strangers.  It's like being at some sort of funeral/protest/seance.  Death is in the air, but it is living.  The images keep the dead alive, but they are kept alive because of their very death.  They are made remarkable because they are no longer with us, yet the are maintained in our sphere through of the living through photos and bios publicized so that we cannot forget them, or moreover, the larger, point what happened to them systematically.  Or, maybe that is  a backwards interpretation, and it really is about these individuals, and it really is, and will always be (despite political allegiances), these mothers who had their children taken away.  They don't have the closure of cemeteries or details of what happened to them.  It seems unbelievable to think that one day perhaps a friend is never to be seen again; into thin air.  

The Madres are no fans of the States, but is worth mentioning that their Thursday appearance is a quite the tourist attraction, and many of these tourists are from the States and go by the souvenir booth and take photos of the mothers.  Photographs are such a large part of keeping the disappeared alive, that it is interesting to interpret what it means to want to memorialize a moment of memorialization and commodify it (although the first memorialization, that of the disappeared themselves, have become circulating commodities and political messages against repression).  It seems strange to see tourists and foreigners, myself included, at a somewhat intimate event.  Of course the speech and the public aspect of the march is very much a defining part of the Mother's activities, but the death of one's child is such personal and painful experience.  We were both in a public and private space at the same time.  We were at a protest and memorial service simultaneously.  Página 12, a newspaper here, everyday runs small "adds" of the people who were disappeared on this specific date.  For example, today were a few of these "adds" for people disappeared on June 24th during the years of  '76-'83.  I can never stop reading them, but I get emotionally strange when I do.  Not just sad, but overwhelmed, like these few inches of photo and text are taking over all the space around me.  Sometimes there is a quote, like a poem, etc.  Always a short message from those who put the add in, such as family, who have some comment about how much they miss this person, how they keep fighting for justice in his/her memory, and it becomes the personal conversation provided for public consumption.  It is so nobody forgets.  Many of these people were around my age.  They were often university students, sometimes even high-school.  Even in the Iliad the heartbreaking unnaturalness of a child's death before that of the parent's appears.  

elections, sausage sandwiches, propaganda, more reflections on dead people

It is obligatory to vote in Argentina, and illegal not to.  It's one of the laws that's taken sort of seriously, although a student of mine this morning told me he never changed residency from the interior, so he is not voting.  It, like all laws, can be broken, although less so than, let's say, working here without a valid visa.  However, the candidates do not need to debate.  The election is on Sunday.  All liquor stores and bars must be closed while the polls are open.  The top four out of the more than a dozen congressional candidates, for Capital (Capital Federal is the autonomous city of Buenos Aires) had their debate late last week.  It was impressive and fascinating, and of course, like all politics, somewhat a theater of the ridiculous.  Everyone, though, has their eyes on the elections for the seats in the Province of Buenos Aires.  The people from Capital have their own representatives, they do not vote for the candidates in provincia. The leading candidate in provincia, although by very little of a margin, is Néstor Kirchner, the predecessor and husband of the current president.  Polls show that he is at a tie or a just barely ahead of one of his contenders.  If he wins, but with only a small margin, of course it will be some sort of victory, but not a very good one.  Provincia is stronghold of Peronismo and where "the couple" tend to be the most popular.  It reflects on how weak Cristina (Fernandez de Kirchner) is.  If, even in their stronghold, they can barely win, they are failing.  They have alienated many Peronistas with their aggressive political style.  Her first two years do not look so good.  When I first got here I was caught up in spontaneous protest that was taking place throughout the country.  It was my first or second full day here and my cousin had taken me for coffee in Belgrano, a mostly upper-class neighborhood.  It was had been 100 days of the farmers' strike.  They had stopped allowing agricultural commodities from moving from the rural areas where they are harvested/manufactured.  It was a response to a completely inappropriate use of executive power.  La presidenta had raised taxes on agricultural goods by a ridiculous percent (somewhere between 30 and 50, lamentably my memory fails me), but without passing at as a law through the congress.  She bypassed the legislative process and then, when el campo went on strike, she refused to negotiate with them.  The people were not protesting the farmers, they were protesting the absurdity of refusing to negotiate with them on the part of the government, a stubbornness that a weak economy based on agricultural commodities does not need in this global economy (even if a year ago was when only tremors of the economic earthquake to come).  As a result, the country's agricultural sector was a at a standstill for about four months.  There were posters all around the city of the military dictatorship that ended Peron's first presidency, when the military flew over Plazo de Mayo with bombers.  The message intended was that the farmers posed the same threat as a military coup.  Peronistas are not popular in Capital, so the president works in a city in which she is mocked and deeply disliked.  The candidates in the provincial election have not debated because her husband refuses to, he knows that in the face of arguments and questions he will look bad.  This government is spending.  I am all for nationalization, after all I did go listen to the Soviet anthem, but so are many people here, they just care about who is doing the nationalizing.  Like when this government nationalized pensions, without a blink and in a matter-of-fact way I was told by so many students:  well, there is a need to for campaign money for the congressional elections in June.  Or, Cristina did say she would pay off the Paris debt (after quoting it's number as much less than it is).  None of these people believed that nationalization was wrong, none believed that there money was not going to spent quickly for anything less cynical than politics.  Not the kind of politics that debates an issue, the kind that chooses Sarah Palin to garner support from evangelics for a republican presidential candidate who was never too popular with that group.  The farmers' strike ended in a great Argentine drama.  When Cristina ran, she made a big deal out of choosing someone from the main opposing party, a Radical.  Julio Cobos was very much ridiculed by many in his own party for accepting the position.  When the situation with the strike got so bad, Cristina finally decided to put the tax increase through the senate.  It was a fifty-fifty vote.  The constitution is based on that of the States, so the VP, in the case of a 50-50 senate outcome, casts the deciding vote.  "Mi voto no es positivo"...he voted against his own running mate and got a quote put on t-shirts.  A very dramatic line on a very dramatic day last winter.  He was the accepted back into the fold of his own party, and Cristina has pretended like he doesn't exist.  There are no juries on trials here, so the equivalent type of service is working at the ballot box.  I was speaking with a girlfriend of one of my students, who is from the provincia de buenos aires, though a rich part.  She said that suddenly boxes filled with ballots saying Cristina arrived to her station.  Given the political profile of the country, she probably did win fairly, though it is known that politicians give the poorer people in provincia money, or a sausage sandwich and a bus ride to Capital to protest in favor of the government.  Hundreds of pesos for people that have very little, and the basic, but traditional, choripan, a fixture at football matches, up north, as the Virgin was descending from the mountains to the tune of Sounds of Silence with indigenous flutes, hot off the grill, and at election time.  

The debate I watched:  The candidate who will probably come in first, who we would call the vice-mayor, but has way more power because BA has autonomy from Provincia de Buenos Aires, is a well put together woman.  I'm sure she is intelligent, but she didn't have responses and voluntarily walked into a debate in which she knew she would have to be on the defensive.  She is representing the current government of the city, the other three have a track record to attack her on.   Gabriela Michetti...She will probably come in first.  The guy who will probably come in fourth, because "the couple is so disliked here, was a very good debater because he used the language of the left, where he is originally from.  He has to defend fake leftists.  His ability to attack Michetti was very good.  Easy:  Mauricia Macri, the head of the government in the city, ran as an opposing ideal to the Kirchners, but the congress, which is very much controlled by the couple, for all of their posturing, has passed almost (if not all) of Macri's proposals into laws.  They talk about the horror of the neo-liberalism of the awfully corrupt 90's, but have not done anything to reverse the trends established under Menem.  Out of the top four, I like the most to the left who wore turtle necks with blazers in weird colors and looks older than his age and makes great documentaries.  He sold me.  Plus, it was very funny to see him go after the kircherista candidate who was pretending to be on the same side of the political spectrum by just telling the truth.  Argentina used to be looked at as "ahead" of all of its neighbors.  I have students that have travelled for work to Chile and Brazil.  They talk about how those countries are going forward while Argentina falls lower and lower while the government lies about it.  The president of Chile is a serious woman, Bachelet, a person more than a parody of women.  Cristina never wears the same outfit twice and dresses in theme.  When she was in France she wore her hair a certain "French" way, when Bill Clinton was here recently, she went to dinner with him in a "90's fashion."  She always displays different members of her extensive hand bag collection.  Her make-up is the butt of political cartoons, and on one of the most popular TV programs, which satirizes all the main politicians, she is played by a man.  She as that drag queen sort of flair with her dramatic self-presentation.  Brazil has Lula.  They have more poverty, but it's a bigger country, and it seems to be going forward, and he seems more regionally and internationally credible.  I found it so offensive to call the president her first name, very sexist.  However, there are two President Kirchners, and she insisted on changing the word la presidente to la presidenta to further feminize it.   Uruguay is considered one of the least corrupt countries, maybe least corrupt in South America and less so than many countries in Europe (according to the Spanish newspaper El País).  

I was here when the first president after the last military dictatorship died.  Raúl Alfonsín died right before I went up north.  Not perhaps the best politician, but his death was another way to look back with nostalgia at a time when politicians were not corrupt.  That would mean maybe less than five out of the last more than fifteen years, and he mismanaged the economy.  His death put Reagan's to shame.  His body was put out in the congress for a day and approximately 70,000 people went to go see his body.  I went.  I went because I felt like I could experience something truly historical in my time here:  The person who symbolizes the return of democracy's death, something larger than myself.  He was a Radical, a very popular party in Capital, the leading opposition to the Peronistas.  Grown men were crying, the city was a at a stand still.  But BA is always still BA, and portenos will be as they are.  The scene was chaos at the congress.  An uncountable amount of lines crunched into the length of two blocks.  There were, police, but the weren't managing anything.  Perhaps a sign that I have embraced the humor here, but it was quite funny: Two older women who were obviously skipping a section of the line by accident because it was impossible to discern any organization to the line system.  You have people in a state of mourning, and then you have men no older than their early thirties yelling at them, saying "Old Peronist Cows, stop trying to skip everyone and go to the back of the line where you belong."  Unbelievable.  I never made it into the congress because I wasn't prepare to wait seven hours.  I had weird reasons for going.  Maybe a bit perverse.  I find the whole putting-the-body-out-for-thousands-of-crying-people thing totally bizarre, I felt like I was in history and watching how people act and react in scenes like that is amazing.  My best Argentine friend was not even born when until the end of his presidency and she stayed in her house crying for a whole day about his death.  This theme of romanticizing when it seems to be something that was never personally experienced is everywhere, and it is so powerful.  If affects elections, emotions, language.  I keep coming back to this concept of nostalgia.  All states rely on some mythologized past, and perhaps the past is nothing more than myth, but a daily life (everywhere, but manifested in different forms) that is constantly making references to past that is conveniently mythologized in the lamentation of the moment, brings us to constant state of mourning, and the contradiction between passion and resignation.  

one year on

This is my way of making up for the year of being having lost touch with all of you and trying to share my experiences of last (more than) twelve months that I have been in the crazy world.

I am in the land of the absurd.  I mean that without condescension, as I believe that I left one crazy country to enter another.  I live with hyperinflation on a daily basis.  I am not living the life of luxury that many foreigners come to Argentina to enjoy.  I have a depressingly small amount of dollars and live on weak currency whose value changes almost daily.  It's a cycle:  people go into panic mode and save, instead of in a bank, in dollars, which they keep somewhere safe.  It is a result of two things:  1) Until the last financial crisis the dollar and the Argentine peso were 1:1 and it suddenly changed to 1:3 overnight.  2) During the crisis people were unable to withdraw their own money from banks.  When there is a global financial crisis, a crisis mentality that already exists, and no confidence in one's own currency, it drives the value of the peso down further.  It is psychology mixed with economics.  There is a crisis mentality, as the economy tends to meltdown approximately every ten years.  It is a reality, and it creates a different type of panic than that which probably exists in the states right now.  People here say that they are accustomed to thinking this way.  There is this feeling of being constantly traumatized by the economy and a political system that seems far too often like a farce.  There is a neurosis that is, at moments, overwhelming.  Fact:  Buenos Aires has more psychoanalysts per capita than any other city in the world.  Sometimes it just seems like a fashionable activity.  I try to reschedule classes with students, but they can't possibly do it on that day because they have a very important appointment to go to a shrink, as they do at least once a week (of course I'm talking about people of a class that are able to).  Other times I think it's completely necessary because the city, and its citizens, are completely nuts, and they admit it openly.  I am not the sanest of individuals, but I have never felt more balanced in comparison to a population before.  I feel a lot of sexism.  I'm used to having a lot of male friends, and that really is not very common here.  I've gotten myself into some uncomfortable situations as a result.  I do feel that my ideas matter less with some people because of my gender.  It gives attitude.  Everyone here has it, a bit of aggression and cynicism, but a sense of humor that cuts through melancholy with a ironic and nostalgic tone, perhaps even bordering on bitter (or more than just bordering).  

Another ridiculous fact:  There is a coin shortage.  It started about a year ago.  Everyone pretty much depends on the buses to get around the city, but the buses only except change.  In fact, the bus companies horde the change instead of putting it back into circulation and sell it at a higher price than its value.  There is literally a black market of coins.  It exists near the natural reserve not too far from my house.  Wealthy  people drive there to picnic on the weekends.  Poor street children find them parking spaces for a coin.  They sell the coins for real money.  It's a business.  A cab driver told a student of mine that he has to go to Puerto Madero, where the reserve is, to get change to be able to give change to his passengers.  You have to find creative ways of finding coins, often by buying unnecessary things. But nobody wants to give you the coins.  Sometimes you are asked to pay in higher bills so that they can give you change in cash rather than giving you a single cent.  Sometimes, instead of change, the kiosko owner offers me caramelos or some small candy as change.  Sometimes, at the pharmacy, cough drops (it is flu season after all).

Fantastic memories:

Going to May Day in Plaza de Mayo where all of the socialist parties convened at once (of course there have to be a gazillion, as the left always needs to be factioned so that we can never accomplish anything).  The soviet anthem was sung in Spanish.  People of all ages pumping their fists.  It was quite beautiful, actually.  Also, something that I would never experience in the states.  Socialism actually exists here.  I have gone to public hospitals and received good free health care.  

Fainting after receiving a cortisone shot in the butt to help with some lung pain.  First of all, the ones in the butt go there because they are large and filled with gel, not liquid, which is to say they hurt like hell.  About five minutes later I walked outside of the hospital doors and fainted on the street.  Typical Buenos Aires, no one helped because they probably assumed that the poor girl just didn't make it on time or that I was drugged.  The later makes sense, as I supposedly had a smile on my face.  I knew to protect my head, but I don't remember that, and I hit the concrete hard.  When I came to, for half an hour I talked about my favorite colectivo (bus) for 30 minutes non-stop.  With the nurses, with the person who had accompanied me.  Poetically.  About the color, it's route, it's interior.  I do love the number 10, but I don't usually feel the need to aggressively tell people they need to use it and lecture them on it's benefits as a bus.  I then took the 10 home, walking like a duck.  

Going to the Northwest of Argentina.  It is a different world from here.  There is actually indigenous culture, not Italians like here.  As my father said, this is the whitests city ever.  Teh north is mountainous, colorful.  The mountains of seven colors in Purmamarca, Jujuy are incredible, Las Salinas:  Salt flats that give you sun burn because you are in this world pure white that reflect the desert sun right back up at you.  Not having sunglasses was a bit painful.

Living with Samantha Cooper for a few months.  She was my roommate.  Maybe she will read this maybe not, but I respect her so much.  So full of energy and fun and thoughtful.  She was traveling the world, so not someone who lingered too long, but she taught me a lot.  Also deserves credit for giving me the best explanation of portenos (meant with spanish n with thingy over it, it's the name for the people of BA):  The neurosis and paranoia of Woody Allen with Italian hand gestures.  Perfect!  I can't capture it better.  

Doing La Ruta de Vino in Mendoza with one Nicholas Hayes and insisting on walking it, rather than biking or doing a driven tour.  Wine tastings and desert sun plus quite a few kilometers results in strange behavior.  Singing Cole Porter through the streets, during which I face planted on the sidewalk, without the knowledge of my dear friend, who continued to sing and walk ahead of me.  

Eating a diet that is not natural for me.  The first few months after going to an asado (traditional Argentine BBQ) I would be sick for 4 days.  That's a lot of time in the bathroom.

My student who is 71 and an ex-supreme court justice.  His passion is literature and is an accomplished novelist.  On his birthday he played me a Chopin piece and it brought me to tears.  Gustavo is one of the most incredible individuals I have ever met.  He was a justice during what is considered the most corrupt supreme court in history, under the presidency of Carlos Menem.  He was appointed by the opposition.  I don't think he enjoyed being on the side of the majority opinion very much.  Most justices from that time cannot walk in public because they are so hated and known for taking bribes, etc.  He still works a lawyer, does international work, and is constantly giving interviews or writing editorials, or walking in the street to the club across the street, perhaps to dance tango with his wife Ana (he told me he secretly hates to go dancing, but won't tell Ana because it means so much to her).  He has no grandchildren and we have this incredible relationship.  I feel so lucky to have met him, even when it is difficult to teach an older person who does not have a high level of English.  

There is so much more to say.  This is just the beginning.  I have a lot to say about the present, and much more about the past.  Perhaps that's very Argentine of me.  There are so many ghosts here.  The pictures of Evita, the idealization of past that is compared to an what is seen as a lamentable present.  30,000 disappeared during the last military dictatorship.  Conversations about how Argentina used to be an economic powerhouse.  It is true, but hasn't been for many many years.  It is a present that is constructed by a mythical past without any firm timeline.  Everything is blurry, but whatever It was, it was better than now.  "Este país de ladrones.  Este país de mierda."  Which politician do you feel was was a true statesman?  How old were you then?  Oh, you weren't alive, it's a name that means something, but you never lived during that time.  And so conversations go backwards, not forwards.  The clock is turned back and everything is perfect, but we are presently sitting in a café in the midst of shit.  This theme of memorialization, nostalgia, ghosts, etc. is what has made me want to start writing about living here.  To share insanity is to share beauty, and often time that which is ugly.  They are intertwined here.  

Stay tuned for what happens in the next few weeks.  We are in high midterm election season.  June 28th: congressional elections.  My shoulders need a rest as I do not have a desk.  So much more to say.  A year's worth of observation, thoughts, living in a different (sur)reality.  

Les mando todo mi amor.

X,

Fierman