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.