world cup, paul mccartney

The last month has been crazy, and not in any way I have ever seen in the States before. Argentina came to a tragic end last week, and it literally left the city speechless and teary-eyed. It would be easy to say that the reaction was histrionic, but it was so genuine, and one of the most authentically real Argentine experiences. It was very hard for me to watch the last game and watch Argentina lose 0-4 to Germany and watch with five people from the States, three visitors and two who have lived here for six months or so. I didn't feel like I could share what I was feeling, it wasn't the same emotive demonstration that I felt was appropriate for the moment and I longed to move and sit with the old men behind me. It was too civilized, too uncaring...too States. The game was truly tragic, and like many dramas here, hilarious in how it serves as the apotheosis of the national character. Perhaps football is like that for so many of the top teams in the World Cup, that how they play seems to reflect how they are, or the parody-able stereotypes of how they are. I would say the Argentina-Germany game was quite the laughable example. The Germans were like a perfectly crafted war machine that attacked tightly and efficiently, whereas the Argentines were a dramatic and disorganized mess with really no strategy and an insane and superstitious coach. The German coach wore cashmere v-neck sweaters as shirts under blazers with perfectly coiffed-hair with eyes that darted across the field reflecting on every movement and making quick calculations, while Maradona looked like an oddly-shaped sausage stuffed into an expensive suit and clutched his rosary. As I watched the press conference after and realized that Diego would probably not do the expected admission of failure and step-down, I both laughed and felt an amazing tenderness towards him. The game was a travesty and a tragedy. I almost cried, in fact I stopped myself from doing so. It is so hard not to feel the passion and importance of the moment. It is a moment that comes once every four years, and is a victory that means much more than just winning a game. In one football match there can be all the possible emotions available on the human spectrum and it feels so very good to have that experience and to share it. It is some love of a country, a type of patriotism that is so arrogant and self-deprecating, and above all, so particular, that it forms micro-communities for two or so hours around a television and allows yells and laughter and the most masculine of sorrows.

Argentina can sometimes mean passions that you never felt you had, and ridiculousness you never even thought you had in you. You defend the Argentine claim to the Malvinas (I mean, I fucking call it the Malvinas for the love of god). And then, well ...


And then an aristocrat tells you to watch Paul McCartney on TNT, and you do it, even though PC solo is beyond your ethics. You do it because you're in Argentina and an upper-class Argentine recommends it, and the hilarity of that alone gets you to do it. You may even enjoy it, but that is really no excuse, but you do it out of some sort of obsessive love (not love as most think of it, a weird love that can't be described in conventional terms). But shit, you may actually think that Sir Paul's suspenders are kind of cool, or that you are with the person, even though they may be asleep in some much more expensive part of town, that you are mocking them, but also paying tribute to them. There is a love that can never be expressed in any other way, so you watch Paul fucking McCartney...even when he does "Live and Let Die"or "Band on the (ugh) Run". And you don't for a moment stop thinking what in god's name am I doing, I mean, it's Paul, solo. The last album did admittedly rock, but I can't believe I'm watching this fucking shit.

two years in and lessons learned, observations made, world cup social effervescence

Monday, the 14th of June, was my two year anniversary of being in Buenos Aires. I have not returned to the States, not even once. I spent most of my time here decidedly not missing the States, and after two years, becoming more comfortable with the idea of eventually returning. Honestly, I don't know if the two years in Argentina is weird because of Argentina or two years, my bet is the latter. More than the sheer craziness of having moved here and stayed, time has passed so very quickly, it is actually unbelievable to the point of feeling like some dark comedy. I realize that what I've done seems completely hippy or misguided, and really for the most part, I don't feel that anyone I talk to thinks I'm out of my mind for being here...the only person who did make me feel that way was only able only able to do so until he then switched the conversation topic, unprompted, to his ivy league business school grades. Yes, I'm probably nuts, not more so than before, and much more grounded than ever, but nuts, and always will be, but hopefully not eclipsing-any-sense-of-self-reflexivity. I realize that starting graduate school here seems so strange, but making excuses for it isn't fair; it's far too good of a program to ever have to be rescued by "first world" reassurance. My school friends are some of the smartest and most interesting people I have ever met and come from various countries. Starting school was the best decision I ever made in terms of a social life, and gave me access to an entirely different world in ways that are very specific. For example, how I have started to think about the government: Cristina Kirchner is so easy to parody, especially as someone from the outside who lives in Buenos Aires, where no other Peronista could probably ever be like anyway, but I will defend against the ridiculous hyperbole (even more so when it comes from foreigners who know nothing about the history of Argentina, or realize what the government is or isn't doing). I'm sure she's corrupt, but I can say that the quality of public education is so high that the academic class of Argentina, which has always been respected, seems to be undergoing some sort of high-energy period that is so exciting to be a part of. In some ways, as a foreigner, going to school here is some of the best fieldwork I could get done about nationalism, observing the effort to construct a class of thinkers. The educational aspect of the national project is quite tangible, especially in anthropology, which is really being invigorated by this government. These are thoughts I have to be very careful about verbally expressing if I don't want to cause a violent hail storm reaction among most of the people I have known in Buenos Aires. Around some people, I go out of my way to talk about how much I love Cristina (and I use the word "love" just to be extra provocative) just because I know it is such an easy way to get the other person so irrationally bent out of shape, with others, I just don't say a word. The reaction that a name or an image can provoke is fascinating and scary, and the force of the reaction can come from the spaces and individuals that usually demonstrate reason. I am starting to think that it is just so easy to see things and be comfortable with that perspective, and that it is this very comfortability, not necessarily a fear, that leads to incredibly strange and bizarre turns of events. I always assumed that so many bad things came out of fear, but I think that so many come out of the desire to actually have convictions, especially when we get so comfortable with our own ideas of morality that we see what is bad and forget the cynicism that tells us that the other possibility really is worse. Idealism and cynicism in their appropriate moments, universalism and relativism, irreconcilable ideas that should always be in the head and at play with each other. It's really how I think of voting for politicians in the States anyway.

A lot of things I've learned have been from not trying to. I would say that my idea of Buenos Aires and Argentina has not really changed in the last year or more, but I'm trying to remember what I was doing last June. By then I already had a very fixed routine, whereas two years ago I almost remember the details better because everything was new. I spent my first month living with my cousins. When I look back on that experience I can laugh, at the time I cried, but I was pathetically thin-skinned on account of having just come to a new place, and I was legitimately living with crazy people (and really crazy, because even in hindsight they seem crazier than the average Argentine).

So for more than I year I have thought that I love in a place that is so beautiful and nostalgic and aesthetically and culturally incredible, but also incredibly tragic, and all of this punctuated by an ironic humor that is so brilliant it demonstrates a striking ability to be present.

The classism is intense. There is no royal family, but the aristocracy is almost treated as such, or acts like it. The gossip magazines are ass scandalous as the British ones, and there is a huge readership for them. I can't tell if there is a desire to emulate the British class system or the French one, I'm leaning towards believing the former.

At the same time there seems to be a determinedly anti-intellectual bent in the upper-middle class social milieus. I was out in Palermo at some place that looked like it could be anywhere, like so many places in Palermo. I was with a friend of mine who went to Columbia, but we didn't know each other then and met here. It is hard to describe how it manifests itself, because it really is just an aura, but the whole place reeked of superficiality. One of the most irritating parts of New York City is the pretentiousness and the desire to demonstrates some sort of depth, which is its own type of superficiality, but I actually see it as sort of admirable in that even pretending to have read a book or article puts symbolic capital in the act of reading and accumulating knowledge, when I'm in Palermo on the weekend with awful music (which I avoid at all costs), I look around and just feel that there is some sort of pride in being dumb, or at least just not caring about anything except for clothes and make up and plastic surgery...basically my unfair stereotype of LA. When I am with an aristocratic acquaintance, he often compliments me by telling me that I am intelligent, and I wonder if he has ever said that to a woman before. I assume that the answer is no, and not because he can't think of women as intelligent, but rather that he is never with women that would take that as a deep compliment, because being seen as intelligent is not one of the objectives. I wonder what that means for him, to tell me I'm intelligent and to feel that he is saying something really sweet, because in his mid-thirties it must be strange to be around somebody wh0 comes from many many different values, worlds apart. When I tell him he is smart, which he is, I wonder if I am one of the only people who tells him that, or values that, who isn't someone who works with him. It's so strange to think, because at Columbia so many people were considered attractive because of comments they made, or their ability to write, and then I see the opposite of that value system. This is one of my favorite people in Argentina, and even our lives in Argentina are based around completely different ideas and people. I just got back from watching Argentina beat Mexico to go to the quarterfinals of the World Cup with one of my university friends. We spent the game drinking beer and talking about the ethnographies we had chosen to write about for our final project for a class while clapping at the goals and analyzing the teams that have made it thus far and the future match ups. My friend Carlos is from Venezuela (all names are pseudonyms, often times ridiculous ones) and is brilliant. He is the only guy in the first year masters anthropology program and probably the most brilliant, or at least interesting and creative student. At the same time, the aristocrat, Rafael, was in some super expensive part of Buenos Aires province at the house of a shitty telenovela actress, who is really famous because of her last name, long legs and scandalous tabloid stories. We exchanged messages throughout the game, and I made fun of him for being there while I was with a "real live chavista", wishing him luck before the game started with a "fuerza Cristina". Maybe when he calls me intelligent he means daring to screw with him, and that probably isn't normal for a woman here, and it throws him off, and sometimes to be thrown off is beautiful.

Carlos and I were in a very traditional and not-touristy restaurant surrounded by 68 yr. old Argentine men shouting "peronista" at the television screen every time Diego Maradona made some ridiculous comment during the post-game press conference. I had hugged a self-proclaimed peronista this past Tuesday who had offered me a spot to sit with him and and his friends to watch the game in one of my favorite cafes. There is always the political with the football, or rather, Perón and Maradona/football are ubiquitous and inescapable parts of Argentine cultural memory. There were no seats left and they squeezed me in because I made them laugh by telling them I was English and winking, then adding on that I was part Brazilian (making me the ultimate football enemy). "Qué mala que sos!", and then I was given beer and a free lunch. With the aristocrat I play with his identity all the time, and the political is a huge identifier. Any person who can be stereotyped as part of the strata of society he comes from is most definitely conservative, probably scarily so. For his birthday I bought him an Evita magnet and a magnet/paper-doll Che, which he agreed were probably the best gifts that he would get. I go out of my way to read a pro-government newspaper when I see him just to ruffle his feathers, and talk about the "proyecto nacional" and how great it is just to play with him.

So, through anecdotes about football, an aristocrat and the weekend, peronismo has come up several times. It's not to talk about politics, it is that he is always here, or Eva, as are the old men that smoke cigarettes and complain about the state of the country in their Argentine dialect with it's Italian lilts and crescendos while shouting at Maradona and reading newspapers. Carlos and I watched the game with them on a small screen, not in some nice house with glittery people, but with newspapers scattered around and foul language, that every gender and class uses during football, and cheap beer. I turned to Carlos and said "sometimes the Argentines are just so Argentine." He knew exactly what I meant, and we laughed and watched Messi answer some questions from reporter and commented that he was only so quiet and understated because he hadn't grown up here; an Argentine who knows he is the best football player does not speak in a low voice, he is like Maradona before all of the absolute insanity, but showing some early stages of emotional instability mixed with arrogance. As Carlos and I walked out after paying the bill I said that I thought Maradona was the perfect representation of Argentina: brilliant, tortured, self-destructive, cult-of-personality-inspiring and completely bipolar. He smiled and agreed.

wow moment in class

My fantastic professor for Métodos y Técnicas de Trabajo de Campo, la doctora Rosana Guber, did this fantastic application of the classic anthropological genealogy chart applied to Argentina. She put it in the context of the different groups that were created in around the idea of justice for the perpetrators of the violations of human rights during the last military dictatorship. She used three groups to represent three different generations: Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo (who I believed celebrated their 33rd anniversary on this past Friday, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, who seek to find the children of their disappeared children, many of which were "adopted" by military families, and HIJOS, who seek justice for their parents, and many of which discovered their identities of children of the disappeared due to their own doubts surrounding their origins and sought out genetic testing to find out who their biological parents were).

Usually, if we start with the oldest generation, a grandmother would be the highest part of the matrilineal chart, followed by the mother, and then the child. But what happens when the children, HIJOS, are really the grandchildren of the grandmothers, and the mothers are of the same generation of the grandmothers, because both of these groups represent mothers of the disappeared. When there is a whole generational absence in the chart, these groups start to redefine a simple and classical chart. When one entire layer of the chart has been wiped out, these easily definable terms, children, grandmother, mother, signify something other than their simple and traditional meanings.

It was quite a moment, and provoked a silent and intense reaction, reflected in the faces of my classmates. "I wanted to apply this classical model to our own society," she stated so simply. I was in awe, and I felt something very deep inside move me. I felt a collective sorrow, but I also felt this alterity, because this is not my society, so I don't want my fellow students to see me react so strongly, because for them this is etched into their national identity as Argentines. And yet, after the time I have spent here, and the intrigue that such a devastating and fairly recent part of Argentine history provokes, it was hard not to feel so drawn in by such a brilliant application of model that is so taken for granted when studying classical forms of classification, usually found in the older and classical texts.

levi-strauss, nostalgia, deb oh, george harrison, beauty

Nostalgia is such a strange and gut-wrenching sensation, or impetus or a provocation of some latent desire. I suggested, during one of my classes (actually the first time I got up the courage to speak in one of my classes here) that the impetus for fieldwork, or the birth of anthropology and its desire to observe "premodern" man and society, as a desire to see the self in a mirror through which the ethnographer can examine himself, as the "noble savage", or whatnot, without the trappings of modern/Industrial Revolution/post Industrial Revolution, debris (can't think of a better word to end that sentence on). The obsession with the encounter with that which is vanishing, that part of mankind that remains "outside" of the modern world. Of course studying such a group involves an encounter that automatically makes the sacred profane. Overt academic talk aside, this moment really hit a chord within me. First of all, I finally had the balls to speak, as the yanqui, in my class, to point out an opinion that was not exactly where the class conversation was headed, so I was broaching another theme that I was deducing from the texts. I was stating that it was not just a cultural nostalgia that existed in the modern world, but that the very actors that went out and did their research were on some sort of journey on their own that could be read as having a personal search for origins as shaping a desire to find one's self in another, or to escape. Tristes Tropiques is one of my favorite books of all time, and there the narrative of voice of Levi-Strauss is not that of the cold researcher, but of someone in exile; a foreigner who is doing research, but also finds himself on a very personal journey, as he is, after all, not just a Frenchman, but a Jewish Frenchman who finds himself away from his home, looking at sunsets and pondering remembrance. His prose is so incredibly beautiful. How many books dedicate entire chapters to sunsets?

I am very far from home. I listen and look at so many things that my friends are doing in New York, especially those that are involved in art and music. My best friend from high school, Deborah Oh, just has a fantastic article written about her: http://www.in-color.net/index.php/article/deb_oh_up-and-coming_and_here_to_stay/
Upon reading the article, I realized that I haven't heard her sing for two years, don't know any of her compositions. I was listening to them tonight, and it was so strange to hear this voice, a voice I know so well, of someone I truly love, and to hear these words and notes...
One song I had heard before, which is a haunting one anyway, but truly got under my skin because of this maturity in her voice. I remember when Deb first started playing her compositions at Spence, and now I am here, in Buenos Aires, listening to this gorgeous person-gorgeous in every way-and I had this strange mix of feelings: distance and proximity.

In the last few days I have obsessively been watching the following youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utg9inWsSlI&feature=related
The two duets are beautiful. It's Paul Simon doing two acoustic pieces with George Harrison. There are multiple moments that I could go on and on about, but it would be too nerdy and boring and would lose this very thin and already weak line of thought I am pursuing. They do "Here Comes The Sun" first, which just hits me like sharp fine point in the heart. It is flooring in it's simplicity and the harmonizing of the voices is just so fresh and clear. The second song they do is "Homeward Bound". To make the connection between nostalgia and that song, or at least the experience of feeling a bit displaced from "home", or one of multiple homes, would be too obvious. I love George Harrison's voice, especially the verse that begins: "Every day's an endless stream of cigarettes and magazines...", and I love the chorus and how, after the arrow that is "Here Comes the Sun", the pain/beauty comes clear to me, because it is directed at people and a place and the experiences I have with these people and with my home city. I am so far away, I love so many of them that I haven't seen in almost two years, but many of them are still quite present in my life. It's not the same as being there, though. But I am on my own journey, too, which is here now. Am I looking for some mirror to see the "pure" me by distancing myself from the familiar?

Buenos Aires makes me feel nostalgic all of the time, which is one of its most powerful and magical qualities. How can I, as someone who is not from here, feel nostalgia? So many things do not relate to me, but I have made them have some relation to me in my mind, through making some emotional connection, a production on my part. I feel such strong emotions about the politics and culture of a place, of it's traditions...How did this happen? Besides my thesis, I am here on my own search, but I also realize, when I watch that youtube video 100 fucking times, that I do feel a displacement, a strange sense of closeness and distance simultaneously. I listen to Deborah and I hear this sexy woman's voice and I think of us being so silly together, and the goosebumps she gave me when would listen to her play for me when I was 16 and how it still has that effect, but this time its more spectral. I can't reach out and touch her, she is reduced to a sound that I can listen to as I do some other activity (although it was hard to use it as background music, I wanted to hear every word so that I could know her, because I don't want to stop knowing anybody I love).

I do feel very at home here, but at some point I will be homeward bound in the most nationalist sense of the term, but it will be more than that. It will be a complete re-adjustment and a coming home that goes beyond just geographical borders. It is a future that is not so close, but then again, "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" and time slips away, or rather escapes through the window while you're not looking. I want to stay on the same plane of time as my friends, I don't want us to feel changes so very differently, although that is inevitable.

I'm definitely not in exile. I am active (not that those in exile usually aren't) and I have very specific plans and goals. I want to do research, but after speaking in class, after watching and listening to moments that fill me with joy and bring me close to tears, I realize that I am doing a project that is much more profound, a project of disassembling; a dissembling that is a type of development. Me estoy desarmando y me estoy desarrollando. Desarmar es desarrollar. I am expanding and breathing and finding spaces and feeling close and distant and beauty and pain. One of the most hair-raising lines of Dylan is "beauty walks the razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine", which is preceded by the line: "I'm living in a foreign country, and I'm bound to cross the line". The first part (which I've written second), literally speaks to my situation and multiple and continual experiences of not being certain of where and how to be, the second part (which I wrote first), always has provoked a strong electric shock through my body. The image of the razor, sharpness, pain. Bob asserts that beauty walks that sharp edge, it's on a border, but it's already in a danger zone. He has a future goal of owning beauty as he is looking back, as the rest of "Shelter From the Storm" is a re-telling in the past tense. He ends his journey with the desire to "turn back the clock to when god and her were born"...we all want to go back, we all want to find what is behind hidden in some secret in the future; we want to find the fulfillment of the present, which aches due to a connection to the past, in the present. Nostalgia is a desire to travel through time, a desire accentuated through a short emotional journey that leaves us with a longing for some higher calling: art, expeditions that lead us to sunsets, cities with crazy taxi drivers.

Maya Angelou has a quote that says that most times we don't remember what people say or do, but how they make us feel. If anthropology is driven by some nostalgia, at least in its formative stages of the discipline, it is based on what we feel, what Claude Levi-Strauss felt when he related remembrance to the sunset. I remember how so many people I love make me feel, even when I hear them singing and know that I am just listening to a recording, or to see something so beautiful it does hurt in such a pleasurable way that you don't wan it to stop. Space is marking distance and proximity as one and the same and anthropology and George Harrison's voice singing about cigarettes are equivalent.

being a masters student in BA

So I enrolled in this public university that has an anthro program run by a friend of a Columbia prof., who I adore and saw when he was here for an anthro conference that I attended at the very end of last September. We had spoken about the fact that I wanted to do a research project about narratives, images, violence and trauma as parts of the struggle to define Argentine national identity, and relating these themes to a specific moment, the 2001-2002 economic crisis (La Crisis). So, it is a Sunday night and I am entering my fourth week of school.

Here is what I can say so far:
The quality of higher education is really really good. The professors are amazing, and even though a masters isn't free at a public university, I'm paying 500 pesos a month. I would convert that into dollars, but by the time I finish writing this, the value of the peso may have changed, so I will leave it up to whoever is reading this to look up the most current value and do the math themselves. The paying on a monthly basis is weird. I paid late, and it really just didn't matter.

There is no: here is your syllabus, now go to BookCulture on 112th St. and they will have all of the books for your class ready for you to go and spend a ridiculous amount of money on. Everything is photocopies. It really adds up, when you have to constantly print and copy, and it's a stupid thing to complain about, but it is such a hassle to even get the readings. I have classes in two different buildings that are their own institutes, both of which make up the Centro de Antropología Social at the UNSAM (Universidad Nacional de [General] San Martin). There are the administrative staff that are in charge, among many many other tasks, of getting all of the materials to the photocopy shop, each institute uses it's own, the closest. One my classes just got it's readings ready the end of the third week of class, but we still had a ton of reading assignments. The prof. kindly suggested that we do more of our reading and we pointed to him that they weren't available yet, which troubled him, but was out of his control. At Columbia one spends a lot of time feeling guilty about the reading they never get to, I am trying to let go of the shit-I-didn't-do-my-reading-for-class guilt, because if you actually are incapable of accessing the readings, it's a good excuse that everyone in your class has.

There are a lot of foreigners. Venezuelans, Colombians, Brazilians, French.

Anthropology is taught in a much more traditional manner, as higher education in Argentina is highly influenced by French and British models, at least in terms of the social sciences, or even classifying anthro as a social science (of course I'm talking about social/cultural, not medical, forensic, etc.). I'm scared that after taking classes called "Anthropology of the War Machine" or "Hidden Worlds, Secrets Spaces: Childhood and Modernity", I'm too out there for sort of conversations or class topics, but it's a an "out there" that really needs this grounding. I need to learn how to do fieldwork, which is a required class, and definitely a huge gap in my ability to do any sort of project instead of just thinking about it.

I was set up with an adviser as soon as was admitted who works on the same theme as want to, which is the anti-undergrad CU experience. He answers emails, he is pushing me hard, he talks ideas and methods through with me and he is quite impressive.

It's weird to be the girl from the States. People just assume I don't know Spanish, which is a sort of a strange assumption, as it would be sort of strange for me to keep going to three hour classes if language were an issue. Also, after almost two years here, I better not have language issues, except for academic writing (that will be my biggest challenge). Of all of the foreigners in my classes, I have been here the longest. On Friday, I was sitting with my maybe sort of new friends, one is from Venezuela, a guy, one girl from Colombia, and four Argentine girls. The passed the mate around, but never offered it to me, which I could write a mini-ethnography on. I've probably had ten million times more mate than the Luis or Marcela, who are South American, but from very different cultures than that of Argentina, whereas I am seen as such an outsider, that I'm considered so distant from so many things, yet I know the city better, or understand the biting irony more. I do have the non-native speaker accent, though, and so I am always thought of as this complete weirdo non-native speaking yanqui who is super-informed about Argentine politics. It's so common to be from the States or Europe and to have an Argentine ask you "why are you here" and laugh a the ridiculous idea of someone from the "primer mundo" choosing to be in Argentina.

I love being a student, which I knew before, but this new huge life change is just really showing. I love talking about ideas, doing reading, being in classes, loving a topic so much you just want to keep reading and talking and researching. So I have confirmed, not surprisingly, what my passion is, and when I do my doctorate in the States I will have had my first graduate student experience in Buenos Aires, and that will be one other reminder of how much this place will mean for the rest of my life. I will always remember this city as being a huge part of my transformation into adulthood, whatever that is, as a space of transformation in general, or of finding myself as I was already, but coming to understand it more...
My time here gets richer and richer. I know that I don't want to spend my life here, but I do know that my life has been and is being hugely shaped by having lived here, now including on an academic and intellectual formation of my mind (if that makes any sense).

taxi rides

I think I could justify blowing all my birthday money away on taxi rides through Buenos Aires. When you know you are getting cheated out of your money, you are at least seeing routes and buildings and landscapes of buildings and people that are all new. Even though transportation can take so much of one's day, it is easy to forgot how very big Buenos Aires is. I saw a different part of the city today, which, once I was at my destination, where I have been before, was no longer different, but the route, which on first thought made no sense to me, brought me there as if it were a different place. I saw a neighborhood, and the lines connecting it to mine, as reconstructed.

I didn't see the underbelly of any neighborhood, but I saw coming from a different geographical angle, coming through from a different street via a route that I didn't even know was possible. And the ride was spectacular! The cabdriver could see that I was questioning his every turn. He repeatedly try to put me at ease, explaining his reasoning (which was very clear, but still seemed unbelievable to me. It was later in the afternoon, probably around 5:30 pm, which is one of my favorite times of day because of how the sunlight becomes really yellow, not just light, but a light with color, and it changes the colors of the buildings and creates shadows and reflections. I always loved walking through Central Park at that time, after 4ish in the afternoon in spring or fall. Perhaps it is one of the most flattering hours for any city, although in Buenos Aires there is something for each hour.

I always loved taking a taxi across central park, from the West Side back home to the Upper-East, at night with the window cracked open. I would feel like I was in some scene from The Great Gatsby, absorbing the grandeur of New York. In Buenos Aires you don't fell the arcing turn in it's elegant half loop, the suavity of the return, you are always subject to the chaos of traffic, or just the possibility of chaos. A violent chaos, but not necessarily violent, as in something will hurt you, but the potential for everything to go off plan. There is so much life in this city, and so much passion, maybe because it's a life that is really incorporated as constant survival instinct, a sensation that everything could go wrong. Preparation is so useless.

I am yet to take a taxi in which the seat belt works, and every time I test to see if it does I feel like I have "tourist" painted across my forehead. A true porteña would probably never even think of the seat belt. I go through this whole neurosis of: I am being such a foreigner to care about the seat belt, if something happens and I die and I could have survived had I just strapped myself in, my father's I told you so will haunt me in the afterlife, and so the seat belt becomes this weird cultural encounter between two mentalities: that which tries to be ready and reduce damage, and that which says, fuck it, this shitty car is going to go really fast and pay no attention to the traffic etiquette and I may as well resign myself to that fact and enjoy the adrenaline. The seat belt betrays me in its inability to even attempt to save through its inadequacy and it betrays me desire to keep a low profile, pretend I am like everybody else here, not be so foreign.

vacation

Back from the south. What a ton of good it did for me. I am seriously so much healthier for having done. It was a very different trip form last year's. First of all I was alone, not with the lovely Noah
Rosenblum nor the incredible Nicholas Hayes.

I went to the Neuquén lake region, San Martín de los Andes and Villa La Angostura. All green mountains, all brilliantly sparkling water. It was amazing to be alone. I felt so safe and it was filled with vacationing Argentines.

On the recommendation of a friend I treated myself to a birthday auto-regalo (probably 506th) and went to a Relais & Chateaux called Las Balsas with a view of the bay with the mountains in the not-to-far distance. Beautiful. Treated myself to the té completo, which is really meant for at least 3 people, maybe 2 hungry people. I went for it. It was exquisite. Finished it off with a scotch and sat there for more than two hours as the sun went down. Treated like a queen for a few hours while bumming around out of one bag and two pairs of pants.

I made sure to bring one nice silk shirt, knowing that I would be attending such a posh place. My shirt, as expected, had gotten quite wrinkled after a few days of sitting in my bag. My mother taught me that if you take a hot shower and hang a garment in the bathroom, it's like steaming your clothes for free. Unfortunately the hostel bathroom was very small and the water didn't exactly stay in the shower stall, so my shirt ended up wrinkle-less and sopping wet. So I ended up 15 km from the hostel, but really in a different world all together, with a damp shirt...at least it wasn't obvious and I was sure to disguise my travel fatigue with make-up. A beautiful day of luxury.

The next day went to go hike to the Bosque de los Arrayanes, this forest of strange trees (although they may technically not be trees, but whatever, flora of some type with trunks and branches). Beautiful.

So much more of Patagonia to see, such a long country. So much more of Argentina to see. What a beautiful, beautiful place. I felt such inner-peace and determination as to what my goals are, what I am striving for. It wasn't like I resolved anything, more like everything was clarified.

My camera broke...second one since I've been in Argentina.

CONSUMPTION: delincuentes, chorros, gil laburantes

I had said something about consumption before...not sure exactly where my thoughts were as a few weeks have passed. Nevertheless, the theme is on the mind and in the eyes constantly. There is the consumption of images and and images of consumption. So really there is a circulation of both images and consumption as we respond to images and consume them, often as messages encouraging us to consume. And then, within all of this, I have found images of children. Children are so much a part of consumer culture. Things are made or advertised as products for children, and the child has been transformed into a consummate consumer, part of a larger capitalist system of accumulation without any inkling of what type of larger system this desire to purchase is playing into.

I was watching a television program on delinquents around the ages of 14 or 15 in the Provincia of Buenos Aires. They looked dirty, not necessarily homeless, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and paco. Some said that they had real day jobs, to keep up appearances, to have some sort of currency of legitimacy (currency not as money but as a symbol of value). Legitimate work isn't offering the quantity necessary, or perhaps only non-laboring cash holds real meaning, but to be a laborer and lead that life is to be a "gil laburante". This term is relatively new and used among younger people. Gil is a character or characteristic that has long existed in tango or gaucho culture. A gil is easily taken advantage of, he is not sufficiently cynical about the pernicious world that resides around him, thus he inevitably becomes it's victim and is taken advantage of without mercy. The term "gil laburante", which these adolescent boys use, is the worker who is robbed daily by society at large. He works and works, but he lives in very humble conditions. The gil laburante is an idiot because he works honestly in a world where that only fucks you over. There is no way that the analytic abilities of these "delincuentes" o "pibes chorros" can be overlooked. They have a cynicism that is not based on some lie, they are the anti-lie in that they see the violence inflicted on those that choose a legitimate life without robbing others or carrying guns. So, in a very important manner, they are choosing to resign themselves to reality that is unjust and cares nothing about the suffering of it's victims, of the gil laburantes, and so, in turn, reproduces this larger and more invisible violence to interactions that are easily perceivable, which then become the problem with the inseguridad. So much energy and footage is spent of these chicos because they have faces and wear clothes and use certain terms, but they do less damage than what produces them, than the reality they are hip and their miming of a larger violence on a smaller level. The worker is an idiot, there is no sympathy; he refuses to play by the rules of the game by insisting on the written rules, the laws, which only makes him a victim. The gil laburante is victimizing himself through his own naivete.

Consumption is always tied to labor. For these boys, their real work is the illegal type, the type that sometimes requires killing or harming other human beings. The program was meant to show these kids as ridiculous and blood loving and lazy and scary. It was scary, but there was more depth to the subjects than the journalists discussed. They oversimplified their frame to make the program part of the security crisis paranoia that is so perversely popular right now. The oversimplification and less than mediocre quality of the program clearly had an agenda, but I do believe that the words of these subjects were not very edited, but left quite untouched. There was an honesty that I felt was transmitted through their tone and matter-of-factness. There was a clear intelligence that was conveniently never addressed or built upon. There was obviously no conversation about how this violence was a response to and recognition of living in a very violent society. The friend I was watching with commented to me about the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption among people that really don't have money, but use what they have, and in this case rob, oftentimes with violence. The absurdity that someone would steal and spend everything for a pair of shoes or a shirt that is associated with a certain brand. An item that just signifies conspicuous and ridiculous consumption; consumption of luxury, not of necessity. I remember at the MERCOSUR anthropology conference I attended in late Sept/early Oct. someone from the audience asked one of the professors about the phenomenon of indigenous Argentine teenagers in very poor provinces in the north with flashy cell phone cases. He responded that it was not so simple that we could judge it as bad, that is is far more complex than something which deserves a simple value judgment. I wish I could remember more of what he said. I have the notes somewhere, but not within reach. It was Alejandro Grimson, who I am so excited to study with, and it was this response that really illustrated his brilliance. Unfortunately I am not equally as apt to be able to do justice to his response. Perhaps the point is that a global capitalist culture makes desires appear as needs, live or die needs. So much of the world dreams of having non-necessities that such a small and select percentage of the global population can only have access to. The object has the status of being a luxury object, and it also stands in as luxury itself, because in a way it is accessing a world that is exterior. However, this object does not exactly mean the same thing in varying contexts. When an item is stolen, or worn in with clothes that are not equally as expensive, or there is so much attention to the embellishment to an extreme, that this seemingly absurd obsession with accumulation of ridiculous things, cannot simply be dismissed as a stupidity. Consumption is a conversation, it is a statement, it is a cultural reflection, it is buying and owning what is outside of one's reach and making it one's own. There are parallels in the violence of 15 year old threateing someone with a gun (or using it) for some money (maybe not even a huge amount) to buy something that doesn't help his family eat better or meet any fundamental needs. We are, though, in a society that advertises objects as if they were necessary nutrients.

Interesting how I am consuming images of these boys talking about consuming; consumption of drugs, of items, of cash...They are consuming products of violence, they are consuming violence, and they are reproducing it on a smaller scale. They ridicule the gil laburante who does not realize or rebel against the his already ridiculed space, his space of worker which is given a lot of lip service, but is ridiculed by a system that sees him as disposable or as not even there, or there and not valuable as a person. The gil laburante is consumed in a way that this boys refuse to be. But they are consumed by something. I don't want to make it trite or make less of their position by moralizing it, but they are consumed by a desire, perhaps like the desire you see in the glassy eyes of someone who is drugged. Like the children that live on the street who supposedly inhale chemicals to leave their lives of pain and see God or the Virgin Mary (Patas Arriba gives some examples). Those children are consumed with a pain, and they consume drugs to escape it.

I need to get some sleep and I am not getting everything down how I wanted or even all that I wanted. I am exhausted and with a fever. But last thought: This television program did not shamelessly dehumanize these adolescents, but they are often dehumanized in discourses surrounding security and delinquency. These boys talked about killing as if it were without a thought, sounding like shooting was done without thinking about pain, but as something easy or as the only way to prevent one's self from ending up on the wrong side of an aimed gun one's self. There is an obvious dehumanization of the victim. The gil laburante is dehumanized because he is ubiquitous and yet almost doesn't exist. He is dehumanized by the economy, by policies, by his ridiculousness in the eyes of his son. Galeano is right. We are living in the world upside down. How else can explain the figure of the Fool as represented by laborer?

tango, dressing up

I was thinking about certain spaces inspire us, or indicate that we are obligated, to change our appearance. We are all performing social role all of the time, but without realizing it. However certain spaces seem to require that we act in a different role, one that has unspoken rules about dress or codes of communication. The space of the tango, where it is practiced, has unspoken expectations about dress and behavior.

Monday night I was rushing out the door to go to a milonga near my house. Even to go to bar with people my age, if I were in a rush, I wouldn't change my clothes or put on make-up, but the milonga makes me think twice about my appearance. I am dressing for a show that I am playing a role in. I have always struggled with the role-playing. Sometimes it's intriguing, but sometimes I don't want to have to obsessively think about my appearance about beauty, about assuming an identity that fits into a location that can seem so distant from my state of mind. Tango can be this appealing beautiful relationship, a way of relating with others, but it can also be this awful milonga environment in which everybody looks everyone over three times over, and we all sit on the sides, while not dancing, talking about everyone who is out there, sometimes spilling their guts, in improvised corporal self-expression.

children?

Such a long time since last writing. Writer's block and also feeling so self-conscious and out of practice at expressing myself through writing. Anyway, I've been doing "research" for this project I'm trying to do on the 2000-2001 Argentine economic crisis. It's completely tragic and the consequences are still so haunting. However, whenever I have a conversation about crisis, or trauma, two main themes are repeated, or at least that's how I'm seeing it (perhaps I'm just trying to formally frame things, which could be a huge error on my part). #1: There is a complete obsession with security, especially of delinquency, specifically among adolescents. It's interesting how children can seem more threatening than adults, because it seems wrong? There is something about young men, some ambivalence when childhood seems to be perverse in it's absence. Eduardo Galeano (in the middle of reading Patas Arriba y El Mundo al Revés), discusses the obsession with security at length. He strikes a balance in pointing to the desire to have security at the cost of justice (thinking that there is a strong tie-in to the Bush years, especially the use of fear in the 2004 presidential election). How paranoia allows for people to see violence against young people, usually of darker skin and very poor, as completely excusable. As a society dehumanizes and objectifies young bodies (child prostitution can be seen as related), there is a loss in hope of the future, and a longing for a past that did not seem to be so very dangerous and when social labels such as "child" seemed more normal, or at least meant that there was a definable space between infancy and toddler and adult. There are the theories that link national identity and the child, the growth of the nation and the maturation of a child. What kind of nationalism, or rather nation-identity, am I witnessing here? I see an adult brother talk to drugged-out teenagers and they ask me about where to get cocaine in front of a this guy's (I'm guessing the age) 8 yr. old brother (maybe younger). These two teenagers have glassy eyes. They say that cocaine costs about 20 pesos and they only have 10. I lie and say I would help them if I could, but I'm honestly without money on me. A lie, but I sound genuine. The thing is, I'm aware of this sickening feeling in my stomach that says run, but I'm a block from my house and they see me all the time and now I'm their neighbor. Better to be on good terms, to win some kind of agreement that is unspoken but based on trust. I'm also perversely intrigued, playing between fear and curiosity. This is fieldwork, right? I am intrigued, but there is something bigger than me, a talk about drugs in front of a child, glassy eyes that say that their already high and want more. I'm coming home from a milonga with make-up on, leggings and a short dress that I often use to go dance tango. I'm leaving this closed-in, exclusive space that calls for a certain etiquette and stepping into another exclusive space. I'm curious about why they are letting me in. The house is beautiful, they are standing in front. This young adult and his brother seem like squatters and I think there are multiple families living inside. A beautiful building whose architecture can be observed from outside despite it's state of disrepair and neglect. Are they engaging me in a conversation to rob me? Or did I engage them by asking for a cigarette and wanting to be friendly; I always feel that it's better to be on good terms with those living close to me, it's true that there can be some sort of security in that relationship. I have been in similar situations before and I always get out clean and safe, and I repeat the same risks over and over again, testing myself, testing my own fear, seeing how far this perverse game of attraction and repulsion will take me.
Buenos Aires is gripped by a fear of such people. It can seem irrational, it leads to the most awful comments you could imagine, but there is an uneasy navigation between not letting one's self become occupied and controlled by fear and understanding the darker side of human beings. There is the Argentine equivalence of a crack epidemic. It's on a much wider scale, and there is the cheapest version of crack, supposedly permanently damaging your brain and laced with glass shards that is sold outside of schools and in slums at the price of a bus ride. Argentina is the highest drug consumer in comparison with it's neighbors. Children are becoming killers. Robbery has gone down, but violent crime is going up. The suburbs of Buenos Aires are far more dangerous and contradictory than the city. As Galeano points out, the suburbs have their closed communities where a wealthy child is also robbed of his childhood through a type of classist apartheid. And the fear is not coming out of nowhere, it is coming from somewhere, often from rumor, more often than not from a sinister media that has it's own political loyalties, but also from a bit of truth. Young people from a neighboring slum are becoming killers that break into beautiful house and killing before robbing, sometimes only running away with ten pesos. The drugged children are those that seem to lose any perspective of reality, of life, but are they not also being robbed of their own right to be a child, to live without a pain that leads to a deep and dark desire to numb it? The police are corrupt, they are violent, they often shoot first before even looking for a weapon or even a threat. And yet, one I see an officer on the corner I feel relieved. Politically I think the city's government borders on fascist, but I felt this paranoia after my night time chat and when I walked home calmly, I ran to my apartment as soon as I got through the front door, pretty much impossible to open without a key, and then unlocked the two other doors to my apartment. So, basically, I'm feeling safer because I'm behind three doors and I feel secure, but I'm haunted by this 8 yr. old. I don't want to be another paranoid BA inhabitant, but I see the contradiction between my social conscience and the individual me. Now I feel a desire to go back, to ask them about the crisis, to answer questions I have that almost don't exist, but are really just ways to get information. I don't even know what I want, but I want to be closer, I want to feel trusted, I want to feel that this anthropological thing can work, that my interests can be satiated. It's not like I'm thinking of going to some Congo war zone. I'm really quite safe. But there is this foreign-ness, this novelty that pulls me in and warns me to stay away. There are children, but they don't have a childhood. There is cocaine for 20 pesos; divide by 3.80 and get the dollar equivalent. It's real, so real it didn't seem real and it was too real. It's the ambivalence between neighbors and outsiders, between adults and learning to walk, form sentences, my inclusion in a place and language that is obviously not my own. It is an ambivalence that is scary and awful but incredibly fascinating, and only a perversity, that exists within me, could see it so, to use to my own devices to achieve some written product. I could get lost in it, not know where I begin or end, not know when to fear or to get closer, not locate myself as neighbor or researcher or foreigner or Spanish speaker. Limits, boundaries, gray, danger, propaganda.