Tangoville

While it’s true that one’s imagination can never be fitted over the reality of a place one visits – the reality is more dense, more physically striking and often disappointing compared to the imagined. Personally, I am always confronted with two realities – I suppose I am a comparative soul and new sensations are always rubbing against my prejudices of the familiar signs and tokens of my home. What was I expectiing of Buenos Aires?  I suppose I imagined narrower streets with elaborate building facades, laundry hanging here and there, cobbled streets in places, harder acoustics - but I think that is just Barcelona Gottika or parts of Rome - not this place.  Streets are wide, traffic is often light but constant, sidewalks are generous but ... well I have already described them.  No pongi stakes at least.

I am reminded of the Jewish folktale of the long-suffering but devout man who is offered the opportunity to select any other life he chooses by his generous G_d. In a nutshell, after endless searching for a life that would suit him better he decides that he prefers his present life despite his challenges. Somehow, regardless of the richness, variety or sweetness of another existence one always wants to return to the familiar.  I wouldn’t give up being a Canadian living in this time and place - regardless of travails, pain, discomfort and uncertainty (Harper,Ford, Canadian Senate, Winter) - for anything.

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We hit the jackpot last night.  I was beginning to despair that all my preconceptions of Buenos Aires were complete misses.  On the recommendation of our host in Palermo we sauntered up the street a few blocks to catch some music and ‘light fare’.  Cafe Vinilo is a wide-ish hole in the wall.  Unprepossessing from the outside and perhaps more unprepossessing on the inside, yet it was rich with Argentine soul.  We were directed to the crowded nightclub at the rear of the building – it held less than one hundred people.  We sat in near complete darkness at tiny round wooden tables. Service was glacial but when the food and wine arrived – GRROWLLLL! Hamburguesas like we have never tasted; rich and dense beef with minimal dressing. The wine - some sort of Malbec but easily suited to the most discerning vampire.

A smallish group of musicians – pianist, cello, saxophone, flute, acoustic bass, drums – started with a familiar Gabriel Faure piece – ‘Pavane’ (this version is like a neutered dog compared to the one played by La Somnambula – no offense Hammond or Hugo (none taken wags Hugo)) then launched into Piazolla-esque pieces that stirred us deeply.  After each piece there was heavy applause and guttural cries of appreciation – not a north American reaction – almost Baptist church-like in quality but add a liter of gitane.  Throughout each piece (photo above) an artist drew images of magical imagination: crippled men (is that me?) and dark, mysterious women took form, were modified, shifted blurrily – pan to threatening crows on stark limbs.  A woman’s half-naked body is revealed, lying on the grass, dense spikes of leaves appear foreground and background, pan, a young boy stares into a pond where a frog sits half submerged in the water – the artist’s brush worked quickly and unerringly, narrating the wordless music, creating a world of love, loss, danger, suspicion. At one point a figure leaps from a cliff – is caught in mid-air. End of Song.  It was magical.  I once saw a performance at Harbourfront Toronto where Winnipeg’s Christine Fellows delivered her quirky songs.  An illustrator similarly drew images on acetate and joined and animated the images that were projected on a screen – but this was somehow more cinematic and more immediate.  I couldn’t understand the technology he used to created the images – afterwards I went up and saw the rig – an ingenious use of cheap bond paper, india ink, a glass plate, a webcam, a 45 degree front-silvered mirror all run through a simple Mac app and projected behind the performing group. The smeary quality was really just digital lag but it had appeared as an analog artifact.  All through the performance I was flashing on Jane Lowbeer’s work from long ago – mid 90’s?  Even earlier – Crankee Consort days.  

Jane has opened her show at Loop Gallery last weekend.  Don’t miss it. She has returned to painting her rich, investigative painting.  Lovely, figurative work sometimes featuring my friend and troubler of frets, Richard Peachey.

We left sated.  The night was cool and a brief rain had left the streets rich and greasy with smears of semaforo winking.  BA was closed up at midnight, the tumbling sidewalks added to the exotic sense of shift. Or was it the Malbec?

Today we took the Subte (subterranean?) downtown.  Fares are cheap.  We emerged at the last station on the line: Catedral.  We popped up like a jack-in-the-box into a mass of humanity. The streets were a throng.  Observations:  the BA women almost ALL wear their hair long. Except for up-dos the style is universal.  Straight, plain, little intervention of scissor or colour.  Shoes are mostly shabby – not a criticism just an observation – espadrilles and battered, age-ravaged loafers.  Few wore suits even though it was presumably the financial center of the city.  I felt like I might be looking at a Toronto of the future when the 1 percent is the .25 percent and almost all of us are relegated to quasi-poverty – the uber-wealthy nowhere to be seen.  All around young men and women were discretely (or not too discretely) offering money changing service. They obviously recognized us as Ingles because they invariably addressed us in English.  Funnily, wherever we travel the natives regard Sophie as one of them.  It didn’t matter if it was Japan, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Mexico… people would look directly at Sophie and speak to her in their native tongue even though I had asked the question.  (‘Why don’t you tell him’ their expressions said, ‘You are one of us’) and so it was at a cafe where I addressed the waitress in my ersatz Spanish.  She looked directly at Sophie and asked her for the order.  I would answer each question but she waved her hand as if a fly were distracting her from understanding the response from the mute addressee.  Weird.  We always have a laugh about it afterwards.  Sophie has the universal face it seems.

Downtown is frowsy, lacquered with graffiti and crowded but fascinating.  The streets are often thematic (electronics here, lamps there, musical instruments for these two blocks.  Booksellers EVERYWHERE) – much like older European sectors. I tried out a guitar – Sophie started rolling the old eyeballs, time to move on.

Tomorrow will be less ambitious.  BTW, forget to write my impressions of the famous Cemetario where Evita lies ‘neath stone. Will shoehorn that into a later missive. Death is impressive here.