Buenos Aires – First Impressions

Let me start off by getting one thing straight: the food in Buenos Aires is almost all good.

It took me six days and approximately fifteen meals before I got a bad one. And that was in a Chinese restaurant, so think I was just begging for it at that point.

I find that arriving in any city I plan to live in for a period of time arouses a complicated mixture of emotions; a state of extreme selfishness and extreme humility. I don’t know a single soul so I’m driven back into the most basic need for companionship and acceptance, yet I’m looking around and thinking, this is great, this sucks, what the fuck is that supposed to be, this is amazing, I’m going to eat here all the time, etc. It’s also a time for dispelling myths and fantasies.

I find that arriving in a city I plan on living in for any prolonged period of time elicits the most childish responses from me, for better or for worse. Naturally, I’m wide-eyed and open mouthed, drinking it all in, the sights, the smells, the shapes the sidewalks take, how the people look. But I’m also less inhibited and find myself talking at length to strangers, telling them I’m looking for a room, what’s the best place to have a coffee in the area, how can I rent a cell phone for a few months, both as a query for information and also as an icebreaker, and people have been exceedingly helpful. For instance, Sonya, the girl who works at the Palermo Soho branch of Notorious, a CD shop, helped me look on her computer online for rooms and called her friend to help me with a mobile phone, not to mention recommend music to me. The woman at Café Orsana on Jorge Luis Borges already knows me and what I like to drink (a café con crema), and all the guys who work at the hostel are always giving me names of musicians to listen to and gigs to check out. A willingness to laugh, share your story, and make a possible fool of yourself go a long way here. I also people remember a Spanish-speaking American of Chinese descent.

I was lucky enough to meet not one, but two great groups of people in the hostel, American university students studying in Santiago, Chile who were kind enough to welcome me into their circles to eat great food, take a bike tour, attend a milonga (tango dancing salon) drink at fancy bars, and get our ears blown out at nightclubs. It almost made me forget I needed to actually find a permanent place to stay. Luckily, craigslist has made it to Bs As and I think I’ve secured a room in a flat in Palermo Hollywood, near the Botanical Gardens and a short walk to the hip cafes, restaurants, and boutiques of Palermo Soho. Details are to be worked out tonight.

A few of the more superficial observations I’ve made:

* Yes, it’s true. You can have an amazing, grass-fed steak for $4.50. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

* The mullet is alive and well – nay – thriving in Buenos Aires.

* People can actually get a signal on their cell phones in the Subte (metro), yet are thankfully discreet about telling their personal lives to the entire train.

* When you thank someone, they will usually say, “No, please,” or “No, it’s nothing,” but usually something that begins with the word “No.”

* Buenos Aires is in a constant war for small change and bills. It’s like a game. If you have a $100 peso note, you’re screwed. If you have monedas (coins), you’re good. Don’t ask.

…on the road again…

Today I leave for another sojourn out of the country, this time way down to the southern hemi to Buenos Aires for three months of studying tango music, spanish, and the age old art of charring a good hunk of beef. It’s always a bit nervewracking getting ready to leave the country; you’ve got to put all your affairs in order, call your credit card companies, put the cell on hold, photocopy every piece of government issue ID, print out boarding passes, get enough cash to exchange and last but not too much that you start to sweat from thinking about how much you’re carrying around… buy reserve toiletries, wash and dry your clothes on super-hot one last time because who knows the next time they’ll see the inside of a machine dryer, map routes and itineraries, charge the iPod and camera, etc… It’s all very meticulous and anxiety-inducing, but once I get moving it’s good and I’m operating mostly on instinct.

I’ll be revisiting my youth by crashing in hostels sleeping six to a room for the remainder of the month before I can (hopefully) find a more permanent living situation (hopefully) with natives so I can (hopefully; did you know that using ‘hopefully’ in this context is grammatically incorrect, as it literally means I’ll be doing these things ‘full of hope’? which in this case is actually true as well) improve my spanish and learn the local culture, and yes, with so much hope in my heart, maybe be invited to one of these mythical weekend asados (bbqs) I’ve read about that sounds essentially like the ritual sacrifice of so many cattle in someone’s ranch-house in the suburbs.

I know it sounds like I’m hyping the beef consumption aspect of this trip a lot, and if you didn’t know me you’d think that was the entire reason I’m going down there (and if you do know me, you probably know it is) but it’s not, it’s more like… a huge perk. I’m hoping to have the chance to learn about another culture not only via its people but most importantly via its music which is something I haven’t had the chance to do yet; a shameful thing for a composer I must admit. The way we sing as a people says a lot about who we are as a people, and this world is too damn small to not enjoy that collision course on foreign turf. The fact that tango music just happens to be among the most beautiful music on the planet is again, just a huge perk.

What I do hope is that what castellano I do have will help me land a room a helluva lot easier than it did in Madrid, where I was telling scores of renters that I was “interesting in your bedroom” before Señor Luis, the bespectacled and bearded sire of MuchoMadrid hostel oh-so discreetly slipped me a scrap of paper with the correctly written, much less suggestive phrase.

So as I’ll be using this forum as my primary diary (I dislike mass emails as much as the next guy), keep your eye out for more (mis)adventures. If you don’t see anything written here in a couple of weeks, call my mother and arrange for my bail.

Need a free vaccination? Check your heterosexuality at the door. (Buenos Aires, here I come.)

Come Autumn, I will again be loosed onto another unsuspecting country to mangle the language, plunder the culture, and most likely make a complete ass of myself. Hopefully along the way, I’ll pick up a few productive things. The country in my crosshairs here is Argentina, and the city will be Buenos Aires. I’ll be there from September 18 – December 17 studying tango music, practicing my Spanish, and eating enough red meat to clog the Lincoln Tunnel. Consider this an open invitation for anyone who wants to come visit.

Naturally, you have to prepare for a few things before heading to an unfamiliar country, such as debilitating infectious diseases. While I don’t expect to be drinking the marsh runoff from the Rio de la Plata, it’s always a good idea to get a Hepatitis A vaccination just in case, as my friend Dr. Roger Yu, M.D. puts it, “someone wipes their butt and then prepares your food.” I guess you just never know.

Unfortunately, the HealthyNY insurance plan thru Aetna does not cover immunizations. Of course they don’t. Why would they want to prevent you from getting a disease when the only way they make money is when you have to be treated for one? Always an original thinker, Dr. Yu suggested I go to a gay clinic, since they provide free vaccinations for high-risk gay men in New York City. So with the help of the ever-popular website, www.hepclinics.com, I found a spot in Chelsea run by the NYC Health Department that does walk-in Hepatitis A vaccinations. Perfect.

There was of course the small detail of my not being gay. I have however paid 7 years of New York city and state income tax, money that’s helped fund these public health initiatives and therefore consider myself just as entitled to a free shot of liver crippling HepA regardless of what I do behind closed doors and with whom I do it. So wearing my tightest t-shirt that says ‘Robot Power’ on it, I dove headlong into paperwork that placed me in a category with ‘people who use street drugs’ and ‘men who have sex with other men.’ I was tempted to write in the margin: ‘not that there’s anything wrong with that…’ Although there was an extremely attractive and scantily clad woman sitting across from me in the waiting room(clearly a litmus test planted to weed out heteros looking for a free shot), I tried my hardest to focus on checking out the other dudes, giving them the ‘Oh yeah, I’m totally, totally gay, too’ nod, and to sit with my legs crossed in the feminine scissor-style, bobbing my top foot rhythmically (I find I do this quite naturally, and perturbingly so). I even tried doing that thing women do where you snake one ankle around the opposite calf from the front, but it was excruciating and I was trying to be gay, not organ-less.

It’s probably a product of my Chinese DNA, but I’m always looking for a bargain, so I had them throw in a tetanus/diphtheria shot while they were at it. What the heck, just load me up, I said. Any other diseases I can sample while I’m already here? How about typhoid? The doctor on staff said no, but if I want, Long Island Hospital in Brooklyn doles those out at bargain basement prices.

I have to say, saving up to $100 in vaccinations by just pretending to be gay for an hour is definitely an experience I recommend to anybody. I mean, where’s Michael Moore when you need him, and why don’t all backpackers know about this loophole? It’s something you sure can’t find in your Lonely Planet guide.

When to call a spade a bêche.

Quick, don’t think:

Just what the hell would you call this?

If you’re one of the bionic mothers in my neighborhood attached to the stroller equivalent of an SUV, and your similarly robo-fied friend asks you what you’re going to order at the neighborhood café, well, you call it a kwa-ssohn.  And if you’re me, sitting next to them, trying to mind your own business even though you’re not because obviously you’re listening to their conversation, well, you make a face like you just drank curdled milk when you should be focusing on sitting with your laptop and pretending to work.

Alright, so it is a French word, but call me a cynical bastard, or as my writing teacher suggested, maybe I’m “just incredibly ungenerous”, but why does this bother me so much?   If we were in France, I’d say OK (actually, I’d say d’accord, with a really bad accent, and totally in italics).  If either the speaker or the friend, or the waitstaff were French, I’d say mais oui.  But between a couple of American soccer moms in Brooklyn, I mean, c’mon.

Clearly, this is an unfair rant.  After all, if an American pronounced ‘tortilla’ with an ending like Godzilla, and you came back from a stay in South America, you’d probably have a hard time reverting to the then-idiotic sounding American pronunciation, which is how I think the French must feel when they hear their national pastry butchered in the States.

An interesting myth about the croissant which was actually invented in Vienna, and not France: During a siege by the Ottoman Turks, a local pastry chef apparently heard the enemy tunneling beneath his shop and alerted the army, who then carried the day.  As a reward, the pastry chef was allowed to name the pastry “crescent”, after the symbol on the Ottoman flag.  This story is purely apocryphal and I have no sources to back it up.  Come to think of it, I can’t even remember where I read that but it must be inspiring for young pastry chefs in war-torn countries.

So I don’t know who would be more insulted when they see and hear me order a kra-sont: a Frenchman, or an Ottoman Turk.  I still don’t know how to pronounce Louis Vuitton.

The Most Heartbreaking, Teeth-Gnashing, Garment-Rending Song You’ve Never Heard

Beatriz by Chico Buarque, covered here by Ana Carolina, about Dante’s unrequited love for a woman who inspired The Divine Comedy. I’d give a kidney to be able to write songs like this…

Argentine Cow Fights Diabetes! No word on how it tastes.

The Argentines have done it again. First, Maradona’s Hand of God, then the mass cultural glorification of grilled meats, and now the inevitable marriage of the two: a genetically modified clone cow that creates milk containing insulin.

Pharmaceutical company Bio Sidus has “birthed” four calves, christened Patagonia I, II, III, & IV. Their goal is to lower the cost of insulin by 30%.

Speaking of Argentine cows, I must wax poetic of my recent visit to an amazing Argentine steakhouse in the East Village, Buenos Aires, on 6th st between Aves & B. Grassfed Uruguayan beef (sadly, there is a ban on Argentine beef in America), and the best steak I’ve had for under $20.

Dick Cheney: What an ass.

On the deck of the USS John C Stennis, Dick Cheney blasted a stern warning to Iran, mumbled a pledge to nobody in particular, and ended with some rambling statement about the Iraqi insurgency being in its “last throes”.

You know what they say: The only thing worse than kicking a dead horse is saddling and riding it.

Yippee-kayay, Mr. Vice President.

Dance, Mutherf*cker, Dance!

I didn’t see the film “Planet B-Boy” at the Tribeca Film Festival, which just ended here last week, partly because I’m too cheap to pay $18 for a flick that I’m sure will pick up major distribution. It’s a documentary about the international breakdancing scene culminating with (naturally) a final dance battle in which “there can be only one.”* I honestly had no idea it had become such a graceful and complex artform with clear styles emerging from each respective region.

You guys know how much I love clips of people dancing all over the planet (see post “What is the Sound of One Man Dancing”). No offense to the amazing dancing Matt, but make no mistake, these guys here are serious athletes. This is guaranteed to make you want to move.

My friend Neil Ruiz, who is currently completing his PhD in Political Economy at MIT via a fellowship at the Brookings Institute in DC used to be part of a filipino breakdancing team. He was the headspinner.

*Anytime I can slip in a reference to Highlander, I will do so.

Why do we allow malignant yahoos* to own guns again?

* Note: I recently changed the subject of this title from people to its current moniker because I do admit that some people (eg, active soldiers, law enforcement, Lewis and Clark, Bruce Willis in the original Die Hard movie at the end because if he didn’t have that gun duct taped to his back, there’s no way he’s saving his wife and getting out of that building…) have a strong argument for needing a gun. I still think we have a serious problem as to why so many people want them.

Believe me, I’m the last person who wants to point a finger in the air and say, “Michael Moore was right!” But can somebody remind me again why, oh why, do we allow such unrestricted gun possession in America?

Less than one month ago, there was a running shooting spree on Bleecker Street on a balmy evening at 9pm on the very block I once lived on with 3 brutally murdered including two volunteer police officers shot execution style, and the gunman killed by police after running out of ammunition.

Today, in “the deadliest shooting rampage in American history”, 32 students at Virginia Tech were killed today, not including the gunman who then shot himself in the head in such a manner as to significantly delay forensics identity tests. THIRTY-TWO students, most of them in a single classroom, others apparently “lined up and shot”.

Oh, wait. Right. We need to protect our constitutional rights to shoot quail and attorney friends of the Vice President. Or, the “tough” logic goes, we need to be able to protect ourselves from the crazy lunatics who would shoot up our schools and loved ones. “If only every student at Columbine High School had been packing! Things would have turned out differently!” Just taking two seconds to actually think critically of the consequences of this logic (just rent Dr. Strangelove if you lack the imagination) reveals the Neanderthal idiocy of it. Maybe if we had prevented the guns from getting out there in the first place, we wouldn’t have this problem. Obviously, it’s too late to cry over spilled milk, so instead, we might as well just spray the goddamn milk all over the place.

To lighten things up (and because I don’t have any new soluble ideas about gun legislation) I’m going to leave you with Chris Rock’s idea, which reveals an unsettling grasp of economic theory: (transcript follows below for the anti-streamers)

“Everybody is talking about gun control. Got to control the guns. Fuck, that…. No, I think we need some bullet control. I think every bullet should cost five thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars for a bullet. Know why? Cos if a bullet cost five thousand dollars, there’d be no more innocent by-standers. That’d be it. Some guy’d be shot, you’d be all ‘Damn, he must’ve done something, he’s got fifty thousand dollars worth of bullets in his ass!’ And people’d think before they shot someone ‘Man I will blow your fucking head off, if I could afford it. I’m gonna get me a second job, start saving up, and you a dead man. You’d better hope I don’t get no bullets on lay-away!’ And even if you get shot you wouldn’t need to go to the emergency room. Whoever shot you’d take their bullet back. ‘I believe you got my property?’ That’s right.”

Kurt Vonnegut, R.I.P.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind”

- from his novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater