Down-home empanadas

Those who know me well know that when I travel, I do like to get with the peeps. I don't flatter myself that I'm either fluent enough in any foreign language nor personable enough to truly penetrate to the lived-in experiences of people who have lives very different from my own. But I do think it's fair to say that when I'm abroad I like to eat where the locals eat, ride on local transport, etc. Travel for me does not need to be a series of hot-shower/clean-sheet hotels.

So, after 2 1/2 weeks, it was high time I got me some street food. The tourist/traveller restuarants of BsAs work so hard to project a cosmopolitan, everywhere-and-nowhere air, and succeed, for the most part. But this is South America, after all, and I was craving a bit of the comida tipica, if you know what I mean.

For no discernible reason, I stopped in this (completely empty) empanada joint in the business district on a walk home from a haircut. Now, while I am savvy enough to notice that no one is eating in a restaurant, and I'm smart enough to know that this information is most likely life-preserving in some regard, I'm somehow not wired to turn around and walk out of a deserted establishment. It's like a learning disorder-- I know I have a problem in the way I process information I receive from the world, but I can't change my behavior.

It turns out I am fated to die in a ptomaine-laced BsAs empanada joint. My whole life has boiled down to this moment. So be it-- write my obit.

I approach the counter, and this lovely 50+-year-old man roars at me in Spanish-- ¿Do I want an empanada? (the Argentine answer to pizza-- a stuffed pizza dough pastry with meat, vegetables and/or cheese inside, baked +400º for a luscious crispy crust.) Oh, si, I say.

I make my choices, and then he says something garbled really, really loudly. The man speaks like his tongue is too big for his mouth. ¿Como? I ask. Using the tried-and-true method of talking to hapless foreigners the world over, he asks a second time even louder, bellowing ¿Caliente? Do I want them heated up? Oh, si I say, nodding and smiling, and I sit down.

He is so delighted to have me in his restaurant, you'd think I was a movie star. He makes a big show of coming over to my table, wiping it down, serving my water. He is over the moon that I come from California.

He retreats to the back which gives me enough time to really drink in the decor.

What I'm going to show you next is a part of what made this whole encounter a story in first place.

Let me drive home the point that I did nothing to this first photo. My camera did something weird-- ghost in the machine, the digital equivalent of a paper jam. It chopped the image into rectangles, developed them at different saturations, and then rearranged them into an arty, almost jazzy tableau. Chair legs on the ceiling-- hmmmm. Making this place (somehow) look like somewhere you'd actually want to spend a meal. But then I will show a second photo of a close-up of what the wall looked like for real:

*Fabulous!*

*Funky*

It's worth a second to drink in all that you see here. This really is an actual wall where someone has taken the time to:

1. Hang wide two random pictures of pizza, somewhat crookedly
2. Lean one head-shot of Carlos Gardel, the near-godman singer of Argentinian tango songs from the 1920s-30s-- That particular image of him is like Sinatra's mugshot in NYC pizza joints- you see it everywhere
3. Set two completely dead potted ficus plants, indifferently spaced
4. Place off-center a black-and-white photo of the Three Stooges

What does all this mean, I wonder? What dining experience is one hoping to impart to one's customers?

A man walks in carrying boxes and says to the roaring man, "Buon Giorno." It takes a second for this to register, the fact that this is a foreign phrase, foreign even to what already seems foreign to me here. The roaring man says something mouth-full-of-marblesish, not Italian, not Spanish, not really anything I can fathom.

I find myself relaxing. My mind is open and empty, like Buddhist practice: Whatever happens next, what if it were neither good nor bad?

But it turns out what's next is lunch, two savory little browned pastry pockets, one with stewed sun-dried tomatoes, basil and mozzarella cheese, one with spicy beef. They are both...delightful. Whatever else, the roaring man can cook.

He watches me eat, and it gives me great pleasure to show him how good his food tastes to me. ¿Rico, no? Sabrosa, I concur, meaning every inch of it. He broadcasts the ingredients: tomatoes, basil, cheese. Yes, yes, I say. It's all there.

Then he mashes some more at me, until it is clear from his hand signals, he's telling me he doesn't hear very well. I'm guessing he hardly hears at all. "Yo tambien," I say, and then hack through my free-wheeling bastard Spanish version of how I might say "I rely a lot on reading lips." I am quite certain he doesn't understand a syllable of it, since it probably wouldn't have made any sense even if he could hear me.

I pay my 13 pesos ($3.25 US), give him a 2 peso tip, and head off on my way. I hope I made his day a tenth as rich as he made mine.

The Long-Weisses learn to tango

Well, here's the best news: Bazr and I had our very first tango lesson together, and we are still married and still talking to one another.

Considering that I had not taken a single ballroom/partner dance lesson since Abu Ghraib junior high gym class, and that I have a highly developed independent streak that I presumed precluded any possibility of following a lead, I was convinced that I could, in order, 1) never 2) ever 3) in a million years learn to dance with another person. I was operating under the fully formed opinion that despite Bazr's years of ballroom dance, he and I were destined for an hour of torture, frustration, and tears.

And I almost made that dream come true by my most *ridiculous* idea that we should walk the 4 miles to our tango lesson in the late afternoon BsAs sun. We arrived hot, exhausted, with swollen feet and sweating like a schvitz.

But looking back, I think the exhaustion worked in our favor-- we were too tired to think.

Our lesson was with a lovely young man named Christian. He was very nice, very kind, spoke limited but clear English, and mostly just didn't mess around: he just showed us how to tango, and let us get on with it.

And holy of holies, miracles of miracles, She-Who-Could-Not-Be-Led turns out to be.... a bit of natural, if I do say so myself. Enough to pick up the step without too much of a giddy-up. And for Bazr, the old muscle memory kicked in, with his adorable manly frame-- we actually made like we were dancing, all twenty toes intact, by the end of the hour!

We'll practice, then go for another lesson next week-- I'll keep you posted. But the flame-out I felt sure was inevitable never happened. Can the milongas of BsAs be next?

Queer graffiti

Transgender renegade art is quite visible here, but I have not yet seen anyone who "reads" truly differently. Gender norms are so strong here that I get stared at-- sometimes long, hard, and rudely-- with my short hair.

I'm sure I'm not traveling in the right circles, but transgenderism seems more a philosophical notion rather than a lived-in experience, from what I've seen in my limited time here.

The stencil reads: "Transgress your gender; liberate your gender."

~*~

It's intriguing that in this country that does allow for gay marriage there is a voice for the [queer] abolishment of the institution altogether.

~*~

Kind of a nice thought, no? Not just that we are all the same (homo), but all one.

Doors of Buenos Aires

Ok. So I have no excuses for why this is such a huge part of my street consciousness, but I am mad for the doors of BsAs. Huge time, energy, and creativity, not to mention a touch of madness goes into all kinds of doors in BA, and I can't get enough!!

Ok. Clock this. How do you actually use these knockers?

This one may be my personal fav.

The military always gets the best doors...

Bazr in BsAs

Now, is it just me, or does he look sweetly happy?

Lookie-loos today-- tomorrow we dance

So, today we went to one of the city's most famous milongas, meeting a British gentlemen who was taking a tango lesson there. It's just... so...gorgeous.

Tomorrow we take our first lesson ourselves.

All I can say is, it really is all that.

3 reasons Argentina is awesome

Two words: queer tango.

~*~

You can get gay married here. Gay marriage for everyone!!

~*~

This took me a while to piece together, but Argentina, like Chile several years back and Brazil just a few months ago, has itself a female president. And she's got a whole lotta beauty queen goin' on.

(Image of the dancing men by Daniel Flores: www.fotos2X4tango.com.ar.)

One big reason Argentina is not awesome

Argentina, like just about everywhere else on the planet, is experiencing real problems, and societal pressures and inequities are feeling a lot sharper than they did four years ago-- no surprise there, I'm sure.

The big, big worry, and the word on everyone's lips, is "inflation," with the much dreaded prefix "hyper" whispered with a shudder.

"Official" annual inflation is somewhere around 12%, but everyone knows it's something a whole lot more like 25-30%, with spot spikes in food prices going up as much as 15% in a week here and there, hitting the poor the hardest, wouldn't you know.

These slick, sophisticated posters are up all over town.

"The Argentinian Table-- Today: Bread. Why is it more and more expensive every day?"

And then, "With this governance, who gains?"

You can feel the storm brewing...

Fig trees

These trees are a national treasure, truly, and they occupy huge magestic spaces in many of the city's parks.

They convey a sense of things both stately and wild, situated within a humanized environment, but in no way completely tamed.

And I love when the enormous limbs have been trained to create these archways that feel, as you walk through them, like outdoor cathedrals.

Weird stuff since we've been here

The day we flew in, four people were killed in lightning strikes within the city limits. (*¡¡Scary!!*)

~*~

Then, a few days ago, a woman was acting strangely, then hurled herself out of a 23-story window at the Pan American hotel right on 9 de Julio Boulevard. Crazily enough, a taxi parked below broke her fall, and she survived.

(The cab driver had gotten out of the cab to watch her-- I guess she was putting on quite a show. Lucky for him, he was a lookie-loo.)

~*~

When visiting Turkey, the Argentine president, Christina Ferdandez de Kirchner (with the uber-cool, Kennedyesque newspaper moniker "CFK") told the Turkish businessmen assembled there: "We do not want that you see Argentina only as a cow."

Oh, no mami-- we don't!!

Another reason Argentina is not awesome

So, this was going on the week we arrived-- Greater Buenos Aires started to run out of small bills-- "monedas." There was a shortage of cash, even at the banks. This of course hits the poorest the hardest. Those who buy food stuffs and other necessities with smaller bills couldn't get change, gunking up the gears of making essential transactions.

CFK's government solved the problem by printing a bunch of new bills (in Brazil of all places ¡!¡) and it seems the crisis is in retreat. But this is a core competency for the government, and when it impacts the ability of ordinary people to go into a store and buy the food they need, it's a sign it has failed badly.

The very best things about BsAs that pictures can't capture

• The stars of the Southern Cross
• Bold, squid-inky Malbecs
• Walking in the full heat of the summer sun, and stepping into the cool, gracious shade of the city's thousands of trees, or those balmy buenos aires that gave the city its name
• 24-hour tango channel (= ¡¡adicción!!)
• Learning Spanish swear words from the subtitles of Ru Paul's Drag Race
• The fact that the beauty of the city combined with the sensuality of the culture feels like permission for pleasure
• Riding in a taxi at midnight with the windows rolled down letting the summer night air flow over you at 60 miles per hour down La Libertador Boulevard, with its ridonkulous 9 lanes of wide-open traffic lanes-- it's a logjam in the heart of the city during the day, but it's a taxista's drag strip dream at night

There is a dark side...

So, let me set aside for a moment the snark, as well as the genuine wonder and admiration that I feel for Argentina.

The first two weeks of being here I floated in a delirious pink bubble of joy to be back, basking a feeling I've never felt before: traveling (while at the same time returning) to a place that feels both foreign and familiar, a place that feels unknown and possibly unknowable, while at the same time also feeling like home. But now I am settling in and facing some ugly reminders that dark episodes from the last few decades are not in any way distant. As William Faulkner said so succinctly: "The past isn't past. It isn't even over."

One example-- the presence of Argentina's 1970's-80's "Dirty War" is still immediate-- there hasn't been a day, I think, when I haven't encountered some plaque, some graffiti, some mention of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers of the Disappeared action group, or some other aftereffect of that systematic governmental terror crackdown on Argentina's intellectual and leftwing population, leaving tens of thousands either dead or disappeared. A Porteña we met and had dinner with named Roxana called the men who lived through the "Dirty War" a lost generation-- if not tortured or disappeared themselves, then pithed of political agency and voice, systematically silenced and disenfranchised.

To be fair, some of the reminders might be considered positive-- there are several high-profile court cases going on right now bringing a judge, some army officers, and some "intelligence" operators up on charges of colluding to sign illegal death warrants and operating torture centers from that time period. So maybe there is some movement towards a little bit of something that feels like "justice," even if it is more than 30 years too late.

~*~

There was a casual reference to the "death flights" in something I read a few days ago, and I was trying to think through why abducting someone and drugging them, and then pushing them out of a helicopter is more terrifying and psychically damaging than getting tortured in some hellhole prison somewhere, then taken out back, put up against a wall and shot, the body either disappeared forever, or dumped somewhere to send a message.

I guess it's because you actually need state clearance to operate a military or police helicopter-- there's a baked-in governmental legitimacy to the job that the more workaday measures for destroying people don't require. Some bureaucrat somewhere had to sign off on the gassing up of that assassination helicopter, and that is stone cold, if you think about it.

~*~

So I was reminded of the uneasy beast that is the state here when I saw this graffiti:

José Luis Cabezas was a photojournalist who worked for one of the most important newspapers in Argentina, Noticias, which has an independent focus and often highlights human rights abuses and governmental excesses. He had recently written an article linking the Buenos Aires police force was linked to prostitution, cartel drug networks, and other forms of institutional corruption.

He was kidnapped while leaving a birthday party in a posh resort beach town; handcuffed; beaten; then driven out to a pit somewhere, shot twice in the head, and his body burned. Whether he was killed by the police or by well-connect "business" interests was never determined. But the sobering fact was this happened in 1997-- not 1977.

His death became a cause that spawned the slogan, "No se olviden de Cabezas," "Don't forget Cabezas." It's a battlecry that reminds one that people who speak out against government institutions can meet brutal ends.

~*~

Therefore, it was with no pleasure at all that I turned the front page of Thursday's International Herald BsAs edition to read about the death of this man, Roberto Rodríguez. Rodríguez was the treasurer of the Maintenance Workers Union, an organization that is affiliated with the Azul y Blanco Party, a leftist group in opposition to CFK's government.

It was a professional hit: Eyewitnesses claim he was called by name, hustled into a van by two men, driven to some spot on the side of the road, forced to kneel, hands cuffed behind his back, and shot once in the head. He actually initially survived the shooting-- he was found several hours later and tried to speak, but died before he could be brought to a hospital.

The central government is keeping miles away from this one, calling it "a police incident." The original investigation focused on a botched carjacking, but now the police are investigating it as a mafia hit, looking into Rodríguez's "personal" connections.

Yeah, ok. But this case heule que apesta-- stinks to high heaven, don't you know, and it can get difficult sometimes when reading about the national government, the local police operators, and the mafia to know where one stops and the other starts.

It stinks even more when you consider that another union officer, Abel Beiroz, head of the truck driver's union, was killed in a similar manner in a suburb of BsAs in 2007, and according to the Herald, there have been others. Bit of an occupational hazard heading up a union.

~*~

As a Yanqui, all this leaves me doubly queasy-- both feeling the heavy psychic weight of knowing I take my holidays in a place where state-sponsored terrorism against ordinary citizens is real. (I'd really like for Brother Glenn Beck to come down here and live amongst some folks that have actually lived his fascist fever dreams, rather than just rubbing mouthing off on the notion that that's where America either is or is heading night after night.)

And in knowing that my own government, the good, old C. I. of A. was neck-deep in all that devil-dark Operation Condor horrorshow. In the 1970's and 80's, when it came to training local governments all throughout the Southern Cone countries-- Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Peru, in how to root out and destroy the leftists they could find and terrorize the ones they couldn't, along with everyone else, why, the good people of the CIA were right there to help fund and train those busy, busy boys.

So I'm not extricating myself from this region's past by staying home. But even in my tourist bubble, there's no escaping the fact that that "history" is still very close to the surface here.

More BsAs doors

Why do I love the tango?

Is it the heat?

Is it the passion?

Is it the fact that it was born in brothels, by men idling their time while the women washed up between clients?

Is that it is so unabashedly, openly, brazenly sexual? But with room for maturity, seduction, boundaried abandon, dignity? A distinctly adult manifestation of sexuality.

Tango, for me, conjures a strange nostalgia for a past I never had, associating myself to a culture I do not share. At it's best, tango evokes in me a physical longing for something I am trying to either learn if I've never known it, or, if I knew it once, remember.

~*~

Barry would like to chime in here-- Old guys rule in tango...

(Top three photos taken by Daniel Flores, a local photographer. Check him out at www.fotos2X4tango.com.ar. The older couple: http://www.tangoaffair.com/tango photos.htm. The last image I got at http://kevinmullaney.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/tango.jpg.)

Reasons to love BsAs parks

Well, let's start with the obvious-- those glorious, glorious trees.

Then, there are the goofy Boteroesque big-man statues...

Actually, it's really all about the trees. They are just beautiful beyond belief.

But if you notice, there aren't any shrubs. It makes these huge parks feel open, vast, and a little lonely, even in the middle of a frantic downtown.

Vegan dreams

I do not think that word means the same thing as we mean it, judging from the size of the steaks they serve here...

BsAs Fashion Edge

Looking good is verrrrry important in this town. I believe, in the immortal words of Brunö, fashionista extraordinaire, fashion is busy saving more lives than medicine everywhich way one looks here.

I'm guessing she feels *fabulous*!!

Outrageous doors, beautiful women, and dresses made of cotton-candy blue feathers-- everything I like all in one place!

Your intrepid reporter, trying on a little over-the-shoulder number in one of the home-grown couture boutiques here...