Music and other Serious Things

I realize that I´ve been doing this blog for a long time, and I´ve written nothing about music. I feel that this is an innaccurate representation of my time here as seeing live music has been one of my primary activities since I got here and I feel that it will become increasingly so.

So a partir de ahora (it means ¨from now on¨ but I like it better) I´m going to write more about music. Actually I´m going to write more in general, but writing about music will serve as a welcome break from writing about more serious things--like how I´m dealing with the emotional fallout from my father´s death, or worse still classes (joke guys, that was a joke).

And while I´m on the subject of joking about serious things I´d like to stop to make a brief aside, which I´ll probably elaborate on more later. It sometimes seems really hard to take things seriously that other people take seriously. Particularly relationships. I was once in a taxi with a couple of friends from the program and the two girls were talking about this Argentine guy she met and whether she should go ahead with this guy, etc. Perhaps it would have seemed trivial to me anyway, but now in particular these sorts of things either make me scornful or amused. I´m working on being more of the latter and less of the former.

That being said here´s a solemn and most serious promise that I will write more about a variety of topics. Those of you with no interest in what I have to say about music, may feel free to skip these entries and move on to more serious things. Or you could adopt my grandmother´s approach to her entertainment choices. As she puts it ¨I´ve had enough sadness in my life [lost her husband, son, son-in-law] I don´t need any more of it in my free time¨. Fair enough.

Getting Settled

It seems a bit absurd to say this, but I'm finally starting to get a routine of sorts.

I finally had this sense today as I was going over my calendar and figuring out what I have to do over the next few weeks, figuring out when I can get in things like studying, lunch, and working out, in between my classes. This wouldn't seem so absurd, except that I've been here for about a month and a half.

I've already discussed why that is for the most part--a long orientation, an equally long drop-add period, and I don't particularly want to get into that again. Instead I'm going to talk a little bit about what that routine is looking like at this point, and what I still need to add to it.

The other thing that contributed to the sense that I have a routine now is that my class schedule is, finally, officially set--I just turned in the form several hours ago. I'm taking a total of four classes, two at the Universidad Catolica Argentina in the Program for Latin American Studies, one in the Universidad de Buenos Aires Facultad de Ciencias Sociales (social sciences) and one required class for my program at the program office downtown. I managed to drop all of the classes that I was taking at Torcuato di Tella (which is really far away!) and the rest of the classes at the UBA and UCA so that I'm down to just those four. This has left me with a rather odd schedule--I have class three days a week (this has never happened to me before) yet everyday that I have class it starts at 9am. Those lovely 9am start times account for half of my classes. The other two classes are both in the evening at UCA, so that everyday that I have class I have to get up in the morning and then have a really long period in between when my morning class starts and my evening class begins.

I actually think that this could be a good thing. One of my problems over the last few weeks has been that if I have a class that starts late in the day, or worse yet if my only class is an evening class, I just don't get up until a few hours before it starts. That or I spend much of the day sitting at my computer in my boxers not accomplishing very much (clearly I wasn't updating my blog!) Having class at 9am means that you have to shower, put clothes on and get out of the house, which keeps my host family happy too (they don't really like it when I just sit around all day). It also (ought to) makes it easier to study in between those classes because I have a lot of time, but it doesn't really make sense to go home in between classes most of the time, because that just means more time and money spent on commutes.

As for the not having any class two days a week, not counting weekends, it gives me the opportunity to stay out late the evening before, allowing me to go out on Mondays and/or have a three-day weekend starting Thursday night, which could be particularly useful for travelling. The disadvantage to this is, once again, the sitting around all day in my boxers problem, which I hope to address by signing up for some volunteer work, or getting a membership at a gym.

Speaking of volunteering, that is something I still have to do. I'm currently torn between trying to find something that is "useful" to me, in the sense that it would have something to do with my future career, and taking care of babies. The latter is part of a program called Baby Help (yes the name is in English, I don't know why) which helps out single moms by having people watch after their kids while they go out to find work. It's sort of odd but I kind of miss being around little kids, I used to babysit for a neighbor back home, and every time I see small children I'm reminded of my dad for some reason. Apparently when I was a kid and my mom asked me the standard "what do you want to be when you grow up" I told her "I want to be like Daddy", so she said " you mean a scientist", to which I replied "no I want to be a dad". This remains one of the few things that I know about my future career plans.

Classes in Argentina

A lot of people have been asking me how classes have been going here in Argentina. As I’m doing a study abroad program this seems like a reasonable request, but I’ve neglected to write about classes here until now. There are several reasons for this but to understand that you first have to understand the structure of the way I’m taking classes here in Argentina.

There are two main ways that you can go about doing a study abroad program 1) direct enrollment, wherein you apply to and become an official student in a foreign university or 2) you take classes through a program, wherein the program has a relationship with a university(s) in the foreign country and handles the transfer of credits to your home university. In my case I actually receive a transcript from the university that runs the program, Butler University, even though I took all of the classes thousands of miles away.

The Argentine Universities Program is one of the programs run by the Institute for Study Abroad (IFSA) of Butler University and it’s the program that runs study abroad in Buenos Aires. As part of the program, we can take classes at any combination of four different universities in the city; the public university Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Universidad Torcuato di Tella, a recently private university, and two catholic (also private) universities, Universidad Catolica Argentina (UCA) and Universidad de Salvador (USAL). The advantage of this is arrangement is that it allows us not only to access different course offerings at different schools, but also to experience what it’s like taking classes at Universities that are very different from one another (something I may get into in greater detail in a later post). We also have a two to four week drop/add period (depending on the start dates of the different schools) where we can try out as many as three classes at any given university. This gives us the ability to weed out classes which don’t really interest us, turn out to be harder than we anticipated, or just don’t fit our schedule anymore.

The disadvantage to this arrangement is that it can be very stressful, especially at first. When you’re first getting to know the city and how to get to various places, trying to take busses across town to get to classes at three (I didn’t take classes at USAL) different universities, when some of those classes overlap (which you may or may not have anticipated) can be a headache. Also, especially for me, the notion of going to a class which you are in all likelihood not going to be attending—because if you try out three times as many classes as you’re going to take that means you’re dropping two thirds of them—is a stressful one. I like to go into a class and prepare myself for what I’m going to have to do for the semester, anticipate what’s ahead and start to plan my life, schedule etc. That’s harder to do when you don’t even know which classes you’re going to take exactly. And some of these decisions end up getting made on the fly—I decided to drop one of my classes, the history of economic thinking, partly based on the anecdotal reports of one of my peers and partly because it overlapped with a few of the last orientation events (including signing up for classes at the UCA) so that I ended up not going just because I’d missed a few classes already.

Now things are finally getting settled and I pretty much know what my schedule is going to be (although several of my professors just changed classrooms/start and end times for classes). I put off signing up for volunteer work, which I intend to do, because I didn’t know what my schedule was going to be yet, so hopefully I can get started on that soon. But it was this phenomenon coupled with our very long orientation period that is the culprit for my not having written anything about classes so far. Hopefully I’ll get around to actually writing about the classes I’ve decided to stick with in the near future.

Music From Back Home

Being away from home can do strange things to you. One of those things is that sometimes you start to miss things from home that you didn't really appreciate when you were there.

The other day, I was on my computer doing one of those "put your iTunes on shuffle and write down the first twenty songs that come up" (for those of you who are not aware this is a very common thing for people my age to put up in their facebook profiles when they're bored or have a paper to write). One of the songs that I came across was a Black Keys song that I had received in a mix from a friend back home. The Black Keys are a sort of Blues-Rock-Punk guitar drum-duo from Akron, Ohio that have really been making a name for themselves recently. And that's saying something since not a lot has come out of Akron since it was the center of a burgeoning punk scene back in the late seventies.

I always liked the Black Keys but I didn't listen to them all that much. I was listening to a lot of ska and jazz then and it just didn´t fit with the other stuff I was listening to. But when I heard them today it was like I'd been hit by a brick. I went on All Music Guide to figure out what album the songs were from (my friend either hadn't labelled them or I'd just forgot to write it down). In any case I started reading about them and got really excited about them and the music they were putting out. I read about their other albums and killed about an hour snooping around for information on a band that probably played in Cleveland a half dozen times last year.

When you´re far from home lots of things can make you excited to be reminded of it. And the important thing is that it´s not just American things. Because American culture is everywhere--from the department stores, to the movies even the music, you can see American imports everywhere. Midwest rustbelt culture, not so much. The Black Eyed Peas, don´t feel like home, but the Black Keys do. Funny how that works.

Daily Life: The last three weeks in review

It occurs to me that while recording my quasi-philosophical musings about this country and about myself might well be fulfilling for me and possibly of interest to others, a lot of people back home reading this blog probably want to know more about what I'm actually doing. Since that was at least part of the purpose of this blog, I'll try to write about that more (at least once a week) as well as just writing more in general.

So first to catch everyone up a little bit on the past three weeks or so.

For the most part my life here began very structured as the IFSA-Butler program has a two week orientation where you have to go to this building near downtown and sit in on seminars about various topics--Argentine history, how not to get robbed, how to comport yourself with your host family etc. Most of these things were rehashings of things we'd already been given information on, things that our host families would later discuss with us, and things which we were told to refer to the website for anyway. Nonetheless the orientation period was valuable in other ways by giving us a chance to get to know how to get around the city, to meet other people from the program, and to get into a kind of schedule.

During our orientation period we also had the chance to visit Bariloche, a small , touristy town in Patagonia near the border with Chile. It was a good experience and a welcome contrast to the noisy, busy city that we'd be spending the next several months in. We did a lot of hiking and I got to go cycling up and down some of the mountains (tiring as all hell). The town of Bariloche was founded by the Swiss, which was evident in the architecture, which combined with the constant presence of mountains made you feel like you were in the Alps (or I suppose, it would if I'd ever been to the Alps). Dad would have loved it there.

The orientation is now over and we're getting into classes now. However because of the way we take classes through the program--we're encouraged to take about three times as many classes as we intend to keep during the "shopping period" and then drop all but about four--it's a really weird and stressful time (at least for me). Anyone who knows me is probably aware that I like knowing what's going on well ahead of time so I have a chance to get comfortable with the idea. I'm not opposed to spontaneity in all things, but class selection is certainly not one of them. And no matter who you are sitting for three hours in a class that you will in all likelihood not be taking, is just an odd experience. As things stand today I'm enrolled in classes at two universities, waiting to hear back about my Argentine language and culture class and have yet to sign up for classes at another university. In addition, a friend from Case is in town for the week. And I badly need a haircut. It's a busy time.

On the other hand busyness does let you forget certain things that might be far more painful if you were bored. Like that I'm thousands of miles away from home and the people that I love and that care about me and that I'm not going to see those people for a long time. Or that I'm never going to see my dad again and tell him how the trip went. So maybe busyness is not so bad.

The Question of Authenticity

I think that there is an issue that not only I, but many others who study abroad struggle with living in a foreign country and that is the search for an "authentic" experience. This can get a bit absurd at times and difficult to define, but the basic idea is that we don't want to travel halfway around the world, just to spend our time eating at Burger Kings and watching Hollywood movies. We want to avoid going to venues and stores and sites that cater to tourists and where everyone speaks English to you and go to places where "real Argentines" hang out.

There are a couple of problems with this pursuit. For one, it is hard to define what is authentic as sometimes those things that are the most traditionally culturally important are also of the most interest to foreigners for the same reason. For instance I was warned by a friend who had studied abroad in Buenos Aires, not to bother taking tango classes, because they are "for tourists". The vast majority of young argentines are more likely to be found dancing to electronic music at a disco than to tango at a milonga.

For me the comparison with the American swing scene is an obvious one--while swing is certainly classic American music, swing dancing is definitely not mainstream, and I understand that I am not in the majority in this respect. Nonetheless, this doesn't make me any less of a real American because I do it. Similarly I don't think that I necessarily need to avoid tango to experience Argentina, I just have to recognize the place it holds in Argentine society, which is necessarily different from the place it would hold in other countries, but is still certainly not pop music.

On the other hand, I don't think that having an authentic experience has to mean sacrificing cultural imports from the rest of the world. It wouldn't be any more authentic to shut oneself off from the music of the rest of the world, because in a cosmopolitan city like Buenos Aires that isn't what the locals do either. By contrast you hear American Top 40 everywhere in Buenos Aires. This sort of phenomenon complicates the issue immensely. I don't listen to American Top 40 in the U.S. so I'm certainly not going to listen to it here. But interestingly this will make me interested in different music than someone here might be interested in. Ironically if I am interested in foreign music, people like me who share an interest in music from foreign lands would be interested in "my" music while I am interested in "theirs".

At the same time as we look for authentic experiences I think it's important to not be restricted by this either. Just because Jazz wasn't born in Argentina, doesn't mean that there's something "fake" about seeing a jazz here, and there is always something different. Music is always colored by where it's created so the jazz scene in Buenos Aires is still a different scene than the scene in Cleveland or the scene in New York. For instance Jazz Clubs in Buenos Aires also feature tango groups, something which cannot be said of American cities, where if tango is performed it probably falls under the purview of "world" music or classical music.

For this reason it is interesting to see how they categorize music here versus how we categorize music at home. Flipping through the paper I saw that "Jazz, Blues and Hip-Hop" was one section, tango another section, singers, folk and rock/pop. A little bit different from how we would classify them in the United States.

I think that one has to move past a sort of artificially imposed definition of authenticity as being "this is real Argentine culture and this is not". That's the sort of thing that dictators do, like Mao Zedong did in the cultural revolution. The fact is that culture is organic, and authenticity to the extent that we can say it exists, is a relative thing, and it isn't so obvious or black and white as we often assume.

In sense this whole issue shows one of the advantages of being in a place, like Cleveland, that is not at all popular to the rest of the world. You never have to worry about being in the real Cleveland--that's all you've got. I don't know that many people come to Cleveland as tourists, so there's nothing that's catered to foreigners with lots of cash.

Change of Name and Direction

Studying abroad is supposed to change your life--everyone says so. It’s become for me almost a cliché by now, but it’s something that I’ve taken seriously. I had planned to study abroad since I was in high school, I was frustrated with the limitations of learning Spanish in school and I thought the best way to learn Spanish would be to go away for a year and just speak Spanish all the time.

And then two weeks before I was supposed to leave—ten days to be exact, my father suffered a fatal heart attack in his office. Most of you probably already know this of course, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for some time, but I seem to have put off addressing it. Part of the reason for that is because it’s such an enormous thing—and I’ve always put off writing about things that feel really important. However it would be dishonest not to include this event in writing about my study abroad experience, an event which surely has been, and will be, a life changing one.

It seems to me at this juncture, that if I were writing about my life it would inevitably be broken into two chapters. Part I ended on February 5, 2009.

And part II? I don’t know yet. During many of those ten days I spent in Cleveland after dad died and before I left, I was very unsure as to what I was going to do. When Mom first came into the hospital waiting room and was talking to some of the other people there I remember overhearing her say “and Stephen was going to go to study abroad in two weeks”. Was. She didn’t know what was going to happen really and I wasn’t sure either. Dr. Seidel, a long-time friend and colleague of my father’s was in the waiting room when I first got there and I remember him saying “You should do the study abroad. It’s what your father would have wanted.” I remember wondering what it matters what a dead man would have wanted.

I finally decided to go. Partly I left because I really wanted to get out of the house, and because I dreaded the idea of staying in Cleveland for the rest of the semester without the possibility of taking classes or keeping myself occupied in any way. I think that would have driven me insane. But more importantly, I thought of how Dad always wanted me to grow up, wanted me to figure out how to take care of myself and, as cliché as it may sound, to be a man. It was as if by his death he was telling me that I had to grow up and couldn’t rely on him any longer. It was even something he told me explicitly back when I was a teenager, “when I was your age, I didn’t have a father. You won’t always have me around to take care of you”.

It’s a goal that energizes me and excites me at times, but it can also depress me. It feels as though (and of course everyone tells me) that now is a very important time in my life, for my growth as a person. It feels like this is monumental or that it ought to be. And yet now that I’m here, I keep expecting something to happen that isn’t happening.

Of course, I’ve only been here for about two weeks—it would actually be rather ridiculous to think that I could undergo some kind of incredible personal growth on vacation. Because that’s what it feels like right now. I still don’t have a sense of the permanency of these changes. That I live (although temporarily) here in Buenos Aires, that I’ll be here for a year, or that I’ll never see my dad again.

But as my dad stressed vehemently in one particularly important drive, “I’m not paying for you to go on vacation”. And when I think about the matter a little more soberly, it’s clear that I do have the opportunity to make this more than a vacation.

Still, it won’t happen on its own, which is something I fully intend to keep on mind. I get the distinct sense that a journey like this is what you make of it. And though I don’t have any idea where I’m going to end up, I know the direction I want to head and I have an idea of the balance I have to strike, between school and fun, between having American friends and making Argentine ones, between maintaining old relationships and building new ones.

For this reason I have changed the name of this blog to better fit what I am trying to do. A Gringo-Chapin in Argentina was for me my clever way of saying who I am and where I’m going to be. But this doesn’t mean that I’m going anywhere. Mi Odisea Argentina, my Argentine Odyssey seems more appropriate for reasons that should be clear by now.