"Writing is my therapy"
I wrote these words about five years ago for a high school creative writing class, in a fit of caffeine and sleep-deprived stream of consciousness writing. It seemed to express well at the time the ability of writing to serve as an outlet for my thoughts, feelings and relationship angst.
As melodramatic as that pronouncement was back then it actually seems accurate now, though I suppose now I'd elect for something less emphatic "I find writing to be therapeutic". In addition to my sparse additions to this blog I've been writing a lot more that hasn't made it here. I've nearly filled the notebook I brought with me, a gift from an old friend and teacher, and I've just started to work on filling a smaller notebook with poetry.
There's a kind of satisfaction involved with watching the blank white pages get filled with words, a sort of constructive instinct, the kind of satisfaction that I imagine you get from
tending a garden, or perhaps cooking. The comparison with therapy is also comforting from a pragmatic standpoint; even if my writing isn't read by anyone other than myself at least it's cheaper than a therapist.
Since I arrived here in Argentina and in light of my father's recent death, seeking "professional help" is something that's been suggested to me by my host mom here, something I've talked about with my mother back home and was brought up by a friend of mine (who also happens to be a therapist). So I thought about it. And it's something that I have mixed feelings about...
Among my people, you don't go and "see somebody" when you have a problem, you just deal with it. The "people" I refer to are those hardened Midwestern folks of Teutonic and Northern-European descent, who have lost jobs to vanishing industries, lived through tornadoes and snowstorms, and lost husbands and sons before their time. In other words, my Grandmother.
Garrison Keeler describes us as "people who disapprove of any sort of weakness in the face of cold weather. We're Northern European stock and we're meant to be stoics and you're meant to pick up your feet and get out there and do what needs to be done, we don't tolerate weakness in the face of cold. Cold is not a personal problem, everybody else is as cold as you are so don't complain about it." I think the same can be said (although perhaps to a lesser extent) about another force of nature: death. In the aftermath you just have to keep on putting one foot in front of the other and do what needs to be done, without asking or expecting help from anybody.
This was certainly true of my grandmother. Years ago, when her daughter, my mother, was just a a sophomore in college (about the same age as my sister is now) she lost her husband. When my mother asked her recently what she did after losing her husband she said "well I just had to get by--I was alone and I didn't have the help you have."
I have my own personal resistances to the idea of doing therapy. Talking about intimate thoughts and feelings with a therapist seems about as strange a practice as prostitution, to pay a stranger to do something that is usually reserved for close friends (and I do have to pay out of pocket, I recently found out that my insurance will not cover it). I'm not trying to put down therapists, (at least two of the people who have commented on this blog are therapists) it just seems odd to me that's all.
Sometimes for whatever reason your friends/family can't be burdened with listening to your problems as much as you need them listened to (and the world wide web can be less than receptive at times). Also my host mother has been trying to get me to go for a while. Finally my mom said that "your dad said that it helped him when he went into therapy 20 years ago". So I made an appointment with a woman that my program adviser suggested.
I'm hopeful. I'll let you know how it goes.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Reggae/Ska in Buenos Aires
It's getting cold here in Buenos Aires, a realization that's made me feel a bit like a wuss because it get's so much colder in Cleveland during the fall/winter than it does here. I can't shake the feeling that the months of warm weather have made me soft.
This can present a problem when going out to clubs. Being the extremely frugal person that I am (some of my friends have less kind words to describe this trait) I abhore the idea of paying for something I don't have to. Four pesos (the equivalent of a little over a dollar american) for a coat check? No way, I could get a cup of coffee or half a pizza with that money! So when I went out on Friday night, dressed in layers, I checked my jacket, but I wore my sweatshirt over my shoulders through a long night of dancing.
Most of the foreign kids who come to stay in Buenos Aires go to boliches (nightclubs) that play music that they're familiar with--American hip hop and rock/pop tunes. While I like to be haughty and say that I'm more adventurous musically than my peers I still like to dance to music I'm familiar with. And in the states I get down to the skittering offbeats of ska, which is what I was after on Friday night when I went to see Dancing Mood and Aztecas Turpos.
But first a few words about ska. Most Americans who know what ska music is do not associate it with reggae, rocksteady and other jamaican musical styles, but with the sort of a American ska punk hybrid that became popular in the 1990's.
This song is one that received a lot of radio airplay back then and is the sort of thing that most Americans probably associate with ska.
There's also a scene for ska bands that play in style closer to that of the original jamaican bands like the Skatalites, Desmond Dekker and Prince Buster, many of whom eventually started playing reggae.
InArgentina
I went with a group of kids from my program including my good friend Sam, who is a huge Bob Marley fan, and loves reggae from all over the world. When we walked in, Sam and I gave each other a knowing glance as the smell of weed smoke that's unavoidable at reggae shows washed over us. But as soon as the first band came up playing reggae fronted by a dreadlocked Argentine (I still can't get over that) we went nuts, and it was all uphill from there. The second band, Aztecas Tupro (I never found out the name of the first band) played a heavier, more rock oriented reggae sound, mixing it with some of the local rhythms Argentines are used to (like cumbia--more on that later I think).
This all went down in Teatro Colegiales an old theatre converted by The Roxy, an interantional bar/club organization, which in Buenos Aires brings in international acts as well as local ones like Friday night. The house DJs that played between sets impressed me with their ability to keep people dancing after the band stopped playing. Usually the sound manager throws on some music in between sets that has nothing to do with the music that the band was just playing. Yet this DJ managed to play music in a similar vein--and all music from Latin America that I had never heard before!--and keep people dancing until another form of entertainment interrupted our revelery.
This interruption came in the form of clowns. Certainly not something I'd ever seen happen in a nightclub or a rock club for that matter. I went to the bathroom in the middle of dancing, intending to come back right away and I was surprised to find that people were all crowded around the floor. As I came closer I saw men in brightly colored suits, outrageous hats and shoes juggling. I enjoyed the break from dancing as I was pretty tired by this point and I was really impressed; they were really good. It was also performed to music which added to it quite a bit. It reminded me of a similar change that my friend Jim Kogler enacted in the Case Juggling Club (he's the only one not wearing a T-shirt in this picture). He's also a swing dancer and so the idea of juggling to music appealed to him and he was able to quite successfully perform juggling routines in ways that fit the music that he had picked, something swing dancers would call "musicality". So the show was both entertaining and reminded me of home at the same time.
The headliner of the show was a horns-led big band called Dancing Mood. Dancing Mood plays in a style that's reminiscint of The Skatalites in their fusion of ska rhythms with the jazz convention of playing a theme, letting all of the instruments solo and then going back to the theme. It doesn't necessarily sound like a scheme that would inspire wild dancing from a crowd of people--in fact I'm not sure that it would in the United States--but this is Buenos Aires. As soon as the first song, The Skatalites' Police Woman, started up everyone was jumping, skanking, singing (even though it´s completely instrumental) and coliding into one another like there was no tomorrow. I eventually got too tired to endure more jumping and collisions, so I staggered up to the front where I could see the band better. And this was when I came to appreciate one of the great advantages of this kind of music, you can simultaneously enjoy it as music to chill out to, enjoy the soloing, or dance to it and go nuts. It's an odd combination, to have in the same room people smoking blunts and staring lazily ahead at the band, and people moshing as if it were punk band.
A friend of mine back in the States, upon my telling him that I'd gotten into ska music, told me that he didn't like the vocals, referring I suppose to the off-key singing bordering on yelling common to many ska punk bands.
I went to a dancing mood show before with an Argentine friend of mine, and I told her this combination of the ska and punk scenes in the U.S. and how the musical hybrid had developed and she was surprised ¨but ska is like, relaxing music. It´s got nothing to do with punk¨
In a way they’re both right.
This is one of the things that I like about ska, that it´s been able to be adapted to punk, as well as jazz (like Dancing Mood or the New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble) and even electronica in the form of dub.
This kind of diversity can surprise people when they´re used to one thing and they get another. I think it´s a bit like taking someone who’s never heard of rock music and showing them a video of Chuck Berry next to another one of Iron Maiden. They wouldn’t believe you if you said that this was the same type of music.
This can present a problem when going out to clubs. Being the extremely frugal person that I am (some of my friends have less kind words to describe this trait) I abhore the idea of paying for something I don't have to. Four pesos (the equivalent of a little over a dollar american) for a coat check? No way, I could get a cup of coffee or half a pizza with that money! So when I went out on Friday night, dressed in layers, I checked my jacket, but I wore my sweatshirt over my shoulders through a long night of dancing.
Most of the foreign kids who come to stay in Buenos Aires go to boliches (nightclubs) that play music that they're familiar with--American hip hop and rock/pop tunes. While I like to be haughty and say that I'm more adventurous musically than my peers I still like to dance to music I'm familiar with. And in the states I get down to the skittering offbeats of ska, which is what I was after on Friday night when I went to see Dancing Mood and Aztecas Turpos.
But first a few words about ska. Most Americans who know what ska music is do not associate it with reggae, rocksteady and other jamaican musical styles, but with the sort of a American ska punk hybrid that became popular in the 1990's.
This song is one that received a lot of radio airplay back then and is the sort of thing that most Americans probably associate with ska.
There's also a scene for ska bands that play in style closer to that of the original jamaican bands like the Skatalites, Desmond Dekker and Prince Buster, many of whom eventually started playing reggae.
In
I went with a group of kids from my program including my good friend Sam, who is a huge Bob Marley fan, and loves reggae from all over the world. When we walked in, Sam and I gave each other a knowing glance as the smell of weed smoke that's unavoidable at reggae shows washed over us. But as soon as the first band came up playing reggae fronted by a dreadlocked Argentine (I still can't get over that) we went nuts, and it was all uphill from there. The second band, Aztecas Tupro (I never found out the name of the first band) played a heavier, more rock oriented reggae sound, mixing it with some of the local rhythms Argentines are used to (like cumbia--more on that later I think).
This all went down in Teatro Colegiales an old theatre converted by The Roxy, an interantional bar/club organization, which in Buenos Aires brings in international acts as well as local ones like Friday night. The house DJs that played between sets impressed me with their ability to keep people dancing after the band stopped playing. Usually the sound manager throws on some music in between sets that has nothing to do with the music that the band was just playing. Yet this DJ managed to play music in a similar vein--and all music from Latin America that I had never heard before!--and keep people dancing until another form of entertainment interrupted our revelery.
This interruption came in the form of clowns. Certainly not something I'd ever seen happen in a nightclub or a rock club for that matter. I went to the bathroom in the middle of dancing, intending to come back right away and I was surprised to find that people were all crowded around the floor. As I came closer I saw men in brightly colored suits, outrageous hats and shoes juggling. I enjoyed the break from dancing as I was pretty tired by this point and I was really impressed; they were really good. It was also performed to music which added to it quite a bit. It reminded me of a similar change that my friend Jim Kogler enacted in the Case Juggling Club (he's the only one not wearing a T-shirt in this picture). He's also a swing dancer and so the idea of juggling to music appealed to him and he was able to quite successfully perform juggling routines in ways that fit the music that he had picked, something swing dancers would call "musicality". So the show was both entertaining and reminded me of home at the same time.
The headliner of the show was a horns-led big band called Dancing Mood. Dancing Mood plays in a style that's reminiscint of The Skatalites in their fusion of ska rhythms with the jazz convention of playing a theme, letting all of the instruments solo and then going back to the theme. It doesn't necessarily sound like a scheme that would inspire wild dancing from a crowd of people--in fact I'm not sure that it would in the United States--but this is Buenos Aires. As soon as the first song, The Skatalites' Police Woman, started up everyone was jumping, skanking, singing (even though it´s completely instrumental) and coliding into one another like there was no tomorrow. I eventually got too tired to endure more jumping and collisions, so I staggered up to the front where I could see the band better. And this was when I came to appreciate one of the great advantages of this kind of music, you can simultaneously enjoy it as music to chill out to, enjoy the soloing, or dance to it and go nuts. It's an odd combination, to have in the same room people smoking blunts and staring lazily ahead at the band, and people moshing as if it were punk band.
A friend of mine back in the States, upon my telling him that I'd gotten into ska music, told me that he didn't like the vocals, referring I suppose to the off-key singing bordering on yelling common to many ska punk bands.
I went to a dancing mood show before with an Argentine friend of mine, and I told her this combination of the ska and punk scenes in the U.S. and how the musical hybrid had developed and she was surprised ¨but ska is like, relaxing music. It´s got nothing to do with punk¨
In a way they’re both right.
This is one of the things that I like about ska, that it´s been able to be adapted to punk, as well as jazz (like Dancing Mood or the New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble) and even electronica in the form of dub.
This kind of diversity can surprise people when they´re used to one thing and they get another. I think it´s a bit like taking someone who’s never heard of rock music and showing them a video of Chuck Berry next to another one of Iron Maiden. They wouldn’t believe you if you said that this was the same type of music.
The common denominator is that ska was and is dancing music (unlike rock which dropped dancing decades ago). Whether it’s the slower groovier beat of Roots ska or the frenetic pace of ska-punk, it’s all dancing music when done right. It means that you can find music that sounds different and offers you something new, but you still understand it because it has that familiar offbeat rhythm. Which is why when I went to the show in Niceto, I danced the night away to music that I still felt like I knew, even though it was very different from the ska bands that play in
Dancing Mood playing their version of Dave Brubeck´s Take Five.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
What Work Is
Most people who know me are aware that I am a swing dancer. Since I started in college it´s given me a lot--my friends, my taste in music, my volunteer position as a college radio programmer, and my only college girlfriend. Over the past few months (it still amazes me that I can use that word in the plural) I´ve been slowly inserting myself into the local swing scene. Part of me thinks that I should take advantage of all the things Buenos Aires has to offer that I couldn´t get at home. But I can´t really put down swing dancing for a year, and it would be a shame to let all that time I spent learning it go to waste.
There are something like four swing dance companies in Buenos Aires, all of which have either nonexistent or infrequently-updated websites, which explains in part why it took me so long to figure out where these events were held. One week I went with a friend hoping to make it to a beginner´s lesson (I was attempting to introduce her to swing here) and arrived at the address on the website where we found ourselves at a kiosco, one of those ubiquitous corner-store type places that sell cigarettes and candy and sandwiches if you´re lucky. Unsure as to whether this was the right place we asked (somewhat ackwardly) if this was the place where they had swing dancing. To our amazement they said ¨oh yeah yeah¨ it´s downstairs. It turned out that they had dance floors in the basement of this place, where they held dance classes. Unfortunately the class we were looking for had left as of at least a year and no one had bothered to update the website.
The same swing company runs a weekly lesson and practice on Fridays a few blocks away from my house; unlike the kiosco gig this one´s still running. It´s held at a local community center where in addition to a dance room they have soccer fields and lifting machines. And, importantly a bar where the owners use soccer´s tendency to make people hungry and thirsty to sell beer and pizza. One night after the practice ended I went downstairs to have beer and empanadas with some people in lieu of the usual Burger King run we make at the nearby Shopping Center. While there, Charles, a Brazilian jazz enthusiast who´s been hanging out in Buenos Aires since the end of the Lindy Hop Argentina International Festival (LHAIF pronounced like ¨Life¨) back in January, invited me to a birthday/blues party at a friend´s apartment.
I was hestitant as I didn´t know anyone besides Charles (who I don´t really know that well either) but in the end I went. We got there around two in the morning and I stayed there until the end at around six, when Gaston, the host, brought his mattress back out and kicked out the last of us. I met a lot of people, most of them foreigners who´d come to Buenos Aires for one reason or another; a couple students like m; a woman my mother´s age who was working with a tango instructor to teach with him and translate his classes into English and a German film student studying at the FUC, the university of film in Buenos Aires.
One of the most eye-opening conversations I had was with an Irish freelance journalist, who´s here writing about the environment and human rights issues. She´s spent the past three years here in Buenos Aires but she also lived in Guatemala for a couple of years. In Guatemala she worked for an international organization of journalists whose job it was to basically follow around people that were doing things that powerful vested interests didn´t want done so that they didn´t get killed. She followed a guy, I think he was a lawyer, who worked to allow peasants to use legal loopholes that they wouldn´t otherwise have known about to reclaim some of the unused land owned by the local landed oligarchy. It´s not hard to see why certain people would want him dead, but it´s incredible how real a possibility that was without the threat of international repurcussions. Basically--if this man dies, the world will know about it.
In addition she was always just telling me a little about how the country is today, how dangerous it is and how corrupt the system is. To some extent I already knew these things, I remember how angry everyone in my family was when my great-aunt Rosa was robbed, not once but several times by some gang bangers who were shacking up in a nearby abandoned house and I remember how my cousin Jeffrey quit his job with the government complaining of the corruption. And he was just working in computers, probably not the very worst in that sense. So it wasn't as though hearing these things about Guatemala was particularly new to me.
What was new was the reality that she had been living and working there in a way that I've thought about one day doing. And rather than feeling like we had something in common and could be friends, it actually made it harder for me to relate to her on a certain level. It made her seem much older than me in a way, above and beyond the actual years she had on me. Thinking about this later I was reminded of a poem by Philip Levine called What Work Is (I've recently been listening to podcasts from The Poetry Foundation and discovered Philip Levine through the podcasts).
That last line is a little puzzling isn't it? You can't express your love for your brother because you don't know what work is? And anyway Levine said that "You know what work is" at the very beginning right? After all if you've been sitting outside in the rain all morning looking for it, how can you not know what it is?
My one and only experience with doing legitimate, taxable work for pay was working at the recycling plant at my University. This was a really important experience for me in getting a handle on what it meant to have a job, and the discovery that one could come back home and not have to worry about doing homework of any kind, that you could leave work at work, was an exhilarating one. But of course, it wasn't the job that I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Like many of my generation, especially among study abroad students, I want to do work that "makes a difference" (although most of us aren't quite sure what that means). For me more and more that desire has been directed towards Guatemala, towards living and working in that country and doing something to improve life there. It's the reason that I came here to Buenos Aires really. Admitting that now sounds odd, a bit like Columbus who meant to make it to India and instead ended up thousands of miles away. But it's true. I wanted to study abroad in a Latin American country because I wanted to go to Guatemala and the system didn't have a way for me to do that.
The exact reason why is not always clear to me. I wanted to improve my spanish, which I took up in the first place because I wanted to be able to communicate better with dad's side of the family. Perhaps because we went back there enough when I was younger that it was sufficiently impressed upon me that I needed to learn Spanish. Now it's just one of those things, you invest in something for one reason, and the investment itself becomes a reason to keep doing it, like people who study piano as a kid and just keep on doing it because they've put so much time into it already.
But I think it's more than that. Dad never taught me Spanish, he just gave me, without really trying to, a reason to study it. And he won't hold my hand now either, I've got to figure things out on my own, without him. This was the sense that I felt so powerfully on the day of his wake just days before I left to come here, as if he was telling me, as he often did while he was alive, "I'm not always gonna be here to do things for you. You have to figure things out on your own."
And so, armed with this highly idealistic "quest" sort of mentality, being confronted with the reality of my father's country from a foreigner who has spent time working there, in what must be said a highly idealistic sort of pursuit, was eye-opening. It was just a few days later that the world received this unhappy news about current events in Guatemala. Like Levine's subject who is waiting in the rain hoping to get a job, and that the fickle foreman won't turn him away, I have no real sense of what that work would actually entail if and when I get it. It's an odd paradox, to finally know what you want and yet not really know what that is. And to be confronted with someone who does know a thing or two about that dangerous world for which you've been arming yourself--with tales of chivalry, an old nag and a rusty sword no doubt--makes you stop and think for a minute. Not to deter you, but perhaps to make you think more seriously about what you're doing. At the very least it makes you feel, as Levine's subject, ackward about interaction with the people that have inhabited that uncertain future.
And yet...perhaps we need a certain blindness towards that future, a certain willingness to forget doubt and remember our stories. We have to tell ourselves stories, even if they're fantastic, in order to stir our emotions, in order to inspire us to action. A completely sober view on life would just remind us that we're all just dead in the end, but that's not the sort of thinking that gets you up in the morning when life is hard. As Thoreau wrote in Cape Cod "nothing remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood". So I've started writing poetry. Wish me luck.
There are something like four swing dance companies in Buenos Aires, all of which have either nonexistent or infrequently-updated websites, which explains in part why it took me so long to figure out where these events were held. One week I went with a friend hoping to make it to a beginner´s lesson (I was attempting to introduce her to swing here) and arrived at the address on the website where we found ourselves at a kiosco, one of those ubiquitous corner-store type places that sell cigarettes and candy and sandwiches if you´re lucky. Unsure as to whether this was the right place we asked (somewhat ackwardly) if this was the place where they had swing dancing. To our amazement they said ¨oh yeah yeah¨ it´s downstairs. It turned out that they had dance floors in the basement of this place, where they held dance classes. Unfortunately the class we were looking for had left as of at least a year and no one had bothered to update the website.
The same swing company runs a weekly lesson and practice on Fridays a few blocks away from my house; unlike the kiosco gig this one´s still running. It´s held at a local community center where in addition to a dance room they have soccer fields and lifting machines. And, importantly a bar where the owners use soccer´s tendency to make people hungry and thirsty to sell beer and pizza. One night after the practice ended I went downstairs to have beer and empanadas with some people in lieu of the usual Burger King run we make at the nearby Shopping Center. While there, Charles, a Brazilian jazz enthusiast who´s been hanging out in Buenos Aires since the end of the Lindy Hop Argentina International Festival (LHAIF pronounced like ¨Life¨) back in January, invited me to a birthday/blues party at a friend´s apartment.
I was hestitant as I didn´t know anyone besides Charles (who I don´t really know that well either) but in the end I went. We got there around two in the morning and I stayed there until the end at around six, when Gaston, the host, brought his mattress back out and kicked out the last of us. I met a lot of people, most of them foreigners who´d come to Buenos Aires for one reason or another; a couple students like m; a woman my mother´s age who was working with a tango instructor to teach with him and translate his classes into English and a German film student studying at the FUC, the university of film in Buenos Aires.
One of the most eye-opening conversations I had was with an Irish freelance journalist, who´s here writing about the environment and human rights issues. She´s spent the past three years here in Buenos Aires but she also lived in Guatemala for a couple of years. In Guatemala she worked for an international organization of journalists whose job it was to basically follow around people that were doing things that powerful vested interests didn´t want done so that they didn´t get killed. She followed a guy, I think he was a lawyer, who worked to allow peasants to use legal loopholes that they wouldn´t otherwise have known about to reclaim some of the unused land owned by the local landed oligarchy. It´s not hard to see why certain people would want him dead, but it´s incredible how real a possibility that was without the threat of international repurcussions. Basically--if this man dies, the world will know about it.
In addition she was always just telling me a little about how the country is today, how dangerous it is and how corrupt the system is. To some extent I already knew these things, I remember how angry everyone in my family was when my great-aunt Rosa was robbed, not once but several times by some gang bangers who were shacking up in a nearby abandoned house and I remember how my cousin Jeffrey quit his job with the government complaining of the corruption. And he was just working in computers, probably not the very worst in that sense. So it wasn't as though hearing these things about Guatemala was particularly new to me.
What was new was the reality that she had been living and working there in a way that I've thought about one day doing. And rather than feeling like we had something in common and could be friends, it actually made it harder for me to relate to her on a certain level. It made her seem much older than me in a way, above and beyond the actual years she had on me. Thinking about this later I was reminded of a poem by Philip Levine called What Work Is (I've recently been listening to podcasts from The Poetry Foundation and discovered Philip Levine through the podcasts).
That last line is a little puzzling isn't it? You can't express your love for your brother because you don't know what work is? And anyway Levine said that "You know what work is" at the very beginning right? After all if you've been sitting outside in the rain all morning looking for it, how can you not know what it is?
My one and only experience with doing legitimate, taxable work for pay was working at the recycling plant at my University. This was a really important experience for me in getting a handle on what it meant to have a job, and the discovery that one could come back home and not have to worry about doing homework of any kind, that you could leave work at work, was an exhilarating one. But of course, it wasn't the job that I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Like many of my generation, especially among study abroad students, I want to do work that "makes a difference" (although most of us aren't quite sure what that means). For me more and more that desire has been directed towards Guatemala, towards living and working in that country and doing something to improve life there. It's the reason that I came here to Buenos Aires really. Admitting that now sounds odd, a bit like Columbus who meant to make it to India and instead ended up thousands of miles away. But it's true. I wanted to study abroad in a Latin American country because I wanted to go to Guatemala and the system didn't have a way for me to do that.
The exact reason why is not always clear to me. I wanted to improve my spanish, which I took up in the first place because I wanted to be able to communicate better with dad's side of the family. Perhaps because we went back there enough when I was younger that it was sufficiently impressed upon me that I needed to learn Spanish. Now it's just one of those things, you invest in something for one reason, and the investment itself becomes a reason to keep doing it, like people who study piano as a kid and just keep on doing it because they've put so much time into it already.
But I think it's more than that. Dad never taught me Spanish, he just gave me, without really trying to, a reason to study it. And he won't hold my hand now either, I've got to figure things out on my own, without him. This was the sense that I felt so powerfully on the day of his wake just days before I left to come here, as if he was telling me, as he often did while he was alive, "I'm not always gonna be here to do things for you. You have to figure things out on your own."
And so, armed with this highly idealistic "quest" sort of mentality, being confronted with the reality of my father's country from a foreigner who has spent time working there, in what must be said a highly idealistic sort of pursuit, was eye-opening. It was just a few days later that the world received this unhappy news about current events in Guatemala. Like Levine's subject who is waiting in the rain hoping to get a job, and that the fickle foreman won't turn him away, I have no real sense of what that work would actually entail if and when I get it. It's an odd paradox, to finally know what you want and yet not really know what that is. And to be confronted with someone who does know a thing or two about that dangerous world for which you've been arming yourself--with tales of chivalry, an old nag and a rusty sword no doubt--makes you stop and think for a minute. Not to deter you, but perhaps to make you think more seriously about what you're doing. At the very least it makes you feel, as Levine's subject, ackward about interaction with the people that have inhabited that uncertain future.
And yet...perhaps we need a certain blindness towards that future, a certain willingness to forget doubt and remember our stories. We have to tell ourselves stories, even if they're fantastic, in order to stir our emotions, in order to inspire us to action. A completely sober view on life would just remind us that we're all just dead in the end, but that's not the sort of thinking that gets you up in the morning when life is hard. As Thoreau wrote in Cape Cod "nothing remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood". So I've started writing poetry. Wish me luck.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Futbol
I’ve been meaning to go to a soccer (it’s hard for me to use the American word now) match for a while. It’s one of those things that you feel as though you’re obligated to do, as part of your “cultural education” or something like that, the same way you feel obligated to see certain landmarks as a tourist. I finally went on Saturday and I discovered why it’s so revealing about the culture here in Argentina.
Soccer matches in Argentina are wildly different from those in the United States in ways that are not captured fully on the television screen. Now, I’m aware of the difference between watching something on television and going to the live event. I go to live music shows all the time both at home and here in Buenos Aires, and I’ve been to plenty of sports game in the U.S. While I’m by no means a huge sports fanatic, I have plenty of memories of my dad taking me to see Cleveland Indian’s baseball games, which are practically the only sports games I’ve ever been to. I can recall vividly the sound that the announcer’s made as he would call out each player that came up to bat and announced the sponsor’s of the game and emphatically announced every home run. I remember my dad buying me overpriced hotdogs and the cheap yellow beer that was everywhere in the stadium (and which I was too young for). I remember everyone standing up during a homerun and the particular way my dad said the word “yeah!” on such occasions. Much like popcorn at movie theatres, cheap beer and hotdogs, and other memories were things that had always been associated with sporting events in my mind.
Imagine my surprise then when I found that you couldn’t even enter the stadium, or come within a certain distance of the entrance with alcohol, let alone buy beer during the game. We passed through at least four security checkpoints on our way into the stadium. I would have an easier time getting a weapon onto a plane (which I’ve done before by accident) than I would have getting one into the River stadium.
The differences between these experiences back home and the game I saw last Sunday cannot be solely attributed to the different sports, as the few soccer games I attended in Cleveland were fairly similar (without the same charismatic announcer). Instead I think that there is a different culture in Argentina around Sports and around other things as well. The next day as we were walking back from my class at the UCA, we encountered a public demonstration of some sort, I’m not sure what exactly. I was struck by the similarities between this demonstration and the soccer match. The riot police were in full form at both events, complete with shields and batons, just as they had been at the soccer match, and they had barricaded off parts of the streets in a similar way. Perhaps even more impressive was that at one point the demonstrators started singing a song that I recognized as being a song sung at soccer matches, that familiar “olé! ole, ole, ole! Ole, ole.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnFLK4iBcok&feature=related
Perhaps it’s cliché at this point to say that Argentines are just very passionate people, but it's true. Even the way they speak--they like to use words like “muy” and the prefix “re” (both of which mean “very”) more than someone from the Midwest would find prudent, and they like to use words like frightful (espantoso), terrible, horrible, ugly (feo) and beautiful (lindo) impressive (impresionante) with great emphasis and often with the suffix –isimo for added emphasis. I remember after my first few weeks of class the first time I said that I really liked something my host mother told me that she didn’t think that I had liked anything else because when she asked me I just “yes”, in a thoroughly unconvincing way. I discovered that in order to communicate that I liked something I had to say that I really liked it—bands I liked were not “buenos” they were “re bueno” or “buenisimo” or else it meant that I didn’t really like it at all and I was just answering in the affirmative so as to change the subject.
Tango lyrics are full of stories about men pining over lovers who have left them or coming back home to find their wife in the arms of another man and killing them both. It's that mix of passionate love that is always on the brink of spilling into aggression and violence. A sign at the stadium pleaded for "Pasion sin violencia". Passion without violence.
Maybe we don’t have this same level of passion in the United States, but one thing that seems to be universal about sports is their ability to allows us to connect with people. My dad really loved sports, long after his body was too full of injuries to continue to play many of them he would keep up with the Cleveland teams, watch games on TV and go to the stadium with tickets that some people in the his department would reserve for him. And even though he’s always loved sports, I’ve long suspected that my dad’s real reason for watching sports—I knew he’d far rather play them than watch if he could--was the way they allowed you to connect with people. During the game’s one goal, everyone was dancing and singing and screaming at the top of their lungs, and we high-fived the guy next to us, who we didn’t even know. I remember that my dad used to talk about sports to everyone, no matter where he was, in bars in other cities, to the hot dog vender on the street outside his work you name it. During my summer working in facilities, a job in which I had very little in common with my co-workers those Cleveland Cavaliers games always gave us something to talk about. In this way we were all Clevelanders together. Sports can unite as and give us a common identity more readily than they start fights.
Which reminds me, I hear the Cavs just swept the second team in a row.
Soccer matches in Argentina are wildly different from those in the United States in ways that are not captured fully on the television screen. Now, I’m aware of the difference between watching something on television and going to the live event. I go to live music shows all the time both at home and here in Buenos Aires, and I’ve been to plenty of sports game in the U.S. While I’m by no means a huge sports fanatic, I have plenty of memories of my dad taking me to see Cleveland Indian’s baseball games, which are practically the only sports games I’ve ever been to. I can recall vividly the sound that the announcer’s made as he would call out each player that came up to bat and announced the sponsor’s of the game and emphatically announced every home run. I remember my dad buying me overpriced hotdogs and the cheap yellow beer that was everywhere in the stadium (and which I was too young for). I remember everyone standing up during a homerun and the particular way my dad said the word “yeah!” on such occasions. Much like popcorn at movie theatres, cheap beer and hotdogs, and other memories were things that had always been associated with sporting events in my mind.
Imagine my surprise then when I found that you couldn’t even enter the stadium, or come within a certain distance of the entrance with alcohol, let alone buy beer during the game. We passed through at least four security checkpoints on our way into the stadium. I would have an easier time getting a weapon onto a plane (which I’ve done before by accident) than I would have getting one into the River stadium.
The differences between these experiences back home and the game I saw last Sunday cannot be solely attributed to the different sports, as the few soccer games I attended in Cleveland were fairly similar (without the same charismatic announcer). Instead I think that there is a different culture in Argentina around Sports and around other things as well. The next day as we were walking back from my class at the UCA, we encountered a public demonstration of some sort, I’m not sure what exactly. I was struck by the similarities between this demonstration and the soccer match. The riot police were in full form at both events, complete with shields and batons, just as they had been at the soccer match, and they had barricaded off parts of the streets in a similar way. Perhaps even more impressive was that at one point the demonstrators started singing a song that I recognized as being a song sung at soccer matches, that familiar “olé! ole, ole, ole! Ole, ole.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnFLK4iBcok&feature=related
Perhaps it’s cliché at this point to say that Argentines are just very passionate people, but it's true. Even the way they speak--they like to use words like “muy” and the prefix “re” (both of which mean “very”) more than someone from the Midwest would find prudent, and they like to use words like frightful (espantoso), terrible, horrible, ugly (feo) and beautiful (lindo) impressive (impresionante) with great emphasis and often with the suffix –isimo for added emphasis. I remember after my first few weeks of class the first time I said that I really liked something my host mother told me that she didn’t think that I had liked anything else because when she asked me I just “yes”, in a thoroughly unconvincing way. I discovered that in order to communicate that I liked something I had to say that I really liked it—bands I liked were not “buenos” they were “re bueno” or “buenisimo” or else it meant that I didn’t really like it at all and I was just answering in the affirmative so as to change the subject.
Tango lyrics are full of stories about men pining over lovers who have left them or coming back home to find their wife in the arms of another man and killing them both. It's that mix of passionate love that is always on the brink of spilling into aggression and violence. A sign at the stadium pleaded for "Pasion sin violencia". Passion without violence.
Maybe we don’t have this same level of passion in the United States, but one thing that seems to be universal about sports is their ability to allows us to connect with people. My dad really loved sports, long after his body was too full of injuries to continue to play many of them he would keep up with the Cleveland teams, watch games on TV and go to the stadium with tickets that some people in the his department would reserve for him. And even though he’s always loved sports, I’ve long suspected that my dad’s real reason for watching sports—I knew he’d far rather play them than watch if he could--was the way they allowed you to connect with people. During the game’s one goal, everyone was dancing and singing and screaming at the top of their lungs, and we high-fived the guy next to us, who we didn’t even know. I remember that my dad used to talk about sports to everyone, no matter where he was, in bars in other cities, to the hot dog vender on the street outside his work you name it. During my summer working in facilities, a job in which I had very little in common with my co-workers those Cleveland Cavaliers games always gave us something to talk about. In this way we were all Clevelanders together. Sports can unite as and give us a common identity more readily than they start fights.
Which reminds me, I hear the Cavs just swept the second team in a row.
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