The temperature has been dropping in Buenos Aires, which has caused my host mother to complain loudly about the cold. She is also constantly telling me to put coats on when I'm already wearing three layers of clothing. I do this out of hard experience with Cleveland weather--you constantly end up going out with a huge coat and end up ruing the decision later in the day when it turns unexpectedly warm. It helps to be prepared.
Despite this, I've had a cold for a few weeks now (I always seem to have a cold). On Tuesday my host mom was concerned (she always is) and this time with reason because I was coming down with a fever. Late Tuesday night it was discovered that I had tonisilitis when we called a doctor to come by the house. The man looked me over, briefly asked me about symptoms looked in my mouth and said "yes, there it is. You have pus, that's the problem. Take antibiotics and get rest you should be fine by Monday". That was it. I paid him 100 pesos for that (which is covered by my insurance fortunately).
This was a bit of a mixed blessing. I had a test the next day which would need to be rescheduled but this now meant that I had plenty of time to work on all that studying when I was stuck at home. And indeed having a computer and internet access means that you are instantly connected to the rest of the world just from sitting on your bed. So why was I depressed after the first day?
For the same reason that my previous five-day weekend had been difficult for me. The same reason that I go to cafes to study even though there's nothing to stop me from studying in my room. I just don't do anything when I'm sitting around in my room and although I keep myself occupied (my host mom mentioned I could watch T.V. or a movie, and then there was the laptop) this was not what I was worried about. I feel unproductive and worthless when the most I can say for my day is that I checked my email a dozen times and played free cell. Meanwhile I have a to-do list a page long with a two items checked off.
At least on the long weekend I had the possibility of going out as something I knew that I perhaps ought to be doing. But here I was on doctor's orders to do nothing but sit around in bed (and sleep sometimes I suppose). The freedom from such obligation is at once oddly exhilerating (I have so much time to get things done!) and feels like an anvil hanging over my head. Because if I don't get anything done...
Kuky, my host mother, took care of me very well, brining me soup and tea to my room, and doing everything she could to ensure my rapid return to health (meanwhile she got herself vaccinated against the flu, afraid that she or her husband would catch it from me--though I didn't have it). Yet her vigilance, while nice, just contributed to my feelings of uselessness.
After a full day of mostly sitting on my computer playing games I decided I needed to get something accomplished and came up with what I think is a rather clever innovation. I took out a piece of paper and wrote "accomplishments" at the top, did 50 pushups and 100 situps and wrote this down on the page. I did some of the ankle exercises that I'm supposed to do for my injured ankle and wrote that down as well. I wrote a blog entry and added that to the list (it was something I was meaning to write about for a while). I wrote a poem and wrote that down as well. I did more pushups and every time I did it felt good to be able to say that I was accomplishing something more in my day (I couldn't leave and go to the gym for fear of affecting people but I was already feeling fine by this point). I figured out that it's much easier to get things done when you're looking at the day as a clean slate than as already filled up with all the things you didn't do yesterday. You're not really going to forget those things, and if you do you can look at the the old list. But just staring a huge to-do list and contemplating the seeming impossibility at chipping away at it seems to be a bit too daunting. I usually try to do something unrelated so that I don't have to think about it.
On my last set of push ups I started thinking, "why am I doing this". I don't know if arm strength is really something that's going to benefit me in any significant way at this point in my life (I don't really play any sport that depends heavily on arm strength). I even questioned the whole purpose of keeping one's body in good shape in the first place--my dad worked out all the time and he died at 54 of a heart attack. There's a certain thrilling romanticism about it, fighting the inevitable, trying to strengthen bodies that are nonetheless steadily and inexorably moving towards collapse.
For those unfamiliar with the second law of thermodynamics, it states that the universe is steadily progressing towards entropy, because heat flows from hot things to cold things, things naturally progress towards disorder and what's called entropy increases. It's easier to break things than put them back together (anyone who' s been frustrated by broken dishes knows what I'm talking about). Yet somehow we keep trying to make things, keep trying to progress and grow things, even though it seems all too easy for everything to fall apart. You spend your whole adult life, twenty years! building your career, your family, stressing about the future, saving for your retirement, dreaming of living someplace more tranquil where there's mountains, just to die in your office chair at 54.
Think about herrings. David Gessner writes about them in his book A wild Rank Place: One Year on Cape Cod. The poor bastards swim upstream, up waterfalls even, facing bears, birds and all manner of other predators and obstacles just to make it to the place they were born so they can spawn. And die.
Yet we need to do work, we can't just sit around playing games, masturbating our time away. We night to fight the current in some kind of way, which is why I can't stand vacation, I can stand staying at home even though I enjoy it. Van Gogh wrote it well in his journals when he said: "Just then I feel what work is to me, how it gives tone to life, apart from approval or disapproval; and on days that would otherwise make me melancholy, one is glad to have an aim." [My italics]
Gessner writes about how like the herring, we have hordes of writers in our society today, swimming out of creative writing and MFA programs with the aim of publishing, and we know that there just isn't enough demand for writing for them all to get published. Like the doomed fish many of them will not make it. I'd love to be published someday and maybe that's part of the appeal of hitting the "publish post" button at the bottom of my screen everytime I write a blog post. I'm casting my words out into the world. And in all probability the only people reading are my family and maybe a few of my friends, so that there isn't any real need to generalize my language, that I could probably refer to people by their first names without anyone wondering who Natalia and Marco (my siblings) are in the context of my story. But the aim of publication (even in a blog) and the desire to create something lasting (of any kind) are important to me and they're what get me up in the morning.
Gessner offers this advice which I have taken to heart "Don't worry too much about the consequences...just keep throwing yourself into things. And think like a herring."
That's what I try to do. So now, ironically after a week of bad health, I feel better than ever.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
Therapy
"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.
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.
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.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Violent Dreams
This was keeping me up the other night so I figured I may as well write about it as long as I’m not sleeping.
Last Saturday I was robbed violently.
That last word is a significant one. While the economic effects of having things stolen from you remain the same regardless of how the stealing was done, a violent robbery messes with your head in very different ways than just being pick-pocketed would. Those of you who know me probably know that I’m a pretty peaceful dude most of the time. And yet I was kept up by very vivid fantasies about visiting terrible violence upon a kid probably only a little older than my brother.
It happened like this. I met an Argentinean girl who’s a film student at the film school here in Buenos Aires and she invited me to come see a movie with her at a theatre that I’d never been to before. Immediately prior I had been having dinner with a friend of mine from the program and since the theatre looked to be in the same direction as where she lived, we figured we’d take the same bus and I would just get off a few stops later. So we took the bus, she got off at her stop and I sat down staring at my pocket city map following (or thought I was following) the bus and trying to figure out what would be the best time for me to get off.
As it turned out I guessed wrong as to where would be the best place to get off. It’s difficult because the bus will go one way and then turn and go the other way for a while so you kind of have to bet as to whether staying on the bus will eventually get you closer or if you’re better off getting off now and walking the rest of the way. In the end I get off on the right street about thirty blocks away. I was already late and was furiously texting this girl when I realized that we were at the end of the line in Retiro.
I had been to Retiro before and I’m relatively comfortable with the place, during the day. But Retiro is one of the train stations in Buenos Aires, and as we were warned during orientation the train stations can be dangerous at night. It’s odd because it isn’t abandoned or dark and while not full of people there’s always lots of people around, so it’s not really the place you’d expect to get robbed. But you do get the sense that it’s sort of the edge of the city and in Buenos Aires, in contrast to most cities in the U.S. it’s the suburbs that are the most dodgy while the center of town is safest.
All of these things which, of course, I knew, did not occur to me at the time because I was more worried about how I had ended up so far from the train station, and how I was possibly going to get there in time to meet this girl—would the movie start without me, would she wait for me, would this be a deal breaker for future dates with this woman etc. I was standing on a corner looking up at the street signs and staring at my city map when a couple of youths accosted me.
After it happened and I was explaining the bruises on my face to my host family, my host mom’s son told me “listen, you need to just give them what they want and don’t resist. Better that you lose your watch or your phone than your life.” This makes lots of sense in the case of a robbery “alright this is a stickup, give me all the money in your wallet now!” The thing was I just didn’t feel like I was being robbed.
I should explain something before I get any further. There are a lot of people in this city who come up to you and make odd requests. Every street corner is filled with someone handing out slips of paper with information about titty bars, tarot readers or restaurants. I met the above mentioned girl because while we were waiting for the bus and I suggested we walk home because a drunk was rather aggressively hassling me for some change to buy booze. I even had a kid ask me, as I was walking to class sipping on a red bull, if he could take a swig of my drink. Finally there was a kid with a group of his friends at the subway station who was rather aggressively asking for my ipod; I didn’t understand him really well, but he was grabbing at it and he and his friends were laughing when I got defensive about it. Somehow I was made to feel that I was the uptight one in not wanting him to get his hands on my possessions.
So it was into this context that I heard these two youths asking me for my cell phone. I figured that the best response given my past experiences, was to hold onto my possessions lest they inadvertently be grabbed, and pretend like I hadn’t heard them—the way you ignore people offering to sell you things on the subway. This didn’t work very well and they started to get upset with me when I didn’t respond, and started to grab at my pockets. At this point things become a little unclear to me, but what I do remember is that I was very concerned that these boys would make off with my ipod, the way the kid on the subway nearly did and so was attempting to cover that and make it either not visible or difficult to snatch quickly. To my surprise they persisted, wouldn’t let me go and start to fight with me, alternating between demanding my phone, hitting me and grabbing at my pockets where they figured it was.
After a little bit of this I found myself on the ground getting hit or kicked (not sure which) in the face (I suppose it was closer down there) after I’d gotten a few hits at one of their heads as well. It was at about this time that I remember thinking “wow this is really happening, I’m being robbed” much like it felt in the hospital room when Dad died. Believe it or not, this is it. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t matter to them that my dad had died a few months ago, and that I wouldn’t have time to make that ridiculous plea anyway. Suddenly they left me and started to run and for one fraction of a second I made the decision whether to run after them or not. I’m not sure if this happened before or after I checked my belongings to see what was missing, but I decided not to run, reasoning that they had a bit of head start so I wouldn’t catch them anyway.
Afterwards I was able to get home because a pair of onlookers gave me some money to take a taxi home, which is I was very grateful for as I had no money and still didn’t entirely know how to get where I was going (this was after it had become to clear me that I had definitely missed my date). It also reminded me of something about Buenos Aires that I’d known already: that the people here are really quite friendly (most of them).
But it’s the image of those two hooligans running away that keeps me up at night, they running and my decision not to run after them. It keeps me up, much the way you might be kept up with thoughts and images running through your mind about making love to a beautiful woman. Only instead of sex, the daydreams (are they still daydreams if they’re at night?) were about violence, about if I’d run after them and I caught up to the second kid and grabbed him by the leg causing him to trip, the other kid keeps running but turns back twenty feet away or so, in time to see me grab the fallen one and punch him in the head repeatedly, until his face starts to bleed all over the cement, and the people waiting outside the train station start to look concernedly on at the scene. The kid in front runs back to confront me, but he’s alone now as the fallen one is in no place to help him. We stare at each other for a while and as other people start to come closer to see what’s going on he decides it’s best that he leaves and continues to run away while he still has something to show for the evening’s adventure.
It might be interesting to note that nowhere in this fantasy does my wallet get returned to me because that isn’t the point for my animal brain. It’s like Vincent says in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction “What I wouldn’t give to catch the guy who did it [keyed his car]. You know, it would be worth him doing it, just to catch him at it.” Ownership in this case is about more than possession, it’s about pride, and it’s about power, about who’s on the ground and who’s standing.
Women don’t think like this. A female friend of mine was recently robbed violently as well; a woman was waiting for her in the doorway of an apartment building and without warning or saying anything started punching her in the chest, repeatedly, until my friend threw her purse at her yelling to stop. I’m sure she was affected by the event powerfully, but I doubt she has quite these kinds of dreams. In some ways at least women are more rational than men.
I was happy and sort of amused when I stood up, a little bit dizzy and searched through my right pocket to assess the damage to find that my cellphone, my ipod shuffle and my brother’s swiss army knife were all still there. Though my wallet was gone, it gave me satisfaction at least to know that I hadn’t been robbed clean of everything, and that my assailants hadn’t got what they wanted (although they were no doubt quite pleased with the hundred or so pesos that were in my wallet). I also attained great satisfaction from finding a hat discarded on the ground, which had fallen from one of the boys in the fight. I picked this up and kept it, I brought it home as a sort of trophy, as if to say “here is proof that I didn’t go down without a fight”.
It also amused me later, that my first coherent thoughts after the event were “shit, now how am I gonna get to the movie” followed by “this transaction constitutes an economic deadweight loss for society as there are numerous costs borne by me that are not equally compensated by gains for my aggressors, i.e. physical damage, the wallet which will likely be discarded, the debit card which I will cancel and will thus be useless to the thieves. This is a prime example of why crime is costly for society in ways that constitute more than simply transfers between parties”. You know you’re a huge economics dork when…
The question of the movie was resolved by calling the girl, since I fortunately still had my phone. I really wanted to see her, or someone that I knew well, but she didn’t know how to get to where I was so, upon hearing that I’d found a way to get home, she told me we could get together another time. It was only afterwards that I realized the significance of still having my phone. I didn’t have her number written anywhere, or memorized or anything. I had gotten her number from her the night I’d met her at the bus stop and the only place it was stored was in my phone. Had I given the phone away as the thieves had wanted I would never see her again, as I didn’t have an email address, last name (for facebook), or any other way of contacting her. She would have thought I stood her up and never called again, and would probably think I was a jerk for never returning her calls and eventually write me off or wonder what had went wrong that she hadn’t seen coming. And that almost happened, but for my vigilance in holding on to my ipod (which was attached to the same pocket that contained my phone).
Finally, on the way home in the taxi, too late I thought of the cross that I was wearing at the time of the assault, threaded on a thin chain that had broken during the fight and now remained abandoned on that street corner. I had purchased the cross while I was in Santiago, at the shrine to our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. It depicted Jesus on the cross with God behind him with his arms outspread and a dove at his head. I had planned to send it to my brother Marco along with the following message: “A good Catholic when he sees this cross would see the holy trinity. But I’m not a good Catholic—I see an image of a son whose going through a very difficult time in his life, and whether he knows it or not his father is watching over him from heaven. So I want you to have it.” It wasn’t until I realized that Marco will never get the cross and that there’s no way of getting it back (it’s doubtless been picked up by now) that I first started to tear up a little bit in the taxi.
Last Saturday I was robbed violently.
That last word is a significant one. While the economic effects of having things stolen from you remain the same regardless of how the stealing was done, a violent robbery messes with your head in very different ways than just being pick-pocketed would. Those of you who know me probably know that I’m a pretty peaceful dude most of the time. And yet I was kept up by very vivid fantasies about visiting terrible violence upon a kid probably only a little older than my brother.
It happened like this. I met an Argentinean girl who’s a film student at the film school here in Buenos Aires and she invited me to come see a movie with her at a theatre that I’d never been to before. Immediately prior I had been having dinner with a friend of mine from the program and since the theatre looked to be in the same direction as where she lived, we figured we’d take the same bus and I would just get off a few stops later. So we took the bus, she got off at her stop and I sat down staring at my pocket city map following (or thought I was following) the bus and trying to figure out what would be the best time for me to get off.
As it turned out I guessed wrong as to where would be the best place to get off. It’s difficult because the bus will go one way and then turn and go the other way for a while so you kind of have to bet as to whether staying on the bus will eventually get you closer or if you’re better off getting off now and walking the rest of the way. In the end I get off on the right street about thirty blocks away. I was already late and was furiously texting this girl when I realized that we were at the end of the line in Retiro.
I had been to Retiro before and I’m relatively comfortable with the place, during the day. But Retiro is one of the train stations in Buenos Aires, and as we were warned during orientation the train stations can be dangerous at night. It’s odd because it isn’t abandoned or dark and while not full of people there’s always lots of people around, so it’s not really the place you’d expect to get robbed. But you do get the sense that it’s sort of the edge of the city and in Buenos Aires, in contrast to most cities in the U.S. it’s the suburbs that are the most dodgy while the center of town is safest.
All of these things which, of course, I knew, did not occur to me at the time because I was more worried about how I had ended up so far from the train station, and how I was possibly going to get there in time to meet this girl—would the movie start without me, would she wait for me, would this be a deal breaker for future dates with this woman etc. I was standing on a corner looking up at the street signs and staring at my city map when a couple of youths accosted me.
After it happened and I was explaining the bruises on my face to my host family, my host mom’s son told me “listen, you need to just give them what they want and don’t resist. Better that you lose your watch or your phone than your life.” This makes lots of sense in the case of a robbery “alright this is a stickup, give me all the money in your wallet now!” The thing was I just didn’t feel like I was being robbed.
I should explain something before I get any further. There are a lot of people in this city who come up to you and make odd requests. Every street corner is filled with someone handing out slips of paper with information about titty bars, tarot readers or restaurants. I met the above mentioned girl because while we were waiting for the bus and I suggested we walk home because a drunk was rather aggressively hassling me for some change to buy booze. I even had a kid ask me, as I was walking to class sipping on a red bull, if he could take a swig of my drink. Finally there was a kid with a group of his friends at the subway station who was rather aggressively asking for my ipod; I didn’t understand him really well, but he was grabbing at it and he and his friends were laughing when I got defensive about it. Somehow I was made to feel that I was the uptight one in not wanting him to get his hands on my possessions.
So it was into this context that I heard these two youths asking me for my cell phone. I figured that the best response given my past experiences, was to hold onto my possessions lest they inadvertently be grabbed, and pretend like I hadn’t heard them—the way you ignore people offering to sell you things on the subway. This didn’t work very well and they started to get upset with me when I didn’t respond, and started to grab at my pockets. At this point things become a little unclear to me, but what I do remember is that I was very concerned that these boys would make off with my ipod, the way the kid on the subway nearly did and so was attempting to cover that and make it either not visible or difficult to snatch quickly. To my surprise they persisted, wouldn’t let me go and start to fight with me, alternating between demanding my phone, hitting me and grabbing at my pockets where they figured it was.
After a little bit of this I found myself on the ground getting hit or kicked (not sure which) in the face (I suppose it was closer down there) after I’d gotten a few hits at one of their heads as well. It was at about this time that I remember thinking “wow this is really happening, I’m being robbed” much like it felt in the hospital room when Dad died. Believe it or not, this is it. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t matter to them that my dad had died a few months ago, and that I wouldn’t have time to make that ridiculous plea anyway. Suddenly they left me and started to run and for one fraction of a second I made the decision whether to run after them or not. I’m not sure if this happened before or after I checked my belongings to see what was missing, but I decided not to run, reasoning that they had a bit of head start so I wouldn’t catch them anyway.
Afterwards I was able to get home because a pair of onlookers gave me some money to take a taxi home, which is I was very grateful for as I had no money and still didn’t entirely know how to get where I was going (this was after it had become to clear me that I had definitely missed my date). It also reminded me of something about Buenos Aires that I’d known already: that the people here are really quite friendly (most of them).
But it’s the image of those two hooligans running away that keeps me up at night, they running and my decision not to run after them. It keeps me up, much the way you might be kept up with thoughts and images running through your mind about making love to a beautiful woman. Only instead of sex, the daydreams (are they still daydreams if they’re at night?) were about violence, about if I’d run after them and I caught up to the second kid and grabbed him by the leg causing him to trip, the other kid keeps running but turns back twenty feet away or so, in time to see me grab the fallen one and punch him in the head repeatedly, until his face starts to bleed all over the cement, and the people waiting outside the train station start to look concernedly on at the scene. The kid in front runs back to confront me, but he’s alone now as the fallen one is in no place to help him. We stare at each other for a while and as other people start to come closer to see what’s going on he decides it’s best that he leaves and continues to run away while he still has something to show for the evening’s adventure.
It might be interesting to note that nowhere in this fantasy does my wallet get returned to me because that isn’t the point for my animal brain. It’s like Vincent says in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction “What I wouldn’t give to catch the guy who did it [keyed his car]. You know, it would be worth him doing it, just to catch him at it.” Ownership in this case is about more than possession, it’s about pride, and it’s about power, about who’s on the ground and who’s standing.
Women don’t think like this. A female friend of mine was recently robbed violently as well; a woman was waiting for her in the doorway of an apartment building and without warning or saying anything started punching her in the chest, repeatedly, until my friend threw her purse at her yelling to stop. I’m sure she was affected by the event powerfully, but I doubt she has quite these kinds of dreams. In some ways at least women are more rational than men.
I was happy and sort of amused when I stood up, a little bit dizzy and searched through my right pocket to assess the damage to find that my cellphone, my ipod shuffle and my brother’s swiss army knife were all still there. Though my wallet was gone, it gave me satisfaction at least to know that I hadn’t been robbed clean of everything, and that my assailants hadn’t got what they wanted (although they were no doubt quite pleased with the hundred or so pesos that were in my wallet). I also attained great satisfaction from finding a hat discarded on the ground, which had fallen from one of the boys in the fight. I picked this up and kept it, I brought it home as a sort of trophy, as if to say “here is proof that I didn’t go down without a fight”.
It also amused me later, that my first coherent thoughts after the event were “shit, now how am I gonna get to the movie” followed by “this transaction constitutes an economic deadweight loss for society as there are numerous costs borne by me that are not equally compensated by gains for my aggressors, i.e. physical damage, the wallet which will likely be discarded, the debit card which I will cancel and will thus be useless to the thieves. This is a prime example of why crime is costly for society in ways that constitute more than simply transfers between parties”. You know you’re a huge economics dork when…
The question of the movie was resolved by calling the girl, since I fortunately still had my phone. I really wanted to see her, or someone that I knew well, but she didn’t know how to get to where I was so, upon hearing that I’d found a way to get home, she told me we could get together another time. It was only afterwards that I realized the significance of still having my phone. I didn’t have her number written anywhere, or memorized or anything. I had gotten her number from her the night I’d met her at the bus stop and the only place it was stored was in my phone. Had I given the phone away as the thieves had wanted I would never see her again, as I didn’t have an email address, last name (for facebook), or any other way of contacting her. She would have thought I stood her up and never called again, and would probably think I was a jerk for never returning her calls and eventually write me off or wonder what had went wrong that she hadn’t seen coming. And that almost happened, but for my vigilance in holding on to my ipod (which was attached to the same pocket that contained my phone).
Finally, on the way home in the taxi, too late I thought of the cross that I was wearing at the time of the assault, threaded on a thin chain that had broken during the fight and now remained abandoned on that street corner. I had purchased the cross while I was in Santiago, at the shrine to our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. It depicted Jesus on the cross with God behind him with his arms outspread and a dove at his head. I had planned to send it to my brother Marco along with the following message: “A good Catholic when he sees this cross would see the holy trinity. But I’m not a good Catholic—I see an image of a son whose going through a very difficult time in his life, and whether he knows it or not his father is watching over him from heaven. So I want you to have it.” It wasn’t until I realized that Marco will never get the cross and that there’s no way of getting it back (it’s doubtless been picked up by now) that I first started to tear up a little bit in the taxi.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Chile
It’s been quite a while now since I got back from Chile, so I thought before I get any farther I ought to write about how that went.
We got Thursday and Friday off for holy week and as a result we decided to go a little farther away then we could on a normal long weekend (and by we I mean my friend Sam decided and I last minute elected to go with him). The logic was that we’d never be able to go to Chile again and this is probably true so I’m glad we went.
The downside to this is that the knowledge that “we’re never going to be here again” alters the mood of the trip a little bit. I noticed right away that taking a weekend trip is very different from the study abroad program. Here in Buenos Aires I don’t feel as though I have to go out and see things every day, because after all, I have a year. There’s no rush. I can spend the night in and read a book, I can study for my classes, I can wander around and explore whenever I feel like it. When we arrived in Santiago we had no idea what we were going to do there. When we finally got to the Hostel and set our stuff down we picked up a map and started to look around for places to go and things to do. Sam marked up the map with places that
It was just the three of us Sam, a friend of mine from the program, Dylan, a friend of his who I didn’t know nearly as well, and I. Still it was often hard to make decisions and we would often encounter situations like “well I don’t have any preference about what we do, I just want to see as much as we can since we’re only going to be here two days.”
But although that aspect of the trip was stressful we still managed to find some interesting things to do. On our second day (our one full day in Santiago) we climbed a cerro (like a hill) that had at its peak a sanctuary dedicated to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (my word processor just capitalized that phrase automatically so apparently it’s a pretty important dogma). Although I don’t in the slightest believe in the notion of asexual human reproduction in the time before in vitro I found the place to be very moving. First of all I like the idea of shrines on top of mountains—it’s something that’s very common in Japan that really appealed to me there as well. There they have Shinto shrines all over the place but they’re always in really remote old places on top of mountains with woods surrounding them. Even if down below is a relatively urban area the fact that the shrine is up in the mountains lends a more tranquil air to them than you would get in a church situated on a major street in a city. Also there is something to be said about the trouble of reaching the shrine. Hiking or even just driving up forever, makes arriving at the shrine that much more meaningful and important. And it makes them more important as places.
Unlike Shinto, which you can only practice in Japan because of the place-specificity of these shrines, Christianity is a very universal religion that you can practice just about anywhere—just bring your rosary and your bible. Mountains are purely optional. This was the approach my dad took to his Catholicism, practicing it wherever was convenient, going to whatever church he happened to be in the same country as he was. As for me, I’ve always been really attached to places, and I stopped being Catholic the day we stopped going to the same church every Sunday and started this business of migrating, going to whatever church fit our schedule just to fulfill the obligation. That completely killed it for me. I like my places to have meaning particularly my holy ones. Thus the notion of having shrines up on mountains, the “this is our lady of Cerro San Cristobal because that’s where she is” notion appeals to me quite a bit.
They had cremations up there too, next to a trio of statues of Jesus on the cross and Mary and someone else (probably the other Mary) looking on. I liked that. If you’re going to cry about something while staring at a statue, that statue ought to be a depiction of a situation at least as wretched as what you’re crying about. Plus I know dad would love to spend the rest of his life up on the top of a mountain, so the notion of keeping cremation boxes up there sat well with me as well.
The other highlight of Santiago, for me anyway was going to see Pablo Neruda’s house. Pablo Neruda actually had three houses (we saw two of them in Chile!) one on Isla Negra, one in Valparaiso and one in Santiago. They’ve all been kept up and turned into Museums by the Fundación Pablo Neruda, and our last day in Santiago we got to visit his house there. What was probably most impressive was the amount of art he had in there! It helps that he was friends with a lot of artists, among them Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera, some of whom made pieces specifically for him. He had one piece made for him that depicted his then-mistress-later-wife Mathilde with two faces, with the face of Neruda hidden in her hair. This was supposed to represent the double life that Mathilde was living as her lover Neruda was married at the time. Nice gift.
Places were pretty important to Neruda as well, and he designed the house (or rather had it designed for him) with the idea of it resembling the interior of a boat, since the sea had always fascinated him. This too was interesting to see in the architecture of the place, which I’m sure would have interested my brother and aspiring architect Marco.
I also enjoyed the place because it reminded me of a contradiction of mine—how much I liked Neruda and how little of his poetry I had read. This is to say, that I know a lot about him, his life, his politics, when he wrote most of the books that he wrote, I’ve written literature papers about him in Spanish and yet I’ve read relatively few of his poems. When you consider he’s written several dozen books and I own one and am really familiar with only about a half dozen of his poems, I find that sort of shameful. I suppose that this is not so uncommon—there are many poets who are very well known but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s read all of the poems of well-known poets like Borges, Hughes, Eliot and Whitman (poets whose poems—the couple I have read—I have liked).
It’s a bit like the ipod culture we’ve created around music. We download that one famous Stones song we like, along with the half dozen Beatles songs we’re fond of and that tune we just heard on the radio that we buy on itunes and throw onto our “gym mix”. We don’t listen to albums anymore, we rarely sit down and listen through the album that a group of musicians put together and read through the liner notes and try to decipher the lyrics. A lot of that has to do with the time we have available to listen to music. A lot of it’s a matter of convenience or a function of the amount of music we’re able to store at one time on the devices on which we listen to music. But I think we miss something there.
Thinking some of these things while walking around the museum, I resolved to pick up a small book of Neruda’s poetry. Not three books that I’d never finish (a common tendency of mine) but just one that was digestible, something I could pick up, page through and finish reading in a few days, and then go back to my favorites, or after looking up some key words. I wanted to read a book of his poetry the way he’d originally put it together, the way it was originally published. So I bought Odas Elementales (“Elemental” or “basic” odes) a little of poems he wrote about simple things, written to such things his socks, artichoke, onion, the city of Valparaiso and the poet Cesar Vallejo.
That was another thing you could tell about his house, he really liked things—art, photos, old postcards, statues, glass bottles, playing cards—and clearly used them as inspiration. This is something else I dig about him as a poet, and it’s something that resonates with me. I wear my dad’s watch every day even though its battery is dead, not to keep time, but to remember times. I carry my little brother’s Swiss army knife for security not because it’s going to be remotely useful in defending myself (it wasn’t—more on that later) but because of the way it makes me feel. Under my futon at home I still keep the box I’ve had since high school, that’s full of little things that have meaning for me.
Neruda’s other house was in Valparaiso and as it so happened, we went there too (we managed to hit two of his houses in one trip). Valparaiso is very different from Santiago and I liked it. It was different in a very obvious and visual way—altitude. The whole city, or at least the residential part, was built on the hills that descended down to the ocean and as a result the whole city was very vertical. Climbing up to our hostel, dragging my luggage whose wheels were useless on the stairs that crisscrossed the city, this difference was apparent right away. But despite the difficulties, I loved it.
In place of barrios (“neighborhoods”) as they’re called in Buenos Aires and Santiago, Valparaiso’s neighborhoods are called cerros (literally “hills”). As in “yeah my friend lives over on San Tomas hill and my girlfriend lives down on hill Los Heroes”. And it’s beautiful. The hills force the architecture to be much more creative as houses are built up and down the hills and there are stairs that go down to the houses in between hills, and stairs that go between hills so that nothing is uniform and boring and routes to get places are vastly different for a car and a pedestrian. And there’s art everywhere. Besides the natural art of things growing in between the hills and parts of streets being totally abandoned to nature, there are murals on so many of the walls and the vertical nature of the city means that many of the walls that house these murals are enormous. Then there are art galleries all over the place particularly in the area around all the hostels (a tactical decision to be sure). I kept thinking of Marco there and how he’d like it.
The last day we spent most of our day in Viña del Mar, the neighboring town of Valparaiso with magnificent beaches on the Pacific Ocean. I don’t think I’ve ever swam in the sea before and I say this because I don’t recall ever experiencing the surprise of the salt content in the water I’d just gulped up accidentally. I loved it, it was a beautiful day, the sun was shining the water was refreshing (by which I mean freezing). It was a warm day, but around sunset it started to get chilly, which is why some of those pictures I have up on facebook show me with a sweater on—it was not like this most of the day, but I did find it sort of funny to think that here I was sitting on the beach and I was wearing a sweater.
We got Thursday and Friday off for holy week and as a result we decided to go a little farther away then we could on a normal long weekend (and by we I mean my friend Sam decided and I last minute elected to go with him). The logic was that we’d never be able to go to Chile again and this is probably true so I’m glad we went.
The downside to this is that the knowledge that “we’re never going to be here again” alters the mood of the trip a little bit. I noticed right away that taking a weekend trip is very different from the study abroad program. Here in Buenos Aires I don’t feel as though I have to go out and see things every day, because after all, I have a year. There’s no rush. I can spend the night in and read a book, I can study for my classes, I can wander around and explore whenever I feel like it. When we arrived in Santiago we had no idea what we were going to do there. When we finally got to the Hostel and set our stuff down we picked up a map and started to look around for places to go and things to do. Sam marked up the map with places that
It was just the three of us Sam, a friend of mine from the program, Dylan, a friend of his who I didn’t know nearly as well, and I. Still it was often hard to make decisions and we would often encounter situations like “well I don’t have any preference about what we do, I just want to see as much as we can since we’re only going to be here two days.”
But although that aspect of the trip was stressful we still managed to find some interesting things to do. On our second day (our one full day in Santiago) we climbed a cerro (like a hill) that had at its peak a sanctuary dedicated to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (my word processor just capitalized that phrase automatically so apparently it’s a pretty important dogma). Although I don’t in the slightest believe in the notion of asexual human reproduction in the time before in vitro I found the place to be very moving. First of all I like the idea of shrines on top of mountains—it’s something that’s very common in Japan that really appealed to me there as well. There they have Shinto shrines all over the place but they’re always in really remote old places on top of mountains with woods surrounding them. Even if down below is a relatively urban area the fact that the shrine is up in the mountains lends a more tranquil air to them than you would get in a church situated on a major street in a city. Also there is something to be said about the trouble of reaching the shrine. Hiking or even just driving up forever, makes arriving at the shrine that much more meaningful and important. And it makes them more important as places.
Unlike Shinto, which you can only practice in Japan because of the place-specificity of these shrines, Christianity is a very universal religion that you can practice just about anywhere—just bring your rosary and your bible. Mountains are purely optional. This was the approach my dad took to his Catholicism, practicing it wherever was convenient, going to whatever church he happened to be in the same country as he was. As for me, I’ve always been really attached to places, and I stopped being Catholic the day we stopped going to the same church every Sunday and started this business of migrating, going to whatever church fit our schedule just to fulfill the obligation. That completely killed it for me. I like my places to have meaning particularly my holy ones. Thus the notion of having shrines up on mountains, the “this is our lady of Cerro San Cristobal because that’s where she is” notion appeals to me quite a bit.
They had cremations up there too, next to a trio of statues of Jesus on the cross and Mary and someone else (probably the other Mary) looking on. I liked that. If you’re going to cry about something while staring at a statue, that statue ought to be a depiction of a situation at least as wretched as what you’re crying about. Plus I know dad would love to spend the rest of his life up on the top of a mountain, so the notion of keeping cremation boxes up there sat well with me as well.
The other highlight of Santiago, for me anyway was going to see Pablo Neruda’s house. Pablo Neruda actually had three houses (we saw two of them in Chile!) one on Isla Negra, one in Valparaiso and one in Santiago. They’ve all been kept up and turned into Museums by the Fundación Pablo Neruda, and our last day in Santiago we got to visit his house there. What was probably most impressive was the amount of art he had in there! It helps that he was friends with a lot of artists, among them Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera, some of whom made pieces specifically for him. He had one piece made for him that depicted his then-mistress-later-wife Mathilde with two faces, with the face of Neruda hidden in her hair. This was supposed to represent the double life that Mathilde was living as her lover Neruda was married at the time. Nice gift.
Places were pretty important to Neruda as well, and he designed the house (or rather had it designed for him) with the idea of it resembling the interior of a boat, since the sea had always fascinated him. This too was interesting to see in the architecture of the place, which I’m sure would have interested my brother and aspiring architect Marco.
I also enjoyed the place because it reminded me of a contradiction of mine—how much I liked Neruda and how little of his poetry I had read. This is to say, that I know a lot about him, his life, his politics, when he wrote most of the books that he wrote, I’ve written literature papers about him in Spanish and yet I’ve read relatively few of his poems. When you consider he’s written several dozen books and I own one and am really familiar with only about a half dozen of his poems, I find that sort of shameful. I suppose that this is not so uncommon—there are many poets who are very well known but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s read all of the poems of well-known poets like Borges, Hughes, Eliot and Whitman (poets whose poems—the couple I have read—I have liked).
It’s a bit like the ipod culture we’ve created around music. We download that one famous Stones song we like, along with the half dozen Beatles songs we’re fond of and that tune we just heard on the radio that we buy on itunes and throw onto our “gym mix”. We don’t listen to albums anymore, we rarely sit down and listen through the album that a group of musicians put together and read through the liner notes and try to decipher the lyrics. A lot of that has to do with the time we have available to listen to music. A lot of it’s a matter of convenience or a function of the amount of music we’re able to store at one time on the devices on which we listen to music. But I think we miss something there.
Thinking some of these things while walking around the museum, I resolved to pick up a small book of Neruda’s poetry. Not three books that I’d never finish (a common tendency of mine) but just one that was digestible, something I could pick up, page through and finish reading in a few days, and then go back to my favorites, or after looking up some key words. I wanted to read a book of his poetry the way he’d originally put it together, the way it was originally published. So I bought Odas Elementales (“Elemental” or “basic” odes) a little of poems he wrote about simple things, written to such things his socks, artichoke, onion, the city of Valparaiso and the poet Cesar Vallejo.
That was another thing you could tell about his house, he really liked things—art, photos, old postcards, statues, glass bottles, playing cards—and clearly used them as inspiration. This is something else I dig about him as a poet, and it’s something that resonates with me. I wear my dad’s watch every day even though its battery is dead, not to keep time, but to remember times. I carry my little brother’s Swiss army knife for security not because it’s going to be remotely useful in defending myself (it wasn’t—more on that later) but because of the way it makes me feel. Under my futon at home I still keep the box I’ve had since high school, that’s full of little things that have meaning for me.
Neruda’s other house was in Valparaiso and as it so happened, we went there too (we managed to hit two of his houses in one trip). Valparaiso is very different from Santiago and I liked it. It was different in a very obvious and visual way—altitude. The whole city, or at least the residential part, was built on the hills that descended down to the ocean and as a result the whole city was very vertical. Climbing up to our hostel, dragging my luggage whose wheels were useless on the stairs that crisscrossed the city, this difference was apparent right away. But despite the difficulties, I loved it.
In place of barrios (“neighborhoods”) as they’re called in Buenos Aires and Santiago, Valparaiso’s neighborhoods are called cerros (literally “hills”). As in “yeah my friend lives over on San Tomas hill and my girlfriend lives down on hill Los Heroes”. And it’s beautiful. The hills force the architecture to be much more creative as houses are built up and down the hills and there are stairs that go down to the houses in between hills, and stairs that go between hills so that nothing is uniform and boring and routes to get places are vastly different for a car and a pedestrian. And there’s art everywhere. Besides the natural art of things growing in between the hills and parts of streets being totally abandoned to nature, there are murals on so many of the walls and the vertical nature of the city means that many of the walls that house these murals are enormous. Then there are art galleries all over the place particularly in the area around all the hostels (a tactical decision to be sure). I kept thinking of Marco there and how he’d like it.
The last day we spent most of our day in Viña del Mar, the neighboring town of Valparaiso with magnificent beaches on the Pacific Ocean. I don’t think I’ve ever swam in the sea before and I say this because I don’t recall ever experiencing the surprise of the salt content in the water I’d just gulped up accidentally. I loved it, it was a beautiful day, the sun was shining the water was refreshing (by which I mean freezing). It was a warm day, but around sunset it started to get chilly, which is why some of those pictures I have up on facebook show me with a sweater on—it was not like this most of the day, but I did find it sort of funny to think that here I was sitting on the beach and I was wearing a sweater.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)