First Snow

The first snow of the season is always so much more exciting than subsequent snows. Even though I know I take the same pictures each year, I couldn't help but haul out the camera after last night's 12 inches or so.

In which I meet my Waterloo, and it is a dress

To cut right to the painful part: I had my worst-ever movie-going experience yesterday, comprehension-wise. Martha and I went to see an Argentine film called El Vestido (The Dress) and that is about as much as I can tell you about what I saw. Not only did I fail to parse the simplest connections between characters, I even managed to miss the fact that two of the main characters were from Spain, speaking with heavy Spanish accents, while the rest of the cast was Argentine. (Notice how I run to arch and posey English locutions like "parse" and "locutions" so you'll know that even though I'm an idiot in Spanish, I can still be pretentious in at least one language.)

It's a slow arty film with tons of wordless scenes, which you would think would make it easy to understand, but no. The dialogue was curt and elliptical and most of it flies by with no context to grab onto. I understood many of the phrases, but couldn't hang them onto any sort of coherent through-line. Afterward Martha explained to me that we had seen two versions of a story, one about the Spanish gentleman and the other being written by the Spanish gentleman. This was signaled by the lead actress being sometimes blond and sometimes raven-haired (I had, at least, noticed that much.) His father died recently (I got that) leaving behind his gay lover (Oh, so that's who that older guy crying was) and his sculptural white-wall labyrinths (I saw them, but thought they were the Spanish guy's, not his father's.) The Spanish guy's ill-fated romance with Ana is constructed and reconstructed and the same Satie-esque piano riff plays over and over, while we see a lot of white walls, flapping white curtains, and that white labyrinth. And there's a dress.

I'll add in my sheepish defense that I saw an excellent thriller this weekend (El secreto de sus ojos; The Secret of His Eyes) and although I missed a lot of the streetwise dialogue, I did manage to follow the plot quite well. And I was alone, so I didn't have Martha there to explain afetrwards (OK, I did have to search the Internet for one important whispered sentence that I missed. Happily I found a chat board where someone else had missed the same sentence and several viewers obligingly explained. You can find anything on the Net these days.)

I'm discouraged by The Dress, of course, but I suppose the best thing to do is get back on the horse. Only the horse is going to look pretty silly in a dress.

Assorted Packaging

Last week I saw an off-off play called Lote 77, which is about three classmates who work in and around cattle. The play looks at masculinity through the lens of animal husbandry, often making an explicit comparison between men and meat. It was quite good, very theatrical and full of energy. I was also quite taken with the program, which was a postcard for the play wrapped in shrink-wrap on a styrofoam tray, like meat in a supermarket.


I bought these matches because I liked the label, which I assume has not changed in many decades.


And how could I resist? You loved the tragedy, now try the candy bar.


Notice that the flavor is "White and Cookies." I guess pretty much sums up the Danish Prince, no?

I, Melting Pot

Was coming back from Caballito last night on a bus (subways shut down at 11) after a very nice dinner catching up with Victoria. People here tend to speak of Caballito as if it were the boonies, the way we might mention Staten Island. It's only about 25 minutes from downtown by subway (longer by bus), but in the public mind, it's a long way away. I like it there, partly because the best used-book stalls are in the Parque Rivadavia. Yesterday I bought three videos. There's a brisk business in copied DVDs, video games, software, music, etc. For some reason copies are called trucha (trout).

On the bus home I sat in the last available seat, a single toward the back. The fellow in front of me was holding court voluminously on this and that. I couldn't follow everything, but he was talking about Jews and Catholics, so I tried to avoid interaction. He was mainly talking to one buzzed fellow who had ingested something that made him essentially boneless. He was flapping around the bus like Plastic Man, his limbs and digits waggling this way and that. Almost the moment this rubbery kid slipped off the bus, the animated one turns to me and asks me if I'm Muslim.

I'm fairly used to this. My face reads ethnic, but people have trouble deciding which one. An angry man at the Ohio State Fair once accused me of hiding my heritage when I insisted that I wasn't Palestinian.

So I told the bus guy No, not Muslim. He asks "Hindu?" Also no. "Morrocan?" I decided to give in before he got to China. "Yankee by way of Lithuania," I say. And he responds "See, I was right. I could tell you were something like that." I was going to say "man, you cast a pretty wide net" but I didn't really want to engage and, besides, I have no idea how to say that in Spanish.

Pride and Fall

Monday night was lit class with a guest author, Martín Kohan. We read his terrific novel, Ciencias morales, about a memorably repressed 20-year-old perceptora—I guess we'd call her a teaching assistant—at the most historically important grammar school in Buenos Aires. It's set in 1982 during the dictatorship and the Malvinas (Faulklands) War, though those events are remotely inferred. Her job is to keep the kids in line, making sure they aren't transgressing. When she smells tobacco on one boy's breath, she's convinced he, and possibly others, are smoking in the boy's room. So she begins to hide out in one of the stalls, waiting to catch them. And that's where 2/3 of the novel takes place—her in the stall, observing with all her senses what goes on. It's obsessive and fascinating. Call it a cross between the intricate study of a restricted mind of The Remains of the Day and the sharp sensory imagery of Perfume.

Anyway, the author was extremely interesting. Like many literary people here, he is fluent in philosophy as well. He casually quotes Foucalt and Walter Benjamin from memory, and it was fun to hear him jump blithely from his own works to Borges and others. I was feeling quite proud of myself for doing a pretty good job following. Still, my brain lags any time there's a shift in context. At one point in the second hour they lost me. I heard "la casa blanca" or "the White House," so I knew they were onto something political. That's hard for me, because I don't always know the references, and names fly by very quickly. Then our teacher, Marcelo, mentioned Sam a few times. Really? Uncle Sam? I didn't realize he was a well known symbol here.

Several minutes later, my brain finally caught up and I realized they were talking about the movie Casablanca. You know—"Play it again, Sam." Oops. Naturally, I have no idea what they said about it.

El Tigre

Yesterday, Silvana and Héctor, my friends from Haedo, drove into town to pick me up for a very nice day trip to El Tigre, about 40 minutes upriver from Buenos Aires. A summer hotspot at the end of the 19th century, the area sits on a delta that includes a whole mess of rivers, streams, and so on. People get around in launches, water taxis, elegant wooden rowboats, kayaks, and private ships. It's generally a few degrees cooler than the city, so it's quite popular as a weekend retreat.


We took a boat ride through the Delta. At the start, there are several massive old clubs, often in the English style.


Then you start to pass private homes with docks on the water. These range from grand to humble.


It's very easy to imagine spending very comfortable weekends here.


Back in town, there's a kind of honky tonk Coney Island amusement park. That's where Hector and Silvana's daughter, Michaela, was spending the day, as part of a birthday party. I was quite happy not to be riding on Capitan Piraña (or waiting the long lines for any of the attractions.)


After lunch walked along the promenade toward the town center.





You really feel like you've gotten out of the city.


Alas, if you have the bad luck to return to the city exactly when a soccer game at River Stadium is letting out and the 40-minute trip takes you 2 hours, you have plenty of time to reacquire your city stress level.

Rey Lear

Saw one of Argentina's leading men, Alfredo Alcón, in Rey Lear last night, my first experience with Spanish Shakespeare. The overall effect was of listening to a rather good paraphrase. I could follow the language well, partly because I know the original, but also because it sounded like fairly plain-spoken, contemporary Spanish. There was a loss of poetry, but a resulting gain of speed. The how clipped along, clocking and in at an amazing 2.5 hours, with no intermission. I never thought I'd see an intermissionless Lear, and it certainly built up a head of steam that way.

The production was abstract modern, with an emphasis on harshly lit geometries, which makes sense for highlighting all of the play's parallels. The acting was overall quite good (minus a pandering and silly Edmund) and Alcón at 79 was a handsome and personable Lear. You could understand why people were staying loyal to him despite his mistaken love of surfaces. But given the common language, I was surprised to find the whole thing a little cold, not very affectionate, even in the end.

Slight disappointments on two of the famous bits: Lear stripping down to emulate Poor Tom (he didn't) and Lear carrying in the body of Cordelia at the end (he didn't). (A lackey carried her in.) I don't think all Lears need to go as far in the stripping as Ian McEwan did (who was clearly eager to show of his bod and...), but I do think that it's a great, revealing image, showing that Lear's obsession with appearances is giving way.

And speaking of bringing in Cordelia, here and there I think the adapting went too far. To translate one of the most famous cries in theater history:

"Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones..."

they came up with something that translates thusly:

"Howl! You men of stone. Howl!"

Now, I may be a little stiff in the ear in Spanish, but I can hear the difference between one "Howl" and four in a row. In this case, four is better.

The theater is a block from my apartment--I'd never noticed it before because it's buried inside a modern apartment building and above a mini-Shopping.

A Twice-Stolen Anecdote

I was surfing the net to prep for seeing King Lear tonight and stumbled on this anecdote that keeps making me giggle, so I pass it on, though give full credit to Daniel Hannan, the British Member of Parliament from whom I stole it, and Tom Utley, the fellow he stole it from in turn.

Just before Othello smothers Desdemona, he says "Put out the light, and then put out the light." Now apparently one of Tom Utley's grade school teachers was convinced that the repetition was a mistake and that the line was a mistranscription. I'm with Hannan in finding this notion preposterous--obviously the first "light" is the candle and the second is Desdemona's life. Regardless, the teacher asked the boys to suggest what the original might have been. I now hand it over to Hannan:

Young Tom stuck his hand in the air: “Could Shakespeare have meant Othello to say: 'Put out the cat, and then put out the light'?"

Gabo, Chris y Yo

I went to a great concert last night by my friend Gabo Ferro. I guess I can say that. We met because I introduced myself as a fan after an panel interview a couple of years ago. We've met for coffee a couple of times and he's very kind and easy to talk to.

His voice touches me in a way that very few singers do. Chris Connor comes to mind, who sadly passed away just a few weeks ago. The first time I heard her was at a theater department get-together at Hamilton in 1980 at professor Ed Barrett's house. He played Chris's Gershwin album and her voice sunk into me immediately and I still can't get enough of it.



The same thing with Gabo. When I first heard him here in a small multi-purpose theater/music space on Corrientes, I was instantly struck by the intensity and purity of his voice. I've since bought and love all of his albums, but the real experience is hearing him live. The best I can say is that hearing him sing makes me feel as if I can sing myself.

Here's a video of a live performance from his last CD, a biting cycle of break-up songs, all dealing with a bad bad split he went through the year before. This is called "Nube y Cielo" (Cloud and Sky) and the gist is that he's singing to his ex, saying that for a long time, he confused the clouds with the sky, mistaking his ex for the latter. Then the thunder comes along to wake him from his confusion. The ex tries to come back, but Gabo's awake now and he's not buying it. The simple, repeating chorus is variations on the words nube, cielo, trueno, y yo. (cloud, sky, thunder, and I) When you hear it live, it's breath-taking.

New Sounds

The apartment is very much as I left it, which is a pleasure. The only addition I've noticed so far is auditory. We've been having a lot of rain, not heavy, but steady. Somewhere in a neighboring building, they've changed or added something on the rooftop that affects the flow of rainwater. Once the rains get going, I hear a heavy, repeated plunking that sounds exactly like a sneaker in a dryer. It lasts until the rain stops. Not the most romantic of rain-on-the-roof noises, but charming in its own way.

Oh, that's the view out my kitchen window. It's so hard to photograph rain. You can tell that it has rained, but not that it's actually drizzling at the time of the photo. Anyway, pretty obviously I didn't fall in love with this apartment because of the views...

on giving in to a childish temptation

I am trying not to buy Kinder Eggs lately. I've been smitten with these surprise-filled chocolate eggs since I first discovered them in England more than 20 years ago. Inside each waxy chocolate egg is a bright plastic capsule, and inside that is a surprise toy. The prizes used to be amazing—complicated assemblies requiring patience and a bit of decoding. They come with diagramatic instructions, wordlessly suitable for misunderstanding in any language.

Back in the day, you would snap out a dozen or more parts and then put them together. (They don't sell them in the States because of choking hazards for small children.) You might get a Pink Panther, or maybe a race car, or an Asterix. The resulting toy was almost always larger than the plastic capsule, and often a feat of cunning engineering reflecting a weirdly foreign aesthetic. I remember a series of anthropomorphized kitchen appliances—an oven that stuck out its tongue when you opened the door, and iron with yellow hands that pushed its own on button. Hedgehogs were big, too.

Over the years, the toys have become less amazing. There's much less assembly to do, the engineering is less sublime, and the commercial tie-ins go from bad to worse. I thought the Smurf year was the worst, but then came the Disneyfication and the next thing you know, it's Ice Age 3.

Even worse, many of special series toys are the solid figurines, nothing more than colorful tchochkes. My heart sinks when I rattle a capsule and hear a dull thud-thud-thud that's the sure sign of a figurine. I've been known to open the capsule and toss it in the trash in the same movement.

So, given that I'm usually in for a disappointment, I try to avoid buying Kinder Eggs these days. Well, that plus it's a pretty childish thing for me to be spending bucks on, what with the recession and all.

However, yesterday when I arrived back in Buenos Aires for the first time since last December, I found myself putting a Kinder Egg on the conveyer belt at the local "chino" (i.e. mini-market run by Chinese). I'm always more vulnerable when I first see them here, and I give in almost without noticing.

So I open it last night and inside is a perfectly OK truck. Really, I am a bit old for these things. Anyway, it has only three parts (disappointing), but the shovel lifts into the air (cool). At first I want to call it a dump truck, but then I change my mind and decide it's a bulldozer. I'm still not sure, but a brief web search suggests that it might be something called a loader. Obviously, I did not spend enough time playing with construction vehicles as a child.

Swallowing the sour satisfaction of a predicted disappointment, I decide to take a nice picture and blog about it to justify my purchase. So here it is, beneath some of our Argentine plants, almost all of which miraculously survived the cold winter here.

25 Years Later

Went to my 25th college reunion last weekend. Here's my Senior photo and roughly the same pose in the same place. A lot less hair, of course, but still the same attraction to plaid...

The High Line Opens

Went first thing this morning to the High Line, which opened today. It's an elevated cargo rail line that was abandoned for 50 years or so and has now been turned into a park. It's about two blocks from our house.

It was rainy (misty at first, then quite stormy), but even when wet, it's terrific. I was worried it might be too architecty, but they've done a great job of creating interesting viewpoints without being indulgent.

Here's the Gansevoort Street entrance.


The plantings are inspired by the wildflowers that had taken root on the rails when it was abandoned.


This is the new Standard Hotel, my favorite new building in town.







Artwork by Hamilton College classmate Spencer Finch (I didn't know him). He took an 11-hour boat ride up the Hudson, taking pictures of the water. Each pane of glass is the color of one pixel in one of those photos; they're arranged chronologically from left to right and top to bottom (this is just one small section of the artwork.) His stuff can be ridiculously cerebral, but this one's quite pretty.


This is my street (16th), looking toward the east. I'm on the right two blocks down. My dad's staying at that building with the round windows (The Maritime Hotel) when he comes for a visit at the end of the month.



This is a hanging viewing area. You can sit on these wooden steps and watch the 10th venue traffic through the plexiglass.


My friend Karen's apartment (the pale yellow building at the right).


The Frank Gehry building on the West Side Highway.


Then it started to pour, so I had to leave. But I'm sure I'll be back, and often.

Some Recent Photos

37th St. near 8th Ave.

45th near 11th Ave.

11th Ave. near 44th St.


9th Ave. near 20th St.

Street View

Saturday was a beautiful day, so I walked to the east side to buy some rummy-nose tetras for the aquarium. Passed this storefront on 36th St. between 5th and 6th.

Más Hónico

Another for my collection of bad Spanish interpretations.


I'm on a guided tour of the Diego Rivera murals at the Palacio Nacional. They depict an amazing array of Mexican history, and our guide is terrific. He gets to one panel and says that it has some of the "más hónicos" elements in the mural. My brain freezes because I don't have a clue what "hónico" means. By the time I re-focus, he's talking abut a pyramid floating in the sky, and it reminds me of the symbol on Grandpa George's masonic mug.

Finally, several minutes later, I realize that the guide didn't say "más hónicos," but "masónicos." (They're not shown in these pics, by the way, which show another part of the mural. That trampy woman kissing a priest is part of the Capitalism panel.)

Monarchs in Mexico

Sunday, February 22

I’ve been in Mexico City for 8 days now. After much hemming and hawing, I’ve finally decided to take time off from the city’s endless cultural sites (everything from pyramids through colonial masterpieces to modern murals) to visit the monarch butterflies, who are about 4 hours west of here. Every year, they travel 2,500 miles from Canada to a winter in the mountains of Michoacán.

The trip to Angangueo is a breeze. I get up early and make quick subway connections to the bus terminal (though the Mexico City subway is crowded even at 7:45 on a Sunday morning). Hop on a bus to Zitácuaro, which is speedy. The long distance buses play movies, whether you want them to or not. So my first views of the desert hills and mountains are accompanied by Hillary Swank’s tough-girl draw melting Clint Eastwood’s scabby old heartstrings in Million Dollar Baby. I change in Zitácuaro for Angangueo, a much more local bus, which seems to stop every hundred yards or so for something or other. I ask the fare collector to let me know when we reach my hotel, but he forgets, so I overshoot my hotel by a bit. I’m walking back toward the center of town when a guy on the street asks me if I want to visit a butterfly sanctuary. I do indeed. His name's Enrique and he offers to drive me around all afternoon for a very reasonable fee. So I hop in his big red truck and he takes me to my hotel. I drop off my stuff and off we go. It's a beautiful drive up a narrow winding road to the El Rosario sanctuary.


Great sunny views of the city nestled into its valley along the way. Once at the sanctuary, Enrique sets me up with a guide named David. He's a skinny kid who might be as old as 20. His idea of guiding turns out to be sprinting ahead of me as fast as he can go. Now this is a steep climb up stairs and rocky roads. The sanctuary entrance is at abut 10,000 feet and you have to climb another 1,000 to reach the monarch’s preferred altitude. So I'm panting away, trying my best to keep up with David. Near the top. he points to a tree. I see nothing. He mentions that it’s cloudy, which I’ve just noticed myself. It’s been a beautiful sunny day, but indeed, it started to cloud over while I was trudging up the trail. And I know that the butterflies won’t fly unless it’s sunny. So I give David a tip and send him back downhill, saying I'm going to hang out by myself and wait for the sun to come out.

Just as I reach the top it starts to rain. I finally notice that what David was pointing at was the dark brown clumps in the trees. It’s the monarchs, huddled together in huge, tight, dark colonies.

Then I’m distracted from this impressive sight when heavy hard pellets of hail start to pelt me from above. The skies open up and a torrent of surprisingly annoying hailstones are bouncing off my head (ouch) and ears (worse). I stop looking up because my nose is particularly vulnerable. In just a few moments, the path is covered in pelleted ice. The only butterflies we see are the few poor slobs that are shot down by hail bullets. A guard walks by, picking up the bodies and placing them discretely n the woods so that the path will look a bit less like the runway of butterfly death it has become.


Regardless, I convince myself that it will clear up and the butterflies will fly, so I sit there in the cold wet hail for an hour. An hour. I'm only wearing a T-shirt. I stop taking pictures because a) there's nothing to take pictures of and b) the focus will suck because my hands are shaking and my teeth are chattering.

I finally give up and trudge my way back down. It clears up about 10 minutes later, while I'm having a couple of quesadillas and trying to keep my legs from shaking.

We drive back down to town and Enrique gives me a nice tour and we gab. He was in the Mexican army, but didn’t care for it, so then went to Tennessee, where he worked for a year and a half in a Chinese restaurant. He earned $250 a week and worked every day he was in the States except for the 4th of July, when the restaurant was closed.

We stop at his house and his son joins us for the rest of our town tour. Enrique has a regular job at an electric plant, but he drives on Sundays for his father, who's got a fleet of 3 trucks. So tomorrow Ernesto, the father, will take me to a different sanctuary where hopefully my luck will be better.

I comfort myself by taking lots of pictures of the streets of Angangueo. There's no TV (or heat) in my hotel room, so never mind the Oscars.




Monday, February 23

Ernesto picks me up at 8:00. It’s a beautiful sunny morning, a bit cool, but not a cloud in the deep blue sky. Very promising. We’re off in a different big red truck to Sierra Chincua, a reserve on the other side of Angangueo.


We’re the first visitors to arrive. This reserve feels much more wild than El Rosario. The butterflies return to the mountain every year, but to a slightly different spot. Ernesto hasn’t been inside the park recently, so he chats with some men tending horses at the entrance and finds out where the butterflies are at the moment. At El Rosario, you hike up to reach the butterflies, but here at Sierra Chincua you hike down. It’s a long hike, so I have a chance to find out a lot about Ernesto. Like many Mexicans, he's cobbled together a diverified portfolio of professions. In addition to the mini-fleet of trucks, he has a ranch (corn and feed grain) and a fish stall at the local market. He drives into Mexico City twice a week to buy fish. I also learn that he has ten children, though only three still live at home (and they’re all adults).

After an hour and a half of hiking, I’m beginning to wonder if we know where we or the butterflies are. The trail has long since turned to an increasingly vague set of possibilities.

But then we find them a bit after 10:00. Yesterday’s sad brown clumps have opened up and now sparkle a deep orange in the sun.


Thousands of butterflies are flying about skittishly. As the day warms up, the air becomes quite thick with them. Butterflies as a weather condition. It’s exciting and peaceful at the same time. We walk down a ravine, deep into their chosen ground. After about half an hour, Ernesto tells me that we’re lucky to be there early, because we are now well into the habitat itself, which is off-limits to visitors. We step right up to a fallen branch that's covered with butterflies that are just waking up as the sun hits it.


He tells me about the platforms he helped a film crew install when making a documentary last year. I lie down and gaze upwards, watching the flickering and listening to the soft breeze. Then I realize it’s not the wind, but the flapping of butterfly wings I hear.


My poetic wispiness shatters when both Ernesto and me hear voices. He looks alarmed and we both have to dash uphill about 50 yards or so to get out of the forbidden zone. Running uphill at 11,000 feet is something I do not recommend to anyone used to living at sea level. After two or three strides, my heart starts to pound. By the time we reach what feels like safety, it’s going so fast I can't feel the space between beats.

False alarm. Turns out it wasn’t park guides, but just another private driver and two Canadians. So we loll in a different, equally delightful clearing for another hour, gabbing and watching the butterflies. By noon, the sun has warmed more of the colonies and the air is oranger than ever. At last a guide comes by and shoos us out of our cozy clearing, which was apparently still beyond the limit.


The hike back is long and hard—it’s uphill in this direction and we have to stop many times to catch our breath. We also pass the day’s tourist lode coming the other way. There aren’t tons of them, but I’m extremely grateful that Ernesto got me there before anyone else. He tells me that in March when the butterflies leave, they fly right through town. It must be quite a sight, though I’m quite satisfied with what I’ve seen today.