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.