A tango with the streets and dusks of Buenos Aires
October 15, 2006 | 12:00am
Why Buenos Aires?" people would ask whenever I said I was about to embark on a South American journey, or when I said I had just gotten back, several pounds in excess of myself. Even the tango teacher in New York, who herself hailed from Argentina, wondered, "Did you put on a blindfold and throw a pin at a map?" as if we were callow enough to be interested only in the tangas of Brazil, and not the tango of its rival neighbor. There was no particular reason – that was yet to be formed by the trip itself – other than the desire to travel, explore and spend the year’s earnings on one short strip of regimented vacation days.
But no, Buenos Aires was chosen. People had been talking about it here and there, not in the archetypical "I just came back from Brazil/Thailand/Tibet and it changed my life" way – but as something else, a city of total livability, a city on the verge, and the city of now: where first-world tendencies are tempered by third-world roots, and grand Belle Époque architecture is bracketed by the shantytown universality of the villa miserables; the exquisite boutiques on cobblestone streets that sell, not imported couture, but local clothes of a hand-hewn quality; the incredible food, which can be summed up in the holy trinity of meat, meat, meat; the people’s passion for life, evidenced by their violent devotion to their football teams, or the way they carry around music with them – not through the lonely filtered beats of an iPod, but as live particles that conflagrate spontaneously when people get together.
I wondered if I could sustain an all-meat diet for the seven days I was there, but my organs were weakly crying out for some fresh greens or a banana. I quashed those feelings. With a bottle of Malbec. When one gets tired of steak, there is always chorizo, blood sausage, sweetbread, lamb, and chinchulines, their version of chicharon. The traditional grilling orgy, the parilla, is a prevalent curbside fixture, so it is never too long before the next meat fix. Most households have their own portable hibachis and I’m pretty sure baby’s first word is vaca. Argentines worship cows with an almost Hindu-like reverence, except of course these grass-fed, hormone-free cows are happily butchered and lovingly eaten, and always in beef’s naked form, sans sauce or marinade.
Dinner is consumed alarmingly late, no earlier than 11 p.m., but my two travel partners and I got used to this quickly by squeezing in post-shopping, pre-prandial disco naps, and once had to beat down closed kitchen doors because we took porteño-ism too far. The area we stayed in, Palermo Soho and the adjacent Palermo Hollywood, has unsurprisingly all the snazzy restos, and we dined disgustingly well, having our pick of cuisines: Argentine modern in Bar Uriarte, Peruvian-Japanese in Osaka, and Latin fusion in El Diamante, which were all within walking distance of each other. I would spend around $10 on each meal. My poor New York bones fattened themselves on the cheap, plentiful flavors of the South. Here, my pathetic few dollars were hopped on steroids, and it was a rush, the guilt-tinged perversity of feeling rich (ha!), tipping wildly, tippling generously, throwing calculators and conversion out the window.
There are few cultural phenomena that don’t roughly translate in another continent. Some perplexing combination of theater, violence and animals, or some kind of fasting, feasting, and frantic dancing exists organically in various nations. But the way the Latinos support their sport is something I have yet to find an analog of in both the United States and the Philippines. It is not puerile fandom or celebrity worship, and it is not transcendent like religious fervor, but it comes close, and it is a lifelong, incontrovertible affair. Football fanaticism is not blind, however. You know when your team sucks, and you show it by unleashing a rage of upturned cars, broken bottles, fires, etc.
We witnessed a match between the Boca Juniors (Diego Maradona’s team) and San Lorenzo. Tourists and the untrained are advised to go with a tour group, who will make sure that you sit separated from the rabid hardcore, who themselves are protected by riot police. Watching a live game is really watching the audience, who sometimes are the more entertaining performers. The home team, San Lorenzo, was losing appallingly by 7 to 1, and the initially invisible crowd of Boca supporters suddenly grew into this giant pulsating yellow and blue organism, sustained by incessant drumming, cursing, flag waving, smoke burning, and the chanting bawdy songs peppered with words like puto and y tu papa. Even an hour after the game ended and everyone was tying to file out of the stadium neatly and safely, the winning fans did not cease dancing their taunting and silly victory jig.
Just as Boracay’s soundtrack will always be Bob Marley and sunrise-inducing beach house anthems, the trademark ambient sounds of Buenos Aires happen to be Marley, and the Gotan Project. Gotan being the most popular and successful proponent of electrotango, and a staple on loungey remix compilations. My friend Erin thought it would be a shame to not visit an authentic milonga, those traditional dancehalls where singles materialize out of the smoky shadows to tango and entangle with strangers. She chose a club from her two-year-old Lonely Planet guide which described the place as "fun and casual," somewhere we could ease into without shame on the bare bones of what we know of this multilayered and incredibly bad-ass dance. La Catedral turned out to be anything but – it was a dark, cavernous room, a vaguely converted warehouse with a large red papier-mâché heart for its telltale chandelier.
Young couples, girls dressed in leggings and heels, guys in jeans and hoodies, were braving it out on the empty dance floor, sliding their legs in the old black and white movements that were beautifully incongruous with this Technicolor generation. Creaky, crackly records played – pure tango, mournful and unanchored by beats. It was the real thing, local, intimate and strange, with a decidedly un-casual atmosphere for the likes of our alien voyeurism. A portrait of Carlos Gardel, godfather of the tango, guarded the spotlit entrance, hindering us from making a discreet escape. It turned out that La Catedral had been closed due to recent nightclub crackdowns after the Cromagnon disco inferno tragedy, and only recently reopened, unofficially. The lesson learned from this is that you should always get the latest, most updated travel guide (I recommend the Time Out guide to Buenos Aires) – a lot can happen in a year. Or if you prefer spontaneity without reference, be sure to ask yourself: So you think you can dance... to this?
Our apartment rental in Palermo was situated a block from the street named after Borges. The author had grown up in the area, and had mythologized in a foundational poem about Buenos Aires the particular four corners of Guatemala and Borges avenues, which are now marked by the hipster bar Mundo Bizarro, a fruit grocer, a hamburger joint, and a furniture store. The neighborhood J.L. Borges is actually associated with is downtown San Telmo, where he served, while blind, as the director of the National Library. San Telmo is the beautifully faded, frayed-edges antiques district, weekend tourist trap, and preferred way station for backpackers. The Sunday markets condense in one plaza – stalls upon stalls of ancient silverware, tin signs, beads and lampshades – a cold plot of curios unearthed from a more civil time when objects were what they were, not displaced ornamental kitsch. J.L. himself has called San Telmo "the somewhat ostentatious center, that bit of public relations," but in the interstitial zones between the junk are cool finds, mini ferias and stores where local artisans, young designers and artsy entrepreneurs ply their trade – these were the things that for me signified Argentine originality and souvenir worthiness. Materia Urbana was one such store, selling handpainted silk scarves, T-shirts diagramming the legendary "Hand of God," purses knitted from copper wire, and warm denim capes lined in fleece. Fashion thrives here, with creativity sparked by crisis.
The theme of living like kings among paupers is a problematic common thread among travelers and expats. One article in New York magazine hyped how easy it was for nobody New Yorkers to relocate to BA and make it big and live large with a small amount of money and modicum of talent. While this effect of the country’s 2001 economic meltdown is definitely a magnet to foreigners tired of the grind, BA’s high move-to factor extends beyond the city being cheap, exploitable and full of beautiful people. Well, maybe not. I, however, was intrigued by the city because it was a place where things were happening, often in contradiction to one another, where things were still real and nebulous while things were also still very old and alive. It was also familiar – endemic corruption, constant political upheavals, deadly traffic, and Evita – the melodrama was all so very much like the Philippines.
We met an American transplant named Grant, an insider at the center of a particular expat local scene. He runs a bilingual website called What’s Up Buenos Aires, a go-to guide for the latest restaurants, events, music, and nightlife. He’s made it his job to unearth the new and buzzworthy, although admittedly he says he keeps a few discoveries to himself. Has BA blown up? Not quite yet, he says; it’s a big enough city for people to explore different options without getting caught up in any one act. Having said that, he showed us a copy of the Argentimes, a newly born English-language newspaper with writing from young Brits and Americans, the kind you would expect from them, too, musings on being foreign, travelogues, photo contests, outsider analysis. Is BA the new Prague, then? I’ll take it as a yes. Grant brought us to see a few refreshingly non-new wave indie bands at another converted warehouse, and a couple of DJs who mash cumbia and hip-hop, reggaeton and electro at an empty club run entirely by Nigerian refugees. This, he tells us, is what’s going to be big. Exhausted, sated, my friends and I speed away home in a dodgy black Radio Taxi, this Buenos Airean night’s character still only beginning to make itself known at three in the morning.
But no, Buenos Aires was chosen. People had been talking about it here and there, not in the archetypical "I just came back from Brazil/Thailand/Tibet and it changed my life" way – but as something else, a city of total livability, a city on the verge, and the city of now: where first-world tendencies are tempered by third-world roots, and grand Belle Époque architecture is bracketed by the shantytown universality of the villa miserables; the exquisite boutiques on cobblestone streets that sell, not imported couture, but local clothes of a hand-hewn quality; the incredible food, which can be summed up in the holy trinity of meat, meat, meat; the people’s passion for life, evidenced by their violent devotion to their football teams, or the way they carry around music with them – not through the lonely filtered beats of an iPod, but as live particles that conflagrate spontaneously when people get together.
Dinner is consumed alarmingly late, no earlier than 11 p.m., but my two travel partners and I got used to this quickly by squeezing in post-shopping, pre-prandial disco naps, and once had to beat down closed kitchen doors because we took porteño-ism too far. The area we stayed in, Palermo Soho and the adjacent Palermo Hollywood, has unsurprisingly all the snazzy restos, and we dined disgustingly well, having our pick of cuisines: Argentine modern in Bar Uriarte, Peruvian-Japanese in Osaka, and Latin fusion in El Diamante, which were all within walking distance of each other. I would spend around $10 on each meal. My poor New York bones fattened themselves on the cheap, plentiful flavors of the South. Here, my pathetic few dollars were hopped on steroids, and it was a rush, the guilt-tinged perversity of feeling rich (ha!), tipping wildly, tippling generously, throwing calculators and conversion out the window.
We witnessed a match between the Boca Juniors (Diego Maradona’s team) and San Lorenzo. Tourists and the untrained are advised to go with a tour group, who will make sure that you sit separated from the rabid hardcore, who themselves are protected by riot police. Watching a live game is really watching the audience, who sometimes are the more entertaining performers. The home team, San Lorenzo, was losing appallingly by 7 to 1, and the initially invisible crowd of Boca supporters suddenly grew into this giant pulsating yellow and blue organism, sustained by incessant drumming, cursing, flag waving, smoke burning, and the chanting bawdy songs peppered with words like puto and y tu papa. Even an hour after the game ended and everyone was tying to file out of the stadium neatly and safely, the winning fans did not cease dancing their taunting and silly victory jig.
Young couples, girls dressed in leggings and heels, guys in jeans and hoodies, were braving it out on the empty dance floor, sliding their legs in the old black and white movements that were beautifully incongruous with this Technicolor generation. Creaky, crackly records played – pure tango, mournful and unanchored by beats. It was the real thing, local, intimate and strange, with a decidedly un-casual atmosphere for the likes of our alien voyeurism. A portrait of Carlos Gardel, godfather of the tango, guarded the spotlit entrance, hindering us from making a discreet escape. It turned out that La Catedral had been closed due to recent nightclub crackdowns after the Cromagnon disco inferno tragedy, and only recently reopened, unofficially. The lesson learned from this is that you should always get the latest, most updated travel guide (I recommend the Time Out guide to Buenos Aires) – a lot can happen in a year. Or if you prefer spontaneity without reference, be sure to ask yourself: So you think you can dance... to this?
We met an American transplant named Grant, an insider at the center of a particular expat local scene. He runs a bilingual website called What’s Up Buenos Aires, a go-to guide for the latest restaurants, events, music, and nightlife. He’s made it his job to unearth the new and buzzworthy, although admittedly he says he keeps a few discoveries to himself. Has BA blown up? Not quite yet, he says; it’s a big enough city for people to explore different options without getting caught up in any one act. Having said that, he showed us a copy of the Argentimes, a newly born English-language newspaper with writing from young Brits and Americans, the kind you would expect from them, too, musings on being foreign, travelogues, photo contests, outsider analysis. Is BA the new Prague, then? I’ll take it as a yes. Grant brought us to see a few refreshingly non-new wave indie bands at another converted warehouse, and a couple of DJs who mash cumbia and hip-hop, reggaeton and electro at an empty club run entirely by Nigerian refugees. This, he tells us, is what’s going to be big. Exhausted, sated, my friends and I speed away home in a dodgy black Radio Taxi, this Buenos Airean night’s character still only beginning to make itself known at three in the morning.
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