Juan's Night on the Pampas

This past weekend, my nephew Juan Massolo and a couple friends traveled to the city of Junín, in the Pampas of Buenos Aires province, to see the Argentine rock legend Indio Solari, formerly of Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricotta. According to Juan, who’s a 20-something professional at an economics consulting firm, it didn’t go quite as planned.

I’ve translated Juan’s account of his adventure here, partly for what it shows about how things can go wrong in Argentina – though not all rock concerts end like this one. But it’s also worth reading because of his attitude that, even when things go wrong, not all is lost, and bad trips can be the most memorable ones.

While it’s relatively long, the video above (which is not Juan’s) helps visualize last Saturday’s experience, from the departure through the concert. It does not, however, tell the story of what went on outside the walls. I recommend sampling it rather than watching the whole thing.

A Pilgrimage Without A Mass
Well, yesterday I went on a seven-hour pilgrimage and never got to hear Mass! So that you understand the metaphor, I’ll explain the details: We left Buenos Aires by car at 3 p.m., to hear a concert by Indio Solari in Junín. The route was pure hell because there was a fatal accident that morning, so we had to detour via San Antonio de Areco. To drive the 260 km from Buenos Aires to Junín, it took six hours!

We got there at 9 p.m., left the car where they suggested, and started walking toward the raceway. Then we realized it was a ten-km walk! It took us an hour and a half in the midst of the scenario that seemed like a march of zombies in the dark, or that could have been appeared in The War of the Worlds, when everybody climbs out of their cars and starts walking on the freeway. Tired from the walk, we arrived and realized that the ticket booths had closed some time before and there were no more tickets.

For doofuses like us who arrived without tickets because the brokers in Buenos Aires told us that the Junín racetrack (pictured above) had an almost unlimited capacity, we had no alternative but to try to get in with the crowds that were pushing against the gates because the show was starting. Things started getting ugly and, after two unsuccessful tries, we realized it wasn’t meant to be, but it was hard to resign ourselves to having spent all day in the car and screwed up so badly.

While we were figuring out what to do, we walked about 50 meters from the mess and ordered ourselves some choripán sausages. As we were paying, there arose a tremendous commotion and the security guards, along with the police, came running with their nightsticks trying to push the people away from the gates that they were trying to force open. In just a few seconds we were in the crossfire, as luxury spectators, open-mouthed with choripán in hand and a spoonful of chimichurri sauce in the air, as one side was throwing bottles and anything else they had, and the other was shooting rubber bullets (into the air, as far as we could tell).

When we started seeing some people get bloodied nearby and the sausage salesman yelled “Everybody under the table!” we realized we weren’t watching Telenoticias and that if we didn’t get out of there quick it could turn out bad. We took shelter behind a pickup truck. Full of adrenaline, but without dropping our choripanes, we watched the situation for a while and saw how the “people” (I use quotation marks because at this point they seemed like remote zombies beyond the reach of reason) started fighting back against the security (who seemed to be enjoying themselves and inciting them!).

This happened a couple times, they came, they collided, they “pushed them back.” At our first opportunity we sneaked along the fence on one side and started walking the ten km back to the car even faster – in just an hour twenty. With no desire for anything else, we got into the car and started back to Buenos Aires, which took us only two hours less than the trip out. At 3 a.m., 12 hours after starting out, I fell into bed, but satisfied with having spent an entire day with friends chatting and chortling in the car! I’m not being ironic - to everybody’s surprise, none of us got upset or returned in a bad mood.

Was that too long a story? Well, I enjoyed writing it and explaining the metaphor.

Surfin' Tango

At first glance this might seem off-topic to a post on Buenos Aires but, last Saturday night, my wife and I went to see Los Straitjackets at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. After all, the Straitjackets are a Nashville-based instrumental surf music band whose members all wear Mexican lucha libre wrestling masks on stage. While they sometimes play with guest vocalists, they almost never sing, and only speak to introduce their songs in broken Spanish.

All that said, there is a Buenos Aires connection here – a few years ago, in the basement of the downtown Club Unione e Benevolenza (the Italian Benevolent Union, pictured above), I saw the Straitjackets’ lead guitarist Danny Amis – also known as Daddy O Grande – on the same stage with the local surf bands Los Kahunas and The Tormentos. Yes, you read right – however improbable it might seem, there is a surf music scene in the birthplace of the tango. For the finale performance of “Pipeline,” not another musician could have fit on stage.

What’s more, surf music and tango are not incompatible, at least to judge from the work of Daddy O Grande and The Tormentos. In 2009, they performed “La Cumparsita” – possibly the most famous of all tangos, composed by the Uruguayan Gerardo Matos Rodríguez – on stage in Buenos Aires. The venue appears to be Palermo’s Niceto Club.

Unfortunately, Daddy O Grande did not appear with the Straitjackets last Saturday, as he is under treatment for multiple myeloma. The group’s tour continues in the Pacific Northwest and tonight, August 24, there will be a benefit concert for him in Boston. At none of these events, unfortunately, are you likely to hear “La Cumparsita.” Those of you in Buenos Aires may well hear it at Festival y Mundial de Tango, the tango festival and dance championship that continues through August 30 - but without that distinctive surf guitar.

Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires in Belmont (San Mateo County)
Next Tuesday, August 30, will mark the third of several digital slide presentations on the fourth edition of Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires, at various branches of the San Mateo County Library. The Tuesday event starts at 7 p.m. at the Belmont Library (1110 Alameda de las Pulgas, Belmont CA 94002, tel. 650/591-8286). There will be ample time for questions and answers, and books (also including Moon Argentina and Moon Chile) will be on sale (at a discount).

Help Support Southern Cone Travel
If you have found this article informative, please consider clicking on one or more of the AdSense links that accompany it - always presuming, of course, that it’s a product or service that interests you.

Chile Changes the Clock; Beyond Lollapalooza

I like to point out the fact that, in traveling from north to south or vice versa, most visitors to the Southern Cone countries don’t face the same jet lag issues that east-west international travelers do. Of course, that depends on the traveler’s starting point, but for those on the East Coast of the United States, for instance, the time difference is only an hour with either Buenos Aires or Santiago.

Normally, there’s an hour’s difference between Buenos Aires and Santiago, which are in different time zones, but Chile goes on daylight savings while Argentina does not. Not so long ago, that started in mid-October and only went until mid-March, but this year President Sebastián Piñera’s government changed the date to April 2nd and, then, to May 7th. Daylight savings will start again on August 20th.

The government’s principal rationale has been energy savings, though it’s not clear how much turning the lights on a little later will conserve, given that Chileans will have to turn them on earlier in the morning to go to work and/or get the kids off too school (here in Santiago, it’s still nearly dark at 8 a.m.). Other professed reasons have been public safety (extra daylight discourages crime) and the simple pleasure of evening daylight for those returning home from work.

When the change finally occurs, the difference with the rest of the world will be one hour less (but there will then be an hour’s difference with Argentina), from the Peruvian border south to the Strait of Magellan (pictured above). Remote Rapa Nui (Easter Island), however, will continue to be two hours behind the mainland.

A Chilean Lollapalooza
The first weekend of this month, in Santiago’s sprawling Parque O’Higgins, an all-star lineup performed at the initial Chilean version of the Lollapalooza pop music festival. The festival brought plenty of money into the city, with nearly every available inexpensive bed occupied - according to Pablo Fernández of Barrio Brasil’s 120-bed Hostelling International facility, demand was so high that he had to raise prices to 12,000 pesos (about US$25) in dorm rooms (when I was here in November, the price was 9,000 pesos, less than US$20). Rates for private rooms rose correspondingly in a facility that usually only has about 40 or so guests. Even the new and little known CasAltura, a self-styled “boutique hostel” in a magnificently recycled downtown mansion, filled all of its 35 beds.

There were some glitches, but the sunny autumn weekend cooperated beautifully and, by most accounts, the crowds were satisfied. The second Chilean Lollapalooza will take place the first weekend of April in 2012.

Given Chile’s thriving economy, Santiago has become an ever more popular destination for high-profile international artists. U2 played here recently and, over the next couple months, Paul McCartney (May 11), John Fogerty (May 15, the first time ever in Chile, though his former Creedence Clearwater bandmates have played the Viña del Mar festival), and even Miley Cyrus (May 4) will perform in the Chilean capital.

Argentina Takes the Oscar

For only the second time, Argentina has taken home a “Best Foreign Film” award from the Oscars. Last night, the Academy awarded the statuette to director Juan José Campanella’s “El Secreto de Sus Ojos” (The Secret in Her Eyes, subtitled trailer), starring Ricardo Darín and Soledad Villamil (pictured here) in a noirish crime drama with political overtones that takes place mostly in 1999, but incorporates a flashback from the 1970s, before the coup that overthrew civilian authority in 1976. Its critical theme is the legacy of Argentina’s traumatic period of political violence.

Argentina’s only previous Oscar-winning film was director Luis Puenzo’s “The Official Story” (1986), a drama about the infant children of detained and "disappeared" prisoners during the so-called “Proceso de Reorganización Nacional,” as Argentina’s military rulers euphemistically called their reign of terror. Many Argentines disliked that film, in which Norma Aleandro plays an upper-class woman who slowly comes to realize that the origins of her adopted child are open to question, partly because it seemed to imply that the public could be unaware of what was going on around them.

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to see Campanella’s film, which is one of the most popular in the history of Argentine cinema, but it’s definitely on my short list. I have, however, seen Darín’s co-star, who frequently sings tango at San Telmo’s Centro Cultural Torquato Tasso. If you want an up-close look at a Oscar winner (or at least a major participant in an Oscar-winning project), the Tasso can be the place to do so (though not scheduled there any time very soon, she also sings elsewhere in Buenos Aires).

Sex & Food in Buenos Aires (Part 2)

A few years ago, in Buenos Aires, Ámbito Financiero film critic and independent director Diego Curubeto invited me to a shoot for his first film, a hybrid docudrama on actress Isabel Sarli. Finally, this month, “Carne sobre Carne” (Flesh on Meat, Spanish-language trailer at the link) has gone into limited release and has drawn rave reviews in newspapers ranging from the left-of-center Página 12 to the middle-of-the-road Clarín and the conservative La Nación, as well as the English-language Buenos Aires Herald (link available only after 2 p.m. Buenos Aires time, daily).

Curubeto uses the story of Sarli (born 1935), whose films seem tame today but were considered scandalous in her 1958-1979 heyday, as a case study of censorship in an Argentina that was dominated by conservative institutions like the Catholic Church that, in turn, supported some of the continent’s most vicious military dictatorships. In interviewing Sarli at her suburban Buenos Aires home for a BBC documentary, Curubeto noticed a pile of film canisters that, as it happened, contained uncensored versions of her films as they were seen overseas (including in the United States). This inspired the project.

I played my own small part in this - literally so, as Curubeto recruited me, on the spot, to act in the 3 a.m. shoot (the Ministerio de Obras Públicas, a rationalist skyscraper that houses the public works ministry, was unavailable except at that hour). Sitting at a desk, improvising with an ancient dial telephone in my hand, I portrayed Roman Polanski’s Polish-producer-in-London-exile in an argument over distribution rights with Sarli’s director/producer/lover Armando Bó. Unfortunately, my scene didn’t make the final cut, but I’ve been assured it will appear on the DVD version (whenever that might come out) and I at least made the list of credits.

Despite my exclusion, the theatrical version of the film does include major Argentine cinema figures such as Gastón Pauls (who starred in the multiple award-winning Nine Queens). "Carne sobre Carne" is playing every Tuesday and Saturday night this month at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), the continent’s foremost modern art museum.

Meanwhile, on a peripherally related theme, Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose plunging popularity perplexes her Peronist loyalists, stuck her foot in her mouth last month. Addressing an audience of pig farmers, and responding to public complaints over falling beef supplies and rising prices, she suggested that pork would not only be cheaper but would also offer an additional advantage: ““I've just been told something I didn't know; that eating pork improves your sex life ... I'd say it's a lot nicer to eat a bit of barbecued piglet than take Viagra.” Certainly, at least, it beats swine flu.

Fernández's words, of course, led to a lot of off-color commentary in the press, the best of which came from the online magazine Planeta Joy, which published a list of the five best places to eat pork in Buenos Aires, plus suggestions for the best nearby telos to “quench your desire.” In a slightly different manner, I addressed this topic in an earlier post with a similar title - thus, the “Part 2” that appears above.

"Authentic Buenos Aires"

Last July, literally the day before I flew to Argentina for a couple weeks to begin updating Moon Buenos Aires, I received an out-of-the-blue phone call from an editor at National Geographic Traveler, asking whether I was interested in writing a piece on “Authentic Buenos Aires.” The idea was to spend a week or so in the city, in the company of local experts (of my choice, with approval from NGT editors) on the topics of food, sights, accommodations, shopping and nightlife in the city. It would be part of a recurring feature that focuses on high-profile world cities - New York and Paris, for instance, have gotten similar treatment.

That occasioned an additional September research trip and, after a rigorous editing process, the results have now appeared in the magazine’s new March issue. It's reached print subscribers already, and the online version of the article is available at the link in the previous paragraph. The magazine photographs are by Bob Krist (though the one above, of a youthful tango orchestra playing in San Telmo, is mine).

Meanwhile, I am finishing up the manuscript of the new edition of Moon Argentina, which is due out this fall, and about to start the bulk of the work on Moon Buenos Aires. I will be in the city until mid-April or so, with a two-week detour to coastal Uruguay (where destinations such as Colonia del Sacramento appear in the book’s excursions chapter); it will be out shortly after the new edition of Argentina.