Polo posers

I guess everyone should see polo at least once, especially if you live a few blocks from the most important polo, uh, stadium, in the country. We all trekked out there and watched the rich and famous drink champagne, consider Mercedes Benz convertibles and, occasionally, watch horses race across a perfectly-trimmed lawn in order use a cricket mallet to smack a small white ball between two posts.

Sarmiento and Rosas, facing off forever

Tatiana Kaler, spanish teacher extraordinaire (if you come to Buenos Aires and want to learn, see http://www.espanol4d.blogspot.com/), pointed out this wonderful example of the politics of memorials. At one corner of Sarmiento and Liberator stands a monument of the old school -- military man on horse on tall foundation that lays out his exploits -- dedicated to Juan Manuel de Rosas, head of Buenos Aires province, uniter of the disparate states, and also authoritarian leader and violent killer of the indigenous peoples of the south. He also earned himself the absolutely enmity of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, exile and later president of Argentina, who wrote the classic work, Facundo, in large measure an indictment of Rosas and the world of the gaucho that he felt Rosas embodied (to Sarmiento that meant rural, anti-urban, violent, anti-European, anti-education). It just happens that catty corner from the Rosas monument stands Sarmiento's statue, looking straight across at his nemesis. But Sarmiento may have the last laugh -- his monument stands atop the archaeological remains of Rosas early 19th century mansion. Either way, the two will stare at each other (or peer around the massive statue in the middle of the intersection which Spain gave to Argentina for its centennial in 1910) for a long time.

Jewish Buenos Aires

I took a tour with the Weinbaums of Jewish Buenos Aires, which primarily consisted of visiting two major synagogues, one Ashkenazi and the Sephardic, as well as several monuments to tragedies -- the AMIA bombing of 1994 and the kidnapping and murder of many (disproportionately Jewish) during the last dictatorship. We found it interesting that the Sephardic synagogue had bright stained-glass windows depicting places and individuals, contrary to the tradition in many synagoguges that disavow any realistic image of an individual.

Palacio Bosch

Eve and I were allowed to visit the ambassador's residence, Palacio Bosch, which is just two blocks away, on Libertador, facing the park. The preservation architect (yes, there is a permanent architect on staff, with her own crew, to keep the landmark building looking perfect) showed us around one of the most glorious of embassy buildings around the world. Built as a private home, it became the ambassador's residence in 1929. The embassy, a frightening bunker of a building, is just a block away. The building is spectacular, vast, overwhelming (the new ambassador is single and her private quarters are on the third floor -- some ten or 20,000 square feet worth). We heard a lot about the upkeep, including the elaborate process for keeping the chandeliers clean and sparkling. And we admired the Carlos Thays-designed garden, the pool, the parilla, and, most of all, the clay tennis court which seems to go unused. I made a pitch for allowed Fulbright scholars access to the pool and court....I think they are taking it up with the state department!

Puerto Madero

Here are a few views of Puerto Madero, one of the largest dockland reclamation projects in the world, which is twenty years old this year. Many feel that the first phase was excellent -- restoring dozens of brick warehouse structures in the docks to make way for apartments, stores, universities -- but that the second part -- huge, ugly towers for the rich and notorious -- is a disturbing otherworld on the edge of the city.

Two articles on the lingering history of the dictatorship

Two articles I came across this week are fascinating windows into the ongoing debates over the memory of the dictatorship (the most recent dictatorship, that is).

First, the legislature approved a very disturbing law, which allows the government to force an individual to give up blood for a DNA test, in order to determine if he or she is one of the children of the desaparecidos. This is a law that was pushed by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayoa) who have focused on identifying all of the estimated 400 children stolen by the dictatorship when their pregnant mothers were kidnapped and later killed. There is a suspected strong dose of political payback here, as the head of Clarin, the multimedia conglomerate that includes the newspaper that is often critical of the Kirchner administration, has two adopted children who many suspect are children of desaparecidos.

You can read more here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34071255/ns/world_news-americas/

And my artist friend Julian d'Angiolillo brought to my attention an article from a few months back about the discovery of one of the planes used to drop the desaparecidos into the Rio. It is not clear what is going to happen to the plane, but I am hoping to see it in the coming weeks.

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-131277-2009-09-06.html

Conspiracies

I have been struck over the past few months at how eager Portenos are to believe conspiracy theories. At different points, people have asked me about the Kennedy assassination and about the 9/11 (especially whether the Bush administration themselves brought down the World Trade Center). Although these conversations begin as questions, seeking my opinion, it is clear that they know the truth -- that the conspiracies are indeed fact. I usually say that I have never met a conspiracy I didn't like, but that in the case of 9/11 especially I don't believe there was a conspiracy. I say that it almost doesn't matter: within hours, the Bush administration was already figuring out how to use the tragedy to go to war in Iraq. They look at me with a form of pity and good natured humor -- how sad that he is so blind about his own country.

I wonder if the roots of believing in conspiracies here stems from a long tradition of not trusting government, for many good reasons. And younger people especially have a right to believe in dark conspiracies, because so many of them have been real, from Menem's arms smuggling to the calendestine detention centers of the last dictatorship.

Of course, the United States has had a long history of conspiracy theory, what Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style" in American politics. And some of the craziest is in full bore right now -- such as the "birthers" (who will believe that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen even if the Almighty himself came down and handed them the birth certificate), and others who we treat as sane citizens -- i.e. Republican legislators -- who perpetrate outright lies about ACORN and about the health insurance bill (it turns out that providing health care to the millions who don't have it is fascism, socialism, tyranny rolled into one).

Zanjon

I finally made it to what some consider one of the best preservation efforts in the city. Zanjon is a house museum on Defensa (just south of Chile). This is no ordinary house museum, with recreated rooms and furniture behind ropes. It is really an archaeological restoration that reveals the layers of a house that dates back to 1830 (atop an even older house). It is wholly private and depends upon the wealth of one individual and proceeds from corporate and social events that take place there to support the museum. Those are the reasons for my reservations about an otherwise amazing historic site.

Jorge Eckstein bought the property virtually site unseen, most likely as a speculative venture. He hoped to turn the first floor, set within up and coming (or returning) San Telmo into a restaurant and art gallery. As he started the process of clearing away the rubble of the building's interior (roofs had collapsed in on a series of courtyards) he discovered the layers of history -- its use as a tenement for immigrants up to the 1960s when it was closed up, its life as a private home from the 1830s, built right at the edge of the original site plan, and the world of slaves and servants who lived there. Most fascinating is how Eckstein revealed the tunnels that the owner and his neighbors built to cover over one of the original streams that flowed through here to the Rio, then just a few blocks away.

All of this is done quite wonderfully. It is a huge museum, three courtyards deep, two levels down into the ground. Visitors - all visits are guide-led -- are taken down to the former riverbed to see the tunnels built to protect those above from the stench of what were essentially sewers. You can even hear the trickle of water of the stream that could never be completely channeled away. (My old teacher Bill Cronon has had much to say about the fraught efforts to redirect rivers away from their natural pathways).

So, there is so much to be impressed by here. Nowhere else in the city, can you sense life in the early 19th century as well as here, with a full accounting of slavery that permeated the city (even though slavery was officially outlawed in 1813) and later uses by immigrants. There are also efforts to distinguish material with new materials, and preserve and interpret the remaining cisterns and objects uncovered during the ongoing archaeological effort.

But there is something also a bit disturbing to me. Because the building is used regularly for weddings, parities, and corporate events, the place has been designed to look as elegant as possible. Slate floors and elegant lighting, pictures on the wall for decoration rather than education push the historical to the side. It reminds me of Ellis Island when it first opened -- the main hall, where millions, crammed to pass by the inspectors, was turned into a gloriously clean ballroom, with little of the sense of the chaos and tension that once existed there.

Indeed, our guide, Mathilde, mentioned a museum that would be opening nearby. Zanjon, then, is not strictly a museum. Much of the infrastructure, the alterations, the flow is organized around the needs and desired atmosphere of corporate clients. It is perhaps an understandable decision that the owner made -- to fore go public funds which come with their own strings -- in favor of totally private funding. But it has an effect on the power and meaning of the site.

As we reached the climax of the tour -- when we enter the tunnels that were the great find of the site -- Mathilda asked that I not take photographs: "Only people who visit get to see this part." Then she described how at events they will suddenly turn off the lights -- "and down here the dark is solid" -- surprising the guests. But then the accordion beings and spotlights shine on the tango dancers. The spectacle begins.

Jacarandas

A major retrospective on Carlos Thays opened at the Recoleta Cultural Center last week. Never heard of him? Me neither. But he is the Frederick Law Olmsted of Argentina, a remarkable designer and visionary who built most of the major and minor parks in Buenos Aires and across the nation. He designed neighborhoods as well as envisioned the national park around Iguazu falls.

It was while visiting Iguazu in the Misiones province that he thought it a good idea to bring back a certain tree that he thought would work well in the city’s parks and on its streets.

How right he was. The jacarandas flowered just a week or two ago and have instantly made the city much more beautiful. It is incredible how these thin, twisted trees with creamy light purple flowers that explode like fireworks at the end of their fragile branches can change the whole look of the city. Against the green in the aprks, or the white marble and stone of the French-style buildings, they enrich the street. They are luxurious and delectable and regal.

They are also, for this photographer, impossible to capture. But no doubt I will keep trying.

For those who can't get enough of the falls...

And a few more.....

Real! Not photoshopped!

And a few more for good measure....

A quiet moment of reflection....while watching a movie on the ipod on the 18-hour bus trip from Buenos Aires.

Butterflies accompanied us throughout our walks throught the jungle and across the platforms to the edge of the falls.
Garganta del Diablo, 262 feet high, twice Niagara Falls.

A few photographs from our magnificent trip to Iguazu. I have new respect for National Geographic photographs, as my pictures don't even begin to do justice to the overwhelming sight of the falls.

Evita Museum

We live not fifteen minutes by foot from the Evita Museum....which is probably why it has taken us four months to get there. The museum is housed in an old mansion that the Evita Peron Foundation turned into a transition home for women and children, part the foundation's extensive social mission. Evita is such a mythical figure that I was eager to get a serious, historical evaluation of her life and legacy.

The exhibit opens suggesting a two-sided view. One exhibit case -- "Blanca" -- shows images of her as a saint. The other -- "Negra" -- shows images and headlines critical of her.

Too bad the rest of the museum only focused on the "blanca."

We learned a lot about her wonderful works and her powerful speeches. We also saw a lot of dresses, interspersed throughout the museum with little comment. We also heard, in her own voice, about people who hated her and accused of her being only out for herself. But for the uninitiated (aka, the ignorant) it is very hard to understand what wasn't to love, other than her association with Peron whose autocratic tendencies undermined many populist policies.

We continue to search for a fully story.

La Boca and Caminito

Yesterday we took bus 29 from Palermo to La Boca, which is an hour-long, winding, crowded ride through much of the eastern slice of the city that we spend ninety-percent of our time in. We ended up for lunch at what several guidebooks call the best Italian restaurant in the city. We now concur. We then walked through this old Genoese neighborhood, location of the first port (and some say the location of the first, failed Spanish settlement at the beginning of the 16th century) and home to the most touristy spot in the whole city, El Caminito. We all flock there, as if by force of nature, even though advance reports usually tell of a highly touristy, shlocky series souvenir stores and tango dancers hawking a chance to take a photo with a woman in fishnet stockings. The windy street, a hundred yards long, is indeed colorful, a recreation of the painted tin sheets that the immigrants used to make walls for their homes. Throughout the neighborhood, beyond the three blocks of tourist mosh pit, are many more tin houses and a real neighborhood, with a lot less color and a lot more poverty.

But the history of this little block is fascinating. We might think that this is a Disneyland, created recently by the city to bring tourists and their money down to a poor neighborhood. But it is, in fact, something more like an 'authentic' (a dangerous word, I know) effort to proudly save and retell the history of the Genoese community. It was the brainchild of Benito Quinquela Martin, a child of the neighborhood who became its most famous artistic interpreter. His paintings are now housed in a museum he created a top a school he donated to the neighborhood. The street, a former river that led right into La Boca (the mouth of the Riachuelo), became a small rail spur to the main train line of the port. But Quinquela Martin decided, in the 1950s, to restore, or reinvent, the street to celebrate the Genoese and their bright tin homes and the tango that was allegedly first danced here, both inventions born of poverty. The outdoor museum opened in 1959. (The 1926 poem by Gabino Coria Peñalosa and Juan de Dio Filibertothat nostalgically recalls the "little path that time has erased" was really written about a lane in the province of La Rioja, but no matter, when memory calls for poetry as an emulsifier).

I was happy to sit on the rooftop terrace cafe of the PROA Foundation museum at the base of Caminito while the others walked around. But looking out over the fetid swamp that La Boca has become (I mean the body of water that was once the city's first port) has become, I had a fair level of sympathy and admiration for the effort, no matter what it had become.