My vacation in Argentina already seems like it took place a hundred years ago. I realize more than ever that I dislike my job, have quickly grown weary from all the sniping on social media, and am tired, tired, tired of the political and cultural drama that my home country keeps exporting to the world.
So let's listen to a tango and forget it all for a while.
I captured this short video of a bandoneón player at the Agüero Subte Station in Buenos Aires on or about 28 August 2018.
I wish I could take credit for this specific juxtaposition of images. Someone on Twitter beat me to it and, frankly, did a better job than me.
This has been a theme rolling around in my head all week, given the angry, petulant, hysterical, aggressive, and highly partisan behavior of a man who sucks at job interviews. Hello, angry drunk possum! Meet angry drunk rapey mendacious candidate for the Supreme Court of the United States, Brett Kavanaugh!
I personally might have gone with an angry cornered badger, just not necessarily a honey badger, which seems at least to have a useful purpose in life. I also considered a weasel and a ferret, although I don't think they are particularly aggressive or prone to assaulting women.
A gaboon viper or a spitting cobra might also be a contender, one of those animals that serves no other purpose than to kill people that startle it. (Sorry, I can't bring myself to post a pic of one or the other. You and Google Images are on your own.)
But, truly, an embittered possum in a nest of beer cans--and Miller High Life, no more, no less, the "champagne of beers"--really is the coup de graceless.
Bravo, Twitter! You may offer the sensory overload of standing in the middle of large party with everyone alternating between drunk-crying, drunk-laughing, and drunk-screaming but occasionally something useful cuts through the bile. And this week it was a possum with a beer tooth and a federal judge in need of an anger management course or a prison sentence, take yer pick.
Last night, via the TuneIn app on my Roku, I was listening to the French radio network France Bleu via a radio station in the overseas territory of St. Pierre-et-Miquelon, just off the coast of Newfoundland. Don't make me try to explain how I got to this place in my life, but if you've read this blog before, it all makes a weird kind of sense.
Et voilà! This song by French singer and actor Vincent Niclo started playing, a recent release in France (May 2018 or so), which builds upon the tango track "Libertango" by Argentine songwriter and performer extraordinaire, the late, great Astor Piazzolla. So there's no escaping the importance and influence of the tango, a uniquely Argentine art form that has transported itself from the brothels and bars of 19th-century Buenos Aires, across continents and cultures, even to the present day.
Mural at the Carlos Gardel subway station, Buenos Aires
Monsieur Niclo is not the first to draw inspiration from the Astor Piazzolla original. There's this from back in the day, "I've Seen that Face Before" by Grace Jones, which converts "Libertango" into 1 part reggae, 1 part new wave, 1 part chanson.
Mon dieu/Dios mío. Shaken and stirred. I was tango before tango was cool (or 1980s cool rather than 2010s cool).
But not really.
I don't know that I've always appreciated tango music or tango style. Over the years, it has been fairly well neutered in North America for camp drama and comic relief. I remember taking my mother to a performance of the show Tango Argentino back in the day and once bought a Carlos Gardel CD but mostly I remember just being puzzled by the tango. Sometimes you have to grow up and grow into these things.
And grow I did on my recent viaje "Down Argentine Way," but not by hanging out at tourist trap tango performances on the streets of San Telmo or the concert halls of the Café Tortoni. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Rather, tango is almost everywhere in Buenos Aires--in the monuments in the Abasto neighborhood, where Gardel grew up, to the memorials in La Chacarita Cemetery, where Gardel was laid to rest after the plane crash that took his and many others' lives in 1935, at the height of his popularity.
Details about the mural
But tango is not dead, a thing of the past, a historical note. It lives in the present day in Argentina. The streets and the Buenos Aires Subte are alive with tango. It lives in the recordings of the Gotan Project and Vincent Niclo. It is part of the visual and literary culture of the city, the country, and the world. And there seems to be no risk of its disappearance even in the fast-paced and rapid-fire life we experience--perhaps because tango represents a valued link to the past, to culture, and to an often unrecognized and unheralded heritage of African and Indigenous, working class and immigrant, sex and sexiness, Spanish and Sicilian and Serbian, that make up Argentina and the world, and that too often we try to plaster over.
Or maybe it's just fun. Remember fun? Nothing wrong with fun at all. I fully support fun's candidacy in all future elections.
As the saying allegedly goes in Argentina, "Gardel sounds better everyday." Such is tango. And gracias a Dios (o lo que sea) for that.
More Southern right whales(ballenas francas australes en castellano), this time viewed from the beach at Playa el Doradillo, near Puerto Madryn, Argentina.
I'll be dreaming about my holiday in Argentina for months to come. Whale-watching off the coast of the Península Valdés and Puerto Pirámides is one of the many reasons why.
