Rain

The 100 Porteño climates -Tomorrow's meteorological forecast is sun in Buerto Madero, partially clouded in Villa Crespo, torments in Caballito, hail alerts in Chacarita..

60 mm's of rain hit us yesterday morning. My barrio overswam, nobody could go anywhere. The buses crammed, el subte stopped and traffic was chaos. The real danger, however, when water flows the streets and blurres the view are the holes in the ground (best bet: breaking a leg - worse: falling into it) and the electric cables with only one connection..

Apart from power-cuts, water-cuts and visits to the emergency-room, accompanying needy visitors, I am fine. The latest system-shortcut was "somebody" steeling all my T-shirts from the roof-top dry-lines. Back to dresses..

Then, realizing there is power in my block, and not in my neighbour's; we have tube-water, the rest have water on their floors.

The first day of crisis, Macri blamed the meteorologists. The second day, he blamed the farmers (!) in Gran Buenos Aires. Finally, when tornado struck, Uruguay was to blame for not stopping the storm.

The estate market is booming and the city is transforming. Take a look at the new emerging barrios VIP.

1. Palermo Amsterdam
-Did you visit the aquarium at Juan B. Justo and Cordoba?
-No, but I went diving in the Maldonado viaduct.
The Europe cool - now in Argentina!




2. Caballito Hights
-I live on 34th floor. It's impossible to go out.
-Don't complaint, now you have river view.
In spite of the neighbours complaints of their hights, the towers now show their utility.

3. Belgrano Venice
-It' so nice.
-I love tango.
-Pompeya (bad part of town), and further ahead, the flood.
The Republic of Belgrano now have their own fleet.

Monedas

Coins are scarce. In my local china supermarket they suddenly started to give us sweets in change instead for 5-centavos. Now we have a jar full.
My old man just came back from the store with groceries. The bill was 35 pesos and 5 centavos. So he suggested: "How about me coming back tomorrow with a sweet?"
Last week, the National Museum downtown was robbed. The thieves got away with some very valuable old coins. I bet they are dissapointed now that they realize the coins are useless on the bus..

Footprints on display

Saturday night I was home on my own trying to get through the newspapers when I caught the notice of a different dance-performance down the street.





A shop normally selling fancy furniture had emptied their store to make room for four dancers performing Huellas (footprints or traces), choreographed by Diana Theocharidis, in their shop-window.









Grabbing my camera, I hurried to see the show. Newspapers forgotten.






The idea of an alternative stage intrigued me, and the work evoked an athmosphere of subtle lunacy, of elegantly loosing control. A powerful and sensual, beautiful and intangible magnet.









Fascinating - and with the suggestive connotation to desire - for anyone who ever walked the red-light district of Amsterdam..

Workers for a cleaner environment

Being cartonero was never easy. A nights work collecting paper, metal, glass and plastic from the streets leave you with less than a minimum of pesos for a living, in addition to marginalized social status.
Residing in the outskirts of the capital, around 40 000 cartoneros depend on transport to carry them (and their residues) to the recycling stations outside the city limits.
For a few years, the state-run TBA railway company has provided a free morning train, el Tren Blanco, for them to "safely" go home every day. Not so aymore. December 28ht the line was shut down.
A journalist friend of mine took the train with them a couple of times to make an article for a French magazine, and he was relieved when the management decided to stop the service. "If only people and trolleys were put in different compartments! As the practice was, with a sudden brake, people would get crushed between tons of compact paper."
Of course they demand their transport back, claiming they work for a cleaner environment. Which they certainly do.
For two months now, some 40 families (around 90 people, among them about 30 children) have camped under very humble conditions in a better neighourhood in the northern part of town. The neighbours wanted them gone, claiming they were a hazard to health and security (for stealing (?) their garbage)?
So last Thursday, before the sun rose, 100 men; police and soldiers from the infantry, removed them by power, without a judicial order. Nine cartoneros were arrested, several of them wounded, among them a women and two minors. The rest were set on trucks and moved outside the city.
Their humble homes, clothes, food, swaddling cloths and soaps were crushed into the garbage trucks who were summoned to assist. Even their trolleys and two months work of paper collection where brutally carried away and destroyed.
In front of their eyes.
Now they are left with nothing. I get sick. What is so different with their demands for decent working conditions and how they are treated from what happend nearly 100 years ago during the tragic week?
Similar camps are found several places along the old line, and they fear the same treatment. With good cause.
Poor people are again beeing harrassed by those of better means.

Nelly's friend Selva refuse to go to the neighbourhood square were the cartoneros are squatting: "It's all ruined, full of garbage, dogshit - it' a mess!"
Nelly: "Look..the artistic intallation is called "Project Sustainable Plaza" and these scuptures will be shown in the next Venice Biennale."
Selva: "I hope they will not show the cartoneros.."

Two pesos and an oral

- "Do you practice oral sex to get in to the disco?"
- "With oral I havn´t any problems. I´m afraid of written."

This week's shock of the news. Teenage girls doing blowjobs for two pesos, a drink - or entrance to the disco. Not very reassuring having one at home. The interesting part, however, is that many of them say they're in it for the kick - feeling whorish while it still doesn't really count.

No suprise, with the focus on Sex Madonnas in the medias around us.

The Ombu of Plaza San Martín

Yesterday, after drawing in Borges, I got the idea I wanted to meet the mature Ombu-tree of San Martín in Retiro. This huge and old, tranquil and powerful tree covers at least 300 feet diameter branch shadow.

Sitting beneath it I thought: "This is where Buenos Aires began, this is the first tree the immigrants saw desembarcing the Transatlantic carriers who brought them from Europe. Argentinians decend from here, from the ships who left them at the pier."

Historical Times

Castro resigns, Kosovo claimes independency. Not quite '89, but hopefully new standards on both behalves.
Bhutto beeing assasinated two months ago blurs my picture. But then, rehens are beeing released in Colombia.

Hidden moon

Sitting up all night to watch the earth swallow the moon came rewarding.
Full moom turned daybreak pink.
It only occurs when Moon is full and Sun, Earth and Moon is aligned. Born, anyone?



Dad: "Last time we had an eclipse like this was 30 years ago. We didn't have personal computers, Internet, MP3's, cellphones or DVD's."

Son: "So how did you manage not to get bored?"

Dad: "We ran from the police."

Sara Facio anthology

"El fotógrafo deber tener visión, intuir lo que va a pasar."

Her retrospective exposition in Imago espacio de Arte on Suipacha 658 was well worth the visit. And free vine came as a bonus.

Mi credo: "Lo que yo hago en fotografía es para lograr que el día cuando muera no digan que se murió una vaca sino que se murió una persona que vio eso. Y lo que yo ví está en mis fotos. Como si dijera 'ésta es mi ciudad, mi gente, la que admiro, la que me gusta'. Ese es mi canon."
- Sara Facio, Fotógrafo (78)






This photo is special: One of these friends went missing during the dictatorship and left a (visual) gap..

Nights in white satin

Order from the dentist: Only white foods and drinks the next 48 hours..

White fish, oysters and champagne
Vodka-tonic
Chicken, cream-sauce, rice and champignons - and white wine from Terazzas de los Andes' winehouse
French baguette and camembert
Water
Freddo's American cream ice-cream...

I can get used to this, too bad the party ends tomorrow.

Well, red days are not that bad, either..

Chaiwanese new year

Year of the earth rat started February 7th. I had to go and take a look. Two blocks in Belgrano full of Chinese restaurants, Chinese people, Mandarin words, Chinese shops, Chinese junk and Chinese symbolism.


So I filled up on food I had no idea what was, bought some spices, a "rat for good luck" and a three-footed frog for prosperity to my old man. I had an even older man massage my back.
Streets so packed you could hardly move, watch your bag!

Lanterns all over.











This cutie cried "By me, I'll bring you good luck!" Now she has perfect view of the Armenian quarter in Palermo.










..a little tired..











I wish what I ate were this recognizable.

Piojo no es piola

Fuckin' lice. Living with teen-agers is living with lice. They hug and kiss and share everything, including the bastards. I complain to the farmacist. We do the treatment, feel releif, and two months later they are back. The creeps seem to find a home no matter. They retreat and hide in your best friend's nest.

Gombrowicz said so, and he is never wrong..

The notion that art is born from poverty and misery is nonsense.
To work and live as an artist your basic needs have to be fulfilled.
You can´t work on an empty stomach.
And canvases cost money.
Artists either have their own money, marry them, or get themselves a protegé.

Tango for three

This morning at 6:15 am (!), I set the alarm to go up to the rooftop and watch Moon in a trio with Venus and Jupiter.






Magical. Beautiful. Hypnotical.
Violet blue crystal clear velvet morning, the Sun about to break. And the special beauty of the Armenian church.

C = M + D - T

Corruptión = Monopolio + Discrecionalidad - Transparencia
Corruption equals monopoly plus discretion minus transparancy.

December 5th, five days before abdicating from presidency, Néstor Kirchner signed an edict favouring his old friend, businessman Cristóbal López, with a slotmachine monopoly deal in the capital.

Lópes' former contract was to run through 2017, rewarding him with a net revenue of nearly 1,5 billion dollars (1 478 250 000 dollars).

This extention will rise his income by nearly 5 billion (4 804 312 500 dollars) and will run for an extra 15 years, through 2032.

Not only were this deal signed nearly ten years before expiration, it secures an increase of slotmashines with 70%!

And this is not the end of it. Maintenance is held by one of Kirchner's own businesses, leaving his hand deep into the golddiggers sack.

One-armed bandits, two-armed bandits, slotmachines and presidecial edicts. How do they get away with it?

Fassbinder´s Berlin Alexanderplatz in La Lugones

Fassbinder, my love.
Berlin Alexanderplatz, 15-hour megatlon in Buenos Aires.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder with muse Hanna Schygulla. Great shot.

Antisosial..

Fun you have to create yourself.
I came across erotic puppet-show in Gorriti.
From there to Anchorena 1121, the oldest swinger in town, the road were short and obvious.
Next door I entered a telo (lumfardo: albergue transitorio, bed by the hour) for the first time.
Porteños are as hot as anybody, but unlike me, they live not only with their husband and children, but with their mother, mother-in-law, half-lunatic sister, her ex and all the children who comes along with that. Two dogs and a few cats. In a two-room apartment.
Here is where the telos flower.
All over town, behind discrete facades, pretending to be at the movie-theatre, in reality, you are having som quality-time with your husband, lover.. or whoever. By the hour. Swedish porn, arabian boudoair, classic sex-chair..fun, fun, fun..
Valentines day last year amorous couples waited patiently for half an hour.
Tango is for tourists :)

But shoes cannot compete.

Quiero volar...

Sharing rooftop studios with abdicated superstar ballet dancer Julio Bocca´s dance school. Exclusive, trancendent, exhalting.






Model Olga - dressed











True garbage recycling, made art.
Nico Alligator´s Soldando Ideas in Centro Cultural Borges






Centro Cultural Borges´ vidrian roof







More ex-garbage..










Trato de llegar a un mundo artistico aquí, para eso tengo que entender la dirección madre, la línea vertical.

Meat market

This morning I stumbled (as usual) into my local chino supermarket for fresh bread, fruits and yougurts. But who is there? Half a cow comes towards me between rows of canned food and mate. Uaehhh!!!

About ro run home and back two bed to re-do my wake-up rutine (still asleep..?..).
Then I realized the cow had two legs - walking, and two legs - dangling.

Tonight these fellas at my local parrillita made a new truth dawn on me:
Cows live in trucks - not on the Pampas as the official brochures tries to convince me.