Scouting Buenos Aires

1. “Versos a la Tristeza de Buenos Aires”, Alfosina Storni

Tristes calles derechas, agrisadas e iguales

por donde asoma, a veces, un pedazo de cielo,

sus fachadas oscuras y el asfalto del suelo

me apagaron los tibios sueños primaverales.

Cuánto vagué por ellas, distraída, empapada

en el vaho grisáceo, lento, que las decora.

De su monotonía mi alma padece ahora.

–¡Alfonsina! — No llames, ya no respondo a nada.

Si en una de tus casas, Buenos Aires, me muero

viendo en días de otoño tu cielo prisionero,

no me será sorpresa la lápida pesada.

Que entre tus calles rectas, untadas de su rió

apagado, brumoso, desolante y sombrío,

cuando vagué por ellas, y estaba yo enterrada.

2. The aristocratic pyramid of Recoleta Cemetery.  Taken by Buenos Aires Photographer.

3. The prolific triangular shadows that change their shape as the sun passes over the city grid.

About a hundred years ago they passed a law here requiring all buildings to have a beveled corner. I believe it was to improve visibility for automobiles at intersections. The law only applies to the ground floor, however. There are a lot of these functional apartment buildings from the 1960s where losing those few square meters was simply economically unacceptable. The result is a sharp corner above the diagonal.

For more ochava photographs, visit Thomas Locke Hobbs.  Quote and photos are his.

Image by Tsunehisa Kumura, from Visual Scandals by Photomontage.  Via BLDGBLOG.

He would bring back into the general picture of life aspects which modern drainage and modern decorum have taken out of ordinary intercourse and conversation.

H.G. Wells in his negative review of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “James Joyce,” New Republic 10 (10 March 1917).  Images by Irish artist Alex Rose, whose exhibition Withdrawl opens today in NYC at Envoy.

Simon O’Carrigan has posted his collages today on Ballardian, a collection heavily influenced by J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World.   These fit nicely with my earlier post about the Venicification of Buenos Aires.

Now:

(Photograph of Recoleta by Thomas Locke Hobbs)

Inevitable destiny:

(Simon O’Carrigan. Lagoon. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 30 x 60 cm.)

The formal parallels between the Recoleta photograph and O’Carrigan’s “Lagoon” are obvious.  The only thing that separates them is time.  But also, in today’s post on Ballardian, O’Connor cites the foreign word nachtraglichkeit as a secondary influence.  This is remarkable.  I don’t know what it means but it’s easily translated into Castellano.  “Nach” is an abbreviated form of “Nacho”, which is the name of most people in Argentina.  The second part of the world, -traglichkeit, is German for “tragic like a kite”, meaning hung up, tangled, destined to be hit by lightning, etc.   The closest word in Spanish is colgado. Thus I propose the translation nachocolgado for O’Callaghan’s foreign word.

Here are a few more future images of nachocolgado flooding.

(Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “The Drowned World”. 2007. Digital montage. Dimensions variable.)

(Simon O’Carrigan. Rain Dogs. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 60 x 40 cm.)

With the reappearance of the submerged streets and buildings his entire manner had changed abruptly. All traces of courtly refinement and laconic humour had vanished; he was now callous and vulpine, the renegade spirit of the hoodlum streets returning to his lost playground. It was almost as if the presence of the water had anaesthetized him, smothering his true character so that only the surface veneer of charm and moodiness remained.

— J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Corresponding quote selected by the artist Simon O’Carrigan.

The drainage system here can handle rainfall of up to 30mm per hour.   When it really pours, this happens:

In February of this year (2010) a man with a motorboat could be hired to cross Santa Fe, one of the main thoroughfares of Venice Aires.

Solving the water problem in a flat city was one of the major public work achievements of the 19th century.  In 1869 a network of potable water supply from the Río de la Plata combined with the development of in-home sewage pipes, grey water gutters and canals to discharge the still water breeding grounds for mosquitoes that were causing a yellow fever epidemic. After these two systems were in place, the death rate in Buenos Aires dropped in half.  During a period of massive immigration.  Incredible.

The most recent drainage project ended around the same time the city population leveled out at around 3 million people.  That was in 1947.  Since then, roads have been paved, green spaces were swapped for high rises, and climate change indicates a growing trend in rainfall.  The cute 10cm canals that run along most side streets need to be linked with underground tunnels to handle a much higher capacity of waterflow.  Unfortunately, not only can this not fit in the budget, the existing budget for drainage maintenance has not been utilized:

“Y y acá hay un problema político: las empresas que prestan el servicio de limpieza de sumideros tienen su contratos vencidos desde 2008.  Encima, el año pasado hubo una subejecución presupuestaria del 25 por ciento para esta tarea”, denunció el diputado porteño.” (Clarin, 26 February 2010)

Rather than burdening the city with an expensive improvement to the drainage system, Macri is unveiling an exciting plan to reduce the production of piss and shit.  In his favor: garlic saturation in pizza is high enough to act as a dietary antibiotic, and the toilet paper is so rough that 14% of the population is already surviving without an asshole.

A friend sent me this, a passage from Joe Bageant.

It took me over fifty years to figure out there is no running away, or finding some perfect life. We just exchange one set of problems for another. I ran away to the US Navy to escape a small redneck town. I ran away to the West Coast to become a hippie. I ran to homestead in Idaho on an Indian reservation, I later ran back into the straight world, mostly out of fear for financial security. And when it became personally undeniable that America had become a lonely totalistic empire, whose heart is a bank vault, and that I would not survive its enforced loneliness,  masked by gunpoint cheer and state authorized messages of “hope,” and loudspeakers above the workhouse extolling the ”work ethic,” well, it was either be somewhere else or die inside. Get a different set of problems. Some nights even sickness or hunger looked acceptable, compared to the screaming, yet silent anxiety I was experiencing. I swear it was fucking unbearable. By 2005, I was in Central America for I did not know how long.

Personally, I found that the problems I encountered every day in places like Belize (and now Mexico) somehow suited my own innate sensibilities better. I had no expectations really. Which is good because both paces would have been extremely disappointing if I had. Mainly I just wanted to give up any “advantage” I supposedly had as a citizen of the “greatest nation on earth,” which was, as I said, quite literally, killing me, much as it seems to be killing you.

Beyond that, I wanted to spend the remaining 10 or 15 percent of my life doing stuff with human beings, face-to-face, asshole to belly button — babies being born, people dying, getting drunk, worshiping their gods, experiencing joy. And I wanted to do so without any mediation by soul killing American corporate culture. I did not want ”security” as Americans and Europeans perceive it, and still don’t. The only way to do that is to intentionally stay pretty broke. Money is a rigged game — you cannot win by trying to buy security. Oh, you can have the illusion of it, but the price is your soul. The entire world architecture of money, beyond basic sustenance, is a horribly corrupted — especially since the advent of the “virtual world economy,” a paper and digital racket that sucks away the people’s hard earned wealth before they ever see it.

Well, I say, fuck their offerings. And screw childish “hope.” Hope is for little kids and tooth fairies. The world we awaken to each morning is the only real thing there is. And if we are spiritually, morally and philosophically intact, and humble enough to feel it and love it each day, we don’t need to hope some unseen force or bunch of politicos, or an “economy” or so-called leaders are gonna make it better for us. The orchids outside my doorway are blooming and my wife still loves me after all these years. A real gypsy taught me a song yesterday and Easter is in the air in Mexico. I guess that as a burned out old hippie and a writer, I cannot imagine anything else to hope for.

When I arrive Thursday in Buenos Aires the city will be celebrating its four day weekend.  Easter.