Into the night....

Well I have been very busy since I arrived. Most of you are aware of my days since I arrived second hand from Buzz. Let's see...a week in hotels with endless notes in my inbox from rental agencies, replies from my craigslist query. The Art Hotel was nice, clean, a little noisy at night but had great dramatic curtains to block out the neon sign outside my window. A little t.v. that only came on late in the evening before bed where I watched and waited for the demise of El Jefe with no such luck.

I wandered the city freely exploring the different neighborhoods and trying to get a feel for what part of town I would like to be in. The weather was and is perfect for me. Not the dire winter they spoke to me of. Highs in the 60's lows in the mid to upper 40's. It is odd after so many years travelling with Buzz and others to find myself as I once was when I was a young man, wandering the streets of an unknown country and capital alone, discovering in silence and dialoguing with my own thoughts and feelings. It is not as easy as it was at 17, 20, 30. Things, while utterly beautiful and interesting just don't capture the same sense of magic, bewilderment and freedom of youth. One cannot forget nor erase the collected scars of time and age and knowledge with a mere shrug. But it is wonderful in a new way. A different intensity. Also, I am not just here to be a tourist but to evolve and work. To delve deeper into things I have avoided in myself. Disciplines I have ignored and put aside too long. I have held on too long to the tether toward the simpler, vainglory days of yore. I have resisted growing up. I must grow up. I must become more responsible to my talents, my ideas, my work. God it is... has been... the most loathsome four letter word in my argot. Why can't life be a string of magical, euphoric unchecked passions. The one blending into the other. An epic film. Sure, with sorrows, regrets, but only as entre-acts to the enduring waltzes, candlelit spaces infused with the glow of romance and the carnal and spiritual love of other human beings, charatcers clothed in outrageous costumes, commingling with one's own ceaselessly inspired and effortlessly gliding soul, drinking from the cup of power, creativity and beauty as if it were only a question of wishing it so. Ah, yes...this little Prince must grow up at long last.

Not that magic and good fortune and luck don't always find me, for they invariably do. Like attracts like? Belief in wonder and magic? Who knows, but I bring a special astral force along in my wake and it opens doors, windows, spreads wings, takes flight and carries me further than I could on mere desire and hope.

Example: I am connected to a mysterious bloke through the new literary and lovely friend I worked with on translating one of my mom's books. We speak from the parking lot of a hotel in Rockville, Md and I speak to her of apprehensions, fears, excitement, the challenge of the thing at hand. She tells me I will be happy in Buenos Aires. The city will sit well with me. It will embrace me. She offers a contact. I take it. A few days after my arrival I contact said guy. He asks if I like cinema...can I rollerskate!

In a few hours I find myself in the old part of Buenos Aires, the most interesting neighborhood, San Telmo. A fantastic amalgam of streets devoted to Art, Antiques, a collection of bars and cafés, cobble-stoned streets, the aged and lovely patina of long forgotten dances, if the streetlamps could speak they would tell us of rich tango- spent evenings, drunken lovers, brawls born of jealousy and ardent lovers. Everything exudes a faded but redolent beauty.

I appear in a cab at the Unversity of Cinema. Buenos Aires' version of NYU, where many of the world's endless celluloid novitiates, products of the wealthy loins of the world come to feel like Hemingway, Buñuel, Bertolucci, Fellini. Endless rooms full of the useless stench of cigarettes and human flesh combined with the clamor of ideas, words, intellectual determinism, foolish dreams, like mine too. For I too, am one of these unrepentant dreamers who are willing to suffer for dreams that may or may not ever bear fruit but are planted nonetheless, prayed over, coddled and dragged within us like huge and musty trunks of desire through our ambitious terrerstrial maps.

Two films. One of quesitonable production values, but honest, guilty of the first time director's crime of length, unedited. Bad sound, but great story, many good moments. An absurd tale of the day of Perón's death - a small group of revolutionary youths who want to switch his body for another's. Interesting, but flawed.

The next was a documentary on the death and subsequent embalming and deification of Eva Perón's body. The Perón era is still a matter of great and polarized passions. Dangerous to give one opinion or another too loudly in public I am told. The devout fanatics and the derisive enemies who feel that Perón and his Vedette were nothing but populists, demagogues serving themselves copious portions from the excesses and loot of the rich, while presenting a pageant of obfuscation, miscreants savoring their lust for power at the cost of the producers and developers of business, manufacturing. Another endless and pointless battle among men, the haves and have nots. Either way....the story of her body and how she was literally mummified and turned into a porcelain human doll is without question one of the most bizzare and incredible posthumous stories of our collective global history. Not even the mummy's of Egypt went through such unspeakable things. It capitvates and enthralls especially for one freshly arrived at this bay city.

After the show we went as a group (of oh, say 20?) to a marvelous restaurant called El Desnivél (The Unevenness). A boisterous madhouse, loud and lusty with laughter, conversation. Full to the rafters. A few tables and odd chairs brought together to accomodate us and thus begins the dinner hour....what time is it? Oh, 1 A.M. the perfect time for a lovely Tenderloin Steak or some Veal Medallion or French Fries and Ribs. All washed down with an endless stream of wine and bread. A manly woman comes in off of the street and begins to belt out a heartbreaking ballad of loss and regret, a lover forever longed for but long gone into the mist of memory and time. I think I'm gonna love this town!