Idle Words

Idle Words http://www.idlewords.com brevity is for the weak en-us Copyright 2008, Maciej Ceglowski Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:06:28 -0000 Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:06:28 -0000 The Great Porteño Smokeout http://idlewords.com/2008/04/the_great_porten_o_smokeout.htm <img src="http://idlewords.com/images/fires.png" /> When I first moved to Buenos Aires I knew nothing about the city except that the seasons were upside down and that I should try the steak. Somehow I had assumed that the city got its name from the refreshing mountain breezes that blew down each day from the ridges of the High Pampas, wafting gently across the white sand beaches before disappearing into the turquoise sea. I imagined the city as some kind of South American Nice, occupying a small shelf of land between hills and ocean, perhaps with a kitschy but lovable landmark (like the Rio Jesus) set up on a nearby mountaintop, kissed in the evening by the last rosy rays of the sinking sun as it descended into the Atlantic. On arrival, of course, I found out that Buenos Aires was actually Sacramento-on-Sea, with the added attraction of the sea being a dark brown color. The name had nothing to do with geography, but had rather been taken from the patron saint of good winds, to whom anguished sailors had presumably prayed after foundering on the hot malarial flatlands at the mouth of the River Plate. The nearest bit of significant topography lay in Córdoba, nine hundred kilometers to the northwest, and everywhere else was table-flat grassland, which, as luck would have it, was also highly flammable. For many days, a thick layer of smoke from burning scrub in the nearby river delta has covered the capital region, much of Entre Ríos province and parts of Uruguay, turning the name “Buenos Aires” into an outright mockery. The amount of smoke is unprecedented - apparently there are some three hundred fires burning throughout the area, and there is no hope of rain for at least the next few days. The fires take hold in the deep root systems of plants and smolder partially below ground, making them hard to find and extinguish. Meanwhile the city has been suffering. The bus terminal has closed regularly, and the downtown airport (which mainly serves internal destinations) has had to stop landings at times. Major highways are blocked on many nights because of the terrible visibility (though it has taken several of the country's signature pile-ups to convince the authorities that something might have to be done). There are dark rumors about the fires. It is clear that they were started intentionally, but no one can say for certain who did it, or why. Looming in the background is a sharp conflict between farmers (who want to plow cows into the ground in order to raise more lucrative soybeans) and the government (which does not relish the idea of convincing voters to switch to tofu steaks). The government has been trying to impose crippling export taxes on the farmers, and is suggesting that they started the brush fires as a way of applying pressure back. Since roadblocks by protesters in the countryside left many stores in Buenos Aires without beef(!) last month, this theory has some legs in the capital. For their part, the farmers have accused the government of starting the fires as a provocation. There is a third theory, that the rise in soy production may have prompted ranchers to look for pasture in more marginal areas like the delta islands, leading them to light fires in order to clear the land, but again nobody knows. A unique feature of politics in Argentina is that not only are all three of these conspiracy theories likely to be true at once, but that there is probably an even more outlandish actual reason for why the countryside is burning which we will only learn about ten to fifteen years from now. The smoke attack is a kind of model Argentine crisis. It affects everyone, its underlying causes are obscure even though the immediate causes are clear, the government has done everything it can to pretend it's not happening before taking ineffective half-measures, and the resilient capital city has been able to shrug off something that would have caused significant protest (once the smoke cleared) anywhere else. This isn't so much civic apathy as it is recognition by the Argentines that their country is still far from being un país en serio, as Kirchner's old slogan had it. For all the economic growth since the 2002 devaluation, public institutions here remain corrupt and brittle, and it is not obvious at all how to fix them. People here deserve better, but the political class is far more adept at staying in power than it is at wielding it. 2008-04-23T00:00:00 Seeking Bedbug Legal Aid http://idlewords.com/2008/04/seeking_bedbug_legal_aid.htm A lazyweb request for my readers: Though writing this website may seem like the work of ten men, I also happen to run the <a href="http://bedbugregistry.com">Bedbug Registry</a>, an online directory of reports by people who have been unlucky enough to encounter the insects in their hotel or apartment. Periodically I will receive email from irate landlords or management companies demanding that I take down a post, or divulge the identity of the person making a complaint (it's possible to post anonymously). So far I have been able to defuse these situations without getting taken to court, but as my viral marketing agents work their six-legged magic I figure it's only a matter of time. The registry earns just about enough from Google ads to pay its hosting bill, so resources with which to pay a high-octane legal team are limited. But if anyone knows a good lawyer with experience in the area of online libel law, I would love to hear recommendations. I'm looking for occasional legal advice about specific cases and someone into whose arms I can run shrieking like a little girl if a process server finds me in Argentina. I also want to know the best way to protect the identity and right to speak out of the various traumatized people who are submitting their stories. Please send email (see sidebar) if you have any good leads. 2008-04-07T00:00:00 Controlled Tango Into Terrain http://idlewords.com/2008/04/controlled_tango_into_terrain.htm <img src="http://idlewords.com/images/tango_show.jpg" width="450" /> From a Buenos Aires travel guide: <div style="padding:5px;margin-left:10px;color:#235;margin-right:20px;border:0px dotted #aaa;background:#fff"> Spice up your life! Take a beginner's tango lesson at 9 and then stay on to dance the night away at the 10:30 milonga. Get swept away in the arms of Buenos Aires' finest dancers - and lose yourself in the magic that is authentic Argentine tango!</div> A few weeks ago I walked into a tango studio that I had been passing daily, just down the block from my apartment. San Telmo is a tango-rich environment and there are many studios advertising instruction, but this one seemed the most accessible for someone with social anxiety. There were no buzzers to ring, stairs to climb, or windowless doors to knock on. Instead, lessons seemed to take place at the far end of a dingy covered arcade, with a clear exit path to the street in case of trouble. One Saturday afternoon I braved the long, intimidating walk, footsteps echoing all the way down to the end of the corridor, where geometric figures were painted in white on a shiny green dance floor. A small, immaculately-dressed elderly man greeted me, positioned me in the middle of the dance floor, placed a pretty Dutch tourist in my arms and said "you are the captain!" And so my first impression of tango was positive. Before coming to Argentina the only kind of tango I had seen was the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEwZIufmafo">overwrought</a>, fishnets-and-brylcreem variety full of smoldering glances, bad hats, legs being wrapped around torsos and a 73:1 fabric ratio between the man's costume and that of his partner. So it was a pleasant surprise to find that tango in Argentina (except for the stage displays) is a much subtler and more elegant dance. Couples tango on <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVV83rj9aOc">a crowded dance floor</a> in a very close embrace that leaves their upper bodies almost motionless, and the dance itself is improvised and highly individual. The result is something that looks like the top half of a hug grafted onto a Fred Astaire number. <div style="padding:5px;margin-left:10px;color:#235;margin-right:20px;border:0px dotted #aaa;background:#fff">Drop into the groove! Take our quick primer in introductory jazz trombone, then get ready to jam through a festive night of bebop, Dixieland and free-form melodic exploration with one of Chicago's finest jazz ensembles!</div> After I had spent a few minutes attempting to move the Dutch woman in rectangles, Armandito's fellow instructor Mónica glided over to have a look. She pried the poor woman from my grip and then stood in front of me in mute reproach, trying to reposition my feet, hands and trunk while all the while shaking her head and mouthing the word "no". After about a minute of this silent adjustment I said, "I'm sorry, I don't think I understand what you want me to do." "You speak Spanish?" "Yes." "Oh thank God!" And from then on I had found my niche. No matter how poorly I might dance, I could always step in and translate for the English-speaking students who often came to group lessons. For some reason many of them were more interested in ordering tango shoes (a side business Mónica runs) than learning anything about how to use them. “Marcel, ask this one why he is walking like a wounded hippopotamus.” “Do you see this bunion on the first outside knuckle of my left big toe? They will need to make it just a touch wider there. Tell her this is important. Hola, señorita, this is very important.” Armandito, a lion of the dance floor, turned out to be eighty years old. This does not prevent him from performing all manner of spins, twists and bends with Mónica, or from moving as gracefully as a cat when he is demonstrating a step to his students. Further supporting the theory that sixty years of dancing tango have rendered Armandito indestructible is a collection of press clippings on the studio's cork board. They detail how a giant chandelier <a href="http://www.lanacion.com.ar/archivo/Nota.asp?nota_id=693743">fell on his head</a> as he was dancing one afternoon four years ago at a ritzy tango parlor called the Confiteria Ideal. A true gentleman, Armandito absorbed the entire force of this blow himself, leaving his partner untouched and anonymous. And after a few hours of observation and some stitches, he was released back into the wild. <div style="padding:5px;margin-left:10px;color:#235;margin-right:20px;border:0px dotted #aaa;background:#fff">Skål! Stop in for a quick prep course in conversational Swedish and then get ready for a night of riotous repartee, debate, and laughter with Stockholm's literati as you discuss the latest currents in contemporary Scandinavian prose. </div> Tango has a similar trajectory to the American Delta blues. It arose out of black culture (back when there was a sizable black population in Buenos Aires), developed locally, crossed overseas, and then remained forgotten in its homeland for many years until a younger generation of Argentines took an interest in learning from the still-living masters and sparked a big revival. Now there is both a thriving local dance scene and an enormous tourism industry built around tango, including large numbers of foreign dancers who take their first trip here with all the reverence of a pious Muslim making a late-life pilgrimage to Mecca. You can identify some of these tango hajjis in the dance halls because they dance beautifully and yet don't speak much Spanish, standing awkwardly during the first moments of each song that other couples use as an opportunity to chat. People dance tango at a structured event called a milonga (the word can also apply to the dance hall itself, or to a two-beat older form of tango music), the only social setting in Argentina where you must fetch your own drinks and empanadas at a bar rather than waiting for table service. The host seats guests around the dance floor based on his guess at their dancing skill and other intangible factors (such as how great they look). Men ask women to dance by trying to make eye contact and nodding towards the dance floor in a gesture called the cabeceo. In theory this is a discreet way for men to save face in the event of a refusal; in practice it means men cross the darkened room, stand three steps in front of their intended partner, and wag their head gravely until she either gets up to dance or tells them to go away. Each tango song is about three minutes long, and in a milonga these come in sets (called tandas ) of three or four songs of similar style. It is considered a big diss to abandon a partner in the middle of a tanda, so if you ask someone to dance at the start of a set you are on the hook for twelve to fifteen minutes of tango. Many dancers who are not ready for that level of committment wait until the second or third song to go out on the floor, creating a paradox for the beginner: the floor is much easier to navigate at the start of a set, but you are far less likely to find someone willing to put up with you for a full four songs. At the end of a tanda the DJ plays a short piece of music called a cortina, which is meant to be a completely undanceable signal for dancers to clear the floor. There is much hand-wringing in American tango blogs over the proper choice of music for this snippet — how do you make the music unambiguous without spoiling the magic, soft-focus, adult-contemporary mood of the milonga? Do you put on Mozart? Do you put on Schubert? DJs in Buenos Aires cut the Gordian knot by putting on Creedence Clearwater Revival and watching as the ebb tide of tango dancers collides with a rush of delighted couples racing to dance thirty seconds of lindy hop before the tango axe falls again. <div style="padding:5px;margin-left:10px;color:#235;margin-right:20px;border:0px dotted #aaa;background:#fff">Kick it into overdrive! Arrive early for a "crash" course in track handling and a practice lap at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, then join the excitement of authentic Formula 1 racing at one of America's most hallowed racetracks!</div> On Sundays the studio puts on a tango show. Armandito arrives dressed in an immaculate white shirt and broad white neckcloth embroidered with a black tango shoe, and optimistically sets out four rows of plastic seats in the middle distance. Luciano the tango singer comes to provide live music. Luciano is a barrel of a man with slicked-back hair and the kind of thunderous voice that can peel paint from furniture. He approaches each song as a matador might approach a bull. He starts his set with microphone in hand, but during the many crescendos he gradually moves the microphone away from his face, which has the paradoxical effect of making him louder. The microphone, it turns out, is acting as a physical barrier to the full impact of his voice, de-amplifying it into a quieter, more distorted sound. While Luciano sings Armandito flits through the audience like a hummingbird, selecting tango partners. In his embrace both elderly Argentine ladies and nervous Canadian tourists transform into lovely figures of elegance for the three minutes it takes Luciano to drive a sword through the heart of another sentimental favorite. Once the singing has ended, Armandito greets anyone still remaining and gives his introduction to the tango, recounting the origins of the dance and making sure to stress a Harvard study that has found it is an effective therapy for people with Parkinson's. Personally, I would just say “I am eighty years old and four years ago a chandelier fell on my head", but I do not wish to second-guess my teacher. Then he and Mónica perform a lovely set of dances, the chairs are cleared, and the remaining die-hards stay for a short milonga. <div style="padding:5px;margin-left:10px;color:#235;margin-right:20px;border:0px dotted #aaa;background:#fff">They say the first cut is the deepest! Build your scalpel savvy at the Mayo clinic's afternoon neurosurgery boot camp; then slip into some sterile blues and get ready to assist a crack team of pediatric surgeons with a delicate procedure on some of the cutest patients you'll ever meet!</div> There is a group of Argentine ladies of a certain age who come every week to the tango show, and between them they graciously accept the responsibility of dancing with me. The job of a tango leader (in Argentina invariably the male role in a mixed couple) is not an easy one to master. The leader has to keep time, navigate the dance floor, avoid collisions, lead the steps, pay attention to what the follower is doing, and at some point notice that the music has stopped, the lights have been turned off, and the follower would like to go home. Like prisoners who have learned to communicate through a laborious system of clandestine taps and knocks on the wall, tango dancers must signal one other entirely through minute, Cabalistic movements of the torso, the one part of the body that does not appear to move at all. Loudly whispering “quarter turn to your left in three... two... one...” is considered bad form. Each week I brute force my way through a dance with these gracious partners, and each week they are quick to assure me it wasn't nearly as much of a Calvary for them as it had been the week before. As one of them said to me sweetly after what I thought was a rare successfully-executed figure, "Don't worry. Someday you will know what you are doing." <h2>A Partial List of Tango Mistakes I Have Made</h2> <ul style="margin-left:10px"> <li>Torso too far forward</li> <li>Torso too far back</li> <li>Torso technically straight but still just wrong somehow</li> <li>Shoulders hunched forward</li> <li>Shoulders arched back</li> <li>Bouncing while in motion</li> <li>Weird panther-like shuffle that kept head unnaturally level</li> <li>Knees not bent </li> <li>Knees bent too far</li> <li>Moved without waiting for partner</li> <li>Wrong-footed partner</li> <li>Instead of taking smooth steps with the sole of foot gliding along the floor, staggered like Frankenstein monster</li> <li>Somehow ended up with partner many meters from dance floor, in construction area in the back of the studio</li> <li>Ran partner into table</li> <li>Ran partner into mirror</li> <li>Ran partner into other dancers</li> <li>Ran partner into wall</li> <li>Tipped partner over</li> <li>Kicked partner in toes</li> <li>Kicked partner in side of foot</li> <li>Kicked partner in shin</li> <li>Stepped on partner's foot</li> <li>Walked directly into partner</li> <li>Inadvertently dipped partner</li> <li>Struck partner in teeth with shoulder</li> <li>Left arm too limp</li> <li>Left arm too stiff</li> <li>Left arm pumping furiously in air for balance</li> <li>Right arm insufficiently firm (the correct position for the man's right arm in tango is wrapped just far enough around the woman's back that you feel she is about to file a lawsuit)</li> <li>Arms moved independently of torso</li> <li>Looked at feet while dancing</li> <li>Failed to listen to music</li> <li>Did not appear relaxed</li> </ul> 2008-04-01T00:00:00 Getting Schooled in Buenos Aires http://idlewords.com/2008/03/getting_schooled_in_buenos_aires.htm The New York Times has put out its <a href="http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/travel/16buenos.html">biannual article</a> about hipster living in Buenos Aires, so it seems a good time to post about two wonderful places you will never read about in the Times that have made my stay here especially enjoyable. If you want to study Spanish in Argentina, I would recommend you arrange classes at <a href="http://www.espanolalsur.com.ar">Español al Sur</a>, a very small school run by a crypto-Polish Swiss woman with a small Justice Team of tutors. They are the usual mix of musicians, dancers and artists; however they are also very adept and dedicated language teachers. The learning materials are Argentina-specific, too, so you have the option of learning Spanish in the lovely rioplatense dialect. I can't vouch for advanced levels, but the quality of instruction for beginners and intermediate students is excellent. The school's one weak spot is Iguazú the cat, who is somewhat too high strung and jittery for a language school mascot, especially considering the number of available sunbeams. The school is on Pinchincha, near the Pinchincha subte stop; classes run from $6-$10 USD per hour. If you are interested in learning to tango, there are excellent sparsely-attended group lessons three days a week at 1456 Defensa in San Telmo (near the San Juan subte stop between San Juan and Brasil). The lessons are deep inside a tourist pavillion, and are advertised with a gaudy street stand at the door that screams out "tourist trap", but inside you will find excellent and inexpensive dance lessons. Armandito, who runs the show, is eighty years old masquerading as sixty. His partner, Monica, is a professional tango dancer with real a gift for teaching. Again I can't vouch for advanced levels, but if you are that good a dancer you don't need help from me. You should come with at least minimal Spanish in order to understand why you are being yelled at. Private lessons can be arranged for eighty pesos (~$25 USD), group lessons are ten pesos ($3 USD) and take place Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at 6PM. There is a free tango show Sundays at five, populated mostly by elderly Argentines. 2008-03-16T00:00:00 Stanisław Maciej Cegłowski, 1913-2008 http://idlewords.com/2008/02/stanis_aw_maciej_ceg_owski_1913-2008.htm I would like to write a few words about my grandpa, who died on Tuesday, depending on which document you believe the day before or after his 95th birthday. In earlier life I think my grandfather was a fearsome man. He ran a large state model orchard an hour's drive east of Warsaw; in a sense he was both sole employer and mayor for the little country that came up around it. Like so many stern men he had mellowed into a gentle and lovable grandfather by the time I met him. Unusually for Poland he was neither a Catholic nor a communist, a rare middle ground, but he was adept enough at placating Church and Party to run a state enterprise in a deeply religious community for forty years. He read and wrote English well, and paid visits to the United States and to China in the sixties when such exchanges were also unusual. There are pictures of him looking stern and dapper in Yellowstone Park; to this day I still have not been to all the places he visited. In America he toured apple orchards, and in Washington state learned about a radical new approach to planting in which growers kept their trees trimmed to about the height of a man rather than letting them grow to full size, having found that the dwarf trees were both easier to pick and more productive. My grandfather mentioned this later while visiting an orchard in Michigan; this type of cultivation became known as the "Polish method". He had a section of orchard planted when I was born and I used to enjoy going there to see row after row of trees that were my exact age. I believe they have now been cut down. It was never fully clear what my grandfather did during the war. He served in the army as an officer and was taken prisoner in Lithuania. By some miracle he obtained a prison furlough and escaped; the remaining prisoners, being officers, were almost certainly shot. He spent the rest of the war living under an assumed name; I believe he also forged documents. He told stories of living in an empty farm building during a winter so severe that he had to walk in the same set of bootprints every day to get to and from town. At night he would light a fire in a metal barrel which by morning would be glowing a dull cherry red. His one roommate was a mouse, with whom he grew close. My grandparents were married for sixty years. I did not expect my grandfather to outlive my grandma, but after a hard year of mourning he rallied and spent his last years still ambulatory, still taking care of his flowerbeds and the various animals that exploited him for bits of bread or salt pork. He lost a lot of his capacity for input and output, but his mind never seemed to dull. Most of his days he spent listening to the television at an incredible volume - I believe he heard it through his bones - or reading magazines and newspapers through an arrangement of magnifying lenses worthy of Mt. Whitney. He would go out for walks in all seasons, leaving us apprehensive that he might slip and break a hip on the slick wooden steps. When the weather was too inclement he walked a measured kilometer around the dining room table. Many years ago my grandfather wrote an authoritative book on pomology, and it always gave me pleasure to keep it on my shelf, since we shared the same name. I enjoyed looking like an expert on grafting, musts, rusts, cankers, and varietals. Whenever I came to visit, he would dress up in a gorgeous wool suit that must have dated from before the war; I would see him in his snappy bow tie, waiting to greet me on the patio. On the way home, and against my protests, the car trunk was be filled with many boxes of apples; it got to the point where my friends in Warsaw refused to see me after I had been out to the orchard, for fear of being overwhelmed in turn. Dziękuję Ci, dziadku, za tyle miłych wspomnień. Żałuję, że już nigdy się nie zobaczymy. 2008-02-16T00:00:00 Sleeping Is Giving In http://idlewords.com/2008/01/sleeping_is_giving_in.htm I discovered bedbugs and modafinil on the same eventful night a little over a year ago in San Francisco. I had just moved back from China and was staying in a dingy Travelodge on the corner of Valencia and Market streets. I had a song in my throat, a dream in my heart, and - thanks to a pharmacologically more adventurous friend - four 100mg Provigil tablets in my wallet. I was about to discover that I also had a sizable bedbug colony under my mattress. Modafinil, of course, is the wonder drug that lets you remain awake for many hours in a row without any of the unpleasantness or fun of amphetamines. The closest it comes to being a good time is making your urine smell like banana pudding. No one really knows how it works, but after feeding large doses to narcoleptics for years, the medical community has decided any negative effects are probably subtle. For such a strong CNS stimulant, modafinil has weird properties. Eating a double handful of pills, for example, will make you jittery where a similar overdose of any other alertness drug (caffeine included) would kill you. In addition to keeping you awake, modafinil tends to give you a sense of heightened mental clarity and focus, making it the perfect programmer's drug. Bedbugs, of course, are the retro parasites now proving that there are second acts in American lives. They started their comeback in the provinces before hitting the big time in New York City a couple of years ago, with feature articles in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/nyregion/27bugs.html">Times</a>, the <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0650,altman,75270,2.html">Village Voice</a>, and the hipster press. Even after receiving the kind of saturation coverage you'd think would inspire a backlash, bedbugs are still going strong two years later, expanding into new media markets across the US, Canada and Europe. Their formula for success is as simple as it is effective: hide in tiny cracks and crevices, travel easily, be practically impossible to eradicate, and feast on the blood of sleeping children. In that happy portion of my life before I knew what bedbugs looked like, I had always assumed they were tiny and nearly transparent insects like mites or aphids. So in the morning, when I found what appeared to be a tick lying on his back next to the coffee maker, feebly waving his legs, I was not alarmed. "Ah, California" I thought, scratching my arms. "Wild kingdom". "Bedbugs," said a <a href="http://lemonodor.com">friend</a> on IRC, and after belittling him for his ignorance I ran a Google image search to show him just how wrong his conjecture was. The next few minutes were not spent in that positive, happy frame of mind that I like to think has come to be the hallmark of this website, and I will draw a veil over them. By early afternoon I was sitting in a public laundry, watching most of my worldly possessions spiral around in very hot water, with the captured bedbug secreted away between two plastic-wrapped plastic hotel cups now stuck in my rolling suitcase. I cannot explain why I took the bedbug along. He seemed like a valuable piece of forensic evidence, except that after my rapid online education on bedbugs I had no intention of trying to get my money back from the hotel. I had slept, been bitten, and knew already from panicky study of the internet there was nothing the hotel could usefully do. I think I wanted to take him along to keep my options open - his kin had eaten me, but he was going to learn a lesson about messing with primates. The bug and his crew had incredible stamina and the ability to stay hidden in the tiniest of crevices for months at a time without eating; I had a brain the size of a cauliflower and a high-speed internet connection. It was on. Upstairs from the laundry was the Hotel Mithila, which turned out to be a wonderful family run hotel just on the edge of the Tenderloin in San Francisco, close enough to the crappy part of town to be cheap and far enough to be clean, calm and wonderful. The rooms had thick, bedbug-patterned carpets and immaculate sheets, which I would check each night before going to bed like a jeweler looking for flaws in a diamond. Modafinil keeps you from feeling sleepy, but it does not remove fatigue or mask any of the other symptoms of staying up too long. This means that by four in the morning of your third consecutive day of little sleep you see a constant crawling in your peripheral vision and feel a prickling on your skin. This certainly livens up the paranoid late-night vigil for bedbugs. Each night I also took care to check on my prisoner, who was waving his legs in his plastic prison. You can fall asleep on modafinil, but after three hours or so you will wake up with the false feeling of being fully rested. A practiced hand knows to ignore this and go back to bed, but in those early days I would get out of bed at seven and go about my day, which consisted of moving from cafe to cafe, trying to stay one step ahead of my other nemesis - the Norah Jones Christmas CD, which was spreading across the cafes of the city even faster than the bloodsucking bugs were invading its hotels. Feeling unfocused (because like an idiot I was sleeping three hours a night) I tried as an experiment drinking coffee on top of the Modafinil, but this turned even my briefest emails into sixty paragraph stream-of-consciousness rants, and I found myself writing object factories just to turn a string into lower case. It seemed wiser to stick to overpriced orange juice. One evening I got home from my rounds to find my prisoner had gone. I had carelessly left him for dead on top of the armoire, covering him with the plastic cup without weighing it down. Now I was going to pay for my complacency: the bug was gone. In a room with a million crevices and cracks I had let escape an insect whose specialty was hiding. I knew the bedbug was not long for this world, but I had no idea whether he might not be a she, brimming with eggs, and I felt terrible for introducing this pest into a hotel that had been so good to me in a time of need. Clearly it had to have fallen from the armoire, but where did it go? The top of the armoire was perfectly smooth and overhanging; the escapee had to have dropped somewhere on that bedbug-patterned carpet. Two long hours later, I conceded defeat. I had officially introduced my worst enemy into the very hotel that had rescued me; I was the viper that the Mithila family had warmed on its breast. I decided it was time to gather what thoughts I still had and go drink beer. I took down a dress shirt hanging from the rack next to the armoire, and as I began to put it on the bedbug dropped out of the rolled-up cuff. Twenty more minutes of hard staring at the carpet and I had found him, on his back again, waving his legs in frustration. This time I settled the matter out into the alley, gangland style, before throwing the shirt in the hot cycle of the downstairs washing machine. I spent that week (and about another half-sheet of pills) setting up the <a href="http://bedbugregistry.com">Bedbug Registry</a>. I figured no hotel or apartment owner in his right mind would ever admit to a bug problem they were powerless to treat. I also recalled my own reaction after encountering bedbugs, which was to search online and try to find every particle of information possible about what to do next. There were excellent sites like <a href="http://bedbugger.com/">bedbugger</a> with lots of useful advice, but there was nowhere I could angrily report an encounter and vent. The registry turned out to be a valuable form of closure. It transformed bedbugs from archnemesis into valued business partner. All I had to do was take charge of the technical end, and the bugs took care of the viral marketing across a valuable urban demographic. Man and bug could work together! The only sour note in our arrangement was the very real distress of the people submitting the bug reports. For those who came across them in a hotel (and the <a href="http://bedbugregistry.com/hotel/FL/Lake-Buena-Vista/Disneys-Old-Key-West-Resort/">most</a> <a href="http://bedbugregistry.com/hotel/CA/San-Francisco/Four-Seasons-San-Francisco/">unexpected</a> <a href="http://bedbugregistry.com/hotel/CA/Midpines/Yosemite-Bug-Rustic-Mountain/">hotels</a> turned out to have bedbugs!) the episode was traumatic but at least limited in time; for people who had to try to eradicate bedbugs from their home, it could mean months of suffering, moving house, and lasting trauma. For the rest of my time in San Francisco, I would pass the Valencia Travelodge every other morning on my way to go running, and the parking lot was nearly always full. This always gave me a strange feeling - I knew people were being eaten there at night, but I wasn't at all sure what to do about it. Knowing that most victims would never notice that they had been bitten at all, it would have been as cruel as it was pointless to warn them. And I certainly missed the days of being able to stay in a hotel room without having to meticulously inspect every mattress and stay up half the night with an imaginary itch; I wasn't about to inflict that on anyone else. I just hoped they were keeping their suitcases well away from the walls. 2008-01-24T00:00:00 The Second World http://idlewords.com/2008/01/the_second_world.htm The defining characteristic of a Second World country is the non-absorbent napkin. From Moscow to Valparaiso, if your café napkin is a square of waxed paper that takes grease from your lips and spreads it to the rest of your face, you can be certain of encountering the whole constellation of other traits common to those industrialized countries where people make less than $20,000 a year (specifically: clean but strong-tasting running water, the Ford Fiesta or its local equivalent, new trains on old tracks, pavement as an ongoing process rather than an accomplished fact, metal buckets on dirty ropes, dogs of uncertain provenance, merchants hosing down their section of sidewalk, manhole covers left open, sixty-eight satellite dishes on one roof, cheap plastic washing machines that fit in a bathtub, paper currency that rapidly gets filthy, a complete absence of vending machines, streets that don't drain, iron fences around suburban homes, good but watery beer, kiosks full of cheap plastic toys, sidewalks with little square lakes where tiles are missing, affordable cigarettes, escalators with wooden steps, the cinder block as the unit of construction, toilet attendants who sell grey toilet paper by the square and receive tips in a little plate, train stations and theatres with fifty glass doors but only one of them open, rectangular buses that belch black smoke, elevators with little inner doors that have to be closed by hand, the complete inability to ever make change). 2008-01-17T00:00:00 Rosario http://idlewords.com/2008/01/rosario.htm <img src="http://idlewords.com/images/night_church.jpg" width="450" /> The best bus ride in my life was in Argentina. I needed to cross Patagonia, from Trelew to the town of Esquel in the foothills of the Andes, on an overnight bus over gravel roads. My only point of reference was a backbreaking Greyhound bus trip across the United States taken when I was nine years old, and I was ready for the worst. Instead I found myself in bus heaven. The seats were giant mattresses spaced so far apart that the seat back in front of me was shrouded in a blue haze. They didn't just recline flat - I'm pretty sure they reclined past flat. I felt like the pajamaed man on one of those late night commercials targeted at seniors, perched on a thick armchair that slowly unbends into a comfortable bed as he presses a button on a hand controller. Except that the commercials never showed a steward coming around to serve the man a steak dinner. A few seconds with the armrest and I had un-reclined; another moment and the armrest itself had transformed, like an autobot, into a lap tray. Soon I was eating hot beef in the dark, looking out the window at the arbitrary set of four stars I thought was Southern Cross, trying to get the Crosby, Stills and Nash song out of my head. When I had finished the steak, the same steward floated by to find out what I would like to drink. ¿Whisky? Right away, sir! It was a Platonic bus trip that I would never quite repeat. On later buses the seat might only tilt to one hundred seventy seven degrees, or the air conditioning would be on too high, or there would be a limp ham croissant instead of steak. But even though I have never re-summited this peak of transportation bliss, bus travel in Argentina remains better than anywhere else I've been. And with each new trip comes the hope that I will eat reclining steak again. Buses serving Buenos Aires leave from a bus terminal in Retiro, a long snake of a building hidden behind three train stations.  Everyone with a van and a dream has set up shop here. Downstairs, where the buses pull in, the hall is packed with kiosks, snack courts, and the giant striped plastic suitcases that signal long-distance travel in the Second World. People in the waiting areas sit watching little LCD screens showing Los Simpsons. Rosario is a city 300km northwest of Buenos Aires, up the coffee-colored Paraná river. The bus ride is steak-free, of course, but otherwise quite comfortable, a straight shot across a giant lawn. The most amazing thing about Rosario is that you can spend the day there without ever seeing a Che Guevara t-shirt, maté gourd, poster or tattoo. Given that Rosario is his birthplace, this shows an unusual restraint, and makes the city instantly lovable. Rosario's other claim to fame is the amazing Monument to the Argentine Flag near the river, which looks like it was built by someone who forgot to uncheck the extras on the monument order form: <img src="http://idlewords.com/images/monument_daytime.jpg" width="450" /> <fieldset> <legend>Monument Options</legend> <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Obelisk <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Reflecting Pool <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Eternal Flame <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Colonnade <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Urn <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Cannons <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Staircase <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Bridge <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Memorial Wall <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Ceremonial Plaques <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Marble Statuary With "Emerging From Chaos" Rodin Effect <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Viewing Tower <input type="checkbox" checked="true"> Eagles </fieldset> The monument also appears to be made out of that special monument-grade concrete, pioneered by the nations of the Eastern Bloc, that is guaranteed to get instantly dirty and develop mysterious black vertical stripes. What makes this immensity especially wonderful is the fact that Argentina has such a gentle, feel-good flag, a flag that does not bloodstain well and is completely incompatible with any kind of martial tradition. You could easily be excused for thinking it had been designed by gay hippies. <img src="http://idlewords.com/images/argenflag.jpg" width="350" /> "We're going to have a field of ivory white, with two bold stripes of sky blue along the top and bottom. That way, when the sun shines through it, it will look just like the summer sky!" "Ooh, I love it - but what if we put Mr. Sun right on the flag itself!" "FABULOUS" And yet the Nuremberg-class monument doesn't give an inch. The eternal flame burns, bored military guards rove around, a tiny gift shop controls access to the observation deck. And just when you think the monument can't get any better, they turn the lights on: <img src="http://idlewords.com/images/flag_night.jpg" width="450" /> The rest of Rosario completely ignores the monument and is instead a leafy, pretty city full of plane trees. Their branches thwack against the roof of the bus as it meanders in from the highway, zigzagging through the outer neighborhoods to let passengers off at a variety of unscheduled stops. Students of South American urban planning will be shocked to learn that the city is laid out on a grid, with a pleasant mix of old buildings and glitzy little pedestrian shopping arcades around a kind of central park. The streets are full of cafés and tired dogs sleeping the day away so they can go barking after taxis once the sun has gone down. There is apparently a string of these cities all the way up the Paraná, places in no way remarkable but very pleasant to be in. Siting them was a haphazard process - settlers would get off the boat, lay out a street grid, and then see if the local Indians came and massacred anyone. If they did, they moved the city a few dozen kilometers up or downriver and tried again. In the evenings, some kind of cooling breeze comes off the water and it is a good time to walk and eat ice cream. Two and a half pesos at any supermarket buys a bottle of "Dark Eyes" dulce de leche liqueur, which looks like Paraná river water but tastes like a caramel sundae. People eat early in this provincial town - ten thirty or so - so by midnight there is the feeling of having the city mostly to yourself, which given the massive migration to Mar del Plata and the Patagonian vacationlands may not be far from the truth. The dogs start to wake up and make trial runs at the remaining cars. You can see a pillar of light on the horizon, in the direction of the flag memorial. For hundreds of miles in every direction, cows are grazing in the dark, waiting to become steak. Rosario is a wonderful place to be. <img src="http://idlewords.com/images/cross.jpg" width="400" /> 2008-01-12T00:00:00 Nuevo Año http://idlewords.com/2008/01/nuevo_an_o.htm Porteños greeted the new year by fleeing the city as fast as gridlocked roads could take them. January is the month Buenos Aires takes its summer vacation, and the destination of choice is Mar del Plata, a seaside resort I have never visited. Given my love for crowds, heat and strangers' children it sounds it would be my own personal Mordor. "You can't even see the sand for all the people! It's an absolute madhouse!" Argentine friends tell me in horror, as they pack up their cars to head down there. Buenos Aires itself is technically on the water, at the mouth of the River Plate, but access to the river is blocked by a fairly new riverfront park called the Reserva Ecológica. The reserva helps provide the city with the copious amounts of wetland acreage required to breed sufficient mosquitoes for a population of fiften million. As a side effect, the park is also home to numerous wading birds on bright-colored stick legs, as well as legions of young Argentine couples who have mastered the art of making out while walking. Pajeras y pájaros. On New Year's Eve the city was as empty as I had ever seen it. I spent most of the evening with my new best friend, the three-speed fan (set on level two to create the illusion that I could hadle more heat), before heading out into the vacant streets a half hour before midnight. The city doesn't really have a central meeting point, but the Plaza de Mayo is home to the Argentine presidential residence and the locus of all protests in the city, and I figured something might be happening there. The only people I could see in twenty minutes of walking were other tourists heading skeptically towards the plaza or the waterfront, along with a few bored cops. To my surprise, the plaza itself was completely deserted. The only people there were the striking riverboat casino workers who had chained themselves there over the holidays to protest their inability to earn an honest wage by seizing the means of consumption. The casino workers had been demanding an audience with Cristina Kirchner, but the new President, fatigued by a simple misunderstanding involving a Hugo Chávez bagman who had been caught in Miami bringing her an $800,000 campaign contribution in a suitcase, had begun her term by going on a long vacation. The former senator and First Lady had drawn many comparisons to Hillary Clinton during her campaign, but as she flew the presidential plane (Tango 01) down to the scrubland of El Calafaté it was clear the better comparison was going to be with George W. Bush, another enemy of overwork. The casino workers were left to rattle their chains alone. Most of the Casa Rosada was cordoned off by the usual set of riot barriers, their intimidating aspect undercut a little by the fact that they were covered in six layers of graffiti. But I noticed what seemed to be a big gap between the left side of the barriers and the edge of the street. Walking closer I saw three armored riot tanks and a group of about a dozen police officers in a festive mood, setting off flash grenades and drinking beer. They were standing in a semicircle around their riot tanks, in the best of spirits, and they paid no attention to the trickle of tourists creeping by as they pulled their pins. Somewhere along the way to the waterfront it turned midnight and the taxicabs began merrily honking, even turning their lights on for brief, expensive seconds to celebrate the New Year. There was a hum coming from Puerto Madero, the revitalized waterfront district that looks like every other revitalized waterfront district in every other city in the world. The dique was packed with tourists, many of whom had brought large Chinese fiesta boxes of fireworks of the kind that could be set off with a simple car battery and would emit rockets in whatever direction they happened to be pointing. There was a splendid hour of drinking champagne nacionál, skittering out of the way of weaving groups of Mexican men and watching explosives fly back and forth over the narrow canal. There was even a little festive breeze to take the edge off the heat. It was 2008, everyone was happy, and you didn't need a suitcase full of dollars to know that it was going to be a very good year. 2008-01-09T00:00:00 A Very Porteño Christmas http://idlewords.com/2008/01/a_very_porten_o_christmas.htm At christmastime the streets of Buenos Aires are full of fruitcake. Eternal, inedible, weighing as much as a thousand suns, this is a scary pastry even in countries that lack the Argentine anti-talent for baking. But in Buenos Aires it becomes something I don't have the courage to buy, even for kicks. How is it that on all the numberless ships that brought Italian immigrants to Argentina the bakers were either thrown over the side or forced at stilettopoint to convert to making pasta? The porteños of today have kept the Italian taste for bread and cakes, and have even re-created a deceptive infrastructure of neighborhood bakeries, but when you bring one of these loaves home you invariably find it can do double duty as a kitchen sponge. There is an element of tragedy in watching a great people play a losing culinary hand like this, just as there is watching the Chinese attempt vodka or the Swedes try to pickle herring. Strange things happen when deeply Catholic Europeans switch hemispheres without enough time to adapt their traditions. The little stores selling fruitcake are surrounded on all sides by greengrocers selling actual fruit, the preservation of which into midwinter was probably the whole point of the fruitcakes to begin with. It is possible to eat an Argentine Christmas dinner consisting solely of mangoes, cherries, watermelon and strawberries that are all in season; it might even make a pleasant break from the heat. And yet the fruitcake lives on, sprigs of holly are painted onto the windows, and Santa Claus, despite the proximity of a polar continent (<a href="http://www.idlewords.com/2006/03/ruling_antarctica.htm">belonging to Argentina</a>, no less!), continues to make the long trip here all the way from the Arctic. My childhood patience would have been stretched to the limit by the old tradition that presents had to wait until the first star was visible on Christmas Eve, since dusk at this time of year isn't until nearly ten o'clock. But I suppose the fact that Santa had to make the trip from the northern pole would have made the late start more credible. It may say a lot about the Argentine national character that two of the three life-size Santa figures along my route into the city are statues of Homer Simpson. Argentines seize the holiday as another opportunity to express their profound love for this national archetype, second only to Maradona in popular affection, and it's true that after a few weeks in Argentina it has become difficult to picture Homero without a mate gourd in hand, sipping blithely away. The traditional Argentine Christmas dinner is, of course, asado, preferably prepared somewhere outside of town. The day before Christmas every one who can leaves the city to spend a day filling up the family charcoal grill with the mixture of steaks, sausages, innards and chicken quarters that are the country's (perfectly reasonable) answer to the exigigencies of any holiday dinner. The news on Christmas Eve is full of alarming reports about the level of congestion on highways leading out of Buenos Aires, especially those pointing towards the southern beaches, and though the capital remains full of pedestrians there are so few cars left you can walk across practically any street without regard for the traffic lights, a rare luxury. The cafes and restaurants hang out big signs warning that they will be closing at five o'clock, and there is an air of rushed anxiety to the last-minute shopping, as if a hurricane or some Panzer divisions were about to come barreling through. Towards eleven the first firecrackers start going off, and there are ranging shots to calibrate the cheap Chinese fireworks that everyone within staggering distance has dragged to the park across from my apartment. At midnight the fuses are lit, every ship in the harbor begins blowing its foghorn, and Buenos Aires transforms into a very festive Beirut. Quilmes is not a strong beer but even it will have an effect if you drink enough, and the rockets that do achieve flight describe trajectories suspiciously far from the vertical. Many of them just sputter around on the ground, tracing graceful red and green spirals of fire as they scatter the crowd, who return undaunted in wary zigzags. On the rooftops, people are still grilling meat, pausing every few minutes to light a rocket fuse with a hot coal. Somewhere overhead Santa Claus - or Homer Simpson - weaves among the flak, bringing presents. 2008-01-01T00:00:00