2. The subway system (el subte) is designed like a fork,
with all the lines of the city converging in a central focal point right around the Plaza de la Republica (the famous obelisko). But since the last time I was here they have opened a new line (the H line) that cuts down the middle of town and allows one to take a minor shortcut. The stations in this new line are super modern yet the trains that run through are the rickety ones found in all the other lines. Some of the trains rumble so heavily through these historical tunnels that you feel the train might actually be wrenched apart while you're en route.3. Part one of Soderbergh's epic about Che Guevara is already playing here, with giant posters of Benicio Del Toro all over town (they might be saving the downer second half of the project until the new year.) There are also posters everywhere for High School Musical 3, which will probably be the biggest Argentine box office hit of all time, as Zack Efron seems to possess the standards of genetic perfection that, outside of Argentina, can only be achieved in science-fiction or at Paul Verhoeven's casting calls.
4. I saw a half-hour show yesterday morning that was all footage of football goals scored, perhaps last week, perhaps all season. One shot after another of a striker scoring and the announcer screaming GOOOAAALLL!!!!!! for thirty seconds. Rinse and repeat.
5. I went to see Quantum of Solace in Palermo last night, shortly after watching a free performance by the Berlin Philharmonic in the centre of town (again, in front of the obelisko). When I bought my ticket and went in, the usher showed me to my precise seat. This might be a North American thing, but assigned seating to go see a movie seems to be a bit much, especially in an age where the film will not only be available in three months on DVD, but also can be found immediately on the sidewalk after coming out of the theatre, in bootleg form.
6. TV in Buenos Aires is insane. The hotel I'm staying at has about 75 channels, about 65 of which are Latin American variants of all the major American satellite channels. One of the tawdriest news channels, Cronicas TV,
is aptly-named because I think Dr. Dre is the director of news operations there - if someone is lucky enough to catch a kid in the favelas firing his weapon off, they will show it in an endless loop and set it to music. There is a channel for each of the main American media conglomerates, plus an MGM Channel. The Latino TCM shows some movies, but mostly Spanish dubs of Get Smart and Kojak. I thought Argentine TV would be way raunchier than it actually is. The local channels are very low-budget by comparison, though they openly mimic the graphics of CNN, right down to the exact onscreen fonts. But one thing I can't do in Toronto is get up in the morning and start the day off with a one-two combo of Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars reruns and stumble home to watch a chapter of Kieslowski's Dekalog, all of it subtitled en castellano... in Toronto you can only really depend on seeing a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond while channel surfing at any given moment. By the way, I don't love Raymond and I want to go on the record with this.
