Un Hombre Muy Respetado

Los Walkers covering the Kinks on Canal 13.

What Can I Tell You About Bs.As.?

1. This music video is actually a documentary.



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.

NBC in the BA

Buenos Aires In Trailer Form

Going To The Movies In Buenos Aires

The best part about seeing a film when you're travelling is if you luck out and pick a good one to go see, you get sucked into it and when it's over, you walk out of the lobby and are suddenly reminded that you are in another city, not your own.

I saw two films when I was in Buenos Aires. My friend Matias and I had to arrange to get a cab to take us all the way out to a shopping centre in the Bs. As. 'burbs to see Beowulf: La Leyenda (in 3-D IMAX! With IMAX-sized Spanish subtitles!) The tickets cost 14 pesos - or about $4.75 Canadian. You could bring beer into the theatre as well...beer and IMAX goggles, plus the trailer for Soy Leyenda!

On my last weekend in town I went to the Palermo multiplex down the street from the massive Alto Palermo shopping centre to take in a trasnoche screening of Gone Baby Gone. A trasnoche, film-lovers, is a movie-going tradition on the weekends in Buenos Aires - shows start between 1 and 1:30 a.m and are PACKED! You have dinner at 10, maybe an ice cream afterwards, then you roll over to the trasnoche, and THEN you go out clubbing. You can get popcorn either sugared (the local preference) or salted (no such thing as buttered popcorn in this town either way). And no Diet Coke - round here it's called Coke Light. Got to see some amazing Argentine commercials plus the trailer for P.T. Anderson's upcoming Habrá Sangre. Except for kids films, all international movies are in their original language with subtitles en Castellano. Argentinian films for the most part play in their own cinemas.

I couldn't find any of the massive theatres that used to exist in Buenos Aires in their original state; the Monumental, right down on Lavalle (the pedestrian tourist trap) used to have 3,000 seats (you can get a glimpse of it in its former glory in my previous post, at the start of one of the 60's Sandro trailers I linked to) but is now a run-down movie pit - they were playing Supercool, Michael Clayton and El Asesinato De Jesse James Por El Cobarde Robert Ford, plus two films that haven't even come out in North America, a thriller by Andrew Lau starring Richard Gere and some John Travolta / Salma Hayek period piece...

I learned something about Toronto while I was travelling as well, a lesson that left my city in the general deficit column. A small Romanian film like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days wins the Palme D'Or, and that fall it quietly pops up in Toronto and plays at the Cumberland for a couple of weeks, before winding up at the back of the Carlton for a couple more weeks. Meanwhile in Buenos Aires, the very same film plays at every multiplex downtown, often with giant ads for the engagement in the lobby, and when I went over to the Palermo on a Saturday night at midnight, the 1:30 a.m. show was already sold out. What are we to make of this?

(See my modest set of Buenos Aires movie theatre pictures here...)

The Proof!

Proof they knew I was coming down to Argentina!

This One's For Las Chicas

This report is filed from a locutorio in Buenos Aires. Locutorios are internet spots that are all over the city - in Buenos Aires, even the act of surfing the net all day can be part of your active social life.

I'm here because my vacation ends tomorrow and I'm on my way into a Musimundo store (there are no HMVs in Buenos Aires) to grab a couple of DVDs of Sandro, a living legend, a man I had never heard of before until I arrived here. He was all over the papers because he had recently turned 60 and was on yet another comeback trail (his last comeback apparently had him hooked up to an oxygen tank on stage but that wasn't enough to keep him from being snowed under by women's underwear).

But sometimes you achieve something that gets you buried in women's underwear for the rest of your life.



Sandro, the Argentine Elvis Presley (or is he the Argentine Amitabh Bachchan?) was a pop singer who made a dozen or so musicals in the sixties and seventies that were massively popular in Latin America... like Presley's films, they seemed to exist as pure vehicles to deliver the man candy to the ladies...here's a trailer or two of the goods.



If you want your own Sandro DVDs but can't hike it to Buenos Aires, you are in luck.

Taking Care of Bs. As.

I´ve been in Buenos Aires for 5 days now and although I could never say I´m making myself at home, I am starting to get my bearings in terms of geography, if not communications. I can read Spanish somewhat, but I can´t necessarily understand it as it is spoken, especially in the Latin American dialect, where the double L in words is pronounced with a J sound instead of a Y sound (e.g. - a crazy chicken is El Posho Loco instead of El Poyo Loco ).

Buenos Aires is New York as designed by the French with Spanish dialogue. All the pharmacies have the flashing neon green cross out in front and the street signs are often blue plates with white writing on them. No such thing as a house - everyone lives in apartments with grand balconies.

Here´s a defining moment - last night my friend Matias and I took a big long walk from the north of the city back towards my neighbourhood in Barrio Norte - we were on one of the main drags (Avenida Santa Fe) on a Monday night at 1 am and on the other side of the street there were about 50 young people wearing hospital gowns and surgical masks jumping up and down in excitement, gathering up their group that proceeded en masse towards a club - it looked like a flash mob-slash-Sprite commercial. Three young guys passed us watching them as well, and Matias told me one of them muttered en castellano to his friends "God. Every day, the same thing."

Telekino Goes To Buenos Aires

Telekino lands in Buenos Aires on Friday morning (November 30th) - staying in Palermo Viejo until December 11th. I will file my first report as soon as I can find an awesome internet cafe.

A note for my Argentinian readers...

According to my Sitemeter and Clustrmap statistics, I have a very high readership in Buenos Aires. For those porteños who are not merely googling the winning Telekino lottery numbers, it just so happens I will be visiting your fair metropolis from November 30th until December 11th. It would be a pleasure to meet some swell people who dig the blog and are into doing stuff, if there are such people. Your city seems amazing!

Is it true that there's a club night in town named after Slavoj Žižek? Are there incredible record shops and vintage clothing stores where I can get 70's t-shirts? Can we go to the movies? Where do the cool brainiacs hang out? I would love to know. I'm Canadian so I only have a grasp of written Spanish and can barely speak it, just so you know...

Anyway, I've thrown it out there.