Skip to main content
(This post from some time ago last year, in 2012)

It's with a heavy heart that I make post number 70 on this blog and eradicate the 69 from post count that has stood so long as warden to this mostly ignored corner of the internet.

I thought I would write something, it being late and I being bored, but reading previous entries has moved me to make a post in the vein of the spotty narrative that has sort of evolved out of the last couple of entries. This country, despite it's great size and previous importance to international politics, exists in a paucity of information about itself. As far as I know, my blog is the only English language source detailing the day-to-day in Buenos Aires that isn't run by an idiot tourist/exchange student breathlessly detailing their life-changing experience. Well, that's not true exactly. My gringo friend Ben has a friend Paul (our names truly are hideously monosyllabic, aren't they?) who has some kind of internet presence, but he teaches English for a living and I think writes for free for some kind of English language rag here in town, which is basically the same as the aforementioned breathless exposition by college students.

Yes, I can sneer at the gringo's teaching English because that's no longer my main gig. You may ascertain from my use of "gig" that I have gracefully joined the creative class as a young artiste, as it corresponds a young man of my WASP background! I get about half or more of my income from music related sources. The truth is, most of that is teaching private lessons, so really I haven't actually stopped teaching so much as changed subjects, so I'm really not any different from the gringos teaching English. You decide. I don't care.

What I do for money now is trombone playing and teaching, supplemented by giving English classes to students have all been attractive young females about my age. Incidentally, in reference to an older post, that is exactly what was best about working at Wall Street. So many beautiful women stumbling through modal verbs with charming accents. I'm still as boned as I was though, having slept with an unfortunate 0% of my students then and now, being monogamous with Luana, a person who I think appeared in a picture from some 4 years ago.

Playing trombone in Buenos Aires is a pretty good gig. It's universally difficult to get by as a musician so that I'm able to scrape by eating lots of lentils and rice after only a year and change of trying I think speaks to the easiness of my situation. I'll give myself a little credit, too, I've been pretty smart about all this.

Inflation has gone up, rent has gone up, and so have the price for my services (a little). I live in a different house (the long story of what has happened with the other house is tale I will tell only if someone whose name I do not know requests it) with more youngish students from Córdoba, a city known for its accent and amiable inhabitants.  I pay 1100-1200 pesos a month to cover an odd list of expenses. The rent, some kind of tax and building expenses (paying the unhelpful "superintendent" to throw water all over the floor of the hallway every once in awhile) and a common fund with the cordobeses and I spend on things like buying toilet paper and bulk bags of lentils. It's a little expensive considering what it is, but it's pretty cheap rent, still.

Listen, I have to be perfectly honest with you, blinking nether. I had kind of hoped that my blog was of service to some mysterious person out there, considering a trip to Argentina. There were a couple of hits from places I had no connection to or from google searches that helped me entertain that fancy. I held on to this idea that my posts would be of interesting historical/ethnological data to someone at sometime. I was interested by my inclusion of numbers and prices and in my mind compared it with some of the earliest forms of writing that we humans have discovered, a bunch of bullshit detailing trivial mercantile transactions in the ancient past.

But I've just lost faith in that idea at the end of the paragraph beginning with "Inflation".

I'm compelled to confess some ideas that have motivated my life since graduating college. I'm sure this is less interesting than even the price of eggs in Argentina (about a peso each, I'd reckon), but I've never articulated them before and I would like to do that now.

I've stopped writing and taking pictures. I haven't really done anything of that kind since moving to Argentina. It's not for lack of time, though at one point I did try to avoid spending too much time "in" English. And its not cause I'm worried about my camera getting nabbed either.

I was motivated to stop doing this indirectly by my brother, Matt, who deserves far more credit for influencing me than I think he realizes. He quipped to me, I don't even remember about what, I think about photographs, that such and such was "commodifying experience."

What a phrase, what a concept. I struggle to put its whole meaning and its implications down on paper, but: turning experience into a commodity. Experience, that beautiful ephemeral non-thing, indefinable, immense and unknowable transformed into commodity, that ugly quotidian widget of life, to be put in the same category as pork bellies and oil barrels.

The object we come up with at the end of our process of commodification might be a poorly composed snapshot inside of an Argentine discotheque or a book about dancing tango well past midnight in a certain now-ruined tango salon, but its really the same. We're afraid to just let that experience lie. We need to have it, we need it a thing.

Aren't things the source of all the trouble anyway? People with too many things, too few things, with other people's things. There are lot's of ways to look at it, when you stop and think about there are entire fields dedicated to the best way of sorting out our things, but I think it's a road that need not be traveled. The experience was fine on its own. Why do you have to go and make a thing of it?

That's where I'm at, these days. I just want as few things as possible. I think that at death, everything we ever owned is tied to our bodies and we're cast into a great dark sea.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"I'm from the interior"

The following is an unfinished ramble inspired by Trump, being on the periphery and the unitarian vs federalists fallout.  A great motor of Argentine history is the conflict between a (more or less) coastal, financial, cultural and political capital and the rest of the country, throughout which its main industry, agriculture, is dispersed. It is through the dominance of Buenos Aires that the rest of the country received its moniker as "the interior". Of course, as a European trader making landfall at the port, all inquiry leads further upriver, further "inside" the country. Where did this fruit come from? Where did these unfamiliar people come from? As a result of its geographic position of interlocutor in all commerce between the fields of production and the sea-bound, European purchasers, Buenos Aires achieved great prominence. It becomes a financial center, a point of high population density and subsequently a hotbed of art and culture. It is, for ...

I saw this one thing in Brazil

I took a trip to Brazil and this scene has been on my mind ever since then. I can't explain why. My girlfriend and I were staying with her cousins, people who definitely inhabited the upper half of that famously abrupt divide between the rich and the poor in Brazil. We had been staying in their daughters playroom--a little space about as large as a walk-in closet, but every conceivable surface covered in dolls and toys. When we laid down on the inflatable mattress that we nestled in between the overstuffed bookshelves (stuffed mostly with toys, no books) we would look up towards the ceiling the three tiers of shelving bolted to the wall, so full of dolls that they leaned precariously outward, looking down at us with their shiny fake eyes. The father of this toy-laden child told us that it was impossible to reduce the number of dolls that she had; that if one were to go missing she would know instantly. I doubted it, being that at least half of the dolls were obstructed from view ...

How to Live in Buenos Aires, Part Whatever

Another technical account of getting started up in Buenos Aires. Per my training in anthropology, I would like to whine defensively that this is based purely off of my experience living in Buenos Aires and is no way representative of what living in Buenos Aires is an standard/typical/objective sense, if such a thing could be established. A different friend informed me that he is planning to come down to live here had some questions after reading my previous posts. Therefore, I answered them and now, published them, grammatical worts and all. Thank you. That did help me gauge where I'll be stepping off, I think. My goal is to be down there in September. Would that be shooting myself in the foot from the get-go? Also, who did you fly down with? I'm planning on buying a ticket this week. What's your story with health insurance? I don't have a TEFL certification. Is this necessary going in or could I take a class while there if necessary? What would a good cushion be going ...