South America

Review: Buenos Aires clublife in the era of NO DANCING!

It is February 2005. For over a month almost two months now, the city government of Buenos Aires has outlawed dancing in clubs, fully shutting the doors on numerous spots in the city following the tragedy at Cromagnon.

Clubbing in this city has gone on anyway, of course, but is uber-strange. First of all, most of the lounges / restaurants that double as posh, velvet rope clubs have been able to semi-legally stay open under the guise of a bar/restaurant.

In the past 3 days or so, I've been to more of these than I care to remember, but some of the top ones I happened into were Tequila, Jet Lounge, and Midlands. The usually difficult door policy might be a touch looser now, but the cover charge was still a surprising 20 pesos at Jet (included a mini-bottle of champagne nacional), and we avoided cover at Tequila by eating a ENTIRELY sub-par dinner.

At each of these places, there was dance music, and people obviously wanted to dance. At Jet, there was even a disco ball with a light on it, but it wasn't spinning. If you can picture it, these are dancy lounges playing dancy music for dancy people who aren't permitted to dance. So, everyone props themselves up at the bar, and solemnly stares at the empty dance floor. It's so odd - the closest thing I've ever experienced to this was going to some crappy dance bar in NYC that didn't have a cabaret license. If I recall that story correctly, I was 'escorted' out for dancing in disregard of the numerous posted signs to the contrary- by the bouncer.

I've yet to succeed in getting kicked out of clubs in BsAs for dancing in protest, but some girls I met at Tequila almost got thrown out by the bouncers for excess coordinated movement of their hips. I think it's pretty unfair to play dance music, then tell people they can't dance. Also, it brings up the grey area of what exactly is 'legally' considered dancing - and apparently, what I was doing at Tequila (that I considered dancing) didn't warrant a warning from the bouncers. Hmmm, am I to understand I'm so bad a dancer, that what I do actually isn't legally considered dancing in Argentina?!?!? Could be.

One of the reactions of people here (the one's that aren't still on vacation in other cities like Cordoba, Mar Del Plata, Punta Del Este, etc) is to throw house parties, charge, and invite big name DJs. Couple of friends caught a really good one last weekend in San Isidro, but I couldn't go due to some frustrating health issues. Blech.

Anyway, the most hilarious part is that the big clubs in suburbs (read: 10 minutes from the city on local streets, no tolls, 20 peso cab ride) are entirely open, and have been the whole time. That said, Sunset in Olivos is the next (and last) clubbing destination for me in Buenos Aires this time around, but I'll go begrudgingly.

It just sucks overall that the city couldn't get their red tape together to open the clubs by this weekend, which is also my last one in town for now. Would have been a nice way to remember this place, instead of trooping out to the burbs to dance. Guess I'll have to remember Buenos Aires as the city that danc-ed, at some point in the past.

The 10am crew - Bar Britanico

Our favorite local bar has to close sometime during the night, so after the doors are locked (repeatedly) at Fin Del Mundo, it's only correct to stagger your drunk self down the block to 24 hour Bar Britanico (the corner of Defensa and Brazil in San Telmo).

Ahhh, Bar Britanico. The food here sucks. The coffee is pretty average. The bathrooms are filthy. It doesn't matter, because Bar Britanico is the choice of local drunkards, wayward swedes, and shouting Americans alike. It was in fact what I did on a hazy, drunken, second morning in South America, and I once in a while still find myself drinking an unnecessary Heineken after 9am on a weekday.

Ouch. Buenos Aires party lifestyle strikes often, and as always, strikes hard.

Superbowl, Buenos Aires

It was a great Superbowl. Not much more you can say about it, especially when you listened to the call entirely in Spanish, with Juan Maddeno.

Domingo, domingo, domingo - Super Domingo.

Anyway, it was a bummer for the Eagles and our table of fans, but we did have fun getting drunk, eating french fries, and watching the superbowl the only way Americans know how to - loudly.

Buenos Aires Nightlife is Closed

Buenos Aires' clubs are closed. They have been closed since New Years, and they will be closed until further notice. Plus, the whole town is gone on vacation. So there.

Everyone's best guess right now is that they may open in mid-February, but it's a shot in the dark. The government is holding the cards on this one, and hasn't given us any clues as to when they will let places open again.

The short story on what happened: A rock 'venue' burned down when the formerly popular sport of shooting fireworks off (note the picture from early december at SAMC with lots of people playing with fire indoors, this was pretty common here) in a crowded indoor area went awry in late December. Lots of kids died needlessly, and now the issue is a polical battle between the City's mayor, the church, the clubowners, and the band that was playing. As I write this, the church is possibly harboring the firework-happy culprit (named today in the newspaper, mind you), and using him as a power to play to push blame on the city's mayor, who proposed sex ed classes in the schools that brought the ire of the church last year. Sheesh.

Anyway, under the guise of public protection, the city is imposing stringent fire safety codes specifically on nightclubs and won't pass any of them yet, which means that any place where you go to dance will not be open till you read a post on this weblog that says otherwise.

My sincerest apologies on behalf of this wacky city for closing one of it's main attractions for the two months you were most likely to come visit it. It's the kind of ridiculous, showboating, in-fighting, non-thought-out political manuever that Argentinian governments are famous for, and it sucks to be us right now without clubs.

See you at Fin Del Mundo.

My First South American Stalker

I ruminated on whether or not to tell this story at all on the weblog, and after a few glasses of Vino Tinto (red wine - was this translation necessary?) I'm gonna go for it.

When Charlie, Felix, Taro, and I did out little overpriced bike tour of Buenos Aires last week, we stopped for a bit to gift shop in La Boca, a neighborhood just south of mine with tons of corny touristy shops. In one of the shops, I started talking to one of the clerks, who was a young girl (that is NOT her in the picture, I'm just selling my mildly boring story by showing a good looking girl in the photo). Half jokingly, we traded email addresses, at least for me - on the pretense that I could study Spanish by chatting on MSN.

This is actually a common thing down here, lots of locals want to trade English practice for Spanish practice, and MSN is a great way to do it. I had done the same with at least 4 other people, so I thought it would be fine.

A couple days ago, she hit me up on MSN. Everything was cool, and on her insistence we traded phone numbers. I still thought this was a great way to practice Spanish, since I spend almost all day thinking and talking in English, and she knew so little English that when the conversation got stuck on the phone or online it was my responsibility to explain in Spanish (castellano) what we where trying to say. Great practice, and all free!

Here's where things get strange. She starts telling me about her boyfriend, so I figure I'm in the clear and we can be friends. I agree to meet her in another neighborhood and maybe go to the movies, thinking once again that I can practice my Spanish without having to pay for lessons.

When we meet, she is obviously all weird. I don't pay it much attention, and we go get coffee. The whole time, she nervously (almost neurotically) checking her phone and talking about her boyfriend. She tell me he's violent, and that she hates him. I'm a little weirded out, but she insisted we go to a movie, and that she pay for it. I eventually agree, especially since the movie theater is across the street inside the mall, so we go for it. I kind of thought - how weird can she be during the movie?!?!!?

I picked the movie which is the only redeeming factor of the whole night. As the movie is running, she is literally pulling out her phone, turning it on, and making calls. This is not a cultural thing. This is a psycho thing. By the third time, I had to say something to her about it, which more than irked me, of course. She sorta apologized, and after over 2 hours of film, and over 3 full length phone calls, it was finally over. Just for the record, I didn't even so much as look in her direction throughout the course in the movie, nor have I ever touched her, kissed her, or hinted that I was mildly interested beyond simply meeting up.

Then, we where about to head home, but I stopped to buy some meats. Long story. Anyway, me, my meats, and this psycho go for the train to head home. Of course, I put us on a train in the wrong direction like an idiot, and it's almost the last train to leave the station. I realize we're going the wrong way, and we hop off the train. At this point, I knew we had only a few seconds to go out, cross the street, and get down on the right side.

Of course, she pulls my arm and starts talking some crap really fast in Spanish, then starts asking random people questions about the trains, proving she has no clue what's going on. We stand there on the wrong side of the tracks, and of course, watch the last train towards downtown leave the station. Now, we're totally screwed.

After another 30 minutes of fruitless questioning, we catch a bus that is headed SORT OF towards my neighborhood. I get off the bus, and promise to text her when I get home. And I did. And, I haven't said one word to her since.

Since then, I've received over 15 calls to my home phone, 40 calls to my cell phone, and approx 25 MSN messages from both her AND her boyfriend. I've answered none. I just got another one right now. It's been two days of this, solid. I'm both annoyed, and mildly scared. I'm going to keep ignoring this psycho, until she either goes away or I get hunted down.

Wish me luck.

Fat Boy Slim is F$*£!NG in heaven

I LIVE! And the Fat Boy Slim concert was pretty fantastic. Front page headlines here of course, and as far as I know - no deaths! It was truly a win / win situation.

Highlight of the concert was definitely when Norman dropped the Franz Ferdinand song and almost blew the midrange right out of his uberhuge speakers. The kids love it. I'm not a big 'techno' fan, but even I had a good time with this completely cracker-a$$ DJ, jumping around and acting a fool. He definitely makes the show fun. Plus, he played the white stripes song about 15 times, and for some reason I still like that song. "I'm goin to Wichita."

We had some sort of VIP treatment, and got to stand really close to the stage, so close that we didn't appreciate the 400,000 kids behind us in another fenced off area. This was all thanks to my new travel buddy Dr. Mario, and his DJing and doctoring ways. The whole concert was painfully sponsored by Nokia, who made everyone in our little gold circle area wear orange shirts. Unfortunately, we got the little girls ones and they didn't quite fit, so we didn't wear them, mostly.

(That's Dr. Mario and Francesca) Later on, after a brief house party and some mildly death-defying driving in the rain with Dr. Mario, we went to some local superclub where John Acquaviva was spinning. It was supposed to cost us 20 pesos (us7) to enter the club, but Darius and Dr. Mario dragged me to the rope to tell the men in the black suits that we are important DJs and that we should get in for free. Even I got in the act, telling the guy how I know some producer or something, it didn't really matter because nobody spoke English but us anyway.

The first man at the rope called another man, who called another fat man, who all interrogated us. I think the last guy was the one the OTHER guys thought spoke English, but guess what? Not at all. So what happened?

It totally worked. They let us in for free, entirely, while some of the world's hottest spanish speaking women stood in line in the rain. Amazing. 3 dudes, free admission basically for just speaking English. Too good, too good.

Great Dj set too, but it got very very hot in the club, and there were actually GUIDOS (think DJai's in Belmar) in the place, so we left early at like 5am or so and headed back to Buenos Aires.

Brau - clubbin'.

I threw my very first South American House Party!

My first South American house party is now in the books. It's about 5am, and I'm looking at some woman's handbag that is clearly not mine, so I'm pretty sure this was a successful operation. However, right at the end of the night (isn't this always the case?) some people hung around who soured the whole thing for me made my memory of the night less enjoyable.

My friend Jay from NY is crashing with some chicks he met for 10 minutes in some other random city, who live 45 minutes west of downtown here in their own version of Bridge and Tunnel Buenos Aires. So, he invites them to come along to my little house party for 9pm.

Everything is going great, except they showed up at around 3:30am, after most people left. In Buenos Aires, coming to a party at that time isn't so strange, but of course, we where all very clear on when the party started, so they shouldn't have been so surprised that people had already left. Also, half the people who already went home too drunk to drive where Argentinians, so I don't think we held it an an inappropriate time.

Of course, these characters are something like film students, or actresses, or something stupid like that, and think they're hot ISH. It's visible. They won't talk to the other Argentines who are still there, and they are scoffing at everyone else's English. Fabulous, already. Anyway, the one dude that came with them, typical suburban guy, lights up a smoke in my living room. Seeing as how no one else was smoking in the house all night, and there where no ashtrays anywhere near him, I asked him to get up and walk 4 steps to the patio to smoke, at which point he became terribly offended.

Might I mention, this man just showed up 1 minute ago in my house, and still does not know my name. Ahem. Anyway, he begrudgingly smokes half a cigarette outside, and returns to sit uncomfortably and talk with the girls, presumably talking smack about other bout-to-leave party-goers, and kindly informs me that Argentinian parties always allow people to smoke cigarettes wherever they feel like. I replied to him in Spanish, already ticked off - "Welcome to my house, my friend."

Within 5 minutes, everyone leaves but these people, and my roommate even decides to go to sleep. It's me, Jay, and them.

Long story short, American-Argentine relations aren't going well and they decide to get a cab without me having to say anything like 'get the hell out of my house you ungrateful idiots' or the like. Might I mention at this point that they also brought nothing with them, whereas every other group of guests brought at least some type of alcohol or gift, including Argentines (it's a cultural thing).

Then, the icing on the cake.

That one boy in the group asks me about getting a cab. I told him I'll take them all outside, and there will be a ton of cabs, and he told me I was wrong. 3 weeks in this house, 2 months in this neighborhood, at least 20 cabs at this hour on similar days of the week, and he told me I was wrong. I was angry. I asked him why he thought they couldn't catch a cab, and with a straight face he told me my neighborhood was poor and dangerous, and it's not like Palermo (think Upper East Side or Lincoln Park).

Calmly, and in Spanish, I explained to him that there is probably a greater chance of getting robbed in a neighborhood like Palermo than here, and that this neighborhood is working class, so it's not dangerous. He told me again that I was wrong. I was so angry at this point, that I pointed at him and told the remaining party-goers, his friends, that he was a Republican, and a friend of Bush (the worst insult I had at the time, and pretty good by local standards).

He responded by claiming he was a Trotskyite, a surprise to me considering his unbelievably classist statements and the posh neighborhood he comes from in the burbs here. Anyway, I let it go, and got in the elevator, and that's where the one girl of the group I had spent the most time talking to all night told me my spanish was terrible.

I lost it.

"You all study English for 8 years, and most people can't speak one phrase to me, and and I study for 4 weeks and you tell me how bad I am? Incredible. Everyone here studies for 8 years in school, and can't hardly say anything, and I study for one month, and you tell me how bad I am?"

Livid. It's the first time anybody said anything but good things about my Spanish, and even though I do still suck at it (meaning she was right), gimme a break. At least I'm trying, as opposed to her and each of her friends who obviously consider English a language so unimportant as to not pay attention while studying it for 8 straight years in school. English is so pervasive, in movies, TV, ads, politics, signs, that it's downright surprising some young Argentines don't know hardly any of it. But , at least for the people I've met so far that aren't interested, it 's a 'we know better' mentality  - one that won't benefit this country in years to come, unless the Peso somehow miraculously overtakes the dollar in value. I'm not saying it's right that everyone should know at least some English, I'm just saying it might be a truthful statement.

So, I got the whole lot of them a cab in under 1 minute as promised, and shipped them and Jay off to the safe, rich, suburbs from which they came. I sent them off, along with their stories about some uptight snob from America who lives in a posh apt. in a poor neighborhood and won't let them smoke things in the middle of his living room. Hrmpf.

A Trotskyist! Saying the poor are dangerous! IRONY! I think some of these young Argentine leftists are just in it for the cool tattoos, like so many straight-edge kids back home. I guess no matter where you go in the world, everyone from the suburbs is a know-it-all idiot who thinks he's a low-level genius.

The "%!"£$ng clubs are closed, where can I dance?

OK, we're all pissed off. We are here to club, and club is what we want to do.

Let's all just take a deep breath, and remember and respect that there was a horrible tragedy here in Buenos Aires. We're all better off with safer dancehalls, so it's probably best that the city doesn't rush things in opening them back up.

That said, here are two resources I found that will give you some insight as to when our favorite local cultural institutions will be back on track:

Tango!
Techno / Electro

The WNC goes ARTSY?!?!?!

ARTSY bar pics? Nah, you must have the wrong group of people.

The WNC( all my old-school nyc friends) has hit the town hard for the past few days, along with my roomate Darius and our new buddy Taro from Tokyo. In the case pictured, we found an orb at a bar that might be my new favorite drink-hole in town: El Mundo Bizarro. In the picture from left to right - me, Taro, Charlie, Jeff, Felix. Missy, Jeff's fiancee, was also with us but was kind enough to take this pic.

Lest you think we've been discussing Sartre all evening long, I'll do my best to transcribe a moment from earlier tonight, after our huge buffet dinner (we each had roughly 4 full plates of meat), at a local upscale irish (ish) pub called Shamrocks (grandma and grandmas stop reading here):

I walk into the men's bathroom to pee, and I see in the mirror Jeff staring at me deviously. I didn't know what he was up to, but I was scared, so I left the bathroom and asked his fiancee. She had no clue, so we sat and waited. About 15 minutes later, Jeff comes back to the table, only to tell us:

The toilet is overflowed. Charlie took a dump, and it overflowed, then I took a dump on top of it.

Classic. We giggled like little schoolgirls, and figured we should finish up our drinks quick and leave the bar, but wait...

While we're trying to chug down our liquor, Jeff gets out of his seat, flags down our very slim and attractive female waitress, and starts screaming "we broke the toilet, it doesn't flush" in English while trying to mime a toilet unsuccesfully flushing. 

What's even funnier is that here in Argentina the toilets don't use the same up/down flushing mechanism here (pushbutton), so she had to come over to figure out what he was saying, and he had to painfully try to explain what he was saying in Spanglish. Then, the moment we all love came, when he turned and pointed at me:

Austin, tell this lady the toilet is screwed up, and there's shit everywhere.

I wish I had a picture of my face at that moment. Why he needed to tell her at all, I'll never know. What he thought I was going to be able to say about this in Spanish, I'll never know. Actually, I just completely froze, dumbfounded at the entire situation. Eventually, she gets the idea from Jeff's excrement miming, and walks away to find somebody to investigate. At this point, I'm laughing so hard i'm crying. He told the waitress, and the whole bar at this point, about his lingering bowel movement. Classic stuff.

About 5 minutes later she returns, looks at Jeff, and simply says

gracias

I was on the floor laughing at this point. 'Thanks for dumping in our bathroom, breaking it, and then telling me about it, all on a Sunday night'. More than a waitress needs to know about a group of people, and if only she knew that two people went in that bowl; and if only Jeff knew what it takes to unclog a toilet here - no plungers, you have to skim the toilet, turn it fully upside down, etc. it's a 1 hour job filled with someone elses waste product. It took me 10 minutes to tell him, because I was laughing so hard. Then, we decided that since toilets flush in two different directions depending on the hemisphere, there might be no international pantomime sign for 'I took a dump in your toilet and it was so big I broke it'.

So, possibly the best part of all was when our waitress returned, and Jeff spontaneously shouts

gimme a sex on the beach

It was kind of like saying

I took a dump on your bar, and guess what, I'm still on vacation.

It was hilariously funny. I laughed so hard it hurt. I couldn't even look at Charlie we where laughing so hard - I almost shot whisky out of my nose. Jeff, of course, didn't know why all this was so funny to us, which of course made it funnier.

And so, the international sign for excessive feces clogging a toilet is done by miming a downward spiral with your finger, while shaking your head no and smirking. Try that right now, picture doint it to a very attractive woman in a ritzy bar, and just try not to laugh. WNC, 2k5, the year is young...

Rio Nightclub fire

I just want to let everyone, mostly Mom, know that I'm ok, and not affected by the Buenos Aires nightclub fire that happened yesterday. Actually, I'm in Rio right now, and I just found out via this blog.

It sounds terrible, so I won't ruminate on it, beyond the fact that bad things seem to happen in BsAs everytime I leave town (garbage burning, nightclub fire, bank bombs, etc).