Mi Ultima Cocina En La Faena

Jorge Luis Borges Quote of the Day:
"The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future..."


Hurried back to the hotel to have one last meal before hopping in a car to the airport... Lomo, Malbec, y vegetales... que rico, eh?

...i realize too late, in my last hours sitting bleary-eyed staring at this southern hemisphere sun, that i never really got a chance to get settled out here... my impressions of Buenos Aires are fleeting, cursory, and largely superficial...i didn't stray out of this hotel by myself till yesterday, which is a testament to how much I've been working and how safe and scripted some business trips can be. It's not a bad thing, but I do always find it lamentable when I'm departing from a magical cultural hub and have only skimmed a few token drops of beauty off its most exposed surface. I hope to return here again soon.

My apologies if these postings sound like the pretentious observations of a spoilt gringo. I have been ensconced in a ridiculously lavish hotel for the past week, dining on high class cuisine I'm way too poor to pay for at home. I hope my reflections of what i've consumed here come across less like a foodie snob and more like a grateful patron of the culinary arts. I haven't had much else to write about other than the copious quantities of red wine I've been drinking, and the wonderful artistic creations that I've since realized emerged out of this unique port city. I'm enormously grateful to have been given the opportunity to visit here, and I hope to come back to learn more about this Latin capital and the wonderful people and artisans who inhabit it...

Gracias Fernando, Pablo, Seto, Rafaela, Mara, y Graciela para la hospitalidad... un abrazo y solidaridad eternamente...

The Cultural Center Of Recoleta

After spending an hour wandering through the cemetery, I strolled through the Cultural Center of Recoleta...

The place has an incredible photography exhibition, along with an assortment of paintings... crazy surreal collection of rooms and installations, full of wonderful art and inspired hipsters eying all the beauty... To the side are a couple of pieces from their collection...

Cementerio de la Recoleta

Jorge Luis Borges Quote of the Day:
"To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely..."












































































































































































Cementerio de la Recoleta

...a final resting place for families with reputations to uphold:
marble mausoleums to hold the memory of those striving for immortality within death's folds
this is where astral ghosts gather & descend, the aristocracy of a new continent, interred in elegant crypts,
on the sculpted hill where the cemetery sits,
haunted with stray felines & the buried bloodlines of Buenos Aires high society...
...in piety & pretentious stone, in urns & on marble thrones, the dead noblesse oblige these corners with the dream of what South America could have been...
Recoleta seems to be where Argentine aristocracy ends and begins...

-argentina-
Better grapes from different soil
italians improved from imported toil
The refined statuesque values of good Catholic tastes
Classic roman columns that time itself can barely deface
Heavy stone foundations & angelic facades
Stained glass tributes to crucified Gods
these are the leavings of generations of elite
the repository for those who live above the streets...

...a field of stone crosses raised so so high...
...crypts filled with decomposing corpses framed against the sky...



















__________________
Upon my death, cremate me, please. Unless it’s a colossal waste of energy or too expensive or something, in that case, do whatever's clever, chop me up into little pieces and turn me into soylent green, i don't really care... the body is just a vessel, a fragile delicate glass used to house some smoky eternal ether that passes through flesh like vibrations... You can tell a lot about a society by how it treats its dead... here en Recoleta these crypts are art, or perhaps some sort of verifiable public crucible for local immortals... i don't know, i can only marvel at all this good marble, and these incredibly elaborate stone tributes to lives long since departed. What an amazing spiritual vortex.... but this is most definitely not how I would want to be remembered...

When I die, BURN me, throw my empty carcass on a pyre and light the kindling as haunted electronica plays... burn me till there's no semblance of a skull left... once the life leaves my body think nothing of my fleshy remains: bodies are just rhythms trapped in a skeleton's chains; don't waste real estate on housing an empty shell: let my epitaph be the resonant story my strange life tells...

Yerba Mate

Jose Luis Borghes Quote of the Day:
"The original is unfaithful to the translation..."
Stupid me, but I hadn't realized Yerba Mate came from Argentina. I figured it to be a Native American thing, which it is, and it turns out the Native Americans who traditionally drink it are the indigenous people of Argentina. I discovered this stuff a few years back cause I have friends who are hippies & yogis & health food freaks & vegan fanatics, all of whom are uber-conscious about what they're putting into their bodies, and when one of my semi-enlightened healthy buddies recommends I try drinking something, I'll usually do it... although I did draw the line recently when my friend Brandon (Baseshot Scenario) showed me the kombucha culture he was growing in his house... that's where I draw the line, with living things floating around in plastic bag... thankfully, Yerba Mate is a much less complicated proposition than Kobucha, although funneling this murky looking stuff into your mouth can be equally intimidating...

I didn't think much of Yerba Mate the first time I had it, because it tasted like bitter loose tea... In essence, that's what it is, a loose tea swimming in hot water, but the traditions surrounding it, its medicinal qualities, and the culture it derives from are unique, and quite a departure from the kind of teas I'm used to drinking. I grew up in a very anglocentric Bengali family, and the teas we'd all grown accustomed to over generations are the tame blends of black tea the British brought to India. It's definitely not the same plant they're making Yerba Mate from...i think...

There's a great blog post i found here, that encaspulates a much more comprehensive take on Yerba Mate than I have time to scribble here... Ya gotta love the Blogosphere... it's a glorious echo chamber of sorts, with a million different versions of the same set of facts...
Here's what Bethany has to say about Yerba Mate on her blog:
___________________________________________________________
From Bethany: "I have been drawn into the mate society. There is not really an official one, so maybe that is not really accurate...but when someone begins to drink mate they will carry their little gourd around with them wherever they go and thus belonging to something...but I am not sure what.

Yerba Mate is a type of tea, some compare it in taste to something between green tea and coffee. The traditional way to drink it (with the gourd and straw or "bombilla") is said to be the best way for the nutrients to be released and absorbed. I mainly do it this way because it is so fun. I love the little gourd containers and different bombillas that you can use, some are insanely elaborate.

According to Mate for life : "Yerba mate is a tea-like beverage consumed widely throughout South America. Is is made from the dried leaves of the "IlexParaguariensis" – an indigenous holly plant.

The native people of Paraguay, the Guarani Indians, refer to it as "the drink of the gods." Since pre-Colombian times, the Guarani have gathered the leaves to use them in their folk remedies and as a stimulant and restorative tonic.

It was first introduced to European settlers when the Jesuits brought Christianity to Paraguay in the 17th Century. They quickly adopted the local custom and yerba mate became known as "Jesuit Tea."

All my live I have not been able to take the effects of caffeine. It is hard on my stomach, but the main reason is that the stimulants are to harsh on my mental state. hahah! Yes, drinking a caffeine loaded late or mocha have not really been an option for me, so I always have to make sure (multiple times) that the coffee Batista knows that I did order decaf.

This yerba is amazing! I can drink it throughout the day, even right before bed and it does keep me alert and gets my mind activate but I dose off immediately once I get to bed. This is because, "mate contains xanthines, which are alkaloids in the same family as caffeine, theophylline, and theobromine, well-known stimulants also found in coffee and chocolate. Mate also contains elements such as potassium, magnesium and manganese." (according to Wikipedia).

As for evidence:
"Researchers at the Free Hygienic Institute of Homburg, Germany, concluded that even if there were caffeine in mate', the amount would be so tiny that it would take 100 tea bags of mate' in a six ounce cup of water to equal the caffeine in a six ounce serving of regular coffee".

Record Shopping - Miles

Hit up Miles Disqueria at the recommendation of my friend Pablo Capara, who was kind enough to converse with me and share some insights on the electronic tango movement emerging out of Buenos Aires... There is amazing music being made in Argentina, ranging from some ridiculously bumping Latin House to hybrid tango electronica to all kinds of other assorted sounds... I spent a whopping half hour in this store, and walked out a couple hundred dollars poorer and with a large stack of fresh sounds to pore over...
the stack to the left is the damage...digging is an expensive habit...

Una Hora En MALBA

Spent an hour at Malba, the Latin American Museum of Art in Buenos Aires, en route to record shopping... a glorious collection of mind-bending work, far too deep, varied, and interesting to truly explore in a mere hour... poor planning on my part, I should've probably spent the whole afternoon out here...

from Malba's website:
Malba’s collection focuses on art produced in Latin America during the 20^th Century, and is made up of a group of over two hundred and seventy works by Argentinean and Latin American artists. It is an institutional collection that is the patrimony of the Eduardo F. Costantini Foundation. Most of its works were donated by Malba’s founder, issuing from the collection he brought together largely during the eighties and nineties. During the museum’s three years of public operation, its patrimony has grown, thanks to its acquisition program and to the generous donations received from artists as well as artists’ family members and individual donors.

Initially revolving around Modern and avant-garde movements of the Río de la Plata area, particularly during the ‘10s and ‘20s, the Costantini collection has in the past decade established itself as one of the main players on the international stage, bringing together one of the world’s most significant ensembles of 20^th Century Latin American art. Artists and works from countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela and Chile have made their way into the collection, which has become increasingly active in Europe and in the United States in terms of its institutional loans policy. From 1997, the project began to take on a public, permanent dimension; and the decisions and steps leading to Malba’s constitution, construction and inauguration gathered pace, culminating in its completion in September 2001.

Since opening its doors to the public, the permanent exhibition of its patrimony has remained one of Malba - Costantini Collection’s main institutional objectives. Most of its Latin American art collection can always be found on display in the museum’s central rooms, presenting visitor and viewer with different approaches and new readings of the region’s art history, from the first avant-garde movements of the 20th Century to the most contemporary productions from the past few decades. A group of Latin American art’s true master works that includes Retrato de Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Portrait of Ramón Gómez de la Serna) by Diego Rivera, Abaporú by Tarsila do Amaral, La mañana verde (The Green Morning) by Wifredo Lam, Autorretrato con chango y loro (Self-portrait with Monkey and Parrot) by Frida Kahlo, El viudo (The Widower) by Fernando Botero and Rompecabezas (Puzzle) by Jorge de la Vega is complemented by important suites of work by artists such as Xul Solar, Rafael Barradas, Agustín Lazo, Roberto Matta, Antonio Berni, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Antônio Dias, León Ferrari and Liliana Porter.

Boleadores En La Boca

So I found myself in a restaurant today with an unlit cigarette in my mouth, as a hired dancer attempted to knock it out of my lips using Boleadores, aka Argentine Poi... below is the footage, taken by my very enthusiastic waiter, who put me in this situation before i really knew what was going on... Then all of a sudden i'm standing in front of dozens of people as a pair of wood balls at the end of a fast moving rope are inching closer to my teeth... hmmm...



I'm a poi devotee, along with a bunch of my closest friends, we're all students and practitioners of the fire arts, which are not unlike what these Boleadores are. Boleadores are actually rope tools used by cattle rustlers in the Argentine plains, the famed patagonian pampas, filled with the South American cowboys commonly called gauchos. Gauchos have a unique culture, rife with unique accessories and paraphernalia, and you have to admit, there's something immensely appealing about the idea of a South American cowboy astride a horse, riding down the sunset with the Andes in the background... that's probably the gayest sounding thing i'll write all week... at least I hope it is... anyhow, the boleadores are a Gaucho tool, and I imagine the way they developed was similar to how Poi developed. If you've never seen poi, they're essentially just weights at the ends of ropes, and were originally used by the aborigines & native Australians as weapons of war. Below is a youtube link to a couple of my buddies on Foster Beach in Chicago demonstrating what we use poi for today: a combustible war dance of elements encompassed in a startlingly beautiful movement meditation.... there's some fire hoop by Shorty and some staff in there for good measure, along with a video of my long lost buddy Banyan throwing down some double fire staff elegance somewhere in Asia...





these gauchos don't have anything on my crew... ;-)

El Tango Rojo en la Faena

caught the Tango Rojo performance at la Faena... although we've been treated to Tango performances virtually every night, this ensemble at the Faena was superior in just about every aspect... there was a 7 piece band, with a virtuoso pianist, an upright bass player, a violinist, two vocalists, & two accordeon players. There were 5 couples, clad in multiple costumes, and over the course of a dozen performances they traced the evolution of the form from the docks of Buenos Aires to a more evolved vision of searing eroticism & mirrored grace... the show was in a really intimate little theater, that really accentuated all the little nuances of both the music and choreography... what a night...

argh...

...so...hungover...
:-(

La Belle Epoque (1871-1913)

Found a great quote on a term I've been coming across in my reading repeatedly, that I'd never really understood. "La Belle Epoque" is the name of an era at the turn of the 20th century, that defines a global cultural movement based on the spread of European ideas to places like Argentina... Buenos Aires is very much a European city, in its aesthetic and orientation. Until you explore it's history it's hard to grasp exactly why. Before the tumultous close of the 20th century, and its subsequent economic collapses, Argentina was a very different place, one which understood itself to be a part of something larger, yet distinct. The following spells out some of the reasons why this place feels so European... have a read, if you're in a scholarly mood...

taken from "A Brief History of the Tripartite Alliance"
"The hallmark of this era was the diffusion of power worldwide, away from France and Britain and towards other Western states (Germany, Russia, Italy, the United States, Brazil, Argentina) and even to non-Western Japan and Egypt. Although nationalists in France and Britain aroused hysteria by claiming that this power shift was evidence of national decadence, in actual fact this was merely the product of these countries catching up to France and Britain. In central Europe, the Americas, and points elsewhere, industrialization finally took hold. This increase in economic strength was accompanied by rapid population growth in each of these industrializing countries even as French and British population growth decelerated. To be sure, this shift away from France and Britain did not seriously challenge Franco-British prestige; indeed, the rising new powers generally emulated French or British models of law, literature, and philosophy. Still, the rise of these new powers forced tremendous change on the world, which quickly evolved into a decentralized complex of competing world powers. Eventually, the strains became too much and the system collapsed in bloody war; in the interim, these strains fostered an unparalleled fluorescence of culture and wealth known to posterity as la belle époque.

The worldwide spread of a common popular culture based on western European -- in particular, French -- models had begun long before the 1870’s. It was only in this period, though, that advanced communications and transportation technologies, the growth of mass literacy, and the emergence of a large middle class with substantial purchasing power allowed for a truly rapid spread of a common culture. Influenced equally by the Romantics’ idealization of emotion and by the Enlightenment’s identification of humans as beings possessing innate capacities and rights, many of the leading artists of the period pushed realism to its extreme limits. In literature, for instance, naturalist writers such as the French Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola and the English Thomas Hardy adopted a quasi-scientific attitude in their writing about formerly taboo subjects such as sex, crime, extreme poverty, and corruption in officialdom, while the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Brazilian Paulo Carnheiro, and the Anglo-American Henry James explored the repressed psychological motivations of human beings. Some authors -- like the French symbolist poets Verlaine and Rimbaud, the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen, and the Anglo-Irish satirist Oscar Wilde -- even went out of their way to demonstrate their contempt for bourgeois life or to shock complacent audiences in the hopes of awakening people to their everyday realities. Similar breaks with tradition were present in music, whether in the form of Debussy’s atonal orchestral music, Stravinsky’s innovative classical music, or the new popular musics emerging in the major cities of the Americas and France, inspired by non-European musical styles and including once-taboo lyrics. In the graphic arts, impressionist and postimpressionist art -- the latter genre exemplified by Cézanne -- defied long-cherished conventions of representation and showed a willingness to learn from primitive and non-European art: Indeed, the French Gauguin was inspired by Tahitian life, while the Flemish Van Gogh was inspired by the hyperrealism of japonaiserie, or Japanese prints. Other major styles included fauvism, in which artists such as Matisse exploited bold color areas; cubism, as painted by the Spanish Picasso, which combined several views of an object on a single flat surface; and futurism, pioneered by Italians, who tried to depict the energy of speed and motion. Architecture was marked by the exploration of the uses of steel structures, using either neoclassical, curvilinear Art Nouveau, or functionally streamlined façades. It is safe to say that throughout the West and in the most modern non-Western countries, this radical new popular culture achieved near-universal penetration of urban populations and substantial influence elsewhere.

This rapid spread of a common global popular culture was remarkable in itself, but this period’s mass migrations -- mainly from Europe, but also including some Asian emigrants -- was even more spectacular, the 45 million international migrants over this period easily ranking as the single largest wave of migrants in world history. The vast majority of these migrants emigrated to the rich republics of non-Andean South America and to the self-governing British colonies in Australia and South Africa, but France (and France’s Algerian and South Pacific provinces) also absorbed millions of immigrants over this period. Even North America absorbed tens of thousands of people annually. Prohibited from entering these destinations by racist laws, most of the Asian emigrants -- overwhelmingly Indian and Chinese -- settled in Southeast Asia and some of the islands of the Caribbean Sea and Indian Ocean under the auspices of colonial powers, taking advantage of their relative wealth and education to create prosperous diasporas. These ceaseless migrations helped bind together many different countries by creating new hybrid identities (like Italo-French, Germano-Australian, and Judeo-Brazilian) and by introducing elements of one culture to another (for instance, the popularity of the Spanish Catalan sardana dance in southern France, brought by Catalan immigrants), though in places it gave rise to violence.

The creation of a unified global culture was parallelled by the creation of a unified global economy, which was itself driven by this period’s rapid technological and organizational advances of this period, and the rapid dispersion of these advances worldwide. In communications, a transatlantic telegraph network -- based on an 1844 invention by the American Morse -- linking the Americas with Europe and selected points in the Southern Hemisphere had evolved by the end of the 1870’s, while British and American inventors independently happened upon the principles behind the telephone in the late 1870’s. These startling advances were replicated in the realm of transportation as railroads were rapidly expanded -- in the 1880’s, more than 150 thousand kilometres of railway were built in addition to the 300 thousand kilometres already built, much of this length being built in the vastness of America, eastern Europe, and Asia. Other advances came in the area of manufacturing, with the construction of more efficient machines and more efficient processes. The human element was not neglected, as the perfection of the principles of mass production through the budding science of sociology caused rapid increases in the per capita output of workers in industrializing countries. The economic cooperative movement pioneered in the United Kingdom also enjoyed great popularity in the industrial world among urbanites and peasants alike, as each group seized upon cooperatives as organizations that could allow them to enjoy some economic autonomy from impersonal government and corporate bureaucracies.

These immense technological and organizational changes, along with material innovations like sewer systems, electric subways, parks, and bargain department stores, helped improve living standards for many in the industrial world. They also made it essential for the world’s countries to modernize their economies using these techniques else risk falling catastrophically behind. In fact, many of the events of this period were driven by technological advances and the accompanying intense economic competition. The rapid spread of colonialism worldwide, for instance, was driven by the demand for raw materials and new markets..."

screwy tenses in appropriated tongues

...been struggling along with the Spanish... Interspersed between the occasional conversation I've had that's had real depth and clarity are recurring moments of profound befuddled ineptitude. Somewhere in the back of my mind a long forgotten high school teacher is standing over me screaming: "conjugate the verb in the past indicative!" Doh! Although I'm doing well getting along and communicating with people out here, my vocabulary needs work and sadly, I do need to dig up a few lessons on how to conjugate verbs in multiple tenses... not unlike this Hebrew man below in one of my favorite Monty Python movies ever, "the Life Of Brian." Observe - this is how some of us learned how to think in another language...

Espacio Dolli y ElConocedor

The meeting started today, and after a relatively painless day ensconced in a purple-draped “teatro del cabaret” with 20 or so delegates from around the world, our group hopped onto a bus for our first dinner together, for what promised to be an exciting evening filled with Tango performers & glorious food. Unfortunately, we hit a few hiccups along the way…

After a solid hour of driving around Buenos Aires on a huge double decker bus (which I believe had “La Empresa del Turismo” inscribed on the back of every seat), our driver sheepishly admitted that he was lost and started asking random people on the street for directions… This marked the descent into absurdity of yet another chapter in what has already been a rather surreal travelogue comprised of misdirected trips. I personally find it damn amusing to be on a bus full of 30 foreign tourists in an unfamiliar city with no address and no sense of direction, but maybe that’s just my sense of humor. Displacement is always entertaining. Besides, that kind of collective disorientation amongst adults is a rare thing (at least, without substances ;-)), and although most of the people I was with were a bit perplexed and annoyed, we eventually stopped the bus, turned around, obtained some clearer directions, and managed to find our way to the destination in question. It was immediately christened “the bus ride to nowhere.” Being lost in a group of high maintenance executives is an adventure of sorts, shedding interesting light on characters and how they perceive and deal with time and delays. I’m lost in my own little world so often that it doesn’t really phase me to be floating around seemingly without bearings. To the rest of these hungry, self-directed individuals, it was more harrowing and got on their nerves. But we all get where we’re meant to go eventually, right? What’s the rush?

And the destination, on this particular evening, turned out to be a little slice of paradise…

Strolled through a huge, locked door in a completely unmarked building, then down a long hallway of what felt like someone’s lavish home, until I found myself walking past what looked like a very familial kitchen and dining area. The rest of the gang was gathered through a glass door, standing around on the back terrace, and I stepped outside again I found myself in a glorious yet discreet chic urban back yard. Someone was tending to some slow cooking chorizo on the grill, a fleet footed wait staff was circulating discreetly with plates, and suddenly everyone I’d just arrived with was holding a glass of good wine and settling in.

…Entre la sommelier…


I had the pleasure and privilege of making the acquaintence of Fabricio Portelli, the editor of the best food&wine magazine in Argenina, El Conocedor...

Soon I was engaged in conversation with a tall, dark & handsome man with shoulder length locks & charm dripping off his jacket...talking about wine...in Spanish, no less... bad spanish, but Fabricio was patient company and more than willing to talk to me about Malbec & Torrontes, and our host, the famed chef Dolli Irigoyen...

Turns out we were being fed by a celebrity chef, a woman famed throughout Argentina and beyond, cooking up a small feast of apertifs and cuisine at her own private culinary house of experiments... talk about a treat...

as Fabricio and I talked, an attentive but unintrusive staff milled about with the following offerings: (my apologies for not remembering the appropriate names for it all...)

Empanadas
Chicken Skewers with Peanut Sauce
A warm creamy soup of pumpkin, or perhaps squash...
a divine fresh Ceviche
freshly grilled barbequed chorizo minisandwich... ("sliders! explaimed by new buddy from Detroit)
Egg Rolls
DeepFried goldenbrownballs speared with a stick
spoon-soft layered cornmeal cake/paella


Dinner was later, a divine steak accompanied with mashed potatoes and an array of fantastic wines.. ///Right at the moment i'm en route to dinner and must describe the rest of the evening, including the Tango performances at a later time... but let me say this... Fabricio told me that we were not in a restaurant, but una "Catedral de Vino" y "una labratoria gastronomica..." i've never feasted on such divinity as i dined on last night, and will describe the rest of it when i get a chance... more tango to come right now...

axe "chocolate man"

a couple of of my favorite absurd Argentine ads of the past year... a little ridiculous, but who can argue with a chocolate man and sad silly clowns singing bon jovi?

La Faena Universe

I really need to drop a few links about this hotel, a magical transplanted place originally from Manchester... I'm staying under a roof that once belonged to a grain warehouse in the UK, and it was transplanted brick for brick across the Atlantic and turned into this classy hotel right near the rio de la plata...

Here's what the Times UK had to say about this spot:

"La Faena is the it hotel in Buenos Aires. When Coldplay, Jamiroqui or any other band are in town, this is where they choose to stay. The French designer, Philippe Starck has really gone to town on Buenos Aires' first design hotel. He told the owner Alan Faena that he wanted to create a beautiful theatre, where the guests are the stars of the show. And I want a piece of the action, so the mission is to keep up with the fashionistas and try and look as polished and glamorous as they do.
But, it’s not just about style at the hotel. Augustina, the new spa manager, has injected a healthy dose of spirituality into the treatments. Guests, staff and even locals can start the day with a meditation session. And “therapies for the soul” such as pranic healing, which works on revitalising the body’s energetic aura, are offered..."

The inside is a glorious scarlet haze of lights and flavors... a review has this to say:

"The owner Alan Faena, earned his money as a clothing designer in Buenos Aires, before he decided to spend them on establishing the hotel and an area around in Puerto Madero, to a culture area with parks, galleries and shops. Originally El Porteño Building was an old silo, built of brick stones from Manchester in England a century ago, in what is called Belle Époque in Argentina, the great time. Alan Faena saw potential in this seven floor high building and united old and new in an exiting universe, along with Philip Starck.The entrance to Faena Hotel + Universe is not very grandiose. It is a modest door in bricks, which leads to an overbuilt corridor between flower pots towards a 10m high double door with red glass windows. From there on the hotel is an experience."

This place is a dimly lit alternate universe, laid out around a central hallway and art directed by the famed designer Philippe Starck... yet another online screed declares the following about the Faena:
"For guests, the transformative experience begins at the 32-foot-tall pair of entry doors made of red-stained glass. These lead into the “cathedral,” a 263-foot-long corridor that forms the central spine of the Universe. Floor-to-ceiling windows, punctuated by brick and gold velvet curtains, flank the corridor while a red carpet, atop dark lapacho hardwood floors, runs the length of it. The cathedral leads into and unites a series of spaces each of which comprises a unique world. This includes a cabaret, library, the “El Mercado” restaurant, a bistro, and a Turkish Hammam. These spaces allow the hotel’s jet-setting guests to interact and mingle.
Starck collaborated with Faena to design the interiors. Etched glass and tall crystal mirrors create optical illusions throughout various spaces in the Universe. Imperial furniture with gold clawed feet, deep red and gold velvet, and Italian marble echo the Belle Époque of a century ago—and signal an opportunity for the era’s rebirth. A playful meeting of bygone style with modern fantasy suffuses the public spaces..."

we're spending the week in their small cabaret theater, around a u-shaped table, debating the merits and failings of our company's offerings to the world...

Alfajores & Dulce de Leche

...upon entering my hotel room I found a plate of delectable cookies accompanying a welcome letter from the hotel managers... the cookies, it turns out, are a Latin delicacy known as Alfajores, and are essentially just a pair of cookies sandwiched around a core of dulce de leche, or caramel... here's a pic:



Here's the recipe for these alfajores, , along with a well written little personal story someone decided to share online about how infatuatingly tasty these are...

Dulce de Leche probably deserves a post of its own, but seeing as how I'm on the subject, here's a pic of the divine chocolate/caramel the Argentines cook up...


The recipe is pretty interesting as well... Is it chocolate? Not really, although it looks like it, or something along the lines of a creamy smooth brown. The actual words "Dulce de leche" translate as "milk jam," and if you read about how it's made, that makes sense... You start with a can of condensed milk, and pressure cook it until what's inside is of a toffee-like consistency. Or to spell it out clearer, you submerge a can of condensed milk in boiling water on a stove and heat it until it caramelizes... mmmmm... They put it on cookies and cakes, & spread it on breads like nutella... i find it immensely difficult to find anything to criticize about cultures that produce elegantly delectable liquid chocolate...

Mano a Dios

Upon arrival at the hotel, there was a #10 Jersey from the Argentine National Team awaiting me laid out across my bed, as a goodwill gift from the agency to the delegates... apparently i'm to assume a perpetual state of fan-boy-dom while i'm here, whether i'm a devotee of the inimitable Diego Maradona or not...
Seeing as how this country worships at the altar of Maradona, I thought I'd post some youtube links of some of the most notable goals of his illustrious career...

panicked arrivals & roja evenings...

Because our Saturday flight was canceled, and I made it to BA a day late, we’re behind schedule. Got to the hotel after an uneventful and largely uninspiring hour long drive through indistinct urban wasteland. Some cities look glorious from the outset, and in others, you are confronted with inequality and impoverishment almost immediately. There are 'villas meserias,' or slums (aka favelas aka hoods of misery) all along the drive from the airport to el rio de la plata, and the ride was rather forgettable until we arrived at the understated but immensely appealing Hotel Faena Universe… I’ll leave my impressions on the hotel for later, as I was forced by time constraints to drop my bags, seek out the sizable contingent of packages we’d shipped, and start setting up for this meeting right away. Barely got a shower in...

Spent a crowded afternoon amongst hungover and sleepless travelers who were trying admirably to speak coherently to the circumstances my company is operating in. It was a lost afternoon of sorts, and the period after work was a bit odd as well, as my body hasn't adjusted to this clock or set of circumstances yet. I had the pleasure of eating lunch with the creative board, dining on a glorious steak, as well as a few glasses of Malbec over the course of a very early day… I don't usually drink at lunch, even if "it's just win," so by the time dinner rolled around I was already a bit catatonic. My supper was Risotto con Albodingas de Conejo. In English, that's a fantastic risotto accompanied by…wait for it…Rabbit meatballs… I realize that may sound terrible to you folks out there, but I couldn’t resist. I once had a Wallaby steak in a open air restaurant on a 72nd floor terrace overlooking Bangkok, and ever since then, I’ve been taking to strange dishes in when i travel. Call it a culinary curiosity of sorts, or perhaps a fetish for obscure animals. Thing is, I don’t seek it out, I just end up in classy restaurants where it’s on the menu, and if it’s sitting in front of you on a page and they say it’s spiced delicately and accompanied by a cheesy risotto, that doesn’t sound half bad… all of which is a poorly argued case for eating Rabbit Meatballs, but I will testify to that fact that they were delectable, a masterpiece of subtle flavors and a testament to a refine culinary aesthetic...

All this Malbec I've been drinking is divine…
I know nothing of wine and won’t pretend to aspire to the fruity, hammed-up descriptions of "fruity overtones with hints of nuts" etc you normally find scrawled in elegant type on wine bottle labels. propaganda aside, I do like this Malbec wine… I couldn’t tell you what distinguishes the taste, the nuances of it, or why it’s rated well… I could tell you it’s a mountain grape imported from France that took to Argentina better than in it’s native soil, but that doesn’t convey anything about the flavor of the drink… I dunno, I think my palate might be primitive when it comes to wine... something that ought to be remedied? or an ignorance worth preserving? Sometimes when you learn to have refined tastes you lose your appreciation for the less classy things in life... i know i don't like Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, or Milwaukee's Best, or Old Style Beer, because i'm well aware of the existence of vastly superior beers and lagers... what if i learn to like quality wine & suddenly am no longer inclined to chug jugs Carlo Rossi with my old college buddies? that might be a tragedy of sorts... or maybe i'm just being a dramatic spoilt primadonna, and should appreciate the blessings staring me in the face... ;-) it's just fermented grapes, fool... drink it!

customs

Arrival:
Immigration was a breeze. A couple of stamps in the passport by a hurried agent. Customs was curious but too occupied to take me and my 64 workbooks and clothing seriously. They ran all my stuff through their machines, cracked open the 70 pound suitcase full of workbooks for this meeting, and quite accurately pegged me for a corporate mule. Hell, they even waved me through without bothering to collect my carefully filled out forms… You can tell a lot about a place by how they canvass the crap trying to cross their borders…

ORD Horror Story #mpteenth / maskedpreKompencounters

yet another episode in a recurring series of surreal experiences at O'hare...

boarded a plane to Buenos Aires in business class
got comfortable
...the power cut off during the captain's preflight announcement, a generally disconcerting event. It's not a good feeling to be sitting in a plane and then all of a sudden the lights go off, the music stops, and everyone starts looking around...
anyhow, they got everything running again without further episode and then we took off...
...leveled out...
...and circled Chicago...
...and circled Chicago...
...and circled Chicago...

the captain said something about a hydraulic problem, or something like that. I can't remember, I was trying to sleep. Full disclosure: i unrolled my blanket and was napping right away, as i haven't slept much lately. Anyhow, while they were trying to sort out their issues, in large laps around the city, they dumped some fuel into Lake Michigan. I don't remember that through my half-awake haze but apparently my fellow travelers were paying attention. In fact, I fell asleep and only really woke up when we made a rough landing...at O'Hare. With a phalanx of emergency vehicles, my fellow travelers report. I was in a strange surreal place because I was trying to figure out how you wake up and arrive back at the same airport you just took off from. Sisyphian Dillemna or some kind of wierd absurdist theatrical plotline that the scandinavians would appreciate... anyhow. we were herded off the plane and told the flight was canceled. they lined us up in a deserted wing of the terminal we'd just departed and were told talk to agents about new flights...

...that, my friends, is where everyone's horrible O'hare story usually goes south...

...because it gets ugly when a couple hundred people are standing around fuming, suddenly confronted with their own self-importance because they have to be places... they have to get places... they have things to do, family to see, business to transact, agendas to tend to... when you mess up someone's flight plan you really toy with their sense of security. That line was full of angry, irritated travelers who wanted to be somewhere else, most of whom had gladly given in to the martyrdom complexes they harbor... every now and then i do believe people want to feel like they're being mistreated by the Man, call it the Job trip, that long simmering streak of Old Testament self-pity most of us have lurking somewhere in our systems...

But that line got ugly, fast... bad energy all around. that wasn't quite as bad as being trapped at o'hare in a blizzard in the winter, but it was still a very poisoned pool of ill will i suddenly found myself swimming in. i got treated well by the agent, booked a flight through DallasFtWorth for the next afternoon, and got bumped up to first class simply by treating my agent with courtesy, respect, and a little humanity. I try not to believe in self-importance because it breeds ego, and i wasn't angry in the least...cause i had PreKomp to go hit up... more on that in a second... before I tell you about preKomp let me put a temporary period on this particular episode in the ongoing epic that is my latest offering culled from the horrors of o'Hare archive...

This i've concluded:
O’Hare is a metaphor for purgatory, a study in indifference, a portrait in dysfunctional functionality. Its worker bees & transients are at the mercy of unpredictable weather conditions & mechanical problems, and ugly unforgiving cots on hostile floors are what happens at o'hare if things go bad. Everyone has an o'hare story or three, of winter storms, witless agents, wasted tickets, all essentially tales of infinite waits for a deliverance that never quite arrives. These are our lives, largely spent in transit to a destination we never get to, because of broken rides, token rewards, and disappointments grown serial… your path through the terminal is determined by how you treat it's inhabitants...

anyhow, in a nutshell, i made it out alive, at 1:45 am, after another strained conversation with an overwrought, clearly overworked guy down at baggage claim who was forwarding, holding, or procuring everyone's luggage... he said he'd send my luggage to buenos aires on my new booking, so i went home, with an eye to dancing the night away with the entheon village kids at radiohiro's rooftop...

i wasn't upset about having my flight canceled because I knew that by the time I got home, it would only be 2 am, and that meant that I could change clothes, grab my vampire cape, my venetian comedia del arte mask, & my fire spinning gear, and go to minimonk's crib & watch all my favorite people do their thing with fire & wax, rocking hard drives & UV clothes, working Boehringer Mixers & custom made kevlar props...

preKomp is Resonate refuse at the height of summer anticipation...
it's the tease before the plunge, the meniscus of a huge swell of collective thought soon to spill over...

http://www.burningmanchicago.org/

...i burned a few times, danced till close to dawn, & left before i was too dehydrated...

...another two flights of travel - 24 more hours in transit through multiple airports to south america...