tango

oh my.

i went to my first milonga tonight. and tango is beautiful ! i totally want to learn.

plus, there is a sort of philosophy. in tango, you dance cheek to cheek. less talking, more perceiving. no real pattern or step. non-formulaic, there is an an understood spontaneity as two traverse the rhythms together. a step forward, a step back, a turn or a swivel--all elegantly in tune with (and attuned to) a certain external cadence.

perhaps a great metaphor for relationships in general.

and there's a milonga codiga, code. the guy gives you a "look" that tells you he'd like to dance. the woman either gives a nod "yes" or her eyes wander, pretending she did not see--an indirect "no." haha.

all this occurs every weekend, only a few blocks from my home.

...coincidence? i think not :)

anyway more to come soon. but first, a visual feast of fotos !

graffiti

i like the graffiti in buenos aires. it's everywhere.

at first i thought it made everything look worn down and ghetto. but on closer inspection, i've found it can actually be quite creative. i'll be walking down the street, see something interesting and stop to take a look. i often get asked by people, "what are you doing?" and when i take a picture, sometimes i get a subsequent, "are you sending that to your friend in china?" haha. i answer that i just like it, and that i think it's a forma de arte.

in general it captures this artistic, anti-whatever sentiment out here. as if it's a loud blatant, i-don't-care-what-important-building-you-are and to tell you that they spot an error in your mainstream, conformist ways.


yes, an error.

i spy something gwen stefani

this looks familiar

why so serious?

fui, fuiste, fue, fuimos, fueron

cuac you too.

maybe i can advertise my blog here.

did you know taiwan's formosa in portugese comes from the spanish hermosa

in other news, i'm picking up guitar again. i like my teacher--he seems like a real musician. i think this is the perfect place as any to finally get my guitar skills (and finger calluses) down.

snapshot

there is a general lament that china is changing too fast. a bulldozer mows down the hutongs. an art warehouse is replaced by a parking lot. the students who once cried for justice now simply cry for more money. in taiwan too, a middle class has emerged and along with it, an endless striving for gucci and lv.

a fact of life is that the world turns and people change with it.

but in man's search for a historical and modern china, i wonder if a chinese identity extricated from an ever-changing society lies in the ones who went overseas. it is as if china itself is a television screen with its constantly fluctuating images, and those who leave its shores are the single stills--eidetic snapshots of the chinese worldview taken out, placed aside. and on the shores of a foreign land, they held on tightly to the home in their minds and that worldview became inculcated, calcified deeply within their beings.

they are in that sense, living history. i sense that here, at least. freed from the momentum of a changing society, the inertia sets in. and somehow time and change occur much more slowly, if at all.

a taiwan of before, a china from the past. here in buenos aires.