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Making the Most of Those Long Argentine Nights - New York Times
Source:
www.nytimes.com
By Matt Gross | February 4, 2007 - The New York Times
VERY late one Wednesday night in November, Calle Balcarce was deserted. By day this street in San Telmo — the quintessential “old Buenos Aires” neighborhood — would have hummed with pedestrians enjoying the warmth of late spring, but now the stone and concrete buildings glowed lonely yellow under the street lamps. Even my destination, a club called X Vos, looked abandoned; only a pair of smokers killing time on the sidewalk hinted that anything might be happening inside.
Within the club's brick and black-painted walls, however, a free-for-all was getting under way. The D.J., Villa Diamante, was spinning hip-hop and reggaetón, video graphics swirled faintly on a wall (I caught images from “2001: A Space Odyssey”), and a hundred or so clubgoers in jeans, T-shirts and hoodies were downing cheap beers and whiskey nacional in preparation for the evening's “cumbia experimental,” an electronicized version of a type of folk music popular in the city's villas, or slums.
Soon, the real party — the weekly performance known as Zizek — began. A corn-rowed guy took the stage and, over the cumbia's ch-ch-ch rhythms, began spouting dancehall lyrics in Spanish, while behind him a boy of about 10 carefully strummed chords on a guitar about as long as he was tall. Suddenly a big dude grabbed the microphone and — how do I put this? — squawk-squealed into it for several minutes. The crowd surged every time a singer chanted the refrain “Cumbia-a-a!” No wonder Clarín, Argentina's largest newspaper, had nominated Zizek as one of the best parties of the year — it was awesome.
But Zizek — named for the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who is married to a young Argentine model and once taught at the University of Buenos Aires — was only the finale of a phenomenally busy but typical Wednesday in Argentina's capital.
At midnight, I'd been eating dinner — rich morcilla gnocchi flecked with crunchy Granny Smith apple — with fashion designers and artists at Casa Cruz, an ultrachic restaurant paneled in gleaming mahogany. A few hours earlier, there were cocktails poolside at the Faena Hotel + Universe, designed by Philippe Starck. I'd spent the afternoon gallery hopping, had an espresso at the contemporary Latin American art museum and met the writer Washington Cucurto, Argentina's answer to Dave Eggers, at the workshop where he transforms used cardboard into hand-painted book covers for his independent publishing house, Eloísa Cartonera. And somewhere in there, I'd found time for a quick nap at the enormous bilevel loft I'd rented in the fashionable Recoleta neighborhood.
If this sounds exhausting, it was. But it was also exhilarating, affordable (thanks to the lingering effects of Argentina's economic crisis five years ago) and accessible. In fact, the only difficulty I'd faced in all of this was deciding which of the night's dozens of events to forgo — in the end, I couldn't make it to a friend's party at El Diamante, a Mexican-kitsch tapas restaurant designed by the artist Sergio de Loof.
Such are the challenges vexing any visitor to today's Buenos Aires: electrotango or art opening, design festival or indie theater, a chichi martini and exquisite cut of grilled meat or a simple beer at a grimy bar (followed by an exquisite cut of grilled meat). But since the average Argentine evening extends into the dawn, there's often time — if you have the stamina — to do it all.
Still, any decision process must begin with a fundamental choice — where do you establish home base? For visitors in search of the next cool thing, two options present themselves, Puerto Madero and Palermo.
Puerto Madero, connected to downtown by a quartet of bridges, was once the city's cargo terminal, where trains from the countryside would arrive bearing grain, beef and wine for export. But for more than 20 years, the forces of urban renewal have been at work. Today the long, broad avenues of Puerto Madero bear only a few traces of the neighborhood's industrial past. The gantry cranes that once lifted containers onto ships now stand guard over antiseptic plazas like anime robots; residential skyscrapers front the boardwalk where street venders grill steak sandwiches (and sell them for 4 pesos, about $1.30 at 3.1 pesos to the U.S. dollar); the sign over one construction site boasts Cesar Pelli as its architect; and Los Molinos, a former granary, is expected to anchor a future arts district.
Puerto Madero is also home to many of the city's high-end hotels: a Hilton, a Sofitel and the Faena Hotel + Universe. (Alan Faena is behind much of the multimillion-dollar development in Puerto Madero, and has engaged Norman Foster to do another building.) Once a red-brick warehouse, the Faena is now one of the city's most opulent lodgings, with buttoned-leather sofas, gilt touches, drooping chandeliers and lots and lots of red: carpets, curtains, lampshades, wineglasses — even the crisp bangs fringing the forehead of the Faena's creative director, Ximena Caminos, were tinted crimson. About the only non-red object in sight was the white cowboy hat on the head of Mr. Faena himself.
And yet Puerto Madero, for all its ambitions and big-name architects, remains a bit underpopulated. There is little foot traffic and none of the sense of neighborhood that elsewhere produces great boutiques, funky cafes and top restaurants. Perhaps when all the construction — including a major revamping of the downtown area across the Puente de la Mujer— is complete, Puerto Madero will come into its own. Till then, Faena devotees will probably be taking a lot of 20-peso cab rides to Palermo.
Palermo is without doubt the hippest part of Buenos Aires. Once it was a quiet residential neighborhood whose narrow cobblestone streets were lined with trees and low Spanish-style homes. But in the mid-1990s, artists, designers, architects and film producers took advantage of its affordability to set up shop — a movement that has dramatically accelerated since the 2002 economic crisis. Today, it feels like every boutique is a former bakery, every hotel a former town house and every gallery a former garage. No writer is allowed to describe Palermo without comparing it to SoHo in Manhattan or deploying the adjective “trendy.” (There's even a blog, trendypalermoviejo.blogspot.com.)
Palermo boasts the city's highest concentration of boutique hotels, with what seems like one opening every month, including the Home Hotel, whose Scandinavian furniture and iPod connections enticed George W. Bush's twin daughters to check in to one of its 14 rooms and three suites in November.
But I didn't stay at any of these places. Instead, I turned to ApartmentsBA.com, a rental agency with hundreds of apartments across Buenos Aires, and found an 11th-floor loft in Recoleta, a tony neighborhood midway between Palermo and Puerto Madero. For $600 a week, I had windows that stretched 16 feet to the ceiling, a big soft bed, glitch-free wireless Internet and even concierge services. Outside, glorious belle époque apartment buildings glittered in the warm sun, and jacaranda trees spread over the avenues, their fractal branches ending in inky lavender blooms.
Not too shabby — but still, I spent little time in Recoleta. Soon after my breakfast of medialunas (a type of Argentine croissant) and a cortado (espresso with a little milk) at the sunny cafe across the street, I'd catch a cab to Palermo, where I'd meet a friend for chocolate brioche at Mark's, then go strolling the neighborhood in search of architectural treasures, like an 1877 mansion with stained-glass windows hidden down an alley and supposedly owned by a telenovela star. In between, I could pop into galleries like El Borde, where the mysterious narrow-gauge rail tracks running through the big white space almost distracted me from Arturo Aguiar's lush photos of his artist friends (very much in the style of the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, but maybe I'm just thinking of his Buenos Aires movie, “Happy Together”).
Though Palermo may sound very commercialized — “SoHo-ized” is the term preferred by some — it is at the same time fascinating to see how the neighborhood had reinvented itself in the five years since the crisis. Those rail tracks in El Borde, the word panaderia (bakery) carved in the stone above the window of the fashion boutique Emme, even the warm, clubby atmosphere inside the Nike store's crumbly edifice — all hinted at a past not too far removed, and suggested that Palermo had undergone a relatively organic transformation.
Still, this metamorphosis has had consequences. Real estate is no longer cheap, so artier denizens have moved elsewhere. Belleza y Felicidad, an eclectic art gallery that sells the hand-painted books of Eloísa Cartonera, is in Almagro, a middle-class neighborhood south of Palermo whose cachet increases as it blends at its edges with other neighborhoods like Boedo — home of the up-and-coming neorealist theater scene — and Once, where the Ciudad Cultural Konex theater plays host to modern dance epics.
To find Appetite, an avant-garde gallery that everyone I met recommended, I had to return to one of San Telmo's less atmospheric blocks. Pop-punk exuberance is Appetite's stock in trade, its walls (and floors) are covered in a profusion of styles, from Ariel Cusnir's paintings of idealized tropical islands and Anabella Papa's witty paintings of beautiful, casual violence (schoolboys brawling, a man attacked by a wolf) to a row of blue plastic shopping bags and a paint can frozen in mid-spill atop a table.
Visiting these lesser-known corners takes a bit of effort. Taxis, which at first blush seem so fast and cheap, get caught in unexpected waves of traffic, and the Subte, or subway, so efficient at whisking people to and from the city center, is worthless if you need to go across town. Walking, while a great way to take in the architecture and vibrant street life, can tire you out, making late-night festivities a literal yawn. And if, like me, you don't speak Spanish well, it can seem pointlessly strenuous to wander outside the comfort zone of Palermo.
The rewards, however, are worth the fatigue. At Appetite, I was led around the corner to a warehouse where Mr. Cusnir and the fashion label Maison Trash were rehearsing a production of Mr. Cusnir's art — complete with sand, palm tree and big model helicopter. And in the Pan y Arte restaurant in Boedo, I ate sublime Mendoza-style cuisine — sweet-corn empanadas, lush calabaza casserole and excellent Mendoza malbec wine — in a room full of actors and directors. In each case, I felt as if I'd begun to penetrate that tricky tourist-local barrier.
What's more, I got a sense of the city's size and interconnectedness — it was more than just a few neighborhoods I'd seen in glossy magazines and coffee table books. Soon, it was unsurprising to learn, for example, that the choreographer with the lauded aerial-tango show at Konex was married to the architect who was transforming the downtown post office into a theater.
But whomever I met, wherever I went, I would always return — without much regret — to Palermo, where I would find a whiskey nacional waiting for me at Mundo Bizarro, a Los Angeles-style diner/bar, or a warm ceviche at the quasi-Japanese Dominga. And my new friends would be there, too, sipping Pink Panther cocktails under the arcing wood ceiling of Bar 6 or eating French-ish salads at the pink-painted picnic tables of Oui Oui. Even Zizek made it to Palermo; in December, the party took up residence at Niceto, one of the city's slickest clubs.
Always, though, there would come a time in those Palermo nights when I would suddenly catch myself with the realization that I'd missed Juana Chang's indie rock show or Codigo Pais, a festival of “creative tendencies” that included D.J. sets, art films, experimental technology and a tantalizing “espacio erótico.” But then I would remember: There was always tomorrow night.
Source:
Making the Most of Those Long Argentine Nights (Published 2007)
A visit to a city where energetic visitors can dance electrotango, attend an indie theater and drink a chichi martini with an exquisite cut of grilled meat - all in one night.
By Matt Gross | February 4, 2007 - The New York Times
VERY late one Wednesday night in November, Calle Balcarce was deserted. By day this street in San Telmo — the quintessential “old Buenos Aires” neighborhood — would have hummed with pedestrians enjoying the warmth of late spring, but now the stone and concrete buildings glowed lonely yellow under the street lamps. Even my destination, a club called X Vos, looked abandoned; only a pair of smokers killing time on the sidewalk hinted that anything might be happening inside.
Within the club's brick and black-painted walls, however, a free-for-all was getting under way. The D.J., Villa Diamante, was spinning hip-hop and reggaetón, video graphics swirled faintly on a wall (I caught images from “2001: A Space Odyssey”), and a hundred or so clubgoers in jeans, T-shirts and hoodies were downing cheap beers and whiskey nacional in preparation for the evening's “cumbia experimental,” an electronicized version of a type of folk music popular in the city's villas, or slums.
Soon, the real party — the weekly performance known as Zizek — began. A corn-rowed guy took the stage and, over the cumbia's ch-ch-ch rhythms, began spouting dancehall lyrics in Spanish, while behind him a boy of about 10 carefully strummed chords on a guitar about as long as he was tall. Suddenly a big dude grabbed the microphone and — how do I put this? — squawk-squealed into it for several minutes. The crowd surged every time a singer chanted the refrain “Cumbia-a-a!” No wonder Clarín, Argentina's largest newspaper, had nominated Zizek as one of the best parties of the year — it was awesome.
But Zizek — named for the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who is married to a young Argentine model and once taught at the University of Buenos Aires — was only the finale of a phenomenally busy but typical Wednesday in Argentina's capital.
At midnight, I'd been eating dinner — rich morcilla gnocchi flecked with crunchy Granny Smith apple — with fashion designers and artists at Casa Cruz, an ultrachic restaurant paneled in gleaming mahogany. A few hours earlier, there were cocktails poolside at the Faena Hotel + Universe, designed by Philippe Starck. I'd spent the afternoon gallery hopping, had an espresso at the contemporary Latin American art museum and met the writer Washington Cucurto, Argentina's answer to Dave Eggers, at the workshop where he transforms used cardboard into hand-painted book covers for his independent publishing house, Eloísa Cartonera. And somewhere in there, I'd found time for a quick nap at the enormous bilevel loft I'd rented in the fashionable Recoleta neighborhood.
If this sounds exhausting, it was. But it was also exhilarating, affordable (thanks to the lingering effects of Argentina's economic crisis five years ago) and accessible. In fact, the only difficulty I'd faced in all of this was deciding which of the night's dozens of events to forgo — in the end, I couldn't make it to a friend's party at El Diamante, a Mexican-kitsch tapas restaurant designed by the artist Sergio de Loof.
Such are the challenges vexing any visitor to today's Buenos Aires: electrotango or art opening, design festival or indie theater, a chichi martini and exquisite cut of grilled meat or a simple beer at a grimy bar (followed by an exquisite cut of grilled meat). But since the average Argentine evening extends into the dawn, there's often time — if you have the stamina — to do it all.
Still, any decision process must begin with a fundamental choice — where do you establish home base? For visitors in search of the next cool thing, two options present themselves, Puerto Madero and Palermo.
Puerto Madero, connected to downtown by a quartet of bridges, was once the city's cargo terminal, where trains from the countryside would arrive bearing grain, beef and wine for export. But for more than 20 years, the forces of urban renewal have been at work. Today the long, broad avenues of Puerto Madero bear only a few traces of the neighborhood's industrial past. The gantry cranes that once lifted containers onto ships now stand guard over antiseptic plazas like anime robots; residential skyscrapers front the boardwalk where street venders grill steak sandwiches (and sell them for 4 pesos, about $1.30 at 3.1 pesos to the U.S. dollar); the sign over one construction site boasts Cesar Pelli as its architect; and Los Molinos, a former granary, is expected to anchor a future arts district.
Puerto Madero is also home to many of the city's high-end hotels: a Hilton, a Sofitel and the Faena Hotel + Universe. (Alan Faena is behind much of the multimillion-dollar development in Puerto Madero, and has engaged Norman Foster to do another building.) Once a red-brick warehouse, the Faena is now one of the city's most opulent lodgings, with buttoned-leather sofas, gilt touches, drooping chandeliers and lots and lots of red: carpets, curtains, lampshades, wineglasses — even the crisp bangs fringing the forehead of the Faena's creative director, Ximena Caminos, were tinted crimson. About the only non-red object in sight was the white cowboy hat on the head of Mr. Faena himself.
And yet Puerto Madero, for all its ambitions and big-name architects, remains a bit underpopulated. There is little foot traffic and none of the sense of neighborhood that elsewhere produces great boutiques, funky cafes and top restaurants. Perhaps when all the construction — including a major revamping of the downtown area across the Puente de la Mujer— is complete, Puerto Madero will come into its own. Till then, Faena devotees will probably be taking a lot of 20-peso cab rides to Palermo.
Palermo is without doubt the hippest part of Buenos Aires. Once it was a quiet residential neighborhood whose narrow cobblestone streets were lined with trees and low Spanish-style homes. But in the mid-1990s, artists, designers, architects and film producers took advantage of its affordability to set up shop — a movement that has dramatically accelerated since the 2002 economic crisis. Today, it feels like every boutique is a former bakery, every hotel a former town house and every gallery a former garage. No writer is allowed to describe Palermo without comparing it to SoHo in Manhattan or deploying the adjective “trendy.” (There's even a blog, trendypalermoviejo.blogspot.com.)
Palermo boasts the city's highest concentration of boutique hotels, with what seems like one opening every month, including the Home Hotel, whose Scandinavian furniture and iPod connections enticed George W. Bush's twin daughters to check in to one of its 14 rooms and three suites in November.
But I didn't stay at any of these places. Instead, I turned to ApartmentsBA.com, a rental agency with hundreds of apartments across Buenos Aires, and found an 11th-floor loft in Recoleta, a tony neighborhood midway between Palermo and Puerto Madero. For $600 a week, I had windows that stretched 16 feet to the ceiling, a big soft bed, glitch-free wireless Internet and even concierge services. Outside, glorious belle époque apartment buildings glittered in the warm sun, and jacaranda trees spread over the avenues, their fractal branches ending in inky lavender blooms.
Not too shabby — but still, I spent little time in Recoleta. Soon after my breakfast of medialunas (a type of Argentine croissant) and a cortado (espresso with a little milk) at the sunny cafe across the street, I'd catch a cab to Palermo, where I'd meet a friend for chocolate brioche at Mark's, then go strolling the neighborhood in search of architectural treasures, like an 1877 mansion with stained-glass windows hidden down an alley and supposedly owned by a telenovela star. In between, I could pop into galleries like El Borde, where the mysterious narrow-gauge rail tracks running through the big white space almost distracted me from Arturo Aguiar's lush photos of his artist friends (very much in the style of the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, but maybe I'm just thinking of his Buenos Aires movie, “Happy Together”).
Though Palermo may sound very commercialized — “SoHo-ized” is the term preferred by some — it is at the same time fascinating to see how the neighborhood had reinvented itself in the five years since the crisis. Those rail tracks in El Borde, the word panaderia (bakery) carved in the stone above the window of the fashion boutique Emme, even the warm, clubby atmosphere inside the Nike store's crumbly edifice — all hinted at a past not too far removed, and suggested that Palermo had undergone a relatively organic transformation.
Still, this metamorphosis has had consequences. Real estate is no longer cheap, so artier denizens have moved elsewhere. Belleza y Felicidad, an eclectic art gallery that sells the hand-painted books of Eloísa Cartonera, is in Almagro, a middle-class neighborhood south of Palermo whose cachet increases as it blends at its edges with other neighborhoods like Boedo — home of the up-and-coming neorealist theater scene — and Once, where the Ciudad Cultural Konex theater plays host to modern dance epics.
To find Appetite, an avant-garde gallery that everyone I met recommended, I had to return to one of San Telmo's less atmospheric blocks. Pop-punk exuberance is Appetite's stock in trade, its walls (and floors) are covered in a profusion of styles, from Ariel Cusnir's paintings of idealized tropical islands and Anabella Papa's witty paintings of beautiful, casual violence (schoolboys brawling, a man attacked by a wolf) to a row of blue plastic shopping bags and a paint can frozen in mid-spill atop a table.
Visiting these lesser-known corners takes a bit of effort. Taxis, which at first blush seem so fast and cheap, get caught in unexpected waves of traffic, and the Subte, or subway, so efficient at whisking people to and from the city center, is worthless if you need to go across town. Walking, while a great way to take in the architecture and vibrant street life, can tire you out, making late-night festivities a literal yawn. And if, like me, you don't speak Spanish well, it can seem pointlessly strenuous to wander outside the comfort zone of Palermo.
The rewards, however, are worth the fatigue. At Appetite, I was led around the corner to a warehouse where Mr. Cusnir and the fashion label Maison Trash were rehearsing a production of Mr. Cusnir's art — complete with sand, palm tree and big model helicopter. And in the Pan y Arte restaurant in Boedo, I ate sublime Mendoza-style cuisine — sweet-corn empanadas, lush calabaza casserole and excellent Mendoza malbec wine — in a room full of actors and directors. In each case, I felt as if I'd begun to penetrate that tricky tourist-local barrier.
What's more, I got a sense of the city's size and interconnectedness — it was more than just a few neighborhoods I'd seen in glossy magazines and coffee table books. Soon, it was unsurprising to learn, for example, that the choreographer with the lauded aerial-tango show at Konex was married to the architect who was transforming the downtown post office into a theater.
But whomever I met, wherever I went, I would always return — without much regret — to Palermo, where I would find a whiskey nacional waiting for me at Mundo Bizarro, a Los Angeles-style diner/bar, or a warm ceviche at the quasi-Japanese Dominga. And my new friends would be there, too, sipping Pink Panther cocktails under the arcing wood ceiling of Bar 6 or eating French-ish salads at the pink-painted picnic tables of Oui Oui. Even Zizek made it to Palermo; in December, the party took up residence at Niceto, one of the city's slickest clubs.
Always, though, there would come a time in those Palermo nights when I would suddenly catch myself with the realization that I'd missed Juana Chang's indie rock show or Codigo Pais, a festival of “creative tendencies” that included D.J. sets, art films, experimental technology and a tantalizing “espacio erótico.” But then I would remember: There was always tomorrow night.
