Cumbia, Tango, Manu Chao, and a Drumline

La Mona Jimenez is to Argentine cumbia what James Brown is to funk - so they say. Wednesday night I went to Luna Park for the first time(where Evita is fabled to have met Juan Peron) and witnessed the man, the myth, in action.


Luna Park is a stadium venue and it was full of sweaty folks dancing, jumping and yelling for La Mona. La Mona is a man in his fifties who struts his way across the stage accompanied by a band of over ten musicians including horns, drums, bass, guitar, percussion, and accordion. His name is a play on el mono - Spanish for "the monkey." He's pretty wild looking; with a mane that looked like a Geri-curl and three costume changes - each of them more Captain Eo than the next. La Mona did have some soul happening, despite the cumbia/quarteto strut, but I saw more Neil Diamond going on than James Brown. This photo is pure Ricardo Simmons:

La Mona put on a great show with special guests, crowd surfing, dancing with chicas from the crowd, TV cameras and all. The show gave me new insight as to how Ricky Martin stays popular as a mainstream sex symbol in Argentina - the whole show wasn't very hetero and the audience ate it up. The crowd was great - mostly on the grimier side and singing along and dancing with La Mona. Outside of Palermo you see the plebian side of this city and it's cool. The crowd didn't feel unlike that of a soccer game at the Sports Arena in South Central LA. (For more La Mona coverage peep me at www.argentinastravel.com)

Friday night La Chicana played at El Tasso. It was a gorgeous, dinner theater set up at a tango venue where the band plays when its not on tour. They're my favorite - a live, modern, female-fronted tango band. Dolores sings and her husband plays fancy acoustic guitar. They're accompanied by accordion, percussion, violin, and bass. The singer is in her mid-forties, gorgeous, and sounds great. The couple have excellent chemistry on stage - she's saucy and smart and he's smitten and sarcastic. The lyrics tell stories of love, life, and struggle with a nostalgic tone. There's even a tango written for their dogs.

There was a rumor that Manu Chao was going to play a free concert near San Telmo. We made our way to the spot - a psychiatric hospital on the industrial side of the town center. We walked back past the main ward and other buildings to an outdoor ampitheater and smaller buildings that resembled summer camp. There was Manu surrounded by patients - doing a live radio broadcast with the inhabitants of the compound. It was a big turnout full of dreadlocks and super Manu fans as well as residents of the hospital. It went on for hours while patients performed spoken word, sang songs, performed stand-up, and freestyled. Manu played between bits. The show culminated in a video with a full band including horns and percussion. It was an inspiring show and the rain held off just until it was finished.
We made our way back to San Telmo and caught a parade of drumlines and dancers two blocks from our house, all along the park. There were drumlines/marching bands representing different neighborhoods with dancers in costume and off the street. I finally got to see some indigenous drums and dancers up close and enjoy the local flavor.


Snoop Dogg and B-Real of Cypress Hill were here for Personal Fest, Buenos Aires' Coachella (not even close but not a bad festival for a place where you have to use a match to light your stove). Snoop made it happen and made me so proud! His Uncle Junebug was the other star of the show, dancing his way down the outdoor stage runway, so fresh.

Tego Calderon played too and I got to have an NYC reggaeton moment. His dancers were hotter than Uncle Junebug and you wouldn't know if from the pic but that's saying something, yo. For more on the show and the rest of the musical happenings click: www.argentinastravel.com and scroll through this past week. Peep the Argentinas Travel Guide for the low down on the city - beyond personal thoughts and cat photos!

This weekend is the house warming party - I'll try to get plenty of pix for you folks. Next up is a retrospect of the visit and shows in NYC...

Cobblestones for City Streets

It's a beautiful sunny day in old town, Buenos Aires where we now live. Max calls San Telmo the "real Argentina." Since we're a couple blocks away from the plaza that's the touristy part even, our neighborhood feels pretty legit. So far I've found some empanada spots, my favorite local graff artist (www.elodio.tk), and a gorgeous venue to dance or watch Tango with live bands (looks like an old school nightclub - like where Ricky played in I Love Lucy).

Kasha has found a spot on our balcony to eat cat grass and watch noisy traffic rumble by. Buenos Aires is rated the fourth noisiest city in the world - in Palermo you'd never know. Here it's much more city.
Here's her view from the balcony:

A view of our building on Brasil street:
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We're in a two bedroom apartment with a loft. From the style I'm guessing it was built between 1900 and 1930 (the loft is kinda new though). The entryway and elevator are cool.
The apartment has french doors throughout and high ceilings and wood floors. It has a servants quarters off the kitchen with a loft too. I'm feeling the bathtub.


We're still moving stuff over from the old apartment. We've been moving for two weeks - they do things at a slower pace here. I'm trying to adjust - so far I find the inaction kind of depressing but I figure I'll get used to it. New York City to Buenos Aires is a big stretch.
(Or not - this isn't too different than the East Village in some ways.)

We've been acquiring furniture and getting rid of stuff - this is a bigger space and was built before cupboards and closets really. We've been armoire shopping which is fun. Weekends there's an antiques fair and the shops are full of vintage to archaic. Our friend found this armoire and painted it nice.


We had a traveler staying with us and this is me hooking up her bed with new sheets. It was fun playing bed and breakfast.
Max got tired of bugging his eyeballs out in photos and has switched to cheek biting.


Friends from LA were in town on business - their zine assignment was to eat their way through Buenos Aires. We thought we should join them. The last day they made it to San Telmo (thanks to Ryan for the photos):


Argentine version of a pimped ride:


Today we came back from seeing Manu Chao play a free show at a psych ward (more blog later) and there was a parade of drum lines and dancers down the street. We joined the crowd for a minute and danced our way home, loving San Telmo.

Monkey Man out of Chile

Okay, this has little to do with Buenos Aires but it's mad contagious - and it's Chilean, not too far off. Straight out of Santiago is an artist I know from NYC. Sebastian paints on skateboards and apparantly makes sick music. His band is Los Mono and Kanye West is blogging about them. It's a small blog world.

Apartment Hunting

We found some great apartments - one was here.

We'll lock down our new home this next week and I'll let you know what happens. San Telmo is the old city with cobblestones and antique shops.

Sleeping and Meeting Babies

I may be catching up on the sleep I've missed my entire life. Is it normal to sleep so much when you are relatively happy? This month I don't have any nightlife crowd shots or smiling, beverage-in-hand pics. Besides sleep and watching the Hallmark channel in Buenos Aires, I've hung out in family settings with kids and ate large meals and relaxed a lot on couches. I'm thinking this is what well-adjusted people spend time doing.

Maxi's new neice and four-year-old nephew.

This is okay as a novelty but not sure I can hold out sitting so much. I'm hoping there's another segment to this settling down thing. We're hunting for an apartment which is more my speed. Think I need to turn up the volume - maybe if there was some kind of sunshine going on - it's overcast here in sunny South America. The city generally has a lot of Naples, Italy going on but lately it's doing its best imitation of London.


This month I made a trip to LA which included one funeral and three visits to the dentists. Despite those, I got to enjoy some quality time with friends and family - even some good times with family in there between the neurotic moments.

Mindy and Mom in Malibu

Len-dog with Maria and Hayden

Aunt Rita with granddaughter Laila (Len-dog is jealous)

Brandon and web wings. Carmen and Maxi have the same eyeball fixation.


Aww yeah, I'm the jewish godmother!
mommies and babies are beautiful




Okay, I did go out a little bit - forgot - just over to the Standard and Chinatown.
Crowds and cocktails.


Richard Ray - there is no other Hollyhood


Remember "where's waldo?" Can you find Dr. Oop and Loco in the crowd?

And Max and I went to a big show before I left - something sponsored by soda.

Mataplantas played at "Pepsi Music"

Max and Mataplantas



Argentina's star emcee - Dante. He's also the son of the most successful rock artist of the past few decades. Even the stars, and children of stars are nice here. It's an amazing culture.