8 - may 01

La Nazionale Italiana is a club which was established in 1861 at Alsina y San Josè, barrio de Montserrat, in the city's downtown. This solid building gives a neoclassic touch to a district which otherwise would be entirely devoted to the wholesale trading of textile fabrics; it actually houses a self-sufficient registry office, a typical trattoria (the cappellettini al doble tuco plus a glass of Mendoza's Chanti will cost you $3) and a dance hall with piso pinotea, arañas and a small bandstand. Even though you won't roll in luxury, the place is not completely unworthy of the social gathering that appears to be the most important event in the season: the reopening of La Nacional. Exactly fortyfive years after the facts that Juan Luis Borges has related in the TQR first three issues, and in compliance with the green carnation's axiom according to which it's Life that imitates Art, the tout Buenos Aires Milonguero, from Abalos way down to Ziegler, is expected to show up the next 9th of May, midnight sharp. A few surprise performances and the Orquesta Nacional's debut will gladden the night. Despite the Direction still mantains strict silence about the name of the T-jay, there is a rumour about Federico from the Salòn Canning. Our reporter El Moplo, who is among us again after his Californian tour, will reach the spot in advance and describe the spectacular inauguration in detail for our readers exclusively.

Tango for import

Arde Paris! – La tercera invasiòn tanguera: una multitud de tangueros argentinos desfilarà en las pròximas cuatro semanas por la capital francesa, en un maratòn de recitales y actividades organizadas en conjunto por una serie de organismos estatales. Para el Secretario de Turismo, Hernàn Lombardi, el festival es parte de una estrategia mucho màs amplia, en que viene trabajando afanosamente, bajo la certeza de que Argentina es una marca que puede ser vendida a travès de la cultura. El razonamiento central al respecto parte de la realidad de que hay en el mundo una nueva clase de turistas, que no sòlo busca paisajes hermosos, sino tambièn actividades concretas que realizar en esos paisajes. Hay quienes buscan hacer deporte, ecoaventura o consumir cultura cuando salen de vacaciones. El Secretario ve claro que Argentina puede elevar en 30 mil la cantidad de visitantes galos, si sabe como atraerlos. Para Lombardi, la fusiòn de la marca Argentina con la marca Tango puede ser un disparador poderoso de viajes de franceses al paìs de la Patagonia.

The State-controlled Tango

Produced by the BAM-Buenos Aires Mùsica, merchandized by the institutions, and promoted by a media coverage without precedent (we are sorry to notice that even the Pagina/12's critic Julio Nudler got mixed up with it), two scholastic records go about town smoothly. If at one hand "De Contrapunto" by the Orchestra Escuela de Tango, founded and directed by the great Emilio Balcarce, is the good performance of a Tango training ship that has been sailing around the big bands' styles for one year, on the other "Cabulero" by El Arranque reaffirms its Calò without background noises sound (and, what's worse, without Maximo Mori at the bandoneòn), with the same smug smile of an eskimo who can at last make himself a fridge. Straining after my grandmother's likes, "Cabulero" pretends nothing happened and wipes out five decades of Tango music. We agree that, as Borges used to say, anachronism can be an artistic genre in itself, but its intentional handling is something different from its sad perpetration. Anyway, we will go into the matter on the TQR's next issue.
In the meanwhile, for whoever would like to audition for the Escuela de Tango two or three orchestras, here are the phone numbers.

The pedal library

The Argentines are avid readers: so we are not surprised to see that the bookstands at the Feria del Libro de Buenos Aires, even if prompted by the shopping most updated standards, have all been provided with suspicious salesmen and inexpugnable alarm systems. On the contrary, the Cuban stand can still give us a touching moment: the books here seem to belong to the romantic pedal library that Luciano Bianciardi invented and ran along in the postwar Grosseto provinces. To start with, their worn-out look suggests many former users - the Macedonio Fernandez's dream finally comes true: you buy a book that's not only already read, but also already returned back from the guy you had lent it to; then, their stowage in bulk, a granel as we use to say: poetry, gastronomy, metaphysics, Josè Martì's works, Alexandre Dumas' novels, proletarian aerobics, bolero's history , experimental pharmacology, mathematics, hypnotism, etc., go together according to the Three Materialistic Stooges' merry systematics; and eventually their fair price. For the tidy sum of $3, your correspondent has purchased "El zapparracho aquel de la calle Merulana" and "The 100 revolutionary cocktails". We are curious to find out how the Commissario Ingravallo's roman-abruzzian accent will sound in cuban, and how the Fidel Eggnog and the Usa Libre will taste in english. We'll let you know asap.

The Tangueros Quarterly Review n.3

The ice-cold Pampero of last week has certainly made a mess of our traditional twentyniners ñoquis, but it has not stopped us from publishing The Tangueros Quarterly Review third issue on-line. As previously announced, these are the contents:

Autumn sprouts

Speaking of auditions, when we were about going to press, a dispatch came from Nueva Compania Tangueros: the NCT new dancers are Ezequiel Paludi y Sabrina Masso and Mariano Suazo y Silvia Vaccaro. Since the audition was full, with over 90 Tango pairs who enrolled in, the decision has not been easy.
That's all, at the moment. We'll go into details on the next newsletter.