Bicycle Diaries

by David Byrne

  Buenos Aires is far enough south to be in the temperate zone, which separates this city, and Santiago, in Chile, just across the Andes, from their tropical neighbors just to the north. There are huge psychological separations too—the Argentines tend to see themselves as more European, and by inference, as more sophisticated, than their Brazilian neighbors. Naturally, ahem, musicians and other creative types don’t carry this snobbish attitude around, but in general it is felt and seen in the architecture, cuisine, and clothing.

  Though both southern Brazil and Argentina were settled by successive waves of Italians and Germans, among others, the Argentines probably deny that there are also African elements that make up their culture, while in Brazil to the north those elements are still strong and visible and the Brazilians are proud, sometimes, of their African blood and culture. In Argentina the Africans all but vanished, but in truth their influence remains, camouflaged and denied, but intact.

  Built on the floodplain of La Plata River, the city is fairly flat, and with the temperate weather and the streets more or less on a grid it is perfect for cycling around. Despite this I could count on one hand the number of locals I saw on bikes. Why? Would I inevitably find out the reason no one else was pedaling around here? Was there some dark secret explanation about to pounce on me? Am I a naive fool? Is it because the driving is so reckless, the theft so rampant, the gas so cheap, and a car such a necessary symbol of status? Is it so uncool to ride a bike here that even messengers find other ways of getting around?

  I don’t think it is any of those reasons. I think the idea of cycling is simply off the radar here. The cycling meme hasn’t been dropped into the mix, or it never took hold. I am inclined to agree with Jared Diamond, who claims in his book Collapse that people develop cultural affinities for certain foods, ways of getting around, clothes, and habits of being that become so ingrained that they will, in his telling, persist in maintaining their habits even to the point of driving themselves and sometimes their whole civilization to extinction. He gives a lot of historical evidence—for example, an eleventh-century Norse settlement in Greenland where the settlers persisted in farming cattle, as impractical as it was there. The cuisine or habits of the local Inuit were never adopted or adapted—their diet and ways were just not culturally acceptable—and eventually the settlers all died. This was not a quick settlement either—it lasted for over four hundred years—long enough for them to convince themselves that they were doing okay. Of course, in the era of total reliance on fossil fuels and global warming, Diamond’s history lessons have a scary resonance. So, while we would like to think that people can’t really be so stupid as to wipe themselves out—with the means of survival right in front of them—they can, and they certainly do.

  I’m not saying cycling is a matter of survival—though it might be part of how we survive in the future—but here in Buenos Aires it seems so much a commonsense way of getting around that cultural abhorrence is the only explanation I can come up with as to why there are no other cyclists on the streets. My cycling is considered so unusual here that it is newsworthy—it is written up in the local papers.

  I mainly visit this city when I am performing, though I arrange my schedule in order to have time to look around. Over the years I have become slightly familiar with some of the music and musicians here. They are some of my favorites in the world, as is this city.

  Talk Backward

  In the morning I decide to bike out to Tierra Santa (the Holy Land) in hopes of some photo opportunities. It’s a theme park located close to the river out past the domestic airport that advertises “a day in Jerusalem in Buenos Aires.” I find that it is closed today, but from outside the gate I can see “Calvary” with its three crosses poking out of the top of an artificial desert hill. I won’t get the ironic shots I might have hoped for, but the ride out was nice—from my hotel I passed through grand parks filled with professional dog walkers (none had fewer than five dogs) and then rode along a promenade that borders the river, which is so wide here that you can’t see the opposite shore—one would think it is a still ocean or a giant lake.

  Fishermen lean on the railing. There are kiosks at regular intervals that grill meats for truck drivers and others who want a quick lunch. Bags of charcoal piled by the sides of the kiosks will supply the heat to grill blood sausages, steaks, hamburgers, and various other cuts of the legendary Argentine flesh that sizzles during the early part of the day in anticipation of the lunch crowd. Many of the kiosks advertise choripan, a conjunction of chorizo (sausage) and pan (bread). There’s another offering called vaciopan, which literally means empty sandwich, but it also is a cut off the cow. This is not a place for vegetarians.

  The slang here, called lunfardo, is many-layered and inventive. There’s even a genre of slang called vesre when you reverse the syllables—vesre is reves (reverse) with the syllables reversed. Tango becomes gotán and café con leche becomes feca con chele. Sometimes this is compounded and complicated even further when a euphemism for something—a word for marijuana or one’s wife—is pronounced backward, adding yet another layer of obscurity to a slang that already approaches a separate language.

  Bobo

  My lovely hotel in the Palermo district is named after the book Bobos in Paradise, a humorous essay by the North American writer David Brooks about the gentrification and commercialization of bohemian culture, which makes it a confusing name for this hotel, as it and this neighborhood are prime examples of that process. The word also means “fool” in many languages. It is as if the Tribeca Grand had a name that poked fun at the fact that it’s located in a gentrified, arty neighborhood. This hotel is located on Guatemala Street, between Jorge Luis Borges and Thames streets—the street names alone say a lot about the cultural makeup of this town, with its mixture of Latin American and European references. It reminds me of how street and town names not only commemorate dates and well-loved (by some) politicians (LaGuardia Place and the FDR drive here in New York, 9 de Julio and Avenida de Mayo here) but also express a conscious mythmaking and cultural longing—a longing for connection, historical continuity, and status. The hundreds of little U.S. towns named Paris or Madrid, the cluster of historical Greek towns in upstate New York, the New London, New Jersey, and New Orleans, Venice Boulevard—how a people see themselves, or how previous generations saw themselves, is embedded in these names. At a glance one can sense how the past is perceived—what people wish their history to be and what is intentionally omitted.

  Mauro, who plays percussion with me, said, with a disappointed tone, that he felt Santiago, where we were earlier on this trip, was very much an “American” city (meaning North American). I can see what he means: it’s pretty, it’s clean, and there are lots and lots of glass office buildings and little of the messy character, charm, or funk of Mauro’s native Brazil. Mauro pointed out that Chile was one of the only countries that didn’t have slavery. What he might have been implying was that it was the Africans who give South American culture much of its character. Being Brazilian, he would say that. Certainly much of the unique music on this continent, and subsequently of many others these days, is a hybrid of European, indigenous, and African styles. It has been argued that even tango has some African in its family tree. Though musical roots and influences are not so hard to hear, at least to me, cultural influences extend in deeper and subtler ways—in grammar and syntax, in humor, in attitudes toward the body and sex—that are harder to tease apart from every other influence. The past is part of the weave, but often we see mainly the overall surface pattern.

  Last night a small group of us were joined at dinner by Ignacio Varchausky from the local tango Orquesta El Arranque. He mentioned that numerous groups these days are trying the tango/ electronic fusion, but to his mind none of them have succeeded yet—not that he doesn’t think it’s a worthwhile goal. Unlike lots of tangueros here, who tend to be fairly protective and conservative, he and the other members of El Arranque are open to col laborations and to new appr
oaches, both from that music’s past and from other foreign styles. Lately, the band members have unearthed old (1940s) handwritten tango orchestra arrangements, and some of them are surprisingly radical, he says. The orchestrations became more smoothed out since then, more conservative, and these older, wilder approaches were often swept under history’s rug and forgotten. They’re in the middle of completing a CD on which older tango masters, those who are still living, join them and play with the younger guys. He says this is unusual because tango is not a very collaborative or open scene.

  Later that night I run into Nito, a member of the local band Los Autenticos Decadentes. They are a large band that came up in the ’80s along with Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. (As one might imagine, the Cadillacs name is meant both ironically and sincerely; here one can love North American pop culture and distance oneself from it at the same time.) Both bands were initially inspired by the Two Tone bands in the UK and the ska scene there (Madness, the Specials, Selector), as were No Doubt and many other bands around the world. Those short-lived UK bands have more bastard children than is often acknowledged. Both of these Argentine bands rapidly evolved and began to incorporate local influences. Los Decadentes fell in love with regional popular styles—working-class dance music and murga, a kind of carnival music—to which they added contemporary lyrics, while Los Fabulosos Cadillacs incorporated more Afro Uruguayan and tango sounds and rhythms.

  Nito and I had crossed paths years ago in New York City when Los Decadentes performed at a disco and I lent them an accordion. Back then the band was viewed by locals here in Buenos Aires as a kind of theatrical comedy band—a bunch of rowdy goofballs, which they more or less were at first. Musically, they weren’t taken seriously, though soon enough they learned to play, stay in tune, and write amazingly catchy songs in a variety of rootsy and popular genres—if you include disco anthems as roots music, and I do, since disco pop is heard in bars everywhere alongside rancheras and cumbias. They soon had hits and became fairly popular.

  I ran into Nito in Mexico City after a show I did there, and he amazed the Mexicans with his knowledge of narco corridos, the ballads sung in the north of that country that glamorize the exploits of drug dealers and traffickers. One could draw a parallel in contemporary rap lyrics with, for example, Ghostface Kil lah’s song “Kilo,” but these Mexican songs are performed with accordions and guitars. Nito knew the words to all of them. Now, here in BA, he’s handed me a pile of CDs of Argentine and Paraguayan cumbia bands. I didn’t know such bands existed in those countries (those rhythms are usually identified with Colombia or Mexico, not with these countries farther south). There’s even a bachata band here, something I thought only existed on the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo. He says Paraguay is the Jamaica of South America, though what he means by that is slightly unclear. He’s not referring to the dope. I think he believes they’ve evolved an original slant on music and have a voracious appetite for whatever they hear, from wherever. Their own popular music incorporates and absorbs a lot of music they hear, but they process it and give it their own twist, and it’s hugely influential—at a grassroots level. The music these Paraguayan bands play is not sophisticated in the accepted sense. It’s trashy music for the two D’s—dancing and drinking—but as often happens these outsiders—the musicians from Buenos Aires—are recuperating this low-class music and re-presenting it to a new audience, the way the British appropriated U.S. blues and Detroit techno and sold it back to the United States.

  Nito attempts to tell me what the various cumbia CDs he gave me represent. He says, “The words are deep, important, like Leonard Cohen.” Somehow I doubt that it is the appropriate analogy, as this musical style is usually the favorite of poor people, and it reflects their concerns, as rap did at one time in North America. But I can see what he means. There is deep poetry here, in the way we think of blues as being deeply poetic, within its self-imposed structural and verbal parameters. Others might claim that Tupac or Biggie Smalls were likewise unacknowledged deep poets working within the parameters of vernacular speech and phrasing.

  Nito said that rock and roll is now viewed as the music of the big companies, as it emanates from the large, usually northern, wealthy countries, and therefore it is no longer considered to be the voice of the people—not even of the people where it comes from. I have to agree that seen from here, contemporary rock is the product of foreign, often North American, multinationals. Their marketing muscle has made it bland, predictable, and ubiquitous. It’s a corporate product that is (or was) being exported. No matter what or who the artist may be, no matter how well-intentioned someone like me might think he is, our music, when it is sold here, is invariably tainted by who is selling it and where it comes from. That said, international “rock” was an important part of the musical diet for a generation here. It’s in everyone’s blood. It’s a lingua franca, even if places like Argentina, far from the northern “source” of rock, no longer look to the north for musical news and inspiration.

  Oddly enough, when I first played here it was with a large Latin band, which must have been a bit of a shock to those expecting to hear “Psycho Killer.” We did a lot of salsa, cumbia, and sambas. I did do “Psycho Killer,” but with two berimbaus—a Brazilian one-stringed “rhythm” instrument that is usually associated with the martial art/dance capoeira. I was a little shocked when I played that concert. I thought for sure the various grooves and flavors of Latin music would all be familiar here, even if the current generation didn’t play them, but they weren’t. I was under the mistaken impression that those infectious Latin rhythms I hear all over New York City would be familiar all over South America. Boy was I wrong. Although there are a few—a very few—Latin American artists whose appeal extends across the whole continent (and often to Europe as well) most of the regional styles have, well, regional audiences. There’s a salsa, cumbia, bachata, and reggaeton audience that encompasses the Caribbean basin along with immigrants from there who have settled in New York, but except for a couple of artists, that music, which was for decades a strong part of New York’s musical landscape, didn’t penetrate south of the equator.

  So it turned out in a small way that Mr. Psycho Killer was bringing salsa and samba to Buenos Aires! I imagined I would be bringing coals to Newcastle (or “sand to the beach,” as the Brazilians would say). I imagined I had made a big effort to import something that was already familiar or available in copious quantities, but it seems the world is not as simple as that.

  Now many of the bands here have increasingly incorporated local grooves and styles into what was once essentially a version, however creative, of northern rock. This, some think, may limit their international audience (though I tend to think the reverse is true). Nito says that he is content knowing that their band may never be “international.” He’s proud that they represent the culture and identity of this region, which he knows may limit them commercially but he feels is right and proper.

  Día de los Niños

  The next day during the afternoon I ride my bicycle out to a park where I notice that there is a “shrine” that consists of a small statue of a saint, and around him offerings of plastic bottles of water—hundreds of them—all over the place. At first glance, if one didn’t know better, it almost looks like a recycling depot. But this has that distinctive, unmistakable appearance of a deliberate human act. An act of faith, a process that has created a nexus of desire and magic. The bottles have a purposeful look, not the look of a heap of rubbish. These everyday objects have been ordered and activated, given power and significance, and charged with hopes and longing. Even if one doesn’t believe, one can sense that a creative and spiritual act has taken place. A transference of will from inside to outside. I take a few photos and then pedal on.

  A Village of the Dead

  I continue to ride around town. Some of the larger multilaned boulevards are bike challenging, so sometimes I opt for the side streets. Since each neighborhood is more or less on a grid it’s not that hard to
figure out how to navigate this city. Sometimes I can even move from neighborhood to neighborhood and stay almost exclusively within elongated parks or along the riverfront promenade.

  I pass through Recoleta. It’s a little like the Upper East Side in Manhattan or the Sixteenth Arrondissement in Paris: elegant, older, European-style apartment buildings with ornate carvings; well-off patricians, mostly older women and gentlemen; fancy clothing boutiques; and upscale restaurants. Here is the cemetery where Evita is buried. The graves in the cemetery are mostly aboveground, as they are in New Orleans, but with a huge difference: these are big, ostentatious tombs—they could be the tombs of kings and queens. The caskets and their inhabitants are even visible through the glass doors of many of these “little palaces.” For that’s exactly what these are—big houses. This place is a neighborhood, a barrio, exclusively for the dead. A whole city, a necropolis. In many of the “homes” one can also see stairs going down into semidarkness where I can just make out more shelves holding more inhabitants. This is where I presume the previous generation “lives.”

  In another necropolis—la Chacarita—there is the grave of Carlos Gardel, the famous tango artist who died in a plane crash. The tomb is covered in plaques commemorating his influential work and inspiring example.

  There are long avenues of “buildings” in varied architectural styles—art deco, classic Greco-Roman, gothic, modern—block after block, an entire metropolis just for the dead, built on a slightly reduced scale from the real city outside the high walls that surround the cemetery. A few men sweep and clean away dead flowers, while a few visitors wander aimlessly, and a few bring fresh flowers.