1495  Notes from Buenos Aires 3

Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2003 18:43:33 -0700
From: luda_r1 <luda_r1@YAHOO.COM>
Subject: Notes from Buenos Aires 3

Rick McGarrey wrote:

"... The men and women never sit together, so
offers and acceptances to meet later are often
hurriedly made during the chatting you see going on
between the music, during the first thirty seconds of
the song before dancing begins, or sometimes when the
man walks the woman to the table at the finish of the
tanda. So the rule is enter with greetings, but don't
acknowledge people when leaving."

Sounds positively medieval!!! In this day and age???!!
Give me a break!! And we should maintain these "holy
cows/sacred traditons", that just make people feel
bad, needlessly??? AND IN THIS COUNTRY??!!

"Interestingly, there is an opposite code that applies
on Saturday nights in the neighborhoods. When we
ENTER these clubs Alejandra usually sees friends from
the downtown milongas, but she never acknowledges
them. Why? Because there's a chance they may have
been going into town without the knowledge of husband,
wife, girlfriend, etc."

So is it all back to tango being an illicit endeavor,
in BsAs anyway, with participants being suspected of
all kinds of nefarious activities and motives?

"A couple of other notes that may help tourists
dealing
with the locals at the traditional milongas. Men and
women should never dance two tandas in a row, unless
they are openly romantically involved. To ask for or
accept a second tanda is to presume more than a dance
relationship. Also, dancing a lot of tandas, even if
they are not in a row, raises eyebrows for couples who
are not intimately involved."

Talk about medieval...

"As you can see from the above short discussion, the
rules of the game are many and varied, some codes are
not always uniformly applied, and some are actually
secret. Things have been written about the codes, but
no one has written everything. If they did, they
probably couldn't dance in the milongas again."

Again, I ask, is this what we're supposed to emulate
here in the good ole' USofA????? CALIFORNIA in
particular???!!! No thanks.

Luda

Luda


=====

Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2003 16:33:04 -0700
From: Rick McGarrey <rickmcg@FLASH.NET>
Subject: Notes from Buenos Aires

The Notes from Buenos Aires series that was posted on tango-L this summer is
now on the Tango and Chaos website. You can find the site by searching for
tango and chaos at Google.com (or any other Internet search engine).

The website has two pages. The first is I. Reports from the heart of tango
2003 which contains the 27 Reports from BsAs- and a new one called Back in
the USA . You can find it by scrolling down to report #19. This new report has
a place where you can click and hear the difference between tango cadence and
vals cadence, as well as a couple of strong opinions on U.S. tango- which are
probably better left off of tango L. The site also still contains the Tango
and Chaos reports from 2001. Click on II Tango, Chaos and Revolution 2001
to read them. [The new image on the main page is a very good picture of how
things looked downtown on December 20, 2001]

Alejandra and I will be back in Buenos Aires in a few weeks to attend a
wedding, and to travel to Mendoza where I will try to ride my bike over the
Cordillera de los Andes, and across Chile to the Pacific Ocean (What's more
powerful than a bad idea whose time has come?). Anyway, if it happens, there
should be a couple of stories in it. So reports on bicycling the Andes may be
on the way, along with stories about meeting with the mayor of Avellaneda (he
apparently liked the stories about his city), and of course tango, (in BsAs,
Mendoza, and Santiago de Chile this trip). This time instead of monopolizing
tango L, we'll probably just post the reports directly to the website and then
put a notice on the list. If you like the stories, you might check the website
periodically, because I plan to add new material from time to time. And I also
may add an alphabetical index to the clubs we visited in suburban BsAs,
Cordoba, Salta, Uruguay (and soon, Chile) so that anyone going south who wants
to explore some of the more out of the way places can read a little about them.
Suggestions are welcome.

Abrazos,
Alejandra Todaro
Rick McGarrey