We'll See

But this time my vision is a little blurry.

Buki the Bukmeister Bukiri Buk Buk

Dude, those were some intense five days. That's what happens when your friend visits you in Buenos Aires and stays for only four nights.

Besides being able to see my friend again, I finally went to San Telmo for the Sunday fair. That's where I started talking to this one señor that was playing the guitar. His name is Juan Carlos Balvidares. Aparently, he is the number one traveler of Argentina and he "takes the patriotic colors as he travels through Argentina at a pace of 50Km per day. He is the author of milongas, zambas, vals and chacareras... poet by experience." He hangs out in the Flores, Recoleta and San Telmo neighborhoods.

This 75 year old man was legit, not like the person impersonating Gardel (a famous tango singer) down the street. He even signed the cd I bought and he asked me who I wanted it dedicated to. There was a time I would have dedicated it to someone else, but this time it was for "mi querida mamá, con todo cariño, tu hijo Issac, que tanto te ama."

I took the oportunity to send back some stuff with my friend. So now I don't have my flamenco guitar nor my djembe anymore. But at least I have the djembe sampled so I can make virtual beats.

Clotheshanger Stereo Microphone

Since I'm going to return my electronic tools I finally decided to make the stereo mic I meant to make a while back. It doesn't have the fancy preamp that I wanted to add to the capsuls, but the original setup works fine. To record my flamenco guitar I used a clotheshangar to hold up the two mics and position one in front of the "golpeador" and the other in front of the fretboard. Oh, and my djembe came in handy as a stand. And if you are wondering why there's a sleeping bag hanging in the corner, well its to drown out the reflections from that corner. Another interesting thing to note is that when I started to work on the video and audio recordings, the noisy saturated audio from my camera is a good reverb for the close-up stereo track of my new stereo mic.

Also, I'm almost done building my very own guitar. I'm trying to finish it faster now so that its ready by the time my sister leaves so she can take it home with her. My hand is cramping up now after a 12hour work day. I have to wake up in four hours to meet my friend Bukzilla at the airport!

Arruinarse

This video does a fantastic job of expressing how I've been feeling inside the last months:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=lB67ebNlH-s

The group is a Buenos Aires rock band called Tan Biónica. But like an Argentinian would say to me "dejate de joder la puta que lo pario."

In other completely unrelated news, mi amiga just got the Watson Fellowship. I've kept in touch with her so I think she has a pretty good idea of what she's gotten herself into :-)

You never know

First, let me say that last weekend I went to Mar del Plata with my "host family." It was awesome, I missed the beach! We lucked out because the last two weeks it had been raining but then we got perfect weather.

Something that overshadows this weekend trip is hearing that http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7286435.stm
we actually saw the train on our way back to BsAs. The scarier part is that next month I'm going to be traveling from city to city by overnight buses like the one that got wrecked by the train, so you never know...

That was intense

Last night I went to watch Calle 13 at Luna Park in centro BsAs. The show was awesome and there was tons of adrenaline in the crowd. I heart standing room only shows more than seated. It was missing someting, though, that Cafe Tacvba show had...the connection with the band. That and the fact that I had to keep my hand on my wallet the whole time because there were people that just walked around the pit stealing. I sacrificed my cell phone at the concert because it either just happened to fall out of my backpack's side pocket or someone stole it. Oh well, it only had $10 credit, but the real hurt was in the enjoyment of the show.

I did appreciate how Residente dedicated all his hateful songs to Bush which fueled the anti-american atmosphere. Another cool thing was seeing Visitante using Ableton Live to run the show...on the ride back to my apartment I was thinking about how all the songs seemed to have the same BPM (at least different from the CD versions) and thought that it might have something to do with them using Ableton. The sweet part was still that they brought a live band with them and not just a cd player.

Other highlights were a drum group for the song Pal Norte and Bajofondo Tango Club violinist and bandoneonist for Tango del Infierno.

At the end of the show as everyone was leaving a huge fight broke out in the middle of the pit (where I was) when one guy was caught stealing. After years of going to rock shows in California I'd never seen something like this. After moving away from the action, I started a useless search for my cell phone. Still, in accordance with the governing laws of the yin and the yang, I may have lost my phone but at least I caught the right colectivo immediately instead of the usual hour wait at 2am.

Oh and funny thing is that the opening band was Emmanuel Horvilleur, whose music video (here) I had seen when I arrived in Argentina and thought (to be pc) that he was a bit extravagant.

PS: here's a dude back in the US mixing psychology and andean music: http://www.doctorsiles.com/index.html