I lied.  For this Post is NOT about Jujuy, sino about something I didn't mention in the last blog, but have done since going to Cordoba.

Last Sunday I went to a concert.  The act that got top billing at this event was Molotov… a Mexican rap/rock band that you’ll have heard if you’ve ever seen the movie Amores Perros.  They’re fucking good, and it was totally worth waiting through four hours of lesser (Argentine) bands on a cold day to hear them. And Tito, one of the members, was wearing a black leather jacket over a blue hoodie with the hood up.  When I get a leather jacket, I'm gonna do that so I can be like Tito.

Their lyrics are always great, too. Pure poetry. Here, look:

Vamos a hacerte el paro haciendo un disco no muy caro
Venimos decididos a quedarnos con tu varo
Vender miles de albums a los fresas we just wanna
Rayarles sus ropitas y quedarnos con su lana
Encarreraderazos de bajada y sin frenos
Somos los feos y malos somos amigos del bueno

Somos los que en la playa chingan los planes chingones.

Somos los superchilangos entre tú y tus vacaciones, GÜEY!!!!

They rap in English too!!:

Now if you´re hungry for some bologna
and you got some buns that you wanna show me
Open up wide you can eat
this Oscar Mayer that’s really bony
I want to get down into your juju bees
and I think I’m gonna flick ’em
Your titties are smellin’ like chocolate chip ice cream
An’ I think I wanna lick ’em.
I got some hot beef wit that rump roast
but you gotta say please
I'll dig into that thigh everytime
but hold the cottage cheese
And for dessert we can do the works
I’ll put my whip cream in your pie hole
and don’t flinch when you feel a pinch on that
pretty litlle taco.
Cuz I’ve tried to pry
a bearded clam that would not budge
so I went around the corner to keep on trying

…
and I got a little fudge.
Changüich* a, changüich a
Changüich a la chichona
Changüich a, changüich a
Changüich a la chichona!!

Don’t call me gringo you fuckin’ beaner

Stay on your side of that goddamn river

Don’t call me a grinnngo, you beaner.

No me llames beaner, Mr. Puñetero

Te sacaré un susto por racista y culero

No me llames frijolero, pinche gringo puñetero.

I bought two of their CD’s at the concert: ¿Dónde jugarán las niñas? and Dance & Dense Denso.  Haven’t stopped listening to them since.  Everybody should listen to Molotov. 

* “Changüich” is how Mexicans say “sandwich,” you see.  “Chichona” means “stacked young woman”, in this case. 

I sure wish I had something to write about. Yo, I promised you all a blog about Argentina. I little thought Argentina would provide so little material.

No. Just kidding. I haven’t had a bad trip here, either as that statement will be understood by a general readership, or in the sense that a user of hallucinogens would understand it. (Truthfully, in the latter sense, I haven’t taken any trip at all. That day will come.) Actually I haven't had a single solitary boring day here. It’s just hard to convey what’s so great about a place to people who aren’t seeing it. Sigh. OK, I shall try.

Here we go: I went to Córdoba province, you guys. With the group, you know, ‘cuz I’ve been too lazy to organize any of my own trips so far. THAT was cool. I can’t remember ever having had a more relaxing weekend. We were all out in a resort on the Sierra, with more horses living in the vicinity than people. I rode one of said horses to the top of a hill to take in the view, and it was a bit of a bitch, truth be told. Motherfucker wouldn’t stop trotting. I hate trotting. Especially when I can’t figure out how to lengthen my right stirrup, and my foot bounces out of it every goddamn time my mount’s hooves hit the ground. I would rather have cantered (fewer knocks on the ass per minute, you know?), but this prick of a horse wasn’t having it.

So what else can I tell you about Córdoba? Well, we all took part in this weird sacrificial ritual called an asado (I understand it translates to “barbecue” in English), at which I ate an entire goat’s leg. Actually, it was a baby goat, but it was still five times the size of a drumstick. Bitch.

It was a lot like chicken, come to think of it, but oilier. And I was expecting it to be like lamb, dammit. Still, I wasn’t too disappointed. I ate some fuckin’ goat meat. Who could complain? I felt like I was a Bedouin in a desert tent or an enthusiast in an ancient Orphic rite. But only until the meat was gone.

What else? Oh, Córdoba would have been wonderful indeed, O my reader, if you had accompanied me thither. But since you couldn’t, I despair of doing justice to the charm of the province with my poor words. I can only say that one of the greatest joys of traveling outside your home continent is seeing birds, little animals, trees, and suchlike things of sizes, shapes, and colors differing from any you would see back home. It is almost enough to make me say, “Fuck this Poli Sci shit, I’m starting over and becoming a field biologist.”

I am too lazy and busy to find the specific names of these trees and birds and little beasts (apart from, you know, herds of goats. Even they look different here) if you were wondering. But even if I told you, I doubt you would feel the same rush of bliss upon seeing photos of them in a google search as I did standing in a sunlit landscape full of them.

And I can’t post pictures either (like they’d be any help… come on. Really.) because my camera has gone all wonky, and will no longer take photographs. Oh, f*dge. Drat and bother.

You will just have to take my word for it that you would have felt the same delight in the change of scenery if you had been at my side to enjoy it with me. I wish you had been.

Yes, it was pretty, but I hear Jujuy, where I’m going next, is even prettier. It’s in the Andes basically, right near Bolivia. I’ll have to watch out for them Bolivian hillbillies. Then I’ll write another post about Jujuy.

To me, Jujuy is a HILARIOUS name for a province for anyone who’s studied Russian. You see, any speaker of Russian who’s worth his salt knows what Хуй means. It’s even on Википедии (ru.wikipedia.org!): Хуй — ненормативное, бранное название мужского полового члена в русском и некоторых других славянских языках.

So I can say things like Я в среду еду на Ху-Хуй. And if you were here and pissing me off, I could tell you Иди на Ху-Хуй! That would keep you busy for a while, since it’s ovr 1000 km from Buenos Aires. (Actually, “в Хухуй” would be more correct, but I don’t care.)

But apart from its sounding similar to the Russian word for dick, and its location, I know nothing of Jujuy. I’m sure there will be plenty of distinctively South American flora and fauna to admire there… but if not I’ll be sure to let you know in the next post.

The title of this blog entry is a quote.  My friend expressed this sentiment in conversation with me here about two weeks ago, and I unreservedly concurred that the L.A. (that's Latin America, not Los Angeles) vibe is quite weak here, if not altogether absent from the "good airs" of this city. 

Argentines have a reputation throughout Latin America for being pretentious European wannabes.  They all know it, but aren't really interested in changing it.  Tango is their thing, and they avoid going to the spots where people dance to Cumbia like the plague, or, to proffer a more illustrative analogy, like white people avoid black neighborhoods in the U.S. 

I don't really get Tango.  Yeah, I can see why Fosse liked it... It's edgy and dark and sexy in a way that would have appealed to him.  But it's nowhere near as fun as merengue, salsa, samba or any of the other, more carnivalesque rhythms that are good enough for the rest of the land-mass, dammit (Not to mention Mexico and the Central American isthmus, and the Caribbean where all that shit CAME from, bitch.).

I just can't get into the violins and bandoneones.  Argentines are proud of it because it's THEIR thing, I guess.  And because their whole national sense is centered farther from the equator than that of any other Latin American country's (except Chile's... but nobody cares about Chile anyway.) (Oh yeah, and Uruguay is to Argentina what New Jersey is to New York, although Uruguay, from what I've heard and read, has a lot more to recommend it.)

Don't read the rest of this if you're not interested in linguistics. No really.  I won't be... sniff... hurt, or anything.

It’s actually not as easy as I thought it would be to converse here.  I can understand everything and make myself understood, but I always feel like my phrasing is a little stilted.  The problem is that the conversational style I learned is Mexican, and Argentines have their own, quite different, peculiarities in the informal register. I’m adjusting, though.  

You can hear the Italian influence in the accent, here. It can be nice, or interesting, or annoying, depending who’s talking.  But just in general, it’s a lot more sing-song than Mexican Spanish. And you can tell they're proud of it, because when they want to get noticed, they really overdo the lilt, so it sounds like a theatrical soliloquy in the presentational rather than representational style (read: hammy). Even if it's a misinterpretation, you can easily see where Argentines get the reputation for being pretentious. But it's probably not a misinterpretation... even they don't deny they have big egos.

And this isn't because of the Italian influence, but a peculiarity Argentines share with Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Chileans is that they barely pronounce the letter s, so I sometimes have to mentally insert it, e.g. when someone says ekhprejar, I have to think for half a second before I realize they said expresar. 

Everybody here uses the vos form (as opposed to the tú or Usted form), and I’ve gotten accustomed to using it, too. I started off addressing my host parents as Usted, just to be respectful, but they said to use vos, so that’s what I’ve been doing. Don’t nobody use vos to address nobody in Mexico, so it’s taken some getting used to. My host mom asked me if the vos form sounded ugly to me. I thought it was a pretty funny question.  So yeah, it’s not regarded as “proper” Spanish (Araceli told me this, once), but that’s an arbitrary, prescriptive convention. Why would it sound ugly to someone who wasn’t a native speaker?  

An Argentine barber here told me that Uruguayans are more polite, less pretentious (this I can believe), and speak better Spanish than Argentines.  I asked him how their Spanish was better, and he said they use tú instead of vos.  This made me laugh: From what I know of Uruguayan Spanish, they use the tú pronoun, but keep the vos conjugations (e.g. tú conocés), which seems a lot more sloppy, mishmash, and incorrect, not to say pompous, than what they do in Argentina. And they think this sounds better?  In Argentine Spanish, at least the pronouns and conjugations agree, and if they use vos they don’t pretend they’re using tú. 

We have stupid prescriptive conventions in English, too. Cockney, Scots, and many rural dialects ridiculed by posh Londoners, are phonetically, and in some ways grammatically, closer to the English spoken by Chaucer than the modern Queen's English (or Standard American English) is.  The vowels used in Northumbria didn't "shift" as far in the 1400's as the ones used in London.  (And, in the same way, using "vos" instead of "tú" isn't really wrong, it's just a sort of mangled preservation of a form used in Medieval Spain and subsequently dropped.)

What sucks most is that this "vowel shift" happened around the Thames estuary because the English-speakers there were snobs who spoke with an indolent drawl... they were too blasé to pronounce their vowels as they were meant to be pronounced, so they just let their jaws hang slack and droned commands at the servants. And now that lazy drawl (also the direct ancestor of American English) is "standard" because London was where the power was at. 

Argentina's dialect shows similar signs of laziness. Something everybody notices is that they pronounce as a "sh" what should be pronounced as a "y".  Where a Mexican, Bolivian, or Peninsular Spanish speaker would pronounce the word "llorar" as "yorar", the initial consonant in Argentine Spanish sounds like the Russian "щ". "Shiorar."

The hardest part of all is the vocabulary. Argentines of both sexes and all ages cuss so much that the cuss-words have lost their profane meanings, but whatever, I can get used to that. But here's what's difficult: it's embarrassing, sometimes, because they'll use different words for basic things and I'll be like, What are you talking about?  Like, they'll say ananás, and I'll be like... I think I've heard of an ananás before.  Turns out it's a pineapple, which I learned to call piña. And they call avocados paltas instead of aguacates, and they call money plata instead of dinero.  Silver? Why? It's obviously not silver.  Peanut is maní here, and not cacahuate.  I don't know why they ended up calling butter manteca in Argentina instead of mantequilla, but at least that was easy to figure out. 

And then, the most pretentious thing of all: they call Spanish castellano instead of español.  OK, I'll grant that it's more accurate.  Because Galician, Asturian, Ladino, Catalán, and yes, even Basque, are languages spoken in Spain, too, and are as validly "Spanish" as Castilian.  But barely anybody speaks the OTHER Spanish languages in this hemisphere, or for that matter anywhere outside the Iberian Peninsula and adjacent parts of France.  Everybody knows what you mean if you say "Spanish".  In Argentina, if you ask me, saying "Castilian" instead of "Spanish" doesn't sound like politically correct deference to the other Iberian languages.  It sounds like you want to be European instead of Latin American.  White instead of Brown. 

I know, I know.  Who cares, right?  I don't, really.  I just like to rant and rave when people treat arbitrary, inconsequential bullshit like it's an important part of the cultural and linguistic heritage.  I don't really think it's lazy for Argentinians to say "schamar" when everybody else says "yamar", anymore than than I care if they use "vos" instead of "tú". It's not necessarily egotistical or pretentious either.  Let Uruguayans say "tú" and use the wrong conjugation.  Let Argentines call their mother tongue "Castilian" instead of "Spanish," even if it sounds less like actual, peninsular "Castilian" to me than anything else in Latin America. They're just doing their thang.  But don't expect me to do it with them.  It's not how I learned, so I'm not going to tell people "Ciao." And I'll use "vos" out of respect, when that's what people want.  But otherwise, I'm using Spanish like the Minnecanos taught me.  Let them think I sound foreign. That's what I am.

Tallinn, Tartu, and Riga all rocked.

That is all.

So I was at the St. Petersburg zoo w/ Titus on my birthday and a lioness started roaring. Only the sounds she was making weren’t so much roars as deeply frustrated, grunting bellows straight from her colossal diaphragm, like she was despairing of life and begging whoever had the courage, the mercy, and the means to end her miserable existence now… It was unpleasant to hear, so it didn’t surprise me to see the people around her cage getting a little uncomfortable at the sounds… they were grinning and giggling nervously and casting sidelong glances at each other.

So whatever…  I looked over at Titus, somewhere nearby, and caught him laughing so hard at something that he couldn’t stop to explain the joke.

“Eugggghhhh!” bawled the lioness.  “Ghhhrrrooouuuughhhh!!!”

Her roars gradually subsided into quieter -- but still clearly audible -- throaty sighs of resignation. I felt my heart breaking. But Titus still couldn’t control his laughter.

I was about to ask him what was so funny, when he rolled his eyes heavenward and groaned, as if in the throes of passion, “Oh God! Oh yeeeaaaaahh!!”, accompanying the lioness’s last heaving moans… and it hit me that every teenager and adult at the damn zoo (the kids, like me, hadn’t been laughing) had been in on a joke that had gone right by me:

That lioness’s solo had been a perfect imitation of a man’s climax, only it would have to have been a particularly large, deep-voiced, and especially lucky man to have made sounds like she was making. 

Funny, I thought, that almost everyone except me in that zoo old enough to make the comparison, whether Russian or *other*, had instantly registered the likeness of the frustrated, caged lioness’s solo to the equally passionate roars of a man having an orgasm.  And that everyone had found it equally hilarious: I saw a girl laughing as hard as Titus, (but more self-consciously) and smacking her friend on the arm for saying something lewd during one of the lioness’s several operatic performances that afternoon.

And I thanked the lioness for reaffirming my faith in the underlying connection of all of mankind’s consciousness. Bryan and Ljudmila Petrovna had both told me sex was still more of a taboo subject for most Russians than it was for most Americans, Russia being a more traditional society and all that.  I thought male orgasms would have been a little more, y’know, <out of Russian sight (or discourse), out of Russian mind…>

And I wondered: was there any zoo in the world where people (or at least, most gay men and straight women) wouldn’t have immediately noticed and permitted themselves to laugh publicly at the resemblance between a lioness’s roars and a man’s moans of pleasure?? In Bolivia, that Catholic backwater (ya don’t get much more “traditional” than Bolivia, lemme tell ya) where everyone is still probably as shy about publicly acknowledging the existence of sex as our Bolivian Araceli… Would such a pious young Catholic maiden as Araceli, upon hearing an analogously angry lioness in her own hometown zoo, have thought to herself, “I say, that frustrated lioness sounds just like a man whose partner really knows what she’s doing!”? (Most Bolivians’ thoughts still run, I believe, in traditionally heteronormative grooves.) And had she thus reflected, would she have then permitted herself a sheepish chuckle in full view of the zoo’s other patrons, or stifled it in shame for having allowed such a sinful notion to occur to her?? I hope she reads this some day, and will oblige me by letting me know.

A FINAL NOTE: The reason this blog entry is about St. Petersburg and not Buenos Aires is 'cuz I ain't in Argentina yet keep your shirt on. Jesus.  I think Annie is the only one reading this blog anyway, so she and I will have to fix that by letting other people know it exists.  Like Araceli, Valentin, and other worthies.  The problem is finding people who'd CARE enough to read it... Any ideas Annie?  I don't have to mention... never mind you know who I'm talking about.  And he's planning to read this, too.