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THE tango dancers took their places inside a cramped apartment
in downtown Buenos
Aires, as David Lampson, a 29-year-old television writer
from Boston,
wiped his brow. Despite the 100-degree weather, the fans
had been shut off, spotlights switched on and windows blacked
out with trash bags. The cameraman waited until the smoke
machine blurred the parquet floor before yelling “Action!” Then
just as the iTunes track reached its dramatic crescendo,
the fuse blew. For the fourth time.
“Let’s unplug the other fan and try again,” Mr.
Lampson told the polyglot cast and crew, which included
a Greek mother, a Colombian architect and an Argentine
shoemaker. Also present was a New
York City film student, who was editing the footage
for YouTube distribution. Mr. Lampson likened the process
to creating art from
garbage. “There is a tango dance based on this idea,” he
added, “called cambalache.”
A better term might be bohemians-in-exile. A new kind of
tango is taking shape along the crooked back streets of
Buenos Aires. At a former furniture factory on Calle Honduras,
the British music engineer
Tom Rixton, who has worked with top acts like Depeche
Mode, runs a stylish boutique hotel called Home with
his Argentine wife. Nearby on Calle Garruchaga, Amanda
Knauer, a fashion designer from Manhattan, sells a chic
line of leather handbags at Qara. And at Zizek, a weekly
dance party run by an expat from San Antonio, the cha-ch-ch-cha
rhythms of cumbia folk music quivers to an electronic beat.
“There are expats everywhere tapping into the city’s
thriving cultural and arts scene,” said Grant C.
Dull, Zizek’s founder, who also runs the popular
bilingual Web guide WhatsUpBuenosAires.com. “And
it’s not backpacker types, but people with money
and contacts.”
Drawn by the city’s cheap prices and Paris-like
elegance, legions of foreign artists are colonizing Buenos
Aires and transforming this sprawling metropolis into a
throbbing hothouse of cool. Musicians, designers, artists,
writers and filmmakers are sinking their teeth into the
city’s transcontinental mix of Latin élan
and European polish, and are helping shake the Argentine
capital out of its cultural malaise after a humbling economic
crisis earlier this decade.
Video directors are scouting tango ballrooms for English-speaking
actors. Wine-soaked
gallery openings and behemoth gay discos are keeping the
city’s insomniacs up till sunrise. And artists from
the United
States, England, Italy and
beyond are snapping up town houses in scruffy neighborhoods
and giving the areas Anglo-ized names like Palermo SoHo
and Palermo Hollywood.
Comparisons with other bohemian capitals are almost unavoidable. “It’s
like Prague in
the 1990s,” said Mr. Lampson, who is perhaps best
known for winning a Bravo TV reality show, “Situation:
Comedy,” in 2005, about sitcom writers. Despite his
minor celebrity, he decided to forgo the Los
Angeles rat race and moved to Buenos Aires, where he
is writing an NBC pilot, along with his Web novela, www.historyandtheuniverse.com. “Buenos
Aires is a more interesting place to live than Los Angeles,
and it’s much, much cheaper. You can’t believe
a city this nice is so cheap.”
That wasn’t always the case. For much of the 20th
century, Buenos Aires ranked among the world’s most
expensive capitals, on par with Paris and New York. Broad
boulevards were lined with splendid specimens of French
belle époque architecture that
evoked the Champs-Élysées, and tree-lined
streets were buzzing with late-night cafes and oak-and-brass
bars. Locals, it is often said, identify more as European
than South American.
Then came the financial crisis of late 2001. The Argentine
peso, which was once pegged to the United States dollar,
plunged to a low of nearly 4 to 1 in the face of mounting
debt and runaway inflation. (It holds steadily today at
about 3 to 1.) Overnight, Buenos Aires went from being
among the priciest cities to one of the world’s great
bargain spots.
There was a silver lining. Even as local artists flocked
overseas, producing a kind of creative brain drain from
Buenos Aires, foreigners arrived in record numbers. And
what they discovered was that this fast-paced city of three
million offered more than just tango and cheap steaks.
The Argentine capital also had balmy weather, hedonistic
night life and a cosmopolitan air that thrives on novelty.
Situated at the wide mouth of the Río de la Plata,
Buenos Aires sprawls across the flat landscape with the
force of a concrete hurricane. It takes more than an hour
to traverse opposite ends by yellow-and-black taxi. And
that’s not mentioning the 48 barrios that creep inland,
each with a distinct personality and crisscrossed by a
web of cobblestone alleys and 12-lane mega-streets. There
are business districts like Microcentro, leafy barrios
like Recoleta and manufacturing sectors like La Paterna.
And nearly everywhere you turn these days, the new arrivals
seem to be planting their flags, whether at a so-called
chorizo house in historic San Telmo or a glassy condo in
Puerto Madero. Or, for that matter, a former door factory
on Calle Aguirre, which Sebastiano Mauri, 35, a painter
and video artist from Milan,
recently bought with several artists on the industrial
outskirts of Palermo.
“Some are now calling this area Palermo Brooklyn,” said
Mr. Mauri during a recent visit of his renovated factory,
a bright yellow building on an otherwise gray street. Cost
for the entire four-story factory? $130,000. “Buenos
Aires makes Milan look like a neighborhood. It’s
lively, multiethnic and you have Europeans from all over.”
After gutting the third floor, Mr. Mauri spent the past
year converting it into an artist-in-residence studio with
hardwood floors, stainless-steel kitchen cabinets and midcentury-modern
furniture. To celebrate the near-completion, he held a
rooftop barbecue on a breezy Saturday in January that drew
a cross section of Buenos Aires’s art elite.
Drinking malbec out of plastic cups and eating steaks with
dollops of ratatouille, the crowd of about 20 artists,
curators and collectors chatted easily about the hyper-commercialized
state of art, a towering sex hotel (known as a telo) nearby
and the city’s obsession with ice cream. “Artists
come here because they can be free,” said Florencia
Braga Menéndez, whose namesake contemporary art
gallery is arguably the city’s most influential. “As
a gallerist, I never tell my artists what sells. They must
create for themselves.”
That creative freedom has fueled plenty of cultural cross-pollination.
Dick Verdult, an avant-garde musician and artist from the Netherlands,
began toying with cumbia around 2000, manipulating the
childish rhythms of the South American folk music with
electronic bass lines, time delays and sampled voices. “Cumbia
is like a ball of clay,” said Mr. Verdult, 53, who
is better known by his stage name, Dick El Demasiado. “If
you stick to the simple laws” — a 4/4 rhythm
that he likens to a galloping horse — “but
disregard the tradition, you can do a lot with it. Argentina has
a very elastic culture.”
His first cumbia album, “No Nos Dejamos Afeitar,” released
in 2002, was so well received that Mr. Verdult decided
to move to Buenos Aires. “The reaction blew me away,” said
Mr. Verdult, who is regarded as the unofficial godfather
of this new electrotango sound known as experimental cumbia.
Not surprisingly, many of his disciples are fellow expatriates. “There’s
a group of maybe 10 producers and D.J.’s who are
really pushing these new styles,” said Gavin Burnett,
26, a D.J. from San
Francisco who blends cumbia with hip-hop and Jamaican
dancehall under the pseudonym Oro11. “If you’re
an artist looking to be inspired and have $10,000 saved
up, you can basically come down here and work, and not
worry for a year.”
It’s not only artist types who are soaking up Buenos
Aires’s budget bohemia. Stumble into many of the
city’s trendy restaurants, bars and hotels, and there’s
a good chance a foreigner is behind it.
One of the newest is Le Bar, a martini lounge and restaurant
in Microcentro with sunken seats, cool lighting and a rooftop
terrace. It was started by several French expatriates including
Manuel Schmidt, 40, an architect from Paris who sailed
to Argentina with his wife and young daughter three years
ago, and basically didn’t sail back. Brasserie Petanque,
a new restaurant in San Telmo, looks as though it was transplanted
tile by tile from the Left Bank. “When I came in
2003, there were no French restaurants, so I stayed and
opened this,” said Pascal Meyer, an owner who was
tending bar on a recent Sunday night. Before becoming a
restaurateur in Buenos Aires, he was a culinary tour guide
for the United
Nations in New York City.
AND then there are the novelists, journalists and screenwriters,
quietly tapping away in their $600-a-month apartments,
seeking to make a name for themselves on Argentine soil.
Nate Martin, a 24-year-old from Wyoming,
moved to the city in November and took a job as an editor
at The Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language newspaper,
because, he says, “I didn’t want to be a waiter
while writing.” For his creative outlet, Mr. Martin
maintains a blog, Grating Space. Like dozens of similar
blogs written by foreigners, it rhapsodizes about the Argentine
good life. He also D.J.’s on the side.
“We play stuff that they’ve never heard of,” said
his friend, Tom Masterson, a 35-year-old transplant from Chicago,
during a night out at Bahrein, a stylish sweatbox in Microcentro
where the headlining D.J. hailed from Belgium. “They
love me here.”
Some literary efforts are starting to bear fruit. The writer
Marina Palmer quit her advertising job in New York City,
moved to Buenos Aires and, in 2005, published a “Sex
in the City”-like memoir set in the city’s
vampish tango scene. “Kiss and Tango” has been
optioned by Hollywood, with Sandra
Bullock recently floated as a possible lead. (The film
that has everyone buzzing these days is Francis
Ford Coppola’s “Tetro,” a drama about
Italian immigrants in Argentina that is being filmed in
the city.)
But moviemaking is hardly restricted to foreigners. Argentina
has a storied film history — notable examples include
the 1968 political documentary “The Hour of the Furnaces” and
the post-junta feature, “Official Story,” which
won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in
1986 — and, in recent years, a so-called New Argentine
Cinema has emerged, thanks to a new crop of directors like
Daniel Burman and Lucrecia Martel who are winning prizes
in Berlin, Toronto and
other film festivals. They have set up shop along the fringes
of fashionable Palermo, in an area now known as Palermo
Hollywood.
As with other creative fields, the cinematic revival got
some unexpected help from the financial crisis. Not only
did the industry benefit from the influx of foreigners
looking for cheap production costs, but the peso meltdown
also provided grist for creative self-examination. “People
were no longer talking about pretty dresses or soap operas,” said
Tomi Streiff, a filmmaker who moved to Buenos Aires from
New York City with his partner and fellow screenwriter,
Jane Hallisey. The couple is now working on a romantic
comedy about a priest. “Everybody was hurt, so
their skin was open.”
The wellspring of creativity is starting to leech out of
Buenos Aires and onto the larger cultural stage. Local
fashion designers, who flourished when European imports
tripled in price, are making inroads into the global marketplace.
Tramando, a high-end fashion store in Recoleta started
by Martin Churba, now has boutiques in Tokyo and
the meatpacking district in New York. And Maria Cher, a London-trained
designer who has an airy boutique in Palermo SoHo, exports
her glamorous dresses throughout South
America, as well as to Tokyo.
Experimental cumbia music is reverberating beyond the city’s
packed dance floors. Mr. Burnett, the D.J., just started
his own cumbia record label, Bersa Discos, and is playing
shows in his native San Francisco. Zizek, the weekly dance
party, is taking its urban tropical beats throughout the
United States, with stops this month in Los Angeles, New
York, Chicago and at the South by Southwest music festival
in Austin.
Buenos Aires’s buzzing art scene, meanwhile, is being
touted as the next big thing. Or that’s the hope,
anyway, of the city’s eager artists and wide-eyed
gallerists. “This city reminds me a lot of Berlin,” said
Elisa Freudenreich, 27, a gallery manger who recently moved
from Berlin and sees parallels in the profusion of street
artists and graffiti-splattered spaces. “The scene
is very fresh, very underground.”
Scruffy galleries have gone up along the city’s edges,
most notably Appetite, an irreverent, punk-inflected gallery
in San Telmo started by Daniela Luna, a feisty 30-year-old
known for her shrewd eye and cool parties. On a steamy
Thursday afternoon, as office workers were climbing aboard
buses back home, Ms. Luna was flitting through her grungy
gallery in a brown miniskirt and sparkly pink T-shirt,
like a teenager in a vintage clothing store.
“My first gallery was so messy that when people came
to my parties, they didn’t know if the stuff was
art or trash,” Ms. Luna said, as she showed off works
by Santiago Iturralde, a local artist who paints portraits
of narcissistic young men based on their Facebook-like
Web profiles. “We’re growing fast and furious.” So
fast, in fact, that she is exporting her cheeky blend of
trash art to the real Brooklyn, where she just opened a
small gallery.
Her gallery will get additional exposure in Milan when the
contemporary art fair, MiArt 2008, spotlights emerging
Buenos Aires artists in April. Adriana Forconi, a jet-settling
consultant to the art fair, was in town recently to scout
for worthy galleries, and was struck by what she calls
the city’s “frenetic and blissfully chaotic” pace.
“There’s definitely something happening here,” said
Ms. Forconi, who was among the guests at the artist-filled
rooftop barbecue. Dressed in a flouncy party dress and
strappy sandals, she looked ready for another long night
on the town. “There’s a clash between European
and Latin American cultures that’s fascinating.”
“And unlike Milan, there are no rules,” Ms.
Forconi added, as she looked out at the twinkling city
and took a sip of wine. For a moment, she sounded like
someone toying with a move to Buenos Aires. “You
can do whatever you want here.”
FROM PALERMO HOLLYWOOD TO PALERMO BROOKLYN
GETTING THERE
American Airlines and Aero Lineas Argentinas fly direct
from Kennedy Airport to Buenos
Aires, starting at $762 for travel in April, according
to a recent online search. The 20-mile taxi ride to the
city costs about 100 pesos, about $31 at 3.2 pesos to the
dollar. Buses and subways are fast and inexpensive. Taxis
are plentiful and cost 10 to 15 pesos for a typical trip.
WHERE TO STAY
Unless you’re packing a business suit, consider the
neighborhoody barrios of Palermo Viejo
or Recoleta.
Home Hotel Buenos Aires (Honduras 5860;
54-11-4778-1008; www.homebuenosaires.com),
opened by the British music producer
Tom Rixton and his Argentine wife, Patricia O’Shea,
is a boutique hotel on a quiet block in Palermo Viejo.
The 17-room hotel features midcentury-modern furniture,
a pool and a restaurant. Rates start at $120.
Designed by Philippe
Starck, the Faena Hotel + Universe (Martha Salotti
445; 54-11-4010-9000; www.faenahotelanduniverse.com)
offers over-the-top elegance in Puerto Madero, a planned
waterfront district. The spacious hotel, which occupies
an old grain silo, has everything from a cabaret stage
to a hammam, with 110 rooms starting at $425.
There are plenty of great hotels for under $100, like the
Art Hotel (Azcuénaga 1268; 54-11-4821-4744; www.arthotel.com.ar).
For longer stays, apartment rentals offer even better deals.
Two reputable agencies include For Rent Argentina (www.4rentargentina.com)
and ApartmentsBA (www.apartmentsba.com).
I paid $125 a night for a modern two-bedroom apartment
in Palermo Soho that slept three comfortably, and included
a large terrace and pool.
WHERE TO EAT
Olsen in Palermo Viego (Gorriti 5870; 54-11-4776-7677) serves
a chic blend of Scandinavian and Argentine cuisine in a
modern space seemingly plucked out of Copenhagen.
Dinner for two with wine, about 250 pesos, or $78 at 3.2
pesos to the dollar.
Le Bar in Microcentro (Tucumán 422; 54-11-5219-0858)
evokes a space age bordello, with red-velvet sunken seats,
a rooftop lounge and a global tapas menu. Dinner for two,
200 pesos.
Brasserie Petanque (Defensa 596; 54-11-4342-7930; www.brasseriepetanque.com)
brings Parisian comfort food to San Telmo. Dinner for two
with wine, 200 pesos.
WHERE TO GO OUT
Zizek is held on Wednesdays from midnight at the Niceto
Club in Palermo (Niceto Vega 5510; 54-11-4779-9396; www.whatsupbuenosaires.com/zizek).
Bahrein (Lavalle 345; www.bahreinba.com),
in a century-old downtown building, has a popular Tuesday
drum-and-bass party.
Kim y Novak (Godoy Cruz y Güemes; 54-11-4773-7521; www.kimynovak.blogspot.com),
a drag-queen-friendly bar in Palermo.
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