Concrete Umbrellas

Massive concrete umbrellas are always fun. You can stand next to them, stand underneath them and even stand away from them. They give you shelter in the rain and keep you protected harmful UV rays.

Mi Barrio Norte

(Above)
My Street in Barrio Norte.

My Building.

Music in Buenos Aires

La Bomba de la Tiempo is huge in Buenos Aires. Growing up in Southern California there is a label and scene for everything. Here it is not like that and people recognize what is good. They enjoy music regardless of what the fuck their hair looks like or some compulsive urge to connect music and identity. This group, La Bomba de la Tiempo, is an improvisational polyrhymic percussion band, conducted and orchestrated to move people. I have only seen them twice but each time I have had a great time and been pretty amazed at the connection between the music, the players and the audience.
A lot of tourists and Americans go to see them because they play every monday night at this wherehouse, that is shown above, and it is advertised in their little pocket tourist guide. So I can only handle a night of "Bomba" every so often. (A lot of tourists use Buenos Aires as their playground becasue it is so cheap and it gets annoying when you want to go see a band and some dudes from Ohio that are studying Spanish here, with Dave Mathews band t-shirts on come rolling in to the place and get shitfaced and make the other Americans, like myself, look as if we were raised on a moron farm.) At least there are no bros here..the Argetnine version of a bro is a tough football/rugby dude, but I think their IQ is still pretty high compared to the bro-anderthal. They also rock a version of the faux-hawk mullet (that was huge a few years back in California) but it is more Argentine and worn with a bad attitude.

A little reality.

I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina on September 3 2008 with little money, no pre-existing debt in the U.S., no secured job and an ulcer. Ok...these seem kind of negative, except for the debt part, but what I did have was Sofia, the Argetnine, an apartment, and plenty of Spanish to learn. These pictures to the above are of my apartment before I moved in. It is small, cheap, on the first floor, piso 1, and perfect for me.
Meet Sofia. She is a 26 year old "Portena", born and raised in Buenos Aires. She enjoys architecture, fotography, My Bloody Valentine, cafes and anchovie olives. We met in Santa Barbara while I was working at the record store. She asked for Magnetic Fields and also if there was a place to get a drink at in town because she was on Holiday with her parents and needed to get out. The picture below tells a story of a girl with a boyfriend and a guy with a girlfriend who met one night and kept in contact for a year until I had to see her again..oh and visit Buenos Aires. Now we live a park apart. One more thing..I think I still have an ulcer and I think it is stress related becasue I have been maintaining a healthy diet and not drinking that much?

A little clarity.

During the first US tour the Debonaires embarked upon in 2004, Kip W., singer and good friend, took this photo in Chicago. Later, after the tour and during the standard recovery after a 2 month road trip, this picture surfaced and really caught my attention.
Whether Kip meant to symbolize anything from this reflexionary photo or not, it said something profound to me about life in general. This faceless and omnipresent sillouette of a person is reflecting throught the velocity of a fast moving and noisy subway car. The photo tells a story of how we should look at our lives.
I look at this photo as reflecting more than just an image of ourselves, much like a mirror; this photo; however, shows reflection at an exact moment when things make sense. The subway car symbolizes the path, speed and velocity in which our lives are reflected off of. The stationary figure, of course, symbolizes each person who is saturated in the common timeline of life. We are a part of this velocity and exist in the same parallel as time. We can never stop the train or ride the train alone, however, we can choose where the fuck we want to go. I chose to transfer.