Quiet Bubble

Movies I’ve Seen: Speed Racer (2008)

Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski. Starring Emile Hirsch, John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, Christina Ricci, Matthew Fox, and Roger Allam.

I would warn that spoilers follow but, if you’ve over ten years old, you know exactly how this movie turns out.

Speed Racer may end up as little more than NASCAR for nerds, but it’s not fascism. When reviewing Speed Racer, both Anthony Lane and Dana Stevens try for the condescending mock-horror pose of dealing with sensory overload (“The colors scare me, Daddy!” “Get her some vapors, and hurry!”) and, even worse, trot out the old canard used to swat aside any piece that a critics either misunderstands or dislikes intensely: fascism. Stevens makes a sidelong glance at it when recalling the movie’s racetrack audience— “so vast they recall footage of Nazi rallies, but no time to think about that now”—but Lane at least has the bravery (and idiotic gall) to issue a direct call to arms:

Though [Speed Racer] is not as criminally poor as V for Vendetta, which the Wachowskis wrote in 2005, it struck me as more insidious. There’s something about the ululating crowds who line the action in color-coördinated rows; the desperate skirting of ordinary feelings in favor of the trumped-up variety; the confidence in technology as a spectacle in itself; and, above all, the sense of master manipulators posing as champions of the little people. What does that remind you of ? You could call it entertainment, and use it to wow your children for a couple of hours. To me, it felt like Pop fascism, and I would keep them well away.

It’s funny how often fascism is applied to mass audiences that effete liberals can’t understand—football games, rodeos, Promise Keeper events—but not to such cultural touchstones as, say, the Beatles’ appearance at Shea Stadium or Woodstock (in which great masses of people also had similar dress, tastes, and hairstyles). Triumph of Will is referred to when discussing a NASCAR race but not a Springsteen concert. I say this, by the way, as an effete leftie myself. I merely wish to point out how the “fascism” label cuts off serious conversation and is lazy to boot.

So, I sincerely hope Lane’s rebel yell is taken as seriously as David Denby’s similar alarmist concern that Do the Right Thing would incite riots among the black folks: i.e., not at all. Tar-and-feathering a work of art with “fascism” forces anyone who admits to liking said work start out from a necessarily defensive and apologetic crouch. So, let me say this head-on: Speed Racer is not fascist, though it might be conservative, and Lane and Stevens are proving themselves increasingly to be twits. (Stevens’s case is one of sad decline; as her alter ego Liz Penn for the late thehighsign.net, she was an engaging and provocative critic. Lane’s always been a prick.)

This isn’t to say that Speed Racer is a particularly good film/video/CGI event—it’s got its problems—but that the Wachowskis have some interesting ideas on their minds, and fascism isn’t one of them. First, let’s outline the problems. As linear narrative, it’s derivative horseshit; every plot twist of this very basic story can be seen twenty minutes before, and almost every narrative thrust is clumsily constructed. As racing spectacle, it’s spatially incoherent and impossible to tell where the racecars were in relation to each other, and the physics don’t apply to any recognizable world. As agitprop against the Man and His corporations, it’s muddleheaded and ultimately defeatist. As acting showcase, the cast is game but hindered by too much greenscreen and turgid dialogue. (Only Roger Allam, as a corporate villain who looks and talks almost exactly like Christopher Hitchens, manages to invest his line readings with any zest.) As a diversion for kids, it’s nowhere near as smart as even the toss-offs by Pixar, and the bratty kid and overbearing chimpanzee should have been nixed from the movie entirely. This irritating duo even interrupts what should have been a glorious kiss between Speed (Emile Hirsch) and Trixie (Christina Ricci) on at least two occasions.

As visual experiment, however, Speed Racer might be the most expensive avant-garde movie ever produced by a major American studio. The Wachowskis have created their own pop fantasia—it is their own, because it only superficially looks like the cartoon from which it’s derived—that dazzles and adheres solely to its own mechanics. It broadcasts its emotion in bold, outsized ways, through a Day-Glo color scheme and LSD-inspired design sense. Instead of cuts, the movie relies on fluid, near-constant wipes, zooms that meld into brand-new visuals, and overlapping, multi-layered shots that superimpose the faces and actions onto other, seemingly unrelated shots. The frame is always full, crammed with in-jokes, sly asides, random bursts of color and light, and talking heads commenting on the action.

Those talking heads are significant, as Speed Racer comments on itself constantly. We’re always hearing voices—sports commentators riffing on the road action, mechanics offering advice to drivers through headsets, dashboard dials giving up-to-the-second info on road and weather conditions, blinking advertisements, and news analysts recapping the story and providing context. Even in the quiet moments, the movie is a meta-narrative, and never an unmediated experience. What made Dana Stevens swoon in terror is this sensory overload and I think most critics are finding it false.

I think, however, that the Wachowskis are trying to show the world as it is now—Speed Racer’s mise-en-scene is futuristic-looking, but it’s not clear that this isn’t just some imagined, alternate present that we’re witnessing—and the world they see is one in which we’re bombarded with information and razzle-dazzle that seems tactile, but somehow isn’t quite tangible. Anything’s available at the press of a touch screen but none of it’s quite, you know, touchable. There’s some overkill there—after four movies about virtual reality trumping the real thing, I sorta wish the brothers would just go outside for a nature walk every now and then—but the vision isn’t exactly off, either. TV and the internet, this century’s prime mediums of art and culture dissemination, both provide infinite avenues for short-term sensation and instant connection to the rest of the world. Speed Racer’s use of wipes and zooms as transitions emphasizes this interconnectedness created by technology. Nearly every shot flows into another. This is best shown by the movie’s opening ten minutes, in which the history of the Racer family is given to us concisely as Speed (Emile Hirsch) races, remembers himself thinking about racing as a child, recalls the circumstances of his older brother’s death, and reminiscences about his idyllic childhood. That’s a lot of flashback and exposition to stuff into the beginning but, by overlapping the images, Speed Racer makes us aware that two (or three) narratives run through and around each other—Speed can’t entirely extract the past from the present. One constantly reminds us of the other.

To “wash that man right out of my hair,” the Wachowskis turn to building cars instead of going on nature walks. Turbines, carburetors, and ball bearings are as lively as flora and fauna to the Racer family. The older brother Rex Racer tells young Speed that the car is “a living, breathing thing,” and Moms (Susan Sarandon) and Pops Racer (John Goodman, providing perhaps the only soulful performance) live by this credo. Moms even compares Speed’s driving to painting brushstrokes—it’s that tactile to her. Speed Racer tries to make technology organic, hence the luscious colors and supple contrails of light that curve and linger like kisses and perfumes. The family, and the movie, comes together best when it works as a team, when all the moving parts are working towards a single goal—a fantastic, gleaming car; a hairpin turn negotiated at high speed by all the players; an impromptu kung-fu fight in the icy mountains.

About that last item… yeah, Speed Racer is beyond silly. The movie throws in references to every Japanese anime show the Wachowskis have ever seen and, though it never tries to emulate a comic with split screens and panels (as in Ang Lee’s Hulk), manga’s visual tropes are always present. This attempt to placate the fanboys means that neither the narrative nor the visual scheme are as streamlined as the Mach 5 car that Speed drives.

For all the justifiable complaints about incoherence during the races themselves, and the juvenile simplicity of the plot, the interwoven and overlapping visual textures display how deft the Wachowskis can be at connecting narrative threads, and at merging the exhilarating with the melancholy. Speed can’t escape the multiple versions of racing history that he’s been given. As the movie begins, Speed sits pensive in an empty locker room, his back facing us. He’s unreadable and maybe forlorn, but always in thought. His childhood, his family, and the race ahead run through his brain. Even during his triumphs, he’s got too much shit in his head.

That, of course, is the downside of this sensory overload. I can’t decide whether the Wachowskis are reveling in this overstimulation or satirizing it, which is why I ultimately think Speed Racer is a noble failure rather than a success. Speed never learns how to achieve a balance between his individual consciousness and his community, though the Wachowskis may think he’s done so. Our hero learns that what matters most is not “how you change racing, but that racing doesn’t change you,” but this “individualism over community” thread is upset by the Wachowskis’s insistence on family values and working best as a team. Speed Racer’s stabs against consumerist conformity and groupthink—two lashes that ensure that the movie’s not fascist—are undercut by the blandness of the video-gamey races and the über-whiteness of the Racer family. It’s weird that a quintessentially Japanese movie, in terms of visual reference and cultural tropes, chooses to cast the heroes as whites, and to persist in thinking of ethnics as “others.” (The Japanese characters become villains and side acts; the international sports announcers are little more than stereotypes.) It would also help if the photography hadn’t included close-ups of modern-day brands at all times, seeing as Speed Racer poises itself as anti-corporate art.

This rocky seesaw of capitalism vs. socialism, of cosmopolitan striving vs. white hegemony, of the handmade and local vs. the mass-produced and globalized dooms Speed Racer, simply because the film can’t quite decide which side it’s on. But that confusion and struggle is, I think, at the heart of contemporary American life. That’s why, for all its flaws, Speed Racer is the most interesting and truly pop of all movies made by the Wachowskis. They might not be geniuses but I no longer think they’re mere poseurs.

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UPDATE: The mighty Dennis Cozzalio has written an epic, combative defense of the movie. Go read it.

Goodnight, Ms. Dundy

I just got an email from Roy Turner saying that Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado–one of the funniest and sexiest coming-of-age novels to be published–passed away on 1 May. (Her website confirms this.) I worked with her, briefly, when University Press of Mississippi reprinted her classic biography Elvis and Gladys in 2004, and found her to be an utterly charming and brilliant raconteur. Her prose style–brisk, stylish, quick-witted, and completely unsentimental–matched her speaking method step for step. Turner, her old friend and late-period amanuensis, said that “she died doing exactly what she loved most: she had a heart attack in mid-conversation with someone famous and interesting.”

Reverend Dennis’s little swath of divinity

On a bright, cool Saturday afternoon, La Bella stared at a wall plastered with collages of newspaper clippings, crude paintings of Freemason symbols, hand-lettered (and misspelled and inexact) quotations from the Bible and glued-on Mardi Gras beads. I wrapped my arms around her from behind, leaned in to breathe the flowery shampoo smell on her hair, and whispered, “It takes all kinds to make this world, doesn’t it?” She nodded, giggling.

Really, what else could she say? Margaret’s Grocery and Market is named for the wife of one Reverend H.D. Dennis, who’s either certifiably a genius or just certifiable. As noted in Off the Beaten Path: Mississippi,

The elaborate archways, pillars, and towers of brick are the work of ninety-plus-year-old Reverend H.D. Dennis, Margaret’s husband. The Reverend promised Margaret if she married him, he’d turn her store into a palace, and he was true to his word. The Lego-like construction project hasn’t stopped yet; the Reverend is still adding on to the elaborate structure, which serves as a combination residence, grocery store, and house of worship. “God is the greatest architect,” Dennis says. “I’m only his assistant.”

God’s architectural sense, at least the branch that resides in Vicksburg, Mississippi, favors the camp and the unwieldy. Dennis’s red, pink, yellow, and white (with the occasional hint of blue) structures are sprawled along the side of Highway 61, just outside of the river city. The folk-art site stretches over 100 feet and climbs into the sky. Altogether, Margaret’s looks like a rougher, more slapdash version of a Gaudi design. From the painted school bus to the makeshift outdoor patio to the ramshackle towers, every surface is cluttered with stenciled and woodblock text, costume jewelry, stickers, mirrors, and thickly applied paint. Sometimes the text comes from the Bible; often, it’s blurts from Dennis himself; sometimes, it’s photocopied profiles of Dennis, including a table of contents from the December 2001 issue of Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies. One section is either a shrine devoted either to King Solomon or a protest against a local trustee’s board; the design is chaotic enough that it’s hard to tell the difference. Cinder blocks and wood panels are stacked and painted, seemingly at random, though the color scheme is, if not soothing, at least orderly. The clutter obscures the fact that this is essentially a trailer park; Margaret’s becomes grander and weirder than just a home as a result.

Reverend Dennis—and who knows if he’s actually ordained?—wasn’t in. I knocked on the front door to make sure. In a way, and I’m a little ashamed to say this, I was glad. If the man’s anything like his work, we would have been treated to an hourlong sermon of love that rambled and fizzled and digressed. At least his message would have been of love and peace. I didn’t see much fire-and-brimstone in his collage structure, and he’s made a point (over and over and over again) of noting that all people are welcome to enter his church. So he’s a benign nut—I’d rather have that than the other kind. Still, walking through and around the site, I kept wondering if my response—gaping in astonishment, occasional collapses into laughter—was what Dennis would want. He’s designed the place as a house of worship but its construction comes across as spectacle. I wonder if half of its tourists are smirking on the inside. I wondered if I was, too.

I’ve always had this antipathy toward folk/outsider/naïve art. (All three of those adjectives, by the way, should probably have qualifying quotation marks around them.) On the one hand, Dennis’s work clearly inspires awe. On the other hand, it’s not skilled architecture—a quick storm would destroy the place, and it looked like parts of it indeed had been rebuilt—or particularly competent art. Earlier that day, in the Attic Gallery, Brünhilde commented on a good pencil drawing that it was “good to see someone who understood draftsmanship for a change.”

Now, I quite liked the Attic Gallery, and found several pieces that could hang on my walls happily. La Bella loved a large painting of a jukebox on wood. But I understood what Brünhilde meant. The gallery Looking around the cluttered folk art and local art gallery, full of ambitious brushstrokes that sometimes outstripped actual talent, I got what she meant.

Reverend Dennis’s love letter to God and wife wouldn’t have made sense on sale in the Attic Gallery, despite the fact that his work and that on display at the gallery are closely aligned. In the gallery, Dennis’s stuff would have been just one of many, part of a context of African American “naïve” artists. On its own terrain, though, Margaret’s was an unrivaled source of wonderment. And it was democratic art, free and open to anyone willing to make the drive. By putting it into a gallery, the work would have automatically been institutionalized, automatically become less “outsider.”

But I couldn’t decide if I thought being an outsider was such a good thing. Rudimentary spelling and drawing skills might have helped Dennis better get across his message. Was Margaret’s Grocery and Market actually any good, or was it just crazy, or was there a worthwhile difference in this case? I still can’t decide. Still, it lingers in my head more than the stately and beautiful Cedar Grove Mansion—baroque and orderly and serene—we toured earlier that afternoon, so I suppose Dennis’s gut-check to the brain was worth the visit.

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RELATED: I visited the Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Alabama, in June 2007.

Now you see him, now you don’t

Though “Phantom” Dan Federici, keyboardist extraordinaire and difficult genius of the E Street Band, died almost two weeks ago, I haven’t quite gotten my mind around it. As you’ve perhaps gathered, I’m a longtime Springsteen follower, and losing Federici’s carnivalesque swirls and oddly timed flourishes feels a bit like losing limbs to me. Yet, most of the obituaries I saw were either too slight or too milquetoast—respectful, brief, and meaningless. I decided to wait.

When a musician of standing dies after 40 years on and off the road, it’s probably best to let a man who played with him for all that time deliver the eulogy. Bruce Springsteen himself provides the best obit of the man that we’ll ever need to read. It’s funny, thoughtful, and above all lacks any sort of sugarcoating about Federici’s crazed life. A taste:

He was the most intuitive player I've ever seen. His style was slippery and fluid, drawn to the spaces the other musicians in the E Street Band left. He wasn’t an assertive player; he was a complementary player. A true accompanist. He naturally supplied the glue that bound the band’s sound together. In doing so, he created for himself a very specific style. When you hear Dan Federici, you don’t hear a blanket of sound, you hear a riff, packed with energy, flying above everything else for a few moments and then gone back in the track. “Phantom” Dan Federici. Now you hear him, now you don’t.

Offstage, Danny couldn’t recite a lyric or a chord progression for one of my songs. Onstage, his ears opened up. He listened, he felt, he played, finding the perfect hole and placement for a chord or a flurry of notes. This style created a tremendous feeling of spontaneity in our ensemble playing.

In the studio, if I wanted to loosen up the track we were recording, I’d put Danny on it and not tell him what to play. I’d just set him loose. He brought with him the sound of the carnival, the amusements, the boardwalk, the beach, the geography of our youth and the heart and soul of the birthplace of the E Street Band.

Go read it.

Commonplace

“Beyond this hegemony of corporate and institutional consensus, however, beyond the purview of uncannily lifelike blockbusters like Jurassic Park and the Whitney Biennial, everything that grows in the domain of culture, that acquires constituencies and enters the realm of public esteem, does so through the accumulation of participatory investment by people who show up. No painting is ever sold nor essay written nor band booked nor exhibition scheduled that is not the consequence of previous social interaction, of gossip, body language, fashion dish, and telephone chatter—nothing transpires that does not float upon the ephemeral substrata of ‘word of mouth’—on the validation of schmooze. Everyone who participates knows this, and knows, as well, that it doesn’t cost a dime. You just show up, behave as you wish, say what you will, and live with the fleeting, often unexpected consequences of your behavior. At this bedrock level, the process through which works of art are socialized looks less like a conspiracy than a slumber party.”

—Dave Hickey, “Romancing the Looky-Loos,” Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997)

Out and about

Department of What Should’ve Been, Part #22,957: A test film for an anime adaptation of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo strip, directed by Whisper of the Heart’s Yoshifumi Kondo. Kondo’s one and only feature, written by Hayao Miyazaki, is among my favorite Studio Ghibli films. Kondo’s wry, subtle sensibility and concentration on the slow, domestic and quotidian had more in common with Ghibli’s other master Isao Takahata than with Miyazaki, but this two-minute clip shows off his skill with the fanciful as well. He was being groomed as the next great lead director in Ghibli’s stable when he died of an aneurysm at age 47. I guess we’ll have to make do with the strips themselves.

Speaking of all-ages comics and illustrated books, editor extraordinaire Francoise Mouly is on the move. The RAW co-founder and New Yorker art director has created Toon Books, a new line devoted to children’s comics. Over at Panels & Pixels, Chris Mautner has a loooooong interview with Mouly about the new venture. (On a related note, Jeet Heer argues convincingly that Mouly’s design and editorial influence have been seminal to the development of comics.)

It looks like Outer Life is back to posting on a semi-regular basis. Here’s two new essays on life in suburbia: “Ear Candy” and “To Serve and Deflect.” Go read them.

The filthiest advice columnist you can imagine writes a sweet, foulmouthed ode to his recently departed mother. It’s rare that Dan Savage can force a lump in my throat but he’s had a rough week.

Sunset Gun pays tribute to the recently departed Richard Widmark by reposting her review of Don’t Bother to Knock, starring Widmark and a young Marilyn Monroe. The Siren gets into obit mode, too, with thoughtful reflections on Jules Dassin and Charlton Heston.

Five Branch Tree surprises himself by liking a work of art by Damien Hirst.

Girish asks the pertinent question: why blog? His emphasis on the intertwining of teaching and learning is terrific, as is—always true for his blog; how does he do it?—the comments section.

That is all.

Queen-Cat

Every morning, my cat and I go through our little ritual. The alarm clock goes off at 6:45am, and I hit the snooze for another 15 minutes of blessed sleep. Eliza, maybe mimicking my slap of the clock, began batting me gently on the back of the head. At 7 or maybe 7:15, I decide I’ve had enough and stumble into the bathroom to turn on the shower. As soon as the rumble and psssst of the faucet starts, I hear the cantered steps on cat on floor, and she jumps onto the rim of the tub. She clambers into the tub and begins drinking the water on the tub’s floor.

Within ten seconds, the water’s hot enough for me to switch from main faucet to shower faucet. I rattle my fingernails on the far wall of the tub, to warn Eliza that she’s about to get drenched by overhead water. She jumps out of the tub, I step in, and whoosh the shower curtain shut. For most of my shower, I see her silhouette stalking the rim. After three minutes or so, once I’m into my morning shave, her head peeks between curtain and wall, and she begins sipping the droplets that occasionally fall from the main faucet. She doesn’t care if her head gets wet. If she’s feeling bold, she’ll jump back into the tub, at my feet, with my body (mostly) blocking the stream of water that would otherwise soak her through.

And that’s the opening minutes of my day.

I’m always curious as to how much Eliza behaves like other cats. I don’t have a second cat, she lost her mother within two weeks of her birth, and she hasn’t been around other cats regularly since I took her away from the rest of the litter, when she was ten weeks old. So, whatever behavior she’s learned is mostly either innate to her cat-self or stuff she’s picked up from her environment and from living with me. At regular intervals, I wonder, How differently does she behave from other cats?

So, imagine the jolt of recognition I had when I read the 4 April 2008 strip of Matthew Reidsma’s High Maintenance Machine. Now, despite my antipathy toward the memoir in general (with Brian Winter’s Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien and C.S. Walton’s Ivan Petrov: Russia through a Shot Glass as noted exceptions), I’ve got a soft spot for autobiographical comics. By drawing yourself and the world around you, you’re automatically forced to put an aesthetic distance between events and your rendition that complicates the reader’s understanding of the situations as the “truth.” With photography, cinema, and prose, the reader is inclined to accept what’s shown at face value; with comics, it’s always conscious that the view presented is a subjective, constructed one.

Reidsma’s strip, expressly begun to force the artist to improve his skills, is a joy. He’s not as stylistically dazzling as James Kochalka’s American Elf—Reidsma sticks to a basic 2X3 panel layout, and draws in black-and-white instead of full color—but I like Reidsma’s work better. His daily vignettes are beautifully, cleanly drawn, and are sweet without being saccharine. The cute, clear-line style is jazzy and bold—the pacing seems quick as a result, even when the six daily panels actually show an infinitesimal moment. He dares to show pivotal moments in his spats with his wife, his minor foibles and successes, and himself at his angriest and least likable. I’ve been following his stuff for a few months.

So, there on 4 April, I discovered that he’s a truly keen observer of cats, and that my girl isn’t a total oddball after all. I decided to buy the original art right then and there: $10 plus $5 for shipping. I got the art, charmingly and carefully packaged and with a free sticker to boot, a mere four days later. Reidsma’s a very tight penciler—there are only a few stray marks differentiating his penciled art and the final inking—and the page makes for a cozy feel. The newest acquisition to the Quiet Bubble collection will hang in the bathroom, where it’s most appropriate.

Commonplace

“Dialect aint a zack science, baby.

You do dialect and you think you got it just right, reppazent it percisely, and twenty years later it all seems quaint and cute and unbearable, like reading The Emperor Jones aloud.

Because people don’t speak dialect, they speak at and around and toward and with it, sliding from level to level as they understand speech and as need dictates.”

—Jack Butler, Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock (1993)

Interview: Brian Winter

In his memoir/critique Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien: A Yanqui’s Missteps in Argentina, Brian Winter uses the tango and the gaucho figure, in equal measures, as lenses through which to view Argentine culture. The book offers a compelling and mordantly funny take on Argentina—full of rich characters and vivid, concise clarification about the country’s politics—during the country’s worst economic crisis of the last hundred years.

Brian—an old friend—was gracious enough to grant me an interview by email about the book, travel literature in general, and the current state of Argentina. Enjoy.

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The book is at once a memoir, a breezy historical overview, and a work of cultural criticism about the nature of the tango. Which aspect provided the biggest challenge to you, in terms of writing, research, and recollection?

Most of the book takes place in dark, smoke-filled rooms between the hours of 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., with most of the characters, myself included, immersed in various states of inebriation. There was dancing and flirting; threats and rivalries. Some of the time I had a notebook with me; other times I found myself drunkenly scribbling notes into my journal when I got home at dawn. So, to answer your question: Doing justice to the conversations I had in the tango halls, to the dialogue and characters that form the core of the book, was very difficult. Most of the writing was done in Washington rather than Buenos Aires, so I was often describing places and people with imperfect memory and a certain degree of nostalgia… which, given the themes of the tango, actually had some advantages.

The four-part structure works very well, moving essentially from being initially overwhelmed to becoming a near-native to being disillusioned, and back again. The deeper we get into the book, the more confident and more extensive the forays into Argentine history and politics. Was the structure something that you had in mind before you began writing, or did it come to you as the book rolled along?

It’s worth noting that I originally set out to write a book about Argentina’s epic economic crisis that touched briefly on the tango, rather than the other way around. Twenty-five publisher rejections later I realized that, hmm, maybe the book needed to evolve into something more funny and less… soul-numbingly depressing (though, given what’s happening on Wall Street, the financial meltdown theme might have proven prescient… oh well). I am glad in retrospect that the book turned out the way it did, because the subject is more accessible and a great deal more fun, frankly. As for the structure itself, maybe it was an accident, but thinking about it now I’m reminded of these silly Power Point presentations that my college professors showed us when we arrived somewhere for a “study abroad.” The purpose was to prepare us for the phases of mood that you inevitably go through—euphoria, boredom, disappointment, constipation, equilibrium, I don’t remember exactly what else—when you move to a new country. Each time, I remember marveling over how stupid it all seemed, yet each time the presentation turned out to be absolutely spot-on. People are predictable, like it or not. The book is ultimately about moving to a strange and bizarre place, so I guess in some ways it’s a reflection of that cycle.

Tango provides an efficient, if complicated, lens through which you can view Argentina? Is there a similar sort of cultural trope that you could apply to America, and why? If not, why not?

Maybe country music, which is so optimistic and yet so weirdly depressing that I think it could only be forged in Middle America. That’s a case I briefly make in the book. I do think, though, that tango could be unique among world music in just how comprehensive a guide it provides to the soul of its country of origin. Tango lyrics basically say that yesterday was paradise, today is hell, and tomorrow will be even worse—and that is about as close to the Argentine credo as you can get. I would add, though, that it’s not perfect. A great many of my Argentine friends who are under 40 believe the tango to be utterly old-fashioned as a dance, a music, and a window into their country’s soul. Something I regret not providing at least a glimpse of in the book is the Argentina I knew outside of the milongas; I spent just as much time playing ping-pong and pounding beers with my twenty-something Argentine friends at houses in the suburbs as I did at the tango halls.

The epilogue tells briefly and hilariously how you imported Argentine customs into Mexico City, much to the annoyance of your peers. In the long run, how have your four years in Argentina affected the ways in which you look at America and the rest of the world?

I love this question. I still find myself subject to weird fits of melancholy and irrational distrust of financial and government institutions, traits that could certainly be credited to my experience in Argentina or… aging, I guess. I consume unhealthy amounts of steak and often resist the urge to grow a mullet. My sense of humor is probably darker and more caustic than it was before. I would also like to think that I absorbed some of the Argentines’ more virtuous traits; that living there made me a better conversationalist, allowed me to really see how a society works from top to bottom, and gave me a higher appreciation of the “good life.” My formative years were in Buenos Aires; when I left in 2004, I had actually spent more time in Argentina since graduating from high school than I had in the USA. That’s pretty incredible. It sure didn’t make me popular in Mexico though!

Though the book takes long looks into the past, giving overviews of the career of tango composer Enrique Santos Discépolo and gauchos and Argentina's economic yo-yoing, the memoir section is very much in-the-moment. How important was balancing the history with the memoir?

This may be a cliché, but the truth is that the book is ultimately a reflection of thoughts and experiences that I had to express. To me, the only reason to subject yourself to the absolute hell of writing a book is if the topic obsesses you so deeply and completely that you must put it to paper. That topic for me was Argentina. So I sat down and wrote, and what came out is mostly what you read. I desperately wanted to write about the more troubled aspects of Argentina’s history, and particularly (as I referenced above) the unique moment in time that I lived through from 2000 to 2004, when Argentina had an economic meltdown similar to the Great Depression. That story to me is still the heart of the book, and it also best explains what drew me to the tango.

What shape is Argentina in these days? Do you still keep up with it or with any of the people you befriended while there?

To my utter surprise, Argentina is in the middle of a transcendent economic boom. It fixed a lot of its problems and these days the streets are packed with people at 3 a.m., the steakhouses are bustling, and the protests and political unrest is—mostly—absent now. It has also become, quite deservedly I think, a mecca for Americans and Europeans who want to live the good life on the cheap, drawing comparisons to Paris in the 1920s and Prague in the 1990s. I wonder if the flood of foreigners has ruined the fun a bit, since one of the things I enjoyed most about Argentina was that it was a secret nobody else knew about; but maybe that is just a classic, bitchy complaint among expats who move on. On the other hand, the skeptic in me (let’s call him my inner Argentine) also notes that this is in every sense a manic-depressive country prone to soaring highs and abysmal lows. They’ll need another two decades of growth like this to start reaching the European living standards that Argentina enjoyed just two generations ago. That seems unlikely. It’s also bizarre to see how, even now, the groundwork is being laid for the next crisis (though I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near as bad as the last one). For example, the government is openly, baldly lying about the inflation rate, which is actually double the official number. Everybody in Argentina knows it’s a lie. The government knows it. The people know it. How can you have a stable economy when nobody knows what prices are like? Can you imagine this happening anywhere else? (As you can tell, yes, I still keep up rather obsessively with events and people there)

How did you decide on the tone of the book? It's very, very funny, even as the material gets bleaker and darker; was this an attempt to recreate the ying-yang idea of tango—cynical lyrics vs. bright music—in your prose?

In one sense, the situation—Argentina’s situation—was so inherently absurd that it had to be funny. I mean, how does a country with some of the world’s best farmland a vibrant, educated populace become such a basketcase that it has five different presidents in a period of two weeks? Tell me how that’s not hilarious. Also, Argentines themselves are possessed of infinite, vibrant, sophisticated humor—and it’s Argentine characters, far more than myself, who take center stage in the book. I’d also note that the economic recovery in the years after I left permitted me to address the crisis itself with far more irony and humor than I otherwise would have. If people had continued dying of malnutrition and leaving the country in droves… well, there’s nothing funny about that. But the fact that things bounced back so quickly just served to further highlight how illogical and unnecessary the whole crisis was in the first place, and it allowed me to write the book in a different way.

You clearly read a lot on Argentina's economic and cultural history, and the depth of your research is reflected in the book's many quotes from primary sources. What models did you use in terms of writing the book? Were they contemporary books or articles, or instead literature from the earlier part of the 20th century? What travel writers would you consider as influences?

I am a collector of old travelogues, particularly those on Argentina and South America, and I’ve used many of them as sources in the book. The gold standard in the industry is obviously Bill Bryson. I like Bruce Chatwin, V.S. Naipaul, and Burton Holmes, all of whom wrote about Argentina. Jan Morris is wonderful. I’m not sure how much of a future there is for books like the one I’ve written; it seems the expansion of video and TV franchises like the Discovery Channel and National Geographic might be enough on their own to satisfy people who actively want to learn about other places. Fifty or even thirty years ago, a book was usually the best way to experience a foreign country; now it’s hard to get people to read someone else’s rendering of what a place looks, feels, and smells like… unless you as an author can somehow mix that with your personal account of divorce, redemption, alcoholism, spiritual discovery, whatever. I’m thinking of Elizabeth Gilbert or Frances Mayes, obviously. I guess I could have gone that route in my book, but it wasn’t me; I wanted to make Argentina the main character, rather than myself. Probably sold fewer books as a result. Oh well.

The book mixes history, memoir, journalism, and cultural criticism. How would you classify the book—as travel literature, or something else?

All of the above, I guess.

Finally, do you still tango?

You know, I lead a very different life now. It’s shocking, actually, just how different it is. I’m a senior editor at a national newspaper and I live in the suburbs of Washington D.C. I am married and I have a young daughter and most of my social life takes place on my screened-in front porch, where I like to drink beer and eat steak and play cards with friends. That is a somewhat convoluted way of saying, no, I don’t tango anymore—but I often wish I did.

Speaking in tango: Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien

As much as I love Jorge Luis Borges, a fair criticism of his literature is that, in a career that spanned five decades as a writer and editor, he never wrote a single credible, rounded character. His short stories and essays concern themselves with ideas, metaphysical gambits, and linguistic constructions. His gnarled, cold, mock-academic prose challenges the conventions and usefulness of language to stylize human experience. He’s interested, on a macro scale, in how we use language to construct ourselves. On the micro level, however, individual humans are mostly left on the cutting-room floor.

For Westerners beyond those most dedicated to Argentina’s culture, the country’s other literary touchstone is the epic poem Martin Fierro. Essentially an elegy for the diminishing Argentine frontier, it’s told from the limited perspective of Fierro, a gaucho—Argentina’s version of the cowboy, in both fact and mythical significance—whose way of life is disappearing. The poem ends with Fierro leaving Argentina’s encroaching government and city-fying ways forever, tears streaming down his face.

So, essentially, Argentina’s most widely-known literary exports are a character type that no longer exists and a writer who was never that interested in characters in the first place.

In Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien: A Yanqui’s Missteps in Argentina, Brian Winter fills his memoir/cultural critique with many richly developed characters—those he meets, those he reads about in history books, and one (the tango) that isn’t a person at all but feels as rounded and complicated as one. From dancehall lotharios and tango instructors to taxi drivers and the expatriates they transport, Winter’s people leap off the page. Even the bit parts feel fleshed out.

Towards the beginning, he finds himself wandering the streets of Buenos Aires, and meets the character that will loom largest over the book:

On just my second day in Buenos Aires, I had been wandering, still strangely unaware of my new surroundings, through a street fair outside the Retiro train terminal when I heard a tinny radio playing. I was on a quest to buy an alarm clock, hoping in a rush of blind optimism that one day I might actually need one to wake me up so I could go somewhere important. Retiro was where newly arrived immigrants had once left the port city for a promising new life on the Pampa, but these days, most trains had stopped running; the operator had gone bankrupt, and Retiro was now mostly a place to buy either suspiciously cheap trinkets from China or even more suspiciously cheap super pancho hot dogs from God knows where. The terminal’s ornate façade, which had once been a convincing replica of the station in Milan, was now covered with soot and graffiti. The street merchants let the clock alarms go off all day to show they weren’t pirated fakes (you always had to be careful in Argentina), so that the whole market sounded like a nest of shrill, beeping baby birds. Amid the awful din, someone had thoughtfully turned on this old radio, and the unmistakable sound of tango crackled through the blown-out speakers.

The voice incongruously happy and bright, sang:

The world was and always will be a piece of shit,
This much I know.
In the year 506, and in 2000 also!
There have always been crooks, backstabbers, and suckers,
But that the twentieth century is a spectacle of insolent evil,
No one can deny.

A bespectacled middle-aged woman behind one of the booths watched me pause to listen, and she noticed the expression on my face.

“You like that?” she called out to me in a smoky baritone. “That’s our national anthem, you know.”

Entering into a jovial/sardonic conversation with the woman and a Marxist bookseller across the way, he discovers that this national anthem—“Cambalache,” by Enrique Santos Discépolo—is perhaps an unmatched blend of acidity, sophistication, weariness, and complicated love. Almost no nation’s anthem proclaims “We’re number two! We’re number two!”; this one suggests that Argentina’s not even in the top ten.

Of course, “Cambalache” is the unofficial anthem, just as Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” is the unofficial corrective to Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” As Winter listens, he discovers lines like “If you don’t steal, you’re a fool/ Nobody cares if you were born honest” and begins to wonder why something so dyspeptic—but so cheery-sounding!—is on pop radio, and why Argentines seem to feel that it’s representative of their country.

Because, after all, Argentines love their country. For all the bitter sighs, emitted by almost every person in the book, Argentines think theirs is the greatest, most sophisticated country in the world. They’ll tell anyone who listens to them, and Winter is a good listener. (His recording—and, I suspect, partial invention—of crisp dialogue is one of Niño Bien’s greatest strengths. More on this in a sec.) As Winter points out, Argentina was among the world’s five richest countries in the 1930s, and a pinnacle of high European civilization transplanted to South America. He also admits, however, that

[t]hose days were gone, and it appeared that they were never coming back… Argentina had been on a hopeless, seemingly irreversible seventy-year losing streak—it was like the Chicago Cubs of countries. It had begun the century with a higher per capita income than Sweden or Spain, and on par with Germany. Perhaps no other nation had fallen so far, so fast. Yet there had been no devastating wars, no epic plagues, floods, or droughts. There had been no one tyrant, no Idi Amin or Josef Stalin who had single-handedly run the place into the ground. A country blessed with some of the earth’s richest farmland was now having problems feeding its people. And while the world is full of countries with abundant natural resources that have failed to reach their potential, perhaps none of them also possess Argentina’s wealth of human capital: a vibrant and skilled population that is nearly 100 percent literate.

Nobody seems to know why things have gone so wrong, and why they continue to do so. Winter—who came to Argentina on a whim after graduating from the University of Texas in 1999—doesn’t quite solve the conundrum, either. In his four years in the country, though, he is an able witness to the general befuddlement—a confusion that’s made most manifest in tango.

Ah, the tango: that shopworn cliché, with its high kicks and exaggerated emotions, has become the de facto symbol of “exotic Latin culture”—much the way Americans loved mambo in the 1950s, and went through a flamenco craze in the 1980s—for clueless Americans. Winter knows, and lets the reader know, early on that he realizes that using the tango as a lens through which to view Argentina is a dicey proposition.

Tango, however, is music and dance suited for lovers, fools, madmen, and anyone who’s felt like any combination of the above—in other words, dicey. In a country that’s gone through more economic fluctuations and presidential changes—at one point in Niño Bien, Argentina goes through five presidents in about as many weeks—than could possibly be imagined, the mix of romantic gesture and engrained cynicism that forms tango must feel especially apt for Argentina.

As Winter discovers, tango songs and taxi drivers are Argentina’s best underground news sources. Both pointedly casting stones (and naming names) at politics and culture and, in an odd quirk, many of the cabdrivers are former government officials, and tango’s most prominent composer was practically a presidential advisor. Though its musical heyday was in the 1940s and 1950s, which are ironically periods of tremendous wealth for the country, it continues to resonate with its controversial lyrics and sophisticated, tangled melodies and rhythms. It seems to operate during periods of both feast and famine. Tango is sleek on the surface, and tumultuous at its core.

To get beyond the surface or, rather, to appreciate both the artifice and the flesh underneath, Niño Bien argues implicitly that one has to look beyond the page. The people Winter meets don’t much trust what’s printed or what the TV anchors read onscreen. Instead, he uses tango as a lens through which he can make some sense of Argentina’s contradictions, charm, and characters.

Winter’s prose is conversational and quick-witted, moving easily from the dance floor to the street to the library stacks. Tracing the roots of tango’s music and choreographies, he dovetails into discussions of Argentina’s yo-yoing wealth, its class dynamics, its odd history of European and African immigration, its historical lack of women during the 19th century, and the evolution/dissolution of the gaucho in reality and myth. He excerpts judiciously from historical diaries, notes, and academic texts, selecting that which emboldens his wary comprehension of the Argentine present.

That present is Winter’s focus, and he seems to spend it mostly in milongas, where the tango is danced, whisky is drunk, and hookups are jelled. As the previous two excerpts revealed, Winter quickly draws compelling people and places. His elderly posse of milongueros—with names like El Tigre (“The Tiger”), El Nene (“The Kid”) Patterson, El Chino (“The Chinaman,” who’s not remotely Oriental), El Chino #2 (again, not Chinese), and Hector El Griego (“Hector the Greek,” who’s Italian)—ring true, with distinct personalities created in quick strokes. Relationships between Winter’s comely dance instructor Mariela and the other men she teaches are rendered with an awareness of how the author is being played for more money, but are nevertheless touching. The aforementioned cabdrivers, sharply opinionated to a man, spurt out memorable one-liners.

If nothing else, Niño Bien is very funny, if grimly so, even outside of the milonga. The dialogue zings, and so do Winter’s descriptions of fashion and gesture. Falling in love with Argentina is “like falling for an alcoholic at the very moment she hits rock bottom, sleeping in a gutter with puke in her hair.” His first tango with a woman would fit in well in an Argentine screwball comedy. Winter’s bitter humor extends to himself as well, but his sentences also mock that very bitterness (and Argentina’s as well).

Throughout the book, his dark wit carries the reader through what are initially considered digressions. Brief histories of slavery and prostitution in Buenos Aires—grim subjects both, with the potential to be portrayed dryly—are engrossing, in part, because Niño Bien brings mordant humor to the discussions. The book’s structure—roughly a chronological progression from 2000 to 2004, with historical side trips—keeps the material focused on how the digressions, in fact, led to modern-day Argentina.

It’s not a thorough view of Argentina, in that Winter mostly sticks to the cities and not to the Pampas. And Niño Bien offers no solutions to, or reasons for, Argentina’s crisis. But the book is Winter’s own, and works on its own terms as a window into a classy, high-strung, and perpetually troubled country.