It is an unusual moment here in Argentina. There is no meat. In a country famous for beef, most markets are without. It would be like Japan without fish, or Italy without pasta. I recently wrote about a trip through the province of Entre Rios. Right now that province is in-passable. Farmers and their supporters have been blockading roads to prevent the transit of all goods to the markets.

At the same time, in the streets in Buenos Aires and other cities throughout the country there have been many seemingly-spontaneous rallies, called cacerolazos, named so because people leave their homes with casseroles/pots and pans, and bang on them to make noise. It is synonymous to a popular uprising, and I understand it was a common occurance during the economic crash of 2001 when things were truly bad here. Continue »

Roll back a few years in history, make that nearly 20, and I was in art school in New York, and with my first boyfriend Robert, still waking up about my sexuality and other things of adulthood. As a California native, my family was far away, but Robert’s family instantly accepted me and embraced me. For 6 and a half years, he and I were never open about our relationship to his parents, but later, after it had ended, we found out that we were fooling no one. It really didn’t matter one way or another, as I always have felt a strong love from Jim and Maggie, as family. We spent countless weekends in their home in suburban New Jersey, combing yard sales, grilling hamburgers, telling stories, and just spending a quiet time in an oasis away from the city. Continue »

We have just arrived safely in Buenos Aires. Thursday before last, my boyfriend Guille (Guillermo) and I set out to visit his friend Pato who lives in the province of Chaco. We call her “Pato Chaco” so as not to confuse her with my friend Pato, who we refer to as “Pato Macho.” He’s hardly seething with machismo, actually sensitive and gay, but macho here means male. My dog Clyde is un perro macho, though he’s castrated. The full name of Pato Macho is Patricio and Pato Chaco’s is Patricia, the final “o” and “a” signify male or female. To confuse things more, Patricia’s last name is Blanco, the male form of the word for white.

Back to the near present: Last Thursday we left for the province of Chaco, more than 1000 kilometers north of Buenos Aires. Though I have been living in Argentina for a few years now I had only driven a car once before here, and aside from adjusting to the given that stop signs here meaning nothing, it was not terribly difficult. I rented the car from a place in the neighborhood, a nearly new Ford Ka compact. With Fernando Peña on the radio, we set out on Avenue 9 de Julio during rush hour; with 10 lanes in either direction and no one paying attention to the lanes, it was a real derby, but soon enough we were on the highway leaving the city. Continue »

Sigue mi propuesta para el “Festival de la Luz,” el agosto de 2008.
Y por ahí­ hay un ejemplo como instalar la obra.

Como un varon, yo entro a baños publicos con mingitorios casi todos los dias. Varias cosas allá me llaman la atención. Empecé con la obra en 2004 en mis primeros dias en Buenos Aires. En muchos baños de Argentina hay justo dos mingitorios, uno al lado del otro, de un diseño sencillo. Es como un dí­ptico preparado para una operación bastante personal.

Seguí­ después de las primeras imágenes, la mayoria en Buenos Aires, y algunas de otros lugares incluyendo New York City. Este proyecto todaví­a no termina, y no sé si va a terminar. En cualquier momento que estoy en un baño, en un restaurante, bar, lo que sea, y me da una composicion que corresponde con la obra, y en ausencia de otra gente, la registro.

Hace noventa años Marcel Duchamp presentó “La Fuente” (y por casualidad pasó un tiempo en Buenos Aires en la misma epoca), y mi obra es en parte un homenaje a él. Pero hoy tenemos estas fotos sobre las formas, las manchas, el ambiente, la repeticion y los cambios. Entre las imagenes hay temas recurientes y distintas diferencias.

Para exponer estas imagenes, las armo todas en forma de grilla, cada foto de un tamaño de 15 por 10 centí­metros.

Michael Kay
Buenos Aires, Noviembre, 2007

The holiday season is near in Buenos Aires so it’s getting hot. Makes for nice walks with my dog Clyde no matter what the hour. We pass through Parque Lezama near where I live a couple times a week. It is a big lush park, with Jacaranda and Ceibo trees now in bloom. There are several stray dogs there I know, and sometimes I think of grabbing one.

For example, there is this cute creature you see to the right. It’s this stray I see in the park all the time with Clyde. And there is another one named “Chicho” who is much more sizeable, a dark shepherdish mutt, and 100% amor. Sometimes Chicho follows us home and waits outside. The first time this happened I was concerned since I at the time lived on a very busy street. I phoned my friend Nacho, who knows Chicho, and assured me that he does the same with many dog owners, always making his way back to the park. For some reason all the dogs here, female and male, seem to love licking Clyde’s genitals. Not sure what it is. I love when it makes the owners uncomfortable that their macho dog is being “gay.”

I have started collecting photos of stray dogs in Buenos Aires. (Certainly that will be the subject an upcoming photo series here.) There are so many strays here, but most are well-cared-for. People leave food out for these cats and dogs, and the strays are usually not too skinny. One time Clyde consumed an entire plate on gnochi in the park, and another time a slab of beef ribs. The street animals eat better than some people here. Seriously. And Clyde doesn’t help the imbalance, as he always seems to charm food from homeless people, like this dude who took out this slab of ham and served Clyde a big chunk (after taking a bite himself to prove it was ok). Furthermore, every police station in Buenos Aires has at least one or a few strays outside accompanying the police officers.

Maybe there will eventually be fewer strays here. I have seen a change of awareness over the 3 years as Argentines used to be so surprised that I had had my dog castrated. Now I see signs insisting that people not abandon their animals; and there is a van that comes to within a block of my apartment every few months to offer free castration to dogs and cats. People line up for this. The government also offer free rabies shots at times. Not too bad a deal.

I came across this new browser today, Flock. I haven’t heard much buzz about it yet, but it seems pretty cool. It uses the Mozilla rendering engine (same as Firefox) and adds features such as integration with Facebook, Flickr, de.licio.us, and a few other such sites, plus other features like an integrated clipboard and blog editor. And many Mozilla Add-ons will work with Flock too.

I tried to used the blog editor to post this item, and failed. Well, that may be because it doesn’t specifically support WordPress, which I use. Still, I am wondering what advantage it has, since many options are not available here that I would have by directly editing it in the web page, which I can open in any browser. But the integration with Flickr and Facebook seems more compelling as well-thought-out modules in the browser.

I’ll see how it goes from more use, but at first glance it seems like a good fruit from the Mozilla project being open source.

War and the suppression of basic liberties are never nice things. Today there are few people who believe that the invasion of Iraq wasn’t a big horrendous mistake. Even the greatest advocate of the war, the current president of the USA, is looking for a way out of the mess. And the US public is just beginning to get wise that suppression of basic laws of privacy and habeas corpus are also a bad thing. Still, in the faint hope that we don’t repeat these mistakes in the future, it helps to point out a parallel between current events and somewhat less current events.

I have been living in Argentina for three years now. I arrived a few days after that arrogant US president who invaded Iraq was reelected. It was embarrassing to be seen as a part of all that. (Fortunately there are intelligent people anywhere who see me for who I am, rather than as a generic representative of my government.) But at the same time, I could point out to any Yanqui-hater that Argentina has not so clean a history, with a recent military dictatorship which kidnapped and murdered 30,000 of its own citizens. Though the “Dirty War” here was largely enabled by US administrations of Ford, Carter, and Reagan, it was primarily a homegrown operation. Continue »

In a country where a steak is cheaper than a tomato, a new president was just elected who happens to be the wife of the current president. She is also a prominent senator in her own right. The centrist Christina Fernendez Kirchner won with 45% of the national vote. And the price of the tomato is finally settling back down to earth.

For the election, I was in El Bolsón, in the mountains of Patagonia. Nothing special for the election except it was raining that day so instead of hiking we went to a microbrewery there and couldn’t drink beer cause they don’t sell on election day. Guillermo, my boyfriend who is Argentine, went to the Police station there to get a certificate to prove he was more than 500 km from his voting place and was exempt from voting. Back in Buenos Aires he has to do one more errand here to get a stamp on his ID in place of his vote so he doesn’t have problems with the law in the future. Continue »

I shot over 300 pics on my recent trip to Salta and Jujuy, and this is one perspective of the landscape there:
Click here

This was a technical exercise in using Adobe Lightroom to process raw digital images. The slideshow itself was generated straight from Lightroom and then I tweaked it to fit this site.

This is the current chief of the government of Buenos Aires, and he is running for re-election. At first these ads seemed a mistake, but now I see that they are a strategy. (Photo by Katarina.) See the entire photo gallery.