When you stop for longer amounts of time, then some of the potential can actually be followed up. I’ve made a lot of those travel friendships – the kind that are all about entertainment and festivity – and I’ve made a few more substantial ones too. Sometimes I just feel greedy, asking myself why I’m spending time and effort on new friends when I already have so many with whom I struggle to stay in contact. I’ve known so many good people. Not that I’m easy – the ones I truly value are a small proportion of those I meet – but over the course of a life they’ve built up. It helps that I’m massively nostalgic, so when someone is associated with an event or time that was important, they remain immensely loved, even if our actual relationship was brief or not especially profound. Some people I know only have a handful of people who are really important to them. I have at least dozens and they probably number into the hundreds. But of course keeping track of them is hard, and can make you doubt the sincerity of your attachment. Facebook, for all the stick it cops, has actually made a huge difference in being able to keep tabs on those people. But I keep finding that however they build up, there’s always room for more.

I left Buenos Aires just over a month ago now, and it wasn’t easy. My plan was to head to Salta to meet two of the pirates from the Antarctic ship, then go pretty much directly to Brazil. I would have to go back through BA, but only in transit to connect to a flight. I knew by the time I got back from Salta, my version of BA would have changed. Washington had already gone. Alex and Ani were due to move back to Australia in my absence. Clemenceau’s girlfriend was arriving from France to take him travelling. And seeing Nora again for a brief instant would only make things more difficult. So I had already decided to pass back through with my eyes closed, and my goodbyes had to be said in advance.

Clemenceau had recently moved into an apartment with a busy professional Peruvian girl. It was  one of those nice new neat little chocolate box jobs, everything white and shiny and organised. Had it been back home all the furniture would have been from Ikea. He was obsessively concerned about keeping it spotless so as not to tick her off. Every time we cooked it would be washed and cleared up within five minutes of eating. He dried everything instead of leaving it in the draining rack. Whenever we finished a beer he would run the bottle out onto the balcony, in case it left a smell in the house. Twenty minutes before she was due home each night would be a frenzy of wiping and checking and polishing. This was utterly hilarious considering the traditional state of Clemenceau’s bachelor quarters both back in La Casa Teixera and then in the Malaysian Pyjama Ghost’s house. It was like having a punk band come over at 9 pm and ask if you just turn the music down a bit, please?

But for the last two weeks I was in BA, she went on holiday. Given I couldn’t walk at this stage, I went to live with Clemenceau. I got there the day after she’d left, and the place had exploded. Every possession Clemenceau owned had been unpacked and scattered over every available surface. Cups, glasses, plates throughout the wreckage. “I’m sorting out my stuff,” he said defensively, “so it has to get bigger before it can get smaller.” His rationalising program went on for the next week or so, till I got sick of it and rationalised it all back into his suitcases. He didn’t seem to notice.

I soon found he was being kind of cranky and snide. I thought it was a personal space issue. I wasn’t too sure. Then after a couple of days it finally came out. I said something about Brazil. “Ooh,” he said. “Look at me. I’m Mister La-di-da, Mr Oh, It’s So Cold, oh, I don’t like winter, oh, I think I’ll just go to Brazil.” It took a while to sink in. I had been treated to several days of passive-aggressive bitchiness because… my friend was mad at me for leaving. When I thought about it, it was actually absurdly sweet.

We were holed up in that flat for most of the fortnight. I physically couldn’t leave, and he didn’t. The furthest he went was the shop  around the corner. We sat and festered in there, cooking new variations on pasta and eggs, washing dishes for the next round, and if not either of these two things, facing each other across the dining table, glued to our laptops, feverishly building and fixing websites. Him for his thesis, me for Wordplay. We truly started going a bit mad. We ended up speaking entirely in in-jokes and non-sequiturs, in a weird melange of French, English and Spanish, with voices and characters in profusion. In the supermarket and the street we would do the same, perplexing all those around. The same when occasionally Carmen came over, looked at us strangely for half an hour, then made a cautious retreat.

I saw Nora the night before I left. I’d hardly seen her in weeks, since she got edgy about my departure and retreated into less threatening territory. Finding space to be alone with someone in this country is hard work. Scattered all around the towns are couples out on the street, on park benches or folded into whatever slightly-occluded doorway they can find, making out with a desperate kind of hunger. It’s because rent is expensive compared to earnings, so a lot of singles stay with their parents even into their 30s. Then those who don’t move in with girlfriends or boyfriends have to share accommodation in ways that we wouldn’t believe. Ani’s sister lives with two other women in an apartment, with a single and a bunk in the one bedroom that they all share. Nora lives with her folks, both siblings and several dogs in the one smallish apartment. She’s 24 and still shares a room with her brother. Bunkbeds again. Clemenceau’s apartment was a single-room studio deal, with  two single beds next to each other, even though his housemate was a professional in her 30s. The simple luxury we all have of the freedom to do what we want in our own personal space basically doesn’t exist.

Clemenceau tactfully excused himself to go for a drink when she arrived, so we did manage some quiet time, and talked well. The level to which we can communicate has advanced so far from when we met. She’s a strange girl, odd in a lot of ways but endlessly interesting. It’s difficult, when you know you’re seeing someone for the last time. Every gesture and word is significant, a nostalgic link to something else that happened. You pay attention to everything. You try to drink them in, to fill yourself with this image of them so that it will stay stronger and clearer, so that you can carry it with you. You want these moments to exist indestructibly, though you know that inevitably with time they will start to blur around the edges. We said goodbye down in the street and there was that sweetly painful last moment, the kind I’ve had a few of now over the years, when you breathe in someone’s scent for the last time, feel their body pressed against you. Then she pulled her pointy hood up and was away, looking like a little elf skipping between the parked cars, until she disappeared around the corner and out of sight.

I was asleep when Clemenceau finally came home. He leaned on the buzzer for so long that I scrambled out of bed and into some clothes in a bewildered panic, feeling like a Guantanamo inmate been broken in for questioning. When I got downstairs to let him in it became clear why. He was drunker than I’ve ever seen another human being. He emerged from the shadows swaying like a pine in a high wind, and holding some sort of club. Closer inspection revealed it to be a thick black-painted table leg, with ragged chunks of nails and timber attached to one end. “I’m too drunk to even think about being drunk,” he pronounced with a heavy slur, twitching his weapon wristily like the world’s worst baseballer at the start of a killing spree.

“The fucking light,” he muttered, swishing ineffectively at the modest recessed halogen overhead. “There’s nothing good to smash here.” He tried to follow me into the lift, but got rather more wall than doorway and rebounded away. He spun a few yards back then unsteadily lined himself up for another tilt, tottering like a newborn giraffe. “Come towards the light,” I said, feeling like I should have been saying this to his bullet-riddled body in rural France in 1943 as he told me through shivering lips that he was cold, so cold. On his second attempt he breached the aperture more or less cleanly, just clipping the edge, and his momentum carried him into the back corner, where he regarded himself in the double mirror and chuckled throatily. As the lift took off he staggered like it were the pitching deck of a Gulf fishing boat during an ear infection epidemic. On the way out his bony French elbow triggered the emergency alarm. “Oh, I’m trash,” he muttered. “That’s what you say? I’m a fucking trashcan, Jefferson.”  I dragged him from the scene. He spied the light from our open doorway. “Hey, look. We have a place to sleep.”

All Clemenceau’s bedding had been to the laundry that day. He collapsed on his bare mattress, rummaged through the bags of clean laundry in a haphazard fashion, and eventually pulled out a pair of jeans. He looked at them for a minute as though perhaps they had the answer to some deep and pressing question, then draped them over his chest and went to sleep. So did I. Since the beds were next to each other I was woken up a while later when he got out of bed. One of the dining chairs was sitting nearby, its white seat glowing in a pool of streetlight. Whether this helped confuse his visual metaphor centre, I don’t know, but Clemenceau wandered over to it, regarded it for a moment, then casually started pissing on it.

“Whoa whoa whoah!” I yelled, jumping up and grabbing him by the shoulder. “No! Bathroom. There.” He wandered off. I looked around vaguely, in one of those Oh-Christ-what-the-hell-do-I-do-about-this moments. Eventually I just threw a couple of towels on the chair and went back to bed. Screw it, I thought. I’m leaving tomorrow. It’s his house.

We both went back to sleep. A while later though he got up again, went straight over to the same chair, and was about to repeat the dose. My brain must have been on alert, because I woke up as soon as he moved and yelled at him before he had time to start. He stumbled obediently away to the bathroom. Playing nightwatchman to a bladder-happy Gauloise was really not how I had envisaged spending my night. The fact there had been a second incident made me start strategising. I made sure the bathroom light was on and the door open for a visual clue, moved the tempting chair outside, and heaped a few clean towels on my pile of belongings at the end of my bed just in case his wanderings should take him there. Then cautiously back to sleep.

It must have been a longer gap until his next excursion, because I had time to fall more deeply asleep. My internal alarm sensors were still wired enough to trigger me awake once he started moving, but it took a little longer to swim up to the surface. So I was aware of his actions a couple of seconds before I could respond with my own. With his first chair unavailable, he walked around to the far side of the dining table, pulled out the chair there, and started pissing on the tabletop itself. “What are you doing?!” I managed to get out. By then I was completely perplexed. This just did not make sense. He looked up at me with one eyebrow cocked (among other things) and said, “I’m pissing on the table,” in a slightly puzzled tone, as though it were the most normal thing in the world. It seemed that all those weeks of self-repression and neatness had finally found their outlet.

“No!” I yelled, as though talking to a dog, and that alone was enough to fire whatever lagging synapse it required, as he immediately turned and wandered off to the bathroom again. I threw some more towels on the table. Tomorrow was going to be laundry day all over again for one Frenchman. Naturally enough, in the morning he didn’t remember a thing, or claimed not to. But he didn’t seem perturbed, just found it puzzling and gently amusing.  But then I guess that we’ve created so many stupid anecdotes in each other’s company that this was just an extension of the legacy.

Dusk was just starting to come on by the time I had to leave the next day. The quality of the light at that time, of the dying day, always makes those moments prime breeding ground for nostalgia and melancholy. It was impossible not to succumb to it. I was leaving a town where I had felt at home, and leaving a little life that I had scraped together for myself. I was leaving friends who had owed me nothing at all when they met me, but had been good to me for no other reason than that they liked me and I liked them. It feels like an extraordinary privilege sometimes when strangers put their good faith in you, and treat you like you’ve added something to their lives. Clemenceau walked a few blocks with me to take a cab. He is one of life’s natural cynics, the kind whose normal mode of interaction is through smartarse remarks and irony. But I hugged him in the street and suddenly all his bluster was gone, he was just this slightly awkward bony shy Frenchman, not much more than a kid, who was a bit angry that I was leaving him and a bit sad that I was going. And he blushed a little at the hug, as though it were unexpected, and I crossed the road for a cab, and he stood a minute in his blue velvet jacket looking skinny and thoughtful and like he wasn’t quite sure what to do, and I was struck once again by just how fucking sad life can be, travelling or not, the way you find people and pass chunks of your precious existence with them and love them and then lose them again, just breaking off from each other like debris in a river and swirling away.

The winners  are:

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one  coughs.

2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how  much weight you have gained.

3. Abdicate (v.), to  give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4.  Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while  drunk.

5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.

6.  Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you  absentmindedly
answer the door in your nightgown.

7.  Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle (n),  olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence (n.)  emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run
over by a  steamroller.

10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding  hairline.

11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on  an exam.

12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified  bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon (n), a  Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

15.  Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief  that, when
you die, your soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish
men.

.

.
The  Washington Post’s Style Invitational also asked readers to take  any
word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting,  or changing one
letter, and supply a new  definition.

Here are this year’s  winners:

1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding  stupid people that stops bright
ideas from penetrating. The  bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign
of breaking down  in the near future.

2. Foreploy (v): Any  misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of
getting  laid.

3.. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a  house, which renders the subject
financially impotent for an  indefinite period.

4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism  spray-painted very, very high.

5. Sarchasm (n): The  gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the
person who  doesn’t get it.

6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee  intravenously when you are running late.

7. Hipatitis  (n): Terminal coolness.

8. Osteopornosis (n): A  degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

9.  Karmageddon (n): its like, when everybody is sending off all  these
really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth  explodes and it’s like,
a serious bummer.

10.  Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day
consuming only things that are good for you.

11.  Glibido (v): All talk and no action.

12. Dopeler  effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when
they come at you rapidly.

13. Arachnoleptic fit (n.):  The frantic dance performed just after you’ve
accidentally walked through a spider web.

14. Beelzebug (n.):  Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your
bedroom at  three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

15. Caterpallor (n.): The color you  turn after finding half a grub in the
fruit you’re  eating.

And the pick of the  literature:
16. Ignoranus (n): A  person who’s both stupid and an  a***hole.

***

I just bought a vending machine triple choc choc-chip cookie.  You know the ones that promise so much: I’m cookie, they say.  I have choc-chips, they say.  Half of me is covered in actual chocolate, they say.  You’re actually not sure what the third type of chocolate is, but you know it’s there.

The vending machine light bathes you in a soft halogen fuzz.  You stand there in front of the machine, wondering if you should buy one. Not as healthy the nut bar or the other healthy snack food.  But you’re smarter than that.  Each of those products are just as bad for you.  If you look at the back of the pack, they’ve all got the same amount of every type of fat, sugar, sodium and bi-phenyl-di-methylate as the last.  At least the triple-choc choc chip cookie is honest. You know where it stands and you know what it stands for: not just one type of chocolate in a cookie, but three different kinds.  Even if you don’t know what the last one is.  You know what you’re getting with the triple-choc choc chip cookie,  It mightn’t be good for you, but at least it will be good.

You put in your $2.20.  You rip open the triple choc choc-chip cookie and take a bite. It tastes like ass.

You don’t have another $2.20 in loose change.

FYL.

She was in Phuket with one of her friends when the tsunami hit. It was their last day. They had been staying in a place close to the beach. The hotel had told them they should take a taxi at ten-thirty to meet their flight. The friend, though, was one of those nervy types, and pushed for them to leave half an hour early. Janis, who was of the slightly disorganised no-rush mentality, would probably have left an hour later were she left to her own devices. But she went along with the plan. As their taxi drove along the foreshore they saw the sea receding way back towards the horizon. People were gathering to watch the puzzling spectacle. Most of you will remember this was the lull just before the drama. Even the driver was intrigued, so they stopped and got out to look with everyone else. After a short while though, the friend got anxious again, and they reluctantly kept going. They made higher ground, and then the waves came in.

Their driver, an elderly Thai man, got a call from his son-in-law saying there was some kind of flood. He went straight to his house, got the family, and took everyone up into the hills. There the girls, neither speaking a word of Thai, were looked after the whole day. The driver’s granddaughter spoke a little English, and they got by. There was no way to get word to anyone, so the girls’ parents and mine were all anxiously watching the news and fearing the worst. The family stayed in the hills until nightfall, then the driver took them back past the ruined town to the airport, where they somehow managed to wrangle two seats on the last plane out to Bangkok before the airport was shut down. It was only there that they could finally call home. That day must have been an agony for the families, and I can’t say how glad I am that I missed it.

They were supremely lucky. And while obviously the extent to which I was affected was laughably minor compared to the devastation visited on so many, I still find the memory distressing. (All this first-person stuff isn’t because I think I’m important, it’s because I can’t give anyone else’s perspective on this.) I remember clearly the plummeting shock of how close a call it really was, which took a few days to sink in. The idea of them standing there watching the waves recede, with all that we now know it signified. It still makes me feel kind of ill. I can’t fathom the idea of losing someone you are deeply in love with, and someone who you think is going to be part of your long-term future. It was the first serious relationship for both of us, and we loved each other with a youthful intensity and a boisterous enthusiasm. There was none of the cynicism or reservation of the present day, several relationships down the line. Had I lost her, and with her something potentially so amazing, I would have carried it for the rest of my life. Then there were the other horrible scenarios, like how would her parents have coped, and how would I have been able to help them through it, given I would be one of their main connections back to their daughter.

Given this background, I’m pretty taken aback when, on the long, long bus ride to Salta in Argentina’s north-west, a film called Tsunami comes up on the TV screens. First fears are quickly confirmed, it is indeed a dramatisation of Boxing Day 2004. And it’s big – an HBO-BBC coproduction, expensive and lengthy, presumably a miniseries in its original form. Good actors: Tim Roth, Toni Collette… but, what the hell?

I don’t know what to feel when the preliminary scenes start coming up on screen. But I’m on a long-distance coach, and there’s no way to escape. Initial misgivings are soon justified. We all know what’s coming, and the set-up is so meticulous, so cynical, that it sets my teeth on edge. We’re presented with a parade of inevitability. Here’s the beautiful hotel. Here’s the lovely idyllic shoreline. Here are the pretty actors. Here’s a nice little bit of character development to get you emotionally invested. Here are the fateful decisions about who goes diving and who doesn’t. Here are lots of shots of sweet little toddlers running around on the beach. Now watch while we smash it all up as graphically as possible. Guttering, choking, drowning. Devastate and destroy. It’s like watching the White House explode in Independence Day, but with the hypocritical veneer of being authentic and serious film.

Given the bad associations, it leaves me a bit shaken. But it’s distressing in more ways than the filmmakers intended. I can’t fathom – why does this film exist? Who decided, six months or a year after the event, that it was a good and desirable and appropriate idea to make this film? And above all, what right do these presumptuous pricks have to this story? It’s like war-porn. We all know what happened. We all know it was horrific. So, do we really need to see that recreated in intimate detail? What purpose does that serve? Is it for our further education and edification? But we already know what happened. It was too recent to have forgotten. The stories were legion and filled the papers for weeks. So then is it just a film? Something to pass the time? Then why pick this story? Consider that concept. You want to tap into that experience, into the terror and death of hundreds of thousands, and the grief and misery of millions, for…your entertainment? If so that’s utterly crass and a disgrace. Apologies to the sensitive, but really it just seems like jacking off over the corpses.

Some films want to tell stories. And some just want to milk every last drop of emotional impact out of real events, convincing you that the impact is due to good filmmaking when it’s really only because the events themselves were so distressing. Art seeks to have some sort of emotional effect, but just because something has an emotional effect doesn’t make it art. Even with a couple of weeks to cool down, it still makes me genuinely angry. Why did such a film actually need to be made? And what of the decision to go, in 2005/06, to some of the locations devastated by the disaster – and then spend millions of dollars on making a movie rather than doing something worthwhile?

Also, while it’s absolutely no surprise, it’s nonetheless pathetic that almost the entire focus of a film on the Asian tsunami is on Westerners.  The wealthy British tourist families of the plush Oasis Resort. (Goodness, one of them is black! How progressive.) The white British embassy staff on their way to the disaster scene. The white Australian aid worker. The white journalist and his Thai sidekick. And this is the model for the whole movie – Asia itself is relegated to the role of sidekick, that and provider of scenery, just the way Western tourists go to drink in Thailand because the bar-girls are easy on the eye and on the wallet. The occasional shots of villages and villagers are as background sets for the white protagonists to play out their stories. Going by this movie, you wouldn’t even know that Thai was occasionally spoken in Thailand.

The one Thai character of any kind of prominence is – wait for it – a waiter from the resort where the important tourist characters were staying. The one Thai who gets even half as much screentime as one of the Westerners, and he has to be presented as a servant, here to carry the drinks and call everyone Sir. He’s firmly kept in that capacity, stuck in his hotel uniform for the entire film. The fact that the film is centred on a tourist resort in the first place is yet another joke. As it is, resorts are all that most Westerners know of Thailand, and serving staff is the only capacity in which they know Thais. Do we really need to perpetuate this? It’s astonishing that the view can be so narrow. Indeed, there’s almost no hint that anything actually happened outside of Thailand itself, despite the fact that three-quarters of the dead were Indonesian, not to mention the devastation of Sri Lanka and deaths as far away as the east coast of Africa. Sure, my personal story was about the tourist centre at Phuket, because that’s the only way that I was connected to the wider tale. But for a film purporting to portray this wider tale, it’s the old story that the deaths of a couple of thousand white tourists mean and always meant a whole lot more than those of 230 000 Asians. Just like Roger East said.

There is a strange final chapter to the story. A couple of hours in to the interminable angsting of the film, the bus starts to slow down. We are on a desert road somewhere in Tucuman province, miles from the last place and miles from the next. Dust lifts up in smoky billows, like a dance of seven veils. Abruptly, as the road’s black tongue lays itself over a slight rise, we can see it: a truck ripped clear in half, its back end flipped over and lying flat in the roadway like a dog on its belly. The cabin is on its side ten metres off the road. Things are in pieces. It’s hard to tell if there’s one vehicle or two. Hundreds of LPG canisters, the cargo, are scattered in all directions, for a hundred metres or more up and down the highway, and scores of metres either side. There is no emergency scene paraphernalia, no barriers or flashing lights, just a couple of silent police cars and one cop pointing us around the chaos. The bus creeps through at walking pace, steering around twisted metal and debris, raising dust from the verge. The many-coloured canisters sprout from the desert earth like strange bulbous fruit, spread among the shrubbery and red dirt like hundreds of thousands on a desert cake.

The first thing I can think of is how eerily the scene is like Zoe Barron’s poem ‘No Sirens’ (listen to it here and see what I mean). The passengers becoming viewers of the drama. But here we have the double absurdity of looking up from the carnage on our screens to the carnage that we’re passing through. A lot of people are so absorbed in the film that they take a while to notice. Then their heads bob up and down like aging helium balloons, partly wanting to see, and partly drawn back to the television. The real-life disaster is in the world outside the windows, paralleling the deliberately and expensively re-created mock disaster inside. Both playing out on squares of glass, viewers looking from one set of reflections to the other. But the kind of real-life disaster that we’re all so keen to avoid soon passes behind us, and everyone is free to relax back into the vicarious enjoyment of someone else’s manufactured, third-hand disaster. The kind of disaster we apparently seek out, if this cinematic offering is to be interpreted correctly. Someone else’s disaster is so much more palatable, in any case, more comfortable, not so hard on the nerves. We should make a note to thank the filmmakers for the enlightening experience.

Burning down the Louvre: Argentina’s beautiful football up in flames (Argentina vs. Germany)

Sneijder finds his feet, uses his head, as Brazil lose theirs (Netherlands vs. Brazil)

Argentina celebrates football as a way of life (This cannibalises a bit at the start from one of my posts on this page, but is still a new article.)

On a different tack my latest Book Show post is also up, which includes a nice mp3 of my friend Julian reading Spanish poetry. Sounds nice, even if you don’t understand it. Find it here.

And in other writing news I’ve had poems accepted for the next issues of Griffith Review, Going Down Swinging, and Divan. So things continue apace at all points on the cultural spectrum.

*

Winter is officially here. I wasn’t supposed to see it, I was supposed to be sweltering on the coast of Salvador by now. But the Battle of Wounded Knee has kept me locked up deep in the Southern Hemisphere. And I have to say – as of today, Buenos Aires has never been so beautiful. The day is perfect, gold and blue. A sky so clear you can almost hear the crack as light passes through it. I don’t know if it’s an illusion, but it always seems like winter sunlight looks different, gentler, and the colour of the sky comes through a in softer shade. The city seems bare – skeletal trees and the hard edges of apartment buildings – but somehow the light gives it all a kinder cast.

I am alone on the high terrace of Palermo House and watching the city fan out before me, recumbent, snoozing in this late-season gift. The warmth is indisputable. I peel back my layers of shirts piece by piece, unstrap and ditch the knee brace, and finally end up in a leant-back lounge chair, jeans rolled up, arms spread wide and open to the world. With a hair-of-the-dog litre of beer warming within reach, even my hangover is a kind of benediction, something that makes me appreciate lying here and doing nothing just that little bit more.

It’s strange how I keep circling back here. I stayed at Palermo House the first night off the plane from Sydney, finding it by accident after the place I’d intended to go to was full. I had wandered the streets with my bag as dark started to come on, more thankful than ever of my travel-incredibly-light policy, up and down Palermo lanes, asking a few questions, and finally finding myself outside this tiny unassuming door with an intercom buzzer. I wasn’t quite sure what to do when it said “Hola?” Should I commence negotiations from the street over this fuzzy channel? “I was wondering if you have a free bed, or do I have to make a reservation?” I said hesitantly in my best stilted phrasebook Spanish. “Come on up,” said the voice in English.

I struggled through the narrow aperture, up a tiny cramped set of stairs, got buzzed through a second set of doors and then…once inside, the place opened up like the Tardis. An enormous hollow concourse with rooms opening off it all along its length. Another set of stairs at the far end, then yet another tiny twisting narrow set folding back on itself to yet another level. It was only after climbing this, red and puffing, that the reception at last made itself known. Just one part of the idiosyncrasy that makes this place so enjoyable.  I got my dorm and watched the street below, standing at the wrought-iron rail of the window feeling raw and new and in awe of it all. Every new thing the city threw up, however slight, was something to notice and digest and try to adjust to. Each shop sign and passing remark, each pedestrian crossing and cracked footpath slab. Like I had abrasions all over my body, and each slight touch of the wind set off another flurry of nerve endings beneath the skin. Later, it was the aforementioned terrace that really made me feel at home. I stood up there that night watching the lights of the city and feeling the buzz of travel and adventure and finding somewhere new. And on the other side of that long jet-lagged sleepless night, I put in my headphones and listened to a friend’s new record while I watched the sun, with its attendant symbolism of rebirth and renewal, hint that this was the start of a brand new phase, and that if the lush gold strokes in which it painted the city were any indication, things just might turn out to be glorious.

I stayed a week or so, and while I stayed in a few places afterwards to try and get to know different neighbourhoods, I somehow always ended up back at Palermo House. The epic cross-continental mission with Mr Fox and The Doctor terminated here – that’s where we met Hawkeye and the Coloradans, and it cemented my fondness for the place. If they handed out medals for trashbaggery then that week would have given us all spinal damage by now from the metric tonnage around our necks. Even the staff remember our group as going especially  hard, which given their industry is an enormous achievement. I was back again just before New Year’s when I was between apartments, and then more recently my place with the crazy old folks was two blocks down the road. By this point I’d become good friends with some of the denizens, so I would stop by just to hang out, and the relationship continued.

Actually it’s pretty amusing to be here now, just near the house I ran away from unannounced a few weeks ago. I wonder if I’ll run into my charming old landlords. Apparently they didn’t take too kindly to the note I left them pointing some of the reasons why they were fucking insane, and a brief helpful rundown of how the rental process generally works in a non-asylum environment. I deduced that this had been their reaction when the Malaysian Pyjama Ghost (who is also their neighbour, you may recall) emailed Clemenceau (who used to rent one of the MPG’s places) to pass on the gossip gleaned from my landlady that I was in fact a male prostitute. Had I been bringing home a lot of men for paid sex this would make some sense, but as it stands this accusation was a little bit left-field. (The gaybar story only happened after I’d moved out.) It sometimes feels like certain stories in my life could only have happened to me. Only I would have gone to Argentina, popped my knee in a gay nightclub accident, and so enraged an old Paraguayan ballerina that she started trying to convince a Malaysian property tycoon that I suck dick for pesos. Admittedly if there were enough pesos involved I would give it some thought, but a suitable offer has yet to be made by the Argentine homosexual community. And frankly I think they already owe me for one medial ligament and one ACL. The lack of which certainly makes it hard to get down on my knees, whatever the hourly rate.

The hostel guys have a better job than street hooking – they basically sit around, talk shit, drink beer, press the buzzer to open the door, and occasionally check someone in. The ones who aren’t working tend to go there anyway to hang out, and sleep there half the time when it’s too late to go home, until eventually their shift rolls around. So they’re always amongst friends, it just so happens that one of them is getting paid. Julian is one of nature’s gentlemen, a shaggy beardy smiley dude who it’s impossible not to like. He basically lives there, and without him the place would fall apart. Lora is a Bulgarian by birth who has lived in Algeria, France and Madrid, so aside from her mother tongue she speaks fluent French, Spanish, and excellent English, and can hold down an interesting conversation in any of the four. It seems every European I meet just compounds my mono-lingual shame. El Turco is the comic relief. He gives the most awesomely surly customer service when he’s tired, which is most of the time. If he’s not up all night in a bar then he’s curled up on the tiny two-seater couch passed out, stumbling blearily over to hit the door buzzer whenever the bell rings. Apparently he holds the record for the most number of people locked out of the hostel for the longest period of time, while he slept blithely on through the dinging and donging that must haunt all of their dreams.

It’s El Turco’s fault that I’m here again today. I stopped by last night for a quiet beer and a hello, checking carefully over my shoulder for mad Paraguayans as I waited on the step. It panned out that way for a little while, but El Turco was getting increasingly deranged. He hadn’t slept during the previous night of bar-hopping, had rolled straight in to his shift at work, and then had hung around until I showed up. By this stage it was nearing midnight. “Let’s go out tonight,” he kept saying, with one of those vague stories people have about a friend and a nightclub and so on. The club in question was again one of the enormous trashy superclubs that line the river under the flightpath from the Aeroparque. I pointed out that I had ruined my knee in one of those places only two weeks earlier, and that a repeat mightn’t be a great idea. I pointed out that it had taken me about fifteen minutes to climb the endless fricking stairs to the top of Palermo House, and I didn’t want to go down again. I pointed out that I still couldn’t really walk, let alone dance. But El Turco is a charming and persistent motherfucker, and eventually he got his way. (Not in the way the Paraguayan ballerina thinks. El Turco doesn’t have that kind of money.)

Now, if you know me, you know I fucking hate nightclubs, especially big trashy commercial ones. Dance parties I can do, but when the object is listening to bad R&B and looking pretty, it’s just not my scene. But I have recently discovered a way to survive those places, and even extract some enjoyment out of them. Ladies and gents, it’s called alcohol. Indeed. Versatile stuff, no? The Blutac of the emotional world. If you are impossibly savagely drunk, you can forget that were you sober this music would have you clawing off your own skin like a wet pink shirt, and that most of the people around you are loathsome specimens of humanity, and that you would C4 the entire premises with approximately as much guilt as you would feel in incinerating a barrel full of cockroaches. The important thing is to do achieve this state before you leave home, so you don’t end up spending x-hundred dollars on tequila shots so expensive that you’re convinced you must have somehow drunk yourself thirty years into the future. If you time the pre-game right, you can ride that wave all the way through the night and be home by the time you really need another drink to settle your shaking fingers. So El Turco and I relentlessly nailed four litres of beer in an hour, then threw ourselves into our tilt at tomorrow morning.

BA nightclubs are weird. Or particularly, the behaviour of men in BA nightclubs is weird. It’s really hard to adjust to how aggressive (they might say ‘forthright’) they are in trying to attract the attention of women. I’m watching this one guy as a girl tries to walk past him in a large doorway. He’s weird-looking, with a bald head and a rubbery face, like a real-time claymation dude. He’s going for it, literally moving a metre to his right and his left to blatantly block this girl’s path whenever she tries to go around him, grabbing her by the arm, leaning in, grinning constantly, trying his best lines, seeming to think that if he just keeps his hands on her waist she’ll soon forget and leave them there. It continues to a point where, if we were in Australia, I would have chanced stepping in and telling him to fuck off. I mean, it’s a fine line between persistence and assault. What’s the protocol? If this is how things are here am I supposed to accept it? The girls seem accustomed to it. But should they be accustomed to it? By the number of guys repeating the routine throughout the night, apparently it is the way things are done. It’s like the kids trying to sell socks on the subway. Every time you see them you think they have no chance in hell, but their very existence indicates that the technique has a certain margin of success.

Not so tonight though – all the girls I see just brush it off. Although Buenos Aires girls seem to brush most people off, most of the time. El Turco is complaining about this exact phenomenon when a girl on the dancefloor turns around and asks me where I’m from. Australia, I say. “Australia?!” she says. She turns around and tells her friends. They explode into shrieking.

“We love Australia!” she tells me.

“Um…why?”

“Australia is great. We love Australia. Whooo!”

This chain of logic leaves me somewhat nonplussed. (Side note. ‘Nonplussed’ means confused or bewildered. It does not mean unfazed or indifferent. You’re thinking of ‘not fussed’. Sounds similar, means something else. Can everyone please stop using it wrongly? Thanks.) So yes. Nonplussed. As in, I feel kind of like you do when a crazy person in the street tries to convince you of something. Like I felt when a dishevelled old lady on a tram fixed me with a beady glare and shouted “My brother married twice! AMP! AMP!” But y’know. In this case I go with it. They love Australia. They are drunk as shit. They surround me in a kind of flesh stockade of lady-dancing. I figure it’s as good a way to pass the time as any. And it does go on for quite some time. “You must feel like a pimp,” says one of them, “with your four women.” I do kind of feel like a pimp. I particularly enjoy the baleful looks from various would-be Latino lovers whose own aggro tactics had failed to pay off, given my own tactics were as complex as standing there and being from Australia.

In the end though, I don’t bother trying to push my pimping to the next level. Since a particularly shameful night when I was seventeen (which I don’t really remember, but have been filled in on piecemeal by an intensely embarrassing number of people over the years since) I haven’t been a fan of the random dancefloor hook-up. (The upside of that night, which I didn’t know until eight years later, is that I threw up on Matt Walford on the long bus-ride home. Yes! Take that, Matt Walford.) To clarify, hooking up with someone you already like while on a dancefloor is fine, it’s just that macking onto some random who you can’t speak to and can’t really see smacks of desperation. The lack of speech is the main thing, given the intensity of club sound systems. I don’t like the idea of hooking up with someone when a transcript of your life’s worth of conversation would be five lines long and all in capitals. I’m in favour of close encounters in their own right, it’s just that stupidity is a massive turn-off. Therefore I need to have sussed out that side of things before I actually have any real interest. Smart girls are sexy, simple as that. Of the girls I’ve been involved with, some have been batshit-crazy, and some have been bitterly unpleasant, and some have been emotional clusterfucks, but almost all of them have had a substantial amount going on upstairs.

So eventually I extricate myself from the Australia admiration society, track down my missing Turkish friend, and we exit into the morning light with a random Haitian named Jean-Pierre. Don’t ask me how that happened. And of course, the way life loops around, we find ourselves back at Palermo House, passing out in a couple of spare bunks, and waking up to my old familiar terrace, a litre or two of Quilmes, and the warm embrace of the midday sun. Which I believe is where you and I found ourselves to begin with, circling into circles into circles. Time to lie back, close our eyes, and stop moving. I still have hopes of making it out of the country, but if I don’t, this doesn’t look like such a terrible option. At this rate we’ll definitely be sunbaking in July.

It goes like this. I was asked for a CV today, for journalism-related purposes, and I realised I didn’t have one on this laptop. So I had to rewrite one, and go and track down a bunch of URLs for old articles of mine online. One of the stops was Citysearch, where I have a stack of old music reviews that I haven’t looked at since they were posted. Now, some of you might remember a middle-of-the-road pop-rock band called Taxiride from ten years or so ago. One of the members, Jason Singh, tried to reinvent himself as an electronic artist by teaming up with a producer called Todd Watson to release a by-the-numbers club anthem under the cunning pseudonym ‘Todd Watson and Jason Singh’. Catchy. Not sure if it worked or not, I didn’t keep tabs. But I got sent the single, and gave it the unflattering review I thought it deserved, as well as having a bit of a dig at Taxiride. (Come on, who wouldn’t?)

I thought nothing more of it until the review popped up today and I noticed there were some comments on it. So I checked them out, and…Jason Singh himself had found the article and left an irate response about what an arsehole I am. Seriously! It’s. Fucking. Hilarious. Here it is in all its glory. (Jason, if you’re Googling yourself again, then… hi.)

Jason Singh
June 09, 2009

This is the first time i have ever commented on a review in my whole career, but i couldn’t resist! Mr Lemon probably hasn’t walked into a club since he was wearing flares! For your information … Taxiride had 8 top 40 singles, were 5 times platinum, and are the only Australian band ever to have 2 number 1 radio tracks. one in 2000 and one in 2002! … nothing in the ’90s. What have you done? If you would like to meet up for a musical lesson, feel free to give me a buzz. If not, enjoy your time in you study thinking about why you weren’t good enough to make it as a musician!

Hahahaha! Several things I love. I love that he presumes I’m a failed musician rather than, say, a writer. Ok, you got me. I played saxophone when I was thirteen and then I got bored. I lament it daily. I love that because I don’t like his song, I must therefore be an old fogey who doesn’t understand young people’s music. Hmm. Jason Singh was born in 1973. He is in fact a full decade older than me. He can actually remember flares. I can remember phat pants. And I can tell you the clubs were pretty sweet in those days. I love his take on chronology. Taxiride were formed in 1997, and became well-known with an album released in 1999. To the best of my arithmetical knowledge, it is fair to categorise both of these as years in the late 90s. I love that they’re the only Aussie band ever to have two Number 1 hits. Hmm again. Sherbet beat them to it by 25 years. Though I agree Daryl Braithwaite shouldn’t be acknowledged as part of human history. I love that he defends the band via sales. Yes, they sold a lot of records. So did Savage Garden and Delta Goodrem. Selling fewer records were The Angels and The Saints and Crowded House. Who would you rather belong to? Plus bear in mind that during that same era, substantial numbers of people voted repeatedly for the likes of Amanda Vanstone, Phillip Ruddock, and Sarah-Marie off Big Brother. The good sense of the wider Australian public has never been something in which to have an inordinate amount of faith. Lastly, I love that he has supposedly never commented on a review in his life, but that I managed to inadvertently piss him off enough to claim this particular honour. That, my friends, is feedback. God I feel validated right now.

See, I did wonder from time to time whether the artists I was writing about ever read these things. Generally I figured they didn’t. I didn’t picture Bono weeping in his castle because I said his new track was derivative. I figured people in bands would have better and more important shit to do than stress over this stuff. And I have this reflex illusory idea of the internet as so big that I’m way off in a secluded corner, and that no-one will read my writing except five of my friends. Today I found out that when you Google ‘Todd Watson and Jason Singh’ the first result you get is my review. So in the end, perhaps not that surprising that he stumbled across it. But the fact that he did, and was pissed off enough to want to fight me about it, was just so absurd I completely lost my shit.

Anyway. Once I finished weeping with laughter, it occurred to me that maybe some of my other posts had harvested a bit of commentary gold in the last year or so. Indeed they had, mostly from people defending stuff that I’d canned. Not that all my reviews are negative – actually I was surprised by the number of positive ones, given some of the dreck I had to trawl through. But the only argument with a positive review was “Worst song ever. Cringeworthy,” after I’d given Ben Lee a lukewarm thumbs-up. Arguments with negative reviews though? Here are a few of my favourites, spelling and grammatical errors the authors’ own.

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kyle: re 3OH!3
July 15, 2009
you must have gotten the wrong disc or youre totally stuckup and stuff. this is the most addicting cd i have ever heard bar none. if youre listening to it for the next great lyrical masterpiece move on but as something i would recommend this is number one on my list

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nuffy: re Jason Singh
May 07, 2009
Seriously!!! i know your entitled to your opinion…its much much better than some of the rapper bad boy crap we are forced to listen to keep it up Jason
[Jason will write nice things on Nuffy’s Myspace page now. Thanks Nuffy.]

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Melanie: re Karl Broadie
May 31, 2009
Sounds like jaded Geoff Melon needs a hug. This is a beautiful album.

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tim miller: re The Feelers
February 01, 2009
i know how to play every feelers song and they rock p.s.you wrote weapons wrong!!

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wjdelliep: Damien Leith
November 22, 2008
I happen to love Damien;s selection of music and would to hear more from a Xmas album . This writer sounds like a dis effected young hoodlum!

.

Awesome. Just awesome. Jason, Nuffy, everybody…you Changed the World As I Know It. Or at least you made me laugh my arse off. This dis effected young hoodlum can only say, thank-you. I will try to be less stuck up and stuff in future.

If you want to read the offending review, you can find it here.

To disappoint fans of the graphic, the internal rupturing actually consisted of the anterior and medial cruciate ligaments, in the erotic locale of the knee. The story goes like this. It is (supposedly) my last night in BA, more or less. My plan is to take a bus to Mendoza in the morning to meet the Pirates (two of them, anyway, Juancito and The Blue Pirate) who are travelling up that way. After that I’m going to grab a flight to Brazil for warm weather and the World Cup. A few friends have come around to Alex and Ani’s place, where I’m staying, and there’s a bit of a send-off going on.

One of our friends, the fabulous Dami, is pretty much the gayest gay guy I’ve ever met. He is snazzy, natty, queeny, sparkly, dapper, debonair, and just radiates gayness in such intensity that it must permeate surrounding subterranean bedrock in levels that will be measurable with Gayger counters for 100 million years to come. One day in the future the Gayliens will arrive on Earth, and they shall know his velocity. He’s insistent that we all go to a gay club with him, and loudly protests that we never do, to the point where it’s easier just to go along with the plan. We head out to a place called Human, on the superclub strip along the river. I have never seen nightlife like that in Buenos Aires. The big clubs hold literally thousands of people each, and there are a dozen of them along the line of the Rio Plata near the Aeroparque. They don’t even bother opening until about 2 a.m., and don’t really fill up until about 4. Then they run on through until 9, 10, midday, whenever the people decide to go home. It’s an incredible commitment to the party, and I love it. As I’ve mentioned before, back home I often used to be last man swaying, cradling an 8 a.m. drink in the midst of a slew of passed-out bodies. Here, I’m pretty much an early piker.

Getting into the place is a mission, a Chairman Mao Long March through half a mile of car parks and pathways down from the arterial roadway to the occluded riverside location, where the lights and towers of the superclubs rear up out of the trees like the shining cities of a brave new civilisation. It would not give one iota of surprise to see one of them take off and hover away down the River Plate delta to the sea. Then another half mile of queues and barriers and enfilades and confusion and people streaming in all directions. Once inside, the place is a cavern. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a gay club before, so I don’t know what I’m expecting, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary, aside from the Argentine-standard bikini-girl podium dancers being replaced by a couple of beefy dudes with wobbling greased pectorals that inexplicably make me think of David Hasselhoff. There’s no-one in outrageous drag. There seem to be as many girls as guys anyway. No-one makes a desperate dive for my pants. (Ah, that grey area between relief and disappointment.)

The night pans out as nights in giant nightclubs do. At least until the crucial point arrives. Dami decides to lift up Flor, one of our other friends, who is too short to see much over the crowd. I decide, for my own inscrutable reasons, that it’d be a good idea to then lift him up while he’s lifting her. I’m just getting in position to try this out when some drunk dude crashes into Dami. Balance in this situation is a precarious thing. All three of us eat shit in spectacular fashion. I am on the bottom of the pile, on my back. Now, if you picture yourself falling backwards, the usual and safe way to end up is on your back, your feet within the line of your hips, and your knees bent outwards in perpendicular triangles, like a roast chicken, or a girl in the missionary position. While my left leg follows this format, I go down with my right foot well outside the line of my hip, knee pointing straight down, foot at a 90-degree perpendicular to the knee, like a guy rupturing an anterior cruciate ligament.

There are a range of things I have learned from this experience. I have learned that knees are designed to bend forwards and backwards. They are not designed to bend side-to-side. I have learned that if they attempt the latter with the weight of three people pressing down on them with the force of Earth’s gravity plus tequila, this will roughly equate to A Bad Time. I have learned the Spanish terms for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. I have learned that having travel insurance is A Good Idea, especially when you go to hospital on what is both a Sunday and a public holiday. I have learned to walk again, more or less. I have learned that people love a guy in a fetching bright-blue knee brace. I have learned that those things I’ve read on the internet about God hating homosexuality must certainly be true, if you look at how quickly he smote me for entering into a palace of sin. I have learned that nobody turned to a pillar of salt, and if they had, a greasy muscly man would probably have started dancing on top of them. And I have learned that a slightly misleading summary can make a tale seem much more interesting than its component parts deserve. So there you go. I busted my knee trying to pick up a guy and a girl at the same time in a Buenos Aires gay bar. That’s the story. Pass it on.

Now let’s just clarify a couple of things. Yes, this is the World Cup. But it is only the group stages, and Argentina have won both their games so far, including a comfortable 4-1 in their recent outing. Their passage to the knockout rounds is all but assured, it would take a string of absolutely freak results to stop them from here. So this is as close to a dead rubber as World Cup football gets. But if you imagined this would make any difference to the game’s following, you don’t understand Argentina. The opponent is Greece, but this doesn’t matter. The match is irrelevant, but this doesn’t matter either. The point is, Argentina is playing. In the World Cup. And no-one in this country is willing or able to do anything else but watch.

Once you get off the streets, you find out where the missing people are hiding. They’re in shops and homes and offices. They’re in cafes and apartments. Anywhere with a power point has a screen attached to it, and anywhere with a screen has a crowd. There are nineteen people crammed into the locksmith’s, lining the counter. The guy from the fruit stall has abandoned it for the sanctuary of the milk bar – there’s no danger of anyone coming by to steal his produce. Out in provincial backwaters, modest houses of mud brick and tin are adorned with satellite dishes. The bars and restaurants off the main plaza are a sea of light blue and white, flags and shirts and hats and make-up, even though Argentina are wearing their solid dark blue strip today. It must be said that the fans of football teams wearing blue have always been just a little unoriginal. The French are routinely Les Bleus, the Italians the Azzurri.  Uruguay are La Celeste, Argentina La Albiceleste, Nicaragua Los Albiazules. In the English leagues, Chelsea are The Blues, as are Manchester City, Birmingham, Coventry, Chester, Everton, Ipswich Town, Shrewsbury, Southend, Grays Athletic, Linfield, Ballymena and Stranraer. Not to mention Dinamo Zagreb, Apeldoorn, and of course Carlton in the AFL. Eschewing plurals, Kuwait and Serbia go for The Blue, while Israel, Bordeaux, and Göteborg are The Blue and Whites. But still. Nomenclatural originality aside, with its pucker-mouthed Sun of May in the centre, the sky-blue and white of Argentina has always made up one of the most handsome flags in the world, and it looks just as well on their team and on their fans. To see both in full flight is a privilege.

Argentina are attacking from the get-go. Messi lives up to his name of The Flea, burrowing in and out of the Greek defence with his strange hunch-shouldered hustle. Every time he embarks on one of his scything runs toward the box you can feel the crowd tense and the volume start to lift. Veron lets fly a thunderous 35-yard drive that leaves Tsorvas vibrating like Wile E. Coyote. Aguero is fed about five chances on goal but punches each one straight at the keeper. The break is nil-all, but you can feel that it’s only a matter of time. Indeed it is. Tevez isn’t playing today, so Argentina’s second-ugliest player in Demichelis drags his death-metal haircut up from defence to smash home a rebounded corner after a sniff of handball. Messi is still going for it. You get the feeling that Maradona’s coaching decisions are based far more on the emotional than the tactical or the pragmatic. He wants to see attacking. He wants to see goals. He’d spit on a six-man backline. When asked by reporters whether his players look for Messi too often, Maradona says ardently “Messi should have the ball. Messi has fun when he has the ball. And when Messi has fun, it’s entertaining for everybody. To take the ball away from Messi means that football isn’t beautiful anymore. To take the ball away from Messi, it’s like…” He pauses for a moment, regarding the half-eaten apple in his hand. “It’s like taking my apple away from me when I’m hungry.”

But never is Maradona’s hunch philosophy more apparent than in the 80th minute, when the 36-year-old Martín Palermo is subbed onto the field. The hubbub at the ground goes up ten notches. Likewise in the bar. This, you can tell just from the reaction, is something special, another chapter in an extraordinary story. In 1999, after several prolific years for Boca Juniors, Palermo made the national team only to miss three penalties for Argentina in a Copa America match they lost 3-0. Those in power said he would never play for Argentina again. During a stint in Spain in 2002, he climbed into the fans to celebrate a goal, then broke both bones in his left leg when the concrete barrier collapsed on top of him. For a while it seemed his career was over. But he returned to Boca and battled other injuries to finally make a comeback, with the winning goal against arch-rivals River Plate. There is, my friend Pancho explains, just something about Palermo. For all his ups and downs, he’s a lucky player, he brings luck with him. He’s awkward and gangly and doesn’t look dangerous, but he has an extraordinary knack for being in the right place at the right time. He’s a master of the last-minute score, and an incredible fluke-merchant. He scores goals that bounce off his back, his leg, the back of his head when he’s looking the other way. He has a swag of mid-pitch strikes to his name, including an extraordinary 40-yard header from a kick-in. He’s…Palermo.

But no matter his exploits, the national squad’s lack of forgiveness continued. Until after a decade of exile, that is, when one Diego Armando Maradona was put in charge. When Palermo was first called back for the tail-end of 2009’s World Cup qualifiers, people said Maradona was mad. Palermo was past it. Too old. Never good enough to begin with. A proven failure. But he was still the lucky player of Pancho’s imagination, and as Argentina faced the very real possibility of failing to qualify for a World Cup for the first time, locked at 1-1 with a resurgent Peru, it was Palermo who somehow found himself in the right spot in a mess of players and mud and rain. It was Palermo who scrambled home a scruffy goal-mouth winner in the 93rd minute of the final qualifying game, and Palermo who stood at the corner flag, shirt off, arms spread wide, face upturned to the teeming rain in his own personal Shawshank Redemption.

And so here we are, with Palermo, at 36 years of age, about to make his World Cup debut. Veron is also 36, and his selection faced similar criticism. But it doesn’t matter. The simple fact is that Maradona loves Veron. Palermo was an even more left-field choice. But Maradona loves Palermo. And that’s all there is to it. No fitness trials, no computer modelling, no strategy planning. Maradona wants them to play, and so they play.

Still and all. With a strikeforce comprising Messi, Tevez, Milito, Higuain, and Aguero, you get the feeling that this is a gesture by Maradona, a final few minutes of top level football for an old favourite now that Argentina’s passage through is assured. Palermo is a kind of Argentine Harry Kewell, a veteran and fine purveyor of his art whose service and skill deserve a send-off. But the Palermo story couldn’t be any more different to Kewell’s desperately unlucky return (and farewell) to World Cup football. After a few confident passes through midfield, and a couple of good runs forward, he floats wide right as Messi’s blazing shot is parried away from goal, and is there to calmly sidefoot past the Greek keeper into the corner of the netting. Cue delirium from the fans. Cue delirium from his teammates. Cue the greatest look of childlike joy ever seen on the face of a footballer. They are not so much celebrating the goal as celebrating the man, the sense of completion, the story. As Maradona says after the game, “The film of Palermo has no ending.”

This is what makes this team stand out from the dullard professional automatons of Europe. Argentina runs on emotion. Maradona runs on emotion. Thing is, it works for him. Veron has been rolling back the years controlling midfield. Palermo has turned screenwriter yet again. Messi has been given trust and free rein, and has so far turned in one of the most dominant singlehanded displays in memory, with a hand (though not of God) in every Argentine goal in the tournament. When Maradona has faith in his players, based on nothing but affection and instinct, they respond to it. Such is the power and charisma of the man, flawed genius though he so clearly is.

Across the road from the bar is a TV in the window of a sports shop. Its broadcast is coming through about ten seconds earlier than ours, but no-one else has noticed. Every close play is followed a belated series of oohs and aahs from our barmates, when we already know the result. So when Palermo slots home in the 89th, Juan is on his feet shouting ‘Goal!’ way too early and too loud. On our TVs, the ball is still in midfield, with Messi yet to make his run. The table next to us half goes up in celebration at Juan’s word. Confusion reigns across the bar, people expectant, frozen halfway up from their seats, looking around for information. The delay gives him time to start videoing the bar before the belated confirmation comes through on our screens, and the crowd erupts in an incoherent roar. There’s not much more to play. The whistle goes. Palermo comes on screen, and the crowd lights up again like the beaming smile on his face.

The girls at the table next to us ask us to email them the video we took. We dick around with phones and addresses for a while. ‘Ok, we’re going to dance now,’ they say.

‘Where?’ we ask, wondering how many nightclubs are open at five in the afternoon.

‘Down there,’ they say, pointing to the street. And sure enough, as we sit and watch, the crowds start to gather, blue and white streaming in from all directions. By the time we make it downstairs, there must be a couple of thousand people, lumped together into a kind of mobile mosh pit that starts to circle the perimeter of the main plaza. There are trumpets and horns and a never-ending array of drums, and by God these people jump and chant and sing. Periodically the music ramps up to a faster tempo, and the people mash together more closely to bounce in circles like a ska concert, before dispersing a little to continue their laps. Little tiny kids are visible above the crowd, their heads jouncing up and down as they ride on someone’s shoulders. People further away straddle scooters and hammer the horns. People are hanging out of windows over the street, draping Argentine flags from the sills. The procession circles and circles endlessly on. Flags are being waved in all directions. Some guy inexplicably has a large model B-52 aeroplane, complete with independently spinning props, mounted on a broomstick, and is zooming it back and forth. On the steps of the town hall, a scruffy but beaming gentleman spreads out a large blue and white banner that proclaims “Dios es Argentino.” (“God is an Argentine.”)

(For atmosphere’s sake there’s a little video here)

And that isn’t the only striking thing. I once heard in an interview that only ten percent of football fans (as opposed to fifty percent of AFL) are women. Well, whoever came up with that stat obviously never came here. As demographics would suggest, women make up a good half of the dancing crowd, and fill most of the spots in the windows. Every Argentine woman I’ve spoken to knows about the team, the players, the progress, who’s in, who’s out, what their major worries are. At game time the streets aren’t deserted on a gender basis. And however stylish and beautiful, feminine and high-heeled, they’re still here, still accessorised with ribbons of white and blue, with cut-off Albiceleste tube tops, with Messi No. 10 singlets over their designer jeans. They’re still waving flags and jumping and shouting with everyone else. They still do much more than care. They’re still living this moment, drinking it in and feeling the high as much as any testosteronal counterpart. The feeling is amazing. The atmosphere prickles your skin. And what’s more amazing is that Salta is only a small city in the scheme of things. There’s the knowledge that this is happening across the country, in Mendoza, in Bariloche, Calafate, Rio Gallegos, La Plata, Trelew, Resistencia, Cordoba. And of course one granddaddy celebration in Buenos Aires. And just to recap – this is for what was essentially a token group match. It’s impossible to imagine what might happen if they win the thing. And on current form that looks a distinct possibility.

On the way out of the plaza I’m collared by a TV crew to be “our foreign friend” for an interview. Questions in Spanish, answers in Spanish. I’m not sure how well I put my points across, though I do my best. But I think that even in English I would struggle. There are things that are obvious, but hard to explain. There are things that are obvious and don’t need to be explained. And the feeling today in the plaza fits both of these descriptions. It’s simple, and intuitive, and all-encompassing. It’s the raw beauty of sport, and of tribalism: when the andinos and the latinos and the mestizos and the italianos and the rubios and the odd lost gringo can all come down to where the drums beat and the trumpets play, and shout their joy to a darkening winter sky.