The Flood Continues

As I've jokingly noted--and been roundly insulted for--on Goodairs, I've done my share of writing and publishing travel pieces about Buenos Aires that, following conventional wisdom, exposes the city's wonderful secret joy to all and increases the flood of tourists (of course, whether B.A. has ever been a "secret" is debatable, to say the least). In another piece, a radio story for an NPR show, I looked at article/tourism logical chain from another side--that a flurry of articles instead might lead to...more articles--and after doing both angles I can't say whether the chicken or egg came first, or even if there's a causal connection.

What I mean to say is that, having done a handful of travel pieces and having lived for a little over a year in a city that is a travel (journalism) mecca, I have no problem with existence of travel journalism, but I've begun to spend a lot more time thinking about what makes good travel writing--and the evolution it can and should take. For a long time, travel writing existed as the intrepid writer going off-map (the title of Graham Greene's "Journey Without Maps" says it all, doesn't it?), then had a Pissy Narrator period (Shiva Naipaul's "North of South" is particularly good) before settling into a clean-fingered guidebook/shopping phase.

This week has brought another pair of articles, both sybolic of one current trend of explaining a city or country through an event (like describing a human being via his toe): This Sunday, the New York Times had "Buenos Aires Beef, on Hoof and on Plates," a piece about the annual La Rural livestock festival, and on Monday Slate launched one of its weeklong travel diaries, this one by Slate culture editor Meghan O'Rourke and boyfriend James Surowiecki, the financial columnist at the New Yorker, about their trip to April's Bafici (B.A.'s annual indy film fest).

Both pieces try to inform and engage their readers outside of the traditional city overview--something I recently did for the Times--by using their respective slices of porteño life as a stand-in for the larger culture (a kind of travel metonymy). It seems to me that the success of such articles can be judged by whether they give readers context and explain the event, give whatever "service" information (likes times and dates) is necessary, reveal something that even surprises/interests/infuriates locals, and don't screw up. It's a difficult path to cut with articles like this, but the articles succeed mas o menos.

Not out of any inate cruelty, but rather because they stuck out and are endemic to the form, I'll mention the failings I saw. Both articles were informative and cogent, in the sense that I learned more about the film and lifestock festivals than I knew before. But while the NYT piece leads with historical context of the livestock industry, it lacks a discussion of the importance of beef in Argentine life (something we all noted here and here and, well, here kinda), which would make real that whole beef:Argentina metaphor thing. Also, curiously, it fails to mention that the industry has locked in a bitter fight with the Kirchner regime, which put a six-month export moratorium on most cuts of beef, and has even threatened a beef strike (such blindspots are a big problem for writers and editors of pieces like this, which are held for 10 months after the presumably out-of-town writer visits an annual event so they can serve as a preview of the next year's version).

While unfair to compare the two--because the diary entries have the advantage of cumulatively running about five times longer--I found the Slate pieces fascinating because I knew so little about recent Argentine cinema and now and because the authors (right) intelligently allowed Argentines to shoulder the lion's share of the article's cultural commentary. The diary, however, containted the proverbial context paragraph that I so loathe, the one where you cram broad cultural stereotypes and economic observations into 200 cliche-ridden words (Cheap! Paris of South America! Pretty people! Devaluation!). Here it is; I guess you just have to do it (god knows I've done it myself).

Buenos Aires is the closest thing Americans have to a Paris of the 1920s or a Prague of the 1990s. On a recent night out in New York, I heard four writers mention they were heading to Buenos Aires for a prolonged visit. The reasons are largely economic: In 2001, the Argentine economy collapsed, and the value of the peso went with it. The city is now very cheap for Americans, especially in contrast to Western Europe. A cup of coffee costs about 60 cents. A good bottle of wine at a nice restaurant is about $8. The atmosphere is cosmopolitan: Many of the city's residents are descended from Italian and Spanish immigrants who came here in the late 19^th century during the nation's first economic boom, at a moment when the government was especially welcoming to European migrants. Today's residents—known as porteños—are talkative and good-looking (if also enhanced with the aid of a surgeon's knife).

One semi-comic note: the writers of the Slate piece seem to have hit plenty GoodAirs faves in their travels, including Bar 6 (in the picture above), MALBA and Home Hotel.

Finally, a quote from Daniel Burman, director of the touching and entertaining El abrazo partido and Derecho de familia, from Slate: "For Americans today, 'Latino' means Ricky Martin. It will be that way for 20 more years. But when our sons grow up, hopefully it will mean something different."