Googling "Buenos Aires" So You Don't Have To

Last weekend the Big Papers in New York had two interesting Buenos Aires stories that you might have missed. First off, a Wall Street Journal Page One story used the 91st birthday party of Julio de Rizio to profile the famed Argentine crank-caller, who first became famous by informally circulating tapes of his crank callers. He performed at his own party:

Mr. de Rizio then made harassing calls to a middle-aged comic-book collector and to a fellow who was offering his services as pop vocalist. He got him to belt out a few bars -- badly off-key. Finally, he called a handyman who had advertised that he would take care of "everything your husband doesn't have time to fix." Mr. de Rizio went off on a bawdy riff about not having time to satisfy his wife. He asked the flustered handyman whether he could fix that.

In the second article, from Friday, New York Times art critic Ken Johnson reviews a New York retrospective of Argentine art. The older works from the 60's get a warm pat--"...the sense of revolutionary euphoria conveyed by this part of the show is impressive."--but the newer stuff, well, not so much. As Johnson writes, in declarative clarity rare for an art critic, "The trouble is partly that many of the new works are just not very good."