I some times muse over the multiple levels of nostalgia in tango. Today we are (at least to some degree) nostalgic about the golden age of tango, peaking in the 1940s. Tango, of course, was already nostalgic about the turn of the century during the golden age.

Now, I always thought of this as layered or maybe even recursive nostalgia, beging nostalgic about the nostalgia of the 1940s. Add the nostalgia being a long way from Buenos Aires and longing back to being nostalgic about how they were nostalgic about the fin de ciecle in the golden age, and you get the picture… Even the nostalgia was better in the old days. It’s all very meta.

The New Yorker provides a different perspective in an article about 40 years nostalgia cycles (also don’t miss the cartoons), and why they occur (people with power are often in their forties). Like many others I tend to link the revival of interest in tango in the 1980s with the fall of the dictatorship in Argentina, but it fits right into the theory because it happened about 40 years after the peak of the golden age.

Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories.

Of course it’s not backed by solid evidence, but let’s say that the 40 years cycle applies. Should we expect a wave of nostalgia about the 80s revival of tango argentino in ten years time?

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Well done, methinks.

HT Alex

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1. “Milonga” — tango short

Standing in front of the window, glancing out. The day had long since started, yet it was dark outside. It was pouring down, despite being mid-winter. He saw through the rain. He saw through the house across the street.

What he saw was her smile.  Her dancing cumbia in the kitchen. Her explaining the concepts of “cheta” and “negro”. Her expertly preparing a mate. “Her standing on one leg in the Comme il Faut showroom, trying one shoe while putting on a second while asking for third pair. Effortlessly. Her standing in front of a man like a woman standing in front of a man. Her radiating as only a bride on her wedding day.

These memories of happy moments were all so vivid, yet he did not smile. Instead tears found their way across his chin.

Behind his back he heard laughter from his little boy, but he was thinking of a little girl that had lost her mother. Still so young she may not remember her mother when she grows up.

He remembered the message to let him and his wife know that she too, was embarazada, just a few months after she with a teasing smile left the gentlemen alone and went for a girl talk to check out the tummy of his wife where the little unborn boy was growing, still almost invisible. They would become compañero y compañera, that’s only natural, she joked when the babies first met.

He closed his eyes.

It was not the sorrow of a daughter losing her mother. It was not the sorrow of a husband losing his wife. It was not the sorrow of a sibling losing their sister. It was not the sorrow of a parent losing their child. It was not the sorrow of a tango dancer losing his partner.

It was not the sorrow of a student losing his teacher. It was my sorrow. The sorrow of losing a friend.

Of course she changed my tango. I never knew what profound experience walking in an embrace could constitute until I learnt if from her. For these lessons I am grateful. Sometimes people say that young people cannot feel the true tango because they have not experienced the pains that accumulate over a lifetime. They say it like it is something to strive for, something admirable.

With her passing she will again change my tango. I will always bear the sorrow in my heart, and it will come through in my tango. It is a change I cannot withstand.

QEPD Andrea.

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I think they make the point very clear.

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Danza y Movimiento have released another batch of De Caro collections. In addition to the places they were available the last time, they are also available on Spotify (links below).

I haven’t had time to listen carefully yet, but the few I have listened to seem to be transferred at the correct speed (unlike some of the older ones).

Just in time for the upcoming día del tango. Enjoy:

• Mocosita (#153)
• Mala pata (#154)
• Aquel (#155)
• Milonga gris (#156)
• Esta noche (#157)
• Fuego (#158)
• Catamarca (#159)
• El candombe (#160)
• Beatriz (#161)
• Copacabana (#162)
• Esmeralda (#163)
• Mosca brava (#164)

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Not much time to write at the moment, here are some interesting posts that you might enjoy that I want to keep track of for later for my own sake:

Interesting interview with Chicho

Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

Quite an interesting read. I could relate very well to his comments on why teachers don’t necessarily dance all the time at festivals. Apparently many people in my local community have difficulties understanding this.

Listening to Music with Professor Craig Wright

This course fosters the development of aural skills that lead to an understanding of Western music. The musical novice is introduced to the ways in which music is put together and is taught how to listen to a wide variety of musical styles, from Bach and Mozart, to Gregorian chant, to the blues.

According to the Yale Open course website.

HT: Mari

Women Dancing The Man’s Part

I have seen very few women dancing the man’s part where it does not look funny, this however is an impressive exception.

HT: TP/Una Milonguera

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As the music of the cortina fades out, she glances over the tables on the opposite side of the dance floor. Refreshes her memory of where the different dancers she watched on the floor are seated. Preparing to try and catch the eye of one of her favorite partners as the music starts for the next tanda.

Her eyes move along the tables,  she is nodding to her self, yes, yes, maybe… her eyes reach the corner of the dance floor, and she quickly moves on. Not him. She saw him on the dance floor, and with that embrace, if that is even the right word, no. Not a chance. She looks down to make it clear. She has to be careful about that part of the room, it seems. Better not cause any misunderstanding.

Subtlety is not his force, apparently. She can see his gesturing in her peripheral view, doing her best to ignore him. But it’s too late. He is coming closer. She picks up her purse. She knows exactly where she got every single item, nevertheless she starts moving methodically between them, checking that each is in its designated place. Travel-sickness pills, mints, magnifier, spare stockings, paper towels, hand disinfectant….  He stops in front of her.

He: Listen, here in Buenos Aires, he says with a  broad grin, we ask a woman to dance using our eyes…

She: I know…

He: So we don’t have to come up to the table to ask…

She: I know….

He: It’s called the cabeceo…

He tilts his head to one side and smiles again.

She: I know…

She speaks without moving an inch.

He: If you want to dance with me, you have to look at me and smile, you know…

He grins again and stretches out his hand for hers.

She: I know. No. Gracias.

She forces herself to make a brief smile and returns to her inventory listing. Now, where did I put that bottle of insect repellent?

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As part of restoring from a disk crash, I am moving to TINT based filing, which is a neat way to sort out duplicates, and useful if you want to share playlists or just make sure your playlists will keep working in the future. However it is not very convenient when you want to browse your file system for a particular file or album, in that case you need to use an application which reads the tags of the audio files or an inclination to remember barcodes.

It turns out that I browse my files for specific music a lot, as part of the user experience of my Squeezebox setup (my preference for tango music, not the only option). I’ve been aware of the pytagsfs project for a while, and this prompted me to finally give it a spin. It seems to work quite well, and at least for the time being that will be the setup on my server.

Two things caused me a bit of head scratching, though:

1. One has to enable allow_other for fuse in /etc/fuse.conf and set read permissions for that file allowing the user mounting the pytagsfs to read it. Without allow_other, the squeezeboxserver would not be allowed to see the virtual file system, neatly organized by artist, album and title.

2. pytagsfs does not support tags containing slashes (obvious in retrospect, took me a while to figure out), and in my first attempts lots of files simply didn’t show up.

Now it works just fine with the following options (tint based files in directory tint and the new mount point is tango):

$ pytagsfs -o allow_other -o format='%?%{artistsort}%:%{artist}%?/%?%{catalognumber} %?%{album}/%?%{TRACKNUMBER} %?%{title}.%{extension}' ../tint/ tango/

I can think of a few other use cases that could be useful, too, for example if you’re happy with your current layout but want the TINT filing for canonical playlists, you should be able to do something like the following (I did not test this):

$ pytagsfs -o allow_other -o format='%{TIN}/%{discnumber}/%{tracknumber}.%{extension} tango-dir/ tint-dir/

You could list all albums from a series, list songs alphabetically or chronologically by artist etc. I have been thinking about a nice way to combine files from different trees, some which are processed and some that are originals  with the srcfilter option, but I haven’t really had time to work it out yet.

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I have this weird interest in the popular culture image of tango, for a large part constituted by various more or less successful renditions of the tango on the silver screen.

As a matter of fact I have been looking for this particular rendition since I saw still photos in the tango book by Collier et al. And thanks to Tangocommuter, I realized Valentino (1977) by Ken Russell was released on DVD. Well, sort of, like many of Valentino’s silents, it was actually a print on demand edition, no extras, no subtitles etc, just the movie.

Mr. Valentino early catched my attention as the iconic Hollywood tango hero, and he was a fascinating character — but we’ll stick to the tango for now.  One thing that puzzled me in tracing back the origins of some of the tango cliches, was that people were talking dismissively of the tango of Rodolpho Valentino, but his dancing wasn’t at all that bad. Bear in mind that there are some really awful tango scenes in the history of film, and that the tango of the turn of the century must have been rather different from the tango of the forties and fifties.

In particular, I remember the milongueros talk about the ridiculous tango of Valentino in Tango: Bayle Nuestro, which was released in 1988. After watching Nureyev’s Valentino, some additional pieces found their place.

Tangocommuter actually warned me about not having too high expectations. Now, where I live, renting is not really an option, all out of the mainstream has to be ordered on the internet. I can live with that, although it means I end up having a rather eccentric dvd collection. Russell apparently wasn’t too happy with the result himself, calling it his biggest mistake. I have to confess I haven’t really watched many of his films, but if you ask me, he comes off as something of a prick that regrets not picking the script that won several Oscars and his supposedly introspective  list of mistakes includes gems such as “ Never give an unreliable member of the crew a second chance”. Maybe I just don’t get the British sense of humour, but I’m not sure how it applies to himself. I would choose Valentino every time, and other people have successfully made a classic out of related material. (Apparently they both quote/parody one particular love scene of Valentino’s Monsieur Beaucaire)

Anyway, Russell’s work hasn’t really aged well, it’s a typical 70s flick, and not in a good way. It’s not really historically correct either, which is ok I guess, but I would think Valentino’s life had enough drama as it were. And Nureyev isn’t really an outstanding actor. Ballet dancer: yes. Tango dancer: not really.

Which brings me to the missing piece of the puzzle. Or at least it will serve as my working theory for now. Isn’t it much more likely that the milongueros of the eighties had Russell’s/Nureyev’s Valentino in mind when they spoke of Valentino, considering it ran only a few years earlier, while the silent movie was from 1921. I somehow doubt ‘The four horsemen’ was shown regularly in Argentina after the sound movie arrived around 1930.

Possibly, the image of Hollywood tango is actually Russell’s image of Hollywood’s image of the tango. Now how is that for distorted tango?

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