This is a great idea! Trouvez l’erreur! from Les Pas Parfaits de Montréal. Simple, funny and well executed. Drawings by Véronique Paquette. My French is a bit rusty, but I believe the drawings are free to use for non-commercial purposes, and that it is allowed to translate them and incorporate translations in the images.
Makes me want to go to Montréal!
Many CTA discs and others are available in Europe through the Austrian DJ Bernhard Gehberger. He recently went to Japan and met with the guys behind CTA, AMP and Audio Park. From his report from that trip, it seems like he is working on facilitating reissues of these out-of-print discs. Which would be of great benefit to the tango community if he pulls it through. Today they are both hard to get and expensive.
Good luck, Bernhard!
There is another tango film coming up. This Belgian production is starring Chicho, and although tango films can be a mixed bag, and I have my doubts how much drama it can yield, it looks sort of interesting. Apparently it won the Warsaw Film Festival Grand Prix.
During a class.
“Good. Now that you know the move, try to enjoy it.”
“What?”
“Enjoy it!”
“Oh shit.”
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?
This post just became relevant again. Happy to bring some good news in 2012. This could mean more posts or less, we’ll see.
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.
I think they make the point very clear.
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:
Simba@Vimeo Favorites@Youtube
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