RIP Facundo Cabral

[from Wikipedia]

Facundo Cabral

Cabral was shot and killed during a tour in Guatemala City while en route to La Aurora International Airport on July 9, 2011.

Guatemala's President Alvaro Colom decreed three days of national mourning. Hundreds of Guatemalans sang songs written by the artist in the capital's Plaza de la Constitución. Some of the signs carried by Guatemalans grieving the death of the beloved singer said ""We ask forgiveness of the world for the assassination of Facundo", "We are here not only for the death of Maestro Cabral, but also for every boy, girl, old man and woman, who becomes, day after day, victim of violence. Not only for Facundo Cabral, but also for the future of our children."

Argentina's foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, tweeted "Adios amigo!"

Guatemala's 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchú, went to the scene of the killing and wept. "For me, Facundo Cabral is a master," she said. "He loved Guatemala greatly."

The President of Venezuela expressed his dismay with a short message via the Twitter social network. "Oh what a pain! Killed the great troubadour of Las Pampas Long live Facundo Cabral weep with Argentina and with all our great homeland," wrote Chavez in his Twitter profile.

"Every morning is good news, every child that is born is good news, every just man is good news, every singer is good news, because every singer is one less soldier."

"I like the sun, Alice, and doves, a good cigar, a spanish guitar, jumping walls, and opening windows, and when a woman cries. I like wine as much as flowers, and rabbits, but not tractors, homemade bread and Dolores' voice, and the sea wetting my feet. I like to always be lying on the sand, or chasing Manuela on a bicycle, or all the time to see the stars with Maria in the hayfield. I'm not from here, I'm not from there, I have no age, nor future, and being happy is my color of identity."

"I'm amazed to form part of this amazing universe and I'm proud of the hunger that keeps me awake. Because when man is full he falls asleep."

"May God want for man to be able to be a child again to understand that he is mistaken if he thinks he can find happiness with a checkbook."

"I don't waste time taking care of myself. Life is beautiful danger. From the danger of love, my mother had seven kids. If she had guarded herself against my father and his fervor, a singer would be missing from tonight's meeting."

"My poor boss thinks that I'm the poor one."

"This is a new day to begin again, to look for the angel that appears in our dreams, to sing, to laugh, to be happy again. In this new day I will leave the mirror, and try to finally be a good man. I will walk with my face to the sun, and I will fly with the moon."

"Forgive me Lord but sometimes I get tired of being a citizen. The city tires me, the offices, my family and the economy. Forgive me Lord, I am tired of this hell, this mediocre market where everyone has a price. Forgive me Lord but I will go with you through your mountains, your seas, and your rivers. Forgive me Lord but sometimes I think you have something better than this for me. Forgive me Lord, I don't want to be a citizen, I want to be a man, Lord, like you created me."

"I am my own inventor because that is the task with which God has trusted me. God, or the Devil because they are the same thing. The Devil is a pseudonym that God uses when he has to create something of morally doubtful character, in order to not tarnish his good name, he uses the pseudonym."

"The poor man that walks through this borrowed life without a song, in addition to being poor is a ghost, and in addition to being a ghost, is nothing."

"We are crossing through life on the train of death seeing how progress is putting an end to people."

"And God created woman and she said 'My Lord, if Mary conceived without sin, couldn't I sin without conceiving?'"

"I stop in San Francisco where there's always something to hear, at least when Krishna Murti is nearby, he who knows that the fundamental revolution is to revolutionize one's self. I stop in Crete where there is always something to love,

I raise my voice in Italy and I am silent in India, because I am and I live in the present, because I am made of dreams, of emptiness, of wine, and of wheat, they call me MAN. It's true that I am dust, but sacred dust I am, even though you know that when I say I am, I am saying you are, invincible, unnameable. Highest Lord, don't worry about our daily bread because that is up to us, that's why we are men, but don't leave us without our nightly dream because without it we are nothing, we who are perhaps only a dream that you dream."

"If I am a thief, it's because of private property."

Facundo Cabral

metal sculptures by Facundo Huidobro

ganso

conejo

Facundo Huidobro was born en el campo outside Buenos Aires in 1982. He studied art & philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires. To read about & see more of his work, visit Facundo's website here.

lechuza & Facundo Huidobro

Argentina author Ernesto Sabato dies at 99

[from Karina Grazina @ Reuters, 30 April 2011]

Murió Ernesto Sabato

(Reuters) - Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato, whose novel The Tunnel is hailed as an existentialist classic and who presided over a probe into the crimes committed by the nation's military rulers, died on Saturday at age 99.

"Humankind cannot live without heroes, martyrs and saints," Sabato, an intellectual known as a tireless activist for justice and human rights, once said.

His death was reported by local media.

Sabato, who trained as a physicist before becoming a writer, had three novels to his name -- The Tunnel published in 1948, On Heroes and Graves published in 1961 and Abaddon, The Exterminator in 1974.

Known for his bald pate, tinted glasses, brush mustache and open-necked shirts, he was viewed as a hero by many in his South American homeland.

After the end of Argentina's notorious 1976-83 military rule, Sabato was chosen to preside over the National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP), which investigated the fate of tens of thousands of Argentines who disappeared at the hands of the military -- kidnapped, tortured and killed.

The commission compiled 50,000 pages of chilling evidence of systematic kidnap, torture and rape waged against anyone even remotely suspected of sympathizing with leftist guerrillas.

Its findings and recommendations that the "Dirty War" soldiers should be tried and punished were published in 1984 in a book called Nunca Mas (Never Again).

Sabato seemed ill at ease in the limelight even as he was idolized by many young people and students in Argentina. Lionized by the political left, Sabato nevertheless rejected any party affiliation.

"I don't belong to any party, I just support anything I think is good for this sickly country and denounce anything I find false, despicable, dirty, corrupt and hypocritical," he said.

He railed against the tendency to seek technological solutions to human suffering, a painful admission for a man who studied science in Argentina, France and the United States.

He embraced surrealism and abandoned science for writing. His first novel, The Tunnel, was hailed after its release in 1948 as an existentialist classic and won him fans including Thomas Mann and Albert Camus.

stars, rocks, & bones in Chile

[from Kenneth Turan @ Los Angeles Times, 22 April 2011]

Movie review: 'Nostalgia for the Light'

Patricio Guzmán examines three groups of searchers in Chile's Atacama Desert — astronomers, archaeologists and relatives of 'the disappeared.'

"Nostalgia for the Light" won't make you nostalgic for anything because it's not like other documentaries you've seen. A film of rare visual poetry that's simultaneously personal, political and philosophical, it's a genuine art film that's also unpretentious and easygoing.

As directed by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán, "Nostalgia" is a completely fascinating meditation on different aspects of the past and the interlinked ways we explore them. This may sound cold and distant but Guzmán's mastery of cinema means that what sounds artificial turns out to be moving in a surprising, even profound way.

Beginning with the landmark "The Battle of Chile," that country's past has always been Guzmán's subject, specifically the Salvador Allende revolution and the Augusto Pinochet counter-revolution. With this film, he's found an unusual new way to approach it, a way that goes though a very particular area called the Atacama Desert.

One of the driest places on Earth, devoid of insects, animals or birds and so arid it registers as a parched brown even from outer space, Chile's Atacama has qualities that make it an accessible gateway to the past, qualities that draw three distinct groups interested in that kind of exploration.

Because he has been interested in astronomy since childhood — the film opens with intriguing images of the still-functional 1910 telescope that inspired him — Guzmán starts with scientists who choose to study the stars from a series of Atacama radio telescopes because the area's transparent air makes it ideal for that purpose.

"Nostalgia" intersperses ravishing images of the solar system with heady conversations with scientists who let us know that by definition astronomy is the study of the past. For the interplanetary light they study has been traveling for hundreds of thousands of years to get here.

The Atacama has also attracted more conventional explorers of the past, archaeologists who show the filmmaker rock carvings by pre-Columbian shepherds that are more than 10,000 years old.

As Guzmán points out, one of the paradoxes of the Chilean experience is that, in contrast to all the attention paid to the distant past, Chile has been reluctant to confront its immediate past, to look into the large numbers of political opponents liquidated or "disappeared" by the Pinochet regime.

The Atacama plays a part in this too, because this remote desert turns out to have been a dumping ground for bodies of murdered political prisoners. And sharing the desert with astronomers and archaeologists is a third group of searchers, relatives of "the disappeared" who sift through the sands looking for remains of their loved ones.

The connections and reverberations among these three groups is the heart of this film, and it is made especially involving because of the articulate nature of the people Guzmán has chosen to interview and the way he talks to them.

"I don't like to corner the people in my films into giving me a specific answer," the director has said in the past. "I usually interview them for hours and hours without ever revealing where the interview is headed."

When combined with cinematographer Katell Djian's stunning images, Guzmán's fluid, unconventional filmmaking deftly explores surprising relationships and meaningful cross-cultural connections among these nominally very different groups of searchers. The result is as emotional as it is unexpected, and that is saying a lot.

cursi

[from Natasha Wimmer @ The Nation, 9 May 2011]

Cursi is possibly my favorite word in Spanish, and one of the most difficult to translate. Depending on the context, it might mean sentimental or prissy or precious or affected. It is the polar opposite of macho, which is the more familiar strain (at least abroad) of Spanish and Latin American culture. And yet cursi has a substantial history in Spanish-language fiction and poetry. The nineteenth century was its heyday, with novels like the tragic idyll María by the Colombian writer Jorge Isaacs and verse by the arch-cursi Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. Not coincidentally, [Manuel] Puig refers to Isaacs and Bécquer in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and The Buenos Aires Affair, respectively, the other two novels republished by Dalkey Archive.

Manuel Puig

The literature of cursi blossomed again in the twentieth century, with Puig’s novels and work by writers like Alfredo Bryce Echenique, the delicious Jaime Bayly (as yet untranslated; for those who read Spanish, Yo amo a mi mami is the one to start with) and — yes — [Mario] Vargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, most felicitously, but also the more recent The Bad Girl).

For more, read here.

Viviana Luengo

Viviana Luengo working at her loom

Meet Viviana Luengo, an artist who lives in Buenos Aires. I met her on the Internet after she discovered this blog. Why not visit her website & explore her work.

Muñequita con Ojai Poppies

interview with Donald Hess

[from Verónica Gurisatti @ Brando, 2 April 2011]

"Los mejores Malbec y Torrontés se hacen en la Argentina"

El bodeguero suizo más famoso del momento, propietario de las bodegas salteñas Amalaya y Colomé habla sobre el mundo del vino a nivel mundial

Donald Hess es uno de los grandes referentes de la industria vitivinícola mundial y el presidente del grupo Hess Family Estate. Nació en Suiza, tiene 73 años y es propietario de siete bodegas en el mundo: tres en California (Sequana, Artezin y Monte Veeder), una en Sudáfrica (Glen Carlou), una en Australia (Peter Lehmann) y dos en Argentina (Colomé y Amalaya) en los Valles Calchaquíes. Además, es uno de los coleccionistas de arte contemporáneo más importantes del mundo.

Atraído por el paisaje y el desafío de producir vinos de alta calidad, en febrero del 2001 invirtió en la Argentina y compró la bodega Colomé en Salta (con los viñedos más altos del mundo a 2.300 metros de altura), luego inauguró un museo de arte contemporáneo y en diciembre del 2010 abrió Amalaya, su segunda bodega salteña, en el Divisadero. Si bien es conciente del enorme desafío que representa, está convencido de poder llevar adelante un plan de desarrollo económico y social.

Desde sus comienzos, Hess demostró una visión muy particular desarrollando como base importante del crecimiento tres principios fundamentales: calidad, cuidado del medio ambiente y compromiso social. Hoy, además de generar alternativas y oportunidades de trabajo, sirve como modelo para inspirar a otros. Pero no depende únicamente de su actitud, sino también del contexto nacional y global, y hoy la vitivinicultura es un negocio que crece al ritmo del mercado.

Algunos días atrás estuvo en Buenos Aires y habló con ConexiónBrando. Acá nos cuenta por qué decidió invertir en la Argentina y cómo se renueva día a día su empresa familiar.

ConexiónBrando: ¿Por qué decidió invertir en la Argentina?

Hess: Porque yo pienso en términos de variedades y como ya hago Cabernet Sauvignon y Chardonnay en California y Syrah en Australia, quería hacer Malbec y Torrontés, y el mejor lugar es la Argentina. Llegué al país por primera vez en el año 1983 y, casi por casualidad, mientras buscaba tierras cultivables para producir vinos, descubrí la bodega Colomé. La finca de 39.000 hectáreas tenía vida propia, pueblo propio, cultura propia e inmediatamente me cautivó.

¿Qué fue lo primero que le impactó del país?

Lo primero que me impactó, enológicamente hablando, fue el Malbec, aunque por esa época no se hablaba tanto de la variedad, tal vez por falta de confianza de parte de los productores en su potencial, pero a mí me encantó de entrada. Por eso en Colomé desarrollé ciento por ciento Malbec y también Torrontés porque creo que hay que enfocarse en uvas que tengan una identidad bien argentina y en un mundo tan globalizado hay que aprovechar la posibilidad de tener algo único.

¿Qué cambios observó en la industria desde su primera visita?

Es notable como mejoró la calidad, hoy casi no hay vinos con fallas. Antes eran sobremaduros, les faltaba frescura y no tenían la fruta que tienen hoy. Ahora, sin perder la intensidad son más elegantes, equilibrados y menos rústicos. En los últimos años se desarrollaron una serie de bodegas boutique con un enfoque bien claro hacia la calidad, y esto ayuda a crear la imagen de una industria más heterogénea y diversa frente a las bodegas grandes que lideran la exportación.

¿Cuándo empezó en el negocio del vino?

Si bien mi familia fue propietaria de una pequeña bodega en Suiza, recién en 1978 comencé a establecerme en distintas partes del mundo para producir vinos premium. Mi familia es originaria de la ciudad de Berna y durante ocho generaciones se dedicaron a la fabricación de cerveza y la hotelería. Yo empecé haciendo cerveza artesanal en Suiza, después embotellé agua mineral y recién después me dediqué al vino.

¿Cómo definiría el estilo de sus vinos salteños?

Son vinos de terroir, con carácter e identidad. El potencial de calidad que tiene el norte argentino es enorme, posee condiciones únicas como altitud, intensidad luminosa, amplitud térmica, clima seco, suelos con buen drenaje y muchos viñedos de setenta a ochenta años que producen uvas de una increíble calidad. Cada día son mejores y los resultados en el mercado internacional hablan por sí solos.

¿Qué es exactamente el terroir?

Es un concepto fundamental cuando se hace vino de calidad y es lo que lo diferencia de otras bebidas industriales. El vino es el resultado de muchas variables (humanas, culturales, climáticas y de suelo) y todas son importantes para definir su personalidad. En un sentido clásico, incluye el suelo y el clima que, obviamente, tienen un peso significativo, pero el terroir implica algo más: la gente con su cultura, su modo de hacer las cosas y sus tradiciones, ya que el vino es la expresión de la comunidad que lo hace.

¿Qué tienen en común la industria del arte y del vino?

La pasión y la gente. A mí me gusta comer con los artistas, hablar con ellos y conocer personalmente a cada autor de mi colección. Comencé a comprar arte contemporáneo hace más de 40 años y en 1989 abrí mi primer museo en el valle de Napa dentro de la bodega, luego otro en Glen Carlou en Sudáfrica y en el 2009 inauguré el tercero en la bodega Colomé dedicado íntegramente a la obra de James Turrell. Ahora estoy construyendo el cuarto en Australia.

¿Cómo es su domingo ideal?

Me gusta mucho ir a la montaña, hacer cabalgatas y compartir con amigos actividades al aire libre. El contacto con la naturaleza es fundamental, me permite encontrar la cordura y tener una escala de valores real. Los tiempos reales y las dimensiones reales son los de la naturaleza no los del ser humano.

Vik

Estancia Vik & Playa Vik are luxury art hotels, two more reasons to visit Uruguay.

Also, don't miss Vik Holistic Vineyard in Chile.

Some pix of Estancia Vik.

parilla & dining room

living room

bathtub

fruit, weather, & art

While you're here, buy & eat fruit from the local vendors. The peaches, plums, pears, grapes, & watermelon are all splendid.

Folks are asking me about the weather.

A week ago the weather was cloudy & occasionally rainy. Then it changed to sunny & warmer. In the last two days, the clouds came back. Last night it sprinkled, & we saw one lightning flash.

This morning the ground is wet, it's partly cloudy, & low clouds hover over the mountains. Mike stood outside Ginny's front door to shoot this picture of snow on the high peaks.

Temperatures are comfortable to warm. Light cotton clothing & occasionally a light sweater are all we've worn.

We stopped by to see local ceramicist Sasha Utama's work this week, but he was not home. I took these photos of his yard.

Faces of My Land

Tetagua Rova 2009 – Faces of My Land – an art exhibit from Paraguay has begun its Latin American tour at the Paraguayan embassay in Montevideo.

Featured artists are Osvaldo Camperchioli, Sergio Buzó, Noel Herzog, Carla Ascarza, Osvaldina Servían, Liliana Segovia, Fernando Alló, Sergio Jara, Marco Reynaldi, Eugenio Massana, Michael Burt, Adriana Duarte, Daniel Muzzano, Raquel Rojas, Ofelia Fisman, Lutgard Van Dyck, Martín Vallejos, Jorge Valladares, y Marta Rocío Benítez.

indigenous pre-Colombian art

Click here to see samples of indigenous pre-Colombian art, e.g.:

local ceramics

You might want to visit Sacha's studio when you are in Cafayate next. He makes wonders out of clay:

stained glass

Nadia Khan creates custom stained glass and furniture. You may have seen her work at Restaurant Colorado in Cafayate. She was first introduced to the art of stained glass while studying sustainable building techniques and fine woodworking at Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Vermont. Her studio is located 15 minutes north of Salta. Visit Nadia's website to read about her process see more samples of her work. Visit April's blog, Living in Cafayate, for more about Nadia's works of art.