Fresh back from Patagonia, but I'm going to insert the rest of the catch-up filler here before I launch an epic report from the snowy depths of the bottomoftheworld, Argentina.
So, where I've been— My second week here I jumped the frugal train of expat mingling and couchsurfed with a couple, Silvi and David—Silvi an architect from Germany and David from Maryland, teaching English. I met them in a bar in Palermo Hollywood (the district where I am staying, named for the concentration of TV studios and small entertainment businesses). Palermo is the largest neighborhood, or barrio, in Buenos Aires and the most popular hub of eclectic goings-on from restaurants (or meat dens) to bars to clubs. It's a pretty prime and safe location. In recent years, sects of Palermo have popped up with new labels like Palermo Soho and Palermo Queens, partly for the way they resemble the original namesakes and partly as an attempt by the real estate industry to bank in on the expat taste for trendy and familiar neighborhoods they do not resemble in the least. Back to my hosters— after 20-some minutes asking every bearded man in a brown shirt if he was "Silvi's boyfriend" per David's self-description on the phone, I found the quiet couple next to a curry tray at Bangalore—a grungy bar with suprisingly quality Indian food—David sipping Quilmes, the South American equivalent of Bud Light that plagues the general taste of Buenos Airesians, and quiet Silvi nursing a liter of gin and tonic. I stayed with them for several days, spending the bulk of it a) venturing 'bout the urban landscape with my camera and b) eating Davids zucchini-oregano scrambled eggs. Silvi is an architect with mediocre but passable English, which, after a few dead-end attempts to pursue other topics, left us both huddled over a crumpled piece of paper and Silvi in the midst of a heated Germanglish rant about the arbitrary inspiration (crumpled trash) of Frank Gehry's (overrated) work. We bonded, since I have a both intimate and volatile relationship with Gehry's work as well, furnished mostly by a picnic or two in summetime Millenium Park...
On my last day, Silvi invited me along as the photographer to document her artist/architect friend's new project-in-process. His name is Gaspar Libidensky. His work—
http://www.google.com.ar/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=feh&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=gaspar%20libedinsky&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1197&bih=624
and my favorite— is High Line Park, abandoned railroad tracks that he and some other architects converted into a bridge/urban garden/public park in New York on the west side. Really beautiful, check it out—
(Here are some better pictures and information—http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/egXTBSZ-R1H/New+York+New+High+Line+Park+Opens+Public/0YYq7L8SMRq)
Now he is working on a new project centered around playing with the text of political graffiti—graffiti commissioned by politicians, painted slogans along underpasses and such—from around the different neighborhoods in Buenos Aires and using the letters to spell out something different. He took me along to document the first experiment cutting away the letters. The day was an experimental urban hike, testing different mediums of removing the plaster. His process went like this—cut a grid into the paint, of which there are 10-20 or so layers, and then plaster packing tape across the grid and peel away the layers.
It worked fairly well, but the back layers tended to crumble away away from the tape as as we peeled off. We may try some kind of spray adhesive or heat adhesion-type laminate next. The next ideas was to repeat the grid-cutting process, then scrape it all off with a paint scraper to be collected in plastic bags and reassembled later. I thought it was a lofty task, since 2948 other colors of plaster get shaved off and mixed in with the desirable ones, but he shrugged and kept grinding away at the underpass wall. After dodging traffic with cameras, knives and tape for a day Gaspar took us back to his studio in an art collective on a campus here and introduced us to the work of his colleagues. He is working under a scholarship that awards you studio space in a small community of established artists ad mentorship by a Very Important German Artist who's name escapes me. Gaspar, being an "architect," was awarded one of the smaller spaces since "the damn committee assumed he only needed a computer." Indeed, the room was plastered by a clothesline of potential project ideas, of which the political-plaster was only a tiny part. With us on the the trip with us was Gaspar's friend, Christian, from the northern mountain provinces in Salta, who, according to Gaspar, is "the last hippie in Argentina, he just doesn't know it yet." 
Christian promptly denied this, whilst packing more coca leaves into his mouth and swelling the already sizeable coca lump in his cheek. Coca leaves are popular in the mountain regions for ameliorating altitude sickness, and "feed Christian's rampant cocaine addiction" in the words of Gaspar. Disclaimer— it takes far many more kilos than this to produce anything resembling the cocaine of glamorous proportions. This is just a mountain people's buzz.
Coca leaves
Mom, Dad, this is the part where I tell you I've become a drug mule.
Cutting the grid
Peeling away
Method 2: Gridding & Scraping
THICK— graffiti here is no spray paint job, it's a real painting.
Before & After
We tracked one painter in particular, "El Narrigon, (Big Nose). There are three others in particular he is tracking, I'm hoping to piggyback on another one of these soon, the last time we spoke of it Gaspar ended with "Bueno pero te aviso. besos" (Great, but I warn you. kisses.). Perhaps it has something to do with space or large knives. In other news, my diet has slowly been reducing itself to sausage-purist tendencies towards choripan—grilled chorizo on bread. That's all. And it's about 8 pesos, two dollars. I had two wonderful but polarized experiences with Argentine cuisine this weekend, the most fantastic raw pizza and pear-ginger-almond milk-chia smoothie at a rogue vegetarian restaurant, and suckled pig at a parilla on my birthday. Head and all. Details coming, but it's time for Molly Tries to Catch a Transatlantic Flight-Take 2.
