2007-03-19 Sunday

A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but it sure beats rethinking everything every day. Isn't that what Sartre calls dizziness (or nausea, or something?)


Tango Walking in Plaza Mitre
Did some tango walking during the day in Plaza Mitre at about 1pm. It was a beautiful day and the Sun was shining, and I guess my walk is getting better because people have started to ignore me completely. The surface of the big monument... hey, wait, I have a picture though it's not from yesterday. There it is! So the surface of the big monument is really smooth and
you can choose to be in the Sun or not. It's actually not bad.

My walk is getting much better, and I can hang out with my weight on one or the other ball-of-foot for a long time. The problem is that on the dance floor one forgets all of that easily. But I would say that that is what you should be thinking about: your posture, your weight, her weight, the music. Maybe I'll ramble more about this later.

9pm Copello Tango 2 with Jose and Vicky
Class with Jose and Vicky was great: few people, good ratio of women who can dance to men (I don't worry about how my compañeros dance, of course). Jose gave the guys some technical exercises at the beginning for changing weight and spinning. Really nice.

Then we did the figure du jour which was really cool for three reasons:

1. it was easy to do, and most of it was easy to do backwards too
2. there was a new barrida for me, in which you trap your foot between the woman's and bring her back to a side opening
3. we did one of those funky twists where the woman has her weight evenly distributed with right foot forward, and then you rotate her so that her right foot forward but now she's faced the same direction as you (you being the man, that is)

It was cool and it worked and the pointers that Jose and Vicky give are right on.

I have to ask Jose less questions. He gets a bit annoyed. Which is a general lesson: Be careful with questions in Argentina: people often feel that you are challenging their authority. Blind trust and professed loyalty are the mainstays of Argentinian society.

1am - Niño Bien
I never made it there, because I went to see Stranger Than Fiction in Abasto instead (cute flick!). But there was some huge International Tango Festival thing happening at Niño Bien. La Viruta would've been good too, being Sunday night and all.

Today
Today I should've gone to class at DNI at 1pm, but I never made it. But that's cool because tonight I'll be at Canning from 7pm on (two classes [or some part of the second one] and then the milonga).