Miss Bolivia playing at Ciudad Emergente 2012 (Photo: Lautaro Aránguiz)

If you have been craving a plethora of youth culture activities stuffed into a one medium sized area, then Ciudad Emegente held at Cultural Centro Recoleta between 6th-10th June is right up your street.

With more things going on than you can shake your stick at, the “five days which will join the pulse of half a million young people who pass through the festival,” is a clear effort by Buenos Aires City Government to once again desperately show that they’re at the forefront of porteño youth culture.

For the fifth year, Ciudad Emergente will be cramming live bands, DJs, VJs, fashion, poetry, film, street art, street dance, stand up comedy, theatre, digital art and interactive art, into a five day long extravaganza. Basically, everything and anything associated with youth culture as they can possibly get their hands on.

The festival will be showcasing work and holding lectures from some of the most interesting Argentines currently capturing the digital and graphic art worlds. Famous Argentine graphic designer Alejandro Ros, is exhibiting his infamous designs for CD sleeves, and street artist Lucas Grothesque, will be painting the courtyard. The ‘3D’ theatre spectacle Hombre Vertiente will take its viewers on a water odyssey every night at 9pm, which if you haven’t seen already, take the opportunity to see what you’ve been missing for free.

Although the festival is a platform for up and coming Argentine musicians, it is also made some stage time for big name Latin American bands throughout the week. Bomba Estéreo, one of the largest contemporary Colombian bands, are headlining the first night of the festival with their experimental-brand of cumbia will surely be a crowd pleaser.

People at the entrance of Centro Cultural Recoleta during the opening of Ciudad Emergente 2012 (Photo: Lautaro Aránguiz)

At 6pm on Thursday, see Chilean Ana Tijoux, whose mixed roots and political heritage is feistily exhibited in a rap/hip-hop/Latino infusion. Growing up in France after her parents were exiled from Chile during General Pinochet’s dictatorship, she started out rapping in French and Spanish, moving on to form Tiro de Gracia, the best selling Chilean rap group of all time. Expect politically motivated songs such as Shock, which was inspired by the student protests, and an impressive display of MC-ing 1977.

And then there is Miss Bolivia, whose cheeky reggae is probably the best (and only) aggressive, feminist, lesbian, tropi-cumbia rap you’ll hear all year. Watch her sneer and gyrate in her video for Alta Yama, then be impressed by the fact she’s just as likely to rap about the drug epidemic in South America or the beauty of pluralism as she is about ripping her thong off.

Street dancing will be taking centre stage on the Patio del Ajibe everyday at 4.30pm and 6.30pm, with body poppers and break-dancers contorting themselves in a way that would make your grandma blush. For old school b-boying check out Los Fabulosos Bboys or current Campeonato Knock Out competition holders Terrible Style Crew.

When you need to chill out from all the noise and movement, head to Sala 4 for a spot of spoken word. Almost agonisingly young and talented, emerging Argentine poets and lyricists will be reading their work aloud. Magazine lovers can discover the cream of Argentine youth publications in Sala 12, both events running from Thursday to Sunday.

Also catch brilliant music documentaries on in the BAFICI space, featuring “Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon”, “Leonard Cohen: Live at Isle of White”, Arcade fire’s “Mirror Noir”, and Chemical Brothers’s exhilarating “Don’t Think”. Spanish Film Quiero Tener una Ferretería en Andalucía unveils the lost years of Joe Strummer in Southern Spain, giving a rare insight into the iconic but enigmatic Clash frontman.

If all this isn’t enough, each night at 8.30pm a cutting-edge Argentine fashion designer will be speaking about the aesthetics of their designs.

Phew. The best part? It’s completely free. FREE!!!

Daniel Tunnard at GrinGo Stand Up (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his MAJOR PLUG ALERT! THIS TUESDAY 5th JUNE THE WORLD-FAMOUS GRINGO STAND-UP COMEDY SHOW IN ENGLISH (FEATURING ME AND FOUR OTHER WONDERFULLY FUNNY PEOPLE) MOVES TO SAN TELMO, BECAUSE LET’S FACE IT, NO ONE WANTS TO GO TO CONGRESO ON A COLD TUESDAY NIGHT. SO COME DOWN TO CAFÉ RIVAS, ESTADOS UNIDOS 302 (CORNER OF BALCARCE) ON TUESDAY AT 9PM FOR THE BEST ENGLISH-BASED COMEDY EXPERIENCE IN THE COUNTRY. 30 PESOS, DETAILS HERE ADVANCED BOOKINGS HERE.

Ahem. Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 22.

Millions of things are happening in Buenos Aires at this very moment. A man in Villa Devoto places a bleach bottle with this phone number on top of his Peugeot 504 and wonders exactly when Argentines decided this was the most effective way to sell a car. An old man in San Cristóbal throws crumbs to the pigeons, oblivious to the fact that the pigeons find this quite patronizing, as if they were incapable of finding their own food. And on ‘Salven el Millón’(known elsewhere as ‘Million Dollar Money Drop’), the best programme on Argentine TV (the fact that this is far and away the best programme in Argentina speaks volumes about the sorry state of Argentine programming) Susana Giménez asks which province the town of Londres is in. The competing couple bet $40,000 on Santiago del Estero. The answer is Catamarca.

For the first time in Colectivaizeishon I go past Plaza de Mayo and the Cathedral. I’d love to know the meaning of so many of these architectural references to be found in the buildings in the old part of the city, but the philosophy of Colectivaizeishon is that you can read about that kind of thing elsewhere and Colectivaizeishon can stick to making sarcastic jokes about the quotidian minutiae of Buenos Aires life. One of the few architectural references I do know is regarding the frontispiece above the Cathedral entrance. This depicts the reencounter between Joseph and Jacob (or was it Abraham?) in the book of Genesis, which symbolizes the reunification of Buenos Aires with the rest of Argentina in 1860 (or was it 1862. So of all the curious stories that exist about Buenos Aires architecture, I’ve managed to commit to memory one of the least interesting ones and can’t even remember its most salient points. (Pub quizzes in 1850s Britain often ended in tantrums and name-calling when the question ‘What is the capital of Argentina?’ was answered correctly as ‘Paraná’ but the quizmaster had been using an outdated encyclopaedia and arrogantly insisted it was Buenos Aires. Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ attests to such a dispute.)

The 22 is one of the few buses that connects Retiro with the south without just going straight down Paseo Colón, which is good news for the present author who was running out of things to say about said Paseo, except to say that its name in English could facetiously be translated as ‘Colon Stroll’. In my first years in Buenos Aires I thought Paseo Colón was a tree-lined pedestrian walkway next to the Colón Theatre. This is patently not the case. Only now is such a walkway being built, and it’s called Vatican Square. I am as oblivious to the reasons for this name as am I to finding a punch line for this paragraph.

Starbucks on the corner of Plaza Dorrego in San Telmo (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Instead of doing the Colon Stroll, the 22 takes me through San Telmo. For many years, when I lived in Palermo and any bar, restaurant or shoe shop more than five blocks from my house was a bar, restaurant or shoe shop not worth going to, I used to go to San Telmo but once a year and every time I did it was a letdown. You know when you go to a foreign city that’s supposed to be really cool, but you spend all your time wandering round the main square bored off your tits because you’re too tight to shell out for a guidebook and so haven’t got a clue where all the groovy people in town hang out? That’s what San Telmo was like to me for many a year.

But then we made friends in San Telmo and with that came the sad obligation to have to visit San Telmo more regularly. One of the things I do like about San Telmo is Av. Caseros, basically because it’s British, with the old British railway workers’ buildings and the Bar Británico a few blocks away. All the same, we came to San Telmo late. According to my spies in the south, San Telmo is just the same as Palermo today, they even have a Starbucks, and Plaza Dorrego’s only purpose is to rip off the tourists. A few years ago I read part of a travel book by AA Gill in which he writes some such nonsense as: “Porteños dance the tango on every corner of this city. The señoritas won’t sleep with you unless you marry them, but they will instead allow you one dance of the most sensual tango.” I can only imagine that AA Gill spent the entirety of his stay on Plaza Dorrego or Florida, and that he was really rubbish at picking up women. (But then AA Gill also described the British as “an embarrassing, ugly race […] lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd” so he’s not a completely rubbish writer.)

I’m surprised to discover that Av. Montes de Oca is named after a man called Manuel Montes de Oca, and not, as I had always imagined, a great mountain of ganders, which would be the literal translation of ‘montes de oca’. What a mountain of ganders is and why a major thoroughfare of La Boca should be named after such a concept are two questions that clearly never occurred to me.

It is on this avenue that I see a man sharpening a knife on his special pushbike. Round about 2005 I was talking to a student who was saying that one of the things she loved about Buenos Aires was that it was a city where men cycled round sharpening whatever blunt instrument presented itself for grateful housewives. I nodded and didn’t tell her how much it bothered me that these people came round buzzing all the intercom buzzers in the building at siesta time. But I decided to go along with my student’s starry-eyed take on porteño life. Two days later, I’m having a nice nap when some idiot buzzes all the intercom buzzers in the building.

Angel, on his converted bicycle, sharpening a knife. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

‘How much?’ I ask.

‘Three pesos,’ says the chap on the intercom. I go downstairs with a chef’s knife, and the old man proceeds to sharpen it on his pimped-up pushbike. He’s done in five minutes and I give him my three pesos.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Thirteen pesos.’

Thirteen pesos! To sharpen a knife that cost me twelve pesos! Now, I know I have a tendency to zone out a bit when spoken to in Spanish, but where money is concerned I sit up and listen, and this man clearly said three pesos (‘Tres’ and ‘trece’ sound alike in Spanish. So do ‘dos’ and ‘doce’. It’s an imperfect language, really. They have no word for ‘flick’ either. They make great show of the fact that they have one word for ‘the back of the neck’ and we don’t, as if that was something, but instead of ‘toe’ they say ‘foot finger’. They really haven’t given this language any thought at all.) I only have a $100 note on me and this man, obviously, doesn’t have any change. I have to cross the road to the Chinese supermarket and spend ten pesos to get change. I cross back and give thirteen pesos to the sharpener, who doesn’t even say thank you, the git. He cycles off and I look at my knife. He’s buggered it. I could have sharpened it better myself, and with a normal bicycle.

Besides, what do we need knife-sharpening men for in this day and age? What is it that you’re cutting, Madame, that requires such a sharp blade? I say, if you’ll forgive me my impertinence, instead of throwing away money on these rip-off artists, why not spend your money on better-quality meat? Unless you, Madame, have murdered your husband and need to dispose of the body, in which case carry on.