There are many people willing to tell you what tango is. Listen to them all. Don't believe any of them. Then, when you're full and you have sifted through it, weighed the contradictions, tested the theories, decide for yourself. Better yet, stay with the question.Tango, like love and God, should remain a mystery.

Starbucks understands the human weakness for comfort. The combination of addictive substances – caffeine, sugar and dairy (and delightful flavored chemicals) – cold in the summer, hot in the winter – has awarded them with the international monopoly in take-out coffee. There's no need to poison the water to control the masses.



My 'left wing' - disappointed, old and broken - will continue to find solace in tiny cups of coffee, accompanied by tiny glasses of water and itsy bitsy cookies… Continue

I think that the thermal travel mug is North America's contemporary version of the baked potato of horse and buggy days. On a day like today I want to wrap my fingers around something insulating a hot beverage and slowly sip its comforting contents. Perfect timing for the opening of the first Starbucks in Argentina.



Having been a health conscious radical I believed that I would only ever support local independent business owners. But, when my daughter got a job at Starbucks in… Continue

At 1800 hours the bell tolls and the gate to La Ciudad De Los Muertos is closed. They lock up the dead. They put chains and padlocks on the door to each eternal home – to keep ... someone ... from getting out – or getting in. Buried in compartments, surrounded by apartments – the dead are discontent. In this city within a city there is little peace when the living come to ogle as if at a zoo. So, the question that I have is 'who is watching whom?'

Hay no ciudad sin poesia states the government sponsored sign in the Subte. I see that poetry in the narrow streets still echoing horses hooves and uneven rhyme in the sidewalk blocks cracked and broken, heaving from overgrown trees. There is an uncomfortable dissonance as car horn musicians attempt to part traffic with their insistence and a resonant beat of the people marching and clanging pots to protest the rising of taxes. I see poetry in the juxtaposition of architecture from a… Continue

After seven years the final veil is lifted. Each has revealed a sin to be grappled with until there is nothing left but nakedness. They are tired – and itchy. He picks her up from the base of her pedestal, rubbing the fog from his eyes until he really sees her. Surprised, he says, “you've changed”. After many years of disappointment, she turns to look at him and replies, “you haven't”.

My first experience of take-out coffee in Buenos Aires was seeing a waiter bustle down the sidewalk with a covered tray containing two ceramic cups and saucers. There is a fine sophistication in this country where people take time, either alone, or with companions, to relax and enjoy a fine cuppajo in a confiteria - a cafe. It's not a cheap addiction – it's a way of life. Two years later I heard that Starbucks was determined to infiltrate Argentina with its over the counter, assembly line,… Continue

I thought I was rid of her. Afterall, winter was closing in on Buenos Aires and I was living in the middle of the concrete jungle, seven floors above the street, in an anonymous building. Accustomed to the constant clamorous street sounds I left the window open just a crack to allow for a little of that 'good air' to flow through my tiny apartment. Last night, I twisted up a lather in my sheets trying to escape her tortuous high-pitched whining. I averted her assault by hiding undercover until,… Continue

One thousand and one pictures can never near the worth of one word. A word that has kept us curious for more years than any of us care to count. It has inspired poetry and song, art and dance, gardens and architecture – spaces in which to worship its omnipresence. It has inspired inconceivable torture, death and destruction. One thousand and one pictures could never capture, could never express, the depth and breadth, the magnitude and magnificence of so few letters. In the beginning was the… Continue

After my massage Christina led me quietly to the hydrotherapy room. I sat my skinny naked body down in a plastic chair facing an 8 x 8 empty space - with a white tiled wall and grey floor older than me - while the plate-sized shower head above me began pounding out a cool and uncomfortable spray. Behind the plastic curtain at my back, my masajista adjusted levers and dials, controlling temperature and pressure, on her console like the little man in The Wizard of Oz. I squirmed around in the… Continue