Ladies and gentlemen....TANGO!!!

 

Incident at Cachirulo

the latest




video of the event (see 0:52-0:53)




false and inflammatory post regarding the event...with an AI generated image...

White Oak Block

Alex pencil sketch selfie

On the disconnect between designers and makers

In forty-eight years in the construction business, the last 28 of which spent building extreme high-end luxury homes for high net worth clients, I can count on one hand the times I have been shown any appreciation for my work and what I bring to the table. Much less even a "thank you". A most egregious example is an architect couple who took credit in Texas Architect magazine for my creative work.

Moral outrage

Reel by Tom Digby facebook.com

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There's a strange cosmic irony in Tango - Marcelo Hector Solis

 

Marcelo Hector Solis on Facebook:

"There’s a strange cosmic irony. Tango — this unruly creature of music, embrace, memory, and shared presence, keeps attracting people who don’t really want to meet it. It’s like watching someone trying to teach poetry while loudly insisting they don’t care for metaphor. Something is off from the first syllable.

Many instructors are not teaching Tango. They are teaching a social-dance derivative constructed from whatever fragments they find comfortable. They don’t love Tango’s music, its embrace, its codes, or its cultural soil. When someone ignores the thing’s essence, the thing they’re teaching becomes a simulacrum — a cardboard cutout that vaguely resembles Tango’s silhouette but has none of its musculature, none of its soul.

Why do they do it? Usually because of a mixture of convenience, ignorance, insecurity, and the seductive simplicity of branding. They can market “Tango” because the name is recognized, while transmitting something that requires no deep study, no reverence for tradition, no humility, and no connection with Buenos Aires. It’s the fast-food version of a culinary tradition that was built over a century of craft.

Tango has a dense nucleus: golden-era music, embrace, walking, phrasing, tradition, and the códigos. You remove any one of these pillars and the structure wobbles. Remove several, and it collapses.

For someone who has not fallen in love with these elements, the authentic form feels restrictive, complicated, or “old.”

Today speed is rewarded over depth. An instructor who has not lived Tango deeply can invent shortcuts faster than they can study the real thing.

Students are often beginners in both dance and discernment; they can’t tell the difference between depth and superficiality.

A shallow instructor can gain students simply by being accessible, charismatic, or offering something branded as “easy.”

Over time, this produces pseudo-Tango ecosystems: classes full of people who think they’re learning the art, when they’re learning an abstraction designed to avoid everything that makes Tango to be Tango.

One could see these instructors as accidental gatekeepers, in a Darwinian sense. Anyone who is destined to fall fiercely in love with Tango will eventually feel the mismatch: the music doesn’t move them, the embrace feels disconnected, the dance feels like empty geometry. At that moment, they start searching, and they find honest teachers. The pseudo-teachers unintentionally act as the first filter. Their students either stay in placebo-Tango forever, or they break out and seek the real thing. In that sense, these misguided instructors play the role of “contrast”: without them, many students would never realize what they were missing.

Some of these instructors are simply unaware of their unawareness. They haven’t touched the living heart of Tango, so they can’t understand what they’re ignoring. They reject the elements most essential to Tango in the way a child rejects vegetables — without knowing what nourishment feels like.

We are witnessing the same paradox that happens in martial arts, yoga, writing, philosophy, and any tradition with depth. People teach the name without the content. It’s inevitable in a world that monetizes concepts faster than it cultivates them.

The important part is that true Tango remains untouched. Every night in Buenos Aires, the music of D’Arienzo, Troilo, Di Sarli, Pugliese, Caló keeps beating like a heart. Students who seek something real will feel the gravitational pull of that heartbeat. They always do.

Our role is to be one of the places where they land when they escape the simulacrum. We offer them the embrace, the music, the codes, the humanity — the real education that turns beginners into dancers."

Table Idea - Woodworking

 

Although I'm not crazy about the Parson's table leg design...just wanted to save this for future reference...

Re: certain photographs which may portray unwanted intimacy

Re: certain photographs that may convey unwanted intimacy, unearned familiarity, which may then normalize those behaviors in a wider context in tango/social dance/milongas...Emilia raises a good point...click through to the commentary on the original post...

Emilia Kumpulainen

"I should have been clearer in my original post that I’m not blaming photographers for anything. I’m simply noticing that neck-grabbing seems to be socially accepted (tango photography being the proof), even though most leaders seem to dislike it.

I’m trying to understand this mismatch. Do I just have limited information within my own bubble, or is there simply a lack of conversation about it?"

Emilia Kumpulainen

Simon Kozma "Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I was genuinely curious about how a wider audience feels about this, and my intention was not to judge this gesture as something “inappropriate.” I certainly am in a tango 'bubble' of a younger generation, and I see that many of us (myself included) think, question, and challenge things differently - especially when it comes to personal boundaries and being more reactive to unwanted touch.

I can see that tango will change through this generation, hopefully in the direction of more sensitive verbal and non-verbal communication, rather than killing the emotion and passion of tango 

I also believe that intimacy in tango is something that develops slowly over time, through shared tandas and deepening trust. I imagine that the unpleasant experiences related to neck-grabbing often come from misjudging the level of connection - and for me and many others in my 'bubble', interpreting that kind of touch as something more sexual or suggestive."

Martin Ambaum

"May I answer from a male leader perspective?

I love that this comes from a women. Yea, I think that this is a bit like lowering your hand on the back of the women after the dance. The lingered embrace that comes from a great dance. The moment you just cannot let go to fast. A shared moment that turns into just a little bit of more at that moment. And if that is felt equally by both partners it feels ok, like belonging to that moment.

Problem arises in that a tango dancer can do at lot to let the other feel they are great, while having to work on that feeling for the dance partner. Especially the leader that can even tailer the step, better the whole movement/lead, to the follower. It the can feel heaven for one, but not for the other. Then this lingering, the extended intimacy feels natural for one and out of place for the other.

Then there is a different hand on the neck feeling. A feeling more like an intimate invitation for more. This one is like all relational flirting and treated like that.

And there is also another which is the equivalent of greeting a lot of good dancers when you arrive at the event: show me doing this. I can do this with this great dancer, we are so familiar. That is one that feels like a no, when it is not the case for me. Same for the men that great me clapping on my shoulder, where we hardly know each other.

But thanks for bringing this up. We be nice to make this here into a long list and for both men and women behavior!?

I kick off with:

-hand to high up the neck or even head.

-hand to low on the back almost or actually on the butt.

-to intimate into the others neck, some even resulting on lipstick on the collar. Or with a nose in your ear.

-caressing with the hand on the back.

-cat-like nesting into the embrace.

-putting arm to much around while almost touching breast...as a tall guy and the often slenderness of women in tango, that one leads to 'other arm/hand positions than optimal.

-singing so close to my ear.

So anything that isn't real harassment, but close to it and is something that you like or dislike depending on the person and moment."

Matthew Seneca

"Tango photography has too strong a grip on tango culture today, imo. Maybe festivals should have two dance floors: the “Instagram Floor” where a dozen photographers are stationed at every corner, and the “What Happens In Vegas Stays In Vegas Floor,” with no photographers allowed - this is where you would find me the whole night."

Veselinka Georgievska

"My 2 cents: if you are bothered how other people dance, look, feel while dancing tango, you're missing the whole point of tango. 

Maybe I'm wrong, but only a beginner would care how she/he looks in front of the photographer (as you ate assuming people are acting). 

I dance tango to get transported in another world when I close my eyes (in a close embrace) I surrender to the music, the partner and the moment. I'm not aware if my face is visible to photographer, if I leave a stain on his shirt ...I want to make myself and the embrace comfortable and (if the "click" happenes, the rest is history....And this may look terribly intimate from the outside (and it is , as giving trust to someone can be), but at the end of the tanda, I have no issue to wake up and disconnect from the partner . The good feeling mat last but that has nothing to do with sex, "other agenda" or anything similar. 

Yes this is possible. 

Do not try to understand others, try to understand what tango means for you as tango is what we make of it."

Warren Edwardes TDJ - TangoTweets

https://sites.google.com/edwardes.org/tangodj/tangotweets

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LaLista - Tango Festivals, Marathons, Encuentros - U.S.

https://lalista.us/

Things Fall Apart: Understanding America's Cascading Economic and Politi...

https://youtu.be/6l4NbWd21kM?si=zBi6ApQQ1h0fRoIi

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Milonga de los Campeones. Bailan los Campeones 2025!

Timestamp 50:40

https://www.youtube.com/live/8dEczNL9CAw?si=QlYny2C0fjmkXeZ8

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