¡No se cuelguen de mis tetas!

The Gay Elements: Buenos Aires Salon Life and The End of Cool

por Canuto Cañete

The final group are the Susan Sonntag-like poofters. These are the self-proclaimed intelligentsia of intelligence and brilliance of intelligent proportions. Their ethos is based on a precarious belief of self worth that even a whisper could shatter. Before that happens they run towards self monumentalisation and, in many cases, through persistence and boldness they achieve it. Daniel Link a.k.a The Soviet is one example. He is so up there with other self made men turned into Gods through apotheosis such as Hercules and Evita (Christina?) that nothing touches him. I answered in this blog his ‘theory’ of love and he replied by copying and pasting making a joke about when in the second page of his recent book he states: ‘prohibida la reproduccion parcial o total de este libro sin mi autorizacion’. So the fact that I state that my writing has ‘all rights reserved’ seems funny to him  as if I had no rights. Not really addressing the issue of love he, I would say, disqualified me as ‘Canuto Cañete, Conscripto del Siete’. Like an 8 year old child, Link receives either devotion or rejection, nothing in between. 

In his ‘Textos de Occasion: Metodo/Politicas/ Forma de Vida/ Amor al Arte/ Diario de un televidente/Lost’, he gathers a series of commentaries that are the outcome of the mechanics of his Augustan mouth, fingers or fingertips moving and all this is expected to be considered in the context of the economy of the relic. At least, he thinks so. Ninety pesos poorer and somehow annoyed by the lack of, which word to use for this book, ‘curatorship’ (?) I found an article called ‘ Le temps retrouve’ (unsurprisingly only the title is in French). In that article he tells how boring he is and how little effort he puts in showing that boredom when invited to the house of a ‘dear friend’ for a ‘soiree’. And he says: ‘I tried to disguise my discomfort wandering around the salons and the splendid gardens, always in fear of being caught by someone wanting to know something new about my life’. An embarrassment of riches of sorts, Link discloses not only lack of gratitude as a guest but he dismisses with elan other people’s interest. Soviet as he is, he forgets that this is a society where small talk does not mean what it seems but it is a tribal way of keeping us alive, together, warm and motivated in the illusion that same day we are not going to die alone. The problem with Link is that all this comes as a reversal of values of low over high. A Fuenteovejuna without stories to tell, Daniel Link finds cool-ness in boredom and greyness. He is what in my Tango-bound country we call a puto triste.