SACS Spring Charity Cocktail — October 22, 2014

Posted on September 16, 2014 by tq

7:30 pm to 10:00 pm

Live Music, Raffle Prizes, Silent Auction, Beer & Wine, Appetizers and Desserts

Price: $500 pesos per person

All money raised supports SACS (Send a Child to School). The SACS mission is to provide backpacks and school supplies to children in need in Argentina.

Ticket sales: silporta@hotmail.com 15-3073-3039
marcia @transpack.com.ar 15-3698-1949
tinamontana@gmail.com 15-5343-9220
jenny_vargasg@yahoo.com 15-4070-8365

Book Group — October 14, 2014

Posted on September 16, 2014 by tq

Dear Book Lovers,

BAIN’s next Book Club will be on Tuesday, October 14th.

Meeting Details:

Book: The Orientalist (2005) by Tom Reiss.

Time: 3:30 p.m.

NEW Location: Café In Boca al Lupo (fair warning: this place has excellent desserts so make sure to leave some room for postre!)

Address: Bonpland 1965 – Palermo (click here for map)

RSVP: loucrie@yahoo.com (Julia)

Come enjoy your afternoon coffee with us, and participate in a lively discussion with other BAIN members (feel free to join us even if you don’t manage to read this month’s book–it’s totally fine).

This month we will be reading The Orientalist (2005) by Tom Reiss, a non-fiction book.

Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, The Orientalist traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best-selling author in Nazi Germany. Born in 1905 to a wealthy family in the oil-boom city of Baku, at the edge of the czarist empire, Lev escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan. He found refuge in Germany, where, writing under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, his remarkable books about Islam, desert adventures, and global revolution, became celebrated across fascist Europe. His enduring masterpiece, Ali and Nino–a story of love across ethnic and religious boundaries, published on the eve of the Holocaust–is still in print today.

Tom Reiss spent five years tracking down secret police records, love letters, diaries, and the deathbed notebooks. As he tracks down the pieces of Lev Nussimbaum’s deliberately obscured life, Reiss discovers a series of shadowy worlds–of European pan-Islamists, nihilist assassins, anti-Nazi book smugglers, Baku oil barons, Jewish Orientalists–that have also been forgotten. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth century–of the origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism and terrorism. Written with grace and infused with wonder, The Orientalist is an astonishing book.

The book, as always, is available electronically. (Click on title above for the kindle version on Amazon).

For those who like to prepare in advance, here’s how our reading schedule is looking for the upcoming months:

November 11th: The Tunnel (1948) by Ernesto Sabato

(*This novel by Argentine Ernesto Sabato is quite short (ca. 120 pages), so those who want to practice the Spanish might venture to read it in the original as well.)

An unforgettable psychological novel of obsessive love, The Tunnel was championed by Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, and Graham Greene upon its publication in 1948 and went on to become an international bestseller. At its center is an artist named Juan Pablo Castel, who recounts from his prison cell his murder of a woman named María Iribarne. Obsessed from the moment he sees her examining one of his paintings, Castel fantasizes for months about how they might meet again. When he happens upon her one day, a relationship develops that convinces him of their mutual love. But Castel’s growing paranoia leads him to destroy the one thing he truly cares about.

December 9th: The Human Stain (2000) by Philip Roth

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it’s not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past–a part-time farmhand and a janitor at the college where, until recently, he was the powerful dean of faculty. And it’s not the secret of Coleman’s alleged racism, which provoked the college witch-hunt that cost him his job and, to his mind, killed his wife. Nor is it the secret of misogyny, despite the best efforts of his ambitious young colleague, Professor Delphine Roux, to expose him as a fiend. Coleman’s secret has been kept for fifty years: from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannily controlled life came unraveled. Set in 1990s America, where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciation and rituals of purification, The Human Stainconcludes Philip Roth’s eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation’s fate as by the “human stain” that so ineradicably marks human nature. This harrowing, deeply compassionate, and completely absorbing novel is a magnificent successor to his Vietnam-era novel, American Pastoral, and his McCarthy-era novel, I Married a Communist.

If you have any questions about the titles or meetings of the Book Club, please contact me at loucrie@yahoo.com

Hope to see you there!

Julia

September 17 — Ladies’ Night Out!

Posted on September 10, 2014 by tq

On Wednesday, September 17th, we will have the opportunity of experiencing a new happy hour in one of the most beautiful hotel bars in town. The bar of the Plaza Hotel Buenos Aires, which is a five-star hotel located in the Retiro district and overlooking the Plaza San Martin.

Date: Wednesday, September 17th

Time: 18.30 to 21.00

Location: Plaza Hotel Buenos Aires, Florida 1005

Please RSVP to: Silvia Portalanza silporta@hotmail.com

Hope to meet you there!

Museum Visit — Thursday, September 18, 2014

Posted on September 5, 2014 by tq

Join us for a visit to Palacio Paz. We will take a guided visit in English to see one of the most beautiful places in Buenos Aires.

Visiting the Palace is a unique experience because it was the biggest and the most luxurious private residence in town. If we add the huge artistic richness and the anecdotes of that period, the visitor gets amazed. Walking along the ballrooms takes us back to a magnificent period of Argentina.

If Buenos Aires was the Paris of South America, the Palacio Paz is the greatest example of French architecture in the city.

Please RSVP before Tuesday Sept. 16 to

Jolanda Maltha

jmaltha@hotmail.com

Cost for the tour is 70 Pesos per person to be paid at the entrance.

Meeting point: the entrance of the Palacio Paz at 3:15 p.m.

Av. Santa Fe 750/Plaza San Martín

Duration of the tour approx. 1 hour 15 min.

After the tour we can get together for coffee at the corner restaurant. (optional)

www.palaciopaz.com.ar

September 12 — Morning Coffee

Posted on August 30, 2014 by tq

The next BAIN Morning Coffee is coming up!
Date: Friday, September 12, 2014
Time: 10:30 am – 12:00
Where: Palermo Soho
Come spend a morning making new friends and catching up with old ones.
This is a casual, fun way to mingle and meet new people and it’s open
to all BAIN Downtown members.

Never been to a coffee event before? New to BAIN or Buenos Aires? We’d love to have you join us. Let us know in your RSVP if you have any questions!

Please RSVP to roxannenodelanglois@gmail.com

*Exact address provided upon RSVP. We hope you can make it!

Venue Change!!! — Buenos Aires Chili Cook Off! — September 7

Posted on August 28, 2014 by tq

What: Chili vs Locro vs Brownie Cook-Off (Bake Off)! If you want to participate as a cook or baker you have to fill out this form. If you want to participate as a judge you need to fill out this form. The forms themselves have more information.

Bi-monthly Meeting — ICANA — Graffitimundo Presents!

Posted on August 8, 2014 by tq

This month, graffitimundo, an art foundation that promotes the urban art scene of Buenos Aires, will give insight into the extraordinary stories behind the art; from its fiery political origins, to the modern context in which Buenos Aires has become one of the world’s most exciting cities for urban art. Graffitimundo works closely with some of the most talented and established urban artists in the city, runs tours, and workshops, and a gallery called UNION.

Address: ICANA, Maipú 672, Buenos Aires

Time: August 29, 2014, Presentation from 5pm to 6pm

Refreshments: Coffee, cookies, and cake

We will be getting together for a drink and/or picada after the presentation.

BAIN members and guests please join us.

Guest fee is AR$50.

*If you join BAIN at the meeting, your guest fee is waived.

(The fee to join BAIN for a year’s membership is AR$250)

Monthly Lunch — July 23, 2014

Posted on July 16, 2014 by tq

On Wednesday, July 23, at 1:00 pm we will have lunch at the Benihana restaurant next to the Alto Palermo shopping center. The chain is expanding and will shortly open a venue in Puerto Madero – let’s take advantage of their current bargain pricing as I suspect it will not last much longer!

Benihana restaurants are traditional Japanese hibachi steakhouses, which feature the Japanese cooking method known as “teppanyaki.” Your meal is prepared fresh and served by a performing chef, right before your eyes. For a nice write up on the history of the restaurants visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benihana. Our group has dined there previously with great reviews. Check out their Spanish language site at http://www.benihana.com.ar/ . Don’t believe the prices on the menu – they are very out of date!

You can choose the chicken, steak or shrimp teppanyaki. This includes soup, salad, water or gaseosa and the main course. Please note that the hibachi chicken rice is also included, as well as the tip!

The pricing for this event is quite “tight” – coffee, dessert, alcoholic beverages, etc. are not included in the price.

Date: Wednesday, July 23

Time: 1:00 pm

Place: Benihana, Arenales 3310 y Coronel Diaz (near Santa Fe)

Cost: 100 pesos

Please RSVP to mweldon213@yahoo.com

4815-4660