Engaging, Informational, Sound Rich

Over the years when it comes to Buenos Aires, I've relied on reporter Marie Trigona. Whereas Trigona has tirelessly exposed Argentine military leaders who covered up the mass murders of their political opponents, the so-called "disappeared" citizens in the 1970s and 80s, another, quieter scene has been unfolding in the Queen City of the River Plate.

Muriel Murch's audio postcard from Buenos Aires sounds surreal. As if speaking through an elongated tube, Murch's stately British accent resonates when she describes the staff and inmates of a large psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires. She leads us on a walking tour, a kind of gentle tango, through the Borda Hospital, an extraordinary venue. It so happens that this sanitorium is the home base for a major Argentine radio station, La Colifata, staffed by patients and former patients. How many North Americans are aware of the poems and music broadcast by LT22 Radio throughout Argentina? Were such a radio station based in, say, Bellevue's psychiatric ward in New York City, this might be a gringo equivalent. For all our technology and alleged concern for our emotionally disabled fellow citizens, we still tend to categorize them as "psychos" and dismiss their ravings.

Rather than recording their Spanish, Murch embraces one and listens to others with remarkable reportorial tenderness. While their muted poems and music may be heard in the background, Murch gives us her impression of one sad inmate dressed in tatters, who begs for new clothes and is soothed by the applause of listeners seated in a semicircle around the studio. "Taking part in the radio," Murch affirms, "saying your name each week, helps slow, maybe halt the disease."

In the midst of a couple of garbage men collecting leaky plastic bags of refuse from the 2000 patients and staff, and a few wild dogs roaming the grounds, scavenging what the trash collectors have left, the show must go on. Radio heads, psychiatric nurses and visitors join the antic cast of performers. Tough as it is to decipher in one or two places, Murch's Argentine "Letter from a Broad" gives voice and dignity to people we gringos would lock away as social outcasts. As such, her piece flies over the cuckoo's nest, with the sky as its limit.

James Reiss
Wilmette, IL
June 7, 2008

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