Paraphrasing the great American writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald, in Argentine lives, how many acts – and opportunities – can there be? In Juan Carlos Kreimer’s, projects and geographical destinations encrypted different possibilities: Buenos Aires, San Francisco, London, Buzios.
Journalist, editor; hustler and chronicler in England; castaway from the good life in Buzios, but castaway nonetheless. And the man behind a best-seller about the bicycle: in its library there is a Russian edition of its unthinkable global success Bici Zen (2013), as a photo of Sai Baba. Your new-but-not-so-new book Buzios was a transit hospital (Seix Barral), is the union of two inevitably autobiographical short novels, where the borders between a diary of five years of his life (1976-1981) and fiction are diffuse, deliberately worked to make them so.
The rain on a Monday morning does not make a dent in Belgrano R, one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the city. Kreimer lives on the third floor of a small building, right on the corner.
From the windows of his studio come the noise of both the pavement and the train tracks. A desk with a laptop, a chair for him, and a sofa for guests. It is someone who is 80 years old and will turn 80 in October., who has no problem sharing his experiences. And boy does it have them.
“A friend in London had the drafts: I had two typed copies, but I had lost them,” she says of the first of the news, From nowhere.
“My friend sent it to me and during the pandemic I spent it as it was. I didn’t correct anything. It came out as a fanzine in Alcohol and photocopies, an editorial by Patricia Pietrafesa,” he says of the local punk pioneer.
“At Planeta they liked it,” he continues, “and they told me: ‘It’s too small for a book, don’t you have another one?’ ‘Yes, I have another one that is in draft, which is the next one, which is when I went to live in Buzios,’ ”she says of the new which gives the book its title. “I made it the other summer, also respecting my diaries.”
Autobiographically writtenwith influences from authors such as Henry Miller, From nowhere It takes place in 1976, when an Argentinian who arrived in London before the Coup notices that something new is happening in England.
In fact, a year later, Kreimer offered his publishing agent Ute Körne Nowhere, but was rejected. Instead, the Bruguera publishing house asked him for a portrait of the Great New Thing. He had a month until it was in bookstores for Christmas 1977.
That was Punk, young death, a first-hand account that continues to be republished, written by a thirty-something who by then was already part of the old guard, and yet was part of the scene as a journalist, audience and friend of cursed figures. A cultural book/artifact where not even the typos were retouched in his reprints: “It was deliberate,” acknowledges Kreimer, who decades later would make Beyond good and punk (2017), a book of talks with the greatest Argentine figure on the scene: Pil Trafa. The stories of young death and Nowhere are intertwined in more than one character, moment and location.
In his early twenties, Kreimer had been a photojournalist in a golden age of the genre, without algorithms that estimated reading times. Before, he had started as a salesman and then assistant to Pirí Lugones at the Jorge Álvarez Publishing House. Álvarez was one of the founders of the Argentine rock label Mandioca: the back cover text of the Manal trio’s debut is by Kreimer. The first magazine she joined the staff of was one aimed at women, Claudia, where she often published under a pseudonym: “My benchmate, Olga Orozco, was seven.” Then, Primera Plana, directed by Tomás Eloy Martínez.
He had access to many foreign publications, not to mention those he requested from the Lincoln Library of the United States Embassy. In 1968, Kreimer wrote the today incunabulum Beatles & Co, one of the first books in Spanish about the group.
Guillermo Schavelzon, founder of Galerna, proposed that he be a partner in the publishing house given the amount of copyright he was owed for that work. In 1970, Galerna published the first book about Argentine rock, Hold on!!! Kreimer had traveled along both coasts of the United States and, even if he had a late arrival to horse racing in 1972, he felt that there was something more to life than the office day at the publishing house.
After one of those journeys, he sold his share in Galerna. His departure from the country for less happy purposes was due to Kive Staiff, who was his direct boss at the newspaper La Opinión: “he tells me: ‘I’m going to fire you, you are going to accept and with the compensation you are going to go to Barcelona. There are friends of yours who collaborate in the newspaper who are dying, and you are going to die for appearing in the notebooks.’” They were Triple A times.
At that time, someone with a journalist’s card could travel on Aerolíneas Argentinas for half the price. He left the country in December 1975. Shortly after, the stories gathered in Nowhere begin, where reality and imagination are artisanally mixed. In England he worked as a washer or carpenter, but also as a journalist. He met punk factotums and its aesthetics such as Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, but also to the writer and artist John Berger.
By 1979, his life took another turn. She left behind scenes, friends, girlfriends, just a few editorial contacts (ostensibly, He would go on to earn a living as a translator for Alianzasometimes retouching the stories when they bored him) and settled in Buzios.
Informality reigned and hippies could coexist with foreign or internal exiles, and people simply without a direction home; looking for a kind of lost paradise that never ended manifesting itself. Sex was a kind of free tap until a disease that no one fully understood began to appear.
“I found it interesting to show the character who couldn’t find his place in the world,” explains Kreimer about his alter-ego. Back in Buenos Aires, launched the magazine Oneself. A publication with previously unpublished themes: organic food, yoga, meditation, alternative medicines. That lasted until 1994.
I found it interesting to show the character who couldn’t find his place in the world.
He directed the popular collection For Beginners, occasionally writing some installments, which reached 132 titles. Throughout his life there are more books of prose, of reflections; two children, a brief marriage represented in his stories about Buzios, and a companion, Graciela (“a wonderful life of love”), who died a few years ago. In addition to other events that led him to rethink everything, such as suffering two episodes of sudden death. Stent, pacemaker and yoga involved, keep going.
“I’m finishing a new book, Why do we come to Earth?. I am aware of what is called collapse or extinction, not because it is apocalyptic; It’s not like tomorrow or the next day, but we are going directly to that place. The Earth, Pachamama, Gaia, is a living being: we are just bacteria that surround this planet.”
The Earth is a living being: we are just bacteria that surround this planet.
He says that people are surprised how austere their existence is. Beyond the real estate level of Belgrano R, its only luxury is prepaid.
He has the minimum retirement, to which he adds royalties, talks, his interdisciplinary program Journeys to Beingand more routine tasks such as preparing book reading reports in English and French for the Spanish market to judge whether or not they are worth translating: “Out of ten, I say yes to two.”
Pogo in London, windsurfing in Buzios, cycling in Buenos Aires: Is there a constant in that transit? “They have something in common: the ego runs. You leave your mind, you enter to live and the emotion is much stronger than what you can think.”
To conclude, a self-definition: “In some way, I am a visionary, but not because I see the future, but because I see the present. “I’m not afraid to see what’s happening.”