Mentira es Verdad

Who you calling crazy?

November 16, 2005
Piso Compartido – San Telmo, Buenos Aires

The Burro and I both agree that next to Tijuana, Buenos Aires has to be the place to see Manu Chao in concert. It’s been a dream of mine ever since I first came across Manu (who was it that introduced me...?) to see him live in concert. Finally Radio Bemba came to Argentina and beneath the full moon rising, we jumped up and down, sweated our asses off and sang and danced and lived the night away.

What really made the show espectacular was the collaboration with Radio Colifata. I hand you over to Time Out for their description of this Crazy Radio.

“From Rush Limbaugh through Howard Stern to Dave Lee ‘Hairy Conrflake’ Travis, radio has always attracted its fair quota of misfits and eccentrics. But BA’s Radio La Colifata (literally, ‘crazy radio’) goes several steps beyond. It claims to be the first radio station in the world run entirely by residents and outpatients at a hospital for the clinically insane….

… Much of the appeal of La Colifata stems from its unpredictability; it has an anarchistic style that owes nothing to the calculated goonery of commercial ‘zoo’ radio. The only regular slot in the Saturday broadcast is that in which listeners’ letters and emails are read out on air. After that anything can happen – a snatch of Willie Dixon courtesy of patient and bluesman Hugo Blues; a rant about the gruesome condition of the hospital’s bathrooms; or perhaps a Chomskyan diatribe on US foreign policy….

… Comments on local and international politicians are almost always defamatory – who’s going to sue? – and usually astute. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone; “I am a neurotic schizophrenic psychopath but I’m not stupid’ is the catchphrase of legendary presenter Garces, also known as the Emperoro of Paranoia. Proof that the musings of the patients are usually no more eccentric than, say, your average cab driver, [which of course I find amusing as I have no idea who an average cab driver is] comes in the form of the La Colifata ‘mock elections’. These ballots are organized in the hospital the week before each Argentinean presidential election, with the patients debating on and then voting for the candidates of their choice. The result usually makes the front pages of the mainstream press. The ‘crazy election’ has accurately prefigured the ‘sane’ vote in the last four presidential contests, a fact from which any number of conclusions can and have been drawn.”

Check them out online at www.lacolifata.org