Real Life Rock Top 10: July 1, 2025

SPECIAL BEING AND NOTHINGNESS EDITION! The obvious and the unsolvable in Buenos Aires, an abyss opens up in the Russian Civil War, and more literary crimes

1 & 2 A kiosk on Calle Gurruchaga, Palermo Soho, Buenos Aires (June 25) & J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop (Verso).

Part of an ad for shoes that look like art pieces or anyway artwear, above four faces, two of them covered by a pasted-over How-to-Live homily (credited to Notes to Strangers, they appear all over the city, changing day by day), seemingly and absurdly as part of a poster marking Día del Trabajador Rural. I walked by two or three times a day for a week and every time my eye was drawn to this inadvertent collage-of-different-hands. The bald man with a two-way beard trying to look like a prophet or a judge, the Cyndi Lauper–like woman sticking her tongue out at life—it was like the barest one-dimensional remnant of the Cabaret Voltaire, artists dancing on a stage in Zurich in 1916 in defiance of the war devouring the rest of Europe. Somehow there was more of what was once called the avant-garde on this little hoarding than in Hoberman’s vast parade of local saints who grow more redundant and less interesting by the page.

Who are these people on the kiosk, or who were they? And what’s happening with the two faces that were there once but now you can’t see? I tried to peel away the Note to Strangers but it wouldn’t come off.