That’s Christian Capiozzo on drums, Mecco Guidi on Hammond organ, and Daniele Santimone on Guitar. You just know you’re going to get quality stuff when three Irishmen get together like that.
That’s Toni Lindgren + Northsoul, whoever that is. She (they) seem to have embraced the current aesthetic and assembled a fine little cult on social media and whatnot. Semi-mucho views on YouTube. Got a webpage, too. Girl guitar players still rate some extra man-bites-dog attention if they’re any good. That’s her brother mandolizing nicely with her. The bass player doesn’t get in the way, a rarity in a world where bass players have strapped an extra treble string on their electric planks to play in the wrong register even more. God, I like kids doing things. Especially happy kids doing happy things. Happy young people, while not hunted to extinction yet, are on the endangered species list, surely.
I suppose I could inform the public about original version of this song. That would be bringing coals to Newcastle, though. There’s a reason why random kids would cover it. Everyone knows the words. It’s a karaoke hardy perennial. I gather it’s on the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack, along with an assortment of other songs that don’t have much to do with each other.
If you’re currently old and in the way, you’ll remember the original assault Come and Get Your Love made on the Top 40, and wonder why the kids didn’t do a rain dance before they started playing:
Lolly Vegas made the world incrementally, intergenerationally happier. How many people can claim that?
Well, I’ve been blabbing about the Paseo Montejo over and over. I suppose I should show you what it’s like. This poses problems. It’s easy to characterize it simply as a big boulevard that runs north and south in the middle of Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, because it is. It’s also all kinds of other things, because Mexico. You’re bound to see most anything while walking down the Paseo, and probably will. Something unpleasant is pretty rare, but other than that, the bets are off. Let’s see if I can demonstrate what I mean.
Here’s what it looks like in general, from a pedestrian’s point of view:
There’s another sidewalk just like this on the other side of the street. There’s a median strip in the middle, too, filled with flowers and trees and people trying to cross without becoming pavement pizza. It’s a busy street.
There are bike lanes on both sides of the street, too. In the US, bike lanes are an urban ornament. Everyone votes for politicians who want bike lanes, who get them installed, and then everyone votes with their ass in their Chevy Tahoes to avoid them. It’s not virtue signalling in Merida. People really do bike in these lanes, and at the drop of a hat, the city closes down half the Paseo, and lets people ride on that all day, too.
The bottom (southern) end of the Paseo is called the Remate. It’s lorded over by a statue of the Montejo boys.
The Montejos were a father/son team. They were both named Fransisco, and there was a cousin named Fransisco hanging around confusing things further. Fransisco the younger was nicknamed el Mozo, which means “the younger.” Apparently conquistadors weren’t staying up late thinking up nicknames back then.
El Mozo is pointing north, and if you follow his directions for about forty minutes, you’ll be at the Port of Progreso on the Gulf of Mexico. That’s where his dad scurried, after the Mayans kicked his ass on the first go-round. Dad figured the Aztec-conquerin’ playbook would work in the Yucatan. He discovered that even the Aztecs thought better than to FAFO down there. El Mozo had better luck when he came back later, and he founded Merida on top of the mostly abandoned Mayan city of T’Ho’. It’s unclear why the city was abandoned. I suspect that the Maya ran out of apostrophes, and went back to the jungle to look for more.
Horse-drawn carriages, decorated with lights and flowers, are a popular thing on the Paseo. I didn’t notice all that many gringo tourists riding on them. Mostly Mexican families out for a lark. The neon sign on the right is the famous Cafe Impala. It’s been in that spot since 1958. If you’re wondering how it got its name, you won’t have to wonder long. There’s half a Chevy Impala sticking out of the wall over the awning.
People mostly sit outside in the evening at the Impala. There’s a legion of feral but tame cats that sit under the tables and perform janitorial duties. They’re completely unafraid of the diners, but it’s nearly impossible to touch one of them. Why do cats know exactly how long your arm is, plus three inches, but the arm’s owners don’t? It’s a dark and bloody mystery.
When you’re done eating at the Impala, you can wander up the street to the Dulceria and Sorbeteria Colon. It’s been thrumming with customers since 1907:
The cats either don’t like commuting this far up the Paseo, or don’t like ice cream, so you’ll have to talk to your family instead of making psss psss noises.
The street is lined with colonial mansions like this one. This was about the richest street in the world around the turn of the twentieth century. The Yucatan was home to henequen plantations. Henequen fibers made the best rope in the world, so the city got rich, and people lived like emperors in big mansions like this one. Then plastic rope turned the place into a ghost town. The mansions are mostly turned into banks, event halls, restaurants, upscale hotels, and…
Honestly, America is an infection at this point, not a country. The last thing Anywhere Mexico needs is an Eightbucks Coffee house. We could walk to four superb little cafes and coffee shops from our house to get cold press ambrosia for less money, and we did. But it was kind of amusing to walk by this place, and the mission-style McDonald’s and other anglo franchise places. Humorous like watching a four alarm fire in a law office, I mean.
Some of the conquistadors have fallen on hard times:
There’s still a fair bit of rubble in Merida. The city is about halfway to restoring all the old abandoned colonial buildings into fashionable homes, shops, and restaurants. The Montejo Palace Hotel wasn’t colonial. It was some sort of midcentury concrete monstrosity. The address was valuable, though, and they are building/rebuilding a ten story something on this lot. Most of the city is only one or two stories high, and it’s kind of a shame to see towers going in.
Across the street, there’s a new, swanky hotel called El Conquistador. When I said that you’re bound to see most anything while strolling the Paseo Montejo, I wasn’t kidding. Get a load of this new batch of conquistadors:
Aren’t you a little short for a storm trooper takes on a whole new meaning in Merida, where the centers on the high school basketball teams are 5′-7′, or would be, if anyone played basketball here, which they don’t. I’m pretty sure I could have bopped all three of these fellows on the top of the head and gotten away with it. My wife said she figured it was a million to one against seeing Darth Vader on the Paseo Montejo.
I told her to never tell me the odds when I’m walking down the Paseo Montejo.
We got mugged in Mérida. Kinda. Sorta. I guess I better explain.
Mérida is the capital of Yucatan state, in the southeastern portion of Mexico. Mérida is more or less the whole state when you get right down to it. There are outlying towns, but nearly everyone in the state lives in or just outside the capital. There’s a couple of million people in the state, and half of them live in Mérida.
There is, for all intents and purposes (or all intensive purposes if you went to public school), no crime in Mérida. I have a lot of trouble explaining that to our friends and family. I live in Maine, where there is essentially no crime compared to the rest of the US, unless you count red hot dogs. There’s even less crime in Mérida than in Maine. We walked everywhere after dark, and never even saw anyone hinky looking. Hell, in a month, I was only panhandled twice, both times by the same guy outside the church in Santa Ana. I can’t walk down the street in Augusta Maine and say the same thing. He told me in sign language (curl fingers, point thumb towards mouth) that he just wanted to get drunk, so I gave him some pesos. One has to encourage transparency wherever you find it.
However, you can get importuned in Mérida, that’s for sure. Many (most) businesses have a tout out front. Sometimes they’re just waiters suffering from empty tables, so they go fishing on the sidewalk. Other times, they’re selected solely for their importuning skills. There’s a liquor store (a rarity) on a busy corner on the Corredor Gastronomico, that hires one Miss America (Mexico is in America, people) after another to stand outside their door and treat male passersby to a sharp elbow in their ribs from their dates as you pass by. They also offer two free shots of mezcal to the unwary, to get your liver throbbing from the inside, too.
The kind of tout you get depends on where you wander. Around the main central square (zocalo), poaching tourists is handled by the big game hunters. If you look like you’re from out of town, there’s no bag limit. They buttonhole you to get you to buy a Jipijapa (Panama Hat) if you’re not careful. Until you learn how to feign total ignorance of the English language, you’re going to be treated to tales of children making these hats in caves with their nimble fingers. I think you’re supposed to be consumed with pity and overpay for a straw hat instead of asking where the cave is, so you could go rescue them.
The rest of the stores around the square are a charming but occasionally exhausting gauntlet of amiable come-ons for street food, guayabera shirts, and various Mayan tchotchkes. Everyone is friendly about it, so you don’t wish they’d go shovel brimstone or anything. No necesito, gracias, no tenemos hambre, and Ich spreche kein Englisch are the only defense you need. No one scowls at you if they fail to land you on their boat of commerce, they just move on to the next pedestrian. With the right frame of mind (three cervezas), you can convince yourself that all that attention is tantamount to being popular.
So a mugging didn’t seem possible, never mind likely, when we went out into the (relative) cool of the evening and headed the half a block to the Paseo Montejo, the big boulevard that runs north from the center of the city. That’s where we got grabbed.
The Centro Cultural Fernando Castro Pacheco was on the corner. It’s a handsome colonial building, perfectly maintained. It was always shut up tight when we walked by. Not that night. It was lit up like a drunkard’s nose, a superb two-man band was playing on the veranda, and three women were scouring the sidewalk out front to waylay strangers. And no one is stranger than me, so they took me in hand. The slipstream of their Spanish befuddled me, of course. After a three or four thousand word assault, they paused to take a breath, and I begged them, “Mas despacio, for favor.” So they said the same thing to us with the record player set on 33 instead of 78, and we got the gist. It’s wonderful inside. An art exhibit. Music. Of course, like nearly everything else in town, it was free. Why not go in?
So we did. The rooms were beautiful. The abstract art wasn’t bad, either, even though I usually rank the style with dental cleaning and second grade art class. I spent most of my time looking at the other people, and the pasta floors.
They had some landscapes I rather liked, and would have stolen if my parents hadn’t ruined me for life by sending me to Catholic School. I read the blurb on the wall about Fernando. He was a painter, engraver, illustrator, and sculptor. A Mexican Giacometti, without all the swearing. He was lumped in with Diego Rivera because he painted on a grand scale a lot, but they don’t really have a lot in common. He sounded like a nice fellow, which is a rarity in the art world.
We eventually escaped past the deluge of friendliness outside the door, and wandered downtown, feigning deafness and a Germanic bearing like pros to avoid any Jipijapa assaults. We ended up outside the governor’s palace, the home of a couple of acres of Fernando’s work. I assumed that like most Mexican painters I have known, he was getting paid by the square foot, or maybe the gallon. There were three very formidable policemen standing outside the palace, blocking the doorway and looking like they hadn’t heard a good joke in years. One of them took one look at my gringo face, and scared me a little when he started talking to me:
It’s wonderful inside. An art exhibit. Music. Of course, like nearly everything else in town, it was free. Why not go in?
Why not, indeed? I was willing to speak to the governor if it was required, but I imagine he had some other pressing affairs, or a haircut appointment or something, that precluded getting my sage counsel. And they put those rope thingies in front of the balconies to keep me from making any speeches to dazzle the populace. I had to settle for a short walk to the Corredor Gastronomico, an elbow in the ribs, and dinner with my inamorata.
I hope they can muddle through without my advice.
We saw a river of souls. It flowed into the Parque San Juan in Mérida, Mexico through a stone gate barely removed from the middle ages.
I’ve never been in a crowd like that. It pulsed and vibrated and bellowed in and out. Roared and whispered. It processed us, nothing short of that, from one end to the other. We lost ourselves in it. Not in the mundane way that term is used. We were each a single cell in a new creature, buoyed on a tide of remembrance, leavened with optimism for the future, but somehow still a complete surrender to the here and now. Dancing on a billion graves, and billions more to come. Hell, our own.
Halloween? Halloween in the United States is a joke, a sad joke. It’s nothing but Stephen King pablum regurgitated into a sugar bowl, then consumed over and over like a holiday for house flies. It’s trivial. The Day of the Dead is joyous and silly and dead serious all at the same time. It means something, but the meaning doesn’t run roughshod over the simple enjoyment of it, or vice versa. It brooks neither sanctimony nor frivolity. It stares death right in its painted skull face, real death, Mesoamerican death delivered roundhouse, over and over, muerte doled out on the scale of a scythe in a field, while dancing in looping circles around it. Unafraid, not unaware.
And so trick or treaters are transformed into a river of souls, marching in no kind of step to music made fresh coming from all points of the compass. The crowd roars and shows their fealty with iPhone fascist salutes. The marching children hold candles that flicker inside little plastic shields, mimicking the lives they represent, protected only barely from being snuffed out by the motion of passing through this world. They are the dear departed, babies snatched from their mothers before they’re ready for their first breath, children boiling with fevers, mothers struggling to produce their ration of life, fathers who put one foot wrong on a scaffold just once in their lives.
The Jesuits told the Mayans that their soul is immortal. It cannot be taken and it cannot be given away. The Maya scratched their heads and said heavenly immortality is a poor substitute for walking the earth in the shadows forever. They nodded and smiled in churches built on the rubble of their temples, because it was close enough to suit them. Still they build altars that would make a bushido blush to greet the shades of their dear departed. The river of souls rolls on.
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