Hallowe’en? That’s amateur hour. Stephen King stuff. I’m talkin’ serious business. The Hanal Pixan is happening in Merida, and it truly is a happening.
Hanal Pixan is different from the Day of the Dead celebrations in other parts of Mexico. It’s Mayan. It translates roughly to “food of the souls,” or maybe “meal for the dead.” Unlike Hallowe’en, it lasts for three days, from October 31st to November 2nd. The first day is in honor of angelitos, i.e.: children who died. November 1st is for adults who bought the farm. November 2nd is for families to visit cemeteries to clean and decorate graves. They’re all excuses for fiestas and parades.
It’s getting about as out of hand as Hallowe’en in the US. They’ve had big ofrendas (altars) set up all over town for days now, and the celebrations have jumped the gun already.
To someone raised Catholic, it seems pretty familiar. Hallowe’en was cadge-candy eve. November 1st was All Saints Day, when you prayed for people who didn’t need it, because they were gorging on manna in heaven already. If Heaven was the mafia, they were the capo regimes. November 2nd was All Souls Day, when you were supposed to pray for people who missed their connecting flight to Heaven, and were stuck in Purgatory. Unbaptized infants would be included in that, so it’s basically angelitos, plus other pious but heathen folks the pope could stand.
I came at it from the Irish angle. I think we were supposed to carve rutabagas, not pumpkins, because pumpkins in Ireland were scarcer than good government in Boston. Anyway, the Druids or whatever heathens the monks found in Hibernia to convert (or else) adopted the Catholic rites. The priests looked the other way and allowed most of the traditional pagan hijinks to go on, but called them something else. Hanan Pixan sounds just like it to my ear. Yeah, padre, we’re [cough cough] Catholics now! We’re going to paint skulls on our faces and march down the street and eat Death Bread to, you know, honor the saints or something. Whatever you got.
So the legions of Las Catrinas will march and dance, and we’ll watch them do it.
And we’ll be home in time for All Saints Day, which ain’t half bad, either. They don’t have Guinness in Mexico, but I’ve got some in my fridge back home.
Follow the lead, it is no wonder, I seem to be so high
Living my dreams the way I ought to
As the days go rolling by
You can’t keep us out of the Dzalbay. They can try as hard as they might, but a Victoria beer is about $1.75, and there’s never a cover. I’ll run out of liver before I run out of pesos.
Swinga Tu Madre was playing at the Dzalbay last night. They’ve added another quite capable guitarist to the crew who’s not visible in the video. The violin player puts down his fiddle when he gets weary of trying to saw all the way through it, picks up a trumpet, and teases some more Gypsy Jazz out of that. We geeked out a bit when they played this one:
They represented enough of a lifelong pseudo-ambition for my wife and I to call it a win. We’ve always wanted to walk to the local bistro and hear Gypsy Jazz. Of course we had hifalutin’ ideas about the where and when. We had visions of Paris and haughty waiters ignoring you while anorexic girls smoke greasy unfiltered cigarettes and drink wine they didn’t buy, accompanied by the dudes who did. That’s the beauty of being unable to do much of anything: You never have to settle for second-best of anything, because you can’t even hope to sniff third best. A Rolex and a Timex cost the same if you have no money.
So this was our ultimate flight of fancy for Gypsy Jazz in a bistro:
Not gonna happen. But we were just aimlessly wandering the streets of Merida last night. It was in the low eighties, and it was clear enough to see the sickle moon for the first time in weeks. I see the moon, and the moon sees me. The streets were quieter than a weekend, although the Day of the Dead events pockmark the city with jolly and morbid goings-on. It’s perfectly safe to walk anywhere around here after dark, whether people with skulls painted on their face are abroad in the land or not. The only danger is that you can’t remember the difference between buenas tardes and buenas noches fast enough when confronted with a friendly stranger. Just when you’re screwing up the courage to give it a go, they say, “Hola,” and your house of Spanish flash cards comes tumbling down anyway.
Entirely by serendipity, the Dzalbay loomed in front of us, the light slanting out into the street to compete with the alternating red and green dazzle of the stoplight. Like almost any event of any kind in Merida, Yucatan, it cost nothing to get in. It was a happy accident that a Gypsy Jazz outfit, Swinga Tu Madre (ya, believe me, I know) was performing.
It wasn’t paradise. But it was paradise’s waiting room, surely.
Dear lord, that’s a smoove groove. The smoovest, I think. Eric Burdon is fun, but borderline superfluous to the proceedings. The backup band, War, eventually thought so too, and they had eleventy hits in the seventies after they left Eric out on the curb. Audiences generally figure that the band is just the singer, with some other mostly anonymous guys standing behind him. The other guys always resent that, but then again, if they could stand out front, they would. I’ve had an arena-rock caliber singer fronting a band I was in for a short while. We all loathed him, but he delivered the mail, so we put up with it. For a while, anyway. I’m not lumping Eric in with him. Eric might be a decent human being. How would I know?
Watch the video. We’ll skip right over the guitar player’s hot pants, if you don’t mind. Let’s talk about Harold Brown on the drums. I owe him something. I’ll pay it now, in the humble scrip of my attention. I wanted to play the drums when I was a kid, but the school wouldn’t let me. They handed me a trombone instead, which everyone knows is plumbing, not music. When I got older I could do as I pleased, and I got a set of drums and set myself to learn. I learned to mimic this little drag beat from Harold, and from this song. It was already an oldie but goodie by the time I cannibalized it, but it’s a hardy perennial in the groove department.
When you hear a groove like this, you could easily miss something like the little flourish Harold is using to drive the beat along. You’d just enjoy the whole thing, and find yourself energized to hear it, maybe want to get up and dance without knowing why. We called it the drag beat. I’m not sure if it has some official name. It’s more of a knack than something you practice, like rolling your R’s when you speak Spanish. With your left hand (if you’re right-handed), you loosen your grip, and sort of skim or drag the tip of the stick across the snare drum head. It bounces twice, quietly, like a trill, and then you strike the snare fully on the 2nd and 4th beats that follow the drag. The soft drag is the equivalent of two grace notes, if you know what that is.
Anyway, if you see it done, you have a “light dawns over marble head” moment, and get it going pretty easily. If you’re simply listening to a record to learn it, it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. I haven’t played the the drums in twenty years, but I bet I could do it right now, and play the little turnaround that Harold plays, too. You’d think I really know what I was doing, even though I didn’t then, and certainly don’t now. It’s like greeting someone in a foreign language with the correct accent. They start blabbing at you, and you have to hold up your palm and tell them you’re fresh out of ammo after shooting “Hello, how are you?” at them.
So what’s this all have to do with anything? Don’t worry, my disordered mind will sew it all together like Frankenstein’s monster, put my abbie normal brain in it, and put the electrodes on the neck bolts to animate the essay, I promise.
The video is a live performance from a German television show, I’m pretty sure. They’re all really playing their regular instruments and singing. If you doubt that, watch at 1:45 as the bass player reaches over with his right hand to turn his tuning peg a little. There were no electronic tuners back then, so you had to tune up your instrument, and match the other instruments, solely by ear. I’m sure I still have an A 440 tuning fork hanging around someplace to commemorate the process. I’ll bet the majority of the currently most famous musicians in the world couldn’t do it.
The point is, that teevee show was a stand-in for seeing people make music right in front of you. No gimmicks, no lipsynching, no auto tune, no recorded backing tracks. Even seeing bands like War live couldn’t compete with the teevee production, because they were popular and you’d look at them from row Double Z in an arena, a flea circus on a distant stage with more equipment than NASA needed to reach low Earth orbit. Performing live, up close, in a small setting like the video, is like tightrope walking. It’s immensely interesting to see people perform live like that. It lends an additional air of excitement to the musical enjoyment, because they might fail. Arena performances and recordings can never come close to it anymore. Milli Vanilli was probably less canned than Taylor Swift is.
So here it comes: My wife and I went to the Dzalbay Cantina here in Merida Centro last night. Went there with our friends last week, too.
It’s a really cool place. It’s been a cantina on the same corner for 80 years or so. A cantina in Mexico is like The Local in Ireland. There’s always one on the esquina and it serves as a convivial meeting spot for the neighborhood. Over the years, the Dzalbay morphed from a straight-up saloon-door bucket of blood into a live music venue. Mostly jazz and blues. I loved it, and got curious about it. Dzalbay?
It’s the Spanish approximation of two words in Mayan. Tsâal and bay.
âDzalbayâ roughly translates to âwhat is poured/spilledâ, âthe poured oneâ, or sometimes poetically, âsomething that flows or is spilled.â
So I went to the Spill the Wine cantina, and I took that girl, and we heard good musicians make wonderful music for us on the tightrope of a stage, with no electronic net. I simply held up my fingers to replenish our supply of cerveza succor when we ran low, and we paid with pesos like Monopoly money.
We zigzagged home, hand in hand in the moonlight, Venus and Mars, and I dreamed I was in a Hollywood movie. With a drag beat soundtrack.
Well, some people are up to no good. But baby, I’m as real as real can get. I’m not secretly staying at the Villages in a hot tub with fourteen retirees with skin like Satchel Paige’s mitt. I’m in Mejico, and I’ll show you what it’s like where I’m at, because that’s where it’s at. Breakin’ hearts just ain’t my game.
We cadged an AirBnB casa in the Zona Paseo Montejo. It’s an unofficial barrio in Centro. Centro is where the action is. The center of Centro is the Zocalo, the big square and park surrounded by government buildings, cathedrals, and clip joints for tourists. Most tourists aren’t from the USA, though. People come from other parts of Mexico, mostly. Canadians are thicker on the ground than USians. There are some Germans, who you can immediately identify by their perfect English. You can see Mennonites wandering around here and there. One is treated very occasionally to an Oriental wearing two sneeze masks, a bucket hat, sunglasses like welding goggles, and a unitard under their other clothes that covers every inch of their skin but their fingers. They take pictures of gas fittings and trash bins and stop signs and don’t bother anyone, and no one bothers them back. La gente are pretty mellow here, all in all.
The Zona Paseo Montejo is north of the Zocalo. The Paseo Montejo is a big, fancy boulevard that starts in what I think is Santa Ana neighborhood, north of the Zocalo, and runs due north for quite a bit. We’re about half a block off the Paseo, halfway up its first leg. We can walk damn near anywhere we want to go from here, and we do.
Last minute arrangements on AirBnB can result in slim pickings. We got lucky, I guess. We ended up spending slightly above regular money to get a very above average place in a superb spot. It’s the off-season. It’s at least 90 to 100 degrees every day, winter and summer, but this time of year is the rainy season. Hurricanes are named after a Mayan god, so do the math about what kind of rain they get. The days start out perfectly clear, rain clouds form while you wait, and then drop bathtubs of water on your head whether you need a bath or not, probably because you do, as the humidity is 90, too. Sane people stay in during the late afternoon when the odds are bad, and go out early in the AM and after sundown, avoid the puddles, and wonder what the fuss is.
I’m too lazy to look up the exact numbers, but we rented this place for a month for around $2,800. Then we got to identify the only people in Mexico who pay taxes. Hint: it’s not Mexicans. Pile on various fees to the tax, and you end up paying around $3,500. Now mind you, much cheaper accommodations are available around here. There’s fairly posh (by Ramada Inn standards) hotels on the Paseo that only charge about $50 a night. On the next corner on our block, there’s a hotel that charges $30 a night. You might expect Salvation Army accommodations for that, but it looks about fourteen times better than any American Motel 6 that charges more, I’m sure. The lobby has marble floors, and the neatly dressed concierge is becoming used to us walking by, and waves. No one waves anything but a gun at you at a Motel 6.
We’re staying a while, so we need a house, not a hotel room. Here’s what you get for around $100 a night:
Step inside, and you’re in the sala, I guess, or the living room, if you’re norteamericano.
I don’t like vertical photos, but there’s no other way to do it. I whack my head on everything outdoors in this town — telephone wires, street signs, tree limbs, doorframes in cantinas — but the ceilings in these colonial houses are 20 feet high. The owners have kept this place mostly old skool, with buttsprung fauteuils instead of sofas to wallow in, but we like it fine. Those are pasta floors. They’re similar to encaustic tile in Europe. Like baked concrete, with the patterns molded right into them, instead of just applied. They’re always cool under your feet, and exuberant to look at.
This room has urns. I have no idea who might be in them, and don’t want to find out. My wife, who could break things while straitjacketed and sleeping, won’t go within ten feet of them. I guess we’re just not urn people. The clock is a hoot. It’s a replica of sculptures I’m very familiar with. They’re someone’s rough approximation of Michelangelo’s reclining statues of Day and Night in a Medici tomb in Florence, Italy. Michelangelo got bored, like he used to, or the check didn’t clear or something, so the face of Night was never really finished. Whoever made the clock decided to take it up a notch, and finish it for him. So we have a clock that doesn’t tell time, with Day and Tom Selleck reclining on it. Which is nice.
Right off the sala is the master bedroom. If fronts the street, too, which can be a problem in some parts of the city. Here, the street is nearly silent after about 10 PM, even though we’re about a half a block from pandemonium, so it’s fine.
There’s an ensuite bathroom off to the right. Like all the interior rooms, there are skylights instead of windows, because you’d have to knock down your neighbor’s house to get a window in, and they’re somewhat unreasonable in this regard. That’s a typical shower. You step in, and the only curtain is a tempered glass partition. Both bathrooms are all sandstone, marble, and tile.
There’s another bedroom off the dining room, with two beds in it, a dressing room, and its own full bath, tricked out like that last one.
Here’s the dining room. Seats eight, easy. There are real, good paintings all over this house, including that portrait. That’s rare. Most other local AirBnBs have nasty modern art blotches and shrines to Frida Kahlo’s unibrow and girlstache.
The kitchen is Italian for some reason. There are no Italians in Merida that I’ve observed. There’s a garrafon of drinking water on the counter. The water for the house is supposedly drinkable. Then again, I’m supposedly handsome. Everyone drinks water from a bottle. The wells are OK, but no one trusts the pipes.
Yeah, that’s a big teevee on the wall on the right. There’s Roku teevees in both bedrooms, the kitchen, and out on the patio. I’d say they were expecting (north) Americans with a setup like that, but the screens were set up in Spanish, and French, so I guess not. The only hard evidence we found that they were expecting Americans was this drawer in the bathroom:
I take no offense about being suspected of being full of mierda. After all, if I ever go to Ireland, the Blarney Stone will kiss me, not the other way around. You know, to recharge it.
I haven’t read the Divine Comedy since I was a kid. That’s why I felt I needed to brush up on it before I improved it some. Don’t laugh. Dante was always cheating off me in Math class, although he was a teacher’s pet in Latin. So I feel like if anyone’s going to fix it, I should.
I guess first we should go over the original circles of Hell, in case you’ve forgotten where your iPhone handbasket travel agent, Steve Jobs, is sending you eventually. Yeah, I’ve seen what you’re scrolling through over your shoulder at the airport. Tsk. Tsk.
But I don’t judge, lest I be judged. And hooboy, I’d rather face the Doges in Venice than any angels who’ve heard what I’ve been muttering to myself lately. So let’s visit the nether regions together, and see how we’re going to fare, if Dante, revised, is to be believed.
Limbo:
No, no. Harry Belafonte is not involved, and no funky dancing, although the bar will still be set pretty low, as they say. There are no umbrellas in the drinks. The first circle of Hell is like the airport lounge when you’re snowed in. You’re not punished exactly, but your flight’s delayed indefinitely, and you have to hang around with allegedly virtuous people who don’t have their Christian Airlines boarding pass. Believe me, though, no matter how confusing the similarity in names might be, Christian Airlines has nothing to do with Spirit Airlines:
That’s not limbo. That’s demonic possession. We’ll explore that another time.
Lust:
The second circle treats its denizens to an unrelenting wind that blows them to and fro. It’s a fitting punishment for anyone who is swept away by excessive sexual desire. I guess the modern version of this would be living in a trailer park with a girl you knocked up when you had your beer goggles on. You’re waiting for God to send a retributive tornado to settle your hash, which by the way came out of a can, and is burning on the little stove you got in your single-wide.
Gluttony:
This is where cable TV chefs end up, I guess. The original description of eternal life in the third circle is lying in filthy, freezing slush while being pelted with icy rain and hail. Occasionally, the neighbor’s vicious dog (Cerberus) tears at your flesh. Since this is an exact rundown of what it’s like to live in western Maine, except the part about getting enough to eat in the first place, there’s no need to update it. Let’s move on.
Greed:
If you’ve been hoarding wealth, or raiding your kid’s piggy bank to go to the racetrack, this will be your zip code, forevermore. Your punishment is rolling heavy weights against one another until the end of time, accompanied by lots of clashing noises and shouting. So basically you get a job in an Amazon warehouse without a timeclock. Don’t drink out of the golden pop bottles you find lying around.
Wrath:
Remember, it’s not just rage that can plop you in this circle. Silent sulking will punch your ticket as well. I’m a stone cold lock for this circle. I’m an anger polymath, as you well know, so I’m actually able to silently sulk with my left hemisphere while berating counter help at fast food joints with my right hemisphere. The punishment for wrath has two tiers, like airplane tickets. The first class wrathful fight on the surface of the river Styx. If you’re flying sullen coach, you gurgle just beneath the surface, stuck in the mud while the plain angry folks stomp on your heads. Since I qualify both ways, I’ll just wade around, I guess, and get trespassed from Spirit Airlines.
Heresy:
This ring is for denial of the soulâs immortality or other core Christian beliefs, or maybe putting Canadian quarters in the donation basket on Sunday. The punishment is being entombed in flaming graves for eternity. I’m currently in Merida, Mexico, and I’m getting used to the climate. At this point, if I was put in a flaming grave, I’d probably ask Beelzebub if I could go home to get a blanket.
Violence:
This one is way too complicated, Dante. He says there’s three rings inside the seventh ring, but there are only nine rings, total. I told you he was bad at math. We get it, violence is bad. And all kinds of violence is mentioned. According to Dante, if you’re a blaspheming, sodomizing, credit card company executive, you’re going to have a very bad time in the afterlife. It’s not specified exactly what APY qualifies you for eternal damnation, but I think only secured credit card rates qualify you for Limbo, instead.
Fraud:
Oh come on, Dante. There are ten different ditches in the eighth circle. Again with the bad math. The ditches have seducers, flatterers, false prophets, hypocrites, thieves, and several other kinds of politicians in them. I’m not sure if a voter could get in.
Treachery:
Dante was running out of parchment again, so there are four demi-hells in the final circle of Hell. You’ll be frozen in ice for your sins, so I guess you could wave to the gluttons from your ice cube tray. Right in the center is Satan himself, eternally chewing on Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. Wow, who knew stabbing Caesar was even worse than nailing the son of God to a tree?
OK, so there’s rings inside of circles with a flaming excavator for a bunch of unpleasant ditches. We get it. But honestly, with the passage of time, these punishments don’t scare anyone anymore. We need some new circles to keep the average person on the straight and narrow. I can thing of a few. How about a circle with really crummy wifi? Not a complete lack of wifi. That would be paradisaical. Just slow. Remember dial-up? Yeah, you’d be up half the night just downloading half a picture of a naked girl. Barely enough to get you into the Lust Circle.
I can think of some others. You know, maybe one circle could be a tattoo parlor in a leper colony. Stuff like that. But I’m often reminded of a quotation from Mark Twain:
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
In the words of Yogi Berra (maybe), Mark Twain never said half the things he said. But that sure sounds like him. It’s an understandable comment if you’re a bit of a rogue with an active mind. There certainly is plenty of bad weather in Dante’s circles, to go with the inelegant arithmetic. But on the flip side, Brutus and Cassius would probably be interesting company, even while being devoured. Judas Iscariot would have plenty of coins for the jukebox of the damned. It wouldn’t be that awful.
Maybe we should come up with a new circle of hell that’s an unbelievable torment, and a stone cold groove at the same time. I think I’ve found it. Ladies and germs, I give you a Mexican bowling alley, the Eleventeenth, Funnest Circle of Hell:
I don’t think I’ll insult my Mexican friends by observing that Mexicans are not known for being quiet. They all told me they weren’t, so I didn’t have to figure it out on my own. I’ll also observe that where I live, Augusta, Maine, it’s louder than Mexico. The difference is that in Augusta, everyone is trying to be loud in order to annoy other people. They drive absurd pickup trucks and riced-out Civics with tailpipes the size of Dinty Moore cans and race up and down the streets blattering and backfiring. The motorcycles are Harleys with straight pipes and boombox radios playing heavy metal they can’t hear, but I sure do. As one of my teachers used to observe when a loud car drove by, “That’s all the noise they’re likely to make in this world.” Bothering other people is the only true American art form.
A Mexican bowling alley isn’t like that. Don’t get me wrong, it was louder than ten Sherman tanks with bees and fender washers in their hubcaps. But it was a brand of Happy Loud that the United States no longer celebrates. We put ourselves outside of enough beers to get our decks awash, and everyone in our group got a strike that we observed but couldn’t hear over the Mexican disco torch songs, the clatter of the balls, and the delightful incomprehensible Spanish chatter from the other lanes.
So to quote Twain again, for sure, right out of Huckleberry Finn’s mouth:
âAll right, then, Iâll go to hellââand tore it up. It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.â
I’d settle for going to heaven for the dearth of snow to shovel. I’d be just as happy if I was damned to visit the Altabrisa Consolidated Cacophony and Gutterball Emporium forevermore.
There’s quite a stack of calendar pages in my life’s rear view mirror, to stretch a metaphor to its breaking point. However, I’m still young enough to dream, I guess. I may have recently decided what I want to be when I grow up. It may not be what my readers were expecting.
Of course faithful readers of this spaced-out space know I’ve spun the tumblers of occupations many times in my life. Everything from a welder in the desert to a near-arctic handyman, with lots of incomprehensible stops and temperatures in between. Most of those stops were just me trying to get by in a world bent on pooping in my punchbowl pretty regularly. Like a lot of my brethren, you’re forced to choose from a very limited selection of grocery enhancers that’s on offer at any given time. If my wide range of affairs over the years signifies I’m a polymath, I assure you I’m a very dumb one, and doing it with a financial gun to my head at all times.
There was little time for dreaming about how I’d like my life to be ordered. I was just trying to feed my kids without being forced to feed one to the other. I might have been tempted to sell them to the circus, but they closed them all down after the elephants joined a union or something. The option of getting a few bucks by selling our tots for medical experiments dried up pretty quick, too, when the public school system started their free, forced injection and vivisection services and crashed the market.
But even at this late date, I still dream. I think I want to have hot and cold running potato chip faucets in every room. I may want to purchase Saddam Hussein’s used living room furniture. I might want my swimming pool to have more hot babes in it than JFK’s secretarial pool. I may want to be something when I grow up, even though I already have.
So I see a business across the street here in Mexico. It’s outfitted with three, deep, offstreet garage bays in a neighborhood where such a thing is unheard of. On the weekends, the bays are closed with elegant Zorro-style wrought iron gates, not the brutish, inelegant overhead doors we favor in the states. The climate here doesn’t require total enclosure of almost anything. In some of the older houses, many of the main rooms are gathered around an open interior courtyard. Kitchens and dining rooms are literally outdoors, even if they are under a roof. If the temperature dips to 60 degrees in this burgh, they set up shelters for people to warm themselves in. It’s hot here, they’re accustomed to it. No one is crazy except Americans. In Maine, for instance, people pretend they live in San Diego, and live in houses built to suit anywhere but Maine. Their children stand in the snow at school bus stops in January in shorts and a tee-shirt. They’re cold, but they’re cool, as we used to say. Everybody in the Yucatan knows its hot, and lives like it’s hot.
This part of town, Centro, sort of, Zona Paseo Montejo in particular, is kitted out with colonial houses and businesses all touching each other. A parking space on the housing side of the sidewalk is spoken of in hushed tones, accompanied by extra zeroes in the real estate peso department. So the purpose of the office across the street would have been obscure to me even if their sign wasn’t in Spanish. The structure itself was only half the conundrum. All the bays, and every parking spot for fifty yards on the curb out front was adorned with a car I could never afford, even if I was willing to part with both kidneys, instead of just one. There were BMW land yachts and myriad Porsches, Land Rovers, and Jags, plus wonder of wonders, the occasional big, black Suburban, a vehicle almost unheard of around here. The side view mirrors whack pedestrians in the head on both sides of the skinny streets as they drive along.
When the first Mercedes something or other rolled up this morning, I was thoroughly vexed. I decided once and for all that I needed to know what they were doing over there, because I wanted to start doing it as soon as possible. Drug lords? Nah, they’re closed on the weekends. Drug lords are like 7-11s. They’re always open, and their clientele requires daily fixes. Slave traders? Unlikely. You can get your pool cleaned for $2 a week around here. A slave would be superfluous. My thinker-upper went into overdrive, and I began to come up with very wild guesses. Is alchemy a thing after all? I didn’t spot lead ingots being loaded in, or gold bars being loaded out, so ixnay on that. Are they selling crypto bucks they manufacture on old Dells and sell to fools with new Apples? Very unlikely. The cars across the street were elegant, not ridiculous atomic doorstops like the Lambos and Veyrons that are favored by the Ukrainian internet scam set.
What could possibly merit three garage bays full of cars too expensive to lend to Top Gear, because they might scratch them? I had nothing to go on, until I noticed the little, stylized feather in the center of their sign. As it turns out, that’s the traditional way to notify the public about what goes on in a certain type of office in Mexico.
I’ll have to hedge my career bets here. I’m not sure I want to be one, because I have no idea what they do around here. I have to go by surface evidence alone. Then again, one only went by surface evidence when judging Grace Kelly. It could soften her allure if you knew she walked around her palace eating beef jerky and telling servants to pull her finger, then delivering on the threat. It’s an IKEA world all around, and you can be certain that there’s a particle board interior 1/32″ below the sexy wood veneer on most everything and everybody. We’ll stick to what we can see, and worry about the rest later.
So a notary public in Maine is just a tubby girl who works in the credit union and has a stamp and a pen, and will notarize a bill of sale for a battered bass boat you sold on Facebook marketplace. I don’t know exactly how cool it is to be a notary in Mexico, but I’m beginning to think it’s more along these lines:
So, at the risk of repeating myself, I think I want to be a Notary Public in Mexico. I’ve been going to the gym, and my forearms are already pretty strong. I’d be a natural, I think, if I could figure out what they hell they do that merits fifteen million pesos-worth of European sheet metal parked outside.
No one really knows for sure how Mexico got its name. I find the place, the name, and the whole lost in the mists of time angle appealing. When Spanish freebooters arrived, the locals they encountered spoke Nahuatl. This “encountering” consisted mostly of rapier thrusts and arquebus blasts, so perhaps the natives were mostly unavailable for comment about place names.
In Nahuatl, meztli (rhymes with Nestle) means moon, and xictli (sheek-ti-lee, best spoken with a Daffy Duck pronunciation) means navel. So for a long time Europeans thought Mexico meant the navel of the moon. Unless it didn’t. Other names like “place of springs,” and “killed by an obsidian arrow” were favored by other intrepid scholars who were scratching their heads and wondering why they were up to their ankles in a swamp with obsidian arrows sticking out of them all of a sudden.
About twenty-five years ago, the Mexicans got tired of people arguing about where the name of their country came from, so they convened an azul-ribbon panel to do what intellectuals do best: argue about it some more. They decided that the Aztecs (the Nahuatl, more or less) once had a leader of some sort named Mexitli, and he decided they should stop wandering around and set up shop for good in what is now Mexico City. His friends called him Mexi, and co in Nahuatl means “place of”, so you end up with Mexico.
I’m not sure I’d want my country to be named after a guy in a straitjacket, with two left feet, his dentures flying out of his mouth, and a barrage balloon of Binky from Matt Groenig’s Life In Hell comics tied to his topknot, but it’s not my country and they didn’t ask my opinion.
I know how modern intellectuals think. I imagine they fixated on the dubious idea they knew the nickname of a guy in a loincloth in the 1300s first, and they worked backward from there until they got the “facts” they needed to make it work out. My Latin is pretty limited, but I pretty sure I’m referring to ex post facto thinking, or petitio principii, or maybe post hoc ergo propter hoc, perhaps ratione conclusa, or it could be spaghetti bolognese. It’s one of those, surely.
Well, I’m in the Yucatan, and everyone around here is Mayan, more or less, and didn’t have a lot to do with the Aztecs back in the day, and don’t have much to do with Mexico City nowadays, either. The Maya, on the whole, look different than Mexicans from farther north. They’re low to the ground, and tend to be stout. A tall Maya is around 5′ – 6.” They’re a wonderful medium brown color, and generally don’t have things like freckles or any other imperfections in skin tones. They have straight, black hair as thick as minks, with dark brown, almond shaped eyes. With a description like that in hand, you can imagine what they think when we walk down the street. Oh look, the nice Italian lady is walking her albino giraffe again.
It took Hernan Cortez two years to conquer the Aztecs. The Aztecs were powerful, but not popular. They had an empire, and empires have a tendency to engender ill feeling from the assorted vassals. Cortez made alliances with various tribes in the area who tired of the Aztec’s approach to open heart surgery. That made it easier to turn Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) into just another excuse for a Spanish town hall.
The Spaniards decided they wanted the Yucatan peninsula, too. Instead of 2 years, it took them 175 or so. The Mayans were tough opponents, proud, pretty sophisticated, and could knap an obsidian arrowhead with the best of them. Perhaps the most vital thing they had going for them was a decentralized state. The Aztecs were an empire, and once you marched into the capital and fertilized the royal palace with the royalty, the war was more or less over. The Yucatan was more like a series of city-states, like Italy or most of central Europe once was. The locals fought like balams (jaguars), and once you beat them, there was another set right down the road to start all over again. And you had to hack your way through the jungle to do it, too.
But it was worth it, on the whole. The Yucatan is where the world of mammals was born, really. A meteor strike there killed off the dinosaurs. If it wasn’t for the Mayans, we wouldn’t have tomatoes, or avocados, or tobacco, or chili peppers. We wouldn’t call 200-mile-an-hour windstorms hurricanes, because they’re named after the Maya god HuracĂĄn. Many people still sleep in hamacas here, although we call them hammocks. Without the Mayans, we wouldn’t have known what to call them, and telling your wife you’re going out in the back yard to put your ass in a sling wouldn’t have the same connotation of relaxation, would it?
But above all, there’s one contribution of the Mayan people that tops all the others. Mi esposa y Yo will go out tonight and stroll down the magnificent Paseo Montejo in the cool of the evening, and eat our anniversary dinner under unfamiliar constellations. And for dessert, we’ll have chocolate (chokolatl) something or other, prepared by the very people who invented it. We’ll treat our waiter to a heaping helping of our barbarous Spanish, and tip him enough so that he doesn’t turn to his co-workers after we leave and call us the lint in the navel of the moon.
Well, I’m traveling again. I’m not sure what fresh observations I can bring to the table about the process of going hither and yon and to and fro and above and beyond. I’m afraid my missives will quickly devolve into a rejected Seinfeld script about little packages of peanuts and fights for primacy over the arms of aircraft seats. Besides, they give you crackers, not peanuts now.
But perhaps my lack of experience in the current landscape of travel might be of some use to my readers. I have fresh, bloodshot eyes to observe the cartage scene. I gather the average person travels all the time, so none of this is new to them. I can certainly assure you that the below average person is currently clogging up the airports as well. So maybe I’ll just try to notice things that others take for granted at this point, and by holding a mirror up to the proceedings, illuminate them somewhat.
In the Portland, Maine airport, I’d be at a loss to describe the polity on the whole, other than to say everyone looks like a Kliban person to me. The Washington DC airport doubled down on the effect. Houston wasn’t much better.
It’s not that most people aren’t particularly attractive. I’m most people, so I can deal with that. It’s that everyone tries to look as unattractive as possible. Violently unattractive. I’ve never concatenated those two words before, but nothing else will do: people are currently violently unattractive, and deliberately so. It’s not just their trappings, their weedwhacked bedhead hairdos, their DigSafe tattoos, or the Marley’s chains they’ve added to their faces. Their mannerisms are, too. No one looks or acts in any way that would put another person at ease around them. It’s useful to reflect that organizing your appearance and behavior to put others at ease is a pretty good definition of what a lady or a gentlemen is. That brand of human has been hunted to extinction in US airports.
So instead, we get human dirigibles, manatees in yoga pants, and whole families from suburban goy shtetls cultivating hobo chic like the lotus blossoms they consume. I gather there’s a pirate website or ten somewhere that sells bogus “service dog” sweaters to all comers, because a hearty helping of the passengers had every manner of rat dog and poochie alike kitted out in one, all acting completely unable to service themselves, never mind their owners. There were many other such dodges on display. A substantial minority of passengers have discovered that if you ask for a wheelchair, you’re squired around the airport by your own personal coolie and allowed to board the plane first. It’s impossible to see that many gimps suddenly get up and walk outside of Lourdes.
It boggles my tiny little mind how much money you must have to spend to look this bad. There was one guy that made quite an impression on me. He was wearing the kind of flip flop sandals I remember on girls in grammar school back in the day, wrap around mirrored sunglasses that looked like skiing goggles for a pro wrestler, a Cat in the Hat chapeau, with dreadlocks peeking out over his pasty forehead, and doing justice to their name. The rest of his ensemble was a mishmash of the kinds of garments used to climb Everest on a hot day, designed for, marketed to, and worn by people who only climb out of bed after 1 PM. The overall effect was a North Face Imhotep, or maybe an Oakley Tutankhamen. The unsittable chairs attracted ad hoc nursing homes like algae blooms, gathering and dispersing on some unseen tide of departures and arrivals.
The physical structure of the airports was totally modern, in every sense of the word. I’m not sure exactly whose idea it was to declare that a complete lack of any kind of style should be considered a style in itself, but I’d be willing to help knock together a gallows for him if you can find him. Nothing in an airport reflects or supports the humanity that passes through it. Acres of carpet spread out underfoot, looking like a malfunctioning fax machine’s idea of a test pattern. It has a riot of uninformative information on the walls, and plenty of advertising for things like our Imhotep’s sunglasses, but nothing to set you at ease in any way. It looks like a mental hospital hallway with more Coke machines. The whole megillah was capped off with a continuous stream of the singsong Urdu of distorted, unintelligible arrival and departure announcements launched into a ten-dollar microphone clutched like a rapper’s first performance.
I spent an hour staring at a trash bin. It was bisected into regular trash, and recyclables. No signage is allowed to have regular English text on it any more, so you discerned the difference between the two sides using only hieroglyphics. So if you had a fish head with a spine attached, or a loaded diaper, or some candy, or an apple core, or several other items that added up to the worst meal ever eaten, you chucked them in the left one. The right one had childish icons for cans and bottles. It makes sense. Both the airplane seats and the trash in the airport are sorted to determine if they can get an extra nickel out of you.
But I survived, of course, like Ishmael, to tell the tale. The epidemic of female docents flying miltary helicopters into airliners has abated. The crackers and Sprite didn’t kill me. The, ahem, service dogs didn’t bite me. So I have no real complaints. But I did notice one thing in America’s airports that was such a fundamental change that it kind of shocked me. Not one, single, solitary human being in three airports and on three very large airplanes, out of thousands of people, was reading a book of any kind. Not even carrying one. Well, you know, except me and my wife.
I’ve been informed that the last person to leave civilization is supposed to turn out the lights on the way out the door. We’re currently searching for the switch.
Dawn has come to Millwood, the city where Richard Anderson livesâa city neither small nor large, simply a normal community where people live together, work together, and do things for each other. This is the story of one day in Millwoodâjust any day.
The story begins at daybreak. All is quiet in the Anderson home; everybody is asleep. It is still some time before Richard has to get up for breakfast, but while most people are still asleep, many are at work doing things for othersâthings which mean a great deal to the community, including Richard himself. While Richard sleeps, men at the dairy are filling bottles with fresh milk, and long before daybreak, Richard’s milkman picks up the milk and delivers it to the Anderson home in time for breakfast. All night long, the bakers have been baking bread for the dayâbread which the delivery man now takes to stores and homes. Long before stores and schools open, trucks are bringing food for Richardâs dinner into town from nearby farms and distant places. From a refrigerated truck, the butcher is already unloading meatâsome of which will be on Richardâs table today or tomorrow.
Richardâs community is always at work. All night in the telephone building, operators have been busy at the switchboards, putting through callsâperhaps to a doctor or fire station. In the cityâs water plant, pumps run day and night to keep Millwoodâs reservoirs filled, and men check gauges so that Richard and others always have water. At the power plant, engineers keep watch so there is electricity whenever itâs needed. At the post office, workers sort mail throughout the night so Richardâs mailman will have the letters ready in the morning. Meanwhile, at the newspaper office, men and women work to meet the deadline for Millwoodâs morning paper. As getting-up time approaches, the newsboy is already on his route, delivering the paper to Richardâs home.
For Richard, the day is just beginning. On his way to school, he sees people in his community at workâlike the linemen who keep the electric lines in good repair. Richard has never really stopped to think about how much people in his city depend on one another. His mother shops at the grocery store, and he often buys things there too, but he hasnât thought about what the city would be like without storesâno groceries, no shoe stores, no furniture stores. The people who work in these places do important jobs for their neighbors. A community needs many kinds of workersâways for people to get from one part of town to another. Some go by taxi, some walk, others use their own cars, and many use buses. Buses are slower than taxis but cost less and are easy to use. Bigger buses take people to many parts of the country, stopping in Millwood too. Trains come and go from the railroad station, carrying people and goods. Trucks carry mail from the station or from the helicopter field, which brings mail from nearby suburbs and towns. Helicopters need little space to land on, unlike airplanes, which require large airports on the cityâs outskirts. Many people come and go by airplane daily.
Though Richard may not realize it, he has an important job tooâgoing to school to learn the things that will help him become a good citizen, ready to take his place in the community. No matter what someone does for a living, many people depend on themâand they, in turn, depend on others. People who work in factories make goods for stores to sell; people in offices write letters and keep records. Some are craftsmen, some professionals like doctors and lawyers, some are storekeepers, and many are housewives who manage homes and care for children. Whatever a person does, it helpsâwhether in big or small waysâto make the community a better place.
In City Hall, people work for the city itself. The mayor, elected by citizens, runs the government and oversees departments like the police, who make the city safe and direct traffic. They enforce laws made by the people for their own safety. The fire department is also part of the city government, ready day and night to respond to fires before they spread. The city hires workers to build and repair bridges, streets, and sidewalks, and to maintain streetlights for safety. It also helps protect public health by monitoring the water supply and inspecting food-handling places. Another department collects garbage and burns it, while a city dump holds non-burnable waste, keeping Millwood clean. The city provides playgrounds for children, ball fields, jungle gyms, and benches for adults to rest on. Recreation also includes tennis courts, a recreation center for parties and games, and a public library with books, records, and films for all ages. Richard and his family go to church, and there are other churches for those who worship differently.
Millwood has a radio and TV station, where programs are created by many peopleâfrom actors to techniciansâensuring Richard gets the right show at the right time. He enjoys watching television and sometimes learns a great deal from it. The family often goes to the neighborhood movie theater, and Richardâs father enjoys bowling once a week with friends. At night, when Richard goes to bed, he may not think much about what his community has done for him or what he has done for itâbut the work of the community never stops. Bread is baked, milk is processed, newspapers are printed, electricity is generated, water is pumped and purified, and phone calls are connectedâday and night. The work of the community goes on, with people helping and depending on one another, all partners in making Millwood a better place to live.
Before my time, but time-adjacent enough to recognize that the video is not exactly raging propaganda. No one is talking about running roughshod over the whole world or anything. Little Richard isn’t being brought up to be much of an ideologue, although a stretch in college in the 1960s should take care of that deficiency.
At any rate, a lot of America was just like that back in the day. The parts that weren’t, weren’t. They refused, or were unable to act the way the people in the video were acting. The suburbs and exurbs served the same purpose as the frontier once did. When cities became corrupted, people reassembled themselves out in the landscape and started over. A republic, if you can keep it, over and over. It has as many obligations as benefits, and anyplace with benefits eventually attracts people who want them without toting the knapsack of obligations that everyone else is carrying. Eventually the free riders get a quorum, and a new frontier is necessary. Lord knows where we’ll find one now. Perhaps the bombed out numerous remains of Free Rider City will be the new frontiers, after the locusts move on.
People like to point to traditionally minded people, with horrified looks on their nose-ringed faces, and screech that trads want to take us back to the 1950s. I can assure you that I’m fairly conversant in all sorts of history, and that the 1950s you fear and trads want isn’t reachable by putting the Caddy with the big fins in reverse. It was way, way more sophisticated, challenging, and complex than life is today, and it would take a lot of work to achieve it. Going to other planets would look easy compared to assembling the modern version of Millwood again, and making it at least common, because people being people, universal is not possible.
I know the title sounds a little like The Lady, or the Tiger, but it can’t be helped. Claudia Cardinale passed away recently, and we must sit shiva.
Hollywood had a bit of a thing for Italian actresses back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Claudia included. Of course the SS Sophia Loren sailed way past the Mercator line between a regular person and an Earth Mother, and was bigger than the Beatles back then. In the land of sex bombs, she’ll always be the MOAB. Gina Lollobrigida was in a bunch of movies made in English around the same time, and was about as hubba hubba as female humans get. To wit:
If you’ve never seen Woman of Straw, you’re missing out. Gina wanders around the movie in a slip for the most part. It’s one of the few good movies that Sean Connery ever made, too. The fellow could act, if you asked him to. He didn’t get asked very often, I gather. Just hired to stand around and be Sean Connery.
Back to the topic at hand. There was a land rush of Italian women in the cinema back in the day. Anouk Aimee, Virna Lisi, Silvana Mangano, Elsa Martinelli. They all drifted back and forth between American cinema and European productions. If you don’t mind reading while looking at things, the Italian cinema has a lot of very fine movies with any or all of them in them.
Claudia Cardinale wasn’t in that many American productions. Many people remember her from Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s kind of a cult film at this point, but if you’re being honest, it’s borderline terrible. A somewhat more obscure western she made was The Professionals, which was a better movie in every which way, with a more interesting cast, and unlike OUATITW, it wasn’t a flop at the (American) box office. Lee Marvin’s kinda awesome in it, doing his Lee Marvin thing, while Claudia was certainly delivering her thing:
Claudia maybe didn’t get her, um, face on the American Mount Rushmore of cinematic Ragazzas fra Diavolo. But it was only because she didn’t care that much about American cinema. She went home to Italy and made movies in French and Italian and was happier doing it. Won plenty of awards, too.
So let’s talk about one of those Italian movies, one that is way more than just a costume drama, although that’s how it’s often described. Il Gattopardo is inexpertly translated into English as The Leopard. The gattopardo is a mythical bobcat that show up on heraldry and in legends in Sicily. A gattopardo is often mis-identified as a serval, which looks like a miniature cheetah, or a very big housecat, but they’re not native to Sicily. But that’s part of the appeal of the title of the movie, and the award-winning book it’s based on. The man, The Leopard, is Burt Lancaster playing a Sicilian prince, and he embodies a kind of mythic duality. Not exactly of his time, part of a chain of minor royalty that outlasts regular history — an enigma adrift on a sea of current events.
In many ways, The Leopardis a mess. All the actors talk whatever language they’re comfortable in, and then Italian is dubbed over them, and inexpertly to boot. But if you forego trying to ingest whoever’s butchering everyone’s dialog, and just read the subtitles, the movie is wonderful. And it has a lot to say to Americans, if they’re paying attention. Here’s a very trenchant scene:
There’s Claudia dancing with Alain Delon, playing the Leopard’s nephew, and next in line to take his place. Cardinale looks like an Italian version of Natalie Wood at that age, and by Italian version, I mean taking it up a notch. She’s portraying Angelica Sedara, the daughter of a lowbrow local merchant and politician. He seems like a clown at first, but quickly becomes a mover and shaker when society shifts gears.
Here’s where an American watching the movie can profit by understanding the forces at play in the 1860s in what is now Italy. The southern half of today’s Italy wasn’t Italy. It was the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Naples and Sicily joined together. It’s funny, but Claudia Cardinale was the perfect actress to play Angelica, and not just because she looks like an angel. She’s Sicilian, and never spoke a word of Italian until she was in her first movie, just French and Sicilian, which is similar to Italian but not identical.
The kingdom was ruled by a Bourbon, Ferdinand II. If you’ve got an afternoon to spare, you could hunt down Ferdie’s family tree, which encompasses more royal houses than I’d like to paint. For example, his sister was, get this, Empress of Brazil. I’d never heard of such a thing, and I thought I’d heard of everything.
Both the American Civil War and the Italian Risorgimento (the unification), were fought on a north/south divide, and by the same sorts of people. Both southern Italy and the Confederacy were agrarian, feudal, socially stratified, and with a long tradition of cavalier notions of honor and virtue. The north of both countries were nationalistic, industrial, commercial, financialized, and had a lot more avenues for upward (and downward) mobility.
Both wars were fought over unification, or reunification if you want to be pedantic about the Civil War. The north of both countries were going to be the arbiters of what it meant to be a nation, and they weren’t just asking the southern half to go along with their ideas. Over such fundamental ideas wars are fought.
To continue the comparison, you might remember that the stratified, inbred society of the South in the US also produced their share of haughty, childish girls ready to swing from the chandeliers, as Burt observed of the Italian versions.
So the Leopard’s nephew hooks up with the Garibaldians who conquered the southern portion of what’s now Italy, and he hooks up with Claudia, too. She starts out as Not Quite Our Class of People, Dear, but ends up the true belle of the ball, and married to a captain in the freshly minted cockpit of a new Italy. Like Rhett Butler, Alain Delon can see which way the wind is blowing, and goes with it.
In his way, so does the Leopard. Before fading away, he surprises most everyone with his support for his nephew’s marriage to the girl next door instead of some sort of imbecilic contessa, dances with her in front of that gigantic crowd to prove it, and so welcomes her into the rarified air of aristocracy. He knew a little fresh blood is what a lot of hidebound societies need from time to time.
And if there’s ever been any fresher blood onscreen than Claudia Cardinale in 1963, I haven’t seen it.
R.I.P.
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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