Sunday, February 26, 2006

More Secondhand Smoke

It's appearing that the choice of the hero in Secondhand Smoke who "goes down to the Yucatan" for Zapata over Sandino wasn't as arbitrary as he thought it to be. Feeling all epic dull he continues trudging ahead as hero anyhow because he knows no other route out. So on he bumbles, bouncing from obscurity to obscurity choosing each not for its merit alone but rather its lack of footprints. Imagine the torment trapped in his jaw when he rode the plane to Cancun with all the giddy spring breakers knowing that not only was he about to head off in the opposite direction of the catamarans and cocotinis, but that the only reason he wasn't in Nicaragua was because the Clash wrote an album about it before he did. What would his friends say if he told them British solidiers were training Sandinistas just across the border in Costa Rica to cripple the American trained troops on the other side?
"Yeah, I got that album too."
It eats him so he goes Zapata. It eats him also because the Clash never posit the strange connection between Bautista and Batista. If they thought like that they wouldn't be the Clash though, but it still eats him. Whatever, they got the topic first so that's the one we get with flaws and all. Our hero gets Zapata, he thinks, concilatorily.
However, singing his lyrics to "Where Cherry Blossoms Breeze..." at a concert in Austin Texas years later on el dia de los San Patricios (wherein Irish American troops defected to Santa Anna's army in 1847)it struck him that Cherry Blossoms brought him to the Yucatan, not just because it was the last unchosen choice. Lotus leaves! So he began with the obvious and worked up his reason from there and it is a fine one.
The obvious: Mexico abuts the States thereby making it more our logical other than Nicaragua.
On the Yucatan particularly: It's a pennisula that juts back up at the States and it's the cradle of one of the most important civilizations ever, The Mayans, whom if you recall two brothers in White Pigeons prove were equal parts Egyptian, Korean, and Celtic (amongst others that didn't serve their purposes of the moment).
On the Mayans: God was called "Malo" and took the form of a serpent, which if you were a Conquistador was like saying "we worship one bad devil."
The Pigalle inverted what it received so says the song.
Well a simple web search for inversions proved better yet.
If you fuse Toltec and Olmec and spell them backwards you have something very similar to Camelot!
Our hero knew where he was headed!

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