V2nd, C3

[Michael Bailey]

business is not as red hot at Aieul's place as the gentlemen's faces

(64) crummy tippers: a piastre and a millieme just doesn't sound like much
(avare! gotta mean cheap)

so who's Mohammed Ali?

some guy on a horse.  'pparently important around those parts...

okay, now the parenthetical interpolation:
how many times had they stood that way.  Now he's obviously thinking
about "they" being Porpentine and Fatso.
But I'm also wondering just by propinquity, how many times had
Mohammed Ali and his horse stood that way?
This is completely tangential, but recursive, bringing me back to Mohammed Ali,
there's a plethora of them on the disambiguation page in Wikipedia,
but I'm gonna go with
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali_of_Egypt

seems he was sort of the Peter the Great of Egypt.  Big horse-breeder (heehee)
"Among his personal interests was the accumulation and breeding of
Arabian horses. In horses obtained as taxes and tribute, Muhammad Ali
recognized the unique characteristics and careful attention to
bloodlines of the horses bred by the Bedouin, particularly by the
Anazeh in Syria and those bred in the Nejd. While his immediate
successor had minimal interest in the horse breeding program, his
grandson, who became Abbas I shared this interest and further built
upon his work."

returning to Manon - Puccini, gotta listen to that sometime,
but the existence of the opera reference to me still resounds,
ignorant of its essence though I remain
-- these guys could be singing:

you should be dancing, yeah!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaXdTe2TYhs

instead they're searching the faces of statues for "a reassurance of
self-agency"

so I doubt this is Aieul wondering that.  He probably more or less
takes the statue for granted most of the time.  It's Porpentine and
Fatty who would be searching the statue's face.  If it's reassuring
them of self-agency, I guess that is simply by comparison with the
statue - just to remind themselves, like "it's a statue and I'm not"

It's a gloriously convoluted set piece, I guess is what they call it.

I mean the horse and rider could actually be part of the relevant imagery -
these pairs of men "both of a color" meaning, both on the same side of
a chess game, right;
and then, like, dividing Europe into squares like a chessboard

so you get the segue back into, hey, the whole "inanimate" thing

but why "dividing Europe" - they are in Egypt.  For me, having given
it a whole 4 seconds thought, I think it's like these guys are
Europeans, and it is "Europe's board" even though they are not
actually in Europe.

That is an implicit condemnation of colonialism, if you give it a
whole 4 seconds' thought.  (they have extended their chessboard and
scheme into a place that isn't actually Europe.  There's a name for
that: trespassing; and a name for what they do to enforce their chess
game: murder, rapine, theft...A-and, old Mohammad Ali had actually
laid out a different chess game for Egypt and there they are in the
shadow of his statue, carrying on in defiance of his legacy)  What?
There may be other ideas in there?

But old Aieul, a person, not a bigwig, probably never that thrilled
about the Egyptian government in the first place, and stiffed on his
tip by the intruders, has the right idea: let them leave unchallenged
and dream of love...and it's raining, which is a good thing
sometimes...

rainy day, dream away...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVqJl-FOYIA
-- 
Yippy dippy dippy,
Flippy zippy zippy,
Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
- Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")