Scissors,

An odd and difficult choice I'm making here. I don't like the option, particularly, of responding genuinely to what I've read in your website then becoming part of the public record... I'm not that much of a blogger at heart. I'll say what I want to say without pulling punches, hopefully, despite the public exposure. I'm an "off-list" correspondence kind of person.

It may surprise you to know, that despite her relative notoriety and what I now guess to be increasing fame, Bébé's "Pafuera Teleranas" returned only six Internet-wide citations when I used my favority search engine. Your blog was one. So on that measure alone I looked you up.

I'd stumbled upon a video of Bebe's "Malo" a couple of days ago, and went back to it again and again. As I commented to a friend in the indie record business (to whom I wrote and sent clips I took from the music video) Bebe would do Garcia-Lorca proud... in all the tradition of cante juando I don't think I'd encountered anything like this. Certainly I'd heard it on my recordings... I seem to remember a woman with an astonishing voice whose name translates as "Little Barrettes."

And my friend Elena, a singer from Los Canarias (who took her schooling in Madrid) sang an impassioned tango about 10 feet from me, in an abandoned quarry not far off Barre Street in Montpelier... that put the hair up the back of my neck. But she didn't, at least on that occasion, have the gut-wrenching bitterness that churns through "Malo." She was positively lightweight by comparison to Bebe.

Instead, I was reminded of the three sisters (and one son) who overpowered the ending of Tony Gatlif's "Latcho Drom"... the one who sang with the same spirit, "there are nights, there are nights, there are these black nights... when I envy the respect you give your dog." I can't forget her jaw shaking with the anger, bitterness and indignation...or her voice... or her sisters' snapping palmas rising and falling like tides.

I believe that film ended with one of the sisters, and her 14-year-old nephew, singing like a glitter-eyed crow, facing into an increasingly chilly nightfall from on top of the Barcelona landfill, after having been evicted (most likely fictionally, for the sake of the film) from their barrio apartment.

So you work and study in Madrid.

And sometimes in England... a strange shock to be loafing along through your photo collection, to suddenly fall into the kitchen in Stoke-on-Trent. Odd, that portrait in a collection bereft of portraits.

Even more odd that not more than a fortnight ago I'd been "flying" over the midlands on the way to the Severn valley, using the Ordnance Survey's new 3-D mapping service (http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/) which layers contemporary topo maps with hand-penned survey maps from the 1880's at exactly the same scale and grid, and with equal-scale aerial photographs.

I was doing archaeological "snooping" for a family member who was convinced that a treaty signed between the Welsh warlord Gryffyd and an English battle commander (in eleven-hundred something) occurred NOT overlooking the Severn as has been claimed by asleep-at-the-switch English historians (who really had nothing to say about their own history for an almost 200 year period... the Venerable Bede later cobbled together accounts made in absentia, and found the most reliable to be Danish). Those folks claimed a site near or at the contemporary town of Billingsley near the Severn.

My relative doubted this, and when I considered that Gryffyd had just mown down a whole lot of English, including clergy and gutted a major cathedral, it hardly made sense that he would venture out so far eastward and away from the Welsh borderlands so farsdddd that he'd, in effect, be behind enemy lines by miles and be cut off from his own retreat.

Rather more likely (I observed after skimming around by air, following hunches I had) I suspected Gryffyd had chosen a ridge not far from what was Offa's Dyke... with easy high-ridge getaway if the English betrayed him. They had a habit of being treacherous. This would be the site of "Billings Ring," a Bronze-Age ringfort mapped by Julius Caesar in what is now Shropshire and its Black Hills. A considerable distance from Billingsley on the Severn.

I've yet to visit that area in person... my own work has taken me exclusively to London and its southern suburb churches where I did some recording, but I'd like to. My grandmother was born in Wolverhampton.

But to end that digression, I took the trouble of looking at a lot of your photos, and reading both your more recent blogs as well as the backgrounder you title "Personal History" as a respectful way to enter a conversation. Not everyone would do it that way, but you've laid a fair amount of your personal interior monologue out there for the world to see.

I find myself looking at most of your photos with nostalgia. I look for my daughter and step-kids at the parade photos and at Bread and Puppet; I see my friend Joseph G. rounding the corner on the 4th; even my former student Nyima petting the shaggy dog with his own shaggy hair matching.

I'm feeling so far away from the valleys of my youth, and your multi-season snaps of roads I've traveled multiple times on the way to Chett and Karen's, or my friend Patrick's (who depending on which side of the ridge you're on... the Woodbury side or the E. Calais side... he's a neighbor about a mile to the northeast from the crossroads on the Woodbury side and so many others you've mentioned, or photographed. "Hey, I know the guy who used to live in that house,"... what a great shot. And my own studio was up Rte. 2 in Marshfield for a couple of years, not far from the magical home of the dead but not forgotten Adele Godchaux Dawson.

I'd a friend who had an apartment next to the Hardwick funeral home, and know the layout of all those valleys... although I'm not so familiar with the one's toward the east (by feel) as I am the valleys and water more toward Plainfield and Montpelier. Although I lived in St. Jay, N. Danville and for a considerable time in E. Hardwick (Walden Corner) I always felt wrenched away from watersheds and valleys of the Winooski, North Branch and Dog Rivers where I went to elementary school, and later returned to teach at nearby colleges and run various media arts enterprises and gallerieis.

Montreal's Musée des Beaux Arts and Musée d'Art Contemporain - National Museum of Art in Ottawa and James Borcoman's wonderful collection of photography - seemed like I couldn't turn a page in your albums or your journals without finding a long-loved landmark or pilgrimage. Even your family's cabin near Fort Edward or wherever along the canal it is... right on the route my family and I took several times a year from Montpelier to Saratoga Springs (our lunch stop on the trip south to grandparents)... and I was born on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence, just opposite Watertown and at the southern end of that Trent Canal you photographed in Ottawa (named after the one in England my ancestors plied barges upon).

Such a mixed bag... Irish grandmother but latkes and yiddish scrambled all through. Warmed my heart to see you tackling life's mysteries from such a mongrel mix of world philosophies, with music tossed in. On the day after Christmas I visited my friend Lori in Montpelier, after that rare day in which Christmas fell on the first day of Chanakah, and solicited her to see if she'd gone to a movie and had Chinese food as was traditional for all culturally-aligned Jews on Christmas day. Turned out she had... but also had a Christmas tree. So there you go.

Bebe apparently got the equivalent of a Spanish Grammy for it last spring, right up there with Paco de Lucia. For the time being... I don't know the colloquialism's of southern Spain and also if a Gitano dialect might be involved. (My first wife was a translator of both Castilian and Catelan, but I no longer have her assistance). How would you translate the title of Bebe's album? -

Best regards,
michaelbix
Brattleboro

p.s. ironic fact - a trio of talented young studio engineers/computer geeks from Germany, Switzerland and Spain designed a "convolving" algorithm that takes a sound signal (like a voice from a microphone) and processes it "as if in the room" of an emulated room or hall somewhere else in the world... ie. the cathedral in Seville and other great spaces from Norway to Rome. They traveled around with calibration microphones and computers, taking "snapshots" of all the halls that acoustically interest them.

For reasons I cannot determine without writing them, those European software guys decided that they needed to include in their list of "acoustic spaces" emulated by their audio plug-in (for recording studios) - the East Calais Meeting House (as well as nearby spaces ranging from Christ Church in Montpelier to the biggest of the Lamson quarries in Barre). You didn't have anything to do with that, did you?

p.p.s. how would we correspond off-list without the email set-up correspondence being put on a public page? (provided you would do that for some part of our discussion)?