A quick word for a couple of pleas. I’ve just come back from a painstakingly excruciating trek up and down the Roman road that cuts across the 2,500 m high mountains that divide Iberia in two halves. The thing is, this road is, perhaps not surprisingly, not dead straight as most Roman roads are, but beautifully serpentine, as well as very well preserved. This is also due to its being THE previous Ur-Neolithic trackway that the ancients used for trade and pasture searching. So, in this case, the Romans adopted the ways of the Keltic and native tribes of the centre for technological reasons. The Roman road is as wide as a modern road, but I imagined the pathway to have been tremendously beautiful, surrounded by pine trees, brooks and waterfalls, my only companions during this whole foot-trip a red squirrel (yes! red!) and a group of wild goats that stared at me wondering what the fuck I was on about trampling alone on the hard granite. LAMF being the only unique musical experience (and only on one occasion), being as it is on the border between Roman paranoia and the last pangs of ancient / native spiritual extasis. Now, I can’t imagine the Romans to have ‘adopted’ native ways for anything other than practical reasons. Are there any other instances out there? Even though the Empire was a huge trans-national killing machine, many of the soldiers that made up its army were ‘barbarians’ - which means superstitions may have prevented the destruction of ancient ways on a *more local* level.
I’d also ask for someone to scan a few of my photos as I haven’t got a scanner. I’ve already got a couple of people in mind but I’d rather they volunteered, ha!
And, in the meantime, the obscurity of Iberian sites makes me wonder... how much would these unclassified sites be worth if they were in the UK? Most of them lie neglected and in isolated unvisited places. Here’s an example...
http://www.arjabor.com/imagenes/peraleda/dolmen.jpg
And I've always felt an enormous urge to hear Carnival In Babylon on arriving after a long ancient trek, its mood lies there IN between all other moods, a sort of not quite intense ecstatic folky beauty of immense personal predilection. The track Shimmering Sand keeps me perplexed, it is my least fave track in the album but it contains my most fave moment of all, that when the obnoxious high tones are replaced by the sustained deep tones of Chris Karrer, right in the middle. That is a visionary moment!!
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