Photos of La Muse by Lowell Brower

Just uploaded a load more photos like this onto Facebook, all taken by the lovely writer Lowell Brower here.

Silent Witnesses

We posted about Daniel Brown's new site here the other day, but we just wanted to let you guys know what he's working on right now as it's directly relevant to La Muse and the village - a new series of work called "Silent Witnesses."

It's the first set of nine drawings in the series called "Pathways and Passages” and how:

"seemingly ordinary or unseen architectural elements return them to the consciousness of a community, acknowledging them as living “members” of that community.  The selected architectural elements define the persona of each village, and have acted as silent witnesses to its history."

You can check out a slideshow of his beautiful new images here. 

Manifestation against France Telecom...

Forgot to post about the manifestation we attended the other day at the top of the village against France Telecom's refusal to listen to the locals of our village, but more importantly the villagers of Pradelles-Cabardes, over dropped calls and lack of service.

For over a year angry letters have been flying their way to no avail, so the locals, local mayors and the powers that be decided to block the road.

You've got to love the one below that says, "Le Telephone ne Passe Pas Vous Non Plus," which basically means, get lost, or, the telephone doesn't work so the road doesn't either, the verb "passe" meaning pass like in English but also not working in French:

Of course, as soon as the Midi Libre article and the L'Independant one came out, France Telecom promised 70,000 Euros in repair work and immediate solutions... the power of the press, and the people!!!

Onion Videos

Here's some video Robin Berson took of the traditional Occitan music that was played in St. Andre, the church at the entrance to the village, after the Onion Walk (Lo Camin de la Ceba) from Mazamet.


We dropped six of our attendees off up there at 7 in the morning and they arrived at the church to eat sausage and pate sandwiches to the melodic cacophony of the Occitan goatpipes many hours later!



This one takes a minute or so to start, but the song is lovely:

Onion Walk - LO CAMIN DE LA CEBA

We dropped 6 attendees off in Mazamet at 7 this morning to hike the Lo Camin de La Ceba - "Onion Walk" from Mazamet to Labastide Esparbairenque, an 18 km annual event that retraces the steps of centuries of peasants who walked to Labastide for the first onion plantings. Labastide is the last Mediterreanean village before you hit the colder Atlantic climate of the Tarn to the North, hence the reason for the earlier onions here.

Although it was raining everyone still had a great time and for those who didn't walk there was the sausage and pate sandwiches, goatpipes, wine, pastis, and Occitane choral music in the church of St. Andre.

We'll try and get photos and videos for you from our attendees and post them later!

Here's some photos of Tiziana's on Facebook.


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