Interesting last couple of days

Too much has been going on and not enough time to write it all up! (I also have pics that I need to Flickr, but that takes time too.)

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be invited to a party at Dar Gnawa where members of Embryo, a Germany-based musical collective, jammed with the members of Dar Gnawa into the wee hours.

I also met a couple of Gnawi MREs (that's Marocains Resident a l'Etrangere, or Moroccans who live abroad) at the party who are holding down Gnawa knowledge in Spain. One of them recommended I get a couple of CDs by Muslim, a local Tanjawi rapper, which I did today, got the one he recommended, Bghini oula Krahni ("Love me or hate me"), as well as another.

Then today I got into the Legation Museum early for some research, found out some interesting sources, but I had to leave before noon to meet a friend for lunch at his home. We chatted afterward, found he knows some important people for me to meet, and then we started into a rambling review of, for some reason, war films... Which led us by way of The Battle of Algiers and Revolution to Platoon and Apocalypse Now...

Which reminded me of the scuttlebutt: Francis Ford Coppola was in Tangier this summer buying a home in the Madina.