To play the castanets, to really play the castanets, one must have a personality that is bigger than all of the room.
It is the same with the zills.
It must be a personality so expansive and enshrouding that it mutes the collective ear-drum drubbing of the mazamir and slows down the systole-diastole of the daff until all you hear is the clap of brass on brass.
Click here to see more photographs of the tannoura performance at the Wikala al-Ghouri in Cairo.
With rain in hair, qahwa in belly and the cardamom still coating the insides of our noses, Cairo soaked through my shoes, socks and skin. Done in by puddle misjudgment, who-knows-what solutes were beginning to squat under my toenails from the dodgy detritus of doings and the leavings of 7000 cats.
After a great dance of squishy hopping about, I felt less eeeghwaikeeooogheey and a bit more 9-years-old-after-madressah-braving-the-oceans-of-the-civic-centre-parking-lot-as-a-keen-stomping-adventurer-on-her-journey-home.
I ran one of those vintage photoshop actions on the photo of a window in Masjid Bilal. It’s just down the road from our flat in Madinat Nasr. I’ll be posting more pics soon. Perhaps I should retitle my 20-ken project to “The Year of Shooting Recklessly”. I’ve been a bit suck about the writing. Our place is on Naguib Mahfouz street, so I’m trying to channel some prolific writer spirit. So far all I’m filling up with is karkadey and basboosah. Good gorge, Cairo’s wonderful.
We spotted this on our way to the Cairo Book Fair:
Acute Fail.
