Saturday, December 26, 2009

Some Photos Posted

Back in Casablanca. Nice to be in my own bed again.

Here are two albums I just uploaded to Facebook. Excuse the artsy stuff -- I'm still in kid-in-a-candystore mode with my new camera. You should be able to look through these without having (or without singing into) a Facebook account. Comments and such enabled once you've signed in.

Imperial Cities: Meknes, Fes, Marrakesh
Sahara: Merzouga and the Algerian border

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Baby Jesus Would Approve

Another short one, and probably the last before I get back to Casa...

The little Sahara excursion was awesome, and the three days spent there seem way too short.

In Sidi Ifni now - formerly Spanish colonial town way down south on the coast. The money I've alloted myself is running a little low (the riad in Fez sort of broke the bank), so I'll probably be another 3 or 4 days in this area before heading back to Casa.

Always an element of suck to doing the holidays solo, but I would feel ridiculous complaining about it. My Christmas plans: Surfing, Legzira Plage (pictured), seafood tagine, bootleg alcohol with French tourists. Win.

Hope everyone has a good Christmas. Pictures/write-ups/obscenity when I get back to Casa.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

In Fez, Still Alive

Four days into the trip now and we're comfortably settling into Fez. We've covered Meknes already. It was a little break-neck, but the weather sucked and pretty much everything that's awesome about Meknes is more awesome in Fez.

The touts in Fez are probably the most aggressive and unrelenting of any that I've seen anywhere. Bangkok has nothing on the imperial cities. Knowing that a myriad of souvenirs (not to mention any sort of drug or illicit service imaginable) is at our disposal at "very special price for you" is comforting, but the saturation of advertisement can be annoying. One 'faux-guide' waited for us outside our riad for three hours before I finally told him off. Two restaurant touts got into a shouting match over us last night - bidding each other's set menu price down from 80dh to 40. "He will give you yesterday's food" the loser shouted at us.

The less-than-endearing form of capitalism practiced here is due entirely to the tourist activity inside the walls of the medina. And tourists are drawn here for good reason. The beauty of the city more than compensates for the hassle and it's really good to be here. It's easy to lose track of why one is drawn to Morocco if you're living in Casablanca. No such danger here.

Pictures and more information to follow. I can see the walls of the city from inside this cybercafe, so I feel ridiculous sitting here.

Ifrane, maybe Azrou, maybe Errachidia, and Merzouga next on the itinerary.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Meticulous Preparation

Besides mapping out the previously posted rough itinerary for my upcoming (tomorrow) trip around the Southern half of Morocco, I have taken the following measures to ensure a smooth journey:

  1. Downloaded the second season of Breaking Bad to watch tonight so I wouldn't go out and spend all my trip money on alcohol.
  2. Took a bag of clothes to the lady who washes them for me. I need the pair of jeans I wore most of last week.
  3. Skimmed my roommate's Lonely Planet book on Morocco. Also Spain, because I love Spain.
  4. Figured out a way to tell my maid (who speaks no English or French) that we'd be gone for a little while.
  5. Thought long and hard today at work about what I would throw into my backpack to keep me going for three weeks.
  6. Looked at train schedules. Well... looking, present tense.

Things my roommate (who is "just going to follow you, dude") is going to wish I had done:
  1. Booked hotel rooms
  2. Booked transportation
  3. Research, of any kind

This is going to be awesome.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Cannibalism

How's that for an eye-catcher? How awesome would it be if this all-of-a-sudden started to be a blog about eating people? That would get a lot of hits. Then I could be famous like that hooker who wrote a blog. Movie deal! Apparently they eat albinos in Tanzania (or something?).

Anyway, this isn't about eating people, it's about music. There was a French girl who crashed at the apartment for a couple of nights a few weeks back and I took all the music off of her external hard drive. And I have since been consuming the music. Thus, "Cannibalism". I don't know - whatever. To be perfectly clear, music is probably the #2 or 3 thing that I miss about the United States. At this point, I'd listen to a Black Eyed Peas remix of a newborn's death rattle if it meant I could go to a decent concert afterward. The things I'd do for a trip to a really good record store are not suitable for a website attached to my real name.

But for all the Casablanca music scene lacks, I've still managed to expand my horizons by looking to other expatirates. Particularily French ones. I don't know why, but the United States is essentially a world music ghetto. Given my rather extreme jingoism, the fact that I had never heard of the following two albums before leaving the protective embrace of CONUS is an embarassing admission. I suppose the argument could be made that such an enormous amount of good music is created in the Anglo world that any additions would contribute diminishing or negligible returns on the margin - the same argument for why so few Americans have passports. But that's pretty retarded. There is no good excuse. Not given how goddamn amazing these two are:

Amadou & Mariam - Welcome to Mali
Serge Gainsbourg - Histoire de Melody Nelson

How's that for a long-winded alternative to the 'What I'm Listening To:' section on Myspace?

If this all sounds very disjointed, then it is a fair representation of where my brain is this week. Have to work until Saturday, but then I'm getting the hell out of dodge. Three weeks all around the southern half of the country. Saharan Frontier, Anti-Atlas, Southern Coast. Could not possibly be more excited.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Eid al-Adha

Disclaimer: There are pictures of dead sheep heads and guys with knives below the body of this post. If you don’t want to see that, don’t scroll too far ahead.

I spent another (it’s happened two or three other times) Thanksgiving away from home this year. When I went to school in New Zealand, I rarely missed it because the southern hemisphere’s summer break fell almost exactly overtop our winter holidays. It meant that I rarely got a tan, but at least I was home for the important stuff.

Happily, I was not without the holiday spirit altogether. In Islamic countries, Eid al-Adha is celebrated right around the same time as Thanksgiving. It’s the day when practitioners of the Islamic faith celebrate the willingness of Ibrahim (Abraham) to murder his son. Happily, Old Testament God was all like, “psyche!” and Abraham only had to kill a sheep, so that’s the practice followed here. So, most families – or nearly every one that can afford the 2,000dh ($260) animal – will buy a sheep and kill it with a knife (exsanguination), distribute the meat amongst themselves and to the less fortunate, eat it, and cook the animal’s head on fire pits in the street. (I am still unclear as to the practical or religious motivation behind burning the head).

So I was awakened on Saturday morning (noon), not only by the usual mind-splintering hangover (buying alcohol during religious holidays is an entirely different story, probably for a less public forum), but by the smell of burning fur - the aroma wafting through my window from the large open grill on the sidewalk below. I heard my roommate retching.

I had managed to remain unconscious for the general massacre itself. Most sheep are sliced and wrung out early in the morning, so my day was filled with the aftermath. I took a shower (something that would be repeated twice more that day) and threw on some sandals. Immediately after leaving my apartment building, I had to hop over a small estuary of gore that had puddled near the curb. I regretted having chosen the sandals. I spent the next few hours wandering the streets with my roommate, snapping pictures with my new camera.

Once the general revulsion and niggling voice of some undefined moral qualm had been quieted in my mind, I really enjoyed myself. The city was a whole different place. Automobile and pedestrian traffic was infrequent, every shop was shuttered and gray smoke rose from open flame as far down every street as you could see. Most of the head-roasting stands were manned by the more entrepreneurial local kids. Fresh heads were thrown onto the fires at intervals as cars or passersby stopped and dropped off their trophy-filled garbage bags. Presumably they came by later to pick up the remains because no money changed hands at the drop. Older kids drove donkey carts full of the still-blood-wet hides. The precise economics of it all still eludes me.

The scene – at first bizarre and macabre – started to take on the feel of a community block party. The kids from each stall would wander back and forth, socializing and talking shop – happily waving their hatchets and poles of rebar and occasionally shuffling the blackened heads around with their feet like soccer balls. So even without the safe hominess of a proper Thanksgiving, I had a good food-related weekend - complete with a strengthened sense of community.












Click for higher resolution (if you're into that sort of thing).

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Shopping

I've spent some time over the last few days camera shopping at the local flea markets (early Christmas present - thanks family!). The markets are arranged like any number of similar enterprises in a developing country. Separate stalls, usually roughly specialized to offer products of one type: Consumer electronics in one, DVDs in another, clothes and shoes in another. There's wasn't really any foresight given to the layout of the market as a whole, so you're left to kind of wander from one aisle to the next, looking for the next camera stall. (Though to be fair, there might be a Vegas-esque element of 'let the customer get lost as hell and take their time getting out' to it).

If you ask to try one of the cameras, the proprietor will helpfully pop in a battery and memory card so you can snap off a couple of test shots. If you're buying used, it's nice to be able to test the exact camera you'll be buying. Some of the older pictures on the memory cards are a little odd though. If you scroll back far enough - past the crappy test shots of the adjacent pants merchant - most of the pictures are of smiling light-skinned families standing in front of The Prado or out on safari in Saharan Africa.

Maybe there's a separate classical art and zebra section of the market that I missed.

Anyway, more pictures forthcoming I hope.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Guest Author

As many of you know, I am spectacularly lazy. If it comes right down to doing something, and there exists the possibility of not doing it and going back to bed, I will gravitate toward the latter. So in that spirit, I'm giving post privileges for this blog to my roommate, Anthony. I'll keep posting, and so will he; thus creating an illusion of much higher productivity. And then: Profit.

I'll need to figure out a way to sort of differentiate our posts in the subject line, but for the most part his will be about his feelings, knitting, and pie recipes, while mine will continue to center around toilet humor.

Friday, November 13, 2009

What it's all about...

So I've got a little over three weeks off, starting in December and running a little past New Years. It's not a lot of time, especially given how much of this area I want to see, but it's enough to do a little reconnaissance. Three weeks really isn’t the sort of timeframe I’d want for a trip of this size – I won’t be able to fall in love with little villages along the way and put my feet up for a day or two – but it will be enough to give my brain a lay of the land.

Most of my interest lies in the south of the country. Less European influence, better nature and fewer tourists make that a pretty easy call. So I’m working on a circuit (having to double back on the same route is such a waste) that will hit the highlights and give me an idea of the places I should go back to and spend extra time.

Here’s what I’m working with so far. Looking at it makes me deliriously happy – almost to the point of giggling:



View Morocco: Southern Loop '09 in a larger map

Click to blow it up.

My roommate, Anthony is probably coming along. Anyone else for a little vacation?

Thursday, November 12, 2009

More Random Things

  • There is an Iraqi guy who lives in our apartment building. He only comes and goes at night, doesn't speak with anyone, and has stained glass pictures of the Koran hanging over all of his windows. He has a cute nickname: Al Qaeda.

  • Everything is closed from 2pm until 5pm here. Ostensibly for prayer. This is annoying because that is the exact time that I often want to buy things. If I were that pious at my job, I would also be fired.

  • A standard first date in Morocco is to take the girl out for ice cream. It makes her feel like you care, but it makes me feel like a pedophile.

  • Morocco has been under the control of France, Spain and Germany at different points in time over the past 100 years. There is an Independance Day for each. No work!

  • It's a good idea to host parties at your apartment. People bring lots and lots of food, and then you have stuff to eat for the rest of the week.

  • People cannot parallel park here. If they are by themselves, they'll just keep going back and forth, bumping the cars ahead of and behind them, until they are satisfied with how close they are to the curb. Usually, there are special parking attendants who work on almost every street whose entire job it is to help people parallel park.

  • Retail CDs and DVDs do not exist in Morocco. Piracy has taken over almost 100% of the market share.

  • Tourists keep telling me not to drink the tap water, but I do. Fine so far.

  • There's a holiday coming up where families all over the country will sacrifice a sheep, give 1/3 of it away to the poor, and eat the rest. I am very much looking forward to this holiday because sheep are delicious. Also, people buy the sheep a few days to a week ahead of time, so there will be random sheep tied up in parking garages and front yards.

  • Morocco protected it's currency during the global credit crisis (my income in Dirhams has improved by almost 15% against the dollar since I first signed my contract 7 months ago) through a series of brutally protective trade policies. You essentially cannot export Dirhams - foreigners cannot wire money home, or transfer funds to foreign bank accounts. And goods essentially cannot be imported for individual consumption. You can order things off of Ebay and Amazon, but you have to use a credit card you got in a different country and the government will charge an addition 40% duty when it arrives. All of this means that I am making more money than I thought I would, but it is kind of hard to pay my student loans.

  • There are three dialects of Berber. Two of them are as distinct as "French and Japanese" according to a colleague of mine. Between those, French, Spanish and Arabic, there are 6 native spoken languages here.

  • Moroccan DJs fight dirty. My friend Anthony punched my other friend Younes in the stomach, so Younes got a spray deodorant and a lighter and shot Anthony in the face with fire.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

The Best Albums of 2000 - 2009 (someone please argue with me)

I've had sort of a boring week, and it has been a particularly frustrating month for music (Thom Yorke recording a track for the new Twilight movie soundtrack? Really?). My boredom and nostalgia for quality-tunes-past has converged in list form. The following is my rationale for my selection of the ten best albums of the past ten years.

I like making lists like this. It makes saying something like, "oh yeah, that's one of my top-five favorite [whatevers]" a lot more meaningful if you actually think about it beforehand. I generally throw down at least 20 possible choices right off the bat. And then, admittedly, I’ll trawl through other lists to make sure I hadn’t overlooked anything (in general, my musical memory is much closer to 5 years than it is to 10). Once I have a very large working list, I’ll start paring it down. But something struck me this time as I began to search: None of the albums really jumped out. I would look at an album, know that it I loved it, but I was never outright convinced that it belonged on a list. The field was too even.

This was not, in my opinion, a decade of seminal, genre-founding breakthroughs. In the last ten years, there was no Nevermind, Slim Shady LP, Back in Black, Talking Book, White Album or Zeppelin II.

This is not to say that there was any shortage of musical genius. On the contrary, I would argue that musicians have never been better. Listen to an Arcade Fire or Kanye West album and you can be rest-assured that the people recording today have set a ridiculously high bar. But the fore of musicality has moved beyond the creation of genres and styles, and into their amalgamation. Interdisciplinary composition is the new genre. Especially in the last few years, I have heard people complaining that it is becoming increasingly difficult to classify a new album. ‘Indie’, ‘pop’, or even ‘hip hop’ and ‘urban’ are cop-out blanket definitions that oversimplify the trend.


10. Lupe Fiasco – The Cool

There’s a line on Lupe’s first album – Food and Liquor – where he briefly describes his introduction to rap: “I used to hate hip hop, because the women it degraded, but Too Short made me laugh; like a hypocrite I played it, a hypocrite I state;, but I only recited half, omitting the word ‘bitch”. An American born Muslim and loudly political, Lupe Fiasco’s affiliation with hip hop culture is tenuous at best. But from his position at the sidelines of gangsterism, he has been able to affiliate himself with a much wider base of musicality than the likes of Talib Kweli and Mos Def. Did you improve on the design? Did you do something new?”


9. El-P – Fantastic Damage

El-P is another rapper who has branched out in ways that would have been nearly unthinkable in the 90’s. He raps in schizophrenic explosions of argumentative dialogue; backed by an ensemble of samples – house beats, screaming strings, trap set rolls – that would make UNKLE blush. And again, this guy isn’t rapping about rims and 40s. El-P narrates his albums like the protagonist of a Palahniuk novel. He searches for hypocrisy and injustice in every nook and cranny of society, pulls it into the light and lyrically crucifies it. His work isn’t easy to listen to, and you’re probably not going to hear it on a dancefloor (it would seriously harsh a buzz), but if you give it time and thought, it rewards the effort many times over.


8. The Arcade Fire – Funeral

The arcade fire deserves to be on the list solely for having made the loudest, most stadium-ready album in recent memory. I like to think of them as the thinking man’s answer to Coldplay – glistening, ecstatic music, wrought with deceptive simplicity. I will admit bias on this one, though. I’ve seen the Arcade Fire live, and I’ve been in love with all twelve of them (or however many – there are a lot) ever since. Their festival sets are long, crescendoing epics that climax in the more up-tempo pieces of Funeral. Hearing the opening bells of ‘Rebellion (Lies)’ as 60,000 exhausted hipsters began humming along was a musically transformative thing for me. I still remember how utterly exhausted I was dancing along as the song imploded in on itself and nova’d out into its cacophonous finale. If Funeral has any faults, it has been to raise a bar for The Arcade Fire that they are very unlikely to clear again.


7. Atmosphere – Strictly Leakage

Strictly an EP, actually – not an album, but I’m making an exception here (and in one other place on the list). Atmosphere is always at the top of their game when they’re talking directly to their fans. Hell, they’re still considered “underground” after dozens of commercially successful releases and numerous mainstream offers for exactly that reason. They full-length albums are always wonderful, but there’s an element of discomfort to them. Slug and Ant are best when unforced – recording and performing for fun. Which is why this [13-song] EP is so amazing. The tracks are just things they had laying around. But the joy and irreverence with which they were recorded is very apparent. There’s a song about white kids who listen to rap, a 1-minute narrative about winning a hand of poker and another song about why bringing a girl back to your mom’s house is so undesirable. You don’t need politics when you have poetry.


6. Sigur Rós - Takk

The lead singer of Sigur Rós modified his guitar with a curved bridge so he could play it with a violin bow. He also sings in a language he invented because his native Icelandic wasn’t whimsical enough. The guy makes Bjork look like a pants-suit accountant… and he composes music so beautiful and emotionally challenging that his personal idiosyncrasies are the last things that come to my mind when I hear it. I’ve seen people, with no comprehension of what is being sung, brought fully to tears by this album. The music is something that transcends almost every measure of quality that you can attribute to artistic expression – it’s just something else. Put ‘Seaglopur’ on headphones, turn down the lights and try to disagree.


5. Radiohead – Kid A

Radiohead can really do no wrong by me (see ‘Honorable Mentions’ below). Thom Yorke is my musical hero and I have never disliked anything he’s put his hand to. With that said, Kid A is a step back from everything that had made Radiohead a critical and commercial darling of rock music. It is a tangle of static, clicks, screams and feedback – a bad acid trip of an album that begs you not to like it. People say, “yeah Radiohead is awesome... but have you heard Kid A?” There are no singles, no anthems, no club beats (maybe Idioteque). But Kid A is Radiohead at their most free and creative, and nothing can touch that. Even beyond the chaotic genius of the album itself, its recording served as a stepping-stone for the band – an adaptation of their style. After ‘Kid A’, ‘In Rainbows’ was clearly to follow.


4. Jay-Z – The Black Album

The Black Album is the nearest on this list to an old-school, iconic milestone. It marked the birth of swagger, yet another post-gangster direction for hip hop, and a new benchmark for one of rap’s most skilled and prolific artists. The whole thing plays like the crier’s song for some medieval King. ‘99 Problems’ was released in tandem with Beyonce’s ‘Crazy in Love’ and the announcement of their pending nuptuals – a coup de grace for Hova’s status. ‘Dirt Off Your Shoulder’ birthed its own widely recognized gesticulation. ‘Encore’ has been mixed so many times that it has become synonymous with the practice. Lines from every song have made their way into street vernacular. There is a reason why Hova can say with every new release that he is the greatest rapper alive. While the accuracy of the statement is debateable; no one can casually deny it.


3. The Black Keys – Chulahoma

Chulahoma, the second EP of the list, is a short tribute to the late blues legend Junior Kimbrough. The last thing on the recording is a voicemail left for Dan Auerbach by Junior Kimbrough’s widow. Her voice trembles throughout as she compliments the guitar/drums duo on recording such a faithful adaptation of her husband’s work. I picked this album as one of the best of the decade mostly for what it represents; the efforts of The Black Keys to reinvent and reinvigorate the blues. Chulahoma is a devastatingly emotional and almost palpably visceral album, and that’s what the genre needs to be these days to stay relevant.


2. Kanye West – Late Registration

The guy takes a lot of flak for what a narcissistic jackass he is. As in, narcissism; a neurotic obsession with one’s self. In West’s case, I think it’s justified. Late Registration is a masterpiece of staggering proportions and the pinnacle in a trilogy of work (College Dropout, Late Registration, Graduation) that I will be untouchable in its artistic breadth for the foreseeable future. There isn’t a club in the western world that didn’t have ‘Gold Digger’ on heavy rotation. There’s a song about his dying grandmother with a tuba baseline. Jay-Z raps about blood diamonds, Common sings about love, he even got Paul Wall, Lupe Fiasco and Adam Levine. The whole thing is drenched in soaring strings, Dre-esque beats, flawless harmonization and obsessively crafted production. It’s Las Vegas in a CD.


1. Radiohead – In Rainbows

When Radiohead releases an album, they do so – every time – with a mind toward disowning their previous work and reinventing their sound. They are a group that specializes in wringing beauty from discontent and, as Yorke has said on numerous occasions, allowing themselves to be comfortable would be to defeat the soul of their work. ‘In Rainbows’ is a marked departure from that paradigm, and a turn toward something completely different. Free from the EMI record contract that “strangled” their creativity (one wonders what the group’s body of work would look like had it been allowed to breath), Radiohead released ‘In Rainbows’ over the internet and told fans to pay whatever they thought it was worth - the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to the lumbering, antiquated business model of the record industry. The songs on ‘In Rainbows’ are fiercely effulgent things, and with Yorke’s sideprojects siphoning the less compatible elements of his artistry, the band sounds like a whole again – unified. So while Radiohead may have forever abandoned the self-imposed pressure that compelled albums like Amnesiac and OK Computer, they freed themselves to make, in my opinion, the best album of their careers.


Honorable Mentions:

Radiohead – Amnesiac
Radiohead
– Hail to the Thief
Radiohead – ComLag [EP]
Drive-by Trucker – Dirty South

The Black Keys – Rubber Factory
The Black Keys – Thickfreakness
Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero
Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova – Music from the Motion Picture ‘Once’ [soundtrack]
Mos Def – The Ecstatic
Raekwon – Only Built for the Cuban Linx Pt. 2
Ghostface – Supreme Clientelle
Ghostface – The Big Doe Rehab
Fugazi
– The Argument
Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Spoon – Ga Ga Ga

The Flaming Lips – Embryonic
The National – Boxer
And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead... – Source Tags and Codecs
Bob Dylan – Together Through Life
Bob Dylan – Love and Theft
Ratatat – Classics
Justin Timberlake – Futuresex/Lovesounds
The Streets – A Grand Don’t Come For Free
M.I.A. – Kala
Lil’ Wayne – Tha Carter III
Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
Animal Collective – Strawberry Jam
The Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
Burial – Untrue
LCD Soundsystem – LCD Soundsystem
Jay-Z – American Gangster
Kanye West – The College Dropout
The White Stripes – White Blood Cells
Raphael Saadiq – Instant Vintage
Queens of the Stone
Age – Songs for the Deaf
Lupe Fiasco – The Cool
Madvillain
– Madvillainy
Danger Doom – The Mouse and the Mask