Apostrophe Day

(Today isn’t the official Apostrophe Day, but who cares?)

From @samtanner:

“An apostrophe is the difference between a business that knows its shit and a business that knows it’s shit.”

Meanwhile, the New Haven Public Library has sent out a flyer stating that it is “accepting donations for it’s big book sale.”

No!

Library people, please consult one of your many books. Or The Apostrophe Protection Society.

And finally, for amusement, I offer you:

Apostrophe Catastrophes.

 

 

Cooking up the CSA

This year, I bought a share in a CSA (community-supported agriculture). My first farm share.

I don’t really do recipes, but I did want to share some delicious combinations of foods that I’ve stumbled upon while cooking up my weekly baskets of food.

Lemony greens and rice

Arborio rice, cooked risotto-style with vegetable broth and a chopped onion

+

Kale and chard, chopped and sauteed with garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, and walnuts

Not your average mac and cheese

Sauteed cauliflower + onion + green bell peppers + penne pasta + cheddar cheese sauce

A New England Jewish girl gets over her fear of collards

A chopped and sautéed onion + a few ears of fresh corn, cut from the cob + a chopped green bell pepper + blanched collard greens  + a little salt, pepper, and cumin

Fresh Peaches

Take one peach. Wash. Eat. Make sure to catch the dripping peach juice before it falls.

Repeat.

Actual Recipes

If you want real recipes, here are two from people who are famous for such things. I’ve made them both and love them.

Tomato and Corn Pie (from Smitten Kitchen)

Tomato Sauce with Eggplant, Caponata Style (from Mark Bittman)

Enjoy.

Influence, schminfluence.

As  I was just looking at Klout and finding great amusement in its assessment of my online influence.

According to Klout, I am influential about:

• Music (duh)
• Homosexuality (hello, gay now!)
• Photography (yes, I take pictures)
• Instruments (musical?)
• Blogging (welcome to my blog!)
• Family (I have parents and a brother and a sister-in-law and aunts and uncles and cousins, and once I wrote about my family’s Thanksgiving…)
• War

War?

I’m influential about WAR?

Gnaoua or never

Essaouira is a great place to end a trip through Morocco. The cool air and wind from the sea felt wonderful after the intense heat of the desert. Seagulls wheeled and cried, and waves crashed on the rocky shore and nearby islands. The smells of salt and fish blew through the air.

Walking through the narrow streets in the medina, I fell in love with the shades of blue. Against the high white walls of the old houses, shutters and doors are painted pale blue or turquoise. Sometimes they’re surrounded with a border of yellow. I wanted to paint everything in my house white and golden yellow and pale blue.

And Essaouira is mellow. Even full of Moroccan visitors and European tourists, it felt relaxed and peaceful. If I lived in Europe, I might make it a regular vacation spot.

We were there for the Gnaoua and World Music Festival. (It’s also spelled Gnawa, but I seem to gravitate toward spelling Moroccan names the French way rather than English). Pronounce all the letters: Guh-now-ah. The title of this post, by the way, is stolen from some posters and t-shirts we saw at the festival.

The New York Times described Gnaoua music in a recent article:

West African slaves, transported far from home, held on to rituals that praise saints and spirits with songs, dances, galvanizing rhythms and trance possession. That’s the story of voodoo and Santería in the Americas, and it’s also the story of Gnawa music in Morocco, made by descendants of slaves brought north from what is now Mali….

The music is spiritual yet never sedate. Most songs are driven by quick-fingered bass riffs played by the leader on the three-stringed sintir and by the bright clatter of large metal castanets called qaraqeb, with call-and-response vocal melodies arching over the beat. The musicians are also singers and dancers: crouching and leaping, twirling and even somersaulting as the polyrhythms grow denser and the songs accelerate.

Here’s what qaraqeb look like.

 

 

Here’s an example of a performance at the festival:

Here’s a short promo video for the festival.

And here’s a longer but better one.

People come to the festival from all over – Moroccans, Europeans, North Americans like us, even further away. One Moroccan had said to Mara before we went, “It’s a hippie festival!” And it is. Our bus from Marrakech to Essaouira was filled with European hippies, a couple of boring-looking travelers like us, and just a sprinkling of Moroccans. We were both amused by the French girl in front of me making a hemp bracelet as we rolled north past dusty hills and olive trees.

The first night of the festival was chilly. People drew together, crowding forward to see the stage, everyone close and lively and happy. The appeal isn’t just the music but the dancing, the performers’ acrobatic moves, and the infectious happiness of the crowd. We found ourselves next to a group of Moroccans who shouted and sang along and danced, and who drew us into their circle to dance and sing with them.

Vendors sold balloons, roasted corn, Rasta hats, slices of pineapple and coconut, sesame candy, and festival swag.

Seagulls kept soaring into the light above the stage, shining white before vanishing into the unlit sky.  Two guys nearby waved Moroccan flags overhead. People lifted children onto their shoulders. The screens of cameras and cell phones glowed amongst the crowd. Fabulous.

Sahara road trip, Part I

We were a little nervous about renting a car in Morocco. But we asked a lot of questions, listened to stories from other travelers, and decided to do it.

Sitting on the couch at Mami Tours, we asked: is it an automatic? Does it have air conditioning? Does it have a CD player? Yes, yes, yes, he said.

Two out of three isn’t so bad. It’s just that it’s been a long time since I’ve driven a car with manual transmission. And that was in New Zealand, on the other side of the road. And car.

But it comes back to you.

Even on roads like this.

With goats crossing. (Sorry for the windshield smudge in the photo.)

Mara took the wheel first and navigated the traffic and roundabouts of Marrakesh and our first taste of Moroccan highway. Once we started to approach the Atlas Mountains, we switched.

The Tizi-n-Tichka Pass is Morocco’s highest road pass, reaching 2260 meters (7413 feet) before descending again. The road winds through pale rock, green valleys, red rock, cedar forest, and black rock before it brings you into the desert.

A fes in Fes. Or a fez in Fez, if you rather.

French spelling, English spelling, whatever.

I bought a fes in the town of Fes. My brother used to collect hats, and I couldn’t help myself. I gave it to him when I got back yesterday.

Since internet wasn’t quite as easy to come by in Morocco as I’d anticipated, I’m going to write a bit about my trip now that I’m home.

We arrived in Fes late in the day. Once we finally landed in Casablanca (after the saga of the cancelled flight and the unhelpful airline and the new flight a day later with a layover that hadn’t been part of our original itinerary), we took the train to Casa’s main station and then hopped the express train to Fes.

When we stepped off the train, bleary-eyed and travel-weary, the sky was pink from the setting sun, and the call to prayer echoed even through the station. The moon was already rising. Finally, we were where we wanted to be.

The Fes medina (old city) is said to be the world’s largest car-free area. The little car we’d gotten into parked outside a gate, and we took our bags and followed our driver into the narrow streets. Some were steep enough to have steps on one side. All curved and intersected unpredictably. It was getting dark, and only men – and a couple of mules pulling carts – walked the streets. Small groups of men sat on low chairs, smoking and talking drinking glasses of mint tea.

We reached our riad, a traditional Moroccan house, and sat in the cool of the open courtyard. The building is over six hundred years old, and the owners (who are from Europe and the Middle East, apparently) did a beautiful job restoring the carved plaster, intricately painted wood, and the zellij (mosaic) tiled floors. (That’s it in the photo on the right.)

After dumping our dusty bags in our room, we made our way up the narrow stairs to the upper terrace. There we could see nearly all of the medina, other terraces and  illuminated minarets stretching over the hills. The sky was now almost dark, the moon almost full.

The next night was a lunar eclipse. We returned to the terrace, this time with a bottle of Moroccan white wine. It wasn’t great, said the friendly staff, “but it does what it’s supposed to do.” We watched the moon darken and then emerge again over the lights of the city.

More about the lovely town of Fes soon.

The Sahara

I just spent ages typing a post about driving through the Atlas Mountains to see the Sahara, and it’s gone. So for now: I’m in Marrakech, heading to Essaouira this afternoon, and I’ll write another time about remembering how to drive stick on winding mountain roads, riding a camel through red sand dunes, sleeping under the stars, and wandering through old kasbahs with crumbling pisé walls.

Morocco

I made it here. Eventually. After a canceled flight and other hijinks. Fes was wonderful/ we stayed in the medina, near the square where craftsmen hammer brass and copper plates by hand and men laze at the cafe. The riads (old houses) and other buildings (medersas, palaces, mosques) are stunning, with layers of deep carving and colored tile and intricately painted wood, and central open-air courtyards planted with bananas, oranges, jasmine, hibiscus, and other leafy lovely things.. Museums hold old weapons and scabbards, ceramics, wedding robes, carpets, urns, teapots, platters, carved doors. This French keyboard is confusing the hell out of me, and I’m off to see Yves St. Laurent’s gardens.
More later.

Films about girls by guys.

I went to the Connecticut Out Film Fest last Wednesday night for a double bill of chick-chick flicks:

A Different Kind of Love
Dir. Martin Dolensky, 2010, Czech Republic, 61 min

Eloise’s Lover
Dir. Jesús Garay, 2009, Spain, 92 min

I liked them – particularly Eloise’s Lover (scene pictured here) – but found them frustrating. Then I noticed that both films were directed by men. It explains a lot, particularly in the Czech film.

Here are some tropes the two have in common:

• The “established” lesbian, the one who is out and comfortable with her identity, has long hair in an unconventional style. (You know, not so unconventional as to be short.)
• Beginning to come out will leave you alienated from your mother or your kids (depending on which is featured in the plot), and definitely from your peers.
• People will think you’re a perv, or will have awkward conversations in which they assert that they’re fine with it but warn you that everyone else will think you’re a perv.
• Hooking up after having a crush seems to result in assumptions that a relationship will develop.
• There’s no happy ending.

I can think of a lot of things that annoy me about the Czech film. Eva’s talking-head scenes gave away plot points so that other scenes didn’t have to do the storytelling as clearly. Daniella, the younger teacher, seemed to function as an adult, and she was supposed to be the one experienced with same-sex relationships; but when it came to dating, she had absolutely no capacity to think ahead or make rational decisions. (Getting it on in her classroom after school? Renting an apartment without even talking to the woman she wants to share it with? Not realizing that a woman with two kids will always have those two kids? If she’s that much of a moron, make her consistently a moron.)

The storytelling in Eloise’s Lover, fortunately, made a great contrast. With the way it cuts back and forth between the hospital and earlier scenes, you only sort of know where it’s going, and without knowing at all how the characters got there and how it ends. The characters made sense, and some lovely acting (Asia’s mother!) added depth. But the way the camera lingers on Eloise and Asia, particularly when they’re swimming and floating, just screams, “A man made this movie!”

In the woods

I went hiking yesterday last Saturday [I forgot to finish and post this, of course], and it was the most confusing hikes I’ve ever done. It was also beautiful.

About the confusing part: the trail and blazes didn’t match the map after a couple of miles, so even though the trail was clear and we kept following the blue blazes, we couldn’t figure out why we were in a low pine wood getting eaten by mosquitos instead of climbing Lamentation Mountain.

Then we heard cars, and pretty soon we came out to a road. The same road, we realized, that we’d driven in on. So we were a mile or two away from our starting point – by road – and not all that close to our intended end point, where my car was waiting for us.

So we followed the road, taking a little detour around a pond and through a cemetery and then back to the road, and it started to rain, and a car honked at us (for what? Walking? Existing?), and just as the rain turned to a downpour we reached our starting point. And drove to my car, and tried to figure out where the trail had diverged.

We found out later that they’re in the middle of moving the trail but haven’t gotten around to, oh, putting up signs saying that you’re about to go in a huge and confusing circle.

Anway, for the good part. We saw:

• Tons of ladyslippers. I’ve never seen so many in one day. And a bunch of jack-in-the-pulpits.
• Three snakes. Two of them were a pair, a pretty big one paralleled by a slim little young thing, sunning themselves on some rocks. They might’ve been black rat snakes. The other one was pretty small.
• A mama quail acting like a spastic, injured freak in order to distract us from her babies. But soon the babies startled, too, and about six tiny dark chicks jumped up and starting running deeper in the woods, crying, “peep! peep!”
• Two families of geese and their goslings. A pair of swans and their cygnets. A bunch of ducks, including mallards and one white duck.
• A great blue heron, taking off in slow motion above a lily-covered pond.
• A low-lying pine grove, damp and cool and lovely. And full of mosquitoes, but that’s okay.

I’m heading back into the woods this weekend. Can’t wait.