"Fes...My Home through a Hole in my... " a Fes Travel Page by JamalMorelli

It is known that it is the slight smell of decay that gives jasmine it's depth and it's elusive quality. With Fes, decay is the ambient environment and yet no place has ever seemed so alive to me. It's like sharing a cigarette, there is communal decay, a delirious consensual slow death. And like a cigarette, there is the perfume of addiction; even though little changes in Fes - everything seems different from hour to hour... I can't take my eyes and ears off of it, can't stop myself from tasting her, from listening to her wild cries of cats, children, donkeys, animals waiting for slaughter, fish-shoe-driedbread salesman and collectors...cries of elated and enraged shopkeepers, glue sniffers and cripples, giggles of girls both veiled and barely dressed, boys with long greetings, soft generous eyes and puffed up chest....cries of the multitudes of prayer calls... like my long time love and other home, New Orleans, we don't bury our dead here... they dance and we dance with them..

Even more Jam
Jamal Morelli

Moroccan tips at a lick

Death is presented as matter of factly as your naked body before an audience of one thousand. There is no pretty version of it made to pinken it, soften it, make you more attracted to it. Death presented as itself is such a Fessian constant - whether through the butchers, the riads, the rotting beggars, the donkey excrement in your path. It is always cause for giddy elation, the sacrifice...
This picture was taken on my birthday, which coincided with the Eid. My friend, brother SiMohammed, asked me to sacrifice a goat. It was an honor his father would have done had he been alive. There wasn't a question of whether killing the goat and my birthday would complement each other - it was just assumed they would. So, after saying, 'bismillah' and 'allahu akbar' while slitting it's throat I watched the blood form a pool at SiMohammed's daughters feet, creeping up on her like a fast moving rain cloud. Nothing. Her face registered no fear or disgust. If anything she wanted to look at the eyes, still glistening on the decapitated head of the goat

Moroccan tips at a lick

People are flowing under you, over you, watching you... Spying women in those tiny windows, spying tourists from their second floor cafe as well as on the streets, spying guides, and lustful men and women who follow you, waiting for a window to flirt in, waiting for you to act. You may feel tired in Fes... as if it wasn't just the wandering through the ground spider tunnels and barely passable streets... as if you have been performing - and you have. You have been on stage the second you get into Fes. The Medivael PanOpticon, you are being watched.
Well, I suppose the next thing to do is love it... become a Fassi and participate in a 1300 year ritual of commerce and communion, prayer and promotion, laywork and love...

When I am not filming or traveling, I welcome guests at my place but don't ask me anything about restaraunts, hotels, guides, etc. Just give me enough of a head's up and then it's "Marhaba, travelmonkey!" Again, I have no (and want no) connection to the tourism business here or anywhere. If you want the absolute best free help for Moroccan travel go here


and if you want to see what I am up to (and where I am up to) go here
JamJam Morelli's Gig
Moroccan tips at a lick

UPDATE LITE: The only sushi restaurant in Fes has opened about a month ago. Spot on for a chap like me who lives for the stuff.