Youth Against Fashionism

Having returned, briefly, from the land of the open-throated alifs (Hala Wallah at your boy!), we’ve got several updates coming your way in the coming day or days. Today we’ll be covering some fashion happening around town.

Juelz

Although TBE’s dream of opening a hamburger joint in Cairo is currently on sabbatical, we’re happy to announce that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in the tonier districts of Zamalek and beyond. It is with great pleasure that we announce the founding of Amoura Designs, the brainchild of a most stylish friend of TBE, which is currently producing gorgeous jewelry like that which graces the top of this post. Check the Facebook page for ordering information and more work samples.

TBE Gets Results (Algerian Embassy Update)

يا موزة... يك

TBE was innocently strolling through Zamalek the other day, en route to the impromptu petting zoo that has sprung up in the meat section of Alfa supermarket, when we saw a large number of vehicles brimming with state security deployed around the Algerian embassy. Our initial thought was that perhaps Egypt’s government had gotten wind of a plan to attack the Algerian embassy. Most likely, we concluded, for having the gall to sully the embassy’s exterior gate with poorly reproduced photographs of the Algerian countryside, an offense about which TBE has written previously here.

Snap of the Week

Location: Tahrir Street next door to Koshari al-Tahrir.

In an otherwise unassuming men’s clothing store, one finds this truly peculiar window display. As you can see, it depicts a rabbit drinking a can of Apple Schweppes from a straw, with a fedora-type hat mounted on its back. A bit harder to make out in this photo, but more easily discerned in the pic below the jump, is a gun pointed out toward the street.

A store employee assured TBE that the rabbit is in fact real. When asked to comment on the display’s meaning, he replied, “كده يعني”

Quick Links for June 23, 2009

DJ QUIK

Music:

THE BEST OF DJ QUIK: MIXED BY MATTHEW AFRICA

Quik makes incredibly beautiful laid-back G-funk beats. He also has the silkiest hair in hip-hop, as witnessed in this video. TBE’s crack research team recently discovered this chronicle of DJ Quik’s many hairstyles.

YOUNG JEEZY: TRAPPIN’ AIN’T DEAD

By now everyone knows Jeezy’s last album was better than Wayne’s and maybe the best hip hop record of 2008, but it’s still said as though saying it is breaking some sort of taboo. Anyway this mixtape isn’t amazing but it’s pretty good, especially the freestyles over other people’s beats.

LIL’ WAYNE & FRIENDS: EVERY GIRL

Speaking of Wayne, this is the video for his entry into the hottest song of the summer sweepstakes.

Words:

AIPAC spy case witness was urged to fake his own death.

Tony Judt calls Obama to account on Palestine in the NYT. Although TBE believes using a dictionary definition to start any piece of writing is just about the most hackneyed and cliched thing ever, we still applaud the Times for publishing this.

Pictures:

More Iran from the Big Picture.

Dr. Backsweat or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fanilla

"هات ستلا لو سمحت"

As a public service, TBE is today offering a primer on how to avoid that most perfidious of summertime scourges, back sweat. Please note that most of this advice is more applicable for our gentleman readers, so if you have any tips for the fairer sex, please post them in the comments.

The number one most important word in the whole lexicon of back sweat resistance is “fanilla (فانلة)” or what the British refer to as a vest and Americans a sleeveless undershirt or, more colloquially, a wife beater. Because the term vest is apt to cause confusion, sleeveless undershirt is a rather clunky construction and wife beater is a hetero- and lesbo-normative term probably propagated by a small minority of sexual deviants who actually get off on seeing back sweat and thus impugned the integrity of its number one enemy, TBE prefers the term fanilla to all others.

“آخر شياكة في خنازمالك: أقنعة “مايكل جاكسون

Michael Jackson, who has been known to occasionally don the niqab, has become an unlikely fashion icon for residents of Cairo’s tony Zamalek neighborhood.

Following on TBE’s earlier reporting on surgical mask usage in Zamalek, The Daily News Egypt is reporting that pharmacies on Cairo’s fairest isle are selling the masks like gangbusters, with upticks in sales also reported in Doqqi and Downtown.

TBE has also received unconfirmed reports that the newest weapon in the arsenal of Western and Egyptian women faced with unwanted advances from men is to claim that they have tested positive for swine flu, or to simply mimic the symptoms of said flu. No word on the efficacy of this technique was available at press time.

More news after the jump.

خنازمالك

Al-Marashli Street in Zamalek has temporarily been renamed “Pigs’ Alley,” as at least eight students residing in the AUC Dormitory have contracted Swine Flu. According to published reports, all eight are foreigners. 

A Boursa resident expressed anger at the news, telling our correspondent that he had planned to make Bolognese sauce tomorrow, but is now unsure whether he wants to enter the invalid island to buy some necessary ingredients, as he is certain that at least one of the ‘Zamalek 8’ has entered Seoudi and gotten swine flu all over the comestibles therein.

Despite the anger of the bolognese-craving masses, a festival atmosphere apparently pervades the quarantined dormitory, in which many TBE readers have no doubt whiled away many an hour. The Daily News Egypt reports that “Students have been playing cards in public and some have taken off their shirts, in an environment that has, in the past, sought a more conservative tone.” Playing cards in public is not an altogether strange reaction, but TBE is enthralled by the logic behind taking one’s shirt off in the event of a quarantine. TBE can envision several scenarios:

1. A group of students is sitting in the lobby and someone says, “This quarantine SUCKS! Let’s all take our shirts off!” After which a spontaneous cheer rises from the assembled grandees, followed by rapid shirt removal operations.
2. A Leninist vanguard from the Shirt Liberation Front was already present in the AUC dormitory, and are using the crisis to foment shirtlessness, in hopes that it catches on outside the dorm.
3. A Fox reality programming producer snuck into the dorm in the early hours of the outbreak, and they are currently filming “Temptation Island: Swine Flu Quarantine.”
4. The students are doing their part to burnish the AUC’s reputation for libertinism among the Egyptian public. All fronts at all times, as they say. 

An exclusive report about eating pork in Cairo after the jump.

Rick Ross Shops in Downtown Cairo

Keen observers of Cairo’s downtown fashion scene will be quick to notice that Rick Ross likely crossed the “AT-Lantic” to shop for the ensemble in which he was photographed for his new album cover. No word on whether his beau, Art, accompanied him on this shopping trip.

Ross has often rapped about his friendships with South and Central American criminals and political leaders. Might he be looking to strike up some new friendships in the Middle East?

Interested parties should head to Georges, on Talaat Harb just off the eponymously named square, should they wish to congratulate the owners on their sartorial coup and/or sample one of downtown’s finest selections of polka-dot scarves.