"We are targeting Hank Freid as an egregious illegal hotelier ... with a particularly insidious past," organizer Yarrow Willman-Cole told The Observer.

Mr. Freid earned the dubious distinction as one of New York City's "Worst Landlords" after contracting with the government to provide housing for homeless persons living with HIV/AIDS at his hotels amid hard economic times, then evicting those tenants to make way for upcale renovations once the economy rebounded.

In a prior interview with The Observer, Mr. Freid expressed frustration about how the neighborhood responded with anger both when he brought the AIDS patients in and then again when he booted them out.

“It’s very ironic that, no matter what you did in that particular situation, they were so strong against it,” Mr. Freid said. “Originally, when I brought this into the community, they were against it. Then, when I looked to take it out of the community, they were against that.

“I was only trying to help, and it backfired on me,” he added. “So I went the other way.”

Activists counter that Mr. Freid raked in millions of dollars from his participation in the government housing program but gave little back. "Instead of putting the money into making his buildings safe, clean and secure, he let the buildings crumble," according to a press release. "When the contract with [the city] was terminated, he began building his chain of flashy 'budget chic' hotels in single room occupacy (SRO) residential buildings! Hank Freid has scammed the New York City housing system for too long. Tenants are fed up, and they want the City to act now!"

Activists are lobbying city officials to pass a bill to crack down on illegal hotel conversions.

Zitoune is Arabic for "olive," another commodity of the souk, where there are stalls that sell only olives-heaped in glistening piles of variegated hues, from blue-black to pale green-which the vendor spoons into cones of rough brown paper. Here, the olives are in a small tajine-a traditional glazed pottery dish with a conical lid-that's brought to the table when you sit down, along with anise bread, olive rolls and the pungent leather menus.

Three months ago, Zitoune took over the premises formerly occupied by the unprepossessingly named (and short-lived) Menu, which before that was a French bistro, Le Gans. It took two years for the co-owner, Alain Bennouna-who got tired of staring at the crowds piling into Pastis across the street while the tables in his restaurant remained empty-to look to his Moroccan roots for inspiration. The decision has paid off. The new place finally has a buzz. It's filled not just with the young and hip, but also older Village intellectuals with their grizzled hair and baggy sweaters. Maître d' Saad Khal-laayoun, Mr. Bennouna's nephew, patrols the floor, presiding over the room and greeting customers like a downtown version of Le Cirque's Sirio Maccioni. The dining room still looks much like that of a bistro, with large mirrors hanging on bare brick walls, a long bar, and mullion windows giving onto the corner of Gansevoort and Greenwich streets. But Moroccan lamps with cheerful red and blue shades have been added, and traditional tajines, unglazed pottery, blue-green ceramic plates and hand-woven baskets are used for serving the food.

The service is friendly, although there can be waits between courses. At the next table one Saturday night, six cool-looking young Asians posed for pictures, which the waiter had offered to take for them. The waiter sported an impressive calligraphic tattoo on his upper arm, and I asked him what it was. "It's my name, Yaseen, in Korean." Why Korean? "Because I'm in love with a Korean woman," he replied simply.

Zitoune's chef and co-owner, Julian Clauss-Ehlers, is an Englishman who trained in France. He has subtly updated Moroccan cuisine, adding details and refinements to many of the traditional dishes. Moroccans like to combine savory with sweet, which they do in their tajines (stews), mixing meat and fruit, as well as in their pastries and pies. Briwats are little phyllo tubes that Mr. Clauss-Ehlers pan-fries after filling with crab and mungbean vermicelli. Delicate and light-better than spring rolls-they're served with a spicy orange dressing and a thick tomato chutney that sets off the crab nicely. B'istiya is a flaky round pastry, usually stuffed with pigeon, that's sprinkled with confectioners' sugar and cinnamon. Mr. Clauss-Ehlers fills it with shredded duck, nuts and raisins. It's disappointingly bland, like the sort of thing dished up for tourists in second-rate Moroccan hotels.

But there are no complaints about the crisp chunks of deep-fried cod served with a relish of diced cucumber (wrapped nouvelle-style in a paper-thin cucumber slice) and a creamy, rich mayonnaise made with a blend of Moroccan spices, cilantro and parsley. I like this dish better than the skewered shrimp, grilled and served hot on a cold wild rice and avocado salad-a strange mixing of temperatures. The platter of traditional Moroccan salads-carrot, chickpea and spicy eggplant-is perfectly pleasant. But the updated carpaccio of lamb res el hannout is a gem: thin circles of meat sprinkled with a Moroccan spice mixture and served with a mound of couscous salad with cinnamon and raisins, and a dressing made from fresh mint and harissa.

Short ribs, which are painstakingly emptied onto the plate from a small earthenware vessel that looks like a miniature Ali Baba urn, are overwhelmed by cumin. Grilled marinated lamb, on the other hand, suffers from a lack of spices. The person eating it reached over for my harissa sauce, which comes with the couscous. The grains in this dish are light and fluffy, but the seven vegetables piled on top of them are virtually indistinguishable (almost like British vegetables in the old days). Even the traditional bowl of broth on the side fails to perk up this lot.

But all is forgiven when you taste Mr. Clauss-Ehlers' lamb tajine. This is a great dish, made with melting pieces of lamb in thick, dark sauce, with caramelized quince and toasted Israeli pearl couscous. It's hard to choose between this and the veal cheeks, which are simmered with dates, almonds and honey, a concoction out of the Song of Solomon. The Cornish hen is juicy, enlivened by a side dish of spinach bakoula, simmered with preserved lemon and green olives. It's worth getting a side order of merguez, too, a spicy lamb sausage that arrives in a coil.

The inexpensive wine list has plenty of good choices in the $30 range to go with this food. I'd like to see some Moroccan wines, too.

For dessert, the chocolate-cappuccino mousse is outstanding, zapped with res el hannout spices that bring out the flavor of the chocolate. Poached figs look pretty but are tasteless, served with Moroccan pancakes and honey and black currant sauce. I am not bowled over by the spiced couscous with vanilla ice cream (a Moroccan answer to rice pudding, and not nearly as good), or the orange cake, made with layers of sponge alternating with orange mousse, which seemed to have lingered too long in the refrigerator.

Zitoune is a welcome addition to this rapidly changing neighborhood. The prices are right (there are no main courses over $20), and so is the friendly atmosphere. If it gets too successful, who knows? Maybe Keith McNally will have to follow Mr. Bennouna's example and start serving British food at Pastis.

Zitoune *

46 Gansevoort Street

675-5224

Dress : Casual

Noise Level : Fine

Wine List : Reasonably priced, mostly French and American

Credit Cards : All major, except Discover

Price Range : Brunch, main courses, $7 to $13; lunch, $7 to $13; dinner, $16 to $20.50; $25 prix fixe (includes glass of wine); tasting menu, $42.50

Lunch : Monday to Friday, noon to 3 p.m.

Dinner : Monday to Thursday, 5:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, to midnight; Sunday, to 10:30 p.m.

Brunch: Saturday and Sunday, noon to 3 p.m.

* Good

* * Very Good

* * * Excellent

* * * * Outstanding

No Star: Poor

We all know what happened to Leonardo DiCaprio. There's a camera crew in position every time he goes to the bathroom. But what about his Titanic co-star? Not to worry. Kate Winslet is back, doing serious work in a strange, intoxicating film called Hideous Kinky , as far from the fame and lights of Hollywood hysteria as a plane ticket and an independent budget can carry her. It's as though she's reminding the world that the big bucks and the monster grosses of Titanic were an accident, and the real work for a dedicated artist of 23 lies elsewhere. And she has the talent to prove it.

In Hideous Kinky (a title as offbeat as the movie itself), she plays Julia, a disillusioned single mother who flees London in 1972, leaving a dreary life and a failed marriage behind, for Morocco with her two daughters. She is trying to find inner peace, freedom from control, and whatever adventures the wind blows her way. Julia is a rebellious hippie looking for her inner child, while her real children need the things other kids take for granted, like food, shelter, security and a father. While waiting for the child-support checks that never arrive, Julia makes crude dolls to sell in the medina and houses the girls in a hotel for prostitutes, finding this "annihilation of the ego" nourishing, while the life of an impoverished flower child takes its toll on her two daughters.

Six year-old Lucy (Carrie Mullan) adjusts to whatever comes along, but 8-year-old Bea (Bella Riza) longs for a more normal life with real friends, school uniforms and mashed potatoes. Dressing the children in Bedouin rags, Julia sinks more and more into the Arab culture. She even takes a lover when she meets Bilal, a full-time vagabond and part-time hustler, acrobat and quarry worker played by Saïd Taghmaoui, a French-born actor of Moroccan descent with a dark, oily streetwise charm. Running free in the color and chaos of Marrakech without money, discipline or a roof over their heads, this motley little band learns that hedonism has a price. The title refers to a word game the girls play to describe their life style with Mummy.

Based on a true story by Esther Freud about the time she lived in North Africa with her own disenfranchised mother, Hideous Kinky embraces the philosophies of hippiedom and the quest for Nirvana while telling the story of Julia's family's adventures. The unfolding of head-on collisions between two distinctly different cultures unravels like pages from a diary, and Scottish director Gillies ( Regeneration ) MacKinnon paints a vast and heady canvas of Morocco's bewildering but fascinating sights and sounds. He does not feel constrained by typical movie brevity. His scenes go on and on, sometimes unrelated to the larger structure, like a bore who dominates a dinner table conversation by holding court too long. Yet you go away with a vibrant feeling of Marrakech-the heat, the smells, the bazaars, the overcrowding, the snake charmers, the primitive music and poetry-a world as rustic and foreign as the surface of the moon. The visuals often cover for emotional subtexts that get sidetracked. Julia is an unconventional woman searching for spirituality, but in her selfish disregard for the children's welfare she's not very likable. After being poisoned by a surrogate father who can only provide tins of spoiled sardines, the look on the girls' faces when they spy their first bowl of cornflakes makes you wonder when Julia will come to her senses.

Kate Winslet miraculously manages to bring some dimension to this carefree but exasperating woman, gullible and childlike yet passionate and needy-a reckless foreigner in a bizarre country she never fully conquers, a spirited mother for whom traditional responsibilities are easily disregarded. With a Rubenesque body that doesn't appear to have ever visited the inside of a Reebok Gym and a refreshing absence of makeup, she's a welcome antidote to the anorexic zombies that populate the screen today, and Hideous Kinky is a brave vehicle that showcases her unusual talents winningly.

24 Hours on Ecstasy

While Hideous Kinky is neither hideous nor kinky, both adjectives apply to Go , a wild, violent, sexy and thoroughly entertaining movie directed and photographed by Doug Liman, who demonstrated his affinity for edgy, dark, quirky material with Swingers and isn't the least bit reluctant to stick to his style. From structure to plot to smartass dialogue, Go owes so much to Quentin Tarantino it could be called Pulp Fiction 2 , but it has a unique and salty flavor very much its own.

Basically, it tells three separate but parallel stories that occur during 24 hours in the lives of a group of post-Gen-Xers in Hollywood and Las Vegas, incorporating every frayed element of nauseating youth-market movies in which everybody gets stoned, waves loaded guns around, talks incessantly about orgasms and vomits a lot. Yet this one is as different as it is annoyingly familiar. Fresh, constantly surprising and entertaining when you least expect fun, Go may be the best youth market movie so far.

An engaging clean-cut cast acting decadent won me over sooner than I planned. Sarah Polley, an Uma Thurman clone from Canada, gets things off to a frenzied start as a tough cookie named Ronna, an 18-year-old supermarket cashier on the verge of being evicted from her apartment who plans a one-time drug deal to pay the rent, selling 20 hits of ecstasy to Zack and Adam, two gay soap opera stars, played hilariously with straight faces by Jay Mohr and the irresistibly charming Scott Wolf. To score the drugs, Ronna has to leave her best friend Claire with the dealer for collateral. When the drug deal backfires, Ronna flushes the real drugs down the john and flees for her life, substituting aspirin for the ecstasy and selling to kids at a rave who think they're drug-savvy. On her way to pay off the drug dealer and rescue Claire, Ronna gets hit by a speeding yellow convertible, thrown into a sewage ditch and left for dead.

The scene shifts to Simon (Desmond Askew), a brainless British expatriate who works with Ronna at the supermarket, on his way to Vegas with three pals who steal a car, shoot a bouncer in a sex club and get pursued in a hairy car chase that would frighten the silk socks off James Bond. The third story returns us to the fate of the two TV glamour boys, who have gone undercover in a drug sting to work off their arrest for possession, only to find themselves the reluctant guests of the bisexual vice cop (William Fichtner) and his oversexed Barbie-doll wife (Jane Krakowski) at a creepy Christmas dinner where they are the dessert.

The three-story structure seems labored and everything is as hard to follow as a map of downtown Tel Aviv. Then the dots start to connect: The handsome actors are the ones who drove the yellow killer convertible, Ronna isn't dead after all, the thugs tracing the four clowns back to Los Angeles from Vegas for revenge work out a compromise. The stories unlock their mysteries and collate into an ironic fusion of intertwining destinies, and you end up laughing, scratching your head with a dumb expression like you've been caught with spinach in your teeth, and marveling at the inventiveness of John August's roller coaster script.

Take characters as scummy as the ones in every other bad movie and go with them into uncharted territory, and you have the exuberantly fearless Mr. Liman's formula for impudent (and amazingly sly) filmmaking success. From the lusty vice cop with a passion for pecs and erotic cologne to the virginal, naïve Claire (who is only stoned on ginseng and Dexatrim) every character provides a jovial kinkiness that becomes amusingly delicious. The superb ensemble acting and the giddy direction that stops short of farcical horror (it's Tarantino with lollipops) prove it's not the basics that matter, but what you do with them. Go does take you places you don't want to go, but you're kind of happy when you get there.

It's Not Shakespeare

Imelda Staunton, the cheerful actress who played Gwyneth Paltrow's fussy nurse in Shakespeare in Love , has brought her cabaret act over from London and plopped it down at the Firebird Cafe (through April 17). Eschewing a thing called truth in advertising, it was originally billed as "Imelda Staunton and Her Jazz Band," but there's no jazz in sight. Flat-chested in a sad, red strapless dress, she bravely warbles a weird collection of some of the worst songs ever perpetrated, and the four loud, twangy musicians who accompany her (including a pianist who spilled an entire glass of orange juice all over the grand piano) have absolutely nothing to do with jazz. It's watered-down pop-blues with a little country western thrown in for total confusion, performed in a wafer-thin delivery.

With a sweet face, an easy grace and not much voice, Ms. Staunton tackles Patsy Cline, the Beatles and "Danny Boy" but not until Noël Coward's wistfully felt "If Love Were All" does she show the capacity to touch. Mostly, she wails lyrics like "I want a brief encounter in a stolen car/A hand on my buttocks in a Spanish bar" and "I'd rather be found in a flophouse bed than under the ground with dirt on my head." There is one funny bit where she impersonates Dame Kiri Te Kanawa trying to sing Tom Jones, but a dismal "Frankie and Johnny" sung to a twanging metal guitar while the drummer pounds out a rum-tum-tum Civil War dirge will send you searching nervously for the exit door.

Merenid ruins, on the north side of Fez, on Dec. 31. We got the message and

drove back to the hotel. We figured the hotel had sicced the police on us

that morning when we declined an official guide. I went back to the desk

and obediently requested an official guide.

Abdul appeared wearing a government guide badge on his brown burnoose.

He was tall and lugubrious, with chocolate-colored eyes and a grim

judgmental expression. But then, it was Ramadan. I don't know whose

idea it was to go to Morocco in the off-season, at the height of Ramadan,

but there we were, and at the tender mercies of Abdul.

At first we liked him. He was a peculiar combination of insolent and

imperious. He led us around the medina, the covered old city of Fez, and

clapped his hands to keep us to the side when donkeys walked by and berated

us when we were moving too slowly or when anyone strayed. There were six of

us and a baby. He led us down the intestinal passageways, with their

atmosphere of ancient menace, trapped air and claustrophobia, and made us

feel helpless.

In mid-afternoon, Abdul proposed that we go back to his house to break

Ramadan with him. He called his wife on a cell phone, and as it got closer

to 5:30 he became more and more impatient. By this time, I should add, I

was fasting, too. I felt too guilty eating, surrounded by sallow fasting

Muslims with sour Ramadan breath. Isn't that what religious ritual is

all about, peer pressure? Do you think I chose to be an American Jew? We

drove rapidly through the west side of Fez. Inside Abdul's apartment

his wife was busy cooking, and his son was copying out Arabic letters in a

notebook. His pretty daughter flirted with us, and I wondered how soon

before she was married off and her charms beaten into the earth.

I sat next to Abdul and his wife brought out a big platter. A nature

show was going on television and there was a portrait of King Hassan II on

the wall. That's the compass of free speech in Morocco. There are

pictures of King Hassan II everywhere, but no one is allowed to say

anything about the king, though everyone privately whispers that he has a

harem of hundreds of concubines. A guy I picked up hitchhiking in the

mountains later explained that speech is strictly forbidden on three

subjects: the king, the nation and religion. So you're not allowed to

question the wanton destruction of women's public talents, or the

notion that the memorization of the Koran at age 6 is religious study. As

visitors, we acted out. We called the King, King HaHa the Second.

Abdul ate three bowls of harira rapidly, then, taking my biceps,

announced solemnly that we were invited to his house the following night,

too. It would be a feast. His in-laws were coming in from the country, with

chicken from the country.

"We're going to Marrakech," I said.

"You can leave the next day," Abdul said. "You only need

a day in Marrakech."

He drove with us back to the hotel. We were going out at 9 to celebrate

New Year's, and I lay down to take a nap. I'd been asleep five

minutes when Abdul called from downstairs. I went down and he informed me

dolefully that we had to eat at the hotel that night, their New Year's

gala at $100 a head. I told Abdul it was none of his business and went back

upstairs. We'd been over this with the management that morning, before

our illegal guide got handcuffed. They said we had to eat the dinner there.

We threatened to check out. The hotel backed down.

Now the hotel was reneging. My friend John and I made a pact not to lose

our temper and went to the front desk to talk to the manager. A short, fat

choleric man with a thick mustache, he kept pointing at an unintelligible

line he'd scrawled across the bottom of my wife's typewritten fax

when confirming our reservation, a line he said read, " Dîner

Saint Sylvestre, obligatoire, 900d par personne ."

"Saint Sylvestre is known all over the world," the manager

cried. "Saint Sylvestre is the feast of New Year's."

The manager kept shouting at us, telling us not to shout. I suppose it

was inevitable that we lost our temper. He waved the fax in John's

face. "You are an American actor. But I tell you, by my god, you will

pay for this meal." John's an architect.

Neither John and I had been so upset for years. It wasn't like we

were going to put our god up against his god. We don't really have

gods in the United States, just the media. We sat down on a nearby couch to

figure things out, but we sensed we were powerless to stop them charging

us. The Moroccan unit of currency is the dirham, worth about 11 cents.

Basically, $99 a head for bad hotel food, a lot more than our hotel bill.

All my cultural relativism went out the window. I remembered the friends

who'd said, You take your freedom for granted, you have no idea what

it's like to live in an Islamic country. The culture was grinding,

authoritarian and overwhelmingly masculine.

Our ally joined us on the couch.

"I think you must eat here," Abdul said.

"I would spit their food out of my mouth before I ate it," I

said.

Abdul sat up straight and shook his head. "You must not say

that," he said. Then he held me by the biceps and asked how many of us

would be coming to his house tomorrow night for dinner.

"Right now, we have enough problems, Abdul."

"But we have chicken coming from the country. I have called my

in-laws."

John leaned toward Abdul, crossing his wrists at his chest in a vaguely

religious gesture. "Abdul? No. No. No. No. No." Abdul stood up

dolefully. I gave him 300 dirhams for the guiding, $33. That's not

counting his cut of the inflated purchases we made in the market, the

burnoose he got one of us to fork over $120 for that was worth $30.

He started to walk away, then turned back to me lugubriously. "If

you change your mind–"

It was more relaxed in the south. We went to Essaouira on the coast, a

town whose name endeared me because it has all five vowels. My wife and I

rented bikes and rode the 10 kilometers to the dusty settlement of Diabat,

where Jimi Hendrix once lived. We left the bikes with kids in the village

and walked out along the sands, looking for Jimi's house. A handsome

guy with a goatee appeared between the dunes, leading a camel with two

Germans riding on it, and said to follow him through the scrub, he was

going to Jimi's house. He insisted that my wife get up on the camel

with the Germans.

Jimi's crib was an abandoned pavilion of white stone that Aziz said

had been a royal palace in the something century. It had hippie graffiti

going back many years. Sand filled the interior passageways. A drug dealer

in blue harem pants sat out on a broken wall, whittling and listening to

music on a boombox.

The others ate lunch on Jimi's porch and I sat in the sand

investigating the camel, his huge soft footpads and milky blue eye. He had

a flat, callused, footstool-sized bump on his chest that Aziz said he uses

to grind his enemies into the ground. Now and then Max issued a bubbling

roar.

Aziz asked us to come over to his house for dinner. We did. There was

the usual nature show going on the black-and-white TV, and Aziz's wife

brought out a ceramic platter filled with couscous. Three of us used our

hands, but my wife used a spoon. She ate a lot of couscous and vegetables but didn't touch the

chicken in the middle.

"You don't eat the chicken?" Aziz asked.

"I'm a vegetarian," my wife said.

"You are not," I said. "You're lying."

My wife gave me an unbelievable look.

She was toasted over that for days. Walking back to our hotel that

night, she said, "Even Sissela Bok would understand that lie."

I blamed it on all the time I've spent hanging out in the

anti-Clinton camp. The camp followers act as if no one lies about anything.

They quote Ms. Bok's crisp, stupid statement, "Veracity functions

as the foundation of relations among human beings; when this trust shatters

or wears away, institutions collapse."

Actually, lies sometimes serve to preserve institutions. In his

revisionist treatise on lying, A Pack of Lies , the Australian

sociologist John A. Barnes points out that in many societies, people go

into agonies of shame when certain lies are exposed. In politics there is

an expectation that people lie, that it is sometimes their duty to do so.

Politicians who don't lie don't last–Walter Mondale and

Michael Dukakis, whose deficit in that department the Democrats set out to

correct with a vengeance in 1992.

This is not to endorse lying, but to recognize its inevitability. Still,

a politician couldn't lie successfully if there weren't an

understanding that mostly people tell the truth. "Coherent public life

would, I think, be impossible if no one ever trusted any politician,"

Mr. Barnes writes. "To maintain a complex social fabric we have to be

prepared sometimes to give some politicians the benefit of the doubt; they

have to avoid excessive, and hence counterproductive, lying."

Mr. Barnes' delightful book is filled with examples. My favorite is

the Mehinacu community of Brazil. At the time they were visited in the late

60's, there were 57 of them and they had lots of adultery. But because

everything could be so easily observed in a small community, and gossip was

rampant, the people constantly lied about adultery, too. People learned not

to believe their own eyes. The social order had a couple of co-existing

realities at the same time, one half-fictional. Lying preserved social

order.

We got home on the 10th. I had cultural readjustment problems. For some

reason, I didn't want to be back. I called the Moroccan Embassy in

Washington and asked the media officer about King HaHa the Second's

hundreds of concubines. She bridled. "No, that is not true. I'm

not aware of that."

I chuckled, but then I turned on the television and the king's

harem was all anyone here could talk about. I'd worried about being

out of touch and asked my sister to save all the papers. But what had I

missed? Nothing. Everyone was still talking about Monica a year later. It

was hard to say which was worse, not being able to talk about the

king's exploitation of women, or being forced to talk about that and

nothing else for years.

I don't know whose idea it was to go to an Islamic country during

Ramadan in the off-season, but I missed it bad.