Haydarpaşa In Colors

Haydarpaşa, with all its all magnificence, is one of the most dominant buildings in Istanbul's soul. If Istanbul is a meeting point between east and west, then Haydarpaşa, being the main train station on the Asian side, is the very point where  these two symbolic poles touch each other perhaps in the most elegant manner. It's like an eagle head proudly standing at the edge of the Asian continent looking at the European shores of Istanbul with a confidence that it seems to take from the vast continent behind.

It was always depicted in the old Turkish movies as the first and rather shocking contact point between peasant Anatolian families and the "challenging" Istanbul with all its - to any foreign eye - intimidating skyline that can be observed right when stepping out the main hall. Perhaps it's this effect or surprise that it makes it "so Istanbul". 

In those movies, you would mostly observe these families observing this skyline - which seemingly is so much more different to what they have in their villages - with thoughtful eyes and maybe also hear the hero utter a word or two showing that he accepts the challenge he is being offered. That that challenge is still the major one going on in Turkey's politics today.

This show I came across by accident. Like many of the Cultural Capital - 2010 things, I didn't hear about this when it happened. Anyway, better than nothing, I'm putting it here.Nice one, indeed, done by these guys.

‘YEKPARE’ (monolithic) from nerdworking on Vimeo.

Yet Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

...

Oscar Wilde


Thanks to the Flying Dutchman from Turkey.

David and Goliath

Here is the result of our new project with ArtActors. This time we worked on Caravaggio's David and Goliath. 

I'm starting a new category - ArtActors - under which I'll be collecting our work.

Art Actors

Last weekend I was in Italy for my good friends' - Idil and Axel's wedding. There is no way for me to describe how much at home I felt in that creepy castle in the middle of beautiful Tuscany. About 30 people - most of them knowing each other since a very long time - became a great family under the same roof. Everywhere we turned we found friendship and care. It was a weekend filled with joy of life.

Result of one of our many little night time activities we organiszd during our stay; reenactment of Da Vinci's "Last Supper":

First with men;

and then with women;

Idil at this one just became the perfect Jesus.

There is a tendency in the group to turn it into a collective hobby where we would re-enact masterpieces like this one. 

Let's see how it develops. Hope to share further results here soon.

Monochrome From Yann Tiersen

Another nice song from Tiersen - this time with its video. I was thinking... Does liking the idea of this clip confirm I'm an engineer?

IF

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is." 

IG Nobel Prizes

IG Nobel Prizes is an actual scientific award that was designed around a very interesting concept.

Wikipedia's definition is:
"The Ig Nobel Prizes are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think". 

... Ten prizes are awarded each year in many categories, including the Nobel Prize categories of physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, literature, and peace, but also other categories such as public health, engineering, biology, and interdisciplinary research. With the exception of three prizes in the first year (Administratium, Josiah Carberry, and Paul DeFanti), the Ig Nobel Prizes are for genuine achievements."

I think this approach - I mean - bringing humor into the area of science is something we deeply need. Because somewhere I think, without humor, we tend to decay; things where humor isn't involved tend to become inhumane.

And here is my favorite research topic that was awarded in 2008:

ECONOMICS PRIZE. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that professional lap dancers earn higher tips when they are ovulating.

Makes sense - eh?

Looking for Some Monday Inspiration?

Yann Tiersen might be of help:

Magus - Bozcaada - Fowles

Magus - a novel by John Fowles - is my favorite book. There are so many elements in it that I like. It is the book for instance which made me question the "realness" of things around me in the most surprising manner: One night reading the book, I must have fallen asleep for a couple of hours to wake up in the middle of the night. I walked to the fridge in the kitchen - a reflex by me -, opened the door, looked into it and then for at least 5 seconds there was a time where I couldn't tell whether what was happening at that moment was real or not. I'm not talking about a case where you would merely try to tell, what you encounter is a dream or not. It was that coupled with: "Suppose this fridge is real; but the way I perceive the feta cheese in it - it doesn't feel real at all. Maybe the fridge is real but the cheese is a set up."

Bullshit in the end - but this is what this book does to you. It shakes your sense of reality - strongly, subtly and in a very smart, intelligent way.


Another thing that stroke me right away was that it was set on an imaginary Greek island - Phraxos (means "fenced") which Fowles created based on this experience in the Greek island of Spetsai. While the atmosphere he describes establishes the perfect background for his mind game, the way he explains the atmosphere in these islands is simply magic - particularly for someone like me with strong ties to one particular island in the very same Aegean sea: Bozcaada (Tenedos in Greek).




Now after maybe 7-8 years, I have returned to this book, this time reading its English original. How different it feels when compared to reading its Turkish translation! And how different the book feels after all the experiences I had in my last decade. 


Anyway, this is how he describes his experience in Spetsai in his introduction for Magus:


"...No writer will happily disclose the deeper biographical influences of his work, which are seldom those of outward date and occupation and I am no exception. But my island of Phraxos (the "fenced" island) was the real Greek island of Spetsai, where I taught in 1951 and 1952 at a boarding school... 

Away from its inhabited corner Spetsai was truly haunted, though by subtler - and more beautiful - ghosts than those I have created. Its pine-forest silences were uncanny, unlike those I have experienced anywhere else; like an eternally blank page waiting for a note or a word. They gave the most curious sense of timelessness and of incipient myth. In no place was it less likely that something would happen; yet somehow happening lay always poised. The genius loci was very similar indeed to that of Mallarme's finest poems of the unseen flight, of words defeated before inexpressible. I'm hard put to convey the importance of this experience for me as a writer. It imbued and marked me far more profoundly than any of my more social and physical memories of the place. I already knew I was a permanent exile from many aspects of English society, but a novelist has to enter deeper exiles still.
...
"

I was going to write an entry about Bozcaada but I thought this paragraph above sums it all so perfectly that it will hold the need for a while. 


May you rest in peace, John, my man.

Naked side of Bozcaada as seen through my eyes during a winter storm - 5-6 years ago. Overlooking to Ayana bay.

What Genius Sounds Like

It seems Fazil Say did it again.


He took this classical Turkish song from 18th. century (one of my favorites),...



to turn into this brilliant jazz piece:

How To Fish A Cat - A National Geographic Documentary

It's one of the many  interesting things about my new apartment block. We share the block with cats. They are allowed to enter the building as they wish, live there as long as they want. While feeding the stray cats is a common habit in this city - as matter  of fact it's an essential part of Istanbul's culture - I must admit I had never seen this nice tradition being taken to this extreme.


Anyway - I like cats; so no big deal despite the smell in the block.


Today, one of these cats sneaked into my apartment and found her way to my extremely small laundry room which has a corner in its end where a cat can perfectly fit in without being reached by any human being. 


At first I tried for many minutes to convince the extremely anxious cat to come out using my most charming voice to not much luck until the point I realized that the whole scene must be looking extremely bizarre. So I initiated the execution of plan B.

Right after this pic was taken, she ran back to her corner. Flashlight scared her a lot.





I went to the corner shop to get some frozen turkey döner. Here is what happened next:

Good bye Miss Cat. 

Nayu - Gevende

This song's lyrics are in Turkish but every single word is sung backwards giving the impression that it is written in a totally different language. Nayu - the title - actually stands for Uyan - meaning "Wake Up".

Amazing...

3 minutes over Istanbul

I came across this video when looking for multimedia art pieces about Istanbul. It is by far my favorite so far. Most of the images in it are more likely to be from early 80s. Things covered look different than they do now and of course things that developed at mind numbing pace in the last 20 years are missing. But the essential feeling about Istanbul and about being an Istanbullu is to be felt in here. I could at best describe it as a mystical sadness that could only be found in the joy of living. Like the lover far away.

Youth for Human Rights

Speaking of incompetent education systems; here is a brilliant campaign that could be a bit of help to fill the gap.

Turkey's Not Europe

Couple of weeks ago, when reading through, the temper hit my head and I felt the urge to contribute in a discussion board on Sunday Telegraph's site.


To understand the average human being's thinking pattern, one should really spend some time on reading newspapers' commentary sections - my favorite sports among with listening to religious radio stations. (topic for another entry). There you would understand how difficult it actually is to reach a peaceful world with current education systems (and with the current nurtition diets for that matter) on the globe.

There is so much to say on this topic that I couldn't include. Anyway; shallow as it is, I'm copy and pasting my stuff here:

Hello from Istanbul; I believe the Turkish perspective is definitely needed here.

First of all; I must say that I was deeply shocked by the level of ignorance displayed here in the commentary section and the apparent confidence displayed when doing so. It seems to me that everybody is pretty sure that nobody else knows much about the topic anyways and feels free to speculate about or even create historical “arguments”.

The paradigms we grow in establish a very essential part of our thinking process. The average being isn’t able to think out of this cage and completes his life having nothing added to the human culture. To maintain a monster-poor-savage Turk image is the easiest; so it is to forget that history isn’t that easy to grasp especially looking from only one side. 

I will not argue whether Turkey should join the EU or not – to be absolutely honest I don’t care. All I care is some historical facts.

First of all, when Turks overtook the city of Istanbul 1453 it didn’t end a glorious Byzantine empire. They merely finished a painful process that had started 200 years ago by a force which was far more barbarian in the way they treated the city. You might be very interested in finding out who: For any questioning mind, here are Google key words: “Constantinople Latin Invasion 1204″.

Moreover, the conquest didn’t end the Byzantine culture, in fact Turks acknowledged that culture and built upon it. In our music, other art forms, imperial architecture, traces of the Byzantine culture is very evident


While kingdoms in Europe were persecuting the ones that weren’t from their own, in Istanbul, Christian (Catholic & Orthodox), Jewish and Muslim lived side by side for centuries. I mean side by side. Today in districts of Istanbul like Ortakoy or Kuzguncuk you still have a mosque, a church, a synagogue at the same little square – all still active. By the beginning of 20th. century there were more churches in Istanbul than there were in London.

Secondly – it’s true that Christian minorities were forced to leave their soils and even got killed in great numbers during the last years of 19th. century and first 20 years of the 20th. century. But we must place these facts into the big picture of that time and realize that nation state transformation was in place anywhere in the region. Turks wanted their own nation state and unfortunately they acted towards it in a shameful way. But they were not alone. Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbians, Macedonians did it. And Armenians tried to do it. And none of these nations have sent Turks who had been living on the same territory for centuries with flowers and waved good bye.

Thirdly, in 1974, Turkey invaded Cyprus based on its rights coming from the London agreement which was signed between the UK, Greece and Turkey. In 1974, the military administration of Greece decided to add Cyprus island to their motherland. Some acts of terror have started, killings of civilians took place. And Turkey moved in making sure that only one third of the island is taken.

History is like this. No one is innocent. And I mean no one.

We are perfectly aware of our strengths and flaws. A strong sense of confidence is growing in Turkey. We have been transforming our identity and surroundings in the last 20 years in a positive direction. Yet we know we have to cover much more. This transformation process isn’t that smooth. Lots of ups and downs but eventually we clearly see where we want to reach and EU is not an essential part of it.

We are neither European nor Middle Eastern. We are a mixture, a fusion, just like our beloved city of Istanbul and we love every bit of this richness.

Illustration of two faced Roman god - Janus. One face looks towards the east - past, the other one to the west - future.






I believe I could finish with an anecdote. In 1964, when the Cyprus conflict started to gain pace, Johnson – the US president at that time – sent a message to Turkish president Inonu where he openly threatened Turkey against any military action in Cyprus. Inonu’s response was a public statement; ”if it’s necessary to do so, a new world would be set up and Turkey would not hesitate to take its part in it”

Please excuse possible errors in my English.

Completely Legitimate Act of Protest

This one was taken at the Zoo in Berlin. The inscription says: "Attention! Lion splashes urine through the lattice."

The Genious of the Crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art

C.Bukowski (1920-1994)

Source of Violence & Equal Societies

I read an impressive article in The Independent yesterday.

Key points to me;

"...One of our most basic psychological needs is for status – to feel that we are a valued member of our tribe. We evolved in small, very egalitarian tribes of hunter-gatherers, and have only lived outside them for a few minutes in evolutionary terms. So when we feel our status is threatened – or there is no way of becoming respected by the rest of the tribe – we begin to malfunction in all sorts of ways.

Indeed, almost nothing makes humans more anxious than panic about our status. Endless clinical trials show what happens to our bodies when we feel we are going to lose our status"
...
"Our systems flood with a hormone called cortisol."
...
"...Yet we have built our societies on exaggerating this status panic, and we have been ratcheting it up over the past 30 years. The more unequal a society is, the more intense it becomes. Even if you slip to the bottom in Sweden, it's not so very different from the top. But when there is a long social ladder, and the bottom rung means humiliation and poverty, everyone at every rung feels a sweatier need to cling to their place – and the society starts to go wrong. This isn't left-wing speculation: it is an empirical fact."
...

...
"How can this be? Permanent status panic is an unnatural state for humans. High cortisol levels corrode our insides and massively increase the risk of heart-attack. We eat more – and our bodies store fat differently. It hugs them to our middles, rather than storing them lower down, in our hips and thighs. We look for ways to soothe ourselves – like drug addiction. We are far more likely to break down into depression or mental illness, or to snap and attack somebody. "
...
"James Gilligan, the psychiatrist running the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School, explains that acts of violence are "attempts to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation – a feeling that is painful, and can even be intolerable or overwhelming". He adds that he has "yet to see a serious act of violence that did not represent an attempt to undo this 'loss of face"
...
"Our élites have adopted an ideology – the extreme inequality of market fundamentalism – that simply doesn't suit our species. It doesn't have to be this way. By democratically taxing the rich and using the money to lift up the poor, we can make life better for all of us. Of course there must be some income differentials, but nothing like our own grotesque rates. Plato suggested the richest person should be allowed to earn five times the wage of the poorest person, which seems fair to me. "

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Thinking about death re-provoked my particular interest for one of my favorite photographers; Nan Goldin.

Especially throughout my university years, her images had a profound effect on me. I was writing pornographic sci-fi stories at the time; this is probably why what at first attracted my immediate attention was the "truth" and the venturesome immorality in her work. Then I started to realize the special thing about her; connections she manages to build with her subjects.

These connections are so strong, that her work witnesses her subjects making love, getting married, melting day by day with AIDS radiating -maybe even burning with- intimate truth of life. She even manages to photograph blankness they leave behind after her subjects' deaths.

Obama the Diplomat

Obama is currently visiting Turkey apparently having done his homework. Cutting all other bullshit out, at his speech he made at the parliament yesterday, he said;

"....This is my first trip overseas as president of the United States. I've been to the G-20 summit in London, and the NATO summit in Strasbourg, and the European Union summit in Prague. Some people have asked me if I chose to continue my travels to Ankara and Istanbul to send a message to the world. And my answer is simple: Evet — yes.
...
This morning I had the great privilege of visiting the tomb of your extraordinary founder of your republic. And I was deeply impressed by this beautiful memorial to a man who did so much to shape the course of history. But it is also clear that the greatest monument to Ataturk's life is not something that can be cast in stone and marble. His greatest legacy is Turkey's strong, vibrant, secular democracy, and that is the work that this assembly carries on today..."





Obama in the Turkish parliament. The inscription behind says: " Sovereignty Is Nation's Alone Without Any Reservations". Subtext: "Sovereignty is not God's when it comes to state issues"



What a relief after 8 years rule of Bush (and all the bunch of his dickhead bureaucrats) who kept referring to Turkey as a country of moderate Islam.

It was the biggest mistake you could have done when approaching a country with a proud history where more than 85% of the public is allergic to the political implications of the Islam word, where its constitution, education system, governmental institutions are built around strict secularism; a country which is changing at a great pace doubling its income, industrial production, size of its urban middle classes every few years; growing its democracy more and more colorful and maturer every decade.

Of course, they harvested what they seeded; in 2003 the very same Parliament in the picture above - backed up by huge public support (including mine) - voted against any support of US ambitions in Iraq. No single US soldier was allowed to put foot on Turkey's soil. The public support for US policies dropped to below 10%.

Obama seems to have been taught well about Turkey's unique realities. Of course; these are all part of a game. But it's good to know that opponents at the table of diplomacy are well informed.