Aegean Disclosure

2007-02-14T12:13:00.000-08:00

The International Istanbul Film Festival's (IIFF) vice-infested and promiscuous niece, the !F film festival, pushes off this week and no doubt proves yet again that "dark hands have chosen Turkey" as our mystic prime minister so eloquently put it. The poster for the horror film The Host is probably an apt flag to mark the occasion with given the recent nature of the events we live in, allowing frivolus transitions from the heavy and turbulent "state of the union." One can be cheeky in relating it to a certain inconvenient assasination and point to Mike D'Angelo's review of the film: "Speaking of children being swallowed up by pure evil..." ( incidentally the other film in his column, the Lives of Others, is also being screened at the festival, someone's apparently reading m'da) And the title may perhaps remind one of that condescending view that some people in this country have, that this country is not a rightful "home country" for some individuals but rather a "host country" in which they have to display the proper manners expected of a well-behaved guest.

Regardless, this movie from the guy that made the great Memories of Murder, is blowing a lot of people away. The !F also has its own raunchy section including Destricted and The Exterminating Angels, and if you thought there was always something missing from Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise then the movie you were looking for was probably In Bed ( "Before Sunrise, with sex") The !F, being the easy lay that it is, will be at playing at the AFMs at Beyoglu and Caddebostan, which means that unlike some still unrenovated opera-houses-turned-cinemas they should have properly angled seats and good sound systems. It'll also be heading to Ankara in the beginning of March. Like I said, promiscuous.

Also, Dani Siciliano will be playing a live set at Babylon for the opening party on Saturday the 17th. put yourself down, pick yourself up etc etc.

Also since I mentioned D'Angelo, go here to view a top ten countdown for the best in 2006 categories ranging from best film to best scene, followed by numbers you don't understand and voted on by people you don't think exist.

2007-01-29T05:42:00.000-08:00

"I never heard of this guy until now, but from what I understand he said some things against this country and he was found guilty. Now you make this guy a hero, I don't get it." --calller on NTV Radio Talk Show "The People's Voice" (Halkin Sesi)

"Well, we finished off the Greeks in this country, and we're finishing off the Armenians, and now it looks like the Kurds will be next. Frankly, I'm starting to get scared...." --calller on NTV Radio Talk Show "The People's Voice"

"Hi, I'd just like to say that I've been reading only the Cumhuriyet newspaper for the last thirty years and nothing else. In those thirty years, I never knew who was the editor of that newspaper and I still don't. I never knew or heard of the names of editors of Sabah, Milliyet, Hurriyet, or any other major newspaper for that matter. But I knew that Hrant Dink was the editor of the Agos newspaper. Why? Because for the last thirty years, the columnists I read have been quoting his sentences here and there and presenting him as a man who was this country's enemy. And I found that none of that is true, and that if anything he loved this country, and loved it more than many. Who then will answer for this?"--calller on NTV Radio Talk Show "The People's Voice"

"The Turkish press is responsible. Did they not say that he was insulting Turks? They did. Did they not say that he wrote "the poison in the Turk's blood must be replaced with our clean blood?" They did. Was he not charged with betraying this country for writing those words? He was. Was he not convicted of the charge? He was. And isn't the penalty for treason death? It is. Then where is the mystery here?"--calller on NTV Radio Talk Show "The People's Voice"

Elsewhere, the Turkish Torque outdoes himself by scanning and translating the schizophrenia of the Turkish press (scroll down when you get there).

2007-01-24T14:53:00.000-08:00

Yasar Kemal: Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

There's nothing like an 83-year-old dude who's had enough and isn't taking shit from anybody, which is why, in the midst of all the pain and anger, one had to laugh away the tears if they witnessed the footage of Yasar Kemal leaving the crowded apartment after paying Hrant Dink's family his respects. It was one of my favorite moments during this entire ordeal and contained in it the exasperated feelings of many. Because of the language many newspapers left out his last few words, but it was those last few unexpected words coming out of the country's oldest literary giant that sealed the deal.

Yasar Kemal: My father was killed in a mosque when I was four that's why I can't stand these deaths. Hrant wasn't just an Armenian, or just a Kurd. He was a human being...passionately in love with Anatolia.
Reporter: The suspect is seventeen years old...
Yasar Kemal: These sort of people are a large group in Turkey. No country in the world has this much racism.
Reporter: They say you are a Kurdish writer, and--
Yasar Kemal: I have never said I was a Kurdish writer in my entire life. If I write in Turkish I'm a Turkish writer, if I write in Kurdish I'm a Kurdish writer, so what? Some people shamelessly write this about me. Try calling Mevlana a "Turkish poet." Mevlana wrote in Farsi, he resides at the top of Persian literature. I'm as much Kurdish, as Mevlana is Turkish. Watch what's going on here, these guys are looking for an excuse to kill people.
Reporter: Aren't you afraid of death threats?
Yasar Kemal: I don't give a damn. I lived my years, let them come and try. They can go fuck themselves.

Well, better if you watch it. It's in the delivery.

2007-01-22T17:27:00.000-08:00

"I needed to have an operation...he came to my aid...I'm shattered inside, I can't..."
--A weeping mourner placing a rose on the ground where Hrant Dink's body lay

Hrant Dink's Shoes

Translated from Turkish in Ekşi Sözlük (Read original here):

This shoe is the thing that strangles my heart, that makes me a scattered mess...destititution and poverty is always hard to witness...especially when it goes hand in hand with death...all the tears one has saved throughout the day will be set free and flooded...

It will unleash my tears but I can't even begin to think what it will do to his girl who will look at this photograph for an entire lifetime...fathers are the love of a girl's life...no matter what kind of father he is...and if he is a father that makes one proud, she would never want his father to be hurt..she would want her father always to stand up straight...never for his hands to shake...The most painful moment in my life was not when my aunt died, but when I saw my father cry for the first time the day my aunt died..when my father resisted and resisted and when he broke down when I, at last, hugged him...when we were little and when our living standards were below the average, and when he would take us to dinner and provide us with whatever we wanted while he just ordered tea, I would feel storms shattering in me--I couldn't eat when he couldn't eat.

And when this was what it was, when I had suffered what I suffered the entire day a thousand fold when I saw this photograph, when I couldn't imagine what I would feel if a saw my father in this way...Delal Dink seeing this photograph, I can't imagine the moment she sees it, and I don't want to...everything aside, a father is laying on the ground, his shoes punctured with holes...for one's father to have holes in his shoes at times fills one with pride, especially a man like this, especially while there are those who speculated about his wealth when it suited them..but sometimes a daughter may see her father in her dreams for a lifetime, her father's shoes...a father who completed his life far too early, and when he died--forget completing his life comfortable and rich--completing his life with holes in his shoes...a father whose life was made into a prison, who dismissed his own life and worried about his family...a father who, loving his homland to the extent of consciously seeing that it could cost his family's life, was declared a traitor...became a fearful pigeon...a father of such scale that one cannot imagine the way he kisses his children..his wife...

I hope Delal doesn't see this picture...but if she does, she should not weep...in this country sometimes fathers die with holes in their shoes, they will complete a lifetime with holes in their shoes but their hearts and minds will not bear the tiniest scratch...in this country most eyes won't see the burning livers, won't hear a mother's, tomorrow, a son's scream...and those fathers with holes in their shoes will spend their entire lifetime trying to open those un-seeing eyes and un-hearing ears...those fathers will not leave bank accounts as their finest inheritance but their honor.

"...and whenever men an women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent." --Martin Luther King Jr.

Sabah compares the murder of Hrant Dink and Talat Pasha.

2007-01-20T16:10:00.000-08:00

Swooping down like the dirty Taksim pigeon

My hope would be that when I wake up tomorrow the fucking retarded and honorless Justice Minister Cemil Cicek, who spent much of his energy resisting pressure to remove or modify the 301 law for 'insulting Turkishness', and who called Hrant Dink a traitor and referred to an academic conference on the Armenian Genocide 'a dagger in the back of Turkey' and allowed Hrant Dink and others to be paraded in front of the nation as traitors and become an open target for ultranationalists, to have resigned his pathetic did-I-say-dagger-I-meant-aloe-vera-massage-oil-post with a letter of resignation written in the finest reeking horeshit.

The 17-year-old shooter from Trabzon, who was identified by his father from video footage on TV, has been caught in Samsun on the way to Trabzon from Istanbul and has confessed. His uncle told news agencies that his nephew, "Didn't have enough knowledge of Istanbul to have been able to pull it off himself." The kid who shot a Catholic priest in Trabzon in 2006 was also under 18 years of age. If someone organizes shit like this it always helps when the shooter can be tried as a minor. Trabzon was also the town in which far-leftists putting up posters and dropping pamphlets were almost lynched by an angry nationalist mob. But it is precisely the general failure of the government and the people who avoided showing the required outrage for these events that paved the way for continued travesties. And the misguided mentality that drove them, or rather didn't, was that fear of 'escalating' or 'provoking' the situation to the point where deadly violence would break out between the two sides: "If we defend these people too much, it will only encourage the nationalists more,"-- an understandable fear from a population that has a military coup that was attributed to the gunfights between leftist and fascist militias etched in its memory. Well, Hrant Dink is dead...and everytime I read his chilling last column my blood curls. As one exasperated journalist put it, "We have taken objectivity to absurd lengths. When you witness a struggle between a firetruck and a raging fire, you side with the fire truck." One recalls how government ministers incredulously called Valley of the Wolves: Iraq a great movie that presents the truth as it is while at the same time condemning the prophet cartoons from Denmark and signing some Alliance of Civilizations bullshit. Around the same time, the Catholic priest in Trabzon was shot. As Yalim Eralp, a retired ambassador, in response to Hrant Dink's death put it: "This is a country of peace? Can there be anything more insulting to one's intelligence?"

2007-01-19T10:00:00.000-08:00

Motherfuckers.

Hrant Dink shot dead in broad daylight.

2006-09-11T16:24:00.000-07:00

Song of the Day: Odd Man Out Playlist Played

Not many city-dwellers travel extensively throughout Anatolia, so it's good to see someone at least occasionally go out and relay their observations regardless of some of their preconceived notions (either consequently adjusted or affirmed). Nuri Akkas, a retired professor in Ankara posted this account on his site in Turkish a while back, translated here:

A Tale of Two Cities: Tunceli and Erzurum

Last week, due to an assignment, I went on an Ankara-Iskenderun-Erzurum-Ankara road trip. Before I forget, and even if it happens to be fragment by fragment, I want to share my observations, especially with regards to the Tunceli-Erzurum aspect. (If I told you there isn't a village left that I haven't seen, I wouldn't be exaggerating that much). Maybe I'll write about my entire East-Southeast observations in more detail some other time.

Tunceli is in my opinion the most modern town not only of East Anatolia, but of Turkey as a whole, in terms of its people and their way of life. Without knowing, and out of sheer luck, I arrived in Tunceli a day before the Munzur fesitival began. Besides, I sensed something strange when I entered the city. There were signs on the main road: We don't want electricity from the Munzr dam. Wind electricity is enough for us. Let's protect our nature and our culture. A classic debate topic. A situation similiar to Hasankeyf. Let's leave the Energy-Nature-Culture-wrapped topic for later.

Tunceli is filled with soldier-police. Because of the festival, they've brought in additional security forces. There are a lot of army panzers inside and outside the city (We call those armor-plated and armed jeep vehicles "panzers", right?) All the hotels are full. The Army guesthouses, the police guesthouses, teacher guesthouses, school dorms, everyone of them tried. No vacancy. The police didn't think me going back to Elazig at this hour (7 at night) was a good idea. If need be, I decided I would spend the night in my car in a some well-lighted area in the middle of the city, but the people around helped me to get a room in some place in the south of the city. Even though they didn't have hot water, they at least it cold.

By not coming into contact with anything, it's possible to spend a short night in the city. Now I know, you're asking, "Is this how the most modern town should be?" But remember, I said, "with respect to the people and their way of life." Otherwise, from a development point of view, Tunceli has lagged far behind. Since it's spread out across a few hilltops, the city has no "city center" concept. I don't think the best hotels out of the few can even manage to get a 3 star rating. Besides a few main roads, the roads are in poor shape. The big Munzur river passes by the city, but the city for some reason has a water problem.

The mayor was DEHAP [one of the major Kurdish-identity parties] member (I know that DEHAP mayors usually don't take responsibility for the town's problems from my past trips. For example, Hakkari and Agri, at least 3-5 years ago, main roads included, were like garbage dumps. One couldn't walk around in the winter, from the mud, and in the summer, from the dust. We would use bottled water for "cleaning." I hope it's better now.) From the information I gathered while I was there, 3 out 4 people in Tunceli were Alevi. The one-fourth left were apparently ethnic Turks and Kurds. Out of this demographic, I couldn't understand how a DEHAP member could win the elections. And frankly, I didn't want to get into deep debates or go around asking questions. Perhaps a reader would like to bring this point to light. [As another reader notes on his site, Alevi is a religion and Kurdish is an ethnicity, thus if most of the Alevis are Kurdish it makes perfect sense...that particular reader says that nintey-nine percent of Tuncelis are Zaza Kurds. ]

The road that connects Tunceli to the Elazig-Bingol side is not that bad. The road that goes towards Erzincan-Erzurum is under construction. It's been under construction for the last 3 years. To this day, this has by far been the worst long-distance road I had to travel in Turkey. I came to the opinion that the construction of the road was being delibrately slowed-down. In short, Tunceli's connection to the north was cut off. People told me the security precautions were being exagerrated, and even the people coming from neighboring villages and town were not being let into the city.

How can a city like this be described as being "the most modern?" This of course depends on how you describe the word "modern." For me (as those that know me would guess), this has to do with men-women relationships, women's rights and the way people dress. The next day when the Munzur fesitival started, all the Tunceli people from four corners of Turkey came flooding in. (The day after when I was going towards Erzurum, The Tunceli Erzurum Club, and the Tunceli Erzincan Club were going to the festival). At night, all the streets of Tunceli were filled with people. Booksellers, crafters, cornsellers, one or two painters, toysellers filled two sides of every street. Young girls and boys, less young mothers and fathers and their children, wandered for hours in this festival area. Turkish and Kurdish folk songs were rising from the teahouses. And do you know what grabbed my attention the most in this uproar? There was not one, forget hijab, headscarf to be seen. Especially the young girls (reminding one of the Antalya resort areas) were wearing the most modern summer clothes, hand-in-hand with their boyfriends, walking arm-in-arm. Don't forget, this is one of East Anatolia's remote corners surrouned by Erzurum-Bingol-Elazig. Not in Ankara's Ulus, nor its Kizilay, nor its Tunali [Ankara's nightlife center] will you see this kind of homogenous level of modernity. "This is how our culture is," they said, when I tried to understand the reasons. (Of course I didn't get it either, when I came face to face with the reality of Erzurum).

The next day at the city's exit I visited a Cemevi [Alevi place of worship]. I took a picture in front of the Pir Sultan Abdal statue that was opening that day with a couple of heavy-moustached old guys (careful, old is relative! I'm 62). I asked them (this time more comfortably), why the Tunceli region was seen as a "terror haven" by "others." In Tunceli culture there is a philosophy of standing by the oppressed, the younger one (in his fifties) told me. Since Alevis were oppressed for many years, Tunceli young folk would back others who were also oppressed. I asked my Cemevi friends about the mandatory Sunni religious classes in schools. I reminded them that one official from the Ministery of Education said, "If they don't want to partake in religious classes, they need to give a document that says that they are not Muslims." One of the old fellow's eyes teared up. He spoke to me about Muhammed and Ali. Everytime he mentioned Muhammed, he would hit his hand on his chest, "God," he would say, "is neither on the ground, or in the sky. He is in the heart." I asked myself what the difference between this and my Sunni past and crticized the Education Ministry some more. They spoke to me about Ataturk and his heroics during the war of Independence, his eyes filling up again and saying, "...though you would know better than us." Later, a funeral came into the Cemevi. Crying women came behind it. Tunceli women with their traditional Anatolian muslin or their heads covered with a scarf. Their necks and legs uncovered, leaning on the men. I left them in their sorrow and departed from Tunceli and arrived in Erzurum.

I wish I had never arrived! I had gone to Erzurum [also in eastern Turkey] many times before. During the Horasan and Narman earthquakes and many times later. I always knew that Erzurum was a nationalist-conservative city. Now instead of nationalist-conservative, "Arabization" (and maybe even Wahhabization!) has taken its place. When I took a trip with my wife five or six years ago I had a feeling it was going in this direction (7-8 year old kids would throw rocks at my wife, at the time I attributed it to their age, now when I think about it, I think the transformation started around then). In all of Erzurum's main roads, shopping malls, and stores, "Arabization" has become complete! Women whose eyes you can't even see covered from head to toe in black cloth even seem to surpass the normal hijab-wearing ones. How long can the two girls, among those VEERRY rare ones wearing tanktops, stand against the stern looks of the two young men who just passed them?

This statement was given to me by a high-level state official: Erzurum has been invaded by religious fundamentalists. All of Erzurum's dorms and private schools are owned by these people, and if college girls need to find a dorm they have to end up joining these religious communities. To save our girls from this predicament, we have to urgently increase the dorm facilities at the Ataturk University there.

I have told you the story of these two cities. Try to visit both of them, and see the contrast with your own eyes. I visited Tunceli during a festival, so some of my observations may seem exaggerated. In Erzurum, I didn't visit the university region. If I had, perhaps my opinions may have softened. See for yourself, decide for yourself, and then write to me and tell me whether I have exaggerated or not.

2006-09-10T05:53:00.000-07:00

You call it Tiffing, I Call It...

"And if your complete mind is a letter then tomorrow you can be a tiger,
a man, an angel. You can be plastic. This is why I like so much
the plastic man of the Fantastic Four in Marvel Comics.
What's his name? He is married to the Invisible Girl.
Plastic man and Invisible Woman can be great pornography.
Plastic man fucking the girl and then he make his penis very,
very, very thin and put inside her vein, and the penis can go,
and go, and go from her vein to her heart. He can ejaculate
in the center of his woman's heart. Fantastic! Fantastic!"
--Alejandro Jodorowsky in a 1973 interview. Elsewhere, Kidney Bingos climbs Holy Mountain.

This is the time of year where a certain breed migrates to Toronto for a film festival of internationalism, a phenomenon referred to as "Tiffing", or more affectionately, "Fucking." If browsing through odd-looking ratings for odd-sounding movies is your idea of a good time, then you might want to hit up the Cypriot, the Academic Hack, the Futurist Who Viewed Too Much, A Rightwing Film Geek, A Member of the Academy, the Onion Crew, or if you want, you can simply Listen to Missy.

Surely, Screengrab will throw up some tidbits from afar as well. Though the link on the right has been up for a while, one should probably alert people to the fact that Nerve has been crazy enough to let Bilge Ebiri man their film blog, and he has been crazy enough to accept. Thus, you will find hilarious excerpts from Vern reviews, heavily-vouched-for forgotten films, and excess usage of the term Idiocracy. He does include some obligatory Turcic concerns like bemoaning the sequel to Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam and hoping Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates is awesome (and does well not to mention the original Superman Returns). You also now have to go to another page to see the meaty "reviewing reviewers" posts, which is fucking annoying frankly. All this and the guy still manages to create a short film and enter it into the LA short film festival. Fucker.

And if you do end up actually going to Toronoto and find yourself aging rapidly and "coming down" with orthostatic hypotension, you might want check out Pivotal Spins, thoughts from a world-weary good friend on being a motivated bone-bender in the (in)famous Canadian healthcare system.

2006-08-09T03:20:00.000-07:00

Song of The Day
________

I was amused by Burak Bekdil's PKK piece today in the Turkish Daily News and his non-existent hollah towards the end:

In this odd equation of real-politik, one recalls a Saudi tribal proverb: If you know the price of a man's ransom, kill him" (the ransom was the price that would be exacted by the slain man's tribe in revenge for his death). In other words, If you know what the costs will be for your actions, and you can afford them, go ahead." Unfortunately, Turkey does not know the price it would have to pay if it "killed its enemy."

Well, King Abdullah and his 17, no wait 15, no wait, 8 planes being in Turkey today does add a little flavor to the Saudi proverb. Or perhaps not, given Jon Lee Anderson's piece on Hizbullah in the most recent issue of the New Yorker:

Mroue cited an old Saudi tribal proverb: “If you know the price of a man’s ransom, kill him.” The ransom was the price that would be exacted by the slain man’s tribe in revenge for his death. “In other words, if you know what the costs will be for your actions, and you can afford them, go ahead,” Mroue said. “But here, who knows what the price of the ransom is?”

Admirably verbatim. I suppose "one does recall" as Bekdil says, especially if you by some fate like me happened to read both articles within the same hour. But citing our inspiration probably does hinder our "conversational traditions".

Casual proverb stealing notwithstanding, Bekdil's pessimistic sarcasm is rather commendable, though his conclusion is a tad alarmist: "But what, really, can Turkey do about its multi-million Kurds who do not yet kill but sympathize with their comrades who kill?"

2006-07-07T12:02:00.000-07:00

Song of the Day

Ass Called Shumble Thought His Beard False But It's Perfectly Alright

Given the various plot accounts, there's no reason to believe Woody Allen's Scoop is of any relation to Evelyn Waugh's book of the same title, besides I suppose, an obvious connection to journalism and the locale of London. As the book was written by a young Waugh, looking back it would have probably fit the proclivities of the younger Allen as well (given that it centers around a clueless journalist's venture into an African Absurdistan). Themes targeting journalism as a whole though are probably overworked these days.

"Can you tell me who is fighting who in Ishmaelia?"
"I think it's the Patriots and the Traitors."
"Yes, but which is which."
"Oh, I don't know that. That's Policy, you see. It's nothing to do with me...."
"I gather it's between the Reds and the Blacks."
"Yes, but it's not quite as easy as that. You see, they are all Negroes. And the Fascists won't be called black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolshevists want to be called black because of their racial pride. So when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white and when the party who call themselves blacks say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I reallly couldn't tell you. But from your point of view it will be quite simple. Lord Copper only wants Patriot victories and both sides call themselves patriots, and of course both sides will claim all the victories...."

He had published eight books--beginning with a life of Rimbaud written when he was eighteen, and concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians...

2006-06-03T12:30:00.000-07:00

Song of the Day

Words

Which part of this is "deep"?
--Murat Belge, referring to the "deep state" term everyone's been throwing around

Those who haven't written books or articles for the last 25 years, who have attended good or bad classes, have become "respected professors" but never "accused professors." When I took the post on the Human Rights Council, there were people who said, "Are you an idiot?" I took the needed lesson from the court case, but I will not abandon my idiocy.
--Ibrahim Kaboglu, on his quasi-acquittal for being charged with insulting Turkishness in using the odd-sounding term "Turkiyeli" in the Council's Minority Report

If an important part of the public wants the military to intervene in the government, and if it claps when the military intervenes, and sees the military intervening as an option, then the issue is not with the military, the issue is with the public.
--Suleyman "Yesterday is Yesterday, Today is Today" Demirel

2006-06-02T08:08:00.000-07:00

Song of the Day

Words

“I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear…Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels.”—The Sound and the Fury

“I don’t want to administer a program that satisfies the conditions of genocide.” –David 'It's been emotional' Halliday, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, referring to the Iraqi sanctions after his resignation from his 34 year career in the UN in 1998.

“The humanitarian disaster which has occurred in Iraq far exceeds what may be any reasonable level of acceptable damages according to the principles of discrimination and proportionality used in warfare.” --Richard Garfield, in a 1999 report on that’s often cited as the most conservative death toll estimate (350,000 through 2002).

“The best we can say is that in Kosovo, and in Iraq, all-out war has been avoided for the time being. But unless people abide by their commitments, and unless they redouble their efforts to find peaceful solutions, we have every reason to fear the worst in 1999.” –Kofi Annan at the end of 1998. The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia started on March 24th 1999. The invasion of Iraq did not start until four years later on March 20th 2003.

“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it."—Madeline Albright, when ambushed with the but-half-a-million-Iraqi-children-died question by a reporter in 1996.

“Most Iraqis…feel they were handed the worst possible outcome from the Gulf War -- sanctions and Saddam.”—Paul Wolfowitz in 1997.

“Say what you will about it, it was thirty years of peace.” –Brent Scowcroft in summarizing the last thirty years in the Middle East.

“Then they talked about what they would do with twenty-five dollars. They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.”—The Sound and the Fury

“Outsiders who have not dealt with Iraq cannot easily understand the extent to which the terror of the Hussein years has penetrated that unhappy nation.”—Rolf Ekeus, head of UNSCOM from 1991-1997, currently OSCE High Commissioner of Ethical Minorites, in making the case for war.

“Iraq always gave up materials once it was in its interest to do so. Iraq has spent the past 30 years building up an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Although the current threat presented by Iraq militarily is modest, both in terms of conventional and unconventional weapons, it has never given up its intent to develop and stockpile such weapons for both military and terrorist use…The link with al-Qaeda is disputed, but is, in any case, not the principal terrorist link of concern. Iraq has long trained and supported terrorist activities and is quite capable of initiating such activity using its security services.”—the late weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly advocating regime change on his own terms.

"Ironically, Kelly, like most of the weapons inspectors, probably wasn't suspicious enough of the intelligence on Iraqi WMD."--Juan Cole.

"When he assumed his post as the chief U.N. weapons inspector inspector in 1997, Richard Butler, an Australian arms control expert, told Anthony Zinni that whether the Americans liked it or not he was prepared to give the Iraqis a clean bill of health if they complied with the terms of the U.N inspections. When Zinni saw Butler again a few months later the UN inspector seemed frustrated beyond endurance. 'He was the angriest most pissed off man in the world. He hated Tariq Aziz and his silk suits and his cigars and the sufferring of the people and the lies and the deception,' Zinni recalled. 'It was clear to the inspectors, I think, that even if you could not find smoking guns that Saddam had the framework to restart a program.'"--Cobra II

“A war in Iraq might not be the greatest humanitarian disaster of all times as some critics argue. But it is surely one of the major opportunities to reduce potential humanitarian damage in the world. To date, the lack of open discussion to address these risks and reduce harm is in striking contrast to the very public dissemination of plans for war.” –Richard Garfield, in correspondence in Lancet, 2003.

We had filed a three-month report the week before, and Madeline Albright was leading the strong resistance to the wording of a new mandate that would include our “ensuring” stability and security in the province of Rwanda. “In her view, it would be more practical to describe the task as the ‘promotion’ of stability,” the code cable read. How far does one go up the scale in the use of force to achieve “promotion” without getting into “ensuring”? How could a junior officer understand the resultant new ROE in the field? Once again, we could end up with soldiers injured and dying, and more innocent people sacrificed, because of nuances in mandate that the politicos did not fully comprehend. I had terribly mixed feelings about my departure but all it took was a code cable such as this or another frustrating session with the administration gang to reaffirm my total incapacity to accept any more excuses, delays or budget limitations.—Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, Force Commander of UNAMIR

2006-05-30T03:12:00.000-07:00

Song Of The Day

Autonomous Regions

Guilin resembles a watery, foresty version of Cappadocia... complete with the "This hill looks like camel" commentary.

Guide: The Guilin area is very poor...this is because it is an autonomous region.

Thinking: That makes sense I guess, central government probably said you want to be autonomous, we're not going to give you any cash...

So how does a region become autonomous, exactly?

Guide: The central government decides...The primary reason is if a province is poor and if it is difficult for the central government to create development in the region.

it's not poor because it's autonomous, it's autonomous because it's poor ...nice.

...How many autonmous regions are there?

Guide: Five. But Tibet and Taiwan are a different situations...

These five pictures are apparently supposed to be in every Chinese schoolroom. Probably a good case as any for the "Imperialism of anti-Imperialism." If this is not amusing already, imagine if the first three pictures were of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington.

2006-04-04T09:14:00.000-07:00

Ventured into Catalhoyuk last week in order to witness the obstruction of the sun by pocket change...

Istanbul Film Festival (through April 16th)

The relatively new include: Caveh Zahedi's I Am a Sex Addict, Nick Cave's The Proposition, The Dardennes' The Child, Takeshi Kitano's Takeshis', Carlos Reygadas' Battle in Heaven, Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies, Soderbergh's Bubble, James Longley's Iraq in Fragments

Some classics include: Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits, Mike Leigh's Naked, Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, Wong Kar-Wai's awesome 2046 (yes, it's a classic damnit), and a Rossellini restrospective.

Where Are They Now: A year after Pelin Esmer's Oyun (Play) was shown at the fest, it finally opened in select venues in Istanbul a few weeks ago. Bilge Ebiri's New Guy, which played in the 2003 fest, is out on DVD. (Note: these are not playing in this year's fest).

2006-03-09T00:48:00.000-08:00

1939-2006

Ah be abi.

A Turkish Call for New Yorker-style Writing

Serdar Turgut at Aksam apparently reads the New Yorker religiously (he's even crazy enough to own its 75 years of archived material on CDs, he says) and has the giddy dream of putting out a Turkish magazine that shares its high standards and respect for the art of writing. He thnks that a lot of undiscovered writers in Turkey have the talent and is calling for submissions to be sent to Sayin Serdar Turgut, Aksam Gazestesi, Davutpasa Cad. No: 34, Topkapi/Istanbul 34010. No restrictions except: No politics and no poems. The Russians have tried this already, hopefully this one won't go the same direction.

2006-02-13T05:40:00.000-08:00

Valley of the Wolves: Mucking About

This is a very amusing shout-fest about the recently released Turkish propaganda film. It's not a particularly adept or comprehensive defense of freedom of speech, granted, but it is perhaps a difficult position to maintain when you have to disentagle two threads of the argument while going up against Donahue, the well-rehearsed bulldozing machine that is mouthpiece of the League of Extraordinary Catholics, who believes offending religion should be out of the question. I would be nowhere as quick to rule out prosecuting people for appearing in Nazi propaganda films during that time, though I would need a more detailed scenerio to make such a decision as well, but then again I wasn't the one on the hot seat. Like I said before, the only time freedom of speech should not be used as a defense is when specific incitements to violence can be traced directly to acts of violence, where it is akin to a mob boss giving orders to kill people while keeping his hands clean. I agree with Donahue on one thing, though, that the most ridiculous aspect of this thing is the response of the prime minister or government officials going on record to say how great this movie is and how it represents the truth and--I would add-- while at the same time writing a letter to European and Arab leaders condeming the cartoons and the violence (an action which the League of C-men would basically agree with).

As for the Anti-Semitism in the film, present but not really in the foreground, the doctor Busey plays comes off more as an American who happens to be Jewish rather than than a Jew who happens to be an American. This movie is often intentionally and unintentionally hilarious though, and the more that aspect of it is emphasized locally the better.

Also: Ayaan Hirsli Ali produces a definitive speech on the cartoon affair. Even though it's not a Turkish voice it's good to see the Turkish Daily News publish two columns by the Danish Robert Ellis:

In Denmark the protest against the cartoons is led by the Islamisk Trossamfund (Islamic Community), which claims to represent the resident population of 200,000 Muslims. However, this claim has been shown to be exaggerated, as it turns out they only have around 15,000 supporters. But the damage has been done, as this organization, led by a Palestinian imam called Abu Laban, has sent delegations to various Middle Eastern countries, including Turkey, to gain support. This organization has subsequently been exposed as speaking with two tongues, as Abu Laban recently stated that they were opposed to the boycott of Danish goods and "sincerely regretted" that the matter has escalated. At the same time he stated to Al Jazeera that they "rejoiced" in the boycott. His limp explanation was that he didn't know the microphone was on.

2006-02-07T17:33:00.000-08:00

For Whom The Bells Toll

Not hear? When noise was everywhere! It tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers,--
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
-- Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

I looked, and saw between us and the sun
A building on an island; such a one
As to age to age might add, for uses vile,
A windowless, deformed and dreary pile;
And on the top an open tower, where hung
A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung;
We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue:
The broad sun sunk behind it, and it tolled
In strong and black relief.
--Juilan and Maddalo

"Exterminate Those Who Mock Islam"; "Be Prepared for the Real Holocaust". And so on. And these people have a right to say these things - the very right they are trying to deny others with the threat of violence. “–Andrew Sullivan

“Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all...This current uneasy coexistence is only an interlude, he seems to say. For the moment, all I can do is claim to possess absolute truth and demand absolute immunity from criticism. But in the future, you will do what I say and you will do it on pain of death….The same point holds for international relations: There can be no negotiation under duress or under the threat of blackmail and assassination. And civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient. It is depressing to have to restate these obvious precepts…” --Christopher Hitchens

“In America we take our freedom to offend seriously; we would never threaten the lives of artists who paint the Virgin Mary with animal dung, or put a crucifix into a jar of urine -we limit the argument to whether our National Endowment for the Arts will subsidize these artists.” —Daryl Cagle, in one of the best blogs about the bust.

It’s been reported in print that the Ayatollah Sistani declared that Denmark should take measures to prevent blasphemy. Fair enough, after all he is the Grand Ayatollah, so this comes with the territory presumably. However, more interesting, CNN International also reported that Sistani had declared that Islamic terrorists brought these cartoons upon themselves. Thus, if the report is true, what we have is a situation where an Ayatollah in Iraq assesses the situation with the same boldness (if not more on occasion) than our own supposedly secular press. That our conservative government meekly suggests “the freedom of speech is not a freedom to insult” is perhaps not surprising (it is of course just such a thing, what it is not is an inclination to insult). However, to hear similar things from those who are not otherwise inclined is truly sad. Yusuf Kanli in the Turkish Daily News writes: “We must, however, once again clearly underline our strong conviction that there's a limit to all freedoms…freedom of expression and the free press understanding should not and cannot entail the right to hurt the feelings and insult the beliefs of people of other religions.” No, what it should be limited to is that which incites violence and can be directly connected to acts of violence. And by “inciting violence,” one does not mean inciting it against themselves as they seem to have done in this case. Had the printing of these cartoons themselves been traced directly to the harassment of Muslims then they may have had a point, and no I don’t think “contributing to a general atmosphere of discrimination” is a strong enough case since any editorial suggesting an unwanted association of Islam and terrorism could fall under such a category. As for British appeasement, well, they have their hands full, politics as it is these days. Salman Rushdie gave a warning earlier with his piece on Pamuk: "The Turkish application is being presented (most vociferously by Tony Blair and Jack Straw) as a test case for the EU. To reject it, we are told, would be a catastrophe, widening the gulf between Islam and the West. There is an element of Blairite poppycock in this, a disturbingly communalist willingness to sacrifice Turkish secularism on the altar of faith-based politics. " You’d think the rigid secularists here would take this opportunity to take a stand, but they seem to be hiding behind the Islamists as well. The desire to be balanced in one’s criticism seems to hinder one’s objective stance. A carpet ban on drawing a prophet, whether negative or positive, is analogous to a fatwa against mentioning the prophet’s name outside a prayer or mosque. When the other side is reacting violently, such concerns are not merely theoretical. All this at a time when our foreign minister is declaring that

Turkey

is where civilizations meet and that anti-Semitism is being replaced with anti-Islam in Europe, the same day a Catholic priest is shot in Trabzon by a teenager for either the same reasons, or for Pope-murdering Mafioso mimicry, or a combination of both. Or, perhaps, simply on a whim, because the sun shined so…

_____________________________

Major Major Major's Section 8

The trial of five journalists who criticized a judge's decision to ban an Armenian conference should remind one of the recent episode involving the National Security Council Secretary General’s trip to the US where he said that the Turkish courts should do a better job of educating their judges. This resulted in a quick response by the judiciary, expressing the language of a clearly outraged and insulted party. Had Pamuk been the one denigrating the reputation of the Turkish judiciary outside the country, perhaps he would have also faced an additional 10 years.

Speaking of matters of the law, the juxtaposition of the Agca case and the conscientious objector case brought to the European Union courts also exposed the ridiculousness that's brought on by the rules governing mandatory military service. Somehow being a convicted murderer did not automatically disqualify Agca from serving the military. In the short time that he had remained released, he had a mandatory health check-up to determine whether he was eligible for military service, during which time it was determined that he could not do his military service because he was, to the surprise of everyone, "anti-social". On the other side, you have an otherwise innocent guy who refuses to go into the military and is punished because avoiding military service is a criminal offense. It's apparently an interesting proposition to suggest a convicted murderer should be banned from military service purely on blatantly obvious ethical grounds, but if that's the case, then under the present laws you have a situation where there are many innocent people who are trying to avoid doing their military service being punished while a convicted murderer is being rewarded, from their point of view, for the crimes he committed. Anyone seen Yossarian?

2006-02-07T17:32:00.000-08:00

The National Lampoon: Mehmet Ali Agca and the Nevsehir 5

"Those who want to continue their lives in this regime, must unite in defending it against terrorism. Those parties against terrorism, the ones that must be against terrorism, must support each other, must formulate their conditions without delay. To lean towards the use of questionable methods, will be to fall into the terrorists' trap. The masses and responsible institutions, without allowing this to happen, without breaking from democracy, must overcome this--must be able to overcome this. This madness must be stopped."
--Abdi Ipekci, July 13 1978, quoted by Can Dundar

As Can Dundar notes in his recap of the Mehmet Ali Agca case, Abdi Ipekci, then editor of Milliyet, was murdered by Agca six months after he wrote those words. Although there are many gaping holes in the story of Agca up to the shooting of the Pope, one doesn't need to elaborately apply conspiracy theories to explain his early, if short-lived, release after he had shot the Pope. He was sentenced to 36 years for the murder of Ipekci, and the time he served for shooting the Pope in Rome was counted towards the murder sentence. As I understand it, that supposedly left 16 years he had to complete from 2000 on. But the 10 year Amnesty given to all criminals during Ozal's time (which no one argued against because everyone and their grandmother had people in jail), had reduced that sentence to six. On top of all that, people had argued that Agca had neither served 20 years (a little over 19) in Rome or completed the hacked sentence of 6 years (five-someting) in Turkey. Thus the minor correction, and the re-arrest of the Messiah (for the next four years, that is). When asked by the reporters if he was God during his arrest, Agca replied, "No I'm not God...I'm not God, I'm Jesus Christ....I'm just Jesus Christ."

Of course, what the outside press usually doesn't mention is that prior to the shooting of the Pope Agca was arrested for the murder of Ipekci and put into a military prison, somehow escaped wearing a military uniform a few months later, and ended up in Rome to shoot the Pope a year or so after that. In fact, after he escaped from prison a note was left at the Milliyet bureau in which the writer claimed to be Agca and stated that he was going to go shoot the Pope. Can Dundar explains in his piece that the four besides Agca that are associated with the murder of Ipekci are Catli (the one who sheltered Agca in Turkey), Celik (the person who is believed to have ordered to murder), Ozbey (the one Agca claimed to be the assassin), Sener (the one who got Agca involved) are all connected to Nevsehir (Cappadocia). Ugur Mumcu, who looked into the case, found out Agca got his passport to escape the country from the Nevsehir Security Bureau. Not only that but four of the five in the group have their passports stamped by the same bureau. In June 1980, Zeki Tekinel, a CHP government lawyer in Nevsehir was murdered by ultranationalists. The person sent to jail for the murder was Omer Ay, who also got his passport from the Nevsehir Security Bureau. Can Dundar writes, "Agca's passport # was: 136 635, Ay's passport # was: 136 636." Not the brightest of fellows it must be said. Before journalist Ugur Mumcu found out who had been their connection at the bureau, he was assasinated by a bomb attack in 1993. That connection at the bureau surfaced years later in the Susurluk scandal. Ibrahim Sahin, a person brought to trial for his part in the scandal, testified that he had worked at the Nevsehir Security Bureau up until 1982. There was also a photo found of him next to Abdullah Catli (the one who hid Agca) at a party....all this pointing to the notion that a network of people were able, in the least, to have mafia-fied parts of the state institutions.

2006-01-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

From Anatolia with Love...and Bird Flu

"Lieutantent...you run this station like chicken night in Turkey."
--Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

After all that talk about maintaining the unity of the State against outside influences, if there were any moment for the state to exhibit its stately-ness (as Hasan "[three word sentence]?!" Cemal notes), it is now.

2005-12-10T05:53:00.000-08:00

Idiocy Masquerading As...Idiocy

As we were defeating the PKK, we were wary of offending our Kurdish brethren, so we refrained from criticizing the Kurds. We refrained from saying how primitive the tribal structure and the status of women in their culture. We did not try to prevent the politically motivated population growth. We said, �This entire homeland is yours.� We concealed our knowledge that their myths about their �glorious history� were a fabrication. In the end they have mustered the audacity to claim that they are one of the two founding groups of this state.

And now we want our togetherness to continue on the basis of this falsehood.

To the victor go the spoils...Get this--we botched this whole Kurdish integration mess because we...killed them with kindness! Are...you...kidding...me. Gunduz Aktan, our esteemed former ambassador, is on dangerously retarded ground...

Yes, it's true the State didn't criticise the Kurds enough, this might have something to do with the fact that it was occassionally busy supporting religious fundamentalist outfits in order to fight the PKK. And then one has the audacity to claim that their tribal structure and treatment of women is somehow unique when the state was supporting those who dabbled in the virtues of honor killings. One can hardly begin to decrypt the vileness that is contained in the phrase "We did not try to prevent the politically motivated population growth." What did you have in mind? A Modest Proposal? In here lies the belief that the Kurds are going to multiply in droves and take over the entire country while the country lies helpless as its hands are mercilessy tied behind its back by...democracy. Who, after all, needs the PKK when you can get it on, all night long? Democracy for Gunduz Aktan is so fragile and pathetic that sheer population growth is going to make Turks slaves to those redneck myth-fabricating Kurds he hates so much (and whose redneckness and tribal customs don't seem to prevent them from being so wonderfully Machiavellian). Way to go, retard.

On a related note, there's an amusing anecdote from the days of Demirel's presidency...Demirel is on a tour of the southeast, stopping at a village to give a speech, he says to the villagers that have gathered around him: "You know, one of the main problems in Turkey is population...we have to be careful of controlling it. Everyone should be careful about having families that are not too big..." Then suddenly, a forlorn looking villager speaks up from the crowd: "Sir, we had one source of entertainment in our lives, and you're robbing us of that too..."

Fusion Paranoia

"There was a continuing contrast between the violence with which he would sometimes state his political opinions and his private gentleness and sensitivity."
--John Judis on Michael Kelly

"If you happen to maintain that the ban on the headscarf needs to be lifted, they fire back, 'Article one!' If you happen to vouch for minority rights, they retort, 'Article two!' If you are a resolute believer in Turkey's European Union accession and support the implementation of the necessary reforms fully and immediately, you are accused of 'Article three'" --Elif Safak

"Being burned for a witch by English brutes is not calculated to bring out the best in anyone."
--Harold Bloom on Shakespeare's Joan of Arc

A couple of weeks ago the Torque, referring to Hasan Cemal's criticism of a top general, wrote:

"What is more noteworthy is the courage...with which a Turkish secular columnist with impeccable republican credentials would take on one of the most powerful figures in the whole country.

The closer Turkey gets to a full-membership of the European Union, we will probably see more deviations from the norm in terms of the established delicate balance between the Turkish press and the most revered institutions of the Republic."

Perhaps, but the question remains whether the process is taking five steps forward and three steps back, or three steps forward and five steps back. Hasan Cemal recently was charged, along with four other journalists (İsmet Berkan, Murat Belge, Haluk Şahin, Erol Katırcıoğlu), for "insulting the judiciary system" with his attack on a court ban on the Armenian Conference that was supposed take place at Bogazici University (the conference was consequently moved to Bilgi University). The punishment for the offense is a range between 6 months to 3 years, though the the likelihood may be a "suspended sentence" that was given to Hrant Dink, who plans to appeal to higher court. Their names are added to the list that includes Orhan Pamuk and Ibrahim Kaboglu (responsible for the report on "Minority Rights" commissioned by the government).

Of course, many among the journalist elite would disagree with the Torque about Cemal being an "establishmentarian" or a journalist with "impeccable republican creditentials." He is a polarizing figure because his main target in his columns are usually those (including a large segment of the journalist elite) who are more closely associated with having "impeccable republican creditentials," and who Hasan Cemal agressively attacks for adamently embracing status quo policies that have had a long-standing history of failure. The reason why he is a rather trustable critic on such people is because he spent 11 years as the editor of Cumhuriyet, which is the main source of "secularist republican intellectuals." In this way his career history resembles that of the late Michael Kelly (and also unavoidably, Christopher Hitchens) who climbed to the top of various left-leaning publications and was accused of betraying the cause. In fact, now Cemal has a new book out called "Cumhuriyet'i Cok Sevmistim" that is a collection of his notes that he took during that period.

Those who don't like him had referred to him (and still do) as a "closet right winger," because of his strong support of foreign investment and economic liberalism, and his criticism of the law banning those who wear head-scarfs from the university. However, "right-wing" with derogative connotations of being indifferent to human rights and being a nationalist is not applied to him because those traits are abundant in the people or stances he chooses to target. He once wrote a column called "What's National Interest?" (In Turkish) deriding many of those failed policies that were committed in the name of. He's a secular democrat who goes after those who are willing to sacrifice democracy in name of secularism, who are willing to sacrifice democracy in hopes of preserving territorial integritiy--sacrifices which end up sabotaging rather than ensuring the survival of secularism and territorial integrity.

His new book has created a controversy now because it contains many dirty bits regarding the renowned securist republican journalists during that time. By "dirty," I'm referring to these people's actual stances that were not reflected clearly in their columns. And even those who are ideologically alligned with Cemal have been taken back by the detail of his notes--bits including conversations in elevators and overheard conversations in next door cubicles--and his keeping a diary of such experiences. Mehmet Barlas said Cemal should have confronted those people instead of letting what bothered him simmer inside. Of course, had Cemal been more confrontational, his days at Cumhuriyet might have been numbered--especially during the the eighties and beginning of the ninties when his was editor. One of his main targets is Ilhan Selcuk, who he accuses of being a military coup supporter and enemy to democracy, even though he says Selcuk deceptively never comes out and admits it in his columns. Cemal's stay at Cumhuriyet ended when Selcuk boycotted the paper and took 80,000 among the 120,000 readers with him. The stand-off came to an end with Cemal leaving the paper and Selcuk retaining his position. Cemal was recently asked about the standoff in an interview.

Q: ...What happened at that time?
Hasan Cemal: When I took over as editor, our numbers were around the 50s and 60s. During my time and towards the end of my term it was up to 120-130, this was despite the disasterous economy...When Ilhan Selcuk withdrew, the readership dropped to 40--
Q: Doesn't that mean the public supported Ilhan Selcuk?
Hasan Cemal: No, I don't think so. Why? Because our entire readership didn't desert us. If all the readership was behind Ilhan Selcuk then one would expect the numbers to assume the 120 mark after I had left and he had come back. The numbers never reached that level, and thirteen years later, it's still at the 60 mark...which I think indicates some of the readership left with me...Ilhan Selcuk was adamently opposed to opening the paper to capital. And then what does he turn around and do? He opens it to capital...now both Sabah's owner and Karamehmet have a stake in it.
Q: You accuse Cumuriyet of being a military paper, is there such a thing?
Hasan Cemal: If you take a look at it, you will see a string of generals who, as soon as they retired, were taken into Cumhuriyet's Board. [Lists names...] These were generals, and everyone knew where they stood politically, so you tell me.

Some of the attacks he received after he left the paper he notes in his book. Ali Sirman hilariously wrote in 1991, "Cemal Pasha sunk the Ottoman Empire, and now his grandson Hasan Cemal is sinking the Turkish Republic. Kemalizm is dead, now there's Cemalizm." Many people knew before the book came out where Hasan Cemal stood, but what created the controversy was that his book was matching names to those objectionable ideological stances, and some of them had passed away, making his criticisms seem disrespectful to certain observers. (On a sidenote, if anyone wants to respect my death, please slander me in death as you would in life.) The harsh words that Hasan Cemal reserves for Ilhan Selcuk didn't prevent him from remarking in a recent interview: "If there were anyone there who I looked up to as an elder brother, it was Ilhan Selcuk."His problems with Ilhan Selcuk, he claims, are on purely ideological grounds. I kind of think it's counterproductive to withold criticism of someone simply because of personal respect. If one is writing columns about how this country should be directed, then the ideal situation would occur if his suggestions were incorporated into policy. I think the reason why Hasan Cemal's columns often exhibit outrage is because he takes what someone says and posits what would happen if his suggestions were to become government policy, even though his target may be innocent in so far as being unaware of the calamitous consequences of his suggestions. Such "innocence" is why others refrain from being similarly outraged, but without such outrage, little stands in the way of of those careless suggestions being absorbed into policy. Many have asked why Ilhan Selcuk was the one who received the brunt of Cemal's attack. In a Tv8 interview with Haluk Sahin, ironically another journalist that was charged recently, Cemal said although he and Ugur Mumcu disagreed on economic matters such as the privatisation of TV channels (Cemal for, Mumcu against), they often saw eye to eye on the democratisation of politics--both in favor of a multi-party system. And despite the sympathy for communism amongst the intelligentsia at the time, Mumcu would often come out in his columns and declare that Stalin was as much steeped in blood as Hitler. According to Cemal, unlike Mumcu, Selcuk was a silent advocate of a single party system and a blatant Stalin apologist.

Hasan Cemal was also among the ones that took notice of the left merging with the right-wing nationalists as result of the Iraq War. This "fusion paranoia" as Michael Kelly called it, probably happened more explicitly in Turkey than it did in the States. The Turkish Left felt betrayed by the Kurds, who had sided with the Americans. One could just as easily say that the Turkish Left abandoned the Kurds in their fight against Saddam because their politics could no longer afford it. Whether there is a friendship such a movment wouldn't sacrifice in order to avoid allying itself with the US remains to be seen. Thus, when you take the sympathy for other ethnicities out of the Turkish Left, there really isn't anything left that distinguishes it from the nationalist Right. Both become committed to protecting "Turkishness" against the onslaught of Western imperialism (EU, the US etc), all the while refusing to contemplate at what cost. Of course, the irony with Cemal is that when he attacked those who waved blind slogans, he would often use harsh simple descriptions in order to attract people to the grave threat someone's thinking posed. In fact, he probably lamented that such loose use made it more difficult for people to realize when someone was in fact a "fascist".

At the root of intellectual enlightenment lies a mind that questions, that critiques,
that doesn't trap one with slogans, a mind that doesn't become a prisoner to cliches...
But it's too late for you to realize it after this hour...
Your work now is not with the democrats, but with the Turkish Milosevics...
Your intellectual enlightenment is facism!
Your Kemalizm is fascism!
Your nationalism is fascism!
Yes, this is how it is Ilhan Selcuk...

--From "Cumuriyet'i Cok Sevmistim"

The late lovesick poet Attilla Ilhan, who passed away recently, was one of those fusionists. Known as "the gentleman's nationalist" with a strong physical presence of a wise old man with his large glasses, chubby cheeks, and forward facing beret, he used the softer term for nationalist-- "ulusalci" instead of "milliyetci" (which is more often associated with fascism)-- to describe himself. One of the things he would say often was "10% of the people in this country are traitors." Of course, what made this amusing was that Attilla Ilhan went to jail in his youth for treasonous behavior (reading a poem by the exiled Nazim Hikmet), and also fled to Paris several times because of anti-communism hysteria. He also had attacked the nationalist movement when it worked to remove traces of the rich Ottoman language from the new Turkish Republic's vocabulary. One would think someone with that kind of history would be uneasy about throwing accusations of treason around. Attila Ilhan's version of Ataturk was Ataturk as Marxist, he believed that what Ataturk had in mind was not the Western model but the Russian one. Publishing such a thesis in a magazine during the fifties caused said magazine to be shut down by the state, and Atilla Ilhan soon left for Paris. In one of the interviews before his death, he spent an hour railing against imperialism and then when asked about Cyprus said: "We should never leave it. The US goes into all those countries without consent, why should we hold ourselves back?" But even if he wanted to be remembered for his political ideas rather than his poetry, I'd prefer to remember him with the latter. If you want to have a bone-chilling experience, there's few things better than listening to Attilla Ilhan ramble through his poems with that deep weary voice.

If the Glove Don't Fit, You Must Acquit

One of the better opinionated programs on TV these days is the Emre Kongar and Mehmet Barlas head-to-head gambit on NTV. Unlike some of the American broadcasts that remove the mediator and turn the deal into the political equivalent of baywatch mud-wrestling, this format in Turkish with these two works pretty well. It does so because of three main reasons: 1) It's 23 minutes long, commercial free 2) Their personal politics are the same, that is, they are both of the secular socially liberal persuasion. 3) The lack of a mediator also allows them to establish their own line of attack, leaving less wiggle room for sloppy arguments that the mediator annoyingly lets pass (many Turkish journalists in this sense are unfamiliar with grilling a guest). The latter feature goes to Barlas' advantage, who often listens to Kongar with an ironic smile and constructs Swiftian hypotheticals from his points. What they differ wildly on is how they perceive certain events, and what should be done about them. Kongar is the more predictable old-guard secularist, whereas Barlas on many key issues is more of a dynamic progressive closer to Hasan Cemal and Mehmet Altan. People who are in half-comas where they seem partially awake are said to have less of a chance of recovering from a coma than people who seem completely unconscious. Barlas seems to point to this with respect to certain aspects of Turkish democracy...here are some back-and-forths that have taken place recently or in the past (These are not transcripts):

Barlas: If the national identity/ethnic identity issue continues as is...it will all end badly. I think we should look at what Abdullah Gul was able to do the other day--he was able to bring the US Ambassador to Iraq together with some of the Sunni leaders in Iraq and say "Turkey wants all the different people of Iraq to participate in the new Iraq, be they Sunni, Shiite, Kurd, Turkmen etc" This is my solution: You have all these parties in Turkey outside the parliament, including DEHAP [Kurdish party], because of the 10% vote barrier. What the government needs to do right now is drop the parliament representation threshold from 10% to somewhere around 3%, so that all various groups and identities can be represented in parliament. And then using this parliament, they must amend the consititution and come to agreement on what kind of national identity that they want....This is what is necessary.
Kongar: I agree with you about the parliament, but I disagree with your solution. We don't need a new national identity, what Ataturk gave us is enough--he said, "Anyone who lives within these borders, Turks, Kurds, Alevi etc are citizens of this country."... Your solution will turn Turkey into Iraq.
Barlas: The problem is that some of major problems we had 80 years ago, we still have now. If there is anything that indicates that we need a new approach, this is it.

_______

Barlas: ...on a military scale its no contest. You have a handful of PKK guys against what is a supremely dominant Turkish military force.
Kongar: Come on, it is a civil war--there's coffins of soldiers coming in everyday.
Barlas: Yes. And it takes a handful of people to kill those soldiers, especially today...cherry-picking the odd army vehicle with remote controlled roadside bombs--
Kongar: Which they got from? The US goes into Iraq, Talabani becomes president, and all of a sudden the PKK has new weapons. Since when did they have remote controlled roadside bombs?
Barlas: Sure. But if you keep on throwing threats their way (to Barzani, Talabani), why should they care about stopping what's going on here when they're busy over there....But anyway, do you honestly believe that, from a military standpoint, the PKK can achieve its objectives?
Kongar: No, of course not...
Barlas: Well, then...the important thing is that they shouldn't gain recruits, and that requires a political solution and the military should not dictate what that political solution is, as you should know--since our history is dotted with them--the danger of a military coup becomes much more real...In all established western democracies there is civilian control of the military, otherwise....
Kongar: Come on, British cops shot some poor guy--
Barlas: Right, and who held the press conference?
Kongar: What? What do you mean?
Barlas: I'm saying, in England the police commissioner took responsibility, didn't he? And who, may I ask, appoints the police commisioner? A politician elected by the people. Not a military tribunal with no civilian accountability.
Kongar: Abu Ghraib?
Barlas: What about it? There is a process of public accountability that could take place. Before you start pointing in that direction tell me this: How many military coups took place in the history of United States?
Kongar: .....
__________

Kongar: It's a political symbol...There wasn't always this many women wearing headscarves, why do you think it happened all of a sudden?
Barlas: If you look at the dates, it took place during the time period when there was a mass migration from villages to cities.
Kongar: Yes, but the way they wear their headscarves now is not how they wear them in the village. Now they wrap it tightly around their necks. Why? Because some guy came and made it a political symbol, they don't wear it for religious reasons. Or rather the religion was hijacked by politics.
Barlas: Are you telling me that if they wore their headscarves "like they did in the village" you wouldn't have a problem with it?
Kongar: Yes.
Barlas: You know what's going to happen right? You're going to say, "wear it like this," and all the women wearing it like that are still going to be supporting the AKP--and then you're going to claim that "wearing it like that" is a political symbol and that those who are wearing it are disingenous and are not really wearing it for religious reasons. The problem is you have no criteria for separating the ones that "really believe" from the ones who are doing it for political reasons...it's Middle Ages thinking--you prosecute based on intentions...it's called a witchhunt, actually. Denying a girl of her college education because of it is unacceptable.
Kongar: Behind those girls is a mentality that wishes to usher in a new era of Sheria law. How can you deny it, with all these alcohol bannings that are taking place.
Barlas: What I'm saying is your solution is no solution at all. The truth is that religious conservatism climbed during all those secularist coalition governments--they did nothing to curb it, they even pandered to it, as you know. The State supported religious extermism in the eighties in the East in hopes that it would help combat the PKK. After that they deny girls wearing headscarves education. That's a good solution...
Kongar: That state support was wrong, two wrongs don't make a right.
Barlas: [Laughs] Funny, that was my point. The state helped these girls get indoctrinated with these ideas, and then on top of that they ignore their responsibility borne out of wrongful action and ban them from the university. You can't wish the problem away by ignoring a large segment of the population.
Kongar: These guys got a mandate with only thirty-some percent support of the public, this is not a majority.
Barlas: Funny, I didn't hear the previous coalition government complaining that they got to into power with minority rule, and I'm sure you didn't mind because they shared your general ideology. This is the fault of the system that every party that comes into power takes advantage of--this does not in anyway show how the opposition parties are somehow less opportunistic and more ethical than the ruling AKP.
Kongar: ...says the AKP's biggest fan.
Barlas: [Laughs] The point is, the AKP is running our government now and I'd rather hope and push it to do right rather than hope it does wrong simply because I'm suspicious of their motives....If you don't trust them, fine...But I have a criteria with which they can gain my trust. I can say if I don't trust you, you can gain my trust by doing this and that--as opposed to: "I won't trust you, and there's nothing you can do to about it." It's like the story about Temel's flight on a plane...He's flying in a commerical airplane and all of a sudden there is an explosion and it catches on fire and takes a a nose-dive. Everybody is screaming and crying, but Temel gets annoyed and turns to the sobbing lady next to him, "What are you crying for, it's not your daddy's plane, is it?!" .... same thing. When the AKP government does something wrong, there's all these people that say, "What're you crying for, it's not like it's your daddy's party..." They'd rather get them out of power than admit temporary defeat and work with them to acheive something...
Kongar: [Laughs]

Harry Pinter and the Globlet of Other Retarded Puns, Analogies, and What Have You

[--written before Pinter's Nobel speech]

Harold Pinter isn't a complete stranger to Turkish current events...He came here with Arthur Miller in 1985 to protest against the jailing of Turkish writers and political dissidents, and in doing so played a hand in speeding up their release. There are very few around today who feel that protest at that time was unjustified, since many people across the entire political spectrum were affected. So now these people feel they have to distinguish between such justfiable protest and what they see as petty and aggravating comments by Orhan Pamuk. The difference that they settled on was, "Hey, at least Pinter trashed other countries and not just his own." Nice. One is henceforth a "respectable activist," the other is a "whiny opportunist". Of course what was swept under the carpert after the Nobel declaration was the small detail of Harold Pinter being ferverently pro-Kurdish, at one time at least. There is an amusingly prescient quote from an archived piece Harold Pinter wrote in 1999:

I'd like to finish here by reading something which I think is a remarkable piece of prose by Dario Fo, which he actually wrote quite recently and submitted to the Turkish press.

'Kurdistan lives. It burns in the mind of every single person of the 35 million people who were robbed of their identity and made into refugees in Turkey, Iraq and Europe. It is burning and living in the fires of Newroz and in jails where 12,000 political prisoners are buried in isolation cells. It lives in the memory of those who disappeared and in the scars of those who disappeared and in the scars of those who were tortured. It is burning and living in the mountains of the popular resistance, called terrorism by the western world.'

I know why he got the Nobel Prize.

Pretty hilarious, actually. Pinter himself protested the arrest of Ocalan in February of 1999 outside the Turkish embassy, he refused to label Ocalan a "thug" even though he off-handedly admitted worse:

The PKK had certainly killed, and has also committed atrocities, but the overwhelming number of these 30,000 deaths, not to mention widespread mutilation and rape, are the responsibility of the Turkish military.

How the Turkish military's responsibility acquits Ocalan of comitting atrocities is one for books I guess. I somehow doubt Pinter is still as energetic for the Kurdish cause after the Kurds, very sensibly and to his abject horror probably, took the American's side in the Iraq War-- Pinter's new target these days. This poem, entitled Democracy, from 2003, looks like it was written for them:

There's no escape.
The big pricks are out.
They'll fuck everything in sight.
Watch your back.

Of course, now I know why he got the Nobel Prize (no doubt now I have quadrupled my chances of getting a Nobel, this is one chain letter with a proven kickback record).

2005-09-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

The Power of Numbers in Absentia

When probabilty theory profs attack, and shoot at their ex-colleagues. A very unromantic and fascinating read even though they gave him his own villian name, Gary Wise a.k.a Dr. Counterexample, and an interactive timeline of the downward spiral.
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Drinking Lemonade with Selim's Vizier

From Slate's A Week at the Trial of Slobadan Milosevic:

To the surprise of exactly no one, Seselj sails off on an expansive discourse about the historical origins of Serbian national consciousness, railing about "the Ottoman yoke," "the Austrian yoke," and "the Venetian yoke," and enthusiastically detailing the machinations of 15^th-century European politics. When all is said and done, it turns out that Seselj's theory lumps just about all the former Yugoslavia (except Slovenia and a few districts in Croatia) into Greater Serbia. As Seselj explains it, Yugoslavia's real problem was its peoples' blinkered inability to recognize that they were basically all Serbs: "An overwhelming majority of today's Croats are Catholic Serbs. All Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina [are] Muslim Serbs."

At which point I started nervously loosening my tie in expectation. Then in parenthesis:

This is eerily reminiscent of Kemal Ataturk's insistence that there are no Kurdish people, only "mountain Turks."

Doh. Remember when Hamlet says, "The play 's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king, " and everyone around him does the circular finger motion around the ear?

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Brendan Simms in bosnia.org:

Most Muslims were simply not interested in hearing that the US government had been a staunch supporter of Bosnian Muslims. By the time I added that prominent American Jews – among them Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz – were leading protagonists of intervention on behalf of the Bosnain Muslims, they had switched off. Bosnia and Kosovo were simply subsumed into their broader narrative of Muslim victimhood....

In the case of present-day Britain, there is a further paradox. Many of the Labour supporters of the removal of Saddam Hussein – such as Peter Mandelson, Peter Hain and – had been strong critics of the inaction on Bosnia. Mr Blair himself was the most principled supporter of intervention in Kosovo, including the deployment of ground troops, if necessary. In that sense European Muslims have had no firmer friend than the Prime Minister, a fact acknowledged by the mainly Muslim Kosovar Albanians among whom he enjoys iconic status. Yet so far, not one of the hundreds of British Muslim and para-Muslim voices I have heard since 7/7 has ever suggested that Muslims should have particular reason to be grateful to Tony Blair. They too seem wired in a way that we cannot reach...

We should remind ourselves and others that European Muslims were the first to benefit from the recent surge in western interventions, some of which were certainly on the wrong side of positive international law.

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Dogu Ergil on September 6-7th (TDN):

These thoughts occupied my mind on the days when we sadly commemorated the destructive events that transpired in Istanbul exactly 50 years ago that is alluded to as the Sept. 6-7 events. What happened on those days half a century ago is of utmost importance for Turks to face their history and understand the ideological fabric of their political culture. There is enough data on hand to interpret the true nature of those events and sufficient liberties to discuss them.

An evening paper called Express, published in Istanbul, made two consecutive prints on Sept. 5, 1955, denouncing the sinister attack on the house where M.K. Atatürk was born in his hometown of Salonika, Greece. A newly created group called �Cyprus is Turkish� invited everyone to retaliate against the Greeks who wanted to annex the island and had not refrained from defiling Turkey's hero's sacred homestead.

Over the next two days and nights mobs raided the homes and workplaces of non-Muslim minorities in Istanbul and Izmir, leaving behind 16 dead and dozens of wounded citizens of Greek origin, 73 devastated Greek Orthodox churches and damaging one synagogue, eight chapels and two monasteries. Some 5,538 properties were sacked, burnt and destroyed, of which 3,584 belonged to Greek citizens of Turkey. Unfortunately, between 50-200 women (varying according to who has reported it) of the same extraction were physically violated. In Izmir, the Greek Consulate and the Greek pavilion at the Izmir International Fair were set on fire by arsonists; 14 homes and five shops were destroyed and ransacked. Some graves of Greek citizens were destroyed as well. The excuse was ready, �They started it and we paid them back.�

It took a few years to learn the truth concerning who had perpetrated a mock attempt to bomb Atatürk's home in Salonika. It was a Turkish student (Mr. Oktay Engin) who later served in the intelligence community and ended his official career as the governor of Nevşehir.

The whole thing was a fabricated provocation to prove that there was public support behind the government of the day (headed by Mr. Adnan Menderes, who was later hanged by a military-backed tribunal) whose Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. Fatin Rüştü Zorlu was negotiating with Greece and Britain for a fair settlement on Cyprus in the post-British era. What went so wrong and got out of control where excited street demonstrations could serve the purpose of the government?

Two-and-a-half factors misled popular reaction.

1) What we call now the �deep state,� or covert organizations that see themselves as guardians of the country and protector of the nation, intervened and changed the course of events. One general (four-star Gen. Sabri Yirmibeşoğlu) admitted in an interview with Tempo magazine (24th edition, June 9-11, 1991) that �the events were the product of �special forces' and were an example of magnificent organization.� Indeed, the raging horde was not an ad hoc crowd that was spontaneously provoked. They were organized, equipped with thousands of clubs, axes, national flags and posters of Atatürk and were waiting for the news of the bombing to come out. They were also supplied with lists of names and addresses of non-Muslim minorities. Police just watched the devastation for two long days and did not help the victims, except a few personal exceptions.

2) The phenomenon was one of the concrete examples of a series of actions of the undeclared policy of weeding out non-Muslims and non-ethnic Turks from the nation and transferring capital from the minorities to the national (ethnically Turkish) bourgeoisie. The process had started during the last decade of the Ottoman Empire led by the Young Turks (or the government of the semi-clandestine organization of Union and Progress) and went on during the republican years, to be repeated in Thrace (European Turkey) by intimidating the Jews in 1934, creating and exacting an exorbitant income tax, called the Varlık Vergisi (Wealth Tax), from all non-Muslim minorities of the nation in 1942 and finally an orchestrated operation that squeezed away 12,000 Greek inhabitants from Istanbul. The combined result of these intimidations and deterrent policies has been departure of initially hundreds and later tens of thousands of non-Muslim citizens from the country.

2 ½) The 1950s were the last years when the last traces of Ottoman social and cultural heritage of Turkey had disappeared or were erased. The republican regime had chosen to legitimize itself as unique and matchless by denying its Ottoman past in all vestiges of life and built its educational system on this rift. What had remained of Turkey's multi-cultural social fabric was destroyed in the 1950s both by discouraging non-Muslim minorities to remain in the country and by massive migration from the countryside into towns, most of all into Istanbul. By 1955, new districts composed of ex-peasants had emerged like Taşlıtarla, Kağıthane and Alibeyköy. The rural inhabitants of these and other new districts were quite unfamiliar with the cosmopolitan atmosphere of urban life and had never experienced a lifestyle enriched by non-Muslim urban groups. They were hungry for power, respect and wealth. Provoked into doing something �good� for their nation, proving their worth as destroyers of �subversive elements� and enriching themselves through booty was a perfect combination to Turkify the nation. In other parts of the world such a deed may be called ethnic cleansing but such a term is unknown in our part of the world so no one is blamed for the act.

We Turks chose not to remember those unsavory days and suppress the assiduous nature of the political philosophy behind similar events. We did not dare to admit to ourselves that we have lost the multi-cultural richness of our society. We did not want to admit that the protection of the lives, properties and honor of the Ottoman peoples that we were a part of was the nobles oblige of the republic that we are also so proud of. We never admit that appropriation of the properties and wealth of the non-Muslim minorities has not made us any richer; on the contrary, their banishment depleted the entrepreneurial power of the nation and dwarfed economic development. Denial of pluralism and multi-culturalism has left us devoid of the culture of reconciliation and tolerance to differences. We are not more stable and peaceful within now that the non-Muslims are only a miniscule part of the national population. We are ready to hate anyone who may dare to say that our recent history may not be a good compass to show the way in the future that is in the making.

Ashamed of what he has read and seen, the military prosecutor at the time has saved the photos and documents of the Sept. 6-7 events to be shown to future generations as a mistake not to be repeated. He gave them to the Turkish Historical Association and demanded that they only be published 25 years after his death. That day has come and in sad commemoration of the events, the Turkish Historical Association has organized an exhibition of photos of those two fateful days.

The exhibition opened its doors to the public on the same day of the events. But what do we see? A bunch of thugs calling themselves �nationalists' raided the exhibition hall and destroyed some of the photos. It seems the scions of the original perpetrators are still alive and kicking. Or is it more than that? Is it an understanding that we have to get rid of if we do not want to be ashamed of similar deeds?

History is not a lot from which we can choose the best; it is a load we have to carry in whole whether we like it or not, for we have accumulated it.

2005-09-09T06:20:00.000-07:00

How about Never? Is Never Good For You?

Good Song from 1929. (Moistworks) stock market crash metaphor?

In reference to the ancient-ness of my last post, Bilge Ebiri has two pieces on the last Istanbul Film Festival.

In June, Yektan Turkyilmaz was arrested in Armenia and charged with trying to smuggle books out of the country and was finally released in mid August (Blogrel and Onik posted updates and pictures of the trial). The guy is a Ph.d candidate in cultural anthropology at Duke University and it was his fourth visit to the place. Signatures and letters were sent in protest to the President of Armenia, but I'm sure he held back from giving a detailed response so he could start getting letters from really cool people, you know, like Bob Dole. Turkish media coverage has been very mild on the subject, probably in part due to Turkyilmaz's work not being too kind to the official Turkish thesis. Meanwhile a Turkish documentary maker Berke Bas is doing a piece on Armenian orphans taken in by Turkish families ("We do know that it was on a scale that the then rulers of the Ottoman Empire issued secret orders to punish families who saved Armenian children"--Professor Selim Deringil). The conference by Those Fuckers that was postponed at Bogazici (Bosphorus) University is now re-scheduled for the end of "September". Orhan Pamuk has just been charged for the "public denigration of the Turkish identity" according to our kick-ass penal code and faces 3 years of jail time if convicted because he failed to collect 200 when he passed Go--I mean--because he blabbed to the Swiss about Armenians being killed 90 years ago. Pamuk's defense team will try to make their case by arguing that Switzerland isn't even a country.

Shalom & Kasuri, the foreign ministers of Israel and Pakistan (not to be confused with the famous contortionists) hung out in Istanbul recently. According to the Israeli foreign minister, Erdogan suggested the meeting to Sharon when he called to congratulate him on the Gaza withdrawal. At one point, Shalom was heard referring to Kasuri as "the shrewd schlemiel", but in a good way.

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Guess You Had To Be There

"The interesting thing is that the same person who goes to see the film The Brown Bunny, and groans as the insects pile up on Vincent Gallo's windshield, will curl up at home with Everything is Illuminated and chuckle approvingly at finding the phrase "we are writing" printed 191 times in a row. (Such assuredness--and in one so young!) In short, two aesthetics often exist in the same mind: a moviegoing aesthetic that trusts primarily in personal taste and perception, and a reading aesthetic that is more likely to defer to established opinion. Which brings us back to the style that established opinion holds so dear. " -- B.R. Myers

McCarthy is probably best known, though, for a rather different register, in which his prose opens its lungs and bellows majestically, in a concatenation of Melville and Faulkner.
--James "Good Cop" Wood

[Cormac] McCarthy has never been much interested in consciousness and once declared that as far as he was concerned Henry James wasn’t literature. Alas, his new book, with its gleaming equipment of death, its mindless men and absent (but appropriately sentimentalized) women, its rigid, impacted prose, and its meaningless story, is perhaps the logical result of a literary hostility to Mind.
--James "Bad Cop" Wood, same review

There's something about book reviews that give them more of a solid feel on a whole to me than film reviews. I think it's because the presence of quotes provides at least some guarantee of objectivity within the review--I can always check whether what the reviewer says goes with the quotes he dishes out. Which is not to say that the literary field isn't just as quarellous, just look at when a certain Dan Green complains about king-of-the-hill literary critic James Wood: said critic hilariously crashes blog (scroll down to Dear Dan Green). This kind of quote-grounding obviously cannot be present in film reviews, to converse about sensory experiences requires abstracting about sensory experiences--which often leads to accusations of simplification ("it's just two guys walking around for two hours", "just another fairy-tale romance"...) and counter-accusations of projecting self onto movie. Of course, there's nothing innate preventing simplifications from being wrong, which complicates things further. Something should be made easier when your source material is already in abstract form, yet the presence of the same kind of stumbling blocks on the literary side still mystifies.
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From the French Quarter

Seized by a strong need to piss, and tired of the Starbucks, McDonald's, and Pizza Huts, where there are almost always signs telling you the name of the guy who "cleaned this bathroom with pride" and the name of the "supervisor" whom you should call "for comments and compliments," I ask Tim to let me off at the edge of a quiet field bathed in sunlight. Scarcely have I begun when I hear behind me the roar of a motor followed by a screeching of brakes. I turn around. It's a police car.

<>"What are you doing?"
"I'm getting some fresh air."
"You don't have the right to get fresh air."
"Okay, I'm pissing."
"You don't have the right to piss."
"What do I have a right to, then?"
"Nothing: it is forbidden on highways to stop, hang around, dawdle, and to piss."
"I'm French …"
"I couldn't care less if you're French — the law's the same for everyone. Keep moving."
"I wrote a book on Daniel Pearl."
"Daniel who?"
"And a book on the forgotten wars."
"What kind of wars?"
"I'm writing about following the path of Tocqueville …"
<>And suddenly, as the name Tocqueville is uttered, a sort of miracle occurs! The cop's face goes from suspicions to curious to almost friendly.
"Tocqueville — really? Alexis de Tocqueville?"<>

And after I tell him yes, Alexis, I'm following in the footsteps of this great compatriot who, 170 years ago, must have passed somewhere near here, this awkward customer, red with rage, who for all I knew was getting ready to book me for inappropriate behavior, for sexual display on a public highway, or, in any case, for "loitering with intent," looks at me with sudden affability and begins to ask me what, in my opinion, continues to be valid in Tocqueville's analysis. --Bernad Levy, In The Footsteps of Toqueville

It's somewhat odd when Americans (The Atlantic) think it useful to ask a Frenchman to retrace the footsteps of Tocqueville, especially when they have the likes of Don Delillo and his ilk internalizing that oh-so-familiar outsider perspective, and like them Levy often brings That Other French Guy along for the ride as well, Baudrillard The Bold. Not to say it isn't mildly entertaining to have Bernad Levy on the walkabout being told to say the "atheist's pray", or noticing that there aren't any fast lanes on the highways, but at times Levy's musings on France seem more informative than his comments on America. As a result, his presence on the continent works better in moments revealing the American View On A French Guy. Also, he likes Seattle, surprise surprise.

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The Frog Prince's Burden

Remember when France gave it's top two votes at the Eurovision contest to Turkey and Israel respectively? Nice plea bargain, funny guy.

2005-05-05T02:39:00.000-07:00

Staring at the Sun

After all is said and done, looks like one of the best things to come out of Istanbul film fest is Pelin Esmer's doc, Oyun (Play). Not one of those fancy Errol Morrissy productions, but Esmer is able to handle and shape the strength of her subject. blurb: A group of village women are coaxed into forming a theater troupe and ambivalence morphs into ego battling. Gender-bending hilarity mucks up an already gender-bended locale; the women do all the muscle work by day and gleefully play their drunk and lazy wife-beating husbands by night. A lot of wise choices prevent this from being the usual oh-poor-them tearjerker--like when feminine subtlety clumsily begins to creep into their hardened routine and gives rise to the occasional stumble. The rather awfulness of the doc preceding it might have something to with my impressions, but I'm betting against it.

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Dementia and Schism

Wow, what a shitty couple of months of politics. It often helps to hear people like Mehmet Altan say that they didn't think they'd be alive to see the amount of progress that's been made in the last few years. The only solid good news these days seems to be Kemal Dervis going to the UNDP.

Now that the leader of the Nationalist Party (MHP) has spoken out against extremism ("instead of guns, buy laptops"), the position of the far right party is quickly becoming indistinguishable from the supposed center left CHP oppostion. Add to that the recent resignations from the AKP, mostly due to those who think the party isn't looking out for the national interest ("selling out Cyprus" etc), thus causing the party to adopt nationalist tones, and you have a big blob of status quo with the adjective "progressive" wiped off the entire political landscape. Mehmet Ali Birand calls the Nationalist Party leader a "forward-thinking statesman", and tries to drag him to the center:

I would like to remind all that Bahçeli had previously shown his stature as a statesman while the MHP was a coalition partner in the MHP-Motherland Party (ANAP)-Democratic Left Party (DSP) coalition. If he had not neutralized the extremes in his party and had not put the interests of the country over party politics, Turkey would never have been able to pass the necessary EU harmonization laws. Permission for Kurdish education and broadcasting and the annulment of capital punishment would never have happened. If Bahçeli had wanted to, he would have called the nationalists to the streets, influencing Parliament into not passing the packages. The MHP leader is carefully executing his policies without straying from party principles. He is thinking of long-term objectives while concentrating on the moment. This way he is saving the MHP from turning into a marginal group that derives its power from street violence. The MHP is gradually becoming a party that is in harmony with the system and capable of representing the government during EU negotiations instead of being perceived as a feared party with an extremist agenda.

I would think though that the Nationalist Party is rather redundant when you have an actively political military. After all, the reason why Bahceli didn't speak out loudly has a lot to do with why the military didn't speak out loudly. Who needs the MHP when the military is much more effective in bringing people to the street? Then again it has its use when news (In Turkish) comes out that Turkes (the nationalist party leader in the early ninties) met with Petrossian and actually considered placing a wreath at the genocide memorial in Yerevan. One would pity the man who had to accuse a nationalist party of treason.

The lack of immediate criticism for the military when it spoke out against the attempted flag burning is hardly surprising. It took the mob attacks in Trabzon (when leftists handing out pamphlets were mistaken for flag burning operatives) for people to get their shit together. Hasan Cemal was one of the few who attacked the notion that the flag waving hysteria was an act of genuine protest, noting that there was silence for two days after the attempted flag burning in Mersin. Only when the military came out with its verbal assault ("so-called citizens" etc) did people take to the streets brandishing their nationalist credentials. One protest parade was even flanked by military jets. The sad thing is that there wasn't nearly this much shit going on after the November bombings in Istanbul in 2003, with or without flags. And that was where 60 people lost their lives. The primary aim of the terrorists there wasn't to split the country apart, though that's the point...There is still more outrage directed at the threat of ideogical weakening (flag burning) than the loss of innocent life. After all, life is cheap and plentiful. Following the military all the politicians scrambled to the mics to say the same thing. Baykal defended the pissing contest: "If the government doesn't talk, the people will." Well I prefer people talk rather than have them try lynching people, which is exactly what happened when the military and government did talk. Who afterwards appeals for calm? The military, obviously. Such words of wisdom are to be expected. After all, this is the establishment that makes a claim to that saintly arena often referred to as "above politics." The AKP had performed the closest thing to a practical joke a few months ago when it gave the military head an award usually given to politicians, he turned it down (I'm not a politician--Ozkok, no shit?--AKP). Then there are those who hold the EU directly or indirectly responsible for this current rise in nationalism, both Turkish and Kurdish, and who conveniently do not hold the military accountable for its recent role. There are those who attacked the public intellectuals who spoke out against the flag waving hysteria, asking them why they didn't speak loudly against those who waved Abdullah Ocalan flags. The notion, "with power comes responsibility" seems to be a foreign concept. It's simple, really. Ocalan isn't running the country, and those who wave his flag are currently not involved in directing policy.

The reaction to Pamuk's politics is another case in point. When the heat began to rise, mainstream intellectuals either did nothing or tried to provide rational or balanced criticisms against Pamuk when public opinion was far passed that point. I was watching Woody Allen's rather hilarious The Front a few weeks ago on CNBC, and I switched to news on NTV (same owner) at the commercial break where they were reporting the decision of a small town near Isparta to destroy all of Orhan Pamuk's books in its bookstores and libraries. Either it was one of the most disturbing coincidences in recent memory, or an ingeniously well-timed hook by NTV. The mayor of Isparta said the individual who gave the order was "out of his league," but this didn't stop Isparta itself from later issuing an order to remove Orhan Pamuk's books from bookstores because "they weren't selling well". The horde of attacks against Pamuk that took place in mainstream newspapers went uncontested in weeks prior, and Hasan Cemal again (In Turkish) attacked his more than comfortable collegues. Ayse Ozgun in the Turkish Daily News, whose writing is often tabloidish and lacking of content and who often reminds people how her family was harrassed by Armenians in California (sparkling credentials for objectivity, no doubt) went with a character assasination piece in February:

He wants the whole world to know all the bad things about Turkey. He wants to tell the world how horrible Turkey and the Turkish people are. That is his one and only message. He gets this message out through his books and speeches. He must write those words with drooling pleasure at his keyboard. [And if you don't feel like arguing with his politics, which is after all why she started to write this piece, just attack his writing]...Mind you, I and a whole bunch of my friends went and bought every book he wrote only to give up after a few chapters because he is so slow, boring, monotonous and repetitious. [ adjectives appear not to be Ozgun's forte] As for being nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, I think he has tough competition. He'll get it if Michael Moore doesn't get it first. You see, what with his humor and human touch, Moore deserves it more.

She often complains Pamuk is giving ammunition to anti-Turkey EU reps, though now the anti-Turkish wing can rightfully point to her, a so-called progressive educated columnist, to show how public self-criticism is lambasted with fervent immaturity and empty accusations even in such (ahem) esteemed circles. Even though Yusuf Kanli and Dogu Ergil are the more objective mouthpieces in the rag, Ozgun's thoughts are unfortunately in tune with the majority of the educated population. When Elif Safak quietly attacked nationalist historians, the Turkish Daily News had to run a correction: "Due to an editing error, Elif Safak's article last Sunday titled "When silences speak" mistakenly included the term "allegedly" when the author directly referred to the atrocities in the past. The term "allegedly" was not used by the author. We apologize." Those goddamn writers and their directness. They should do their job and write shit that no one understands.

One of the reasons things may change (besides the Crusade for Sanity led by the likes of Mehmet Altan) is this apparent tendency of those mainstream talking heads who deride Pamuk of praising prominent Turkish Armenians like Hrant Dink (spokesman for the Turkish Armenian community) and Etyen Mahcupyan (writer for Zaman). Part of the reason for the praise is because these two tend to piss off the Armenian Diaspora frequently by having good things to say about Turkey and criticizing Armenia for not opening its own archives. But if you listen to what Mahcupyan actually says, he doesn't shy away from the heat of the genocide issue. On the other hand, he also rejects the notion that the intent went beyond a small group of people. Mahcupyan's point: if we put them all in one basket, we're basically inviting the other side to do the same. Strenuously defending Talat Pasha prevents us from praising Cemal Pasha who objected to his and his collegues's decisions. He thinks there hasn't been an in-depth study here of the intent of the major players. If it was truly a relocation that got fucked up, one question that comes up is why did the empire quickly sell the property it had seized. According to him, an up-and-coming Turkish historian is currently doing a dissertation on certain documents in the Ministry. One of them is a telegraph to Syria in 1913 where Talat Pasha wrote that he was planning to send the Muslims fleeing from the Balkans to Der Zor. Apparently the response from Syria is: If you send them here, they will die. On the other hand, you could look at what Gunduz Aktan says: "Turkey has never accepted the allegation that the Ottomans had massacred the Armenians. This is because those members of the security forces that abused the Armenians and the bandits that massacred the Armenians were court martialled and sentenced." What? So If US security forces are convicted regarding certain acts then the US should not accept allegations that are encompassed in the convictions? Aktan tries to be careful by saying security forces did the abusing, and only bandits did the killing. Some are not as careful. The curious reasoning seems to be: since the low level was convicted of certain acts, we don't have to accept the allegations. I think the allegations he's trying to refer to are the allegations of the intent of the upper echelon, chain of command etc.; it's a very poor way of going about it.

What has the new "diplomatic attack" exposed? If anything, the weakness of our line of reasoning. In a rush to produce something, Erdogan insisted that Western countries should remove The British Blue Book as a reference when dealing with this issue ("propaganda written by biased individuals"). Well....If you happend to go to the English site of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, under the topic Armenian Allegations, there's a 40 page document called "10 Answers to 10 Questions." On Page 17 and 18 (besides all the other things that raise eyebrows) we use The British Book as a reference to support our own point of view. Given that you've long held the view that the book is a bunch of lies, this is not a good idea. I would have thought going on a diplomatic attack would entail checking your website for any inconsistencies. Guess not.

The academics have themselves said in polls that they have little trust in most of the democratic institutions in the country including the police, but trust the military more than any other outfit. Well then none of these people have the right to ask for entry into the EU; asking the Europeans to have faith in the institutions you yourself have no faith in is retarded.

2005-04-07T05:09:00.000-07:00

Him With His Mouth, and Also a Foot

Childishness is not a obstacle to survival--he said it, and he proved it, in a way that would have made utilitarians jealous. I already used his own title for the last post, but if there were ever a running bet on the "when are they going to die already" posse, I would've thought Saul Bellow would outlast many of his juniors, including the Polish wonder kid and Castro. Most seemed to find it rather annoying that a writer of his talent was still alive. It did have its uses though, as Joan Acocella noted: "The Library of America has now run out of dead Americans, and so, for only the second time, it has devoted a volume to the living." Bellow would have perhaps cracked a smile on the "run out of the dead" remark. To his credit, he kind of kept out of the way, though new books would unfortunately remind people he was alive--good new books, which added even more emphasis on the alive part. I have an ultimately misguided tendency to think that his playful thoughts were always in close proxmity to death, no matter what his age, and that acted as some kind of antibiotic. And I think, by his own admission, such thoughts had something to do with a near-death experience when he was a child. Vulnerability can go a long way. He would handle modernity at the edges and the cross currents, keeping it from flowing through his work entirely like DeLillo or DF Wallace. Keep it at bay, seemed to be the slogan, although characters would often find shrapnel lodged in their psyche:

What do you do about death--in this case, the death of an old father?...Take this matter of mourning, and take it against a contemporary background. How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odors, the moldiness or gassiness, of old men...Think what times these are...the Lufthansa pilot in Aden is described by the hostages as being on his knees, begging the Palestinian terrorists not to execute him, but they shoot him through the head. Later they themselves are killed. And still others shoot others, or shoot themselves...We know what goes daily through the whole of human community, like a global death-peristalsis.

Maybe this kind of direct confrontation put some people off, but it was also the source of things. The characters, when confronted, were trying to face these questions head-on. And the art was in the bursting of the seams. I read somewhere that "he was good as describing faces," which made me laugh--a great epitaph really, but faces?

The round face had lengthened, and a Voltarian look had come into it. Her blue stare put it to you directly: Read me the riddle of this absurd transformation, the white hair, the cracked voice. My transformation, and for that matter yours. Where is your hair, and why are you stooped? And perhaps there were certain common premises. All these physical alterations seem to release the mind. For me there are further suggestions: that as the social order goes haywire and the constraints of centuries are removed, and the seams of history open, as it were, walls come apart at the corners, bonds dissolve, and we are freed to think for ourselves--provided we can find the strength to make use of the opportunity--to escape through the gaps, not succumbing in lamentations but getting on top of the collapsed pile.

When I was a kid, some teacher off-handedly told me that everyone in world were cousins. By some miracle, I was able to hold that belief for a lengthy period of time, maybe one or two years. When I was playing with a friend, the subject came up by way of a toy globe sitting in the middle of the room. The usual "Yes, they are" and "No, they're not" ensued. After which we went to the livingroom to consult the parents. Their initial response was "Of course not," but seeing my shocked expression, they modified it, "Well, in a sense they are." Every knowledge betrayal after that was a walk in the park.

We were issued booklets: "Our Little Japanese Cousins," "Our Morrocan Cousins." "Our Little Russian Cousins,"...I read all these gentle descriptions about little Ivan and tiny Conchita and my eager heart opened to them. Why, we were close, we were one under it all...We were not guineas, dagos, krauts: we were cousins. It was a splendid conception, and those of us who opened our excited hearts to the world union of cousins were happy, as I was, to give our candy pennies to a fund for the rebuilding of Tokyo after the earthquake of the twenties. After Pearl Harbor, we were obliged to bomb the hell out of the place. It's unlikely that Japanese children had been provided with the books about their little American cousins. The Chicago Board of Education never thought to look into this.

Some come to think that he name drops and rambles too often. In Turkey, the novel that's most often translated (if not the only one) is Dangling Man, precisely because it seems to lack those properties. Well, somebody is missing out. His characters at times seem to mock the reactions....

He repeated himself. The commodity brokers, politicians, personal-injury lawyers, bagmen and fixers, salesmen and promoters who worked at the club lost patience with him. He was offensive in the locker room, wrapped in his sheet. Nobody knew what he was talking about. Too much Chinese in his cantos, too much Provençal. The club asked the family to keep him at home.

Yeah, right. The proper nouns seemed to function as mental life jackets for the characters, the deeper the shit they were in, the more they threw out there.

What she occasionally talked about while Fonstein and my father stared at the chessboard, sealed in their trance, was the black humor, the slapstick side of certain camp operations. Being a French teacher, she was familiar with Jarry and Ubu Roi, Pataphysics, Absurdism, Dada, Surrealism. Some camps were run in a burlesque style that forced you to make these connections. Prisoners were sent naked into the swamp and had to croak and hop like frogs. Children were hanged while starved, freezing slave laborers lined up on parade in front of the gallows and a prison band played Viennese light opera waltzes...I was invited to meditate on themes like: Can Death Be Funny? or Who Gets the Last Laugh? I wouldn't do it, though. First those people murdered you, then they forced you to brood on their crimes.

It's death or good company. Or may be the staleness of self-preservation.

The uncritical affectionate child. He hoped I might bring back something. But all he got from me was a cripple by his bedside. Yet Rexler had tried to offer him something. Let's see if we can ratchet up that old-time feeling. Perhaps Albert had got something out of it. But Albert had taken no conscious notice of the man hit by the train...Rexler, who didn't even know where the cemetery was and would never go to visit it, walked lopsided in the sunny grass...Deep-voiced, either humming or groaning, he turned his mind again to the lungs in the roadbed as pink as a rubber eraser and the other organs, the baldness of them, the foolish oddity of their shapes, almost clownish, almost a denial or refutation of the high-ranking desires and subtleties...His deformity, the shelf of his back and the curved bracket of his left shoulder, gave added protection to his hoarded organs. A contorted coop or bony armor must have formed by his will...Don't tell me, Rexler thought, that everything depends on these random-looking parts--and to preserve them I was turned into some kind of human bi-valve?

Well, what of the end?

And when he was separated from his warmth, he slipped into death. And there was his elderly, large, muscular son, still holding and pressing him, when there was nothing anymore to press. You could never pin down that self-willed man. When he was ready to make his move, he made it--always on his own terms. And always, always, something up his sleeve. That was how he was.

Maybe, maybe not.

...adolescence turned him into a cripple gymnast whose skeleton was the apparatus he worked out on like an acrobat in training. This was how reality punished you for your innocence. It turned you into a crustacean...But he had taken pains to train himself away from abnormality, from the outlook and the habits of a cripple. He walked with a virile descending limp, his weight coming down on the advancing left foot. "Not personally responsible for the way life operates" was what he tacitly declared.

And yet.

These observations, Rexler was to learn, were his whole life--his being--and love was what produced them. For each physical trait there was a corresponding feeling. Paired, pair by pair, they walked back and forth, in and out of his soul.

2005-03-22T02:28:00.000-08:00

From a very talented individual who's going for everything under the sun.

More Die of Heartbreak

His characters are equipped not with obligingly suggestive childhoods or case-histories, but with a cranial jukebox of situation comedies...their dreams and dreads all mediated secondhand. They are not lost souls or dead souls. Terrible and pitiable...they are simply junk souls; quarter-pounders, with cheese. --Martin Amis

Watching Lawrence of Arabia on video is like looking at a postcard of "Guernica" that's been folded six times, tucked into the pocket of a ratty pair of jeans, and laundered for eleven hours. --Mike D'Angelo

The Istanbul Film Festival is starting up in a few weeks, which hopefully will allow me to catch up on the Asian invasion led by Memories of Murder, Nobody Knows, 3-Iron, 2046, Tropical Malady, Sympathy for Mr. Vengence along with Kings and Queen, Whisky, and The Holy Girl and others. There are tribute screenings for Polanski and Neil Jordan (not my cup of chai). There is also a "Jane Campion and Harvey Kietel Special", unfortunately and lamely titled, because it only consists of a screening of The Piano. The French hottie Emmanuelle Beart was supposed to drop by for her film The Art of Breaking Up, but cancelled due to police brutality during Women's Day protests. To which I'll respond with my nonexistent french: Sophie range la vaisselle dans le bahut (Sophie stores the china in the sideboard). Harvel Keitel will still be there though, fitting I guess for The Bad Lieutenant (Place that bet, I'm a cop!).

The great thing about this era is that you can put out an absurdly extensive list of cinematic statistics and obscure polls by heady people (or heady polls by obscure people) without getting lynched for wasting valuable resources. Apparently Mike D'Angelo noticed...and put out 60 pages of the stuff for this year, with lots of space left for marginal musings (not on the web anymore). The likes of Dogville, Eternal Sunshine, Before Sunset, Kill Bill, Hero, are up there somewhere. The voices of dissent sections are especially amusing, so I'll throw some on here.

What may be second nature in the normal world, is rebellious territory in Plato's celluloid cave. It's surprising to find that someone actually liked The Village. Don Marks remarks with a straight face that "the film comes by dread honestly." Erick Gregerson, pumping up Troy: "Jack Palance was right. A German was needed for Homer." Jim Ridley in genuine awe: "The Polar Express (IMAX 3-D) is simply one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever seen in a movie theater."

Veering closer to the cineaste center, Bilge Ebiri goes native:

Sure, one could easily see Distant as yet another example of the cinema of static long shots------it’s virtually impossible to read a review that doesn’t compare it to Jarmusch or Tsai, and not without some reason. But what to make then of Ceylan’s impeccable comic timing------is there a better directed humor scene this year than Mahmut switching Stalker for porn? And the comedy isn’t there merely to enliven the proceedings. Drawing attention to the follies of his characters weaves into Ceylan’s greater concerns...Distant has the entire city of Istanbul------cut in half by a massive body of water, covered in snow, ominous skies looming above. The whole city is a failed attempt to keep nature at bay, a place of suppressed emotions, foundering relations, and blurry connections. That Ceylan manages to work this theme without having to resort to surrealism is further proof of his accomplishment. An accomplishment that was, sadly, ignored by you people this year.

Having recently watched The Return, I have to side with Theo Panayides over Mike D'Angelo's 48:

TIFF, 2003. Playing the inevitable keeping-up-with-Venice game on Day 5 or thereabouts, I ask Mike di Skangelo: ‘‘So what won the Lion, do we know?’’ ‘‘Didn’t you hear?’’ he replies. ‘‘It’s some Russian movie no one’s ever heard of. They’re scheduling extra screenings.’’ Quick schedule-reshuffling and I’m watching The Return in a packed Cumberland 3 (or was it 4?), sitting next to trend-setting taste-maven Chris Stults. Have you ever had the sense of being witness to an instant classic, a film that requires no justification? Almost invariably it’s a case of mulling over, waiting for the dust to settle, but this was just there, complete in itself, honed to a diamond-hard precision. The opening scene drew me in, and everything else just followed. I looked for flaws, couldn’t find them. Maybe that younger boy pouted a tad too often; maybe the visuals tried too hard to ape Tarkovsky (and I don’t even like Tarkovsky). What did it matter when the film was so tense, so spare, so atmospheric? Oh my god, I thought, we’re watching a classic. This is like being at Cannes in the early ’60s...Seems I was the only one who’d actually liked it...My eyes blazed fire, my fists curled into balls. Andrei Zvyagintsev! I intoned, exultant. Zvyagintsev! Andrei! I drained the dregs, picked up my coat and fled into the cold Toronto night.

Ryan Wu loses himself in The Saddest Music in The World:

A tragic accident! A scheming, beautiful cripple fused with glass legs filled with beer! A goth composer in disguise! A nympho amnesiac! Or is it a amnesiac nymphomaniac? Beer dunking! Crazy Thai musicians! Mad love! Did the folks who’ve mislabeled this as ‘‘the Guy Maddin movie for people who don't like Guy Maddin’’ get this one mixed up in their heads with The Notebook?!? As delirious with movie love and as lovingly handcrafted as any Guy’s made, this gorgeous, giddy curio------shamelessly hokey, stridently earnest, stupendously witty (what the fuck am I writing?)------should score a spot on every movie nerd's top 10 list.

Victor Morton will no doubt tell him to immigrate to Canada already, but he apparently had his own concerns (his intensity towards the end makes him sound like Sontag. I never knew Catholic phraseology could sound so postmodern):

What the fuck is wrong with you people. I hope you all realize that this means I’ll have to pray even more to get you guys out of Purgatory (those lucky enough not to be elsewhere, that is). Seriously, I wish more people could have seen The Passion of the Christ innocent of having to prove their kulturkampf bona fides. ....[on Maia Morgenstern playing Mary] Just the way she digs her fingers into the ground. And her look. This is not some ethereal irenic statue at St. So-and-So’s Parish. This is the suffering co-redemptrix. And Hristo Nomov Shopov as Pilate gives a performance that looks out of key with the rest of the film------modern, unhistrionic, careful and calculated. ‘‘Realistic’’ in our terms. And Shopov’s style of acting carries the meaning------Pilate is us. Eager to wash our hands.

So when is Mike D'Angelo going to publish a collection of his group thread posts (I don't even remember how I stumbled on his site) from way back when? It'll be like The Biographical Dictionary of Film except better, with the added advantage of being fucking hilarious (the self-described "hours of amusement" is almost an understatement). After all, it should be called The Origins of The Species or something.

_____________________________________________

Bloodclot

The extreme hype around the musical abilities of Maya "I want people to listen to me while they’re playing bingo in Swansea" Arulpragasam, the Sri Lankan Tamil UK refugee, seems to have a humorous resemblence to the mass-marketed popstar Brutha Fez in Don DeLillo's surgical Cosmopolis:

He thought his friend was impressive in repose, wearing a full beard and a white silk caftan with hood folded back and the iconic red fez on his head, stylishly tilted, and how affecting it was for the man to be lying in the spiral of his own vocal adaptations of ancient Sufi music, rapping in Punjabi and Urdu and in the black-swagger English of the Street:

Gettin' shot is easy
Tried it seven times
Now I'm just a solo poet
Workin' on my rhymes

...Then came the break dancers, in pressed jeans and sneakers...His best songs were sensational and the ones that were not good were good...the chorus became intense, driving Fez into impoverished rhythms that sounded reckless and unsustainable...here came the dervishes, turning to the faint call of a single flute...

Man gave me the news in a slanted room
And it felt like a sliver of icy truth
Felt my sad-ass soul flying out of my mouth
My gold tooth splitting down to the root
....
Let me be who I was
Unrhymed fool
That's lost but living

He wanted the hearse pass by again, the body tilted for viewing, a digital corpse, a loop, a replication. It did not seem right that the hearse had come and gone. He wanted it to reappear at intervals , proud body open to the night, to replenish the sorrow and wonder of the crowd.

This, on the other hand, is a profile of M.I.A. by Sasha Frere-Jones:

Anyone who has trolled through bins on Canal Street for videos of kung-fu movies or reggae mix tapes will recognize M.I.A.’s first single, “Galang” (2003), as an example of actual, on-the-ground world culture: synthetic, cheap, colorful, staticky with power. The beat is shuffling and abrasive, made from what sounds like the by-products of some other, more polite song. It most resembles Jamaican dancehall patterns, but with a twist...Alongside the beat runs a distressed motif that may have been a melody before it was Xeroxed fifteen times.
...
“Fed’s gonna get you pull the strings on your hood / One paranoid youth blazin’ through the hood”, and a scenario that sounds far removed from Leicester Square: “They say river’s gonna run through / work is going to save you / praying you will pull through / suck a dick, he’ll help you / don’t let them get to you / if he’s got one you get two / Backstab your crew sell it out to sell you.”

And then the music stops. We are left with a queasy keyboard peal as a multitrack chorus of Mayas calls out, “Ya ya heeey, woy oy ee he hay yo.” It isn’t a pop chorus, or any sound that you’d hear on American radio, even if the station were playing, you know, world music. It’s a voice from a place where kids throw rocks at tanks, where people pull down walls with their bare hands. It could be the sound of a carnival, or a riot....

She was wearing a cotton jacket and pants, both imprinted with a pattern that you’d see on pajamas, and carried a handbag of the same fabric and pattern, with the colors inverted. Her lacquered yellow pumps looked...like a repurposed cab door. Except for the shoes, every item was made by her or her friends. “That’s just the way of living, with Sri Lankans,” she said. “You just make everything. If you want clothes, you make it. If you want a table, you make it.”

Ah yes, to make stuff, there's the rub...

2005-03-20T16:25:00.000-08:00

Weird things have been happening of late. A re-issuing of Hitler's Mein Kampf is apparently a best seller here. Leman, an alternative cartoonist rag that doesn't shy away from featuring explicit depictions of horizontal dancing, complains that a major bookstore claiming that the cartoonist publication didn't "fit their line " and wasn't appropriate to sell in their bookstores has no qualms about selling Hitler's doctrine. It notes that when a famous model was asked if she reads any books, she answered, "Yes, I just finished Mein Kampf". Apparently, one publishing house has a campaign that is selling the book at about 3 or 4 euros. Whether this is a cause or consequence of it being a bestseller, I'm not sure. Number one on the bestseller list is a Tom Clancy-like novel called Metallic Storm which features a doomsday war between Turkey and the US. Dogu Ergil claims that its our thirst for conspiracy theories. Unrelated, he also has cogent summaries regarding the education system and nationalism.

Journalists are complaining about the new penal code which is still vague and allows people to be charged with "insulting the government". Erdogan had pressed charges against Cumhuriyet cartoonist Musa Kart for making him look like an idiot. My favorite of his cartoons is one mocking AKP's adultery-as-a-crime attempt. It features AKP MPs throwing copies of the penal code at a lying naked woman (-> stoning etc etc)

The CHP finally did something seemingly useful, perhaps motivated by the resignation of Baykal's rival Livaneli, who had said that it's rather sad when a reformist party at its roots becomes less reformist than conservative Islamists. Baykal announced that they were going to leave no question unanswered with regard to Armenian genocide claims. Of course, the rejection of the claims is seen as a forgone conclusion. The attempt here is a comprehensive rebuttal, which will not likley happen. Milliyet publishes a full page interview with Halil Berktay, who says what happened to the Armenians was clearly ethnic cleansing. A symposium on the subject is conducted, Berktay is not invited.

Paul "I didn't leave, the Democratic party left me" Wolfowitz

aka Paul "if Barham Salih is a Scoop Jackson Kurd, I consider myself a Scoop Jackson Republican" Wolfowitz

Those who don't like this guy claim that, besides Iraq, he supported the dictatorships in the Phillipines and Indonesia, that his policy of engagement with Indonesia encouraged the invasion of East Timor, and that he was too soft on dictator Suharto even after the invasion of East Timor. Those who support him claim he did pretty much the opposite. Wolfowitz is more like Kissinger if the former view is correct. Christopher Hitchens, who hates Kissinger's guts, loves Wolfowitz primarily because he holds the latter view and claims that Wolfowitz, too, doesn't like Kissinger. It was Kissinger, not Wolfowitz, who wanted Marcos to stay as dictator in the Phillipines he says. And he was known to object the US support of Saddam in the war against Iran. What also complicates the idea of Wolfowitz-as-Kissinger, is that Wolfowitz is friends with Abdurrahman Wahid aka Katak Gus Dur aka Uncle Gus, the first populist elected president after the fall Indonesia's 30-year dictator, and who also happens to be a moderate Muslim cleric. Who in turn happens to be friends with Al-Sistanti of Iraqi-Shiite fame. Hmm, looks like Wolfowitz didn't just depend on opportunistic Iraqi exile by the name of Chalabi. Looks like he was more "in touch" than some thought (Ever played that game "2 degrees from the Ayatollah"?). Some pundit on CNN just said that when people are saying that Wolfowitz has no experience with economics they forget the papers he wrote on the equation of "Economy, Growth, and Democracy" back in the day. Don't know much about that. It can go either way. Either he'll enforce American policy in the World Bank, or because of his influence in Washington he can get the US to accept World Bank initiatives ( loans vs. grants?). But maybe the biggest hint in all of this is his special lady (she's not my fucking special lady, she's my lady friend--The Big L)

Apparently, Kemal Dervis was also considered by some to be a candidate.

The Go-To Guy

After all that saber-rattling, Osman Koruturk was sent to Europe for damage control and came away with a statement from the EU along the lines of, "We share Turkey's concerns on Iraq". Surprising if only for its lack of admonition or reference to our macho grand-standing a few weeks prior. Impressed, the government sent Koruturk to head a formal delegation to northern Iraq to hang out with possible future president Talabani. After which it was reported that Talabani was considering the idea of having the deputy governor of Kirkuk be a Turkmen.

When asked why he hadn't announced a head negotiator for the EU membership talks, Erdogan responded, "What's wrong with me?" The problem with the AKP is that if they pick some guy not affiliated with the party, if it goes right the media may place most of the credit on him and if it goes wrong they'll blame it on the government. At least with their man steering the ship, if they get it right they'll at least be credited for it. Whatever they do, it may help to keep Koruturk close by.

2005-02-09T03:23:00.000-08:00

more good stuff by Tolga Sezgin (top) and Kerem Uzel at Narphotos....

Kirkuk Like It's 1999

The tools we seem to have for getting the attention of superpowers are unsurprisingly limited. For weeks, the idea of intervention in northern Iraq has been omnipresent in public speeches this side of "boo." This while the likelihood of intervention is almost nil simply because, as Cuneyt Ulsever put it, the likelihood that any kind of intervention will be successful is "close to zero." The machismo is there because apparently it has become the only sure way that we can express our concern. The logic as the government sees it seems to be: if we say we are concerned, the US et al think what we mean is "we don't give a shit". However, if we are screaming bloody murder then the US et al note that "Turkey is concerned". It's a bad rut to be in, not only to not be able to say what we mean, but also to not be able to do what we say. The former diminishes our respect, the latter our credibility. What is concerning is this: prior to the elections and a few months back, we were saying that an independent (or largely autonomous) Kurdistan would lead to civil war. The jury is still out on that. The more essential question is this: Given the choice between an independent or largely autonomous Kurdistan or a civil war, which does Turkey prefer? It seems an odd question to be asking, but it is not so odd if one entertains the possibility that a largely autonomous Kurdistan can come to being without an outbreak of civil war. It is also not so odd when many in the military are feverently against Kurdish autonomy, and that within such a group there may be some make the observation that a civil war will prevent Kurdish independence. But the truth is any such war will accelerate the creation of such a state. What's amusing is that Europe has stayed quiet on this; it's surprising because any kind of Iraq adventure has the possiblity of pushing Turkey back a couple of decades regarding the EU. What does seem clear, for better or for worse, is that preventing the US in launching a northern offensive cemented us in the act of screaming from the sidelines, like a deranged soccer mom....put up, or shut up, I say (on second thought, shut up).

Meanwhile, the presidential council of the Human Rights Advisory board resigns. You may remember me mentioning a press conference a while back where the head of the council, Kaboglu, was outlining the report and a member of the Human Rights Commitee grabbed the report and tore it up on live television.

Ulsever's parse of Rice's speech in Turkey.
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From Stratfor Intelligence Brief:

Mustafa Safran, chairman of the Turkish Education Ministry's commission on textbooks, says the country's newest history textbooks will include references to the controversial Armenian "genocide." Armenia has long insisted that Turkey acknowledge that it committed genocide against more than1 million Armenians in 1915, a charge Turkey has denied -- so vehemently, infact, that the topic has been taboo until recently. Textbooks, however, willnow include both Armenian and Turkish version of the events so students canmake up their own minds, Safran said.This essentially amounts to an astounding change in Turkish foreign policyand an enormous concession to Armenia. Diplomatic relations between the twohave been frozen since, in the wake of Armenian independence from the Soviet Union, Turkey closed its border with Armenia -- this was done in a show ofsupport for its Turkic brethren in Azerbaijan over Yerevan's role in theNagorno-Karabakh conflict that began in 1988.

Complementing Safran's surprise announcement was a statement the same day, Jan. 28, from Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian on a Turkish radio station. Oskanian said Armenia no longer considers Turkish acknowledgementthat the 1915 events constituted genocide as a precondition for normalized relations. Oskanian added that Armenia would renounce all claims to territory now within Turkish borders and that the re-opening of borders between the twocountries would be enough to re-establish normal ties. These two announcements are tantamount to an earthquake in the old foundation ofrelations between these two longtime adversaries, and their simultaneous presentation likely signals coordination -- revealing that a serious push is on.

The two sides have been holding high-level secret meetings for several years, sources close to the talks say, to avoid havingnationalists on either side scuttle negotiations before they can make progress. Turkey's EU drive likely has given those negotiations a strong shove forward.

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A couple weeks back, Andrew Sullivan goes:

Kudos to the academy for ignoring the execrable "Fahrenheit 9/11" and the pornographic "Passion." Right-wing and left-wing ideologues will be disappointed. But what do they know about art?

Quite a lot actually. After all, Celine appears to have been a rabid anti-Semite and yet he still managed to create a great piece of art with A Journey To The End of the Night. And did Sullivan forget Ezra Pound waxing fascistic after taking a survey of the literary landscape? All this while the so-called academy did not give an Oscar to Hitchcock, the spiritual father of audience button-pushing Hollywood films ("A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake."..."The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.") Loony ideologues may know more about art than rational gay libertarians, and those who failed to recognize their own reverse-countershot "have some pie" Messiah for that matter.

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Days of snow in Istanbul, and clear blue skies in Ankara. Something's not right.

"Salzburg has announced a Second Modernism. I am announcing the End of the Second Modernism."-- Alex Ross

2005-01-22T11:11:00.000-08:00

Nepotism in the Age of the Internet

a friend tells the tale in Turkish:

Kemal'e babasini tanidigi email yaziyor. Oglu varmis, NYU'a gidiyormus. Turkiyeye geri donmek istiyormus, lutfen Kemal onunla bir konusabilirmi. Kemal tabii diyor, cocuga email yaziyor. Merhaba ben Kemal, enisten'den email aldim beni aramak istiyorsan cumartesi aksami ariyabilirsin, telfon xxx,xxx,xxxx.

Cocuktan response:

kemal enistene bir sana iki ibne, kurumadi kokunuz sictiminin spamcileri.

Kemal tabii sasiriyor. Ne oldu falan diyor kendi kendine.

Ertesi gun cocuktan response Pardon, sizin kim oldugunuzu bilmiyordum. Ne zaman ariyabilirim?

Okay, the translation won't do justice but here it goes:

a friend of Kemal's dad sends him an email saying he's got a nephew in NYU who wants to come back to Turkey, can he possibly talk to him? Kemal says sure and writes the kid an email saying: Hey, I got an email from your uncle...If you wanna talk you can call me Saturday night at tel: ######

The kid writes back:

One to your uncle, two to you faggot. Your stench still hasn't faded [from me shitting you spammers out].

Kemal is confused, obviously.

Next day, the kid writes: Sorry, I didn't know who you were. When can I call?

Maybe AI specialists should give up on robots for the time being, engaged in hackery, and come up with a Turing Test for this shit.

2005-01-20T04:54:00.001-08:00

Belated Remarks On Films That Would Screw Time Were It To Forget

I will simply point to those who've been in this business for a long time and who have diligently put together some kind of list or round-up of the year's movies. One of things that keeps on coming up is Eternal Sunshine, so I will say a few words about it (I do not pay attention to giving things away, so those of you who haven't seen it might want to opt out.)

I suppose one would have to give credit to Gondry and Kaufman for trying to inject some soul into pomo. The memories and confrontations that escape the wrath of the clever plot are diamonds in the rough. The scenes up to the opening credits, and the scene with Winslet indifferently eating Chinese food and watching TV as Carrey paces about muttering, “There is a guy in your apartment, and he’s stealing your panties”—stand out. But I couldn't let go of a lot of things. When Kaufman gives himself creative space, seeking shelter for Carrey in humiliating memories, what does he come up with? Getting caught masturbating and being bullied as a small kid which--in this day and age--have to be the most generic humiliating moments someone could come up with. Staring up at the stage light bearing down on him, Carrey still has that ghastly Truman Show residue clinging onto him: "I want to cancel, can you hear me!"

Unfortunately, yes. The subplot with the doctor and the secretary seemed to be a rather redundant distraction. The tape-listening session is what carries the movie, and Kaufman can get to it only through this inane plot twist. It could have gone on in Carrey’s head—he knows what’s on her tape, knows every one of his own faults and annoying habits anyway (isn’t the dark truth about your grown self a better place to hide than some predictable Freudian angle that’s bound to get zapped?). And the considerate Clementine who is a passenger in his memories is not any different than the Clementine who he meets anew, which rather simplifies things. And as for the plot logic and mechanics, what’s the point of all that Montauk shit when the secretary fell in love again sans self-referential romantic rendezvous? Or did the doctor whisper “meet me in the office” right before he got snuffed (No--he forgot to give himself one of those “Do not mention ex-lover” cards)? Looks like something out of a three-day scriptwriting class….And when Elijah Wood woos Winslet with Carrey’s memories, Winslet submits too easily into the “Error Error does not compute” mode and snowballs smoothly into Carrey’s arms again. La-di-daaah.

It is still a pretty good film though, although no better (and maybe worse) than I Heart Huckabees (disclaimer: I saw Eternal twice, and Huckabees once). And though one could claim that stereotypes abound in the latter, with the likes of Jude Law as Mr. Apprentice (which we get now thanks to CNN Turk) and the religious right family, their arguments fair remarkably well (“You have to own the land to save it”, “Africa doesn’t need open spaces, it needs development” etc etc) against those spouted out by our distraught protags. I suppose some may have mistaken the religious family’s ire towards them and subsequent “God bless you” when Wahlberg mentions that he’s a fireman as hypocrisy, whereas they’re simply exercising a reasonable thought: that people who do good things can say stupid shit, and it’s good to keep those two things separate. I do think the film succeeds in portraying the human inclination to try to follow an obsessive thought to its logical conclusion. Although I also think that Niaomi Watts and Schwartzman's bickering parents were kind of useless. Overall, it would be hard to deny using the description for the film that Allan Bloom used for Woody Allen’s Zelig (and what he perceived as America's current state of mind)—that it is merely nihilism with a happy ending.

____________________________

Milliyet newspaper thought it was a good idea to let everyone know that the BBC was hosting a Word Cinema Award, and that people should go to the website and vote for Uzak (Distant). No doubt now that people who haven’t seen the movie and who would have walked out in the first half hour of the film if they had are going to rush to the website. Apparently Milliyet forgot the last time a newspaper advertised an award and urged people to vote. It was Time’s Men of the Century. And to give an idea of the scope of the disaster for those who don’t know, Ataturk was beating out Einstein for Scientist of the Century (or so it was said), and Time Magazine had to scrap the whole approach. Looking at the shortlist, however, we actually have a contender in the right place.

In general there seems to be a lot of cheerleaders-turned-journalists or journalists-turned-cheerleaders, I can't decide which, running about (see Birand below).

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The cold blooded murder of a Turkish Cypriot couple and their 15 year-old daughter in southern Cyprus made the entire island nervous. From the Cyprus Mail editorial:

Under the circumstances, it was rather foolish for television stations and newspapers to announce whom they suspected had committed the murder in the absence of any evidence to support their claim. Greek Cypriot stations reported on Saturday night that the murder had been committed by members of the Turkish secret service (MIT), without a shred of evidence to back this up. In the north, the ‘interior minister’ was more cautious, but still alleged that mafia elements were probably responsible for the triple slaying.

Was it really necessary for journalists and politicians to engage in a public guessing game as to who had killed Elmas, his wife and daughter? In such instances, the media and the politicians have a responsibility to exercise restraint, because there is a danger of allegations being exploited by extremists on the two sides to create tension and hostility between the two communities, at a time when confidence and trust are growing.

In the south, the more hard-line newspapers insisted that MIT were behind the murders and tried to cause alarm by alleging that armed Turkish agents were coming and going freely from the north. These allegations were endorsed by the government spokesman in an attempt to score political points. In the north, the hard-line nationalist papers were convinced that Greek Cypriots were behind the murders. One alleged that Greek Cypriots, who had ran up big debts gambling in Ali’s casino were responsible; another claimed that Greek Cypriots, who did not want him to market his bottled water in the south, had ordered the killings.

The big danger is that a couple of hot-heads on either side of the line could take this nonsense seriously and undertake a revenge killing which could take relations between the two communities 20 years back.To be fair, the majority of the media and the politicians in the north did not exploit the killings politically, while the ‘interior minister’s’ speculation about a mafia crime was helpful in that it quashed any Turkish Cypriots suspicions that Greek Cypriots were behind the crime. But there will always be extremists who will use such crimes to cause tension and hostility. This is why it is important for the media and the politicians to act responsibly when something like this happens.
______________________________

James Bowman on Nazi madness.

2005-01-14T02:28:00.000-08:00

Sticks and Stones

Veronica, who seems to have completed a Istanbul-Kiev-St. Petersburg trek in the blink of an eye (and still seems to have managed to get off 400 shots in the Bosphorus), points to Mehmet Ali Birand's stillborn analogy between Armenian genocide claims and the Asian tsunami. Well, he probably thinks he's being very literary. Don't let the, er, daring rhetorics fool you though, Birand on the whole has good intentions (Well, you know what they say about good intentions). His suggestion is merely an echo that has grown from the EU parliamentary report:

...call for the establishment of a U.N. Genocide Allegations Investigation Commission just like Yalım Eralp and others suggest. Turkey is in the right. No one can talk of genocide. However, it has failed miserably to put its view across. The only way out is for the matter to be investigated by internationally acknowledged academics and researchers. This is the only way to find the truth.

Of course, what he means is for them to find the truth. You see, it simply hasn't been investigated internationally. We already know the truth ("Turkey is in the right. No one can talk of genocide. etc etc"). Yet, we are not going to accept it if genocide is confirmed. It would also be rather awkward if the claims were not confirmed for countries whose government already recognized the genocide, an outcome that is immensely unlikely. Hmm, when was the last time an ethnic group hoodwinked the entire world into believing in a genocide that did not exist? The official Turkish view is that the deported Armenians were ordered by the Ottoman Council to be protected, but that didn't happen because the Empire was in shortage of fuel, food, medicine and supplies in general. I suppose one of the questions that will come up is how ignorant one could be about the consequences of deportation under those conditions.

2005-01-07T11:55:00.000-08:00

Hiatus

I got hit with a wave of viruses and worms these past few weeks through ADSL channels (along with the rest of the country--a minister even mentioned it in a press conference), and being that our ISP security is, well, underdeveloped, the people that man the controls at my end decided to ban my computer's physical address without letting me know. And blogging outside my home involuntarily is annoying, hence the hiatus (the problem still remains).

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December 17: Riot On An Empty Street

What was amusing about this whole thing was that European expectations remained rather constant throughout, all the way from the beginning of the year; and if not the beginning, then at least since May. I would think the agreement that emerged from the meta-negotiations were rather anticlimactic from their standpoint. Turkish expectations—months, weeks, or days aside—oscillated absurdly in the span of a few hours (I think it was between 13:30 and 15:30). It went back and forth from “We’re completely screwed” to the theme music from Shaft (Or Cemil). The stocks jumped when it finally settled on the latter, even though they had factored in positive results months ago. The sad thing was that this was not the media’s or the public’s reaction, it was the reaction first and foremost of the delegation that was there in Brussels. At one point they gave a press release saying they felt completely shattered as a result of Cyprus. The question became: were they actually this retarded or did they think they were being smart? After all, the parliamentary report was released days before. That was reported as a victory in the Turkish press despite Eurlings publicly mentioning a few alarm bell issues, such as the Armenian genocide. You'd think at least Cyprus would leak into the next few days. Common sense would dictate that if you’re not going to recognize Cyprus then you should have said in May (when the South was admitted) that you were going to put EU membership on ice until there is a solution on the island, thus being the first to admit it would be silly to join a group without recognizing all members. But of course that would have rocked the market that has been pumping the EU drug through its veins for a while now. On top of that, no date would be given and no pressure to solve Cyprus would exist. Instead of that do this: play dumb and be absolutely shocked when they insist on Cyprus recognition. Will they be shocked by your shock? If not, you’re a complete failure. If so, you’re a hero. I don't think the initial shock of the delegation was a calculated lie; they probably could not fathom the other side would cross a red line in front of the cameras. Our press, on the other hand, fed on Erdogan's supposed machismo for the next few days ("Get the plane ready,"-- Erdogan, when no agreement was reached. "What the fuck?"--EU) This reminds me of a recent piece by Henry Blodget ("Born Suckers") where he talks about the habits of the majority of people who own stocks. A few of those habits are pertinent here (and are related to each other):

Self-attribution Bias: We attribute our successes to ourselves, and we blame our losses on others or bad luck. This hobbles us in two ways. First, we don't learn from our mistakes because we don't see them as mistakes. Second, we assume we are skilled or smart when we're just lucky.

Conservatism Bias and Confirmatory Bias: Once we form opinions, we tend to overvalue information that reinforces them and undervalue information that undermines them (conservatism bias). We even tend to seek out supporting information (confirmatory bias). Thus, we irrationally cling to incorrect conclusions, and, to paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel, hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.

Outcome Bias: We tend to evaluate decisions based on outcomes instead of probabilities. Thus, we congratulate ourselves for stupid choices that happen to turn out well and vow to never again make smart choices that happen to turn out badly. Our errors get reinforced, and our wise decisions rejected.

Hindsight Bias: When we reflect on the past, we imagine that we knew what was going to happen when we didn't. As James Montier puts it, "You didn't know it all along, you just think you did." This allows us to imagine, for example, that we knew that the tech boom of the late '90s was a bubble and that everyone who suggested otherwise was an idiot or crook. It also makes us overconfident about our ability to predict what will happen next.

After the agreement, what happened? Our government bends over backwards in insisting to the public and the opposition that what they agreed to does not amount to recognizing Cyprus ("The translation you got is wrong" --Erdogan to opposition CHP during parliament session--It seems we're still churning out shitty translations at the government level) . Whereas Europe tells its people that although they will be asking for more, what Turkey agreed to pretty much kind of amounts to recognition. In fact, this whole thing is just one big postponement with every sensitive issue guaranteed to come up in the future.

After the report one columnist wrote, “We did it despite Pamuk,” and continued by saying that Pamuk’s books were popular abroad because he spent his time trashing the country. That’s slightly below the waist (it’s reminiscent of the cheery headlines Czech newspapers used to have when something bad happened to Milan Kundera), especially since Pamuk is not in the habit of writing contemporary political novels. Apparently, some reader sent the columnist a letter saying that she went to one of Orhan Pamuk’s talks in a university in the States and he kept on mentioning the bad. When she asked if he didn’t have anything good to say, he replied: “I’m sorry, I’m not a tourism minister.” That was a pretty good response. A few days after the column was printed, he appeared on CNN Turk, and although he did note that the episode occurred in 1994 and that things were worse then, he didn’t really back down. At one point he said, “It's good to be squeezed by the EU, we need it.”

Which brings up an interesting point. The general consensus is that the pro-EU people are the optimists, whereas the indifferent or anti-EU people are pessimist realists. But there are gaping exceptions. For example, there are many who believe that we don't need the EU to implement the reforms, and believe that getting in the EU won't solve the problem at its roots. Although they are pessimistic about the EU, they are optimistic in a greater sense--about the will and progressive nature of Turkish people, who they believe can push with reforms on their own. People like Pamuk are the pessimists or realists ones in this sense, who believe that left to our own devices, we will sit on our ass and coast on neutral. The latter camp has been winning the argument of late. Nuray Mert has a tongue-in-cheek article (In Turkish) to that effect.

Meanwhile, Turkish Daily News has been bought by Dogan media giants. I hadn't checked out their website in a while, but they now seem to have shamlessly ripped off CNN .

And Can Dundar tries to take on Enver Pasha and the events that led to the deportation of Armenians (In Turkish, notice the self-consciously defensive flag waving picture), his conclusion:

"Had Enver Pasha had listened to his mentor, Turkey's history could have been radically different. He didn't. And the Sarikamis disaster became a turning point...And now it can once again become a turning point by allowing us to calmly and clearly analyze the chain of mistakes that originated from that defeat."

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Words

And for a few moments there is no goddamn history,
which if you think about
it is an infinite series of befores and afters,
as in before, when I had legs, and after,
Or when I still had a spleen and then didn't,
Before I was gut-shot and lay rotting in my own shit
in the elephant grass in the sun,
and after,
And so on, including when I still had an asshole
and now don't.
But this last time she was kind to me
I thought of the little whores of Saigon
who laughed as if they really liked whoring
and who fucked as if they liked fucking
And who we thought as meat, who were meat,
War meat, like us.
And now I don't know if it will work anymore
this good lady's back-room act of grace...

--City of God

The state withered. But faith didn't. Failure only led back to faith...If the state failed, it wasn't because the dream was flawed, or the faith flawed; it could only be because men had failed the faith. A purer and purer faith began to be called for.

--Among the Believers

But for "the chosen" there was no choice...we now knew what was possible...Such a volume of hatred and denial of the right to live has never been heard or felt, and the will that willed their death was confirmed and justifed by a vast collective agreement that the world would be improved by their disappearance and their extinction...with a pretext of rationality...He was a funny man...he lectured about archaic history, stuffed his pipe, and lit a lot of matches...the observations crowd out the main point...he was suspect--thought to be in league with killers...I can't seem to get a tight grip on the meat-hook people.

--Ravelstein

Sights and Songs

I attended a screening of Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees in 2002 where Susan Sontag was the guest speaker. She treaded on her often repeated thoughts on how, in certain instances, creative minds grow sharper under severe limitations, as with Kiarostami and Iranian censorship, and about the revelations she would gain by watching films over and over again--all the while taking care in being very casual and unacademic. She looked rather vibrant, almost a decade younger than she actually was...

2004-12-11T06:15:00.000-08:00

Of Mice and Men

Some pro-Turkey Italians have said in the recent past that if Turkey is not admitted it will be in danger of sliding into Islamic fundamentalism. Erdogan et al have refrained from criticizing those who are in favor of Turkey, but I think doing so with clarity in this case would have won him some character points in general. He should have said something like, "Fear-mongering by those who are opposed to Turkey should not be met with fear-mongering by those who are in favor." Too bad.

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The Old Hitler Argument

This is always the best way to win a lost cause. Woody Allen, in one of his older movies (Bananas?), put it pretty well when he said, "Why the hell should I be a leader? Hitler was a leader, you know." The AKP nowadays wants to implement the presidential two-party system used by the Americans; and it's trying to get it approved by parliament. What could have been a legitmate discussion began to morph into sheer stupidity as usual. The Republican People's Party (CHP) deputy Ali Topuz accused Erdogan of power-grabbing. He called the law professor and Parliament Constitution Commission Chairman in favor of it "naive," and followed by saying: "Hitler came to power under such a system. It would be incompatible with the realities of Turkey." Well, a progessive democracy is probably incompatible with "the realities of Turkey" when you follow such a weighted phrase to its logical conclusion.

________________________________

Slowly but Surely

Yusuf Kanli:

"If Turkey wants to be in the EU, it has to realize that the Cyprus ship left to port long ago. A day will soon come when Turkey will have nothing left but to acknowledge the bitter reality that we have lost the Cyprus struggle, [and that we have to] abandon the Turkish Cypriot people and extend recognition to the Greek Cypriot state."

2004-12-10T05:39:00.000-08:00

Ağzin Sucuk Kokuyor

The Turkish Film Industry is not a topic that usually awakens intellectual curiosity, but in this case I found it rather amusing. The new Turkish film GORA which is basically a Turkish version of Mel Brooks' Spaceballs used to be owned by the Uzans and thus became government property once they were convicted of embezzlement. It's been reported (rumored by normal journalistic standards) that the Uzans did not hand over 3/4 of the entire shoot and plan to release their own sequel. But the interesting part of this story is that GORA has in consequence been a government-funded and approved film. By having a cabinet minister attend the premiere, the Islamist AKP party has endorsed a film that comes complete with guttural cursing, a gay robot, drug references, and footage of bamboos [Ed. baboons-- I'll defend myself by saying I probably had just finished watching Hero or Flying Daggers or something, and that the phrase was meant as a two-word review of one or the other] fornicating. Another colorful page added to their intriguing resume, no doubt.

the film: Not likely to be shown many places abroad since there are lukewarm Matrix and Fifth Element parodies and many of the good jokes rely on cultural cues....In a caricatured commentary on the decade, possibly titled "Coups and Chicks", there is a flashback to 70s Turkey: a porno director looks out the blinds and asks if anyone hears the tanks.

2004-12-07T08:03:00.000-08:00

Un-Empirical

Robert D. Kaplan has always been a rather amusing read, with the odd title of his books (Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos), his obsession with the American military, his interest in obscure history, and his support of the US as a “reluctant empire” that will last only for a few more decades anyway. In a recent article he writes:

“Who says empires are bad? The multi-ethnic Ottoman Turkish Empire, like the coeval multi-ethnic Hapsburg Austrian one, was more hospitable to minorities than the uni-ethnic democratic states that immediately succeeded it. The Ottoman caliphate welcomed Turkish, Kurdish, and other Muslims with open arms, and tolerated Christian Armenians and Jews. The secular-minded, modernizing "Young Turk" politicians who brought down the empire did not. They used Kurds as subcontractors in a full-scale assault on Armenians, which scholars now argue about calling genocide. Ottoman toleration was built on territorial indifference...

The emergence of Mustafa Kemal's fiercely securalist regime delivered stability and pro-Western orientation, but at a significant cost...Democracy developed late and anemically... Because Turkish politicians assumed that the military would always rescue them in the lurch, at a subliminal level they never felt the need to act responsibly--and so they didn't.

The first break in this dreary chronicle was the election of Turgut Ozal....He loved to read the Koran and watch soap operas, to bang his head against the carpet in a Sufi mosque and go to Texas barbecues...He gradually wrested control over foreign policy from the military...By the early 1990s he was veering toward neo-Ottomanism...But he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1993. It was said he ate himself to death, just as Ataturk had drunk himself to death....

Never before has the West been so lucky in Turkey as now. The re-Islamization of Turkey through the rejuvenation of the country’s Ottoman roots was going to happen anyway; Ataturk’s republican-minded secularization had simply gone too far. The only question was whether this retrenchment from Kemalism would take a radical or a moderate path. Erdogan’s political leanings suggest the latter. Europe should seize the opportunity.”

Kaplan attempts to show Erdogan's "lack of small-mindedness" by noting that he tried to get parliamentary approval for US troops to use Turkey in the invasion. However, he gives too much credit to Erdogan for pushing to allow a northern offensive for US troops and puts to much blame on the CHP for opposing it. He mistakes “politics as usual” for actual personal or party intentions. As an opportunistic opposition party, CHP simply attempted to gain points from the public and many AKP supporters for opposing the widely unpopular idea of allowing US troops to use Turkey in their invasion. I have no doubt that if Erdogan and the AKP were the opposition party they would have done the same. Erdogan was able to get the parliament to approve sending Turkish troops if Iraq desired them, another unpopular position, in a way to make up for rejecting the US earlier. It was easier to convince his party to support him because he could point out that the Kurds would not accept Turkish troops anyway.
Kaplan also seems to give illegitimate responses to what he considers to be illegitimate European objections to Turkish membership. That “Turkey is Muslim,” for example:

“The answer should be Europe has no choice. It is becoming Muslim anyway, in a demographic equivalent of the Islamic conquest of the early Middle Ages, when the Ottoman Empire reached the gates of Vienna.”

If the European interest is to prevent Islamic culture from eclipsing secularism, Kaplan is insisting that the Europeans have lost or certainly will lose that war in the coming years. If such a culture war is ongoing, adding more Muslims to the mix would most likely push them towards failure. So until Europeans believe they have lost (or won) that war it would make no sense to admit Turkey for that reason. His other point is that “Turkey is not only contiguous to Europe but is economically intertwined.” Well, he’s already said that Turkey is “far poorer” than many countries that were recently admitted. It would be difficult to draw the line in an ever-extending union if being “economically intertwined” took precedence. If Turkey is admitted, then its Middle Eastern neighbors would be contiguous and economically intertwined with Europe--etc etc. Kaplan then boils it down to:

“The only issue that remains is whether Europe will encourage Islamic moderation through economic development.”

I guess what he means is, “We’ll give cash if you don’t get too religious.” For all the “lack of small-mindedness” Kaplan attributes to him, Erdogan failed to see what a stupid move it was to attempt to criminalize adultery at such a late period in the game. An often cited objection to Turkey’s membership is “Once Turkey is in the EU, there will be no incentive for it to assume progressive positions.” This view gains popularity in Europe when certain politicians in both the AKP and CHP, lamenting past idiocies, say that had Turkey taken the opportunity to get in the EU decades earlier it could have vetoed the European recognition of the Armenian genocide. This, presumably, goes for Cyprus issues as well. It is a European suspicion that is usually leveled at the secularists and the military, and Erdogan and the AKP often avoid it because of their more progressive foreign policy. However, it’s evident that although they may fear Turkish intransigence in foreign policy less with Erdogan, they may begin to fear Islamic inspiration and intransigence when it comes to cultural issues. For one could argue, had Turkey been in the EU already under Erdogan, adultery would have been a crime.

The other side of progressive reforms or concessions (with or without the prospect of EU membership) is to hold steady and shout your case as loudly and as often as possible. And then we would be assuming the position of our misfit friends to the south. And Israel, even with the best and most efficient PR outfit around, is not exactly in an enviable position.

If Turkey does not get a go-ahead for the EU, Erdogan’s government may be the only government that could possibly survive a series of major failures and unpopular positions. He let down his base by not being able to do anything on the headscarf issue, imam hatip schools, and by not passing the adultery law. Let down the fence-sitters by not getting anywhere while softening on Cyprus and minority issues. Let down the general public by pushing for allowing US troops to attack Iraq from Turkey and sending Turkish troops to Iraq (the opposition parties will definitely exploit this). And, of course, by getting rejected by the EU without suggesting a detailed alternative. The only reason why Erdogan’s party would remain the majority party is the overriding reason that people will feel that life has gotten better in the last four years.

2004-12-03T11:06:00.000-08:00

Moon Shadow

Relating to my previous post: compare this with this.

2004-11-28T09:22:00.000-08:00

Form and Content

I was scanning TV channels a couple of nights ago and caught a columnist/historian? (though not his name) describe our odd position on Iraq: "Turkey is not on the US' side, and it is not on the side of the insurgents, it is not on the side of the Kurds, and it is not on the side of the Shiite either." That pretty much sums it up. Then, get this, the commentator said that before the commercial that an actual Iraqi insurgent called the show and, referring to Turkish truck drivers, said that those who did business with the Americans would be killed. After which they got a businessman who had a road contract in Iraq on the phone. The guy said he only dealt with Iraqis. Then he was asked: But weren't the Americans providing their security? No they can only protect themselves, was his reponse. But weren't the Iraqis he dealt with brought to power by the Americans etc. etc.? Then one of the guests, the editor of the Turkish Daily News I think, said that in northern Iraq Turkish companies were making something close to 500 million dolars. The businessman said his gains didn't come anywhere close, and besides he wasn't working in northern Iraq and did not know of any other Turkish companies working in the area. He added that when a couple of French journalists got kidnapped, the French foreign minister went to the Middle East, when Turkish workers got kidnapped there was hardly a word from the Turkish government.

The international skepticism towards Turkish policy usually stems from the contradictions and inconsistencies that plague it when one looks at its position on a number of subjects instead of just one. For example, I have yet to see a convincing argument that details how Turkey's position on an independent Cyprus does not contradict or weaken its position against an independent northern Iraq (an opposition that's based mostly on principle, not implementation). The only argument thus far is "national security", which works when you want to convince your own citizens but does nothing to earn you respect in the eyes of the international community. If Turkish Cypriots are right in asking for autonomy after what they suffered, didn't the Kurds suffer as much under Saddam if not more? Response: But the population demographic is much more complicated in Iraq... counter: It would difficult to argue that Turks and Greeks were geographically (and conveniently) segregated before the invasion. etc etc. Maybe someone can come close to giving a reasonable defense of our position. What's more worrying is that no one in the media or political spectrum seems sharp/brave enough to realize that this is a problem. In other words, there is no attempt to make such an argument to begin with.

Looking at the 2001 Cyprus symposium hosted by Denktas, one sees one Turkish historian argue that it was a bad thing that Greece was encouraging Greek nationalism on the island, and then sees another argue how good it was that Ataturk's Turkey was encouraging Turkish nationalism on the island, how good it was that Ataturk never wavered in cultural or monetary support for that community. The problem is, no one who attended the symposium or put the articles together thought anyone would see a contradiction or, in the least, something odd that required further elaboration....

2004-11-24T05:47:00.000-08:00

"In the US, people are very hard-working, but have a tendency to become immediately restless with their jobs. In a place like Turkey, where I showed the film at the Istanbul film festival, people are fortunate for the jobs they have and are more obsessed with job security. They don't want to leave their job and write the Great Turkish Novel -- I don't think they've reached that level of social prosperity." -- Bilge Ebiri (p & b tip)

Psyche

Can Dundar, from the more "literary" camp of columnists, churned out a poem called "I am Falluja" (In Turkish) that alludes to the killing of a insurgent by a marine, and has lines like "I'm buried with my own blood...Godless me/The one who took a bullet to the brain in Vietnam was me/The one in Palestine who had his arms and legs broken by stones was also me...in all my crime was the same: defending my country against invasion".

This Falluja is not the one that allows car bombing of its own citizens, cutting off heads, and as hostage Zeynep Tugrul mentioned, making children accomplices in your resistance. Probably not Falluja--probably a clean lost soul who left there long ago.

Turkish deaths in Iraq have reached 64 (most if not all were truck drivers), only ten less than the number of British soldiers killed.

Meanwhile, Iraq the Model takes on Juan Cole.
_____________________________

Damn you, Shevchenko!

Those in Ukraine who are worrying about election outcomes can take solace in their 3-0 ass-kicking of Turkey in the World Cup qualifiers, and of Dynamo Kiev's impressive trail in the Champions League...

2004-11-12T06:44:00.001-08:00

Horizon

The Tork has put out a couple of interesting posts, one of which addresses Bernard Lewis' curious, if not bizarre, claim that the US' invasion of Iraq and its subsequent attempt at acheiving top-down democracy should be successful when looking back at what happened in Turkey. But top-down democracy was not acheived here because it was a stand-alone solution, it was acheived because of one man's decisions. If Ataturk was Stalin what he said would still go. We are fortunate that he wasn't. The fact is, once you are crowned the savior of a country by repelling an onslaught of foreign forces, people are going to listen to you no matter what you say. If Ataturk had not proven himself on the battlefield there would be little likelihood that his ideas would be implemented at all. The blatantly obvious difference between Turkey and Iraq is the absence of local credibility in the goings on of the latter. If this is all there is to Lewis' claim, then he is on a downward turn. It's true that Arafat didn't cut it as a valuable leader, but it looks like he was the only one with enough credibility to "sell out" to the Israelis without getting shot by his own people (which is probably what he partly feared at Camp David). Denktas is another who had the credibility but lacked the wisdom. Rabin, on the other hand, had the right idea but did not have the political clout needed to avoid getting shot. The tork seems to argue that those who are contra-Lewis believe that "tyranny is endemic to the East", and therefore he objects to their position. The truth is once you have credibility in the Middle East it wears away very very slowly. If someone were to say that tyranny is much more likely where the population is less educated, would many object? (I don't think pointing out Hitler suffices since if the Germans were any more ignorant, his job would be that much easier) Isn't the Middle Eastern population currently less educated than the West? Do they react more emotionally and ideologically to their leaders and tend to rationalize failed policies?

________

I can't believe the amount of hysteria that has been caused in the last couple of weeks by the sheer lack of understanding English. Hint: If the word "minority" doesn't mean the same thing as its literal translation, use another word. The National Security Counsel (Military) joined in the paranoia by stating that the use of the word could encourage attacks on the terrotorial integrity of the country. I'm sorry, but historical precedence doesn't cut it anymore.... Unfortunately, the army is still burning forests in the East in order to drive out terrorists who are hiding out (again our "burn the blanket to kill the flea" proverb comes into play. Just how small is the flea?), and in a few areas soldiers are afraid of approaching cars at checkpoint for fear of getting shot. Deborah Dickinson a while back said: "race schmace--it's about class". And it's true here as well. Many cosmopolitan Turkish Kurds are seen as sell outs because they avoid talking Kurdish or mentioning their roots, partly because of separatism fears and partly because Kurds tend to be seen as hillbillys by many people (one guy who did his mandatory military service said there were Kurds in his regiment who would use rocks instead of toliet paper...how exclusive this practice is in exremely rural areas is debatable however).

______

In his other post, the Tork mentions this: "In June 2004, the Turkish Radio and Television (TRT), the Turkish state-owned broadcasting company, has quietly started to broadcast programs in the following non-Turkish languages: Bosnian, Arabic, Circasian, and in two Kurdish dialects (Kirmanci and Zaza)."

Quietly internationally, perhaps, but it was frontpage news in Turkey. I'm not sure "started to broadcast" is accurate since I've only seen it shown once (translated nature programs). No mention of a radio station in Diyerbakir which was shut down for a month because they introduced a Kurdish singer in Kurdish. They were told by the authorities that they must introduce the singer in Turkish (this was also a subject in a recent BBC documentary). Slow is perhaps the best adjective at present.

______

There seems to be another wave of Chomsky-bashing going on...echo chambers being unleashed on echo chambers. He became a talking point here in 2002 when a publisher of his books was charged with attacking the unity of the Turkish state. There is an interesting correlation between Chomsky as linguist and his political travels. For linguists languages are scientific evidence that can be used to determine whether or not a universal grammar exists. Therefore any political action that advocates the suppresion of a particular language is for them a direct attack on science.

2004-11-03T04:59:00.000-08:00

Ministry of Silly Walks

The chaos around the Minority Report reached Monty Python-esque proportions when, during a live TV press conference given by Kaboglu (Chairman of Human Rights Commision), a member of the Commision (Fahrettin Yokus) grabbed the report in front of Kaboglu and tore it to pieces! This is despite the fact that out of 30 members of the commision, only seven voted against the report. A lady standing behind Kaboglu could not contain her laughter. Kaboglu's paraphrased response: "And people wander why we can't get into the EU."

2004-11-03T04:28:00.000-08:00

Talat Steps Up

Alreadly facing an unstable political climate in Turkish northern Cyprus and criticism from nationalists, Talat sticks his neck out even more by hinting at concessions that go beyond the Annan Plan:

"We are ready to re-negotiate, offer new and make new changes in the Annan Plan"... In a statement to the Greek Cypriot newspaper, Fileleftheros, Talat said, "The Greek side should decide what it wants and everybody expects Leader of the Cypriot Greek administration, Tasos Papadopulous, to declare what he and his administration want."

2004-10-27T03:08:00.000-07:00

Odds and Ends

Understatement of the day:

"Maybe there has been some miscommunication between us."
--Prime Minister Erdogan on the high poll numbers in Europe against Turkey in the EU

Somewhat good news: Polls in Greece actually less negative than France. Possible reason: France's gains from Turkish membership are limited, whereas Greeks may feel our government (State/Military) would have to tone down its machismo outlook.

bad news: Greeks are reporting an increase in violations of their air space.

funny story: Christopher Hitchens was for Bush less than a week ago, now he's for Kerry (scroll down)

2004-10-26T03:41:00.000-07:00

Minority Report (cont'd)

The same people that raised hell over the report now sent in a request asking for it to be returned. One of complainers said "the best thing about the report is that the back pages are empty. " They claim that the procedure in which the report passed through the commission was not legal, and that changes were made to the report after it was approved. My theory: they didn't attend the meetings or pay attention until the report was made public, and then they freaked out. These guys are also blaming the foreign minister Abdullah Gul for appointing the people that prepared a report that "attacks the country" and "creates new problems" instead of fixing the existing ones. The governor of Diyabakir put in his support behind the report saying, "Turkey has to solve its problems through debate, not by pretending they don't exist." (Hurriyet)

Meanwhile, the TV and Radio content regulators (RTUK) announce that the police are aiding them by scanning channels that RTUK can't reach (probably in the east). In other words, the police will likely be reporting broadcasts that are deemed to encourage separatism. (Hurriyet) And knowing what broad definitions may be used to define separatism, this looks like to be another self-fulfilling prophesy.

Fikret Bila, a Milliyet journalist, declares he wants a "Turkey that doesn't take the written word to court" after he was taken to court for writing a book about Ankara's relation with the Iraq war. The claim is that some things in the book are classified information. (In Turkish)

Update: Peter Boyer on Wolfowitz in the New Yorker, Hitchens' response

2004-10-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

Timeshift Censor

The non-cable TV channel CNBC-e, which is kind of a Turkish Bloomberg on economy during the day, American sitcom channel by night, and upper tier film channel by late night, was forced to push back "Angels in America" to a later time (10->11pm) when gov. content regulators realized that the show was about "a bunch of homos". Where were they at with that godawful Will & Grace? Then I went to check what the so-called Kuran thumpers in Iran were showing on their TVs. To my surprise people were watching LA Confidential and Gangs of New York. Wtf? Oh wait, Kim Basinger and Cameron Diaz are edited out of the entire movie, nevermind.

2004-10-25T11:20:00.000-07:00

That Rug Tied The Room Together

Fetih Bolayir, the chairman of something called "Toplumsal Dusunce Dernegi" (lit~Social Thought Association) and also member of the government's Human Rights Commission accused his own chairman of presenting a "Minority Report" that makes "horrifying" attacks on the secular democracy of the country and encourages separatism. He demanded that charges be brought against the chairman of the Human Rights Commission and those responsible for putting together a "document of treason". The chairman, Kaboglu, countered by saying that more than half of those attending the meetings voted in favor of the report. (in Turkish) Things began to get weird earlier in the week when the report was released, then later the lock to the room where the Commision held its meetings was changed. The government ministry complained that the public saw the report before they did. Kaboglu said nothing was made public before informing them.

2004-10-25T08:40:00.000-07:00

Yeah!

Erdogan apparently said that the Cyprus issue and EU membership are not related. If you think about it for three seconds it makes sense. But if you think about it for a second longer it's almost laughable. It makes sense because the acute apathy shown towards Cyprus as a whole after the referendum leads one to think that the EU couldn't really give a shit. That's possibly true, but even they are going to be forced back into caring for one blindingly obvious reason: Turkey does not recognize The Republic of Cyprus, which happens to be a member of the EU (fancy that). Recognizing existing EU members obviously has nothing to do with becoming an EU member...olives and oranges, man. (But we do recognize Cyprus when we're hosting shitty singing contests like Eurovision. Let's mention that!)

2004-10-23T04:10:00.000-07:00

Gul: The non-choice negotiator

Mehmet Ali Birand has a rather amusing piece on who should be the negotiator when "the condition of our condition" talks start on December 17. It is amusing if only for its lack of depth. One would be inclined to think that when doing an analysis on possible negotiators, one should first establish a set of possible candidates. In fact, the only alternative to Birand's main choice is Kemal Dervis, at least according to Birand. Everyone knew though that Dervis (a political innocent and ex-IMF economist) was scratched off a while ago. Gul, our current foreign minister, seems like the only possibility; anyone else were things to go bad could be easily made a scapegoat. The man's greatest assest is his ability to casually put down occasional nationalistic or status quo arguments that bubble forth from some corners (as he had done when the Annan Plan for Cyprus was put on the table) without denting his credibility. Although he does have his occasional gaffs, his English is not embarrassingly bad (Does anyone remember that god-awful CNN international interview with Mesut Yilmaz? The guy didn't bring a translator and resorted to repeating one answer for dozens of unrelated questions). Birand, as usual, shies away from presenting something that is little known about the negotiations or Gul. (He even begins is article "As usual in our impatience...", see "Penal Code" post below for Birand's patience theme.)

2004-10-22T17:19:00.000-07:00

Hitchens: Wolfowitz is the anti-Kissinger

Apparently (or hopefully), there are two camps under the neo-conservatives, one that believes fixing Iraq will ease Israel's expansionist policies, and the other that believes fixing Iraq will prevent Israel's expansionist policies. In a debate with Tariq Ali, Christopher Hitchens says Wolfowitz is in the latter group:

Hitchens: Now there are some of the neo-conservatives, I think, thought by taking out the main rejectionist dictatorship in the region, they would make Eretz Israel, or Greater Israel, more secure, or more feasible, alternatively, whether you think Greater Israel has been achieved or not. There were others of the same kidney, if you wish, where Wolfowitz and others took exactly the opposite feeling. If you took out the rejectionist dictatorship, you were in a stronger position to bring the leverage on Israel about the settlements and about expansionism, especially at a time when the Likud party itself is beginning to abandon the ultimate dream of Eretz Israel. I think it's very seldom noticed about this election, especially on the left, and this surprises me and I dare say I might even get Tariq's half acquiescence on this point. If you care about the rights of the Palestinians, which I do and I know he does, and you do, there's absolutely no reason whatever to hope for a Democratic victory in November. It's quite obvious to me that the only chance they have is a Bush second term. The possibility that some pressure can be brought in Israel from this quarter, the only quarter that counts, increases if Bush is re-elected.

Ali: Well, I must say what Christopher said on this is undeniable. The Democrats have over the last 20 years been completely uncritical of every single Israeli government, which has continued to press the Palestinians and crush and kill on a daily basis. What I dispute is whether a Bush second victory would be of any benefit in this particular direction, because the whole thing has now been subsumed under the war against terror, so-called. And Sharon became a valued ally of the Bush administration because he was regarded as absolutely central in the war against terror. And every single struggle is now characterized as a struggle against terrorism. I mean, Putin has destroyed half of Chechnya in the name of the so-called war against terror...I mean, what makes Wolfowitz different from Henry Kissinger in terms of projecting America power?

Hitchens: Wolfowitz and Kissinger disliked each other and disagreed very strongly with each other for a long time. I think the origin of the disagreement and the origin of Wolfowitz's political career is that he argued it was important to dump the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. Base or no base, let it go and take the chances that this would have a ripple effect in the rest of Asia, which was just what Kissinger didn't want. As a result, there were outbreaks of democratic insurgency, starting with the Aquino election, in South Korea, in Taiwan, eventuating in Tiananmen Square, in fact, in 1989, which of course, Kissinger also opposed and took the side of the Chinese Stalinists. On the Middle East, the victory of the neo-conservatives is very paradoxical, because contra Bush, Eagleburger -� Bush Sr., that is -� Eagleburger, Scowcroft -- I've just mentioned, by the way, the two leading members of Kissinger Associates -- and others, Colin Powell. The argument of the neo-conservatives, or at least of the Wolfowitz wing, was, "We can't go on like this, running the Middle East as a kind of political slum of client states. We have to take the chance that destabilization would be worth it in the long run." That's what, that's still why the extreme right in the country, people like Buchanan and others, oppose it. Precisely for that reason. They and the pro-Saudi conservatives.

2004-10-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

An Act of God

When she was theorizing about artificial intelligence, Ellen Ullman once wrote:

“I decided that there are huge swaths of existence that would be impenetrable—indescribable, unprogrammable—to a creature that did not eat or shit.”

Well, it turns out that Protestants may not have had their Reformation if it weren't for one man's constipation. The toliet was where Martin Luther came up with the idea and he wouldn't have been stuck there for so long if things had been working smoothly. Archaeologists, apparently, have found his spot. Whoever reported this story definately got their kicks:

The scholar suffered from constipation and spent many hours in contemplation on the toilet seat...."We still don't know what was used for wiping in those days," says Dr Treu. The paper of the time, he says, would have been too expensive and critically, "too stiff" for the purpose....Future visitors to Wittenberg's Martin Luther museum will be able to view the new find, though structural concerns mean they will not be free to test its qualities as a toilet.

2004-10-22T06:36:00.000-07:00

Carney on Kael

This is old stuff but still:

RC:....the Times's restaurant reviewer should forget about La Grenouille and Aureole and start covering the local Pizza Hut and McDonald's outlets. The art critic should make sure he writes up the black velvet Elvis paintings. The book review editor better not miss a Tom Clancy or Stephen King novel. All kidding aside, shouldn't the film reviewer take his job at least as seriously as the restaurant reviewer? At the very least, shouldn't there be one reviewer at each major publication assigned to covering the real works of art in film–no matter how small their budgets or limited their releases? There's no one at any major publication I know of doing that now.

VISIONS: Doesn't Pauline Kael's promotion of the early work of Coppola, Lynch, the Coen brothers, Toback, and DePalma disprove that?

RC: (Laughing) You're asking the wrong person about Pauline Kael....Kael wasn't interested in art; she was a connoisseur of kitsch. As far as I'm concerned, she was the single most unfortunate influence on the last thirty years of American film reviewing–stylistically, intellectually, and aesthetically. OK, so she went out front and championed certain filmmakers' work before anyone else did. But doesn't it matter that she was wrong about each and every one of them? Have any of them produced a major work?

Kael was the Michael Milken of film reviewing–she had a genuine flair for rhetorically inflating the value of a worthless stock and creating a stampede on the part of others to buy into it based on the inflated value. Look at how it worked in practice: Kael canonized The Godfather, Dressed to Kill, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Fingers, Blood Simple, and Blue Velvet as masterworks. Since most critics, like most stock market investors, are more or less sheep, they followed her lead. Once they jumped on the bandwagon, the fiction acquired a life of its own, and she seemed astonishingly prescient. Reputations were made, canonical oeuvres were established based on one or two works, careers were avidly tracked, with the critics wagering on each of the successive works. The only problem is that it was all a shell game. A few years went by and the initial offering inevitably went back to zero, since there was no intrinsic value to start with. Subsequent works (not surprisingly) failed to live up to the "promise" of the director's previous work. The six movies I named were eventually perceived to be merely quite ordinary or worse than ordinary. (Most people seem to have realized this about the DePalma, Spielberg, Toback, Coen, and Lynch movies, though there are those who have invested so heavily in Coppola that they still can't admit that they are holding worthless promissory notes.)

VISIONS: But it's always said that she was a great writer.

RC: Doesn't great writing have something to do with being smart, being perceptive, being critically "right" about a work or a career? Is it great writing if you're consistently stupid and wrong? Are we in such an alexandrine age that great writing has become nothing more than jazzy metaphors, panting exclamations, the snap, crackle, and pop of adverbial self-stimulation? But what's even worse is that the awfulness lives on in all of the Kael-clones she spawned over the past twenty years. You come up against her lamentable legacy every week in the Village Voice, New York, and the Boston Globe–both in the schlock sensibility and in the costume-jewelry glitz of the writing itself.

2004-10-21T15:52:00.000-07:00

Rick Trembles, Maverick Film Reviewer

There are few people in the world who are greater defenders of cinematic trash than Rick Trembles. A resident of Montreal, this guy churns out comic film reviews like no other, and I'm sure those south of the border will be hard-pressed to find an equivalent. Many of his archived reviews are now being published--anything from Birth of A Nation (1915) to Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951) to Charlie's Angels. You can check out his review of Team America as well... or maybe his archives.

2004-10-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

Language Edition Variations

There are only a few newspaper that have English online editions, and the ones that do have amusing differences with their Turkish counterpart. For example, the socially conservative Zaman has Erdogan's France visit as the main story but its English edition heads with the guilty plea of a US soldier in the Abu Ghraib scandal. It also has a headline that states the Muslim contingent support for Kerry in the US elections, absent from the Turkish front page. The Turkish edition, on the other hand, has a headline that informs the reader that a Hollywood movie about Fatih Sultan Mehmet is being made. The subtle difference in covering homosexuality is also amusing. The Booker Prize winner, Hollinghurst, along with his "gay novel", is mentioned on the front page in the English edition, but left for the Culture section in the Turkish version.
Hurriyet's English online edition is less detailed than Zaman's. However, it contains a story that Zaman does not mention:

While in France, P.M. Tayyip Erdogan gave liberal messages. He said that gays had their own law and that there should be no fear from an idea that made no "Actual harm."

I guess when he says "an idea that makes no actual harm," he's referring to gay sex. I have no idea, though, what he means when he says that "gays have their own laws." What, in God's name, does that mean? Laws that protect them (I highly doubt it)? (I am reminded of the Christian provinces of the Ottoman Empire which, though they were taxed, were not required to follow Islamic law--but what Turkish laws nowadays do not apply to homosexuals?) This headline is also completely absent from Hurriyet's Turkish online edition, which leads me to believe that Hurriyet does not want to cause a minor domestic controversy, but at the same time hopes to show off our "cosmopolitan" prime minister to foreigners. How thoughtful of them, if only the story made sense....

2004-10-20T14:08:00.000-07:00

"I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song." --Rilke

Some amazing photos from the Narphotos collective....these are by Coskun Asar. If a transvestite has got your back in a fight in Turkey then you're good to go. They are by far the toughest of the tough, out of necessity of course. For in a hostile environment, they have to put up with getting attacked just for walking the street. If they go up against some gang in any part of the world they will kick ass. No contest.

2004-10-19T17:23:00.000-07:00

One (or Two) Sentence Belated Reviews of Mostly Retarded Movies

The Terminal: Ever wonder what it would be like if Forrest Gump was Russian instead of retarded?

Collateral: Jamie Foxx tells the Last Samurai not to give him "this I-Ching shit" in a taxi cab, thus ending the age-old practice of using taxis to dump bullshit dialogue in a script. Tom Cruise reinstates the practice by continuing to talk about the insignificance of man in the cosmos.

I Robot: Will Smith is a racist black cop in the future chasing down robots who happen to be running down a street with a purse in their hands. This provides sharp commentary on life in the States today where cops chase black people down a street for the same reason, and most of the time it turns out that there is an inhaler in the purse and the poor black guy is trying reach some bitch who is about to die, just like in the movie.

Life is A Miracle: A guy masturbates as bombs fall on his head. No, it's not Underground. Way to go Kusturica!!

Old Boy: When the audience has lost all hope, and while on the ground and having the crap kicked out of him by twenty people, our hero ingeniously begins to hit the attackers' feet with a hammer, like a deranged Charlie Chaplin.

2004-10-19T15:38:00.000-07:00

Turkish Penal Code (Apparently, size does matter)

Cumhuriyet gave a free copy of the new penal code with their newspaper last week, knowing the little I do know about penal codes I was surprised how thin the thing actually was. Cumhuriyet must have sensed the laziness of the general public to go out and find the damn thing...good for them. They have, after all, saved me a trip to the library. Although I did not see laws against Armenian genocide acceptance or advocating removal of Turkish troops from Cyprus, there is an article that presumably allows people to be charged for it (2+ years jail sentence):

Insulting the Turkish national identity, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey: up to 3 years (if committed by a Turkish citizen abroad: to be increased one-third); Insulting the Turkish Government, the judicial organs, military or security institutions: up to 2 years (if committed by a Turkish citizen abroad: to be increased one-third).

The vagueness in wording is rampant throughout the text. What differentiates a criticism from an insult? The fact that one would leave such a distinction in the hands of a few judges is absurd. Convinctions may be hard to come by, but even having to waste months or years in court is punishment in and of itself.

The European Green Party, usually referred to as the most vocal supporter of Turkey's EU bid, held a parlimentary meeting in Istanbul today. And for ardent supporters, they made a lot of people squirm. Daniel Cohen-Bendit bluntly stated that people being sent to jail for speech, even when their words directly attacked the State, was unacceptable. His bluntness even took the translator by surprise, who started off watering down some of his words but then began translating them more accurately when she realized he wasn't letting up.

What's also been amusing is a couple of pieces by Mehmet Ali "Gee What a Great View" Birand. He spends most of his time begging both the EU and Turkey to be patient cause "things are getting better." Either I haven't been paying attention, or Birand is growing a few fangs, and it's a good thing:

"I am talking about our general attitude towards our Kurdish citizens.

We didn't even recognize their existence.

Didn't we tell them: "You don't know who you are. You are not Kurds, you are mountain Turks?"

Didn't we change the names of their villages to Turkish?

Didn't we even prevent them giving their children Kurdish names?

Didn't we ban them from talking Kurdish or listening to Kurdish songs?

Didn't we purposefully leave the Southeast poor and ignorant? Didn't we ignore the fact that a clan structure was being established there?

Now, let's look at the status of the Alewis.

Didn't the dominant Sunnis force Alewis to remain on the sidelines for years?

The religious Affairs Directorate didn't use even a small part of the taxes it collected from the Alewis to support Cem Houses (Alewi places of worship).

Alewis were always put under pressure.

Only when the Sunni Islamists became dominant did the Alewis draw praise as the "protectors of the secular system."

Didn't the state instigate Sunni-Alewi conflicts? How quickly we forget the large-scale clashes that occurred in the 1970s.

In his later article, his title exhumes his usual, almost child-like optimism: "I bet Ataturk is smiling," he says. In it, he notes the following:

"The European Commission gives a 'green light' to Turkey. However, the report was dominated by its aim to alleviate fears in EU countries. And then I looked at our media: Some are just ignorant, while some want to be seen as rebels while blasting the commission's report. Thank God most see the bigger picture."

One of those rebels, presumably, is Nuray Mert, who attacked the report on being weak on defending religious freedom and too overly concerned about superficial exhibitions of cultural diversity. Then Birand throws this in the field of strawberries:

"Our 'commission official' was honorable after all...We criticized the man for years. We accused him of being a Nazi and anti-Turkish. What he said was right but it didn't suit our purposes, so we just ignored them. However, we should now give credit where it's due."

Well, no wonder Guenter Verheugen is being ridiculed by Europe's right nowadays. Birand, as usual, finishes by saying that the pessimism exhibited by some goes against the facts. There are some pessimists out there, however, who are so inclined because they refuse to demand anything less than what is just.

What was also amusing was the misunderstanding of our press over the use of the word "minority". In the West, it usually implies receiving some kind of additional attention. In Turkey, it is used to refer to groups of people who have to pay a certain price to be who they are.

2004-10-17T04:00:00.000-07:00

Amis vs. Updike Redux

If there hasn't been a book that has lost its place on my bookshelf despite having the last 70 pages drenched in coffee it's Martin Amis' The War Against Cliche collection of essays (1971-2000), filled with his take on Updike and Bellow. For the last twenty years it looks as though Updike has not relaxed his insistence on reviewing translations. Amis' 1976 piece on Updike's book reviews reads as if it were written yesterday:

"Updike can keep a straight face while noting the linguistic tang of translated 'Arab and Bantu exclamations'; and he is perfectly capable of talking about the style of a novel translated from the French translation of the Polish--which is like analysing the brushstrokes of a Brownie."

Updike's last two reviews have such musings.

From José Saramago's (Portugese) The Double:

The proof that the universe was not as well-thought-out as it should have been lies in the fact that the Creator ordered the star that illumines us to be called the sun. Had the king of the stars borne the name Common Sense, imagine how enlightened the human spirit would be now.

Updike's response:

One wonders. “Common sense” in Portuguese is surprisingly similar to the English: comum senso or bom senso. Nevertheless, some spirit-altering connotations may be lost in translation. Is common sense really a cure-all?

From Orhan Pamuk's Snow:

“….You’re here this evening, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Because I want to read you my poem again,” said Ka, as he put his notebook into his pocket. “Do you think it’s beautiful?”
“Yes, really, it’s beautiful.”
“What’s beautiful about it?”
“I don’t know, it’s just beautiful,” said Ipek. She opened the door to leave.
Ka threw his arms around her and kissed her on the mouth.

Updike's Response:

Maybe...it reads better in Turkish.

Clearly, books that rely on too many cultural cues usually do not fair well in translation. Novels that do exploit cultural cues, however, are usually popular nationally because their cues can act as a cover for an otherwise obvious lack of depth. Their mediocrity is unearthed with another language. In cases where novels that first wallow in cultural debris but then transcend it, it’s more of a tragedy because the actual transcendence is what is absent in the translation, and the cultural debris all the more present. There are those that can avoid this, and at least Updike is out in front leading the search.

Meanwhile, his collection of short stories (in untranslated English) came to my library.The thing, unsurprisingly, is huge. If you happen to like Updike and step aerobics, it’s your lucky day cause this doubles as both.

"The reckless aggression of his first term moderated into the diplomatic 'hardball' of his second."
--Amis on Reagan circa '88

2004-10-13T13:24:00.000-07:00

Uhh...What?

"Coalition personnel mounted two operations last month to rescue members of a group of three hostages held by Iraq, but they didn't find them, a U.S. government official said Tuesday."--Fox News

I suppose they meant "in Iraq"--talk about adding flame to the "indecorum of speech" fire.

2004-10-12T04:43:00.000-07:00

In the Veins, with Wings

"I'm close to Heaven....crushed at the gate." --Tom Waits

There is this thing called Ilkyar run by a small group of people that gathers students and profs and sends them to run down primary schools across Turkey, many in the East. During the year they pack boxes full of toys, enough to fill trucks with, and take those to schools. Throughout the day they introduce their fields to the students, eat with them, and at night they open the boxes and play with them--and dance past their bedtime. The children flock to every volunteer, hardly letting go of their hands (and even legs) during the entire time--many crying as they leave and sending letters for months to come, The look of amazement on their faces when they see a computer, or their new notebooks and pencils, is the purest expression one can witness.

If you want to know more: (ignore this)ilkyar(-at-)ilkar.org.tr

2004-10-09T05:28:00.000-07:00

Eeau

The EU commission report (and all its footnotes) is the most bloated non-news I've come by, so much so that it's impossible to retain the amount of interest needed even to write a couple of sentences. I suppose I'm closest to Nuray Mert on this one (in Turkish)--cut the shit and implement reforms for reforms' sake.

2004-10-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

Cassavetes Criterion Boxed Out

Apparently Ray Carney worked on the box set for eight months, got no dough and no recognition, and they even held his kids for ransom and fed his wife to the sharks; well, not exactly, but close.

Lessons to be learned in life: don't fuck with Gena Rowlands.

2004-09-25T01:32:00.000-07:00

Lord of the Flies

"I saw that around Mosul, everybody is the resistance - not terrorists, but not civilians really either...They used the small kids to bring them water, and nobody treated them like children. They'd be with the men who were talking about cutting heads, and the kids would be standing guard, like little men, so you become afraid of the children too."

That was Zeynep Tugrul, a woman journalist from Turkey who was kidnapped at Tal Afar and taken to Mosul, talking to the New York Times. In a way, this supports the claim that there are terrorists lurking in that city, contrary to the denial of the town's representatives. In fact, the eyewitness account proves that the Iraqi security forces have been infiltrated or bribed:

"...When they stopped to ask a policeman in Tal Afar to direct them, he waved over a car with three masked men inside who ordered them to get in. They were taken to a nondescript house..."

However, to the town's credit they seem to be outsiders:

"They spoke Turkish... but also claimed to be Sunni Arabs, and not Turkmen of the Shia branch of Islam. Ms. Tugrul said they also spoke a very different Turkish dialect from the Turkmen."

Tugrul appeared on Turkish television, saying at one point that her captors would force her to pray five times a day.

"I apologized to God and told him that this was all for show; I told him that I didn't really pray five times a day and that I wasn't even sure I was praying right. Luckily, the captors would not look at me while I was praying because I was a woman. I would pray loudly, so they could hear the words."

2004-09-22T02:13:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchens on Orhan Pamuk

After two positive reviews from Harper’s and John Updike from the New Yorker, the Atlantic follows suit in reviewing Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, with who else but Christopher Hitchens. One of Hitchens’ earlier causes has been Cyprus and Turkey’s role in the conflict; he often gives talks to Hellenic institutes in the US regarding Turkey and Cyprus (his ex-wife also happens to be a Greek Cypriot). It doesn’t come as a surprise that Hitchens uses this opportunity in reviewing a political novel to further his case against Turkey: “The United States and the European Union have lately been taking Turkey’s claims to modernity more and more at face value. The attentive reader of Snow will not be so swift to embrace this consoling conclusion.” Thus, he praises Pamuk in crafting a work of ambivalence with regards to Turkey being the clichéd bridge between East and West. Hitchens points to Pamuk’s virtues and faults on both the political and literary front, leaning toward the negative in terms of literature, “Prolix and often clumsy as it is, Pamuk’s new novel should be taken as a cultural warning.”

Written before September 11th, Snow takes place in Kars, which is a town near the Armenian border, and it describes the conflicts of various secular/militant, Islamist, and Kurdish voices of the population. Of his literary virtues, Hitchens notes, “Pamuk is at his best in depicting the layers of the past that are still on view in Kars—in particular the Armenian churches and schools whose ghostly reminder of a scattered and desecrated civilization is enhanced in its eeriness by the veil of snow. Nor does he omit the sullen and disaffected Kurdish population.” To Hitchens the most sympathetic group seems to be the Islamists, and the most unsympathetic are the secularists, even though Pamuk himself is, by ideology, a secularist who had defended Salman Rushdie when Satanic Verses broke.

Hitchen’s criticism of Pamuk’s style is most clearly summarized when he notes that “Pamuk’s literalism and pedantry are probably his greatest enemies as a writer of fiction; he doesn’t trust the reader until he has hit him over the head with dialogue and explanation of the most didactic kind.” Although I haven’t read Snow, I know this attribute comes up once in a while to bite Pamuk in his other works.

Then on the political side, although praising him for his ambivalence, Hitchens criticizes Pamuk for his lack of courage:

“Some important Turkish scholarship has recently attempted an honest admission of the Armenian genocide and a critique of the official explanations for it. The principal author, in this respect is Taner Akcam, who, as Pamuk is certainly aware, was initially forced to publish his findings as one of those despised leftist exiles in Germany—whereas from reading Snow one might easily conclude that all the Armenians of Anatolia had decided for some reason to pick up and depart en masse, leaving their ancestral properties for tourists to gawk at.”

Hitchens is criticizing Pamuk here for not being blunt enough, for not taking a stand, even though he scolds Pamuk for being too explicit and didactic with respect to other aspects of the novel. However, with such a blunt explanation, wouldn’t the sense of eeriness of Kars subside rather than swell? Pamuk may in fact be guilty of not wanting such an admission to eclipse his entire novel.

John Updike disagrees with Hitchens on courage:

“To produce a major work so frankly troubled and provocatively bemused and, against the grain of the author’s usual antiquarian bent, entirely contemporary in its setting and subjects, took the courage that art sometimes visits upon even its most detached practitioners.”

In his review, Hitchens repeats something that he has used in his Cyprus book, namely, that Turkey is not a country with an army but rather an army with a country. In his case against Turkey, which he sprinkles throughout the review, he fails to mention that Turkish Kurds, for obvious reasons, are one of the most ardent supporters of its EU bid. He does, however, mention Nazim Hikmet.

“…in 1920, the legendary Turkish Communist leader Mustafa Suphi set out along the frontier region…and was murdered with twelve of his comrades by right-wing “Young Turks.” This killing was immortalized by Nazim Hikmet in a poem that is still canonical in Turkey. (Hikmet himself, the nation’s unofficial laureate, was to spend decades in jail and exile because of his Communist loyalties).”

That Nazim Hikmet is our most popular poet hopefully goes to our credit.

2004-09-18T02:32:00.000-07:00

Turkish Invasion, A Musical Style That Never Caught On*
*(courtesy of Mcsweeney's)

Our tightrope walk with respect to the Turkoman in Iraq has been executed with the agility of a mule. Those in the military and elsewhere who are connecting the words "civil war" with Iraq (the unsaid words being "we will help the Turkoman"), are probably crazy enough to want a rerun of Cyprus. Thankfully, most people realize thats beyond the boundaries of acceptable action. Kurdish media has an article on the Turkoman Front, which is one out of a few Turkoman political organizations, but also the one that is supported by Turkey:

The Turkoman Front, TF, which should be more appropriately called the Turkish Front behind a Turkoman Façade, has damaged the rightful, lawful and just demands of the Turkoman people.

Since its inception, the TF has been unwavering in its crusade and direction of its energy, time and money, which is to drive a wedge between the Turkoman and the Kurdish people.

Its political objectives, periodicals, newspapers and internet sites have two main and well thought out aims, the first is to spread lies about the Kurds and the second is to provoke the Kurds into taking some sort of retaliatory action in order to get the big brother behind the scene into executing plan A, which is to send in Turkish troops.

What is striking however, is that the TF’s Arabic internet news site has attracted a number of Arab and Turkoman writers who seem to share a passion, of complete dislike and disdain of anything Kurdish. In fact, their usual anti-Kurdish diatribe and harangue, such as the Kurds are nothing but peasants, Kurdish language is only a mixture of languages, to cite but a few of the content of TF’s net news writers, is a true and accurate excerpt taken from pages of Turkish academia of humanities, which for years published thesis and awarded doctorates on topics such as the Turkish origin of Kurds and the non-existence of Kurds as a race and language. These can be easily constituted as racist materials which incite hatred and violence, which anywhere else other than Turkey is punishable by the law.

If this is true, its pretty damning. There is also evidence that there is falsified material that is trying to be channeled to the outside world from Iraq. Just today, Milliyet reported that the US ambassador thanked the newspaper for not publishing photos that claimed to be pictures of bodies of massacred Turkoman civilians. The photos, he said, were actually old pictures of the 12 murdered Nepalis.

The Turkish Torque says:

"Next month there’ll be population survey in Kerkuk in preparation for the Iraqi elections in January. The news stories suggest that the Kurdish administration in the North is bringing Kurds by the busloads into Kerkuk and quartering them in tents on the outskirts of the city. Kurds claim they are just “Kurdish refugees going back home.” Even the American sources took notice of this sudden swell in the Kurdish population in Kerkuk, a city that had a Turcoman majority for centuries. Turks are upset that the U.S. commanders in charge are not doing anything to stop this attempt to change Kerkuk’s population composition."

I doubt the majority Turcoman claim, and noticeably the Tork does not cite his sources. The idea that the US commanders should stop immigration into Kerkuk is rather ridiculous, because what information are they going to use to determine whether or not someone has the right to reside in Kerkuk? Certainly, a blanket policy that turns back everyone who tries to enter is not acceptable. How about until the population survey is complete? Maybe. But how many Kurds immigrate to Kerkuk is beside the point, as long as the Turcoman that are already there aren't kicked out of their houses. The point is to protect the rights of the Turcoman regardless of the population composition. This obsession with population percentages provides, at best, a shortcut to hell.

2004-09-11T16:44:00.000-07:00

In Memory of An American

I do not know anybody who died on that day, but I would like to take this moment to pay tribute to an American that comes to mind when I think about that country. Rob Myslik died young a year ago somewhere between home and a film festival. He was muse and mentor, a trickster with effervascent honesty in his sleeves--a neighborhood wolf in sheep's skin. When he taught he was an open wound at times--laying his soul on the line. It seemed he'd stay on one topic until he had "a moment" and only then would he move on. And on days when people were completely unresponsive it would get to him because he never put up any guard for it. He was attracted to the absurd, but not to the degree that it became a way of avoiding honest experience.

some random quotes I'd throw his way....

"You never have to change what you got up in the middle of the night to write." Saul Bellow

“Memories strike home, like slaps in the face….” Philip Larkin

"When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice." Saul Bellow

"I saw commercial that told me uncle john smokes his own bacon, now there's a tough son of a bitch." Bukowski

"Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining." Saul Bellow

"Ain't there anybody friendly around here? I'm friendly. What the hell do you want?" -- Kid Blue

"Do sober what you said you'd do drunk" Hemingway

"Little man has done it again. He's made a monkey out of the forces of evil." -- For Your Height Only

"I am the nemesis of the would-be forgotten" Saul Bellow

"What kind of son of a bitch puts a snake in a man's salad?" – Blindman

"Never confuse movement with action" Hemingway

"Dr. Hughes called you and told you that the tumor on her neck is definitely a fetus." -- The Manitou

"Old age is no place for sissies" Belle

<>"The Constitution says you got a right to be weird if you wanna." -- The Woman Inside

"He who is vitalily alive is ready to die with life." Samuel Johnson

"If I want to listen to an asshole I'll fart." -- Go to Hell!

2004-09-11T03:54:00.000-07:00

For You Gmail People

Mindtrick has done something to relieve that pain in your ass:

Well, i wrote a small perl utility to download files from your gmail account which are actually attached to the emails, and upload the requested file by sending an email to yourself....Those who use gmail also as a backup system would like to give gmcp a try.

Check it out.

2004-09-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

Trash (Paul Morrissey, 1970)

This films great. I was lucky to see it in the theatre a while back. The Istanbul Film Festival also ran a Paul Morrissey Trilogy screening a couple of years ago. Here's a rather hilarious interview with Paul Morrissey by Matthew Hayes (Montreal Mirror, since moved to Toronto).

"the basic idea for the movie is that drug people are trash. There's no difference between a person using drugs and a piece of refuse."--Paul Morrissey

2004-09-07T04:18:00.000-07:00

Random Ozu Day

The number of Ozu films on DVD is kind of pathetic (there are only four on Amazon via Criterion), here are Ray Carney's thoughts when asked:

Flavor of Green Tea over rice

Must see, a critical work that brilliantly shifts from sit. com. to tragedy in mid-course

There Was a Father (Chichi ariki) (1942) 87min

skipable

Early Spring (Soshun) (1956) 144min

must see

Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Nagaya shinshi roku) (1947) 72min

skipable

Tokyo Twilight (Tokyo boshoku) (1974) 141min

should see, but not the ultimate highest supremo

A Hen in the Wind (Kaze no naka no mendori) (1948) 84min

skipable

Good Morning (Ohayo) (1959) 93min

must see

Floating Weeds (Ukigusa) (1959) 119min

should see, but not the ultimate highest supremo

Late Autumn (Akibiyori) (1960) 129min

must see....

An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no aji) (1962) 113min

must see
And where is Late Spring in your list? Add it to the Must See group!

Ozu IS amazing. All the films are interesting, but just as with any other artist, there are "roughly zones." Even Homer wrote some lines in haste. Even Bach has a few unnecessary repeats. So, yes, some of the early films in particular are "skippable." But the ones I've marked Must See you really should try to get to. Ohayo is the only one in that group that you might skip, but since it is comic and has fart jokes, I know you wouldn't want to, so I put it on the Must See custom for you! : ) Just kidding! It's a sweet, charming flic!

Keep making trouble!

Ray

"It is always easier to be a scoffer, a debunker, a skeptic, than to open oneself to unfamiliar insights. It is always easier to resist an experience, to hold oneself above it, than to put one's certainties at risk by deeply yielding oneself to it. There are twentieth-century critics who practice the hermeneutics of faith, but for obvious reasons they do not get as much attention as the other sort of critics. They are not system builders. They are not generalizers. Their work does not make self-aggrandizing claims about literature's complicity with repressive systems of race, class, and gender. They do not offer comforting, utopian prospects of escape from those systems through projects of literary and critical cleansing. What they do offer, in fact, is not what most people want: an unending course of work, conducted through arduous acts of sustained attention, without the promise of grandiose ideological insights and sociological generalizations at the end of the road."--Ray Carney

"squeeze your nuts and open your face." ee cummings

2004-09-04T13:39:00.000-07:00

Circle of Angels

This is what a Russian friend told me about the massacre: The moment they walked in they took twenty or so adult people from the crowd of hostages upstairs and shot them. Then they gathered all the kids in the gymnasium. Once the bodies started to rot, the smell started spreading throughout the building. In the morning they sent a woman out to telll police to collect the rotting bodies...When the woman came back, the terrorist who was supposed to let her in forgot about the explosives planted at the door he chose to open. He and a part of the wall blew up. Then children tried to escape and the terrorists started to fire at them killing nearly a hundred. Russian soldiers started firing into the bulding at that time. A few terrorists blew themselves up. Thats what caused the roof to collapse on the gym floor...

Push Back the Clock For Me

The time when the current government's pro-EU agenda clashed with its Islam-influenced social agenda has finally arrived. Erdogan's party wishes to make adultery a criminal offense when it priorly was only considered a vaild cause for divorce, like in most Western countries. If the AKP gets their wish then we'd be in the esteemed company of countries like Saudi Arabia, Sudan and the like (Millyet ran a sarcastic headline on its front page entitled "Family Photo" with a cartoon showing all countries who criminalize such an act). When asked to comment, Erdogan said that he viewed adultery as being the same as stealing. Well, all the more reason for the EU to shudder in the shadows, I'm sure their dying to learn a few lessons on morality from such neighbors...

2004-08-14T15:36:00.000-07:00

A Little Press From Across The Lake

The English Translation of Orhan Pamuk's Kar or Snow has been released. Harper's says that at one point it's "as if Nabokov and Rushdie had taken their circus act on the road, or Carlos Fuentes was anatolian instead of Aztec, or Milan Kundera remembered how to laugh." The review concludes by saying "Snow is also written by the man who got into trouble for supporting the rights of Kurds and opposing Iran's fatwa on Rushdie...[who] makes fun of intellectuals like himself even as he acknowledges the bull's-eye on his back. From the Golden Horn, with a wicked grin the political novel makes a triumphant return."

The Atlantic gets harrased by a non-Turkish reader who points out their heading for a piece called the "Arab World's response to the Passion of the Christ"--or some variation thereof--is incorrect since Turkey is not a Arab country. But I wonder what kind of person sucks in his stomach and bothers writing something like this. It could be worse, like when Powell said Turkey is a great role model for a Islamic state--that was great (apparently, he meant Pakistan).

2004-08-13T04:15:00.000-07:00

Belated Film Reviews

Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke): 7.5/10

Caught this on a critic's pick month at Kavalidere Cinema in Ankara. Had expectations for it and was let down a bit. It shares a premise with any natural disaster film where people end up jumping on each other's throat after a while--the only difference is the viewer enters while the unravelling is in progress. The film partly relies on its surprising beginning scene for its strength and this characteristic weakens it at the end. It doesn't go as deep into the crevices of human behavior as it should, despite its realistic tones, and the ways in which people unravel soon become predictable. There is also a lengthy scene which borders on horror movie-ish a la Blair Witch, with no valuable insight.

What scene am I talking about? Scott Tobias has a different take on the same scene in an Onion review:

"As ever, Haneke's capable of conjuring some astonishing images, including a bravura sequence that plays out in darkness, save for the flicker of a torch made of hay. At its best, the film sustains the heightened tension of great science fiction, dropping in on a frightening new world that's just this side of familiar."

I don't take it well when disorientation is used to conceal an otherwise bland engagement.

2004-08-11T14:42:00.000-07:00

Earthquake Season, Whoo-hoo!

So lets see...this past week there was bomb, a train crash, and two earthquakes. You gotta love august. I figure its high time that we came up with an extreme sport for earthquakes. We average about two big ones a years, and the last two weren't big ones. One of the earthquakes (and its aftershocks) happened in Bodrum (across Kos) where I went recently.

As for the bomb in Istanbul, the PKK/Kurdish rebels angle is a little more believable at this point since the hotel in question had a unusual number of Iranian tourists...Iran, as I recall, launched a PKK offensive recently.

The sense of alarm this has caused: hardly any. But then again, it always looks worse from the outside

2004-08-11T06:41:00.000-07:00

That's One Hell of A Caucasian, Jackie

I'm back and I gotta hand it to Peter the Great, he knew his shit. Saint Petersburg is a place that makes you forget nearly a million people died there 60 years ago. Basically, every czar since Peter brought in a famous architect of that period from Europe and commisioned him to build buildings there for the next however many decades. The city is made up of many islands, and in the center island its hard to find any building that is less than 200 years old. You don't get to the monstrous communist buildings (in both size and architecture) until you get to the outer islands. At least Russians can blame communism for their ugly edifices, we, unfortunately, don't have that excuse. Their old government model also seems to have given a sense of fashion appreciation to pretty much every generational demographic. The range of styles from a twentysomething to an 80 year-old is impressive.

Some Random Notes

The redundancy of the phrase "White Russian" was never more pointedly apparent to me as when I saw a black guy dressed in 1700 s clothing (which included a white wig) welcoming people into the Chocolate Museum.

Mickey Mouse outside the Kremlin:

For some reason, the Russians have a very efficient subway system. In Moscow the next train clocks at a minute and twenty--which is the fastest service I've seen in my limited exposure to subway systems in general.

I did drink a lot, which is impossible not to do since the Russians have a tendency to make a toast every five seconds. I also attended a barbecue where I was given the choice of eating horsemeat or pork. Mmmm.

Whereas the Ottomans were busy turning churches into mosques, Russian czars seemed to be comfortable in their curosity. I saw two mosques that were built in Imperial Russia, one by Nicholas II in 1910 in St. Petersburg and the other by Catherine the Great (18th century) in her palace.

"Coffee" in Russia means "Expresso". There is no "normal coffee". Similar to Turkey, where people ask for Nescafe. This is otherwise known as the Kleenex phenomenon.

There are close to zero taxi cabs in St. Petersburg, and a little more in Moscow. People take what are called "private taxis"--another name for hitchiking with a fee. You basically hail any car that passes by and tell them you'll pay X to get to Y. They either accept or give another price. The rest is left to your bargaining skills.

Some churches and cathedrals have a cross with an upturned crescent at its end. I asked a guide what that meant and she said it represented Christianity's triumph over Islam. When I first saw it the explanation made sense because the church I saw it on was partly paid by a Bulgarian contingent who were saved by Russia from conversion or death in the hands of the Ottomans. But the more and more I saw, the more and more I was unsure. The orthodox cross has a second smaller horizontal bar near its end, and the crescent on these churches seem to act as a substitue for the second bar.

In Moscow, I also checked out the cemetary where all the famous Russians are buried. A surprising number of clowns are buried there (more than zero), not to mention some of Stalin's family. Nazim Hikmet, the famous Turkish exile poet, is also there. I thought his grave would be in the backwaters of the cemetary since he's not Russian, but he actually has a nice pad.

A historical rumor in Turkey is that the Ottomans were going to invade Russia in the time of Catherine the Great but the Sultan at the time fell in love with her (or screwed, depending on who you talk to) and gave up on the idea. So regardless of the truth, I half-expected Catherine the Great to have been some kind of hot babe. She was huge by the looks of it. This is not surprising once you learn that dinner at a czar's humble abode lasted for eight hours.

I also went to a football game between St. Petersburg (Zenit) and Irtish. For those who are not up to par on their Tundra geography, Irtish is a town in Siberia that is a 10 hour flight away from St. Petersburg. Zenit won 7-1. Apparently while I was away, Fenerbahce beat Juventus 2-0 in Izmir and Galatasaray beat Porto in the States.

The sun set close to 11:00 while I was in Russia and it didn't get dark until midnight. St. Petersburg shares the same longitude as Istanbul, meaning when I got on the plane to get there I went north for three hours. It was still hot as hell.

2004-07-23T14:46:00.000-07:00

Waving not Drowning

Sorry for the break, I was at the coast for a while with no access...I will also be going to St. Petersburg shortly.

Meanwhile

A Turkish translation of V. Dadrian's works regarding the Armenian genocide entitled "Ermeni Soykirmda Kurumsal Roller" is out in bookstores in Turkey with newspaper Radikal supplying a review by his friend Taner Akcam in its literary supplement (for those who don't know, Radikal is not "radical"--but owned by media giant Dogan). Its a positive review by one of our meager few historians who accept the accusations. There are many sites which attempt to conduct (unintentionally hilarious) hatchet jobs on such folk. Akcam states that Dadrian makes extensive use of Turkish resources to back his claims rather than relying heavily on other documents. One of Dadrian's points is that a doctor and scientist historically cherished by Turkey is responsible for using Armenians in fatal experiments, and that in fact it was not simply Armenians but two Turkish doctors in neighboring hospitals who accused him of doing so...

2004-07-04T01:11:00.000-07:00

Spiderman 2: 6-7/10

They finally figured out the difference between a comic book and a video game... congratulations.

The movie happens to be an all out assault on lazy people. The only excuse you can have for missing your classes, apparently, is if you're pulling immigrant babies out of burning buildings.

Retarded Tidbits: T.S. Eliot gets his revenge on the ignorant. Extra from the set of Frida ends up as the wife of uber-genius Dr.Octavius. B-movie king and Army of Darkness/Evil Dead star fronts as Doorman to Broadway theatre--adds that "extra feel". Spiderman suit leaks color in wash--dry cleaning preferred. First explicit Christ figure in Post-Passion era (might not be true).

2004-07-04T01:00:00.000-07:00

Souvlaki, Por favor

My guess, Greece takes it unless someone on their side gets red-carded. If the Portugese realize its not their "destiny" and that they actually have to work for it they will probably choke.

....................

(Milliyet)

Well, There you go.

2004-06-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

Pass the Doochie on the Left Hand Side

Things are getting tense in Cyprus:

THE government is working frantically to thwart EU plans to open direct trade with the breakaway Turkish Cypriot regime in the north, hinting at a recourse to the European Court of Justice if the move goes ahead.

The Greek Cypriot side is up in arms following the leaking of a draft package of measures by the European Commission to end Turkish Cypriot isolation in the wake of the community’s ‘yes’ vote for the Annan plan in April. The EU is to decide on the package on July 7.

Under the plan, the EU would open direct trade, which involves the opening up of ports and possibly airports, under Article 133 of the Treaty of Rome, which covers customs duties between the bloc and third “countries and territories”.

The recent Treaty of Nice says such a decision does not need the unanimous approval of the European Council of Minister, just a qualified majority.

In simple terms it means that to pass the measure, the European Commission needs 88 out of 124 votes. Cyprus has two votes under the system, which grants more votes to the bigger countries, while Greece has five.

2004-06-29T03:36:00.000-07:00

We want Chiwawas

I always thought our policy of trying to get the Americans to call for EU accession at every chance they get was amateurish and counterproductive. Milliyet quotes Bush as saying: "If it was me, I'd accept Turkey into the EU" (yeah right), to which Chirac angrily responds "Do we tell you how to act toward Mexico?"

Maybe at some point we will defeat the desperation and hysteria. Who knows maybe we will get beyond our myopic EU focus. For now, yo querio taco bell.

Meanwhile, Milliyet also reports that Foreign Minister Gul is taking steps to act as mediator between Armenia and Azerbaijan. This goes with my guess that Turkey is trying to dodge the genocide issue by moving to open borders with Armenia before December.

However, Blogrel points out that Erdogan believes it is "impossible" to go foward while genocide recognition by the Armenian Diaspora is insisted upon. But it has been reported earlier by some that Armenia itself does not see recognition as a prerequisite to opening borders. If it is impossible for us to accept the genocide, then Turkey must think it is impossible for the EU to insist on the issue. And whatever the probability of that is, it is far from "impossible". And rightly so.

2004-06-26T06:28:00.000-07:00

US Detour

Kerry Attributes Snow Melting in Colorado to Bush's Environmental Policies

While on the trail, John Kerry says he is "extremely disturbed" by recent reports that indicate snow is melting in some parts of Colorado. Aides deny that the comments are related in anyway to Kerry's pathetic attempts at a reverse 360 tail-back during a ski trip in Aspen. When asked to comment on Kerry's remarks that snow is melting in Colorado in July, President Bush responds by saying, "Is that what month this is?" Aides deny that they told Bush it was still February and that he could approve of ads making fun of Kerry for another eight months. Officials who have seen the ads say more than a few start off with Bush saying, "A horse walks into a bar, bartender says 'Why such a long face?'..."

2004-06-25T16:11:00.000-07:00

The Shit Hits The Fan: Part II

From Haaretz via Cumhuriyet:

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul is the source of the leak to New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh that dozens of Israeli Mossad agents are ostensibly in northern Iraq. The reliable Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet yesterday stated that Gul, along with two advisers and a spokesman, had a breakfast meeting with Hersh on May 27, on which occasion he gave the information to Hersh.
....
In any event, Israel has made it clear to Turkey that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided not to open a channel of cooperation with the Kurds. For now, that decision is blocking proposals submitted by Israeli intelligence officials to Sharon to try to reestablish the connection with the Kurds.

If its true, its pretty ridiculous.

2004-06-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

Not Something You See Every Day

Cyprus Mail:

TURKISH Cypriot Ibrahim Aziz yesterday won his case against the Republic of Cyprus, when the European Court of Human Rights delivered the judgment that he must be allowed to enroll in the Republic’s electoral roll for the parliamentary elections.

Aziz, 66, who lives in the free areas, complained to the European Court of Human Rights that he was prevented from exercising his voting rights on the grounds of national origin and filed his case through lawyer Sotiris Drakos on May 14, 2001.

After having played an active role in politics for 40 years, on January 30, 2001, Aziz applied to the Minister of the Interior, requesting to be registered on the electoral roll in order to exercise his voting rights in the parliamentary elections of May 27, 2001
However, the Ministry declined his request stating that members of the Turkish Cypriot community could not be registered on the Greek Cypriot electoral roll.

2004-06-21T16:43:00.000-07:00

The Shit Has Hit The Fan

Seymour Hersh bounces off the Abu Ghraib story with a piece about Israel's active efforts in Kurdistan viz a viz training commandos and other related endevours. Hence the cooling of relations between Turkey and Israel does not simply seem to be motivated by Turkey's attempts to gain the Islamic Conference Presidency but rather Turkey's fears of an independent Kurdistan.

The Israeli decision to seek a bigger foothold in Kurdistan—characterized by the former Israeli intelligence officer as “Plan B”—has also raised tensions between Israel and Turkey. It has provoked bitter statements from Turkish politicians and, in a major regional shift, a new alliance among Iran, Syria, and Turkey, all of which have significant Kurdish minorities.
...
At the moment, the former American senior intelligence official said, the Israelis’ tie to Kurdistan “would be of greater value than their growing alliance with Turkey. ‘We love Turkey but got to keep the pressure on Iran.’” The former Israeli intelligence officer said, “The Kurds were the last surviving group close to the United States with any say in Iraq. The only question was how to square it with Turkey.”

In a classicly awful Turkish response:

Over breakfast in Ankara, a senior Turkish official explained, “Before the war, Israel was active in Kurdistan, and now it is active again. This is very dangerous for us, and for them, too. We do not want to see Iraq divided, and we will not ignore it.” Then, citing a popular Turkish proverb—“We will burn a blanket to kill a flea”—he said, “We have told the Kurds, ‘We are not afraid of you, but you should be afraid of us.’” (A Turkish diplomat I spoke to later was more direct: “We tell our Israeli and Kurdish friends that Turkey’s good will lies in keeping Iraq together. We will not support alternative solutions.”)

We will burn a blanket to kill a flea? ohh-kay. The legitimate concern is that the Israeli trained Kurdish commando units will run attacks into Turkey with their new found power. I have no idea how this will benifit Turkish Kurds if it were to happen. Whatever the case, our government or military clearly does not trust the Iraqi Kurd leadership to discourage or prevent attacks into Turkey. Under what pretenses though do they think that Turkey can afford a war with a neighbor, politically or econmically? We can only afford the body count, which is a very sinister way of looking at things. Of course, any small chance we had of getting into the EU in the next decade or two will disappear--but that never really concerned me as much as a general evolution in policy.

What we need is a guarentee from the Israelis that if the commando units they train turn against us, the Israelis will be on our side. In that way, Israel may be able to do what the Iraqi Kurds perhaps cannot: keep tabs on hostile fighters. Of course, the need to continue pumping money into the East for development goes without saying.

2004-06-16T03:57:00.000-07:00

Zebari: Erdogan is The Man

Instead of chuckling at Erdogan's statement of late-- "countries need to reform themselves, or else outside pressure will force them."-- Zebari has endorsed it:

At the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) meeting in Istanbul, Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, said yesterday that with its democratic and secular identity, Turkey is a good model for regional countries, primarily for Iraq.

Zebari told Zaman: "Turkey is a democratic country. There is a new development everyday on the issue of improving freedom. Turkey, as a Muslim country, has been a good model for the region with its democratic and secular identity." Regarding Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's attendance at the G-8 summit, Zebari said: "This pleased us. I particularly like Erdogan's speech. I believe that the region needs reforms. Like you, we also want that to happen by the countries' own will..."

When Zebari was asked to comment on the fact that the outlawed terrorist organization, the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) has resumed its activities, Zebari said: "Now I represent Iraq. This has no south and north. All of the terrorist notions will be excluded from Iraq. We will no longer make Iraqi lands a base for attacks on its neighbors."

Still the irony does seem to be lost Erdogan, unless he knows that he is presenting Turkey as a country that has recently reformed due to outside pressure, viz a viz the EU.

2004-06-16T02:27:00.000-07:00

Of Mice and Men

Another pathetic attempt by the government to tie whatever concessions it needs to make with improvements to Northern Cyprus (Cyprus Mail):

Turkey is not likely to meet its EU obligations and extend its customs union to include Cyprus any time soon...

According to reports, Ankara is preparing a second letter through its permanent representative in Brussels to try and attach the extension of the customs union to the lifting of the embargo in the north.

There is no way EU accession can be taken seriously as long as Turkey does not recognize one of its member-- it can only drag its feet until December. The EU is saying "Recognize Cyprus and things will become easier for you" while Turkey is adopting the laughable position of "You guarentee EU membership, and we will recognize Cyprus."

2004-06-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

East is East

The recent overtures to the Arab world at the expense of Israel are making some believe Turkey is itching for the presidency of the IOC, although Erdogan maintains that "friends tell friends the painful truth", referring to Israel. This is magnified when coupled with necessary reforms toward the military.

Concern emanates from the Jersulem Post:

In recent weeks, the AKP launched a frontal assault on its chief domestic rival – the country's powerful military. As part of constitutional reforms intended to harmonize the country's legal system with European standards, Turkey's parliament on May 7 overwhelmingly approved a raft of laws substantially trimming the military's power. They include the removal of military officials from national broadcasting and education oversight committees, the elimination of state security courts previously used to try political crimes, and stripping the military of its budgetary autonomy, making its previously-independent national security planning subject to parliamentary oversight and review.

The effects of this erosion of power are already being felt. Turkey's military establishment, the traditional guardian of Mustafa Kemal Attaturk's secularist legacy, has long been the main proponent of strategic ties with Jerusalem. Its progressive loss of control over the country's security policy has therefore called into question the durability of Israel's most important regional alliance.

Israeli policymakers, dazed by the rapid turnaround in the strategic partnership, are now scrambling to mend fences. But the Israeli government's ability to alter this trend is limited; the health of Israeli-Turkish ties remains largely dependent on the political priorities and foreign policy trajectory of the AKP itself.

And, at least for now, their future is uncertain, as Turkey continues to drift away from its traditional role of an independent, pro-Western partner in the Middle East.

2004-06-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

Obligatory Euro 2004 Comments

"If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, Italians and Yugoslavs, each match watched by a mixed audience of 100,000..."

--George Orwell

"Years have gone by and I've finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good soccer. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: 'A pretty move, for the love of God.' "

--Eduardo Galeano

         Its perhaps fitting that voting on European unity is taking place at the same time as the launch of Euro 2004, with one candidate already dying from a heart attack in the host country. Campaigning has been suspended there, which will probably come as a relief to the people residing in what is widely regarded as Europe's laziest country (Portugal's deputy foreign minister's response: it's true). Its the time of year when Europeans can put aside their nagging and spitfulness and become...well more nagging and spiteful. Everyone will root against Italy, Italy being Italy, and the Iraq war being all that. Turkey's failure to qualify prevented a possible embarrasment to the EU, with the upcoming judgement day in December and France's election campaigns in consideration. Not that they would have had a chance or deserve it in anyway, having been brought down to Earth by Latvia--my horse for this race. Latvia doesn't stand much of a chance, either, being in the worst group of all: with the Nedveds, the Ballacks, the Davids, and the Ruud Vans. What Latvia can do it is take advantage of an inattentive side and come back from behind. And Verpakovskis is the man to do it, having scored in almost all the qualifiers. Combined with the "nothing to lose" mentality, one can fantasize about a silver lining. If they were only grouped with Spain and Portugal they could stand a chance (both teams have a reputation of underperforming or being very unlucky ). But the dream is not dead yet.

ps

         Dammit, I should have bet on Greece when I had the chance. It wouldn't surprise me if they're feeling that pre-Olympics wind and being more awake as a result. Success here would make people forget about the pain the Olympics is causing them, both in the cities and in their wallets.

pps

         Notice repeated references to "poor finishing" by Spain. They bombarded Russia the entire first half, and couldn't get the job done until a sub scored the minute he stepped into the pitch in the second.

Picks

Spain – Greece: Tie
Portugal- Russia: Portugal
England- Switzerland: Tie
Croatia – France: France
Bulgaria – Denmark : Denmark
Italy – Sweden : Sweden
Latvia – Germany: Latvia
Holland – Czech: Czech

2004-06-03T15:06:00.000-07:00

Poetic License

"I'm doing alright for Country Trash." Johnny Cash

“Memories strike home, like slaps in the face….” Philip Larkin

"If most people were born twice, they'd improbably call it dying." ee cummings

"books...like broken glass:
I wouldn't wipe my ass with 'em
yet, it's getting
darker, see?" --Charles Bukowski

2004-06-03T12:02:00.000-07:00

A Ship Is Never Run As Tight As When It Is Swimming In A Bottle

         There's something to be said when "the most secretive administration" in recent times gets its pants pulled down by an Iraqi opportunist on their pay bill, leaks a cia operative's name to the press, and has its CIA chief resign now instead of waiting for the elections. I would be inclined to think "secretive" and "sloppy" would be a match made in Hell, but then I would have to accept the consequences of "secretive" and "effective". This, though desired in the intelligence realm, may in fact be infinitely worse in the sphere of policy management.
         Personal reasons, of course. If one thing is clear, its that Tenet didn't want to exit with the usual cabinet-shuffling during elections. He made a stand (either by ego, or principle). Its hard to come to a conclusion other than that. As to whether he was ordered to resign at this date by the administration, I find it hard to believe. If that was the case, it was a huge risk at best and a retarded move otherwise.
         Notice that he thanked the President personally, but did not extend the thanks to the other "wonderful men and women" in the adminstration or cabinet. Maybe its not a big deal, but the speech was all about family--CIA and otherwise--not about W or WH. He talked more about partying with his son and instant messaging his friends than he did about the President.

2004-06-02T05:28:00.001-07:00

Slate's Kurdish Sell-out Watch

A couple of weeks after Fred Kaplan's Kurdistan-Turkish invasion remark (see May 5th below), Slate finally began to realize that Turkey wasn't as deluded as pundits have claimed (see the Torque for alternative commentary). The problem is this has been apparent since the Irbil bombings at the beginning of the year. At that point it was also reported that the terror brought the two parties closer together. The Iraqi Kurds had previously mantained that Turkey has only been interested in them in light of the fight against the PKK separatists. Otherwise, Ankara ignored them. This was a valid complaint. The Turkish Daily News also reported that a "senior Kurdish official" admitted that they appreciated Turkey's consistent frankness, saying that Ankara had always told them what they liked or didn't like in a direct manner. This seemed like a slight directed at the US at the time. As good as the cooling down of Iraqi Kurd and Turkish relations look, the unpleasant truth is that these relations are dependent on increasing terror attacks against Iraqi Kurds. Such a basis for an improvement in relations is not to be cheered.
What's also clear is that more and more news organisations are losing the ability to take the pulse of the countries and populations that are involved in the war on you-know-what. It's almost as if they're taking what droplets of information they have and extrapolating it into luscious waterfalls.

2004-05-30T14:08:00.000-07:00

New York Times Lameness

They reported the attack took place in a "Saudi Oil Area" which is the last thing Oasis compound or Khobar itself actually is. Its a normal city where everyone's job is indirectly or directly related to oil. The only way an attack wouldn't be considered in an "Oil Area" in Saudi Arabia is if it took place in the middle of the desert. Even then it would be dubious. An attack in an "Oil Area" would be sneaking into Aramco and putting explosives in the fields. This is a by-the-book shoot up.

ps

The Muttawa comes through again:

Three others escaped, as they always do, because that is how it is foretold in the old prophesy from the Sage of Riyadh

"Tho' many be surrounded,
and the surrounding be complete,
all shall escape
but the one with bad feet".

2004-05-29T07:23:00.000-07:00

Belated Film Reviews

21 Grams (Inarritu, Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio del Toro, 2003): 5.5/10

Poster child for gimmicky movies where the acting drips with the weight of the world, and where crying is inevitable. Sean Penn plays a mathmatician in this one, but you wouldn't know it if the filmmakers didn't need to explain the title of the movie. Frankly, mathematics has nothing to do with anything. Apparently the title does. The chronology of the film is cut-up to retain a relationship with three intertwining narratives. It is also used to eliminate suspense so that they could throw in a last-minute twist. The plot goes like this:

Someone needs a heart. Someone kills a man. Man is Someone's husband. Someone gets heart of dead husband. Someone wants to find Someone who lost husband. Someone who lost husband wants Someone who has heart to kill Someone who killed husband.

Excited? Good. Sean Penn stars as Someone who needs a heart. Naomi Watts stars as Someone who lost husband (read: heart). Benicio del Toro stars as the other Someone.

2004-05-26T11:36:00.000-07:00

Deconstructing the Deconstruction

Andrew Sullivan attempts to put Susan Sontag in her place with his new article in the New Republic after her "The Photographs are Us" piece in the New York Times. He attacks her bold claim that the prison torture was covered up by saying:

These abuses were initially exposed by soldiers within the military structure. Someone realized they were wrong. We have as yet no hard evidence of a cover-up. In fact, the exposure of these images, their dissemination, the congressional hearings, the journalistic coverage, and the military courts are not signs of a society unable to recognize when something has gone terribly wrong.

         It is true that soldiers exposed the torture, but would "heads fly" without Seymour Hersh and CBS? Would a soldier get a year in the brig? The answer obviously is a flat out "No". In fact if people were fired and soldiers given the sentences they deserved, it would have attracted the media's attention. What Sullivan doesn't realize is that most cover-ups are discovered usually because of someone on the inside. It is rarely the case that someone on the outside walks into a room and says, "What the fuck is going on?" Incidentally, this happened with the Red Cross and they had agreed previously to shut up. It's still a cover-up if the top guys are trying to block what low-level special forces or reserve guards exposed.
         Michael Bowden (of Black Hawk Down author fame), who had written a recent piece on torture practices before the prison scandal, implies that the pentagon by not covering up the events indicated something much more damning about the people involved. The idea that the pentagon allowed CBS to run the photos, to him, means that the highest ranking person who knew of the photos didn't give a shit. Such people in his eyes are not fit for their positions.
         So, on the one hand, if you cover it up you can't prosecute those responsible to the fullest extent of the law--on the other hand, if you don't cover it up you obviously don't realize the immorality the photos depict. This still doesn't explain why the army itself didn't present the photos to the media, which goes in favor of Bowden's point.
         Sullivan also accuses Sontag of equating incidents of hazing in the US with the prison torture, thus obscuring the difference between her and Rush Limbaugh. What Sullivan fails to grasp is that Limbaugh says hazing is no big deal, whereas Sontag says the hazing that goes on these days are in fact gruesome. Are they equivalent to Abu Ghraib? A few months ago a US high school football team raped one of its members at a get-together "hazing" event in Long Island. This is the type of hazing Sontag has in mind, not the put-a-bannana-in-a-toliet-bowl-and-make-him-think-he's-picking-up-shit kind.

And I think she has a point.

2004-05-22T02:46:00.000-07:00

Distant ("Uzak", Nuri Bilge Ceylan, DVD, 2003): 9/10

         This film is as deadly serious as great comedies get. A cousin from a rural village in Turkey visits his cosmopolitan cousin in Istanbul. As far as the plot is concerned, this is all. The city-dweller, Mahmut, is a relatively affluent disillusioned bohemian who is an advertising photographer by trade (making his money by taking pictures of ceramic tiles). The man's occupation is crucial here. Ceylan could have easily have made him out to be an employee of the technology sector but a vital element would have missed if he had done so. It is often said that there is a biased toward engineering and science disciplines because of their inherent "usefulness". In Western countries though, the artist's passion is respected. After all, he is not expected to convince society of his "practical use" (only of his entertainment, which is bad enough). In Turkey, artists are pressured to adhere to a kind of professionalism that serves society in a more direct way. In other places it is done for financial gain, in Turkey it is also done to be respected. It comes as no surprise then, that Ceylan himself started off as an electric engineer major who later found his cinematic calling. Thus, we see Mahmut attempting to portray his engagement in artistic endevours even though it is apparent that he has abandoned these motivations long ago. And it is apparent not least in a scene in which Mahmut is watching a constant shot of a man on a train, a film that drives his cousin out of the living room through sheer boredom. Once his cousin leaves, Yusuf changes the tape with a porno. (the in-joke, apparently, is that one can do the same thing with this feature).
         Throughout the film, Yusuf slowly unravels as he forced to live with his cousin's (Yusuf) brutish mannerisms. He ends up having to spray Mahmut's shoes with air freshner and finds himself turning off the lights after him. The bastard doesn't even flush the toliet. Yet it is not Yusuf's piggishness that we learn of, but Mahmut's own. He is a lonely individual who refuses to acknowledge what little comfort he gains from the company. At one point, we see him waking up from a nightmare in which the lamp next to the TV crashes to the floor in slow motion. This is not intended as a symbolic revelation (thankfully). It is a very literal one. There is nothing else left for his subconscious to extract from his life experiences.
         The characters, when apart, spend there time stalking strangers or abandoned loved ones at various landmarks in Istanbul. This is either underexplored or overexplored in the film, although you do get the scenery. ("The Stalker", incidentally, is the name of the film Yusuf switches for the porno). It is one of the film's few weaknesses. The film manages, however, to prepare you for The Reckoning.

2004-05-06T14:43:00.000-07:00

In line with politics-as-hyperbole, Turkish MPs on the Human Rights Commision say that the US torture cases in Iraq stem from a "culture of systematic dehumanization" dating back to the Blacks and Native Americans. One MP says that "the pictures, God forbid, are reminiscent of Nazism." All this despite being harassed by the EU with cases of domestic torture. At least there are still places left where one can read his high school poli sci thesis on television without getting laughed at.

2004-05-06T14:37:00.000-07:00

sketchy stuff going on in Cyprus, from Cyprus Mail:

Below is the full text of the statement claiming responsibility for the grenade attack against the Limassol home of DISY leader Nicos Anastassiades on Tuesday.

The Cypriot Nationalists Organisation (CNO) claims responsibly for the minor damages against the arch-traitor.

The Greek Cypriot people will not forgive the high treason by the president of DISY, who attempted to misinform the outside world with various lies and charges against our island for his own interests and those of others.

There is no room in this place for these kinds of people.

The CNO warns the president of DISY and traitor of the island that he should hand in his official resignation by Tuesday May 11, or else what happened will have been just a small warning.

If he does not obey, he and all the members of his family should be careful.

Furthermore, all those who voted ‘yes’ to the plan of treason should also be careful because Cyprus is not for sale.

As of today, the nights will never be the same.

2004-05-05T09:43:00.000-07:00

Parts of the Taguba report seemingly contradict Rumsfeld's insistence that it was abuse and not torture. from the report:

g. (U) Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
k. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee.

Unless rape and sodomy are not considered torture, which they might not be...there's an easier way to figure this out, whats the punishment for rape in the US?

2004-05-05T09:06:00.000-07:00

"A quasi-independent Kurdistan would be ripe for Turkish invasion..." says Fred Kaplan of Slate, who apparently has spent way too much time playing Risk .

In the event of an independent Kurdistan he could move most of the US soldiers to the north and Turkey would have to roll a whole lot of sixes in order to take that over. It also would have to be on crack.

If Turkey takes any public military action beyond its self-fashioned buffer zone it would effectively kick its own ass out of europe and into the middle east indefinately--being that its still feeling the stings from Cyprus. And I'm not sure how you can invade a country covertly.

And if the Turkish army hasn't learned that they can no longer go beyond their borders to solve their problems, it will learn fast. Even the US has come to the realization that their national interest has become inextricably tied to world perception, or at least some parts of the world--depending on what day it is.

2004-05-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

A Cathothic conservative film critic who doesn't mind X-rated films as long as they're "good and moral X-rated films", Victor Morton can stir up words on film that can put his less-conservative and less-catholic collegues to shame. His pieces on Lars von Trier are well worth the time although the religious/moral bias may edge some films over others. I have a suspicion that Kill Bill 2 made his top ten because its Christ-figure-vengence-play hit one of his five pressure points.

2004-05-01T03:29:00.000-07:00

Belated Film Reviews

The Limey (Soderbergh, Terrance Stamp, Henry Fonda,1999): 7.5/10

The attempted moral horror in this film is not what makes it stand out, and those who suggests otherwise are being a little disengenuous. What's the moral horror after all? An ex-con tries to find his daughters killer and the path boomerangs back to himself. Its not a revelation because his shitty relationship with her is fleshed out all through the movie in retro sixties flashbacks. Some critics mention the Limey as a contrast to Kill Bill or Tarantino perhaps, but I suspect they like the film precisely because of its similarties. What makes the Limey get attention is its clever editing and use of old footage as flashbacks, and on top of that, its dead pan dialogue that reminds of a certain diner. Enter old crazy brit into Californian landscape with ex-con Hispanic sidekick and the script writes itself.

Stamp: I'm gonna have a butcher's look.
Guzman: who you gonna butcher?
Stamp: Butcher? hook, look?

Stamp: Where did she meet this bloke?
Guzman: She said she met him at a beach...said she was blinded by his smile. Can you believe that shit man--The motherfucker never smiled at me.

Stamp:
Black Cop (played by token black guy from Predator):
There's one thing I don't understand. That one thing I don't understand is every motherfucking word you said.

Assistant to Bad Guy: He said, "Tell him I'm coming."
Fonda (Bad Guy): Tell him I'm coming?
Assistant to the Bad Guy: Tell HIM I'm coming.
Fonda: ...Jesus, you sound like the six o'clock news.

Hitman: ...
Assistant to the Bad Guy: Who the fuck are you? You're not even God.

If the dialogue highlights the moral bankrupt landscape, it also includes exchanges between the heroes of the film, don quixote (terrance stamp) and sancho panza (luiz guzzman). It includes most of what some people like about Tarantino (good music, dialogue, and bad-ass posturing) and excludes what some don't (extreme masturabatory impulses). That films are so deviod of meaning these days that one confuses the presence of meaning with "moral horror" is somewhat amusing.

What I've mentioned so far may seem like a caricatured premise with tongue-in-cheek dialogue. The enduring virtue of the film is not what Soderbergh has created, but what he has brought to light. And that is the out-takes from the old Terrance Stamp movie, which provide the backbone for the rare humanizing moments.

Also

I don't think the sidekick roles are going to end for Luiz Guzman until he actually plays Sancho Panza in a Don Quixote movie.

2004-04-28T06:29:00.000-07:00

Its back to square one as everyone is holding on to the Kurds as if its the last day on earth and some are saying the US might have to succumb to the temptation of creating three different federations, with Kurdistan being the new American beacon in the middle east. Of course, people like Chris Hitchens, assuming he buys into the idea any time soon, will have to argue why this is completely different than the "divide and quit" tactic of the british empire. I suppose one of the reasons would presumably be that unlike the British who didn't really give a shit about any of participants of the partition, the US will be active in siding with the Kurds in the long term. The problem, though, would be Syria flooding the Sunni federation with its people and Iran flooding the Shiite federation with its own. And if both federations welcome this influx, there goes the dwindling metric on the fight against islamofascism. It will also be a huge loss in the propaganda war, with the Arabs looking at Kurdistan as American territory with oil revenue coming out of Kirkuk-- a cross between Guantanamo and Saudi Arabia--and feeding the conspiracies that the US was out to break Iraq apart. When the US leaves the Sunnis and Shiites and pitches a tent in the north, moderate Iraqis in the two federations could feel betrayed to the extent that if the US launches attacks into those areas to clean out terrorists again they will be in a fight against the whole population more than ever.

2004-04-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

Finished reading T.C. Boyle's Drop City...entertaining in an adolescent sense. Makes me miss the days of Greasy Lake. In this one he goes too far in establishing the hippie commune's premise and one can immediately see that the entire attempt and the people involved are going to fall on their face. The hippies' failures are attributed to their simple stupidity and selfishness, which is not a bad thing in and of itself but...the work's virtues could have been helped if the commune collapsed under a more rigorously defensible premise. The idea that even a pinch of hippy thinking may lead to a catastrophe would have been more interesting to explore, and the result would have been much more revealing if that were the case. Watch von Trier's The Idiots instead, or Together by the Swede whose name I cannot spell yet. But Boyle's taste in quotes is appreciated.

2004-04-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

Kill Bill 1-2 (Tarantino et al, viewed separetly): 5/10

Takeshi Miike's films make QT's attempts at gory real life japanimation sequences look minimalist in comparison and entirely forgettable except for the actual cartoon part. The second installment should have just have the Bride training with Pai Mei and be entitled "A Silly Day at Pai Mei's Summer Camp."
Monologues on african snakes in the film remind one of the lame monologues of aliens talking about DNA in Speilburg's awful Artificial Intelligence. Other dialogue is limited to: "My name is Buck, and I like to Fuck." This is the film version of a shitty Beck song, and conveniently, it is carried on the merit of its soundtrack and well, Bill himself.