Monday, November 24, 2008

Write. Weekend.

Start.

Thursday. Meet in Bethnal Green. Take a bus, take a train. Small quarrel. Arrive Alexandra Palace. Clear skies, fantastic views of London over the hill. Get over the fight. Smoke. Get high. Walk in. Watch Sigur Ros. They blow your mind. Distortion, melancholia, heavy drums. Rain effects onto the stage. Listen to Sigur Ros. Get even higher.

Friday. No work. Rent a car. Start driving, small tension. Move out of the house. No new house. Dump the stuff. 2 rounds to move houses, take the whole evening. Increasing tension. Settle the tension, go to sleep.

Saturday. Leave house. Take housemates, go to Broadway Market, fetch food, drop the housemates. Leave for the road.

Take A3. Incredibly beautiful skies. All colours on clouds and trees. Arrive in Portsmouth. Walk on the waterfront. Play arcade games in the Pier. Win tickets. Buy a bubble maker. Portsmouth, bombed-down city, regenerated port, modern architecture, Saturday evening loneliness. Freezing cold.

Leave Portsmouth. Change drivers. Drive 100 miles. Arrive Exeter. Call the hostel in the forest. No vacancy. Call a hostel in the city. Check-in, drop luggage, explore Exeter at night. Go to a gay club, dance half and hour. Leave. Walk around the old town. Cute, small, young population. Saturday night out people. Walk back to the car. Check the nearby pub. Live music over. Drink 2 whiskey-cokes each. Man in the pub, take 2 steps back, fart out loud into the pub. We are disgusted. Man fart again. Silent but even stinkier. Leave the pub. Go to sleep.

Sunday. Leave the fart-town, Exeter. Take M5, leave for Bristol. Change plans. Arrive in Glastonbury. From fart-town to hippy-town. Walk around. Attend a baptism ceremony in the church. Go to a hippy-cafe. Have brunch. See hippies on the street. Leave hippy-twon Glastonbury.

Arrive in Bath around 13:30. Beautiful town. Simply beautiful. Drive around. Park in the centre. Go to the Spa Centre. Last entry at 19:30. Have 6 hours. Start wandering around. Victoria Gallery, Prior Park, riverside, Guildhall Market (closed on Sunday), and a delicious vanilla-chocolate-chunk-fudge. Bath on 7 hills. Walk. Tension. Increasing tension. Walk. Fight. Get over it. Have dinner.

Go to the spa. Steam room, hot showers. Go to the rooftop. A rooftop pool with hot water, and a night skyline of Bath whilst swimming. See the tower of the Cathedral in swimming suit. Back to the Steam room. Leave Bath. Change drivers. Terrible migraine attack. Drive 2 hours with a migraine attack. Back to London. Take a pill, sleep like a baby.

Finish. Monday. Back to work. Think over the weekend:

Angelic Sigur Ros, exhausting house move, walk along the waterfront in Portsmouth, farting man in the pub in Exeter, hippy brunch in Glastonbury, rooftop night-spa in Bath...

Friday, November 14, 2008

the boy with the wind and girls

It was not the bitter wind he minded. He had one of those edgy faces, thanks to the climate of where he came from. White, but not threatening. He put up the purple-colour dominated on the wall to my left, had a quick look at me, a shy one, and decided not to disturb my peace. I would not let him put up one behind me anyway. I could not be bothered, and I did not like the ad he was putting up: The school’s beauty contest 2008.

The last time I had put up posters for an event was 4 years ago. Some gigs, some festivals and some film screenings. Back then I was responsible for the Treasury of the Music Club of my university. That was almost simultaneous with my presidency for the Cinema Club. People were joking about me transferring money from the Music Club, and that was one of the wealthiest in the school, to the Cinema Club, to which I had a much bigger affiliation. All I was doing, however, was to put up some posters for some gigs, some festivals, and some film screenings.

She was lying on my lap, and has started to shiver a little from the cold blowing wind. I went on to tell her the story of the white guy. He came from a land where almost anyone he knew could easily win this beauty contest here at this school. Only if they had the money to dress up and shine themselves. They were quite unlike the party crowd here. Back there, they were never shy of hitting on boys, maybe to receive a small kiss that they’d go on to tell their best friends in the long nights spent together in decaying housing blocks, whose walls seemed ever to topple on them like greyhounds. The girls back home, he thought, would easily kick the girls’ asses here. And they had tight asses back home.

The girls were not shy hitting on boys back home, but he was shy today, putting up the posters of the beauty contest early in the morning wind. The grey of the weather was no less disgusting then some concrete memories, but he had a different problem. Here, you could put up any posters and would only be warned to be doing so. The sheer lack of physical confrontation by someone who did not like what you did made everything look so simple but yet so unconvincing and meaningless. He had not left the grave masses back home to join the insignificants in this city. This hurt his pride.

The girls here were no prettier but made him feel uncomfortable at the cellar parties of the first Friday nights of the school term. The music sounded unreal and the masses moved only in chunks, chunks that did not invite him, chunks of girls who never touched him. A guy passed by him as he was putting the poster under the sign “Directors and pro-directors”. He could only read the word “Ich”. Germany did not remind him of a glorious past.

I bent down over to her: “Now he is getting really tired of this. As more people flock into the campus, he will already start thinking about the class, starting in half an hour. Look, he is so uncomfortable. He does not want to have any posters left in his hand. The others in the class do not approve what he is doing and this is less a reputation he is willing to make at the school. Now, he is desperately looking for an empty spot on the walls to get rid of the rest. That other Asian guy posting up Deutsche Bank ads is not helping him at all. He is disgusted. The edges of his face turn icicles”

I took the last bite of my morning sandwich. She said she was getting cold and we were ready to leave already. I dropped a tiny peace of salami onto her head. She did not mind much. The smell of the fresh morning meat blended with the scent of her coconut shampoo. On another day, it could have blended even better with the grease of her 2-days of unwashed hair. I would not mind. But today was a clean day. The boy with the posters turned the corner on to the adjacent street. I would not be surprised if he dumped the rest of the posters at the mail box of the Post Office. Beauty spread around the world. His harsh figures on his face turned a little greyish as the sun showed its face through the clouds and the shades of the impressive Victorian building fell on his face.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Looking through cheap accomodation in Istanbul for the work I'm doing the whole day, the sun set in the grey London sky. It's been raining constantly since the last week, and the last 2 days have been horribly windy and thunderous, and cold.

I am reminded of the mild autumn evenings of my childhood and young age Istanbul years. Nowadays I wear even more lightly despite the weather being much colder and wet in London. But back home, I would love the cold for its curiosity and hate it for its loneliness and threat.


I would wander around the streets of Harbiye or Taksim, running away from the familiar crowds of the main street. Side streets, narrow streets, street after street, flooded with water and filled with mud. People would look brown or ash-colour like the cigarettes they smoked and heavily in thought whilst making their way home.


Around 5 PM, like right now at the current hour in London, the smell of the burnt coal would migrate from the lower valleys of Dolapdere and lower Elmadag upwards into Taksim-Harbiye axis. The typical middle-aged Turkish men would look slightly tired if they had climed up the hill, and I would gaze through them to see some more innocence.


Now, I just came across a picture of a doorman at a cheap hotel, whilst researching for work.


I will share this tiny, skewed resolution of the young man. It fits the curious context where a total stranger finds mild winter comfort. In a very, very small scale...




Saturday, November 08, 2008

We remember..



“Beams up G.”

“Beams down G.”

“Beams up immediately G., as soon as the passing car is away. And slower on the turns please, it is slippery and these narrow roads can be dangerous in the dark!”


I had maybe a 10 cm. between my knees and G.’s driver seat. P. had a little more comfort on his side of the back seat, but I was already too busy drinking the mixture of 4 different red wines with that delicious port wine. I was not afraid of the road. We could handle G. I was afraid of the wine that could give me a headache next morning. Thankfully, it was the right mix.

The bloody GPS did not do us much good. We were drawing circles round and round somewhere in the country side. G. felt the anxiety. I opened a window. The smell of evening cow shit and fresh air... I took a deep breath. Shame there was no weed in our possession. There was cow shit and a good mix of wine. A car whizzed by our trunk 50 Mph as G. took a sudden turn to the right, disregarding basic traffic rules. We were almost bashed to the pavement. We calmed him down.

“No rush G. Thanks for this great wine mix and the road trip anyway!”

We parked a mile outside the town. Roads were closed down to vehicles a few hours ago already. A nice stroll down the hill where we parked the car prepared us for the action. The main problem was the rain. I don’t like umbrellas, I had no hoody jumper and my short-short hair only helped the rain dribble straight onto my back like rivers downstream with no barriers or dams to stop them. I did not even have a chance to shiver as a thunderous firework lit up the rest of the sky.

Now, there, we got excited.

We rushed into the city, surpassing the younger crowds by an old pub and stood by the side of the main road. People paraded down in costumes of vikings, witches, prophets, the deceased, the butchered, the butchers, crucifix; all in an order of militaristic perfection, threatening us standing too close to them on the edge of the road with their torches blasting in front of our nose. A natural hair-dryer, only if I had more hair. Red and orange dominated the scenery, and the massive house made a corner at the edge of the street where the parade faced us and turned into the uphill road. The edge of that massive house with its white painting reflected the purples, blacks, violets, maroons of the make-up, the costume and facial expressions of the parading group. This was a well-organised entertainment.

“Thanks, G.”

There were 5 bonfire events after the parade, spread evenly around this small town of few thousand people. That few thousand was multiplied a 10-fold tonight for the special evening, remembering Guy Fawkes or the Parliament that never blew up. Whichever you like. We went to the bonfire by the riverside.

A 20-meter high, 15-meter wide pile of woods. When it was burning, we were the closest to it. From 30 meters distance, there was no way you could face the ‘biggest oven’ I have thus far seen in my life. A girl next to me asked for a lighter. She could easily have touched her cigarette on my face and smoked me up.

Cracking sound of the woods joined the cheering crowds and the plop-plop of the pouring rain. The mud on our shoes and our jeans... Never minded. A New Zealander, a Venezuelan, a Brazilian and me.

Before midnight, we needed to head back. As we were crossing back over to the other side of the river, fireworks began on another part of the town. We stood still on the tiny bridge, joining another couple, 3-4 local teenagers and 2 guys in their coloured jackets. As the patterns of the fireworks danced in the sky, the reflections on the small stream at our feet shook with ease in the smallest of waves. A parading dance of lights on the water. Beaming lights, cracking fireworks. We remember the 5th of November.

Special thanks to G. and the others for the blasting entertainment.


Thursday, November 06, 2008

Never leave Berlin

Continuing geographically and thematically from an earlier post, I will tell a recent story from Berlin.

Berlin has played a significant part of my life's last-minute adventures. Apart from my first trip there (which is the one briefly mentioned at the end of the previous post), I always had funny encounters of travel. Once I was flying back to Istanbul from Berlin whilst doing my Exchange study in Aarhus, Denmark and after a 8-hour bus ride into Berlin I almost missed my flight because I had one too many beer in a bar with a new friend I made during the bus ride. Following that, my last two visits were marked by missing my flights back to Istanbul because of the same pattern: The S9 train to the station would break and the taxi I would take from there on would never exceed the speed limit and I'd miss the flight. Needless to say, I never allowed enough time for bad luck in these occasions and was responsible for missing the flight. This last time last week, the story was different:

My 4th visit re-established my love of the city. Whilst trying to make the most out of it, I was out in the east part of the town in Warschauer Strasse until around 2.30 AM. I got back to my friend's house in the west at 3:30 AM to fetch my stuff and have a 1-hour sleep. At 4:45 AM I was at the bus stop to get to the S-Bahn to take the famous S9 again. I was on time, everthing went smoothly and at 6AM, I was at the check-in desk for the 7:15 AM flight. The lady at the check-in desk gave me a knocking surprise:

"You are too early in fact. Your pilot is sick and the flight is re-scheduled earliest for 12:00".

With a 1-hour sleep early in the morning, I was not in the best mood to handle any bad jokes. After not believing her (why should I not believe the check-in staff), and asking some other officials, I had to accept this fate. Thankfully, I found a good companion to chatter until we set foot at London. However, despite all my good attempts of leaving Berlin on time, I failed once again to reach the desired destination at the appointed time.

This time I did not ask for it, but Berlin was simply trying me once again:

"Are you sure you want to leave me?"

Monday, November 03, 2008

"Of Time and the City": A Terence Davies take on Liverpool

The National Film Theatre (NFT) at the BFI Southbank is arguably my favourite cinema theatre in London (see, for example, here (in Turkish)). The venue sits beautifully on the South Bank of the River Thames, directly connected to the city centre via Waterloo Bridge and the nearby favourite Hungerford Bridge. It is the primary venue for the London Film Festival, as well as the BFI (British Film Intitute) Headquarters, the BFI IMax Cinema and is part of the wider South Bank arts complex consisting mainly of the Southbank Centre, Hayward Gallery, the National Theatre. The frontal BFI Southbank cafe opens right into the Jubilee walkway under the Waterloo Bridge and a stroll around there is a great joy, with an occasional stop at the 2nd hand, cheap book stalls located in front of the cinema.

If BFI Southbank is a decent depiction of many of the qualities of London, then it is arguably a prime venue to host films portraying homelands of many other cultures. BFI Southbank usually holds film series of famous filmmakers (recently, Wim Wenders, Coen Brothers), actors, countries, film cultures or genres. 3 major film halls (NFT 1, 2 and 3) screen for large audiences, while the Mediatheque and Gallery cater for a much smaller crowd in the shape of screenings of experimental films or video. More video installations or exhibitions can be visited in the decent gallery, BFI Southbank Gallery, which currently holds a Pierre Bismuth and Michel Gondry exhibition.

One of these special events was the screening of "Of Time and the City", the first-ever documentary by the famous British filmmaker, Terence Davies (1945 - ). The film was screened on 2 November 2008, on a nice, partly-cloudy London Sunday afternoon. After the screening, Terence Davies came up to the stage for a conversation with the head of the BFI and the audience.

"Of Time and the City" is a documentary about Liverpool. It is rather a subjective documentary through the eyes of Terence Davies who was born in the city and lived there until the age of 28 (1973). Davies had never done a documentary before, and this was his first film after being away from the industry for 8 years. This was rather a special commission, in part with the Liverpool '08, the European Capital of Culture, project. In stead of depicting a Liverpool of what most non-UK citizens associate the city with; the Beatles, Liverpoool FC, Liverpool dock-workers, Davies has followed a quite dramatic approach, almost denying the existence of these institutionalised aspects of the city and taking a very personal approach to it.

Majority of the picture consists of archival footage, bought from BBC, Liverpool Council and many other sources. There is very few contemporary footage, a few scenes of city-life of today, shot by Davies. Other than that, Davies's main involvement has been to prepare a working script, cutting through the scenes and installing the soundtrack. It is quite unique in the sense that, a contemporary document on Liverpool, especially given the current Liverpool '08 project make so less use of contemporary images or references to widely-accepted cultural notions of the city, as described above. But, this is precisely what makes the film more interesting.

A strength of the film lies in the poetic nature of it. Terence Davies uses his own voice as the voice-over narration and extensively reads into the images from literature. Homeros, T.S. Eliot, classical music, hymns from church music and his own poetry blend with the recurring black and white, and color images of life in and around Liverpool.

The film begins with a graphically filling shot of an empty theatre hall, drawing its curtains into a grimmy Liverpool scene. Church images, loud hymns and extremely sarcastic narrative of Davies flow in. It is this extreme sarcasm that creates the working tensions and the conflicts of the film. Archival sound from a BBC Radio show from the 1960's, or jokes that Davies makes about his time and his city are not completely graspable for non-UK, or even non-Liverpool audiences. At the Cannes Film Festival, the UK side of the theatre at the film's screening was reportedly giggling while some were puzzled. However, the conversation with Davies after the film at the BFI clarifies many questions.

There are extensive references to religion and Davies' conversion from a devout Catholic into an atheist. As a life-time skeptic, Davies' was challenged further by his father (died when Davies was 7), after whose death, Davies started to indulge in conflicting realities of life. At a very early age, he discovered interest in the same-sex and came out as a young gay man in the mid 1950's, having to wait 12 years (from ages 11 to 23), until homosexuality was no more illegal in the UK (1967). The years 7-11 play a significant role in his development where he was taken the films quite extensively and the 'awakening' to the non-existance of god, and turning an atheist simultaneously with discovering homosexuality seem to be main elements of why Davies chose ballet over Beatles or classical music over hooligan chanting of Liverpool fans.

He is the youngest of 10 children. I don't know about the others in the family but he may as well be the most enthusiastic and entertaining. It is easy to see the fragility in the man when he blushes as he is applauded by the full-house crowd of the giant NFT 1 Theatre, or in the use of gestures, the non-stoppable movements of his hands and arms in excitement when he tells a story from childhood. He told about a funny incident he has recently encountered, in order to give an example of the "northernly humour" that he cherished a lot about the Liverpool culture:

He has recently given a lecture at Harvard. Harvard gave him a jumper with the "Harvard" text over its chest. Davies was wearing this one day when he was back in Liverpool. A street beggar saw him and stopped by him asking:
"Hey mate, do you have some spare change? I am going to go to Yale".

It is much more than to Davies that these funny incidents came across his way. Although not peaceful with his childhood traumas and his sexuality, this is a man, grasping the world, and 'his city' of his first 28 years with full enthusiasm, arms and eyes open wide. And there comes the "Of City and the Time", maybe a slightly difficult piece to get into in the beginning, but a sheer joy of classical music, folks on the hill, decaying housing estates, the Cathedrals and fighting for a place in the Liverpool crowd of 1960's and early 70's.

I suggset the 70-minute long film screened with a 20-minute cut from a Terence Davies interview. It adds so much more to Liverpool and the city, knowing this interesting and remarkable person.

------
Further reviews on the film can be found at the following links:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/movie/124576/of.time.and.the.city
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/film_reviews/article5048582.ece