Apparent ink

More Food for Thought

2011-05-11T16:27:00.002+01:00

Our recent trip to Istanbul seemed to mainly revolve around eating. This is largely because - in a very English way - I can’t say no to offers of food. When my mother-in-law offers me a THIRD helping of spicy sausage and egg for breakfast I basically accept. Of course I have to go through an elaborate charade of declining several of the initial offers, before eventually shrugging my shoulders and pretending to change my mind – holding my bowl out for more in apparent defeat. This is how the game works.

It's also because the food in Istanbul is really good, readily available and affordable. You can eat a good lunch for two and still have change from the equivalent of a tenner.

Street food is a bit of feature of the city. In fact, a few years back - when there was greater excitement about the prospect of joining the EU - there was something approaching a media-led panic in the city. The rumour was that European hygiene rules were about to kill off the vendors selling fish-in-a-bun and their ilk. Clearly, it was something people really cared about. Whatever the hygiene concerns, it seems to me that the type of food being sold seems pretty healthy. Not dodgy hotdogs but freshly fried fish – or vegetables to pick up and eat on your way – sliced and slated cucumbers are one of this season’s faves.

This year people in Istanbul’s bustling Beyoglu area are drinking more at lunchtime. I mean, I spotted several mid-day beer drinkers, which wasn’t the case before. Some have suggested this may be in reaction to the AK Party - the mildly Islamist governing party that is scaring the hell out the ardent secularists by stamping it’s conservative message all over the place and having the audacity to keep on winning against what seem to be rubbish opponents. So the theory is that people are drinking AT the government and its covert attempts to make the population more conservative.

Workers of the world are alive, maybe not so well, but living in Istanbul. In a more extreme political culture there are still leftists around ready to take to the streets. The May Day march felt pretty positive this year. It went by peacefully, the police allowing protesters to make their way to the central Taksim Square for only the second time since a bloody clash in the square in the 70s. Afterwards, along the back streets of Begolu we bumped into a contingent of socialists connected with one of the football teams, going silly on beer and communist fervor. They were happily chanting socialist songs and clapping each other. One had a massive communist flag that he held proudly aloft, but for most of the time couldn’t be bothered to leave his seat.

An image of Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul

2010-07-19T09:30:00.005+01:00

Inside a book shop selling expensive coffee to tourists (right next to several smaller places selling the same coffee for half the price). Western rock plays as people browse intellectual books. Directly outside a group of headscarved young woman, immigrants from the east walk past someone with Western looks playing Arabesque music. Next to them on the endless street that carves through the liberal shopping and drinking dens of Beyoğlu, is another Anatolian-looking woman sitting on the floor selling spices. Next to them kids play on the street, next to them an old man sitting on a tiny chair observing the day - as if he in a small village. Next to him a young Turkish couple with hair braided like Rastafarians. Next to them rich middle class Turks chat loudly, more western than the westerners shopping in fish market round the corner - the smelly crowded market street a short distance from other western exported shops. Next to them one Turkish lady is playing classical music. Next to them is a wizened old man playing traditional music, a small boy holds up a microphone to his mustachioed face.

In short, a curious mix of everything, a clash of cultures that somehow hangs together - like an Oxford Street dreamt up by spice traders in a Bazaar.

What’s not such a mix of everything is Turkish TV - that centre of Turkish life and guard against family arguments. In the summer daytime it’s wall to wall famous people gallivanting around half naked in Turkish summer resorts - particularly Bodrum, talking about a never-ending list of other famous people doing the same thing. Don’t people get annoyed with these displays of obvious wealth? Spain may well have invented the concept of famous people who were famous for being famous, but it goes down pretty well in Turkey too.

Talking of TV, several steamy soaps based on Turkish classics are also proving a great export by Turkey to the Arab world. Could this be seen as Turkey turning its back on the West? Maybe, but the soaps also portray a sexual adventurousness usually associated with the West - thus one fatwa against them in Saudi Arabia.

Still, Prime Minister Erdoğan’s rhetorical stand against Israel has done brand Turkey no harm in the Middle East. “Every time Erdoğan rails against Israel our exports go up. It makes good business sense,” one Turkish journalist tells me. Is it me, or does that wily attitude smack of Western foxiness?

Goodbye noughties. Hello, erm, a new decade

2010-01-01T04:49:00.002Z

The deer have moved. This is a very worrying sign. They used to hang around on top of the hill in Richmond Park. But this younger generation seem a bit too cocksure. They’re lurking in all kinds of new places much closer to people. Golly, they seem to have little or no respect for tradition.

Time is slipping by and a new generation is taking over. It’s the end of the noughties - a decade so weird that they couldn’t even name it once – not properly anyway.

Woooosh! We’re now hurtling headlong into another decade which no-one has the faintest idea how to name. The teens? The post-noughties? The two-thousand-and-tens? It’s all horribly wrong.

“I can’t wear it like that,” I complain to my wife “It’s so 90s.” I am referring to the un-buttoned-shirt-over-T-shirt look.

“You have no idea what people wear today,” she replies.

“Of course I do. And I want to look back-dated.” I am of course bluffing. I have no idea what is fashionable. What do people wear in the noughties? This utterly terrible. We’re rushing into a new decade - which doesn’t even have a name - and I’ve barely got a grip on the last one. It’s seems like only yesterday that I was happily mocking the 80s look. Now it looks like I may be trapped in the 1990s forever. I have become my parents.

This is it

It has been a decade of profound world events – from 9/11 to 7/7 to the implosion of the world economy. And how did popular culture respond? Did we get a new Bob Dylan, or a radical new form of protest art? Not exactly. We got the Strokes (best album of the decade, according to the NME) and a Bob Dylan Christmas album. Most people seem to have given up on reality all together, flocking to see the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the millions of Harry Potter films and ever-multiplying number of vampire flicks.

Pods, blogs, wikis, YouTube the iPhone – technology really kicked some butt in the noughties. The weird thing is that it's almost completely impossible to imagine the world before them. Was Wikipedia really created in 2001? How on earth did people check slightly dubious factoids before then? Even Google was only born in 1998. I checked, I just googled it.

Of course, one of the greatest things of the last decade was the triumph of hope over fear, when people finally dared to believe in change. They turned up, tuned in and voted with their mouse buttons – downloading Killing in the Name and stopping Simon Cowell's latest X-factor creation getting number one yet again in the UK.

Happy new year everyone.

Self-facilitating media Jose

2009-06-05T20:15:00.000+01:00

It's now a fact. Official. Our brains have reached a point of total overload. The constant bombardment of 24-hour news, RSS feeds, emails, Tweets, Facebook updates and leaflets from the English Democrats is just too much for our brains. (Read more here.)

This means two things. One, we no longer have any emotional response to a tragic news headline. When we hear of another horrific bombing our minds just think: "whatever" and get back to working on a particularly difficult Sudoku.

Two, we have "Continual partial attention" – an attention span of exactly zero.

I've definitely seen evidence of this. My friend Dan recently said his routine was something like this: "Write a sentence. Check emails. Write another. Check Facebook. Check twitter. Pace around room." Well, he didn't actually say it. It was a Facebook update. Because, of course, no one actually says anything to anyone anymore they just instantly message it. Or post it on Facebook. Or Twitter. And assume you're across these different things all the time.

In fact, that's got to be part of the reason no-one is able to concentrate anymore. No-one actually rings up their friends to invite them for a coffee and Sudoku. They have to send a Facebook invitation, tweet it, blog it or set up a complex invitation wiki.

Technology really doesn't help on this. I love my iPhone – which is so advanced that it is several billion times better than a Wasp T12 Speechtool of Nathan Barley fame.

But I am now constantly available. I have emails, Tweets and Facebook on a kind of digital intravenous drip – and so have Absolutely No Excuse for not commenting on someone's "Just ate cake" Facebook update.

Back to point one. Totally zero emotional reaction to news events. Surely this has already happened. International conflagrations go by unnoticed. North Korea effectively threatens nuclear war, in a story oddly reminiscent of Team America. Yet this barely registers a blip on the stock market – see this view from the City.

Comic opera

In the UK, we see politics descend to the level of a comic opera directed by Michael Winner. Well, that's what Labour MP Denis McShane said on the BBC News channel. Hey, former Europe Minister Caroline Flint even said: "Gordon Brown treated me as female window dressing". Ouch.
It's incredible. Potentially half of Britain's 646 MPs will wiped out at the next election, according the Sunday Times.

But are people reacting strongly to this?

Well actually, maybe they are. Up and down the country the usual political apathy that politicians like to stir up is being replaced with anger (altough turnout for local elections was still rubbish). People are putting down their coffee & Sudokus and getting really quite worked up by the whole expenses shindig.

So now we know what sort of stories excite our overloaded brains. Global recession and capitalism on the brink of collapse: depressing. Potential nuclear war: annoying. Obama tries to bridge the divide with the Muslim world: kinda interesting. MPs mis-spending our bleeping money: Viva la Revolution!

PS iPhone software seems really keen on predictive text. It changed one of my references from the Nathan Barely world, so that I ended up signing off myself as a Self Facilitating Media Jose. But I kind of like that.

Chewing gum coffee

2009-05-19T16:24:00.000+01:00

Drinking coffee mixed with chewing gum (interesting idea, surprisingly nice) and eating biscuits also mixed with chewing gum (maybe a bit too much of an interesting idea) in a cute café on Cunda island and the cares of swine flu-infested, economic crisis-filled world seem a world away. The coffee is a local speciality and mixed with natural gum so hopeful my insides should be safe.

Cunda, also called Alibey Island, is linked by a causeway to the mainland and the Turkish resort town of Ayvalık, opposite the Greek island of Lesbos (yes, that one). It has that cartoon atmosphere of resorts. Relaxed people. Eternal landscape. Far too many restaurants.

Which makes it hard to imagine that just some 90 years ago people’s lives were uprooted as whole communities were forced to swap homes either side of the Aegean as Turkey and Greece tried to build nation-states.

Melancholy

Melancholy is an emotion that writers associate with Istanbul. This is also mixed with its flipside: gregarious joy. I visited the Cumhuriyet Meyhanesi, a rakı-drinking den fave of Atatürk, apparently. As the night unfolded, the raki flowed and the music got even more ridiculously emotional until people were dancing on the chairs, and then tables. Outrageous. Surely people should have been debating politics under those Atatürk busts?

Istanbullus seem to live amongst the great ruins of the city’s enormous past, not proudly showing off them like museum pieces as the do in the West, Orhan Pamuk suggests. In Istanbul: Memories and the City, he says the people are gripped with a collective melancholy, the knowledge that the world turned away from them after the First World War, that their city will never be as great as it was in the ancient times witnessed by the crumbling monuments around them.

Anyway, who’d pay to show off history when there isn’t enough money in the present for social security? The jobless rate has reached about 15/16% and a large percentage of people will not get unemployment benefit. (See these articles on unemployment and its psychological impact.) Outside a coffee shop we were in on Istiklal Caddesi – the Oxford Street of Istanbul - a small man doused himself in petrol and threatened to set himself alight. A crowd gathered and the police took him away before he had a chance. He was broken because he couldn’t find a job.

Düm Tek Tek

Turks watch far too much TV, they’re the fourth biggest television addicts in the world. My wife thinks this is a family-argument-prevention reflex. On the last day of my holiday, I joined the Turkish nation as they crowded round TV sets to watch the – rather fun – Turkish entry take on the European powers. It featured a Belgian-born singer, was mainly in English and the stage show also featured a man apparently in a green dress. Days before there had been intricate dissection of the entry on TV shows. Would this entry be the one? Did that dress have the wow factor?

As the points rolled in, it became clear Turkey would once again be disappointed by their European neighbours. They were even beaten by Azerbaijan.