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A Muslim-American is “shamed by the language and attitudes I find some of my fellow Americans using about Islam.”
The “commodification of ugliness.”
Love French pop singers (and who wouldn’t)? Then check out The Ye-Ye Girls tribute site.
“Children of God Together,” Wednesday night’s peace march from St. Mark’s to St. James cathedrals, was as solemn, united, and respectful as any other of the many terror-attack memorials this past week. What made it different was its purpose. It brought thousands together, not just to remember the victims of the horror but also to try and prevent future horrors with future victims, here and/or overseas.
Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Moslems, Unitarians, a few Buddhists and Baha’is, and assorted others slowly trod the two miles between Seattle’s two most spectacular churches, holding candles and singing spirituals; while supportive bystanders all along Broadway and Madison lifted their arms or held up banners.
Their message is best expressed in this quote from one of the prayers recited by the overflow throng at St. Mark’s:
“Merciful God, we pray for our country, our city, and for Americans everywhere:
“That we may help one another heal from hurt and anger; that we may turn ot one another in love and compasison, rather than fear and misunderstanding; that we may not give in to a spirit of division and the desire to blame and to vilify; for unity and mutual love among peoples of all faith traditions; for strength and wisdom in our witness and service; that you will sustain us now and lead us through whatever lies ahead.”
For further thoughts on this topic, see ‘A religious response to terrorism.’
BILL CAUGHEY WRITES with some suggestions for the media, and for the rest of us:
“1. No speculation, the pundits and so-called experts need to be quiet. ‘Just the facts…’
NO ONE SHOULD REPORT OR PUBLISH TV RATINGS FOR THIS PERIOD. That should stop future excesses by the networks!
Stop the replays of the crashes; one viewing of the planes hitting the buildings is enough!
Stop the journalistic posturing, the investigations will tell us ‘how could this have happened.’
Go back to commercials; we need to return to a sense of normalcy as soon as possible.
Quit looking for the ‘scoop;’ journalists are already getting in the way of investigators.
Remember that children watch TV too; enough of the hysteria and talk about war.
Stop showing the celebrations in in the mideast; no need to fan the flames, we know some people hate America.
2. FIND THE HEROES; we are not a nation of victims!
3. Respect for everyone; no scapegoats. Let the investigations run their course.
4. MORE prayers and blessings for those who suffer.
5. No mercy for the criminals and those who helped them in any way.
6. No politics; we rally behind the president and follow his lead.
7. God bless America and those who stand with us.”
Yr. ob’d’t c’r’s’p’n’d’t recently saw the classic 1960 film Elmer Gantry, based on the even-more-classic 1927 Sinclair Lewis novel of corruption and hypocrisy in the heartland.
I was struck by the film’s remarkable willingness, for a Hollywood product of its time, to maturely handle its topic (though it was still considerably toned down from the novel’s even harsher anti-hypocrisy message.) And, yes, I was pleasantly shocked to see Shirley Jones, Mom Partridge herself, as a hooker w/a heart-O-gold.
But I was even more astounded at the story’s lessons for today’s Netculture.
In the film, Jean Simmons’s revival-preacher character is wowed by Burt Lancaster’s smooth-salesman title character into turning her ministry into a cash-generating circus, only to lose everything as his snake-oil ways catch up with him and destroy her life’s work.
So must the online community (those of us, that is, who’ve worked to make a real community out of online communication) must now work to rebuild our battered tents and broken pews after the invasion by, and subsequent comeuppance of, the IPO gang.
In the movie, Simmons’s character is destroyed in a church fire (caused indirectly by Elmer’s having convinced town leaders to let him ignore building codes), while Elmer soldiers on to new scams. Can the human-scale Internet avoid such a metaphorical fate?
Commentator Dave Winer, whom we’ve mentioned here previously, likes to use the acronym “FUD” (for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt”) to describe the rhetorical hype mechanisms by which certain big companies try to control the medium’s future.
Companies accomplish FUD by convincing other companies and end users that, for instance, the Microsoft agenda will inevitably prevail, and hence that any technology or business model contadicting the MS agenda (Java, Linux, Macintosh, Netscape, RealAudio, open-source software, or cross-platform Net-based applications), and anyone attempting to use it, is doomed to the eternal damnation of techno-obscelescence.
But FUD doesn’t have to be deliberately spread by someone with an unterior motive. It can thrive on its own power. Folks in the tech-biz can get caught up into it on their own.
Companies can be be-FUD-dled into believing they’ll never make it unless they Get Big Fast, or that they’ll lose the “mindshare” wars unless they spend megabucks on hi-profile brand advertising, or that they won’t get or keep an A-list staff unless they pour more megabucks into perks for executives and other “key” personnel.
Hundreds of companies were so be-FUD-dled in these ways that they put everything they had and more into business practices any sane person could see were faulty. Many of these companies are no longer with us, burned up in fiscal disasters of their own making.
Those of us who have, thus far, survived the tech-biz equivalent of a trial by fire should consider ourselves duly chastized and inspired to follow the true faith of changing the world.
The United Methodist Church has offered a compromise with its Woodland Park congregation.
The Green Lake area church wants to keep the openly gay Rev. Mark Williams as its pastor, even though the denomination’s rules prohibit “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from the job. (The congregation had already lost a previous pastor, after she outed herself as a lesbian.)
The new deal: Williams can stick around, but only if supervised by an interim pastor who’d be the congregation’s official senior minister. This arrangement would last at least until October, when the denomination’s Judicial Council next meets.
I’d been involved in several churches back when I was into that sort of thing. The Methodists were the most liberal of the mainline Protestant churches. They (or at least many of them) were big on the “social gospel,” a schtick in which one was expected to show his faith through good works (taking in Vietnamese refugees, recycling, boycotting grapes). Sunday sermons would often be concerned with why we should vote for the school levy or support affirmative action.
Our youth group met in a parsonage basement, whose concrete walls were painted black and adorned with “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things” posters. Some other Methodist youth groups screened explicit sex-ed films for teens (albeit with in-person lecturers explaining the importance of a strong marriage or at least a strong committed relationship).
But this almost-Unitarian do-gooderism annoyed some of the old-timers in certain congregations. These church ladies and gents were more accustomed to the Methodism that was the blandest of the old-line Protestant faiths. (Welch’s Grape Juice was originally marketed to Methodists, as a non-alcoholic communion drink.)
This rift continues, nearly three decades later, and is at the heart of the Woodland Park church’s little brouhaha. And it will probably always be part of that odd denomination; so long as the old-timers control its hierarchy while its social-gospelers take their own “embracing diversity” talk seriously by staying in the church.
WHAT WE KNOW about Bush Administration deux after a little over one week:
I predict: He’ll see how much stink these actions raise; then, if they raise sufficient stink, he’ll pretend to be reluctantly disappointed as he backs off from the positions he’s now pretending to uphold.
He’s a dealmaker, the kind of business tycoon who accomplishes power-building transactions, then lets others sort out the resulting operations. (Except he’s generally gotten along in business (and Texas statehouse politics) because of his name, and let other guys do even the dealmaking details.)
He’ll play out his term as an affable head of state, kowtowing to whatever national agenda Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan pushes–just like Clinton eventually did.
NEXT: What’s wrong with Playboy isn’t what feminists think is wrong with it.
IN OTHER NEWS: If you haven’t noticed, I’ve cut out about a third of the clutter around the left and right sides of this page. If anyone still has trouble loading the site properly, please let me know.
ELSEWHERE:
JUST AS I START to get bored with my existing selection of cable channels, AT&T Digital Cable serves me up a fresh batch. In an effort to stave off the juggernaut of home-satellite-dish ownership, they’ve quickly gone and snagged up a bunch of the secondary and tertiary program services dish owners have long enjoyed.
Among them, in no particular order:
Still not on local cable screens but wanted, at least by me: The Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Boomerang (Cartoon Network’s oldies channel).
NEXT: If you’re really nice, I might share some pieces of my next book.
IN OTHER NEWS (Mike Barber in the P-I, on unseasonably-low levels in hydroelectric lakes): “A walk down through the terraced brown bluffs is a stroll through the history of modern beer. Colorful newer cans and bottles glimmer in the sun at the higher levels, giving way to more faded cans tossed overboard in the pre-Bud Lite era.”
LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, we began a talk about how passe pop-culture genres are reguarly given an extra lease of life by being remarketed toward born-again Christians. Then we mentioned one particularly passe pop-culture genre (pornography) and how a Christian (or at least spiritual) focus might revive it.
Then we went off on a tangent, and started instead to discuss the centuries-old dichotomy between established Christendom and the pleasures of the flesh, a topic some folk have written whole books about.
Religion needs more sex; it needs to acknowledge human passions and the joys of earthly existence. And it always has needed this. Back in the early Christian days, when the study of Jesus was was essentially an ethnicity-free Judaism for Romans (and Roman-conquered peoples), women from prominent families were among its leading converts. These women appreciated a religion that treated women as something more than just sex-and-baby machines.
(Then, of course, Constantine made it Rome’s new official religion, and a hierarchy formed that kept women out of power within the church, etc. etc.).
Anyway, Christianity developed as an antithesis to the decadence and excess of Rome’s bread-and-circuses culture, its orgies and slavery and human lion-feedings and corruption and cruelty. It developed into a religion that, in various degrees and with various exceptions over the years, renounced sex and the whole physical aspect of human existence.
But porn (or erotica, or whatever PC term you prefer to use) also needs more religion, or at least more spirituality.
Whether you’re talking hardcore videos and magazines, hard-sell web sites, softcore cable shows and magazines, strip clubs, “women’s erotica” books, or the get-a-guy articles and see-thru supermodel pictures in women’s magazines, you get almost nothing to do with two human souls using their bodies to come closer together.
You just get stimulus-response mechanisms. Sex is defined as a shallow physical pleasure to be obtained by spending lots of money and suppressing anything cool or individualistic about yourself.
It’s a ruthlessly materialistic vision. In a nation where prostitution is outlawed (except in rural Nevada), commercial sex-culture defines both female and male genitalia as nothing more than capitalist tools, products to be sold and/or target markets to be sold to.
All this means the “Christian porn” I thought up last Friday half jokingly could actually be a useful thing, an aspect of reintegrating bodies to souls, females to males, and humans to one another and their universe.
We finish this topic, at least for now, with a very brief example of what written Christian porn might be like.
(Be warned: This particular fiction piece is not only sexual, but also involves an attempt to write characters of an ethnicity other than my own, in a nondemeaning yet candid manner.)
Dozens of African-American adults (and a few interracial-couple spouses) arrive at a series of revival tents constructed at a private campground. They remove their well-ironed, handsome garments to enjoy a nude BBQ feast. This is followed inside the tents by a boistrously inspiring service of chorus music; a nude and exhortative preacher who gets everybody into the right state of emotional ecstasy while he encourages everybody to love everybody in the room; and then the sex itself. All the attendees gleefully join in: Thin to obese, young-adult to elderly, breasts heaving, erections proudly flailing, couplings (and triplings and more) of every pleasurable sort, a few woman-woman and even man-man encounters somewhere in the tent, orgasm moans in “tongues,” many “Praise Be”s and “Hallelujahs.” Outside, there are a few church buses among the parked cars, a gorgeous sunset between the trees, and a couple of strewn flyers marking this as an event that would only be promoted within churches–“No TV or Radio Advertising; No Outsiders Will Be Invited.”
Dozens of African-American adults (and a few interracial-couple spouses) arrive at a series of revival tents constructed at a private campground. They remove their well-ironed, handsome garments to enjoy a nude BBQ feast. This is followed inside the tents by a boistrously inspiring service of chorus music; a nude and exhortative preacher who gets everybody into the right state of emotional ecstasy while he encourages everybody to love everybody in the room; and then the sex itself.
All the attendees gleefully join in: Thin to obese, young-adult to elderly, breasts heaving, erections proudly flailing, couplings (and triplings and more) of every pleasurable sort, a few woman-woman and even man-man encounters somewhere in the tent, orgasm moans in “tongues,” many “Praise Be”s and “Hallelujahs.”
Outside, there are a few church buses among the parked cars, a gorgeous sunset between the trees, and a couple of strewn flyers marking this as an event that would only be promoted within churches–“No TV or Radio Advertising; No Outsiders Will Be Invited.”
TOMORROW: Remembering some things that went away at the end of Y2K.
LAST FRIDAY, we began a talk about how passe pop-culture genres are reguarly given an extra lease of life by being remarketed toward born-again Christians. Then we mentioned one particularly passe pop-culture genre (pornography) and how a Christian (or at least spiritual) focus might revive it.
That simple gimmick led me to pondering a whole bigger question–how to bring sex, and a healthy respect for it, back to Christendom.
This might seem either double-icky or sacreligious to some of you. I assure you I don’t intend to be either.
After all, many of the world’s great religions and cultures have embraced strongly sexualized images and messages–including the Euro-pagan cultures Christianity borrowed so much else from.
What I imagine, in 3 parts:
Examples and precedents from over the centuries:
TOMORROW: The last of this for now, I promise.
ANY POP-CULTURE GENRE that’s washed up, or at least on the decline, can be given a new life, or at least an afterlife.
All you have to do is revamp it for a born-again Christian audience.
It’s been done with hippie folk music, soft rock, and even hardcore punk rock. It’s been done with thriller and romance novels. It’s been done with form-follows-function modern architecture. It’s been done with superhero comics and action video games.
How you do it: Take a genre (such as those above) with by-now cliched rules and formulae. Slap on a devotional, evangelistic, or crusading-for-the-faith message (doesn’t matter how trite). Make sure the protagonists are (or claim to be) morally forthright. Wrap it up in sanctimony and sell it thru Christian niche-market outlets (specialty bookstores, websites, catalogs, magazine ads, etc.)
There’s one genre out there that hasn’t yet been Christianized, at least on any visible scale; yet is clearly ripe for it. It’s got an established schtick and an established audience, but has gotten completely ritualized, commercialized, artless, non-entertaining, and otherwise meaningless.
I speak, of course, of pornography.
But the ol’ American puritan hypocrisy thang’s prevented much experimentation with Christianizing porn; at least as far as I’ve been able to find.
A simple web search of the word “Christian” with “porn,” “erotica,” or “sex” will get you a lot of angry anti-porn preachers, many prayer-based programs for overcoming “sex addiction,” and a few over-the-top parody pages (some apparently created by disgruntled ex-Christians).
But no actual Christian porn, verbal or visual.
The closest you get are a few pages that provide potential ideological justifications for Christian porn. Some of these are by members of the Christian-swingers and liberated-Christians sub-subcultures, such as Rebecca Brook’s recent essay “Body and Soul: Confessions of a Kinky Churchgoer.” “God is a caring top,” Brook writes, “not a rapist.” Brook, like other members of these subgroups, believes there should be no contradiction between exploring one’s spiritual potential and exploring one’s sensual potential.
Similar thoughts are promoted on the “Christian Sex” pages of Poppy Dixon’s Adult Christianity site. That’s the same semisatirical site that’s got The XXX-Rated Bible, the “good parts” chapter-and-verse listing that could indeed be the original Christian porn.
So what might real, commercial, non-parody, Christian porn be like?
It could build on the sensual traditions of medieval mystery plays, the ecstatic traditions of holy-roller evangelists and speaking in tongues, sensual Catholic imagery, pro-sex interpretations of Scripture, the works of pro-sex artists and writers with spiritual inclinations, and Christianity’s historic ability to absorb pieces of other spiritual traditions (including, and why not, Tantra and sacred prostitution and “pagan” mating rituals).
This genre would not be “anti-family,” or contradict Jesus’s real teachings, by any means. There’s much that the preadolescent can learn about body self-esteem and living a life of connection with one’s surrounding world; and there’s plenty the adolescent needs to learn about dealing with raging hormones in the context of respecting oneself and others.
MONDAY: Some more thought on what what this new sub-sub-genre might be like.
MORE LITTLE ANECDOTES inspired by real estate (perhaps the last batch, at least for a while). This time, we ponder why old fake architecture’s more durable than new fake architecture.
Just ’cause Seattle’s only 149 years old and in North America, that doesn’t mean we can’t have Roman ruins (well, sort of). The four, beautifully-decaying columns adorning this lookout point near Pine and Boren came from the original University of Washington building, which had been where the Olympic Hotel is now. These days, neighborhood activists are trying to preserve the lookout’s views, threatened by city plans to permit more high-rise buildings in the Denny Triangle district just beneath it.
Compared to the box-of-leaky-fake-stucco look of many modern “luxury” apartments and condominiums, Frederick Anhalt’s Capitol Hill buildings of the ’20s look more astounding than ever. His Tudor brick and Norman-style bungalow apartments featured individual entrances and felt more like homes than rental units. The Depression wiped out his company; until his death in 1996, he ran a garden-supply store and nursery near University Village. Many of Anhalt’s buildings today command premium rents or condo prices–including this classic on East Roy Street, known to ’80s comic-book readers as the “Sherwood Florist” building in DC’s “Green Arrow.”
The former Capitol Hill Methodist Church was built back in the late 1880s, as the area surrounding 16th and John was first filling with residences. In the 1990s, the dwindling congregation (one of the first in the state to openly welcome gay and lesbian churchgoers) formally dissolved. While the exterior is protected as a city landmark, the interior was redone as an architects’ office. (Former workers there claim the building’s haunted by a former pastor.) Now, One Reel Productions (producers of Bumbershoot, WOMAD USA, and Summer Nights on the Pier) are reportedly interested in the structure as an office for its growing entertainment empire.
The “golden ages” of some entertainment genres are hard to define. But many connisseurs of sex films define that form’s peak as the 1970-87 era of theatrical porno; after “stag films” emerged from the underground into real theaters, but before home video and zoning restrictions across the country put many of the theaters out of business. After ’87, when the last on-film theatrical porno was released, most remaining adult cinemas switched to video-projection systems. The Apple Theater was one of the last film-based porno houses left in the U.S. when it was razed in 1998, as part of an affordable-housing project. The new building’s storefront tenant is in a different “skin trade,” that of tattoos.
TOMORROW: Bremerton, just possibly the most surreal town on the planet.
IN OTHER NEWS: Perhaps never has so much fuss arisen over the firing of a prize-pointer.
LAST FRIDAY, I began a recollection of what Seattle was like in the fall of 1975, when I first came to the allegedly Big City after a childhood in much smaller burgs.
I’d already mentioned the only “alternative” paper at the time, The Seattle Sun; and its target audience niche, a Capitol Hill-centered clique of 25-to-35-ers who just wanted to settle down after doing whatever they’d done in The Sixties.
The mainstream media in town were also fairly tame at the time.
The Seattle Times, still an afternoon paper, was still as wide as the Wall Street Journal and as plain-looking as a cheap suburban tract house. It always ran a half-page photo on Page 3, which was almost always of a dog or Mount Rainier. Its features section, then called “View,” had many cute stories about somebody doing something important who was–gasp–a woman!
The P-I, meanwhile, was a feisty archrival to the Times in those pre-Joint-Operating-Agreement days (well, except for the editorials, which usually touted the same Chamber of Commerce party line). It still had some of that old Hearstian spunk in it; at least in the sports pages, which were then mostly about the Sonics, college sports, and out-of-town stuff. There were no Mariners or Seahawks yet; though the P-I’s lovable geezer Royal Brougham (who’d been at the paper since WWI) was already drumming up oldtime rah-rah support for our soon-to-be local heroes.
Local TV was a far different animal then than now. Newscasts were heavy on in-studio commentators and grainy 16mm film. Portable video cameras were just being introduced, and were largely used as gimmicks (as they mostly still are). That meant a lot of interviews, press conferences, and staged media events (held before 1 p.m. so the film could be edited by 5); interspersed with a few of the fires and police chases that now dominate local newscasts across the country.
And there was still a good deal of non-news local TV. J.P. Patches and Gertrude still ran a bizarre, funky kiddie show on KIRO, whose influence on the local theatrical and performance scenes lasted for decades. KING had morning and evening talk shows, providing endless interview slots to all the itinerant book-pluggers crisscrossing the nation. KOMO had a “religious program” called Strength for These Days, which ran at 5:45 a.m. weekdays and consisted entirely of the same film footage of ocean waves and windblown trees every day, accompanied by choir music.
Seattle radio was an even odder beast. For one thing, AM stations still dominated.
For the grownups, KVI’s dynamic eccentrics Bob Hardwick and Jack Morton engaged a spirited ratings battle against KOMO’s personable square Larry Nelson and KIRO’s fledgling news-talk format.
For the kids, KVI and KING-AM played an odd top-40 melange of anything that happened to be popular (Dolly Parton, Lynard Skynard, Helen Reddy, Barry White, Edgar Winter, Tony Orlando, Donny Osmond).
For the older kids, the FM band found KISW and KZOK blasting Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and their metal brethern out to Camaro-drivin’ teens from Spanaway to Stanwood.
The UW, meanwhile, had a little FM operation, KUOW, which played blocks of classical music (competing with the then-commercial KING-FM) and that newfangled network newscast with those really soft-talking announcers. (The U also ran a smaller operation, KCMU, as a laboratory for broadcast-communications students to play Grateful Dead songs and mumble their way through the weather report.)
And there was an honest-to-goodness radical community station, KRAB-FM. Its announcers often hemmed and hawed their way through a set list, but they played everything from Thai pop to big-band to political folk. It had talk blocks, too: Vietnamese children’s fables, classical lit, rambling speeches by already-aging hippie celebrities about why Those Kids Today had become too apathetic. KRAB stumbled through internal politics and mismanagement until 1984. Its frequency is now occupied by KNDD.)
TOMORROW: The Seattle arts scene at the time.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here’s a fun rumor for all you conspiracy theorists (which I’m not): Could OPEC countries be scheming to raise oil prices and engender U.S. voter restlessness against Gore/Lieberman? (found by Progressive Review)
IT’S BEEN A FEW WEEKS since Seattle Mayor Paul Schell’s most recent total doofus action.
I’m a little less upset now, but still sore enough to call for his impeachment, or at least a concerted drive to find a progressive opponent in his ’01 re-election.
The All-Ages Music Task Force had spent the better part of two years in committees, forums, hearings, and compromise-filled strategy sessions, trying to once and for all kill the onerous Teen Dance Ordinance (which, since 1985, had essentially prevented all-ages music events in Seattle under the pretense of “regulating” them). They worked and worked and crafted a delicately-worded successor law that would allow all-ages shows, but still answer the concerns of cops and parents. It miraculously passed the Seattle City Council on a 7-1 vote (with one absention).
Schell promptly vetoed it, apparently without having fully read or studied what he was vetoing, and apparently under the heavy guidance of city attorney and gentrification-enforcer Mark Sidran.
As he proved with his utter mishandling of the WTO fiasco and his purposeless cancellation of public New Year’s celebrations, Schell is totally, hopelessly out of touch with anyone who’s not an upscale Rainier Clubber such as himself.
He apparently believes (as does his chief media apologist, P-I columnist Susan Paynter) that the only people who want all-ages music are people too young to vote, or perhaps just old enough but too apathetic to vote; while a “bold” move to Protect Our Children (the same rationalization politicians elsewhere use to crack down on gay rights) would score popularity points with the concerned mommies and daddies.
Schell (like his predecessor Norman Rice) seems to have not heard that there’s been this thing called a Seattle music scene. (Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if Schell even knows the name of a single post-sixties recording artist.) There are a lot of people (and not just commercial music promoters) who believe live music (particularly the indie-rock, underground-dance, and prosocial-hiphop types) are good for teenagers.
Remember: The parents of teenagers today aren’t likely to be Schell’s own pushing-60 crowd. They’re more likely to have come of age during the early punk years. Even if most of them weren’t hardcore punks themselves, they may still have stayed up to watch the B-52s on Saturday Night Live or saved up to see David Bowie at the Tacoma Dome.
Also remember: The indie music scene leaders these days, especially the all-ages activists, are no lowlife crusters. Many of them are anti-drug and anti-drink. Some, such as the promoters of the Paradox Theater in the U District, are born-again Christians. They all believe in creating a supportive, empowering environment for the under-21s.
When done properly (i.e., by promoters other than those of Woodstock ’99), all-ages shows can be safer than going to football games, more wholesome and less noisy than Gameworks, and less peer-pressure-prone than hanging out at Northgate.
Indeed, participation in indie music (as a spectator, reviewer, promoter, or performer) can help turn a young person into a free-thinking, independent-spirited, culturally and politically aware citizen.
Which, perhaps, is what Schell and Sidran just might really be afraid of.
TOMORROW: Beyond the environment-vs.-jobs dichotomy.
IN OTHER NEWS: The lawyers are circling the dot-coms like vultures.
Praying for Turkey, Part 2
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
(IN YESTERDAY’S INSTALLMENT: Our guest columnist travels to Samsun, Turkey to make a documentary about the Amazon warrior legends, and finds a country enmeshed in its own present-day wars–including the war against Kurdish separatist guerrillas, whose leader, Ocalan, has just been captured by Turkish authorities.)
ON THE KURDISH FRONT, a great deal of death and despair. Perhaps the worst part of the trip. That week, my hosts were informed that their friend, who was doing his mandatory military service, had lost an eye from a Kurdish mine in Batman, a city in southeast Turkey.
In an effort to soothe their grief and the impending doom of their own upcoming military service, I told them I’d read the war is almost over with the Kurds! Hadn’t they read that, from his prison cell, Ocalan asked his people to withdraw?
But the Turks shook their heads. The newspapers were lying, they said (yes, they know). Kurds and Turks are killing each other as much as before. All their friends are dying.
I asked, “What is the solution?” They said there is no solution. The war will continue forever, because the government and the Kurds won’t talk.
It was pretty fucking sad. I was sitting in a hotel lobby with five young men who had not yet served their 18 months (there’s no concienscious objection in Turkey). I sat there thinking they were going to die too, because of this war they don’t even believe in.
Strangely enough, the #1 song while I was in Turkey was by a Kurdish singer, Ibraham Tatlises. I think it speaks a lot about this generation. All the young Turks loved him. They even dance to him in the discotheques.
TARKAN ISN’T SO LUCKY. Tarkan is the Turkish equivalent of our Beck (or maybe our Ricky Martin, more truly, I guess, considering the corniness of Turkish pop). He fled the country to evade his military service. He’s now incredibly successful in Europe–especially in Paris, where they love really good looking ultra cool skinny young men who look good with eyeliner.
And although he’s still (strangely) greatly admired for his music, the Turks will tell you they don’t like Tarkan personally. He didn’t do his duty. It could be they were censoring themselves again, but here’s a story:
One night I was dancing at a discotheque and suddenly everyone cleared the floor. I kept dancing, thinking in my twisted American way that maybe everyone just wanted to watch the cool American. I found out later it was Tarkan’s song. Big mistake.
A really scary guy in a Don Johnson-type suit walked up to me and asked what country I was from. (A Turk wouldn’t have danced to Tarkan). Once it was established I was an ignorant American tourist, I was out of danger’s way. I wish Americans would do the same to Ricky Martin fans.
Did I mention discotheques in Turkey frisk for guns? (Just as easy to buy a gun in Turkey as America, but no high-school shootouts. Hmmm….)
THEY ARE ALL MUSLIMS. Five times a day, and very loudly, someone sings prayers to Allah from the nearest mosque. Sometimes there are many nearby mosques and the songs collide. It’s sweet, though, and loud. The electrical speakers really aren’t necessary; you can just hear them fine without the amps.
The Matrix was just coming out in the theaters. I was stuck in an ear-shattering prayer to Allah from a couple different speakers, and all I remember is Keanu Reeves’s life-size cutout gazing at me. Allah Akbar, they say. God is the greatest.
It was really something else, the prayers. We would be headed to some archaeological site and the people in the car would park at a mosque and go pray and come back and drive. I was embarrassed that they weren’t at all embarrassed at their own spirituality. In respect, I would pray in the car.
My prayer is always the same one.
“God, I pray that everyone prays.”
TOMORROW: From City Light to City Extra Light.
WITH THE LAUNCH OF MISCmedia MAGAZINE (copies should be in early subscribers’ mailboxes by today), it’s time to open up this site to the works of other commentators.
(You can submit proposed items if you wish. Just remember: This site does have a scope of subject matter, no matter how vague; so don’t be miffed if your submission isn’t used.)
Our first such installment comes in the form of a travelogue.
Praying for Turkey
I WENT TO TURKEY to film a documentary about the Amazons. I know, I know there was a big earthquake there and why would anyone do that?
Well, I’ve been wanting to go to Turkey for many years.
A few years ago I would’ve gone but we were (are) at war with Iraq (Turkey’s neighbor). Then there was all the confusing horror of the Balkans, just kissing Turkey to the northwest. Meanwhile, there’s the escalating civil war with the Kurds to the southeast (still going strong). There had been terrorist bombs in tourist sites all over Turkey due to the capture of Ocalan, the Kurdish leader. To the southwest, tensions with the Greeks were mounting into perhaps a larger dispute over Cyprus. I kept postponing, praying, waiting for a peaceful time to go see Turkey.
When the earthquake hit, I guess I realized that five years was enough. I prayed real loud, and, as usual, no one answered.
SO I WENT TO TURKEY. To Samsun, about 600 miles east of the epicenter. From there I explored the wild and dangerous Black Sea coast in search of Themiscrya, the supposed ancient homeland of the Amazons.
Did they talk about the earthquake in Samsun? Not much. It was in the air; and, from what I could gather in three weeks, the Turks suffer loudly and animatedly, but not for long. The earthquake would come up once in a while and everyone would say it was bad and unfortunate (two words I heard over and over again), and thank God for the Americans, and the Iraqis, and even the Greeks for helping out, and then there would be a deep silence until someone would mention how unlikely an earthquake would be in Samsun. On to the next subject.
They realized I was the representative of the tourist industry. Nothing negative, oh, no. One person said, “You gave us 10 million dollars, but Iraq gave us 20 million in oil.” That’s kind of embarrassing, considering I think we have some airbase in Turkey from which we are refueling to bomb Iraq.
Just before I left for Turkey a news story struck my attention from the back pages of the newspaper. Americans had mistakenly launched a missile at an entire Muslim family’s home in Iraq. They were murdered while they slept. Mothers, uncles, children–everyone was dead. Two cousins who were outside at the well survived. This was brought up in conversation while I was in Turkey. I felt too humiliated by my own country to say anything. Most Americans, I wanted to tell them, don’t know we are still bombing Iraq at all.
I HAD READ IN MY LONELY PLANET GUIDEBOOK not to discuss politics with the Turks. Turns out the people I talked to were not at all opposed to arguing politics. We shared our unhappiness and frustration about nearly every country. (America shouldn’t be bombing Iraq to hell, we decided). I argued for the legalization of prostitution; they didnt agree.
This is from a society which is highly censored. You can’t speak against the government.You can’t say anything negative about Ataturk, the man who westernized Turkey in the 20s. If you do, it’s straight to jail. And the Turkish police are not opposed to torture; although since Midnight Express they are really really nice to Americans. I’m not kidding.
While most unmarried turkish couples can’t get a hotel room, even in Istanbul, tourists can be an heathen as they like. In a country which needs tourists more than ever now, there is a great deal of pressure on the whole country to treat tourists like royalty.
STILL, DON’T PUT DOWN ATATURK. On every pedistal, in every town square, every school, mosque, etc. there is Ataturk, who gave the Turks their last names, their westernized letters, and their secular goverment. You can go to prison for criticizing him. I made an off joke, saying something like, “Oh, another Ataturk statue”, and I noticed some self-censorship on the part of my friends. Laughter was stiffled, heads were turned, the subject was changed. Best to avoid Ataturk altogether.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
