
Okay, okay. It’s been a while. The time slipped by really, and things just went mad here at work, start of term, middle of term and more of that. Apologies all ’round for that. I will try to be more on the ball with this as the few readers I do have have wondered where I’ve gone. I’ve not been far, er, well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve been to various conferences, one in Sydney and another in Istanbul. I was asked to write a blurb on my travels in the latter, for the Association of Cultural Studies’ newsletter. I wasn’t particularly taken with the conference, for a number of reasons which I’ll not get in to here. However, Istanbul this time around was great and it was nice to have friends to share it with. So without further ado, here’s the review (I chose a Perec quote to start things off, a bit I have cited here before. You can see where my blog life and academic life blur occasionally).
Thoughts on Istanbul, the city that happened around the conference.
To cover the world, to cross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square metres of it, a few acres, tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small, incidental excitements, improbable quests congealed in a mawkish haze a few details of which will remain in our memory: out beyond the railway stations and the roads, and the gleaming runways of airports, and the narrow strips of land illuminated for a brief moment by an overnight express, out beyond the panoramas too long anticipated and discovered too late, and the accumulations of stones and the accumulations of works of art.
George Perec
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1997)
This was my first Crossroads conference and my second trip to Istanbul (my first visit came while I was based in Berlin, which has its own “Little Istanbul” in Kreuzberg; the second after a move to New Zealand, which has its own “Istanbul” restaurant on Cuba St.). As there are no doubt many other conference reviews, and at the invitation of the editors of this newsletter, let me take the liberty to give a brief glimpse into my perambulations around the city before, during, and after the conference. My meandering was not done without reference to the conference however, as my motivation was to do my own informal study of the city’s cultural life.
A confession, but certainly not one I harbour alone, I’m sure: one of the reasons I go to conferences is, whenever possible, to bookend the trip with opportunities to survey a locale’s uncharted pleasures, inspired as I am to seek out those nooks and crannies that get me off a well-worn path, the wilful search for the promise of some element of surprise and wonder (couple this with the fact that it’s a forty-hour flight from New Zealand, the urge to wander, if only to work off the jet lag, seems necessary to sorting myself out). I’m driven in part, nay mostly, by my desire to collect odd and/or unusual local music and ephemera, as well as an insatiable need to photograph all sorts of buildings, alleyways and assorted urban fragments (I’ve collected many of these photos here).
I could indulge in Istanbul’s musical and cultural detritus this time because I’d scoured many of the tourist sites and learned to manage and navigate through the sea of hustlers who cluster around the Blue Mosque and other sites in Sultanahmet during that first visit. This second visit allowed me a chance to witness the city unfolding through other daily rituals and encounters. I admit that I weary easily of museums and galleries, fatigue befalling me after an hour or so. Instead, give me cafés and restaurants, bars, shops and the vital artlessness of street life that keeps me alert and primed to wander for hours. Sitting among backgammon players, game boards squared up against teacups full then empty then full again; I’ll take this over the still, pallid air of yet another museum. I’ll happily indulge instead in soaking up a street scene where the atmosphere is heavy with the smell of fresh food and sharp with the tang of cat urine, knowing that this is the city. I’ll spend hours perched on a stool, reading, writing, editing, distracted now and again at the sight of some curiosity, architectural or otherwise, savouring precisely those vestiges and incidentals of which Perec writes, miniature affirmations of the city’s character, its tenor, and its tempo.
A story: I was roaming again, strolling through the city’s many alleys, past brothels and crumbling tenements, mosques and pensions, serpentine passages and dimly-lit arcades, the latter filled with reams of Turkish tabloids, style and fashion magazines, 70s movie posters and tawdry daybills, a treasure trove of trash, the forgotten and the forlorn massed in piles well over a metre high. It was clear to me that since last in the city, only a year earlier, things had changed, but only incrementally, thankfully. The old man who ran one of the tiny little curiosity shops that stole three too many of my afternoons, floor to ceiling as it was with books and vinyl, had passed away. It was run now by a young woman with tattoos coiled around her forearms, who indulged me (and with me) as I sifted through a mountain of chipped and dusty Turkish 45s and LPs, she explaining to me the titles, the lyrics, and divulging, with occasional salacious glee, the sordid or tragic life of the artist. As I placed them on the turntable and played them over the shop speakers, she was sometimes wistful, sometimes smiling, but genuinely pleased to see someone taken with so many different sounds, Western, Eastern, caught up in the pleasure of fossicking around in, to these ears at least, the unheard archive of arabesque pop housed there.
I revel in these more mundane pleasures, not bent on spending my day in awe of Istanbul’s monumental grandeur, which always feels so abstract and distant to me. Rather, I was keen to give in to the minor rapture found in the immediacy, the tactility, of these etched slivers of pop culture, hearing the patina of age and their travels, from who knows where, in the pops and crackles of once-loved 45s, seeing the smile of the shop owner as I put on another song that transported her elsewhere, and witnessing the delight she clearly had in telling me stories of growing up with this music.
Another affirmation: At the Grand Bazaar, away from the carpet salesmen and knock-off jean stalls, I watched as a gramophone repairman, a fastidious septegenarian, toiled furtively in his shop, tucked down a less-trodden offshoot of the bazaar’s main laneways. Dwarfed by a wonderful floral display of antique horns, flanked by walls filled with old 78s from East and West, Europe and Asia, shelves piled high with crank phonographs, greasy gears and cylinders, here he was with soldering iron in hand, meticulously attending to the metal innards of what must surely be the last of a dying breed. He seemed oblivious to my presence, although given the close quarters, there was only a moment of silence. He asked if I wanted a photograph and pointed out some wonderful blue-tinted horns, as well as the window display of gramophone needle tins from around the world. I took a moment and set up my tripod, watching him turn to work again, and began snapping away. I thanked him in my very broken Turkish, he smiled and then greeted a man carrying a wounded phonograph into the shop. The cycle continues….
These two encounters, about the pleasure of music, the tangibility of history, the local and the global, and the many resonances of popular culture, are what I’ll forever remember about Istanbul, vignettes that affirm once again that culture is ordinary and its multiple pleasures are always to be found in the nuanced grooves of the everyday.
You can find out more about the conference here
More soon, but not before I leave you with some music. Three Turkish tunes which I found the first trip there. Some more to come, but I have to rip those still. Patience, as you’ve not doubt learned to exercise already….
Ilham Gencer - Istanbul
Cici Kizlar - Delisin
Siluetler - Lorke-Lorke
Le G.
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