The first time I encountered this musician (the one sitting and playing baglama) was through a song of Bulent Ortacgil, Pencere Onu Cicegi. He was performing it in a tribute album to Ortacgil. I got to see him live, he does pretty experimentalist and weird stuff with old Turkish Music. Here is a video of him:
This song Selanik Turkusu (selanik=thessaloniki - so hard to spell the word) reminds me of the melodies I've heard at the synagogue back when I was growing up.
For a lot of people that watch these videos, this will all be about a Lebanese Christian lying to promote the "Zionist" interests by adding fear into the minds of regular people. Then I guess, to a lot of pro-Israel people this will be the truth in it's simplest form.
It's very hard to separate propaganda from truth these days. Still, I hope that the many people around me, so eager to accept the "truth" told from specific point of views (which is an oxymoron in itself) will consider this one as well.
Raki - the so called Turkish national drink is also my favorite form of alcohol, especially in the summer time back home on the Aegean sea with some good food and good Turkish music. I unfortunately never drank ituntil the age 19 (it has a very strong aniseed flavor). It all started when I was away from home, traveling in the USA for more than 45 days. I missed it. It seemed pretty strange then - you can't miss something that you have never experienced before, right? Now, when I look back I see it as a minor identity crisis of a guy in his late teens.
Turkey, especially in the 90's was becoming very Americanized, not in terms of
values and thoughts and ideas but in a very materialistic way. So I grow up in that era and almost everything I like in those days (music, film, magazines, books...) is either a direct or an indirect product of the USA... Finally when I made it to the USA for a long vacation, I clearly remember how I felt when my uncle picked me up from Logan and we started driving back to his house: like a kind of home, like a religious-Zionist Jew that found his way back to Israel... Fast forward
a month, I spent time with a friend from high school studying at Drexel at his house in Philadelphia, at a YMCA children's camp in upstate NY, in Boston at my uncle's house and at the end I find myself installing a nice picture of Istiklal Caddesi on my uncle's desktop, downloading bunch of MFO songs and desperately missing Raki.
I guess during my high school and early university years I developed a sense of belonging to merica through the popular culture items that I've chosen to accept from the set that finds it's way to Turkey. What I hadn't considered was that the group of items I've chosen to identify myself was only a very small subset of what USA has been producing and the big picture probably was a lot more different then what I thought. Those 40 days was a time where I, on a subconscious level, realized the surreality of my sense of belonging. Missing Raki was an instinctive reflex to find another notion to belong - because a person always needs to belong - and it somehow helped to figure out my relationship to the land where I was born.
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Raki: How it's consumed? and my current favorite.
My third attempt on blogging has officially begun...
The first one was an extremely personal blog which eventually found its way to deletion... The second one is actually still up and on-hold, it's a blog on my research at LEMS as a graduate student at Brown University. I was actively blogging during last winter break (january 2006) however I didn't work on a lot of research on spring '06 and the summer time was frustrating as none of my proposed algorithms worked due to a hardware error which I was finally able to identify a couple of weeks ago. Anyhow, that is a different story - that blog is still on hold and my aim is to get it back on track with the contributions of my fellow grad students working in my professor's group.
I'll try to update this blog frequently (a few times a week) about the ideas and feelings that I develop through my experiences I encounter in my daily life. I'm kind of aware that good blogging requires a level of discipline and commitment thus this will be a good way to see how I'm doing in these terms...current things going on in my life are:
- confronting two students in my professor's class for copying down answers from the solution manual of the book
- trying to persuade my professor to postpone my progress review 'till early february
- getting a good grasp of the topics in AM0211 - Real Analysis class and be ready for the final on December 12th to secure a B
- deciding between a sony dsc-w50 and casio exilim ex-s600 digital camera
- finishing a 1500 piece puzzle - the tower of babel
- deciding between buying an ipod - or some other form of an mp3 player to buy - this is a pretty interesting decision to make and the process is thought provoking because as I view it, by buying a digital music player you pretty much decide on the service you acquire music as well, which means it's not as simple as buying a digital camera (which in itself is not simple anyway)
