Carpetblogger

Save Acrassicauda!

From Villa Luna:

HELP SAVE OUR HEAVY METAL FRIENDS FROM AN UNCERTAIN FATE IN BAGHDAD

In November 2007, the Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda  was able to get to Turkey through the help of friends who donated money for them to leave Syria. Their visas in Syria were expiring and the government of Syria was threatening to force all Iraqis to return to Iraq.

Now they are in Turkey and their money and options are running out. Life in Turkey is very expensive and very difficult for people waiting to find out if they can officially be resettled by the UNHCR in another country (Turkey does not accept refugees from anywhere other than the West). As it stands now, they may have to return to Baghdad, simply because they can't afford to stay in Turkey much longer. It's impossible to stress just how dangerous this will be for them. It could very likely be a death sentence, and the time in which we can help them is quickly running out.

You can help by making a donation to assist Acrassicauda in surviving while they are stuck waiting in Istanbul. The band has no bank accounts, and Paypal doesn't function in Turkey so the makers of the documentary about them (HEAVY METAL IN BAGHDAD) setup a Paypal account on their behalf. No donation is too small. By giving as little as ten dollars, you can be a part of keeping the heavy metal dreams of four young Iraqi men alive.

Donate Here!

Born out of a basement rehearsal space in Baghdad, Acrassicauda (Latin for "black scorpion") is Iraq's only heavy metal band. Inspired by western bands like Metallica, Slayer and Slipknot, they began writing and playing metal in 2001. Their dream of performing live in Iraq soon became the struggle of their lives.

Due to increased security precautions throughout Iraq, it became difficult to practice-much less get through a show-without literally risking their lives. As the situation worsened in Baghdad they began receiving death threats from insurgents and religious fundamentalists accusing them of Satanism.

The war has now all but destroyed their dream of living in peace, growing their hair long, banging their heads and shredding as loud as they want. The members of Acrassicauda are currently seeking asylum in Istanbul, Turkey.  All of their visa applications to foreign countries have been denied.

In November 2007, the Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda  was able to get to Turkey through the help of friends who donated money for them to leave Syria. Their visas in Syria were expiring and the government of Syria was threatening to force all Iraqis to return to Iraq.

Now they are in Turkey and their money and options are running out. Life in Turkey is very expensive and very difficult for people waiting to find out if they can officially be resettled by the UNHCR in another country (Turkey does not accept refugees from anywhere other than the West). As it stands now, they may have to return to Baghdad, simply because they can't afford to stay in Turkey much longer. It's impossible to stress just how dangerous this will be for them. It could very likely be a death sentence, and the time in which we can help them is quickly running out.

You can help by making a donation to assist Acrassicauda in surviving while they are stuck waiting in Istanbul. The band has no bank accounts, and Paypal doesn't function in Turkey so the makers of the documentary about them (HEAVY METAL IN BAGHDAD) setup a Paypal account on their behalf. No donation is too small. By giving as little as ten dollars, you can be a part of keeping the heavy metal dreams of four young Iraqi men alive.

Donate Here!

Born out of a basement rehearsal space in Baghdad, Acrassicauda (Latin for "black scorpion") is Iraq's only heavy metal band. Inspired by western bands like Metallica, Slayer and Slipknot, they began writing and playing metal in 2001. Their dream of performing live in Iraq soon became the struggle of their lives.

Due to increased security precautions throughout Iraq, it became difficult to practice-much less get through a show-without literally risking their lives. As the situation worsened in Baghdad they began receiving death threats from insurgents and religious fundamentalists accusing them of Satanism.

The war has now all but destroyed their dream of living in peace, growing their hair long, banging their heads and shredding as loud as they want. The members of Acrassicauda are currently seeking asylum in Istanbul, Turkey.  All of their visa applications to foreign countries have been denied.

Ask Carpetblogger: What's up with Eurovision?

As a public service to our American readers, who frequently have a hard time seeing eye to eye on cultural issues with our European friends, Carpetblog presents...

                                                Eurovision: A Primer

As with the first and second most boring non-Canadian sports ever (soccer: dozens of Americans can't be wrong!), Eurovision hasn't crossed the pond very successfully. But it should surprise no one that a contest won by Abba in 1974 ("Waterloo") is one of the biggest television events of the year in Europe. Given the recent influx of Eastern Europeans and former Soviets into the contest, observers should expect the quality of the performances to far exceed that of Celine Dion's winning barnburner in 1988. In terms of talent and production value, Eurovision makes American Idol look like "An Evening at the Lincoln Center." 

I'm not going to waste a lot of space here trying to help you understand just exactly what Eurovision is all about (its history and voting procedure is surprisingly long and complicated. Wiki's got it all), but these sentences from RFE/RL should help clarify things:

"Nine out of the 10 semifinal winners are from postcommunist countries. Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Latvia, Hungary, and Slovenia all qualified. The other country was Turkey.

This year, it seems folksy ethno-pop -- complete with Cossack sword dancing and panpipes -- is triumphing over drum machines and techno."

When the battle is between the "folsky ethno pop" of a bunch of former commies and Scandinavian "drum machines and techno," one might conclude that the larger war has already been lost. The devushkas won.

Eurovision 2007 might be one of the few arenas in the world, other than fertilizer production, in which Belarus is considered a leader.

Turkey's entry this year -- considered a frontrunner -- is also tritely bland.

 Last year's winner, the Finnish "metal" band Lordi, caused quite a scandal for its divergence from the bubble-gum pop that the contest's pan-Euro voting system encourages. Because Finland won last year, it is hosting this year's event.

The problem with Eurovision is that not that it's tacky and frequently trite -- all of us appreciate that. It's that it's taken so dead seriously. When people are arguing about and voting for "the best song" they seriously mean "the best song," not the "most over-the-top-song" or "song that best illuminates national character." Sometimes they mean "goofiest floor show," though. This helps explain the success of Ukrainian Ruslana, who won in 2003. Ruslana seems to have been influenced by The Attila Collection, or vice versa. You never know in the creative caldron that is the FSU.

This failure to appreciate legitimate talent is why this year's Ukrainian entry -- a anti-Russian drag queen named Verka -- is mocked for not being "serious" rather than given a lifetime achievement award for being 1000 different kinds of awesome. How a country devoid of intentional irony managed to nominate a drag queen for Eurovision is beyond me but VERKA rocks and totally has my vote!

Coming soon: Eurovision and geopolitics!

Mr. Evil Promotes Russian Tourism

Although every day I feel the FSU draining out of my bloodstream (except for those Azerbaijani polymers and the Ukrainian radiation -- that stuff might be a little harder to shuck), I can't stay away from English Russia. It's like watching a different car wreck every single day, from the safety of a distant overpass. Today's photos might be the best ever.

                

       

 

The site's writer reports:

These are works of Russian net-artist Mr.Evil. He often published his own view on different things in Russia, including these ads. A few days ago he was visited by people from Russian police. All his printed works were confiscated and he was told not to leave the city or he would regret a lot. That’s a real story of a real person, happening these days in Russia.

Update: Global Voices reports that the St. Petersburg artist's name is Ivan Ishkov and this whole thing is not a stunt by the artist to create a buzz. The police threatened to shut down his photo business. I'm shocked, SHOCKED that something like this could happen in Russia.

Anyway, if your Russian is rusty, below is a super-hot toilet lady -- most toilets are pay in Russia -- charging tourists more than Russians, according to written policy. How charmingly typical.

            
    

                   

Mr. Evil doesn't just use his talents for the benefit of the motherland. He also likes McDonald's.

                

                         

and IKEA:

               

               

Hey Mr. English Russia-dude, be careful, eh?

 

More Pamuk on Istanbul

If Far Outliers wants to excerpt the whole of Istanbul: Memories and the City, it's OK with me because Amazon seems to be pretty slow to deliver here.

After a long period when no one of consequence came to Istanbul, and local journalists interviewed all foreigners who turned up at the Hilton Hotel, the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky published a long piece entitled "Flight from Byzantium" in The New Yorker.

Perhaps because he was still smarting from W. H. Auden's brutal review of the book recounting his journey to Iceland, Brodsky began with a long list of reasons he'd come to Istanbul (by plane). At the time I was living far from the city and wanted to read only good things about it, so his mockery was crushing, yet I was glad when Brodsky wrote, "How dated everything is here! Not old, ancient, antique, or even old-fashioned, but dated!" He was right. When the empire fell, the new Republic, while certain of its purpose, was unsure of its identity; the only way forward, its founders thought, was to foster a new concept of Turkishness, and this meant a certain cordon sanitaire to shut it off from the rest of the world. It was the end of the grand polyglot multicultural Istanbul of the imperial age; the city stagnated, emptied itself out, and became a monotonous monolingual town in black and white.

The cosmopolitian Istanbul I knew as a child had disappeared by the time I reached adulthood. In 1852, Gautier, like many other travelers of the day, had remarked that in the streets of Istanbul you could hear Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Italian, French, and English (and, more than either of the last two languages, Ladino, the medieval Spanish of the Jews who'd come to Istanbul after the Inquisition). Noting that many people in this "tower of Babel" were fluent in several languages, Gautier seems, like so many of his compatriots, to be slightly ashamed to have no language other than his mother tongue.

After the founding of the Republic and the violent rise of Turkification, after the state imposed sanctions on minorities—measures that some might describe as the final stage of the city's "conquest" and others as ethnic cleansing—most of these languages disappeared. I witnessed this cultural cleansing as a child, for whenever anyone spoke Greek or Armenian too loudly in the street (you seldom heard Kurds advertising themselves in public during this period), someone would cry out, "Citizens, please speak Turkish!"—echoing what signs everywhere were saying.

House of Mirth adds his point of view too in older posts here  and here.

I wouldn't be able to distinguish Kurdish from all the other languages I don't speak, but you don't have to be terribly adventurous to come across it in Istanbul. The Producer and I were walking around the Tepebashy neighborhood (the search for cheap real estate leads people to do silly things) and it became abundantly clear that we had crossed into a much, much different world than Cihangir. A large family shared tea on the sidewalk, next to a colorfully painted truck that probably contained many of their belongings; the laundry hanging over the streets was more derelict; the garbage cats were skankier. Then, we rounded corner to stand in front of an Armenian church, from which the music from Sunday morning service flowed out. That sort of thing happens every single day here.

Word is that, since the Dink murder, Pamuk has cleaned out his bank account in Istanbul and moved to the U.S. What a huge loss for Turkey, but who wants to get shot on the street by a delusional 16 year old, leaving the world to see the cracks in the bottoms of your shoes?

My landlord told me that one of the many old boarded up houses on our street belongs to Pamuk and that he had plans to open some kind of literary museum in it. It'll probably be boarded up for a while. Sad.

 

Commitments Made

Way back in the late '90s --- or maybe it was the early oughts; the details of this story are admittedly hazy -- the Producer made a commitment.

This was not the widely-ignored "quit smoking before we get married" commitment of 1994. Nor was it the "you're going to buy me a horse someday" commitment (but for quick action on my part, I almost had a half-Arab courtesy of some guy in a L.A. bar called "the Casting Couch" back when we ate ramen for dinner every night and walked a lot of places because we had no money for gas).

Under circumstances that are now obscure*, probably because of an alcoholic haze hanging over the event, The Producer agreed to procure a Gram Parsons impersonator, wearing a genuine Nudie Suit, to perform at my 40th birthday.

Because I believe in accountability, and the Presidential election, which falls AFTER my 40th birthday, has already started, it's time to increase the sense of urgency around this issue. This agreement was made MINIMUM eight years ago. My 40th birthday is approximately 17 months away and the Producer is no closer to making this happen than he was when he agreed to it.

Giddy up!

*Do any readers out there recall those circumstances?

Pahmuk on Cihangir

I just found this lovely passage from Orhan Pamuk's book Istanbul: Memories and the City about the Cihangir neighborhood posted on this rather interesting blog Far Outliers. Cihangir is right next to my 'hood of Firuzaga. Firuzaga is just like Cihangir, except for all the mansions and Bosphorus views and stuff.

It was in Cihangir [named for Mughal Emperor Jahangir] (where we too would move as our fortunes dwindled) that I first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives—a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what—but an archipelago of neighborhoods in which everyone knew one another. When I looked out the window; I didn't see just the Bosphorus and the ships moving slowly down the familiar channels, I also saw the gardens between the houses, old mansions that had not yet been pulled down, and children playing between their crumbling walls. As with so many houses that look out on the Bosphorus, there was, just in front of the building, a steep and winding cobblestone alley that went all the way down to the sea. On snowy evenings I would stand with my aunt and my cousin and watch from afar with the rest of the neighborhood as noisy, happy children slid down this alley on sleds, chairs, and planks of wood.

The center of the Turkish film industry—which put out seven hundred films a year in those days and was ranked second largest in the world, after India—was in Beyoğlu, on Yeşilçam Street, only ten minutes away, and because many of the actors lived in Cihangir, the neighborhood was full of the "uncles" and tired, heavily made-up "aunties" who played the same character in every film they did. So when children recognized actors they knew only from their hackneyed film personae (for example, Vahi Öz, who always played the fat old card shark who seduced innocent young housemaids), they'd heckle them and chase them down the street. At the top of the steep alley, on rainy days, cars would skid on the wet cobblestones, and trucks had to struggle to get to the top; on sunny days, a minibus would appear from nowhere, and actors, lighting men, and "film crews" would pile out; after shooting a love scene in ten minutes flat, they would disappear again. It was only years later, when I happened to see one of these black-and-white films on television, that I realized the true subject was not the love affair raging in the foreground but the Bosphorus glittering in the distance.

While I was looking at the Bosphorus through the gaps between the apartment buildings of Cihangir, I learned something else about neighborhood life: There must always be a center (usually a shop) where all the gossip is gathered, interpreted, and assessed. In Cihangir this center was the grocery store on the ground floor of our apartment building. The grocer was Greek (like most of the other families living in the apartments above him); if you wanted to buy anything from Ugor, you'd lower a basket from your floor and then shout down your order. Years later, when we moved into the same building, my mother, who found it unbecoming to shout down to the grocer every time she wanted bread or eggs, preferred to write her order down on paper and send it down in a basket much more stylish than those used by our neighbors.

We're all huge fans of Pamuk here at Carpetblog and hope that he's well protected from the savages in this country.

Carpetblogger Takes Issue

Goddam! It seems like short-lived new features pop into my head every day now! The latest ephemera: "Carpetblogger Takes Issue."

This week in "Carpetblogger Takes Issue": Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, as one of the New York Times Review of Books Top Ten Books of the Year. Not so much.

Now, when I read Shteyngart's  Travel and Leisure article about his visit to Azerbaijan, back in September 2005, I thought that, based on the lede, he might be a genius. I will reprint it here because it's just that good.

AZERBAIJAN IS DEMOCRATIC AND LAWFUL is one of the billboard sayings attributed to the country's recently deceased dictator, Heydar Aliyev, which for many of its citizens would be true enough if "democratic" were changed to "kleptocratic" and the first l dropped from "lawful."

So, the main character, Misha -- a corpulent, Jewish, first generation Russian oligarch -- struggles to balance the competing psychological demands made by his pop culture-laden US education, his African-American girlfriend and his fundamental Russian-ness.

The book’s strength, no question, is the characterization of Misha’s post-Soviet character, his soft but frustrated life in St. Petersburg and his American ex-pat friend Alyosha-Bob who owns a video-pirating company called ExcessHollywood.

Where I think it falls apart is when Misha travels to “Absurdistan,” a fictional, oil-soaked seaside post-Soviet Republic, peopled by “Golly Burton” oil workers, not-so-smooth operators and slutty Russian girls.

This is thinly disguised Azerbaijan. Too thinly disguised and thinly rendered, I think. If ever there was a country that should be renamed Absurdistan -- that’s filled with parochial people with questionable motives, exaggerated grievances and transparent, remorseless greed -- it’s Azerbaijan. Even after staging a fake war between indigenous religious groups over the true position of the footrest on Christ’s cross, Shteyngart barely scratches the surface of the folly that is daily life in Baku. No fictionalization is even necessary.

Absurdistan: Not absurd enough.

Nobel Literature Prize Winner

Congratulations to Orhan Pamuk for winning the Nobel Prize for Literature!

If you are at all curious about the artistic, historical, religious and political forces shaping Turkey, I highly recommend Snow and, especially, My Name is Red. Neither are easy reads, but he manages to illuminate the major themes using compelling stories in both books.

Well done!

More here about Pamuk.

 

Internecine Rivalries

From the longing perspective of someone looking west, Latvia is so very European, a model to be emulated by countries like Ukraine, which, well, are not.

However, it's interesting to listen to Ukrainians talk about the cultural achievements of their former Soviet brethren. While I was in Riga, I had the opportunity to see the ballet Swan Lake with several Ukrainian colleagues. It was quite revealing.

I am an American Cretin. I admit this. My education was woefully lacking in the areas of classical music, ballet and opera. Blame not the carpetparents -- they tried to sow the seeds of high culture, but they fell on fallow soil. Thus, at my advanced age, I can appreciate little more than the spectacle of a ballet. I've seen the Nutcracker half a dozen Christmases at the Seattle Center, but so deep is my ignorance of the dance, I had to have my colleague explain the plot of Swan Lake.  That's sort of embarrassing.

There's no arguing that Riga's a pretty small town, but keep in mind that Mikail Baryshnikov started his career there so it's not like they're taking off the farmers' daughters' clogs and replacing them with toe shoes. Over lunch, a Latvian colleague extolled the high quality of Riga's Russian-school ballet. The American cretin in me concluded that since Russians were good at things like ballet and shot put, this would be an excellent ballet.

I thought it was! I love shiny pretty things and the costumes and dancers were ever so swanny and shimmery. They hardly at all thumped around like elephants in tutus. Yay white swan! Boo black swan! I applauded at the all right times and comported myself with dignity.

To listen to the Ukrainians I was with, you'd think we'd watched a community theater production of Grease.

"Oh! These Latvians! Russians and Ukrainians would never use such costumes! We are classical. Latvians are...not."

"Oh! But those Latvian ballerinas are sow-shaped!"

"Oh!  The lead ballerina was surely Russian. She was so much better than the rest of them!"

But this air of superiority hardly is limited to culture. I made an offhand remark to a friend about Misha giving those Russians a backhanded bitchslap and my Ukrainian friend, who's normally fully supportive of punitive measures against Russians, rolled her eyes and said "well, yes, but he is Georgian and you know what that means."

I wonder how Russians would respond if they knew Ukrainians (khokhols!) were inviting themselves to the cultural table of their slavic brethren.

Polish Poster Madness

Since we lived in Warsaw waaayyy back in 1991, the Producer and I have been collecting Polish posters. In the old days, the posters were a cheap, cool way to decorate our bland apartment. In fact, I still have some –but not all -- of the ones we bought. This is dismaying because some of them are worth quite a bit more than the couple thousand Zloty we paid for them, back in the day.

One of my favorite things to do when in Warsaw is to visit the Museum of the Polish Poster. First of all, it’s in a lovely summertime location in the Wilanow palace and the weekend was perfect for walking in the park. Second of all, my visit coincided with the 20th annual poster biennial which displayed the modern state of the art, with some very intriguing examples from places like Iran, China and Taiwan. Personally, I like the Polish posters from the 70s and 80s better, but it was worth it to see the modern contributions from the Iranians.

After Stalin died and things loosened up, artistically speaking, the art took off. Street posters promoted all kinds of concerts, films and public events and provided a splash of color to Warsaw’s dreary streets. Sometimes, posters for rather benign cultural events carried a very strong political message to those who knew how to read the code. Other times, later in the Solidarity era, very political films (such as the Wajda films Man of Steel and Man of Marble) spawned very political posters. There's a lot more backgournd on posters at Polish Poster Shop.

The art form thrived from the 60s to the 90s. Then, Poland became a real country. Ads are now focus grouped within an inch of their life and ambiguity is forbidden by EU directives. Posters are still made, but not with the same goals, or I believe, intensity.

There’s a guy who has been selling posters from a lawnchair in a Warsaw underground passage for 10 years. He has a phenomenal collection of political posters, but won’t sell them. I purchased these posters for the Producer at Galeria Plakatu in the Old City where we bought our first ones 15 years ago.

Man of Marble (1979)

Man of Steel (1981)

As a form of mass communication, posters demanded a lot engagement from viewers. Because the artists had been cut off from outside influences, they developed a very unique, highly stylized idiom. Artists interpreted an event such as a film (foreign or Polish) or play using traditional imagery (storks, eggs, ravens), violence, eroticism, and elements of the absurd and grotesque. It’s very distinctive and it’s easy to identify a Polish poster, or an artist influenced by the Polish school, once you know the visual cues.

The biggest names are the Lithuanian-born Stasys Eidrigevicius, with his phalluses,  Jan Lenica and my favorite, the old-school Henryk Tomaszewski .

Some of the most creative are the interpretations of American movies released on the Polish market. Did you ever think Tootsie was so dark?

How about a Muppet as a crazed crackhead?

The Poles have always been big theater-goers and the posters for Shakespeare plays are wonderfully evocative.

As I’ve run out of floor space, I’ve also run out of wall space, since we’ve also started moving into Ukrainian propaganda posters. There’s a great gallery in Kyiv. The posters from the 50s and 60s are prohibitively expensive, but those from the 70s and 80s are still pretty reasonable. I’ll post some photos of them.

They’re not carpets, but they’ll have to do.