Carpetblogger

OMG! Check out This New Blog!

It is 1000 different kinds of awesome. Everything you wanted to know about politics in places like Azerbaijan and Turkey! Lots of data! We love data here at Carpetblog.

We have inside information that she promises to update it more than once every three months.

Asking Tough Questions in Tough Places

This List is too Short

If you don't read 5ives, you are a fool.

Five Nouns From Which it can be difficult to scrub the scent of utter bullshit.

May 29th, 2007

1. Performance
2. Excellence
3. Mission Statement
4. Synergy
5. Enterprise

Enidd Asks Carpetblogger

One of the funnest parts about blogging is making blogfriends. Blogfriends are like radio DJs. Based on the selective information that person provides about him or herself, you develop an image in your head of what he or she looks, thinks like and even what their real name is. Then you get to meet the person and poof! Everything has to be recalibrated to match reality.

Carpetblogger just met Chirol of Coming Anarchy for a couple of beers beneath the Galata Bridge as he passed through Istanbul. Fortunately, we remembered to ask his real name right before meeting up. He had just visited Azerbaijan and oddly, he didn't find it all that compelling. Hard to believe. Here's a piece of advice if you're about to meet a blogfriend for the first time: He or she will probably be younger than you expect.

Enidd is one of my favorite bloggers. She lives in Kyiv --er, Molvania --and I can't believe we weren't real friends when I lived there. Stalin and Fluffy, however, would have kicked the Carpetdogs' skinny white dogasses out of principle.

Enidd has a feature called On The Couch, in which she poses questions to her blogfriends.  She directed some questions to Carpetblogger. Carpetblogger promises to direct questions to someone else, probably Wu Wei, whom we met in Kyiv last summer, or The Copydude.

1) how did you meet the carpetdogs?

We knew the carpetdogs back before they had passports written in three languages, back when they did other things besides sleep all day.

                   

The most precious dogchild came from the San Francisco SPCA, in 1996, at a year old. He's always been a willful dog, which was probably why it was already his second visit to the SPCA when we picked him out. The fact that he later flunked out of three Canine Good Citizen classes just endeared him to us even more. He was just a lot smarter than those dumb golden retrievers and suck-up labs. Some might even say gifted. You can't blame him for being frustrated in that environment.

The other, less precious dogchild came from an Aussie rescue in Hood River, Oregon, in 1999 at about two years old. She is known as the Supermodel -- beautiful but dumb as a box of hair. On the other hand, she had never gone to the vet for any but routine reasons, she has never seen a doggie neurologist, she has never contracted deadly diseases, nor has she exploded pus all over the walls. Some argue that she is, in fact, the better dog.

When people ask us why we don't have children, we point to our dogs as evidence of our bad parenting skills. We ignore basic principles of obedience. We play favorites and encourage unhealthy rivalry. We don't believe in traditional educational systems. We left them alone with a complete stranger for a year. Not much better than dirty hippies, really. And anyway, we don't even live in the same country, so it would have to be like immaculate conception.   

2) you switch on the tv, and hear the scariest thing you've ever heard.  what is it?

Bush re-elected. 1/20/09 is not that far away, right?

3) enidd's dying to know why you were kicked out of baku - but if you'd rather not say, tell us why you decided on ukraine (for a while).

There isn't enough bandwidth to cover the whole story and names would have to be changed to protect the craven. So, you'll just have to wait for the book (or a nice Napa Valley Cab at Enidd's new house in SF). The readers' digest version is that the wheels of the petrocracy bus in Azerbaijan were really, really painful.

4) there's only one jar of peanut butter left in the whole world, and it's in your kitchen. do you send it to your elderly, cancer-ridden, peanut-butter-o-phile relative, or pretend it never existed?

Well, I still have that salmonella-ridden jar of Peter Pan. I could totally give that to the elderly, cancer-ridden relative. That would be ok, right? What could it possibly hurt?

5) yushchenko or yanukovych?

I'm sorry. I have no idea who those people are.

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.

Istanbul Link Round Up

In an effort to re-orient Carpetblog from an FSU blog to an Istanbul blog, here are some of the links I have discovered. So much more useful information is available online here, than say, Baku or Kyiv.

For a lot of links, try Turkish Blog Count. Turkish Torque is a good cultural roundup.

LOVING Binnur's Turkish Cookbook and Yogurtland. I mean, I love them in theory. I'd love them more if they would come cook for me.

Turkish street fashion is hardly headscarves and chador, though you can get that scene if you want it. If not, Istanbul Street Style has got --wait for it -- street fashion covered.

Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish columnist who writes articulately in English on The White Path and Erkan's Field Diary has a lot of good EU-related information.

There's Metroblogging Istanbul, as well and good ol' Global Voices.   

Trying to Make Things More Interesting

Seriously, I'm trying to gin things up a bit. Hopefully big news is going to break in the coming weeks. In the meantime, the Producer is on his way to Kyiv, the carpetsibling is breeding (why didn't she break this news on Carpetblog? That's what we're here for) and I have a new favorite blog: Worker #3116. 

If you've ever slogged your way all the way to the end of the whole NYT Sunday Magazine feature called The Ethicist and wanted to punch someone, or if you've ever taped your broken moral compass to your computer screen, you'll adore  Gawker's  new feature written by W3116, The Unethicist.

Live Through This!

Everything I want to say about Azerbaijan but can't is here on long-time reader Breed's new site. Breed's now in Tbilisi, but has wasted plenty of time drinking with the Produer in Baku, kicking ass in Bishkek and picking cotton in Ferghana.

No castrated commentary here!

A "Do Over?"

"All save one of Baku's votes got subtracted" due to a "server crash?" Is this for real?* Don't fuck with Azerbaijan, man. You don't want to end up like Armenia.

Oh, wait....

Get in there and VOTE

*You know, if Azerbaijan was a more technologically advanced place, I would wonder...

Baku is the Opposite of Wellington, NZ

If you're a Carpetblogger demographic, you probably think of places like Wellington, NZ only in terms of whether Azal flies there non-stop, whether there are good malls with decent shoe stores or the availability of a quality lunchtime V&T at a bargain basement price.

That's why you should visit Gridskipper and strike a blow against "ironic hair metal and low-fi electro" music scenes, Maori delicacies (mmmm, fresh Maori) and clean living.

Crapistan rules! Vote for Crapistan!

Link Roundup

As part of the painful transition from blogging in one Crapistan to another, I've updated my woefully out-of-date links list, adding a couple of interesting blogs here in Ukraine. Most of them cover politics, which is really nice to read since in Baku there was little -- nay, nothing -- in English worth reading about the political environment.

Worry not, Carpetblogger will not be commenting on gas deals, lighthouses or the Black Sea Fleet. Carpetblogger will continue hardhitting coverage of lifestyles of the debased and delirious, if only she can find out where these folks hang out.

Here are a couple I've come across lately. Chase Me Ladies, I'm in the Cavalry for some witty writing about the world, Foreign Notes and Orange Ukraine for Ukrainian political coverage. Neeka's backlog is nice too. Why most of these blogs don't have RSS is beyond me.