by David Byrne
Our friend from Kazakhstan knows which house we’re heading for, so we ignore the kids who swarm over the car urging us to stop at their families’ establishments and we proceed to “Chez Moi.” We’re met by more Kazakhs—bankers, they claim, although one wonders exactly what sort of “banking” these fellows do—and then a group of bleach-blond babes with rouged cheeks dressed in bulky sweaters. The house mother, a short woman in a house dress (is she pregnant?), leads us to “our” room, upstairs, where we will be entertained and, we have been forewarned, fleeced.
This is the polar opposite of Sakip Sabanci’s mansion, in the extreme. As the room is stone cold, “Mom” carries in a bucket of glowing coals from outside and plunks it down in the middle of the linoleum floor, which is pretty ripped up in spots. Our Kazakh friend begins to negotiate while we get settled. The room is almost completely bare, except for the mismatched chairs that line the walls. A kid brings in a kind of folding card table. Four musicians (two percussionists, a tambourist, and a man with a Turkish banjo) seat themselves opposite us and begin to tune up.
The dancers, still in their winter sweaters, enter briefly and then leave. Mom takes drink orders—beer for the expats and me, roki for the Turks, and vodka for the Kazakhs. A Kurdish gentleman, who might be part of our party, sits near the musicians. He doesn’t drink.
The musicians start to wail. They sound great, full of vigor and emotion that explodes in sudden bursts of intense and beautiful sadness. The sadness of the world is in this music. I don’t care if they’re just playing for us to make a quick buck; it’s deeply moving anyway. I’m transported. A kid circulates and takes “donations.” Cheese, grated carrots, and pistachios appear and eventually even a dancer, who makes the rounds before she starts asking for more donations (small bills seem to do). She takes off her sweater and plops it on a chair, revealing not a costume, but her bra and a pair of tights, rolled down just enough to reveal the arches of the top of her panties. She begins to dance. Not belly dancing really, but whatever it is, it’s got some spirit. Everyone, whether from the cold, the drink, the music, or the whole situation, is in great spirits, laughing and toasting one another.
The dancer makes the rounds again, and bills are stuffed in her bra this time. Occasionally she does a sort of very basic lap dance. She sits on someone’s lap (male or female, it doesn’t seem to make a difference) and bounces up and down. It’s more funny than it is sexy. It’s all pretty tame, and it’s not really belly dancing, but everyone’s having a great time. Except for the man on my left, who twirls beads all night and consistently asks the girls to pass him by, most of us get up and dance at one point with the girls or with each other. Everyone laughs, fills one another’s glasses, sings, shouts, and pastes dirty old bills on skin. The Kazakhs are getting pretty sloshed on their vodka, but nothing untoward ever happens. And, as the dancers don’t have the requisite tummies for belly dancing, a few of the women pull off the shirts of the men, whose bellies are more than ample enough for shaking.
At one point there’s a commotion outside and we discover a local TV team, led by a famous local talk show host (who resembles Fidel Castro a little—he’s bearded and wearing green fatigues). The Turkish elections are about one week off, and he’s polling the citizens of this poor neighborhood about their situation. He’s surrounded by belly dancers on break, street kids, and the owners of the house.
I’m told that the outcome of this election, like many of the elections coming up in central Asia and in the former Russian republics, will demonstrate to what extent a sizable chunk of these populations want to return to a more stable world, whether it be based on the Communist religion or the fundamentalist sort. It is said that the fundamentalists here are very well organized, as opposed to the young secular moderns, who are largely apathetic and couldn’t care less about politics. The religious party, it is rumored, is even flying in votes from the Turkish communities in Germany and Austria. They pay for the round-trip airfare, it is said, in order to guarantee another vote from the expats. Naturally, all this fervor is stronger in the eastern part of the country, far away from Istanbul, where a war with the Kurds has also been going on for years.
There is a big gap between rich and poor here, just as there is in the United States, although here in Istanbul one doesn’t see, as one does in New York and other cities, the really wretched poor discarded by society. This country is truly on the border between East and West, and the conflict between westernization—the chaos of democratic liberties and heartless capitalism—and a way of life that surrenders to the righteous and sheltering arms of God and tradition may play itself out here.
The next day I ride over to the beautiful Topkapi Palace, a tourist attraction, to see its harem museum. While the proportions and scrollwork of the interior of the palace are incredible, I am more taken by the displays of religious relics. In other places, in other countries, these would be displayed in a cathedral or in a shrine of some sort—they are the holy of holies, after all—but here they are all grouped together in a museum room. A hair from the prophet, the sandal print of Muham mad, the arm bone of St. John the Baptist, and more skulls and bones are all shown in this way as if to prove how successfully Atatürk has turned the country into a secular nation.
I bike back across the Horn, over the bridge to the hotel, and in the evening I have dinner with the local concert promoter and a few of her assistants. Alev, the promoter, is a forthright, energetic thing, and her assistant Daniel (I’m sure that’s not his real name; I suspect it’s been anglicized), who picked me up at the airport, is a slightly effeminate immigrant from Kazakhstan arrived here via Moscow. In other words, he hasn’t yet acquired the requisite mustache upon entry into Turkey, which I imagine makes him appear slightly less manly than the traditional men here. The ubiquitous mustaches were commented on by Alev and her staff as being indicative of a certain type of Anatolian. This view of facial hair marks my shaved friends as being somewhat more cosmopolitan, and I guess slightly more alienated—their view of mustaches might be comparable to my view of mullets, I would imagine.
Hairs of the prophet, Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, 1992.
Footprint of the prophet, Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, 1992.
In the five years of her company’s existence Alev’s main focus has been promoting raves and dance events (dance music events meaning house and techno parties, not ballet). The festival of which I am a part is to take place on a beach site on the Black Sea, about an hour and a half’s drive from here. They call it the Alternatif Festival. There is to be a big tent, toilet facilities, all the usual Euro music festival structures, and the usual set of sponsors—a jeans company, Carlsberg beer, a radio station, and CNBC.
It turns out that the original site was near a village where some of the local “mafia” have almost completed a largish club that they soon hope to open as an attraction in that area. Having preexisting ties with the local military (the military functions as the police outside of the city municipalities here), they requested that the military make it “difficult” for this music festival to go on, or so it is claimed. The mafia, they reason, see the festival as possible future competition for their club. This all came to a head over the last few days, it seems; the military issued a directive that the festival would be unsafe, citing danger of drowning, fires from the local forest, and possible drug use.
Alev told of approaching various ministers, some of whom are fundamentalist Muslims, for help. Can you imagine . . . ? First of all they most certainly don’t want to deal with a woman, and second they see these events, and Western pop music in general, as the devil’s work, so good luck girl.
The Alternatif Festival folks then took their cause to the national government. It may seem a big leap, from the community folks to the federal government, but apparently local corruption runs pretty deep, so one has to leapfrog it to escape it. Our Alt Festival pals decided to link the right to hold their music festival to the pending EU membership issue—something Turkey would dear
ly like to have. How does accommodating raves make one more eligible for EU membership?
Turkey, as I write this, is right in the middle of applying for EU membership, and it seems they just about qualify economically. But on the human-rights and cultural fronts there are huge gaping holes. Mostly the human-rights issue, which is a bit of a Turkish cliché, as everyone thinks of the film Midnight Express when they think of Turkey. (Imagine if your entire country and culture was represented by one film, one which portrays your country as being a brutal cesspool. I’d pray for another successful film about anything else. A nice love story maybe.) It seems the EU also requires member nations to have a full deck of cultural institutions—historical preservation societies, support for local and regional traditions, education, and institutions focused on different socioeconomic strata of the country.
This is where we come in. Youth programs are part of the EU’s cultural requirement. The other music festivals here focus on jazz, classical, and “ethnic” (i.e., world) music and are presented at prestigious venues, lavish concert halls, and the like, as are jazz festivals around the globe. Obviously these jazz festivals play to a so-called sophisticated portion of the Turkish public, with occasional demographic overlaps that include some of the hoi polloi. (I often personify that overlap at those jazz festivals.) But the Alt Festival folks hope to assert that the youth are not being served by these officially sanctioned festivals and that therefore the EU commission needs to see festivals like the Alt happen in order to be certain that all levels of the Turkish public are being catered to. It’s a kind of shaky argument, it seems to me, but go for it.
There is a limited audience in this part of the world for the fringe, albeit hip, side of global pop culture, of which the other acts like Jarvis Cocker, Sneaker Pimps, and I are representative. How important it is culturally for our limited slice of the global culture pie to be presented everywhere and be supported in part by the state is debatable. Ditto, I would argue, for orchestras, jazz, and contemporary art, which have all gotten support for years. Jazz (not to mention classical music) for decades was exported by the United States and tours were funded by the U.S. State Department and even by the CIA as being representative of cool U.S. culture, which went a long way toward making that music acceptable and suitable for concert halls around the world. But that is another rant.
Alev optimistically claims that within a few years I will be able to do a circuit that includes Beirut, Cairo, Sofia, Ankara, and Tel Aviv, which sounds good to me. I’ve done concerts in two of those cities previously, and it would be nice to someday connect all the dots. But do these countries really need Western art-pop music? A cosmopolitan demographic certainly likes it, but increasingly there are homegrown acts that are just as good as anything foreign. Though, for many countries, a foreign act will usually command more respect and interest than anything homegrown—sad but true.
At present the festival is still on, but the latest word is that it will be moved to another site—possibly without the tent, but with the full stage and the other bits. Yikes. It could get a bit wobbly out there, if they’ve moved the stage but haven’t moved all the toilets, the water trucks, and the food concessions.
I told the promoters I intend to visit the Asian side today on my bike. It’s not as touristy, but I’ve seen the tourist stuff—the Hagia Sofia, the Blue Mosque, and the vast underground cistern that the Romans installed—on previous visits. I bike down to the water and catch a ferry, and then I pedal around the promenade that stretches along the coast on the opposite side of the Bosphorus. The ferries leave every fifteen minutes or so and I catch one that goes around the outside of Istanbul harbor and drops me near a large university on the Asian side. There’s a nice green pedestrian strip along the water with scattered outdoor cafés, so it will be a pleasant ride back to the other Asian ferry terminal—the one directly across the Bosphorus from where I left.
I ride by the first train station built in the East. Trains head from there to Baghdad and points east, and near here is where the line begins, at the Bosphorus. Couples are out for a stroll, eating ice cream.
On returning I hear that the festival was denied permission at the second site, which is not a huge surprise. Their claims that a pop music festival would do wonders for Turkey’s cultural and human-rights record didn’t seem to fly.
The Show Must Go On
I spend the rest of the day wandering around town on my bike and I buy some wonderful reverse bas-reliefs of Atatürk and some cool old prints of Arabic maps and medical engravings of dissected brains. I meet Daniel, Alev’s Kazakh assistant, in the lobby, where I assume some journalists will join us. Instead he leads me out to the hotel garden where some tables and chairs are set up and it seems there is going to be (surprise!) a whole press conference with TVs, etc. Ah well, what can you do?
Alev then comes up to greet me and in a low voice informs me that now the festival is off entirely. I am slightly, but only slightly, shocked. Alev has arranged the press conference to announce the canceling of the festival. I sit beside her and say to the press and TV that I am saddened by what has happened as I have been very much looking forward to playing here again.
Meanwhile, all the journalists in front of me immediately get on their cell phones—it’s an odd sensation to talk to an audience when they are all making calls. Alev is on and off the phone herself, and she suddenly announces that maybe there is a possibility of yet another site. This one will be smaller, and closer to town (good news, I think, that last bit, given the horrendous traffic here).
We, my band and crew, all go out to dinner, but I am first taken to a TV station, where I had agreed to put in an appearance. When we finally get there it turns out to be a sports show, and World Cup fever is rampant. Somehow they’ve managed to shoehorn me into the program due to the general World Cup excitement. Maybe some of the euphoria will rub off?
The next morning it seems the festival is really back on, at the new, third site. My crew head out in the morning. Although we had prepared ourselves to leave for an early-morning sound check and rehearsal, it gets pushed back twice—to two PM. Kind of a worry, that, as there are two new string players in the group and we’ve all been off the road for a couple of months and could use the run-throughs . . . but there’s nothing to be done.
We are taken by a small bus to the park in which the concert is to be held, but the (British) driver gets lost and we somehow end up back at the hotel. Soon enough we’re back in the Istanbul traffic. Other than a trolley on one boulevard and buses there is no public transportation, so at rush hour things grind to a halt.
Our soundcheck/rehearsal is pretty short—the generator is shut down just before we are to begin. But we make some progress learning “Lazy”—a live version of a remix version with strings. It’s going to sound lovely—moody and orchestral in bits and driving and funky in other sections. It still needs work so we won’t play it tonight, but maybe after another rehearsal.
The show goes off very well in the end. The sound is fine. The audience, while not the eight thousand they’d hoped for, is respectable and very appreciative and they love it when the strings join the rhythm section! They swoon and wave their hands around. It feels good to sing and dance. A million thoughts run through my head as I sing—personal stuff and otherwise—and they make the songs fresh for me. The two new string players do wonderfully for only having run through much of the stuff with the other strings and not the entire band. It’s a short set, as it’s a festival and there are other acts on after us.
Arhan is backstage. He calls Esra, who says we should come on by to where she is. She’s having dinner with the minister of tourism and the minister of state at a fancy restaurant after the opening of a museum.
Esra got married a week ago in Paris to a man I’d met previously—a businessman, I think, and when we arrive I am also introduced to the various ministers and their wives or girlfriends as well as a Turkish fashion designer.
The restaurant is on a hill w
ith a view of the Bosphorus. I am seated at the end of the table, near Esra and across from Arhan. Our table is outside, on the grass. The view is incredible. One can see the boats and ferries down below plying the Bosphorus and a steady stream of cars crossing the immense bridge to Asia. Below us are the lit-up palaces and the Kempin ski Hotel along the water’s edge.
Esra is, I gather, somewhat wealthy. She’s charming and attractive, but not conventionally pretty. She’s animated as she leans attentively toward the minister of tourism on her left—an immense man with tiny little eyes who reminds me of Mr. Creosote, the Monty Python character who eats until he explodes. When our minister leans back after making a remark his head seems like a blip on top of a mountain.
All the ministers have mustaches. All their wives or girlfriends have cleavage.
Some of the women speak English; the ministers do not, at least not to me. Conversation seems to be sporadic, and with me being a fresh new element in the mix, it starts up again—at least for a while. Eventually Arhan and I leave, as I have to pack for a drive to Belgrade in the morning.
With some of the worst traffic in the world—the city has exploded in population in recent decades—one wonders why, with its agreeable Mediterranean climate, central Istanbul hasn’t embraced the bicycle as a mode of transport. Aside from the hills I come back to status as the only explanation that fits. Sure, folks will say, as they do in New York City, “It’s dangerous, and where will I park my bike?” Those questions get answered and rapidly rendered moot when there is political will—or when the price of gas is five times what it is today. They are really excuses, justifications for inaction, not real questions.
Buenos Aires
It’s the Paris of the south, they say—due to its wide avenues, cafés, and nightlife. Avenida 9 de Julio is the widest avenue in the world, so there you go Mr. Haussmann. If the obelisk wasn’t plunked in the middle of this boulevard you could land a 747 in the middle of the city.
