exit through the gift-shop

Apparently chuffed from his recent claimed mandate after a referendum passed by a slim margin investing the office of president with executive powers, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has directed the Turkish Ministry of Culture to erect a museum dedicated to the victims of the failed coup d'état of last summer.
Some three hundred people died but it is unclear if those deaths were at the hands of insurrectionists or whether the other victims, the hundreds of thousands of civil servants, educators, artists and journalists that were purged, aren’t also deserving of memorial—and not just damnatio memoriæ. The Museum of 15 July: Martyrs and Democracy as it is to be known will have besides its permanent exhibits a library, café and gift-shop.

(s)alt çoğunluk

Whilst the sentiments of Turkish citizens voting abroad from embassies in Germany and Austria were solidly in favour of constitutional reforms that would give the country’s executive broader, consolidated powers more in line with those of the president of the United States, there was no clear majority among domestic polling stations.
Though the election commissioner is expected to release in ten days, the party of Erdoğan is already claiming victory with a bare fifty-one to forty-eight percent majority in the contested referendum. The opposition party is to launch an investigation over voting irregularities. With campaign pledges certain to derail any hope of Turkey’s pending membership in the European Union, it would seem that the expatriate community would not vote against their own self-interests but with relatives and in some cases whole families left back in Turkey, I suppose these voters are also among those that could be easily intimidated, just enough to nudge the outcome.

5x5

ærodrome: Kottke wonders if the circular aircraft runway might ever take off

no mister bond, i expect you to die: movie villain dermatological trends

my beautiful launderette: the Pope opens a free laundromat for the poor and homeless of Rome with plans for expansion

nakkaşhane: scenes from cult films depicted in Ottoman miniature style by Murat Palta, whom we’ve admired previously

bring a whistle to a knife fight and pretend you’re the referee: Texas is tendering legislation to name an official state gun—with the Bowie knife being a top-contender, via Weird Universe 

trial balloon, probefahrt

Although allowing a foreign government to play in Peoria to its diaspora (many of whom left their homeland for fear of political reprisal) would be without precedent, the refusal of Germany and Austria to permit the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to campaign at venues in those respective countries with sizable Turkish populations has garnered much angry and caused further tensions between the outlier and EU member states.
In mid-April Turkey plans to hold a referendum not on EU membership but rather on changing the country’s constitution to invest the office of the president with greater executive powers, more akin to those of the president of France or the US rather than the largely ceremonial, soft-power that Erdoğan enjoys now. With rallies in Turkish communities, the administration is hoping to persuade (or perhaps intimidate) the expatriate population to vote to strengthen the presidency—while many outside Turkish jurisdiction probably harbour the exact opposite sentiments. While in Austria the denying of a platform is coming from the government directly, the federal government of Germany, who has seen continual strained relations for some time now, insists it’s played no part and local venues are wholly cancelling engagements at their own volition without the government’s influence. As stated, it would be highly irregular to allow a foreign politician a pulpit from which to bully exiles in a power-grab—Obama passing the mantle of leadership of the free world to Merkel is something quite different, though these are quite irregular times—but perhaps this refusal is a sign that other institutions will stand up to America’s Minitrue and Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda when he and his minions try to through European elections.

7x7

bowie.net: prescient 1999 BBC News Night interview with David Bowie regarding the emergent world wide web

urban league: a primer on why cities grew where they did

track 61: an intrepid team of urban spelunkers explore FDR’s custom train car underneath Grand Central Station, via the always marvellous Nag on the Lake

hic sunt leones: the Phantom Atlas chronicles how we filled in the gaps of our geographic knowledge with centuries of fictitious locations

time and tide: beach installation of mirrored poles captures the reflected sunrise and sunset

shyriiwook: woman goes into labour wearing a Chewbacca mask

curds and whey: a dairy factory in the western Turkish province of Afyonkarahisar boasts a circular viewing gallery around its central courtyard that offers visitors a demonstration of cheese-making

now it's turkish delight on a moonlit night

A new collaboration by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s civil engineering faculty creates a privileged platform for witnessing the development of Istanbul and several junctures of its modern and urbane history as one of the world’s mega-cities. Through the lens of history and with geopolitical superposition, one can trace the evolution of the metropolis from 1850 onwards. Surely all communities are just as much representative as the heirs and drivers or change and deserve a show-case of their sprawl and re-zoning for their own re-inventing, only hopefully without too much directed or ordained.

bir varmış, bir yokmuş

Following in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm of the previous generation (but whose legacy was still being unfolded), Hungarian linguist and ethnographer Ignácz Kúnos travelled around Ottoman Turkey collecting folklore, and in 1913 published a brilliantly illustrated by Willy Pogany edition of forty-four Turkish fairy tales.
Though in presentation, the collection may strike Western readers as something more in the tradition of 1001 Arabian Nights, the stories are cognates of the archetypal ones that the occident monomyth is heir to. The title above is the beginning of the Turkish preamble to all fairy stories, the equivalent to Once Upon a Time (Es war einmal…) and like Kúnos’ own Hungarian Egyszer volt, hol nem volt, volt egyszer egy... means once there was where there wasn’t, there was a, a form of introduction that was playfully duplicitous. Visit Public Domain Review to read the book in its entirety and to discover more forgotten literary gems.

rapprochement

Over pledges to endorse the return of capital punishment within its borders and fully drain the swamp after staged coup attempt of the summer, Turkey is vocally protesting EU misgivings about the prospect of every joining the economic bloc over its poor human rights record and the way things are tending that run counter to the principles that Brussels tries to uphold—threatening to throw open its frontiers and no longer impede transit of refugees on to EU territories.
The Turkish government, furthermore, is not pleased with the slow manner in which the EU is disbursing the three billion euro aid package agreed upon in exchange for Turkey’s care-taking and triaging of the refugees. Detecting the potential for corruption, the EU has been judicious in remitting these alimony payments, issuing them in small instalments and directly funding projects rather than paying Turkey to manage it. As uncivil and incredulous as this is and people are being used as pawns in the purge and in the surge, it was as precocious to believe that Turkey would live up to its end of the bargain as it was for Turkey to believe that it could ever really ingratiate itself and be given membership. “Throwing open the floodgates” sounds ominous but I don’t think that Turkey was doing a very good job controlling its borders in the first place—and probably more walls will follow in response. Perhaps with everything else going on in the world, those B-List whingers and their demands, fulminations will be dismissed as merely obnoxious and not to be engaged with diplomacy or plied with politics.

inherit the wind or john henry was a steel-driving man

Though polls placing the United States between Latvia and Turkey when it came to tolerance for the concept of evolution and natural selection—simple scientific curiosity with or without decrying that it’s only a theory, were sampled well before the farce of democracy that was the US election, I am sure that the vice-president elect inserting his sanctimonious nose into the halls of academia and reaffirming his beliefs (unbidden by the scientific community) only goes to reinforce the incuriousness of his constituency, secure in having their foundations unrattled.
This does not bode well for the state of American education, nor for those institutions that drive progress, no matter how support might be spun to curry favour with certain parts of the industry. One’s rose-tinted convictions have little to do with mastery of the extant, rentier economy—that of branding, trademarks and profits gleaned off the friction of moving assets around, and these models are easily given over to machines that would indubitably conspire to out-perform humans. I wonder how it feels to encourage and reach out to those with the world view that is in danger of becoming redundant. I’m wagering that when manufacturing returns to America, it won’t be with the attendant jobs as expected but rather with more automation. Artificial intelligence will surely be innovative as well in ways we cannot imagine or possibly understand (and robots are not surrogates for gods and angels) but I do not think we could factor in at all unless scientifically literate.  Not only might business-driven science be more reckless with trying the untested, public health and environmental degradation globally will pass the tipping point and become unsalvageable as we’ve known it. It’s going to be a long, painful regime, with the swapping of titles, à la russe to skirt or trounce term limits. Even though entering his fifth term Trump will be in his nineties, he be as spry as ever, having regenerated and taken a donor body.

rendition

When the German government failed to respond to the extradition demands of Turkey to turn over some four thousand suspected dissenters and dissidents who were party to the failed coup attempt thought to reside in Germany, the Turkish government accused Germany of harbouring terrorist elements, which will boomerang back and destroy Germany. The tense exchange comes right after a series of purges and censorship of the press. It is unclear which persons of interest Turkey is hoping to be offered up or whether radicals are of the established variety (Berlin said to antagonise Ankara over its tolerance for the Kurdish minority) or if they recently fled the country. There was not a rush of political asylum-seekers but many lawyers who suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the coup did seek sanctuary in Germany.

autobots, roll!

An Ankara-based research and development firm has created a range of prototype and fully operational Transformer vehicles. These BMW cars can be driven just like any car but also can take a robotic form and is fully articulated. Maybe these warriors are not quite ready for a pitched-battle but the team behind these custom Decepticons are working fervently to add more features.

curveball

Although it was known for years that agents and informants were keeping their country’s diaspora under surveillance to uncover any expatriates who might be harbouring critical views of the ruling regime, it seems no one really appreciated the scope and the reach of this network in Germany (which rivalled the Stasi of East Germany) and other European countries with significant Turkish populations until the failed coup.  In fact Ankara’s MİT (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı) had formerly worked closely with counterpart intelligence services in host nations to thwart potential terrorism and smuggling operations (of all sorts), but in the aftermath of the failed coup, spies have been drawn closer to the regime and deployed to menace and intimidate (reminding the exiled that they still have family in the homeland can force anyone to be silent or even rally in the regime’s support) those that probably left the country in the first place over political reasons.
Now, instead of having faith in the intelligence of their partners, the BND and others fear that any information they act on might have been presented to them in order to incriminate individuals (sort of the reserve false testimony of the informant known as Curveball, a dissident who feed the war hawks the salacious details it wanted to hear) who don’t share the Turkish government’s vision of how national and religious identities are to be portrayed and exercised.

lustration

While it is probably almost always amateur-night at the False Flag, depending on how chuffed one imagines oneself to be and the target-audience to be duped—despite what the hecklers may counter, the manufactured junta, military coup that the current and long-standing regime of the Turkish government sprung in the midst of tragic distraction and suffering ought to be a cue to the world that this Ottoman cabal ought not be accorded the respect and confidence of a legitimate and democratically sourced power any longer.
The rolls of undesirables to be purged were at the ready to be released in the immediate aftermath of the orchestrated failure, like the enemies-list of some paranoid Roman emperor (the attested role of country’s military’s executive estate being to preserve the standard of secularism in the face of the blurring of Church and State) and ushered in the lock-down of thousands of educational, judicial, media and charitable institutions accused of subversion, not counting the depleted ranks of the army and untold political dissidents in the sweeping process. The staging of the whole theatre was sloppy—but also was the media coverage and critical-analysis. Such disdain for difference of opinion certainly and basic human-rights could not be the hallmarks of accession to the European Union—not that the muzzled majority of Turkish people should suffer more for the tyranny of their leaders, nor does it seem to be an ideal location for the US to store its nuclear arsenal or consider its NATO partnership a reliable one. Let’s hope that this pretend narrative could lend momentum to the real thing.

brussels calling

Chief diplomat to the European Union’s delegation to Turkey, Hansjörg Haber, has abruptly resigned, reportedly (angeblich), over Ankara’s conduct regarding a deal to create an immigration buffer-zone in exchange for visa-free access to the EU bloc of nations for Turkey and refusal to live up to its end of the bargain.
This rather cantankerous behaviour is to be expected from a nation that realises it has the EU over a barrel with the refugee situation, even if Europe does not itself fully appreciate the situation. This further fracture comes at a time when tensions are already running high over a lack of candor about the present and the past that has seen German journalists being denied entry and German officials of Turkish ancestry being given police protection, worried that there could be retaliation for their votes to label the massacre perpetrated by the Ottomans as genocide—and campaigners in the UK are vocal with a political hot-potato that EU ascension for Turkey is either imminent or otherwise will not happen within our natural lifetimes but that Turkey should nonetheless strung along with a glimmer of hope to maintain good terms. I’ve wanted to say to the Leave camp, “You know, Brussels can hear you?  They hear all those awful things you are saying about them.” Perhaps the Remains need to have the same thing pointed out to them about Turkey.

system of a down

Far worse than the potential dictatorial stance of the likes of the Free World under the yoke of a Trump regime or the sprawling tin-pot nation of Fāçbükıstan, our friends in Turkey are facing the insufferable under the endless presidency (it seems like few politicians can go gracefully into retirement, and it is convenient to swap the offices of president and prime minister) of Erdoğan.
The latest dillusory stunt is Ankara’s recall of its ambassadorial mission to Berlin (restored, apparently after pulling out recently over a satirical song by a German comedian) is over the German parliament’s resolution to designate the Ottoman Empire’s killing and persecution of Armenians (and other minorities) during World War I as genocide (Völkermord). Turkey is rebuffing criticisms both internal and external and accuses Germany of being provocative—but pledges that in no way will this grave and unfortunate decision affect the deal with the EU to siphon refugees first through its borders, discouraging the dangerous overseas crossing.  If Turkey is truly earning a place within the European Union community with such gestures, one would think it would play this leverage with more strategy.  With this resolution, Germany is joining a chorus of voices, including the Pope, but there was some tremolo-heroics behind the symbolic vote (which was just as likely to have not occurred), with some top government officials conspicuously absenting themselves from the assembly.

asia-minor or turkish delight

The middle of next month (16 May 2016) marks the centenary of the signing secret pact known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement that carved up the Middle East in an arbitrary fashion, drawing the modern borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Palestine. Covert negotiations went on for the previous five months, in anticipation of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Triple Entente, Britain, France and the assenting third party, Imperial Russia, but pivotal battles of the Great War were yet to be fought.
The outcome on the fields of Amiens, Ancre, Marne and Megiddo did not negatively diminish the apportioned claims of the UK for Jordan, Palestine and strategic points along the Mediterranean and for France, the Levant, represented by the eponymous ambassadors—however, Imperial Russia, who had been promised Constantinople, the straits of the Bosporus and Armenia (but consulted in matters as much as the Arabs or the Persians were) lost their territory due to the intervening destabilising of the Bolshevik Revolution that transpired in November of the following year. This forfeiture allowed the other powers to proceed with a second wave of colonialism and though the resulting architecture has fuelled overwhelming sectarian strife but did also engender a framework of protections, tolerance for minorities in the region. This imperfect and shaky geopolitical architecture endured as a legacy for nearly a century and though the formal lines in the sand still exist, what precious little about the Agreement that was sheltering and steadying was dismantled with violence and prejudice by the Cosplay Caliphate. The Agreement only came to light thanks to a leak from the Bolshevik brokers to the newspaper Pravda, in retaliation for having their claim denied, and later picked up by the Manchester Guardian. The revelation led to massive uprisings in the Middle East as World War I itself drew to a close, which was countered with damage-control measures that were not more flattering than the secret partitioning , the buzzards circling, to begin with.

lèse-majesté

The leader of the Berlin faction of the Pirate Party was detained by law enforcement for conducting a literary analysis of the infamous poem about the Turkish president on the street in front of that country’s embassy (the Turkish mission to German in der Tiergartenstraße, Berlin, mind you, and not in Ankara) over the weekend.
This development comes just after the Chancellor expressed second-thoughts on her initial condemnation of the comedian’s satire though still feeling that the case of the prosecution should go forward. The last time paragraph 103 from the German book of criminal code (Strafegesetzbuch—essentially a left-over from the days of European monarchy, criminalising the insult to the dignity of a foreign head of state, lèse-majesté) was invoked was by the Shah of Iran in an attempt to muzzle the critiques among the Iranian diaspora settled in Germany, and perhaps the Chancellor, announcing the intent to sunset the antiquated law within two years, was quietly hoping that it would similarly backfire. Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, who have comparable laws in their penal codes (and constitutional monarchies all), announced that they would be repealing them post-haste.

muzzled oder totem und taboo

In a chilling development, a German comedian could face hefty fines and a prison sentence for a encore act directed at the president of Turkey—who has gone on record (as some other choice demagogues) saying while he welcomes criticism, those critics will be sued. Adding to the list of not just taboo subjects of conversation in Turkey, like defaming Ataturk’s memory zum Beispiel, or questioning the official party line on the Soviets’ allegiances in World War II, but illegal ones, Germany’s diplomatic corp was called to the carpet—well, rug—for this satire, causing the Chancellor to intervene, perhaps out of fear that her tenuous deal for a refugee-exchange with Turkey might be jeopardised over this spat.
Germany, along with a few other European nations, has a law on the books regarding the slander of foreign heads of state, which is rarely but selectively enforced and carries with it a possible jail-term, if relations are not smoothed over. What do you think? This is horrible, but I suppose that libeling a dictator in this instance carries a punishment less than that for sacrilege.

gatekeeper and key-master

The European Union is reaching out to Turkey in order to help stem the tides of humanity washing up against the Greek coast and halted at the Macedonian border. The agreement currently being tendered has the country that spans two continents offering to take one migrant in limbo on the edges of Europe in exchange for resettling one Syrian refugee hosted by Turkey in EU lands.  Presumably, non-Syrian refugees deported from Greece and Italy back to Turkey will be then returned to their countries of origin—Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. after an appeals process, which could not be conducted in the chaos of camps and choke-points along the Balkan route.
I don’t know what to think, and know there’s real terror and reason to flee and that determination to survive and protect one’s family is not broken by the bartering going on in Brussels, but as if this deal did not seem tenuous enough already, Turkey (knowingly, as the EU needs Turkey just now more than Turkey needs the EU) has asked for extra concessions to include three billion euro in aid, visa-free travel for its citizens to the EU and accelerating its ascension into the economic bloc. While I truly hope the lives and aspirations of millions are not subject to such political horse-swapping—all the more exacerbated by the upcoming plebiscite over the so-called Brexit—or become a political hot-potato over the leverage that the Turkish government has garnered. Seldom is heard a discouraging word—however, as no one dare speak about deportment past and recent that this new partner has displayed on the international and domestic stage: internal political and ethnic strife that is approaching a civil war of its own, aggression towards Russia, collusion with smugglers, terror attacks, and a despotic suppression of press-freedoms that barely register a mention. What do you think? Should Europe enter into this pact?

non-euclidean, not constantinople

Via Colossal, resident artist Aydın Büyüktaş transforms the timeless landscapes of the city of Istanbul into warped skyscrapers and other impossible geometries that dizzyingly ripple back over themselves in an exhibit called Flatland—inspired by the dimensionally biased commentary of the same name on the gentrified Victorian court by school-master Edwin Abbott Abbott (so named as his parents were first-cousins, in keeping with the practise of keeping blue-blood in the family). As denizens of Spaceland, and despite seamless and masterful composition like the visual, we have difficulty imagining worlds sinking and without horizons, nonetheless. Seeing the slack and swell of the land curling over like a wave is hard to invent—even as a dreamscape, and it is worthy of deference that the imaginative capacity of another could concoct and communicate such vistas.