Look out for guitar at 3:30.
Tags: Andalusia, Antonio de Patrocinio, Bulerías, Flamenco, guitar, Pedro el Granaíno, Spain
Flamenco: I can’t get enough of these guys right now: Pedro el Granaíno y Antonio de Patrocinio | En Clave de Fa | por Bulerías
27 AugLook out for guitar at 3:30.
“…ours by right of conquest” though it’s 2020. Erdoğan’s combo of Muslim triumphalism and Turanian triumphalism, and a certain kind of Turk’s responsibility
21 AugThere’s a kind of White Turk, usually with grandparents born after or around the founding of the Turkish Republic, always of a slightly (if only in their imaginations) leftist bent, urban, fairly well-educated, who, rebelling against their parents, and in order to feel good about themselves, made their mission a rejection of Kemalist secularism as bourgeois and anti-democratic, and prioritized the liberation of “popular” Islamism from the racist shackles of the Republic as part of their discourse — a discourse of slumming that folks of their class always engage in; in doing so — and in castrating the military in any way they could — they enabled and laid the road for the Erdoğanist Muslim Brotherhood ideology that is turning Turkey into an international pariah, though he had already made his quasi-taqiyya beliefs (“democracy is a bus…we take it when needed and then get off at the stop we want”) very obviously obvious as early as the 90s, but that’s what “the people” — though they ordinarily have nothing to do with the people — wanted, and if you objected to bringing that Islamist ideology into Turkish politics, they would call you an Islamophobe, though Erdoğan’s combo of Muslim triumphalism and Turanian triumphalism (Hagia Sophia: “ours by right of conquest” in 2020) mutually reinforce each other in the most powerful way possible.
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But now you’re angry because it’s hit your pocketbook? Well, my message: suck on it now. You wanted to play around with that kind of fire? You deserve to be called to account for what an ugly country Turkey has made of itself.
I’m wondering if he’s going to take on the Mouchliotissa also, which is the only Byzantine church in the city that wasn’t turned into a mosque and has the honor — but for the grace of God — of functioning continuously for 800 years, and a good muslim must certainly not allow centuries of that kind of rezili to continue.
Or if it’ll get to a point where he starts converting Ottoman-era churches, of which there are a good thirty or more, in other neighborhoods in Istanbul.
The Mouchliotissa or St. Mary of the Mongol’s, below. Read for an explanation of the strange name.
Cavafy: “…there was always an obstacle there.”
17 Aug
Also see:
Γκαμπριέλα ♰@GabrielaRomanou Twitter feed for great pics of life in Greek C-Town. They’re particularly moving because many of them seem “late” — I mean like in the 60s and 70s — when the community had shrunk down to about 50 or 60K, yet seemed to still be brimming with life and urban gusto on all levels, even after 40 and 50 years of incessant harassment and persecution.
Lauryn Hill: “How you gonna win when you ain’t right within?”
17 AugOr, as Nietzsche said:
“For one thing is needful: that a human being attain his satisfaction with himself – whether it be by this or by that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to revenge himself therefore; we others will be his victims, if only by always having to stand his ugly sight. For the sight of the ugly makes men bad and gloomy.”
Missing New York. Missing Black folk.
And a beautiful video that I had somehow missed till now, twenty years later. That St. Nick Avenue?
See some fuller Nietzsche quotes on the Jadde.
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Are Serbs and Croats the same people? response to a Twitter thread
16 AugOf course they’re the same stock and came to the Balkans, where they mixed with the local inhabitants as perhaps one group in the 6th and 7th centuries. There are historians who think that Srb and Hrvat were the names of two Indo-Iranian groups that gave their names to the Slavs that then became Serbians and Croatians, kind of like the Bulgars gave their name to the Slavs of the more southern Balkans, but were then absorbed into the population and Slavicized, or like the Scandinavian Varangians became the ruling class and gave the name Rus’ to what later became the first Russian polity to be centered at Kiev. It fits so many peoples’ founding myth — including Greek peoples like the Spartans and the Thebans — that outsiders with special, even magical, powers arrive and organize simple tribal groups into coherent city-states and polities, that those myths probably are remnants of real processes and events.
So yes, outsiders like the Greek sources you’re referring to, were writing at a time when both Serbs and Croats were only first converting to Christianity and conditions and identities were in a state of flux. For a while it almost looked like Bosnia or even the first Serbian kingdom of Raška was going to become Catholic; I know, it sends chills down my spine too. Soon afterwards, however, the Catholic-Orthodox division solidified the two as separate ethnic and political identities.
And it’s been turtles all the way since then.
Despite their sophistication and the super-human effort they made to engage with their neighbors instead of waging costly warfare, the Byzantines were not — due mostly to their snobbery — the sharpest tools in the shed about the peoples around them, especially when they called the Turks Persians and the Slavs Scythians because those were the exonyms established by Attic historiography for those who lived in either of those directions.
Photo: Prinkipo, 1960
16 AugHow do you just know, in photos of this period, Büyük Ada in 1960, and like in so many of Ara Güler’s work, that the subjects are Greeks. I mean, you just know, no?
And see also: @GabrielaRomanou :
Δημοσίευμα Τούρκου που αναζητά και θυμάται τα υπερωχαααα χρόνια που πέρασε και μεγάλωσε με πολίτες Ρωμιούς τη Πόλης. Translate Tweet
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 