Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus, Levant and other Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, South Asia, occasional forays into southern Italy, Spain or eastern Europe, minorities, the nation-state and nationalism — and whatever other quirks or obsessions lurk inside my head.
The best thing is to take the train — if it’s running — downtown and find a nice bar or restaurant with big windows, like Bar Pitti on 6th or the Blue Ribbon Bar on Downing Street or the bar at the Mandarin Oriental and watch it all from inside with a glass of good champagne.
What sucks are the weeks of black ice and the ungaugeable depth of massive slush ponds.
As you can see, my brain doesn’t have an image archive of locked down New York yet.
You know, you can’t just throw together anything you feel like…like, I dunno, the Pennsylvania polka with polyphonic southern Albanian orchestration or background singers, and call it music. There’s a great Greek expression for what would result: “May God call that [whatever] …” music, in this case; то есть, only God can give this thing the existential status it’s claiming for itself.
Fusion happens organically. Egyptian pop has a çifteteli rhythm Greeks like, and slowly Greek pop develops a whole genre that is heavily Egyptian sounding. Klezmer musicians, especially Romanian and Moldavian ones, heard Greek Balkan tunes in Bucharest and Constanța and Istanbul and incorporated them into their repertoire. Serbs are attracted to Greek music, to its tone and melodies and especially to its affective nature, so lots of the new starogradska music (which literally means “old city” music, meaning popular, but urban, not folk, like Greek λαϊκά) develops a deep Greek vibe. Greeks loved Bollywood in the 50s, so a whole genre (one railed against by many, including Tsitsanes, which is why I can’t forgive him), of some really beautiful music, developed out of some plain rip-offs, and some imaginative reworking, of the Indian material that Greeks liked in their movies.
I’ll soon bring you examples of all of the above. My point is simply that these intermeldings happen organically and if they’re forced, consciously and stupidly, the product kinna sucks.
I’m sure the intentions of the Khoury Project — four Palestinian brothers from Jordan, with a last name that probably indicates Christian (“Khoury” means priest in Levantine Arabic) — are good…oh, Lord, please don’t let them be misunderstood. But the result is atrocious. It’s a little bit classical Um Kalsoum Arab suite, a little bit Balkan brass band or tamburaša, a little bit demek jazz improv’ — and it’s all made worse by the lust for speeeeeeeeeed our civilization suffers from, to cover up for lack of art, because form is sacrificed on the altar of cheap excitement, till form becomes illegible, rhythm becomes unfollowable, and melody disappears…and it all turns into a dog whistle that we can’t even hear.
Everything is like coked-up Bregović.
And what did that poor kanun do to this dude, that he’s banging away at it like it’s a heavy metal drum set, or like he’s hoping to snap a few of its strings?
Ok, there is one cool idea they’re working with, and that’s in the title: “RUMBA”. It’s not a ton of people who know that, but the musical and other cultural influences that Spain, especially Andalucía, sent to the Caribbean, were matched by the musical influences that the Caribbean, especially, of course, that heavenly font of music, Cuba, sent back to Spain. (You can probably trace the popular music of the whole twentieth-century world to either this one island of ten million people or the Mississippi Delta…or to the West Africa that both sprouted from.) Rumba, for example, is a flamenco genre, as is tango, though they don’t much look like their Latin American namesakes in their Andalusian gypsy forms (Morente gives us a moment of Cuban/Andalusian “rumba” dance moves at 6:56). But sevillanas and bulerías also have rhythmic structures and verbal phrasing and dance moves that have earlier Cuban antecedents.
The reason most people don’t know this is because there’s no more cliché-bound human than the modern tourist. And the academic tourist, who you think would have more outré interests to pursue when he travels, is often the worst of all. So as far as Spain goes, they’ll go to Barcelona, because it’s just such a “hip,” “cosmopolitan” Mediterranean (Christ, sometimes I hate that word) city, and skip the edgier, scruffy, by far more involving urban vibe of Madrid.* And if they’re under 35 they’ll go to Ibiza; over 35 will go to Mallorca. The MESA or other academic folk won’t go to either (if they want beach action they’ll come to one of our more remote Cyclades); rather, after Barcelona, they’ll do the Glories of Al-Andalus tour of Córdoba and Granada and then hightail it back home.
And you can’t get a full picture of flamenco in any of those places. Yes, there’s clearly a gypsy community in Granada that has created its own sound (including Estrella Morente and the whole Morente clan). But “gypsiness” and flamenco are to be truly appreciated in lower Andalusia, the flat river-delta of the Guadalquivir (the al-wādī l-kabīr in Arabic, the “great river”, like the kabir in this blogs’ name.) The great (or “kabir”) flamenco palos or genres, the great flamenco singers and guitarists, are almost all from the Gypsy barrios of Seville, Jerez, Cádiz, Sanlúcar, Puerto deSanta María, or the large village/towns of the region, like Osuna, Écija, Carmona, Utrera. This was not just the entry point for Spanish contact with its American colonies; it was the region that soon after the Reconquista came to be made up of large estates, latifundia, and a large rural proletariat that worked those estates and a large urban proletariat that lived in semi-employed poverty. Unfortunately, this was the pattern that Spain exported to not just its American colonies, but to southern Italy and Sicily during the centuries that it ruled those lands. What’s so fascinating about Naples and Palermo (like, of course, Seville) is that they were the first large, third-world cities of European modernity, overgrown, over-densely populated, surrounded by a countryside where land ownership was wildly unbalanced, cities of fabulous wealth and a dispossessed urban proletariat that still characterizes the modern and post-modern megalopolis — from Bombay to New York.
The Guadalquivir
Unfortunately or not, the pressure-cooker of urban poverty seems to be the petri dish of fantastic music: whether it’s Havana or Seville or Naples or New Orleans or New York and Chicago or Smyrna or Piraeus. We owe it to the creators of this music, and their suffering, to not mangle it the way the Khoury Project has done in this and in many other videos of theirs.
That’s why I’m bringing you more than just one of the original versions of the Cuban classics that Morente and the Khoury project butcher beyond recognition. Take the time to listen to both: the several original versions and the shameless interpretations the new fusion versions bring.
At 6:15, Morente sings the historic Cuban song “Songoro Cosongo”. This was a “son”, an Afro genre from eastern Cuba that, in the early twentieth century, became the more or less national dance (out of which the mambo and then salsa grew) replacing, even in polite society, the danzón. The lyrics are not original “Afro”; they’re Art-Afro, from the Black Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén — y de allí you get into all kinds of questions of authenticity that basically lead you nowhere. What’s important is that this first version was sung by the Septeto Nacional, which was the first group of Black musicians who were allowed to play in the Havana Tennis Club in the 1920s, marking the entry of Blacker music into the social mainstream of Cuban life (or maybe that was the Sexteto Habanero?). Here’s the original version. For Colombians, forget the baldosa please and watch the first part of the video and incorporate some movement into the dance; drop the screwdriver step.
And here’s Hector Lavoe’s 1970s big band sound, salsa version:
The other Cuban/PR classic that the Khoury Project and Morente make kokoretsi out of (at 7:10) is the piece known alternately as “Mandinga” or “Bilongo” or “La Negra Tomasa”.
Here’s a Cuban έντεχνο version from pianist Rubén González of the Buena Vista Social Club:
And here’s the truly breathtaking salsa version, again from the 70s, of Eddie Palmieri, with singer Ismael Quintana: “Kikidi-boom, Mandinga, Kikidi-boom Mandinga….”
Y aquí la tienen, la Negra Tomasa:
La Negra Tomasa, like Mamá Inés (“ay Mamá Inés, ay Mamá Inés, todo’ lo’ negro’ tomamo’ café.”) It’s amazing how powerfully Pan-American this archetype of the Black woman is: Mamá Inés, La Negra Tomasa, Aunt Jemima, the Black woman who, despite the misery and servitude of her existence, still feels and expresses genuine love for those she has to care for. Here’s the scene from Gone with the Wind where Hattie McDaniel gave the performance that garnered her the first Oscar to go to a Black woman:
Ok…
And back to Estrella Morente’s outta space performance. I don’t want to sound like one of the judges on #MyStyleRocksGR (though I’d like to have a drink with Stelio Koudounare — below)** but, Estrella, you’re a magnificent woman. But you’re also a modest Gypsy girl. Don’t wear a strapless dress that you’re constantly tugging up for fear it’ll fall off and reveal your ample bosom. It cramps your style, especially for a number as fast this “Rumba”.
(There’s something that’s so interesting about the semiotics of Gypsy and flamenco sexuality, a really interesting interaction between the revealing and openly erotic and the puritanical and covered up — that’s maybe a real remnant Indian cultural trait. We had a long-time Gypsy tenant, Mandy, who rented a commercial space in a building we owned in Manhattan for her Tarot-reading business; how they made the rent for a midtown Manhattan space offa Tarot readings is anyone’s guess. And whenever I dropped by at that time of the month, she was always dressed kind of like Lola Flores in this video below of commercial, movie, kitschy but beautiful copla-flamenco [look up “copla”; it’s a critical bridge between flamenco and other Spanish popular music]:
A tight top, but with straps — please — and an ankle-length skirt, tight around the hips and flaring out from the knees, like Gypsy women all over the world wear. The use of the skirt in flamenco dance, the flipping and turning around, the gathering up of its ample folds and ruffles and waving them back and forth or stuffing them between the legs, almost up into the crotch…all of those moves become especially powerful because revealing of the lower body seems so taboo. Not to mention the similarities between the prop manipulation of the long skirt in flamenco and that of the cape in the corrida, or bullfight.)
* There’s a wonderful expression in Spanish: “De Madrid no se ve el mar.” — “From Madrid you can’t see the sea” which condenses the whole personality of the city. Madrid is really nowhere. It doesn’t occupy a strategic position, like the older cities of old Castille. It’s not on an important navigable river. The weather sucks: the famous “nine months of winter and three months of hell” (“nueve meses deinvierno ytresdeinfierno”), though I love the cold, sunny weather of a Castillian winter (“colder than a Lutheran” says one character in the film version of Alatriste), and the food is perfect for the climate. It was simply built by royal fiat as a court and imperial capital in the early 16th century because there was an old, Moorish town there in the geographic center of Iberia, on the high, arid and underpopulated central plateau, or meseta, of Spain.
And yet this isolated city — from where “you can’t see the sea” — in the middle of nowhere became the sophisticated, highly cultured and rich capital of a massive empire. The contradiction is that it couldn’t ever really evade or deny its roots. Madrid remained and remains a deeply castizocity. “Casticismo” is a complicated term that means “pure”, “[Spanishly] authentic”, “native”, “conservative” and even a solid melding of all of those together won’t give you the precise sense of the word. Casticismo is what makes Spain Spain. I’m tempted to find Greek analogies and thought that it might beRomiosyne as in versus Hellenismos. But no…
When you’re in a bar somewhere in the center of Madrid in July, and there’s a cold, sweaty caña, or half-pint, of beer and an equally sweaty few slices of ham in front of you, when there’re dirty paper napkins or toothpicks (or there used to be; this custom has sort of fallen out of style) or peanut shells on the floor (the more garbage there was piled up on the floor, the more it signalled to potential customers that, “oh, this is a fun bar that people like…let’s drop in here”) and you’re packed in with super-friendly, inquisitive Spaniards speaking at a totally unnecessary decibel level…and it’s only 11:00 am — well, that’s the right time to get a feel for casticismo, even if it’s just a sensory feel that you can’t express discursively.
And that’s kind of the essence of Madrid, a liberal, tolerant, mad creative, open place that’s still closed and stubbornly archaic and even anarchic: even cañí (tacky) or hortero (red-necky, rough, kitschy, or vulgar). As opposed to the dizque sophisticated-acting, cosmopolitan but actually staid bourgeois air of Barcelona, Madrid is more a microcosm of Spain: one of the West’s and Europe’s most progressive, advanced in every way, societies, that’s simultaneously not part of the West or Europe at all, but a wild, limit-pushing land that is something totally itself, where the grappling between the “raw” and the “cooked” is as interesting and powerful as anywhere.
The go-to book on casticismo is by my saint-hero-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno who wrote it in the early 20th century, when the question of identity — especially after the disastrous Spanish-American War of 1898 when Spain lost its last colonies to the United States — and how Spain needed to generate some kind of new dialectic between its “deep” identity and the modernity it had to face was a red hot, controversial issue. As a Basque, he had a particular insider-and-outsider take on Spain and if you read Spanish or can find an English translation — which I’m not sure there is — it should be on your reading list before your next visit there.
Stelios Koudounares, Greek fashion designer and guest judge on #MyStyleRocksGR
I’ve never been even remotely interested in fashion. I mean, I like to know that what I’m wearing looks ok, but in terms of high-end, concept fashion that nobody really wears…nothing’s ever bored me more. So don’t ask why I’ve gotten hooked, and on a daily basis, to #MyStyleRocksGR. Yeah, I like Stelio, but it’s basically because the judges and contestants on the show are all having so much fun…and when it’s mean it’s because there’s some serious Greek shade being thrown around that, ultimately, no one takes seriously. Any way, I’m addicted.
Next: between occasional blogging and working on my translation of Polites’ Stou Hadjifrangou, I’ve also gotten addicted to reality show #BigBrotherGR. (Owning up: I was addicted to Jersey Shore too.) The other night I sat transfixed through three-and-a-half hours of the special live Friday night broadcast they do, because I was afraid that my favorite room-mate, Demetres Kehagias (Δημήτρης Κεχαγιάς)below, was going to get booted off the show.
I don’t like Kehagia just ’cause he’s good-looking. I like him ’cause he’s echt-Greek/Rhomios.He’s always grouchy and irritated about something and someone and getting into fights with everyone around him, talks a mile a minute in thick Athenian attitude and intonation… And then suddenly becomes all loving and caring and sweet in a way that makes everyone around melt. Luckily he survived.
Here he is in rare form against his nemesis room-mate, the woman with the fried peroxide hair, Anna Maria from Chania (that’s just what they were missing on this show, a Cretan woman of a certain age with fried, peroxide hair…) Check them out in this video below; the fun starts at around 2:17. Yes, the two guys in the black t-shirts are identical twin brothers (makes for all kindsa nuttiness), Zac (Ζαχαρίας) in the Marine t-shirt says and does absolutely nothing in any episode except look pretty, and the zaftig chick in the fuchsia top with the fan, splendidly named Aphrodite!!! is the loving Big Mama that me and apparently all Big Brother addicts in Greece — so say the polls — adore, and she spends lots of her time trying to de-escalate arguments like these. Enjoy. This is a perfect Greek kavga, the Turkish word we use for pointless, steam-letting, “let’s-have-some-fun” arguing. I’m not going to translate or tell you what it’s about….because it doesn’t matter!!!It’s not about anything! They’re just arguing!
I started watching ΣΚΑΪ (SKY) because it’s the of right-of-center channel that still maintains (despite these trashy shows I’m into) some sense of cultural and social standards out of all Greek TV stations. And also because a right-of-center good friend of mine got voted in as MP in Greek Parliament this year and he appears as the go-to expert on Greece’s international relations — especially at a tight time in Greek-Turkish relations like now — on ΣΚΑΪ‘s news broadcasts. But then I get back to work and leave the television on with no sound. Explains how I got hooked on these shows.
Addendum: they’ve also been broadcasting American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace these past two weeks. It’s fascinating. Because it’s not about Versace almost at all. It’s about his tragically psychotic murderer, Andrew Cunanan. And it leaves you with the very disturbing sense that he wasn’t so distantly psychotic from the rest of us, that he just wanted what we all want; things just came together in a way that pushed him over the edge. It’s on Netflix; check it out.
Darren Kriss as Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace
…or, how does one react to the tiring self-righteousness of certain left-dudes.
X. (I want to respect anonymity) is a journalist who I generally like personally, whose work I respect, and whose opinions and judgements about the Middle East I value and find extremely useful; he’s my go-to guy, especially about Lebanon, a country I find particularly fascinating. But he’s called me a few times too many on what are supposedly my biases, which generally consist — sorry to be crude — of my not being “brown enough”, in a way I find not just a little offensive.
I call it “not-brown-enough” because though his criticisms seem to indicate that he believes I’m on the right side where the oppressed are concerned, he also seems to think that I’m not on the side of those he considers the really and truly oppressed.
For one, he’s patently impatient and irritated by my concern for Middle Eastern Christians — though that’s par for the course when dealing with post-Christian Western intellectuals who, at best, have only traumatic memories of growing up Catholic or Lutheran and see any defense of Christianity as a racist and irrelevant leftover piece of creepy reaction. So for X., someoneworrying about the survival of Eastern Christianity seems to be tantamount to being Pat Robertson. For my part, I don’t think that, being Greek Orthodox, I should have to apologize for caring about the losing battle that eastern Mediterranean Christians are fighting. (I would take a guess and assume X.’s unspoken attitude basically consists of: “Oh, so many millions are truly suffering and displaced and dying and you’re worried about 60 old Greek ladies in Istanbul”; well, yeah, somebody has to worry about those old Greek ladies in Istanbul too, ok? No apology). Nor do I think that I should have to apologize for believing that that battle for survival is real — or apologize for believing that it’s an ancient battle that dates back to the glorious entry of Arabs and Islam into the Greco-Roman-Christian and Sasanian worlds — or apologize for believing that that “entry” was anything but an unalloyed good — or apologize for believing that sectarianism in the region has a long and bloody history way before any blood-letting was caused or provoked by Western colonial powers. I should probably send him a copy of one of Walter Dalrymple’s early and brilliant books: “From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East“.
But in an exchange about this issue, he had the gall to refer once to what he calls “elite minority supremacism”. Remember that phrase; it’ll come back to haunt us all. This means that it’s racist, on some level, and politically incorrect of me, to care about the rights of minorities — Orthodox Christians, Maronites, Jews, Copts, Armenians, the Alawites of Syria, the Shiites of southern Lebanon and the Bekka — when it’s really the Sunni majority of the Levant and Iraq that are the true victims.
Sorry. The Sunni Muslim majority of the region were the politically, socially and economically privileged majority group until the late nineteenth century and specifically 1918 — that tragic year when Turkey capitulated and the Ummah and Caliphate were humiliated by the boot of the kaffir West. That tragic humiliation is what left us with the likes of Sayyid Qutb and Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta, all so enraged and humiliated and boiling over with rancid testosterone.
Granted, not much sympathy from me there. And the fact that the non-Sunni or non-Muslim minorities of the region might have found that “humiliation” to have been a liberation of sorts, after centuries of discrimination by said Sunnis, seems perfectly natural to me. There’s a reason Maronites and Syrian Christians turned to France in the mid-nineteenth century and especially after 1860. There’s a reason Syrian Alawites became the French Mandate’s mercenary force. There’s a reason Serbs looked — somewhat ambiguously, with their typical wariness and sense that they don’t really need or think they should trust anybody else’s help — to Austria, and that Bulgarians and Armenians looked to an Orthodox Russia for most of the last two centuries of Ottoman rule in the Balkans and Anatolia. They took a route that they believed, rightly or not, would give them protection from the ethnic and religious groups that had systematically marginalized and persecuted them. So the result is that the 20th century and modernity come around and Syrian Alawites become the dominant military and therefore political force in that country. The 20th century and modernity come around and most Maronites and other Christians in Lebanon are generally better educated, more connected to the outside world and better-off economically than most Lebanese Muslims.And there’s a whole set of reasons that the 20th century came around and Ottoman Greeks, Armenians and Jews were also generallybetter educated, more connected to the outside world and better-off economically than most Ottoman Muslims except for a small elite. Is the colonizing West entirely to blame for that too?
“European colonisation put an abrupt end to political experiments towards a more equal, diverse and ecumenical Arab world”
And wait a minute; let’s backtrack: you discriminate against a minority group; you bar it from conventional access to power and wealth; you confine it to the interstices and margins of your society, and in those interstitial niches they develop the skills and the talent that enable them to survive, and not only to survive, but to come out on top once they’re emancipated — and then that only makes you hate them even more — I’m sorry, but is that not the fucking textbook definition of anti-semitism??!! Call it “elite minority supremacism” if you like. It’s the same thing. And just as nasty, racist and toxic.
Then there was a persnickety exchange about minorities — again — in Turkey this time. X. disagreed with an eccentric but actually quite informed and smart Byzantinist Brit on Twitter, because he tweeted that “the state of minorities in Turkey is not a good advertisement for dhimmitude”. “Dhimmi” in Arabic, or “Zimmi” in Turkish and Farsi pronunciation, is a term that specifically — and very specifically — means the non-Muslim subjects of an Islamic state. X. thought that it was “epistemologically sloppy” of him to refer to the now practically vanished Christian and Jewish minorities of Turkey and ignore the intra-Muslim (for lack of a better word) minorities, like Kurds, Alevis, Zaza-speakers, or the Arabs of the south-east and Antakya (X. calls it Hatay, but I refuse to use the place-names of Turkish science-fiction nationalism). Again, the Byzantinist Brit was supposedly being biased because he lamented the fate of Turkey’s non-Muslims and ignored its persecuted and more deserving of pity Muslim “minorities”. But that’s his right to do and feel — and mine. And, in fact, there was absolutely nothing “epistemologically sloppy” about his analysis. By simple virtue of the fact that he used the word “dhimmi”, he made it unequivocally clear that he’s talking about Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities; he’s not using a “dog-whistle to mean Christians,” as X accused him of in one tweet. He’s stating it very loud and clear that that’s what he’s concerned with. But for X. that makes him biased and probably an Islamophobe, while all that he — and I — were doing was simply pointing out the fact that there was/is a qualitative and taxonomical difference between the status of non-Muslims in Turkey and sub-groups within the Muslim majority in Turkey. And proof of that qualitative difference is born out precisely by the fact that the Christian and Jewish groups have practically vanished; “elite minority supremacism” apparently didn’t save them. Tell me what X.’s objection was, because I can’t make heads or tails of it — talking about “epistemologically sloppy”.
“The National Transportation Safety Board has recommended that helmets be required for all bicyclists in the U.S., but some advocacy groups say putting the recommendation into law can have unintended consequences.”
[Me]: How ’bout we let them crack their heads open, and then maybe they’ll think about how biking — in a city like New York at least, not Copenhagen — is a deeply ANTI-URBAN, elitist, yuppy phenomenon that makes our cities’ centers more and more inaccessible to borough dwellers who can’t afford to live there, to street vendors, to truckers, to commercial traffic, to theater-goers and to everything that makes New York New York and not Bruges, all dressed up in the pedantic Uber-Green self-righteousness of a bunch of rich vegan kids from Michigan?
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Walt Whitman would be turning in his grave.
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Blows me away that more people don’t see that.
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I immediately get a response from X., because he’s one of those people who always has a pre-printed ravasaki in his breastpocket with an analysis and a supporting, supposedly proof/text for almost any political issue. You’re concerned with Christians in Syria? X. is right there on the barricades to call you an elite minority supremacist. You suggest there seems to have been a shortage in the Arab world of leaders able to successfully create a solid civil society and functioning democracy, X. immediately has a long list of names for you, even if that list includes more than a few murderous dictators. You wonder what suddenly caused Syrian Sunnis to stand up to the despicable Assad regime, X. tells you part of the issue is agriculture and water supply. You accept the fact that environmental conditions might have been what literally and figuratively sparked the civil war, and then X. tells you water and drought have nothing to do with it. You articulate an opinion on the mating habits of homosexual penguins in Antarctica and…well, you get the point.
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Hey, maybe that’s what makes a good journalist, but it also leads to dizzying instant analyses and superficial opinions, without a single “well…” or “maybe…” or “Shit…I never thought of that” or any even remotely multi-facetted take on things. Sorry to be channeling Sarah Palin — never thought it would come to this — but so many exchanges with X. immediately degenerate into “gotcha” discourse.
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So, he responds, with lightning speed:
Actually most bicyclists are low-income immigrants. Which is why upscale white people love to shit on them.
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Not everyone can afford first-world privileges like taking taxis. Even riding public transportation is too expensive for a lot of folks.
Except, I don’t know any upscale white people who shit on bikers. As far as New York is concerned, I don’t have statistics, but my visual gut observation is not that there are multitudes of immigrants riding bikes around, but almost exclusively young white guys — the “upscale white people” who supposedly shit on bikers. ?
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And here I think it’s important to point out that it’s a bit disingenuous of X. — if not just a total misrepresentation of facts — or maybe even a teeny-weeny bit of what we used to call lying — to send this particular article because it refers almost exclusively to Houston and totally exclusively to Sun-belt cities and southern California: all cities that are of radically lower density than New York, which is the city the discussion was about, and that, incidentally, have kinder weather. Bikes there may not cause a problem or may be mostly for lower-income city-dwellers. But in New York they’re a nuisance. And I see and know very few poor people using them.
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I wrote back:
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“Very possibly low-income immigrants, ok, but do we have and how exactly do we get statistics about that? [As it turns out we don’t; we only have statistics from Houston] But even if that’s true, they don’t demand that a modern, industrial city, built and designed to be a modern, industrial city, change itself and cater to a mode of transportation that such a high-density city [like New York and unlike Houston] is not designed to accommodate.
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“And as for taking taxis, or even the subway, I am and have always been a borough-boy, who couldn’t and can’t afford to take a taxi to get into Manhattan, nor could I tolerate a commute to and from a two-fare zone, which is what we used to call neighborhoods where you had to ride the subway line to the end and then pay a second fare to take a bus, like Whitestone, where I spent my teens and twenties. I used to drive into Manhattan (20 minutes instead of 2 hours on public transport) and parking was easy to find even on a Saturday night in the East Village. And while we’re on the subject of poor immigrants, have you asked a Sikh cab-driver how he feels about the pedestrianization of Times or Herald or Madison or Union Squares? Or — while we’re weeping for the working class — have you asked a truck driver who has to negotiate backing his truck up into Macy’s loading platform with Herald Square blocked off and 35th street narrowed by a biking lane how he feels about that?
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A superfluous number of pedestrianized zones, biking lanes, Citibank bike stops, farmers’ markets, happy piazzas for office workers to eat their $15 prosciutto sandwiches from Eataly, Bloomberg’s unsuccessful plan to put tolls on East River bridges — a flagrant fucking attempt to keep the non-rich out of Manhattan — because his constituency wanted less traffic and less noise in their neighborhoods, have all contributed to making Manhattan less accessible for me, because I, like your immigrants, can’t afford to live there.
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“And even if there are more Mexicans delivering Chinese food on their bikes than there are entitled pricks from Indiana using bicycles, the Mexicans don’t give me attitude about how I’m not respecting their hobby. They’re too busy working. Plus it’s hard for me to imagine that taking care, storing, maintaining and protecting your bike from theft or vandalism in New York is cheaper than taking the train.
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“You know that long passage between the E train at 42nd Street that connects to the 7 train? Would you, at rush hour, let a toddler free there? Obviously not. Because you wouldn’t let a being of radically different size and speed go free in a space where he’s more likely than not to get trampled.
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“Nor could you possibly ask NYers rushing to work to watch out for that toddler.”
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Again, I’m progressive but not quite progressive enough for X. Poor, brown immigrants should be entitled to ride their bikes anywhere at any time, though that’s a sociological type that barely exists in New York. But a white, working-class, ethnic-American kid from outer Queens like me can go fuck himself (the implication that I was ever rich enough to take a cab into the city on a regular basis is infuriating) and I can be denied access to the pleasures and resources of Manhattan, even as Manhattan becomes a sterile playground for the rich on one end and and hip enough to let hipsters and X.’s poor immigrants ride their bikes supposedly on the other end. No room for me, who falls in the middle of that spectrum.
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Density, up-close, claustrophobic even; maddening; density is the essence of a city like New York. If you’re from there you know that; if you’re not, it might make you a little nuts and you might long for parks and greenery and bike-lanes. And it’s almost always non-New-Yorkerswho are clamoring for these pleasantries that will remind them of Madison, WI. Density; it means cars and street traffic too — and noise — things that give access to the maximum amount of people, cities you can get to easily and that let you in. Not obnoxious, exclusive enclaves like Georgetown or Cambridge, MA, where you need to prove you’re a resident to even park on one of its streets. Look at what pedestrianization has done to Istanbul, where Erdoğan has transformed Taksim, Tâlimhane and the upper Cumhurriyet into a concrete wasteland with all the charm of a Soviet plaza in a city like, let’s say, Perm’.
“I would love to see these people try and live somewhere like Pendik or Küçükçekmece, and commute to work for 4 hours total/per day in crowded public transport for 3,000 TL/month… like most of Istanbul… and then see what they have to say.
“At least these people aren’t as terrible as the (appallingly numerous) Westerners who think Dubai is a lovely holiday destination.”
Dubai? Who needs Dubai when Erdoğan builds hideous and hubristically six-minaretted mosque monstrosities like this:
For 2,676 years, the Megaran Greeks who founded the city, the Romans, meaning the the Italian ones and us, and the Ottomans only built things that added to the beauty of Istanbul. Only Erdoğan had the arrogance to build something so hideous on a site so conspicuous that it mars the entire sea-landscape, horizon and view of the City.
…are so blissfully ignorant of how much ugliness and violence went into creating the questionably “beautiful” city you see today. Your type probably wept in the 90s (if you’re even that old), along with Susan Sontag and Angelina Jolie, for the violent segregation and ethnic cleansing that evil Serbs inflicted on poor Sarajevo. But there’s apparently a statute of limitations on such crimes where Istanbul is concerned. And if, like most ex-pats, your existence is pretty much limited to the axis between Karaköy to Bebek — maybe some 0.5% of the territory of the city — with an occasional foray to the islands or to Kadıköy to go eat at AKP Çiya, and you’ve ingested enough Turkish tourist propaganda, then you’ll believe anything.
You know nothing about Istanbul. You know nothing of the violence, massacre, pogroms, property destruction and confiscation, discriminatory taxation and imprisonment, expulsions and deportations that created the wonderful East-West playground you love so much. You know nothing of the genuine Mediterranean worldliness that’s been displaced by rural Anatolian puritanism. You know nothing of the last muhallebici in Pera that’s been replaced by another kitschy restaurant with women in salwar and headscarves kneading flatbreads in the window. You know nothing of the subtlety and sophistication of the City’s cuisine that’s been totally replaced by the monotony of kebab/köfte joints that you think are authentic and cool.
Yes, it still has a modicum of its old charms. And it’s hard to beat its stunning physical location, though the Padishah’s monster kitschario-mosque has managed to mar even that. But mostly, Istanbul today is a Baudrillardian simulacrum of the city that it was for centuries. And you buy it up. It’s a massive — and aside from the axis mentioned above — hideous monstropolis of 15 million, 99.9% of whom are Turkish or Kurdish Muslims, and yet still manages to sell itself as multicultural.
Look at what a tiny bit of the actual city you really have any relation to:
And how ignorant you are of even the neighborhoods that you do move about in. How clueless you are about who used to live there. (see below)* About who was displaced to house you and your Turkish yuppy friends. The zoning corruption that’s destroyed neighborhood after neighborhood and the woodlands and wetlands of the City’s environs and replaced them with massive high-rise developments that make the Queensbridge Houses in New York look like the Place des Vosges. The megalomaniacal mega-mosques disfiguring Taksim or Çamlica, that are more Riyadh or Dubai than Istanbul. The cheezy, glitzy Gulfie shopping malls…
Plus, how glibly non-concerned you seem to be about political developments…Islamist dictatorship…more imprisoned journalists than any other country in the world…whatever.. It’s exhausting to even talk to you.
This “DAMN” city is right.
Enjoy your Turkish Life.
Oh, that’s the Sülemaniye on the right, isn’t it? and the Yeni Camii in the distant left?
“All – I thought a lot about whether I should use “almost all” in this sentence and decided against it –becauseall the hippest, funkiest, most attractive, gentrified neighborhoods in the historic parts of İstanbul are neighborhoods that were significantly, if not largely, minority-inhabited until well into the twentieth century: not just Pera and Galata, but Cihangir and Tarlabaşı, and even Kurtuluş — of course — and up and down the western shores of the Bosphorus and much of its eastern towns too, and central Kadiköy and Moda and the Islands. (And if serious gentrifying ever begins in the old city it’ll be in Samatya and Kumkapı and Fener and Balat; I wouldn’t put any big money into Çarşamba just yet.) If young Turks are fighting to preserve the cosmopolitan character of areas made cosmopolitan by a Greek presence, among others, is it a recognition of that presence, however vestigial, that I want? Yes. Is it because some recognition might assuage some of the bitterness of the displacement? Perhaps. Is the feeling proprietary then? Does the particular “cool” quality of these neighborhoods that protesters have been fighting to protect register for me as a form of appropriated “coolness?” I’m afraid that yes, sometimes it does. In darker moments this spring and summer, these Occupy Gezi kids annoyed me: “What’s wrong mes p’tits? The Big Daddy State threatening to break up your funky Beyoğlu party? Do you know the Big Daddy State made life so intolerable for the dudes who made Beyoğlu funky that they not only had to break the party up, but shut down shop altogether and set up elsewhere? That your own daddies and granddaddies probably stood by and watched, approved even? Do you know that now? Do you care?”
I not only love Maryanne Williamson, I took the slightly pretentious step of having the editorial board of the Jadde (me) endorse her for President. I wrote:
“…she [Williamson] gave a talk on the Triangle Factory Fire, Frances Perkins, Roosevelt,* the New Deal and how twentieth-century American prosperity, creativity, strength, and relative social justice were all born out of those individuals and phenomena that moved me to tears.“
Well, it wasn’t Maryanne Williamson; it was Elizabeth Warren, who I’m also a great fan of. Williamson has mentioned it on a couple of occasions, but not in a coherent passage the way Warren has several times, once in front of the arch in Washington Square Park, just two blocks from where the fire happened.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, on March 25th, 1911, occupies a weirdly vivid niche in my psyche. More than other New Yorkers? I dunno; I can only speak for myself. The sheer horror — girls in their teens having to choose between being burned alive and a jump to certain death — should be more than enough. And it always felt creepy to have class in what’s now NYU’s Brown building on the same floors where the factory was. Then, I didn’t hear anyone mention it at the time, but the parallels to 9/11 — innocent people trapped by death on both sides — made both events reciprocally more disturbing. It even raised the question of the daring and innovation that makes New York New York. Were both events punishment for some kind of hubris: building things too tall to escape from if you need to? I don’t really believe that there’s some cosmic force that actually punishes for that, but your mind wanders, in more archaic spaces…
Then the event chimes in, in a more than initially obvious way, with my deep intellectual and emotional engagement with Judaism. The victims were obviously not all Jews. And the women garment workers that had gone on strike less than two years before the fire to demand better working conditions were also not all Jewish. But the harshness and persecutions of life in Eastern Europe, the progressive impulses Jews had collectively developed in response to that harshness and injustice, the dislocation of immigration, and an America — but especially a New York — that was a receptive vehicle for that whole psychological complex, made them disproportionately important in the movement and the whole series of events.
The proposal for a general strike for all garment workers in 1909 at the main hall of Cooper Union was made by a frail, twenty-three-year-old seamstress, Clara Lemlich — in Yiddish**, and a response from the crowd was a little slow in coming because it first had to be translated into Italian and English. They were koritsakia, malaka; most had just come; they hadn’t even learned English yet. There’s a women’s organization — I dunno who — that goes around the East Village and Lower East Side on March 25th and writes the names of the victims in chalk on the sidewalks in front of the houses where they lived: on the same block, next door to each other some of them. The neighborhood must’ve felt its heart ripped out.
But when the response to Lemlich’s proposal was delivered, it was a resounding “YES!”. And Jews need to remember and be proud of the fact that they’ve been over-represented ever since in every progressive movement that made America — but especially New York — what it became in the 20th century.
It gets a little more intense. Because March 25th, the day of the fire, is also the day when another brave young Jewish girl exercised her God-given free will and said “yes” to God and changed the course of history and human civilization. And that also weirds me out. I might be sounding like a little child here: but why didn’t she do anything to help them? The Mother? The archetype of Christian compassion? On that day that celebrates her own courage?
And more. March 25, 1944 was the day the Germans rounded up the Jews of my mother’s hometown, Jiannena, including her best friend, Esther Cohen, and sent them on the road to certain death at Auschwitz. And no, there were no righteous Gentiles to help, just Greek police collaborators. And just the German psychopaths, who diverted men and resources from the eastern front that had collapsed already the previous year, just to make sure and clean up the lands they already knew they had lost of any Jews. It’s incomprehensible. Oh, and they made sure they took detailed archival photos of the operations at the same time. Ψυχοπαθείς… *** And if I were sure they were totally cured…
A woman weeps during the deportation of the Jews of Ioannina on March 25, 1944.
We’re entering a kinda Jungian territory of synchronicity here, but maybe I made this big gaffe on Rosh Hashanah for a reason. Let my endorsement of Williamson extend to Warren too, oh, and, of course, BernieSanders, who was probably at that Cooper Union meeting. Because this first day of 5780 is as good as any to declare the three of them vehicles of Tikkun and use that inspiration to do what we can to get Haman out of the White House and bring the republic back to righteousness.
* These were αριστοκράτες — the Roosevelts, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, however sleazy their origins and the origins of their wealth — true aristocrats — which is a word that I think Williamson uses in a slightly warped and unuseful way. People who understood that their station implied obligation and not just privilege. One of our emperors — unfortunately I can’t remember who; it wasn’t Basil I but it may have been one of the other Macedonians or the Comnenoi, said, and I’m paraphrasing: “Σήμερον ουκ εβασίλευσα διότι ουκ ευεργέτησα.” “Today I did not reign because I did nothing of benefit.” “ευεργέτησα” is a many-layered but not tricky word. It means “to benefact”. “I didn’t deserve to be called basileus today because I did nothing: to benefit my people, to glorify God, to strengthen my City or my State.” These people — the Roosevelts, Perkins — knew they had duties too. And the not always morally spotless “benefactor” millionaires of the 19th and 20th century Greek diaspora knew they had duties too. Not only to make more money for themselves but to help build and cement the institutions of the new state. Not like the sleazy, ship-owning mafia of Greece today. Which not a single Greek politician has the balls to put forth policy that would tax them.
** This is just one thing that makes Yiddish, along with Neapolitan and Caribbean Spanish, one of New York’s three sacred languages.
*** Jiannena has, however, become a very hip, progressive and (always) lovely university town. And last year, it voted in the first Jewish mayor in Greek history; out of about 30 Jews that are left from a pre-war 5,000 — one is now mayor of Jiannena. More on the city’s transformation, and the continuity with its past as a prosperous center of the Greek Enlightenment, in another post.
P.S. It was Frances Perkins, who Warren speaks of and the woman who, as the first female cabinet member in American history, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, put the whole causal string together. She said: “The New Deal began on March 25th, 1911, the day the Triangle Factory burned.”
And P.P.S. Let’s not forget that today those factories are in Malaysia and Honduras.
And P.P.P.S. “Volume Four of Ric Burns’ monumental New York: A Documentary Film is probably the most stirring visual treatment of all of the above. Get your hands on it if you get a chance. Amazon’s got in on Prime.”
Didn’t know there was any left. The still great institution, Village Voice, has excellent piece on the city’s attempts to use zoning to keep manufacturers in “EAST” Williamsburg.
Tahini pours into tins stamped with Joyva’s signature sultan logo. Gwynne Hogan
See article by Gwynne Hogan. “East” kind of perplexed me though, since it’s kind of joining in on the gentrification process by using the name; there was never an “East” Williamsburg until Williamsburg itself got so hipster-saturated that realtors decided they’d call an adjacent ‘hood “East Williamsburg” because that would be a greater draw than calling it what it really was and is: Bushwick. Same happened at some point much earlier when realtors decided that part of the Lower East Side north of Houston would be called the East Village, because LES wasn’t cool yet and still reeked a little bit of schmaltz.
There were three Williamsburgs actually: the far southern Hasidic parts, south of the bridge; the also “south” streets that were solidly Puerto Rican and are now mixed Rican and Dominican — what Nuyoricans call “los sures”; both of these are still pretty much intact socially, especially the Hasidim. The third was the heavily Italian-American “northside,” which went from being a working-class neighborhood of the kind that New York — if any place in the United States — definitively does not have any more, through a middle period where it was a kinda old-immigranty, romantically dead waterfront zone, mixed with slight funkiness and bars you had to know in order to find, say, like Galapagos, to what it is now: the single most obnoxious neighborhood in New York.
I doubt Bushwick is safe from a comparable plague, no matter what the city has planned. To seriously fuck with the real estate industry is political suicide in New York.
I don’t know how or why Williamsburg and Bushwick were so food-oriented. I still remember being hit by the whiff of herring, bread and sweet-candiness as you crossed the Kosciuszko (pronounced “Kasi-as-ko” in Boroughese) in from Queens on the BQE.
Workers at Joyva’s confectionary plant in East Williamsburg, which may relocate after 99 years to take advantage of soaring real estate values. Gwynne Hogan
ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA PARINI; ANIMATION BY JOSE LORENZO
“In Lahore, I was neither a student nor someone with a regular job. And so, as I went about writing my books and seeing my friends and helping raise our children, I was newly free to travel. We spent months abroad. When a friend in New York left his apartment for the summer, we took it. And slowly my ache diminished. It seemed I had been thinking about my problem in the wrong way. Whether to live in Lahore or New York was an impossible question. How to live so I could spend meaningful time in both was not. Journeying between them was my answer. [my emphasis] It remains my answer, even as the dread of a possible travel ban floats somewhere out there, waiting like a spider on the edge of my delicate web.”
Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus, Levant and rest of ME, Iran, South Asia
Me, I'm Nicholas Bakos, a.k.a. "NikoBako." I'm Greek (Roman really, but when I say that in English some five people in the world today understand what I'm talking about, so I use "Greek" for shorthand). I'm from New York. I live all over the place these days. The rest should become obvious from the blog.
“European colonisation put an abrupt end to political experiments towards a more equal, diverse and ecumenical Arab world”
Mulberry street, c. 1900 — “Density, up-close, claustrophobic even; maddening; density is the essence of a city like New York.”
A woman weeps during the deportation of the Jews of Ioannina on March 25, 1944. 
Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 