7 posts tagged “weird”
These ne'er do wells were all over the town on my walk tonight.
Against my better judgment, I have bought a ridiculous number of tickets for the !F festival. But so far I haven’t regretted it. On Saturday, I saw three films, including the touchingly rendered and exquisitely shot Zoo, which premiered at the last Sundance. Zoo is a documentary retelling of the people involved in the farm in Washington State where a man was killed after being penetrated by a horse in 2005 (see this article from Seattle’s The Stranger). Admittedly, I was drawn to this film for the gross-out factor. But it was a feast for the eyes, with night shots of orchards in bloom and majestic mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
Perhaps the film I am most excited about plays tomorrow: My Winnipeg by Guy Madden. I was won over to Madden with his silent film Cowards Bend the Knee, which I watched three times in one day last year. All in all, I am scheduled to see eight films over the course of the week. It’s so much fun, especially because I almost never visit the cinema in Philadelphia. I will also be fun to go to the queer party sponsored by the festival on Friday. It is being DJ-ed by the venerable Lady Miss Kier, who sang for Dee-Lite in the 90s. Groove will indeed be in the heart this weekend.
My adopted Turkish sister and almost look-alike (if you really need glasses) is the director of !F, the coolest film festival in Turkey. !F is the abbreviation for the Istanbul International Independent Film Festival, and it starts today. Tonight I am going to see the new David Lynch film with a friend before heading to the festival opening party. My friend pointed out that Lynch’s films have been getting crazier and crazier over the years, so we can’t expect this one to make a lick of sense.
I accept the fact that Inland Empire will most likely be a bunch of shots of Laura Dern looking deranged, intercut with flowing velvet curtains and accompanied by molasses-slow atonal acid jazz. But isn’t this the whole reason for going? I don’t care so much if there is a discernable story as long as I leave with a creepy feeling.
I will admit that Lynch’s unquestioning support of the Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi and his cult transcendental meditation organization makes me love
him a little less. I mean, if I had the time to just meditate and film creepy
shit, I think I would be supporting people like Anna Politkovskaya and Arundhati
Roy rather than the Beatles’ old guru who runs his organization like a
bad-manimal-Rescaper (see the book listed at the right by Keller Easterling for
a chapter on the spatial projects of the TM organization.)
I can count this as a day that all of my dorkiness has finally paid off. Well, not in any monetary or important sense, but at least I can be smug. Today I was promoted from level 2 Turkish class to level 3. Having never really studied Turkish before coming, I will permit myself a secret inward smile to assuage my fears of running out of cash and having to sell my library books from the US on the streets of Istanbul. (Who am I kidding? No one wants to read books about waste disposal in the Caucuses except me.)
The downside of leaving my level 2 compatriots is that my current classmates are much less entertaining. They are all very nice, and probably good study partners, but they don’t fit into easy-to-mock stereotypes. Someone shed a tear for me here!
However, the new teacher is a blast. Today when we were learning what Carpetblogger calls “the gossip tense,” the teacher pointed to one middle-aged student and said: “He is learning Turkish because he left his wife in Bulgaria for a younger Turkish girlfriend. He wife doesn’t know about it, and he is maintaining a family in each country.” Then, pointing to another student she said, “I heard that he doesn’t tell people he is Italian because he hates the Italian people and is ashamed of his country.” To top it off, she was wearing a deliciously crazy outfit that was somehow a blend of Little Orphan Annie, Elaine Stritch, and an oompa loompa – and she pulled it off looking cute and professional. And the kicker: platform mary-janes. She is a force to be reckoned with. I can’t wait for tomorrow.
So, I have been fighting to stay healthy since I got to Turkey just under eleven days ago. At first, it was an ear infection that refused to go away with one round of antibiotics. Now, while halfway through the second treatment, I get a mean case of asthma that makes me just want to lie in bed and cough. This morning when I finally admitted to myself that it wasn’t going away on its own, I went to my stash of medicine only to find that my primary inhaler has somehow been misplaced/lost in one of the various places I’ve unpacked my bags. So I took the trolley down İstiklal Cd. to class instead of walking, and during the first break I headed to the pharmacy across the street. When they told me the price for the albuterol (said inhaler) I was sure I misheard them. I asked them to repeat the price three times. It was 6 ylt (about $5.50), and this was for the name brand medication. I was so incredulous, the pharmacists thought I was crazy until I explained to them that in the US I would need a doctor’s prescription and the drug would cost over $50.
This nice experience, coupled with the ease that I had getting more antibiotics for my ear (and the craziness of this), has made my boner for Turkish pharmacies swell to epic proportions.
For the last several days, I have been trying to find a gym near my place in Istanbul where I can try to counteract the effects that full-time studying has on my body. I have checked out the only two gyms in my part of town and they were both a) unimpressive and b) extremely expensive. I didn’t even bother looking into the decked out gyms in the luxury hotels nearby, where membership costs over $400/month. Can’t a guy find a place to get some exercise?
While looking for other potential gyms, I came across some pro-anabolic steroid group discussion threads lauding Istanbul for having all the “juice” you want, over the counter at low prices: see here and here. There are more threads about it if you can stomach poking around the 'roider site.
Are these two things related? Will I leave Turkey in the fall with bulging muscles and track marks? All this makes my eyes cross.
Some haircuts are such a bad idea that they need to be considered as affronts to goodwill and sensibility. Of course, being the man that I am, when I encounter said haircuts I am simultaneously attracted and disgusted.
A popular style among kırolar* here in Istanbul involves the hair from mid-skull forward being gelled against the skull and combed to the front, the hair on the sides and back gelled down and combed towards the neck, and the hair on the skull crown (the area that a yarmulke would cover) being gelled straight up. There is really no good way to describe this that will have the full effect of seeing it for yourself.
I think that a good name for this ‘do would be the slickprick on account of its ability to seem both greasy-flat and pointy-hard, all the while looking wholly ridiculous. It also aptly describes the type of guy who would proudly wield this amount of product in his mane. I hereby announce a contest for everyone to send in pictures of yourself sporting a slickprick. The winner gets a special snail-mail card from Istanbul.
Sometimes I think that the amount of money spent on hair-sculpting products (for men) exceeds that spent on housing.
*Kıro = A Turkish mix between a guido/jock and a punk-for-fashions-sake poseur.
