Aside from the points of the story that we touched in as a group, there are two moments in particular that i want to pause on, (re)consider.
1. We hear about the red car from Arturo Manzana, another fixture of the city. My mind, when he mentions it, flickers to the main street in Taksim, Istiklal Caddessi, and the “Tram”: A Red Car, appropriated in kitschy keepsake art as symbol of urban Istanbul, at once nostalgic and indicative of the city’s urban-ness.
When we are still in the beginning of the story—Morales (Morality figment) has just questioned the main Apple—when Arturo takes the A streetcar.
The experience embeds so much.
The experience of the urban transcends the flaneur’s distanced observance. Something about public transportation stuffed full of the sounds the noise of people, music.
As Arturo speaks, the scene flickers back again, the metros, streetcars, Taksim, Şişhane, music.
We were interested, last week, in how it is possible to love another culture, implicitly, how to know another culture.
Music is a great mystery, I think: indeed, we have far less sound-specific adjectives for the intangible phenomena of sounds than we do for the visible and the touchable; the description of sound, like taste, tends to borrow adjectives from these two other senses: soft, textural, blue, bright. Or from affect: sweet, sad, angry, harsh, passionate. Arturo describes the Harmon’s as effecting “elegance and refined melancholy.”
Music does something fantastic, simultaneously affecting psyche, cognitions, sensorial.
Arturo sings sin ti, elegant, melancholic, refined, residues of Big Red Cars and Fellow Musicians—jazz Filipino dance halls boogie boys mariachis—and the strange suffocating combination of oppression (curfew, later, we learn, combined resistances) and vivacity still on the palette.
And I flicker backwards again.
In a café owned by a family of Georgian musicians, with their instruments strung up all on the walls and lying on a table here or there, and Oktay’s brother(-in-law? or cousin? or…?) and his sons or someone else’s sons smoking and playing football outside, and Oktay telling me carefully at first but with growing conviction of the fascism of Erdoḡan, and this one time as I’m sitting there reading about Medieval Turks, the Mother and daughters(in-law?) are singing around a table and playing their instruments, with so much laughter and such beautiful harmony, the two of the kids join and suddenly they are all up on their feet in that tiny cafe of theirs, laughing and dancing with stomping feet…
how do you fall in love with someone else’s culture?
another night, in Kafka’s Cafe, this time i’m reading about Byzantium. In the over-cushioned room, only two other girls. Their Turkish turns high-pitched and fragmented by their overpowering laughter—tears cascading, sides clutched, they are quite literally rolling around in laughter, as I sit in a purple armchair not reading about Byzantium.
each time the stones of the pavement rising up before me, ready to catch my face on their creviced crystalline planes. each time, the Red Car. and the soundscape of Istiklal Caddessi throwing a different tune to you from a different street musician every twenty feet.
how do you fall in love with a place that's not yours?
~~~~~~~~
2. Sin ti.
The strange ubiquity of pop sentiment. Its strange resonance.
Without you,
what else could I care for?
if that what makes me cry
is far away from here.
Without you,
there is no mercy for my pain,
the hope of my love, at last
you are taking it away.
Without you,
it is useless to live,
as useless it will be
wanting to forget you.
To read this as though I’m reading poetry rather that to hear this within the familiar confines of a musical type is astonishing.
Arturo:
"The poetry is simple, the sentiment is common. But there is the art! Effortless, comfortable, each thought set before the listener like pearls strung into a necklace by the hands of a beautiful woman, one by one."
how do you fall in love?
