Melodramas are the filmic equivalent to country or arabesque music- they have a history of being stubbornly dismissed by the cultural elites who labeled them as sentimental and fatalistic trash for the simple and stupid people, and intolerably inferior to arthouse. This closed-minded understanding of arthouse cinema was temporarily exposed and suspended when Danish director …
All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. -Travis Bickle The New York of Travis Bickle, Stanley Kubrick and Roman Polanski is real- Byzanz 2.0, a modern Moloch/Metropolis literally build on …
Kilink, the Turkish super villain in a skeleton suit, who was inspired by the Italian comic hero Killing, who again was inspired by the other Italian superhero Kriminal, opens the long series of Kilink installments (11 in total*) with this blockbuster cult movie of Turkish cinema. The film’s synopsis reads like this: „Kilink visits Istanbul …
The civilization of the modern West appears in history as a veritable anomaly: among all those which are known to us more or less completely, this civilization is the only one that has developed along purely material lines, and this monstrous development, whose beginning coincedes with the so-called Renaissance, has been accompanied, as indeed it …
I’m not here to be the light for anybody’s darkness- I’m burning for my own pleasure. Ibrahim Tatlises Every country has its Pavarotti, although not all of them are necessarily shining in posh opera houses. Having the same voice range as the heavy, scarfed tenor from Modena, Ibrahim Tatlıses can certainly be labeled the Turkish …
Just let me forget and die The Simple Minds are an easy target, because their essence and typical audience is already manifested within their bandname: it’s mind-numbing music for simple minds. But this band and its pathetic tunes show a shockingly frequent recurrence in my life, which I do not understand- but it fucks me …
How the Soul of Anatolian Rock Ended up Making the Greatest German Protest Record Constructing a daydream often starts with the same setting: I’m in a stripped down universe that must be close to the gates to heaven due to its bright nebula of bliss, and I have to give an angelic answer to a …
Forget Kraftwerk and Can, because here they are: DAF (Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft), the most exciting and influental German band of all times, with the second of their golden run of four albums*: Alles ist Gut (1981) – a unique marriage of sex and totalitarian attitude that remains timeless and fascinating to this day. DAF is a …
Ritterstrasse – a magical place for Colognian record collectors, because it is the name of a small street in whose horizontal vanishing point lies the majestic Cologne Cathedral, and a street that also houses 4 directly adjacent independent record stores, with another big corporate one in direct sight at the end of the road. You …
Our insular existences do not allow us to grasp all the wonders of this big, wide world, and know about all the many facets beyond regional stereotypes and canons. Facets that present themselves as phenomena in our perception, but are equal expressions of the soul of a nation. Few outside of Turkey will know that …
