Radar Live

Seeing that other blogs such as the City on Earth have covered it, I felt obliged to post about the recent Radar Live festival that took place in the Black-Sea coast village of Kilyos. This was by far the largest of the recent series of Turkish camp-in music festivals, with a line-up including Marilyn Manson, Juliette Lewis and a shitload of other artists I've never heard of. Here is a shot from the hour-and-a-half long drive from the City to the festival, as we pass through Byzantine aqueducts that still carry water.

My friend Derya was waiting patiently at the entrance for a free ticket, while I dished out the equivalent of €45 for two days of concerts. Damn.

Captive audience: Entranced with the artists, she did not notice the impending shutter... of Memo Pervert Style!

I don't know how our children will be able to forgive the current trend of enormous, bug-eyed glasses. My friend Ayşe and distant relative Gözde are waiting for their boyfriends to replenish their beers.

... One of the visions that greeted electronica fans at the festival's techno stage / chill out lounge next to the beach. These are my friends Burcu and Inci.

While all of this was going on, this daddy-longlegs spider (family Pholcidae, possibly Pholcus phalangioides) was happily sitting on its web in the men's room, completely oblivious to the carnage of music and hominid sexuality around it.

Who will take them home? For those who didn't sleep over in the festival's tent city, the hours-long trip back home was particularly arduous. I still find it preferrable to a night in the tents.

Onwards with day two! This monday's Marilyn Manson concert was the climax of the four-day-long event, and attendance was in record levels. To complicate things further, the take-off site of the festival shuttle was blocked to all traffic due to a meeting organized to remember the victims of the Sivas massacre in 1993.

This sad event took place when religious fundamentalists burned thirty seven poets, singers, writers and artists alive during a cultural festival in the eastern Anatolian city of Sivas. Fourteen years on, no one's getting burned alive and many young people have sadly forgotten this tragedy. I took this picture as the festival crowd was made to walk about two miles through abandoned streets to an alternative pickup point. I also wanted to slap some young punks who kept complaining about "that stupid protest" that "ruined their day."

Young Mansonites: Three fans are waiting for the bus to arrive. Are they discussing who's more hardcore?

Young Mansonites: A pubescent couple whining about the heat and the Sivas protests. If they only knew...

Young Mansonites: Fashion and alt-culture spreads in waves, like a stone tossed into a pond. The early-2000's wave of gothic platform boots has only hit Turkey recently.

Oops, the water is too cold to swim! No problem, I'll just kick around and flail my arms up and down like a baby! My friend Sila took these photos.

The rest of the festival was fun, but exhausting. Especially those who tried to "sleep over" in flimsy tents found themselves exposed to extremes of heat, cold, hunger and drugs for four days. This guy was probably in the deepest sleep (or coma) of his life.

What will... become of us? Tired party people at the last day of the festival. The events ended in a chaos of organization, no one new where to go, or how. Still, except for the poignant co-incidence with the Sivas events, I really had a nice time.