London Graffiti

With bookstore shelves bending under the weight of crappy "world-graffiti" books and a search for "Old Street graffiti" turning up more than 300.000 hits, presenting this post on London's graffiti artists loads me with a certain level of populist guilt. Nevertheless, here are some pictures from that city's bohemian center, Old Street.

Above, you can see a statement and counter-statement played out by nameless stencil and marker artists.

"B," on the other hand, is an artist who has traveled to London all the way from Greece. I was familiar with this artist's trademark style since my last survey of Athenian street art.

I don't know if this was intended as street art or an ultra avant-garde poster for a show or a concert.

Stencils...

...as well as political pieces are quite common.

While in London, I "discovered" a certain street artist named Natty, obviously a twist on the famous and overblown Banksy. He (or she,) places one such signature beneath each and every one of his works.

There's one. This was one of the most atypical of the "Natty" works and might not even belong to the same artist.

That's more like it.

This one might also belong to someone else...

Why do I have to write a particular comment for every piece? It's just graffiti!

Again, by "Natty." Pictures like these sure look good, but they are among the most shallow forms of human expression when it comes to original subjects. Sticking it up to the man, yeah. I wonder when street art will focus on works created purely for wonder and joy, instead of contrived attempts to "protest" something.

A Giant Scarab

I found this giant scarab beetle outside my house last week, shortly after a freak summer rain.

This was not the first time I'd found horned scarabs outside my garden, but this particular beetle was probably the largest I've ever seen.

So heavy! The giant scarab compared to my hand. I think this is something of the genus Orcytes, perhaps even an O. nasicornis like the one I'd found before, only a female. Of course, one can never be too certain...

The Nightlife of Bodrum, Again

After my last post about Bodrum, here is a a follow-up on certain aspects of the nightlife of the ever-popular holiday location.

A detailed discussion of Bodrum's thousands of bars and clubs, of course, will be patently impossible and pretty boring. Instead I want to tell you about the places that mattered to me, my close friends and the 1000-2000 other young people that frequent them.

This, for example, is the infamous BBC club, the only place that played rock and alternative during my adolescence in the early 2000s.

We were struck down with grief when the old BBC closed down to become one of the omnipresent "holiday discos" found throughout Bodrum. In 2007, however, it reopened as a rock bar, with the original trashy decoration meticulously "restored" to evoke the old days. However, people had moved on...

...to other places, Bodrum's labyrinthine streets among them. Here is my brother and his friends during last year.

They were busy preparing and drinking vast amounts of a notorious concoction called "Karışım," which was made out of beer, wine, vodka and tequila, among other things. Naturally disgusted by alcohol, I could only fathom one sip - which tasted like stale oil.

If the streets are not to your liking, you can always try the real bars that lie around Bodrum's landmark castle.

The first, and the most popular of these is called Körfez, which is always crowded to the brink and has not updated its playlist of songs since 1999.

These factors, however, do not deter people from having a good time, as this couple I shamelessly spied on can attest.

Other good places to go apart from Körfez include the newly-opened Tower,

...and the ever popular Adamik. If you spend your holidays in Bodrum, chances are your nights will be spent tracing infinite triangles between these three bars, and... nowhere else!

All of these pictures were taken last year. I wonder what this summer will bring? By the way, this is not my first post on Bodrum's nightlife. Check this out for the last report!

At Bodrum

With summer in full swing, I, like many other people in Turkey, am having daydreams about being in Bodrum, the country's Mediterranean glory hole.

As things are, I am not in Bodrum yet. So here is a selection from last summer; a collection of rare sights from the convoluted (and vomit-stained) alleys of that beautiful holiday town.

Tequila shots costing as little as 2 Euros are advertised on this beautifully hand-drawn street sign. You guessed it right, a lot of drinking goes on in Bodrum.

This handwritten ad, on the other hand, seems to be composed by the screenwriters of Borat. "We also Happy here, Bodrum Turkey OK ENJOY TIME!!!"

Moving on to more serious, but no less interesting things, this mural shows Nazım Hikmet, the celebrated leftist-romantic poet. As with many other liberal places in Turkey, Bodrum has a local political stance that combines leftist ideals with...

...a frenzied love for the nation and its leader, Atatürk. A pretty weird and sometimes ungainly combination, but it works well enough to guarantee a liberal, secular lifestyle. The place seen here is the Bodrum branch of the Turkish War Veterans Association.

Multi-Lingual Street Signs

Istanbul is getting to be such a cosmopolitan (!) city that even the warning signs for rubbish dumpers are getting subtitled in English.

At Riddim Bar

Nope, these are not scans from one of H.R. Giger's amazing books.

"If not, then what?" You might ask. Well, these pictures are all on walls.

And the walls belong to one of Istanbul's largest and oldest rock bars, Kemancı.

These murals were painted here by one of the students of Galip Tekin, one of Turkey's most famous fantastic comic artists, who ran this place as a "hobby." Some hobby!

Kemancı used to cover three whole floors, with different concerts and music on each. These intricately copied paintings decorate the stairs between different floors.

They are all reproductions, but these pictures were so good that a local legend soon grew, that Giger had painted them himself, and what's more, these pictures were the originals!

Of course, something later happened that put these images slightly out of context.

That "something" was R&B music. As hardcore rock and metal music lost its audience in Turkey to newer genres, Kemancı became an unsustainable venture. The establishment first sold one, then two, then all floors off to a new R&B club called Riddim.

In the initial days of this partition, a slight tension grew between the heavy metal fans and R&B revelers that went to the different clubs in the same building. The Kemanci crowd obviously hated losing ground to what they saw as their polar opposites and played only ultra-hard metal hits to annoy Riddim. This, of course, only hastened Kemanci's demise.

So now Kemanci is Riddim, and sizzling rap hits echo off the same walls that once rang with Metallica and Slayer. The beautiful pictures have been left untouched by Kemanci's new owners, so now people like me can enjoy the doubled pleasure of grinding with hot chicks while admiring quality reproductions of top fantastic artworks. Rock on!

Mystery Beetle

Sorry for the silent week, dear readers. I'm rather busy now on a new film project, and it is taking up all of my time. Still, here's a new post to keep you busy.

I saw this metallic green beetle in Old Street, London, on the day Turkey beat the Czech team in last month's Euro 2008 craze.

Although this critter looked like a Tiger Beetle with its large eyes and large-ish jaws, certain differences in its body and wings led me to think it was something else... but what?

I frankly do not know. Speaking of London and insects, however, one of my friends has also started a new photoblog about the invertebrates and other wonders she keeps finding in London and elsewhere. Please pay Fez's blog a visit!