Why the World Needs Graphic Designers

An international exposition on optic and ophthalmologic products is going to take place in Istanbul. The "solution?" Let's put a pissed-off looking gumball baby and frame it with a gay rainbow so that no connection to the subject can be made whatsoever! Fail.

Graffiti Bigotry

Racist graffiti in the streets of Galatasaray reflects the social tensions underlying Turkish society all too clearly.

I took the photo above at the end of last summer. Two days later, someone had sprayed over the offending slogan.

Clup Trend 99 Crazy Party

I found this bizarre ad for a new year's party at a certain "Club Trend 99 / Memoli" on the pavement during a stroll in the first morning of 2007. I really wondered what the "Karambol sokakların hızlı gençleri" (Fast lads from chaotic streets!) were all about. What was DJ Ferdi's music like?

Then again, after seeing the 10ytl (5 Euros,) price tag, (which, for a New Year's event, is so cheap that it feels like there has to be something wrong with the deal,) I was glad that I left this mystery unsolved.

Blammo!

Blammo! Blammo! Blammo! It's the ONLY WAY! I see street-art as an overblown phenomenon that has more in common with dogs urinating to mark their territories rather than with art, creativity and self-expression.

That being said, I also like preparing my own street-art stickers and pasting them around. Here is a new one, named Blammo. You can still see some of these stickers in select corners around Istanbul, Bodrum and London.

One final riddle, can YOU guess what on Earth Blammo is? Enjoy!

At "Teras Büklüm"

Now it can be told: Here is a selection of pictures, going all the way back to 2004, of a particular crash pad that was very popular among certain youths in Ankara, my friends among them.

"Teras Büklüm," as it was called, was one of the innumerable places to hang out and drink in the drawn-out and boring weekend nights of the Turkish capital. A rooftop flat now abandoned by its owners, the only way to access it was to creep up silently through the apartment building and again, silently unlock and climb through a window leading up to its balcony. That famous window is seen in the first picture of this post. Here is what the flat looked like from the inside.

Now decorated all over with graffiti, Teras Büklüm had passed through its heyday in the mid-to-late nineties, when its owner was still living there and was throwing legendary house parties almost daily.

Here is the "living room" overlooking a beautiful vista of Ankara. The faint red glow seen from the right-hand window is Anıtkabir, the tomb of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Much fun was had in front of this regal view, as the beer bottles littering the floor can attest.

A bizzare collection of objects still remained in the house, including a broken-down old radio, a bird's cage, a smashed guitar and perplexingly, a pair of jeans. I wonder who took it off, and why?

A detailed view of the layers of graffiti covering the main window.

The fanciful "Büklüm Club" sign was overlaid with faded lines of song lyrics and bad poetry.

A weird poem written on one of the doors read as:
No one tops you in making beauty ugly, in blaming the world for your fault. You knew the value for nothing, and you won't for me. You will ruin this too, certainly.
Note: A reader known as "Pınar" has warned me that this poem is actually a selection of lyrics by Teoman, a sex-obsessed Turkish pop star.

Here are some of the more interesting pictures we found on the walls. Here is a perplexing cube. But... it's also a lightbulb! Wow!

So hardcore!

This drawing, termed the "David Bowie" after the name of the song written next to it, was probably the most haunting image I came across in Teras Büklüm.

One really wonders the artists who painted these images, and their mind-states at the time.

And thus, with a peek at the Trainspotting-like toilet of Teras Büklüm, we finish our Tutankhamen-esque photo expedition of this wonderful place.

The last I visited this place was in a cold winter in 2006, two years after these photos were taken. The window had been smashed and then boarded up, making entry impossible for visitors. After that, rumors started that the entire building was to be demolished, but as far as I knew, nothing of this sort happened. I now have no idea what state Teras Büklüm is, since I haven't visited Ankara for more than two years.

Blowing Out the Candles

You might have noticed that I haven't posted anything for almost a month now, but don't worry - that is about to change as I have returned from my summer vacation. These pictures, on the other hand, have nothing to do with my summer.

These two sweet wall paintings are on the famous "Little Beyoglu" street in Pera. I have no idea who might have done these, but their level of sophistication is seldom matched in the streets of Istanbul.

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.

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!