Most of what I know about Turkish culture I learned from my Greek friends

I am endlessly fascinated by the uneasy fit between culture and political boundaries, and people's stubborn determination to fill those boundaries with coherent, self-adhesive stuff.

Orhan Osman, who was born in Greece and now lives in Turkey, seems a good vehicle for my weighty thoughts. I'm not a huge fan, but I love this song, a remake of an old rembetika tune. I have a version recorded in the 1920s by the great Roza Eskenazi, a Sephardic Jew born in Istanbul who sang in Greek, Turkish, Armenian, Ladino, and even Yiddish, I think. Rembetika music is all about getting high, getting into fights, and getting laid, which is why it's called the Greek blues. (Ime Prezakias means "I'm a junkie.") Mostly, the drug songs are about hash, but some of them sing about smack and cocaine too. Like this one:

He's singing how this Moroccan princess has fallen in love with him. (Why a Moroccan princess would be hanging out in Piraeus, he doesn't say.) She says she'll make him a king in Arabia and give him wagonloads (camel-loads?) of hash and cocaine. And there'll be lots and lots of hookahs.

Rembetika is Greek music, but very Turkish, especially in the 1920s and 30s. For example, Ime Prezakias is a tsifte telli, or, in the Turkish way, cifte telli: a Turkish dance rhythm that's particularly friendly to belly-dancing. More fundamentally, the whole culture of rembetika reflects life in the multicultural Ottoman cities of Constantinople/Istanbul and Smyrna/Izmir. In 1923, in an attempt to make national boundaries make sense, ethnic Greeks were expelled from the newly formed Turkish Republic and vice versa. Many of the Greek rembetes and rembetisses emigrated to the homeland they'd never seen then, bringing their decadent Ottoman ways with them. The refugees weren't especially welcome in Greece. They settled in port cities like Piraeus and Thessaloniki and became manges, outlaw types who scorned conventional society, especially jobs and cops. In Greece, rembetika was played mainly in jails, hash dens, and brothels. Early rembetika is sometimes sung in Turkish; there are songs like "The Dervish's Broad"; and it has a distinctly Middle Eastern sound to it. More musically literate folk than I could explain why, but you can hear what I mean.

Marika Kanaropoulou, who was born in Bursa, was also known as Tourkalitsa, little Turkish girl. And now, some notes from two of my favorite diasporas.

Migrations, expulsions, exile: they keep culture moving. If you've ever seen the magnificent Latcho Drom, you know exactly what I mean. "Hicaz Dolop Rom" is from a Turkish gypsy ensemble featured in the film. I don't know much about Turkish gypsies, but, on the whole, gypsies don't seem to do well in other people's countries. Which means all of them. And then, there's the Jews. Uskudar is a suburb of Istanbul today, but was originally a town near the old Jewish district of Kuzguncuk. A taxim, or taqsim, is a highly formalized kind of improv, and if I had the Naftule Brandwein version of "Terk in Amerike" you'd be hearing clarinet magic. But I have to buy food for my kid, so I can't buy so many CDs. And Metropolitan Klezmer isn't bad, as new klezmer goes.

People of the world, my apologies: Blogger doesn't let us do accents or diacritics.

Go to Calabash and check out their stuff; highly recommended.

I have a Turkish friend who, when he's not complaining about other things, complains that the only ideas Yanks have about Turkey are 1) that it's in the Middle East and 2) that there may or may not be camels there. (There are. See?*) But a country is so much more than its livestock, isn't it? Turkey has a Nobel Laureate, so apparently it has some sort of civilization. And with Pope Ratzinger having public flashbacks of the Crusades, it seems like a good time to do a little Turkish-conscious-raising among my fellow Americans.

Despite Europe's god-given victory at the Battle of Tours, most of the continental periphery has been tarred with the Islamic brush. The Ottomans, like the Byzantines before them, ruled most of Eastern Europe; they were also, if indirectly, responsible for the world domination of the brass band. The Ottoman Janissaries, elite troops recruited by a slave tax of nubile Christian youths, brought their own theme music with them to dazzle their enemies: military bands that marched ahead of the troops. The colonized Balkans translated this into their local idiom, the brass band, which eventually spread from Eastern Europe to New Orleans and points beyond. But that's a whole other post.

I guess, from a certain point of free sex cams view, "Bratislava" isn't authentic; it's the work of this 19-year-old New Mexico wunderkind and a couple of his indie-rock pals. I don't care about that. I fell in love with Beirut over the summer and this song is Balkan brass beautifully done. And "Baym Rebns Sude" ("Dinner with the Rabbi") is brass done klezmer style, based on the Russian army versions of the Janissary bands. My daughter and I used to play this tune in the car on the way to school every day, at her request. Marching music is good for mornings, gets the day started right. She also likes the Nil Karaibrahimgil cut. If I spoke Turkish, I'd probably be too snotty to listen to the song; it seems, well, poppy. Linguistic barriers are sometimes freeing, no? Me, I'm really digging Baba Zula, or BaBa ZuLa, as they seem to call themselves. I guess a bunch of songs on Duble Oryantal (like "I Think I'm Pregnant") were banned from Turkish Radio and Television. Which makes me kind of wish I knew what they were talking about.

Listen, people: I know not everyone has my tolerance for wild baglama solos and minor mode melisma so I've tried to keep it lively today. Tomorrow I'll get a little folkier as we view Turkey through the eyes of various despised minorities.

Careful readers will note that the camels Salon describes are actually imported from Iran. Camels are not native to Turkey, but are available to tourists seeking picturesque Oriental excursions.

A reader from Istanbul writes: "The song is a celebration of Istanbul's ethnic and religious diversity. He names most of the groups living there, and calls the city a rainbow of jasmin live peoples, condemning a history of violence against minorities."

I was rocking proto-bogan garage anthems all day at work

Then I found some YouTube videos. Then I figured I'd throw it all up on Moistworks with no rhyme or reason and in doing so, realized the frightening and amazing connectedness of it all.

The Saints....

...need no introduction for you early-punk tramspotters. Nor does the compilation-happy "(I'm) Stranded." But have you seen the video? How brilliantly un-punk seems Chris Bailey. Dude looks more like a movie theater usher. And did you buy 2005's superb Nothing Is Straight In My House? It's impossible to believe that nearly 3 decades gone by from a ragged, firm-prostate kicker like "Porno Movies."

The Victims...

...were a short-lived 3 piece punk band from Perth. Victim James Baker went on to become a founding member of...

The Scientists...

...who gained swamp-rock fame in the 80s under the leadership of Australia's godfather of grunge, Kim Salmon. If the surfy thumping of "Swampland" reminds you of...

The Hoodoo Gurus...

...it's because the original Gurus included fellow Scientists James Baker and Rod Radalj as well as Baker's former Victim bandmate Dave Faulkner. The Hoodoo Gurus knocked out masterful pop harmonies in their sleep. But they were a garage surf-rock band at heart. And the OG Oz kings of garage surf-rock were...

Radio Birdman...

I've written about RB and Deniz Tek before. (I think you can still download the smashing track by TV Jones, Tek's pre-Birdman group.) Great video of going Hawaii 5-OMG! Fellow Birdman Rob Younger moonlighted as a producer for a ton of influential Oz bands, including Lime Spiders and Died Pretty and...

The Stems...

Another Perth garage band in love with the New York sound, though dialing the clock back even further in this live sex video. And Died Pretty frontman Ron Peno co-wrote "Igloo" by...

The Screaming Tribesmen...

...that will make you ask yourself, "How great are Husker Du?" and "What the hell did the shoeshine boy say to you?"

Pure nostalgia today, folks

My friend, my best friend, was just explaining to me how every guy I've ever dated was secretly gay and it reminded me of my first years in Chicago, back when I was a lonely virgin. I had an unerring eye for sensitive boys from French class, all of whom wound up coming out to me over romantic candlelight dinners. But they liked to dance and so did I, and we spent many wasted weekends shivering on the el platform on our way to Medusa's, this juice bar near Clark & Belmont that played lots of goth industrial, stuff like Sisters of Mercy and Front 242 and, of course, Ministry, the local godhead. Oddly, the place was filled with sailors most weekends, which was to none of our tastes. But after midnight, they'd start jamming the house music. By that time, the fuzzy navels we'd drunk in the dorm room had started to wear off, but we were loose and in the groove. And they'd always kick off the house set with Rob Base. So if you were flagging upstairs, trying to muster some enthusiasm for the 10,000th spin of "Bizarre Love Triangle," when you heard that yelp (yeah! whoo!), which I didn't know then was a James Brown sample, you'd bust it downstairs to jack your body with the Navy boys and the Wisconsin girls who'd driven in for a big-city weekend.

And these guys could MOVE: my friend Chris could snake it down to the floor like he didn't have any bones in his body. At 17, I was incredibly self-conscious. I'd always been large and sort of clumsy (a charming nickname was "megaton") and I thought of my body as something potentially dangerous to innocent bystanders, myself included. But I'm also competitive, and I wasn't going to be outdone by a bunch of skinny boys. I learned to feign total confidence and take the floor like I meant it and they'd be egging me on: Work it, girl!

At some point, we discovered that gay bars could be extraordinarily lax in carding cute young boys. We started hanging out at this place, Windy City, which was like the gay bar for the rest of us. Not everyone had a sixpack; not everyone had rhythm. There'd be lots of guys in jeans and white sneakers, incredibly average-looking, waving their hands in the air like they just didn't care. I was usually the only natural-born woman in the whole damn place, which was fantastically liberating. No one was checking me out. No one cared what I did. And we could drink. So that's when I learned all my ultra-nasty moves. My friend Bill would be spanking my ass, I'd be humping his leg, and it was all just playing around. Try pulling that off with one of the sailors.

One night we took a road trip to St. Louis and went to a gay bar down there. We were upstairs checking out the drag show and all these men kept coming up to me, telling me how beautiful I was. I was drunk with compliments. But as we were coming downstairs, this truly gnarly queen poked me in the chest, yelling nasally, "Omigod! He's pretty!" My friends thought this was hilarious and I was reliving that moment for the next two years of college. They even gave me a drag name, Cafe au Lait, which I spelled Cafe Ole for added flair. That moment became the metonym for all of my ambivalence about being a woman. I always felt kind of like a drag queen when I dressed up in girl clothes. Girl clothes were for 120-pound nymphets and I was Megaton, Godzilla's annoying Jewish aunt.

Eventually, I realized that hanging out at gay bars was not going to get me laid. I started hanging out with the indie-rock crowd, which was much less, uh, colorful and often downright phobic. My friends were disappointed in me. They wanted me to cuten myself up, get out of the combat boots. I got political and they were bored by my manifestoes. And so, we just drifted apart. I haven't seen those guys in years. It's funny to think that I learned everything I know about vamping and tramping from a bunch of gay guys. Maybe it explains some things.