Ayran in Adana.
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things of interestFollowing
Ayran in Adana.
This sugarless Turkish gum thing tastes of nothing. It’s basically like chewing gum that you’ve chewed for too long.
this deserves to be reposted here
My good pal co-directed this film and has only three days left to raise the money to finish it in time for the Los Angeles Film Festival. Please consider donating if you can! Thanks!!
“Cats purr during both inhalation and exhalation with a consistent pattern and frequency between 25 and 150 Hertz. Various investigators have shown that sound frequencies in this range can improve bone density and promote healing.”
So a friend of mine is involved with planning a conference investigating this question of praxis and theory. I was reading the call for papers again today and realized how much this question really means to me and the basic problems i’ve been running up against in various professionalizing situations that seem to depend, either implicitly or explicitly, on the assumption that “thinking” and “doing” are two separate spheres that should be performed by different kinds of “professionals.” A very basic example is the way in which my film program, a very praxis-oriented one, kept “production” and “theory” very separate. There was a separate film studies major, and those students were never given the opportunity to collaborate with “production” students within the formal structure of the program. While collaborations did occur, they were rare, unfunded, and, quite frankly, not encouraged. Is there something within the training of a film scholar that makes her unable to make a film? Would she lose her position of objectivity were she ever to actually take part in the thing she studies? I found it strange that I had to choose between thinking and doing, and I still find it impossible to imagine that one could do one or the other solely!
Critique only serves to reinforce this dichotomy at times. You, the critic, are outside the thing being critiqued.
I have heard that this is more of an issue in the US, in a context where professionalization is narrower, more segmented, more specialized than in other places. I’m not sure how true this is, but it sounds probable enough.
Back when I lived in Flatbush, Brooklyn, this was my local grocery store. It was a bizarre place where every kind of product was emblazoned with a picture of a smiling cactus and the words “western beef”. Think of it as a low-rent trader joe’s. For some reason I decided to look it up today… evidently, their whole business plan is to set up in low-income areas and sell the “exotic fruits and vegtables… yucca, yampi, sapote…” that their customers like to buy. It was an intense place, the meat department spilling blood onto the sidewalk, the inside freezing cold like a warehouse, but it kept my roommate and I fed, for cheap. We cooked a lot, and though most of our meals consisted of rice and beans, I remember how shopping at Western Beef was kind of fun. We’d laugh at the sign depicting the little western beef cactus with a huge gleaming knife in its hand, pointing the way to the meat department. We’d check out the giant yucca and promise ourselves that next time we’d buy one and figure out how to make it. We’d pool our meager resources and figure out how we’d stretch them until the end of the week. It wasn’t until I moved back to LA that I realized how much better the whole fruit and vegetable situation is here. Still, I have to admit a certain nostalgia for Western Beef and am glad it was there for us.
View across the Bosphorus, as seen from Topkapi Palace. Istanbul: August 2008.
The pleasure of afternoon tea. Cairo: December, 2008.
More Egypt nostalgia: cafe at the top of Jebel Musa, in the Sinai.
