After spending two confusing weeks in Istanbul, tortured by barely seeing what there was to see in the city, worn down but exhilarated by the sightseeing, pushing my way through crowds of tourists from all the weirdest edges of the earth, I found my moment of calm in Beyoglu, perhaps the most romantic part of Istanbul outside of Sultanahmet, where the ancient monuments were bunched up and nightlit and very proud. Beyoglu was easier on me because there were so many more nooks and crannies and as it was on a steep and winding hill, there were infinite steps up stairs and beautiful patterns in the night made by the lamps.
I was still bumping into tourists too, but there was something refreshing about being in the playground of the city, pressed in on the long pedestrian streets by the flood of people looking for something on a Friday night. How many faces would I never see again in my life for a second time? It was like being jostled around Paris or New York City for the first time.
I just like to wander through neighborhoods, it's a hobby I've always had. I like maps and streets and alleys. We went to Levent too, which was less romantic but interesting too, smoky and affluent and plagued with 12 lane traffic jams. The wealthy of Istanbul were impeccably dressed in all the latest Italian and Turkish fashions, facial hair plucked and hair styled and incredibly fit and chic. There were rows of designer furniture stores in shopping malls where the sofas looked like kidney beans.
There was the music, too. and the dancing! on new year's eve we sat in a strange posh Italian restaraunt (it was very random) full of middle-aged women with lots of make-up and very tight swathy black clothes, and there were gypsies there singing and dancing to the night, and this woman, she had to be about fifty? she got up and danced to the drumbeat and followed it with her hips, her face matching her emotions, and the men could dance too! it was so beautiful. and everybody sang the words to the songs out loud. when was the last time you were somewhere where they weren't too proud to do that? i was very sad and consumed with thoughts of death and she was out there with perfect hair dancing arabesque, so full of life.
A few days ago we finally saw the movie
crossing the bridge, and i identified with the crazy burned out einsturzende neubauten band member Alexander Hacke crashing around Beyoglu, unkempt with a straggly beard recording random musicians in this crazy city. i'm old and burned out sometimes, and i could relate to him passed out in his rickety hotel room staring into space, staring at the sea. but so much importance is placed on musicians, where were the interviews of the dancers? what do musicians have to say most of the time? they were stoned, all of them. and the singer is always fooling around with the drummer's girlfriend, that's how it always is.
we got a huge bargain on another place later in an old ottoman mansion, where the walls were painted pink and there were pink curtains and so was the bedspread. it was pink, not painted I mean. we had a balcony, but it faced a big gray school whose bell rang every hour and was full of screaming children and an ice cream truck playing fuer elise. i liked it. one morning a rainbow shone over the playground after the children had left. it was in a neighborhood full of immigrants and working class people and old-fashioned ottoman houses made of wood that were crumbling. but they were so beautiful, and so were the little chimneys that stuck out sideways and belched smoke into the night.
Fashion is a huge deal there, and next to that neighborhood was another one full of Russian immigrants and four story high showrooms for denim and fashion textile manufacturers. it was incredible. I had never seen such an explosion of high quality designer jeans in such a small area, and in every shop there was a sullen and very, very beautiful Russian girl sitting disinterestedly in front a television set expecting me to say something, but maybe they knew i was just lost.
There were not so many girls wearing head scarves, but the ones I did see were really wild. one had a pink headscarf and had make-up on as thick as an art school girl of doom. she wore knee-high converse all star sneakers and a puffy floral skirt, she was a riot of color and beauty. The girls without headscarves weren't as made-up and stuck to black, next to her they faded, she was a supernova!!!
like a good tourist i read books set in the city. being in a dark mood, thinking of failures and death and friendships lost, it was not a good idea to be checking out
orhan pamuk's Istanbul: Memories of a City. I had bought the book a few months ago in a generous money-spending kind of mood and didn't realize that he was on trial, and neither had I read his other works, and a memoir about Istanbul in its less than shiny days in the sixties and seventies as he was growing up, a city on the verge of collapse, it was something of a downer, and I can tell even from his childhood photos scattered throughout that book that mr. pamuk was a dour, rather gothy boy. it was comforting to read because he is also the kind of person compelled to wander through city streets aimlessly, staring wide and watery-eyed at the people around him. he repeats again and again that this is not a book just about the city, istanbul, which he loves, but a badly disguised self-portrait.
