Author: Brian Felsen

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Artist’s statement

Whether mounted on a wall or placed lovingly in a neat plastic notebook on the counter, the dread Artist Statement is always easily found, polluting every art gallery near you.  Read one, and any desire you might have had to meet the artist will immediately melt away.  In merely a few obtuse paragraphs, the artist will tell you what you already know, expound inarticulately upon philosophies which they know less about than a standard Wikipedia entry, and allude to art trends or influences which have nothing whatsoever to do with their work.  (One glorious exception: Bill Viola, whose notebooks are as enlightening as some of his best video art.)  I know, for I have been guilty of this.  The artist would do best to heed the sage advice of Frank Zappa: “Shut up and play yer guitar.”  Still, art gallery owners have required me to write one, and, depending on which artworks of mine they exhibit, my Artist’s Statement usually goes something like the below:

My photography explores the link between the way thoughts jostle for attention in one’s own consciousness and the way people compete to control each other’s behavior.  As many of these procedures and behaviors (even among lovers) stem from childhood experiences, I create entertaining and theatrical compositions, stereo photography (View Master Reels and Holmes stereo viewers), and digitally manipulating children’s objects.  My hope is that the work’s psychological concerns and modernist attention to detail give the work a depth which rewards extended viewing

One of my obsessions is in exploring the theatricality of daily life: “performances” we play for ourselves in conscious experience, and the games couples perform with each other.  Rather than photograph with strobe lighting, I use the hotlights of film, manipulating and positioning my subjects like department-store mannequins. I typically create unusual juxtapositions in common living spaces: a pregnant woman in a cage in a snow-covered suburban backyard; a wife spoon-feeding her husband in a crib, both serving and infantilizing him.

Another theme running through my photography is how our memories, future plans, fantasies and desires compete for attention with the “real world – so that we live our lives both in the present and in a halo of counterfactual states. My fine art is a visual depiction of this simultaneity.  To illustrate the way memory acts as a scrim on our daily experience and relationships, I transform toys and children’s books and shoot in abandoned swimming pools and playgrounds.  I combine dreams with reality through digital manipulation: an opera singer practices in a room full of distractions and alternate selves acting on them; a husband fantasizes murdering a sleeping spouse in a bedroom filled with dry ice.

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Photo Gallery: Towards a Science of Consicousness conference

TSC 2006 - Towards A Science of Consciousness
TSC 2006 - Towards A Science of Consciousness

Of all of the mysteries of the universe, none is crazier, nor more amazing to me, than the mystery of consciousness.  I’ve always been interested in how people think – not just in the psychology of others, but in how a lump of grey matter can process incredible amounts of information; how the brain serves our volitions and instinctual needs automatically; how it generates the sense of personal identity (a self) and the feeling that we have a “soul” – and, above all, why the heck it feel like something to be the subject of experience!

Ever since college, I’ve read the works of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind, starting with Douglas Hofstadter‘s Godel, Escher, Bach and moving on to the works of Dennett, Humphrey, Chalmers, Rosenthal, and too many others to mention.   Every other year, many of the greatest minds in the field gather in Tucson, Arizona for the Towards a Science of Consciousness conference (TSC).  Elif and I go whenever we can, and we’ve twice exhibited our art there with some of our favorite writers.

Here are some pictures from the 2006 TSC.

 

 

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Jacques Derrida Lives Again!

“The effects or structure of a text are not reducible to its ‘truth’, to the intended meaning of its presumed author.” (Derrida, Otobiographies, quoted in Thiselton, New Horizons, p.111)

Jacques Derrida

J’adore Jacques Derrida.  Not only do I find him enormously entertaining, I even occasionally find him enlightening.  Elif had cooked Derrida dinner one night in 1992, and found him to be delightfully preening.  Admit it: of all of the Pieds-Noir philosphers, he’s just about your favorite, non?

Kirby Dick‘s wonderful documentary on Derrida offers an excellent opportunity to revel in the great man’s absolute engagement in his own role as celebrity subject. Derrida’s response to every interview question was exquisitely crafted for maximum comedic value. To formulate these responses, he took his sweet time – at one point, it seemed like he waited over 30 seconds to answer a question about his mother!

I’ve always found it amusing that many of the particulars our own internal lives often not – our microthoughts, our motivations, our desires – only are closed to others, but also to ourselves. So how could I find out what Derrida was thinking during these great gaps in the dialogue?

As Elif and I watched the film together, we came to the stunning realization that rather than spending an eternity thinking about his responses to Kirby’s questions, Derrida was in fact writing the sequel to his chef-d’œuvre Of Grammatology. To test our theory, we carefully extracted the video from the film, applied a traducer filter, applied deconstruction analysis and specific Derridean techniques to the soundtrack, and were able to clearly make out his signature brainwave sounds.  After transcoding the signals, and with full realization that the rhetoric was inevitably being subverted by the grammar, we meticulously transcribed his internal dialogue, which ended up being printed inorganically over the film in a crawl from one of his favorite works of pop art, Star Wars.

The result is ground-breaking, revolutionary, and even NSFW: now, years after his shedding his mortal coil, you can visualize and hear his genius the full flowering of his genius like never before – and be privy to participating in the gestation of a great new, still-lost masterwork, Of Grammatology 2: Revenge of the Post-Structuralists.

Without further ado, our brilliant art film from 2003: Derrida Thinks!

 

 

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Book review: Nicholas Humphrey’s “Soul Dust”

In an earlier post, I wrote about how the dinner I had at Nicholas Humphrey‘s house while visiting the UK for the London Book Fair. I was so moved that I decided to post here a book review I wrote for his latest masterwork, Soul Dust. Enjoy!

Why do people have qualitative phenomenal experiences, and why is it “like something” to have sensations? And why do we feel special and spiritual, as if we existed in a “soul niche?” In his marvelous book Soul Dust, Nicholas Humphrey provides perhaps the most sensible solutions to these fundamental but seemingly-intractable questions, and he offers some credible possibilities how and why consciousness likely evolved with these features.

The first half of Soul Dust is a whirlwind tour through Humphrey’s thoughts on sensation and why first-person experience feels like it does. As the author favors brevity, this part of the book is dense and requires some mental lifting on the part of the reader. Humphrey explains how natural selection could “adjust the properties of existing sensory feedback loops so as to steer the activity toward a special class of attractor states… [which] would seem, from the subject’s point of view, to give sensations their phenomenal properties.” Then, he illustrates multiple lines of evidence on what consciousness is for – why it may not enable you to do something but still has the crucial function of encouraging you to do something – and that primary individualism, by helping us develop a theory of mind, is beneficial for the individual *and* for the social group. Finally, he surveys the important work of scientists and convincingly argues why philosophers are still necessary, arguing that “the probability is that brain scientists would not recognize the NCC [neural correlates of consciousness] for what it is even if it were right in front of them.”

With this foundation in place, it’s the second half of Soul Dust which truly astonishes, for here, Humphrey shows why life can be beautiful in the face of death. Drawing on multiple lines of evidence (from for types and degrees of consciousness and “presentism” in other animals; poetry; primitive art, psychological studies; and even the last meals of death row inmates), Humphrey describes how and why we take pleasure in existence in itself. If natural selection can arrange pleasure in the feeling of existing, existing can become a goal, and you can plan and go through pain or delayed gratifications to achieve or continue it. In a brilliant move, Humphrey shows how and why our experience and the structure of our minds guide the false intuitions that our “souls” could somehow live on after bodily death. This helps explain why reductionist theory is counterintuitive for so many people and how religion rides as a parasite on our natural predilection for spirituality (and not vice versa).

The beautiful final chapters provide strong evidence for how phenomenal consciousness is a “magic show” you stage in your head which lights up the world so you can feel special and transcendent, and why it’s adaptive for you to feel that way (as well as even to have death anxiety). In so doing, Humphrey gives voice to the notion that there is actually beauty in being a creature which knows it’s going to die.

For thousands of years, people have told crazy stories to explain and to comfort each other in the face of death, tales which include positing earth-centered creation, the permanence of souls, and even consciousness as a separate fundamental element of the universe. But, to quote the film True Grit, “I do not entertain such hypotheticals, for the world as it is is vexing enough.” It can seem like a dark joke to have a subjective experience of consciousness for such a brief period of individual existence. But this book finds meaning and beauty in our brief skein not as a fairy tale a “gallows-humor” consolation prize; it shows how this “magical mystery show” of consciousness and sensation over a limited timeframe is actually lovely, and in so doing, it gives the reader the feeling that everything is illuminated. “Sentio ergo sum” (“I feel, therefore I am”) indeed!

Soul Dust is worth every minute of attention it demands, and it’s a mind-expanding, life-affirming work.

– Brian Felsen, President, BookBaby
@bookbaby, @brianfelsen

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Tuli Kupferberg, 1923-2010

 

Tuli Kupferberg
Cover of Tuli Kupferberg

Tuli Kupferberg died yesterday. While his contribution to the history of punk music, the antiwar movement, the American counterculture and Lower East Side scene of the 60’s is immeasurable, he’s played a special role in my life. In November 1994, a friend of mine liberated a few albums from the vault of a certain college radio station (which had gone mainstream and certainly wasn’t going to play them anymore) and shared them on the street with his artist friends. These albums included a live Randy Newman bootleg, a couple of Holy Modal Rounders discs, Wild Man Fischer – and a few by the Fugs. The first night I met Elif, it was love at first sight. She sung me some comic interpretations of Italian arias; I played her some of my own art songs and some records by the Fugs. I can’t imagine having spent the last 16 years without having the songs “Carpe Diem” or “Nothing Nothing” bouncing around in my cranium, and I can’t imagine regarding my wife without thinking of the lyrics to the Fugs’ song “Supergirl.”

Many of Tuli’s lyrics are nowhere on the Internet – so here are the “Supergirl” lyrics (as best as I can understand them).

I want a girl that can
fug like an angel,
cook like a devil
swing like a dancer
work like a pony
dream like a poet
flow like a mountain stream.

Super girl, my super girl

I want a girl that can
kiss like a cherry
squeeze like a berry
smell like an ocean
talk like a songbird
walk like a fountain
touch like a flower
sing like the Leaves of Grass

i want a girl that can
love like a monkey
hug like a castle
think like a darling
laugh like a lemon
eat like a monster
roar like a jug of wine

I want a girl that can
kiss like an eagle
bend like a sapling
bark like a beagle
bite like a bagel
fly like a butter
shake like a (mumbled…’hummer’? Human?)

(in the background during fadeout) ‘up up and away!’

Thanks to Eliot Duhan for help with the transcription – and Eliot adds a verse of his own:

I wanna girl who can
Sin like an angel
Twist like an angle
Preach like an engel(s)
Fight like a stengal…

R.I.P., Tuli.


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Erdogan

9/20/2002

The elections are coming in two months. The leftists include two Jews whose-families converted to Islam in the 1920’s, Al Gore types, western-oriented and American-bred. They’ve split off from Prime Minister Ecevit, and then from each other, and there are now something like 27 secular parties (at last count) who will all be running against pretty much one religious party. I’ve seen this movie before. I can see why people would vote for the religious party – the secular politicians are factionalized, corrupt, and anti-charismatic; the general economic condition sucks; and the European Union wants nothing to do with Turkey. Elif and Dilek are optimistic. I think it’s not unlikely that the religious party will win again with 25% of the vote, just like in 1995, and that we may some day have to add another chapter to our movie.

******

10/3/2002

A cropped image of Foreign Minister Abdullah G...
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On the way out of the country yesterday, at Ataturk International Airport, Elif voted in the elections by absentee ballot. She was one of the first in the country to vote, and as she put her ballot in the box, she was interviewed. They asked her who she voted for, and she answered, “Look at what I’m wearing, my physical appearance.” Dilek tells us that the interview made the TV news last night.

********

Postscript (from Wikipedia):

On November 18, 2002, Abdullah Gül, from the AKP (the Islamic “Justice and Development Party“) was elected prime minister and formed “a government which was to serve as a transitional government. The goal was to make a constitutional amendment, in order to permit Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, the chairman of the AKP to become prime minister (as Erdo?an could not be elected to parliament because of his punishment), thanks to a by-election round in the south-eastern Anatolian province of Siirt. On March 14, 2003, Erdo?an took over the post of prime minister from Abdullah Gül and appointed him as his deputy prime minister and foreign minister.”

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Yom Kippur in Istanbul

neve shalom synagogue istanbul
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Last night, we went to temple Neve Shalom on the European side of Istanbul so our Israeli friends could check out the Yom Kippur evening services. As much as I hate being among a group of people who believe in the absurd, it’s a historic and hidden building, Istanbul’s oldest and supposedly nicest synagogue. We get there, and the whole street was lined with nightclub-bouncers, burly young men, some with their heads shaven, obviously spent time at the gym, well-dressed with earpieces connected to walkie talkies, and Jewish! I didn’t know they came in that size.

We’re all dressed up, we get out of the cab, walk up to the metal detector, show our American and Israeli passports, and one of the guards, not liking the name “Elif” on my wife’s passport, looks at her and grills her on Yom Kippur. She says she’s married with an American Jew and points to me.

He gives us a Sophie’s Choice: I can go in, with the Israelis, but Elif has to wait outside. And, by the way, she shouldn’t stand by the front doors but down the street, and the rest of us have to stay inside for over an hour until services end.

We’re incensed; the Israelis complain mightily; the nightclub bouncer says (while waving a few shlomos to go inside) we were bombed once 20 years ago; and the Israelis say, so what, our temple in Israel gets bombed every month or two. I think of some line my dad once told me about a Jew being welcome in a temple anywhere in the world, and I remember it again a couple hours later at the Tapas bar down the street, as we happily play backgammon and toast Dionysus over pitchers of homemade sangria.

******

Postscript (from Wikipedia):

On November 15, 2003, two truck bombs slammed into the Beth Israel and Neve Shalom synagogues in Istanbul, Turkey and exploded. The explosions devastated the synagogues and killed twenty seven people, most of them Turkish Muslims, and injured more than 300 others. The two suicide bombers also died. A Turkish militant group (IBDA-C) claimed responsibility for the blasts, but Turkish Government Officials dismissed the validity of this claim by pointing out that the minor group did not have enough resources to carry out such an intricately planned and expensive attack

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Fighting at the Sultan’s grave

Elif met me one day near Mesut’s bread factory in Fatih, and we went to the Sultan’s grave at the Suleymanie Mosquegot, where we got into a lovely fight with the ticket-taker. He told her to wear head-covering, which not only against the law for the municipality to demand (ominously, the heads of the government Islamic tourist center, and even the ticket-takers on Istanbul’s boats and buses, are looking more and more religious in appearance), but it’s actually contrary to Islam: you’re not supposed to pray over a person’s grave.

On our way out, he nagged us repeatedly to make a donation, to which Elif said, “Just do your job and sit in your chair; there’s already a ‘donations please’ sign.” He made the grave mistake of talking back to her; Elif asked him, “Did you say something?” (That’s Elif’s pet “Are you talking to me?” expression.) He told Elif to “calm down, sister”; she said she wasn’t his sister and that she had every right as a Turkish citizen to be there as she pleased; and he came outside his booth and said a phrase he immediately regretted: “You’re just saying that because you’re in charge of the country now…”, implying, “You just wait till we religious people take over in a couple of months.” A nice crowd of Turkish women not only in headscarves, but in burkas, had gathered to see him visibly shake when Elif demanded his name for making that comment. He refused to give it, so I got in his face and made him. It was really great in nice, safe, broad daylight to back up Elif and watch him quiver with fear, with him thinking we were important and wishing he could eat his words. It’s even better that Elif’s mother will call the municipality today and give his name. Most likely, it won’t help a damn, but as I told Elif, men here have to do military service, so this is your duty for your country.

More Turkish extremists are being arrested in Germany every day, which is where they’re fleeing from the Turkish government in order to plot the revolution. One couple was arrested simply for trying to name their kid “Osama bin Laden.” Another was arrested for plotting to blow up US stuff there. We stopped by the American Consulate, and they’ve instituted a phone chain warden system. “If you are registered at the Consulate you become part of our emergency notification system, called the ‘warden system.’ In the event of a natural disaster or other emergency affecting American citizens, the Consulate will phone a number of volunteer ‘wardens’ who are American citizens resident in Istanbul. They will in turn call 20-25 other Americans residing in their area to pass along information from the Consulate. If you are interested in volunteering to serve as a warden, please call the Consulate’s American citizens services unit.” I was born in Los Angeles and live in Istanbul, so natural disasters are a way of life. It’s the threat of “other emergency affecting American citizens” that begins to worry me, which is the whole point.

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Six months with the Istanbul Opera

2/17/2002

The Turkish Opera had its auditions on the 11th for new people to become a sozmesleli, or independent contractor. You toil away for the opera at low pay for a few years doing that, waiting for an opening as a lead singer, or cadreau – at which point, you’re on the gravy train, salaried, tenured, with bennies, set for life. Lately, though, because of the influx of new students from the schools and the economic crisis, there’s a bottleneck of sozmesleliler, with no new cadreau openings. They just have to wait for a lead singer to retire or die, at which point, the sozmesleliler enter a competition for that new cadreau opening.

Elif auditioned for sozmesleli, and it turned out that the real purpose of the audition was actually to fire people rather than to hire new people; they made many sozmesleliler re-audition. They asked Elif to sing the bitchy Pamina aria, and then Mimi (instead of Micaela), which meant she had to sing long slow lyrical lines that need lots of breath, when she could barely speak – because she was so spent staying up with me during my recovery from my tonsillectomy. And still, with all of that, she made it in, number one on the list. We talked with the director, Mesut, and they put her down for lead roles as a lyric soprano, no coloratura anymore, thank goodness, go to the head of the class. But when it will all start is anyone’s guess; this season ends in May, so we’re figuring next season.

Elif immediately went down to the famous opera cafeteria, where the singers hang out and drink tea all day, to shmooze and rekindle her old ties with singers from like almost a decade ago. The prodigal daughter returns. To celebrate, we went to Changa, a New York-type bar owned by a famous chef whose name I forget. We had some nouveau trans-continental cuisine (eggplants with a sauce that was a combination of miso and tahini – yum!) and two drinks: mine was called an Asian Fusion (which included vodka and cucumber and ginger and some other stuff) and Elif’s was something of a pomegranate vodka snow-cone – it had all the sweetness, tartness, and bitterness of eating a pomegranate.

********

3/6/2002

One of the top people at the opera has taken Elif on as a vocal coach for free, so certain she is of her stardom. Mesut, the opera director who loves Elif, is under the cloud of a scandal for fondling his students, and there is talk that he may be on his way out. Although he’d promised Elif the role of Musetta in La Boheme, it ended up going to one of the cadreaus. Mesut, who likes to please everyone, swears that he’ll violate the pecking order and give Elif the lead (the only) role in Menotti’s “The Telephone” (a 1-hour modern opera where the audience gets to hear Elif’s side of a telephone conversation).

Despite the crunch in funds, there’s a drive to open new opera companies in remote outposts. Elif is told that her biggest hope by far to become a cadreau in the near future is to sing in Samsun for a couple of years, and she’ll get fast-tracked so that by, say, 2004 or 2005 she’ll be tenured. Elif is not going to go to Samsun or any other Turkish city; her plan is to stay in Istanbul and get onstage here in whatever roles she can, and then, when a cadreau opens up here, audition for it.

*******

6/14/2002

Elif got a huge writeup in the large Turkish newspaper Radikal, a delightful piece about her singing career, her CD, and our film COUP. The article had the unexpected result of getting her strongly reprimanded by the opera company. Combining the best of Ottoman and Soviet organizational thinking, the opera heads told her that it was wrong for an individual player to grant an interview to the press, because opera is a team effort. Although they talk about Elif internally with such terms as “the future of the Turkish opera” &c., they don’t want to read about her in the papers – after all, people don’t go to see Placido Domingo, they go to see Tchaikovsky. Their biggest problem with the article, though, was Elif’s comment: “People unfamiliar with opera shouldn’t be scared of it. It’s not all big people screaming poetry for five hours – the melodies were once pop songs of their eras, and the librettos are often as light and silly as a soap opera or romance novel.” They informed her in no uncertain terms that opera is a serious, serious art, and people are all working very hard (and getting government salaries) to work on its serious, serious production. (I guess F.T. Marinetti wasn’t able to save art from the Solemn, the Sacred, and the Serious after all.) Elif came home irate, mostly at herself for swallowing her tongue for the first time I can think of.

Each time she goes for lessons with her free and enthusiastic vocal coach, she has to stop by the cafeteria to shmooze, and it’s really getting her down. She says that the singers are morally low and spend all their time gossiping, bad-mouthing, and philosophizing on the Ottoman intricacies of working your way up the opera hierarchy. One of the opera directors came into one of her vocal sessions and then gossiped about her to another student.

The good news is that she is down on the board to be a lead in next season’s Mozart aria festival, “Do You Like Mozart?” The bad news is that we saw one of the productions of that this year, filled with sozmesleliler, as it gave the company an opportunity to give its people stage time, and it was so bad that we thought it should be named “Did You Like Mozart?” Nothing’s posted on the board about them even mounting “The Telephone,” let alone with Elif starring in it.

*******

8/20/2002

The scandal over them having granted a sozmesleli to a Minister’s mistress has gotten out of control, so all current opera members, including Elif, have to reaudition. Elif is disgusted by the whole situation and says she has no intention of doing so. I know Elif, and when a situation doesn’t feel right for her, she’s completely done, and nothing will change her mind. Her vocal coach will be heartbroken, but I suppose we’re heading back to the U.S. soon.

We’d done a series of concerts, I’d written a screenplay and a stage play, Elif got into the Turkish opera, I taught English, and we were down our cat. Elif thinks it’s time to leave. She’s had it with the Turkish opera and will not reaudition for sozmesleli just because the opera admitted a Minister’s mistress. She says that she achieved her goal of getting into the opera, and that she only wanted a career here if she could get leading roles immediately and become a cadreau next year at the latest. I asked her about taking them up on their offer to fast-track her if she went to Samsun, but she says that she can’t spend a part of her life in such a place if she’s not doing a great public service like being a doctor. She’s also concerned that I’m finishing up a lot of my writing here and now need a real community to work in as an artist, and I’m barely able to do that in Istanbul, let alone in a small industrial city on the Black Sea coast. She says it would be fun to live in New York and make more recordings and do avant concerts. She seems at peace with this, as if getting into the opera again has cleared up a lot of “what-if” questions in her mind, ever since she divorced Mehmet in 1993 and came to America and met me.

I’m not thrilled to be going back to New York. I think that NYC works a little too well; that it constantly reminds one of opportunity and sunk cost (rent); that its finger points at your indolence and others for comparison; that it’s difficult to have or hear of or express a meaningful political opinion there; that living there will force me into its mechanized systems of transaction and utterly predictable rhythms of transportation and movement; that I’ll be captive audience to the John Cage symphony of car alarms, at which I am trained to understand that they in fact signify nothing other than the start of a time block which will hopefully pass. I love the chaos and wonder of Istanbul, the city that prays to the twin goddesses of atrophy and Brownian motion. I love being in an Islamic country whose national celebrities are transvestites, even Tansu Ciller.

But it’s settled, and I know better than to try to change Elif’s mind once I’ve seen that itch in her. It will be fun to take classes with David Rosenthal, to hook up more often with my friends and family, to think about my future in grad school for philosophy, or not, to make some strange short films about consciousness, and perhaps to mount a nifty new play I wrote based on Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Model.

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Puking in Diyarbakir and Nemrut Dag

Statues of gods and the pyramid-like tomb-sanc...
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Now it was time to head north to Diyarbakir. I was pissed at Isik for having sung Mardin folksongs the whole time we were around the region; now as we were approaching the oil wells of Batman, it was payback time: over and over: “Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo BAT-MAN!” After the merriment passed, as Kadri was trying to see if the car would fly us to Diyarbakir at warp speed before PKK time travelers could arrive to catch us, I started to feel not well at all. They passed me a bag, and I breathed in and out of it, in and out, and when we arrived at the hotel in Diyarbakir, I staggered through their lobby, found their toilet, squatted (even the lobby had a Turkish toilet) and probably flooded Hasankeyf all by myself. I was unable to puke, unable to walk, and they drove me to the hospital, where I tried to get into the elevator but could not, found the toilet in their lobby, squatted, and left the rest of my insides there for good measure. I had sweat through my shirt in the process, removed it, and made my way upstairs, under Kadri and Elif’s arms, and the doctor told me I had tyfo, which is not typhus or typhoid but something else, something I didn’t understand, but I knew exactly what it was, knew that he was wrong, and I got a cup and gave another stool sample, a porn star in my ability to deliver the goods on demand. The aide came in, gave me a knowing wink, and announced that my old friends E. Hystolitica had again found a happy home in my intestines. They put me on serum and some anti-nausea drug, and the serum was too strong, or started to panic, but in any case, under the drip, I started to freak out after awhile. I got hyper and started yelling and banging my head like at a heavy metal concert, and Elif convinced the doctor to add some downers to the drip, which he was at first loathe to do but indeed did, and I felt mighty fine after that.

I laid back with the drip in my arm and heard a nice new aide, fourth day on the job, tell Elif that even though I’m an American (I think screaming in English was the giveaway), “we don’t like Americans,” and Elif tried to be civil, saying that a government’s actions don’t always reflect its citizens, and its citizens don’t really know or need to know or give a fig that Apache Longbows are stopping people like him from seceding from a country six thousand miles away, especially when there’s Reality Television on, but when he extended it to saying it was all the Jews’ fault, Elif gave up. Kadri was able to yell at the guy when paying, as the guy tried to get the full price of $16 rather than the discount of $12 from us, and Kadri made a big shame on him for trying to charge us more than promised, etc., but we were not liking Diyarbakir one bit.

The hotel was dirty, the hotel was gross, but the hotel was home, and when they left it to walk around Diyarbakir the next morning, I was not about to join them; my usual phobia of missing out on anything was nowhere to be seen, there was only my pillow. They came back an hour later, angry and wanting to bust town: unlike Urfa, although they all talked in Arabic and Kurdish on the streets, no Turkish, everyone gave them filthy looks and told Elif she’d burn in hell if she’d go into the mosque dressed like that, and she wasn’t at all provocatively dressed. So they saw some buildings from the outside, packed me in the car, and headed toward Nemrut Dag.

We drove the better part of an hour way up the 2 km summit; the whole road was cobblestoned. On the way, we were stopped by a gendarme: can you please bring up these food supplies to my men at the top? Sure… but can Brian use your bathroom? And in a violation of every policy, I got to see the inside of a gendarme station, which was very unspectacular, but their (Turkish squat) toilet was (before I used it) very, very clean.

When we reached the top, there was a storm and it was like 40 degrees Fahrenheit, drizzling, and there was no way I was going to leave the car. They hiked up while I slept in the passengers seat. We got a hotel nearby.

The next morning, they took me back, it was much warmer, and I was able to hike up with them. Nemrut Dag is a silly but terribly wonderful site, with lots of massive stone heads adorning the temple and tomb of the great king Antiochus. Antiochus I ruled from 64-38BC and the son of Mithridates (whom Mozart did an opera on); he founded the Commagene kingdom, and it was some rinky-dink empire, covering from Adiyaman all the way to Gaziantep. His main accomplishment was to hold off the Romans from the territory for awhile. At some point, he decided he was a god, claiming descent from Darius the Great of Persia and Alexander the Great, but when he sided with the Parthians against Rome and was deposed, and the Romans took the territory, end of the great Commagene kingdom and end of story – but he left behind a massive funerary ode to himself. After hiking up, we came to the eastern temple with 6 decapitated seated statues and heads all over the place; we then walked around to the west and there’s more of the same, plus lots of reliefs; a lion has an astrological chart on it signifying something. When you look at them left to right, Elif pointed out the Lion, Eagle, Antiochus, Commagene (female), Zeus (authoritarian and bearded), Apollo, Heracles (bearded like Zeus but a bit younger), another Eagle, and another Lion; but our guidebook says it’s Apollo, Fortuna, Zeus, Antiochus, and Hercules. Me? I trust Elif.