l’ve done this today. lt’s about being so lonely in the crowd.. lt reflects my usual situation. l talk to so many people during the day but none of them understands me, none of them knows anything about me. There’s always a lonely feeling coz l know that when l talk noone listens to me.
The Teahouse of the August Moon
My plan for today was waking up early and drawing my school project whole day. So in the morning l woke up early and I sat in front of PC for drawing… Then I received an unexpected sms from a friend of mine telling that she had an extra ticket for a theater play so she was wondering if I could join her. Of course I accepted immediately although I had tons of things to draw. We met in the pier, we got on the boat and we were in front of the theater building in half an hour.
I had no idea about the play so I let it be a surprise for me :
Okinawa Island…It’s a weird country which was occupied by Chinese first, then Japanese and finally Americans that it owes its fame to this bloody occupation which ended with 200.000 dead in April 1945…
The writer of the novel “The Teahouse of the August Moon” is one of the officers of the occupation army. Vern Sneider…and John Patric ,who’s also one of the officers of the occupation army , made a great comedy from this book.
It’s about the occupation mentality of USA. As they always do, also in Okinawa they’re far from evaluating the human factor, they are just ordered to apply the decisions which was taken on a desk in Washington with general logic. As they think that what is valid for them is valid for everyone in the world, the people of the island is forced to be shaped with “american life style “ model.
The aim of this approach is to destroy the differences of the other cultures and making them similar to american one. So the army builds schools to give their own culture to the island people. But one humanist man who was taken to the army by force because of the war, refuses to build a school and he builds a teahouse
.
Usually I don’t spend time in very touristical areas of Istanbul, I stroll around the historical districts which tours dont take tourists much. Nowadays I walk in the back streets of Uskudar a lot because of the project I am working on. I’m designing a little library next to a building which was an ottoman primary school some hundreds of years ago.
So I dont see many tourists. Only one or two very curious and courageous ones who are able to get a map and stroll alone. Today while I was going down the hill, I saw one climbing the hill with an Istanbul map in the hand and a stupid fes on the head. I couldn’t stop laughing… It wasn’t the only one with fes I have seen so far.Why do tourists wear those weird fes?? Don’t they feel stupid with it? Don’t they look around themselves and notice that noone in Turkey would wear it?
Sometimes the ignorance of the tourists amazes me. They have no idea about Ottoman Empire, Turkish republic , turkish culture, Istanbul, other cities of Turkey…So why are they in Istanbul? They usually go to Italy because it’s a kind of fashion, it seems even Istanbul becomes something like that. I hate this empty tourism. Like the shopkeeper who sells miniatures has told me once : ” Tourists don’t come to my shop to buy miniatures. I have only very special foreigner customers who understand miniature art. Usual tourists who come here aren’t different than gypsies towards art”
Like french, italian, english in Istanbul, like hundreds of americans I see in Florence whole summer or thousands of russians in Antalya…like milions of tourists who destroy , pollute and rape Venice each year more just for commercial reasons far from art, architecture and understanding.
A sculptor made a very nice statue for expressing love. And the city administration put it in the city center of Antalya in Turkey. But some sick closed-minded people threat the administration to remove this statue because they find it ” Too explicit, against morality”…..What kind of a mentality is it? If you are able to get aroused because of this statue, it means there’s something wrong with you not the statue…..sexuality-fobia…
I have returned from Barcelona on Friday. I enjoyed each minute there.Leaving the city was very difficult for me because I completely felt in love with it. Barcelona is the city of my dreams because :
Today I wanted to try painting. It was my first experience with acrylic colours. I thank to Lorenzo’s parents because they let me play with the painting tools =)
On saturday after lunch we went to Florence to Palazzo Strozzi to Cezanne exhibition. l liked it but we were a bit disappointed because we excepted to see more paintings of Cezanne. Although the name of the exhibition was “Cezanne” , there were more paintings which belong to other painters.
Paul Cézanne , (January 19, 1839 – October 22, 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century’s new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne “is the father of us all” cannot be easily dismissed.
Cézanne’s work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognisable. Using planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields, at once both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature, Cézanne’s paintings convey intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.
Cézanne’s explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Gris, and others to experiment with ever more complex multiple views of the same subject, and, eventually, to the fracturing of form. Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th Century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art.
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 | Unblushing on Usual Loneliness |
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