Category: Video

As If

I’ve discovered a hilarious new Turkish comedy show called “Gibi” (translated to As If). The episodes revolve around a group of friends who get embroiled in absurdist situations and have very nasty but eloquent arguments with each other.

To me this gives off a very Seinfeld-like feeling with nasty people living in a nasty city talking about nasty things with each other. Not the touchy feely stuff that you see in normal sitcoms. You don’t really quite get why these people hang out with each other but they do.

Below is the first episode in its entirety on YouTube where both main characters find themselves pressured to open a kebab shop. The rest of the series on Exxen has passable English subs for anybody who would be interested.

I’m always a sucker for performances where people argue/fight with each other. The more fierce and physical the better. Carnage is an old favourite of mine and the fight scene I witnessed in ‘Langs de Grote Weg’ remains with me as one of the highlights of visiting Frascati.

I’ve watched a couple more episodes and I think I can say that the theme of the show is the weird social conformities that people in Turkey impose on each other. Hell is other people, especially over there.

Exxen

To be able to watch the full series I took a month’s subscription to Exxen. This seems to be one of a bunch of bespoke streaming platforms. Another one I was aware of through social media has been Gain (a self-described ‘next generation content platform’).

The Exxen website is kinda broken and the boss of the site has been quoted saying ‘they are competing with Netflix.’ That may be right, but Netflix is probably not competing with them. Still, with the 80M people living in Turkey, the substantial diaspora as well as people from other countries who consider Turkish culture and media to be aspirational (a lot more of those out there than you would think living in Europe), they probably can get by.

One weird déja-vu has been seeing many of the Turkish social media stars that I used to listen to on Clubhouse (Chaby, Enis, Zeynep) make an appearance in weird and zany television formats exclusive to the platform. Most amazingly, those formats are also pretty professionally executed with high production values.

Bir Başkadır (Ethos) Character Network Chart

The character relations turned into a bit of a tangle so I fired up Miro and quickly charted them out. In the end it wasn’t that complicated but the worlds of Meryem and Peri are very clearly separate.

There are lots of movies where a cast of characters roams a town and occasionally intersects in a couple of dramatic moments. What comes to mind for me most immediately is Amores Perros. Of course a Netflix serial doesn’t hit the cinematic height or dramatic depth of that movie despite having more runtime to play with. What it does manage is to set a mood for the weird tangled up modern Turkey.

The most interesting and dramatic events in Bir Başkadır happen on the road (Mesude’s death under the bridge, the family dance off on the way to the village). Along with some of the commuting sequences and the continuous questions of what bus stops where and how to get somewhere in time, that is an essential part of Istanbul. The city is so vast and spread out that people are always underway, an apt metaphor for character development—interrupted or otherwise—if ever there was one.

“The privilege I have – how? No, genuinely, how?”

Well, I say, in terms of wealth, class, education – that kind of privilege, in knowing how to decode the rules in certain spaces. As a caveat, I add that both of us have privilege, and it’s not a criticism; I was simply curious to know what she thought. Things take an awkward turn.

“Well no, because, no… ” There is a very long and tense pause, before she insists that, actually, there is little difference between her experience and that of her co-star John Boyega, who grew up in south London to British Nigerian immigrant parents. “John grew up on a council estate in Peckham and I think me and him are similar enough that… no… Also, I went to a boarding school for performing arts, which was different.”

Daisy Ridley has no idea that she is privileged.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/07/daisy-ridley-jj-abrams-star-wars-a-religion

Ende Gelände is the radical environmentalist movement against climate change and here they are blocking a strip mine.

Protesting is a core German competence. There is deep institutional knowledge of how and why to do this. At the drop of a hat and with a lot of organizing infrastructure, it is possible to get thousands of people to join something like this.

YouTube hatchet job on the CDU

A collective of the largest German YouTubers have just before the European elections launched a campaign against the CDU and it’s a joy to see.

The CDU which is usually fully ignorant when it comes to digital issues has taken this broadside seriously. That by itself was a huge mistake. Most serious institutions would and should brush off something coming from new media.

Whether this will have an effect is hugely unclear. The core CDU audience is disconnected and apathetic but they do get a lot of votes from other segments as well and there they could be slightly vulnerable. In any case, the series of fumbles that the CDU has embarked upon while trying to address this has only served to give the boycott movement wings.

What’s interesting about the YouTubers is that they break with the German institutional consensus which is white, male and old. That group of people has a certain set of opinions and interests which has made sure that Germany has become increasingly backward. The YouTubers are young, (judging by their names and handles) diverse and not all male. And most importantly they have reach and fewer entrenched interests.

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/neues-video-von-rezo-mehr-als-70-youtube-stars-rufen-zum-boykott-von-cdu-und-spd-auf/24379566.html?fbclid=IwAR2jbOBkIBldbxKy6HN45qqt9N8CotfCYP-4h1mBosolneeTcknxFxgTjCY