This is Elias. He was the captain of our little 8 cabin Turkish guillet for four days last week as we travelled from Fethiye to Demre. Elias is a terrific guy. He is one with the sea, having grown up in Demre and worked all his life on boats. Captaining the Alaturka for tourist cruises is hard work but for him it is a labour of love. Elias was one of the original Blue Cruise captains who got together around 15 years ago to discuss sharing the south coast of Turkey with visitors from around the world. Until he and …
This is a photo i took of the bust of the Emperor Augustus in the Ephasus Museaum this afternoon. He was quite a guy. He ruled during the time that Jesus Christ was born but he died before Jesus got really going. At Ephesus, he was the subject of a cult, which transferred love and affection from the official state gods to heads of state. You can see how that can happen. But there is something really interesting about this bust. Carved into the Emperors forehead is a cross. It is a result of the Christians getting their comeuppance on …
We’ve moved from the splendour and imperial regency of Istanbul to the remote and incredible Cappadocia. This is a place of unreal geography and living history. I love the way ruins here aren’t preserved, but rather used as the basis for building new things. The region is known for the thousands of ancient cave settlements, built as long as 4000 years ago from the soft volcanic rock. Nowadays parts of those ancient caves are incorporated into modern buildings, and form the basis for themed hotels like the beautiful Esbeli Evi, in which we are staying. Cappadocia is also a cradle …
In this article, stringing together some obersvations about Louis CK and Mary Halvorson, Seth Colter Walls touches on the wellspring of collaboration. He writes a little of the play that replaces rehearsal for true improvisers, of finding outlets of artistic practice where “no one person is responsible for all the tunes–if tunes are even the order of the day. Such groups aren’t the ones that players use as reputational tent-poles; they’re the ones that successful artists keep going in order to keep the channel for new sounds open. It’s the jazz-world equivalent of Zach Galifianakis’s avant-chat Web-show “Between Two Ferns,” …
Istanbul is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, and it’s not surprising why. The city holds so much history of importance to both Europe and Asia that people come from all over to touch it and see it. Although there are lots of Europeans and some North Americans wandering around the Sultanahmet district where we are staying, there are also lots of tourists from Central Asia and Turkey itself visiting during Ramadan. So of course staying in the tourist district it’s hard sometimes to glimpse the important things to local people, but two stood out yesterday. …
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