Describe a relationship with RHCP lyrics!

I grew up on RHCP. Literally, I remember my first experience came at the age of 7 maybe. We lived in a sunny flat in Budapest with my mom. When my stepfather moved in, he brought loads of cassettes with himself; a piece of this collection was Blood Sugar Sex Magik. How much I loved it! Even though I didn't get a word from the lyrics, I memorized as much as I could. I clearly remember when I asked Gergő about the following line:

Suck my kiss

 I did understand my kiss however I had no clue about suck (which I tend to forget during these days of pauper). He, obviously not willing to explain the real meaning told me something like soaping. I remember myself in awe, thinking how cool and punk it is to soap a girl's kiss! Just pushing the bar of soap in her mouth when she wants a kiss.

Anyways, my enduring love towards the band never diminished. Knowing most of their lyrics, at the age of 18, the year dedicated to my broken heart I realized how much they can describe a relationship. The most elemental example is Breaking the girl, which I always listened with joy after ending a relationship (or even beforehand...duh).

So yesterday I got the idea: let's try to describe a relationship with only RHCP lyrics! Enjoy as I attempt the impossible.

Phase 1. Spotting the girl
(Dosed)

In you a star is born and,
You cut a perfect form and,
Someone forever warm,
Lay on, lay on, lay on, lay on,
Lay on, lay on, lay on, lay on

Phase 2. Insisting a closer relationship
(C'mon girl)

C'mon girl
Let's get it right
Let's get it right
Let's get it right

Phase 3. Blinded by the pink cloud
(Falling into grace)

Head dressed in white
Beauty bazaar
You can smell the purple light
Comin' from her hear

Phase 4. Starting making demands as the initial passion is gone
(Suck my kiss)

Hit me you can't hurt me
Suck my kiss
Kiss me please pervert me
Stick with this

Phase 5. Issues start to occur but you don't take it serious
(Minor thing)

To readjust you've got to trust
That all the fuss is just a minor thing, y'all

Phase 6. She throws you out in the cold, you feel like...
(Nobody weird like me)

I'm a freak of nature
walking totem pole
look and see I think you'll agree
nobody weird like me

 Phase 7. You swear to bring down the stars for her...
(I could die for you)

Come again and tell me
Where you want to go
What it means to me
To be with you alone 

Phase 8 ...however, your prayers are unanswered
(Tear)

In the end and then
All will be forgiven when
Surrender rises high and I
Gave what I came to give

Phase 9. You are desperate and feel the world is filled with idiots
(Pea, made it plural for better understanding)

Fuck you assholes
You homophobic redneck dicks

Phase 10. All your efforts were in vain. You have to realize the only thing loving you is not a person.
(Under the bridge)

It's hard to believe
That there's nobody out there
It's hard to believe
That I'm all alone
At least I have her love
The city she loves me
Lonely as I am
Together we cry

+Phase 11. For the clingy ones who can't move over the past
(Don't forget me)

Don't forget me I can't hide it
Come again get me excited

 So... I hope it was satisfactory...

It was August

(so click here for an improved blog experience.)

It was August, 2012.

After a day-long trip the bus rolled to a derelict gas station. The passengers spread out towards the toilet or lit a cigarette. Both have equivalent importance. Eventually, I was in Turkey.
It was truly freezing. Amidst the mountains of Inner Anatolia the small station was built on the ridge of a gentle hill. The cold wind was sweeping from the top of the road downhill only to creep under my clothes. I was tired. And shaken. With the malleable, clay-like near future right on the top of the hill waiting for me I shivered and turned my back. The sun was going down but the dense mass of clouds didn't let the last beams light the highlands. Hazy tones of orange and red painted the bottom of the sky.
My eyelids were wetted; by my thoughts or the wind I couldn't tell.

I felt like it's only me, the bus and the mountains.

The first time in my life I was making a decision solely on my own. Was the country or the love that anticipated this move more? I was hesitating. The earlier didn't sound convincing enough, a country would never affect me so much. The latter... I'd never admit such a bold move. And yet here I stand.

My saddest fucking August.

The month I always hated and loved the most. The peak and landmark of each year. The grand final.

As the Sun shrank into a distant point and eventually vanished from the grim sky, I got back on the bus. My highly emotional self felt the gloomy sunset was forecasting an even gloomier scenario I was about to experience.

Shortly, life in Trabzon and my exaggerated misery had begun. But nothing happens in vain. One thing I learned during through my adventure in Calypso nymph's city was that life is much bigger than our petty decisions and concerns... so I definitely won't be the guy making a fuss about it.

And hey! We only live once. Fucking it up just doesn't seem to make any sense.

Movies- art or only a habit?

Many smart people have discussed a thousand times how social media and the new technologies reshape our world. While there are some definite advantages, some are indeed negative and I wish they'd  never existed.

Watching a movie today is nothing special. We know we gotta do it cause if we miss it we won't be able to talk with our friends and we'd feel embarrassed if we won't have an opinion. I clearly remember my teen years: we didn't have internet at home so watching a movie was a rare thing. We only did it on weekends if none of us was tired. It happened maybe twice in a month. As my uni started, things just turned upside down. I suddenly had the chance to watch basically anything ever made in the past 100 years without an effort. That was the moment when I lost the respect towards movies.

Whose idea was the Ben Hur remake? I'm gonna
beat the crap out of the guy (C. Heston)

Now it takes us maybe 10 clicks at most to download a movie. With a mediocre internet connection we can start watching a movie in 60 minutes. What's worse, we watch them in the same disrespectful way. My colleague Salih watches movies (LotR atm) with his finger sticked to the 'fast forward' button: if a scene is not interesting, he just skips. Or more like, he watches a long trailer of the movie. Before I judge I gotta tell I'm nothing better. Watching a movie alone at home, I catch myself over and over alt-tabbing to gmail, twitter and facebook. I even check all the bios of the actors meanwhile, the plot, and every little detail about the movie. I feel so ashamed while I'm typing these sentences, but it has been some time since I've last watched a movie without pausing it.

Who is to blame then?

I'd say it's both us and modern technology that turns watching a movie into a pathetic attempt on having fun. The days when I watched movies in the cinema or home, from video recorder- yes, those were the days. If I wanted to skip a part or go for a drink, I knew I was destroying the atmosphere not just for myself but for the others. I had the patience to sit and wait until the end. That's how Tarkovsky sucked me in during my uni years: watching S.T.A.L.K.E.R. made me realize how far the audience drifted from the art of cinema.
It's a long way back to the point where movies were still considered to be a piece of art and not another must-to-do on our Daily Schedule of Doing Nothing.

Rihanna in Battleship. The future?

Meanwhile, movie industry is choking in it's own feces. Over the decades, pop movies got lighter and lighter. Rihanna and Hasbro forge an unholy alliance (Battleship), Adam Sandler and other funny guys infest the screen with jokes comprehensible for a poodle, the original crew of Ben Hur will definetely turn away watching the coming remake, and the list goes on. 'Hollywood can't make anything but remakes' cries out the 'movie junkie' of our generation (which is another joke, as if watching tons of movies was such a great effort...). But they forget it's the audience whose needs are considered before making a new movie. Before making another crap we can skip on our laptops.

Now others may say there is a thick line between artistic and popular movies, which is fine by me. It's like Coldplay vs. Pat Metheny. Both play music but only the latter is seriously considered as a form of art. So why the fuss? Art movies should target smaller and more sophisticated audiences while pop movies should keep on producing the shit we all enjoy. Here I have just one small footnote.

Machete. One of the few entertaining action
movies of our decade

Take action movies. They have never been among the most meaningful of movies. But watch Rambo from 1982 and then watch any other action movie from this decade (The Expendables 2 for eg). You'll feel the difference. What's more is that the only fun popular movies (let's stick with action as a genre) are the ones that make a fun of themselves (Machete for instance). Movie production for the masses has never been about the artistic effort, but today's level has reached an all-time low.

Meanwhile the Oscar ceremony also tries to transform with the changing needs of the audience. While until the 80's the best picture award went to the truly meaningful and artistic movies, nowadays it's enough to take the Recipe That Pleases The Academy and your job is done. 2013's probable winner Lincoln just tells everything about this. An ever-green topic (American history), an experienced and well-known actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), a director whose name is known by anyone who sat at least once in front of the TV (Spielberg) and the genre... well, it's just always the same (drama).

Lincoln. The prototype of the 'Oscar-movie'

I'll be old fashioned now. I think the only solution is to spend less time in front of the laptop watching movies and more with sitting in the cinema. We do owe the filmmakers with the minimal respect, eventually they worked with it for months to entertain us. And once its provided, maybe we can start enjoying movies again.

Notes on İrfan Yılmaz’s Evolution- Science or ideology?

I have a speaking class with doctors. Few weeks ago only one of them came, so we didn't study much, just spoke a bit about various topics. We had a decent argument on God and evolutionary theory- me, as the rather atheist and pro-evolutionist, and Abdulkadir, the moslim and creationist. It was a pleasure to argue with someone who believes in something completely different and still manages to keep his cool head- we promised each other to buy one-one book which expresses our viewpoint the best. My choice was the God Delusion, I still owe him but he handed me Evolution- Science of Ideology? yesterday after our class. I started immediately, and decided to take some notes about the arguable points. Here is my first take on it:

The title asks a question which the author dismantles in the first 20 pages by saying ‘a theory which does not provide the opportunity to disprove it, and thus is not falsifiable, does not have the qualities required to be accepted as scientific’. Let’s ignore the practical fact that answering our own book’s question in the first pages makes the rest of the book look less interesting, and now linger on a bit on the citation. Yılmaz states that theories can only be scientific if they can be proven/ disproved with various experiments. He follows the same logic while nullifying the scientific origin of evolutionary theory, stating a said-to-be billion year process cannot be tracked down nor observed because of the length of time. 

However he somehow forgets to mention plenty of inventions and eventually proven theories that appeared to be impossible to prove, for instance, a hundred years ago. I’m not a scientist and truth be told my grades never been satisfactory in those subjects but it doesn't need an expert to disprove Prof. Yılmaz. The modern physics, such as quantum physics (which my father’s main field of research) is utterly based on theories. Proving them seemed to be impossible 50 years ago, nay 30, only a small circle of the scientific world was busy creating theories. There was just no way to prove them. These riddles, however,  appear to be closer to a solution nowadays. Take the Higgs particle, which was probably detected in July 2012 (hasn't been proven as a certainty though). Discovering it seemed a mere and daring dream fifty years ago. Today, it’s reality.

Yılmaz apparently doesn't have the trust in science, the trust that has been moving it through the centuries. The fact that evolutionary theory can’t be proved at the moment, doesn't automatically imply that it can never be proved, it just means we don’t  have sufficient knowledge- yet. He also reiterates numerous times that evolutionary theory is the commonly accepted theory for the origin of life and humankind however it’s unproven. Yılmaz definitely makes a point in the dispute with stating that the theory is almost handled as a fact and has become so sacred since it’s creation that questioning it appears to be almost stupid as questioning whether 2+2 equals 4. However, the book is a hard read especially if you read Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion beforehand… take this line for instance ‘However, the weakness of [Darwin’s] religious understanding, namely his lack of knowledge of God’s names and attributes- knowledge that is particularly exclusive to Islam’. Not that I’m a crusader of Christianity but this sentence just convinces me even more why religions can’t dwell within the walls of objectivity. What Dawkins expresses with shining humor and decent objectivity, Yılmaz substitutes with offensive dogmatism.

That’s it so far, the book is enjoyable despite of what I wrote; the sole fact that it stretches my vision on the topic is satisfactory enough. I’ll make this post a series of writings and will update it any given time I have some thoughts to share. Take care people… in Ourselves we trust.

Rosetta numero quattro

Shameful enough but the first activity in the new year on my blog is another attempt on making a Rosetta video. This time, even worse quality, no screen capture etc... Fans will be rewarded around 7.30. 'Enjoy'!