New Year, New Man

Why not start out 2013 appreciating a little beauty?  Here at the Café, regulars will know, we have a bit of a thing for tall, dark, and handsome, on the order of Bollywood's Mr. John Abraham, fetching Mr. Upen Patel, sometime Mr. Egypt Tarek Naguib, and such Hollywood staples past and present as Messrs. Kline and Gable.

Here we have a new addition to our stable, as it were - Turkish star Burak Özçivit (don't ask me - I haven't the foggiest on how to pronounce it; any and all suggestions welcome). He's popped up on the radar of late because Mr. Muscato has become addicted to a new soap opera on local television; it's an Arabic-dubbed version of the blockbuster series Muhteşem Yüzyıl (The Magnificent Century, known in Arabic as Hareem al Sultan, meaning The Sultan's Harem).  It's a sprawling costume drama of the life and times of Suleiman the Magnificent, and it's basically Dynasty in turbans and fab Ottoman court costumes.

Among other things, the period setting requires the male half of the cast to sport an alluring range of facial hair, and it's this that has really brought our Mr. Özçivit into his own. He's been around for a while, it seems, as one of Turkey's leading male models and a dabbling actor, but the addition of the moustache seen here has transformed a pretty but rather bland young man into... something more special.

Sadly, Turkish stars don't have the pleasing tendency of their Bollywood brothers to drop their shirts at the least provocation, but Mr. O. has the charisma to make fully dressed seem almost as alluring as the alternative.

In any case, between the distractions offered by the moustache and all its counterparts on the other actors and the splendid outfits (the ladies of the harem swan about dressed in massive velvet gowns and quantities of jewelry, while the men run to embroidered vests and inventive headgear), I'm enjoying Hareem al Sultan almost enough to ignore the woeful dubbing, which is very much on the level of that seen in Mr. Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? - lots of bits in which voices float over faces that stopped speaking moments ago, and/or great stretches of frantic acting dubbed with something along the lines of "Yes, Your Highness."

It's all very fraught, with a level of slapping and storming in and out of palace chambers that would do Aaron Spelling proud.  If only there were more scenes set poolside at Topkapi...

Ten Thoughts on a Low Dive

While we were lolling about in Istanbul, Mr. Muscato and the Egyptian boys decided they wanted to see the real Turkey, to go off the beaten tourist track of Taksim and Sultanahmet.  Through friends of friends, they had heard about a little pub on the wrong side of the tracks, frequented by the right sort of clientele.

That's how we found ourselves, latish one night, rattling along in the tram out past the bright lights of touristland, out along an avenue that grew progressively less cosmopolitan with every stop.  The slight lip-service of at least a little English on signs seen elsewhere in town disappeared, and soon enough we appeared to be the only non-Turks aboard.  I had been the Internet researcher that turned the boys' vague memories of friends' accounts into a name and an address, and so I led us at what seemed to be the right stop out into the darkness.

It turned out I'm a better navigator than you might have thought; we found the place.  It was all that it had been painted, and more.  I'm pretty sure that almost everyone there was a direct descendant of one of the gentleman above.  Hell - I think some of them might have been the gentlemen above.

Following, in no particular order, are the things I learned about a night out at a wholly non-Westernized Turkish nightspot catering to (to steal a phrase from Papa Hemingway) Men without Women:

1.  Nowhere else on earth will you ever feel so completely not-Turkish.

2.  Not to mention not-butch.  In this joint, Charles Bronson would feel like Totie Fields.

3.  When compared to about 80% of the men present, that is.  As one’s eyes adjust to the dim light, one realizes that she was in fact a good deal butcher than about 15% of these boys.

4.  The remaining 5% may in fact be Totie Fields.

5.  Wherever they register, however, they all have moustaches.  If they’re really butch, their moustaches have moustaches.

6.  In general, this is a very good thing indeed.

7.  In the hands of the right house band, Turkish pop combines the energy of its Arab counterpart and the melodramatic darkness of Slavic folksongs.   The result is disconcerting but not unalluring.

8.  Especially when it’s making half of those present dance, and the other half weep.

9.  Whether dancing or weeping, however, everybody’s singing.

10.   When you find yourself dancing, weeping, and singing, it’s time to go home.

In short, we had a Very Good Time. 

A couple of things surprised me about the joint.  For one, even though Turkey remains a country ferociously devoted to smoking as a nearly mandatory social pastime, the place scrupulously observed the no-smoking-in-public rules flouted in cafés and restaurants all across Istanbul.  For another, there was a casual cheerfulness about the place (even with all the minor-key induced weeping - it really was as if every other song were a cross between "Danny Boy" and "Leavin' on a Jet Plane," albeit with a belly-dance beat, from the reaction they were getting) that belied its outside grittiness.  It sort of gave you the impression of a gay Turkish Cheers, if Cheers had been ten times more crowded, and Carla had been a man (actually, one of the barbacks was disctinctly rheaperlmanesque, right down to the perm).

And the regulars really had a very Turkish kind of charm.  They tended either toward the mature:

Just a snap found online, but it conveys, I think, the butch-Totie conundrum...

Or the less so, but still not uninteresting:

Although, just to clarify, everyone that night stayed full dressed.  Pity.

We missed the last tram back to the more-traveled side of town, but all agreed it had been worth the excursion.  Once we stopped weeping and singing, that is...

Random Thoughts for Thursday

A busy day chez nous, darlings, as Mr. Muscato has launched once again into one of his domestic fits.  Pasta making, it seems, is the current thing, and while he's very good at it, it does involve my pitching in and helping drape long strands of the stuff everywhere possible.  Mildly exhausting.  Tomorrow, I am led to believe, we'll be moving on to ravioli and gnocchi.  After that, God only knows, but if I seem a little punchier than usual, blame it on a carb coma.

The snap above has nothing, really, to do with culinary goings-on in the Villa Muscato, but I rather like it.  It is the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul, a curious and rather marvelous tourist attraction a few yards from the Hagia Sophia.  Once a primary reservoir for Byzantium, today, with its mood lighting, pan pipes, and teashop at the exit, it feels more like a lost set for Phantom of the Opera, lacking only Michael Crawford oaring about in a skiff.  Still, it's undeniably atmospheric, and the vast forest of columns drawn from hither and yon around the Eastern Empire to support the tidy brick vaulted ceiling inspires a kind of pleasant, abstract melancholy as you wander about (if, that is, you can ignore the tourist families and omnipresent camera flashes).

We're feeling very indulgent, about more than just fresh pasta - which with a splash of good oil, a sliver of garlic, and a little of this or that is delicious - as we've embarked on a long weekend.  Islamic New Year, you see, which is, I must admit, only moderately festive in and of itself, being celebrated with a notable lack of party hats, Champers, and "Auld Lang Syne."  Time enough for that, all too soon.  At least in the meantime, terriers permitting, we'll be sleeping in for the next couple of days.

Back to Reality (or What Passes for It)

"The Signora had no business to do it," said Miss Bartlett, "no business at all. She promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here are north rooms, looking into a courtyard, and a long way apart. Oh, Lucy!"

Having once read Forster - or seen Merchant-Ivory, for that matter - I suppose any hotel room that looks out on water will inevitably call up visions of Lucy Honeychurch and her trying Cousin Charlotte. 

Our pleasant little rooms this past weekend looked out on the Bosporus rather than the Arno, but it was a gratifying view nonetheless, even if the Otel Stella Theodora lacked the cosy English charm of the Pensione Bertolini (not to mention anything as toothsome as Julian Sands in his prime.  Or Simon Callow for that matter, who was truth to tell always rather more my taste).  A short trip such as this one was can seem rather surreal on one's return, sudden and unwelcome, to reality; that feeling is perhaps amplified when the contrast between two places - the immense energy and history, layer on layer, in Istanbul, as opposed to the lethargic artifice of this invented Sandlandian semi-metropolis - is so great.

But here I am again, and while Mr. Muscato continues his little autumn jaunt, I return to the grindstone, a dubious pleasure allayed only by the ferocious joy of two small dogs.  What they'll do when the one they really care about returns later this week, I hardly dare think...

Travel Report

Well, Istanbul is all that memory and others' rave reviews have painted it - heaving with people, wildly international, and boasting, this weekend, perfect fall weather (if you live in the Sandlands, at least - having enjoyed a warm and sunny morning, I'm now relishing watching a thunderstorm roll in over the Bosporus from the balcony of our hotel room - it's a refreshing change actually to see weather).

We took it slow to start, arriving at our hotel off Taksim in the middle of the afternoon and only venturing out later for dinner and a long walk.  The Otel Stella Theodora* is just off a busy street, at a place where it seems the more-or-less real city meet Touristlandia.  That makes for a nice juxtapostion of backpackers, hipsters (domestic and imported), and other hapless types (like us, I suppose) running into large round ladies swathed in a fashion that recalls Moscow housewives circa 1962, with the babushka replaced with capacious headscarves.  Their sons and grandsons run about smoking with a grim determination rarely seen in the West these days, apparently eager to turn their toothsome selves at 27 into what their elders look like by 50.

As for the Otel, what it may lack in cosmopolitan polish, it more than makes up for in cost and a truly lovely view of the water, something one would never expect from its tight urban setting and unpreposessing facade.  It's not the Four Seasons, but it's cheap and cheerful, with a surprisingly fine mattress and lots of hot water.  The Egyptian boys are perfectly happy, because it's also two doors down from a very festive watering hole, which we will likely (among other dives) habituate this evening.

We did manage to cover a few tourist sites today, and while the terrifying line at Hagia Sophia means that we may try there again, we did brave a shorter queue to visit the Basilica Cistern (certainly the finest watertank-of-antiquity-based tourist attraction I can think of) and wandered about the hippodrome, with the Egyptians becoming wroth, as they are wont to do, about the presence there, as in what seems like every major metropolis we visit, of an obelisk pillaged at some point from the banks of the Nile.  I told them all about the massacre of the Janissaries, which happened more or less at its base, and they agreed that they probably had it coming to them (despite meeting their unfortunate end a millennium or more after the column's looting).

Then it was a lovely fish lunch at a shamelessly touristy restaurant nearby (full of shamelessly flirting waiters, which made it all worthwhile, even the acrid house white), and now here I am - and really the rain is pouring down now - having a little siesta while the boys go off and misbehave.

It really is the most remarable city - every platitude you can imagine about clashes of old and new, religious and secular, shabby and chic, all at once, and more so.  Somehow, the fact that everything's in Turkish comes as an odd surprise, as is the sensation (which you really don't get in much of Europe, where at least scraps of the language are familiar) of being able to read a sign, but not understand a word of it.

Fortunately, there is beauty everywhere, and in many forms, so one doesn't (at least after this little bit of time, so far) lose one's mind.   In any case, as Mr. Muscato (and have I mentioned how nice it was to see him again?  We've rarely been apart for ten days in our nine years together, and for the very good reason that neither of us like it) and I keep reminding ourselves, it's not the Sandlands, which right now is a very good thing indeed.

* Name changed to protect the dilapidated.

I've Got a Date (in Constantinople)

This deathless clip - from the fabulous "Around the World in Eighty Ways Revue" of the one and only Miss Vickie Eydie (of whom there is no doubt that she is a lounge act) - heralds some amusing news, darlings. 

Yes, it's true - I'm jetting off to meet Mr. Muscato on the shores of the Bosporus (where we will no doubt get preposterous).  He's crossing the Med from Cairo with some friends, I fly in from the Sandlands at very nearly the same time, and we'll all have a jolly long weekend in Taksim. 

I was last in Istanbul (not Constantinople) nearly ten years ago, in what turned out to be the waning months of my carefree bachelor days.  In memory it was a supremely amusing place, and if at that time that involved some unlikely-to-be-repeated naughtiness, well - that's nobody's business but the Turks...