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Thread: All Down The Line

  1. #316
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    ♪ Putting the pressure on much harder now
    To return again and again ♪


    Red Rain

    Red rain is coming down
    Red rain
    Red rain is pouring down
    Pouring down all over me

    I am standing up at the water's edge in my dream
    I cannot make a single sound as you scream
    It can't be that cold, the ground is still warm to touch
    Hey, we touch
    This place is so quiet, sensing that storm

    Red rain is coming down
    Red rain
    Red rain is pouring down
    Pouring down all over me

    Well I've seen them buried in a sheltered place in this town
    They tell you that this rain can sting and look down
    There is no blood around, see no sign of pain
    Hey, no pain
    Seeing no red at all, see no rain

    Red rain is coming down
    Red rain
    Red rain is pouring down
    Pouring down all over me

    Red rain
    Oh! Oh!
    Putting the pressure on much harder now
    To return again and again
    Red rain
    Just let the red rain splash you
    Let the rain fall on your skin
    Red rain
    I come to you, defences down
    With the trust of a child
    Oh!

    Red rain coming down
    Red rain
    Red rain is pouring down
    Pouring down all over me

    And I can't watch anymore
    No more denial
    It's so hard to lay down in all of this

    Red rain coming down
    Red rain is pouring down
    Red rain is coming down all over me
    I see it

    Red rain coming down
    Red rain is pouring down
    Red rain is coming down all over me
    I'm bathing in

    Red rain coming down
    Red rain is coming down
    Red rain is coming down all over me
    I'm begging you

    Red rain coming down
    Red rain coming down
    Red rain coming down
    Red rain coming down
    Over me in the red, red sea
    Over me
    Over me
    Red rain.

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    All down the line ...

    Across Turkey in 24 hours on the Dogu Express | DW Documentary



    The Dogu Express travels across Turkey from Ankara to Kars. During the nostalgic journey, the train travels at about 70 kilometers an hour and needs a full day for the 1,310 kilometer trip. Young people especially are clamoring for tickets.

    A ticket costs less than 10 euros - but because they're in short supply - bootleg fares can be more than sixteen times that price. Sometimes it takes months to get a ticket. Almost 300,000 people use the train annually. This documentary joins young devotees of the Dogu, who prefer it to low-cost airlines. They say they make the journey to slow down. The young couple, Melve and Atalay, are no exception: They booked the trip to spend quality time with one another. Conductor Hüseyin Celik has been working the route for many years and still loves his job, and the views of the beautiful landscapes the train travels through.
    Jul 31, 2020

    25:56 minutes


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  5. #318
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    ‘All right, Mr DeMille. I’m ready for my closeup’ …

    Sunset Boulevard at 70: we’re all
    Norma Desmond now


    Sunset Boulevard showed the damage wrought by fame.
    Seventy years on, popular culture is more obsessed than ever
    with being seen



    Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

    Tom Joudrey
    Published on Tue 4 Aug 2020


    "On its release in August 1950, Sunset Boulevard punched its own industry in the face. Showbiz royalty, normally enclosed in an echo chamber of self-congratulation, sputtered into a rage. At a star-studded private screening on the eve of the film’s debut, MGM studio mogul Louis B Mayer lambasted the film’s Austrian-born director, Billy Wilder: “You befouled your own nest. You should be kicked out of this country, tarred and feathered, goddamn foreigner son of a bitch!” Wilder’s response: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

    Audiences, however, piled into cinemas. Serendipitously released in the same year as Joseph L Mankiewicz’s All About Eve – a ruthless dissection of the American theatre world – Sunset Boulevard became a landmark statement on the perils of celebrity culture. But 70 years later, at a time when visibility has been weaponised as a tool of social change, the film is no longer just an indictment of Hollywood’s vanity but of a whole cultural ethos that values “being seen”.

    Every domino of the plot falls in the direction of the onlooker-ringed final spectacle. Norma Desmond has just gunned down Joe Gillis in a spasm of jealousy. Now marooned in cinematic delusions, she glides triumphantly down her grand staircase, the news press agog, and ecstatically intones: “All right, Mr DeMille. I’m ready for my closeup.” Substitute “Mr Zuckerberg” and she’d be right at home in the Instagram age."


    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USv1hJTlbhg


    "Sunset Boulevard seems strangely tailormade to skewer our contemporary culture. In some ways, Norma is, like Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe, a tattered but resilient icon of womanhood who fell victim to the studio system. We learn that she was infantilised by handlers and pumped full of barbiturates in her early days, then cast aside as she aged out of her nymph-like beauty. Twenty-first century Hollywood, meanwhile, continues to weather fierce blowback for putting female actors not named Meryl Streep out to pasture around the age of 40.

    Sunset Boulevard also mirrors our political rifts. In a tribalised era, Norma Desmond has for both partisan factions the complexion of the enemy. For liberals, she epitomises super-rich self-delusion. Cocooned in privilege, she fancies herself a meritocratic success story. The fantasy of her self-made triumph is abetted by an information silo that she doesn’t even know she’s trapped in. Her sycophantic enabler – erstwhile director, ex-husband, and now butler, Max von Mayerling – showers her with forged fan letters, as though anticipating the echo chamber that would manifest under the banner of Fox News. “Without me there wouldn’t be any Paramount studios,” she imperiously declares, discounting the swarm of worker bees buzzing around the lot. When Gillis describes her as a has-been (“you were big”), she snaps back, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” capturing the toxic mix of arrogance, nostalgia, and resentment that feeds into the Maga battle cry. President Trump telegraphed as much last February when he touted Gone with the Wind and Sunset Boulevard in a nativist harangue against the multicultural modernity that the popularity of Parasite represents."


    ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small’ … Norma surrounded by reporters

    "Conversely, for conservatives, Norma is the trauma-broadcasting, victim-centred hysteric. Immune to irony and armed with snobbish entitlement, she preps for her starring role with fanatical earnestness. Oscar Wilde once observed that “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling”, and Norma’s faith in her screenplay is, well, genuine. Meanwhile, whenever she senses Gillis’s attention waning, she sounds off about her frayed nerves, wielding guilt as a tool to gag his misgivings. It’s a prescient caricature, from the perspective of the right, of the modern-day theatrics that thrive in grievance culture. Had Gwyneth Paltrow’s brand gurus been on the job in 1950, they’d have called Norma’s extravagances “self-care”.

    In fairness, though, whatever is vile in Norma is what the gaze of the crowd made of her. She’s the vampiric femme fatale feasting on the adulation of others and crowing that “no one ever leaves a star”. Yet there she is, Gillis observes, “still waving proudly to a parade which had long since passed her by”. That’s the real tragedy the film explores – not the noxious effects of ageing or wealth, but the surrender of selfhood that comes from living as a spectacle. When fans stop gawking, her loneliness forces her to invent phantasmic replacements, so that her psychic survival finally depends on her insanity.

    Here’s where a chasm opens between 1950 and 2020. Sunset Boulevard indicts fame. By contrast, 21st century popular culture extols the virtue of maximised visibility. So widely shared is this belief that it passes as a banal truism: “being seen” constitutes both a form of personal therapy and a social justice imperative. “So, I want you to know that I see you,” wrote Hillary Clinton in the heat of the 2016 campaign, as though rescuing supporters from the dark fate of anonymity. Meanwhile, the largest organisations advocating for LGBTQ acceptance have made media visibility and identity representation the fulcrums of social progress.

    And no doubt visibility politics does strip back prejudice. But Sunset Boulevard forces us to contemplate the cost of needing to be seen – namely, the unquenchable thirst for external validation that festers beneath a culture of exhibitionism."


    A poster for Sunset Boulevard featuring Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, William Holden as Joe Gillis and Betty Schaefer as Nancy Olson.

    "The final decades of the 20th century showcased the depredations of celebrity. From the infantilied, rhinoplastied, and blanched persona of Michael Jackson to the crucified rebel-from-royalty that was Princess Diana, fame built and toppled global icons. In the aughts and teens of the new century, Lindsay Lohan scraped rock bottom but survived; Amy Winehouse didn’t.

    But amid this wreckage, celebrity status didn’t fall into ill-repute; instead, it became the average person’s ambition. Social media enabled anyone and everyone to be digitally seen. Influencers proliferated. YouTube stars opened their bedrooms to the public. Clicks, likes and retweets transformed into a cryptocurrency. Lady Gaga’s mega hit Paparazzi from her debut studio album The Fame captured the zeitgeist: sure, fame shatters you, but it forges resilience and gives a platform to the abject. By bearing their wounds for all to see, Taylor Swift and Demi Lovato announced that naked visibility had congealed as the basis for self-esteem and community belonging. The ideal of self-exposure went viral.

    And that’s the most unnerving revelation of watching Sunset Boulevard in 2020: what ails Norma Desmond is what defines today’s popular culture. How’s that for an influencer?

    Still, it’s worth remembering that the studio era’s “greatest star of them all” was the inscrutable eccentric who turned her back on the frothing fandom of the masses. With her shocking exit from the industry in 1941, Greta Garbo clawed back her privacy and never again relinquished it. In a strange way, the occult heroine of Sunset Boulevard is one who never occupies a single frame. In 1948, Wilder summoned Garbo to his home at 704 North Beverly Drive for a drink. His plan was to entice her to accept the lead part in his embryonic film. Offer he did, but her answer was no.

    Wilder’s ballsy film notwithstanding, it was Garbo who, faced with the blandishments of renewed fame, delivered the most authentic “go fuck yourself".

    Source:theguardian.com
    Last edited by Gio, 5th August 2020 at 12:07.
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    Will share this here and well worth the listen ...



    Found Voices : Ex Slaves talk about Slavery in the USA

    Descriptive:
    'A full broadcast story done by ABC News in 1999 about slavery as told by people who were slaves. A very unique 'Nightline' program that introduces us to voices from the past. These are actual slave recordings done in the 1930's and recently digitized. Crafted beautifully by Producer Karen Dewitt. Field Producer & Camera-Fletcher Johnson, Audio- Wayne Boyd.'

    29:46 minutes


    Note does contain commercials, though
    the ads are also uniquely/strange to
    hear 21 years ago now.


    Last edited by Gio, 6th August 2020 at 14:23.
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    And speaking of preserving ...

    In Japan, young people rush to document
    Hiroshima survivors' memories


    PBS NewsHour


    It has been 75 years since the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, leveling the city and killing some 150,000 people. The horrifying aftermath of that attack, and one on Nagasaki three days later, has been described to the generations since -- now with special urgency as the population of survivors dwindles. Special correspondent Grace Lee reports.
    Aug 6, 2020

    7:56 minutes


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    Question

    Which begs to question ...

    Nagasaki – why did the US drop the second bomb?

    DW Documentary



    The first atom bomb destroyed Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Just three days later, a second atom bomb flattened the city of Nagasaki, even though Japan had long been ready to capitulate.

    Conventional wisdom holds that these two atomic explosions - the only use of nuclear bombs in the history of war - brought the Second World War to an end. Yet an increasing number of historians are critical of this interpretation. International experts say it is a myth and say it glorifies an war crime that killed more than 100 thousand civilians. Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa argues that the Soviet Union’s unexpected declaration of war on Japan is what really pushed Tokyo to surrender. He says that Japan had been hoping that Moscow would step in to broker a diplomatic end to the conflict. Research in Russian archives has discovered that the United States knew that, so why did it drop the bombs at all? Especially the second one?

    Aug 6, 2020

    42:24 minutes


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    Question

    hmm ...



    The global coffee crisis is coming


    It's becoming harder and harder to grow.
    Aug 10, 2020

    11:33 minutes



    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IN4ZcZAUbA



    We want to do a lot of stuff; we're not in great shape. We didn't get a good night's sleep. We're a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.

    Jerry Seinfeld


    I like coffee because it gives me the illusion that I might be awake.

    Lewis Black
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    Noooooooooooooo.

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    you look kookoo DT
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    I guess I'd start drinking tea, but coffee is my thing. I like coffee. I wish I could grow it but I can't make a fake mountainside...

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  21. #326
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    All about ...

    Preserving Gaza's photographic history | DW Documentary

    Gaza is a war-zone - surrounded by Israel and controlled by Hamas. The works of an Armenian photographer taken in the 1940s and the 1960s show a Gaza that is little known today.

    "Photo Kegham" was known all over Gaza. As one of the territory's first phtographers, the Armenian Kegham Djeghalian opened a photo studio in Gaza City at the end of the 1940s. His images, taken between 1945 and 1970, show a little-known face of Gaza. One image is of Che Guevara, who visited the area in 1959. Another is of a railway station along the line between the Gaza Strip and Egypt which no longer exists today.

    Marwan Tarazi, whose family took over the business in the 1980s, was able to preserve a part of Djeghalian's archive, even though Studio Kegham is closed now. Archiving the photos has been anything but simple. Most of the negatives and prints are in boxes and plastic bags in a cupboard. Says Tarazi, "It's these negatives and prints that are what's so important to me. They're our legacy, our culture."

    For more than twelve years, Israel, and in some cases Egypt, have tightly cordoned off Hamas-controlled Gaza. Travel and business are almost impossible for the area's two million residents. Three wars and many bursts of military conflict between Hamas and Israel have dominated recent years.

    Photographer Shareef Sarhan is documenting the conflict today, but he also tries to present daily life. Says Sarhan, "Most people know the Gaza they see in the media - destruction, war, destruction. Blockades and occupation. Yet beyond that, there's another Gaza."

    The young rapper Rapper Ayman Mghamis uses old photographs in his videos as he tells of life today in Gaza. He says this past is long gone, adding that Gaza today cannot offer its young residents any opportunities. He says, "I can't plan my life in Gaza. I don't know what will happen tomorrow. Will I still be alive? Will there be a war? I can't see a horizon."

    Anahid Boutin is Kegham Djeghalian's eldest daughter. She lives in France and remembers her childhood in Gaza in the 1950s and 1960s, when the place was under Egyptian military administration. She says, "What are my memories of Gaza? They were happy times. As Armenians, we were very welcome in Gaza." Although Boutin has been unable to visit for many years, she still maintains contact with her friends from that time. The photographs connect different generations and places. "It would be good to preserve the history,” she says. "At least the history we know. These photographs reflect a part of Gaza's turbulent, emotional history."
    Aug 12, 2020

    42:24 minutes


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    Returning Topic

    The latest ...

    FAMOUS GRAVE TOUR - England #1
    (Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier, etc.)


    Welcome to Hollywood Graveyard, where we set out to remember and celebrate the lives of those who lived to entertain us, by visiting their final resting places. Today we leave Los Angeles behind to visit England, where we'll find such stars as Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier, Deborah Kerr, and many more.

    Full list of stars visited today:
    William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, TS Eliot, PL Travers, Cecil Day-Lewis, Ian Fleming, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Roger Bannister, Winston Churchill, Deborah Kerr, Roger Lloyd-Pack, Anthony Shaffer, Peter Shaffer, Max Wall, William Friese-Greene, Bob Hoskins, Jean Simmons, Beryl Bainbridge, Philip Harben, Patrick Wymark, Lucian Freud, Michael Faraday, Christina Rossetti, Tim Pigott-Smith, George Michael, Laurence Olivier, Henry Irving, Peggy Ashcroft, George Frederic Handel, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy.
    Aug 16, 2020

    36:14 minutes


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    Question

    With nothing to compare it to ...


    Generation Putin

    DW Documentary


    Vladimir Putin came to power as Russian millennials were coming into the world. Everything they know about their homeland has been shaped by Putin’s authoritarian regime. Some revere him. But others long for democratic change.

    Boris Yeltsin stood down as the first President of the Russian Federation on New Year’s Eve 1999, just hours before the millennial celebrations began. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin stepped in as caretaker president and pledged to protect freedom of speech and the press and property rights. Since then, Putin has consolidated his grip on Russia and his promises have become just empty words.

    More and more Russians, particularly the young, are opposed to Putin’s authoritarian regime. Even though they have only ever known the former KGB officer as their leader, like their counterparts in the West, they have access via the Internet to information that is suppressed in the Russian media.

    This film asks young people from St. Petersburg to Eastern Siberia how they feel about life in today’s more powerful yet also more unstable country. Some are fanatical Putin supporters, while others are opposition activists. We look behind the barbed wire around a closed Siberian city, visit a Muslim village in Tatarstan, and talk to young Muscovites. And we also see how the Russian education system instils children with the regime’s propaganda from an early age.
    Aug 23, 2020

    42:26 minutes


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    The Forgotten Stones That
    Still Inspire Turks to Help Their
    Neighbors


    A tradition of anonymous charity lives on in the age of COVID-19.



    by Jennifer Hattam August 24, 2020



    One of the best preserved charity stones in Istanbul, outside the İmrahor Mosque in the Üsküdar district.

    "On a typical Friday at midday, the racks at the entrance to the Dedeman Mosque in northern Istanbul would be full of shoes, doffed by members of the congregation before they enter the building for the most important Islamic prayer of the week.

    But when Turkey suspended mass prayers in mid-March, to try to stop the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, those racks stood empty. And as businesses around the city shut their doors, the mosque’s young imam, Abdulsamet Çakır, knew that the pockets of some members of his community might soon be empty as well.

    “On the day the mosques were closed to communal prayers, I dragged the shoe racks into the garden to clean them off and then filled them with some groceries I bought,” says Çakır. “Then I called up some of the people in the neighborhood who I thought might be in need and invited them to come take what they wanted.”


    Imam Abdulsamet Çakır and his pop-up food bank in the Dedeman Mosque.

    "Word of Çakır’s initiative spread quickly. Soon it was drawing recipients from all around Istanbul, and donors and media attention from across Turkey, and even abroad. But what seemed like a novel idea for pandemic times was actually inspired by a very old tradition: the sadaka taşı, or charity stone.

    “People who had money would leave some on top of the stone, and those who didn’t would take some, according to their need,” Çakır explains.

    Though its exact origins are murky, the sadaka taşı tradition is believed to date back to the time of the Ottomans, the Turkish dynasty that arose in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) around 1300 and grew into a powerful empire, only collapsing after World War I. Charity stones have been found in Jerusalem, Tunis, Ohrid, and other places that were once part of the Ottoman Empire.

    (The Ottomans apparently had a penchant for useful stones: Other types recorded include a binek taşı, with steps to help a rider mount a horse; a hamal taşı, on which a porter could briefly rest his heavy load; and a yitik taşı, an alcove that served as a kind of lost-and-found.)

    At least 160 charity stones are thought to have been located in Istanbul at one time, but finding them today is no easy task. All that’s left of some are weathered stumps embedded in the sidewalk. Others have been painted over, cast to the side, used as ashtrays, buried under new construction, or hauled away entirely."


    The remnants of a charity stone are embedded in the courtyard of the Zal Mahmud Paşa Mosque.

    "Independent cultural-history researcher Nidayi Sevim had never heard of a sadaka taşı before the mid-2000s, when he stumbled upon one amid some of the elaborately decorated gravestones he was studying in the Eyüp district of Istanbul. “It drew my attention because it was different—it had this indentation, this hollow in the top,” he says.

    From the scant written sources on the subject, he learned that these stones were typically unadorned pillars three to six feet high, set up in similar locations: in a mosque’s courtyard, a tomb’s entrance, the foot of a bridge, next to a public fountain.

    “The logic of having the sadaka taşı up high was that you would have to reach over the top of the stone, so that no one could see whether you were putting money on it, or taking money off,” says Ali Çarkoğlu, a professor at Koç University in Istanbul who studies philanthropic giving in Turkey.

    This anonymity reflects Islamic directives that charity be given in a way that both maintains the dignity of the poor and keeps the rich from becoming too prideful.

    Following the trail of previous mentions of charity stones in the city, Sevim roamed all over Istanbul’s neighborhoods searching for what was left. He identified about 30 stones or their remnants, eventually writing what was at the time the only book on the topic. Since it was first published, in 2009, he says, some of those 30 have been lost in the constant churn of urban development."


    A charity stone in the Üsküdar district.

    “This is a very important culture, a treasure, but unfortunately one that’s been mostly forgotten, and thus is disappearing,” says Kemal Özdal, chairman of the charitable foundation Sadakataşı Derneği, which carries out humanitarian aid projects in Turkey and abroad, and works to raise awareness about the history of its namesake.

    As Imam Çakır’s pop-up food bank shows, however, some of the concepts behind the sadaka taşı live on today in different forms, which have assumed new importance—and continued to evolve to suit contemporary society—during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    An estimated eight million people in Turkey—almost a third of the country’s workforce—labor for daily wages outside the social-security system. “When the pandemic hit and their workplaces closed, these waiters, barbers, porters, and others lost their incomes,” says Murat Ongun, a spokesperson for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. Following the shutdowns, a million new people applied to the municipality for cash or food assistance.

    The municipality’s initial attempt to start a fundraising drive for the city’s needy was stymied by a political dustup with Turkey’s central government. But the municipality, which operates the local gas and water companies, hit upon the idea of creating a website where families under low-income thresholds could upload their unpaid utility bills, and other citizens with more means could log on to pay them off. To date, anonymous donors have spent 24 million Turkish Liras ($3.4 million) doing just that, paying off nearly three-fourths of the 241,000 bills uploaded.

    “We think this campaign was one of the most positive outcomes of the pandemic period,” says Ongun. “This kind of social solidarity is in our nation’s DNA; to capture it, you just need a good idea and a trustworthy method.”


    A “solidarity hook” installed outside a residential development.

    "The name of the municipality’s website, Askıda Fatura (“Bill on the Hook”), came from a familiar concept in Turkey: paying for two loaves of bread (ekmek) at a bakery and leaving one literally “on the hook” (askıda) outside the shop for someone in need to take. Signs in bakery windows encouraging customers to participate in this askıda ekmek tradition proliferated during the pandemic, as did other kinds of charitable “hooks.”

    In the Cihangir neighborhood, for instance, small markets set up askıda gıda (“groceries on the hook”) corners where people could buy and leave surplus essentials for their neighbors. The district municipalities of Beylikdüzü and Beşiktaş launched dayanışma askısı (“solidarity hook”) campaigns where people could hang up bags of donated groceries at the supermarket or outside their residences—or do so virtually via online shopping—and have them delivered by municipal personnel to the needy.

    Similar stories—about anonymous benefactors going into shops and paying off the accounts recorded in zimem defteri (debt ledgers), another practice said to date back to the Ottoman era, and most commonly done during the holy month of Ramadan—also kept popping up in the Turkish media.

    “Traditionally in Turkey, people have not made the charitable donations obligatory to Muslims through formal institutions, but rather in cash or in kind to people they know through their networks,” says Çarkoğlu, the professor. “[This] serves to maintain social hierarchy, by keeping the poor in a direct linkage with their patrons. The askıda methods build a barrier against this kind of linkage—people know that whenever they are hungry, they can get something to eat, but they don’t have to kiss the hand of the person who gave it.”


    A charity stone in the small cemetery at the Aşçıbaşı Mosque.

    "The origins of practices like askıda ekmek are debated. Some say they popped up only in recent decades, perhaps mimicking the caffe sospeso (suspended coffee) concept in Italy, or have been deliberately revived as part of politically minded efforts to recapture a glint of Ottoman-era glory. But Sevim, the researcher, has found evidence that their inspiration dates back even farther than sadaka taşı—back to the early days of Islam itself.

    “There’s a story in the Hadith [an Islamic religious text] about the Prophet Muhammad’s time in Medina [in the 7th century], where he instructed his followers to hang up two strings in the mosque and put bunches of dates [hurma] up there, so people could take what they need without sacrificing their pride,” Sevim says. “Like an askıda hurma.”

    “These are all versions [of] the same idea,” he adds, musing on how the concept could be further adapted: maybe an askıda bilet (ticket) system on a bus, or askıda maske (mask) for the ongoing pandemic.

    “The names can change, the forms can change, but this is a universal method of goodness,” Sevim says. “Not physically as a charity stone, but different versions inspired by them can do great things today.”

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    Refugees: Going through hell

    DW Documentary


    Many people try to reach Europe through Niger and Libya and across the Mediterranean. But they are exploited and abused along the entire route, and often don’t make it there anyway.

    Even those who finally do arrive in Europe are often forced into prostitution, earn starvation wages and face deportation from refugee camps. Reporter Anne-Frédérique Widmann traveled with migrants in Niger, Libya and Sicily. She met penniless minors who were injured, traumatized, clueless and soon to become fodder for the sex trade. Widmann also talked to European officials, aid workers, human traffickers, overwhelmed police officers and frustrated rescuers who are no longer permitted to come to the refugees’ aid at sea. Yet at the same time, viewers can also sense the unwavering hope of people who are certain they will find a better life in Europe.
    Aug 27, 2020

    42:24 minutes


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