America Diary: Handsome Manhattan

Milestones in life are always remembered with lasting echoes of the experience. America Diary: Handsome Manhattan left lasting echoes in my memory as the place where an unforgettable dream came true.

After working at Michigan State for a while in 2017, I couldn’t wait to go to New York, which was my dream. I worked as a groundskeeper at a very ‘spectacular’ resort in a small town. In this article, I will remember some distinctive parts of Manhattan, which has a cultural heritage, and the avenues and streets that fascinate me.

I was trying to find a hotel to stay on my way from Detroit to New York. It was like I had literally thrown myself into the unknown. I went there without a plan or preparation. I guess I took a big risk, now that I think about it. When it got dark in the evening after I arrived in New York, worrying alarms were ringing in my mind. Finally, I found a hostel in a run-down part of Brooklyn and hurriedly settled there. I had the best sleep of my life. Fatigue was leaving my body like steam.

America Diary: First Touching to the New York’s Soul

The next day I woke up and went down to the garden. I urgently needed to make cigarettes and coffee. Just then I met a French guy who seemed to have jumped out of outer space. It was so obvious that we were both strangers there. Even though it was an international hostel, me and him were even strangers. Frankly, this foreignness and surprise of a French guy and a Turk was more evident both in their facial expressions and in their accent when speaking English. Some cultural influences were also involved. The French have always had a distance from the USA. He also had distances. He accompanied me for a few days. We became friends with him…

I was floating like a dot in the fascination, endless skyscrapers and extremely fluid structure of Manhattan in New York. I wandered around in a magnificent miniature for days. Side street bars in Brooklyn, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge at night, the secluded streets of Chinatown, the endless artistic design of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, watching the rain on the 82nd floor of the Empire State Building, long walks in Central Park and other things. All moments left permanent traces in the flow of experience. It was all like a fast and very fluid dream.

America Diary: Touching the Spirit of the 50s and 60s

MacDougal Street is a street located in the immediate vicinity of Greenwhich Village. It’s a very lively place that spreads out before you like a carpet once you pass Washington Square. This street has a very important place in American culture and history. Allen Ginsgberg, Jimi Hendrix and Tom Waits welcome you here. Places such as Cafe Reggio, which brought the first cappuccino to America, Fat Black Pussy Cat, and Cafe Wha are lined up in blocks next to each other on this street. I specifically chose these places as showcases of cultural awakening and experience.

There is a book called Kaddish by Allen Ginsberg that I brought with me just to get into that time. I was individually portraying the book, coffee and cigarette generation. Afterwards, I go inside and sit on a real throne belonging to the Medici family. I want to feel the Tom Waits and Bob Dylan vibe.

The 1950s were the place where cultural transformations occurred that would radically change American social life on New York’s Lower Side. MacDougal Street witnessed the revival of American folk music. Bob Dylan showed himself at Cafe Wha, one of the cabarets on this street, and Jimi Hendrix, who played his guitar with his teeth, gave his first performance at Cafe Wha. It all happened under the hospitality of this street. At the same time, Washington Square, located right in the back street, has witnessed history as the place where poems were read, stories were told and political uprisings took place. https://www.gpsmycity.com/attractions/macdougal-street-190.html

America Diary: Beatific States of Handsome Manhattan

I first read about the Beat Generation in K magazine when I was in high school. Over the years, I was slowly collecting and reading everything about the corpus. Magazines, books, music, movies and TV series. Of course, this was the passion of an internalized lifestyle rather than a formal show-off and a show of air. The Beat Generation particularly appealed to me with their creativity and radicalism in experiential aspects of life. Under the influence of all this, I dreamed of going to America. And then it happened…

While I was at university, I learned a little from American literature’s guidance to colorful experiences in life. This interest, which started in 2014, was of course further shaped by the music I listened to and the circle of friends I hung out with. But what particularly pushes me towards Beat literature is that it is a manifestation of the writing and reading habits I have had since my childhood.

Cultural enlightenment emerged in these lands with poets, writers, jazz musicians and folk music masters. The American version of the Dadaists in France manifested itself with a fluid dynamic in these places in New York. For people suffering from spiritual deprivation after the war, there was a renaissance of the intensity of experience with the emphasis on process philosophy, in which reality was reshaped through mutual dialogues.

Echoes of a culture of spontaneity and an improvisational life were heard in Greenwich Village with Jackson Pollock, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan. The interplay of body and emotion had seeped into the very marrow of American life with its expressiveness, the sheer intensity of experience.

Later, Rock & Roll culture manifested itself rapidly starting from the 70s, thanks to the discovery and application of intense movements and unconscious dynamics in this period.