Losers Club A Kadikoy Interview

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“the losers club was a premature birth. It was a project that could only be done at the current point of radio…”

Sinan: Don’t be nervous, we are just going to chat. You already know our format?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Yes, according to your format you are a provocateur! We’ve spotted him! (Laughter)
Sinan: You can warn us if we go into topics you don’t want published.
Kaan Çaydamlı: No abi, it is what we say.
Ulvi: Of course we got our asses kicked in Şenol’s! Where to cut, what to do! (Laughter)
Sinan: Yes please! We would appreciate it if you don’t swear too much. After a certain point, we work our asses off to preserve the meaning while trying to correct it.
Kaan Çaydamlı: Isn’t it in the whole?
Sinan: There is no problem with slang up to a point, but… When you change excessive slang words, the flavor of the conversation cannot be reflected in the text. No, if you’re going to swear…
Ulvi: Do it and do it properly! (Laughter)
Sinan:
“Losers Club”
We won’t talk about the movie. Our main concern is the “Losers Club” itself, its own story. Your personal adventures… Of course, we will also enter the movie.
Mehmet Öztekin: That’s what I prefer.
Sinan: Mehmet, there is a story. What do you think made this story worth telling?
Mehmet Öztekin: Hmmm… It was when I had just arrived in Istanbul.
Ulvi From Eskisehir?

Mehmet Öztekin: No, from Izmir… I have never said it anywhere before, I was already doing a radio program in those years. It was a program called “Gamli Baykuş”… So I was very interested in radio at that time. It was a time when private radios had just opened. “Gamli Baykuş” was a radio program that was completely opposite in format to the Losers’ Club. For example
Nirvana
A special program just for him
Seattle Sound
It was a program that talked about ‘s, gave technical information and didn’t take any phone calls. In other words, I didn’t receive requests, live connections, trinkets, praise and criticism calls, I would just do a two-hour program on the radio and finish it. I was doing conceptual programs… Actually, it was a bit of a ridiculous move, because that was the period when freedom in radio started with the establishment of private radios and I
TRT
I was doing a program in the format! That’s when Kaan and I met. A mutual friend told me a lot about Kaan. Then, when I had to be in Istanbul for the love of cinema, I started to stay in Kaan.
Sinan: Where were you until then?
Mehmet Öztekin: I was in Izmir. I was reading. Radio was very much in my life for the last 2-3 years…
Kaan Çaydamlı: You used to run a radio station, I think?
Mehmet Öztekin Oh yes! The radio management job was in Antalya. I was doing a program in Antalya. I was in charge of the radio station newly established by E Medya for a while. I stayed there for 3-5 months.
Sinan: From love of radio to love of cinema?
Mehmet Öztekin: Radio has become disgusting for me. I stopped listening to the radio, that’s all. But I was watching a scary movie. It was like working overtime… I was watching four movies a day. I’m not exaggerating, three or four movies every day… So there was no time to listen to the radio anyway. In the meantime, I would go to Taksim, I was working at Hanif Han at the time, in the production company. The radio station is in Gümüşsuyu… It’s a ten-minute walk away… It’s a ten-minute walk away, but I rarely go to the radio station. You know, if there’s nothing much to do, if there’s nowhere better to go, we talk to Kaan, he says “come on, come to the radio”, I buy a couple of beers and go. I just sit there in the studio and listen to them. I used to listen to the radio program on the radio. I wouldn’t just turn on the radio at home and listen to it like everyone else… (Laughs)
Sinan: Live?
Mehmet Öztekin: There was no radio at home though, where was I supposed to listen to it? Anyway, one evening while listening to Kaan in the studio, he started telling a story about a bee landing on a train! I had already witnessed many times when I was listening to them from time to time that they used harsh words. I thought they were doing a very good program. But what struck me in that story was the rhythm… I don’t remember much about the story now, but there is one thing I remember very well. As I listened, the story suddenly took on a terrifying visualization in my head. A lot of weird, surreal images. As Kaan continued to tell the story, I remember getting disconnected after a while. A rhythm formed in my head. This is something I believe in very much in cinema. A rhythm starts and from that moment on it finds its own way! It doesn’t matter what you write, what you act, what you shoot. So the movie creates its own poetry. Such an atmosphere emerged in Kaan’s narration. He came to a very interesting place, right at the breaking point of the story and he messed up the story a lot… I thought he wouldn’t be able to pick it up, I remember how he picked it up with something incredible, he picked it up and finished it… The story ended and Kaan was back to his standard in no time at all. So the phone rang and “have we slept with you?” “no!”… It turned into a Losers Club format… Kaan’s story of the bee landing on the train lasted about five minutes. And when he finished that story, I remember saying “I want to write this, I want to script it” on the visualization that appeared in my head. That’s the opening scene of The Losers Club, which I wrote first. Under the voice of the character Kaan on the radio, there is such a visual thing, there is a sequence… It ends with the explosion of a flash in the radio studio. So we only see the studio for a second in the whole sequence, but we always hear the sound. I had already written that scene before I wrote the synopsis… The moment I said I was going to write the script for this, I wrote that scene and put it aside. Then I sat down with the synopsis. Something similar happened in this scenario. In this script, I first wrote the final scene and put it aside, then I sat down and wrote the second version.
Sinan: Years have passed since the program. I wonder what triggered me to turn this story into a feature film all these years later. What makes you think it will be interesting for today’s audience?
Mehmet Oztekin It’s a bit about my approach, of course…
Sinan: Look, look at the question! (Laughter)
Mehmet Oztekin There’s a weight, so I don’t know what to do! (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı: I will only answer Ulvi’s questions! (Laughter)
Mehmet Öztekin: Now there is a situation like this. In fact, every story is worth telling. If you can convey it correctly, of course. I don’t think what is being told is very important, the important thing is to tell it correctly, to convey it correctly. It’s the same for the Losers Club. I thought about it a lot, it’s a bit like this: the fact that someone like Beethoven was born at the time when the piano was invented is very unfortunate for very good composers born today, for example… I think this was the situation of the Losers Club in the era of private radios. In fact, a program like the Losers Club could only have started today…
Sinan: So it was a kind of premature birth?
Mehmet Öztekin: Yes, I think it was an early birth! As a matter of fact, I have taken this scenario to many places. There came a moment when we said, “No, this is not going to work, let’s put this aside.” Almost everyone we took the script to had the same attitude, the same comments… “Hmmm very nice, very sophisticated!” So the producers responded with the most polite version of “I don’t understand shit from this”…
Sinan: I will ask you to stop there and Kaan I will ask you a question right away. This is your story after all… The movie is about you and your experiences. Did you do all this for the glory, brother?
Kaan Çaydamlı Pardon? What do you mean, “glory”?
Sinan: Did you live thinking that one day someone would come out and tell these things, carry them to others?
Kaan Çaydamlı: There is no such thing. I was abandoned! I took refuge in a small room upstairs in my house. So, let me tell you how I started… I’m an engineer, I’m in a bad relationship, I don’t want to go home, and I work thirteen hours, fourteen hours, fifteen hours a day, including weekends… When I come home, there is a resistance to sleep… I sit on the couch, private radios started at that time, I turn it on and listen to it for hours…
Sinan: What year is it exactly?
Kaan Çaydamlı: The years when it just started! The 90s or something… Maybe the early 90s… That’s how some mechanisms work in me. I focus on something without realizing it, it’s a bit like Mehmet watching four movies a day… One day I caught myself wanting to do a radio show, wanting to talk on the radio. We live in Kadıköy with a friend. I think it was Ahmet Özgür, he was doing the sound system.
Kent FM
‘in. We were in Kadıköy, he said, “Well, let’s go and talk, you do something”… I said, “Fine, let’s go” and we went. I made a night program called Night Fanzine. I was also doing a book program called “Bookless”. It was a book program where I never talked about the book… That’s how I got into radio. All of a sudden… I found myself ready and I started… The format of the Kaybedenlerler Kulübü was actually a format that was practiced a little bit at Gece Fanzini… It was a little training… Then the radio moved to Gümüşsuyu. In the meantime, we’re
Open Radio
and we went to Open Radio… Did I miss the question? Are we going right?
Ulvi: Yeah, we’re going right…

“I went to open radio, I was about to go on the air. I looked and there was a chicken. of course I said this on the air. ömer madra called me immediately…”

Kaan Çaydamlı: I don’t know what kind of answer you expect, but I’m telling everything directly, as it is?
Ulvi: Of course, that’s exactly what we want.

Kaan Çaydamlı: We went to Open Radio. I walked into a meeting and I couldn’t believe what I saw. I’m an engineer. Press the “On Air” button, start broadcasting, brother, right? They’re having a meeting on how to broadcast! Press the button, start broadcasting, and we’ll gather in the meantime! Anyway, I forced them to put on a rock and roll program in the morning. The rock and roll generation! In the morning! It was the most listened to program of that period. In the meantime, Kent FM closed down and will move to Gümüşsuyu, but there is a gap of five or six months. I did another program on Açık Radio in that gap, I don’t remember the name of it now. It could be without a book, it was something like that… Something caught my attention on the radio. I mean, there are so many brothers now, brothers with such beautiful names. The program will start, where? In production! So they’re recording the program! They’re putting tape on it! There’s a radio and it’s not live! He’s not alive! Before me, the wife of a famous advertiser (he gave money to the radio) is doing a program. The program goes on and on. And you can’t do anything because they’ve taped it. Here I come, I see that the woman’s tape is getting longer and longer, I go out and walk around for half an hour and finally they say “the diet program is over” and I go on the air! (Laughter) Anyway, I did the first program and the phones were ringing off the hook on the radio. Very normal? Now there is an expectation for Open Radio, but there is nothing they can communicate live! Suddenly, when a guy like me starts talking recklessly, and the phones get locked up.
Omer Madra
“What the fuck is going on here? Did you swear?”… (Laughter) When I went for the next program, something else happened. Tam Welfare Party ‘s period in power! And these are “open to the whole world”? They are open to the whole world! I still think so… I looked up and there was a camera and a turbaned woman standing in front of me! I said, “No, I don’t want this one.” They said, “They’ve been waiting since the morning, because there was no live broadcast… You were the first one in the morning, let them film it.” I said, “No, they shouldn’t!” They said, “Yes, they should.” I said fine, I started broadcasting. Of course, I started by saying, “I have a chicken in front of me.” But it’s a real chicken, brother! A technological gadget with a chicken or something! After the program, Ömer Madra called me, of course… He said, “What are you doing? We are open to everyone.” “Well, I’m not open!” I said and left. That’s how this adventure ended. Anyway, in those days Kent FM moved to Gümüşsuyu. Mehmet Duru was the owner, he said, “Come on.” In the meantime
Mete
(Avunduk) too.
Tonmaisterlik
to do it. During the program, I’m always talking back to Mete. The format was actually formed there.
Sinan: So everything happened spontaneously?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Mete started to give such answers, he started to receive the ball so well and make passes… Then we went to Mehmet Duru and Mete started working at the radio station. He became music director. In the meantime, I said I wanted to do a “night caller” thing. Mehmet Duru was very excited and told us about the night caller program he had in mind. So we said yes and we started… We didn’t do that, of course… I mean, that was something in his head… It could have happened, of course, but it just didn’t coincide with us. And then we pressed “on air” and kept talking.
Sinan: You say, “I came out and talked, I don’t know what happened after that”?
Kaan Çaydamlı: So that’s how everything happened…
Mehmet Öztekin It was, it was! I remember. So “nobody listens, nobody listens!” Who’s gonna listen to this? It was a threshold. It was such a period that they would sit a douchebag with a slightly decent voice and they would make a radio program saying we were playing for so-and-so’s boyfriend in the military.
Kaan Çaydamlı: Now, of course, Kent FM’s tradition was a bit different from private radios. For example
Barbaros
(Devecioğlu) had created a style. There was the stagecoach. There were actually very important programs. I listened to them, I listened to them without going to sleep, instead of going to work the next day, doing engineering for fourteen hours, coming back and sleeping with the woman… It was a very depressive period anyway. I learned a lot from there. That’s how I prepared myself… That’s why mine is something that coincides with the example of Mehmet watching a movie… Maybe it was something in me, because there were no examples of such things…
Ulvi: I am surprised by this, and I will connect it with the movie. I remember that period too. It was a very heavy program. But now you meet someone by chance, someone who has never read a book, for example an advertising sister… “Oh, the Losers Club?” she says! So he was listening!
Mehmet Oztekin Yes, they always say that…
Ulvi: So why were you listening? What did you understand and what were you listening for? When I talked to you before the movie was even made, when you said The Losers Club, I honestly thought that it would be a movie that not many people would be interested in, that it wouldn’t be popular, that it would remain on the sidelines, that it would be made and only a certain audience would watch it. A movie that won’t be a box office success… But now it’s gone to a completely different place?
Kaan Çaydamlı Wait, we don’t know anything yet?
Ulvi: No, but it is obvious that it has gone somewhere else. On the internet, a lot of people who neither know altıkırkbeş nor are of our mindset are writing and talking about the Losers’ Club. That surprised me a lot. For example, it is very interesting that so many people show interest in the Losers Club on Facebook , it is a sociological situation.
Mehmet Oztekin Yeah, I had the same feeling Yapı Kredi Publications Ulysses when he raided the (Laughter) The first 7 editions sold out immediately! With unbelievable speed! I said, where was the country really at and we didn’t know it! Let me give you an example:
Tolga Örnek
he liked this script very much and wanted to make a movie. At the same time, a young cinema collective found me, we sat and drank in Kadıköy. They said, “We want to make this movie no name.” So no director, no actor! Someone will play, someone will shoot. With such an anarchist attitude, they said, “We want to shoot this script, can you give us permission?” I said if you can do what you say, I’ll let you do it. Set up your system, tell me we are making the movie… But don’t tell me it will take ten years. If you really want to do this, get organized and do it. Yes Ulvi, in a sense you are right. I mean, what are advertisers doing with this program? The script went through the same thing with me. I had a lot of meetings, a lot of people came. From the underground directors we know today to the popular directors, there have been people who have said “I want to make this movie”. But there have been examples like this…

“the characters in the program were real people. brit was really brit, samsa was really samsa. we didn’t try to know more. we didn’t need to know more because we didn’t need to know”

Ulvi: Is it something like this?
Marcus Miller
I went to the concert, the company I worked for at the time was the main sponsor. The Open Air is packed! Dude, his album barely sells 100 copies in the country. What, are there people in this country we don’t know? Or are we talking about a group of people who say “being there, being seen there, communicating with the people there adds a lot to me”?
Mehmet Oztekin I want to answer that! Abi, recently I was sitting in a cafe waiting to shoot and there was a free moment. A music channel is on the café TV.
Serdar Ortaç
from the early days of
a clip
is playing. It’s a very strange, very terrible work, shot in a very strange setting, with blunt hair. We’re waiting, I’m watching. You know, “I mean, there really was such a thing once”… At that time, something caught my attention. All over the place in the clip route 66 they have signs! The place is not a real place. Here they have created a certain bar environment, they have decorated it. The only thing they put “visually” in the place is the route 66 signs! There’s nothing else.
Kaan Çaydamlı: Mother of all roads!
Mehmet Oztekin Yes! Now there is a problem with the stance of that road, the “mother of all roads” stance as Kaan said. Route 66 has become such a thing now that you put it everywhere and it stops! It’s everywhere you put it. It struck me that this was not disturbing at all.

Ulvi: Well, he’s an icon now!
Mehmet Öztekin: Yes! He’s an icon now! And somehow a sense of belonging arising from its power has also emerged. Route 66! Everybody wants to stick it on their top, back, wall, car, wherever! Now, to be frank, the Losers Club has come to this point a little bit because of the name “Losers Club”…
Ulvi: So tell me more clearly, he became a pop icon!
Mehmet Öztekin: Yes! And maybe there is also something about Turkishness here… I mean, you know, “being a loser”…
Ulvi: There is an arabesque situation…
Mehmet Öztekin: Well, I mean, they took it there a little bit… I don’t know if I’m wrong, but a lot of people are like that at this point…
Kaan Çaydamlı: My dear, it was obvious from the phone calls! It’s a little bit about how the loser is being filled in… I mean, the interesting part of the program was that we confronted this over time… We confronted the state of being a loser… But we never surrendered!
Mehmet Öztekin: Oh, by the way, we should talk about how the radio program turned into such a thing, not how the movie turned into such a thing…
Ulvi: The radio program has already been transformed, that’s what we are interested in. In a sense we are questioning this…
Mehmet Oztekin So there is a statistical fact, was the most listened to radio program this is what we are talking about.
Sinan: I told you at the beginning, we are more interested in the radio program and the men who are the subject of this movie than the movie… Kaan, have you seen the movie?
Kaan Çaydamlı: No, I haven’t seen the movie, I’m too scared.
Sinan: I was curious because, are you the man over there? Did you find yourself in the movie?
Ulvi: How much is fiction and how much is fact? Where are you in the movie?
Kaan Çaydamlı Mehmet wrote the script in the end, together with Tolga… We made very long video recordings on the first script. We talked and talked for days… Everything! The movie is close to one hundred percent real! In fact, it’s 100% real! Only some of the characters were married… Two different characters were reduced to one character, for example… Because it was a very difficult matter to have to fit the story of a program that was made nine hours a week for 10 years into ninety minutes… That was the biggest pain! They chose certain major things to make the movie.
The program
One of our most important characteristics was our relationship with the audience… We never said no. Only people who made us say goodbye were able to stay on the phone… Much later Okan Bayülgen’s We were actually doing a more honest, more real version of the zapping zapping he was doing. Therefore, some characters were formed over time. For example, there was a taxi driver named Hüseyin usta. You know he had a separate tail? License plate B 17! There was a line for the B 17 in Taksim,
AKM
next door. The queue of those waiting for his return… For example
Brit
A character called Dilemma appeared… Dilemma appeared… The most important thing was Bird Brain… I think this was the most bizarre thing in the program. Still today, if you ask me “what did that program bring you?” I would say it brought me a man like that… Yalçın is like that too… These characters are in the movie. They came and talked… What about Tayfun… Brit’s name was Tayfun. I just found out thanks to this movie… He was a Brit for us… For example, I still don’t know Samsa’s name. But that was the way it was supposed to be… It was not supposed to know… We never tried to know. Because they were real… What was real was the way they were… Whatever their name was, that person was really Samsa and we were in a relationship with Samsa, not with the identity Samsa assumed! I think this is the most important thing that the program has created. We selected and honored people who could create a character or be themselves!
Mehmet Öztekin: Look, for example, we have the same situation here. When you look at the resting capacity of the program, the network, I think the number of these characters is also small? I mean, considering the rest rate?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Well, I don’t think it was physically possible… I mean, searching for the program was a matter of courage first of all. For example, now I talk to people, I understand them better. Probably because of our attitude, it took courage to call the program. For example, the other day someone who was taking photos said, “Brother, I called you.” It happens a lot. Theater people and so on. They say, “Brother, I called you.” I say, “What did I do?” They say, “I couldn’t call them again, I was ridiculous, I was so excited.” Very sane, men like you and me… (Laughter)
Sinan: You overturned the understanding that the listener was used to until then, which was flattering and a little bit sucking up to the listener. People are not used to it. So, when you first started getting phone calls, weren’t you worried about the possible reaction of the listener because of your style?
Kaan Çaydamlı Either we had only one phone dedicated to the program. Sometimes we would forget a listener on the phone and he was waiting there… There are many examples of this. There were people on the phone for two hours waiting for us to say something to him. So they couldn’t call even if they wanted to. Until we shut it down! Sometimes the calls were too long. For example Brit! He was talking for half an hour… I mean, you could say there were three of us doing the program. For example, when Birdbrain called, he was playing the ney. For example, even our Can called and sang a song.
Can Gox
Can Gox is in a weird place in all of our lives. But that’s another thing… I mean, creating that character is another thing… A lot of people could have created it, but those people created it, they insisted… Look, we realized that we were doing something funny when seven girls called us… Seven girls gathered, they called us. We said something, but we are speaking normally. Suddenly there’s laughter in the background! I remember Mete and I exchanged glances. We were very surprised… That was the first time we realized, “I think we’re doing something funny”… There was a very wide range of audiences… For example, the washing place of “Bastard Osman”! And the taxi drivers there… We used to go there, and there would be crates of beer in the back of every taxi! There was Sütçü Hüseyin, for example. He would add milk to vodka and throw nuts in it and drink it. He had a very good explanation; “vodka does something to the stomach, milk suppresses it, and hazelnuts take the cholesterol from milk” and so on! Bastard Osman, Jackal Yılmaz… For example, they never called the radio station, but they stood guard at the door when we received all those threats. It was the Erbakan era, of course…

“we were not into this popular crap. were we too conscious? too calculated? no! everything was intuitive…”

Mehmet Öztekin I want to share an anecdote, by the way.
Kaan Çaydamlı: Are you going to tell about the milkman?
Mehmet Oztekin: Yes. The program ended, three or four years have passed. When I stayed with Kaan, I would leave in the morning and take a taxi to Üsküdar, from there I would go to Beşiktaş, and from there I would go to Taksim. Anyway, I left the house one morning, took the first taxi that came and went to Üsküdar. We were on our way, on the slope going down from Zeynep Kamil to Üsküdar, another taxi suddenly cut in front of us. My driver braked. It’s not a very hard brake, but it’s an unpleasant situation. You know, usually taxi drivers overreact in such situations, they start swearing and shouting and so on. The guy has zero, zero reaction! My taxi driver looked at the other taxi driver with surprising calmness and continued on his way. The taxi from earlier was in the front, we were going in the back… We went like that for about a hundred meters. The same taxi suddenly pulled over. I think he’s dropping off passengers. I was thinking, “Ulan, what a strange behavior this guy is doing,” when my taxi driver stopped next to him, rolled down his window and looked at him. He doesn’t say anything, but he just looked. My cabbie is growing on me, by the way! He’s super cool. Meanwhile, the guy in the other taxi opened his window and looked. “Milkman? Sorry, I didn’t realize.” My cabbie said “it doesn’t matter”, rolled down the window and continued. These are the kind of guys…
Kaan Çaydamlı: It’s like a movie…
Mehmet Öztekin: Yes, these were people who felt such a sense of belonging, they were actually such men. I think each of them were already legends in their own way…
Kaan Çaydamlı: We went to Bastard Osman’s place, Yilmaz the Jackal took us there. When we went, there would be a small locksmith’s table on the counter… Three slices of bacon, cheddar cheese, very well set… The raki is ready. Yilmaz the Jackal used to drop us there… We were listened to by men like that, and on the other hand, we were also listened to by some very strange intellectuals. Painters, journalists, etc. We still meet…

Sinan: You said it was a shitty period of your life when you started radio?
Kaan Çaydamlı: No, this is how I started. I was separated… I had a bad marriage. I married very much in love, but we were very young, it turned into a nightmare… And we separated. In that period of loneliness, the urge to do something was overwhelming. Rather than running away to engineering, to work… Because I had such a life, in fact I had stopped my life in a sense by getting married early. So when I got divorced at 27, I started doing the things I dreamed of doing at 18.
Sinan: What kind of things?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Well, a lot of things… Now I can’t speak too openly in case my wife reads it (Laughter)
Sinan: No, I will push a little bit, naturally. Did the program help you get out of that emotionally troubled period?
Kaan Çaydamlı I’m a bit of an idiot. Really! I am a man who does not perceive things. Somehow, just like I don’t perceive that the program is listened to so much, I don’t perceive a lot of things about women. I have a perception problem. Maybe people are sending some signs, but… I don’t know…
Mehmet Öztekin: I remember very well sitting at home, in the living room, looking at the TV, and suddenly you said, “Dude, I think they’re listening to this program of ours…” Then Esquier, the TVs started to get busy…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Yes, we always refused to give interviews, to give photographs. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but… One day they called me to a morning program. Because we made the news in a newspaper… I said something heavy about love. It was a very popular channel. We said, “Well, okay, let’s come, but who’s here?” Here are two of the pop icons of the era, one psychic and one of us! There was almost an attack on us at that time… They wanted to make us material, because we were very suitable for television. They were hoping for ratings if we said something like that.
Mehmet Öztekin: Hülya Avşar called me or something.
Kaan Çaydamlı: They all invited us, we didn’t go to any of them… Oh, we only went to the Politics Square, they didn’t let us speak there anyway… (laughter) But there was something else there too, I mean… All these media people were there! They all meet each other! Mete and I look like dicks… Who the fuck are they? What is happening? What do you mean, do they all know each other? we look at each other. But when there was a break, the whole student tribune came down and came to us. Then we felt good. That’s how disconnected we were. That’s how far we managed to stay away. We were not used in this popular nonsense. Were we too conscious, too calculated? No, but it was very intuitive, let me tell you… Everything was intuitive actually…

“it turned out to be a good combination. a combination of someone from inside our world and someone who can look at our world from the outside…”

Sinan: Okay! What happened when you started to benefit from the “meat and milk” of the program?
Kaan Çaydamlı: We have never benefited from it! We refused! Occasionally, when they gave us money for the program, at first it went to pay for drinks as “program expenses”. But then, thanks to them, when we started to receive more alcohol and cigarettes than we could drink, that expense was eliminated… Every day the courier was coming, so we drank a lot of Jack Daniels… (Laughs) We only wanted it and we got it for a period… One time they put a commercial in the middle of the program. Wait. I might be confusing it with the script! But I think it was a car commercial? And we were like, “why ride a car when you can ride a motorcycle?”…
Mehmet Oztekin No, no, no! You did a Pepsi commercial!
Kaan Çaydamlı We had a dig at Pepsi…
Mehmet Öztekin: “Why drink Pepsi when you can drink Coca Cola?” (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı: We were Coca Cola people then. So they couldn’t insert advertisements into our program. But one interesting thing, I understand that this came about because there were a lot of advertisers listening to us… The commercials were always in front of and behind our program. There were no commercials. I don’t know, is there such a thing in the history of radio? Why a Pepsi commercial at 2:00 in the morning? He was coming in after we finished! We’ve never been obedient in this matter. There were people who wanted to sponsor us. For example, we were drinking Jack Daniels, the rival brand came to us saying “drink ours”, we said we wouldn’t. Well, we couldn’t, because we were drinking Jack Daniels! I mean, everything is so naive…
Sinan: Thank you, thank you, but I actually meant something else when I said “meat milk”! Anyway, I’ll get into that later… (Laughter) From what you’ve told me, there are some embellishments in the script?
Mehmet Öztekin Now we had to do this in one or two places. For example, since we couldn’t use Pepsi and Coca Cola in the film, we looked at how we could revise it to show this contrast… In other words, how we could give it the closest to the reality, without distorting the original… We made a change in the middle of the car advertisement to say, “How can you ride a car when you have a motorcycle?”… Actually, we would have liked to convey it the way it actually happened. So if you call them embellishments, we had to make a few changes in this way… Well, you have to make some touches when you are conveying a 10-year process, the events and characters in that process in a movie. There are also places where we have to describe 2-3 events that took place over time as if they happened in 2-3 days. There’s also taking two characters and merging them into one. There are many places that we would like to enter but cannot… Look, I want to say this especially. There were characters I really wanted to focus on. There were some very important characters that needed to be addressed. I tried to get into these at first. But the characters are so heavy! For example, I sit him at the bar… He has a scene with Kaan and Mete or Zeynep. He’s just passing through! But the script actually needs to stop and take care of this guy. You need to listen to his story. When I saw that this was not possible, I reluctantly decided not to enter, not to touch, not to mention his name in the movie. I think that’s the right thing to do… Because I think each one of them is a movie in itself… Once you’re in, you can’t get out…

Ulvi: Before I forget, let me jump in and ask. Is there much work left for Tolga in the script? I’m asking you this specifically because “Veronica wants a pump”I read your book and I swore at you, your ears must be ringing, Mehmet! When you read a book, you create a world of imagination, you visualize the characters in your head, right? You won’t let me? Like watching a movie, we have to act out whatever you have drawn in our minds! (Laughter) It’s very disturbing! I was very uncomfortable reading the book! Let me get into the story, let me imagine it, let me build the characters and events in my head, right? No, man! It is not possible. You’re not reading a book, you’re watching a movie! You’re so dominant! That’s the thing, when you’re reading, you imagine this like this and that like this! That’s how she is! I mean, you can’t even jerk off, it’s so defined! It was very disturbing! (Laughter) I haven’t read the script, but if that’s how you wrote it, there’s no shit left for anyone. Did something like that happen?
Mehmet Oztekin (Laughs) Yes, I’m afraid so!
Ulvi: What did Tolga do in this situation?
Mehmet Öztekin: My tendency in such matters is this. I’ll make it like this, and if someone else wants to shoot it and wants to bend it, bend it…
Ulvi: So he didn’t get offended? Because you don’t give me space?
Mehmet Oztekin On the contrary, he did the opposite. To speak in Tolga’s own words, Tolga comes from a very sterile environment and a sterile life, exactly as Tolga himself puts it… He says this all the time. I mean, in fact, to tell such a story, we described Tolga as “extremely hygienic”… He said “the word hygiene doesn’t cover this”… (laughter) Now when you look at it like that, Tolga wanted to get into it quickly. But he said, “There’s no point in saying ‘I’ll do this, I’ll fuck him up’… A man of that mind, Tolga…
Ulvi: So he swam in unfamiliar waters…
Mehmet Öztekin: Yes, it was a bit like that… But it also brought an advantage… He added to the movie the perspective of how interesting this story can be through the eyes of a man who can look from the outside, who can look from a world that neither we know nor knows us… A man whose cinematography and eye we trust very much! I don’t know if this will be enlightening, but let me give you an example: I was very strict in some places… You know, there were places where I said, “Brother, this is how it’s going to be!” One of them was birdbrain, for example… You can see from the way I underlined it. For example, very long scenes scare the director. Very long scenes have a lot of stress. It can be boring, it can make you faint, the actors can lose their emotions, it’s hard to edit… Kuşbeyin’s was such a scene… When I was writing that scene, Tolga warned me not to make it too long. I sent four pages of the scene! (Laughter) So these things happened! There were scenes where we fought a lot, argued a lot… But I designed a scene, for example, and Tolga came and put a bird on it! He made very important touches like let’s add something like this to this.
Kaan Çaydamlı: I think there is a good combination here… A combination of people who can look from inside and outside.
Ulvi: I haven’t read the script, but I know you… When I read Veronica, I said “you can’t work with this guy”… (laughter). You close all the corners because…
Mehmet Oztekin Well, yes, that’s how I prefer it… If you prefer to break it and redo it, if you want to put something on it, I don’t have an obsession like “I won’t let you touch it”… But I also say “this is the energy, the feeling that should come out at the end of the work”… So you can break it, you can change it a hundred and eighty degrees, you can turn it upside down… In the end, if you can give the feeling it should give, there is no problem…
Ulvi: Did you feel good about the movie? Kaan I can’t ask you, you haven’t seen the movie yet…
Mehmet Oztekin Cower, cower! I’ve thought about it a lot, it’s soothing. Oh, of course, when you say “cynical”, of course you see a lot of faults… But I’m sure Tolga feels the same way…
Ulvi: Well, there is no end of course… You have to leave it somewhere…
Mehmet Öztekin: Of course, you have to be realistic. After all, someone else made this movie. Even if I did, I would have found a lot of faults in my work. Some of the touches of another person, especially a man looking from a completely different world, will disturb you… For example, I watched it once before it was released. I watched it once in particular. Tolga called me a lot to watch it a second time, he put a lot of pressure on me. But I wanted to let it brew and see how I would feel… To see if I would feel worse or better… But it didn’t go anywhere bad…

“there is a lot of overlap between the time of the program and today. now erbakan is dead, his children are screwing us…”

Sinan: Who played Kaan?
Mehmet Öztekin:
Nejat Isler
played.
Sinan: How was it?
Mehmet Öztekin: That’s an interesting story for me too… In the conversations we had with Nejat before the movie, what I understood from Nejat’s electricity, energy and the things he said was this: Nejat will play something completely different! So there will be neither Kaan nor Nejat… I felt that… But after watching the movie, I have to express this clearly: Kaan would not have been able to play Kaan this much if he had played Kaan himself!

Kaan Çaydamlı: We sat down with Nejat before we started the movie. He asked me one question… He came up to me and said: “I’m going to ask you one thing. Fuck it all, what do you want?” When you see a man approaching the situation in this way, there is nothing to worry about. I said, “Go on”… There was nothing else to say anyway… So it’s a special case, Nejat…
Ulvi: How did you decide on the actors? Why Nejat? Why others?
Mehmet Oztekin Well, I always objected to Nejat. He will be seeing this for the first time, if he reads the interview…
Sinan: Hmmm… Who was in your head?
Mehmet Öztekin: In my head, in a way that I don’t know why
Mete Horozoğlu
There was.
Sinan: Interesting?
Mehmet Öztekin: I don’t know why, but Mete Horozoğlu became very Kaan in my mind. Oh, this one.
Breath
‘s performance in the US, that disconnect may have been effective. I thought that this is how the man could take Kaan out on another plane. The more I insisted on Mete, the more I objected to Nejat. The reason why I objected to Nejat was perhaps what we call successful today… For some reason, I thought that in a movie like this, Nejat would be the first thing everyone would think of. To be honest, I don’t really like this kind of thing. I always think the last guy you think of should play. Casting director Luisa insisted on Nejat. Tolga was more neutral…
Kaan Çaydamlı: I understand that Nejat was very sure?
Mehmet Öztekin: Tolga said, “Let’s send the script to Nejat, let him read it.” As soon as he read it, he raided the production company. (laughter) He said that no one else can play this but me, and if you try to play anyone else but me, I will create trouble, I will create problems, I will destroy, I will knock you out…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Nejat said something very sincere: “I have been preparing for this role since I was sixteen”! Nejat used to have a record stall in the courtyard of the mosque in Nişantaşı, of course I didn’t know that Nejat was this Nejat at the time, we exchanged a lot of records. We hung out a lot in record stores. “We used to listen to you guys a lot,” he says… “We didn’t have shit, just a radio at home… We used to boil water in the tube to keep the house warm, we used to listen to Kaybedenler,” he says… In other words, we came from the same places, from the same life… We hung out in the same places…
Ulvi: Can did the music, let’s talk about Can…
Kaan Çaydamlı: The film, or rather the program, has 7-8 songs. There were fans who listened to them. This is a very interesting thing… The program resonates with people even today…
Ulvi “Losers Club Songs” in Ekşi Sözlük
list

Kaan Çaydamlı: Yes, there are a lot of things! In Brit’s words, people are in a new mode again. A mod like our ’68! This is very interesting to me. I could never listen to our program. You can’t stand the sound of your own voice. But today I get a lot of e-mails from people who have listened to those seven programs circulating on the internet. “Brother, where can we find the others? Make DVDs”… Suddenly people started talking like that. I want to emphasize that they haven’t seen anything about the film yet… So it’s interesting… It’s actually a kind of answer to the question “can it be done again?”… So something like this should really be done again. I’m not saying this in the sense that we should do it… There is a lot of overlap between the period of the program and today.
Erbakan
he had, he had his children then. Now that Erbakan is dead, his children are fucking us! In fact, it’s a worse period! They make it worse! So it seems to me that everyone needs something like this. It would be good for someone to have the courage to come out and show this courage. To be able to talk about taboos, to make fun of the new taboos they created, to make fun of themselves… Look, this was our most important characteristic. We were what we were. We were mocking ourselves. If we came early, we came early there too! We did a lot of weird stuff. We did a Viagra test on live TV? Viagra had just come out. We stopped, we thought, I wonder what would happen if we tried this and we tried it… What would happen if we did something like this now?
Ulvi: They won’t!
Mehmet Öztekin: Yes they won’t!
Kaan Çaydamlı: They wouldn’t have done it then either? There were very serious complaints. Fortunately, they would ask us for a record and we would make a record with that date and send it. (Laughter). So we were making fake records… Now this is one side of the issue… I am interested, I observe. I would like to say something about the way the program was conceived, the way it reflected on Tolga and the whole team. For example, when we introduced Tolga to Birdbrain, he couldn’t believe it! “Is there such a person?” he was surprised. When he told his wife, she said, “No way, there can’t be such a person.” When we asked him to go to Kuşbeyin, he was shaking. (Laughter) We sat and ate for an hour. It was weird! Let’s actually go one day; those characters, those people, those people’s relationships are still very strange. The program makes a man like Tolga, who is out of this world, who is on the sterile side, who has films that have made so many box office hits, who lives a completely different life, say “are there such people?”. Can is one of these people for tolga. When the topic of “Who should do the music?” came up, we said, “We have Can, he’s an architect, we work together.” 3-0? We’re winning 5-0! And that’s for the record, please! (laughter)
Mehmet Öztekin: No, no! There wasn’t even a discussion about “who should do the music?”… When music wasn’t even being talked about…
Kaan Çaydamlı: I’m not going into details, I’m saying something about Can.
Mehmet Oztekin: Sorry, you go on then…
Kaan Çaydamlı: How to do it is another story, but when we asked Can and Cavit if they would do it, there was no question mark. Normally, if someone says to Can, “Can, do the soundtrack for this movie,” Can would say, “Fuck you!”… I mean directly! This is the same for all the other characters… We just told people “come on, brother” and that was it… We told Brit to come and talk. People came and talked in the midst of their work. I think this attitude of people was one of the things that affected Tolga the most. He couldn’t believe it… There are such people and such a thing happened. He tried to understand, he tried very hard. As far as I can see, everyone from the editor to the whole set was very much involved. Everyone started talking in the jargon of the movie, from the actors to the lighting crew…
Mehmet Öztekin: These were very high quality guys, but… For example, one of the characters that affected Tolga a lot was Gülşen… A fan named Gülşen… We had a conversation with her too. Tolga made a calculation that Gülşen could have been 15-16 years old at the time the program was broadcast. “At that age, did you even understand what these guys were saying? These guys were saying some heavy words, the rest was jokes. Let’s say you listened to them once, twice… But what could have made you so attached, so impressed, that you would follow them for years?”… Gülşen said, “Yes, I didn’t understand, but I knew they were talking about something heavy and deep and it was very interesting to me”… We put this in the movie for example… I know Tolga was very impressed by this…

Sinan: What on earth? Now I look at this Kaan from the right, from the left, from the front, from the back… Uh-uh! I don’t see a man to make a movie? What do you see in this guy? (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı: Wow, successful!
Mehmet Öztekin: Yeah it’s starting to come in hard! (Laughter)
Ulvi: You don’t know Kaan now. I met him thanks to Ozgur. Go to Kadıköy bazaar in any way, say Kaan Çaydamlı to anyone, a greengrocer, etc… You will see, there is a cult of Kaan Çaydamlı…
Sinan: Now I will go in there, I will go in there… (Laughter). I mean, I look, I’m an ugly guy, I’d make a good character, but… What about this guy? What did you see in this guy?
Mehmet Öztekin Yaa… (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı You should ask the women! (Laughter)
Sinan: We get it, you’re heterosexual! (Laughter) We underlined it! Reportare special note! He’s straight, don’t get your hopes up! (Laughter)
Mehmet Öztekin: We’ve heard so much about you! (Laughter) I’m a bit of a Tolga in this environment. I was an 18-19 year old guy who was walking around saying “I’m going to make a movie”. There were rings around them like rings of water. Here is the first circle, the second circle… I was not among them, although I was related to each of them individually… Except Kaan, I did not have such an intense and special intimacy with any of them… These people constituted a very strange group, but none of them were aware of this strangeness… They did not care whether they were aware of it or not. People were just living, and no one thought anything strange or strange…
Sinan: Why weren’t you among them much?
Mehmet Öztekin: I can say that I especially preferred it. There was a different atmosphere and I didn’t feel the need to get involved in it all of a sudden. Pretending to be among them was not something I could do.

Sinan: Let me ask you more clearly, did your ass not want to be among them?
Mehmet Öztekin: Yoo? In that sense, I was not outside them, I was very much inside them. But I was a little bit behind in terms of building relationships… Otherwise I was in the middle of everything…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Mehmet’s position is different, we need to underline that. Mehmet came out one day. “Well, welcome, you stay upstairs,” I said. Our relationship with Mehmet was always like this: I’d set off for Antalya on my motorcycle, I’d call him when I was 60 kilometers away, “Mehmet, what are you doing?” He’d say, “Ulan, I’ve been waiting for your phone call these days.” We would go and have something to eat and drink, and then I would move on… I mean, we actually have a relationship that was established much further back and Mehmet was always the “man at home”… As the “man at home” he was already a man who lived where Mete and Kaan hung out… He was with us but somewhere else…
Sinan: Why do you think he withdrew then? Even though he felt so strongly that he belonged? In a way, he is also saying that he is an actor in this structure?
Kaan Çaydamlı No! On top of this structure! Mehmet was one of the men at a point on top of this structure… I could watch him…
Sinan: But you expressed it with a margin? You used a phrase like “I was even more on the outside looking in”?
Mehmet Oztekin Hmmm… It was… I was really obsessed with cinema. I was obsessed with making movies. For me it requires being more observant and living things that way…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Well, we were already living enough… We were living in front of you…
Mehmet Oztekin Yes…
Kaan Çaydamlı: He was taking pictures, Mehmet…
Mehmet Öztekin Yes… It is a passion to take a very good photograph, to take a very good frame. You can choose this… If it’s a sunset, for example; it’s a momentary thing, a split-second thing… You can choose to watch it instead of photographing it… You can choose to watch and enjoy that moment, you can choose to document it, to photograph it, let alone enjoy it… Here I chose to photograph it…
Sinan: Is this something intuitive? You actually felt that you were in something cinematographic and you started recording in a sense?
Mehmet Oztekin Yes, yes…
Sinan: This is a completely different, special intuition because…
Mehmet Öztekin: From the very beginning I was aware that it was a cinematographic situation…
Sinan: And you started observing him?
Mehmet Öztekin: Yes…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Mehmet came from outside anyway… Apart from that, we were also having a relationship… One day I went to Antalya, we met. Then I moved to Antalya for a while, but this time Mehmet was not in Antalya… But we were in constant contact… He moved to Bodrum, I moved to Antalya. Then one day I went to Bodrum, it lasted about a month. Every morning I set off but I couldn’t get there. (Laughter) That’s how this guy jumped in and came to me. You know, we come and we set up a setup and we’re like, elephant miles and whatnot, and all of a sudden this much time… We didn’t understand…
Mehmet Oztekin: Oh, that is a fascinating story. Kaan came while I was doing some work with some people in Bodrum, doing books and stuff like that. He hung around for a long time, then he left. Then he came again. The second time he came, he said to the people I worked with, “I’m taking this man away.” (Laughter) We were eating fish in Bitez, I’ll never forget it. Kaan and I jumped in and came to Istanbul.

“I didn’t interfere in anyone’s life. I didn’t expect anything from anyone. some people left, some people stayed… I don’t know, that’s the kind of man my father was!”

Sinan: So what do the Kaans represent? Freedom? Something else?
Mehmet Oztekin Really, very sincerely, he was not in such a position. We met for the first time in front of Kelepir in Antalya. We had a five-minute conversation at work. Although I had never met him before, we had a very strange dialog. Then we sat across from each other at dinner that night, chatted some more…
Sinan: The first day you met?
Mehmet Öztekin: Yes… The first day, the first…
Sinan: A man named Kaan, whom you had heard of before… And the first day you met, a strong connection was established between you.
Mehmet Öztekin: Yes, a friend of mine told me about Kaan. That night we sat down, Kaan was restless. “I’m going back to Istanbul,” he said, got up and left the table…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Hasan was there, I couldn’t sit…
Mehmet Öztekin: He was very distressed… He got up to go to Istanbul and left…
Sinan: So? That’s attractive?
Mehmet Oztekin She wasn’t attractive! And then we have to follow up on that…
Sinan: Kaan, don’t glare at me like that! (Laughter)
Mehmet Oztekin He’s going to get into you now (Laughter)
Sinan: Look, I came with a ghusl ablution! (Laughter) I’m meeting the guy! Big event! I’m trying to understand this feeling! This man is a prophet in his community… A prophet in the Kadıköy underground! Now I’m just trying to figure out if it really is or not.
Ulvi: Let me put it this way, I am from old Kadikoy. I always heard of Kaan before I knew him… I knew him from Kelepir and I was familiar with him because I was in similar environments… Now Sinan is a kind of Tolga Örnek…
Mehmet Oztekin Oh, I get it!
Ulvi: Sinan was shocked even when he met Şenol. Now a man Şenol speaks of as a prophet, Kaan! When he goes online, there is again a profile of such a man and Sinan wonders “what do they see in this man, what is it about this man”… The man has a hegemony in Kadıköy
Kaan Çaydamlı Of course there is! Coffee shops know him (Laughter)
Ulvi: I do! Go to the sour dictionary, type in Kaan Çaydamlı and look… No sir, “I was going to my friend, the bell said Kaan Çaydamlı, he lived in the same apartment, he was a neighbor” and so on…
Mehmet Oztekin Let me give you an example. About a man, a man who is still alive, let me tell you the truth of what he told me… I am driving in Antalya. I’m going from Dedeman to Şirinyalı. There are traffic lights in front of Dedeman, which is five hundred meters away. The light turned red, we stopped. I have a painter friend from Istanbul with me… There is a great spring weather in Antalya… My window was open, I looked at the air, it was clear, very warm, lovely… I said, “Kaan will be in Antalya on a motorbike one of these days”… We set off. The next lights are about 200 meters ahead… We came to the next lights, Kaan called… “I’m coming down from Korkuteli, slowly”… Now this is actually an answer to your question… How many men do you know who can do this? We are talking about a man who confirms within a distance of 200 meters that when the weather gets better, he will jump on his motorcycle and leave Istanbul and come to Antalya… I think it’s that simple! His works; sixty-forty-five, losers club and so on…
Kaan Çaydamlı: (pointing to Sinan) He didn’t understand again… What you just told this guy didn’t cut it, but in the meantime, a lot of things got into my ass (Laughter) Mehmet has started talking now!
Ulvi: Well, we are getting somewhere…
Mehmet Öztekin: I was thinking I shouldn’t go there! (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı The story is this… Not expecting anything from a person… There is a man in front of you… Ulvi is like that for me, for example. I don’t see him for 20 years, but he’s been there for 20 years. I don’t expect anything, I don’t do anything, but when I see him in Kadıköy one day, we sit down; we drink, we fuck, then he leaves, we don’t see each other for two years… When was the last time we met Ulvi?
Ulvi: It’s been a long time…
Kaan Çaydamlı: This is a way of behavior! A little bit like this
Richard Brautigan
There is something like ‘something here. It takes some ass to understand this… Now people who understand this are already catching this thing. I’ve had a lot of people like that in my life. If you ask how many of them are left, Mehmet is left, Şenol is left… If a man has a sparkle in him, if he passes it on to me, that man is OK. That man doesn’t have to be anything, he doesn’t have to do anything anymore. It is therefore inevitable to treat him like a man. That’s how I formulate it… Okay? I don’t know how else to answer.
Ulvi: Kaan has a situation like this… He is not a very close friend of mine. I have never sat alone with Kaan in my life, we were always with someone else… But I have this feeling: I feel close enough to Kaan to call him on Friday and say “hari, let’s get on the bikes and go somewhere”… If you say “what have you shared with this guy before?”, I haven’t shared anything…
Sinan: What kind of power is this?
Kaan Çaydamlı: This power is the umbrella in your ass! (Laughter) What does that have to do with power? It’s not power…
Ulvi: It’s about sincerity… You see the guy and you feel good, you feel close to him… You say this guy won’t fuck me up, nothing bad can come from this guy…
Mehmet Öztekin: This is actually a really troubling situation! It’s a very troublesome situation, especially for a man in Kaan’s format… Our fights with Kaan have been on this basis… I’m a bit more materialistic, for example. I warned her about many men in her life and she reacted very harshly. “Why, how can you think such things?” he would get angry with me… For example, I remember he got very angry when I said “watch out for this guy”.
Kaan Çaydamlı: That’s what’s up my ass!
Mehmet Öztekin: There have been times when I thought he was going to get up and walk on me or something… This is the state of a man who has no such armor, for example, that makes Ulvi say these things, that makes him feel that way… I am not such a man, I have never been such a man. Maybe that was the answer to the question you just asked… Being in this group required being such a man… Revolution was such a man, now that I think about it…
Kaan Çaydamlı: All the rest of them are like that…
Mehmet Öztekin: So!… But it’s an observation… When Brit was getting me to sign the book The Losers’ Club, I wrote down a detail that Brit and I talked about on the night of the first lonely party. It really impressed Brit, she couldn’t believe how I remembered this detail… As I said, it was a choice between watching the sunset or taking a photo of it…

Kaan Çaydamlı: Look, no one is interfering in anyone’s life… This guy wants to make a movie, let him make a movie… This guy wants to do advertising, let him do advertising… There is no such thing as let’s make a movie together, let’s do something together… If it develops naturally, it develops… That’s the agony: We’ve done too much! Indeed, we always did something… Since the first day… Mehmet and I “
Howl
We did “bitter pain”… We did “bitter pain”. What do I know about movies? But when this guy says “I’m going to do it”, I’m a man who doesn’t say “no, don’t do it”… Because I know he’s going to do it… And he’s going to do it well!
Sinan: Based on what I’ve heard, what I’ve read and what you’ve told me, I understand that you’ve become a role model… Whether you accept it or not…
Kaan Çaydamlı: For a lot of people, that’s true…
Sinan: We also talked to Şenol. You always have those rings around you. You have people you’re with…
Kaan Çaydamlı I never cared about those rings, you know? The magic is here! So they made him the hero of a novel… I never once mentioned his name on the radio. I was sitting in Eskisehir and someone was talking about our program. He tells strange things. I never interfered with them. I didn’t do it on the radio, I didn’t do it in my private life… These guys are doing something, so let them do it! These guys are taking something from Altıkırkbeş and doing something, let them do it! Let them do it! It’s not that we don’t care…
Sinan: So you are saying “I live myself”?
Kaan Çaydamlı: I mean, some guys can get in… Otherwise, it’s actually very difficult to get close to me… Am I wrong, Mehmet?
Mehmet Öztekin Yes, it’s difficult…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Şenol’s story is like that, for example… Şenol didn’t come because he said, “Brother, I don’t know what I am”… One day he showed up, I looked at him and said, “I’m leaving, you take care of the shop”. He said, “When will you come?” I said, “I don’t know, I’ll probably be back in three months”… I was leaving on a motorcycle… Now if you say “why Şenol?”, it’s not something that can be expressed in words… Because it was Şenol… He came and went in there… I don’t know if I can explain.
Sinan: I’m trying to understand.
Kaan Çaydamlı: Uh-uh! It’s hard for you to understand! (Laughter)
Sinan: The reader will find it harder to understand… (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı: I’m looking at your face, but… (Laughter) I don’t know, I guess it’s not something that can be expressed…
Sinan: As a result, there is something in the middle that has one way or another turned into a landslide. So you can’t just say “this is difficult for you to understand” and get out of it. Moreover, a movie has been made about it. Now we will probably see the second generation of fans, the second wave. This is no longer something that you can say, “you can’t understand this, this was something like this”…
Kaan Çaydamlı Maybe this is where the magic is! I was always me… You know what I mean? Maybe this is where the magic is… I told you, sometimes I’m surprised myself… Such men have come and gone? If it was someone else, maybe after meeting once or twice, they would have tried to get a job… I never had such an attitude…
Mehmet Öztekin: Well, you know, so many people came into our lives because of the commercial business… British directors came, we hung out together.
A

m

elie
‘s art director stayed at our house for three days, the house Kaan and I lived in together… German cinematographers, Spanish directors, Americans came and went. The same thing happened with them. When they got into this environment, they were surprised that we were more knowledgeable than them about beat generation, for example. You know a lot of things he doesn’t know, and on top of that you talk about causes and effects. You think about what they tried to tell, what they went through. For example, I participated in the objective cinema collection. Very new, in Los Angeles. It was through such a connection… It was through the intermediary of a director who came here and hung out with us and drank raki at Radika…
Sinan: A kind of modern community situation…
Mehmet Öztekin: All this is a little bit related to the personality I just described…

It came from the heart: For Dessert
“Bahamian Suspicion”

“every journey ends where it begins. with every step you are getting closer to where you started…”

Since Sinan Kaan and I are close in terms of age, there is something interesting for me… You lived through the 80s, before that there was a period of intense politicization in Turkey, and after the 80s the effects of that politicization on our generation continued in different ways. Everyone expressed themselves through different channels. You found and expressed yourself in a completely different space, in a strange space of liberation. As far as I understand, this has paid off in spades… With the radio program, with altıkırkbeş… As you started to discover completely different areas of freedom, people started to discover them with you… How did this opening, this liberation take place in your inner world?
Kaan Çaydamlı: I don’t know? It just happened… I don’t know?
Sinan: No abi! You can’t get out of it by saying “I don’t know”…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Maybe my father was such a man? What do I know? And my father is really such a man (Laughter)
Ulvi: This needs to be in the headline! (Laughter)
Mehmet Oztekin Right? (Laughter) I don’t want to!

Sinan: Give me something Kaan! Give me something!

Kaan Çaydamlı: What shitty questions you’re asking! It’s hard to express it now… I don’t know… For example, Birdbrain is a strange person… He comes there a bit. The Welfare Party was fucking the shit out of that period! Everybody
Contemporary Life
“I’ll do something too, man.” They are going there to do something… Our program is looking for a man called Kuşbeyin. He lives in Sultanahmet. It’s so mystical! Everyone around him is a believer… They live very religiously. Religion is a very important part of their lives… When Tolga says “why did you listen to this man?”, Birdbrain says “what if one day
Recai Kutan
I bet he’s wearing bell-bottoms,
Deniz Baykal
How can you not listen to such a program?”… A man who can caricature things like that… A man who sits down and plays the ney on the program… We met a lot of men like that. We had a relationship. We still have a relationship… We published their books. We are not interested in that side of them. They know our lifestyle too… This is such a life… Riding a motorcycle, rock and roll, pumping, blah blah blah… It’s about feeling what’s underneath it all…
Mehmet Öztekin: Look now, for example, Birdbrain is a man who thinks, “If the process of evolution is a process, those who are so opposite to each other are actually the same”… A man who says, “The farthest place in the world is your back”…
Kaan Çaydamlı: We were expressing it in another way on the radio… What was I saying? Every journey that begins…?

Mehmet Öztekin Every journey that begins on a sphere…
Kaan Çaydamlı Every journey ends in the same place… With every step you take, you are one step closer to where you started…
Sinan: Kaan, why does talking bore you so much?
Kaan Çaydamlı: I get bored about these things…
KTN
As I wrote to one of the ‘s, these are things not to talk about… You need to drink! It’s better not to talk! These are such things actually… Because these are not things related to consciousness, these are things related to intuition… I am an engineer as a result… My formation is engineering formation, but art has always been based on intuition… Intuition has always been ahead of the science that follows behind…
Sinan: Isn’t that a view incompatible with an engineer?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Not at all! If there is no intuition, you cannot have that scientific imagination… I am not talking about imagination, I am talking about intuition… When I see a man, when I intuit something, it is okay… I don’t question it. Until one day he shoves something up my ass, or I shove something up his ass… That’s life… That’s what it’s like… That’s what we write to tell…
Sinan: You know that after Kaybedenlerler Kulübü is released, it will be the center of attention, it will be the center of attention of other segments, right?
Kaan Çaydamlı: We never fucked that up until today… We were already the center of attention…
Sinan: Maybe you didn’t give a fuck, but…
Kaan Çaydamlı: I don’t have to explain this… I’m talking to Ulvi here because it’s you! You know what I mean?
Sinan: I understand, but in the end, something has come in front of people who didn’t know you before, who didn’t know what you did, how you lived… With this movie, this man (Mehmet) said “there is such a mass of people, there is such a man, and this man lived like this, this man said these things”… Now with the movie, this man has put all these things in front of us…
Mehmet Oztekin That’s right…
Ulvi: Forget that, my son will watch this movie in 10 years and say “Dad, do you know Kaan? What kind of a man is he?”
Sinan: Don’t go there either… Let alone ten years from now… I look at it today, it’s a completely different world for me that you live in… Imagine that we are from the same generation…
Kaan Çaydamlı What in God’s name are you living (Laughter)
Ulvi: He started talking again (Laughter)
Sinan: We are from the same generation, but your channel is completely different, my channel is completely different, so-and-so’s channel is completely different… So I’m curious about you based on the guy who put something like this in front of me with this movie…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Okay man, here’s the problem! You wonder! We can already have a relationship with you if you are not curious… But as long as you are curious, there is no possibility of us having a relationship with you. (Laughter)
Sinan: We can’t have a relationship anyway (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı: I’m saying this as an answer… Besides, we can have a relationship, dear (Laughter)
Sinan: I don’t think so (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı: I like it (Laughter)
Sinan: I don’t think so! You are a very interesting man though… (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı God bless you…
Sinan: You are weighing the other person…?
Kaan Çaydamlı: I can sense it abi! There is never any weighing…
Sinan: I’m talking about perception… This is perception…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Sometimes you can be wrong… But you are not wrong until you are wrong… Am I wrong?
Mehmet Öztekin: No… I can go back to what I said at the beginning. That video of Serdar Ortaç… This is about how one stands… You may be looking from different places, you may be from different genres. Again, Birdbrain is a good example in this sense. It’s about how firmly I stand where I stand, how you look at life… It’s about how at peace you are with your own values…
Kaan Çaydamlı: How honest you are with yourself about how honest you are…
Mehmet Öztekin: Now, if these guys had turned this into a tribe because we are doing a program called the Losers’ Club and it’s getting some attention, they wouldn’t be where they are now…
Ulvi: They wouldn’t have stayed in the middle anyway, if they had gotten into such a trance…
Mehmet Öztekin: Yes, they wouldn’t… If you try to dress it up, you can’t… Oh, this can’t be a thing on its own… For example, sixty-five publications are a very important factor. It has an important role in the sewing of this dress. Kaan’s photography is also a factor… He talks about Richard Brutigan, for example… He talks about the Beat Generation… Books that have been published, talking about books that have been read, those literary conversations… All of these things are effective… For example, Kaan once a month
Enis Batur
It was a standard thing, almost a ritual…
Oruç Aruoba
with
Mehmet Gureli
He used to have dinner with him once a week… When you look at it now, these men determine a lot of things… We are talking about the men who decide who will study what in this country… So all this is not just a radio program or hanging out in Kadıköy… You can’t create this effect with something like this even if you wanted to… However, with all this, that dress is put on you and then you can’t take it off even if you want to… In this respect, Sinan, you are right to come with that aggression… Naturally, you naturally wonder “what, a radio program, is everything just three or five stories”…

“knowledge is a human right! if you can’t access knowledge because you don’t have money, it’s a crime against humanity! it’s fucking knowledge!”

Mehmet Öztekin: Kaan says “these things are not explainable” and I’m trying to be a little bit of a translator there. In this respect, maybe I am standing at a somewhat interesting point. I’m shooting a series right now. A popular TV series… TV series are the lowest point of filmmaking. It’s a popular business. It is an interesting point to work in such a TV series “business” while at the same time writing the script of a movie that is considered marginal…
Sinan: What are you filming?
Mehmet Öztekin: “
Love and Punishment
“but I am also the screenwriter of The Losers Club. Both together, can you imagine? It’s very difficult for me psychologically…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Sinan, this actually answers your question… Do you understand? You’re shooting “Love and Punishment”! How do you shoot, man? You take your work seriously! You shoot trying to add something. You shoot for a living! Ayvallah! Who can say what about that? But you’re writing the script for The Losers Club, you’re writing Veronica Wants a Pump… Your agent says, “wait, let me read it first” (laughter)

Ulvi: What? Was it your agent? (Laughter) let’s put that in the headline! (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı She’s a strange woman! You’ll fall in love right away! I can hardly contain myself! (Laughter) Put that in the headline! (Laughter) Now the first thing Turkish people do here is to judge. “Man, you hang out like this and then you go and get love and punishment, fuck you!” or something like that… No, man! What’s that got to do with it?
Ulvi: Well, I am doing the same thing. I’m in advertising! But I have a son, I have school installments… I have to do it, so…
Kaan Çaydamlı But you’re also trying to do good!
Ulvi: I try to do everything I do well… It’s about personality… Whatever you do, you put your signature under it. Nobody looks at life like that… Nobody says, “That guy does his job well, but he’s blowing this up to make money”…
Kaan Çaydamlı I mean, there is such honesty… He puts his name there! A lot of assholes, a lot of assholes who walk around in this world as intellectuals, print there, blah, blah, blah, blah! That’s why it’s all rags to me! This guy’s making a name for himself! For example
Erol Egemen
example. The guy has been working as a graphic designer in many big companies everywhere for years, making a living. But he also does the covers of altıkırkbeş! Nothing stops him from doing this… What is this? “Why are you selling your ass? Why are you doing this?” Who can say? He’s good at this and he’s good at that! Ha, we don’t tell him to come and do it… He calls and yells at us anyway, “why don’t you send him?” That’s the story! So let’s talk about this too, this too
Poet

i

x
‘s honesty. I care a lot, we all care a lot… We don’t make any money from it. Every time an issue sells out, we print it with the sadness of “one and a half lira went into our ass” and with the excitement of “how fast did it sell?”. People are sending emails here. If it’s good, we print it, that’s the only criterion! This is actually an answer to you… This is what we do… I mean, you don’t need to be a member of any gang… There is no “Enis Batur crew”, there is no “whatever crew”… I don’t know if these things still exist, but we don’t have these things. In this country, in order to do something, you have to get involved somewhere, you have to sweep the floor a little bit, you have to lick some ass… This is not for us.
Sinan: Yes, there is a world in Turkey built on belonging, on discipleship…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Of course, of course… There is a congregation mentality…
Sinan: When Ulvi first put you and what you do in front of me, I looked at it as “hmm, a group of marginals”… In fact, last night when we were talking, in passing, I said “abi, what is this, go to hell in a handbasket, put them in a row… Is this what these big brothers do?” But the more I get to know you, the more I talk to you, maybe again intuitively, I feel that this is a liberation movement that we are not so used to in this geography… That’s why I care about it… Otherwise they can’t fuck me up and bring me here…
Mehmet Oztekin Ayvallah!
Sinan: But here’s the problem… I can’t see the formulation of this… There is nothing, no mechanism that formulates this… This is something I can only express intuitively, as I said… “Hmm yes! This is a space of liberation that doesn’t require belonging… Such a space has been created here and it has no end, no beginning, no end!”
Kaan Çaydamlı: That’s right!
Sinan: If Kaybedenlerler Kulübü was a popular product, we wouldn’t talk about it much, we would pass it by… We would say “This is this”… But you are a man with a thesis… Therefore, even if it is not possible to formulate this thesis exactly, I think at least hints should be shared… Individual freedom, this kind of emancipation is still very new for Turkey, something that is still not perceived… But you come out and say, “I did this in the eighties, nineties”… “I did this, I did that, I overcame this”… “I’ve closed this book and put it aside”… “I’ve put it out there, eat whatever the hell you want!”… Meanwhile, the world is not going towards liberation… The world is going towards communalization… This is a sociological evolution from classical communities to modern communities… I would like to talk to you about this… Where do you stand in all this process? How do you deal with this process?
Kaan Çaydamlı Well very difficult to cope! I see… Hmmm… Did you just ask a political question?
Sinan: Yes, I asked a political question, life is about politics (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı: What did you ask?
Sinan: Whatever you understood… (Laughter)
Mehmet Öztekin: I… Anyway, why don’t you answer…
Ulvi: Shall I tell you what I understand?
Sinan: Wait a minute, don’t translate…
Ulvi: No, not translated… Şenol sent an e-mail in the previous issue, he said “brother, don’t say we like it, send money”. I think I was one of the first to send money… Why? If you say tomorrow that this magazine cannot be published, I can sell my machine and publish one issue… Maybe I can publish two issues… Because this magazine has to exist…
Kaan Çaydamlı I agree…
Ulvi: It doesn’t matter if only 500 people read it… This magazine needs to be on the shelf… There are people like this in this country, there are people who live like this, there are people who feel like this… For this, this magazine needs to be on the shelf! Like it or not, like it or not… I don’t like every article either. You don’t have to like it, but that article is there… Because we don’t have a media, it has to be there…

Sinan: Do you think so too, Kaan?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Hmmm. Now, of course, there is a bit of belonging here… I don’t exactly think so… But I know that when I say “go out and write in the streets” for this magazine, I don’t know how many people will come out and spend the night in jail… This is something else… Maybe this is what you insistently call power… But again, it is honesty that provides this… Because there is no criterion for this except “being good”… So what is the criterion for good? It’s us, unfortunately! Şenol, Mehmet, me, I mean everyone in altıkırkkbeş is the criterion of good!
Bahamian Suspicion
” we started a series. People send 8 books… If they are good, we print them… A lot of places refused to sell them… For example
Remzi
He refused to sell Bahamian Doubt… He didn’t find it appropriate…
Friend
Ankara didn’t approve… They’re going to sell the fuck out of it, got it? Look, I might have to give a statement to the prosecutor because of this… Because what is he saying here? “Ya Rasulululah! Last night you were a woman smelling of autumn in front of me, your hair hanging down from your thin but fleshy ears. And whenever I smelled you, my mind wandered in endless fields…” Now, there’s a God’s beauty here… I’ll defend it to the end, you understand? I’ll go to jail for it! I won’t be here this much! But if someone else here says “I’m going underground” and puts two hundred dicks, assholes, assholes, fuck your ass, fuck your ass, etc… I mean, if I can’t defend it, if I can’t go to jail for it, then I won’t publish it! That’s the criterion! Because underground is something else, man! I’ll defend it… That’s honesty! Unfortunately, we are the criterion for that! We are, because nobody does that in this country! Nobody takes the risk, but we do! Why is that? Because this is a strange text, son! This is it! Let me tell you something interesting, this magazine is more popular abroad than in Turkey… It’s in the libraries of many universities… Professors from Oxford and Cambridge came, they were interviewed… He said come and give a lecture… They send articles from abroad…
Mehmet Oztekin
Nietzsche Circle
, New School New York… They want to enter…
Kaan Çaydamlı
Martin Puchner
We bought your book and asked you to write a foreword. 2 days later he sent 20 pages… He said, “From now on you can print all my books, no one can ask you for money.” Now, if Martin Puchner says this to us, this is a very serious thing… Nobody may not realize this, but in 20 years, in 30 years, they will realize it… But if Martin Puchner says “nobody can take copyright money from you”, I put copyleft behind it, I say “if you can’t take it, take it down from here”… I’m that honest… Because I believe this: Information is a human right! If you can’t access information because you don’t have money, a crime against humanity is being committed against you! This is information!
Sinan: This is a manifesto!
Kaan Çaydamlı: Of course it’s a manifesto!
Copyle

f

t
! S.kerim right! I don’t mean that in the sense of right-left…
Sinan: I understand…
Kaan Çaydamlı: And fuck the right as well!
Ulvi: You mean “also”!
Kaan Çaydamlı: In private! (Laughter) That’s the story! This is the story of Altıkırkbeş… This is what I will say about the Kaybedenler Kulübü: With Altıkırkbeş, they have just started to print things that we printed fifteen years ago in this country, they are just now printing them… They will print the things we are printing now fifteen years from now… We make this clear in our manifesto. That’s the story… We are after this, it excites us… But in the meantime, there are things we have to do to make money… I did engineering for example… I built a lot of buildings…

“no matter what you believe in, if you don’t read these things, you are incomplete! If you don’t know them now, you will have to try to discover them later…”

Sinan: Do you think that all this, all these efforts and risks have paid off?
Kaan Çaydamlı: There is no such question! If we are acting with that in mind, we can’t…
Mehmet Öztekin: Let me give you an example with what we put in the movie. I’ve had two examples… There was one in Altıkırkbeş
Cortazar
‘s “Explanatory Information Handbook”was published.
Kaan Çaydamlı Years ago…

Mehmet Öztekin: A very long time ago… Cortazar is not even mentioned in Turkish… Until that day, no one had mentioned the name Cortazar. A harsh text for the time it was published. Especially for the Turkish reader… I think, it is not possible to read…
Ulvi: It still is…
Mehmet Oztekin Sure… We printed it and there was a joke about “smoking a cigarette in front of the pile of books coming from the printing press”… There was one for the castle of Otranto…
Kubin
‘in “
Other Party
“It had already happened for Kubin, we had already made a party for Kubin called “overlooked ones – overlooked ones”… Kaan was obsessed with “we need to publish important texts” then… I was astonished. Four hundred copies of Alfred Kubin sold! The Other Side is a great text… (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı It is one of the fundamental texts! I don’t understand how these children can dream without reading it!
Sinan: You have a militant side… Militancy for freedom! You know they “need to read this”! Why should he read it? “He has to read it, man! Because otherwise he can’t!” you say…
Kaan Çaydamlı But we’re the benchmark, man! We are the criterion here! As I always say, we printed what we wanted to read!
Mehmet Öztekin: It’s interesting, of course… You know, all these are okay, these are hard texts, good texts… But for example, the Castle of Otranto is not a good text… But it’s a special text… The first text of gothic literature… What does it mean, the first text of gothic literature?
Kaan Çaydamlı: This is also important… What is Gothic literature? Revolution, writing something like that on that date!
Mehmet Öztekin: The guy says it’s bad text, but we have to print it…
Sinan: Abi, you’re taking a risk. You’re taking a commercial risk?
Mehmet Oztekin You’re not taking any risks! You’re jumping off a cliff! So there’s not even a risk! (Laughter) No risk of going under!
Sinan: And to be dragged through the courts! In the name of what? Why, they must read it!
Kaan Çaydamlı The moment you ask that question, I say you can’t!
Sinan: Brother, I will ask you this question and you will explain it to me… In the name of what?
Kaan Çaydamlı: I can’t help it, man! What should I do? (Laughter)
Sinan: Are you supported from outside? Are you getting paid, what are you doing? (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı I wish! I wish someone would give me the money…
Sinan: Are you receiving support from outside to disrupt the traditional Turkish moral structure, family structure and system?
Kaan Çaydamlı Look, there is something I always say… I will give an example of Birdbrain again… He is a very important person in our lives… I feel uncomfortable giving this example, but I mean, that man reads these books every time I send them to him, says a sentence about it in the most unlikely place, and expresses to me in such a subtle way that he has read it and understands very well why we printed it… That is the story! We are not actually doing anything as you say… Whatever you believe, if you don’t read these things, you are incomplete… If you don’t know these things, then you try to discover them again…
Sinan: Why didn’t you go into something easier than publishing?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Well, I did engineering, you know? (Laughter)
Mehmet Öztekin: Actually, there is a very good example… In the same years, in the mid-90s, Afa Publications published “
Bluffer’s Guide
” series… So you can hang out like that, you know what I mean? Indeed, if I remember correctly, The Bluffer’s Guide was 16 books,,,,, You can be super ranty about those 16 subjects… It’s about choosing to be like this… It’s about sincerity… One of Kaan’s biggest disappointments was probably the rudeness of Harley Davidson Turkey when they published Hell’s Angel, for example…
Ulvi: Why don’t I know that?
Mehmet Öztekin: Now.
Hells Angels
,
Harley Davidson
is a very important group all over the world…
Kaan Çaydamlı: They created the designs… the center pillar…
Ulvi: Yes, that extension leg?
Mehmet Öztekin: Now.
Hell’s Angel
will be published, Altıkırkbeş bought the rights…
Harley Davidson Turkey
He contacted me excitedly… You know, “we’re going to do something like this”…
Kaan Çaydamlı: They took a ridiculous attitude… They said, “We don’t want to get involved with them” or something like that… Of course, they are the dry types… You can take your Harley, travel 5 thousand kilometers and…
Ulvi: They would send the Harley to Bodrum in a truck (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı: Send it to Spain… (Laughter) They were the guys who went to Spain by plane and hung out… But this is not such a culture. That’s what happened in Turkey… That’s why we hated riding Harleys here… The only time I rode a Harley was when I went to America… Well, it’s a good machine! (Laughter)
Ulvi Good machine in America! We’ll go into the engine issue separately, of course…
Mehmet Oztekin Now it becomes the Bluffer’s Guide… So you are a bluffer! You say “I’m a biker” but you’re not a biker at all… If you can wear it, wear it, if you can’t, don’t wear it… Don’t try so hard to wear it…
Kaan Çaydamlı: I mean, I make creations like that, scarves, scarves and so on and so forth and so on, more or less in Bebek… Well, of course, it’s very ugly for me to say these things…
Ulvi: Yoo? It’s not ugly at all, it’s the right thing to do.
Kaan Çaydamlı I feel bad saying this… Actually, they gave 5 thousand dollars to “get out of HOG”… When you buy a Harley, you become a natural member of the Harley Owners Group… So they gave them money…
Mehmet Öztekin: I remember him!
Kaan Çaydamlı I guess America is a little bit uncomfortable with this image that something is changing… Or I don’t know if it can be taken more easily, but this is comedy for example… Hells Angels, what we call Hell’s Angels is outlander, outlaw… I mean he smuggles weapons, he is a drug dealer, he fights, I don’t know, he sells women… Because he has to do something to get gasoline… He has to do something that will not prevent him from being on the road… They are actually organized crime gangs… But now here it has turned into a kind of club…
Ulvi Rich people’s club!

Kaan Çaydamlı: I mean, let’s all go to the bar together, let’s have vests, let’s drink, let’s cut the profit… So when you say “let’s sell this stuff and distribute it”, “how so?”! (Laughter) If you’re an MC, you’ll come any way! When the president calls, you go and kill a man… If you kicked him out of the band, if he still has your tattoo on his arm, you catch him and scrape that skin off… I’m not saying that these are the right things… This is the story: Vietnam! After the second world war, unemployed Americans took to motorcycles because they were cheap. They are all thought to be fascists… However, the helmets that came from Germany after the war were cheap. They brought cheap German helmets, belts… They bought them because they were cheap, because they had no money. So that’s why they wore German helmets… To Keith Richards they pulled a gun.
Ginsberg
They hung out on the farm, smoked weed, talked about “fucking assholes” and shit like that. Because they didn’t care…
Mehmet Öztekin: That’s how “One Percenter” comes out, you know? It comes out with the statement of the American Motorcycle Association, so when it says “a nonsense created by one percent of all American bikers has been attributed to all bikers”, all bikers are one percent! They start wearing the I am from there crest…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Organized Crime Court, organized crime branches were established to deal with these… Because they are very organized! There is an incredible situation, there is a hierarchy. Military order! It’s a matter of getting a rank, it’s a matter of giving it its due when you get it… We experienced this, for example… We were a member of an MC here. It was MC then, really. Mehmet’s motorcycle was stolen, we called the mayor and he assigned one of the boys. He put a gun in his waist, went to Marmara Ereğlisi and that engine came! “you will give me the engine” and it came… Didn’t it?
Mehmet Oztekin: Yes, the bike arrived in two days!
Ulvi: Actually, this is the group that saved Harley… Harley was sinking!
Kaan Çaydamlı: Yeah, now he doesn’t have that kind of power anymore. And that turned into something else…
Ulvi: Where is the motor in your life? Let’s talk a little bit about that…
Kaan Çaydamlı Actually, we got a bit off topic… Mehmet and I have a very common story… Because of this provocateur’s (Sinan) questions…
Ulvi: He is always trying to link it to politics (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı: But the story got away! I felt very much caught in the middle…
Ulvi: Nothing has escaped. And it doesn’t matter if he escapes. Let’s talk about food, let’s talk about daily life, let’s talk about what we like… Let’s talk about motorcycles…
Kaan Çaydamlı No, Mehmet and I have a lot of stories in common… Including Altıkırkbeş… We are together at Altıkırkbeş, we are together in many things… I thought we were going to talk about these… I felt a bit left out…
Sinan: Since we’re talking about Altıkırkbeş, I’ll ask… Are you satisfied with the readership of Altıkırkbeş?
Kaan Çaydamlı: What a stupid question! (Laughter) How should I know, man? Who is that audience?
Sinan: So you’re not interested?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Of course I’m not interested… How could I be interested? It’s not something that can be measured. Some books are bought by three thousand people, some books are bought by four hundred people…
Sinan: I didn’t ask numerically… I’m talking about the audience that you say “they must read this”… Is this a readership that satisfies you in terms of quality?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Actually, publishing houses are not followed in Turkey… This is also wrong! We are also wrong… I don’t know what you call a publishing house one day
Burrougsh
and one day Harper Collins The next day Wiley publishes it, the day after that, I don’t know, Wiley publishes it, the day after that, someone else publishes it… I mean, it is a service… They also create writers… Now there are two serious problems in Turkey: For example, Suleiman the Magnificent came out, and now it’s Hürrem Sultan! I’m waiting for a comic book porn! (Laughter) It must be done! How the Magnificent screwed Hürrem: Graphic novel! These things are strange… NTV is into graphic novels, but it has nothing to do with graphic novels, that’s another business! Hamlet sold 20,000 copies in this fucking country! Why the fuck? So
Sheakspeare
If we were so interested in reading, why didn’t you read it? It’s everywhere? The theater is playing, the movie is playing? There is such a thing in the country… Some trends are created and then they are fucked up. So we are a bit different… People don’t perceive us like a publishing house… I mean, we are doing something and since we are doing it, they think they should take a look at it there… Mostly without understanding anything!

“one day someone will come along and say sixty-five is mine. that’s how this story works. it may sound absurd, but that’s how it works…”

Sinan: As far as I understand from both Şenol and these conversations, you are actually trying to carry your readers somewhere… You have a problem to carry them somewhere?
Kaan Çaydamlı Actually, our problem is with ourselves… We publish these things because we want to read them! Let me tell you how the publishing house started. I’m doing photography, I’ve received a lot of awards, and I keep them in the basement! There are so many I can’t tell you… There are invitations from international competitions… Well, of course, we had to get rid of them. I got other people to replace me; they gave speeches, received awards from rectors, this and that… That was a breaking point. When you are young, you start with excitement. You get an award, you are honored. Then you realize, “What the hell? Honored, honored, honored!” Fifteen people are looking at that photograph. There is no reality… I want to study something related to photography, no! I’m doing engineering.
Camera Lucida
there’s a book, I need to read it. I don’t speak English? I gave the money, had it translated, it started to circulate… I want to read it, I need it! Then one day we said, “Well, let’s publish it then?”… This is the story of the beginning of our publishing… And this has not changed until today. That is the basic motive. They don’t print them, people don’t wonder about them! Everyone’s a photographer in the fucking country! But no one is interested in reading about photography! Then you can’t be a photographer? The same goes for cinema…
Mehmet Oztekin In poetry too? Everyone is a poet?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Especially poetry? Poetry sells 150 copies in this country! We receive four poetry files every day! How does this work?
Mehmet Oztekin Poetry doesn’t sell
Kaan Çaydamlı We are full of poets who don’t read poetry! Such a situation… This is our need… I mean, I have an interest, I want to study! This guy has an interest, he wants to read… So does Şenol… Then we print them to read them ourselves. That’s the basic starting point…

Sinan: Does the reader force you at some point?
Kaan Çaydamlı: The reader follows… It’s the same with the radio program… Okay, a lot of guys come out of the crowd and stand out… Kerem comes out for example, he stops at the Bursa Fair… I don’t know why he stops?
Mehmet Öztekin: One of them is hosting, for example, in Bursa…
Kaan Çaydamlı We announce on the internet, for example… “Solidarity: Someone from Altıkırkbeş is coming, is there a place to stay?” It doesn’t take half an hour, the response is “keep it.” There was an anarchist group, for example, he’s staying in their house now. He is standing there at the fair… We don’t know what he is selling, how much money he has in his pocket. He brings and gives the money… He says, “I spent this much, I sold this much” and leaves… We ask him to do this, he does it… For example, another one, Özgür Kurtoğlu, sent a CV the other day. He’s got a hell of a CV. A twenty-something year old kid, working as an IT consultant for companies… “Abi, this is my CV, what can I do?”… Let this guy do something now! Because he wants to do it… Şenol’s exit is like that. So what he said in your interview is true… One day someone will come along, say “I am Altıkırkbeş” and continue… That’s how the story goes. It may sound very strange, it may sound absurd, but this is really how the mechanism works.
Sinan: No, no! On the contrary, your story gains meaning with these…
Ulvi: I know from myself. For example, I hate science fiction, but I have all the science fiction of Altıkırkbeş… I paid for it! Why? Because it has to be taken… Because it has to be turned around… I have made some people take it, I am making some people take it…

Sinan: Have you ever imagined a reader who can surpass you, Kaan?
Kaan Çaydamlı: There are things like… A professor from Oxford comes to meet us… He comes… The art director of Amelie came and stayed with us for three days. Why the fuck is he staying with us? And why does he make himself at home? So comfortable? Now they worked with this guy, for example… You asked me, “How does it work?”… I don’t know what they talked about with this guy… The guy felt so comfortable, he came and stayed for three days… A guy named Michael called me, he said, “I’m coming with my wife”… He was the cinematographer of Amelie… He was an amazing art director… The guy did a good job, we admire what he did…
Mehmet Öztekin: Well, of course, things like this also affect people… A man comes from abroad, what do you do? You know, Topkapı Palace, Dolmabahçe Palace… I took him to Moda, to a tea garden… I took him to the Tuesday market… He went crazy! I’ll never forget, it was a cold day in Moda, we sat in the indoor section. There’s an unbelievable crowd, you know, the old crew from Moda… They’ve come, they’re sitting around playing cards, drinking tea and so on… We’re looking at the sea, there’s such a beautiful view… It’s dark and rainy… The man said, “Oh, it’s a beautiful view, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ll sit over there,” and he turned to the people and sat down… Because when you look at it from that point of view, it’s really a very strange view… Old men with umbrellas, hats, old men sitting there, playing bridge and chatting…
Kaan Çaydamlı: They smoke their pipes…
Mehmet Öztekin It’s a horrible sight! I showed the man around the Tuesday market… In the middle of the Tuesday market, the man said to me, without exaggeration, “Fuck Topkapı Palace!”… There is such an image there that you actually start to look at it from that point of view… When you are walking around with them, you realize much better that this Tuesday market is really something strange!
Sinan: Damn your Tuesday market! Don’t boil my question! Kaan, do you imagine a point where the reader can surpass you?
Kaan Çaydamlı That’s where we’re coming from! Of course! There is already a transcendental situation… We are already after these things to learn. And while we’re at it, we think we should print them… A lot of people at Poetix buy them from abroad, follow us… A Spanish professor comes and says, “Did you really print them?” He can’t believe it! “I want to come to your office,” he says. This guy from Oxford, for example… He has books like this… This guy has already surpassed me a thousand times! You know what I mean?
Mehmet Öztekin: There’s this… We tried to do a work called “Dawn Diary”…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Tell me this story?
Sinan: Now I understand this then… So you are saying that you are not doing anything within the borders of Turkey, that you can reach a very wide, very “global” audience?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Now these things find us… The internet!
Mehmet Öztekin That infrastructure is already formed…
Kaan Çaydamlı: 15 years ago it was not like this. Now type something on the internet and Altıkırkbeş comes up!
Mehmet Öztekin: We set out to make a project called Dawn Diary…
Kaan Çaydamlı It’s an incredible story!
Mehmet Öztekin: It was 7-8 years ago, right? That’s it?
Kaan Çaydamlı: We were drinking in Ankara, and it all started with a word in the middle of a deer… Mehmet suddenly had a light bulb moment and turned it into a project… It’s a weird story!
Mehmet Öztekin: A documentary with ten writers on their private lives… We have identified these ten writers, but now there is a cost… There is a shooting cost… But there are such names that the real challenge is to convince these names for this project! But we’ve made it so easy you won’t believe it! The only thing left to do was to find the budget and then we faced a harsh reality: finding that budget is out of the question! By the way, we are talking about a simple budget!
Kaan Çaydamlı: Can you name the writers?
Mehmet Öztekin For example.
Michel Tournier
…
David Grossman
… Enrique Vila-Matas!
Ulvi: Someone died, you said we missed it at that time?
Mehmet Öztekin:
Jurgen Habermas
Peter Ackroyd! I’m sorry!
Sinan: Fuck! You’re going to film their private lives?
Mehmet Oztekin We’re doing a five-day residency at their house… Ion Derillo! He’s been living a reclusive life outside New York for years. He doesn’t see anyone, he doesn’t give interviews to anyone… He agreed! Even stranger,
Fredric Jameson
He was not on our list, but he sent a request saying “I want to be on this list”.
Vüs’at O. Bener
The only local name there was… He said, “I have a checkup at the hospital, let me do that and get out, let’s do it that way”… He went in, he couldn’t get out…

Sinan: The motive behind so many people accepting such a thing is of course the work you have done so far… Awesome!

Mehmet Öztekin: Yes, I think it should be so… We never questioned it but… Michel Tournier never hesitated. We were going to go to him first. But, for example, Tournier’s “
Farewell Dinner
“we were more interested in why he lived 85 kilometers from Paris and didn’t go to Paris, rather than how he wrote it…
Kaan Çaydamlı: We wanted to see their Kadikoy, understand? That’s the story!
Mehmet Oztekin Yes! Where does he write, who is his wife, in which cafe does he sit and drink his coffee? That’s what we wanted to tell. They accepted. The most striking example was Dondevilyo, as he said that we will be inside their house… Because he doesn’t accept anybody… Nobody! No interviews, no meetings! No one knows where he lives except his publisher, let alone meet him…

Sinan: So what did you do? Do you have such a project?
Mehmet Oztekin Yes, we have such a project and we have filed it very well… We have also prepared the packaging very well… We have made some very strange files… We are asking for very small budgets. For example, the shooting crew is five people… I’ll go and use the camera, he’ll talk, the other one will take the sound, and so on… Even in such a situation, there is no such thing… It’s impossible to find half of the budget, let alone the budget! If you say I’m giving half of it out of my pocket, it’s a matter of finding the other half…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Only Enis Batur! Yapi Kredi had two writers: Peter Ackroyd and Vusat O. Bener…
Mehmet Öztekin Enis Batur said, “I will pay for these”.
Kaan Çaydamlı said: “I will cover these, you find the rest”. I remember we went to Ali Saydam…
Mehmet Öztekin
Ali Saydam
and I had a very difficult conversation. He said, “This is one of the most bizarre projects I have ever seen in my life… I have 25 clients, I would not bring any of them into this project”… He said, “Because you are trying to do such a job with this project that it would require me to spend millions of dollars to position any brand behind it”… I agreed with him… Of course, when you look at it from that side, there are advertising, brand positioning and so on… But on the other hand, there are promises taken… We show faxes, we have documents… I have permission to enter Tournier’s house for five days… Today we don’t have such a chance anymore… It’s over, the man can’t speak now… He can’t even form sentences because of illness, he can’t remember what he said, etc… If we could have done this that day, we would have the last things about Tournier… We would have the last things about Habermas…
Sinan: For God’s sake, what was the cost of this project?
Mehmet Öztekin: It was 250 thousand dollars… 250 thousand for 10 writers! We asked for 25 thousand dollars per writer…
Kaan Çaydamlı: But mind you, one of them was in San Diego… Right? We were going to Argentina?
Mehmet Öztekin: Of course, it was huge!
Sinan: When you think about how much money companies spend on which projects…
Ulvi:In projects, you’re always limited to the vision of the client… You’ll take the project to the man, and if there are ten names, he won’t recognize ten of them…
Mehmet Öztekin: Yes, he said that too!
Kaan Çaydamlı: But he doesn’t have to recognize it. After all, it doesn’t help the brand, that’s how he looks at it… The only funding we could find came from Germany. If we were living in another country and not in Turkey, perhaps it would be a different situation…
Ulvi: Maybe it was necessary to follow the European Union funds?
Mehmet Öztekin: Well, we are not very successful in those matters… For example, I wrote a letter to Euroimage. I sent a fax. Faruk Ünaltay, the representative of Euroimage, gave me a ridiculous answer, “this can’t happen”, blah blah blah… There was other math there. Later, when I get more into the industry, I understand this… But I’m telling you 250 thousand dollars… This money is spent only for Peter Ackyord, for a man who knows…
Kaan Çaydamlı: No, no! Not even 250. 150,000 dollars! 100 thousand dollars had already been provided by Enis Batur…
Sinan: Yes, there’s that… You just said that Enis Batur agreed to cover part of it, that’s right…
Kaan Çaydamlı: 4,000 Euros came from a fund in Germany…
Mehmet Öztekin: 4.000 Euros came in, yes… It was a small fund… It was a resource we found in Cologne with our personal connections… They support short films… They said, “We can support a 45-minute episode”. They don’t have any other money… In the end, I am very sad that a project like The Dawn Diary could not be realized…
Kaan Çaydamlı We also have immaturity here… We were immature back then… We were at the very beginning, we didn’t know anything… We don’t have such a culture… Now in this country, the French Cultural Center said, “I will support French writers”. I don’t know how many publishing houses that publish only French authors… They must have bought houses, cars, yachts… They must have slept with French prostitutes (Laughter)
Mehmet Oztekin: That made me very sad, I mean…
Ulvi: Don’t worry, I’ve been in this sector for years, now I’m thinking, “How many company managers know these ten names?” I can’t find them…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Isn’t this bad management now? Now you have ten men coming to you, you have a list, you have everything here… Don’t you have advisors?
Ulvi: No brother, no!
Mehmet Öztekin: Enrico Flamatas for example… A writer who has been compared to James Joyce. At that time I was very frustrated, I mean… I had an incident like this, which is also related to this issue. Adolfo Dominguez perfume commercial is being shot… Everything is Spanish… The client comes from Spain, the agency is Spanish
TBWA
And so on… There is an agency head, he doesn’t talk to anyone. We are shooting a commercial in the travertines in Pamukkale. We will shoot for 2-3 days… We sit in the evening, we chat… Everyone is in their own way… The head of the agency doesn’t even say hello to anyone. We are sitting at a long table. I’m chatting with the person next to me, he’s chatting with the director in Spanish…
Enrique Vila-Matas
I heard the ‘tude passed by. I turned to him and said, “Did you say Enrique Vila-Matas?” He said, “Yes? Do you know Vila-Matas?” When I said, “Of course I know”, the man who never said hello to anyone started to keep me by his side… We have breakfast together every day… So much so that the man became overwhelming… His problem was, “How can a person in Turkey be aware of Vila-Matas, how can he know Vila-Matas so well”… I told him about the project, for example, and he was very interested…
Ulvi: How many customers would he have?
Mehmet Öztekin: I think he has the power to do these kinds of projects on his own without anybody else behind him… He said, “What a great project! I think you should do it,” and we fell silent (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı: Well, that’s how it works there, you apply to Cervantes, you get in and that’s it…
Sinan: Anyway, don’t be so upset that you couldn’t realize this project. After all, there are things that you want very much, but you can’t bring in because you can’t pay the royalties…
Mehmet Oztekin It happens to us a lot…

“I am now waiting for a doctor to tell me that you have 5 years to live. if that happens, I will jump up and do route 66 for the second time”

Sinan: Commercial concerns are not your priority at Altıkırkbeş. But on the other hand, there are good things you want to do. For example, the Losers’ Club has a meaning beyond being a commercial work. This is a dilemma at the same time… After all, it is a fact of life, money is important… Money is also necessary in some way for all the work you plan to do… I wonder how you cope with this… Mehmet, what is the success criterion of the Losers Club for you, for example? You know how the box office is usually the criterion for success in movies?
Mehmet Oztekin I started writing The Losers’ Club in 2000, eleven years ago… Now, when it comes to me putting a value, a box office, a number on a project that has matured in such a long time, we would be lost… Just before you came, I was talking to Kaan and I said this: “I’ll be relieved in 15 days, when the movie hits theaters”… I mean, I’ll be relieved not in 25-30 days, not after 25,000 box office, but in 15 days, when the movie hits theaters, when the machines start spinning… I’ll have thrown off a burden I’ve been carrying on my back for 11 years… Now can you put a value on that? 3 million? 4 million? What value can be placed on this labor?
Sinan: Of course, the fact that the movie did very well at the box office is also a matter of course…
Mehmet Öztekin: Absolutely! I said this… I would be disturbed if the movie made 1.5 million box office!
Sinan: There is an injury here then?

Mehmet Öztekin That’s it.
James Joyce
It goes back to his story… I’m obsessed with Joyce, so I’m going back there in particular. There is nothing as ridiculous as the fact that a man who pushes perception so much has made 7 editions that sold out instantly… If the Losers Club, for example, makes 1.5 million box office, the first thing I will think is “are we so popular, have we made something that appeals to every ear and every eye?”…
Sinan: We keep coming back to the same point. You need money for a good project… It must be something that squeezes… On the one hand, you have a “to-read list”. This year Altıkırkbeş will publish them, because you want to read them this year…
Mehmet Oztekin Now I stand in a slightly different place. I’m shooting a TV series. I somehow make a living by making dramas. If I hadn’t made the series, I wouldn’t have been able to do these things that I love. Here I received a fee from the Losers Club that can only be called “a name, a number”. I have already distributed almost all of it… As long as I can survive by making TV series, I will be able to do these kinds of projects.
Sinan: Does this also apply to Altıkırkbeş?
Mehmet Öztekin: Of course it does! I’ll never forget something Kaan used to say: “One of the Tatlıcı Towers in Zincirlikuyu is an Eskişehir and the other is an Antalya Kelepir shop”. I remember this every time I see those two towers… Kaan also shouldered the projects as an engineer. He built the towers, he opened the bargains and they went down spectacularly! This is how it works… It can’t be any other way. Each of us will make money in different areas and we will do great things together. If we try to say and do otherwise, it would be to deny everything we have talked about so far… Altıkırkbeş is not a place to make money for us!
Kaan Çaydamlı: We don’t make money!
Sinan: There’s no way you can win this way anyway… I would understand if you had said something like “this book will do well, let me put out some books like this”… But look at you now: “I want to read this, I’m curious about this, these books will come out!” With your mindset, ohoo! (Laughter)
Mehmet Oztekin “This is what the people want!” This is the deer I am most annoyed with… Because you educate, you are already on this mission…
Sinan: That’s the ideal, of course…
Mehmet Öztekin: Yes, let me give you an example… After all, we travel, we look, we don’t only know the Turkish society.
Clockwork Orange
‘s 63-week run in theaters in the UK also seems strange to me… The British are not the kind of people who would keep a movie like this in theaters for 63 weeks? It’s a little bit about how you adjust the dosage…
Stanley Kubrick
‘s words, “producers are people too, brother”… In other words, these people are not organisms that can survive without food and drink… This man also has to pay his rent… These men look at cinema as a sector, as a business… Therefore, he is saying “you have to make your movie with that mindset”… To be honest, I also believe in this kind of work… Work that can be read and looked at, and the survival of the people who stand behind that work… Mind you, I’m not talking about living in super comfort, I’m talking about their survival… We were able to keep Altıkırkbeş afloat for so long, we were able to grow it to the point where it can stand on its own…
Kaan Çaydamlı: No, there is a situation like this now… The other day we got very drunk, Nejat, Şenol, Mete, me and so on… A sentence like this came out “
Philip K. Dick
and buy fucking diapers.” So we’ve come to this point now… It’s a bit ironic, isn’t it? (Laughter)
Mehmet Öztekin: At the last book fair, our books were exhibited together with Laika publications, I don’t forget that. Mehmet Gözüpek used to criticize us a lot for the prices of the books, calling them “overpriced”… “That’s where I realized what Altıkırkbeş is; those who can afford it buy it without questioning the price,” he said. Kaan and I argued a lot. For example, it’s a funny story: “I had a breakdown in Eskişehir, you mislabeled a book by Philip K. Dick”. It came back to Istanbul and reached Kaan’s ears. It is actually labeled correctly. I don’t know the price of the book. Kaan then explained… He broke down the costs item by item, and we realized that he had actually put the price at the lower limit on the label… Unfortunately, there is such a situation, the cost is clear. You can’t put a 5 lira label on a 20 lira book. You can’t finance it because… But we don’t sell a book that costs 20 liras for 30 liras.
Kaan Çaydamlı: The story of Poetix is the same… We lost 1.5 Lira when we sold it. It was the first issue, it sold like hotcakes! It was a mixed situation whether to be sad or happy…
Ulvi: How are the sales now?
Kaan Çaydamlı: It reached 1,000 units with a crazy graph! At 600 units, it’s already saving itself. That leaves us with 400…
Ulvi: When it first came out, I scratched like a psychotic, I fought with the bookstores in Kadıköy, so that they would bring it if they didn’t have it… I bought it from Mephisto on Friday night, and on Saturday I went to ask for this Bahama series… A guy came in, he had long hair and everything, he said, “Don’t you have Poetix?” and they said they were sold out… I liked hearing the word “sold out” very much. Even if 10 people bought it, it’s nice to know that 10 people have Poetix at home.
Mehmet Oztekin With 200 people, you wouldn’t feel that way, but…
Ulvi: Of course you won’t feel it…
Kaan Çaydamlı: 10 were sold out that day, they ordered five… 2. they sold out for days. As soon as he left, the room was gone.
Ulvi: It’s a very good thing. No matter the number, there are people like me in Kadıköy…
Kaan Çaydamlı
Nezih
they don’t sell it anymore, they banned it! He did not find it appropriate. He would disturb his client…

Sinan: Do you think you are getting old?
Kaan Çaydamlı: I am getting old!
Sinan: I am asking because of this. Do you think there is a danger that you are starting to create your own status quo?
Kaan Çaydamlı: I think about it a lot! I’m waiting to hear from the doctor, let me put it this way… Let a doctor tell me, “You have 5 years” or something like that… There is something wrong. Now I am married, I have a seven-month-old child. On the one hand, I’m 50 years old, but I still feel like I’m in my 20s. I look at my father though, he lives like that too… (Laughter) So there seems to be no problem (Laughter) I’m 50 years old and there’s a party in Kadıköy, for example, we go, it’s like the radio parties of 10-odd years ago… I see; Şenol, Mehmet have youthful energy… They are much younger than me…

Mehmet Öztekin: But here’s the thing. When I look around me, I also see that people are very sterile when it comes to perceiving life, living in the moment. Especially if you consider the difference of the environment I am in, that I am still observing… We talked the other day, we were riding our bikes together towards Ölüdeniz for example… When we were going towards Fethiye, the sky was very dark, there were black clouds. It was the middle of the day and the air was charged with electricity.
Kaan Çaydamlı: (laughing) We were driving to disaster!
Mehmet Öztekin: Lightning flashes and we drive the bikes towards there… Our route is the storm… I think this is something very few people can experience… Before we knew it, we had traveled 4 thousand kilometers. On that road To Lake Bafa On the way there, where we had dinner, I said “this is how a lifetime can pass”… It was a great joy… You can live until you are 90, what matters is what and how long you live… Everything else loses its meaning there… It was something very beautiful, very heavy… It was a strange evening in Ölüdeniz, in that caravan park…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Nobody! Winter!
Mehmet Öztekin: We had dinner in the pouring rain. Just the two of us… There was no one else…
Kaan Çaydamlı: The whole Ölüdeniz was empty… Awesome! I can’t tell you!
Mehmet Öztekin I stood on that small pier, left the engines, took off the helmet, the mask, the clothes we were wearing and went out to the pier in shorts… I looked at the water, I don’t forget, there was a very small engine… A sea motor, attached to a boat… Some guy was walking around there. Truck, truck, truck! There was a strange wind. I could write a very long story about this. I think it’s a great wealth! Riding a motorcycle is not getting up and going to Nişantaşı. I have a bike and nobody sees it here. You get up and stand in a place where there is no one and look out to sea. You sit and eat fish and drink raki. And that’s what it’s like to publish those books…
Kaan Çaydamlı It was a very high thing for me too… A very high visualization! There is something similar to this. One morning I was so depressed, I went out on the road. I went down to Olympos in the evening. A German woman was waiting on the road, so I said, “I’ll give her a ride.” We were talking on the road, he said, “Where are you from?” I said, “From Istanbul.” He said, “How far is Istanbul?” I told him, “about a hundred kilometers.” He said, “How long will you stay?” I said, “I’ll be back in the morning. He said, “Why did you come?” I said, “I came to eat sea bass”… Indeed, that’s why I went… I ate sea bass and came back! That’s something… You know what I mean? I did Route 66, for example… It was a dream! Now I want to do it one more time… That’s why, if the doctor says, “You have 5 years left,” I’m out of here… (Laughter)
Ulvi This “
Personal Meeting Notes
” (KTN) how did it come out? There are a few people I know, they bought a book by Altıkırkbeş, it’s on their shelf, they haven’t read it. But he read the KTNs. He knows…
Mehmet Oztekin Let me tell you something, it’s an important anecdote for me… When I was living in Bodrum
Ilhan Berk
I got to know him well. We had long conversations. He would come to Kelepir, collect Altıkırkbeş’s books and disappear for a while. Then he would come back, collect the books and disappear again… He also knew Kaan, one day he showed up. We sat in the shop, ordered tea and chatted. I’m 21 then. He took a few Sixty-Five books and put them next to the safe. “Some of them don’t have KTN,” he said. I said, “No, I don’t.” “Why?” he said… I said, “No, he didn’t write it, he couldn’t keep up.” I know that the books were waiting for KTNs at the printing house, ready with everything… When the KTNs arrived, they were printed. Sometimes the KTNs didn’t arrive in time… İlhan Berk was asking me for the KTN… “Why aren’t there any KTNs in these books?”… Finally I said, “He’s coming in 1-2 weeks, you can ask him”… What can I say? If he didn’t write the KTN of the book, go fight with him, right?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Well, of course, there is a bit of bastardy in KTM’s debut… The book is a very sacred thing for some people… It is very valuable! Untouchable! If you ask, it’s like that for everyone in general… It’s like the Koran! I started just to make fun of it at first… Little notes that communicate with the reader… At the beginning they reacted to it a lot. “How dare you look into the book of who knows who?”… What the fuck is the ring? I am a broadcaster! I’m printing the book! That was the main motivation… You know Sinan asks, “why did you do it?”… I didn’t think, I did it without thinking… But I guess a really interesting genre has emerged…
Ulvi: When did you realize it was “something”? Which I can easily call “cult”…
Kaan Çaydamlı Well, I realized it when people came and asked me at fairs and things like that, when some beautiful women fell down… (Laughs)
Mehmet Öztekin: For me, I look at every new book that comes out to see if there is KTN…
Kaan Çaydamlı: I didn’t write specifically for a few books. Out of respect! I mean, I couldn’t do it for the writer… But apart from that, we put it in almost all of them for a period of time… I think these also contributed to Altıkırkbeş becoming a brand. Şenol’s observation is also interesting for me… Şenol thinks that another type of literature has emerged. It’s an underground thing… Because you infiltrate the guy’s book…
Mehmet Öztekin At a time when Altıkırkbeş was not advertised anywhere
Republic Book
he asked me for an article. A book review… Year 98… I said I would write, but I meant it too much… It took a long time for the article to come out. Anyway, I wrote and sent it and they printed it immediately… I was surprised! I didn’t expect them to release it so soon. In ’98, that’s 13 years ago… A James Joyce book… Kaan called the next day and said “congratulations, there’s not a single one left in the warehouse after that blurb”… (Laughter). I mean, you don’t have a commercial mind, so you can write that promotional article by looking at what’s in the warehouse (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı: It was a good article, but it took him how many years to write it! But it was a great article… Look, one of the bizarre examples is an article we wrote on the back of The Hobbit…
The Hobbit
and nobody knows! The Hobbit is not selling! The book sells 50, maybe 100 copies a month… Then all of a sudden everyone
Tolkien
in the country! They raided your pirate. When the pirated version was published, we made a note on the back of the book: “Look at the oldest tree in the garden and think, don’t be a bitch! Piracy is being a son of a bitch, don’t do it!”… When the book became very popular, we received a message from a school in Mersin: “We make our children read this book, it says ‘son of a bitch’ on the back”… (Laughter)
Mehmet Oztekin Now you’ve made a good point… For example, in 2011, in many newspapers, in many magazines, this issue of “presenting with uneasiness” became news… Nurgül Yeşilçay said that she found it interesting in one of our conversations… I said, “Altıkırkbeş has been doing this since the day it came out”… None of you are aware of this… Altıkırkbeş has been saying “presenting with uneasiness” ever since it came out… And now we’ve reached the point where we’re “presenting the shit out of it”… The poster we made, for example, it must be 4-5 years old, right? It’s frustrating to know that things that are original today were actually made 20 years ago…
Ulvi: But that’s the way it’s always going to be…
Mehmet Oztekin We don’t struggle with this anyway… That comfort at the time may have stemmed from having an insight that no one else was aware of… The luxury of being able to say, “What could be more serious where there is death?” and then “But every Altıkırkbeş reader knows that the hamburgers at Kristal Büfe are more scrumptious” is a good thing…
Kaan Çaydamlı Back cover writings are also an issue… The other day someone I didn’t know shouted the sentence we wrote on the back of a book: “Your mother never told you such stories, but we are not your mother”…
Ulvi: Even the back cover articles can be a book in itself one day…
Mehmet Öztekin: Of course, they opened threads on Ekşi Sözlük… It makes you feel good… 5-6 months ago, the movie wasn’t filmed yet… I was walking down the street in Kadıköy. A young boy leaned over the balcony and handed me his beer, saying “I drink to you”. Of course I said “Bon appetit”… (Laughter)

“I don’t feel good about the political climate in Turkey. I don’t feel good at all”

Ulvi Shall we say a word or two about Kadikoy? So there is no Kaan Çaydamlı – Mehmet Öztekin interview without Kadıköy?
Kaan Çaydamlı: What I have found is that you always want to talk to people about good things, and this guy is always looking for provocation. That’s why I thought a lot about this interview! (Laughter)
Mehmet Öztekin: Abi, let me tell you one thing, something I told you in Veronica… When we went down to the street of bars, we said, “Oh my God”. (Laughter) I always say this is the feeling I get every time I get off the ferry… I finish my work across the street, get on the ferry and get off in Kadıköy… There is always something to finish and return to as soon as possible. But here, there is always a state of ease, laxity and endlessness… I don’t cross the street unless I have to.

Kaan Çaydamlı: If we go to Beyoğlu once a year, we do… But I also think that, for example, the Moda of the past and the current Moda are very different… There used to be a neighborhood culture, you grew up with the culture of that neighborhood… I am like that, I grew up on Çelik Çomak Street in Kuzguncuk. For example, before “mother” I used to say “Melahat Abla”… She used to bring us eggs… We grew up in the neighborhood… As the city became “gentrified”, as the concept of neighborhood disappeared, the situation of belonging to a larger area emerged… Every person is actually from Fikirtepe, Nişantaşı, from here and there… Nişantaşı has a culture. If you live in Nişantaşı, that culture inevitably rubs off on you. It determines you… From where you walk around, the coffee you drink to what you know… There are few such points anymore. Kadıköy is one of them. Okay, Kadıköy is not the old Kadıköy… It’s not even the Kadıköy of 15-20 years ago anymore… Akmar Passage is no longer Akmar Passage, but the mind is there… I told you in a program, the more you live with life, the more you die with death, and the more you die somewhere, the more you start to belong there… It’s a bit dark like that, but Kadıköy is like that for me… We fed from there, we fed from the people there. We had our “routes” there; we met at the same place every Sunday without speaking, we drank tea… We showed the things we bought, we greeted people and so on and so forth… All these things defined us. I think that human structure would have been different in Nişantaşı, I think we would have been different in Kuzguncuk… The previous generation was different in Moda, for example… It was more non-Muslim… Look at Cihangir. All the artists and shit are settling there, but it’s still not “something”… But if they continue to stay there for another 20 years, if they can integrate with it…

Mehmet Öztekin: So they are running away now…
Ulvi: Of course it’s a “fake” place…
Mehmet Öztekin: They adapt to Moda, but… Look, we tried to create a “Kadıköy sound” brand with Kaan in an absurd way. It was a project that would bring the musicians in Kadıköy together. In Buruk Acı, this had reached a very hip point. In 2004, after we shot Buruk Acı, when Elle Magazine wanted to make a story about Buruk Acı, I tried to turn it into a “Kadıköy Sound” story. “Kadıköy Sound: A Way of Life”… In 2004, this turned into a 4-page article in Elle Magazine… It turned into a dossier with Kaan, Şenol, Altan and Cenk in it… It wasn’t something they could stay away from… In 99, Esquire made a news article with the title “You can’t be happy without sex on Saturday nights: losers club”… The reason I give these examples is because they are objects of popular culture… Otherwise, they have always been and still are objects of subculture… I think this is because of the clarity of their stance…
Kaan Çaydamlı: For example, Kadıköy is still the center of comics… It never changes and I think it will hardly change… People come to Kadıköy to buy comics. All the publishers are there, it hasn’t changed… we
Mehmet Öztekin: When you talk about Kadıköy Sound, you talk about Cem Karaca, Barış Manço, Cahit Berkay, Moğollar… You also talk about these… It goes all the way back to Köhne… Laterna Bülent’s laterna shop… Then of course Akmar… All the cassettes and records are there…
Ulvi: Of course, dear… The first collection of cassettes, selling vinyl cassettes on the street there…
Kaan Çaydamlı: The garbage men are also in Kadıköy? Garbage auctions are held…
Mehmet Oztekin: So is the engine?
Kaan Çaydamlı There is another truth: As the generation changes, the structure changes… Of course, there is nothing unchanging about culture… In the past, Kızıltoprak used to be Kadıköy, Kalamış used to be Kadıköy… All of them were Kadıköy… Now, when you walk around, there is a different situation… I think Moda has changed in the same way… Despite this, Moda is still Moda… But if these twits give it to TOKİ, I will see those edges and Moda…
Ulvi: No, if there is still a park called Sherwood, that says it all (Laughter)
Kaan Çaydamlı: There’s this subway thing, it’s bad when it’s finished… Haydarpaşa is becoming a hotel, they’ve already erected that thing…
Ulvi: Yes, they erected the Hilton
Sinan: That was terrible!
Kaan Çaydamlı: Horrible!
Mehmet Öztekin Yes! We’ve been talking about it, I mean, how strange it looks!
Kaan Çaydamlı: Do you know what a beautiful building there was? It was in a huge garden…
Ulvi: I haven’t been there, but for example, every hotel on the docks has a personality. Kadıköy has a soul after all…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Yes, it doesn’t look awkward… Of course, people who are used to Beyoğlu get bored when they come to Kadıköy, but we have regular bars in Kadıköy… You enter, you greet everyone…
Mehmet Öztekin Well? So, is the interview over?

Sinan: No, there is no easy way out… Kaan, how do you see Turkey’s climate?
Kaan Çaydamlı: You mean in terms of climate?
Sinan: Politically…
Kaan Çaydamlı: The situation is obvious! He’s shouting! We are heading towards a catastrophe… With a very clever strategy, we have been heading towards Iran for a very long time…
Sinan: So you have such a perception?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Of course I do… The last thing I read was horrible for example… Family Imam! What the hell is this?
Sinan: Adana is a pilot region…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Yes, Adana is a pilot region!
Mehmet Oztekin: What the fuck is that? First time I’ve heard of it?
Kaan Çaydamlı: Yes, yes! I thought a lot about whether to take the imam or not, but I decided to take him! Because if an imam comes to the house, he comes because God exists. Then he has to prove it. I mean, it’s very loud! Very clever… They have been working hard for years, weaving the cocoon, and all the castles have fallen… They have infiltrated everywhere… They are going as they want… Of course, it will not go towards Iran, because they are more global. They are more traders. They are as interested in selling everything as they are in selling religion. But with this communal mindset, and with the ability to distribute the rents they have obtained, they are running away. I think it’s great…
Sinan: There is an increasingly conservative social structure and your world of perception does not coincide with this conservatization.
Kaan Çaydamlı: Of course not!
Sinan: And to the extent that your living space narrows, so does your room for maneuver… I mean, as a publisher, as a human being…
Kaan Çaydamlı: Of course, I’m worried about whether we can sustain it for too long… I’m waiting to see when we’ll appear before the prosecutor… The other day the governor’s secretary called, she wanted a book. So we said, “OK, it’s about time.” It turns out that he saw our pasta monster somewhere, liked it so much that he asked us to send him one… Did we do good or bad, but we did (Laughter) So there is this uneasiness… Of course, this uneasiness was always there, but it was not this intense. It wasn’t a case of “when does the doorbell ring?” There is now a climate that makes this strongly felt. We feel it very much. This is a little bit related to what you are saying. You know how you said, “You’re 50 years old, you have a child”? But it is not possible to do otherwise, to act otherwise…
Sinan: You’re saying this is what I do.
Kaan Çaydamlı: I observe this. When I look at the television, I see that they have started to talk about the details. You know when a group of people fight for a common interest, take over, and then they start talking about “details” among themselves… These people started talking about sects on TV, they started talking about incest… The other day one of the hodjas was speaking on TV. You know, they used to be oppressed and they used to talk about poverty and destitution, but now the hodja comes out and says, “It is not befitting for a Muslim to live in such pomp and splendor”… So now they are talking about completely different details… I think this is actually the beginning of a dissolution. They have become so relaxed that they even talk about incest… They discuss details such as “Is muta marriage a shirk?”… It is unbelievable, they have reached that point! There is a teacher on Channel 7, I think, I love him… I sit at home and watch them. I listen to them on the road, on the radio. On the way to Ankara there was an imam who was a pump attendant, we listened together, didn’t we Mehmet? He’s got a weird voice, you want to give it to him now! (Laughter) It’s just bitches calling and you wouldn’t believe the questions they ask. “I don’t know, while I was watching, I don’t know what happened, hodja, would it be okay?” (Laughter)
Mehmet Öztekin: Those were some harsh words! She was like, “I’m wet”!
Kaan Çaydamlı: “I wonder if the fasting is gone” (Laughter)
Mehmet Öztekin: We can’t believe we’re coming back from Ankara with the man! What’s going on, what the hell is this!
Kaan Çaydamlı As we got farther and farther away from the station, we started to say “the station is going, let’s stop so we don’t miss it”. (Laughter) Let’s take a break so we don’t lose the canal! That teacher must have pumped me up! (Laughter) Now they will be revealed! So the day they stop talking and start fucking each other’s wives, everything will fall apart! I’m waiting for him… Because they will! Because they are looking for religion between their crotches! For example, he says there is only one def, no instruments other than the def, don’t call them… When God asks “what did you do?” will he say “I was a zurna player”?
Ulvi: There is another video of the same guy, he says “I told a relative of mine, you are being cruel to men by dressing like this”…
Kaan Çaydamlı: It’s a disease!
Ulvi: Well, I’m such a relaxed guy that I could never say that to a woman: “You are being cruel to me by dressing like this!”
Mehmet Öztekin: You wouldn’t think of it? That’s the main thing… You shouldn’t think of such a thing…
Kaan Çaydamlı: The guy’s argument is this: you can play the def, all other instruments are haram because they lead to sin. So is the female voice… When it’s a bit playful, not in speech…
Ulvi: Sickening!
Kaan Çaydamlı: When it’s titillating… That’s when he shouldn’t sing… The radicals among them, the “let’s sell everything to America, let’s take the money” among them have started to talk about these things now… They also talk about incest, they talk about all the things that used to be covered up…
Sinan: Don’t you think this is positive? That everything can now be talked about? The fact that they talk among themselves about even the most extreme topics that used to be taboo?
Kaan Çaydamlı But they talk about it in a state of dissolution. They were so relieved. After all, there is an image of Muslims… You know, Muslims are moral, they don’t eat haram, they are charitable, they don’t look at other women and so on… There used to be this discourse, but they have become so relaxed that they have gone beyond these discourses… This is the unsettling part of it… Anyway, when we looked at the map, a shape emerged. That’s the man by the sea, men who eat fish make sense (Laughter) Don’t laugh, that’s what it is! Olive oil, grapes, figs! The Roman Empire was also built on wine. There is such a situation, there is a de facto division… It doesn’t sound like a conspiracy theory to me at all. There is a Sevres situation. Turning the oil region in Iraq into a Kurdish state, establishing the Pontic Greek State, etc. do not sound like conspiracy theories at all. What is the so-called Kurdish opening? It is something to distribute. The man has a culture, a mother tongue. He’s Kurdish, just like we’re from Kadikoy! That’s how I look at it… The man has heard Kurdish since he was born, let him speak it! Give me your tongue! Open up spaces of freedom to people… Then the problem will be solved by itself. They don’t try to solve it! They like the man in the mountains… They use him! Indeed, they will divide it and establish Kurdistan together with Northern Iraq. The oil is there, the energy routes are there… When you look at these arguments, it doesn’t sound like a conspiracy theory at all, it sounds very rational… But all this will take 200 years, and then what? After 200 years, the oil will run out… After that, no one will give a fuck in the desert of Allah… Then we will return to normal. It’s all about controlling energy! That’s the problem! Maybe technology will improve and we will be relieved if this oil mindset ends…
Mehmet Öztekin: Then something else will come out… This has always been the problem of the world. There used to be a spice road…
Ulvi: Well it never ends, let me control the wind, let me control the water, it goes on…
Kaan Çaydamlı: We are really very small… We don’t have the knowledge and we don’t have a situation to be effective at these points. We’re just hanging out like sheep. That’s how… That’s how I think about Turkey’s climate. I don’t feel well! I don’t feel good!

“If we forgive our fathers, what’s left?”

Ulvi: Mehmet, I have one last question about the Losers. I know it was your dream. You did it and you’re “relieved”?

Mehmet Oztekin: I am alive, yes…

Ulvi: What’s next? Keep pumping? (Laughter)

Mehmet Öztekin Keep going, keep going! (Laughter)

Ulvi: Tell us what’s next, we’ll wait ten years, fifteen years if necessary.

Mehmet Öztekin: The Losers’ Club was a project I really wanted to do cinematographically. I envisioned this as a project where I would not limit myself at all… Although Kaan limited me a bit (Laughs) There is another script I wrote before that: “Smokers”. It’s a scenario I love very much, but the realities of life are known… If I shoot this, no one will stand behind it, no one will invest in it, it won’t be shown on TV… Smoking bans are known…

Sinan: You’re late!

Mehmet Oztekin Yes! I really want to do it, but I don’t know if it will stop in 10 years or 15 years… We will do it one day. Apart from this, there are a few other projects that have been written and are being written. As Kaan just said, this is actually what we feed on… It’s not possible to say that it’s over now, we’ve closed that book. What are we going to do, we can’t write a Foça story now, can we? Therefore, there is another story that feeds from the same place, we are continuing with it right now… Kaan writes…

Kaan Çaydamlı: We write together.

Sinan: Kaan, is it because you are a married man with children that there was no talk of women and girls in this conversation? (Laughter) What pump story did I hear, what swearing did I hear in this interview?

Kaan Çaydamlı: Well, of course we’re old!

Sinan: So you have slowed down now?

Kaan Çaydamlı: I said provocateur! (Laughter) I slowed down, Mehmet did not…

Sinan: Wait a minute, how did you slow down? We’ll come to Mehmet soon, he’s young!

Kaan Çaydamlı: What did you just say? You got an ass, you got a belly?

Sinan: Ohoo, they’re even lining up for Ulvi, they’re lining up for you! (Laughter)

Kaan Çaydamlı: Okay, but the size of that man, his posture….

Sinan: Oh my, I’ve always wondered what’s wrong with this guy… You’ve got charisma!

Ulvi: I have the advantage! I say, “I know Kaan, I know Mehmet”… What will they say? Will they say I know Ulvi (Laughter)

Sinan: Anyway, let’s not wrestle illegally, please. Women?

Kaan Çaydamlı: I mean, we love women… We still love women… They are our sisters, our mothers… (Laughter)

Sinan: We know you love him, but…

Kaan Çaydamlı: What are you asking here? (Laughter) We lived… I’m married now. We lived a very active life. The program also had an impact. Since we were uncomfortable men, the ease of access to women started to bother us after a while… I can’t talk anyway, for example… If a woman came and sat here, let’s go, let’s do what we have to do. I mean, “what are we going to talk about?”… Now it’s very difficult…

Sinan: Abi, almost the whole movie is based on your speech and you say “I can’t speak”, how so? (Laughter)

Kaan Çaydamlı: Well, when it comes to women, I don’t talk, I sleep! Maybe I didn’t make myself clear! (Laughter)

Sinan: Okay, but he has a “tying process” that I watched in the trailers, for example, ohoo, the guy ties it … And he brings it to a place as far as I can see …

Kaan Çaydamlı: The story told there is a true story. Let me tell you how it started… There was a woman who was extremely beautiful and resembled Hülya Avşar when she was young. He insists on inviting me to his house. A balcony, fish and chips… He insisted so much that I went. His house in Bostanci. We sat down, but I fell apart talking to the woman. I got up and said, “I’m leaving.” He said, “Where to?” I told him the name of the bar. He said, “So? What am I going to do?” I said, “Come.” When he said, “I can’t ride a motorcycle,” I went to the bar. There was an empty seat at the bottom, in the corner, and I sat there. A woman came to the empty chair next to me, it was the only empty seat, so I guess that’s why she sat down. The dialogues you see in the movie took place between us. So she said “my boyfriend is coming”, he came and after a while they left. But she’s back. I said, “What happened?” She said, “Nothing, I want to sit here.” Anyway, we had a drink and left. I got on the bike. She’s wearing a skirt, but she just got on the bike. We went home, that’s how the story started… So that’s the context… The woman had no connection to the program. Maybe that’s what triggered me…

Sinan: He saw you, liked you and wanted you…

Kaan Çaydamlı: We were like equals, you know? That’s what I just said… I mean, someone comes up to you and they already know you or they think they know you… You are in such a situation that it’s like if you say höt, they will faint or if you say zört, they will give you a zört… We have experienced such things, but it made me uncomfortable. This is my only long relationship, but later we learned that it wasn’t so spontaneous… Turns out she knew about the program!

Ulvi: What did the child change in your life?

Sinan: Aha, talk about a man with a child! Wait a minute, it’s not over! How many women have you “lifted”, Kaan?

Kaan Çaydamlı: I never lifted them, they came already fallen! (Laughter) I don’t know, man. I can’t count, can I?

Mehmet Oztekin 3-5…

Kaan Çaydamlı: He was counting mete for a while. There was a numerator, he was printing numbers every day (Laughter)

Ulvi: What did the child change in your life?

Kaan Çaydamlı: The child is a strange thing! I did Route 66, I did Chicago-Los Angeles and I decided to come and get married… Sergül didn’t leave me for 7 years… Of course, a child is a very strange thing… I don’t recommend it to anyone though, it’s a very difficult thing…

Sinan: How old is he?

Kaan Çaydamlı: He’s only eight months old, he’s so cute!

Ulvi: Did it change you?

Kaan Çaydamlı: Of course he did! The part of this movie that excites me so much is that he’s going to see it one day! I don’t know, the fact that I dedicated the book to him and all that, these are very important things… But I don’t feel uneasy… Am I already screwing up the life of a child who has so much information about his father? So it’s a bit of a mixed feeling…

Ulvi: It’s a difficult thing…

Kaan Çaydamlı: I am constantly confronted.

Sinan: It must be very annoying for the child… A father who has done everything he can imagine as he grows up!

Kaan Çaydamlı: Well, if he imagines such things…

Mehmet Öztekin: He will probably be a very standard guy.

Ulvi: I don’t think so! I was saying the same things, I was saying this guy will be very sterile, he won’t swear. I thought she’d hate a father who drinks and fucks around, but it’s not like that.

Kaan Çaydamlı: Maybe yours didn’t work out that way…

Sinan: Why did you have a child?

Kaan Çaydamlı: I didn’t think about it either… I didn’t think about it, I did it! Of course, I am not a very comfortable man economically, I don’t earn a lot of money. A child is a burden, but I wanted it… I think my relationship with my nephew changed me. I could never relate to children, but one summer I spent two or three months with my nephew and I understood my brother, Gökhan. He changed your whole life. That’s one of the reasons why it happened after America… I saw Gökhan, Nihan. And you really disconnect, there is a kind of meditative state after traveling thousands of kilometers… I was very ready when I came back…

Sinan: Is this a sign of settling down, a sign of taking root?

Kaan Çaydamlı: Well, I don’t think I can take root. Sergül probably feels this uneasiness too… So I’m going to go… For sure…

Sinan: So the child is not binding in this sense?

Kaan Çaydamlı: If possible, I’ll go with him… If not, I don’t know what to do, I think we’ll go back at most… I think about it very seriously, I’m coming to terms with it… It’s not much different from having a cat at home… On the one hand, what we just talked about, what will my life be like? For example, my mom read your article… She read the script and said, “Mehmet never swears, you swear. Don’t let Atahan read this,” my mother called me… The criteria is this: Mehmet doesn’t swear, you do! (Laughter) You shouldn’t interfere, it’s his life too. He has a father like that, what can we do? That’s why I wrote to the man at the beginning of KTN… “If we forgive our fathers, what will be left?”… That’s how I feel about it. So I hope he won’t forgive… (Laughter)

Sinan: Mehmet, do you intend to have a child?

Mehmet Öztekin It can happen. I’m not like Kaan, I’ve always gotten along very well with children.

Kaan Çaydamlı: He’s weird about that!

Mehmet Öztekin I love it! I never had such an obsession. I mean, I won’t get married, I will get married when this period comes, I will have children or not… I believed that all these are things that find their way in the flow of water… If it doesn’t happen, I won’t break my head wondering why it doesn’t happen… But I’m not against it either.

Sinan: Very surprising! You give the impression that you don’t favor monogamy, that you don’t care too much about the institution of marriage, but the more you talk…

Mehmet Öztekin: For a certain period, actually. Yeah, I mean, how far does that go? After all, there’s no bottom to it. You say, “OK, I’ll calm down now”… Maybe you can go somewhere with rock & roll in this lifestyle, it’s good to experience the things that need to be experienced at the time they need to be experienced… Today our biggest luxury is the motorcycle… We get on the motorcycle and go wherever we want… After this time, it’s pointless to get into how many notches I made. You’ve already thrown it… You can throw just as many more if you want… Knowing this maybe brings this comfort and looseness, who knows? After a while, what are you going to experience?

Kaan Çaydamlı: Repeating the same thing in different bodies becomes meaningless.

Mehmet Öztekin Tires you out! It’s just tiring.

Ulvi: Do you have a fear of commitment?

Mehmet Oztekin Yoo?

Ulvi: Because there’s something like that in Veronica?

Mehmet Öztekin: Yes there was… Well there is! (Laughter) I have this problem, I’ve always had it… Maybe Veronica revealed it, it was a text that helped me to relax. So there was always such a problem.

Ulvi: Is it like a trust issue?

Mehmet Öztekin: It’s not… It’s actually a problem of the shell, you want to protect it. Actually, it is not about the person, it is about your connection with your shell.

Sinan: Is a cloud like snow hidden inside you? you put something like that out there (Laughter)

Ulvi: There is, there is a cloud… The man is a filmmaker, he draws a type and he wants it to be him…

Sinan: However, if he is breathing, if he is at room temperature?

Ulvi: No, not in that sense. I don’t mean the pump. “Let it be a person, I am open, I am ready,” he says, “let it come, I will marry, I will have children, but let it be someone like this.” (Laughter)

Kaan Çaydamlı: I can speak here. Just as Mehmet watched me, I watched him… In fact, Mehmet should always be in love, it’s in his nature… If he’s not in love, nothing happens… I remember one night at a party, she was hugging Mehmet’s leg but he said “I’m not going to sleep with you”.

Mehmet Öztekin: It’s very tiring, it’s very agonizing for me… I’ve closed many nights in fear of that tiringness…

Ulvi: “I don’t want to!” (Laughter)

Mehmet Öztekin: Yes, these things wear me out a lot… I get sad, I get hurt…

Sinan: Let’s delete these, okay? This is terrible! “I’m offended”! What is this, man? We’re here because we’re tough guys! (Laughter)

Mehmet Öztekin: Abi, we are, okay, but (Laughter)

Kaan Çaydamlı: All tough guys are like this, you haven’t seen a tough guy (Laughter)

Mehmet Öztekin: Well, I mean, we lived…

Sinan: The man (Mehmet) was deeply embarrassed, he blushed! Excuse me.

Mehmet Öztekin: Well, maybe we went through that period of notching and counting, but for example, I remember that Kaan was worried… I remember one evening when we were chatting and I said “there’s Sopranos tonight, should I go to bed or should I wait and watch it?” and he said “well if that’s your choice, watch Sopranos” (Laughs)

Kaan Çaydamlı: We have a lot of stories… I mean, we go to the living room and then we go to different rooms… If it’s toughness? (Laughter)

“for a road to be a road, someone must have walked it before…”

Sinan: Even though people want to listen and read, they should go to the movie. The details are there! It is interesting, but there is such a world in the texts and books you publish, a world where everything is lived, explained and defended as free and unfettered, where everything should be lived in this way. And as publishers, you are expected to live such a life…

Mehmet Oztekin Yes!

Kaan Çaydamlı: When you look at these texts, especially the ones we have written, what you are saying is very strong…

Sinan: But the “good urban kids” I see now?

Kaan Çaydamlı: Yes?

Sinan: Men who have an emotional side to them, who want to have children in the future, who are looking for the princess of their heart… I say this for the record. (Laughter)

Kaan Çaydamlı I have this observation: As soon as Turkish men change geography, they start looking for who to fuck… It doesn’t matter the social level. For example, I experienced this a lot in Eskişehir. They come from Istanbul, “So abi? Who are we going to fuck here?” This is Eskişehir, who the fuck are you going to fuck? Am I a pimp?” I mean, it’s not like chicks are waiting for someone from Istanbul to come and give it to them. Everyone is prone to this. There are many stories like this.

Sinan: Doesn’t this turn into a pissing contest? Young people have something to prove…

Mehmet Öztekin: It’s something about yourself actually… It’s like the motorcycle issue… For example, in the series I work on, there is a trend among the actors, they ride motorcycles. I ask them if they have ever been on a long journey, and I have not yet received an answer. Underneath all of them are engines that are more expensive, bigger, more durable than the engines I use… So there is no infrastructure for this. The engine is an accessory.

Kaan Çaydamlı: We don’t ride in the city, for example? It’s very difficult…

Mehmet Öztekin: Yes, I used to ride, for example Kaan used to criticize me. I had a serious accident in Taksim, and after that I quit. Because it’s just dangerous to use a motorcycle like ours in the city.

Ulvi: Same here. I’ve had two bikes since last year, I’ve ridden one once. With the other one, I went to Çeşme once with my son… We traveled a long way on the weekend and that was it.

Kaan Çaydamlı: We want to buy two Jawa’s, 250.

Mehmet Öztekin: Sinan, what you’re asking is a question about yourself… It’s a question about what you put where you put it… It may be an effort to prove, but I mean, how can there be any satisfaction in that? After a certain point, it doesn’t matter how many there are. You already need to have a certain number of relationships for your personal development, but if you continue after a certain experience, it means that you have a separate perversion…

Kaan Çaydamlı Of course you may have a problem…

Mehmet Oztekin Yes! Or you can look at it the way we look at it and at most go home and watch The Sopranos….

Sinan: I will ask one last question and then I will finish…

Kaan Çaydamlı: So you are saying that you will end the disturbance to the environment (Laughter)

Sinan: I’m asking both of you this… Do you see this as an intellectual accumulation, whether it’s Altıkırkbeş or Underground, or do you see it as a way of life, but an imposed way of life? Because in the end, whether you accept it or not, there is an audience that accepts you as a role model. One way or another, you are important in the lives of this audience. Someone is paying attention to you. Are you saying “this is something that belongs to me” like Kaan saying “here I have lived the way I wanted to” or are you presenting it as a “recommended way of life”? Let’s end it in a very corny way: In conclusion, what advice do you give to your readers, your viewers?

Mehmet Öztekin: I look at it like this. I will now refer to the sentence I put in the preface of the book… When I look at the men I look up to, who I follow, how I form my own strategy, I believe that it is not right to make these calculations… For me, the right way is my way… You cannot draw or determine that way from the beginning… But it is important how good you feel, how peaceful you are with what you do… The way you feel comfortable in your conscience is actually the right way…

Sinan: But this is your way…

Mehmet Öztekin Sure, sure! It is my way. However, although this may seem like the simplest thing to do, it is actually very difficult to do… Environmental factors are so effective now… All this pressure, this attack, this harassment is so effective; it makes you constantly question, question and attack you at every step you take… It becomes difficult to take that step then… There is something that is constantly sticking to your feet! You see “okay, this way seems right”, but you can go in one direction without realizing how much you are heeding their guidance, where they are pulling your leg… It is a matter of not going there! The path that you were peaceful on turns into a painful and difficult path… I think the path of Altıkırkbeş is a bit like that… You do something that everyone thinks is ridiculous just because you believe it’s right… After you take that step, suddenly everyone becomes its advocate… But no one stands around you like that until you take that step. In fact, everyone is trying their best not to throw it away. I told you the Losers Club is 11 years of stubbornness. When I look at myself when I was in my 20s, a man who has received this comment four times from very fatherly men can be expected to put it away and never mention it again… This is a very nice thing for me, but now everyone, everyone except me, owns this movie… I am proud, I enjoy it very much, I am not tripping or anything like that. But that’s the situation… It’s like it’s not my movie right now… And believe me, there’s nothing more enjoyable for me than that…

Sinan: What are you saying Kaan?

Kaan Çaydamlı Now you say road, road… We do… For something to be a road, someone must have walked on it once before… This is an important thing… I’m not talking about paving a road, if you walk on it for the first time, you have paved a road… Regarding the program, the issue of being a role model in people’s lives bothered me during the program… One day I did a program on suicide. I never uttered the word suicide again. Throughout the program, we started to receive suicide calls and we couldn’t remain indifferent, so we closed the program and left… We saw concrete examples of how we were actually irrevocably changing the lives of many people. The lives of very young people… When I first realized this, I felt uncomfortable, but nothing we have ever done has ever been with the mindset of “how will someone’s life be affected”. It still is… I don’t care about anything! We are doing something… This movie was made, if 300,000 people watch it, I will like it, if 500,000 people watch it, I will like it, if 3,000 people watch it, I will find it small, but it doesn’t matter… As Mehmet said, this man carried it for 11 years. This movie came out. Tolga believed in it, he found money… He found serious money, he put it on the table. We did what was necessary, we gave all kinds of support. Actually, we did something that wasn’t going to happen. Whatever they asked, we answered, whatever they asked, we ran. So we owned it! Tolga may have done it to make 1 million box office, but that was not our thing… I can say the same thing about the radio program… After all, we are doing an intellectual job. We are undoubtedly influencing things. We have printed and will print things that no one else has printed, will not print, cannot afford to print… Really, this is clearly the only criterion here… What triggers us is about being able to read these things… It is not about “100 children will read this and their lives will change”… If we had a responsibility to the reader, we would not write those sentences at the beginning… If we felt a responsibility to the reader, we would not put the note “don’t be a son of a bitch” on the ass of The Hobbit… We have no such concern! Maybe we sold 50 thousand, 100 thousand fewer copies of The Hobbit because we put that note… It’s possible! Schools did not. So that’s the thing…

Sinan: What I wanted to hear a little bit was this… All this is the journey of self-development of a group of intellectuals… The man who wrote a murder novel did not commit murder. You can publish a text about suicide with an intellectual motive, and the reader will take that text in the same way, with an intellectual motive, to read and be informed… An intellectual man should be able to read and discuss “what is suicide”… He should be able to read and discuss “what is drugs”, “what is drug culture”… Publishing these things is not imposing these things… Altıkırbeş, Poetix put these topics of intellectual curiosity in front of their readers…

Mehmet Oztekin Yes! Absolutely!

Kaan Çaydamlı: Of course, because we are curious…

Sinan: Is this it Ulvi?

Ulvi That’s it!

Sinan: Well thank you then… We enjoyed it very much.

Kaan Çaydamlı: Thank you very much.

FINISHED!