Hello Taner, it’s Taner

Before I started writing, I looked outside my window at the leaves of a tree reaching to the sky. They are still intact. My mind clings to the fact that fall isn’t here yet, but it can’t help but list all of its memories from colder days. The colors of the days have changed. It’s as if someone turned down the brightness of the year to save battery. On a day like this, I met with Taner Yücel.

We have a seat on both sides of the table HOOD Base has put outside. He and I actually came together before, for our Newsletter Soundtrack project where I made a connection between 1960’s free radios and independent internet publishing under the theme of “Future,” and he sealed the textual content with a song of his named Object Permanence.

Even though I am a person who e-mails notes to himself, it felt weird to send him messages that start with “Hello Taner.” When we got together, we agreed that people with common names such as Murat or Ayşe wouldn’t understand. For an hour in his busy work schedule, we talked about the recording day.

Before we left, he said “Every problem feeds the aesthetic,” when grounding his love of punk music. My brain recalled the David Lynch quote “Accidents or destroying something can lead to something good. It can lead to something good. Very controlled things, not being open to, these boundaries, they just screw you. And you have to sometimes make a huge mess and make big mistakes to find that thing that you’re looking for,” from the documentary The Art Life, which he probably delivered with a cigarette in his mouth. I wanted to say “Margins of error exist.”

Taner and Taner, at a coffeeshop in Yeldeğirmeni

We meet on an ordinary Wednesday in September and make plans to record a podcast episode on a Tuesday in October, a month when a lot of my beloved friends have birthdays. And that Tuesday is also Taner’s birthday. Happy birthday to him. I am happy our paths crossed.

Now, there is another person named Taner in my phone book and e-mail archive. Not to offend anyone named Murat but you are invited to a story that ricochets from Taner to Taner, that seems familiar to me, that shares commonality with my past mistakes, current habits, and future sorrows. See you on the other side.