I’ve been working on the OKAPI island in Second Life pretty hard recently, with the addition of Sadrettin’s cafe, the water tower complete with little owl, and some cosmetic fixes that I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.  I’m also happy to report that Karl Harrison will be helping us BURN Çatalhöyük DOWN at the end of the semester.  Good stuff.

More to the point though, is that there needs to be Efes in Second Life, as it is an integral part of the Çatalhöyük experience (for better or worse!).  I was looking around for good photos of the beer labels and found these masterful constructions:

There’s a deep and obvious kinship here, one that hits me right at home:

Because Art is a cowboy hat, made out of a beer carton, according to the headline of the Austin American-Statesman, flagship newspaper of the capital of Texas.

(this image is downright stolen from my brilliant friend Joolie, who has much more to say on the topic)

Trav mentioned in the comments for the last post that the excavation was done during a field school. While I was looking for something else, I happened upon the photos I took during my first field school in Dallas. That’s when I actually started my first blog (“Things to do in Dallas When You’re Dead,” now defunct) so I could keep in touch with my friends while I was away for the summer.

Our pits weren’t particularly straight and were pretty unproductive, until we stopped digging under the house (to find the foundations?) and started digging behind where the house once was.

I still remember walking up to Jamie, our TA, and asking him straight-up if I could actually be an archaeologist. He said Yes! See, until that point, it hadn’t occurred to me–I was a socio-cultural anthro major (explains a lot, right!) and was just taking the class for my field credit. I wanted to go to Greece, but was broke, so I ended up digging for Maria Franklin in Dallas. And, eventually, I made it to Berkeley. Not too shabby, really. And ever since that summer I knew that I wanted to dig for the rest of my life.

Anyway, it looks like the Juliette Street project has a lovely website where you can learn more about the history of the site and of the amazing church located right next door. I have a few more photos of the site and the participants in the dig on flickr.

Pamuk, when asked about the allegations of “insulting Turkishness” brought against him, quoted Adorno: “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home”. It is necessary to critique the culture in which you are the most comfortable–it’s a fairly basic lesson in reflexivity, but one that can make you an absolute bore at parties. Striking a balance between the voracious intellectual appetite for incisive commentary and telling good stories over beer can be tough, and I’ve seen a lot of people fail miserably at it.

And, sometimes, it feels pretty damn amazing to let go and love home. I don’t quite have the gall to count myself as one of Said’s ‘exiles’, able to look at home with detachment, especially as my ‘exile’ has been self-imposed and has only served to make me appreciate Texas all the more. Now I have a more certain metric to measure this love-of-place.

All the intellectualizing aside, it was amazing to be with my adopted ‘family’ again, eating funnel cakes, drinking beer, and listening to a bunch of bands in the big yellow Texas sunshine. I borrowed a big cadillac from an old lady and had to clean out the guns and prescription pills before driving it around. Out of all the bands I saw (New Pornographers, Okkervil River, White Denim, Explosions in the Sky, Of Montreal, Final Fantasy, The Sword, Sick of it All, Madball, Neurosis, Angry Samoans, Battalion of Saints, Witchcraft, Girl Talk, Battles, Mates of State, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, Against Me, Riverboat Gamblers, Youth Brigade, Murder City Devils, Poison Idea, The Saints, Diplo, MC Chris, Clap! Clap!, Ocote Soul Sound) the two bands from Texas were the best, and I stood to watch them with my fellow Austinites–scruffy, black-clad, tattooed compatriots, holding cans of Tecate in beer koozies–and I found myself wondering, for the millionth time, if that was enough.

Nope. Not yet. But it’s still home.