Tag Archives: Sean Bw Parker

On June 7th 2015, Turkey will hold a general election. Recep Tayyip Erdogan as president is meant to be above party politics, but his desperation for his ‘ex’-party the AKP to retain power yet again is palpable, especially with some polls putting their support in this election as low as 40%. With the economy uncertain, corruption scandals, freedom of the ...

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ensured two cartoonists have been sentenced to nearly a year behind bars, for portraying him having a hand gesture made to him that implies he might be homosexual. This gesture is similar to the middle finger bird or self-pleasure ones that anyone under 50 knows well enough, but happens to be the same as ...

For children, the stories of religion can be fascinating things, depending on the credulity of the child in question. Jesus’ sermon on the mount, the good Samaritan, Mohammed’s famed seventy two virgins in heaven – they’re all great, compelling stuff, as all great literature should be. I don’t want to come over all Richard Dawkins in his dismissive ‘why don’t ...

Sean Bw Parker As a sometime English teacher, mostly via the Kubrickian futureworld that is Skype these days, much of my trade is now done internationally. Whilst following up an idea born during the Gezi Protests in summer 2013 in Istanbul, during which I felt like Adolf & Eva’s illegitimate son, hiding out at friend’s apartments lest the new ‘Islamo-Robocops‘ ...

Sean Bw Parker Daily our algorithm-frazzled synapses are bombarded with self-help memes, cat videos and outraged politically correct protest (anti-) propaganda, all surely designed to infotain our Kardashian-raped, Cowell-infested sensibilities. Whilst bemoaning the fact that anything consumptively enjoyable will either bankrupt or kill you, we are also unremittingly told that either Iceland or Denmark for the 16th year in a ...

Sean Bw Parker One of the more bizarre results of Turkish President recent detainment of hundreds of journalists and other media figures was the arrest of a TV series producer who had seen fit to represent the Prophet Mohammed as a beam of light penetrating a truck, which then drives away. At Christmas time, with images of Jesus aplenty and ...

Sean Bw Parker Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP at dawn on Sunday 14th December had some 400 journalists, editors, directors and producers detained in a countrywide clampdown on freedom of expression in the press. Correspondents who had been reporting objectively on the government’s sweeping changes; TV series makers who represented the prophet Mohammed as a beam of light entering ...

Sean Bw Parker A much heard water-cooler get-to-know-you question for a certain generation has been ‘Do you remember where you were when John F. Kennedy died?’, or for a later one ‘Do you remember what you were doing when John Lennon was assassinated?’ The last major culture-connector for my generation and subsequent others is ‘What were you doing when you ...

Sean BW Parker When Christmastime rolls around, as it is at the time of writing, an Englishman’s thoughts turn to having to buy presents and spend time with a handful of relatives, close or not, who are more often than not close purely by accident of birth. Either because they are genuinely dissimilar to each other, or because being seen ...

Author and musician Sean BW Parker moves to Chichester with a new book marking his ten years living in Istanbul Originally from Exeter, Sean explores his thoughts and feelings about Turkey in his new book Salt in the Milk – Ten Years in Istanbul on Kindle Direct. “I was published in Time Out Istanbul, Cosmopolitan, Turkish Daily News, Louder Than ...