Eyup takes the blame for his politician boss, Servet, after a hit and run accident. In return he accepts a pay-off from his boss, believing it will make life for his wife, Hacer, and teenage son, Ismail, more secure.

Ismail falls into bad company, becoming uninterested in the life he once led. Hacer, wanting to help her son, asks Servet for an advance, but soon gets more involved in him than she had anticipated. Eyup’s return from prison is the catalyst that works to bring all these storylines to a climactic finale.

Three Monkeys, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s most recent cinematic venture, is imbued with a mesmeric brilliance from start to finish. Though strikingly frugal in its execution—this is a man whose cast list rarely exceeds the bounds of his immediate family—it is neither deficient in spectacle nor in energy. One gets the real sense that this is Ceylan’s natural environment, affording him the ability to manoeuvre seamlessly through images and ideas that would have tripped up many an otherwise talented director.

Three Monkeys shares a deep likeness with the novellas of Alberto Moravia. Here in Ceylan’s film, as in Moravia’s Two Adolescents, the family emerges as a site of philosophical contention, a place into which all adjacent conflict is pointedly focused, with each character shocked into a desperate awareness of themselves and those around them.

The family, in Three Monkeys, serves as a stage, a plane upon which drama can be produced. This is borne out in what the director himself has to say about the film—’Since the beginning of my adolescence, what has most intrigued, perplexed and at the same time scared me, has been the realisation of the incredibly wide scope of what goes on in the human psyche. I have always been astonished to see in the human soul the co-existence of the power to rule and the potential to forgive, the interest in the most holy and in that of the lowest banality, love and hate.’

But to imply that this is nothing more than a philosophical treatise would be to do the film a grave disservice. To return to Ceylan’s affinity with the environment in which Three Monkeys is set, it could be said that he never misses a shot. Every image serves as an unflinching record of Ceylan’s eye for the piercing and the beautiful, with the final shot arguably as traumatic as the final revelation it serves to illustrate.

Five stars.

I read your piece on theory in The American Prospect (‘Life After Theory’, 16th July, 2004) and agreed with the conclusion regarding the necessity of mediation between the academy and the public sphere. Do you see n+1 as successfully fulfilling this role yet, or does more need to be done?

Thank you for reading that essay. I don’t think n+1 is filling this role yet. I’ve always wanted us to. I do think there’s still time for it. We’ve tried to do it with the material from the philosopher Nancy Bauer and from the critic Walter Benn Michaels, and the assessments of Agamben and others-and in a different way with a special kind of writing that Helen DeWitt and Elif Batuman and Ilya Klieger can do for us, which variously gets called ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ and is really something beyond each. But we’re still not doing a very good job.
Mediation between the two intellectual layers depends first on finding individuals who are committed to both the university and to the mass media. Those who have, for each sphere, the right degrees of respect and suspicion. Such people exist, in private; I feel like plenty of people know how to balance the claims of the two spheres of intellect when they’re just reading the paper. But this kind of mediation requires, too, a shared language of mediation, in which you can talk about both worlds and not make stupid distinctions; and not get caught up in the cult worship of the New York intellectuals or the defence of the disciplines; or filter all of intellectual life through the memoiristic, the reactions of the self, and similar garbage. Lord knows, we get caught in those refuse piles, like anybody else. The common language is the missing element. I think the reasons that some such language doesn’t exist are probably economic and defensive.
‘Public’ intellectuals can’t admit they’re really ‘market intellectuals’-that’s Michael Denning’s term-shaped by their uncertain economic fate at the hands of the same forces that promote pulp novels and movies and radio programs. University intellectuals can’t fess up to the dangers of their over-secure economic position, cosseted and paid for, and therefore unrealistic about their relation to the economic world exterior to the university. I don’t see a lot of progress beyond the increasing intelligence people have about what goes on in their own sphere-i.e., intellectual journalists’ sophistication about the funding (and current defunding) of newspapers, and academics’ analysis of what ten years ago they called the ‘corporate multiversity.’
In that American Prospect article I said I wished there were a layer of ‘linking intellectuals,’ between the two spheres. They’d be unafraid of academic thought and would interpret it for the public. But they’d also be committed enough to a public sphere to be able to call ‘bullshit’ on university intellectuals without rancour or the trace of sour grapes. Since that article was written, I’ve been looking for such people. I’ve been disappointed by how strongly professional training in either the academy or journalism ties writers down. The major intellectual development of the last 50 years was the universitisation of intellect, for better and worse, and I don’t see that either the public or academic stories of that process-I’m thinking of the cretinish discourses of the ‘lost public intellectual’ at every level-have found any new, original relation to it. I find the instincts to all these mistakes in myself. I’m the first to make them. But n+1 exists in part to try to tamp down the erroneous instincts of the editors, and improve things. So we’re working on that.

You mentioned Helen DeWitt-have you read Your Name Here yet? I’m about half-way through and am not sure what to think. On one hand, it’s very funny and well-observed, particularly the Oxford stuff. It was excerpted in the latest issue of Oxford Poetry (as well, of course, as n+1) and seems to work well in that format. As a 580-page novel, though, I’m less sure. She seems to admire David Foster Wallace, but I’m not sure that YNH quite measures up to the subtlety of, say, Infinite Jest or his later stories; it reads more like the gimmicky metafiction of The Broom of the System, or like some Barthian nightmare that just exploded. I know that’s partly the point, but it seems to invest too heavily in this sort of thing not to feel at least a little bit outdated. That, and Ilya Gridneff’s emails are just boring.

Yes, we read it before we did the excerpt. I think it’s an excellent book. That was a big objection among the n+1 editors, that Gridneff’s emails are boring. But I think a good part of the book is the Pygmalion relationship (sexes reversed) of DeWitt to Gridneff, and Zozanian to Pechorin. You have to see that Gridneff is no Joyce to appreciate the manic creation of this young man as a hero, so that the genuine writer-DeWitt / Zozanian-can stay home and fantasise. Beyond that, I think DeWitt is brilliant in part because the underlying ideas are worth it-the fully lotteritized society, for example, as an extension of the current privatised and neoliberal order. Yet they’re rendered in the broadest strokes, for pleasure. She’s fundamentally not an elitist writer, but someone who reaches to a mass audience, more Vonnegut than Pynchon somehow. I really believe if that book were printed it would have a mass audience-a mass audience with aspirations to languages and high culture, which is part of what DeWitt’s book is devoted to making you love. She has a bit of a ‘spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down’ approach altogether. She is so deliberately out of the mainstream that her democratic and anti-elitist tendencies come out alongside her real brilliance and attachment to erudition. I love Helen DeWitt.

I thought the best bits of Issue Seven were the interviews: the conversation with the Hedge Fund Manager seemed accessible to a ‘literary’ audience without being just another ‘economics for dummies’ type run-through, while David Harvey was admirably tentative with his political conclusions. Will n+1 be dealing with the ‘credit crunch’ again in Issue 8, or in future pieces for the website? Does the magazine have a particular stance towards it, in terms of political importance?

We hadn’t done interviews before. In fact we’re against them. They’re often a way to fill up space in a magazine without committing to the hard work or writing and editing an essay-and they’re so plentiful. They’re most plentiful in places where text is just a means for filling in pages between pictures-have you noticed the rich harvest of interviews in art magazines? Since part of the point of n+1 was to try not to run things that people could run elsewhere, interviews were really out of bounds. (What would be the point in that? They should just go elsewhere!) But HFM appeared, the anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, and one of my co-editors started talking with him, and those conversations happened.
This co-editor, I think, is a genius. He knew what he had, and he went with it-he kept interviewing. The funny thing is that the early interviews with HFM happened before the crisis emerged into public discourse. HFM knew things were unwinding, and he was watching what none of us knew to look at-like when, in the second interview, he talks about the possibility that AIG could fail, and the catastrophic consequences, and those of us in the office said, ‘AIwhat?’
I’d tend to think the financial meltdown is immensely important politically. The ambition of a significant part of the US conservative realignment of 1964 to the present had been to keep growing in ideological power until the generation that had experienced World War II and the Depression and the postwar era of growth in real wages would die off.
Then there would be no one left who remembered national solidarity in an economic framework, and the remains of the New Deal welfare state could be chopped up and thrown out once and for all. So a decent, serious, really heinous financial meltdown caused by deregulation and mass business irresponsibility, which can only be salved by massive governmental intervention-you know, it could be character-building for the US and maybe, you’ll have to tell me, for the UK, too. You have a stronger welfare state and, with Gordon Brown, a sane and confidence-inspiring Prime Minister, but it must be nice to be reminded that deregulation and privatisation isn’t the answer to everything.
David Harvey was tentative with his political conclusions, and it’s our inclination not to be tentative-but, also, not to be ‘responsible’ and realistic. The reality is that there are more than enough places which repeat the same sorts of realism.

Breath rises in the neon lights as the crowd shuffles despondently outside the O2 Academy. Yesterday’s snow is today’s ice and a press agent has just confirmed the circulating rumours that Fake Blood is too ill to play, having already cancelled a gig in Manchester. Luckily, there is more than enough talent remaining in the line-up.
The O2 Academy has a shoe-box smoking area, a ridiculous queuing system and an air-con unit that works like an emphysaemic lung. However, its cavernous space is fast becoming an attractive prospect for major electro, dubstep and drum n’ bass DJs.
Toddla T’s set covers all of these genres and everything else in between. He moves seamlessly through dance-floor classics both new and old, while incorporating his own tropical style.
His tracks sound like someone taking garage on a day-out to Notting Hill Carnival: it’s bouncy, jump-up music. Backstage, he explained that track-swapping and collaborations between DJs have created a rapidly expanding community that is open to every influence. This sonic explosion applies to Toddla T in every sense possible. His first single ‘Do You Know?’ was released less than two years ago. In a few months he will be releasing a compilation album on the prestigious Fabriclive label.
In person, he is full of an infectious enthusiasm that fuels his manic onstage performance. With a schedule that regularly demands two separate gigs in a night it is fortunate that he obviously enjoys his sets as much as his fans. Unlike most DJs he has not made the move to London, preferring to stay in his hometown of Sheffield.
‘That scene is always so extreme,’ he explains, ‘it’s nice to get away from it during the week.’ Sheffield, with its cultural diversity and eclectic musical history, is at the heart of his sound. A heavy reggae influence soars over the top of grimy two-step rhythms and he seems capable of interacting with anything and everything around him. At one point, a raver stumbles backstage in search of a toilet, Toddla talks to him until his eyes water with desperation.
The remainder of the Fuse Night bill was just as strong. On stage, Lee Mortimer has taken the slot left in Fake Blood’s absence. Techno has been less in the spotlight recently, what with the excitement surrounding dubstep and electro. Mortimer’s set proves it is still incredibly popular. He keeps the crowd at boiling point until it is finally time for Stanton Warriors to take charge.
Previous sets by the Stanton Warrior’s have ranged from the frustratingly minimal to the borderline mainstream. This time they absolutely smash it.
In a two and a half hour set that demonstrates their substantial archive of tracks, they prove that they are two of the most talented DJs around. Their remix of ‘Handz Up’ by Deekline and Solo kicks off the show with its up-tempo rap and whirling drops. They then unleash ‘Pop Ya Cork’ and ‘Shake It Up’ to drive the crowd to fever pitch. It’s certainly too much for the air-con which gives a final cough before retiring for the evening. The next hour is an exploration of the new album Stanton Sessions Vol.3. Although this album lacks the singles that made Stanton Sessions Vol.2 so popular, it brings plenty of fresh vocal samples to their original breakbeat sound, demonstrating a new direction for the Warriors.
Just as the crowd begins to flag, they return to their impressive collection of remixes. They play two encores finishing with a massive edit of their ‘Feel Good Inc.’ remix. Any trace of disappointment from the beginning of the night has evaporated into the pulsing, sweaty atmosphere.
But the night belonged to Toddla T. He tries to emphasise the importance of ‘the party’ in his music, and explains that he doesn’t ever intend to restrict himself to one sound or genre, asserting ‘I love everything me.’ It is refreshing to speak to someone who is so obviously enjoying himself. His aim seems genuinely just to make sure his crowds have the best time possible and he certainly achieved this end tonight.