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Alexander Christie-Miller
ALEXANDER CHRISTIE-MILLER  is a writer and journalist based in Istanbul. His writing about Turkish politics and culture has been published in Newsweek, the Times, the Atlantic, and other publications. He is a regular contributor to The White Review.


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Ada Kaleh

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Issue No. 17

Alexander Christie-Miller

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Issue No. 17

When King Carol II of Romania set foot on the tiny Danubian island of Ada Kaleh on 4 May 1931, it was said among...

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October 2015

War is Easy, Peace is Hard

Alexander Christie-Miller

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October 2015

At around midday on 19 July, Koray Türkay boarded a bus in Istanbul and set off for the Syrian...

LowerGreen is situated in the unlikely surroundings of a near-dead mall in Norwich It is not just any mall, but Anglia Square Shopping Centre: a decaying quondam monument to Modernism circa-1970, in which the architecture calls to mind a cross between a spaceship and an office building from the science fiction film Brazil (1985) – severe, oppressive, featureless at first glance, and possessed of certain smooth, seductive lines at second stare There is a bargain store that sells tote bags pitched unintentionally in the key of Barbara Kruger, with the brilliantly apropos slogan WHEN I DON’T SHOP I FEEL EMPTY, and a cinema called, with some irony, The Hollywood ‘In July, 2013,’ boasts Wikipedia, ‘the cinema hosted the world premiere of Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa’   It is difficult to say why Anglia Square Shopping Centre is appealing, in the same way it is difficult to pinpoint the appeal of certain human faces (The French, in coining jolie laide to describe women who are ugly but incredibly alluring, may have come the closest to elucidating this specific feeling, even if they did not necessarily intend it to describe a building) It is Brutalist, but not in the more elegant mode that tends to be salivated over by the kind of people who WhatsApp each other listings from The Modern House, or regularly eat bone marrow at St John’s, or give their children names like ‘Clementine’ It is extravagant and stately in its ugliness It is unfortunately very, very doomed LowerGreen’s final show will be this spring, thanks to a planned destruction of the shopping centre by the City Council; the area’s redevelopment is slated to cost £271 million, roughly equivalent to 54,308,617 tickets to see Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa at The Hollywood, or 184,000,000 oddly-existential tote bags Weston Homes – the developer whose aim is to replace it with ‘1,234 new homes, a leisure quarter with a cinema, car parks, a 200-bed hotel, [and] a tower block’ – have described the proposed plan as being like ‘Marmite’, which is an especially euphemistic way to say that of the 939 comments submitted to

Contributor

August 2014

Alexander Christie-Miller

Contributor

August 2014

ALEXANDER CHRISTIE-MILLER  is a writer and journalist based in Istanbul. His writing about Turkish politics and culture has been...

Forgotten Sea

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Issue No. 11

Alexander Christie-Miller

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Issue No. 11

I. As I stood on the flanks of the Kaçkar Mountains where they slope into the Black Sea near the town of Arhavi, the...
Occupy Gezi: From the Fringes to the Centre, and Back Again

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July 2013

Alexander Christie-Miller

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July 2013

Taksim Square appears at first a wide, featureless and unlovely place. It is a ganglion of roads and bus routes, a destination and a...

READ NEXT

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February 2015

Greece and the Poetics of Crisis

Joshua Barley

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February 2015

On the Aegean island of Skyros, in the Carnival period immediately preceding Lent, a more ancient ritual takes place....

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April 2017

Symbols Made Me Hardcore

Joe Bucciero

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April 2017

‘A Sound System, like the property of any system, is the interaction of the sum of its parts.’ —...

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Issue No. 12

After After

Johanna Drucker

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Issue No. 12

So many things are ‘over’ now that all the post- and neo- prefixes are themselves suffering from fatigue. Even...

 

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