Almost Good and Better Than That

When I wrote a song with the Turkish Björk

It is an enormous risk, when a student in your class offers to perform original songs, but something told me I should take it.  Her name was Idil Mese, an exchange student from Istanbul.  Her English was excellent, but she was fluent in droll.  This was a class on popular culture, and I was teaching The Social Network after Citizen Kane, because one generation’s Hearst is another’s Zuckerberg.  No one is Orson Welles, of course, but David Fincher is very good, and the zinger filled screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin, alum of Syracuse, where I was teaching the class.  Idil was not impressed with The Social Network.  “I like European films,”  “not American movies where people are fighting over the computer.”

Her songs were otherworldly and magical, like a Turkish Björk

On a few occasions, we would find pianos on campus.  I would play, she would sing, and I found a simpatico spirit.