In between Thanksgiving Dinner, Products and Works - Opinion on Henri Lefebvure "The Production of Space"

Last night I went to a Thanksgiving dinner held at the Flemings Hotel in Mayfair. My partner and I had been invited by one of his friend, who is married to a very successful lawyer. It took me a second to realize what kind uneventful dinner party I was going to participate to. Very reluctant, I put on a black shirt – with no collar – I guess as a sign of protest, or simply to prove that I don’t need to wear a black tie outfit to be able to formulate a phrase, which is syntactically correct. Or yet mostly because I had to make a statement that I differ from that kind of crowd.

When we approached the dining room I spotted my name neatly printed on an ivory card. And I was not particularly excited to notice that I had been placed next to a lady that looked like she could have easily been three times older than me. I told myself; ‘this is going to be a very long evening…’ Throughout dinner, probably in between the first and second course, I was pleasantly surprised to catch the word production among the noisy but still very polite buzz generated by Ivy League educated mouths. I immediately engaged with the elder lady beside me, who turned out to be a brilliant artist, animatedly sharing opinions on work, products and of course Simon Cowell.

Whilst discussing products, it is almost impossible not hit the X-Factor topic. Its executive producer Simon Cowell and his company Syco TV are possibly the biggest producers of pop phenomenon of the 21^st century.

Most of the guests sitting at my table agreed with the fact that the music produced by the show has no intrinsic quality to it and that the contestants aren’t in fact artists, but products mirroring the ideals of the contemporary pop industry. It is quite interesting to notice how they also agreed on the fact that the show is indisputably entertaining admitting that they look forward to the next episode every Saturday night. It is evident how most of us are addicted to something that we all know being non-educational as well as painful for most of the times not because of the fact that it might be entertaining but because of the simplicity of participation. You might not agree with the ideals of something but if you don’t know this something inside out you’ll never be able to argue it.

Sometimes it is irrelevant whether you like the X-Factor, or football or Paris Hilton, looking closely to these events and therefore questioning, is the only way to raise awareness and hopefully create a better social environment.

I firmly stand against people that say: “if you do not like the X-factor just change the channel.” Unlike animals we were born with the ability to talk so how can this be a better world without any sort of communication?

At the end of the night I felt like there are in fact people that, despite their jobs environment and the mask that they put on everyday don’t stop question reality seeking for that famous golden age of cultural theory. Some people proved me of being searching for the truth. Showing the importance of looking under the skin of what seems to be reality. I left the building smiling. 

Thoughts on Dave Hickney 'A Home in the Neon' - Air Guitar

What a pleasant reading.

Considering the quality of the texts I recently came across for the Theory Course, when I grabbed a copy of Air Guitar, I was prepared to face a reading as intense as Alain Badiou or Jonathan Meades. So I laid down on my bed, right after supper, and took a long breath in order to gather my concentration… After the first few lines I was kindly surprised. Completely caught off-guard by the refreshing approach of Dave Hickey – one of my new heroes - to talk about Las Vegas. Do not get me wrong. I’m not saying that I didn’t enjoy the previous readings, as intense and syntactically twisted as they were, I must say they had their own charm. But I personally believe that Dave Hickey’s writing transports you on a completely different level. The way he describes Las Vegas as his hometown is simple but at the same time very colourful, I cannot help my self to quote him: ‘a moral bottom line – a secular refuge and a source of comforts and reassurances that are unavailable elsewhere’.

What a genius. Of course Las Vegas feels like home! Why would it feel any different when everyone is treated the same no matter how much cash you are carrying in your pockets? There are no secrets. Or perhaps there weren’t…

Just like a parent that quietly picks his favourite child, Las Vegas – like the rest of the world - in the past few years seem to have picked celebrities. Pop culture phenomenon like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton started feeding hotels and clubs with front-page headlines, free publicity as well as a lot of cash. Who doesn’t love a little bit of extra money? I do not blame Vegas for having ‘given up’ letting celebrities somehow shape part of its values of equal approach to people. We all have our weaknesses and money seem to be one of those that binds us all.

Even though somebody may be treated differently according to his status it is important to notice how everybody gets the exact same chance to win or lose in front of a roulette. Both celebrities and regular people experience the ‘fluttery moments of faint but raising hope, in the possibility of wonder, in the swell of desire while the dice are still bouncing’. And the very fact that Vegas ‘cheats you fair’ is what still makes it a special and unique place on this planet. 

Personal Opinion on Terry Eagleton "After Theory"

Postmodern culture tends to deconstruct the theories of the past and at the same time obscure the truth. It is inevitable. Even if you try really hard to prove that you are different, that you do care about your roots and about those values that made your parents and the parents of your parents able to make an impact in their era, somehow you find yourself gasping, sucked into what it is the unavoidable tornado of pop culture. After the demolition of the puritan dogma, which stated that ‘seriousness is one thing and pleasure is another’, one cannot help to wonder whether popular culture could make you a better person. Can pop culture awaken your inner instincts and drive you to be a better person?

If we consider pop artists it is mostly clear how incredibly well it all worked out for them. Lady Gaga for an instance constantly claims how stardom and fame has always inspired her to become that mix of fashion-music-art phenomenon of the 21^st Century. What it desperately needs to be addressed is the reasons why individuals, a concept that has become so strong within the postmodernist times, lack of single capacity to detect if the values they’ve been brought up with are correct. Instead they seem to passively accept them, becoming part of the intoxicating unrolling of what has become the capitalism lifestyle.

Fortunately not all individuals are the same. Usually the frustrated and sad ones are able to detect the lack of moral values that the contemporary society is filled with, and eventually begin a meticulous research of what is authentic. Where is the truth hiding? What is the truth?

I personally think that it doesn’t take an extraordinary sensitivity to perceive that there is something wrong with modern theories that have been inculcated in our brains from modern society. Just try to spend one day fulfilling the postmodernist keystone rules. By that I mean to visit expensive restaurants, shopping malls, sipping cocktails at the Soho Hotel and flipping through pages of gossip magazines whilst talking to your close mate about the latest TV show that everybody seemed to be getting into: “The Only Way is Essex” a painful and tacky tracking-shot of bad actors and crazy make-up artists. If at the end of the day you won’t be frustrated by the lack of values as well as feeling as sense of emptiness then you are silly and superficial.

And to be honest, I am not sure what is worst: being oblivious to what is really going on, or on the contrary being able to get underneath the surface in order to discover the real, getting to the bottom of human culture, raising questions regarding the unbearable difference between rich and poor, the climate change, technology taking over the world, and the evident economic exhaustion of the financial systems. Terry Eagleton states that ‘innocence and amnesia have their advantages’. Just like a child who is unaware of the realities that surround him, people that ignore tend suffer less than people that actually do realize what is going on. But why shall we be oblivious to what is around us? Isn’t the ability to analyze things and formulate our own thoughts what makes us different and, most of the times, better than animals? So, shall we keep leading our lives with no sense of belonging and community? The answer is obvious to me.

Personal Opinion on Mike Davis "Fear and Money in Dubai"

Stories such as ‘Treasure Island’, ‘The Lord of The Flies’, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, or yet ‘The Beach’, narrate how people unexpectedly thrown in, apparently heavenly, parallel universes, gradually come across the real essence of these places. A secret secured under sands, behind exotic trees and protected by wild animals and ferocious aboriginal tribes.

I am not stating that millions of individuals are thrown against their will every year to the capital of visual excess that Dubai has become. In fact most of the people that set foot on the land of ‘architecture on steroids’ crave opulence and look forward to stuff the city’s malls, hotels and restaurants with their money.

Of course that’s true up until the point we talk to a local taxi driver or we consider a regular workman. Both freely decided to leave their hometowns, most likely to be located somewhere in Southern Asia, to enthusiastically embrace the slavery lifestyle.

Dubai stands to labour just like ‘The Island” stands to the characters of the books previously mentioned. Everything seems to be magical and convenient to begin with, and then day-by-day the darkest and cruellest sides are revealed. Behind the shining facades of luxurious hotels and shopping malls hides an army of bare workers, mostly from Pakistan and India, that live in the poorest and most deplorable conditions, often falling ill out of hunger or due to the lack of clean drinking water.

For some people there seem to be nothing really to fear in a city that offers entertainment that goes beyond imagination but if start peeling off the first few layers that enclose Dubai’s essence, you may come across illicit goods imports, prostitution rings, slavery, and the delicate balance between royalty, petrol and the rest of the world. Perhaps we should all stop and consider how Western Civilization, and especially the unrestraint consumerism that comes along side of it, allowed oil to become the most valuable raw material. All the economies depend on oil and its derivatives: petrol, diesel etc. And having neglected the use of alternative energy for too many years has made us in fact dependent on United Arab Emirates and other major oil producers.

One wonders how long this situation in going to last, and how many more souls will suffer its regime, as the oil deposits are not eternal. And especially because sooner or later despite the opposition of large multinational companies of oil producers, the world will stop depending on oil favoring the use of cheaper and less polluting forms of energy.

Personal Opinion on Alain Badiou "This Crisis Is the Spectacle: Where Is the Real?"

Alain Badiou wants us to pay attention to the fact that the contemporary world is about to collapse and that a return to the real is absolutely necessary to save us all. I don’t mean to pride but, isn’t it typical of intellectuals to be against capitalism? Unfortunately capitalism is a form of society that is not, and it looks like it never will be, able to satisfy the intellectual needs as well as their sense of fulfilment in life, driving them to a constant, and sometimes irrational, search to a new solution; in this specific case “the communism”.

I personally don’t think that Communism is such a brilliant idea after all.

As Paul Hollander, professor at Massachusetts University stated after years of research, study and understanding; ‘the deception has survived the failure of the bloodthirsty regimes and still dominates the liberal intellectual’s hearts and brains’. The deception being that cultural and psychological trick that induced poets artists and philosophers to actively line up with the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Castro and Che-Guevara’s Cuba against western civilization and especially the United States which represented the vanguard. Western intellectuals guided by fantasy and presumption to build the perfect society, heaven on earth, simply wanted to be deceived.

Hasn’t communist already proven to have a bad effect everywhere that it has been tried? All communist countries have either suffered economic collapse or have modified their system in order to allow more free-market transactions over time. It has proven wholly unworkable and against motivation for improvement in any process whatsoever.

On the other hand, I do believe that each individual should be given the same opportunity to succeed in life and therefore the resources necessary to pursue that success. But I do also feel very strongly about human freedom and happiness and it has been historically testified that communism as well as other dictator forms of govern have never respected and provided these values.

I also believe that if capitalism didn’t exist communism would not been identified and vice versa. They both are two concepts that wouldn’t exist without each other. Therefore when you are talking about communism you are implicitly talking about capitalism too.

That said, we all must accept the fact that the capitalist lifestyle is at the end of its days. I think it is of vital importance that governs try to improve social equality within each nation, and also try to decrease their differences in order to loosen the political and social tensions and therefore, hopefully, decrease people’s inequalities.