On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 7:03 AM, Dwayne Monroe <dwayne.monroe at gmail.com>wrote:
> When I read this
> [<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2006/2006-December/025915.html>] I was
> already imagining what the islands will look like when they're
> abandoned.
>
> Dennis Claxton, Dec 2006
>
>
>
> "Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin..."
>
> Smashing Telly, Feb, 2009
>
>
>
> Goodbye Dubai
>
>
> URL -
>
>
> <http://smashingtelly.com/2009/02/15/bye-bye-dubai/>
>
>
>
> Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world's
> worst business idea, and there isn't even any oil. Imagine proposing
> to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an
> anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai - it
> was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.
>
> Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the
> worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for
> those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a
> secular driven culture.
>
> The opening shot of this clip [
> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk9Sbpnkd-4>] shows 200 skyscrapers
> that were built in the last 5 years. It looks like Manhattan except
> that it isn't the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or
> Wolf or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other
> cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core
> spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of
> vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a
> self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the
> empty desert that surrounds them.
>
> Dubai is a place for the shallow and fickle. Tabloid celebrities and
> worn out sports stars are sponsored by swollen faced, botox injected,
> perma-tanned European property developers to encourage the type of
> people who are impressed by fame itself, rather than what originated
> it, to inhabit pastiche Mediterranean villas on fake islands. Its a
> grotesquely leveraged version of time-share where people are sold a
> life in the same way as being peddled a set of steak knives. Funny
> shaped towers smatter empty neighborhoods, based on designs with
> unsubtle, eye-catching envelopes but bland floor plans and churned out
> by the dozen by anonymous minions in brand name architects offices and
> signed by the boss, unseen, as they fly through the door. This
> architecture, a three dimensional solidified version of a synthesized
> musical jingle, consists of ever more preposterous gimmickry - an
> underwater, revolving, white leather fuck pad or a marina skyscraper
> with a product placement name that would normally only appeal to
> teenage boys, such as the preposterous Michael Schumacher World
> Champion Tower.
>
> But if there is one problem with the shallow and the fickle, its that
> they are shallow and fickle, they won't put down deep roots and they
> won't remain loyal to Dubai. The people who appear in People magazine
> need to be told what is cool by Wallpaper magazine who in turn will
> discover something after the hipsters have moved on. The problem is
> that Dubai was never hipster-cool and is no longer Wallpaper-cool.
> This realization will have the same impact as suburbanite bachelorette
> party in a Wallpaper-cool nightclub. It will spread like the sighting
> of a floating turd in a public pool, flushing people to the exits with
> silent panic, unacknowledged for fear of embarrassment.
>
> As people scramble for the exits in Dubai, there is no 'key mail',
> like in America, where people can often mail back their house keys and
> walk away from a mortgage without the immediate threat of jail. People
> are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded
> at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for
> this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in
> a debtors prison. Perhaps Dubai will at least create a new Dickens?
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