Category Asides

Pop culture, funny lawyer, summer festivals

• Saudi Dawn aka the Eternal Philosopher thinks Saudis are brainwashed with a certain pop culture that “is filled with half-truths and out of context religious information that is promoted to control the masses.” I agree.
• Lawyer Ahmad Al-Rashid said he will sue Riyadh’s summary court after it refused to consider his lawsuit against MBC for what he called “encouraging deviant behavior in Saudi society.” The court told him to contact the Ministry of Culture and Information’s media violations committee, but he said he won’t. Funny. As a lawyer he should be well aware of this. Citing the example of Mazen Abdul Jawad case doesn’t make much sense here. That case was against Abdul Jawad not LBC, although the channel later got punished for operating without a permission (which is also funny because none of the other non-Saudi channels working in the Kingdom have such permission).
• Lou K has another good post. This time about so-called Saudi tourism and its so-called summer festivals. “Basically, our summer festivals are nothing but shopping festivals.. There’s nothing more to it..” he says. There is a lot of truth in what he says, but there are also exceptions. The local summer festival here in Al-Ahsa, known as Hasana Falla, tries to mix culture (folklore, arts, traditional crafts, etc.) with entertainment and some shopping. I made a short visit last night to the event, ironically to meet some American visitors, and I thought it was okay. In the words of a Hassawi girl on Twitter, it’s “not half-bad, but nothing much to do.”

Abdullah al-Eyaf, Ahmed Bin Baz

• If you enjoyed reading about Abdulmohsen al Mutairi and young Saudi filmmakers, you probably want to read this interview with director Abdullah Al-Eyaf. His latest film, “Ayesh,” has been well received and won the first award of the Gulf Film Festival that was recently held in Dubai.
• In the second part of a series on Saudi Arabia, GlobalPost runs this piece by Caryle Murphy who profiles the upstart scholar Ahmed Bin Baz. I have been reading for the young Bin Baz for a while now, so I’m not surprised by the opinions he offers in this interview. However, I’m a bit surprised to see Dr. Mohammed al-Hodaif, father of the late Hadeel al-Hodaif, likens Bin Baz to Paris Helton in the sense that he is using his father’s name to become famous. Totally uncalled for.

Female ref, Lou visits KAUST

• The Saudi football league champions Al Hilal are currently in Austria preparing for the new season. Playing a friendly match against a Romanian team there, the Saudi players experienced something they won’t see in the local stadiums anytime soon: a female referee. Al Hilal lost 0-3. You think we can blame her for this defeat? :P

  

• Lou visit KAUST for the third time, and he comes back with a bunch of interesting thoughts. I agree with most of what he has to say, and I think many citizens share his sentiments. At the end of his very long rant, he writes a letter to the Saudi government: “You managed to force a new open campus, with a different take on what a Saudi culture should be.. Please, tell me that you’re doing this just to test how it works, and then later implement it all around the kingdom as a Social Module.”

Filmmakers, open letter to MoDo, muttawa hunt

• Whenever someone asks me what interesting things Saudis are doing, I tell them to look at our rising group of young filmmakers. They are determined, passionate, and hardworking. Abu Dhabi’s The National caught up with my friend Abdulmuhsen al Mutairi when he was shooting his latest short film. “If you believe in art, you can make something, and in the beginning you will make very low, medium-quality work,” he said. “But if you continue to learn from your mistakes and the reviews of your audience, you will have something.”
• Sarah Haji at MMW has an open letter to Maureen Dowd regarding her latest Vanity Fair travel piece about Saudi Arabia. “So unless you’re a self-righteous Times columnist with a history of thinking that thousands of years of culture and tradition should tremble in your Western wake, you should attempt not to project all of your customs onto another people,” Sarah writes.
• Eman al-Nafjan aka Saudiwoman announced last week she was taking a break from her blog. Then she discovered she just can’t be away from the blog. How cute is that? So on her comeback post, she takes an expat friend who is about to leave the country to the mall on a Muttawa hunt. They got lucky in Riyadh Gallery, where they had a chance to witness a classic CPVPV raid on shoppers. Good times.

Land-grab, Saudi vuvuzela, and tasting weird drinks

• According to recent stats, about 60 percent of Saudis do not have their own homes. The main reason behind this situation is the prohibitively expensive cost of buying land where you can build a house. Of course this is crazy because Saudi Arabia is a vast desert. You would think lands would be dirt cheap, right? Wrong. Why? Land-grabbing. Fellow blogger Essam al-Zamil has been on a roll with a series of thoughtful blogposts about the problem of land-grab in the country. He recently crunched some numbers to estimate the fair price for land, and his findings are nothing short of astonishing. Per his estimate, citizens pay between 5-10 times the fair price when they buy a small piece land in most decent areas.
• Now that the World Cup is over, I’m looking forward to enjoy watching football without the deafening noise of vuvuzelas. Or so I thought. The vuvzela will find its way to our stadiums because although it might be an African tradition, it is actually made with Saudi materials. The Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) waited until the end of the competition to proudly announce that the plastic horns are manufactured using its high-density polyethylene products. So yeah, Saudi Arabia did not reach the World Cup finals, but they still somehow managed to make themselves heard in this global event. You are welcome.
• Since drinking alcohol is illegal in KSA, the Burdened Mary decided to sample some of the weird non-alcoholic drinks available in the local market. Her verdict: “These drinks were mostly duds compared to fresh fruit juices or Saudi Champagne.”

KSA joins the first world, marketing to Muslims in Riyadh

• Prince Khaled al-Faisal, the Governor of Mecca, has repeatedly said that our country is on its way to join the first world. Fouad al-Farhan says he would like to join the Prince in his optimism, and has some ideas on what it would take to move Saudi Arabia from the third world to the first world.
• My good friend Abdulmohsen al-Madani will be joined by Roy Haddad, Chairman & CEO of JWT MENA, for a presentation called “Marketing to Muslims – Unseen Opportunities.” The presentation will be given today, July 6th, at 7PM. The venue is Riyadh Chamber of Commerce on Dhabab St. It should be interesting. Unfortunately I won’t be able to make it because I’m in the EP, but if you are in Riyadh and you care about marketing, advertisement and content creation then you probably want to be there.

MoDo does KSA, Boom?

• Maureen Dowd visited the Kingdom earlier this year. Few weeks ago I was contacted by her assistant. I was told that Dowd was writing a travel piece about Saudi Arabia for Vanity Fair and she has some questions for me. I answered her questions, but I don’t know if any of what said made it to print. The article is published in their August issue, and to go with it they put together a slideshow on the magazine website under the title “Sex and the Saudis.” Lame linkbait. Don’t wast your time on that. Instead, go to Qusay blog where he offers the same slideshow with much better captions. The pictures are bad because MoDo did not bother to bring a professional photographer with her, and these pics were taken by her assistance Ashley Parker who actually appears in one of them.
• Speaking of slideshows, back in 2007 I put together this one in which I collected images of the many megaprojects that were announced at the time: economic cities, financial districts, new universities, skyscrapers, etc. Three years later, where are they now? Hadi Fakihi takes a moment to check on the development of these projects, and the picture is pretty dim. There were way too many huge promises that are yet to be delivered. Construction in some of the projects has begun, but none of them is anywhere near completion. Boom? What boom?