Best Blues Pubs Direct Ho Chi Minh Near Me

4worldlovers: After more than seven years of writing texts for each and every one of our events, we’ve taken the decision to change strategy and try something different. You’re now reading the first installment of what will be a monthly feature article, discussing what we hope will be a diverse and absorbing collection of subjects, ideas and insights.

Future articles will pursue a journalistic approach and perspective to engage with topics we believe our network will be interested in. The aim is to be as broad as possible, and to involve detailed analyses of a wide range of issues we believe are important and worth discussing. Our society, culture and economy; ideas about music; our history, and anything else we consider reflective of our identity and vision as a club will all be up for discussion.

While we may also refer to our events and include interviews and analyses of the DJs and artists that have played or will play at The Observatory, this series will not simply be a review of our monthly program: it will be an exploration of our world, in a way that reflects and articulates what The Observatory is, what we want it to be, and who the people behind it are.

We’ll start by explaining what brought us to this point.

When The Observatory first opened on the corner of Tôn Thất Tùng and Lê Lai in Q1 in October 2013, HCMC was quite different, and so was the club.

The first space was meant to be “a multifunctional cultural centre”. We had an art gallery, intended to be open all day as a café, and had plans to host a wide range of different cultural projects, including exhibitions and performances. We also wanted to be a reference point for people seeking insights and information on other spaces and individuals active in the contemporary culture of the city (which is part of the inspiration for The Observatory’s name), and to be a focal point on HCMC’s cultural map. As it turned out, what we quickly ended up focusing most on – and doing best – were our parties.

However, while our initial ambition of being both a conduit and node of multidisciplinary contemporary culture in HCMC may have been slightly sidelined by our focus on the musical side of the operation, the desire to be more engaged in diverse aspects of contemporary culture has been latent in the backdrop since the beginning. As such, we view this new communication medium as a chance to finally engage on an intellectual level with the types of issues and concepts that we originally wanted The Observatory to be instigating and facilitating.

The Observatory was the idea of Dan Bi Mong (aka Hibiya Line), who had moved to Vietnam from Switzerland with the aim of creating a place where people could experience art and music in a way that wasn’t yet available in the country. Dan and I met around the end of 2012, when Dan was still planning The Observatory’s launch, and in the meantime throwing his notorious weekly Optimist Club parties. Although we definitely bonded quickly off our shared love for diverse types of music, partying and street rum, in hindsight it was probably our shared academic background in the social sciences that placed us on the same page when it came to understanding our city, and the possibilities for the club as the years went on.

While it’s taken a while to get to this point, this new chapter for The Observatory feels like a necessary and natural evolution. Dan and I both have backgrounds in studying and writing on issues ranging from politics to culture, economics and society. While I’ve been working as an editor and writer for a long time in parallel to my work with The Observatory, Dan has not, but will be making his return to the field in this series as Co-Editor-in-Chief with me. We will also periodically be inviting other writers who are engaged in our fields of interest to feature articles in this series.