I spent a lot of time in China in the early 2000’s, trying to make up for an overly euro-centric upbringing. I knew there was a world I’d overlooked, and hadn’t been taught about in school, a missing hemisphere. I’d read books like Ernst Gombrich’s History of Art which ignored the “East” side of the […]

Over the past few years a symbol has made the leap from movie into life. It is a salute with three fingers held high: pointer-middle-ring.  It came from The Hunger Games, the series written by Suzanne Collins.  Both a book and movie franchise, it is a tale following the life of Katniss Everdeen. Her name […]

WPIG #6: Why we Travel Edition Be it escape, education, entrapment, euphoria, there are a plethora of reasons to take to the road, to be on the lamb.  This episode of WPIG explores a few of these streams while leaving room for more with some help (and stolen clips) from Pico Ayer and Wade Davis.

There is a noise I associate with heat and fever, and I am not sure if it’s real or from distortions of memory.  It could be from something as simple as the cicada, that strange beast that emerges from the ground, periodically, in the hot humid months, and rages against the known world with its […]

Anticipation – that mixture of stress and excitement, with a dash of trepidation. The rush that comes from thinking on what’s to come next. It’s that magic ingredient that keeps you watching a play performed, a sport in action. And it’s the sine qua non of electronic music.  Today we are talking about anticipation, and […]

Castro and the revolution reached Havana on 9 January 1959.  Two years later to the month, while reducing the US embassy and stoking the early embers of the Bay of Pigs, he and Ernesto “Che” Guevara went golfing at the Havana Country Club Park, a sprawling chunk of the city, rolling hills, manicured greens.  It […]

That small chunk of rock in the North Atlantic…..no, not Iceland, the O.G. Iceland, home of a slew of folks who went out into the world to make a mark, and make it loud. Ireland. It is on all the lists, we all want to go there but we all tend to wait until we […]

Sidewalks and the paved parts of the urban landscape have a funny definition in some Asian cities.  On the Silk Road after midnight, the roads and sidewalks become the communal domicile, as beds are dragged out into the streets to enjoy the cool breeze of the desert nights. Hanoi and Bangkok are two cities so […]

George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. grew up in Illinois, obsessed with the moon, its shape, its craters and scarred face.  He drew pictures of the moon in grade school and studied it in high school, and when he graduated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as a civil engineer, the lunar mark stuck and came back to […]

I have a list of three things which, perhaps due to a repressive part of my psyche or some masochistic Protestant lean, I have denied myself until I felt I could no longer continue without them; reading the entire Faulkner cannon, going on a surf/bike road trip through California, and learning how to make my […]

I love the cheese, I love pop… good pop music. There is a sea change happening right now.  One of those high tide marks that we look back on decades from now to measure things from and it is disorientating. Emotions are magnified in both excess and ecstasy which is perhaps why pop music feels […]

The winds of Dabancheng can pick up an 18-wheeler and toss it like crumpled up newspaper. The winds are so strong that the landscape has no soil, no sand, no plant, no animal – just rock left over, boulders. And if the winds here can pick up a 40-tonne truck, then the rocks left over, you can imagine, […]

A dreamer for surf, I always imagined my life would follow the tides and know the nooks and crannies of some little seen coastline like the back of my hand, but I never lived on the salt water, at least not for long enough to get used to the patterns of the sea. All the pot-smoking […]

I think it was late spring, and school was going to let out a few weeks later, but things had been rough on the home front so it must have been decided that my brother and I were going to skip the end of the class year, and my 7th grade finals would be missed.  […]

Eight years ago I got a call from friends who were thinking of moving back to Asia from the UK, with their family of 3 little ones in tow.  The discussion was whether Bangkok or Hong Kong would be a  better place to live. At the time Bangkok was under a protest and safety was […]

I was a shameless child with drag strip courage and an imagination that would often mistake clouds for mountains. I liked to move. My parents tell a story too often about them leaving me in the crib for a nap and when they came back to wake me up the crib was on the other […]