Balls, Brains and Badassery: An Ode to the Heist

Everybody loves a good caper: they keep superheroes employed, pompous bank executives nervously watching security monitors and Antwerp diamond wholesalers in a constant state of paranoid agitation. The best heists usually involve Danny Trejo, some tunneling, a motorcycle, months of patient surveillance work, blueprints, an elaborate escape plan that may or may not involve sky […]

Richard Swarbrick: Making the Beautiful Game Even More Beautiful

When does sport become art? When do athletic prowess and years of training transcend a battle of skill and become Shakespearean poetry personified? When Richard Swarbrick animates it, that’s when. Last year, for a lark in his free time, the London-based elementary school teaching assistant animated Gareth Bale’s single-handed demolition of Inter Milan in last year’s Champion’s […]

Haoles on the Pequod

In recent days, my mind has been awash in a cascade of Hawaiian saudades, a phenomenon that has occasionally accompanied me since the 80’s, when American television networks forced their viewers, even here in Europe, to choose between tropical miniseries. The Love Boat, Fantasy Island and Magnum P.I. battled weekly for supremacy in the working […]

Space is the Place: the Sun Ra Appreciation Society

What is not to appreciate about the inimitable Herman Poole Blount, known forever as his professional persona, Sun Ra? One of the most prolific musicians of the 20th Century (recording over 1000 songs), the self-professed extra-terrestrial from the planet Saturn here on Earth to invite all Earthlings seeking a brighter today and tomorrow to join him […]

‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano Appreciation Society

Takeshi Kitano: the renaissance man, the mythological beast, the living legend. Simply put, and in all seriousness, one of the greatest and most multifaceted actors, directors, writers and artists of our time.