Honey Hunting in Nepal

The only time I’ve had trouble collecting honey is when it’s particularly runny and falls off my spoon. If my honey proved as difficult to get as the stuff the Gurung tribe finds in Nepal, I’d probably stick to Marmalade. The tribe has to journey to the Himalayan cliffs to find the hives that house …

Ticket to Ride

The tale of an elderly possibly senile pensioner and his quest to claim a million dollars with the help of his son seems an unlikely Oscar nominee. Yet Alexander Payne’s tale has a hidden depth that makes this movie stay with you long after the end credits have rolled. The ‘winning ticket’ that Woody Grant …

The New Yorkers According to Robert Herman

Since the late seventies Robert Herman has been taking pictures of New York and its inhabitants. He uses Kodachrome which gives the pictures, some of which are taken as late as 2005, an old school cool and vibrancy. Like a lot of street photographers Herman talks of how taking pictures helps him bond with his …

Antonio Smith

One of the pleasures of music is discovering something entirely new and almost forgotten from the dusty musical past. I’ve had several such pleasant surprises already this year but arguably the most pleasant has been a guy called Antonio Smith. He is a Chilean folk rock performer from the 1970’s who initially was in a …

Ernst Haas

Ernst Haas is considered one of the pioneers of color photography in the 20th century. Indeed 14 years before William Eggleston he was the first color photographer to be shown at MoMA. His Kodachrome images often use color to create rather abstract structures more akin to a modern artist than a photographer. This combined with …

Orange Juice

The music of our youth. No other music will ever quite replace it. It’s nothing to do with quality or superiority, it’s the fact such life changing and formative things are happening while these sounds are playing. You can even actively dislike the sound of a certain voice but its sheer ubiquity overcomes your reservations …

Wall People

For Georgian artist, Eka Sharashidze photography has become a useful tool in the creation of her intriguing series ‘Wall People’. She captures images of pedestrians and then cuts them out and repositions them in superimposed layers. From a distance they almost seem like notes on a musical score, individually unimportant but when taken together a …

The Existential Meow-ings of Henri

Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past year you are more than likely aware of the of one of the Internets deepest and most profound thinkers. Henri, le Chat Noir. This cat intellectual is the natural successor to Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus even though he possesses only paws. The fine feline …

The End of the World As We Know It

The end of the world is nearly nigh. Well it is according to one southern family, the main characters in Mary Miller’s charming and heartfelt debut novel’ The Last Days of California’. With the rapture upon them they opt to spend their last days on earth driving from their home in Montgomery, Alabama to California …

Sun Kil Moon

It’s difficult to find records that are genuinely moving. Plenty are entertaining, clever, catchy, even electrifying but the ability to get us to listen to something that is so deftly handled that it transcends its deathly dark subject matter is rare indeed. Sun Kil Moon’s ‘Benji’ achieves this. Every song deals in some way with …