SWEEP THE LEG, JOHNNY!

I am 59 years old and a Brazilian jiu jitsu addict.

THE CHORUS

I spend a lot of my life — maybe even most of my life these days — in hotels. And it can be a grim and dispiriting feeling, waking up, at first unsure of where you are, what language they’re speaking outside. The room looks much the same as other rooms. TV. Coffee maker on the desk. Complimentary fruit…

BROWN DOG

You may be the most cynical, born and bred, citified lefty like me — instinctively skeptical of big concepts like “patriotism”, relatively…

HANOI

We started talking internally about the possibility of shooting a scene with the President of the United States a long way out — nearly a year…

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Tagalog, the language of the Philippines, is not an uncommon thing to hear in my household. Like many children all over the…

THE RIGHT THING

As often happens on Parts Unknown, the show you are going to see Sunday night is not the show we intended to make. I’d been to Cologne, years earlier, for a book fair, and I’d enjoyed myself. The endless torrent of tiny beers, the pig knuckles and schnitzels — my kind of place. Though locals…

MAMMA ROMA

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
ancient footprints are everywhere.
You could…

CUBA!!!!

The toothpaste is out of the tube and there’s no putting it back.

WHERE THE COOKS COME FROM

Somebody said “GUN!” and the next thing I know, director Mo Fallon drops his camera, drags me to the floor of a…

SENEGAL

We live in a time I never thought I would live to see, where, in the United States of America, a nation founded on the principles of religious…