The guy from New York has seen all three seasons of the television series ‘Game Of Thrones,’ “at least five times,” he says. He, a couple from Colorado, a father and son from New Zealand and South Korea, Nanna (our Icelandic photographer) and I are in a van in sub-arctic temps, north or west or both from the airport in Akureyri we flew into. We’re being driven around by Jón Þór Benediktsson, ‘The Travelling Viking,’ on his tour of film sites from the ‘Game Of Thrones.’

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An Icelander, two Germans and a Brit are sitting in a bright and cavernous room in Reykjavík’s Old Harbour, drinking coffee side by side in total silence, physically together but intellectually apart. They are freelance PR representatives, freelance photographers, freelance whatever-ists, each renting one of six desks in a former industrial space called the Reykjavík Coworking Unit. Their tribe is governed by one rule: no assholes.

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The Beat That Went On And On

Magnús Trygvason Eliassen, “Maggi,” drums in local bands Amiina, Borko, Kippi Kaninus, Moses Hightower, Sin Fang, Tilbury, Snorri Helgason and a number of others on a rotating basis. He manages to balance domestic and international touring, recording and practicing with all of them throughout the year, but from a peripheral view, it seems like trying to date several people at the same time, and Airwaves would be that weekend when they all happen to be in town at the same time.

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Wasted At Airwaves

Your last sip of beer it not its last song...

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The Beach Boys In Space and Other Sounds You Might Have Heard At Amsterdam

In a bathroom with no locks, in the basement of the Amsterdam bar, I ran into Elín, the female wonderstorm at the front of the folk band Bellstop. It was an endearing experience where we laughed about what it meant to be an artist playing at a venue that is typically a black hole for daytime drinking and gambling while I pulled toilet paper off of my boots.

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Icelandic Soul Is Life Of Party

The decision to spend the last night of Airwaves at Gamli Gaukurinn was one of the better ones I made over this four-day music bender. Though Gamli was hot and packed and people were by now sweating beer, there was a sense of camraderie in the room – we’d all made it to the end.

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The Big Sleep At Harpa Kaldalón 

Kira Kira, an experimental noise band fronted by Kristín Björk Kristjánsdóttir, opened up Harpa Kaldalón with a song I imagine is similar to the sound of a dinosaur being born. 

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Gamla Bíó 

At Gamla Bíó’s seated concert hall, we show our enthusiasm for a band by gently wobbling in our chairs. Tilbury’s opening performance, however, had the crowd rollicking on their asses like buoys in a storm on Reykjavik’s Old Harbour.

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In mid-April, Saudi Arabia’s liberal-leaning newspaper Al-Watan published a satirical article about a hot topic in the country entitled, “Would You Marry a Girl Who Practiced Sports?”

The article was published shortly after Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Education was called upon by the country’s Shoura Council, the consultative assembly to the king, to conduct a study about introducing girls’ physical education (PE) classes in the nation’s public schools. PE was officially permitted for girls in Saudi Arabia’s private schools just last year, to the chagrin of several outspoken conservatives in the country who condemned it as another grade on the slippery slope to irreversible westernization.

What the measure is, in actuality, is an attempt to fight soaring rates of obesity and diabetes in the country and to, at long last, participate in the tidal wave of sports development overcoming the Middle East during the past 10 years.

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I spent the summer after I turned 20 sleeping with a can of bear spray. I took off for Alaska alone with a tent, a sleeping bag, a corncob pipe, a banjolin and enough matches to burn down every wooded corner of the state. I am not kidding you—I was Alaska’s biggest cliché that summer (see also: shameless responses to reading Into The Wild).

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Outside of the tiny town of El Bolsón in the Argentine Patagonia, five hours down a rocky path to a canyon in the Andes Mountain range, I met an 18-year-old Hawaiian girl named Julia Douglas.

Julia is a tall girl with cropped blonde hair and sharp blue eyes. She’s quick-witted, incredibly well read and she smiles totally unreserved, like she’s never tried not to.

Julia didn’t follow the prescribed trajectory of entering university right after high school. The year before I met her, she was finishing up her senior year and working the night shift at a McDonald’s in Honolulu. She worked from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. during the school week with the express purpose of saving enough money to last somewhere for a year on her own. While friends packed dorm kits, Julia loaded a backpack.

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