Text & Photography © Sophie Knight / HESO
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by MDMA…”
All the festivals I have ever been to ran like modern versions of Ginsberg’s “Howl”- there were boys with dinner-plate eyes rocking back and forth in darkened corners of tents, girls wailing that they’d dropped their baggies in the mudfield outside the mobile toilets, and the campsite was like the Somme, littered with trench-foot victims and burning piles of trash. Showers? Not unless you count the spray of warm beer and amyl nitrates …

It’s summer in most of Asia, which means heat, sweaty, hot, shirt sticking to you no relief in sight mold literally growing on you dampness. Rather than another boring “How To Beat the Heat” post, which never really work, how about just distracting that part of your brain always reminding you of the barometer reading with some classics from the closet? Don’t have the money to travel the world? Why not take a trip of the mind? Put down the magic mushrooms and let HESO come up with the perfect …

GIA, ETA, IRA, ELN, FARC, Tamil Tigers, Islamic Jihad, Abu Sayaf. What do these names mean? What makes the men who establish & recruit for them tick? To try and answer these questions, HESO looks at Phil Rees’ seminal book Dining With Terrorists

Mac McCaughan, co-founder of Merge Records & lead guitarist/vocalist for Superchunk & Portastatic, talks about his love of hockey, being a small business owner & the future of music.

What is the mystery of photography? Why do we love the static image? What is it that these fragments of reality, frozen in time tell us? What is it about the photograph’s ability to transcend commonplace existence that has taken it from an unrecognized set of chemical reactions to the most popular and life-changing art-form the history of the world has ever seen?
Are we seeking knowledge of our place within the greater universal complexity? Or could it be that we are a conceited bunch of heretic animals in love with …

HESO interviews Robert May, co-producer of The Animation Show, and independent animator Bill Plympton.
HESO: Can you tell us a bit about the history of Animation Festivals in the US and abroad?
Robert May: In the 1950’s a group of international independent animators formed Association Internationale du Film d’Animation (ASIFA) to help bring animators and filmmakers from around the world together to communicate ideas. A festival was born from this in Annecy France. The International Annecy Animation festival is still the largest in the world today and embodies that original spirit. The first festivals for …