On The Road

Ecuador at Your Service

May 1, 2012

. We turn from yesterday’s Semitic to today’s sublime. (Yes, a redundancy, but some things require emphatic repetition.) Some of you may recall that your proprietor traveled to Ecuador in late January. (And why would you not remember? We are friendly people here on the sad red earth, deserving of some remembrance, no? Yes? Please?) [...]

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Penelope in Charge

February 14, 2012

. I’m still taken away by the first weeks of a heavy teaching load this semester, so I thought I’d take a moment, then, to honor the day – Penelope‘s 14th birtday, on February 14th, Valentine’s Day. If you don’t know Penelope, more’s the loss, but here’s a chance to get aquainted. I wrote about [...]

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El viajar en Ecuador

January 27, 2012

. Making our way through the Andes, writing and connecting as I can. Preparing some posts for the coming days. Mountains and clouds – always a road to wonder. Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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Letter from Paris: a Lump in the Throat

March 17, 2011

Yesterday’s Jazz Is entry, a Dexter Gordon film rendition of “Body and Soul,” put me in mind, for a reason you will soon understand that number always now does, of an another experience of the jazz standard. It was September 2001, and I was beginning a sabbatical year with a month-long drive around Europe. Julia [...]

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Why We Need Unions #351

February 26, 2011

I’m in activist mode this week. Later, next week, I’ll offer some deeper reflections. But a curious result of all the activist tweeting I’ve been doing through the week has been the response from conservatives. Mostly, my tweets are retweeted by the generally liberal like-minded. My tweets on the Wisconsin labor standoff, though, making their [...]

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Politics and Art

February 14, 2011

Vladimir Nabokov did not like the novel of ideas. Artists often have their idiosyncratic dislikes, contrary expressions of the unique aesthetic vision that drives their own work. Particularly, Nabokov did not like the work of those monuments of great-idea novels, Dostoyevsky and Mann, though there is no reason his distaste should have excluded the novels [...]

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How We Lived on It (34) – Pierre Gleizes and Greenpeace

February 12, 2011

Photographer Pierre Gleizes has worked for Greepeace for three of the four decades the environmental campaigning organization has been in existence. He has shot some of the organization’s most striking and well-known images. This year, Greenpeace turns forty. This video offers the photographer’s thoughts on his long career as journalist and activist. Follow Greenpeace Video [...]

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Who

October 29, 2010

Arriving home from an evening out a few weeks ago, I sat down at the computer for one last check of email, Facebook, Twitter, all the disparate and convergent paths of communication. I discovered an email that made me cry out. (How soon, already, in resemblance to a long-form letter of lore seems an email [...]

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Writers Write

October 13, 2010

“Oh! It is only a novel! … only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818) Related articles Howard Jacobson on taking comic novels [...]

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“The Poverty of Experience”

September 29, 2010

Another one of those particularly good posts at the Atlantic yesterday, this one from James Fallows, or more precisely, mostly from one of his readers. This has been my experience, too, in travel, that every place I visit is transformed from more than just another place in the world into a part of my life, [...]

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Life in Motion

May 13, 2010

I drove the motor home down to San Diego for servicing yesterday for its final repairs and detailing in preparation for sale. It has been sitting in storage, and after driving it around the country for over a year, I hadn’t been behind the wheel for two months, since we moved out of it into [...]

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Gimme a Break

March 8, 2010

Or I’m taking one, anyway. Today, we begin the move out of the motorhome, out of storage, and into the new apartment. It is reorientation time. Then, next Sunday is my birthday. (I will be thirty-five. Or twenty-five. I forget. But either way I look much younger, and I have a head of hair like [...]

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Landed

March 3, 2010

Julia and I took an apartment yesterday. Just over sixteen months ago we rented our home, uprooted nearly every element of our lives, and hit the road in our thirty-seven foot motorhome. We spent four days with the coach parked in front of our house moving about a half percent of what we own into [...]

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More Montevideo

February 20, 2010

This delayed contribution of student photos from Uruguay comes from Michaela Reisinger, a fourth-generation pharmacist from Austria. Nearly everyone else on this travel photo workshop had been on multiple trips with Julia (and me), but Michaela was new. Smart, witty, and gregarious, a lover of good food and drink, she instantly became part of the [...]

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Uruguay (Ooruɣwai)

February 10, 2010

Uruguay, they say in Ooruɣwai, is the ubiquitous ham in the sandwich between the baguette-size slices of Brazil and Argentina. If it bites on those populations, the teeth are heading for the Uruguayans (Uruguayos – Ooruɣwaishos) The 3.3 million-person nation (1.1 million in the capital of Montevideo) is formally the Oriental Republic of Uruguay. According [...]

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Iguazu Falls

February 4, 2010

This is my adventure to Iguazu, between Argentina and Brazil. The night shot is from the full moon walk out to Devils throat from the Argentina side. It is all a sight to be seen. The helicopter ride from the Brazil side is a must. What a thrill. If one has a chance of this [...]

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Some Random Buenos Aires

February 1, 2010

In Recoleta Cemetery, burial place of Eva Peron and many notables, among the mausolea. Photography by Julia Dean AJA Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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On the Road

January 30, 2010

Julia and I will be traveling in Argentina & Uruguay over the next two weeks – we just landed in Buenos Aires yesterday – so posting will be a little erratic. I will try to keep it up, though, and interesting. Since I’m with a pack of voracious photographers, I’m going to flatter them with [...]

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Buenos Aires and Montevideo with The Julia Dean Photo Workshops

January 12, 2010

It’s not too late. If you are a photographer of any level who wants to learn anything from the basics to the photojournalistic techniques of street shooting, join Julia and me, along with the usual gang of intrepid traveler-photographers, for eleven days of color and fascination in Argentina and Uruguay, Feb.1-11. The workshop, during Montevideo’s [...]

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Happy Anniversary to Us

December 2, 2009

Today is the one year anniversary of the sad red earth. Before December 2, 2008 my general response to the idea of authoring a blog (from people, generally, who seemed, for some reason, to want me out of their ear for a reasonable period of time) was “I don’t want to write no blog thing.” [...]

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A Pause in the Journey

November 16, 2009

A year and and nearly two weeks ago, Julia and I left Los Angeles to travel the country by motorhome and do research for our book on contemporary Native American life. Thursday we returned to L.A., not home quite – because we’ll be setting wheels to road some more, intermittently, throughout the next year – [...]

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