This is an excerpt from my book “Vagabonds: Sometimes Getting Lost is the Point” . It’s available as an ebook for kindle or ebook readers. Over the next several months we will be exploring some of these amazing vagabond characters from the past (and present). Eric the Red was a vagabond explorer and in Greenland he…
Harry Franck’s willingness to travel with no money, his keen eye for the details of his journey and the societies he recorded (some of which soon disappeared) make him a welcome addition to our list of Extraordinary Vagabonds.
8 1/2 Federico Fellini’s film 8 ½. It was not what I expected. It was marvelous. It was the story of a man who is looking at his life and trying to figure out if he has what he wants or even more importantly, what it is that he wants. Ostensibly, it is the…
Travel is not just moving over the earth from one place to another in some kind of conveyance. It’s not about where you’re going or how you’re getting there. It’s not about getting away from it all, at all. In fact, more the opposite … a way of getting to it all. Travel is a metaphor for life, a way of experiencing it more intensely and self-consciously. Traveling is not so much an action as an enlightened state of consciousness, opening you to fresh experience, to fresh looks at the world and yourself in it.
I thought it would be a good idea to have my 9-year-old watch Hawaii (the movie based on Michener’s novel Hawaii) since we live here. I’d never seen the movie but read the book some years ago. While I admit that the movie wasn’t anywhere close to as good as the book – my daughter’s…
Film on Film as Life on Life Watching a great film can give a person insights into the existence they lead. That may be the key to why human beings are willing to spend as much time as we do sitting in darkened theatres or immobilized on couches during sunny days watching things that may…
Five Seasons of Fellini If you are no longer a teenager, think back to the time when you were. If you were to pick one significant year from that time and make it into a movie, who are the people, what are the images, and what are the things that you would want people…
Going around the world hasn’t always been as easy as it is today. In fact, the great explorers of the past often suffered great hardships to see distant lands. One such extraordinary vagabond was Marco Polo.
Welcome to the Liberators “Welcome to the Liberators!” It is painted on a brick wall as Antonia and her daughter walk into a Dutch village that Antonia grew up in in the movie Anotonia’s Line, directed by Marleen Gorris. While the message is clearly meant for Allied troops who are clearing out the Nazi…
Richard III: Evil Evil England A Review of Richard III (1998) starring Ian Mckellen and Annette Bening When one looks at the United Kingdom, one naturally expects to find certain things. Among these are crumpets, tea, drivers sitting on the right hand side of automobiles, double-deck buses, and a deep and abiding love for the…