•  22 March 2012  •  1 note

My cat Paddy, a couple days after minor surgery, tripping out pretty hard on chicken-flavoured kitty morphine.

•  20 March 2012  •  12 notes

Another intimate look behind the scenes of The Fruit Hunters.

•  12 March 2012  •  1 note

I spent some time this week on the set of The Fruit Hunters, a documentary by my friend Yung Chang, based on a screenplay that we wrote, adapting the book of the same name by my friend Adam Gollner. Here is a brief, important look at filmmaking “process” I shot while I was there.

•  9 March 2012  •  6 notes

“It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now.”

•  14 February 2012  •  1 note

If you live in Montreal and haven’t seen it yet and want to see it, now’s your chance! February 23rd at 9:45pm at the Cinémathèque québécoise.

•  8 February 2012  •  4 notes

Bingham Ray died this weekend after suffering a stroke at the Sundance Film Festival. He might not have been a household name, but Bingham was, at least to me, one of the most important and committed forces for good in the world of independent film. He founded October Pictures, effectively introduced Mike Leigh to America, was responsible for getting films by everyone from David Lynch to Pedro Almodovar into theaters and the cultural conversation, as it were. (He has a large part in Peter Siskind’s ’90s-indie-film-chronicle Down and Dirty Pictures, largely playing in contrast to the Machiavellian Miramax crew.) Bingham was truly on the side of the angels.

I was lucky enough to meet and spend a few days with him at TIFF 2011, last September, where he was one of the “governors” (basically, mentors/advisors) at a program called Talent Lab I took part in along with a couple dozen other emerging filmmakers. I think I can say we were all very taken with this straight-talking but warmly friendly man, who seemed to make an extra-special effort to get to know us, to hang out with us, to drink with us, to encourage us.

Bingham would sit at the back of the room as we conversed with the other guest speakers, and would often join in the conversation, sometimes with hilarious candour. One of the most memorable moments of the week was when a legendary documentary filmmaker was visiting us, along with a smarmy, glad-handed sycophant who had the title of co-director on his most recent effort, and who seemed to think his opinions were most important to us than the legend in question. It was when this glad-hander interrupted the documentarian on the question “Who are your influences as a filmmaker?” to say, “Well, Marty’s films have always been a huge influence on me,” that Bingham could be heard to say, “What a douche!” and storm out of the room. We all loved him so much for that.

Most important to me, though, was when I had the chance to ask him a question that had been gnawing away at me for a long time. “Is it crazy to be a filmmaker and live in Montreal and not L.A. or New York? Am I out of my mind or wasting my time?” No, Bingham answered. You’re doing the right thing. Tell your own stories, don’t try and make the same films as everyone else. Stay where you are. That meant a lot to me.

I know I’m one of many, many people to have been touched by the man’s wisdom and good nature. There are probably thousands of stories like mine, most from people who knew him far better and longer. But the fact that just a few days’ acquaintance could have such an impact on me, and I know, my fellow Talent Labbers, says a lot about this extraordinary man. Rest in peace, Bingham, you were truly one of the good guys.

•  24 January 2012  •  2 notes

While at my family cottage last week over the holidays, I found this great old picture of my dad standing in front of his childhood home on Cecil St. in Toronto’s Chinatown, which was once a teeming neighbourhood of Jewish immigrants. Walking through Chinatown yesterday, I happened to pass in front of the same house, and had my friend Norm take a picture of me in the same pose. It’s an exercise in double nostalgia; the first picture, taken some 40 years ago, was shot years after my father and his parents moved uptown and he must have been just passing through, on a day (we can tell from the coat), much like yesterday.

•  9 January 2012  •  9 notes

“Hartley Coleridge began life with limitless promise—’all my child might be’—and ended it universally viewed as a failure. He is remembered not for his poems or his essays, though he wrote some fine ones, but for two things and two things only: he was the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he was a disappointment. He has been called a misfit, a dreamer, a sinner, a castaway, a wayward child, a hobgoblin, a flibbertigibbet, a waif, a weird, a pariah, a prodigal, a picturesque ruin, a sensitive plant, an exquisite machine with insufficient steam, the oddest of God’s creatures, and, most frequently—by his father, his mother, his brother, and his sister; by William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle; and by countless others over the years—’Poor Hartley.’”

Anne Fadiman, “The Oakling and the Oak”

•  3 January 2012

“I was perhaps twenty-three when I first ate almost enough caviar—not to mention any caviar at all that I can now remember. It was one of the best, brightest days of my whole life with my parents, and lunching in the quiet back room at the Café de la Paix was only one part of the luminous whole. My mother ate fresh foie gras, sternly forbidden to her liver, but she loved the cathedral at Strasbourg enough to risk almost any kind of attack, and this truffled slab was so plainly the best of her lifetime that we all agreed it could do her nothing but good, which it did. My father and I ate caviar, probably Sevruga, with green-black smallish beads and a superb challenge of flavor for the iced grassy vodka we used to cleanse our happy palates. We ate three portions apiece, tacitly knowing it could never happen again that anything would be quite so mysteriously perfect in both time and space. The headwaiter sensed all this, which is, of course, why he was world-known, and the portions got larger, and at our third blissful command he simply put the tin in its ice bowl upon our table. It was a regal gesture, like being tapped on the shoulder with a sword. We bowed, served ourselves exactly as he would have done, grain for grain, and had no need for any more. It was reward enough to sit in the almost empty room, chaste rococo in the slanting June sunlight, with the generous tub of pure delight between us, Mother purring there, the vodka seeping slyly through our veins, and real wood strawberries to come, to make us feel like children again and not near-gods. That was a fine introduction to what I hope is a reasonably long life of such occasional bliss.”

M.F.K. Fisher, “Once a Tramp, Always…”

•  25 December 2011