“‘How large a crew do you use?’ David Lean asked him one year at Cannes. ‘I always work with 18 friends,’ Bergman said. ‘That’s funny,’ said Lean. ‘I work with 150 enemies.’”

— Roger Ebert on Ingmar Bergman, who died three years ago today.

•  30 July 2010

From a canoe, on a lake somewhere in Muskoka.

•  30 July 2010  •  1 note

I put this together last night from footage I shot over the weekend.

It was shot in the vicinity of Little Lake in Muskoka, Ontario. No hummingbirds were disturbed, disenchanted, disenfranchised or downsized in the making of this video.

Shot on a Canon Rebel T2i (550D) with a Sigma 30mm f1.4 lens at 720p/60p, then conformed down to 24p for the overcrank-style slow-mo.

•  28 July 2010

Do you hear music in your head?

Sure, but I try not to, now. I really have to block music out. It’s too painful for me. The sense of loss is unbelievable. I mean, my soul came through with music. Music was everything for me. I get musical ideas where I’m, like, “OK, don’t go there.” And actually, listening to music can be a real problem for me now, because it creates symptoms.

“Speaking With John,” a sad interview with John Lurie at the Huffington Post.

•  20 July 2010

“At the end of september 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Higham with Clara in search of somewhere to live.” (The Emigrants)

“In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” (The Rings of Saturn)

“In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks.” (Austerlitz)

•  19 July 2010  •  2 notes

A li’l movie I cut together yesterday distilling a night in NYC. Music by W.A. Mozart. Starring my friends Sharon Eisman, Stuart Jenkins and Siobhan O’Connor.

•  18 July 2010

“Your camera takes such great pictures.”

•  16 July 2010  •  1 note

Oh hey, my movie is premiering tonight. I talk about it a bit here. (I’m also on CBC radio in about 10 minutes.) We’re screening again on Sunday, if you’re interested.

•  14 July 2010  •  3 notes

Sugar Minott died this week at the age of 54. A great singer.

•  13 July 2010

“With a couple of exceptions — Mr. Bellingham among them — interviewing pot sellers is unlike interviewing anyone else in business. Simple yes-or-no questions yield 10-minute soliloquies. Words are coined on the spot, like ‘refudiate,’ and regular words are used in ways that make sense only in context. One guy kept saying ‘rue’ as though it meant ‘reluctant,’ as in ‘I think the state was rue to act.’”

— David Segal, “When Capitalism Meets Cannabis,” in the New York Times

•  9 July 2010