Monday, July 4, 2016

Celebrating U.S.A.'s 240th birthday today from hot & humid Florida, but wishing I was in Sweden, on a boat in the Stockholm archipelago, eating strawberries with friends, and enjoying the Midnight Sun; Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries"

Snapshots, in a few tweets and words, of what I'm thinking about today, the Fourth of July...
Celebrating U.S.A.'s 240th birthday today from hot & humid Florida, but wishing I was in Sweden, on a boat in the Stockholm archipelago, eating strawberries with friends, and enjoying the Midnight Sun; Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries"







A photo posted by fullofkeys (@fullofkeys) on

Above, a great recent snapshot of a boat in an archipelago in Sweden taken on Midsummer Day by super-talented Anni Bernhard, a.k.a. singer Full of Keys, a friend of the blog and someone we adore for a whole host of good reasons, many of which we've written about here in the past.



Updated on 2016-07-05

Well, it's the Fourth of July, Birthday #240 for the USA.
Owing perhaps to the oppressive heat and humidity of Florida as I'm experiencing it in 2016. I mentioned strawberries in one of my tweets earlier today to Magnus Lundin, savvy and personable CEO of SISP, the Swedish Incubators & Science Parks, located in beautiful Stockholm, because 
a.) I really do LOVE strawberries, and,
b.) It seems without ever planning to, more often than not, most Fourth of July weekends, at some point, often after watching fireworks, I end up watching Ingmar Bergman's iconic film "Wild Strawberries" because... it's SO perfect, SO summer and SO Sweden!

I can't believe that I and my then-friends put up with this crazy summer heat as a kid growing-up in South Florida in the early and mid-1970's, riding our bikes EVERYWHERE during the day, without benefit of plastic water bottles!


Which is to say, for me, it's a perfect film for transporting me away from my everyday, mundane concerns, including helping me to forget how truly hot it is outside, with mosquitos buzzing around aiming to make me their meal ticket, something that was just as true this time of the year when I was living and working in Chicago and Washington, D.C. as it is today back in Florida. 

Part of the genius of this film, at least to me, is that like the best films, it always gives gives the viewer a reason to contemplate a life very different from the one they are currently living, since it has a huge dollop of wistfulness in it, something I, perhaps, already spend too much time considering.
This classic film of remembrance, known as Smultronställe in Swedish, officially opened in Sweden on December 26th, 1957, but for me, it remains a film of #summer.

One of my all-time favorite films, I've probably seen it, conservatively, over two dozen times, mostly on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), though I have a DVD and videocassette of it and many other Bergman films. It's a film that I always gets something new out of, and never tire of watching in part because there's so very much going on, even when it doesn't always seem that way.
It stars Victor Sjostrom, and a 22-year old Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Gunnar Björnstrand.  I've got some good clips of it at the bottom of this post for you to peruse.

 For those of you who are new to my blog and the wide variety of subjects that I like to discuss, share and analyze here, or newbies to my ever-expanding number of Followers on Twitter via my @hbbtruth handle, https://twitter.com/hbbtruth, I note here that Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman was accorded one of the greatest honors of any film personality I can think of when a few years ago, he was chosen to be the face of the newest Swedish 200 Kronor note, starting last year, replacing Selma Lagerlöf, who was the first female writer to ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Designed by Göran Österlund

I previously discussed who the newest faces of Swedish currency were in this April 25, 2012 blog post titled, "Beautiful, just like the original! Greta Garbo will be featured on the new Swedish 100 Kronor note, with Ingmar Bergman on the 200 SEK note, all designed by Göran Österlund, starting in 2015"
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/beautiful-just-like-original-greta.html

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