Eh...lots of interesting stuff or not....
Dec. 2nd, 2019 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Cutting Edge Brain Surgery for Essential Tremor
[I was diagnosed with essential tremor in 2002, and use medication to keep mine in check. It's not severe, and my neurologist prescribes the mediation instead. My mother and brother have versions of it as well. Mine is by far the most noticeable, my brother's isn't that noticeable at all. Stress, anxiety, anger, lack of sleep, low blood sugar (not eating), overexertion - all elevate it. Alcohol and nicotine decrease it. I don't smoke, and drinking isn't the best option. Also CBD decreases it. When I get really upset or really angry -- my right hand shakes so badly that I can't type. But it is nowhere near as bad as the man in this article.]
Lou Pandolfe looks at his freshly shaved scalp in a mirror and smiles ruefully at the unfamiliar reflection smiling back. The previous evening, he and his wife, Christine, drove up to Boston from their home in West Hartford, Connecticut, for pre-op preceding a new type of brain surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Tomorrow, Pandolfe will turn 77. He and Christine hope a successful surgery will be his birthday gift.
Over the last two decades, Pandolfe developed a serious tremor of his limbs and his voice. His shaking got so severe he often had to stop what he was doing when he still worked at the auto parts company his father had started as a scrap yard during the Great Depression. “I was struggling with handwriting and working with equipment,” he says. “The guys in the shop couldn’t read my work orders.” Navigating a screwdriver into a screwhead took grim concentration, fighting the tremor and gripping the tool with both hands. He’d enjoyed singing but his voice has diminished to a growly tremolo. He can’t raise a glass of water to his lips without sloshing it on himself.
Except for the tremor, Pandolfe is pretty healthy, with a daughter and son he visits, and grandkids who love to play with him. “I never felt embarrassed by the tremor,” he says. But he longs to have his hands, voice, and sense of control back. A few years ago, a neurologist told him he had something called “benign essential tremor,” a condition involving a disruption in the thalamus, a relay point in the brain for touch, pain, and other sensations. This type of tremor afflicts 7 million to 10 million Americans, and Pandolfe is in the 10 percent suffering severe symptoms.
His neurosurgeon, Dr. Rees Cosgrove, stands beside him in the white-walled prep room, surgical suite L1, bay 3 at the Brigham. Cosgrove gently encircles Pandolfe’s bald, shining head at hat-brim level with a gray metal frame about an inch wide. He peels and refastens the Velcro webbing supporting it, until it hangs evenly just above Pandolfe’s eyebrows.
Cosgrove and a neurosurgical resident poke long needles of novocaine through holes in the front and back of the frame. Then they insert and tighten bolts with sharp tips that dig in to the skull and stop the frame from slipping. Pandolfe winces. “That was the worst part of your day,” Cosgrove says. “Does the frame feel tight?”
Pandolfe, tall, gangly, and quiet, not sedated at all, stands up from the prep chair and follows Cosgrove and his physician’s assistant, Sarah Christie, into the next room. They help Pandolfe lie, face up, on a gurney that will slide into a huge MRI machine. Then they wrestle a gasket-tight hat — it looks like a pith helmet designed by Salvador Dalí — over the top of his skull. After it’s securely sealed, the team clamps Pandolfe’s rubber-hatted head to the gurney, then lowers a double-walled dome like a beauty-parlor hair dryer on top of the frame. They fill the dome with water.
For the next two hours of precision brain mapping and fastidious surgery, the patient’s head must not even wiggle. Cosgrove and his team will focus ultrasound waves on a spot deep in Pandolfe’s brain, burning up part of the circuitry of his tremor. Pandolfe’s head is bolted down because a millimeter or two shift could burn the wrong part of the brain, which might slur speech, numb a hand, or leave him with weakened limbs, imbalance, even cognitive difficulties.
Before settling on this new surgery, Pandolfe had looked into his options. Since medication wasn’t working for him — “it made me dizzy,” he says — deep brain stimulation was the standard approach. That procedure involves drilling burr holes in the skull, inserting wire-thin electrodes into both thalami, and linking them to a neural pacemaker implanted in the patient’s chest. This eases tremor in both arms, but it is costly, there is a risk of infection, and the pacemaker batteries must be surgically replaced every two years. Pandolfe thought it seemed too complicated.
One of Pandolfe’s neurologists knew of the new procedure being performed by Cosgrove at Brigham and Women’s. Cosgrove is soft-spoken, 62, with three grown daughters. He’s done his share of deep brain stimulation surgeries. He has about the same tall, thin build as Pandolfe, and he too was born to his vocation. “It chose me,” he says. His father, a neurologist at Montreal Neurological Institute, was also “a concert-quality pianist who loved Mozart. I prefer Bach.”
Cosgrove met with the Pandolfes and told them more about the new approach, that it took just a few hours, and that it did not involve cutting into the patient or a pacemaker. And, best of all, the relief it offered from tremors appeared to be permanent. Pandolfe met the obvious requirements: He was over 21, and his tremor interfered with his life and did not respond well to medication. After the meeting, Pandolfe felt certain: He would do the surgery.
2. 20 Slang Terms From World War I - some of which are still in effect
3. Stop Obsessing Over Sleep - Your Brain Will Thank You
Maiken Nedergaard considers herself a pragmatic woman. She’s got kids, a career, and she knows she feels better after a solid night of shut-eye. She’s also a neuroscientist at the forefront of research showing the biological value of sleep. In studies she coauthored in 2013 and 2019, she documented how during sleep, fluid washes over our brains, clearing out toxins like beta amyloid, which is linked to neurodegenerative diseases.
Suddenly sleep became a tonic: an Alzheimer’s wonder drug available, for free, every evening. For Nedergaard, the results made her anxious about her own bedtime priorities. Now, she says, “I take sleep very seriously.”
For the rest of us, who don’t have labs full of equipment to study the inner workings of the brain, there’s a growing suite of gadgets offering the illusion of science: nightly reports full of numbers and charts purporting to show just how well we’re performing while conked out. Fitbit kicked off this trend when it released the first tracker in 2009.
Little more than a glorified pedometer at the time, the Fitbit couldn’t monitor your heart rate, pay for anything, or even tell you the time. (It even shorted a WIRED reviewer’s run by 0.6 mile: “Not cool!”) But it did include a sleep tracker that measured the duration and quality of your slumber, producing a “sleep efficiency” score. Since then, obsession with sleep optimization has only grown. The global sleep-tracking market topped $1 billion in 2016. It’s expected to increase by another 18 percent by 2024.
Sleep, once no more glamorous than taking a shower, is now perched at the pinnacle of the well-being-as-a-lifestyle trend. The irony is that by agonizing over sleep, it’s also turning into a source of anxiety—the kind of thing that keeps people up at night. Fears over bad sleep are getting the TED treatment and topping best-seller lists.
In his semi-pop-science distillation of research, Why We Sleep, UC Berkeley psychologist Matthew Walker warns that sleep loss is an epidemic that could have dire consequences. Our chronically overtired brains make our bodies more susceptible to diabetes, cancer, and other diseases, he argued. Getting a good 40 winks, on the other hand, would improve memory and mood, and even make us feel and look younger. “Sleep is a nonnegotiable biological necessity,” Walker proclaimed in his 2019 TED talk. “It is your life support system. And it is Mother Nature’s best attempt at immortality.”
Who among us would scoff at immortality?
And so we’ve slipped Oura rings onto fingers and wrapped Fitbits and Apple Watches around wrists. Beneath sheets and mattresses we’ve concealed Beddits and Emfits, sensors that promise to monitor heart rates and sleep cycles from their discreet hiding places. We track our REM and non-REM cycles, scrutinizing the length, quality, and depth of our rest on Reddit forums like r/sleep and r/Biohackers, where users write about the benefits of cold showers and question the need for pillows.
All this measuring, rating, tracking, and comparing now amounts to a new sleep disorder that some scientists are calling orthosomnia. A coinage of Greek origin that merges "straight" or "correct" with "sleep," orthosomnia is a condition where anxiety over proper sleep metrics actually induces insomnia.
“The patients' inferred correlation between sleep tracker data and daytime fatigue may become a perfectionistic quest,” wrote the researchers from Northwestern and Rush universities who came up with the term after observing three cases of people who relied more on their sleep-tracking data than on the advice of experts. In one case, a 27-year-old woman insisted she wasn’t getting enough deep sleep and underwent a full examination in the lab. The test concluded she slept normally, but she remained unconvinced. “Then why does my Fitbit say I am sleeping poorly?” she asked.
Sleep has become one more thing to feel guilty about, even when the data we’re consulting is often flawed or incomplete. It’s one more number we didn’t hit, one more goal we didn’t achieve. Pangs of guilt follow every new study reminding us of this magical panacea, if we would just turn off Netflix, forget our social lives, emails, and all the dishes in the sink, and just climb into bed.
Sleep may be a biological necessity, but our stress over it is a choice. So let’s put the issue to bed. Hit the snooze button on this one! All the wide-eyed worry over shut-eye is the thing that’s actually cheating us of immortality, or at the very least, stealing the promise of a delicious, relaxing, no-pressure night of sleep.
[It's odd, but I have no interest in immortality. Also, I did start sleeping better when I stopped stressing over it and just let it be.]
4. Does Who You Are at 7 Determine Who You are at 63? -- an article describing in detail, Britain's ground-breaking "7 UP Series".
To spend time with a child is to dwell under the terms of an uneasy truce between the possibility of the present and the inevitability of the future. Our deepest hope for the children we love is that they will enjoy the liberties of an open-ended destiny, that their desires will be given the free play they deserve, that the circumstances of their birth and upbringing will be felt as opportunities rather than encumbrances; our greatest fear is that they will feel thwarted by forces beyond their control. At the same time, we can’t help poring over their faces and gestures for any signals of eventuality — the trace hints and betrayals of what will emerge in time as their character, their plot, their fate. And what we project forward for the children in our midst can rarely be disentangled from what we project backward for ourselves.
These are the tensions that have animated and shaped the “Up” programs on their way to becoming the longest-running documentary film series of all time. The narrator of 1964’s “Seven Up!” reminds the viewer that “the shop steward and the executive of the year 2000 are now 7 years old,” as the boys and girls arrayed before us in grainy black and white chase each other around during a special outing at the zoo. “This,” the episode concludes, “has been a glimpse of Britain’s future.”
The first film was conceived as a special one-off episode of a program called “World in Action.” The mid-1950s saw an end to the BBC’s monopoly on terrestrial broadcasting, and “World in Action” became the flagship current-affairs program of a Manchester-based commercial upstart called Granada Television. The show was run by a 30-something Australian émigré named Tim Hewat, a former editor of the northern Daily Express and an instrumental figure in the expansion of broadsheet vigor to television. As an expat, Hewat found absurd the idea that postwar Britain had at last begun to dismantle the rigid class determinations that striated the country for centuries, and he was looking for a novel way to expose the lie of the new egalitarianism.
Hewat was taken with the saying, “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will give you the man,” and proposed the idea for “Seven Up!” As one researcher remembered it, Hewat imagined an aerial shot of 20 7-year-olds subjected by voice-over to merciless prophecy: “ ‘Five are going to be winners (zoom in), and 15 are going to be losers (zoom in). Now we’re going to show you why.’ ” Years later, the researcher said, “we supposed artists nodded condescendingly at this barbarian tabloid conceit and then went out and made a film which, though not in those words, said exactly that.”
Apted, 22 and a fresh graduate of Granada’s trainee program, was enlisted as a researcher. His background made him an obvious choice. Apted’s mother was a Blitz evacuee, and he was born in the countryside northwest of London in 1941. His family returned in peacetime to Ilford, a middle-class town east of the city proper. His father worked as a surveyor for a fire-insurance company, and his mother brought up the children — Apted, a brother and a sister who was adopted after a string of miscarriages. He has described his mother as “a kind of tragic figure,” a very bright woman who, as the youngest of six siblings, was denied the educational foundation for a career. His father went to good schools but never attended university. Apted’s parents, in the hope that their children would reach the solid ranks of the respectable middle class, put what little money they had into education, and from age 10 he commuted on the underground to the prestigious City of London School.
AND another excerpt..
There is no way to describe the arc of the program without making it sound like an incidental soap opera of our short and ordinary days. Tony becomes a cabby, fails as a publican, confesses his marital infidelity on camera, buys a home in London’s outskirts, adds a vacation property in Spain, raises his granddaughter when his own daughter proves unable, tries and fails to open a sports pub, sells his home in Spain after the financial crisis and through it all talks about the celebrities he has driven in his taxi. John, one of the posh boys, drops out of the show before “28” and only returns at “35” on the condition that he can draw attention to the charity work he does in Bulgaria; he never makes it to Parliament, to his chagrin, but he wears the wig and the silk as a Queen’s Counsel. He never has children. (John, who declares in “35 Up” that the show feels like a “little pill of poison” injected into his veins, will not speak to Apted on camera; Lewis has conducted the interviews since 1991.) Bruce, who once dreamed of missionary work, teaches immigrant children in the East End — it’s the same school Tony attended, as it turns out, after the neighborhood’s great demographic shift — before marrying late, having two boys and abandoning the ideals of his youth to serve at an elite school that was founded in the year 948. They gain lined faces, put on weight, lose parents.
The original political aims of the series weren’t abandoned so much as rendered implicit. Apted experimented with various timely inquiries over the years — he once asked the participants about the death of Princess Diana — but the material never worked and he threw it out. Class, of course, never goes away. Though there is indeed some social mobility, the elites are running the country and the nonelites, while mostly comfortable, are not. In 2005, with the release of “49 Up,” the British journalist Jonathan Freedland wrote, “It seems Granada’s original premise — that background determines fate — has held up depressingly well.” The nature of the class system, however, had changed since the Thatcherite revolution of the early 1980s. As the British social historian Joe Moran noted, in 2002, the series “did not foresee the decline of the British economy’s manufacturing base, the fragmentation of the working class, the rising number of white-collar jobs and Thatcherism’s destruction of union power.” It also didn’t foresee the expansion of middle-class consumerism or the rise of the predatory gig economy.
Apted might not have anticipated these things, but they nevertheless find expression as the delimiting conditions of the participants’ lives. If in the early installments he attempted to recruit individual biography to dramatize socioeconomic history, the program’s attention is ultimately drawn to an even more profound dynamic: the interplay of self and environment. The narrative center of gravity of the “Up” films hovers somewhere between the stiff-necked documentarian and the unruly subjects to whom he is yoked. Apted, like a social scientist, emphasizes the role of big, obstinate forces; his participants almost invariably take the opposing side of agency and self-determination. What we get, as the show goes on, is an ever-fuller picture of how particular individuals at times shrink to inhabit the givens of an inheritance and at times spill over the sides of those constraints. What emerges are the countervailing qualities of structure and dignity.
The program is able to generate this surfeit of meaning in part through the frictional trajectory of its participants’ relationship with Apted himself — as both an individual and as a sort of imago, a figure of fraught authority. Apted has been candid about the odd, transactional nature of the exercise. The children retain an enormous amount of power over him. Many of them have made no secret of the fact that they wish they’d never been chosen; they endure it only out of loyalty. Which is not to say that they aren’t happy to exploit Apted’s vulnerability. Peter, who dropped out after the right-wing media tarred him for the vehement anti-Thatcherite politics he expressed in “28 Up,” was only coaxed to return when Apted agreed to help him promote his band. Still, the negotiations could be extremely difficult and often drove Apted to the end of his tether. He spent several “ludicrous” months trying to get Suzy to participate in “63 Up” — in which, among other ruses, he used other people’s phones to call so she wouldn’t know it was him — and she nevertheless bowed out, to his enduring peevishness.
When they have agreed to continue, Apted nevertheless has needed to remain cautious; he gets right up to the line of the unacceptable without crossing it. His perennial gambits, as he once acknowledged to an interviewer, are “Why?” and “What do you mean?” He recognizes that “why” is an aggressive question, yet he is perfectly happy to ask it and then sit in silence, to the point of sadism. “I never want to take advantage of them or be too soft on them,” he told me. “With people like Neil, who are very bright but very vulnerable, you don’t want them to think you’re being too judgmental.” Still, he can be frontal to an astonishing degree. At the end of his interview with Neil in “63 Up,” Apted risks asking what Neil makes of the maxim, which in Neil’s case would have predicted something other than a life of free-fall.
“At 7 and 14,” Apted says, “everybody was in love with you. … ”
Neil cuts him off, saying, “And now nobody speaks to me.”
Apted thought that was marvelous.
Over their three hours together, Jackie was alternately furious, despondent, cheerful, horrified, frustrated, disbelieving and amused. Every half an hour they would break, and Lewis would come to Apted’s corner like a boxer’s cut man. Eventually they got around to the material Apted and Lewis discussed in the van. Jackie conceded that something of the core of her character had been captured at 7, though what life would dole out to that child could not of course be anticipated with clarity. Apted pushed her.
“This is an odd question for you,” Apted began. “I mean, we all think you’re a very, very bright, very talented woman — I mean, could you have done more, do you think?”
“Yes, I should have done more. I should have done more. But the trouble is, when you’re 18, 20, 22, you think you know it all and you’ve done it all — or I did, let’s put it that way, but by the time you reach 35 you’re like, ‘Oh, dear, I didn’t know anything.’ But by then I had my children, so I had to concentrate on my children. I was going to say, ‘By the time they grew up and left home,’ but they haven’t!”
“We’ve talked about relationships,” Apted said, “but one we haven’t talked about is you and me — ”
Jackie giggled, a sound that has not changed since she was 7.
“ — which was a big part of our lives in a way, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, of course it is,” Jackie said.
“What was that about? What’s your version of it?”
“Are you talking specifics?” Jackie asked. “You’re talking about ’49’?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Jackie collected herself for a moment. “Now I appreciate,” she said, “that when we started at 7 most women were in the kitchen or were bringing up children, there weren’t many career women and those there were were frowned upon, but when we hit 21 I really thought you’d have had a better idea of how the world worked, shall I say?”
It wasn’t just about how many men Jackie had or hadn’t slept with. “I just didn’t feel that you had any idea of the changing role of women in the U.K. at that point,” she said. “That sounds awfully dismissive, but it was how I felt,” she went on. “I knew you knew you didn’t have enough women in it, and that’s why you introduced Debbie and some of the other wives, but you still asked us the most mundane, domestic questions, and I really wanted to go, ‘Rrrrrr.’ So by ’49’ I actually thought, You know what? No more. I’m not having this anymore.” This part was included in the film, in slightly shorter form, but the following exchange was not.
“I went to a boys’ school and all that sort of stuff,” Apted replied, “so I never saw the lives of a lot of women, girls and whatever, so you’re probably right, I was a bit. … ” Apted seemed to lose his train of thought.
Jackie laughed and rescued him. “I understand that,” she said, “and that’s why I’m saying. … I wanted to say what I wanted to say but that would never affect our relationship. I know if I picked up the phone and said, ‘Michael, I need help,’ you would be there.” Jackie’s voice began to catch, and her eyes shone. “You would say to me, ‘Where, when and how?’ and if it was humanly possible you would help me, I know that. I know you care about me, and I care about you, but that didn’t stop me having to have a go at you. Well, we’re a family, families fall out, families have arguments, but we are a family.”
Jackie stopped, unsure if she had it in her to say out loud the thing that was plainly on the mind of every person in that room. Apted was frail and prone to falls; he regularly misplaced his personal items; he could often enough recall the past with great detail but sought frequent clarification of where he was supposed to go and why. Apted, she feared, would not be well enough to make a movie in seven years’ time. The likelihood there would ever be a “70 Up” was vanishing.
“And this is one of the reasons, and I’ll tell you this now, it’s one of the reasons there’ll never be another program for me.” Her voice broke. Apted himself was not in tears; everyone else in the room was either openly crying or seemed to be struggling for composure. “This is me, I’m done. Because I’m not having somebody else sitting in that chair and somebody else sitting behind the cameras. I wouldn’t be able to trust them the way I trust all of you.”
At a recent celebration of Apted’s achievement, the filmmaker Alex Gibney noted that “63 Up” — the culmination of a program that has drawn its energy from the unfairness of class and its tenderness from the unfairness of flesh — is marked by a “profound sense of mortality.” Lynn has died; her husband, who had always kept his distance from the program, nevertheless agreed to appear, along with their daughters, in Lynn’s stead. Another of the participants, Nick, reveals that throat cancer has made him “seriously ill.” In its broad strokes, Nick’s life has had the greatest resemblance to Apted’s own: an Oxbridge degree, expatriation to the States, divorce. Nick has also provided some of the more astute on-camera commentary. In “56 Up,” he wonders aloud whether a few minutes of his life drawn almost at random every seven years can possibly say anything about who he is. “It isn’t a picture, really, of the essence of Nick,” he concludes. “It’s a picture of Everyman. It’s how a person — any person — how they change.”
In “63 Up,” this change has run its course, and Nick acknowledges that his thoughts extend no farther than the short term. The program’s dreamlike, foreshortened and haphazardly disobedient rapport with chronology renders not only his present but his past almost unbearably poignant: not a midcareer professor but a dying professor; not a newlywed but a dying newlywed; not a student but a dying student; not a child but a dying child.
This past February, a few months after Jackie’s shoot in Norfolk, I visited Apted in a rented editing suite in Santa Monica, Calif. The notes he got from the studio executives had been a cause for irritation — he felt as though they were trying to revise a formula that had worked for 56 years — but by his own admission he’d never been particularly agreeable about studio notes. Or rather, the notes weren’t terrible, he allowed; he just wasn’t going to use any of them. He felt as though the producers were too new to the series to appreciate its scope. Apted was irked by notes like “Lose Sue’s dog.”
Kim Horton, who has edited the series since “28 Up,” matched Apted’s indignation. “That dog’s been in it for two or three programs!”
“Sue’s dog is quite famous,” Apted said solemnly; he was again confusing two different dogs, but it didn’t matter. “He runs downstairs and watches an animal show on TV. The notes said, ‘That’s not their life, take it out’ — well, it is their life.”
As Apted finished the rough cut, he was also moving out of the bungalow that served, for the previous seven years, as his office. Recently he has had some difficulties securing work, and his professional future in Hollywood was uncertain. The office was in complete disorder, littered with decades of files, awards and scripts, as well as his youngest son’s childhood artwork, an embroidered West Ham pillow, business from his years as the president of the Director’s Guild and cartons of financial, medical and divorce records. “When this is over,” he said, “and I’m not doing anything for the rest of my life, I can go through these boxes.”
On his last day in the office, he peered at the assorted leavings and turned to Cort Kristensen, his producing partner; originally hired 18 years ago as Apted’s assistant, Kristensen now tends to Apted with filial devotion. “You’re sure we got everything done in here?”
“Stop panicking, Michael,” Kristensen said.
We sat at a picnic table outside the editing suite, and he evaluated his achievement. “On the whole,” he said of “63 Up,” “they’ve never been better, the people in it. They’ve had to pay attention to the whole life span, to confront themselves, and they seemed to be very serious. I was fairly thorough with them.” It hadn’t required a lot of prodding this time. “I suppose when you’re asked to look back on your life, it can’t be a flat experience; it has to be an emotional experience.”
I asked if any of them had surprised him. There were a handful of plot twists, long-delayed revelations and belated experiences, but those were par for the course. What struck him now were tonal shifts. He mentioned Nick, the ailing expat professor, who had only agreed to an interview in a last-minute text of three words, Apted told me. Apted had rushed back from Australia, where he was shooting Paul and Symon, to visit him in Wisconsin. Apted had been warned that Nick might have to stop every 10 minutes or so for a break, but Nick had spoken without pause for an hour and a half. “He wanted to settle things,” Apted said, “with himself and the people who knew him and the audience.” In the past, it had been a struggle for Nick to summon emotion; now he struggled to summon his old dispassion. “I’m still the same little kid, really,” he said over the footage of himself at 7. “I think all of us are.”
Apted paced the terrain of recollection; he never felt bound by archival chronology in the show — he had always loved Buñuel above all, and thought that the “Up” series’ desultory shuffle of the flashbacks mimicked the peregrinations of the unconscious — and now freely wandered the chambers of his memory. The excruciating time Tony admitted to adultery on camera. His anger with Charles, who dropped out after “21.” John, he felt, had never really trusted him; he supposed he might have been making fun of him a bit with the business of running him out with the hounds, but he’d always really liked him. Apted felt a strong reaction this time to the accordioned archives that began each segment. “To condense all that time to a hysterical pace — it’s terrifying, in sort of a bogus way, but it does dramatize how quickly things go by.” It gave him, he continued, “strange feelings about time and passage of time — it’s all so distorted.”
I asked him what he thought now of the maxim “Give me a child until he is 7, and I will give you the man.”
“It’s just a platitude,” he said, with little ceremony. “There’s no great wisdom. My two older boys, when I think back to how they were at 7, pretty much turned out how you’d expect — one serious, the other a jolly fellow, and they still are.” He stopped. “Well, the elder one died. But they stayed the same at heart. I don’t think it’s a particularly brilliant observation, frankly.
“This is my life, right in front of me,” he added — a life overlaid by 14 other, random lives, forever entwined with them, a life forever contoured in haunting outline by other people’s triumphs and other people’s pain. “My life is concentrated, the way it’s laid out now. ‘Seven Up!’ was the first serious piece of work I was involved with, and now it’s my whole working life in front of me.” He shielded his eyes from the sun. “I’m not going to be well enough to make another of these — it’s an irony that here are the bookends of my life. I might have 10 more years of sadness of not doing what I want, but there’s something beautiful about that — about having my life in that beautiful box.”
5. Interview with Jamie Lee Curtis in New York Magazine -- talks about Knives Out
6. Thanksgiving
Coworker: Did you enjoy the holiday.
Me: Yes.
Coworker: What did you do?
Me: I watched movies, tv, wrote, drank chicken soup, ate apple pie and baked apples, took a couple of short walks, and slept...which I completely enjoyed.
Coworker: Uh...no family? Or thanksgiving feast?
Me: No, family lives too far away, and I can't eat half of it anyhow.
Coworker: Oh that's sad.
Me: Not really. I enjoyed the rest, and I got over a bad chest cold. It was relaxing not to have to go anywhere for a few days, just wander about my own hood, and rest.
I have a people intensive job, with an hour and a half commute each way on subway and train. I love having four days just to myself. No travel. No making conversation. Just being. (Although I did talk to Wales and my mother, also corresponded on FB fanboard, and on DW journal. So not completely people free.)
Weird, I know, but there it is.
7. The Crown
I'm enjoying Season 3 more than expected. The second and third episodes blew me away in their quiet yet detailed portraits of various members of the Royal Family. I cried through a good portion of Aberfan, which reminded me a little of my father's mother -- who much like Queen Elizabeth couldn't cry. I remember being upset with her once as a little girl for not crying when her cat of 20 years had died. My grandmother told me of how she'd watched her mother die at the age of 7 (the age I was at that time) and after that she rarely cried. She'd been taught not to.
And said, just because someone doesn't express emotion through tears or the way you do -- doesn't mean they don't feel anything. They just are private about it.
I never forgot it. My father rarely cries. He does but rarely. Nor does my brother - although I'm admittedly not around him enough now to know. He did cry as a child.
My mother and I, on the other hand, have been known to cry during commercials.
8. The Irishman -- haven't seen it yet. But my parents did, they had mixed feelings. My mother felt it was too long and overrated. Which was Chidi (film buff co-worker who looks like Chidi from The Good Place) reaction as well. He told me that the film feels the need to go into detail about everyone's lives from beginning to end, my mother agreed. On NY1 they said it was the hot ticket this weekend, and historic in that it leap frogged from the movie theaters to Netflix streaming in less than a month. One person saw it, while the other guy watched The Crown. The one who watched and loved the Irishman, couldn't get into the Crown and vice versa.
Everyone agrees that it is too long and needed a good editor.
I suppose I should see it, since people keep asking me if I have yet. I may split it into two parts. Martin Scorsese sort requires me to be in the right mood. And I haven't been lately. His films tend to be very male dominated, he's not really fond of writing female roles for some reason -- although he has done a few films that had strong female roles within them.
I'm actually more curious about "Marriage Story" -- but then I'm more into relationship drama at the moment than historical drama or crime drama.
Chidi and I both want to see "Knives Out" -- I may try to see it next weekend. Not sure yet. (Not with Chidi, I see enough of Chidi at work.)
[I was diagnosed with essential tremor in 2002, and use medication to keep mine in check. It's not severe, and my neurologist prescribes the mediation instead. My mother and brother have versions of it as well. Mine is by far the most noticeable, my brother's isn't that noticeable at all. Stress, anxiety, anger, lack of sleep, low blood sugar (not eating), overexertion - all elevate it. Alcohol and nicotine decrease it. I don't smoke, and drinking isn't the best option. Also CBD decreases it. When I get really upset or really angry -- my right hand shakes so badly that I can't type. But it is nowhere near as bad as the man in this article.]
Lou Pandolfe looks at his freshly shaved scalp in a mirror and smiles ruefully at the unfamiliar reflection smiling back. The previous evening, he and his wife, Christine, drove up to Boston from their home in West Hartford, Connecticut, for pre-op preceding a new type of brain surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Tomorrow, Pandolfe will turn 77. He and Christine hope a successful surgery will be his birthday gift.
Over the last two decades, Pandolfe developed a serious tremor of his limbs and his voice. His shaking got so severe he often had to stop what he was doing when he still worked at the auto parts company his father had started as a scrap yard during the Great Depression. “I was struggling with handwriting and working with equipment,” he says. “The guys in the shop couldn’t read my work orders.” Navigating a screwdriver into a screwhead took grim concentration, fighting the tremor and gripping the tool with both hands. He’d enjoyed singing but his voice has diminished to a growly tremolo. He can’t raise a glass of water to his lips without sloshing it on himself.
Except for the tremor, Pandolfe is pretty healthy, with a daughter and son he visits, and grandkids who love to play with him. “I never felt embarrassed by the tremor,” he says. But he longs to have his hands, voice, and sense of control back. A few years ago, a neurologist told him he had something called “benign essential tremor,” a condition involving a disruption in the thalamus, a relay point in the brain for touch, pain, and other sensations. This type of tremor afflicts 7 million to 10 million Americans, and Pandolfe is in the 10 percent suffering severe symptoms.
His neurosurgeon, Dr. Rees Cosgrove, stands beside him in the white-walled prep room, surgical suite L1, bay 3 at the Brigham. Cosgrove gently encircles Pandolfe’s bald, shining head at hat-brim level with a gray metal frame about an inch wide. He peels and refastens the Velcro webbing supporting it, until it hangs evenly just above Pandolfe’s eyebrows.
Cosgrove and a neurosurgical resident poke long needles of novocaine through holes in the front and back of the frame. Then they insert and tighten bolts with sharp tips that dig in to the skull and stop the frame from slipping. Pandolfe winces. “That was the worst part of your day,” Cosgrove says. “Does the frame feel tight?”
Pandolfe, tall, gangly, and quiet, not sedated at all, stands up from the prep chair and follows Cosgrove and his physician’s assistant, Sarah Christie, into the next room. They help Pandolfe lie, face up, on a gurney that will slide into a huge MRI machine. Then they wrestle a gasket-tight hat — it looks like a pith helmet designed by Salvador Dalí — over the top of his skull. After it’s securely sealed, the team clamps Pandolfe’s rubber-hatted head to the gurney, then lowers a double-walled dome like a beauty-parlor hair dryer on top of the frame. They fill the dome with water.
For the next two hours of precision brain mapping and fastidious surgery, the patient’s head must not even wiggle. Cosgrove and his team will focus ultrasound waves on a spot deep in Pandolfe’s brain, burning up part of the circuitry of his tremor. Pandolfe’s head is bolted down because a millimeter or two shift could burn the wrong part of the brain, which might slur speech, numb a hand, or leave him with weakened limbs, imbalance, even cognitive difficulties.
Before settling on this new surgery, Pandolfe had looked into his options. Since medication wasn’t working for him — “it made me dizzy,” he says — deep brain stimulation was the standard approach. That procedure involves drilling burr holes in the skull, inserting wire-thin electrodes into both thalami, and linking them to a neural pacemaker implanted in the patient’s chest. This eases tremor in both arms, but it is costly, there is a risk of infection, and the pacemaker batteries must be surgically replaced every two years. Pandolfe thought it seemed too complicated.
One of Pandolfe’s neurologists knew of the new procedure being performed by Cosgrove at Brigham and Women’s. Cosgrove is soft-spoken, 62, with three grown daughters. He’s done his share of deep brain stimulation surgeries. He has about the same tall, thin build as Pandolfe, and he too was born to his vocation. “It chose me,” he says. His father, a neurologist at Montreal Neurological Institute, was also “a concert-quality pianist who loved Mozart. I prefer Bach.”
Cosgrove met with the Pandolfes and told them more about the new approach, that it took just a few hours, and that it did not involve cutting into the patient or a pacemaker. And, best of all, the relief it offered from tremors appeared to be permanent. Pandolfe met the obvious requirements: He was over 21, and his tremor interfered with his life and did not respond well to medication. After the meeting, Pandolfe felt certain: He would do the surgery.
2. 20 Slang Terms From World War I - some of which are still in effect
3. Stop Obsessing Over Sleep - Your Brain Will Thank You
Maiken Nedergaard considers herself a pragmatic woman. She’s got kids, a career, and she knows she feels better after a solid night of shut-eye. She’s also a neuroscientist at the forefront of research showing the biological value of sleep. In studies she coauthored in 2013 and 2019, she documented how during sleep, fluid washes over our brains, clearing out toxins like beta amyloid, which is linked to neurodegenerative diseases.
Suddenly sleep became a tonic: an Alzheimer’s wonder drug available, for free, every evening. For Nedergaard, the results made her anxious about her own bedtime priorities. Now, she says, “I take sleep very seriously.”
For the rest of us, who don’t have labs full of equipment to study the inner workings of the brain, there’s a growing suite of gadgets offering the illusion of science: nightly reports full of numbers and charts purporting to show just how well we’re performing while conked out. Fitbit kicked off this trend when it released the first tracker in 2009.
Little more than a glorified pedometer at the time, the Fitbit couldn’t monitor your heart rate, pay for anything, or even tell you the time. (It even shorted a WIRED reviewer’s run by 0.6 mile: “Not cool!”) But it did include a sleep tracker that measured the duration and quality of your slumber, producing a “sleep efficiency” score. Since then, obsession with sleep optimization has only grown. The global sleep-tracking market topped $1 billion in 2016. It’s expected to increase by another 18 percent by 2024.
Sleep, once no more glamorous than taking a shower, is now perched at the pinnacle of the well-being-as-a-lifestyle trend. The irony is that by agonizing over sleep, it’s also turning into a source of anxiety—the kind of thing that keeps people up at night. Fears over bad sleep are getting the TED treatment and topping best-seller lists.
In his semi-pop-science distillation of research, Why We Sleep, UC Berkeley psychologist Matthew Walker warns that sleep loss is an epidemic that could have dire consequences. Our chronically overtired brains make our bodies more susceptible to diabetes, cancer, and other diseases, he argued. Getting a good 40 winks, on the other hand, would improve memory and mood, and even make us feel and look younger. “Sleep is a nonnegotiable biological necessity,” Walker proclaimed in his 2019 TED talk. “It is your life support system. And it is Mother Nature’s best attempt at immortality.”
Who among us would scoff at immortality?
And so we’ve slipped Oura rings onto fingers and wrapped Fitbits and Apple Watches around wrists. Beneath sheets and mattresses we’ve concealed Beddits and Emfits, sensors that promise to monitor heart rates and sleep cycles from their discreet hiding places. We track our REM and non-REM cycles, scrutinizing the length, quality, and depth of our rest on Reddit forums like r/sleep and r/Biohackers, where users write about the benefits of cold showers and question the need for pillows.
All this measuring, rating, tracking, and comparing now amounts to a new sleep disorder that some scientists are calling orthosomnia. A coinage of Greek origin that merges "straight" or "correct" with "sleep," orthosomnia is a condition where anxiety over proper sleep metrics actually induces insomnia.
“The patients' inferred correlation between sleep tracker data and daytime fatigue may become a perfectionistic quest,” wrote the researchers from Northwestern and Rush universities who came up with the term after observing three cases of people who relied more on their sleep-tracking data than on the advice of experts. In one case, a 27-year-old woman insisted she wasn’t getting enough deep sleep and underwent a full examination in the lab. The test concluded she slept normally, but she remained unconvinced. “Then why does my Fitbit say I am sleeping poorly?” she asked.
Sleep has become one more thing to feel guilty about, even when the data we’re consulting is often flawed or incomplete. It’s one more number we didn’t hit, one more goal we didn’t achieve. Pangs of guilt follow every new study reminding us of this magical panacea, if we would just turn off Netflix, forget our social lives, emails, and all the dishes in the sink, and just climb into bed.
Sleep may be a biological necessity, but our stress over it is a choice. So let’s put the issue to bed. Hit the snooze button on this one! All the wide-eyed worry over shut-eye is the thing that’s actually cheating us of immortality, or at the very least, stealing the promise of a delicious, relaxing, no-pressure night of sleep.
[It's odd, but I have no interest in immortality. Also, I did start sleeping better when I stopped stressing over it and just let it be.]
4. Does Who You Are at 7 Determine Who You are at 63? -- an article describing in detail, Britain's ground-breaking "7 UP Series".
To spend time with a child is to dwell under the terms of an uneasy truce between the possibility of the present and the inevitability of the future. Our deepest hope for the children we love is that they will enjoy the liberties of an open-ended destiny, that their desires will be given the free play they deserve, that the circumstances of their birth and upbringing will be felt as opportunities rather than encumbrances; our greatest fear is that they will feel thwarted by forces beyond their control. At the same time, we can’t help poring over their faces and gestures for any signals of eventuality — the trace hints and betrayals of what will emerge in time as their character, their plot, their fate. And what we project forward for the children in our midst can rarely be disentangled from what we project backward for ourselves.
These are the tensions that have animated and shaped the “Up” programs on their way to becoming the longest-running documentary film series of all time. The narrator of 1964’s “Seven Up!” reminds the viewer that “the shop steward and the executive of the year 2000 are now 7 years old,” as the boys and girls arrayed before us in grainy black and white chase each other around during a special outing at the zoo. “This,” the episode concludes, “has been a glimpse of Britain’s future.”
The first film was conceived as a special one-off episode of a program called “World in Action.” The mid-1950s saw an end to the BBC’s monopoly on terrestrial broadcasting, and “World in Action” became the flagship current-affairs program of a Manchester-based commercial upstart called Granada Television. The show was run by a 30-something Australian émigré named Tim Hewat, a former editor of the northern Daily Express and an instrumental figure in the expansion of broadsheet vigor to television. As an expat, Hewat found absurd the idea that postwar Britain had at last begun to dismantle the rigid class determinations that striated the country for centuries, and he was looking for a novel way to expose the lie of the new egalitarianism.
Hewat was taken with the saying, “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will give you the man,” and proposed the idea for “Seven Up!” As one researcher remembered it, Hewat imagined an aerial shot of 20 7-year-olds subjected by voice-over to merciless prophecy: “ ‘Five are going to be winners (zoom in), and 15 are going to be losers (zoom in). Now we’re going to show you why.’ ” Years later, the researcher said, “we supposed artists nodded condescendingly at this barbarian tabloid conceit and then went out and made a film which, though not in those words, said exactly that.”
Apted, 22 and a fresh graduate of Granada’s trainee program, was enlisted as a researcher. His background made him an obvious choice. Apted’s mother was a Blitz evacuee, and he was born in the countryside northwest of London in 1941. His family returned in peacetime to Ilford, a middle-class town east of the city proper. His father worked as a surveyor for a fire-insurance company, and his mother brought up the children — Apted, a brother and a sister who was adopted after a string of miscarriages. He has described his mother as “a kind of tragic figure,” a very bright woman who, as the youngest of six siblings, was denied the educational foundation for a career. His father went to good schools but never attended university. Apted’s parents, in the hope that their children would reach the solid ranks of the respectable middle class, put what little money they had into education, and from age 10 he commuted on the underground to the prestigious City of London School.
AND another excerpt..
There is no way to describe the arc of the program without making it sound like an incidental soap opera of our short and ordinary days. Tony becomes a cabby, fails as a publican, confesses his marital infidelity on camera, buys a home in London’s outskirts, adds a vacation property in Spain, raises his granddaughter when his own daughter proves unable, tries and fails to open a sports pub, sells his home in Spain after the financial crisis and through it all talks about the celebrities he has driven in his taxi. John, one of the posh boys, drops out of the show before “28” and only returns at “35” on the condition that he can draw attention to the charity work he does in Bulgaria; he never makes it to Parliament, to his chagrin, but he wears the wig and the silk as a Queen’s Counsel. He never has children. (John, who declares in “35 Up” that the show feels like a “little pill of poison” injected into his veins, will not speak to Apted on camera; Lewis has conducted the interviews since 1991.) Bruce, who once dreamed of missionary work, teaches immigrant children in the East End — it’s the same school Tony attended, as it turns out, after the neighborhood’s great demographic shift — before marrying late, having two boys and abandoning the ideals of his youth to serve at an elite school that was founded in the year 948. They gain lined faces, put on weight, lose parents.
The original political aims of the series weren’t abandoned so much as rendered implicit. Apted experimented with various timely inquiries over the years — he once asked the participants about the death of Princess Diana — but the material never worked and he threw it out. Class, of course, never goes away. Though there is indeed some social mobility, the elites are running the country and the nonelites, while mostly comfortable, are not. In 2005, with the release of “49 Up,” the British journalist Jonathan Freedland wrote, “It seems Granada’s original premise — that background determines fate — has held up depressingly well.” The nature of the class system, however, had changed since the Thatcherite revolution of the early 1980s. As the British social historian Joe Moran noted, in 2002, the series “did not foresee the decline of the British economy’s manufacturing base, the fragmentation of the working class, the rising number of white-collar jobs and Thatcherism’s destruction of union power.” It also didn’t foresee the expansion of middle-class consumerism or the rise of the predatory gig economy.
Apted might not have anticipated these things, but they nevertheless find expression as the delimiting conditions of the participants’ lives. If in the early installments he attempted to recruit individual biography to dramatize socioeconomic history, the program’s attention is ultimately drawn to an even more profound dynamic: the interplay of self and environment. The narrative center of gravity of the “Up” films hovers somewhere between the stiff-necked documentarian and the unruly subjects to whom he is yoked. Apted, like a social scientist, emphasizes the role of big, obstinate forces; his participants almost invariably take the opposing side of agency and self-determination. What we get, as the show goes on, is an ever-fuller picture of how particular individuals at times shrink to inhabit the givens of an inheritance and at times spill over the sides of those constraints. What emerges are the countervailing qualities of structure and dignity.
The program is able to generate this surfeit of meaning in part through the frictional trajectory of its participants’ relationship with Apted himself — as both an individual and as a sort of imago, a figure of fraught authority. Apted has been candid about the odd, transactional nature of the exercise. The children retain an enormous amount of power over him. Many of them have made no secret of the fact that they wish they’d never been chosen; they endure it only out of loyalty. Which is not to say that they aren’t happy to exploit Apted’s vulnerability. Peter, who dropped out after the right-wing media tarred him for the vehement anti-Thatcherite politics he expressed in “28 Up,” was only coaxed to return when Apted agreed to help him promote his band. Still, the negotiations could be extremely difficult and often drove Apted to the end of his tether. He spent several “ludicrous” months trying to get Suzy to participate in “63 Up” — in which, among other ruses, he used other people’s phones to call so she wouldn’t know it was him — and she nevertheless bowed out, to his enduring peevishness.
When they have agreed to continue, Apted nevertheless has needed to remain cautious; he gets right up to the line of the unacceptable without crossing it. His perennial gambits, as he once acknowledged to an interviewer, are “Why?” and “What do you mean?” He recognizes that “why” is an aggressive question, yet he is perfectly happy to ask it and then sit in silence, to the point of sadism. “I never want to take advantage of them or be too soft on them,” he told me. “With people like Neil, who are very bright but very vulnerable, you don’t want them to think you’re being too judgmental.” Still, he can be frontal to an astonishing degree. At the end of his interview with Neil in “63 Up,” Apted risks asking what Neil makes of the maxim, which in Neil’s case would have predicted something other than a life of free-fall.
“At 7 and 14,” Apted says, “everybody was in love with you. … ”
Neil cuts him off, saying, “And now nobody speaks to me.”
Apted thought that was marvelous.
Over their three hours together, Jackie was alternately furious, despondent, cheerful, horrified, frustrated, disbelieving and amused. Every half an hour they would break, and Lewis would come to Apted’s corner like a boxer’s cut man. Eventually they got around to the material Apted and Lewis discussed in the van. Jackie conceded that something of the core of her character had been captured at 7, though what life would dole out to that child could not of course be anticipated with clarity. Apted pushed her.
“This is an odd question for you,” Apted began. “I mean, we all think you’re a very, very bright, very talented woman — I mean, could you have done more, do you think?”
“Yes, I should have done more. I should have done more. But the trouble is, when you’re 18, 20, 22, you think you know it all and you’ve done it all — or I did, let’s put it that way, but by the time you reach 35 you’re like, ‘Oh, dear, I didn’t know anything.’ But by then I had my children, so I had to concentrate on my children. I was going to say, ‘By the time they grew up and left home,’ but they haven’t!”
“We’ve talked about relationships,” Apted said, “but one we haven’t talked about is you and me — ”
Jackie giggled, a sound that has not changed since she was 7.
“ — which was a big part of our lives in a way, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, of course it is,” Jackie said.
“What was that about? What’s your version of it?”
“Are you talking specifics?” Jackie asked. “You’re talking about ’49’?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Jackie collected herself for a moment. “Now I appreciate,” she said, “that when we started at 7 most women were in the kitchen or were bringing up children, there weren’t many career women and those there were were frowned upon, but when we hit 21 I really thought you’d have had a better idea of how the world worked, shall I say?”
It wasn’t just about how many men Jackie had or hadn’t slept with. “I just didn’t feel that you had any idea of the changing role of women in the U.K. at that point,” she said. “That sounds awfully dismissive, but it was how I felt,” she went on. “I knew you knew you didn’t have enough women in it, and that’s why you introduced Debbie and some of the other wives, but you still asked us the most mundane, domestic questions, and I really wanted to go, ‘Rrrrrr.’ So by ’49’ I actually thought, You know what? No more. I’m not having this anymore.” This part was included in the film, in slightly shorter form, but the following exchange was not.
“I went to a boys’ school and all that sort of stuff,” Apted replied, “so I never saw the lives of a lot of women, girls and whatever, so you’re probably right, I was a bit. … ” Apted seemed to lose his train of thought.
Jackie laughed and rescued him. “I understand that,” she said, “and that’s why I’m saying. … I wanted to say what I wanted to say but that would never affect our relationship. I know if I picked up the phone and said, ‘Michael, I need help,’ you would be there.” Jackie’s voice began to catch, and her eyes shone. “You would say to me, ‘Where, when and how?’ and if it was humanly possible you would help me, I know that. I know you care about me, and I care about you, but that didn’t stop me having to have a go at you. Well, we’re a family, families fall out, families have arguments, but we are a family.”
Jackie stopped, unsure if she had it in her to say out loud the thing that was plainly on the mind of every person in that room. Apted was frail and prone to falls; he regularly misplaced his personal items; he could often enough recall the past with great detail but sought frequent clarification of where he was supposed to go and why. Apted, she feared, would not be well enough to make a movie in seven years’ time. The likelihood there would ever be a “70 Up” was vanishing.
“And this is one of the reasons, and I’ll tell you this now, it’s one of the reasons there’ll never be another program for me.” Her voice broke. Apted himself was not in tears; everyone else in the room was either openly crying or seemed to be struggling for composure. “This is me, I’m done. Because I’m not having somebody else sitting in that chair and somebody else sitting behind the cameras. I wouldn’t be able to trust them the way I trust all of you.”
At a recent celebration of Apted’s achievement, the filmmaker Alex Gibney noted that “63 Up” — the culmination of a program that has drawn its energy from the unfairness of class and its tenderness from the unfairness of flesh — is marked by a “profound sense of mortality.” Lynn has died; her husband, who had always kept his distance from the program, nevertheless agreed to appear, along with their daughters, in Lynn’s stead. Another of the participants, Nick, reveals that throat cancer has made him “seriously ill.” In its broad strokes, Nick’s life has had the greatest resemblance to Apted’s own: an Oxbridge degree, expatriation to the States, divorce. Nick has also provided some of the more astute on-camera commentary. In “56 Up,” he wonders aloud whether a few minutes of his life drawn almost at random every seven years can possibly say anything about who he is. “It isn’t a picture, really, of the essence of Nick,” he concludes. “It’s a picture of Everyman. It’s how a person — any person — how they change.”
In “63 Up,” this change has run its course, and Nick acknowledges that his thoughts extend no farther than the short term. The program’s dreamlike, foreshortened and haphazardly disobedient rapport with chronology renders not only his present but his past almost unbearably poignant: not a midcareer professor but a dying professor; not a newlywed but a dying newlywed; not a student but a dying student; not a child but a dying child.
This past February, a few months after Jackie’s shoot in Norfolk, I visited Apted in a rented editing suite in Santa Monica, Calif. The notes he got from the studio executives had been a cause for irritation — he felt as though they were trying to revise a formula that had worked for 56 years — but by his own admission he’d never been particularly agreeable about studio notes. Or rather, the notes weren’t terrible, he allowed; he just wasn’t going to use any of them. He felt as though the producers were too new to the series to appreciate its scope. Apted was irked by notes like “Lose Sue’s dog.”
Kim Horton, who has edited the series since “28 Up,” matched Apted’s indignation. “That dog’s been in it for two or three programs!”
“Sue’s dog is quite famous,” Apted said solemnly; he was again confusing two different dogs, but it didn’t matter. “He runs downstairs and watches an animal show on TV. The notes said, ‘That’s not their life, take it out’ — well, it is their life.”
As Apted finished the rough cut, he was also moving out of the bungalow that served, for the previous seven years, as his office. Recently he has had some difficulties securing work, and his professional future in Hollywood was uncertain. The office was in complete disorder, littered with decades of files, awards and scripts, as well as his youngest son’s childhood artwork, an embroidered West Ham pillow, business from his years as the president of the Director’s Guild and cartons of financial, medical and divorce records. “When this is over,” he said, “and I’m not doing anything for the rest of my life, I can go through these boxes.”
On his last day in the office, he peered at the assorted leavings and turned to Cort Kristensen, his producing partner; originally hired 18 years ago as Apted’s assistant, Kristensen now tends to Apted with filial devotion. “You’re sure we got everything done in here?”
“Stop panicking, Michael,” Kristensen said.
We sat at a picnic table outside the editing suite, and he evaluated his achievement. “On the whole,” he said of “63 Up,” “they’ve never been better, the people in it. They’ve had to pay attention to the whole life span, to confront themselves, and they seemed to be very serious. I was fairly thorough with them.” It hadn’t required a lot of prodding this time. “I suppose when you’re asked to look back on your life, it can’t be a flat experience; it has to be an emotional experience.”
I asked if any of them had surprised him. There were a handful of plot twists, long-delayed revelations and belated experiences, but those were par for the course. What struck him now were tonal shifts. He mentioned Nick, the ailing expat professor, who had only agreed to an interview in a last-minute text of three words, Apted told me. Apted had rushed back from Australia, where he was shooting Paul and Symon, to visit him in Wisconsin. Apted had been warned that Nick might have to stop every 10 minutes or so for a break, but Nick had spoken without pause for an hour and a half. “He wanted to settle things,” Apted said, “with himself and the people who knew him and the audience.” In the past, it had been a struggle for Nick to summon emotion; now he struggled to summon his old dispassion. “I’m still the same little kid, really,” he said over the footage of himself at 7. “I think all of us are.”
Apted paced the terrain of recollection; he never felt bound by archival chronology in the show — he had always loved Buñuel above all, and thought that the “Up” series’ desultory shuffle of the flashbacks mimicked the peregrinations of the unconscious — and now freely wandered the chambers of his memory. The excruciating time Tony admitted to adultery on camera. His anger with Charles, who dropped out after “21.” John, he felt, had never really trusted him; he supposed he might have been making fun of him a bit with the business of running him out with the hounds, but he’d always really liked him. Apted felt a strong reaction this time to the accordioned archives that began each segment. “To condense all that time to a hysterical pace — it’s terrifying, in sort of a bogus way, but it does dramatize how quickly things go by.” It gave him, he continued, “strange feelings about time and passage of time — it’s all so distorted.”
I asked him what he thought now of the maxim “Give me a child until he is 7, and I will give you the man.”
“It’s just a platitude,” he said, with little ceremony. “There’s no great wisdom. My two older boys, when I think back to how they were at 7, pretty much turned out how you’d expect — one serious, the other a jolly fellow, and they still are.” He stopped. “Well, the elder one died. But they stayed the same at heart. I don’t think it’s a particularly brilliant observation, frankly.
“This is my life, right in front of me,” he added — a life overlaid by 14 other, random lives, forever entwined with them, a life forever contoured in haunting outline by other people’s triumphs and other people’s pain. “My life is concentrated, the way it’s laid out now. ‘Seven Up!’ was the first serious piece of work I was involved with, and now it’s my whole working life in front of me.” He shielded his eyes from the sun. “I’m not going to be well enough to make another of these — it’s an irony that here are the bookends of my life. I might have 10 more years of sadness of not doing what I want, but there’s something beautiful about that — about having my life in that beautiful box.”
5. Interview with Jamie Lee Curtis in New York Magazine -- talks about Knives Out
6. Thanksgiving
Coworker: Did you enjoy the holiday.
Me: Yes.
Coworker: What did you do?
Me: I watched movies, tv, wrote, drank chicken soup, ate apple pie and baked apples, took a couple of short walks, and slept...which I completely enjoyed.
Coworker: Uh...no family? Or thanksgiving feast?
Me: No, family lives too far away, and I can't eat half of it anyhow.
Coworker: Oh that's sad.
Me: Not really. I enjoyed the rest, and I got over a bad chest cold. It was relaxing not to have to go anywhere for a few days, just wander about my own hood, and rest.
I have a people intensive job, with an hour and a half commute each way on subway and train. I love having four days just to myself. No travel. No making conversation. Just being. (Although I did talk to Wales and my mother, also corresponded on FB fanboard, and on DW journal. So not completely people free.)
Weird, I know, but there it is.
7. The Crown
I'm enjoying Season 3 more than expected. The second and third episodes blew me away in their quiet yet detailed portraits of various members of the Royal Family. I cried through a good portion of Aberfan, which reminded me a little of my father's mother -- who much like Queen Elizabeth couldn't cry. I remember being upset with her once as a little girl for not crying when her cat of 20 years had died. My grandmother told me of how she'd watched her mother die at the age of 7 (the age I was at that time) and after that she rarely cried. She'd been taught not to.
And said, just because someone doesn't express emotion through tears or the way you do -- doesn't mean they don't feel anything. They just are private about it.
I never forgot it. My father rarely cries. He does but rarely. Nor does my brother - although I'm admittedly not around him enough now to know. He did cry as a child.
My mother and I, on the other hand, have been known to cry during commercials.
8. The Irishman -- haven't seen it yet. But my parents did, they had mixed feelings. My mother felt it was too long and overrated. Which was Chidi (film buff co-worker who looks like Chidi from The Good Place) reaction as well. He told me that the film feels the need to go into detail about everyone's lives from beginning to end, my mother agreed. On NY1 they said it was the hot ticket this weekend, and historic in that it leap frogged from the movie theaters to Netflix streaming in less than a month. One person saw it, while the other guy watched The Crown. The one who watched and loved the Irishman, couldn't get into the Crown and vice versa.
Everyone agrees that it is too long and needed a good editor.
I suppose I should see it, since people keep asking me if I have yet. I may split it into two parts. Martin Scorsese sort requires me to be in the right mood. And I haven't been lately. His films tend to be very male dominated, he's not really fond of writing female roles for some reason -- although he has done a few films that had strong female roles within them.
I'm actually more curious about "Marriage Story" -- but then I'm more into relationship drama at the moment than historical drama or crime drama.
Chidi and I both want to see "Knives Out" -- I may try to see it next weekend. Not sure yet. (Not with Chidi, I see enough of Chidi at work.)
no subject
Date: 2019-12-03 07:14 pm (UTC)I cried through a good portion of Aberfan, which reminded me a little of my father's mother -- who much like Queen Elizabeth couldn't cry.
That was a wrenching episode. One of the things I appreciated was that I'd never heard of the incident before so it was entirely new to me. And it was quite interesting to see in the post-episode notes that she has always regretted her choices. So well written. I particularly liked how it lay the groundwork for why she and Wilson got on well, he served an advisory purpose to her as well, just as Churchill had.
Kind of fascinating to think of the stretch of the Up series. Now with participants dying it really is the time to look back on a life, even though some may yet go on another 20 years or more.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-04 01:34 am (UTC)An aging filmmaker who misses the way things were -- and is sort of embracing Netflix as a half-way forgivable option. Also from everything I've read -- Netflix and Amazon are a television/filmmakers dream come true -- it doesn't restrict them much at all. Except, it doesn't necessarily always pay as well and you don't do as many episodes.
And the Crown -- has done a marvelous of job of showing how the Queen and Wilson's relationship evolved from one of initial distrust and awkwardness to a meeting of minds, similar to Churchill. Also, like you, it helped that I went into the Aberfan episode knowing very little....I thought at first it was flooding, what happened was so much worse.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-04 02:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-04 03:32 am (UTC)