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Continuing with the Airplane/Police Squad references here....
We actually started watching a film with a rather extended series of boxing scenes on the evening of MLK Day: One Night in Miami, a dramatization of an encounter on an actual Miami night in 1964 including Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, NFL legend Jim Brown and (the soon to be no longer known as) Cassius Clay. These scenes, with former Soprano actor Michael "Christophuh" Imperioli playing Ali's longtime trainer Angelo Dundee, were hard to watch, but we wound up bailing because the motel room scenes with all four African American legends were just slow and overly wordy. It probably worked better as a play, which is what it originally was. Then, two nights ago, Netflix delivered something called Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Despite some good acting from Frances McDormand in the title role (she even got in a "you betcha," though not in Minnesota Nice), it just didn't work for us, and ultimately we concluded that we had both mistaken it for something in the much more fun Miss Peregrine franchise.
But last night's film went much better, as of course the whole day had up to that point.
----
We've read many books and even more New Yorker pieces from Oliver Sacks. His long career in neurology became much better known when his 1970s book Awakenings got more-or-less adapted into a film in the 1990s with Robin Williams in the starring role. But last night's film was a documentary titled Oliver Sacks: His Own Life. Much like the Lebowitz series I mentioned the other day, it's a mix of new (from before his 2015 death) filmed interviews with him, clips of him from other programs, and a remarkable amount of archival footage of him and his patients going all the way back to the beginning of his medical career.
I'm not sure I ever quite "got" that he was British before this; I definitely never realized he was gay, but then even his eventual life partner from his final few years didn't know that until they met in New York City. Neither of these really had bearing on what he learned and shared with his colleagues and eventually readers, but they're interesting sidelights into an amazing life. Most of his post-residency life was spent in that city, his final home being in the West Village, but he also lived and practiced for many years in the Bronx. While he did most of his clinical work at that borough's Beth Abraham Hospital, he also mentions working in the mid-1960s at a migraine clinic at Montefiore. Our older sister Sandy was working there at the time; she never mentioned him or his work to me during her too-short lifetime, but most of his fame came after her passing.
The key to his medicine was understanding his patients as people, not just as statistics or studies. Watching this at the end of Inauguration Day, where the incoming President has been so badly bulled for everything from his stuttering to supposed dementia, Dr. Sacks's caring approach to patients as people, even those with far worse conditions than he, you or I will likely ever develop, seemed to herald a refreshing change from four years of this horror:
----
Not that all mocks are bad, mind.
Perhaps the strongest image to come out of yesterday's events, which was filled with so many- the inaugural address, the songs, the poem by a young speech-impaired woman- was of a bundled-up Bernie Sanders among the crowd. These are now the Mittens That Launched a Thousand Memes:
Can two grumpy old men share a dais without driving each other crazy?
And Bernie said, "This is my Medicare, which is given for All."
And the one I photoshopped my own self this morning:
So here's another clue you can learn.... The Walrus was Bern!
Keeping up with the Bernie meme was one that wasn't visual, because it involved the Heir That Wasn't There. By the end of the day, many people wondered why young Barron wasn't led out to the chopper with Mummy and the Brute, and did so even more when he was absent at Air Force Not Yours Anymore when the other kids and even grandkids were present:
The White House confirms President Trump left a note for President-elect Biden:
-Please take great care of Barron..we left some of his favorite snacks in the pantry
barron trump standing at the foot of the biden’s bed tonight asking if they’re his parents now
I know, he's 14 and we're not supposed to make fun. But Tom Hanks was in DC, and there are these stories about him kidnapping kids and drinking their blood....
We actually started watching a film with a rather extended series of boxing scenes on the evening of MLK Day: One Night in Miami, a dramatization of an encounter on an actual Miami night in 1964 including Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, NFL legend Jim Brown and (the soon to be no longer known as) Cassius Clay. These scenes, with former Soprano actor Michael "Christophuh" Imperioli playing Ali's longtime trainer Angelo Dundee, were hard to watch, but we wound up bailing because the motel room scenes with all four African American legends were just slow and overly wordy. It probably worked better as a play, which is what it originally was. Then, two nights ago, Netflix delivered something called Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Despite some good acting from Frances McDormand in the title role (she even got in a "you betcha," though not in Minnesota Nice), it just didn't work for us, and ultimately we concluded that we had both mistaken it for something in the much more fun Miss Peregrine franchise.
But last night's film went much better, as of course the whole day had up to that point.
----
We've read many books and even more New Yorker pieces from Oliver Sacks. His long career in neurology became much better known when his 1970s book Awakenings got more-or-less adapted into a film in the 1990s with Robin Williams in the starring role. But last night's film was a documentary titled Oliver Sacks: His Own Life. Much like the Lebowitz series I mentioned the other day, it's a mix of new (from before his 2015 death) filmed interviews with him, clips of him from other programs, and a remarkable amount of archival footage of him and his patients going all the way back to the beginning of his medical career.
I'm not sure I ever quite "got" that he was British before this; I definitely never realized he was gay, but then even his eventual life partner from his final few years didn't know that until they met in New York City. Neither of these really had bearing on what he learned and shared with his colleagues and eventually readers, but they're interesting sidelights into an amazing life. Most of his post-residency life was spent in that city, his final home being in the West Village, but he also lived and practiced for many years in the Bronx. While he did most of his clinical work at that borough's Beth Abraham Hospital, he also mentions working in the mid-1960s at a migraine clinic at Montefiore. Our older sister Sandy was working there at the time; she never mentioned him or his work to me during her too-short lifetime, but most of his fame came after her passing.
The key to his medicine was understanding his patients as people, not just as statistics or studies. Watching this at the end of Inauguration Day, where the incoming President has been so badly bulled for everything from his stuttering to supposed dementia, Dr. Sacks's caring approach to patients as people, even those with far worse conditions than he, you or I will likely ever develop, seemed to herald a refreshing change from four years of this horror:
----
Not that all mocks are bad, mind.
Perhaps the strongest image to come out of yesterday's events, which was filled with so many- the inaugural address, the songs, the poem by a young speech-impaired woman- was of a bundled-up Bernie Sanders among the crowd. These are now the Mittens That Launched a Thousand Memes:
Can two grumpy old men share a dais without driving each other crazy?
And Bernie said, "This is my Medicare, which is given for All."
And the one I photoshopped my own self this morning:
So here's another clue you can learn.... The Walrus was Bern!
Keeping up with the Bernie meme was one that wasn't visual, because it involved the Heir That Wasn't There. By the end of the day, many people wondered why young Barron wasn't led out to the chopper with Mummy and the Brute, and did so even more when he was absent at Air Force Not Yours Anymore when the other kids and even grandkids were present:
The White House confirms President Trump left a note for President-elect Biden:
-Please take great care of Barron..we left some of his favorite snacks in the pantry
barron trump standing at the foot of the biden’s bed tonight asking if they’re his parents now
I know, he's 14 and we're not supposed to make fun. But Tom Hanks was in DC, and there are these stories about him kidnapping kids and drinking their blood....