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      Recreating an Archaeological Discovery From the Ground Down

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRecreating an Archaeological Discovery From the Ground Down“The Dig,” on Netflix, revisits the astonishing find made by two amateurs in Britain as World War II was dawning.Carey Mulligan as a landowner and Ralph Fiennes as a laborer in a scene from “The Dig.”Credit…Larry Horricks/NetflixPublished More

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      What Happens Now to Michael Apted’s Lifelong Project ‘Up’?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat Happens Now to Michael Apted’s Lifelong Project ‘Up’?His documentary series chronicled the lives of its subjects every seven years since 1964. Now the participants ponder whether it can carry on without him.Michael Apted in 2012. His death last week left the fate of his decades-long project up in the air.Credit…Robert Yager for The New York TimesJan. 14, 2021Every seven years or so for more than half a century, the filmmaker Michael Apted returned to what he referred to as his life’s work: documenting the same ordinary people he’d known since they were 7 years old.Throughout nine installments of the “Up” series — which has been called the noblest, most remarkable and profound documentary project in history — Apted turned a restrained lens on class, family, work and dreams, both dashed and achieved, in his native England. The programs, beginning with “Seven Up!” in 1964, went on to inspire international copycats and even an episode of “The Simpsons.”So when Apted died last week at 79, he left behind not only his enormous artistic undertaking, but a nontraditional family unit that was at once uncomfortable, transactional and as intimate as could be.“It’s a bit surreal,” said Jackie Bassett, one of 20 schoolchildren originally featured in the series, who went on to become part of the core group that appeared every subsequent time. “He knew us so well,” she said in an interview, and yet she’d had no idea that the director was seriously ill.Jackie Bassett, Lynn Johnson and Sue Sullivan in 1964 in the original film.Credit…BritBoxBassett, left, and Sullivan flanking Apted and the producer Claire Lewis together for the most recent installment, released in 2019.Credit…BritBoxIn “63 Up,” from 2019, she processed on camera some of her decades-long frustrations with Apted’s handling of gender.“We had our moments,” said Bassett, a working-class grandmother from East London who now lives in Scotland. “But it’s a bit like having a favorite uncle that you fall out with occasionally, yet it doesn’t alter the relationship. He introduced me to a life that I otherwise wouldn’t know anything about.”Tony Walker, once a voluble boy who hoped to become a star jockey and instead became a taxi driver, said Apted was like a brother to him. “He’s always been there,” Walker said, choking up. “We never, ever thought it would come to an end.”Now, in addition to the 11 remaining participants — one regular, Suzy Lusk, opted out last time and another, Lynn Johnson, died — Apted’s longtime collaborators are also pondering the fate of a project that has spanned their professional lives.Claire Lewis, who started as a researcher on “28 Up” and later became a lead producer, said that Apted had always been “very proprietorial” about the series. But she recalled that on the press tour for “63 Up,” as it became clear that the director was becoming more frail and forgetful, he told a Q. and A. audience, “I suppose she could do it,” gesturing to Lewis.Tony Walker at age 35. He is interested in continuing to film the series.Credit…BritBox“I could carry it on,” Lewis said, adding that it would come down to the subjects’ assent and the health of the crew. The cameraman, George Jesse Turner, and sound engineer, Nick Steer, have been with the program since “21 Up,” from 1977; the editor, Kim Horton, joined for “28 Up.”“None of us are spring chickens — we’re all geriatric, honestly,” Lewis said, citing her own age as “70-ish.” “We’re going to need an ambulance, if we ever did it again, to take us all around. I think we’ll just have to say we’ll wait and see.”Asked if she would participate without Apted, Bassett began to cry. She agreed that Lewis, who’d long had the job of keeping in touch with the cast between shoots, was the logical successor. (Walker concurred and was more enthusiastic about continuing.)“70 and 7 do have a good symmetry,” Bassett said. “It would definitely have to be the last one for everybody.”Mortality had already hung over the most recent installment. Another subject, the engineering professor Nick Hitchon, who started as a bashful farmer’s son from the Yorkshire Dales, learned he had throat cancer and struggled through his portion of filming.Apted was “a fixture in my life,” Hitchon said in an interview from Wisconsin, where he moved to teach in the early 1980s. “Despite the fact that we’re not good at communicating as Englishmen, I did feel some closeness to Michael,” relating to him more and more with age, he said.It was important for the “Up” series to see life through, from retirement to death, Hitchon said. But he preferred not to contemplate his own future participation. “To be honest, if I’m alive at 70, I will be very, very glad,” he said.The “Up” series began as a one-off program for the current affairs show “World in Action,” on Granada Television. Apted was at first a young researcher, tasked with helping pick the children, and a casual suggestion from an executive to check in on them seven years later gave the project new life.At work on “63 Up”: Lewis, left, Apted, the cameraman George Jesse Turner, Paul Kligerman, Naomi Mendoza, Susan Kligerman, Terry Chadwick, Mikhaela Gregory and David Rose.Credit…BritBoxAlong the way, Apted became a Hollywood director, helming projects as varied as “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and entries in the James Bond and “Narnia” franchises. He was also “begrudgingly referred to as the godfather of reality television, something he clearly objected to over the years,” said Cort Kristensen, Apted’s assistant-turned-producing partner.“He cut his teeth making news programs and then got into scripted drama after that,” Kristensen said, “and he loved using the skills of both to enhance the other.”“Up” was also a document of technological progress. Horton, the editor, recalled going “from splicing tape all the way now to pressing buttons,” with hours of footage kept on a hard drive the size of “a pack of cigarettes in my pocket.”Yet the series has remained stubbornly straightforward, with spare narration and no music or modern techniques. It is optimized for watching every seven years, not bingeing, with plentiful catch-up footage repeated each time.“Every seven years we’d get a new commissioner and a new executive producer, and they all come into the program thinking they’re going to make some change,” Horton said. “Michael saw them all off,” at first politely and then with a colorful two-word phrase.His collaborators said that should they continue without him, this essence would carry through. “Michael felt very, very, very strongly that it must remain as it is,” Lewis said, noting that the director hated “tricksy, artsy-fartsy” documentaries.“His preference was simplicity, elegance,” she said. “It was about people and what they say and who they are. It was all about the stories.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Why Digga D, a British Drill Artist, is Banned from Using Violent Lyrics

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFor British Drill Stars, the Police Are Listening CloselyRecent court rulings require officers to keep watch over artists’ rap lyrics, which prosecutors say celebrate gangs and violent crimes.The rapper Digga D, whose real name is Rhys Herbert, in a North London park this month. A court order, issued in 2018, restricts the subjects the musician can mention in his lyrics.Credit…Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesJan. 11, 2021LONDON — The British rapper Digga D can’t explain how he lost the use of an eye while serving a prison sentence last year: not because he doesn’t want to, but because talking about what happened might get him sent back to jail.The police here scrutinize everything the 20-year-old says in public, whether in an interview, or on a track.In 2018, Digga D was sentenced to a year in prison for conspiracy to commit violent disorder, after a court case in which music videos by the masked rapper were presented as evidence. In sentencing Digga D, whose real name is Rhys Herbert, the judge also issued an order banning him from releasing tracks that describe gang-related violence.He must notify the police within 24 hours of releasing new music, and provide them with the lyrics. If a court finds that his words incite violence, he can be sent back to prison; parole conditions also limit what he can say publicly about his past.So when asked, in a Zoom interview, about how he lost the sight in his eye, Digga D could only shrug.Digga D is a leading voice in Britain’s drill scene, a subgenre of hip-hop featuring eerie piano melodies layered over droning bass lines, and lyrics portraying life in some of the country’s most deprived neighborhoods. Arising in Chicago, drill started to take on a new life in London in the mid-2000s, fusing with the city’s grime and garage sounds and helping to drive offshoot scenes in places as disparate as Brooklyn and Brisbane, Australia.Digga D performing at the Wireless Connect virtual festival in July 2020.Credit…Lambert Productions, via BBCBut drill’s sometimes violent lyrics have led the police and lawmakers to accuse the genre of fueling knife crime, which is currently at a 10-year high in England, according to government figures.Like Digga D, some of Britain’s most popular drill artists have found themselves on the wrong side of the law, and their lyrics reflect their experiences of gang life, criminal justice and time behind bars.Sentencing orders, like the one banning Digga D from rapping about violence, have also been handed to other drill artists. Introduced in 2014 and known as criminal behavior orders, the measures give judges broad powers to regulate a convicted criminal’s life, such as by banning them from certain neighborhoods or by preventing them from meeting former associates. Judges have also used the orders to control some musicians’ lyrics, arguing that when rappers brag about attacks on rivals, it stokes street tensions.In January 2019, for example, a London judge sentenced the musicians Skengdo and AM to nine months in prison for breaking a criminal behavior order by performing a song with lyrics including a list of gang members who had been stabbed.Rebecca Byng, a spokeswoman for the London police’s violent crime unit, said in an email that criminal behavior orders had “a wide-ranging scope, and go beyond addressing lyrics which incite violence,” adding that they were an important tool to “steer young people away from violence.”“We are not targeting music artists, but addressing violent offenders,” she added.Yet the London police has recently stepped up its efforts to remove drill music videos from YouTube.In 2020, the video platform removed 319 music videos at the force’s urging, according to a police report obtained through a Freedom of Information request. That is more than twice the number it took down in 2019. In total, YouTube has removed more than 500 music videos over the past three years, the report says.Keir Monteith, a criminal defense attorney based in London, is advising a government-funded research project studying how rap lyrics are used as evidence in court. He said that in some ways, the authorities’ treatment of drill recalled the heyday of punk in the 1970s, when the police shut down concerts and the BBC banned a hit single by the Sex Pistols.But if punk artists were treated harshly, drill rappers have it even worse, Monteith said. The efforts of the criminal justice system were “focused, worryingly, on a particular set of our society, which is young Black lads,” he noted. “That’s the real concern here.”Lyrics that deal with life behind bars have long been defining features of American hip-hop, but they are relatively new preoccupations for British rappers. As a growing number of drill artists fall foul of the criminal justice system, however, those themes are starting to trickle through.“There’s more in my heart that I would like to speak about and show,” Digga D said.Credit…Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesIn a recent freestyle posted to YouTube, Digga D raps about using his jail kettle to boil canned tuna; and Headie One, another London-based drill rapper, describes using cookies to make a birthday cake in prison in “Ain’t It Different,” a song that reached No. 2 in the British singles chart this summer.Potter Payper, a 25-year-old drill musician, was incarcerated on drug-related charges when he wrote much of his most recent album, “Training Day 3.” He has been in prison 14 times, and, like Digga D, his music videos have formed part of the evidence used to convict him.During his most recent custodial sentence, Payper initially wasn’t writing music or looking after himself, he said in a phone interview. But a turning point came one evening in June 2019.Stormzy, perhaps Britain’s most commercially successful rapper, was performing on the main stage at the Glastonbury Festival, and Payper could hear fellow inmates in nearby cells listening to the rapper’s performance. After Stormzy named him onstage as one of his influences, the other prisoners started banging on their doors, yelling Payper’s name.After that, he wrote nearly 30 new songs, he said.How Digga D lost the use of his eye — the story he was so hesitant to talk about — can be found in prison records. He was stabbed with a blade fashioned from a tuna can, according to an official at the Ministry of Justice who was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Cecilia Goodwin, Digga D’s lawyer, said that the rapper had been struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder after the attack.But much of Digga D’s experience remains hidden, for now.“There’s more in my heart that I would like to speak about and show,” he said.He might get to do that with music when the court order expires, in 2025.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More