I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t have some gripe about the state of SNL, very often rooted in nostalgia for a simpler, funnier Golden Age. It’s hard not to associate iconic TV shows with lost youth, even shows that have moved on when some of the rest of us haven’t.
The live sketch comedy show, now two years into its fourth decade, has done its best to keep pace with changing times and tastes. While my own fandom has waxed and waned, one thing has remained a constant: my considerable appreciation for the talent and sheer moxie required to stage original live comedy on national television, week after week for forty years.
Comics and celebrity guests risk the disaster of dead air when jokes fall flat. Crewmembers rig up convincing sets only to strike them minutes later for completely different environs. Make-up artists transform Kate McKinnon from the cartoonish Jeff Sessions to the bald, jowly “Shud the Mermaid” in-between sketches, a process that seems to unfold in seconds in the sped-up behind-the-scenes video above.
Sure, everything on the show is scripted and choreographed, and the actors read from cue cards. But as the popular phenomenon of “corpsing”—breaking character by breaking into laughter—shows us, anything can go wrong live with the best-laid plans of writers and directors. The quick-change transition between the cold open and the opening monologue, which both happen on the “home base stage” of studio 8H, as you can see at the top; the rock-solid segues from the live band, below…. The SNL machine depends on every one of its many moving parts to function.
And if—or inevitably when—one of those parts malfunctions, well the show goes on… and on and on and on…. How many seasons does SNL have left in it? Another forty? A possibly infinite number? Given how well its teams of creatives and crew have mastered the art of live televised sketch comedy—not all of it to everyone’s taste, to be sure—it’s possible that Saturday Night Live will outlive even the phenomenon of television, transplanting itself somewhere in our brains in the far future, where we’ll lean back, close our eyes, and hear the saxophones and that familiar, rousing announcement, “Live, from New York….”
As reflexively as we may now describe the 2019 Los Angeles of Blade Runner as “dystopian” — and indeed, as vivid a modern dystopia as cinema has yet produced — who among us wouldn’t want to spend at least a few hours there? Much of the surface appeal is, of course, visual: the rainy neon-lined streets, the industrial fearsomeness, those tower-side video geisha. But no film truly succeeds, at creating a world or anything else, without the right sound. We may not consciously realize it when we watch the movie, no matter how many times we’ve seen it before, but the sonic elements, all carefully crafted, do more than their fair share to make Blade Runner feel like Blade Runner.
And so the best way to put yourself into Blade Runner’s world may be to surround yourself with its sounds, a task made much easier by “ambient geek” Crysknife007, whose Youtube channel offers a playlist of ambient noise from Blade Runner places. These include Deckard’s apartment, the Tyrell Building, the Bradbury Hotel, and others, each of which loops for a continuous twelve hours. (The complete playlist above runs for 72 hours.) Some of the locations even die-hard fans of the movie might not recognize, because they come from another extension of Blade Runner’s reality: the 1997 PC adventure game that has a new cast of characters play out a different story in the proto-cyberpunk urban setting with the same necessity for just the right sound to create just the right atmosphere
Crysknife007, who as an ambient musician goes under the name “Cheesy Nervosa,” seems to have a side line in this sort of thing: last month we featured other sci-fi-inspired selections from the same Youtube channel like the sounds of the ship’s engine from Star Trek: the Next Generation and the TARDIS from Doctor Who. But it’s Blade Runner, as Thom Andersen says in his documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, that “continues to fascinate. Perhaps it expresses a nostalgia for a dystopian vision of the future that has become outdated. This vision offered some consolation because it was at least sublime. Now the future looks brighter, hotter, and blander.” But even as the real 2019 draws near, whatever the future actually ends up looking like, we at least know we can keep it sounding interesting.
The 78-video playlist above comes from a course called Neural Networks for Machine Learning, taught by Geoffrey Hinton, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto. The videos were created for a larger course taught on Coursera, which gets re-offered on a fairly regularly basis.
Neural Networks for Machine Learning will teach you about “artificial neural networks and how they’re being used for machine learning, as applied to speech and object recognition, image segmentation, modeling language and human motion, etc.” The courses emphasizes ” both the basic algorithms and the practical tricks needed to get them to work well.” It’s geared for an intermediate level learner — comfortable with calculus and with experience programming Python. [Get a free course on Python here.]
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Richard Feynman knew his stuff. Had he not, he probably wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, let alone his various other prestigious scientific awards. But his reputation for learning all his life long with a special depth and rigor survives him, and in a sense accounts for his fame — of a degree that ensures his stern yet playful face will gaze out from dorm-room posters for generations to come — even more than does his “real” work. Many students of physics still, understandably, want to be like Feynman, but everyone else, even those of us with no interest in physics whatsoever, could also do well to learn from him: not from what he thought about, but from how he thought about it.
On his Study Hacks Blog, computer science professor Cal Newport explains what he calls “the Feynman notebook technique,” whereby “dedicating a notebook to a new learning task” can provide “concrete cues” to help mitigate the difficulty of starting out toward the mastery of a subject.
Feynman did it himself at least since his graduate-school days at Princeton when, according to biographer James Gleick, he once prepared for his oral examinations by opening a fresh notebook titled “NOTEBOOK OF THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT.” In it “he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject.”
“At first, the notebook pages are empty,” writes Newport, “but as they fill with careful notes, your knowledge also grows. The drive to fill more pages keeps your motivation stoked.” In other, more general terms: “Translate your growing knowledge of something hard into a concrete form and you’re more likely to keep investing the mental energy needed to keep learning.” But how sure can you feel of your newly acquired knowledge if you don’t regularly test it? Feynman had to go face-to-face with the elders of the Princeton physics department, but if you don’t benefit from that kind of institutional threat, you might consider putting into practice another Feynman technique: “teaching” what you’ve learned to someone else.
In addition to being a great scientist, explains study-skills vlogger Thomas Frank, Feynman “was also a great teacher and a great explainer,” owing to his ability to “boil down incredibly complex concepts and put them in simple language that other people could understand.” Only when Feynman could do that did he know he truly understood a concept himself — be it a concept in physics, safecracking, or bongo-playing. As Frank explains, “if you’re shaky on a concept and you want to quickly improve your understanding,” try your hand at producing a Feynmanesque simple explanation, which will “test your understanding and challenge your assumptions.” Just make sure to bear in mind one of Feynman’s most quotable quotes: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” And if you find that you have indeed fooled yourself, head right back to the drawing board — or rather, to the notebook.
It is often claimed that relativism, subjectivism and nihilism are typically modern philosophical problems that emerge with the breakdown of traditional values, customs and ways of life. The result is the absence of meaning, the lapse of religious faith, and feeling of alienation that is so widespread in modernity.
The Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) gave one of the most penetrating analyses of this complex phenomenon of modernity. But somewhat surprisingly he seeks insight into it not in any modern thinker but rather in an ancient one, the Greek philosopher Socrates.
In this course created by former associate professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, Jon Stewart, we will explore how Kierkegaard deals with the problems associated with relativism, the lack of meaning and the undermining of religious faith that are typical of modern life. His penetrating analyses are still highly relevant today and have been seen as insightful for the leading figures of Existentialism, Post-Structuralism and Post-Modernism.
It’s graced the soundtracks of dozens of films, and provided the title for at least two more: the recent Edith Piaf bio-pic and an award winning French feature about a pre-adolescent transgender girl…
And now the above love story, set on the Pont des Art, starring an anthropomorphic rose and a long tall stick of beef jerky bearing a suspicious resemblance to Iggy Pop.
The animated Iggy stalks across toward his lady love with the stiffness of a White Walker, but it’s undeniably moving when this biologically ill-matched couple begins to dance in a swirl of green and red leaves signifying… what?
Practicing for countless hours before we can be good at something seems burdensome and boring. Maybe that’s why we’re drawn to stories of instant achievement. The monk realizes satori (and Neo learns kung fu); the superhero acquires great power out of the blue; Robert Johnson trades for genius at the crossroads. At the same time, we teach children they can’t master a skill without discipline and diligence. We repeat pop psych theories that specify the exact number hours required for excellence. The number may be arbitrary, but it comforts us to believe that practice might, eventually, make perfect. Because in truth we know there is no way around it. As Wynton Marsalis writes in “Wynton’s Twelve Ways to Practice: From Music to Schoolwork,” “practice is essential to learning music—and anything else, for that matter.”
For jazz musicians, the time spent learning theory and refining technique finds eloquent expression in the concept of woodshedding, a “humbling but necessary chore,” writes Paul Klemperer at Big Apple Jazz, “like chopping wood before you can start the fire.”
Yet retiring to the woodshed “means more than just practicing…. You have to dig deep into yourself, discipline yourself, become focused on the music and your instrument.” As beginners, we tend to look at practice only as a chore. The best jazz musicians know there’s also “something philosophical, almost religious” about it. John Coltrane, for example, practiced ceaselessly, consciously defining his music as a spiritual and contemplative discipline.
Marsalis also implies a religious aspect in his short article: “when you practice, it means you are willing to sacrifice to sound good… I like to say that the time spent practicing is the true sign of virtue in a musician.” Maybe this piety is intended to dispel the myth of quick and easy deals with infernal entities. But most of Marsalis’ “twelve ways to practice” are as pragmatic as they come, and “will work,” he promises “for almost every activity—from music to schoolwork to sports.” Find his abridged list below, and read his full commentary at “the trumpeter’s bible,” Arban’s Method.
Seek out instruction: A good teacher will help you understand the purpose of practicing and can teach you ways to make practicing easier and more productive.
Write out a schedule: A schedule helps you organize your time. Be sure to allow time to review the fundamentals because they are the foundation of all the complicated things that come later.
Set goals: Like a schedule, goals help you organize your time and chart your progress…. If a certain task turns out to be really difficult, relax your goals: practice doesn’t have to be painful to achieve results.
Concentrate: You can do more in 10 minutes of focused practice than in an hour of sighing and moaning. This means no video games, no television, no radio, just sitting still and working…. Concentrated effort takes practice too, especially for young people.
Relax and practice slowly: Take your time; don’t rush through things. Whenever you set out to learn something new – practicing scales, multiplication tables, verb tenses in Spanish – you need to start slowly and build up speed.
Practice hard things longer: Don’t be afraid of confronting your inadequacies; spend more time practicing what you can’t do…. Successful practice means coming face to face with your shortcomings. Don’t be discouraged; you’ll get it eventually.
Practice with expression: Every day you walk around making yourself into “you,” so do everything with the proper attitude…. Express your “style” through how you do what you do.
Learn from your mistakes: None of us are perfect, but don’t be too hard on yourself. If you drop a touchdown pass, or strike out to end the game, it’s not the end of the world. Pick yourself up, analyze what went wrong and keep going….
Donʼt show off: It’s hard to resist showing off when you can do something well…. But my father told me, “Son, those who play for applause, that’s all they get.” When you get caught up in doing the tricky stuff, you’re just cheating yourself and your audience.
Think for yourself: Your success or failure at anything ultimately depends on your ability to solve problems, so don’t become a robot…. Thinking for yourself helps develop your powers of judgment.
Be optimistic: Optimism helps you get over your mistakes and go on to do better. It also gives you endurance because having a positive attitude makes you feel that something great is always about to happen.
Look for connections: If you develop the discipline it takes to become good at something, that discipline will help you in whatever else you do…. The more you discover the relationships between things that at first seem different, the larger your world becomes. In other words, the woodshed can open up a whole world of possibilities.
You’ll note in even a cursory scan of Marsalis’ prescriptions that they begin with the imminently practical—the “chores” we can find tedious—and move further into the intangibles: developing creativity, humility, optimism, and, eventually, maybe, a gradual kind of enlightenment. You’ll notice on a closer read that the consciousness-raising and the mundane daily tasks go hand-in-hand.
While this may be all well and good for jazz musicians, students, athletes, or chess players, we may have reason for skepticism about success through practice more generally. Researchers at Princeton have found, for example, that the effectiveness of practice is “domain dependent.” In games, music, and sports, practice accounts for a good deal of improvement. In certain other “less stable” fields driven by celebrity and networking, for example, success can seem more dependent on personality or privileged access.
But it’s probably safe to assume that if you’re reading this post, you’re interested in mastering a skill, not cultivating a brand. Whether you want to play Carnegie Hall or “learn a language, cook good meals or get along well with people,” practice is essential, Marsalis argues, and practicing well is just as important as practicing often. For a look at how practice changes our brains, creating what we colloquially call “muscle memory,” see the TED-Ed video just above.
Last week, the folks behind Serial and This American Life, teamed up to release S‑Town (short for Shittown), a seven-episode/seven-hour podcast which I devoured in three days flat. I don’t want to give any spoilers. So let me give you just the text that promotes the podcast on iTunes, and then suggest you start listening:
John despises his Alabama town and decides to do something about it. He asks a reporter to investigate the son of a wealthy family who’s allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder. But then someone else ends up dead, sparking a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure, and an unearthing of the mysteries of one man’s life.
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