Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high-signal curation of things worth your time.
This week: what shows up when you give things a little more time. Go players realizing the future arrived early, eight episodes of slow-cooked revenge, Theodore Roosevelt before he became Theodore Roosevelt, Four Tet on repeat, and Danny McBride poking around the Criterion Closet and accidentally explaining half his career.
1. AlphaGo : We’re All Go Players Now
I first watched AlphaGo when it came out in 2017. Really enjoyed it at the time. I rewatched it recently, in large part because I read the excellent book The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut, and the events covered in the film play a big role in the book. I enjoyed it just as much, but it felt like a different film the second time.
Back in 2017, watching some of the best Go players in the world suddenly realize that an AI was much better than they expected felt like a glimpse of some weird future. But in the post-ChatGPT world, it feels a lot more like we’re all the Go players now.
Go was supposed to be safe for a while. Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, but Go is another animal. There are something like 10^170 possible board positions, and good play relies heavily on pattern recognition and intuition, because on every move you can do almost anything. Brute force alone doesn’t work.
Go legend Lee Sedol had seen an earlier version of AlphaGo play. He basically thought: pretty good, but nowhere near me. He predicted he’d win 5–0 or 4–1. The problem was that the games he’d watched were already five months old. He had no idea how much better AlphaGo had gotten in the meantime.
I won’t spoil how the match unfolds, because a big part of the fun is watching Lee, the commentators, and even the DeepMind team keep recalibrating in real time. At one point, AlphaGo plays what became famous as “Move 37,” a move so weird and unexpected that the experts watching initially don’t quite know what to make of it. Lee later said it made him think AlphaGo could be creative.
Director Greg Kohs spent years at NFL Films, and you can tell. He treats this less like a documentary about software and more like a sports film about people under pressure. You really don’t need to know anything about Go to get into it. Half the drama is just watching people’s faces as they try to understand what they’re seeing.
What happened after the film? A 2023 study analyzed 5.8 million professional Go moves from 1950–2021 and found that after superhuman Go AI arrived, human decision quality improved and novel moves became more common. Apparently, getting beaten by a much better player and having a tireless practice partner to learn from can teach you a few things. [Liberty]
🎬 AlphaGo Documentary (2017, free on YouTube)
2. The Count of Monte Cristo : Revenge Needs Room to Simmer
Eight episodes is not much time to tell the story of a 1,200-page novel.
But it’s immensely better than trying to fit it into a 2-hour movie.
That’s why I really enjoyed the recent miniseries adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo directed by Bille August, and starring Sam Claflin as the tortured Edmond Dantès.
I’ve seen multiple film adaptations of this epic story and despite their best efforts, they are forced to either rush through major plot points or cut them out entirely.
This series, while still needing to abridge at times, lets the story of betrayal, adventure, and revenge simmer long enough for you to occupy the headspace of different characters. The web of competing ambitions and desires between Dantes, Villefort, Danglars, and Mondego feels palpable.
My favorite part is how the series handles the change in Dantès over the course of the story. If you’ve never consumed this story, I’ll spare you the details so you can enjoy it fresh. But for those who know, Claflin embodies the arc from young and optimistic to ‘experienced’ and cynical very well, allowing the novel’s message to land.
I think one reason this story is so enduringly popular is that the drama plays out like the world’s greatest soap opera. So if you decide to give it a go, make sure you don’t have early meetings the next morning. Because you’ll be fighting the impulse for “just one more episode.” [Jameson]
📺 The Count of Monte Cristo (2024, TV Miniseries)
🎬 The Count of Monte Cristo (2024 French film, Original title: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, 178 min)
3. The Making of Theodore Roosevelt
There was a stretch in my twenties when I was reading everything I could get my hands on about Theodore Roosevelt. I don’t think that’s uncommon among a certain kind of ambitious person. Whatever your views of the man, you cannot help but admire the sheer volume and range of what he accomplished in a single lifetime.
Here was someone who ran the New York City police board, served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, left civilian life to raise a volunteer cavalry regiment and fight in Cuba, came home to be elected Governor of New York, then Vice President, then President at forty-two, the youngest we have ever had. He wrote some three dozen books, the first of them a serious naval history published when he was twenty-three. He boxed at Harvard. He reportedly read a book a day, sometimes more. Just reading a list that long can make you tired and leave you wondering if he’s from the same species as the rest of us.
That’s why my recommendation this week is The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, the first volume of Edmund Morris’s masterful three-part life. The book is the story of how that resume began. It’s also the story of the things the resume leaves out: the asthmatic, sickly boy whose father told him he had the mind but not the body, and that he would have to make his body, which the boy then set about doing in a home gymnasium with a grim determination that never really left him. The early political defeats. The years of being underestimated by everyone in Albany. Once you’re done, you feel a pep in your step.
Most powerfully, Morris gives us February 14, 1884, the day Roosevelt’s young wife Alice and his mother Mittie died within hours of each other, in the same house. He drew a large X in his diary that night and wrote that the light had gone out of his life. This is what sent him back west to the Dakota Badlands, far from the politics and the literary world he had known in New York. Then you watch him come back, and everything he goes on to do looks more remarkable for what it cost. Watching Roosevelt move through his grief reminds you that he was a human being, and there is something in the way Morris renders that humanity that makes you respect the man more.
It’s beautifully written and exceptionally well researched, and it won everything when it came out. If you’re just beginning your Rooseveltian journey, this is where to start. But I revisit it regularly, because it always returns me to the person behind the long Wikipedia entry. [Jimmy]
📘 The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
4. Four Tet: Electronic Music for Deep Work
As I look back, I see a running theme with some of my Field Notes selections. I covered DJ Padre Guilherme earlier, and Barry Can’t Swim a few issues back. Clearly I’ve been on an electronic music binge lately, and this note is no different.
Lately a friend of mine mentioned the musician Four Tet in passing, and I decided to check him out. Four Tet is the stage name of English electronic musician Kieran Hebden. The kaleidoscopic cover art caught my eye (Jason Evans made the cover by photographing printer-test images on film, hole-punching the film, arranging the tiny discs on glass, and making a C-print), so I picked his 2010 album There Is Love in You. I’ve been listening to him almost non-stop for the past week.
There’s an absorbing quality to the music, and for someone who’s new to electronic music in general, it’s perfect. I don’t quite have the words to describe it, except perhaps to tell you where I listen to it: while in a state of deep work, often when I’m writing, editing a video, or on long drives.
As Pitchfork put it in its review:
“Instead, it’s both heady and physical, subtle but powerful music for thinking and moving or ideally doing both at the same time: It’s been a while since a brisk walk through the city sounded this good.”
A few favourites from the album. First, the opener ‘Angel Echoes’. It’s uplifting and rhythmic, with a soft vocal sample looping through it. It’s awesome. ‘Love Cry’ has these strange industrial hums and buzzes, but then suddenly a wonderful drum loop begins and I’m transported into the world of this song. I can see it playing in a dance club straight out of Mirror’s Edge. When the words ‘Love Cry’ start to repeat, I’m deep in a trance.
The Expanded Edition of the album also has remixes of these songs, and I’ve been really loving Floating Points’ remix of ‘Sing’. [Rohan]
5. The Closet That Became Cinema’s Tiny Desk
In 2010, Guillermo del Toro stopped by the Criterion Collection’s New York office for a meeting. Someone on the social media team suggested taking a picture of him in the closet. Criterion president Peter Becker went one step further: he pulled out his iPhone and filmed him picking movies. That one-off video became the Criterion Closet Picks series, which has since filmed more than 300 episodes featuring everyone from Cate Blanchett to Hideo Kojima to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and has quietly become one of the most reliably great things on YouTube. Think of it as cinema’s answer to NPR’s Tiny Desk: intimate, unscripted, and revealing in ways that press junkets never are.
The latest episode features Danny McBride, who studied filmmaking at UNC School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. He picks Badlands and explains how Malick’s naturalistic style shaped his own filmmaking instincts. Five Easy Pieces reveals that the cold ending of Eastbound & Down’s first season was lifted directly from Jack Nicholson’s final scene. A Face in the Crowd traces Andy Griffith’s fraudulent-southern-charm performance straight into Kenny Powers’ fourth-season media arc. “It’s funny how much of Eastbound is actually inspired by classic films, but it is,” he says. And he explains that on George Washington he was the second-unit director — his first-ever production job, shot in two weeks around Winston-Salem the day after graduating film school.
The Closet lets you see the invisible thread between the movies people love and the work they make. Three hundred episodes in, and the formula hasn’t changed. Here’s to hoping it never does. [Taylor]
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Back when, I picked up Four Tet's "Rounds" and it became my go-to listen for riding the DC Metro. Something about it just fit the moving cityscape and softened it, somehow.