downtime

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downtime episodes

November 21, 2021 downtime episode 1: skateboarding
Episode Notes
[The music in this podcast is titled “Aced It” by Ketsa. It is licensed for use under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.]
THOMAS: Welcome to Downtime, the podcast where Northwestern students discuss their hobbies, passions, and other cool things they do in their free time. I’m your host, Jade Thomas.
I know finding free time during college is hard, and even harder when we’re taking classes on the quarter schedule. But despite that, people still manage to make time for activities that enrich them, even activities that might not be academic or professional in nature. Hopefully, in listening to this podcast, you’ll feel empowered to make time for your own happiness and peace of mind.
In today’s episode, you’ll hear from all sorts of skateboarders - including two friends who met randomly on the street, a reformed snowboarder, a man who went flying on Sheridan, and more. You’ll learn about different types of boards, the transitory nature of memory, and why you should try out some wheels for yourself.
THOMAS: Weinberg second-year Naomi Gizaw says she started skating from a really young age, but didn’t pick it back up until last year.
GIZAW: So I actually started originally in middle school. Like we’re talking fifth grade, Disney XD – the primetime. It was really hard to get into it, especially because I didn’t really have any older siblings and my parents did not know how to skateboard or whatever. So, it was just taking me to the park and trying to figure it out for myself. It kind of plateaued after a while so I didn’t really get into it as much. I think like this past summer, and including spring quarter of freshman year – so last year – I really got into it. I kind of started with longboarding first. So I had a skateboard in middle school and I got into longboarding through my roommate, actually. So we would longboard all around campus. So this past summer when I went back home, I got a couple of my friends from high school and we just went all around the Detroit area, hitting up different spots and skating, and longboarding,you name it. It just felt a lot more comfortable. I felt like when I was going to skate parks when I was younger it was very male-dominated and I was also young at the time, too. It was very intimidating. I feel like when I approached it now I already had that community.
THOMAS: Like Naomi, McCormick first-year Otis McCallum says he started skating when he was younger, but only started to take it more seriously when he was in high school.
MCCALLUM: My first, I guess, brush with skateboarding was through my godparents. They were both really into that graffiti scene in the city. They both skated, and they're both really good at it too. I got my first skateboard when I was a really young kid but I never kind of touched it. So, I didn’t actually come back to it until like, freshman year of high school, where I kind of met a group of people who were super into it and they ended up becoming my best friends in high school. And we just ended up skating all over the city. Going from place to place and just exploring new areas was like a huge part of my high school and just like, social experience growing up in New York City.
THOMAS: Everyone’s path to skateboarding is a bit different, but sometimes it might not start with skateboarding at all.
MA: So, I started it because I like snowboarding a lot. I started snowboarding at 11. I’m really into snowboarding, it’s like an addiction, but obviously you can’t do that unless it’s winter. So I‘ve found an alternative which is skateboarding. It’s actually pretty similar. Not that similar – snowboarding is more fun.
THOMAS: Vanessa Ma is currently a first-year student at Weinberg. Despite her bias towards snowboarding, she says she still enjoys being on dry ground.
MA: Sometimes, I just feel like doing it. Like it really makes me happier. It’s really helpful for relieving my stress.
THOMAS: On the surface, skateboarding seems like a disjointed community with people starting the sport for all sorts of different reasons. But at its core, some say that it’s the friendship and family that is forged through late-night skate sessions, random meet-ups and spontaneous practices that brings everyone together.
MCCALLUM: I think I skate better by myself, but I always have the most fun when it’s with other people. It’s such a community sport, too. You can walk down the street and see someone with a skateboard – that’s actually how we met. I literally – we both have decks from this brand called like “Fucking Awesome”. I literally was like, “Oh shit, he has the same brand” and I ran up to him and just started talking and that’s how we became friends and shit.
THOMAS: The person that Otis is referring to is Mahan Malhotra, a first-year in the School of Communications. Malhotra is from Hong Kong, a place where he says that despite the sport not being all that popular, at least for now, he was still able to build up that close circle of fellow skaters.
MALHOTRA: In Hong Kong, skating is not too big – it’s getting big now – but back when I was growing up it was really small, there was like, one skate store in town. And I remember like me and all my friends when we first started out, we saved up money the whole summer and decided to get our own boards and build them together, which was super fun. Those guys are my best friends for life.
THOMAS: The bond that Mahan is referring to is very strong, but it’s really flexible, too. Not only can you meet new friends in your area, you can even develop close connections with people who don’t even speak your language.
MALHOTRA: People are so nice. You know, in Hong Kong, there's not a single, nasty skater. I only spoke a little bit of Cantonese, so I couldn't communicate with most of the local guys back there. But like we got on through skateboarding, you know?
THOMAS: Well, maybe I exaggerated. It seems like skating is really an entire language of its own. Skaters communicate with one another, of course, but they communicate with their boards too. These crazy loud pieces of wood with four wheels sort of melt into their character, and ultimately paint a picture of who they used to be and who they want to be.
MCCALLUM: In my dorm, I have a wall of kind of like, I just kind of hung up old boards as decorations, but each of them is not like I have a long history with – it's more of like snapshots from like a certain month or two period in my life that I look back fondly on, just because they are made to kind of get destroyed.
MALHOTRA: I mean, yeah, like skateboards are made to break. I've snapped like, at least like 20 decks by now. It just happens. But the thing is I could look back at any of those old, scratched up, you know, snapped boards, and I could tell you exactly where I was in my life during that period. Because, you just remember it so, you know, fondly – especially like learning a new trick. Like it's all like, ingrained in your head because it's such a feeling. It's such a feeling landing, especially even if you've been trying it for like, ages. That's the best feeling in the world.
THOMAS: The distance that Otis and Mahan have with their boards does seem to translate into a greater sense of intimacy than someone would expect to have with a material object. I mean, isn’t it awesome that you can look at a beat up piece of wood and see who you were in middle school? High school? To be instantly reminded of all of the times you were elated or insecure? I just feel as if you have to have so much trust in yourself, but also in the board – in this vessel – to be able to merge your heart with it. So, I guess, maybe it’s not where you take your board, but where it takes you.
GIZAW: I feel like I place more value on where I’ve been with the longboard, or like where I plan on going.
THOMAS: The type of trust I was talking about earlier obviously isn’t cultivated in a day, or a week, or even a month. Learning how to use your board and maneuver your way through the world with it is definitely a learning curve. Weinberg third-year Tomer Cherki says he’s had his fair share of bumps in the road. And road in this context, is exclusively referring to Sheridan, by the way.
CHERKI: So I bumped into, like, an uneven tile. And I went flying off the board and then the board went flying into the streets, right? Like, with cars. This is actually a testament to how strong the boards are. A car ran over the board. But it still didn't break. Right. It's flexible enough that like even with the full weight of a small car it survived. Thankfully, I did not fly into the street. I was on the sidewalk. But uh, yeah, that was a more extreme one.
CHERKI: But obviously, you know, with more practice, I just became more comfortable and confident. It's not that I don't still fall – of course I do. But I have more of a...sort of like with driving, right? You have more of an understanding of the car, how you can move it. And so you can start making maneuvers with more confidence, right? Like the difference between someone who's 16 and just got their license making a left turn and someone who's been driving for 10 years making a left turn, right? They both could be making good left turns, but one just does it with a lot more confidence and ease and it's almost automatic.
THOMAS: The wild thing about skating is that every single person I talked to said that confidence – that trust in yourself – really is dependent on whether or not you have that support from other skaters. Naomi says she’s trying to create that kind of environment for skaters at Northwestern, free from exclusivity and judgment.
GIZAW: So the club that I was trying to start, like a skate club here, which is inclusive of not just skateboards, but longboards, pennyboards, nickelboards – you name it. I think what I was trying to do is replicate what I was able to have this past summer and create that on campus, but not in a way that’s as exclusive or male-dominated as what I experienced when I was in middle school. I feel like there’s not a lot of opportunities on campus to meet people outside of your major, or even just your residential area, too. I think there’s been some clubs that are starting now that are able to do that, which I’m really happy about, but I feel like what I’m trying to start is just one more club that could possibly do that as well.
THOMAS: And if you’re still on the fence about whether or not you should give skating a try, Naomi says don’t sweat it.
GIZAW: So it's like if you don’t kind of grow up in that environment or are very exposed to it or kind of start at it at a young age, you kind of like, missed your opportunity. So I would just like to say PSA: that’s not true. You can start as late as you want. I’ve even met people who’ve started and they’re whole adults, you know? You just have to remember, at the end of the day, it’s a hobby. It’s not like it's something that’s like, outrageously difficult to pick up. If you work at it, you know, maybe twenty minutes a day, you’ll actually get really good at it.
THOMAS: At the end of the day, it is a hobby. And at schools like Northwestern, it’s so important that students have hobbies and outlets where they can be bad at stuff, and then maybe get good, or maybe keep being bad, but ultimately having fun anyway. Thank you so much to Naomi, Otis, Vanessa, Mahan, and Tomer for opening up about how you spend your downtime and a special thanks to McCormick first-year Jonathan Chan for rolling his skateboard around in front of my microphone. Much appreciated.
Lastly, thank you all for listening and please let me know how you spend your downtime. For NBN Audio, I’m Jade Thomas.
[Graphic by Billy Kirchgessner]
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13 min
November 08, 2020 Tenny's Tunes #16: What Music Captures "Summer?"
Episode Notes
["Summertime," by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald]
Hi y'all, it's Tenny. Welcome to another episode of Tenny's Tunes.
I know it's way past summer at this point for most people living in the Northern Hemisphere, but whenever I come across good music, I share it with you.
When you think of summer, do you picture a desert with the midday sun hovering above it, an air-conditioned living room with board games and TV or the beach filled with people? Bottom line is, we all have our own versions of summer. It's an amorphous concept.
There is this popular mobile game called "Arknights," and it's more renowned for its soundtrack than the actual gameplay, which is basically tower defense similar to “Plants vs. Zombies”. For every major seasonal event like summer fest, Halloween and New Year, the game developer puts out music specific to that event through the hands of "Monster Siren," an in-game music producer.
Two summers ago, Monster Siren published a summer theme song called "Ready?" The fictional in-game artist who performed the song is called "DDD" and is modeled after Marshmello. The piece overall brings up imagery of a sunny day at the beach, people sunbathing, splashing water at each other, making some barbecue, whatever they are allowed to do near the beach. The misty piano sounds create a sense of "coolness" amidst the summer heat.
It's probably easier hearing it for yourself. But due to copyright issues, I won't be playing the original version, just a piano interpretation I recorded a while back. Hope you find it pleasing to the ear. This is NBN Audio. Peace.
["Ready?" DDD, piano version by Tenny Tsang]
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6 min
October 08, 2020 Tenny’s Tunes #15: Can Piano Sound Like Guitars
Episode Notes
[“clavar la espada” by Shiro Sagisu]
Hi guys, it’s Tenny. Welcome to episode 15 of Tenny’s Tunes. Hope everyone’s doing okay as we head into the final three months of 2020. I hope the worst times have passed, but yet I wonder if what is to come will be any better. I guess that sums up life in general.
I have a question for you. Do you think pianos can sound like other instruments? We often hear people commenting on how flutes can sound like birds chirping, or clarinets at high pitches can resemble kettles with boiling water. But those are comparisons between a strictly defined musical instrument and a non-conventional instrument - because one can certainly make music out of anything in this day and age.
With regards to piano, I often find it easy to emulate the sound of a choir from fugues by Bach with the distinct SATB voice lines. Step on the sustain pedal, and you have a Bach piece that sounds like it should be played in the church. More recently, I’ve started to take an interest in guitar, not in the sense that I have one and I am learning how to play it, but that I see similarities between the techniques used in guitar and piano performances. Specifically, the Spanish guitar, which is known for some of the most advanced techniques.
As an example, the Spanish guitar often features picado, which is an alternate picking between the index and middle fingers as you hold your thumb onto the E string. This results in a fast-paced rhythmic repetition that goes either up or down the scale and, quite frankly, serves as the soul of a flamenco performance. Of course, there are also claps and singing that accompany a flamenco dancer, but if you only want to go with the essentials, a guitar is what matters the most from my experience. But don’t quote me on that.
In this sense, piano and guitar are quite similar. Your fingers can move pretty fast up and down the keyboard, or repeat in a cycle of three notes to mimic that picado sound. There are limitations to how much a piano can try to reproduce a guitar piece, of course. For instance, traditional pianos can’t really do vibratos like guitars or violins, but I believe electric pianos can through certain functions.
With that in mind, I bring to you today an attempt at interpreting a guitar/violin piece with piano. The piece is called “La Distancia Para Un Duelo” and has a Spanish feel to it. Hope you like it. You can also look up the original version on YouTube as well. I am Tenny, and this is NBN Audio. Peace.
[“La distancia para un duelo” by Shiro Sagisu, performed by Tenny Tsang]
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7 min
May 26, 2020 Tenny’s Tunes #14: 千本桜 (Senbonzakura)
Episode Notes
[“千本桜 (Senbonzakura)”]
Hi guys, welcome to Episode 14 of Tenny’s Tunes. I am your host, Tenny. Hope everyone is safe and healthy.
This was arguably the most popular Japanese song in 2014 (by Wagakki Band, a Japanese rock band that uses traditional instruments). I was still in middle school back then, and my range of preference for music was a bit narrow. The melody didn’t appeal to me for some reason, but at least it was pleasing to the ear. One thing I didn’t get was why people were so crazy over the tempo or speed of the song, creating their own versions and remixes that were even faster than the original piece. To me, showing off skills for the sake of it didn’t do the music justice at all.
Nevertheless, I decided to revisit this piece in honor of that era. If you wanna see me playing it, here is the link to the video. Hope you enjoy.
This is NBN Audio.
[“千本桜 (Senbonzakura)”]
Music performed by Tenny Tsang.
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5 min
May 01, 2020 Tenny’s Tunes #13: Clair de Lune
Episode Notes
Hi guys, welcome to Episode 13 of Tenny’s Tunes. I am your host Tenny. Hope everyone is safe and healthy.
Inspiration: Back in high school, I volunteered at a local senior center and played piano music for the residents there. I would take requests to play certain pieces, but there’s one that I just did not take the time to learn. That’s right, it’s Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy, not the Beethoven Moonlight Sonata that some people might confuse it with. Even my good friends in college tell me, “You know Tenny, you really should know how to play this one.” Well, quarantine time means piano time for me!
Creation: It took a lot of tries to nail this one. I played at a slower tempo than usual. It’s actually harder to play classical pieces on my MIDI keyboard than on a regular piano.
Message: Haha, I was a bit lazy for the past few ones. We are all different people, but I will tell you what I got from the piece. How do you feel when you look at the moon at night? Do you prefer a crescent, a gibbous, a new moon or a full moon? Maybe a combination? I have no preference. To me, the moon is as fickle and elusive as it can be, but it still abides by the pattern of the moon phases every month. Humans are too. We all have a bottom line that we will never cross over, or else we cease to be humans. Alright, enjoy! This is NBN Audio.
[“Clair de Lune” performed by Tenny Tsang]
Music performed by Tenny Tsang.
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8 min
April 15, 2020 Tenny's Tunes #12: Tchaikovsky Nocturne Op. 19 No. 4 in D minor
Episode Notes
Hi guys, welcome to Episode 12 of Tenny’s Tunes. I am your host Tenny. Hope everyone is safe and healthy.
Inspiration: I was very fortunate to be able to perform a cello piano duet of Tchaikovsky’s Nocturne No. 4 with an elderly French gentleman in Aix-en-Provence, France, the summer of 2019. I was studying abroad there for six weeks. Now, I want to return to this piece for memory sake after nearly a year.
Creation: I was planning on recording the common piano solo version that’s in C sharp minor, but the key just didn’t sound right to me personally, perhaps because I originally played the duet version in D minor. So I took a U-turn halfway through recording and decided to stick to D minor key.
Message: Not going to spoil it. We all have our own unique interpretations of this piece. Enjoy!
[“Tchaikovsky Nocturne Op. 19 No. 4 in D minor (piano solo)” performed by Tenny Tsang]
_Music performed by Tenny Tsang. _
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7 min
February 18, 2020 Tenny's Tunes #11: White Night March
Episode Notes
[“White Night March” performed by Tenny Tsang]
Hi guys, welcome to Episode 11 of Tenny’s Tunes. I am your host, Tenny.
Today, we are not going the fancy route. Just plain old piano with no other accompaniment. This piece is a movie soundtrack from Journey under the Midnight Sun, which came out around 2011. Original by Hirai Mamiko.
Inspiration: Not much. I wanted to play this myself because I love it.
Creation: This is an easy piece at first glance. But it does take effort to nail the intonation and articulation of each note and chord.
Message: One cannot stare directly at the sun. Nor look directly into what’s in the heart.
Original by Hirai Mamiko. Music performed by Tenny Tsang.
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5 min
January 30, 2020 Tenny's Tunes #10: Stärker
Episode Notes
[“Stärker” By Tenny Tsang]
Hi guys, welcome to episode ten of Tenny’s Tunes. I am your host Tenny. Before we dive in, I want to wish everyone a safe, healthy and successful 2020.
For some time, I have been thinking of getting a good MIDI keyboard to make some simple music, and it just so happens that our current NBN editor-in-chief was selling one. So I got it from him and made this instrumental adaptation of “Stronger” using the piano and erhu, a Chinese string instrument. Original by Daft Punk and Kanye West.
Inspiration: 2020 is not a chill year given the coronavirus season, wildfire, diplomatic tensions, etc., but it boils down to one thing that has endured the test of time: Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker (That which does not kill me, makes me stronger).
Creation: At first, I just wanted to record a piano version but it turns out erhu is such a magical fit to piano, so then the rest of the elements fell in one by one. Called the piece “Stärker” to pay tribute to the original work.
Message: As always, you figure it out dude. Interpretation is not up to the creator but to the receptor, though it should be obvious enough. Whether you can always remember this line, however, is yet a test of time.
Music by Tenny Tsang. All copyrights reserved.
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5 min
November 19, 2019 Tenny's Tunes #9: C-Pop 101
Episode Notes
[周杰倫 - 三年二班 Backing Track, by Studio One]
Hi guys, welcome to episode nine of Tenny’s Tunes! I am your host, Tenny.
As promised last time, I’ll be discussing C-pop, or Chinese pop music. People all over the world are familiar with K-pop, or Korean pop music and culture. From my understanding, the worldwide K-pop phenomenon took off in the 2000s and never really died down in terms of enthusiasm from fans. On the flip side, C-pop never achieved the same level of popularity, and fervor for C-pop remains mainly within Chinese-speaking communities, occasionally resonating with people from other cultures.
Indeed, at first glance, K-pop shadows over C-pop in terms of its eye-catching fashion and flashiness. Sometimes, it doesn’t take rocket science for people to see the talent that many K-pop artists display. But it often takes more time and patience to discover the true value of certain things in life. C-pop is no exception to this rule. I don’t believe that I can convince many people to start liking Chinese music just from listening to this show, but it is a good recommendation for you if you are into Chinese or Asian music as a whole.
Today, I am experimenting with this topic by briefly covering arguably the most influential figure in the last eighteen-some years of C-pop or M-pop (Mandarin pop, whatever English-speaking people coin this genre). Most people consider him the one-and-only in his unique taste for music and rap that has never been successfully surpassed or mimicked before: Jay Chou from Taiwan. If you are studying Chinese, this artist is definitely crucial to your understanding of contemporary pop culture in both mainland and Taiwan, because both sides of the strait has loved him for close to two decades straight just for his talent and cool persona.
[夜曲 (Nocturne)]
What you heard right now was one of Jay’s top hits in the mid-2000s called “YeQu” or Nocturne. As you can tell, he’s really good at writing love songs, making up more than half of his playlist. In particular, this song won five awards at a music festival in Shanghai when it was first released in 2005. Here are a few more suggestions. Feel free to copy and paste the names into YouTube, because it’s kind of hard to accurately translate them into English.
[三年二班]
[外婆 (Grandma)]
[夜的第七章]
That’s as far as I will take you on this journey to discover Jay Chou and the Chinese music industry overall. One final thing I would remind you is that you will get the most out of C-pop only if you take an interest in Chinese culture, just like any other languages. The Chinese language is a very concise and profound language, and learning it is the only way you can appreciate the lyrics in the songs. I wish you the best of luck. This is Tenny’s Tunes on NBN Audio.
Music used in this episode belongs to Jay Chou and Studio One.
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5 min
October 23, 2019 Tenny's Tunes #8: Be The King, E-Dubble
Episode Notes
[“Tribute to E-Dubble,” arranged by Tenny Tsang]
Hi guys, welcome back to Tenny’s Tunes! I am your host Tenny.
It’s been a while but I am back! We are continuing this series this year that I started around the same time last year. When I was considering what type of music to talk next, it occurred to me that I haven’t really touched on hip hop and rap. By that, I mean the kind of music that started with The Eagles, Michael Jackson (the King!) from around the ‘70s to Outkast and Kanye West in the 2000s. Of course, we still have very talented artists continuing the genre, but music these days are usually accompanied by some kind of sci-fi sound effects and whatnot.
Anyways, I grew up in China and, throughout my childhood, experienced not only the golden period of C-Pop in the 2000s (something I will touch on in the next episode), but also American and European music. To be fair, 90 percent of which were from Michael Jackson’s albums. It was only when I came to the U.S. that I slowly got to know more about other singers, composers.
Today, I wanna talk about E-Dubble, an online American hip hop rapper/singer. He passed on in February of 2017, over 2 and a half years ago. The very first time I got to know him was in 2017. Sitting on the toilet and browsing through random YouTube videos during my junior year of high school, I came upon an outro music that a youtube gamer used.
The song and the lyrics hooked me instantly. The clash between rational thinking and actions versus the ones driven by pure emotion -- now that is real, authentic stuff. I let the playlist take me to the other E-Dubble songs. Some of my favorites are “Be A King”
[Play “Be A King” by E-Dubble]
What It Do
[Play “What It Do” by E-Dubble]
Robots Can’t Drink
[Play “Robots Can’t Drink” by E-Dubble]
The list goes on. The bottom line is, I let E-Dubble’s music speak for themselves. No wonder people call him The King. I do too. People often say E-Dubble didn’t get as much credit as he really deserved as such a rare talent in hip hop and rap. But I speculate, just like many others, that to him, the numbers were not his priority. It’s doing what he likes to do that continued to fuel his passion for music and give all of us so much joy in listening to him rap and sing.
There are so many awfully talented musicians out there, in all ages. E-Dubble had a unique flair for music, and he will continue to have a special place in our hearts for as long as we live. Even after we die and go to his concert up there. I hope you will come to like E-Dubble too, after you explore more of him on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, etc. Thank you again, E-Dubble, for sharing with us your story. My name is Tenny Tsang, and this is NBN Audio. Thank you so much for listening, and tune in next time on Tenny’s Tunes. Bye-bye.
All music used in this episode belong to E-Dubble. I do not make money from this.
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5 min