In his latest act of digital restoration, Denis Shiryaev has used AI to revive and colorize footage documenting daily life in Paris during the 1890s. The remarkably clear footage lets you see horses and buggies move past Notre Dame; youngsters floating their boats at Luxembourg Gardens; the Eiffel Tour during its first decade of existence; firemen dashing down the city’s grands boulevards; and people hopping onto futuristic moving sidewalks. Quite a delight to see.
Find other recent video restorations in the Relateds below.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
“Most daemoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable,” goes a typical line in the work of H.P. Lovecraft. “Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied.” As a writer of what he called “weird fiction,” Lovecraft specialized in the narrator plunged into a loss for words by the sheer incomprehensibility of that which he sees before him. But in the case of this particular sentence, the narrator sees not an ancient monster awakened from its millennia of slumber but “nothing less than the solid ground” — or as the reader put it, nothing more than the solid ground. But then, most of us haven’t lived our entire lives locked up high in a castle.
The story is “The Outsider,” something of an outlier in the Lovecraft canon due to its outsized popularity as well as its Gothic tinge. By the author’s own admission, it owes a debt to his literary idol Edgar Allan Poe, and indeed represents Lovecraft’s “literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height.”
In 1926 or today, one could do much worse for a model than Poe, and critics have also detected in “The Outsider” the possible influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, and Oscar Wilde. Anyone daring to read the story aloud must thus strike a balance between several different competing tones, and few could hope to outdo Roddy McDowall’s performance on the 1966 record above. But as Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher notes, that actor, “child star of Lassie Come Home and My Friend Flicka,” is “hardly a name one would associate with the master of the unnameable.”
Though McDowall would later “star in some jolly decent horror movies like The Legend of Hell House and Fright Night, he was in 1966 best known for the likes of “That Darn Cat! or Lord Love a Duck or the stage musical Camelot.” In the event, McDowell proved “almost a perfect choice to give life to Lovecraft’s words,” delivering a “light boyish charm” combined with an intonation that “causes a growing disquiet and a dreadful sense of unease,” altogether suitable for the work of “the weird and reclusive Lovecraft.” He also brings to the role the kind of faint, unexpectedly refined menace that would make him famous as Cornelius and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes films. After “The Outsider” McDowall reads Lovecaft’s earlier story “The Hound,” and surely his voice is just the one in which Lovecraft fans would want to hear spoken, for the very first time in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, the name of the Necronomicon.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
My neighborhood thrift store has a very large VHS wall, filled with Hollywood movies, endless children’s videos, instructional tapes, and best of all a box of unknown vids. Maybe they’re blank. Maybe they contain 6 episodes of Matlock. And maybe, just maybe, they have something completely nuts.
But who has time or the old technology for that, especially when the Internet Archive has recently expanded its VHS Vault section to 20,000 digitized tapes under the (non) curation of archivist Jason Scott. We make no claims for the quality of the videos contained therein, because that’s really up to you. A cursory glance shows episodes of Blues Clues next to Traci Lords’ workout tape next to Mystery Science Theater alongside Gerry Anderson’s Lavender Castle, a mix of claymation, puppetry, and rudimentary CGI.
So look: you have to go digging. There’s gems among the junk. There’s That’s My Bush! the ill-conceived and ill-fated sitcom from South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone that disappeared down the memory hole after 9–11.
Or check out this Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults, 75 minutes of paranoid lunacy with a halfway decent ambient soundtrack and some groovy visuals. Once you hear “abnormal sexology” you’ll be hooked!
This 1994 footage/interviews from the playa at Burning Man is a fascinating time capsule. “We have enough guns out here to start World War III,” one man says. Yep, it was certainly a different time.
You’ll also find plenty of just straight-up “no idea what’s on this, just hit play and record” VHS tapes, like this 4 hour block of MTV from 1995.
The Archive also serves another purpose: right now it acts as a kind of “safe space” from the increasingly unforgiving algorithms of YouTube, designed to take down anything its AI hears as unlicensed footage or music. It’s one reason for the amount of Mystery Science Theater episodes up here, as some can no longer be shown due to expired film rights.
And unlike YouTube, all the videos are available for you to download, keep, remix, edit, and/or purge. You won’t have to wash your hands like after a trip to the thrift store, but your soul will feel equally gross. Enjoy! Enter the archive here.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
The history of exploration is replete with famous names everyone knows, like Robert Peary, the man most often credited with first reaching the North Pole. Those who work alongside the legends—doing the heavy lifting, saving lives, making essential calculations—tend to be forgotten or marginalized almost immediately in the telling of the story, especially when they don’t fit the profile for the kinds of people allowed to make history.
In Peary’s case, it seems that the most important member of his team—his assistant, African American explorer Matthew Henson—may have actually reached the North Pole first, along with four of the team’s Inuit crew members.
Henson and Perry first met in a Washington, DC clothing store where Henson worked. When they struck up a conversation, Peary learned that Henson had fled Maryland “after his parents were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan,” as Messy Nessy writes. He had then signed on as a cabin boy at 12 and sailed around the world, including the Russian Arctic seas, learning to read and write while aboard ship.
Peary was impressed and “hired him on the spot,” and “from that point forward, Henson went on every expedition Peary embarked on; trekking through the jungles of Nicaragua and, later, covering thousands of miles of ice in dog sleds to the North Pole.” Also on their last expedition were 39 Inuit men, women, and children, including the four Inuit men— Ootah, Egigingwah, Seegloo, and Oogueah—who accompanied Henson and Peary on the final leg of the 1909 journey, Peary and Henson’s eighth attempt.
As the six men neared the pole, Peary “grew more and more weary, suffering from exhaustion and frozen toes, unable to leave their camp, set up five miles” away. Henson and the others “scouted ahead,” and, according to Henson’s account, actually overshot the pole before doubling back. “I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot,” he later wrote.
Peary eventually caught up and “the sled-bound Admiral allegedly trudged up to plant the American flag in the ice—and yet, the only photograph of the historic moment shows a crew of faces that are distinctly not white.” Either Peary took the photograph as a “way of honoring the crew” or he wasn’t there at all when it was taken. The former doesn’t seem likely given Peary’s eagerness to claim full credit for the feat.
Peary accepted the sole honor from the National Geographic Society and an award from Congress in 1911, while Henson’s “contributions were largely ignored” at the time and “he returned to a very normal life” in relative obscurity, working as a U.S. Customs clerk for 23 years, unable to marshal the resources for further expeditions once Peary retired.
In his writings, Peary characterized Henson according to his usefulness: “This position I have given him primarily because of his adaptability and fitness for the work and secondly on account of his loyalty. He is a better dog driver and can handle a sledge better than any man living, except some of the best Eskimo hunters themselves.” The passage is reminiscent of Lewis and Clark’s descriptions of Sacagawea, who never emerges as a full person with her own motivations.
Sadly, in his 1912 account, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, it seems that Henson internalized the racism that confined him to second-class status. “Another world’s accomplishment was done and finished,” he writes, passively eliding the doer of the deed. He then invokes a trope that appears over and over, from Shakespeare’s Tempest to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: “From the beginning of history, wherever the world’s work was done by a white man, he had been accompanied by a colored man. From the building of the pyramids and the journey to the cross, to the discovery of the new world and the discovery of the North Pole.”
The kind of history Henson had learned is obvious—a whitewashing on a world-historical scale. It would take almost 30 years for him to finally receive recognition, though he lived to become the first black member of The Explorers Club in 1937 and “with some irony,” Messy Nessy writes, he “was awarded the Peary Polar Expedition Medal” in 1944. Since then, his name has usually been mentioned with Peary’s in histories of the expedition, but rarely as the first person to reach the pole. Watch two short profiles of Henson’s accomplishments above, and see many more photos from the expedition at Messy Nessy.
If you keep up with climate change news, you see a lot of predictions of what the world will look like twenty years from now, fifty years from now, a century from now. Some of these projections of the state of the land, the shape of continents, and the levels of the sea are more dramatic than others, and in any case they vary so much that one never knows which ones to credit. But of equal importance to foreseeing what Earth will look like in the future is not forgetting what it looks like now — or so holds the premise of the Earth Archive, a scientific effort to “scan the entire surface of the Earth before it’s too late.”
This ambitious project has three goals: to “create a baseline record of the earth as it is today to more effectively mitigate the climate crisis,” to “build a virtual, open-source planet accessible to all scientists so we can better understand our world,” and to “preserve a record of the Earth for our grandchildren’s grandchildren so they can study & recreate our lost heritage.”
All three depend on the creation of a detailed 3D model of the globe — but “globe” is the wrong word, bringing to mind as it does a sphere covered with flat images of land and sea.
Using lidar (short for Light Detection & Ranging), a technology that “involves shooting a dense grid of infrared beams from an airplane towards the ground,” the Earth Archive aims to create not an image but “a dense three-dimensional cloud of points” capturing the whole planet. At the top of the post, you can see a TED Talk on the Earth Archive’s origin, purpose, and potential by archaeologist and anthropology professor Chris Fisher, the project’s founder and director. “Fisher had used lidar to survey the ancient Purépecha settlement of Angamuco, in Mexico’s Michoacán state,” writes Atlas Obscura’s Isaac Schultz. “In the course of that work, he saw human-caused changes to the landscape, and decided to broaden his scope.”
Now, Fisher and Earth Archive co-director Steve Leisz want to create “a comprehensive archive of lidar scans” to “fuel an immense dataset of the Earth’s surface, in three dimensions.” This comes with certain obstacles, not the least the price tag: a scan of the Amazon rainforest would take six years and cost $15 million. “The next step,” writes Schultz, “could be to use some future technology that puts lidar in orbit and makes covering large areas easier.” Disinclined to wait around for the development of such a technology while forests burn and coastlines erode, Fisher and Leisz are taking their first steps — and taking donations — right now. On the off chance that humans of centuries ahead develop the ability to recreate the planet as we know it today, it’s the Earth Archive’s data they’ll rely on to do it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
This week’s guest Vi Burlew has arisen, a shining figure clad in mail, carrying aloft a shimmering broadsword to bring your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt this topic about the hero’s journey.
This general plot structure dating back to ancient myth was detailed by Joseph Campbell and famously and deliberately plundered to create the plot of the original Star Wars. So how has this evolved with the increasing introduction of female heroes in recent, largely Disney-owned blockbusters? We talk Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, anticipate Black Widow and the new Mulan, but also bring in Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Wizard of Oz, Little Women, Jane Eyre, Working Girl, and of course Road House.
What complicates this issue is that a distinct “heroine’s journey” had already been plotted in response to Campbell by feminist thinkers at least back to Maureen Murdock in 1990. The key difference is that while the hero achieves the goal and comes home in triumph, the heroine then realizes that there was something self-betraying about the triumph and requires an additional step of reconciliation with her origins. This is like if Luke realized after destroying the Death Star that he was a moisture farmer all along and had to come to terms with that. (Maybe he could actually grieve for his dead aunt and uncle and his best friend Biggs!)
It’s been argued that Harry Potter’s journey more closely resembles that heroine’s journey, whereas, say, Eowyn from Lord of the Rings (“I am no man!”) is a more traditional hero. Action films of today may feature female heroes, but when this is done thoughtfully (not just by taking an action hero and swapping the gender without further alteration), then filmmakers may tweak the structure of the myth to include some gender-specific elements and perhaps blend the two types of journey. These new variants that may or may not resonate in the way that caused the original Star Wars/Campbell formula to become so popular.
Two articles we specifically cite in our discussion are:
For some basics about the journeys described by Joseph Campbell, Maureen Murdok, and a different version by Victoria Lynn Schmidt, see the Wikipedia entries on Hero’s Journey and Heroine’s Journey.
In addition, The Heroine Journeys Project website features numerous articles about female heroes in media. We also looked at this reddit thread, which among other things provides some opposing views to those of our guests about the Star Wars franchise character Rey.
When Helen Keller was only twelve years old, she stood accused of plagiarizing a short story. A tribunal acquitted her of the charges, but when her dear friend Mark Twain read about the incident years later, he strenuously protested, exclaiming in a 1903 letter, “the kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterance—is plagiarism.”
Given the finite number of possible narratives, and combinations of phrases, words, and syllables, he’s got a point, though it wouldn’t hold up in court where the question of intent comes into play.
Litigious artists and their estates frequently sue other artists whose work is too close to what they claim as their own invention. Twain might say (his own copyrights aside) that the idea of inventing art from scratch is an “owlishly idiotic and grotesque” fantasy. He might say so, for example, of the recent legal decision that keeps Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” a form of private property, despite its author’s desire for anyone and everyone to sing and record the song. (Guthrie’s daughter Nora claims she is protecting it from “evil forces” who would misuse it.)
If literature is mostly plagiarism, what about music? How is it possible to copyright melodies when they float through the cultural ether, appearing in similar forms in song after song around the world? What would have become of the blues, bluegrass, and nearly every form of traditional folk music from time immemorial had copyright law prevented unauthorized borrowings? These are questions judges and juries often ponder when faced with two similar sounding pieces of music.
In one recent case, for example, a jury found that pop star Katy Perry had “infringed upon the copyright of Flame, a Christian rapper who’d posted a song” with the same melody as her song “Dark Horse,” even though Perry “insisted that she’d never heard of the song or the rapper” as Alexis Madrigal writes at The Atlantic. “For some musicians, musicologists, and lawyers, the verdict felt scary; after all, large numbers of songs now live on SoundCloud and YouTube. It became thinkable to ask: Could the world run out of original melodies?”
This seems unlikely given the “functionally infinite possibilities” for melodies resulting from “all the notes and all the traditions of music around the world.” However, when it comes to Western pop music and the more limited parameters that govern its composition, the number reaches a more “comprehensible part of finitude.” Programmer, lawyer, and musician Damien Riehl and his fellow programmer and musician Noah Rubin decided to “brute force” their way out of the problem entirely, as Riehl tells Adam Neely above, using an algorithm that generated all of the melodies in the range they’d seen in copyright lawsuits.
By generating all possible melodies above the middle‑C octave as MIDI files, the two artists hope to head off costly infringement litigation that can hobble creative freedom. Riehl explains the ingenious concept in the TEDx Minneapolis talk at the top of the post, beginning with the issue of “subconscious” copyright infringement that sometimes forces artists to pay out millions in damages, as happened to George Harrison when he was sued for plagiarizing “My Sweet Lord” from the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine.”
Maybe what the law has not considered, says Riehl, is that “since the beginning of time, the number of melodies is remarkably finite.” Rather than inventing out of whole cloth, artists choose melodies from an already extant “melodic dataset” to which everyone potentially has mental access. Now, everyone could potentially have legal access. By committing melodic data to a “tangible format,” Samantha Cole reports at Vice, “it’s considered copyrighted.” Or as Riehl explains:
Under copyright law, numbers are facts, and under copyright law, facts either have thin copyright, almost no copyright, or no copyright at all. So maybe if these numbers have existed since the beginning of time and we’re just plucking them out, maybe melodies are just math, which is just facts, which is not copyrightable.
Riehl and Rubin have released their billions of melodies under a Creative Commons Zero license, meaning they have “no rights reserved” and are similar to public domain. Available as open-source downloads on Github and the Internet Archive, along with the code for the algorithm the artists used to make them, the dataset might actually have sidestepped the problem of musical copyright infringement with technology, though whether the law, writes Cole, with its “complicated and often nonsensical” application, will agree is another issue entirely.
Broadly speaking, the “Space Race” of the 1950s and 60s involved two major players, the United States and the Soviet Union. But there were also minor players: take, for instance, the Zambian Space Program, founded and administered by just one man. A Time magazine article published in November 1964 — when the Republic of Zambia was one week old — described Edward Mukuka Nkoloso as a “grade-school science teacher and the director of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy.” Nkoloso had a plan “to beat the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the moon. Already Nkoloso is training twelve Zambian astronauts, including a 16-year-old girl, by spinning them around a tree in an oil drum and teaching them to walk on their hands, ‘the only way humans can walk on the moon.’ ”
Nkoloso and his Quixotic space program seem to have drawn as much attention as the subject of the article, Zambia’s first president Kenneth David Kaunda. Namwali Serpell tells Nkoloso’s story in a piece for The New Yorker: not just the conception and failure of his entry into the Space Race (“the program suffered from a lack of funds,” Serpell writes, “for which Nkoloso blamed ‘those imperialist neocolonialists’ who were, he insisted, ‘scared of Zambia’s space knowledge‘”), but also his background as “a freedom fighter in Kaunda’s United National Independence Party.”
Born in 1919 in then-Northern Rhodesia, Nkoloso received a missionary education, got drafted into World War II by the British, took an interest in science during his service, and came home to illegally found his own school. There followed periods as a salesman, a “political agitator,” and a messianic liberator figure, ending with his capture and imprisonment by colonial authorities.
How on Earth could this all have convinced Nkoloso to aim for Mars? Some assume he experienced a psychological break due to torture endured at the hands of Northern Rhodesian police. Some see his ostensible interplanetary ambitions as a cover for the training he was giving his “Afronauts” for guerrilla-style direct political action. Some describe him as a kind of national court jester: Serpell quotes from the memoir of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Arthur Hoppe, author of a series of contemporary pieces on the Zambian Space Program, who “believed it was the Africans who were satirizing our multi-billion-dollar space race against the Russians.” As Serpell points out, “Zambian irony is very subtle,” and as a satirist Nkoloso had “the ironic dédoublement — the ability to split oneself — that Charles Baudelaire saw in the man who trips in the street and is already laughing at himself as he falls.”
Whatever Nkoloso’s purposes, the Zambian Space Program has attracted new attention in the years since documentary footage of its facilities and training procedures found its way to Youtube. This fascinatingly eccentric chapter in the history of man’s heavenward aspirations has become the subject of short documentaries like the one from SideNote at the top of the post, as well as the subject of artworks like the short film Afronauts above. Nkoloso died more than 30 years ago, but he now lives on as an icon of Afrofuturism, a movement (previously featured here on Open Culture) at what Serpell calls “the nexus of black art and technoculture.” No figure embodies Afrofuturism quite so thoroughly as Sun Ra, who transformed himself from the Alabama-born Herman Poole Blount into a peace-preaching alien from Saturn. Though Nkoloso never seems to have met his American contemporary, such an encounter would surely, as a subject for Afrofuturistic art, be truly out of this world.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
