Shiryaev’s casual distribution of these efforts on YouTube can make us take for granted just how extraordinary they are. Such recreations would have been impossible just a decade or so ago. But we should not see these as historic restorations. The software Shiryaev uses fills in gaps between the frames, allowing him to upscale the frame rate and make more naturistic-looking images. This often comes at a cost. As Ted Mills wrote in an earlier Open Culture post on Shiryaev’s methods, “there are a lot of artifacts, squooshy, morphing moments where the neural network can’t figure things out.”
But it’s an evolving technology. Unlike wizards of old, Shiryaev happily reveals his trade secrets so enterprising coders can give it a try themselves, if they’ve got the budget. In his latest video, above, he plugs the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000, a $4,000 graphics card (and does some griping about rights issues), before getting to the fun stuff. Rather than make old film look new, he’s “applied a bunch of different neural networks in an attempt to generate realistic faces of people from famous paintings.”
These are, Shiryaev emphasizes, “estimations,” not historical recreations of the faces behind Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Lady with an Ermine, Botticelli’s model for The Birth of Venus, Vermeer’s for Girl with a Pearl Earring, or Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. In the case of American Gothic, we have a photo of the model, artist Grant Wood’s sister, to compare to the AI’s version. Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird gets the treatment. She left perhaps a few hundred photographs and some films that probably look more like her than the AI version.
The GIF-like “transformations,” as they might be called, may remind us of a less fun use of such technology: AI’s ability to create realistic faces of people who don’t exist for devious purposes and to make “deep fake” videos of those who do. But that needn’t take away from the fact that it’s pretty cool to see Botticelli’s Venus, or a simulation of her anyway, smile and blink at us from a distance of over 500 years.
Welsh crooner Tom Jones made an unlikely comeback in the late 80s, covering Prince’s “Kiss” with Art of Noise. Then in the mid-90s, he showed up on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air to sing mid-60s hit “It’s Not Unusual” for superfan Carlton Banks. This was a time of 60s comebacks all around, but Jones’ resurgence was a little odd (though perfectly in character for Carlton Banks). Tom Jones had been a big star in the mid to late 60s, with his own TV show and a string of international hits. But Tom Jones was never exactly cool in the way that, say, Neil Young was cool in 1969, the year he and Jimi Hendrix stole a truck to get to Woodstock.
“Tom Jones and his show might’ve been seen as somewhat ‘square’ by the rockstar standards of CSNY,” writes Dangerous Minds,” but when the foursome agreed to appear in September of that year, just weeks after the massive festival in upstate New York, it turned into a memorable television event, with Jones taking lead vocals on “Long Time Gone” and blowing the audience and the band away.
“The man’s mighty lungs inspire the rest of them to keep up, it must be said,” even Young, whose “face goes from one of disdain/’What am I doing here?’ to ‘This fucking rocks’ about halfway through.”
Even stranger than this combination is the fact that Young agreed to do it at all. He had become notoriously averse to doing television, even turning down The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and citing his hatred of TV as a reason for leaving Buffalo Springfield two years earlier. Though he may have been caught up in the moment, he later regretted it, as his longtime manager Eliot Roberts told biographer Jimmy McDonough: “Neil went, ‘The Tom Jones show! What possessed you? It’s that shit.’ He always used to say ‘that shit.’ Crosby had this weed of doom… Neil never forgave me for that. He ripped me about it for a very, very long time. Years.”
“It was highly rated,” says Roberts, “sold a lotta records, but in retrospect it was embarrassing.” Young probably shouldn’t have worried. Weed of doom or no, it didn’t seem to hurt his credibility as much as his bewildering (though critically re-appraised) 1982 New Wave record, Trans. Jones has done just fine, reinventing himself in the 80s and 90s in good-humored self-parodies, then becoming a bona fide pop star once more. He has yet to appear again with Neil Young.
Extremist: in any political squabble, and especially any online political squabble, the label is sure to get slapped on someone sooner or later. Of course, we never consider ourselves extremists: it’s the parameters of acceptable political discussion that wrongly frame our entirely reasonable, truth-informed views. But what if we were to embrace the extreme? “What we never hear about extremism is its advantages,” says Monty Python’s John Cleese in the television advertisement above. “The biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good because it provides you with enemies.” When you have enemies, “you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies and all the goodness in the whole world is in you.”
If you “have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway,” you can justify your own uncivilized behavior “because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons, and that if it wasn’t for them, you’d actually be good-natured and courteous and rational all the time.” Sign on with the “hard left,” Cleese says, and you’ll receive “their list of authorized enemies: almost all kinds of authority, especially the police, the City, Americans, judges, multinational corporations, public schools, furriers, newspaper owners, fox hunters, generals, class traitors — and of course, moderates.” If you prefer the “hard right,” they have a list of their own, one including “noisy minority groups, unions, Russia, weirdos, demonstrators, welfare sponges, meddlesome clergy, peaceniks, the BBC, strikers, social workers, communists — and of course, moderates.”
As Cleese tweeted this past weekend, “Hard to tell if I recorded this 30 years or 10 minutes ago.” In fact he recorded it more than 30 years ago, as an endorsement of the centrist SDP-Liberal Alliance between the United Kingdom’s Social Democratic Party and Liberal Party. Having formed in 1981 and gone defunct by 1988 (when it became the party now known as the Liberal Democrats), the SDP-Liberal Alliance leaves little in the way of a legacy, but this clip has only grown more relevant with time. As an extremist, Cleese reminds us “you can strut around abusing people and telling them you could eat them for breakfast and still think of yourself as a champion of the truth, a fighter for the greater good, and not the rather sad, paranoid schizoid that you really are” — a statement that, uttered in our internet era, would surely make more than a few enemies.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
The UK of the late-70s was, in many unfortunate respects, like the UK (and US) of today, with far-right attacks against West Indian and Asian immigrants becoming routine, along with increased aggression from the police. Enoch Powell’s inflammatory 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech (denounced in the papers as a naked “appeal to racial hatred) energized the far-right National Front. Nazi punks and skinheads began violent campaigns in the mid-70s. A very hot summer in 1976 saw a riot at the Nottingham Carnival, when police attacked the West Indian festival. Carnival-goers fought back, including the Clash’s Joe Strummer and Paul Simenon, who describe the events below.
Strummer was inspired to pen “White Riot,” a call to arms for white punks against the police and far right, and the band moved increasingly toward reggae, including a cover of Junior Murvin’s “Police & Thieves.”
Into this boiling cauldron stepped Eric Clapton to drunkenly declare his support for Powell onstage in Birmingham and repeatedly chant the National Front slogan “keep Britain white!” In outraged response, photographer and former Clapton fan Red Saunders and others founded Rock Against Racism, publishing a letter in the NME to recruit people to join the cause. The short note addressed Clapton’s glaring hypocrisy directly: “Come on Eric… Own up. Half your music is black. You’re rock music’s biggest colonist.”
The letter articulated the disgust felt by thousands around the country. Paul Furness, working as a medical records clerk in Leeds at the time, found the anti-racist declaration “positive” and “life affirming,” as he says in the short film at the top. He helped organize the first Rock Against Racism carnival in 1978 and was amazed “that there were thousands and thousands and thousands of people descending on London. The excitement of it, just this realization…. That you can change things, that you can could actually make a difference.”
Created with the Anti-Nazi League, the April 1978 Rock Against Racism Carnival in London’s Victoria Park was the moment “punk became a populist movement to be reckoned with,” writes Ian Fortnam at Classic Rock. (Learn more in the documentary above.) “Never before had so many people been mobilized for that sort of cause,” headliner Tom Robinson remembers. “It was our Woodstock.” The Clash were there—you can hear their performance just above. It was, writes Fortnam, “their finest hour”:
The Clash were on fire, feeding off of an ecstatic audience and premiering as yet unrecorded material (eventually released on Give ‘Em Enough Rope the following November) like Tommy Gun and The Last Gang In Town. The show was a revelation.
The Rock Against Racism Carnival brought together punk and reggae bands, and fans of both, starting a tradition of multi-racial lineups at RAR concerts into the 80s that featured X‑Ray Specs, the Ruts, the Slits, Generation X, Elvis Costello, Steel Pulse, Aswad, and Misty in Roots, among many others. “When you saw a band like ours jamming with Tom Robinson or Elvis Costello,” says singer Poko of Misty in Roots, who played more RAR shows than any other band, “it showed that if you love music we can all live together.”
That message resonated throughout the country and the sound systems of the streets. At the first Carnival, Fortnam writes, “phalanxes of police held back counter-demonstrating skinheads” while an estimated 80,000 people marched through the streets chanting “Black and white unite and fight, smash the National Front.” Rock Against Racism became a massive movement that did create unity and pushed back successfully against far-right attacks. But it wasn’t only about the politics, as photographer Syd Shelton recalls below. It was also a fight for what British punk would become—the music of fascism and the far right or a synthesis of sounds and rhythms from the former Empire and its former colonies.
Fine art and reality TV are typically rated our highest and lowest forms of entertainment, yet creative competition shows combine the two. Robin Slonina graduated from Chicago’s Art Institute and lived in the gallery world doing sculptures, paintings and installations for several years before discovering body painting and opening Skin City Body Painting in Las Vegas, perhaps the foremost institution of its type in the world.
Robin then served as a judge (along with RuPaul!) on the show Skin Wars for its three seasons (2014–2017) before The Game Show Network decided that the whole thing was too expensive to produce. She joins Mark, Erica, and Brian to figure out the degree to which the competition reality show format lets the art shine through.
That which stands first, and is most to be desired by all happy, honest and healthy-minded men, is ease with dignity.
—Cicero, Pro Sestio, XLV., 98
There is much to admire in Roman ideas about the use of leisure time, what Michel Foucault referred to as “the care of the self.” The Latin words for work and leisure themselves give us a sense of what should have priority in life. Negotium, or business, is a negation, with the literal meaning of “the nonexistence of leisure” (otium). The English word—considered in its parts as “busy-ness”—doesn’t really sound much more appealing.
The notion that everyone, not just a propertied elite, however, should be entitled to leisure time came about only relatively recently—mostly advocated by radicals and trade unionists. In the U.S., anarchists and striking workers in Chicago fought against police in 1886 during the Haymarket Affair to achieve “Eight Hours for Work, Eight Hours for Rest, Eight Hours for What We Will.” In 1912, women-led immigrant strikers chanted “Bread and Roses” in Lawrence, Massachusetts, proclaiming their right to more than bare survival.
After the achievement of the 40-hour workweek, paid vacations, and other labor concessions, many influential figures believed that egalitarian access to leisure would only increase in the 20th century. Among them was economist John Maynard Keynes, who forecast in 1930 that labor-saving technologies might lead to a 15-hour workweek when his grandchildren came of age. Indeed, he titles his essay, “Economic Possibility for our Grandchildren.”
Writing at the start of the Great Depression, Keynes finds reason for optimism. “We are suffering,” he writes, “not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another.” Keynes’ essay concerns what he calls the “economic problem,” which is not only the problem of mass unemployment but also, in his estimation, the ability of capitalism to provide a decent standard of living for everyone. He did not see its failure to do so as evidence of a more fundamental dysfunction:
[T]his is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day. There would be nothing surprising in this even in the light of our present knowledge. It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of afar greater progress still.
Many economists shared Keynes’ optimism through the 1970s, “a time when revolutionary change still seemed like an imminent possibility,” writes John Quiggan, professor of economics at the University of Queensland.” Utopian ideas were everywhere, exemplified by the Situationist slogan of 1968: ‘Be realistic. Demand the impossible.’” Cult figures like Buckminster Fuller explained, as had Keynes decades earlier, how technology could free everyone from the tyranny of the labor market and the scourge of “useless jobs.”
Keynes and others made a “case for leisure, in the sense of free time to use as we please, as opposed to idleness”—a distinction that draws from the ancient philosophers. “But Keynes offered something quite new: the idea that leisure could be an option for all, not merely for an aristocratic minority.” He was, obviously, mistaken. “At least in the English-speaking world,” Quiggan writes, “the seemingly inevitable progress towards shorter working hours has halted. For many workers it has gone into reverse.”
That has certainly been the case for the majority of workers in the U.S., at least before the novel coronavirus led to mass layoffs and reduced hours. What happened? For one thing, the ascension of neoliberal economics in the late 1970s, and the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, began a long slow decline of organized labor. “Employers have had increasing desire for workers to work long hours,” says Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College. “And workers haven’t had the power to resist that upward pressure.”
Keynes’ predictions resonated with NPR’s David Kestenbaum, who interviewed some of Keynes’ descendants, the closest thing he had to grandchildren, in a short segment on Planet Money in 2015. One Keynes relation points out the irony that the man himself “died from working too hard.” How can those of us who aren’t globally famous economists help end the tyranny of overwork? Maybe a lot more striking workers making demands; maybe a universal basic income or something like Bhutan’s “gross domestic happiness” index?
Keynes may have erred in his predictions of the future (though he seems to have understood the needs of his moment well enough), but he may not have been wrong to view the economic turmoil of his time as a radical opportunity for utopian change and better living for everyone. Overturning the dire conditions of the present for our own grandchildren will require not only hard work, but the leisure to do some visionary futurist thinking. Read Keynes’ full essay here.
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“The two things I love most are novels and birds,” said Jonathan Franzen in a Guardian profile not long ago. “They’re both in trouble, and I want to advocate for both of them.” Chances are that even that famously internet-averse novelist-turned-birdwatcher would enjoy the online attraction called The Bird Library, “where the need to feed meets the need to read.” Its live Youtube stream shows the goings-on of a tiny library built especially for our feathered friends. “Perched in a backyard in the city of Charlottesville,” writes Atlas Obscura’s Claire Voon, “it is the passion project of librarian Rebecca Flowers and woodworker Kevin Cwalina, who brought together their skills and interests to showcase the lives of their backyard birds.”
Recent visitors, Voon adds, “have included a striking rose-breasted grosbeak, a cardinal that looks like it’s vaping, and a trio of mourning doves seemingly caught in a serious meeting.” The Bird Library’s web site offers an archive of images capturing the institution’s wee regulars, all accompanied by enlivening captions. (“Why did the bird go to the library?” “He was looking for bookworms.”)
Just as year-round birdwatching brings pleasures distinct from more casual versions of the pursuit, year-round viewing of The Bird Library makes for a deeper appreciation not just of the variety of species represented among its patrons — the creators have counted 20 so far — but for the seasonal changes in the space’s decor, especially around Christmastime.
As longtime viewers know, this isn’t the original Bird Library. “In late 2018 we demolished the old Bird Library and started design and development of a new and improved Bird Library 2.0! Complete with a large concrete base for increased capacity and a bigger circulation desk capable of feeding all our guests all day long.” Just as libraries for humans need occasional renovation, so, it seems, do libraries for birds — a concept that could soon expand outside Virginia. “Cwalina hopes to eventually publish an open-access plan for a similar bird library, so that other birders can build their own versions,” reports Voon. And a bird-loving 21st-century Andrew Carnegie steps forward to ensure their architectural respectability, might we suggest going with modernism?
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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