The Long-Lost Pieces of Rembrandt’s Night Watch Get Reconstructed with Artificial Intelligence
Most of us know Rembrandt’s masterpiece by the name The Night Watch, but it has a longer original title: Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. By the same token, the version of the painting we’ve all seen — whatever we happen to call it — is smaller than the one Rembrandt originally painted in 1642. “In 1715, the monumental canvas was cut down on all four sides to fit onto a wall between two doors in Amsterdam’s Town Hall,” writes The New York Times’ Nina Siegal. “The snipped pieces were lost. Since the 19th century, the trimmed painting has been housed in the Rijksmuseum, where it is displayed as the museum’s centerpiece, at the focal point of its Gallery of Honor.”
In recent years, the Rijksmuseum has honored The Night Watch further with a thoroughgoing restoration called Operation Night Watch. This ambitious undertaking has so far produced attractions like the largest and most detailed photograph of the painting ever taken, zoom-in-able to the individual brushstroke.
That phase required high imaging technology, to be sure, but it may appear downright conventional compared to the just-unveiled recreation of the work’s three-centuries-missing pieces, which will hang on all four sides of the original at the Rijksmuseum for the next three months. This making-whole wouldn’t have been possible without a small copy made in the 17th century — or the latest artificial-intelligence technology of the 21st.
Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum
“Rather than hiring a painter to reconstruct the missing pieces, the museum’s senior scientist, Robert Erdmann, trained a computer to recreate them pixel by pixel in Rembrandt’s style,” writes Siegal. Erdmann used “a relatively new technology known as convolutional neural networks, a class of artificial-intelligence algorithms designed to help computers make sense of images.” The process, explained in more detail by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei at ARTNews, involved digitally “splitting up the painting into thousands of tiles and placing matching tiles from both the original and the copy side-by-side,” training multiple neural networks to complete the painting in a style as close as possible to Rembrandt’s rather than the copyist’s. The result, with a few new faces as well as a startlingly different compositional feel than the Night Watch we’ve all seen, would no doubt please Captain Banninck Cocq and his militiamen: this, after all, is the portrait they paid for.
You can watch videos on this Rijksmuseum page showing how the classic painting was restored.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.
Read More...Tom Jones Covers Talking Heads “Burning Down the House”–and Burns Down the House (1999)
It was supposedly “the album that finally obliterates the thin line separating arty white pop music and deep black funk,” as David Fricke wrote on the release of Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues. The praise maybe oversells music that is more arty white pop than “deep black funk.” But there’s never been any denying the funkiness of Talking Heads, either, just as there’s never been any denying the soulfulness of Tom Jones. Not that they’re musically comparable artists, but both have incorporated Black musical styles into their own idioms, winning respect on either side of the industry’s segregated line for self-aware re-interpretations of the blues, funk, soul, and R&B, as well as Ghanian high life and Nigerian Afrobeat.
Jones’ late-career reinvention involved showing up on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, covering Prince, working with Wyclef Jean, and making music one might characterize as generally good-humored pop that showcased his still-got-it vocal abilities. In 1999, he took on Speaking in Tongues’ P‑Funk-inspired single “Burning Down the House” in a cover that can be called a slick dance-pop interpretation of an art-rock re-interpretation of funk music.
Joined by the Cardigans, Jones belts it out with his typical swagger, while Cardigans’ singer Nina Persson acts as the “foil” writes Patrick Garvin at Pop Culture Experiment in a roundup of the song’s many covers: “She sounded as monotone as he sounded maniacal. And he sounded pretty damn maniacal.”
But Jones doesn’t sound maniacal like David Byrne sounds maniacal. The original track came together from a jam session, with lyrics improvised by Byrne, who shouted random phrases until he found those that best fit the song, changing the Parliament-Funkadelic audience chant “burn down the house!” into “burning down the house,” a line which could mean anything at all. (At one point, he tells NPR, it changed to “Foam Rubber, U.S.A.”) Is it a threat? A panicked outcry? A celebration? A manic lamentation? In Byrne’s anguished yelps one can never tell.
Jones makes “burning down the house” sound like a come-on, set against the iciest of tightly syncopated arrangements, in the most 90s of music videos ever. (Contrast it with the live version above, with P‑Funk’s own Bernie Worrell on keyboards, from Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense.) Every cover of the song, and there are many, does its own thing. “The one consistent aspect,” Garvin writes, “is Byrne’s weird lyrics… because they don’t tell a story in a linear sense, they can take on any variety of meanings.”
According to Byrne himself, the song did take on added resonance for him, perfectly in keeping with the 90s rebirth of Tom Jones. “I didn’t really know at the time,” he said in 1984, “but to me… it implies ecstatic rebirth or transcending one’s own self…. In classic psychology, the house is the self. And burning it down is destroying yourself… And the assumption is you get reborn, like a Phoenix from the ashes. See? It’s all there.” Indeed.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...1540 Monet Paintings in a Two Hour Video
I am distressed, almost discouraged, and fatigued to the point of feeling slightly ill. What I am doing is no good, and in spite of your confidence I am very much afraid that my efforts will all lead to nothing.
To know anything about the school of painting called Impressionism, one must know Claude Monet, who gave the movement its name with his painting Impression, Sunrise and provided its method — an almost confrontational relationship with landscape in plein-air. “I have gone back to some things that can’t possibly be done: water, with weeds waving at the bottom,” Monet wrote in a letter to his friend Gustave Geffroy in 1890. “It is a wonderful sight, but it drives one crazy trying to paint it. But that is the kind of thing I am always tackling.”
That “kind of thing,” the compulsion to paint nature in motion, required working quickly, repeating the same experiments over and over, despairing of getting it right, producing in the attempt his glorious series of haystacks and water lilies. Monet began painting landscapes upon meeting artist Eugene Boudin, who taught him to paint in open air, and he never stopped, refining his brushstroke for almost seventy years: from his first canvas, 1858’s View from the banks of the Lezade, to his last, The Rose Bush, finished in 1926, the final year of his life.
Whatever else Impressionism might mean, when it comes to Monet, it entails a prodigious amount of drawing, sketching, and painting. Over 2,500 such works have been attributed to him. That number is probably much higher “as it is known that Monet destroyed a number of his own works and others have surely been lost over time,” notes the Monet Gallery. Around 2,000 of those works are paintings, now spread around the world, with the largest collection located at the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris, where Impression, Sunrise (above) is held.
While it may be nearly impossible to see all of Monet’s known works in one lifetime (just as it seems impossible that he could have made so many masterpieces in one life), you can see 1540 of them in the video at the top — in a presentation that may or may not suit your art viewing sensibilities. If zooming slowly into hundreds of Monet paintings for a few seconds leaves you feeling a little overwhelmed, you can also head to the Monet Gallery online to see over 1900 of the artist’s attempts at “following Nature,” as he put it, “without being able to grasp her.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Every Roman Emperor: A Video Timeline Moving from Augustus to the Byzantine Empire’s Last Ruler, Constantine XI
Famed Roman orator and consul Cicero is celebrated as a staunch defender of the Republic, and of traditional Roman morality and civic virtues. He was also a shrewd opportunist who survived the Republic’s demise and lived to tell about it, although he supported Julius Caesar’s rival Pompey in the contest for control of Rome. When Caesar became a dictator, he forgave Cicero. And when Caesar was murdered, Cicero applauded:
Our tyrant deserved his death for having made an exception of the one thing that was the blackest crime of all… here you have a man who was ambitious to be king of the Roman People and master of the whole world; and he achieved it! The man who maintains that such an ambition is morally right is a madman, for he justifies the destruction of law and liberty and thinks their hideous and detestable suppression glorious…. All honest men killed Caesar… some lacked design, some courage, some opportunity: none lacked the will.
Cicero then attached himself to Caesar’s great-nephew and named successor, Octavian, the future Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. “The elder statesman was extremely flattered to have Octavian ‘totally devoted to me,’” José Miguel Baños writes at National Geographic. “He became convinced that an alliance with Octavian might help to destroy [Mark] Antony’s political aspirations.” This time, Cicero backed the right dictator. Nonetheless, before committing suicide with his lover Cleopatra, Antony had the great orator beheaded. It was “the moment,” writes Baños, “the Roman Republic truly died.”
Cicero’s death, and Augustus’ ascension, marked the birth of the Roman Empire, ruled by a succession of emperors — or sometimes two, three, or even six or seven emperors. Many of these are renowned, rightly or wrongly, for their decadence and hedonism. Caligula, Nero, Commodus have all become villains in feature films. Some were philosophers, like Marcus Aurelius; some were teenagers, like Heliogabalus, who reigned from age 14 to age 18, when he was murdered by his own Praetorian guard, and Romulus Augustulus, the last of the Western emperors, who ascended at age 12, a proxy for his father, and was deposed by German general Odoacer in 476 AD.
The Empire continued for another 1000 years of Christian rule in the East, first under Constantine, in Constantinople (now Istanbul), which had been named Byzantium; hence Rome became the Byzantine Empire. The video above shows a timeline of every Roman emperor from Augustus to the very last ruler of the Eastern Empire, Constantine XI Palaiologos, who surrendered Constantinople in 1453 to Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II.
The Empire had finally fallen, 1500 years after Cicero warned of the Republic’s demise. Before his army’s defeat, the last Byzantine Emperor gave a speech to “the descendants of the Greeks and Romans.”
I can tell you that this city mastered the entire universe; She placed beneath her feet Pontus, Armenia, Paphlagonia, The Amazonian lands, Cappadocia, Galatia, Media, Georgian Colchis, Bosphoros, Albania, Syria, Cilicia, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Palestine, Arabia, Judea, Bactria, Scythia, Macedonia, Thessaly, Boeotia, Locris, Aetolia, Arcarnania, Achaea, the Peloponnese, Epirus, Illyria, Lykhnites, the Adriatic, Italy, Tuscany, the Celts, and Galatian Celts, Spain up to Cadiz, Libya, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Beledes, Scude, Numidia, Africa and Egypt.
Consider, said the last emperor, “my brothers and comrades in arms, how the commemoration of our death, our memory, fame and freedom can be rendered eternal.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Hear Demos & Outtakes of Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the 50th Anniversary of the Classic Album
When Joni Mitchell released Blue in 1971, she revealed herself to the world as a poet with a hard-boiled interior life. The album, writes Rolling Stone, challenged the image many had of her as an innocent flower child. “The West Coast feminine ideal” was a role “Mitchell hadn’t asked for and did not want.” Of her writing of the album, she said in a 2013 interview, “They better find out who they’re worshipping. Let’s see if they can take it. Let’s get real.”
Get real she did, shocking the men around her, some of whom she’d written about candidly, including Graham Nash, Leonard Cohen, and James Taylor, who played on several tracks. She wrote about the heartbreak of leaving her daughter and rewrote the breakup song as a confessional on “River.” The album’s cultural impact, 50 years after its release, has much to do with Mitchell as a lone female protagonist in a male-dominated industry. “Along with its romantic melancholy,” Rolling Stone writes, “Blue was the sound of a woman availing herself of the romantic and sexual freedom that was, until then, an exclusively male province in rock.”
We listen to Blue now and hear the voices of later generations of singer-songwriters, from Tracy Chapman and Tori Amos to Phoebe Bridgers, who seized their own power. By the time of Blue’s release, Mitchell had become a powerful voice of her generation, penning “Woodstock” just the year before. “Blue is Mitchell’s first song cycle whereby all the songs interrelate in their themes of loss and transformation,” writes Classic Album Sundays. “The album reflects the disillusionment and disenchantment felt by a generation during the closing of The Sixties.”
“It’s a description of the times,” Mitchell attests. “There were so many sinking but I had to keep thinking I could make it through the waves. You watched that high of the hippie thing descend into drug depression. Right after Woodstock, then we went through a decade of basic apathy where my generation sucked it’s thumb and then just decided to be greedy and pornographic.”
As if capturing the feelings of her own personal losses and those of millions of others weren’t enough, Mitchell’s songwriting and musicianship on the album are consistently astonishing, each word married to a suspended note, an unexpected chord voicing, a pregnant breath. “My words and music are locked together,” she says. She proved on Blue that she was a talent to be reckoned with and never underestimated. On the 50th anniversary of Blue’s release, Mitchell is releasing a five song EP, Blue 50 (Demos & Outtakes), which you can hear above (see tracklist below).
- A Case Of You (Demo) 0:00:00
- California (Demo) 0:04:00
- Hunter (Outtake) 0:07:30
- River (Outtake with French Horns) 0:10:25
- Urge For Going (Outtake with Strings) 0:14:27
It’s a document of a different album, one that might have included “Hunter” — a country-like strummer — and might have had french horns on “River,” perhaps the album’s best-known song and one of the most beloved Christmas songs of the past 50 years. Look for the next release celebrating a half-century of Blue on October 29th. Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 2: The Reprise Years (1968–1971) “will explore the period leading up to Blue,” notes her official YouTube, “through nearly six hours of unreleased home, studio, and live recordings.” Or, you could just listen to Blue over and over. It seems to reveal something different every time.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Story of the MiniDisc, Sony’s 1990s Audio Format That’s Gone But Not Forgotten
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Whether or not pioneering carmaker Henry Ford actually uttered that quip, it has long held near-Biblical status in the realm of American business. On the other side of the Pacific, Sony founder Akio Morita put it less memorably but more generally: “If you ask the public what they think they’ll need, you’ll always be behind in this world. You’ll never catch up unless you think one to ten years in advance, and create a market for the items you think the public will accept at that time.” And had Sony, creator of the Walkman and co-creator of the Compact Disc, asked its customers what they wanted in the late 1980s, they may well have said digital cassette tapes.
In fact Philips, Sony’s partner in the development of the Compact Disc, did want to make a digital cassette tape. But Sony saw the future differently, imagining optical discs that were even more compact, and rewritable to boot. The result was MiniDisc, which within a few years of its launch in 1992 managed to see off the Digital Compact Cassette, the competing format Philips ended up developing with Matsushita. But then the story gets even more interesting, and you can see it told in detail by the half-hour This Does Not Compute documentary above. Though the MiniDisc wasn’t a straightforward success, it turns out neither to have been the sort of Betamax-style failure many Americans seem to remember today.
As a consumer audio format, MiniDisc actually became a massive phenomenon, at least back in Sony’s homeland of Japan. The peculiar economics of the Japanese music market, especially back in the 1990s, made CDs about twice as expensive there as they were in the United States. Enter the music-rental shop, where customers could check out a dozen albums for the cost of buying a single one of them, then go home and copy them all to their MiniDiscs. Veritably printing money, Sony and other MiniDisc hardware manufacturers came to the defense of music-rental chains when the displeased Japanese record industry took them to court. By the time the issue was settled, MiniDisc had already entrenched itself in the Japanese market to the point that its devices surpassed CD players in sales.
Confused by the sudden preponderance of options, most of them pricey and of uncertain value, American music consumers of the early 1990s stuck with what they knew: the high-quality CD for home listening, and the “good-enough” analog cassette tape elsewhere. In the world of professional audio, and especially among radio producers, the flexibility, reliability, convenience, and clarity of MiniDisc proved undeniable. But never cheap or widespread enough for the average listener, nor quite high-fidelity enough for the exacting audiophile, it spent most of its life in the West as a niche product. Today, a decade after its discontinuation, the history of technology has come to recognize MiniDisc as the evolutionary link between the Walkman and the iPod, each of which revolutionized the way we listen to music. And what with the newly retro appeal of 1990s technology, its aesthetic stock has never been higher.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.
Read More...The Captivating Art of Restoring Vintage Guitars
Mention the Martin D‑28 and you need say no more to fans of folk, country, rock and roll, country-rock, folk-rock, country-folk, etc. Elvis, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Neil Young… all played one. (Neil, in fact, owns Hank’s guitar, and calls it “Hank.”) It is the standard against which all “Dreadnought”-style guitars are measured, because it was the first, and is still, arguably, the best. Named after the Royal British Navy’s HMS Dreadnought, a famous vessel that “spawned a new class of battleships around the world,” writes Daryl Nerl, the larger-bodied D‑28 (D for “Dreadnought”), first arrived in 1917, at a time when small parlor guitar and ukuleles were the norm.
The D‑28 has lived up to its name, says Jason Ahner, C.F. Martin & Co.’s archivist. “If you were on that ship, you wouldn’t fear anything else and if you were playing that guitar you wouldn’t fear not being heard over a banjo or another instrument.” Built like battleships, D‑28s don’t only take up space in an ensemble, they fill a room perfectly well on their own, with delicate fingerpicked figures or big booming strums. The D‑28 flopped on arrival but exploded in popularity after it was advertised in 1935 as a “bass guitar,” before such things as bass guitars existed.
As more and more folk and country players fell for the D‑28’s square shoulders, broad waist, and rich, almost symphonic, tonal range, the guitar became an object no player, once they got their hands on one, would part with easily, or ever. Repairing and maintaining vintage Martins, however, is a delicate business that requires an intimate understanding of the guitar’s construction. Not every luthier is up to the task, but as you can see in the video above, Norwegian guitarmaker Lars Dalin has the experience, patience, and know-how to disassemble and restore one head (and neck) to tail.
Dalin’s D‑28 restoration video should not only interest students of guitar repair. In it, we learn about the special features of Martin’s build that give the instrument its special tonal qualities, those we’ve been dancing and crying to for over a century. For those more interested in electric guitars, Dalin presents a refret and restoration of another American classic — one that also didn’t get its due at first, but has since become an icon: the Fender Jazzmaster. Introduced in 1958, the guitars didn’t catch on until the 1970s when they could be picked up cheaply at pawn shops by punk and new wave pioneers like Television and Elvis Costello. The 1960 model above is a joy to behold, and a lesson in guitar building, repair, engineering, like no other. See more of Dalin’s guitar restoration projects on his Instagram.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...AI & X‑Rays Recover Lost Artworks Underneath Paintings by Picasso & Modigliani
You see above a painting by Amedeo Modigliani, a portrait of the artist’s lover Beatrice Hastings, unseen by the public until its rediscovery just this year. Or at any rate, some see that: in another sense, the image is a new or almost-new artistic creation, based on X‑rays of Modigliani’s Portrait of a Girl. Underneath the paint that makes up that celebrated work lie traces enough to establish the presence of a different, earlier one beneath. But only now, after the employment of neural networks fed with enough of the artist’s acknowledged work to recognize and replicate his signature style, do we have a sense of what it could have looked like.
“Anthony Bourached and George Cann, both PhD candidates, are heading the ‘NeoMasters’ project through a company called Oxia Palus,” writes The Guardian’s Dalya Alberge. “They have ambitious plans to rediscover further hidden paintings on canvases that were reused by artists, who were perhaps too impoverished to buy supplies or dissatisfied with initial compositions.”
Modigliani was certainly impecunious enough to have done so more than once, and his relationship with Hastings — a long affair that was volatile even by the standards of the early 20th-century Parisian bohemia they inhabited — did provide material for other portraits.
Specialists, respectively, in neuroscience and the surface of Mars (their company’s name refers to a region of that planet), Bourached and Cann have proven enterprising in this art-oriented endeavor. “A 3D-printed physical rendering of their creation, complete with computer-simulated ‘brushstrokes’ and texture, will soon go on display at London’s Lebenson Gallery as part of the duo’s ‘NeoMasters’ project,” writes Nora McGreevy at Smithsonian.com. Earlier this year, McGreevy also covered Oxia Palus’ digitally assisted recovery of a Barcelona landscape possibly painted by the Spanish poet, playwright, and artist Santiago Rusiñol — before it was painted over by Pablo Picasso.
This discovery actually goes back to 1992, when conservators first determined the existence of another image beneath Picasso’s little-known La Miséreuse accroupie, or The Crouching Beggar. “Researchers suspect that Picasso used the mountains in Rusiñol’s landscape to shape the contours of his female subject’s back,” writes McGreevy. “A 2018 X‑ray of that lesser-known work by the Art Gallery of Toronto provided Oxia Palus what they needed to start work on their A.I.-assisted recreation. Not only did Bourached and Cann 3D print 100 physical copies of the final product, they linked each one to a unique non-fungible token (NFT), the new kind of digital artifact that has become something of a craze in the art world — surely an unimaginable afterlife for these images Modigliani and Picasso must have assumed they’d obliterated for good.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.
Read More...British Actor Bob Hoskins Helped Thousands Learn to Read in On the Move, a 1970s “Sesame Street for Adults”
British character actor Bob Hoskins has been remembered for “playing Americans better than Americans,” as USA Today wrote when Hoskins passed away in 2014. Characters like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’s Eddie Valiant, Nixon’s J. Edgar Hoover, and The Cotton Club’s Owney Madden stand out as some of his best performances in Hollywood. But he began his career in British film and television, playing cops and gangsters. Helen Mirren, who starred opposite him in his first major role, The Long Good Friday, and onstage in The Duchess of Malfi, penned a glowing tribute for The Guardian. “London,” she wrote, “will miss one of her best and most loving sons, and Britain will miss a man to be proud of.”
Mirren’s sentiments were echoed by British actors everywhere. Shane Meadows called him “the most generous actor I have ever worked with.” Stephen Woolley described Hoskins as a working-class hero. “With his talent, Bob gatecrashed the world of celebrity, and made all of us ordinary people feel a little better about ourselves.” It was a role he was seemingly born to play, despite his range. Hoskins was “a great actor,” writes Woolley, “yet unlike many actors he was first and foremost a courteous, sweet and caring human being. He could make monsters human and wring a smile out of any situation without a whisker of embarrassment.”
Those are the very qualities that endeared viewers to Hoskins’ first breakout character, Alf Hunt, a furniture removal man who struggled with reading and writing in On the Move, a kind of “Sesame Street for adults” that ran in 1976 on the BBC. The 10-minute shorts ran on Sunday afternoons “as part of the BBC’s adult education remit,” Mark Lawson writes at The Guardian. Hoskins’ performance brought to life for viewers “a proud man who has desperately disguised his learning difficulties.” It met a serious need among the nation’s populace.
“The show attracted 17 million viewers a week, (way beyond the size of its target audience),” notes a MetaFilter user. On the Move “helped make Hoskins famous. It was also responsible for persuading 70,000 people to sign up for adult literacy programmes.” Hoskins treasured the letters he received from viewers who decided to change their lives after seeing the show. They may well have done so because he gave his all to the character, as Lawson writes:
Handed a working-class stereotype (not for the last time in his career), Hoskins gave Alf a vulnerability and poignancy far beyond the requirements of a public information short. Apart from its intended audience of adults struggling with reading and writing, On the Move gained a large secondary following among literate viewers because, even then, Hoskins’ expressive face and growly voice made you want to watch and listen.
In each episode, Alf revealed his struggles to his friend Bert, played by Donald Gee. The show also featured inspiring interviews with adults who had taken adult literacy classes and appearances by special guest stars like Patricia Hayes and Martin Shaw (who both appear in the episode at the top). While other famous actors may disown early television work, Hoskins never did. On the Move “shared the qualities of his best stuff. Whereas most footage in Before They Were Famous type shows is calculated to be bathetic or embarrassing,” Hoskins’ earliest work does quite the opposite, explaining why he “went on to become the star he did.”
On the Move may also have earned Hoskins another title, one he might have cherished as much as any acting plaudit. George Auckland, who later directed the BBC’s adult education program, called him “the best educator Britain has produced” because of his wide reach among adults struggling with literacy in 1970s Britain. See an episode of On the Move at the top of the post and hear what commenters call “the catchiest theme song ever” just above.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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