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Darren Criss To Hit Broadway In 'Hedwig And The Angry Inch'

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"Glee" star Darren Criss is Broadway-bound in a very, very big way.

Starting April 29, the 28-year-old actor will don platform heels and a sky-high wig in the title role of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." As Variety is reporting, Criss will take over for John Cameron Mitchell, who co-wrote the musical and originated the role off-Broadway. (Mitchell's last performance will be April 26)

Criss, who is currently slated to play Hedwig through July 19, posted a short video on his Facebook and Twitter pages confirming the news.





This will mark Criss's first Broadway appearance since 2012, when he was tapped to replace Daniel Radcliffe in the revival of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” for a three-week run.

The Broadway incarnation of "Hedwig," which opened last year, nabbed four Tony Awards, including one for the production's original star, Neil Patrick Harris. Harris, who left the production in August 2014, has since been succeeded by "Girls" star Andrew Rannells, Michael C. Hall and Mitchell.

“I've got a grin plastered on my face that Darren is joining the brotherhood of Hedwigs," Mitchell said in an email statement. "His stage presence is electrifying, his rock and roll credentials and comic timing impeccable and I'm thrilled to be working with him to create a brand-new Hedwig!”

Calling Criss "a game changer," composer-lyricist Stephen Trask added, "I’m happy that Hedwig can be Darren’s next stop on his way to world domination.”

Bjork On Feeling Like An Alien, Child Stardom In Iceland And 'Vulnicura'

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The following article is provided by Rolling Stone.

By DAVID FRICKE

Tugging at the fingers on her right hand, Björk counts off some recent, traumatic events in her life: a 2012 throat operation; a devastating breakup with her longtime partner, artist Matthew Barney; her mother's heart attack (she has recovered); and the death last year of studio collaborator Mark Bell. "It's been quite a dramatic time," the Icelandic singer admits, "but also very happy." Her new album, "Vulnicura" — a candid chronicle in strings and electronics of her split with Barney — hit the Top 40 in more than a dozen countries. In March, Björk, who shot to fame with the Icelandic post-punk band the Sugarcubes, will be the subject of a major audio-visual retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. "It was a coincidence when this album came down in the middle of it," she says, but notes, "I get claustrophobic when it's too much of the past."

Has the album cured your heartbreak?
I can't begin to describe how much better I feel, just physically. Obviously, life is not that black and white. Something will happen to me in five years, and it might come back to life. But I am out of that emergency stage, when you feel like a space alien, just possessed.

Bjork Likens Making Emotional 'Vulnicura' to 'Open-Heart Surgery'

What did you get out of writing about the breakup? You even date the songs, so we know what you felt when.
It was a survival mechanism. I thought, all the way to the last day [of the relationship], that everything would be fine. Maybe that's why it was such a shock to me. At first, I was just going to put the songs together and not say anything. But putting the months on — it felt right. It would justify being that full of self-pity [laughs]. When people listen to these lyrics, I can go, "It was only two months after the breakup. I was a teenage mess!"

Did you sing love songs in the Sugarcubes?
There were all these poets in the band. It was more about word jokes. "Deus" [on 1988's "Life's Too Good"] was sugary pop about God, which was ridiculous. There were personal songs. [The 1987 hit] "Birthday" is about being in that magic world with a newborn. We loved turning the lyrics on their head. But when I started my solo albums, it was fresh terrain for me.

5 Things We Learned From Björk's Magical 'Biophilia' Documentaries

Did music and art run in your family?
My grandmother was quite artistic. When her children left home, she went to art school and learned how to be an abstract painter. At Christmas, she would have a party. People played bingo. The person who won got a painting. She passed away, but we still do it. I won this year's painting!

Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Albums of 2014

You were 12 when you released your first album in Iceland. Did you sense that you were on a path?
I was a little pushed by my mom. I'm not sure she was aware of what psychological work it is to be a public figure at 12. The magic of the studio was the best bit. I kind of wished it would never have to come out, that I'd just make album after album. The guys who recorded me wanted to do another one, but I said, "No, I want to start bands with kids my age."

Did any female singer-songwriters from the Seventies inspire you as a teenager?
I loved Joni Mitchell. I never heard her folk records. But I learned [1976's] "Hejira" and [1977's] "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter" by heart when I was 15. She was creating her own universe; she wasn't a guest in a man's world. And it was her chord progressions. I liked music that was modal, more chromatic. There is more room for the singer to improvise.

Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Songs of 2014

When you had the throat operation, were you afraid you might lose your voice for good?
I couldn't speak for three weeks. My daughter and I made notes for each other — it became like a game. But the album was a new beginning. The chorus in "Lionsong" — I was in this forest outside Reykjavík, warming up, opening my throat like a bird. It was cathartic — you realize the tension that built up, because you were protecting that part of you.

Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Artists of All Time

Are you prepared to relive your breakup when you perform the new songs live?
I know I have to do it. If I could have skipped these heartbreak feelings, just go to the next bus stop, I would have been like, "Yes, please!" But there were no two ways about it.

The 2015 Oscar Best Picture Nominees, Recreated By Adorable Little Girls

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The Academy Awards are this Sunday, so it's time for celebrity interviews, red carpet dress fittings, outcome speculation... and cute kids posing as the nominees.

Back in 2012, mom Maggie Storino created the viral tumblr "Don't Call Me Oscar," where she posts pictures of her daughters recreating posters and stills from Academy Award-nominated movies. This year, 4-year-old Sophia and 3-year-old Sadie tackled the 2015 Best Picture nominees with their usual dose of adorable perfection.

Though the girls are too young to see the movies themselves, Storino told The Huffington Post that they love getting dressed up and recreating the images. Sadie's favorite was "Birdman" while Sophia enjoyed posing as J.K. Simmons in "Whiplash."

In fact, Sadie and Sophia love dressing up so much that their parents had to make a a new rule in the house: "No costumes until after breakfast."

Keep scrolling to see the Storino sisters take on "Whiplash," "The Imitation Game," and more.





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The Bottom Line: 'Satin Island' By Tom McCarthy

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Satin Island
by Tom McCarthy
Knopf, $24.00
Published Feb. 17, 2015

The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

What we think:
Last year Tom McCarthy wrote thoughtfully and passionately against the merits of Realism -- that is, the mode of writing that prefers to describe events straightforwardly, under the pretense that such a style conveys truth more accurately than, say, stories about magicians or time travel. He dismisses the latest crop of Realists lauded by critics, namely Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose My Struggle is said to weave the epic and the quotidian together in the space of a single paragraph. Instead, McCarthy praises writers such as William S. Burroughs, whose photography keenly shows the approach he takes in his writing. Burroughs cuts up photos of city streets and reassembles them, forming fragmented images and explaining, “Consciousness is a cut-up; life is a cut-up.”

McCarthy’s reverence for Burroughs is apparent in his latest novel, a slim and abstract book called Satin Island. The story begins in Turin, with its protagonist U. describing the famous shroud discovered there in the 19th century. He dismisses the myth behind the object -- that it encased Jesus Christ when he was buried after crucifixion -- writing, “We see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixelated screen. When the shapeless plasma ... begins to coalesce into a figure that’s discernible ... we can say: This is it, stirring, looming, even if it isn’t really, if it’s all just ink-blots."

To both McCarthy and U., the mythical shroud isn’t the only object that, while charged with meaning by many, can be dismissed as “just ink blots.” The entire novel seems to serve as a metaphor for the writer’s charges against Realism -- a defense of his craft as an artist who prefers abstractions.

U. embodies McCarthy’s argument against organizing knowledge and perceptions formally. A “corporate anthropologist" for a company referred primarily as "the Company," the narrator structures his ramblings about work, travel and trivial relationships like an academic essay, meticulously numbering paragraphs that otherwise flow like an interior monologue, with tenuous connections between topics. He jumps quickly from Turin to airports to bicycle hubs, relating only surface-level information, much in the way we pleasurably follow Wikipedia chains without retaining a lot of deep knowledge.

U. writes earnestly about his strange day job, which involves observing everyday human interactions with products such as blue jeans and coffee lids and Japanese video game avatars, and passing his findings on to clients via dossiers to be used for marketing purposes.

Because U. blends his background as a cultural theorist so effortlessly into branding initiatives, his boss grants him the opportunity to work on a promising long-term project: to compile the "Great Report," a comprehensive study of... well, everything. U.'s thrilled as the prospect: his hero, after all, is anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, who traveled widely, recognizing patterns across societies. But his tendency to draw neat conclusions from human practices is revealed to be an obsession that darkens his mood when events on the news or in his personal life don’t add up logically.

McCarthy is at his satirical best when U. attempts to chalk up random tragedies, such as a widely reported parachuting accident, to complex murder plots or suicide pacts. But when the same sharp humor is applied to U.’s personal relationships -- his friend who’s diagnosed with thyroid cancer, a strain with a high survival rate, slowly loses hope in conventional treatment options before his health nosedives suddenly -- the story comes off as almost absurdly nihilistic.

While Satin Island functions as a funny and often thoughtful commentary on the falsity that underlies many quests for meaning -- be it through religion or, say, novel-writing -- its argument approaches its own kind of dishonesty. By ignoring the value of the meaning we create for ourselves, in our hobbies, our personal relationships, and our artistic pursuits, McCarthy’s book sometimes suffers from chilly cynicism.

The Bottom Line:
McCarthy's latest novel hilariously, if sometimes too cynically, mocks the way we tell stories today.

What other reviewers think:
The Atlantic: "Satin Island is the act of an artistic provocateur with an existential bone to pick. It cries out in protest (albeit with a healthy sense of mischief) against the calcification of narrative art -- a form that’s been coopted by corporate interests, which reshape culture to their own mercenary ends."

Los Angeles Times: "McCarthy's style is at times reminiscent of David Foster Wallace's stories of characters caught in the gears of consumer capitalism coupled with the whimsy of Jean Philippe Toussaint's literary situational comedies in which every detail is microanalyzed."

Who wrote it?
Tom McCarthy is the author of three earlier works. His 2010 novel C. was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Who will read it?
Anyone interested in abstract art or writers who wear their philosophies on their sleeve.

Opening lines:
"Turin is where the famous shroud is from, the one showing Christ's body supine after crucifixion: hands folded over genitals, eyes closed, head crowned with thorns. The image isn't really visible on the bare linen."

Notable passage:
"The article kept mentioning 'faith.' Skydivers are induced into and graduate up through a world in which faith plays a fundamental role. They must believe in their instructors; in the equipment; in the staff packing their rigs; in tiny ring-pulls..."

22 Books Women Think Men Should Read

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This is the era of the book round-up. 30 books everyone should read before they're 30; 20 books they should read in their 20s; 50 books all women should read; 12 books introverts will love. Fortunately, despite their reputation for reading fewer books, especially fiction, than women, men have their fair share of such lists enumerating which books to read in order to burnish their masculinity. And with list after nearly identical list, it's become clear: Men think men should read books by men, about men.

Time and again, lists of required reading for men circulate that seem more like lists of required reading BY men. Esquire’s list of 80 books all men should read included just one by a woman; AskMen’s 10 books men should read before 30 did as well -- a cookbook. Shortlist’s 14 Daunting Books Every Man Must Read were all by men; a list from The Art of Manliness includes an impressive four books by women -- out of 100. Out of 21 books from the 21st century GQ recommends for men, they fit in four by women, all but one of which are explicitly described as books ABOUT men and manhood.

Why is it that we don’t think men should read books by and about women? In a canon and culture flooded with the perspectives and stories of men, men have no difficulty finding books that reaffirm their self-images and explore their masculinity. Why aren’t we encouraging men to also read great books that widen their horizons and show them life through the eyes of people unlike them? Reading great books reportedly has the capacity to strengthen our emotional intelligence, empathy, and understanding of others, and investing ourselves in the stories of people we don't easily relate to can only magnify these benefits.

So, to supplement all those hypermasculine lists (which, of course, feature incredible literature!), we asked women from the HuffPost newsroom to suggest books they believe men should read. Here are 22 books we recommend all men (and women!) should read:






Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn


We'll start off with an easy one. Who wouldn't want to read Gone Girl? Maybe you've already checked it off your list! (If not, block the weekend out; in case no one's informed you, it's a page-turner.) To be clear, Gone Girl is a thriller, not a treatise on gender politics, but everyone should at least read the infamous "Cool Girl" rant to get a hint of the kind of pressure women are under to be effortlessly hot and yet bro-ish these days. Plus, Flynn perfects the domestic thriller often considered a bit more the domain of women than political or spy thrillers, demonstrating that the dynamics of a marriage can be just as subtle and dark as the workings of the CIA.


-- Mallika Rao, Arts & Culture Reporter



Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay


Roxane Gay writes bluntly and honestly about feminism, elucidating a concept that shouldn't be so difficult to grasp. She analyzes novels by women thoughtfully, weaving in her own personal experiences. Most touching is an essay in which she uses her own adolescent obsession with the blonde, immaculately dressed Sweet Valley High twins to remind us that there's no feminine or feminist ideal: all women deserve respect. Plus, she's funny as hell.


-- Maddie Crum, Books Editor



Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen


Yes, yes, insert teenage boy groan here. Sure, a lot of women love Austen for the saccharine-sweet endings of her romantic novels, but if men would read with an open mind, they might see that there’s a lot more there. Pride and Prejudice is wickedly funny, lampooning flirtatious girls and rakish men alike, and Austen’s sharp satire and honest insight reveal the underlying sexism and class inequalities that governed much of life in her era. Many of those inequalities still persist today, and reading Pride and Prejudice -- really reading it, not reading with one eye while rolling the other at every other dude who walks by -- can be an enjoyably enlightening experience.



A Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood


In an era when women’s health options seem more and more under threat, maybe A Handmaid’s Tale should be required reading for everyone, men and women alike. Set in a post-revolutionary North America, in an oppressive Christian theocracy, A Handmaid’s Tale suggests what life could be like for women if their rights continued to be eroded for biblical reasons. A Handmaid’s Tale is a reminder of how tenuous what equality women have achieved really is, and how hard we have to fight to keep it and to achieve more. These are realities that are understandably difficult for men to viscerally grasp, but Atwood’s chilling narrative brings it home.



Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine


When great books debunking gender myths are publishing, they’re often only read by the devout choir. It would be great if men, allies and skeptics of the feminist cause alike, would pick up Delusions of Gender, a highly readable, witty and thorough book that attacks pop neuroscientific theories used to prop up sexism. By the end, even the most determined gender essentialist will have had cause to question the casual assumptions we all make about how boys and girls “just are.” While this is often framed as a women’s issue, it’s really an issue for everyone -- men should be talking about it too!



Self-Help by Lorrie Moore


With her signature sharp wit and take-no-prisoners style, Moore explores facets of the contemporary female experience in wry second person, from how to be a mistress to 'the kid's guide to divorce.' For all men who worry they'll never be able to relate to a female character, crack open this book and find yourself transformed by Moore's barbed prose, equal parts hilarious and poignant, and entirely unforgettable.


-- Talia Lavin, International Fellow



The Group by Mary McCarthy


There simply aren’t enough books out there about female friendship. As Virginia Woolf herself wrote in A Room of One’s Own, literature by men often fails to imagine what women might talk about when men aren’t there. “I tried to remember,” she writes, “any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends.” But of course, women often have powerful friendships. The Group explores the friendship of eight women over the years after they graduate from college, and it does so in an honest and unflinching way. While women often read about male friendships, it’s just as important for men to read about women’s friendships and to remember that women have lives outside of dating and marriage.



The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman


While men have been writing about the innermost thoughts of women for centuries -- think Juliet, or Emma Bovary -- people often feel uncomfortable with women daring to write about men’s innermost thoughts, especially as those thoughts pertain to women. Waldman’s novel tells the story of a rather self-satisfied Brooklyn writer, Nathaniel, who thinks he’s pretty feminist and egalitarian. He begins dating a woman with whom he seems to have a lot in common. As a woman, his internal monologue during their dates and eventual arguments is painful to read, but he’s not an unsympathetic character, just pretty oblivious about how he treats women. Perhaps reading a woman’s take on this sort of male psychology might help some men understand the seemingly mysterious behavior of women in relationships a bit better?


-- Jessie Heyman, Entertainment Editor



The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot


Though Eliot escaped her small town and carved out a career as a writer and critic despite her sex, her fiction often deals with the limitations faced by Victorian women in a far bleaker light. While progress has been made since the writing of The Mill on the Floss, there’s an uncomfortably familiar ring to the sexist slurs of the book. When brilliant Maggie is quicker to learn some Latin than her brother, his tutor reassuringly proclaims that girls “couldn't go far into anything. They're quick and shallow." This sounds archaic and cruel, but not so different from more modern tendencies to suggest girls aren’t good at math or hard sciences. The tragedy of Maggie is a familiar one for many women, but one men should read and think about when they consider their female colleagues and friends.



Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi


Women have served as muses and motivation for books since men first began writing them, but these women aren’t always served well by these narratives -- whether they’re twisted into caricatures, brutalized or exploited to provide titillation or motivation for male characters, or killed as plot devices. Oyeyemi’s brilliant, elegant novel turns an examination of this problematic relationship between male artist and female muse into a radiant work of art. It will leave you with more questions than answers, but the valuable thing is how deeply it makes us think about how artistic choices can affect us in the real world.



Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit


“Men Explain Things to Me,” an essay by Solnit, was a sensation when it was originally published. It’s mostly discussed now as the origin of the now somewhat overused concepted of mansplaining. But to hear the term “mansplaining” and not read Solnit’s sharply observed essay -- now the title piece in a brilliant essay collection -- risks missing the point. Her eye-opening account of a conversation with an older man who attempted to explain the subject of her own book to her provides the sort of small but meaningful revelation that we need to confront inequality. Without bad intentions, a more powerful person in an interaction (as men, particularly white men, often are when interacting with women) can so easily discount them or marginalize them. Awareness of our subconscious tendencies to discriminate is the important first step in being more open-minded.



Plainwater by Anne Carson


"The New York Times said Anne Carson gives the impression of “someone from another world, either extraterrestrial or ancient.” But she isn’t removed on the page; she writes with abandon, in beautiful but plain language that sucks you into her narrative prose-poetry, a form all her own and peppered with allusions to ancient Greek.


All of her books are remarkable and can offer a nuanced perspective on a woman’s inner life. 'The Anthropology of Water,' a section of the book Plainwater, contains a perfectly fractured and complex portrait of a woman in love, in pain and in search of herself. While the female character, written in first person, may be utterly vulnerable, she wields self-effacing wit and introspection like a shield, her restless spirit keeping her in constant pursuit of answers to difficult questions.


-- Kate Abbey-Lambertz, Detroit Editor



Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill


In Gaitskill's dark, even ominous short stories, which are filled with dysfunctional relationships and lurid details, there's an honesty about relationships between men and women that can be uncomfortable to take. And while many male authors have recounted distasteful liaisons and sexual misadventures in literature, Gaitskill's perceptive portrayal of how real women think and behave -- and how their fantasies and desires mingle uneasily with harsh reality -- adds a piece to the psychological puzzle. Instead of obscure objects of desire, as women in such stories penned by men often are, Gaitskill's women are alive, and have their own thoughts and actions, sometimes willful or self-destructive ones.



Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides


Middlesex at many points reads as a story about a girl, but it's actually a story about a man -- an intersex man who is identified as a girl at birth. The book explores how Cal, who we first know as Callie, finds out about and grapples with his gender identity. It may be less easy and comfortable to read for the average man than Hemingway on the macho joys of hunting, but masculinity is a complex and variegated experience that Middlesex helps elucidate.


-- Zoe Lintzeris, Food & Taste Blog Editor



Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton


I think every man should read Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, not only because Edith Wharton is the biggest badass of all time (she was the first lady author to win a Pulitzer, FOR THIS VERY BOOK), but also because it is the quintessential 'nice guy' novel. A 'nice guy' is a guy who thinks he's a real gentleman/upstanding citizen/sweetheart/feminist, but is really just a self-obsessed, self-righteous, obliviously misogynist asshole. Unfortunately, women deal with 'nice guys' all the time. I imagine there might be fewer 'nice guys' in the world if they just read The Age of Innocence and realized that they all sounded like the biggest douchebags ever.


-- Zoe Triska, Senior Editor, Global Content Strategy



On Love by Alain de Botton


A love story told from a man's perspective that (I feel) captures the sentiments of love in the most perfect, beautiful way.


-- Carly Ledbetter, Associate Lifestyle Editor



To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf


Though Virginia Woolf had no problem flouting all conventions, her writing showed a remarkable sympathy and appreciation for women who held more traditional roles in society. In To the Lighthouse, we see both sorts of women depicted with warm understanding -- Mrs. Ramsay, the charismatic housewife and mother who holds together the household of distracted academic Mr. Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe, the spinster artist who admires Mrs. Ramsay’s social graces but chooses her life of solitary creativity. To the Lighthouse centers and humanizes women who are too often placed at the margins of literature. Men as well as women should see the value of these quiet but meaningful domestic narratives.



The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath


It's such a perfect encapsulation of coming to grips with female sexuality in a hostile world -- and such a beautiful depiction of mental illness, from a deeply female, deeply wounded, unforgettable perspective.


-- Talia Lavin, International Fellow



Wild by Cheryl Strayed


What do men love more than a tale of man vs. wild, right? Well ... why not woman vs. wild? Cheryl Strayed's runaway bestseller has been marketed with the same cozy, woman-focused angle as Eat Pray Love, but it's a powerful read for men and women alike. Strayed's gorgeous, acutely observed nature writing and her unflinching confrontation of her personal demons should enrapture men who loved reads like Into the Wild, while reminding us that women, too, have a place as dauntless solitary travelers navigating unexpected corners of the earth.


-- Zoe Lintzeris, Food & Taste Blog Editor



My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante


What begins as a series of novels about a quiet friendship between two young, jealous friends ripples into a thoughtful critique of social injustice in Naples and beyond. Narrator Elena's feelings towards her best friend Lila are complicated: the two hope to escape their unfortunate family situations by learning to read and write. While one tries to leave her economic situation behind by marrying a wealthy shop owner, another takes the arduous education route, and both remind us that truly transcending your fate is a costly ambition. Like the works of Jane Austen, Ferrante's books are important not only in their quiet analysis of interpersonal relationships, but in their deft and sometimes humorous mockery of harmful social norms.


-- Maddie Crum, Books Editor



The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenberger


Men should read this book because it talks about love and women in a raw, unflinching way. It doesn't shy away from mistakes -- rather, it casts a spotlight on the essence of the relationship itself: trust. The love story of Clare Abshire and Henry DeTamble starts off with an awkward chance meeting (relatable to both men and women) and evolves into friendship and then deeper into an actual, meaningful relationship.


Few books are able to balance a woman's honest point of view in a relationship with a man's point of view. This love story isn't like other love stories. Reading this book allows men to dive into the thoughts of a woman and know exactly what she is thinking and analyzing in various situations while in a relationship.


Men should read it because trust is paramount. Henry and Clare love each other freely and consistently talk about their relationship. They learn the most intimate details of each other's lives. They don't judge, make fun of, or break down their significant other. Rather, Clare and Henry trust, love, and work together to improve their relationship. Their relationship isn't perfect (no relationship is) and they work together even in the most difficult of times to the best of their ability.


-- Madeline Wahl, Associate Editor, Blogs & Community

Fun. Frontman Nate Ruess Reveals Solo Plans Amid Breakup Rumors

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As expected, fun. frontman Nate Ruess is launching a solo project. That news has been chatter up until now, as Ruess released a snippet teasing his new song, "Nothing Without Love," a demo of which was originally recorded for fun.'s next album.

The 28-second a cappella clip promos Monday's full release. It arrives on the heels of rumors that a "clash of egos" has prompted the platinum-selling "Some Nights" trio to take a hiatus. Ruess and bandmates Jack Antonoff, who's at work on his own side project, and Andrew Dost, who recently wrote the scores for Sundance comedy "The D Train" and MTV's "Faking It," posted a Facebook note announcing their intent to work on individual projects. "Fun is not breaking up," the memo read. "'Some Nights' was a successful album and it would have been very easy for us to jump back in the studio and capitalize on our momentum. But making records and touring when its 'good for business' means nothing to us. We make records and tour when we are inspired to do so."

Here's what Ruess was inspired to do: belt out his new song while lying in what appears to be a rippling ocean.

Carnival Looks Pretty Wild In Europe, Too

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MADRID (AP) — The wild and colorful costumes and masquerades that precede the Christian season of Lent have created popular festival traditions in Spain and Portugal.

One of Portugal's most famous Carnival events takes place in the northcentral town of Lazarin, with its pagan 'careto' ritual of young men in colored woolen quilts donning brass, leather or wooden masks as they dance and chase people — especially young women — through the streets, trying to scare them by making lots of noise and jingling bells.

In Spain's central town of Luzon, men covered in oil and soot wear bull horns and cowbells to represent the devil. Records of Luzon's Carnival date as far back as the 14th century, although it is believed to be much older.

spain portugal carnival photo gallery
Men covered in oil and soot carrying bull horns on their head and cowbells on a belt representing devils, march during a traditional carnival celebration in the small village of Luzon, Spain, Feb. 14, 2015. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)


Up north in Alsasua, half-man, half-bull figures known as Momotxorros smear their face as if with the blood of a sacrificed animal. Wearing horns and red-stained sheets, they roam the Spanish town, roaring fiercely and brandishing sticks.

In Spain's ancient village of Unamu, people dress up as Mamuxarro, folkloric figures in white with a red sash and a metal mask to cover their faces as they pursue townsfolk with sticks. According to custom, their alleged victims (usually young women) must kneel and kiss their knee after he makes the sign of the cross on their forehead.

In the northern Basque village of Lesaka, where the central character is the Zaku Zaharrak, revelers stuffed into sacks full of straw threaten people with sticks bearing inflated animal bladders.

The Pyrenees villages of Ituren and Zubieta stage one of Europe's most ancient carnivals — dating from Roman times. Residents dress up as figures known as Joaldunak and parade through the streets with sheepskins around their waists and shoulders, conical caps and cowbells on their backs.

Here's a gallery of images from this year's festivals:

lazarin
Revelers dressed in traditional costumes run around a burning effigy of a traditional figure during annual Carnival festivities, in Podence, Feb. 17, 2015. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)


spain portugal carnival photo gallery
Revelers from the Portuguese village of Podence dressed in traditional costumes pose for photographers during annual Carnival festivities, in Podence, northeastern Portugal, Feb. 17, 2015. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)


spain portugal carnival photo gallery
In this photo taken on Feb. 17, 2015 a ''Momotxorro'', wearing typical carnival dress, walks to take part in a parade in Alsasua, northern Spain. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)


spain portugal carnival photo gallery
A 'young 'Momotxorro'' prepares his typical dress to takes part in the carnival, in Alsasua, northern Spain, Feb. 17, 2015. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)


spain portugal carnival photo gallery
In this photo taken on Feb. 17, 2015 ''Momotxorros'' take part in the carnival wearing typical carnival dress, in Alsasua, northern Spain. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)


spain portugal carnival photo gallery
A man covers his face with blood to takes part in the ''Momotxorro Carnival'', in Alsasua, northern Spain, Feb. 17, 2015. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)


spain portugal carnival photo gallery
Revelers dressed as the traditional carnival characters 'Zaku Zaharrak', or old sack in Basque language, walk during the carnival parade of the small village of Lesaka, Spain, Feb. 15, 2015. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)


spain portugal carnival photo gallery
A reveler wearing a costume poses for a picture during a traditional carnival celebration in the small village of Luzon, Spain, Feb. 14, 2015. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)


spain portugal carnival photo gallery
A man dressed in local Carnival traditional costume runs as he parades with others during Carnival festivities in Lazarim, northeastern Portugal, Feb. 15, 2015. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)


spain portugal carnival photo gallery
Joaldunaks take part on the Carnival between of the Pyrenees villages of Ituren and Zubieta, northern Spain, Jan. 27, 2015. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)

Alexis Bittar Shares Cherished Memories To Fête 25 Years Of Designing With Lucite

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Alexis Bittar's love affair with Lucite is legendary. The famed jewelry designer has spent a quarter of a century handcrafting baubles with the shatter-resistant material, which has turned him into a certified fashion industry rockstar. His fans include Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and perhaps the biggest style star of them all, Michelle Obama.

Yes, even the first lady can't get enough of Bittar's luxe acrylic creations that range from elegant floral brooches to edgy embellished chokers.

"I was 22-years-old when I first discovered Lucite," Bittar told HuffPost Style. "I started recognizing it in a lot of 1930s Deco furniture -- and what drew me was its sculptural malleability and translucence that could be adapted to reflect light in many ways."

Twenty-five years later, Bittar still has his Lucite designs hand-carved and hand-painted. He celebrated this milestone on Wednesday night by staging his first-ever New York Fashion Week presentation. In addition, Bittar tapped four contemporary artists -- Cordy Ryman, Mickalene Thomas, Natasha Law and Juliette Losq -- to create works using Lucite that were auctioned off with proceeds benefiting The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York.

So, what do the next 25 years hold for Bittar? “I’ll definitely keep pushing the boundaries of materials, straddling the worlds of art and fashion and branching out into other categories," he said.

In celebration of Bittar's 25th anniversary, we asked the designer to share some of his most cherished memories over his awesome career. Check them out below.









Blur Announces 'The Magic Whip,' First Album In 12 Years, And Releases New Single

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Blur is back with a new album, "The Magic Whip," due out April 28. It will be the band's first album in 12 years, since 2003's "Think Tank." They also released the first single, "Go Out," which you can stream below.



The news came during a live-streamed press conference in a London Chinese restaurant hosted by BBC's Zane Lowe. The band began recording the album in Hong Kong during a five-day break in touring in 2013. "It wasn’t a flash studio, it was pretty claustrophobic and hot. We went in and knocked about loads of ideas," Damon Albarn said during the announcement. To London's excitement, Blur will also play a show at Hyde Park on June 20. When asked if they would tour in the U.S., they answered ambiguously: "Maybe, if anyone's interested."

The album art and track list for "The Magic Whip" is below:

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1. "Lonesome Street"
2. "New World Towers"
3. "Go Out"
4. "Ice Cream Man"
5. "Thought I Was A Spaceman"
6. "I Broadcast"
7. "My Terracotta Heart"
8. "There Are Too Many Of Us"
9. "Ghost Ship"
10. "Pyongyang"
11. "Ong Ong"
12. "Mirrorball"

Watch the whole press conference here via Facebook:


What It Was Like To Shoot The 'Bridesmaids' Bathroom Scene (And Other Stories From Robert Yeoman)

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What do Wes Anderson, Paul Feig, Drew Barrymore, Kevin Smith and Robert Downey Sr. have in common? Robert Yeoman, the cinematographer whose work on Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" makes him a first-time nominee at Sunday's Academy Awards. Yeoman has shot all of Anderson's live-action movies, and his work on three Feig titles -- "Bridesmaids," "The Heat" and the forthcoming "Spy" -- prompted the director to ask Yeoman to shoot his female-centered "Ghostbusters" reboot, too. (No deal has been made on that one yet. "There’s always a lot of politics going on," Yeoman told The Huffington Post.)

HuffPost Entertainment caught up with the 63-year-old a few days after the Oscar nominations were announced. In celebration of his wide-ranging career -- which has also placed him behind the camera of films directed by William Friedkin ("Rampage"), Gus Van Sant ("Drugstore Cowboy"), Sally Field ("Beautiful"), Roman Coppola ("CQ"), Wes Craven ("Red Eye"), Peyton Reed ("Yes Man") and Nicholas Stoller ("Get Him to the Greek") -- we selected a handful of films and asked Yeoman to name his favorite scene or discuss one that evolved during the filming process.

"Drugstore Cowboy" (1989)



Yeoman's first solo cinematography credit came with William Friedkin's 1987 thriller "Rampage." He then shot the comedies "Johnny Be Good," "Dead Heat" and "Rented Lips." But no film was as defining as 1989's "Drugstore Cowboy," Gus Van Sant's breakout feature about a heroin addict (Matt Dillon) and his gritty misadventures. Yeoman was 38 when the indie film drama opened to acclaim. The following year, he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography. But the touchstone of his time on the "Drugstore Cowboy" set was meeting Beat writer William S. Burroughs, who cameoed (in a role based on one of his short stories) as a priest turned junkie who doles out smack to neighbors in need. Yeoman's fondest memory involves a scene in which Dillon encounters Burroughs and the two stroll down the block discussing the latter's memories of the neighborhood.

Yeoman and Van Sant wanted the moment to stand out, so they shot it using a 300mm lens, which "isolated the characters" in front of the trees that draped the background. "It was something that evolved as we were shooting it," he said. "The day was a very beautiful sunny day in Portland, Oregon, in the fall, which doesn't happen that often. Many people later commented on that scene, saying how beautiful it was, but I think a combination of the light in the park that morning and using that long lens with the shallow depth of field gave it a special kind of quality."

"The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001)



When anyone thinks of "The Royal Tenenbaums," which is often still heralded as Wes Anderson's finest achievement, they think of Margot (Gwenyth Paltrow) stepping off the bus and gliding toward Richie (Luke Wilson) in that beige fur coat as Nico's "These Days" serenades them. Because Yeoman shoots Anderson's projects on film rather than digitally, the inability to rewatch footage instantly means there's no telling how a slow-mo scene will turn out. Yeoman says the "film gods" were on their side that day, providing the proper lighting to burnish Paltrow's windblown bob, Wilson's aviator shades and the white-clad sailors who traipse through the background.

But Yeoman points to a second "Tenenbaums" scene as one of its signature moments: Richie's suicide attempt. After he cuts his hair and shaves his beard with deadened eyes, Richie whispers, "I'm going to kill myself tomorrow." Images of Margot, his sister by adoption and his sweetheart by tacit affection, flash across the screen rapidly before the movie cuts to Yeoman's overhead shot of Richie resting his arms on the sink as rivulets of blood trickle out, surrounded by the hair he's just shed. Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay" scores the scene, which is illuminated with hues of blue appropriate for such a dim bathroom suicide.

"I was good friends with Luke, and it was very chilling when we were shooting that scene with the shot where the blood is rolling down the arms into the sink," Yeoman recalled. "I remember when we shot that, even though it was obviously fake blood, everyone was kind of freaked out by the whole thing."

"The Squid and the Whale" (2005)



Filmed mostly using a handheld camera, "The Squid and the Whale" was shot quickly and with a tiny budget of $1.5 million. Noah Baumbach rehearsed extensively with the cast -- Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney play a strained married couple informing their teenagers (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Klein) of their separation -- before the shoot, knowing they didn't have much time. Yeoman and Baumbach "spent a great deal of time" during pre-production masterminding the logistics of each of the shoot's locations. That made interior shots inside the Brooklyn townhouse simple. The one thing they couldn't overcome, because the story takes place in the 1980s, was the anachronistic cars sprinkled throughout the exterior shots. "We tried to use a shallow depth of field to throw them out of focus and put a few period cars around our main vehicle, but at a certain point we just had to let that go," Yeoman said. "If you look closely, you’ll see non-period cars in the background. We didn’t have the budget to get more cars."

The other struggle came in shooting Eisenberg jogging briefly through Central Park on his way to the Museum of Natural History toward the end of the film. The production didn't have the money to set up a proper operation, and the city is quite restrictive on shooting in Central Park, so Yeoman poked his camera outside the window of a van that followed Eisenberg as he ran. As soon as they began rolling, a park official, whom "everybody knew was not the most pleasant person," parked next to them and asked what they were up to. "So we just took off," Yeoman said. "We knew we had one take, that was it, so Jesse ran through the park and we were shooting him out the side of the the van and the park guy was chasing us the entire time. [...] We shot on the subways, and you’re not supposed to do that either. We took a couple of PA's with us so that when people in the subway who were riding it were looking at the camera or noticing us, we would just have a PA block them so we couldn’t see it. A little bit of run-and-gunning, but that was more in the style of that film, for sure."

"Get Him to the Greek" (2010)



"Well, that was a crazy movie," Yeoman said, when asked to recall "Get Him to the Greek." Written and directed by Nicholas Stoller ("Forgetting Sarah Marshall"), with whom Yeoman worked on "Yes Man" (his first studio movie), and produced by Judd Apatow, "Greek" required a raunchy energy suitable for the return of wild rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand). It's one of Jonah Hill's standout moments that gave the production pause, though.

Yeoman wasn't sure what would come of the Las Vegas hotel scene in which Aldous and his father (Colm Meaney) give Aaron (Hill), a talent scout at a floundering record label, a "Jeffrey." The "little bit of this, little but of that" joint -- which, according to Adlous, contains weed laced with opium, heroin, Ecstasy, Clorox, methadone, Subutex, morphine, peyote and angel dust -- has Aaron convinced he's having a heart attack. The question was whether to shoot the riotous scene using a practical location or a soundstage. Yeoman and Stoller scouted hotels in Vegas. When they were unable to find a room with which they were "comfortable," the studio requested they build the interior on a stage. No longer reliant on natural lighting, they were able to shoot the rendezvous during the day. "We put backdrops out the windows so we can control the light on them, so it certainly made it way better and easier than what we would have done had we shot it practically," Yeoman said.

The result is one of the film's highlights: Yeoman uses extreme closeups to capture the distress Aaron experiences as Aldous and his father chortle on the opposite sofa. The soundstage also allowed them to construct the "furry wall" the Aldous instructs Aaron to stroke as a source of comfort while the glamour of the opulent hotel room colors his panic.

"Bridesmaids" (2011)



While in post-production for "Get Him to the Greek," Apatow approached Yeoman about working with Paul Feig, who'd created "Freaks and Geeks" and directed episodes of "The Office," "Arrested Development" and "Weeds." The movie was "Bridesmaids," originally titled "Maid of Honor." Yeoman and Feig became fast friends over lunch and agreed to team up, bolstered by Yeoman's appreciation of Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne, with whom he'd worked on "Whip It" and "Get Him to the Greek," respectively.

Yeoman says almost every day on the set of "Bridemaids" brought something fresh because scenes were constantly evolving thanks to the improv-capable cast. In fact, the bridal-shop scene in which Wiig, Byrne, Maya Rudolph, Melissa McCarthy, Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper all come down with food poisoning after eating at a Brazilian steakhouse wasn't part of the original script at all. That's the way Apatow, who produced the hit comedy, prefers to work, unlike say, Wes Anderson, whose script is locked down by the time the shoot begins.

"They brought those pages in and said, 'This is what we’re going to do,' and I remember at the time being a little horrified by the whole thing and thinking, 'Oh my gosh, how are we going to do this?'" Yeoman recalled of the two-camera shoot. "It’s not my style of humor, really, and I just wasn’t sure how this was all going to be pulled off. But Paul seemed to have a handle on it, so I said, 'Okay, Paul, you run with this one.' We shot it and I know a lot of people have commented, 'Oh, that was so funny, that was so funny.' I find that I’m sometimes not the best barometer of what people enjoy. That’s not something that I personally was a big fan of, but a lot of people really love that scene."

"The Grand Budapest Hotel" (2014)

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And now we come to the work that triggered Yeoman's first Oscar nomination. He calls the experience of making "The Grand Budapest Hotel" a "magical fairy tale from beginning to end." That sounds fitting, as the movie plays like something of a fairy tale. Filmed entirely on location in Eastern Germany in January and February 2013, the cast and crew met few sunny days and plenty of snowfalls, just as they'd hoped. The scenery was right, but the timing was murkier: Because of the skies' ashen tones, their window of shooting lasted from 8:30 a.m. until only 4 p.m., when it began to get dark. When they first captured the sequence where the assassin Jopling (Willem Defoe) hunts down the lawyer Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum) in the museum, chops off his fingers and strolls down a nearby sidewalk, Yeoman did his best to overcome darkening skies. He and Anderson later saw the dailies and knew the moment didn't look right.

"Wes said, 'Let’s just reshoot it,'" Yeoman said. "Luckily we did because we went back and that particular day a giant fog moved in and had this amazing feeling to the background that hadn’t been there when we shot the first time. Our whole goal in shooting these exteriors was natural light without any artificial light being added to it, so we shot it with natural light and the shot turned out way better than it would have the first time anyway."

"Spy" (2015)



Before "The Grand Budapest Hotel," Yeoman fulfilled DP duties on "The Heat," starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. That means "Spy," which premieres at South by Southwest next month and opens in May, is his third project with both McCarthy and Feig. The comedy satisfies the director's longtime desire to make a "James Bond" movie. Yeoman cites "Casino Royale" and "Skyfall" as the "mantra" he and Feig used while shooting the action-heavy film, in which McCarthy plays a modest CIA analyst who goes undercover to penetrate a deadly arms dealer's operation. One might assume "Spy" was a relatively comfortable endeavor for Yeoman, but in fact it's the first movie he shot digitally.

"As opposed to past comedies, [Feig] really wanted to make certain scenes very dark and sinister from a cinematography standpoint," Yeoman said. "He really pushed me. It was my first digital film, so Paul was able to see on the monitor exactly what we were shooting and he would often push me to a darker place than what we initially had, which is very different than what I’m used to. Usually directors want to make it much brighter, but he was the opposite. So it’s an action-comedy and has a lot of gunfights and fistfights and knife fights and things in the film. Yet it has certain comic Paul Feig aspect to it, as well, obviously -- it’s a combination of the two."

Paintings Of Living Rooms And Tiny Apartments Show What The Insides Of Marriage Look Like

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Step inside an Ann Toebbe painting, and the world around you becomes a two-dimensional plane with no one way up.

Windows and doors frame floor plans littered with desks and tables, striped carpets and rounded lamp shades. It's clear you're standing amidst the components of a living space, as evidenced by the random pieces of domesticity flattened in every direction. But the layout is amiss, lacking the depth that separates a kitchen from a bedroom. Everything exists on one level, pinned in mid air or flowing forth an ungraspable point of origin.

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E & A, 2014, gouache and cut paper on panel, 22 by 24 inches


Toebbe's works, now on view at Monya Rowe Gallery in New York City, aren't necessarily meant to depict the exact inner layouts of apartments or homes. Her series, titled "Remarried," renders memories as architecture, transforming the dynamics of her loved ones' first and second marriages into pieces of furniture and formal arrangements.

To construct the cut paper paintings, Chicago-based Toebbe uses not photographs but recollected details gleaned from her friends and acquaintances, sometimes told second-hand and years after the fact. The paintings attempt to piece together the memories of relationships past, hinted at only through a vase of sunflowers or a lone teddy bear stranded on a bed. The works are intentionally familiar yet vague, allowing the viewer to insert her own memories to connect one square foot of imagined space to another.

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E & L, 2014, gouache and cut paper on panel, 24 by 22 inches


Toebbe's work with interior spaces has, according to Steven Zevitas Gallery, come to define her practice over the past decade. Before "Remarried," she explored the shared spaces of her childhood friends' homes, the botched inheritance of her parents' neighbor, and the vintage stories of homemakers in the 1940s and '50s.

"I have a knack for flattening space," Toebbe explained to Bad at Sports. "It wasn’t considered a great asset in my early training in drawing and painting but I have cultivated my skewed perception -- often called folk or faux naïve -- of space. I imagine objects flat first, then bend and fold them in creative ways to make everything fit in a given room."

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First Wife, 2014, gouache and cut paper on panel, 22 by 28 inches


While Toebbe flattens, the viewer sees her impressively detailed worlds from a bird's eye view, spying on the spaces inhabited by real people. Though they are just fragments of whatever reality once was, her works immediately pull the onlooker into their centers, as off-kilter as they might be.

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Living Together, 2014, gouache and cut paper on panel, 18 by 20 inches


Ann Toebbe's "Remarried" series will be on view at Monya Rowe Gallery in New york City from January 11 to February 22, 2015.

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Second Wife, 2014, gouache and cut paper on panel, 28 by 24 inches

These Gorgeous Maps Show The World's Great Cities From A Local's POV

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Everyone knows that tourists tend to take a lot of photos—especially in cities that attract a lot of them. Any New Yorker will gripe about the selfie sticks and endless camera flashes in Times Square—but where are the places locals of the world’s most popular cities love to visit, and take photographs of their own?

Data artist Eric Fischer set out to answer that question. Using geotagging—location data embedded in photographs and other digital media—he’s created a series of maps that show us precisely which locations are beloved by tourists, by locals, and by both groups.

Utilizing the same data he drew on for the Geotagger’s World Atlas, another project that incorporates location-based phone data to visualize cities, Fischer has created a series called “Locals and Tourists.” From Beijing to Rome, these stunning data displays show just which places tourists love to photograph—and how much, or how little, they overlap with locals’ favorite haunts.

How to decipher the map: according to the project's Flickr page: "Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

Yellow points are pictures where it can't be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven't taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all."





A version of this post originally appeared on HuffPost Japan.

Here's What Might Happen If Persephone, Goddess Of Spring, Were A Millenial

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In ancient mythology, Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and the harvest goddess Demeter, is the Greek goddess of spring and awakening. But what happens when you take Persephone, who roams between the underworld and earth, out of ancient Greece and place her in contemporary New York City, amidst somewhat of a existential crisis?

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A hypnotic new multidisciplinary performance titled "Tungsten (artery)" poses a modern response to the timeless myth, combining shadows, Japanese Bunraku-inspired puppetry, sound, text and projected video to yield a story that floats between life and death, reality and fantasy. Written by Erik Ehn and directed and designed by Janie Geiser, the piece will be presented as a work in progress as part of the Getty Villa's Theater Lab, produced by Automata in collaboration with Los Angeles Performance Practice.

"I was approached from the Getty Villa about their works in progress series for a new work," Geiser explained to the Huffington Post Arts in an interview. "Of course it had to have a relationship to the classical world. I just started reading a lot of the plays and I thought that Persephone didn't really have her own story yet. Her story also ties in a lot with other things I've been thinking about, the environmental changes that are happening with global warming, and the going back and forth between life and death, which is something we're all aware of. She's one of the few figures in mythology who can do that."

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Geiser worked with Ehn to create a story that's not so much an adaptation, but, in her words, "using the story as kind of a springboard." The piece revolves around Cora, a contemporary Persephone commuting by train to New York City, an annual ritual before the oncoming of spring. However, due to massive disruption in the earth's natural cycles, the cycle of the seasons has been thrown off course. Cora thus can't quite remember where she is coming from or where she's going, and endures a search for meaning as the life she knew before begins to unravel. "I was not interested so much in making an ancient Greek piece so we took her figure into the present and -- okay, if she's been going back and forth for thousands of years she's exhausted, she's confused, and sort of going forward with that."

Perhaps the most unconventional part of the piece is the fact that the entire play is enacted via painted wooden puppets, manipulated by actors who operate them visibly, dressed in black. "I think the great thing about puppets is, they are who they are on stage. Immediately you have a character, you have the character of Cora. She is who she is and how she looks is a great personification of her character... The puppets really embody, that's the best thing that they do. In all of the physical senses of that word -- they give it a body."

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"And then, they're also able to do all kind of things that are difficult for humans. They can flip in the air, they can walk in the air, they're not bound by gravity. Using those moments of the puppets -- sometimes they're attached to a set piece but they're often just going out into the void of the theater and walking in the air. They lend it kind of an element of otherness which is really interesting for the piece."

"Tungsten (artery)" is scheduled Friday, February 20, 2015, at 8:00 p.m.; Saturday, February 21, 2015, at 3:00 & 8:00 p.m.; and Sunday, February 21, 2015, at 2:00 p.m. Tickets are $7 and are available by calling 310-440-7300 or visiting the Getty website.

8 Artists Working In The Delightfully Bizarre World Of Contemporary Ceramics

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Ceramics. If the word conjures whimsical images of cups, bowls, vases -- and, sure, Patrick Swayze -- you're not alone. But the artistic genre contains much more than tableware.

In the past year or so, the 27,000-year-old art form has been making quite the trendy comeback. We've encountered ceramic art objects ranging from the minimal to the eccentric, the abstract to the explicit. Yet through the outpour, a particular current has caught our eye.

Today we're ogling the work of seven gifted ceramicists who combine the sweetness inherent in the medium with something a bit more sinister. From porcelain dolls spewing blood and guts to stark sculptures of toes and tongues, the following artists are not afraid to get creepy with clay. Behold, eight eerily beautiful ceramicists whose work gives us goosebumps in more ways than one.

1. Jess Riva Cooper

"'Viral Series' is a continued exploration into the death and regeneration taking place in deteriorating communities. Places and things, once bustling and animated, have succumbed to nature’s mercy. Without intervention, nature takes over and breathes new life into objects, as it does in my sculptures. In 'Viral Series,' the busts, once pure and pristine, are hardly recognizable. They become tattooed with nature. Their heads grow leaves instead of hair. The faces scream out in pain -- or perhaps pleasure -- in the midst of transformation. Often used to represent life, nature instead becomes a parable for an alternative state –- one where life and death intersect."

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2. Debra Broz

"These works are part of my continual desire to understand and change the meaning of objects, especially those that were once valued, then discarded. Using ceramics restoration techniques, I dismantle, dissect and recompose figurines from secondhand stores. My seamless surgeries create works that humorously reflect the constant abnormality of society and nature, and offer considerations about the power of kitsch, and the 'truth' of objects as they pass from one owner to another."

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Dressage Horse, 2014, secondhand ceramic objects, sculpting compound, acrylic

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Guardians (Winged Dogs), 2012, secondhand ceramic objects, sculpting compound, acrylic, Collection of Joel & Elisa Sumner

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Hybrid - Tropical, 2013, secondhand ceramic objects, sculpting compound, acrylic


3. Daniel Ramos Obregón

"I like to address different concepts and ideas of what constitutes us as human beings -- from a material and metaphysical point of view -- by working from within the spectrum between art, fashion and performance."

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Photography by Jorge Perez Ortiz

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Photography by Jorge Perez Ortiz

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Photography by Jorge Perez Ortiz


4. Marianne Nielsen

"To me hair is interesting because it at the same time is both personal and universal. I regard the hairdo as an image that expresses our culture: the cultivation of the nature in human beings -- the hair being civilized by the hairdo."

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Hand build, glazed stoneware, length app. 38 cm. 2008. Photographer: Ole Akhoj

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Hand build, glazed stoneware, length app. 38 cm. 2008. Photographer: Ole Akhoj

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Hand build, glazed stoneware, length app. 38 cm. 2008. Photographer: Ole Akhoj


5. Ronit Baranga

"In these series of works, I sculpted human mouths and fingers emerging from tableware. The blurred border between the living and the still in these works is intriguing. It is fascinating. It is daunting. It makes you think. In this combination of the 'still' and the 'alive' joined as one, I try to change the way in which we observe useful tableware. The useful, passive, tableware can now be perceived as an active object, aware of itself and its surroundings –- responding to it. It does not allow to be taken for granted, to be used. It decides on its own how to behave in the situation."

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6. Rami Kim

"I am interested in making unique objects and pieces that are useful and visually interesting."

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7. Jessica Harrison

"Working with materials as diverse as porcelain, embroidery, stone and ink, my practice explores the mechanics of perception and the fallibility of observation through an examination of the interaction between the visual and the tactile. I am interested in how we handle and interpret materials, objects and space and how this process can define the shape of the body. The things I make propose a re-imagining of these definitions, offering an alternative shape to our perception of things, using the simplicity of materials to explore the complexity of the sensory body."

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Chloe, 2014, Found ceramic, epoxy resin, enamel paint, acrylic varnish
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Painted Lady 6, 2014, found ceramic, enamel paint

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Nude Bust 1, 2014, ceramic


8. Sophie Woodrow

"Made in the anthropomorphic tradition my ceramic figures explore how animals are portrayed, as allegory, sentimentally or decoratively. My characters appear as instinctive beings, conveying both strength and vulnerability, through them I hope to lead the viewer to question 'how at ease are we with our animal selves?'"

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Alan Cumming Puts A Cheeky Spin On Gay Blood Donor Policy For 'Celibacy Challenge' Campaign

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Actor Alan Cumming puts a cheeky spin on news that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recommended an end to the nation's lifetime ban on gay and bisexual male blood donors only to replace it with a new policy that would prohibit donations from men who have had sex with other men over the past 12 months.

Cumming stars in the "Celibacy Challenge" social media campaign, which was launched by GLAAD, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and other organizations. In a PSA for the campaign, the "Cabaret" and "Good Wife" star introduces himself as the head of the "Department of Sexual Abstinence" before offering up a few winking (and hilarious!) suggestions as to what potential donors can do in their year of celibacy before they give blood.

The campaign's ultimate goal, officials say, is to urge the FDA to implement a revised blood donation system that screens all donors based on risk for HIV transmission, without limits on sexual orientation or gender identity.

“Stereotypes have no place in saving lives,​” GLAAD President & CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement. “The FDA’s proposed change still means that countless gay and bisexual men will be turned away from blood banks simply because of who they are."

To read more about the "Celibacy Challenge" campaign and view a petition urging the FDA to screen all prospective blood donors based on risk, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity, head here.

20 Rare Photos You Need To See From Black Broadway: African Americans On The Great White Way

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Continuing our coverage of Black History Month, BroadwayBox brings you a preview of some of the 300 rare photos that appear in Stewart F. Lane’s Black Broadway: African Americans on The Great White Way.

Ellen Page Joins Instagram, Talks About Coming Out

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Ellen Page isn't just an A list star -- she's also a social media maven.

In the last year she used Twitter to slam an anti-gay preacher who gave her grief after she came out in February 2014, she lashed out at the Queen of England for honoring an anti-gay politician, and she even took time out of her busy celebrity life to rename people's dogs.

But one thing Page hasn't done is join Instagram, which is really unfair to all of us who want to see (and not just read) about what the "X-Men" star is up to on any given day.

Until now.. that is.

Yes! It's true: Ellen Page has finally joined Instagram!

Rio makes you happy AND join Instagram. #firstphoto #brazil

A photo posted by @ellenpage on




The actress currently only has three photos on her profile (she's in Rio for Carnival right now) but has already accrued a following of over 30,000 followers -- even with the limited profile engagement.

While celebrating in the southern hemisphere, Page told reporters that her decision to come out was the best one she's ever made.

"I decided [to come out] because I was sad, I felt uninspired, I felt uncomfortable, it hurt relationships, I felt guilty for not being out, and it was time," Page told a reporter in Rio De Janeiro.

Want more photo goodness from Page in the future? Head here to check out and follow the actress' Instagram. And check out the full interview with Page from Rio at the top of this story.

New 'Mad Men' Teaser Hints At Jump To Mid '70s For Final Episodes

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"Mad Men" has featured anachronistic music cues in the past, but creator Matthew Weiner often keeps the show's tracks accurate to era. "Although we take license for artistic purposes with the end-title music, we never want the source music to break from the time period we are trying to recreate," Weiner told the New York Times in 2012, after he was criticized for an anachronistic song choice.

With that in mind, consider this first teaser for the final episodes of "Mad Men," a visual representation of the preview photos AMC released on Wednesday. Diana Ross' "Love Hangover" plays over images of Don, Peggy, Pete, Stan, Roger and Joan. The song's release date? March 1976. The mid-season "Mad Men" finale took place in 1969.



Watch the teaser below. "Mad Men" returns on April 5.

Does The Internet Really Make Public Shaming Worse?

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The following is an excerpt from Jennifer Jacquet's Is Shame Necessary, a new book that analyzes the merits and potential problems with holding others accountable for their mistakes, particularly in the digital age. In this chapter, Jacquet proposes that online shaming has taken on a new form entirely since Internet use became widespread, namely because disparaging comments now spread quickly and sometimes anonymously.

In seventeenth-century Boston, Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne ambled through the streets with a scarlet letter “illuminated upon her bosom.” Today, the U.S. government might not be interested in her affair (unless she was a U.S. politician), but if Prynne were Chinese, her marriage record might be online. Chinese officials began making marriage records available in 2011, starting with Beijing and Shanghai, with plans for all of China by 2015.

The all-seeing, omnipresent government makes most people uncomfortable, which was true long before the Internet. Writer Milan Kundera, who immigrated to France from a “surveillance-riddled Czechoslovakia,” wrote that “when it becomes the custom and the rule to divulge another person’s private life, we are entering a time when the highest stake is the survival or the disappearance of the individual.” Kundera was referring to state surveillance, which the Internet allows with increasing ease.

Despite what might be implied in its name, we now know that the U.S. National Security Agency collects data on individuals all over the globe, even in virtual worlds like Second Life. Police departments around the United State have experimented with different forms of shaming on difference social media platforms for every type of criminal. Governments not only are watching us, but are developing policies and platforms that threaten to expose, and thereby shame, public offenders. But large-scale surveillance and the potential shaming that comes with it are no longer reserved for just governments.

"The Hester Prynne of today need not worry about the government, but she might instead find herself the object of contempt on a Facebook page created by her cuckolded husband."
Digital technologies now provide a platform conducive to anyone exposing behavior, not just the state. The Hester Prynne of today need not worry about the government, but she might instead find herself the object of contempt on a Facebook page created by her cuckolded husband. He might add her name and photograph to CheaterVille.com (whose bald motto is “Look Who’s Getting Caught with Their Pants Down”™). He might post naked photos of her online. He might decide to use social media to shame Prynne’s paramour. (In June 2011, a judge in England dismissed two charges of harassment against a London man who had used social-networking sites to shame his wife’s lover.) In other words, the Hester Prynne of today isn’t necessarily any safer from shaming.

There are nongovernment websites displaying cheaters, mug shots, deadbeat dads, and sex offenders. A neighborhood group in Leicester, England, posts videos of people caught littering, and removes them only if the “litter louts” are identified and pay their fine. A father made his teenage daughter post a video to Facebook in which she admitted to how young she was and apologized for deceiving boys. A colleague told me that after an argument, his teenage son edited his father’s Wikipedia profile to say he was a pedophile (ah, New Yorkers). Consumers use their social networks to expose bad services and products, but it cuts both ways: a restaurant in Los Angeles uses Twitter to shame people who do not show up for their reservation. Today, there is a whole reputation-related Internet vocabulary, such as digital footprint (what’s on the Web about you), digital dirt (the bad stuff about you online), sock puppet (an online identity used for purposes of deception), dooced (to lose your job for something you said on your website), and doxing (the act of revealing personal information about someone online).

"One major difference between shame online and shame past is the speed at which it can happen. Another is that, with the Internet, it’s no longer necessarily clear who is doing the shaming."
But isn’t this just an Internet version of vigilantism, which, like shaming itself, changes with each new set of communication tools? Is online shaming really so different from being tarred and feathered or being featured in the tabloids? One major difference between shame online and shame past is the speed at which it can happen. Another is that, with the Internet, it’s no longer necessarily clear who is doing the shaming. Anonymous, an informal and anonymous collective of online activists and protesters, hacked accounts and leaked a video online of two Ohio high school football players joking about having raped a girl, which, defense attorneys worried, undermined their right to a fair trial. Anonymous issued a statement that “they” shared the worry about a fair trial, too -- because cover-ups by officials and because the boys were star athletes. A judge sentenced both boys to prison time.

The speed at which information can travel, the frequency of anonymous shaming, the size of the audience it can reach, and the permanence of the information separate digital shaming from shaming of the past. In this new global panopticon, we must be mindful of shame’s power and its liabilities. It is difficult to imagine anyone ever acquiring pre-Internet levels of privacy, but there are now looming questions about whether there is a right to privacy and, if so, where it begins and ends. It is also true that with regards to these new platforms, many of the old arguments against shaming become less useful. (The term “Internet” is not indexed in Martha Nussbaum’s book against state shaming.) Legal scholars who have argued that shaming cannot be effective in highly mobile, anonymous, and urban societies haven’t spent enough time online.

From the book: IS SHAME NECESSARY? by Jennifer Jacquet. Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Jacquet. Published by arrangement with Pantheon Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Rejected Cover Designs For Laura Van Den Berg's 'Find Me'

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Rejected Covers is an ongoing series for which artists reveal their inspirations and unused design ideas for popular titles. Below, designer Nayon Cho discusses the illustrations that were considered but ultimately discarded for Laura van den Berg's novel Find Me.

Find Me is the second of Laura van den Berg's books I've been lucky enough to work on. The first was The Isle of Youth, a brilliant, fierce, and heartbreaking collection of stories. With Find Me, Laura tops herself and masters surreal, beautiful, and magical territory. Laura is also a dear friend of mine, so with both books I felt extra pressure to create a design that would do justice to her writing.

The novel is divided into two parts. In the first, the protagonist, Joy, is in the midst of a deadly epidemic sweeping the country. She is lost and alone, an orphan abandoned by her mother as a baby, but lucky enough to have a natural immunity against this mysterious illness. She and others like her are sequestered in a hospital in Kansas, to be studied for a potential cure. In the second half of the novel, Joy escapes from the hospital and embarks on a cross-country journey to find her mother, whom she believes lives in the Florida Keys.

After reading the manuscript, I was struck by two motifs: 1) bare tree branches in the winter, starkly outlined against the sky; and 2) the gradual transition from a cold and white world (Kansas in winter) to a warm and colorful one (the Florida Keys). My first attempts focused entirely on how to combine these two ideas into one cohesive design. The results were largely unsatisfying. I just couldn't get my ideas across clearly and succinctly. I was tangled in a web of concepts that were a little too abstract, a little too hard to grasp.

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I decided to change course and incorporate a more personal, human feel. The winter scenes in Kansas inspired me to use sugar to represent snow, into which I drew the title with my finger. I wanted it to feel like a note Joy might have left on a snow-covered windshield, an ephemeral cri de coeur. In one version I paired the sugar with a moody photograph of two figures walking through a deserted landscape. I overlaid it with warm colors to hint at the end point of the characters' journey. In another I changed perspective and used the title itself as the snowy landscape, with two tiny figures trudging across it. But this wasn't the right direction either. Legibility was a problem, both of the title and the concept.

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So I simplified even further. Snow and ice is a dominant theme, but so is the fierce life force and strength within Joy. I found a close up photograph of ice in a rich, vibrant blue. I set the title in a real font, in all caps. And I embedded the type within the ice, to reflect both paralysis and potential. With just a bit of warmth, that type could break free. I still liked the idea of playing with scale, so I included the walking figures in my first round.

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But everyone agreed they made the book feel small. With a quick deletion, we had our final jacket.

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