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These 'Star Wars' Shoes Are Epically Adorned With Lightsabers

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"Star Wars" fans: Have you dreamed of wearing Chewbacca on your feet? Fantasized about hearing the sounds of R2-D2 click against the pavement as you walk?


Well then, you're going to want to get your hands on this epic shoe collection



U.K.-based retailer Irregular Choice has launched a limited-edition collection of "Star Wars"-inspired shoes ahead of the Dec. 18 release of "The Force Awakens," and the shoes feature all the film's most beloved characters. Prices for the shoes range from£110-275 ($169-423 USD).



There are Jedi oxfords, Chewbacca booties and even a pair with flashing light saber heels, to name a few. 


 



 


David Lee, The Walt Disney Company EMEA's footwear director, said in a release that the brand is "thrilled with this exciting collaboration," which "features the most iconic characters from the original trilogy."


Of course, if Yoda heels aren't your thing, there are also these adorable Darth Vader flats.



 


Styles are selling out quickly, so head to Irregular Choice to see more now, and never feel too short to be a stormtrooper ever again.


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See The Most Intense 'Secret In Their Eyes' Trailer Yet

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Julia Roberts is on a mission, and with every "Secret in Their Eyes" trailer, that mission gets more intense.


In the newest clip, which The Huffington Post is premiering, she cycles through grief, rage, sleuthing and more rage -- and understandably so: Roberts plays an FBI investigator whose daughter has been brutally murdered. Based on a novel that became an Oscar-winning 2009 Argentinian film, "The Secret in Their Eyes" unites Roberts with Nicole Kidman and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who play her colleagues.


Directed by Billy Ray ("Shattered Glass"), the thriller opens Nov. 20. Watch the gripping new trailer below.





 


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Meet Morton Bartlett, The Harvard Man Who Secretly Made Life-Size Dolls

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Most children own a doll of some kind. Maybe an action figure, a stuffed furry bear, a porcelain princess. Some of these dolls wind up on shelves like proto-works of art, but others remain close to their owners, serving in the roles of partner-in-crime, confidante, bedmate and best friend. The inanimate creatures come to life in the eyes of their guardians, taking on the personality traits, fantastical and ordinary, ascribed to them. 


Most of us, however, eventually leave our childhood playthings and their imaginary personas behind. Maybe it's a matter of physically growing out of them, realizing with more clarity the improbability of our blossoming relationships. Or we just get occupied with other things, like people -- real people. And as for the few adults who seriously engage with dolls later in life, they're often looked upon with furrowed eyebrows and a watchful gaze. 


Perhaps this general suspicion is why Morton Bartlett, despite spending countless hours constructing and photographing incredibly lifelike dolls of children, died without mentioning them. The 15 dolls, and some 200 photographs depicting them, were discovered by antique dealer Marion Harris in 1993. She bought them on a whim at the Pier Show, a big New York antiques fair, and was told they were removed from the house of a man recently deceased in Boston's South End. 



There are three boy dolls in total; the rest are girls, approximately aged 8 to 16. Made with the help of medical growth charts and anatomy books, their proportions are entirely accurate. The detail is astounding, with toenails and fingernails and teeth and tongues just as they should be. The girls contain fully realized genitalia. The boys do not. Both genders are dressed up in outfits expertly stitched and knitted. Their body parts are removable, so the dolls could change outfits without causing a mess. In spite of all this precision, though, Bartlett's dolls still look like dolls -- not people.


What kind of a man would devote years of his life -- from 1936 to 1963, approximately one year per doll -- to such an uncanny passion? The answer, at least according to Bartlett, is a relatively conventional one. 


Bartlett was born in Chicago in 1909. He was orphaned at the age of 8, and adopted by a well-to-do family in Boston soon after. He received a top quality education, first at Phillips Exeter Academy and then at Harvard University for two years before dropping out. He worked some odd jobs -- gas station attendant, furniture salesman -- before settling into a career in graphic design and commercial photography. 



Two years after Harris discovered Bartlett's trove of dolls, she brought them to the Outsider Art Fair in Manhattan. While the uncanny tale of the found, masterfully crafted works fit the usual "outsider" bill, the story of the artist did not. Bartlett was not some eccentric loner locked in his home, isolated from the world. His friends swore he didn't express any deviant sexual tendencies or inclinations. He was highly educated, lived in Boston and worked in a creative field. His normalcy only makes his one "transgression" all the more mystifying. 


Regardless of his relatively normal biography, Bartlett has been hailed as an outsider genius, his work mentioned in the same breath as Hans Bellmer or Henry Darger. And though Bartlett's dolls were well made, it was his photographs that, many argue, capture the height of his craft. 


Small, black-and-white photographs, dramatically lit, feature the dolls -- and some human subjects -- in hauntingly innocent scenarios. A girl of around 10, slouched in a sofa chair, immerses herself in Grimm's Fairy Tales, an enthralled and devious grin spreading across her face. In another, a doll girl of around five sits across from her stuffed puppy, pointing a finger at him in stern admonishment. She's wearing socks, her legs are spread, and you can make out the trim of her underwear from beneath her dress. 



Bartlett's dolls, despite their anatomical exactitude, don't necessarily try to pass as real. In the photographs, however, the line between animate and inanimate becomes seriously blurred. The artist, with the expertise he acquired as a commercial photographer, crafts scenarios that look alternately real and fake from one blink to the next. Bartlett's images display the camera's ability to freeze true life and life-like moments with the same sense of veracity. It's in these photographs, which capture neither quite intimate memory nor repressed fantasy, that the viewer loses grip on what's real. 


There are many ways to process Bartlett's work, none of them quite satisfying. Many read Bartlett's art as a way to create the family he never had, his 15 life-size dolls becoming surrogates for his lost childhood and unrealized kids of his own. "Bartlett has been viewed as a lost child who grew into a gentle Gepetto," Roberta Smith said in 2007. Gepetto would be the most generous literary comparison to Bartlett; others have suggested Pygmalion's Henry Higgins or Lolita's Humbert Humbert. The combination of playful eroticism and pure innocence in the works does derail from the usual family portrait. As Ken Johnson wrote in the Boston Globe: "Looking at these dolls is like seeing through the eyes of a pedophile."



In 1932, still years before Bartlett made his first doll, he composed a short autobiography for Harvard's 25th anniversary report. It read: "My hobby is sculpting in plaster. Its purpose is that of all proper hobbies -- to let out urges that do not find expression in other channels." Aside from being quite the ominous alumni update, the brief glimpse into Bartlett's thought process hints at the repressed compulsions at the core of his work, whatever those may be. 


As any good Freudian knows, what is familiar in the past and repressed in the present often returns to disrupt us in the future. This is the story of all that's uncanny, all that infects our safe spaces with a whiff of something old, loved, turned sour. My favorite theory about Bartlett's dolls is that they are manifestations of his own inner child, perhaps a little girl, innocent and precocious, who never got to express herself any other way. 


When he died in 1992, Bartlett instructed that his estate, worth $300,000, be "divided between orphan charities." Of course, he really left much more: a trove of hypnotic photographs, 15 masterful sculptures, and the mystery of a seemingly harmless man with a very unusual passion that is equal parts inspiring and unnerving. 


"Family Planning: early photographs and archival material," featuring three mannequins and a series of photographs made circa 1955, will be on view at Julie Saul Gallery in New York until December 23, 2015.



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'World's Greatest Cat Painting' Sells For $826,000

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Carl Kahler's 1891 painting My Wife's Lovers—which rose to Internet prominence recently—sold on November 3 at Sotheby's 19th Century European Art sale for $826,000, more than two times its estimated price of $300,000.



The massive painting is six feet tall, eight-and-a-half feet wide, weighs 227 pounds, and features 42 felines. If you think that's a lot of cats (you'd be right), consider the fact that they're just a small fraction of the 350 owned by San Franciscan millionaire Kate Birdsall Johnson, who commissioned the painting.


Johnson, who it's safe to say was the ultimate cat lady, lived with her furry friends on a 3,000-acre farm near Sonoma during the turn of the century. She hired an entire staff whose sole purpose was to care for the pets, and her will stipulated a gift of $500,000 to guarantee their continued care.


When Kahler, who was best known as a painter of horse racing scenes, was commissioned to complete the work in the late 1800s, he had never painted a single cat in his life. To resolve this deficiency, he completed several sketches of each feline to become acquainted with their individual personalities and mannerisms. Sotheby's estimates that My Wife's Lovers took him three years to complete. The title was bestowed upon the work by Johnson's witty (and remarkably patient) husband.


In 1949, Cat Magazine glowingly referred to it as “the world's greatest painting of cats."


Though the buyer of the work is unknown, we think it's probably safe to assume they're a cat person. At $19,666 per cat, you'd have to be.


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An Illustrated Guide To The Seven Simple Ways You Can Practice Peace

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"Sometimes it's okay if the only thing you did today was breathe."


So begins artist and author Yumi Sakugawa's newest comic-meets-meditation guide, There Is No Right Way to Meditate. "Breathing lets your loved ones know that you are still alive," Sakugawa continues, loaded with whimsy. "And every time you breathe in, a new idea is born, and every time you breathe out, an old grievance is released."


Sakugawa is known for her tranquil, art-laden books, like Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe or I Think I Am in Friend-Love with You. Her similarly soothing comics have appeared in compilations like the Best American Non­Required Reading 2014 and lit-obsessed sites like The Rumpus. And she's no stranger to book tours, touting her brand of peaceful living across the country as she meets fans and waxes poetic on the power of "meditations, affirmations and ways to set your true self free."



Suffice it to say, the California-based Sakugawa is not just a writer or an illustrator. She's an advocate for millennial-age understandings of love, hope and fulfillment. Removed from past generations of self-help promoters, she uses her equally inspirational and wistful language to guide readers through de-cluttering, being a better listener and solidifying friendships -- generic advice not included. And, lucky for all of us, the world is starting to listen.


"Sakugawa deftly blends comics, illustration, and short story writing so well that every page is rife with hope, humor and heartache," Bitch Magazine wrote. "Her work has an eerie, wondrous quality to it, blipped with panels that will make your heart soar and dip and soar again," NPR added


"There is an ambiguity and a complexity to everything she does," The A.V. Club reiterated




Take, for example, the abstract yet simple ways she explains why meditation is good for you in her latest work, featured above."You don't freak out as much to life's inconveniences and detours," she explains. Unpretentious, largely unadorned, her words and pictures speak to the 20- and 30-somethings who chase meaning and happiness, rather than explicit success and achievement.


A telltale sign of her millennial upbringing? She's grown up in an age of ever-increasing connectivity, introduced to Facebook when she was in college. Yet she has managed to retain a sense of optimism about our growing dependence on technology, pushing for practices that maintain peace outside of social media, without denouncing it.


"I think that Facebook, instant messaging, LiveJournal ... really did shape the way that I express myself and interacted with other people," she explained to NPR, without an apparent tone of disapproval. "[Facebook] worked itself into the social fabric of my day-to-day life and it still does to this day ... You really get a thrill when somebody you like or somebody you want to be friends with connects with you."


It helps that Sakugawa doesn't take herself too seriously, too. In a list of ten ways to get rid of a bad mood included in There Is No Right Way to Meditate, she suggests both having a doppelganger extract said bad mood from your chest so he/she can make fun sculptures with it, and explaining the reasons for your bad mood over a cup of tea with your two-headed neighbor. Cheekiness is another marker of her updated take on furthering ourselves.


At the end of the day, though, the title of her newest book speaks more to her ability to confront our eternal desire for betterment without laying down laws or conjuring impractical #fitspo. There's no right way to meditate, she confesses up front. And, actually, that's all a lot of us need to hear.


There Is No Right Way To Meditateis available through Adams Media. Check out a preview of the book, "Seven Simple Ways to Practice Peace," below.






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Sara Bareilles Wants Her Female Fans 'To Learn How To Love Themselves'

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Sara Bareilles credits years of feeling "unlovable" and "invisible" with helping her feel enormous "empathy and compassion" for the struggles her young fans go through today, she told HuffPost Live on Tuesday.


"I have a lot of young female fans, and young women are really important to me, and I want to continue to develop a relationship encouraging them to learn how to love themselves," the singer explained. "I don't exactly know what I'm doing in all of that, but it's a message I know I need to hear, and I see it in young people of any gender, but young women especially."


Too often young women are confronted with "stresses and so much comparison that has to do with our physical beings," the songstress lamented, noting that her years as a chubby kid made her feel like an "outsider."


"I identify really strongly with that psyche -- the people that feel sort of invisible or misunderstood but not in a super overt way. It's a more internal way of feeling unseen," Bareilles said.


Recent years spent in the spotlight haven't overshadowed those days of hardship for her either, Bareilles said.


"Those childhood insults don't ever leave you, and I still look in the mirror and see that little girl who struggles and feels ugly and unlovable and all of those things, who just wanted a boyfriend so bad."


Watch more from Sara Bareilles' conversation with HuffPost Live here.


Want more HuffPost Live? Stream us anytime on Go90, Verizon's mobile social entertainment network, and listen to our best interviews on iTunes.


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We Might Be Getting The Ultimate 'Squad Goals' Emoji Next Year

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Behold! The emojis of the future.


Emojipedia, a comprehensive online resource about emojis, on Tuesday released new mock-ups for expressions, gestures and objects that could be coming to your phone next year. Among them: a glass of whiskey, a leafy salad and a sneezing face.


There's also this hilariously specific "Modern Pentathlon" emoji, an assemblage of triumphant athletes who seem to epitomize the sentiment behind "squad goals":



Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia, explained to The Huffington Post that the mock-ups are styled after Apple's emojis and based on approved ideas for Unicode 9.0, an update that's expected in mid-2016.


Unicode is essentially the standardizing force that allows special characters like emojis to display accurately across platforms -- it's why " " is a poop whether you're on a computer, an iPhone or an Android device.


"We created the images in the Apple style, as people tend to think of this as the canonical version of an emoji," Burge explained.


Of course, just because Unicode approves new emojis doesn't mean that companies like Apple (or Samsung, or Microsoft) will implement them. For example, Microsoft brought the middle-finger emoji to its platform several months before Apple. And companies can also implement their own characters without traditional Unicode approval: Apple's platform recently got its own anti-bullying emoji you won't see elsewhere.


Emojipedia has been tracking the new list of approved emojis and creating mock-ups since August -- you can see a full collection here


For what it's worth, we're most excited about an emoji way to order a Jim Beam on the rocks :


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Original 'X-Men' Character Iceman Confirms He's Gay

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The mystery of "X-Men" member Iceman's sexuality has finally been solved. 


A teenage version of the iconic character, displaced in time, made the surprise revelation in All-New X-Men #40 which was released in April. The plot line raised questions about the character's present-day self, who presented himself as heterosexual -- until now. 


In Uncanny X-Men #600, which hits newsstands on Nov. 4, the young Iceman, or Bobby Drake, comes out officially as a gay man while confronting his older self. 


Gay and lesbian characters are becoming increasingly visible in the comic book universe. In 2012, Marvel Comics announced that its first openly gay hero, Northstar, would marry his longtime civilian boyfriend, Kyle Jinadu, in an issue of Astonishing X-Men.


Iceman's coming out, however, is noteworthy given that the character was one of the five original "X-Men" members, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963.


Marvel Comics Editor Daniel Ketchum told The Huffington Post that he was particularly proud of the new issue, calling Iceman's character just another example of how the franchise has always strived to reflect "the human experience." 


"As a young person reading comics, starved to see my own life experience reflected on the page, I remember thinking it seemed only possible for that to happen as a one-off story relegated to a D-List character," he said. "I don’t know that I would have believed it if I was told that years later, this story would be presented in the flagship 'X-Men' title, featuring an A-list character who has been a mainstay of the franchise since the beginning." 


Get a sneak peek at Iceman's coming out in the images below.  



 


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46 Hilarious Books Guaranteed To Make You Laugh Out Loud

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Want a fun new read to dive into? Well, you're in luck! We've got you covered with everything from classic to contemporary titles. Consider this the ultimate comedy booklist with something for everyone. 







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25 Honest Selfies That Sum Up What It's Like To Be A Mom

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Last month, actress Olivia Wilde shared a frazzled selfie that resonated with parents everywhere. "I call this hairstyle, 'keep the kid alive,'" she wrote in the caption. "Products you'll need: sweat, string cheese, diaper rash cream, chewed up crayon, snot, and an enthusiastic spritz of panic."


We asked the HuffPost Parents Facebook community to share selfies that sum up what parenting is like for them and received hundreds of fatigue-filled responses.


From the messy hair to the dark under-eye circles to the moments of clarity in the midst of chaos, here are 25 spot-on parenting selfies.



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A 3D Film Attempts To Show Sex On Screen Like It's Never Been Done Before

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Warning: This article contains spoilers about the film's plot and some graphic content. Be (double) warned. 



This is Murphy. He's the protagonist of Gaspar Noé's new film, "Love," a hardcore, 3D look at the euphoric experience of having sex while in love.


Murphy is very sad. He's sad for a lot of reasons. Two years ago, his wildly hot art school girlfriend Electra wanted to have a threesome with their wildly hot 16-year-old neighbor, who Murphy decided to have sex with again in secret, got her pregnant -- oops! she's pro-life! -- and now he can't be with the love of his life. Also, he's sad because Electra hates him as a result, is a junkie, and is missing.


Murphy is also sad because his dreams of being a famous filmmaker have shriveled up, mostly because he did too many drugs and had too much sex, leaving little time for work. Finally, he is sad because he's gained a belly and has a stupid baby mustache.


In summation, Murphy is sad because, in his words, "I'm a dick. A dick has one purpose: to fuck. And I fucked it all up." Murphy's right, he is a dick! And in Noé's visually blissful film, this big ol' dick is very much in your face.


"Love" boasts rapturous, stretched out depictions of real, passionate, un-cinematic sex, where contorted grimaces, manual stimulation and slow pleasure replace porny moans, creaking bed frames and strategically filmed, entwined feet. And yet, despite the sensuous symphony of licking, panting and touching underway, it's hard to think about anything but the giant dick taking up the whole frame. And I'm not talking about the close-up of Murphy's erection. 




Murphy isn't just a bad guy. He's a bad character, a fuckboy, a sexual cliche.


Considering Noé's lofty aspirations for presenting sex on screen as its never been seen before, it's peculiar and frustrating to see that ambition grafted onto a man who is so uninteresting in his stereotypical misogyny, selfishness, moroseness, and aggression. The kind of guy who takes his girlfriend to a sex club and then berates her for enjoying herself. The sort of dude who lambastes the woman he's trying to impress about her not having seen "2001" and then declares his wish to become a director to teach (dumb) people (like her) about film. The man who, after finding out he just had sex with a 16-year-old girl, responds, "I fucking love Europe." Noé's triumphs in portraying real and raw sex on screen are garbled by Murphy's nauseating and unoriginal antics. Instead of making your jaw drop, this dick will just trigger your gag reflex.


Can we stop ogling big dicks on the big screen? From Marlon Brando as a rape-y romantic in "Last Tango in Paris" to Joaquin Phoenix as a poor, sad, white boy in "Her," so many films aiming for provocation and ingenuity deliver the same old faux complex frontman. Of course, it doesn't help that Murphy's character seems like a stand-in for Noé himself, who too studied abroad as a film student and potentially also had some hot threesomes, thus eliminating the hope that Murphy's antics are meant to be criticized without empathy. When audiences laugh at Murphy lamely calling his girlfriend a bitch or a slut, they do so, it seems, with that hipster mix of irony and understanding. 


In a Q&A following a Los Angeles screening of the film on Nov. 3, Karl Glusman, who plays Murphy, recalled the moment he found out he'd been cast in the film. Gaspar Noé called. "I answered the phone," Glusman said, "and Gaspar said, 'How do you feel about having your erect cock in my film?'"


I walked out of the theater about then, but the message was heard loud and clear. "Love" is a movie about love and sex, at times honest and beautiful and real and very hot. But unfortunately, one very large dick is taking up too much space. 





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Inside The California Desert Community Where Societal Rules Do Not Apply

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Slab City is an unregulated squatter settlement in the dusty Sonoran Desert, located about 140 miles east of San Diego. In a former life, it was a Marine training base, but over the past 60 years, it's become a community for hippies, rebels and misfits of all kinds. Living in campsites made from old trailers and campers, the 150 or so residents live free of the responsibilities and burdens of contemporary life. No bills, no jobs, no tweets, no likes, no electricity, no water, no taxes and no rules. That's why the off-the-grid commune has been dubbed the "last free place in America."


In 2004, Colorado-based photographer Teri Havens stumbled across an article by Charlie LeDuff, describing the desert playground and its unusual inhabitants. Havens quickly knew she had to go there for herself. "When I arrived, I immediately felt at home," the artist wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. "It was open and friendly -- not at all what I had expected. And the landscape was inspiring. The raw beauty of the open desert made me feel like anything was possible."



In Slab City, Havens lived in a small camp trailer for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. She originally tried photographing with a digital camera, but the newfangled technology felt out of sync with an environment that didn't have running water. So she went for black-and-white film, returning occasionally to Colorado to spend time in the darkroom and fill up on film. "I wanted to get to know the people I photographed, so I worked very slowly, building relationships over time," she said. "Over time, my motivations changed as I became more a member of the community and less of an observer."


Havens' subjects didn't have jobs; they mostly got by using social security checks and occasionally cashing in scrap metal they gathered from the nearby Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range. "It was as if Slab City was living off the dregs of the American Dream," she explained. "Yet there was this real sense of freedom that the residents celebrated, which, in part, came from having a place where they could feel some semblance of permanence, where they were free from the stress of imminent eviction. Besides the freedom from being kicked around, they were also free from the shackles of social convention. You could hunker down in your trailer and drink all day, or collect rattlesnakes, or whatever. And, as long as you weren’t bothering your neighbors too much, it was all perfectly acceptable."


As 66-year-old Slab citizen Morgan Wolf told The New York Times just this year, "I’ll live here for the rest of my life if I can. It filters out the world."



In bonding with her subjects, Havens was also struck by the way the Slab City lifestyle eliminated the superficial elements we attach to our egos and identities. "Having no wealth and few possessions with which to construct a persona, the identity of the residents was truly their own. I met some incredibly original, intelligent, individuals there, and I made some good friends. People really looked out for each other. It was a very generous community."


And yet, Havens stressed that the environment wasn't a utopia. There were conflicts and disagreements, and the summer heat was brutal. However, the ups and the downs were equally important in the grand experiment of creating a lawless community in the desolate desert. "Sometimes Slab City felt experimental, a condensed form of society playing itself out in an open-air laboratory. It was dysfunctional and anarchic, but, in a strange way, it worked. I learned a lot out there."



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The End Of The End Of The World

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It’s hot, and you’re walking. Shuffling, actually. You’ve spanned a seemingly endless chalk-dry plane, and you’re thirsty, run-down, exhausted. You think about your flaking, parched lips and aching muscles, and about how your arduous journey will be worth it if you ever reach your destination. An immigrant, you’re searching for a new place to live, because the place you call home has become barely livable. You’re thinking about the hot dirt sweat-caked on your skin when you’re interrupted by an even greater pain -- your tooth, recently implanted with a geo-location chip, is practically vibrating. This means you’re close.


So begins Madeleine Ashby’s short story, “By the Time We Get to Arizona,” published last year in Hieroglyph, a collection of science-fiction stories meant to inspire readers about the possibilities the future holds, rather than invoke fear about impending societal doom. Solutions to climate change catastrophes abound in the series; so do suggestions for jumping forward in our approach to space exploration technologies. Ashby’s story -- a spinoff of her Master’s thesis on making border security more humane -- explores a world where guns and guards are replaced by sensors and facial recognition technology.


Conceived of by Neal Stephenson -- a celebrated writer whose most recent novel ventures a guess at what post-Earth diplomacy might look like -- Hieroglyph showcases a growing crew of writers who, by commission or by choice, present sunnier alternatives to the now-prevalent, Hunger Games-fueled dystopia trend. These aren’t the stifling factions of Divergent or the heart-pounding twists and turns of The Maze Runner; they aren’t the bleak worlds crafted by Margaret Atwood or even the fable-like, anti-technology morals embedded in movies like “Wall-E.” Although many of the stories in Hieroglyph highlight societal problems, they have technological solutions to those problems embedded within them.


The anthology, along with the few others like it, was divisive in the science-fiction community. One camp, headed up by Stephenson, holds the belief that scientists and engineers could use a positive push from the writers whose job it is to imagine what the future will look like. Writers, Stephenson asserts, have a responsibility not only to confront social problems, but to provide potential solutions, too. So, a socially disheveled community like The Hunger Games’ Panem might feature a technology that allows citizens to communicate with each other, and fight back. Because these writers are using their fiction to provide solutions to contemporary problems, many necessarily couch their stories in grim scenarios the characters must escape from. Sexism, racism and classism are addressed, if subtly.


This doesn’t sit well with the other school of readers and writers, who lament the days when an interstellar story was a joyride, whizzing quickly past social justice issues towards thrilling plot twists. One particularly rabid breed of decriers are the writers who make up a group called the Sad Puppies, who banded together during The Hugo Awards to stack the vote against minority and women writers. The problem, they claim, is that the science-fiction community has prioritized social justice and diversity, ignoring superior prose and more inventive stories as a result. Science-fiction, they say, is about fun. It’s about escaping the problems of the real world through otherworldly scenarios -- including dystopias -- in which a central hero implausibly conquers evil alone, rather than with the aid of collective thinking and the useful technologies that arise from it.


The future of science-fiction -- which, if George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World are indicators, runs parallel with the future of science and technology on our own planet -- probably lies somewhere on the vast, auroral spectrum between these two approaches. So, it’s worth examining both, and the groups of writers propelling them.


***


“Now is not a time for realism,” Margaret Atwood said in a recent interview with NPR, succinctly summarizing why so many literary writers flock to fantasy, to dystopia, to amplifying the threat of impending problems -- environmental and political -- that aren’t yet a reality.


Though the genre has seen a spike in popularity within teen-centric reading communities, it’s seeped into the realm of grown-up storytelling more than ever. Which isn’t to say it’s unfamiliar territory for writers of adult literary fiction. In fact, dystopian stories began, arguably, with a weird, little book written by Mary Shelley in 1826 that’s since become a beloved classic: The Last Man. The story centers on a plague-addled Europe, where a man named Lionel struggles to survive alongside various extant communities. There’s a false messiah, political turmoil, and all the other makings of a present-day dystopia. Though Shelley’s book wasn’t recognized until the 1960s, others like it by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells surfaced shortly thereafter, spawning a sub-genre of writing that asks timeless questions about human nature, and how it responds to dire, life-threatening scenarios.


But today, with a few notable exceptions (Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins), popular dystopian stories have lost a bit of their original complexity. They tend to be thinly cloistered morality lessons, better suited for young readers. Rather than highlighting the nuances of human interactions, they tend to generalize, and draw hard lines between good and evil.




It could be that our present realities seem increasingly fantastical, due to the quick proliferation of disastrous events filling our Twitter feeds alongside our friends’ quotidian musings.


 


Why are more and more adult literary writers, and adult literary fiction readers, opting into the rather nihilistic and juvenile genre? It’s a quandary posed again and again by columnists, providing more questions than answers -- perhaps because the answer is hazy. It could be that the genre distracts readers from present realities, or provides a puzzle-like, limited scenario for a protagonist to work through, so different from the more fractured plot of real life. Or, it could be that our present realities seem increasingly fantastical, due to the quick proliferation of disastrous events filling our Twitter feeds alongside our friends’ quotidian musings.


Madeline Ashby believes it’s the latter.


“There are elements of dystopia in everybody’s lives,” she said in an interview with The Huffington Post. “Remember the Christmas protests in Ferguson? There’s this image of riot police under this big electrified, ‘Season’s Greetings’ banner. If you search for Ferguson plus Season’s plus Greetings, you’ll find the picture. I found it, and I tweeted in all caps, ‘WHY DO SO MANY KIDS LOVE DYSTOPIA? HM, I WONDER.’”


Ashby cites her own dystopia-like governmental interactions as inspiration for many of her sci-fi stories, including “By the Time We Got to Arizona.” In 2006, she immigrated to Canada, and says the process, for her, was dehumanizing.


“My immigration took over a year,” she said, adding that she feels fortunate -- for other people immigrating to Canada, two years is the average wait-time.


“During that process you’re essentially a number and a sheet of paper. You feel it every time they ask you progressively more invasive questions,” Ashby added, sharing an anecdote about how immigration questions reduce complex romantic relationships to statistics-based judgement calls. “[They’d ask] things like, ‘Can you describe to us the number and monetary value of gifts exchanged between the two of you.’ And then you start to think, oh, OK, the quality of my relationship is already interpreted through capital. I have a monetary value.”


In her short story, Ashby acknowledges these issues, but also offers solutions to the problem. She notes that by working change-inspiring technologies into her plots, she's at the very least offering readers a sense of hope. 


“Dystopia is very useful in grappling with the world as it exists,” Ashby said. “It’s a really stylized, formalized way of talking about things that are already happening in practice. But utopia, or more optimistic stories, can also be useful, because you can imagine a future that you actually want.”


Ashby’s fiction is informed by her other, more technical approach to writing. After studying Strategic Foresight and Innovation at the Ontario College of Art and Design, she started getting gigs drafting potential future scenarios for organizations such as Intel Labs and Nesta. Envisioning the future on behalf of corporations and research labs isn’t exactly an established career path -- actually, it sounds a little like something out of a sci-fi novel. But Ashby isn’t the only writer who moonlights as a “narrative scenario” practitioner. There’s a host of organizations dedicated to allowing sci-fi writers to draft potential outcomes for specific companies or entire industries. Sci Futures, a sort of think tank dedicated to providing these services to clients such as Crayola, Ford, and Lowe’s, has a pithy tagline encapsulating their mission: "Where sci-fi gets real.” A comparable organization, 2020 Media Futures, describes its mission as, “an ambitious, multi-industry strategic foresight project designed to understand and envision what media may look like in the year 2020.”


So, the research interests are vast. Of her work with Intel Labs and beyond, Ashby said, “They often tell me, we want the future of intelligent systems, or the future of warfare in smart cities, the future of a world without antibiotics, the future of programmable matter, or the Internet of things.”




Techno-optimism [is] the breed of science-fiction writing that’s working to counter the rough terrain of dystopia, barren and desolate as it is; thirsty, it sometimes seems, for a solution that’s bigger than a big-hearted narrator.


 


Because Ashby spends considerable time dreaming up innovative solutions to social problems, she can’t help but imbue her stories with similar gizmos and features. Her stories don’t always involve positive situations for her characters, but they do often incorporate technologies that could solve said characters’ problems.


This is the central tenet of “techno-optimism,” the breed of science-fiction writing that’s working to counter the rough terrain of dystopia, barren and desolate as it is; thirsty, it sometimes seems, for a solution that’s bigger than a big-hearted narrator.


Writer and anthology editor Kathryn Cramer was a reluctant adopter of the genre. When aforementioned writer Stephenson, author of Seveneves, approached her to edit a collection of stories united under the banner of positive change, she worried the stories themselves would suffer from lack of plot, and lack of diversity. But, as she commissioned works of techno-optimism, she realized the genre promotes diverse voices rather than suppressing them. Her fears were quelled.


“When we contemplate dark scenarios or disasters for the future, it is perhaps an ethically and morally good thing to do to figure out what the solutions might be, especially technological solutions,” Cramer said in an interview with HuffPost. “If we look at the 20th century, there are a whole lot of things that changed our lives in good ways, and solved a lot of problems, ranging from vaccines and refrigerated food transportation to frozen food. Some of them are sexy, like space travel, but a lot of them are things that improved everybody’s lives in ways we might not’ve expected. Preservatives, things like that.”


Cramer’s altruistic outlook hints at her thoughts on what a book can, and should, accomplish. While she believes writers have a responsibility to push innovation in a positive direction, some readers and writers think that mindset interferes with the quality of a story. So addressing societal problems, be it via extended, post-apocalyptic metaphors, or via similarly bleak settings peppered with hope, doesn’t sit well with all sci-fi readers. Most notably, there are those -- cue the Sad Puppies -- who are nostalgic for the days of so-called Golden Age sci-fi: “Star Trek”-like space-travel adventures that offer a means of briefly escaping the restrictions of the real world. Nimble writing and world-building is supposedly the aim for such stories; political opinions, solutions-oriented and otherwise, are actively eschewed.




It involves hope not in the form of a triumphant narrator, but in the technologies we can create when we do something really miraculous: work together.


 


But the Puppies’ agenda -- which resulted in No Award being given at the Hugo Awards this year in categories for which only white men were nominated -- extends beyond particular tastes in writing styles. Claiming science-fiction has opted for “affirmative action”-guided decisions rather than supporting story-centric writing, they lobbied to place white, male writers -- including themselves -- on the award ballots.


Ashby spoke passionately against the Puppies’ movement: “That’s part of their battle cry: Why do we have to think about social issues in our science fiction? Why do we have to think about other genders, or sexualities, or economic circumstances? Why can’t it just be fun like it used to be? Well, yeah, I’m sure it was really fun when you weren’t thinking about it. Everything’s a lot more fun when you’re not thinking about it.”


Thinking about it, according to Ashby, involves confronting the dire state of life for some social groups. It involves constructing a narrative that encourages the reader to consider the lives of others, rather than just getting lost in his own fantasy world, in which he alone is the hero and the solution. It involves hope not in the form of a triumphant narrator, but in the technologies we can create when we do something really miraculous: work together.


 


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'Miss You Already' Is Catherine Hardwicke's Quest To Prove People Care About Female-Centric Movies

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Catherine Hardwicke has had one of the decade's more mercurial directing careers. After winning acclaim for 2003's gritty "Thirteen," her résumé began to look like a case study in the unpredictability of Hollywood's studio films. 2005's slick "Lords of Dogtown" coasted on Heath Ledger's performance, while the following year's tame "Nativity Story" fell short of the Christmas cash cow one might hope for. Hardwicke rebounded with the lucrative first installment in the "Twilight" franchise, but 2011's "Red Riding Hood" attempted to capture the same demographics with less success. Her 2013 erotic thriller, "Plush," made all of $3,080 at the box office.


Now she's departed from the teen-oriented features that define her roster, and the results make for arguably her best movie since "Thirteen." "Miss You Already," which opens on Friday after premiering at September's Toronto Film Festival, stars Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette as lifelong best friends who must cope with the latter's sudden breast-cancer diagnosis. Think "Beaches" set in London, with Collette playing the narcisisstic party gal and Barrymore her down-to-earth support system. Hardwicke, helming a script by Morwenna Banks, extracts a rich comedic rapport from the two women, who have natural chemistry that will make you wonder why no one had already thought to cast them together. 


As strong filmmakers are wont to do, Hardwicke positions "Miss You Already" as an extension of her previous work. The Huffington Post sat down with the 60-year-old director to discuss her weepy girl-power ode, that time a studio told her she couldn't direct a movie because she's not a man and why her new motto is "vote with your ass."


This movie is going to excite a lot of longtime "Beaches" fans. I was excited about it.


I’m excited because my favorite thing is HuffPost.When we did the test screening, we’d ask them to put their favorite website that you go to every day, and everybody put you guys. I was like, “Oh, you guys have the ear of the public.”


How were those test screenings?


We only had one test screening. That’s all we could afford because it’s an indie movie, and it went really awesome. It was in a red state-type thing, so it was Middle America, which was kind of fun. They frickin’ loved it. I was there in the focus group and these "normal" people really connected to the movie. They laughed their heads off and had some waterworks when it was appropriate. The men dug it!


I do think it’s a surprisingly male-friendly movie, if we want to feed into that binary.


Yeah, and look at the three guys. They’re hot.


Yeah, can we just objectify the men in this movie for a minute?


Okay, for one minute! You’ve got Dominic Cooper as Toni's husband, love it. Tyson Ritter, yum yum. And then Paddy Considine as Drew's husband is so soulful. They’re all really good. But that was one of the things I wanted to do. I really wanted to make them all dimensional, like real people. I wanted to give them dogs and jobs and weird shit and to defy your expectations. I think, with Dominic Cooper, most people would think he’s going to cheat and he doesn’t. He’s a standup guy. He’s a good dad! And look at the role models we usually have for men in movies. Either they go out and avenge the kidnapping of their daughter and they’ll kill a million people, or they’re just a man-child, not grown up -- goofy, dumb, infantile. But these guys are really cool guys.



It's Toni's character who's complicated. Some might call her unlikable, that other silly binary.


She’s a mess. She admits that she’s a narcissist and has a huge ego and that she’s selfish. And she is. But if somebody is unlikable in a weird way, you almost like them more than if they are a perfect saint. We can’t all relate to the perfect. However, it’s weird because Drew’s character is pretty damn great and I still love her. 


It’s the balance.


And you want Drew to be your best friend, right? You already love her and you already feel her heart.


But you had the two roles reversed at one point, right? 


Actually, they reached out to Toni before I was on the project. Toni was originally Drew’s character, but that’s the role she always plays. She did it in “In Her Shoes.” She was the more dowdy one. Or, not dowdy, but the more solid one. Cameron Diaz is the hot mess. I thought it was so much more fun if you see Toni start out all glamorous and fabulous. And then, of course, Toni is brave enough to go on camera and get her head shaved. She went all the way to unglamorous.


That head-shaving is probably the most special scene in the movie. I assume you only had one take to get it?


Oh yeah. That’s real. Frances de la Tour, from “Harry Potter,” is literally shaving her head. It was scary.


Was that the most nerve-racking day? 


Dude. It was totally nerve-racking. When we asked if anybody could volunteer to get their head shaved so Frances can practice, one guy said okay and let her shave his head. So she’d done one head. She’s a great British actress -- she’s super funny, her voice and everything -- so she sits Toni down like, “Are we okay?” We’ve got the cameras and I said “Frances, do you feel comfortable? You’re going to start here and go here, etc.” And she goes, “Great!” And then she just starts going, so fast. I’m like, “Slow down!” She was so confident, just whipping through, and I’m like, “Dude! I can’t even catch this on film.” She was so brave, and Toni was just sitting there fully brave. She was really in the moment because it’s really happening. Her hair is going away. She’s not going to have that pretty hair for a year. Think about how anybody would feel. It was damn real for her.


"Miss You Already" fits in with your past work in surprising ways, most clearly in its parallels with "Thirteen." Both deal with two people enacting a certain dependency and then growing up within the confines of that.


Oh, I like that. 


Thinking broadly, what attracts you to those types of stories? And more specifically, do you see “Miss You Already” as a natural segue within your films?


I do see it closest, in a way, to “Thirteen.” I think you’re spot-on on that because "Thirteen" was kind of like a triangle. The mother was important in that, and then the two friends trying to find their friendship and twisting it and bending it and breaking up, and then going back to the mother, who was the original friend in that case. And in this case, it was the two friends that are having this strain. They twist and turn and try to find the balance and try to love each other while going back to the original friend. It’s almost the reverse of the triangle of “Thirteen,” but they end up together with this solid person that was really their platonic love story. Drew said to me when I first met her that her favorite movies are platonic love stories. I thought, “Oh, that’s so cool.” This is such a love story when you see Drew and Toni. They love each other so much. It’s a beautiful love story.



In terms of financing, getting this movie made couldn't have been easy, even with Jennifer Aniston attached at one point.


We know it’s difficult, because how many female-directed movies get financed? Only 4 percent. And then how many star women? That’s only 25 percent. So the odds just keep getting smaller. The fact that this one got made, and “Suffragette” and a few other movies like this, fought the odds. It was that one sperm that made it.


Did it require officially casting the two leads to get everything cemented?


Oh yeah. Actually, Toni was already involved, but we had to have the other component, so when Drew said yes, we literally had nine weeks to start shooting. Our producer had to pull the financing together, we had to get a whole crew, all the locations and all the rest of the cast in a foreign country in nine weeks. There are obviously great professional crews in London. That goes without saying. However, we didn’t necessarily get them because they were doing “Star Wars” and all the big-budget movies. It was like "Death Race 2000." I mean, it was exciting.


Speaking of big movies, “Twilight" was heralded as the highest-grossing release by a female director at the time.


Yeah, $69 million opening weekend. I think “Fifty Shades” beat it.


But you haven’t done much in the blockbuster realm since.


Well, we didn’t know that was going to be a blockbuster. Nobody knew that at the time because that was put into turnaround by Paramount. They said, “This movie isn’t going to make money, so we’re not going to make it.” Then Fox wouldn’t make it. Most studios wouldn’t make it because they all thought, “Oh, a girls’ book isn’t going to make money.” The literally said to me, “'Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants’ made $39 million and that’s all this movie will ever make.” I was like, “OK, but it seems like people online like it.” The studio literally said to me, “Hey, that could be 400 girls in Salt Lake City who could be the only people emailing about this.” I thought, “Really? It seems like it’s a few more than that.” And then the buzz started building and Stephenie Meyer wrote two more books while we were prepping the movie, and that was amazing. She’s really good with her fans, so she built up her fan base. Then it turns into this awesome blockbuster, but no one thought it was going to be, or else every other studio would have tried to make it, instead of this little upstart Summit.


Did you think you would get blockbuster offers after making that movie?


Yeah, I did.


And did they not come, or were you just not interested?


No, they didn’t come. I could have directed the next one because that was in my contract, but I didn’t feel for the other books like I felt for the first book. I liked the dizzy, falling-in-love stuff in the first book, and I didn’t really feel it in the second one, so I didn’t want to do the second one. But then “Red Riding Hood” made $90 million. That’s not too bad. We made it for less than half of that. But I felt like a lot of people felt. I thought the world would just totally open up to me because I’d started this mega-franchise. I thought I’d be able to get an office on a studio and people would say, “What do you want to do?” But that did not happen. 


Was there a movie that you really wanted to direct?


Yes. There were a few, and even after the movie had made $400 million, my agent and I had read a script for another movie that I really loved. I had a whole take on it and was so excited. I knew the producer, and he let me go in and talk to him and pitch my take. The call came back. “They want a man.”


That’s literally what you were told?


“They want a man to direct this movie.”


What movie was it?


It was a movie where I love the director and I love what he did with it, so I don’t want to say anything negative because he didn’t know that I had ever wanted to do it. It was “The Fighter.” I loved the character drama of it. I had taken boxing classes. I was all into it. I loved the feeling of it. It was gritty like “Thirteen.” I said, “Have you seen ‘Thirteen’? I’m perfect for this.” They said, “Nope, we think a guy should do it.” I couldn’t even get the interview to go on from there. They wouldn’t even meet with me. Immediately you go, “OK, a guy can direct all the other ‘Twilights’ and ‘Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants’ and ‘Sex and the City.’ They can direct the girliest movies ever with no problem, but a woman can’t direct this? Unconscious gender bias, that’s what we’re all talking about. How do we get underneath that unconscious gender bias that women have and men have, break through that and stop so that more people don’t have to just hire their mini-me that looks exactly like them?


It's such a cyclical myth that people don't care about movies about women or other minorities. 


Studios should go for diversity and actually say, "Let’s hire different kinds of people that look different than us and think different than us." Every company that’s done that, like Google, has transformed their culture to be less biased and pale male. They’re more successful, more inclusive, their profits go up. Just think about “Orange Is the New Black.” That celebrates diversity and it’s popular! People love it. So let’s all get a clue, guys. We want to know about different characters.


I think that’s what’s so good right now. It's like Meryl Streep talking about Rotten Tomatoes. Of course the movies are biased toward males. If there are 760 male critics and 180 women, when everybody in America says, “What movie should I see this week?” they’ll say, “Oh, I’ll go to the one that’s male stereotyped.” Then the males in power can say, “Hey, well, those are the movies that make money,” because those are the ones that are marketed with $100 million campaigns. Those are the ones that are sanctioned by the male critics. Our movie, which we want people to see, is written by a woman, directed by a woman, starring women in it, but how do we get the word out? How do we say to people to connect the dots that, if you want more diversity, support it by showing up? Then we can have ammo and say, “Hey, this movie, directed by a woman or about two women or about different kinds of people actually made money.” Those are the connections that we’ve got to make. Go there and vote with your butts in the seats. Vote with your ass! That’s our new motto!


"Miss You Already" opens Nov. 6. This interview has been edited and condensed.


 


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The Artist Telling Greeks' Stories Through Playmobil Figures

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ATHENS, Greece -- We ask how we should describe his work. Is it a form of socially committed art?


He says it isn't.


"But I recently realized that there is, in fact, a term which describes what I do. Although I don't know if it's art," says Nikos Papadopoulos, who's also known as Mr. Plasticobilism. "I read the term 'artivism,' art plus activism. So I said, yes, if there is something that describes what I do, it's this.”


Papadopoulos, 36, was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, and he initially worked as an astrophysicist, a remedial high school teacher and a scriptwriter. For the past two years, he has been using toys to challenge people to think about the woes of Greek society amid the financial crisis.


Instead of seeing Playmobil figures as firefighters, pirates, policemen and doctors, he transforms them into protagonists of Greek society. They re-enact events of everyday life, situations that cause distress and ideals that he believes should not be forgotten.


Papadopoulos has portrayed German Chancellor Angela Merkel and German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble, who've played key roles in the European Union's handling of the financial crisis, as well as empty cash machines, extremist right-wing party Golden Dawn, the July referendum on the international bailout and the ongoing refugee crisis. 





But he also hasn't shied away from universal issues such as gender inequality, love and resistance against the establishment. 



Papadopoulos' toy figures aren't intended to bring smiles to people's faces. Rather, his work is a product of the Greek crisis and serves as a "journal of a harsh reality."


“I am a happy father of two children, aged four years and six months, but I am also an unhappy Greek. Not because I am personally unhappy, on the contrary. But because there is misery around me. People suffer. We are all miserable when even one person next to us is miserable, as a society. Even if some people haven't realized it just yet,” he says. 



Papadopoulos says it all started one day at a mall in the city of Thessaloniki. He had taken his oldest son, who was just 1 at the time, to watch a Playmobil presentation.


“We took some of those toys with us. They were stiffer than the typical ones, because they are meant for kids. At night we were trying to put my son to bed. Although he wasn't in a position to understand exactly what I was doing, I made him a first representation of night sleep: Playmobil figures going home to sleep. I took a picture of that and uploaded it on Facebook. Then I got the idea of making more representations of images of my domestic life.”


Soon he no longer wanted to limit himself to personal and family moments. He expanded his representations to themes that were of particular concern to him: political issues as well as themes from everyday life like the financial crisis and the refugees.


Papadopoulos' collection of Playmobil figures isn't as big as one might think. The makeover of the figures is often simple, some clothes and hair. 



"The truth is that before the crisis I wasn't very political," Papadopoulos said. "Like so many others, I said all politicians are the same, discussed austerity a little, but nothing more. Everything is different now. What we demand of our politicians has grown, and the extremes are more intense. The things that touch us are many and the consequences of policies have become far graver.”


Papadopoulos “got off his couch,” as he says, and started talking to us through his Playmobil figures about all that annoys us, hurts us, outrages us and troubles us. He doesn't only want to find creative ways of expressing himself, but wants to mobilize people, to get them "off their couches," too, and show solidarity.


“In the evening, I think about everything that I have read, heard, seen throughout the day. What touched me, what is really eating me up. And then I think of a new representation.”



Even though he is a scriptwriter for a number of comedy series on Greek TV, he doesn't particularly use humor in his creations.


“I think I use satire on some representations, in the sense that I tell some truths that apply to all of us, in a sharp way," Papadopoulos says. "There is one rule, though, always. I don't want to make you laugh. The rules of satire require from us to criticize and compel the receiver of the satire to think. To stand, with our work, opposite power.


"When I just create something that makes people laugh, for example by ridiculing a political personality, then I just help them get it out of their system. And afterward, people move on. They don't stop to think. That's how each and every one of us becomes a supporter of this system, through inertia.”



Papadopoulos has made about 900 representations so far. We asked him to pick his favorite ones to be included here. One of the images is an emotionally charged one he made for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. It shows a woman with a bruised face, who has fallen on the ground between the legs of a male abuser.


“I painted her face with water paint, to make the bruises," he says. "When I took the first picture I felt there was something powerful and true in this work. I knew what I wanted to say.”



Reactions to his work, mainly on Facebook where he counts more than 19,129 likes, are overall warm. But he has received critical and even threatening comments, too, mostly from Golden Dawn supporters.


Even the company itself, Playmobil, responded negatively. “At some point my page was blocked and I thought it was someone from Golden Dawn but it was Playmobil from Germany,” he says. In the end, he sorted things out by issuing a statement that said Playmobil was not responsible for the content of his representations. 


Of all the praise and interviews, the one that mattered most to him was a young Greek student living abroad who analyzed Papadopoulos' work in his postgraduate dissertation. 












 


This story originally appeared on HuffPost Greece and was translated and edited for an international audience. 

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The Story Behind One Of Salvador Dalí's Strangest Portraits

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Salvador Dalí, the Surrealist painter known for his melting clocks, is one of the world's most recognizable artists. Though he died in 1989 at the age 84, there is currently no lack of Dalí replicas hanging in dorm rooms across the U.S. or Dalí originals adorning mega-galleries and museums around the globe. From the iconic "The Persistence of Memory" to the mouthful that is "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening," even a casual Dalí fan can recall a piece of the painter's legacy.


So, imagine if Dalí -- the seismic personality that he is -- painted something as prosaic as your family portrait?


It turns out that, in his lifetime, Dalí completed numerous portrait commissions beginning in the 1940s and throughout the 1970s, capturing the faces of some of North America's elite. One such commission involved a small Maryland family, comprised of Montgomery M. Green, his wife Ann and their children. 


Mr. Green, a respected farmer and avid patron of the arts, had admired Dalí's work from afar for some time. Though he had no direct relationship with the artist, Green courageously reached out to Dalí's gallerist in New York with hopes of securing an introduction. "It was a very bold move,"Julian Dawes, vice president in Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department, explained to The Huffington Post via email. 


The bold move paid off.Dalí welcomed the Greens into his home in Cadaqués, Spain, in 1962, and after a series of preparatory photographs (taken by Dalí’s personal photographer, Robert Descharnes) and several preliminary drawings, the painter completed the three-foot wide "Portrait de Madame Ann W. Green et de son fils Jonathan" in 1963.


Inspired by the family's vacation home, located in Cape Canaveral, Florida, otherwise known as "Space Coast," the resulting family portrait features the faces of Ann and her youngest son Jonathan, surrounded by wildly cosmic imagery and some of the more Surreal iconography we've come to associate with Dalí. Jonathan appears dressed in his father's corduroy suit, equipped with what Sotheby's describes in its catalog as an "embryonic helmet." As he floats before Ann amidst the launch of a rocket, the image of mother and child evokes the relationship of Madonna and child.


"Angels were a recurring motif for Dalí, and he incorporates them here likely at the request of the Greens who had/have deep Christian faith," Dawes added, referencing the angelic figures positioned in the mid-ground of the family portrait. "The two liquids on either side of the canvas are blood and water, both illustrated in a seemingly zero gravity state. The precise meaning of this symbolism is not known, though there are many fascinating possible interpretations involving space travel, family, etc."


The family, Dawes noted, was "completely amazed by the outcome, and it instantly became a cherished treasure." The Greens not only preserved the painting -- which is set to hit Sotheby's auction block on Nov. 6 courtesy of the family -- but they also kept footage of their trip to Dalí's home, rare film that shows the dark-haired Spaniard gesturing emphatically at the camera, surrounded by his rapt listeners.


Check out a clip from the home video, and read a recollection of the famous Green-Dalí encounter from John Rodgers Meigs Green, son and elder brother of the two figures depicted in the portrait, below.






"Dalí and my father were both sparkling conversationalists who shared some eccentricities and some values. Both men liked to claim remembering their own births, and during their visits with each other in Spain and New York, they touched on the artistic themes of time, space, dreams, birth, motherhood, and love.


 


"In late 1963 as I tagged along with my father on a business trip to New York, I had the privilege of meeting Salvador Dalí myself at an opening of his work at a gallery in midtown Manhattan. My father and I were there when the artist strode into the gallery surrounded by a flock of aficionados. Dalí was wearing a black suit and carried a black walking stick. My father and Dalí immediately approached each other, and I was introduced and coaxed to get his autograph on my copy of the show’s catalogue, which I still have to this day over half a century later.


 


"Among other pleasantries after their greeting, my father informed Dalí that we had witnessed a night launch of a missile after the painting was created, and that by some atmospheric phenomenon, there had been a halo around the glowing missile’s flame as it ascended into the night sky, much like Dalí had depicted in our painting. Rolling his eyes wide and twirling his waxed mustache the artist replied: 'What Dalí paints happens.' Both men delighted in this statement of fact that doubled as a universal declaration." -John Green



"Portrait de Madame Ann W. Green et de son fils Jonathan" will be go up for sale during Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale on Nov. 6 in New York.


 


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Yoga Heads To New, Terrifying Heights On Glass Bridge Over Canyon

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Time for some don’t-look-down-ward dog.


These 100 color-coordinated gals look so incredibly serene doing yoga atop a glass-bottomed suspension bridge -- 590 feet in the air -- in China’s Shiniuzhai National Geological Park, that we almost don’t feel terrified for them.


Even so, we couldn't help remembering a different glass walkway in China that cracked recently. We’ll probably stick to doing our tree poses from the safety of solid earth for now.



Contact the author at Hilary.Hanson@huffingtonpost.com

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These 'Food Scans' Will Make You See Vegetables In A Whole New Way

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Here's a pop quiz for you: Which vegetables are in season right now? Not at the supermarket, but in the countryside a few miles from your home? What can you drive out and pick, fresh off the vine, to eat for dinner tonight?


Photographer Henry Hargreaves and frequent collaborator Caitlin Levin wanted to know, so they documented the calendar of produce as it changes through the seasons in their new series, "Seasonal Food Scans."



Taken over the course of a calendar year, from late autumn 2014 through all the seasons, Hargreaves and Levin picked the produce that was in season -- Levin, a chef and food stylist, arranged them and Hargreaves scanned them -- to document time and food in a different way.


"We like to show food in a non-obvious and unpredictable, interesting way, kind of subvert people’s expectations as to what food is and what you can do with it," Hargreaves told The Huffington Post. "With this series, we’re hoping people can get a better understanding of seasonality and see that produce has seasons -- it’s not available all year round. We wanted to show it in a way that was totally unique and different."



Hargreaves, who grew up in New Zealand and is now based in New York, said the process was educational for him as well.


"For me, it was looking at the calendar in a totally different way, because I'm from the Southern Hemisphere. Suddenly the things you have during Christmas time here are different. But I also think it’s about modern society -- we kind of expect to go to the supermarket and get anything we want at any time of the year. So this was also an exploration to show people what are the things you should be getting at certain times of the year."


Hargreaves has produced many other food-focused projects, recreating everything from the backstage requests of famous performers to the last meals of death row inmates.


He might play with the food, but he also eats what he can when he's done -- "basically anything that hasn’t gone stale or rancid or slimy, we definitely used and cooked and ate," Hargreaves said. The stuff that didn't make it through? "It lives forever, so nothing goes to waste."


See the series below.



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Is This The Right Way For Fashion To Do Cultural Appropriation?

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Fixers is a series from What's Working that profiles the people behind the most creative solutions to big problems. 


Halloween season just ended, and brought with it the attendant high times for the cultural appropriation wars.


It will be easy enough to let these questions slip until next October. But really, cultural appropriation is a year-round hustle, and nowhere more so than in the fashion world.


The fashion industry's breakneck pace of innovation has always prompted designers to incorporate other cultures' distinctive looks to stay fresh. Just think of Paul Poiret's harem pants and tunics in the 1910s, Yves Saint Laurent's beaded and feathered "African collection" in 1967, or Hermes' stylized Indian saris and jodhpurs in 2007.


The line between inspiration and appropriation is blurry, however, and easily veers, even in 2015, into shockingly tasteless territory. Like in Valentino's most recent "Africa-inspired" show, where, as Fashionista pointed out, the mostly-white models all sported cornrows, apparently without irony. Cringe. 




In light of blunders like these, it seems like the only safe option might be to send out models every season in blue jeans and sneakers.


But there may be a better way to respectfully use other cultures' designs, and Oskar Metsavaht, founder and creative director of the Brazilian sportswear label Osklen, is leading the pack.


Osklen's spring 2016 collection, which showed earlier this month in New York and Sao Paulo, was inspired by the designs of the Asháninka, an indigenous people who live in the Brazilian and Peruvian rainforest. In return for permission to adapt their tattoos and traditional fabrics, Osklen paid the tribe. With that money, the Asháninka have been able to make various improvements, including building a school. 


Metsavaht is also working to publicize the Asháninka's fight against illegal loggers and environmental degradation of their native forest. An 18-minute documentary about daily life in the Ashaninka community, directed by Metsavaht (who moonlights as a photographer and musician), is streaming on the Osklen website. And the collection itself is called Ashaninka. You can buy a T-shirt emblazoned with its name. 



If this completism seems remarkable, it is, but it is also totally in character for Metsavaht, one of the first designers in the world to produce sustainable fashion. It was in his native Brazil, where countries first convened in 1992 and coined the term "sustainable development," at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. His 2012 collection, called A21, was inspired by the "successes and failures" of that Summit's Agenda 21, as Metsavaht told VICE. 


Metsavaht's cerebral design process often comes about in this way, blossoming from a trip, idea or concept. He began his career as a doctor, created a winter sportswear line in 1990, and shifted to luxury fashion in 2000. He was dubbed "Brazil's first global luxury brand" by Forbes in 2012 and is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. He also runs an art gallery and Instituto-E, a non-profit that encourages sustainable human development through projects like developing environmentally friendly fabrics.


I spoke to the polymath about his unique take on cultural exchange and how to make eco-fashion cool.



Can you tell us more about the trip you took to meet the Ashaninka people? When did it happen? Where did you stay -- did you live with them in the village?


We went there last June, during the annual festival when the tribe celebrates the demarcation of the indigenous land 23 years ago. Our teams of nine people stayed in some cabins without walls. We slept either in hammocks or in inflatable mattresses on the floor.


Besides payment, what do you think are the elements of responsible borrowing from other cultures, instead of being insensitive/ culturally appropriative?


It’s very important to respect other people’s culture and find a way to reproduce it for the public while taking into account its traditional knowledge. For instance, what we have been doing with the Ashaninka is promoting their battles by disseminating their own best practices toward the preservation of the forest.


What percent of the revenue from this collection is going to the Ashaninka?


Actually, Osklen signed a contract with the tribe in which they received a set amount of money stipulated by the tribe, because they preferred this way. So the Ashaninka were able to plan in advance what investments to make with these funds.



So how are they planning to use this money?


They have already used it for the construction of a new school for the young people in their village and to buy a piece of land where they installed their store, where they sell their artisanal products like necklaces, bracelets, headdresses and clothing. The store is in the major city close to their village, called Cruzeiro do Sul, in the western part of [the Brazilian state] Acre. And also, with another part of the royalties, the Ashaninka constructed a building for the people who attending the Yorenka Atame Center, their School for the Knowledge of the Forests. This school is located in the small village of Marechal Taumaturgo, which is the point from where you take boats to reach the Ashaninka's indigenous land. In this school, indigenous people from other tribes and non-indigenous people take courses of how to manage the forest in a sustainable way.


How much have you managed to donate so far? 


Keeping in mind that the exchange rate between American dollars and Brazilian currency is not very favorable these days, it is something around USD $50,000. In Brazilian currency, it’s a lot of purchasing power. Also, on top of that, our contract includes support for the trip of two Ashaninka leaders to the UN Conference on Climate Change. So we underwrote their trip last December to Lima, to take part of the COP-20, and next month we'll take them to Paris, for the COP-21.


What's an easy step that other designers can take to make sure their collections are sustainably sourced?


The first and essential thing to do is to check production conditions, like the environmental and social impact of the process, whether the labor laws are respected, that the management of natural resources involved is not predatory, etc. After these first steps, the designer should envisage the opportunity to do trace the whole production process in order to share it with their public. Today, there are many tools to improve an initiative like this. Osklen did it so through the projects called "TRACES" and "Water TRACES," which we developed with the Italian Ministry for Environment. We tracked ten products from their origin to the store, and this information was offered to the public in a tag outfitted with a QR code.


How do you think we can make sustainable fashion "cool" for other designers? 


Whenever we match ethics with aesthetics, it’s very probable that the piece created becomes an object of desire.


 


Interview text has been edited and condensed. 


See some of Oskar Metsavaht's photographs of the Ashaninka people in this slideshow:



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The Accidental Color That Changed The Course Of Art

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True blue, royal blue, ultramarine: During the Renaissance, these were all names for the most prized of all pigments, lazurite, derived from the semiprecious mineral lapis lazuli. Mined and processed since the sixth century almost exclusively in Afghanistan, and imported to European markets through Venice, it was worth more than five times its weight in gold. It was used sparingly, often reserved for the richest patrons by the most prosperous artists.



Look at this sumptuous still life, for example, painted in mid-17th-century Paris by Paul Liegeois, which features his signature royal blue drapery. He achieved the effect with thin glazes of ultramarine oil paint applied over a layer that was highlighted with white lead. When light penetrates the thin blue glaze, the white reflects it back, intensifying a deep blue hue.


We often take for granted the dazzling range of colors in old oil paintings as we stroll through an art museum. Early Renaissance panels are full of jewel-like shades. Mannerists like Bronzino used shocking, acidic color combinations as they stretched the limits of naturalistic representation. Grand Baroque era artists, like Caravaggio, set vivid hues against dramatic dark shadows. In truth, these colors were hard-won. Time-tested, layer-by-layer techniques were required to ensure that a limited range of natural colors would maximize their visual impact. Creating a colorful oil painting was not yet the spontaneous act we envision the likes of Monet performing as he captured fleeting light and color effects.



That spontaneity required two remarkable advancements—a scientific understanding of the laws of light and color, and a new palette of colors that could be used to exploit these laws. As luck would have it, both happened around the year 1704. Sir Isaac Newton published his revolutionary text Opticks, and a German chemist discovered a vivid new blue pigment with amazing properties.


I’m fascinated by how those two developments come together. I am a museum conservator, not a curator. I bring a scientific and technical perspective on the methods and materials of art to the preservation of the collections. I am also a painter, and it was my passion for decoding the mysteries of “old master” paintings that led me to art conservation.


In mounting the exhibition “A Revolution of the Palette: The First Synthetic Blues and Their Impact on French Artists” at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, I seized the opportunity to share my investigative processes with museum patrons. Given the opportunity to choose masterpieces from the collection and study them under the microscope, I looked for evidence of how painting in oils had changed between the end of the Baroque era and the mid-19th century, thanks to a single color: Prussian blue.


That blue was an accident. In 1704, a chemist and color maker named Heinrich Diesbach was rushing to manufacture a batch of Florentine lake, a red pigment derived from boiled cochineal insects, alum, iron sulfate, and potash. Lacking this last ingredient, he borrowed some from the alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel, not knowing it had been contaminated with so-called “animal oil”—a foul concoction of blood and other animal-derived ingredients that Dippel sold as a “cure-all.” Diesbach returned in the morning to discover a deep blue substance, thanks to the presence of an iron-cyanide contaminant. The two men quickly realized the commercial potential of this new pigment, and independently began producing batches of it to sell to painters at the Prussian court.



By 1710, the first samples of Prussian blue pigment arrived in Paris, where Antoine Watteau is known to have shared it with his fellow painters Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher. Both were early and enthusiastic adopters of the new blue for their compositions. So was Canaletto in Venice, who found it indispensable in achieving his atmospheric effects.


This fête champêtre (scene of a garden party) by Bonaventure de Bar, an intimate of Boucher’s circle, was painted in 1728. A glimpse under the microscope reveals rough, irregular particles typical of early Prussian blue, scattered in a thin glaze over the sky and clothing.



Although Prussian blue lacked the clear, “true blue” hue of lazurite, Prussian blue had unique properties that allowed painters to work more spontaneously. Only a small amount was required to impart a strong tint to other colors, including white. Painters could now mix a much wider spectrum of colors on their palette.


Painters could also take advantage of new knowledge. Artists were keen to depart from the old conventions of representing space and form, which depended more on metaphysical and philosophical arguments than scientific facts. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, had now begun.


In Opticks, Newton wrote about his findings about light and color. For example, he had separated a beam of sunlight into its component colors with a prism. Word spread of Newton’s work, thanks to highly vocal supporters like Voltaire and vehement opponents like Goethe.


Artists began to experiment with color harmonies to create illusions of depth in new ways. Color wheels and other diagrammatic representations of color theory revealed sophisticated relationships, and artists soon realized that colors diametrically opposed on the color wheel, known as complementary colors, had a special “harmonic” relationship. Placing one next to the other, or partially covering one with the other, results in optical effects simulating three-dimensional depth. One color tends to “advance”—or “pop,” as we sometimes say now. Thanks to the discovery of Prussian blue, painters had, for the first time, a palette of oil paints that could let them reproduce the full color wheel, and thereby experiment spontaneously on the canvas to achieve marvelous optical effects.


In France, these new possibilities came to fruition in Rococo painting. With its playful subject matter, delicacy of color, and exuberant brushwork, this art movement became known in the early 18th century as peinture moderne. Deceptively simple, these paintings reveal a mastery of the new scientific principles of color theory. Boucher, Fragonard, and others experimented with advancing and receding complementary colors. Color harmonies were everywhere, in the deepest shadows and the most brilliant sunlight. Black was all but banished. Practices popularly credited to the French Impressionists have their origins more than a century earlier as Rococo artists took advantage of an expanded palette.



Look, for example, at a painting like Jupiter and Semele by Deshays de Colleville, Boucher’s son-in-law. His masterful brushwork, characterized by deftly placing and blending strokes of varying colors and hues directly into each other, juxtaposes complementary colors in carefully orchestrated variations. As a result, his figures project forward from the Prussian greens and blues of the forest backdrop.


The Norton Simon exhibit moves forward from the full blossoming of the Rococo era through the French Revolution, after which the new Republic desperately sought to develop new products and revive the shattered economy. A centerpiece of this effort was the nationally subsidized quest for new paint pigments inspired by the brilliant ceramic glazes seen on French royal porcelain, resulting in the discovery of cobalt blue and its variants, and ultimately the attainment of the “holy grail” of an inexpensive “true blue,” a.k.a. “French ultramarine.” The exhibition concludes with the Impressionists, who went even further with optical color manipulation and spontaneous brushwork. They enjoyed the advantage of myriad oil paint colors now sold in convenient, re-closable metal tubes, easily taken outdoors for true plein air painting.



In helping viewers read the surfaces of paintings from this remarkable period, I have rekindled my own desire to look, to experiment, to study for a new series of paintings. But more than that, I have gained renewed optimism regarding the potential for an accidental discovery to occur at just the precise moment when it can be best exploited to the benefit of all.


Prussian blue was made in the “laboratory” of an alchemist at the right time to resonate with the dissemination of a grand scientific revelation and to catalyze a whole new direction in human expression. Serendipity happens, and sometimes the result is revolution.


This story was originally published for Open Art, an arts engagement partnership of the Getty and Zócalo Public Square.


John Griswold, a third generation Angeleno, has trained and worked as an art and architectural materials conservator in Greece, England, Canada, Egypt and the U.S. He has been the conservator on staff at the Norton Simon Museum since 2007.

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