This article first appeared on QuietRev.com

We are at the pharmacy, perusing lipsticks as we always do. Sophie, my firstborn, asks if she can buy the nearly black lipstick for her performance tonight.

“Really?” I ask. “It’s…a pretty bold statement.”

“What’s wrong with that?” she asks, laughing. “It’s expression.”

“I can work with that,” I say.

She hugs me spontaneously.

“I can’t wait for tonight!” she squeals. There is nothing she likes better than singing and playing her ukulele or keyboard in front of a crowd.

This child—this young woman—weighed only four pounds at birth. We both came close to not surviving the precarious labor: pre-eclampsia in its most terrifying form.

“Be prepared,” the doctors warned us as they examined her floppy limbs and her fragile fingers. “She’s likely to have a range of developmental delays. She may not be a normal child.”

As an infant, she ignored the milestones as the doctors had predicted. She would not roll over. She smiled rarely and fleetingly. Only her father or I could hold her—she refused eye contact with unfamiliar faces.

But this was only proof to me that she was in pain—not “delayed”—because of a rapidly growing vascular tumor on her left arm.

“A hemangioma,” her pediatrician told us. “It’s not uncommon.”

But it was uncommon to us. By the time Sophie was 4 months old, her left upper arm had sprouted horrid scarlet growths, like rubbery cauliflowers, and swelled to twice the size of her right arm. Ulcers appeared. Bloodstains pocked her crib sheets and summer dresses. She frowned and shook her arm obsessively as if to free the pain. People stared in the supermarket and asked horrible questions: “What’s wrong with your baby?”

“Have you considered autism?” a well-meaning friend asked when Sophie refused to smile for her on command. “Considered”—as if it were a political movement worth joining.

“That’s not what’s going on,” I said. “She’s hurting. She’s in pain. So she goes inside herself. I can see it in her eyes.”

“Uh-huh,” replied the friend. “If you’re sure.”

I was sure. Sophie was doing things her way on her own time. She was handling her pain in a way that was familiar to me: an introvert’s way of dealing with what hurts. I identified deeply with her kind of quiet.

Around her first birthday, her hemangioma began the process of involution (the fancy word for “shrinking”). The swelling subsided; the redness began to lighten; and the ulcers scarred over and healed. By the age of two, she was willing to extend her trust to a few close relatives and family friends, but she would suffer no fools.

Fast forward to third grade, when my quiet, book-loving, serious girl announced that she would be singing in the school talent show the next day.

“Oh,” I said. “With your class?”

“No,” she replied. “By myself.”

I remember how I held my breath as she took her place beside her teacher, accompanying her on the guitar. Could she sing? And what possessed her to want to stand in front of her whole school and sing alone?

I am glad I captured that song on video that day. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” she sang. Perfectly, magically, on pitch. I still cry when I watch this performance. I can’t look away from her tiny fingers, nervously smoothing the folds of her white skirt. Who was this child?

Sophie is 14 now. Today, she suffers fools only when she is busking with her ukulele and eager to supplement her lipstick fund. Her arm is a ghost of the red devil it once was. It’s pale now like the rest of her, but it’s still mottled and scarred. The stares and questions still come. Depending on the day and the person, Sophie will tell different tales. A bear attack. A unicorn’s touch. A house fire, but she managed to save everyone. Or simply: It’s called a hemangioma.

I was sure, once, that she was a pure introvert. What’s remarkable to me is that my concept of introversion has changed as she has changed. I believe it’s a more fluid matter than I had realized. She still keeps matters of import to herself. She still loathes to share too much of what hurts. She still prefers the book to the movie, every time. But somewhere along the way—despite her arm? because of her arm?—she became fearless. Quietly fearless.

As she’s applying her lipstick before her performance, she tells me she’s taken the Myers-Briggs test…and she’s an ENTP. “I’m just a little closer to the E than I,” she adds. My INFJ self takes this in: My baby’s all grown up. And my baby’s an extrovert.

That slight Tower of Pisa lean to the E is never more obvious than when she takes the stage.

“How’s everybody doing tonight?” she calls out to the crowd, grinning like a pro—this baby of mine, who once reserved her smiles for those who knew her and her pain, no exceptions.

“Great!” the crowd yells in response, and they mean it.

I scan their faces—to see what she sees, to see what they see.

She hasn’t yet sung a note yet, but she already owns the room.

This article originally appeared on QuietRev.com.

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In a small Colorado mining town -- a blip on the map -- everything is quiet. There's not much to do, except grab drinks at a local bar, where football games are aired all night. So the narrator of Lincoln Michel's short story, "Some Notes on My Brother’s Brief Travels," drives around aimlessly, contemplates his failing relationship, and ... watches a man in a yellow chicken suit dance on the side of the road?

It's not the sort of precious, quippy scene that'd be at home in a John Green novel or a movie starring Zach Braff. When couched in Michel’s honest, dialectical language, these events feel like the bizarre stories you’d share with a friend over drinks. “The strangest thing just happened to me,” his narrators tell the reader casually, granting their anecdotes an air of wonder and intimacy.

If Michel's stories, which have been recently published in his debut collection, Upright Beasts, are unified by anything, it's this element of the everyday absurd. His characters aren't slowly morphing into bugs or suffering for crimes they didn't commit. They aren't pinching themselves, hoping to wake up from their nightmarish surroundings. Instead, most of them bear witness to the sort of stranger-than-fiction realities of the world beyond the page.

In “Our New Neighborhood,” a husband takes a subdivision surveillance effort too far, while his wife inadvertently scours the web for local wrongdoers on dating sites. By exaggerating the lengths we’ll go to protect our loved ones -- no matter how estranged we feel from them -- Michel crafts a very funny story about marital tension.

In “Halfway Home to Somewhere Else,” a man takes his family -- a new bride and a young child -- to a swimming hole he used to frequent, only to find it’s just as dangerous as it was when he was a rowdy kid. A tiff with hecklers on a nearby cliff quickly escalates to a violent confrontation, broken up by gunshots overhead, fired by the same farmer who’d shooed him off the property decades earlier.

The narrator makes a weighty observation about his narrow dodge of injury, followed by a flippant remark, bringing the reader back to capricious reality. “I was feeling all right though, as if I had fought in a noble war and had been sent home before being blown apart or disfigured for life,” he writes. “When we got to the car, there was a long key mark down the left side.” This quick pendulum swing from deep to shallow makes for a funny feeling of unease, an awareness of the absurdity of violence.

Michel’s stories are set in the strange ether just outside of the real world. With the exception of a few allegorical stories, like the simple and affecting “The Room Inside My Father’s Room,” they’re not the stuff of wild dreams or uncanny worlds. More “The Twilight Zone” or “Twin Peaks” than The Metamorphoses, they express universal fears and wants through the distinctive voices of bewildered suburbanites, and will be a source of peculiar joys for any fan of experimental fiction.

The bottom line:

Michel captures the strangeness of the suburban South, and the rural wilderness surrounding it, through its chorus of blunt voices. His stories are absurd enough to reel you in, and emotionally honest enough to keep you reading.

What other reviewers think:

The Rumpus: "Each story in Lincoln Michel’s debut collection, Upright Beasts, contains an element of unreality that delights even as it unsettles."

Kirkus: "A strong debut despite its unevenness."

Who wrote it?

Lincoln Michel is a founding editor of Gigantic, and an online editor for Electric Literature. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, NOON and BOMB. This is his first short story collection.

Who will read it?

Those interested in classic writers of uncanny stories, such as Flannery O’Connor. Those interested in fresh, experimental fiction.

Opening lines:

“Time passes unexpectedly or, perhaps, inexactly at the school.”

Notable passage:

“How we ended up in those backwoods hills was Iris said we needed to 'get a little air,' and Dolan added 'country air!' and that was that. Iris was my lover, and Dolan was her roommate I’d never liked. All of us were alive, at that point.”

Upright Beasts by Lincoln Michel
Coffee House, $16.95
Published October 13, 2015

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A woman’s short, purple dress splays out in a poof. It’s one of those Marilyn Monroe moments when wind and woman meet, making for a lovely image of a fleeting moment. But in this photo of Natalie Deryn Johnson, her gown isn’t being blown tantalizingly upward. Johnson is a choreographer and dancer, and her dress is whipping around as a result of her stealthy movements.

“I am on a quest for a perfect moment,” photographer Lois Greenfield tells The Huffington Post of her dancer portraits, now collected in a new book, Lois Greenfield: Moving Still. The perfect moment, for Greenfield, is when “the conjunction of the dancers’ movement, expression and gesture, becomes part of an enigmatic scenario.”

To achieve this, Greenfield calls dancers into her studio, and asks them to improvise rather than perform a set routine. She then shoots a barrage of images, each one with a shutter speed of 1/2000 of a second, allowing her to capture “moments that actually could never be performed on the stage.”

It’s important to Greenfield that she creates this effect with her work without the help of post-production adjustments. “I don’t digitally manipulate my images because I am interested in the spontaneous act of creating images without forethought,” she says. “I know many artists start with an idea in mind and then they put it on paper. I don’t work that way.”

Greenfield added that for her, capturing a photo that occurs spontaneously -- within an environment that she structures -- is an essential part of her process. Rather than arranging an image to appear as she’d like, she finds it important to allow room for variation.

“Frankly if I knew what the finished picture would look like I wouldn’t bother to make the picture, as my interest in this process is to get beyond my imagination, not document an already formulated idea,” Greenfield said. “My inspiration has always been photography’s ability to stop time and reveal what the naked eye cannot see. What intrigues me is making images that confound and confuse the viewer, but that the viewer knows, or suspects, really happened.”

Greenfield’s approach to capturing moments naturally is rooted in her background as a photojournalist. But when she was assigned to cover dance, she felt that she’d found her passion.

“I realized that one of the differences between news photography and dance photography was that the former has to tell a specific story, whereas all a dance photograph had to be was visually interesting,” Greenfield said. “I realized I didn’t want to document someone else’s art. I wanted to find a way to merge photography and dance in order to create a hybrid of the two art forms.”

Images from Lois Greenfield: Moving Still, published by Chronicle Books 2015.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article listed Lois Greenfield's book as Hold Still.

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You may think, after looking at the GIFs of Vancouver-based artist Brandon Muir, that he's trying to make your heart crawl into your stomach and settle there between the guts and juices, rousing your half-digested breakfast. It turns out, however, he's only trying to make you laugh. 

"When I first started making these, I was really just trying to figure things out, collaging and re-contextualizing cutout images into something I found amusing," Muir explained to The Huffington Post. "It's only recently that I've started to sort out certain elements and feelings I'd like to convey."

Those images include, in no particular order, demonic children with red beady eyeballs, marble statues that bear a striking resemblance to Kevin Bacon's "Invisible Man," women with snakes as tongues, and hoodie-wearing flesh lumps that cry tears of green goo. 

Muir has a knack for tapping into the stuff of digital nightmares, mixing and matching mutant creatures with just enough human elements to draw you in before devouring your preconceptions and spitting them back out. Muir hopes, however, that you won't judge a horrifying GIF by its cover, and will instead take a second get to know that green snake baby with a bald, lumpy head and scaly tail. 

"Yes, the first feeling is usually discomfort. but I hope that's not always the case. I'll agree that there are a number of GIFs I've made that probably only work for people on one note, but you should definitely see a human side in these mutated subjects. That's what I hope comes across the most. However, sometimes I just want to make you feel gross. It really depends on my mood."

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"I strike it, stalk it, try to make it obey me. Then in its disobedience, it forms things I like."

This is how Argentine painter Leonor Fini described her art-making process. Her body of work, fittingly, feels like the product of cosmic BDSM, with opalesque, otherworldly women engaged in cryptic exchanges of authority and surrender. Amalgamated visions of castration, shapeshifting and knife-wielding characterize her painted world, her every brushstroke making the supernatural realistic and the real supernatural. 

Fini, born in 1907 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, lived her life as if it were a work of art, obeying no rules except her own. Often dressed in disguises or nothing at all, Fini intoxicated those around her with her intelligence, fearless wit and creative fire. Despite the imprint she left on those who knew her, like too many women artists, Fini's name disappeared from the canon of art history following her death in 1996. 

A new exhibition at San Francisco's Weinstein Gallery is hoping to rectify this, honoring the legacy of the self-proclaimed "queen of the underworld" and her immense impact on surrealist and feminist art. In preparation, we've compiled a handy guide to living life the Leonor way. It involves lots of hard work and insistence, but also plenty of treats, like costumes, threesomes and Persian cats. 

Play dress up, and not just as a kid.

Fini began dressing up out of necessity. After her parents separated when she was a young child, Fini lived with her mother and reportedly dressed up as a boy to avoid being kidnapped by her father. Despite its terrible origins, the habit stuck. Fini would continue to cross-dress and dress up well into adulthood. She was spotted with hair dyed every color of the rainbow, and would attend art happenings wearing only white boots and a cape of white feathers. "I have always loved, and lived, my own theatre," the artist once said.

Find inspiration, wherever you may find it. 

Largely self-taught, Fini studied composition and technique at local museums. Far stranger, her fascination with death and decay led her to study anatomy through the cadavers at her local morgue. 

Choose your friends wisely. 

Fini, for example, chose Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Leonora Carrington, Christian Dior, Man Ray, Balthus, Brigitte Bardot, Jean Cocteau and Georges Batailles, among many others. She did refuse to get chummy with surrealism founder Andre Breton, mostly because, well, he was a well-known misogynist.  

Follow your dreams. No, literally, follow them. 

Fini's enigmatic and erotically charged imagery often originated in her dreams. She has credited the vibrant interior world she created to a period in her teens when, suffering from rheumatic conjunctivitis, Fini was forced to wear bandages on both eyes for months, forcing her temporarily dwell in darkness.

The paintings that followed this period often feature mysterious planes populated solely by strong women engaged in some sort of ritual or game without explanation or resolution. As Catherine Styles McLeod of Architectural Digest wrote in 1986: "Her art is the crack in the mirror, the edge of the equation, the dream of tremendous important half-grasped upon awakening, whose meaning dissolves with daylight."

Make men your muse.

In 1942, Fini made artistic history by painting the first ever erotic nude portrait of a man made by a woman. She continued to depict males in an unconventional manner -- soft, androgynous, powerless and beautiful. "The man in my painting sleeps because he refuses the animus role of the social and constructed and has rejected the responsibility of working in society toward those ends," Fini said in a 1982 interview. Simply put, Fini's male subjects were in touch with their feminine sides. 

Resist categorization ... 

Although she's often labelled a Surrealist due to her incorporation of mystical themes, Fini herself never identified as such. She didn't even like to be referred to as a "woman artist" because of the potential implications of the term during her time. Fini's art was galvanized by myriad movements including the Mannerists, the pre-Raphaelites, and the Flemish masters.

... In art and in life.   

"Marriage never appealed to me," Fini famously said. "I have never lived with just one person." The artist, who was married once briefly to Federico Venezian, was proudly bisexual. When she did take men as lovers, she preferred them two at a time. In the artist's very wise words: "A woman should live with two men; one more a lover and the other more a friend."

Surround yourself with things you love. (And if those things are cats, do not hold back.) 

Fini was a proud mama to 17 Persian cats, who slept in her bed and ate at her dining room table. It's no surprise Fini's spirit animal was the sphinx: feminine yet somewhat androgynous, powerful, sensual, enigmatic and -- yes, a cat. 

Make your home your sanctuary. 

In Fini's case, this meant decorating with theatrical costumes, vintage undergarments, glass hands, birds' skeletons, doll wigs, lots of velvet and an old bronze foot. 

Ignore the haters. 

Because sexism, Fini's friends and contemporaries all too often made comments regarding her work that are no better than the lowliest of Reddit trolls today. For example, none other than Mr. Salvador Dali said Fini's work was "better than most, perhaps. But talent is in the balls." Luckily, Fini didn't take someone with such idiotic facial hair all that seriously. 

Spread your skills far and wide. 

Fini painted, yes, but she did so much more. She designed theatrical sets and costumes for the Paris Opera, George Balanchine’s ballet "Palais de Crystal," choreographer Roland Petit’s company Ballets de Paris, and Federico Fellini's iconic "8 ½." She drew illustrations for Marquis de Sade’s Juliette and the Sadean novel Histoire d’O. She collaborated with Elsa Schiaparelli on a female torso-shaped bottle for the designer’s perfume "Shocking." She later employed a similar idea for a corset-shaped chair that appeared in a furniture exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery. 

Live your dreams. Again, being v. literal here. 

"I paint pictures which do not exist and which I would like to see," Fini once said. Her imagination birthed countless images of strong, sphinx-like women from a mythical realm, engaged in power plays the viewer can't quite understand. Instead of searching for answers, the viewer is left buzzing from the unnerving feminine energy, inexplicable yet unmistakeable. 

As Max Ernst said: "Her paintings are made up of vertigo ... inhabited by the most astonishing collection of legendary beings ... Miraculous plays of darkness and light are given ultimate expression in the pulsating pearly colors of this chimerical flesh, that resembles the bifid love-making of sphinxes."

"Leonor Fini: Réalisme irréel" runs until December 5, 2015 at Weisman Gallery in San Francisco. For more forgotten Surrealist women artists you should know, check out an earlier piece, 7 Surrealist Women Artists Who Deserve To Be Remembered. 

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To their legions of gay fans, the Warwick Rowers are so well known for their chiseled bodies that their sportsmanship sometimes seems like an afterthought.

For the past six years, the Rowers, who are students at England’s Warwick University, have been stripping nude for their annual calendars. Released earlier this month, the 2016 edition is the sexiest version yet, featuring shots of the boys cavorting in bed, in the woods and on the grounds of a “Downton Abbey”-style mansion, completely naked.

It’s easy to dismiss the photos as a trivial exercise in vanity, but the Rowers say the calendar has a greater aim. The project began in 2009 in hopes of raising funds for equipment, but quickly drew a massive following among gay men. These days, proceeds from calendar sales go to Sport Allies, a U.K. advocacy organization aimed at combating homophobia in team sports, in an effort to give back to the admirers who support them the most.

Three of the team's members -- Lucas Etienne and Will Johnson, both 19, and Tristan Edwards, 20 -- visited New York in early November to mark the calendar's release. They told The Huffington Post that they don’t mind being objectified, but hope their fans realize there’s a greater message in the photos that goes beyond what some might call “queer-baiting.” Many of the images feature the boys sunbathing together and innocently cuddling, in an effort to break down stereotypes about masculinity in sports and show that it’s OK for straight men to express affection and be intimate with one another.

“A lot of the problems around homophobia in sport come from the enforcement of gender norms… people saying what a man is or what a woman is,” Edwards, who returns to the calendar after his 2015 debut, said. “We don’t want to be put into a box in terms of what a man ‘should be’ in sport. This is how we think you can act.” Their charitable efforts, he said, have impacted them as a team, too: “The last two years have been the most successful we’ve had as a club.”

Creating the 2016 calendar, they said, was very much an “organic” collaboration with photographer Angus Malcolm. There aren’t any specified limits on physicality or content, even though you won’t be seeing any full frontal images in the calendar anytime soon.

“We know our audience, we know our boundaries and we know what we’re trying to achieve,” Edwards said. “So we’d never do anything that would brand us as porn.”

Striking a few compromising poses with their teammates does come with the occasional challenge, though.

“The first minute, you think, ‘OK, this is strange,’” Johnson, who is appearing in the calendar for the first time, said. “But after seeing [your teammate naked], it just becomes normal, and if anything, it becomes hilarious.”

Next up for the Rowers is a 220-page coffee table book that will include photos from the 2016 calendar as well as outtakes, which they hope to release by Christmas. As athletes, however, they hope their message resounds beyond the holiday season.

“All of us have gained so much from having sports in our lives,” Etienne said. “The idea that people could be gay and not get that privilege is unfair, and we want to do something about it.”

Being a good sport shouldn’t be limited to the athletic realm, so it’s great to see the Warwick Rowers having some cheeky fun and maybe opening a few minds along the way, too.

Be sure to check out the Warwick Rowers on Facebook, Twitter and of course Instagram, too. 

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In the opening moments of "By the Sea," the Pitts cruise down a windy European road, Brad driving a silver convertible and Angelina perched beside him in shades and a wide-brim hat, looking like she just earned a master's degree in Glamorous Magazine Spreads. We are keenly aware that Angelina Jolie Pitt collected her doctorate in that discipline years ago. It's time, now, for her to convince us she is worthy of a bachelor's in directing because, after 2011's blunt "In the Land of Blood and Honey" and 2014's conventional "Unbroken," Jolie needs to make something that confirms she has the wherewithal to helm good movies. "By the Sea" isn't it. 

Within the veneer of the glossy seaside French town in which "By the Sea" takes place, there is something admirable about the film. Even though it stars one of the most famous couples in the Western Hemisphere, Jolie Pitt, who also wrote the script, has made the least mainstream studio film she could about an imploding 1970s marriage. It's a slow, art-house melodrama, and on its face, it's great to see A-listers devote time to an ambiance not often seen in contemporary American cinema. In fact, I see it as a nice shift away from the prestige-war-flick trappings to which "Unbroken" fell victim. But in practice, "By the Sea" seems painfully aware of its mission: to convince us to take Angelina Jolie Pitt seriously as a writer and director.

It's there that the movie, and its muted marketing, falls apart. Perhaps the Oscar-winning actress feels we've undervalued her talents as an auteur, but there's no justification there: "By the Sea" was filmed in fall 2014, before "Unbroken" opened to lukewarm reviews and was subsequently shut out of every major Oscar category. Instead, this feels like an ineffective exercise in the voyeuristic interpretations we impart upon others' lives. Does the central couple's turmoil echo that of the Pitts, one may logically ask. 

Granted, Brangelina boast six children and no obvious signs of relationship deterioration, but Jolie Pitt seems too conscious of the question, and her avoidance of much actual plot dulls down the movie. When Roland (Pitt), a hard-drinking novelist battling writer's block, and Vanessa (Jolie Pitt), his pill-popping, despondent ex-dancer wife, check into their waterfront hostel, they discover a hole in the wall that allows them to peer at their newlywed neighbors (Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud), whose spirited sex life makes Vanessa and Roland's connection appear even more deadened than it already was. But they are enlivened by the ability to spy because the act of doing so recalls scenes from their younger days. Is that couple the Pitt stand-ins, incessantly watched, as if fame is the world's collective peephole? In some ways, probably, but it doesn't matter because the twist, so to speak, that reveals the origins of Vanessa and Roland's devolution -- which I won't reveal here -- is so predictable and overwrought that it's hard to care about much of anything.

But Jolie Pitt, who has called this a "personal project," has to know she's too famous for us not to pose such questions. It's by no means inevitable that she would dramatize her own experiences, so I ask: Why make such a boring movie when there are so many interesting stories about strained relationships worth telling?

These interrogations were fun, or at least intriguing, when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were making movies together, or when Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise made "Eyes Wide Shut." But as much as "By the Sea" may long to be "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," it has none of that movie's bite. Here, such questions are devoid of appeal because this is a story about love and sex whose pouty pseudo-characters make us want to think about anything but. Vanessa stares at the rippling sea in blatant suicide metaphors, and Roland spends significant time at the hostel's bar, partly to write and partly to escape the numbing presence of his pained wife. When their paths cross, it's all angst and little insight into a history that makes these two people worth two hours of our time. Jolie Pitt's luscious cheekbones, shot in frequent close-ups, cannot carry a movie alone.

The rub of it all is that Jolie Pitt clearly wants an Oscar nod for her directing efforts. The drama premiered at the year's final awards-centric festival, last week's AFI Fest in Los Angeles, and the marketing -- what little of it exists -- distinctly conjures up the '70s European art pictures that inspired the film. (Harry Nilsson's soothing "Perfect Day" scores the trailers precisely because its lyrics are in opposition to the essence of "By the Sea.") Reports have indicated the film will open in a tiny limited release with no plans to go nationwide, despite the fact that it cost almost $30 million to make. On top of it all, the Pitts have given few promotional interviews and don't seem to have an elevated media presence at the moment. Do people even know about this movie? Will it make any money? For a project with so much star power ("Mr. and Mrs. Smith" made $478 million worldwide!), that silence is the strangest bit of it all. Universal Pictures is distributing the film -- this isn't an independent underdog without the purse strings to get off the ground. What is Jolie Pitt's game here, if not to establish the effort as a prestige flick (read: Oscar contender)? She amped up the seriousness of the story in an apparent attempt to emphasize its importance, but to what effect? The movie is too arty for Oscar voters, who haven't included Jolie Pitt in their nominations since 2008's "Changeling."

I've resisted calling "By the Sea" a vanity project, a term many critics have used in their reviews, because Jolie Pitt certainly doesn't need to cater to any market segment, mainstream or otherwise, in order to justify the type of story she chooses to tell. But she does need to craft a tale worth telling, and the stilted characterization and wooden performances in "By the Sea" don't accomplish that. At least it looks glamorous.

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With Christmas shopping and other prep beginning as early as September, many people have complained about the premature timing of the holiday season in recent years. 

Dad Jon Murray counts himself among them. In this funny parody of "Apologize" by OneRepublic, the dad shares his frustration with the holiday phenomenon -- from Christmas cookies on Halloween to holiday decorations in the fall to hot chocolate in 80-degree weather.

As Murray sings in the chorus, "It's too soon for Christmastime! It's too sooooooon."

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Experts at Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery discovered two previous paintings and an inscription underneath Kazimir Malevich's seminal "Black Square" (1915).

The Russian museum -- which owns one of three versions of the work -- performed an X-ray analysis on the top layer of black paint to uncover the underlying images. The findings could reveal the story behind the groundbreaking artwork. 

Similar tests have been known to lead to breakthrough discoveries. Berlin's Gemäldegalerie used X-rays to determine that a Rembrandt canvas had been repainted by Joshua Reynolds, and a second image was found beneath the surface of another painting by the Dutch master. There was even a new painting added to Claude Monet's oeuvre when his signature was found on a "Haystack" painting thanks to a hyperspectral camera.

"It was known that under the 'Black Square,' there was some underlying image," Ekaterina Voronina, an art researcher at the Tretyakov told Kultura TV. “We found out that there is not one image, but two." 

She continued, “We proved that the initial image is a Cubo-Futurist composition, while the painting lying directly under the 'Black Square' -- the colors of which you can see in the cracks—is a proto-Suprematist composition."

The X-ray analysis also uncovered a handwritten note by the artist on the painting's white border which is still being deciphered. However, according to AFP, preliminary investigations have revealed that the text says “Negroes battling in a cave."

The note may be a reference to an 1897 black square painting by the French writer Alphonse Allais titled "Combat des Negres dans une cave, pendant la nuit (Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night)."

If the preliminary interpretation holds up, it could support a connection to the earlier French painting, demonstrating that one of Malevich's most famous works was in fact an art historical response or an interpretation of Allais's piece, showing that the Russian artist's pool of influences had been much broader than previously thought.

In the 1910s, Malevich adopted Cubo-Futurism, a Russian avant-garde style that combined Cubism and Futurism.

He then developed what he called Suprematism and started painting geometric shapes instead of figurative subjects. "Black Square" was the culmination of this concept.

The gallery's findings will reportedly be presented at an exhibition opening on Wednesday.

Malevich's "Black Square" is part of the Tretyakov's current exhibition "The Mark of Malevich," which marks the centenary of the unveiling of the artist's "Black Square."

"The Mark of Malevich. Graphics From the State Tretyakov Gallery's Collection" runs until February 14, 2016.

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“Things I wish my mother taught me.” 

"I wish my mother taught me in this society as a woman, the first thing that you’re ever going to learn is that your body is not yours.” 

That's how 21-year-old poet KiNG began her riveting spoken word poem"Things I Wish." The genderqueer feminist performed the poem in August at the 2015 National Poetry Slam in Oakland, California. 

KiNG described in the poem what she wished her mother had told her about life as a woman. "I often times wonder when she forgot to warn me saying, ‘Beware, you will encounter your sexuality far before you are old enough to understand it. You will lose your innocence before you were even aware that you had gained it,'" she said. 

She told the crowd about a time she was crying on her apartment floor, wishing her mother had warned her before a man “contorted [her] no into a yes.”

"I wish she would’ve told me that the first thing you learn will not be the last," KiNG said. "How you should blame him, before you blame yourself -- actuallyyou should blame the society that created him. The one that keeps him safe and leaves you cold."

KiNG declared towards the end of her poem that no one should ever be treated like this, telling the crowd: "I was not made for this. You were not made for this. Do not -- I repeat do not -- ever let anyone else tell you any differently." 

Hell yes, KiNG. 

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The metaphorical armchair is a comfy place -- the temperature is controlled, snacks are readily available and the Internet speed is high. Best of all, it is the easiest place to comfortably critique society in the digital age.  

Los Angeles-based performance artist and comedian Kristina Wong is all too familiar with that abstract cushy seat. After years of making live theater, the armchair is where she, like many before her, went viral. At the beginning of her new one-woman show, "Wong Street Journal," she explains this pivotal moment with a simple bar graph.

Two years ago, Wong recounts, she had finished touring two consecutive one-woman shows. "Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" was her take on the high rates of depression and suicide among Asian-American women, followed by "Cat Lady," a play about the loneliness she experienced touring "Cuckoo’s Nest" and the larger, tragic subculture of of pick-up artists. One squat bar on her graph (made of felt, like most of her personally handsewn set) represents the response she received from those shows, while another bar towers in comparison. The latter represents the high number of likes, followers and shares she received as the result of an xoJane essay she wrote in 2013, titled "9 Wack Things White Guys Say to Deny their Asian Fetish."

Wong lovingly strokes the tall bar in a happy-ending fashion, contemplating the beginning of her tumultuous relationship with social media. After publishing the article, Wong went after any commenters she came across who were racist, misogynist or generally ignorant on the Internet. Through hashtag campaigns and troll wars, she cemented her role as a self-proclaimed "public shame master."

As much as the Internet feels infinite, the stream of people reinforcing and maintaining the oppressive status quo can feel just as endless. To demonstrate this in her performances today, Wong enacts a live hashtag war with her audiences, using felt versions of the symbol "formerly known as the pound sign." In a frenzy, she throws plush, red hashtags into the audience while exclaiming her favorites.

"Hashtag revolution! Hashtag not your stereotype!" Someone throws one back at her -- "That’s a retweet!" she says. "I can do this all fucking day!" Wong exclaims.

But in truth, she couldn’t.

"I just found myself fighting with people online all day. It was this weird rush, not having to see people face to face, but it also just felt so exhausting," Wong told The Huffington Post. "Is this going to be my life?"

If Twitter was her battleground, theater was her safe haven. But after touring two emotionally wrought, personal plays for the better part of a decade, Wong was sick of herself. So, three months after publishing her xoJane piece, she decided to get away from the theater, social media and her armchair by volunteering in Uganda.

"I had an existential crisis, which felt like such a privileged thing," Wong explained to HuffPost. "I was guilty of having an Eat, Pray, Love moment."

That feeling of privilege and the guilt that followed was pervasive throughout her three weeks in Uganda, working with the organization Vac-net, which empowers women through efforts like microloans. Before her trip, Wong had built a reputation for her online and offline antics focused on race -- crashing the Miss Chinatown pageant, seeking reparations from white guys with yellow fever, and co-opting a televised talking-head segment on "Why everyone wants to date Asian babes." But once she arrived in Uganda, the racial dynamics in her world shifted. One of her initial interactions in Uganda involved someone calling her "mzungu," a Bantu term for "white."

"Suddenly, I was the face of oppression," she explained to The Huffington Post. "It was really weird to go from constantly calling out white people to people having to literally walk around the power I bring to the room." 

During "Wong Street Journal," she defines white privilege and gives an overview of her (and perhaps most Americans’) knowledge of Africa through celebrities, "the dark continent brought to you by white people." Similarly, she emphasizes that the lingering question that hung over her while in Uganda was, "How do I enter this situation, leave a legacy, and not be a colonial asshole?"

She recounts how, upon learning of her travels, friends and Facebook "friends" (an important distinction) who had never been to Africa told her to "be careful" or praised her for being "so brave." A projected screenshot on view during her performance shows how one particular Facebook "friend" pestered Wong about how she could help, potentially by sending her clothes to Africa. The "friend" ended one message with, "I have a purse, too."

While Wong does point out the ignorance of those individuals, she scrutinizes herself most of all. In addition to being self-conscious about her privilege, she analyzes her own urge to document, upload and share all her thoughts on social media. 

For example, Wong acts out a relatable moment from Uganda, when she realized that her head had become "24 hours of backlogged tweets." On stage, she demonstrates her first foray outside of her comfortable hotel, when she met and befriended a group of young male rappers and music producers. In an unexpected and hilarious turn of events, Wong ended up cutting a five-song rap album with them featuring songs about racial privilege and female empowerment, which is still played on Ugandan radio.

Still, Wong's quest for connection and authenticity isn't finished. Throughout her performance, she awkwardly and humorously fumbles through her Western privilege but refuses to sit in it, grasping for answers to tough questions.

"I’ve found the best way to help [marginalized people] is to find ways to support their self-determination," Wong concludes. "What actually supports the ability of people who want to speak for themselves?"

At the end of her performance, she finds herself back in her armchair, literally and figuratively, scrolling through messages from her rapper friends, photos with her colleagues at the volunteer organization, and videos of moments in the community that moved her to tears. By getting out from behind her computer, Wong made herself vulnerable to the same criticisms she had lodged at others, in addition to her own shame, discomfort and guilt. But she pushed through those feelings, and with self-awareness and sincerity, she managed to find genuine connection with the people she met, no "liking" or "retweeting" necessary.  

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Donald Trump has already been immortalized by his image painted in menstrual blood.

Now a different kind of portrait is currently representing for the Republican presidential candidate -- at least in some circles.

Behold Tumblr user HomoPower's mosaic of Trump composed entirely of dick pics. 500 of 'em. 

The penis picture portraitist explained that he was inspired by a porn mosaic once made of Rick Santorum. "I thought I'd go one better," HomoPower wrote.

You likely will not make out the genitals in the embedded version here, so we invite you to visit the artist's site and zoom in -- with a NSFW warning.

There. See them now?

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The ladies of Twitter never fail to brighten our days with their brilliant -- but succinct -- wisdom. Each week, HuffPost Women rounds up hilarious 140-character musings. For this week's great tweets from women, scroll through the list below. Then visit our Funniest Tweets From Women page for our past collections.   

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Stephen Colbert doesn't know a lot about art, but he's devoted six minutes of his show this week to analyzing the different between it and porn.

As you might have heard, a famous nude painting by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani sold for $170 million at Christie's auction. Some people guffawed at the price tag attached to an early 20th century artwork, others just blushed at the naked female body contained within Modigliani's frame.

Take, for example, Bloomberg news. During a broadcast segment on Tuesday, Bloomberg censored the painting, blurring the areas of the painting depicting breasts and pubic hair. "Too racy!" the anchors exclaimed, a little embarrassed by the painterly brazenness of "Reclining Nude." Bloomberg seems to have mimicked the puritanical ways of Fox -- remember when that outlet censored the record-breaking sale of Picasso's "Women of Algiers"? But why?

"I don't really know why they did that," Colbert mused in his own segment. He then goes on to cheekily educate his audience as to which artworks CBS arbitrarily allows him to show. These include: a floral painting by Georgia O'Keeffe, "The Birth of Venus," and two seconds worth of a distant shot of Michelangelo's "David." 

Modigliani's nude is not allowed. Neither is Colbert's crude drawing of boobs. And we're not exactly made privy to any explanations behind the decisions.

The arbitrary nature of art censorship isn't confined to television. Instagram censored artist Rupi Kaur's "period photo," claiming that it violated community guidelines, yet the same platform allows for a litany of pornographic images found under the simple hashtag #girls. Facebook really didn't like it when a teacher attempted to share a photo of Gustave Courbet’s "L’Origine du Monde," despite claiming in statements that "photos of paintings, sculptures and other art that depicts nude figures are [fine]." 

For more on this issue, you can always read art critic Jerry Saltz's "I Got Kicked Off of Facebook for Posting Images of Medieval Art." Bottom line: old and new media still don't know what to do with nude art. To be frank, we -- the HuffPost Arts & Culture editors -- often have to slap overly cautious NSFW modifiers on articles that contain "racy" art, largely because our posts will end up on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. 

Colbert's sobering take on this ambiguity? "Until all this controversy over what's too racy to be considered art is settled, I should probably just play it safe and stick with what's allowed on network TV: police procedurals where they stack up dead hookers like cordwood."

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NEW YORK -- The city’s largest Colombian music festival celebrates its 12th year on Saturday at Le Poisson Rouge in the Village.

Founded by musicians Pablo Mayor and Anna Povich de Mayor in 2003, the six-hour Encuentro Colombian Music Festival brings together nine bands that run the gamut of musical styles including salsa, Latin jazz, Afro-Caribbean rhythms and electronic.

The eclecticism that defines the annual event has packed the venue for the last few years with a diverse group of New Yorkers, some who have ties to Columbia and others who don't. It’s not uncommon to see three generations of people dancing side by side.

“We hope that people bring their kids,” Pablo Mayor, the festival’s founder and director, told The Huffington Post. “This is music for the community.”

Dozens of Colombian-born musicians trained in jazz, classical and other styles have built a thriving music scene based in the borough of Queens, and are dedicated to exploring and developing their country’s musical roots. Bands that have emerged over the last two decades from that scene might mix Cumbia and big band jazz, or Gaitas and punk.

They’ve also built relationships with other musicians in other Latin and immigrant communities around the city. This year, Mayor’s Folklore Urbano will pay tribute to the music of East Harlem, home to a Puerto Rican community that played a key role in creating Salsa.

Mayor, who teaches music in El Barrio, as Spanish speakers refer to East Harlem, says he hopes to keep young people connected to the musical traditions that gave rise to Salsa in the 1950s and 1960s.

“I came to a neighborhood where you heard music on every corner,” Mayor said. “I want to communicate that to people.”

But while the festival was born to celebrate Colombian traditions, Mayor says this year the bands were selected with the aim of showcasing new artists who are pushing Colombia’s musical roots in new directions.

Los Aliens will play a set of electronic music anchored by traditional Colombian rhythms, featuring the drumming of Andrés Jiménez from Colombian punk-funk outfit MAKU Sound System. The new large-ensemble bullerengue band Bulla en el Barrio will play the festival for the first time. The Gregorio Uribe Big Band, which released its first full-length record last month, will close the show.

Watch the video for Gregorio Uribe Big Band's "Yo Vengo" below:

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A lack of formal training wasn’t enough to keep “Empire” co-creator Lee Daniels from succeeding in the film industry. "Because I hadn’t gone to film school, I hustled," he explained. "I managed actors as I directed theater." As a film director/producer, Daniels earned accolades for critically acclaimed films like "Precious," "The Butler" and "Monster's Ball." Taking on primetime television was the logical next step in an already adventurous career, brimming with compelling stories too real to be fictional.

But that's the thing. Daniels routinely lets his life inform his work. The filmmaker often injects personal stories in his scripts, putting a bit of himself in every production he creates.

When it came time to pitch "Empire" with co-creator Danny Strong, Daniels recalls being adamant that the show be accessible to as many viewers as possible, despite (and simultaneously because of) the somewhat controversial subject matter.

"How can you tell the story of hip-hop without the verbiage, without the cursing? I knew that was going to be a challenge and I wanted my cousins to be able to see it -- a lot of them them can't afford cable. It was important to me to bring it to primetime," Daniels told John Horn at the Middleburg Film Festival last month. "Danny and I came up with the layout based on the 'King Lear' story and I said, 'OK, what do I do?' My contribution is my life, as it is with all of my work. So I just laid out the characters, each of them. I didn't know if it would get picked up; I was like, 'I'll move onto my next movie,' but then they picked it up!"  

Honest portrayals of relatable, personal experiences, a thread that binds Daniels' body of work together, lend depth to the characters on "Empire" brought to life by Taraji P. Henson, Terrence Howard and Gabourey Sidibe, among others.

"I have an obligation to tell stories that I understand, because the minute that I don't understand, I'm bullshitting," Daniels said. "I get in trouble for it, I take bullets for it, I am ridiculed for it, I'm lauded for it, but I can live with it because I know it's the truth. And yes, I'm black, but the stories are so often universal. 'Empire' doesn't just work because it's black. It's the story and the people we identify with, and that's great."

And he continues to look to family for inspiration, with his children playing a crucial role in the editing process. Daniels has two 14-year-olds -- his biological niece and nephew whom he adopted with then partner Billy Hopkins shortly after their birth.

"They enjoy telling me it's shit," he said. "They told me I could never do 'Empire,' that I was stuck in Whitney Houston land and couldn't do hip-hop. I do things for my kids. They know me and I live for them; everything I do is for them."

I have an obligation to tell stories that I understand, because the minute that I don't understand, I'm bullshitting.

As for extended family and black identity, Daniels concedes that fame has been coupled with difficult choices.

"What does one do when you are African-American and you've tasted wealth, when you feel an obligation to your extended family? Because in the world that we come from, we all look after each other. And then you have predators that think you owe them. What I have to do now is tell stories about what is happening to me right now and how I haven't changed. I'm still that motherfucka'. But they think that I have changed. It's hurtful because when is no no? 'I cannot write you any more checks,' and then they stop talking to you. It's emotional for me to talk about. That's where I am currently in my life with my family."

Despite having a successful career in film, Daniels has faced his own hardships in the past. Translating those experiences to the screen has been met with varied reactions. "When we played 'Precious' at the Magic Johnson theater in Harlem," Daniels explained, "it was 200 black people, and I thought it was a comedy because they were laughing. And then I played it at Sundance with all these white people and it was art!"

In the second-season opener of "Empire," Cookie (Henson), decked to the nines, pays a jailhouse visit to Lucious. "Why you look like Mr. T?" he asks as he takes a seat. 

"I get sucked right into everything about the magic of Lucious and Cookie. In that scene, I told Taraji, I said, 'I can't bear that jewelry, why?' But she said she really wanted to wear it. So I had to get my dig in. I said, 'Lucious, when you sit down say, 'Why you look like Mr. T?' So when she gave him that look, that's not her looking at Lucious, that's her looking at me," Daniels said. "It's a trip, but it's a lot of fun." 

Daniels shifts his focus back to film with an upcoming biopic, "Richard Pryor: Was it Something I Said?" He notes the profound influence Pryor has played throughout his career.

"He was a revolutionary. He didn’t care, and he lived in the truth. I was friends with Whitney Houston, and didn't get to meet Richard Pryor. But I know what it's like to be an artist of color, not feeling deserving for whatever reason," Daniels said. "There are so many unsung heroes. There are brilliant artists that change the world and don’t know that they did it, and he is one of them. So I connect to him on a spiritual level. He was able to change the world and unite us without being aware. He was an innocent and he was told that he was nothing."

Part of what makes Daniels such a capitvating individual is his recognition of a darker past. As he's mentioned in previous interviews, it wasn't so long ago that he fought drug addiction.

"My first movie was 'Monster's Ball,' and Halle Berry won the Academy Award. And because I was still in a darker place, I was at the Chateau Marmont and I was watching her on the TV, I was crying," Daniels remembered. "Then she called me and she said, 'Big daddy, big daddy, are you coming to the Vanity Fair party?' I said, 'Yeah, I'll be there,' and I picked up my crack pipe. I was there with a prostitute, I think, and I realized I didn't deserve to be there."

"What I found in my research for 'The Butler' was that the slaves that survived were the slaves that laughed," Daniels said at one point, explaining how finding positivity and connection even in the most dire of circumstances can be valuable. "So even with all the bad things that happened to me, that I wasn't killed as a kid by a drive-by, that I survived the AIDS crisis and ended up HIV-negative is a miracle," said Daniels.

Still, that doesn't mean it's not painful to linger on certain aspects of his work. "My artistry is the same as my personhood, I still am growing. After I’ve left the premiere, I leave it, I don’t want to see the film again. I won't see any of my stuff again. It's too painful, I don’t want to relive it again. I'm a better man, but I'm not a perfect man," Daniels explained. "I think as an artist, I’m very insecure about my work because I don’t understand what perfection is. I can only do my best. And somewhere in the back of my head, it’s still never good enough."

Asked if he comprehends his own influence in television and cinema, Daniels takes pause: "I still haven't had the moment, where I realize what's all happening," he said of his undeniable success. "I'm afraid that when I have that moment, I’ll lose the magic."

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Police on Friday evening reported several attacks in Paris, including a shooting at a restaurant and explosions near a football stadium. Multiple outlets reported Friday night that at least 140 people were killed in the attacks, which appeared to be coordinated. 

Photos depict the chaos as restaurant patrons ran for cover after hearing gunfire and football spectators ran on the pitch following the explosions.

See the photos from the Paris attacks, below. 

This is a developing story, check back for more photos.

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Once, in the John Hughes-imagined suburbs of Chicago, a young boy awoke in December to find out that he made his family disappear.

If you can't picture that iconic line whispered in the voice of Macaulay Culkin circa 1990, then I can't help you. But if you can -- nay, if the mere suggestion of the original "Home Alone" made John Williams' compositions start playing in your head, and made you pull out the aftershave for your most realistic "AHHHH!" face, then welcome. Culkin gave the performance of his career thus far in this film (to be topped, some argue, in "Home Alone 2") as a precocious personification of id: all animal emotion ("I'm living alone! I'm living alone!") and speaking without thinking ("I hope I never see any of you jerks again!"). It was a performance that delighted '90s kids, a fact confirmed once more in the dark Long Island theater where I sat last Sunday, surrounded by youngsters who fell into fits at each moment of random violence that befell the Wet Bandits. Joe Pesci freezing in place for way too long as his head is blow-torched is a hilarity still registers with our jaded, smartphone-using future. 

Let us, on the 25th anniversary of the movie that set a world record as the highest-grossing domestic live-action comedy, step back and appreciate this besweatered troublemaker for the hero he was. Behold, 10 Kevin McCallister's gems we can still apply today, thanks to the human capacity for nostalgia and movie magic.

10. "I bought the milk, eggs and fabric softener." 

A dark horse, for sure. This quote is unassuming -- are we sure Kevin said it, and not just our mom coming back from a grocery run? But he did! While his family was presumed evaporated and he had to hatch several unique plans to thwart local bandits, Kevin also had the time to buy not only supermarket staples, but the very stuff that makes clothes feel baby soft. "What a funny guy!" Mr. McCallister responds, amazed at his genius kid. What a funny guy, indeed.

9. "Goodnight, Kevin."

Uttered in response to his mom's request to "Say goodnight, Kevin," after the incident caused by a disastrous lack of cheese pizza toward the beginning of the film. Kevin's response was the height of cleverness when I was 6. It still is. 

8. "I can't sleep with Fuller, he'll wet the bed!" 

Being the youngest in a family can be the pits. Especially when it means sharing the hide-a-bed with your fictional cousin/IRL brother Kieran Culkin, who is way too pleased with himself for getting his hands on some soda. But who can blame him? Uncle Frank (of "Look what you did, you little jerk!" fame) is his dad, after all. 

7. "Bless this highly nutritious microwavable macaroni and cheese dinner and the people who sold it on sale. Amen."

Capitalism, prayer and the idea that microwavable macaroni and cheese is nutritious: 'Murrica at its finest. Let's appreciate his character's evolution, choosing to eat something that at least resembles dinner instead of the heaping ice cream sundae he consumed earlier in the film, trying to tempt out his family by shouting, "I'm eating junk and watching rubbish!" The only disheartening thing is that Kevin never gets to enjoy his meal. The Wet Bandits are approaching! 

6. "Buzz's life savings!"

This, here, is why "Home Alone" is gold: as a kid, I watched this scene and felt totally jealous that Kevin had all these dollars (multiple dollars!) at his disposal; I could feel what a quality find it was. As an adult, I still laugh, because his life savings could barely buy a venti cappuccino these days. That right there is TIMELESS. COMEDY. 

5. (In reference to a knitted bird sweater) "Not for a guy in the second grade. You can get beat up for wearing something like that."

As much as I hope we live in enough of an evolved world that kids are no longer jerks to each other and can appreciate a quality animal sweater, Kevin understands a simple truth: we will all be judged for our appearance, like it or not. What we can control is whether we judge others on theirs, as Kevin initially does with his older, sidewalk-salting neighbor before realizing he's actually a cool guy with communication issues.

4. "You guys give up, or ya thirsty for more?!"

Culkin actually improvised this line, which was not in the original script. Somebody give this kid a parody pizza group. And even though his taunt doesn't stop Marv or Harry from chasing him upstairs, it really makes us think: Do we give up? What is more? Are we thirsty for it?

3. "This is it. Don't get scared now."

Our hero, who has already set up an elaborate fake-out party involving a Michael Jordan cutout riding on a model train and creepy mannequins (seriously, why did the McCallisters have so many mannequins?), still has to remind himself to be strong when it comes down to the final moments before the all-out Wet Bandits ambush. Keep this in your pocket for your next job interview or first date: it might be nerve-wracking, but at least you're not planning to torture and maim a couple of middle-aged thieves.

2. "Keep the change, you filthy animal." 

Kevin doesn't even say this line in the movie. He just owns it, whether he's deceiving the local pizza boy for fun or keeping Marv out of his house. If "Angels with Even Way Filthier Souls" comes out, we hope the powers that be will consider him for it. 

1. "BUZZ, YOUR GIRLFRIEND, WOOF."

Buzz. Your girlfriend. Woof.

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A Great Big World's Chad King opened up about the experience of working on the pop-rock duo's new single, "Hold Each Other," which is a love song featuring lyrics performed by a man to another man. 

Even though he's been out for about eight years, King told HuffPost Live this week that co-writing the song with A Great Big World's other half, Ian Axel, was very much a personal challenge. 

"I grew up in a very small town in Florida where there was not one gay person, and I didn't [meet another] gay person until I came to New York for college," he said. "When I would write, I don't know...the female pronoun would be the go-to pronoun, no matter what, because that was just what I knew." 

King admitted that his struggles may have been indicative of internalized homophobia, brought on by growing up in an environment where he felt like he didn't fit in. 

"I didn't even realize I had any sort of homophobic thoughts to begin with until this song came about," he said. "It was a very big deal for me, and I'm so proud to stand behind it now."

Both King and Axel, who is straight, hope that "Hold Each Other" encourages other out performers like Sam Smith to be more gender-specific in their songwriting. The song, which features a guest rap by Futuristic, is the first cut from the new album, "When The Morning Comes," which dropped Nov. 13. 

"I think artists should...not [be] lying by omission," Axel said.  

Also in the interview, Axel recalled the moment that King first came out to him as gay, and said, "For the next few days, you had a smile on your face constantly." 

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The day after a series of attacks in Paris killed more than 120, a man rolled up a piano outside the city's Bataclan theater and played John Lennon's "Imagine."

CNN's Hala Gorani reported on it live from the scene Saturday during the CNN morning show "New Day." The sounds of the piano can be heard in the background of her report.

"There's a grand piano that was just rolled out in the middle of the crowd and in the middle of this group of journalists and someone playing 'Imagine' by John Lennon -- quite loudly, so perhaps you watching us all over the world, can hear it," Gorani said. 

German news site Sudkurier identified the man as German pianist Davide Martello, based on a tweet in which Martello said he would be playing Paris, rather than appearing as planned on Saturday in the German city of Konstanz. 

Martello, who goes by the nickname Klavier Kunst, then tweeted out a link to the Sudkurier piece with a message in English.

He posted identical messages on his Facebook page.

"Imagine," the title song of Lennon's 1971 solo album, remains one of the world's most famous peace anthems. Its lyrics ask us to imagine a world of unity and harmony. It specifically speaks about removing nationalist and religious prejudices.

"Imagine there's no countries / It isn't hard to do," Lennon sings. "Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion too / Imagine all the people / Living life in peace."

At least 89 people died in the attack on the Bataclan theater on Friday night. It is the site of the deadliest in a series of gun attacks and bombings across Paris that have killed at least 129 people.

Martello has a history of taking his piano to socially significant events. He played an extended set at the protests in Istanbul's Gezi Park in June 2013.

"My goal is to travel around the whole world with my grand piano and to inspire people in the middle of the streets," Martello wrote on his Facebook page. "I compose my own stuff usually in the street or daydreams."

Read more: 

- How The Paris Attacks Unfolded
- People Everywhere Share Messages Of Support For Paris
- Here Are The Locations Of The Paris Attacks
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