If you're in New York City, there's only one place where you can find yourself going "Homo for the Holidaze" this weekend.

Sunday, Dec. 13, will mark the holiday edition of queer promoter, performer and nightlife aficionado Earl Dax's quarterly performance series "PUSSY FAGGOT!."

Throughout the many shades and hues of queer performance in New York city, events like the ones curated by Dax and resident host Penny Arcade are somewhat rare. "PUSSY FAGGOT!," named after a drunken insult once hurled at Dax by a fellow promoter, brings together performers and influencers from a number of different scenes with a special focus on intergenerational and intersectional community building.

"I'm always striving to get people together that you wouldn't typically see in the same room," Dax told The Huffington Post. "There are so many niche communities in New York, which is great, but I like a heterogenous mix of homosexuals, dykes, misfits, queers, trans and gender-variant folks and cool straight people! I guess that's what New York City means to me at a fundamental level -- being pressed up against a broad tapestry of humanity and enveloping yourself in it. I'd like to think 'PUSSY FAGGOT!' is a queer iteration of that experience."

In honor of another full year of the PUSSY FAGGOT! queer performance series, The Huffington Post chatted with a number of individuals who have proved seminal to the evolution and long-term success of "PUSSY FAGGOT!," as well as performers involved in this Sunday's event.

Check out what they had to say below and head here for the full line-up of this Sunday's "Homo for the Holidaze."

Want more info about the "Homo for the Holidaze" edition of PUSSY FAGGOT!? Head here.

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When Showry puts things in her mouth, the Internet eats it up.

Watch above and be amazed.  

We can't wait to see what's on the menu next.

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Have five hours to kill in the airport? You could check out the selection of neck pillows in the magazine shop. Or, if you have some mad ballet skills, you could use that time to make the best airport layover video ever. 

Members of the State Street Ballet in Santa Barbara, California, used the moving walkways at Denver International Airport to put on an unforgettable show last week.

"This is what happens when State Street Ballet has a 5-hour layover haha," dancer Nick Topet wrote on Facebook.

The group was in town for a performance of "The Nutcracker." 

Check it out in the clip above. 

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It was an “easy” touch-up, transforming an old tattoo into something new, but for one Canadian couple, the change represented a show of support and love for their transgender son.

Steve Peace, a Calgary-based tattoo artist, gave his wife, Lindsay, three tattoos more than a decade ago. Each piece of ink featured a portrait of one of their three children -- Elliot, Hamish and Ace.

Lindsay recently decided to have the tattoos touched up, but the image of Ace, their eldest son, needed extra work. 

The original portrait showed a girl wearing pigtails and a pink dress. It was created before Ace, now 15, had come out as trans.

Lindsay says the original tattoo had made her son “sad.”

“As our oldest child Ace is FTM transgender we need to update the tattoo to fully represent who he is in his happy new awesome life,” Steve wrote on Facebook.

So, the dad went to work: 

As the photo shows, Steve created a new portrait of Ace that better captured his son’s identity. The pink dress was turned into a blue T-shirt and shorts while the purple flower was transformed into a slingshot.

“A lot of trans people don’t like pictures of themselves from their past,” Steve told BuzzFeed. “That’s one that sort of walked around with us, as a family.”

Once the new portrait was complete, Steve and Lindsay surprised Ace with the fresh ink. 

The teen, who came out to his family about a year ago, was over the moon. 

“It made me really happy. I didn’t realize how much she believed me. It finally fits,” Ace told Global News. 

Steve admitted that raising a transgender child can be challenging at times, but said he and his wife were committed to supporting their son “100 percent.”

“You have to support your kids. I mean, it's tough when you hear that as a parent, but you have to be strong for your kids. You have to come to terms with it yourself, on your own time and just have to offer 100 percent support,” he told HuffPost Alberta.

“I would never wish for him to be anybody else,” Lindsay told Global News of Ace. “He’s just so brave.”

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A seven-part photo series about a Syrian family whose home was destroyed by missiles elicited thousands of comments on Facebook this week, including a heartfelt message of support from President Barack Obama himself. Now, the viral Humans of New York post has helped raise nearly half a million dollars for the refugee family ahead of their move to America.

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If you can remember your dreams, chances are you're intrigued by them. Whether it's their utter mundaneness (your basic work dream) or their surrealism (your basic "eaten by a neon sea creature" dream), your dreams might be on your mind all day long. 

If you have a hard time understanding your dreams, you're certainly not alone. We've been trying to pin down the reason we dream for a very long time, but there's still a lot we don't know.

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud theorized that our dreams are symbolic representations of our primitive thoughts, urges and desires. In 2010, researchers hypothesized that our dreams help us remember things. Watch the TED-Ed video above to hear five other science-backed theories about what happens in our heads at night.

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It's both the blessing and the curse of the modern book lover: great titles come out at lightning speed each month in buzzy lists and flashy blurbs. We add them to our reading queues, promising to check out each interesting one when there's time, but as the churn of publishing never stops, we soon realize there's simply never enough time.

That interesting book about Beanie Baby economics is forgotten for the Ta-Nehisi Coates that finally came in for you at the library, or the latest Ferrante that your friend pushed into your hands.

Alas, don't punish yourself for having obligations outside reading 24/7 that prevent you from absorbing all of the books. Instead, rejoice at the wide range of literary options we have each year (added to the many still available to read from the last thousand few thousand years of the written word -- no pressure, though). If you're looking at the calendar and realizing you're craving the voyeuristic pleasure of getting in another's head, or want to stock up on fun facts to share at the holiday office party, these 20 options published in the last 12 months will do you good. 

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In her day-to-day life, Lee Godie was a homeless woman who made a living selling paintings on chilly Chicago streets. She kept her belongings in various lockers throughout the city, showered in hotel bathrooms, and slept outside on benches despite freezing weather.

However, in her self-portraits, taken in a photo booth at the Chicago Greyhound bus station, Godie transforms into a 1920s-era "It Girl," dramatically dressed in furs, broaches and floppy hats, posed lackadaisically like the most glamorous of movie stars. With each individual ensemble and pose, a new, glitzy character is born.

It's the palpable tension between the two lives of Godie -- the struggling drifter and the sought after art star -- that makes her images enchanting. She adorned the small black-and-white prints with various embellishments, sometimes pen or paint, other times eyeliner and lipstick smudged in the appropriate spots. On occasion, Godie rubbed instant tea on her face as a pseudo self-tanner. 

Her images' overzealous beautification only emphasizes the hardship awaiting Godie outside the photo booth. Her glazed eyes and gristly flesh bely her megastar persona, resulting in a jumbled vision depicting both rags and riches and nothing in between. 

"I don't celebrate my birthday," Godie once said. "I celebrate my status as an artist."

Aside from illuminating Godie's private nature, the statement also captures the way Godie invites her fabricated mythology to subsume her personal history, renouncing her natural date of birth in favor of her eternal reign as a beloved artist.

According to popular legend, Godie's tenure as an artist in began 1968, when, at around 60 years old, she was rocked to the core by an Impressionism exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Shortly after the show, all shaken and sweaty, Godie stood on the steps and publicly declared herself a French Impressionist, one "much better than Cezanne," at that. 

From then on, she painted. A lot. Godie's paintings are flattened portraits of high society ladies, wide-eyed beauties with wide-brimmed hats, smokey makeup and cherry red lips. From her self-proclaimed inauguration into the art world in 1968 until 1990, when she was 82 years old, Godie peddled her work every day on the Chicago streets, carrying her portfolio around in a big black case.

Her paintings sold for around $20 or $30 -- if she liked you, that is. "She would have her canvases half uncurled," gallery-owner Carl Hammer explained to The Telegraph. "If she was interested in selling to you, she would let [the canvas] open up so you could see more. If she didn’t like you, she would curl it up the other way."

During the course of her career Godie became an iconic figure in the Chicago art scene, known for galavanting about in a toga one day, a fur coat the next. She'd sing and dance when interacting with her fans, adding a performative element to her tireless art making. 

On the website "Your Memories of Lee Godie," strangers share their favorite interactions with the artist. "For three years I worked in City Hall for the Chicago Department of Water," Ronald D. Fetman reminisced. "After midnight each day when my shift was done I would walk home to my apartment. As I passed by the area around 666 North Michigan Avenue, I would see Lee Godie asleep for the night in the courtyard on a concrete bench between the two huge skyscrapers, clutching her large black portfolio case. It was, more often than not, freezing, sub-zero weather. Needless to say, Lee was a tough woman."

Despite her exuberant charisma and propensity for performance, Godie was private about the details of her personal life. According to Black Sheep Gallery, Godie was married with three children before her art career began. Her marriage disintegrated and two of her children passed away, all of which potentially contributed to her life on the streets. In 1988, Godie was reunited with her daughter Bonnie Blank, and eventually moved in with her child after being diagnosed with dementia. She stayed until her death in 1994. 

Godie's life was characterized by a paradoxical duality. On the one hand were her dreams of grandeur, made up of artistic notoriety and eternal elegance. And then there was the reality of life on the street, full of unspoken tragedies and unimaginable struggle. Forty years ago Godie may have seemed delusional, parading around the city proclaiming herself an artist extraordinaire. And now, of course, Godie has become the myth she always propagated, an exhibiting artists whose works sell for $15,000 instead of $20. 

Looking back, Godie's self-portraits engage with a legacy of theatrical photography that includes Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who imagined her subjects as classical, religious, and literary figures; Ana Mendieta, who transformed her body into hybridized natural forms; and Cindy Sherman, who revamped her photographic image to resemble the various roles women play. Today, many artists, especially those from marginalized and silenced communities, are using the selfie as a a weapon of change, employing the photographic self-portrait as a site of personal transformation and widespread revolution.

Now, Godie is remembered as a masterful outsider artist -- an artist operating outside of the mainstream art world. Yet unlike most artists in the genre, Godie was all too conscious of her status as an artist. She had a knowledge of and passion for art history, and was often spotted roaming the Chicago Art Institute or public library. 

"She was hyper aware of the art world, hyper aware of being an artist," Karen Patterson explained to Brut Force. "Her whole life was dedicated to being an artist."

In the end, her striking images didn't just create a character for the duration of Godie's pose, they shaped a mythology that is now inextricably linked to her persona and legacy. In the face of Godie's enchanting and jarring portraits, the dark details of her life fade away. The facts are now the legends. The legend is now the fact.  

"Lee Godie: Self-Portraits" runs until February 8, 2016 at John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin.

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At last, the big week is here. After more than a year's worth of teasers, magazine covers and cryptic plot hints, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is mere days from being unleashed upon the globe. Some pundits say it could become the highest-grossing movie of all time -- a fate no one would have predicted in the early blockbuster days of 1977, even after the first installment surpassed "Jaws" to set its own box-office record. And before it was subtitled "Episode IV: A New Hope" (that didn't occur until its 1981 re-release, a year after "The Empire Strikes Back" opened), the original "Star Wars" was the subject of unprecedented frenzy. Critics, for the most part, adored the film, calling it "spellbinding" and "quietly sophisticated." While George Lucas' space opera was not without detractors (hiya, Pauline Kael), the Oscars followed suit with 10 nominations, including Best Picture.

Will the Force be as strong when it awakens in theaters on Thursday night? While you wait to find out, here's what critics said about the original "Star Wars."

• "The true stars of 'Star Wars' are John Barry, who was responsible for the production design, and the people who were responsible for the incredible special effects -- space ships, explosions of stars, space battles, hand-to-hand combat with what appear to be lethal neon swords. I have a particular fondness for the look of the interior of a gigantic satellite called the Death Star, a place full of the kind of waste space one finds today only in old Fifth Avenue mansions and public libraries." -- Vincent Canby, The New York Times

• "The most fascinating single scene, for me, was the one set in the bizarre saloon on the planet Tatooine. As that incredible collection of extraterrestrial alcoholics and bug-eyed martini drinkers lined up at the bar, and as Lucas so slyly let them exhibit characteristics that were universally human, I found myself feeling a combination of admiration and delight. 'Star Wars' had placed me in the presence of really magical movie invention: Here, all mixed together, were whimsy and fantasy, simple wonderment and quietly sophisticated storytelling." -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

• "There’s no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the double sunset. It’s enjoyable on its own terms, but it’s exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. An hour into it, children say that they’re ready to see it again; that’s because it’s an assemblage of spare parts -- it has no emotional grip." -- Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

• "Lucas combines excellent comedy and drama and progresses it with exciting action on tremendously effective space battles. Likeable heroes on noble missions and despicable villains capable of the most dastardly deeds are all wrapped up in some of the most spectacular special effects ever to illuminate a motion picture screen. The result is spellbinding and totally captivating on all levels." -- Ron Pennington, The Hollywood Reporter

• “'Star Wars' is not a great movie in the sense that it describes the human condition. It simply is a fun picture that will appeal to those who enjoy Buck Rogers-style adventures. What places it a sizable cut above the routine it is spectacular visual effects, the best since Stanley Kubrick’s '2001.'" -- Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune

• “'Star Wars' is dense, compressed like good poetry, without any wasted sound or motion. It is utterly simplistic and at the same time totally sophisticated.” -- Joseph Gelmis, Newsday

• "Above all, there is Alec Guinness as an ancient sage, looking like a monk who has walked a long way; dressed in a brown habit, he seems to have come to us from the Bible. In the end, he dies that we should live. He knows the power of the Force, which is the film’s word for what is sometimes called 'the life force.' When the power is used for moral ends, it seems to be the power of belief and devoutness in the face of unbelief and evil. The good shepherd gives his life for his sheep." -- Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker

• "Surrounded by these fascinating creatures, the actors barely hold their own. To be sure, Mark Hamill has a bland-faced innocence as Skywalker, and Carrie Fisher is comically plucky as the distressed Princess Leia, but Harrison Ford hams it up terribly as Han Solo, a cynical space pirate who has 'flown from one side of this galaxy to another and seen a lot of stuff.'" -- Kathleen Carroll, New York Daily News

• "'Star Wars' is not without content, but reaches as well for an area as embraceable by children or teenagers as by us older folks. With the opening declaration, it stakes out its turf: It will be a wonderful adventure, a fairy tale, a contemporary 'Star Trek,' a stylish 'Space: 1999' that will whisk us on the magic carpet of our imagination and Lucas' vision to a time and space where spaceships exceeding the speed of light are flown by anthropoids, where slavers deal in hot robots and where chess games are played with mini monsters instead of rooks and pawns. -- John Wasserman, The San Francisco Chronicle

• "Carrie Fisher, previously in a small role in 'Shampoo,' is delightful as the regal, but spunky princess on a rebel planet who has been kidnapped by Peter Cushing, would-be ruler of the universe. Mark Hamill, previously a TV player, is excellent as a farm boy who sets out to rescue Fisher in league with Alec Guinness, last survivor of a band of noble knights. Harrison Ford, previously in Lucas’ 'American Graffiti' and Francis Coppola’s 'The Conversation,' is outstanding as a likeable mercenary pilot who joins our friends with his pal Peter Mayhew, a quassi-monkey creature with blue eyes whom Fisher calls 'a walking rug.'" -- A.D. Murphy, Variety

 • “Strip ‘Star Wars’ of its often striking images and its highfalutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality, without even a ‘future’ cast to them: Human beings, anthropoids, or robots, you could probably find them all, more or less like that, in downtown Los Angeles today. Certainly the mentality and values of the movie can be duplicated in third-rate non-science fiction of any place or period. … ‘Star Wars’ will do very nicely for those lucky enough to be children or unlucky enough never to have grown up.” -- John Simon, New York magazine 

• "'Star Wars' is Buck Rogers with a doctoral degree but not a trace of neuroticism or cynicism, a slam-bang, rip-roaring gallop through a distantly future world full of exotic vocabularies, creatures and customs, existing cheek by cowl with the boy and girl next door and a couple of friendly leftovers from the planet of the apes and possibly one from Oz (a Tin Woodman robot who may have got a gold-plating as a graduation present). -- Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times

• "The special effects in this film may be something the screen has never seen before. The spaceship battles are imaginatively extrapolated from World War II, and the film team travelled to remote parts of the world to find convincing settings for alien planets. ... The scriptwriter (George Lucas) wrote five separate drafts before he was satisfied (imagine one of those B-feature fellows doing that!), and the effect is to persuade us that there is little in this film which may not one day happen in real life." -- Adrian Berry, The Telegraph

• "There's something depressing about seeing all these impressive cinematic gifts and all this extraordinary technological skills lavished on such puerile materials. Perhaps more important is what this seems to accomplish: the canonization of comic book culture which in turn becomes the triumph of the standardized, the simplistic, mass-produced commercial artifacts of our time." -- Joy Gould Boyum, The Wall Street Journal

• "It remains the most appealing film in the subgenre it launched, with its finger on something basic and satisfying." -- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

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Fans of singer, songwriter and "squad" queen Taylor Swift can now count themselves as crowd-sourced "authors."

Simon & Schuster announced Sunday -- T. Swift's birthday -- that it will publish a scrapbook-like title named, designed and compiled by Swift's fans. The release date for the unnamed book is set for October 24, 2016.

The book will have one “honorary author” -- a fan who wins a contest arranged by the publisher by submitting a three-minute video announcing her (or his!) fandom. The publisher referred to said author as a “super-Swiftie,” but did not specify whether the fan can already be a member of T. Swift’s squad.

The winner of the authorship contest will also receive $10,000, which is significantly less than an author of a bestselling book about Taylor Swift could potentially make. To compare, Lena Dunham's memoir racked up a record-setting $3.7 million advance.

Actually, the whole scheme is a little diabolical: asking fans to contribute to the book is sure to bolster sales, while incurring minimal costs. But, the concept of a crowd-sourced book -- not totally unprecedented in the literary fiction realm -- is a fresh approach for a living artist’s pseudo-biography. Certainly, it’s more impressive a feat than living writer Jonathan Franzen’s recent pseudo-biography, which, according to its author, is more of an “update on who he is.”

The Taylor Swift book will be a little different than, say, Neil Gaiman’s crowd-sourced short story collection, for which his followers tweeted lines of prose to include. Instead, Swifties can visit swiftfanbook.com and submit fan art, suggest favorite Q&As or profiles, and generally gush.

Without one designated author, or even a list of contributors, the project calls into question what a book can be. Is this fandom-fueled collage a brilliant post-modern mashup subverting our notions of chronology and authorship? Probably not. But it might be a fun collection to flip through, or to keep on a glittery, girl power-y coffee table.

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The Internet is a complicated space for most young women. One the one hand, it's a site of frequent abuse, where women's bodies are passed around like objects, criticized without recourse, violently threatened and harassed. And yet, the web also carves out a realm for incredible creativity, community, activism and inspiration.

As both a concentrated mirror of sexism as it exists offline, and a stage to bring personal issues into the public sphere, the Internet has become a powerful place for feminism to declare its home base. 

In his new documentary film "The F Word," filmmaker Robert Adanto highlights the contemporary artists using new media to bring fourth-wave feminism to the World Wide Web. Whether they are promiscuous, prude, pro athlete, porn star, selfie-addict, devout Christian, theorist, cheerleader -- these fourth wavers believe the only truly feminist choice is a choice a woman makes freely for herself. So bring on the hair flipping, vocal fry, cleavage, baby talk and whatever other traditionally maligned feminine habits you please. There's no shame in being a womanly woman or girly girl. 

"Feminism as these women define it is very different from what you'll get in soundbites on the news," filmmaker Adanto explained to The Huffington Post. "I think we've demeaned that word as a culture. It remains the 'F word.'"

Through video, performance, photography and a combination of the three, the featured artists make art that is powerful because of, not in spite of, their gender. Much of this is achieved by exploring dynamics of the feminine body, the domestic space, gender roles and sexuality. Following in the footsteps of '60s art queens like Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneemann, the artists blur the line between their lives, their bodies and their work. 

"I wanted to create a mosaic of feminist performance," Adanto said. "At first I was looking specifically at Brooklyn but as I was starting to put things together, I realized a big part of the fourth wave is online. Why should I limit this to Brooklyn if we're talking about the digital world?"

The structure of the film falls somewhere between, according to Adanto, an essay and a curated exhibition. He brings this up when asked if he feels uncomfortable about a man controlling the narrative of these young female artists. "I let them explain what their work is," Adanto replied. "I make choices, of course, with choosing different photos that illustrate or bolster the claims they make. But I allow people to say what they believe, and I'm just putting it together." 

Adanto's targets audience is an audience who learns about feminism from the news, not their gender theory classes. The same goes for their knowledge of contemporary art. "I didn't want to make a film for the marginalized feminist art cliques," he said. "I'm championing art making. I think human beings are at their best when they are creating meaning from raw materials or from their imagination outward. I think that's our higher purpose. More people should care about art, and they don't!"

Meet the artists of "The F Word" below. 

1. Narcissister

Narcissister, never seen without her Barbie mannequin mask, stages sexual, burlesque-inspired performances about the roles women play and, of course, tear down. "Narcissister is nobody," she said in an interview with VICE. "It is a plastic mask that is only animated by the person who is wearing it. The mask becomes a mirror and it’s very rare for artists to make themselves a mirror. It’s so much more common that we get absorbed into them. Into their subjectivity."

2. Ann Hirsch

Hirsch is a video and performance artist whose work explores the intersection of technology, sex and gender. Her virtual play "Twelve," which lived on an iPhone app until it was censored and taken offline, follows a 12-year-old girl who starts up a virtual relationship with a 27-year-old man on AOL Instant messenger. 

"It was worse when I first started and there wasn’t any dialogue about any of this," she said in an interview with New York Magazine. "I had art professors who were like, You shouldn’t be doing this. You’re smarter than this. More recently, there’s been more discussion. Selfie is a word everyone knows. We’re really changing how we view narcissism and showing ourselves and what that means, and there’s more interest in that, especially in the art world."

3. RAFiA Santana

Santana creates dreamy, Afrocentric self-portraits that take the selfie from banal self-documentation to a mode of cosmic transcendence. 

"Anybody who thinks selfies are only vain wants to reduce the importance of a human being. I am not sure where the judgment comes from," she said in an earlier interview with HuffPost. "We should all be reflective of ourselves whether we are in a good place or bad place. Selfies help to bring us out of a bad place to uplift ourselves and connect with others."

4. Kate Durbin

Durbin is a writer and performance artist whose work bridges the gap between private and public, personal and political, especially as it pertains to femininity. Her series "Cloud 9" invited female-identifying artists to confess the strangest things they've done for money to supplement their art careers.

She explained to HuffPost: "I started to notice everything in the world around me that had to do with art and money, and I paid attention to it, instead of ignoring it -- instead of believing in the fantasy that these were all 'individual failings,' that none of these people were 'good enough' artists to make it."

5. Rebecca Goyette

Goyette is a multidisciplinary artists whose sex-centric work explores kink, fantasy, queerness and taboo. Through her alter-ego Lobsta Girl, Goyette partakes in deliciously bizarre lobster pornos that play with power dynamics, non-normative roles and the psychology of desire.

"I draw inspiration from what I see that’s very structured and conservative in art, I draw inspiration from that, I also get inspiration from history," she told Posture Mag. "I’m nerding out on Puritan history all of the time. I like to read a lot of non-fiction."

6. Sadaf

Sadaf is a DJ and multimedia artist who operates between the languages of experimental DIY and mainstream celebrity. As she explained to The Quietus: "I think at this point culturally, we're at a place where being confined to one genre is conservative in my opinion! Whether that's the umbrella of experimental, or the umbrella of pop. I really wanted to challenge what both those genres imply and mix them up a little bit."

7. Leah Schrager

Schrager is a photographer whose eroticized self-portraits present the selfie as a means of providing a woman complete creative and economic control over her body. For her performance project "Naked Therapy," Schrager assumed the identity of therapist Sarah White, and lead therapy sessions in the nude.

"Freud was a male therapist and had created a version of therapy to match female sexuality (hysteria)," she told AnimalNY. "I was a female therapist and had created a version of therapy to address male sexuality. Plus, I felt there had to be something to the fact that there are tons of images of naked women online -- I thought there was something about nakedness in a woman to a (heterosexual) man that is essential, therapeutic, and driven by evolution." 

8. Rachel Mason

Mason is a multidisciplinary artist whose recent experimental rock opera, "The Lives of Hamilton Fish," was inspired by a 1936 newspaper front page on which two men named Hamilton Fish were pronounced dead. One was a statesman, the other a child serial killer. "Over the course of nearly a decade I imagined how these two men might have met and wove together an imaginary story which took me along a journey into places including Sing Sing Prison and The American Society of Psychical Research," she told AnimalNY.

9 & 10. Go!PushPops (Elisa Garcia de la Huerta and Katie Cercone)

Go!PushPops is a radical, transnational queer feminist art collective that uses the female body as a mode of resistance and celebration. Led by Elisa Garcia de la Huerta and Katie Cercone, the sex-positive community embraces non-mainstream influences including yoga, shamanism, witchcraft and hip hop. This summer, the collective hosted a Beach Babylon Feminist Prayer Service, a topless women's ritual that included no shortage of chanting, drinking herbal infusions, and "conducting sacred miracles." 

11. Damali Abrams

Abrams is a video artist whose work incorporates elements of performance and collage. Her ongoing fictional television network, "Self-Help TV," riffs off the mainstream language of self-help and self-improvement while paying attention to how race, class, personal history and other elements affect one's wellbeing.

"Collaboration is a really amazing way to learn about art and myself," she said in an interview with Delve. "I learn so much from everyone that I collaborate with. I guess the most valuable lesson is to keep an open mind as well as an open heart and really use the opportunity to get out of my comfort zone and try new things."

12. Claudia Bitran

Bitran is a multidisciplinary artist whose pop culture-laced works combine obsessive fandom with a taste of the uncanny. For her "Britney" series, Bitran recreates iconic Britney Spears videos, rendering a DIY copy of the sets, including perfectly memorized choreography. 

13. Faith Holland

Holland is a multidisciplinary artist whose works explore topics like beauty, porn, cats and the Internet. Her "Porn Interventions" series is a collection of site-specific videos made for porn site RedTube, in which Holland employs and subverts pornographic tropes to yield a mix of arousal, frustration and absurdity. 

"My relationship to porn is always evolving," she told AQNB, "particularly since I’ve been looking at SO MUCH for these projects. I’ve never been anti-pornography, and for me that’s a really important factor to consider in relation to my work. But I do find faults in pornography -- its homogeneity, its production that targets heterosexual male audiences, its privileging of thin white cis-women’s bodies and the fetishization of all other bodies. So I try to make interventions into some of these problems through my work to open up a dialogue about porn’s biases and the potential for better porn. It’s meant as a loving critique."

14. Michelle Marie Charles

Charles is a video artist whose catchy and glitchy videos spoof mainstream hip hop music videos. Charles herself plays a variety of roles, thus subverting the objectifying space normally reserved for black women in rap videos. Lines such as "Girl, I love you so / for all your emotional attributes such as your titties" illuminate the pitfalls of the genre in a critical yet loving manner. 

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The holidays are a hectic time for parents. Between the decorating, caroling, shopping, cookie-baking, Elf on the Shelf-moving and Santa secret-keeping, there's a lot to keep up with. 

But moms and dads can take comfort in knowing they're not alone. Some creative illustrators have channeled their parenting frustrations and Yuletide observations into hilarious cartoons. 

Here are 14 cartoons that capture the chaos and hilarity of the holiday season.

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StreetMusicMap is an online platform that incorporates Instagram's sharing capacities to bring together street musicians from across the world, with the goal of giving greater exposure to their music.

If you’re walking down the street and you happen to catch the tail end of a street performance, but the artists leave before you find out more information about them, the street music map might be able to help you identify them.

The platform is open to anyone; a passersby can send in 15-second videos, identifying the musicians' names or the address where they spotted them, via email or by adding the hashtag #streetmusicmap on Facebook or Instagram. Artists can also benefit by connecting directly with their fans and potentially draw the attention of talent scouts. So far, StreetMusicMap has a strong presence on social media platforms, further incorporating Spotify playlists and Google Maps to expand the global ambitions of its project.

StreetMusicMap is the brainchild  of Daniel Bacchieri, who in 2013 began posting videos of street performers on his personal Instagram account. His first "audio portrait" was of a Ukrainian band from Kiev. But it was only when Daniel moved to São Paulo in Brazil that he had the idea to launch a platform dedicated to featuring buskers. "I passed through the Consolação subway station on Paulista Avenue every day, which is one of the places visited most frequently by street performers, and I decided to start recording some of the musicians," he told HuffPost Italy.

"My friends really liked the video series I was making, and they started sending me videos they recorded on their travels everywhere," he said. Thus, the StreetMusicMap community was born.

"It was my best friend, Max Laux, who told me I should create an Instagram account,” Bacchieri remembers. He believes that there are really talented street musicians out there, and he hopes StreetMusicMap could help producers track down new talent.

"Streets are the perfect places for musical performances, but in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, we often happen upon amazing artists without even taking notice of them,” he says. “That is why it’s important to share their music, taking them from the street to all across the world on the Internet."

Today, StreetMusicMap has over 22,000 followers and 1,000 posts on Instagram. The project is also very active on YouTube. Bacchierei says that social media serves as business cards for these artists. "We want to create a bridge between artists, fans and producers. Everybody has to work together." 

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We’ve all fallen for it before. We’re sitting at home in our stain-covered, leopard-print Snuggies eating peanut butter straight for the jar when a gorgeous picture of our high school friend pops up in our Instagram or Facebook feed. She looks healthy and happy holding hands with a man in a park on a bright, sunny day.

It makes us feel like complete losers.

Yet, for most of us, this is just a knee-jerk reaction. By the time we’ve licked all the peanut butter off our teeth, we know that time, effort -- and maybe a tiny bit of manipulation -- had to be put into such a powerful image.

So we take off our Snuggies, put on some clothes, go to a park and take 46 pictures of ourselves sipping a latte under a leafy canopy of fall foliage until we get that one picture-perfect snapshot, post it online and the circle is complete. Some other peanut butter-eating fool feels like a failure. 

Hồ Anh Đức of Vietnam was sick of this cycle, and decided to burst the bubble of lies with a funny video revealing what it really takes to create these images. 

And some of his behind-the-scenes footage is pretty hilarious.

This isn't the first time someone has exposed the raw side of filtered online images. Thailand-based photographer Chompoo Baritone posted images on her Facebook wall last September that made fun of what Instagram photos look like without clever cropping. Limitless, a Singapore-based tech company, uploaded an album on their Facebook wall called “Broken India” that reveals the unglamorous side of travel photography.

“We really wanted to strike a raw nerve,” Limitless told Buzzfeed at the time. “Because only when people realize the state of affairs and break out of their comfort zones, is when they can start to make a difference.”

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RENO, Nev. (AP) — Organizers of the Burning Man counter-culture celebration are challenging the enforcement of a Nevada state tax that they say could cost them nearly $3 million.

Burning Man officials said in a letter to the state Department of Taxation on Friday that the festival should be exempt from the recently amended tax on live entertainment, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported Saturday.

The 25-year-old annual arts festival attracted about 80,000 participants this year to the Black Rock Desert 100 miles north of Reno.

Burning Man attorney Ray Allen said the 9 percent tax would translate into a tax bill of about $2.8 million. He said the tax is known by some as the "Burning Man tax."

"From our perspective, this is the latest attempt by an outside entity to unfairly tap the resources of Burning Man and its participants," event organizers said in a statement posted on their web site. "Some seem to view Burning Man as the 'golden goose' they can turn to when they want money for other projects."

Burning Man officials said they will not set 2016 ticket prices until they hear back from the taxation department because they could be forced to bump up the cost of entry to the temporary village dubbed "Black Rock City." They urged the department to respond by Jan. 15.

In June, the Legislature approved a revised version of the live entertainment tax, which originally came into law in 2004 as a way for the state to gain revenue from Las Vegas's robust live entertainment industry. The revised version became effective Oct. 1. 

Certain events — including school, sporting, racing and nonprofit events attended by fewer than 7,500 people — remain exempt from the tax. Burning Man and the Electric Daisy Carnival, a music festival held in Las Vegas, were the two largest events newly affected by the change.

Burning Man maintains it should be treated as it has historically during the weeklong celebration that culminates with the burning of a towering, wooden effigy the day before Labor Day.

"Black Rock City is not an arena concert, a sporting event or a Las Vegas show; it's a thriving metropolis with all the trappings of a functioning temporary city, with people camping, cooking meals, visiting neighbors, and exploring the offerings of its citizens," the organization said in its online statement.

"While the Burning Man organization provides the space and basic infrastructure for Black Rock City, we simply don't provide live entertainment as defined by the statute."

Burning Man previously was exempt because it was an outdoor event, said ex-House Speaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick, D-Las Vegas, who co-sponsored the bill in March. No other newly affected organization, including the Electric Daisy Carnival, had qualms with paying the tax, she said.

As is, the tax brings in about $137 million annually, most of which goes toward the state's general fund. About $150,000 will go toward the Nevada Arts Council in the future.

"It's just a sign of the times. Entertainment has changed," Kirkpatrick said. "There's no way we could have predicted in 2003 that there would be an event like Burning Man. It's disappointing that they take it so personal."

Burning Man previously stated that an increase in ticket prices may be necessary to cover the tax. General admission tickets in 2015 were $390, a $10 increase from 2014.

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Art experts are currently examining a mysterious painting housed in a St. Petersburg private collection, believed to be a second version of Leonardo da Vinci's iconic "Mona Lisa." As usual, Mona herself is being quite coy on the topic. 

Currently, the assertion that this very Mona Lisa-esque Russian portrait is actually Mona Lisa's kin is only hypothesis, though research coordinator Silvano Vinceti maintains that there is sufficient evidence indicating the work is authentic.

The Russian Mona looks very similar to the Italian Mona. In fact, to the untrained eye, they're almost identical. One clear difference, however, is visible in the Russian Mona's backdrop, taking the form of two columns framing the canvas. However, while these columns aren't present in the final Italian Mona by Leonardo, they are present in some preparatory sketches leading up to his piece.

"When comparing the preparatory study from the Louvre and the Russian painting, the overlap between the two was clear to see," Carlo Pedretti, a leading Leonardo expert, told The Daily Mail. "[It's clear from] the columns, present in the Russian painting and in the preparatory study, but also in the perfect resemblance between the upper lip in the preparatory study, the Russian painting, and the 'Mona Lisa' in the Louvre." 

Pedretti has developed new software to analyze the two Monas. Initially, he intended to use the technology to examine the original more intensely, yet the tools ended up providing valuable insight for evaluating the two Monas in comparison. Further research, including a paint analysis dating the work, will hopefully illuminate whether the work was created by Leonardo himself, or one of his devoted pupils.

This news comes less than a week after the latest Mona Lisa mystery, suggesting there lies a second, hidden portrait beneath the work we've come to know and love. While "Mona Lisa" is commonly thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the Florentine silk merchant, French scientist Pascal Cotte believes the hidden portrait depicts Lisa, while "Mona Lisa" is based on someone else entirely. 

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Dancing is so much fun, which is one of the many reasons we're glad it's also an excellent form of exercise. And ballet in particular has become one of the hottest workouts around. 

Thanks to the popularity of body-sculpting barre classes, the mind-blowing fusion of ballet and pop music, and badass ballerinas like Misty Copeland, we're sure there are probably a few gals in your life that are as ballet obsessed as we are. So why not help them twirl through life with a few great ballet-inspired holiday gifts? 

Whether they're a serious dancer or more of a barre class ballerina, this gear will keep their style on pointe both in the studio and on the street. Check 'em out below!

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In an interview with Man of the World magazine, Man Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James revealed his next book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, will kick off a series to rival Tolkien and George R.R. Martin. 

The author described the work as "an African Game of Thrones." For fantasy fans who delight in intricate world-building, James teases it all: "One hundred pages describing a village? Hell yeah," he told the magazine. "Two hundred pages on a mysterious dwarf race that lives underground?" Yes, there's that too.

Should anyone doubt whether he has what it takes to invest fantasy with literary panache and convincing detail, a perusal of his 2014 prize-winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, should lay any hesitations to rest.  

Brief History -- a thick, sprawling story of Jamaican post-colonial politics, organized crime and the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 -- speaks through a cacophonous cast of fully realized characters, bringing the era and the corrupt machinations of its governing bodies vibrantly off the page.

High fantasy hardly seems the likely next step after such a bold work of historical literary fiction, but James has his reasons to, as he told Man of the World, "geek the fuck out."

"I realized how sick and tired I was of arguing about whether there should be a black hobbit in Lord of the Rings," he said.

Lack of diversity in fantasy works have long been a pain point for many readers. Many fantasy series, like LoTR and A Song of Ice and Fire, take place in a world that resembles a medieval Europe; still, it's hard to swallow the argument that a black hobbit or elf would be more fantastical than the orcs and dragons that do populate Middle Earth and Westeros. 

With his nascent series, James is abandoning this argument and taking another, much-needed tack: He's taking Europe out of the blueprint. "African folklore is just as rich, and just as perverse as that shit," he told the magazine. "We have witches, we have demons, we have goblins, and mad kings. We have stories of royal succession that would put Wolf Hall to shame."

With all due respect to European lore, and the many fantasy worlds it's inspired, James has a major point. Black Leopard, Red Wolf won't be the first fantasy book to venture outside that mold, but here's hoping there's an HBO show, and a lot more space for multiculturally inspired fantasy worlds, in the offing.

H/T Time

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Another day, another hashtag.

On Monday, #CivilRightsTwitter emerged to jokingly explore what social media could have been like had it existed during the Civil Rights Movement back in the 1960s.

Twitter users are sharing photos of Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Angela Davis, with fictional quotes in 2015's style and lingo. The tweets, full of "Netflix & chill" and Drake references, have taken over Twitter.

See some below: 

But some on the Twitter-verse aren't 100 percent on board with the hashtag. 

What are your thoughts about #civilrightstwitter?

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