I’ll admit it: I’m an unabashed Apple fanboy. I spent far too much on a Macbook Pro with specs that would cost half as much in the Windows world, I love my pair of ridiculous-looking and easily misplaced AirPods and I may or may not have a box full o…
The first three episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale are now available on Hulu; we’ve already given our thoughts on the series, which remains mostly faithful to Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel of the same name, but there are some changes, some big, some small, that separate the two—and we’ve broken them down for you…
It’s going to get easier to delete your Uber account and all the data associated with it, as the ride-sharing firm finally updates one of its more controversial aspects. The service repeatedly made headlines over the past few months, in no small part down to the behavior – and political side-projects – of Uber founder Travis Kalanick. It even spawned … Continue reading
NASA has taken the wraps off its new LEGO Ideas 21309 NASA Apollo Saturn V kit, a model that was designed by Felix Stiessen and Valeri Roche for LEGO Ideas. The kit features a 1:110-scale replica of the NASA Apollo Saturn V rocket, which measures in at about a meter tall. This was the notable rocket that first put humans … Continue reading
Elon Musk’s The Boring Company may have a drab name, but details on the billionaire’s project to dig tunnels under LA and send cars shuttling through at high speed are anything but dull. Musk outlined some of what he has in mind today, speaking at the TED conference. As you might expect, these are no simple tunnels you drive in … Continue reading
Todd Ray is freaking out, and with good reason.
The owner of the Los Angeles-based Venice Beach Freakshow is being forced to close the doors after 11 years of showing off human anomalies like the world’s hairiest man, people who can regurgitate metal balls and the world’s largest collection of two-headed animals.
The last show at its Venice Beach location is on Sunday, and Ray says he’s being pushed out by Snapchat.
“It’s been an ongoing thing for the past eight months,” Ray told HuffPost. “Snapchat started buying buildings in the area. At first, nothing changed, but we were coming to the end of a five-year lease and the landlord told us they weren’t renewing.”
Snapchat reportedly has been interested in the building that houses the Freakshow since last year, and had a right of first refusal when the space became available, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal.
But Snapchat told The Argonaut that it is only interested in the top two floors, not the retail space that currently houses the Freakshow. The tech giant also said it is unaffiliated with Snapshot Partners, the company reportedly leasing the space.
Neither Snapchat nor Snapshot Partners immediately replied to a request for comment from HuffPost.
SnapChat’s reported building buy-up of funky Venice Beach frustrates Ray, and not just because he believes it’s forcing him to pack up and move.
“They’re buying up the boardwalk because they liked the vibe,” he said. “But they’re killing the vibe.”
Ray hoped to buy some time and at least operate the Freakshow through the summer.
“It was the worst winter of the 11 years we’ve been in business,” he said. “I asked [the landlords], ‘Can we get to June?’ Then I asked, ‘Can we get to Memorial Day?’”
Ray’s request was denied. That means Sunday’s show is the last until Ray can find a new space for the show.
He prefers to think of it as a celebration, rather than a funeral. On Facebook, Ray promises that the final show, which he’s calling a “Farewell Party and Protest,” will include performers, stunts, music and the wedding of Jessa the Bearded Lady.
Meanwhile, Ray has to pack up a lot of weird stuff, including a jar that holds the corpse of a two-headed baby.
“I have these displays and some delicate pieces that are all packed up for storage,” he said.
Ray hopes he can find another place in Venice Beach for the Freakshow. If that doesn’t happen, he’s willing to look at other places, including Las Vegas.
Regardless of any relocation, Ray thinks the spirit of the Freakshow will remain in Venice Beach where it started.
“You can buy the property, but you can’t buy Venice Beach and its spirit,” he told The Argonaut.
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President Donald Trump on Friday said he intends to appoint Charmaine Yoest, a prominent anti-abortion advocate, as assistant secretary of public affairs for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Yoest, who was a Trump campaign surrogate, is the former president and CEO of Americans United for Life, an advocacy group chipping away at abortion rights across the country. The organization is best known for drafting most of the anti-abortion bills that have passed in state legislatures in recent years. Those measures have included legislation banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy and efforts to undermine Planned Parenthood.
“As we’re moving forward at the state level, we end up hollowing out [Roe v. Wade] even without the Supreme Court,” Yoest told The New York Times in 2012. “That’s really where our strategy is so solid.”
Yoest is currently a fellow at American Values, a conservative nonprofit that opposes abortion rights and same-sex marriage.
The announcement was immediately condemned by Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
“Trump has broken nearly all of his promises to the American people in his first 100 days, but he has certainly stuck to his pledge to erode the constitutional right to abortion, punishing women in the process,” Hogue said in a statement. “This nomination helps fulfill that twisted promise and speaks volumes about the Trump administration’s continued disdain for reproductive freedom and women’s rights.”
Yoest, in her new role, will shape the HHS communications strategy. The appointment does not require Senate confirmation.
The announcement reflects Trump’s continuing assault on abortion rights. He signed a bill this month allowing states to withhold funds from organizations, such as Planned Parenthood, that provide abortion services.
And shortly after his inauguration, he signed an executive order reinstating a ban on giving U.S. funds to nongovernmental organizations that offer or advise on family planning options if those options include abortion.
Donations to Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, have skyrocketed during Trump’s presidency.
“I take no joy in our popularity or support when it comes at the expense of women in this country,” Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards told HuffPost this week. “Planned Parenthood’s popularity is stronger, our membership base is stronger, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that millions of women’s health care is at risk under Donald Trump. His first 100 days have been incredibly painful for women.”
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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell thinks marijuana is “addictive” and generally bad for football players, and won’t change his stance until his advisers prove that it’s medically beneficial.
Goodell wouldn’t budge when questioned on ESPN Radio’s “Mike and Mike” Friday morning, claiming that he had the players’ safety in mind.
“Listen, you’re ingesting smoke so that is not usually a very positive thing … it does have an addictive nature,” he said. “There are a lot of compounds in marijuana that may not be healthy for the players long-term. All of those things have to be considered.”
He’s long been criticized for his strict handling of marijuana use in the league. The NFL Player’s Association is down with dope as a tool for pain management, as are many NFL coaches. Heck, most of the nation is pretty lax about marijuana use these days.
But Goodell is known to hand down extreme suspensions for any hint of THC in a player’s bloodstream. All the while, players are complaining that they’re being fed huge amounts of highly addictive prescription painkillers for pain management, according to Deadspin.
Research shows marijuana may be the least dangerous of recreational drugs, including tobacco and alcohol, and can be even less addictive than caffeine. Painkillers like Vicodin, meanwhile, are classified as potentially very habit-forming.
Apparently, Goodell needs his medical advisers to prove not only that weed isn’t that bad, but that it has medical benefits for football players. He told “Mike and Mike”:
We look at it from a medical standpoint. So if people feel that it has a medical benefit, the medical advisers have to tell you that. We have joint advisers, we also have independent advisers, both the NFLPA and the NFL, and we’ll sit down and talk about that. But we’ve been studying that through our advisers. To date, they haven’t said this is a change we think you should make that’s in the best interests of the health and safety of our players. If they do, we’re certainly going to consider that. But to date, they haven’t really said that.
The health and safety of NFL players has indeed been a topic of interest over the past few years, but not because of reefer. Traumatic brain injuries are a growing problem among players, and Goodell is consistently raked over the coals for his apparent inability to focus his attention on concussions and CTE.
But then again, weed.
To be fair, Goodell did open the floor for later discussion about marijuana, likely due to the fact that seemingly everyone else is on board.
“Medical marijuana is something that’s evolving,” he said, “and that’s something that at some point the medical advisers may say this is something you should consider.”
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Warning: This article features artworks depicting nudity and other explicit scenes. You’ve been warned.
When Carol Rama was 12 years old, her father committed suicide. Three years later, her mother was committed to a psychiatric clinic. Without any formal training, Rama turned to art as a form of therapy. She continued to make work, with limited recognition, until her death in 2015 at 97 years old.
The words “art therapy” call certain images to mind: smiling flowers and gentle trees, pointy-roofed houses and birds like lowercase m’s. You know, Bob Ross–type stuff. Rama, however, was interested in more unorthodox subject matter: tongues and teeth, prosthetic limbs and animal pelts, masturbation and puddles of shit.
The first New York museum survey of Rama’s work, titled “Carol Rama: Antibodies,” is now on view at the New Museum in Manhattan. Featuring 150 of Rama’s works, it is a stunning overview of an artist who followed no one and learned nothing, making work in her 80s the same way she did at 18, by following her gut. Despite the fact that Rama was born in 1918 and raised under Benito Mussolini’s fascist rule, her work feels current, frighteningly so. In a variety of media and styles, Rama visualizes the ecstatic horror of existing in a female body ― sexual, deranged and unbound.
Today, women are creating the most visceral and compelling material in the horror genre, whose borders are bleeding out at an ever increasing pace. There is Julia Ducournau’s “Raw,” described in Rolling Stone as a “cannibal coming-of-age” movie ― a film so grotesque some theaters stocked up on barf bags for queasy viewers. There is also “XX,” an anthology of short horror films directed by and starring women, which made waves at the film festival circuit earlier this year.
Horror has crept outside the confines of film as well. Musicians including Jenny Hval, Bat for Lashes and even Beyoncé have incorporated the genre’s tropes and aesthetic into their mangled and monstrous music videos. And on TV, there’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a thriller that verges on horrific, based off Margaret Atwood’s haunting 1985 dystopian novel, visualized with a “radical feminist aesthetic.”
There are two interrelated ideas lurking at the core of most works of feminine horror. Firstly, the experience of being a woman can be a horrific one, plagued by restrictive standards, a persistent fear of violence, a sense of enforced silence and ― if you think about it all too much ― subsequent madness. The other key of feminist horror is, however, to subvert these terms, to take ownership of femininity and all the monstrosity it possesses. “I desire, I bleed, I make, I bite,” says the monstrous female, feeding off her own suffering and even taking pleasure from it.
Rama herself made a conscious decision to confront the unfathomable suffering she endured at such a young age, turning pain into power. “Private circumstances put me in a state of psychological amputation and loss,” she said in 1986. “I understood that I was obeying a mechanism of repetition of pain. And that when I turned it on its head, it became a sort of devotion to pain, to joy, to death.”
Rama was inspired after visiting her mother in a psychiatric clinic and observing the other patients housed there. People, she described, “with their tongues sticking out, their legs apart or crouching down in some other position.” This blatant disregard for societal norms enthralled young Rama, who found in women with mental illness something stimulating and even hopeful. “The sticking-out tongue is the object of desire,” she said in 1995. “The desire that we have too, except that etiquette enables us to swallow our tongues.”
In the 1930s, Rama began creating delicate watercolors of undressed women, desirous and deranged. She often returned to the image of “Dorina,” a nude woman reclining blissfully as a snake writhes from between her legs. Her labia is blood red, as is her tongue, which dangles from her lips like a slab of raw meat.
“Sin is my master,” Rama once said, when asked about artists who influenced her. The snake, a symbol of sin in Christianity, often manifests in her work, though its presence often seems more pleasurable than agonizing.
During the time Rama was creating her early work, Fascism labelled deviant bodies of any kind as wicked ― whether they be physically disabled or sexually unorthodox in any way. Rama made such persons her subjects, rendering women in wheelchairs and strapped into hospital beds, men touching themselves while admiring dead horses and a lady mid-squat, producing a watery pile of poop. Through her work she bestowed the de-humanized deviants persecuted by a Fascist regime with subjectivity, and this, humanity.
“I believe there is no freedom without derangement,” Rama said in 1997. “But then, we are all pretty deranged.”
When Rama first exhibited her work in 1945 at Turin’s Faber Gallery, the show was abruptly shut down by the police for public indecency. Over 25 works were lost or destroyed as a result. This incident prompted Rama to explore more abstract avenues for exploring similar subject matter. Moving from figuration to expressionist collage, she continued to create works that growled and licked and scratched, never aligning herself with any particular movement, tradition or man.
Rama’s abstract works, it turned out, were even more ghastly than her figurative depictions, the kind of nonsensical scary most of us only encounter in a dream state. Her canvasses are first covered with oozing globs of black, red and brown, then sprinkled with objects like doll eyeballs, fingernails or dirty syringes. The paintings resemble botched autopsies, glimpses inside bodies that refuse to remain silent any longer, their bloody insides at long last coming out to play.
With her 1950s and ‘60s work, which she called bricolages, Rama took the unbound body one step further, exorcising all unnecessary parts like hair and skin. This is body horror at its finest, inspiring a mix of terror and fascination in the viewer. Rama threw the unknowability of our own bodies back at us, illuminating that few real-life monstrosities can compare to the excrescence of our own blood and guts.
Rama went on to fold themes into her work that inspire feminist horror of all genres to this day. For example, one series titled “Omens of Birnam” is based on the Three Witches in “Macbeth,” who use their powers to control the fates of men. Rama was enthralled with mythical, occult women, a subject which was recently explored in 2016’s “The Witch.”
For another series, Rama worked with textiles to transfigure the traditional bridal gown, eschewing traditional white for black frocks accentuated with red gashes and welts. Blood-splattered wedding dresses, symbolizing the perversion of purity, have become a horror flick mainstay, most memorably appearing in prom dress form in “Carrie.”
In the 1990s, Rama became fixated, along with much of the world, on bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a deadly illness also known as mad cow disease. Research revealed that an epizootic in the U.K. was a result of cattle being fed a cattle meat-based product, therefore unwittingly committing cannibalism time and time again. Infected beasts would convulse wildly as their brains deteriorated, a visceral physical manifestation of their mental anguish.
In this bizarre tale of cannibalism and madness, Rama glimpsed her own story, and the story of womankind. She connected human’s hunger for cow meat with men’s hunger for women’s flesh, thereby aligning pornography with cannibalism. “The feminine body is meat and animal meat is a body that has been sexualized by the normative heterosexual gaze,” Beatriz Preciado writes in The Passion According to Carol Rama.
The madness that results from this cannibalistic chain of bodies consuming bodies, Rama believes, has been cast over time as “female hysteria.” The artist summed up her conclusions by stating, “The mad cow is me and that has given me joy, an extraordinary joy.” Her mad-cow-centric works take the shape of large-scale collages featuring pieces of rubber cut in the shapes of breasts, testicles and meaty sacs. It’s hard to decipher which parts are food and which are not.
In the film “Raw,” eating meat serves as a metaphor for self-discovery and self-empowerment, feasting off others to strengthen oneself. The taboo act of eating meat generates a chain of rule-breaking discoveries ― some sexual, others psychological, some straight-up cannibalistic. The film offers an empowering alternative to Rama’s mad cow premonition ― finally a woman gets to do the consuming, for once.
Today, it still qualifies as news when a “unlikable woman” appears on television. Yet decades ago, in the 1940s, Rama was pushing boundaries by depicting, in dainty watercolor, a woman sticking out her tongue while spreading her cheeks and taking a shit.
Throughout her life, Rama followed no “masters,” accepted no instruction and adhered to no tradition. Her oeuvre is as loose and leaky as the innards of a dead animal. She preferred to work untrained and untethered, thus making art which which she believed “belonged to everybody,” because “madness is close to everybody” ― male or female, man or beast. Sadly, she did not receive widespread acknowledgment for her work until she was in her 80s. Even now, she remains largely unknown and underappreciated, especially given the unorthodox and insurgent nature of her work.
In subject matter and style, Rama’s work most closely resembles work made decades after her ― by artists working in film, music and television. A true pioneer of the monstrous feminine, Rama realized the brutality inflicted on women’s bodies and minds and the seed of pleasure buried within that brutality. Embrace the depravity, she teaches, embrace the lunacy, embrace everything. When there is desire, even amidst unbearable suffering, there is joy.
“Carol Rama: Antibodies” runs until September 10, 2017 at New Museum.
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A Texas congressman choked back tears at an event in Washington, D.C. this week as he begged God to forgive the U.S. for legalizing same-sex marriage.
Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX) was one of 20 different members of Congress who spoke at the sixth annual “Washington ― A Man of Prayer” event, held at the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, on Wednesday night. He opened his remarks with a politically charged slant on the Lord’s Prayer, before pleading with God to forgive the country for the “sins” of marriage equality and abortion, Right Wing Watch reports.
“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth here in the halls of Congress, in our nation’s capitol,” the Republican told the crowd as seen in the video above, before confessing the “sins our nation has been so emboldened to embark upon.”
“Father, we’ve trampled on your holy institution of holy matrimony and tried to rewrite what it is and we’ve called it an alternate lifestyle… father, oh father, please forgive us,” Weber, who was visibly crying, said in the melodramatic prayer. He then continued, “Lord, we have gone to killing the most innocent amongst us… we’re killing our descendants and we’re calling it a choice. Oh, God in heaven, forgive us, please.”
Weber, of course, is no stranger to making headlines. In 2015, he blasted former President Barack Obama for not attending the Paris Unity Rally, and compared the commander-in-chief to Adolf Hitler (which he misspelled “Adolph”) in a since-deleted tweet. He later apologized, noting that he did not intend “to trivialize the Holocaust nor to compare the president to Adolf Hitler,” but stressed that Obama’s “actions or lack thereof is my point of contention.”
He offered similarly bombastic views on Obama, shared before the former president’s 2014 State of the Union address, on Twitter a year earlier.
H/T Right Wing Watch
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