Last year, Michael Moore surprised fans when he announced he’d been making a “secret film” about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, which he released shortly before the November election.

“Michael Moore in TrumpLand,” however, has been described more as a “love letter” to Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton than an excoriating profile of her GOP opponent. Maybe Moore’s upcoming Broadway show will give Trump critics the incendiary takedown they’ve been waiting for.

Moore will indeed make his Broadway debut this summer, in a limited-run production titled “The Terms of My Surrender.” And he’s teasing the show as sufficiently Trump-critical: “Can a Broadway show take down a sitting President?” a poster reads.

A slightly longer description of the “theatrical work” provides a little more color:

In a time like no other in American history, and with a sense of urgency like never-before, Michael Moore comes to Broadway for the first time in an exhilarating, subversive one-man show guaranteed to take audiences on a ride through the United States of Insanity, explaining once and for all how the f*** we got here, and where best to dine before crossing with the Von Trapp family over the Canadian border.

Moore will act out the “The Terms of My Surrender” ― a flexibly scripted one-man show, with the potential for guests, that’s not quite stand-up comedy or a play ― eight times a week for 12 weeks, beginning with previews in July. The performances will take place, as a press release makes clear, “blocks from Trump Tower” at the Belasco Theatre. 

“It’s a humorous play about a country that’s just elected a madman,” Moore, who predicted Trump’s win, told The New York Times. “I mean, there’s really no other way to put it.” 

Like “TrumpLand,” Moore has indicated that “My Surrender” will be about more than just our current president. (Though he stands by the question on the poster, quipping to the NYT: “Can something like this unravel an unhinged man? I think that discombobulation might be our most effective path to undoing his presidency.”) 

“I think what the world needs right now is Michael Moore standing on a Broadway stage, sharing his hilarious stories and incendiary political perspective” the show’s director, Tony Award-winner Michael Mayer, noted in the show’s release, “creating the kind of dialogue that can only happen in the theater.”

Since Trump’s election, Moore has outlined his own blueprints for resisting a man he refers to as our “so-called” president, who’s already, according to the documentarian, declared “war against the actual planet.”

If you’re itching to see how Moore will continue the resistance on Broadway, you can checkout tickets for the show ― which officially opens on Aug.10 ― here.

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Every new movie season seems to bring with it a few character names that jump out for their distinctive baby name potential, and these past few months were no exception. We saw new names that are right on trend — vintage nicknames, gender switches, literary characters, and surname names. Here are 12 of the best — some of which might even catch on!

Antonina

“The Zookeeper’s Wife,” a true story set in 1939 Poland, features Jessica Chastain as heroic Antonina Zabinski. Heard in Russia, Italy, and Poland, Antonina is a daintier diminutive of Antonia that becomes a lovely possibility.

Laird

James Franco plays an over-the-top, extravagantly tattooed Silicon Valley millionaire character named Laird Mayhew in the comedy, “Why Him?”. The name Laird, is a Scottish title for the landed gentry and may have been given facetiously to this comic character. Most famous bearer is surfer Laird Hamilton; Sharon Stone picked it for her son in 2005.

Dorothea

Annette Bening gives a striking performance as the bohemian 1970s mother in “20th Century Women.” Despite the revivals of Dorothy and Thea, the lovely Dorothea has been left behind, just waiting for a nudge into the Top 1000. It’s already number 838 on Nameberry.

Gardner

Rising young actor Asa Butterfield plays an imaginative boy in “The Space Between Us,” a romantic sci-fi film. Not quite the occupational name Gardener, surname Gardner still evokes greenery and flowers — and glamorous actress Ava.

Mason

The mighty Kong has risen again in “Kong: Skull Island,” and this time around, the leading lady of the film, played by Oscar-winning Brie Larson, is named Mason Weaver. Though Mason currently ranks at number three for boys, it has been used for girls before — Kelsey Grammar has a daughter named Mason Olivia, born in 2001.

Hutton

The thriller “Nocturnal Animals,” starring Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal also features Armie Hammer as Adams’s husband, Hutton Morrow. With its decidedly upscale surname feel (E.F. Hutton, anyone?), it could easily join Holden and Hunter — and was indeed a recent celeb choice.

Cassian

There are not one but two Cassians in recent films. In “Rogue One,” Cassian Andor, played by Mexican actor Diego Luna, is an intelligence officer in the Rebel Alliance. There’s also a Cassian in “John Wick: Chapter 2.” This Latin saints’ name has, along with the related Cassius, a lot of potential. Also from “Rogue One”: Galen, Orson, Bodhi, Baze and Jyn.

Tennyson

In this Vin Diesel franchise, “Return of Xander Cage,” Rory McCann plays getaway driver Tennyson the Torch. The poet name Tennyson was used by Russell Crowe in 2006 for his second son and would make a cool choice for literary parents. Other characters in the movie: Augustus, Darius, Lazarus, Ainsley, Talon and Hawk.

Modesty

Modesty and Chastity Barebone are two young sisters (brother is Credence) in “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” the latest installment in the Harry Potter franchise and evidence of J. K. Rowling’s naming chops. Modesty and Chastity might not be as usable today as other virtue names like Amity and Verity. Also in this film: Newton/Newt, Queenie, Credence and Seraphina.

Caliban

In “Logan,” the latest Wolverine film, set in a dystopian 2029, comic actor Stephen Merchant plays the mutant Caliban, a veteran of comics and an earlier “X-Men” film. Best known as a not so appealing Shakespearean character in The Tempest, Caliban is, nonetheless, a name with an accessible feel, rhythmic sound and friendly nickname Cal. The “X-Men” movies have already done a lot for the name Logan. 

Mary

What, you may ask, is Mary doing on a list of cool new names? It’s precisely because it seems such a surprising choice for a little girl character in “Gifted,” a 2017 film. The top girls’ name for centuries, the saintly Mary still ranks at number 124.

Letty

In the latest Vin Diesel giant blockbuster, “The Fate of the Furious,” the female lead, played by Michelle Rodriguez, has the sweet vintage nickname, Letty. Originally a pet form of Letitia, it peaked at the beginning of the 20th century but has a good chance for a comeback a la Hattie and Maisie.

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In order for Aneesh Sheth to find her voice as an actress, she had to walk away from show business first.  

Sheth, who is transgender, can currently be seen in William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” which is being performed at various venues in all five New York City boroughs as part of the Public Theater’s Mobile Unit. In the beloved comedy of mistaken identity, the 35-year-old plays Maria, servant to the wealthy countess, Olivia (Ceci Fernandez), who falls in love with Viola (Danaya Esperanza), disguised as a man. She says the production, which opened April 27, is everything she’s “hoped and dreamed for,” particularly since she’s getting the chance to inhabit a role traditionally played by cisgender women.

“When the opportunity came up to do this, I was absolutely terrified. I’ve never done Shakespeare before,” Sheth told HuffPost. Now that performances are underway, however, she said she feels “very, very blessed to be able to do this show for so many people and see the way that different people and communities react to it.”

“Twelfth Night” marks Sheth’s second Public Theater stint. In 2016, she starred in the acclaimed bluegrass musical, “Southern Comfort,” about a group of transgender friends who gather to support a dying trans man (played by Annette O’Toole). Between “Twelfth Night” and “Southern Comfort,” Sheth is now finding steadier work as an actress. When she began her transition in 2008, however, it was a much different story.

“Back then, ‘Transparent’ and ‘Orange is the New Black’ – these big shows that are trans-inclusive – did not exist,” Sheth said. Convinced she wouldn’t get cast as a trans actress, the Pune, India native relocated from New York to California and began pursing a career in social work instead. “I felt like there was no space for me,” she said.

Sheth’s thespian dreams wouldn’t be cast aside for too long, however. In 2011, a friend connected her with the producers of NBC’s “Outsourced,” who offered her a guest spot. Though the role of Kami Sutra lasted only two episodes, it turned out to be turning point for Sheth. “I thought, ‘Well, if I’m able to land a spot on an NBC sitcom, then I should not limit myself because of who I am,’” she recalled. “Having that opportunity pop up proved me wrong. I was able to go back to where I was meant to be.”

Though Sheth is generally pleased with how her career has progressed, she admitted there have been setbacks. The recent push to cast transgender actors in trans roles on stage and screen has helped land her auditions, she said. Still, a number of casting agents have told Sheth that she “doesn’t look transgender enough,” a comment she calls “ridiculous.” Then there’s the roles themselves, many of which promote “ancient, stigmatized and fetishized views” of both Asian Americans and the trans community, she said.

“My gender identity, as well as my race, has been a hindrance sometimes,” she said. “It’s been easier to get my foot in the door, but there’s still this misconception that we all look a certain way, or that we’re all one way.”

After “Twelfth Night” wraps May 14, Sheth would like to turn her attention back to the musical stage, possibly in a role that has yet to be written. Though she cites Broadway icons Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald as influences, she’d ultimately like to “forge her own path” as an artist.

Given that openly trans performers are still an anomaly, Sheth said she does feel a responsibility to portray her community in a positive light. She won’t shy away from addressing politics in her work, either. “Like everybody else, we are human, and have our own thoughts and feelings about the things that are happening in the world,” she told HuffPost. “I feel lucky that, as an artist, there are ways for me to express what I’m feeling about the world through my art.”

Sheth doesn’t see her recent successes as much as a reflection of increased trans visibility as much as a testament to her perseverance as a performer. “If you keep reaching for what it is that you want, eventually you’re going to get there,” she said. “Eventually you’re going to show people that you deserve to be there as much as anyone else, regardless of what your gender identity is.”

The New York Public Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” runs through May 14. Head here for details. 

For the latest in LGBTQ entertainment, check out the Queer Voices newsletter. 

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Perhaps Emperor Nero didn’t actually play a fiddle while Rome burned, but we’re now living in a time when a country’s “shadow president” may spend today watching a video of his old rap musical being performed while the government around him starts yet another week in various scandals.

Before becoming a high-profile political strategist and adviser to President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon attempted and failed to achieve a career in Hollywood. Along with writing partner Julia Jones, Bannon wrote various scripts that never ended up becoming movies, including at least a couple adaptations of William Shakespeare plays for the modern era.

In one of these adaptations, a take on Shakepeare’s “Coriolanus,” Bannon set the story during the Los Angeles riots of 1992. He also transformed the play into a hip-hop musical.

According to Jones when she spoke to The Daily Beast, the main concept was Bannon’s idea and then Jones wrote most of the rap lyrics, with help from the son of Bannon’s assistant. Bannon then “added stuff,” according to Jones, explaining, “all the ‘dudes’ are him.”

Bannon once set up a live reading of the musical, but the script hadn’t been publicly performed in many years. Parts of the script have been released by publications such as The New York Times, but until Monday, you’d be hard-pressed to take in the whole thing. 

Thankfully, NowThis News just produced a live-reading of the script with various professional actors such as Rob Corddry, who said in a press release, “It’s pretty eye-opening to imagine Steve Bannon writing this. People need to see it to believe it.”

From that same announcement, NowThis highlighted a few quotes:

Quotes from The Thing I Am:

Marcius:

“They say! Fuck they! They hang out shooting pool and think they know what’s going down – who’s up, who’s out, who bounds, and if there’s crack enough. If I had my way, I’d make a quarry of these slaves.”

Marcius:

“Whoever deserves greatness, wants their hate. Peep game, boy. To count on them for favors is to swim with fins of lead.”

[He turns back to the mob.]

“So fuck you! Trust you? Ha! With each passing minute, you change your common mind. You call him noble that was once your enemy, then dis your king. You cry against the “other” – crackers, Blood, Crip, popo, Pol, the rich – it don’t matter, niggas; awe keeps you feeding each another.”

Watch the video above.

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At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this weekend, comedian Hasan Minhaj joked that the real presidency has become so stressful that he’s taken to watching “House of Cards” “just to relax.”

Judging by the new trailer for Season 5 of the Netflix series starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, which was released on Monday, Minhaj might need to amend that statement.

In the clip, the Underwoods smile, strangle and sneer their way to seizing power in the capital, all while expressing their general disgust for the American public. Essentially, nothing has changed. 

“The American people don’t know what’s best for them. I do,” Spacey’s character, Frank Underwood, says. “They’re like little children, Claire. We have to hold their sticky fingers and wipe their filthy mouths, teach them right from wrong, tell them what to think and how to feel and what to want. They even need help writing their wildest dreams, crafting their worst fears. Lucky for them, they have me.”

Er, tell us how you really feel, Frank. 

Watch the full trailer above. 

“House of Cards” Season 5 premieres May 30 on Netflix. 

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No reader of Patricia Lockwood’s irreverent verse would be surprised to discover that her upbringing was a perfect storm of oddities.

Her father, a naval veteran who spends most of his time clad solely in boxer shorts, calls his daughter “Bit” and drinks Irish cream liqueur. He’s also a Roman Catholic priest ― an achievement that, given the Church’s rather strict rules regarding celibacy in the priesthood, required a circuitous path through the Lutheran priesthood and a dispensation from the pope. Her mother, a colorful Irish Catholic matriarch with five children, frequently spouts bon mots grounded in paranoia. For example: “Did you know rats in big cities are getting aggressive from eating too many cigarette butts?”

Lockwood spent her childhood moving from rectory to rectory ― the Catholic Church prefers frequent geographical shakeups over allowing priests to cultivate deep roots in specific communities ― and, increasingly, imagining ways out. When her father bluntly informs her that there’s no money for her to attend the colleges she got into, she finds another way to escape: Falling in love with Jason, a boy she met online who shares her passion for poetry. She runs away with him. They get married young. Several years later, after he needs eye surgeries that force him to leave his job as a newspaper editor, he and Lockwood move in with her parents.

This is where the real action of the memoir begins. As a grown-up, married, extremely lapsed Catholic, living in the home of a traditional (in terms of gender roles) yet unconventional (in terms of clothing choices) Catholic priest and his deeply maternal wife, Lockwood experiences a maelstrom of conflicting feelings. She adores her parents and seems to have a particular closeness to her mother, but frequently finds them ludicrous. Home is familiar, but also alien; comforting, but also claustrophobic. Living in a rectory with Lockwood’s parents, a young seminarian, and copious crucifix-based art stifles them. After they move in, she and Jason “look at each other and realize, with sad certainty, that we will never have sex in this place.”

Instead, as they save up to move out again, Lockwood sits and reads with the young seminarian, periodically offering him educational tidbits about cuckolding and other sexual fetishes. In return, he lets her know that Satanism is “on the rise” in Italy. (“Understand,” she adds, “that hardcore Catholics get their news from different places than the rest of us.”) Her poem “Rape Joke” is published on The Awl and rapidly goes viral. She gets a book deal. She remembers her dad teaching her to swim and how her parents reacted when she first told them about her sexual assault. She goes on a road trip with her mom, who is slightly fastidious about a hotel bed that appears to have semen on it. “I guess a ‘fun mother’ wouldn’t care about all the cum?” she quips.

Her parents’ habits and catchphrases, her oddly religious yet profane upbringing, and her own mischievous attitude toward her childhood religion are the stuff of pure comedy, and Lockwood doesn’t waste a drop of it. Her parents’ and siblings’ over-the-top, slapstick wit seems so unlikely that she goes out of her way to note that she and Jason are constantly scribbling down her family’s riffs verbatim. Her family life needs no punching up. As a memoirist, she can milk all the humor out of human absurdity in one passage (“[M]y mother,” she writes, “is best described in terms of her Danger Face, which is organized around the information that somewhere in America, a house is on fire”). As a poet, she excels at painting familiar and unfamiliar scenes alike in startlingly unexpected terms, terms that force you to reevaluate your own mental pictures. Savannah, where she and Jason lived for some time, “looked like an enlightened underwater city with all the water gone, and seaweed still hanging in the middle of the air. Great mermaids flowed through the streets: southerners. The sun shone down because it was a blonde.”

The book, with its slightly off-color-seeming title, isn’t a lighthearted ode to her youth. She struggles with her father’s ingrained, prescriptive misogyny, which he evinces with the confidence of a man who assumes that his audience agrees, and with his fierce determination to have things all his own way.

And, as the daughter of a Catholic priest, she’s looking back on a childhood and young adulthood that took place in the eye of a brewing storm: the Church’s sexual assault problem and its long, long coverup. The book isn’t about sexual abuse by priests, and there’s no indication that Lockwood herself was ever a victim ― it’s just that the problem was so pervasive, and the coverup implicated so many in the Church hierarchy, that of course she was touched by it. An oily, ingratiating priest who taught at her school later turned out to have been a molester; the bishop she meets at a church dinner reportedly moved predatory priests from parish to parish to hide their crimes. Being deeply embedded in the Catholic community means knowing men of God who did unspeakable things.

It’s a testament to Lockwood’s way with words that glimpses of such grotesque wrongdoing, painfully candid reflection on her youth and her family, and countless sidesplitting anecdotes about her boxer-clad father and her safety-obsessed mother can not only coexist in this book, but weave together seamlessly, constructing a memoir that’s propulsively readable and brimming with humor and insight.

The Bottom Line:

Lockwood’s venture into memoir proves just as hilarious, textured and evocative as could have been hoped.

What other reviewers think:

Kirkus: “Funny, tender, and profane, Lockwood’s complex story moves with lyrical ease between comedy and tragedy as it explores issues of identity, religion, belonging, and love.”

The Atlantic: “Lockwood’s book is really a rather deliciously old-school, big-R Romantic endeavor: a chronicle of the growth of a mind, the evolution of an imagination.”

Who wrote it?

Patricia Lockwood is a poet and the author of two collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. One of her poems, “Rape Joke,” went viral in 2013 after being published on The Awl.

Who will read it?

Poetry buffs, former Catholic school kids and anyone who loves a well-executed memoir.

Opening lines:

“‘Before they allowed your father to be a priest,’ my mother tells me, ‘they made me take the Psychopath Test. You know, a priest can’t have a psychopath wife, it would bring disgrace.’

“She sets a brimming teacup in front of me and yells, ‘HOT!’ She sets a second one in front of my husband, Jason, and yells, ‘Don’t touch it!’ She situates herself in he chair at the head of the table and gazes at the two of us with total maternal happiness, ready to tell the story of the time someone dared to question her mental health.”

Notable passage:

“I submit that every man of God has two religions: one that belongs to heaven and one that belongs to the world. My father’s second religion is Nudity, or Underwear, to be more precise. There are some men who must strip straight down to the personality as soon as they would through the door of their castle, and my father is one of them. I have almost no memories of him wearing pants, and I have a lot of memories of his sitting me down for serious talks while leaning forward on his bare haunches. He just never wore pants on principle. We saw him in his collar and we saw him in his underwear, and nothing ever in between. It was like he couldn’t think unless his terrier could see his belly button. In the afternoons, he reclined nudely on leather couches and talked to Arnold Schwarzenegger while he shot up the jungle, and every time Arnold made a pun about murder, he laughed with gratification. As far as I could tell, he thought movies were real. He watched them in a state of alarming physical receptiveness, with his legs so completely open toward the television that it seemed possible he was trying to watch it with his butt. His default position was a kind of explicit lounge, with one leg up and the other leg extended, like the worst kind of Jazzercise stretch you could possibly imagine.” 

Priestdaddy

By Patricia Lockwood
Riverhead, $27.00
Publishes May 2, 2017

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

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George R.R. Martin was just 26 when he won the Hugo Award for Best Novella, an impressive feat for such a young writer. But he was published in print over a decade before that ― in the fan mail section of “Fantastic Four #17.”

In an upcoming History channel documentary about comics, Martin says that this letter was the first time his writing appeared in print.

In a post about the letter, Entertainment Weekly notes that the “A Song of Ice and Fire” author shows an early penchant for unexpected plot twists, a staple of his own writing.

“In what other comic mag could you see things like a hero falling down a manhole,” Martin wrote. He continued to shower the issue with effusive praise:

“You were just about the World’s worst mag when you started, but you set yourself to an ideal, and, by gumbo, you achieved it! More than achieved it, in fact ― why, if you were only half as good as you are now, you’d still be the world’s best mag!!!”

Read the entire letter below:

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In Amazon’s new sex comedy “I Love Dick,” the protagonist, Chris Kraus, played by Kathryn Hahn, becomes wildly obsessed with a mysterious man ― part cowboy, part artist ― by the name of Dick. The camera itself, however, remains entirely fixed on Kraus.

Like the characters around her, viewers are glued to Kraus’ every move, watching a strong woman’s willful unraveling with a mix of fascination, horror and reverence. The way she tousles her hair with a bit too much muscle, like some sort of seductive metalhead. How she punctuates her jerky dance moves with overly carefree yelps and howls. Or how she occasionally makes additional use of random, long, solid objects by running them ever so gently between her legs.

The particular gaze with which the camera savors Kraus’ ― and Hahn’s ― every move is one many women viewers will identify with. It’s the admiring gaze women reserve for one another when attempting to understand who a person has made herself into ― and how and why. A way of looking that considers women to be smart, sexual, messed up and striving to be better, a perspective not often seen on screen. 

Jill Soloway, the show’s creator, is known for bringing this particular kind of female gaze to mainstream television ― doing for instant streaming what writer Chris Kraus herself did for writing in her 1995 semi-autobiographical manifesto I Love Dick, on which the show is based. 

Soloway’s “I Love Dick” follows Kraus as she accompanies her husband, Sylvere (Griffin Dunne), a Holocaust scholar, to a fellowship in the solidly trippy town of Marfa, Texas. There, Kraus meets Dick ― played by Kevin Bacon ― a scruffy, silent type, a land art sculptor who possesses deep appreciation for straight lines and large, concrete phalluses. Dick awakens something inside Kraus: desire, an eruption of excess energy that is not only sexual but creative, personal and political.

Fueled by her hunger for Dick, Kraus begins to describe his influence on her body and brain in a slew of love letters, each beginning “Dear Dick,” turning the archetypal male artist into her very own rugged muse. One reads: “Dear Dick, I want to make the world more interesting than my problems. Therefore, I have to make my problems social.” Even the book’s title, I Love Dick, positions Kraus as the subject, Dick as the object. 

“I think [Kathryn Hahn] is a muse for me in the same way De Niro is a muse for Scorsese.”
Jill Soloway

Kraus’ lust stimulates her creative drive, transforming the former failed filmmaker into, to quote Kraus, a “female monster,” a woman who boldly wreaks havoc on her life without remorse or apology, who uses her emotions and impulses as impetus for art. “Art supersedes what’s personal,” the book reads, and Kraus lives this truth unabashedly, as her piles of love letters transform into a revolutionary declaration of female irrepressibility.

While Dick becomes a muse for Kraus, Hahn is something of a muse for Soloway. Except instead of zooming in on misty, love-sick eyes or lengthy legs, Soloway keeps her lens fixed on Hahn’s delectable self-destruction, frenzied artistic innovation and virtuoso horniness. 

“I think she is a muse for me in the same way De Niro is a muse for Scorsese,” Soloway explained in an interview with HuffPost. 

“She has this clownish relationship to her body when it comes to sex,” she continued. “You know, it’s that awkward moment where you are supposed to be sexy but you are just too much in your head. As a physical comedian, she reminds me of Charlie Chaplin.”

Soloway first worked with Hahn in her 2014 series “Transparent”; Hahn plays Rabbi Raquel, a bastion of sanity juxtaposed against the dependably unholy Pfefferman family. But even as the show’s faithful dose of vanilla, a breath of normalcy amongst the selfish havoc, Rabbi Raquel is never one-dimensional. She is ethical, yes, but she’s goofy, flawed, romantic and confused ― as a result, she’s one of the most beloved characters in the stellar ensemble cast. 

“When ‘Transparent’ was happening, I was always like, ‘Kathryn needs her own show,’” Soloway recalled. “I thought, ‘If I do another show Hahn will be the lead.’”

It’s hard to think of a better role for Hahn than that of Chris Kraus ― who not only resembles her physically, but offers the actor endless opportunities for physical absurdity and emotional complexity through breathless rants, fevered sex and searing works of art. 

“Chris Kraus is a kind of like Philip Roth for women,” Soloway explained. “The more Dick ignores her, the more turned on she gets. What heroic, female TV character has ever admitted that? There are these things we women are supposed to keep secret, in service of male protagonists. The female gaze allows us to have our own version of our reality.”

The first time Hahn read Kraus’ I Love Dick, she felt an intense connection with the writer and protagonist. Many women creatives do. “Her writing got under my skin,” Hahn told HuffPost. “I couldn’t believe how similar some of our behaviors were, how fast our motors ran.”

While getting into character, Hahn took pleasure in how far Kraus pushed and how giddily she relinquished control over her identity and her life. “In the normal romantic comedy,” Hahn said, “Chris would flirt by getting dressed up, doing everything Dick asked, being quiet and demure, and waiting for him to look at her. But no, she just keeps going further and further. It is so cathartic to see someone moving forward into her own abjection. There is something so cringeworthy and delicious about it.”

 

There is a stark difference between Soloway and Hahn’s relationship and those of famed auteurs and muses past, which traditionally run male and female, respectively. Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, Bernardo Bertolucci and Maria Schneider ― such cinematic relationships are often fraught with unequal power dynamics that can result in violence, stemming from gendered stereotypes of the male genius and female beauty.

There is something distinct at play in Soloway and Hahn’s connection, and not just because both actor and filmmaker are women. “I Love Dick” destabilizes the very idea of a muse, founded upon patriarchal understandings of female desire. “I think women are expected to connect to their desire through being seen,” Soloway said. “We grow up in the world where we are told sex is the prize you get for being hot. We have been raised to believe that our sexual satisfaction, desire and orgasm are derived from succeeding at collecting male approval.”

“Women have had to do what they’ve had to do to make a living, so I don’t degrade female muses of yore,” Soloway added. “People who are conventionally attractive, like Brigitte Bardot, rise up thanks to men who believe they possess something special. Women became icons through being muses because that’s all we knew. ‘Some man thinks I’m fantastic and beautiful and look great in a hat and now I’m in a movie.’”

The argument “I Love Dick” makes is that, when a woman stops seeing herself only as a muse can, she processes her potential as an artist. “I’m beginning to think there’s no such thing as a good woman filmmaker,” Hahn-as-Kraus says during an unprompted rant in the second episode. “How can you be, if you are raised to be invisible? I mean visible ― I mean looked at. It’s a wonder that any woman could look at herself as an artist.”

Hahn, however, represents a new breed of muse, one who is both subject and object, artist and artwork ― as Kraus might put it, predator and prey.

“Chris Kraus is a kind of like Philip Roth for women.”
Jill Soloway

When she becomes addicted to Dick, Kraus bids her ego farewell and plunges into the world as a female monster, unguarded and unafraid. This is revolutionary, even within the fictional world of Soloway’s creation. In the TV show, Kraus becomes a living catalyst for the other women and artists in her midst. Her awakening inspires the local groundskeeper to write a play and a fellow artist to stage a nude performance. 

For Soloway, it was important to expand the scope of Kraus’ novel to include new characters like Devon (Roberta Colindrez), Toby (India Menuez) and Paula (Lily Mojekwu). In part, this constituted an effort to tell stories of women who were not, like Kraus, white and straight. But also, Soloway hoped to visually represent the book’s influence on the contemporary generation of women and artists.

“We wanted to put into action what happened to us when we read the book,” Soloway said. She wanted to show, within her show, just how revolutionary it is to watch a woman pursue a man madly and fail happily. To watch a woman write and create without fear or self-doubt. 

“The book radicalizes people,” Soloway said. “People read it and they say, ‘I want to write. I want to have sex. I have an idea. I am not ashamed anymore.’ What happens when one woman says, ‘This is who I am’? Women start to go, ‘My turn, my turn, my turn.’ It just takes one woman to start telling her truth.”

Few demonstrate the contagious effect inspired women have on one another quite like Soloway and Hahn themselves. They feed off each other’s energy, brilliance and sense of humor, both moonlighting as water to nourish the other’s gnarled plant. “I feel like we’re constantly surprising each other still,” Hahn said.

For muses of yore, growing older means a decline in roles and a depreciation in value as the stock female parts of ingenue and romantic lead fade out of view. For Hahn, however, aging through the eyes and lens of a filmmaker who is enthralled by the entirety of her body and mind is a thrilling prospect. “There is something quite moving and profound about growing old alongside somebody that knows you so well,” she said. “To grow along with each other’s brains and bodies is something special.”

Like its source material, Soloway’s “I Love Dick” is a triumphant scrambling of art and life, a “matriarchal revolution,” a battle cry for any woman who has yearned to make something of herself, while only ever knowing how to criticize herself.

In her book, Kraus is both author and character, subject and object. As a woman, in the 1990s, this was new terrain. With her TV adaptation, Soloway bolsters Kraus’ words with the help of a writers room comprised entirely of women ― no male genius required. Kevin Bacon, for the record, credited the writers with creating two of “the best, most well-rounded male characters that I’ve read in a long time.”

What happens when a woman writes the story of herself ― activated, lustful and unafraid? What happens when a woman brings this story to the screen, expanding Chris Kraus’ narrative to house the entire history of feminist art? This was the revolution Soloway had in mind.

“Patriarchy recycles male protagonism over and over,” she said. “Every piece of art that is from a man’s point of view continues to make men feel like the subjects. We are women writing, women shooting, women turning the world upside down. You are not seeing women through a male perspective at all. That is a new feeling.”

Soloway described the powers of activated female desire as “too dangerous for this planet.” The exact effects remain to be seen. It seems safe to say, though, that the holy mythology of the lone, male artist is ― like Dick’s artistic legacy ― reaching its expiration date.  

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In June of 1978, artist and activist Gilbert Baker hand-dyed and stitched together eight strips of vibrant fabric, yielding a rainbow flag. 

Each color signified a certain power: pink stood for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for nature, turquoise for magic, blue for peace and purple for spirit. Today, that flag ― which over time was condensed from eight colors to six ― is immediately recognizable as a symbol of LGBTQ rights and pride. 

Baker, who called himself “gay Betsy Ross,” died in March 2017, but his iconic contribution to queer visual culture lives on. In honor of Baker’s legacy, advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather has teamed up with Newfest, NYC Pride and Fontself to translate the energy and strength of the beloved rainbow flag into text. Finally, there is a rainbow font. 

The colorful type, titled “Gilbert,” is made up of the deconstructed stripes of the Pride flag, with multicolored rectangles curving and overlapping to produce lettering reminiscent of the flag’s 1970s roots. 

“We wanted to celebrate something that he created that actually changed peoples’ perception of that community,” Ogilvy creative director Chris Rowson told Dezeen. 

The blending of colors visualizes, according to Rowson, the fluidity and openness of the LGBTQ community. “We liked the idea of that crossover and that overlay, it kind of creates new things,” he said. “People aren’t just one thing, they’re not just gay, or not just transsexual, everyone can be a mixture of things.”

The font is available for free download from Type with Pride. Its creators hope the eye-catching lettering will be spread across protest posters, Pride rally banners and queer-friendly public spaces around the world. 

Queers, allies and font fanatics, get ready to write with rainbow. 

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Six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was murdered in her home in Boulder, Colorado, sometime late on Dec. 25 or in the early hours of Dec. 26, 1996. 

Now, 20 years and some months later, her unsolved murder has been the subject of numerous articles, books and television specials. The latest addition to the genre is Netflix’s newest documentary, “Casting JonBenét,” which doesn’t concern itself actually trying to solve the murder of the miniature blond beauty queen. In fact, no new evidence is uncovered and no forensic experts were interviewed for the project. Instead, the film explores JonBenét’s tragic death through the audition tapes of mostly amateur Colorado-based actors, who offer their insight, theories, judgments and personal experiences. 

The film’s director, Kitty Green, grew up in Australia, where she was “obsessed” with American television and sitcom fantasy families when Ramsay died.

“I had never seen a beauty pageant or even heard of a beauty pageant before, so it was so foreign,” she told HuffPost in an interview on Friday, when the film began streaming on Netflix. “It was a uniquely American phenomenon and I was captivated by how odd it was, how dark it was and how it kind of punctured this image I had of idyllic American life.”

Those who grew up in the ‘90s will likely relate to Green’s earliest memories of the case. 

“I mean, it was the imagery associated with it, which was all the pageants and crowns and the dress and the feather outfits that she was put in,” she said.”I think those images were really haunting. So it was almost like this image of this pageant queen who almost seemed to have it all, but whose life went horribly wrong, or horrifically had it taken away from her.” 

Green’s fascination with the case ended up being a lasting one. Whenever she would meet someone from Colorado, she couldn’t help but ask who they thought was responsible for JonBenét’s murder. Their varied responses piqued her interest. 

Before making the film, Green said she read every book and watched every TV special on the case. She came to the conclusion that trying to find JonBenét’s killer was futile and decided she didn’t want to make another true crime documentary. 

“I knew there’s no way we can solve this,” she said. “There’s absolutely no way we can find out who killed her. So my motivation became an entirely different thing. If we can’t solve the crime, then how do we deal with the idea that we will never know?”

Green said that she’s more interested in the remaining ambiguity and the mystery that haunts the public as the case remains unsolved, and believes the casting-tape framework employed in the film allows for the actors to “talk about how it affected them emotionally and personally and they can draw parallels with their own lives and look at the way that they kind of digest this tabloid material and true crime films.”

In the course of the film, multiple actors audition for the roles the members of the Ramsay family, as well as local law enforcement and other suspects. It’s through these auditions that these actors reveal their own theories and personal experiences that they believe better inform them to portray the character ― like one actress whose brother had been murdered and spoke of understanding how people might react to the sudden loss of a loved one in different manners.

“I always knew we’d get stories out of people, but I was amazed at the level of honesty and some of the stories were so heartbreaking and it was an incredible experience and a privilege to be in the room with them. I guess I didn’t expect that level of raw emotional humanity that we got,” she said. 

Since “Casting JonBenét” doesn’t offer any answers, it’s easy to see why it might be construed as exploitative ― not just of the 20-year-old cold case, but of the actors and their own stories. But everything is up for the viewer to decide. 

“We’re looking at the way people speculate. The way people jump to conclusions,” Green explained, later adding that the film is about “human experience.”

When asked what she hopes viewers will take away from watching her film, she hesitated, and then recalled a time when someone approached her after a screening. 

“They had read everything about the case for the last 20 years ―every article, watched every special ― but this was the first time they actually felt anything or felt any empathy for this family and the loss of life,” Green said. “And if they can feel the gravity of what happened in that town, if [the film] can humanize this whole case for people in some way, that would be really fabulous.”

“Casting JonBenét” is now streaming on Netflix.

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