If you know me in person, you'll definitely be aware of the fact that I used to be one of the biggest Rihanna fans. To me, she was the 'real role model' and she still is, even tough she does not like to consider herself one. However, over the past fifteen years, she has proven to the whole world that she's a powerful human being and a great example of women's empowerment through authenticity, creativity, vulnerability and audacity.

Nicki Minaj did not lie when she said "Dem island girls is the baddest" because they definitely is (are) and many of them achieved a lot despite originating from small and isolated places, including our beloved badgalriri. She has single handedly proved to the entire globe that no matter how humble your background is, you can achieve big things and this actually reminds me of Lupita Nyong'o's emotional Oscar's acceptance speech when she reminded us that our dreams, passions and aspirations are valid.

I still remember the day I got my very first MP3 player, it only had two songs: Bob Sinclar's iconic Love Generation and Rihanna's If It's Lovin' That You Want. Back in the day, I did not know how to upload music to the device so I contented myself simply with listening to those two track. By dint of playing Rihanna over and over again, her voice grew on me and transformed into some kind of drug that I became addicted to. The lord spoke to me through a song and thus became enlightened as to the truth.

Getting my first personal computer made it easier for me to keep myself updated on her music, her latest shows and her appearances during award shows. Basically everything! Rihanna was my spare time and my default topic. The thirst became even real when she dropped her glossy dance-pop audio version of the holy book a.k.a Loud. It was the album that made me feel very delighted and euphoric whenever I put my headphones to listen to its timeless bops. The following year, Talk That Talk was released. It had a completely different feel to it as if her previous opus and the one before which was quite murky and rage-fuelled had a baby and then Unapologetic came out later in 2012 to complete the new image of the versatile rising star.

After the release of her seventh studio album, I became less and less interested in what she does. It felt like she was doing the same things over and over again without any remarkable effort which made my addiction to her seems pretty dull. I stopped fangirling. It kind of felt like a break up, like a commitement I never made and I would be lying if I said I didn't felt bad right after. It took me a few months to recover and get over this delusional toxic relationship I signed up to. In fact, I might have learned a lesson from this experience, a very important thing when it comes to my relationships with people. Deep-digging into people's lives, no matter how interesting they are, makes them somehow uninteresting.

It's that time of the year again.

After the Golden Globe, The Oscar nominations in all 24 categories have been announced in a two part live presentation on January 23. And as I was expecting, three of my favourite films from last year are on the lists. The mesmerizing cinematographic adaptation on André Aciman's critically acclaimed novel Call Me By Your Name is nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as Best Actor for its young lead, Timothée Chalamet, and Best Original Song for Mystery of Love ,which I've been obssesed with lately, by Sufjan Stevens, who wrote three songs for the film. 

Shot on location in Crema, Lombardy, the film tells the story of Elio, a 17-year-old American boy living with his parents in northern Italy, who has a summer romance with Oliver, a grad student who comes to work with his academic father. The movie is full of light, breathtaking landscape and unstoppable beauty that will make you want to vist Italy and spend a whole summer vacation in a rural area there.

The second film which is a romantic fable about a janitor who falls in love with a sea creature, has won 13 Oscar nominations, leading a field of films with an unexpectedly strong British showing. Yep, I'm talking about Guillermo del Toro's Shape Of Water. The cold war-era fantasy was nominated for best picture, best director and best actress for Sally Hawkins, who plays the mute cleaner, as well as in 10 other categories, part of a bumper haul on Tuesday just one nomination shy of the record for the most in Academy Awards history.

Lady Bird ,which has got me extremely emotional when I first saw it, received best picture and best original screenplay nominations. The film’s star, Saoirse Ronan, was nominated for best actress, while Laurie Metcalf was nominated for best supporting actress. The director Greta Gerwig received a best director nod, becoming only the fifth woman ever nominated in that category. 

The endearing coming-of-age portrait might not have made it out of urban art houses and into the mainstream multiplex if it hadn’t been for some new math. The indie, with its modest budget and a first-time director, made national news when it achieved a rare and coveted 100% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the popular movie review aggregation site. This officially surpassed big-budget blockbuster Toy Story 2 (1999), which also had a 100% rating but from slightly fewer critics.

To conclude this post, I've decided to rate each of the three movies out of 10:

Call Me By Your Name: 9/10

The Shape Of Water: 8/10

Lady Bird: 8.5/10

ln 1995, controversial artist Ai WeiWei photographed himself as he picked up a 2000-year-old urn and Iet is smash to the ground. f we're appalled when cultural heritage is destroyed in the name of god and state, how can we possibly defend Ai's action? How can we buy a ticket to see photos of it in a museum? How can tho photos sell for over a million dollars? How can this man be one of the most renowned artist of our time? 

Study of Perspective – White House, 1995–2003

Ai Weiwei is decidedly one of the most well-known and prolific artists active in the Republic of China today. Working in sculpture, photography, cinema, installation, design, music, and architecture, Ai engages political and cultural criticism to investigate instances of government cover-ups and corruption, confronting China's stance on democracy and human rights. Ai often uses aesthetic strategies related to Conceptual Art as well as readymade objects in the lineage of Marcel Duchamp (who, along with Andy Warhol, profoundly influenced Ai's artistic practice), frequently in direct juxtaposition with traditional Chinese materials and production methods. 

Ai’s genitor was the famous Chinese modern poet Ai Qing; the family was sent to a work camp as a result of his father’s denouncement during the 1957-59 Anti-Rightist Campaign purge, and they were subsequently exiled to Shihezi, Xinjiang, in far Western China. The family only returned to the capital city in 1976, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, after which Ai studied animation at the Beijing Film Academy and co-founded the avant-garde art group Stars with fellow artists Ma Desheng, W. Keping, Huang Rui, Li Shuang, Z. Acheng, and Qui Leilei. He then spent a little over a decade in New York City, where he attended the Parsons School of Design as well as the Art Students League. Ai started taking photographs between 1983 and 1993, while living in Manhattan’s East Village, and in 1993, upon his returned to his homeland, he continued producing art in Beijing, where he built a studio.

In 2008, Ai was commissioned to cooperate with the prestigious firm Herzog & de Meuron on the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics; he later referred to the project as a “pretend smile of bad taste.” In May of the following year, Ai’s widely-read and influential blog, where he posted scathing criticisms of Chinese government policies, was shut down. That August, the artist was beaten by Chinese police for trying to testify for Tan Zuoren, with whom he had investigated the aftermath—student casualties as well as poorly constructed buildings and infrastructure—of the devastating 8.0-magnitude earthquake that shook the Sichuan province in May of 2008. Also as a result of his activist work, in 2011, AI was arrested and held for about 80 days without being charged with any crime. His series “SACRED,” which premiered in La Biennale di Venezia directly drew on his detainment experience (his arrest was loudly protested by governments, artists, and individuals across the globe).  

Forever, 2003, 42 bicycles.

Ai’s breathtaking work has been presented in huge solo exhibitions at New York’s Brooklyn Museum, Seville’s Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne, and Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution, amongst others. He represented Germany at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, and he has won multiple international awards, including a doctorate in Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art, the Santa Moritz Masters Lifetime Achievement Award by the luxury goods conglomerate company Cartier, and the Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent of the Human Rights Foundation. Ai lives and works in Beijing; he is now prohibited from traveling outside of China.

I really am not into television programs, but lately, I've come across a couple of great series and shows that got me addicted.

In this article, I've selected six TV shows that I've recently done watching.

6. Stranger Things.

A love letter to the '80s classics that captivated a generation, Stranger Things is set in 1983 Indiana, where a young boy vanishes into thin air. As friends, family and local police search for answers, they are drawn into an extraordinary mystery involving top-secret government experiments, terrifying supernatural forces and one very strange little girl.

5. Chewing Gum

Comedy series about Tracey Gordon, a religious, Beyoncé-obsessed twenty-something who is fast finding out that the more she learns about the world, the less she understands.

4. How To Get Away With Murder

The brilliant, charismatic and seductive Professor Annalise Keating gets entangled with four law students from her class "How to Get Away with Murder." Little do they know that they will have to apply what they learned to real life, in this masterful, sexy, suspense-driven legal thriller.

3. Westworld

A sci-fi drama set in an Old West theme park where guests interact with automatons in scenarios that are developed, overseen and scripted by the park's creative, security and quality assurance departments. Based on the 1973 feature film directorial debut by Michael Crichton.

2. Shameless

From producers John Wells and Paul Abbott, this outrageous family drama is based on the long-running hit UK series and stars Emmy winner William H. Macy as a working class patriarch of an unconventional Chicago brood of six kids headed by the eldest sibling who keep the home afloat while their dad is out drinking and carousing.

1. Making a Murderer

The series examines the legal woes of Steven Avery, a man who spent 18 years in prison despite being wrongfully convicted of sexual assault. Several years after he was released, he was accused of murder, found guilty and sent back to prison.

 

 

Normally, when I watch a movie, I scan the screen, terminator like, analyse each frame, each moment, each scene, each arc of the story, trying to find the pattern. I contemplate the structure, build an impression of theme and meaning in my mind. I'm always searching, unravelling, tearing apart and reconstructing. A ceaseless analysis of moving images and sounds. 

The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos, however, toys with this sense. It's way too easy to understand mainstream movies before you even take a seat in the theatre. Good guy, bad guy, sidekick, backstabber, love interest, endgame. It’s all there in the trailer. You barely even need to think, problem solving is simply not involved as the evidence is presented clear as day. It’s rarely stimulating in an intellectual way, and appeals only to our most basic and comfortable needs - that of escapism and pure entertainment. 

The Lobster throws curve balls; expectations are constantly needing to be re-evaluated. As my mind seemed to focus in on the central thrust of the film, as I was instinctively and by habit scanning for that take home message, I found myself proven wrong over and over. Oh, these people are here to find true love, so they’ll want to find matches. No, some of them want to kill each other. No, some of them are just trying to survive. No, some of them are acting out of fear. No, they all seem to be lying. Wait, he’s not lying now, they’re in love, for real this time. But now it’s not allowed. Wait, yes, it's happening, no, it's not, wait, why would he do that, did he do that, what did he want all along, how do I find out, there isn’t enough evidence shown, god dammit now what. Was he good or bad? Were they even human, these strange robots? If they are all determined to love why are they so cold? The movie offers no answers to any of these questions. No clean finish, no over arching theme to make you click and say “Oh yes, now I get it.” Because every time you zero in, the movie offers a counterpoint. Love appears at first a lie, a fabrication, and for a moment becomes real. Then it is torn away. Or is it? 

This is a movie about love and fear, the fear of love, the love of fear. What is says about people is less clear, the characters are absurd caricatures by design, militant in their ideology, radicalised into two distinct camps, each majorly broken. The restraining expectations of love are boiled down to superficial similarities, literally a zero sum hunger games where compromise doesn’t exist and ultimatums rule everything. It is a work of art about our expectations? Is it a mockery of Disney brand perfect matches? Is it about desperation, loneliness and connection? All of these things, probably. But then that got me thinking. Is this movie really about anything at all? Why was I searching so desperately for that clean takeaway? Was it about getting value for money? From trying to learn a neat lesson from the movie? And before I knew it I was thinking less about the film itself, and more about the way I watch movies. That’s the genius here. 

Where The Lobster succeeds most is in its ambiguity. It forces a different kind of analysis, a re-construction of expectations to suit its own world. It’s a profoundly different movie to be quite honest, and one that managed to make myself question the very way I think about how I take in what I see on the big screen. Moreover, how one takes in this film is also up for debate. To me, having a nice girl to see later in the day after the movie, the world seemed brighter and warmer to me when I exited the theatre, and all I could think was ‘thank god my world isn’t like that’. I imagine, depending on your position in life and relationship history that this movie could impact your perspective on love in a myriad of ways. It left me feeling very grateful. 

So what’s the takeaway? You tell me in the comments. I’d love to hear it.

My appreciation for couture has never been greater! Were you as impressed with this video as I was?

Let me know in the comments below, and head over to Refinery 29 for more on the making of Dior’s mind-blowingly gorgeous pleated creations.

It is pretty easy to regard René Magritte as a better image-maker and inventor of visual and verbal mysteries than he was a painter. Surely, a couple of his oeuvres look way better in reproduction than they do in the flesh, if flesh it is.

A lumbering and seldom self-regarding technical blandness blights many of the surrealists: Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and the awful, glossy Yves Tanguy. Actual encounters w/ their paintings are often a letdown. The astonishing image is the thing. In surrealism, radical and upsetting imagery goes hand-in-hand with pictorial conservatism.

René's paint does its job perfectly, no more, no less. It records and describes, if it is a windowsill, a view, a room and the people and things in it, a steam train emerging from a fireplace and the clock on the mantelpiece stuck at 12:40. It must be lunchtime, unless it's gone midnight. Sometimes in Magritte it is kinda hard to tell. The lamps are lit in the darkened suburbs, but there's broad daylight in the sky above.

With Mag, even the dull Belgian sky becomes something other: a sky dreaming of itself in the plainest blue, in his favourite greys and white. One painting of an inoffensive sky is called The Curse. Magritte is asking us not what is in the sky, but what unseen thing is impending. He coaxes it in to the viewer's mind.

His decision to paint in a conventional, slightly inexpressive, even illustrational manner was as conscious and cautious as his dress and habits: the bowler hat, the overcoat, his affectation of the suburban lifestyle of the French-speaking Belgian petit bourgeois. In fact he was always a political rebel, an anti-fascist. After the second world war he joined the Belgian communist party. The artist's best disguise was being himself.

Sometimes something abrubt – even for a surrealist – slipped out, notably during and just after the war. It was then he embarked on a kind of sickly pseudo-impressionism, with depictions of women licking and fondling themselves, followed by his repulsive and wonderfully coarse "Vache" paintings. These were a joke about the Fauve painters, who thought of themselves as wild beasts. They were a retort to the Parisian art world and to surrealism itself, from whose ranks René felt he had been excommunicated.

The Vache paintings erupt from Magritte's work, as they do from Tate Liverpool's exhibition, like a fart in church. Daft, slightly cartoonish and lumpen, they have a particular Belgian humour. They also allow Magritte to laugh at himself. In Ellipsis, a green-headed guy wearing a Magritte bowler w/ an eye in its crown has a rifle for a nose, ping-pong eyeballs and one hand that seems to be disembodied. Somehow, this is not surrealism. The Vache paintings, long out of fashion, as well as beyond the pale, have been admired by younger artists for several years. Ad interim, while the Magritte every-single-body knows remains untouchable, an influence only on advertisers, philosophers and essay-writing psychoanalysts keen to unravel his dazzling mysteries.

To be continued.