No Makeup Selfies: Stop Being Ass Hats

Originally I was tentative about posting a picture of myself barefaced and claiming it was for cancer awareness. Like that weird KONY thing (which I have seen people draw comparisons to) I thought it was something that would pass, and was confused about the motivation behind it. I didn't want to just do it because everybody else was.

What changed my mind was the simple fact that the campaign made £1million overnight. How could anyone now deny its usefulness or criticise the #nomakeupselfie? 

If you know anything about charities you will know that awareness is a major part in making money. If people know about something, they are more likely to know to donate (obviously). That's why advertising in general is a thing: it makes money. 

All obvious so far, but you'd be surprised how many people don't get this. 

I find the same sort of people who criticise charities for spending money on adverts, and not specifically that which they are trying to raise money for, are those who are criticising the no makeup trend. 

What they don't realise is that awareness is so, so vital to charities. 

For those who say 'well why not just donate, why do you have to proclaim it to the world?' I say: well I'm glad you're so altruistic, but not everyone is. Amazing if you already do donate, but look how many people have been peer-pressured into donating and being a source of advertisement for cancer charities, who may not have otherwise. 

Another niggle for 'haters' was the fact that people were using the guise of cancer awareness as an excuse to fulfill their own narcissim. This is why it is important to mention the reasoning behind the lack of makeup in your pictures, people. The selfies of women looking glorious without makeup (perpetuated by a fair amount of celebrities) perhaps reinforced this viewpoint. Of course you don't want a hideous picture of yourself out in the world, but looking flawless - in dimmed lighting with perhaps just a smidgen of concealer - isn't helping to dispel that irritating ideology that makeup is unnatural and women are tricksters for wearing it. I like to think this is why I didn't want to look so amazing in my own pic...

Furthermore critics are questioning the 'bravery' it takes for women to upload pictures of themselves without makeup. I'm going to go out a limb and proclaim that it is frankly chivalric - it's certainly cool for once to be bombarded with images of women who aren't looking 'perfect'. 

Let's remember that those going through chemotherapy do not look their best. 

The no make up selfie has raised a middle finger to critics anyway. The campaign has now garnered over £2million and I am very proud to be a part of it. 

Text BEAT to 70099 to donate.

Had to wrangle Beyonce in some way, sorry

Film Review: Shame

Released in 2011, Shame is the second feature film directed and co-written by Steve McQueen. It stars Michael Fassbender as sex addict Brandon, and Carey Mulligan as his sister, Sissy. As you may predict the plot centres around Brandon's secretive and lonely existence in New York city, which is disrupted indefinately when his sister comes to stay. 

As blunt as its title, Shame is a film about the simultaneous complexities and primalities of human emotion. From its opening sequences we are confronted with nude shots of Fassbender, we share his most intimate moments, from masturbating to urinating. Brandon suffers silently from an overwhelming lust, which seems to derive from an intrinsic sense of emptiness in his life. I have never witnessed a film which can possess such a dichotomy of the (mutually dependent) graphic and subtle. Yes it's very base, it's very visceral - there is, predictably, a lot of crude sex - but this is told with such style that you can see there's a deep sadness in Brandon's past and present.

An omnipresent theme in postmodern American art, the disappointing nature of the American Dream is alluded to, with Carey Mulligan’s melancholy rendition of ‘New York, New York’. This scene was apparently shot with three cameras in real time and in one take, with Fassbender never having heard Mulligan sing, his reaction being completely authentic. The camera hovers on Sissy for an uncomfortable time span, forcing us to watch her in many ways pathetic state as she gazes to an off-screen presence and laments slowly, poignantly and painfully. It then mirrors this stare at Brandon, and through such matched juxtaposition we see that they are the same, brutally unhappy parts of one whole.

The reason for the siblings’ unhappiness is never revealed in the film, instead we are given random mismatched pieces of their past in the form as subtle as Sissy flinching when a man moves towards her wrist, to Brandon’s unexplained scarring on his back. We don’t need to be told explicitly what mutual horror they faced in their childhood – it is manifested in what they do, how they appear and perform, as well as through the beautiful cinematography throughout. 

Something that caught my attention stylistically throughout the film was the use of a blue colour palette whenever Fassbender’s character is alone in shot, and he is isolated as such frequently. Blue here contrasts with the vapid gold and yellows of the city, casting Brandon as cold, lifeless, alone. It encapsulates that bitterly ironic feeling of being alone amongst masses.  

Moreover, more indie elements of Shame include McQueen's use of long takes. It really unsettles the edit-trained viewer (including myself) for a shot to last longer than normal, or worse, for a shot to continue to frame someone's face when they are listening to the other person talking. McQueen uses whole scenes made of one shot. The most impressive is when Brandon goes out for a run and a tracking shot films a couple of minutes of him just running, clearly frustrated, until he leaves the shot at a crossroads and we (the camera) do not follow him. This is irritating for us, the viewer as we are so spoilt in cinema at having multiple, privileged viewpoints of the action. The director removes this privilege and tells us that no, you are just a voyeur, you can't have everything you want, this is the film as I want you to see it. It's refreshing.  

As with many indie films also, you're left thinking 'well, what was all that about?'. Shame is bleak, graphic and grotesque often, and its ending is so open. Once again destroying conformities: we do not get a satisfying narrative ark; I'm not convinced the characters develop throughout the film apart from becoming more angry and twisted. There is no sympathetic character, and there is no resolution (sorry if that's a spoiler). And yet, I felt moved.

Chill the Bugger Out About The Royal Charter

It seems absurd, even profane, to be writing an article for a newspaper recommending the regulation of newspapers. At its best journalism can reveal political and social corruptions and injustices in an impartial format. But at its worst so-called ‘journalists’ can be ruthless, unethical parasites: phone-hackers, celebrity-chasers, liars.

The issue of press regulation emerged recently due to the phone-hacking scandal and consequential Leveson Inquiry.  The result of this is that the press has been weighed, measured and found wanting a royal charter.  Granted in October, the new royal charter will oversee a regulation of media organisations. 

Newspapers have inevitably made a racket about this. Like petulant toddlers, The Mirror, the Daily Mail and the Express have reeled out the sensationalist hyperbole: “THE DEATH OF FREEDOM!”Of course, the concept of a state-controlled press is frightening, connotative of Soviet Russia or Communist China. But haven’t we witnessed a whole other end of the spectrum, with journalists of zero integrity hacking into the phone of murdered schoolchildren in the name of  ‘press freedom’ and that ubiquitous, self-righteous concept: the ‘freedom of speech’?

The charter has been labelled “bonkers” by former BBC Chairman Lord Grade. In almost the same breath, he conceded that “the press...has brought this situation on itself”. With the risk of sounding like a parent or primary school teacher, the press really have brought it upon themselves. Thanks Rebekah Brooks, you’ve ruined it for the rest of us decent journalists.

As you probably know by now, Brooks and Andy Coulson are among the defendants charged as a result of the Leveson Inquiry. The charges against them are of conspiring to hack phones, committing misconduct in public office and perverting the cause of justice. 

But these are not isolated incidences of individual indecency in the British Press. Recently the Sun (a paradigm of media excellence, I am aware) deigned to allot a miniscule corner of their newspaper to ‘clarify’ that there is no evidence of 600,000 ‘benefit tourists’ invading the UK. Following in similar footsteps, the Daily Mail – the newspaper which appears to speak the loudest against press regulation - on November 7 admitted that it had completely  coined out of thin air that ‘Gordon Brown had claimed more than £316,000’ in expenses. Making things up and pretending they are facts is not freedom of speech. It is deliberate manipulation which is as problematic, in its agenda-instilled, scaremongering propaganda, as state control.

To address frenzied concerns for the government interfering with the press – they already have been. From David Cameron being text buddies with Rebekah Brooks during the 2010 election campaign, to Tony Blair dining with the former Sun editor, it is an ugly truth that politicians have been getting into bed (maybe not literally) with press leaders frequently in recent years. So, besides press freedom, is there an underlying motive behind such newspapers’ hysteria? Chris Huhne in the Guardian, put it quite aptly: “If the Sun could not make up fictional stories when accuracy is too boring, time-consuming or costly, how would it make money?” How, indeed.

Contrary to these hysterics, the press charter will not establish its regulation in a tyrannical, George Orwell-esq melee of censorship. Rather the idea is to arrange a body which certifies the independence of pre-existing self-regulators. That is, newspapers nowadays are required to self-regulate, but the royal charter will be able to oversee whether this is being done legitimately.

Ultimately, something needed to be done. Whether the royal press charter is effective is yet to be discovered, but we’re hardly going to wake up in a totalitarian state.  So calm down, people.

Enough with the Caveman Culling

Culling has hit the headlines recently, and various species have topped the undesirables list. it seems to be fashionable across the globe to shoot first, ask questions later. From the Japanese randomly killing dolphins, to Australians going all out on sharks, I’d like to make a radical proposal to stop this madness.

In Norway the new fad is to kill the wolves, despite 80% of population wanting to keep the species in their high numbers. The problem is with farming: it is claimed that sheep are killed by these animals. However, around 1500 out of 2 million Norwegian sheep are killed by wolves a year, and these small numbers are compensated for. A much higher proportion of their deaths is predicted to be the result of some dumb sheep thing like falling down a crevasse. Moreover, wolves supposedly present a danger to human life. Remarkably, for a somewhat foreward thinking, humanitarian country, the proposed culling in Norway still seems to think of the wolf as the big bad creep out of a Brothers Grimm fairytale. In reality they affect humans very little: no one’s been killed by a wolf since 1800.

These animals, which have called Scandinavia their home for thousands of years, are facing extermination by ignorance and fearmongering. Absurdly, farmers have said the animal ‘contributes nothing’. Well besides balancing the ecosystem what do you expect wild animals to contribute to the human world? It’s like saying ‘hamsters are shit bankers, so to hell with the lot of them’. And quite frankly I think this statement is rash, existentially wolves may ‘contribute’ more than economics can measure. If it wasn’t for wolves, what would people get tattooed to represent their spiriuality? Jokes aside, if people do not pay attention to this ridiculous occurance its existance will only snowball, and these majestic creatures will become extinct.

Similarly the Hufflepuff mascot is being culled by our meat obsession. Not to go all Morissey on you, but the British badger is effectively being killed so we can kill other animals. It’s not even working. The aim of the policy is to prevent TB spread in livestock. The randomised culling however has led to the remaining badgers spreading to TB areas and catching the disease, so the problem has just been aggravated. My only suggestion in this line of thinking, for a completely successful British cattle-farming, is to kill every animal apart from the ones we want to eat. In fact, kill all the cattle too because 94% of bovine TB spread is due to herd-to-herd transmission. If we’re going to roll with this fists first attitude, why not go the whole hog?

One could argue that it is a survival of the fittest, dog eat dog, world. If the Dodo was too stupid and fat to survive, that’s not our problem. The issue I take with this reasoning is that it’s regressive and insulting to humanity: have we not evolved beyond the carelessness of survival techniques such as these? Aren’t we intelligent enough to realise when something is destructive – and what’s more, ineffective – and found a logical and peaceful way around it? It’s like we haven’t made any progress since we were hairy cavemen and ladies thrusting spears at woolly mammoths.

To me, culling is an unnatural, nonsensical and lazy policy which does not belong in the modern world.

The Mail versus Miliband

“The man who hates Britain” was the headline the Daily Mail used to describe Labour leader Ed Miliband’s father. By extension, we are supposed to infer, the shadow minister hates Britain too.

What evidence did the Mail use to spearhead this damaging sweeping statement? Ralph Miliband, a 17 year old Jew fleeing the Holocaust, recorded in a private journal that he sometimes wished Britain would lose the war due to its overwhelming nationalism. He probably never thought anybody would see it. How many of us have written ridiculous, cringe worthy things in a diary in our teens? And yet this is the central argument for the Mail’s attack on the man. Ralph went on to serve in the British Navy, risking his life for a country he allegedly hated, when he didn’t have to.

Of course the diary of a 17 year old who just escaped the holocaust is credible evidence for judgement of his entire life’s beliefs. But the Mail does not stop there! It furthers this ‘evidence’ with the fact that Ralph spoke out against the Falklands war. Well there it is! Anyone who disagrees with a war is, by default, a Britain-hater. So anyone who disagrees with the Iraq war is unpatriotic and worthy of a post-mortem public shaming I suppose.

The pompous refusal to apologise for this unfounded slander does not come as a surprise. It’s not news that the Daily Mail is ridiculous. Nor is this the first time the newspaper has unleashed unsubstantiated attacks on public figures. Stephen Fry recently received the brunt of the Mail’s hatred when he deigned to speak against Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay laws by calling to cancel the winter Olympics in Russia. Stepping around any blatant homophobia, the Mail proceeded to unleash a tirade of nonsensical critiques of his bullying nature and the fact he should have called for a boycott of all Russian music instead, making what is possibly one of the most absurd arguments in human publication.  (Article here)

Take a glance at history and it doesn’t get better. The 1960s  and 70s Mail was a minefield of anti-immigration racism (Enoch Powell has the right idea!), misogyny (blocking women’s pay rises) and general anti-progress propaganda. So not much has changed then. The newspaper’s founder, Viscount Rothermere, was a well known Nazi-sympathiser, which for a start makes its allegations against Miliband’s dad hypocritical.

Nowadays - concerningly the most popular online British news publication - the Mail Online is peppered with sensationalist nonsense. A glance at the ‘headlines’ on Sunday 6 October and all they could muster was a story about drunken women taking over an “ENTIRE” – yes, shouty capitals - train carriage. How unladylike! I can’t imagine that has ever occurred before, this is newsworthy stuff! Groups of male drunkards would never behave in such a way, particularly not in the football season. Perhaps the most offensive aspect of the Mail Online is its ‘Femail’ section. Ladies, skip the News, Science and other important, manly issues and let your little minds think on fashion, beauty, and celebrity instead. Words fail.

Mehdi Hasan, political editor for the Huffington Post, unleashed a rant on a recent Question Time which has been viewed on YouTube almost half a million times. He said “who hates Britain more? It isn’t a dead Jewish refugee from Belgium who served in the Royal Navy, it’s the immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay baiting Daily Mail”. I couldn’t put it better myself.  

Why Beyonce's Latest Album Makes Her a Modern Day Feminist

While I have always seen Beyonce as a strong figure of female empowerment, from Destiny’s Child’s Independent Woman and Survivor to Run the World, others have been less certain. I have read many conservative opinions of her ‘over sexualised’ dress sense amongst criticisms that she is being appropriated by the masculine music industry to represent feminist ideals in order to sell records to women.

I’m calling bullshit.

My reasons being, her newest, suprise-released album, Beyonce, is her most earnest revelation of female empowerment to date.

Pretty Hurts is perhaps the most explicit example of feminist ideas throughout the album, criticising the shallow and problematic nature of Western culture’s obsession with physiognomy. The video accompanying the song exposes this through an American beauty pageant, the epitome of vanity. Beyonce sings ‘it’s the soul that needs the surgery’, suggesting it is this ideology of female outward perfection which needs to be altered as it is regressive.

***Flawless is a homage to feminism, pumped with aggressive assertions of empowerment: ‘bow down bitches’. This is accompanied with the insistence that ‘Yonce is not just Jay Z’s ‘little wife’, perhaps a reference to her much-criticised decision to name her 2013 tour ‘The Mrs Carter Show’. ***Flawless seems a heated affirmation that she ain’t defined by no man *clicks fingers*. The borderline martial imagery is also manifested in Superpower, where a vision of people power questions society. 

The album’s sampling of a speech by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is also a brave moment. The speech discusses various experiences of the modern woman, and paradoxes the modern feminist is confronted with. Beyonce seems to recommend a reform of societal thought, not to value women for their looks or relations to men but for their actions.

Referring back to the conservative view of Beyonce being sold through objectification, the album does anything but shy away from these constructions. Songs such as Rocket, ‘Yonce, Drunk in Love, the subtly titled Blow, and Partition are all sexy as hell. From performing for Jay Z in the Crazy Horse strip club, to the fragmentation of the female body through close up, the videos accompanying these songs all conform to various examples of the male gaze.

Alone, these songs do not suggest a feminist message - indeed they are the types of songs other female artists, such as Rihanna (Pour it Up), churn out consistently. However it is the consciousness of the feminist argument, within other songs on the album, which casts Beyonce as a much more nuanced and intelligent artist. The aforesaid Adiche speech mentions how women cannot be sexual beings as men can. I would argue that these songs experiment with female sexuality to question such conservatism.

I’m sick of the argument that women who dress in a revealing manner cannot be feminist, as it’s for the attention of men. How do you then explain the primarily female audience at Beyonce’s concerts? Is she being objectified then? What if – and this is a radical premise –women just like feeling sexy. In fact, the sultry French passage in Partition translates (admittedly less glamorously) into English as ‘men think that feminists hate sex, but it’s a very stimulating and natural activity that women love’. There is a misconception, which Adiche addresses, that to join the feminist club you must A. hate men and B. veto sexuality. This assumption is beginning to be eroded, thanks to feminism’s inception in popular culture, of which Beyonce is a strong example.

Beyonce is not the perfect feminist, whatever that may be. But she is a real, nuanced human being, a strong, empowered woman who is a role model to millions. Her album charters real female experiences, with Heaven touching on her miscarriage, Blue about the unconditional nature of motherly love, and Jealous and Mine reflecting on the complexities of marriage.

Yet it is Grown Woman, the album’s finale, which encapsulates the spirit of the entire artwork. That line ‘I can do whatever I want’ transcends the song because it is what Beyonce has been saying in every song. She can so what she wants: she is Beyonce. She can be a seductress, mother, revolutionary, and businesswoman. And with this message she is speaking to all women: we can have it all. We don’t have to worry about whether being sexual compromises our ethics, or being a mother and wife makes us less ‘feminist’, to me that is not what feminism should be about: rather it is choice. To me, the message here is that we don’t have to be restricted by an unattainable ideal. We can have it all. 

Film Review: Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain

‘Death is the road to awe’ a Mayan priest whispers at the summit of a great pyramid. The last man, struggling to sustain his only companion, a dying tree of life, voyages through space in a bubble. A star fades, wrapped in the death-lock of a nebula.

These are moments which punctuate visionary feast The Fountain. Darren Aronofsky’s third feature film sits firmly among the writer/director’s greats, including Requiem for a Dream , The Wrestler and Black Swan. However it is little known and wildly overlooked, with takings of half its $35 million budget and critics sneering left right and centre. Ultimately this is a great cinematic tragedy - it really is a work of consummate beauty, a -see-before-you-die deal.

Often described as a tri-narrative tale, the film explores three parallel stories from the past, present and future. Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz play the central protagonists in each narrative: a conquistador hunting the Tree of Life for his Queen to the historical backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition; and a space man, Tom (a homage to no less than Bowie’s Major Tom) the Last Man, seeking salvation in the collapse of a star. But the central story is that of Tommy and Izzi, a modern day couple whose lives are haunted by her terminal cancer. Although originally startling in the sense that we are not often confronted with this sort of narrative, it’s refreshing, and as the story unfolds the connections and parallelisms create a combined message.  Izzi and Tommy’s tale permeates and encompasses the film, with Tommy’s memories of Izzi projected within Tom’s storyline, and the plot of the conquistador and Queen being a story Izzi has written for Tommy to help come to terms with her death. Although the fragmentary and ambitious non-linearity of The Fountain is indeed as disorienting to watch as it is to describe, they each run with parallel themes and are inter-connected through graphic-match editing, aesthetic motifs and ecclesiastical iconography.

The message this film emanates is encapsulated in the words of the Mayan Priest. Death is the road to awe. Aronofsky’s work is profoundly focused on the idea perhaps more basely referred to in The Lion King as the circle of life: death is a natural process, one we all must face. This idea blooms throughout the film as Tommy, after a struggle as a neuroscientist to prevent his wife’s death, fails and gradually becomes at peace with himself. The conquistador, on discovering the tree of life finds he has interpreted its powers erroneously – rather than raising him to immortality as a man he meets a different fate. And Tom reaches Xibalba and witnesses, as Izzi has reiterated earlier in the film, that the most exquisite death of a star creates new life.

The Fountain is at times bleak, dealing with raw human emotion and universal experience. Centrally the film focuses on death and mankind’s relationship with our mortality. At some point, everyone has to consider and accept the fact that they will die; while this is agonizing for Tommy who insists ‘death is a disease’ to be cured, Izzi embraces the life she has left. This is the mastery of Aronofsky’s film: its immeasurable scale – narratives scattered across time and space, enormous life questions – is countered by its intimacy. The storyline is surprisingly uncluttered with the aforementioned strand of Tommy and Izzi dominating screentime, undiluted by other characters. Extreme close-ups physically enhance this immediacy, with almost intrusive zoom on the face, lips and neck involving the audience in their relationship.

Stylistically as ever Darren Aronofsky pays intricate attention to detail. Izzi is - without exception – dressed in white throughout the film, a dramatic contrast with Tommy who is shot in dark, low-key lighting and black costumes. Aronofsky plays with this chiaroscuro throughout, particularly in a bath sequence in which Izzi is the brightly lit central focus of the shot; Tommy lingers on the sidelines, in darkness, a visual expression of the regressive nature of his attitude to death.

A reflection of the film’s limited budget (for Hollywood standards), Aronofsky as ever uses creative techniques to replace expensive CGI. The shots of Xibalba – the Mayan underworld - as the spaceman hurtles into the dying star are in fact the work of macro-photography of undersea micro-organisms. The use of the infinitely miniscule to represent the infinitely colossal is an exquisite, inspired idea which in this context not only works but has deeply philosophical implications.

The double act of Weisz and Jackman is remarkable. Both performances are beautifully convincing and, accomplished with the aforementioned intimate cinematography and poignant screenwriting from Aronofsky, the bittersweet nature of their parting is all the more severely felt, as if it were a direct blow to the viewer as well as the characters onscreen. Indeed, the film encapsulates the agonizing hopelessness which accompanies loss. Tommy’s frustration at his inability to save his wife is deeply relatable, a heart-heaver. Jackman’s performance is particularly distinguished as Tommy strives in desperation to achieve the unattainable and cure death. His pain is that of every person as it is an innately human response to riot against the ending of our lives, or that of our loved ones.

An adventure across spirituality of all planes – Christianity, Buddism, Mayan – but also in science, philosophy, The Fountain manifests the human urge to gaze at the sublime, to wonder. Head on it might be a tale of darkness and morbidity, but ultimately The Fountain urges us to celebrate the life we have rather than fight the inevitability of death. 


Originally published in No-Wave Magazine.