The idea began during a play-fight, the sort a couple has, say, when quarrelling over whether "ridonculous" is legal in Scrabble. "Stop being a doucheaholic," Elizabeth Mitchell told her live-in partner, Sean McCarthy. He counter-accused: "I'm not a doucheaholic. You're a doucheaholic." Inspired by the idea of a 12-step support group for douchebags, co-creators Mitchell and McCarthy spun out a series of seriously funny short films. McCarthy co-starred as the unfazed ringleader of the meeting, and Mitchell played a seething gothette. Doucheaholics will be released on iTunes April 24 and Amazon on May 1. The South Bay-based filmmakers doing business as as Guerilla Wanderers, with Mitchell and McCarthy's collaborators Dustin Strocchia and » Read More

Preposterously large, purple, and full of wrath, the villain in Avengers: Infinity Wars--the destroyer of worlds, Thanos (Josh Brolin)--reveals his philosophical reasons for wanting to prune the universe. Hearing him out, the magus Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is unimpressed: "Congratulations, you're a prophet." This is but one of dozens of styles of grace under pressure here. It's all about courage in various modes: headstrong idiots like Chris Pratt's Peter Quill; the Vision (Paul Bettany) resigned to his potential fate; the unsuperpowered Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) pitching herself into a fight with a monster; Peter Parker (Tom Holland), still an eager, fearless kid who ends up clinging to a spaceship before he's had a » Read More

I was lucky enough to be in Los Angeles during the 2014-15 retrospective of Larry Sultan's photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "Larry Sultan: Here and Home" featured images from three of the artist's series. While The Valley consisted of comical, salacious outtakes from a porn shoot, the photographs of his parents in Pictures from Home cast a lasting and more resonant spell. In the first chapter of his book of the same name, Sultan wrote, "I want my parents to live forever." As Sultan prepared to mythologize his parents on 28 rolls of film, he spent the day "scavenging, poking around in rooms and closets, peering at their things, studying them." One of those images, Mom Posing by Green Wall and Dad Watching T.V. (1984) » Read More

While most of us in the near-term future will be predictably obsessed with Donald Trump's legal woes, the latest trending hashtag, or whether to quit Facebook, composer Felipe Perez Santiago will be consumed with the biggest of big-picture undertakings: how to represent humankind to the cosmos. He calls his current project Earthling. It's a massive effort to collect language and sound recordings from all corners of the world, and merge them into one cohesive whole in a live performance with a wide range of top-flight musicians. Its ambitions are nothing less than to articulate the universal human experience through sound--presumably for the benefit of some speculative nonhuman audience. » Read More

When Mary Shelley published Frankenstein on Jan. 1, 1818, she had no idea that the bioethical questions she raised in her groundbreaking novel would still have relevance 200 years later. Shelley's exploration of the human form--and the moral, ethical, scientific and spiritual questions surrounding technology and the body that still remain unsolved--are the subject of a new Cantor Arts Center exhibition, which asks viewers to consider what it means to be human, as the line between science and science fiction becomes increasingly blurry. "Betray the Secret: Humanity in the Age of 'Frankenstein'" is one of the main visual attractions of [email protected], a year-long, universitywide celebration of the novel's 200th anniversary. » Read More

As of 2017, nearly half of the world's population is online. Current U.N. estimates put the number at 3.58 billion users. Of them, nearly a third, regularly tune into YouTube to watch or share videos. According to the company's official blog, a billion hours of video are streamed through the platform every day. That's hours, not minutes, and billion with a 'B.' Every 60 seconds, users upload 300 hours of video to YouTube. By the end of day today, 432,000 hours of new footage will have become part of its archive. In addition to home movies, music videos and promotional content, some of YouTube's massive daily upload is submitted by the site's stars, of whom some make millions of dollars a year from their channels. Some of the site's most » Read More

When a punk rock lesbian sound engineer from Iran told me her life story in a Paris fertility clinic, I no longer felt disoriented. A sense of grounding, part Eastern, part Western, brought me home as I learned more about her. Kimiâa Sadr escaped Iran at the onset of the revolution in 1979, traveling with her mother and sisters through perilous situations in Turkey before eventually making her way to France. Now she was sitting in a waiting room with a tube of sperm, thanks to her donor, some dude named Pierre. Engrossed by her multiethnic, multigendered, multilingual, mythic story, I learned about various generations of her family back in Iran--her political dissident father, various uncles, and a strange maternal grandmother who could » Read More

It's understandably depressing if the only time there's heavy breathing in the bedroom is when you're re-enacting WrestleMania XXV--that is, trying to get the duvet cover on. This doesn't mean you should buy into the lesbo-bashing notion of "lesbian bed death"--the myth that lesbian relationships, in particular, are where sex goes to die. The term traces back to a finding from social psychologist Phillip Blumstein and sociologist Pepper Schwartz, published in their 1983 book, "American Couples: Money, Work, Sex." Blumstein and Schwartz, reviewing results from their survey of 12,000 American couples, announced that lesbians in relationships "have sex less frequently by far than any other type of couple." This single survey led to decades of » Read More

Imagine you're one of four porcupines caught in frigid weather. To keep warm, you all have the urge to huddle together and pool your body heat. But whenever you try to get close, you prick each other with your quills. The only solution to that problem is to move away from each other, even though it means you can't quell your chill as well. This scenario was used by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud as a parable for the human dilemma. We want to be intimate with each other, Freud said, but we hurt each other when we try. The oft-chosen solution is to be partially intimate: not as close as we would like to be, but only as much as we can bear. Now everything I just said, Aries, is a preface for better news: In the coming weeks, neither your own » Read More