9 h. ago My cultural awakening: A Jim Carrey series made me embrace baldness – and shave my head on the spot

I was a mess of insecurities, trying to hide thinning hair, worried I was ageing too quickly. Then a scene in the TV show Kidding changed everythingGrowing up, I was obsessed with Jim Carrey. I was just entering my teens when The Mask came out, and I can still picture myself watching Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls on TV one weekend afternoon, absolutely howling at the silliness of it. His elastic facial expressions, the energy, the stunts – it was the perfect tenor of humour for a young boy.By the time I was in college, I had moved on to his more thoughtful films. The Truman Show was a favourite: still funny, but with a philosophical edge that spoke to me at the time. I loved seeing Carrey stretch into more serious roles, and as the internet made it easier to watch interviews, I came to admire him as a person, too. Continue reading...

Culture

7 d. ago My cultural awakening: ‘The Specials helped me to stop fixating on death’

After several people close to me died I became obsessed with fitness and gripped by panic attacks. But then a ska cover taught me life doesn’t have to be serious all the timeMy anxious disposition means I think about death a lot. But a cluster of people I loved dying in 2023, and most of them unexpectedly and within a few months of each other, was enough to shake my nervous system up pretty significantly. Five funerals is too many. The first was my nan: she was the family matriarch. The oldest person in the family, so there was a level of acceptance among the sadness. But soon after it was her son, and then her granddaughter (my cousin). The latter two were shocks, completely upending my nervous system, one compounding the other. From there, two more followed. Death was all around. It wasn’t just a part of life by that point – it was something to expect soon and often.At first I seemed fine. Despite concerned friends and partners asking if I was hiding anything, ...

Events

2 w. ago My cultural awakening: ‘Kate Bush helped me come out as a trans woman’

As a not-yet-out trans teen, The Sensual World – the singer’s rejection of masculine influence – felt like an invocation of everything I was feelingIt wasn’t safe for me to discover The Sensual World, the eponymous track on what Kate Bush described as her “most female album”. The song was intended to be a rejection of the masculine influence that had unwittingly shaped the artist’s previous work, and an ode to something taboo within the female experience. Based on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses – a stream of consciousness in which the character reflects on her experiences of nature, sex and love – Bush wanted to celebrate the experience of life inside a woman’s body, and the ways it gives her spiritual and sexual pleasure. I knew that, for someone like me, who was already being bullied, to openly love a song like this could make me an even more obvious target to those who saw femininity as a sign of weakness. More daunting than that, it might force me to ...

Politics

2 w. ago A relic of horny Hollywood: why The Mummy remains a classic bisexual awakening movie

A floppy-haired Brendan Fraser, a smokey-eyed Rachel Weisz, some grisly scarabs and biblical plagues? Hail to a lost era of multiplex entertainmentAt the threshold between life and death sits the ancient Egyptian city of Hamunaptra and at the threshold of many a millennial adolescence (including mine) sits 1999’s The Mummy, a story about a hot lunk (Brendan Fraser) and a sexy nerd (Rachel Weisz) learning first-hand the consequences of expatriating cultural artefacts.A turn-of-the-millennium Spielbergian blockbuster with shades of the superhero craze to come, Stephen Sommers’ desert romp remains dizzyingly fun to this day. Both masterfully well-made and refreshingly horny, it is one of the last great examples of a specific mode of multiplex entertainment now all but lost to the sands of time: the mid-budget action-adventure movie. Continue reading...

Culture

3 w. ago My cultural awakening: Ratatouille helped me overcome my insomnia

My difficulties with sleep stretched back to childhood, when I would put on a movie to pass the time – until I watched the children’s animated film and it made me drop off straight awayI have never been good at silence. When it’s quiet, my brain fills the gap with racing thoughts. It wasn’t until lockdown, when I was 27, that I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism, but looking back it made sense: the fidgety teenage nights, the late-night TV marathons, the constant need for background noise.As a kid, my insomnia was brutal. When I couldn’t sleep, all I wanted to do was get up and do something, but I shared a room with my sister so I just had to lie there, still and frustrated. I found our workaround: TV. My sister and I would put films on at night to soften the atmosphere and fill the silence. Continue reading...

Politics

4 w. ago My cultural awakening: The Parent Trap made me reconnect with my estranged father

Growing up with a stepfather made me wonder about my real dad – until the Lindsay Lohan film inspired me to seek him outIn 1998, the year The Parent Trap was released, I was six. My mum and I had recently moved out of a one-bedroom council flat into a Victorian terrace house in London; my half-sister had just been born, and I was training myself to call my stepdad “Dad”.My life felt as if it had been torn in half, right down the middle – like the photograph of their parents that Hallie and Annie piece together in the film. The 11-year-old identical twins (both played by Lindsay Lohan) reunite at summer camp after being separated at birth, and switch places in their plan to reunite their family. My own biological dad had left for good on my second birthday, moving back to Hungary. Continue reading...

Politics