There’s always a little bit of a connection between Oklahoma City and me. When the basketball team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, wins, I get, like, 50 texts.

I’m currently in Brighton, England, but on Monday, I was at a hotel right in the middle of London on Camden Street. We were playing a show here and I had the flu, so I had been sleeping all day Monday. My phone was lying there on the bed and I started getting hundreds of texts. After I woke up from whatever cold medicine I was on, it was around 10 p.m. in London, so 4 p.m. in Oklahoma City. I turned on the news and watched. As the night went on, you don’t know if you’re going to hear from someone who says, “Oh my god” this-and-that, and you do your best to check in on people as quickly as you can. That’s the marvel of cellphones, I guess.

A recent 11-course tasting menu at Eureka, a monthly pop-up restaurant at Los Angeles’s BierBeisl, included a dish of fresh and dried English peas concealing a hidden parmesan and whey pudding, a live scallop under a cucumber foam, gnocchi made from ash, and an unctuous sous-vide egg yolk encircled by hedgehog mushrooms, pork skin snow, and a sauce made from preserved lemons and radish greens.

On an evening in early May, this was a meal that showed the precision, vision, and creativity of its gifted chef, one that soared on a deliberate rhythm and flow: plates arrived at just the right moment with an explanation of the dish’s ingredients, each showcasing the season to perfection. The chef, Flynn McGarry, moved in the kitchen with grace, charring ramps for a dish of sturgeon and tapioca with a charred onion sauce before spinning around to sauce a plate—on which quivered a single slice of blood-red dehydrated beet—with just the right amount of raspberry-black pepper vinaigrette.

If you Google Liberace, the word “flamboyant” turns up repeatedly. A double-edged epithet, “flamboyant” has long been a common euphemism for a campy gay sensibility and also aptly defines the career of a crowd-pleasing pianist who, almost despite himself, ended up having an enormous influence on American popular culture. Sporting an impeccably coiffed pompadour (simulated, in later years, by well-positioned wigs) Liberace performed in gold lamé suits and sequins for largely conservative, heterosexual audiences. During the 1950s, his television program introduced millions of viewers to classical music through virtuosic, if gimmicky, interpretations of Chopin and Liszt.

Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra, which premiered Tuesday at Cannes, stars, however incongruously, Michael Douglas as Elvis and Elton John’s self-mocking predecessor. The film, which will be broadcast on HBO on May 26, is less concerned with chronicling Liberace’s musical and cultural legacy than zeroing in on the most notorious years of his career—his tumultuous relationship with the much younger Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), an earnest young hunk and animal trainer who triumphs over a stable of rivals to become the illustrious man’s occasional chauffeur and full-time lover. Despite a tonal shift that converts Candelabra’s initially farcical ambiance into darker melodramatic terrain—imagine an eccentric amalgam of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Scenes from a Marriage— Soderbergh’s film rings changes on a Hollywood staple: musical biopics like Walk the Line that chart an iconic star’s road from addiction to eventual redemption.

Juicy J is high as fuck.

We’re seated next to one another inside Irving Plaza, a midsize music venue in lower Manhattan. It’s three in the afternoon, and stagehands can be seen scurrying about hauling various rigging in preparation for Juicy J’s sold-out show later that night. The rapper and I are aglow in red light—fitting, given the similar lighting in the music video for his solo hit “Bandz a Make Her Dance,” which has seemingly supplanted Tyga’s “Rack City” as the de facto strip-club anthem.

It is virtually impossible to talk about The Fall—BBC Two’s addictive and provocative serial-killer drama that begins streaming stateside on Netflix on May 28—without mentioning the ghost in the room: Prime Suspect.

The allusion to Prime Suspect, a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic, is well founded. For one, The Fall is the closest that television has come to capturing the taut alchemy of Prime Suspect: part police chase, part psychological portrait of the hunted and the hunter. At the time of its premiere in 1992, Prime Suspect captured the institutional misogyny of the Metropolitan Police and placed at its center Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison, a knife-sharp detective who wasn’t content to hover at the edges of a “man’s world.” Over the seven seasons that Mirren portrayed Jane, viewers came to see her as a brilliant, if flawed, protagonist who somehow remained tethered to the glass ceiling that she had shattered and who turned to drink and sex to dull the loneliness of her life.