LATEST COVERAGE
The Flaming Lips: OKC Is Resilient
Rock band the Flaming Lips is synonymous with Oklahoma City. Lead singer Wayne Coyne, who’s lived in OKC since 1961, on the devastating tornado that hit his city, claiming at least 24 lives—including nine children.
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.
Wayne Coyne grew up in Oklahoma City. (Anna Webber/Getty Images; Kim Johnson Flodin/AP)
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.
America’s Next Great Chef Is 14
The chef behind hit Beverly Hills pop-up restaurant Eureka is Flynn McGarry. Jace Lacob sits down for an elaborate 11-course meal and interviews the teenage prodigy.
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.
Flynn McGarry (left) and BierBeisl chef Bernard Meiringer. (Will McGarry)
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.
The Many Shades of Liberace
Soderbergh’s new Liberace biopic carefully navigates the campy joy of the pianist’s persona with the hard edges of his personality, finding an important niche in America’s conversation about gay rights.
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’s Big Return
Seven years after winning an Oscar with Three 6 Mafia, rapper Juicy J has launched a solo career with his strip-club anthem ‘Bandz a Make Her Dance.’ He opens up to Marlow Stern.
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.
Rapper Juicy J of Three 6 Mafia visits BET’s “106 & Park” in March. (Taylor Hill/FilmMagic, via Getty Images)
'Idol' Alums Will Save 'Idol'
There’s hope after all! Reports surface that Fox is planning to stock next season’s judging table with alums. Quick, someone call Kelly (and Kellie).
Just over a week before the confetti rained down on Candice Glover, reports leaked of an American Idol bloodbath—all four judges, including stalwart dawg Randy Jackson, were being booted from the panel—and we argued that it’s in the best interest of the aging reality show and the misguided music stars it courts not to hire celebrity judges in the future. It seems now, at least in part, producers are listening.
Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images
The Idol off-season rumor mill is already whipping furiously, with Vulture reporting that Fox is giving “serious consideration” to the idea of inviting former Idol contestants and winners to next season’s judges tables. Kelly Clarkson and Jennifer Hudson already reportedly have been approached, with Clay Aiken and Adam Lambert also under serious consideration.
The Dark Lure of ‘The Fall’
BBC Two’s ‘The Fall,’ starring Gillian Anderson and Jamie Dornan, debuts on Netflix on May 28. Jace Lacob on Anderson and Dornan’s searing performances and why you need to watch.
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.
Gillian Anderson in BBC Two’s “The Fall.” (BBC)
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.
Beyoncé's New Song Is Fantastic
It may have taken what seems like forever to release it, but Queen B’s first full track leaked of her upcoming album, “Grown Woman,” is worth the wait.
Forget whether or not she’s pregnant with a new Baby Carter. Beyoncé just gave birth to a “Grown Woman.”
Ezra Shaw / Getty Images
After months of being music’s biggest tease—she announced her new album, out later this summer, in the winter and has since only released brief snippets of new material in ads for Pepsi and H&M—a full, new single from Queen B finally leaked Monday. “Grown Woman” is the song she leaked in April’s Pepsi commercial, so ubiquitous at this point that your body probably instinctively knows the choreography.
Cheat Sheet
Entertainment
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HEAVENS!
‘Downton’ Castle Raking in the Dough
Don't forget your souvenirs!More
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LATINO PRIDE
Sheen Gets In Touch With His Roots
Going by his real name, Carlos Estevez, in new movie.More
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COLD TURKEY
A&E’s ‘Intervention’ Canceled
After 8 years and 243 interventions. More
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OH GOD
Amanda Bynes Arrested in NYC
Allegedly threw a bong out a 36th-story window.More
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BOX OFFICE
‘Fast & Furious’ and ‘Hangover’ Face Off
‘Hangover’ kicks off to disappointing start.More
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Fashion Beast
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Nine Best Fashion Instagrams
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Amanda Bynes Wigs Out
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Jenna Lyons Will Not Wear Google Glass; UN Backs Woman Who Sued Prada Japan for Sexual Discrimination
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The Royalist
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William: Bayern Munich Will Win Euro Soccer League
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King Edward VIII's Phone Was Bugged By His Own Government
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Queen to Visit London Terror Site
The Queen is to go ahead with a long-planned visit to Woolwich Barracks next week More













