Flavorwire

Staff Picks: Flavorwire’s Favorite Cultural Things This Week

Need a great book to read, album to listen to, or TV show to get hooked on? The Flavorwire team is here to help: in this weekly feature, our editorial staffers each recommend the cultural object or experience they’ve enjoyed the most in the past seven days. Click through for our picks, and tell us what you’ve been loving in the comments.

30 Seconds With… Laura Benanti

In this … Read More

Seafaring Must-Reads for a Swashbuckling Summer

“Down dropped the breeze, the sails dropped down, / ‘Twas sad as sad could be; / And we did speak only to break / The silence of the sea.” –- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Taylor Coleridge). If you’re planning on spending some time on the open water this summer — or, more likely, if you only wish you were, you’re in luck. After all, you can get a taste of sea salt air from your living room… if you choose the right book. To that end, Flavorwire asked Ethan Rutherford, whose own excellent debut collection, … Read More

A Virtual Tour of the Now-Closed Liberace Museum in Las Vegas

Almost a decade before his death in 1987, world-famous entertainer Liberace opened a museum dedicated to himself. Housing all of his flamboyant outfits, pianos, cars, and jewelry, the Liberace Museum became a prominent attraction for Las Vegas tourists willing to venture away from the strip of casinos, nightclubs, and performance spaces. While the museum closed in October 2010, the non-profit Liberace Foundation for the Performing and Creative Arts hopes to open a new museum space dedicated to the performer. With Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra set to premiere on HBO this Saturday, let’s hope there’s enough renewed interest in Liberace’s life and luxuries to open the museum’s doors once again. After the jump, check out a few photos of the museum’s collection to get an idea of what we’re all missing.

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Teens Love Naomi Watts, Apparently

As it turns out, the Critics Choice Award nominees

Why Tobias Is the Best ‘Arrested Development’ Character

Arrested Development fans are busy counting down the hours until Season 4 premieres this Sunday at midnight on Netflix, and here at Flavorwire, we’re no different. So, we’re passing the time by declaring this Arrested Development Week, all leading up to a Recap-a-thon on Sunday, when our own Jason Bailey will review the whole season, episode by episode. This piece is part of a … Read More

Great Musicians on the Concerts That Inspired Them to Make Music

If you aren’t already, it’s time to follow The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle on Tumblr — his blog is as witty and entertaining as one might expect, and he updates it fairly frequently. In particular, it was interesting to see him recently post a photo of a very young version of himself at a Nick Cave show. It turns out he’s quite the Cave fan, and that seeing The Bad Seeds play on the tour in question was quite the formative experience on both Darnielle himself and on his nascent musical project. He’s not the first musician to be inspired to form a band after seeing a hero play live, of course — so here are some other recollections of great musical revelations.

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Flavorwire Interview: ‘We Steal Secrets’ Director Alex Gibney on Julian Assange and the Wikileaks Backlash to His Film

In his riveting new documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, director Alex Gibney (the prolific Oscar winner behind Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer) tells two stories: the thriller-like ascendency of the organization and the troubling questions it asks about government transparency, and the crumbling of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, which plays like something out of Greek tragedy — the transformation of an admirable idealist to a paranoid propagandist, injecting his own legal woes into the lofty aims of his organization, and conflating them. Gibney was unable to procure an interview with Assange; “Julian wanted money,” Gibney explains in the film, though Assange was willing to exchange his interview for information on the other people Gibney was talking to. The filmmaker refused, and We Steal Secrets has been under fire from Wikileaks supporters since it was unveiled at Sundance last January. I asked Gibney about that backlash, the importance of the story, and related troubling matters of transparency in the Obama administration.

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15 of the Greatest Celebrity Commencement Speeches

We’re almost through the month of May, and you know what that means: it’s college commencement speech season! While some of us had boring academics speak at our college graduations, there are a lot of other people who get to listen to folks like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Amy Poehler, or Meryl Streep. So if you’re like me and are still annoyed that the creator of Joan of Arcadia was the celebrated guest who spoke while you baked in your black polyester cap and gown, take a short break and listen to these famous (and, generally, hilarious) people give advice to 22-year-olds.

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What Made ‘The Middle’ One of the Best TV Comedies in Years

This morning we shared the