Popular Posts

20 Highbrow Books to Read on the Beach This Summer

By Emily Temple on May 23, 2013 2:45pm

For even the most seasoned of book nerds, a trip to the beach can raise some difficult questions. After all, you don’t want to waste your precious vacation minutes reading something you’ll forget by the time your suntan fades, but a beach towel is also (probably) not the ideal location to tackle Ulysses. With this weekend marking the unofficial start of summer, Flavorwire has you covered with a list of twenty decidedly highbrow but still totally beach-appropriate… Read More

Television

Exclusive Supercut: All The ‘Arrested Development’ “Chicken” Dances

By Jason Bailey on May 23, 2013 11:00am

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. Click here to follow our coverage.

It began with a throwaway joke on the first season episode “Staff Infection,” with G.O.B. accusing Buster of being a chicken, and proceeding to imitate… well, not a chicken, but some sort of animal that clucks and claps. It then became one of Arrested Development’s best running jokes, with Lindsay, Lucille, and George Sr. each providing their own variation, none of them all that similar to a chicken. Here’s our supercut of all of them—along with our hope that we’ll see more variations (how’s about one from Buster?) in season four. … Read More

Television

11 Shows That Wouldn’t Exist Without ‘Arrested Development’

By Jason Bailey on May 23, 2013 9:30am

By now, the common wisdom is that Arrested Development’s original three-season run was influential and groundbreaking — but what, specifically, do we owe to the show? The dubious film career of Jason Bateman? David Cross appearing in those Alvin and the Chipmunks movies? The forgotten Fox animated flop Sit Down, Shut Up? Hardly. For your consideration, a brief survey of television programs that may never have existed were it not for the Bluth crew. … Read More

Photography

Remarkable ’80s-Era Photos of Iconic NYC Artists

By Jason Bailey on May 22, 2013 11:45am

Jeannette Montgomery Barron’s new photo book SCENE is a must-have for aficionados of the ‘80s New York art scene — for which Barron was something of an unofficial “yearbook photographer,” capturing images of legends like Cindy Sherman, Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Francesco Clemente, David Salle, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eric Fischl, and Keith Haring during their starving-artist days. The book launches with an event tonight at BookMarc; the tie-in exhibit, NYC c. 1985, opens tomorrow at Chelsea’s ClampArt. But if you’re not in Gotham, Flavorwire’s got you covered — we were lucky enough to get our hands on several gorgeous images from SCENE. … Read More

Film

Surprising Early, Alternate Versions of Iconic Movie Posters

By Jason Bailey on May 21, 2013 1:45pm

Movie posters, as we’ve discussed before, are a tricky business, and a great movie poster must serve many functions: it must capture the essence of a movie, it must be aesthetically pleasing or interesting in itself, and it must sell the product in question. Unsurprisingly, the quest for that balance can result in reworking, re-imagining, and revisions galore, which is why the new Daybees online exhibit The Iconic Movie Posters That Never Were is so fascinating. In it, the designers behind some of Hollywood’s most memorable posters share their early drafts and alternate versions of classic posters; check them out after the jump, alongside the final drafts that became part of movie history, and visit Daybees to learn more about their creators. … Read More

Books

The 20 Most Beautiful Libraries on Film and TV

By Emily Temple on May 21, 2013 1:05pm

If you read this space with any frequency, you’ll know that Flavorwire is perhaps unnaturally fond of the beautiful library. Recently, Book Riot mused over which Doctor Who library is the best — or perhaps the most beautiful. But why stop at the Doctor Who universe? Countless gorgeous libraries have appeared on screens large and small (if only there were set designers in all of our homes), whether old and dusty, shiny and modern, underground, filled with water, or, um, animated. Click through for 20 of the most beautiful libraries on film and… Read More

Television

Flavorwire Exclusive: The Ultimate Ann Veal “Her?” Supercut

By Jason Bailey on May 21, 2013 12:15pm

In Arrested Development‘s Season 1 finale, “Let ‘Em Eat Cake,” a flat-voiced young woman approaches George Michael Bluth at the banana stand. This was the first appearance of Ann Veal, played in that episode by Alessandra Torresani and through the rest of the run by Mae Whitman (series creator Mitch Hurwitz said he’d toyed with the idea of having a different actress play Ann in each episode, to emphasize how unmemorable she was). She would become George Michael’s greatest love, and Michael’s greatest enemy — when he could remember her. And with that, we present a brief but thorough look at the history of Ann and the Bluths — all the “Who?”s, all the “Her?”s, all the “Egg”s, and all the insults. … Read More

Design

The Internet’s Funniest Band T-Shirt Parodies

By Tom Hawking on May 21, 2013 11:30am

A hilarious T-shirt design has been making the rounds on the Internet over the last couple of days — it’s the iconic radio wave landscape from the cover of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, emblazoned with the words, “What is this? I’ve seen it on Tumblr.” The shirt is the work of one Adam J. Kurtz, a New York City-based designer, and you can pre-order it here. As you wait for your purchase to arrive, here’s a selection of similarly amusing takes on iconic band logos, album cover art, and T-shirt designs. … Read More

Music

The 50 Albums Everyone Needs to Own, 1963-2013

By Tom Hawking on May 20, 2013 12:00pm

No one buys albums anymore, goes the music industry truism. And yet, for all that the format’s commercial viability may or may not be on the wane, sitting and listening to a great album from start to finish is one of the greatest pleasures that music can bring. Flavorwire recently got to thinking about how one might build a record collection if you really only did buy one record a year. So here’s the result of our thought exercise: 50 albums you really should own, one a year from 1963 until the present… Read More