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Fashion

“Angles Are Attitudes”: Men’s Style Tips From Pop Culture’s Greatest Fashion Icons

By Alison Nastasi on

Brooks Brothers has unveiled its new limited-edition men’s clothing line, created in collaboration with The Great Gatsby costume designer Catherine Martin. Gatsby isn’t the first pop culture project to reinvigorate interest in the distinctive and discerning man of the Roaring Twenties. The gentlemen of Boardwalk Empire and Downton Abbey have recently donned wingtip shoes, white waistcoats, and straw boaters. With the “dreamlike world of pristine green laws and lavish parties” in mind, we gathered great fashion tips from ten cultural icons to learn the secrets of sharp-dressed… Read More

Film

67 Great John Waters Quotes For His 67th Birthday

By Jason Bailey and Alison Herman on

The great filmmaker, writer, raconteur, and all-purpose rabble-rouser John Waters turns 67 years old today, and since he’s one of the most quotable and entertaining pop culture figures out there, we figured we’d mark the occasion in the best way possible: by rounding up 67 pearls of wisdom from one of the best interviewees around. Join us after the jump for some of Mr. Waters’s liveliest thoughts on bad taste, high fashion, pornography, nudity, politics, and movies. … Read More

Celebrity

The Craziest Advice From Famous People

By Emily Temple on

This week, we stumbled across this amazing video of William S. Burroughs doling out some highly questionable advice to young people. As you might have noticed, we’re pretty big fans of collating advice from cultural icons here at Flavorwire — but the advice those cultural icons give isn’t always totally sound (or maybe it is, we don’t judge). After the jump, we’ve put together a collection of some of the craziest advice from famous people. Whether you listen or not is up to you. … Read More

Film

10 Movies We Can’t Wait to See at SXSW 2013

By Jason Bailey on

A confession: nothing against Sundance or any of our other regulars, but SXSW is probably our favorite film festival to attend. The warm weather is a nice respite from late-winter NYC, there’s a relaxed and chatty vibe in the lines, and Tex-Mex and BBQ are always within reach. Oh, and the movies are great. If you’re headed down to Austin, we’ve got plenty of cool events for you to check out. And for those of you who plan to spend your days shotgunning as many movies as possible, here are a few of the flicks we’re eager to take… Read More

Music

Revisiting Divine’s Overlooked Musical Career

By Tom Hawking on

Anyone casually aware of Harris Glenn Milstead, who died 25 years ago today, will most likely know him as John Waters’ muse Divine, the pudgy drag queen who ate shit in Pink Flamingos and played Ricki Lake’s agoraphobic mother in Hairspray. As far as legacies go, that’s not a bad one, but it does kinda sell him short. In particular, it rather ignores his oft-underrated musical career, which flourished briefly in the 1980s and remains a largely undocumented influence on the evolution of club music, particularly the gay club-centric Hi-NRG sound that would in turn go on to influence the development of house and techno. And, more importantly, it was a whole lot of fun. … Read More

Pop Culture

Controversial Cultural Icons Interviewing Each Other

By Alison Nastasi on

The gamine-coiffed creator of Girls, Lena Dunham, is currently on the cover of Interview magazine. Creative comrade Miranda July conducted the chat with the Tiny Furniture director. Both artists have carved their own path in the industry and made careers out of being keen observers, illuminating the unspoken intricacies of the everyday. Each has also faced their share of controversy — arousing criticisms over sex, nepotism, racial insensitivity, and body image, to name a few. We wanted to explore what happens when two cultural icons sit down to interview each other — and we’ve shared the Dunham/July talk past the break. Do these pioneering, celebrity culture makers ask the tough questions? Can they relate to one another, or do they lock horns? Check out the interviews between several controversial cultural icons that we tracked down, and find out. … Read More

Pop Culture

The Most Bizarre Celebrity PSAs of All Time

By Alison Nastasi on

As our friends at Open Culture recently pointed out, the heyday of the public service announcement has passed. The Internet is our new gateway for learning about social issues — once you sort through all the false information, of course. When we saw a cheeky anti-smoking PSA from John Waters, we got a hankering for more vintage awareness videos with a bizarre twist. Go henceforth to see what the Pope of Trash had to say about cigarettes, and enjoy other PSAs that mesmerize with their well-intentioned weirdness. … Read More

Television

The All-Time Weirdest Guest Appearances on ‘The Simpsons’

By Tom Hawking on

So if you haven’t heard, Tom Waits was on The Simpsons last night, voicing “a gravelly voiced paranoiac” prepper and joining the long list of illustrious and not-so-illustrious guest stars who’ve graced the show since it started screening way back in 1989. His appearance got us thinking about some of the more unlikely guest stars and/or performances the show has seen over the years — and so we’ve amused ourselves after the jump selecting some of our favorites, from Johnny Cash playing a psychedelic coyote to Thomas Pynchon breaking a 40-year TV silence. Did we miss any of your favorites? Go ahead and let us know. (And advance apologies for the quality of a couple of the clips — Simpsons videos are like hen’s teeth on YouTube.) … Read More

Film

What Are John Waters’ Favorite Films of 2012?

By Judy Berman on

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Various individual critics and critics’ circles. These are the people the American public trusts to pick the best movies of the year. But here at Flavorpill, there’s one cinephile whose taste we value over all others: John Waters. So it’s… Read More

Books

10 Famous Writers on How to Read

By Emily Temple on

Recently, we came across Kurt Vonnegut’s term paper assignment for his 1965 “Form of Fiction” course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, recently reprinted in Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield. Needless to say, the assignment is almost a short story in and of itself — filled with Vonnegut’s delicious turns of phrase and serious expectations, plus his advice on how best to read fiction, or in particular, how best to read short stories that one can then talk or write about well. Inspired, we hunted around for other famous authors with opinions on how best to read — get a little instruction in something you’ve been doing all your life after the jump. … Read More