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Last night, the first season of A&E's Bates Motel came to a close. The show is a Psycho prequel that takes place in present day and thus is insane in concept even before you get to the unstable characters, the Chinese sex slave subplot, the fields of marijuana, the girl with cystic fibrosis whose gorgeousness can't be obscured by an oxygen tube, the taxidermy and the dog that became roadkill before our very eyes. Fun show!

And then there are the performances. Vera Farmiga is a very good actor. Bates Motel is not a very good show, but it is a consistently entertaining one due in no small part to Farmiga's willingness to throw herself around, howl and spit out lines like, "I killed the crap out of him" with stunning conviction. Because she is playing Norman Bates' crazy mom, it is hard to say whether her foaming at the mouth is justified or over-the-top, but it did make me laugh throughout the season. The only thing that has come close in recent memory is Jessica Lange on the first season of American Horror Story. There's something about macabre television that brings the best-worst out of its women.

J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot franchise performs several admirable balancing acts. Among them:

• It adheres to traditional, if not conservative values, such as the importance of intelligence, the power of teamwork, the virtue in staying covered up (those Starfleet uniforms reveal nothing!) without seeming stuffy.
• It does that sci-fi thing of explaining a lot about the universe that it's introducing you through dialogue without any of the exposition seeming like it's been piped in from a Wikipedia page. Don't know what Prime Directive is? It's OK, the charaters in Star Trek Into Darkness gradually explain it. Don't remember that Spock is only half Vulcan? Don't worry, you'll get a gentle reminder.
• It is a big masquerade ball where familiar faces like Zachary Quinto don appearance-altering aesthetics and symbolize giant concepts/personality types (Kirk is spontaneity; Spock is logic), yet the acting is so good that this rarely feels over-the-top, if at all. Everyone in Darkness is in top form and utterly charming — Quinto, Chris Pine, Zoe Saldana and Karl Urban, especially. Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan is a tremendous addition to the cast, as he brings an elegance to the kind of diabolical, impossible-to-defeat villain type that he's playing.
• It behaves like a superhero franchise in that its characters pull off humanly impossible feats of strength and agility without falling into the trappings of the modern superhero movie and having to be either overly meditative or sneer at itself.
• It acts like an action franchise but it's actually capable of pulling off excitement. My heart rate increased during a scene where Kirk must fly from one ship to another, zooming through outer space and dodging space junk as a hairline fracture in his helmet threatens to cause his head to explode. All the while, the person in his target destination is being distracted from opening the hatch.

• Its one-liners are truly weird. "Sometimes I wanna rip the bangs off his head," Kirk smarts when frustrated with Spock. "Damn it, man, I'm a doctor not a torpedo technician!" says Bones.

I have no deep association with what came before 2009's reboot. I can't say whether or not Star Trek Into Darkness will satisfy diehard fans of the series, but I suspect that for many of them, very little would at this point. However, I have seen virtually every big budget action movie that has been released in recent memory, and Into Darkness, like its predecessor, is among my very favorites. This is the only remaining action franchise that I care about it, the only one that moves nimbly enough to consistently entertain. It has no lofty goals but it is sharply written and acted enough to avoid feeling mindless.

If anything, Star Trek Into Darkness seems too eager to please. It winds down with a three-part climax, during which new members of its multi-ethnic, multi-species crew—a real rolling pan-universe Benetton ad—is constantly and politely flashing on screen. I don't need to tell you what the image of a spacecraft at skyline-level aimed at a building evokes, but the film apologizes for itself in a dedication to 9/11 veterans that flashes onscreen during the credits. Star Trek Into Darkness doesn't always go boldly, but its momentum is thrilling all the same.

April Kidwell shrieks, "Different places!" about five minutes into Showgirls the Musical, and the crowd loses it. This is in response to being asked where she's from, and though these words alone are not particularly funny, their delivery is. So are the flying French fries that punctuate the line.

And then there's the nostalgia, the personal associations, the fact that these words were initially written by Joe Eszterhas, directed by Paul Verhoeven and spoken by Elizabeth Berkley in American cinema's last big-budget camp classic, the infamous flop Showgirls. The stripper-pole-licking, mispronunciations of Versace and fucking underwater that ensue all but bring down the house.

The musical satire opened in April at the Kraine Theater in New York's East Village, where it was been packed night after night. It has since moved to the gay nightclub XL, where it opened Wednesday, and is set to run Wednesdays and Saturdays through June 15. Though XL's neon-on-black color scheme is more Cheetah than Stardust, this venue is bigger and flashier than the Kraine, and just blocks away from the theater district. Rena Riffel, who played Penny in the movie, is now reprising her role onstage—the stage version comes complete with the song "No One Wants To Fuck a Penny." Like its demented protagonist who goes from whore to stripper to showgirl and back, Showgirls the Musical is clawing its way up in the world.

This is deserved. The audience at the two performances that I have now attended seemed to agree that the musical does their beloved movie justice. There is a sense of communion, of congregating to worship this rare breed of film that never stops devising new ways for its characters to be insane and disgusting. As a Showgirls devotee since the movie was released, I endorse this show. (I saw the movie opening weekend, way back in September 1995. It had me at "smiling snatch.")

Showgirls the Musical probably shouldn't work as well as it does – crucial to Showgirls' charm is its obliviousness. In an essay in its photo book companion that's as misguided as the film itself, Showgirls: Portrait of a Film, Verhoven gushes, "I got to direct an MGM musical!" Slate writer and Barneys creative-ambassador-at-large Simon Doonan is an opening-weekender like myself who is well connected enough to have discussed the film with its stars Elizabeth Berkley and Kyle MacLachlan. "The fascinating thing is that they all concur that while they were making the movie, they thought they were just making a really dramatic film about Vegas," he told me last weekend over the phone, cackling. "Which, of course, they were. They said they were just showing up for work that day and throwing themselves into it. They were unaware that they were making a camp classic. They had no sense of it at all. I guess that’s what makes it so genuinely, ferociously camp is that it was done for real. It’s haute couture camp."

That unawareness is what Susan Sontag deemed "pure camp" in her seminal set of bullet points, "Notes on Camp." Showgirls the Musical, then, presents a different sensibility, one entirely aware that it is straightforward comedy. Sometimes the musical takes lines from the movie and builds on them to stretch out the absurdity ("I didn't fuck him. I just made him cum in his pants. Not. Fucking," spits Nomi). Sometimes it merely replicates the film verbatim (the Nomi/Cristal scene in which they discuss eating dog food takes place at the Café Le Actual Dialogue from the Movie). Sometimes its cast comments on the action Greek-chorus style ("They can't dance! They can't dance!" actors sing when Nomi and James flail at each other in the club). Sometimes it operates as film criticism – the song "We Should Probably Just Fuck" explores the unresolved sexual tension between female friends in the film: "We're best friends now / We should probably have sex / Because that's what best friends do / When the writers are men." During the final song, Molly sings to the crowd, "This movie would be better without the rape at the end." What's amazing is that Showgirls loses very little in the translation from unknowing comedy to pointed spoof.

Showgirls the Musical is the brainchild of the pseudonymous duo Bob and Tobly McSmith, who wrote the bulk of it last fall when they were trapped in Brooklyn during Hurricane Sandy. They were so inspired when a Showgirls joke in their Bayside! The Saved by the Bell Musical! repeatedly killed. Kidwell told it – she played Jessie Spano, which means she has now translated two Elizabeth Berkley roles to the stage.

Neither Bob nor Tobly were diehard Showgirls buffs before they watched it the 50 or so times necessary to crank out a 90-minute musical (with about 15 songs) based on it. Now Tobly says it's her favorite movie.

"We’re not taking it down, we’re celebrating it and all its amazing and terribleness," she told me earlier this month when I met her, Bob, Kidwell and the show's choreographer, Jason Wise, at the Kraine a few hours before a performance.

Kidwell, who looks a lot like Berkley but with more conventionally attractive proportions, was the McSmiths' muse. Her energy fuels the show, and watching her, you get the feeling that she could power a city with her sweat. Her performance is a tour de force. Along with most of the cast, she is rarely not topless. She is at once absolutely ridiculous and straightforwardly amazing. She has Nomi down to the lopsided wiggle. Her face is a freak show of contortions. She's no butterfly. She's all pelvic thrust. She prowls. She's got it. She learned it, but they don't teach it in any class. Hers is exponential absurdity – you can imagine Kidwell watching Nomi on screen and replicating her scissor-hands move while Nomi watches Cristal on stage and replicates her scissor-hands move.

"I don’t feel angry throughout my daily life because I get to get out on stage and go nuts," Kidwell told me about the catharsis in convulsing for 90 minutes multiple times a week. (Kidwell recently told Slate of how the show has been therapeutic for a past sexual assault.)

There have been other musicals based on Showgirls, including a brown-bag puppet show in New York some years ago and a more straightforward retelling that played Chicago last year and used pop songs like Britney Spears "Gimme More" and Christina Aguilera's "Keeps Getting Better." Tobly told me that they didn't even Google the earlier shows: "We had our Nomi. We had our writing style and we just went for it." None of the past productions touch this one because none of them featured Kidwell.

Regardless, tapping into the madness of Showgirls is something people have been doing for years. It's a no-brainer: Get a bunch of Showgirls fans in a room to focus on the film and mass giddiness ensues. Kidwell and company recently performed at a screening of the film in Williamsburg's restaurant-theater Nighthawk. She described the experience of watching it with a crowd as "joyous."

"It’s almost like there are two shows going on at once," said Showgirls the Musical choreographer Jason Wise. "The reactions of people are just as fun as the action that’s happening onstage." The stage show's original script had to be cut down because the audience's laughter dramatically extended the show's running time.

I notice such joy when I reference Showgirls, which is often. I mention it on Twitter and get dozens of responses. I bond with people over that movie like Nomi and Cristal do with Doggy Chow. When I was talking to Doonan, his designer husband Jonathan Adler jumped on the phone, breathlessly eager to discuss this movie.

"The kids who work for me are in their 20's and they don’t know any of the references that they should," he lamented. "They don’t know Valley of the Dolls or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. But they all know Showgirls, thank god. That generation thinks Bring It On is a classic. It’s not. Showgirls is."

Indeed, it is the last vestige of high-scale, old-school camp, the kind of thing that demands repeat viewings to simply wrap your head around the depths of its outrageousness and the dearth of its taste. After getting off the phone with Doonan and Adler, I performed an informal poll by texting anyone in my phone contacts who's 25 and under the question, "Do you like Showgirls?" Out of about 10, one said, "No," one didn't know what I was talking about and the rest answered emphatic yeses. Out of those, only one could rattle off movies he thought of as similarly funny/awful: Batman and Robin, Troll 2 and The Room.

But out of those, only Batman and Robin has the sort of Hollywood opulence that makes Showgirls the full-throttle mess it is. It is sinful, through and through, and its tits-out lewdness allows it to transcend the traditionally gay ghetto of camp.

“Some of the followers I’ve picked up along the way will be these mistresses and madams and the men who follow them," the anonymous person who runs the RealNomiMalone parody Twitter account told me by phone this week. "I can’t tell if they’re actual fans of Showgirls or if they appreciate any kind of seedy picture I post here and there."

The straight guy that I live with, A.J. Daulerio, loves this movie and I asked him if it is at all erotic to him. "Yes. I've never looked at a swimming pool the same," is what he told me. Bob McSmith told me that before writing Showgirls the Musical, his biggest association came when he would masturbate to it as a teen. I'm not sure that he was kidding.

I thought it was interesting that all of the gay guys that I talked to for this piece mentioned having empathy for Nomi, and in the process, straightforwardly reading her fame-hungry narrative between fits of laughter.

"There's no mumbling," said Doonan. "It’s very dramatic and sad and insane and camp and funny. It’s very successful on so many different levels. You want Nomi to succeed and you are rooting for her. There are genuine components to it."

I never quite experienced it that way, as Nomi is a raging asshole and I enjoy seeing her cry way too much. But I do know a good underdog story when I see one: Showgirls itself has that narrative. A flop at the time of its release, it took years to find appreciation, to attain its classic status. Even Elizabeth Berkley, who was paid a meager $100,000 for her work and subsequently referred to as a "blow-up fuck doll" by Eszterhas (who was reportedly high while writing much of the screenplay) has come around. She mentioned it in her book 2011 Ask Elizabeth book as a symbol of self-discovery. (Berkley's management didn't respond to my interview request.)

"She’s more than happy to do a few of those scissor hands in front of the face," reports Doonan. "It’s good to be known for something, hello."

"It’s been an amazing blessing, an incredible opportunity this past year to make something off somebody else’s career. That sounds horrible," says Kidwell, who may be the world's only working Elizabeth Berkly impersonator. "I hope it makes her feel better about her Showgirls experience that she’s bringing sunlight to everyone else’s lives."

Daft Punk's Random Access Memories emphatically exploits pop music's reliance on context. It's been eight years since the French house pop-crossover critical darlings released their last full-length album, 2005’s Human After All, which was initially a considered a disappointment. In that span, Human's furious pummeling and caustic textures went on to influence the prevailing style of house music more than any other single work of the past 10 years. If their prescience wasn't enough to bring Daft Punk back into the good graces of their audience, surely their 2007 live show performed on a mesmerizing light-up pyramid was.

Random Access Memories (which began streaming on iTunes this week) is a pointed response to their past work and the EDM it inspired. It turns away from their trusted synthesizers and drum machines for something more "live," something featuring disco god Nile Rogers on guitar and session musicians who played with Bowie and on Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall.

This is more than a stylistic shift. As the chattier half of the duo, Thomas Bangalter, recently told Rolling Stone:

Electronic music right now is in its comfort zone and it’s not moving one inch. That’s not what artists are supposed to do…[The genre is suffering] an identity crisis: You hear a song, whose track is it? There’s no signature.

If it was funny that their most suffocatingly programmed release was called Human After All, it's even funnier that after Human After All, these robots show us that they are human after all. "Emotion" is a word they have been using a lot to describe the record's objective.

To put their own signature on dance music in 2013, Daft Punk trace the hands of forebears like Rogers and electronic dance music pioneer (decades before EDM) Giorgio Moroder. The latter does a rambling spoken account of his musical history over watered-down approximations of his arpeggiated disco and his proggy flourishes on the nine-minute “Giorgio.” Random Access Memories is often disco, but when it is it's of the slow-chug variety. The stellar first single, “Get Lucky,” is as energetic as it gets. It also routinely dips into a slower, self-consciously smooth groove resembling lite fare like the Alan Parsons Project's “Eye in the Sky.”

Random Access Memories is album-oriented pop in a time of singles. It is full of drum-kit-workout breakdowns and little shimmies of guitar riffs that would have sounded trite within the late '70s/early '80s era that Daft Punk salute. But these references are self-evident enough to be easily forgiven. And if the retroism isn’t evident, well, Daft Punk will explain it to you—with features in Rolling Stone, GQ, The New York Times, Billboard, Dazed, and Pitchfork, the mystery-valuing duo are talking more than ever. Context is crucial for something this subtle.

Daft Punk marry these vintage influences with their affinity for slithering melodies and repetitive near-songs (on Random Access, the second verse is often the same as the first). To the Times, Bangalter rhapsodized the “infinity of nuance, in the shuffles and the grooves” made by human hands, not machines. But given its loopy, simplistic nature, this huge production—which took years to complete and roped in big names of varying genres like Pharrell Williams and Animal Collective's Panda Bear—feels akin to a rediscovery of the lost art of cursive or long division. Yes, it is more dynamic and warmer than the block waveforms of Top 40 radio. Yes, the drums have a satisfying spring no matter how mellow the groove. Yes, you feel space here. Yes, craftsmanship is a forgotten pop virtue. And that handmade garment with such lovely decorative lining is so special to the person who's wearing it.

For all of the work that went into it, and that went into making it an event (those SNL promos built such suspense that the release of “Get Lucky” felt orgasmic), there is something slight about this album. It would be one thing if we were actually living in the disco era and Random Access Memories were one album in a string of them—if this were Daft Punk’s C’est Chic, for example. But this is rare output from trusted tastemakers. The hype and possibility were more intoxicating than this rather dry work. I can’t imagine listening to most of this album after this week.

And yet, I admire Random Access Memories. I love Daft Punk for confronting a public that is more attentive than ever with the audacity of cheese. I think it's bold of them to force kids today to consider the past that their moment-fetishizing #yolo lifestyle is founded upon. I appreciate them for giving us disco to unite us in these gay times. But if these are its key strengths, Random Access Memories works better as an object than an album.

Last night, Kanye West played a nearly 90-minute surprise show as part of Adult Swim's upfront presentation. At least two notable things happened: He sang an AutoTuned ode to Kim Kardashian that doesn't live up to its possible name of "Awesome," and he went on a tear about pitfalls of fame.

The latter is above. "I'm a terrible, terrible, terrible celebrity," West said early on. That simply isn't true. He is a wonderful celebrity, prone to unpredictable behavior, with an catalog of public rants that is thus far unparalleled by any of his peers. He is a great celebrity in that all he needs to do to command attention is pop out his pacifier. "I'm the worst kind of celebrity, because all I do is make real music," continued the rapper, who may have debuted his Skrillex collaboration last night. He sang-song this information. The music he was making at this moment was only quasi real. It should be noted that throwing fits, also, is a big part of his art. Obviously.

He went on to complain about photogs. He was commanding attention because of his fame yet promising that he is no celebrity because he thinks he is God and he is entitled to make arbitrary decrees within any given paragraph: "So I don't want no people runnin' up on me with cameras, trying to like sell pictures and shit to magazines, asking me dumb ass questions, throwin' me off my focus and shit. Harrasin' you all muthafuckin day. I ain't no muthafuckin' celebrity."

He was probably referencing the paparazzi that made him run into a pole last week, as they chased him and the person who's famous for being famous that he decided to make a baby with. He would have gotten the photogs' attention all by himself though, and will for years to come as long as he's treating all the world like his subway car to rant in and distract people from their music.

But you're right — there is a legacy there of playing with the truth.

Former future dirty old man/cross-singer Prince granted a "rare and far-ranging, two-hour-plus interview late, late on Monday night" with his hometown paper The Star Tribune. One thing he wouldn't discuss? Minnesota's recent passage of marriage equality. Says the paper:

He dodged questions about the state’s new marriage-equality law...

Nice, thanks Prince. Not even a phoned-in, vague talk-around. Not even one of those piercing squeals used in the edited version of the "Sexy MF" chorus.

Prince became a Jehovah's Witness in 2001 and has been very vocal about it since. He's also expressed a shift toward conservative views about sex and cursing in pop culture. This is very convenient for someone who might not have the opportunity to voice such views today had he not built a career on being lascivious in the first place, but whatever. Prince does as Prince wants. Oh motherfucker, he's a motherfucker, can't you understand?

That said, the article reveals that he eats pizza with a fork, so at least he's kind of queer.

Elsewhere, he discusses his new band, 3rdEyeGirl. "It’s time for their legacy," he promises. (Prince also helped usher in the legacy of Carmen Electra.)

He's been touring with 3rdEyeGirl for about a month now, but it seems like as good of a time as ever to point out that he lied about this band when asked about them during a January interview for Billboard, during which Prince made Gail Mitchell refrain from recording and note-taking as she chased him around his Paisley Park estate while he rose from a series bathtubs, threw doves at her and sneered. Here's Mitchell's account of the 3rdEye stuff:

And then it's back to the conference room, where we talk about the recent leak of unreleased Prince material. A mysterious person with the Twitter handle 3rdEyeGirl (whose Twitter bio describes her as an "International Art Thief") was posting links—since removed—to new material. Was this a publicity stunt or Prince himself? He counters that it was indeed a bootlegger. But why then is 3rdEyeGirl's Twitter avatar pasted on the face of the drum kit on the soundstage I've seen him rehearsing on? Prince says it's just the girls (his backing trio and [his manager] Ramadan) poking fun at the situation. "As a band, they don't even have a name. They're not 3rdEye."

And now they are. Animals strike poses that are as curious as ever.

Ramadan, by the way, is 22 and 3rdEyeGirl's drummer is 24. "I don’t have time for old people," says Prince. Why, though? They are so weird and fun!

Prince turns 55 next month.

[Image via Getty]