The Culture Show Podcast

Callie Crossley is joined by Lisa Simmons, Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival and program manager at Mass Cultural Council, and Maurice Emmanuel Parent, award-winning actor, Professor of the Practice, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies  at Tufts University, and Producing Artistic Director at Front Porch Arts Collective. They go over some of the week’s biggest arts and culture stories, which include:

Tracy K. Smith,  former U.S. Poet Laureate discusses her book “Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times” — an invitation to listen, reflect, and let poetry guide us through uncertainty. 

Don Gillis and Ray Flynn join The Culture Show to discuss Gillis’ new book “The Battle for Boston: How Mayor Ray Flynn and Community Organizers Fought Racism and Downtown Power Brokers.” On June 5th at 6:00 Don Gillis will be at a book event at the Roslindale Public Library. To learn more go here.

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough spent decades helping Americans see their past in human terms. A new collection, “History Matters”, gathers his essays and speeches on why history endures — edited by his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and longtime collaborator Mike Hill. She joins us ahead of her American Ancestors Headquarters event today at 5 p.m. To learn more go here.  

Callie Crossley leads this month's  Wednesday Watch Party with GBH’s Jeremy Siegel, host of In Common, and Culture Show contributor Lisa Simmons, Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival and program manager at Mass Cultural Council. 

We're  revisiting Spike Lee’s landmark 1989 film Do the Right Thing. Set in Bed-Stuy on the hottest day of the summer, the film is funny, combative, exuberant and ultimately devastating, using blazing color, a restless camera and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” to explore race, policing, neighborhood change, ownership and belonging. Nearly 40 years later, we consider what the film understands about the way prejudice builds through insults, resentments and competing claims to the same place — and why so much of what Lee put on screen remains recognizable today.

Bobbi Brown built a beauty empire on simplicity and self-expression. She joins The Culture Show to talk about her new book  “Still Bobbi,” where  she lays bare her lessons for  reinvention, resilience, and redefining beauty on her own terms.

From there, actor, singer and entrepreneur Donnie Wahlberg. Familiar to millions as “Blue Bloods’” Detective Danny Reagan, he spent fourteen seasons solving crimes in New York City. Now Danny Reagan is back — but this time, he’s doing it Boston-style. “Blue Bloods” followed a multi-generational law-enforcement family. In "Boston Blue," Wahlberg once again steps into Reagan’s shoes — this time moving the New York detective to Wahlberg’s own hometown. He joins The Culture Show to talk about a new chapter in the “Blue Bloods” universe and about his homecoming. 

Finally, McGonagle’s Pub  landed a spot on “The New York Times” list of America’s best restaurants, making it the first Irish pub to get this national recognition. Chef Aidan McGee joins The Culture Show to talk about how he is reimagining pub fare. Aidan McGee is the chef patron of The Dubliner and McGonagle's P

A sweeping  drama on MASTERPIECE brings one of Britain’s most famous literary families back to the screen. In “The Forsytes,” actors Stephen Moyer and Jack Davenport play brothers Jolyon and James Forsyte, members of a wealthy Victorian dynasty whose fortunes can’t shield them from rivalry, ambition, and betrayal. To learn more go here.

Then Fabiola Méndez is bringing the Puerto Rican cuatro to new audiences and bigger stages.,  The singer, composer, and bandleader joins Jared Bowen to discuss shaping a musical voice that has taken her from folk-rooted performance to the global stage alongside Bad Bunny. 

And Filmmaker and novelist John Sayles is back with “Crucible,” a new historical novel set in Henry Ford’s early-20th-century Detroit, where labor, power, and indu

Joyce Kulhawik joins Lisa Simmons, Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival, and Culture Show producer Kate Dellis for a look at some of the week’s biggest arts and culture stories, which included:

Christopher Rothko joins us to discuss his donation of his father’s 1934 Gloucester Harbor painting to the Cape Ann Museum and what the early work reveals about Mark Rothko before abstraction defined his career. He and his sister, Kate Rothko Prizel, will also appear at the museum’s Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the SeaSymposium September 17 and 18.

Filmmaker Ivy Meeropol joins us to discuss Ask E. Jean, her new documentary tracing E. Jean Carroll’s unconventional life, public voice and legal battle with Donald Trump. The film screens August 27 as part of the Nantucket Film Festival’s summer documentary series.

Washington Post reporter Danielle Paquette went to a forest outside Warsaw, where Europeans spent 28 hours role-playing life in a fictional Ohio trailer park. Her story, “What I Learned About the American Dream From Europeans Pretending to Live in Ohio,” explores what the experience revealed about America’s mythology abroad.

Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Paula Cole joins The Culture Show to remember Dolly Parton, an artist she long admired and later collaborated with on “Heart Door.” Cole reflects on Parton’s songwriting, influence and the experience of making music with her. Cole’s new archival project, Sonic Memoir: Demos 1989–1998, arrives September 10. On September 18, she brings This Fire: 30 to the Wilbur, performing This Fire in full for its 30th anniversary.

Polish resistance fighter Kazimierz Moczarski spent 255 days imprisoned with Jürgen Stroop, the Nazi officer who oversaw the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. Translator Sean Gasper Bye joins us to discuss Conversations with an Executioner, now available in its complete English translation for the first time. He’ll be at JustBook-ish in Dorchester September 1.

Worcester was once a corset capital, producing a garment that constricted women physically even as the industry helped liberate them in the workforce. Anne Marie Murphy joins us to discuss A Proper Fit: Women at Work in a City of Corsets and the women who designed, invented and built businesses around the garment.

Tony Award–winning director Diane Paulus, Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theater, joins us to talk about “Masquerade,” an immersive reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera.” Set in a five-story former department store on West 57th Street, the production turns the Paris Opera House into a candlelit maze of salons, staircases, and hidden rooms, bringing audiences in masks inches from the show’s spectacle and romance. To learn more go here.

James Beard Award-winning chef Ana Sortun has spent more than two decades making the flavors of Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean part of Boston’s flavor profile. The chef behind Oleana, Sofra and Sarma joins us to talk about how travel changed the way she cooks and why vegetables, spices and communal eating remain central to her food.

In her new book, Flora Culture: How Flowers Shape Our World, writer, designer and gardener Christin Geall follows flowers through a global industry in full bloom, tracing the labor, trade, traditions and environmental costs behind what we grow, give and bring into our homes. She’ll sign books at Edgartown Books on Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday, August 26.

First up, Sally Mann. In 2015 renowned photographer Sally Mann published her memoir “Hold Still,” an inquiry into family history, the American South and the nature of creativity. Now, comes her book  “Art Work: On the Creative Life.”  It is laugh-out-loud funny. It’s irreverent. And it’s refreshingly practical as she guides the reader through her experience and process of being an artist. 

From there Jeremy Sewall, Chef and Owner of Row 34, shares recipes and stories from his new  “Everyday Chef: Simple Dishes for Family and Friends,” which illustrates how restaurant expertise can translate into simple, satisfying meals at home.

Finally, Richard Smith. For more than a quarter century he embodied Henry David Thoreau—donning the waistcoat and straw hat, walking the paths of Concord, and giving voice to one of New England’s most enduring thinkers. Now, after 26 years of living deliberately in another man’s shoes, Smith has stepped  away from the role. Closing a chapter that made Thoreau’s world vividly real for thousands who visited Walden Pond.