Studio 360 With Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen talks with novelist Karl Ove Knausgård about his nonfiction book about Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Ani DiFranco’s new memoir chronicles the ups and downs of being a feminist folk hero. Pete Seeger would have been 100 this week, and Kurt revisits a lovely afternoon he spent with the singer in the home he built himself along the river. And a site-specific art project, “Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy,” exposes misogyny in popular music in a grueling yet entertaining way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ali Smith’s 2016 book Autumn was heralded as the first great post-Brexit novel. Kurt talks with her about politics, art, and the very nature of time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kurt Andersen talks with Susan Choi, whose engrossing new novel about on- and offstage drama at a performance arts high school is called “Trust Exercise.” How Edward Doyle-Gillespie ended up writing poetry about being a Baltimore cop. And This Woman’s Work, our new series in collaboration with Classic Album Sundays that highlights classic albums by female artists, kicks off with Patti Smith’s groundbreaking first album, “Horses.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kurt Andersen talks with playwright Suzan-Lori Parks about “White Noise,” along with one of the play’s stars, Daveed Diggs from the original cast of “Hamilton.” Iggy Berlin explains what he does as an extra for operas and ballets, where they’re called supernumeraries. And the rich history of the song “In the Pines,” which many luminaries sang in their signature style, from Kurt Cobain to Lead Belly to Bill Monroe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month marks the birth centennial of American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. His defiant work transformed contemporary arts beyond dance. Cunningham talks about movement and technology, and dancers Daniel Roberts and Bill T. Jones tell us about his influence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At 82, the writer Frederic Tuten has published a memoir of his formative years in New York, “My Young Life,” and Kurt Andersen strolls the East Village with him as he reminisces.  Cartoonist Cathy Guisewite looks back at how some of her own struggles and insecurities inspired the “Cathy” comic strip, and how while many women loved the strip, others thought it didn’t do enough to forward the cause of feminism. And Helado Negro performs songs from his new album, “This Is How You Smile.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Studio 360 is teaming up with Classic Album Sundays for a series of storiescalled This Woman’s Work, highlighting classic albums by female artists. We'll talk about records that represent women musicians at the peak of their creative powers, and whose influence is felt all over the musical map. From what is arguably one of the most arresting opening lines on a debut album, to the mournful romanticism of its final track, Patti Smith's Horses is one of the most significant records in American music history. Classic Album Sundays founder Colleen "Cosmo" Murphy explains how the word "freedom" defines the album through and through: the social and sexual freedom of the era, the artistic freedom born of a city in crisis, and the freedom of rock n’ roll. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Understanding our fascination with the criminal underworld. Jia Zhangke’s takes an empathetic look at criminal brotherhoods in China in his new gangster film “Ash Is Purest White.” Stand-up comics reveal what it was like working in Vegas when mobsters owned the clubs. A brave critic defends “The Godfather: Part III.” And how the late Sue Grafton created the seedy universe of her “Alphabet” crime novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Susan Choi’s new novel, Trust Exercise, is a story about trust, betrayal, and the blurry lines between fiction and real life. It focuses on a group of teenagers at a performing arts high school in the 1980s and their fraught relationships with the eccentric teachers whom they idolize. The book takes a metafictional twist about halfway through, but Choi is loathe to describe it as such: “Don't use the M-word. Don't!”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The trailblazing filmmaker Agnès Varda died on Friday of breast cancer at age 90. In tribute to her, we’re revisiting Kurt’s 2017 interview with Varda and her collaborator JR. Their Oscar-nominated movie,Faces Places,documents their loving — albeit unexpected — friendship. She was a founding member of the French New Wave, while he is a 36-year-old French artist known for plastering huge black-and-white photographs on the sides of buildings around the world. A few years ago, they hit the road for a tour of the French countryside, creating a series of public art projects everywhere they stopped. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our monsters, ourselves: Why creatures repel us, yet attract us. Our latest American Icons segment is about “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and producer June Thomas reports on how the movie became an audience-participation phenomenon — and gave a sense of belonging to some of those moviegoers who were made to feel like outcasts elsewhere. Kurt Andersen talks with author and filmmaker Mallory O’Meara about her new book “The Lady From the Black Lagoon,” the story of Milicent Patrick, who designed one of Hollywood’s most famous monsters but didn’t get credit for it. And how author Helen Phillips’ life was changed when she read Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kurt Andersen talks with Marcia Clark, prominent again after two highly regarded television shows revisited her role prosecuting the O.J. Simpson case, and who now has a new legal-drama TV show, “The Fix.” And producer Sam Kim takes on a case of his own: He helps unravel the mystery of an old “Sesame Street” cartoon called “Cracks.” Many people who are middle-aged now remember it terrifying them as kids — and then the cartoon vanished. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For much of his career, Jia Zhangke’s films were officially banned in his home country, China. But through austere, realist movies like Still Life, Platform, and The World, Jia became one of the most celebrated directors on the international arthouse circuit. His latest film, Ash Is Purest White, appears at first to be a conventional mob epic, focused on a “gangster’s moll” character played magnificently by Zhao Tao. But with a story beginning in 2001 and spanning 17 years, the movie is just as much about the effects of the rapid growth of China’s economy on its society. The dramatic changes led some working-class Chinese to form criminal brotherhoods for support.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kurt Andersen talks with director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck about his new film “Never Look Away,” and why the director interviewed the artist Gerhard Richter extensively to make a film that is only kind of about Richter. Plus, how Yanni, John Tesh and other musicians discovered an improbable vehicle to ‘90s stardom: the PBS pledge drive. Nat King Cole would be 100 this week, and to celebrate: an appreciation from both his biographer, David Mark Epstein, and actor Dulé Hill, who is currently playing Cole on-stage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kurt Andersen talks with Heidi Schreck about her new play, based on oratory competitions she took part in as a teenager, called “What the Constitution Means to Me.” Siblings Elan and Jonathan Bogarín join Kurt to talk about their new documentary “306 Hollywood,” an artful and even surreal look at how they dealt with their beloved grandmother’s house after she died. How Niki Russ Federman meant to stay out of her family’s smoked fish business, Russ & Daughters, and then found herself drawn in by klezmer music. And how Broadway productions are hosting special performances that take into account some of the heightened sensitivities and needs of audience members who are autistic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edward Doyle-Gillespie always found writing stories cathartic, a way to process whatever was going on in his life. But as a police officer in Baltimore, witnessing people in the most desperate conditions, he increasingly turned to poetry as a vehicle for understanding and expressing his experiences on the job. “There are these moments in policing, distilled moments of a word, an image, a smell, a concept, that to me bespeaks of a kind of encapsulated poem right there.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kurt Andersen talks with author N.K. Jemisin about writing, politics, and her new book “How Long 'til Black Future Month?” Our latest American Icons segment is about “Cross Road Blues,” the song that helped to posthumously popularize — and mythologize — Robert Johnson. And how “This Is Spinal Tap,” which opened 35 years ago this week, helped create the template for other hilarious mockumentaries.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The annual Oscar hour. Kurt Andersen starts it off with his takeaway from this year’s crop of nominees: some actors delivered great performances in films that overall were not so great. Then Kurt talks with Richard E. Grant about his nomination for "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" and some of his other memorable roles, including in “Withnail & I.” Finally, the invaluable yet seldom acknowledged job of a movement director, namely Polly Bennett, who helped Rami Malek embody Freddie Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the mid-1970s, Jon Armond was traumatized by something he saw on Sesame Street. It was a cartoon about a little girl who encounters creatures formed by the cracks on her bedroom wall — including a horrifying, screaming face who called himself “The Crack Master.” Decades later, Armond wasn’t sure if the cartoon actually existed… until he discovered a subculture of obsessives who remembered the exact same thing. Armond details the bizarre rabbit hole he fell into trying to track it down. Plus, Sesame Street Executive Producer Ben Lehmann talks about the cartoon’s disappearance and uncovers some of its elusive mysteries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Cupid takes aim this week, a look at how sex and sexuality are handled — and mishandled — on-screen. Kurt Andersen speaks with Slate’s Jeffrey Bloomer on depictions of first-time sex. Intimacy-scene consultant Alicia Rodis describes how she helps actors who are virtual strangers seem like they are deeply and lustilly in love during sex scenes. Desiree Akhavan’s show “The Bisexual” takes on what she sees as an anti-bisexual bias, a bias she demonstrates with clips from shows including “Sex and the City” and “Orange is the New Black.” Plus a look back at how “Reality Bites,”which hit theaters 25 years ago this week, helped channel the Gen X zeitgeist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices