Oct 16, 2026 · 45 min · 14 segments
Jared Bowen, Callie Crossley and Maurice Parent discuss the week's arts and culture headlines, including: - Kelly Clarkson's feud with a Brooklyn novelty shop over a $15,000 mechanical songbird…
Jared BowenHostMaurice ParentPanelist
Callie CrossleyHost
Craig LeMoult
We're going over the week's top arts and culture headlines starting with a little foul play in Brooklyn.
Kelly Clarkson spotted a $15,000 mechanical songbird in a novelty shop and asked about purchasing it.
Clarkson says the staff, bearing attitude straight out of the film Pretty Woman, treated her like she couldn't afford it.
The store says that's not how it all went down, and while Clarkson may have left empty-handed, she wasn't about to walk away.
She took her grievances online, then the shop chirped back, and now feathers are flying.
And so we're adding to the flying feathers here on The Culture Show because this has dominated the headlines this week.
and it's fascinating and I think it does speak to our culture and it speaks to celebrity and it speaks to perceptions and profiling, in this case really the profiling of Brooklyn in general.
So I just think that this is so interesting because a lot of people are trying to interpret where there's no real evidence of what actually happened other than this surveillance video of Kelly Clarkson just walking around and clearly having some sort of encounter and four and a half minutes later walking out tweeting because of these parasocial relationships that we keep talking about on the show.
Then they started offering threats and even death threats to the store owners in Brooklyn, to the neighbors of the store owners in Brooklyn, because they happened to be friends with them.
Well, being the parasocialist that I am, my first impulse was like, why are y'all messing with Kelly Clarkson? Come on, don't do that.
You know, you should have figured out she had the money, and if she didn't, figure out some kind of way to accommodate her.
And since then, having, you know, read the stuff from her fans and then some other commentary, you know, I've come back to a kind of bottom line thing with stores, which is that In these difficult circumstances, you really have to try to cater to the customer, whether the customer be a celebrity or not.
So somewhere in there, there's some miscommunication that she took quite personally.
We're going over the week's top arts and culture headlines starting with a little foul play in Brooklyn.
Kelly Clarkson spotted a $15,000 mechanical songbird in a novelty shop and asked about purchasing it.
Clarkson says the staff, bearing attitude straight out of the film Pretty Woman, treated her like she couldn't afford it.
The store says that's not how it all went down, and while Clarkson may have left empty-handed, she wasn't about to walk away.
She took her grievances online, then the shop chirped back, and now feathers are flying.
And so we're adding to the flying feathers here on The Culture Show because this has dominated the headlines this week.
and it's fascinating and I think it does speak to our culture and it speaks to celebrity and it speaks to perceptions and profiling, in this case really the profiling of Brooklyn in general.
So I just think that this is so interesting because a lot of people are trying to interpret where there's no real evidence of what actually happened other than this surveillance video of Kelly Clarkson just walking around and clearly having some sort of encounter and four and a half minutes later walking out tweeting because of these parasocial relationships that we keep talking about on the show.
Then they started offering threats and even death threats to the store owners in Brooklyn, to the neighbors of the store owners in Brooklyn, because they happened to be friends with them.
Well, being the parasocialist that I am, my first impulse was like, why are y'all messing with Kelly Clarkson? Come on, don't do that.
You know, you should have figured out she had the money, and if she didn't, figure out some kind of way to accommodate her.
And since then, having, you know, read the stuff from her fans and then some other commentary, you know, I've come back to a kind of bottom line thing with stores, which is that In these difficult circumstances, you really have to try to cater to the customer, whether the customer be a celebrity or not.
So somewhere in there, there's some miscommunication that she took quite personally.
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