Interviews

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Click here to read the Shimon Peres interview

Edmund White, November 8, 2007 Novelist, critic, activist and Princeton University professor

Shankbone: You had mentioned particular issues about a father may arise in a slave-master relationship. You were sexually attracted to your father, so do you think you worked through your own issues with him?

Edmund White: Yes.

Shankbone: Where do you think that attraction came from?

White: I don’t know; I think it’s very hard to explain attraction. If I’m attracted to you right now, why? I don’t know why.

Shankbone: But that’s something people could perhaps explain more readily than attraction to one’s father.

White: I don’t know; I wasn’t really raised by my father. I lived apart from him and I would spend every summer with him, but not see him much during the year. My parents were divorced from my age of seven on. I think the incest taboo sets in and turns somebody off sexually with somebody they know very well and lives with. I think with my father he was somebody who every eye in the family was focused on and he was a sort of a tyrant and nice-looking, the source of all power, money, happiness, and he was implacable and difficult. He was always spoken of in sexual terms, in the sense he left our mother for a much younger woman who was very sexy but had nothing else going for her. He was a famous womanizer. And he slept with my sister!

Shankbone: What advice would you give to couples pursuing an incestuous relationship?

White: You mean like a father and daughter who want to have a love affair?

Shankbone: Or a brother and sister.

White: God, move to a more tolerant country, first of all.

John Vanderslice, September 27, 2007 Singer, song writer, musician, producer Shankbone: Depression breeds apathy, and your music seems geared toward anger, trying to wake people from their apathy. Your music is not maudlin and sad, but seems to be an attempt to awaken a spirit, with a self-reflective bent.

John Vanderslice: That’s the trick. I would say that honestly, when Katrina happened, I thought, Okay, this is a trick to make people so crazy and so angry that they can’t even think.

Evan Wolfson, September 30, 2007

Founder – Gay marriage movement; Time Magazine 100 Most Influential People in the World

Richard Hell, Unpublished Punk rock icon, poet, author, artist

Shankbone: Do the qualities that you most admire in a man and the qualities that you most admire in a woman differ?

Richard Hell: That’s interesting. No, I don’t think so, though I think men and women are very different. But if you’re talking about the qualities that I admire, I think of the people who are my ideal models. They have ideals of–

Shankbone: Behavior?

Hell: Yeah, and achievement. And values, right? It’s the same for men and women.

Shankbone: What are those?

Hell: Well, for me, it’s always artists. And thinkers–but people that have certain kinds of values, and ethics. A woman who comes to mind would be Susan Sontag. And a man who comes to mind would be Godard. And I think it’s the same things that I’m liking in the two of them.

Eric Bogosian, April 17, 2008 Playwright, novelist, actor

Shankbone: Nobody wants to find out why a person’s troubled anymore?

Eric Bogosian: No.

Shankbone: They just want to see what the effects are and how things resolve?

Bogosian: Yeah, and tell a good story, and have lots of different things going on between different kinds of armies, like 300 or whoever they are–talk about medieval, 300 is before medieval. I think you’ll see more stuff like that. It isn’t entirely to my taste, but the funny thing is, when I see all that kind of material, and then I go back and I look at the kinds of the things that have always attracted me, I realize that it’s really the same story over and over and over again. Some troubled white male and his dick, and he’s trying to figure out what the fuck is going on in this life–I mean, this is Philip Roth. It gets you to the Philip Roth novels that he’s been currently writing, which are–

Shankbone: Which are critically acclaimed but not commercially successful.

Bogosian: Yeah, and they’re also complete dead ends.

John Reed, October 18, 2007 Novelist and artist John Reed, Snowballs Chance

Shankbone: What do you think it is that drives many artists to sink their own ships?

John Reed: I think the inclination to be a creative person is to blow things up…and of course the nearest thing around you is yourself.

Natasha Khan, September 28, 2007

Singer, songwriter, artist; Bat for Lashes; Finalist for the Mercury Prize

Shankbone: Is it difficult to come to the United States to play considering all the wars we start?

Natasha Khan: As an English person I feel equally as responsible for that kind of shit. I think it is a collective consciousness that allows violence and those kinds of things to continue, and I think that our governments should be ashamed of themselves. But at the same time, it’s a responsibility of all of our countries, no matter where you are in the world to promote a peaceful lifestyle and not to consciously allow these conflicts to continue. At the same time, I find it difficult to judge because I think that the world is full of shades of light and dark, from spectrums of pure light and pure darkness, and that’s the way human nature and nature itself has always been. It’s difficult, but it’s just a process, and it’s the big creature that’s the world; humankind is a big creature that is learning all the time. And we have to go through these processes of learning to see what is right.

RuPaul, October 6, 2007 Singer, performer

Shankbone: Has the Iraq War affected you at all?

RuPaul: Absolutely. It’s not good, I don’t like it, and it makes me want to enjoy this moment a lot more and be very appreciative. Like when I’m on a hike in a canyon and it smells good and there aren’t bombs dropping.

Dr. Joseph Merlino, October 5, 2007

Author, Director of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Queens Hospital Center

Shankbone: How do we know what is normal and what is insane?

Joseph Merlino: That is part of what moved psychiatry and the psychoanalytic field to where it is currently, and that is the value and appreciation for societal values. It’s not like definitions of normality and pathology were handed down on some tablet that spelled out what those things are. It is largely defined by society and culture. We, as a profession, have to incorporate that as practitioners in that society and culture. For example, something in our society might not be a problem, but it might be in another culture or society.

Nadine Strossen, October 30, 2007

Attorney, New York Law School professor and President of the ACLU

Shankbone: Should suicide be legal?

Nadine Strossen: Absolutely. The idea of government making determinations about how you end your life, forcing you, which could be considered cruel and unusual punishment in certain circumstances, and Justice Stevens in a very interesting opinion in a right-to-die raised the analogy. But you said before you turned on the tape that you typically ask people how they would want to die, which is very interesting. I mean, of the zillions of questions I have been asked, nobody has ever asked me that! It’s very rare I am asked a question that I have never been asked before.

Shankbone: So how would you like to die?

Strossen: Well, the first thing that occurred to me was: I want to have the choice. That was the very first thing that occurred to me, because I know how through personal experiences, through vicarious experiences, through reading the complaints in our law suits where we have challenged the absolute restrictions on compassion and dying, people are essentially tortured. And I don’t want that to happen. And I don’t want my loved ones tortured by watching that happen.

Ingrid Newkirk, November 27, 2007 Co-Founder and President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

Shankbone: What do you think drives people to jump at negative spin?

Ingrid Newkirk: It’s human nature. You see the thing at a silly level with celebrities. They love them, and then they tear them down. Or they are just salivating, hoping for somebody to trip and fall. I think it’s jut another nasty past of human nature.

Billy West, February 13, 2008 Voice actor – Ren & Stimpy, Futurama, Doug, Bugs Bunny

Shankbone: Were you at a point where you didn’t necessarily want to die, but you just didn’t care if you lived?

Billy West: That’s pretty much it, yeah. You put your finger on it. There is a point that you can reach in your life where you don’t want to live but you haven’t made the decision to die.

Tashi Wangdi, November 14, 2007 Representative to the Americas of His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Shankbone: So if somebody is gay they could not be a proper Buddhist?

Tashi Wangdi: I’m sure under certain precepts of Buddhist tradition, a person would not be considered as following all the precepts of Buddhist principles. People don’t follow all the principles. Very few people can claim they follow all the principles. For instance, telling a lie. In any religion, if you ask if telling a lie is a sin—say Christian—they will say yes. But you find very few people who don’t at some point tell a lie. Homosexuality is one act, but you can’t say they are not a Buddhist. Or someone who tells a lie is not a Buddhist. Or someone who kills an insect is not a Buddhist, because there’s a strong injunction against that.

Shankbone: Have you ever killed an insect?

Wangdi: I’m sure, yeah.

The Raveonettes, October 16, 2007 Sharin Foo and Sune Rose Wagner, rock band

Shankbone: What do you think is the greatest depth of human misery?

Sharin Foo: I…

Sune Rose Wagner: [Sighs] Famine?

Shankbone: Famine?

Sune: Maybe.

Shankbone: Starving to death?

Sune: Yeah. It just seems so…

Shankbone: Slow.

Sune: Yeah, and it just seems so unnecessary. Know what I mean?

Sharin: Obviously, war. Being in a war. Being in Darfur right now, for insta

Shankbone: It does not appear many gay people are galvanized to fight for the marriage right.

Evan Wolfson: For what do you see gay people more galvanized? I would say the opposite. I’ve seen gay people marching in the streets of California, on Freedom to Marry day all around the country. But marching in the streets is not the ONLY methodology of social change. Here in New York we passed a marriage bill this year. California passed a marriage bill through two consecutive legislatures after unseating anti-gay opponents and electing pro-gay legislators. That took action, that took planning.