UNDER CONSTRUCTION
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.
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.
Founder – Gay marriage movement; Time Magazine 100 Most Influential People in the World
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.
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 t
hings 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.
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.
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.
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.
Author, Director of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Queens Hospital Center
Attorney, New York Law School professor and President of the ACLU
Shankbone: So how would you like to die?
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
