Interviews

A friend passed along the note that Nat Hentoff has been dismissed from his longtime post at the Village Voice, a move that had initially eluded me. The note pointed to Hentoff’s last column for the Voice, which is very much in the man’s style.

A few months back, when Amanda Doyle and I shifted The Wire radio show into what’s now her solo joint, Topic A, we had Hentoff on as one of our first guests. As we expected, he was interesting and provocative and not a little bit prickly. It was a satisfying (but not exactly fun) way to spend a half-hour of conversation, especially after some early phone woes were cleared.

That conversation’s rolled around my head this week for a couple reasons. Hentoff’s depature keyed it. My media writing classes at Webster are back, with the first two weeks given over to the simple art/craft of the interview. And I’m thinking about a project that would satisfy the yen to talk to some folks that would otherwise not give me the time of day. (More on that in due time/short order.)

My question to you, my five readers: if given the chance to talk to anybody, on any topic, with the web the source of interview dissemination, who would you talk to?

I’ve gotten the chance to visit with Nick Hornby and John Waters and Henry Rollins and Crispin Glover and Lee Ranaldo and Bruce Arena and Butch “Eddie Munster” Patrick and a bunch of other white guys, plus a bunch of other folks who aren’t guys or white. So they’re off my list, for this exercise.

And if I were answering the question, it’d probably be Parker Posey. Well, it would be.