This collection of interviews, Talk
to Her, is a follow up to McKenna’s previous collection Book of
Changes.  It includes dialogs with
many well-known musicians and a few other notable characters: Elvis Costello,
Joe Strummer, Tom Verlaine, Chrissie Hynde, Ricki Lee Jones, Joni Mitchell,
Iggy Pop, Joey Ramone, Lou Reed, John Lyden, and also Robert Altman, Eva Marie
Saint, Allen Ginsberg, and Jacques Derrida. 
Each interview is accompanied by a drawing of the interviewee drawn by
notable graphic artists, including Charles Burns, Dan Clowes, and Jeff
Wong.  Since each chapter is short and
the interviews are easy reading, it is an excellent book to keep in the
bathroom.

McKenna has published interviews in
some of the main popular culture magazines, and the range of people she has
interviewed is impressive.  However,
transcribed edited interviews lose a great deal since it is hard to get a sense
of the dynamic between the two people. 
For each interview, McKenna writes an introduction about the context of
the meeting and she often comments whether the person was easy or difficult to
speak with.  Elvis Costello and Lou
Reed, for example, were deeply unenthusiastic conversational partners in her
experience.  However, it is hard for the
reader to judge this for him or herself, and it is tempting to conclude that
her bad-tempered subjects were merely reacting to stupid questions. 

Excene Cervenka reacts graciously
when asked "how many times have you been in love?"  Similarly Ricki Lee Jones betrays no
annoyance when asked "why do people cling to the past?"  Jonathan Omer-Man is rather dismissive when
posed the riddle, "does everyone have the capacity to love?"  Admirably, when asked "what’s the
purpose of chaos?," Iggy Pop replies "Chaos is the sound of one hand
clapping."  When she asks of Lou
Reed "is the ability to create a happy life for oneself a talent or skill
one can acquire?" he snaps back "questions like that make my skin
crawl."  KcKenna has a love for
abstract questions, and often focuses on the central life events of her
interviewees.  Occasionally they open
up, but more often they reply with something vague and evasive.  That tends to be more satisfying than when
the interviewees take the questions seriously and actually give answers,
because they rarely have anything interesting to say. 

All this raises the question of why
one would want to read interviews with artists and creative people, and the
obvious answer is that one wants to know about their work and how they go about
it, what they think of their peers and what are their relationships with old
associates.  Occasionally McKenna goes
into those sorts of details, but mostly she prompts her subjects to pontificate.  You have to be a real fan to want to learn
how Joni Mitchell thinks how art should function in society.  But I was interested to learn that Elvis
does not believe in psychology and does not see any value in it. 

Link: Publisher website http://www.fantagraphics.com/

© 2005 Christian Perring. All rights reserved. 

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of
the Arts & Humanities Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at
Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online
Review.  His main research is on philosophical issues in medicine,
psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Memoirs, General