KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Radio Wolinsky 3: A Conversation with Gore Vidal, 1990.

This encore podcast originally was posted on November 18, 2015; a shorter version aired as a Arts-Waves program/podcast on October 31, 2016.

Gore Vidal (1925-2012) was the author of such novels as Burr, 1976, Julian and Myra Breckinridge, as well as one of America’s greatest essayists. On June 30, 1990, he sat down with Richard Wolinsky for an illuminating interview about his career as both writer and social critic. The interview was transcribed and published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian on July 11, 1990. It was recorded in the offices of the KPFA Folio because the off-air studio at 2207 Shattuck Avenue was incapacitated, which frequently happened in the years before the move to the building on Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

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Octavia Butler (1947-2006) in conversation with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, recorded in 1983.

Octavia Butler, who died in 2006 at the age of 58, was one of the giants of modern science fiction. Winner of multiple awards for her short fiction and novels, her work explored issues involving gender, race, and power and featured protagonists often at odds with their societies. At the time she began writing, there were no other African-American women writing in the field, but she was not merely a pioneer: she was a master of the genre. Her first novel, Patternmaster, was published in 1976 and was followed by a series of sequels. Along with those books, she wrote a stand-alone novel, Kindred in 1979. It’s a masterpiece, a time travel story of a modern African American woman suddenly finding herself in the racist antebellum South.

By 1983, with her handful of novels and a growing reputation within the field, she made a visit to a science fiction convention in San Jose California, where she met up with Richard Wolinsky and his co-host Richard A. Lupoff. At that time, she had yet to win her first Hugo or Nebula Award, and was still unknown outside the field. This interview was the first of two recorded with Octavia Butler. The second interview, from 1998, will be posted later this year.

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Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), interviewed in 1991 by Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff.

In 1991, while on tour for his collection of essays, “Fates Worse Than Death,” Kurt Vonnegut Jr. stopped in the KPFA studios to speak with the hosts of the “Probabilities” program about his work, his career, and his feelings about life and politics.

This interview was originally recorded in September, 1991 and was digitized, remastered and re-edited in 2011 by Richard Wolinsky.

This was the last interview of any kind to occur in the off-air studio in KPFA’s old offices on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. The new radio station on Martin Luther King Jr Way was already operational but we were able to squeeze in this last one in the old building.

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Jonathan Allen, co-author of “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign” in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky.

Nobody expected Hillary Clinton to lose the 2016 presidential election. Jonathan Allen and his co-author Amie Parnes followed the campaign from the beginning to the dreadful night in November when Donald Trump was elected president. This book dissects the campaign from the vantage point of its conclusion. Richard Wolinsky follows up with key questions concerning the private server, the media’s focus on e-mails, the possibility of a rigged election, Clinton’s gaffes and why she was given less wiggle room than Donald Trump.

Mitch Jeserich’s interview with Jonathan Allen.

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Steven Bach (1938-2009) author of the biography “Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl”, interviewed in 2007 by Richard Wolinsky.

Leni Riefenstahl was the film maker behind the Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Reifenstahl, who died in 2003 at the age of a hundred and one, to the end of her life denied her work was political, that she was an artist.

Stephen Bach, who died at the age of 70 in 2009, had been a studio executive and began writing  books with “Final Cut”, his memoir about the making of the film Heaven’s Gate. He followed that with a biography of the playwright Moss Hart, and then a biography of actress Marlene Dietrich, which as he says, led him to Leni Riefenstahl. The interview was recorded in the KPFA studios on May 7, 2007. Guardian Obituary.

In an interview perhaps more timely than the year it was recorded, Bach compares Reifenstahl’s work to right-wing propaganda in America, and the use of the Hitler playbook. What’s scary is that he could have been describing the Trump campaign and administration.

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Peter Brook, visionary director, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky.

Peter Brook is one of the greatest theatrical directors of the twentieth century. Artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company for twenty years from 1962-1982, he transformed how the English speaking world looked at the plays of William Shakespeare. He is perhaps best known, during those years, for his production of “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade,” also known as “Marat/Sade,” which later became a film and turned Glenda Jackson into an international star. His other films include “Lord of the Flies,” “Meetings with Remarkable Men” and a version of “King Lear” starring Paul Scofield.

His 1985 nine-hour adaptation of the Indian epic Mahabharata is probably his masterpiece. Now, at the age of 92, he and his collaborator Marie Helene Estienne have gone back to the Mahabharata with a short theatrical piece, “Battlefield,” which is playing at ACT’s Geary Theater through May 21st. This interview was recorded on April 24, 2017 in a rehearsal studio in the ACT offices in San Francisco.

American Conservatory website

Peter Brook Wikipedia page

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