Above & Beyond

ABOVE & BEYOND P ORTR AITS AND INTERVIE WS OF E X TR AORDINARY PEOPLE IN OUR TIME

HOWARD SCHAT Z

L E S L E Y S TA H L —

“I’m pessimistic about the future, partly because of this insinuation about fake news that absolutely permeates. We all now are tainted.

People don’t trust the media anymore. We are essential to democracy; we are essential to this form of government that we have.

The founding fathers knew that the press, the fourth estate, was going to be the cleansing agent. We are the reason that this country has basically less corruption than most countries. We’re doing our jobs.

And we’re doing them the way they should be, with our standards.

The truth is the most important thing to us. And we just do it; and we will continue to do it.

As someone said ‘life is an act of courage, and we’re just plowing through.’”

INTERVIEW

Lesley Stahl is an American television journalist, for CBS’s 60 Minutes. She is known for her news and television investigations and award-winning foreign reporting.

SPIKE LEE —

“My mother wanted her children to be wellrounded. She was taking us to Broadway plays, museums, libraries. And we went, kicking and screamin’, ‘cause we’d rather run right down the street. But thank God my mother said, ‘I want my children to be wellrounded.’ And that was really the basis for our understanding art and creativity.”

INTERVIEW

Spike Lee is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. His work explores race relations, the role of media in contemporary life, urban crime, and poverty.

BILLIE JEAN KING —

“Every woman and man should play sports, but particularly women. They don’t have to be good, but I want them to experience it because it was developed by men, and if you can learn to navigate in sports, you know how to navigate in business. Boys are taught to be brave, and girls are taught to be perfect . . . they never think they’re good enough. If you fill out an application, here’s what happens: The boy looks at it, and there’s ten things on it.

He goes, I can do five of those or six; I’ll bluff the others; I’ll get that job.

Here’s what the girl does. She looks at the ten things; she goes, I can do nine of those really well. I don’t know about that tenth one. I don’t know if I should even turn it in because I can’t do the tenth one.

And that’s the difference. Girls do better than boys in school; they do not have the confidence when they get into the workforce.

We have to change that. And one of the ways to change it is being an athlete.”

INTERVIEW

Billie Jean King is a former American former world number one tennis player. She is an advocate of gender equality and has long been a pioneer for equality and social justice.

A N T H O N Y FAU C I —

“Given the fact that we always have emerging and reemerging infections, a global health security apparatus would be wonderful. So if something happens here, it doesn’t take four months for the rest of the world to figure it out . . . I would hope that sometime within the reasonable future we would get universal input into the global health security agency.”

INTERVIEW

Anthony Fauci is an American physician-scientist and immunologist.

He served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and was the chief medical adviser to the president of the United States.

MICHAEL POLL AN —

“Food is fuel. Food is entertainment. I think we forget that humans approach eating very differently than any other animal—that there is ceremony, that there is communion, [and that] there is pleasure. It isn’t just biological need that drives us to eat. We have mixed food up with our social lives. It’s a way to connect.

When two, even two enemies and political enemies, get together, they will have a meal together.

It’s a way to symbolically disarm yourself.”

INTERVIEW

Michael Pollan is an American author and journalist, who is best known for his books that explore the socioculturalimpacts of food, such as the The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

M AYA L I N —

“My process is almost always, no matter what I might think about a project, that I think about a cultural site, study it, learn all about it, [and] get an idea of what I might be trying to say, and then I put it all away. And I don’t push it, and I generally don’t try to take on art projects that have a deadline; people have been very respectful of that.

I’m always afraid that if I have a deadline then I’m designing artwork.”

INTERVIEW

Maya Lin is an American designer and sculptor. She designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.

P H I L L I P P E S TA R C K —

“I work alone. I work absolutely alone. I’m a little Asperger, and I can work only alone far from everything in the middle of nowhere, the middle of the dune, the middle of the mud, the middle of the forest, [and] the middle of the sea. Never the middle of the city—never, we never stay in the city. I cannot.

Too much vibration. I will always have a bed, a table, and a beautiful view—a view of the clouds, a view of the waves, [and] a view of the dune. And I work alone fourteen hours per day.”

INTERVIEW

Phillippe Starck is a French industrial architect and designer known for his wide range of work.

B IL L T. J O N E S —

“The protagonist was always my body, literally, negotiating time, space, racial dynamics, [and] gender dynamics . . . it’s no exaggeration to say that there was always a sense of a trial. When you were on stage, you were being judged. Everyone is sitting in the dark, but you’re in the light. Now, what do they come to see?”

INTERVIEW

Bill T. Jones is an American choreographer, director, and dancer.

M ARIAN WRIGHT EDEL M AN —

“We’ve always had very clear understandings about faith, spirituality, [and] God. I grew up in the most segregated community, but I was very clear from the beginning with my great preacher father, who was a real servant leader, and my mother, who was the entrepreneur, that God did not make two classes of people and that every human being is sacred, and nobody has the right to invade that set of basic principles. ” INTERVIEW

Marian Wright Edelman is an American activist and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund

E VE ENSLER —

“When we women finally come back into our skin, into our bones, into our beings, [and] into our flesh, the revolution will happen. We won’t be living in a world where domination is the primary modality. We’ll be living in a world of cooperation.

We won’t be living in a world where consumption is our direction—connection will be our desire. We won’t be living in a world where we are proving to each other how better we are than each other. We’ll be living in a world where we’re trying to help each other to become the best that we can be. We won’t be living in a world where sexuality is sinful, but it will be seen as our greatest source and our greatest strength.”

INTERVIEW

Eve Ensler is an American playwright, best known for The Vagina Monologues.

DAV I D B R O O K S —

“My political ideology is WHIG, which was a party in the early nineteenth century. The basic idea is that we have one party, a Conservative Party that believes in enhancing freedom and creating security. We’ve another party, the Democratic Party, which, basically, believes in government to enhance equality. But there’s a third tradition in this country which believes in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility to create a context [in] which poor boys and girls can rise and succeed. And that’s what I believe in. That was Hamilton. It later became the ethos for the WHIG Party and Abraham Lincoln, the early Republican Party—maybe Theodore Roosevelt.

And then it vanished from American life.”

INTERVIEW

David Brooks is an American political and cultural commentator for The New York Times.

ADA M GOPNIK —

“As artists, our job, as writers, is many things but, above all, I think, it’s to make private life public, saying everything that’s going on in our collective heads as one writer experiences it privately and writes about it, whether it’s kids growing up, blue fish dying, imaginary friends thriving or friends dying, [or] the experience of going to analysts—all the things that are part of our private life that we can make public. That, I think, is the essential task of a writer, at least my kind of writer.”

INTERVIEW

Adam Gopnik is an American writer and essayist and a staff writer for The New Yorker.

LY N N N O T T A G E —

“I’m incredibly tenacious, and I think that as an artist, you have to oscillate between grandiosity and despair.

Those grandiose moments are the ones in which you really face down all of the demons and you face down the people who tell you that you can’t do it.

And when you’re in despair, you have to figure out how to resurrect yourself.”

INTERVIEW

Lynn Nottage is an American playwright; she has received the Pulitzer Prize for drama twice: once for her play Ruined and once for her play Sweat.

JOHN GUARE —

“The fact that a play is a success is not the miracle . . . the fact that a play even opened is a miracle. That you got x amount of people to come together to greet and meet on a certain day to agree to a director, a designer, actors all to show up and hopefully tell the same story as the writer is telling or even all the people involved are telling the same story. And the fact that a play gets on is a miracle. That’s the miracle.

Everything conspires against getting a play on.”

INTERVIEW

John Guare is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is also the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS —

“Historically, women artists have been disregarded. We’ve always had to work harder for our recognition—for a seat at the table. It’s just a part of the social dynamic in which we are engaged and involved in the society in which we live.”

Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist and photographer.

DANIEL BOULUD —

“If you care to keep learning about cooking, be part of a team. To be part of a moment in life of the restaurant world and to grow in that world, you have to accept who you are—your strengths, your weaknesses—and try to work on it. I think it’s very important to earn trust and to keep your knowledge constantly filled with experience.”

INTERVIEW

Daniel Boulud is a French chef and restaurateur.

H O WA R D S C H AT Z @ H O WA R D S C H AT Z .C O M W W W. H O WA R D S C H AT Z .C O M

©Howard Schatz & Beverly Ornstein 2023