Weather for the day… mid to low 40s, overcast, nice cool day for a walkabout
Instagram post for the day
Podcast for the day Pod Save America finishing up the episode from the other day (Tuesday).
Next up, John Heilemann, Hell and High Water podcast with Aaron Sorkin in a reprise episode. Now, this is great, because I keep trying to get away from politics, and into psychology, phenomenology, or the Arts. And I do love some Aaron Sorkin. I loved The West Wing. It helped me get through the Bush years (our first post millennial Republican POTUS, foreshadowing a more ridiculous downward trend into the Trump years. I thoroughly needed The West Wing in the pathetic Trump years during the criminal POTUS45 administration. But we did have The Good Fight and that was not nothing. And for those who didn’t like The West Wing, because of Aaron's style or because of their political beliefs, I know a lot of those people liked, A Few Good Men. The play which Sorkin wrote, from which the movie was made.
I wasn’t much into podcasts when this Aaron Sorkin episode came out. But I’m very happy to be able to listen to it today. He has very interesting things to say. I didn’t know that his To Kill a Mockingbird got produced for 18,000 New York area kids at Madison Square Garden, in the round. Sounded amazing. Being myself by effort, and if not fully and in practice as a writer, author, playwright, screenwriter and a filmmaker, I’m very interested in things Aaron Sorkin has to say. To qualify that last statement, I’ve done all those things, but have yet to have a play or a screenplay produced. And I’ve heard professionals ask me why that hasn’t happened yet, and that it should happen immediately. But you gotta convince the right people. I mean, I started making my own films because I got tired of not just the hoops you have to jump through, and the bullshit to get a play or screenplay produced, or the time it takes, when you can just do it yourself. How many times have we heard a movie or a play took 10 years to get to an audience? My first movie took a summer, that fall, and the beginning of the next year's winter and it hit film festivals around the world started winning awards. My last film “Pvt. Ravel’s Bolero” took me six months, all alone editing, before it hits screens around the world. And won even more awards I’m proud to say.
Well, the upside of Republicans controlling the House, and Kevin McCarthy probably being Speaker is now you have something to compare the Nancy Pelosi House as Speaker to. Order in accomplishments, versus chaos and probably fake investigations for purely political purposes, wasting ever more taxpayer money... yet again.
So if a new Republican controlled House is going to investigate how Trump was treated by the FBI and DOJ, are they also going to investigate how Trump abused the FBI and the DOJ during the POTUS45 abusive administration? Because come on, if you’re so correct about law and order... do your job?
With Power Grid Under Attack, U.S. Struggles to Pursue Far-Right Extremists
About this mandatory vaccine in the military issue. When I was in the USAF, we had to get vaccines for swine flu. I didn’t want to get it and a lot of us didn't. We were a bit freaked out about it. There were rumors of deaths. But we got it, because we were in the MILITARY. It has to do with Readiness. It’s like if your job isn’t handling a gun, but in a war they could hand you a gun. And you'd do your job. I find it interesting and disgusting that we’ve got people today refusing to get the vaccine in the military and yet supporting an autocracy and being anti-democratic, and supporting a moron president who also supported )or actually physically) attempted a coup against the United States of America. People's priorities, have gotten severely twisted into the inane and insane, and the disinformed and propagandized by domestic enemies, some of whom are quite obviously, according to our courts and law-enforcement, have been positions of control in our country, after years of seeding this insanity and sewing it into the fabric of our nation's government (some crazy types have gotten gov. jobs over the years).
For some who wonder why I don’t listen to non-liberal podcasts, or news, I’ve tried. But when you get to where all you’re doing is correcting errors and incorrect information, which I have to do a wee bit with nearly any podcast or just about any news report (at least in my head), I just can’t do it with too many of these conservative media types. It’s just not worth your time. It’s better to put out what’s good, out there in the world rather then trying to debunk & disagree with all that’s bad as it's being pumped into our reality. There are those who actual do that and I thank them for their service. But we don't all have to be doing it. Do what you are best at.
We have some marvelous democratic processes to place in our republic for the continuation of our grand experiment, and for the protection of our people. While we have had some very bad people trying to thwart those processes in the Trump years (and still) and still, certainly in administering those and now a Republican Party that has been absconded by that same individual, and polluted with a toxic authoritarian mindset. When times are hard, we buckle down and work our way out. We don’t abandon our country and turn to autocracy like some banana republic. We don’t need a conservative political party now seemingly dedicated to that, or fitfully and fearfully walking that fine line of thinking they’re good people and doing nothing. While either way, they are indeed doing evil
Government is designed to be a lumbering giant. To make instant change is to do damage and to do damage at that level, is to see citizens die by the hands of the State. People's frustration and needing help immediately and seeing it not happening, is understandable. But you’ve got to be proactive, think ahead, make the government functional, apply laws ahead of time that will handle things when they go wrong. And you certainly can’t do what the Republican Party has been doing in trying to do as little as possible (or less), or use illiberal or old Soviet tactics to assure forever retaining power. Where their job seems only to be complaining about the other side and repeating over and over, "We’re better!" as a plan. You gotta BE better. And then you gotta act. And then you'll actually make mistakes. Those who do, aren't perfect. Only those who don't, because you can't fail when you do nothing substantive. But you HAVE to act.
Leadership is bravery, it’s courage under fire. It’s courage when not under fire. The courage not under fire, however, should not be the Republican way, as it is. For them to never have actual courage, or show bravery and “leadership“, means they have to be swept up by potentially the lowest common denominator in a tide of citizens, forcing their hand to actually fucking do something. And under those circumstances the something Tends to be, as we’ve seen of late, typically the worst possible action available.
Sorry… I know this is all political. It’s the talking on the podcast, they're talking about Aaron's film, "The Trial of the Chicago Seven". Which is kind of pretty political and just kind of really relates to the past few years. Yeah I know, I can’t win. Just know that I keep trying…
About the Chicago Seven film, Sorkin says people ask him if he changed the script to fit events of late, and he said, "No, events changed to fit the script."
Which is similar in a minor way to my film “Pvt. Ravel‘s Bolero“. I put that film out and one of its first official selections of the film festival just happen to be in Moscow, Russia. Two days after Putin invaded Ukraine. And then suddenly, more of the lines in my film had far more relevance, and I believe affected people who saw it a lot more. Good timing, sadly. Especially, how I ended it. There is a list of all wars ever on earth. I only saw the film once in a theater with an audience at a film festival. At the end, it got a very good round of applause. And then the list of Wars on Earth came up. It got quiet, the applause slacked off. And the list seems to go on forever. In the middle of it you see an atomic bomb explode. Which starts the modern era and indicates WWII, and then a lot more wars scroll after that. Then the screen goes dark. There was silence in the theater. It was eerie. And then the next film was announced. It was about a soldier and his pains after fighting in the Middle East Perfect adjunct to follow my film. After the four films in that block showed, the filmmakers were called on stage for a Q&A. We had a chance to meet briefly and talk. I got handed to mic and may have talked more than most, but there were questions to answer. And the filmmaker whose film followed mine came over, and we shook hands, both eagerly wanting to meet the other. We both had very nice things to say about the other and our work. And then we left the stage. It was actually the first time I got to see one of my films in a theater with an audience. And as sobering a subject as it was, it was one of the highlights of my life, artistically speaking.
There I got some arts snuck in.
OK, I said I want to talk about Art. If you’re an artist of any kind, especially a writer, or a filmmaker, sculptor, painter, whatever… Definitely read this next passage:
Sorkin says he didn’t want to push the 70s aesthetic of tie-dyed shirts and peace signs and protest songs, and that whole playbook. He wanted an orchestral score and nothing to get between the audience when the film was released, and the times when the event took place. Which was a piece of brilliance. For my film, it was based on a poem about a composer and a song he wrote, and his actions in World War I. So I was tied to using that song. Which really wasn’t tied to that war. But the music performances I used were all written or performed by Ravel in the film, and only one song was truly tied to the war. That was the one Ravel wrote that I think he started during the war and couldn’t finish until after and was dedicated to five of his friends who died in the war. Each received a movement in the score. To be precise:
Aaron Sorkin saying when he penned the first episode, the pilot to The West Wing, he never thought it would get on the air because he’d never had any success. I feel your pain, sir. And then it and he went on to be one of our most celebrated projects and writers in history.
When I started these walks to fight long Covid and later started these blogs, I had to wear an ankle sleeve/brace on my left ankle. I'd been so sedentary over two years from covid and long covid and I don’t have much ankle there anyway. But today, I’m not wearing it because hopefully it’s now strong enough to handle this. Just noting that I feel like I’m getting healthier and stronger and oh, yay... we’re headed into the Pacific Northwest winter! Good times!
Sorkin is addressing an answer to a question. John ask him about his writings, as some have said he was naïve or I think he said "pie-faced" at one point… Sorkin said he like writing romantically about things. Which reminds me many years ago, of a girl telling me in response to something, that I was a romantic. Having grown up being a little sociopath, as many young males are, I thought the idea of being a romantic was nonsense. Until I better understood, understood a broader sense of it and realized that, yeah, she was spot on. I believe there was a time, hundreds of years ago, when people referred to plain fiction, at the advent of the novel form, that it was a "romance". That a romance doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with romantic intentions between two or more people: "Middle English: from Romance, originally denoting a composition in the vernacular as opposed to works in Latin. Early use denoted vernacular verse on the theme of chivalry; the sense ‘genre centered on romantic love’ dates from the mid 17th century."
John Heilman, comment: regarding those who know how the government works, and excluding the Trump administration on this…” Which is so true. Trump has so little clue how our government works. And he chose people to follow that mindset. Or as some intelligent people might say, lack of mindset.
Here John is quoting Sorkin from other places where he has said, he likes BTS, behind the scenes, but he likes to "write about the two minutes before, and the two minutes after what I’ve seen on CNN." Now understand that reference to CNN, may have been made when it was synonymous with cable, news or 24 hour news. And not politically, as it is known today more as part of a section of news or in politics.
I’ve always very much been a fan of two American writers in particular for film and screen stage. Aaron Sorkin, and David Mamet.
John Heilman, in our overly aware in media society today, everyone thinks there’s a story behind the story, even if the story is all of the story. And that’s how we get these thinking they are smarter than they are conspiracy theorists, who “know”, or think they know, the "real" story.
I give you Sigmund Freud: “sometimes the cigars just a cigar.”
The problem with MAGA and QAnon nowadays is they always think that there’s a story leaning the direction they want to believe in whatever story they’re looking into and that when you offer up the facts, they simply can’t see that story. That’s kind of a problem because they’re ignoring reality and adhering to fantasy. Until eventually, you get someone like Trump as a president.
Originally Republicans pushed for mail-in voting because they thought it was beneficial to them at the time. Now they’re against it because they think it’s beneficial to them at this time. I've been complaining about this for decades. Voting should be for the People and it should be taken out of the hands of political parties. Voting Day should be a national holiday, with long voting hours. It should be open for at least a week ahead of time and we should prefer people use mailing in their ballot, which are inherently safe. Our elections are safe. What’s not safe is toxic conservatives thinking of only themselves, or a political party who doesn’t want democracy, who doesn’t want ever to be out of power, leaning toward theocracy and autocracy. This is ALL about OUR Citizens. None of this is about the political parties. We were warned about political parties at the founding of this country. To be careful, very, VERY careful about them.
This is fascinating. Aaron Sorkin wrote every episode, all 80 episodes of seasons one through four of The West Wing. He and Tommy Schlamme left and new people took it over for the last three seasons. Larry David called him at that time and told him, himself having left Seinfeld a couple of seasons before it ended. “ You will never be able to watch The West Wing again. Because if you watch it, if it’s great you’ll be miserable. And if you watch it and it’s less than great, you will be miserable.“ Sorkin said, since Larry David's known to be professionally miserable, he blew him off. He got episode 501 on a VHS tape sent over when it was available, threw it in, and sat down to watch it. After 20 seconds, he said he didn’t even reach for the remote. He jumped up and turned the power off. Because as soon as he heard words spoken, he hadn’t written, he felt like someone was making out with his girlfriend, and he just couldn’t do it. Then he said, "Now that I’ve said this publicly, I hope it doesn’t hurt the feelings of my friends on the show who worked so hard the last three seasons. But I think they understand." As of the time of this podcast, I think in 2020, he said he’s never seen those last three seasons.
Podcast for the day Pod Save America finishing up the episode from the other day (Tuesday).
Next up, John Heilemann, Hell and High Water podcast with Aaron Sorkin in a reprise episode. Now, this is great, because I keep trying to get away from politics, and into psychology, phenomenology, or the Arts. And I do love some Aaron Sorkin. I loved The West Wing. It helped me get through the Bush years (our first post millennial Republican POTUS, foreshadowing a more ridiculous downward trend into the Trump years. I thoroughly needed The West Wing in the pathetic Trump years during the criminal POTUS45 administration. But we did have The Good Fight and that was not nothing. And for those who didn’t like The West Wing, because of Aaron's style or because of their political beliefs, I know a lot of those people liked, A Few Good Men. The play which Sorkin wrote, from which the movie was made.
I wasn’t much into podcasts when this Aaron Sorkin episode came out. But I’m very happy to be able to listen to it today. He has very interesting things to say. I didn’t know that his To Kill a Mockingbird got produced for 18,000 New York area kids at Madison Square Garden, in the round. Sounded amazing. Being myself by effort, and if not fully and in practice as a writer, author, playwright, screenwriter and a filmmaker, I’m very interested in things Aaron Sorkin has to say. To qualify that last statement, I’ve done all those things, but have yet to have a play or a screenplay produced. And I’ve heard professionals ask me why that hasn’t happened yet, and that it should happen immediately. But you gotta convince the right people. I mean, I started making my own films because I got tired of not just the hoops you have to jump through, and the bullshit to get a play or screenplay produced, or the time it takes, when you can just do it yourself. How many times have we heard a movie or a play took 10 years to get to an audience? My first movie took a summer, that fall, and the beginning of the next year's winter and it hit film festivals around the world started winning awards. My last film “Pvt. Ravel’s Bolero” took me six months, all alone editing, before it hits screens around the world. And won even more awards I’m proud to say.
Well, the upside of Republicans controlling the House, and Kevin McCarthy probably being Speaker is now you have something to compare the Nancy Pelosi House as Speaker to. Order in accomplishments, versus chaos and probably fake investigations for purely political purposes, wasting ever more taxpayer money... yet again.
So if a new Republican controlled House is going to investigate how Trump was treated by the FBI and DOJ, are they also going to investigate how Trump abused the FBI and the DOJ during the POTUS45 abusive administration? Because come on, if you’re so correct about law and order... do your job?
Dear right wingnuts, stop attaching our power grids. Fools. I've wondered for decades why our power grids are not better protected and buried underground.
With Power Grid Under Attack, U.S. Struggles to Pursue Far-Right Extremists
About this mandatory vaccine in the military issue. When I was in the USAF, we had to get vaccines for swine flu. I didn’t want to get it and a lot of us didn't. We were a bit freaked out about it. There were rumors of deaths. But we got it, because we were in the MILITARY. It has to do with Readiness. It’s like if your job isn’t handling a gun, but in a war they could hand you a gun. And you'd do your job. I find it interesting and disgusting that we’ve got people today refusing to get the vaccine in the military and yet supporting an autocracy and being anti-democratic, and supporting a moron president who also supported )or actually physically) attempted a coup against the United States of America. People's priorities, have gotten severely twisted into the inane and insane, and the disinformed and propagandized by domestic enemies, some of whom are quite obviously, according to our courts and law-enforcement, have been positions of control in our country, after years of seeding this insanity and sewing it into the fabric of our nation's government (some crazy types have gotten gov. jobs over the years).
For some who wonder why I don’t listen to non-liberal podcasts, or news, I’ve tried. But when you get to where all you’re doing is correcting errors and incorrect information, which I have to do a wee bit with nearly any podcast or just about any news report (at least in my head), I just can’t do it with too many of these conservative media types. It’s just not worth your time. It’s better to put out what’s good, out there in the world rather then trying to debunk & disagree with all that’s bad as it's being pumped into our reality. There are those who actual do that and I thank them for their service. But we don't all have to be doing it. Do what you are best at.
We have some marvelous democratic processes to place in our republic for the continuation of our grand experiment, and for the protection of our people. While we have had some very bad people trying to thwart those processes in the Trump years (and still) and still, certainly in administering those and now a Republican Party that has been absconded by that same individual, and polluted with a toxic authoritarian mindset. When times are hard, we buckle down and work our way out. We don’t abandon our country and turn to autocracy like some banana republic. We don’t need a conservative political party now seemingly dedicated to that, or fitfully and fearfully walking that fine line of thinking they’re good people and doing nothing. While either way, they are indeed doing evil
Government is designed to be a lumbering giant. To make instant change is to do damage and to do damage at that level, is to see citizens die by the hands of the State. People's frustration and needing help immediately and seeing it not happening, is understandable. But you’ve got to be proactive, think ahead, make the government functional, apply laws ahead of time that will handle things when they go wrong. And you certainly can’t do what the Republican Party has been doing in trying to do as little as possible (or less), or use illiberal or old Soviet tactics to assure forever retaining power. Where their job seems only to be complaining about the other side and repeating over and over, "We’re better!" as a plan. You gotta BE better. And then you gotta act. And then you'll actually make mistakes. Those who do, aren't perfect. Only those who don't, because you can't fail when you do nothing substantive. But you HAVE to act.
Leadership is bravery, it’s courage under fire. It’s courage when not under fire. The courage not under fire, however, should not be the Republican way, as it is. For them to never have actual courage, or show bravery and “leadership“, means they have to be swept up by potentially the lowest common denominator in a tide of citizens, forcing their hand to actually fucking do something. And under those circumstances the something Tends to be, as we’ve seen of late, typically the worst possible action available.
Sorry… I know this is all political. It’s the talking on the podcast, they're talking about Aaron's film, "The Trial of the Chicago Seven". Which is kind of pretty political and just kind of really relates to the past few years. Yeah I know, I can’t win. Just know that I keep trying…
About the Chicago Seven film, Sorkin says people ask him if he changed the script to fit events of late, and he said, "No, events changed to fit the script."
Which is similar in a minor way to my film “Pvt. Ravel‘s Bolero“. I put that film out and one of its first official selections of the film festival just happen to be in Moscow, Russia. Two days after Putin invaded Ukraine. And then suddenly, more of the lines in my film had far more relevance, and I believe affected people who saw it a lot more. Good timing, sadly. Especially, how I ended it. There is a list of all wars ever on earth. I only saw the film once in a theater with an audience at a film festival. At the end, it got a very good round of applause. And then the list of Wars on Earth came up. It got quiet, the applause slacked off. And the list seems to go on forever. In the middle of it you see an atomic bomb explode. Which starts the modern era and indicates WWII, and then a lot more wars scroll after that. Then the screen goes dark. There was silence in the theater. It was eerie. And then the next film was announced. It was about a soldier and his pains after fighting in the Middle East Perfect adjunct to follow my film. After the four films in that block showed, the filmmakers were called on stage for a Q&A. We had a chance to meet briefly and talk. I got handed to mic and may have talked more than most, but there were questions to answer. And the filmmaker whose film followed mine came over, and we shook hands, both eagerly wanting to meet the other. We both had very nice things to say about the other and our work. And then we left the stage. It was actually the first time I got to see one of my films in a theater with an audience. And as sobering a subject as it was, it was one of the highlights of my life, artistically speaking.
There I got some arts snuck in.
OK, I said I want to talk about Art. If you’re an artist of any kind, especially a writer, or a filmmaker, sculptor, painter, whatever… Definitely read this next passage:
Sorkin says he didn’t want to push the 70s aesthetic of tie-dyed shirts and peace signs and protest songs, and that whole playbook. He wanted an orchestral score and nothing to get between the audience when the film was released, and the times when the event took place. Which was a piece of brilliance. For my film, it was based on a poem about a composer and a song he wrote, and his actions in World War I. So I was tied to using that song. Which really wasn’t tied to that war. But the music performances I used were all written or performed by Ravel in the film, and only one song was truly tied to the war. That was the one Ravel wrote that I think he started during the war and couldn’t finish until after and was dedicated to five of his friends who died in the war. Each received a movement in the score. To be precise:
"Interrupted by and after his war service, Ravel finally finished his piano suite "Le Tombeau de Couperin", dedicating each of its six movements to friends who had not survived the war. Which included the husband of Marguerite Long, who performed the work's premiere on April 11, 1919."
That only plays right near the end. Just before Ravel's death. Which goes into how he became the greatest composer in the world. And elicited Stravinsky's quote about Ravel as: "...the most perfect of Swiss watchmakers.". When the subject of your film or story is that well-known, it’s redundant to shove that all down the audience's or reader's experience. Which reminds me of something I’ve used in my writings for years, and exhibited so intensely in my first novella, "Andrew". When you're expecting in a horror movie, to see the most intense and graphic things, sometimes showing far less works better in the reader's mind, to let IT fill in when what you're expecting just isn’t there. Then it comes across as more intensely than it ever could’ve been, had it been written out and described. Then it appears, one might say, far greater than the effort used in describing it. Whenever I’m writing and get lost or frustrated and can find no way out, I look 180° in the other direction and usually find there, somewhere in the curve of that arc, a solution that is typically far better one than I would’ve seen otherwise.
That only plays right near the end. Just before Ravel's death. Which goes into how he became the greatest composer in the world. And elicited Stravinsky's quote about Ravel as: "...the most perfect of Swiss watchmakers.". When the subject of your film or story is that well-known, it’s redundant to shove that all down the audience's or reader's experience. Which reminds me of something I’ve used in my writings for years, and exhibited so intensely in my first novella, "Andrew". When you're expecting in a horror movie, to see the most intense and graphic things, sometimes showing far less works better in the reader's mind, to let IT fill in when what you're expecting just isn’t there. Then it comes across as more intensely than it ever could’ve been, had it been written out and described. Then it appears, one might say, far greater than the effort used in describing it. Whenever I’m writing and get lost or frustrated and can find no way out, I look 180° in the other direction and usually find there, somewhere in the curve of that arc, a solution that is typically far better one than I would’ve seen otherwise.
Aaron Sorkin saying when he penned the first episode, the pilot to The West Wing, he never thought it would get on the air because he’d never had any success. I feel your pain, sir. And then it and he went on to be one of our most celebrated projects and writers in history.
When I started these walks to fight long Covid and later started these blogs, I had to wear an ankle sleeve/brace on my left ankle. I'd been so sedentary over two years from covid and long covid and I don’t have much ankle there anyway. But today, I’m not wearing it because hopefully it’s now strong enough to handle this. Just noting that I feel like I’m getting healthier and stronger and oh, yay... we’re headed into the Pacific Northwest winter! Good times!
Sorkin is addressing an answer to a question. John ask him about his writings, as some have said he was naïve or I think he said "pie-faced" at one point… Sorkin said he like writing romantically about things. Which reminds me many years ago, of a girl telling me in response to something, that I was a romantic. Having grown up being a little sociopath, as many young males are, I thought the idea of being a romantic was nonsense. Until I better understood, understood a broader sense of it and realized that, yeah, she was spot on. I believe there was a time, hundreds of years ago, when people referred to plain fiction, at the advent of the novel form, that it was a "romance". That a romance doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with romantic intentions between two or more people: "Middle English: from Romance, originally denoting a composition in the vernacular as opposed to works in Latin. Early use denoted vernacular verse on the theme of chivalry; the sense ‘genre centered on romantic love’ dates from the mid 17th century."
John Heilman, comment: regarding those who know how the government works, and excluding the Trump administration on this…” Which is so true. Trump has so little clue how our government works. And he chose people to follow that mindset. Or as some intelligent people might say, lack of mindset.
Here John is quoting Sorkin from other places where he has said, he likes BTS, behind the scenes, but he likes to "write about the two minutes before, and the two minutes after what I’ve seen on CNN." Now understand that reference to CNN, may have been made when it was synonymous with cable, news or 24 hour news. And not politically, as it is known today more as part of a section of news or in politics.
I’ve always very much been a fan of two American writers in particular for film and screen stage. Aaron Sorkin, and David Mamet.
John Heilman, in our overly aware in media society today, everyone thinks there’s a story behind the story, even if the story is all of the story. And that’s how we get these thinking they are smarter than they are conspiracy theorists, who “know”, or think they know, the "real" story.
I give you Sigmund Freud: “sometimes the cigars just a cigar.”
The problem with MAGA and QAnon nowadays is they always think that there’s a story leaning the direction they want to believe in whatever story they’re looking into and that when you offer up the facts, they simply can’t see that story. That’s kind of a problem because they’re ignoring reality and adhering to fantasy. Until eventually, you get someone like Trump as a president.
Originally Republicans pushed for mail-in voting because they thought it was beneficial to them at the time. Now they’re against it because they think it’s beneficial to them at this time. I've been complaining about this for decades. Voting should be for the People and it should be taken out of the hands of political parties. Voting Day should be a national holiday, with long voting hours. It should be open for at least a week ahead of time and we should prefer people use mailing in their ballot, which are inherently safe. Our elections are safe. What’s not safe is toxic conservatives thinking of only themselves, or a political party who doesn’t want democracy, who doesn’t want ever to be out of power, leaning toward theocracy and autocracy. This is ALL about OUR Citizens. None of this is about the political parties. We were warned about political parties at the founding of this country. To be careful, very, VERY careful about them.
This is fascinating. Aaron Sorkin wrote every episode, all 80 episodes of seasons one through four of The West Wing. He and Tommy Schlamme left and new people took it over for the last three seasons. Larry David called him at that time and told him, himself having left Seinfeld a couple of seasons before it ended. “ You will never be able to watch The West Wing again. Because if you watch it, if it’s great you’ll be miserable. And if you watch it and it’s less than great, you will be miserable.“ Sorkin said, since Larry David's known to be professionally miserable, he blew him off. He got episode 501 on a VHS tape sent over when it was available, threw it in, and sat down to watch it. After 20 seconds, he said he didn’t even reach for the remote. He jumped up and turned the power off. Because as soon as he heard words spoken, he hadn’t written, he felt like someone was making out with his girlfriend, and he just couldn’t do it. Then he said, "Now that I’ve said this publicly, I hope it doesn’t hurt the feelings of my friends on the show who worked so hard the last three seasons. But I think they understand." As of the time of this podcast, I think in 2020, he said he’s never seen those last three seasons.
This is interesting. John asked Aaron his top five political movies. Not in order. The Candidate (the first one I thought of with Robert Redford). All The Presidents Men. The Manchurian Candidate, he didn’t say which one. The Best Man. All The Way, the LBJ movie. and he asked if he could have a sixth, and he named, The Contender.
Cheers! Sláinte!
Cheers! Sláinte!
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