Noam Chomsky is, in some ways, a victim of this new millennium we live in because you can't pull a sound bite from that guy and understand what he is talking about. You have to hear the whole paragraph. You have to hear the whole page. You've got to hear the whole conversation if you really want to understand it and that could change your life.
John Buffalo MailerWhat it means to be a man is to take on all the emotional pain and work through what you got to work through with the people you love while at the same time getting your business done. And it's tough. I think that most children when they grow up they kind of realize that the things they didn't like about their parents or didn't understand about them they get now and that you know every year you get more responsibilities. You get more overhead. You get more things you got to take care off.
John Buffalo MailerI grew up in an artistic family where everyone was doing something in one field of the arts or another. I was I think 12 years old when I did my first acting at the Actor's Studio and James Dean once said that the only reason to become and actor is because you have to. I think that you know from a young age if that is a certain rush that you're going to need to satisfy you and to make you feel fulfilled - and if you don't then you shouldn't do it. It's just too brutal of a business most of the time.
John Buffalo MailerTen years ago when I started out I was kind of told I was insane for trying to pursue multiple fields at once because in five years everyone who just did one would have five times the resume I would if I was lucky, but I took that gamble because I just my gut told me it was the right thing to do and you know as an actor there is so much downtime you want to fill it with something else and as a writer you know sometimes you're doing a passion project, sometimes it's a paid gig, sometimes there is nothing, so you can do a journalistic piece.
John Buffalo MailerI don't know if it's possible for anyone to really have that level of a voice anymore because our media is so diluted and parsed out. You know people kind of go for the news and information that they want as opposed to picking up a paper and seeing what catches their eye. It's a very stark difference and there is a few stories that end up going wide and everybody hears about them, but they're usually salacious celebrity stuff that is not about substance or it's the latest disaster and it's kind of covered in a way that is just trying to get eyeballs on the screen.
John Buffalo MailerI would say the only one person I know of who kind of combines the elements that my father brought to the table in terms of affecting the public discourse would be Oliver Stone. His combination of academic brilliance and real life experience and just understanding people I think is what makes him such a great storyteller, but also he cares. He is interested. He meets somebody and he listens to them. He has some questions. He wants to know what they're about. And as a result I think his worldview is much more complex and whole and most of the other.
John Buffalo MailerWhat's against legalization in a practical sense? A couple of college kids figured out how to take a hemp plant and turn it into newspaper and it was actually a better quality of paper. It was cheaper and if you plant hemp in a field it revitalizes the soil. You can grow food in a dirt lot if you do enough harvest of hemp. I don't pretend to know the specifics of the economics of it to say how much we'll be getting, but there is money to be made there that is not being made because it's illegal.
John Buffalo Mailer