Shooting the Ghost

A Podcast About Men

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June 14, 2009 03:21 PM PDT

Part One of a conversation with Phil and Keith. Topics of discussion this week include: the dangers of imbuing physical objects with psychic energy, the parallels between Stanislovski's Method style of acting and MK-ULTRA mind control techniques, the difference between The Method and the old school/outside-in style of acting, the possibility of Hollywood as a large scale intelligence psy-op, the effects of McCarthyism and the collapse of the Studio System, Lee Marvin & Robert Mitchum vs. Marlon Brando, internal vs. external style, authenticity and performance, the anti-hero and the anti-actor, the Sons of Lee Marvin, how people are unconsciously drawn together by matching wounds, how sensitivity and early wounding often lowers our tolerance for BS and disrupts our ability to accept consensus reality, the possibility and pitfalls of bonding with fellow misfits/outsiders.
Original music contributed by TJ.

Podcast Summary

Movies are collective dreams. The current focus of the podcast is on filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, the legendary, scabrous, & self-destructive director, and by extension the themes of masculinity, mythology, initiation, generational wounding, male bonding, ritual space, misfit culture, the rebel instinct, shamanism, addiction, creative expression, self-destructive urges, storytelling and the function of myth, both for survival and for gnosis, the mutation of the species through sharing of knowledge and experience - and such like!

About Jason

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Writer, independent scholar, world traveler and misadventurer, if Horsley had a mission statement to describe the trajectory of his life, it would have to include the words “heroic” and “pathological.” Horsley's hung his hat and poncho in London, New York, Edinburgh, New Mexico, Morocco, Spain, Paris, Amsterdam, Portugal, Mexico, Guatemala, and Canada. Quests ever inward to the core of his wounded psyche with an almost maniacal vigor. Not satisfied with a shallow participation in life (or able to find a day job), Horsley applies a unique fusion-philosophy to himself that combines Jungian psychology with the sorcery of don Juan Matus and the practical animism he learned as a shaman’s apprentice in Guatemala. Horsley has also found time to write countless books and scripts, a few of which have been published: a two-part treatise on film violence, The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, 1958-1999 (Scarecrow Press, 1999), Matrix Warrior: Being the One, (Orion, 2003), Dogville Vs. Hollywood (Marion Boyars, 2005) and The Secret Life of Movies: Schizophrenic and Shamanic Journeys in American Movies (McFarlane, 2009). He also produced a six-part digital documentary, The God Game, a digital feature, Beauty Fool, and a semi-autobiographical documentary, Being the One: Document of a Delusion, currently viewable on Youtube. Horsley would like it be known that he is no longer the One, being content finally to be the Other.

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