Shooting the Ghost

A Podcast About Men

Shooting the Ghost 8: Man Without a Home

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July 13, 2009 09:34 PM PDT

The latest episode entails a whole new departure for Shooting the Ghost, as we enter the underworld to meet Chris, a living, breathing wild man. Nomad wanderer, tobacco farmer, carpenter, father of five, ex-Hell’s Angel and mob collector, Chris also just happens to share a birth date with Sam Peckinpah—say what? Meeting up by sheer chance, the podcast is hurled far from the realms of movie psychopaths and fantasy anti-heroes, into the down and dirty trenches of reality. Of all the podcasts I’ve worked on, shooting the Ghost or weathering the Storm, this latest has proved the most surprising, the most deeply disturbing and yet also the most satisfying. Impossible to sum up and do justice to it, so I won’t even try. This one has to be heard to be believed—but even then, there will be doubters.

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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