Shooting the Ghost

A Podcast About Men

Shooting the Ghost # 9: Lightning Strikes Twice

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July 18, 2009 06:08 PM PDT

Follow-up discussion with ex-mobster and wild one Chris; starting with Chris' experienced of being struck by lightning not once but twice, covering Chris childhood on a tobacco farm in Ontario, the death of his father, having his first child at 16, hitting the road on a motorcycle at 18, and his early life of crime.

What factors contribute to form the mind of a sociopath? What permits us to take the moral high-ground and judge the actions of another when our own circumstances fail to match theirs? How do we know what we are really capable of, under the right conditions? What permits us to draw a clear-cut line between criminal and "civilized" behavior, between sanity and psychosis? Just how closely aligned are the qualities we know of as heroism, and those we diagnoses as psychopathy?

Opening song, "I Hear You," by Holly Golightly.

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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