Shooting the Ghost

A Podcast About Men

Shooting the Ghost # 12: The Prodigal Son

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August 08, 2009 01:46 PM PDT

Continuing tales of Chris’ nomad life – Chris talks about his tattoo-bonded male group, the designated crew, and about what finally got Chris out of “the life” (unwittingly bringing a friend to his destruction); Hell’s Angels as a “security force;” how he is always fighting a war; Chris’s grandmother, a powerful matriarch in an apron; how Chris had to kill cats and use the dead bodies to keep up the outhouse; how he fell into mob mentality and participated in the torture of cats; the house with 700 cats in it; how Chris went home one time and a family member asked him: “Would you kill me for money?” On the danger of being asked to help to whack someone: if you say no, you might get whacked yourself. The tale of the prodigal son; how Chris threw his sister’s husband down the stairs; Chris’ inability to cut his family ties and how blood is thicker than water; the need for a connection to the ancestors; the black era; Chris’ job in the slaughterhouse.

Opening and closing song: “Snake Eyed,” 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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