Tom Baker
Author of Haunted Indianapolis , Indiana Ghost Folklore, , Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest : http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com
Anarchism in America
"All of history is a struggle of the individual against the institutions." --Emma Goldman Modern America, the "Land of the Free," incarcerates more people than any other nation on Earth, including China. We spend more on military spending than the next twenty-five countries combined. We give more in "corporate welfare" than we do in human welfare, healthcare, or the basic services to common citizens. In the film, Anarchism in America, made by filmmakers Joel Sucher and Steven Fischler of Pacific Street Films (which was founded in 1969 as a way to document the continual struggle of radical groups against the Vietnam War and other social ills), we see the various modes of anarchist thought and philosophy in the emerging era of greed and corruption, the trickle-down era of Reaganomics. These are the roots of where we find ourselves today, so to look at the past (which, to quote a certain film, "is prolog") is important.
To the Max
I well remember the mid-to-late 1980s: that was a very special, magical era for me, personally. Or maybe not. Memory always plays you false.
The Vampire at the Inn
Once upon a time, there were four noble Buddhist monks, each a dedicated mendicant, all traveling together to get from one impoverished village to another. As they went, they spread the doctrine wherever their sandaled feet fell.
Saturn in Retrograde 3:13
She was in most respects a happy woman. Except, of course, when Leland beat her. It was just something she had to bear, she realized. Divorce was not an option if you were the wife of a highly respected local physician. Not if you had no way to maintain the lifestyle to which you had become accustomed.
Dead Man Calling
I recently had what I believe to be a dead man leave a message on my voicemail. Most specifically, I think that this was my friend and co-author Jon Titchenal, who passed away (I'm assuming by suicide) on June 27th of last year.
The Secret Language of Dreams
There is no more perplexing code than that comprising the various arcane and occult symbols and metaphors sent to us nearly every night, while our eyes are closed and our brains are, seemingly, on auto-pilot. The surrealistic landscape of our dreams, the hidden codes that reveal our deepest emotional traumas, our deep-seated fears and longings, and, more rarely, reveal future events--this language forms a pattern of communication between ourselves and some shadowy, unknown Infinite; the "Universal Consciousness," so to speak. On the surface, in the most simple analysis, dreams are simply a portal to a surrealistic world, one that can encompass everything from supernal beauty and intrigue, to eroticism, to horrors beyond the mind's ability to reason. Up is down, black is white, and nothing, no two events, seems to fit together rationally.
The Howling
1981 seems to have been the "Year of the Wolf ": Werewolf, that is. In that year alone, three films--The Howling, Wolfen, and An American Werewolf in London--were all released. Of the three, An American Werewolf in London, directed by John Landis, is undoubtedly the most widely popular, if only because of the incredible (for its time) transformation make-up effects sequence created by Rick Baker.
Madame, Please
"Yes, I realize the Marquis de Sade is the fetus aborted by God."--Yukio Mishima, Madame de Sade (1965) Madame de Sade is a play by Yukio Mishima, a Japanese playwright of no small repute. Mishima is a legendary character, a man who, before committing ritual suicide during an armed assault on a Japanese military installation, in which he took the commandant hostage, forged a brilliant and shining pathway (what we in the West call a "career") as an author and poet, an actor, model, political philosopher, filmmaker, mystic and universally hailed genius. His shining brilliance is offset by his radical politics, which were fanatically nationalistic, opposed to Western decadence, bourgeois capitalism as well as communism, and the erosion of what he considered traditionally and purely Japanese, fearing that his nation would devolve into a "rootless people."
