Interrogating Ideology With A Chainsaw

Tell me about yourself and your writing?


My name is Mark Weir and I am the wrong side of forty but the right side of forty-five. (So that’s forty-four then) I live a very happy life with my artist wife, Julie and my two grown up kids. Writing has always been a passion, ever since I formulated the kernel of an idea after reading a Stephen King novel back when I was a kid. That kernel became the basis of my second novel, due for publication around Christmas 2014. King was a massive influence, as was Dickens, Lewis Carroll and Kipling. Enid Blyton was another favorite. These brilliant writers sparked something in me. I think that I have always been a word man, even when I listen to my favorite songs, I am always looking for the great lyric or the fantastic wordplay. If I hear it, I have to memorize it. The tune is almost secondary to me and the greatest tunes can be ruined by poor lyrics. That’s how I see people, either you’re a tune person or a lyric person. Lyric people are often frus…

Welcome to our journey into the guts of The Walking Dead. What kind of journey? A philosophical, psychoanalytical and political kind. What I would like to do over the next couple months is dig thought the Walking Dead episode by episode to see what it can teach us. Thank you for following me on this journey. I look forward to reading your comments. Be forewarned: There are spoilers everywhere. Don’t forget to check out my previous article in the Philosophizing TWD series: Philosophizing The Walking Dead S2E6 Secrets And Lies That Make Truth Possible

What is the goal of therapy? A social worker or therapist might argue the purpose of therapy is to get people to be happier or live more successful lives. For many reasons people enter into a maladaptive pattern or get fed up with a certain way of living. People seek out professionals to talk out their problems. Shrinks and priests come to the rescue and listen in order to deceive the malady that has someone in knots. Religious leaders fin…

A week ago I received an email about, a job position. The job sounded great and was exactly what I was looking for. I took a short break from writing my last grad school paper ever (!) and responded to the email. I snagged an interview for the following day. I was already associated with the organization so the interview was less formal and I didn't second guess wearing jeans as my first option. All sorts of cocky I walked into the interview without a plan! Most of the interview went fine, but there were a couple questions that I was not prepared for. Primary, "Do you have the "it factor" that is needed to be a community organizer?" Of course, the instant I walked out of the interview hind sight delivered clarity! Hell yes I do!

I stumbled on The Making of Black Revolutionaries By James Forman on my last trip to Half Priced Books (my favorite place to be). The book is a 500 page beast that has been staring at me from my bookshelf for the last two months. I did not know who James Forman was or his role in Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Black Panthers and the struggle for civil rights and human rights. I'm goofy I picked up the book because the title was cool. Absolutely, revolutionaries are made! Revolutionaries aren't born in trees cocooned in red flags! Revolutionaries carve themselves out by reading, struggling and writing. Forman's thesis is clear revolutionaries are made and he is in the business of making revolutionaries.

Welcome to our journey into the guts of The Walking Dead. What kind of journey? A philosophical, psychoanalytical and political kind. What I would like to do over the next couple months is dig thought the Walking Dead episode by episode to see what it can teach us. Thank you for following me on this journey. I look forward to reading your comments. Be forewarned: There are spoilers everywhere. Don’t forget to check out my previous article in the Philosophizing TWD series: Philosophizing The Walking Dead S2E5 Chupacabra, Daryl and the Myth of Sisyphus

Secrets is about... well secrets, no? Lori is juggling a complex pile of lies. She is pregnant because she bumped dirties with Shane, and but Shane does not know he is the baby daddy. On the other side of the farm Hershel is lying by omission about the zombies shambling around in his barn. The question this episode begs is: What is the right truth?

Between Anne Rice's bourgeois vampires and the buckets of neurosis found Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series the last several decades have been coated in uppity rich vampires whom miserably fail at being scary. What happens when monsters that haunt our dreams come to don the clothing and attitudes of the 1%? And become the drooling focus for the fondling eyes of working class women? When these post-modernist monsters become iconic they only serve to reinforce dominant narratives which reinforce the 1%'s values. Boom! Let The Right One In enters the frame and brings back the scary vampire in the pale skin of the proletariat.

Welcome to our journey into the guts of The Walking Dead. What kind of journey? A philosophical, psychoanalytical and political kind. What I would like to do over the next couple months is dig thought the Walking Dead episode by episode to see what it can teach us. Thank you for following me on this journey. I look forward to reading your comments. Be forewarned: There are spoilers everywhere. Don’t forget to check out my previous article in the Philosophizing TWD series: Philosophizing The Walking Dead S2E4 Cherokee Rose and Zombie Dating

Sisyphus thought he was a slick dude. He thought he could play one God against another. Cleverly manipuating information to meet his ends. Zeus, realizing his mistake, ordered Thanatos to chain Sisyphus in Tartarus. Sisyphus then manipulated Thanatos to let him see the magical chains which helped Thanatos regulate Death. With Thanatos chained human could not die. This irked Ares because his war games lost their entertainment value. The gods joined f…

I recently had the opportunity to interview Debbie Moffitt. The Moffitt family experienced a set of haunting which began in 1987. A Deadly Haunting tells the terrifying haunting of the Moffitt family by Mr. Entity. 
Could you tell me about yourself and A Deadly Haunting

Everyone that experienced the haunting except my three children and myself have passed away. I am grateful my children were just babies when it occurred. I decided to have a book written about the haunting when my husband passed away in 2013. For over 20 years we had hid what had happened to our family. We never even spoke about it among ourselves. When Mr. Entity left ,we did not want him to come back so we destroyed everything that had to do with him. At least that is what I thought. For years we had taken photos of his messages and all his destruction. When I was cleaning out the closet after my husband's death I found that he had saved over 100 pictures and their negatives. Looking at all those pictures bought …

Could you tell me about yourself and Too Young Too Die?


My name is Henry Thompson, one third of the Thompson brothers (Three like-minded, unrelated filmmakers who have become a real family through making movies), I’m an American displaced in the UK and I’m the creative director of Eze as Pi Productions. We’re a low budget film group in the North East of England. We’ve made several short films in the past and have one self-funded feature film in post-production.

In the midst of turning my dream of being a filmmaker into a reality, I’ve also had a variety of jobs including Photographer, web-designer, graphic artist, grill master, envelope packer, Apple Technical support and HP printer specialist.

The internet has been whining for several decades that remakes are not as good or as scary as the originals. In Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970's and 2000's: Why They Don't Do It Like They Used To by David Roche the original vs. remake argument is thoroughly fleshed out. Roche targets his argument on four pairs of films: Halloween (1978/2007), Dawn of the Dead (1978/2004), The Hills Have Eyes (1977/2007), and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974/2003). Unlike the internet, David Roche is a competent philosopher with a ruthless argued set of points that digs into themes at topics such as race, ethnicity, class, the American family, gender, sex, remaking films, monsters, and mask. All the fun topics that horror movies are good at playing with.This book is ultimately a study of adaptation. Roche, 2014, Loc. 335

Welcome to our journey into the guts of The Walking Dead. What kind of journey? A philosophical, psychoanalytical and political kind. What I would like to do over the next couple months is dig thought the Walking Dead episode by episode to see what it can teach us. Thank you for following me on this journey. I look forward to reading your comments. Be forewarned: There are spoilers everywhere. Don’t forget to check out my previous article in the Philosophizing TWD series: Philosophizing The Walking Dead S2E3 Save Last One and Do Zombies Believe In God? One rose is an expression of sentiment. A dozen roses is symbolic oppression. - Simone De Beauvior

The tragedy of the Hunger Games franchise is that its critique of the state of modern pop culture and state power is lost on viewer. Yes, the world that Katniss inhabits is cruel and unfair, but it is only a movie. One is reminded of the advertising slogan used to promote Last House on the Left “To keep from fainting, keep telling yourself it is only a movie.” There is a sense in which the ideology of “it's only a movie,” is the key to the cognitive dissidence that compartmentalizes the critique of power from being generalized into our lived reality. It is as if, because the Hunger Game is fictional the truth located in the subtext becomes fictionalized as well. Hiding the truth in supposed fiction is an all too common tactic used by mainstream media to trigger the consumers's emotions to react rather than think. Hunger Games 1 and 2 deploy these fictionalizations in different modes. Below, I will argue that the shift between the first and second film is between Farce and Tra…