Sorry, this is going to be long.
Ok, I've decided to site two examples. Both are pretty much played out
(so I'm not worried about dispelling them by talking about them) and
both can be at least partially verified. One is small, the other is
quite large. I agree with Erwin in that it is not magick without
intention, so I assure you that both of these were entirely intentional.
However, there will be no wand waving here, no god names, or assistants
- angelic or demonic. And where oh where is Satan?
And, no, I won't put this in Physics terms.
First the small.
As a guitarist I like guitars, but they can be quite expensive. My
initial work was to grease the wheels at the local Guitar Center. I
made myself very well known there and gifted some of the "sales
engineers" with music according to their tastes. This resulted in
massive discounts, they wouldn't think of selling me anything at floor
price. But this wasn't good enough. So I encouraged my brother to
start a business building guitars and to start chumming up guitar makers
at NAMM conventions. I then suggested to him that it might be a good
idea to distribute guitars made by promising Boutique artisans. This
lead to a flow of very expensive guitars and prototypes through my
hands, some of which I have kept at cost, often at a savings of about
3,000 dollars. I now have so many that I would have to stop and count them.
Here is my brother's web site as partial verification:
http://www.rahanguitars.com/
Ironically, my brother is a chistian and the Warrior Guitars he sells
are consecrated to Jesus.
So, on to the big one, probably the biggest I have ever attempted with
this level of success.
In the mid 80s I was selling occult books and supplies at a fantasy
convention in Memphis. We had sold well so decided to take the final
day off and look around. I wasn't interested in the convention per say
but what did catch my eye was a guy selling bootlegs of something called
Anime, or Japanese animation. I purchased a few based on cover art and
watched them when I got back to Houston. There were several thing I
found interesting about the one's I got. One of them was about a love
affair between a young boy and a demon (a common theme as it turned out)
and another was the most violent thing I had seen in a while. I
realized right away that there was a great deal of potential here.
Consulting my diary of the time I noted that bringing this stuff to
America in a big way was beyond my means but imagined young children
defying their parents wishes to see the forbidden. Plus I just wanted
more for myself, and in those days the bootlegs were raw, without
subtitles or dubbing, and I wanted that to change as well.
But how to achieve my ends?
Well, I'm not very obsessive about stuff, but some people are so the
first thing I did was to find someone who lived and breathed Anime. I
found him in the person of Matt Greefield, who ran an Anime club near
NASA. A few years went by and I had benefited a little by getting a
direct line to stuff Matt was importing, but I wanted more.
One day, around '88 or '89 I tripped into a store that sold import
Japanese video games and got to know the owner well enough that he
started giving me games for free when they came in to try out. I
quickly realized that the owner of the store, John Ledford had a
connection to Japan that might be put to use but he knew nothing of
Anime even though many of the game titles were derived from animated
series. John was also highly motivated to be rich.
I got Matt and John together one day for a brainstorming session. We
needed one more person to complete the circle and this was a student of
mine named Toshiro, sorry can't recall his last name, who spoke fluent
Japanese and English.
Another couple of companies had tried to bring Anime into America but
with very limited success, so the first thing was to figure out how to
make the connections to Japan (John already had an in there)and to work
out what went wrong with the other guys. This was pretty simple, they
concentrated on giant robots which have a limited appeal so we decided
to concentrate on sex and violence. We chose the name for the company
based on my suggestion that we randomly stack up some Japanese Laser
disks and choose a two part name from words randomly selected. This
lead to the name A.D Visions (since renamed ADV Films). Our first
selection was a film called Devil Hunter Yohko, a little light weight by
some standards but a good place to start (we didn't want to shock
America right away but instead to slowly acclimatize America to the more
extreme forms of the genre).
Before going on it should be understood that though I benefited greatly
from this work and initiated it, I never claimed any part of the company
or its profits aside from my goals, I just made the connections and
pushed psychological buttons to help it happen.
Anyway, our choice was a great success and with our second choice
(Vampire Princess Myu) John heard interest from Blockbuster (a little
less restrictive in those days) so we got the stuff into blockbuster and
from there it took off.
Before A.D.Visions the Japanese had no interest in bringing Anime to
America and in fact were adamant that it was made for the Japanese
people and that Americans would not understand it. After A.D. Visions
they understood the smell of money and the gates were broken through. I
measured this as a great success when Bandai (the biggest) got into the
act and now encounter young students who grew up wathching the rather
violent and somewhat Satanic Dragon Ball series all these many years later.
Me, I burned out on the stuff once it became a flood and rarely watch
it, though I sometimes fulfill the urge.
Here is a link to the current incarnation of the company, it is now
their 15th anniversary:
http://www.advfilms.com/
Names and such can be verified on Wiki, looks like John has just sold it
to a Japanese firm and I am sure he is quite rich by now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADV_Films
Of course I could have made this all up but I didn't and at least you
can verify that the company started in Houston.
Hope this has been helpful. But it will probably lead to more bloodshed.
