michael arnzen

I have to assume this banner was won by an impressively hungry cannibal.

For your next movie night, rent:

Sssssss (Kowalski, 1973)

Kaw (Wilson, 2007)

Eegah (Hall, 1962)

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This triple feature brought to you by Jeffrey Thomas’, Aaaiiieee!!!

As you’ll see in the long scroll of photos below, I was a lousy photographer this time around but generally had a good time at this year’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA 33), which transpired in Orlando, FL, last month (March 21-25, 2012). The photo brevity is a symptom of being overprogrammed and otherwise entirely focused on the events, rather than on shooting snaps. If you want photos, they’re already out there, anyway. If you’re looking for the best of the bunch, I recommend you drop by flickr and peruse the galleries of:
James Patrick Kelly , Ellen Datlow, or Kathryn Cramer.

But here are the highlights of my experience at the 33rd annual International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts…highlights which may or may not reference any of the photos below. For the funk of it, I will employ a bulleted list of microevents with ambiguous summaries mixed into the programming descriptions.

+ Arrived. Casillero del Diablo in many bottles. Old friends under a dark umbrella in the dead of night. Laughter, followed by splashes in a nearby pool. Then: profound silence.

+ Thursday, 8:30am, fiction reading. Read my poem, “Creasing His Collar” as a good morning wake-up call to all who attended at this ungodly hour (surprisingly many). Then read Matheson’s “Born of Man and Woman” followed directly by my sequel, “She Screech Like Me,” from He Is Legend. Used weird voice. [Dave Sandner later told me I should talk in that voice all day. I was tempted.] Enjoyed stories by fellow writers in the panel, Greg Bechtel and Daryl Gregory. Greg’s reading gave some insights into his writerly process — with big projects afoot for the future. Daryl Gregory was particularly on fire; he read an amazing story from his new Fairwood Press collection UNPOSSIBLE — which I recommend — and then he told an unforgettably (unforgiveably?) bizarre “Aristocrats” joke…featuring Asimov’s robots. We signed together after the panel. I was surprised that folks showed up with books for me to sign — Bernie Goodman and Jacob Weisman (of Tachyon Publications) win the prize for having some of the rarest editions with my signature on them, including copies of Paradoxa and Last Drink Bird Head.

+ Registered. Academics don’t believe in goodie bags. But this place is fun. I got a conference program, banquet tickets and a limited edition China Mieville t-shirt that I happily pre-ordered. Was disappointed that it was China’s art on the tee, though, and not one of the soiled and sweaty old Hanes tank tops he wore while writing Kraken. [Actually, it was the same art that appears on the graphic of the program cover above... a neat ape/bride/tentacle face!] Regardless: the con opens with smiles, hugs and handshakes with old pals.

+ Thurs., Lunch. China Mieville gave a slide-show enhanced guest lecture on permutations of the uncanny. This was a provocative essay, even as it was parodic. I recorded the audio. Preter-uncannilly, I knew to record the speech in advance. It was one of the best lectures of the weekend. A profound auto-parodic work of criticism, that pleaded for us to not over-taxonomize everything we find strange. I think of Mieville as a Marxist, but this was deconstruction pure and simple. It was really, ultimately, yet another deconstruction of the failure of language to capture experience, even as we try to master experience through it. I thought his unwillingness to bring Kristevan abject into the picture — by denying she had any say in his topic even as he used ideas of trash and disjecta membra (in monstrous icons like ‘Garbage Man‘) was puzzling.

+ Thurs., 2pm. Responded to a theory roundtable discussion of one of my articles on teaching horror fiction, called “The Unlearning.” Great conversation, hosted by the effervescent Barbara Lucas. David Sandner (who not only teaches horror in a Gothic class at U Cal Fullerton, but also appears in The Gorelets Omnibus) wins for asking the hardest questions. Jacob Weisman, Brian Rapp and others got to share their experience or thoughts about teaching horror. I wished I would have recorded this. Something like it (a roundtable of horror teachers discussing the use of horror fiction and film in the classroom) appears in the new book, The Best of Dissections — a hard copy anthology that Gina Wisker was proudly sharing at the conference, and which hopefully will be available as an ebook someday soon.

+ Thurs., 4pm. Sat on a panel called “The Monster in the Room: Archetypes of the Monstrous in Children’s Literature” with Jessica Fontaine, Alaine Martaus and Bridgid Shannon. These folks were very impressive, and I believe many of them had studied at Hollins University, which has a fantastic Children’s Lit program. I was happy to be a part of this dialogue, but I probably didn’t belong on this panel, as I literally became the ‘monster in the room’ by talking about theories by Freud and Bettleheim that folks didn’t want to hear about. Maybe the only good thing I really contributed was my insistence that these books say as much about adults as they do about the kids they’re written for, which everyone already knew but perhaps likes to forget. I learned a lot about picture books and new titles I hadn’t heard of before. And one of the panelists used the phrase “Grover Studies” in answering a question about a book, which I will never forget whenever I hear an academic describe their field again. (It’s all Grover Studies, baby.)

+ Later that day: local writer friends who weren’t attending the conference pulled up in a minivan, tossed a bag over my head, and then drove away. They pulled the bag off my head and I found myself at a local seafood restaurant — one that would become my only foray into local cuisine the whole time. Jeff Strand, Lynne Hansen, Sally Bosco, Gina Wisker, David Sandner, and Andy Miller were a blast. We talked about the ebook revolution, cover art, bad zombie movies, Jeff’s latest novels, and the Bram Stoker Awards. Then a bag went back over my head and I woke up in my room, bruised and bloody.

+ Friday, 8:30am. This conference likes to balance the pleasure of good company with the pain of early morning panels. Ah well…I can drink coffee and shoot the breeze anytime, anywhere. But only if there’s coffee. This morning I moderated a panel on horror film directors, called “The Thing Is…Barker, Craven, Carpenter and Watts.” The title sounds like the typical “potpourri” of things that they lumped together because the organizers couldn’t figure out a more coherent theme. Yet this one worked and was groovy. Dominick Grace read a fantastic essay on Peter Watts’ so-called “fan fiction” tribute to John Carpenter’s famously tentacled film, The Thing — called “The Things” (and every Carpenter fan reading this NEEDS to read this story — it’s over on Clarkesworld Magazine right now for free reading). Joseph Lewis presented a piece on the Elm Street films which smartly cited Joseph Andriano’s excellent work on monsters. Tony Vinci also gave an awesome paper on Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and Nightbreed, rife with penetrating analysis. This is what I would call “a great panel!”

+ Friday, Lunch. Sat with Stephen Erickson, and talked about his days back in the Iowa Writers Workshop. Learned some things about T.C. Boyle. Then listened to guest scholar, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who presented a slideshow-infused after-lunch lecture called, simply, “Undead.” While the coverage was wide, the depth was still there all along the zombified cultural landscape. I knew a lot of this already, but he helped me to understand zombies as a popular trend in today’s culture a little differently. I loved his comment, “I wish we could have our zombies without demanding so ardently an apocalypse to go with them.” Here, here. And in my view, almost all of the ‘fun’ zombie titles (just think Shaun of the Dead) seem to domesticate them. But of course, the second you domesticate a creature, you rob it of its power. However, why must that power always be apocalyptic? That’s as stupid as having every James Bond villain a person who is set out to destroy the world. The scope is always too wide, too generic. Maybe that’s tied in with what zombies themselves are commenting on. My opinion anwyay.

+ Friday, later. Sat in on a fantastic poetry reading with David Kopaska-Merkel, Carolyn Clink and Bryan D. Dietrich. Poets who work in science fiction, fantasy and horror are really some of the smartest writers around, and I really wish they were read more often. This is why I remain a member of The Science Fiction Poetry Association and bought a lifetime subscription to Dreams and Nightmares magazine.

+ Saturday, 8am. Sleep, glorious sleep. Nightmares, glorious nightmares, filled with ropy mucous monsters and dopy doofus lobsters. Followed by glorious coffee.

+ Sat, 10:30am. Listened to the panel on Hal Duncan’s book, The Last Werewolf. Douglas Ford is one of my favorite horror genre critics working today and he presented a masterful analysis of the text that’s still got me thinking about the issues it raises, Sarah Benton smartly looked at Kristevan abjection in the book, and Chelsey Lucas explored the ‘humanity’ in the title. I’ve never been a huge werewolf fan, but I really must read this book. This panel was an example of how critics can love a book and celebrate it through literary criticism at the same time.

+ Sat, Noonish. Lunched with friends from Tachyon Publications. A butler statue with a strange and disgusting hole in its hands greeted us at a storefront. We swapped stories of neighborhood murders and other crimes we experienced, growing up. I remember Amityville and the Son of Sam. Good conversation. Orlando residents in earshot gave us funny looks. Story of my life.

+ Sat, mid-midday. Alerted that there was something waiting for me in the silent book auction. All books are silent, so this alert scared me.

+ Sat, 5pm. Attended the annual editorial board meeting for Dissections: The Journal of Contemporary Horror. Gina Wisker likes to have folks share poetry before we get down to the business of talking shop about the literary journal. I read my Zombie Haiku from twitter last Halloween (appears in The Gorelets Omnibus) while a young boy splashed in the nearby kiddie pool. I directed my reading at him, trying to gross him out or scare him away. Instead, he offered a giggly critique after each poem. It was hilarious, till Mom came outside to fetch him. I think she looked at me like I was going to drown the poor kid. I just made him swim in a pool of horror poetry.

+ Sat evening. Awards banquet. I always attend this formal end-cap to this conference, which is rife with good food, congratulatory speeches, and applause. Feels very genuinely like a gathering of friends. Only this year, I somehow managed to sit at a table where they delivered food last. And they ran out of food early…so they brought us bottle after bottle of free wine to pour into our empty stomachs until the food was prepared. People at the table were hungry and upset…but I couldn’t think of a better way to end the night!

+ Sun morning. No one is awake. I get on the shuttle bus like a zombie. Fly. Do not crash. Come home to catch up on work. Then write this. Still like a zombie. End.

I’m still overhauling this website to consolidate things and make them easier for me to manage (so I can spend more time writing).  I recently pulled my microblog from the Posterous website (and dumped my pinterest account) and those posts are now happily reintegrated into this blog, which I’m trying to make more active as a genuine blog and less of a page for only sharing Goreletter department drafts.  I also started a new department on this blog, called “Ambulations,” to make up for it:  it will feature mobile posts, road trip photos, and ideas jotted while on the move, essentially taking over what was formerly found on posterous.  The newsletter will continue and I plan to release the next issue in early May, so feel free to subscribe.

I’ve yet to find a new suitable art/photo gallery for gorelets.com, so I decided to post a batch of artwork that was published here in the past to my flickr gallery site, where I’ve been posting digital experiments for two years now anyway.  I’m not sure yet where or how I’ll share images of my book covers and other illustrations, but for now, I just wanted folks to know what was happening with the gorelets.com gallery.  Go over to http://www.flickr.com/photos/gorelets/  and check out some crazy images I’ve created over the past few years — like that strange “Demonaurus” creature pictured above, which is one of my personal favorites.

Many see the Freaksicord as if it were a mirage when they first encounter it. It stands — astonishingly — like a walking stomach. Only as an afterthought does one notice the head, which dangles somewhere down below. Its head is so heavy with teeth, the neck can not bear its weight, and the head sometimes swings on its stalk like a pendulum between the beast’s stocky legs. Many presume that they might die between those muscular jaws, but what they don’t realize is that the neck, wings and head together function like a lever, lifting pray up into the air only to drop it back down onto the horns that protrude from a place near the bloated tic-like stomach. Blood is absorbed by the Freaksicord’s skin. It needs no mouth to consume you.

***
Thanks to Quinto Martin, who ran a teaching-with-technology training session this week at Seton Hill University on the subject of games in education. We installed Maxis’ free trial edition of the popular Spore Creature Creator. “You could have students make creatures and then write stories about them,” Martin suggested, pointing out the various character traits that can be manipulated in the software. He asked us to try it ourselves and submit what we came up with. The above was mine, which I thought I’d share here.

I think I was getting hungry when I wrote this. I also think the wings should be where ears might appear on the sides of the golf-club-shaped head.

Maybe I’ll try this activity next time I teach my undergraduate course in Horror and Suspense Writing.

My favorite Bizarro comic of recent days involves Mr. Peanut — that dapper mascot of Planter’s nuts — in a scenario that makes plain the inherent contradiction of advertisements that employ cartoon mascots to represent the very same products they sell.

What IS the appeal of these imaginary spokespeanuts and mascots and similar characters in mass advertising that embody the very same product that their companies would have us consume? How does our brain respond to the cognitive dissonance of a cartoon tunafish selling us tunafish to eat? How does the child’s brain process the implied relationship between, say, the character of Mayor McCheese in the Playland and the Quarter Pounder available at the nearby counter at the local McDonald’s restaurant? How do we disavow the “unnatural” and “disturbing” undercurrent to advertising mascots, as expressed by this surprisingly frank commercial for M&M candies from the early 2000s?

I find this advertisement — featuring Patrick Warburton (Seinfeld’s “Putty”) vastly interesting. Beyond the “unnatural” situation — which I’ll focus on in a moment — the setting of this exchange is very telling. It is located in a convenience store that seems a nostalgic throwback to the general “candy stores” of an unidentifiable past. Why does this matter? For one, it situates the story of the ad in the context of economic exchange, but one where no exchange is really happening, save for the actor’s parental scolding and taking away of the candy. The commentary feels realistic in its dark commentary, but the story is still situated in a fantasyland, and it is one which is aligned — dreamily, hazily — with the past for the viewer. The Ms are like “kids in a candyshop” and Warburton plays the adult parent who comes into the shop to scold them.

It matters quite a bit, I think, that the proprietor behind the register is not minding the store, has his back turned when Warburton walks in, and disappears quickly from the image. This allows a situation to transpire that is odd, because normally the clerk would be the one chiding the candy to stop eating the goods he is trying to sell. Instead, we have candy doing nothing at all but hungrily eating more candy, implying a scenario where “the cat is away, so the mice must play” but also providing a parody of the consumer who merely induges his desire to consume without much thought. The M&M characters are not just cannibalistically, but hedonistically indulging themselves in the store, but doing so in a way that is represented as juvenile and childish, allowing the shopper (Warburton) to take on the role of both consumer and parental authority figure, who speaks, ironically, with the voice of reason. It is as though his consumption is valid, but there’s is not an acceptable display of it. The world without consumerism — the theater of the store prior to Warburton’s arrival — is uncivilized, or as animalistic and bestial as it is cannibalistic. The consumer’s exchange — Warburton’s chiding — employs a civilizing effect on the scenario, with the “natural law” (“you don’t eat your own kind…it’s unnatural”) being applied by the consumer’s authority.

This is not the book of Deuteronomy; this is an M&Ms commercial. Commerce is the operative word. The M&M’s try to swap their “colors” but this mutual exchange is not acceptable to the consumer, because it is not a “real” exchange with any symbolic gain. There needs to be some semblance of gain: thus, the consumer takes the candy bags away — getting it all to himself in the process. The popping of an M&M on the way out the door is a symbolic reward, but it also suggests quite clearly: you don’t eat your own kind, but a superior being is free to eat the lower forms…like the juvenile, animalistic, cannibalistic, uncivilized candy. In other words, a hierarchy between parent/child and consumer/product is reaffirmed here and that is the key lesson of the commercial’s “story”: you are not free to gobble up the goods of capitalism — you need to pay for the privilege, and paying makes consumption of ANOTHER KIND perfectly okay.

In other words, it rationalizes the exploitation of the other, in a very self-congratulatory and superior way.

Perhaps I am over-analyzing what amounts to a darkly comedic joke, but often such jokes do relate to unconscious desires, and one of the lessons of the Uncanny is that laughter is just as much a response to the return of the repressed as is a scream. As this commercial and the Bizarro comic up above make clear, there is a cannibalistic undercurrent to the funny and comedic world where animated icons and product spokesmen are normalized. Why else does the Pillsbury Doughboy giggle when we put his brethren children in the oven? Why else does the Michelin Man smile when he asks us to drive on the very rubber flesh that constructs him?

Advertisers employ the literary conceit of personification and the technologies of animation (or costuming) to lend their product an aura of “life” — this, preposterously, gives these icons the implied power “beyond nature” that comes with their status. But it is not so much the living-dead commodities that are embued with this power. It is the manufacturer — the magic machinery of the dough factory, the tire factory — that are attributed with some “secret” power in the process. This is what is meant by “commodity fetishism”; we begin to treat the products of the factory as if they were created by a god or a token of a higher being, instead of something created by the hands of man. Advertising, as Raymond Williams has put it, is a magic system that perpetuates this fetishism of commodities. This may sound like a lot of weight to put onto the back of Mr. Peanut or an M&M candy, but one of the lessons of studying the popular uncanny is that the more unnecessary and empty a consumer good, the more the supernatural is drawn into its marketing and advertising to sell us on its value. If one colored bag of candy is the same as any other, then perhaps the claim that “you don’t eat your own kind” is really betraying a secret fear that this economic system really is a form of self-cannibalism, after all, by trying to disavow it through an imaginary alternative universe, where what we eat is not us, and is not ours, but something magically Other altogether.

Pea Green Boat is an online magazine of curious and compelling miscellany, publishing issues that collect articles and snippets on unique themes. The current issue of PGB (Spring 2012) focuses on The Uncanny.

I should say up front that one of my articles, on “Eyebombing,” is reprinted from this very site. But PGB’s Uncanny issue includes a diverse mix of variations on the topic, which makes for a compelling if not downright entertaining and thought-provoking read. There are plentiful discussions of robots and cinema (Tintin, Tron, Metropolis, Real Steel), interviews with relevant figures and creators (a new interview with author Tanith Lee is a headliner here, along with interviews with bio-ethicist James Hughes and owners of a museum of automata, Michael & Maria Start), and samples of poetry, research, reviews, humor and more on all things uncanny, from the proverbial uncanny valley to the creepiness of dolls and optical illusions. It even includes a reprint of Freud’s seminal essay on “Das Unheimliche” and a nicely-illustrated version of ETA Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann,” which Freud copiously analyzes in his essay.

My favorite contribution in the Uncanny issue of Pea Green Boat is the historical article on “The Uncanny Valley of the Cabbage Patch Dolls,” which traces the frenzied events surrounding this weird-headed phenom from the 80s, citing a book by William Hoffman on the subject that really got me thinking, paired up with a great discussion by Ramona Creel on “Babyland General” — a Cabbage Patch theme park in Cleveland, Georgia that sounds genuinely fascinating. [See Roadside Attractions for more on this real world 'patch' -- or better yet, drop by the Cabbage Patch Kids website for information on how to set up a visit or to 'adopt' your own doll, fresh from the sprout!]

“…the uncanny return of the body in all its messy “bodiness” against the ineffective mediation of words, of culture, of technology, of all idealizations that try to move us toward abstraction and away from our smelly, gurgling selves, is characteristic of Arnzen’s work. Not new in horror, of course, it may nonetheless be the kind of horror those in the grip of the promise of new technology and its seeming power and mastery over the world needs to hear.”

I recommend the hardcover edition, which includes several additional articles and bonus poetry, as well as a “horror poetry writing workshop”. If you’re curious, investigate this book at amazon.com or directly from the publisher at Raw Dog Screaming Press.

In their latest campaign, “Enough. Is. Enough,” JC Penney is running what is, to my mind, a hilarious television commercial, involving a serial montage of consumers shouting for outrageously loud and extended time periods at sales tags and other marketing tricks familiar to us all.

What makes this commercial so great is all the horror film iconography — from the ever-present scream to the use of ambulatory mannikins — to treat its, admittedly, very vague subject. I think my favorite spot involves a woman opening her mailbox and screaming at the endless stream of junk mail that pours out of it, reminiscent of horror films where rats stream out of a sewer. The commercial ranges in references to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to They Live. It is clear to me that the message is about getting rid of fine print and weaselly language in direct mail and sale materials, but judging from the commentary this campaign is generating on facebook, not everyone understands this and most people are simply annoyed by it).

The ad is really a build-up in anticipation of (as of this writing, tonight’s) “reveal” of a special change in the department store giant’s marketing structure. JCP even brashly announces on their facebook page that “On 2.1.12 we’ve got the biggest news in jcp history (Yeah. We’re talking big time here, since we’ve been around for 110 years).” This commercial also has a great tie-in app on its facebook page called “The No Meter!” in which you can literally scream “Noooo!” at the website and the meter will measure your rage and give you a cheeky comment about how potent your screams are.

Whatever JCP has in store for us, I find it fascinating that this advertising campaign appropriates consumer rage at ads into an ad that is a ploy for consumer loyalty. There’s something inherently contradictory here. And it is using the appeal of tropes of the uncanny to sell us on it. But it is using more than just the directorial horror film references that one can easily spot in the commercials. It is using extratextual parlor tricks.

The No Meter is an excellent example of a modern day “fortune teller” machine, an automaton of sorts that invites humans to interact with its mechanism (or in this case, program) in order to “uncannily” respond with an interpretation of their emotions. It plays on the concept that the computer “app” can really “listen” to you and respond. It is, in other words, the domestication of the funhouse parlor trick, the exotic stuff one used to only find on Coney Island, now broadcast in your home office, living room, laptop, and cell phone.

This folksy sort of hokum reminds me of the horror movie ballyhoo of William Castle — who, in his classically campy title, The Tingler, had Vincent Price taunt audiences to “scream for your lives” by yelling at the movie screen in order to kill the monster that was loose in the theater. The gimmick — called Percepto — notoriously included wiring theater seats with joy buzzers that would go off to try to induce screaming.

I’ll be watching the development of this campaign. I can only imagine what it will be like in the shopping mall next time I visit… I suspect that fun-loving folks familiar with this stuff will scream for laughs whenever they walk in or near the store, and for as long as this cultural memory survives, the mall will echo with these goofy “nooooo!” shouts, reminiscent of a scene from Dawn of the Dead.

Thank you, Tim Nudd at AdWeek, for posting the 30 Freakiest Ads of 2011. Some of them were quite disturbing (I think the anti-child abuse PSA from Ireland hit me hardest (literally). And some are freaky in the way they just push the boundaries of what is taboo. But many are prime examples of the popularization of tropes of the uncanny in a way that is so orthodox, it’s a little mind boggling. In my review of this annual top thirty list, it seems to me that the ads that take the symbolism from their slogans or product names the most literally are the ones who generate the strangest of all ads.

Note how Freudian these ads are in their symbolism. The number one pick is literally a series of dream scenarios offered up for viewer interpretation. The truth is, ALL ads are dream scenarios to begin with, so Nudd’s selectio of this one — while being the most “freakiest” — is also at the same time the most honest.

I am always interested in advertisements for chewing gum (the first chapter of The Popular Uncanny focuses on the history of gum advertising in fact), because they must go out of their way to grab our attention and “sell us” on buying something akin to food — that is, something we chew but never swallow, in a simulacra of consumption.

Here’s one from the list that is the most audaciously Freudian I’ve seen in quite awhile: a video from the “Unexpected Turn” campaign for Vivident Gum:

Another uncanny ad that struck me from the “freakiest” list is the giant ear that moves of its own accord, in ESPN’s Sports for Your Ears advertisement. An obvious example of animism, with an ambulatory body part taking on all the characteristics of a sports fan, but it’s more like a wacky dream than an advertisement. I find it telling that in the opening of the ad, the ear is shopping, and when it is at work it is a psychologist (subtly recalling (if not directly referencing) the faux radio host Frasier from TV: “I’m listening”).

Some in the list are hilarious. Some are disturbing. Some are not safe for work. Most employ the uncanny to sell a product. See them all at AdWeek.

Leave a post if you want to tell us which ones you’d put in your top two.

Here’s a fun form of culture jamming — a very soft and cuddly act of public defacement not unlike smiley face graffiti — that’s picking up attention online this month: “Eyebombing.”

“Eyebombing” is the art of sticking “googly eyes” (a.k.a. “wiggly eyes” — the glue-on sort of craft store kind) onto an inanimate object in the public sphere in a way that cleverly lends the object the appearance of a living creature.

The purpose? According to eyebombing.com, it’s “humanizing the world, one googly eye at a time.” A wee bit subversive in nature, like drawing a mustache on a billboard celebrity.  Take a snapshot of this public (de-?)facement, post it to eyebombing.com, link to it on a facebook group or flickr group or some other social network, and you have a mounting trend that — while nothing new, really — is emerging as a cute internet “meme.”  We could possibly also call this meme an instance of the popular uncanny.  But maybe not in the way you might, at first, suspect.

Sure, it’s just anthropomorphizing. Such gestures — which give the attributes of life to an inorganic object — often are “uncanny” because they confuse the assumed boundary between what makes something an object and what makes something — anything — a subject, capable of “returning the gaze.” We might feel an aura of weirdness for just the first moment we look at the object and see that it is “looking back” when it’s not supposed to. This reaction harkens back to what Freud once termed the “surmounted” childhood beliefs in an animistic world, in this case rendering everyday urban life as fantastic as the trees that talk in fairy tales or the Muppets of television childhood. Only now Oscar the Grouch doesn’t live a trashcan — he IS the trashcan. From guard rails to postal boxes, as the result of eyebombing, the objects of everyday life become doll-like with those cheap stick-on “googly” eyes so familiar to us from craft stores.

But googly eyes are plastic simulacra to begin with.  They do not “move of their own accord” per se — in fact, it would probably be far more uncanny and disturbing to see human beings with plastic eyes like these on their faces instead.  In other words, this is a representation of the gaze, a plastic staging of the uncanny, rather than a genuinely haunting act of defamiliarization.

Yet it is still — at least at first glance — a little uncanny.  Indeed, it is the eyes themselves, far more than the objects they transform, which I would say are the harbingers of the popular uncanny.  Is it not the familiarity of the googly eyes — not of the defamiliarized postal box, but the plastic eyes themselves — used in such a strange way, that makes them seem so odd, if not haunting? The googly eyes themselves are displaced from the faces of dolls and other crafts and are now potentially looking at us from anywhere, especially places where we would not expect to encounter them.  The “bombed” site — a guard rail, a trash can, a light switch — is surprisingly looking at us when we turn around, precisely like those eyes on the GEICO dollar bill stack from advertising (“I always feel like somebody’s watching me.”)

Of course, this is not really scaring anyone.  Disturbing a few, momentarily, perhaps. But we remain “surmounted” because we are not fooled by the eyes — they are not realistic the way that, say, fantastically  customized contact lenses or the eyeballs from a “reborn doll” are.  No — these “craft” items are virtually two-dimensional in all their clitter-clatter spinning disc glory, and are located more in the realm of concepts than animals.  Indeed, they seem to make a statement more than talk for themselves.  The subversive act of rendering a public, hard object as a personalized and personified object is still potent; it can defamiliarize in a very palpable manner, like all good art — but it does so in a way that is not felt as threatening.  Its unreality is domesticated — which, while seemingly lacking in the haunting power of the uncanny is nonetheless a a defining element of many items of the “popular” uncanny, which sublimates but never entirely buries repressed desire in its attempt to make the unfamiliar more familiar — often by employing the tactics of childhood fantasy. 

Eyebombing is the Fozzie-Bearification of the community property — the Jim Hensoning of the public square.  There is a return of the repressed invoked here, but it very well may a repressed belief in the power of folk art, which has been increasingly “surmounted” by technology — or even just a psychological reawakening of some relationship to a children’s puppet from days gone by — which here returns with a twinge of uncanny recognition.

Bombs away.