Monday, September 23, 2013

Slightly Nutty Uploads New Book Cover

Exciting news - I've given my blog compilation a new cover!

These blog entries have all been lovingly edited and cleaned up and handpicked for your delectation.

Okay, well perhaps more exciting things have happened in the world. But I did the cover all by myself, and with a photo sourced from the creative commons, no less.


Oh I hate selling. I am not good at it. It goes against the very fibre of my being, unless I am selling for someone else.

You can buy it here. Or here if you're in the UK. Find out more about it here. Okay I'm out of here.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Things that Go Bump in the Daytime: The Spooky Fun of Ghost Videos


Some people consume amateur porn on line. I am a sucker for amateur fright night videos.

I only properly discovered YouTube a couple of years ago. It wasn’t till then that I fully understood the power of the internet to effortlessly dispose of time. Here you’ll find every pleasant television memory, every edgy advertisement that didn’t get aired on TV, every pop song that held special meaning and that you had previously thought could only be called up from your own internal hard drive, every possible interview featuring your favourite celebrity and every single amateur video, however lacking in basic intellectual or artistic merit, ever uploaded by Josephine or Joe Average.

The amateur ghost vids are a genre unto themselves. The first question we lovers of the paranormal are supposed to ask ourselves is: ‘Is it real?’ This question is often unintentionally answered in the negative by the makers themselves: the urge to go overboard is just too tempting. The orbs are pleasantly spooky (orbs are surely the ecotoplasm of the twenty-first century), but then the light of the bathroom turns on by itself, followed soon after by the faucet doing the same. Sleeper ‘wakes up’ to investigate. I didn’t come down in the last shower, along with the restless spirits of the dead.

Other times, as in the imaginatively titled Ghost Children in Our Basement Caught on Tape, the video looks genuine at first. These ghost kiddies slowly move toy cars around, rock chairs, gently throw a doll to the ground and then turn the tele on. They seem slightly sedated, and one commenter notes that she would much rather have these polite ghost children than her own brats who would probably trash the joint. The greenish tinge of the infrared light adds to the understated air of authenticity.

But this impression is soon spoilt by onscreen messages like ‘subscribe for more ghost children videos’. Would someone who was genuinely under assault by a poltergeist have the emotional fortitude to create a YouTube channel with 112 videos? And once you start reading the comments, which pick the video apart, you lose the forlorn hope that, despite your misgivings, perhaps this really  is a genuine depiction.

While the majority of these videos reveal themselves to be fake, for would-be believers like me it is the liminal area between the likelihood of fakery and the dim hope of authenticity that makes these tapes so compelling. Perhaps that’s why the comments calling out the fakes are sometimes so vitriolic. We’d rather remain uncertain than know for sure that someone's trying to pull our collective leg.

This one, which is obviously faked if you look carefully, shows a speeded-up version of the reason a couple supposedly argue about whether he makes the bed every day after she leaves for work. Delightful shivers up my spine before the trick became obvious.

And here is a ghost that does the vacuumming. I wish I had this type of ghost.

I found this one very creepy at first, not because it couldn’t be doctored – anything can be doctored – but because imaginatively this seems unlikely. If you were going to create a ghostly effect, would you do it like this? But then too many commenters declared that this was a speck of dust moving over the lens, and I reluctantly conceded they were probably right.

Even if the trick isn’t obvious, a sure warning sign of fakery in the majority of examples is that so much of the poltergeist action takes place squarely in the vision of the time lapse camera that the makers supposedly leave on for hours at a time.

Sometimes there is a dog involved, barking anxiously and staring at something the video maker can’t see. The makers always seem compelled to ask their dogs over and over again ‘What is it, Fluffy?’ (or Sid or whoever), perhaps expecting their dog to be shocked into speech by the drama of the moment: ‘Dog speaks for the first time after being asked “What is it?” twenty times during poltergeist episode’.

Dog See's [sic] a Ghost! is a good example of the ghost-and-dog subgenre. Featuring  a creepy attic ghost, it attracted no accusations of fakery, and the dog is genuinely terrified. If the authenticity of these videos should be judged purely by the comments, this one could be authentic (she says hopefully).

What scared me most in this video, though, was the terrible use of apostrophes and unnecessary commas. ‘See’s’? What’s that about? Can a verb possess something? Perhaps the apostrophe indicates that the verb is itself possessed by the ghost of bad punctuation.

The videos recorded on security cameras  seem by their very nature to be more authentic because of  the low pixel rate and the fact that they're often in black and white. What do readers think of this one, which is set in a video store? The person putting the videos away seems genuinely startled, but perhaps he’s just a good actor?

But in the final analysis, for genuine lovers of thrillers it doesn’t matter whether these are real or not, any more than it matters whether the people in amateur porn movies are really into each other. Because this is really a replica of an existing genre – the thriller that apes reality, pioneered by the brilliant Blair Witch Project, and carried further in the Paranormal Activity series – the first of which was pretty good, with the quality dwindling further with each sequel. We knew Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity weren’t real but it was the similitude that made them scary, not a mistaken belief that one was watching a doco.

The same goes for these amateur videos. When they don’t overreach themselves and you avoid reading the comments, they provide great cheap thrills. It’s the carefully timed depiction of boring domestic reality, with its combination of natural and technogical sounds, followed by sudden, inexplicable events at unpredictable intervals that produces the delightful eeriness. And of course the overly serious intertitles, which are usually white text on a black background, feature lots of full stops and are often accompanied by nothing but an ominous silence.

A decent supernatural thriller comes out only once every couple of years, so I am chronically thriller deprived. Amateur fright videos fill the gap in the meantime.

Ghost videos and the uncanny
Wikipedia tells us that the state known as the uncanny was first identified by Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay, ‘On the psychology of the uncanny’. According to Jentsch, the uncanny is the result of ‘intellectual uncertainty’; it is always ‘something one does not know one’s way about in’. He goes on to say:
... one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.
This explains why splatter porn is horrifying but not thrilling, and why its consumers require increasing amounts of gore to get their kicks. Good supernatural thrillers play on this uncertainty rather than revealing the source of the fear, or at least putting off the revelation until late in the day.

Freud goes further, arguing that the uncanny is basically about taboos like sex and death. Because these taboos are traditionally not dealt with directly, we end up projecting all our ‘stuff’ onto them; the uncanny thus reminds us of our own repressed desires. It doesn’t bust the taboos, though – it plays on them. A decent thriller uses all this psychic possibility while not spoiling the effect by exposing the taboo. Thus ghosts should be either invisible or indistinguishable from humans, and gore should be kept to a minimum.

But for someone with anxiety there is another dimension. Anxiety means a constant fear of chimeras – the next social event, the next work assignment, and even stretches of time ranging from the next five minutes to the future itself. Watching a scary video is a way of controlling the way one is exposed to fear of the unknown, enabling the viewer to mediate their fear in a safe environment.

But as well as immediate fears, perhaps the uncanny also helps us mediate those unnamed fears that supercapitalism and the threat of climate change cultivate in the most balanced personalities. Given the Russian roulette we are playing with finance, people and environment, the future is terrifying. Much safer to be terrified by chimeras that we know probably aren’t real.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Slightly Nutty and the Election of Doom


Australia has an election coming up this Saturday.

As a progressive and Greens voter as well as an anxiety sufferer, I am feeling a creeping, lonely, doom-laden dread of the future. I could be on the rotor, a funfair ride in which the floor drops away and you’re left clinging to the sides, pinned there by the furious spinning of the barrel.

It is fascinating how this vertiginous feeling replicates what my father must have felt when the Australian Labor Party achieved power in 1972, even though the objects of our dread could not be more different. The apple never does fall far from the tree (damn that silly tree!)

Dad, a Catholic of Irish descent, was and is terrified of communists, whom he believed at the time had overrun the ALP. While I was growing up he was active in the DLP, a right-wing Catholic party whose fear of reds, single parents, the pro-abortion lobby and environmentalists was only slightly ameliorated by its contradictory rejection of large corporations and poverty. Up until Whitlam was elected, the DLP had held the balance of power in the Senate, keeping Australia in conservative hands for over two decades.

Now there is a new threat on the horizon. Tony Abbott, leader of the Coalition, will almost certainly achieve power on Saturday, booting the ALP out of power. Although he is a member of the Liberal Party – the conservative party in Australia – Abbott is part of the landed Catholic gentry and culturally close to the DLP.

Abbott’s misogyny

As far as personality goes, Abbott has little traction. It is fascinating that, with all the stuff-ups and musical-chairs-style leadership changes in the ALP, along with the fact that Murdoch is using his media empire to boot Kevin Rudd out of power, Abbott is not slated to win by a landslide. In fact most people don’t like him much – they just find him less reprehensible than Rudd. If Rudd finds it hard to keep his temper, Abbott is a long-time bovver boy, still haunted by his own violent tactics as student politician at Sydney University.

Abbott is also a right-wing Catholic who until recently was widely seen as a committed misogynist and opposer of women’s rights, most importantly abortion rights. His remarks about women have returned to damn him again and again – they include such gems as ‘abortion is the easy way out’, ‘[virginity] is the greatest gift you can give someone’, the idea that women do not have an absolute right to withhold sex, and, on the carbon tax, ‘What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially it's going to go up in price’. It’s no surprise that there is a recurring theme in the media about women not trusting him.

Abbott was health minister in the Howard Coalition government from 2003 to 2007; during this time he opposed the abortion drug RU486, and tried to restructure Medicare so as to ban funding for abortion.

A DLP member, John Madigan, is now in the Senate and there is a possibility that after the election he might share the balance of power in the Senate with other conservatives – he has openly expressed his desire to restrict abortion (he rang up here once, wanting to speak to Dad!)

Abbott’s team have moved heaven and earth in recent years to change his entrenched image. ‘Do you want to know how God turns a man into a feminist? He gives him three daughters’, was wife Margie Abbott’s challenge when she threw down the gauntlet at her first political function, a business lunch in western Sydney in October last year.

I have to laugh at this – my dad has five daughters and no sons, and Dad and the word feminist don’t sit comfortably in the same sentence.

It’s not women per se that men like Abbott and my own dad fear, I realise now – it’s powerful women.

The conservative agenda

But my fears for women’s rights under Abbott sit alongside more well-defined concerns. Abbott has pledged to ditch a price on carbon and will make things even more nightmarish for asylum seekers than the sociopathic policies of the ALP are currently doing. There is also the possibility – albeit probably not in a first term – that he would work behind the scenes to reduce penalty rates and increase the consumption tax. He is also touting a paid parental leave scheme that would pay some wealthy women the equivalent of their wages up to $75,000.

The ALP hasn’t been a progressive party since the late eighties, but despite its egregious sins the question of whether life for all but the wealthy will be worse under a Coalition government has to be a qualified ‘yes.’

I can still remember the shock that Howard’s ascension to power in 1996 had on progressives; I recall bumping into someone I knew in the car park of the local shopping mall the day after the election and commiserating with them about our fears for the future. Things were quiet at first, but once Howard had grasped that he could win over the battlers by generating fear and gagging charities, he never looked back.

My fears about coalition rule are partly based on selfishness about how bad I’ll feel about the plight of others. With my excessive identification with the powerless I will ache every time I hear of some new cut to services or welfare payments.

But I am also frightened for myself, and for my own security. What will Abbott do to me and my life? Will the conservatives come for me in the dark, stealing the tiny bit of financial certainty the government metes out to me? If I am one of the unfortunates who takes a hit to pay for the Coalition’s seventy-five-thousand-dollar gifts to rich pregnant women, how will I cope emotionally, let alone financially?

And I am scared and saddened for my country. During this election campaign the major parties have all but ignored aged care funding, homelessness and the plight of the poor – only the Greens have focused on these issues. Yet there is a small chance that if Rudd were to be elected he would finally get around to increasing Australia’s shamefully low dole rate, and reverse Gillard’s disastrous decision to move around 800,000 single parents, mostly women, onto the dole. In other areas such as asylum seeker policy the ALP has become an appalling imitation of far right parties such as One Nation, and the ALP’s ‘commitment’ to climate change policy is greenwash at best.

My one comfort? The Greens’ approval rating seems to have risen slightly, proving the pundits wrong.

Enough for now. I’m off to throw some Greens brochures into the letterboxes of the rich and self-focused of Toorak. Exercise, you see, is an excellent antidote to Politically Induced Depression.

BTW I have done absolutely no doctoring to the photo above - it's just naturally weird, and all part of the attempt to show the public what a powerful woman Margie Abbott is!

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