Michael Arnzen's Notebook on the Strange in Everyday Life 

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MUTTERVERSE: Mutter Museum Poems and Other Halloween Delights

Throughout #Halloween day I will tweet new poems inspired by my recent trip to @muttermuseum #MutterMuseum with hashtag #MUTTERVERSE — Michael Arnzen (@MikeArnzen) October 31, 2012 Happy Halloween! More tricks and treats over on the gorelets.com blog! Here’s an uncanny Halloween treat for you — a house strangely possessed by a familiar artifact of popular

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A Choreography of Cameras: “Hibi No Neiro”

I discovered the “cover song” web podcast site, Coverville, earlier today, and was musing over the way in which one band’s version of another band’s overly familiar song can chime the chords of the uncanny. But then I saw this video for Sour’s “Hibi No Neiro” — which I don’t think is a cover song

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Late Night with Wax Figures in the Men’s Room

There was a particularly uncanny moment last night on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.  Wait for it: The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien – Wax Figures, Redux Creepy Wax Tom Cruise Stalks Wax Fonzie In The Bathroom from D-Train on Vimeo. The wax/flesh boundaries are blurred in unexpected ways in that video that leave

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Andrew Huang’s Uncanny Videos

I thank my colleagues at Seton Hill University, Laura Patterson and Maureen Vissat, for recently passing along a YouTube link to “Doll Face” by Andrew Huang. It’s a brilliant treatment of the relationship between media technology and gender identity, using uncanny structures like automatism and the compulsion to repeat to deliver its message. The video

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Mock Band: The Simulation of Artistic Processes

Rob Horning‘s recent essay in PopMatters — called “Doomed to Dilettantism” — performs an alarming and fantastic excoriation of the trend toward substituting “professionalism” in the arts with “amateurism” by consumers. Ingeniously, Horning connects the proliferation of faux-artisan strip mall stores like Michael’s (the chain craft store “Where Creativity Happens”) to the consumerist propensity for

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Creepy Automata Videos

For Halloween, the readers of Oobject voted for their Top 12 Videos of Creepy Automata. A great theme, from cats in a milk churn to maniacally laughing dolls. One of my favorites is this clip of a Decaying 1880s Automaton Harpist by Vichy: I won’t belabor how uncanny the signifiers are here, from the doll’s

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