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Today's Stories November 5, 2009 Pam Martens Vijay Prashad Brian Gallagher Norman Solomon November 4, 2009 Stan Cox Andy Worthington From Gitmo to Palau: Who are the Uighurs? Robert Weissman Susan Galleymore Ralph Nader Michael Leonardi Bitta Mistofi Robert Bryce Martha Rosenberg Dave Lindorff Website of the Day November 3, 2009 Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney Franklin C. Spinney Laura Carlsen Serge Halimi John Stanton Sophia Weeks Dave Lindorff November 2, 2009 Steven Higgs Ishmael Reed David Macaray Bouthaina Shaaban David Michael Green David Swanson Ellen Brown Adam Federman James McEnteer Stephen Fleischman Website of the Day October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair / Carl Ginsburg Mike Whitney Joe Bageant Gareth Porter Saul Landau Anthony DiMaggio Dave Lindorff Rannie Amiri Niranjan Ramakrishnan Jayne Lyn Stahl Rev. William E. Alberts Alvaro Huerta Martha Rosenberg Binoy Kampmark Norm Kent Charles R. Larson Roth's "The Humbling:" Nothing Like a Novel From an Old Pro Ron Jacobs David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 29, 2009 Michael Neumann Mike Whitney Gary Leupp Conn Hallinan Marshall Auerback Laura Flanders Eamonn McCann David Macaray Mark Weisbrot Stephen Soldz Christopher Brauchli Website of the Day October 28, 2009 Moshe Adler Dave Lindorff Frank Joseph Smecker Alexandra Early M. Shahid Alam Vijay Prashad John Ross Franklin Lamb Gregory Travis Susan Galleymore Website of the Day October 27, 2009 Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn Stewart J. Lawrence Alan Farago Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Bouthaina Shaaban Brian M. Downing Elections in Afghanistan, the Second Time Around Iain Boal Carl Finamore Jayne Lyn Stahl Website of the Day October 26, 2009 Bill Quigley / Paul Craig Roberts Uri Avnery Mike Whitney Michael Snedeker Shamus Cooke David Michael Green Martha Rosenberg Patrick Bond Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 23-25, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Christopher Ketcham Jeff Gore Gareth Porter Jayne Lyn Stahl Saul Landau Mike Whitney Nikolas Kozloff Ron Jacobs Russell Mokhiber Missy Beattie Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman David Ker Thomson Rannie Amiri Ronnie Cummins Norm Kent Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Ben Sonnenberg Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 22, 2009 Dan Pearson / Jonathan Cook Paul Craig Roberts The US as Failed State Mark Engler Johann Hari Brian M. Downing Eric Toussaint Tom Mountain Israel Shamir Charles Thomson Website of the Day October 21, 2009 Pam Martens Linn Washington, Jr. Liaquat Ali Khan D. K. Wilson Franklin Lamb Norman Solomon Stephen Fleischman Patrice Higonnet Binoy Kampmark Kevin Coval / Website of the Day October 20, 2009 Sharon Smith Tariq Ali Mark Brenner Bouthaina Shaaban Michael D. Yates Dean Baker Dave Lindorff John Ross Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Kevin Zeese Gilad Atzmon Website of the Day October 19, 2009 Mike Whitney Greg Moses John Ross Michael Donnelly Jayne Lyn Stahl Eric Walberg Russell Mokhiber Barbara Rose Johnston John V. Whitbeck Christopher Ketcham Website of the Day October 16-18, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Carl Ginsburg Ralph Nader Nikolas Kozloff Carlo Galli Dave Lindorff Catherine Rottenberg
/ Neve Gordon Marshall Auerback Nicola Nasser Windy Cooler James L. Secor Ron Jacobs Wes Jackson Jesse Lerner-Kinglake David Ker Thomson Against Leaders Missy Beattie Emily Ratner Stephen Martin Michael Snedeker Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Peter Stone Brown Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 15, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Brian M. Downing Ramzy Baroud Danny Weil M. Idrees Ahmad Margaret Kimberley Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Harvey Wasserman Nirmal Ghosh Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 14, 2009 Michael Neumann M. Reza Pirbhai Gareth Porter Paul Craig Roberts John Strausbaugh Fortress Moon Ralph Nader Dean Baker Charles Modiano Nadia Hijab Walter Brasch Website of the Day October 13, 2009 Peter Linebaugh Shamus Cooke John Ross Brendan Cooney Frida Berrigan Yves Engler David Macaray Dave Lindorff Mark Weisbrot Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 12, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Martha Rosenberg Jessica Arents Eamonn McCann Bill Hatch Sen. Russell Feingold Niranjan Ramakrishnan Gideon Levy Iyad Burnat Alan Cabal Dan Bacher Website of the Day October 9-11, 2009 Alexander Cockburn James Bovard Kathleen and Bill Christison Andy Worthington Marc Levy Tariq Ali Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Alan Nasser Jack Z. Bratich Steve Breyman David Michael Green Dave Lindorff Paul Buchheit Jim Goodman Missy Beattie Michael Leonardi Nadia Hijab Mel Packer David Macaray James T. Phillips Charles R. Larson Michael Donnelly David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 8, 2009 Saul Landau Paul Fitzgerald / Linn Washington, Jr. Marshall Auerback Dave Lindorff David Rosen Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee John V. Walsh Stewart Lawrence Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 7, 2009 Brendan Cooney Paul Craig Roberts Dean Baker Jonathan Cook John Stanton Joanne Mariner Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman Sen. Russell Feingold Mary Lynn Cramer Website of the Day October 6, 2009 Mike Whitney Gareth Porter Jonathan Cook Boris Kagarlitsky Iain Boal Ron Jacobs John Ross Michael Dickinson Stephen Fleischman Ira Glunts Missy Beattie Website of the Day October 5, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Harry Browne Sara Mann Omar Barghouti Shamus Cooke Brenda Norrell Fred Gardner Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap Website of the Day October 2-4, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Diana Johnstone Greg Moses William Blum Brian Cloughley Russell Mokhiber John Ross Ellen Brown David Ker Thomson David Macaray Gary Engler Robert Fantina Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer Anthony Papa Joe Allen Harry Browne Ron Jacobs Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
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Weekend Edition A Review of "Paranormal Activity"A DIY Horror FilmBy KIM NICOLINI Is Paranormal Activity as scary as everyone says it is? Sure, this shoestring budget “DIY” horror movie that’s making a killing at the box office is scary. It’s scary because watching a faux home movie about people being stalked by demons while they’re sleeping is scary. It’s scary because the possessed female body is scary. It’s scary because the emptiness of affluent American suburbs is scary. But part of what’s scary about this movie is that everyone wants to know if it’s scary. Paranormal Activity has been so successfully marketed that the movie itself has become a kind of paranormal marketing activity that has possessed the mass movie going audience. Let’s start by talking about the basic things that are consciously scary, the Things That Go Bump In the Night horror elements of this movie. These are the parts that everyone wants to see and know about. The whole premise of the movie is that a young couple – Katie and Micah – are being haunted by some kind of otherworldly presence in their home while they’re sleeping. Micah buys a movie camera to document the spectral presence, and the entire movie is presented like a home movie, as if we are watching an eyewitness account (via the video recorder) of a real haunting. The movie is entirely stripped of back story, unnecessary plot details, extraneous characters, artificial sets, lighting, or special effects. It’s a man and his camera filming his girlfriend and their house. Period. The movie’s sparse elements and the fact that it seems to be a real life account of Scary Things certainly heighten our sense of foreboding and fear, and after drawing us into this scene, the movie exploits its barebones minimalism to full effect. There is no shortage of the experiential horror film kind of scary in this movie, but it doesn’t come with big gory drooling monsters or masked madmen wielding machetes. It is the smallness of things that is thing. We feel the terror that resides in the things we can’t see, the things we expect, the things that lurk in the corners of the screen, the impenetrable dark, and the emptiness of space. The simple act of sitting in the darkness of the movie theater watching this couple sleep is scary. The dark of the screen mirrors the darkness of the theater as we (and the camera) watch the couple sleep, and the movie plays on our primal fear of the dark, of the night, of things under the bed. The simplest things are incredibly frightening and imbued with an invisible but nonetheless terrifying sense of dread -- a door swinging open and shut, a light switching on and off, the sound of footsteps on stairs. With each slight shift in shadow, sound, or light we feel the couple’s vulnerability through our gaze as we watch them sleep. Our bodies connect with the bodies on the bed, and it is truly eerie and creepy to watch how our bodies occupy space and the potential “paranormal activity” that goes on when we’re not in the conscious world. In fact, it’s like the unconscious has a life of its own while we’re sleeping. Indeed, much of the movie can be read as the unconscious that haunts the sterile American domestic space., and sometimes that unconscious can manifest like a demon. Indeed there is a demon in this movie. We never see the actual demon, but we know where it comes from – the female body, as represented by the buxom Katie. There is nothing paranormal about this movie’s basic plot structure. It’s fairly textbook, and we’ve seen it dozens of times before (think The Exorcist and Carrie). Beginning at age eight (right at the cusp of pre-adolescence) Katie began to be haunted by a demon (female sexuality), and this menacing spectral presence torments Katie and wreaks no end of havoc in her life. It burns down her childhood home and now threatens to destroy her new stable domestic space. Wherever Katie goes, her demon follows her. She can’t escape her demon because her demon is the female body itself, and female sexuality is a force to be reckoned with. Some of the scariest scenes in the movie are scenes of Katie standing in the bedroom staring down at the bed, her female body frozen in the frame and agitated with its own presence. Very scary. Once Micah discovers that Katie is haunted, he does what any normal guy would do. He tries to control Katie and her demon with a camera. He goes out and buys the biggest, best camera he can get (a.k.a. technological penis) and tries to contain the paranormal activity (Katie’s body and its demonic attachment). Sure, the sleeping scenes are really scary, but a large chunk of the movie involves Micah and Katie arguing over the camera and Micah’s obsessive desire to capture Katie in its lens. Micah thinks that by turning Katie into the erotic object of the camera that he can contain her “paranormal” presence. In the opening scene, one of the very first things that Micah films is Katie’s ass as she walks up the stairs. The camera zooms in, and we watch Katie’s butt fill up the screen. Throughout the movie, Katie’s tits and ass are constantly in full focus: Katie’s bountiful breasts push out of a low-cut dress or bulge against a tight t-shirt; her ass peeks out of the bottom of her shorts or is squeezed into her jeans. Micah asks Katie to perform a striptease for the camera and asks if he can film them having sex. Katie, of course, declines because she will not be controlled by the camera. Over and over again, Micah tries to turn Katie into a kind of pornographic object, and over and over again, Katie resists. In fact, in the end, the paranormal activity cannot be contained because the paranormal activity is Katie’s female sexuality and body, which eventually castrates the male that wants to contain it. But why does this presence need to be contained and controlled? Because the possessed female body doesn’t fit nicely into the sterile domestic space that is the really scary thing in this movie, because its agitated presence disrupts the deadened emptiness of affluent American domesticity. What is truly frightening is not the demon that haunts Katie but the emptiness and lack of life that haunts the domestic space that she and Micah occupy. What is truly disturbing is spending nearly ninety minutes in this creepily dead home that is the embodiment of material culture and completely devoid of individuality and human presence. The very first internal shot of the home shows a giant large screen TV sitting in front of the window, blocking out all light and life from outside. The house’s department store showroom leather furniture and lifeless mass-produced artwork hanging on the walls are haunted by the empty specter of American consumerism (the kind of consumerism that will drive a man to buy a camera to control his girlfriend).We spend the vast majority of the film being weighed down by Micah and Katie’s dull existence, their perfect home a suffocating presence more ominous and menacing than any demon. As we watch the couple bicker and banter in their lifeless suburban home, we experience a lingering sense of boredom as we are sucked into this “home movie” of a couple that is not very interesting. The most exciting points of the movie are when the couple is sleeping and we can witness the menacing presence that is trying to materialize in this dead domestic space. The demon is actually a breath of fresh air compared to the claustrophobic dullness of Micah and Katie’s everyday life. It’s actually a relief when Katie embraces the demon and rips the throat out of her boring domestic existence. What’s interesting is that the movie’s primary focus on the dull minutiae of Katie and Micah’s domestic life creates its own sense of heightened desire for those scary moments when the boredom is interrupted by rendering the couple unconscious and bringing on the demonic presence. The movie mirrors formally how its marketing strategy has worked to bring in record-breaking profits at the box office. In the movie, we suffer through the irritating ordinariness of Micah and Katie’s life so that we can experience those moments of adrenaline-pumping fear while the main characters are sleeping. In real life, we endure the ordinary minutiae of our own lives and then shell out ten bucks at the theater to use the movie to disrupt our own suffocating boredom. In the movie, Micah is a day trader whose affluence is dependent on his ability to make good investment choices. Obviously, filmmaker Oren Peli is his own kind of day trader and was no stranger in understanding how the market functions when he created his product. Using the Blair Witch Project as a model for success, Peli created a film for a mere $15,000 using his camera, a house in the San Diego suburbs, and two friends for actors. He then created a cult of desire for the object and marketed it as a paranormal object in its own right that promised to disrupt the boredom and minutiae of everyday life that plagues the American masses. Domestic box office take as of November 3, 2009 was $86,944,269. It looks like Peli’s paranormal investment strategy was successful. One of the things that’s really scary about this movie is the fact that people can be so easily manipulated to buy into a cult object. What’s scary is that the cult of the movie has become such a media sensation and such a massively desired object of consumption. People want to consume the movie like some kind of drug that promises to deliver them from the dullness of their lives, when really all it does is strip your wallet of ten bucks and give you the privilege of watching a boring guy unsuccessfully try to maintain domestic stability by controlling the hysterical female body. Still, it’s kind of fun to watch and to think about. Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her daughter and a menagerie of beasts. Her work has appeared in Punk Planet, Berkeley Poetry Review, Bad Subjects, and Bullhorn. She is currently finishing a book-length essayistic memoir about being a teenage runaway in 1970s San Francisco. She can be reached at: knicolini@gmail.com
Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter! Obama and Black America Ten months into Obama-time, the plight of black Americans is terrible. Yet overwhelmingly they rally behind the president. In a powerful report from the Deep South Kevin Alexander Gray asks the question: what should the black political agenda be? Mark Rudd counterposes “organizing” with “activism” and describes what it will take to build a movement. H. Bruce Franklin gives a chronology of the march into Afghanistan. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents.Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year !
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Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Yellowstone Drift:
"Powerful and shocking ..
Waiting for
Lightning
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