When our friend Chad lived with us for a while, one of the big pieces of unexpected decoration that he brought with him was a lime green suitcase. I remarked to him on one occasion that it was by far the ugliest suitcase that I had ever seen.
“I know,” he said, “Isn’t it great?”
I told him that I didn’t understand what he meant by that and he went on to explain.
We rely on stereotypes a bit too much in the theatre to provide a crafted, but logistical, shorthand for wringing out the emotion from our audiences. How easy is it to invoke the Angel and the Badge to provoke push-button reactions? We must always be wary before invoking the Cross and the Gun.
Do you believe in “Ripley’s Believe it Or Not!”
Since 1918 Ripley’s have been challenging the human condition by testing belief, trying honor and tempting our darker side with unknown and wanton wishings.
Have you noticed how people born beautiful are actually cursed throughout their lifetimes — even though they may not know it? There is a viciousness about The Beautiful that seeps from the inside out and changes their natural shine into an ethereal ugliness.
Should we be surprised to read in the New York Times this morning that disabled students are spanked more than their average peers?
We find the rise of television and internet singing phenomenon Susan Boyle confusing and disappointing. What the world is confessing in their stunned sycophancy for her is ritualistically simple: “Golly, we never suspected ugly, unkissed, people could have beautiful singing voices.”
You can see the new, tiled, background image for my Twitter account. The multicolored bonanza of triangles and primary colors is mesmerizing and aesthetically pleasing, right? Or is the image effect sort of eye numbing and hard on the retinas? Did you notice the twitter logo shares the same color blue as my background image? There’s nothing to that shared hue of blue except that “it is the color that it is” — which is a complicated way of saying, “it’s a popular primary blue.”
I was riding on a dollar van yesterday — you pay a local step van driver to sweep you up and down the streets so you don’t have to walk — and I overheard a conversation between a wrinkled and crusty old man and pock-faced younger boy: “Marry an ugly girl,” the old man said in a heavy Spanish accent, “and you’ll be happy the rest of your life because she’ll be grateful for the attention and content with the ring on her finger.”
Are blue eyes superior to brown? Have you ever experienced or witnessed an example of Black Rage? In 1970, author Toni Morrison took on both matters in her first book and subsequent ovaric masterpiece: The Bluest Eye.
Any big blog that’s been around awhile — like Urban Semiotic — has its share of rejected sycophants who just won’t go away after violating our publication policy or for being a personal nuisance.
Michel Foucault is one of those certain talents where a quirky mix of genius, talent and savantism all congeal in the mind of one person to shed the powerful glow of meaning and context on the rest of us One of Foucault’s passions in life was his love of words and his research into the power of labels.
Ugly is everywhere. Some of it is visual. Most of it is internal. None of it is ever hidden.
A lot of it used to be punished via Ugly Laws. Some of the best Ugly Advice I was ever given came to me as a 
youngster in the form of punches to my face from a crew-cut boy two years older than me — but in my same fifth grade class. His name was Alex.
He was a bully. He wore a perpetual scowl.
He outweighed most of us in class by 75 pounds.
Everyone hated him.
Everyone admired his giant fists and punching power.
He was a brute in a boy’s body.
He was a boulder that gathered moss.
While the rest of us wore mop-top bowl haircuts, Alex waxed the ends of his crew cut and shaved the base of his neck every morning.
Alex imparted his reality to me in a flurry of blows to my face after I had taken the advice of my mother’s boyfriend to “stand up to a bully and fight him on your own turf!”
Are you aware in the early-to-mid 1900′s it was illegal to be “found ugly” on the streets of some mainstream American cities like Chicago, Illinois (Chicago Municipal Code, sec. 36034) and Omaha, Nebraska (Unsightly Beggar Ordinance Nebraska Municipal Code of 1941, sec. 25) and Columbus, Ohio (General Offense Code, sec. 2387.04)? Your punishment for being caught public ranged from incarceration to fines of up to $50.00 USD for each ugly offense.
