Male Heterosexuality: A Celebration

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Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, creators of "Go Fug Yourself."

“Go Fug Yourself” recently named Amber Rose, a model best known for being Kanye West’s paramour, the winner of their annual “Fug Madness” contest, which uses reader voting to name this year’s “fugliest” celebrity.  This development reveals exactly how pernicious this silly little celebrity gossip website really is.

If you are not personally familiar with “Go Fug Yourself,” a brief explanation is in hand.  In short, “Go Fug Yourself” is a website where pictures of celebrities (mostly women) are posted daily, and made fun of.  The factor supposedly guiding the selection of said pictures is the relative level of “fugliness” exhibited by the celebrities’ appearances.  “Fugliness” is a portmanteau term; it refers to things or people which have quality of being being “fucking ugly.”  You may be forgiven if you find this term to be tiresome at best, since it’s one of the trashiest linguistic manglings extant on the Internet today.  The creators of the site, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan (the self-dubbed “Fug Girls”) make lots of shitty puns with this term–individuals are determined to be worthy of “fugging”; items of clothing judged to be founts of “fug”; outfits that are deemed marginally acceptable are deconstructed in order to figure out how to make them wholly attractive, in a process called “unfugging”; and so on.  This cheap wordplay is characteristic of the site’s writing, which tends to mistake heavy-handed sarcasm for wit.

Those of you who are familiar with the site are no doubt asking yourselves why I am bothering to criticize it now, since the “Go Fug Yourself” backlash is “so 2006.”  Were it not for recent events, I would agree with you.  While I’ve despised the site for a long time, it’s been in the same casual way that I despise gas station point-of-sale cologne displays, or Starbuck’s biscotti, or people who pronounce “forte” like “for-tay”–as one of the world’s many small yet avoidable evils.  However, this last iteration of “Fug Madness” opened my eyes to latent sexism and racism hidden behind the site’s usual misogynistic assholery.

“Fug Madness” is run in the same manner as the NCAA college basketball tournament–it is an elimination-based tournament that pits various celebrities against each other in brackets.  There are four brackets, each named after an iconic “fugly” celebrity–namely, Charo, Cher, Madonna, and Bjork.  Celebrities are individually ranked in order to determine which ones will face off, and there’s an Internet randomizer involved.  If this all sounds ridiculously ornate, that’s because it is.  The amount of energy that the Fug Girls put into organizing and maintaining this system is symptomatic of their lack of self-awareness regarding the entire exercise.  Sports teams are ranked based on their respective skills and performances; “Fug Madness” ratings are based on subjective perceptions of various celebrities’ failure to meet the Fug Girls’ standards of chicness and attractiveness.  It perpetuates the idea that it is a woman’s obligation to do a good job of being a sex object; it’s woman-on-woman violence at its worst.

This is real.

What’s so wrong with Bjork, or Madonna, or Cher, or Charo, anyway?  In their own ways, these women redefined what it means to be a woman in the public eye.  Bjork, Madonna, and Cher are all incredibly talented musicians and actresses, boundary-smashers who refused to fit into traditional entertainment industry molds.  (Okay, Madonna’s not that good of an actress–in movies.  But she did a bang-up job of playing herself in the doc “Truth or Dare.”)  Even ol’ Charo is a pretty talented guitarist and comedian (and one of the first Latina entertainers to make it in the U.S.)

Role model

The point is, these women should be celebrated, not denigrated.  And that’s the problem with “Go Fug Yourself” in a nutshell–its most common targets tend to be strong, unconventional women whose only crimes seem to be (in the eyes of the Fug Girls) straying from traditional gender norms.  Some of their favorite targets include brilliant actress (and noted androgyne) Tilda Swinton; Oscar-nominated actress (and icon of aggressive female sexuality) Sharon Stone; the magnificent Helena Bonham Carter; avant-garde bastard actress Chloe Sevigny; the delightfully off-kilter musician/actress Juliette Lewis; sly and intelligent actress Maggie Gyllenhaal; performance artist Lady Gaga; fearless musician/actress Courtney Love; and comedian/style icon Sarah Jessica Parker.

What do these women have in common?  Well, when surveying the list, the most noticeable commonality is the fact that most of these women are not conventionally attractive.  Don’t get me wrong–they’re better-looking than you or me, but by Hollywood standards, they’re straight up jolie laides.  They also have extremely distinctive personal styles, which tend to go against the grain of mainstream fashion.  Swinton is fond of futuristic, mannish clothing; Stone dresses in a flamboyant parody of old-fashioned stars like Rita Hayworth or Joan Crawford; Bonham Carter tends toward stylized, witchy couture; Sevigny wears bleeding edge styles; Lewis dresses like a rock star, because she is one; Gyllenhaal wears 70’s-style anti-chic; Gaga’s outfits are all elaborate jokes; Love just doesn’t care (in a good way) what you think of her; and Parker takes breath-taking risks.

Tilda Swinton, in a shoot for "Another Magazine."

Making fun of how any of these women look is pointless.  None of them are trying to look like Jessica Alba; indeed, their personal style is often predicated upon highlighting their unconventionality.  It’s like making fun of David Bowie for not sounding like AC/DC.  By mocking Parker or Sevigny for looking “weird,” the Fug Girls are merely demonstrating their cultural illiteracy.  Even worse, they’re enforcing sexist conceits of beauty.  They reserve their praise for dull, cookie-cutter cheerleaders like Reese Witherspoon and Amanda Seyfried–blondes with boobs and a high quotient of straight white male approval.  Through their very popular website, the Fug Girls reinforce the idea that the only valid metric of beauty is predicated upon traditional male standards of desirability.  In a culture where eating disorders, cutting, and other self-destructive behaviors run rampant among women, this is a very harmful idea to promote.

I mean, seriously, would you rather be Cher or Reese "Pudding" Witherspoon?

“But wait,” you’re thinking.  “The Fug Girls don’t just make fun of awesome bitches.  They also make fun of dumb skags like Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian!  You’re cherry-picking your examples.”

Ah, but I’m not.  While unconventional women come under frequent fire by the Fuggers, they’re also fond of a different sort of target–the easy target.  They enjoy making fun of clinically depressed, the mentally ill, and the drug-addicted.  Like the aforementioned Lohan and Kardashian, troubled women like Mischa Barton, Bai Ling, Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, and Tara Reid are common “Go Fug Yourself” targets.  It’s all too easy to make fun of them, since they often appear in a state of sartorial (and physical) distress.

Ha, ha, this woman's alcoholism is totally hilarious!

This needs to stop.  It’s not funny that Britney Spears had a nervous breakdown.  It’s not funny that Lindsay Lohan is a drug addict.  It’s not funny that body dysmorphic disorder has led attractive women like Simpson, Kardashian, and Heidi Montag to undergo surgical procedure after surgical procedure.  These women are mentally ill, and by criticizing their appearances, you’re feeding their disease.  This is exactly the same as if “Go Fug Yourself” posted pictures of the uproarious outfits sported by mental patients, or the misguided togs of the mentally disabled.  In other words, it’s not funny, it’s sick.  If you care about feminism at all, you should stop reading websites like “Go Fug Yourself.” They seem like innocent fun, but they’re actually extremely destructive.

Finally, I have to address the depiction of minorities on “Go Fug Yourself.”  Beyonce comes under scrutiny by the site often, due to her choice of “unflattering” ensembles.  This is another way of saying that Beyonce’s figure is a little fuller than the white, heteronormative standard.  Similarly ample African-American entertainers, like Leona Lewis, are sometimes criticized for wearing clothing that makes them look “dumpy” or “squat.”  The projecting of white standards of beauty onto these women is more than a little offensive.  Worse is the site’s “coverage” of Jennifer Lopez, which often takes the form of monologues written in a parody of Lopez’s persona.  These monologues are written in a sort of pidgin, generously sprinkled with Spanish malapropisms.  I’m not sure how the Fug Girls get away with this; it’s pretty much verbal minstrelry.  Perhaps it stems from the fact that “South Park” went there first?  I don’t get it.

Finally, we circle around to this year’s “Fug Madness.”  As mentioned above, the winner of this year’s “Fug Madness” was Amber Rose, an African-American socialite and model.  The runner-up was Barbadian singer Rihanna.  I have a huge problem with this.

Amber Rose.

Rihanna and Amber Rose are both unusually attractive women of color.  Neither of them fit the typical mold for female entertainers of color, much less female entertainers in general.  Neither of them can be easily classified–they’re both racially and culturally diverse.  Their personal style quotes a number of influences, from Robert Palmer videos to “Mad Max.”

Rihanna.

Both women enjoy flaunting their admittedly fantastic bodies.  This is entirely appropriate–they are, after all, a rock star and a model, respectively.  If rock stars and models aren’t allowed to wear exotic, glamorous clothing, who is?

I’m highly suspicious of the fact that these women were voted the “fugliest” celebrities of 2010.  It just doesn’t make any sense.  For one thing, both of them are actually quite well-dressed.  For another, could you really, rationally, accuse either of them of looking “fucking ugly” at any time?  Objectively, the answer is no.

Look at this ugly woman. Wow, she is so fucking ugly.

So why were these women voted the winners of “Fug Madness”?  The answers, I think, are “fucking ugly.”

Oh, look, another fucking ugly woman.

I can’t help but suspect that the Fug Girls and their readers find these women threatening.  They are amazingly beautiful, they’re culturally complex, they’re unconventionally chic, and they’re leading much cooler, much more fabulous lives then they are–or you are, or I am.  I also suspect that tearing these women down online won’t do much to dent their confidence.  However, if we really care about celebrating the unique and the beautiful in all of us, then we need to stop denigrating it in the larger culture.  “Go Fug Yourself” is stupid.  Quit reading it.

MK Speed Dial presents “Dark Dream”

Some notes: I neglected to grab a copy of the video from Scotty at the event, so this remained the one undocumented presentation. Fortunately, I was able to correspond with Mr. Rickard and a master DVD was procured via the post. I ripped the disc and re-encoded the video. The result is what you see above. Thanks to Scotty for adding a great presentation to the Winter Commission, and for going out of his way to get me that disc. Now all of the presentations from WC2 are available on youareweare.com for posterity! Now I can sleep.

-Ross
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IRIC performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Some tech notes: There were a lot of steps involved in creating this video and the resulting performance. First of all, the background music. This was created wholly in Ableton Live 7. I first imported Ms. Newsom’s performance into Live. Fortunately I had already beat mapped it a long time ago for some other aborted project. I lowered the pitch to my desired key. Then, using Ableton’s notorious ability to turn wankery into art, I jammed over the basic performance on guitar, bass, piano, and drums. My limited musicianship for each of these instruments was negated by Ableton’s ability to rapidly isolate the ten seconds from each run-through which sounded really good and re-combine them, “Live” as it were, in “Infinite Combinations” as it were. Ableton’s the best for a lazy musician such as myself. Thirty hours of tweaking and arranging later, I had the musical backing for the video.

Next up, the video itself. Basically, the bulk of work for the video was done in Adobe Premiere. Throughout the editing together of these videos, I have had a lot of trouble with Premiere. Notably, it hates Xvid-encoded AVIs, which most of my content was stored in. Thankfully, there is an amazing plugin for Premiere which allows AVISynth to act as a frameserver into Premiere. If you are having trouble getting Premiere to handle any kind of AVI content, I highly recommend it: Premiere avisynth import filter.

Finally, I had to create the Karaoke part. For this, I used Karaoke Builder Studio, which I think is what the pros use. The output looked just right. I had never made Karaoke before, so this was a treat. This program is old and weird. It’s designed to make traditional CD+G Karaoke CDs. During my youthful Karaoke obsession, I had always assumed that the glitchy-ness of Karaoke discs was due to scratches on the physical medium. Not so! The program creates glitchy output, wonderfully so – look for the screen artifacts in the videos shown here.

Once I had created my base track, I downloaded a CD+G DirectShow filter (I think this one). Then, I created an AVISynth file which referenced the resulting CD+G file and loaded it using DirectShowSource. It was harder than this, there was an extra step and my memory is a little blurry of that week… getting the CD+G file to load into AVISynth was tricky. Doom9 had a guide on how to do it, though, worked like a charm after I finally read it through VERY CAREFULLY. “Filter Graphs?” I dunno. Oh wait, I found it. I hope to recreate this step and post a tutorial in the future. Anyway, once I had it loading in AVISynth, all I had to do was load it into After Effects using the AVISynth/Premiere plugin mentioned above, add in the scrolling IRIC graphics and song title (I admit I created them in Photoshop at low-rez and used After Effects to make it look crappy and genuine rather than doing it in the Karaoke editor proper) render the whole thing to an AVI, import that AVI into Premiere, key out the background color provided by the Karaoke software, and overlay the whole mess over the video I had edited together. Cake, right?

At any rate, I hope you all enjoy it. And I hope to make more of these. Now, at least, I know how. I have included below the original video in case you ever want to perform this song in the privacy of your own home.

IRIC performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Thanks to everyone for their kind words about this performance. It was scary but fun.

-Ross
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Grandpa Wheelchair Performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Some recording notes: There are three video sources here. Jubal’s camera, Alan on my HV20, and also some footage sent to me from Evan from his camera. Evan was doing some insane stuff. My understanding of the situation (and feel free to correct me, Evan) is he hacked together a control interface out of an old joystick, which along with who knows what other triggers controlled a Max/MSP/Jitter session consisting of weird effects put over old films, switching back and forth with the live performance. The whole thing was then shunted over the projector system. I’m glad we were facing the other direction because I think its brilliance might have distracted us from the task at hand.

The instruments played were Erik Wallace’s drums, first by Luke, then Amanda (thanks Erik for the loan), Jubal on bass, Mark on Casio SK-5 sampling keyboard. Violin, first by Amanda then myself, and roommate Eric’s electric guitar, first by me then by Luke (thanks for the loan, Eric). The first number was totally free-form, both as a warm-up and an attempt to do a true improvisation. The next number we called “A Drone”, basically attempting to play around the chord of A Major but still playing whatever we wanted. The results were weird! Which is what we were shooting for. Thanks to my friends for making this happen.

-Ross

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Banana Splitz performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Some recording notes: The evening opened, of course, with a technical glitch. As the Splitz took the stage for the first time, the audio immediately crapped out with a “pop”. The ever well-prepared Anjali ran back on stage and regaled the audience with tales from the dark realms of science as the AV crew scrambled to figure out what the heck went wrong. We still don’t know what went wrong. We plugged the audio source directly into the board and called it good. The Splitz were good sports about the whole thing, but for the purposes of brevity, the preceding video edits out the tense bit.

The following video consists of 3 sources. My (sort-of) trusty HV20, Jubal’s camcorder, and a the video (I’m guessing from an iPhone?) Kelly sent me. There were a lot of people walking in front of the various video sources so it took a good deal of editing to get a good shot of the stage at all times. Hope you enjoy!

-Ross
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Sri Craven Bla lectures at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Later that evening, Sri Bla graced the stage again for a look at the foundation of all scientific thought with his presentation Well, Actuarially, a look at how the science of the insurance industry permeates through all areas of the scientific method, especially those pertaining to performance artistry.

Sri Craven Bla lectures at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Thanks to Sri Craven Bla for all of his help raising metaphysical awareness for the evening, and creating the sound scientific foundation on which the rest of the Winter Commission so precariously perched.

-Ross
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Camp Meeting performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Some recording notes:  Mark made the video which was projected above the band as they played. It was down to the wire, his computer kept crashing, but the render finished just in time. Also, the camera Alan was using to shoot the band kept glitching out, so only a certain amount of footage was usable. Which is a shame, because it really looked good. As a result, I cut to Mark’s video quite a bit. We were also kind of racing to get the live audio working in time for the performance. The band finally got a live sound they were happy with so they started the performance before we could mic for the recording. As a result, the audio could be better.

But in case you wanted a copy of it, here’s an mp3 of the performance:

MP3 of the Camp Meeting Performance

There is, thankfully, a more clear recording of Camp Meeting, created when I miked the band’s practice the day before the Winter Commission, in my basement. I have coupled it with Mark’s video to create the following video.

Camp Meeting performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission
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If you would like an mp3 copy of this demo recording, the links follow:

Track 1
Track 2
Track 3

-Ross
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Sol Olmstead performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Some recording notes:  Again, this was taken from the night of February 20, 2010 at the American Museum of Radio and Electricity. Erin’s art was projected with a classic slide projector. In fact, the whole performance was all-analog, at least until we got our grubby little hands on it. Sol’s performance was captured on Jubal’s camcorder, and I believe Alan shot the handheld video for this segment. Alan stepped in quite a bit (with zero notice or incentive) to capture a huge swath of the entertainment that night, and the resulting video is quite good. For that I thank him. Thanks to Sol and Erin for creating a really cool multimedia experience.

-Ross
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