You Know You Grew Up In the Nineties When…

Haircut

PETERMBALL Journal , ,

I would be showing you a picture of my freshly-shorn scalp right now, but for the fact that instagram is being uncooperative. Instead I’ll have to link that shit and leave it up to you to be pro-active if you want to mock my new hair-do. Don’t be shy about that shit either – it’s quite a mockable haircut once you get started.

The short version, for those who aren’t inclined to follow the link, is that I recently went from my long-haired grunge-kid do back to the “seriously, just pull out the clippers and shave my damn head” look that seems to bother the hell out of hairdressers when you walk in with hair longer than six inches.

It’s a process I go through ever two years or so, whereupon I start growing my hair out again. Mostly I do it because my hair only works in these two states – in-between it’s a mess of kinks and spit-curls that are impossible to deal with – and because I never really got the hang of talking to hairdressers and getting the kind of haircut I actually wanted.

This time around, though, holy shit, it was a new experience. I kinda did everything on the spur of the moment after work, which meant I walked into one of those male barber places where you sit on a bench with a bunch of other dudes until someone calls your name. No appointments, just sit your ass and wait your turn.

I picked it because it was close to the train station and Pulp Fiction books. And, seriously, holy shit this place was good.

First up, they didn’t engage in the standard hair-dresser rhetoric when I asked them to shave my head, they just nodded and pulled out the clipper.

Secondly, well, no-one’s ever taken that much care when they’ve shaved my head before. It’s usually clippers, a little clean up, and you’re done. These guys fucking hunted for stray hairs, went at the back of my neck with a straight-razor, and took a little extra time to even out my fringe-line where the cowlicks usually fuck things up a few days after the cut.

I’m telling you, that shit was impressive, and totally worth the wait with a bunch of dudes who were, well, dude-like in their appreciation for the car mags and old copies of Zoo on offer while we were waiting. I may have found the first hairdresser I’ll willing go back to, and it only took me twenty-five years of haircuts to get there.

And with that, I leave you with an oddly in-theme favourite film-clip:

Friday Youtubery

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , ,

I suspect that many lads of a certain age who read this journal will have just had a sudden moment of “oh, yeah, I remember then,” before wandering off to youtube one of their other videos. I say this because I spent about two years with Transvision Vamp’s first album on the tape-deck of my car in my mid-twenties and every male friend who got a lift would hear the opening bars of I Want Your Love and get an immediate flash-back to their adolescence.

And yet once you get past the gratuitous objectification of Wendy James, there still something fascinating about Transvision Vamp. I have a moderate fascination with Andy Warhol and his relationship to celebrity that was heavily reflected in the band’s first album (Pop Art, which included a song about Warhol’s death). I’m intrigued by the number of former punk musicians who ended up playing pop-rock in the background (including former members of the X-Ray Specs and the Partisans). I’m freakin’ amazed that James’ post-Vamp solo-album was written by Elvis Costello, and moderately bummed that I never actually tracked it down in a record store. I’ve spent years trying to work out whether they were a punk band who got coopted or an experiment in controlled branding that used capitalism against itself, and I’ve never realy come up with an answer.

I really do need to go find a copy of Pop Art on CD though.