Boy, is my hair wrong for this assignment.
I have really, really short hair. When the Hollywood studio heads got scalped, I knew it was only a matter of time before I followed suit. In matters of personal grooming, Jeffrey Katzenberg, above, is my God.
But short hair doesn’t work here in Kansas City. Matrons are giving me a wide berth at the mall. Kids stare at me. Security guards are giving me hard stares. This hair cut worked ok in Boston and Seattle but here it is some kind of flag of protest, or confession of imbalance. Let’s keep an eye on this one, the locals say. Plainly, he’s a nut bar.
It reminds me of research in Shanghai about 10 years ago. Every time I turned around, I would catch a woman checking me out. In this case, the object of their attention was my clothing. Shanghai was once and is once more the style center of China. Women there are happy to gather fashion news from any source, even a slightly geeky Westerner. I was happy to be a “diffusion agent.” They also serve, who merely get dressed and go out. And frankly Shanghai is one of the few places on the planet where an anthropologist can serve at all.
But in Kansas City, I am apparently too far ahead of the curve, too “out there.” This is not the Shanghai of America but the Cheng Du, happy to wait a little longer to get the news. Here my Hollywod hair is just plain odd.
For God sake, someone tell Jeffrey.
Test comment. I’ve been getting rejected lately.
Okay, well I wrote a whole thing about hair and my old hair (long) and my newish hair (short) and my business card (long) and then talked up Big Hair.
this is an experiment to see which word provokes the screen
CRUMBLES!! do you realize how hard it is to compose something sans a followed by s?
Could it be not the hair but the all-black attire? Or the round gla5ses? Or–I can’t tell from the photo–the black-on-black design of the jacket?
The photo is of Jeffrey Katzenberg, though.
In Kansas, your hair is probably seen as metrosexual if not gay outright. The question is, why? Crew cuts used to be a very straight, very macho/butch thing. Now …
Ennis, very good question, I wonder if this is one of those “Village people” appropiration strategies, with the gay community deciding to adopt the markers of a hypermasculinity. What makes this still more interesting from a cultural architecture point of view is that I believe the “butch” part of the lesbian community followed something like the same strategy. Strange bed fellows. Grant
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