"Vivague Ramaslimey backpedaling more than his receding hairline."

Tweeted Nalin Haley, quoted in "One Haley Who Isn’t Afraid to Let Insults Fly Nikki Haley’s 22-year-old son, Nalin, has hit the campaign trail and is taking shots at his mother’s political attackers" (NYT).

Nalin, who obscures his own hairline with massive bangs...

... even as high-foreheaded folk lurk behind him, doubles down on the receding-hairline theme:

Someone help me spot the difference I’m having trouble… pic.twitter.com/AiM6OK7ia5

— Nalin Haley (@Nalin_Haley) November 9, 2023

Ha ha. Hilarious. Are we allowed to make fun of how people look? More importantly, should candidates unleash their handsome offspring to hurl insults at their parent's opponents? If the answer is yes, then tremble at the thought of Trump releasing the Barron. But who can imagine Barron launching out onto the political landscape with blithe insults and memes? When Barron springs forth it will be with grandeur and momentousness... won't it?

Bangs came up, organically, reminding me I still need to do that post about today being the 20th anniversary of the first day of this blog.

 

I've been looking forward to this date, so I could say, look, I've been writing this blog — writing every single day — for 20 years. 20 years! But what I like about blogging is that it's in the moment, spontaneous, so any sort of required occasion feels contrary to the essential nature of the enterprise.

That's why I've already written 6 posts today, and I've yet to do the 20-year anniversary post. But now it's happened. And all because I wanted to tell you what Theodore Roosevelt said about the 1913 Armory Show, and he'd used the phrase "lunatic fringe."

It turned out he was the first one, as far as the OED has noticed, to use "lunatic fringe" to mean something other than women's bangs. In 1874, someone had used "lunatic fringe" to mean "A woman or girl's hairstyle in which the front is cut straight and square across the forehead":

'Was that why you studied so hard all winter, and wouldn't go to singing-school, you sly thing?’ said Lizzie, eyebrows and lunatic fringe almost meeting again. Our Boys & Girls....

And there it was, the spontaneous thing: a portal back to the first day of the blog, January 14, 2004. There are a number of posts in the 20-year archive that bear the tag "bangs," but click on that and scroll, and you'll get back to...

Next to me at the hair-washing station of the salon was a woman who was ranting about bangs. "I've always had bangs. Then, not having bangs, I was going crazy." Googling "bangs," by the way, is not a good way to come up with websites about the kind of bangs people rave about in hair salons.

That was the fifth and last post of the first day. One thing fell trippingly after another... for 20 years!

***

Here's the post from 2 days ago where I noted the upcoming blog milestone and — seeking material for today's post — asked readers if they'd point out something in the 20-year archive that somehow might seem to them to represent the essence of what this blog is. There are 143 comments there, and you can add more here, but let me pick out a few: 

"It is vitally necessary to move forward and to shake off the dead hand... of the reactionaries; and yet we have to face the fact..."

"... that there is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of any forward movement. In this recent art exhibition the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists, or Near-Impressionists...."

Wrote Theodore Roosevelt, in 1913, in "A Layman’s View of an Art Exhibition."

"The Cubists are entitled to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored puzzle pictures of the Sunday newspapers. Of course there is no reason for choosing the cube as a symbol, except that it is probably less fitted than any other mathematical expression for any but the most formal decorative art. There is no reason why people should not call themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, or Knights of the Isosceles Triangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as fatuous as another."

"There was a long time — who knows when it ended? — when, if you were a woman and you parted your hair on the side, someone would say you look like Veronica Lake."

"Side part *meant* Veronica Lake" — I write over at Facebook, where my son John — a propos of his "101 Years of Movies" blog — posts a lovely photograph of Veronica Lake (from "Sullivan's Travels," his second favorite movies of 1941).

John responds: 

A scene in Billy Wilder’s breakthrough movie, “The Major and the Minor” (1942), starring Ginger Rogers, pokes fun at Lake’s famous hairdo: “There’s an epidemic in [this] school…. They all think they’re Veronica Lake.” 

Amazing! Look:

 

To quote myself again (with an added link, to Glamour):

That was way back in 1942. That was still going on in the 1960s and beyond.

These days, there's a big fad for parting the hair straight down the middle. We had that in the 1960s too. But hysteria over a side part is really very funny. Lake didn't pull the hair back, though. That was a big thing about it. She let it fall over her eyes.

It was the hair in your eye/eyes that drove people crazy. I got the impression they thought it was one thing for one actress — Veronica Lake — to perform that insanity in movies, but no one else can try that — certainly not in real life, where you've got to watch where you're going — and if you do, we're going to discipline you by calling you out for copying Lake. Like this was a hairstyle for one person and one person alone. 

I think it was just over-the-top policing of young women. And I'm saying that as someone who, in junior high, was sent to the vice principal's office for having excessively long bangs. I mean, what are eyebrows for if not to tell you here is the line that must not be crossed?

"I really like trying to re-create bad haircuts I gave myself when I was like 6. I think there’s something powerful about re-creating looking in the mirror..."

"... and going, Oh shit, this was a horrible idea. I shouldn’t have done this with these scissors. A lot of my inspiration comes from people cutting their own hair and kids cutting their own hair, for sure.... With a step, you lose all the hair around your face — you lose any opportunity to hide, which is cool. I think bangs are there to kind of hide behind a bit. But with a step, there’s no hiding; you have to have your face out in the open.... When you hit the lobes, there’s something about it that feels medieval and kind of pre-Raphaelite; it’s something you can recognize. The second you take it past that, it completely fucks with the golden ratio in your head. You start going, Why is it doing this? It’s not supposed to look like that, which I also like doing to people, I’m not gonna lie."

Said the hairdresser Dylan Chavles, quoted in "Can You Handle These Bangs?" (NY Magazine). This hairstyle is crazy, but it may hoodwink kids too young to think "mullet." Chavles even says, "Youʼll have two bobs — a little ’20s bob up here and a regular bob in the back," which is sounds a lot like "Business up front, party in the back," the classic description of a mullet. And yet "’20s bob" sounds like the party and "regular bob" sounds like business, so it's actually more party up front, business in the back, but that doesn't make it any more aesthetically pleasing. Here's Chavles’s own proud promotion of his work:

View this post on Instagram

Little step for Sienna 🌹

A post shared by Dylan Chavles (@dylanchavles) on Jun 28, 2019 at 3:24pm PDT

"If nothing else, a diary teaches you what you’re interested in."

"Perhaps at the beginning you restrict yourself to issues of social injustice or all the unfortunate people trapped beneath the rubble in Turkey or Italy or wherever the last great earthquake hit. You keep the diary you feel you should be keeping, the one that, if discovered by your mother or college roommate, would leave them thinking, If only I was as civic-minded/ bighearted/ philosophical as Edward! After a year, you realize it takes time to rail against injustice, time you might better spend questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn’t afford. Unless, of course, social injustice is your thing, in which case — knock yourself out. The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can’t. Won’t people turn away if they know the real me? you wonder. The me that hates my own child, that put my perfectly healthy dog to sleep? The me who thinks, deep down, that maybe The Wire was overrated?"

From "Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)," by David Sedaris. That passage — from the introduction — appealed to me because it also applies to blogging: It teaches you what you’re interested in. You can set your blog to private, making it just like a diary, something you write for yourself but not without the capacity to think someone else could see this, if I changed the setting. The thing is that if you maintain a daily writing practice, after a year (or so), you'll have worn down, and if you're still there, you can't still be posing for the admiration of your imagined audience. Can you?

And here's the interview Sedaris just did with Terry Gross (on "Fresh Air"), which got especially intense as he talked about the suicide of his sister Tiffany:

Looking back over her life, my mom never really liked Tiffany very much. Tiffany was too much like my mother, and I remember that as a child almost ... I just thought, Ugh, wouldn't want to be Tiffany. ...

The rest of us should've said, "Mom, you need to do something about this, because that's not OK for you to treat somebody that way." But we never said that. We never called our mother on her behavior towards Tiffany. You think, You're 7, what are you going to do? But I wasn't always 7. I was 20 and I was 30. ... Tiffany had a lot of anger at us and a lot of it was really well-founded. We were adults, we could've said to our mother, "This isn't OK." ...

That came after he'd said a lot — and this is only on the audio, not in the text at the link — about how he was his mother's favorite. He made it sound as though he'd acquired much of his own literary power through her.

ADDED: This post had me going back to the starting point of this blog, and I see that in my second post, I describe the moment I decided to start blogging. It was funny to see that it happened in the middle of listening to "Fresh Air":

I was in the midst of cleaning out my office, having just covered the floor with books and papers. I paused the direct streaming "Fresh Air" I was listening to and checked my email, which included a colleague's description of her reasons for starting a blog. I had just emailed her about my admiration for her and my own timidity: "I'll have to think about getting up the nerve to do this sort of thing. It seems if you're going to do it, you need to become somewhat chatty and revealing, which is a strange thing to do to the entire world." Then it seemed altogether too lame not to go ahead and start the blog.

I'm reading some of the earliest posts and — maybe just because I'm reading Sedaris's Diaries — they seem a lot like Sedaris's Diaries:

Next to me at the hair-washing station of the salon was a woman who was ranting about bangs.

"I've always had bangs. Then, not having bangs, I was going crazy."

"Unethical hair."

Oh, how humans have fought over hair! Ideas about the right way to cut your hair are often based on religion, but even when the ideas are not religious, people have fought with a fervor that might as well have been religious.*

I myself got caught up in The Great Secular Hair Panic of 1964 when teachers sent me to the school vice principal's office more than once because of the length of my bangs. (Let's just say The Ramones stole my hairstyle.) I challenged the authorities to justify their zealotry to override my style autonomy, and they spluttered and resorted to bogus health claims.

The point is: Hair matters. It matters in a way that's like religion and often part of religion.

Today comes the news (at BBC.com) that a "footballer" (i.e., soccer player) named Asamoah Gyan — along with 40-some others — has been deemed to have "unethical hair" under the United Arab Emirates Football Association guidelines.

Some Islamic teachings ban 'Qaza' hairstyles, where only part of the head is shaved.

Gyan's hair isn't some extreme half-shaved look, but simply a short on the sides, long on top look. (I see many American college basketball games out of the corner of my eye, and I'd guess that at least half of the men get their hair cut like this. It strikes me as neat and attractive.)

So Islam, like many other religions and things that are not even religion but unleash religion-like repression, has rules about hair. I don't remember noticing the word "Qaza" before, so I looked it up. Before I show you what I found, let me say that I think sports teams are entitled to have rules about how the players look. They have to wear uniforms, but unlike uniforms, you're stuck with the haircut outside of the game, so I'd like to see some benevolence here.**

Here's a webpage that looks like a sincere effort at explaining Qaza: "Ruling on shortening the sides of the hair more than the middle."

Al-Nasaa’i (5048) and Abu Dawood (4195) narrated from Ibn ‘Umar that the Prophet (blessings and peace of Allaah be upon him) saw a boy part of whose head had been shaved and part of it left. He told them not to do that and said: “Shave all of it or leave all of it.”....

[I]t says in Sharh al-Iqnaa’: Qaza’ includes shaving some places on the sides of the head, or shaving the middle and leaving the sides, as most of the Christians do, or shaving the sides and leaving the middle, as many of the foolish do, or shaving the front and leaving the back. Ahmad was asked about shaving the back of the head and he said: This is the action of the Magians, and whoever imitates a people is one of them. Thus it is known that it is not permissible to leave some parts of the hair longer than others....

Moreover, this style is not beautification for either men or women, rather it is changing the creation of Allaah and spoiling people's appearance, and it is an imitation of the West in which there is no benefit, in addition to the cost involved, as it involves a lot of effort and spending money on something that is harmful, as is well known. We advise men not to adopt this western style and we advise women to stick with that which their mothers and grandmothers did, of letting their hair grow and braiding it, as this is more beautiful....

3 things connect: 1. Subjective opinions about what looks good (aesthetics), 2. The interest in distinguishing your group from other people (politics), and 3. The words of venerated persons (historical and textual reasoning).

Do you have any strongly held views about hair, strong enough that you would impose them on anyone other than yourself? If so, does your view contain those 3 elements?
__________________________

* What is "religion" anyway? To explore the continuum from religion to absolutely no way that's religion, read my 2009 Religion and the Constitution exam, which had 5 prisoners asserting a right to be free of the prison's forced haircut policy.

** Much more could be said — in the style of that 2009 exam — about the individual reasons people have for their hairstyles and why some might deserve special treatment and others not. But once you give an exemption, it's hard to exclude somebody else from an exemption. You can't say rules are rules. It's best to begin with a rule that isn't any harsher than it needs to be. And it's especially bad to begin with a rule that has a disparate racial impact, which might be what's going on in Gyan's case. (Did the United Arab Emirates Football Association crack down on a kind of haircut that had caught on among black players?)

How to turn your face into an "anti-face" — a sight that surveillance technology cannot read as a face.

Don't imagine that sunglasses will work. You need things like dramatically asymmetrical bangs in multiple colors.

I think whatever we do, the robots will learn it and get out in front of us, but you can look quite foolish in your feeble effort to outsmart them. The linked article is more of an art-and-fashion project than a real defense against surveillance. Isn't it funny? Finding surveillance funny is perhaps the closest you can get to a defense.

Leave Michelle Obama alone.

She's growing out her bangs, okay? Have you never gone through the issues of growing out bangs? It's not easy.

What's with powerful women and thick bumpers of bangs?

Drudge is — I think — implicitly asking with this alignment of photographs:



What drives intelligent women to that hairstyle? Are they thinking something like I don't want those feathery bangs...



... or the classic Louise Brooks straight-across look...



... but I can't have my forehead just out there to be gazed at!



What's wrong with foreheads? Is it that the forehead symbolizes the mind, and a woman can't have you looking straight at that? The intelligence must be filtered. There must be a buffer zone of femininity, so there must be some hair veiling the forehead — the theory seems to be. But why the bumper look that we see in the Drudge trio of Angela Merkel, Condoleezza Rice, and Maureen Dowd?

"The sultan has a duty to the harem. You will be called upon countless times to perform duties only a man can carry out successfully."

"For example, you will: change flat tires, put on snow chains, unlock locked bumpers and carry in bulky packages."

A line from an obituary that I put at the end of this post from last Saturday. It's about my old teacher, Mr. Hannan, who wrote a novel about being the only male teacher at an elementary school. The name of another teacher comes up in the obit, and it sends me into an old memory:

Mr. Ginter! The man whose office I was sent to by teachers who didn't like my short skirts and long bangs! Ha. He tried to reason with me, hypothesizing what if a girl came to school in a bikini. What would happen to the poor boys? I reasoned back: I was not wearing a bikini, but a skirt — in the length that was fashionable. Let the girls wear pants then, but don't force me to wear a skirt that's the wrong length.

Here's a picture of me from that era, but that's not a mini-skirt, it's what you call a skort, and I would have been disciplined for wearing that even if it had been knee length.

Cindy and Laura at the convention.

I've watched dribs and drabs of the GOP convention tonight, but the coverage is annoying. Gustav turned out to be a routine hurricane coming ashore -- which is great -- but I don't want to see repetitious shots of reporters in windbreakers in the rain in front of a tree that is blowing the way streamers taped onto air conditioners blow: enough to send you the message that indeed there is a breeze. But I did stop and watch Laura Bush and Cindy McCain, who read some words off the teleprompter in support of charitable giving -- which is nice -- but I didn't listen. I hope after tonight we get the normal convention schedule as originally planned and no more of this all-about-Gustav business. Aside from Gustav, today was such an insane day, focused on a 17-year-old's pregnancy. How could that possibly be news? And yet it was. So all I want to say is, wow, Cindy McCain had on a fabulous dress. I love the color, the collar, the cut, the ropes of pearls, the big pin. And I love the white blonde hair with the bangs and the tendrils. Lovely! Laura Bush.... not so much, but maybe that was intentional. Modest. Knowing her place. Not stealing the show.

Are you having trouble understanding Sarah Palin's hairdo?

I hear some of the lefty bloggers are having trouble with it, even daring to mock it. Let me help you we a couple reference photos:



Get it?

When's the last time we had a VP with bangs?

And some cheeky people are typing: VPILF. Oh, no! That's so wrong! But, that said, I don't think it would be so unusual to have a VPILF. Why I dream of Dick Cheney every night! j/k.

ADDED: Sorry, I said "a couple" and then had some internet troubles. Here's another:



AND: Here's Palin:



AND: Where I see Audrey Hepburn, Neo Neocon sees a different movie star.

The closer you get...

Ambivablog thinks "The Gates" look nice from a distance, like Buddhist monks' robes:

But when I walked through and under them, the fabric looked heavy and inert, more like drapes than filmy wind-yielding robes. (There wasn't any wind, was part of the problem.) And there was something claustrophobic and oppressive about the way they hung straight across, like Christiane Amanpour's bangs...

"Better hair."

John Kerry, on his first day of campaigning with John Edwards, makes this claim:

"We've got better vision. We've got better ideas. We've got real plans. We've got a better sense of what's happening to America," Kerry told thousands of supporters here in the first of two stops in Ohio. "And we've got better hair. I'll tell you, that goes a long way."

That bulbous wig of a hairdo Kerry's been using to offset his lengthy face is good hair? That flappy, fine fringe accentuating Edwards' babyish looks is good hair? Please! For decades, I've been groaning about the outdated Beatle haircuts worn by aging Baby Boomers. Long hair is a young man's style that makes an older man look like an unattractive woman! Beatle styling, with combed down bangs in front, belongs in the 1960s--early 70s at the latest. It's as if 20 years from now, some guy were to run for President and wear his hair like this. I realize practically every man in Congress is making the same mistake of keeping the Beatle do alive, but could someone please tell these people how terribly estranged from any sense of style these men are? The only one of the current candidates with a respectable hairstyle is George Bush. Cheney ought to wear much shorter hair: he's making the same mistake as Edwards, but he's unable to pull if off because of baldness. It's especially important for balding men to wear their hair quite short. (Bonus fashion advice for Cheney: get smaller glasses.)

Next to me at the hair-washing station of the salon was a woman who was ranting about bangs. "I've always had bangs. Then, not having bangs, I was going crazy." Googling "bangs," by the way, is not a good way to come up with websites about the kind of bangs people rave about in hair salons.