Hair apparent

There’s this episode of “Seinfeld” in which Elaine introduces Jerry to her new boyfriend, a tall, shaved-headed dude who keeps his pate bare to make himself more streamlined for swimming competitions. When he leaves, Jerry quips, in wink-wink sitcom fashion, “Is he from the future?” Cue audience laughter. In the early 90’s, a shaved head was apparently a futuristic concept, right up there with flying cars and robots that cook spaghetti.

I chuckle every time I see the episode, and not just because I share a hair-do with Future Man. In a way, the comment is prescient; shaved heads may have been rare in the early ‘90’s, when the only options available to bald guys were horseshoe-style cuts and wigs that looked like unkempt ferrets. Now they’re all over the place. The bare head has become the go-to do for the follically challenged, and they’ve started to infiltrate popular culture: Howie Mandell, Bruce Willis, and Vin Diesel all sport the gleaming bareheaded look, and not a moment too soon. If any of them had held onto their hair for longer than was necessary, they’d be sporting the kind of combovers typically associated with accountants and high school guidance counselors.

It’s the latest trend in the ongoing evolution of the “do.”

I’m currently reading an account of the life of George Washington – apparently presidential biographies are my thing now, soon to be followed by backgammon and tweed jackets – and despite the remarkable life he led, some of the quirkiest passages are about his hair.

Everybody assumes that, because Washington was a right dandy sort of fellow, he wore a wig. Not true. The weird triangle shape of his hair, which makes him look like a wise and benevolent kite, is due to a popular 18th Century hairstyle called a “queue,” in which the hair at one’s temples is flared out and tied behind the back of the head in a kind of ponytail. Washington’s hair was white because he applied powder to it, which was another popular practice in the 1700s. Nowadays, the effect would make it seem as though his head was being attacked by a swarm of angry marshmallows, but in colonial Virginia, he fit right in.

One wonders what Washington would have made of the voluminous, bird-like hair-dos of the 1970s and early 80s. I watch movies from that era and I’m struck by how even the baldies would grow out their unruly hair in the back and on the sides, giving them the surreal impression of having been raised by cocaine-addicted wolves. Women in particular seemed fond of the flared-out Farrah Fawcett-style wings on either side of their faces. Which served a practical purpose, if you think about it: If they were chased to the edge of a cliff by a marauding sasquatch, they could simply take the plunge and glide safely into a ravine like a flying squirrel. For some reason that seems like a particularly 70’s thing to do.

One of the tantalizing mysteries of human history is how styles evolve. In a lot of ways, biological evolution – the actual physical changes that occur over centuries and millennia – is much less of a mystery. We stopped swinging from trees, so we lost our tails. We learned to walk upright, so we developed hands. It’s an easy enough concept. But popular trends are tricky; they don’t contribute to survival, so it’s tough to explain a pompadour in any kind of Darwinian terms. Things like hairstyles just seem to happen. I like to think of trends as originating from a single person – someone has to be the first to do something, after all. The Duke of Earl gets up one morning and decides he’s tired of his long hair getting caught in his mouth when he’s eating lamb eyeballs and porridge. So he ties it back into a ponytail. Boom. Next thing you know, everyone’s got a ponytail, from the merchants to the sailors to the guy who sews underwear for the merchants and the sailors. It’s the hair equivalent of a modern-day Internet meme, without the cats and terrible grammar.

Not all hairstyles are as long-lasting as the ponytail, which is near-ubiquitous for women of certain ages, and still fairly common among men, especially hippies and owners of comic book stores. Much more fleeting was the rat tail. When I was a wee schoolboy in the late 80’s and early 90’s, the rat tail was all the rage; while the rest of the hair was kept short, one long strand was grown out in the back and often braided into a knotted sliver that looked like a whip for an eight-inch-tall dominatrix. It was similar to the ponytail, only super gross.

In that same era, it was popular for young boys to have shapes or words shaved onto the sides of their heads. Lightning bolts were common. One kid I went to school with had the Batman insignia shaved into the hair just above the nape of his neck, which would have made him a demigod on the playground had it not been for the rat tail directly below it, which was frayed and long enough to choke a small horse.

Fortunately, certain hairstyles are destined to die a gradual death. I just hope the shaved head isn’t one of them, because otherwise, I’m out of options. Although, fashion being cyclical, I suppose I could always bring back the queue. My contemporaries would find it utterly ridiculous. But unlike the honest-to-a-fault Washington, they can always lie about it.

Lost and found

Hi. I’m Jeff, and I’m a GPS addict.

And no, that’s not a hip new street drug, although frankly a hardcore drug addiction would only be incrementally more embarrassing. GPS stands for exactly what you think it does: Global Positioning System, that handy little device that tells me when I’m close to home, and when I’m about to drive off the Main Street bridge into the Saco River. Which, considering my driving habits, happens more often than you’d think.

If this was a casual, on-again, off-again romance, I’d be fine with it. Using a GPS to get somewhere isn’t an inherently shameful activity. If I want to get to someone’s house in the middle of Bar Mills, the only other way I’m getting there is if I hitch a ride on the back of a wise, talking falcon ripped from the pages of an acid-inspired Tolkien fantasy. Way more fun than GPS, but you don’t find talking falcons next to the Guitar Hero controllers at Best Buy.

Shame enters the picture due to my over-reliance on the little satellite unit, without which I’d have a hard time locating my living room. Men, traditionally, have seen themselves as Masters of Thing-Finding, gifted through years of evolution with the ability to locate stuff by an infallible inner compass; when Lewis and Clark set out for the Pacific Coast in 1804, one pictures Lewis saying, “Ask for directions? Why, you buffoonish tallywhacker! I’ve totally got this!”

This inner compass, of course, is a fiction as fanciful as unicorns and Ewoks. Boastful pride is the reason why, in the days of yore, maps were often crumpled and tossed into the backseat, forgotten amidst a sea of gas station receipts and empty two-liter bottles of Orange Crush.

What the GPS did was allow men the luxury of stress-free navigation without infringing on a misplaced sense of independence. The reason is simple: The GPS is a device. Men love devices. If you’re looking for a gift for your husband/boyfriend/parole officer/whoever, all you have to do is get him something shiny that plugs into an outlet and makes a whirring noise. Screens are a bonus, and you’ll get extra brownie points for buying a gadget that talks to him in the soothing monotone of a soul-dead Lebanese prostitute.

When GPS technology became affordable for everyday schlubs like me, it allowed the directionally-challenged to conceal their weakness, much as Donald Trump conceals his scalp by covering it with dried seaweed and pocket lint.

Good thing, too, because being lost in a strange land can be an unsettling experience. A few years ago, before the age of digital helpers, I drove to Portland with a former girlfriend to attend a high school graduation. Portland is a city in desperate need of a subway system; its webwork of one-way avenues and labyrinthine side streets is the perfect setting for a “Where’s Waldo” tableau – one in which the stripe-shirted Waldo is found weeping in an alleyway in the Old Port, half-hidden by booze-juiced college frat boys. Our journey to the Merril Auditorium was so riddled with missed turns and retraced steps that for a while it seemed like we would perish right in the heart of downtown, probably in front of a coffee shop with a name like “The Bearded Scribbler.”

You don’t want to get lost when you’re taking your girlfriend somewhere. It does not result in copious smooches. We made the best of a bad situation, and made it to the graduation with roughly a nanosecond to spare. But when we walked up to the entrance, we bore empty, gape-mouthed expressions more commonly associated with trauma victims and Pauley Shore.

Had the situation been different – if we’d had the luxury of a little pocket robot to help us out – we’d have had time to spare. And time is really the biggest benefit. With the hours I’ve saved by admitting defeat and buying a dash-mounted unit for my car, I could do something really worthwhile, like teach a child to read, or see how many marshmallows I can fit in my mouth.

We often rely on technology when we shouldn’t. Math, for example. Calculators are great when we’re trying to figure out the square root of 121, but if you’re adding together two double-digit numbers, it’s probably better to just work it out in the margins of the nudie magazine you keep in your desk drawer. A little brain exercise may not be as fun as, say, eating a box of nails, but like vegetables, it’s good for you. The math, not the nails.

But it’s hard to know where to draw the line with GPS technology – it’s a convenience and a crutch. Using it to navigate a complex and unknown city like Boston qualifies as an appropriate use; I’ve talked to Vietnam vets who had experiences less traumatic than driving on Boylston after a Sox game. I, however, use it to mark the exact locations of buildings on Route 1 in towns I kinda know. That’s a bit much.

Manly thing-finding men might shake their heads at that, but at this point, I hardly care. I’ve been a rate in a maze my whole life – and it’s nice to finally find my way to the cheese.

Although I still want a talking falcon.

Grad to see you

Last year I went to a graduation ceremony in Portland, where I heard a girl belt out a rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” that could blow the hubcaps off an armored car. And I mean that in a good way.

It definitely constituted that graduation’s “memorable moment,” although to be fair, my perspective on the whole event was fairly broad; I was there to shoot photos and write a story about it, which is an odd phenomenon when you’re at an event that holds special emotional resonance for people. It’s kind of like sitting in on a random person’s birthday party at the local bowling alley: You can watch, but no one knows why you’re there, and chances are you’re not getting any cake.

But having donned the cap and gown myself once upon a time – back when neon pants were still considered socially acceptable – I could feel myself pleasantly moved by the moment, which is a tough admission for a man to make. Men aren’t supposed to be moved by things that aren’t small children or dogs. It’s one of those unspoken Rules of Dudeness, right between “Never cry at movies” and “I can lift this heavy thing myself.”

Covering graduations can be a pain in the tookus logistically, but it’s nice to have the reminder of why people consider it an important event. If you’re not the parent of a child graduating from high school, sometimes that perspective can be lost; amidst the din of daily life, from work to social engagements to reruns of “Thunder Cats,” it’s easy to forget why you once considered it the most important day of your life.

It’s a function of time, I think, which makes jaded bastards of us all, to one extent or another. Gradually, high school graduation becomes superseded by a steady parade of increasingly important landmarks: College graduations, weddings, that time you saw Stephen King at the supermarket and he turned into a bat and flew away. You know, life. Saying goodbye to high school classmates and teachers, and oftentimes hometowns and states, starts to feel less like a watershed moment and more like something that just kinda happened to you once, like that long-ago Christmas when your uncle Earl drank too much eggnog and peed on the tree. Thanks a lot, Earl.

Being back in that environment is a bittersweet jolt of nostalgia.

Let’s take a trip in the Wayback Machine, shall we? Cue bloopy time-travel noises.

The year was 2000, I was wearing a cap and gown, and I had a full head of hair, all things that are no longer true. It was nearing sunset when we took our seats on the football field and started listening to speeches; it was one of those dramatic evenings when the sun starts to melt like candlewax over the treeline and stains the sky Garfield-orange. That’s a detail I remember much more clearly than the speeches themselves, which ranged in topic from “what a journey” to “can you believe we made it?” It’s tempting to criticize graduation speeches until you realize there are only so many directions they can take. Although I’d love to experience a surreal moment where a brave valedictorian dedicates an entire five minutes to the breeding habits of the African bonobo.

After an interminably long speech by former Senator Olympia Snowe, whose remarks have since been bottled and distilled into high-grade horse tranquilizer, Leslie Eastman took the stage. Eastman was a god amongst men. I took his Current World Problems class as a junior and knew I was in the presence of greatness when he finished his lecture early and let us watch episodes from the first season of “Family Guy.” I don’t remember the details of his speech – no one ever does – but I remember it was almost shockingly short. He came, he killed, and he left – much to the cheering approval of his mostly-male fan club, who couldn’t wait to be done with the ceremony so they drive around town with their windows down and make loud whooping noises. Many of them still do this.

But while a few memories remain, none stand out so vividly as that of caps being flung into the air by a knot of smiling kids, nervous and excited and unequivocally happy. The more life you live, the more moments like that get crowded out by a crush of practical realities, from paying the bills to convincing your family it’s time to start inviting Earl to Christmas again. It’s helpful to remember the importance of a high school graduation: It’s the last time we walk the tightrope with nets. The end of the innocence, as Don Henley would call it.

A line in “Don’t Stop” proclaims that “yesterday’s gone,” except that’s not exactly true, is it? While you can’t change the past, you also can’t escape it – we’re the sum of all our yesterdays, to some extent. The trick is to use the past to provide the present with context; then when the future comes you’ll know what hell to do with it. And if you followed all that, then you are entitled to a butterscotch cookie and a hearty congratulations.

Graduations are often the fulcrums on which life turns. So when a senior stands at the podium and speaks about how momentous the day is, those tempted to roll their eyes will be missing something profound: That in many ways, it’s true.

What's in a name?

Maybe this is a generational thing, but whenever someone coins a unique or musical phrase – like “bastardized hieroglyphics” – somebody under the age of 40 will inevitably quip, “That would make a great name for a band!”

Despite the fact that they’re joking, they’re oftentimes right. Although whether that’s due to linguistic brilliance, or a lack of decent names for contemporary bands, is anybody’s guess. Calling a cool-tempered bearded dragon a “suave lizard” might make it seem as though you’ve stumbled upon the greatest moniker this side of “Black Sabbath.” But that could be a manifestation of the better-by-comparison phenomenon; the sad reality is that “Letters to Cleo” is what passes for a name nowadays.

Yes, “Letters to Cleo” is an actual band. Oh, how I wish it wasn’t.

I guess you’d have to be a music junkie to appreciate just how awful band names have gotten in recent years. And this isn’t a stodgy, fuddy-duddy shot at a younger generation’s music; a lot of the actual tunes coming from these ill-titled artists are really pretty good. A nice example is “Of Monsters and Men.” What I’ve heard from them so far is actually pretty decent, but their name is way better suited for a fantasy novel penned by a pasty dude in suspenders and knee-high socks. In other words, me in the second grade.

Obviously, modern bands don’t have a monopoly on silly names. “Abba,” “Three Dog Night,” and “The Teenagers” are all artists of yore that sound as if they stumbled upon their titles playing word association games under the influence of government-grade psychedelic drugs. (”The Teenagers” is particularly silly given that its members now qualify for senior discounts at the cineplex.) But those have become fairly tame by today’s standards. I submit as evidence groups like “Goo Goo Dolls,” “Hootie and the Blowfish,” and “Mott the Hoople.” Apparently we’re running low on words not uttered from a baby’s crib.

While I’m tempted to suggest pretension on the part of these musicians, part of me thinks the English language is simply being drained of anything approaching respectability. There are only so many words, and so many combinations thereof. All of the good, simple, and memorable names – “The Eagles,” “Iron Maiden,” “The Cure” – have been snatched up by generations past, leaving some dictionary-deprived artists to invent nonsensical gobbledygook, like “Chumbawumbas.” Which, I’m sorry to report, is as real as a punch to the groin.

Still, that hardly seems like an excuse. If you give a million monkeys a million typewriters and let them peck away for a million years, eventually, one of them will come up with a band name less embarrassing than “Toad the Wet Sprocket.”

Perusing my own collection, I’m pained to see that some of the groups I truly love have names that would make the bassist for “Hoobastank” titter like a tickled toddler (while picking pickled peppers). Case in point: Megadeth. Now, I fully acknowledge that heavy metal is a style that appeals to only a select portion of music aficionados; most of them, myself included, think nothing of air drumming violently at stop lights, which probably explains why co-workers give us wide berths at the vending machine. But as far as the genre goes, Megadeth is one of the elite. They’re titans. One year, I went so far as to finagle my way backstage at a concert, where I was able to meet the band’s frontman, Dave Mustaine. A tall, golden-haired shredder, Mustaine is a brilliant musician – but naming his band “Megadeth” was an error in judgment almost as grievous as developing his own line of coffee. (This is absurdly true.)

To be fair, “megadeath” – with the correct spelling intact – is an actual word, hard as it is to believe. You can find it in the dictionary. But you can also crack open a Merriam-Webster’s and find such gems as “mollycoddle,” “argle-bargle,” and “snollygoster.” That doesn’t mean you should name your band after them. “Megadeth” seems like a name settled upon during a massive coke-and-heroin bender. Here it should be noted that Dave Mustaine is infamous for massive coke-and-heroin benders.

It’s a tricky business, naming a band. It’s almost easier to know what not to do than to get it right. The musical world would be a much less ridiculous place if those concocting names would follow just a few simple rules: Don’t intentionally misspell anything (”Limp Bizkit,” “‘N Sync,” “Boyz II Men”), don’t needlessly include a preposition (”Archers of Loaf,” “Fountains of Wayne,” “Apples in Stereo”), and don’t make it needlessly long (”Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts”).

Also, don’t be stupid.

That might seem obvious, but clearly, the namers of the next band were not following this last, most important rule. In all my vast research on this topic – encompassing 30-odd years of music fandom, topped with a 10-second Google search – I have never seen a name more ludicrous, more embarrassing and cringeworthy, than the following.

The 2013 Gassman Award for Band-Naming Stupidity goes to:

“Colonel Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit.”

G’night, everyone.