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September 21, 2005
the rare(r) still
here's an oddity: when i am full of tumult, i go out and get shaved.
there's nothing kinky or odd about it, and i'd go so far as to say: you're not a man 'til you've been shaved by a barber. i do it maybe once a month (or two?).
i often get labelled as someone unable to be still, someone restless, fidgetty. in times of immense stress, i go and get shaved. "Having a Shave" is a normal, twice weekly necessity.
"Getting Shaved" is an event.
now, i freely admit that part of my affection for this dying ritual of masculinity is partly attributable to my italian heritage, and growing up in freo (that's fremantle, western australia), where many elderly italian migrants plied a lasting trade as barbers. shave and a haircut, two bits. there were barber shops aplenty in the port town before the america's cup yupped up the place, even during my childhood, not just my dad's.
what i love about it is this: the quiet, the undivided attention and care, and the tacit confrontation of issues that somehow seem to be at the core of various types of expressions of masculinity: vulnerability, trust. letting go, placing your personal safety in the hands of your fellow man.
picture: a near-sighted man for whom english is a second language quietly guiding a razor sharp piece of possibly not entirely hygienic steel around your face for twenty minutes; there's even courage and derring-do involved!
no, far from it being some olde worlde curio, delectable just for the un-tarted-up, un-market-researched soap smells, the dusty counters and AM radio, the Italia '82 posters emblazoned with a beaming Dino Zoff or Paolo Rossi trumpeting the football (soccer) triumphs of the Motherland that go largely un-noticed in this land of the assymetric bladder - no, there's more to it than a mere aesthetic and romanticism or nostalgia.
there's the care that's shown, only as effective as the shavee's trust in allowing the shaver full acquiescence and malleability. there's the faith in the ritual, that the attention to method and process in sterilisation and preparation will mitigate forty years of unheeded sanitary and technological developments (my barber's 'implements' were in a blue-lit box that trumpeted 'Ultraviolet Sterilisation' - since when did UV light sterilise anything???). there's the sense of being pampered simply because it *takes time*. it's not the haphazard Mach Three before work, it requires Patience.
time to think, time to contemplate and pause - and time where it's absolutely necessary to Be Still. being shaved is calming.
sure, in the days when these barbers were the norm and not the present-day exception, a shave was 10ยข, not $10. but it's a chance to recapture and revel in an era when the Care of The Self (to pull a Foucault) perhaps felt less about a paranoid sense of surveillance than de-bearding might first appear ... more like the last vestiges of a certain kind of 'pride' more than conformity in line with a conservative stereotype of presentation that equated to 'respectability'. a pride in allowing oneself to be Groomed in a way basically superior to the 'fast' alternatives that have emerged during the practise's decline. a barber shave is closer, smoother, feels and looks better than your Mach Three jobbie.
barber-shop shaves rock; they allow this jitterbug space for contemplation, and letting go of what would ordinarily make him twitch.
Posted by reuben at September 21, 2005 11:24 PM