pferdeschwänze

2007-01-23T17:07:00.000-05:00

"Start with a ponytail and before you know it.. you have Party Hair!"

John Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, does it. so do hippies, gas station attendants, DMs and good ol' boys. what, my friends, do these people have in common?
it is known in france as the queue de cheval. it is known in some other place as the pferdeschwänze. it is, short or long, the ponytail. more accurately, the mantail-- the long, flowing, loosely bound locks of nature/the trailer park/fucking the system/slaying an orc.

according to teh OED, buzz about the mantail began mid-century as a dialogue about "longhairs", defined there as "a ‘brainy’ person, an æsthete, an intellectual; also, a devotee of classical (as opp. to popular) music". combined with widespread panic about communism and the G.I. Bill, it also came to mean "a hippie, a beatnik", and was frequently used as a descriptor for the scurroulous, developing Boomer ethos. in the Portland Press-Herald, September 1950, the "young fry" are reported "wearing pony-tail coiffures too, you know"; men wearing ponytails were especially associated with the artistic and the effete, as well as the emergent trends of liberal politics and recreational drug use. notice the byline on the beatnik poster: apparently, longhairs "explode from alleyways and ivory towers". the association of rebellion, long hair and men created an enduring archetype, the ponytailed boho, who existed as cultural currency in lyrics and broader pop culture throughout the 70s and 80s.

by the 80s, however, even longer hairs drowned out the chorus of support for the idea of the ponytail as a rebellious statement. the end of the cold war and the power of the ponytail declined together, and by the time the berlin wall fell, the ponytail was more college-professor-antichic than crazy youngin' anarchy. as the boomers aged, so did their styles; and, as far as anyone i knew assumed, the ponytail stopped irritating anyone outside the NRA circa 1992.

according to the BBC and brandon, however, this is not the case. in england, a fully qualified man applying for a position in a "technology company" was turned down on the grounds that his hair was not "conventional and business-like", a standard of dress a judge ruled that the company had the right to enforce. LaborLawTalk reveals thousands more stories of men told by supervisors that their ponytails make them gay, rebellious, unemployable, or some combination of all three. A website devoted to men with long hair includes a link to one dude's musings on the sociological implications of long hair, as well as the apparent problem that virtually everyone has with it.

Having never simultaneously been male and possessed of a pferdeschwänze, i issue an open call for stories about the difficulties of getting over business casual preoccupation with re-revolutionizing the ponytail. are there really poeple out there still scandalized by those dirty longhairs and their wacky ways?? will there be a time when we finally see a return to the kind of weird hair-neoconservatism in the workplace that the tech bubble foretold the end of? i'm bothered by the implication that hair and gender are inextricably linked, and that men having 'girly' hair somehow makes them unfit for labor, and that the political movements of the 1960s are somehow innovative or bothersome to the neoliberal corporate attitudes of 2007.
in the broader sense, i worry about what will happen as the "trust no-one over 30" generation starts its long descent into decrepitude. sure, there's sure to be some backlash; but are the irritated children of the boomers really going to take out their frustration on developing styles of the business world?

(if this guy is really a threat to the system, the world is a lot farther behind than i thought.)

legend

2007-01-18T21:04:00.000-05:00

Nay, on my breast thou must
Forget and rest and dream there
For thine old legend-lust.
Ezra Pound, Canzoni 42

the concept begins, as many material anthropologists point out, where it always seems to begin in the West: "visualism". visualism is, in short, the popular, academic and folk interpretation of a long western tradition of transmitting stories of worth and significance through text or visual media. modern use of the word legend begins in the latin legere, that which can be read; a legend was originally the story of a life of a saint, such as those recorded in the 13th century Genoese Legenda Aurea.

in its simplest form, it connotates such a history: perceived to be historically real and culturally significant, the legend is an excellent example of literate society's strong links between the written and the sacred, and sits in the uneasy space between myth (a tale of a god, usually used to explain natural phenomena) and a fable (a moral tale, believed to be true only in the instructional sense).

by the mid-1600's, in the midst of mercantile expansion throughout the old and new worlds, it would come to mean the words or symbols impressed upon coins. it would also come to mean the explanatory portions of maps-- which become, in our parlance, legible manifestations of an expanding worldview.

in our time's much-maligned You of the Year, a legend is also an individual figure who has made a impression on their peers, stood out in their time. there is the pop culture icon qua legend, our james browns and madonnas; there are invented legends, the zeldas and pihkals of modern counterculture.
legendary gear, omnipresent in most competitive virtual communities, is the natural union of materiality and uniqueness: it's really fucking difficult to secure. with legendary gear, one can be a legend in one's own lifetime.
recently, the oxford english dictionary has added a new slang term derivative: in deference to the postmodern condition of rapid fame and even more rapid obscurity, one can now be a legend in one's own lunchtime.

the link between legends and time is rapidly disintegrating. the link between legends and explanation has only begun. hopefully, the practice of everyday life will not lose this essential element of the definition of legend, one which links the process of legend-making with the ideal of the legendary. in the spirit of the legend, this blog is about definitions, words and images that lie in and around the accepted, factual elements of our everyday lives. i think we all have legend-lust; i hope to indulge that pleasure here.