Haircuts of today, number three

Fashion is, of course, the reverse of fish.

That is, while fish rot from the head down, fashion works the other way, from the bottom up to the head.

In this case, of course, that means Stan Kroenke. As Arsenal’s big boss (he owns the biggest hunk of shares), he has clearly been influenced by the fashion decisions of his ‘employees’. Certainly in the hairdressing department, anyway.


Or is it just me that reckons it’s a syrup?

Haircuts of today, number two

Well, actually, whatever it is, it’s not the number two of skinhead world. It’s true that it could be seen as a number two at the edges. And some have suggested that the middle section looks like a different kind of number two, left there by a passing flying bird.

I guess it could also be seen as some kind of mix of a flat-top and a Mohican. (Or is it a Mohawk? I get them mixed up.) In fact, I think it looks more like a landing strip — in the women’s beauty parlour sense. Maybe he had his wife/girlfriend’s beautician do it.

Two more things.

One I do wonder how much they talk about hair in football dressing rooms. Has it taken the place traditionally occupied in footballers’ empty afternoon by visits to snooker halls, turf accountants and, in the days before afternoon pub opening, drinkers?

Two Frimpong announced he intended to dye his hair pink if Arsenal beat Chelsea. But he doesn’t seem to have done so. Now, I’m no shakes when it comes to tweet’n’twittering but I did find a few things in that world.

* A message from, all people, Lord Sugar.Frimpong new hair style you should try @piersmorgan will suit you.’ No I can’t make sense of it, either. Then I don’t watch The Apprentice. Maybe it’s written in code.

* A picture of Frimpong with a pink stripe on his head, looking like one of his auntie’s slippers has flip-flopped on to. It looked like it might be a fake.

* A note from Frimpong26AFC — which I guess is the man himself. It says: ‘My mum said if i go pink she will disown me I’m really sorry i need somewhere to sleep can’t have me on the streets now can we.’

And I think, aaah, how sweet.

Next in this chain The big boss’s do. (Not the one you’re probably thinking of, though.)

Haircuts of today, number one

It’s a job that needs doing. So, even though the pay’s not great, I’ve hired myself to do it. As of today, therefore, I am the Premier League Haircut (and Hair Extensions) Correspondent.

My credentials? Hours spent at Arsenal. No more than that really. Historically, Arsenal players have been well-known for their timidity when it comes to hairdressing. Presented with the choice between a barbers or boozer (or bookies), they would choose the latter for their haircut.

Tony Adams etc would, I think, only have gone near a hairdressing salon if they wanted to borrow some money from the wife. Okay, David Seaman was an exception, with that ponytail of his. I saw him (and his ponytail) close-up once. He was driving to the match, in his Aston Martin. And I must say he looked fine. I did, though, see him on TV last night. He was being a complete pundit. And the ponytail has gone. I said a prayer of remembrance.

These days, though, Arsenal players have taken to setting the pace in the hairdressing area. For a long time, my favourite has been Bacary Sagna’s. On the menu — ha, ha — of greasy spoons, there used to be a dish — ha, ha, again — called The Lot. It may still be there for all I know. Now I guess it’s called the Full English — or, as I saw in an upmarket(ish) Newlyn cafe, The Very Hungry Man’s Cornish Breakfast.

And I think that’s how Sagna got his do done. Asked what he wanted, by his barber (or hairdressing consultant, perhaps) what he wanted in the way of hair modification, he replied: ‘The lot.’

And so he got cornrows, plaits, extensions and colour — plus, most likely some other stuff you can’t see unless you’re really close. The lot. I found myself wondering where he has it done, how long it takes — and how much he pays. But I couldn’t find out, despite trawling the internet for, oh, seconds.

So now you know what to ask for next time you’re having your hair done. The lot. Or not.

Next up Emmanuel Frimpong’s hair: some history and an opinion

Next week I become Official Haircut Correspondent for the EU

Wonders of the modern world, number eleven, Bushey Park

Actually, the reality is more striking — by far — than this rather bad picture. It was a mid-late autumn afternoon in Bushey Park. I'd never been there before. Apart from anything else, I always thought Bushey Park was in Bushey — Watford-way, that is. But I found myself round Bushey Park way the other day and decided to walk to Teddington Station via the park — which seems to be vast.

There was a warning on the gate about how I couldn't go in there because there would be live guns firing. Then I realised that only applied to the weekend nights. Then I remembered something about there being too many deer in the park and how they needed to cull them. (And I, being me, wondered what their meat would taste like. And where you could buy it.)

But nothing prepared me for this. A stag with a full set of antlers, having an afternoon nap less than ten metres from the path. When I raised the camera to take the shot, it was even better, in fact. There was a bird wandering about all over the stag. I thought the deer was a corpse, in fact, till an ear twitched and the bird flew off.

I'm sure Bushey Park regulars are surprised at my surprise but, well, you don't expect to see this kind of thing in a London park. All kinds of other things, yes. Things which are illegal in many parts of the world, including inner London, yes. But a fully antlered stag, no.

For once, I feel innocent.

Me and Philip Glass

More than twenty years ago, I found myself at Philip Glass’s house. Philip Glass, the composer, that is — though he wasn’t there. I was in New York for a piece about David Bowie.

He’d just started his Tin Machine venture and had given me pretty much the worst interview I’d ever had from a major pop star. He’d decided that Tin Machine was a band and that he was only a member of the band. Therefore, he wouldn’t do any more talking than the rest of the band. They, of course, had nothing of interest to say — and probably even realised they didn’t. He, while being one of the best interviewees in pop, came on like one of them — teenage, inarticulate, musicianly.

It’s a long time since I looked at the piece I eventually wrote but it’s possible that I used no more than half a dozen sentences from the interview.* The piece needed to be several thousand words long. It needed an appearance of depth, at least. So I had to think of a way to fill it out — hopefully with fat and flesh rather than padding.

The Tin Machine show was at a theatre on the Lower East Side. At that time, the area was at the most extreme of its paradoxes. Crack heads all over. Literally, you crunched as you walked the streets sprinkled with used crack vials. But also still the remains of the district’s previous incarnation as a first stop for eastern European immigrants. So there were still the hot bath places (shvitzes?) and kosher delis, both milk ones and those with jugs of schmaltz (chicken fat) on the table. And there were also what we would now call hipsters living there — some of whom had been there since the 1970s when it was just rough rather than dangerous and some who’d just moved in to take advantage of the cheap rents and thrills. Nor was it that long since the Tompkins Square riot — a tiny, weenie local rumble which acquired quite lunatically elevated mythic status.

So I figured I could write a piece about slumming and downtown and how David Bowie fitted into that and how Tin Machine was his own version of slumming — an artistic pretence. But then, of course, I’ve always liked artistic pretence, thought it’s often more honest — or rather, truthful — than a posture of honesty, which is so often just pretence. Anyway, I’m sure you get the idea.

Which is how I found myself in Philip Glass’s house. He lived in the very heart of the Lower East Side crackfields. A friend was a friend of his I called and, although, he wasn’t there, his wife graciously agreed to talk to me and invited me over for tea at her house. She told me about the area and what it was like and how she saw it. It was smart, of course, and far usable than anything David Bowie said. So I put it in the piece.

I knew I’d need to thank her, though — effectively. I’m sure I took a gift of some kind — a physical one, that is. But I can’t remember what it was. I do remember the other gift I took, though. It was a joke. About her husband. This is the joke:

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Knock-knock, knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Knock-knock, knock-knock, knock-knock?

Knock-knock, knock-knock, knock-knock, who’s there?

Philip Glass.

A somewhat show-offy gag in some circles, true. But already an established winner in my tiny repertoire of jokes — I guess I only told them to people who knew who Philip Glass was and what his music was like. So I was worried his wife would have heard it before. But she hadn’t. And she loved it.

Now, the other day, I was listening to a Marc Maron podcast. One of his guests was Ira Glass, the NPR broadcaster, the one who does This American Life. I knew he was Philip Glass’s cousin but I’d forgotten that. He told a story about his wife drunk-dialling PG at 3am then forgetting about it entirely. Then he told the PG knock-knock joke. My PG knock-knock joke. And Marc Maron had never heard it. And he loved it. And the crowd loved it. And I decided — with no evidence apart from the fact that if a toppish-line comic like Marc Maron hadn’t heard it before, then not many other people in the US can have done — that Ira must, therefore, have got it from his cousin’s wife. Who got it from me.

I can’t even admit how pleased I felt.

* The PR was pissed off at me about this and, later, told me so. Much later, he phoned me to say he’d re-read the piece and re-thought it and realised that, under the circumstances, my piece was more than fair and, well, he was apologising. A gracious act. Not unusual among PRs in my experience, in fact. By and large, PRs were better behaved and more moral and more fun people than journalists — notably so, in the case of the upmarket dailies. That PR deserves a credit, by the way. His name is Alan Edwards.

Steve and me

The death of Steve Jobs only just appeared in this morning’s papers and I’ve not read any of the obituaries or comments so I’ve no idea if I’m saying anything original or it’s already a cliché.

I’ll head straight to my conclusion. The fact is, I feel better for Steve Jobs’ death. Liberated, almost. Maybe now, I can escape Apple jail. Maybe I’m alone. Or maybe there are lots of us.

I’ll explain.

The first time I ever saw an Apple computer was sometime in the 1980s. I fell in love. It was in a producer friend’s home studio. It not only did the things I’d dreamed computers would do when I was a kid in thrall to Dan Dare and his future. It did them in a cool way I hadn’t even dreamed of. It was like Dan Dare had somehow had a side career in, say, a rock band.

Which, of course, was both kind of the truth about Apple. And kind of the shtick. (Which is, again, of course, where this story is eventually going.)

I decided right away that this was the computer I wanted. Till I could have one of these, I’d rather struggle on with my IBM Selectric — itself a dream machine, which made a noise like an assault rifle as you typed, turning the act of writing into a cousin of urban warfare. I still miss that noise.

(The machine itself is in a cupboard, along with its predecessor, an Olivetti Lettra 32, the portable choice of real war correspondents. Maybe I should have them buried with me. Or, as I want to be cremated, burned. I wonder if you’re allowed to do that.)

So I never bothered with Amstrads or shit like that. I waited till the price came down far enough for me to be able to afford one. Which, eventually, it did.

But, before that happened, Steve Jobs had already entered my life, revolutionised it even. I just happened to be around, in a position of relative responsibility, on the first magazine in the UK to move to Apples and what was then known as ‘full-page make-up’. It was, believe it or not, Punch, that repository — and butt — of old jokes.

So, overnight, I became something of an expert on Apples. That is, I was one page in the manual ahead of most everyone else. Soon, very soon, I was hired by The Guardian — mostly on account of this Rizla-thin skill — to help it reinvent itself for the 1990s. Difficult to believe as it may seem from this distance, but it had been hit hard the arrival of the Independent five years earlier — and still hadn’t figured out what to do. (This is not unusual at The Guardian. It is currently clearly foundering financially — dropping £30 million a year, while still paying its editor a few monkeys short of £500,000 — and pushing for accountability on executive salaries in other businesses.)

Anyway, as a result of this I became a true believer — an Applostle, perhaps. And, eventually, by semantic process, an Applostate, maybe.

As a fan, I proselytised for Apple, telling anyone who’d listen how superior an operating system it was to the clunk world of PCs. I also, for a while, had access to a NeXT machine — the test-bed for many of the great things that appeared on Apples, too, once Apple had brought Jobs back into the fold (and bought out NeXT).

Eventually, I stopped talking about it, coming to believe, I guess, that if people couldn’t see the difference with their own eyes, they certainly weren’t going to hear it through their ears. I never swayed from using Apples, though, even when the build-quality of their software tested my resolve to its limits.

Skulking around in the back of my mind, though, was something new, some kind of reserve. That was the real reason I became more reticent.

And the source of that reserve I realised was Steve Jobs — though that took even longer to realise. First of all, I became embarrassed at my own applosticity. An Apple computer was, after all, just another product. How could I have an emotional relationship to it? (I know, I know, that’s the story of modern capitalism but we all like to believe we’re different, don’t you.)

I started to see smugness and entitlement in Apple users — though never in myself, of course, ha, ha. Next, I read the court judgment on Apple vs Apple. It’s a fascinating piece. Long, though. Essentially, to my mind, the evidence all tilted the Beatles’ way. The Jobs lawyers presented a case of such casuistry that they could have as well been arguing over angels and pinheads. It was the kind of case I would have made up if I was having a laugh.

But they got away with it , for one simple reason. Or, rather, one simple person. Neil Aspinall — who ran the Beatles’ Apple. His evidence was such that there were only two plausible alternatives. One, he was a complete idiot. Two, he was pretending to be a complete idiot.

The judge — clearly a highly competent man — fell victim to the reverse Dunning-Kruger effect. That is, his own competence rendered him incapable of seeing others’ incompetence. He decided Aspinall was a liar rather than an idiot. The truth is, he was the latter. He had no idea of what was going on, no understanding of computers etc etc.

I was, though, more or less repulsed by the approach of Jobs’ lawyers. I know lawyers are meant to be devious etc but I just couldn’t stomach this for some reason— probably because it made me feel an idiot for ever having been a believer.

Then I went into an Apple store and, fuck it, it felt like church. If I ever do have to go into an Apple store, I have to breathe myself through the experience.

The last straw — see how emotion brings clichés to the fore of my brain — was seeing one of Jobs’ presentations. They were like — and here we go into the inexorable relationship between length of posting and likelihood of a Third Reich analogy — a Nuremberg rally. I sometimes think what I loathed most about the couple of the I watched was Steve Jobs clothes. That and the fact that — although he had made great computers — he seemed to be a quite loathsome human being, self-satisfied, arrogant etc etc. The fact that everyone there seemed to love it was even more distressing.

I guess that’s what happens when you fall out of love. You fall into hate. One projection replaces another.

Wonders of the modern world, ten . . . When dinosaurs roamed north London

Other places have gnomes in their front gardens. Primrose Hill has dinosaurs.

It reminded that the great ice age stopped at Finchley Road station. Honest. Back then, there was a great ice cliff, a couple of miles high – half way down where the platform is now, I think.

One day I’m going to walk that boundary — where the ice stopped and the dinosaurs began. (Okay, I may have got my pre-history a little messed up there. But . . .)

Which leads me back to Freud . . .

I hear that Lucien — sorry, Lucian — Freud’s nephew Matthew is moving into the area, following in his great-grandfather’s steps. Elsworthy Road was the psychoanalyst’s first home in exile. Matthew isn’t living there, though. From what I hear, he’s on the other side of the park. Not exactly where Sidney Bechet or Roger Fenton lived but not far. Nor from where Sylvia Path killed herself.

I think of Matthew Freud’s forebear, Edward Bernays. He was the son of the marriage between Sigmund’s sister and his wife’s brother. Vienna-born, Bernays emigrated with his parents, becoming a true New Yorker — a top-dollar pitchman, the PR rep for the Wilson government, Lucky Strike cigarettes and, later, anti-smoking campaigners.

He either did invent both the phrase ‘public relations’ (a replacement for the word ‘progaganda’, made unpalatable by German use of it in WW1) and the practice of public relations — or, by claiming he did, Bernays convinced everyone he actually did it, even if he didn’t. Now that’s what I call public relations, volume one.

Just the kind of thing that it looks like Matthew Freud’s in-laws could do with right now, I find myself thinking.