love is real

love is hard

the HAIRCUT VIDEOS!?

Speaking of Dad ques... a while ago I had really long hair and needed to cut it and when I decided to stat cutting it I wanted to do something creative and productive in the process... like asking my friends/dad/strangers in Texas to give me a haircut and secretly video-taping them on my computer.

I think this idea stemmed from a few points
 
1. I never had long hair my whole life until I stopped going to the "hair dressers"- the people who tell you how much hair needs to be cut to keep the hair "healthy" (hair is dead) and how they will cut it special so that it will grow long (hair is dead and it grows even after you die).

2. I wanted to see how people would cut my hair when I asked them to do whatever they felt like and gave them no direction nor instilled in them the fear that if they did it wrong I would never be beautiful again! (hair is dead and grows even after you die)

3. As a junior high and high schooler I used to fantasize about freezing time in class and going around the room to each desk while everyone was frozen. I would imagine how I would cut every person in the class's hair- some I would give a very stylish imaginary cut to and obviously on others I would seek  revenge or entertainment.

So unfortunately the getting people to cut my hair part of the haircut program got momentum before the video-taping the haircuts program got momentum, although it did get going and has since successfully clogged all data availability on my laptop.

What this means is the videos kind of stat out with me having pretty short hair already, although the initial idea was that I would have long hair and also I did. I did have long hair in the beginning and to the present moment I have still not gone to the hairdressers for any assistance in getting it shorter.

Since I still can't find my external hard drive I started uploading the videos to youtube as a pre-emptive measure in possibly deleting them from my computer. The ones up on youtube take place mostly before during and after Robert Tortora and I's trek across America in the name of Goodluck with Elevators (late summer 2012).

*Videos of longer-haired cuts do exist some places in different formats also, which I will one day also find. Maybe I should have uploaded to youtube from the beginning but I wanted to just sort of compile the cuts like data and do something with them which I still might do but haven't done yet,

SO IN THE MEANTIME if you're looking for weird haircut videos to end the day or look into my youtube channel and find a myriad of weird haircut videos along with some accidentally uploaded nonsensical maybe haircut video related/ maybe not videos with me in them or without me in them THIS IS THE REASON!

One of the first haircuts I solicited was from my Dad (dad ques full circle, remember) and he took his work pretty seriously. He also needed little direction to do what I assume he would think of as "the right job".

Here it is!

Oh no just kidding looks like that was a video I didn't know I recorded- really sets the stage though, right!? Let's leave it, youtube!

Here it is, REALLY!

norwell, ma

 19 minutes! (the time it takes for each free art-sociological experiment haircut turns out to be a varying factor)

As you can see as the project continues...

#2



atlanta, ga

#3



bastrop, TX

#4



#5



austin, TX

#6



#7

charleston, SC

#8

Marylou's News: Best Coffee In Town

A great thing about being home for a little while, is sitting on the back porch, casually partaking in the same high school activities which once served as the penultimate goal of a many tentacled and frequently booby-trapped nightly undercover mission.

So while having some pinot noir & tall boys out back last night, Lindsay and I started reminiscing about our ill-spent childhood years. Somehow we got around to discussing Marylou's, an establishment in the center of Hanover, Massachusetts where Lindsay and I spent much of our youth serving coffee drinks in pink cardboard cups with pink straws on top of pink napkins, slid over a pink counter-top, the cost of which we registered into a pink cash register which we would later count out before close and lock in a pink lock-box before mopping the pink linoleum floors and flipping over the pink closed sign on the pink front door....
all the time wearing
pink.^1

We were discussing the trouble we would run into in conversation now, when trying to explain the experience of working at Marylou's to anyone who is not from the south shore, (as Marylou's is only found in this particular woodland habitat).

Some may describe Marylou's as the Hooter's of coffee shops, but I like to believe that Hooter's is a bit more well-run than that. They seem to be semi-pro. I doubt they have a pink lock-box. Or at least they don't have 30-odd once-teenaged girls who still have a key to their back door.

Marylou's was a lot like our boys & girls club in high school. It was our after-school activity, if you will. You got to know the men around town who drank 3 jumbo's with cream a day and who, for the most part, made up the local law enforcement community. You got to know the middle-aged women around town who had gotten a divorce/never married, still smoked cigarettes/gotta quit, had a particular order to their lottery ticket tearing, and would like to pour their own milk, please, do you have an unopened one, this one's been sitting out hasn't it, looks sour, yes mam, no thankyou.

In highschool I used to go to AA with a friend of mine who had gotten in trouble with a member of the local law enforcement (she had not been an employee of Marylou's)^2.
At one of these meetings, I saw a very nice, very shy man who I recognized as an after-school regular at Marylou's. Very shy, very kind regulars who were a man of his age were a rarity. I was thrilled to see him there...and then I realized I would now be an alcoholic in his eyes,
everyday,
after-school,
medium,
cream,
no sugar.

I admit I was a bit concerned over this initial change in our relationship, but everyday after that when mr. medium cream no-longer-alcoholic came in, he would come to my register and we would exchange a knowing and sympathetic smile over our shared secret, our one-day-at-a-time triumphs; he would mention something privately about the next meeting, ask an unobtrusive but insightful question or two about my well-being, for which I would return a knowing glance and a medium coffee with cream. He was a quiet man with stooped shoulders and a long ponytail, an outsider from the boisterous and often bawdy police force/gas attendant/ mechanic & friends regular type which dominated the Marylou's afternoon 7 by 8 interior. I think he took comfort in coming to my register with the memory of having congratulated me earlier that week, as I walked up for my triumphant '24-hour' medallion, or won '12 simple rules' in the AA raffle^3. I too was an outsider from my happy-go-lucky pink-clad counterparts, who were learning life's small lessons on the weekends, spending their workdays enjoying a frosty funky fanabla iced coffee through a pink straw, as-of-yet unburdened by the shackling weight of incurable addiction...

The truth is, he was a friend I needed and appreciated, and if I'm being honest AA was probably a friend I needed and appreciated, too. There was a reason we were only going up for those '24-hour' medallions.

As for Marylou's, well, Marylou's was the best coffee in town.

I think if anything can help better explain Marylou's, it would have to be a visual; It was an establishment hot on the local commercial scene.




^Girls with Boston accents really were meant to work in Coffee Shops



^I gotta say, there's really nothing about this I don't like.
If I had to sum up my experience at Marylou's, I would say it was a place that tried to keep something alive, which never really existed.

if that wasn't enough obscure coffee shop nostalgic anecdote for you,
find out for yourself @ www.marylous.com

^1. or else black emblazoned with pink

^2. i did actually win '12 simple rules' in an AA raffle, a book which my mother later found in my room and used as the jumping off point for reaching some quite hilariously off-base conclusions about my life, but that is another story

^3. actually, this is not quite true. said friend was actually employed at Marylou's for a little under a week, during which she managed to knock over a row of flavored beans, flooding the back counter and no-doubt sending a few pony-tailed gum smackers slipping ass-first behind their registers. needless to say, she was promptly fired...and then she got a dui.

Oh, New England!

a dream on 158 south street, Norwell Massachusetts--

I am watching West Side Story on a small television in a large and empty, drafty warehouse (it is dark). Out of nowhere heavy jets of clay, (the kind dense enough for a well constructed dribble castle base)hit my hands like bullets. The clay dries in spots on my palms. An asian man pulls up in a blinking golf cart and jumps off. He takes my palms in his hands and, removing the clay, looks at my calloused palms. "Does your brother go out back and wring the necks of roosters?" he asks me.
"No," I say.
"Oh," he says,"I see. So you have wrung the necks of roosters."
He then seemed to notice I'd been watching West Side story, and I believe he approved of this.

OooH, nEW England!



oddly enough, this song reminds me more of Paris and Candace-
six degrees back and we find ourselves in Boston