this is art

it went down like this: i was cleaning my desk and found an old drawing that i made in my “moustache” phase and thought i would post it to the internet and so that is what i did.

this is a real movie

were i to huff the fumes of every mr. sketch magic marker from licorice black to banana split yellow, i still would not believe you if you told me that this movie actually exists. its plot is so bizarre and mundane at the same time, that as soon as i heard about it, i hastily invited my rowdiest friends to a screening on my 70” plasma television TONIGHT. if you’re in the area, you should swing by. also: if you shave your mustache beforehand, i will not notice it on purpose to help you better understand the plight of the movie’s protagonist.

for wunderkammer: a victorian moustache guard.

what you need to understand about the differences between the victorian moustache and the ironic ones that you see hanging around park slope these days is that the victorians were deadly serious about their moutaches, oftentimes going to great pains to dye them just right, wax them perfectly, and curl them precisely. when a hairy dandy supped from his teacup, he was putting his exquisitely quaffed lip hair in peril. the hot tea could melt the wax, wilt the ‘stache, and send streaks of toxic hair dye into his favourite earl grey.

the solution was found in the moustache cup which had a special built-in guard. eventually, this guard was made portable so that if you were invited to tea at the estate of those not fortunate enough to own moustache prophylactic drinkware, you could plunk in your own and save the day.

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the book, mustache cups: timeless victorian treasures, is a great resource for collecting and is apparently the best guide since dorothy’s hammond’s 1972 book on the same subject.

also: you can instapaper this moustache cup essay for later perusal.

handlebar moustaches

notice: they are wearing beSPOKE suits as well. 

aspirations

for all the young people out there who are wishing to one day wed a fine set of upper lip hair—like yours truly—this book from 1872 by a certain mrs. t. narcisse doutney may* very well be the guidebook that we have been searching for.

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*[cocktease alert] i say may because—quite oddly—the word moustache does not seem to exist anywhere in the book apart from the title

also: get a load of the chapter titles: 1) i am born, 2) i am a baby, 3) i am a child, 4) my girlhood, 5) the circus, 7) i am a wife, & 9) i am a widow.

the wig thief

check it: you are lusting after a designer periwig from this season’s hot new lineup of outlandish hairpieces but your daddy’s not about to drop £20 on “another frivolous head merkin” and your current wig is soooo last year (plus it still reeks of pickle brine from the time that you and phillip played “hide the sauerbraten” instead of attending your younger cousin’s harpsichord concert). WHAT DO YOU DO, HOTSHOT?

what you do is get your gang back together and run one of the oldest wig scams in the book, the boy on a butcher’s tray wig scam. here’s the play × play.

A boy was carried covered over in a butcher’s tray by a tall man, and the wig was twisted off in a moment by the boy. The bewildered owner looked all round for it, when an accomplice impeded his progress under the pretence of assisting him while the tray-bearer made off.

there is even a poem about this scam. from trivia:

Nor is the flaxen wig with safety worn
High on the shoulders in a basket borne
Lurks the sly boy, whose hand, to rapine bred,
Plucks off the curling honours of thy head.

if you need me, i will be in harvard square looking for an agile young accomplice that i can conceal under a blanket on a platter of meat.

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source: at the sign of the barber’s pole, by william andrews (1904).

more period scams you and your gang can run:

•the mouldingborde gambit (if you are patient, you can turn a little dough into a lot of “dough”)
•the panel game (you will need access to a prostitute)

for wunderkammer: a 1705 “borodoráia”—a russian beard token

check it players: my halloween costume this year is mostly likely going to be “raynor with a beard” or some variation on this like “raynor with a soul patch” or “raynor with picadilly weepers.” to make my guise complete, i thought i’d mint myself this russian beard token so if anyone dressed in a sexy tsarina costume demands to know if i paid my beard tax i can be like: “da, female comrade.” (or whatever). and then we will toast to mikhail bakunin and i will slurp vodka out of her cupped hands, and she will nurse it from my infused whiskers as if chawing raw sugar cane.

with this image lingering, i will now tell you the provenance of the russian beard coin. or—even better—i will let some smithsonian copywriter do it for me:

[Beard tokens were] issued at the time when Peter [the Great] had ordered the boyars (Russian nobility) and commoners to shave their traditional beards as part of his program to modernize Russia. If they wished to keep their beards, they had to pay a tax. For nobility and merchants, the tax could be as high as 100 rubles annually; for commoners it was much lower — as little as 1 kopek… The tax was strongly opposed by the Russian Orthodox Church and led to several citizen revolts.

the tokens were inscribed with two phrases: the obvious: “the beard tax has been taken” and the propagandic “the beard is a superfluous burden”.

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also related: lettuce not forget the the hair powder tax 
more about russian coins here

week 16: oed

i suppose that it was inevitable that the three random letters that i generated for my oed game would eventually be o, e, and d themselves. but 16 strings in? this is highly highly unlikely. but what is also unlikely is how the word œdipean describes someone who is clever at solving crossword puzzles—and not someone who wants to marry the person that gave birth to him.

while œdipean is a good word, whiskerandoed is a great one. you can have bearded, shaggy, bushy, and even hirsute, but you can’t have whiskerandoed without the oed.

ambuscadoed · placed in ambush
infœdation · defilement
œdipean · pertaining to, or like that of œdipus; clever at guessing a riddle
œdipodic · swollen-footed, gouty
paratragœdia · mock-tragedy
triexoctoedron · a solid figure having 18 square and 8 triangular faces
vuligoed · filth, rubbish; used as an expletive

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this is a post in the ragbag word summer series. for this series, i search for words in the oh ee dee that contain a randomly generated string of 3 letters and report my findings. it is a thrill ride.

face merkins

everywhere i go, people are always telling me about their trendy new merkins, but nobody is paying much attention to the pubic wig’s northern cousin—the chin wig. yet, the fake beard is almost as old as beards themselves (with a history just as lush).

egyptian pharaohs (and even she-pharaohs) donned gold plated chin wigs (called atefs) despite the cultural penchant for hairlessness. the charming specimen above was recovered from the 4th century b.c. frozen grave of a central asian chieftain by indiana jones.

and then medieval europe caught onto the chin wig craze:

False beards crop up again in medieval Spain. By the mid-fourteenth century they were so much in fashion that a wealthy gentleman might have possessed a whole range of them in various colors, shapes and sizes to suit different moods and occasions. In fact the abuse became so widespread that the king of Aragon banned them. At Rouen, in France, false beards were made illegal in 1508, but the edict had to be repeated in 1513. The fact that there were two official efforts to ban them in such a short space of time suggests that they were immensely popular.

our 16th century rallying cry: they may take our lives, indeed they may even take our beards, but they will never take our face merkins.

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source: ancient inventions (1994) by james & thorpe
an additional account of anti-facial hair legislation can be found here.

receiving robo-facials

the fact that modern day photo programs like picasa and iphoto have the ability to recognise my face gives me the heebie-jeebies. i have tried to disguise myself by: growing a beautiful mustache, wearing XL hipster glasses, and shaving off my exquisite unibrow to no avail—picasa can still somehow distinguish between me and my many handsome associates. how far would i have to go to keep these systems from recognising me? furthermore, what is the threshold of abstraction for a face to still be understood as a face? enter scott mccloud and his graphical abstraction scale from understanding comics.

before i start presenting this groundbreaking chart at siggraph, i should note that the function of facial recognition in photo programs is to help catalogue your photo database, it is NOT for helping you organize your manga collection. thus neither iphoto’s literal view of the world or picasa’s high tolerance for icon is better than the other.

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many many thanks to my taekwondo sparring partner for running this image through iphoto and reporting back the results in the scientific manner that this issue deserves.

a space opera… in the year 2000

what do you imagine going to the opera will be like in the year 2000? what about people in the 1800s, what did they imagine what going to the opera would be like in the year 2000? furthermore, what do you imagine that people in the 1800s imagined what you would imagine that they would imagine what going to the opera 9 years ago would be like? before we sink into an infinite abyss, let us observe this 1882 illustration from the hyper-cool paleo future blog (which has several more pictures of this series) where lithographer albert robida conceptualises his 2nd millennium operatic vision. consider:

your elegant monocle and tender moustache and the bevy of fly honeys in paisley petticoats that you assist in boarding your flying yellow dolphin while kaiser wilhem patrols the perimeter in a solo spaceship (sword at the ready), and 100 feet below you, some dandy ushers boobsy mcgee out of her wooly overcoat. it’s almost as if steampunk scene happened last year.

and to think only a few years before this lithograph was published, nietzsche (in die geburt der tragödie) went on a 54 paragraph tirade about how much opera blows chunks. look who’s eating a corvine delmonico now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(answer: friedrich wilhelm nietzsche!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)