“WHAT is it about Baz Luhrmann that tickles the nerve of reviewers so firmly it sees them racing to their blogs proclaiming disapproval of all he does before he has even done it? Is it his love of bold, technicolour dance sequences? Perhaps it’s his penchant for melodrama and theatrical characters? Or is it because he’s not making gritty, hard-hitting films about life in the suburbs?”
 — I… DON’T KNOW! You know what I would be first in line to see though? A movie called Baz Luhrmann’s Black Hobbit. Don’t pretend like that wouldn’t be amazing. [Via]

“Despite what some people might say you are more than just an accident of the universe — there is meaning to your existence.”

Tonight at Housing Works is a don’t-miss panel (no pun intended!) of critics who are women who are all going to throw down. Elsewhere: Molly Ringwald sings some jazz and Sebastian Junger talks about his feels.

by Matthew Borden

As soon as I noticed I was going bald, I took the only sensible action and shaved my head. How could I not? Growing up, I grimaced at the sight of my father’s ill-advised comb over. I swore I would not make the same mistake. I love the man dearly, but I’m scarred by the image of his few scraggly hairs flopping in the wind like a dying fish. I always wondered who my dad thought he was fooling. It’s not as if anyone would look at him and think he had a full head of hair. Eventually he let go and got a buzz cut — only because of an insistent barber and a dose of the truth. To this day, he insists that it didn’t look that bad.

Recently at lunch, I complimented him on his latest trip to the barber.

“I was looking at my wedding photos. Matt, I forgot what it was like when I had hair,” he said.

“But even then, you really didn’t have hair, Dad,” I said.

“It was something, though,” he said.

“More like nothing,” I said.

If youth is wasted on the young, then hair is definitely wasted on everyone who isn’t bald. Fortunately, I wasn’t one of those poor saps who started losing his hair in high school or college. Back then I had a mane so thick my scalp would hurt when I put a brush through it. I even used mousse on occasion, which left its bottle as a liquid and then miraculously transformed into a mass in my hand. I can even remember how it smelled, perfumed and syrupy sweet. It left my hands sticky after a generous application. I didn’t realize it would be a love affair that would end.

There are so many things I would have done differently had I realized I would be bald by 30. There are so many hair styles I never got to experience that I wished I had: mohawks, dreadlocks, perms, mullets. All hair fantasies involve music from the 80s and me strutting through a crowd pointing at imaginary fans, letting them know that I see them and I know they see me and my awesome hair.

And when I first began to lose my hair, I thought it was an optical illusion. I found out when I started teaching fifth-graders. My colleague Ms. Cannon inspected me one day. “Mr. Borden, you’re going bald,” she said. “You have a big space on the back of your head.” I appreciated Ms. Cannon because she was a straight talker, even though she could hurt your feelings while she was keeping it real. What could I say? She was right. Eventually I came to face my reality and got what the kids called a “baldie.” All my hair was shaved, and my days of using hair products were officially over.

This hairless reality has not been reflected in my dreams. They all follow the same script: I am in a dimly lit bathroom, staring at myself in a mirror. I glance at my head and gasp in amazement upon seeing myself with a full head of hair. Instantaneously, I realize that my baldness phase had been an enormous misunderstanding… with myself. I was preventing myself from having hair with my insistence on shaving my head. What a fool. If I just stopped shaving my head it would all come back. Then I wake up.

I told my wife about my recurring dream and she laughed. Then she kissed my scalp. “I love you just the way you are,” she said. Maybe. But how much more would she would love me if I had hair?

In some ways I do feel responsible for my plight. In my carefree hair days, I mocked my friend Hirsch who used a shampoo in his 20s to stymie his loss. I laughed at my friend Eeyore, who fastidiously shaved his head every other day to deal with his receding hairline. My mother’s father had hair until he died, and so I believed I was to be promised the same fate. I thought my destiny was to be a silver fox, a John Slattery. But the only thing that has turned gray is my beard. That just makes me feel even older.

The hair I have left is a problem now, actually. My eyebrows are going through a difficult time. Stray hairs shoot out from all directions like a child’s drawing of sun. I am grimly aware that it is only a matter of time until these furry caterpillars blossom, not into beautiful butterflies, but into shaggy beasts that will live for eternity beneath my temple and mock me as they softly chant, “You are getting old.” Shut up, eyebrows.

But what is it about going bald that is so frightening to so many? What goes through the minds of those who think they are fooling the world with a bad comb-over? I resent and feel empathy, in equal measure, for these men who want to be a member of a club that doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. It’s not as though anyone with a great head of hair sees a man with a comb-over and asks him for the name of his barber. I want to start a website, Just Shave It Dot Com, which would consist only of pictures of men with bad comb overs. I will point them out and humiliate them until they come to their senses. Tough love from one bald man to another. A hairless revolution is brewing, and I am on the front lines. Bald can be virile — just ask Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, Taye Diggs, or Patrick Stewart. Bald can be bold. I choose to be bald, rather than suffer the indignity of balding. Just Shave It. Keep your dignity.

And to all those who have hair, I implore you to treasure it. Regardless of your weight, height, or looks, there will always be a bald man somewhere out there, staring longingly at your hair, wishing he could be you. It might even be me. Although I have come to grips with the fact that I am bald, a part of me will always hope for the impossible. Recently, I received an email from a local athletic store, promoting a new study that purported to show a connection between barefoot running and hair growth. My heart started beating rapidly as I imagined my new exercise regime. It wasn’t until I reached the third paragraph that it became apparent that it was an April Fool’s Day joke. In addition to being virile, apparently bald men can be suckers too.

Matt Borden is a writer in Brooklyn and is in no way connected or affiliated with Matty B Raps Dot Com. Photo of a painting of Charles-Louis Regnault and his startling comb over, c. 1815, by Karen Green.

★★★★ One part of the cloud cover was dark and trailing mist below, like it meant to be serious; another part was showing blue patches, like the game was up. Pigeons worked on the scattered leavings where the line of garbage bags had been at the curb. By midday, the sun was a bright region in the white eastern sky; the deep clear blue in the west, under the filtered light, looked like nothing so much as gathering thunderclouds. Then, right at the moment of schoolyard pickup, it broke, and down poured the sunlight. The jackets came off. The children ran around the apartment building garden, past floating abundant tulips, blazing pure primary red, primary yellow.

“Carrying a guitar can increase the chances of you getting a date by a third, according to a study by researchers from the University of South Brittany. The study found that women were 31% more likely to give their number to a man carrying a guitar — double the amount of people who would give their number to the same man when he was empty-handed.”

“Honey Locust Honky Tonk is supposed to be a mock country album even though it’s not country, although it is a little more straightforward than albums I typically make. I was going to use a pseudonym — Cash Rivers.”
 — Robert Pollard, you don’t need to try to convince us that there’s something different about your songs. We like you just the way you are!

“It’s hard to remember now, but at one time, MTV really was watched just like commercial radio was listened to: you would turn it on and see what came around, and if you particularly liked a video, you’d wait a while and hope you heard it. That’s what half the slumber parties of my adolescence were about: waiting for Michael Jackson or Duran Duran.

We don’t wait very much anymore. It’s not just that this model of MTV largely went away, or that getting most of your music listening through the radio faded. It’s that the entire idea of ephemeral availability — that you would have to sit and wait for something to be played for you, and that at other times you had to do without it — is simply not how people expect to digest much of anything anymore. The VJs who believed they were at the beginning of the age of the music video were actually at the end of the age in which innovation in music would involve giving people new ways to wait for you to play the music they wanted to hear.”
 — I can’t help thinking that the world will be a better place when the last one of us who goes on about how we had to sit by the radio with a cassette recorder and wait for a song we liked to come on so we could tape it and how there was always the slight sound of your little sister’s phone conversation in the background and gosh how simple that time seems now dies. But I also know that the future is mostly about fires, so it won’t make much of a difference. Anyway, read this.

You know, maybe we don’t need to auto-tune everything. Good Lord.

“It is the problem of the leftwing. They clean up the vomit after the cocaine party of the neocons, who go into rehab and then come back to reap the benefits.”
 — Birgitta Jonsdottir, head of Iceland’s Pirate Party, pretty much nails it. (We would have also accepted a “bag of shit” analogy.