Posts tagged: hair

Since 1992, Blue Blood has been about encouraging people to think critically and not just go along with the herd. My hair is purple and red at the moment. But the hair color is a signifier, not the endgame. What I mean by this is that all of us who fought the battle to convince the world that someone with primary-colored hair or tattoos could be beautiful or sexy, we can all pat ourselves on the back and go home, if that was all the whole thing was about. That battle is won. But the point is that the physical appearance was supposed to be about being a maverick and living on your own terms, about marching to the beat of your own drummer. If mohawks become trendy, then having one does not necessarily signify that one is a nonconformist. You can still aesthetically enjoy very tall hair, but the most important body part in the battle against conformity is slightly lower — your brain. You need to have an evolved intellect to avoid being a bah bah sheep conformist.

I’m about to tell you all the most important lesson of a liberal arts education and it is not even going to cost you a hundred grand or whatever higher learning is priced at these days. I was less enamored of the lessons I learned in school, while I was paying off the tab, so here is the most crucial stuff for free. My parents certainly deserve most of the credit for my brain, but my education really helped ingrain some of their lessons.

In order to have an intelligent and human approach to the world, you must learn to be analytical and think critically. Some people are born more or less disposed …

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I have a new guru. I just watched the Katt Williams Pimp Chronicles Pt. 1 on HBO. Well, specifically on my TiVo of an earlier HBO broadcast. Anyway, I have this impediment to increasing my personal success as briskly as my work ethic should guarantee. Specifically, every time my accomplishments start coming really fast and furious, in a way which is visible to others, the haters come out. I would like to claim I am immune to haters and their low end bottom-feeder tactics, but I’m not.

I do what I do from a place of love. It sounds corny, I know. But, as I’ve said many times in the past, the initial print issues of Blue Blood were in many ways a love letter to the scene I had become a part of. The DC scene of the early 90’s was this vibrant nexus of punk, fandom, and cyber cultures. In that part of the world, we were less concerned with the genre-quibbling of bigger entertainment business cities. Goth-industrial music was identified as sort of a subset of punk there. Knowing who both Gary Gygax and Wendy O. Williams were was a plus.

The city produced both Chemlab and Fifth Column, and Fugazi and Dischord, and Henry Rollins and 21361 Publishing. Although I was born in London and have lived on three continents, in half a dozen countries, and a whole bunch of states, in many ways DC is the city which most created me as an artist and, as an extension of that, created Blue Blood. I knew all these incredible, artistic, fabulously creative people who just needed a venue to showcase their brilliance. And …

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Any kind of extreme hair makes a statement, but none so unambiguous as the Mohawk. A shaved head makes a statement, but you have to parse it out. A shaved head can say near anything: “I’m a javascript programmer who cuts his own hair,” “I’m a 136 lb. passive-aggressive Vegan dickhole,” “Welcome to the Brotherhood, prag,” “Hi, I’m Dave Attell, and welcome to Insomniac,” “The girls can come in, but you losers have to leave,” or “No, I’m not the Dalai Lama, I’m Hunter S. Thompson, you little screwhead.”

A Mohawk says one thing: “Fuck you.” A Mohawk is a tonsorial middle finger to the world.

A Mohawk is different from a set of whitewalls, which is frankly not so far from a mullet. Lank, greasy sk8hawks also verge into mullet territory. A Mohawk stands up, bristling and sharp, and does not flop onto your forehead giving you a comical strip of extra-dense forehead zits.

When seen in nature, the Mohawk is there to intimidate. A raised strip of fur along the spine is the universal sign for “I’m ready to kick your ass, boy.” Rhodesian ridgeback dogs have permanent Mohawks, and they were bred to take on lions. You don’t want to get caught with your hackles down when your job is fucking with bigger, badder species. Think hyenas, or wild boar.

The name comes from the Mohawk tribe of native Americans, who held a bunch of territory around what’s now upstate New York. They actually didn’t sport Mohawks any more than the Huron and Iroquois or anyone else did at the time, but “Mohawk” sounds more badass than “Algonquin”. Brits call the haircut a “Mohican”, which is cute.

(Daniel Boone was captured by Indians around 1778 and given a Mohawk as a test …

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