I talked to a bunch of folks about it ahead of time, none of whom could make it out. Fair enough. Zach’s a nice young man, and was kind enough/self-promotional enough to post the video on Vimeo. Here it is, see for yourselves:
A few years ago, I saw God’s most hated haircut rocking around Williamsburg. And I was motivated to write a blog post about it, complete with a drawing on my office’s whiteboard of the thing. “Thing” is a relevant term here, too.
BoingBoing picked it up, and so did Gawker. It was fun while it lasted, watching the traffic spike and getting a bunch of comments and generally feeling brilliant and witty and bright.
I started feeling pretty bad about all this fun at someone else’s expense, though.
But whatever. Fast-forward two years to last week when I got an e-mail from a nice young man named Zachary Timm:
I am making a short film about the infamous Williamsburg Hair, that you made so popular a year or so back. The film is going to be screened exclusively at the Filmshop Presents Unprotected film screening @ Music Hall of Williamsburg, on Saturday, February 27th. The film is basically about his experience and unwanted celebrity that came from the coverage on your site and gawker. Since you had such a big part in the story I figured this would be a great follow up blog post for And I Am Not Lying since this will basically be the first time Chris speaks up about the experience.
You read it right. My blog post two years ago was the impetus for a short film that’s screening at the Music Hall of Williamsburg at 66 North 6th Street, Brooklyn this Saturday, 2/27. Doors are at 8PM. Click on the image of the poster (above) for more details.
I’ll be damned. I’ll be there to check it out, shake Chris’s hand and have a laugh — hope to see you all there, too.
I checked with Zachary — wanted to make sure there wasn’t any bad blood or anything. He assured me there wasn’t, and sent this photo as proof:
Have you ever noticed how some people put a pair of headphones in, and it’s like it’s the performance version of Thor’s hammer? Like by putting those buds into their ears, they are suddenly blessed with an incredible singing voice, perfect pitch and total invisibility? Put on some sunglasses and an iPod and all of a sudden nobody is on the train except Simon Cowell and Dr. Dre, and both of them are hiring. It’s kind of like having a low-budget version of Rock Band that only plays R&B.
You never hear anyone singing Coldplay or Dave Matthews, is all I’m saying. I prefer it that way.
And don’t get me wrong here — sure, sometimes the phenomenon is a little annoying. But other times it is completely the most awesome thing that can happen to your whole week, a beautiful, off-kilter accident.
Like this guy that sat across from me on the J Train last weekend singing Chris Brown’s “Winner.” Check this thing out, it’s beautiful. I love how he doesn’t let his performance stop him from pouring himself a little sip of something from his thermos, then gets his soul stole by the music before the cup hits his lips … and caps it all off with a shameless crotch scratch. Also of note is how quickly the guy next to him stops giggling and starts ignoring the whole thing.
Don’t let me spoil it for you, though – check this out for yourself. It’s stuff like this that reminds me that the world is alive and beautiful and full of strange surprises …
I saw this peeling, yellowed and filthy sign offering “Easy Credit” in a neglected storefront around the corner from my apartment the other day. I wonder if the store went out if business as a result of offering Easy Credit, or if it went out of business long before credit collapsed in this country.
Somebody came along with a marker and edited the sign to say “Easy Credit For Homicides.” I know there’s some serious gang activity in South Williamsburg – the wave of gentrification hasn’t created nearly as high as it has on the North side – but man, I hope that particular credit market has locked up, too. I just signed a yearlong lease by the Marcy stop on the JMZ …
Emmet is my neighbor. He’s a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. His owners found him in a gutter in Louisville, Kentucky, a tiny little neglected piglet crying and dying in a pile of wet leaves. They rescued him, nursed him back to health and it looks like he hasn’t missed too many meals since.
Emmet is the physically densest mammal I have ever seen -he feels like he is made out of warm, bristle-covered cannonballs. He loves having the spot between his little piggy shoulder blades scratched.
I only ever see Emmet on misty, overcast mornings – the kind of mornings that really activate New York’s greyness, the ones that give this grey city some serious character and color. It’s like Emmet emerges from the city’s hazy, sleepy dream state. Nobody else is ever around to see him except for me, my girlfriend, and Emmet’s leash-holders.
We always talk about the South, me and Maggie and Emmet’s people. We talk about how great it is, what an amazing, rich and Gothic creepiness the South has and how we are so glad it runs through our blood. And how glad we are that we moved up here, too.
The South is a spectacular place to be from, but not always a good place to be at. Love the culture, hate the crippling willful ignorance, I say.
I live a couple blocks away from the Brooklyn base of the Williamsburg Bridge. Walking over it never gets old. Whenever I have friends visiting from out of town, I always take them on a walk over into the Lower East Side. It’s completely free and the views are so classic, so stimulating. I love how the graffiti on the bridge grows like barnacles, flourishing, dying and getting painted right over. The light’s always perfect from one angle or another, and I always see something that just blows my mind into a million crinkly pieces.
Danielle and Ezra are two of my favorite friends, and when they were here this weekend the bridge delivered. I got this shot on my iPhone — something about the blurriness of the low-budget image sensor really adds to the beauty for me.
Those great big billboard ads you see on the subway are nothing but giant peel-and-stick Coloforms, really. I love the accidental collages you see when people randomly pick and peel those thing like they’re great big scabs, and I just knew it was a matter of time before someone started making art out of them.
Then I saw this ad for Star Wars that had been chopped and remixed with bits from a beer ad and a poster for a Takashi Murakami exhibit and I heard a horde of angels singing a song titled “Shit Yeah!”:
You can see the whole billboard and a gold-bikini Princess Leia mixed with Iron Man after the jump …
Last weekend I saw a haircut ugly and evil enough to impregnate a nun just so it could kick her down a set of steep stairs. I’ve seen some stupid haircuts in my day, rocked more than a few regrettable ‘dos my damn self. My own hair in high school was shaven on the sides and back and semi-sorta-not-really-at-all long on the top in a ‘do that would have looked like a brain handle had I been able to pull it into a ponytail. I used to wonder why girls didn’t take me seriously.
I used to pour concrete with a man whose braided mullet hung low enough to tickle the tanned top third of his ever-exposed ass. I’ve seen cuts on the subway here in New York that I found personally offensive, hairdos whose cheeky chunkiness screamed of disposable income, willful ignorance and a powerfully asexual aesthetic retardation.
I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where ironic commentary on the fashion choices of the American working class has collapsed in on itself warping into a white dwarf shaped like a Mobius strip: a one-sided form that slows down light and the passage of time so aggressively that silver tights underneath ’70s running shorts seem like a good idea.
My friend Eric called me up late the other night from somewhere outside of Barcade, panting breathlessly in the cold. “Dude, don’t go to bed yet,” he said. “I’m bringing something over for you.”
And what a something it was! In its heyday, he looked like this, functioning as an expensive karaoke toy.
