Interview with the World’s Foremost Beard Expert

I've never "reblogged" something before, as blogger doesn't have a button for it and I feel weird copy/pasting the entire content of a website posting from elsewhere, but I have never wanted to do so more than now. About two years ago I first heard an excellent interview with Dr. Christopher Oldstone-Moore, a historian at Wright State University. He is a pogonologist, or studier of beards (among other things, I presume). The interview is conducted by David Malki ! of Wondermark.com, an excellent website featuring repurposed Victorian illustrations used to make comic strips. Malki ! (the exclamation point is part of his name) is a very vocal beard advocate, so I was not surprised to see/hear him follow his interest into the academic realm.

I think it is safe to say that this interview is fascinating, even if you are not as thoroughly interested in beards as I am. Particularly notable is the discussion of the origins of shaving, and how it came to be the "default" look of men. Then later, the time when beards suddenly burst back on to the fashion scene. Both can be traced to remarkably specific historical events (hint: they are 2179 years apart)!

To quote Dr. Oldstone-Moore:
"The one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that these changes are connected to whatever conceptions we are developing of masculinity. Ultimately, it is always tied to the question of what is it to be a man, and 'how should I be a man?' That’s the existential version of that question, as a man. However that question gets answered is going to have a lot to do with what you do with facial hair. And that’s why I’m interested in studying facial hair, because I think it’s a way of looking at the history of how people think about their masculinity."

The interview is 24 minutes long, and both the mp3 and the entire transcipt (with visual aides!) can be found here:
http://wondermark.com/the-worlds-foremost-beard-expert/

Anyone who cares about me (or history, fashion, or masculinity) at all should listen to or/and read this interview.



The blogger's beard visits Glacier Point at Yosemite National Park

A Moment of Commentary

It is easy to think of the internet as a massive sea of trivialities, memes and pop-culture references. There is a lot of creativity out there but, maybe because of the sheer volume of media one consumes in 10 minutes of internetting, it is easy to think that the actual work took as little time and effort to create as it did to enjoy. Of course it doesn't. A lot of time and effort can go into silly video or a good joke. Even lolcats, perhaps the most ubiquitous and trivial of internet trivialities, require a good photo.

A few months ago my friend Whitney directed me to this neat poster/flowchart describing the logic of crediting an image online. (As it was created on a design blog, it is also appropriately cool looking.) A cartoonist/author/general creative-type person I follow recently wrote about his corner of this emerging debate, extending the conversation to creativity in merchandising authorship and pop-culture commentary. It also gets at why we feel the need to wear images on t-shirts, the motivations behind that impulse that I've not heard articulated as efficiently anywhere else. It's a short but excellent blog post by an internet creator and merchant who is walking the line between "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" and "give credit where credit is due." Or between "nobody 'owns' a funny sentence" and "simply repeating a funny sentence isn't funny."

"I’m glad that our knee-jerk reaction to seeing a ripoff is to call it out and shame it. I think we’re right to feel proud of someone coming up with a new idea, or creating a new combination of old ideas, but bored or sickened by the same old lazy references being regurgitated for profit. Don’t tolerate it! Having high standards pushes the culture forward faster."
(Read the excellent original piece here.)


By the way, apparently the original insult was removed, from at least one website.