Playgirl’s Mr Movember!

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can always tell when a bloke is only growing a moustache for Movember.  For some reason the dignity and gravitas that usually accompanies a genuine nose-muffler, the type grown by ringmasters, philosophers and maths teachers is completely missing. Movember mo-growers either carry it with the grace, aplomb and subtly of an oversized novelty sombrero, brashly waving it around as if to say ‘I’m a wild and crazy guy I want to make party-party’. Or they especially furtive about it, ducking their heads when they catch you checking out their face-friend and giving you sheepish looks through their eyelashes which say ‘I don’t usually look like this’.  

The former I can deal with using the same patient good nature that I use to deal with other people’s ribald dads but the latter I find infuriating because they don’t seem to realise that their bashful moustache makes them about 34% more attractive to me. It makes me so sad that the first day of summer that things gonna be long gone and the city’s make-out appeal is gonna slam right back down to ‘minimal’ until the drunken Christmas parties roll around.

Annyway, I thought I do a little tribute to the most popular ‘tache styles I’ve seen this year. I have obvious favourites, despite loving them all. As my model I have used English actor, J.J. Fields below;

J.J.s pretty awesome permanent moustache honestly make me think, ‘Is there anything wrong with marrying someone based solely on their facial hair?’ The answer is no!

The Bryan Ferry

Although similar in appearance, this thing should not be confused with the Shifty Sam, because it’s  about a billion times more  sophisticated in a never-to-be-attempted-by anyone-other-than-a-thin-attractive-70’s-crooner-or-F. Scott-Fitzgerald kind of way. Just look at J.J. in this baby, he looks like Indiana Jones if he had decided to take art history instead. These things are so classy they have to be rinsed in champagne and styled with tiny silver combs. If I was even  half as well maintained as I should be to deserve a guy sporting one of these,  I’d have to be Audrey fucking Hepburn*

Notable Examples: Bryan Ferry, Clarke Gable, Sammy Davis Jnr. 

Chopper Gringo Hulk Hughes the 70’s Porn and Tennis Star

‘Oh look at me! I’m 100% man oozing with frustratingly charming machismo. I’ve got absolutely no imagination or sense of humour, but I’m great at making out! I’ve never really understood irony but some girl with a fringe and glasses told me my ‘tache was ‘ironic’, and that’s expanded my pick-up range by 20%! I’ll keep milking this fad until it disappears and use the phrase ‘moustache rides’ indiscriminately! Come on ladies, you know I’ll win you over eventually!’

And they do, they always do.

Notable Examples: That dude in Dead Wood, Bubble-O-Bill, and Nick Cave

Patches McGee

Whilst there are a lot of sensory memories about high school which I may still find sexy but patchy pubey facial hair is not one of them. There’s something about this one reminds me of that kid in at school who developed too quickly and had man hips, appalling skin and a shadowy moustache before most other kids could turn 13. Although we should all be impressed with the fact that many men can grow a credible nose-neighbour within a month, there are many who try and fail, miserably. I suggest that these guys don’t bother looking like teenaged nightmares and make generous donations to their more hirsute fellows.

Notable examples: The Woman for Le Tigre, boys from the Brewery Coffee shop on Erskine Street, Leonardo DiCaprio. 

Shifty Sam

Nothing says ‘I’m trying to smell you while you’re not looking’ than a shifty Sam. Even J.J. looks like a sexual harasser in one of these. These kind of thin, wispy snail trails are favoured by office creeps, adult book store owners and the skinny weird villain in costume dramas. But what’s not to like about that? I always said that the best thing about creeps is their perseverance and tenacity.

Notable examples:   Chris Cornell,  John Waters, Crispin Glover (ok, he doesn’t really have one but if he did it would be weird).

Captain Flourish

This is truly the king of all moustaches! It’s majestic, rugged, stately, regal and manly all at the same time. I like these best when they are growing on charming old-timey Southern Gentlemen who say things like ‘I say, well, I say, its mighty fine to meet ya, miss Jo-Maybelleline, would you care for a mint julep and the deed to the plantation in my heart? If you would do me the honour of takin’ it, well, I’d be mighty obliged’.

However, the Captain Flourish may need more than a month to really get going. I don’t think it’s possible to grow a mo in secret, but if you could, it should be this one. Then on the first of November you unveil this beauty and let us all bask in its glory for the next thirty days, a memory to treasure for the rest of my life.

Notable Examples: Corey Stoll, Tom Hardy in Bronson, Mel Gibson in his 'I'm Completely Mad with a beard now' phase. 

Finally, as I woman I felt that I’d been put at disadvantage with Movemeber, being unable to really participate (not that I don’t try, the results are underwhelming). That was until I heard about this lady. I think her story is pretty cool, I think she’s pretty cool. I’ve said it before, I wish I had a credible tache... 

Also also also, before I forget, y'all should really head over to Movember Australia's official site, where you can donate, play games and check out more amateur mos online! Exciting!

*I am currently more like Katherine Hepburn, but the really old Katherine Hepburn who turned up to the Oscars wearing her gardening clothes, covered in dirt.

Costume Drama-Mama

Ladies of a particular generation and type! It’s Sunday evening yet again, and I don’t know about you but I am feeling the undisputable adolescent twinge that only comes when the Sunday night ABC costume drama should be only two hours away.

The first costume drama I remember watching during that time slot was Pride & Prejudice back in 1996 when I was 9, the one where Colin Darcy comes out of the lake wearing the wet shirt. After that I assumed that all costume dramas were enriching epic romances which were as good for the intellect as they were the soul. However, now that I am older, and perhaps wiser, I can see how insidious they really are, and how they given me a slightly skewed perception of romance and life.

Unrealistic Expectations I have developed by watching costume dramas through my formulative/adolescent years

1.All English dudes are handsome gentlemen who explain themselves eventually.

It’s true that there’s no ‘he’s just not that into you’ in costume dramas. If you are the heroine, everyone is into you, and they're all really hot in a sexually repressed way. All you have to do is pick the one with the most money. Even if a dude appears to actively dislike you, it’s only because he’s so besotted with you. Being incredibly rude, ignoring you and making your father bankrupt is the only thing keeping his propriety.

And at the end, once you’ve emerged unscathed from the siege of death, disenfranchisement and misunderstandings that constitute your life, you will get an explanation so eloquent and lovely and convenient that all the suffering worth it. Unless you’re Tess of the d’Ubervilles, because by that time, you’re already dead.

2. Your life as it is would be really great if it was transferred into that setting

You’ve seen Lost in Austen, where a modern girl goes into Pride & Prejudice land and manages to fuck everything up so amazingly that she can’t possibly fix it and Jane ends up Mrs Collins? Well the experience on the whole would be something worse than that.

Whilst I would be the daughter of a wealthy Industrialist, with two older sisters married, an allowance of 50,000 pound a year and a house in town, I would also probably be far too old to be married, far too single to be proprieties, far too sarcastic to be demure, and far too well educated to be content. I can’t play the piano forte, embroider or sing and I think I’d get so bored I’d start racing the servants for fun.

3.Bad guys are obvious from the beginning

A musical sting, an odd filming angle, a nose and a beard skulking around a corner. Oh, that must be the bad guy! I wonder who he’s about to beat with a cane or knock up or send to Australia? Dickensian baddies are just so obviously bad they make the lipstick on pantomime dames look subtle. When I moved to the city I was so busy listening for bassoons and watching out for pock-marked men with club feet lurking in doorways, I could get pick pocketed by green camels and not notice.

4.Ioan Gruffudd can act

He can’t. He just can’t. We all wanted it to be true to give us an excuse to demand his sculptured cheek bones and expressive eyebrows be in more things. Well, we got that what we wanted didn’t we, Rise of the Silver Surfer exists and we only have ourselves to blame. And you know what, I watched Hornblower the other week and not only does his name have hilarious homoerotic implications, he comes across as a bit of a weeny. Sorry.

5.Woman may be soppy objects for barter but at least we had lovely things

Are you kidding me with this one? Women those days had about four dresses that were supposed to last them years of their lives. They bathed infrequently and had no such thing as deodorant, shampoo, toilet paper or feminine hygiene products. Their silk, lace and linen dresses may have been beautiful masterpieces of haberdasherical engineering but they would have smelt worse than a dead tramp in January. More to the point, your hat offered little or no sun protection.

For an authentic experience of the Georgian wardrobe, wrangle your way into the BBC costume department. After years and years of being passed from Emma Thompson to Billy Piper to Gemma Arteron to Julia Sawalha, reused in endless productions from Fanny Hill to Watership Downs* those dresses would probably be so crusty with sweat, make up and soup from the catering van they would varily stand up by themselves.

*Before you say anything, I know, it's about rabbits, okay?!

Hack Literature: The Celebrity Story

I just finished reading The Bryan Ferry Story by Rex Balfour (1976), an unauthorised biography about my equal 1st favourite rock-star

For those of you that don’t know who Bryan Ferry is, he’s the front man of the 1970’s rock band/ art project Roxy Music, with a simultaneous solo career that’s been going on for about 35 years now. He was the guy who caused a bit of trouble about ten years ago when he was misrepresented as a Nazi sympathiser, when in fact he had just expressed a liking for the work of Leni Riefenstahl. Not the same thing, but deffinately not great publicity...

Whilst they may be no argument as to Ferry’s musical innovation, inspiration and slight genius, this biography portrays him as the mad stylish reclusive wizard who single handily invented music. An all-round toadying piece of fanatic clap trap.

Moreover, the book was written only three years into Ferry’s career and since then he’s had many more hits, fox-hunting children, divorces and affairs, not to mention the whole Nazi thing, and I can’t help but think ‘wouldn’t it have been better if they had waited?’

Something I have learnt about biographies is that they should be all about mystery, scandal and intrigue. A Kim Kardashian book would just not be interesting because we already know EVERYTHING about her. I don’t think there’s anything I could find out in a book about her and her deepest darkest personal life that I couldn’t find out by simply walking past a news agent. Her life is not so much as open book as it is a large billboard on Broadway, and I don’t care.

Biographies are also all about timing.

It’s strange when young or uninteresting celebrities get biographies about them before they’ve had enough life lived to fill them. I just looked on line and discovered that Justin Bieber has a biography, Justin Bieber: First Step 2 Forever- My Story. Isn’t he about five? To fill a 100+ page book he would have had to start doing coke and getting divorced in kindergarten. All I’m asking is wait until the story is at least two thirds through.

Having said that, it would be wrong to say that celebrities should put out biographies until they are dead, in fact it’s probably good that they don’t, because we know how the story ends and because it means that they can do a big old money grubbing sequel when their lives go to shit. Take for example Rolling Stones Guitarist mark III Ronny Wood, whose biography Ronny came out for Christmas 2007. Not even a year later later he was in rehab, on sabbatical from the Stones, broke and divorced living with a 21 years Old Russian model. I can’t wait to read about that in Ronny 2: Oops, my bad.

I picked up where The Bryan Ferry Story ended in 1975 with another book, the autobiography of his erstwhile fiancé Jerry Hall, Telling Tall Tales. In this ‘book’ Hall goes into great detail about the cuckolding she did to poor Bryan with Mick Jagger, as well as everything she didn’t like about Ferry and how mean he was. Not only was this the airing dirty laundry to the equivalent of putting shitty undies on your doorknob, but it made her come off as a naive, foolish, mean, vain and self-sensationalising moron, which is a shame because I actually like her. Tell all, but don’t be cruel, or people will laugh derisively at the fact that the perfect home life you were so happy about by the end of your book will end in within 20 years.

By contrast Keith Richard’s Life is a beautiful book, one of the best autobiographies I’ve read. It’s told in the spare and wandering style of Richard’s own words, which aren’t half as confused as one would expect. Love, fame, fall-outs, appalling excess and deaths creep into the narrative in a quiet, funny way without wallowing in appalling excess or praising his fortunes. Richard’s neither attempts to rationalise or descends to self-pity.

In short, I would advise you to read this book, and if you are a celebrity considering a biography, I would advise you to wait for your life to become more interesting and so that the disadvantages of hindsight don’t come back to bite you in the arse. I would also recommend a good ghost writer, my services are available.