2010 August — Tripping Overland

“There are two kinds of people in this world that go around beardless—boys and women—and I am neither one.” -Greek aphorism

The Beard in the bathroom aboard the Trans-Mongolian Express en route to Ulan Bator

The idea to grow a beard is not such an arduous task-when you first have to shave at thirteen, can buy beer (and condoms to pass it off) with a week’s growth at sixteen, date a few upperclass intellectual hottees at the tender age of eighteen-it’s just as natural as putting on pants or eating cheese.

That is of course just the idea of growing a beard. The reality is another thing entirely. The difference between a few days’ growth (lazy), a few weeks (really lazy), and a few months (tying to break up with your girlfriend) is the difference between men and boys. The main reason why most men (or their associated women-folk) can’t get beyond Don Johnson’s three-day Miami Device is not the filthiness, crudeness, or eccentric disposition often associated with facial hair, epsecially on the west coast of the United States, but simply because facial hair- aka Sideburns, Chinstraps, Donegals, Garibaldis, Goatees, Juncos, Hollywoodians, Reeds, Royales, Impériales, Stubbles, Van Dykes, Verdis, Neckbeards or Neards (my favorite), Soul patches, Stashburns, Friendly Mutton Chops, French beards or Bulgans, i.e. what is known as the “Full downward flowing beard with either styled or integrated moustache”- is simple: it’s itchy as heck.

Cue winter 2005. Living in Fukuoka- the biggest prefecture of the south-western island Kyushu, as well as the original destination for the atomic bomb Fatman, somewhere between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan- I was pretending to be an English teacher at a local high school for misanthropes when one day I received an invitation to join in Winter Beard.

Winter Beard…huh?

Nine or so guys (and one dog), a camera, photoshop and a (sadly, now defunct) website: it sounded like something I could do with my eyes closed. I could grow a beard in my sleep. The conversation I had with myself soon thereafter went something like this:

Me: I am the one living in mountainous Japan, a place where it actually snows, as opposed to the moderate climes of southern California, I should have something to protect my face from the cold.

The Other Me: Your opponents are working in the entertainment industry, i.e., Hollywood. They have reputations to uphold. Their looks are their business cards.

Me: Hollywood? They’re animators, designers and work with video games. They sit in front of their computers most of the day. No one cares what they look like, especially their girlfriends. Most people expect them to look like a disheveled, straight George Michael…

The Other Me: They’re designers, digital masters, they trained in this. You, on the other hand, suck at photoshop.

Me: That may be so, but with my Gaelic blood I am facially haired like no other. Look, it almost connects to my chest hair…

A fond reminiscence of Japan in 2004, when we were young, innocent, bearded young ladies.

A fond reminiscence of Japan in 2004, when we were innocent, bearded young Asian teens.

Eventually finishing in second place (not for lack of length nor girth, but due to a lack of aforementioned mastery of machines) in the month-long competition (the dog did not finish last), my appetite for Friendly Mutton Chops had nonetheless been whet. And having become beard-dicted, I wore some variation of the Van Dyke on and off for the next five years. I was also single during most of this time.

When, in between facial hair revolutions, I did meet some sweet young lady who was willing to take a chance on me, it generally ended between the time they said, “I think you’d look good in a beard…” and the actual fact of it sprouting on my face. No big deal. So I learned to be alone with my man hair. After all, what do we remember from the bearded greats of history: Darwin, da Vinci, Socrates, and Zeus? Their women? Or attributes such as wisdom and knowledge, masculinity and high social status? Ok, Zeus, the olde-timey Olympian who knocked up half of humanity, is a bad example. Darwin was into animals. Socrates liked young men…maybe I’ve spoken too quickly. No, wait, da Vinci was a man of great creative and artistic ability, to say nothing of having a stately mane of flowing face growth that just oozed sexual virility. Am I wrong? I wonder if he had as much beard-ruff (beard dandruff) as I did…

In traveling across Asia and Europe I have seen many of the wonders which the world offers, walked many miles in the barren outlands and in my luckier moments, talked and broken bread with some of the finest people alive. Like a portly, useful Sancho Panza-like companion by my side, all this I have done with a beard on my face. In not a small way this has provided me a cushion of sorts, a sense of security into which I can reside in times of cold vulnerability, a friend to comfort me when missing the company of a fine lady, a place to catch any wayward bits of food.

The truth is that compared with eras of not so long ago, the beard has faded in popularity with the coming of recent, more technologically adept times. Whereas it is still acceptable in the chillier agrarian-based areas, it is generally seen an an unkempt, unnecessary affectation more and more the further one heads west. The U.S. armed forces declined comment, but has maintained a ban on beards beginning during the Vietnam war due to increased risk of napalm burns (and tick infestation, but they don’t say that too loudly), making wartime facial hair all but obsolete. This ban has seeped out from beneath the camouflage and into the modern consciousness. How?

To blame biased media coverage of, say, Brooklyn’s carnivalesque Williamsburg trust fund community, who happen to maintain alternative rock affiliations and pot bellies as characteristics of a growing majority of bearded malcontent young males, for skewing the perception of Middle Class Americans against what made us great as a country would be to insult Lincoln’s Chin Curtain (aka the Donegal)- the first facial hair in presidential history- which gave him the gravitas to lead a young nation through its darkest hour, Teddy Roosevelt’s handlebar moustache- just the thing to give a small-lipped man the courage to bust a gang-ridden New York, and then the world, into shape, and, jumping ahead a bit, let us not forget Thomas Magnum, who saved the beautiful women of Hawaii any number of embarrassing misadventures. America is a country founded on the curlicues of cheeks and jowls alike- Damn the naysayers- In Beard We Trust!

Sigh.

If only life were a forty-four minute CBS drama in the 80s. As it stands, beards in the United States of America, and in the borderless Internet Culture Mall in general, have run on hard times. Most people these days associate hair on faces as a religious anachronism (Amish, Sadhus, Hasids and Islamists), a cartoonish prop of left-wing revolutionaries (Castro, Lenin, Zapata), somehow related to criminal violence (Hell’s Angels, Cat Burglars), or alternatively something that hippies (Tommy Chong, Jesus) are born with. Despite several creative individuals zealous attempts at hitting the B-spot of nicknaming this wayward bearded traveler, the ever-changing Great Beard of Manny resists classification. It still seems that people have yet to learn that when something happens of its own accord, like water flowing, air breezing, or men ogling boobies, that that’s the way it should be.

I leave you with a quote from the French Naturalist Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle, “They have no…ardor for the female,“ who then goes on to describe their reproductive organs as “small and feeble.”

He was talking about the clean-shaven. Winter or summer, spring and fall: Grow’em if you got’em.

[nggallery id=15]

http://www.beards.org/

Russia: Where Beards & Mail Order Brides Come From, Natch

The monuments of the old mother (Manny Santiago)

“We are not Asia. We are not western Europe. We are just Russia. Why do we have to be like this or like that? We are just Russians. We have our own civilization, our own alphabet, our own language, everything our own.”

-Victor Bodarenko, Publisher (Art of Russia, Andrew Graham-Dixon)

What to write about Russia that hasn’t already been written thousands of time, more eloquently by more talented men? In my first attempt (which I scrapped) I started with a truncated history lesson, which quickly fell apart when I realized I didn’t know some pretty big things about the biggest country in the world. Which begs the question: what do we really know about Russia? Beside Vodka, Mail Order Brides and Kalishnakovs. I’m pretty sure we- being anyone born during the Reagan regime which promoted commodifying natural resources, deregulating economic oversight of corporations, and racing to outspend the Soviets in order to topple the Berlin Wall for the Free Market Economy to go global- don’t know much that isn’t pure propaganda. Or out of a John le Carré spy novel or a Tom Clancy techno-thriller. So it was with much trepidation I wrote the following excerpt in my journal while seated in my compartment on the Trans-Mongolian Express en route to Irkutsk from Ulan Bator:

It is helpful to not over-analyze the situation into which you are about to dive headlong. If only to tame the growing inkling of a hunch that you are way out of your depth here and would do well to apply swift pressure to the emergency brakes and exit the vehicle rushing through frozen steppeland toward the Siberian border. You could always find a way to go around. China to Tibet, into Nepal, through India and then up through…hmmm. Well, there are always the Stans to consider- Kazakh, Uzbek, Afghan, and all the others- maybe you could… Wait, you are just being silly. Though often one-way in the hey-day of the Gulag-bound Soviets, this is a well-traveled route taken by millions of people for well over a century. Your fellow train riders should at least be polite if not friendly, and ignore you if not spit on the capitalist red white and blue blood in your veins, if anything, but even that, nah…you’ve seen too many Cold War era B movies. Rich people fly first, hell, any class. Who takes the train any more? The salt of the earth. Hah, people with no better choice is who. People, tovarich, like you. Give in to it. Accept your fate. Sit back in your second class seat and wait for Mother Russia to come to you. There’s likely to be some milk left in that great Slavic tit of hers, you could probably scrounge up some vodka around here somewhere, and there’s plenty of ice outside. White Russians anyone?

Like gossip heard around water coolers and soft mutterings whispered in corridors it is a risky thing to try to generalize about things which we don’t actually know to be true or false. So I demur to answer the tedious, “How was Russia? Was it like this…?” when asked by curious anecdote seekers, with easily categorizable sound bytes hearkening back to demeaning cold war era nicknames, but prefer to confuse with offerings of “Well, you know the Cossacks…” or “Once a commie, always a commie…”, simply for the fact that a ten-day transit visa through anywhere is tantamount to more confusion than clarity. What you get is a whirlwind of imagery that amalgamates into a liquor-tinged jambalaya that is nearly impossible to recall after the fact without at least some of the original conditions.

Hence, the bloody mary by my side.

From Beijing through Ulan Bator to Moscow, the Trans-Mongolian Express rolls on a Path of Blood (Manny Santiago)

From Beijing through Ulaan Baatar to Moscow, the Trans-Mongolian Express rolls on a Path of Blood

Five days of speeding through the frozen eastern steppes, where the derelict houses resemble those itinerant dwellings of Mongolia more than anything typically Russian (but the question is what is typical for Russia?) until the landscape gradually gives way to more and more grassland, allows one time to think beyond the stereotypes. The steppe folds back to reveal a rolling country of verdant foothills which herald the Ural mountains, the Eur-Asian continental divide. Random trees coalesce into great swaths of majestic forest. The faces of those provincial folk who live along the lifeline of the train track steadily change from dark to light. Where before animal husbandry was the norm, now crops are sowed and reaped. Buildings of a bygone era, mostly onion-domed orthodox churches and dilapidated nuclear reactors, dot the wild landscape more and more as the train persists in its caterpillar-like creep toward the cities of the west: Omsk, Ekaterinberg, Perm, Kazan, Nizhny-Novgorod, Moscow, St. Petersburg. Despite seeing and absorbing all of this and more, I have only myself for a guide, and have to go by appearances until something more substantial comes along.

Hence, the beard.

The Russians are well known for their beards. And their beard lore. Apparently Ivan IV (Mr. “Terrible”) believed it was due solely to the beard that Russia rose from antiquated medieval fiefdom to imperial nation-state. A few years later the thoroughly Europeanized Peter (Mr. “Great”) decreed that all Russian men had to shave their beards and levied fines if they did not. Though variations persist, from then on, no Russian leader would ever sport a full beard again. Trotsky and Lenin made the philosophical goatee popular throughout the Beat Generation and Stalin patented the bushy bigote that would later become Tom Selleck’s claim to fame: The Magnum.

Fresh Dill Pickles with Vodka (Manny Santiago)

Food from around the world

Whatever your stance on Russian politics, beards, etc., until you have been there, sporting at least a ten-day growth, you won’t know how at home you feel until you have stepped off the train after five days of green pastures into the central station maelstrom of babushkas hawking flowers and fresh herbs, Putin matroshkas on sale next to dollar packs of cigarettes, and emerge onto the shiny Benz and Rover-packed traffic snarled roads, wander past the wide soulless boulevards into the small canal-fed byway and happen upon an alley of cheaply built pubs and beer stands, where you are eating fresh dill pickles and drinking shots of vodka in plastic cups in a tree-lined public square in central Moscow as a makeshift electro-polka band strikes up gritty ditties, after which cute punk rock chicks come up with ruble-filled Converse asking for donations with smiles you can’t deny and the homeless looking men you’re talking to (but not understanding) keeps saying “Amerikanski” and gesturing to the sky with explosive blue eyes, you lean back, drain your cup, and pause to scratch your chin. It’s a natural movement. People think you look pensive or introspective. The truth is simple. Beards are itchy. You’re not an anachronism when half the men in the crowd are all synchronized scratchers, you are amongst your people, despite the language barrier. That’s what the food and drink is for. Given this level of camaraderie, your initial fears now seem unfounded. The thick fuzzy beats and accordion music start to meld with the thick, chilled vodka, those cute rocker girls have now doubled in numbers and are buzzing about like bees smiling and winking, and as you reach for the best pickle you’ve ever had, whilst simultaneously sliding into the pulsating vibrations of the zone of tremulous dancers, you let the midsummer night sun wash over you and you give in to the inevitable.

Hence, the ineffable Mother Russia.

In Beard We Trust

Russia: Where Beards & Mail Order Brides Come From, Natch

Top Posts & Pages

Archives