The Last of The Gray

I watch a fair bit television. Somehow it helps me think about things that have nothing to do with what’s on the screen.  It can also be a great nonprescription sedative. Unless I see something that grabs my attention.

“Senior-product” commercials obviously written by 30-somethings bring out attitude and the remote.

Some are just awful.

I don’t know who can tolerate the threadbare “golden years” crap – the trite little slices of life that some 35-year-old Copywriter thinks a 55-year-old should be living. Some are just lame, like a suburban white kid trying to vocalize (a.k.a. “represent”) The Hood and tripping up on his “YOs”.

Hair coloring product messages can punch all of my buttons at once. “Nice ‘n Easy is running a spot featuring a guy who ‘s telling us that he’s going gray as opposed to his wife who’s "still herself", still cool, hot, relevant -- or something else fabulous.

But Just For Men’s “The last Gray-Haired Man on Earth” is in a class by itself. It comes on the screen and I’m scrambling for the clicker and pointing it at the TV set, wielding it like a taser. The manufacturer wants us to believe that our society frowns on all gray-haired men and sees them as drifters into senility, incompetence and impotence. The concept is stale, the execution is weak and the Big Finish – dropping the product from a helicopter to a guy on a tiny desert island – is just dumb.

Hair dye. Just what a guy who's marooned -- alone -- on a desert island would have at the top (or anywhere) on his wish list.

What, no condoms?

I have no issue with the fact that some men want to get the gray out, feeling that it makes them look better, younger and more...whatever. That's cool. But these kinds of messages do promote some radical follicular adjustments. Some guys overdye their “doos” and get a kind of Darth Vader black helmet-effect which fools nobody but the fool under it.  Then there’s the screaming hairpiece, a “toop” that looks like a chunk of scorched Astroturf. Maybe the Astroturf folks will see a niche market here and line-extend.

I want these “Last Man” mutts to know that I’m a guy with gray hair on my head, face and ...elsewhere. If they’re on a mission to rid the world of my kind I invite them to come and get me.

A word of caution: I’m an old hockey player. Wear a mouth guard. And bring lumber.

A Port You May Be Missing

Some minds grow old before their time. But it always was the way that we tended to form most of our core beliefs when we're young and hung onto them. The 60s generation ushered in a massive change. There are a bunch of ex-hippies out there who threw the doors and windows of their minds open and let new ideas in. 

Once open, those windows are damn hard to shut.

So, ambling along in the direction of that analogy, let’s say the mind is like a laptop’s CPU  (Central Processing Unit or "brain") and it has a huge number of USB and Firewire ports. None of us can use all of the ports. There are just too many. But some of us allow access from more ports than others leaving us open to more input. Ideas that come from unanticipated directions gain access to the processor, while other brain/CPUs shut the data out.

In any profession, that’s one definition of a creative mind. It can process data that the isolated CPU cannot. I’ll call it “Asynchronous Port Syndrome” (“APS”).

Most political discourse is driven by APS. Liberals are more inclined to accept and promulgate ideas they hear from Liberal sources. Conservatives process and retain information exactly the same way. So, Rush Limbaugh’s pronouncements can be absolutely true – or totally false, depending on APS. Same applies to anybody named Kennedy. It’s APS that qualifies their credibility, even though the eyes and ears that receive the input look pretty much the same and have all come from the same Creator.

Fashion is a good example. If a  fashion statement is addressed to a non-working port, will it not compute? If an old person wears something that’s fashion-forward is it "brilliant"? Or an early signal of dementia?

All depends on APS.

IMHO, I see two people seem to be processing an obscure data stream. Ari Seth Cohen decided one day while walking on the street that elderly women had major fashion statements to make. His Advanced Style blog features ladies of advanced age. Few others could recognize this. So a 20-something fashion blogger has locked his trendsetting eye on ladies in their 80s and 90s and made them stars of an amazing film. All because he has that open port.

Then there’s Tavi Gevinson, crowned The Oracle of Girl World by The New York Times (a port, like The Wall Street Journal, that should always be open). She’s 16, been blogging as The Style Rookie since preteens and once dyed her hair gray to start the “faux-old movement" that she wanted her readers to take further, drawing lines on their faces to replicate wrinkles. Wrinkles got cool.  

Wrinkles? As a fashion statement? What planet did that come from?

Ours, actually. Did something happen to it on the way to your CPU? Test you ports. You've got one you can open there somewhere.

"Faded" Beauty

I was going to write a review on a film: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary “About Face: The Supermodels, Then and Now.”

One problem. I haven't seen it.

I do try (pretty much) to avoid writing on subjects about which I know nothing as opposed to pontificating at length on them verbally.

So I'll write a review on a review: When Beauty Fades by the New York Times' Ruth La Ferla. Ms. La Ferla is an expert on beauty. At least one kind of beauty – the physical sort that anyone with a working eyeball can recognize. But what does she know about the way beauty ages and how wide are her sympathies on the subject? Especially in her business where wrinkles are not seen as beauty marks?

In her review of Mr. Greenfield-Sanders’s film Ms. La Ferla reports that Isabella Rossellini complains that she “is not invited to the ‘A’ parties any more” and comments that she then “erupted into peals of laughter touched with rue”. Is the “rue” Ms. La Ferla hears an editorial opinion based on misinterpretation? Maybe not, but I didn’t hear any empathy for Ms. Rossellini’s regret.

The truth is that even if you’ve had a beauty-based career, if you trust your identity and self-worth to the kind of people that invite you to those kinds of parties you have put your fine self in the wrong hands.

Fashion is big business and its modeling icons can become “super” in their mid-teens (sometimes running a gauntlet through low-life types who abuse children) but it’s a business that lives in the moment and if those moments are all the Supers will ever have there’s likely to be a hard fall into supernova at the end of the runway.

The business needs -- we all need -- an updated perspective.

There’s a whole new generation coming on the scene and they’re going to force their own definition of beauty and fashion. We’re going to be yanked up to speed with the rest of the world. Wrinkles, in many societies, are seen as lines that mark the division between those who’ve gained the wisdom that comes with experience and those who haven't. And wisdom -- along with a lot of other remarkable things -- shines with its own kind of beauty and it comes from beyond the depth of skin.

Any woman who gathers that wisdom and cultivates those other alluring traits can age gracefully. And beautifully. And that beauty, Ms. La Ferla, doesn’t fade.

It evolves.

We need to get past the surface, look deeper and find the things there that are worth admiring. It’s not an impossible mission. In fact it’s become obvious to some of us. Even a few in the fashion business.