June 9, 2024 - TWO BITS!
photocontest
Theme: Money
(inspired by the “two bits” of today’s challenge)
- Brush: Alpha Brush & Shaving Co. - Bully Boy 28mm
- Razor: Edwin Jagger - DE89 #ZAMAC
- Blade: Treet - Carbon Steel [2]
- Lather: Maggard Razors - London Barbershop - Shave Soap with Tallow (sample)
- Post Shave: Barrister and Mann - Seville - Balm
- Fragrance: HAGS - Barberwood - Rollerball Extrait de Parfum
FIRST BIT - AN INTERPLAY OF LEGACIES
Today's theme comes from a song with African American roots.
Also, barbershop quartets have African American roots.
When advertising their barbershop scents, manufacturers often evoke Italian or French traditions. Why?
I wonder if it could be because Figaro, possibly the most famous barber in popular culture, was created for a play by French author Pierre Beaumarchais (also a key supporter of the US revolution, as seen in Apple TV's Franklin), and then made even more famous by an opera by Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini. If you dig deeper, Figaro is inspired by Brighella, a stock character of the Italian tradition of Commedia dell'Arte, strongly based on a component of playful improvisation.
Today we live in a world of intertwined legacies.
African-American music has been the main influence for all the popular styles of the 20th Century, including jazz - a musical genre based, just like Commedia dell'Arte, on playful improvisation.
An example of interplay of all these legacies is IL FIGLIO DEL BARBIERE (The Barber's Son), a quasi-absurdist song recorded in March, 1949 by Quartetto Cetra, an Italian quartet inspired by the African-American quartet The Mills Brothers.
The song tells an eccentric story about Figaro's son, and then concludes addressing directly Rossini in the Afterlife. I'll post the full translation in the comments.
One year before recording Il figlio del barbiere, Quartetto Cetra had also dedicated a song to a guy who is desperate about losing his hair. The song, titled Crapapelada (Milanese dialect for bald head), is featured in this short newsreel / proto- music video. Decades later, in yet another interplay between legacies, Crapapelada made a glorious comeback in a memorable scene with Gale's character in Breaking Bad
We keep embracing and re-hashing each other's cultural expressions, and that's inevitable. Today I posted a little personal rant about how Italians were represented in a SOTD: I fully believe in 's good faith and good spirit, and I am sorry if I came out a bit harsh. We can all laugh about self-humor from within a community (like with this series of barbershop-based clichés), but when the mockery comes from outside, people can easily get offended. I don't have The Answer, but I guess one of the key issues is feeling misunderstood, getting frustrated because "the others" don't even properly comprehend what they are trying to make fun of.
All that said, I'll share an anecdote on the only old-school barbershop I did visit in my adult life, about twenty years ago, in a different Italian city. The barbers, two white-haired brothers in their 70s (one of them with big candid mustaches), had a very classy salon with leather-covered chairs. Only after I had been seated, I discovered that they followed the old-school approach with the utmost rigor. Another client appeared at the entrance, accompanied by his girlfriend. The woman stopped suddenly on the threshold, as if held back by an invisible barrier, like an uninvited vampire. Then, the client sat on the leather-bound couch and opened one of the magazines available to read during the wait. It was the Italian edition of Playboy magazine.
SECOND BIT - LET'S BE EVOCATIVE!
Barbershop scents are rarely interesting to me, but I came to this opinion after smelling a bunch of samples by various brands.
One of them was Maggard's "private label" London Barbershop, which according to the dupe list, is based on an EO accord that is also used by many other artisans. Today's shave confirmed the impression I had at first sniff: forgettable, generic, somewhat "fake".
I followed with B+M Seville (the balm, as the lather had not provided the kind of post-shave I was longing for), which embraced me in an original orange-led citrus accord, combined with a fresh herbaceous note. It doesn't smell like any barbershop I ever set foot in, but it's good, comforting and refreshing. The name feels both clever (citrus + Figaro) and appropriate: in a word, evocative.
Barberwood Extrait de Parfum is an oil- (not alcohol-) based fragrance that represents a worthy addition to the still short list of original scents by HAGS. The official blurb promises that - guess what! - the fragrance "evokes the timeless charm of a traditional barbershop".
To me, it's mostly a warm and soft (sandal)woody / ambery scent that shares some DNA with Ritual. I am not a big fan of sweet "oriental" drydowns, but I am happy I purchased Barberwood in the whole trifecta (I still have to try the soap).
I consider it as an original "fantasy barbershop", where both the "barber" and the "oriental" aspects feel like re-imaginations of distant cultures.
I may be wrong and this could be the most accurate conjuration of the Spirit of Barbershops in Greece (where the artisan, the American-born Dimitrios Charokopos, is currently based), but in any case it's a great scent, and for me it could have a non-barbershop related name, and I would still buy it. It's a rich scent, whose name, while catchy, feels like just a pale reflection of its layered complexity.
FOF
EDIT to add my quiz score: 13/32. Lost time trying to understand how to skip the questions I didn't know how to answer.
ROTY