HAIR CARE FOR MARXISTS

I know what you're thinking. And I want
you on my Pictionary team too.

People are always asking me: 'Lewis, how do you juggle keeping up that beautiful bonnet of hair you have with the tolls of being a noncommital socialist who doesn't want to be pigeonholed but nonetheless identifies to many of the stereotypes of the modern anti-capitalist thinker?'

Well folks, I think it's about time I gave an answer.

Here's some science: hairdressing. I know what you're thinking: Hairdressing? Science? But aren't hairdressers meant to be really stupid? Don't they just want to know where you went on your holidays? No.

Here's the deal with hairdressers: they're kinda like computers. They serve a function, yes, and on the outside they look simple enough, but if you cut into them, they're full of cables and wires and circuit boards and stuff.

Back up.

What I'm trying to say is hairdressers are full of hidden knowledge.

Let's go back to the basics. Shampoo is evil as shit, right? That stuff is like heroin for your scalp. Sure, it makes your hair all nice and fluffy/shiny/sparkly or whatever, but after a day or so, your hair goes all greasy again and you have to buy more shampoo - and nobody wants to look like they washed their hair with an oil derrick just because they want to shun capitalist urges. Shampoo does this because - and brace yourselves, because I'm going to use some serious scientific terminology - chemicals fuck with your body.

If you're reading this in 1960, I'm sorry if I dropped that bomb prematurely.

I stopped using shampoo and stuff last year, instead opting for a hot water regimen to keep my hair looking lovely, because being a Marxist shouldn't mean you should be any less fabulous (Do note, when you start washing your hair like this there is a day or two of greasiness - this is your natural oils overcompensating as a reaction to shampoo). For some people, shampoo simply makes the problem of grease worse, and a shampoo-free life is the alternative to twice-daily washes.

You'd be surprised how many people live like this, because nobody ever mentions it. This is because people are dicks. As soon as you come out of the closet for not using shampoo, for about five minutes, everyone in the room treats you as though you're a homeless person who just materialised in front of them. Once, someone sniffed me.

Surprisingly, this led to me mentioning it as little as humanly possible. However, one time when it is appropriate to mention your hair care regimen, is when you're at the hairdressers. Because, like I said before, hairdressers just cutting hair is a bit like brain surgeons administering plasters.

As an example of some of the wisdom a good hairdresser can bestow upon a Fabian with an image to uphold, here's some advice I picked up upon my last visit to the beauty parlor:

1) Stroke that shit.
When massaging your hair in the shower, don't get too into it. No, not like that. Massaging your scalp opens up the pores, and encourages oils to escape. So be gentle.

2) End it on a cold note.
Warm water also opens your pores. If you have the luxury of a shower with heat controls, you can give your hair a cold rinse to close them up again. If you shower in the mornings, this also helps wake you up.

3) Drying.
The heat rule also extends to drying - use either a light towel dry, or a cold/medium temperature on your hair dryer.

Viva la hair revolution. Fuck L'Oréal, yeah?

-Lewis

VISIONS OF DAVE

I was walking through the park and it had been an okay day. Nothing special, but nothing went wrong either, and it's always important to count your blessings. I remember the sky was looking a bit dreary, and in retrospect, I had been in a daze all day long. Nothing seemed to affect me. If eyes were really the windows to the soul, it probably would've looked like I had misty white cataracts.

You know how some words are inherently better in certain accents? There were a pair of Jamaican guys sat on a park bench, and apropos of nothing, one of them enthusiastically shouted 'Booker Dewitt!' as though he were calling out the name of a messiah. Maybe he was a big Bioshock fan, I don't know. All I know is, in that accent with that particular intonation, it sounded more like 'Booker Dooweet!' and that this surprised me and made me smile like a lunatic in equal amounts.

Further on through the park I saw a second important thing. A woman rode past me on her bicycle. She had a big black coat on and a woolly had with dangling bobbles from either side. Either arm was held down by a carrier bag from what I assumed to be a wholefood store, but I only caught a glimpse of the bags. She really looked like she knew what she was doing, like she could handle herself and life was going well. Sometimes I do my shopping on a bike, even though the supermarket isn't far. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but she made me smile. Looking back, I think it's because it reminded me of Holland, and the way everyone there rides their bikes everywhere, for every occasion. To shop, to go nightclubbing, to work.

Later on, I was in the Student Union bar. I wasn't drinking, I barely have enough change for the newspaper. Dave Grohl came to me in a vision and I don't really know what it was he was trying to say but the way he was saying it you really know he meant it and it was so beautiful and that things were starting to make sense and I nearly cried and then I could hear distant echoes of Bianca asking me if I was okay and then her hand waved in front of my face and Dave disappeared.

It was Bianca's first Guy Fawke's night and she was very excited. When we left the Student Union, a big purple firework went off in the sky in front of us. It felt like a scene out of a corny romance, except we weren't sharing an intimate moment and the firework wasn't a metaphor for our souls touching. At least I don't think it was.

On our way home there were more fireworks visible across the parks. This made Bianca really happy, really excited. Happiness is like heat, it conducts. I saw how this celebration I had seen countless times was so fresh and brilliant again, and it made me happy. It had been a touch and go day. My eyes were misty and my brain had emotion fog. But the little spikes of happiness, like tokes on an imaginary cigarette that lasted all day, seemed so much more important and profound because of it.

As for the vision, I'm still working on that one.

-Lewis

BAD THINGS & BAGPIPES

I moved in to a small room in Southampton opposite a congregation of parks. I've been here two weeks now, and whenever I've been given the opportunity, I've patted out the limits. In cities, everywhere is so immediately close, and when you're fresh in town you're surrounded by an intricate network of things.

Some of them are bad things. Students like to focus on bad things; it gives a good sense of mythology and folklore. After dark, everything looks at least 20% scarier. Behind us is an estate block, looming up in the dark, and a row of shops that probably have some very good deals but look incredibly shady once the sun has gone down. Even the parks turn evil. During the day they're pretty - for a while there were tastefully decorated rhino statues, people playing football, greenery, hobo fights. At night, a park just on my doorstep becomes known as 'Rape Park'.

I didn't take stock in this - what better place to set a horror story than in a place just outside where we live, in the dark of the trees? And during Freshers Fortnight - a two-week period where clubs will try with all their advertising might to get you to spend your money on Jagerbombs and vodka-mixers - it seems feasible that there are going to be a lot of drunk young potential victims walking home at night.

Saturday is my favourite day. Everyone is out in the town and there are markets and buskers and I get to do my shopping and sometimes ride my bike. I was making idle chat with someone on the way out of my room, and they told me the park had been cordoned off by police, so I couldn't ride through - it's the easiest way to get anywhere. I thanked them and went out. They were right.

Hoards of police were combing the grass, looking for something; I assumed it was a knife. People started saying there had been a rape. If they were looking for a knife, we thought, it was either going to be a stabbing or a rape involving a weapon. I told my friend how where I come from, there aren't police, and how different this was. A day later, police started asking around halls. The police spoke in their usual riddles, but it was clear: it had been a rape. Right outside my door.

The park seemed shaded with different crayons. I felt confused about things, and my head hurt a bit. It rained when I was on my way back from shopping. It's been a confusing week since. So many people saying so many different things and I've been trying to make sense of it all, trying to figure out the good and the bad and the nice and the nasty and if there's any chance I can write a blog post about any of it.

I went out to do my shopping this morning and town was busy again. On my way past the park I suddenly heard bagpipes playing. There was a whole band of bagpipes and marching drums. Just playing for us - not collecting money, not preaching, or promoting. Just playing. I stopped and watched for a while. Some people drove past and shouted to ask if they were wearing anything under their kilts.

It made me happy. Things started to make sense. The park, like the world, was random. Like flicking through television channels - you'll see different things, some good, some bad, and some depending on the time of day. It's random, it the most literal way. But if you stick around, something good might happen.

-Lewis

NUCLEAR EMOTIONS

Name any given movie including nuclear weapons – ‘Dr Strangelove’, ‘Goldfinger’, ‘Superman’, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ – and I can tell without looking that they don’t play a minor part. Since its gruesome entry into the world the atomic bomb has been a dramatic symbol of ungodly interactions by science into the world of man. It’s scared many a country into or out of war. It’s a game changer. It’s a referential point in our mind of complete chaos and destruction. It’s a narrative symbol.
I don’t know much about politics, but I know a lot about films, media, fiction, that sort of thing. This might have something to do with my choices of subject at college and what I’m good at, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t crossovers. For instance, what if I were to propose the hypothesis that Bashar Al-Assad – one man on one side of the ongoing Syrian civil war – dropped an atomic bomb on his own people? What would that change?

Back in July, the United Nations estimated that 100,000 people had died in the Syrian civil war since it’s outbreak two and a half years ago. That estimate was before the chemical attacks in August, the estimated deaths of which are between 500 and a thousand. 
So why the comparison to nuclear weapons? Well excusing the fact that nuclear weapons are tightly controlled in today’s world and it is therefore unlikely that the scenario would actually be possible, the damage to human life has been equivalent. When the ‘Little Boy’ bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the initial explosion and detrimental effects killed over 100,000 over the course of a year. Politically, that and the bombing of Nagasaki three days later ended the war that had killed millions, and so no further military action was taken – but consider the conflict since then that has been sparked by even the possibility of nuclear weapons.

Of course, to simply discuss mortality in numbers in such situations is cold – to fully get our heads around the hypothesis we must also discuss what else separates the bombing of Hiroshima and the Syrian civil war.
When Little Boy was dropped, it was a step into the unknown – a dark turn in human history. The survivors of the blast literally did not know what hit them – for days after the bombing, rumour circulated that ‘Mr. B’ (The affectionate name for the circling B-52 bombers) had dropped either petrol or some sort of chemical explosives which were then set alight by the towns tram network. The explosion was big, it was blinding, and it was silent. It was dramatic.
The Syrian civil war has been going on for nearly three years, with no military intervention by the west. Like many a story that drags on without a happy ending, the news dropped for a while after the first few months of coverage. People continued to die, and us busy Westerners stopped reading, stopped watching, stopped caring. It wasn’t until recent chemical attacks that we shifted in our armchairs and got a bit hot under the collars as politicians started talking and we started asking ourselves – quite unassumingly – if we’d like to bomb another country again, as though we were simply diners pondering whether or not to visit the buffet table once more. The graphic videos and pictures that spread on social networking of people and children convulsing and foaming at the mouth from the attacks were much of what prompted calls for military action, and much more graphic than anything we've seen of Hiroshima. But as the Osundare poem goes, ‘What business of mine is it / so long they don’t take the yam / from my savouring mouth?’
Another thing to consider is our attitudes towards countries like Syria – the fact that we regard them as ‘others’ (See ‘9 Questions You’re Afraid to Ask About London’) the fact that we regard it as little more than an unimportant political country and therefore okay to be bombed.

Of course we would see things differently if Assad dropped a nuke – maybe it’s because of what films we watch or maybe it’s because of more logical reasoning. What we need to remember is the paints that are used when our news is displayed for us. We need to ask questions beyond that of what on Earth the newsreader is wearing and where did he get that tie from – we need to ask things like: What makes us think we have the authority to bomb another country that poses no threat to us? What alternative measures are we faced with as a wealthy and democratic country? Do we care because we have heard the facts, or because we are told to care?

I’m getting ahead of myself. I guess my point is watch the news – watch it as much as you can and pay attention to it. But don’t just watch, god knows all we do nowadays is watch – think.

-Lewis

(As a side note, thank you for reading. I haven't posted for a while despite having nothing else to do, but I caught a glimpse of my stats the other day and realised how many people check back every day. It kinda broke my heart. I feel like an abusive parent. But really, thank you.)