Lets talk about Spanish, and hair cutting, and androgyny. It was a couple weeks before I would be attending a number of arts events and I needed a half decent haircut. Okay I hadn’t had my hair cut all winter since a traumatic incident last time.
It’s not easy getting your hair cut if you are androgynous. Although you would think the invention of the unisex hair salon and unisex haircut in the 1980’s would have solved all that. But no, no matter what I say, ‘flat top’, ‘buzz cut’ - thinking singer Grace Jones, they say ‘like a man’ and I sigh and give up and say ‘yes’. It still gets cut short in some head-hugging hair facing forward definitely feminine with little curls by your ear and a wispy fringe like model ‘Twiggy’ kind of way. Sigh. Instead of some clean cut, partly sticking up on top, stylish kind of way. The thing is I don’t want my hair cut in a particularly masculine or feminine way, I want it cut like me, what I look like. But there are not words for that, the androgynous haircut.
The best haircuts I ever had were at a Men's Hairdressers on Lambton Quay, Wellington; in 3 Lamps Plaza, Ponsonby Auckland; Kaua’I, Hawaii, and up the Sunshine Coast. Haircutting is a service industry, where immigrants, refugees and visible minorities are over- represented. It’s partly about what kind of work is (and isn’t) made available, or starting your own business I think. Or perhaps cultural rituals around hair, or maybe coz no one else knows how to cut their hair either? Some hairdressers say they like being around people, well you know like for 20 minutes at a time. At a Men’s Hairdresser at 3 Lamps Plaza, Ponsonby the woman and younger man were from Iraq, and they knew their local clientele (him perhaps personally), how to cut gay peoples hair, men and women. In the beauty shop which also did enamel fingernails, in a tiny strip mall next to an industrial part of the highway in Kaua’i, the woman hairdresser was Asian Hawaiian. I gradually told her bit by bit, you know trying it out, to see what her reaction was, that when I got back I was going to be best man at a wedding and would be wearing a suit. She gave me the best haircut ever! Up the Sunshine Coast, a neighbor cut hair, she was originally from Greece and liked to talk about her trips back there. She had such a lovely way about her. Maybe coz she was such a good conversationalist you hardly even noticed her cutting your hair, all you could see was the azure seas of Greece, and then voila it was time to shake out the plastic cape. At a Men's Hairdresser on Lambton Quay, the woman was originally from England I think, or her family were, it was a government town, she asked you how your work was going, told you about her sons sports events. Her salon was right handy to me, I got my hair cut often, and was happy. Oh yeah and there was that cute wee pixie of a lesbian who was raised by dykes and worked at some swanky downtown gay frufru hairdressers in the ‘couv, who could make you look and feel fabulous! But that was many years ago, and then she moved salons, and we lost track of her, and we couldn’t afford it anyway. Before that I'd come from getting my hair cut for $5- $10 at the Peoples Centre. Where the cuts were okay, more perfunctory, completed with good natured humour by an irrepressible sleep deprived young Russian woman, who was in night school studying physics.
My friend T had such a traumatic haircutting experience she didn’t get her hair cut for 2 years, which is saying something for a butch who looks good with a buzz cut! I don’t know exactly what happened, I think the hairdresser saw the lesbian symbol tattooed on the back of neck, and things went downhill from there. She arrived at my place with hair down to her shoulders, asking for an intervention! She was real sick of her cult-like government workplace too – if you called in sick, then didn’t answer your phone later, managers came to your house! So I typed her arts based resume while I was at it, as part of my comprehensive complimentary make over service! Took her in to the lovely woman at the Men's Hairdressers, who I had already primed with the story my friend was recovering from a bad hair cutting experience. The Hairdresser chatted away to us about how my friends holiday was going, she looked at my friend’s girlfriends short haircut a few times, and modeled it partly on that. Turned out just fine!
I am ashamed to confess I privately thought my friend was being a bit of a baby about the whole haircutting incident, until, I had my own bad experience recently. I’ve been to this place a few times, Iranian women work there, I have had some good hair cuts there, but lately I keep getting this woman who says ‘oh I remember you’, points to a picture of a man with a curly flat top haircut, I say ‘yes’ and away she goes. It would be fine if she would just stop cutting half way through, it looks good. But for some reason no matter what I say she keeps going and it gets shorter and shorter. Until she might as was well have taken the clippers and run them over my head with a number 3 blade until I look like the fuzzy egg I do, at the end anyway! Don't get me wrong I have spent many a year with just such a haircut, and I did it myself, but theres good #3's and theres bad #3's! Maybe that's the difference between a haircut and a hairstyle, I was here for the latter. For goodness sake it’s the middle of winter! I go home, cry, put on a hat, won’t come out of my room for a day and leave the hat on when in public for 2 weeks! Until it grows a little. I’m not all that fond of having anyone touch my head anyway. Often after the creative concept negotiations, and they get going I shut my eyes and go off in to a meditative trance just to cope. Kind of like being at the dentist. Hairdressing is a act and conversation across culture, language, gender and sexuality, some things get lost in translation. I suspect though for me the concept that androgyny is something to be accentuated, (if you've got it flaunt it!) desired, desirable, may be biggest loss in translation.
No more! So I decided to return to my late teens early 20’s practice and cut my own hair! I have some clippers, so I got them out, plugged them in, oiled them, and away I went. Well not quite, this time I proceeded with caution, I was laughing picturing some of the less than great youthful haircuts I gave myself! So for the first time I got out the instructions. It said ‘Instrucciones para recortar el cabello en casa’ you know which got
Para Graphia’s attention what with the word PARA being in there!
On the English version of the instructions it said: ‘Home Hair trimming instructions’. There were pictures too, with hair trimming tips, what process to follow, the order, and how to do a crew cut, puurrffect! I followed the instructions, I remembered how to cut hair. I laughed some more remembering the good and bad haircuts I gave some of my male fellow students at Uni who asked me to cut their hair and paid me in chocolate. I know how to cut MY hair, I’m real good at cutting straight up to the ears with the scissors, I used the clippers on the sides and the back, but not cutting too high up, and not too close, the largest blade, number 7. Which was good, its too hard to cut the back of your hair using scissors, directions become very confusing in the mirror. I cut the top with scissors, using the trim along your index finger method paying special attention to that tricky crown area. Otherwise one week after my haircut I start to look like a parrot! I really like my haircut! It still sticks up, there’s a bit if a wave to it.
So about those Spanish instructions: ‘Instrucciones para recortar el cabello en casa’, according to Bablefish online translation
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt it means ‘Instructions to trim the hair in house’ which if you re-translate back to Spanish is ‘Instrucciones de ajustar el pelo en casa’ again to English ‘Instructions to fit the hair in house’ back again to Spanish ‘Instrucciones de caber el pelo en casa’. That’s about where it ends.
Unless you think it wise to rely on free online translations such as Babelfish – and I personally don’t - as opposed to say online Dictionaries which seem much more reliable in their translation, of words, if not always sentences. Part of the fun of Babelfish is translating and retranslating a phrase between languages as it gets further and further away from the original sentence to something ludicrous, fantastical or nonsensical which may make you howl with laughter. But it’s only really funny for about a day and then you get bored. Unlike human translators, computers do not cope well with idioms, colloquialisms and contractions. Which is how the drift away from the original occurs, and because languages may construct sentences so differently, while computers translate literally. No not literary! But that might be useful……
