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Analysis of a Mustablishment. Part III.

The Lifestyle

For some people, a mustache is more than a mustache. It is a living, breathing thing. To be loved and nurtured as a child, or at least pet. For these men, a mustache is a Lifestyle. They enter mustache growing contests and wear their mustaches like kings wear crowns. These men know that no matter what they achieve in this world, their legacy will be their finely crafted mustaches.

You don’t see these men often because very few of them exist. And those that do exist tend to be older. Young men still have their lives ahead of them. They don’t have to resort to growing a mustache to feel noticed or like they will be remembered. They also frequently don’t have the time retirement offers to grow such a ‘stache. When you do catch a Lifestyle mustache, you immediately notice. You probably stare too.

Arguably the most celebrated mustache in America belongs to Hall of Fame relief pitcher Rollie Fingers. His gravity-defying masterpiece will probably find itself in the Smithsonian one day. The mustache was born when Rollie’s boss, then Oakland A’s owner Charlie O. Finley offered players a $300 bonus to grow mustaches. Fingers liked it so much, Sports Illustrated says his 1973 contract included $100 for mustache wax. Of course, he still wears it today.

If there is an argument for 3D busts instead of plaques at the baseball Hall of Fame, this mustache is it.

I will mention one other American mustache icon: Wilford Brimley. His mustache might not seem be as technically impressive as others in the Lifestyle category, but it has more soul and more body. I challenge you to find a thicker mustache. I also challenge you to find a picture of Wilford Brimley without a mustache. They don’t exist.

His parents say he was born with that mustache. The scowl came later in life.

There is another, darker, side to the Lifestyle mustache. A side that good, god-fearing mustache wearers like Wilford Brimley loathe. It is the side of sketchy pervert mustaches. Why do they share a category? Because the wearers of sketchy porno mustaches take them very seriously. They might not have the pleasant or awe-inspiring aesthetic quality of most mustaches, but they are part of a very finely crafted image. They are often framed by long hair and leisure suits. Or Hawaiian shirts:

You know what they say about men with dirty mustaches.

The Cop

They deserve there own category because I’m pretty sure police officers nowadays grow mustaches for no other reason than to fulfill a stereotype. There is little analysis here, but I will point out that mustaches in this category are prone to the Piazza Corollary, and that I believe the tendency for police officers to wear mustaches traces back to this man:

If you only know Wyatt Earp's mustache from the Kevin Costner movie, then you don't know Wyatt Earp's mustache.

I’ve read that police officers grow mustaches so frequently because in most departments it is the only facial hair cops are allowed. It’s a great rule. Here’s a picture of Dennis Mitchell, DARE Officer:

Drug abuse results in a thinning of mustache hair. Science has proven it.

Note: I apologize for the ridiculous formatting. BlogSpot is horrible, and as soon as convenient I plan on taking my (free) business elsewhere.

Irony Rocks (and Rolls)

It's a choir of old (but not that much older than the real thing) people singing The Who's My Generation. The music isn't face-melting and the humor isn't subtle, but that doesn't take take away from the ridiculous ironic genius of the video. Click the title of the post, or here.

Analysis of a Mustablishment. Part II.

The Flamer

Sometimes mustaches are exceptionally gay. There is nothing wrong with this. Unlike the Dictator, for example, which just screams mental problems, the Flamer says nothing of shortcomings. The Flamer is in no way intended to be a gay-bashing description for a mustache, it is just the best I can come up with.

To clarify, I’ll explain what a Flamer is not. The mustache Jake Gyllenhaal wore so uncomfortably towards the end of Brokeback Mountain was not a Flamer. That mustache falls into a different category because the character being gay has absolutely nothing to do with its existence.

The Flamer, a rare mustache in the real world, is the kind grown by a gay man for seemingly no other reason than to celebrate his being gay. In other words, this category exists for the sole purpose of classifying Freddie Mercury. If anybody else falls into it, that’s fine.

I wonder whose eyes he's looking into. It can't just be the camera.

As per the Piazza Corollary, the Flamer can and (and frequently does) overlap with the Thug . In fact, this combination is why it’s called the Piazza Corollary. Picture a tough gay biker with a big fu-manchu. It’s impossible to classify him or the mustache. He’s definitely gay, but he’s also very much badass. Just like Mike Piazza.

I can't even think of a clever comment for this picture.

The Thug

Some men grow mustaches to intimidate. At times it works, and at times it fails miserably. The success of the Thug mustache has more to do with the man behind the mustache than the mustache itself. Like The Dictator it can be the result of insecurity. But for the Thug, certain other conditions apply. Men in this category tend to be frightening even without mustaches, usually because of their physical size, but also often due to their mental instability and evil intentions.

The Thug is at it’s most visible when watching baseball. By it’s very nature baseball consists of many individual matchups in which keen observation is often a prerequisite for success. Players can’t help looking at each other. So many (especially pitchers and power hitters) decide that they might as well scare the bejesus out of opponents by growing mustaches. Devotees include the aforementioned Mike Piazza, Randy Johnson, and clinically insane pitcher Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky.

And he did it all without steroids.

Stars such as David Crosby, Lemmy from Motorhead, and Derek Smalls of Spinal Tap. These are men who realize that no amount of swagger or talent can make the same impression on stage as a badass ‘stache:

His mustache is in between fire and ice, kind of like lukewarm water.

As well as just plain bad people. Gang members, for example, grow this kind of mustache. They are mean and because of their Thug mustache, people know it right when they walk into a room. My favorite actor, Danny Trejo, fits into this category. Trejo used to be a gang banger and a very good armature boxer. His career in acting began by accident. A director saw him walking near a set and offered him a job as an extra immediately. That’s how menacing he looks. You might know him as that scary looking Mexican guy who is in literally everything:

Seriously, it's the mustache that makes him scary. Also check out www.myspace.com/trejodanny

Also falling into this category are men who might not necessarily be intimidating at first sight, but grow mustaches to foster a sense of evil. Their mustaches fall somewhere between creepy and scary. Although these men aren’t big, it is obvious at first glance that they are up to no good. Like underhanded Wacky Racer and pet abuser Dick Dastardly:

Even though his glasses are upside down, Dick Dastardly's mustache is very long.

Analysis of a Mustablishment. Part I.

Welcome. What follows is a serious essay about the gravest of topics. Last fall, about an hour before it was due to be turned in, I wrote a poem about mustaches. The poem was shitty and nobody deserves the kind of pain that would come from reading it. But it got me thinking. And now six months of intense meditation have come to fruition. This writing may not be as brutally honest or emotional as the poem, but I believe it is true to the procrastinated soul of that abortion of a poem.

In my opinion there are eight and one half classes of mustache grower. The style of mustache they wear is of no importance (though certain patterns do exist). What matter are intangible things like the character and behavior of the man behind the mustache, and his motivation for growing the mustache.

Before we start, there is one crucial caveat: It is possible for one man to fit into more than one category of mustache wearer, or for the same mustache to change categories over time. This is called the Piazza Corollary.

The Dictator

Part of what makes the mustache so frustrating and hard to study is that each one can say so many things. Men can study their whole lives and never fully grasp the significance of a single mustache. Sigmund Freud, for example, was so confounded by the mustache that he absolutely refused to wear one.

However, it doesn’t take a genius, or even Sigmund Freud to perceive that mustaches are frequently born from a seed of insecurity. Nowhere is this more evident than amongst wearers who fall into the Dictator category. The category gets its name, obviously, from the awe-inspiring list of 20^th century dictators who sported mustaches.

The includes household names like Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin, and Sadaam Hussein as well as second tier dictators like Agosto Pinochet, Francisco Franco, Anwar Al-Sadat, and Zimbabwe’s very own Robert Mugabe. Stylewise, my favorite dictator ‘stache belongs to Jozef Pilsudski. Pilsudski died in 1935 and spent the last ten years of his life running Poland as only a man who liked like this could:

It is no coincidence that Hitler waited three years after his death to invade Poland.

Dictators, by the very nature of their jobs are insecure. It requires a certain level of insecurity to be so power hungry that you want an entire nation under your control. And for most of them, that isn’t enough. They live in a perpetual state of fear. The smart dictator trusts nobody and is eternally vigilant, seeking out and destroying threats to his power.

That type of egotistical and paranoid behavior is not limited to dictators. Other men are insecure, power-tripping maniacs and those men grow mustaches for the same reasons. Despite not having his own country, a man might still have a dictator mustache. Consider your shitty middle-managing boss, overly strict fifth grade teacher, or Eli Whallach’s character Tuco (The Ugly) in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Or even better, have a look recently fired UN Ambassador John Bolton:

Some experts speculate that Bolton's mustache actually consists of Kofi Annan's hair. They say he stole it from "Tico's Barbershop for Men" in the Bronx.

Also, a quick side note: I could not find any Asian dictators with mustaches. I’m not sure why this is, but I’m pretty sure it has to do with the different significances of mustaches historically in that part of the world. At least I know that if I was a dictator, I wouldn’t want to be following in the facial hair footsteps of anybody like Confucius, the only man to ever pull off a completely separate mustache and beard simultaneously.

To clarify, Confucius was not a dictator

On Mullets (A Work In Progress Forever).

Mullets in so many styles

Mullets that go on for miles

Mullet-watching in a plaza

Mullets often induce nausea

Mullet’s that inspire awe

Mullets begging for a saw

Mullets that fade into dreadlocks

Mullets smell like hippy socks*

Mullets frame heads like trashy crowns

Mullet is my favorite noun

Mullets on leather-clad punks

Mullets on white-capried hunks

Mullets as Spanish as paella

Mullets fluffed and puffed and layered

Mullets make pretty girls hideous

Mullets aren’t worn by the fastidious

Mullets don’t deserve real poems

Mullets don’t even deserve rhymes

*That is, if there are any hippies out there who wear socks.

** In the third to last stanza, pronounce the word layered in a Boston accent so as to make it rhyme why paella.

Get The Hell Off My Plane

Is there a more inane reason to have your flight canceled than this?

A Northwest Airlines flight was canceled because a passenger heard a pilot swearing over his cell phone, confronted the pilot, and got sworn at by the pilot.

Imagine if bus routes got canceled for every petty confrontation involving the drivers.

If they can do their job, I don't give a flying fuck what pilots say over their cell phones. Hell, Maverick swore all the time in Top Gun. And maybe a little vulgarity would bring some much needed character to the agonizing in-air commentary most pilots saddle you with.