Mustache mustache

I couldn’t find a YouTube clip of Kottke playing Accordion Bells, so I sent this to Polansky to cheer him up:

IN case you have been in a hole the last few years, stylish men have cast aside razors for electric clippers and taken to styling their face and body hair — a k a “manscaping” — with a zeal not seen since Edward Scissorhands. The beard, that onetime symbol of rural cluelessness, has become a badge of urban hipsterdom. This has grown to include a spectrum of variations, from a week’s slackerly growth to a handsome Czar Nicholas II beard to a full-blown Rutherford B. Hayes thicket.

But its upstairs neighbor, the mustache, has had a bumpier ride. It, like the beard, enjoyed its most widespread popularity between 1850 and 1900; John Wilkes Booth, it must be conceded, had a beaut. But today, the mustache cannot shake its ties to the sexy-yet-buffoonish machismo of the mid-1970s, epitomized by Burt Reynolds, Sam Elliott and the Village People, ’stache sporters all.

Apparently mustache promotion is a growth industry. Okay, okay, no John Bolton joke here.