Hackles, Pompadours and Pentimento

I don’t always need to be right, but it sure as hell gets my hackles up when I am wrong.

Hackles. Apparently they only go in one direction. You may wonder what they are. Hackles are the “erectile” hair along the back of a dog, or other animal, that rise when it is angry. I sort of knew that, but I never thought of hair as being “erectile”, but it makes sense if you think about all the hair raising adventures. And what could be more hair raising adventures than growing up?

Speaking of growing up, does your hair grow up or does it grow out? Is it falling out? What is the bald truth? Is this just a hairpin curve on the detour to hell?

I was raised with my hair combed down, and the front combed up and across in a sort of junior quiff. Sadly, I did not get a badge for achieving quiffdom. With quiffs, the hair just above the forehead is swept upward and backward. See me at age 2 or 3 below with my sister Kathy.

As a hair style I favour the pompadour, a style where your hair is brushed backwards to make the hair denser and more sleek. This style became more popular for those gifted late in the 70’s and early 80’s.

Early adopters of the pompadour included a band from Southern California called the Screamers. This graphic below is more famous than the band.

Lead singer Tomata du Plenty achieved his look with the help of hair sprays, gels and a full-time stylist. Here is a painting of Tomata by Penelope Houston of the Avengers.

A Pompadour take a ridiculous amount of time and effort just to maintain its volume and height. All of the hair on top is pushed up and swept backward, giving a lot more volume than a mere quiff. In general, pompadours are glossier, higher maintenance, and require more styling product than quiffs do. 

In the early 80’s, New York’s bad boy performance artist John Sex, infamously kept his hair erect with a combination of Dippity-do, Aqua Net, egg whites, beer, and semen.

The word Pompadour comes from Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764), King Louis XV's mistress and cultural advisor.

Enquiring minds may ask “what about bouffants?” Which came first - the bouffant or the egg white pompadour? Did the pompadour precede the bouffant? What is the difference?

For those keeping score, a bouffant is a wannabe pompadour, first crafted for Marie Antoinette, who had thin hair. She wanted to create the illusion of a full head of hair. So the bouffant is a wannabe pompadour.

Madame Pompadour was mistress to the King of France from 1745 to 1764. Marie Antoinette was Queen of France from 1774 to 1792.

Madame Pompadour gave head and Marie Antoinette lost her head.

Time to pull my head out of the proverbial rabbit hole and get back to hackles and the growth of my anger. As a young punk, a time when my hackles really grew up, I shaved my head, then grew the resulting crew cut, which later grew into the stratosphere in the grand style of the grandest pompadour.

Between 1979 and 1984, it was a bull market for voluminous hair, and by the time I had created my fake jazz nom du plume, Les Goodman, it was more Sex than Screamer.

But I digress. We started talking about hackles, not hair. Before I could say Macguffin, my shaggy dog dashed off chasing a double rainbow, and dove down the rabbit hole.

I should be peeling back the skins of artifice, like layers of onionskin, crying as I peel away, revealing …..more onion.

These days I raise hackles before I raise glasses. Although my drinking is a distant memory, I remember when I did not have any hackles. I was very young.

My long term memory is a rich tapestry, built on loose threads from the old carpet that I played cars on as a child, to driving across Canada in a van with Jazzmanian Devils.

I can remember speaking to the local RCMP detachment in Moose Jaw, as we had to get said van repaired before continuing on to Calgary. Being the only van filled with jazz crazed young men , I guess we stood out. Strangers.

My long term memories are preserved with alcohol, but my short term memory sucks. I used to remember names of people and even their phone numbers, I memorized entire scripts of plays. Now I have to look 3 or 4 times at a phone number just to write it down. But my memories of the past seem more vivid. Cloudy, incomplete, yet vivid.

Is that possible?

In the 1980’s, I read the book Pentimento, by playwright Lillian Hellman, who was married to Dashiell Hammett. The National Gallery in London describes the word pentimento as being “derived from the Italian 'pentirsi', which means to repent or change your mind. Pentimento is what we call the changes made by an artist during the process of painting. These changes become hidden beneath subsequent paint layers. Hellman’s memoir Pentimento, looked back at some of the people who, knowingly or unknowingly, exerted profound influence on her development as a woman and a writer. 

Hellman describes it as "Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again."

When buildings are torn down, we discover behind the walls, previous signs from earlier decades. We call these ghost signs. My good friend, and lifetime subscriber Gord McCaw captures these Ghost signs, revealing remnants of old advertisements painted on the side of a building in the pre-billboard era.

We discovered them only upon demolition of later-built adjoining structures. Once revealed, they are often hidden again when construction of the new adjoining building continues, literally going back into the woodwork, only to be seen if and when the newer building is itself demolished.

As I grow older, my hair gets thinner, my memories are buried further down in the brain fog. I long for the comfort of pentimento, and ghost signs. Instead I am served up shards of old songs that were never finished.

I was reading an article today about Michael Stipe, formerly of R.E.M. in the NY Times. He recounts his struggle to continue creating in a way that has personal relevance. He is easily distracted. He will jot down something, as I do with my Notes. It is not a lyric, but writes it down anyway, in hopes that the seed will grow into a lyric, and eventually a song.

“All these ideas I want to focus on, I’m not going to have the life span to be able to complete all of them.” It wasn’t lost on him how many friends and acquaintances whose names came crackling into our conversation were no longer alive.

He says he has difficulty finishing songs because “life gets in the way.” Boy those words resonate. He speaks of 2022 as “the year of flexibility by necessity, and ’23 as the year of flexibility by choice.” He remains optimistic on all fronts.

I recognize those words as truths. For me, the years 2021 - 2023 have been full of reasons to be both hopeful and hellish, leaving me thankful for the lessons and the love, but there is residual anger as well.

I am no stranger to anger. My father was an angry man, although I’m sure he wasn’t as angry as I remember him, but it’s those moments that stick. His name was Fred, so I sometimes say “ I’m getting my Fred On.”

My anger comes out at the wrong times, if there ever are right times to be angry. I have little patience. There are too many fools to suffer, and too much suffering to be foolish.

I feel this need to reflect and write it down, while simultaneously feeling I should be doing something more important. Life is not forever, especially given my age and my recent bad luck. So I feel this need to get it down, (yet not knowing what “it” is), and to not waste my remaining days with depression.

If you know depression, you know when you are in it. And you know that finding your way out of it, is not as simple as wishing. Let me close with a sunset from my balcony.

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