Spring Pruning

While you might expect this term to apply only to plants, it is a little known fact that this annual ritual is also performed by a member of the animal kingdom. The Bensonius Lupus Maximus, usually found in central China around the Yangtze River delta, and occasionally in warmer climates in South East Asia and North East Australia, will every year cut off his long, shaggy winter mane to make way for new growth in the spring. We were lucky enough to capture this on camera:

Looking like I just got back from a
performance of my latest opus

Got the threads, but now I need the haircut

About to go "under the knife"

The corporate effect was instant

I scrub up alright, don't you think?

And while we're on the subject of hair and hairy people, here's one from the archives:

A Beginner’s Guide to Beard Art – by Benson Wallace

the following beard configurations should only be attempted under the strict supervision of a beard art practitioner

(The original version was published in the University of Queensland Semper, November 2001. This edition has since been updated to include recent beard experiments)

What is beard art?

Beard art is technically defined as the deliberate trimming of facial hair to produce a distinctive pattern. Beard art can be anything from a small pair of sideburns through to a full beard. Although it is still a matter of debate among academics in the field as to whether a full beard is counted as beard art, in this article, we will include them in our definition. Standard beards such as the goatee, the moustache and the sideburns will not be covered in this article, as they are already in common use. This article will concentrate on what people usually think of when they hear the words “beard art”, that is, unusual and eccentric beard patterns.

Getting Started

Before you unleash your facial hair on the world, make sure you have enough of it. Depending on the complexity of the beard art you are attempting, you should have a good even coverage over your entire face after 4 or 5 days. Do not attempt beard art if your facial hair is in any way patchy, wispy or fluffy.

This is an example of a good “blank canvass”

A slightly overgrown canvass

Do not attempt beard art if your beard looks like this

Equipment

You will need a high quality razor that gives a close shave but is not too bulky. The Schick FX or the Gillete Mach 3 are both good all-round beard art razors, but their precision is not quite high enough for some delicate operations. For beginners, however, these are probably the best razors to start with.

Conventional shaving cream is not good for beard art as it can easily get in the way and obscure your vision of the masterpiece. Nowadays you can buy shaving cream that stays on the face as a clear gel; this is much better for precision shaving.

For longer-term projects, it may also be helpful to have a beard trimmer or a pair of beard trimming scissors.

Basic Rules

Symmetry – as a general rule, beard art should be symmetric. That is, it should be mirrored about the line that runs down the nose and finishes at the chin. A good example of how symmetry can be used is shown below. This beard is modeled on Samuel L. Jackson’s beard in the movie “Shaft”. Note the careful trimming of the moustache and the appropriate use of accessories.

The Shaft beard, also known as the Omega beard

There are always exceptions to the rule though, and recently a new movement known as Avante-Garde beard art has been emerging, which features asymmetric beard patterns. Some examples of this are shown below.

The Microphone Beard – so named because it resembles a headset mic

The half beard, as seen on the Bic razor ad

Maintenance – how often should you trim your work of art once it has been carved out? The general rule about trimming beard art is that the frequency of trimming should be directly proportional to the complexity of the beard. For example, a simple beard, such as the large sideburns shown below, is best left to its own devices, and trimming should be kept to a minimum.






Lamb Chops should be left to their own devices

Benson would often get moody during full moons

Complex beards, such as the “Lightning Bolt” beard, need to be trimmed regularly otherwise they will lose their shape.

The Lightning Bolt or Zigzag beard – an example of poor maintenance.

This beard required around 45 minutes of maintenance per day

In addition to regular trimming, often the blank areas of the face need to be shaved daily in order to maintain the beard’s sharp appearance:







A strict shaving routine must be adhered to for successful beard art.







Coverage Factor – The Beard Coverage Factor, or BCF, is the fraction of the face that is covered by hair. It is a number between 0 and 1, and is defined as the ratio of the area covered by beard art to the area of the entire face. You should aim to have a BCF of between 0.2 and 0.5. Too high a BCF can result in a cluttered beard that requires a lot of maintenance. Too small a BCF will make your beard hard to notice.

A warning – do not get over ambitious when you are first starting out with your beard art. Know the limits of your beard growth and keep it simple, otherwise you may end up with some bad experiences. Below are some of the traps you may fall into:

A failed sideburn experiment – a warning to all youngsters out there.

An attempt at an Abraham Lincoln Beard.

A classic example of an over-ambitious beard, and one that few can pull off - the soccerball

Celebrity Beards – a quick review

George Michael: freestyle goatee
BCF: 0.2
Difficulty: medium to high
Comments: obviously well maintained but needs to shave the moustache to a smaller width

Merv Hughes: moustache with elongated ends
BCF: 0.3
Difficulty: Medium
Comments: good concept but a little overgrown

Elvis: Lamb Chops
BCF: 0.35
Difficulty: Low
Comments: a classic example of large sideburns that do not require trimming

Copyright 2008 Benson Wallace

A close shave?

(published in Map Magazine, Nanjing, September 2007)

Finding a barbershop shave in China is extremely difficult for the more 'hirsuite' among us, as Benson Wallace finds out the hard way...

Those of you with heavy beards will know what a drag it can be to have to hack away at a stubborn beard every morning before work so that you can conform to the norms of respectability, and not scare away small children. Conversely, you will know how relaxing and liberating it can be to exercise your right not to shave when you're on holidays. An extension of this freedom, that I discovered while travelling in the developing world, is having someone else, a professional barber, shave that wild and untamed holiday growth for you.

During my travels, I had become so accustomed to this lifestyle, that by the time I arrived in China, I had ceased even carrying a razor or shaving cream. In India, for example, there had been an abundance of barbers just waiting to give you an expertly smooth shave, whenever you needed one, for about 5RMB (50 Euro cents). That said, I arrived in the Middle Kingdom at a time when I had been exercising that freedom not to shave a little more than usual – I hadn't shaved for four weeks, nor had a haircutfor about nine months – and found that I wasn't so well received this time around.

It would be the fourth time that I had set foot on Chinese soil, so for me, it was starting to feel like my second home. Obviously the feeling was not reciprocated, however, as I ran into some trouble at the customs checkpoint when I presented my shaggy, long-haired, bearded, prisoner-of-war-like self at the counter, looking completely different to the face on my passport. I was asked to present another form of identification, but unfortunately all I had was a driver's licence photo that looked even more clean-cut than the one in my passport. Thankfully, after a few more suspicious looks, I was allowed to pass into the country.

Seeing that I was continuing to get strange looks from the locals (more so than usual, at any rate), and that if I wanted to find a job, it was looking like I might have to take the advice of George Thorogood's 1993 hit single “Get a Haircut”, I decided that the first order of the day should be to get said haircut - and while I was on the subject, I badly needed a shave. Finding a barbershop capable of doing both of these things turned out to be a difficult task in a country where most men have about three hairs on their chin. I practically had to get quotes for shaving my beard - they'd look at me and say "you want me to shave that? Buddy, that's gonna cost you. I'll do it for 25 Yuan". Many times, I was refused service altogether. Sometimes, it almost felt like barbers would see me walking down the street and hastily shut their door and close their windows, like a scene from one of those old western movies where the lone gunman strides into town.

This is the kind of customer that even the most experienced of barbers has nightmares about

Eventually I found some cowboy in a back alley who did it with a blunt cut-throat razor for my target price, 5RMB. Then I discovered the real meaning of Chinese torture. Every stroke had me taking deep breaths, kicking my feet and squirming in my chair. I tell you, if you ever need me to confess something, just take me down to the local hairdresser's, strap me into the chair, and have them shave me with cold water and no soap.

Mind you, the price paid for a shave did not always correspond with the quality of the shave, as I was to find out through the rest of my journey – I had some reasonable shaves for 3RMB, and some very bad ones for 15RMB. Often, I was charged a “heavy beard surcharge” or “extra razor surcharge”, but a brand-new razor meant nothing when it was in the hands of an inept young girl who was working in a hairdressing salon that was a front for a "special massage" parlour.

Things got more difficult the further south I went (while northern Chinese can usually grow a goatee, Cantonese men have virtually no facial hair or body hair), and by the time I got to Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province (aka Canton), there was just no market for barbershop shaves. I don't think there is even a word for "razor" in Cantonese, and the word "beard" refers to the two long strands of hair poking out of a mole on your chin that you've been growing all your life.

Finally, after trying out a few of my local barbers after moving to Nanjing, and finding that the shaving process was not only painful, but also time consuming, I slowly began to let go of my stubbornly-held romantic notion of going down to my local barbershop for a shave every couple of days. I once read a piece of travel advice that went something like, "Countries aren't designed to make travellers comfortable. They're designed to make the citizens of that country comfortable". This certainly rings true in China, a country where a can of shaving cream costs the same as a day's wages for an average worker (and 2-3 times what it costs in the west, more to the point), and where most men change their razor once a year. I guess I'll just have to keep forking out for those Mach-3s after all.

Copyright Benson Wallace 2007

Extreme(ly) Weak-End - A Day at Jiangsu Television

(published in Map Magazine, Nanjing, August 2007)

The prologue to this story begins on the balmy beaches of Goa, southwest India, when I was about 7 months into a one year trip around the world. There, I bought a “travel guitar” and began earning a keep as a musician by playing and singing easy listening classics in tourist bars and restaurants in exchange for beer and food. Since my music had been quite well received, and I had always wanted to be a rock star, I resolved to continue on this career path, and hopefully, start getting paid more than fish and beer.

After nearly 4 months in India, I decided that it was time to head east again, and I flew out of New Delhi for China in early March last year. Starting in Beijing and working my way south, I continued on my path towards “stardom”, by visiting my contacts around the country and attempting to peddle my travelling musician “wares” around various bars as I went. I didn't know it at the time, but destiny had set my rock star trajectory on a collision course for Jiangsu Television and their weekend variety show, “非常周末” (Feichang Zhoumo – Extremely Weekend).

I got the gig somewhat by chance, when I was visiting Adam-Paul Smolak (a.k.a. AP), an American businessman who is the CEO of an on-line, English learning, “edu-tainment” company called “Enjoyabc.com”, and a personal friend of mine whom I met in Yunnan Province during an earlier trip to China in 2001. AP had set up shop in Nanjing in 2003, and had worked hard at establishing his 关系(guanxi - connections) around town, so it was with envy that I watched his recent TV appearance on the Jiangsu Television talk show Small Talk as “CEO of the week”. AP assured me that getting on TV around here was easy, and true to his word, two days later he'd been asked to appear on a weekend variety show on the very same network. The gig was for a foreigner who spoke a bit of Chinese to participate in a matchmaking game (one girl, two local lads, and a hapless foreigner) that was to be one segment of the show. AP wasn't really interested, and nor did he have the time, so he called out to me from his office, “Hey Benson, you said you wanted to be on TV, right?”. The rest was history.

The next day I met with the producer of the show, and my travel guitar found a use for itself again - I was to be pitched on the show as a travelling musician, and sing a Chinese song to try and “woo” the beauty. On arrival at the TV station, I was ushered backstage and greeted by a scene of busy make-up artists and some rather attractive lasses practicing their dance moves. We were briefed on the format of the show, which was best described as semi-live and semi-scripted, and it quickly became clear that I was to be the comic relief. The two other guys were given trendy shirts to wear, while I was left in my scruffy travel clothes (they did, however, put me through the make-up production line, which I thought made me look like a zombie, but apparently turns out well under lights).

After this I was made to wait backstage for several hours while they filmed the other parts of the show (we were last, and the audience was live), so I nervously strummed my guitar and tried to memorize the words to “对面的女孩儿看过来“ (Duimian de nühaier kanguolai – which translates roughly as “Girl over there, look over here”), and the rest of the Chinese punch lines that we'd agreed on, while sweating my make-up off.

The basic plot followed that of most dating shows – the girl, looking for “Mr Right”, would ask us some tough questions and put us through a few “tests”, in order to determine which of us was worthy of taking her out on a date. During the first “test”, we had to see how many needles we could thread while being distracted by couple of “辣妹” (lamei - "hottie" - hey, that's the term I was told to use!), which, to my delight, turned out to be the above-mentioned attractive lasses. I was instructed to give up on the needles and start dancing with the girls. To make up for this mishap, of course, I then had to offer to sing a song to the girl to try and win her heart, and my guitar magically appeared from offstage – cue the Chinese love song.

When show time came and the lights went up, my Mandarin was hopelessly inadequate – I couldn't follow the flow of the show at all and often just had to hope that I was nodding and smiling at the right time, my song lyrics came out all wrong, and when I was given a chance to speak, I stumbled over my sentences. Thankfully, they had a skillful editor, and I think I came off quite well in the final product.

After a few more elimination rounds, I was part of another pre-scripted gag where, in a Chinese play on words, I deliberately wrote the wrong (but identical-sounding) characters when we were asked to write the names of the four city gates of Nanjing (们 – plural for people, vs 门 - gate, both pronounced "men"). Simple stuff, but the Chinese audience seemed to love watching this “foreign comedian” sing, dance, and write Chinese in child-like handwriting.

Did I get the girl you ask? Alas no; that was scripted too. Not that I was overly upset - there wasn't even a dinner-for-two prize on offer for the winner, and what's more, I got the girl's phone number anyway! And so it was with much satisfaction that I collected my first paycheck in China – 200 Yuan and a free dinner for 8 hours' work (albeit mostly sitting around backstage practicing guitar). It's a long road to the top, but you have to start somewhere, right?

To see my appearance on the show, go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rVXjudyEBk (Part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvzEzpUYEr0 (Part 2)

Copyright Benson Wallace 2007