Our Towns

What about movies or directors with a strong sense of place? There are a few working now who I think can be praised for their sensitivity to locality. David Gordon Green and Kelly Reichardt come to mind. Perhaps the great cinematic poet of place in my book is the Scottish director Bill Forsyth. But their worlds, the South, the Pacific Northwest, Scotland, are far removed from my own.

It’s something else to see your own town up there. Though the general area in Connecticut that I grew up in has had exteriors grace the screen, usually in movies about suburban dystopia, I know of only one movie that was actually filmed in what I still call my town: Tom Gilroy’s 1999 Spring Forward. It’s a lovely piece about the friendship between two parks department workers played by Liev Schreiber and Ned Beatty.

The thing about the movie is that it doesn’t obviously set itself in the town of Ridgefield – there are no shots that I can recall of Town Hall, of the quaint Main Street, of the historic Community Center building, no references to the name. This reticence beautifully suits a film focused on two figures who seem to be both at the periphery of the town and central to its life. A very different movie could have been made about Ridgefield, and it wouldn’t be an less true. But Gilroy emphasizes the smallness. Things like the stock people put in family history, and lasting friendship by sheer circumstance, both of which seem not only to be more prevalent in smaller towns than in cosmopolitan cities or larger, more anonymous suburbs, but that have been part of my own life there. The movie is made with a small town pace -- the seasons pass from scene to scene but the conversations between the two men, months long in the making, continue unrushed. Filmed, as the two often are, alone, together, the characters sometimes seem forgotten in an otherwise anonymous, New England town that I just happen to recognize as my own.

-Don DeLillo

It's that time of the month again, time to prune my ever-thinning locks of hair. Cheered on by the mid-August murk that's descended upon the eastern seaboard, I'm sporting, against my better instincts, a kind of ad-hoc ducktail. It needs to go.

Unlike the female lead in this summer's Wes Anderson knock-off, (500) Days of Summer, I've neither loved my "long dark hair," nor "how easily [I] could cut it off and not feel a thing." And not only because the window for growing my hair long has closed -- slammed -- shut.

Too often I've settled for the discount barbershops, your Bo Rics, your Supercuts, your Fantastic Sams (no apostrophe, fellas?). It's time to graduate to a full-blown (pun intended) experience, the real McCoy: mirrors edged with yellowed clippings of high school football triumphs not of the current decade; the lead barber, Gussie, who inherited the shop from his father, Big Gus, and wears matching rhinestone encrusted pinky rings; the dim hope that a shave with warm lotion and a straight razor is the fanning of a few GW's away.

Surely I'm being nostalgic, tracking back to "Y" (Yale) Haircutting, a barber I frequented when living in downtown New Haven, CT, where much of the above is still possible. Like the dive bar regulars who sit on a corner stool farthest from the door, at "Y" there were the local-friends-of-staff who sat in their designated chairs away from the haircutting, there to return the volleys of barber commentary ("Hot one today." "Sure is." "Can you believe what 'xyz public official' did now?" "It's beyond me. This country's in the shitter.") Repeat daily. They seemed to never leave.

"A barber is a place where you can get a haircut," writes Geoff Dyer. "That's the defining quality of the establishment but certain other elements are also essential: the availability of conversation (if required), reading matter and a task-specific seat (midway between the regular chairs provided for waiting customers and the frightening specialism of a dentist's chair.)" A suitable definition, but somewhat parochial. The photographer Edward Weston (no relation) got at something deeper: "I always feel denuded from the barber shop -- quite immodest: and seated in the chair I feel helpless -- anything may happen."

What do you think of when you think about barber shops? Is a trip to the salon one that elicits dread, that, like Samson, loss of hair is loss of life force? Or do you look forward to a haircut as a chance for renewal, that in the trusted hands of scissor-wielding men and women holds a new you?

Gallery:

Peter Brown: Barber Shop, Brownfield, Texas, 1994.

Michael Ormerod: Untitled, Undated.

Christiaan Geirgio salon, Grand Hyatt Mumbai

Sign, 5th Ave. btw 14th and 15th Streets, Brooklyn, NY