Saturday, July 11, 2009

On Foof...(from last week)

Foof, froof, frou-frou la-la. Accoutrements.

I don't usually wear a lot of foof. I do however have a redundant nasal piercing, made redundant by the fact that I only ever wear the retainer so you can't see the dang thing. After suffering the discomfort and humbling embarrassment of one too many colds and sinus infections this winter, I put my dainty bull ring away. It's dumb, I know. Maybe I should let the piercing heal up but the retainer isn't doing any harm in there; it just hangs out (not literally) and sometimes I touch the sides of my nose and can feel it's little U shaped arch and I feel a little tough, maybe a little bit hard core. I paid $30 bucks to have someone pierce my septum and then re-pierce it when I blew the ring out in a gob snot early on so, I know the value of a dollar. I'm not going to toss my piercing aside until it becomes fully necessary to do so. It may come in handy someday.

That bit of foof in my life didn't pan out but my next idea is to get a silver cap for one of my canines. My only concern beyond the dental hygiene is whether it would be cultural appropriation. Granted piercing your septum and wearing a silver ring through it is blatant cultural appropriation and I'm ashamed to admit that I'm not even sure from which culture I appropriated it. Maybe I should be more concerned with the cow community (wacka-wacka). Honestly, that is part of the reason I don't wear the ring. I feel like a ponce when I wear it. I would probably feel like a ponce wearing a silver cap on my tooth too. I just haven't seen a lot of that in hipster culture yet and I think it would be funny. I'm not interested in getting a grill. I don't want rhinestones. Just one silver tooth.

The inspiration behind it was really a child at the after-school program where I taught this year. He was probably about seven and every time he smiled up at me from his four foot height, he revealed a bright and shiny silver cap on his left front tooth. It was so incongruous, the combination of that cherubic, rosy-cheeked face and that tough little silver tooth. I know that he needed that cap and I do not. Maybe I should be worried about class appropriation rather than cultural appropriation. Some dentist out in The Sunset District of San Francisco is still using metal caps on small children but that is not my territory and he is not my dentist. Maybe I'll need a cap someday and that will be my chance. "No thank you, I would not like the white enamel cap. I'd prefer the silver." I'll say. Still, I know that a silver cap on one of my canines would be hilarious and that I'll probably stop by "Mr. Bling Bling" on Geary St. one of these days just to see.

Thirdly, I'm considering dying my hair white blonde. Nothing more to say there. I think it's a great idea.

So, foof. I support it. Further, I would like to submit glasses as a possible example of foof. Yes, for most of us it is a practicality but I'm sure you all have noticed the advances in glasses fashion over the past year or so and would offer that many a fashion icon was made by his/her glasses. I would also like to submit to you a question: Is it okay to wear glasses solely as a fashion accessory? I've heard a lot of complaints from the 20/20 vision community lately and am wondering how people feel about their desire to get in on our, the poor-visioned community's, single proprietary fashion item.

Next time: poetry maybe. Maybe poetry. Okay, Jen? I hear you. I do.

5 comments:

Nada Gordon: 2 ludic 4 U said...

After losing two "porcelain" caps on a back tooth, I asked my dentist to re-do it in gold. Yeah baby!

I love my gold tooth.

Re: appropriation. Please. We are all part of the human family.

Ridiculous Human Things said...

Nice, Nada!

Re:re: appropriation. I don't know. I have concerns. I'll try to distill them into something smart at some point but for now I'll just express general concern. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Nada Gordon: 2 ludic 4 U said...

Japanese culture, although it seems so original, is perhaps 60% appropriated from elsewhere... and then refined.

t seems to me there's appropriation and then there's appropriation. It's one thing to steal a culture's artefacts and exhibit them as colonialist trophies and never give them back, and another to receive, appreciate, and re-transmit style memes.

Without R & B, thee would never have been Elvis, or the Beatles, and without classical music and its concomitant instrumentation, there never would have been jazz. It's these sorts of "appropriations" that bring "separate" groups of people closer together, it seems to me.

And in this young country, nothing is really authentic anyway; there's nothing to do but appropriate; identity is very largely costume, at least as it extends beyond the givens of race & gender, which it turns out aren't necessarily so fixed as we thought, either.

It's right to have concerns, I think, about behavior that is exploitative, but I don't think we need to worry about our nose piercings, which are not hurting anyone at all. They are things of beauty and if anything they are tributes, not appropriations.

I'm sorry... am I ranting? Forgive!

John Sakkis said...

let's all agree that it's "froof" not "foof"...

Ridiculous Human Things said...

Nada, I'm going to work on a response but for now, I hear you, yes. There are certain appropriations that just irk me to no end and I'll try to list them here at some point but must leave the comforts of home just now.

John, I like frou-frou la-la, myself. I can just imagine the office politics surrounding the term at SPD right now. "La, It's Foof, John. Foof! I say, Foof!" says Laura. "No, dagnabbit, it's Froof!" says, John.