90s hair

90s hair, originally uploaded by david.stockwell.

To misquote Oscar Wilde, if you can't be a work of art, you should shave one into your head. My stylist seems to have taken inspiration from The L'Oréal Studio Line logos of the early 90s (What frigid heart is not warmed by the memory of those naive, synthesised jingles in the spirit of "Jane Seymour Set Two / Is Something New / Spray it on / Dry hair and your style will / Stay there").

In London, home of the Mercurochrome Mohawk, my 'fro went largely unremarked upon, except at work where I won the weekly Homer Simpson-inspired "Doh" award. I shudder to think what lengths I might have to go to stop traffic in this controversy-proof metropolis.

I do wonder these days if I'm a little bit past the age where these gestures tip over from art to anachronism. I always assumed I'd be the little old lady in the purple coat and red hat, so really this is all just practice for when I'm good-and-proper-eccentric.

Even my parents, who weathered all sorts of rebellious antics from The Tatoo Incident through to dying my eyelashes, have begun to see the lighter side of my precociousness - and they live in Pretoria, a city where the word Satanist is applied to everything not directly endorsed by the co-conspiring Dutch Reformed church and their public relations unit, the powerful tuck-shop mothers association.

Perhaps it is time to lay down the shears and my personal battle with conservativeness and apply my attention-seeking to more appropriate causes... I'm sure there's a cause out there that needs me... something that demands intelligence, philanthropy and oddly matched socks.