I'm so NOT a gamer! 
The Tom Selleck Thread
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SelleckLover
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SelleckLover
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oh, wikip. says it was released in 1991, thought I played it in the 80th...-
Sparkle & Fizz
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Selleck Killed The Mustache?
A humorous piece from The Boston Globe:
Who took my ’stache?
The sad and curious exile of the American mustache
By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff | October 11, 2009
IF YOU DIDN’T know anything about Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!,” which opened last month, you could at least deduce from the poster that it was a comedy. Just above Matt Damon’s popped-open mouth sits a large brown mustache. It looks like a caterpillar. Even if “The Informant!” were the most serious movie ever made, that mustache would be funny.
On Burt Reynolds or Billy Dee Williams, movie stars of a generation ago, a mustache was an alluring matter of fact. Before them it was Douglas Fairbanks, William Powell, and Clark Gable. On Damon’s adolescent-looking face, a mustache is a joke. There’s nothing stylish or sexy about it.
For most of the 20th century, the mustache was a serious option for follicular self-expression - an elastic emblem of masculinity. Cowboys and truckers wore them big and thick. Movie stars and certain roués wore them faint or thin. For comics like Groucho Marx and Charles Chaplin, the mustache wasn’t the gag; it was just part of the persona. Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft took mustaches to the White House. Mike Ditka took his to the Super Bowl. If at any point during the 1970s you threw a rock, the gentleman you hit was probably wearing a mustache.
What happened? For the past 20 years, a parade of facial hair has taken root on the faces of movie stars and American men - sideburns, the three-day beard, the chinstrap, the soul patch. The goatee returned from the 19th century and seemingly brought eight cousins with it. But the mustache? As far as pop culture is concerned, the mustache remains trapped in the land of porn and irony.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a mustache. Worn with conviction, it’s just as attractive as any of these. It’s not hard to maintain. So why can’t the mustache have its comeback?
The answer lies in something deeper than maintenance. It’s about manliness. There’s an unapologetic ruggedness to the mustache that’s been gradually chastened and civilized out of popular American culture. Americans just aren’t as comfortable with masculinity as they were 30 years ago. Today, men wax their chests. They do yoga. As one barber I spoke to erupted, in a robust Russian accent: “There are no mustaches anymore because there are no real men!”
TO APPRECIATE WHAT has happened, you need only look at two notorious movie mustaches. In 1958, Charlton Heston wore a mustache for “A Touch of Evil,” one of those long thin numbers that parted in the middle. Watching the movie today, the mustache feels corny - a prop to make his narcotics cop seem Mexican. But it also feels like a serious gesture. On Heston, it conveyed real authority and virility. You’re inclined to take the mustache seriously because Heston did.
Contrast that with the hedge of a mustache that Sacha Baron Cohen grew for “Borat.” It accessorized the character’s cheap suit, weird gait, and knowingly bad English. Cohen is a handsome guy, and he grew a mustache to show he wasn’t serious - to make Borat seem more foreign, less attractive, and, by the movie’s naked hotel climax, kind of unappetizing. It was a mustache that you mockingly draw on a subway billboard.
The difference between Heston’s and the mustaches that Cohen and Damon wear, as good as they are in their respective films - comedies both - is that for the younger actors, those mustaches are wearing them. This is also how mustaches feel whenever they make a half-hearted run at a pop-culture comeback. Brandon Flowers, the Killers’ fresh-faced front man, kicked up a hot fuss a few years ago after he grew a mustache. He was accused of overseriousness - but no one seemed to take his new facial hair, or his band’s music, as seriously as before. It was as if we could hear the mustache in the songs. By the release of the band’s next record, Flowers was clean-shaven again.
Wittingly or not, Flowers wore what has come to be known as an ironic mustache (he has said he grew it merely because he could), the irony stemming from the idea that the mustache has become a symbol of uncool. The hipster’s appropriation is an extension of the vintage-store experience - an antique you wear on your face. This isn’t facial hair per se. It’s facial hair in quotation marks, concentrated in such hipster ghettos as Austin, Texas; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and Allston.
Every now and then the mustache surfaces as a trend story in the wider culture, but that seems determined by whether Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington happens to be wearing one for a role. In talking to barbers in the city, I couldn’t find one who’d trimmed more than a few mustaches in the last couple of years. Between customers the other day, Youssef Aboura stood outside State Street Barbers in the South End, and explained that of his 200 or so regulars, only about seven have a mustache - “and they’re all in their 50s,” he said. The most serious one he’d seen recently was for a competition. When did the mustache go from staple of the American face to sport?
The answer, it seems, is some time around the 1970s, when facial hair moved beyond Vietnam-era shagginess and the mustache was just the thing to do. Mustaches were manly. They were suave. Even among Ivy League college men, having a mustache was a way to seem a bit wild without being woolly.
But something began to happen to the mustache. In attaining ubiquity, it also became entwined with two increasingly visible subcultures: pornography and gay men. John Holmes and Ron Jeremy wore mustaches in their X-rated movies. And more than anything, the mustache said bathhouse and late-night cruising. It said, “Y-M-C-A.” The Village People conflated blue-collar masculine iconography and gay fetish until it became impossible to see law enforcement or the American West without a glittering disco ball hovering over it. The mustache became the symbol of this inversion. There was something costume-y about it. It was the beginning of a joke we’re still telling.
BY 1980, TOM SELLECK wore the culture’s most famous mustache, and you could say he put it out of business. Selleck did for the mustache what Angela Davis did for the Afro. He made future wearers - straight white guys trying to seem handsome with a mustache - look like imposters. The mustache survived Hitler. It could not survive porn, disco, or Magnum P.I.
This is not the mustache’s fault. In the wake of “Macho Man,” maleness acquired a tinge of camp; in the wake of the porn industry and the women’s movement, straight masculinity also started to feel retrograde. A breed of new men emerged: sensitive and open-minded, and afraid of seeming too serious about being male. It gave us Ben Stiller, the Wilson brothers, Tobey McGuire’s Spiderman, and Will Ferrell, whose “Anchorman” mustache was a comic wink at 1970s manhood.
To be a guy became a kind of adolescent joke - think Jackass and the G4 network - and to be a man, a grownup, meant shaving your upper lip, and possibly maintaining your eyebrows. There are more college-educated American men now that there have ever been, and while education can create self-confidence, it’s also good at creating self-consciousness. You could say that a huge swath of American men have simply misplaced the self-confidence required to wear a single strip of hair on their lips.
We’re no longer comfortable with Charlton Heston’s brute primacy, or Clark Gable’s bravado, and this is never clearer than when modern celebrities try to wear a mustache - really try, instead of wink-wink try. When Jake Gyllenhaal shows up in the latter half of “Brokeback Mountain” in a mustache, he’s trying to wear it for real. He’s supposed to be a cowboy. But every time I saw the movie, the audience laughed. Gyllenhaal was a metrosexual in mustache drag, and they knew it.
This is, sadly, our loss. Without the mustache, we’ve lost a whole language of facial hair - the sleek pencil mustache, the villainous curl. An entire universe of mustaches is now relegated to contests and annual conventions. It may not be too late to reclaim this legacy, though. What the mustache needs isn’t another pretender. What the mustache needs - no, what the mustache demands - is a hero.
Wesley Morris is a film critic for the Globe. E-mail wmorris@globe.com.
Who took my ’stache?
The sad and curious exile of the American mustache
By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff | October 11, 2009
IF YOU DIDN’T know anything about Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!,” which opened last month, you could at least deduce from the poster that it was a comedy. Just above Matt Damon’s popped-open mouth sits a large brown mustache. It looks like a caterpillar. Even if “The Informant!” were the most serious movie ever made, that mustache would be funny.
On Burt Reynolds or Billy Dee Williams, movie stars of a generation ago, a mustache was an alluring matter of fact. Before them it was Douglas Fairbanks, William Powell, and Clark Gable. On Damon’s adolescent-looking face, a mustache is a joke. There’s nothing stylish or sexy about it.
For most of the 20th century, the mustache was a serious option for follicular self-expression - an elastic emblem of masculinity. Cowboys and truckers wore them big and thick. Movie stars and certain roués wore them faint or thin. For comics like Groucho Marx and Charles Chaplin, the mustache wasn’t the gag; it was just part of the persona. Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft took mustaches to the White House. Mike Ditka took his to the Super Bowl. If at any point during the 1970s you threw a rock, the gentleman you hit was probably wearing a mustache.
What happened? For the past 20 years, a parade of facial hair has taken root on the faces of movie stars and American men - sideburns, the three-day beard, the chinstrap, the soul patch. The goatee returned from the 19th century and seemingly brought eight cousins with it. But the mustache? As far as pop culture is concerned, the mustache remains trapped in the land of porn and irony.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a mustache. Worn with conviction, it’s just as attractive as any of these. It’s not hard to maintain. So why can’t the mustache have its comeback?
The answer lies in something deeper than maintenance. It’s about manliness. There’s an unapologetic ruggedness to the mustache that’s been gradually chastened and civilized out of popular American culture. Americans just aren’t as comfortable with masculinity as they were 30 years ago. Today, men wax their chests. They do yoga. As one barber I spoke to erupted, in a robust Russian accent: “There are no mustaches anymore because there are no real men!”
TO APPRECIATE WHAT has happened, you need only look at two notorious movie mustaches. In 1958, Charlton Heston wore a mustache for “A Touch of Evil,” one of those long thin numbers that parted in the middle. Watching the movie today, the mustache feels corny - a prop to make his narcotics cop seem Mexican. But it also feels like a serious gesture. On Heston, it conveyed real authority and virility. You’re inclined to take the mustache seriously because Heston did.
Contrast that with the hedge of a mustache that Sacha Baron Cohen grew for “Borat.” It accessorized the character’s cheap suit, weird gait, and knowingly bad English. Cohen is a handsome guy, and he grew a mustache to show he wasn’t serious - to make Borat seem more foreign, less attractive, and, by the movie’s naked hotel climax, kind of unappetizing. It was a mustache that you mockingly draw on a subway billboard.
The difference between Heston’s and the mustaches that Cohen and Damon wear, as good as they are in their respective films - comedies both - is that for the younger actors, those mustaches are wearing them. This is also how mustaches feel whenever they make a half-hearted run at a pop-culture comeback. Brandon Flowers, the Killers’ fresh-faced front man, kicked up a hot fuss a few years ago after he grew a mustache. He was accused of overseriousness - but no one seemed to take his new facial hair, or his band’s music, as seriously as before. It was as if we could hear the mustache in the songs. By the release of the band’s next record, Flowers was clean-shaven again.
Wittingly or not, Flowers wore what has come to be known as an ironic mustache (he has said he grew it merely because he could), the irony stemming from the idea that the mustache has become a symbol of uncool. The hipster’s appropriation is an extension of the vintage-store experience - an antique you wear on your face. This isn’t facial hair per se. It’s facial hair in quotation marks, concentrated in such hipster ghettos as Austin, Texas; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and Allston.
Every now and then the mustache surfaces as a trend story in the wider culture, but that seems determined by whether Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington happens to be wearing one for a role. In talking to barbers in the city, I couldn’t find one who’d trimmed more than a few mustaches in the last couple of years. Between customers the other day, Youssef Aboura stood outside State Street Barbers in the South End, and explained that of his 200 or so regulars, only about seven have a mustache - “and they’re all in their 50s,” he said. The most serious one he’d seen recently was for a competition. When did the mustache go from staple of the American face to sport?
The answer, it seems, is some time around the 1970s, when facial hair moved beyond Vietnam-era shagginess and the mustache was just the thing to do. Mustaches were manly. They were suave. Even among Ivy League college men, having a mustache was a way to seem a bit wild without being woolly.
But something began to happen to the mustache. In attaining ubiquity, it also became entwined with two increasingly visible subcultures: pornography and gay men. John Holmes and Ron Jeremy wore mustaches in their X-rated movies. And more than anything, the mustache said bathhouse and late-night cruising. It said, “Y-M-C-A.” The Village People conflated blue-collar masculine iconography and gay fetish until it became impossible to see law enforcement or the American West without a glittering disco ball hovering over it. The mustache became the symbol of this inversion. There was something costume-y about it. It was the beginning of a joke we’re still telling.
BY 1980, TOM SELLECK wore the culture’s most famous mustache, and you could say he put it out of business. Selleck did for the mustache what Angela Davis did for the Afro. He made future wearers - straight white guys trying to seem handsome with a mustache - look like imposters. The mustache survived Hitler. It could not survive porn, disco, or Magnum P.I.
This is not the mustache’s fault. In the wake of “Macho Man,” maleness acquired a tinge of camp; in the wake of the porn industry and the women’s movement, straight masculinity also started to feel retrograde. A breed of new men emerged: sensitive and open-minded, and afraid of seeming too serious about being male. It gave us Ben Stiller, the Wilson brothers, Tobey McGuire’s Spiderman, and Will Ferrell, whose “Anchorman” mustache was a comic wink at 1970s manhood.
To be a guy became a kind of adolescent joke - think Jackass and the G4 network - and to be a man, a grownup, meant shaving your upper lip, and possibly maintaining your eyebrows. There are more college-educated American men now that there have ever been, and while education can create self-confidence, it’s also good at creating self-consciousness. You could say that a huge swath of American men have simply misplaced the self-confidence required to wear a single strip of hair on their lips.
We’re no longer comfortable with Charlton Heston’s brute primacy, or Clark Gable’s bravado, and this is never clearer than when modern celebrities try to wear a mustache - really try, instead of wink-wink try. When Jake Gyllenhaal shows up in the latter half of “Brokeback Mountain” in a mustache, he’s trying to wear it for real. He’s supposed to be a cowboy. But every time I saw the movie, the audience laughed. Gyllenhaal was a metrosexual in mustache drag, and they knew it.
This is, sadly, our loss. Without the mustache, we’ve lost a whole language of facial hair - the sleek pencil mustache, the villainous curl. An entire universe of mustaches is now relegated to contests and annual conventions. It may not be too late to reclaim this legacy, though. What the mustache needs isn’t another pretender. What the mustache needs - no, what the mustache demands - is a hero.
Wesley Morris is a film critic for the Globe. E-mail wmorris@globe.com.
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golfmobile
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Maybe it's just me and my "age bracket," but the three main "loves of my life" have all had moustaches and NONE looked "forced." As a matter of fact, as far as I am concerned, when they shaved the moustaches, they looked naked and more dorky! Sort of like the way TS looks when he shaved his (picture him in "In and Out," e.g.). Some faces just need a moustache, IMO. It may be how we are initially "introduced" to the individual person. But take the moustaches of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting." In the former, Redford had the 'stache and he looked FINE. Newman had one in the latter, and he looked fine. Though I must confess, I thought Redford does the with or without moustache better . . . . but then Newman never looked BAD. Also, as another example, Clark Gable looked naked without his. Maybe it says more about the lack of charisma of the current "movie stars" that they can't "carry" the burden of machismo by having one if we're used to seem them without one. E.g., Brad Pitt, IMO, looks better without one. For another example, Mark Harmon of "NCIS" looks just as good with or without. But Sam Elliott looks goofy without one (the same way TS looks without one).
Maybe it's all personal interpretation. Or personal experience. I just know that I, for one, DEFINITELY prefer TS with one - AND without that (to me) dorky Van Dyke (or whatever you call it) chin whiskers that Jesse Stone has. To this "Georgia peach," that limited-to-the-chin beard looks rednecky -- needs a mullet to balance it!
golf
Maybe it's all personal interpretation. Or personal experience. I just know that I, for one, DEFINITELY prefer TS with one - AND without that (to me) dorky Van Dyke (or whatever you call it) chin whiskers that Jesse Stone has. To this "Georgia peach," that limited-to-the-chin beard looks rednecky -- needs a mullet to balance it!
golf
"Portside, buddy."
I've had my moustache for 14 years and don't see anything wrong with it. I don't understand what's so gay about it. My wife tried to make me shave it off once, but she didn't succeed.
I wish my stache was as cool as Magnum's is, but at least i don't have a cranky british butler barging into my house at all hours of the day!
I wish my stache was as cool as Magnum's is, but at least i don't have a cranky british butler barging into my house at all hours of the day!
I just don't give a damn!
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golfmobile
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Well, here's Larry's moustache when we first started dating and I fell in love with him.
Side view when snow-skiing in Banff on our honeymoon:
I can't imagine him without it! He's had it since about 1973, I think (I didn't know him then).
If I can find pictures of my "other" loves and scan them, as they were pre-digital photos, I will. But I think you get it that, personally, I really like a good moustache on a good looking guy -- and I liked them pre MPI! TS just contributed to my attraction to a moustache.
golf
P.S. Found a picture of my second husband and his 'stache. Now that I look at this picture again, he looks a little bit like Gerald McRaney, doesn't he?
Side view when snow-skiing in Banff on our honeymoon:
I can't imagine him without it! He's had it since about 1973, I think (I didn't know him then).
If I can find pictures of my "other" loves and scan them, as they were pre-digital photos, I will. But I think you get it that, personally, I really like a good moustache on a good looking guy -- and I liked them pre MPI! TS just contributed to my attraction to a moustache.
golf
P.S. Found a picture of my second husband and his 'stache. Now that I look at this picture again, he looks a little bit like Gerald McRaney, doesn't he?
"Portside, buddy."
The other day I bought a Red Baron frozen pizza. When I took it home, I was surprized! The caricature depicted on the box looks a lot like Selleck! Same bushy stache and prominent chin. The man is wearing aviator gear from the 1930's. It's possible that the illustrator was looking at a photograph from the movie "High Road To China".
How ironic if someday the pizza company offered a contest with the prize being tickets to Disneyworld or Waikiki!!!
How ironic if someday the pizza company offered a contest with the prize being tickets to Disneyworld or Waikiki!!!
I just don't give a damn!
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Frodoleader
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I've always thought the same thing about the Red Baron pizza box. Just never got around to posting about it!MACattack wrote:The other day I bought a Red Baron frozen pizza. When I took it home, I was surprized! The caricature depicted on the box looks a lot like Selleck! Same bushy stache and prominent chin. The man is wearing aviator gear from the 1930's. It's possible that the illustrator was looking at a photograph from the movie "High Road To China".
How ironic if someday the pizza company offered a contest with the prize being tickets to Disneyworld or Waikiki!!!
"You are three months at Dak Wei and still you crack jokes?" - Ivan
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Styles Bitchley
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I've never heard of Red Baron pizza - obviously hasn't made its way to Canada or Switzerland yet! - but I just did a google image search to see what you're all talking about... Now I get it!
I also found evidence that someone else caught on to the same coincidence...
I also found evidence that someone else caught on to the same coincidence...
"How fiendishly deceptive of you Magnum. I could have sworn I was hearing the emasculation of a large rodent."
- J.Q.H.
- J.Q.H.
