To allow art its influence is to really live

Howard Ho
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Snip. Buzz. Trim. Snap. Pop. No, this is not a Rice Krispies
commericial. Rather these were the sounds made as I lost my flowing
mane Sunday. The picture of the long-haired journalist you see
before you now looks nothing like the baldy I have become. This is
me saying, “My body is my granite slab through which I hope
to discover my true shape.”

The shift from massive amounts of head hair to none may seem a
bit drastic, but sometimes we need to be extreme. After all, my
life is just moving from one thing to the next, as I plan things
out for a future that may never come. As John Lennon said,
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making
other plans.”

In other words, there are a few times when overwhelming
circumstances cause you to change your entire lifestyle and way of
viewing the world. Growing long hair and then cutting it has no
doubt changed my lifestyle. From now on, I will never have the
oily, itchy mess that happened when I didn’t wash the
spaghetti and I will never have to brush it, tearing some out due
to frustrating knots. I’ll never again feel the subtle motion
of knocking my hair back in the wind or be able to run my hand
through it with water. I will miss these things.

Going bald, I imagine, will be like losing a limb. I can just
see myself trying to grab my hair only to realize that it’s
not there. The shock alone makes the cut worthwhile.

Think about how many shocking things you’ve done lately.
Things that push the limits of your emotions. Often without these
shocks, life would be a solidifying glacier day after day, each day
moving toward that ultimate destination.

What is art if not using media to shock an audience into
reexamining their lives, their loves and even their hairdos? In
this case, my hair is art, shocking all those around me, including
my mother, forcing people to reconsider who I am, which ultimately
allows me to reconsider who I am. It’s throwing rocks into a
pond and seeing where the waves will go.

In fact, art is identity. It reinforces certain ways of
thinking, such that propaganda would be impossible without skilled
craftspeople churning out icons. Catholicism would lose virtually
all its powers without those huge cathedrals, the costumed priests,
the crucifixes and, of course, perhaps the single most influential
piece of literature ever written, the Bible.

Similarly, going to UCLA means getting acquainted with the
8-clap, wearing blue-and-gold shirts and caps, and listening to the
band play the UCLA victory march ad nauseum. On the other hand, if
you wore red (USC’s color if you didn’t know),
you’d be violating the strict codes of etiquette. Art becomes
identity.

Music is perhaps the best source of identity since, with the
internet, MP3s and peer-to-peer servers, one can now experience
virtually any type of music instantaneously. As one of my
professors would say, it enables people to try on different
identities risk-free.

So the cookie-cutter suburbanite can see what it’s like to
be a glam goth with a little Marilyn Manson blasting in the aural
canal. A raver can become romantic opera lover with a few arias
sung by Andrea Bocelli.

Each type of music tells you how to move your body. Rap is all
about moving to the groove with syncopations. Trance is all
about pretending that you don’t even have a body, but are a
free-flowing being in a sea of happiness. Classical tells its
listener to not move at all, but instead to sit silently while the
emotion and intellect of the music tell a story without words.

Art is intimately connected to the body and to think otherwise
would be to engage in puritanical denial. Since art is also
identity and your identity is also the body … what was I writing
about again?

Anyway, the point is that it’s all interconnected in this
beautiful way. Take advantage of what artistic potential you have
to live dangerously, to shock others and more importantly, to shock
and change yourself. When you’ve lost this ability, death
cannot be too far away.

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