Reykjavík Grapevine - 20.05.2011, Side 10

10
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 6 — 2011
Fashion | Facial
To learn more about competitive bearding, you can visit the competition's
official site at worldbeardchampionships.com.
Beards Gone Wild
Kraum of the crop
A shop dedicated to the best of icelandic design.
OPENING HOURS
Week days 9:00 - 20:00
Saturday 10:00 - 17:00
Sunday 12:00 - 17:00
Kraum is in the oldest house
in Reykjavík. Aðalstræti 10,
p. 517 7797, kraum.is
When you live in a town of Reykjavík's
size, any change in the surroundings
is instantly noticeable. So when an in-
creasing number of men with long and
sometimes extravagant beards began
to appear downtown, it got our atten-
tion. Sure, there are plenty of young
dudes with beards in Reykjavík, but sel-
dom are they navel-length, or parted in
the middle and then curled upwards on
both sides. When the curiosity became
too much to bear, we approached two
guys sporting ZZ Top-tier beards and
asked, “Is there some beard-related
event happening in Iceland or some-
thing?”
“Yes and no,” he said with a smile.
As it turned out, he and dozens of other
bearded gentlemen were on their way
to the World Beard and Moustache
Championship in Trondheim, Norway.
The festival, which is held every two
years since 1995, attracts competitors
from around the world, most of who are
from Europe and North America.
Our visitors, who were stopping over
to do a little sightseeing before head-
ing to Norway, hailed from the US and
Canada. As it turned out, the timing of
running into these two guys could not
have been better—other competitors
were at that moment just blocks away
at the bar Dillon, enjoying happy hour.
When we arrived, there were already
close to a dozen bearded guys sipping
beer and chatting. While most of these
guys had the long, bushy variety of
beard, Bill Mitchell's stood out (as his
photograph can attest). We spoke with
him briefly about competitive bearding.
The first question on our mind was,
what categories of competitive beard-
ing are there? “Well, Full Beard Natu-
ral is the most popular. But altogether
there are 17 categories and three sub-
categories. It's an expensive hobby.”
Mitchell's beard preparation is a
labour of love, and requires a regime
that would put many to shame. “There's
the constant shampooing, for one, then
I blow-dry it”, he explains. “When it's
dry, I use a curling iron on the sides.
Then I curl them around a pair of cans
and hairspray them. Once that's set, it's
done.”
His experience in Iceland, he said,
has been very pleasant. “They really
put out the welcome mat for us,” he
said. “We went on a walking tour, saw
the national museum and the national
library. Tomorrow we' re going on the
Golden Circle tour. I wish every day
could be like this”.
Mitchell was confident that he
would do well, and in fact, the official
website of the World Beard and Mous-
tache Championship announced that
he won in the category of Partial Beard
Freestyle. In fact, America walked away
with six gold medals in the competition,
but Germany's Elmar Weisser—better
known on the internet as “the guy with
the windmill beard”—came out on top,
as the site reports his “reindeer beard
couldn't be stopped.”
The BBC reports that while Europe-
ans have traditionally been the reigning
champions of competitive bearding, the
US is “fast becoming the world's new
facial hair super power”.
An exclusive look inside the world of competitive bearding
PAUL FONTAINE
ALISA KALYANOVA
On Friday, May 13 (of all
days), New York Times
Magazine ran with an ar-
ticle by shock-reporter and
radio commentator, Jake Halpern,
entitled ‘Iceland’s Big Thaw’. Much in
the exaggerated ilk of Michael Lewis’s
2009 Vanity Fair hyperbole (‘Wall Street
On The Tundra’), Halpern paints a pic-
ture of the new Icelander as a smug,
boorish, easy-go-lucky wannabe,
who’d rather collect on unemployment
than get knee deep in fish guts which,
according to Halpern, is the only work
going in Iceland at the moment.
The author paraphrases Ásthildur
Sturludóttir, Mayor of “Patreksfjordhur”
[sic] as saying that the only people
who will take jobs in the local fish fac-
tory are Polish immigrants. Halpern
claims he interviewed a manager of a
fish factory outside of Reykjavík, who
said: “The Icelanders don’t want to do
this [fish processing] work—and it has
nothing to do with the salaries—it’s just
not fancy enough for them.”
In the article, Halpern supposedly
travels across Iceland in search of what
Icelanders have become since the 2008
crash. What he claims to have found is
a bankrupt, disillusioned nation on the
brink of a nervous breakdown. Among
others, he interviews Reykjavík’s May-
or, Jón Gnarr, who says that the biggest
issue facing Iceland right now is to
whether to adopt the Euro. According
to Halpern, Jón Gnarr is all a-tingle with
the dollar: “People think we should go
to the Euro, but it doesn’t look cool…
It’s the dollar that you see in the mov-
ies—it has the image.” And it seems,
Halpern is taking Jón at his word: “I
waited for Gnarr to smile, but he didn’t.”
Halpern also tells the excess stories
of Guðfinnur S. Halldórsson, car sales-
man, who, during the boom years, sup-
posedly managed to resell the same
Porsche five times within the space of
six months (each time with a profit).
Apparently, not one of the five custom-
ers ever paid the first leasing instal-
ment to the bank. If such was the case,
one wonders why in 2009 Michael
Lewis claimed that Icelanders were
blowing up Land Rovers for insurance
money. Surely Guðfinnur would have
been pleased to make yet another sale?
Back in the good ole days, Guðfinnur,
who Halpern says goes by the name of
Guffi (pronounced “Goofy”, as in Mick-
ey Mouse’s sidekick), had regularly in-
vited Ukrainian and Swiss chicas he’d
met on the internet to paint Reykjavík
crimson red. Now, a picture of signifi-
cantly more balance, he has decided to
settle on a regular Icelandic woman. “I
do nothing stupid, and then I have no
stress.”
It seems that Halpern has gone far
out of his way to seek out the most odd-
ball characters (with the exception of
Jón Gnarr of course), and puts across
an image of Iceland that borders on
the edge of insanity. One has to won-
der, with the mainstream press pulling
stunts like this, what the rest of the
world thinks of Iceland. Do they really
think of Icelanders as a bunch of failed
wannabe bankers who have now taken
up knitting and enjoy vetoing their gov-
ernment’s decisions?
He quotes drama teacher Steinunn
Knútsdóttir as saying: “Everyone is
knitting. People are also making jam.”
Which, Halpern says, he finds incred-
ulous until he says, “one day I saw a
woman directly across the street from
my hotel, perched on a chair, yarn in
hand, stitching some so-called ‘knit-
graffiti’ into place around a tree.”
He goes on to interview “the knit-
ter”, Ragga Eiríksdóttir, whom he puts
across tongue-in-cheek as some kind
of new-age-knitting-needle-touting-
existentialist-philosopher: “Knitting is
the opposite of idolizing money. Knit-
ting embodies thriftiness and is some-
thing old that has been with the nation
forever. In the 1800s, the state actually
published documents that outlined how
much citizens should knit. It was said,
for example, that a child from the age
of 8 should finish a pair of socks each
week.”
Honestly, I’m quite surprised that
Halpern didn’t manage to slip in an
interview with a puffin taxidermist, a
rod-dowser, or that little old guy with
the three foot beard that lives in the
middle of nowhere with four dogs and a
two-headed chicken and talks to elves.
Perhaps it was a word-count issue?
And, by the way, Jón Gnarr is spot
on: the dollar is far cooler! Clint East-
wood in ‘A Fistful of Euros’ just wouldn’t
work.
What New York Times
Magazine Thinks Of
Iceland
News | Iceland in the International Eye: May
“Do they really think of
Icelanders as a bunch
of failed wannabe
bankers who have now
taken up knitting and
enjoy vetoing their
government’s decisions?”
“Well, Full Beard Natural is the most popular.
But altogether there are 17 categories and three
subcategories. It's an expensive hobby.”
Have you read Jake Halpern's article?
How does it compare to Michael Lewis' 'Wall Street on the Tundra'?
MARC VINCENz