We Are the Unibrow

Right now you are rubbing that little cranny on the top of your nose. Admit it. You are fingering the little nubs of hair, the errant survivors of your best shaving or plucking or electrolysizing efforts to keep yourself from looking like a neanderthal. They tell us that Frida Kahlo--god rest her soul--could pull that shit off. So could Salma Hayek playing Frida Kahlo. But neither you nor I have Frida's talent or Salma's rack, so we must do our damndest to keep the skin between our eyebrows fresh, smooth, naked.

We here at the Unibrow say no! Let us cast off the tweezers and razors that have long been our masters, our whip-wielding enforcers of oppressive standards of beauty--

Okay. I'm kidding. We all know unibrows are gross, and I intend to keep shaving mine and I politely request that you do the same. Despite the background image of Ms. Kahlo, this blog has nothing to do with the merging of eyebrows. Rather, we're interested in the merging of cultural brows, namely high brow and low brow. The collapse of these once-inviolate domains has been a major trope in post-modern theory at least since I've been alive (I can personally certify Baudrillard has been hot shit since October 1985). We are not the first to carry our high academy toys into the pop culture sandbox, but we think the sand castles we build might be worth seeing.

I'm a writer and doctoral student in communications at Columbia (check out my personal website here, and since we're getting all web 2.0 up in this piece, follow me on twitter here), and my partner in crime, John Jacob Nasser (see what he did there?) is an NYU law student with a poet's heart and an autistic's lust for graphs. Tune in for rants, rambles, and hopefully insights by the shitload. If I were a betting man, I'd guess my posts will tend toward TV, literature, the news media, and pretty much anything else with a narrative, whereas JJN will be inclined toward the law, economics, and music. We both tend to think we have something to say about politics (right now, that something is "did anyone else notice the mullet on Michele Bachmann's son?"), so there'll probably be posts on that, too.

So bookmark this page, slap us on your RSS feed, etc. And keep those eyebrows groomed. Please.