I think most of the people who patronize Dani's shop can sense, maybe even see, the soulful aura Dani radiates. There's no Sweeney Todd vibe here (though I still won't let anyone come within 10 feet of me with a straight razor). Dani told me he bought the shop from his cousins around 2019. It's a small shop, with four chairs. Currently, Dani has two full-time employees and one trainee. When I questioned Dani about the shop's name, I learned that the A is not just an indefinite article but also, more importantly, a reminder to him of his aspiration to always do his best.
I asked Dani why he became a barber. He told me he'd first dreamed of being a writer but that he was never able to marshal the discipline to make that happen. Around 2018, he started hanging out at his second cousin's barbershop, Johnny Blades in Albany Park. The work sparked his interest, so he decided to give barbering a go. In case he harbored any regrets, I told Dani that I'm in a book club that just started reading George Eliot's Romola and that it might interest him to know that her character Nello the barber asserts there that "[He] saw very early that authorship is a narrowing business, in conflict with the liberal art of the razor, which demands an impartial affection for all men's chins."
Dani explained how his apprenticeship began with Johnny letting him give buzz cuts. He told me the experience of completing his first haircut kindled something a bit ineffable in him and that to this day the work provides that same emotional resonance it did back then. He'd found his calling there and committed himself to cultivating this craft, in hopes that that flame would get even brighter and more richly hued.
I got curious about how long it was before Dani really got the hang of the barbering. He said it took about a year before he started to feel comfortable cutting hair. After that, in 2019, he took the next step and enrolled in a barber school to obtain his license. Illinois currently requires 1,500 hours of training, and then an exam, for licensure. It was while Dani was completing the program in 2019 that he purchased A Barbershop.
Dani said that owning a shop gave him more confidence and an even greater desire to please his clientele. Though he still considered himself a novice, he never refused a cut-style, no matter how challenging. He said he'd always be square with customers and let them know when it was his first attempt at a particular style. He'd vow to do his best and even not to charge them were they not satisfied. Knowing Dani, I wasn't at all surprised to hear that his clients would shell out regardless and keep coming back. Per Dani, there were few things that improved his chops as much as these "salutary failures." By his third year in the profession, Dani felt quite a bit of confidence in the facility he'd acquired. He was still bothered, however, by the length of time it would take him to finish. "It was taking me about an hour and a half to finish a cut with a beard."
If I may digress, it seems like an opportune moment to remind readers that the word barber comes from the Anglo-French word for "beard." I was disappointed to learn that there were no etymological ties to barbarian—that term the Greeks coined to mock the speech of foreigners (bar bar bar . . . ). Such barbarism would have tied in nicely to the trade's medieval traditions. In addition to giving haircuts, barbers in the Middle Ages also served as dentists and surgeons, producing that bloody mess we're told the colors of the barber pole are meant to represent. Back to Dani . . .
It wasn't until about seven years in that Dani began to feel up to speed, clocking in under 30 minutes with those hair-plus-beard-cuts. He said that he was finally able to get so much in the zone when cutting that he'd be taken by surprise by how great things usually turned out. Now, says Dani, "It always feels as if something else takes control." I told Dani that I'd read something about this process in a book by sociologist Richard Sennett. (Sennett's a fellow Chicagoan, born into a Jewish family of Russian emigres who raised him in Cabrini Green.) In The Craftsman, Sennett reminds readers how, under the old guild hierarchies, it generally took apprentices about seven years of practice to become skilled enough to produce their chef d'oeuvre, which earned them the status of journeymen. It took five years or so more to acquire the expertise needed to produce their chef d'oeuvre élevé and earn master status.
I've been curious for a long time about the nebulous border that exists between "craft" and "art"; between fine artists and artisans. Sennett talks about the historical development of that rift, as does Larry Shiner, in his The Invention of Art. There we learn that this distinction really didn't gain a foothold until the eighteenth century, when "all the nobler aspects of the older image of the artisan/artist, such as grace, invention, and imagination, were ascribed solely to the artist, whereas the artisan or craftsperson was said to possess only skill, to work by rule, and to care primarily about money." This certainly goes against the grain of Dani's thoughts and feelings.
He'd told me that he'd always been more of an "intuition guy . . . because of that, I see everything as an act of art. But my experience in barbering taught me that craft comes first. It is the base of everything. A strong foundation and a lot of practice and repetition builds great mental and muscle memory. When the craft is built strongly, it almost eradicates fear and that's when I started to have great trust in my craft, the clippers and the scissors have become an extension of me. They help me to produce the vision I have for a haircut and that’s the artistic part of it. But it only became that after having first built the craft." I remember him saying in our initial interview that the creative side of things "is the only thing that gets me going," and later, that the greatest moment comes with the smile on completion. "I work for that smile. The money is nice, but the smile is precious."
Dani's thoughts about his profession got me thinking about a different kind of aura—not his, but that aesthetic aura whose decay Walter Benjamin talks about in his essay, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). Benjamin writes about how photography, audio recordings, film, and other technological developments had begun to uproot art from the times and places which they'd previously inhabited—eroding claims of authenticity and originality. Though not insensitive to this loss, Benjamin was optimistic that our grief would be mitigated by the gains delivered by reproducible art. He believed that the spread of mechanical reproduction might prise art from the abusive grip of power-hungry politicians, financiers, and clerics, giving us masses the opportunity to direct a less reverential and more critical eye on what all those unscrupulous pricks are up to.
Thanks to hindsight, I'm a bit more pessimistic about those gains and their political utility. Considering where we are now, it might not be a bad thing to be repotted in time and space and become a bit more rooted there than we seem to be nowadays. Don't get me wrong; I'm no neo-Luddite. I really do enjoy my screen-time and the endless flow of musical reproductions I hear on 107.1 F.M. But shouldn't we at least consider sticking with some of those objects and practices, which, though seemingly antiquated, might one-up their successors? I'd much prefer the urban landscapes that came with trains than the strip-mall wastelands that arrived with automobiles. Maybe we should be prepared to throw up the barricades and be ready to defend written letters and post offices, and books and public libraries? I think there's something to be said for Amistics (1) and taking seriously Neil Postman's warnings about Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985).
My nostalgia got me daydreaming about how Dani and other "tradespeople," at least those who are tuned into the aesthetic aspects or their work, might be seen as guardians of the positive aspects of those fading auras Benjamin describes. Maybe they're in a position to revivify that magical space-time, to whose dissolution Benjamin gave a wistful nod. In my daydreams, Dani's guild becomes a tribe of performance artists and producers of transient things rooted in time and place—like those Tibetan Buddhists and their sand mandalas, only on someone's scalp. In Eliot's Romola, Nello claims, "My shop is a no less fitting haunt of the Muses, as you will acknowledge when you feel the sudden illumination of understanding and the serene vigor of inspiration that will come to you with a clear chin." There's a fair share of mockery there, but there's also some truth. I think we do need to be aware of the snootier aspects of our "fine arts." At the end of her essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag talks about this culture of ours . . .
"Based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. . . . What is more important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all."
Let's also talk about the remarkable spatial aspects of Dani's guild—one of the loveliest having to do with the long-standing social tradition of barbershops, and similar spaces, illustrated in operas like The Barber of Seville, films like Barbershop (set on Chicago's South Side), or books like The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, in which Habermas talks about how spaces like Ice Cube's barbershop, outside the control of the state, make it possible for people to "exercise collective influence over their social destiny" by allowing them to subject ideas to the "acid bath of relentless public discourse."
[Discourse at a Barber Shop] by [Allan Rohan Crite] via [Art Institute of Chicago]
Dani is certainly tuned into that, in a way that brings my daydreaming to life. In our initial interview, he even told me that "barbershops have a social responsibility . . . you need to set a good example . . . especially to the young people." Dani's ambitions might seem inconsequential, but as Naperville's Parvesh Cheena says to Ice Cube, "Sometimes I think we are unaware of how the little things for us can be so huge for others." Or as Cedric the Entertainer tells him later on, "Your father, he believed in something . . . he believed and understood that something as simple as a little haircut could change the way a man felt on the inside."
Although Dani's shop is a little different than the Ice Cube character, Calvin's, its patrons seldom engaging in group discussions and riffing together on thoughts and ideas, Dani did tell me how much he relishes and values the conversations he has with customers. These dialogues are more like those that occur in the Apollo and the Razor, where Nello has one-on-one chats with customers like Piero di Cosimo, and Machiavelli!
Dani mentioned a moving experience he'd recently had on one of those days when Chicago hosted a No Kings March. That morning, he had a meaningful conversation with a man who happened to be a staunch Trump supporter, while, later in the afternoon, he shaved the head of a man in the opposing camp. Dani's not without political leanings, but he said he was much more attuned to the goodwill and the healthy fundamental principles shared by both (instead of being infected, like some us, by those polarizing caricatures that raise our hackles and blow thought bubbles with the POTUS decorating an Esso station). Maybe this is why I have the treat of seeing such an intriguing mix of ages and ethnicities on my visits—something that seems wonderfully unique for such a little hole-in-the-wall. Dani said he's blessed with "customers from all continents," though he guesses his current clientele is about 40% South Asian.
Dani himself hails from Syria, where he was born in 1989. His Assyrian great-grandfather arrived there from southern Turkey during the Sayfo (2), which overlapped the Armenian genocide of the early 1900s. Dani's family established themselves in northeastern Syria in the village of Tel Meghada, one of a couple dozen villages on the Khabur River. Dani grew up in the city of Al Hasaka, but he made frequent trips to the family village, which he still sees as the core of his identity. He said that when Assyrians ask you where you are from, you always name the village—and every last member of that village is seen as a cousin.
Dani told me that many villagers began to leave the region after the flow of the Khabur had become less dependable due to changes upstream, when Turkey expanded dams and irrigation as part of its Southeastern Anatolia Project. He said that most of his cousins ended up moving to either Melbourne or Chicago, where he settled in 2009. Per Dani, the current population of Tel Meghada is 2, as compared to 72, back in 2004.
I was curious about the impact of village culture on Dani's ideas about his shop. He did not hesitate to say that the tribal orientation of his village culture greatly informs how he sees his endeavors. He was unequivocal about his feeling that the individual was not to take precedence over the community, that there needs to be a well-thought-out balance there. I have the same feeling about the volunteer Village of Chirp, where there's also a remarkable amalgam of craft and art, as well as a camaraderie that Bryan White speaks of in his recent blog post. And again, as with the Amish, I'm totally onboard with their new technologies, as they strengthen, not weaken, the community. And what could better bond our tribe than mechanically reproduced music. How else could I have savored the bliss I felt when one of our DJs played Jeffrey Lewis's Time Trades?!
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1 A term coined by Neal Stephenson in his 2015 novel Seveneves, alluding to the practice of the Amish, who choose which technologies to adopt and which to reject based on preexisting values, rather than accepting new technologies by default.