My.Hair
Wednesday, April 1, 2009 at 1:34PM 
Like any vain idiot with an ostensible readership, occasionally I'll Google myself to note my ranking in the mercurial food chain of web notoriety. As of the moment, type in "kevin murphy" and I show up fourth, between two economics professors, which leaves me feeling rather chuffed. After all there are probably eleven million of us. And it's always fun to browse the hundreds of pages of Kevin Murphy's to see what the hell we're up to in this world. Overall I'd say we're a decent bunch. A lot of economics professors for some reason. But today I made a discovery: add the word "hair" to the search and a whole new Murphian world opens up.*
Seems there's a world renowned hairstylist named Kevin.Murphy (punctuated like India.Arie) living in Melbourne. This explains why I'd never heard of him because as we all know Australia is actually a Mirror Universe that ended up somewhat cooler than our own, so we Normal-World folk do our best to smile and nod and snub their Antipodean Netherworld as often as we can. However, this particular Kevin.Murphy has famously done things to the hair of our cultural elite as well as theirs: Enrique Iglesias, Jewel, Cate Blanchett and of course Kylie Minogue. Images of how and where he arranges hair have graced the pages of such tony publications as Vogue, GQ and Spanish Vogue.
I rather like this excessively punctuated version of me. His image appears nowhere on his website, which I'll take for modesty. His products look well made, presented in clean, simple, environmentally friendly packaging with a near-clinical minimalism in style. And there's a product for almost every type of hair incuding my own whitening thatch of Celtic boar-bristle, for which Mr.Murphy recommends his Balancing.Wash and .Rinse for everyday use. This is good for me because short of a slaughterhouse nothing sloughs off more grease and dead tissue than my skull.
So I think I'll try some of his stuff. We Kevin Murphy's need to stick together, whether we embellish the name with superfluous punctuation or live in the Great Antipodean Netherworld. Besides, I'll send him a link to this page and maybe he'll send me a coupon. Say what you will about us Normal-Worlders, we do love our coupons.
And maybe next time we'll discuss the Kevin Murphy who paints images of very muscular naked people.
-kwm
*I added "hair" to my search because some twittering joker had accused me of wearing a toupee. I don't.
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Reader Comments (12)
Now that you have your own regularly updating blog, I think you have a chance to take the top spot.
If you do get your hair done by this Awesome-World Keven.Murphy, make sure you post a link to the Spanish Vogue article that the pictures end up in.
I'm amazed that my paper hanging campaign to drive you to the top of Google hasn't paid more results. Now of course I was working the VFW parking lot on bingo night, but I don't think that was the reason for my seemingly limited success.
I have resolved myself to contact my nearest elected official and demand official investigation into this issue. Which in retrospect may also meet with limited success since I'm not allowed to contact Congresswoman Emerson since "the incident."
Wouldn't this compete with your own high quality hair-care products...I would sue.
Kevin
In order to differentiate yourself from the aforementioned and similarly monikered updoer from down under or from sundry so named and equally hirsute Hibernians may I suggest the appending of the ever popular hyphen followed by the surname of your wife (particularly if, as in my case, her father is rolling in dough and you hope to weasel your way into his will). Or you could punch up your name with some pugilistic sounding sobriquet flanked by quotation marks, something like Kevin "The Riffer" Murphy or Kevin "Not the Aussie Coiffeur" Murphy.
Dan "Ostensible Reader" Noutko-Kennedy
While I am sure Kevin.Murphy is an agreeable sort of fellow, as a bald man his products would be useless to me. It seems as though I shall have to go on supporting the work of my local Kevins Murphy instead.
Now excuse me, whilst I rub my copy of A Year at the Movies on my scalp some more.
I'd say the packaging is more military-like minimalistic than anything else. I fully expect his industrial-sized shampoo to be sold in genuine WWII jerrycans.
I think we may all have Australian alter-egos.
Funny, when I Google you (purely platonic, I assure you) you come up third. And if you go to google images, you come up second. The guy who swam the English Channel 32 times seems to have a lot of press. Maybe you should give that a shot.
So you also paint?! And they are muscular naked bodies!?! WOW! You really have your work cut out for you with Rifftrax and the painting!
We will get you to number one. Why? To take over the world (Of Course!)
I have been following the evolution of your hair color and style, beginning back in the days when you were Hadrian and another, fictitious, Roman noble, through the noble grey-templed stage and on into the distinguished all-grey version of today. I have recently taken the rash step of darkening all of my encroaching grey hairs. Please keep us posted as to which of the other Kevin Murphy's products you decide to try. Nothing ventured nothing gained, except overwhelming regret and a death wish coupled with a sense that maybe this was a good idea.
After resenting and battling the other Kyle Cassidy's for screwing up my vanity searches, I realized it would be better if we were all fighitng together, against everybody NOT named kyle cassidy, so i started a Facebook group called "people named Kyle Cassidy".
now we are us.