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Music, Milo, and Pin-Ups of the Heart
Conservatives are not exhibitionists. But real Americans value real-life experience. Which means, if you write, putting your real life on display. I was thinking this as I read @therightnurse’s recent, very frank post on fibromyalgia, written with a kind of directness I’m quite honestly not brave enough to attempt in front of a full audience.
Like many children with a musical ear, I used to improvise at the piano a lot. The impromptus weren’t technically brilliant – I was (and still am) clumsy at the keyboard – but you could always tell a piano what you really thought, and it wouldn’t judge you. Instead, it would make music for you, music which could be judged, if there was anyone around to judge it (and often there was not), for itself alone. Some found the music beautiful, some found it annoying, but in either case, the music could be valued for itself rather than for the experience of the one who made it. For a shy child, that was mostly an asset.
Shy people may remain shy even when they’ve disguised themselves with music, and for years I had horrible stage fright. I still do, I suppose, it’s just now I’m marginally better at managing ways around it. Some audiences are less scary than others, though. Friends’ families, babysitting charges… “Why are all the songs so sad?” one littler kid my older-kid self was babysitting once asked me. “Those aren’t sad, just minor. Minor is beautiful.” It wasn’t a lie. Minor is beautiful. Even for those who tend to live life in a minor key.
Pin-up art nostalgia is pretty common here at Ricochet. It’s not hard to get conservatives to hold forth on why pin-up art, which reveals a lot, but not everything, is superior to today’s exhibitionism. Where is the thrill of transgressing boundaries when there’s no longer a sense of boundaries to transgress, and so forth? Even Milo Yiannopoulos, who is an exhibitionist, displays this aesthetic. He quips gay is boring when it’s no longer transgressive. He’s Catholic and happy to be a bad Catholic, one who jokes about his latest shag and how he once seduced a parish priest as an underage teen. (NSFW) Exhibit. Exhibit. Exhibit. As long as there are boundaries. After all, there must be at least some fig leaf to distinguish us salt-of-the-earth folk from the exhibitionists we decry.
Gross exhibitionism, exhibitionism without reserve or regard for what others want to see, is not even seductive, we say. Either display less than is seductive, or seduce, but for heaven’s sake, don’t display more than that! Not that everyone wants to be seduced, either – a serial seductress is manipulative, and good Americans also hate being manipulated.
So, what do we choose to exhibit, and what do we choose to keep covered up?
I know when I write an essay, the more personal the topic, the more careful I am about what’s showing, for fear of immodesty. Many conservative women are happy to admit they have two reasons to fear bodily immodesty: virtue and vanity. Writing is the same. Expose what is flattering, cover what is not – not just for your own sake, but for the sake of the poor reader whose eye you have caught and who has to look at it. And if you feel silly displaying yourself as too much the protagonist when you know you’re not (a predicament I often find myself in), tell the same story, but about other people, or abstracted altogether.
Sure, not everyone claims to like the abstract, but that doesn’t mean the abstractions we assemble aren’t rooted in real experience. A musician talks to his instrument, using the abstraction of music to say the real things he couldn’t say otherwise. Nor is music the only abstraction we speak through, it’s merely one of the most abstract: music is an end in itself, can be judged for itself, and in that sense is intensely impersonal, although everyone knows how personal it can be.
Other times, maybe, the abstraction is just a personal mythology, not “high abstraction”. But we can’t get away from abstraction, nor should we if we wish to reveal our hearts without disgusting exhibitionism.
So sometimes we’re “artless” and “tell it like it is”. Other times, we artfully leave something (maybe a lot) up to the imagination. It’s a pin-up artistry of the heart, hopefully seductive enough to catch some reader’s fancy, but not the kind of shameless seduction that just makes people feel used.
In the past two years, there’s been a lot I found I just couldn’t talk about politely in public, and no, most of it hasn’t been about US politics. It would simply be too absurd if all told, and gross. Maybe cheaply manipulative, too. If acceptable revelation proceeds in true pin-up fashion, the license to bare one thing is purchased by deciding to cover something else. Which means, if you’re not sure what to keep covered, not baring in the first place. And even those of us bravely “baring it all” on one matter might be quite reticent on others.
Published in General
No.
Yikes!
As we said growing up in the countryside, Hypage, Satana!
You see what you’ve gone and done, Midge? You see? You’ve created a monster!
On your head be it.
That only happened once, upstate. Fun was had by all.
Thank god. Someone else gets it!
Hear! Hear!
Amen.
You have invoked the wrath of the Red Carpet Watcher. Yes, there are a large number of celebrities who get maybe a bit too artsy with their red carpet attire (though I rather like the sunflower dress), but there are many more who wear perfectly elegant clothing. From last year’s Oscars, sure the big names were looking horrid (Jennifer Lawrence did herself no favors by wearing a lace negligee on top of what looks like a sheer hoop skirt, and Rooney Mara looks like she’s being tortured by her hair), but many other actors and actresses looked quite stunning.
Margot Robbie, even with the plunging neckline, looked gorgeous in gold.
Zuri Hall is an entertainment journalist, not an actress, but her red number was beautiful.
Eddie Redmayne rocked a classic tux (we will excuse his wife’s somewhat unshapely dress -she’s pregnant).
Probably not, more’s the pity.
Very nice!
That link came up with Hardy and Riley, but Redmayne was in the panel to the side.
When it comes to private communication and personal friendship, I think I’m like this, too.
But when it comes to formal or public communication, knowing what to say is far more difficult.
This is a side of you, @sabrdance, that I’m not sure I’ve seen before. Milo would approve, I suspect.
I wasn’t thinking of guys giving themselves permission to look in the sense that they couldn’t look without permission – of course they would – but that the humorous situations made the looking – or showing – less shameful. Voyeurism and dirtier stuff than pinups has existed since time immemorial, but a taste for pin-ups is more innocent, less creepy.
My favorite shirt is a cotton-polyester blend (45/55) with a flat front, no pocket, button down collar. But the arms are pleated, so there is a tremendous amount of fabric in the shoulders. It’s very comfortable to work in. I wear it with a vest and flat front pants, and I feel like a swashbuckler or a wild west lawman. If I wear it with a suit, and wear my overcoat, the wind hits the tails and they ripple in the wind, and I feel like Gary Cooper. I have other, formally nicer, shirts, but when I wear them I’m just wearing formal clothes (nothing wrong with that). This is the shirt you save the world in, the shirt you look stylish in. But it’s also the shirt you go home in at the end of the day and don’t feel the need to change into something more comfortable.
Clothing may not make the man, but it announces what he is.
I must be living under a rock because the Milo sensation is not a “thing” in my current undisclosed location. Reckon that’s a good thing.
I can… look garment-construction words up in a glossary…
Of course, women are spoiled for choice when it comes to dressing up enough to look respectable – or swashbuckling.
Second! I mean Third!
Midge, this may come as some surprise but I liked your pinup girls and think that they added elegance and dignity to your OP. I may be wrong about this and it has gotten me into some hot water on occasion; but I have always thought of Ricochet as a writing club for adults.
Unless they’re idiosyncratically-shaped and nothing hangs right when they’re sitting; I’m extremely beholden to the faculty of imagination most of the time re: flowing, clinging, elegant wardrobes with swash and buckle. Respectable, I can usually pull off ‘with a little help from my friends’.
Roger this…It’s even helped make grownups, from time to time…I think this is a great vehicle – along with @She‘s recent tour-de-force – for discussing self-image, what one considers attractive, interpersonal expectations, and the power of imagination in all of it…More, please and thank you!
Only there is one thing about the second pinup girl that concerns me. Looks like she might have a tramp stamp. Hope to God that that was not a thing all the way back in the ’40s. “Oo-oh Grampa, tell me ’bout the good ole days.”
Nope! Just dimples of Venus. And a right leg much shorter than her left leg.
Y’all need your eyes checked. It is a lovely bathing suit with a teardrop cutout in the back. It is creased a bit because of her position. No tramp stamp.
And did someone call for a swashbuckler?
God bless you for that link! I am forever in your debt.
And apparently 1947 was not a leap year.
Her leg is just up in front of her, as if she were about to do a snap kick.
Reminds me of The Red Violin.
But @sabrdance‘s right – the perspective is a little weird, and the longer you look at it…