Saturday, April 09, 2005
Willie Gillis at the USO
(Just a reminder; please send me your pictures! Send me a picture of yourself holding a sign saying hello to me, Carl, or the site in general, Bubblegoose. Send them to unsung1974@yahoo.com and have a lot of fun with it! The pictures will be placed on my Sony PSP in a photo album, and unless you request other wise, I will post the cool ones on this site off and on! see the April 8th post for more begging)
I have this calendar hanging in my bathroom that I got free-of-charge from a disabled American veteran’s organization. Each month displays another in the long line of lame Norman Rockwell paintings. You know, the guy famous for his good-old-days paintings, as seen in the Saturday Evening Post and finer dentist's offices everywhere.
This month's picture is a goofy looking guy (ala Gomer Pyle) dressed in a soldier's uniform. He is seated with a plate of donuts and a cup of coffee, while two slim women are attending to him. The women are USO reps, and are making him visibly embarrassed and uncomfortable. The thing that I find interesting is that by looking at the picture, you immediately are in the understanding that the man is a dork, and the women are beautiful...
... but the women do not appear that beautiful. The one on the left looks like she is 50 and the other one just looks goofy. But this is a perfect display of how the image of beauty changes with time. It (beauty) is not only in the eye of the beholder, but is also subject to the dreaded "paradigm shift." (note: paradigms are the scientific/anthropological version of a fad)
Our concept of beauty changes constantly, and frankly, if you look back too far, it is hard to find a lot of women or men who look contemporarily beautiful. The ones that do have a special timeless quality that makes them unique anyway. One of my favorite pastimes in high school was to look through all of the old yearbooks in the archives. As the old joke from MST3K goes, they all look like they are long past being teenagers (my favorite use of this joke by Mike and the 'bots was during a movie where Mel Torme was supposedly a teenage rebel, and he looked at least in his mid 30's).
My friends and I were always quite surprised when we found a "hottie" in the pages of our school's past. Let's just say that I would expect that a women's college's student body back-in-the-day did not look like the cast of Mona Lisa Smile.
Even the Hollywood actresses from previous eras suffer from this. While it is apparent at first site that these ladies are beauties, they still seem to the modern eye a bit "off." And it is more than the hair and clothes... it is how they carry themselves, their body shape, and even facial features.
Three great places to look at past beauties are old James Bond movies (where the women seem angry, old, and more shapely than today's starlets), Hitchcock movies (where he cast timeless beauties, but those that are still hard to place an age on... Shirley MacLane looks 30 in her debut role), and the old British Hammer horror movies (perhaps more than the others, these actresses look incredibly hot, but do not look like anything walking about these days). Not to dog on the English, but if you look at the 70's sci-fi movies from the UK, you will often see a parade of women that lack even a hint of attractiveness; a far cry from the adult film stars that are used to fill roles in today's sci-fi trash.
I wonder why this is, that beauty would change with time? I wonder if Helen of Troy could launch any ships today? If Rene Zelwigger was actually able to go back to the 20's and be a flapper (ala Chicago), I wonder if she would be make the other women pale in comparison, or if she would seem an ugly duckling? Would Paris Hilton seem attractive to Sean Connery circa 1962? Would Marilyn Monroe even be able to get a TV show role in today's world?
So, if you look in the mirror and don't see George Clooney or Kirsten Dunst staring back at you, don't worry. Maybe your face and body were just meant for another time. Like all things, there is always hope for a paradigm shift. Or, as they say, every dog will have its day... good news for us dogs! (I am hoping for a shift to make men with receding hair, a spare tire, and no muscle tone at all to be the new standard for male beauty)
Horns up!
I have this calendar hanging in my bathroom that I got free-of-charge from a disabled American veteran’s organization. Each month displays another in the long line of lame Norman Rockwell paintings. You know, the guy famous for his good-old-days paintings, as seen in the Saturday Evening Post and finer dentist's offices everywhere.
This month's picture is a goofy looking guy (ala Gomer Pyle) dressed in a soldier's uniform. He is seated with a plate of donuts and a cup of coffee, while two slim women are attending to him. The women are USO reps, and are making him visibly embarrassed and uncomfortable. The thing that I find interesting is that by looking at the picture, you immediately are in the understanding that the man is a dork, and the women are beautiful...
... but the women do not appear that beautiful. The one on the left looks like she is 50 and the other one just looks goofy. But this is a perfect display of how the image of beauty changes with time. It (beauty) is not only in the eye of the beholder, but is also subject to the dreaded "paradigm shift." (note: paradigms are the scientific/anthropological version of a fad)
Our concept of beauty changes constantly, and frankly, if you look back too far, it is hard to find a lot of women or men who look contemporarily beautiful. The ones that do have a special timeless quality that makes them unique anyway. One of my favorite pastimes in high school was to look through all of the old yearbooks in the archives. As the old joke from MST3K goes, they all look like they are long past being teenagers (my favorite use of this joke by Mike and the 'bots was during a movie where Mel Torme was supposedly a teenage rebel, and he looked at least in his mid 30's).
My friends and I were always quite surprised when we found a "hottie" in the pages of our school's past. Let's just say that I would expect that a women's college's student body back-in-the-day did not look like the cast of Mona Lisa Smile.
Even the Hollywood actresses from previous eras suffer from this. While it is apparent at first site that these ladies are beauties, they still seem to the modern eye a bit "off." And it is more than the hair and clothes... it is how they carry themselves, their body shape, and even facial features.
Three great places to look at past beauties are old James Bond movies (where the women seem angry, old, and more shapely than today's starlets), Hitchcock movies (where he cast timeless beauties, but those that are still hard to place an age on... Shirley MacLane looks 30 in her debut role), and the old British Hammer horror movies (perhaps more than the others, these actresses look incredibly hot, but do not look like anything walking about these days). Not to dog on the English, but if you look at the 70's sci-fi movies from the UK, you will often see a parade of women that lack even a hint of attractiveness; a far cry from the adult film stars that are used to fill roles in today's sci-fi trash.
I wonder why this is, that beauty would change with time? I wonder if Helen of Troy could launch any ships today? If Rene Zelwigger was actually able to go back to the 20's and be a flapper (ala Chicago), I wonder if she would be make the other women pale in comparison, or if she would seem an ugly duckling? Would Paris Hilton seem attractive to Sean Connery circa 1962? Would Marilyn Monroe even be able to get a TV show role in today's world?
So, if you look in the mirror and don't see George Clooney or Kirsten Dunst staring back at you, don't worry. Maybe your face and body were just meant for another time. Like all things, there is always hope for a paradigm shift. Or, as they say, every dog will have its day... good news for us dogs! (I am hoping for a shift to make men with receding hair, a spare tire, and no muscle tone at all to be the new standard for male beauty)
Horns up!
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