melancholy diary
twelve o’clock, July 17, 2021 – 08:26
of Diego De Silva placeholder image
Vwell, it’s hot. Very hot. a very sultry summer, even more than the previous one, at least in this first half of July. Okay, we couldn’t wait to get some air, and instead we’re getting mostly humidity.
In addition, we still have the masks (even if we make a more casual use of them than when we were cataloged by color, and it is not even said that they do not repaint us), and endure the gag when the heat is raging even more challenging. But scrapping the modesty one month after the August holidays a discount on the times that concur with the summer sales.
Thermal exasperation disinhibits clothing up to half-nakedness, blunting the awareness of the state of the bodies. So it happens to come across human figures similar to moving installations, such as Alberto Sordi’s wife mistaken for a work of art at the Biennale in the famous “Vacanze Intelligenti” (which has now become a classic). Judging by the frequency of the apparitions, it is not too dangerous to think that the strip-teases offered to the dismayed public are aimed at the addiction of the eye. A sort of aesthetic amnesty claimed in the field.
And then green light to long johns and tank tops (not Bermuda shorts and beach tops: real underwear for a housewife), De Fonseca with a sock, uninhibited armpits, clogs slammed on the asphalt with hippo grace, bold escapes of waxing.
In this forced exhibition of domestic intimacy, we can see the adhesion to an amateur-porn aesthetic, like a self-timer of the past, which aspires to release the unwatchable body from the bars of shame by claiming its right to expose itself and propose itself as an object of desire. But in the arrogance of those who throw their (s) graces in your face there is more: a desire for civilization, for the infringement of decency; above all, of privatization of public space. An I do as if I were in my house, with the implicit addition of: What do you have to look at ?.
A similar encounter (or rather, an eye clash) happened to me just the day before yesterday. At first, when I glimpsed the phenomenon from a medium distance, I swear, I didn’t believe my eyes. Then I realized – supported by the stigma of the other passers-by of that stretch of road, who, however gasping, had retained the capacity to be astonished – that it was true. That the humanoid figure that came towards us – moreover in the heart of the pedestrian area and therefore completely uninhibited – was not a vision deformed by the heat.
The subject, male, over sixty, medium height, hairy and bald, advanced preceded by a naked belly that made up almost the whole body, having thought well to roll up his shirt up to the breastbone, giving the disconcerting spectacle to us poor wretches who we came in the opposite direction.
This of the rolled-up T-shirt that realizes the crime of obscene belly in a public place is not a brand new boorishness (in fact it has been practiced for several years). But I hadn’t seen such a thing yet. We are in the post-covid of trash, where there is no longer any need to make a mistake in the dress: just leave the house, and take your domestic version for a walk, effectively privatizing the public space.
July 17, 2021 | 08:26
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