movement

An interlibrary loan that I've been waiting on since June, A Cultural History of Gesture, finally came through last week and I've been reading it with great interest.

My curiosity about historic movement, manners, body language etc. was sparked at the Medieval Congress by multiple related presentations: one about the effect of clothing on movement (describing an experiment in which the presenter walked up and down stairs in a gothic fitted dress; the paper seemed kind of incomplete but still provocative) and a couple on the difficulties in reenacting historic fencing movements when the manuals are subject to (often modern biased) interpretation.

Given that I'm trying to describe an intangible like movement rather than a physical artifact like clothes it's hard to explain why gesture, posture, etc. is so interesting except to say that it seems another fact of the everyday realities of history, beyond the glamour of famous historical figures, landmark battles, etc. What did the average day feel like - get up, eat breakfast (or do you?), get dressed, go about their day, etc. In all these activities people moved around and I'm finding that people moved differently - the past is even more of a foreign country.

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More from the files of vivid dreams...

I was walking down a cold rainy street. It was lunch hour, or rush hour, or some similar time when people have to be out on wet gray sidewalks trying to get somewhere.

I went inside one door and it was so different I immediately wanted to live there. Far from being cold and damp it was warm with golden light, polished dark brown wood, soft upholstery, and it smelled inviting, like cinnamon buns or warm blankets fresh out of the dryer.

There were lots of women milling around the lobby, in 1930s-40s style, all red lipstick and slim skirts and preppy sweater sets, talking and drinking and flirting. one of them told me that the downstairs of the building was "for the children".

In love with the comfy building, I all but begged the concierge to let me a room and got a big old-fashioned key that fit a door on an upper floor.

The room had charmingly old-fashioned flowered wallpaper and two bulging overstuffed beds. Being tired and cold I decided to get some sleep but in the low light I didn't see that there was an old woman already sleeping in one of the beds.

She woke up and told me that she and her lover (sleeping in the other bed) had lived there for years, and that when they slept their younger selves went to the lobby to talk and flirt and be young again.

I left so they could be alone together, and I can't remember much else about the dream, just that it felt really welcome and cozy.

more Tony Wilson

On his role as design patron - it's true, Factory Records had some iconic sleeve art, particularly the original Blue Monday and Joy Division.