I’ve always had shitty posture. I blame Tom Waits. I got into his music when I was in my teens. My dad had a cassette tape that just had WAITS hand scrawled on it. It was spelled in capital letters so it seemed important. I grabbed it and gave it a listen. It opened with I'll be gone, from the Franks Wild Years album(still my fave to date), and I was instantly sold. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard. It was over the top, the voice was definitely unique, and you can never go wrong with a good dose of accordion. And was that… was that a real rooster? (yes it was).
Tom instantly bombarded himself into a huge influence of mine. I started listening to all his other stuff and haven’t stopped. Everything about the man was cool, his music, his way of talking, his posture, his own influences whom I instantly adopted, his other fans became close pals of mine. Ah yes. The posture. Often hunched over, arms flaring everywhere, legs wrapped around itself, hanging over chairs, shoulders slouching forward. I enthusiastically started embedding it in my own posture wherever I went.
Turns out, on a woman, this way of carrying the body doesn’t quite look as cool as on this songbird. I was blissfully unaware, for this was during a time the Internet was still wearing diapers, Instagram was digital sperm, and photographs usually came out with a big blurry finger blocking the subjects, after the impatient week long wait to have them developed.
I persevered. I slouched, I pretended to care a lot less. Life was cool. I could wrap my legs around oneself twice! It didn’t boost my popularity one bit, I was still as unpopular as ever, but it didn’t matter. I had an invisible friend, painting stories through my ears, in a theatrical way, with humour and sensitivity and a rawness, I developed an interest in the awkward things of life, where the piano sounds a bit off, people aren’t polished but unique and strange, mixed with a good dose of biting humour and a strange melancholy.
Surprisingly, there were no big fans of my posture in acting school. “The floating head“, they called me. Not something to aspire as a thespian. Dr. Harrop’s “stand straight, Clairrzzzyuh! Stand straight!!!!“ is still ringing in my ears. She was my acting teacher in America. She even gave me one of those harnesses in an attempt to fix it. She really tried.
I’ve been collecting reference material for my art and, pondering on posture, I guess what keeps attracting me to black and white old estate sale pictures and vintage mugshots is this: there is a lot of crappy posture and imperfect people, ears are askew, glasses are massive, and everyone looks uncomfortable. Because the shutter time is long, because they just got arrested and are experiencing a particularly bad day or simply because the garden is the only spot with enough light and uncle Rob is thumbling with the camera too long for the smile to hold.
Nobody knew how to pose yet. I kind of miss those days.
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