Why bad boys limp

being on holiday

It’s the last day of holiday. 5 nights in Dorset at an old-fashioned hotel by the sea (patterned carpets and framed memorabilia) my eyes are permanently half-closed because the holiday has taken its toll (in a good way)—holidays are funny like that. They can actually “work” or “do wonders” or something though they’re backwards for that reason too like it can take three days of a five day holiday to shake off the petty grips of reality and settle into the wonder of beach, breakfast, each other’s laidback company…. and with a good holiday, by the end usually something has been cured (human meat in salt & sun) and some truth has been negotiated. Really though. A surprising amount of transformation can occur in such a short amount of time… it should be called “holiday therapy” or something (of course it can also go wrong…)

But not this one. My sisters are delightful savages. And my little brother is a god-send from the land of human lap-dogs (an Elvis to be). Ella their mother is bold-faced and shameless in her excellent parenting and Dad is, sweet, in surprising moments. What he gives sometimes it’s hard to see, but it’s also what makes the trip and our family so unique, difficult, special: driving around in his old car, talking to everyone, eating food off the floor,—letting the girls run around nakkie… I felt some shame at the start of this holiday for being the feral family in the old age pensioner’s home (this hotel) but then what I learnt from spending time with Forest (little brother 1) and Marnie and Meadow (little sisters 2 & 2) is that you can style anything out. Like walking across a room for example. You can sustain yourself in the journey by being lost in thought or listening to music (those are two tried & tested mechanisms for filling spacetime)—OR, you can fall down and zoom-in to inspect something on the floor… entering insect mode. This is the way of Forest—OR, you can go the way of Marnie & Meadow and expand and lift to fill the moment, get large and lumber your arms around to create momentum bouncing off physical plains like a human skateboarder without a board… I mean it’s as if, in any given moment, those two are choosing to star in their own music videos with their eyes as the cameras and their wills as the directors and their bodies as the principal actors—then, all that’s left is to style it out. Pivotally, what they’re focusing on is not what it looks like but what it feeeeeeeels like. That’s what’s getting them the Oscar’s. The only way to move through life then like you’re in a music video is to feeeeeeel like you’re in one. This is what I understood by the end of this holiday. And it answered one of my semi-long-standing fascinations with bad boys. and why they limp. Or rather why that limp is a sign of power and why, when embodied correctly, it is the ultimate swag.

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The bad boy limp, lilt (or bop lol) is one of my favourite movements on the London street because it registers to me as an implicit acknowledgement of how much power there is in the off-beat and how much good there is in delay… it’s how a man swings his hips, inhabits his body, fills the second with promise of what’s about to be... sometimes the bad boy limp is a genuine battle scar… and maybe that’s when it’s in its most perfect expression? But more often than not it isn’t and doesn’t need to be because it still resembles it implies perseverance in the face of adversity where adversity is as simple as the adversity of doing outdoing being… that is until the bad boy limp comes along and twists doing into being so effortlessly—on the street, going from A (aaaaaaaaa) to B (beeeeeeee) which is probably why when it’s done performatively (if you’re operating from how it looks over how it feels) then it can seem grotesque and cringie (yes hello Michael. You’ve deepened my thinking.) Although, truth be told, I still think the attempt is admirable from my perspective of dancer/space-cadet, because, it seems to me that if he’s¹ doing the bad-boy limp then he’s probably not in a rush to go somewhere, he’s probably paid his dues, made peace with his past and, now he’s allowing himself to get giddy in the smallest of moments that there is that of

walking down the street &

there he goes he’s

becoming to you and

if he is then

when he does

he’ll

sneak in effortlessly like joining in (a jump rope)

close your eyes

(partially)

feel the swing

the

hummingbird hover—stay, stayyyyyyy

then leave—sorry. I think the city started to creep back into my parlance there. I became a bit more poetic/ambiguous/self-protective (?) … but now I’m back again in this multi-textured, multi-patterned, multi-decaded lobby and it’s 2am and I’m going to be very real with you again. Cold coffee in front of me, parcel of chocolate from Ella, melting…

1. I can’t work out if this is necessarily gendered or not. Physical embodiment is more naturally available to women or so I believe at this point in time… examples of male embodiment seem harder to find. And should definitely be encouraged.