New Fitness Culture Scrapbook #17
This is a collection of five things I found out about in the past week that felt relevant to my work.
They can be read as individual curios, or, as I understand them, as waymarkers towards a more interesting and inclusive culture of fitness.
We’ve been thinking about what to plant in the garden and at the allotment this year. I’ve been taking a lot of inspiration from a brilliant little book from 1980 that I bought for £3 or something called ‘Salads the Year Round’, by Joy Larkcom. She and her family travelled across Europe (their “Grand Vegetable Tour”) in a van for a year researching salad traditions and she has presented her findings in a number of books on salad growing. Many of these plants are easy to grow in a window box, so it’s really worth a look, whether you have a garden or not.
I love learning about changing tastes in food and training. Larkcom mentions many plants - wild and cultivated - that have fallen out of fashion and I’m excited to try them.
Larkcom herself seems to have fallen out of fashion, though her writing is clear and full of passion. I was pleased to find this interview with her.
Len Deighton’s ‘Action Cook Book’ was an attempt from 1965 to make cooking appeal to men “unskilled at knowing their way around the kitchen” via the medium of the “cookstrip” - a recipe in the form of a comic strip.
It’s an interesting mix of ‘60s cool, macho posturing, and Deighton’s real passion and knowledge of classical French cuisine.
I first heard about it on this episode of the Food Programme.
While finding an image I read that Deighton has been making new cookstrips for the Observer since 2017!
In this video, MOMA’s La Frances Hui introduces the kung fu film genre through the work of legendary actor/director/choreographer Lau Kar-leung. His films are beautiful, precise, athletic, and uncompromising.
I enjoyed the comparison of Bruce Lee’s Chinese-American boxing/wushu hybrid style, Jackie Chan’s Peking Opera acrobatics, and Lau’s pure, Southern Chinese artistry:
Big thank you to my sister’s fiancé, Keaton, for sharing with me these great physical challenges set by a Finnish PE teacher:
Loads of excellent ideas! Many more here.
Finland has good form on creative ways of training the body - there are a whole load of weightlifting games from there in my World Sports Encyclopaedia… I hope to put on a workshop of them one day.