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.

Dr. Vivienne Lo studies Chinese approaches to training and treating the body. The presentation below explores some of her findings and illuminates the overlaps and differences between fitness cultures:

Shokugeki no Soma (Food Wars) is a manga (and anime, and video game series) about cooking. Aimed at teenagers, and ostensibly a slice-of-life comedy manga set in a culinary school, it smuggles surprisingly detailed recipes in between extremely OTT super-cooking montages. Great fun!

My friend Hannah wrote this poem ‘Inconvenience: the yoga of daily life’:

A low door in the wooden gate
for using after dark
fold forward
plum wine
in your belly
A railway bridge
you can push your bike under
If you bend double
arms ahead of you
A small step to stand on
while you take your shoes off
Single leg squats while you manoeuvre
Changing slippers
for the toilet
Heel to toe
pair them up
side by side
for the next person
A table a foot above the floor
Squat and lower yourself
shuffle under the duvet
to keep warm
Daily inconveniences
balancing acts to keep spine and mind aligned
Squatting and creasing and opening
pumping blood around the body

The fucking incredible food writer Patience Gray at home on her farm in Apulia, in southern Italy. Please read ‘Honey from a Weed’.

I’m a big fan of the iconoclasts Bernard and Berta Rudofsky. They wrote very enthusiastically about cultural attitudes towards the body and how design might challenge these.

I enjoyed reading this interview with an expert on their work about the ideas behind the house they designed in Málaga, and especially the bit about their bathroom and bathing cultures:

ARQUITECTURA-G:
We’re also very attracted to the bath culture they adopted. They trace a clear division between the bathtub and the toilet, which in most houses today are just two elements in the same room. We see a big connection between Rudofsky and César Manrique, who we had the pleasure of talking about a few issues ago. Manrique placed the strictly sanitary function in the background, focusing more on the sensuality of bathing. Seeing the configuration of the bathroom at La Casa, the bathtub seems almost like a sacred object. Could you tell us more about this?
Andrea Bocco Guarneri:
Yes, the toilet and bathtub had to be separate. As Bernard had already theorised, especially in Behind the Picture Window, these two elements have nothing to do with each other; they respond to two very different necessities. They’re often placed together to facilitate the installation of a water system, and also because our culture doesn’t prioritise daily domestic pleasures. The toilet is separate in Frigiliana but also directly linked to the bathing area, alongside another space containing the shower, which has no door. The bathroom is a very stark space with white tiles—and in my own experience, it’s very empty, even more so than other rooms in the house. This approach was not the same as Manrique’s hedonism; if such a thing existed in Frigiliana it would be the swimming pool, but even that was more austere. It wasn’t the sensuality of a Japanese bath either, or of the shared bath that Rudofsky proposed in his book Sparta/ Sybaris. The bathtub in Frigiliana is for one person only. I always found it a bit sad, but to Bernard the act of bathing was sacred—a very physical and earthly kind of sacred.

New Fitness Culture Scrapbook #11