New Fitness Culture Scrapbook #19

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.

Someone on Reddit gathered together all the feats of strength in Asterix comics. I like the way they’ve been categorised (cheeky full-wanker chance to reference Borges’ Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge and its point about meaningless taxonomies):

  • Do you even Lifting Feats (potion users lifting and carrying heavy objects)

  • Throwing Feats (impressive displays of throwing things)

  • Smashing Feats, what! (when potion users break things)

  • I Sea Feats (impressive showing with water involved)

  • Striking Feats! (for surprising feats achieved in one hit)

  • Combat Feats (fighting techniques)

  • A Number of Feats (Potion Users VS Large Numbers)

  • Other Strength Feats (not exactly combat feats)

  • Speed Feats

  • Durability

  • Anti-feats (the potion's limitations and weaknesses)

  • Other (healing properties, left over feats, etc)

This made me think too of GutsMuths’ first P.E. curriculum (Gymnastik für die jugend, from 1793), which divided physical activity intro three forms:

  1. “Gymnastic Exercises properly so called” (systematic exercise)

  2. “Manual Labours” (gardening and other physical work)

  3. “Social Games for Youth” (games and team sports)

And then sub-divided the gymnastic exercises by movement type:

  • Leaping

  • Running

  • Jaculation (...throwing)

  • Wrestling

  • Climbing

  • Preservation of Equilibrium, or Balancing

  • Lifting and Carrying, Trial of the Back, Drawing (pulling), Skipping

  • Dancing, Walking and Military Exercise

  • Bathing and Swimming

  • Others

  • Reading Aloud, and Declaiming

  • Exercise of the Senses

I’d like to put together a workshop exploring different ways of breaking down human movement…

A beautiful 12th century hammam was discovered during the renovation of an old bar in Seville. The architect of the bar, back in the ‘20s, had concealed but preserved the ruins.

Some of the geometric painting is still there! And the beautiful star-shaped skylights!

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On Sunday evenings I have been doing a film club with my friends Jo and Yas. It was Jo’s choice a couple of weeks ago and we watched ‘Full Mantis’, a really special documentary about the visionary jazz drummer Milton Graves.

It was absolutely brilliant. Hard to do justice in a few sentences but I wanted to include it here because there’s an amazing physicality to all his work.

The film draws the viewer through the artist’s lush garden and ornate home, into the martial arts dojo in his backyard and the laboratory in his basement - all of this just blocks from where he grew up in the housing projects of South Jamaica, Queens.

Graves tells stories of discovery, struggle and survival, ruminates on the essence of 'swing,' activates electronic stethoscopes in his basement lab to process the sound of his heart, and travels to Japan where he performs at a school for children with autism, igniting the student body into an ecstatic display of spontaneous collective energy.

Oscillating from present to past and weaving intimate glimpses of the artist’s complex cosmology with blistering performances from around the globe, MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS is cinema full of fluidity, polyrhythm and intensity, embodying the essence of Graves’ music itself.

And thanks to my dad for sending me this video of rock climbing bears! Impeccable technique!!

Scrapbook, ResearchGuy LochheadComment