jab
Nothing but violent kickboxing classes, spittle of the instructor flying in your faces as he screams that you are weak. This is the third or fourth time that my mood has plunged severely after taking this man's class. Nowhere else do I feel such a profound sense of being devoured by fitness culture. His classes are always too crowded, he is too large, bodies consume the room and they are animated but far from lifelike. It is like a parallel universe in which everyone is denied agency, given tight clothing, and plunged into a slick-floored room repeating things that, long ago, were indications of great brutality-- it is so perfect: the punch as floating signifier. It is a thousand times more frightening when this psychotic instructor castrates these moves and makes them meaningless, uses them as choreography, gets in your face, all to some miserable, bemuscled end.
There are a handful of women, coarse, naval, mighty ladies indeed, who attend all his classes without fail. They are disciples, his Greek chorus. I am fascinated with this Dionysian relationship he seems to have with them, and I stare glassily at their rippling backs as they punch the air. It makes me think of The Great and Filthy Feminine Identity, where women murder each other to keep fucking the same dude. Unflinchingly must they have their one and only dude. Sometimes I imagine having sex with this man and in my imagination he always ends the encounter by giving me a body-fat test.
Goddamn, that's a hostile motherfucking environment.
To those who asked, I'll be in NYC on the 20th February.
There are a handful of women, coarse, naval, mighty ladies indeed, who attend all his classes without fail. They are disciples, his Greek chorus. I am fascinated with this Dionysian relationship he seems to have with them, and I stare glassily at their rippling backs as they punch the air. It makes me think of The Great and Filthy Feminine Identity, where women murder each other to keep fucking the same dude. Unflinchingly must they have their one and only dude. Sometimes I imagine having sex with this man and in my imagination he always ends the encounter by giving me a body-fat test.
Goddamn, that's a hostile motherfucking environment.
To those who asked, I'll be in NYC on the 20th February.