Parries → Squelching in a bath of me 

This evening here in Los Angeles I met someone at her house, in Hollywood, who told me she does yoga but maybe only 1% of that has been Bikram. Too intense, she says. I’ve heard that before. Must it be so intense? Bikram obviously believes so; anyone can walk right in and do the same class with others who’ve been at it for years, demonstrating that the poses he’s chosen and the order he’s placed them in is something fundamental for humans—never too old, as he says. Right from the get-go you are reaching and holding at your physical limits; within just a few minutes you can reach what feels like the end of your endurance; and you do that 50-odd times in various ways within the hour-and-a-half class. These poses go straight to weaknesses, systematically. Compare that to bench pressing, where you’re focused on your strengths. How ridiculous bench-pressing seems when in this class you see you can barely support your own body except in a limited number of positions. And awkward pose—squats seem overwrought after that. How elegant to do it with no tools, just the body itself. Without Bikram yoga I can’t see that I would ever get to exercise my body so comprehensively at any time throughout my life. When you start going routinely you can forget that.

We went to the downtown LA studio this evening. It’s in the middle of an array of vast concrete and glass, across the road from the new Disney Concert Hall by Gehry, all bendy metal surfaces. The parking is underground. We’re greeted at the front desk by a very smiley woman with some Asian in her yet blonde or at least peroxided. But in class the instructor just cannot keep track of whether we are on first or second set. She makes that mistake at least four times. That many and she’s obviously just going through the motions, her mind wandering elsewhere. Not good. See, this is an example of taking it for granted: rather than being grateful there’s a venue where someone will take me through this routine together with a group where we all keep each other motivated, I bitch about its imperfections.

Yet perhaps even yoga, despite its evocations as being a passive, Eastern sport, is a bit yangy, with its formalism. I mean that a sport such as kiteboarding or surfing might be a better all-round workout. Here too you’re using strength, balance and flexibility. They seem superior activities. Or am I comparing apples and oranges; Bikram say his class only workout designed for whole body. What I’m asking here though is whether other workouts also exercise the whole body without being designed to do so. Perhaps it’s more accurate to refine Bikram’s claim (lightning hasn’t struck me as I write this) to say it exercises the whole body in the most harmonized way, that is, muscles don’t get exercised to the point that they are more developed than the system supporting them, thereby throwing the system out of whack.

I also went yesterday for a frustrated tour around LA. Rode the Metro subway for the first time—hadn’t even known the city had one. It’s cheap, it’s clean, but there just aren’t that many trains, as if the city sabotages its own public transport system and wants you to have a car; that’s its infrastructure, that’s how it’s designed. With a car, this whole plain is your city. Beach, opera, hills, airport, stadium—it’s all equidistant. If you truly are going to get in your car to go anywhere, that is, there is no neighborhood around you that you frequent any more than geographically further places, then in comparison to other cities it doesn’t seem to matter so much where in it you live as long as it’s safe.

So I got off at Koreatown and saw a huge McDonald’s sign. This was a high-morale McD’s, with a framed tribute to Ray Kroc, 1902-1984 I think, and one of a recently deceased priest. I took my food outside to the concrete canopy that was serving as meetingplace for a collection of middle-aged Asians sitting and chatting and calling each other over and bringing each other McDonald’s coffees. A drunk sat on one chair yabbering loudly the whole time in what I presume was Korean. It was sunny. Only when I stood up to go did I see that the drunk was actually a woman. Colorful place, this town.