Routine Movements

Two quotes from  Weighing the Evidence on Exercise by Gretchen Reynolds with just a twist of lime to flavor them.

"Exercise “re-established the homeostatic steady state between intake and expenditure to defend a lower body weight,” the study authors concluded. Running had remade the rats’ bodies so that they ate less."
A hopefully productive reworking: Routine remakes our thoughts' bodies so that they eat/taste more.

"Standing, for both men and women, burned multiple calories but did not ignite hunger. One thing is going to become clear in the coming years, Braun says: if you want to lose weight, you don’t necessarily have to go for a long run. 'Just get rid of your chair.'"

To twist our thought, we may not need grand gestures, it may be as simple as getting pulling the seat from under our own thoughts.

A short post on Appropriation

Some quotes that I find interesting.


Richard Prince: you have to play the picture, you can't play yourself.


Kruger: I am prone to a kind of lascivious optimism. I want to question the notions of heroism and skew the conventions which loiter around depiction. 


Yve Lomax as quoted by Tickner: she knocked some metaphors off the table.


Stezaker: What is hidden in that surplus, that excess [of images], is what interested me, because it's clear that it is the tension between the world of excess and the world of everyday reality governed by its rationalist forces


Aragon quoting Ducasse: a maxim does not need to be corrected. It needs to be developed.


Debord and Wolman: Detournement is less effective the more it approaches rational reply.  


Duchamp: use a Rembrandt as an ironing board. 


Warhol: when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect


Retort: Empire and "Jihad", two virulent mutations of the Right.

Topics overlapping: obesity dances with health insurance

There is much to chew on in An Insurer's New Approach to Diabetes, whether one is focused on my public policy issue obesity or Wendy's policy issue heath care/insurance.  

Both UnitedHealth and the C.D.C. want to expand on the success of a clinically proved program that has been offered by the Y. Based on evidence drawn from that program, people who are pre-diabetic and lose just 5 percent of their body weight can reduce their chances of developing the disease by almost 60 percent. The C.D.C. is also considering ways to encourage organizations beside the Y to develop similar programs.

What is most interesting to me is that this program's success is founded on a regular (weekly) routine of social gatherings as well as solo work. This is a stretch, but I want to connect the idea of this social routine with what it means to think the event.

Unhinging productivity

Barbara Kruger in interview tells us, "I think the 'C word' [criticism] can still be operational, can still work to put into place certain procedures and ways of looking, which have a tumultuously unhinging relationship to the etiquettes of power" (A, 115).

We should be unhinged, productively. I propose a Mad Hatter move in which as we rehearse our routines we remember that "detournment is less effective the more it approaches rationale reply" (A, 35). The "plane of immanence . . . implies a groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rationale or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess" (WIP?, 41). We are to give, for our own work, "witness to the abrupt coming together of unrelated, even incoherent thoughts" and "shameless transgression" (M, 130 and 131) "Proper grammar and syntax have nothing with making a joke funny" or a joke-machine run (SUC, 60).

I thought I wanted to use the understated overstatement as the tone for the voice of my stand up conceptual persona. My obsession with the idea of restraint (rules, norms, systems to pull meaning out of chaos) in the texts leads to its opposite. I do not wire my jaw shut to lose weight. 

To create meaty work, worth its weight, as I weigh these matters, as I am way laid by my manners, I, as the mad fool, have to unhinge my jaw. I gorge and vomit. 

I will be The Biggest Loser. To lose the weight, to lose my way, to lose my preconceptions, to loose my trek. 

This is in the mode of the Brazilian film/literature/art that uses anthropophagy as a tactic. (http://www.lorenzogunn.com/tropicalia.pdf). I try to ingest and transform some of the power of, take the strength of theory and popular culture.  

And to bring it back to image, we should let our images consume us. To quote Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, "It is the image that devours the spectator." I want to unhinge the jaws of my images so they eat my thinking, digest and transform it. 

bit=byte=bite

routine=diet (die it, dye it, dial it, deal it)

twist=unhinge

A bit rehearsed in an email now with some images and links

A phrase I have turning in my head is "It's all over until the fat lady does not sing." An stereotypically large opera diva as the statue of liberty stands on on side of a set of scales- the other scale is weighted down with books and studies and facts and tables and laws and arguments about obesity. She weighs less than these weighty tomes. The scale is made of a distorted image of the logo for The Biggest Loser.  The opera diva's mouth is sewn shut yet things are sliding in and out of her mouth at the seams.

The scale with the tomes is the hungry maw, the hungry ghost, the figure of gluttony (referencing Paul Cadmus).

Her scale is a bridle- she stands on the mouth piece, the leather straps forming a cage around her- leading to reins, some in her hand, some in the "hands" of the tomes. Some strap down the books/laws/agruments/facts/tables/studies. All of this is set on a plate, as if the viewer is a diner about to dig in.

Fat tax: a taxing diet

Quote from Health Official Willing to go the Mat Over Obesity and Sugared Sodas.

A response to the "crusading" Dr. Richard Daines, who is trying to get a penny-an-ounce tax on sugared sodas passed in New York State, from supermarket owner Mr. Nelson Eusebio:

“Educating people helps them more than taxing them,” Mr. Eusebio said. “If taxation was a form of diet, New Yorkers would be the healthiest people on the planet because we are the most overtaxed people on the planet.”

I like this image of taxation as a form of diet. In my mind it links to the larger dyad of restraint/lack of restraint that seems to be threading through my understanding of not only my target but most of CATTt.

A minor textual detournement of Lifeload and Multitude

Kind of sort of of a cut up of a passage from Lifeload, a fantasy novel by Jo Walton, (p. 1) and a passage of Multitude by Paol Virno (pp. 52-53 and 61).

If you go far enough to the defect of semanticity, they say, you come to the lands where people are like statues, going through a defined series of monotonous signals each day out of pure routine. The world dries up. Acts are without power.

Contrariwise, if you set off to the excess of semanticity, people become feyer and stranger, more powerful maybe, but less able to remember who they are from moment to moment, until at last they run together and separate as fast as rainbows, an unstable and contained continuum, and only the gods can keep themselves whole. Power is without acts.

Between these extremes falls the katechon, where folks have wit and will enough to oscillate between the negative and the positive, to restrain but not remove the regression to the infinite.