The sun is not up yet and this heave set guy in the building across Broadway is running up the stairs for the last 10 minutes or so. On a stair master, in front of a television set. The movement is so violent that there is almost an illusion of the entire building shaking.
What is going on in his head? How does his brain feel, fed with all that fresh oxygen and then exposed to morning television? It could probably handle so much more than it is offered. His body too, it thinks it is going places. Yet it is not. Hmm... Ok... He stopped. I somehow still do not understand these gyms. It is fun keeping a regimen and looking at a number on a display ensuring that the thing done here is healthy and good. But it would be so much better to do actual work. Maybe hack some wood, or carry come stones up a hill. Even riding a bicycle for 40 miles in the morning surely beats a stair-master, no?. (is it called stair-master, because the users are stair-slaves?)
The Hungarian Pavilion on the Venetian Biennale last year was filled with workout machines by Antal Lakne that mimicked real world work tasks. There was the paint-master, a machine that simulated the task of painting a wall, the cell phone master, a really heavy model of a cell phone with incredibly hard to press buttons... There was also a wave master... Hmm, it might have been a creation of Chris Ware.
