Muscle Beach

That, that, that-

... beach blanket where I'm laying next to a, a young lady who is all of that and more, and I'm gonna get up and run into the water and help some tourist who a half hour before was saying, "Look at that meathead on Muscle Beach."

What? That, this is ridiculous.

I don't think so.

And it wasn't as bad as it is now.

I was gonna get to that, about how ba- you just cannot walk around where I used to live anymore, especially at night, which is Muscle Beach, right next to Muscle Beach.

Yeah.

Which that changed, too.

Venice Beach.

Muscle Beach.

I love it.

What are you doing there? So I'm here for a very special launch for Hot Wheels.

That's on location, right? Because the pier with all those cool...

Yeah, and Muscle Beach.

Exactly.

All the little bridges and cool little fancy houses.

Mid-Morning Mic Check on KRLD.

Residents in Venice Beach, out in Southern California, in L.A. That's where the Muscle Beach thing is located.

Oh, yeah,

I've been there many times.

And so I had sort of grown up with this, like a, a background in sports, um, and I was never really sure how to integrate that, um, into the sort of like newer sort of political understanding or these, these changes politically that I was sort of going through as I was growing up.

Um, and so, you know, I think the, the, the sort of the, the essay for Ultra, um, which kind of like talked about the, the different changes in the history of exercise through like Muscle Beach and trying to understand, you know, why it is that we arrived at sort of CrossFit today.

Um, a lot of that is als-also just kind of my own tr-trying to think through the politics of, of exercise and physical culture.

And so similarly with the, the Regimen series, both in Ultra and Spectre Magazine, I think those were sort of my own attempts at trying to historicize and understand a little bit like what is the past relationship between exercise and left politics because, uh, you know, that was, those, in, that sort of, those positions became to increasingly reflect my own politics and, um, I, I didn't always have, you know, people around me that, that sort of made se- were able to kinda make sense of that.

There's places kind of all over the US where, uh, the city has basically built, you know, just like gymnastics parks.

They've got pull-up bars and some other kinds of really simple, cheap equipment, um, and people make these really big outdoor communities out of them, uh, and they're free.

Um, and I think that that's really exciting to see that stuff happen and is a little reminiscent of the kind of the early Muscle Beach in the, the '50s and '60s in the United States.

Um- But, uh, but even informally, I think that, you know, it-- with, with the sort of the instances of things like Antifa soccer coming out of the, the, the George Floyd rebellion very briefly, um, even in the, the anti-farm law protests in India in, I think in 2020, 2021, there were, there were, like, sort of, uh, news stories of farmers that just brought their gym equipment to the protest site and sort of set up little gyms.

it's like wcw uh spring break i mean that whole promotion they'd be out there let's all work out on the beach and drink whatever oh

yeah that's like muscle beach out in california page you ever go there yeah uh That seems miserable.

It's like a

tourist thing when you go down to any of those California beaches.

Could have been a gay movie, for all we know.

Could have been.

You could say it's called Muscle Beach.

The Love Muscle Beach.