unlocking the fat trap

i have talked about fat before. but until january 1st, 2012, i had little in the way of stats. below are excerpts from the New York Times' fact-filled magazine piece, The Fat Trap. in the meantime, in my quest to find a decent physician, i had to interview a number of frogs. the one i have in mind is the one who responded to the question as to why he thought so few people kept weight off since losing it. with an expression saying, 'isn't it obvious?' he made it clear: for the same reason they got fat in the first place: they're lazy, and they're not quite honest. these doctors need to be educated.

A full year after significant weight loss, these men and women remained in what could be described as a biologically altered state. Their still-plump bodies were acting as if they were starving and were working overtime to regain the pounds they lost. For instance, a gastric hormone called ghrelin, often dubbed the “hunger hormone,” was about 20 percent higher than at the start of the study.

Another hormone associated with suppressing hunger, peptide YY, was also abnormally low. Levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and increases metabolism, also remained lower than expected. A cocktail of other hormones associated with hunger and metabolism all remained significantly changed compared to pre-dieting levels. It was almost as if weight loss had put their bodies into a unique metabolic state, a sort of post-dieting syndrome that set them apart from people who hadn’t tried to lose weight in the first place.

Researchers know that obesity tends to run in families, and recent science suggests that even the desire to eat higher-calorie foods may be influenced by heredity.

That experimental binge should have translated into a weight gain of roughly 24 pounds (based on 3,500 calories to a pound). But some gained less than 10 pounds, while others gained as much as 29 pounds.

The research shows that the changes that occur after weight loss translate to a huge caloric disadvantage of about 250 to 400 calories. For instance, one woman who entered the Columbia studies at 230 pounds was eating about 3,000 calories to maintain that weight. Once she dropped to 190 pounds, losing 17 percent of her body weight, metabolic studies determined that she needed about 2,300 daily calories to maintain the new lower weight. That may sound like plenty, but the typical 30-year-old 190-pound woman can consume about 2,600 calories to maintain her weight — 300 more calories than the woman who dieted to get there.

Scientists are still learning why a weight-reduced body behaves so differently from a similar-size body that has not dieted. Muscle biopsies taken before, during and after weight loss show that once a person drops weight, their muscle fibers undergo a transformation, making them more like highly efficient “slow twitch” muscle fibers. A result is that after losing weight, your muscles burn 20 to 25 percent fewer calories during everyday activity and moderate aerobic exercise than those of a person who is naturally at the same weight. That means a dieter who thinks she is burning 200 calories during a brisk half-hour walk is probably using closer to 150 to 160 calories.

How long this state lasts isn’t known, but preliminary research at Columbia suggests that for as many as six years after weight loss, the body continues to defend the old, higher weight by burning off far fewer calories than would be expected. The problem could persist indefinitely.

Tara Parker-Pope

the yoshiwara of paris

with the help of two extraordinary websites, i would like to take you back to the pleasure quarter of montmartre, the yoshiwara of paris.

i feel drawn to the people, those side-liners who represented a working class aching for and gaining some personal liberties and leisure time with which to mingle with the swells and the song-and-dancers in what became one of the first venues where classes met and mixed, and only sometimes for money changing hands.

there has always seemed to me something more comfortable about unrefined folk; in high school i always said i yearned for squalor, and talked in the 'dead-end-kids' jargon. and even the greaser kids, the ones that went to viet nam right after high school, asked me to teach them how to dance.

but in the bohemian, artistic, rebellious fin-de siecle the times still echo in our times today; strikes were rampant, the taste of freedom creating the craving for more. Montmartre's remote location and inexpensive lodgings contributed to its transformation into a primarily working-class neighborhood in the second half of the nineteenth century. Known for its revolutionary politics and underground culture, its liberal reputation lured students, writers, musicians, and artists to the area in the early 1880s.* the geographical division of classes sent the upper class scurrying to the outskirts, looking for the women and wine, for the sin they likely couldn't find at home.

Replacing the Latin Quarter as the locus of the city's intellectual and artistic community, Montmartre boasted a thriving bohemian culture that was driven by its critique of deca- dent society. Its raucous café-concerts and cabarets featured satires and crude, often subversive, performances that mocked the Third Republic's bourgeois morality and increasingly corrupt politics. Cabarets and café-concerts were favorite spots for avant- garde artists, who sought to capture their celebrated performers, hazy atmospheres, and artificial stage lighting.*

i guess that, despite privilege, the follies of the bourgeoisie never fooled me. as the monocled stuffed-shirts ogled the can-can dancers, so the husbands of my parents' friends ogled us hippies. nobody had all the answers (though both sides thought they did) (of course), but one side had less to protect and appeared to have more fun.

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the appeal of the cabarets and café-concerts extended well beyond the borders of Montmartre. Its performance halls provided a rare opportunity for the mixing of social classes, particularly between bourgeois men and working-class women, whose interactions were often based on prostitution. The blurring of class boundaries contributed to Montmartre's reputation as a place for escape, pleasure, entertainment, and sexual freedom.

By the time of the World's Fair held in Paris in 1900, Montmartre had developed into a veritable entertainment industry, boasting over forty venues comprised of cabarets, café-concerts, dance halls, music halls, theaters, and circuses. The area's underground bohemian culture had become a part of mainstream bourgeois entertainment through the rapid commercialization and marketing of its venues and performers. As a result, Toulouse-Lautrec and his avant-garde contemporaries lost interest in Montmartre's nightlife and sought their modern subjects elsewhere. What had begun as a critique of decadent society had become a symbol of decadence itself.*

just like what happened with the hippies too.

the two sites i referred to up top are the always valuable Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History in italics with asterisk.* the second is an amazing compendium of theophile steinlen's work. i have never seen anything as comprehensive.

no definitive why

NOT KNOWING WHY

Adolescent white pelicans squawk, rustle, flap their wings,
lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger.
What danger on this island in the middle
of Marble Lake? They’re off to feel
the lift of wind under their iridescent wings,
because they were born to fly,
because they have nothing else to do,
because wind and water are their elements,
their Bach, their Homer, Shakespeare,
and Spielberg. They wheel over the lake,
the little farms, the tourist village with their camera eyes.

In autumn something urges
them toward Texas marshes. They follow
their appetites and instincts, unlike the small beetles
creeping along geometric roads, going toward small boxes,
toward lives as narrow or as wide as the pond,
as glistening or as gray as the sky.
They do not know why. They fly, they fly.

Ann Struthers
Copyright ©2009 by Ann Struthers

and so the question is why. everything, why? let us talk, then, of the seemingly knowable whys. why did i do that? why did he? why did she? why did they? perhaps even narrower than that; perhaps only i.

some answers are easy: i put on my gloves because my hands were cold. that's simple enough, isn't it? maybe this: i went to the store to buy milk because i had run out. (already for this i can think of a dozen other comments that would be necessary for you to fully understand my motivations, but i don't think they're important. yet who am i to judge?)

who am i to judge? that's the steam behind this train of thought. because as i thought about it i realized that the reasons for all motivation are unknowable. not by you, not by me, not by your mother who thinks she knows everything, not by that guy with all those books.

in psych 101 they teach about richard who, when he was in the school library, stretched his leg. it was cramped, what can i say? but martin, who was walking by, tripped on the out-stretched leg. both martin and marcy, who was watching, were sure richard had done it on purpose.

but what about the bigger things? alice marries lou. alice is sure it's because she's in love. lou isn't sure what love is but is delighted that now he will be able to fuck alice just about as frequently as he wants. both of their mothers think she married him for his money, and he married her for her looks.

her best friend credited it to his honesty and ability to hang shelves, and his best friend knew that he had finally found someone who actually thought he was smart. and her therapist knew that he was just like her father. or maybe pheromones.

when it came time to divorce, alice asked herself, why did i ever marry lou? she never even considered that possibly he smelled just like kindergarten. or that he looked like the salesman who sold her her lucky scarf. or chocolate.

we do this all the time, why did i.....? and we think we can figure it out. we can't.

i have spent my entire life, as, perhaps, have many of you, wondering why. this and that. and it suddenly just occurred to me that i would never find out. there would never be definitive answers; there was never a way to find an absolute, positive, unquestionable, undebatable why.

we don't know why. we fly. we fly.

when i fall in love

(to set the mood,
i must first ask you to CLICK BELOW)
then close your eyes.)

why this, now? i finally found a friend,
from 40 years ago.

A LOVE SONG

What have I to say to you
When we shall meet?
Yet—
I lie here thinking of you.

The stain of love
Is upon the world.
Yellow, yellow, yellow,
It eats into the leaves,
Smears with saffron
The horned branches that lean
Heavily
Against a smooth purple sky.

There is no light—
Only a honey-thick stain
That drips from leaf to leaf
And limb to limb
Spoiling the colours
Of the whole world.

I am alone.
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.

See me!
My hair is dripping with nectar—
Starlings carry it
On their black wings.
See, at last
My arms and my hands
Are lying idle.

How can I tell
If I shall ever love you again
As I do now?

William Carlos Williams

first published in Poems 1916.

and all i can say is how little we've learned,and yet too much,

interlude

In this world
love has no color --
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours.

Izami Shikibu
tran. Jane Hirshfield

interlude

i can't remember ever --
well, not for a long time, anyway --
feeling this way:
being offered, now,
what i may have wanted then,
but recognizing how
it was never what i thought.

and it's painful very deeply inside.
that his life, i think,
has been destroyed
by his unavoidable
misunderstandings.

the pain comes, of course,
witnessing his pain,
and knowing by osmosis
it once was mine.

the panama-pacific, that is! • part 3

Aside from the construction of the $50,000 pipe organ, which, after the Exposition, will be placed permanently in the Civic Auditorium, the two most important musical items found on the schedule of Exposition enterprises are the engagements of Camille Saint-Saens and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The former, who maintained that "Beethoven is the greatest, the only real, artist, because he upheld the idea of universal brotherhood," is perhaps better fitted than any living composer to write special music for the Exposition.

This he has done, -- writing two compositions in fact; and their presentation has been an outstanding feature. "Hail, California," was dedicated to the Exposition. Scored for an orchestra of eighty, a military band of sixty, a chorus of 300 voices, pipe organ and piano, its first presentation was an event.

The Saint-Saens Symphony in C minor (No. 3) Opus 78, composed many years ago, has become a classic during the life-time of its creator. It was one of the wonders of the Boston Symphony programmes played in Festival Hall. Its yield of immediate pleasure and its reassurance for the works of Saint-Saens to be heard later, grew from the fact that it was scored for orchestra and pipe organ, and in this massive tonal web the genius of the composer to write in magnificent size was overwhelm- ingly evident, thus forecasting the splendors of "Hail, California."

The French Pavilion is a dignified and impressive structure, as those who recall the Legion of Honor Palace in Paris will understand. The entrance to the court is a triumphal arch flanked by double rows of Ionic columns on either side, with figures of Fame as spandrels. The arch is connected by lateral peristyles with the wings of the pavilion, the attics of which are adorned with has reliefs.

Ionic colonnades extend along the sides of the court to the principal front of the building, which is decorated with six Corinthian columns, forming a portico for the main entrance. The portal opens on a stage, above which a great central hall, flanked by lesser halls, extends back through the palace.

More notable than the building itself, or its priceless contents, is the fact that these are here. That, in the midst of war and its demands, France should still find time for the ideal, and for this beautiful tribute to the long-standing friendship between the two countries, is a demonstration of French spirit and of French culture that will not escape the attention of any thoughtful American. For France herself, as it has well been said, her appearance here means as much as a victory on the battlefield.

But the glory of the building is in its exhibits. France poured out the treasures of the Louvre, the Luxembourg and the National Museum to adorn this pavilion. Fine as is the exhibit in the French section of the Palace of Fine Arts, the best pictures and Sculptures are shown here. In the Court of Honor stands the masterpiece of the master sculptor of modern times, "The Thinker," by Auguste Rodin. (p. 158.) In the galleries are his "John the Baptist" and other important bronzes.

Vast, unique and of the greatest interest is Theodore Riviere's wonderful group in bronze representing a triumphant band of desert soldiers dragging captive the Moroccan pretender, secured in an iron cage. There, too, are splendid paintings by Monet, Meissonier, Detaille, de Neuvilie, and many other French artists approved by time. **

(these all are actual pieces shown in that exhibit, accompanied by the music played there, described by someone who visited there. and this is just the teensiest fraction of just one country's offerings, just france. and the world was there. bibliography to follow.)

the bath, part 4

TEODORO LUNA CONFESSES AFTER YEARS TO HIS BROTHER, ANSELMO THE PRIEST, WHO IS REQUIRED TO UNDERSTAND, BUT WHO UNDERSTANDS ANYWAY, MORE THAN PEOPLE THINK

I am a slave to the nudity of women.
I do not know with what resolve

I could stand against it,
a naked woman
Asking of me anything.

An unclothed woman is
sometimes other things.
I see her in a dish of green pears.

Anselmo, do you know what I mean if I say

Without clothes

Her breasts are the two lions
In front of the New York Public Library,

Do you know that postcard of mine?
In those lions there is something

For which I have in exchange
Only sounds. Only my fingers.

I see her everywhere. She is the lions
And the pears,
those letters of the alphabet

As children we called dirty, the W,
The Y, the small o.

She is absolutely
the wet clothing on the line.
Or, you know, to be more intimate,

May I? The nub, the nose of the pear,
Do you know what I mean?
Those parts of the woman

I will call two Spanish dancer hats,
Or rounder sometimes,
doughboy helmets from the War.

Sometimes they are flat
in the late afternoon
Asleep. Like drawings,

Like a single rock thrown into the lake,
These parts of a woman
an imperfect circling

Gyre of lines moving out,
beyond the water.
They reach me at the shore, Anselmo.

Without fail, they are stronger,
And they have always been
faster than I am.

It’s like watching the lassoing man,
The man with the perfectly circling rope,

Pedro Armendariz in the Mexican movies,
Or Will Rogers. Wherever one is from,

Whoever this man is.
And he is always there.
Everybody knows one.

He always makes his big lasso,
twirling his rope
Around himself and
a woman from the audience

Only I am the woman,
do you understand, Anselmo?
Caught in the circling rope. I am the woman

And me thinking of a woman
Without clothes

Is that man and that rope
And we are riding on separate horses.

Alberto Ríos

from Teodora Luna's Two Kisses. Copyright © 2000 by Alberto Ríos.

are the men who are the capturers, the 'nurturers,' the captured, in fact? in the whole bath series, we have naked women being seen by (presumably) clothed men. i have tried to choose images in which the women are not apparently posing, apparently unaware of being observed. but in fact they are.

i have to admit that i don't exactly know what to make of all of this. when i used to do my magazine i realized that both male and female artists were most likely to feature their nudes female.
i like looking. feel comforted by looking.

so is it sexist? fashionable, yes (at that time, 'bathers' was a de rigour subject), but oppressive too? i just don't know. what do you think? if you are a woman, do you feel you are capturer or captured?
and men -- same question.

THE GREAT EXHIBITION:

About Dyes and Beauty and Coal-Tar Mauve and Magenta How Made Extra- ordinary Specimen of Aniline Art and the New Colors

Although the ancient Britons dyed themselves with wood, and only a few years ago an Irish member of Parliament offered to die on the floor of the House, it is a remarkable fact that the pigments used in manufacture for the purpose of imparting brilliant effects to silks and linens, have until quite recently been imported from Holland.

The secret of color is, however, returning to the British Isles, and the mauves and magentas, so much in fashion just now, seem to promise for the islanders a monopoly of these peculiar dyes. Does it ever occur to Angelina, as she floats magnificently down Broadway, in all the luster of youth and fashion, that the exquisite dress she wears, and whose faultless sheen seems to be robbed from the dewy blushes of Spring, is in fact dipped and steeped in the essence of vile, smoky, stinky, crackly English coal; that she is — not to be too squeamish about terms — walking off with a ton, more or less of the best Walls-end attached to her skirts.

Yes, frightful as it may seem, our wives and sweethearts are gradually becoming carboniferous, and the day may not be far distant when we shall have to hand them to dinner with a pair of tongs. Coal, or rather coal tar, is the basis of all the new colors now in use, such as mauve and magenta, Both these well-known and highly esteemed colors were discovered by English chemists, who have already reaped handsome fortunes by their labor.

Perkin, the discoverer of mauve, was in search of artificial quinine, when he happened upon it, and almost at the same time a Mr. Simpson discovered magenta. Both these belong to the aniline, or coal-tar series of dyes, and as the way in which the color is produced has been very explicitly given, I have no hesitation in recapitulating it here.

When these new colors have been naturalized in the world of art, as well as in manufactures, what extraordinary results may be anticipated from the pencils of great colorists! At present, the manufacturers carry everything before them. They can make a silk dress of tough, durable, palpable material, a hundred times brighter and more beautiful than the best artist can paint it. "Dick Tinto" is no longer privileged to flatter a lady’s dress as well as her face.

July 28, 1862
The New York Times 1

In its early years, Ault & Wiborg capitalized on two innovations -- the use of coal-tar dyes to produce brightly colored inks and the development of lithography. Both developments helped to expand the ink business beyond the simple black product that had been produced for centuries. Toulouse-Lautrec was just one of the artists who used Ault & Wiborg inks for his prints; and the company commissioned him to create an advertising poster. 2

we tend to think of color as, well, having always existed. yes they have... but clearly the ability to reproduce them has not. we looked at the resurgence of blues here, science catching up with desire. and the rest of the colors came shortly thereafter. these wondrous inks dovetailed easily with the rest of the things we've been looking at here to create that golden poster moment.

it was 1859 when this color revolution came about in the west, one year after the entry into trade with japan. the japanese prints evidence the usage of a wide range of colors, though, for over a century. were secrets of the japanese inks part of the scientific discoveries that occurred just at the time that they would have if they had? i do not know.

i've written david lance goines to see if he knows; he's steeped in printing history knowledge.
if i hear anything i'll let you know.