Scott Schultz Schultz is willing to
provide his old stereo for the Wooden Center. If you want to
provide speakers, e-mail him at sschultz@media.ucla.edu.
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Spring quarter is traditionally the time where I enter the gym
in order to shed my winter belly in advance of the looming summer
days at the beach. However, the Wooden Center seems more like a gym
servicing a Florida retirement community than the health club at
America’s hippest university.
The problem has nothing to do with a lack of exercise machines,
and the courts are fine. There is ample mat space for tumbling and
stretching. And they have all the free weights I could ever hope to
lift.
However, for some ludicrous reason, Wooden defiantly refuses to
pump up the students with suitable workout music.
According to Dennis Kohne, assistant manager of Wooden, they try
to keep it at a happy medium. However it appears that the medium
there is clearly lying on the side of the old folks.
“There are a couple of professors who complain when
it’s too loud,” Kohne said. “Most people with a
strict preference for music bring a walkman.
“The only recreational music in the foreground is in the
weight room.”
I know they have those television sets with that stupid College
Television Network. But it only plays commercials, and the volume
is never raised above a level that anything but a dog can hear.
Is it too much to ask to blare some hip hop, some techno, or
even some metal while we burn off our Panda Bowls? Apparently it
is.
According to Koehne, Wooden has a contract with CTN, which
provided the center with the televisions and pays to continue
broadcasting its weak music and advertisement-laden
programming.
It’s not like we need televisions to occupy our attention
while we work out. The room is already filled with eye candy,
namely buffed-out coeds working up a sweat. I don’t need to
see a commercial from The Backstreet Boys’ choreographer for
a video teaching us how to dance “street” like the
sissy quintet *NSTYNC.
Hard-driving music is essential to a good workout, and Wooden is
negligent in a major way here.
“The louder the music is, the more positive the effect
is,” said Susan Holt, a graduate student in pharmacology.
“It’s not loud enough in cardio, so I usually workout
with a walkman, which is inhibiting.”
During my 20-minute workout, the televisions played only three
songs, a Maxwell ballad (yeah,that will give you the extra boost
you need), an *NSTYNC video (that could work if I were using a
punching bag, because I could imagine I was kicking Lance
Bass’ sterile ass) and a remake from some white hip-hop
wannabe act covering the legendary Sir Mix-a-Lot’s
“Baby Got Back,” (the remake blows, but the video has
some motivational butt-shaking).
By the time the fourth song, another ballad (who chooses this
music!?) started, my workout was over.
I claim that the Wooden Center is responsible if my gut is not
extinct by June.