"You need to understand why you are doing this. It is a dangerous sport, you risk your life all the time. You shouldn't waste your life. It's very important before you move, to know why you move, why you do it. The training that you do have to be useful in your life. It has to bring you something. You have to ask yourself if it is really important in your life. If you think the answer is yes, then you will ask less questions to yourself, when you train. Because you are going to be free. And you know why you do it. No doubts."

-Williams Belle (one of Yamakasi founders), speaking to trainees at Parkour Generations Rendezvous 4

I watched Generation Yamakasi (the documentary) after stumbling across a clip of the Yamakasi guys being featured on Ripley's Believe It or Not, and I really felt moved. It's not just the physique, but these guys have a philosophy. The physique is important too, I think... I really felt, when I watched them move, that this is what the human body is capable of and it is really amazing. And yet I, and many people, have lived a life ignoring this body and not letting it reach the potential it is capable of. I do not think I can just start now and train and become good like this, but I feel a positive impact, and I wish to become much healthier, much more aware of the environment, the real time, the body and the mind.

I hope that I won't forget this too fast... I hope to have this feeling in me. I want to be alive.

They are always saying, "Why do you do it?" If you know why you are doing something, you will overcome fear, and you will be free. I am not doing a risky sport. But in the things that I do everyday, the path that I am walking, the path that I have chosen, I very often waver and have doubts. They say that when they fight, it is not with others but with themselves, to become stronger. The next time I am troubled and my mind is confused, as it is often and as it is now, I will try to remember, to know why I am doing it, to defeat the fear and become stronger, calmer, and better.

"How they survive, I don't know. Where they get their food from, I have no idea. I just wish that they themselves realize that their existence and survival is an impossibility."

- David Attenborough commenting on the overwhelming presence of leeches in a New Guinea forest where pigs and humans are rare, after plucking one off his leg. BBC documentary "A Blank on the Map", 1971.



He's hilarious... but more than this, it's what he said near the end that is gonna stay with me...

After having met the Biani tribespeople for the first time, he said that the point is not about how different we are, how they have wooden pegs in their noses and "we eat bits of cow meat wrapped up in a cunning way in bits of metal. It's not the differences between us that are important, but the similarities. It's the fact that when one of us laughs, the other knows what he's feeling."

まるで都市みたい

I dreamt that I was in a hotel... my room was right next to the lift landing. I remembered thinking, the last time that happened was at Ronchamp... But that was of course dream reality... I was never in Romchamp...

The quality was slightly like Unite de Habitation at Marseilles though... the colours a little like it... a little like La Tourette too, maybe.



When was the last time I stayed in a room right next to the lift landing? I can't remember... but it felt deserted, and a little cold. The concrete was smooth...