"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...

白云纯白色

下了一整天的雨

雨还没停

有点冷

听了以前喜欢的歌

想起了一些日子

「終りの来ない夜に君は一人怯えてる
怖いほど安らいだ君の素顔見られたら」

ー"Dear Blue" 黒夢

想飞

"When you can't run from the storm, turn around and go head-on into it."

- Advice from sea survival experts (Surviving Disaster - Lost at Sea)

Carnival

October 4, 2008, Nottingham, UK


Nottingham Goose Fair, since 1284

飛行

August 18, 2008, From Singapore to Rome

I'm sorry.

25

二十代のうちに沢山経験して失敗して、思い残す事のない二十代を過ごしてくださいなう！！

二十代は失敗ばかりのはち。
でも後悔はしてないなう（苦笑）


- Post by Hisayoshi Suganuma in DABA blog (2011年01月11日)



Translation:

When you're in your twenties, experience lots of things and make lots of failures. Make it a twenties with no lingering regrets!

This is Hachi, who had nothing but failures in his twenties.
But I do not regret it (bitter laugh)

DABA is a seiyuu (anime voice actor/actress) unit formed by six seiyuus born in 1978. I used to read their blog pretty often because I like Fukuyama Jun. Anyway, I just wanted to put this post down here...


--- --- ---




I will be exactly in the middle of my twenties in six months' time. For the past couple of years, I've been changing... and when I thought I couldn't change anymore, I continued to change. Especially in the past year, I've started to see things that I didn't or couldn't see before. I wish to become a better person, more worthy of Him. I had been so arrogant in the past. I will never be so again. If I am able to walk in the sun, it will only be because He saved me.

背後の暗闇

I forgot how I got to it, but I spent the last couple of hours reading Ryutaro's twitter and catching up on Plastic Tree...

Ryu-chan fell sick on Dec 21 with a fever, and was diagnosed with the Guillain-Barré syndrome... It was really worrying, but it seems that he's getting much better already... I hope so. I haven't been listening to Plastic Tree very much recently, but they were really an important part of what sustained my youth.

I really liked Ryutaro. I liked the things he wrote - lyrics, prose, observations. And I liked his voice, and I liked their songs. When I was lost in darkness, they made me feel a little better.

Well, I knew they got a new drummer after Bucchi left, but I didn't know anything much because as I said, these days I wasn't listening to them much. But now I think the new drummer is actually really cute! He's called Sato Ken Ken. He reminds me of Miyavi, actually. It seems like he's really sweet too, like how he hugged that little kid who acted as the young Ken Ken in the PV for Mirai Iro, and gave him his drum sticks as a keepsake. And he visited Ryutaro very often when he was hospitalized. And he sends really funny messages to Ryutaro via Twitter. And one of them is this, I just have to put it here (and Ryu-chan's reply too):

ケンちゃん。俺、香港の港で一分間ぐらい背後の暗闇に話しかけてたよ。みんな、居ると思って。 RT @Pla_kenken: @Pla_ryutaro 有村さん聞いてください。友達と買い物してて「コレいいね」って話しかけたら他人だった時、恥ずかしかですね(涙)それじゃ、もう寝っです。

3:33 AM Nov 18th, 2010 via ついっぷる for iPad
Retweeted by 21 people
Pla_ryutaro
有村　竜太朗

Translation:

Ken Ken: Arimura-san, please listen to this. When one is shopping with a friend, and calls to him "This looks good, doesn't it?", and realizes that it was someone else, it's embarrassing isn't it (::cry::) That's all, I'm going to sleep now.

Ryutaro: Ken-chan. In Hong Kong, at the harbour, I was talking for about a minute to the darkness behind me. Everyone has times like this, I think.

Haha, I think Ryu-chan's reply is super awesome... 'The darkness behind him'. This is why I liked him so much in the past. I still do, perhaps...

Well, this is all I wanted to say, hope Ryu-chan gets much better soon!

Today I took some time to get to know my Nikon D60 dslr... I bought it in 2008, just before I left for Europe.

The one above is a zoomed-in picture of the eave above my window. It has a small hole, beyond that is the sky. The rough texture is that of the painted concrete.


And this one below is a portrait of Garfield and Pooky (albeit pink), and a miniature Le Corbusier armchair in the background - all sitting on top of my computer.

O Mio Babbino Caro

Maria Callas, 1973. "O Mio Babbino Caro" from Gianni Schicchi (1918, Giacomo Puccini).

Gardener of the Artificial Landscape

I just watched 展覧会の絵 (Tenrankai no E) or Pictures at an Exhibition, 1966, an animated short film by Osamu Tezuka. He's most notably known for Astro Boy... but I realized that he's actually extremely unconventional and, just pushing boundaries with his stuff (see here for description of some of his short films)

Anyway, I came across this particular film while reading about Pictures at an Exhibition, a famous musical suite written by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky in 1874 in remembrance of his friend Viktor Hartmann.

The film has this segment called "Gardener of the Artificial Landscape". A grasshopper was flying through a city at night with his belongings on his back, thirsty and tired, and wanting to find some water to refresh himself. But, he could not find a single drop. All the flowers were artificial, even the dew were glass beads. Not a singe organic thing was in sight or reach. Daybreak came, and the 'gardener' came out together with the pedestrians... and the gardener pruned the artificial plants and perfumed them and admired them; the other people also admired them. He then put a flower in his shirt pocket then admired his own reflection in the glass of the artificial pool. Then he saw the grasshopper lying dying on the ground, picked it up, looked at it, and flicked it away with disdain. It ended up outside that perfect artificial city, in the dirt, underneath a dirty-looking weed-like plant. As it lay there dying, a drop of water slid down the plant's leaf and landed on his head, and he closed his eyes.

City Connection

Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1!!!!!

I've been searching for this since forever... I played this game when I was a little kid, on an old dusty nintendo console... the background melody has been haunting my mind ever since, and I was just thinking about it recently...

You can play City Connection here

3 = π = √10

When you see √125 in your life, solve for √121.

- Charles Bailyn, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale

Open Yale Courses

sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt

"These are the tears of things, and our mortality cuts to the heart"


The term comes from line 462 of Book I of The Aeneid, an epic poem written in Latin by Virgil, one of Rome's most distinguished poets, in the 1st century BC. Aeneas, while crying, says, "sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt" as he gazes at one of the murals found in a Carthaginian temple, which depicts battles of the Trojan War and deaths of his friends and countrymen. - Lacrimae rerum, Wikipedia

“Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive.”

A Physicist Solves the City, The New York Times

カキゴオリ

『カキゴオリ』上田竜也





「いつかまた　季節が巡り　君に会えたとしたら
同じ気持ち　同じ思いで　また笑えるように・・・」






笑いアエルように・・・