Reflections
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Kennemer Dunes 360° today. Spring [ birth of a nation ]
Min/max temperature: 4°C/23°C; humidity: 76%; precipitation: 0 mm; sea level pressure: 1031 hPa; wind: WSW 5.0 km/h; visibility: 14.0 kilometres; Clouds: few 2700 m.
"Our preoccupation with numbers, preferably growth figures (polls, ratings, stock market figures, budgets, salaries, penis length et cetera) hides the underlying fear to actually having to think. Before people start a discussion within a so called consultation council […] at first figures need to be produced and made visible; once read, every discussion is unnecessary. The figures are supposed to tell the truth about a certain supposed transparent reality automatically. Equal fear for the process of thinking appears in the well-meant suggestions to people 'in trouble': 'You just do not have to think about it too much, it serves no purpose, it makes matters only worse.' The next logical step is towards thought-restricting drugs of which the French designation -- 'des stupefiant' ('stupefying') -- speaks so much more clear than the semi-soft name calling 'tranquillizers' […] What we experience today is the degeneration of the importance of language on a broad social scale. When thinking can be understood as an externalised act, then the inability to think must lead to the occasion to act in itself. In this area infantilization takes place, which does have an effect on the aspects that characterises being human, namely the delusion of providing meaning. In this case: the effects of the inadequacy of providing meaning. The consequence then becomes agitation and acting [ that ] out. According to the classic formula, taking action will elicit a reaction."
Paul Verhaeghe in 'Het einde van de psychotherapie', page 222, 223, 224, 225, first published in 2010 by De Bezige Bij, The Netherlands (unauthorized translation from Dutch)
"Movies are written in sand: applauded today, forgotten tomorrow. […] I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl. [on sound movies: ] It is my arrogant belief that we have lost beauty."
D.W. Griffith (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948)
"In a Hollywood movie, after the movie is over, there's nothing more. There is no relationship between the screen and the spectator. There's just a duration. If you don't like it, you go to sleep, the way I do. [ The ] movie is not on screen. The movie stems from moving. The movie is a mover. The move from the reality to the screen and back to the reality. And the screens are nothing, just shades. It's like a swimmer doing a crawl until he arrives at the end of the swimming pool and then turning and going back again. This is the screen. […] When you arrive, [...] the moviemaker [ is the swimmer ] ; and when you start, it's the spectator. […] I don't think you should feel about a movie. You should feel about a woman, but not about a movie. You can't kiss a movie. […] Let's have a look and talk about it, but certainly not feel about it. That's what the Church says, feel about God. [ I ] can't [ work for television ]. You get more mystified than ever. Unless you think you can address 20 million people and you have something important to say and think you can go through all this mystification to get to the people, it's very difficult. [ I ] make very small movies to show to fewer people more often. More movies to fewer people but much more often. So [ I ] can survive […] it's very natural. I couldn't do anything else. You have to know how to survive. You have to be optimistic, because the world situation is so bad. Marx said that. The very pessimistic situation makes me feel optimistic. I'm an optimist because things are so bad they must get better because they can't be worse than they are. It's the same today."
Jean-Luc Godard in 'Jean-Luc Godard: The Rolling Stone Interview A look behind the lens at the famed French new wave director of 'Breathless' and 'Band of Outsiders' by Jonathan Cott, first published in June 1969 by Rolling Sone, USA
"Trough the reading of the script and the impressions given [...] by the director, slowly one starts to realize what [ needs to be done ]. In [the ] hot Los-Angeles burning sun -- we had to make the [ 'Barfly' ] interior acceptable, though being able to look outside at the same time to see what happens there. You need to take that into account, it [ can be ] difficult to stack those small rooms up with light. They need to remain out of frame. And the interior scenes required a certain ambience. You need to take that into account. I had ordered these huge rigging-towers -- with reflection screens -- with 12Kw's that bounced inside. Always reflected, never direct. […] Would I have said in these multi-billion dollar film: 'guys here we should not use any [ additional ] light, it needs to be dark' -- then they would go with that. The hardest part is to get the team to go with that, they are all crusted heads. So when we arrive at a street-corner, daytime, to shoot a car driving by -- only that -- all kinds of equipment is brought in. The script car and electricity trucks, and they all stand in the way, they take a lot of space. I've experienced that! [ I ] have always said to students -- when I had them in a workshop -- : '… the case is, when looking at the rushes and everybody applauds you because they look so great, when you think for yourself that it is not so good, than it is not so good. Because other people tend to believe pretty quickly that things look great. They see a sunset and it looks nicely orange, but you did not have to do anything to accomplish that, it always works. But there are also more complicated situations. With Friedkin, that was good working. He knew how to listen. We then had a complicated shot, with a car. It arrives at a terrain getting into a hangar. Shot with a crane, from top to ground. I then said: '… but why cover it in different shots? It can just drive in and we pan with the camera and the car can drive trough. […] Theoretically there are three possibilities. Dusk is short. Shoot a shot at dusk with the exact perfect light. One before that in touch over and one afterwards, which will just be doing fine. In twenty minutes we have three takes to shoot.' He understood that, and then started to organise very strictly the whole situation. We then immediately shot the first take and you get it all within schedule. But you need people who know how to react."
Robby Müller in 'Interview Robby Muller (2007)' first published in 2008 on the Netherlands Society of Cinematographers website (authorized translation from Dutch)
" [ Unless ] you know how [ a style ] is done, you say, 'What the hell is the idea? Where is it?' You keep looking for some kind of justification. Our brains are designed to see signs and put them together into a story. [ The ] brain always tries to read stories into things, and as every edit is a story in its own right, the brain can't accept it and begins to link them all together."
Lars von Trier in 'Framing, A Symposium on Cinematography; On Random Framing -- Automavision', page 142, 143, edited by Andreas Fisher-Hansen, Igor Koršič and Tina Sørensen (unpublished manuscript)
SAR_sarsential™_toolbox_3/14
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Above: PGIA 30K SAR BLT. Sarsential 3 : awesome-ice-power for tendon care after training. When summer gets hot, dries up the ground and warms-up sea-water, tendons need extra care to support injury prevention. This is part of post-training standard procedure.¹ Ice-cubes can be as large as 500cc frozen water from a Quark bucket. They are seperated from direct skin-contact. Elastic stockings could be found useful: one over the leg, one over that one -- to be filled up with ice. Pictured above: 4 buckets attached, to either side.
More: refer to Search option in lower right corner website, to find more on -- for example ice.
¹ Strategic use of available resources (such as cold water in ponts and at the beach, around winter-season) and Alertness, such as for luring injuries and taking care of them trough developing better technique, is what SAR aims at -- before, during and after Running. Training on steep ground, for example, such as found at many beaches near the branding, is to be found serious un-runanble ground, it is begging for tendon injury. To raise up resistance for the feet by choosing an underlayer of shells (at the beach) or concrete cycle-paths (in the dunes) with small stones on them, on the other hand, seem to stimulate proper technique. It activates the senses in the soles of the feet, spicing up the healing effect of running .
Training/footprint/today_sunday/wild_wind_and_beach/wide_tide/32K/smooth_ride
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Fridays training preluded on this (todays-) one. 1) Properly dressed for the occasion this time; 2) Strategically navigating landscape and weather for maximum results. Excellent training-experience, full of opportunity: grab/praise/gratitude/thank-you-day! Strong wind from the South, sweeping low-tide-sea over flat beach -- creating awesome training conditions. Distance: 32K under richly varied circumstances.
Back to earth: Todays training inspired by coach Mark Divine's last blog:
"Training the fundamentals will allow you to build a foundation to move faster and go deeper into the training. Without the foundation, you could veer off track and get unbalanced, or fall off altogether out of frustration. This stage can take as long as you need and will depend upon your level of skill and time restraints when you start—some of my students spend just a few weeks getting up to speed on the basics while others take up to a year. Embrace your process and enjoy learning the new skills."
Read full post 'Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast'
SAR_sarsential™_15_authenticity
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Sarsential 15: authenticity [ unified identities on integral experience of growth: personal, as a family, group or team, and tribal, within a neighbourhood, company or society ]
Why train Strategic Alert Running? To support clearity and unity on all levels: shared vision (common, mutual understanding, reliability and trust at foundation), shared performance (looking out after teammates) and love and respect for people's uniqueness within the collective while expanding together.
"Representational pictures were the first true “medium” our ancestors created, some 30,000-40,000 years ago. Some of the early pictures were accurate depictions of the natural world. Others likely had a persuasive, even political, intent as they employed deliberate factual distortions. Understanding this human factor is crucial in understanding pictures. Any estimation of the meaning or effects of a picture must take into account the receptivity, attitudes, and beliefs of audiences, as well as those of producers or disseminators. [...] One popular myth is that pictures do not lie, and further that they have a fixed meaning. [T] he audience context confounds such a simplistic cause-and-effect scenario. [...] One man's atrocity photo may be another man's trophy snapshot. [...] People interpret what they see trough the prism of a media climate that discourse elites, such as journalists and political leaders, shape to serve their own interests. Humans, conditioned from infancy to favour seeing over our other senses, ascribe generally to the notion that "what we see is what we get". [...] The human mind has almost infinite capacities to ignore the truth when it wants to do so. [...] Information processing models within cognitive theory of mind in psychology suggest that what we see develops meaning in the context of what we have seen before and what we have stored in our long-term memory. Much of what we think about when we see a picture stems from our subjectivity and guides our interpretation. [H] umanization may not be as powerful as some think when it resides in the photo icon. Human beings have remarkable abilities to ignore the suffering of those whom they do not like. [...] To study the image, we must study the world from which the image originates and the world that the viewer encounters."
Natalia Mielczarek and David D. Perlmutter in 'VISUAL PROPAGANDA AND EXTREMISM IN THE ONLINE ENVIRONMENT', edited by Carol K. Winkler and Cori E. Dauber, chapter 9, page 215, 219, 220, 221, 228, 229, first published in USA, Juli 2014 by Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War College Press
"The English peel off the unessentials of modernity very easily -- they 'go native' more readily than any Europeans except the Italians; and the more refined their upbringing the quicker the change comes about.": http://bartvanbroekhoven.com/en-US/running/134-sar-sarsential-toolbox-10-14ad