I have been getting so much sleep lately that I may never be tired again. Don’t you wish you could just store sleep up like pennies and break it out when you need it most? I seem to be one of those people who needs a solid 8 to 9 hours of sleep a night, but at the same time, I have trouble turning off my brain and falling asleep. Whenever I hear stories about people who can get by on 4 hours, I get so envious. If I had even one more hour in my day I could get so much knitting done!
But let me randomly jump over to what I did on Sunday. As I mentioned in the last post, it was the New Yorker Festival and on Sunday they held this really excellent presentation on Parkour. Here’s a video of it from one of my fav action movies called B13. It was French and actually had a plot along with beautiful stylized actions sequences featuring Parkour. One of the main characters is played by David Belle, the founder of parkour and he was the guy that the New Yorker had come to speak at the presentation.
It was great fun, set in front of the Javits Center where they have these enormous concrete pillar things that David and about 20 other traceurs jumped all over. The basic premise is that you overcome obstacles by leaping and jumping over them. It looks very much like watching a group of monkeys run through the jungle in the tree tops by swinging from branch to branch. There’s a kind of bounciness to the landings and they really rely on their arms to get from place to place. I think it would be a great thing to have taught in elementary school gym class as it teaches you how to fall and roll back up and I think it would give children a lot of physical confidence that I think they just don’t have anymore in a society where we’re always badgering them to “be careful!” If we were all practitioners I’ll bet insurance rates would go down too!
Here’s another video that shows more of what it’s about. I think this one really shows the monkey-like movements.
Will you guys let me know if you can see the videos? (edited to add: They do seem to be coming up! Yay!) Also, does anybody know how to insert You Tube videos so that you get the little screen to come up? I have so much to learn with all this blogging stuff.
OMG! That is so cool! To be able to move like that?!
Glad you’re finally getting rested up–enough to try some freerunning? Saw some of it at a Banff film fest tour and was blown away! Interesting thought about incorporating this into PE for kids. We don’t have enough sense of our own bodies anymore.
Youtube has code you use to share the video on your site. It’s in the links right under the video player. Ramping up the multimedia, yeah!