Chaosophist » Ashley Raiteri

Tweeters from Denmark

Ashley — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:32:09 +0000

don’t like the twitter per post thing. So, I’ve manually created a weekly digest. Need to ask alex to add that as an option. I don’t twitter enough for a daily digest, but weekly might be cool. Anyway, I’ll unpost those tweets and here they are for reference. If you tweet in a forest and no one is following you, does Twitter still crash? “doing it l8r”

Danish Film Festival in Austin

Ashley — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:47:39 +0000

So we watched Reconstruction last night. It had my second favorite Danish actor – Nikolaj Lie Kaas as the main character. It was avant-garde and romantic. Very non-linear narrative, like a dramatic romantic version of Stranger than Fiction. Still. One of the major problems I had actually “loving’ this film was the score. They used the “Adagio for Strings” composition by Samuel Barber that was made famous from Platoon. First off, this song has been used in at least 24 Films or Television shows! Secondly, even it had never been used before, the song is clearly evoking of Big Panoramic images and epic scale. Like Bombs falling on villages or Climbing a mountain while remembering a dead wife in flashback.

I mean it does have an aural subtext that is intimate and personal (which is why it worked so well in Platoon) but its major theme is epic. This film is not epic, it’s quirky and clever but mostly its personal. The music should have followed that line of themes. So that pretty much ruined any chance of me Loving it.

Other than that complaint, it was good. It reminded me a lot of Godard, and I really enjoyed how different it was from other Danish films we’ve seen lately. It didn’t follow the Dogme Manifesto but it’s not a Zentropa film – not all Danish films are!! Speaking of which, I am not sure I will love the Zentropa stuff after they were bought by Nordisk. I suppose it was inevitable, but really how could something created by the maniac von Trier end up moving towards commercialist art forms.

My First Ever Real Race

Ashley — Sun, 11 May 2008 09:40:38 +0000

Golly Gee! Results here

I ran a race. Before I saw the sign for the 1st mile marker I thought I was doing pretty good.

My pace was up, and I felt like I was about half way through. After that disappointment I resolved to stop thinking about how far I had to go and just get into listening to my breathing. It was like 98 degrees outside and it was on pavement which was new for me. But they finally had water stands set up around mile 2.

Near the last half mile I started to bonk out. I stopped and walked for about 30 seconds twice, which I know added to my time. But overall I guess I was happy. Beat my previous best time on the Lake Loop by 5 minutes.

I know that 33 minutes is not exactly Olympic but for me it was a good measure of my progress and dedication to something new.

It was pretty funny being beaten by a lot of people who coudn’t drive though. The youngest person to beat me was an seven-year old girl! The oldest person to beat me was 81! But Hey, at least I beat eight people in my age group!.

SmokesBeerandWork are also Drugs

Ashley — Wed, 07 May 2008 02:54:09 +0000

Running is a drug, but smoking, working, drinking…these too have powerfully addictive qualities. I went 5 days without running last week, then we did our thing with the Texas round-up which involved a little bit more training but then I went off to Seattle to work, and only managed to actually run a full 5k one time along the Seattle Elliot Bay parkline. Dang. This thing is probably going to take some serious commitment.

Running is a drug

Ashley — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:54:19 +0000

So, just back from Copenhagen, where I rode my rented Bike everywhere (I wonder if Markus – my friend there – ever returned the bike for me, cripes, that would be a lot of rental days unused!) Anyway. So being back on the bike made me feel POWERFUL. I wanted to replicate that feeling so as soon as I got back to Austin I started running. Basically I hate running. Always have. I prefer to swim.

But the lake here has this great 10 mile loop with shortcuts around the way to shorten the run to a 5k. So I started doing that, and well I am hooked. Renee says, I am pretty much obsessed. Its been only 7 days I’ve been home and I’ve run 5 of them.

Cella is running with me too sometimes, dang her 6 year old legs are so cute trying to set a pace.We are entering in several local races together and I think she might quit after the 1st one, but I am determined to have her train for the first one before she quits. She is a real trooper.

Last night she asked her mommy, “What does he want from me, I mean darn, I am running all the time!”