Straight Up Mountain Province!

So, who's seen this new show Human Weapon on the History Channel? You haven't? A couple of dudes travel the world, train for a bit in different styles, and then go one on one with one of the practicioners.

Check out segments from the eskrima episode.

EDIT: Duh, how about some YouTube-age?

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Drooling

Via Stickman's Escrima Blog: seminar and interview vids of Sonny Umpad.

I haven't even made it all the way through the first video because I've been replaying snippets of certain moves, in total awe of the intricacies of Sonny's techniques.

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Utensils, My Ass

E and I spent this morning at the local farmer's market. There was a stall with a merchant selling wooden furniture and cooking utensils. Amid the spatulas and spoons, these jumped out at me...



I picked one up and thought, "With that curvature? Utensils my ass." But they were exactly the right size and shape to be a different sort of tool, something I can train with. So I bought two.

I mean, come on...

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Ever Been Outnumbered?

Didn't stop this dude...


Via: Flixya

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Ultimate Knife Defense!

Some of us laugh, but some of us know this hits a little close to home for some people.

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Suspicious Minds

And now, another post for Blog 'Til You Drop Sunday.

March 5th through the 11th was Filipino Week at the Big Red School on the Hill. I wormed my way out of work early on the day they had an FMA workshop conducted by a very respected and well-known instructor.

To him, I was probably just some random Filipino until he picked me to demonstrate some empty hand disarms. He stripped my stick away, went to hand it back to me and then realized, "Oooh...he's got his own sticks. And they're not mine!" I'm thinking: Great, he probably thinks I'm from some rival school and now he's gonna beat on me.

So he takes two seconds, stops the demo and asks me, "We've never met? I don't know you, do I?" I smiled, said "No, sir" and it all seemed cool from there. He let me help demo knife disarms as well as some of the arrest/restraint techniques he teaches to military and LEO-types.

It was a fun couple of hours, sort of reminiscent of the old Fight Club. You had the mix of utter newbies in awe (read: gross overestimation) of my "mad skillz" (someone said, "You must be a pro," to which I quickly and loudly replied, "Oh, no I'm not!"), senior students who, while nice, were saying to themselves, "Yeah, I can take him" and the experienced martial artists who decided that since I "didn't start none, there wasn't gonna be none."

But it makes me wonder: Am I forever doomed to make Caucasian FMA instructors look at me with raised eyebrows when we first meet?

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Welcome to the Jungle Rain Forest

Part of Blog 'Til You Drop Sunday...

God, I love YouTube. These are clips from a show on BBC Three, featuring the grandmasters of two different Filipino arts.

"...and if a Filipino is fighting you, I'll have somebody engage you. I watch. And when you focus on him, I'll hit you. It doesn't sound nice, but morality comes before and after the fight. When you kill a guy just be sure, if you can help it, that the family doesn't know it's you. Because the family is gonna go after you, they don't go to the law.

And, if you've ever wondered what a Grand Tuhon's orasyon looks like up close, check this out (it's about 2/3 of the way into the clip).

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Ketchup

This time, this one time, I've got no real excuse for not having blogged for over a week, other than to say I've just been too lazy between the things I've had to do. That's all--nothing personal.

So, where to begin...

1
Last week, I started a class in Vinyasa Yoga. It turns out one of the folks I work with is a relatively well-known local instructor, not just in yoga, but kung-fu, qigong, and tai chi--the same style of tai chi, in fact, studied by Ms. Bizarro back when we lived in A-Town. She actually emailed him first about six months before I started working at my present job. Ithaca really is a small town.

I finally decided to start after finally trusting my body and listening to what I believe it's been telling me I've been needing, which are (a) a series of serious exercises that I can do myself in a confined space and (b) a sort of psychic change of pace from the study of bone-breaking, weapon-oriented, southeast Asian arts. (Not that I've given up on those entirely--I've still got the name and number of a local FMA/WMA instructor!)

2
Ms. Bizarro just had a Mac Attack--that is, one of the brand new Intel-powered MacBooks! Congratulate her; she's just joined the 21st century! It's a sweet machine. This two-year old beast of mine is definitely old and busted compared to what she's got. But, she deserves it--she's spent the better part of the last three years dealing with hand-me-down or work computers without any tool of her own to make her writing dreams come true. Now she's got it.

3
As if I don't have enough damn books, I managed to score Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 for free from a friend who's moving. And, needless to say, the minute I came across a cheap second-hand copy of his collection Slow Learner, I grabbed it!

The mysterious Mr. Pynchon is, of course, a graduate of the Big Red school on the hill.



4
I've been feeling less and less badly about shopping at second hand bookstores and even the two big-boxes because there was almost nowhere else since the Bookery II closed down a few months ago.

Well, a few weeks ago, the store reopened under new management with only some slight changes. I haven't talked to anyone yet who isn't jumping for joy that it's back. I shared this with one of the staff members who said that she'd been hearing the same thing, and that she tells all those people, "If you want to show your appreciation, buy a book!"

That's not to say that I'll give up sitting in the Borders cafe, observing and making note of my fellow customers' behavior.

5
Lastly, a choice to make. Which do I buy first? This or this?

B or Steve-O--thoughts?

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Memoir of a Martial Arts Master

This is for B, Steveo, and all of my friends and fellow-students of the martial arts. Not since Tao of Jeet Kune Do has there been so much martial wisdom in one place. Behold...

Still Kicking: The Very Authorized Biography of Steven Segal, Volume II, Pgs. 567-568
by Jared Bloom

from McSweeney's

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Random Btichings

1
For the rest of the summer, the Twenty Minute Travel Rule is in effect. Anything non-business related that requires me to do more than twenty minutes of driving one way isn't anything I'm going to feel like doing. If no one's bleeding from the eyeballs or in imminent danger of shuffling off from this mortal coil, they can use my email address.

2
On the good side, I got the best rejection letter a writer could get...

I think it's a great story, just not a good fit for [redacted]. Do you have some other work you could submit? I would love to see if maybe another story of yours would be a better fit.

Needless to say, I sent something else off as soon as I got the email. We'll see how that goes.

3
Well, there may be a single exception to the Twenty Minute Travel Rule--but in all honesty, I've got siht to do. Like the Good Book says, there's a season for everything. I'm thinking this is the season for me to reach the next plateau.

4
The next choice to make on my plate is whether or not to seek out the pricey, out-of-the-way local FMA/WMA instructor, or to use a brand new hookup I have to start taking yoga in my neighborhood?

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Sticks Don't Kill People, Nuts Do

Every time I argue against the banning or restriction of martial arts training and weaponry, I get my foot shoved in my mouth by idiots like this.

This is from an old friend from Fight Club. He's on a mailing list which he describes as...

...unfortunately half filled with Irish Catholic religious zealots who view western fighting arts as the physical component to their faith (similarly to shotguns in the Bible belt I suppose). anyway, after a lengthy discussion about christianity and a few of us asserting that a WMA group is not the place...one wrote:

"Unless Christ was a stick fighter, can we end this thread?"

Which is pretty funny, until a response came:

"Actually the only account I recall indicated he was proficient with the use of a cat-o-nine-tails. . . . However many of his followers were/are proficient in many arts."

I know, you're thinking, "Sure, rip on the Irish Catholics. What about anting-antings?" Hey, that's one thing. But most people just don't believe, as some Filipino FMA practicioners, that the Santo Niño de Cebu is holding an escrima stick. Or that the "angle one" strike, known in some systems as the strike of San Miguel was actually taught directly by St. Michael.

And, what the hell is "were/are proficient" supposed to mean?

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Topical Solution

That's "solution" in the chemical sense, i.e. a mixture of solutes. (Hey, damn, that's pretty good--that's what I'm going to call these types of posts from now on!)

ITEM 1
Guru Mushtaq said some kind words for this blogger. By the way, he's 85% quirky. Given his silat skills, I dunno how I'm gonna sleep at night knowing that--hehe.

ITEM 2
I've known for awhile that I've got way too many RSS feeds. I gloss over most of the ones I've collected with only five or so exceptions like Mushtaq's. Imagine my pleasant surprise as I revisited Stickman's Blog. Stickman is a legendary name in Filipino Martial Arts circles as one of those fortunate individuals to train directly with Angel Cabales, and his knowledge is priceless. You could pay a lot of money for the insights Stickman gives away for free on his blog to be linked and tagged with del.icio.us.

ITEM 3
I'm reading two compilations right now.

Tapping the Dream Tree by Charles de Lint contains stories from his series dealing with stories from his mythical city of Newford. I have to confess that I'm not enjoying them very much. The writing's exceptional and the stories are okay. They just don't hold my interest. I find very little, if any, tension in the tales I've read.

Of course, people have said the exact same thing about Raymond Carver's stories. I suppose it's probably an unfair comparison, commenting on de Lint while reading Carver, but there it is.

There's very little that's fantastic (i.e. pertaining to fantasy) or mythical about Carver's stories. And yet, I can't put them down.

I was initially drawn to Where I'm Calling From mainly to explore the short-short form, because whatever you might say about Carver's writing, very few can combine briskness and intensity like he does. I will say that there have been a couple of stories that I didn't get at first. But I prefer that to "Who cares?"

ITEM 4
Just food for thought: Should it be any surprise when you get rejection letters from anyone who has to go through a slushpile during a holiday weekend?

ITEM 5
T-Minus 33 hours to the interview at the Big Red Barn.

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Not Everyone Likes BJJ

More McSweeney's goodness:

And with the growing popularity of this damn ultimate fighting, the rules of engagement have been redefined. Now any Joe wearing khakis could possess the skill set of a Brazilian jujitsu master. One second you're telling Chadwick that he can't take his drink outside; next thing you know, Royce Gracie's protégé's got his legs wrapped around your neck like an anaconda, choking you out. For $10 an hour, you can keep that shit.

From "A Seminar for Nightclub Bouncers, as Conducted By a Big, Menacing Former Doorman Who Abhors Violence"
by Amir Farhang and Omid Farhang

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Ketchup Time

1
I've given up (for now) on Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. His style is just too far over my head. I'm reluctant to even go near Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits.

2
I love prophets, so I recommend Channel Zero by Brian Wood. This is a fictional ad from the fictional world in the story where Church and State run the media.



EDIT: This was first released in 1997 by Image (Then subsequently in September of 2000 by AiT/PlanetLar).

3
Yes, it took me a week to recover from the par-tay, partly because of what I'll call "The Blue-State Blues," in this case, the amount of static and hassle to get your car registered and inspected in the state of New York. Okay, I admit, it wasn't really "static and hassle" except in comparison with what you have to go through in Ohio, which is (outside of three counties) nothing. So long as the lights work and you don't have your car looking like something out of Mad Max, you're not going to have any problems.

Ah, the Libertarian diatribes that will spill out of someone who's under the weather to begin with, and had a bout of insomnia the night before. It's horrible, I tell you.

4
Here's something interesting that I didn't notice until recently. The next time you watch an episode of Law & Order, any of them, pay close attention to the opening credits after the title sequence runs. Count how many people are credited as a "producer" of one sort or another.

5
Everything is a weapon.

Everything.

6
There is no...number 6.

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Still Enjoying teh Violence

You've probably been thinking, but have been too kind to say, "You've all but given up all your martial pursuits, haven't you, you lazy bsatard?" But, while my efforts have been admittedly sporadic and irregular, my love of the arts hasn't gone anywhere!

In anticipation of training with a local FMA/WMA group (I've got the cash to start, just not enough to go very far), I've been looking up a whole bunch of online WMA material online. Lots of interesting stuff, especially those details that relate directly to FMA stuff. Man, I've heard lots of people slam Mark Wiley, but it turns out he's loathed by a WMA people as well because of his "historical accuracy."

I've run into the occassional video. Datu_B knows how I am about video clips. Some folks on a message board dug up:

• Kyra Gracie vs Erica Montoya in recent Abu Dhabi tournament (Kyra's the dark haired girl on top).
  
• Yoshihiro Nakao tries to psyche out, Keith Herring, aka the Texas Crazy Horse, before a K-1 Dynamite match. It doesn't really work.
  
• A low-quality film of a TKD vs. Shaolin kung-fu "no grappling allowed" exhibition with a bad soundtrack.

But Don, you're thinking, have you actually moved around at all? Done any actual work?

Well, I've accomplished two minor things. One was managing to transfer a stick move from my right hand (a sort of head-level witik followed by a downward vertical head strike) to my left (more or less). And, working on that made me realize something while shadowboxing--now I realize why my left jab always got more respect than my right cross.

Beside my right foot being too far back (as usual), my hip doesn't have that "snapping" quality when I throw the cross like it does when I throw the jab. Sure, the hip rotates as it should. But, all the strength of the punch is coming from my upper body/arm, instead of my hips. Now, I got something new to work on between stories and job-searching.

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Because, the World Isn't Safe

Once upon a time, I blogged this:

I've read whole lists of "legal, improvised weapons" (pens, rolled-up magazines, and the like) that you can use to defend yourself in the case of a terrorist threat on your flight. Yeah, because only even-keeled, responsible, and law-abiding citizens read Black Belt Magazine.

Now, if you tried, but couldn't track down all those back issues and are afraid you missed out on all that valuable data, worry no more!

CITIZEN’S GUIDE TO STOPPING SUICIDE ATTACKERS: Secrets of an Israeli Counterterrorist by Itay Gil and Dan Baron

[snip]

Just some of the vital topics covered in The Citizen’s Guide to Stopping Suicide Attackers include

• facing off against knife-wielding airline hijackers alone or as a group, armed or unarmed
  
• identifying and subduing suicide bombers before they can carry out their deadly mission
  
• escaping from or disarming gunmen intent on mass murder
  
• recognizing and responding to a crazed driver bearing down on a crowd
  
• reacting correctly during the two most crucial stages of a hostage crisis

By absorbing the lessons in this book, you will be better prepared to confront the worst and stand up for yourself and your fellow citizens rather than helplessly accept the cruel death someone else has planned for you. That is the right and the duty of all civilized human beings in the 21st century.

No, I'm not laughing at the sincere desire to survive in today's world. Nor am I laughing at those who want to empower or want to be empowered by teaching and learning.

I'm laughing at a certain segment of people who are going to line up in droves to buy this book. The ones who will absorb these techniques while fantasizing about being Passenger 57, the ones who will actually say to themselves, "Man, I wish someone would try to take over my flight!" Even worse will be the segment of this segment who will actually be on a flight and injure some innocent Punjabi man in a turban who sneezed and then innocently reached into his coat for a tissue. You don't think something like that could happen? Tell that to the Brazilian embassy in England.

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Bare Knuckle Shotokan?

A friend of mine is a Western Martial Arts practicioner, and loves to collect old manuals on bare-knuckle boxing and European/Early American wrestling styles. This is from Ned Donnelly's 1888 text Self-Defense; Or, The Art Of Boxing:



A lot of people I've trained with like to make fun of Shotokan Karate. I've joined in the jokes, too... I've studied Song Moo Kwan Taekwondo, so I knew just where to hit. But, in my defense, I've always held that regardless where one stood on whether or not kata originally meant anything practical, you could always make that training practical.

Donnelly's technique... sang dan maki... hmmmm...

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Once Upon a Time in Ithaca: Old School

I finally decided that I've had enough of half-heartedly working through dead patterns on chairs and doing footwork drills in the living room, so I decided to take it back and do it Old School. (If you're wondering, I fell out of contact with the local FMA guy, but I'll pick it up again as soon as the paychecks start rolling in.)

I forget which of the Old Masters--I want to say Punong Guro Edgar Sulite (Datu_B, check me on my facts if I'm wrong)--was trained like this: His father would hang a single stick, held in the middle by a piece of string, off of a tree. The object was to hit the stick, and just have to deal with all the different ways it would bounce and spin around. Not necessarily the safest thing to do.

Needless to say, I said "Screw it."



I worked that for about twenty minutes before I realized that I was just hanging out on the outside. I played around with it, and came up with this configuration:



Now, I worked this facing the tree (my "opponent") as my frame of reference, the idea being to have to stay inside those boundaries, which I could modify as I saw fit. Then, things started getting fun for the next fifty minutes.

Now, I realize that all I've done is reinvented the wheel (one of my biggest pet peeves), but since this is the first time I've actually tried this, I learned quite a few things right away. (And, no rolling your eyes and going "Duh!")

• Somehow I managed to figure out that how much more effective it is to keep hitting, as opposed to hitting and waiting for a "counterstrike" to deflect and attacking again. I suppose this means I've finally made the connection that deflection isn't necessarily a "passive" act, so to speak.
  
• When in doubt, "candlestick."
  
• If you keep the angle of the stick to your wrist at 90° it's easier to do that.
  
• When I could pull them off, gunting movements with the double stick are nice.
  
• The strangest thing, I managed to work in every deflection (depending on how high or low I hung the stick) except my favorite, the reverse umbrella. And, I tried, believe me. Oh well, guess I'll always suck at that move ;).

Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated. I gotta go do some chores... can't train and blog all day ;).

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Monday Bloggery

It feels like I've been away longer than I have. Anyway, let's get started. One of the things that's kept me away was our social calendar which E keeps pretty full. To be fair, I was never forced to take part in any of our impromptu social gatherings. But, you know how it is--you don't want to look anti-social, and once you get past the initial nagging "I got other siht to do" feeling, you find you're actually having fun.

Other things that have kept me away are movies (one in particular that I'll write about later) and an overload of RSS feeds--48 at last count, mostly blogs. Yes, it's information overload, and I haven't had time to comment until now, and that's only because I'm making time (that is, until the temp place deigns to call me back or I hound them again, which I will later this afternoon).

ITEM ONE
A good number of the thirtysomethings I know wonder, in our nostalgia, why we no longer see certain things on TV, like The Muppet Show.

Personally, I miss Crazy Harry. (Via Monkey Disaster)

ITEM TWO
Whoever said Bruce Lee is God apparently isn't all that far off.

The Art of Fighting Without Fighting

Muslims and Catholics unified by image of Bruce Lee.

Two years after the Urban Movement came up with the initial proposal, the Bosnian town of Mostar, has collected enough financial and popular support to erect a monument to Bruce Lee in their town center.

ITEM THREE

I posted awhile back about what became and what is still my favorite episode of This American Life, called "My Experimental Phase," which featured the story of a Hassidic Jew who led a double life as a local rock star.

Tina Fey's working on a script for the movie.
(Via lindsayism)

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Ohio/Michigan

Even though in the big scheme of things it's never really mattered to thousands upon thousands, the prospect of someone from Ohio wanting to spend time in Michigan (or vice versa) always raises eyebrows with some, especially if you've lived in Columbus (Go, Bucks!). So, why would an Ohio boy be heading out for a weekend in October?

For the Fall Gathering seminar from Innovative Martial Arts, of course. If I can work out transportation issues, I'll get to train with Mushtaq Ali al Ansari and Steve Van Harn, among others. I'm always up for more knife fighting techniques; the prospect of learning Zulu knife techniques is just too good to pass on. See, all those essays your teachers forced you to write about "Compare and contrast x, y, and z" can be good for something, in this case comparing Filipino, Western, and now African knife fighting styles.

And, my hand will probably be fully healed by then--I can now hold weapons again--so I might actually be able to do some work!

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