A Master at Work

Some time ago, I posted an excerpt from a lengthy review of Mathew Crawford's first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. Since then, he's written a couple more books and has also begun a Substack. At his Substack, Archedelia,  there is a very nice article about someone whom he considers a master at his craft. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

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A while back I pitched the editor of Hagerty Drivers Club Magazine on an idea to write a profile of my machinist. The article appears in the current issue of the magazine (print only), but we arranged it so I can share it with readers of Archedelia as well. Labor Day seems like a good day to release it, so here you go. For this assignment I teamed up with my friend Henri Boulanger, a Bay Area photographer, motorcyclist and lover of all things vehicular or musical. You can find more of his work at his site; I encourage you to check it out. -Matt

Not people who know how to Google it, or AI-prompt it, but who have a web of knowledge in their heads that is vast and detailed and synoptic, and who are able to synthesize it on the fly to arrive at some practical solution. This kind of knowledge accumulates over the course of a lifetime, slowly ripening and finding its way into their bones, to the point they probably couldn’t tell you how they know what they know.

Ken Jansen is the go-to machinist for the performance air-cooled Volkswagen cadres of Northern California. For the drag racers, in particular. Full-bodied Bugs powered by his motors have made it well into the 10s in the quarter mile. That’s all motor (no boost, no bottle). With boost, he has one customer who is currently in the 8s.

Ken’s shop, Jansen Enterprise, is in Belmont, which is perhaps the least glamorous of those unglamorous towns that dot the northern Peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area. It may come as a surprise that there could remain anything like a “town” in this sprawling metropolis, which attracts the sleekly credentialled from every corner of the globe. But in places such as Belmont and Redwood City, one finds pockets of residents who grew up and still work in the place where they were born. There is still an industrial ecosystem of little shops tucked away, often with no storefront, where mechanics and machinists continue to hang on by a thread under the shadow of Big Tech. They represent the area’s last vestige of a certain middle-class type, defined not by income so much as by disposition: tradespeople who are self-employed, have no truck with computerized bureaucracy, and whose attitude to the surrounding powers is proud rather than servile. These survivors are the ones who had the wisdom and the means to buy their buildings thirty or forty years ago.

I found my way to Ken initially because I wanted to get the bearing journals on a crankshaft polished. I cut my teeth on Volkswagens as a teenager growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s. After an extended foray into motorcycle repair and fabrication in Virginia, I returned to my VW roots in my late 40s. I also returned to the Bay Area in 2019. Asking around for a machinist, I was told by other shops to call Ken.

Looking up his location, I got an uncanny feeling. This is going to require an autobiographical digression before we get back to Ken – a brief story about remembrance and the transmission of some tiny, meaningful corner of the world from one generation to the next. I suspect such stewardship is what keeps the world as a whole from petering out.

The year is 1982 or thereabouts. Charles Martin (Chas to his friends) was a machinist by training. He worked the parts counter at Donsco, a VW speed shop in Belmont. He also built race motors for them and pitted for their off-road racing campaigns. Once a classical guitar-playing Buddhist vegetarian, he was now a gun freak and brilliant misanthropist. He still had long hair, but it was rarely released from the bun under his tweed cap. His orange, split-window VW bus, with wheel wells cut away to accommodate large off-road tires in the back, was a chaotic treasure trove of superb American handguns, Snap-On tools, and VW parts. The darkness behind the cab carried a sharp note of Berryman’s B- 12 Chemtool on top of a more subtle smell that is generic to mechanics—a mixed-up aroma of various petroleum distillates that had been oxidized by combustion, thickened with road grime, and ripened on a substrate of shop rags to the point of acquiring substance. He kept a large tank of CO2 in his bus for running an air impact wrench, indispensable for swapping out a broken transaxle on a race car in the desert. This bus was his only personal space, and at this time cell phones were something you saw only in the movies. Outside Donsco business hours, you reached Chas by calling the Lyons restaurant in San Mateo, where he manned a certain stool at one end of the coffee counter.

Oppressed in my seventeen-year-old way by the liberal pieties of the time, I had recently taken to wearing combat boots to Berkeley High and reading Soldier of Fortune magazine. But Chas was something different, the first genuine reactionary I ever met. Deeply cynical and deeply witty, he loosened up these angry tendencies of mine with his corrosive humor. By that I mean he both lubricated them and dissolved them, like penetrating oil. He also initiated me into a certain positive possibility opened up by alienation from all things respectable: the pleasures of metal.

Boxing and Martial Arts in the Movies

Budo Journeyman had an entertaining post on boxing and martial arts as portrayed in movies. Below are some excepts. The original may be read here, where there are lot of clips that you may enjoy.

 

Boxing.

Below is a list of the main themes encountered in boxing movies. But bear in mind that boxing on film has probably the longest history in cinema. Ideal for the silent era, because language is not needed to explain the drama (very early documentary movies feature famous boxing matches).

First theme:

The Underdog.

Pitched against the injustices of society, whether it’s race or class, or the wrong side of the tracks; the ‘zero to hero’ story always has appeal; it offers hope to even the most downtrodden.

Notice how many boxing movies come out of America, clearly it taps into the myth of the American Dream. You could start with Rocky (Stallone) and carry all the way through to the ‘Cinderella Man’ (Russell Crowe), a biopic where the underdog theme is really larded on.

Probably the most famous non-boxing scene from a boxing movie, every line quotable. Great acting ‘On the Waterfront’ 1954, Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger in the back of a taxi.

Second theme:

Obsessions and consequences.

Tragic individuals and catastrophic results.

Probably the most gritty story rendered on to screen is that of Jake LaMotta in the movie ‘Raging Bull’, artfully told by Martin Scorcese. A true-life story of how LaMotta’s urge to make a success of his life and career, results in human carnage, in terms of relationships and family.

LaMotta played by De Niro; strong stuff, not pleasant.

We also need to consider how neither LaMotta nor the fictional Rocky Balboa are blessed with high intelligence; but that seems okay in boxing movies, where philosophy never really gets a look in (unlike martial arts movies). You don’t need deep thinking to understand a boxing match.

Theme three:

Violence packaged for the public in the name of sport.

Naturally, everyone pretty much understands the rules and objectives of a boxing match. Consider also how the contest and the drama is all conveniently contained in a small space; no need for long rolling tracking shots to follow the action. Compared to other action movies, this makes things so much easier to manage.

Also, the narrative on every boxing movie is split into two zones; inside the ring and outside the ring. The viewer unconsciously understands this, and accepts it unconditionally.

We also tolerate the brutality of the ring, no matter how graphic. Example; ‘Raging Bull’ was a movie shot almost entirely in black and white, but it didn’t lessen the gore-factor. In fact, it enhanced it.

The next theme:

Masculinity, and, a place for women?.

There are women’s boxing movies, but they are quite rare (think of Clint Eastwood’s ‘Million Dollar Baby’). Decades ago, the idea was totally unthinkable. There have been combat sports movies with women as the central protagonists; recently ‘Tatami’ 2023, a judo movie which is worth watching, for many reasons, cerebral, cultural and political, and then there’s the judo.

From the male perspective there are often very positive themes of honour, duty and responsibility, as well as sportsmanship (there is also pressure against corruption).

A quick mention of bare-knuckle, whether historical or not. (But, let’s put aside anything with Brad Pitt in it).

My go-to examples for historical bare knuckles fighting are; the short section in Robert Downey Jnr’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

And, the not very successful, ‘Prizefighter, The Life of Jem Belcher’, 2022. The Americans don’t seem to have an interest in these stories, leaving it up to the Europeans, despite having their own pantheon of fighters from the bare-knuckles age. I suspect that across the Atlantic everything has to hook on the myth of the, previously mentioned, ‘Great American Dream’. Europe and the UK tend to be more historically nuanced.

Comparison with martial arts movies.

Now, on to my main objective.

The common ground:

· Discipline and grind (Rocky chasing chickens and Shaolin types carrying buckets up steps).

· Underdog tales in both genres. It taps into something fundamentally human.

· Final climactic showdown. Think ‘hall of mirrors’ in ‘Enter the Dragon’ and any Rocky movie.

All of the above are found in martial arts and boxing movies, but…

The real differences:

· Martial arts movies don’t go for the same grit as boxing movies. They are more about grace and aesthetics.

· Superhuman potential is really ramped-up in martial arts tales. The bar is set really high. With boxing it tends to be grind and muscle, and, dare I say it; more realism?

· Endurance versus self-actualisation and philosophy. Eastern religions and disciplines very much guide the martial arts storylines. While in the world of boxing, it tends to be just doggedly staying in the fight and clawing your way out of poverty etc.

· With boxing, the themes tend towards Western individualism, while the Eastern traditions lean heavily into collectivism, even heritage or ancestor worship.

· Technical aesthetics: In boxing it’s the close-up toughness of the brawl. While in martial arts movies we find the viewpoint is pulled back away from the action, so we can appreciate the artistry and the flair of the fighters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Japanese Sword Documentary

Below is an excerpt from a post at The Budo Journeyman, which is a review of a 2024 documentary about Japanese swords and the West, entitled The Sun's Shadow. The full post may be read here.

This is certainly not like the usual documentaries about culture and heritage based in Japan, e.g. the ones that National Geographic produce. Neither is it a bite-sized piece in a travelogue episode by a celebrity who happens to be visiting Japan. This is what makes it so intriguing.

With ‘The Sun’s Shadow’, over three episodes, we are introduced to a range of enthusiasts who have pitched their all into their particular shared obsession – the Japanese sword.

What is surprising is that contemporary Japanese sword makers barely feature, these are all Americans. I know that Europeans will raise a quizzical eyebrow at anything the Americans throw themselves into with their body and soul…. I certainly did; but even half way through episode one, I was totally convinced they’d got it right.

Admittedly, this series ticked many of my boxes; not only traditional Japanese martial arts, but Japanese culture, history and the world of crafted bespoke artefacts. I found myself salivating at the lingering shots of antique and contemporary Nihonto, beautiful understated sword furniture and wrappings, yes, sword porn.

But the characters… including grizzled elderly craftsmen, working away in backwoods forges, enthusing about types of steel, temperatures, carbon content and quenching, totally captivating. They were pushing beyond the boundaries that historical Japanese swordsmiths were struggling to reach, even seeming to recreate techniques the Japanese thought had died out centuries ago.

However, this was not approached with Western arrogance, but more with reverence and full respect for what these earlier smiths had achieved.

Two other aspects came over strongly:

Cultural understanding.

The American swordsmiths were not just focussed on the sweat and grind of the forge; they were all clear in their own heads that Japanese culture has a depth that must be really worked at for Westerners to get a grasp of what the real background is.

Swords as practical objects.

Although we are no longer in the age where people swing swords at each other, either one-to-one or in massed armed conflict, a sword loses its identity and status if it is just considered as a decorative artefact, or a historical curiosity. (or even an investment antique). By including in the documentary those individuals who, for various reasons, feel they are custodians of an uninterrupted tradition that includes the art of swordsmanship, this adds real value to the enterprise. It tightly ties the craftsmen of the forge to the craftsmen of the Dojo, in a line that stretches back into history.

 

 

 

 

An Aesthetic of Taijiquan Practice

Over at Thoughts on Tai Chi, there as a recent post about the poetry within Taijiquan practice. I believe this applies to any martial art. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

 

The real poetry in Tai Chi is in its simplicity. The problem is that it’s nothing you can show to others, it’s something invisible.

All high arts strive towards simplicity. Why? Because you can judge all high art forms by the perfection in its details. And here is the thing: The more simple something is, the harder it is to perfect.

• Holding one high note is harder than just sing “anything”
• Making pottery perfectly straight, thin and absolutely even is harder than making curvy shapes
• In Chinese calligraphy, single brush strokes should be practiced thousands of times before trying to connect two together.

There are so many more examples that would make the same point. But it is also the same in martial arts. Even though I am not a fan of Japanese martial arts in general, I still think they often do a better job at this than in the Chinese. Just look at Kendo, Iaido or Japanese bow arts – they are all about perfecting one single strike, one single shot. Endless repetition of something seemingly simple.

Even a seemingly crude and unsophisticated style as Karate, compared to Chinese martial arts, does something very well. It only has a few types of kicks and punches that are repeated and perfected. Here is something I really respect, the philosophy that less is more. Or like Bruse Lee famously said: “I don’t fear someone who has trained ten thousand kicks once, but someone who as trained one kick ten thousand times.” This is a generalization of course, but it certainly makes a good point.

And I believe that this type of mind-set is also something that separates great Tai Chi practitioners from the mediocre ones. The mediocre ones are always obsessed about visual appearance. They like to train in Chinese traditional clothes, they like a ceremony around the practice and in class, and everything around the art. And obviously – they like collecting forms, both empty handed and weapon forms.

And the worst Tai Chi practitioners do everything out of own vanity and ego, they want to feel they know something “special” and look pretty while practicing. Some are lost cases. How much they train, they can never understand Tai Chi, because they are not interested in the art itself, but they use it as a tool to feel superior to others.

And on the other side of the spectrum, there are those who only focus on the perfection of every single movement they do. Just to raise hands, or turn to the right, becomes something very difficult, something they spend years and years to perfect. They practice on how to feel how the balance and weight distribution in their own body changes by every little small shift and movement. They study years and years to embody the simple Tai Chi principles in every movement and all of the time.

Poetry means to cut away everything unnecessary, and to strive for the most simple and clear expression possible. You can show poetry through words and sounds. But when you achieve it in Tai Chi, it looks like “nothing”. Because you can’t see it.

The Most Rewatched Fight Scenes of All Time

Below is a compilation of the top 15 most rewatched fight scenes.

 

Happy Fourth of July!

My favorite 4th of July Video:

 

 

Cook Ding's Kitchen 20th Anniversary

Today is Cook Ding's Kitchen's 20th anniversary. I began this as a place where I could find things that I found interesting, and would know where to look for them again.

So far there have been over 2.6M views of over 2500 posts.  

The "skill stories" of Zhuang Zi (Chuang Tzu) particularly resonate with me, especially the story of Cook Ding, whose attentiveness to his job led to his enlightenment.

Below is the story of Cook Ding.

Prince Huei's cook was cutting up a bullock. Every blow of his hand, every heave of his shoulders, every tread of his foot, every thrust of his knee, every whshh of rent flesh, every clink of the chopper, was in perfect rhythm — like the dance of the Mulberry Grove, like the harmonious chords of Ching Shou.

"Well done!" cried the Prince. "Yours is skill indeed!"

"Sire," replied the cook laying down his chopper, "I have always devoted myself to Tao, which is higher than mere skill. When I first began to cut up bullocks, I saw before me whole bullocks. After three years' practice, I saw no more whole animals. And now I work with my mind and not with my eye. My mind works along without the control of the senses. Falling back upon eternal principles, I glide through such great joints or cavities as there may be, according to the natural constitution of the animal. I do not even touch the convolutions of muscle and tendon, still less attempt to cut through large bones.

"A good cook changes his chopper once a year — because he cuts. An ordinary cook, one a month — because he hacks. But I have had this chopper nineteen years, and although I have cut up many thousand bullocks, its edge is as if fresh from the whetstone. For at the joints there are always interstices, and the edge of a chopper being without thickness, it remains only to insert that which is without thickness into such an interstice. Indeed there is plenty of room for the blade to move about. It is thus that I have kept my chopper for nineteen years as though fresh from the whetstone.

"Nevertheless, when I come upon a knotty part which is difficult to tackle, I am all caution. Fixing my eye on it, I stay my hand, and gently apply my blade, until with a hwah the part yields like earth crumbling to the ground. Then I take out my chopper and stand up, and look around, and pause with an air of triumph. Then wiping my chopper, I put it carefully away."

"Bravo!" cried the Prince. "From the words of this cook I have learned how to take care of my life."

ZhuangZi (Lin YuTang)  

 

 

Imperfection, Impermanance and the Transient Nature of Existence

At The Budo JourneyMan blog, there was a nice article about a category of  Japanese aesthetics, Wabi Sabi. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

 

Westerners who have an interest in art and the aesthetic seem to have really picked up on this in the last twenty years. Even if that’s not your zone, it’s worth looking at from a cross-cultural perspective.

Definition: ‘Wabi Sabi’, “Japanese philosophy that embraces beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and the transient nature of existence”.

Broken down; ‘Wabi’ is a kind of subdued, austere beauty. While ‘Sabi’ equals the appreciation of ‘rustic patina’.

Put these two together and you have a meditation on objects and phenomena that contain a type of understated, much loved and even over-used utility. A cracked teacup, no material value in itself, but perhaps it is an adored family heirloom and has some sentimentality, even charm. This can include the simplest of objects, clothing or utensils. It might be something used and worn by being passed through many hands. These are objects that have a rough simplicity to them, asymmetrical perhaps, but they are honest and intimate.

Human interaction.

Here is a quote from English writer (and bespoke furniture designer) Andrew Juniper:

"If an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi."

Andrew Juniper wrote the definitive book on Wabi-Sabi in English in 2003, ‘Wabi-Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence’.

(Incidentally; I met Andrew Juniper briefly, but sadly we had no time to talk about Wabi-Sabi as he was too busy giving me a short masterclass in how to make the perfect cup of coffee).

Taking time to ponder deeply about the nature of objects, buildings, utensils, we find ourselves perhaps coming to terms with a mixture of wonder and sadness, a resigned reflection on our own transience and vulnerability.

This is a meditation, an interaction with an inanimate object, given purpose and meaning by us.

Why imperfection has value.

To me, imperfection is the antidote to the mechanism of the production line. I think that instinctively we have a mistrust of perfection; we treat the whitewashed wall with suspicion.

Deliberate artful symmetry can be dramatic, but can also lead to blandness and eventually boredom.

If the imperfections and the asymmetry are given space to occur, or the freedom to happen, then the honesty and the rawness comes through.

In a way, the perfection of the factory product had to happen, so that we appreciate the qualities found in its opposite.

 

 

The Great Wave

Over at The Budo Journeyman, there was an article about one of the greatest Japanese artists, Hokusai Katsushika. Below is an excerpt. The full post, with some of Hokusai's greatest works, may be read here.

19^th century European painters have more than their fair share of Bohemians, wild boys (and girls), eccentrics and geniuses; but you don’t tend to think about that with the Japanese. Let me tell you, they are definitely there.

Hokusai was, in his generation, the best of the best. In fact, his sparkling and dramatic artworks have continued to ripple through time; very much like his iconic ‘Great Wave off Kanagawa’ (1831).

Hokusai Katsushika (1760 – 1849) lived a full, if not eccentric, life. The development of his artwork and continued influence moved diverse western artists like; Van Gogh and Monet. But his inspiration and very modern ways of working didn’t happen in a vacuum. It is said that very early on when he was beginning to cut his teeth as an artist he was exposed to French and Dutch copperplate engravings. I am certain that his experimentation with distance and perspective came out of the European tradition.

This is why the ‘Great Wave’ is so famous. Observe the way that mount Fuji viewed through the eye of the wave is diminished and shrunken under the massive movement of the water that appears to engulf it; the panicking boatmen there as a device for further scale references. The subtext is about the comparison of these various entities in size and distance. The earthbound Fuji is humbled by the might of a dramatic moving body of water; the ocean gets its revenge; Nature shakes her skirts.

 Note in ‘Great Wave’ the repeated major and minor spirals; the smaller ones as kinds of ‘claws’ in the water.

 

 

 

The Sword of Doom

Over at the excellent Ichijoji blog, Chris Hellman had a post about a classic samurai movie, the Sword of Doom. The post includes one of the most iconic sword duels in filmdom, which I will NOT include here. Visit the blog instead.

An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

The snow yesterday (not so common these days, and comparatively light compared to much of the rest of the country) reminded me of this classic scene from the film, The Sword of Doom, one of the several versions of the multi-volume novel by Nakazato Kaizan, Daibosatsu Toge – Great Buddha Pass, but arguably the best. (The others do have their good points, though). 

The sword master, Shimada Toranosuke, played here by Toshiro Mifune, (I have written his name the English way, but all the other names here are written surname first) is attacked mistakenly on his way back from a friend’s house. The attackers realise they have the wrong man, but make the mistake of pressing on with the attack regardless. This may be one of Mifune’s best appearances as a swordmaster (admittedly, the role is quite minor) but he plays it to perfection.

Imperfect Practice

It is said that practice makes perfect. That has been updated to perfect practice makes perfect. 

But we are imperfect people. There was an article on Thoughts on Tai Chi regarding how we imperfect people can progress through our imperfect practice. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

So, what about Tai Chi? What is the value of imperfection, and how can you apply these ideas? First of all, some traditional Tai Chi teachers argue that striving for perfection while practicing Tai Chi creates more obstacles than it does improvements. I agree with this, especially when it comes to trying to perfect every detail.

Focusing too much on the “perfection” of the final posture in each movement, trying to replicate your teacher’s exact appearance, or obsessing over how things should look points to a shallow mindset and indicates that the person is focusing on the wrong things.

Instead, your focus should be internal. You should aim to feel and become aware of your movements and internal state. Your mind-body connection is what truly matters for developing internal awareness. You will be able to sense where your movements have “gaps” and “weaknesses,” but what you feel won’t always directly impact the visual appearance of the form. Developing smoothness and balance in the movements certainly will, but again, these real qualities are brought forward by focusing on the internal state and maintaining awareness in each moment – not by external corrections of the form.

Another aspect of focusing too much on imperfection is that it can make your Tai Chi feel “double weighted” or “double heavy.” In Tai Chi Chuan, it is crucial to separate Yin and Yang. But what does this mean in practical terms? It means that one side of the body leads, while the other follows. One side is “weak” or empty, while the other is “strong” or full.

This separation should also influence your focus and awareness of movement and posture. If you try to balance everything equally or maintain the same focus on both sides, you will block yourself. Your movements will become forced, and you will prevent yourself from moving smoothly and freely.

In fact, we could say that a certain imperfection in the balance between the two sides of the body creates smoothness and freedom in movement. Because of this aspect of practice, it becomes easier to let your body make decisions by itself and move more naturally, as it wants. This is also what the masters refer to when they speak of developing “natural movements”—something impossible if you try to force yourself and your movements.

Bruce Lee's Training Regime

Over at The Art of Manliness blog, there was an extensive article on the techniques and philosophy of Bruce Lee's training regime. I thought it was an impressive article. 

An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

Bruce Lee is a legend.

He revolutionized movies and martial arts.

He also boasted incredible strength and all-around physicality.

Lee could place his fist one inch from the chest of a man twice his size and unleash a quick, cobra-like strike that’d send his opponent flying. 

Lee could perform push-ups using just two fingers of one hand. 

Lee wasn’t huge, but his lean, chiseled, defined physique was widely admired, and bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, Flex Wheeler, Shawn Ray, and Dorian Yates all acknowledged the impact it had on their careers.

Co-star and fellow martial artist Chuck Norris described Lee’s ripped physique as “muscle upon muscle.”

A woman who asked if she could touch Bruce Lee’s flexed bicep (a common request he appreciated receiving) described it as “warm marble.”

How did Lee develop his strength and physique? Was he simply a genetic freak?

Nope. If you look at early pictures of the Little Dragon, he was a pretty scrawny guy.

Instead of genetics, Lee systematically and relentlessly built his body with physical training.

Thanks to the meticulous research of martial artist and writer John Little, we know exactly what Lee did to achieve his results. Little shares the details of Lee’s fitness training in his 1998 book Bruce Lee: The Art of Expressing the Human Body. The book is an absolute gold mine of fitness history and information, and I highly recommend picking up a copy.

In today’s article, we take a look at the principles that informed Bruce Lee’s training and the components of his regimen that turned a man into a legend.

Throughout his childhood, Lee was incredibly active. He got in trouble at school, and his spiritedness drove him to mischief and street fights. If Lee had grown up in the 21st century, he probably would have been diagnosed with ADHD. His hyperactivity inspired his family to call him “never sits still.”

To channel Lee’s energy into less destructive activities, his father signed him up for kung fu instruction under the tutelage of master Ip Man. Thus, at age thirteen, Bruce began the lifelong practice that would make him a worldwide legend.

By the time Lee was in his twenties, he had developed enough physical conditioning to excel as a martial artist, but remained a skinny guy.

Then came a moment that would take his physical training to the next level.

In the early 1960s, Lee lived in Oakland, CA, and had begun teaching kung fu. Lee didn’t discriminate in who he took on as a student, and according to some accounts, some traditional Chinese kung fu masters in the area weren’t happy with him teaching the martial art to non-Chinese. So in 1964, they presented an ultimatum to Lee: take part in a kung fu battle against their best fighter; if Lee lost, he had to shut down his kung fu class.

While different versions of exactly how the fight went down exist, according to Bruce, the fight lasted three minutes and primarily involved him chasing his opponent around a building until he forced him to submit.

Despite winning, Lee was disappointed with how he performed. He was unhappy about the shape he was in and had begun to feel that the parameters of traditional martial arts were impractical for street fights. He concluded that to realize his full physical potential and become the best martial artist in the world, he’d need to move beyond kung fu and expand his repertoire of physical modalities.

This moment of discontent not only inspired Bruce Lee to get serious about his physical fitness, but birthed a martial art and overall life philosophy he called Jeet Kune Do or the Way of the Intercepting Fist.

In moving forward from the fight, Lee sought to develop a physical training system that emphasized “practicality, flexibility, speed, and efficiency” and drew from a wide range of training methods.

While Jeet Kune Do sounds like a formal martial art style like Tae Kwon Do, Lee intended it to be “the style of no style” — a martial art that transcended formal rules and incorporated the best ideas from various disciplines.

To find these ideas, Lee became a devoted student of the art and science of physical training.

Even though Bruce had struggled in school, he had a strong commitment to continuous learning and was a voracious reader throughout his adulthood. Over his life, he amassed a huge personal library of over 2,500 titles.

He trained his mind by reading Eastern and Western philosophy (Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas; The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi), as well as American self-help (As a Man Thinketh by James Allen; How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie).

He also religiously studied everything he could get his hands on about training the body.  

Lee thought there was something to be learned from all combatives and read books about boxing by Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, and Rocky Marciano, texts on karate and aikido, and over sixty volumes on fencing.

In the 1960s, bodybuilding magazines were the primary sources of information on strength training, and Bruce Lee subscribed to them all. If he found an article that contained useful information, he’d clip it and put it in his filing system.

Lee also browsed used bookstores and bought copies of health and fitness books from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Strength and How to Obtain It by bodybuilder and strongman Eugen Sandow and The Application of Measurement to Health and Physical Education written in 1945 by H. Harrison Clarke.

Lee continued to add fitness books to his extensive library throughout his life and never let a set lens contort his reading choices; if a book or magazine had some useful info in it, he bought it and read it.

Besides magazines and books, Lee would ask his friends and students for training advice. Two men who had a huge influence on Lee’s physical education were James Yimm Lee and Allen Joe. James Lee (no relation to Bruce Lee) was an Oakland-based martial artist and weightlifter, and Allen Joe was the first Chinese-American bodybuilding champion. Both men introduced Lee to the way of the iron and helped develop his first weightlifting program.

 

Lee’s study of all aspects of physical training led him to experiment with different fitness modalities, including barbell training, isometrics, plyometrics, circuit training, running, and stretching.

His practice of these diverse modalities all had a single goal: becoming a better martial artist.

While Lee only chose exercises that would help him improve as a fighter, because martial arts require the full spectrum of physical capabilities (strength, power, speed, endurance, and flexibility), Lee systematically trained all these capabilities; he didn’t specialize.

 

Practice and Resistance

The author Steven Pressfield (author of Gate of Fire and the Legend of Bagger Vance) frequently writes about topics that while specifically are about writing, apply more widely to art in general and to martial arts. Below is an excerpt from a post about Practice and Resistance. The full post may be read here.

Why do we have a practice at all?

I have my own reasons, some of which definitely go deep into the airy-fairy, but the most obvious and the most practical is this:

We have a practice in order to confront and overcome Resistance.

A practice by definition defeats Resistance because it produces work every day with total focus and dedication. And a practice is lifelong, so we know we’ll never quit.

One could say that a practice is “habit.” But in truth a practice goes way beyond that. A practice enlists habit. It implies habit (if we have a practice, we do it every day, i.e. it can be called a habit) but it is habit only in the sense that giving birth is exercise.

Likewise, if we said the purpose of a practice is to overcome Resistance, we would be vastly understating the depth and effect of having a practice.

Overcoming Resistance is a side-benefit of having a practice. 

For myself, I was years into the act of having a practice before I even thought about its efficacy as a strategy to overcome my own Resistance. Resistance was (and is) a given for me. It wakes up with me. I know I will have to face it every day, and I know it will never diminish or relent or go away.

But I have a practice. That’s all I need to know. I know at a certain time of day I will go into a certain room. I will enter with a very specific mindset, i.e. “Leave your problems (and your ego) outside.” And I will engage in a very specific (though infinitely varied in the moment) enterprise.

 

Musashi the Artist

Besides being a famous swordsman, Musashi was an artist. At Ichigoji, there is an article about his famous dragon painting. An excerpt is below. The full post, with accompanying photographs, may be read here.

 

Another year draws to a close and the Year of the Dragon begins here in Japan (yes – it is a somewhat odd combination of the Chinese lunar New Year that begins a couple of months later, and the western New Year).

The imperial connections of the dragon in China are well-known; in Japan there was a strong connection with esoteric arts and Zen Buddhism in particular (at least in art) where they are seen as protectors of the Buddhist law. In this respect, they are still to be seen on the ceilings of many temples in Kyoto – some of them dating back to the late Muromachi  period (late 1500s). Some of these are on public display, some in areas only open to the public during the special openings in the spring and autumn, and some are rarely to be seen at all - perhaps only when peering through the wooden slats into the gloom. Some of these are very evocative, some less so, but they certainly have a power in situation that is difficult to reproduce in photographs.

 

The same may be said for the many dragons depicted on sliding doors and screens, some of them very powerful, others quite strange (or even both in the case of some of Kaiho Yusho’s paintings, where the dragons loom out of the darkness as presences quite different from the scaled creatures of Chinese lore. I wrote about some of the great dragon paintings (Master Dragon Painters), and strongly recommend seeing them in the flesh if possible. The reality of a painting is more than the image itself - the setting, the lighting, the size, the texture, the sense of antiquity, - all these add something to the experience that make it more than visual alone. With ink, the age of the paper, the way the ink has sunk in, faded or worn off – the patina of age, I suppose you could say – is part of the work. 

For whatever reason, I have always found the works of Miyamoto Musashi particularly powerful in the flesh (not something I’ve had the chance of doing very often, mind you), but I have not had the chance to see his dragon painting. Of course, he is better known for the more modest creatures he depicted, things he had seen with his own eyes, but at least one dragon painting survives (and there is supposed to be another, even more elusive one, too).

 

The dragon faces left into space, but his eyes look elsewhere. The look on his face is mild, even sheepish, recalling some of Kaiho Yusho’s dragons. (It is quite likely that Musashi had seen and perhaps made copies of Yusho’s work). What is he looking at? 

As I’ve written before, there is recognition now in art circles that the pairing of dragon and tiger had strong associations with military divination, and these connotations would have been familiar to many warriors. It is possible that this painting was one of a pair – I have seen it suggested there could have been a tiger, or as in the case of Kaiho Yusho’s works, another dragon. Perhaps the eyes are a clue. 

Vintage Martial Arts Ads

At Hogan's Alley is a long, exhaustive and entertaining article about martial arts ads that appeared in magazines, comic books, etc. Below is an excerpt. The full article may be read here.

 

With the world grown smaller and the Far East drawn so near, it's hard to imagine a time when martial arts had an aura of mystery about them. Nowadays, with afterschool tae kwon do, cardio-kickboxing and a slow-motion kung-fu scene in every action flick, martial arts—while still a crowd-pleaser—have long been leeched of exoticism. In the backhanded benefit of cultural assimilation, they're practically quaint. DAN KELLY examines the once-robust campaign of martial arts ads in comic books.

FEAR NO MAN

Saying adieu to Orientalism, it's impossible to approach comic book ads touting martial arts training (the golden age of which took place between 1960 and 1985), with anything but snickering derision. (For the purposes of this essay, martial arts refers to the organized systems of hand-to-hand combat and weaponry training originating in the countries of the East, particularly China, Japan, Okinawa and Korea. Western countries, obviously, also practice arts of warfare (boxing, wrestling, fencing, savate and others, for example), but the term has become almost totally associated with Asian styles in the Western public's mind (ironic since the root of the word martial arts is Mars, Roman god of war). (For further details on practitioners of Western martial arts, please visit http://www.mrdankelly.com/csg.html.) "FEAR NO MAN!" bellows one ad, promising you the ability to "flatten out any Thug, Mug, Wiseguy or Bully" rendering him "ABSOLUTELY HELPLESS IN SECONDS." Another ad screams a musky-with-man-scent vow to bequeath the power of Chinese Kung-Fu," an art of "...crippling self-defense where every part of your body is a fearful weapon. Your feet, your hands, your elbows, your fingers..." forged into "lethal weapons WITHOUT REQUIRING SUPER MUSCLE-POWER OR BRUTE FORCE." Yet another ad trumps them all, telling the lumpish Superman reader that even his pasty, sow-bellied self can learn "...torturing techniques which are meant to maim, disfigure, cripple or kill and have been used by oriental terrorists and assassins to MURDER!"

Whew.

 

Times and people were simpler then—accent on the definition of "simple" as "easily gulled." Seemingly improbable now, back then the ads were semi-convincing because people knew little about martial arts beyond what they saw misrepresented by popular media. Decked out with Chinese takeout fonts, blazingly violent copy, mystical gibberish, fear tactics and flimflam, the ads took advantage of the dying view of east Asia as a place containing ancient secrets of savage violence. "Fill out and mail in the below coupon," ended each ad in a crashing crescendo, "and be imbued with the bone-shattering fighting arts of the Orient"—and for only 99 cents at that!

Naturally, what was promised and what one actually received for that 99 cents were very different things—par for the course with American advertising at large. What made these ads more interesting than others were the freaky mail order senseis behind them, the highly dangerous "product" they allegedly sold, and the unflattering way the ads reflected American attitudes and knowledge about martial arts and their places of origin. Despite what a certain mindworm of a song suggested, not everybody was kung-fu fighting. Some were just faking the moves in order to separate the kidlings from their allowances.

While this article concentrates on ads appearing in so-called Silver and Bronze Age comic books, we should first make a detour to the slightly further past to understand what brought about comic ads for Yubiwaza, Aicondo and other "deadly Oriental fighting arts" puffery.

The biggest myth this article wants to burst is the notion that Asian martial arts were forbidden to non-Asian eyes until recent decades. Certainly, racial prejudice on both sides created insularity and thereby an unwillingness to share and explore ideas. Also, consider the historical truism of conquerors forbidding the conquered from ever practicing how to fight, causing many Asian martial arts to be practiced in secrecy for a very long time (Okinawans hid their karate training from Japanese occupiers by disguising it as classical dance practice, for example.) Regardless, Americans might be surprised at how long certain styles have been taught in the United States. Despite the hype, not all roads lead to Bruce Lee.

A full-scale survey of the presence of Asian martial arts in American history is impossible in this article, nor is it the goal. Better instead to briefly look at how they first appeared here and the way they were initially promoted. The first recorded instance of an American viewing a demonstration of Japanese jiu jitsu took place when President Ulysses S. Grant visited Japan in 1879. Pinpointing the exact moment Asian martial arts were introduced to America is nigh impossible, but it's certain that judo (already present and practiced in Victorian England) sailed to the states in 1902 when Yoshiaki Yamashita, a sixth-degree master, was hired by Great Northern Railroad director Graham Hill to teach his son his not-so-gentle art. Hill and wife quickly decided martial arts were too risky for the lad but obligingly arranged for Yamashita to exhibit and promote judo in New York and Chicago. Shortly thereafter, jiu jitsu became quite the thing to do among the haute monde. Yamashita later trained another president, Theodore Roosevelt, who added a judo brown belt to his list of sporty accomplishments. For more information on the history of martial arts in the United States, visit this site.

In this manner, Asian martial arts slowly trickled into the mainstream. Training wasn't as omnipresent then as it is now, but it was available, though the affluent and particular occupations had the easiest time finding instructors. If one was a cop, one could expect a lesson or three in throwing, joint-locks and pressure-points—useful in the nonviolent, but no less painful, apprehension of ne'er-do-wells—when the Tokyo Metropolitans Police's brand of jiu jitsu came over here (leading to the coinage of the term police jiu jitsu, which turns up in pulp fiction of the time). Any man who did a stint in the armed forces, too, received hand-to-hand combat training, and though it may not have been called jiu jitsu or judo in boot camp, that's what it was. Several army and marine instructors, in fact, went on to produce the precursors of the manuals referred to later in this article. After World War II, organizations like the YMCA added judo training to their curricula, well before the first official karate schools opened. All told, even in the early part of the last century, Asian martial arts weren't invisible in America. 

 

The Brutal World of Bonsai

Below is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the New Yorker, about an American who apprenticed himself to a Bonsai master in Japan for 6 years. 

How hard could such an apprenticeship be? Well, brutal might be the way to describe it. 

The full article may be read here.

In the winter of 2002, a young American named Ryan Neil joined an unusual pilgrimage: he and several others flew to Tokyo, to begin a tour of Japan’s finest collections of bonsai trees. He was nineteen, with an athlete’s body and a sunny, symmetrical face. The next-youngest adult in the group was fifty-seven. Then, as now, rearing tiny trees in ornamental pots was not commonly considered a young man’s hobby.

Neil had grown up in a small Colorado mountain town. For much of his youth, he was focussed on playing sports, especially basketball, which he approached with an almost clinical rigor: during high-school summer breaks, he’d wake up every day at five-thirty and attempt twelve hundred jump shots before going to the gym to lift weights. By his junior year, he was the best player on the team. By his senior year, he had torn one of his quadriceps—“It was hanging on by just a thread,” he recalls—and was looking for a new obsession.

Like many Americans of his generation, Neil had discovered bonsai through the “Karate Kid” films. He was especially fond of the third movie in the series, which features dreamy shots of characters rappelling down a cliff face to collect a miniature juniper. In the films, the wise karate instructor, Mr. Miyagi, practices the art of bonsai, and in Neil’s young mind it came to represent a romantic ideal: the pursuit of perfection through calm discipline. One day, after seeing bonsai for sale at a local fair, he rode his bike to the library, checked out every book on bonsai, and lugged them all home.

About a month later, he got his hands on a trade magazine, Bonsai Today, which featured an article about Masahiko Kimura, the so-called magician of bonsai, who is regarded by many enthusiasts as the field’s most innovative living figure. (Kunio Kobayashi, one of Kimura’s chief rivals at the time, called him “the kind of genius who comes along once every hundred years, or maybe more.”) The article described how Kimura had transformed and refined a small juniper tree that had been collected in the wild. A scruffy, shapeless plant had become a cantilevered sculpture. As Neil saw it, Kimura had given the tree not just a new shape but a soul.

Near the end of high school, Neil laid out a meticulous long-term plan that would culminate in his travelling across the Pacific to apprentice under Kimura, who was considered the toughest bonsai master in Japan. Neil knew that the work would not be easy. Bonsai apprenticeships could last anywhere between five and ten years. At the time, some fifty people had begun working under Kimura, but only five had completed the apprenticeship, all of them Japanese.

Neil went to college at California Polytechnic State University, in San Luis Obispo, where he majored in horticulture and studied Japanese. He helped take care of the university’s bonsai collection and travelled around the West Coast to attend master classes with renowned practitioners. While other students were partying, he stayed home looking at bonsai blogs, or drove his pickup truck to remote mountain locations in search of wild miniature trees. “He was possessed,” his father recalls.

Neil signed up for the tour of Japan during his sophomore year, and took a short leave from school. On the second day of the trip, the group visited Kimura’s garden, in a rural area some thirty miles northwest of Tokyo. It was a cool, gray morning; Neil wore a hoodie. The group was met by one of Kimura’s apprentices and ushered past rows of ancient and pristinely shaped bonsai into the back garden—the workshop—where few visitors were allowed.

Neil later likened the moment to peering into the mind of a mad genius. Hundreds of knee-high trees, in various states of arboreal surgery, were lined up on benches and beer crates. Custom-made power tools were scattered around the workshop, including a machine, used to sculpt trunks, that shot out tiny glass beads. Kimura was famed for his deft use of these devices to carve rippling torrents of shari—bone-white deadwood that is laced with thin veins of living wood.

That day, Kimura, who was then in his sixties, was working on an Ezo spruce with a spiky, half-dead trunk which was estimated to be a thousand years old. A photographer from the Japanese magazine Kindai Bonsai was present to document the process. Neil and the other visitors observed as Kimura, with the help of his lead apprentice, Taiga Urushibata, used guy wires and a piece of rebar to bend the trunk downward, compressing the tree—an act requiring a phenomenal balance of strength and finesse. Kimura misted the branches with water and wrapped them with thick copper wire. He then bent the branches—some slightly upward, some downward—arranging the foliage into an imperfect dome, with small windows of light spaced throughout the greenery. He worked with relentless focus, but what amazed Neil most was the synchronicity of Kimura and Urushibata: whenever Kimura needed a tool, he would wordlessly extend his hand, and Urushibata would have the implement waiting for him.

After Kimura had made his design decisions, he left Urushibata to finish wiring the branches. The tour group moved to the front garden, but Neil lingered, watching the apprentice work. Urushibata, a stern young man with the pretty face and floppy hair of a J-pop idol, turned to Neil and spoke to him, in English.

“So you want to apprentice here?” Urushibata said.

“I do,” Neil said.

“You should reconsider,” Urushibata said, then turned his attention back to the spruce.

 

 

Movies that Botched Martial Arts Fighting

Below is an interesting article that appeared at Looper on movies that screwed the pooch on their presentation of martial arts. Below is an excerpt. The full post may be read here.

From boxing to judo and from jiu-jitsu to eskrima, there are nearly 200 different fighting styles that originated in various countries all around the world. Many of these martial arts styles have been brought to the big screen in action movies over the years, but they aren't always translated into cinema faithfully.

To one degree or another, there is always some realism lost when a martial arts style is depicted on camera. Beyond all of the trickery needed to keep action scenes safe for the actors and stunt performers involved, movie fight choreography rarely ever sticks to a single real-world fighting style on a one-to-one basis. Movements often need to be exaggerated in order to sell on camera, some real fight tactics simply aren't exciting on screen, and some moves that are exciting on screen would be useless in a real fight and have no basis in reality.

100% authenticity in a movie fight scene sounds like something worth striving for at face value, but it would be easy for the end result to wind up being dull and unimpressive. The best action movies strike the perfect balance between realism and exaggeration, while other movies throw realism out the window and botch the fighting styles they claim to depict. Here are 11 martial arts movies that got their fighting styles completely wrong.

Man of Tai Chi - Tai Chi

From the kung fu of "The Matrix" to the judo of "John Wick," Keanu Reeves has consistently proven himself to be one of the most physically committed Hollywood stars. In 2013, Reeves's passion for martial arts extended behind the camera with his directing debut: "Man of Tai Chi." Reeves plays the film's villain opposite martial artist Tiger Chen, whom Reeves met while working on "The Matrix" trilogy as a stunt man. Reeves also met the legendary fight director Yuen Woo-Ping on "The Matrix" and enlisted him to work on the action scenes for "Man of Tai Chi."

Despite being a total financial bomb, Reeves delivered a remarkably authentic kung fu flick. However, there was a notable lack of authenticity when it came to the titular martial arts style. Despite it being in the title, there is hardly any legitimate tai chi used in the film. In reality, tai chi is not an offensive fighting style and instead finds far more use as a light exercise suitable for the elderly. In the film, the so-called "Man of Tai Chi" is constantly on the aggressive and tears his opponents apart. This is one instance of a movie getting the martial arts style completely wrong but winding up with better action because of it. The fights in "Man of Tai Chi" are fun and exhilarating, whereas if they stuck to actual tai chi, they would be slow, dull, and the protagonist would certainly lose every fight.

Tai Chi, The Watercouse Way

Back in the 80's, Chungliang_Al_Huang did his part in popularizing taijiquan within the Human Potential movement. 

After the death of his friend Alan Watts, Huang finished his book, Tao, the Watercourse Way.

Below is a ~18 minute documentary on Huang and his Taijiquan.

 

Japanese Buddhist Woodcarving

Carving the Divine is a documentary film that offers a rare look into a 1400-year-old Buddhist woodcarving tradition and the practitioners struggling to preserve its legacy in a rapidly changing Japan.