Better Martial Arts Movements

Happy New Year!
And happy work out…
every day for the next 365 days.
You deserve it.

Here’s something I realized,
which helped me,
hope it helps you.

I was reading a forum the other day,
it was some offbeat subject
on some martial arts forum,
and this guy did a rant on old movie musicals.
We’re talking people like Fred Astair, Gene Kelly, and so on.

This fellow said something like,
“These old black and white movies are gay!
How could anybody watch a guy and a girl,
dance for five minutes!
And there’s even movies where two guys are dancing!
how gay!”

How interesting.
Art is gay.
And he was holding himself up as a martial artist.
Maybe he was too much martial?
And not enough artist?

To be sure, dancing is not martial arts,
there is not much in the way of fist and defense.
But dancing is motion,
and martial arts have motion,
so the two have common ground.
Further,
I have seen many martial artists who were good,
but could have been better,
had they a bit of the poise and grace.

And,
here’s an interesting tidbit,
before I discovered martial arts,
when I was going to high school,
and then college,
I used to be a thespian.
That’s right,
an actor.
And I was in all the plays and musicals
that my schools had to offer.
Loved it.
Good looking girls there, too.
But,
good looking girls aside
(can’t believe I said that!)
one time I was in the play
West Side Story.
I was one of the Sharks.
And we were choreographing the big rumble
between the Sharks and Jets,
and I picked out the biggest guy I could,
and I went to him with an idea.
I hit you,
you hit me,
then I hit and you duck,
and you pick me up and throw me over your shoulder.
Man,
it was great!
We rehearsed it,
went to the director and showed her what we had.
She loved it!
So the night of the play
the rumble started.
I swung and he acted like I had hit him,
then he swung,
and hit me.
Bingo…right on the jaw,
and I was out like a light.
In front of 500 people,
The audience didn’t realize what had happened,
but the director did,
and my partner did,
and somehow,
I don’t know how,
I managed to come to enough to stagger off stage.
But I was knocked out.
So much for dancing being non-violent.

Anyway,
the big hint I wanted to give you has to do with this.
During the holidays they sometimes play old movies on TV.
Find the ones with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly,
look for some other names,
check out how the masters move.

There was a fellow name of Baryshnikov,
considered the best in the world at ballet,
and he said his favorite dancer was Fred Astaire,
wished he could move like him.

Fred would do things like dance with a standing lamp.
He would roll that thing around,
tilt it and catch it
until you thought the standing lamp was alive!
There is never a hesitation,
never a hint of a stall,
it is actually one of the ONLY examples
of perfection in motion
on this planet.

Now if only a standing lamp was a martial arts weapon, eh?
We’d all be practicing the Fred Astaire Kata.

And,
not to leave out the gals,
Fred had a partner name of Ginger Rogers,
and one time some reporter asked her
if it was difficult to dance with Fred.
She replied,
“Heck, I did everything he did,
backwards,
and in high heels.”

Now that is perfection of motion.

So drive safe tonight,
or just stay home and do your imbibing,
and check out some of these masters of motion
and see if you can pick up anything about balance,
grace and poise,
or anything else
that will help make your kata perfect.

Happy New Year
and have 365 great work outs!
Al

Last day of the Two for One Special!
Read about it here!

The Reality of Martial Arts in Movies and Novels

The first example of martial arts in this country (the USA) was probably the James Cagney film, Blood on the Sun in 1945. Man, it was a rock ’em sock ’em movie, with a judo match in the end that was gr-r-r-eat!

Before that movie the only other instance of martial arts in the US was that Teddy Roosevelt supposedly took Judo lessons while in the White House.

The Wudan Assassin and REAL martial arts! Click on the cover!

After Blood on the Sun was ‘Bad Day in Black Rock,’ where a one armed Spencer Tracey used Judo to dispatch some very nasty two armed villains. Quite good stuff.

Somewhere in the late fifties and early sixties people started hearing about Karate. It was cocktail humor, and people joked about karate chopping somebody to death. On chop and cowier…bad guy gone.

And martial arts began making its way into cheap movies. Matt Helm featured a young Ed Parker, a hippie did Tai Chi Chuan in Billy Jack.

But, truth to tell, this was all pretty shlocky. Nobody knew how to film this new beast, and it really wouldn’t open up untilBruce Lee came along about 1967.

Which brings us to novels.

I remember reading ‘Six Days of the Condor,’ before it became a movie called ‘Three Days of the Condor,’ and the villain was so deadly because he had a(gasp) brown belt in Karate.

A brown belt.

The writer obviously didn’t know proper research.

And, to this day, there is little research, and writers are not too knowledgeable about the martial arts.

There have been a few good writers, Eric Lustbader is supposed to have done Aikido, but how much is not known, and then there is the question of whether he was a good enough writer to translate the art to the written page in a realistic manner.

Just a couple of years ago I read a book by Laurell Hamilton in which her heroine knows martial arts, but it is obvious that the author took a few lessons, painted Kenpo as the deadliest martial art around, and then slithered through any real fighting sequences without knowing what she was talking about.

All of the above, of course, is great for me. I’m a writer, and a martial artist of nesar fifty years. I know the techniques, I know the reality of the martial arts, and I can translate it to the written page.

Not to say that I don’t embellish for the sake of the novel. After all, you have to have a scorcher plot, and you have to build things up larger than life.

But, when I detail a Martial Arts technique as it would be used in the reality of a fight, it is fact based. THAT is what would happen if you stuck your finger in an eyeball. THIS is what happens when you lever an arm so that the bone snaps. THAT is the effect of trying to block a samurai sword.

But the thing is not to just have dynamite techniques, but to have a sub theme of martial arts.

In ‘The Haunting of House’ there is a girl who teaches martial arts, and she knows martial arts, and when she uses martial arts, it is with a sword and a hefty helping of the B chromosome. And it feeds the plot, it is important that she know martial arts, it shapes her, and it shapes the plot.

In ‘Machina’ Martial Arts is pivotal. The good guys all know martial arts, and they can link the arts together to create…something else.

But probably the best of these books deals with the Wudan Assassin. Three books, all filled with martial arts mayhem, all pivoting around the abilities of personal combat, and in a way that modern people, even people who haven’t studied the martial arts, can come to enjoy and empathize.

The first book, ‘Hero,’ has a guy down on his luck, a violent sort, whose only redeeming quality is the fact that he practiced martial arts in prison, that he survived prison through the martial arts. This opens the door to an engagement with a religious order protected by…the Wudan Asassin.

In the second book, ‘Assassin,’ the Wudan Assassin makes his appearance, and you finally meet somebody who IS the martial arts. Who can feel things behind him, can sense what others are thinking. It is the highest level of martial arts possible, and it is all translatable to the written page.

In the third book, ‘Avatar,’ The Hero and the Assassin come together. There is a threat to the world that is so great that the Assassin actually needs help!

And all these books have rock ’em sock ’em REAL martial arts.

No posing or posturing, no bad information, just real martial arts.

Heck, there are even training routines that the reader can do himself and learn from!

So, they are all available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble on line, Createspace, and other places. Though you might have to ask the clerk to order it for you.

Here’s the list of books.

The Haunting of House

You might have to sort through the links if you wish paperback or Kindle, but these novels are in both platforms.

Enjoy, and have fun with the real reality of Martial Arts.