Drunken Monkey

BUT i still hold that if a person wishes to train in uniform in public, that does NOT automatically mean that person is showing off or make a spectical and this is what i have been saying. it doesn't matter what you think or intend. it is how other people wil perceive you. you can't stop people thinking you are showing off BUT you can prevent some of it by NOT TRAINING IN YOUR GI. but like i said, all you seem to have been doing is justify why you can as opposed to listening to what we say.

gi and kimono are not the same thing. this has been bugging me for quite a while now... and quite frankly, it kinda says something about you. i mean, if you don't even know that your training outfit/uniform isn't a kimono (that you can't even spell)... and anyway. why do you need to train before school in the hall? what's wrong with your home? why do you need to train at lunch times and breaks? that's time for friends and socialising and hell maybe even for reading a book. If that is what you think if you see a person in a gi training... then quite frankly you're immature and not worthy of MA and i say if you insist that you can/should wear your gi for training outside of the dojo then i say you are immature and stupid and don't deserve our attention. I am NOT planning to wear my gi to boast or "show off" or to get special attention it doesn't matter what you think or intend to do. the question isn't with you (although more and more i think otherwise...) the point is, the gi WILL get you attention. It is also my deepest wish that through my training i may enlighten some people and help them see that which they what but could not. Such is the case with a few ppl here no offence here mate but this is just another sign of your arrogance.... what can you, a green belt, someone who isn't even halfway through the learning process teach? that line just furthers goes to show that you want people to know you do karate that you are really involved and that you are 'superior'. so far, everything i have read in this thread is just you justifying why you should wear your gi depsite words from many people who are in a much better position to give advice than you or i, that go to say otherwise.

....i would say that wing chun is something that you should either learn first or learn last.... i say this because wing chun tends to intefere with anything else you do. or perhaps the other way around is also true; almost all other striking arts will interfere with wing chun. the only time this won't happen is when you are already more than familiar with your base so instead of dealing with moves/techniques, you deal more with the theories and ideas.... (your base then becomes a reference point of some sort that the wing chun will um, take apart....)

....i keep getting in my head that wong shun leung was supposed at the top of the pagoda instead of the tall dude. maybe one of the bruce lee fan(atics) can correct me...

hehe, i think we've just decided on the place we will eat if we ever get to meet up like we planned....

... i would say the hardest thing is to be able to separate the timing from pressure to no pressure in both arms at the same time. the next time you roll (assuming you are doing double hands) pay a little attention to when you are applying pressure and when you are not. you'll find that the crossover point for both arms are out of synch. this is what catches out a lot of people so kepp half a mind on the timing of the forward pressure. hopefully this makes sense. oops, shouldn't hi-jack someone else thread. sorry....

hmmm let's see. hagaan daz has a really good chocolate milkshake but i can't remember the name. cranberry is my juice of choice. white russian, whiskey sour, or seabreeze are my coctail choices. malibu+baileys+milk+ice is my 'get the girls drink' (and almost my own little mix from my bartending days but i'm pretty sure i'm not the first to mix this) i'm definitely a red wine person. a good chateaux neuf du papas or st emillion is hard to resist. but for some reason, when dining out, i prefer a simple sparkling water. other than that, tea will do me fine. with milk, lots of sugar, hot or cold. hmm, i think the fact that i have been brought up around restaurants and bars have lead me to have very wide preferences...

.....right now, i can't get enough japanese food. satsuma in soho is my current haunt. if you see a short chinese guy with fuzzy hair and a green t-shirt on with a really cute chinese girl with short hair, that'd be me and my friend..... hold on, darn, being in soho, every other guy in there is going to be short and chinese with fuzzy hair.... um, sorry. i just had to mention her again. i'm still going through that phase when i can't get her out of my mind and even a passing mention of her makes me smile....

...but the chinese ones are cooler than the english ones.... stupid overgrown lizards...

dubbing sound onto vhs.... to be honest, i have no idea. i'm by no means an expert. i do remember a little bit of kit though that lets you record a sound track and video onto a new vhs. i never paid much attention to the film studio induction cos it was never my intention to use it for film making. it was just where i took my photos.... sorry i can't be more help.

...and now that you've joined a wing chun club, you will find now that EVERY wing chun student is like family. trust me. one day you will walk into another club and chi sau with a total stranger. one day you will be talking to someone at a hairdressers and talk about wing chun, next thing you know, you're at the bakc rolling hands.... it's one of the reasons why your chi sau has to be good, after all, with chi sau being the universal wing chun language, you don't wanna show up your school...

...but not the best..... he was never the best. he had a little dream and that was to beat wong shun leung. this was supposed to happen in a scripted fight in one of the films (can't remember which), as a kind of in-joke between bruce and wong shun leung, y'know, cos it would never really happen....

well, yeah, that's what i mean. in that very short time period of 150-200 years, everything shifted more than once and in more ways than one. i use the anti-ching as a starting point as it is un-doubtedly the starting point of modern chinese martial arts as well as being the point where history can be reliably traced, and confirmed. however, there is still a lot of mixed up 'truths' out there. also, it's where the schools/styles started to really get noticed. the big five families gained attention during this period as did wing chun, tai chi, choy li fut, mantis, white eyebrow and eagle claw. this flowed (almost) into the boxer rebellion. and with the chinese obsession with history, legends and what-not, things get very muddled, very quickly. during this period, martial arts in china were divided between the performers who may or may not have known 'real' fighting arts, and the likes of wong fei hung and leung jan. after this the whole cultural revolution began and this is where old traditions were being persecuted and things moved on, physically as well as culturally... (although one thing the government couldn't repress was the old chinese tradition of legends and stories) once again, remember that characters such as wong fei hung, leung ja, tit kiu sam, so hut yee, fok yuen gap etc etc, were less than 50-60 years previosly. they could ban the arts but they couldn't ban the knowledge of them. so yeah, a lot of people moved. but a lot did stay behind. leung jan had a lot of good students in the canton region that had no need or want to leave. wong fei hung's students didn't leave and his wife still ran the school until long after his death (although none of his sons were taught kung fu after a little incident...) as i said before, the jing woo school was still present throughout the whole revolution and takeover (as shown in the movies fist of fury/legend....) so yeah, don't discount what you can find in china. it's just that the majority of schools you come across are either going to be wu-shu schools, or well, 'performance' schools.... and like i said earlier, it's getting more depressing as the old 'rarer' styles such as bagua, wu-dang, and even mantis, seem to be the latest victims of the "let's make a pretty form to show people and call this kung fu", craze.

My real question, once again, was wether wearing your gi outside the dojo is somehow insulting to teh school or disrespectful to the art... i guess the most direct answer to this would be 'no'. (unless you were challenged in which case, if you lose, then you would've dishonoured the uniform. in which case, simple solution; don't wear it) but then other issues come up. forget about your 'right' to wear whatever you want , where-ever you want, the fact is, wearing your gi outside of the dojo or group training environment is asking for trouble. you can say that idiots will be idiots and that it isn't your fault, but if you know fire burns, don't stick your hand in it.

I know an extremely traditional kung fu master, and he says most of the high level masters have immigrated to the states not quite..... however, a lot of the second gen guys from the original 'migration' (as it were..) have since moved to the united states. choy li fut sems to be bigger in the u.s than here in the uk. one of the most direct 'pure' lineages of wing chun is in the u.s. i should say that my knowledge of chinese arts in the u.s is rather limited and what i do know is purely second-third hand. Great history lesson, DM! Very informative, thanks whoa.... just a very, very rough outline of events and a little insight into how the chinese culture 'sees' things. there are lots of holes in what i have stated above, a lot of them cos i don't know how to fill them. this one of them things that i am trying very hard to learn more about. so much of it happened in a relatively short amount of time. anti-ching movement, red junk, boxer rebellion, civl war, fleeing to hk, 1997.....

the 8 immortals form is more or less the formal shaolin drunken form. the concepts/theories/types of movements are all named after the immortals (to describe their essence) and it isn't really a style unto itself. as i said before, drunken forms are normally taught later; they are just another part of training.

......y'know, the more i watch darren brown, the more similarities i see with some chi demonstrations...

drunken is more like a template, a set of theories that you apply to what you know. to use it, you first have to know your base very, very well. it is like knowing the 'rules' of your style and deliberately breaking them and exploiting them in order to gain an advantage. other than that there is also an actual drunken fist style/form. but again, it, being a shaolin based style/form, depends on your knowledge of base shaolin techiniques/forms. it was usually only taught later in your studies because it, for lack of a better way to describe it, teaches you wrong things AND more importantly, a lot of things depends on you having perfect control of your basic structure. in other words, you can't really learn drunken unless you are really good in the first place. then again, if you want to go practice wu-shu, the syllabus has drunken forms in it. but then, that's not really going to be the same...

...i see no reason why you can't use an off the shelf, almost basic digital video cam. as long as it has dv in+out you're fine. you don't even need to invest in filters or studio lights (although they always help...) the other killer is how you're gonna edit. if you go the cheapest route and get a vhs (cos it's simpler) video cam, then you can edit with two vcrs. nice and simple. no mess. getting a decent sound track on that will be a bit more hassle, esp with timing and all that. final product won't be as sharp as you want but then it is much cheaper and 'quicker' and more direct to play with. on the other hand, if you go the digital route as i mentioned first, then what you will also need is a decent pc. scratch that, you need a blindingly good one. (or be prepared for a lot of waiting) massive amounts of ram, a top end graphics card with at least 256 are essential. i would say if you can afford it, a nice dual xeon set up would be nice. after that, premiere is a must but once you get to grips with that, actual editing is quite easy. oops. kinda gone off the track slightly. ok, gonna try and be more helpful. first. i think the actual camera doesn't matter that much. what matters more is how/where you film. what looks good in real life may not translate well onto film. but then that depends on what you are filming for. hmm, in fact a lot depends on what you are filming for. just a useless bit of film trivia. 28 days later was filmed using off the shelf 'home' digital video camera. of course they had acces to highly skilled post production graphics people.

over my life time i am aiming at mastering, or as close as i can get to mastering: Karate, Aikido, and Kung-Fu ....um, what exactly do you mean by 'kung fu'? i do hope you realise that the term is used to desribe ALL chinese martial arts. and if you didn't know that, then i think maybe you should do a bit more reading.... unless of course you really did mean that you wish to master every single chinese martial art.

well, i mean, doesn't kempo work by taking a set of moves (any set of moves) and then break them apart and put back together again. from what i gather, kempo works with principles rather than fixed moves. i know there are forms but again, these are just 'versions' (or perhaps, physical interpretations) of the principles, right? i should point out that my knowledge of kempo is purely second hand. that's why my first reply was also posed as a question.

due to the Communist influences in promoting some styles (or ways of doing them) and disapproving others not quite.... anything that would promote anything that goes against the communist ideal was banned. religion, martial arts and anything else that could create a 'superior' group or promote a community outside/separate of the communist way was illegal and as you will find out with a little research, punishment was in a lot of the cases, brutal. also, you have to remember that some of the people/names were still very close to the legends/heroes: students of lam sai wing, student of wong fei hung, yip man student of chan wah sum/ng jung so, students of leung jan, the jing woo school was in it's prime and fok yuen gap was still fresh in people's memories. these were 'powerful' people with lots of influence. if they ever decided to fight against the government, the people would no doubt follow them. the government weren't stupid. don't forget, the chinese culture looks deeply into history and the whole boxer rebellion was also still quite fresh. as a result, you could say that the 'educated' were allowed to/persuaded to leave. there was a grace period when people were allowed to leave china for places such as kong kong, tai wan, malaysia etc etc. in most cases, the government even helped with the paper work. the kung fu elite, being high scholars of the classical kind, were not stupid people. besides, the choices were simple. stay and lose everything your family has worked for through the many years/centuries/generations AND lose being able to openly practice and teach your art or leave and be able to continue the tradition. as i said before, a great deal of the major heads of schools left. those that stayed behind didn't get to teach or at least not openly. martial arts were only recently allowed back into the culture being seen as good for moral. during the wars, it was seen that the old performances were good for moral and so a few performers were allowed to travel, putting on shows for the soldiers (of the opera kind, which was kinda ironic given the hung suen history...) even more recently, the govenrment decided to adopt/adapt martial arts, again to help with promoting national identity; after all, it is taken that a lot of martial arts come from china/shaolin. that was when the shaolin temple (which isn't the one of legend - they don't know where that one is although they do have suspicions about a site in fukien) was refurbished and re-opened. what they teach is a bit confusing. a lot of it is traditional shaolin forms but what they do with them is kinda questionable. outside of the temple, the government set up a board for controlling the 'new' national art called 'quo-shu' which was/is the performance based fancy flying about stuff you see (nothing traditional at all....). the name was changed to 'wu-shu' to further remove it from the communist ideas (as it was supposed to be the government showing that it is not bad and still allows people to learn the old stuff.....) the board's job was to collect and 'refine' forms that people could learn and perform and compete in. (remember, the whole quo-shu/wu-shu plan was to increase moral and national identity and pride). what you were left with were forms that bare very little resemblance to the original fighting forms. i.e the drunken form in the wushu syllabus is nothing like the drunken form of legend. the same happened to tai-chi and more recently, as i discovered after watching a god-awful documentary, wu-dang itself. as for where 'true' kung fu masters are. well, currently the head of the chow gar mantis lives in hk (good school in near me in uk). the head of the lau gar eagle claw lives in hk (good school near me in uk). the 'purest' most direct lineage of white eagle lives in malaysia. big time hung gar school in malaysia. yip man's top students are in hk (as are his sons) but there are still quite a few 'true' door-keepers still in china (a lot did move back once china started to be more welcoming/open). from wing chun, yuen kay shan and pan nam have their bases in china. the big lee gar school is in china. jing woo is still thriving in china (but i'm not sure if they still teach the fok gar kuen of legend...). but generally, the way things happened, i still say the best kung fu teachers are going to be found outside of china. please note, this is a very brief and over-simplified description of things. much of this is from memory and if i have missed any names of styles/schools that should have been mentioned, i apologise.

...not quite.... kung fu is something you have to work for. this, i was born/raised with. it's no different to you explaining english grammer.

see! that's what i like to hear. i don't give a (drunken) monkey's what you think of a style, whether you think it is effective or not. we all know tkd gets a lot of mis-guided flak but how many guys at that age from other styles take part in any type of competition these days? past 40 and still kicking with the young uns. that has got to be a good thing, right?

.....5th dan? so um, how old was he then?