Four Events at University of San Francisco Worth Checking Out

EMPIRE OF SILVER
A talk by writer/director Christina Yao, with excerpts from her film
http://www.usfca.edu/pacificrim/events/#Silver

Tuesday • August 30, 2011 • 5:45 PM
USF Main Campus, Fromm Hall
Enter from Parker Street between Golden Gate & Fulton, San Francisco

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An Evening of Enchanting
INDONESIAN ETHNIC DANCE
http://www.usfca.edu/pacificrim/events/#Dance

Monday • September 12, 2011 • 5:45 PM
USF Main Campus, Fromm Hall
Enter from Parker Street between Golden Gate & Fulton, San Francisco

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A JESUIT IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY:
Matteo Ricci (1552 - 1610)
http://www.ricci.usfca.edu/events/index.htm

Wednesday • September 14, 2011 • 5:45 PM
USF Lone Mountain Campus, Room 100
Enter from Turk Street near Parker, San Francisco

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TURANDOT
"Excerpts and Explanations"
http://www.usfca.edu/pacificrim/events/

Monday • September 19, 2011 • 5:45 PM
USF Main Campus, Fromm Hall
Enter from Parker Street between Golden Gate & Fulton, San Francisco

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Stripping For the Dead?

I don't have much of a commentary on this yet, but it is a must read.  When people claim that a type of Kung Fu is 'just x' or 'just y' and it was 'originally just z' but then got mixed with 'a little p influence,' they are usually just repeating something they heard from someone who either didn't know, or was trying to cover something up.  The real history of religious Kung Fu theater ritual is itself an incredible treasure, way more interesting and complex than any of the spins we have heard yet.  This is the first I've heard of stripping for the d



ead, and I've been reading about this stuff for a long time.

Here is the Director/Anthropologist's website.

This article about the film is pretty good too.

Robert W. Smith

Rum Soaked Fist is reporting that Robert W. Smith has passed away.  I have not seen any obituaries yet, but he was one of the earliest Westerners to train and write about Asian martial arts.  His devotion to the practical and historical study of martial arts and internal martial arts opened up tens of thousands of doors for others to walk through.  He will be greatly missed.

Weakness With a Twist in Japan: Sumo

I have been in a whirl wind of change.  I moved from San Francisco to the suburb of Lafayette, and then I got on a plane to Japan.  At the moment it is 7 am in Tokyo and I am sitting down in line to see an all day Sumo match.

If anyone has contacts in Japan that they would like to introduce me to, please send me an email.  If you are in Japan and you want to meet up, same.  If you happen to know of something particularly cool or weird to do, particularly in Tokyo or Kyoto, I’m all ears.

The report on radiation:  There is none in Tokyo,  we brought a Geiger counter from home and it shows no change.  Second, the abundance of cheap delicious food is overwhelming...in Japan there is no sales tax, and no tipping and my American Express card is not charging for currency conversion.  Sarah is at my side playing angry birds, we are in need of coffee and snacks but we must sit here for one more hour before the tickets are handed out.

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Update...the Sumo was awesome. Here are my quick observation which are certain to offend someone so let me preface them by saying they aren't meant to offend, just to provoke thinking:

1.  I would like to see what Sumo was like before the spread of Fascist movements in the early 1900's.  Was it more or less theatrical? comic?

2.  Are the Sumo guys meant to be Cosmic Babies?  I ask this because Tangki in Taiwan are often seen that way and the defining characteristics are sometimes said to be bare feet, bare chest, and bib (They wear two kinds of bibs in Sumo, a fighting one and a ceremonial one.)  When baby or child deities are made into icons or puppets or actors in China, they also have these characteristics.

3.  I was reminded of Indian Monkey wrestling several times.  The "dirt" that gets watered and swept at regular intervals on the Sumo stage has similarities to the 'dirt' that gets mixed with gee and nice smells and gets shoveled into even softness in the Indian wrestling temples between fights.  Also a Sumo guy did a bow (as in bow and arrow) dance at the end which looked a lot like a monkey king spinning a staff.

4.  Between each fight there a singer comes out and does a short dance with a fan, it looks closely related to the Shimai (Noh Dance/Drama interludes) I studied at Oomoto 23 years ago.  So does the officiated Shinto priest's vocalization and movement.

5.  The wood clappers are used at certain times, for theatrical effect?

6.  I believe there was a ritual in which each match was formally announce.  It seemed like the reading of imperial decrees.

7.  I have heard from several sources that the Japanese do not think Sumo and Mongolian wrestling are related.  I heard for instance, that the squat dance they do with their arms out to the sides, hands together than up then down, is to show that the wrestler has no weapons.  But it looks a lot like a version of the Mongolian eagle dance.  (check Youtube)  Also the side balance with one leg up in the air and then coming down with a heavy stop looks just like Mongolian wrestling.  As a demonstration of prowess it has a lot in common with the stamps in Chen Style Tai Chi too.  Maybe Mongolian wrestling came from Sumo?

8.  I really appreciated all the dancing and posturing and throwing salt and slapping and grunting.  It really gave me a chance to see who was likely to win and why!  Especially when looking at the early junior matches-- the (not)-eagle dance instantly let me know if they had good shoulder integration which is key to winning.  The squat let me see head integration and uprightness, and the four legged prone posture let me see if they had any spine problems.  Later in the show when they started reaching for and then throwing salt, they sometimes really looked like gorillas.

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We've got tickets to Kabuki...so I gotta run.

Kung Fu: The Hard Way

I just watch the first part of this 4 part video made by the BBC in 1983.  It's quite good, it's asks most of the right questions, sometimes it's answers are too brief and too general, but if we started from this very good basic explanation, how did we get side tracked?  The basics are here, Kung Fu was a devotional and exorcistic religious practice, a highly developed form of actual fighting skill, it played a roll in social cohesion, children's moral and physical education, triad organizations, rebellion, theater, dance, medicine, health and music.  The well established ties between Indian and Chinese civilization during the Han and Tang dynasties likely played some roll in it's development, especially in the realm of meditation and yogic action.

In answer to the above question I've come up with five reasons that the nascent field of Kung Fu studies has been so retarded.

1. When Qigong fever got out of mainland China it really confused the issues of Kung Fu's origins with a false narrative.


2. This particular BBC documentary focuses on Hong Kong, and manages to avoid getting caught up on the propaganda narrative of Chinese Nationalism dominant in both mainland China and Taiwan.


3. The Western ideas of mystical energy, self-defense, moralistic non-violence, and the belief that categories must be clear and distinct-- all have played a roll in inflating, diminishing or obscuring some aspect of the actual history of Kung Fu.


4. Buddhism exploded in the West, which amplified the 'Shaolin comes from Bodhidharma' narrative and tinted the glasses through which we look at everything Chinese.


5. The traditional Chinese distinction between Orthodox and Heterodox religion was so 'foreign' to Western notions of religion that it took over 100 years of scholarship and cultural exchange to become comprehensible.  (See here,... here,... here ... and here.)

Enjoy!

Is Ballet a Chinese Martial Art?

Is Ballet a Chinese Martial Art?

While such a question may strike some as the outer edge of reasonable scholarship;  the facts, when ordered properly and examined thoroughly, speak for themselves.

First of all let’s acknowledge that ballet is Europe’s only classical movement art.  India has at least six classical movement arts, Indonesia has more, China has over a hundred.
Ballet today is taught to millions of screaming little girls in pink tights.  But a couple of hundred years ago it was a man’s art.  When Euro-centric scholars have examined the origins of ballet they have looked principally at two sources, folk dance and fight training.

Folk dances are generally divided into the somewhat arbitrary categories of classic, pre-classic, festival, mating, and court dances.  There is no doubt that ballet choreography is deeply rooted in the movement patterns of for instance the pre-classic pavan, the court minuet, and that graceful mating dance, the waltz.  But none of these popular culture dances give us any clue as to why the serious study of technical and virtuosic skill characteristic of ballet developed.

Louis XIV in Lully's Ballet de la nuit (1653).

Scholars generally point to court dances as the origin of all this serious fuss because nearly all the kings and queens and their aristocratic entourages from Spain to England to Russia were getting together for diplomatic shin-digs and princess exchanges.  They knew each other and they knew the same dances.  So it has been argued that there was a need for a common language of entertainment, and perhaps a common language for male suitors to demonstrate their masculine prowess.

All this is quite possible, but let’s leave it aside for the moment and look at the origins of martial ballet technique.

The European gentry was obsessed with dueling.  I’ve written about this elsewhere but suffice it to say, knowing how to fence by the strict rules of chivalry was part of the definition of the aristocracy.  Fencing schools and tutors were all the rage.  The basic positions of ballet children learn today, first, second, third, forth, and fifth position, come from fencing, as does the general aesthetic of turned out legs.

Then there is the art of tripping.  The basic footwork of ballet has at least some origins in tripping skills.  Ballet students do endless demi-plies with the arm in forward, side or back position while the toe rotates around on the floor in a large arc with extraordinary force integrated with the fast kicking action of coup-de-pied.  Ballet dancers know how to trip.

Interior of the Royal Chinese Theatre in San Francisco during a performance in the 19th century. --- Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

Another argument about the movements of ballet goes that they have roots in the aristocracies endless formal presentation movements and bows.  Know doubt this is true, imagine a lord with his arms held open wide to the sides holding in each hand an eligible maiden trailing a long dress.  We’ve all scene this in the movies.  And it’s true, the nobles of Europe were obsessed with “presentations.”  In fact there is a form of martial presentation which is also given as an origin of ballet.  I speak of course of the horse pageant.  This parade of power and status spurred an industry of riding schools which taught people how to show off on a horse.  You can still watch this on youtube. Riders doing pirouettes standing up on the back of their horse.  It seems fun and silly today, but it was martial in those days.  Remember the war horse was both the tank and the fighter jet of the 1600’s.

Yes, OK, you say, ballet has some rambo-tough aristocratic roots, but where does China fit in?
To answer this question we have to consider how they were thinking about China back then.  Besides silverware, the two finest things you could own in the 1600’s were blue and white ceramics and silk clothing from China.  When you got together with other lords and ladies, what did you do? Why you showed off your China gear, that’s what.  These items were known as luxuries.  The word luxury has come to mean anything expensive, but in those days it referred to the exclusive possessions of the aristocracy.  If you were a wealthy merchant you were expected to wear course wool and rough linen.  If you wore silk it was a sin.  If you were a successful artisan and drank tea, another luxury, from a Chinese cup, that was a sin too.  As global trade increased the aristocracies all over Europe were trying to find ways to visually and viscerally demonstrate their exclusivity and superiority.  The more trade increased, the more prices fell, and the more prices fell the more opportunities there were for commoners to get rich.  Extortion, the main source of income for the aristocracy, just wasn’t enough to keep the aristocracy on top any more.  They became desperate for distinction.

Marco Polo’s account of China was like one of the only books.  I know this sounds outrageous but in 1500, before the enlightenment, there just wasn’t much to read.  Everyone knew about Marco Polo.  Then in 1500 when Jesuit priest Mateo Ricci went to China, followed shortly by a string of both Franciscan and Jesuit priests, interest in everything Chinese exploded.  They don’t teach it in schools but the enlightenment debate about the possibility that virtue existed outside of Christianity was started by translations of Confucius.  After all, if Confucius was talking persuasively about the importance of virtue before Jesus was, could he really have gone to hell?

I don’t know that anyone was taking dictation at parties back then, but imagine the questions you would be asked by members of the aristocracy if you were a priest or a trader returning from a recent trip to China.  “So what do the Chinese upper classes do for fun?”  “What distinguishes an Chinese gentleman from the common rabble?”  You would have, of course, told them about the Ming Dynasty “Scholar’s Cities,” that is, the theater districts just outside city walls that scholars young and old flocked too.  “And what sorts of spectacles did they see?”  “They saw actors and singers all of whom were trained from childhood in an extraordinary form of physical dance theater.  A form of physical dance theater, you add, that demonstrated incredible feats of martial prowess.    These ‘dancers’ were cast in history plays where they played great lords and ladies of the past, as well as warlords and youthful heros!  Sometimes the fight scenes of these plays were the main attraction!”
“Chinese scholars were obsessed with these arts, in their spare time they were amateur actors and dancers.  They would spend long hours singing snippets of their favorite history plays into the night with close friends and bowls of wine.  Although a Chinese gentleman would never take money for a performance, it was quite common for them to formally employ a famous actor to tutor them in the arts of singing and martial arts.”

The lords and ladies of Europe invented ballet training as another much needed way to distiguish themselves from commoners.  They modeled it on accounts of Chinese martial arts.

I’m not suggesting that there are any direct physical links between ballet training and Chinese martial arts, but it seems quite likely that the idea of Chinese martial arts was in fact the impetus that got ballet off the ground.

---I originally intended this as a parody.  I wanted to make fun of the irrational fear many martial artists have of the entertainment roots of their arts.  But it says something unnerving about how deep I am in my own well of ideas that I think I just convinced myself of the likelihood of my own conjecture.

I welcome all challenges, serious and otherwise.

Jack LaLanne

Today we mourn the passing of Jack LaLanne, age 96.  LaLanne defined the notion of American fitness.  In the early part of the 20th Century, everywhere we found modernity, we also found the idea of National Fitness.  The idea was that the vigor and discipline of the individual body was a reflection of the power of the state that body belonged to.  Even Foucault and Nietzsche weighed in on this notion.  There is plenty of room for absurdity here--think of the iconic image of Ben Gurion doing a headstand on the beach in Tel Aviv--and I think no form of theater exploited that absurdity better than Japanese post-apocalyptic Butoh, but as movements go, National Fitness has had a profound effect.  (I've written about it's influence on China here.)

Before LaLanne opened his Oakland Fitness Gym lifting weights just to "look" fit was a cultural marker of homosexuality.  I suppose it still is, in some ways, but the idea that fitness itself had a long list of positive things going for it opened abstract exercise routines like weights or jumping jacks to everyone.  Before that change in mindset, athletes and jocks were just supposed to have been born that way.  If you didn't get big, fast, and powerful just by playing the game, too bad, get a desk job!

It's hard to imagine what the world was like back then, just like it's hard to imagine what it was like when everyone thought the world was flat.  Today, "training" is a prerequisite for sports.  Before LaLanne, training was a form of cheating!  Really!

There is an obvious parallel here with the mentality of dueling.  Back in the old days when gentlemen fought duels to maintain their honor, to train in fencing was un-gentlemanly.  It was a form of cheating.  When guns were used for dueling, it was considered un-gentlemanly to practice target shooting for the same reason, it was cheating.  In fact, for over 100 years, the definition of dueling pistols was that they had no rifling!  Rifling is the spiraling etched into the inside of a gun barrel that makes the bullet go straight.

So it's worth considering that the idea of fitness is really tied to the end of class in America.  Many commentators have already noted that fitness has been tied to the rise of the middle class.  It's also worth considering that if "working class" is now just a style of fashion, dressing like a superhero is truly a pardim shift.

I use to love watching Jack LaLanne on TV when I was a kid, he seem to me to be a kind of real-life superman.  But where as Superman was imaginary and made his living disguised as a newspaper reporter, LaLanne was real and made his living actually dressed as Superman!

As a tribute to this great man, now join me in doing 50 Jumping Jacks.

National Living Treasures

I really don't know what to do.  Paulie Zink has another video up on Youtube.  His Daoyin is the link between Daoist hermit rituals, Shaolin, the martial theater tradition, and internal martial arts.  I don't know of anyone else that has even come close to receiving the complete transmission of this knowledge.  Paulie Zink has it, yet hardly anyone appreciates that fact, even worse, I don't think he appreciates it!  For crying out loud, why call it Yin Yoga?  You're killing me.

For those who have missed this story, here are some of the details.  Paulie Zink learned Daoyin and Monkey Kungfu in Los Angels in the late '70's early 80's from a guy, Cho Chat Ling who learned it from his father and taught no one else.  The Monkey Kungfu is made up of 5 different Monkey forms and qualities all of which Paulie then taught to his close friend Michael Matsuda.  I interviewed Michael last year in Santa Clarita and he told me that he never learned any of the Daoyin and that Monkey Kungfu and Daoyin were completely different systems.  It's my opinion that Monkey is one of about 20 Daoyin animal movements, but it happens to be by far the most developed of the animals because Monkey was such a popular stage role in every part of China.  Michael dismissed this notion by saying that it was purely a martial arts system.  He backed up this statement by telling me that a group of Paulie Zink's teacher's father's Kungfu cousin's  disciples (got that?) came to visit Los Angels from Hong Kong twice in the 1980's to compete in tournaments and Michael got to travel with them.  He said they were superb fighters, unlike Paulie Zink who never had an interest in fighting.  But Michael also said that none of the visiting group knew Daoyin, and none of them knew all 5 monkey forms either.  That means Michael is also a National Living Treasure and more people need to get down there and study with him.  I took his class-- that's some serious gongfu!  (Buy a video!) (There is more of Michael's argument here, but the idea that there was some wall of separation between fighting skill and performing skill does not stand up to historical scrutiny.)

The purpose of Daoyin is very simply to reveal the freedom of our true nature.  That's the purpose, or I could say the fruition.  One of the reasons this thing has gotten so screwed up is that people are always confusing the method with the fruition.  They think that physical looseness and flexibility is the fruition, when in fact it is only the method, and only a small part of the method at that.

The method of Daoyin is very simply to distill what is inside from what is outside so that we might become aware of this other thing, call it emptiness, call it freedom, call it original qi, call immortality, call it whatever you want.  The world outside of us is always pushing or pulling, and the world inside of us is always pushing or pulling.  The premise of Daoyin is that there is a place in between inside and outside which is always pure and always free.

Thinking back to how Daoyin was created, there were two ways in.  One way was to cultivate extraordinarily plain stillness and emptiness, and from that experience begin moving.  The other way was to tap into the spontaneity of the animal mind, to move, think and feel like a wild animal.  In order to have the complete Daoyin 'experience' you would have to go in one way and find your way out the other!  So in a sense, Daoyin can't really be taught, it has to be found.

One of the many differences between Yoga and Daoyin is that Daoyin has what we call in the martial arts world, "external conditioning."  Somewhere in the middle (1:26) you see Paulie putting his legs together and flopping them side to side, whacking them on the ground.  His torso becomes like water and his legs like someone else's legs.  Who cares?  Just throw them around.  This is one of the doorways in.

Later, when he does the pig, he is banging his knees on the ground in a rapid fire vibration.  Then near the end he does the caterpillar (changing into a butterfly) which looks totally smooth, but I've taught it to kids a lot and I always have to explain that "gongfu teachers like me are the model of toughness and dispassion!" and "I don't care if you get little purple bruises--the cure is more practice!"

In the video he starts with the frog, then the stump, the tree, then the crab, the transition to lotus sitting, then the pig (at 1:59, I've never seen that before!), then the caterpillar into the butterfly.

The music is barely survivable.  It should really be done on a hard, unforgiving surface.  The production quality is even lower than the stuff I do.  I'm pretty sure that most people will look at this video and say, it doesn't measure up to this or that standard--but that's partly because people don't know what they are looking at.

He is doing only a tiny fraction of each animal. Viewers should know that all the animals have meditation postures, and they all come totally to life, like the pig did for about one second (1:59).  The pig is particularly interesting because like the dog, it was the lowest status role there was in the Chinese theater tradition.  Think about it, to be an actor was lower status than a prostitute or a thief!  Playing the role of a dog or a pig was really low.  The animal role specialists would draw straws to see who the unlucky guy was who would have to play the pig!

Given that Paulie's teacher probably inherited a really low social status, it isn't all that surprising that he would want to abandon it himself and go into the import-export business (no one actually knows where he is now), but he obviously valued it enough to believe that it should be passed on to someone in it's complete form.  I can even understand wanting to free it from it's original Daoist/Theater context, even if I think that was short sited and highly problematic given that Paulie does not seem to understand what a treasure he is or has.

The Cleanest Race

I almost always avoid politics on my blog, most of what we call politics is simply too shallow to warrant any overlap with the general topic of this blog.  I also do my best to avoid seeming rude, rudeness in other people often turns me off, why would I subject my readers to that?  But I'm going to make a small exception for a big issue.  (Exceptions prove the rule, right?)

After a week of listening and reading commentators on the issue of North Korea I am absolutely sick and disgusted with the incompetence of what passes for 'expert' these days.  If you fancy yourself an 'expert' and you haven't read and formed an opinion on B.R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, stop writing and giving interviews, and go get a copy and read it.

I had the chance to meet Myers this year at a talk and slide show he gave at UC Berkeley.  To paraphrase what he said (he used kinder language of course), the US State Department is clueless and stuck in the mud, unwilling to experiment with a novel practice called "thinking."  We can only pray that a few military leaders have read his book by now.

Anyway, I've lost my patience.  If you don't know what you are talking about, shut up!

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Here is an hour long lecture with questions and slides he gave.  And here is a Youtube snibit I haven't had a chance to watch because I'm sitting in a cafe without earphones, but it looks like a piece of the same lecture.

What is Medicine?

Hey, don't look at me. I'm not crazy enough to take on this question. It is the title of a book by Paul Ulrich Unschuld, who is one of the top scholars on the history of Chinese Medicine and Medical Anthropology.
The full title of the book is, What is medicine?: Western and Eastern approaches to healing. You can read the whole thing on Google books, but this is his attempt at a popular book so finding it at the library or just buying it is easy. It is a translation from German and you can really tell that because the only way you know he is excited about something is by attending to the exclamation points at the ends of sentences...like this...!

But I did really enjoy the book because it is about ideas, and about how people think, know, and change.  It is a comparison of the History of Western Medical traditions beginning with the Greeks (~500BCE) and moving all the way to the present--and the History of Eastern Medical traditions beginning with Mawangdui (~150BCE) all the way to the present.

Here is the hard cold summary.  There are three distinct categories:

1. Therapies


2. Scientific Theories


3. Medicine

This is counter-intuitive so bare with me.  Therapies are as old as dirt and new ones are being invented all the time.  They include shouting Hallelujah, popping pills, brewing herbs, and surgery.  Scientific Theories are models of what is happening to the body (usually on the inside).  They interpret what is visible, like changes in skin color, and then assign a theory to explain what is invisible.  The theories tend to follow from social and political experience!  The models are based on things like government, geography, mechanics, electronics, or construction materials.  Medicine happens when one of these models is checked directly against real data collection.  Medicine is the adaptation of a model based on evidence.

It's a bit of a brain twister to get with this organization of the three categories, but the conclusion is that the number of models about what a human body is are quite limited and severely limit our ability to think.  On the other hand, we get results so what a lot of fun it is.  Weird view, right?  Check out his table of contents!  All 100 chapters.

I'm happy I read this book, it sharpened my thinking.  Because Unschuld doesn't have a background in martial arts models of the body he is missing the most basic cosmological theories about how our experience of body, perception, and action gets tested in a theatrical-martial-senario-application context.  Thankfully he has left that field wide open for you and me.

Now check out these awesome images from Edo-period Japan!  Here are a couple, but there's more if you follow the link.