But a sword dipped in ink, now, that's a good compromise
Only six months or so after the front page ninja animation went live, I have finally added crosshairs to the end of it (because several people had complained about this "obviously" missing feature). You have to sit through the whole silly film to get there, though.
Coming next year (or, uh, maybe later): sound!
An old link, but hey.
The Guardian's film blog has a martial arts quiz.
I got 7.
See also: the Fudebakudo MAQ, which currently has close to 400 questions in its database.
Shrew on shrew action.
German film-maker Tomer Eshed has created a fabulous animated short. Runs for about 5 minutes, and is an astonishing piece of work: beautiful, educational, and accutely observed fight sequences. You won't see a better nature documentary.
Watch Our Wonderful Nature on MySpace video.
Incidentally, this is one of the films nominated in this year's SIGGRAPH animation festival. This brings back memories of 1991 (yes, a long time ago) when I attended SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles.
A final, sad view of Mr Bike being taken away in a van. I've obscured the number-plate so you can imagine it was FBD 1. For what it's worth, "Honda" is a genuine samurai family name.
This weekend saw the retirement of a much-loved member of the Exploding Pen team . . . Mr Bike was the unimaginatively named, two-wheeled, shaft-driven workhorse of the team. Technically speaking he was a Honda NT 650V, also known as the Deauville, unkindly nicknamed the Dullville or Duvet, and considered by more sporty bikers as one of the most unexciting bikes on the road.
Sadly Mr Bike started losing compression in one cylinder last year. On the last run down to Eastbourne he began backfiring rudely at innocent pedestrians. So his number was up — too expensive to fix, it was time to let him go. On Saturday he left in a van in a manner that seemed awfully reminiscent of the workhorse Boxer leaving Animal Farm.
If you've bought a copy of Fudebakudo through Amazon, or from a chain bookshop like Borders or Waterstones, then your book got to you thanks in part to the power of petrol exploding inside Mr Bike's 645cc engine and pushing his Japanese (actually, made in a factoy in Spain) pistons. It's one of the joys of self-publishing — no, really — that eventually you get your hands dirty in every part of the process. In this case that means doing runs down to one of the national UK book distributors, Gardners, to deliver consignments and collect signatures. (Incidentally, if you bought your copy from Foyles in central London, that may have been delivered by bike (there's no congestion charge for bikers in London — yet) although it is equally likely that I delivered your book by tube).
Happier days — Mr Bike next to a pallet at the book distributor's warehouse. I loaded that pallet myself, with my own hands. Artist's hands.
On the last run down to Gardners, nobody was about in the goods bay when I arrived. So I punched the "Deliveries" button, which set off a satisfying industrial klaxon. About a minute passed and then the bay door rolled up. I could hear the 2001 music but that may have been in my head. Presumably the dry ice must have run out just before I got there too. And then they came out to unload the books with a forklift truck. Yes, they gave Mr Bike full cargo honours by coming out to unload him with a forklift.
Tim's sack barrow has no engine.
I got my signature on the POD (proof of delivery, don't you know) and we rode back, backfiring through the 30mph built-up areas of the A22, waking the sleepy villagers of Nutley and rattling the cultists of East Grinstead. I knew it was the end, but then Mr Bike must have known too. After all, he'd been given a respectful forklift send-off, which had never happened before.
So farewell Mr Bike. When the current consignment of Fudebakudo is exhausted, the next one will be delivered courtesy of Britain's unevenly managed and increasingly expensive railway system. I will probably be obliged to use Tim's sack-barrow. He bought it especially for hauling books for Seni last year. It has two wheels and can carry 50 books at a push . . . but it's just not the same.
There's a film out there that sadly hasn't been released in the UK (as far as I know) that would definitely appeal to fans of Fudebakudo: Big Dreams Little Tokyo.
It's due to be released on DVD in July (although the stupidity of the DVD "region" mechanism means that's probably not true for law-abiding UK residents . . . really, DVD regioning is one of the most stupid and offensive ways of penalising people for not breaking the law). I haven't seen the film, although I knew about it through an earlier Japundit review, but I am totally won over by the utter Japaneseness of this trailer:
Official site: http://www.bigdreamslittletokyo.com . . . and there's a review in LA Splash magazine, too.
Incidentally, I thought Lost in Translation, which somehow became the de facto Japanese-Western culture-clash film (Richard Chamberlain's effort in Shogun notwithstanding) was rather feeble. Maybe it was only clever if you hadn't been there.
It's been all quiet on the Fudebakublog recently because I've been super-busy on another Beholder project. Oh, and in the South of France, oui. But here's Rex kwon do to make up for it.
"Now, watch this, everybody. Grab my arm. The other arm. My other arm! Okay, now watch this. I'm just gonna break the wrist and walk away. Break the wrist, walk away." Nice.
A wee bit more at http://www.rexkwondo.com/.
At the core of most martial arts is the business of learning, acquiring physical skill. In fact, since most modern practitioners are never going to be in a combat situation where the need for what martial artists love to call "application" arises (despite the fantasy of believing otherwise), I think one of the key justifications for practice is simply to develop your ability to learn any skill. Certainly in aikido, which I practice, this is overtly the case, since a lot of the structure of aikido practice is so abstract. And of course there's nothing unique about the martial arts when it comes to acquiring skill — it's there to the same extent amongst people practicing sport and (in my experience) especially dancers.
In traditional martial arts the process of learning is often very explicit, because you're shown the right form by an instructor demonstrating, which you are then expected to acquire first by extreme amounts of repetition, and later, only when you've absorbed those movements, by self-analysis of them. I don't think you can practice a martial art for a long time — let's say over a decade — without wondering about learning in general and why it can be so difficult. In fact, if you can train for that long and not develop any insight into how you learn, then you're probably practicing something that is too easy. That might be good if the skill itself is your end-point, but it's no good for developing learning skills, which is possibly one of the most beneficial and transferable side-effects of all that time spent training. Of course, your mileage may vary, and maybe you just like training because hitting other people makes you feel good about yourself.
The process of learning something which looks simple and turns out to be a bit trickier as soon as you try to do it really well is made very clear by good jugglers. I'm lucky to have met some fairly serious jugglers (Eric at Flaming Sparrow, and Charlie Brown whom I met in his kitchen). On the TED site they've just released a presentation (recorded in 2002) given by one of greatest jugglers in the word — Michael Moschen — in which he confronts this directly.
Make yourself a cup of tea because it runs fo 40 minutes (that's over twice as long as a normal TED talk) but there is some insightful stuff in there about learning.
Here's what he says, in passing, about watching and learning. Of course, with a "regular" instructor things are a little different, but specifically this applies to when you are watching a master from whom you are supposed to learn, and (in my personal experience) this is how things are.
"A moment of learning, a moment of challenge. It's a moment that you can't make sense of —
"why the hell should I learn this? Does it really have anything to do with anything in my life? You know, I can't decipher is it fun, is it challenging… Am I supposed to cheat?"
You know? What are you supposed to do? You've got somebody up here who's the operative principle of doing that for his whole life, OK? Trying to figure that stuff out . But is it going to get you anywhere? It's just a moment, that's all it is, just a moment OK?"
And later…
"As your skill increases, you learn to find those tinier spaces, those tinier movements…"
Anyone who's practiced aikido for a while will have heard that before.
So, anyway, here's the presentation:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/260
If that's too academic for you, that's OK: enjoy the Raspyni Brothers juggling for the sheer joy of it instead (also at TED).
Oh yes, the other thing there: Moschen really is one of the true juggling masters, and yet, yes, he still drops things. As the Japanese say, Saru mo kikaraochiru!
Great trivia fact: if you've seen Labyrinth, those were actually Moschen's hands sticking out from under David Bowie's armpits when the Goblin King is "contact juggling" his crystal balls.
Lassie knows some moves.
Thanks to Ed for the link.
Trophies at Seni08. I didn't win one. Based on what I saw, it might have been because I wasn't being silly enough.
This weekend Seni, the UK's big martial arts expo, was held in London. Exploding Pen didn't have a stand this year and the event was, of course, poorer as a result.
I did attend though, to have a look round and to see the staff on the MAI stand, especially Moira. She's the one who continues to put Fudebakudo into the magazine despite the awkard suspicion that the other regular cartoon in there, Surviving the Martial Arts, is funnier, uses full colour, and is drawn in considerably more detail by Chris Perry (the man is a cartoonist and, according to his own website, an O Sensei too — some people have all the luck). Meanwhile, back at Seni, the MAI staff treated me to what can only be described as lavish corporate hospitality by Huddersfield standards until eventually my minder returned and I had to go away.
This year's Seni had the usual inverted-iceberg of public martial arts events — a large number of disturbing people doing some preposterous things for uncertain reasons, with a considerably smaller number of people doing some quality stuff if you take the trouble look hard and deep enough under the surface. Still, no Fudebakudo tattoos on display, again.
Browse the Exploding Pen Seni reports from previous shows to see days of former glory.
A lady takes a bow
There's a new illustration in the gallery on the topic of Women Fighting Men. You won't find this one in the book — it was drawn for the May issue of MAI magazine (the one with Shannon Lee on the cover).
Working on this one reminded me of something that I didn't have enough information to include, although it fitted the theme perfectly. Years ago a friend told me that he had come across some amazing rules for conducting fights to settle disputes between men and women in medieval Germany. I remember him showing me copies of the illustrations that accompanied the detailed descriptions. At the time I understood that the book from which they originated was illustrated by Dürer and my friend was working on a collaborative translation; but now I suspect that I may be combining two different works because Dürer's fechtbuch is rather well-known and I don't think it includes such things. I've never seen the finished result, if indeed it ever was finished (the person concerned has since died). But I should chase it up because the rules were very odd indeed — for example, very specific about the different (and unequal) types of weapon each could have, and that one of the combatants (I forget which, but I think it was the man) was obliged to stand in a pit. I'm not making this up. If I can find the details there may well be a second illustration, a part ii to this topic.