Regarding Erle;

In the last two weeks we have seen the passing of two great athletes; fitness guru Jack Lalanne, and now Kung Fu expert Erle Montaigue.

Australian Erle Montaigue was a larger-than-life character who pioneered his unique brand of Hippie Kung Fu, and I mean that in a very wholesome and respectful way. Montaigue always had a following of pretty women, athletic men and his ever-present children who he shared in video demonstrations.
This aspect of Montaigue's presentation drove some more conventional martial artists crazy; Imagine that... Hippies doing Kung Fu.
But it was right up my alley. Montaigue had a folksy communal air about his art. Some of his videos had the sounds of farm animals and chirpy birds right outside his training areas, in one case a barn with a concrete floor.
When I began the transition from Karate to Chinese Internal Martial Arts, I wanted to understand the subtle methods of Chinese infighting. Erle Montaigue's work was recommended by some students of George Dillman's Ryukyu Kenpo. Dillman had a professional jealousy with Montaigue, as both were recognized as experts in pressure-point fighting. Montaigue had written the definitive catalog on Pressure points: "The Encyclopedia of Dim-Mak".

Volume one is over 400 pages, and I read it cover-to-cover.
Montaigue wrote on his website about a seminar he attended when George Dillman went to Australia. He volunteered to have Dillman demonstrate on him, and recalled how Dillman nearly tore his fingers off to make a point in front of Montaigue's students.
Because both men were involved in the more esoteric side of their respective arts, they were often treated with derision by more conventional members of the martial community. That didn't slow Montaigue down a bit. The guy produced book after book, and video upon video. He may be the most prolific author and videographer in the martial world.

What most people don't know about Erle Montaigue is that he was also a pretty good musician. His family had a little band and appeared to play at all the gatherings. In his younger days, he fronted his band "Earl's Court", (spelling correct) which was a popular hang-out for Australians visiting the UK.
As yet, no official announcement is posted on Montaigue's website, but there is a Facebook page notification, and a confirmation by Montaigue's friend and co-author Michael Babin that Montaigue had passed.
I was in contact with him by e-mail several times in 2000. He provided me with contact information for his students in the U.S. and reminded me that he could not cash my U.S. Postal Money Order in his native Australia. I promptly sent him a cashier's check as he had sent me a requested video despite my knucklehead method of mispayment. I still have several of his books and videos in my extensive collection. Erle will be remembered as a skilled martial practitioner, a student of Chinese Master Chang Yiu-chun. But more importantly, he will be remembered for his personal and communal family; the leader of a merry little band of eclectic Hippie Kung Fu artists.
Rest in peace, Erle.

Erle Montaigue's "Tai Chi World" Website

Where I'm Getting My Kung Fu Gear

First, let me say I currently have no affiliation and receive no compensation from this company. But every Dojo Rat has his price; Talk to me, Wing Lam...

It can be tough trying to find good training gear and weapons that are at the right price with good quality. I've been very satisfied with my purchases through Wing Lam Kung Fu.


I bought this nice Tai Chi Dao (saber) when we started learning the Wudang Saber form. I liked it so much, we bought another as a present for another student.
Here's the description:

"The Long Quan Tai Chi Dao (tai chi broadsword) is unique among dao broadswords. Its taper is much gentler than the more martial variety and has no flare. Two fullers extend down the blade, one nearly the entire way and one only a fraction of the length. The first third of the blade (the shoulder) is thicker than the rest for strength in parrying. It is fitted with a blade forged in China legendary Long Quan (dragon well) forges, by the Shen family smiths from combat (high carbon content) steel."

(D.R): The quality is good for the $139 price, it could certainly be deadly if sharpened. For now mine is left with the factory edge. You can see the forge marks, so it must have been hand worked rather than stamped out. If there is a possible weak point, it might be the threaded tang. But all-in-all, it's a pretty good weapon. There are dozens of other swords available, many appear to be custom-made and some are quite expensive.
The selection provides many that are affordable.


And I finally found some Tai Chi shoes that fit, wear well, and are the right price.
The problem with some kung fu shoes is they have a crappy plastic sole that provides no traction on hard floors. These shoes have a nice rubber sole that has a good grip on our wooden training floor. At $7.95 a pair, I stocked up and bought extras, but I haven't worn out the first set in nearly a years worth of use.
Because I wear heavy work boots all day, putting these light Tai Chi shoes on is a dream to work out in. The only time they tend to slip off is in grappling on the floor, but for form work, drills and light sparring, these are great.

I've been very happy with these products, and intend to shop at Wing Lam in the future. Here's the link for Wing Lam Enterprises

Jack Lalanne and "The Nature Boys"

Fitness Guru Jack Lalanne died this week at age 96, a life lived well.
It's a familiar story; Jack was a young sickly kid, always had sugar headaches and didn't "fit in".
Lalanne began to turn his life around when he attended a lecture on eating healthy food, and he soon quit sugar, white flower and ate mostly vegetarian. He said he would never eat anything that came out of a cow, but occasionally had wild fish or egg whites. Primal diet and Meatatarians take notice.
Lalanne opened his first health club in 1936, and never missed a daily workout since 1930. I wish I were half that dedicated.
While Lalanne went on to commercial success as a television fitness star (I remember him since I was five years-old) there was another California-based health movement that took a very different track.
"The Nature Boys" from "hippy.com"

"Seven of California's "Nature Boys" in Topanga Canyon, August 1948. They were the first generation of americans to adopt the "naturmensch" philosophy and image, living in the mountains and sleeping in caves and trees, sometimes as many as 15 of them at a time. All had visited and some were employed at "The Eutropheon" where John Richter gave his inspiring lectures about raw foods and natural living. The boys would sometimes travel up the California coast some 500 miles just to pick and eat some fresh figs. (Back row: Gypsy Boots, Bob Wallace, Emile Zimmerman. Front row: Fred Bushnoff, eden ahbez, Buddy Rose, ?) - (Photo courtesy of Gypsy Boots.)"
(snip)
"Some of the young employees of the Eutropheon were Americans who had adopted the German Naturmensch and Lebensreform image and philosophy, wearing their hair and beards long and feeding exclusively on raw fruits and vegetables. The "Nature Boys" came from all over America but usually ended up in southern California. Some of the familiar ones were Gypsy Jean, eden ahbez, Maximilian Sikinger, Bob Wallace, Emile Zimmerman, Gypsy Boots, Buddy Rose, Fred Bushnoff and Conrad. This was decades before the Beats or Hippies and their influence was very substantial. In "On The Road" Kerouac noted that while passing through Los Angeles in the summer of 1947 he saw "an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals".

Lalanne is known for his heroic feats, such as towing 70 rowboats while swimming handcuffed - at age 70. He probably single-handedly got a million bored housewives off their couches and into shape with his TV show.
But Lalanne was a conventional figure, with mass appeal to American middle-class values.
On the other hand, "The Nature Boys" represented something different; rejecting conventional society. They were free souls before the "Beat" generation, before the word "Hippie" had been hallucinated.
While Lalanne was mainstream, the Nature Boys were counter-culture.
Neither genre ever went away, they merely became very different versions of a similar health movement.
If Lalanne was a hero, "The Nature Boys" were anti-heroes.

"Superheroes" Push Dojo Rat Over The Top

Above: "Superhero" Phoenix Jones
Below: Current Blog Stats


Wow...
Today I fired up the computer and checked up on "Dojo Rat" as usual. I nearly spit hot tea all over the damned keyboard. The stats were through the roof, and I thought it might be a mistake.
As you can see, the last week we averaged around 500 unique visitors per day. That is, until Friday. Holy shit. 5,214 unique visitors.
So I started digging through the log in my statcounter and think I see what happened. Last November I wrote a piece on the "Rain City Superhero" movement. I was a little skeptical and somewhat critical of the seemingly useful crime fighters. It's not a far slide from there to some potentially dangerous vigilante action.
Enter the movie "Kick Ass":

Apparently, this superhero fantasy is catching on with the release of the movie. Over at "Bing", the MSN search engine, The Dojo Rat article is at the top of the list - above links to superhero articles at the "Daily Beast" and "Perez Hilton". Most of the incoming hits appear to be channeled through "Bing".
Another thing to note is how much traffic seems to go through smart phones and mobile devices now.
I don't know if this is an anomaly or possible trend, but I find it very interesting.

Barbarian Brothers Update

Here's an update for those readers who have been following the saga of "The Barbarian brothers". The brothers are two huge dudes that have been coming from the mainland to train with us nearly every Wednesday since around August.
The older brother is athletic, has wrestled and played ball sports. Younger Bro is heavily muscled. Neither one has martial experience, but young Bro has been in his share of fights. They started by coming with another Tai Chi Chuan friend of ours, primarily for Tai Chi applications. Little did we know, but young Bro had his sights set on MMA fighting. We tried to tell him months ago that we didn't train for MMA, but I guess we were the closest thing to real instruction he could find in our area.
Well, we hadn't seen them for a couple of weeks, so Monday we called them up while we were having Dojo Beers after practice. Older Bro answered the phone, and after a bit he told us that young Bro had had his first MMA fight.
We were like "What? You've got to be kidding??".
So, unbeknownst to us, young Bro had entered his first fight, held at an Eagles lodge on the mainland. He's had, let's see... about 16 hours of training.
You can guess what happened. He was paired with a guy that had about eight years of experience, and was submitted in the first part of the second round with a rear choke.
I gotta' give the guy credit, he stepped up, jumped in and got his feet wet. He also found out he wasn't so much of a tough guy after all.
It's been fun training with these guys. They are big and strong as hell. They'd be tough to handle if they were in a mad rage. But training with them has reminded us that twenty or thirty years of martial experience makes our techniques look like magic to them. Just basic body awareness, kinesthetic perception, and relaxed movement is not in their toolbox yet.
Right now young Bro has his tail between his legs and is still under the porch. But given a little time, he'll be back and ready to train again. And this time he'll look at it in a new light; With limited experience, he survived his first MMA fight without injury. Now he needs to learn how to hit and grapple.

The Tears of a Clown

Glen Beck doing what he does best


Well, I've waited a while for the dust to settle from the tragic shootings of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a Federal Judge and a number of civilians in Arizona.
In weighing the controversy surrounding the issue, I've had to take a hard look at the kind of political language I myself have used in the past, and how I should approach similar topics in the future. Perhaps someone can pick a bone with some of my past political posts, but I feel I have been fairly reasonable and either try to state historical fact or use humor to try to get my point across. Sure, I've been known to rant.
But one thing is clear. The far right wing of American political commentary has been over the top since the Clinton administration and parallels the rhetoric that resulted in similar tragic shootings in the 1960's.

Look Familiar?

This is a poster that was distributed by the thousands before John Kennedy made his fateful trip to Dallas. The funding for this was by wealthy Texas oilmen like the Hunt brothers. The same mechanism is at work in today's media. Fox news lost millions and millions of dollars for the first five-or-so years they were in operation. They loose money on Glen Beck's show right now. But the propaganda is so necessary to further the right wing's agenda that they run the show even as advertisers drop Beck daily.
Posters like the one above are the mainstay of "Tea Party" rallies, with pictures of President Obama as a "witch doctor" and worse.
Make no mistake; the progressive political leadership of the 1960's was killed off. John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King - powerful progressive voices silenced. That power vacuum drew political dialogue to the right with the scandals of Watergate, Iran-Contra, the savings and loan bank scandal, the lies leading up to the Iraq war, and the deregulation that brought us the 2008 bank crash and near-depression.
The violent talk during the health care debates featured threats and guns in public view, clearly intended to intimidate progressives, the Democratic Party, and the Obama administration.
Jared Lee Loughner and Glen Beck

So now we have an anti-government "lone nut", Jared Lee Loughner, that just shot up the crowd at a Democratic Congresswoman's public meeting. Sure, the guy had serious mental problems. But with millions of hours of talk radio screaming against health care legislation, environmental protection and the Obama administration, it's no small wonder that some horrible event like this was bound to happen.
Here's a brief example from an article by William Rivers Pitt:

"I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus - living fossils - so we will never forget what these people stood for."
- Rush Limbaugh, Denver Post, 12-29-95

"Get rid of the guy. Impeach him, censure him, assassinate him."
- Rep. James Hansen (R-UT), talking about President Clinton

"We're going to keep building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs."
- Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), Mother Jones, 08-95

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building."
- Ann Coulter, New York Observer, 08-26-02

"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."
- Ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, 02-26-02

"Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past - I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble - recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an 'enemy of the people.' The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, 'clan liability.' In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished 'to the ninth degree': that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed."
- John Derbyshire, National Review, 02-15-01

"Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity. The degree these two have diminished is in direct proportion to the corruption and fall of the nation. Every problem that has arisen (sic) can be directly traced back to our departure from God's Law and the disenfranchisement of White men."
- State Rep. Don Davis (R-NC), emailed to every member of the North Carolina House and Senate, reported by the Fayetteville Observer, 08-22-01
--------
Weather they are talking in racist code like Rush Limbaugh, or Biblical code like Sarah Palin and Glen Beck, or wrong facts and innuendo like Fox "News", the message might be incorrect but is still propagated to steer American political discourse into the hands of huge multi-national corporations.

Glen Beck's image was used here because he is simply the most outrageous propagandist of this decade, perhaps surpassing Rush Limbaugh. Here's a link to some profile information about Beck from journalist Dana Milbank, in his book "The Tears of a Clown".

Let's take a deep breath and hope for some civility...

UPDATE:

Form Review at the Gilman Studio

Last weekend we went to visit and train with Michael Gilman, our Tai Chi Chuan instructor. For several sessions, we have been reviewing the 2-man 88-movement San Shou fighting form. This form takes nearly all the techniques from the Yang-style long form and pairs them up like pieces in a puzzle. The form is the most complex I have learned, with 44 movements for each side - and you have to learn both sides.
Here's us doing the form when we first were learning it, about three years ago:

It's fun to look back on this video, as we attempt to smooth it out and get the moves right. I think it took us three cuts to get it without mistakes. Still, our postures and intent are lacking and we have made many improvements with time.

We always have a great time with Michael. He's a truly great instructor, a push-hands champion who has worked with other famous masters. In fact, the San Shou form was taught to him by the late Jou Tsung Hwa. The form is very rare, seldom taught, and difficult to learn. But within it are arm breaks, pressure-point strikes and takedowns. Michael has thought through this form for many years, and has tweaked it here and there with improvements and alternative methods of application. I think one of the benefits of reviewing a form that we are already familiar with is in observing Michael's teaching method. Following a good teacher's methodology also allows us to teach others better.
Now, this form will certainly not transform the average Tai Chi Chuan student into a serious fighter. What it does however, is show how the often mysterious solo form techniques work in application. There is a strong emphasis on blending and continual motion, the quintessence of good Tai Chi Chuan.
It's probably time to film a new video so we can compare our current level of training to the stumble-bum video we shot several years back.

Goofing off after class


Here's a link to Michael Gilman's website, and "The Gilman Studio" in Port Townsend, Wa.