Friday, August 19, 2011

Ameri-do-te




 Swiped this off Wim's blog–link over there in the list–and it's funny, but awful close to reality. I think a lot of us have trained at this school, under a different name ...

8 comments:

Ian Sadler said...

a different sort of training video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PqQGdjb_bk&feature=related

Steve Perry said...

I like yours better, Ian ...

Stan said...

Jesu Chris!!! I was getting ill just watching that A@@hole! Yes, I've definitely seen guys like that, but they usually are wearing jail-house orange belts instead of black!

He kinda looked like an early Chuck Norris... on a bad amphetamine-steroid cocktail!

I didn't watch it to the end... does this jerk wind up in jail, or just in court?

Steve Perry said...

It's a goof, Stan, a send-up of eclectic know-it-all-masters. Thing is, it's only slightly exaggerated ...

Dan Gambiera said...

Ye gawds and little fishies! I've seen that school. I've been at that school. Many years ago I made a joke on a Usenet forum, yes, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and we wound the memory cores on our computers. I talked the mythical school of Budo Ryu Ninjutsu Kung Fu. So help me I got an angry (serious) email from a guy well South of the Mason Dixon line who was angry at me for dissing Grandmaster Bubba. This is almost exactly how I imagined it

Stan said...

Okay, I was fooled... badly!
The worst thing is that I could believe the BS, because I really have encountered too many yahoos that could have been that guy.

I guess it's probably as bad, today, but "back in the day," (the '80s, in this case) it seemed like every bully who'd ever watched a Norris, Bruce Lee, or Seagal flick was suddenly the creator of "instant ass-kicker fu." Not only was this "school" the lazy cowards' wet dream, anything else was weak and worthless.

"Cobra Kai's" on steroids.

Steve Perry said...

The traditional arts have their problems, including just how traditional they really are -- some of the arts that are supposedly a thousand years old were actually put together in my lifetime as such, albeit some of the root techniques in them are much older.

Probably best not to name names, but: Taekwondo ...

Karate, which came from Okinawa's te, seemed to have found its way to Japan in the early 1920's.

My current art of Silat Sera has evolved considerably since it came into being, and it was a meld of several arts at the beginning. The origin story is no less suspect than others, and if you look at the history that is remotely verifiable, it's probably a little more than a hundred years old, plus or minus a few. We are only four teachers away from where we are pretty sure it came.

My teacher has changed it; his teacher changed it; and I have no reason to believe that his teacher and his didn't do the same.

Purity in a living art isn't likely -- if you see something that works that you don't have? You swipe it. Why wouldn't you? Like language, when new words show up, you add them to your working vocabulary.

Doesn't bother me a whit if it was all swiped, as long as it does what I want it to do.

On the other hand, the eclectics who take a dash of this and a pinch of that and bundle them together in the New and Improved No Flaws! martial art? I"m not too impressed with those. Studying something for a year or two and then cherry-picking it is tricky. You don't know enough to know what to keep and what to toss unless you are some kind of martial genius.

Yeah, viable new systems usually arise when somebody with a lot of skill and talent and drive puts his or her spin on stuff they've learned, adding, cutting, blending, but those folks are few and far between. For every Bruce Lee who creates his own style, there are a hundred guys who mostly rename what they learned and present it as something new -- as the guy playing the Master in the vid says, "Best of all systems, worst of none ..."

Right ...

Joe said...

Back in the early 90's there was a guy here in WI who opened an MA studio after having some success in the ring with his own brand of kick@ss martial arts.

Since his 'system' was little more than being a mean, tough, 6 foot 6 - 280 lb monster his business didn't do well. Seems that system just can't be taught.