It's been a bit of a challenging week, eh? Here you thought you'd get some good publicity for your crash dieting book by writing a piece in the British Daily Mail saying that plus-sized contestant Chloe Marshall doesn't deserve to be a finalist for the Miss England pageant because her size indicates that she has a "shocking lack of self-control" and she's obviously been overeating. Then all those nasty fat people tried to defame you by pointing out that you call yourself a dietician even though you don't have the academic or professional credentials to do so legally. How unkind of them.
Listen girlfriend, after a week like this, you probably need to unwind. So how about, next time you're in the Toronto area, you drop by the Fighting Arts Collective and have a few friendly bouts of Dog Brothers-style stick fighting. (Or would that be Bitch Sisters-style? Anyways...) You'd like the sport. It takes a lot of fitness and self-control, which you must have in spades because you're skinny.
I know a great partner you can spar against: there's this chick at the Collective who goes by the handle of henchminion. You'll cream her for sure. She must be slow and she'll surely burst into tears at the first hit because she's very nearly the same body mass as Chloe Marshall. Obviously she doesn't work out and she has no self control. Besides, everyone knows that extra body mass is a real disadvantage when it comes to giving and taking hits. That's why special forces soldiers and UFC fighters are all bony and stuff.
So yeah! Anytime, sweetheart. Have your people call my people and we'll set it up.
For lack of anything profound to post, I'd like to point out the video section of the Fighting Arts Collective's new website. It's a marvellous diversion from essay marking, especially the part with the AEMMA demo from last January's open house.
Last week, Rick Mercer dropped by the AEMMA display at the Royal Ontario Museum and got some footage of a bit of arming sword freeplay. Keep an eye on the Mercer Report tonight to see what he does with it.
Yesterday, I walked past a copy of Charles Stross' new novel The Merchants' War at the Bakka-Phoenix bookstore. It took me about half a minute to realize that the image on the cover is supposed to be surprisingly incongruous.
To me, men in medieval armour carrying assault rifles look like part of a typical Sunday afternoon at FACT, when the tactical airsoft guys start sharing their toys with the historical European martial artists.
This morning, as I was doing a Jeet Kune Do class on the mezzanine, Aldo and Jack were sparring with longswords on the floor, and some acrobats who have recently started renting space from the Collective were winding themselves up in scarves dangling from the high ceiling. It's a wonderful, surreal place.
This year the FACT open house will be on Sunday, January 27th starting at 2-ish. We've laid in a supply of straw mats, so unlike last year there will indeed be the opportunity to cut stuff up with sharp swords. There will also be demos by all of the martial arts schools, chili and beer, hopefully in that order. Come one, come all!
This year, I learned that it is possible to stuff three adults with fighting and camping gear into a Pontiac Grand Am, to fight a swordsman when carrying just a dagger, and to build a campfire hot enough to melt beer bottles.
Never attempt to use your face as a bludgeon. The results aren't pretty.
At the fight club today, Kel and Aldo's light armoured freeplay got into grappling range and Kel decided to try a head-butt. Unfortunately, he used his forehead instead of the top of his head, which latter option is the way the Jeet Kune Do guys teach you to do it.
Now the thing about a fencing mask is that it is in many ways like a cheese grater. That is to say that part of Kel's forehead is now cross-hatched hamburger. Last I saw, it was still bleeding impressively an hour and a half after the incident.
No word yet on how Kel's wife, the formidable Maryanne, reacted. Aldo is rumoured to have joined the witness protection programme.
Today my favourite word (well, two words) are koc stappis, or cock-steps. It comes from a footwork drill in the MS Harleian 3542, a rather cryptic fifteenth-century text about English longsword training.*
Ever notice how, when a chicken walks, its toes hit the ground before its heels do? I think the point of the expression was to remind sword students to keep their weight on the balls of their feet rather than their heels.
Popular culture portrays ancient swordmasters as men of gravitas with profound spiritual insights. In actual practice, it seems they went around saying things like "Son, when you're in danger, always remember to walk like a chicken." I love it.
*Credit for the translation is due to lifegivingsword, who recently edited the section of the MS on swordfighting.
I'd tell you what I was up to yesterday, but larkvi's version is funnier.
The backdrop for our sword-banging was the Great Hall of Hart House, with a fire burning in the fireplace behind us. It should make for an awesome video.
There will be demonstrations from the schools of medieval European martial arts, Jeet Kune Do, Wing Chun, and airsoft firearms. Probably the Systema and Capoeira teachers will be there as well. Everybody gets to play with the sharp swords and the FHT, and there will be a chili cookoff, and beverages as well. You know you want to be there.
It's at 927 Dupont Street, a few doors west of Ossington, over top of the Master Mechanic. See you then!
When it comes to media attention, it never rains but it pours. The Academy of European Medieval Martial Arts was featured on the Discovery Channel's show Daily Planet tonight. It reruns tomorrow morning and the episode should be posted at http://www.discoverychannel.ca/dailyplanet/ sometime tomorrow as well.
Since I don't have cable (or a TV for that matter), I haven't seen it yet, but I'm reliably informed that the AEMMA crew looked really good. Watch for Henchminion cameos!
Sweet! The Fighting Arts Collective was profiled in the front section of today's Toronto Star. Brian McIlmoyle, our principle instructor, is quoted extensively, and he managed to put in some good plugs for AEMMA along the way.
Christian Cotroneo seems to be a little bit clueless about mixed martial arts in general, and specifically the fact that the term 'McDojo' is a serious insult (and NOT a true one in our case) but hey, all free publicity is good publicity.
The only other time I remember feeling this stoked was at the McGuinty war room victory party on election night in 2003. It's been a damn fine day.
This morning I set an AEMMA record by fighting sixteen schollers and free schollers in a row. (Well, with a five minute break in the middle.) There's still a lot I need to learn, but I managed to land some clean whacks on people I had no expectation of being able to touch. It made me very happy. They got some good ones on me, mind you. I'm now limping slightly because there's a big purple egg on the side of my right knee.
Interestingly enough, I think the best psychological preparation for the test was the ten or fifteen times I've re-read Robin McKinley's novel The Blue Sword, which has a great tournament scene in it. It made me feel like I'd been in that particular headspace before. Really, people who think fantasy fiction doesn't teach you to cope with the real world have obviously just never done anything interesting with their lives.
Today I spent a few hours at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. I came home with a package of smoked ostrich sausage and some peculiar notions about dressage.
Dressage, if you'll recall, is that sport where riders in top hats and tail coats appear to sit very still while their horses go around in circles and occasionally look like they're skipping. Sometimes it's done to music. In classical dressage, which is much less common than the competitive variety, the horse performs airs above ground, which involve balancing on its hind legs and performing different kinds of leaps, kicks and crow-hops.
There's actually a lot more to it than that. Dressage is an art that refines human-equine balance and power generation to their purest and most efficient forms. That's why it reminds me of martial arts.
Dressage was, in fact, a martial art at one time. It was the art of training cavalry horses. The airs above ground are theoretically supposed to scatter footsoldiers and help the horse and rider escape if surrounded. However, the art's last ties to combative practice were severed about a hundred years ago with the demise of cavalry warfare. It's become a kind of equestrian Tai Chi for Grannies.
Which brings me to my point: wouldn't it be cool if someone started a combative school of dressage? The thing about martial arts is that they tend to become less effective over time, as people introduce modifications for the sake of safety or historical context and later generations assume that the modifications are part of the original deadly art. I'll bet dressage has all kinds of those tweaks.
What would happen if the equestrian world got its own Marc "Animal" MacYoung? Goodbye silly top hats and prissy teenage girls! Arguments about the correct seat and leg position would take on a whole new light if riders had to stay in the saddle while someone was trying to grapple them and hurl them to the ground. Also, the capriole might turn out to be no more than an equine flying side kick, something flashy but ineffective as a kick. And a mounted UFC would just be fun to watch.
At first I wasn't going to show off Veronica's (a.k.a. Truth, Honour, Love's) photos of Igal and I sparring at summer camp, since they demonstrate graphically what a raw beginner I am. But in retrospect, they're kind of funny because they illustrate all kinds of ways not to win a swordfight, so here they are for your edification. I'm the one in the beige gambeson.
Heigh ho, I'm off to summer camp for four days, starting tomorrow morning. It will be just like the good old days in Girl Guides.
Except that the Girl Guides didn't have beer. Or a pig roast. And they didn't ignite a gasoline-soaked campfire with flaming arrows. And hitting each other with weapons was definitely frowned upon. And hitting things with swords from horseback was right out of the question. So maybe not quite like Girl Guides...
Yesterday a police officer dropped by the fight club and left behind an interesting tidbit of information. He was interested in taking up a self defence-oriented martial art because he and his colleagues have recently had a few experiences with American Iraq veterans who are armed, angry and not quite in this world. If the Toronto cops are noticing an influx, I can only imagine what American cities are dealing with.
On the Queen streetcar yesterday, at Spadina, I went past a crowd of about 25 roaring and staggering people made up as zombies. The guy standing next to me sighed. "Ho hum, another dull afternoon on Queen street."
Sartre imagined Hell as a room with tacky decor and three irritating people in it. He forgot to mention that it's also full of journals written in academic German. I wish my German were stronger. This week has been very slow and painful going, but I don't know any remedy except to read more German.
My personal Valhalla, on the other hand, looks an awful lot like the salle of the Fighting Arts Collective on a Friday afternoon, with sunbeams slanting in through the tall windows. Yesterday I spent a whole hour dagger fighting with Shawn, the Jeet Kune Do instructor. Just me and Shawn and one dagger between us. It was frigging awesome. yaksman and pencil_mig_in, you have to try it.
And now I have the usual problem I get when I play with daggers at any kind of speed: I look like a victim of domestic abuse the next morning. There are bruises all over the backs of my hands, my wrists and the blades of my forearms. It's not Shawn's fault; it's just that my pain threshold is high enough that I never want to give up the dagger if there's still a chance of sticking it in him. It's too hot to wear long sleeves this week. I'm just going to have to grin and bear it.
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henchminion's journal