Scott Bush

Upon read­ing the title of this post, did you imme­di­ately hear the “thwap, thwap, thwap” of exag­ger­ated sounds of blocks and strikes that are the hall­mark of kung-fu movies in the 60s and 70s? If so, then you already know and respect the name “Shaw Broth­ers.” If not, let me intro­duce you…

Every­thing you prob­a­bly know about kung-fu movies—poor sub­ti­tles, bad Eng­lish dub­bing, extreme close-up zoom, hard-to-follow plots, etc.—has its gen­e­sis from the films of this amaz­ing movie pro­duc­tion house. A num­ber of web­sites do a great job explain­ing the his­tory and pro­lific nature of their movies and stars (includ­ing house­hold names like Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung), so I won’t try and repli­cate that here.

Instead, a brief list of Shaw Bros. kung-fu movies you sim­ply have to see:

Two Cham­pi­ons of Shaolin (1978) — Broth­er­hood and revenge are the cen­tral themes, which is typ­i­cal of a Shaw Bros. pro­duc­tion. Excep­tional fight­ing and an intri­cate plot with char­ac­ters con­flicted about where their loy­al­ties lie make this a great one. Oh, and the Chem­i­cal Broth­ers mas­ter­fully edited and “enhanced” this movie to cre­ate the video for their song Get Your­self High:

Heroes of the East (1979) — My favorite aspect of this film is its inclu­sion of Japan’s mar­tial arts, not just China’s. The story revolves around a Chi­nese man’s arranged mar­riage to a Japan­ese woman who prac­tices mar­tial arts. Nat­u­rally, they argue about what is bet­ter, kung-fu or karate. This leads to a con­tin­gent of Japan’s best mar­tial artists com­ing to China to face Ah To (played by Gor­don Lui). Sword, spear, staff, darts, fists and feet clash as Ah To uses forms of kung-fu (includ­ing drunken box­ing) against karate, kendo, nin­jitsu and other Japan­ese arts. What I loved about this is although kung-fu wins out, it’s done respect­fully to Japan’s mar­tial arts rather than vil­i­fy­ing them. Take a peek:

Five Deadly Ven­oms (1978) — A total clas­sic! This film fea­tures kung-fu based on five ani­mal forms (cen­tipede, snake, scor­pion, lizard, and toad), each of which is prac­ticed by a stu­dent of the same mas­ter. One stu­dent must seek out and end the tyranny of these rogue pupils. This film (and other SB films) heav­ily influ­enced the hip-hop group the Wu-Tang Clan. It’s bet­ter seen than described. Here’s the final fight of the film:

There are a ton of excel­lent Shaw Broth­ers films. My rec­om­men­da­tion is to get some friends together and watch the three above; if you like them, check out more. It’s help­ful to have friends to watch with since the plots can be hard to fol­low, espe­cially if you’re not famil­iar with kung-fu story lines or can’t read two lines of sub­ti­tled dia­log in under 2 sec­onds, which seems to hap­pen some­times. It’s just part of the magic.

How’s this for a lucky day? In line at Star­bucks in the morn­ing, I spy a wadded-up bill on the floor at the counter. Nat­u­rally, I bend down and non-chalantly pick it up. I look around but other than my car­pooler and the baris­tas on the other side of the counter, no one’s around. Later, I unfolded the bill think­ing it’s a buck or maybe five–nope, it’s a ten-spot. Cha-ching.

It also hap­pened to be a day when my team­mates and I were on a site visit, which meant we got to drive around to some com­mu­ni­ties out on the Kit­sap penin­sula. That meant tak­ing a ferry… and tak­ing a ferry meant cof­fee machine cof­fee! Not sure why, but I love cof­fee from those machines you find on fer­ries, in hos­pi­tals, and col­lege cafe­te­rias. My favorite: amaretto latte. So, while my col­leagues shelled out $3 plus for lattes from the stand near the ferry slip, I waited with my dol­lar bill, ready to enjoy that machine-dispensed cof­fee beverage.

I approached the vend­ing machine and glee­fully stuffed my dol­lar bill into the pay­ment slot. It didn’t take. I flat­tened it against my leg and tried again. Noth­ing. I was just think­ing that some­thing was wrong when I saw that it was actu­ally very right: it was free. Yep, free. This is what I saw on the screen:

Nice, huh? I went back again later and got another, too.

It was my third wed­ding anniver­sary, and the lucky day con­tin­ued with a deli­cious apple pie my wife baked. But, that was after karate class, where I got popped in the nose and bled a bunch. But it wasn’t bro­ken so I con­sider that lucky, too.

Like every­one else, I’ve been watch­ing the Olympics in the evening. It’s an amaz­ing event and I look for­ward to it every four years. But this year, more than ever, I can’t stand the single-minded focus of NBC’s pro­duc­ers: Amer­i­can or (almost) noth­ing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of the Amer­i­can medal count (14 gold, 12 sil­ver, 18 bronze as I write this). And I under­stand that it’s NBC’s right to decide what they broad­cast and how they spin it. After all, they shelled out nearly $900 mil­lion bucks for the privilege.

I just get tired of over-caffinated pro­duc­ers cut­ting away from other coun­tries’ teams so they can show more B-roll of the Amer­i­cans: stretch­ing, tap­ing their hands, or just stand­ing around. That time would be bet­ter used show­ing us what the Roma­ni­ans or Pol­ish are doing. And the Cult of Michael Phelps is grow­ing old, too. It’s as if the swim­mer has been picked by NBC to be “the guy” for this Olympics. Com­men­ta­tors talk about him con­stantly, and I even saw a lit­tle graphic over­laid dur­ing gym­nas­tics cov­er­age that showed Phelps swim­ming with the label “Phelps in 5 min­utes.” Give me a break. But, it makes busi­ness sense for them. Accord­ing to NBC researcher Alan Wurtzel:

“We know that the rat­ings spike when Michael appears,” Wurtzel said. “There’s no ques­tion that Michael is an extra­or­di­nar­ily impor­tant driver.”

Oh, and if I hear one more thing about some Amer­i­can athelete’s dat­ing life or how their fam­ily has strug­gled to get them where they are, I… I… well, I’ll do some­thing. Prob­a­bly just mute Bob Costas until the sports are back, but still—it annoys me. And I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who feels this way.

To be fair, they do show a lot of China’s atheletes. Whether that’s because they’re neck-in-neck with the US in medal count (and have more golds) or because they’re the host coun­try, I’m not sure. And their online cov­er­age (http://www.nbcolympics) is much more expan­sive. (How­ever, you have to use Microsoft’s Sil­verlight, a rel­a­tively new video-delivery plug-in for your web browser, to view it. I’m curi­ous about the deci­sion to use it over some­thing like Flash-based video, which nearly ever browser can sup­port. It’s likely related to the NBC-Microsoft rela­tion­ship. I’ve not used Sil­verlight yet so I can’t talk much about it.)

And since I’m writ­ing a wish list, how about show­ing more of the lesser-known but very cool sports? Judo would be great, as would archery. And hey, why aren’t they show­ing more tram­po­line! Who knew tram­polin­ing was an olympic event?

What are the most impor­tant body parts for fight­ing? (More specif­i­cally, for mar­tial arts in gen­eral). Easy, right? Let me guess your answers: fists and feet. Why? So you can punch and kick. If that was your guess, you’re not entirely wrong. But they’re cer­tainly not the most impor­tant, I’ve learned.

Dis­claimer: I’m cer­tainly not in a posi­tion to teach or speak from author­ity here, but I’m begin­ning to under­stand the mechan­ics behind mar­tial arts (after about year of cur­rent train­ing at NW Mar­tial Arts and two years in col­lege) and want to share my admit­tedly begin­ner per­spec­tive. If you’re a mar­tial artist your­self you’ve got a pretty good chance of being able to kick my butt.

The answer I would give as the two most impor­tant body parts in fight­ing: elbow and the hips. Why? Real power in a punch comes not from mus­cle, but from body mechan­ics. A strong punch is sup­ported by the legs planted firmly on the ground (which isn’t going any­where), up through the legs and torso, down the arm and through to the fist. That power is dis­si­pated if any link in that chain is weak­ened. The elbow is a com­mon weak point because your aver­age puncher swings the arm around with the elbow bent out. When the fist con­nects, the elbow does what it does best: bends. A good karate punch is per­formed with the arm shoot­ing out from the body as though on track. It stays straight in line—fist up and elbow down—until it is about to con­nect, when the first rotates but not the elbow. The elbow is sup­ported by the body an the legs, deliv­er­ing full power into the tar­get. Phrew, that’s a lot of words to explain a very kinetic expe­ri­ence. A 4 minute visual may help make sense of this (but I can’t vouch for their form, these guys look like box­ers not mar­tial artists. (And if you do pre­fer more words, you can read more peo­ple dis­cussing elbow posi­tion here.)

The sec­ond impor­tant body part is (are?) the hips. From my admit­tedly nar­row per­spec­tive, I see three area the hips are important:

1. Gen­er­at­ing power — So much more power can be gen­er­ated by land­ing a strike as the hips snap into place than just the using mus­cle alone.
2. Sta­bil­ity — One aspect of mar­tial arts is stay­ing put when you want to, and the hips really help that. The power and sta­bil­ity of Sanchin kata (about which so much can be said it requires a book) comes in large part from proper hip position.
3. Throw­ing — I don’t study jiu-jitsu or judo but luck­ily many of the stu­dents and instruc­tors I train with do, so I’m exposed to it. The hips play an impor­tant part in exe­cut­ing a effec­tive, “effort­less” throw. I’ve been thrown a lot, and the best—meaning the ones that just “hap­pened” to me with­out me real­iz­ing what was going on until I was star­ing up at the ceiling—were deliv­ered with hip power.

Read­ing over this post it seems there are so many things that are impor­tant to mar­tial arts that I’m neglect­ing (bal­ance, tim­ing, relax­ing, ki etc.) . But I stand by the idea that elbows and hips are two of the most impor­tant. It also makes me real­ize how much I have to learn… but that’s the goal, right? Improve­ment through learn­ing and practice.

Ever see Fist of Leg­end? (You bet­ter have said yes!) I’m begin­ning to under­stand why Jet Li’s char­ac­ter says, after a very intense but mea­sured fight against Funakoshi (the Japan­ese uncle), “I guess I have a lot to learn about fight­ing.” That state­ment always both­ered me because clearly he was equally matched against his older, karate-practicing oppo­nent. But now I see that no mat­ter how good you become, there is always more to learn—especially from an opponent/teacher skilled in another art.