On Indefinite Hiatus

With regrets I'm putting all of my blogs in mothballs for the time being. Between a new job and school I really have no time for them anymore. My hope is that I'll be able to return to them at some point in the future, but I'm not holding my breath. Thank you all for your participation.

A Preliminary Proposal For A System of Martial Arts Notation

It's been quiet over here recently, but I'm still around. I'm occupied trying to identify martial arts families as discussed in my previous post. I suspect that's going to take awhile, so to keep you all entertained I'll throw out a related idea I've been mulling over: martial arts notation.

I've been reading through some of the MA books in my collection and realizing that, when they discuss techniques and forms, its oftentimes difficult to figure out exactly what's going on. Its awkward to describe simultaneous action in English in any sort of a concise way, let alone convey the rhythm of a technique. For example, one form I know involves jumping, executing a punch and a kick, then landing in a specific stance while executing another hand strike. That description of a single, fluid movement is long enough, but if I were to add the additional verbiage to let you know what kind of punch, kick, strike, and stance, and their relative timings, the description would quickly become difficult to understand.

A lot of books use pictures to illustrate techniques, which can be an improvement, especially when augmented with text descriptions. But pictures have some inherent limitations:

• They're not compact: The pictures necessary to illustrate a single technique can take up an entire page; illustrating an entire form can take many pages. Especially in the case of forms it becomes difficult to present a holistic overview.
• Photos require cameras: If I want to illustrate a particular technique I need to have the forethought to take pictures, get them developed, and then have them easily accessible. Which is fine if you are putting together a book or a magazine article, but complicates ad hoc writing. An obvious alternative is to use drawings instead of photos. You lose some information in the process, but whether that's a substantial concern is up for debate. The bigger challenge is what to do if you have limited artistic talent.
• Pictures, be they photos or drawings, are captures moments of time. There's an unseen transition between any two pictures; sometimes the transition is important, but underdetermined by the pictures (more on that later). You can always add more pictures in an effort to determine the transition, but then you start running into the "compactness" issue already mentioned.

What I'm searching for is an alternative to words, picture sequences, or both. Such an alternative should be:

• Compact: The space required to illustrate a technique or form should be minimized.
• Easy to use: Whatever notation is chosen it should be easy to read and write, even for the artistically challenged.
• Generic: It should be able to describe a wide variety of practices rather than being tied to a particular art.

Those are the absolute, bare minimum requirements. A truly useful system will also:

• Capture motion accurately: It should provide some way to describe the transitions between pictures.
• Provide timing information: It will show not only what happens, but will also give the reader at least a basic sense of the rhythym of the form/technique as well.
• Provide a "birds eye view": It would be very useful if the reader could, at a glance, get a general sense of what's going on in the technique/form as a whole.
• Make comparisons easy: Since this is a blog about comparative martial arts, it would be nice to have a medium by which to perform comparisons. I would like to be able to look at the notation for two techniques side-by-side and immediately pick out the similarities and differences between the two.

The martial arts, at least in terms of choreography, resemble both music and computer animation. I unsure if this is an original insight on my part, but I've not run across the analogy elsewhere, so I'll elaborate a bit. A form/technique is a sequence of events which transpires in a pre-determined, chronological order. Anyone who's done computer animation work can see the similarities; computer animations are programmed as events/motions unfolding with respect to time, a lot like a kata. Like music, a form involves multiple instruments (hands, feet, etc.) which operate independently but work together in a common endeavor. These ides pre-date the rest of the material below; the music/animation connection first occurred to me in 2000/2001 when I was trying to design a computer-based instruction system for teaching martial arts. So, if what follows looks like sheet music or keyframe animation, its not a coincidence.

Now I'm going to work through how I derived the basic ideas for this proposed notation systems in the hopes that others will call attention to where I've made a wrong turn or overlooked the obvious. I started by trying to characterize what I know as a "front ball kick", an elementary technique which is found in many arts. Being one of the "artistically challenged" myself I used stick figures to illustrate the motion: After doing so I made the following observations:

1. The stick figure did a decent job of conveying the basics of the technique, but failed to convey some important nuance.
2. Interpreting the sequence requires at least a basic understanding of martial arts. For example, figure is a horse stance; that's probably apparent to a casual practitioner, but not evident to the uninitiated.
3. The stick figure is more comprehensible that an English description, but more compact than full-fledged drawings/photos. It's still probably to "verbose" for forms.
4. There's a lot of redundancy; only one leg moves, but the position of all limbs is depicted repeatedly.
5. The positions of the joints (the black dots) completely determine the configuration of each figure.
6. The transitions between figures 2, 3, and 4 aren't capture well.
7. Neither the striking surface nor the direction of the applied force are obvious from the figures.

These observations, in turn, merited the following responses:

Item 1: That the stick figures convey at least a general sense of the technique means that this isn't a totally fruitless avenue of exploration.

Item 2: It's OK if the notation is opaque to non-practitioners; the whole idea of an MA notation will only be of interest to people with a pre-existing MA background. At a more fundamental level the difficulties in interpretation are caused by projecting events occurring in 3D space onto a 2D surface. If it becomes necessary to disambiguate such a sequence it's always possible to present multiple elevations simultaneously: Such disambiguation will often be unnecessary; the action in the hidden dimension will be obvious. As a general rule, though, finding a way to concisely render 3D motion in 2D is going to be important.

Item 3: It may be necessary to have a couple different type of notation: a "detailed" notation for demonstrating specific techniques and a "concise" notation for sequencing techniques.

Item 4: The stick figures should be reduced in some way; the notation should focus on changes in position. This will eliminate the redundancy and (hopefully) contribute to compactness, readability, and ease of use.

Item 5: In conjunction with Item 4, if the figures are going to be reduced in some fashion then what's left should focus on joint positioning.

Item 6: This is a biggie. For example, the sequence 2,3,4 makes it look like the kick delivery and return are symmetric, but in the version of the kick with which I am familiar such is not the case. Remember what I said earlier about transitions being important but underdetermined? Some transitions are essentially path independent; it doesn't matter how you go from A → B as long as you get there. The 3 → 4 transition is an example of such independence; if you make the transition efficiently then the minutia of how you get there is not terribly important. But the 2 → 3 transition is different; there is a very specific way to deliver the kick. Deviate from the prescribed motion and your kick is going to be, at best, ineffective.

Per Item 4 you can characterize a transition by describing how a joint moves in time. We'll concern ourselves with such descriptions shortly.

Item 7: A simple annotation can show striking surface, direction, and even magnitude of the force if we so desire:

Now we come to the point where I just started tinkering. The first thing I realized was that using the positions of the joints in space to describe a transition wasn't the best approach. Absolute positions aren't invariant under scaling and, more importantly, aren't terribly intuitive. Relative positions, at least in terms of Cartesian space, aren't much better, since it's still important ot know how the limb in question relates to the rest of the scene.

I realized that I shouldn't focus on Cartesian coordinates, but rather on joint angles. Angles are invariant under scaling and rotation, so the same description applies regardless of size or orientation. Once I came to this conclusion is was a matter of finding a clean notation to describe the joint angles. I tried a few approaches:

In this figure I've added an interim step and some arrows to indicate how things move. It's too cluttered; it's difficult to read the arrows overlying the joints. So I thought about removing the middle stick figure entirely: Still not particularly descriptive, but I feel like we're moving in the right direction. The use of the arrows to indicate the transition seems like it might have potential, but I'm not sure it tells us anything we don't know. We can tell that the joints must bend in a certain way just by looking at the before and after; what we need is relative timing information. So how about:

So what to make of this? This shows the relative timing of how the three joints should bend; everything starts at the same time, but you need to have your foot bent before impact or else you break your toes. To interpret this you need to assume that the top line represents the hip, the middle line represents the knee, and the bottom line represents the ankle. You also have to assume that we're talking about a leg. I believe that the above figure contains most of the information needed to correctly describe the kick, given the constraints of the figures preceding and following. But, for the sake of readability, I'd also like to add information detailing the direction and magnitude of the joint movement.

Most joints only hae one degree of freedom; they can either bend or straighten. Both motions are meaningful independent of the orientation of the joint/limb, so they're suited to our purpose. As far as magnitude, it seems simple enough to just use degrees. Combining these yields the following:

That seems readable enough. The top says "bend 90 degrees" while the bottom says "straighten 180 degrees". But I realized that a further refinement is possible if we can make assumptions about the default "bend" and the default "straighten". If we assume that "bends" are 90 degrees and "straightens" are 180 degrees (both measures absolute), then we can omit the angle descriptions entirely in these cases. Going back to our motivating example, a front ball kick can now be rendered as:

This figure describes the following:

1. Start in horse stance.
2. Make a standard transition from horse stance to crane stance.
3. Deliver the kick. Drop the knee slightly and straighten the leg to 180 degrees. Bend the ankle to 90 degrees; this should be completed before the knee is completely straightened. The striking surface is the ball of the foot and the force of the blow should be directed straight forward.
4. Make a standard transition to crane stance.
5. Make a standard transition to horse stance.

The stick figure diagram is no worse, and quite possibly better, than the English description. It also has some advantages over a sequence of pictures in that its compact and describes the transition between 2 and 3 better.

Recall that we said earlier that we'd like the notation to focus on change; since the configuration of the upper body doesn't change it's only necessary to draw it once. We assume that if there's no notation indicating change then a given configuration remains the same throughout. In order to clarify which limbs are changing we'll divide our notation into an upper portion (above the waist) and a lower portion (below the waist). To disambiguate which leg is doing what we'll further subdivide the lower portion into left and right sections; ditto with the arms. So we end up with something which looks like a musical staff:

But how, then, do we use this to show a "horse stance"?

This is the point where we commit to developing a generic framework rather than a notation for a specific system. A horse stance is a known, static configuration, but the specifics of the stance will vary from system to system. So we need some way to define what we mean when we say "horse stance". This takes us back to stick figures:

We say that a "horse stance", alternatively represented by the glyph "H", is given by the above body configuration. This would be an example of the "detailed notation" I speculated about above. We can then render a horse stance as follows:

Since the horse stance involves both arms simultaneously we represent this fact by positioning the appropriate glyph on the midline dividing the left and right arm regions, an approach we also follow with the legs. Since both the upper and lower body are involved simultaneously we represent this fact by placing the horse stance glyph on the midline dividing the upper body and lower body regions. Assuming that we've defined crane stance by a glyph "C" we can now render the front ball kick as follows:

This is where I'm going to leave it for the time being; this is obviously a work in progress. Some areas for improvement are as follows:

• Glyph placement: I like placing glyphs on a line to indicate that multiple limbs are involved in a motion, but doing so makes the glyph hard to read.
• Detailed notation: Drawing the disembodied stick figure leg seems like an ugly hack.
• Robustness: I know forms that would break this scheme easily. It will have to be expanded to include things like changes in direction, jumping and ducking, attacks delivered off the center line, etc.

I'll continue to tinker with notation as I write more on various topics.

Allen Cook is a Fraud

When someone tries to sell you a $1000 sword for $200, make sure you do your research.

This afternoon, as we were driving back from the Olympic Peninsula along Washington State Highway 3, we stopped to check out a guy selling swords and knives by the side of the road. The gentleman's name was Allen Cook, and he gave me this story about how he was a dealer and was liquidating his collection to pay for his wife's (or daughter's, I forget) cancer treatment. Then he shows me, among other things, a Damascus-type katana which he claims is worth $1000. But he was going to let me have it for the low, low price of $200 dollars. Granted, it was a pretty nice sword; I might have bought it if he'd taken credit cards. Alas, such was not the case, but he gave me a business card in case I wanted to get it later:

When I got home I took the liberty of trying to figure out whether the sword was really worth $1000; if it was I'd likely buy it^*. Turns out the sword is worth about $200 retail; I'm pretty sure it was a Frost Cutlery katana. The box looks the same, the contents look the same, it might have been a different color but that's it.

So, boys and girls, the moral of this story is as follows:

• Allen Cook is a fraud and a liar.
• Don't buy swords from roadside stands.
• You didn't need a katana anyway.

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*What I'd do with it after that, given the fact that I'm lousy with the katana and would likely end up seriously injuring myself, was a whole different question.

New Feminist MA Blog

(Via Alas) Ms. Nancy Jane Moore has started a new martial arts blog, Taking Care Of Ourselves, discussing martial arts with an emphasis on practical self-defense for women. Based on the material that's available there so far she seems to have a concrete, possibly atypical, take on the subject as a whole. It'll be interesting to see what she has to say on the subject as the blog develops.

What to Compare, Continued

What To Compare, Continued

I've had a chance to look over The Ultimate Martial Arts Encyclopedia, and its not all that I'd hoped and dreamed. Its not an encyclopedia per se but rather a collection of reprints from Inside Kung-Fu and Inside Karate. There are a few articles on combat systems originating outside of Asia, but the book is still heavily focused on the arts of East Asia. Disappointed, but undaunted, I looked in a couple of book stores, new and used, to see if there is anything to be found that deals with non-Asian martial arts in a substantive fashion. Barring books on capoeira and jiu jitsu, of which there are plenty, there seems to be a dearth of material on non-Asian practices. This gives me hope that I'm engaging in a worthwhile endeavor and not just re-inventing the wheel.

At the same time, while perusing the UMAE, I've come to the realization that its not going to be sufficient to try to identify representative arts from different regions. For one thing there's the ever-present difficulty of tryingto determine what qualifies as "representative". Even if you managed to do so you'd end up with a (rather large, I imagine) list practices without any overriding sense of order.

It seems to me at this point that, if we're going to talk about comparative martial arts, the best way to start out will be to assemble a fairly exhaustive list of current practices and trace their lineages back into the past. I expect that this process will be analagous, in many respects, to tracing the development of languages, since up until fairly recently both have followed similar patterns of geographic diffusion and mutation over time. Like languages, I expect that martial arts will naturally fall in to families that share certain characteristics, and that performing inter- and intra-family comparisons will go a long way towards helping us suss out the water and flour of the martial arts.

The next task, then, will be to assemble our list of current practices. In this endeavor the UMAE will undoubtfully be helpful, as will the various resources scattered willy-nilly over the vastness of the Internet.

What To Compare?

I've said that we're going to be engaging in comparative analysis, which means that we have to select those martial arts which we are going to compare. This is a process fraught with potential for disaster; if we choose poorly we'll end up doing nothing more than reinforcing our own biases. So its important that we try to identify some practice-agnostic criteria to help us on our way.

This blog is primarily concerned with exploring the martial arts as they are practiced in the US, so it would be a mistake not to include those arts which are popular here. By this I mean to include not only those that have significant followings, but also those that have inserted themselves into the public consciousness over the years. I'll toss out the following off the top of my head:

• Karate
• Kung-fu
• Tae Kwon Do
• Judo
• Muay Thai
• Jeet Kune Do
• Jiu Jitsu
• Capoeira

Obviously this list has problems already. The terms "karate" and "kung-fu" encompass a huge range of practices; to talk about one or the other monolithically risks the (perhaps justified) wrath of their practitioners. Some people are likely to say "Jeet kune do? Isn't that just karate?". To which I'll reply "Yes, but Bruce Lee is probably the single most recognizable martial artist in America, so it merits special mention". This list also excludes boxing, aikido, tai chi, and kendo. Boxing is excluded on the grounds that it's not typically thought of as a "martial art", while the rest failed the initial cut because they aren't as popular (by either definition). But all four represent distinct traditions with interesting things to say, so "popularity" clearly isn't the only metric to consider.

So now our list looks like

• Karate
• Kung-fu
• Tae Kwon Do
• Judo
• Muay Thai
• Jeet Kune Do
• Jiu Jitsu
• Capoeira
• Tai Chi
• Aikido
• Kendo
• Boxing

But this list is very heavy on the East Asian martial arts. Depending on how you classify Jiu Jitsu (Brazilian, but derived from a Japanese art), there are only two or three which count as non-Asian. Surely there's valuable martial practices to be found outside of East Asia?

And that's where my personal experience peters out. We're going to have to dig together to find out what's out there, but first we should set some ground rules. I justified including kendo, aikido, and tai chi on the grounds that "represent distinct traditions with interesting things to say". What did I mean by that? Well, aikido and tai chi are "internal" or "soft" arts, with a distinctly different emphasis than the "external" or "soft" arts already on the list. Kendo is the only art I can think of that focuses on weapon work. Those focuses aren't covered by the other arts, thus helping to broaden the variety of techniques we're going to compare. But the "tradition" portion is important as well; we want to look at arts that have some substance to them, and longevity/historical depth seems to be a good initial proxy for this.

So what now? Time to start breaking out those encyclopedias. I know I pooh-poohed them earlier, but I think they're valuable in this instance because they can help us to inform ourselves about major traditions outside of East Asia. As far as I can tell the gold standard right now is Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia by Thomas Green. Unfortunately its on the pricey side, so we're going to have to make do with lesser sources. After poking around what's currently available on Amazon it looks like the next best thing is the Ultimate Martial Arts Encyclopedia. The reviews are positive, and they mention specifically that the book covers non-Asian arts as well; the other encyclopedias appear to concentrate on the Asian arts. So we'll return to consider this topic further once I've had a chance to give the book a once-over.

What Is A Martial Art?

I've gotten ahead of myself; I've spent lots of time talking about the "martial arts" without defining what I mean by that phrase. I'm not going to get really fancy here; this blog isn't an attempt to re-imagine the concept as a whole. Rather, I'm primarily interested in exploring modern practice, so I'm going to try to capture the gist of the term as it is commonly understood.

In an effort to suss out the boundaries of what it means to be a "martial art" I present to you five different practices: kung fu, boxing, tai chi, wrestling, and yoga. Which of these, if any, represent a genuine martial art? My gut reaction is as follows:

• Kung fu: Without a doubt.
• Boxing: Yes, though its not often cast in that light.
• Tai chi: Maybe, but it's definitely an edge case.
• Wrestling: Iffy... I lean towards "no".
• Yoga: Definitely not.

So let's start with the easy distinctions: Why is kung-fu a martial art while yoga isn't? The essence, the driving principle underlying the practice of kung fu, is preparation for individual combat. Most of its practices are designed to prepare the practitioner for or are inspired by individual combat. In yoga, on the other hand, you have to strain very hard to hear even the faintest echo of anything martial.

How about the others? Why is boxing a definite yes but the others are sketchy at best? Bluntly, boxing is about beating the tar out of your oponents. In some sense its even more of a martial art than kung fu since it doesn't indulge in aesthetic or meditative practices. But can't the same be said of wrestling? Yes... sort of. I think of wrestling (Olympic, not WWE) like I think of tournament sparring... its an elaborate game of tag. Its not really suited for anything other than the controlled environment of competition. Though it could easily become a martial art; maybe we'll run across something like that in our explorations.

And tai chi... what to make of that? I'm of the understanding that most people practice it for its health benefits. But that's not an immediate disqualifier... many people practice the martial arts principly as a form of exercise. It's also true that, when you get really good at tai chi, you can engage others in unarmed combat. But that's more of an atavism reflecting tai chi's historic roots than a benefit which most practitioners seek to accrue.

Looking at what I've written above, I'd say that focus and intention matters an awful lot in determining whether something is a martial art. Can the practice in question legitimately claim to help you hold your own in a fight? That, I think, is the fundamental distinction. A person who boxes, or who does kung fun, will have a good set of tools at their disposal and will have practiced how to use them. A wrestler, or someone who does tai chi, has an incomplete set of tools and probably doesn't know how to use them in the real world.

So then, I think that a good definition is as follows: A martial art has, as an important focus, the preparation of the practitioner for individual combat in an uncontrolled setting. This definition seems to capture the common understanding fairly well.

Introduction

So, the question is "What are we doing here?". We're here, in large part, because there's a dearth of quality writing on the martial arts in a format which is accessible to the average reader. This is especially true with respect to comparative studies; such material may be out there, but if it is I'm not sure where you'd find it.

Before getting in to the thick of the discussion I think its important to emphasize that, in the end, I'm just a guy with a web-page. I make no claim to any sort of formal training; the only assets I have in my favor are an abiding interest in the martial arts, facility with the written word, a few brain cells, and time to kill. Much of what I say will be based largely on my own personal experience and perceptions; I hope that this project will provide me with the impetus to conduct more formal research and perhaps draw other people with interesting things to say out of the woodwork. I'm also somewhat limited in my perspective; my direct experience involves East Asian martial arts as practiced in the United States, so I've undoubtedly got some big blind spots. Caveat lector.

Caveats out of the way, why is it so hard to find good writing on the martial arts? Or is that putting the cart before the horse? I've not yet demonstrated my basic premise; before you look at the "whys" of a phenomenon its behooves you to be sure that such a phenomenon actually exists. Since "there's a dearth of quality writing on the martial arts" is a matter of opinion the best I can hope to do is persuade rather than prove.

Consider the experience of buying a book on the martial arts. You go into Borders or Barnes & Nobles and head towards their sports sections. To their credit most of the mega-booksellers have a couple shelves dedicated to the martial arts, but the contents of those shelves are hit-or-miss. What are you likely to find therein?

In my mind I tend to group the books into three rough categories:

• Crap
• Practitioners' guides
• Everything else

Let's take a look at each of these categories:

Crap

I think that the single biggest problem with the practice of the martial arts in general is that, to borrow a word from Orac, its totally infested with "woo" of various kinds. In the United States the martial arts are strongly associated with Orientalism and/or Oriental mysticism, leading to the propagation of a great deal of information of dubious provenance and merit. Credulous consumers can buy books on how to become a ninja, improve their chi, kill with a single touch, etc. These books often suffer from low production values and give no assurance other than the author's word that ey're not just making shit up. There's little doubt, in my mind at least, that many of the authors and publishers are playing on people's hopes, dreams, and insecurities to make a quick buck.

Practitioners' Guides

This category contains all of the single-art manuals out there, which seem to account for the majority of titles you're likely to find at the book store. These books are intended for people who are learning/want to learn a particular discipline. They obviously vary greatly in quality but, unlike the crap above, at least they represent authentic traditions with time- and field-tested techniques.

But these books also, as a general rule, share a couple of deficiencies. Their authors are preaching to the choir. They don't intend to demonstrate the virtues of the art to the skeptical, but rather guide those who have already committed to its practice. As such they tend to be pretty heavy on the received wisdom, emphasizing the "what" of the practice but not spending much time discussing the "why". Their emphasis on a particular tradition and the emulation of its forms also makes them vulnerable to the propagation of erroneous information, though obviously to a much lesser degree than the crap. Lastly, and this is less a critique than just the nature of these books, they almost always limit their discussion to just one particular art.

Everything Else

What's left are the books which a) aren't obviously crap and b) aren't "howto" manuals for a particular discipline. Your best bet to find thoughtful writing about the martial arts falls in this category, though the real gems are few and far between. If you're lucky you'll find items like The Book of Five Rings, a (somewhat) discipline-agnostic discussion of martial practice. Sometimes you can find various encyclopedias of the martial arts, but I have, as a general rule, been disappointed with their quality, finding them to be little more than general descriptions accompanied by pretty pictures. While certainly useful these books also skimp when it comes to trying to get a deeper understanding of the "whys" of the martial arts.

I think the above demonstrates some general trends in the available literature. Materials which are currently available tend to be:

• woo-ish
• heavy on description and light on explanation
• limited to specific disciplines

I believe that there's a lot to learn by writing specifically to counteract these tendencies. The posts which follow will (hopefully) tend to:

• be empiric
• describe the "whys", not just the "hows", of martial practice
• be cross disciplinary

Sifu Brian Bateman, of the Rochester Shaolin Training Academy, once told me that the martial arts are like bread: there are many different types of bread, but they all start with flour and water. By this I believe he meant that, though the outward forms may look different, all martial arts are grounded in common principles. It is my hope that, by comparison of practice across a number of disciplines, I can begin to elucidate the "flour" and the "water".

Manifesto, Or Statement Of Purpose, Or Something

Welcome, all. Hopefully some of you folks already know me from my general-wankery blog, Shiny Ideas. This new one represents a forum where I can work out some ideas about the martial arts that have been bouncing around in my head for awhile. There's a whopping great bucket of mysticism surrounding the martial arts; I think the universe as a whole could benefit from a more empirical approach. I'm hoping that, provided the planets line up correctly, I'll eventually be able to turn the material I post here into a book. So the posts are going to, as a general rule, look and proceed in a book-ish manner. Comments are welcomed, all rights reserved, etc. etc. etc.