the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

I'm actually listening to the Black Phillip show as I discovered this, so I didn't pay attention to the audio (multi-sensory-tasking), but watching Chinese girls do Chen taiji is useful because they tend to exaggerate the shen fa, which makes it more apparent for me. and they tend to be well trained since girls are smarter than boys, so I can use it as a 3D reference for what's going on in the form and steal it directly from them just by watching and following along with my qi.

You can count on the Chinese education system to make things very obvious and clear, so then you can learn by watching if you know what you are looking at. Chen style Taiji is such a great example of the Chinese education method, it can be broken down and taught to large numbers of people with consistency.

The better the player, the closer it is to being the standard. So after watching for a while you can get a sense of the standard. I see it it forms and push hands.

There is a curriculum that includes push hands and throwing techniques. You can count on people properly trained to do well in push hands competitions, which they do.

Of course I have the luxury of first hand experience with people trained in this type of system, which is vital for really getting the feel for things, but now with a solid foundation I can actually teach myself due to the high quality of internet video, as well as using text references.

Compared to 10 years ago, one could conceivably train oneself to a decent degree of skill using videos and other media, if the intelligence and talent is there to make use of these tools.

Three of my teachers were women - Mrs. Zhang Xu Baomei (Master Zhang Junfeng's wife, with whom I studied after Master Zhang's passing), Zhu Suyi - from Hunan, she was an associate of Ch'en Panling and Xiong Yanghe. She helped master Chen develop his Taiji sets, and was very highly skilled in Mian Quan, Xingyi, Bagua, and Tongbei as well. My last Tong Bei teacher was a woman as well. All of them were very strict and detailed in teaching the mechanics of the movements - far more so than most male teachers, and I think more tolerant of questions regarding details.

'girls are smarter than boys'?

That's sexist!

'girls are smarter than boys'

Where? I'd like to buy one.

New Zealand, according to the Daily Mail.

I got to take some piano lessons from my teacher's teacher, Clara Roland, who was just a grand old lady, a real character. I do remember playing the Wild Boy of Bornio, which is a fun exotic sounding piece for kids.

I think I was a bit intimidated by this lady, but overall I was with the program. I didn't mind her strictness so much I guess, I was used to it having an Asian mom.

I also got to take some private music theory lessons with her and this beautiful blonde girl from my high school, older than me, way out of my league, but in the context of this lesson I was actually better.

I guess growing up Asian and knowing some of the more well known music teachers in town, the idea of a woman teacher of an art being hard core is not strange at all. There was another old lady who taught all the best violinists in town, a town that regularly enjoyed international level players because of a university and art center. Gonzalez? I actually got to meet her and I knew lots of friends who studied with her.

Old school, European, if you wanted to be the best, you trained with her. Strict, even to little kids, but then these kids became amazing. Shit, I was almost amazing, it's just my heart wasn't into classical music.

But I think back and as a 9 or 10 year old I was able to pull of some pretty complicated pieces, I can say that I studied Bach, Mozart, Chopin, etc. In the end I do appreciate the classical education, but it became sort of not useful as I grew older and the world started changing faster and faster, but I have that experience to draw from when studying martial arts and am grateful for that.

I grew up around this kind of seriousness for classical music, as Asians tend to be, it's just it took a while until I found an art thatresonated with me. I often wonder what kind of person I'd be if I'd been introduced to jazz during high school, but then I remember that there's no point in imagining what if.