BEWARE!!! Principles of Promotion of Martial Arts

[baguaboy]

Hi all - I'm glad to see Eds article is still amusing and useful - and some of the truth in it is still sadly so; much of Asian martial arts taught in the U.K. has still to grow up out of the Majic BS!
If any of you are in Paris I'd highly recommend that you go and check Ed out as he has started teaching again http://www.transformativemartialarts.com/. Ed is a brave and accomplished martial artist; and he wont make you a MONSTER ~ promise!

[chimerical tortoise]

Then IKF is following where Gene Ching's stellar birdcage liner has gone before. There simply are no decent magazines available which specialize in Chinese martial arts.

http://journalofasianmartialarts.com/cms2/

I bought an issue a short while back (Winter 08?), and it had a few interesting articles on the modernisation of MA's, instructor-student pedagogy etc., the movements that were explained were as all pictorial sequences, a little vague to me (as compared to irl) and none are from anything I've learned, so I can't really comment much beyond that.

The most interesting article was on the modernisation of Taekwondo, Karate and Wushu, the steps taken to consolidate and organise etc., but I guess that's a well-beaten horse. I guess being a university student I really dug the fact that it had pretty good written structure and there wasn't as much of a sensationalist tone.

[Chris McKinley]

JAMA is fairly decent, if a bit ponderous and academic, but then they don't specialize in CMA. That aside, one can usually count on one half-way interesting article per issue, with the rest being the kind of forgettable blather that only a collector would be interested in. Frustratingly, even when an article's topic is seemingly of particular interest, there is usually little information of immediate value. Most of the time, it functions much like the other MA rags in that it's an advertisement to compel the reader to find out more on their own. That's only of use if the reader is not already aware of the topic to begin with, and provides little for one that is.

[Doc Stier]

JAMA is fairly decent, if a bit ponderous and academic, but then they don't specialize in CMA. That aside, one can usually count on one half-way interesting article per issue, with the rest being the kind of forgettable blather that only a collector would be interested in. Frustratingly, even when an article's topic is seemingly of particular interest, there is usually little information of immediate value. Most of the time, it functions much like the other MA rags in that it's an advertisement to compel the reader to find out more on their own. That's only of use if the reader is not already aware of the topic to begin with, and provides little for one that is.

Man, ain't that the truth!

I have come to view martial art magazines in general as glorified comic books for novice level enthusiasts. Hardly worth the price per issue and the time spent reading through them for anyone who's already been around the block a time or two before.

Doc

[Chris Fleming]

What's sad is that there were some fairly good if not outright great articles in JAMA years ago. Last good article I noticed was Shifu Zhang Yun's long article on Shuai Jiao. Had history, training methods, application. Not ridiculous ivory tower antics.

[chimerical tortoise]

Perhaps (in reference to the previous thread on songs and difficulty interpreting) it would be better to collect and present the information over the internet? The XYQ database for instance, complemented with video, song, etc., would be an accessible source of reasonable information for somebody interested in learning about what is generally/widely? practised.

Academia has databases of articles, but it can get stuffy. Online, most hobbyist websites ie parkour, have collections of articles written by people. It could be good to have a decent explanation of why people hug trees and other 'incomprehensible' basics so that people can make sense of it. That said, individual schools do have pages similar to what I'm thinking of, so I think there would probably be intellectual property problems or something that could be problematic, although I think people should have a basic idea of what they can expect to learn, might help to cut the BS.