The absence of China

Like most bloggers, I keep an eye on my visitor statistics. It’s really interesting to see where my readers are from (hi Armenia! Hi, Iran!). It’s also fun looking at the latest visitors at various times of the day, to follow different countries appearing as the dateline moves, seeing who’s an early riser, and who’s a night owl. (OK, so this is really geeky, like you hadn’t worked out that I’m a geek?).

There’s one big hole, though: China. Very occasionally, someone will show up from Beijing or Guangzhou – but only once in a blue moon. When I went to Beijing on holiday, I couldn’t access WordPress at all – either to read, or to write. Guess the Chinese government doesn’t approve of what some WordPress bloggers have to say…

So: I suppose that before I move to Beijing, I need to migrate this blog to another host. For various reasons, I want to start getting back into geeky work, so I’m thinking of a self-hosted WordPress installation, probably hosted by John Companies. Any other suggestions for a reliable, secure, and affordable hosting company that’s accessible from China?

Week in review:confidence wobbles a bit

Not much activity here, this week: I find that my blogging energy tends to alternate between here and my other blog, and recently I’ve been active there rather than here.

I haven’t practiced so much this week either. On Wednesday, one of my normal solo practice nights, friends from Beijing were in town, so I went out to catch up with them. Last night, Madam Ge was in Malaysia so there wasn’t any class. Instead, I went to the cinema to catch Resident Evil: Extinction. Hehehe, it was entertaining enough, though probably won’t appear on anyone’s list of the 21st century’s greatest films. I’m absolutely terrible when it comes to suspense in films, so I was jumping in my seat all the way through, much to the entertainment of those next to me.

I did make it to class with Master Zhou on Friday. He was late, so he says he won’t charge me for that class, which is very good of him. As usual, we went through the form and on to some new material. However, we spent a lot of the lesson talking theory, about the importance of the number of steps, and issues relating to the time of day that you practice. One of his Chin Woo students had come along as well, and helped a lot by translating, which made things a lot easier! He also showed me some more attacks, particularly to the throat; one point on my windpipe is actually still very tender. It just goes to show how deadly bagua can be! He reiterated, strongly, that I need to be practicing every day, otherwise the lessons will ultimately be of no value. So true. Sigh…

The Drunken Broadsword is continuing as well; I’ll be leaving for today’s class shortly. It turns out that some of what our teacher had us working on before was just introductory moves, not part of the actual set; unfortunately, that means I’m having to un-learn those moves, which I’m finding a bit confusing and demotivating. This, I guess, is just one of the consequences of not being able to understand what your teacher is saying. Hehe, I should mention that last week, one of our teacher’s friends came along to watch. He’s a Hung Gar Preying Mantis master, and showed us how he can easily drop into the splits, body facing forward, not sideways; he did this onto a sheet of paper, then asked Jono to try to pull the paper from underneath him. The paper tore: his whole weight was directly on it. He’s 82 years old.

Yesterday, I bought myself an iPod Touch. I’m hoping to load all the clips I have of my various teachers onto it, so that when I go to practice solo, I can use this for reference whenever I’m hazy about what to do next.

Testing

WordPress and Facebook: does this work?

Week’s roundup

Phew, well, that was the first week of the new job. As you can imagine, things have been pretty busy – lots of people to meet, things to learn, new sleep patterns, etc etc, so I’ve not had much energy for blogging! I like the new job; it’s really interesting, and so are the people.

On the topics that concern this blog, the most important consequence was that I was too tired to attend the bagua spear class. That was the second in the sequence, and I’d missed the first because I was ill. That means I’ve missed too much, so I’ll wait for the next time Madam Ge runs this.

That reminds me, I lent Madam Ge my copy of The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter; I must remember to ask her what she thought of it…

It’s been a wet week – an unusual amount of rain for this time of year. I took a tumble while I was walking down a steep slope; the concrete was wet and greasy, and I landed quite hard. For a while I was worried that it was a rerun of two years ago, when I slipped on wet tiles on Orchard Road, and screwed up my achilles tendon. On this occasion, quite a few joints were wrenched, including a knee, but luckily nothing was serious. I’ve been out to practice my taijiquan and bagua in Duxton Plain Park a couple of times, but taking it a little easy while my joints still ache.

On Friday night I was practicing the bagua qigong set when some European (judging by his accent) guy came out onto the back stairs of one of the shophouses overlooking the spot where Ialways go; he was shouting “oi”, “hey you” and so on, trying to get me to move into a spot more convenient for him to take a photo. A**h**e. I’m not performing for your entertainment, and in any case is it so hard to ask politely?

Interesting to see that for the European launch of 300, they held the press conference in Second Life. That’s a little bit of synchronicity; I’ve just joined Second Life myself, as I think I’ll be using it a lot for the new job. I see that the film is stirring up controversy as people (try to) draw contemporary parallels…

Getting those videos

I lost my blogging mojo for a while…. Still going to all the bagua and capoeira classes; Master Chong is away, so no taiji for a while.

One thing I wanted to mention  – as you can, see, YouTube is a great source for martial arts material. Sometimes, though, people take down a clip I really like – rarely, but it’s really annoying when it happens. Also, of course, we can never be sure how long a site like YouTube will be around. Perhaps one day we will wake up, and all of those great capoeira and bagua clips will have vanished. Oh no!

Well, there’s an answer, which I found via a Slashdot discussion about something else. If you use Firefox, you can download an extension that lets you save video from YouTube and other sites to your computer. Very useful. I’ve triedit out, and it works for me.

YouTube is my friend

Thanks to Alan’s comment, I started searching for clips that relate to what I practice – and there are quite a few interesting ones!

• Here is Sim Pooh Ho demonstrating the applications of his taiji gong. It includes the “knocking down 8 men at once” feat that I’ve seen his brother doing several times…
• … and here he is performing the small-frame Yang taiji set. I saw him doing this at the Nam Wah Pai centre in Geylang a couple of years ago.
• Here is his teacher, Wu Tu Nan, doing the same set, at a slower pace.
• The taiji form I’m studying at the moment is the one developed by Cheng Man Ching in the 1930s and refined while he was in Taiwan. Here is clip of him performing a truncated set, plus some examples of self-defence/push-hands application.

[Updated August 01 to correct the names; sorry for that slipup, and thanks to Pern Yiau for bringing it to my attention]

I’m shocked, shocked!

There’s an interesting piece in the Guardian today about the healing power of electricity. Apparently it’s quite an old idea, but had been overlooked until recently. Can the body’s electrical fields and currents be manipulated by the mind? How about by needles? The resonance with qigong, acupuncture, and other traditional Chinese medical practices is clear…

Crossing cultures…

This is a stream-of-consciousness ramble, I’m afraid, inspired by the fact that I’m killing time before going to the airport for my flight to Singapore.

Niti Bahn had posted a list of attributes that she felt are characteristic of ‘global citizens’, or ‘global nomads’ – and not, as I said, of a generation as a whole. Fair enough, and it’s not the first time I’ve told off for taking small piece of someone’s post and going off on a tangent with it. I suspect that we are both right, in that today’s culture-crossers, and ‘global nomads’ are developing a skill set that will be much more widely necessary for the generation that are in school now.

Anyway, this all got me wondering what sort of culture is going to be generated by the mixing and sharing of cultures that’s going to be happening in the near future.

In the colonial past, fairly large-scale physical transfers of population took place, voluntarily or otherwise, and some fairly fascinating things came up out of that. I wrote in a recent post about Vodou, which grew out of the transplanting of fractured African cultures to the Caribbean; and about the generation of new languages in the South African gold mines. Doing some reading about Kalarippayattu (which when transplanted to China led to the martial arts of Shaolin), and Silat led me to the discovery that when Malay slaves were taken to South Africa, Silat merged with Zulu stick fighting techniques to form a unique Afro-Malay martial art. Wow. It isn’t just the Zulus who fight with twin sticks, though: the BaSotho do as well. While I was working in Lesotho, we often saw small groups of youths wandering, in isolation as they went through initiation rituals. Wrapped in blankets or plastered in white or red clay, and armed with sticks, we were told on no account to go near them, for our own safety. The world they lived in wasn’t ours. The oddness was in seeing these small armed groups moving alongside the highways, with trucks and minibuses roaring past them, a reminder that the modern world has gaps in it, I guess – to adopt William Gibson’s maaxim that The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed, maybe even the present isn’t either.

So where am I going with this? I don’t know. It just seems worth bearing in mind that introducing ubiquitous access suddenly, connecting parts of the world that have the skill sets for that with parts that only comparatively recently didn’t have any communications at all, could lead us to some strange places, and I wonder whether we might be very surprised at some of the results. We like to think that our Westernised, liberal, capitalist model will dominate – even if we question whether it ought to – but perhaps something entirely different and unexpected will be created by the online meetings of minds.

Who wants to live forever?

I don’t know, but I wouldn’t mind giving it a try! The search for immortality has always been an element of Daoist thought (or some strains of it, anyway)and so I suppose my practice of qigong isn’t unconnected. Commentators will tell you that this doesn’t mean literal immortality, but simply the combination “right living”, meditation, and qigong to keep the mind, limbs and organs flexible and strong, thereby prolonging the lifespan well beyond the usual. This is because normally we become mentally and physically less flexible as we age, and allow toxins to accumulate – and to many Daoist thinkers, stiffness and inflexibility lead to death. (Of course, this hasn’t stopped plenty of Daoist alchemists poisoning themselves in their search for an ‘immortality pill’!) In the West, the search for immortality – or at least, extended life – through science is gathering pace. I’ve mentioned the Cyborg Democracy site before. Via a blog post there, I’ve discovered that Demos, the Blairite think tank, have published a free-to-download collection of essays on the subject. This is going to happen, in some shape or form – barring the possibility of a bird flu pandemic, or some other not-impossible catastrophe bringing global civilisation crashing down around our ears, of course. Simply put, medical breakthroughs are increasing, propelled by the wealth and numbers of the boomer generation – whose sudden recognition of their mortality has spawned a rash of articles recently. What kind of world will this be, where the wealthy can afford to live far beyond ‘normal’ lifestyles, while ecological collapse makes life harsher for everybody but especially the poor? Update, 11 Feb: Via Johnnie Moore, I find this post by Jeff Risley, which adds to what I was saying about Daoism. He writes this:

As we grow older, our minds begin to cloud. We form judgments about everything. We have pre-conceived notions about people and places and esoteric things like death. Because of the particular world-view we have developed, it’s difficult for us to experience anything with a “child’s mind,” or as though we’re experiencing it for the first time. But that’s exactly what we should strive to do.

As I said: mental, or physical, inflexibility lead ultimately to death. Maintaing mental and physical flexibility prolongs life ‘Non-attachment’ is of course a Buddhist concept as well: the two overlap on a lot of things. Vipassana meditation is great for working on this.