another rough poem (with help from crits from Scott) -

Exalt, and forget.

Exalt, I tell my body;
I arch my back to the ceiling,
open my mouth to the rain
of a stormy sky
in my mind's eye.

Forget.
Fire, ignite in my legs and hips,
in my nerves.
Burn, and cleanse -
exalt.

Breathe, I tell my body;
Stretch the skin,
flex and relax into the pain.
Let it go.
Let it go,
and forget.

Elongate, I tell a wet, bony chain -
my spine.
Tip my face back
to a dusty ceiling
and imaginary rain.
Free my body,
and exalt.

Free my breath, I tell my lungs,
and they glow, like embers.
Ground through my feet,
I tell my nerves,
electric.

I feel my heart beat.
I open my eyes to clouds,
and forget.

Exalt.

The Boondock Saints, with Willem Dafoe, Sean Flanery, and Norman Reedus. Clever, clever movie. Also very, very violent. Something about the style reminded me of Ghost Dog, though I'm not sure why; in any case, the continuous shifts back and forth of perspective and odd story certainly hold one's attention. My favorite aspect of it was that it had an undercurrent that was key to the entire movie, but never explicitly stated - just expressed in indirect, awesome lines or visual cues. Not really sure how to explain the movie, though; Alan and Wyatt said that nobody they knew who'd seen it had said anything bad about it, and Carolyn said it speaks for itself, and Bridget (looking at the cast list) said why haven't I heard of this movie?! So...that works for me.

The Aviator with Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett. Well, it wasn't particularly to my liking, but it was fascinating, I suppose, in a biographical sense. Part of the trouble was that I have no idea what was historically true and what wasn't, so I was continuously wondering; another part of the trouble, which shouldn't really count, was that this was one of those movies that was like doing my job at the hospital for the length of the movie, and not on a particularly pleasant day. The acting was great, but just because it was quality doesn't mean I wanted to watch a slow, downward spiral over three hours; I mean, it wasn't even like a tragedy, where it might have blossomed into an ending, rather than shrinking back into a corner.

-Logos Universal Conjugator - simple, useful

-Feng Zhu Design - some interesting concept art

No, I wasn't scheduled for Monday.
So why had I walked with my hood pulled low,
still stiff with sleep in the predawn black?

I wondered as I left
the permanent fluorescent day
and found myself in the sooty gut of a parking garage,

so I went up.
And began to cross the
concrete badlands, top floor.

At the edge, I waited.
I stood still, hood pulled back,
watching.

The sky was big -
everything earthbound seemed the minority,
even the mountains being bathed
in their first shadowed texture.

I wasn't really still, though;
even when the glow in the clouds began to blush,
I was impatient, caught up
in twilight dreams, and the stories behind headlights below.

When the sun bloomed inside the blush,
it caught me shifting my feet, fidgeting, but
my breath was not stilled.
I bowed my eyes to the glare,
but it was no different than what had come before.

I waited.
But when the blush cooled to blue
and the cloud's glow to gray,
it was another sky.

-Well, I think it needs revision; of what kind, i'm not sure. I think it needs to be smoother, and I'm not sure I've figured out exactly where I'm going with it. The trouble is, I got zero help from class, because reading the bloody thing seemed to nix any criticisms people had (they suggested I just send a cassette with any copy); I think that's just because I and the other guy who read it managed to smooth over the awkward parts with our intonation, but I don't know. So, any thoughts? And I need a title, we couldn't come up with anything good in class, either.

      From zero to infinity is infinite; but there are infinite divisions (decimal/fraction) between zero and one, so that's also infinite. So there are infinite infinities contained within infinity. Which sounds horribly inane when I say it like that, but in class it was profound, for a moment at least (we were getting into a discussion of the possible existence of a soul, and whether an afterlife is logically possible). Either way the idea of infinite is interesting to me because it has been an important part of what I believe spiritually for a long while now, and apparently it is an integral part of some philisophical ideas. Not in the same way, of course, but I'm down now for some healthy disagreement.

      The other recently new development at the Ko Sho dojos has been our communication with the Rincoln cage-fighting group (re: trained by UFC people, generally for the more local Rage in the Cage I believe). So far the relationship has seemed to be working out ok, in my opinion. Some of them come to us for experience training with different people, and to refine certain things like their throwing techniques. Trouble with that second part is that they don't seem to really want to actually listen for the most part, and then are confused when some of their stuff doesn't work. On our side of things we've gotten the same different-training-partners benefit, and some techniques from other martial arts (for example, augmented kneeling pins - my face hurts, like ow - or practice with the (half)guard). We get some odd mixes of people, though - kenpo/Brazilian jiujitsu versus aikido and wrestling versus Japanese jujitsu. And that's already added to our internal mixes like taekwondo versus karate and kung fu (wing chun and tai chi) versus kickboxing. We are diverse, let me tell you.

20Q - at first I thought it was a gimmick, but then it quickly guessed pangolin - I mean, whoa.

-the periodic can't-generalize-for-a-billion-people plug

      An article the other day gave me a nice opening in regards to asanas. Just like we're always looking for connections within texts in English classes, and between martial arts and techniques at the dojo, there are connections between various yoga poses. I'd had some inklings before, mostly in regard to what poses would help the development of other poses, but nothing so explicit as what this article pointed out. That is, take downward dog - on one's hands and feet, the body is held at a ninety degree angle, basically making an upsidedown "V" with the center of the body at the apex. In staff pose, one sits upright with their legs straight out in front of them...but in that regard the body is in the exact same position as downward dog, same ninety degree angle, just sitting down instead of balancing. Then there is a basic legs-up-the-wall pose just for relaxing - same thing as the previous two, but with the butt against the wall and the legs going straight up. So each has the body in the same position, but the dog pose really focuses on the back and calves, staff pose is a lighter stretch of the back and the hamstrings, and the last isn't so much a stretch as purely for relaxation. Anybody got anymore? I'm certainly going to be on the lookout now.

-Koo-ki Sushi - yes, yes it looks dubious but click on the 'if you knew sushi" part....so tasty...

-I love Nike commercials; now we just need to throw that gal in a capoeira roda

-Prometheus Spawning Grounds - some fun retro game art among other images

"We are all of us beginners and the knack of making an uneven wad of earth into a smooth shape while it's centered on a turning wheel - it's not the sort of task they're used to learning. They are intellectuals, used to mastering spreadsheet programs or new marketing paradigms, and to apply themselves to something that will not listen to reason...it's hard, frustrating."
      This passage really clicked with me. Not so much because I feel that I get frustrated in that way, but in that I get frustrated by the opposite. I enjoy martial arts and yoga and poetry and little crafts because in some way or another I enjoy working with the things that I feel don't listen to reason in some way or another. Of course reason is there on some level or another, but there is always some point for each of those things where to really get it one has to step outside of logic to some degree. Conversely, I have tried to work with some horribly intelligent people who have been intensely frustrated by martial arts because they are so used to just applying their mind to something and having it instantly work. I think that's also part of the reason that the existential philosophy class I'm in is rubbing me the wrong way; religion is included in the list of things outside of reason for me, and the class' (in my opinion narrow-minded) insistence upon pure rationality is beginning to chafe.

Power Yoga: Stamina with Rodney Yee. Sonuva....I got just one of the tapes for $5 at Bookman's, and now I find them on sale for even less? Ah well. Yee does a great job as usual with very clear, pleasant instructions. The sequence is a cycle of Sun Salutations that progresses steadily in depth and speed, and introduces some variants near the end. It's worked well as a kind of warm cool-down after a regular calisthenic workout for me.

-Army robots? - if I didn't know better, I'd say there's a Harry Potter reference right in the middle of that (via Wyatt)

-Fried Wontons - some cute art and comics

-yum. (via Scott)

-apparently the force of a nuclear weapon coming out of the same stuff that made up most of the solid propellant in the Precision 1 (via Phil)

-hey, if it tastes as good as the MRE's we had in Alaska, cool (via Scott)

      Aikido is often derided as being too passive to be called a martial art, and about that effective; the angle on that being that many aiki stylists push their 'nonviolent' path as a selling point. But here's the new local angle, as opened to the class's eye today: it's not that aikido is passive or nonviolent, but rather that it doesn't give the opponent anything to fight against. Now, to clarify. If a clinch or grapple occurs, the natural reflex is to tense up, to keep from getting thrown, brace for blows, &c. But aikido training focuses on staying relaxed - except for the moments when tenseness is needed - and flowing with what happens, or to put another way, accepting what the opponent does without second-guessing and blending to be part of it, to be a bit more zen about it. If an opponent tenses up before striking - they're nixed, they telegraphed. If an opponent tenses up, like the built-like-a-fireplug weightlifter the other day who lived in a state of perpetually flexed muscles, they get picked up and thrown in a feather-like manner. Except they hit the groud harder. That's also not to say that an aiki stylist has to be passive and wait to be attacked, as they are sometimes denigrated for; part of the training is exploding into movement for an opportunity that arises, and linking into jujitsu principles of flow between techniques. The trick is, developing that kind of mental/physical state means a lot of neuromusculature has to be rewired, to break old and make new reflexes.
      Which brings us to our (old) new friend - repetition! The Tucson Ko Sho dojos seem to have gotten into an odd place. We were teaching techniques, and lots of them, but only to the point where we would just get the idea of them. So we'd have a plethora of techniques, but not amazing skill in any particular area, unless we individually worked at it. But now we're getting back to old-school repeat everything a hundred times, and then a hundred more, damnit. Practice makes perfect after all, I suppose.
      The other thing that we've been incorporating specifically into the jujitsu classes on the east side is (what we call anyway) Session. It's kind of like sticky hands/chi sao, but there's no requirement to maintain contact between limbs. The targets (with any kind of upperbody strike, though usually no contact for elbows) are the side of the head and the torso. The strikes are almost secondary, however, to flowing into joint locks or manipulations, which is where the real difference from sticky hands is; upping the ante means attempting to chamber throws. That being said, at a basic level Session just means both people in firm horse stance - any large movement from that to create distance turns it into striking-sparring. With more joint locks small angling steps and foot replacement come into play, but usually no kicks, as that isn't the real point of it.

A Hunger Like Fire, by Greg Stolze. They're back, baby. White Wolf Publishing was starting to get a little to cornball for even me to get into, or rather away from anything that could be called horror, but after a suitably apocalyptic ending to their old lines - voila! And by horror I don't exactly mean modern slashcore, as it were, but something more approximate to gothic horror in a contemporary setting - cell phones and AIDS and all (with a delightful twist around focus on moral conundrums and consequences). The story for the most part seems to be an oblique introduction of Persephone Moore, a character who as far as I can tell will probably appear in more novels; in that, it rotates through the main characters' perspectives, each perspective subtly distinguished from the others, and opening up a wholly different chunk of backstory at a time. Unfortunately, however, there is a wealth of characters to keep track of, which is a bit daunting at first before they are each fleshed out and as the byzantine manipulatons develop. That's a minor issue, however, compared with character development based on what their perspective brings to the story and the moral choices they face and make.

-I can't figure out whether twinkie sushi is gross or not; which of course means I'll have to try it (via Scott)

      A long time ago I read an article that described using one's martial art every day. Basically, a student asked his teacher whether he had ever used his martial arts training; the teacher replied that he had only once used it in self-defense, and in that case it was only to restrain a mentally ill person - but he still maintained that he used it everyday. The perplexed student questioned him in this regard, whereupon the teacher responded by saying that he used the principles of his art in every day social situations (the article went on to describe specific examples of conflict management &c). So the reason I thought of this was because in the middle of philosophy today (which can basically be characterized here) I realized the teacher was kind of doing it. I seriously doubt he does any martial arts, but I recognized him blending with what people were saying by repeating their arguments in different words, then turning it around on them. Or, if someone just wasn't getting what he was saying, he flowed from the example he was using smoothly into another.

      Somewhat tangentially, the head instructor at the dojo used an interesting analogy today: the ABC's. When one learns them, one sings them in their specific order, and then learns to put them together to make words, and words to sentences, &c. So kata/forms are kind of like the original song; then you take the component parts out as needed. The words in this case are variously, say, boxing combinations, or karate hand/foot combinations, or counter vs counter in jujitsu. Then, stringing the words together forms conversation, which is another common analogy. Or this could be taken through many threads, that's one right there at any rate.

House of Flying Daggers, aka Ambush from Ten Sides in China, aka Lover in Japan; with Ziyi Zhang, Kaneshiro Takeshi, and Andy Lau. The martial arts were top notch, and even the sleeve thing which vaguely irritated me at first had its own sort of consummation. Kaneshiro was a pleasant surprise, and interestingly his Mandarin was also surprisingly skilled. In that lingual regard, apparently the inherent meaning of this movie wasn't so lost in translation as in Hero, but just some shadings of the flirtations and lovers' proclamations were distorted. The consensus in regards to Ziyi was that she wasn't even so annoying as the normal distractingly irritating; she didn't even flare her nostrils once, but Michelle did note some twitching of the ears. *spoiler* I thought it was interesting that Lau's character was the only male associated with a seemingly all-female society, in that if you took the thready thread of that making him obliquely feminine, what does that say about the feminine in the movie? Though I suppose I should probably stay away from any genderific pondering; I mean, hey, I still like and enjoy Kill Bill ;).

Xuemei's Nice Meal of the Day:
-tofu noodle, chicken, mushroom and cabbage stirfry
-firm tofu and broccoli stirfy
-wonton, mushroom, and cilantro soup

-some useful tips on yoga-style bridging, well at the beginning and end, basically; now I'd love it if someone found something similar for me for a wrassler's bridge

-what a great setting for a skiffy story; tangentially, I hope someone can come up with a simple, non-physics way of explaining to me what happens when a singularity falls into a singularity - there seems something kind of boggling about the idea of that

-cavemen vs dinosaurs: round one! - okay yeah that is entirely misleading but there are mammals involved

-I demand there be more research on sprites and elves (via Wyatt)

-it probably doesn't help that I'm hungry (and they're from Belgium! crazy.)

      So why do they bother teaching people English? People know their own language, right? They know how to read, yes? I'm sure there are many answers of the patently obvious sort to respond to that, but one that I hadn't thought too much about till recently was that the English subject is partly about teaching critical thinking (the sad trick of it being that many English teachers don't seem inclined to teach that, apparently, which is what the new "AIMS-centered" class is ironically set for fixing). So, besides the patently obvious again, why bother with that skill? Because in order to have critical thinking, one needs to recognize one's own perspective as only one upon many perspectives - sometimes simply in different registers, sometimes in a hierarchy - but that's why English also teaches rhetoric and argument. But, the value of that baseline skill of critical thinking is, hopefully, patently obvious.

Battlestar Galactica, (of which I saw my first couple of episodes today) seems to be very mature and promising show. They bill it as an 'adult show with adult themes,' which doesn't mean sex or gore in this case, but complicated characters and a pretty heavy storyline. I was hurting for backstory, however, but the show's website fixed that with a glance. Not bad for a remake of something from the seventies.

Elektra - with Jennifer Garner and Goran Visnjic. I thought it was okay, just really underdeveloped. I was disappointed by the lack of visible martial arts, especially considering how good Garner usually is in a fighting role, but mollified by the fantastic nature of what there was. I was confused a few times in watching Garner, because angst plus her usually equals Alias. I was also a little disappointed by how little some of the secondary villians were used, though I think that having Bob Sapp in any movie is hilarious. So, hey, it was alright - girl power!

-finally, Titan; been waiting for this

-in middle school they had us write letters to random companies to ask for free samples

-old school Old Main; that is amazing, I tell you (via Scott)

(a bit odd because from a scifi novel, but...)
"I know you can learn to read."
"But what if I can't?"
"If it'll make you feel better, you don't have to. You can learn a few key words, a few symbols. Few people choose to read these days. They watch the trid and the flat for news and entertainment. They use icon and voice-based computers to move data around for their employers. Programmers are literate in the comp language, but not much else. The only people who have to worry about reading are the ones that make it all work. They have to know how to read to keep things going, to improve the tech. But it's rare. You can get by without reading if you want. You'll learn a few words, like STOP, and you'll see them just like icons, and that'll be that."
      So basically the author was getting that maybe there isn't a sharp black and white distinction between literatacy and illiteracy. That and more interesting ideas in Changeling, by Chris Kubasik. This novel takes basically all the things other Shadowrun novels take for granted and explores them in-depth, which makes a better straight up skiffy book, but less of a Shadowrun story in some ways. While piecing together some of those ideas for the plot, however, Kubasik strays into something of the pedantic at times. The ending is a little too pat for me, but the heavy/raw feeling at the beginning makes up for that.

Shhhh.... - just like in Deus Ex; does that vaguely creep anyone else out?

McShuarma - on that razor edge between disturbing, sad and funny. An edge can have three sides if I say it can.

-ahh, the "land tank;" I think the redundancy of that lends itself to the article

-great cause, kid, but now I have to fear for my life if this spreads

      Xuemei said an interesting thing - that when learning some things, sometimes it is better to not think, and sometimes it is better to think too much, than to only half, distractedly think about it. She was knitting at the time, but another good example I think is martial arts (natch). Sometimes it is better to not think at all, and just let your body do it (you performing the action, as opposed to your mind telling your body to perform the action). And sometimes to learn you have to have complete focus. But too much thinking can hinder the body from doing its thing. Either way, only half-thinking about it never gets the job done.

The Phantom of the Opera-with Emmy Rossum and Gerard Butler. For the most part, I liked this version better than the original. I definitely liked Rossum over Sarah Brightman, in any case. I wish I was still taking literary theory at the moment, as there are so many things going on in this musical that deal with the uncanny and the abject, not the least of which being the Phantom and Christine's reciprocal identifications (tied in with so many mirror motifs!). Carolyn even noticed a narcissistic catch in the song with 'the point of no return' line in it, in that that might be the point where the Narcissus-figure (practically tripled in this case) realized it can't have itself, as it were. And then there's the whole mask motif, I mean....yes, well, I could go on.

-The Free Fall Research Page - possibly silly, but I like the line, "Mount it and ride, cowboy!"

-Tucson Roller Derby - Rollerskates. Violence. Yes.

-Eric Kellerman Photography

-Varieties of English - probably better with some linguistics knowledge, but still kind of fun

2XS - by Nigel Findley. While there have only been a couple Shadowrun novels I didn't particularly like, I can't decide if this one fits into that category or not. On one level, I really did end up caring about the main characters, and that along with the wealth of description provides a nice depth to the writing. Sometimes, however, the amount of detail just becomes tedious, and while I usually enjoy the darker endings and characters this author creates, they are kind of mood-dependant as to whether they end up depressing the reader, I think.

Xuemei and Magda's Nice Meal of the Day:
-breaded pork chops
-zuchinni and garlic stirfry
-rice
-orangina
--ladyfingers, double fudge ice cream, topped with berry mix
--vanilla cinnamon tea

      The sky was red tonight, from the city light on the clouds. It reminded me of California. Trees were silhouetted black, clearly so, and every light had its own cone of existence. And the plume of steam down the way is towering, rather than enveloping. Interesting night out. There's no horizon, like a foggy sea-no horizon.

Code 46 - with Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. There's a huge amount going on in this movie, but it's kind of hard to tell without a good deal of attention paid. It seems based around a whole bunch of different SF ideas, but never explicitly defines any of them. A healthy knowledge of Spanish, French, Arabic, and Mandarin might be useful, as they are mixed pretty freely with English throughout. One might say it was a twisty tangent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Gattaca, with something of a less lurid William Gibson or Peter Watts novel thrown in.

Garden State with Zach Braff and Natalie Portman. A wonderful, quick movie, and not just because I'm that much of a fan of Portman. To me it seemed deceptively simple, that is, without ostentatious acting and complex enough underneath to warrant a repeat viewing, like a novel where you miss things the first time through. I particularly enjoyed how the story repeatedly blossomed in scope from a single, well put sentence.

Moving Towards Stillness, by Dave Lowry. A fomer columnist for Black Belt magazine, Lowry put me off a bit in the first several essays of the collection by being so over the top Japan-o-philic, but as I got further into the book there was less of that and more thoughtful discussions of various concepts. One off the top of my head was just a pointing out that as much as the analogy of bamboo bending to survive where more brittle plants wouldn't is used a great deal, it forgets that the roots of each bamboo plant intertwine to support each other, making a strong foundation where otherwise the tall stems would just tip over. Or, an essay based around a statement by a famous potter, Shoji Hamada: "There are two kinds of people: those who make themselves the center, who live as though their ancestors lived only to create them; and those who make themselves as low as possible, consider themselves nothing in relation to the whole, live in order to protect and cherish what their ancestors lived or and who bear children in order to pass on that idea of protecting and cherishing. Most artists fall into the first classification. Most artisans in the second one."

Filthy, Gorgeous - because drag queens rule. I remember the interesting posit from that arts class I took that a crossdresser can be more masculine/feminine than the sex they're impersonating could be, because in not being that sex, they are able to understand it in a different way.

Kingdom of Heaven - looks to be the movie about the Crusades I've been waiting for; I just hope they show the Muslims in a fair light, that would be nice.

      In the imagination-full Vampire: the Requiem book that I've been savoring, in the section where they define what a vampire is for their purposes they pulled an interesting thing. That is, at the point where a person is made a vampire, they stop growing emotionally or maturing. They might gain immense amounts of knowledge or be that much smarter over years of unlife, as it were, but will never go beyond the emotional maturity at which they died. That, and the emphasis on what suddenly becoming an out-and-out predator might do to the psyche are just a couple of the interesting implications in, as the authors point out at the start, is supposed to be an exploration of one's self as much as the story or characters in question.

my parents' Nice Meal of the Day:
-spicy chicken and green bean stirfry
-rabbit tempura
-rice

-quantum darwinism - very interesting article, kind of reminds me of Mage: the Ascension, Kevin said it made him think of the novel Starfish (via Kevin)

Music to Slay By - fun site for Abigail Whistler fans (via Scott)

-phonetic symbol guide - kind of fun to play around with

-scrambled course catalogs - well, I actually thought it was a real catalog before I read the top (via Kevin)