Would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies? (May/June 2004)

[SimonW]

Finally got hold of the latest issue.

Bit of a mixed bag really. Not because of suject - it's always interesting to read about the 'internal' styles - but because of some of the self promotion going on. Though as Gene has pointed out before unfortunately the mag depends on 3rd party contributors.

One article that stood out for me in this regard was the Wing Tsun interview. The way that the interviewee blatantly referred to one of his interviewers in the 3rd person sense by saying he was a really good teacher symbolises what I hate about most UK martial arts mags.

If any contributors are reading this, I'll just reiterate that I still really miss the days when the mag had a lot of impartial historical articles, or first hand accounts from people who had learnt off the masters of old.

I have never been a fan of technique application articles for the sole reason that I don't believe in being able to learn a martial art from a magazine. That's what martial arts teachers are for. While showing techniques can give some insight into how other styles operate, I believe that such things can be illustrated far better and in a more interesting context in other ways.

[GeneChing]

Thanks for chiming in. I think you might be looking at a lot of those old articles through rose-tinted glasses. True impartiality is very difficult to achieve - it's akin to being free of ego. But clearly, most submissions are overly self-promotional. Such is the nature of the beast (but you should see some of the stuff we reject )

As for technical articles, your opinion is very interesting since most of our readership have specifically asked for more technical material. I understand your point about learning, but I personally disagree. You can learn from anything. Every teacher, every article, every bit of martial arts knowledge, they are all just doorways. You can't learn anything from a doorway unless you go through it. Now obviously, it helps when some one like a human master tells you exactly how to go through it. But the ancestors learned from primordial doorways, like watching snakes and cranes, clouds and gods, expressions of power in nature. This is a much more difficult way to learn then having a human teacher, but not outside the realm of possibilities. Personally, I try to learn something from everything I experience, even if the lesson is just how NOT to do it. That's actually the most valuable of all. Research indicates that the main difference between an expert and a novice is that an expert does not explore as many fruitless pathways, whereas a novice will waste a lot of opportunities by following dead ends. It can be very self-limiting anytime you say you can't learn from something.

Well, that was a bit of a rant. Thanks again for your comments everyone. I know my reactions probably appear defensive, but what do you expect? I truly enjoy these threads because at least I know some one is reading us here.

[SimonW]

LOL, nope, no rose tinted glasses. I quite often go back and re-read a lot of them.

I understand what you are saying about learning from everything, and it is true that some insight can be gained from technical articles. However, especially with Chinese martial arts, there can be many minor details that are not conveyed through the articles that can make or break a technique. Further, many Chinese styles rely on sense of touch as well. Something that cannot be learnt without proper instruction.

But mainly I find the technical articles to be written in a very dull way! Technical yes, but some of them seem to be on the level of a car manual in terms of writing style. And on top of that many seem to take the most basic parts of a system and end up repeating themselves over several pages. Often I find I have read 3 pages of nothing.

This is why I suggested that perhaps there was another way for writers to tackle the technical issue. Perhaps placing the techniques in historical context, or combining such step by step approaches in an article that gives a detailed history of the style, or particular master of a style. This way there would be some real meat to such a piece. Rather than, as is often the case for me, the article is so technical it would only be of interest to practitioners of the style being written about. Further still I have personally never been a fan of 'technique A defeats technique B' style instruction. As we all know the real world isn't that perfect!

IMHO I find pure instructional/technical articles to be much like bad film reviews. Instead of commenting on the qualitiies of the film the writer will just describe each event in the film. So I find such articles to be lacking in imagination on the writers part. I will concead that one technical article I liked was the one by Adam Hsu. He took his own knowledge of the styles he knew, but wrote a technical piece that applied to all martial artists, as well as giving something for people to think about. That is the kind of thinking that is needed if technical articles are going to become more prolific in the magazine.

Now I know that some people didn't like that article (although I also know that some reasons for that were politically based more than anything), but at least he tried to approach such an article from a different angle and enabled people from all styles to understand what he was saying.

[GeneChing]

...it's not technical articles that you dislike so much as boring articles. Well, I certainly respect that. FWIW, the article that I would consider the most technical - Ayron Howey's Sanshou piece - has garnered the most compliments so far. Go figure. That one was just three linking combintations - very sparse - but some people like it that way.

The one thing that we all have to consider is that CMA is an immense field. We try to cover all the bases as in depth as possible, which means that there's almost always going to be something that's not in your area, unless your a real CMA freak. However, it may well be exactly what another CMA person might be interested in. At least we don't cover TKD...