was bruce lee any good

Was Bruce Lee any good at martial arts? Ask anyone who punches, chops, kicks or throws as a hobby or even a living and the answer will be one of incredulity- isn’t it obvious? Of course he was good, he was amazing! Now you can see how people might get confused- all the cat squeaks, the ambiguous scratches on his body from the tiger claw of Han, the general kung fooey hysteria which still envelops martial arts from the Orient. And then there was his death at 32, very James Dean, just before the release of Enter the Dragon. So how do you know? How does a non-martial artist tell how good Bruce was?

Born in 1940 in Hong Kong into a family of well respected actors, Bruce Lee was in child movies from the age of 3 and by the time he left Hong Kong for America, when he was 18, he’d been in over a dozen feature films. If his aim had been to just be an actor, he could have stayed put. But acting was always just a vehicle for Lee to promote his fascination with martial arts, which initially was Wing chun kung fu, taught to him by the famous master Ip (or Yip) Man. But Bruce also boxed- becoming schools champion of Hong Kong and danced- winning the regional Cha-cha championships too. He also got into street fights, since one of the teaching ideas of Ip Man was that martial arts skills should be tested in real fights. Lee was suspended from school several times for applying this.

Lee had a half-German grandparent, and had been taunted as a youth for being part foreign. He decided to leave Hong Kong to attend college in Seattle. Here he found that the kung fu he knew, though good, had its limitations. It was a turning point . Wing Chun with its fast moves and low kicks wasn’t enough. He began to assimilate moves from Japanese and Korean arts taking everything that suited his style and physique and rejecting that which didn’t work for him. Usually this is a disaster- the equivalent of mixing curry with steak and chips- but in the hands of a master chef you also have the possibility of fusion cuisine of the highest order. This was what Bruce Lee called Jeet Kune Do- his own system that featured kicks, throws and any weapons he felt like using. In 1966 Bruce Lee appeared in the TV series The Green Hornet and this was a big hit in Hong Kong. He returned a hero to make the five feature films that made him world famous, and revealed just how good he really was.

Basically there are three ways to tell. Firstly, performing strings of complex moves is easy- look at Keanu Reeves in the Matrix- looks good but it’s all piffle. It’s harder to make a single move look good and even trickier to perform minor activities like walking, talking to others, even putting the salt down on the table. If it has pizzazz, clarity, springiness and above all timing then it’s a good sign. Bruce Lee (and Steve Mcqueen, one of his martial arts students) has all this in spades. Watch a Stallone movie- his timing is terrible. He acts in almost total isolation.

Next, you can tell how good someone is by their students. Apart from his Hollywood clientele Bruce Lee taught fighters such as Dan Inosanto and Taky Kimura, both of whom command great respect worldwide. Ever met anyone boasting of being taught by Jean Claude Van Damme?

Third- what’s it like being on the receiving end of their technique? There’s a sequence in Enter the Dragon during the outdoor tournament section when Bruce Lee kicks an opponent out of the ring. This guy is catapaulted back into the crowd. What you don’t see is the man behind who’s arm is broken by the sheer momentum of Lee’s kick at one remove. On another occasion when Lee was on Hong Kong TV, he was surprised by a test, set by the presenter, which was to push over a Tai Chi master, notoriously good at rooting themselves to the spot. In a flash the Tai Chi master has disappeared. What happened is too fast for the camera to catch. Finally the camera pans down to the master out cold on the floor. “I don’t push,” says Lee, “I punch.”

Was Bruce Lee any good? Of course he was!

paddleboarding marsa alam

In the previous post I mentioned I have just been to the ‘characters of Egypt festival’ in Marsa Alam. While there I decided to make use of the free time to do some inflatable paddleboarding in the red sea. The inflatable paddleboard is a brilliant invention as you can carry it on the plane, this time I used a collapsible paddle as my long paddle incurred a charge last time. My clothes were hand luggage and the weight of the paddle board and paddle was less than 15KG.

The flight from Cairo was less than an hour. The drive to the hotel was another hour. Marsa Alam, in trying to avoid the concentrated build up of Sharm and Hurghada is spread along a hundred km of seafront. This means each resort is huge and the beaches are clean and empty. Though rocky. Since the area is aimed squarely at divers and snorkellers the reef and the nearby drop off (you can swim out from the beach and see the deep blue after only thirty metres in many places) are given primacy over loads of soft sand. Which isn’t great for the inflatable paddleboarder in bare feet. So I made a mental note to bring slip on neoprene socks next time.

The weather was calm, very calm, hardly a wave being raised- which was fine by me- I just paddled around getting a good dose of exercise. It was warmer and more humid than other Red Sea resorts I have been too, but I would trade that any day for the emptiness and clear waters. There were more fish and more varied fish than I have seen close in to a hotel beach than anywhere else I have been too.

After taking a break to witness the musical extravaganzas at the festival, I walked back through the desert- the eastern desert is always a nice change from the western. It has plants and trees and lots more snakes. I did some more paddleboarding the next day going a long way out into the Red Sea. Emptiness and waves all around. Not so far away a dolphin fin broke the water. The sun shone. A nice place to be at the end of October.

crossing cairo roads

The key thing to remember when you launch out to cross any crazy road in Cairo is that you have as much right to be there as the biggest bus and the smallest moped. There is an essential democracy of the roads, which, though the biggest will tend to bully, they cannot take away from you. And every car driver accepts this. So if you should step right in front of something they may hoot and scream but they will stop. Not so in the West where a pedestrian’s rights only extend as far as the pavement and the zebra crossing. On the road he takes his life in his own hands. There are even countries like the US where crossing roads not at the special crossing is an offence. Get rid of that mindset in Egypt. Here, on the road, we have our right to be there, and, knowing this, one can launch into any stream of mad cars with equanimity. You will be respected, rather as a slow car is respected in the West when it tries to cross a busy road. If you launch out, cars will stop, not just because they don’t want an accident, but because you have as much right to be there as they do. Think of yourself as a very slow and very fragile car crossing a road of juggernauts. Lock eyes with oncoming drivers and never stop once you start moving, you may stall. Show decision and telegraph a clear trajectory so the oncomers can take early evasive action. Stand sideways if the gap between two headlong plunging bangers looks especially tight.

emotion and climate change

One major concern I have over climate change is that it leads to over emotional reactions to the evidence. Panicky advocates of nuclear power ‘because time is running out’ is one worrying example. They assume, for example, that the news is all bad. It isn’t. Vicky Pope, a scientist at the UKs Met Office warned the recent UN world climate conference in Geneva that recent dramatic Arctic ice loss was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming, as was previously thought. Preliminary reports suggest there is much less Arctic melting this year than in 2007/8. Climate physicist Mojib Latif of Kiel University, Gemany is an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He reported at the Geneva Conference that we are about to enter "one or even two decades of global cooling" rather than warming. He said, “People will say this is global warming disappearing. I am not one of the sceptics, however we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.” The atmosphere that surrounds discourse about global warming is emotional, not objective. All our information about climate change comes from computer models and from real measurements taken in the world. Now some of the most respected models are showing that global warming will decrease, for a while. And Arctic temperatures are confirming this. So the ‘problem’ of climate change is now one of global warming happening not now, but maybe twenty years away. This is not a strong enough reason to embrace nuclear technology as a quick fix ‘carbon emission’ solution. I disagree with any form of unsustainable energy as it seems plain greedy to want more than we ought to have. Those green activists who advocate nuclear power or weather 'engineering' (seeding clouds for rain etc) are committing a huge mistake based on misreading the often subtle evidence for climate change. The right move is directly towards complete dependence on wind, tidal and solar energy rather than setting a terrible example to the developing world by embracing nuclear technology and all its pathological implications.

characters of egypt

I have just returned from the fabulous entertainment offered by the 'characters of egypt' festival held this October in Marsa Alam on the Red sea. This festival operates every year and is rapidly growing it seems in popularity as you can actually camp on site or stay in a nearby hotel as we did. Hosted by the impeccable egyptian tourist authority the event featured traditional singing and activities by bedouin tribes from all over Egypt. I have a suspicion that this great venue will morph into a massive music festival something like the current offering in Mali- it would be wonderful to have all the bedouin musicians of the Arab and north african world meeting in such a great location as this.

Polymathic Quotation

“ A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly: specialization is for insects.”

Robert Heinlein

cairo nights 2

I drive at night reluctantly in Cairo, partly because I have poor night vision and partly because only one light works on my car and that single cyclopean light is wrongly adjusted so that it shines in everyone’s faces and mirrors and makes them flash angrily both red lights from behind or white lights from the front, or sometimes the plucking fruit gesture they make with extended arm sticking out of the car, this Cairene gesture deserves more than this but succinctly it means ‘cut me some slack will you?’ So usually I AM DRIVING ON SIDELIGHTS ONLY like some cave fish groping along half-blindly navigating the dim streets looking for the road where I dropped my daughter off only hours before in scorching daylight. Now the place is quite different, utterly different, a group of three men watch a TV propped on the curb- the only light source around, black wind rustles black leaves, side roads appear at random, or so it seems. Yesterday a man told me he couldn’t get used to not seeing the stars in Cairo, he was from new Zealand, a remote part I would say as not seeing the stars is what happens in any city you live in the world over. At least you can see the moon I said determined as I usually am to stick up for my adopted home. The moon is very yellow in Cairo , decadent, not like the icy silver moon you see in the frozen north. How can the moon vary so? It does. It also seems bigger on occasion, so big that it might break something, the night horizon, or be pregnant.

Of course I could fix my car but you see here in Cairo there is actually a law that says you should turn off your headlights when driving under streetlights. Police cars obey it as do many taxis. Me too. A strange pedestrian-friendly law. A strange law for a strange place.

When I park my car I look up at the sky and strain my eyes looking. There is one star, far off faint. All you need.