In the dojo now

A martial art from the Rising Sun
Before you do it, it sounds like fun
You're in the dojo now
Oh, oh, you're in the dojo now

Now you remember what the chairman said
Just some suburi on a fictitious head
You're in the dojo now
Oh, oh, you're in the dojo now

You’ll be the hero of the shiai-jo
If only you could hit some do
You're in the dojo now
Oh, oh, you're in the dojo now

Polite bows before the “hajime!”
When your true weakness shows there’s just one way
You're in the shiai-jo now
Oh, oh, you're in the shiai-jo now

Men ippon scored in only one go
It hurts a lot when you are toe on toe
If you want to survive you better practice do
You're in the shai-jo now
Oh, oh, you're in the shiai-jo now

Kiai ring out in the dead of night
The sensei calls (stand up and fight)
You're in the dojo now
Oh, oh, you're in the dojo now

You've got your training schedule
Be it dark or light
You practice footwork
But it don't seem right
You're in the dojo now
Oh, oh, you're in the dojo now
You're in the dojo now
Oh, oh, you're in the dojo now

After 1000 haya-suburi there’s only sweat I see
Are kata illusion or reality?
You're in the dojo now
Oh, oh, you're in the dojo now
You're in the dojo now
Oh, oh, you're in the dojo now

Once

Some quotes I stumbled over in the last weeks:

From Babylon 5 (I re-watched all seasons recently - fun :D)

"I don't watch TV. It's a cultural wasteland filled with inappropriate metaphors and an unrealistic portrayal of life created by a liberal media elite."

(not quite as good as Ivanova's:
"Who is this? Identify yourself?"
"Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova, Commander, daughter of Andre and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengence and the boot that is gonna kick your sorry ass back to earth. I am death incarnate. And the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me."
...but also quite amusing when hearing it in the series.)


And from a book I've just finished reading:

"Linda Stone [...] labeled the disease of the Internet age 'continuous partial attention'-two people doing six things, devoting only partial attention to each one-she remarked to me, 'We're so accessible, we're inaccessible. We can't find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves. We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise. We are everywhere-except where we actually are physically."

and

"Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?
By dreams I mean the positive, life-affirming variety. [...] 'One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries. You don't want to forget your identity. I am glad you were great in the fourteenth century, but that was then and this is now. When memories exceed dreams, the end is near. [...]' In societies that have more memories than dreams, too many people are spending too many days looking backward. They see dignity, affirmation, and self-worth not by mining the present but by chewing on the past. And even that is usually not a real past but an imagined and adorned past. Indeed, such societies focus all their imagination on making that imagined past even more beautiful than it ever was, and then they cling to it like a rosary or a strand of worry beads, rather than imagining a better future and acting on that."

***

Last week I noticed one of the small, private bookshops in downtown had closed down. It had been a family business for 200 years. The small note on the door sounded as if the owner had had a very hard time actually deciding he had to close the shop for good. Seeing it hit me by surprise, too, even though it shouldn't. You grow so familiar with the small businesses that you walk past regularly that you take them for granted.
But, shamefully I have to admit it has been years since the last time I bought a book there. My tries to buy local products haven't really gone much further than the food-sector.

I was similarly surprised when I walked into the Moviemento on Thursday and saw masses of people queuing up for the film I wanted to see. It seems arthouse films aren't so much arthouse anymore when it comes to the audience. That's probably good. Hollywood shouldn't be the only one to make money.
The film I saw was Once. I was a bit unhappy at first, because the film had German subtitles, but ended up being happy about that because the story is set in Dublin and one of the protagonists is Irish - so I got to listen to that lovely Irish accent after not having heard it in a long time. Overall, the language was a big treat in the film. Like many other aspects, it felt very natural and realistic. It isn't the polished, movie-English that you get in most films nowadays. It's colloquial, down-to-earth and how I remember people speak (sometimes painfully so, bringing up old memories).
The music is another treat. It has a big part in the film, and admittedly, I only wento to watch the film because I had listened to the soundtrack over and over again in the last weeks and it stayed with me all the time (you can listen to all of it here).
All in all, it's a very rare and special film. I don't remember the last time I sat in a cinema and forgot where I was, completely emerged in the story that evolved between the screen and my mind. Walking out of the cinema, I was speechless, slightly confused and in a way out of touch with my surroundings, as a part of me was still within the story.
It was quite an experience.

***

Small memory from last month:

Langenzersdorf

I paid Vienna a visit this weekend and went to the medieval craft fair in Langenzersdorf. It was a really nice event - no fee and very much focused on education and passing on information on all sorts of stuff from the Middle Ages. I loved how open and friendly everyone was, ready to explain everything and talk about anything, especially the guys from the Wiener Wache/Dreynschlag. Markus and me spent a long time talking to them about their group, fighting styles and training. Very, very informative and interesting (of course, I couldn't stop finding comparisions to Kendo).
Just a pity that the weather wasn't all that good. That night there had been a storm, and the people sleeping in tents had a quite eventful "rest".
Also talked a bit with Viatores Vitiosus about leatherwork, since I'm really intrigued by it and would like to start it myself. It looks like that will be a bigger (ahem, financial and temporal) investment, so I need to think about it some more.

Photos:


Pretty armor


Arduinnas Gefährten showing their skills with a bow (later they shot with their feet - yes, really)


Music, my favourite part of these markets


The highlight of the day - two trebuchets. One big, one smaller, shooting 150m into a field. In the evening, they shot fireballs :->

Sunday was Kendo training in Vienna. It amused me to see how everything is connected. One day I talk with Dreynschlag about footwork in historical fencing, the next day we practice ashi sabaki. Everything's connected, and the more you learn, the more connections you find.

An Ode to Humanity

From my research:

The folk tale is not afraid of greatness. It believes that humanity is not a drab collection of mediocrities, but that nearly everybody has some poetry in him, and that it can flower at times into something which leaves the earth altogether and strikes the stars. Because it believed in human nature it believed that human nature could transcend itself [...]
- John Buchan, The Novel and the Fairy Tale

We're living in a time that likes to emphasise the wounds that mankind deals to nature. Many people feel they have an easier time dealing with inanimate matter than with other people; - which makes this almost a century old sentiment nicely refreshing. It's good to be reminded every now and then that everybody is special in their own way, and you only need to take the time to discover their singularity (the "greatness of little things in others", as the Book of Tea says). I like to lament the self-destructive way of mankind myself quite often, but if All of Humanity was really that bad, I think we wouldn't be here anymore. Most of the people we encounter are inherently good.
The quote also reminded me of one of my teachers in my first year of uni, who made us learn a poem by heart. He said that in several years' time we probably wouldn't remember the poem anymore (he was right), but that a small part of the poem would remain within us and make us more beautiful.

This also ties in with something that Takuan writes about education:

Menschenliebe ist die natürliche Gesinnung des Menschen. Pflicht ist der natürliche Weg des Menschen. Wie traurig ist es, wenn einer seinen Weg verlässt und nicht darauf wandelt, wenn einer sein Herz verloren gehen lässt und nicht weiß, wie er es wieder finden kann!
Wenn einem Menschen ein Huhn oder ein Hund verloren geht, so weiß er, wie er sie wieder finden kann; aber sein Herz geht ihm verloren, und er weiß nicht, wie suchen. Die Bildung dient uns zu nichts anderem als nur dazu, unser verlorengegangenes Herz zu suchen.
- Zen in der Kunst des kampflosen Kampfes

Which makes poetry one of the means to find our heart and the love within us, in order to transcend ourselves and reach the stars. People should read more.

***

Last week I went to a cabaret. The media was there, so now here's a short video of the music that was played there with an interview of Leonding-based band Rhiannon.

***

Tehehe :->



(Apologies for only posting these small, silly comic pictures recently. There's not much time to work on the big illustrations.)

Impressions

I love how life repeatedly shows me that it is to a great degree fate-based. Things you do show their after-effects almost a decade later (e.g. if I hadn't played a certain MMORPG in 2001, I wouldn't be doing Kendo now). Sometimes it seems that most of the good stuff in life is based on coincidences. Maybe karma has its part, too. Whatever it is, I like it.

***

Small stuff that found its basis in the Kendo training of the last few days.

From the weekend:



And from Monday's training:



(Uh, I should stop mixing languages in pictures...)