Martial Arts 2: Electric Boogaloo: The Street-quel

Previously, I posted a blog entry about martial arts and the scientific method.  In it I talked about how important aliveness is to a productive learning environment, that way you can actually pull off what you learn.  After I posted it, martial arts schools around the world began incorporating more aliveness into their curriculums, while those who didn’t were forced to shut down in shame.  Thanks to that entry, I am now stacking paper to the ceiling and riding on 24 inch chrome.

Okay, that story is as full of myth and magic as the stories you heard in your Karate class growing up.  In reality, a lot of people who responded wanted to know about self-defense specifically, which makes a lot of sense.  What good is an activity that improves your health, self-confidence, concentration ability, body awareness, speed, strength, and coordination if you can’t use it to hurt someone?  Some people went even further and pointed out that alive arts can’t prepare you for the streetz because of all the deadliness.

Honestly, these people have a point, but not in the way they think they do.  Its like when you agree with someone that you’re both disappointed with Obama’s presidency, but as you begin to express your disappointment that he hasn’t closed Guantanamo Bay, they start going off on a tangent filled with so much closet racism that coat hangers become the new international symbol for hatred.  The fact of the matter, though, is that alive martial arts can’t completely prepare you for the streetz.

I’ve never gotten into a fight in the streetz, but I’ve gotten very close many times and have seen quite a few happen right in front of me.  You want to know what stopped me each time from getting into one?  If you think emotional maturity and feeling like I have nothing to prove is the answer, then you’ve never met a male between the ages of fourteen and dead.  The reason is because every fight I’ve ever seen outside of a school yard (and plenty of them on one, as well) has involved either weapons, far superior numbers, or far superior weapon numbers.  Knives, bats, brass knuckles, gun blades- I’ve seen them all.

I’ve..  sniff…  lost many a friend to the gun blade.

To think knowing how to properly pull off a jab-cross or uchi mata will help you get through ten opponents or someone with a knife is as misguided as thinking a snap kick will do anything other than let nearby predators know that you will be their easiest kill of the day.  You simply can’t prepare for such an unpredictable, dangerous event in any sort of controlled environment that requires respect for your opponent’s safety and genitalia.  However, and this is important, an alive martial art is immensely better than a shitty interpretive dance.

If you wanted to use eye jabs on people, which would you rather take: boxing, which teaches you how to properly throw and avoid punches, or a shitty LARP fest where you throw eye jabs in slow motion at someone who isn’t even trying to block, stopping right before you hit them?  If you were a boxer and tried to pull off a finger job, all you’d have to do differently is point out your fingers when throwing punches.

If you did a “deadlier” martial art, though, the list of things you’d have to change on the spot would be much longer.  You’d have to learn how to react when your opponent is actively trying to block instead of compliantly letting you attack them, deal with them actually attacking back instead of just absorbing what you are throwing, raise your qi to a level deadlier than your opponents, roll for a +5 to agility, and fight in a way that doesn’t reveal you’ve been training in something better suited for opening a plastic water bottle case than poking out a person’s eyes.  I’ll take boxing, thanks.

Some “clever” people are going to want to point out that you train the way you fight.  I’ll respond with this: you’re about as clever and free thinking as someone who points out that Justin Bieber or Twilight are terrible, an observation so safe and bland trying to disguise itself as edgy that it probably writes jokes for Jeff Dunham.  Also, while alive martial arts don’t train with deadly techniques, martial sharts (my new name for shitty martial arts that lack aliveness) train slow, without a resisting opponent, and people usually stop their attacks before the “kill” (read: mildly uncomfortable) position.  In actuality, this argument could be reversed and used against these people much more effectively.  In debate we call that a "turn" and in freestyle ciphers we call that an "oh shit, son!"

 

Here is a video where Bas Rutten explains in two minutes why LARPers' deadly patty cake game wouldn't work in an actual fight, as well as the fact that you should never fuck with Bas Rutten (perhaps the most important lesson of all).

I know a lot of people aren’t going to like this, and explain their combat ideas as if abstract theorizing will ever help you outside of an 8 year old ass kick fantasy.  To quote Mike Tyson, “everyone has a plan until they get hit.” If you heard that quote and want to give me a lecture on how you could use a special striking technique you've mastered that would let you push someone’s nose cartilage into their brain, I already know I can beat you in a fight.  If you attacked me at a bar I’d say the exact same thing your former significant other used to say: “the only reason I haven’t called the police is because of how unthreatening you are when you put your hands on me.”

This man has bitten another human being’s ear off, and he is still more pragmatic than most RBSD practitioners.

Then again, maybe these martial sharts actually do train with Death Kumites when people aren’t looking.  In boxing, it is well known that constantly being hit on the head takes a toll on the brain, especially when you compete at high levels.  Considering how stupid, corny, and pseudo-philosophical martial sharters are when they speak or type, theres a very real chance that they test their deadly moves out on each other under the light a full moon.  Many don’t survive, and those that do, well…  the night, it…  it changes them.

Even if that awesome theory isn’t true, though, I think I may have another.  In fact, I think I may have blown the lid off the entire Ninjitsu disciple.  In most parts of the world, self-defense laws only let you react with a certain amount of force or else you cross the line from victim to assailant (unless you’re Israel, that is). With such an ineffective style, anything that isn’t an emotionally riveting ballet recital or Firaga spell will probably qualify as “excessive force.”  After suing you, your assailant can then sneak back into the shadows with all your riches- it is the way of the shinobi.

My UFC 140 Experience

Today I watched the final three fights of UFC 140 with my friends (along with a prelim card spliced between the Lil Nog/Ortiz and Big Nog/Mir fights, though I won’t describe it as I didn’t pay much attention to it), and it was insane.  We watched it Wings N Things, sitting at a pool table that was converted into a make shift table for us to sit down at.  I was happy to see everyone else there look like regular, everyday folk.

Other times I have seen UFC events at bars I noticed the typical people associated with its early subculture: tough guy skin heads with Tapout shirts and scowls that they had rightfully earned by their tough, limit testing two free lessons at an MMA gym.  As the UFC becomes more mainstream it is starting to lose touch with its earlier subculture, like anything that goes from niche to popular, and I must say that this is a case of cultural hegemony that I am totally okay with.

Tito Ortiz and Antonio Rogerio Nogueira faced off in the first fight that I will describe.  Tito Ortiz is nicknamed “The Huntington Beach Badboy,” and is even more of a diva than that moniker implies.  Once, after beating a fighter named Guy Mezger, he actually had a shirt ready to wear that said “Gay [sic] Mezger is my Bitch!”  Antonio Rogerio Nogueira, also known as Lil Nog, was derived from his older brother Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira through a series of spells obtained from the Necronomicon.   The original plan was to create a Nogueira for everyone weight class, but a group of intrepid youth destroyed the accursed text before the laws of nature could be further perverted.

When the fight started, Ortiz opened with a flurry of shots that illustrated he wasn’t the fighter he used to be.  He shot for a leg hug, but Lil Nog was able to deflect it like it wasn’t no thang.  The two were exchanging hits until finally Lil Nog hit Ortiz with a left hook that opened him to a crazy flurry of punches, the likes of which you usually only see in an anime.  Speaking of anime, Lil Nog spent the rest of the round taking advantage of Ortiz in a way that would fit right in with weird anime porn.  Lil Nog was the tentacle monster, Ortiz the oddly childlike victim, and the audience the sick fucks who were actually getting some sort of pleasure out of all this.

As the flurry went on, Lil Nog hit Ortiz with a knee that put him to the canvas quicker than an artist’s paint brush with marijuana.  From there Ortiz was able to regain his composure enough reclaim his guard, but it was pointless.  It would be like a member at Westboro Baptist fixing his hat before giving a sermon to make sure he didn’t come off as crazy.  Lil Nog kept pounding away at Ortiz, who was covering up and offering no sort of offense.  I think the knee may have scrambled Ortiz’s mind around so badly that he actually thought he was a punching bag.  Meanwhile, the ref watched with a tragic sort of apathy.  It felt like I was watching a documentary about the Rwandan genocide and the ref was the international community.  Finally, just as I started dialing the number for Amnesty International, the fight was ended and we all felt a little bit worse about ourselves.

Next was Frank Mir and Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, the twin “brother” of Lil Nog.  Both Mir and Big Nog have surprising similar styles: they are primarily Brazilian Jiu-jitsu practitioners, have established a solid striking skill set to balance out their fighting abilities, and are badass enough to have withstood attacks by motor vehicles (Big Nog by a truck when he was a kid and Mir by a car while on his motorcycle during his time in the UFC).  Mir was considered to have a slight edge with striking while Big Nog was considered to have the edge on the ground.  The two had fought before, where Frank Mir defeated Big Nog by technical knockout.  This time would go a little differently.

When the fight started, it was clear the two were out to destroy each other.  They hit and wrassled with the type of stubborn intensity you see from people who are each convinced they are correct in a Facebook argument.  Eventually, Big Nog hit Mir with a left hand that dropped him in a manner almost identical to the way Lil Nog had dropped Ortiz before. The stars began to align and everything was going just the way the prophecy had foretold; the elders watched with grim acceptance. 

Big Nog jumped on Mir to get in a guillotine that seemed more like a formality than anything at that point.  However, Mir still had some fight in him and rolled them over.  The two began to fight for position with so much rolling I thought they were trying to intimidate each other by acting like car wheels.  Eventually, in a stunning upset, Mir ended up with a perfect kimura locked on Big Nog.  I don’t know anything about Brazilian body language, but apparently tapping just isn’t part of their body’s vocabulary.  Mir had to destroy Big Nog’s arm to end the fight, as well as any chance of the prophecy coming to fruition.  It was shocking for Mir to win by submission; it was the equivalent of beating someone in the Guinness Book of World Records at a time wasting contest.  The elders were once again at ease.

The main event of the evening was Lyoto Machida vs Jon Jones.  Lyoto Machida is a counter fighter and one of the few fighters who have successfully used Karate as his MMA base.  Jon Jones is a lab experiment designed to see if creativity and Mr Fantastic’s DNA could become a successful MMA fighter.  Up until this point Jones had never been seriously challenged, succeeding in reminding human beings just how fragile we are.  Going into the fight, no one expected Machida to win.  Watching him walk into the cage was like watching a black guy or scantily clad white woman go investigate a strange sound in a horror movie.  We couldn’t bring ourselves to look away, partially because we paid to get in and partially because the human psyche has some very dark corners.

The fight started with Jones crouched down as the two fighters approached each other, and everyone watched with more anticipation than they would watching a news report about a celebrity meltdown that involved side boob.  The two started slow, just trying to test each other out.  They each avoided strikes as if they were big corporations in a developing nation.  Then Machida got the better of Jones in an exchange where he was able to use his Shotokan skills to quickly get in and out to avoid any real damage.  He then did it again, and again.  The crowd was stunned, especially Jones’s corner, which was composed of scientists with the type of questionable ethics that Nietzsche warned about.  By the time the first round ended, the unthinkable happened: not only did Machida still possess use of his cognitive faculties, but he had actually won the first round!  It was proof that a level 33 monk could stand up to an aeon.  Ordinary humans around the world cheered, while Fantastic Four fans and “human” experiments sat disappointed.

The next round looked like the first, until Jones was able to use his wrestling.  He got Machida up against the fence and got a takedown.  While Machida is a black belt in BJJ, that doesn’t matter if your opponent doesn’t possess the anatomy of a normal human.  He was able to dominate Machida and hit him with an elbow filled with such hatred and disregard for human life that the United States CIA would have given it funding and military training during the Cold War.  After some scrambling around the ref stopped the fight to check if it would need to be ended on a doctor’s stoppage.  Machida must have done something to piss off the physician, though, because he allowed the slaughter to continue.

At this point, Machida looked exactly like you would expect someone to look after fighting a man-made demigod familiar with every concept in fighting except failure.  The two exchanged and Machida lost his footing, having already checked out of this fight.  He tried to get back up, but Jones got him in a standing guillotine and pressed him against the fence.  Machida, knowing all would be lost for mortals everywhere if he tapped out, decided he would tough it out.  It was a noble gesture, but just ended in the ref ending the fight after Machida passed out.  The second Jones let go of what was once Machida’s neck, Machida collapsed to the ground.  The victory was actually called a “technical submission."

Thus Jon Jones retained the light heavyweight belt, considered by many to be of more merit than the heavyweight title.  I was impressed by the way Jones spoke immediately after the fight: he gave Machida credit as a fighter and also clarified that he wasn’t out to hurt anything, including those who would identify themselves as homo sapiens.  “I didn’t ask to be created in a lab,” Jones pointed out when being interviewed by Joe Rogan.  “I only wish to dedicate the rest of my life to understanding this human concept of ‘friendship,’ while continuing to fulfill the desire of my creators to fight.  Everything I am is a reflection of you as a people.”