This past weekend was the Renaissance Martial Arts festival, an event we’ve been running out of our Kung Fu school for the past 7 years. Below is a slide show of pictures from the festival. Since I was typically behind the camera I only appear in one of these pictures.

Flickr continues to impress me. While it has some draw backs, galleries that used to take me hours, if not days, come together in under 60 minutes. Which is a nice thing, especially since my work as the RMA webmaster is purely voluntary.

The Saratoga Martial Arts Festival was excellent. Not only did I get the chance to take some wonderful seminars, but I also made some progress on some Anthro research that I’ve been interested in for quite a while. Much of Sunday was spent picking the mind Sifu Sharif Bey, a very high ranking Hung Ga practioner. Hung Ga is a traditional southern Chinese system of fighting with close ties. Historically it was a revolutionary system, concieved and developed to fight against the Qing Dynasty. What is particularly interesting to me is that embodied in it are both fighting and cultural concepts. Hopefully down the road, I’ll be able to tap Sifu Bey for more research assistance. That said, Martial Art research is currently far, far, far down my list of priorities.

Also, for those who missed the Lessig lecture here at RIT, you can find a stream of it here:

• http://blade.rit.edu/TLC/Lessig-20060324.ram

If you have two hours, take the time to watch it. It’s excellent and thought provoking.

One of my many guilty pleasures is movies. I love ‘em in just about every variety from art house fare to good bad movies (Armies of Darkness for example). Thankfully where I live makes it very easy to feed that urge. Rochester has two great theatre for lovers of non-mainstream movies (and a bunch of great mainstream theatres too): The Little Theatre and The Dryden Theatre at the Eastman House. The Little is our local art house theatre. If you’re interested in seeing indy films here in town, it’s the place to go. And that’s cool…

But for the best selection of films, good and bad, new and old, you’ve got to go to the Dryden. The George Eastman House is both a museum and film preservation institute. They are responsible for salvaging, restoring and storing massive amounts of film. When the Wizard of Oz was re-released into theatres a few years back, they were showing a print that was restored at the Eastman House. Almost every night of the week you can go to the Dryden and catch a different film, with an introductory lecture, for about 7 bucks.

So where is this blog going you ask? Well August is a kick bootie month at the Dryden for Fan Boy’s like me. You can check the calendar yourself, but here are a couple highlights:

• 8/2 Godzilla (1954) - the original Japanese print, subtitles, no Raymond Burr
• 8/3 Oceans 11 (1960) - see the brat pack movie before the star studded remake is release this December
• 8/7 The Valiant Ones (1975) - Old School good Kung Fu cinema
• 8/8 Annie Hall (1977) - Arguably Woody Allen’s most mainstream film and one of his best
• 8/9 Destroy All Monsters (1968) - More rubber suit goodness than you can handle. 11 Monsters and Godzilla throwing a drop kick. What more could you want in a film
• 8/10 La Femme Nikita (1991) - forget the crappy American Remake or the bad TV series, this is the good stuff
• 8/12 Touch of Evil (1958) - Only Orson Wells could figure out a way for Charlton Heston to play a convincing Mexican
• 8/14 Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) - Before Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon there was The Bride with White Hair. And before the Bride there was Zu. This was one of Hong Kong first big Kung Fu/Fantasy/Wire Work/Sword Play films and still one of the best (thanks to the presence of talent like Yuen Bao and Summo Hung). Also a lot funnier too
• fingers are getting tired… to many good movies… one last
• 8/21 Swordsman II (1991) - Before Jet Li came to the US he made his name in period Kung Fu films. This is regarded as one of his best.

Fact is, just about every movie in August is a good one. Check the calendar for yourself And if you’re in the area and want to take in a flick, drop me a note.

Wow. It’s been three days since I returned from the Martial Arts conference and I’m still grappling with the lessons learned there. Within the course of two days my world suddenly became a much bigger place. More about that on the Martial Arts Page.

One of the other projects I’m involved in when I’m not at work is setting up a Theatre Company. I’ve been involved in theatre for a number of years on a college basis. Basically, the theatre scene here is Rochester, well… kinda sucks. We have one major professional theatre here in town that stages good stuff from time to time. But the majority of their stuff is way too safe. The rest of the professional and semi pro groups in town are a pretty mixed bag at best. Any hoo, I’m documenting our progress in the creation of the company on my Theatre Page. I’ll have a report up later today on our meeting with the associate director of University of Rochester’s International Theatre Program.

Other than that I’ve been fighting exhaustion and a bit of depression. My body is trying to recover from the weekend. I’m feeling a lot better as I got more sleep last night. Night’s here have been very hot and I’m too cheap to get AC. Oh, check out the new look of Julia’s Blog! I need to get on the ball and add links to my friends blogs from this page. *Sigh* So much to do and such little time….

We had the work group picnic yesterday and everything went off without a hitch! Jenny, Abby, Tina, Jo, Sarah, and I were in charge. We had it at a Rochester Redwings game. Check out thier site and the cheezy flash animation that kicks it off. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. I didn’t see very much of the game cause I was to busy playing with some of the kids there.

And with this I’m off to Super Summers. I managed to throw together a quick website for the school. Check it out here. It’s just brochure-ware now, but pretty soon I’ll get some pictures and more up there. Blog to you on Monday….

I’ve been working very hard to get in the habit of posting once a day. Unfortunately there is still a lot about blogger I don’t understand. For example can posts only be a certain length? I keep having issues posting my updates in the Martial Arts page. Thankfully, I can bring out the big guns on this problem and talk with Jenny. Check out her page for the gripping account of the rescue of Spiderman who had been lost between the walls of our partitions.

I’ve been practicing to get ready for this martial arts seminar coming up this weekend. As part of that I’ve been trying to spend a lot of time brushing up on my Monkey skills. Rolling is a big aspect of that. It’s an area where I’ve approved greatly. Watching me fall and roll in the past was not unlike seeing a sack o’ flour hit the floor. But even today I still sometimes hit the ground a little too hard. So I have a small silver dollar sized black and blue mark on my right shoulder blade. Which, along with a sore right shoulder, makes sleeping a little difficult. So the past few nights my trips to the magical land of dreams have been troubled at best. Needless to say I’m feelin’ a little sleepy.

After a lot of tweaking I’ve finally settled on a page design that I like for my homepage/blog. I realize that I shouldn’t be this finicky, but when you work on the web you tend to want to put your best foot forward. There is still some tweaking that needs to go on. But it’s a big improvement.This weekend I’m going to be off at Super Summers, a weekend long Martial Arts seminar held at Colgate University in Hamilton NY (about an hour outside of Albany). I’ll be assisting my instructor, Sifu Mark Cardona, instructing 2 seminars. Over the two days (Saturday and Sunday) there will be roughly 40 seminars given in subjects ranging from nutrition to ground fighting. The majority of the material tends to be focused on Karate and other Japanese martial arts. We’re going to be doing a Monkey Kung Fu demo there that will be very different than a lot of the material covered. Because of that we’re expecting a large audience, as it will be a great chance for folks to get exposed to something that they’ve only seen in bad Kung Fu films.

Speaking of bad Kung Fu films, we’ve also been asked to present a demo on Saturday night. The typical demo usually is a form or Kata set to music. Or sometimes a short presentation. In our case, we’re opting for something a bit more original. Basically we’re staging a bad Kung Fu movie (like a Shaw Brother’s production). We’re still working on it, so I’ll have more tomorrow.

In the meantime I need to get the Theatre and Martial Arts pages up and running. But all and all this is a good start.

Wow the last few days have been quite a whirl wind! On Sunday I was lucky enough to get to a Bela Fleck and the Flecktones show. And it was sooo good. I was also lucky enough to spend time after the show talking with Victor and Roy (FutureMan) about their different projects and interests. More to come on this…

On Monday I accepted a new job at the Big Yellow Box. I’ll be handling the project management on our new online community efforts. I also have decided to move! It’s not a big one, I’m just moving to the upstairs apartment, but I’m really looking forward to it!

I’ve found that I like it when my life is in flux!

Went to a They Might be Giants concert last night at the “U of R” last night… and they rocked the house as usual. TMBG always holds a special place in my heart. I’ve meet great friends at concerts; Flood was the first alternative album I bought; and New York City off of Factory Show Room is one of my favorite songs of all time. Plus it was the first live show I’d been to in a while. The set list included:

• James K. Polk
• You’re not the boss of me now (the theme from Malcolm in the Middle)
• Edith Head
• Spider
• Fingertips
• The Guitar
• Why does the sun shine
• Robot Parade
• She’s actual size
• Birdhouse in my Soul
• Dr Worm
• Anna Ng
• Partical Man
• Istambul
• and of course New York City

All and all absolutely brilliant. There were a few others that I missed. My friends Aaron and Maria were up for the happy goodness. A lot of bouncing up and down was had by all.

Actually this is the weekend of concerts. Tomorrow I head for Geneva, NY to take in Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. I’ve had the chance to meet a few of the members of the band, Victor and FutureMan. Not only are they great musicians, but they’re great people as well. In fact we just had Vic on Kodak.com for a chat about his bass and Nature Camp. Photographer Greg Kessler did an amazing photo essay of the camp. They were both on-line to share photos and tell stories from the camp and the road. This was the first of these events that I produced end to end. Which was a learning experience and a half.

One of the things I want to do with this site is use it both as a testing and sounding ground for some of the communal idea’s that I’ve been working on. Hopefully there will be more to say about that in the days and weeks to come…