I was on my way to Shanghai to teach English and do some in depth research in language and martial arts, but I ended up in Las Vegas working as a security guard on the graveyard shift in a 3rd rate casino famous for thier 99cent/28 oz. margarittas...

My I Chuan/Hsing I training came into play almost every night.

I was always very careful not to use a lot of power on the average "88",( an anoying and vexing individual)and what was interesting was that the softer I became, the more dramatic the effect, ie. projecting heavey weights 10+ feet, taking 88s down to the ground with nothing more than belly contact and a half step, etc. ...

I Chuan training helped me a lot. Most of the time I never had to think, I just went into automatic action. It felt like my actions more "done through me" as oppossed to "done by me".

On those occassions that I had to "stop and think" all I had to do was initaite Pi Chuan and the autocmatic action feeling would return...most times it never went past the rising-drilling before the confrontation was over.

One last thought: Many times all a casino security guard has to do is approach the anoying and vexing indivdual and say something like, "Sir"?

Knowing that they are on candid camera they will abruptly change attitude. Then, 9 times out of 10 they move in for "the drunk love hug". But when your're armed the last thing in the world you want is some ••••••• giving you a bear hug...

I found that a pointed finger posture I learned from Uncle Bill combined with Beng Chuan worked great. Most of the time, ( drunk as they were) they could feel the intention and would back off... If they actually came into contact with the the finger to the ribs they jumped back like they had taken a jolt from a cattle prod. That one always made me laugh.

Did you train in Florida?

Mr. Wieck,

Which teacher would you say gave you the most help with your Hsing-I in all your years of study?

Steve

Steve Feng,

It would be really hard to say...

Wang Fu Lai? Because he introduced me to I-Chuan standing, and because when the other students laughed at me,(saying I was wasting my time with all the standing) he said that I was "the smart one"...

Kenny Gong? Because I spent the most time in his system,(under Stuart Charno)...

B.K. Franstiz? Because Kumar insisted that we always return the the basics,(Pi Chuan).

Or Uncle Bill? Because he showed me that each of the five elements consisted of the other four...

Hard to say my friend, hard to say.

Rich,

When I graduated from highschool in 1979 I moved down to Hollywood Florida with a friend, and we got jobs as hot tar roofers...in August. Our crew was a motley assortment drug addicts, butt pirates, and vets who never "really" made it through Vietnam.

I don't know if it was the heat, or the methamphetamine, but a lot of fights broke out. Once a knife was pulled out to settle a dispute over a pack of bolgne, and that's when I changed carreers, and took a job delivevring Coca-Cola in Liberty City...

In those days Liberty City was the heart of the heart of The Ghetto. All the other beverage trucks had a two man team. One to drive the truck and deliver the goods, the other, to ride shotgun, (and that's not just colorful language, they acttually carried shotguns). None of the liquer stores had doors. They were all set up like the drive-through teller at a bank...

Anyway, it was against Coca-Cola policy NOT to have armed guards on their delivery trucks, and so, after two weeks of training on my new route, I was going to be on my own...

The night before my first day alone, I layed down in bed and visulized my route. Liberty City had been built as a kind of utopia by some religous movement back in the 30's,and a lot of the buildings had a kind of Art Deco/Arabic archetectre. The streets all had romantic sounding names like Ali Babba,(which the delivery drivers all called "Alley Stabba").

Alley Stabba street was the last street on my route, and when I was finished visulizing it's broken glass and frondless palm trees I rolled over and fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up, and the first thought that went through my mind, was: Pack Your ••••, and Get The Hell Out Of Dodge!

I don't know why, because I was stoked about my new job. I was making good money for an 18 year old kid, and the gig held a certain amount of macho bragging rights, but I had a wierd all pervading feeling that my Floridian adventure had come to an end...

I packed my things, and drove straight back home to Iowa without stopping... When I got home, I realized that everyone was out at the family farm for Christmas Eve... I turned on the tv, got out a cigarette, and lit a match, and there, on the 11 o clock news was Liberty City. Up In Flames!

Apparently a cubano cop had shot a black kid, and the whole place erupted into riots. I sat there transfixed, till the match nearly burned my fingers...If I hadn't left the day before, I would have been right in the middle of that chaos. Gangs of angry Liberty Cityians turning cop cars over, burning everything, dragging old white ladies across the street by thier thin blue hair...It was ugly.

And I wasn't there.

When I told that story to my First Princilple Teacher, he thought about for a few seconds, and then he yelled out,"THAT'S REAL CHINESE GUNG FU"!

So to answer your question Rich; no, I've never trained in Florida...

;)

Hey Mike,
Hope all is well. Good to see you're still on this side of the ground.
Cheers,
Buddy

Hey Buddy,

I'm dealing,(and playing) poker in Las Vegas. I tried to drift on over to Shanghai, but the prevaling winds have jetisoned me here...

So I'm making my stand in Sin City, ( ironicly, the first thing I had to do was pass a drug test)...

There isn't much in terms of internal arts in Vegas; so I'm going to goof around with some these body guard types they have here. The Machado's are opening up a dojo right around the corner from where I live, and I think Mike Patterson has plans to move here sometime in the near future...

And I want to sign up for Uncle Bill's DVD course...

What's up with you ?

Ahhhhh.... good ol' Ali Bab street. I try to stay away from that part of town.

All of your above referrences... I remember well.

I worked with the same type of crews... I was a tree monkey, lawn jockey, labor saving, low paid, shoveling fool.

Moral of the story:

...stay in school.

Or carry a bigger weapon to work!

Mike Strong,

Message boards are dead ground.

These types of places are battles that will never be won.

It was a good try with the first post.

hey Frank, this is for you:

Back in '86 I decided I was going to go the mystic orient and study at the feet of the Masters[sic]...

I had been in touch with Master Ni Hua Ching for a few years;(had read all of his books, seen him for some accupuncture,etc.)so I had a meeting with his sons, MaoShing and DaoShing.

They said I had two choices: I could go to Shanghai and study with a Dr. Gu, or I could go to Taiwan and study with a Dr. Shen...

I decided on Taiwan based on the fact that I would probably not have as much fun in a Communist country that was opening itself to the world, as I would in a Capitalist country hunkering down under martial law...

I met with Dr. Shen and his students, and even though I felt that they were racist, zenophobes I jumped through hoops in order to study with them. Dr. Shen wouldn't let me study with him untill I stood on my head for an hour;which I did,(much to his consternation)...

He wanted all the students to go on a 7 day water fast, as part of a study he was doing at the university where he taught medicine. We went through a battry of blood tests, and what-not before the fast began. Every morning we were told to meet him at his house at 4 a.m. in the morning, so that we could make a day trip to different mountain temples to fetch the spring water that we were to drink for that day...The only problem was that I was the only one that showed up at 4a.m...I sat on my motercycle and watched an old guy make soy milk for a couple of hours before the others showed up.

Anyway, one morning we went to a very special place called Tiger Mountain. It was explained to me that Tiger Mountain was something of a vortex, like they talk about in Sedona Arizona...

We drive up as far as we can, then we start walking... through a graveyard!!! We were walking up to Tiger Mountain through this graveyard when we came upon a group of people sweeping off a tomb the size of a basketball court...Dr. Shen didn't even say anything to the people. he just cut across the tomb like he was walking through downtown TaiChung...

The people sweeeping the tomb looked at us like we were unwelcome interlopers, and I kind of bashfully bowed my head and gestured that, "hey I'm just a dumb waigwo ren tagging along for the day...

We got to Tiger Mountain, and sure enough, it was a special place, and the Chinese practicing martial arts and chanting mantras there were none too pleased that someone had brought a "long nose" to their seceret spot. I couldn't blame them. The place was for real!I felt "ma chi" very strongly that day, and to this day it is very easy for me to sense chi with an "electro-magnetic quality", (ma chi)...

On our way back, we crossed over the basketball court sized tomb agine, only this time instead of sweeping, the people were practicing Tai Chi...

I was the only one of Dr. Shen's students who made it 7 days on nothing but spring water. He explained to the other students that it showed how extreme and unbalanced I was...

To make a long story short. I split from Dr. shen's class and hooked up with an Isreali who introduced me to Wang Fu Lai.Wang Laoshr looked very familar to me, and no wonder...

IT WAS WANG SHU JIN'S TOMB THAT WE HAD CUT ACROSS THAT DAY!!!


to be continued...

Did you ever meet a westerner who suprised you with a special skill?

Herb #1

Herb #1,

Yes. Just recently I posted on the YiQuan Yellow pages to see if I could find someone in Las Vegas to practice with,(even if it was someone visiting here on vacation). A German guy responded, saying he was coming through town with his family.

We sent email back and forth. he sent putfile clips of him practicing "tui shou", and it turns out he knew Helmut Barthel since he was 16...He was Helmut's "Boss Student" out on his farm, and now he has developed his own stlye based on Helmut's work....

His skills are very good, along the line of Sam Tam I would say, but what made his skill special was that he is able to go "into state" at a momments notice...

For example, we had been doing Rou Shou in my living room when the subject of Helmut and Shamanism came up. With his daughters playing in the dining room and his wife reading a magazine he was able to go into state with me in under 5 seconds.

I have known many others who have extraordinary skills, or have an affinity with epiphenomenal states of awareness.

If you have a platonistic mind you can understand what I'm talking about, if you are predominantley aristotelian, google "the awareness continuam"...I would like to say the The Awareness Continuam was developed by someone cool, like Maslow, but I'm afraid it was someone lame, like Skinner...

Cheers

Cheez, and I thot I had a good vocabulary....

I have a cool story to share.
My big brother from my fraternity was a very wealthy man. Atleast that is what I thought.
He is the president of Amautuer import racing association. He ran and owns the "battle" a import car 1/4 mile race(rice rockets and all).

He had this niceass Rx7. It was built from the ground up by Greedy(not sure about the spelling)Anyways it was fast in 1/4mile and also on the freeway third gear hit 120.

He told me a story about how he thought he had alot of money and so he got the balls to walk in to one of those expensive snobby beverly hills rodeo drive botiques. He said he walked in thinking he was the man but he left a chump. All he bought was a white tshirt with no logo on it that cost him $5000. He bought it because he didn't want go in the store and leave with nothing.

To make a long story short, that is how i felt when I began to train with Tim cartmell at Shenwu.
Anyways, I train at Tim's on weekends.
I'm going to quote tim hope he doesn't get mad...
"That's why you pay me Steve"

and, my T shirts are only $15.

Hello Mike,

i never heard of Helmut Barthel. Was this guy in the US for giving seminars or does he just visit you? At Emptyflower if found some treads by someone named "Torsten" from germany who whould come to the US and some of his videos.

http://www.putfile.com/media.php?n=t_faust
http://www.putfile.com/media.php?n=t_tuishou
http://www.putfile.com/media.php?n=t_kampf

Is this the one your talking about?

Herb #1

Herb#1,

Are you the Herb from Herb King in Santa Monica?

Anyway:

Yeah, that's Torsten. He and his little family are on holiday, and wherever they stop, Torsten looks up martial artists that he has "met" on these discusion boards...I put up several open invitations for anyone coming through Vegas to come see me, and Torsten took me up on my offer

His "tuishou" is very similar to the Rou Shou practice my friends and I do.

From his putfiles it looks like he is doing an amalgimation of Tai Chi/Wing Chun/ & Hsing-I...

After playing Rou Shou and trading demonstrations I would say that what he is doing is very similar to what Sam Tam is doing...

I told Torsten to check out Sam Tam, Sonny Umpad, Bernnie langan, and Su Dong Chen, because I think all those guys are doing maartial arts from a similar angle...

Sam was as Eagle Claw man, before he was introduced to I-Chuan by Han, and Prof. Yu...After that,(according to his wife) Sam Tam just kind of layed on the couch reading the Tai Chi Classics, and starreed out the window...He had a couple of epiphanies, and now he teaches the principle of Yin/yang Equlization ...and he's very good at it.

I first heard of Helmut from Don Ethan Miller. There are a lot of fantastic, paranoid rummors about the guy, and I reckon the truth lies somewhere in the middle...

Helmut Barthel was a GojoRu guy, a kind of genius who read the Tai Chi Classics, and just kind of 'sussed out a few things through what I would term "Sofia Perrenis"...

One of the stories that goes around is that he peaked out and couldn't go any further without help; and so what he did was, he went up to Finland,- North to Lapland, where he took off his clothes, sat down on a rock, and vowed that he wouldn't move untill a teacher showed up...and one did. A Laplander Shaman, who agrreed to teach him.

Torsten says the part about being naked on the rock is bullshit, but Helmut really did go into the forest and found a Laplander Shaman to train under; then he formulated his own homegrown brand of "Tai Chi", calling in Dan Tien Chuan...

Regards

Michael A. Wieck
aka
Mike Strong

Torsten is real live ass kicker.

Got to meet him today and it was good times.

Very interesting take on the martial arts.

S

---Shawn,

Yes, if we open our minds to different aproaches the rewards can be great.

What I like best about "Torsten's Takedowns" is that they rely on a principal of UNITY, or Becoming One with the "opponent".

Also, torsten in nearly imposible to land a punch on...I had heard stories about this kind of thing from people who had gone to see his teacher,(Helmut Barthel).

It seems to be all in the feet, interesting.

Some of my friends are reluctant to meet with Torsten, because of his teacher's reputation s a cult leader...But Torsten has gone his own way, and has his own way of teaching...It's their loss.

It's a pity though, I thought I asscocaiated with more broad-minded individuals...

Mike

Hi MIke,

Yeah man!! Loved your stories, glad to hear Las Vegas is treatin you right. From the slums of SF to the heart of Sin City.... You have a knack for finding the most interesting spots...

Hope you are well and healthy. Keep up the good work..

-Jess O'Brien
(oakland, ca)

JessO!!!

I've got a line on a vortex two hours up a box canyon out at Red Rocks...I'll check it out and see if it's a "for really-o juicy energy spot", and if it is...LET'S ALL DOUBLE PALM CHANGE NOW!!!

Do de do dadumdumdidi do!!!

Strong

Frank,

here's my TaiKiKen story:

I was back from Taiwan, dropped out of Yo San Uneversity, and was pretty much just training. I was traning I Chuan with Heming, Hsing I with Stewart Charno, I was teaching Tai Chi for the Ni's, AND I had just startted hanging out with Don Miller...

I was bartending at an Italian restaurant called Domiano's,(not the hip Domiano's were you would see movie stars,- the other Domiano's that was pretty much empty all day long)...

Since I was pretty much alone in this joint all day long, I took it as an oppoutunity to practice. I would practice Zhan Zhuang while polishing glassess. I'd reach up, slide a glass out of the rack ,and polish, polish,polish...I could make that task last a couple of hours if the bossess daughter didn't come in and bug me...

Anyway, one day I was polishing when a group of six martial artists came in. It was pretty obviuous that this was a gruop of about five local martial artists, entertaining a visiting master. Japanese I reckoned.

They came in every day around 3:00. Everyday they ordered the same thing: 6 spegghetti with marinara, and 12 Coronas...I'd just stand there practicing clandetinley...polish, polish,polish. And I really was doing my best not to be obviouse about what I was doing...I promise!

On the third or fourth day, they sent a big Iraanian looking dude up to the bar. He did a kind of little bow and then he said,"we are a group of martial artists haveing lunch with our teacher from Japan,...our teacher would like to invite you to come to our school in Santa Monica"...

"The TaikiKen Dojo"? I asked.

"Yes"!

"When should I be there"?

I was pretty excited. For one thing I had guesssed correctly that they were a group of martial artist s with a visiting teacher from Japan, and more importantly, their teacher recognized me as good recruit...

Heming said that when I went to see him, I shauld ,"make he go down". In the recent past,I had given several people a lot of wiggle room in order that they not lose face, and Heming was adamant that I stop doing that...

I showed up at the dojo, and in a second I realized that these guys were doing I Chauan,(at that time I was aware of who Kanichii Sawai was, but I didn't know of the name Taikiken, except from the sign on this school that I passed every day).

A flyer in the window said that this guy had been the #1 body guard of Japanese President Nagasoni,(nagasaki?)...

"Great, I'm gonna make HE go down".

They were practicing a kind of Rou Shou with knuckle gloves on their hands. The object seemed to be to conect with the oppnents frame, and either project him, or nail him with a cross-punch to the chin...

I walked in, bowed, took of my shoes, and hoped that this guy would knock me out with the first punch, because I figured if I was lucky enough to get in on him he would probably return the favor by killing me. I took a deep breath, banished the paranoia, and shook hands with the guy,(I'm an idiot for not remembering his name)...

The first thing he said was:

"Can you imagine a martial art were the only practice we do is standing"?

"Yes, I can. Have you ever heard of Wang Shang Dzai"?

His eyes lit up, and he expalined that Wang Shang Dzai was his teacher's teacher. What a coinskdence I said, Wang Shang Dzai was my teacher's teacher...All the fear and paranoia went away. I felt like I'd just run into a long lost friend.

He invited me out onto the mat, and motioned for one of the students to come over. They gave me a pair of knuckle gloves, and was I ever relieved when it became apparent that I would be having a go with one of the students,( a 6 foot tall, 150 pound Japanese).

We touched wrists and it was a natural...I "framed him up" and pulsed him away with a little "peng pop"...

Then something weird happened:

His right wrist was on the outside of my left wrist, and I took a shot at his chin...As I punched from left to right he went off his feet, staying conected to the outside of my wrist,and went flying past my left ...IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION OF MY PUNCH!?!

It was like our wrists acted like cogs or gears or something...

The teacher laughed, and stoped us. he asked me to sit and watch as he taught the rest of the class, and when the class was over, he said if I was ever in Japan, I was welcome to come train at his dojo...

Idiot that I am, I lost his buisness card,and I forgot his name. I would have to say that was the one that got away...The practices that they did looked like more fun than even Rou Shou...Who ever he was, he was one hell of a nice guy, and one of the best martial art's teachers I've ever met...

Ah well, the world is full of excellent martial artists... and I can learn from them all!

Has anyone ever seen the lower hand in Pichuan, done with a fist?

or... when the top hand chops, and the foot steps,as the foot touches and roots, instead of one clean downward chopping motion with the arms, there are two to five quick circular "switch ups" with the hand{top}and fist {bottom}?

Not to mention the other elements...

Thanks WXW

sounds like a serated PiChuan.

More like a chainsaw PiChuan...

Dale Shigenaga has a school in vegas, trained under xuhongji in taiwan

Mike

Maybe the guy you met from Japan was Kobu Isato. He is pretty much one of the top guys there and has spent alot of time at the Beijing Zongxun Wugan with Yao Chengguan.

Don't know if this helps?