The Life and Death of Great American Kung Fu Classes

Yesterday was my Old Master's birthday. None of us know how old he is, even today. I biked an hour to see him, which doesn't seem like a long way to go, but riding on the expressway by bike speaks volumes if you ask me. Anyway, he changed my life. It was the least I could do.

Passing this abandoned class, once the "Double Dragon" Kung-Fu studio (true story), I felt a pang of sadness. I've biked by it many times before. Very Karate Kid- big bulky guys in sleek black kung fu uniforms teaching hyper aggressive kids. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I'd catch one of the monks from Mommy and Uncle's temple stepping into the Cash4You next door and give them a good bow. It was always nice to see them outside temple.

Kung fu's everywhere in popular culture and it does good on screen to try and teach the values of kung fu- the things people usually laugh about in real life, but the same kind of things I've been told numerous times by my Old Master. Eat bitter, protect each other, the metaphors go on. It's a shame that these kinds of truths are starin' us in the face, but we hardly believe them. Unless of course you're lucky enough to be taught by a man that was orphaned in red China and worked his way to fame by way of martial arts, fighting for Mao, fighting for a shitty bowl of egg drop soup after 13 hour days in factories.

Without kung fu, I'm willing to bet a lot of people wouldn't have made it. These are the kinds of perspectives people need today. How kung fu can really communicate this? I don't know. The only way might be to devote your life to it. To really devote your life to it, and that takes a lot of guts, because it can leave you poor. Very poor. So my heart went out to this studio, even if the kung fu taught was bad.

My friend and I often have arguments about kung fu's use, and in today's age it may not be practical, especially when students don't practice hard enough, but it's certainly got me through some bad times. Not in literal fighting, but in having some sort of spirit and giving me perspective to soldier on. If I have a soul, it's because of kung fu, it's because of my Old Master, it's because of places like that studio that do a good job, especially on my Old Master's birthday, of giving me the perspective to carry on, so long as the road lasts.

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Farmer's Shitty Market

If a city lacks the ethos of community, then there's no point in creating spaces that attempt to foster community- as far as I'm concerned, they're nothing more than marketable attempts at nostalgia for the sake of profit. What happens when you put people without a proper ethos for community in a space that is supposed to foster that ethos an attempt to re-root it? A bunch of rude behaviour; individuals who do not know each other and therefore cannot recognize each other and therefore have no sense of caring to show respect for each other in a civil space, but instead ignore each other, walk ignorantly in front of people, cut them off, and have no qualms about what they just did. These "community spaces" become places of obligation, and bad manners, where people can act poorly towards each other- because they don’t know what community traditionally implies, or historically was, instead today associating it with commodities (cities can be commodities) that say ‘nostalgia’- and therefore think there is no harm of getting in trouble or being shamed by the community because people simply just don't really know each other. Hence, there is no real ethos of community. Cities only kid themselves when they market this idea, unawares it seems of the sense of community diminished by none other than an urbanized life. So as far as I'm concerned, places like farmer's markets in cities are nothing more than carnivelesque spaces where low behaviours flourish and are accepted, especially today when our more or less anti-social public personas just don't talk to each other and expect customer service from merchants who half the time can't speak a lick of English and respond with rude remarks.

Cities only market these spaces so they can make some kind of buck. Shit man, the sinister planner would sell you the rope you were gonna hang him with just to make a buck. These "plans" for community are nothing more than a bunch of flashy rhetoric for profiteering. If planners really gave two shits, they'd stop spewing out crap about grass-roots and at least preach that it takes proper education from the media, and family to foster a sense of relationship and general comradeship in the outside, anti-social, put-on-air space of the public, and that, more importantly, it's going to take a lot of time (generations maybe). But if you don't bring attention to this subject you merely have the shitty continuation of bad behaviours, tourist traps and ridiculous spectacles. But hey, at least the city is making money right? Phh. Some days, I have no truck about dropping out of urban planning.

With that, I've been going to the St. Jacob's Farmer's Market for 10 years with my grandmother to buy tomatoes, only to notice the disrespect towards the old, and disrespect of merchants, and disrespect of space- littered horse shit and god knows what- and I still can't come to terms with that place as having any sense of value or convenience. Nothing it seems is genuine there; vegetables have stickers on them which makes me question their authenticity (or if they were stolen from the back of a produce truck). It'd do that place some good to have a strip-mall or hotel built over it, then maybe it'd at least be a little more civil, and I wouldn't have to put up with one of the rudest spaces in Kitchener-Waterloo.

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