New Blog
Brian Jewell
Fri, Feb 12, 10:44 AM (3 days ago)
A Few Words Regarding Matthew Polly’s Bruce Lee: A Life
A while back I wrote a blog entry on why I stopped reading about Bruce Lee. The quick summary of that blog is that I had passed the age Bruce Lee was when he died and I didn’t feel like I had…
sifujewell.wordpress.com
James,
Here is the link to my latest blog. Once you get to the end, you'll see I'm writing mostly in response to something someone posted in reply to me on YouTube. Rather than reply and go back and forth with someone on YouTube, I decided I'd express myself on my own platform. I believe this is similar to advice you gave me before about using my own platform rather than writing book reviews on Amazon. Speaking of which, this will be the last book review I do for a little while. My "editor" expressed a desire to read something other than book reviews for a while.
Thanks,
Brian
Brian, I am so glad you are taking this route. People have devoted up to a decade in you tube channels and had everything deleted with one press of a button.
Any social media posting is a total waste of creative time for a writer, unless it is backed up and curated.
Writers are supposed to spend most of their efforts promoting their books on social media, rather than improving their craft or deepening their search. This is because writing is only valued as a money-earning act, and promotional writing, in this society created by 90 years of advertising science, exceeds the art that it supposedly promotes in value.
I read your rational and thoughtful impressions of the book and the predictable insanity related to the emasculated men of a spiritually dead nation worshipping an actor from another time and place. I have always found it unfathomable that people cared about Bruce Lee at all and his worship troubling. In the 1970s, when I boxed and my friends did karate, they all reminded me that I was practicing something useless, because Bruce Lee had defeated Muhamad Ali in a secret death match and permitted the heavyweight champ to live. That was a fantasy and did not even rise to the level of a thoughtfully constructed lie. Than 25-years later, when I heard stories about me, that I was a pro boxer, that I was some high-flying martial arts master, as I rode a bus with strangers past Sifu Livingston's where I had only flown when kicked across the room, I became a dedicated anti-martial artist. I have since declined to be trained in various arts and elevated to instructor for free—no charge. And in all four cases, I declined, to avoid the fake taint of being a martial artist, buoyed by the suspicion that my retarded ass would never graduate.
In the end, martial arts was always, to me, a way of establishing a claim to combat excellence while avoiding combat.
The hard fact about Bruce Lee, is, that we only think of him as a fighting machine or even expert instructor, because he was an actor. The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, would be no more better known than the videos of Carl Cestari, if Lee would not have been involved with the propaganda engine that is Hollywood. I think he was a brilliant innovative instructor, like hundreds of others, like Holman Williams or Jack Blackburn or Jimmy Wilde. But Lee made movies and trained Steve McQueen.
