Ok, I musta had too much pizza & was too sleepy last night. The other book is Ted Hillson's book "Taekwondo Classic Forms". I don't know where "Tillson" came from...
Ah,
that's why Amazon.com professed not to know about that book!
I actually think I've got that one too, around somewhere.... I
think I bought it...Yup, found it. Astonishing, what treasures you can turn up if you revisit your bookshelves every so often
Perhaps it's the fact that the Olympic style sport oriented TKD is a known quantity & the Kwan era Art is more of a mystery is why it's so appealing. But, for whatever reason, it is.
I think myself that it's probably more the sense that there are answers to many of our technical questions which are to be found in the pre-sport era of TKD, when it was known as a particularly hard-style fighting system. At bottom, a lot of us are probably not very happy with what's happened to TKD; we see all of these effective combat resources left to die on the vine in favor of an increasingly artificial system which has little meaning outside the ring. So personally, I have to say, I'm not all that interested in the outcome of a WTF-rules sparring match, in the same way I'm not particularly interested in Pogo-stick Ultimate Frisbee or synchonized weaving competitions. No negative reflection on anyone who's interested in any of 'em, but... And as Sheryl Crow says, I get the feeling I'm not the only one. There are, going by what people post, a lot of us like that on MT. We say that we're curious about the Kwan era form of TKD; but what I think it really is is the sense that TKD as we understand it is in danger of becoming a lost art (certainly, if the arena-sport mega-organizations such as the WTF continue to define TKD, that outcome looks like it's in the cards) and we want to get it back.
I've heard referrences to GM Uhm, Woon Kyu being called "the sliding side kick god" in his younger days. I'd love to see video of that!
Sadly, in our Youtube "everything you want to know is but a few clicks away" world, it's hard when some things are simply handled down in stories. Like Alex Halley, I'd love to discover those "Roots". I guess some things will always be mysteries.
I can't wait til GM Song's book arrives!
You'll like it—every page has the feel of something from the dim past (well, next year it'll be 40 years old, eh?—though as I say, S. Henry Cho's book, published the same year, doesn't have that feel at all. Actually, a systematic comparison of the two textbooks would be, I suspect, an
extremely revealing exercise. Cho's work feels very contemporary, and his point of view is also very contemporary: TKD is Korean karate, indigenous fighting systems played at most a marginal role in its formation, the technical content is almost entirely Okinawan/Japanese in origin; what innovations there are have to do mostly with kicking mechanics, etc. And, especially significantly, there seems to be much less emphasis on the primacy of street defense as the motivation for TKD in the first place. Son hits that note early, and keeps on hitting it throughout his book, which has a much 'grittier' feel to it—more street-Seoul, less Americanized, than SHC's book...)
