illumik

As tired as I was today, I forced myself to go to my capoeira class tonight after having enjoyed so much good food this weekend. I’m glad I trained tonight as we had a special guest train with us! –> Stuntman, actor and capoeira extraordinaire, Lateef Crowder!

He lined up at the door with all of us, but I didn’t want to bother him, so I left him be. The dude was so agile and full of presence with every move. Everything he did seemed to have a little extra something in it.

He definitely had a little air of bad-assedness about him. No, he was FULL of bad-assedness. So much so, that anytime he did anything, he folded up his extra long cobalt-beaded necklace and clenched it in his teeth so as not to let it get in his face. I wondered why he didn’t just take it off when we were training, but then I noticed he took it off when we were done training. Like he needed to be extra bad-ass and put it in his mouth during training or something. O.o But, whatever… fine by me!

We did some walking the floor on our hands and I thought, ok, I can at least maybe get across as well as he can. WRONG! He walked forward on his hands (very quickly), then spun around and went backwards on his hands, then did this sideways pseudo-skip on his hands… O.o Not once did he touch his feet to the ground. Damn,…

Class ended with a great Q&A session with everyone asking about his training, career and acting. He told us he’d be in the Tekken movie coming out next year playing the part of Eddie Gordo. It was great to be able to train with him and when we switched from action mode to stop-and-relax mode, he was a calm, yet centered and humble guy.

Anyway, if you’ve never seen him in action, here he is…

(The video’s about 6.5 min long, but he’s only in it for the first half.)

On a slightly different topic, my mestre gave me the usual hug after class and then held my head with both hands, looked me in the eyes and (seemingly hesitantly) said, “Joo should reeelly try to come to another class sometime. Maybe even change the night joo come. I tink theez class eez getting too eeezy for joo.”

He’s allowing me to participate in the advanced class. With so many new students, we’ve been doing basic review week after week. He said it would be tough for me at first, but that I would get more out of it. Cool! I’m glad he thinks I’m ready to move on! ^_^ So if I show up anywhere with a black eye, twisted ankle or neck brace,… you’ll know why.

To help our dear friend, Gobo (Sean Keily), there’s going to be a barbecue this weekend at Harvey West Park in Santa Cruz, CA. If you don’t know Sean’s story,… he has been a huge advocate of the Goth/Industrial scene in Santa Cruz and has organized many events at the Blue Lagoon.

He is now battling lymphoma and is undergoing treatment at Stanford. Several benefits have been held to help pay for his expenses and this barbecue is another that will bring in funds to help pay for CNA care so he can be at home between treatments.

He’s a great friend and can use our help.

Learn more about Sean at www.savegobo.com.

UPDATE: I just learned that, after costs, this benefit yielded $4,000.00 for Sean! Way to go everyone! It was an extremely fun event, too!

WordPress 2.5 was just released, so I’m installing it on a couple of my domains and testing it out. What I’m really interested in checking out is the new gallery feature which allows you to upload images and will create a gallery for you. See a demo of it here.