Takeshin Sogo Budo/ Tony Annesi (Roy Goldberg)

[kenkyusha]

Never mind

[Edited by kenkyusha on 10-15-2000 at 08:42 AM]

[MarkF]

Just to be fair, you aren't the only one up thataway

[Nathan Scott]

Gee, I just came across a post on another BBS directing readers to a web site hosted by Mr. Tony Annesi.

On this site he is selling a massive amount of self-produced products, including at least two full seminar videos of Don Angier Soke, and a host of other videos including Mr. Angier, Wally Jay, Joe Cowles and many other instructors.

The two other tapes with Angier Sensei (the principles of aiki) imply that Mr Annesi (Shihan) is co-instructing.

One tape that features Mr. Annesi contains in it's tape a description of instructional concepts that matchs identically to terminology used by Angier Soke.

There is also some kind of Jujutsu wall chart that includes aiki lineages, etc. and a book called "Aiki no katei set" that sports a price of $119.00.

His company is called the "Bushido-kai", and seems to be the business side of his own invention "Takeshin martial arts". His page can be found at:

http://www.pobox.com/~bushido-kai (email=bushido-kai@pobox.com)

It occurs to me that there is alot of material being sold there that is based on seminars from other isntructors/groups, but he is the only one selling the videos for them. For instance, Mr. Williams (Bugei) informed me recently that Mr. Angier does not allow video taping of his seminars anymore because previous seminar tapes were being distributed without his permission.

The information found in these expensive products being sold at the Bushido-kai site may (or may not) be benficial, but it makes me wonder if these products are being integrated/reproduced with the permission of the instructors he is borrowing from?

*Does anyone know or care to comment on the products being sold there from a consumer standpoint?

*If they are being sold without the blessings of the instructors, how do you all feel about that?

*Are you o.k with supporting a company that makes a living off of other instructors if that is the case?

Part of Mr. Annesi's site makes reference to a Kenkyukai, which is a research organization, so perhaps he feels justified producing these products under this pretense.

Regards,

[bomb tech]

I posted a question about obtainining a specific video of Angier Soke that another poster had mentioned on another forum. He provided a link to "Bushido-Kai".

Fortunately, a subsequent post alerted me to the fact that these videos were/may be "unauthorized". This also explains why they are not available through Bugei.

To answer your question:

No, I would not buy a video from any company that was selling them without the instructor's permission or consent. It should be up to the instructor as to what he does and does not want disseminated to the public.

Yes, I do think that doing so constitutes unethical practices and brings one's honor into serious question.

Don

[Neil Yamamoto]

*Does anyone know or care to comment on the products being sold there from a consumer standpoint?

I have seen these and while not great,there is some good, bad and downright ugly techniques on the videos. Don Angiers performances even are down rated to just good because the camera work is not very well thought out and the audio stinks.

*If they are being sold without the blessings of the instructors, how do you all feel about that?

Pre crash e-budo, I made a few choice comments I won't repeat. It's amazing how many people remembered what I said and know who I am from just one little comment.

*Are you o.k with supporting a company that makes a living off of other instructors if that is the case?

No, I think it is not ethical. But short of sueing the guy, what are you going to do? If the guy who is doing this type of thing doesn't care, then it's pretty hard to get him to stop his actions short of major legal action.

[Nathan Scott]

Interesting.

It's kind of hard to believe that someone could actually blatantly sell video of other people and not be called on it legally.

I guess one thing you could do about it if you don't find this kind of business ethical is educate the public and boycot the products...

Has anyone had any personal experience with this particular issue or inquired as to the nature of Mr. Annesi's publications?

Regards,

[Cady Goldfield]

Sigh. In the good ol' days, we had dojo storming. I remember a few choice incidents where individuals attempted to open schools to teach bits and pieces of an art, without permission of the system's head or even their former instructor. A "friendly visit" by some of the system's senior practitioners to the unwelcome school helped convince the transgressor that he really should close down and stop teaching/selling books and videos of teachings, etc. It really did put an end to unethical use of other people's arts and talents, lemme tell ya.

Nowadays, though, people have RIGHTS, dammit, and can go about abusing the intellectual property of others, and offending the ancestry of entire systems and arts, with impunity. The only recourse is legal, but too few serious martial artists have the time or desire to pursue that avenue. They just grumble, chalk it up to experience, and get back to shugyo. Too bad, because it lets the schmucks continue their illicit activities. And yet, that's the way it is.

I do miss the good ol' days sometimes.

[Dan Harden]

I am quite sure Mr. Annesi has a life full of good qualities and relationships outside that of Budo. Overall he really isn't a bad guy. Maybe his commercial side just gets away from him. Of course not all commercial dojo are that way. The nature of having to make a living teaching these arts to the public opens a very wide door to all sorts of potential compromise. More than one man, of sound pedigree, has faltered in the "quicksand" of business.

Moral? Don't make Budo a business
Stay small
Remain a student
and teach for free.

Just my general opinion,

Dan

[Edited by Nathan Scott on 10-16-2000 at 05:02 PM]

[autrelle]

he's no aikido guy either, in my opinion. i saw a few of his tapes. i thought lowly of his instruction. he seems to be another person "getting away with it."

[Arne Oster]

Hi,
Would Goldberg Sensei really have returned for more seminars with Annesi Sensei if he was unhappy with the first one appearing on video? Twice?

Regards
Arne Oster

[kenkyusha]

Originally posted by autrelle
he's no aikido guy either, in my opinion. i saw a few of his tapes. i thought lowly of his instruction. he seems to be another person "getting away with it."

Have to take exception to this...
[snip]
Be well,
Jigme

[Edited by kenkyusha on 10-15-2000 at 08:40 AM]

[Neil Yamamoto]

I seem to recall I said something about a bokken, not a chainsaw.

[kenkyusha]

Be well,
Jigme

[Edited by kenkyusha on 10-15-2000 at 08:39 AM]

[MarkF]

http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/F...embership.html

Federation of Better Budo?

[Nathan Scott]

Shortly after reviving this thread, I took the liberty of sending Mr. Annesi an email letting him know that we were discussing his publications and invited him to the forum to offer his perspective. Below is a copy of the email I sent him, and following that is a reply containing a statement he asked me to post on his behalf (sorry for the length):

My email to Mr. Annesi:

Hello Mr. Annesi,

I came across your web page from a posting on the Aikido Journal bulletin board. Your site was listed in connection with an article recently published in Aikido Journal concerning Don Angier, that you may be aware of.

I moderate an Aikijujutsu forum at e-budo.com, and re-opened a thread there concerning the same topic with your web site and products for the list-ka to discuss or comment on.

In the interest of fairness and objectivity, I'd like to invite you to participate in the discussion or at least offer a statement of some kind as to whether or not the products you sell that include other instructors, such as the seminar tapes of Don Angier, the aiki wall chart and book on Aiki you have written, are produced with the blessings of the instructors associated with them?

The reason I brought it up on our board and even thought about it was an ambiguous mention of someone on the east coast who had used some intellectual property of Mr. Angier's without permission (stated in his recent article), and my own experience of having attended one of Mr. Angier's seminars in which he stated that video taping of his seminars was no longer allowed anymore because someone else was selling copies of his seminars illegally.

The discussion at e-budo can be viewed at:

http://204.95.207.136/vbulletin/show...?threadid=1483

If you would like to offer a response directly, you can go to the main page at:

http://204.95.207.136/vbulletin/index.php

and click on the upper right hand icon to register and post a reply. If you would rather not reply to the board directly, I would be happy to post a response for you if you wish.

I don't mean to sound presumptuous in this email, and am open to the possibility that there is a valid perspective to your side of the issue. But since it is being discussed, I thought it would be only fair to make you aware of it and give you an opportunity to offer comments if you wish.

Thanks for your time,

Nathan Scott

**

Response from Mr. Annesi:

Dear Mr. Scott,

Normally, I would be happy to respond via your WEBsite but my computer is not up to it. It has an older, smaller processor and often "times-out" when loading a site. I expect to get a new computer, funds allowing, in January, but for now I am relegated to e-mail, so I hope you will be kind enough to post this for me.

Thank you so much for the time you took to write your letter and for requesting a response from me. You were correct in deducing that the person whom Soke Angier referred to in his article was me.

It is an understatement to say that I was shocked and saddened by the one paragraph that refers to publishing material of Soke Angier's without credit. I tried to contact Soke Angier twice by phone but found no one home, so I contacted him by e-mail, instead. I am attaching that e-mail and a relevant e-mail for your general information. I was hoping to clear up an apparent misunderstanding with Soke Angier but have not heard from him as yet. I also hoped that readers might ignore the paragraph in his otherwise fine article while, at the same time, I realized that someone would want to know more. I did not want to put Soke Angier and myself on opposite sides in the public's eye nor put him in a position where he felt he had to defend what I feel is a misconception.

For my part, I find myself put in a position of wanting to be respectful to a man that I revere as an aiki practitioner and teacher and simultaneously wanting to strenuously deny any wrong-doing on my part.

Don Angier is the finest aiki stylist in the country and one of the 3 or 4 best in the world, at least in my 36 years of experience. His contributions have been very private and low-key--doing occasional seminars and publishing his Dragon Library videotapes--but to those of us who have learned from him, doors have been opened which have advanced our budo (at least in my case) by decades.

I met Soke Angier by letter around 1979-80 when I wrote him regarding an article he had written for the now defunct Self-Defense World magazine. I noted that there were very few aiki-ju-jutsu practitioners around and that, judging by the illustrations in his article, some of his waza were quite similar to some I was used to teaching from Shihan Albert Church's Kamishin-ryu Aiki-ju-jutsu. He wrote back, gave me the history of his art and invited me to visit. Unfortunately, when I was able to visit the west coast in 1980, he was on location working on a film as a make-up professional; so, we were unable to meet.

A few years later, a person who later became a mutual friend, Victor Block, called me at my dojo and introduced himself. Having read some of the articles I had written for Inside Karate (then Kick) magazine and other publications, he suggested that I contact Soke Angier again. He felt we would hit it off well and had a lot in common. When I called, Soke Angier was quite approachable, interested in sharing information (although he had much more to share than I), and we had many long phone conversations regarding martial arts.

I invited him to visit my dojo when I hosted Roland Maroteaux (Aiki Goshin-do, France) for the second time in 1985. I was pleasantly surprised when he attended the seminar and was willing to share some sword etiquette on the video we were shooting.

He was so impressive in his aiki technique and low-key in his demeanor that I immediately invited him to be the featured instructor in the next year's seminar (Soke Don Angier's Yanagi Ryu, 1986). I was especially fascinated by his teaching-by-principle method because I had used a
similar method in the seventies but gave it up as being too complicated.

Soke Angier urged me to reconsider this.

Soke Angier was kind enough to do three other seminars for us: a group seminar with Dennis Palumbo [Hakko ryu Jujutsu], Henri-Robert Vilaire, Miguel Ibarra and Roy Goldberg (Modern Masters of Five Aiki Arts, 1988), and two seminars with me (The Principles of Aiki, 1989, 1990).

I was appointed Soke-dai of the Kamishin-kai International in 1984 by my late instructor's wife, Catherine O. Church, who had inherited his style after his death in 1980. By 1988, I could see that what I wanted for the kai conflicted with Mrs. Church's desires. I contacted Soke Angier to ask for his advice and also visited his home-dojo during that year. He encouraged me to continue without the Kamishin-kai and to consider starting a new style, something I was hesitant to do. In fact, it was in his back yard, looking at a carved logo of his Yanagi-ryu that I got the idea for the name of the system, Takeshin Sogo Budo.

When I started our video company, Bushido-kai Budoya, in 1989, in order to help support a traditional dojo so that it would not have to cave to commercialism, I needed to find someone to dub the videos at a moderate cost. Soke Angier suggested that I send my originals to a friend of his
in California for dubbing. While his friend was relocating his business, I mailed the original videos, including the three that Soke Angier had done at my dojo, to Soke Angier's home, and his friend would drop by to pick them up. My company also has served as an outlet for Dragon Library videos.

During the late eighties and early nineties, I did a number of seminars in Dallas at SMU for Bryan Robbins and Toby Threadgill, new members of our Bushido-kai Kenkyukai. I encouraged them to invite Soke Angier to do a seminar for them. If they thought I was talented or subtle in execution, they would be amazed at Soke Angier's technique. They did so and struck up a cordial relationship with Soke Angier.

A few years later, when Sensei Robbins opted not to continue with our federation because of additional expenses he was incurring and a decreasing draw at the door during seminars, he contacted Soke Angier for direction. Soke Angier offered Bryan and Toby an unusual arrangement which, as I understand it, gave them his recognition (something he does not easily hand out) and freedom to do what they wanted with their curriculum. Bryan and Toby continued inviting Don Angier to teach seminars for them regularly in Dallas. This is relevant because the SMU dojo is now associated with Soke Angier and because I still talk to Toby occasionally on the phone as a friend. Toby Threadgill has spent a lot of time with Don Angier since then, training, traveling and talking. Toby is also a student of the late Yukiyoshi TAKAMURA (Shindo Yoshin-ryu Ju-jutsu), a superb martial artist who both respected and became close to Soke Angier.

In the past 5 or 6 years, I have called Soke Angier a few times a year on one subject or another but found him polite but cool. In talking to Toby Threadgill, I asked him about this, but he had no information except to say that "Sometimes Don can seem kind of moody on the phone." I brushed the coolness off, assuming I had simply disturbed Soke Angier at a awkward time. He never mentioned any misgivings he had about our relationship or anything he found offensive. I was therefore taken by surprise when I read his article in Aikido Journal.

This gives you the background, the attached letters will give you what I have deduced, from talking to Toby, might have been the cause of the paragraph in Soke Angier's article. Admittedly, I cannot be sure.

Finally, let me respond to your direct questions. I think the "intellectual property" that you refer to was a list of Soke Angier's 50 principles which I originally printed up and sold, with his knowledge and permission, on the occasion of the second Principles of Aiki seminar (1990). Later, it may have been 1991, I called Soke Angier on another subject and he used that occasion to ask me to stop publishing this list. I was surprised. His attitude when he had done seminars for us was that knowledge was meant to be shared and, besides, only the most talented of martial artists would comprehend instruction at this level, so his material was, in essence, "hidden in the open," waiting for those
who put in the work to reap the rewards. I reminded him that he had given me permission to publish the list but he remembered it differently, saying that he had been intended just for me and my students. Since it was clearly information that had come from Yanagi-ryu, I agreed to not reprint the list at all.

Shortly thereafter I undertook a project that I had been working on since I first had been reintroduced by Don Angier to teaching by principle. I wanted to try to unify both karate and aiki by discovering principles that both arts shared. The result of ten years of work was my Principles of Advanced Budo which is published in chart, book and video format. Naturally, there were a number of overlaps with what I had been taught by Soke Angier. I called him, explained that I was writing two books in which I mentioned him and, knowing that he did not like being mentioned in publications, made sure it was all right.

One cannot learn how to do a martial technique more efficiently and then suddenly opt to perform it inefficiently. However, one can too easily forget, conveniently or accidentally, from whom one had learned that more efficient method. Too often in the martial arts' non-academic atmosphere, people do not credit their sources, pretending that they secretly always had that more efficient method in their style. I made sure that where I used principles I had learned from someone else, I credited my source. Don Angier was, of course, credited several times. However, I consciously used a completely original way to organize the principles and when other teachers' concepts were similar to those I wanted to emphasize, I used different names (mentioning, when relevant, that Soke Angier or Shihan Church or Sensei X called this principle something else or used it a different way.)

In every aiki seminar I have done even to the present day, I credit Don Angier if I perform a technique his way or emphasize a principle learned from him. Even in my own small dojo classes, I credit him when appropriate as I credit other martial artists from whom I have learned.

I can only assume that the little instructional article referred to in the attachments struck a nerve with Soke Angier and that he assumed that I had something to do with it. I did not know until much later that the article in question was even published. You can refer to the attached
e-mails for details.

As far as I know, I am one of the few martial artists who regularly and publicly credit other martial artists for what they have taught. That is why I was so upset that Soke Angier might consider me someone who would publish his material without his permission or neglect to credit him
when credit was due.

Thanks for giving me this opportunity to comment on this issue. I appreciate your sense of fairness in a martial arts world that tends to fall into political squabbles too easily and sometimes unnecessarily.

Best of success in your WEBsite and in your martial studies.

Sincerely,
Tony Annesi
Takeshin Sogo Budo

**

Not the kind of response I had expected, and interestingly enough, ties in pretty closely to the thread on "what is really yours to teach?"

There are two attachments that Mr. Annesi asked me to post as well, but I have to convert the format first and will post them here when I get a chance.

Regards,




[Edited by Nathan Scott on 10-05-2000 at 12:19 PM]