7 Interests meme

A while ago, theklute posted his answers to the following meme: "Comment here and I will choose 7 interests I am curious about. Respond in your journal."  So I did.

Here’s the 7 he chose for me:

"Mescalero, NASCAR, Free Jazz, Old Punk, Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, Fighting Knives"

Mescalero:
My father, as many of you know, is Mescalero Apache.  He was born on the reservation in 1932, and in 1937 was forcibly removed to attend one of the US government residential schools for Native kids.  I posted the interest because I am always trying to make contact with and learn more about a side of my heritage that I know something about, but not enough. 

NASCAR:
The only sport I’ve ever been truly passionate about.  frequegrl was a longtime fan; when we started dating, I started watching, casually at first.  When I attended the Cup race at Loudon, NH, in September of 2006, I got far more involved; now, I watch the Cup race every week in season, whether live or on DVR.  I don’t try to explain it much anymore, but in general the atmosphere, watching team/driver/crew strategies on the track, and following the statistics and rules conflicts is fascinating to me.  I even have a fantasy team.  (Plus, it’s loud and fast.) I know it drives some of my friends crazy trying to figure out the attraction, mostly because I don’t fit the stereotype a lot of folks have about "the typical NASCAR fan," but there it is.  I sincerely love watching it.

And no, it’s emphatically NOT because I’m "waiting for someone to wreck."  In a NASCAR race, wrecks and the cautions that follow them are potentially game changing events, so they add drama and throw monkey wrenches into the plans of everyone on the track, even those who didn’t wreck.  Wrecks are important factors in any race, and I’m sure there are some people who love the carnage, but it ain’t the majority of fans, I can tell you that.

Free Jazz:
The stuff that mainstream jazz fans hear and throw their hands up about, saying, "That’s not music, that’s noise!"  The frequently chaotic and not neccessarily melodic/harmonically conformist sound of "free jazz" (there’s a whole deep historical explanation of the term I’ll skip here) is the type of music I find most intellectually challenging to listen to. Think of later Coltrane (say,"Interstellar Space" or "Ascension"), Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, etc., and modern descendants.  For those uninitiated, it’s what happens when a player decides to go outside ("playing out") traditional structure of melody, harmony, time, and/or linear flow to create, freely, solo or with an ensemble, music that pushes boundaries of what we think "music" is.  As such, it requires the listener to pay close attention to what’s going on among the players in a way that is pretty different from the way we listen to most music.  It engages me.  I can’t listen to folks playing out while I’m doing anything else.

Old Punk:
Having come of age in the 70s, I was an early follower of and participant in the punk scene around Boston, Worcester, and Providence, with occasional forays to NYC.  Listening to the Pistols, the Clash, the Jam, Minor Threat, and lots of anonymous local bands from that period made me a diehard fan of not only the music but also the philosophy and esthetic of punk — DIY, etc.  I have the letters "DIY" tattooed on my chest, in fact, to remind me of the ideals that so many of us were fascinated by and tried to live up to during the heady years before the music was co-opted and commodified.  It still informs my own work today — explains, at least in part, why I’ve been reluctant for years about publishing a manuscript, preferring to make my own chapbooks and distribute my poems through my blog rather than becoming part of the larger industry. 

Anthony Braxton/Ornette Coleman:
Two of my favorite jazz musicians.  Coleman pretty much coined the term "free jazz" and created a theory of music called "harmelodics" that attempts to define that nature of playing from shifting melodic and harmonic centers in given pieces;  Braxton is a marvelously complicated composer and player who’s done some amazing work that jumps back and forth across the line from post-bop melodics to free playing, and who frequently titles his work with mathematical formulas and graphic representations about what’s going on in the pieces.  I’ve been listening to both for years — Braxton longer; got turned onto him by a friend at UMass back in 1977, about the time I was really getting into punk, as well.

As an aside, many years ago I had the distinct and weird pleasure of having Braxton back one of my poems — I was featuring in a now-vanished space in Middletown CT around 1994, 95, when Braxton was in the music department at Wesleyan University.  He kept a studio upstairs from the performance space (I didn’t know this; if I had I’d have been terribly intimidated).  During one of my poems, this insane saxophone music started playing from the top of a concealed stariway behind the stage.  I got into it and improvised along a bit.  When I finished the poem, the music stopped.  I went back to the stairway and looked up to say something to the player — looked up into darkness.  No one there.  Only after the feature did I learn that he only did this when he was enjoying the poetry, and only did it anonymously — never came down and never met the poet.  I was honored, and terrified after the fact, you betcha.

Fighting Knives:
My father gave me my first knife when I was 6.  He’d been in the Army as a drill sergeant and combat trainer (a Korean War POW, he left the service in 1960 after I born because my mom didn’t want him to take a job as a combat advisor in a little known place called Vietnam).  When I got older, he taught me some basic knife combat skills and encouraged me to learn how to handle a knife properly.  If you’re going to learn about knife combat, you need to have decent equipment — so I got started on getting some.  I have a pretty substantial collection of tactical blades, including major Allied infantry weapons from WWII, starting with my uncle’s M3 combat knife from the Pacific campaign, various Army/Navy items, and a British Sykes-Fairbairn double edged assassin’s dagger.  I don’t collect Nazi or other Axis stuff, for the record. 

In addition, I have quite a few modern tactical folders for daily carry — I switch off so there’s no one particular favorite.  Lately, I’ve been carrying a Kershaw self-assisted open piece with a parkerized blade (blackened so it doesn’t glint in the dark). 

I’ve trimmed the collection a lot in recent years, keeping just the stuff that’s either of historical interest or is, um, useful. 

Still have the knife my dad gave me at 6 — an Edgebrand "Buffalo Skinner" with a 9 1/2 inch scimitar-shaped blade and stag handles. 

Old Apache proverb — "A man is only half a man without a knife."  My dad used to quote it to me all the time. 

Is there something pathological about my love of knives, something worth psychoanalyzing and teasing out?  Sure.  They show up all the time in my poems, and I know it’s my attempt to deal with that message about manhood and completeness; the central section of the second Duende album, "Americanized," is about knives and manhood.  It is what it is.  We are what we are.

Hey, you asked.  😉  Or rather, theklute  did.