Yo Yo Ma on Intonation, Practice, and the Role of Music in Our Lives
I actually enjoy practicing more and more…as a child, I practiced because I had to practice and you didn’t want to mess up. But that’s not a good thing. You want to please your teacher, you want to please your parents, you want to please your peer. And now I practice because I’ve experienced so much love that you practice out of loving a [musical] phrase, loving a motivic change, loving a [musical] structure or harmony change or the way a sound can get to something.
Yo Yo Ma, interview in Strings Magazine, September 2015
Good Reads
Generally, this section will include small snippets of books I found interesting, helpful, or uplifting. Like this book, they will not always be specific to the martial arts, but there will always be some relationship to what we do. I’ll give short descriptions and some quotes and a bit of commentary.
Professor Sennett would be a natural jujitsu player and practioner of our our style even though there is not one mention of any fighting art or even a sport in his book. He talks about patience, slow learning, curiosity, the sanctity of skills, and the corrosion of machinery and automation. In a quote that echo’s Yo Yo Ma’s, he explains that pure repetition goes nowhere without reflection:
Craftsman take pride most in skills that mature. This is why simple imitation is not a sustaining satisfaction; the skill has to evolve. The slowness of craft time serves as a source of satisfaction; practice beds in, making the skill one’s own. Slow craft time also enables the work of reflection and imagination—which the push for quick results cannot. Mature means long; one takes lasting ownership of the skill.
And on the idea and practice of the medieval workshop, which we will all recognize immediately as the idea and practice of the Dojo:
The Craftsman is a good read. It will prod the imagination of a jujitsu player, and remind us that slow is good, curious is good, reflective is good. And it will remind us of the anthem of the greatest craftsman of my lifetime: "Practice does not make perfect...only perfect practice makes perfect.
Sensei Vince Menona and the Joys and Sorrows of Monkey Drills
After teaching us the very basic kicks and punches (front kicks, side kicks, pulling one arm back as the other one struck, replacing the feet to a position of balance and strength, etc.), my first Karate instructor, Sensei Vince Menona, would have us throw these punches and kicks while stepping forward, up and down the deck. We’d get to the end of the floor and would turn around in a highly prescribed fashion, pivoting, shifting and spinning in place, trying not to lose our balance, and then work our way back to the other wall as he counted in Japanese. This went on for what seemed like hours, until our ribs hurt, until the bottoms of our feet blistered and the skin peeled away from the constant turning and twisting. Exhausted, drenched in sweat, heaving to catch our breath and in great pain, Sensei Menona would pause, consider us all holding our breath in fighting position with his cold, murderous eyes, and say, seemingly out of spite, “again.”
Meanwhile there was another class across the stairway, on a big raised gray mat, where a fatherly older man with a warm, harmless smile would gently put his hands on people and they would smack themselves and roll across the floor. But that, as they say, is another story.
It was the Yoshitsune Dojo in Closter, New Jersey, 1980, Mondays and Wednesday evenings. Jimmy Carter was the President, 52 U.S. hostages were being held in Iran. “Big Mike” DePascuale would often come over, looking over at our spastic selves, lurching, falling, gasping, and comment approvingly to “Sensei Vinnie” (as we called him when he was out of earshot). Occasionally, “O Sensei” would have us all freeze in a deep, uncomfortable fighting stance, walk onto the deck with his old shinai, weave through the formation, pick one of us out and start whacking our arms, back and legs. I like to think that I was his favorite teaching example, since I flinched the least. At least that’s how I remember it. It taught me focus and I remember glowing with their approval. But I still hated “Monkey drills.” They had the unique quality of being exhausting, painful, boring, and useless. I didn’t want to be walking up and down the deck like a monkey. I wanted to “learn” Karate. I wanted to know Karate.
Fast forward 23 years later. George W. Bush was the President. 150,000 U.S. hostages were being held in Iraq, and I was teaching my own class at the Stamford YMCA. Occasionally, I would duck out of work early, head over, set up the mats myself, and lay out the training gear. Large mirrors all around the big aerobics room allowed me to easily check my students’ stances from every angle. The wood floor was solid and smooth. If I could get everything done before the students arrived, I would start at the far wall, line up in a deep zen kuzadachi stance, line up my outstretched fists with my right eye in the far mirror, and enjoy the bliss of…yes, monkey drills. Over-exaggerating each step, each recovery, each heel turn, hip swing, each punch, each turn, popping out each kick. I no longer do monkey drills to achieve something. There is no desired outcome. My Sensei is not watching. I do it to now, as Yo Yo Ma puts it, for the love of the movements themselves.
I am not alone. Just a couple of months ago, during my semi-annual pilgrimages to the home of my partner, Sensei Gabriel Perez, I caught him in the early hours before we rei’d in to begin our work, before it got too hot, when he thought I wasn’t watching from his kitchen window. He was next to his pool with his bokken, going through his kenjutsu stances, his gamai, his giri’s, his katas. Quietly, slowly, and with great precision.
A major advantage of certain forms of bujutsu over more familiar Western sports is their use of unique training exercises known as kata.
The beauty of kata as a training method is that, in the beginning stages, a kata forces you to turn your mind inward. This is quite different from most Western sports, where the focus is on some external goal: hit the ball, jump over the bar, run faster than the man in the next lane, and so forth. A kata is different; it has no goal of winning. Even if it is done with a partner, the outcome is fixed. Its only aim is the perfection of form.
The Way and the Power, pp 43
(gifted to the author by Sensei Perez)
Good Videos
This section will include YouTube suggestions from Sensei Gabriel Perez, who has a great eye for what to look for, and how to look at it.
For this month's installment, he suggested videos for Shihan Tony Annesi. The one shown here is called “Yielding and Leading.”
Shihan Annesi looks to have a true shihan-level command of the fall line, hakko dori, and ma-ai. I enjoyed watching him teach as he often demonstrates the wrong way, or common pitfalls before demonstrating the correct way. He uses metsobushi often and observes good Tsugiashi-do form.
The video’s on YouTube are an abbreviated, lower-quality than the ones available for purchase at http://bushido-kai.net/.
The Onions of Practice
1981, Hackensack Highschool gymnasium. The big multi-dojo demonstration of the year. Roughly a dozen dojo’s showed up with their sensei’s and their uki’s. Each dojo would put on one or two demonstrations by their top sensei’s, using their best uki’s, strutting their best, most impressive stuff. Sensei Mike DePascuale Sr. was the master of ceremony. It was the year Mickey Bradle performed one point defenses while standing in broken glass, to demonstrate that he could block, redirect, lock and throw without moving a millimeter. It was the year Doc performed multi-attacker defenses from seiza [kneeling] position. It was the year Richard Faustini took the 8 foot 2X4 across his midsection (swung by Bill Timmy) and broke it in half.
Around the perimeter of the gymnasium, each dojo group was huddled together, each with their own style of dogi [uniform], their own patches. There was great tension and nervousness throughout the room. Each person in their cluster, whether demonstrating sensei or lower-ranked uki (Shihan DePascuale Sr. used me as uki that night for cane defenses) were warming up, stretching, practicing their moves, bouncing from foot to foot, then stretching some more, then practicing their moves again, trying to be ready when their time came at the center.
But there was one dojo in the far corner of the room from our section who were not practicing. A dozen or so people, men and women, dressed in traditional Chinese kung fu uniform, with the ties down the front and no obi, were still, watching the demonstrations calmly, stoically. They were not stretching, they were not bouncing from side to side, they were not furiously practicing or even stretching. And they did not appear to be nervous.
I asked Doc, whom I did not know very well at the time, about this dojo, and why they didn’t seem to be preparing at all. He looked at me with one of those omniscient Spencer Tracey smiles that I would come to know, took me by the elbow and began walking me over to them, passing the bustle of the many dojo’s furiously practicing and warming up. Doc walked me up to the head of the school and said “Ask him what you asked me.”
Uncomfortably, I asked the sensei “Um, well, why aren’t you guys practicing?”
The sensei shared a smile with Doc, then smiled warmly at me, reached and shook my hand slowly, and said "Thank you", leaving me a bit bewildered. He and Doc began talking “Sensei stuff” and the sensei’s top student pulled me to one side and explained. “We don’t have to get ready to practice. When we go out there (he nodded to the center of the gymnasium, in front of the audience, where a senior sensei was just then demonstrating against a half dozen students), we are practicing. It's what we do.”
When they eventually took their place center stage, and went through their movements, the gymnasium fell silent in a way it had not done all evening. They performed their Tai Chi Chuan without the nervous energy or self-consciousness of the other schools. And yet every move appeared to be perfect, every push to an invisible opponent, every foot placement, every hand sweep, knee bend, pivot, hip twist premeditated and deliberate. Their concentration was fierce, but it was not, as I think I understand now, a "performance" with an objective (bodies on the floor). It was practice in its purest form.
And that’s the onions.
The Way it Was
This section will be a monthly remembrance of the glories of the past, and what we learned from them.
The new Sensei and the new student, circa late 1960s
Since the last Shinbun left off with the final rei’ing out of Shihan Mickey Bradle, I thought it would be fitting to relaunch the Shinbun with a photo of the way it was, and the beginning of a partnership that would shape everything.
When I work with Sensei Perez, or Sensei Wilson, while practicing ourselves or teaching, and we quote Soke Sensei, it seems that we unconsciously speak in hushed tones, the way, I imagine, the second generation Rothschild brothers would speak about "what father would say." But when I throw an attack at Sensei Mike Wilson these days, and my elbow locks in a painful way I didn't see coming, or my wrist comes close to breaking in a strange angle I wasn't expecting, and Mike starts laughing as I hit the mat harder than I'm supposed to, we both know that Mickey is there, laughing with us.
The two men in the picture above, together, formed the rock that I crawled out from under.
Thank you for reading this newsletter. More are coming and your feedback will make them better.
Faithfully,
Sensei Scot Lynch
Yondan, Tsugiashi Do
June 1, 2018
This is awesome can’t wait to share
June 3, 2018
Nice job Sensei. The picture of Soke and Shihan is awesome. And you are wright, when we practice, Shihan Mickey is always with us.
June 5, 2018
Thank you Scott for taking the Shinbun and bringing it back to life…. I know Doc Cohe will be beyond happy to see this…he put his heart in this just as he does everything else. I can see you do the same and you will make him very proud!
I appreciate the article about my dad also, more than words could ever tell you! It made me cry … because I know what the martial arts and the “family” you all created, I meant the world to him (and my mom)!
I don’t know if you know what the circumstances were as to how Doc and my dad ever became a part of each other’s lives but my dad was only 16…,Doc was his chiropractor… then his sensi and then a beloved family member. (I can give you more details about it all if you would like) I don’t really remember if you were around with the actual”tea room” …. there’s many, many memories there! (I set up a Christmas village every year for my mom, she loved them so much, but I have a firehouse and a building that says Tea Room ALL for my dad!)
I could go on and on, the seminars, the long hard work outs and feeling so awesome when they were done.
I had 2 of the best, my dad and Doc…being their uki makes me remember becoming friends with the mat more times than I would have liked.. but I also learned more from the 2 of them than I could have imagined!
Seeing articles and photos of them working out together warms my heart because I know, next to being with my mom, the mat was where my Dad loved to be!!!
A huge thank you to Mike (Sensi Mike) Wilson for sending this to me today to ñ upread!
I agree with you, every time you’re on the mat mlDad is right there with you smiling, or laughing or going over the move so you can see/get it…
Don’t know if my Dad said it to you, but he ALWAYS did me… just remember… the K. I.S.S principal… Keep It Simple Stupid (please, don’t take that personally…. you knew my dad!!)
Keep up the good work and if there is anything you think may be into me, please feel free to share! Stories of my Dad, his love of the martial arts and the family that each and every one of you are is very heartwarming….they may bring a tear or two but you all were important to my dad and THAT Makes each and every one of those tears worth it!
God Bless and you can be sure m,y Dad is smiling down at his “family” ALWAYS!! ??
June 5, 2018
This “long” comment is from Mickey’s daughter…you know me as Sondra Ann….ya know, only my family calls me by my actual name!! Funny isn’t it? ?
June 15, 2018
Sondra and Mike: Very sorry, your comments were waiting for me to approve and I didn’t see them. I’m still getting use to the site management tools (for a technologist, I’m a crappy webmaster…I’m working on it). Thank you both for your comments. Sondra, yes, I knew Mickey and Doc met professionally at first, but I didn’t know it was at 16! No wonder Doc always refers to him as kid. Yes, I remember you too; you were a greenbelt for the years I was at Closter before I went off to the Navy. Mostly, I remember you as the only human being Johnny was ever actually afraid of on the mat. And yes, who can ever forget the TAAZ bar? The sticky floors, the small, dull lamps over tiny tables with red and white checked tablecloths, the pinball machines on the way to the rest rooms, the bikers sitting at the bar, watching us like we were from another world. A lot of this is going to come up in the next shinbun, July’s issue, which will be along the theme of “The Dojo.”