Rise of the Martial Punks

Starting at age 9, I felt a spiritual connection to the martial arts through a sense of beauty and purpose that was conveyed by some of my on-screen heroes. As a pre-radical American male child, my options for a sense of purpose in life included: sports jock, cop, fire-fighter, military service man, and martial artist vigilante. Luckily due to a lack of role models in my life, my allegiance to the system was weak so it was easy to decide to be want to be a rebel against the “bad guys” of the establishment. I was most enchanted by Bruce Lee. Though not a “revolutionary” per se, he was very radical in his own way and fought for peace, justice, and liberation inside and out. I was also highly influenced by the rebel archetypes found in many Sci-Fi flicks that brought Phillip K. Dick's very radical anti-state/anti-corporate/anti-tech themes into mainstream consciousness.

I played Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat in the nickel arcade for 10-12 hours a day almost every Saturday and Sunday when I was 10 and 11. And I diligently trained on my own with d-i-y home-made training gear. When I became a punk I was 12 years old, I was adopted into the Portland Gutter Punx tribe as I started running away to find a family on the streets of Portland. I was quickly radicalized by my experience of being caged, drugged, and mind fucked by the youth juvenile justice and mental health system and the warrior culture of anarcho-punk felt like a natural application of my existing martial artist life path. I ran away wearing my black Kung Fu pants and “wino” shoes with a copy of Bruce Lee's The Tao of Jeet Kune Do in my gym bag.

As I became a rebellious runaway resistor, I fantasized about well trained warrior punk tribes being fit and ready to live in and defend autonomous Ewok style villages. I've always had a futuristic sci-fi martial arts vision of what punk would become when, in the words of Blix from Legend, “evil anarchy rules the land...” (See my previous column on The Tao of Doom for a further explanation of the dystopic violent post-apocalyptic world our punk descendants will soon inhabit and why we should learn to defend ourselves now!)

When I was a traveling gutter punk, I did a lot of daydreaming but as drug addiction took over my body, my physical training stopped. I was a meth shooting tweak addict at age 13 living on a skateboard in alleys in ....San Francisco.... listening to Doom over and over on my walkman spun out of my mind. I was in a mystical state, sleep deprivation, night skating, hallucinatory trips lasting for days. I often connected with glimpses of the future as a desired it. Autonomous punk tribes, skating through the ruins. However this imaginal realm connection was only rarely something I felt I had control over. Most of it was a spiraling paranoid psychotic nightmare that at times robbed me of my ability to speak, write, and even stand on my feet. The drug fog cleared at one point when I was hospitalized with an infected eye-brow piercing. I had to lay there and reconcile with myself the fact that my dreams of resistance and liberation were being killed by speed. I wrote a manifesto to myself about how I needed to rise above my condition and train for the future. When I got out though, I went straight back to the needle and the street.

There was a drop-in center in the Polk District and one of the staff was a college student doing a project. She was writing a paper and she was asking all the druggie street kids the same question: If you were offered $5,000 to quit doing drugs, would you take the deal and if so what would you do with the money? My answer was simple, I would gladly quit drugs, take the money, get out of the city, and go live in the woods and train for revolutionary opportunity in the impending chaostrophic apocalypse. I may not have used those exact words at the time, but however my 13 year old mind stated it, that’s always been the vision…a sort Jeremy Clark aesthetic mystique meets Enter the Dragon.

At 14 I was finally caught and put in lock up again, this time for almost 2 years. While in lock up I trained my mind and body a lot. But when I got out and became a teenage house punk, I grew into the scene of shows, records, parties, fashion, etc. I lost my personal training routine and again lost my discipline to the dominant punk life-style of self-destruction. I wasn’t apathetic, I was always passionate about the cause of liberation, revolution, autonomy, etc. but even in the activist world which can be excessively cerebral, I somehow lost connection to my body. I became a theory, a manifesto, an essay, a windbag.

I can't simply blame the herd though, as a professional kick-boxer punk friend of mine told me a while back, “Don't blame punk for losing your connection to martial arts, be a true punk, be yourself.” Punk is strange that way, in many ways it encourages you to be yourself, but in other ways it enforces conformity to certain peer-pressured norms. Without displacing responsibility I can say one thing to explain but not excuse my loss of authentic connection to my body: in the punk scene I grew in, physical fitness was considered jockish and was ridiculed. It was not 'built in' to a healthy balanced community. It among many other healthy practices was shunned. I'm guilty myself of getting sucked into that self-destructive norm and ridiculing my own friends for 'working out'. Of course there is no shortage of jock asshole macho bastards that dominate the pit with shirtless sweaty displays of ego, and that should always be resisted. But for some reason, the culture didn't seem to really facilitate a middle ground. Like my friend said, I should have been a “true punk”, been myself and kept my martial way even if it was laughed at or put down.

To be honest though, the loss of my martial way was more complicated than simply not being encouraged by my scene. Though I've never returned to hard drug addiction, the reason I fell out of training as a late-teen was that I became an intellectual and as I studied radical politics and the state of the world more, I got progressively more depressed and felt more and more disempowered, negative, and cynical. When your psychology is depressive, your whole body feels heavy and toxic and moving it, conditioning it, and training it becomes physically and mentally painful. And the longer you go without keeping flexible, fit, conditioned, etc. the harder it is to get it back. There is a very real chasm of pain that has to be bridged by positive self-love and self-discipline. Self-love and self-discipline are rare gems in most punk scenes I've experienced. The body is most often treated as a disposable utensil of shallow gratification through sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Only we have it worse. Unlike the ignorantly blissful masses of rock musicians and fans, we fucked ourselves over by developing radical critiques of the world which make school, jobs, families, careers, and responsibilities to the system feel completely torturous! So our depressive load is greater than that of all the pop music scenesters having a great time getting laid, rocking out, looking good, and having families, day jobs, degrees, and good credit...

Back to the rise of the martial punks, I think it will be necessary to the evolution and survival of the anarcho-punk movement to develop self-love, self-discipline, and a culture of resistance that starts with well trained bodies. Right now the culture primarily develops bands, commodities, party pads and venues. It doesn't develop many families, many warriors, many gardeners, many craftspeople, etc. That's why it's still mostly a scene phenomenon and not a cultural phenomenon. There are places in the world where “punks” can sustain themselves as autonomous village societies, but they are rare.

As an amateur anthropologist, my thesis is that punks will have to rapidly evolve real communities with real roles, rights, and responsibilities in order to survive the inevitable transition into anarchy. There are many things we lack, and one of them that I've become particularly passionate about is a culture of fitness and self-defense. I love the history of the Shaolin Temple, peaceful mystics developed masterful fighting styles not to rule and conquer, but to defend their peaceful way of life in a world that's ruled by might. I love in Bruce Lee's The Chinese Connection, the communal Kung Fu school where all the students loved each other, protected each other, and lived in a sacred and honorable way.

A couple of years ago, I had a quarter life crisis that melted down a lot of my self made mental prison and I found a pathway out of depression which was reuniting with my body through martial arts training. It's a very personal thing, but I feel it’s important to share it in column because now that I'm 28 years old and have spent more than half of my life as a punk dreamer, I see the value that training can and should have for the whole culture. I have no desire to take my own personal (re)discovery and try to preach and convert anyone else. The more spiritual/traditional martial arts can be very anarchistic in their weariness of ego, leaders, and loudmouths.

I just want to express how I feel I've come full circle with an understanding that I began with at age 12: for punk to become a real warrior culture, it has to have the individual and collective self-discipline to train its bodies. This doesn't mean every one has to be “thin”, that's bullshit. But we all really do need to create movement to be physically and mentally healthy. First we have to develop the personal will to be healthy, the self-love to feel worthy of defense, the discipline to move, and hopefully a culture to back us up and provide the infrastructure for movement to be fun and have a relevant purpose. For example, I've always heard about and sometimes joined in on punk soccer leagues. Would it be so hard to imagine punk dojos, punk gyms, etc?

In a conversation with the drummer of Behind Enemy Lines about working out, he said, something to the effect of: What's the point of having strong convictions if you can't defend them? Of course this doesn't mean we all must build muscle, but I think it does mean that we as individuals need to have a loving disciplined relationship with our bodies and communities where we know we can either out-run, out maneuver, out-think, or over-power any foe. There's a basic “readiness” that I think we lack.

As a population, punks are pretty defenseless against all the sharks out there ready to devour us. Whether it be the state, gangsters, jocks, metallers in the pit, abusive boyfriends, date rapists, etc. To be alive in this world is to be the prey of human predators who practice the way of patriarchy. If we don' t train to defend ourselves and our communities, we're basically saying, if an attack is survived, it will be pure luck.

It seems hypocritical to me now more than ever how a subculture that prides itself on the iconography of resistance (raised fists, running wild in the streets, smashing and destroying things, etc.) can be so sluggish. Again, I'm not being self-righteous, I have been the ultimate sloth! I've laid in a toxic soup of depression for months, barely moving just to get more beer, ramen, and cigarettes. The goal I think is to find an anti-authoritarian, rule-less personal balance of unhealthy pleasures, healthy pleasures, and unpleasant healthiness (definition of discipline: doing what you have to do, even when it's not what you want to do...)

As I started training in the martial arts again, like magic, martial punks hidden in the scene started appearing in my life. People I'd known for years would suddenly disclose to me that they were into training as children, or that they train now, or that they are actually instructors. It felt very synchronistic for me to be getting into it again, and I've felt now for the last couple of years that a lot of people are re-awakening to practices that help align the mind, body, and spirit, build the self-esteem and give people pride, purpose, and direction after so many years of pointless nihilistic partying.

Whether or not it becomes as cool as records, blast beats, mohawks, dumpster diving, distroing, etc. my hope is that martial arts will take hold in our scenes and give punks renewed health, vitality, strength, invigoration, love, connection, dedication, passion, togetherness, solidarity, co-operation, mutual aid, etc. And perhaps build the confidence that we can survive anything together.

Right now I feel honored to be friends with a Brazilian anarcho-punk who lives in China studying Shaolin Kung Fu, a professional punk kick-boxer who fights with a charged mohawk, a punk couple who train in Ninjitsu, a punk Ju Jitsu instructor, a punk Jeet Kune Do instructor, two punk Tae Kwon Do instructors, a punk Kenpo Instructor, and many more. One day I'll organize a collaborative zine for people to tell their stories as I have here. There are hopeful things out there and there are strong currents of health/wellness/fitness/self-defense/martial arts training happening in punk scenes throughout the world. A really amazing concentration can be found in the East Bay where punks enjoy skating, biking, going to anarchist dojos, participating in the Girl Army self defense collective, and much more.

I'll close this with the insightful words of Bruce Lee, excerpted from The Tao of Jeet Kune Do:

“Times of drastic change are times of passions. We can never be fit and ready for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test; we have to prove ourselves.

A population subjected to a drastic change is thus a population of misfits, and misfits live and breathe in an atmosphere of passion.” -Bruce Lee