Kevin, you suck.
I was well on my way to blissful ignorance until attending your lecture at Ashokan. Then after sharing Chinese food with you in a Japanese restaurant and having you steal all my Partagas I saw your
real nature...
...you're just a good guy.
I'll add my thanks in this thread also, Kevin - although I think I know you well enough to know that you'll never respond to this thread!
Well I guess I need to keep you guessing then
Wow, I don't know what to say. I know I step on toes quite a bit in challenging the status quo, but the sad state of the status quo makes that unavoidable if you want to get good information
. Often in order to build on a good foundation it is necessary to knock down the decrepit wreck of a structure standing in your way
Thus I half expected another chastising when I clicked on this thread.
Call it false modesty if you will, but I never know how to comfortably handle conversations such as this. Foremost in my mind is never to allow myself to become a little tin god. I hate, detest and despise little tin gods who owe their existence to the adoration of unquestioning followers; they almost always turn out to be more selfishly destructive to their field than helpful. It is not about me, or any other single individual, it is about the craft. Gentlemen we practice one of the most ancient and noble crafts in the history of mankind. What took us from stone tools to copper swords, and then successfully from the bronze age to iron? It was skilled craftsmen making a better blade! To whom do we owe the existence of steel if not the bladesmith striving to keep up with the world around him? Today our civilization has a steel skeleton, it was not kings, priests or scribes that gave us that, it was the sweat of the bladesmith giving to his culture instead of preying on it. It is unavoidable that the bladesmith would become an anachronism, but it is unacceptable that such a figure in history would become a sideshow joke. Yet, popular culture and the desire to do or say anything to open the wallet of any mall ninja walking by a magazine rack has reduced us to just that.
I like Matts approach in recognizing that I am just a steel beating slob like anybody else here, just an average %@#$head with no special secrets, knowledge or talents that anybody else doesnt have available as long as they decide to critically think for themselves instead of assuming that some clowns recipe must be correct since he has a following or gets crap printed. Every time I type a word here I have a chance to open another set of eyes to this, human nature being what it is may also cause threads like this to spawn resentment that becomes a barrier to that that end (I refer back to the little tin god syndrome of the previous paragraph)
There is no shortage of information on bladesmithing, there is tons of if in print, on dvd and scattered across the net, but how much of it actually means anything? Tons of fluffy feel good information but if there are any facts included they are well hidden with a thick coating of whitewash. I feel folks hungering for information on how to make knives have been spoon fed the most atrocious prepackaged junk food for so long that any morsel of actual nutrition would have to hit the spot! Think about it, why do we eat junk food? Because it immediately tastes good at the time, and we arent really thinking about long term health when the deep fried, sugary glop excites our taste buds in just the way the manufacturers designed it in order to get our money!
I am just hoping to provide enough non-speculative, fact based information and objective observation to balance bladesmithings diet with enough real nutrition that it can prosper in the new century with a little more credibility than the mass marketing gave it at the end of the last.
Always remember this- while I am very humbled and grateful for the kind words, I would much rather talk about steel than about me! Steel is a whole lot more interesting
