I've posted some stuff in the unarmed discussion area, but here is my official greeting to all of ARMA.
My name is Kevin, I'm a bartender and bouncer by trade. My (largely unrequited) love affair wth European Martial arts started in 1988 when my mother took me to see "Willow". Yeah, I know, dorky, but I must have watched that movie 200 times, just to see Val Kilmer as Madmartigan. I was fascinated. It was the first time I had ever seen a european style swordsman depicted as anything other than a lumbering oaf staggering around wearing what appeared to be half a '57 chevy. So I hit my local library (I basically lived at my local library when I was a kid) and started looking at everything I could find on knights and swords and european war history and two things became almost immediately clear to me. First, was that europe did have a martial tradition that was developed and advanced, and second, that it was all gone, having been turned into sherman tanks and aircraft carriers.
Frustrated but resigned, I decided to see what I could find that was left. I joined a local fencing school, and took a few courses, but it became clear that while it was fun, it was just a sport. The most blatant example of this being the fact that it was legal to flick your foil over your opponents shoulder in order to compress the tip on the back, resulting in a point. At that point I decided that it was, all told, too expensive for a sport, and not what I was looking for, so I tried wrestling instead. I wrestled for a few years in high school, but when I dropped out, that went too.
After high school I experimented with a few different Eastern martial arts, including Karate, Tae Kwon Do, and Aikido. I took a few classes in each, but they always felt weird. It took me a while to realize that it was because I felt no cultural connection to any of these arts. The philosophies felt alien and forced, almost like being "de-westernized" was a requirement to progress. So I dropped it.
I experimented with the SCA breifly, but it seemed like they were more interested in giving themselves archaic titles, getting drunk, and hitting each other with rattan. And it seems like all the heavy fighters studied kendo anyway. I even joined up with some LARP groups for a while. Made some good friends, but dropped the LARPing. Still not right.
A few years later, a friend asked me to join him in a fencing class. I remembered having fun with it in the past,and I needed the exercise, so I signed up for the 6 week beginner course, to take it with him, and as a brush-up for me, as I hadn't fenced in over 5 years at that point. As it turned out, the instructor had a few copies of old fencing manuals, and a copy of "Medieval Combat" a reprint of the Talhoffer manual. Excited, I started grilling him on anything he knew about historical fencing. He told me he just picked them up as a curiosity, and suggested the SCA or Iajitsu classes (what he did outside of sport fencing). This was, once again, discouraging, until he told me that he had heard of some kind of western martial arts revival, and directed me to the Journal of Western Marital arts.
After devouring just about everything posted in the JWMA, I discovered AEMMA. Unfortunately, with me in Seattle, and them in Toronto, attending was impractical (though I seriously considered moving, halted only by a smack upside the head from my loving wife).
Still, it had become known to me that people really were reconstructing european martial arts in a serious and respectful way. Then, a few weeks ago, I stumbled over the youtube video from ARMA Poland (the kampfringen one). I looked up ARMA from there and lo and behold, there is all the philosophies and sentiments and respect and scholarship in this subject that I've been looking for for 19 years. I sent my application in the next day, and started working on Worstel-Konst with one of my old martial arts (wing chun) buddies the day after.
And here I am. Happy to be here and absolutely thrilled to finally have access to the resources to explore my own western martial history. My deepest gratitude to all who have made this possible.
Now that the sentimental crap is over. Are there any more ARMA members in the Seattle area that I could get in touch with? That would rock.
Kevin
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