Leaderboard

I've started vlogging my experiences in early work with video and color to capture some of the elements I've been pursuing in still photography. You can check out the first two below: What is principal here for me are all the ways that slowing down footage actually works to produce motion. It is all this micro-motion, which for me is like a kind of breathing, as if the form itself is breathing, that I find really interesting. This...and how color grading can work to building up atmosphere, a materiality of space, out of which the depicted form or focus emerges, is cloistered in, or erupts. This is something I seek in lots of my still photography. It's why I often try wider lenses. I feel like Muay Thai photography, and videography as well, has extracted too much from the surrounding nature, mechanizing it, alienating it, making an fragmentation. These video experiments are in that direction.

I've never been injured by my trainers, but I've had this shit-just-got-very-real experience of emotional rise and physical amplification to drive/meet it. It's scary. I'm sorry for your experience of it, but I've also learned from the experience and it's not all mistakes and terror. I don't know the culture where you are now, but in Thailand (where you know the culture) talking about it isn't a thing. There was a kind of acknowledgment of it, a few words to make sure that we both understood what happened, and that was that. Being bashed in the head like that is much worse than I've ever experienced, but learning to control emotion - including someone else's emotion - is part of the whole game, unfortunately... and fortunately. I hope your head is okay and that the relationship in the gym space is manageable.

Like most things, it's imitative until it's natural. Maybe mimic someone you like for a bit until something clicks, but then just find your beat and go with it. It's like dancing. You can steal choreography for a while, but then you have to actually hit the beats and feel the music for yourself. I find tire bouncing and shadow most helpful for this, personally.

Small upgrade here as well: camera stand, phone holder and external mic for our live training sessions. But I am really glad that we can finally re-open the gym tomorrow, even though it has to be contactless training for now.

Thank you very much for your advice and it's also comforting having my emotions validated. With the language barrier and me still navigating the culture, I've opted for an acceptance approach. Like I don't understand it, but I'll accept it. It's tough this shit but would it be easy everybody would be doing it. I think you're right about talking to the trainer, hopefully I can create a bond with him so I understand this better.

Reading a really good essay on how the very National identity of Thailand, a modern conception born out of engagements with the colonial West, was established by creating 4 spiritual centers geographically spread across the country. Read that here: National_Identity_and_the_Geo_Soul_Spiri.pdf National Identity and the Geo-Soul: Spiritually Mapping Siam It traces the logic of the establishment of 4 spiritual centers by the anti-Royalist spirit of Prime Minister Phibunsongkhram, creating a constellation wats that helped define the national borders of the country. Saplings of the original Bodhi Tree of the Buddha's meditation were planted at each of these wats, in the early 1940s. What is interesting to me is that as Phibunsongkhram was carving out a new national identity, it was also in these years that Rajadamnern was being built. And, in these years as well that Phibunsongkhram and magazines celebrating Muay Thai started lauding a new kind of hero, every-men like the much feared Suk. The point being, just as the foundations of the Spiritual conception of a "whole" Thailand was being developed, a people's Muay Thai, along with the first National stadium, also was developed. When people think about what Muay Thai means to the identity of Thailand itself, it was poured into the foundation from the very beginning.

Construction of Wat Phra Sri Mahathat Woramahawihan, the centerpiece of Prime Minister Phibunsongkhram's Spiritual Identity project, began on 20 March 1941 in commemoration of the government victory over the Boworadet rebellion in 1933. The foundation stone of Rajadamnern stadium was laid first, on March 1st of that same year.