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Kevin — this is beautifully written and profoundly resonates with what we are trying to protect. At our gym in Pai, Thailand — led by Kru Sittiphong (Eminent Air, Bangkok) — we often find ourselves discussing this exact tension. The split you describe between aggression as war and tradition as festival maps directly onto the current shift happening in Muay Thai today, especially in the growing clash between Muay Farang and traditional Muay Femur. So many Westerners arrive here asking for two sessions a day, intense sparring, and "hard training" to burn through their fire. They believe output equals progress — but they miss that in Thai Muay Thai, form comes before fire. As Kru says, “If no one corrects your technique, you're just burning energy and money.” You can train for years and still lack timing, balance, and control if no one slows you down. He calls this rush-to-power style "Muay Farang." Not in judgment — but as a cultural observation. It’s mechanical. It’s linear. It seeks transformation through depletion, rather than refinement. It forgets the smile in the sparring ring. The mutual game. The moment when two fighters laugh and say, “You got me.” That ease is the solarity. That’s the festival. Lerdsilla, Saenchai — we show students how they move not to win but to shine. Their movement is gift, not dominance. We see this in our students too — that knife’s edge between aggression and release. Some say they want to spar to “let out the fire.” But this isn’t the Thai way. Not really. Not the artful way. Real Thai Muay Thai is not made in war. It’s made in play, in rhythm, in control, in beauty. Muay Thai was born out of community, not conquest. The rings were surrounded by farmers, not fighters. And even now, the countryside promotions like Pai Fight Night are pushing back against the gambling, the scoring controversies, the drift toward aggressive spectacle. They are preserving Muay Thai as cultural heritage — as festival, as you so eloquently say. Even the structure of Thai training reflects this longevity: one thoughtful session a day, not burnout. Recovery built in. Years spent mastering balance before layering in power. It's a slow art. A patient art. It cannot be "hacked." And it cannot be copied in systems that don't understand its roots. So yes — we’re witnessing a shift. And some, like Samart Payakaroon, are trying to protect the tradition. Others, like the Muay Femur stylist who left ONE Championship, are quietly walking away from the pressure to perform brutality over brilliance. We believe this conversation matters deeply — and must continue. Thank you for holding space for it, — Jennifer & Kru Sittiphong Sittiphong Muay Thai - Technical Muay Femur Training Pai, Thailand

What many do not realize is that ONE has so thoroughly commandeered the social media ecosystem of Muay Thai in Thailand (quite consciously, as part of its marketing approach, absorbing trad social media accounts, controlling messaging across all platforms through various systematically means...and quite brilliantly I would say), that many, many New Gen Muay Thai fans in Thailand, who speak no English at all, now have bought 100% into the ONE Entertainment full power smash aesthetic. Demographically much of it is somewhat a new fan base for Muay Thai, but its very vocal in SoMe post comments, and has influenced the older online gen as well. What we in the West are drawn to in traditional Muay Thai is now is ardently being pushed against by a segment of Thai fandom now, even in the trad ruleset. There is a kind of tug-of-war now between the traditional values of superior fighting and the new International smash values, and hybrid promotions like RWS are kind of caught right in the middle, but seemingly for now siding with trad values for the most part. It does mean though that some trad fighters are just going to go in there and smash on trad cards, which is kind of amazing because this change has occurred in only a few short years.

A Battle of Affects I've argued that the highly Westernized (Globalized) affect expression in ONE and other Entertainment Muay Thai, typified in the Scream face you'll see in fight posters (which sometimes ironically looks like a yawn) and in post fight celebration, expressing aggro values that work against the traditional affects of Thailand's trad Muay Thai, a fighting art that comes out of Buddhistic culture largely organized around self-control...(that's a mouthful!) is attempting to invert Muay Thai's relationship to violence itself. It is interesting that spreading in the trad circuit is this mindfulness/meditative post-fight victory pose, an example of which is here, the young fighter with his trainer. This is no small thing because arguably culture is made up of prescriptions of "how you should feel", largely expressed in idealized body language and facial expression. When you change that prescription, in fact inverting, you are challenging the main messages of culture itself. One of the gifts of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai, I have discussed, is that it provides a different affectual understanding of violence itself, which then cashes out in simply more effective fighting in the ring. Something of a gift to a world that is more and more oriented toward rage and outrage.

above, festival fight in Pattaya Just some thoughts and observations on the overall state of Thailand's Muay Thai. Not an expert opinion, just an informed perspective. The title of this piece may sound absurd, or maybe for some just an exaggeration, but there is among some long time fans who have watched a lot of Muay Thai in Thailand the sense that the only Muay Thai worth watching in Thailand now, in terms of actual skill, is Muay Dek, the Muay Thai of Thai youth. This piece about why that may be so. There is a sense that Muay Thai has been stretched now in two directions. You have Bangkok stadia, gambling driven traditional Muay Thai, supposedly the acme of the country's traditional talent, and you have Entertainment Muay Thai (with various versions of itself), a Muay Thai that is bent towards - and in many cases just FOR - the foreigner. If I was to really generalize between the two, one line of Muay Thai heads toward more "technical" point fighting and fight management (trad stadium Muay Thai), fights where fighters and corners are always responding to shifting gambling odds, and on the other hand a Muay Thai (in the extreme case of ONE) which is all about combos, aggression and offensive risk taking, emphasizing trades in the pocket and knockouts. The problem is, neither trajectory is very skilled (at least in the historical sense of Thailand's greatly skilled fighters). Muay Thai has become increasingly deskilled, along these two trending branches. And, if you mostly watch one of the two, you might not have noticed the deskilled aspects, because this is just the "new normal", and competition always produces winners who seem in comparison to others, quite skilled. It's only when you take the wider view, not only of the history and greatness of the sport, but also of the present state of Muay Thai itself, importantly including Muay Dek, do you see the drop in skill in adult fighting...as each promotional style squeezes out certain qualities from their fighters, cutting off their full, expressive development. Even with big sidebets on fights (gambling), and seemingly lots of pressure, Muay Dek fighters fight with great freedom. Some of this is a mystery why this is lost, but what follows is a sketch of how Muay Dek fighters change and become limited once they reach a certain age. Why Are the Muay Dek Fighters the Best Muay Thai Fighters in Thailand? If you just watch a few fights, and you have an eye for it, you'll see it. In a word, freedom. In another word, expressiveness. And still an third, sanae (charm, charisma, a key component in Thai traditional scoring). The Muay Thai of the Golden Age (1980s-1997) was filled with highly skilled, very well-rounded, but importantly very expressive fighters, fighters who fought with experimentation who were constantly adjusting to their opponent, drawing on styles and tactics that could in shifts change the outcomes of fights. And in fighting in that way that exuded personality, uniqueness and charm...aura. Much of this quality, and flexibility is gone from Thailand's Muay Thai, but in today's Muay Dek some of it is really still there. Its only when these fighters get to a certain age...maybe 15-16, that it starts to become squeezed out. In the Muay Dek even of today you get fighters who are regulating their energies with great subtitle, not swinging between overt passivity or over-aggression, fighters engage more continuously in the classic style, with fewer ref breaks, less stalling, fighters drawing out extended phrasing and highly technical defensive stretches that endure. A greater variety of weapons, and even transitions between fighting styles or a shifting of tactics, to solve what is happening in the fight, a kind of cerebral aesthetic that older fighters seem to have lost the capacity for. At the highest levels of Muay Dek youth fighting you see dimensionality...and personality. There is much less nibbling at leads. Instead one sees that leads are vied for more or less continually, and expanded when achieved, without devolving into hyper-aggressive mashing. I'm going to leave Entertainment Muay Thai to the side for now, especially ONE which is its own particular excessive exaggeration, mostly because its kind of obvious how promotional hype, booking dynamics, rule-sets and bonuses shape fighters to fight in a certain more limited way. What many may not realize is that trad Muay Thai in the stadia also forces fighters to fight in a certain way, in many cases simplifying or pairing down what they had been capable of when developing as youths. I'm going to say "gambling" here, but gambling is not the boogieman monster that a lot of online commentary makes it out to be. Gambling in Muay Thai is essential to its form, in fact I don't think Thailand's Muay Thai would have reached the complexity of its art without ubiquitous gambling, all the way down to the 1,000s and 1,000s of villages and provincial fight cards, its ecosystem of fighting, which have gone on for maybe centuries. Some of the discussion of the importance of gambling I discuss speculatively here: above, festival fight in Buriram The problem isn't "gambling" per se, but rather that in the larger venues in Bangkok because of the changing (eroding) demographics of Muay Thai the shift of economic power to big gyms, and the dwindling talent pool, the powerful forces of gambling interests have lost proportion, and now have outsized impact. There are not enough counter-balancing forces to keep gambling's historically important role in Muay Thai's creativity, in check. These have worn away, leaving gambling as too prominent. But, I'm not talking about corruption here (which everyone loves to turn to with an infinite finger of blame). I'm actually talking about the way in which Muay Thai is traditionally fought with fighters responding in a live sense to the shifting odds of the audience. Online gambling has complicated this more human, social dimension of the sport, abstracting it to 1,000s or 10,000s of people of varying interests and even knowledge, on their mobile phones. The demographic of "who" gambles has changed, and increasingly people are gambling who have less knowledge about the sport. They'll place a bet on Muay Thai just as they'll place a bet on a football game. Again, let's bracket, let's put the online nature of gambling to the side, and just talk about the traditional relationship between live fighting and live in-person gambling in the stadia. The fighters are fighting TO the odds. The odds are the "score" of the fight, just like in basketball you could look up to a scoreboard and see the score of the game, in Muay Thai you can look to the odds and (roughly!) know the score of the fight. There may be distortion in the odds, whales and their factions of one sort of another may be putting their thumb on the scale, but there is a symbiotic discourse happening between live gambling and the fighters (and their corners). Some of this traditionally has produced great complexity of skills, the ability of fighters to not just "win" the fight in terms of points, but also manage the fight, in stretches, shaping narratives. But today, the exact opposite is happening. Gambling is deskilling traditional Muay Thai, in large part because the small gyms of Thailand - the gyms that actually grow all the fighters, feeding the talent of Bangkok - have been eroding. Not only have they been disappearing (there are far, far fewer of them), those that exist still have no political power in the socio-economics of the sport. When fighters of small gyms enter the gambling rings of Bangkok, not only are they doing so on a very fragile line of income, often losing money to even bring their fighters down, they can no longer bet big on their fighters to supplement fight pay. Betting on your own fighter was once an entire secondary economy which grew small gyms and encouraged them to create superior talents. If you had a top fighter he could be a big earner not only for the gym, but also all the padmen krus in it, aside from fight pay. Because small gyms have lost power overall, political power, they have to live at the margins, which means their fighters have to fight extremely conservatively so as to not be blamed if their fighter loses. They need the backing of the social circles of gamblers. If you lost, it can't be because you took a risk. And because big gyms are going to win (force through political weight) close fights, small gyms have to practically walk on egg-shells in the way that their fighters fight. Generally: get a small lead...and once you have that lead protect it at all costs. Don't do anything risky to expand the lead. And, because small leads are easily lost, fights often turn into a series of nibblings, with both fighters protecting their tiny leads, back and forth. They aren't trying to win, they are trying not to lose. This form of fighting has transmitted itself to big gyms, is the new traditional form of fighting. Don't risk blame. This aspect of "not my fault", "defend a small lead, take it to the end of the fight if you can (5th round), make it close enough and then blame politics or corruption if you lose" has become a normalized style of traditional fighting, across venues among adults. Some of this is because the current state is an out of proportion exaggeration of the truth that traditional Muay Thai fighting always has been expressive of political powers and social capital struggle in hierarchies outside of the ring. Fighters ARE part of and in the ring express social networks. This is part of Muay Thai's social dimension and cultural anchoring. It's just that with the erosion of the powers of small gyms, the dilution of the talent pool, the hoarding of limited talent, has pushed this aspect too hard, and distorted the sport, draining it of skills and its renown complexity. To give a small anecdotal example of how this deskilling works, I remember when a smallish gym was training a fighter, and in padwork the fighter switched to southpaw, just experimentally. No! The answer came back from the kru, and they related a story from the past when one of the gym's fighters had switched to southpaw in a fight and lost. The gamblers who bet on him were furious. He had "blown" the fight. The gym had lost face. From this single event, probably a fight not of much consequence, the gym now forbade switching. It could cost you a fight. An entire branch of Muay Thai (that of switching) was cut off from that gym's fighters...forever. Not only in terms of that technical branch of development, the whole spirit of experimentation and creativity was closed off. The goal was: get a lead...keep it. Don't develop a style that is complex, or varied. Don't do anything in a fight that IF you lose, the gamblers who backed you will blame you and the gym for. This is deskilling. one reason why Thai fighters have been the best in the world isn't just that they have trained and fought young. It's also that they have been at the apron of fights, watched the shape of the traditional aesthetic, socially absorbing a great deal of fight knowledge. At the rope, even as cornermen or impromtu coaches. Its not just the doing, its the participation in the Form of Life that is traditional Muay Thai, bringing a depth of IQ. As small gyms and kaimuay across the country lose power in Bangkok, social power, they have to exist in very narrow economic margins, which means that technique wise their fighters have to fight in very narrow lanes. The spontaneous and the creative is too risky, because gyms don't want to be blamed. Fighters cannot explore or develop new ways of winning fights. There is a secondary dimension in this, as the downfall of the Thai kaimuay is told, which is IF a small gym does produce a particularly strong talent, this talent will not become a resource for the gym, adding honors to the gym (championship belts, etc), growing the gym through his presence. Instead, if you produce a talent this talent will be ostensibly stolen from you. Not outright stolen, but you will be pressured to "sell" their contract to a big Bangkok gym. This pressure will usually come from the fighter's parents, who want success and fame for their son, and the esteem of a bigger name, and it will come from within the hierarchies of the sport. The sale will happen. Instead of a developed talent adding to the richness of a gym's culture and growing their talent own pool of younger fighters who want to share in the glow of gym success, instead you'll be financially compensated with a contract sale. Some money in the pocket, to the gym owner, but not the kind of verdant growth a talent would have brought in the past, something that would shine across all the krus and padmen, and younger fighters in the kaimuay. And, fighters now are being extracted from small gyms younger and younger. The comparison is fruit being picked from trees more and more less ripe. Not only are fighters in general entering the Bangkok stadia with far less experience and development in the past, fighters are also being swept up by big gyms at a much higher rate, at an earlier state of their development. The ecosystem of the small gym, 100,000s of them, is being starved out. And its that ecosystem that historically had produced so much of the foundational complexity that gave Bangkok fighting so much of its renown diversity. Fighters that entered Bangkok stadia used to be much more complex and experienced, and then once they got there the complexity and experience of that scene increased and amplified them, spurred them to greater growth. Now, its the opposite. Arriving in a Bangkok stable may very well nullify your potential. We might add to this that the large big name gym stables of Bangkok today, that have swept up much of Thailand's diminishing promising talent, concentrating it, have become more like holding houses of that talent, and fighter factories for promotions, and less like developmental houses as old Bangkok gyms like Muangsurin, Thanikul, Pinsinchai, Dejrat, Sor Ploenjit had been, promotion favorites which maintained not only a kaimuay developmental creativity, but also more lasting connection with provincial sources. Muay Dek and Facing Power So, the good news is, despite all these forces against creativity, against small gym development, Thailand is still producing very high level Thai fighters from youth. These fighters fight with complexity and freedom, full of sanae, technical excellence, narrative control, quite different than their older counterparts who have learned to strip away their individuality attempting to preserve leads in gambling's stadium Muay Thai. I'm not sure what to account for this other than to believe that Thailand in its heart still maintains the aesthetics and richness that created the acme of the sport in the Golden Age, these qualities haven't been stamped out yet...it is only when fighters get to a certain maturity, when they are fighting for gamblers without a lot of social power themselves, protecting tiny leads, that they lose these qualities. They become deskilled. There is another element to the mystery of why these Muay Dek fighters lose their skills when they age. Kru Gai at Silk tells Sylvie: It's easier to be femeu when everyone is low weight, and nobody has power. Muay Dek fighters develop all this complexity because there is no "power" consequence for their experimentation at low weights. And one can see how this makes a serious amount of intuitional sense. Gamblers today favor more "power" in Muay Thai, so femeu fighters enter contexts where suddenly there are consequences that limit what you can do. But, if you take a moment to think about it, femeu fighting youth of the Golden Age also once they hit a certain age encountered "power" in opponents. But, instead of losing their skill sets at maturity, they actually grew as fighters, became more complex, more creative, more effective...against power. Someone like Karuhat was fighting up two weight classes in the 1990s, a very femeu fighter, against very powerful opponents. It's can't be that encountering the maturation of "power" is the thing that is shutting down the development of the youth, who have already developed so much prior. In fact, there seems a rough parallel between artful youth fighters of the Golden Age and now. Both of them hit this "wall" at a certain age. But in the Golden Age this accelerated their growth, today it stunts it, and even regresses it. I suspect it has to do with the overall conservative form of stadium gambling Muay Thai, the entire incentive and punishment system that produces a lot of tiny-lead chasing...and this goes back to the dis-empowerment and erosion of the small gyms that feed the sport, developing the fighters. The best fighters in all of Thailand are the Muay Dek fighters. It is the closest thing to a natural lineage with the greatness of the past. But right now...there is no way forward for them. No way for them to allow their expressiveness of character and technique to expand and not be disciplined into submission, dulled. They have to face the trad conservative ecosystem, or have to turn to the hyper-aggression of entertainment promotions, each of which robs them of a vocabulary of control and expression.

A lot of these thoughts of several years came together for me in side conversation with Arm of Muay Thai Testament Instagram who is looking to perhaps put together a project around Muay Dek fighters of today. I asked him if he could link some present Muay Dek fighters on the rise. This is what he wrote, posted with permission, posted in a series of replies: Strong Muay Dek Fighters Today 1. I was rewatching one kid this morning, as I do with all the kid fights that gets good reception, and this kid from some gym I've never heard of is so good femue. I think the gym is a new addition to Petchyindee's roster now. His name is Kaona Jor. Nopparat The part about Femue being easier to execute at lower weight is so true. Regarding the examples, I only really know the Petchyindee ones but here goes. In no particular order: 1. I was rewatching one kid this morning, as I do with all the kid fights that gets good reception, and this kid from some gym I've never heard of is so good femue. I think the gym is a new addition to Petchyindee's roster now. His name is Kaona Jor. Nopparat

This perspective is related to our manifesto of values and a priority on provincial fighting in Thailand.

The first fight between Poot Lorlek and Posai Sittiboonlert was recently uploaded to youtube. Posai is one of the earliest great Muay Khao fighters and influential to Dieselnoi, but there's very little footage of him. Poot is one of the GOATs and one of Posai's best wins, it's really cool to see how Posai's style looked against another elite fighter.

The championship fight was such a perfect illustration of "basics make champions." Not fancy, not showy, just incredibly solid foundations.

This was their fight back in August, where Marie pulled out the upset. I believe Marie was a last minute replacement in that fight. Useful to compare the fights.

This was just a really wonderful performance by Barbara, on so many levels, for the RWS Raja belt. You could feel her training in her fight, the way she stays within herself, at surface a very basic approach in terms of weapons/style, but underneath it all is a very important thing that not a lot of Westerns understand. You fight WITH Space. And she persistently denies Marie the space she wants, it ends up blowing up the fight, especially because she brought with her a beautiful very deep, head-sink clinch lock that Marie had no answer at all for (and that Raja let her work from, thank goodness). I have to watch the 2024 fight where Marie upset her in the clinch, but in this one Barbara was loaded for bear. This is the same recipe Sylvie used to beat so many, especially bigger opponents. You fight the Space, not the opponent. And you fight your fight with the belief "If I fight my fight, my way, the right way, you are going to have a very difficult time". I also loved Barbara's 20% - 40% power hands, just using them to touch and semi-pop Marie, to stress the space. No mindless, 100% power combos, actually seeing one's way in the space, and touching the opponent. This is just glorious controlled dern Muay Thai. Barbara's lock was so pure, so good - with a very deep head sink. She also had something that a lot of locking fighters fail to do. Once locked you walk your opponent. Not only do you pivot, or pull, you drag and also literally walk them so that their feet cannot set, so you tangle them, breaking the line of counter control. This is advanced, developed stuff and great to see. A lot of Thai stadium fighters of today don't even do this, its part of the eroding art of clinch. She also was very aware to drag Marie off the ropes so the ref break doesn't come and she could paint longer pictures of her lock dominance. Small touch with big awareness and effect. I don't really understand why Marie decided to fight this fight as a pure femeu fighter, back to the rope. I have to watch their first fight, but this plays exactly into Barbara's closing style. I imagine this is something trainers have been moving her toward? I'm not sure. A very cool, very worthy victory.

You could just pick a high-level gym in a European city, just live and train there for however long you want (a month?). Lots of gyms have morning and evening classes.

Muay Khao in Padwork - note a little bit advanced stuff Talking a little more about Muay Khao training (and padwork), beyond some basic things like the padman doing rounds of "latched on" work where you trailer hitch and continuously knee or work into knees, there is a shape to Muay Khao that involves building up the fatigue in your opponent, which involves continuous pressuring and tempoing early on, nothing rushed, importantly with the mentality of depositing fatigue. Even if you don't have a padman aware of this, you can do this on your own, of your own device. People do not think much of manipulating or effecting your padman, but taking cue from David Goggins trying to mentally break his SEAL Team trainers, you can use your padman's energy managements to become aware of their fatigue, tempoing up or displacing them when they start to manage. This builds up your own sense of perception, becoming acutely aware of its signs, and developing responses, things that will serve you well in fights. This doesn't mean going HARD, like 200%. It means managing your own fatigue while you work that edge and tax your padman. The purpose of this is to slow reaction times and decision quality in later rounds in fights. You don't win fights early in Muay Khao work, you prepare the material so you can work late. A great padman will see and help you train this shape of the rounds, even as they manage their own fatigue. It goes without saying this involves not just "following along" with called strikes, which I believe is detrimental on a deeper level, because what you are training in those cases is "being dictated to". Lots of fighters have this problem, they have spent countless hours of (unconsciously) learning to be steered, so when their opponent looks to dictate timing, space or rhythm they have years of being comfortable being dictated to. This though is a subtle line to walk, and it depends a great deal on the experience of the fighter and the quality of the padman. Ideally, you want padwork to gravitate towards a dialogue, a back and forth, which mirrors the dialogue of fighting, accepting dictated tempos and spacing, modifying them, shaping them in return. Good padmen (who aren't just burning you out with kicks or holding combos over and over, largely ex-experienced fighters) will recognize this dialogue dimension, and you'll bring out more of their "fighter energy" and creativity, which is Golden stuff. Lesser experienced padman, or padmen who are just grinding, may not respond well, but you want to get into that zone of your 5 rounds being shaped like a fight...and for a Muay Khao fighter that means depositing fatigue in your padman early, if you can. Even if you can't, the aim of recognizing stalls, energy management, gatherings, and working on them yourself (not being passive) is a perceptual skill set you want to develop. For Muay Khao fighters though, you want to get to that clinch, or those finishing frames in the later rounds. You have to feel those angles of dominance, the cherry of what you built in previous rounds. Great padman know this, and develop pathways later where your body can sense, can experience those finishing elements. Femeu fighters, other style fighters, have other shapes in their fights. This is specific to Muay Khao.

When I've come out to Thailand to train (and holiday!), I've always trained just once a week for the first one. It takes a while for the body to adjust, especially with the heat and/ or humidity, and gives me a chance to recover and explore. After that, it depends on how I feel/ what my goals are. Sometimes I've switched to twice a day, other times I haven't. If you're coming out to fight, you might want to. If it's just to train, improve and enjoy your stay, sometimes twice a day is a slog. Your decision... Chok dee.

Speculatively, it seems likely that the real "warfare roots" of ring Muay Thai goes back to all the downtime during siege encampment, (and peacetime) Ayutthaya's across the river outer quarters. One of the earliest historical accounts of Siamese ring fighting is of the "Tiger King" disguising himself and participating in plebeian ring fighting. This is not "warfare fighting" and goes back several hundred years. One can imagine that such fighting would share some fighting principles with what occurred on the battlefield, but as it was unarmed and likely a gambling driven sport it - at least to me - likely seems like it has had its very own lineage of development. Less was the case that people were bringing battlefield lessons into the ring, and more that gambled on fighting skills developed ring-to-ring. In such cases of course, developing balance and defensive prowess would be important. Incidentally, any such Ayutthaya ring-to-ring developments hold the historical potential for lots of cross-pollination from other fighting arts, as Ayutthaya maintained huge mercenary forces, not only from Malaysia and the cusp of islands, but even an entire Japanese quarter, not to mention a strong commercially minded Chinese presence. These may have been years of truly "mixing" fighting arts in the gambling rings of the city (it is unknown just how separatist each culture was in this melting pot, perhaps each kept to their own in ring fighting).

I think people are becoming aware that there is a kind of tourism pipeline that has developed, from commercial gyms to Entertainment Muay Thai, put on for tourists. Tourists working for tourists in tourism "shows", (notably a sport redesigned for tourists to win). There are a lot of things of value in these fights, but people are also becoming aware that they are on a conveyor belt that was made for them. The Muay Thai they came for is far from these experiences. It's very hard to work your way free from this "system" which has become pervasively pointed at the Westerner. Gyms face the problem that people come to them and say: I don't want to fight on these shows, under these rules...because this is actually a tourism system. It's made for you. For you.

Wow, just had an amazing conversation with Karuhat, him telling us about a Saturday Boxing show put on by OneSongChai which featured lots of Thai Muay Thai stars, in which he fought twice, losing to Nungubon and to a Muangsurin fighter whose name escapes me. Most amazing is that he said that he had no special boxing training, in terms of kru, just mixing up boxing imitation training in his small Sor. Supawan gym, and Thai principles (he's not a bad boxer even today). He lost both fights, but he also said he WANTED to lose, because if you showed promise you would be drafted onto the Thai National team at the time (he even DID get drafted onto the team, it seems, fighting on am boxing fight on the King's Birthday vs a Cuban who was incredibly fast). Amateur boxing meant lots of hard training, but not a lot of fighting, and the pay was horrible. It was the last thing he wanted. He was a star in Muay Thai, had great kaduas, fought every month, honed his femeu style. Even pro boxing wasn't that lucrative because fighters only kept 30% of the purse (in Muay Thai it was 50%), and usually didn't fight that much. He said in one of his boxing fights he even stuck his head out of the ropes, he wanted so not to do this. I asked him who was on the Thai National team the brief time he was there and he said Sittichai, Jongsanan and Coban came to mind. I also asked why it was that fighters like him could just kind of develop boxing skills without specific boxing instruction, but Thai fighters today can have all kinds of boxing instruction, even from legends, and not develop the same level of boxing skills. He said "electronics"...all the distractions. The phones, etc. He said that you used to really pay attention, go to fights and emulate fighters, really absorb their powers and ways, imitate them in the gym, steal from everywhere, now Thai fighters are just doing what they are told and going to their phones. There is no attentiveness. I asked about Namkabuan (who is in one of these SongChai boxing fights below vs Chatchai), and his "nongki bounce" footwork which seemed unusual for Muay Thai, if that came from boxing. And he said that this is just normal Muay Thai to him. You can see some of that in this clip (really, look to the Muay Thai Library session to see so much more). When asked about where Namkabuan got his boxing (in the video below) he said Nongkipahayuth probably (Karuhat spent time up there because he was friends with Namphon). Maybe some from Muangsurin (a big boxing gym the brothers sometimes trained at), but he really didn't think knowing boxing as Namkabuan did was the result of special training.

timestamped, Kristen Stewart says an interesting here on what would happen if the entire Hollywood machine of movies came crashing down, small film culture would still persist in pockets, people making small films. In a flash I repositioned on what would happen if Bangkok Muay Thai just broke down and was no more. This isn't to say that there isn't important advocacy, or that globalizing, commodifying, tourism-izing trends can't destroy something...but it is to say that there is resilience.

Two experiments in images from the other day. Exploring lines of force inside movement and position.

Red Sonja, Female Badassery and Liberty Just finished Red Sonja: Consumed by Gail Simone and was pretty blown away by it, much of it probably because I didn't know the character and was just looking for some light adventure reading somewhere near "pulp". I need to relax my mind, and have had a hard time finding the right language for it all, so I thought this would be a vacation and a chance to just enjoy a hardcover book after all the pdfs I plough through. And well, it surprised me a great deal, and in fact it seriously impacted me. Some of this is likely because I have a warrior wife who in real life overcame some pretty serious childhood trauma and violence, and just became an insanely voracious fighter, fighting more pro fights than any woman on documented record, so already I have lived as an intimate witness of the very subject that is being taken on fictitiously, mythographically...and for that reason it cut to the core of many things I feel and even sense from all these years with Sylvie. And, I happened also to be reading Simone Weil's essay on the Iliad in overlap at one point, you can read that here "Poem of Force". The Iliad is one of my favorite works of all literature and Simone Weil cuts the core of what makes it like no other work. Reading the two at the same time, Red Sonja and Simone Weil's essay, actually allowed me to see a great deal of parallel between the novel and the ancient poem of war, and it just took the novel to another level for me. You can see some of my thought on Red Sonja as novel in this Reddit post and in comments. But now I'm reading back into her character (following the line of fan complaints that rejected Gail Simone's Red Sonja which had removed her chastity vow and her rape origin), and find myself thinking again about the Badass Female Fighter archetype, as it plays within (patriarchial, commercialized) society, something the female professional fighter is always dialogue with. I ran into these feminist objections to the Classic Red Sonja, who was rape and vow defined, in a very good counter argument essay on female Badassery: What is also interesting is that Gail Simone's Red Sonja: Consumed addresses and resolves each of the feminist objections to the Class Sonja, placing her within a different (likely feminist?) response to patriarchial desire. Classic Sonja seems born of First Wave feminism with at Paladin like knightly quality of fighting capacity and the renouncing, at some level, sexual desire - the supernatural key to her martial power. Simone's Sonja, at least in the novel, seems more a 3rd wave resolution where liberty consists of being able to follow desire without judgement. The novel also critiques social "masking", and in its materiality seems to lean into a liberty of action close to what Simone Weil describes of the Iliadic world, a world of dehumanizing forces.

There is one small passage in Deng's article that really comes forward to me. It cracks open into a possible very powerful critique and analysis of what is occurring. It's this line, in the following context: "...this imagined Thai masculinity erases Indigenous conception of the man fighting body as a coarse ‘hunting dog’ tethered in communal ties" What stands out is the use of this term, course. The courseness of the Thai body as nak muay as presented by Pattana back in his famous "hunting dog" analogy in the early 2000s. What Deng is drawing forth is that the courseness of the Thai body, which importantly was tethered "in communal ties" (not just tethered, but also constructed by, composed of those ties), is being erased and replaced by an emulative body. This, I would argue, is a transmutation....and significantly, an enormous disruption in the gaze economy which made up the traditional kaimuay. Because I am most interested in locating and when possible preserving the form of traditional Muay Thai, I want to talk about it in those terms, and not really in terms of political or rightful judgement (at least at this point). I want to think about how the radical nature of this change points us in both directions, back towards the gaze economies of the traditional kaimuay, that of the "course" body, and towards the coming "emulative" body of the Thai nak muay in Western training contexts...and think how this relates to Muay Thai itself, in the ring, as well as a cultural form of expression. If we imagine the traditional Thai kaimuay (and, there are so numerous kinds of this we really have to idealize and even fantasize about it to bring this point), the Thai body especially as a youth is never looked at emulatively. In fact as early youth likely most of the work and effort is either unseen, or under control of judgement following the hierarchy of the gym. Thai fighters, especially as youth, but also through out are quite low socially, and the gaze economy would position them as such. They also would be judged just physically, in terms of their physiognomy, or their capacity to perform tasks, techniques, endurance. Noticing how young nak muay would often in photos pose in this (seemingly unfighterly) way, he told us: its so you can see their chest. Promoters and others want to see the state of physical development: above, Karuhat maybe at 16. We are not far from Pattana's notion of hunting dogs (by which he's attempting to draw a picture of huge social disparity with extreme comparison), or of racing horses, or of any other physical capacity driven contest. Leaving aside Pattana's likely ideological aims, point taken. The gaze to the young fighter in the economy of the kaimuay is largely not emulative. If we look at this clip of 1988 kaimuay shadowboxing and think about the gaze economy - who is looked at and why - we can see we are quite far from the gaze dynamics Deng is locating in traveling fighter gyms (though, what should be lost is that there IS a camera here, I believe the camera of a Westerner, so already we are not really looking at the gaze economy of the kaimuay uninterrupted...they would be shadowboxing different). Thai boys in a kaimuay, but also the maturing fighters are socially quite low, as are even the older padmen and krus, under the hierarchy of the gym, all of them stacked and ordered by a gaze economy. This is what Deng is referring to as the "course" body of the Nak Muay. All of them are de facto "workers", though not "laborers" in the theoretical sense. Workers in the cultural sense of meaning producers within the culture, structured in part by a stacked hierarchical gaze. I would put forth, the economy of this gaze is inseparable from the pedagogy of the nak muay as fighter, and this is especially so because Muay Thai itself is a performance of Thai hypermasculinity. It literally is a performance on a stage, and the development of the Thai nak muay cannot help but be centered on the economy of gaze. Who gets looked at, and why? I remember, we were at Lanna which at the time was a fairly "authentic" amalgam of adventure Thai tourism fighting and a real kaimuay. It had a kind of "secret" Thai kaimuay that was inside the gym, Thai fighters raised since kids, traditional training etc. Occasionally another kru outside the gym would come and bring his kid fighter for sparring or such. He became years later, sold to another gym, a powerful military gym, the Bangkok fighter Tanadet. At the time he was just "Poda". Sylvie and I watched with some amazement when his kru just put him on the bag and left, and Poda just went at knees on the bag endlessly. Nobody was looking at him (overtly). This wasn't this gym, he didn't train there. He was just put on the bag. It seemed that unseen by anyone (again, overtly) he would tirelessly go like this on the bag until he was stopped. He would never stop himself. He was very unlike the Thai boys, the fighters of the gym that we had come to know, who were in their own gaze economy (which involved serious Western traveling fighters). There was nothing of the emulative Body in what he was doing. It was the course Body. But, truthfully, it was not that he was unseen in doing this. Both Sylvie and I saw him, and we both will not forget it. His body, and he likely was not aware of it because this was not his space, and we were far on the other side of the gym, went from course Body to emulative Body. And, his example likely influenced Sylvie to train at even higher levels of commitment throughout the years. The above is just an anecdote of the tension between kinds of gaze economies in the Thai-Western gym training spaces, something that Deng uncovers in his article. Much can be made of who affluent Westerners are who travel across the globe to come and train and learn from Thais, many of whom could never afford such a trip in their lives, either financially or as an idea. There can be no doubt that the disparity of Western economies entering the low-economies of Muay Thai subclass feeds that economy, but also seriously distorts it, if even as a differential of power, a differential outside of the differentials of power which organize traditional Muay Thai, the wealth and status ladders which make Muay Thai happen, and develop nak muay. This is true. And, I have seen and even talked about how Western traveling fighters bring into Thai training spaces their own cultural habitus, their own conditioned management and performances of affects that are quite alien, and even counter to traditional affect habitus - for instance displays of fatigue, exaggerated signaling of effort, which in the West can be valorized signals of commitment, big sighs, or collapsing to the ground, etc - and that these affect signals can pervade and even overwrite traditional codes in hybrid spaces. This is another sort of incursion. I never really thought about who the very gaze of Western traveling fighters is itself a disruption of the traditional gaze economy of the kaimuay, and then the Thai "gym". The very vital distribution of "who gets looked at, and why" is what conditions the values of training, it is training. When Western eyes enter Thai training spaces, even if nothing is said, even if comportment follows customary values, the very distribution of gaze (and the intent in looking) creates an entirely different kind of "Body" (in the sense that Deng is talking about). And kinds of bodies are very important to Muay Thai, because ruup (posture, form, outline) is a significant scoring factor. The body matters. Bodies are constructed not only by effort and trained capacities, its constructed by gaze. Gaze socially rewards behaviors or comportment. It can also punish the same. And removing gaze can be a powerful feature of shaping capacities. In some substantive sense, entering the financial economy of a gym and spreading around $100s of dollars is disruptive, but also entering the gaze economy of a gym and spreading around gaze, especially in a restrictive gaze economy in a kaimuay, could be just as disruptive. And, as the number of Western eyes increase in a training space the gaze economy we become further and further skewed towards Western values. This is where Deng's observation of emulation because very significant. This, culturally, is the transmutation of the course Body into the emulative Body, especially along Western valuation. Who gets looked at, and why? There is an allure of the Thai nak muay Body for the Western traveling fighter not only because the sport is theirs (it is), or even because most of those in a training space have been training and fighting since childhood (many have). It comes also from the affect values that are embodied in Thailand's Muay Thai, the way that it is an achievement of ruup (form) and importantly ease (ning) - as well as values like sanae (charm) and otton (endurance, showing no symptoms). It is especially the cherished quality of ning (being at ease, natural, undisturbed) which is in direct contrast with the Western affect trait of tensing up for both effort and also in the face of duress, which gives the Thai Body of the nak muay an "aura". When training with (and against) Thai nak muay, or even with Thai krus/pad men, there are "how did you do thats?" and "how do you move like thats", but also there can be that "aura" which as Deng points out can be racially, or at least ideologically charged, an exoticization of the Other. The gaze upon this Other is often the gaze of emulation. It transmutes the socially low "course" Thai Body into an emulative one. And...without too much irony Deng points out, Western traveling fighters are not only emulating the Thai Body, they are emulating it to attempt to defeat and dominate it...in the ring, as part of their own transmutation...an effort which certainly would yield to some Colonialist criticism. The power of the gaze as such is worth considering, especially as it featured in the kaimuay gaze economy. It is quite common to attribute the great grace and performative capacities of Thai fighters to how young they started training and fighting in the sport. There is a sense in which all that experience is already baked-in and become second nature by the time they reached Bangkok rings in the past. And we can regard this as true. But, I would offer with a focus on the gaze economy in the role of pedagogy, and the development of the very identities of fighters that it may be even less how young they started fighting (Karuhat, for instance started at 15, comparatively late), so much as how they have been shaped by the gaze economies of their culture and sub-cultures, the who and whys of getting looked at, and importantly, that by the time nak muay are becoming rising stars in the rings of Bangkok (at least in the Golden Age of the sport) they are passing through adolescence into young adulthood, exactly when gaze can matter most in identity formation. Because Thai nak muay were suddenly gaining cosmopolitan gaze attention, they also were hitting 16, 17, 18, notably after a rather restricted gaze economy of the kaimuay, and the gazes of local festival fighting. It is likely that the sequestering of gaze played a vital, formative role in the sudden bursting on the scenes of Bangkok, Thai fighters dramatically displaying hypermasculine performances under duress, in the aesthetics of the sport, as an expression of identity itself. It is enough to say, these economies of gaze are changed in our day, and in mixed cultural training circumstances with Westerners, radically changed. Different things get you looked at. A 14-15 year old Thai boy sparring a Westerner in a training ring while 3 Westerners look on at the rope is just a very different set of gaze criteria today than if sparring a gym mate in a corner of the gym rather unseen in 1988. (As just a sidenote: I have seen Thai fighters who have trained around Westerners, even in fairly traditional contexts, fight with a sort of early fight peacocking that seems new to the sport, a peacocking that could not be backed up, perhaps a product of the new gaze training economies.) This is also to leave out a completely separate and quite different gaze economy of the nak muay which certainly did not exist 35 years ago, the gaze economy of social media, being looked at through video and photographs by numerous, faceless others. Training kaimuay of the past were very cloistered environment, not only in terms of outside influence, but in terms of highly restrictive gaze dynamics. Now Thai nak muay gaze economies are spread throughout the world in social media channels, not only to Thais, but to Westerners and everyone else. It likely is unmeasurable how much of a change this has brought to the culture, let alone Muay Thai and the development of the fighter as hypermasculine performer. Deng brings in the very significant factor of the Western traveling gaze in the tourist gym, in tourist centers like Phuket or Chiangmai. Socially low Thai bodies of nak muay and ex-fighters are being looked at with emulation by social high (affluent) Westerners. Among the higher, cosmopolitan classes of first Siam, and then Thailand have held the Western gaze with great esteem (even if problematized, or mixed esteem). It should not be overlooked at that in these training spaces lower status Thais are receiving the emulative gaze of the Westerner. This cannot help but be a status transmutation, in even a historic sense, if even in part, of no small order. And the kinds of valorizations that occur at the level of gaze and imitation are of a very different value economy of those that traditionally produced Muay Thai (even if the things valued, like ning, or balance, or sanae are the same). Their production is different. And, there is the power differential that these are larger bodied, economically affluent (often) men who are looking through emulation to defeat and dominate the Thai Body in the ring. The cross-signs of power, especially at the ideological level, are contradictory and complex. Deng also eludes to but does not state outright that in adventure fight tourism there is another alluring Thai Body in tourist destinations, that of the bar girl and prostitute. In a strange pair, there is a male and female counterpart (leaving aside trans-gender, and queerness for a moment) both forming a Thai Body Other, often both partaken from by Western fight tourism. The homosocial fighter and the emulative nak muay, and the alluring, receptive Thai bar girl. I do not have another perspective on this because I know these mostly just through stereotypes because I haven't spent time in these kinds of more tourism-oriented training spaces or around bar culture, but it cannot be without comparison at least in terms of critique. What is interesting is that if the Thai kaimuay gaze economies are radically and utterly undermined - I remember filming at a Bangkok kaimuay that still is almost entirely Thai and regularly provides fighters for all the stadium shows, and we asked if they are interested in Westerners training there, and at first they said "no", and then a short time later came back and said "They can, but if they train here they can never leave", meaning, you are on lockdown at the camp, you don't leave its walls, the gaze economy is in tact - and certainly they are undermined if only at the level of social media, what is to become of the Thai nak muay and the magical fighter camps would produce? Long now have we said this fighter no longer exists, Saenchai being the last of them. We see them in videos, and we have documented them as a generation or two, in the Muay Thai Library project. Could it be that the training capacities are falling not only because the talent pool is diminishing, or that the small kaimuay is being lost to Thailand, or that the camera and video have changed what is wanted from a fighter, but also that the gaze economy of instruction and development has been broken open. Who is looked at, and what for? I was wrong, or at least incomplete to say that in the kaimuay the lower-status nak muay did not have a emulative body. I delayed this because I didn't want to complexify the contrast too much in the above. Indeed there is an emulative body of the nak muay that develops in the very maturation within the kaimuay, as younger boys become stronger, more accomplished fighters, and start receiving more of the gaze economy. Older fighters, even by one year, just as in any school or family, are emulative to the younger, but as Deng points out, this emulation is quite personal. It is tied to the "community", in really in a much smaller community than that, the family of the kaimuay. Status is increased with age, and younger fighters emulate older fighters in their own small gym. This is one of the destructive elements of big Bangkok gyms when they take fighters of any success from smaller kaimuay. They are removing the emulative body from the de facto "family" of the gym, the practice and identity which draws the lower status fighters up. This emulation and status change though happens within closed, traditional gaze economy of the kaimuay. It develops. It is quite different than the allure of the Thai Body nak muay or trainers may be assigned by a Western traveling fighter. The distribution of the gaze and the values of that distribution are radically different and altering.

Enshittification, Here's How Platforms Die, Cory Doctorow https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?feature=shared&t=130 "First it is good to its users. Then it abuses its users to make things better for its business customers. Then it abuses those business customers to claw back the value that was once with the users, and then with the business customers, allocates it to themselves, then there is no value left. It turns into a pile of shit and then it dies." We should look at who are the "users" of Muay Thai (fans? consumers?), who are the business customers (the promoters? the gyms?), and who is the platform? There definitely is an abuse of Thai fighters going on in the altering of their sport. ...looking into the concept of Capitalist enshittification to understand what is happening to trad Muay Thai. The argument above is that enshitification ensues when anti-competition laws or barrier fail. We can see how, for instance, a certain very well funded Entertainment fighting brand came in and tried to corner the market on big names, lock down messaging across all social media platforms, and (probably quite sensibly for this sort of aggressive move) monopolize as much of the sport as could be, up and down the production and consumption chain. It was likely quite fortunate that competition indeed did arise, and push back across the board, up and down that same chain.

Yodkhunpon visits PK Saenchai every Thursday, so you could be connected to him there, but I suspect the work you could do with him is much more thorough in private sessions in Pattaya, where he lives. Clinch is gyms is very hard to assess, because opportunity can depend on what size you are. If you are large bodied probably clinching with other Westerners would be what you require (but you'll not be training as much against skilled Thais, who know the art at a deeper level, which is important because a lot of clinch learning is through osmosis). We haven't been up to the (new) Lanna yet, but it does seem fighter-centric.

In all this time, I never realized that Muangchai's WBC Championship belt was the belt that Chatchai Sasakul won, passed through Yuri. Basically Chatchai resumed the Thai Champion legacy. The more you study, the more you see how embedded Western Boxing has been in Thailand's Muay Thai history. Filmed with Muangchai yesterday, documenting his Muay Thai.

The cover is above, you can download the full magazine in hi-res pdf: Muay Magazine - Nov. 8, 1968 ? - pdf download here Not sure about the year, inside there are cards posted from the year 1968 it seems. These magazines were sent to us by a supporting collector so we can share with others. Any informative comment or translation below is much appreciated.

Lev brought to my attention Lankrung Kiatkriangkrai, who happens to be on the Holy Grail card, Christmas Eve of 1982, when Dieselnoi beat Samart. He's fighting Boonam Sor.Jarunee for the vacant 112 lb Rajadamnern title, and displays just a beautiful increasingly tempo'd style showing how boxing and the weapons of Muay Thai went together in early Golden Age. You can watch the fight below. He was a 1984 Olympic Boxer under the name Teeraporn Saengano. The good people of Muay Thai wikipedia, including Lev, have filled out his wikipedia page to give more anchorage of his fighting in history, a hugely important step in preserving the legacy of Muay Thai in Thailand. Without records we just have stories. You can find his wikipedia page here. This is some of his record context for the fight: Klaew Tanakul the promoter was a very big supporter of amateur Thai boxing, often financially lifting fighters up out of his own pocket, so its of no surprised that one of the best amateur boxers who was also a top Muay Thai fighter was featured on his promoted card. Video timestamped to about 25 minutes in if anything goes wrong. The fight starts very slow, but watch for his gradual uptempoing, his use of the jab, as he closes the distance round by round.

One of the great ethical difficulties to the above is: Do you want to make visible what is currently invisible to the cartographic appropriations of colonial capital? Or, just let them sit safely out of range, in their unseen character? On one hand it feels like you must make them visible so to marshall forces to protect and safeguard, and even possibly restore; on the other hand by mapping the invisible then you just set the conditions for appropriation and distortion, and eventual elimination. One of the aspects which I believe kept Thailand's Muay Thai so resilient, despite so many international influences (probably for 500 years even), is a certain kind of hermetic quality to provincial Siam/Thailand, the way that there are cultural dividing lines, which provincial ways of life and culture exist in their own right, than you are passing into another "land".

from Reddit discussing shin pain and toughening of the shins: There are several factors, and people create theories on this based on pictures of Muay Thai, but honestly from my wife's direct experience they go some what numb and hard from lots of kicking bags and pads, and fighting (in Thailand some bags could get quite hard, almost cement like in places). Within a year in Thailand Sylvie was fighting every 10 or 12 days and it really was not a problem, seldom feeling much pain, especially if you treat them properly after damage, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztzTmHfae-k and then more advanced, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcWtd00U7oQ And they keep getting harder. After a few years or so Sylvie felt like she would win any shin clash in any fight, they just became incredible hard. In this video she is talking about 2 years in about how and why she thought her shins had gotten so hard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFXCmZVXeGE she shows in the vid how her shins became kind of permanently serrated, with divots and dings. As she discusses only 2 years in (now she's 13 years of fighting in) very experienced Thais have incredibly hard shins, like iron. Yes, there are ideas about fighting hard or not, but that really isn't the determining factor from our experience with Sylvie coming up on 300 fights and being around a lot of old fighters. They just can get incredibly tough. The cycles of damage and repair just really change the shin (people in the internet like to talk about microfractures and whatnot). Over time Sylvie eventually didn't really need the heat treatment anymore after fights, now she seldom uses it. She's even has several times in the last couple of years split her skin open on checks without even feeling much contact. Just looked down and there was blood.

Thank you for these insights, I did not know any of the information you provided! Seemingly similar to these commercial gyms buying out fighters from smaller gyms, ONE has bought out the social media representation and global perspective of Muay Thai in a way. RWS is interesting in that aspect of observance, its kinda like the doomsday clock

Sylvie faced an undersized opponent yesterday in a Boxing match, beyond her control, so on the way home we counted up the number of times in her 280 plus times she's faced someone smaller than her, and it is now 6. And each time it was a no contest bad match. Size differences do really matter. Firstly, it is absolute remarkable that Sylvie's only faced 6 opponents smaller than her, this is a just a very common and in fact pretty pursued advantage for Westerners. Some Westerners are in fact hard to match because they are big, but also gyms that represent Westerners also leverage for size advantage as well. This is something Sylvie just never has engaged in, its an advantage she NEVER wants...in part because she knows what its like to be the smaller fighter, having fought vastly up for most of her career. (This is one reason, among many, that Sylvie has never hooked herself up to a powerful gym or promoter trying to advance her, its the form of the sport to try and find and push for as many advantages as possible in Thailand, this is just how its done...this is often done with the aim of just declaring your fighter unfightable, and retiring, a career arc Sylvie has wanted nothing to do with. The other thing is that size f-in matters. Give Sylvie a few pounds and its an incredible problem. Which means her victories fighting way, way up, often multiple weight classes, just shows how unique and incredible fighter she really is. She overcomes the single most determinative factor in fighting, weight, regularly. Be that as it may, it also was a good opportunity to fight with some size, even a little bit, because fighting up so much really constricts what you are even able to do, or build confidence in. She was able to bring her power down and increase accuracy, hold more relaxation in her ruup, free up her feet instead of having to brace for large bodied strikes.

Muay Thai, Colonialism and "Techniques" not a competition, its a celebration There is a lot that is culturally complex in how the West (and others) interact with the traditional Muay Thai of Thailand, and honestly it is worth of analysis and thinking about. It's likely full of contradictions, and doesn't present only a single picture of motivations, but...there is one thing that is pretty common place and intense, and that is the way that fighters, coaches and various purveyors of information on Muay Thai to the West, usually in the form of demo'd techniques, simply present themselves as "experts", as if their knowledge, what they came to is simply something OF them. It becomes the signature of their authority and value, especially in social media contexts where a lot of platform reach comes from "demos" of one kind or another. This is just a serious trend, a pattern. But really it is almost inexcusable when sharing or teaching others not to share where and even more importantly WHO learned something you are demoing from. Almost uniformly, it wasn't something you learned from yourself. This means, with every share you are actively erasing the past, the actual lineage of that knowledge, you are erasing the people who actually knew something more than you, and you are removing their importance for anyone who might be interested in what you are sharing. This is pretty extreme, in that it is quite widespread. One of the biggest problems Muay Thai has right now is that as it internationizes, as it reaches for more commercial markets, so many of its roots are being erased...it has less and less concrete rootedness. And while this may help it spread quickly, charged up by the popularity of influencers and such, soil without roots will just wash away when there is a change in season. The roots are what holds everything together. Further of course, if you aren't naming teachers, krus, padmen and coaches that gave you that bit of information you are undermining the entire hope of Thailand in sharing Muay Thai in the world. You are erasing the very thought that you have to go to Thailand to learn specific things (or, in other countries well educated krus and gyms), the notion that to learn something better or more completely you should go further down the coaching tree, further into the roots. This was a huge motivation for pretty much everything Sylvie has done. Her path started learning kind of psuedo-Muay Thai from a strip mall gym that had a lot of TDK in the mix, but there was the photo of a guy on the wall who had taught the head coach of the gym his Muay Thai. This was "Master K", Sylvie's first Thai teacher. What do we do? We go to the teacher of the teacher. And this is exactly what lead us to Thailand, eventually to the Muay Thai Library documentary project itself. It's been an instinct from the beginning, but also a motivating value. Shine the light backwards. The teacher always will know some things the student will not. Because the teacher's knowledge comes from something very complex, a lived experience that is full of details and reasons and contexts that don't get filtered down into the particular technique. The teacher is full of richness and intensity...and its our job to raise up and preserve the teacher, to pull them into the present, and thus into the future. And this should be done with every share of technique possible. It should be just regular, not only etiquette, but also passion to bring the sources of what you know forward with you, and build a picture of knowledge that immediately causes people to look past you, before you, when they learn something. The krus, coaches and padmen need to be known. If you've been to Thailand and trained seriously you already know that many Thai padmen in gyms in some ways know more much more about Muay Thai than you'll ever know, even if you are a very experienced fighter. Muay Thai needs for us not to erase its own past, it needs to stop cutting off the vines below the flower. It is just amazing to me that so many shares of technique do not automatically tell of where it came from...who it came from. This doesn't mean you have to authorize your knowledge, because you got it from someone more famous, or more esteemed than someone else. As I said, there are so, so many in Thailand who are just brimming with knowledge who are almost completely unknown to but a few. Common padmen just walking experts of Muay Thai, padmen who don't have even much social standing in their own gym. Lift these names. Inspire people to connect to your own knowledge tree. It's not a competition, its a celebration. There are many krus that we've documented in the Muay Thai Library who are not or were not social important krus or padmen, but they are full incredible knowledge and wisdom. Raising their names, and sharing their muay is absolutely vital, and can change their lives as well. There are so many example of this, even very famous names now. Sharing can be something as simple as: "Point your toes up on checked kicks, this is something learned from Kru Big at Sinbi [made up name] and a few other places as well" or, "Hook-lowkick is a great go-to combo, this is a mainstay of the Sitmonchai style started with Kru Dam" or, "Kru Toi always told me to use the teep more in fights, and its something I've had success in when I did it". It's just a way of talking about advice or demonstrated knowledge. Also, if this became more regular it would undercut just people cribbing demo advice from other content sharers, other influencers or breakdownists of varying quality, something that thins out the knowledge base. There isn't much wrong with learning from other sharers, but maybe just mention that you have? Create and build lineages, and inspire others to do the same. Muay Thai itself needs this.

I put together this compilation of little notes Sylvie has taken in a stretch of training and sharing Muay Thai, and was surprised that there is a full 30 minutes of these. I'm just struck and really almost shocked at how much knowledge she drops and the nature of it. These are not "demos" of techniques, but looking beneath or within techniques, something that comes from being closely connected to techniques for many many years, and her self-transformation. I can't think of another person in the world who could drop notes like this, of this much variety, because this just comes out of her path. These are like reading notes of Muay Thai. It's a very interesting, and kind of inspiring level of knowledge. She's a walking encyclopedia of experience and knowledge. That foot-drop taught by Manop is just this kind of thing. It's not "technique", its a piece of a technique, but its related to a generative principle that informs all sorts of other techniques, and even can touch all of your Muay Thai. There are so many of those.

Some of my comments in reply to The Pretzel clinch position that is increasingly common in Muay Thai. You can see this discussion the comment section of Yodkhunpon's Fast, Trapping Anti-Clinch Reversal from Outside Position - (8 min, public) The proliferation of inside elbows in today's Muay Thai is part of the erosion of soundness. Against skilled opponents you really don't want to be approaching them and grabbing double wide as a habit. You are cleanly open. It's much more sound to regularly control the middle in principle if you are worried about inside attacks. Once you have the elbow from the inside part of that technique is leveraging it so doesn't get high (you can see that in the photo with Karuhat), and using your weight to steer. Additionally, if that elbow does get high this opens them up very easily to a quick pass under the arm to the edge and a very strong side control position if not just taking their back. A lot of the time you actually WANT that elbow high, and you even force it high (Sylvie does this pass a lot). But hey, I'm sure that people teach the pretzel now, its extremely common in Thailand among Thais. It just my view is that clinch is highly degraded in Thailand, among Thais, and not really as complex or technically sound as it once was in the Golden Age. Even fighters like Karuhat, who seldom clinched in his fights today are pretty profound clinchers, even decades removed from their fighting days. They just understood the grappling element at a higher level. A lot of the Muay Thai Library is about documenting the disappearing Golden Age techniques and principles, and this is one of those. and... (Kevin commenting) Yes, if I'm reading you right, I think the theory is in agreement with what you are saying. The point being, when you see habitually double outside position...this is born out of a gym with poor clinch training habits...it starts with poor inside control by one partner (high up on the bicep, near the shoulder, and not down by the elbow). This is just a weak inside position. Given that position in a partner it is perfectly reasonable to fold your arm(s) down over that over that arm to control the intside elbow, but the deeper point is that this produces in real terms bad habits between BOTH training partners, especially when two partners train together a lot as they often do in Thailand. The first partner shouldn't be automatically slapping their hands down at the shoulder, they should be controlling the frame on first move (generally), and the second partner shouldn't really just take an inferior position as a default response...the receving fighter honestly shouldn't be just giving up inside position on a default either. What happens in real life, is that two partners end up just "taking" these relatively poor positions, neither of which are fighting for inside control, for long periods of time, just to waste away chunks of training time, just so they can look like they are clinching - these are teen to young teen boys. Neither fighter is actually trying to control and dominate the frame in these instances, because it's tiring. In the Rambaa video too, he is not at the elbow, and honestly this isn't ideal (small inches or angles can made a big difference), but it is part of a swim he is teaching and constant fighting for inside position. This struggle over position and the frame is the essential part of clinch dominance. You take the outside position in order to GET back to the inside. What I'm speaking to is a kind of weakness in Thai clinch training over all, which involves kids learning how to burn hours NOT fighting for inside position. I'm not saying you should never braid your arm over, I'm speaking particularly to the lasting double outside pretzel, as a "default" start position. When I see Thai fighters in the ring default to this double outside position in fights the first thing I think is "This person doesn't really know how to clinch", and even some by reputation high level Thai clinch fighters do this a lot. The reason why I say this to myself isn't because they are making a technical mistake. It's that taking this position somewhat by habit tells me that when they clinch in the gym this is a common default between partners. It means that regularly BOTH partners are taking weaker positions repeatedly (there is no correction). It means that the training itself is not about the struggle over positional dominance. It's the signature of a lack of rigor, and kind of a baked in laziness. Clinch is actually a very fragile art, and bad habits can creep in quickly even in experienced fighters, and lack of clinch in training can erode even spectacular clinch fighters over a very short period of time. Honestly though, gyms now are no longer kaimuay in the general sense, and Thais have changing motivations for training. And the authority or rigor of a gym has shifted in how it is exercized. Some of the study of traditional Muay Thai is about tracing these changes in training (and even socio-economics) and how it is altering, or even eroding, techniques. I do also think that there is a tendency to just feel that if Thais are doing something a lot this is automatically high level, especially in something like clinch which has been their specialty, but often there is degradation in technique as training changes, and with clinch being less and less emphasized in Thailand rings there is likely to be even further erosion of Thai clinch habits and techniques. --- I was really struck when I watch Karuhat (one of the least clinch oriented fighters of the Golden Age) clinch up with Samson (one of the great clinch fighters of the Golden Age)...I believe its in the most recent Karuhat MTL session. Karuhat completely neutralized Samson in the clinch...through inside control. It was kind of amazing to see. He just was technically superior. Small things matter. Samson's relentless swims and Muay Khao assault maybe wins the day given enough time, Samson said as much, but on grab or just after Karuhat won the position, because he is VERY sound. Maybe he had to be sound like that because he was small and fought up against strong clinch fighters, I don't know, but it was and is a little startling. It opened my eyes even more to these kinds of principles that are buried in training habits. A lot of Thai fighters on entry do not take dominant, or fight for dominant position these days. They often take weak positions...and THEN fight for dominance...or not, sometimes they just take neutral positions and wait for trips, or attempt knees. (That's where Yodkhunpon's reversal is helpful, its a move like that from a weak position.) --- sorry to on about this, but your comments allowed me room to go at length on something I find really intersting, and in terms of clinch success really imporant. To share a little about our process and thinking: Sylvie is an amazing clinch fighter, perhaps the best clinch female clinch fighter in Muay Thai history, if only in terms of the size of fighters she's been able to beat almost entirely through Muay Khao clinch styles, but we are constantly aware that training conditions (wrong sized partners, lack of correction) can produce serious degradation of techniques, and honestly bad habits. And one of those bad habits can be just flopping down over in a pretzel. As a smaller, physically weaker training partner (Sylvie for years has trained against partners with 10 kg or more on her) this becomes really easy to become accustom to doing, because you are just trying to neutralize greater strength and size, like you say, control that elbow from the outside, but this leads to some serious problems in actual fights. It develops a habit of taking outside control and resting in it, or kind of "losing" the initial grab because you are used to giving up inside position vs bigger training partners. This has consequences in fights where refs are making quick clinch breaks (sometimes because of the promotion, sometimes because of the ref). If you are taking outside, weaker positions on entry, this means you spend the first movements just trying to improve your position. By the time you have struggled to swim inside and frame up the ref is breaking the clinch. This is a huge problem in todays Muay Thai if you are Muay Khao fighter. You have to get to the dominant position quickly because they won't give you time to work the position and develop it. In clinch training you have long stretches, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes...but in a fight you have 3-7 seconds to get to a dominant position before the ref comes. If you aren't used to taking a dominant position quickly, and you rely on clinch as a major part of your game, you lose. You simply will lose the fight. Clinch training for you has to be about fighting for the inside more or less continually, and winning inside position on entry, so you can keep the ref off of you, and part of that is making sure that you take the right angles on grab, you get at and dig in at that elbow.

To the above I would add, this is the enormous difference between transmitting the form of the ring sport, that is the living practices of (actual) training and (actual) fighting, including so much of its embedded social context...and simply trying to transmit its "techniques", as if a dead script of a forgotten language. The more we move towards the transmission of "techniques", the more we are heading towards the ossification (and likely ideologically, and unrealistically imbued "construction") of an art. Not "techniques".

Wow, just watched an old Thai Fight replay of top tier female matchup that featured Kero's opponent in her last fight, someone she pretty much overwhelmed right away (with probably a 4 kg advantage). It was amazing to see the difference in performance on Thai Fight. Very skilled, very game, sharp. I came away realizing just how HARD it is to fight up. It changes everything. Sylvie takes 4 kg disadvantages all the time, and honestly overcomes them more often than not. What she does is so unappreciated, not only by others, but by Sylvie herself. Giving up significant weight and winning doesn't just take toughness, it takes an incredible amount of skill to keep that fighter away from what they want to do, to nullify all that size, strength and the angles. It's a complete art. You see this in female fighting all the time, big weight advantages REALLY matter.

Here is some private discussion traditional Muay Thai description which helped develop this parable of the Guitar. The challenge, from a philosphical sense, but also from an ethnographic sense, is to explain the diversity and sophistication of technique and style that arises in the Thai kaimuay, without much Top Down instruction. Here appealing to Simondon's theory of Individuation. But...in the Muay Thai (traditional) example, you actually are learning through a communal resonance with your peers, everyone else in the camp. Through a group memesis. It's not a direct relationship to the "music" per se, between you as an individual and an "experience" It's horizontal... how the person next to you is experiencing/expressing the music and relating to the authority and the work. I've compared it to syncing metronomes. youtu.be/Aaxw4zbULMs?... the communal form of the kaimuay (camp) brings together a communication of aesthetic, technical excellence, in which there is very little or NO top down direct control or shaping. young fighters sync up with the communal form, which actually also involves an incredible amount of diversity. Everyone kicking on a bag in a traditional setting has a DIFFERENT kick, because they haven't been "corrected" from the top down... But all the kicks in the gym have a kind of sync'd up quality, something that goes beyond a biomechanical consistency. There is a tremendous Virtual / Actual individuation dynamic that I think you would vibe on. This is what gives trad Muay Thai so much of its diversity. So much of its expression. It's because of its horizontal, communal learning through mimesis and a kind of perspective-ism If you go into a Western Muay Thai gym all the kicks on the bag, from all the students/fighters will be the SAME kick. With some doing it better or worse, with more "error" or less than others. In a trad Thai gym all the kicks are different. ...but, its hard to describe...because they all express some "inner" thing that holds them together. Maybe the same thing can be seen in other sports, like inner city basketball or favela football/soccer, things that have a kind of "organic" lineage. They hold together because they are a cultural form that is developed in horizontal context and comparisons with peers (not Top Down), but everyone has their own "game". It is very diverse. When people try to "export" knowledge from these, let's call them "organic", contexts, processes, not only are things "abstracted" (often biomechanically, traced into fixed patterns), but they are also exported with Top Down authority which channels and exacts "faithfullness" to some isolate quality. I think this is Deleuze's main issue with Platonism. The idea that there is a "form" and then "copies" which are more or less faithful. This, I'd argue, is actually something that prevails in "export" (outside of a developmental milieu), under conditions of abstraction (and perhaps exploitation). This is the "cut". 6:29 PM Here is a video where we slow motion filmed the kick of Karuhat, one of the greatest kickers in Thai history. We not only filmed him, but also Sylvie trying to learn through imitation. He is the only person who has this kick, in all its individuation. You cannot get this kick by just imitating it...(in person, Sylvie) or as a user practicing it from the video. It was developed in a virtuality of the kaimuay, by him. But, in documenting it...some (SOME!) aspects of it are transmitted forward. ...its a kick that is very different than many Western versions of the "Thai Kick" The keys to it are about a feeling, an affect array perhaps, and its uniqueness came out of the shared "metronome" of the traditional gym, the horizontal community of training, which also produced other kicks of the same "family of resemblance" (as Wittgenstein would say) Ultimately, its preservation is about returning to the instruction of a "feeling"...but also highlighting that the kick itself came out of a mutuality of feeling, and not a Top Down instruction. It's much closer to something like all the diversity of qualities of different pro surfers, who learned to surf not only one-to-one on individual waves, but in communities of surfers who would all go to one spot, and kind of cross-pollinate, compete in a mutuality (non-formally), steal and borrow from each other, a milieu. Not because there was some kind of Top Down authority of "how to surf" or "what exact techniques to use", or because there was an ideal "form" and a lot of error'd versions of it copying it. Almost everything that Sylvie produces is Sylvie learning through imitation and FAILING before the living example, because what we are actually documenting is not the Ideal vs the bad copy...but rather the actual, embodied, lived relationship that integrates oneself with another, converging in communication. She is "copying", but that's not really it. It's about syncing up, and the material/psychological relationship between two people, which smooths over the biomechanical "copy", and fills in some of the affects. But...this mutuality is really also artificial, because its one-to-one, and this isn't how Muay Thai technique is transmitted. It's developed in community. One-to-many. Many-to-one.

6. I'm very femue-leaning when it comes to preferences, but this is like the strongest kid I'd ever seen in my life. Ferrari Banktongtaipetchburi

4. Some kid who they didn't even have a proper photo for. He knew he was fighting on the day and he just pulls up as a big betting underdog who no one knows and won easily. His name is Petchyindee Sor. Roongaroon. His dad fought under Sia Nao's show, now his kid's under Sia Boat's show, that's why hid name is Petchyindee

I am going to Bangkok in a few weeks and plan to stay there for one month, working remotely. I'm coming off a 1-year hiatus and will need to slowly ramp up my training again, so looking for a place that I can pop into 2-3x per week to start, and then slowly progress. I am a casual student so don't think training camps are for me right now. I also want something in between traditional and Westernized - just a gym culture that is welcoming to intermediate women, and makes sure that egos are checked at the door (I've been to way too many gyms holding pads for large, powerful dudes with egos that went unchecked, which led to a lot of unnecessary injuries for me - part of why I took a hiatus). Given this, I wonder if taking just private classes is better, until I "sniff out" the vibes of the other students, before holding pads with them.. I've been looking through lists on here and quite frankly, overwhelmed by the choice. Budget-wise, id like to keep the privates down to less than 40/hr Anyone have recommendations?

Just some notes from today's casual shoot. I don't always photograph at Chatchai's (we go 2x a month), but it is a great opportunity to just experiment with aesthetics, or to change the way I see. Ultrawide & Wide for Muay Thai Photography I've always been very drawn to wide lenses for Muay Thai photography, if only to get away from all the focus on "the action" and the proverbial sweat-spray shot. Mostly I've shot with longer lenses to get away from this moving in the opposite direction, to explore more the psychological aspects of fighting, and to locate what might be called sculptural body forms, but honestly, I've wanted much more to shoot in wider lenses, because I think the sense of space, of emptiness, is really what the art of fighting is about, like scuba diving is about what you do IN the ocean. Its harder to do in fights themselves because you don't have control over your setting and are locked more or less into one or only a few vantage points. I've been lately interested in the Contax 645 35mm lens (27mm full frame), (above), adapted for the GFX system, in part because it seems to give that "what the eye sees" kind of field of view, something that I find in many of the beautiful films of the 1960s, and some early documentary photography. You can see a short article on the lens that attracted me. I want a little more of that tableau feeling, with some beautiful sample shots. I love this sort of photography, and I'd like to bring that nobility to Muay Thai. What I'm interested in with this Contax lens is that many times I encounter situational muay, often with older fighters, scenes that are full of details and composition, that it just feels like it has to all be captured, rendered, brought forward. With that in mind I went back to my Fujifilm 8-16mm (12-24mm ff), above, which I really forget how much I love, a wide angle zoom on the X-series cameras that is underrated in the images it can pull. I have shot some very memorable photos with it. Today I shot Sylvie training with Chatchai at his Thai Payak gym in Bangkok just to get reacquainted with the wider view. I want to get used to seeing-in-wide again. You can maybe see what I see even in these somewhat casual shots, the way that the space envelopes the figures, and the figures almost arise from it. Note. I'm not a super technical photographer, and not really a gear person. I see things I like in my mind, my hands, and then look for ways to achieve it. I do like the 8-16mm, and its zoom is really very helpful in muay settings where you cannot change your position easily to alter the composition. With ultrawide this is really important especially regarding the distortion, not only how much distortion there is, but what it is that is distorted. The zoom is super valuable. photos on this thread are unfortunately compressed and lose sharpness. I'm hoping to see more wide angle and even ultra wide treatment of the sport, because the art is really all about the spaces that hold it. And I've ordered the Contax lens and the adapter, the first time I'll have shot with a vintage lens. I'm very excited to see what will show up on the very large and detailed GFX files.

Some beautiful examples from the Contax 645, from Rambaa's festival card this week, where you can feel both the space AND the details, more than I even intuited. This to my eye is very close to a "natural" view, with just a little artifice to give it that oneiric feeling, which is related to my larger Noir sensibilities.

Check out Sylvie's article on The Myth of Overtraining – Endurance, Physical and Mental for Muay Thai

Coming back to mind the pejorative of young kids fighting in Thailand called "child abuse" recently by a redditor in a discussion I was having not long ago. I suspect this issue is about as complex and profound as any in West vs Thai relations and the ways Muay Thai is translated/transmitted to the West. But...this small piece of video goes into the complexifying folder of those arguments. Kids cheering as intensely as at any Little League game for their mate. This doesn't "solve" the ethical question, but it does push it further away from polarizing, simplifying pictures. It touches such a raw nerve along the faultlines of culture I do find the conversation almost impossible to have with some otherwise fairly reasonable people. It just is very hard to see the assumptions behind the very fabric of our culture, assumptions which likely distort and even motivate the appeal of Muay Thai itself to the West.

This photo accomplishes something, a focus, that is quite hard to achieve outside of ultrawide. You need the rest of the world, the gym world as a space to indicate how this very small thing is the focus. It's the contrast. You can miss the pointing finger, and that's the point. The feet are so much of the key to effective movement, which is key to effective striking & fighting. You don't want the finger to be the "point" of the photo, but rather its after-point, which communicates a wide (sic) range of relationships the information and the gesture. Not only the case in teaching, in Muay if the eye is very close and selective, one can frame very important details of a moment in a great complex of composition.

Awesome I didn’t know about that page I only knew about his fb page where he sings and plays guitar I’ll send them a message! just out of interest do you know any gyms or trainers that do privates near prachinburi it’s my Mrs home town apparently the gym that used to be there closed which is a shame can’t find anything online only places that are too far away

I train out in Thailand and tend to do 5-7 rounds on the pads. Even though I'm now too old to fight, I kind of treat it as such. The first couple of rounds are lighter, to warm up, get my technique and rhythm going. Then I'll blast a few in the middle, full power. Later ones, I may mix it up- focusing on technique and correcting what I did just before, speeding up to test them at 100%. The final one will be full-on, to push my cardio again- drain the battery before it charges overnight..!

I've felt some pretty strong disillusionment as a photographer, which pretty much comes in line with the overall dilution of meaningfulness in digital communications, as everything gets stretched out into endless (truly endless) digital series, consumed in scrolls, catching affect-torquing algorithm effects (or not), much of it aligned to dopamine hits, which stresses us out into over-stimmed depression beasts. We take photos because this little fragment of reality...matters. And the art of the camera, its alchemy, is applying rites, practices and crafts to that image to bring that meaningfulness forth. To just dump that carved piece of the REAL into a knowledge mill, into a vast encryption pulverization is just fundamentally wrong, and deprives the photograph of the very sort of sacred (yes, sacred) life it was given. This is a fundamental crisis...and deeply affects even how I relate to my own images, or even the desire to take them. I've always felt that this problem is one of occasional aesthetics, that there must be forms out there, waiting to be created, which deny some aspects of this digital pulverization. (This I suppose are what galleries are for, or printed prints on walls in homes...to forestall the profanation.) This problem is absolutely unresolved, but... This morning I began editing my photographs of Kru Hem at TDet99 from yesterday and the first two photographs really spoke to me. They spoke to me as a pair. Together, they held a symbolic form, I might say. So I asked myself, how in this digital time (I refuse Instagram...actually since my Instagram account suddenly vanished several years ago, for no reason at all, but also because its form for photographs is dead wrong), could I even present them as a Symbolic Form, as a Two? What would be in some sense homological to how it might be if they hung on a wall, framed, side by side? The question was a very simple one, one that instinctively felt had an answer...at least a partial answer. I imagined, just place them in relationship to themselves in video (video holding its own very serious, de-aestheticizing problems in the scroll), but do so using a feature that I believe is what made large screen cinema different. The secret to cinema's magic was that the size of the screen cannot be taken in in a single glance. The action may occur here or there, but there are always areas of the screen to explore, at any given moment in the flow of time. The viewing eye sculpts, as it selects attention, in the narrative. (This is something, a magic, that no longer operates within our world of small screens.) I just entered one of these photos and selected out frames within the frame, and placed them in tempo with the overall frame, mimicking in part some of the nature of cinematic magic. I have no idea how or if this changes how the images may be received and experienced in various digital flows and scroll/refreshes, within the pulverization mill which grinds our attention, packaged for exchange in markets, but it DID change how I related to my photographs themselves. The process pulled me into them, and brought the pleasure of the large files I'm able to shoot with. I love exploring the worlds and pieces of worlds within a single frame, so it made me happy with my art, it changed the possible within it, rather than de-spiriting it.

I'm an 18 year old taking a gap year before college, and i'd love to go to Thailand for a month or more this spring for Muay Thai. I've been kickboxing for 2 years and doing MMA for 1, and really enjoying those. I had an opportunity recently to do a month of Muay Thai as well while traveling and it was awesome, but now I want more. If the "fanciness" (staying in a resort, nice facilities, etc.) isn't important to me, does anyone have any recommendations for good gyms? I have the experience and conditioning to go somewhere a little more intense, which is what i'm really looking for. I'd really appreciate any help and/or suggestions y'all have!

Thanks for the good words. I used to write a Philosophy blog some years ago, so you could get a sense of my interests and influences from there. Most of it was research around Spinoza, with influences like Deleuze & Guattari, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Autopoesis, Bourdieu, minor influences like Agamben, Negri, Campanella, Vico. Most of the blog was organized around research into Spinoza's lens-grinding and optics. I'm not sure though how to recommend books, as some of the stuff I read feels very, narrow of field? This was my list of 10 greatest philosophers: 1. Spinoza (parallel postulate under a register of power) 2. Plato (formulating the Orphic) 3. Augustine (Immanent Semiotics of truth) 4. Plotinus (Degree of Being transformation of Plato) 5. Davidson (Triangulation and Objectivity) 6. Guattari and Deleuze (Ontology of Affects) 7. Wittgenstein (Language Game) 8. Nietzsche (Ascent of Metaphor) 9. Sophocles (The Surpass of Tragedy) 10. Maturana and Varela (Operational Closure)

Hi, this might be out of the normal topic, but I thought you all might be interested in a book-- Children of the Neon Bamboo-- that has a really cool Martial Arts instructor character who set up an early Muy Thai gym south of Miami in the 1980s. He's a really cool character who drives the plot, and there historically accurate allusions to 1980s martial arts culture. However, the main thrust is more about nostalgia and friendships. Can we do links? Childrenoftheneonbamboo.com Children of the Neon Bamboo: B. Glynn Kimmey: 9798988054115: Amazon.com: Movies & TV

Just throwing this out there: an interesting thing would be to build a criteria list for judging/recommending gyms, maybe something like: Active Young Thai Fighters - young, developing Thai fighters are a sign that the gym is a living Thai-focused gym that does not only prioritize western tourist, commercial interests Active of Top Stadia Thai Fighters - some people find this to be important. It's great to have high level examples to look at and imitate. Convenience of Location - how hard is it to get to? Surrounding Location - what is the surrounding location like? Is it hospitable? Enjoyable to live around? Gym Atmosphere - what does the gym feel like, it's tone? Food - If food is served (or local food options) what is it like? Fight Opportunities - how easily can you get fights, and what kinds of fights? And how invested is the gym in finding you fights, and why? Female Safety and Respect - is there is history of respecting female fighters and students? are there reports of unwanted advances? are females given top training and enough fight opportunities? Ownership - Management - sometimes management/ownership can be a big positive for a gym. It speaks to the gym's motivations. It can also help smooth difficulties. Language - How much Thai do you need to know? Is English spoken? Are there other western language connections? (Some gyms have specific ties to other countries...Sweden, Italy, etc) Trainer Stability/Turnover - this can go two ways. Sometimes trainers never turnover, and become really entrenched in negatives or lack of caring. too much turnover can suggest unstable management. Quality of Equipment/Facility - some people find new equipment important. Cleanliness - gym cleanliness can reflect the quality of care invested by owners/management. Some people also find this to be very important. Clinch Training - does the gym provide substantial clinch training, practice? Pad Work Training - what is padwork like? Is it consistent? Between different trainers? Technical Instruction - is there much technical instruction or correction? some people really value and look for this. Privates - Are privates offered worth the cost? And do you have to pay for privates in order to get good instruction/training? Training Partners - Are there training partners for your size? Are they Thai? Affordability - How does the gym compare in price to others of its kind and location, short term, long term. Long Term Stay Opportunities - If you want to stay longer term, are there benefits? Discounts, sponsorship? Living Quarters/Options - Is there onsite lodging, if so what is it like? What are nearby apartment options like, cost and quality? Farang Gym Culture - Is there a long term western gym culture? If so, what is it like? Off-Time Entertainment Options - What are the things to do on off-days? Maybe add any aspects you find important if I missed any?