Jump to content

Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

Administrator
  • Posts

    2,030
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    463

Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu last won the day on February 4

Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu had the most liked content!

About Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

  • Birthday 12/17/1964

Contact Methods

  • Website URL
    https://www.behance.net/muaynoir

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Pattaya, Thailand
  • Interests
    Thailand, Muay Thai, cinema, philosophy, the philosophy of Spinoza, post-structuralism, feminism, community building, social media theory.

Recent Profile Visitors

51,708 profile views

Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu's Achievements

Community Regular

Community Regular (11/14)

  • Well Followed Rare
  • Reacting Well Rare
  • Dedicated Rare
  • Conversation Starter
  • Very Popular Rare

Recent Badges

2.7k

Reputation

  1. Noting the other day, there is a generation in Thailand of 12-15 year old farang, which I consider the children of the Muay Thai Library, who fight in the Thai style in Bangkok stadium shows, making the effort to permeate those social orders, and refuse the lure (and the absurdity) of Entertainment Muay Thai. "Muay Thai" is being done, reborn in a certain way, from that commercializing blight that struck momently with COVID onward...but, its a shame that they face a highly reduced Thai fighter pool, many of whom have lost the ability to fluently fight "Thai", often themselves delinquent in defense or overburdened by the combo, or saddled with the inherent conservativism of this decade's gambling Muay Thai, those foreign boys not having the mountain to climb even of the 2000s, let along the 1980s and 90s. There is muay being done, being spoken, being practiced, but there is no home, no breast really to draw it to...at least at this point. The well-spring resides in the countryside, in the provinces, in the features of the depleted kaimuay and festival seasons, but it is not known how long it will remain.
  2. "their misunderstanding of me was not the same as my misunderstanding of them" (Roy Wagner, 1981) In approaching Thailand's Muay Thai, both as "Thai", but more importantly perhaps as a subculture, the above is the abiding North Star. You will misunderstand, and you will be misunderstood...in incommensurate ways. Keeping track of this dividing line, this faultline, and feeling its edges is of the utmost importance...long term.
  3. This written about Jean-Pierre Melville's best films, regarded by some as slow, can equally give insight into apex Golden Age Muay Thai, which holds something of the cinematic in its control over time and rhythm: "There's a rhythm in each of Melville's mature films that rivals that of the best of John Ford and Yasujiro Ozu. The movies are not "slow," but rather, they move at a deliberate and calculated pace wherein not a single shot or second is wasted."
  4. ...this puts the ethical characterization of youth fighting in Thailand in a contradiction, varying with its framework. Typically the notion of "child labor" is seen as children (innocents) engaging in the onerous, fallen-state of labor, the least free thing an adult can do...in particular, a violent, dangerous sort of labor, the worst kind. In this world picture in which labor is seen as onerous servitude, and fighting as labor, it makes deep sense to see this as ethically wrong. But...if fighting within the culture contains an expiative meaning, and the training in fighting, traditionally, as the maturation and bulwark of culture against violence (predation), we would be quite far from fighting-is-labor frameworks. We are reaching toward an understanding of the pedagogy of personhood, one that is Buddhistic, in that young males help form the prophylactic fabric of the culture. The problem is that both of these frameworks can apply, or, by circumstance one may apply much more than the other...especially as Muay Thai is being commodified for a violence-hungry global entertainment economy. *This is leaving out any thorough disentangling of the very concept of "labor" from the West's industrial age (along with its coterminous Cult of the Child), and also from Marxist & other ideals of measured units of equity. To say this is to allow traditional Muay Thai to investigate us, rather than us investigate traditional Muay Thai. How is it that we organize ourselves toward violence (and its corollary, predation)?
  5. Key to decoding Muay Thai in terms of the excluded predation is that "domination" (often symbolized aesthetically in the conventions of the sport and art, but always suffused with physicality) = Predation, inscribing it within the (ritualized) social sphere.
  6. Without imparting a colonialist lean, one might argue that Muay Thai (in its rite form, and then apex to its art) is Christological. In this one sense (at least). It is taking predation (the violence of Death, the display of power over another) at the very heart of the communal, at the heart of personhood. As Girard argues, the Christological lifts up the practice of the sacrifice to a universal. I do not adhere to his Catholicism, but it is good to trace this vein of ethics, along the line of predation itself. If we read the expiative force of the fighting ring in the preformative of an excluded predation, then the Christological "death hath no dominion over him" pronoucement is "predation has no dominion over us"...it does not belong here...through the rite practice of alchemizing it, inviting it in on our terms. Exclusion through inclusion. The point of this redescription isn't to Westernize Thailand's Muay Thai so much as to resposition what is going on in Thailand's Muay Thai in terms that sit within some of Western ethical, liberatory frameworks.
  7. This is quite important, even at the personal psychological level, as Sylvie's recent Jungian readings of the Tale of Bluebeard (Women Who Run With Wolves) point out, if the exclusion of predation is the foundation of community (ontological grounding of the "person"), we each can have a predator within our psyches, a predator who preys not upon others (outside of us), but upon the persons within us, emanations of innocence, youth and dreams. The boundary of predation, as it can be symbolically and ritualistically defined, may be key to our own mental health and liberty...otherwise we ourselves predate ourselves.
  8. Muay Thay Beyond the Logic of Girard, an Alchemy of Violence Girard creates a kind of electro-static concept of the Rite of Sacrifice, the analogy that violence as some kind of energy builds up within the group, which unless symbolically though still quite affectively discharged, by rite, will otherwise surface as real violence between members of said group. Not adjusting or correcting this - though Girard's vision does have something of late 19th century electro-magnetism science mysticism to it - de Castro points out that Amerindian peoples live in a world of predation, and personhood is awarded within (and between) groups where markedly predation is excluded. This is its defining characteristic, the outer edge where predation (which rules the universe otherwise) ends. Just as a sketch, it seems that my Girard-inspired concept of ring Muay Thai as an extension of the logics of the Rite of Sacrifice (the production of the loser, ie, the holy-profinated victim) is further clarified if we imagine that the group logic described by de Castro involved also the ritualization of predation, at the group's edge, folding in the outer logic within the circumfrance of the group. And, this rite of symbolized predation, when risen to an art and practice, can work both with Girardian expiative properties, but also with the logic of boundary predation, reinforcing the exclusion of absolute predation (the law of the Universe). This is about affectively alchemizing violence (and its real-world corollary, predation), into practices of civilization and personhood making. In a certain sense digesting it, breaking it down, so as to not practicing it. This is one of the great violations of the West in aggro-molding Thailand's Muay Thai so as to feed its own needs to consume violence in the simulcrum of entertainments. One is undo-ing the very cultural alchemy and turning Gold back into Lead, so to speak.
  9. Concepts of Predation I'm reading a fascinating book right now, Cannibal Metaphysics (by de Castro), which is providing a powerful re-dimensioning of my already somewhat sketched out Girardian perspective on the deeper meanings of Thai Muay Thai ringsport, and its likely cultural antecedents. Cannibal Metaphysics argued for an anthropological ethical equal footing of other cultures in a way that does not reduce itself to a multiculturalism, and it does so by conceptualizing various animistic practices and beliefs AS Philosophy. It's long been my sense that the animisms of South East Asia actually help us see the animistic underpinnings of our own beliefs, many of them forced into the shadows to make room for our Clean Room of dissective griddings, underpinnings that still are operating throughout the West, in a kind of Unconscious...which is not to say "less developed". These methods of relation operate side-by-side within and thorough the more hegemonic manners of discourse. I've just begun the book, I look forward to what more I can see in it, but already the very concept of a ubiquity of predation (and prey), variously managed, sidelined, ignored, and sometimes ritualized and symbolized in hierarchies, goes right to the root of the meaning of fighting as art and sport. How we organize and meaningfully interpret violence, personhood, and imagined violence within the inner circle of culture, kind and family.
  10. 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.
  11. Defense Even the best intentioned don't train actual Muay Thai, the Muay Thai of Thailand. The foreigner, even quite knowing ones, train 90%-95% offense, when in fact Muay Thai is probably about 70% defense. There is a reason why in Thailand when you have the lead you defend the lead. This is the position of the superior. Every fighter who gains the lead learns how to defend it. This is what distinguishes it - in skill, in spirit. The foreigner only SEES offense. Trains its words and vocabulary, missing the entire thing. Even the high-so Thai, quite-Americanized, sought to take out as much defense as possible, every drop and drip of it, because even Thais can be very far from the root and tree of their sport, separated by class and commerce.
  12. Sylvie tells me that Arjan Gimyu called her to say that last night was the first time in the last month that he was able to sleep at night, because he could breathe.
  13. The Muay Thai Library is so incredible. Today I was realizing how many men we have filmed with who have passed. This is a generational greatness, and it is an honor to have met these men, and in some cases to have come to have known them. Taking a moment to think of them and feel them. Each of these men a universe of a muay within them, of which we have touched just a teaspoon. Andy Thompson Morakot Sor. Tammarangsi Sangtiennoi Sor Rungroj Namkabuan Nongkipahuyut Sirimonkol Looksiripat Kaisuwit Sungila Nongki
  14. We've been watching a lot of David Lynch since he passed. Rewatches of Lost Highways, Wild At Heart, Blue Velvet, Inland Empire...and now working through Twin Peaks. I talk about it a lot. One of the things coming through is the way that he works with melodrama, and in Twin Peaks the soap opera tv form of it. It allows archetypal (in fact at times wooden) characters who are moving through scripts they repeat, stories that are told about these kinds of characters. As the actors say in Inland Empire (paraphrased), "I thought we were doing an original script, I wouldn't agree to do a remake". IN this sense Lynch is saying we are all doing "remakes" as we repeat the scripts we have inherited. But the characters are experiencing very real, intense emotions in these scenes, just like we do in our "real" lives. We are acting in scripts, doing "remakes", but living with tremendous pathos within them. Lynch, I imagine, is making two points about our pathos. There are two doors. The first is akin to Buddhistic (un)attachment. The only reason we are suffering (or enjoying) intensely is because we are attached to these wooden characters, the "remake" we are making. If we saw that these are just recycled characters the grip of our emotions would lessen. But, there is within his films & show another door. Sometimes characters suffer or intensify their experiences so thoroughly they transcend it, they are transformed, in a passion-of-Christ (archetype) type intensification, often it is female characters who pass through this door, with a sort of glowing, mixed divinity. As such with the Muay Thai fighter who is a woman, in a certain way. Female fighters especially are putting on the "clothes" of the fighter, because the fighter is a model of hypermasculinity in many cultural traditions.
  15. You can't train yourself, anymore than you can tickle yourself. Yet, on the other hand...you are always training yourself.
×
×
  • Create New...