Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

Sylvie is attending for two days starting tomorrow, she should have lots to say when she gets back.

8-22 - what is a fighter? I was just talking to a fighter who was feeling low because he just lost on points to someone he felt he could have beat, and was flying back to Thailand to fight up in Isaan in a few days. Utterly impressive. Why? Not because he's fighting twice in so short a time. Not because he's fighting shortly after a disappointing loss. Not because he's flying across the world to fight one after another. It's because he is riding the line. This is what separates the fighter from the non-fighter. The line. When you ride the line you are riding along the possible and the impossible, where nothing is sure. You are pushing the limit of what is and what can be. This can be physical limit, a mental limit, a performance limit - but in truth these three always form a holy trinity, never one without the other two. Fighters ride this line, the point where things threaten to break apart, where it might not quite hold together, nothing is set for you. This can be facing one huge opponent you might not ever beat. Being a part of a high-pressure event where your opponent isn't even the biggest hurdle. This can be fighting 6 fights in a month, or fights in back to back days. Or facing opponents that expose your weaknesses rather than just those you match up with nicely. It's the line. Fighters seek out that line. They seek it out in the gym, they seek it out in the ring, they take it up into their hand as a thread that stitches the meaning of their lives together. And you might very well fall on the wrong side of that line again and again, into the shadows where there is no glory, where few see the merit of what you are. Or you might fall on the right side of the line and be covered in the perfume of glory. But in either case, for those that ride that line, truly ride that line, they know that both sides of that line are joined, that finding and riding that line again and again is what the whole thing is about. You lose. You collapse. You freeze. You doubt. You fail. Just find the line and ride it. It is the path to true, personal victory.

The husband of the director of this film finally put up a copy for the general public. Featured in this film is the fight author Sam Sheridan of the books "Fighter's Heart" (and "Fighter's Mind"), presumably when he was gathering material he would write about. One can compare the film footage with some of his description of what was going on: The description of that book: In 1999, after a series of wildly adventurous jobs around the world, Sam Sheridan found himself in Australia, loaded with cash and intent on not working until he’d spent it all. It occurred to him that, without distractions, he could finally indulge a long-dormant obsession: fighting. Within a year, he was in Bangkok training with the greatest fighter in muay Thai (Thai kickboxing) history and stepping through the ropes for a professional bout. That one fight wasn’t enough. Sheridan set out to test himself on an epic journey into how and why we fight, facing Olympic boxers, Brazilian jiu-jitsu stars, and Ultimate Fighting champions. Along the way, Sheridan delivers an insightful look at violence as a career and a spectator sport, a behind-the-pageantry glimpse of athletes at the top of their terrifying game. An extraordinary combination of gonzo journalism and participatory sports writing, A Fighter’s Heart is a dizzying first-hand account of what it’s like to reach the peak of finely disciplined personal aggression, to hit—and be hit.

8-20 Thailand is an incredible incubation. There is something about the way that it plays to western fantasies - most of them male, sexual or violent - that allows for a maturation of inner vision, not always for the good. Pattaya is filled, I mean filled to the brim, with hormone and steroid injecting coursing sexuality, the aging male ideations that never were what they thought they were, matched with slight-boned girlfriends purchased for the witness. But it isn't just the sex trade as men ascend to bar stools like soft thrones in familiar quarters. It's the full wrought of how the west applies its fantasy self to Thailand, across every single avenue and park, every rice field, business and mountain. The whole of Thailand receives what you think of yourself, what you dream of for yourself and it puts it unto the test...by making it possible. When you make fantasies possible, when you let flesh be grown on those phantom bones, the skeleton of what you believe about yourself, about desire, it creates a hard salt water shore. The otherwise pristine and unchallenged, floating, undirected desires of your life then become responsibilities, become constrained, bounded, real and living things, with the unnumbered aspects of their reality. It is the very same with fighting. Or, the mad desire to "fight a lot". You can hold this dream anywhere in the world and it really doesn't mean the same thing. Here, you can have that dream and it really, honest-to-god, can and will happen. You can walk into a gym, never having trained, and be fighting within a few weeks - and not just against a Phuket circus "tuk-tuk" performer. Fighting. Like knocked-out. You could want 30 fights, and actually have them. You want to explore and become more than proficient in Muay Thai? You can. You will have to build that mountain, rock by rock. You will have to scale that mountain, rock by rock. But it is right here. What it does it forces your desires and dreams to the surface. If you want to party, you'll end up partying. If you want girlfriends, you'll have those. If you want fights, you'll have fights. Thailand is filled with those who have become what they want. Beneath all of this, are the people of Thailand. It is not easy to find your way across the layers and veils that separate cultures. But beneath all of the fulfillment, and misunderstandings, the projections, are relations. These are luminous examples of what may be, beacons of a possible that is woven from something very different than all of the above. I ever return in my mind to the way that the "fake" and the "real" is braided in Muay Thai. For the western fighter it is even more so the case, because the westerner is caught in the simulacrum of their own desire (and it's fulfillment). I suspect that one of the reasons why westerners who trained and fought in Thailand even a half-generation ago did not share their fights, or even their detailed stories, was not simply that there were so many fewer cameras, or mechanisms of sharing (like blogs, or Facebook)...for even now fights and details of experiences are not often shared. It's that the western fighter is swept up in the very production of Muay Thai here. I mean production in really almost a capitalist sense: the construction, presentation, consumption and perpetuation of Muay Thai, as ideological form. A way of seeing and expressing the world. The western fighter is somehow sandwiched between the production (and fulfillment) of their own desires, and the role that desire plays in the production of Muay Thai, for Thailand. I recall a western pioneer of female fighting in the country, more than a decade ago, describing how poorly trained many Thai female opponents were, as westerners "destroyed" them (a story without any specifics). But this same fighter was overwhelmed by the most dominant Thai female fighter of the decade, who outweighed her, and also surely fought some very strong opponents. How does a westerner authentically position themselves in such a context? How does one talk about and share the very tension of the real and the unreal? I recall the story of how two French fighters were brought to fight big named Thais on Khmer ruins a few decades ago, and how (surely), none of the French knew that they were very likely there to re-enact the thrashing two disrespectful French brothers took at the hands of the King's champion and guard in 1788 (the first ever farang vs Thai match) - yes, there was that meaning. Today, very fine western fighters are fighting real fights, hard fights, on MAX Muay Thai, which is essentially a Muay Thai "show", and it is impossible to really ascertain what is happening there. Some fights seem bizarrely matched. Some bizarrely judged. All of it is geared towards producing hyper-aggressive clashes that do not resemble the Muay Thai of stadium fighting. How is one to tell that story? Position oneself in that story? You are a fighter at a gym that has a reputation of producing world title belts, producing them, but you fight like hell and beat top talent. What does that mean? But again, "artifice" does not necessarily mean "unreal" in Thailand. This is the production of Muay Thai. And for westerners we have to grasp beneath the surface, at the fight itself, towards the bodies to understand. The fighter in a way loses his or her voice. The time here tends to become cocooned. Shared only with those in the gym, because there is no easy way to convey its reality beyond the boundary. Most of the time the unrecorded time here becomes a fish story to those back home. But this of course is what is unprecedented in what Sylvie has done and what she is doing. She has been making reports, sending message, essentially from the Moon. Over 200 vlogs. 800 articles, 150 fight videos. These are raw evidences, impressions, stakes in what there is here. It is remarkable and its meaning really will not be digested for years perhaps.

8-19 Preparing energy coming into a big fight is like driving in the snow. We used to have a way of talking about pre-fight energy calling it "coming in too high" or "coming in too low", as if one is trying to land a plane. Sylvie's gotten so far along that we don't really talk that way at all. The compass of fight energy really starts weeks out, and if you are fighting all the time like Sylvie it means it's always in play. Like driving in the snow you have to feel what the road is like, with your foot on the gas. And, you don't ever hit the brake. The road might look great, only a thin layer of flakes or powder. The road might look awful, the headlights bouncing off huge falling crystals, catching glare. But what tells you if you are going too fast (or too slow) is the feel of the road. And when you feel the car starting to lose itself you take the foot off the gas and let the weight of the car slow itself. To a crunchy halt if necessary, ever ready to start rolling again. The driving is the negotiation between the weight of the car (you) and its momentum, caught in the context of the road. When in a hurry to get where you want and need to be everything is determined by the play of your own weight, your own momentum, and the feel of the gas pedal. It's the physics of feeling. Nobody can read it but you. It's an art. I can remember those 4 am NY hurtlings up the Palisades, back to Fort Montgomery from nyc, with Star-Wars-like hyperdrive filling the windshield. Within oneself, when you are desperate for progress and performance, look to see if your wheels are spinning. And do not touch that brake, certainly not if you are rolling along. Feel your own weight and how it creates ballast. This is the beautiful thing about fighting 150 plus times. You get to drive in the snow over and over and over again. You can feel the relationship between performance and inertia. You begin to sense the conditions before they even become "conditions", the drift before it becomes drift. This is the learning of fighting in volume. This is beauty. A body in motion stays in motion, for all that it means.

This was her fight against Duangdaonoi, she's a nice little fighter, and even held the 105 lb WPMF title for a bit.

Hopefully sylvie will jump on, but I can say that she doesn't know much about the series. MAX though is very firmly against female fighters. Currently though, PPTV is showing female fights every week it seems, though they are only 3 rounds. So while MAX ignores women, maybe others are seeing the profit? The fight that you are talking about featured Duangdaonoi who Sylvie has fought (and beaten), she was pretty awesome in that fight vs the Italian - such teeps. Video was posted in the Female Fight thread here.

Any idea of the prize money? Maybe you can lure Tiffany Van Soest from Bali? It isn't that far away.

https://dai.ly/x4oh938 Former 105 lb WPMF champion Duangdoanoi vs Sara Donghi 12/8/2016 Super Muaythai Inspiring, almost text-book use of the teep against an encroaching western style hands-heavy fighter. What a performance by Duangdaonoi.

It is not something that is talked about publicly much, but there is a very strong connection between the WPMF and Kaewsamrit gym, and Thanonchanok is a fighter with longtime Kaewsamrit connections. She's a very good fighter, indeed, but she lost this fight. But things go this way in Thailand sometimes.

It is great to be in parallel with you in this Dana, and for you to be with us. But that sounds like such a difficult time.

8-15 I lost my biggest client the other day. The huge preponderance of my time in Pattaya, in Thailand, is spent in the apartment. I could be literally anywhere in the world and my life would be pretty much the same. Very little of the exotic seeps up to me here, while Sylvie is accomplishing herculean tasks, and beating a path through a male jungle of twisted vines that regrow surprisingly fast when you stop slashing away with the machete of your heart, I'm calculating social media effects, and numbingly running through platform protocols, for hours. It was a corporate structuring over seas that took my client away, pairing things down to bare minimum, and its the kind of thing that happens. Its part of the life of businesses. But it does leave our time here in jeopardy. Opening up is a chasm of some sort. A beautiful uncertainty. I love times like this, in the way that you might come to love a food that is an acquired taste. As I've aged, and I'm much older than Sylvie, I've become much more sensitive to a principal that I think I read and learned from mythograher Joseph Campbell. We think that time moves in a line, but in Life it really moves in circles - huge, symbolic circles that have stages that they go through, over and over again. What is key about this is that the times for "change", the times for increase, the times for doing the things you really, really want, or becoming who you really want to be, only happen in windows that open and close. Much of the time you really cannot create the changes that you want to. Yes, you can prepare for them, you can build the foundations, or grease the rails of whatever alteration you are looking for, but the change cannot be made...just yet. Much of the frustration of life comes from not recognizing this essential nature of Time. You push and push, directing mental energy - sometimes even enormous emotional energy - and the change never comes. And when the window happens, when the time of the cycle spins round to open up, you are often distracted, or more likely, lack the ability to see that it is a window, that what you really wanted to happen can happen now. Part of the reason for missing the window, not seeing it for what it is, is that with it comes de-stabilization. And de-stabilization can be felt as very unsafe, or unnerving. You can feel how nothing is firm beneath your feet. This is unnerving. But this is the time when the world, your world, has become malleable. This is the chance. If you have created the foundation points for the place you want to get to, the future you, the values you want to adhere to, they can carry you through to the other side, and create the new world as a better place. There is an amazing working analogy in the history of AI computation called Simulated Annealing. I wrote about it here, at a time when I was a personal blogger. The basic premise was that you could treat data in the same ways that molecules can be treated, through "heating" and "cooling" schedules just like those that work in annealing metal. Annealing is the process that makes the steel of swords harder and potentially sharper. I'll leave aside the computational theory and just look at what is being talked about in the annealing of steel. It explains what I'm talking about. The smith heats the metal which at room temperature had settled into a hardened into a rigid state. It is not as hard or as resilient as it might be, but the molecules are more or less "locked". When you heat the metal the molecules become unlocked, as the metal starts to redden and glow, its world is now less stable. In these states the molecules can fall into new arrangements. And the overall shape of the metal can be changed. As the metal cools it stabilizes. For metals like steel, the cooling schedule is very important, it is slower than other metals. If it cools incorrectly it can become brittle. If it cools artfully its re-crystalization will leave its molecules locked in a stronger, more organized structure. This is how the samurai swords become what they are. Through artful heating and cooling. This is a long way of saying that the window of de-stabilization in the cycle is often lost because the eye is on the emotion of de-stabilization itself. All the changes you hoped to make through the entire cycle, are actually available to you now, when the molecules of your life are suddenly unlocked. What is really remarkable about everything that has happened for Sylvie and me, in this time in Thailand, is that we've been very "lucky" in the windows like this. We've somehow, so far, been able to identify when the molecules start to jump, and we've been patient when they are firmly locked. This goes for growth in Sylvie herself, her fighting, her emotional steel as a fighter, a journalist, and also for circumstance - the real world boundaries that constrain what is possible (where you live, financial limits, community). Somehow we have been aware of these windows. The Japanese swordsmith knows many things we do not know. There is an art to these things. There is a small holy statuette that sits on a mantel in our apartment. It is a bronze-looking figure of a man, a warrior, posed with a spear pointed upward at a diagonal across his body, and with the other hand near the spearpoint he holds a bouquet of green. His face is that of a demon. His body that of an athlete. He is a little known god, much debated in niche circles, Phra Pirap. He as I understand it is a kind of god of war and battle, but mostly is known as the god of dance, the one that leads the arts. At his left hand come together both the spear point and the bouquet. This the unfathomable combination of what makes up Muay Thai in Thailand. For us in the west there is a fundamental division in how we parse the world. There is the "real" and the "unreal". In Thailand these two things come together to braid into something else. People looking at fights want to say "that's a fake fight!" or "that's a 'real' fight!". What makes them real or unreal are supposedly the intention of the actors. But because Muay Thai is an art, and not only a sport, these things come together. It is ultimately both dance and violence. The reason for this is timing. Phra Pirap happens also to be the god of timing. Of finding the perfect moment. Nietzche made a big deal of this in Beyond Good and Evil. In Greek there are two important fundamental kinds of Time. Chronos is circular time, the time of the seasons. Kairos is the time of the moment, the perfect moment to act. Kairos makes an incision in Chronos. Phra Pirap is the god of Kairos. This is why he is god of the dance. This is why the Muay Thai of Thailand is both real and unreal. It carries the power of artifice into the world of the "real" of violence, to steer it. It recognizes the moment of change, and therefore may spend much of its time in the realm of the fake, the performed. It is steering the cooling schedule of the steel, when all the molecules are afloat and changing their positions. In the west we only think of linear time. For us the "real" of fighting is merely the degree of "heat" in a fight, and the application of force of one body against other bodies. In Muay Thai, for Phra Pirap, it is the point in the circle when real change can happen, it is the art of taking hold of that change and shaping it to a valued outcome. It is where the spearpoint and the bouquet come together. We are at that point now, we are the molecules of the steel that we are are starting to unlock. Many things may result, not all of them good or preferred. This loss to Loma was an event marker, when the heat weakened the metal and it began to glow.

8-14 There is a strong breeze blowing hard across the urban sector we live in, the kind of constant wind that only comes from the beach. It isn't far from us, but we seldom see it. There is a rooster crowing at 4:30 in the afternoon, and another one after him. And then another, staggered in sound and distance. Remote sounds that I love having never been a country boy, and loving the unconscious meaning of what it means to live by their clock, or even near their clock. The streets themselves are narrow, cement alleyways. Everything is cement, as if modern Pattaya looked to seal out its forgotten jungle and bush past that was not long ago, concrete poured like glue over everything. High walls stacked with cinderblock, and the sea breeze blows over all of it, rushing like a weightless river, crashing through our open window on the 4th floor. Sylvie is gluing news clippings into her scrapbook which she hasn't worked on for a very long time. I'm a little astounded at how much she's collected, and this enforced 5 days into inactivity for concussion is probably the longest she will be still in the more than 4 years that we have been here, and that she's be grinding it out in the gym, day after day. Even after broken bones she's in the gym after 2 days. Even when stitches require no sweating, 3 days max. This time it will be five. A time to reflect. To gather our mental forces for what the next 6 months will bring. I hear the old newspaper creaking and crisping as she turns dried pages, now able to read the Thai that she once had to really strain to get through. I've always felt that Sylvie's Muay Thai has (and will) progressed at the same rate as her Thai. Each of these are mysteriously parallel. For the longest time she was too shy to speak to Thais in Thai, retreated into her shell, just as she was too afraid to spar and clash. But then one day she found herself on the other side of that, in confidence. Now she glues the newspaper into books, looking at words, sentences and paragraphs she feels more comfortable with.

We've read that most concussions resolve in 7-10 days, and this one appears symptomatically mild. So 5 days totally shut down. Then very slow reintroduction, looking for symptoms to return. We are being cautious.

Unfortunately we had to cancel that fight, and another scheduled after that. Not only was there a cut, a concussion requires rest. This is the first time Sylvie will have to shut down training for a stretch. Looks like by the symptoms this is a only a mild concussion, but everything on the safe side. Crossing fingers we can rebook Thanonchanok. She's very hard to book a fight with.

8-13 Last night Sylvie faced her nemesis. Her Kryptonite. There she was standing in the slate gray, blank corridors that surround the auditorium, with legend Dieselnoi explaining to her what she must do, while another incomparable of Thailand's past, Karuhat, quietly removed the resistant wrap of gauze and tape that he had painstakingly wound around her fists a few hours before. Sylvie was looking at all of us with something of a blank look on her face, and repeatedly asking the questions she would return to over and over again. Was I knocked out? Was I cut? No matter how many times we answered her she would ask them again, as if for the very first time. No, you were not knocked out. Yes, you were cut. A few of our circle attempted to provide more complete answers, but nothing would stick. We were all trying to figure out, when did she get concussed? I thought it might have been some of the glancing head kicks that didn't look like much during the fight, but you never know just what impact there is. Or maybe the headbutt when Sylvie split her forehead rushing in straight against Loma. It was Emma who figured it out, after taking Sylvie to the bathroom and answering a similar round of questions repeatedly. She was doing okay, but short term memory was gone for while. Sylvie remembers practically nothing from the fight even now, but she remembers falling on her head and neck during a throw, with Loma landing on her. It turns out, looking at the film, it happened with 1:17 left in the 2nd round. Sylvie was pretty dinged, still, 30 minutes later. She had thought she was going to be fighting a 5 round fight. In fact big head honchos had assured her that it was a full rules 5 round fight. But it wasn't until she was sitting on the stool between the 1st and 2nd rounds that she overheard the broadcasters from the live feed mention that it was 3 rounds. Oi. So Thailand. But also a little uncool. The first round had already been spent tracing Loma across the ring without much urgency, and as it turns out Loma would break out some pretty spectacular and concussive throws in the 2nd round. Sylvie's primary clinch entry position under duress unfortunately plays right into Loma's main clinch leverage move. It's a pretty bad combination.She had tried to fix this in training, and may have figured out a way to solve it, but there really was no time. And now she was concussed. In over 150 fights Sylvie's been dinged only twice. Once, about 3 years ago, she was head-kicked to near unconsciousness, flat out on the canvas, early in the first by "Farang Smasher" Nong Ying; and recovered to win the fight by knees. There were no lingering, notable side effects. This was the first time after a fight that she had become impaired. And very noticeably so. Even hours later, after she had gotten her handful of stitches at a nearby hospital, and we were back in the hotel room, she was still fogged. It was painful for me to see this absolutely brilliant, articulate mind struggle with basics of orientation, and also fall into lulls of sadness and embarrassment for her performance. This was her Kryptonite. This was her Nemesis. This was maybe the best female Muay Thai fighter in the world (vastly underrated), and she had friends from all over Bangkok coming, and two incredible legends had decided they wanted to corner for her...and it all came crashing down in not disaster, in not dismay, but in low-lying fog. She had actually fought better after the concussion, more free, more aggressive, more what-the-hell, but who knows what state her mind was in. None of us noticed anything was even wrong for more than 20 minutes. This is what very few people appreciate. Yes, pro Muay Thai is far safer and far less "accidental" than how people who who are completely unfamiliar with fighting think. But each and every time you step into the ring you are risking altering your life for ever, by damage, and even really death. It IS dangerous, even though fight fans don't really experience it that way. And it makes Sylvie's 150+ fights even more amazing. She is climbing on crags, and people don't even notice. We, between ourselves, often talk about the 200 fight goal, or becoming the fighter she really wants to be, in terms of mountain climbing. If you want to know what we are talking about watch the film Meru. People die on mountains. Not metaphorically. To properly climb them you have to understand and embrace that. Now, with hopefully only two or so years facing us before Sylvie will be nearing completion, we are in precarious positions. Financially we are in a very challenged place, it feels almost impossible. Logistically it is becoming harder and harder to find opponents that will fight Sylvie, as her reputation as an endless knee fighter spreads across the pockets of communities that make up female fighting in Muay Thai in Thailand. And now, realistically, the limits of her body are part of the equation. Though extremely resilient in heart and body, once concussed it is more likely to be concussed again. Though Sylvie takes very few if any direct shots, because of her fight style, last night showed that when violence is the game, violence can occur. Everything becomes a calculation to the summit, never even sure if it is possible. And, all the while it was just incredible to see Dieselnoi and Karuhat with Sylvie, as if the hands of Muay Thai tradition had reached out to embrace her. This was not some master plan to try to see if we could somehow have "big" names help. We had lost our corner option so at the last minute yesterday we asked Karuhat if he had any friends who wanted to corner, we could pay them something for their trouble. We never dreamed that he would come himself. I watched him in such a protective way watch over Sylvie, for hours last night, often standing away from the circle of people around her backstage. And then Dieselnoi arrived...why? Because he knew Sylvie was fighting, and he just wanted to be there in support, and offer his sage advice. Incredible. Karuhat and Dieselnoi were texting each other before long, coming to help this 100 or so lb western girl covered with tattoos, a nobody in the scheme of Muay Thai Thailand history. It's such a shame that part of Sylvie's memory of this event was erased, because this was special. IS special. For me, as her husband, I cannot help but feel that it comes out of Sylvie herself. There are detractors murmuring online, people who don't know her much. But in the gym, between the ropes, she is something incredibly special. In her privates with Karuhat and Dieselnoi I think these amazing fighters of real wars see something in her. It's not the greatness of "talent". Talent is more often than not a liar. It's what she's about. Each of these men, and god they are completely different men - Dielselnoi is a furnace of intensity and passion for the sport. Karuhat is a trickster, a magician, a winking genius - each of these men have some how just quietly gravitated to her, opened up themselves a little in a way that is mindblowing to me. When I was in the car driving to the arena before the fight I looked over to my left and saw her sitting there so peaceably. We were gnarled in traffic. It was okay, we'd get there. She was getting set to fight Loma in a few hours, the best 46 kg fighter in the world, and 4 days later she was scheduled to fight world champion Thanonchanok in Chiang Mai, possibly the best 50 kg fighter in the world, a few weight classes up. I instinctively said to myself my own private fight nickname that I now use for Sylvie, silently in my own mind. At the sound of it I just spontaneously started to cry, and turned my face away from her. She laughed..."Are you crying?!" I choked up the tears a little, wiping my face, a little embarassed. I took several beats as the tail lights brightened in the long line of cars in front of us. "I couldn't help myself", I said. I said to myself my fight name for you: Sylvie Legend.

8-10 - what I was going to write about follows very nicely on what Sylvie said above Muay Thai is a language. To call it a set of techniques would be like calling Italian or Farsi a set of linguistic techniques. It's has a tremendous vocabulary and grammar of techniques, yes, but it is so much more. Learning a technique in Muay Thai is like learning how to say "Where is the bathroom?" or "How much does a ticket cost?". It gets you from here to there, but that is about it. You learn and learn the various structures of Muay Thai, some of which are like "kickboxing" or "boxing" or some other martial art, but most of them are not quite that. And eventually you come to rest on a set of techniques (a grammar of "moves", a vocabulary of actions, organized around the human body) that can get you through a fight in the ring, but really you have barely learned anything. You can basically function in Muay Thai, using memorized dependables, occasionally flipping through a mental dictionary. Maybe you knew a different fighting style first, and many of the words are cognate, some of the grammar the same, so you can more or less mimic your way through Muay Thai. But it is not Muay Thai. Then there are those in foreign countries that LOVE Muay Thai, the language, but are not intimately connected to it in a living, cultural way. They can perform exquisitely executed moves on the bag, or in shadow, or even in a fight, e-nun-ci-at-ing every syllable with the utmost care, out of a love for the technique, sounding like a foreigner who speaks with absolutely zero accent...but with a limited vocabulary. Perhaps you can say "But, how do you find the weather?" with impeccable pronunciation...but this does not mean that you know English. The reason for all this is that Muay Thai is a language. It's a Language (capital L). It is born from and lives in Thai culture. It, in real time, expresses and shapes Thai Culture. This does not mean that all the non-native Muay Thai coaches in the world who teach Muay Thai don't know anything substantive, in fact they might be brilliant observers and preservers of aspects of Muay Thai language. This does not mean that the 1,000s of non-native Muay Thai fighters are poor fighters, or not "real" Muay Thai fighters, it just means that they do not truly speak the language, in the context of its continual birth. There is not in my opinion "Dutch" Muay Thai, or "Brazilian" Muay Thai. These are variations of kickboxing heavily influenced by Muay Thai. There is only one Muay Thai, the living Muay Thai of Thailand. This means that there are 1,000s of less talented Thai fighters and non-fighters in Thailand who might get their ass kicked in a "Muay Thai" fight, under full rules, that know Muay Thai better than countless fighters that may be able to do so. The reason for this is that Muay Thai is a language. It is a language of Thailand. It is not an ass-kicking technique. Once you know a fair amount of "words" and a pretty familiar with the "grammar", within the World of Thailand's fighting you can then start speaking Muay Thai. But that is just the start of it. If you are non-native you can say "hey, I can get around in Muay Thai". But then it comes down to "Well, what can you say with it?" Just as with English, there are an infinite number of ways you can use it. You can use it like Shakespeare, you can use it like Elliot or Cummings, like London, or James or Faulkner, like K. Dick or Shaw or Blake, or a myriad of nameless others who stretched the language in a unique fashion. And many, or even the great preponderance do not use it very well at all, in the sense of "What can you do with it?", even though fluency itself is a great use of any language. Once you can move in the language you can start to look to those who exercise a unique liberty within it, who have explored it's boundaries and raised it's possibilities. Then, you start to communicate, and express yourself. "Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt" (The boundaries of my language are the boundaries of my world) - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Not having seen the the site I'm guessing that they are talking about an ED Visa (not a tourist visa), in reference to Muay Thai study. There was a time before 5 years ago, when you could apply for an ED Visa and use study of Muay Thai as your education, but that option was closed down with the exception of only a select few. As far as I understand only Master Toddy's in Bangkok and WKO in Pattaya are the only two government recognized ED Visa options for the study of Muay Thai. Almost all other commonly used ED visas occur through the study of Thai Language, and can be arranged through schools here in Thailand. Many long term Muay Thai students are also Thai Language students, achieving their visa through that language study. From what I recall, in terms of tourist visas, you can automatically get a 30 day tourist visa upon arrival by plane (and try to extend those with "visa runs" by bus to Thai Consulates in Burma/Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, etc); or you can arrange a 6 month tourist visa through the Thai Consulate in your home country. The other longer term visa option is through teaching English. Emma wrote a very thorough post on what is involved in teaching English in Thailand.

This is what I wonder. I do believe an elite Thai fighter would make a run at the UFC, if the money was there. Already we know of a young fighter who basically refused the Lumpinee and Rajadamnern path (belts, etc), and instead chose to fight for Thai Fight long term, which isn't really real Muay Thai at all, but more circus Muay Thai. Why? Because the financial security and opportunity was much better. IF, and I know that is a big if, but if the UFC money was there there could be the move of an elite, young Thai fighter, to the UFC. This is the thing, my own opinion. The UFC is getting really stale, and it is only a matter of time before it's momentum dies out. It's core growth occurred under very different fighting set ups. The original thrill of MMA was seeing discipline versus discipline. What art could beat what art. As MMA itself has slowly begun to become it's own fight style, and as fighters who came from specific disciplines work to close the holes in their game, you are losing that specific discipline excitement and intrigue. When a fighter like McGregor comes along, he reignites the fire because he fights with a unique fighting style. But most of the matchups are relatively stale, with "complete" fighter fighting "complete" fighter, each of them staying away from the other (just to generalize). This is the reason I believe that female MMA has taken off in the UFC, way beyond expectations and beyond Rousey. Female fighting is still relatively undeveloped. Almost all the top fighters are specialized in what they do well, and have fairly big weaknesses too, weaknesses that have to do with their original arts. Female fighting is back where male fighting was when the UFC was growing. It is still discipline vs discipline, to some degree. Perhaps the UFC will realize that there is a country filled with 10,000 fighters of Muay Thai who fight with a very specific style, a style that is nothing like the Mooey Thai that the UFC has seen. There is a ready made market injection sitting there, true Muay Thai. There is the huge technical hurdle that such fighters would have to have a modicum of takedown defense, and ground defense, but I don't see it as impossible. Yeah, highly unlikely, but not impossible. Perhaps the UFC continues to grow stale with fighters circling each other over and over for 5 minutes at a time. Perhaps it realizes what made it exciting in the first place. Perhaps Thailand becomes a source for unique fighting styles, fighters with lots of ring experience, that re-energizes the sport. I honestly would like to not see it happen, but maybe.

8-3 Many things we think are new, or that we discover in Muay Thai are actually old. There is a sense in which the past of the art feels like it has 100s of buried techniques, things that have fallen out of favor because of the sport, or aesthetics, or because the line of teachers and schools which may have taught them have just died out. But today Rambaa M16, who was a pretty unconventional fighter, showed Sylvie a technique that we had never seen before. He was just nonchalantly going through all the elbows you can do, the usual set, and then he added another one. Then he dropped the bomb when asked who had taught him this, he said he invented it himself. I'll leave the elbow up to Sylvie to share, it's deceptively simple, in fact so much so that it feels shocking that there even could be such a simple elbow that wasn't commonly known - but there it was staring us in the face, an elbow thrown like no other. And what was even more interesting is that it fits so perfectly into context: clinch. It's like wandering in the shadow-dappled woods and seeing all the generic species you've come to expect flitting and hopping around, almost banally, and then out walks a new species. You have to rub your eyes. What? Perhaps this elbows comes from long ago, and it only resurfaced with Rambaa out of accidents of forgotten transmission. Perhaps indeed he did invent it, as he says, because he is a small fighter, and it was part of his ingenuity. He says there is video of him using it in fights to knock people out. He says he has taught it to people but nobody he knows has used it in a fight other than him. But there is something just internally brilliant about the event, that an elbow can just come out of nowhere, sneak into existence, and that it's creator, Rambaa, thinks nothing of it. All the elbows are the same, he says, just very little differences, "nit noi" pinching his figures close together. This is what is beautiful about Muay Thai in Thailand. Here we are in a little sun-baked alley, with no noteable traffic other than just those of the neighborhood, most of whom are probably related to each other in one way or another. Lazy dogs fall over in the sun, in the middle of the soi as if drunk, there are huge speed bumps of concrete, as if anyone would speed through here. We are with a legendary fighter who has opened his gym not long ago, a ring, a cage, canvases emblazoned with his trademark stinging bee. Nobody really comes to this gym, other than a few Thai boys. And he is training Sylvie almost as a lark. He's given us no price for these daily beatdowns and instructions, it's just part of a diversion of what 11 am might hold. And out of his pocket rolls a nugget of gold. Not because this is some mysterious technique that will unstoppably win fights. Not because it's soooo cool (and it is). But because it just comes out of the life of a fighter, a fighter raised in and through Muay Thai, so thoroughly, so inescapably, that new Muay Thai just creates itself. Not out of any purposive: "wouldn't that be interesting?" exploration, but out of the only thing that genuinely grows a combat art, actual fights. This elbow was born humbly out of clinch positions, real and repeated agonstic clashes over and over, since childhood, performed in a program of tens of thousands of bodies. It was born or reborn out of Rambaa.

I think all these VERY old (by Thai standards, 300+ fight) names are not really the answer, Saenchai included. I do think Thai clinch at the deepest levels is a profound grappling art, but these guys don't have much tread on the tire. Petchboonchu even lost in the IFMAs against a strong Russian dude, including in the clinch at times, in a very unexciting fight. Not to say that he isn't amazing, but he isn't what he was.

Phetjee Jaa WMC 45 kg title fight vs Phen Phet Sor. Thianchai - July 30th, 2016 [edit: scroll down, a better version was posted] I think PJJ was really lucky to win this fight. It's an obscured view, but it looked like she lost the 4th, and could not hold the 5th to my eye - her own corner got pretty quiet. Maybe Emma who was there can comment with what she saw live. I was pretty impressed with her opponent.

8-2 I'd love in this journal to paint several pictures of Pattaya. It's a city we never thought we would ever be in, even for a minute. We imagined it to be a kind of older, rundown Phuket, full of tourists, sex bars, dirty beaches. Even when we pulled down Pattaya Klang (a main, center road of the city), we were gritting our teeth. It was incredibly urban, loud with motorbikes, dirty concrete and glass, in fact it felt pretty industrial. But somehow we have fallen in love with it. Well, not really with "it", but with living here. There are no real fights to be had here for Sylvie, almost no opponents, and the main stadium that gives endless fights to westerners no matter their skill level, MAX, does not allow women to fight. But midst the grime of beach tourism there are incredible pockets, and as you move away from those narrow centers, back into the town, it becomes very, very Thai. English is not spoken on the sidestreets or in shops, neighborhoods resemble those of any town in Thailand, and the whole city hums. Mostly though its the relationships Sylvie has made with families and gyms in the Muay Thai community. Petchrungruang is wonderful, an expression of a man (Pi Nu), his family, and all the Muay Thai that has gathered there, bubbling up out of the gym through the people that are part of the extended family. Small family gyms like this are like coral reefs. Their structure and pulse draws others from the community - gamblers, trainers, ex-fighters, kids, parents, and those that really resonate with the values of the gym remain as part of the fabric of it. Others pass through, return, pass through, and still others are only seldom seen. There is an aura of people who create the Muay Thai of Petchrungruang. But it is more than this, Petchrungruang has relationships with Sor. Klinmee (Sudsakorn Gym), it is a kind of cousin gym, and Sor. Klinmee has them with Rambaa's gym, so there is a kind of loose community of gyms that are more or less in concert. It's allowed Sylvie to piece together a program of work (and relations) that is really extensive. Sylvie kind of trains across Pattaya, scooting around on her motorbike. And this isn't even to mention the benefaction of Sifu McInnes of WKO, our original gym here. Sifu has been really very generous with Sylvie, as has Pi Mutt who has been holding for her for the last year. Beneath everything there is a network here of Muay Thai. It isn't always stable, and there are shifts within it, but Sylvie has somehow worked her way into a fabric of local Muay Thai, without really fighting here, which is a little amazing. So our world consists of the apartment, where I usually am working on things digital, and the nodes of several gyms and families that hold together. All of it works like a solar system of planets, each with their gravities, each with their orbits. With the sun of Pattaya Muay Thai burning.

Really interesting. Add to that that "Bang" Muay Thai isn't really Muay Thai other than they call it "Muay Thai", UFC audiences are maybe already shifting off the Muay Thai bubble. There is some MT cross over in Glory now, but I guess what it would really take is a true Muay Thai fighter making waves in the UFC. Most of the Muay Thai seen in the UFC has been fairly limited in development. On a brighter note, maybe Joanna and Valentina will do something for female Muay Thai awareness.

8-1b The thing that solidified Sylvie and me was language. From the very beginning it was words. I met her in college - I was returning late in life - and she was working in the gym, passing out equipment in the cage. She was reading a fat book of 17th century drama, bored out of her mind, and somehow through repeated and initially very short conversations I let it be known that I was attempting an experimental translation of the German poet Holderlin, who himself had attempted his own experimental translations from Ancient Greek. I was enthralled by Ancient Greek, and coming in touch with Holderlin (perhaps a mild schizophrenic, and Romantic poet) was my way of working my way towards the Greek itself. Sometimes you don't move towards the thing of study, but you move towards something else which is very close to that thing. You see it pass through, distorted, as if through a crystal prism, and you uncover elements that are otherwise unseen from our place and time. None of us are Ancient Greeks. The problem was, I knew no German, though I was studying Ancient Greek. Instead I had struggled through this poem ("Mnemosyne") with a dictionary for hours and for months, honing the very precise translation that treated words like literalisms, atoms like bricks of construction. I was attempting to translate Holderlin how Holderlin had translated Greek...foreignly. So I asked her if she would take a look at my translation...as she is fluent in German...and the rest is history. Well, not so much history, as the initiation of an incandescent start point. As it turns out, and readers here you already know what I mean, I write in an unusual fashion. Too many commas, too much dependency on cadence and rhythm - I write favoring delays, repetitions. These are fundamentally flaws that given enough time and will become one's own style, and as style, become the way in which one sees the world, sings the world. What was bizarre to me was that Sylvie wrote very much like me. She not only used commas almost musically, she switched tenses without accident so much as with intension [sic], much as I seemed to. It was like looking in a mirror, but within words. I didn't know what to make of this, other than to surmise that somehow deep in the weave of who we are, we are made of the same stuff. Our coming together came out of that. There's a long story, something I'll not repeat here, but it's enough to say that when she took my (unpublished) experimental novel with her to Germany, my long-coded words therein somehow spoke to her too, and when she returned a few weeks later we were in a very different place. We were...together. And have been together since. Throughout all this none of it could be imagined. There were glimpses of course, threads of gold you could trace backwards in time from now til then and see what the staircase was built from, but there was not vantage point then where you could even imagine what this is, and what it has become. There was one small thing, a keyhole of light, a passage from a favorite play that we read to each other then, which described an Amazon Queen as she attempted to scale a cliff face she had fallen from, on her horse, that echos forward in time from then all the way up til here. The author von Kleist had somehow presaged something in Sylvie I even now only glimpse, in his work "Penthesilea". I thought I was Achilles then, and she...words. But I didn't even know what was inside her.