Journaling - Readings, Muay Thai, Concepts and Articulations

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

"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.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

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.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

This will not be for everyone or even anyone (perhaps one day this will be a productive line of investigation), but an Anthropological Deluzian-Guattari reading of Sylvie's (Shamanistic-Warrior) path of Nak Muay of Becoming, in particular as it relates to filiation and alliance, transversals. One cannot stand in filiation without being confined by the strictures of that filiation and culture, by gender and elsewise. By forming an transformative alliance outside of filiation, with the stem-roots of filative branches that have been forgotten or denied, she creates a hyper-filation Becoming.

citations from de Castro's CM.

 

This framework has strong (homologocal) descriptive resonance with Peter Galison's theory of Trading Zones, discipline languages and trading "agents" in his explanations of Science (without recourse to metaphysics).

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

An interesting phenomena is older Muay Thai coaches in the West having to confront the growing CTE fear, which they view as alarmist. People just don't want to join gyms, spar and get CTE. These coaches view this worry as alarmist and exaggerated, and cutting into the potential of the sport. I'll just say that when the sport is sold as hyper-violent, all about the KO (marketed through endless KO highlights, promotions hyping "KO rates", and visibly changing the rules of the sport and how it is fought to generate head-hunting and knockouts, this is the shadow side of all that aggro-marketing. People just don't want CTE.

It's one of the hidden ways in which the "modernization" or "globalization" of Muay Thai is likely undercutting its deeper, long term potential. The sport being turned into a commodity for entertainment, an entertainment thirsting for fighters going unconscious, may actually do well in a digital, short attention span environment...but, people like their brains, and increasingly don't want to be a part of the "will sparring give me brain damage?" experiment (the truth is, nobody really knows the boundaries on this).

This hidden long-term marketing failure runs parallel to a second problem, which is if you change the sport into a clashing, defense-less KO fest, you are actually going to give brain damage to the Thai fighters who are the foundation of the sport, including Thai kids. It was the defensive prowess and capabilities which truly separated out the great muay of the past, just not as sexy a thing for the casual doom scroller or sunburned tourist. It is possible to market the deeper meaning and support the past capacities of the art, but this takes longer term thinking. In the meantime Western coaches will be answering CTE concerns.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Lessons in Narrative

 

I love this fight from January New Power soooo much. It explains why in trad scoring you can't just add up "points" or count "damage". It's almost entirely symbolic control. Dodo starts telling his "story" right away, and its the same story the whole fight: "Your strikes don't matter, they have no effect on me, I'm coming". He doesn't rush, he only ups the metronome in a few decisive points in the fight, he is entirely dictating, and it doesn't stop. And the fight is very easy to follow in terms of dramatic narrative: Will he break through? Will he do "enough"? When he reversed direction (after getting his head snapped back by a punch in the 5th and giving a bit of a humorous head shake), after so much stalking...and Blue follows giving chase, his few moments of femeu slipperiness swing the scoring hard. After landing endless strikes Blue is suddenly out of it.

 

There's no "KO", there's no highlight reel moment. He's taking head kicks glancing off the dome and high scoring mid-kicks. It's all tempo and imposition.

 

Dodo Kor. Sakpairin (red) vs Liam Petch Captain Ken Boxing Gym (blue)

 

watch it here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/muaythaiphotolifeideas/posts/3432943350176138/

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Watched Sylvie's padwork today, something new I really have encouraged to happen and that she has been doing daily for a few weeks (?). Tons of in-the-pocket rhythms and improvisations, space management. I can see lots of growth, creativity, enjoyment. Good, good stuff. Unfortunately just like everyone else who has trained her for maybe 4 years now, they all want to take away her clinch. Nobody likes her clinch because it feels reductive. Hey, nobody respected the muay of Samson, Langsuan, even Dieselnoi either, this is a long story with the style. They don't care that she can beat 60 kg girls with it, and is hell for pretty much anyone to face, and has won nearly 200 fights with it (almost every win a direct result of her clinch), its an anti-style especially to the contemporary eye (which has been shaped by Entertainment Muay Thai). This is really good work, but its been years since she's trained with anyone who loved her Muay Khao stalking style and developed her into a clinch demon. All of her clinch dominance in the last several years, pretty much since COVID, has been pretty much kept on life-support by her alone, every clinch partner much bigger than her, stronger, Thai, so she just is managing controls, never being able to experience dominance in the grab, that taste of blood in the water with the lock, every kru in their own way discouraging her from the one thing she has been the best in the world among female fighters at. This is just the morphing of the opportunities of muay in Thailand, and something that has to be lived through. I'm excited for the in-the-pocket work, it fits nicely with what she's been developing with Chatchai. It's very good stuff. But ideally, all that pocket work should be used to pressure and punish the pocket so her clinch is even more unstoppable. Not sure how to get there, giving the state of Muay Thai and the place clinch has within it now. It's been sheer willpower from Sylvie that she is even the clinch fighter she has been over the last several years. Clinch is a vulnerable skill, it erodes quickly, and true clinch requires all kinds of rhythms and set ups to make it effective in the later rounds. It's a very complex, systematic approach to fighting. It's not just about winning clinch positions. It's the culminating persistence of them, using fatigue as a weapon so mistakes get made, positions neutralized too slowly, a bit late, windows getting bigger and bigger. I'm hoping this all comes together. If it does, and Sylvie can regain that late locking effectiveness, watch out. It will be quite a combination. This difficulty though, in the wide view, is that proper Muay Khao training likely does not exist as a whole any longer in Thailand, and that we've had to piece together elements of it even to get this far. There is an incredible bricolage to training in Thailand if you want to reach back into what the Golden Age was, because so much of the methods of muay have changed. Not only is the sport fought differently, and trained differently, its also thought differently even among Thais.