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.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

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.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

There is a Right Wing problem in adventure tourism in Thailand. This is very difficult to talk about because everything is heavily politicized/polarized, and the manosphere has long dovetailed with and supported combat sports, but this is far more pervasive than one would expect or even believe, occurring on several fronts. There is no easy way out of it, or even to avoid it, but becoming more aware is probably a good thing.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

The Art of Producing Time

When discussing the nature of Time and historical revival, Campagna speaks to the Art of producing Time that is preserved in epic restoration, the very frame of the world. This is why I emphasize the temporal mastery of Golden Age Muay Thai. A small seed of Time, a kind of Time, on the subject and solve of Violence.

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Campagna on Time leads into the idea that we are all producing Time (what he calls "Worlding") in each of our days, our existence, and that we also live in "a Time", a shape of things. This makes of Muay Thai's trad "Art of Producing Time" a certain marvelous imperative. I regularly emphasize the temporal nature of Golden Age fighting, that in a certain sense these were Time Battles between two elevated agonistic arts-of-time. In this sense, in the Campagna sense, the (rite-oriented) aspect of ring Muay Thai captures pure elements of Time creation.

As he forwards the idea, the facticity of events in Time, in the past, are not what matter. You can get everything "wrong" about past events, even inverting outcomes or perhaps to some degree values, but the core of what "was" is its particular "art of producing Time", which is to say its unique, substantive way of placing events in relationship to each other, the qualitative expression of those events in narrative, the temporal changes and internal relations of those facts/events, basically...their "unfolding". The nature of their time. In this way, by analogy, in Golden Age fighting it is not the strikes, it is not the techniques, as isolated elements, that need to be passed on, it is their art of producing Time...because the art of producing Time is the fundamental fabric of our reality. How things unfold, much less than "what" is unfolded (though certainly there is some relation).

*     *     *

There was a minor event in the stadia last night where Naksu, Sylvie's training partner at Rambaa's, was knocked out (rather spectacularly) be a bicycle knee right up the middle. The immediate temptation is to "solve" this problem at the technical level. What was his guard like? What was his strike-choice? "How did that get through?" --- but the problem happened at the temporal level. The pace and rhythm with which Naksu was fighting, and the way that he would stall on the porch, resetting some, before an "attack"...lacking in Doh, created this knockout, a 15 year old against a seasoned 25 year old. Before the knockout you could see that the distances were all wrong, that his opponent was fighting in "his Time". In the battle of Times, Naksu was losing. The fight was early, the odds were mostly even, but Naksu was in a bad spot...in regards to Time. Its not always or even often that the mismatch of Time dominance results in such a clear and decisive blow. He could have easily missed and the fight could have gone onto a more complex femeu control, largely uneventful...or Naksu may have recovered his sense of Time, and begun imposing it upon his opponent in later rounds...but this knockout came almost entirely out of Time. The opponent was given their own temporality, and out of that they were able to draw out one of their more rare techniques...perfectly timed.

The agonism of Time.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

- diary

Trauma directs us to liminal spaces [Campagna, 2] because trauma is the breakdown of our metaphysical view, our "frame". These liminal spaces and practices can work to carry for the truths (loosely stated) which the trauma could not coherently bear...that is, the mark, the eruption, the break in the Timeline bears it, as a fissure. These are fractures and rifts of personhood. A liminal space such as Thailand's (trad.) Muay Thai, liminal in its trans- or intercultural nature (Westerners practicing in another culture, re-tuning their bodies to new modalities and their values - not only that -, liminal in the way that its Muay Thai works within violence and fear, threats to the breakdown of the body, in impact, psychological agonism, in Ruup, but also the breakdown of the body in training, and with that the person, all of it gathered together in an art, importantly an art, because only an art can successfully carry the truths of the Traumatic, forward into a post-apocalyptic (end of Time) future.

The Littoral Zone.