Jump to content

A writer's journal - Muay Thai, My Wife and Thailand


Recommended Posts

3-24

Was just reading this, a summary of a Kevin Ross Muay Thai Journey art film called "Oss". The title of the film is explained this way:

OSU is based upon Kevin’s study of the Muay Thai philosophy of ‘osu’ (pronounced ‘oossss’) – the training mantra by which a student steels themselves against any hardship, physical or mental...more here

I don't mean to rag on Kevin Ross - who is an American Muay Thai trailblazer, fighting when the sport was very undeveloped in the country and even to this day, practically becoming synonymous with the words "Muay Thai" for many less familiar with the Thai realities of the sport - or on the filmmakers who are admittedly artists and poets...for instance maybe they liked "Oss" because it is typographically like "Ross". But is it wrong to just say: Hey. This is not a Muay Thai philosophy, and that it is pretty stark that one would name a film centered on Muay Thai, Oss? Of all the Thai words available to you, you choose Oss? The problems with this are layered. The first of which is that Muay Thai doesn't really have "a philosophy", at least not one you study. It would take a pretty big stretch to frame one, if you wanted to, in fact what defines Muay Thai in so many ways is that it isn't esoteric, isn't "idea" driven (which is different than saying it has no ideas). Secondly of course, Oss is a Japanese term, one with very ambiguous origins. Read This. And its uses/meanings in Japanese are quite different than how they are used in gyms in the west. Yes, I understand that this term has really proliferated in western contexts, and maybe that is how it somehow got attached to a film about a journey in Muay Thai, but choosing a Japanese term to indicate a supposedly Thai concept is pretty far out there. Why? Well, for one the Japanese more or less tried to steal/appropriate Muay Thai through the invention of "Kickboxing" in the late 1960s and 1970s. Naming a Muay Thai related documentary 'Oss' really comes full circle on this, twisting the cultural knife in a little. To this day there are still tensions/ambitions across this cultural divide.

There are additional difficulties, for instance how we in the west tend to treat all things from Asia as the same, ignoring important differences that the peoples of cultures find vital. To flip the script: no, hockey is not the National Sport of the United States, no Ramon Dekkers was not a French Kickboxer. Or one can think about how a lot of how Muay Thai, or other Asia martial arts, are taught in the west involves a sometimes very orientalizing tendency of imitation (for instance, this seems to have been involved in the indiscriminate spread of the term "Oss" itself). Imitation, but without understanding. On one level, none of this really seems to matter. These are very well-meaning creative people doing things that are often quite worthy, and meaningful to themselves and others, helping spread the art/s - and in this particular case exploring the relationship between addiction and authenticity. But hey, on another level preserving the differences between arts is pretty damn important to preserving the arts themselves. You can't just make up the idea that a certain way of thinking is Thai, when in fact it's Japanese, and not lose something. I really have no clue at what level this kind of cross-wiring is occurring. My issue isn't really with this particular confusion, but maybe with the way that Muay Thai is being digested in the west, especially in the all-consuming maw of the UFC which swallows every fighting art it can. And it may very well be that in some American gyms "Oss" pretty much functions as a "Thai" term, said along with a wai, or what not. But at a certain point don't we have to make a correction? Put people on the right track of the culture they believe they are studying when they devote themselves to an art form? Oss is not Thai. In fact, in someways arguably it's very un-Thai.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I find it fascinating to gaze into the fish bowl that is American kickfighting culture as it develops via foreign influence and local interaction. The way it went from Bruce Lee movies, to Karate class, to long pants fighting, to a subset of the UFC. The strict dividing lines drawn in the progenitor cultures never really existed. However, there are also those like us; an esoteric clique that has reached into the murky waters to reveal the underlying origins in their pure form. And I suspect that thanks to the internet, the social prestige we hold will lead to the permeation of Thai culture into more general "striking" culture. With this progression in mind, an American Muay Thai pioneer being intimately linked to a term spread through Japanese Karate is oddly fitting. A symbol of the 2010 trendy blend. Perhaps one day a curious relic for a purified future.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3-25

I have to say I find myself torn in two very different directions when thinking about western ambitions and appropriations of Muay Thai. On one end we have very sincere, heart-felt, sometimes heart-aching reach toward an art that is perceived as beautiful, if violent, from the framework of the west. People yearn for "World Championship" belts, none of which are such, and cross great distances (both physical and mental) to achieve them, they learn all sorts of "Thai" things, get sak yant (I have them), and across gyms throughout the Land imitate what their coaches learned in the few months, or even years, they spent in the country. There is a great arcing towards "legitimacy" in the sport, almost a desperate need for it. And this has to be respected. This is the human condition. This is a beautiful thing. This is amazing. But, on the other hand almost all of this is fraudulent to some degree. There are no World Championship belts (no rankings), no, Max Muay Thai is not a legitimate, or perhaps one should say authentic Muay Thai fight promotion (it bills itself as "extreme entertainment" I believe). So much of encountering the "Thai" involves hiding film, or bullshitting away, showing "moves" you learned like parlor tricks, it feels like there is a great cabal of deception. And it feels like this has been going on for decades, as if Thailand were Las Vegas...what happens there, stays there.

If anything we've learned in our 5 years here, and Sylvie's endless fighting, its that we are JUST learning about what Muay Thai is. We are still reaching toward and peeling back layers. And its fucking incredible. It feels bizarre to see claims or even ambitions to authenticity so far outside the country, when even in the country there is so much more to learn. I used to be much more against these faux World belts, or the use of Kru or Arjan by westerners (that once felt like a big deal, no longer), but following along it feels like a far shore that is absorbed in the distance by fog. That shore is just so proliferate, so wide and long. So many belts, so many truly yearning, leaning into achievement. You can't disparage it. All I can say is: Keep on going! But, in this way, it feels like we are heading for a different shore, one we cannot see at all, and only heard rumor of. Something less exotic, more mundane...something like: just the fight.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3-24

Was just reading this, a summary of a Kevin Ross Muay Thai Journey art film called "Oss". The title of the film is explained this way:

OSU is based upon Kevin’s study of the Muay Thai philosophy of ‘osu’ (pronounced ‘oossss’) – the training mantra by which a student steels themselves against any hardship, physical or mental...more here

I don't mean to rag on Kevin Ross - who is an American Muay Thai trailblazer, fighting when the sport was very undeveloped in the country and even to this day, practically becoming synonymous with the words "Muay Thai" for many less familiar with the Thai realities of the sport - or on the filmmakers who are admittedly artists and poets...for instance maybe they liked "Oss" because it is typographically like "Ross". But is it wrong to just say: Hey. This is not a Muay Thai philosophy, and that it is pretty stark that one would name a film centered on Muay Thai, Oss? Of all the Thai words available to you, you choose Oss? The problems with this are layered. The first of which is that Muay Thai doesn't really have "a philosophy", at least not one you study. It would take a pretty big stretch to frame one, if you wanted to, in fact what defines Muay Thai in so many ways is that it isn't esoteric, isn't "idea" driven (which is different than saying it has no ideas). Secondly of course, Oss is a Japanese term, one with very ambiguous origins. Read This. And its uses/meanings in Japanese are quite different than how they are used in gyms in the west. Yes, I understand that this term has really proliferated in western contexts, and maybe that is how it somehow got attached to a film about a journey in Muay Thai, but choosing a Japanese term to indicate a supposedly Thai concept is pretty far out there. Why? Well, for one the Japanese more or less tried to steal/appropriate Muay Thai through the invention of "Kickboxing" in the late 1960s and 1970s. Naming a Muay Thai related documentary 'Oss' really comes full circle on this, twisting the cultural knife in a little. To this day there are still tensions/ambitions across this cultural divide.

There are additional difficulties, for instance how we in the west tend to treat all things from Asia as the same, ignoring important differences that the peoples of cultures find vital. To flip the script: no, hockey is not the National Sport of the United States, no Ramon Dekkers was not a French Kickboxer. Or one can think about how a lot of how Muay Thai, or other Asia martial arts, are taught in the west involves a sometimes very orientalizing tendency of imitation (for instance, this seems to have been involved in the indiscriminate spread of the term "Oss" itself). Imitation, but without understanding. On one level, none of this really seems to matter. These are very well-meaning creative people doing things that are often quite worthy, and meaningful to themselves and others, helping spread the art/s - and in this particular case exploring the relationship between addiction and authenticity. But hey, on another level preserving the differences between arts is pretty damn important to preserving the arts themselves. You can't just make up the idea that a certain way of thinking is Thai, when in fact it's Japanese, and not lose something. I really have no clue at what level this kind of cross-wiring is occurring. My issue isn't really with this particular confusion, but maybe with the way that Muay Thai is being digested in the west, especially in the all-consuming maw of the UFC which swallows every fighting art it can. And it may very well be that in some American gyms "Oss" pretty much functions as a "Thai" term, said along with a wai, or what not. But at a certain point don't we have to make a correction? Put people on the right track of the culture they believe they are studying when they devote themselves to an art form? Oss is not Thai. In fact, in someways arguably it's very un-Thai.

Those guys (Ross and his coach) should have never taken shots at Sylvie's fund-raising; I love how you two consistently clap back.  These seem like very legitimate objections given your superior immersion in Thai fighting, and I abhor sloppy cultural appropriation as well.  At the same time, I fear purists because over time, very little seems original to its place.  Mixing in the long run is healthy.  As a visual artist, I've had my work appropriated and people make money off my ideas and vision (early on).  I do understand the pain of some being elevated due to their pr skills and general fame-friendliness (not Kevin per se but Western "kickboxers" for example, who are tied to a bigger global press machine). But I've found in the end that nothing matters when it comes to public attention; all that matters is the work.  I am speaking on an individual level of course, rather than cultural but I think there is some analogy.  You seem to allude to a greater acceptance of this natural mixing in saying you've become relaxed about Western teachers using the term "Ajarn" and "Kru".  Other thing I would add is that in my efforts to bring martial arts into the museum setting DAMN its been hard not to have any description of fighting forms not sound stupid and corny and just.. wrong.  Once you use the words "martial arts philosophy" (which the most recent museum press dept did despite my efforts), its all downhill lol.  I have to relax and let people communicate to the uninterested though, which I reckon is what these filmmakers have to do in conveying their piece in one short paragraph.  Anyhow I look forward to this film although also, I am not a fan of addiction narratives in film or otherwise.  Meh.  Don't like romanticizing that stuff but we'll see how they handle it.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Those guys (Ross and his coach) should have never taken shots at Sylvie's fund-raising; I love how you two consistently clap back.  These seem like very legitimate objections given your superior immersion in Thai fighting, and I abhor sloppy cultural appropriation as well.  At the same time, I fear purists because over time, very little seems original to its place.  Mixing in the long run is healthy.  As a visual artist, I've had my work appropriated and people make money off my ideas and vision (early on).  I do understand the pain of some being elevated due to their pr skills and general fame-friendliness (not Kevin per se but Western "kickboxers" for example, who are tied to a bigger global press machine). But I've found in the end that nothing matters when it comes to public attention; all that matters is the work.  I am speaking on an individual level of course, rather than cultural but I think there is some analogy.  You seem to allude to a greater acceptance of this natural mixing in saying you've become relaxed about Western teachers using the term "Ajarn" and "Kru".  Other thing I would add is that in my efforts to bring martial arts into the museum setting DAMN its been hard not to have any description of fighting forms not sound stupid and corny and just.. wrong.  Once you use the words "martial arts philosophy" (which the most recent museum press dept did despite my efforts), its all downhill lol.  I have to relax and let people communicate to the uninterested though, which I reckon is what these filmmakers have to do in conveying their piece in one short paragraph.  Anyhow I look forward to this film although also, I am not a fan of addiction narratives in film or otherwise.  Meh.  Don't like romanticizing that stuff but we'll see how they handle it.

 

Hey Dana, honestly I'm not even aware of their attacks on Sylvie - or, if I was at some point aware I certainly have forgotten. I don't follow them, and I hardly follow people that follow them. But I guess it doesn't surprise me that they were part of that crew. So this isn't really clapping back. If it was I certainly would have published this as a guest post on Sylvie's blog, instead of keeping it here in my little corner of the internet read by 5 or 6 people. There's a lot one could say in that direction, but I really choose not to get involved. What is involved here are ideas. These things are really important to me, and I think about these things a great deal.

I do have to say that the notion that my critique comes from that of being a "purist", I can't really identity with. Purists tend to be removed from their source, romanticizing the distance, preserving something they themselves are detached from. It isn't really "purist" to say: Hey, that Thai word you are using, that isn't a Thai word. In fact, it's not even close. Really, my issue wasn't even with the short film, which you can see here. If I had watched only this I would have perhaps chuckled a little to myself. It was really the quoted description itself that triggered me: OSU is based upon Kevin’s study of the Muay Thai philosophy of ‘osu’ (pronounced ‘oossss’) – the training mantra by which a student steels themselves against any hardship, physical or mental Here you not only have misstatement of fact, its a misstatement in the tone of trying to educate someone (here is how this esoteric word is pronounced), and not only that, but that the film's deep character apparently came out of Kevin's "study" of this concept/principle, a study which may not even have involved knowing where it came from. I'm sorry, this does more than make me shake my head. It makes me say WTF? Now maybe none of this came form Kevin Ross, or even the film makers. Maybe it's this MMA writer's creation, but come on now. If you are going to take up an authoritative tone, and look like you are passing on some knowledge of Muay Thai and it's culture, please have some grasp of reality? 

re: "But I've found in the end that nothing matters when it comes to public attention; all that matters is the work."

I have to say that I disagree with this at the cultural end. Yes, as an artist (which you are), yes!, all that matters is the work. But the artist exchanges something with society when she/he purchases such expressive freedom. Yeah, you can say or do whatever you feel provokes or inspires meaning. But everything you say or do gets placed under critique and criticism. And no, if they had painted Kevin Ross's eyes to be slanted so he looked more "Asian" that would be problem...or at least problematic, not to mention humorous in the wrong way. And yeah, if you are going to create some kind of pan-Asian homage to Muay Thai, that too is going to be subject to an Orientalism charge. It's not a light thing. Yes, we may think it is a light thing because as white folks from the west it doesn't affect us (directly), but it isn't cool. No, not all Asians look alike. No, not all Asian fighting arts are the same art (as much as MMA tries to turn them into one). You don't have to be a purist to say: Hey, wait a minute.

Just because it is hard to put words properly, effectively to martial art subjects, doesn't mean that it doesn't matter how we do so. In fact the very difficulty suggests to me the opposite. It means that we should be more careful, more exact, more informative. We don't just free associate, and bring in every sort of unconscious ideological baggage...that is, unless we don't really care about serious critique.

As to Arjan and Kru in the west, I just find it silly in most instances, the Fist Foot Way kind of way. Part of the fantasy. Not worth fighting about in my daily go-about. Okay, so you call yourself Arjan. Hmm. No big deal.  But it too is worthy of critique.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3-25b

...I should add. One of the most amazing things about Muay Thai that you discover when you spend a long time in Thailand is how mundane it is. It is not some exotic, delicate flower. It's living in 1000s of dusty, tiny gyms. In the minds of 1000s of two-bit fighters turned trainers. There isn't anything purist about it. It would be like being a purist about western boxing in the US in the 1950s. There is no "Muay Thai", there are just thousands and thousands of Muay Thai expressions. This doesn't mean that Muay Thai doesn't have definable characteristics, or that it isn't intimately "Thai", come right from the soil of Thai culture and belief. But there is nothing really to be purist about. It's an incredible every-day thing. It's like being a purist about how a newpaper is read in New York. Okay, there is the whole subway fold. There is the cafe lean back and flap of the pages. But it really is just rather mundane. Or, at least it strikes me that way. One really only becomes a purist of newspaper reading when people no longer read newspapers, seeking to preserve a lost thing, or it's a thing you are cut off from by time or distance. You can imagine former German exchange students arguing about real NYC newspaper reading back in Berlin. Muay Thai isn't really there, at least in Thailand.

In Thailand though of course there are ideological battles that surround Muay Thai, and how it portrays or demonstrates Thai history, and National character. These are different kinds of questions, questions important to Thais.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hey Dana, honestly I'm not even aware of their attacks on Sylvie - or, if I was at some point aware I certainly have forgotten. I don't follow them, and I hardly follow people that follow them. But I guess it doesn't surprise me that they were part of that crew. So this isn't really clapping back. If it was I certainly would have published this as a guest post on Sylvie's blog, instead of keeping it here in my little corner of the internet read by 5 or 6 people. There's a lot one could say in that direction, but I really choose not to get involved. What is involved here are ideas. These things are really important to me, and I think about these things a great deal.

I do have to say that the notion that my critique comes from that of being a "purist", I can't really identity with. Purists tend to be removed from their source, romanticizing the distance, preserving something they themselves are detached from. It isn't really "purist" to say: Hey, that Thai word you are using, that isn't a Thai word. In fact, it's not even close. Really, my issue wasn't even with the short film, which you can see here. If I had watched only this I would have perhaps chuckled a little to myself. It was really the quoted description itself that triggered me: OSU is based upon Kevin’s study of the Muay Thai philosophy of ‘osu’ (pronounced ‘oossss’) – the training mantra by which a student steels themselves against any hardship, physical or mental << Here you not only have misstatement of fact, its a misstatement in the tone of trying to educate someone (here is how this esoteric word is pronounced), and not only that, but that the film's deep character apparently came out of Kevin's "study" of this concept/principle, a study which may not even have involved knowing where it came from. I'm sorry, this does more than make me shake my head. It makes me say WTF? Now maybe none of this came form Kevin Ross, or even the film makers. Maybe it's this MMA writer's creation, but come on now. If you are going to take up an authoritative tone, and look like you are passing on some knowledge of Muay Thai and it's culture, please have some grasp of reality? 

re: "But I've found in the end that nothing matters when it comes to public attention; all that matters is the work."

I have to say that I disagree with this at the cultural end. Yes, as an artist (which you are), yes!, all that matters is the work. But the artist exchanges something with society when she/he purchases such expressive freedom. Yeah, you can say or do whatever you feel provokes or inspires meaning. But everything you say or do gets placed under critique and criticism. And no, if they had painted Kevin Ross's eyes to be slanted so he looked more "Asian" that would be problem...or at least problematic, not to mention humorous in the wrong way. And yeah, if you are going to create some kind of pan-Asian homage to Muay Thai, that too is going to be subject to an Orientalism charge. It's not a light thing. Yes, we may think it is a light thing because as white folks from the west it doesn't affect us (directly), but it isn't cool. No, not all Asians look alike. No, not all Asian fighting arts are the same art (as much as MMA tries to turn them into one). You don't have to be a purist to say: Hey, wait a minute.

Just because it is hard to put words properly, effectively to martial art subjects, doesn't mean that it doesn't matter how we do so. In fact the very difficulty suggests to me the opposite. It means that we should be more careful, more exact, more informative. We don't just free associate, and bring in every sort of unconscious ideological baggage...that is, unless we don't really care about serious critique.

As to Arjan and Kru in the west, I just find it silly in most instances, the Fist Foot Way kind of way. Part of the fantasy. Not worth fighting about in my daily go-about. Okay, so you call yourself Arjan. Hmm. No big deal.  But it too is worthy of critique.

Duly schooled and corrected.  I figured when I wrote my paragraph, you might have an excellent response and you did.  Also I should say that it may not have been Kevin who was a pill about crowd-sourcing; by all accounts he is a generous guy and of course an exciting fighter.  I just remember some douchey remark his coach made (in the context of many douchey remarks).  Little protective here.  But he was probably just being protective of someone, as I have been here.  Its an endless cycle and one that I, as mainly a fan, ought not to participate in.  Thank you.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Duly schooled and corrected.  I figured when I wrote my paragraph, you might have an excellent response and you did.  Also I should say that it may not have been Kevin who was a pill about crowd-sourcing; by all accounts he is a generous guy and of course an exciting fighter.  I just remember some douchey remark his coach made (in the context of many douchey remarks).  Little protective here.  Thank you.

 

Ha. No need to school you, you are school unto yourself, and I'm always glad to hear your perspective. I'm sorry I'm a little passionate about this stuff.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Some very cool and fun discussions going on here!

 

3-25

I have to say I find myself torn in two very different directions when thinking about western ambitions and appropriations of Muay Thai. On one end we have very sincere, heart-felt, sometimes heart-aching reach toward an art that is perceived as beautiful, if violent, from the framework of the west. People yearn for "World Championship" belts, none of which are such, and cross great distances (both physical and mental) to achieve them, they learn all sorts of "Thai" things, get sak yant (I have them), and across gyms throughout the Land imitate what their coaches learned in the few months, or even years, they spent in the country. There is a great arcing towards "legitimacy" in the sport, almost a desperate need for it. And this has to be respected. This is the human condition. This is a beautiful thing. This is amazing. But, on the other hand almost all of this is fraudulent to some degree. There are no World Championship belts (no rankings), no, Max Muay Thai is not a legitimate, or perhaps one should say authentic Muay Thai fight promotion (it bills itself as "extreme entertainment" I believe). So much of encountering the "Thai" involves hiding film, or bullshitting away, showing "moves" you learned like parlor tricks, it feels like there is a great cabal of deception. And it feels like this has been going on for decades, as if Thailand were Las Vegas...what happens there, stays there.

If anything we've learned in our 5 years here, and Sylvie's endless fighting, its that we are JUST learning about what Muay Thai is. We are still reaching toward and peeling back layers. And its fucking incredible. It feels bizarre to see claims or even ambitions to authenticity so far outside the country, when even in the country there is so much more to learn. I used to be much more against these faux World belts, or the use of Kru or Arjan by westerners (that once felt like a big deal, no longer), but following along it feels like a far shore that is absorbed in the distance by fog. That shore is just so proliferate, so wide and long. So many belts, so many truly yearning, leaning into achievement. You can't disparage it. All I can say is: Keep on going! But, in this way, it feels like we are heading for a different shore, one we cannot see at all, and only heard rumor of. Something less exotic, more mundane...something like: just the fight.

 

Very good way of putting it! The argo sails ever onward.

Hey Dana, honestly I'm not even aware of their attacks on Sylvie - or, if I was at some point aware I certainly have forgotten. I don't follow them, and I hardly follow people that follow them. But I guess it doesn't surprise me that they were part of that crew. So this isn't really clapping back. If it was I certainly would have published this as a guest post on Sylvie's blog, instead of keeping it here in my little corner of the internet read by 5 or 6 people.

 

 

 

In my experience forums will have 10-20 lurkers for every active member. We're bigger than we think!

 

 

 It was really the quoted description itself that triggered me: OSU is based upon Kevin’s study of the Muay Thai philosophy of ‘osu’ (pronounced ‘oossss’) – the training mantra by which a student steels themselves against any hardship, physical or mental << Here you not only have misstatement of fact, its a misstatement in the tone of trying to educate someone (here is how this esoteric word is pronounced), and not only that, but that the film's deep character apparently came out of Kevin's "study" of this concept/principle, a study which may not even have involved knowing where it came from. I'm sorry, this does more than make me shake my head. It makes me say WTF? Now maybe none of this came form Kevin Ross, or even the film makers. Maybe it's this MMA writer's creation, but come on now. If you are going to take up an authoritative tone, and look like you are passing on some knowledge of Muay Thai and it's culture, please have some grasp of reality? 

 

The comedy writes itself.  :laugh: Its a common theme when I see Westerners try and step into the cultural realm of Muay Thai. The fishbowl swirls on. Kinda reminds me of that time the Thai girl had to pretend to be French and they named her Steven or something lol

 

if they had painted Kevin Ross's eyes to be slanted so he looked more "Asian" that would be problem...or at least problematic, not to mention humorous in the wrong way. 

 

I dunno man, Gilbert and Sullivan pulled it off:

 

 

3-25b

...I should add. One of the most amazing things about Muay Thai that you discover when you spend a long time in Thailand is how mundane it is. It is not some exotic, delicate flower. It's living in 1000s of dusty, tiny gyms. In the minds of 1000s of two-bit fighters turned trainers. There isn't anything purist about it. It would be like being a purist about western boxing in the US in the 1950s. There is no "Muay Thai", there are just thousands and thousands of Muay Thai expressions. This doesn't mean that Muay Thai doesn't have definable characteristics, or that it isn't intimately "Thai", come right from the soil of Thai culture and belief. But there is nothing really to be purist about. It's an incredible every-day thing. It's like being a purist about how a newpaper is read in New York. Okay, there is the whole subway fold. There is the cafe lean back and flap of the pages. But it really is just rather mundane. Or, at least it strikes me that way. One really only becomes a purist of newspaper reading when people no longer read newspapers, seeking to preserve a lost thing, or it's a thing you are cut off from by time or distance. You can imagine former German exchange students arguing about real NYC newspaper reading back in Berlin. Muay Thai isn't really there, at least in Thailand.

In Thailand though of course there are ideological battles that surround Muay Thai, and how it portrays or demonstrates Thai history, and National character. These are different kinds of questions, questions important to Thais.

This is a great analogy that really shows how silly the exoticism can be. I have a crystal clear image of that German guy in my head  :laugh:

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I dunno man, Gilbert and Sullivan pulled it off:

 

When I wrote that I actually had in mind Mickey Rooney's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's, which is cut from the same cloth of Time:

mickey-rooney-breakfast-at-tiffanys-last

 

Hey, I don't know how closely Mickey Rooney's character and the use of the term Osu are connected, but there do seem to be similarities. One could say that this too is "broadly exotic"...one in the mode of comedy, one in the mode of respect.

Kevin-Ross-Osu.png

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't think I've ever watched the movie through, but I've seen those iconic pictures of Audrey a thousand times:

 

41wnnT%2B4OzL._AC_UL320_SR214,320_.jpg

 

When trying to find a non-massive version of that picture to post, I was amused when I somewhat ironically came across this:

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

5/28

I guess this is a strange follow up to the above entry, and I'm hesitant to even bring this forward. But this is my semi-private space where I just get to talk about things that preoccupy or fascinate me, and this is one of those. And really I write this because I care about Muay Thai, the Muay Thai that we all love, the Muay Thai of the big stadia in Thailand, especially those marvelous fighters of the Golden Age. It's already said by many that Lumpinee belts don't mean anything much when compared to the fights of those eras when the best fought the very best, over and over, sometimes even across weight classes. Now Lumpinee belts feel much more arranged or managed, big mega gyms purchasing lots and lots of talent from around the country, and top talent often kept from other top talent. I honestly don't know enough about the history of the sport and the inner machinations of current Thai arrangements to be firm about this, but you do hear legends just shake their head at the current state of top fighting. This could simply be Old School fighters dismissing modern developments, something you always see in sport. But it's enough to say that at the highest level of Muay Thai, the level at which we all aim our eyes, there have been stories of serious and significant slippage.

Why does this matter? Well, what I have in mind isn't so much Lumpinee or other Thai belts, but the way that we in the west represent our own Muay Thai development and achievement. I read the achievement list of a very well known YouTube fight technique purveyor who describes himself as an International Pro Muay Thai fighter. I'm not sure about this, but I believe he's had only one Muay Thai fight ever (many years ago), in Thailand against a windmilling Thai opponent of very questionable skill, and that is the anchor of the title: "International Pro Muay Thai Fighter". I'm just shaking my head. Ok, I get it. Everyone has to market themselves. There is a kind of built in bloat to achievement claims, and for people who want to make a living instructing others there is a need to establish authority. I'm sensitive to this. But there has to be a limit.

The above is an extreme example. But there are two other conflations that each time I hear them I cringe a little. The first is the claim "Muay Thai at Madison Square Garden". This is such a tricky thing. When Muay Thai fights happen at MSG this really raises the prestige of ALL of American Muay Thai, and maybe a little bit of western Muay Thai. Madison Square Garden is a famed name in the history of western fighting. The greatest of the greats of boxing fought there. This is just hallowed ground. The idea that people are fighting Muay Thai, where the legends of boxing were formed, is just a huge feather in the cap of Muay Thai. But...and everyone who goes to these shows knows, these are not Madison Square Garden fights, in the sense that a casual listener would imagine. These are MSG "Theater" events, in a separate space. Not the Arena. But still they are sometimes billed as "at the Mecca" of fighting.

Madison-Square-Garden-Muay-Thai-3-e14959

vs

Muhammad-Ali-Madison-Square-Garden-boxin

I'm not sure why this bothers me. Hype is a big part of the fighting game, and if I were running promotions for a show at MSG Theater I would definitely want to draw heavily on the name, and its history - and even the theater itself is a huge achievement for Muay Thai. It's a big venue right in the middle of Manhattan. But there is something beyond the mere event that sticks in my throat a little. Fighters themselves, and really all of us, try to blur the lines between these kinds of achievements and the hallowed events of the 1960s and 1970s, we participate in the wink and the nod. Something of the same thing was going on when westerners, of almost any skill level, found that they could fight on pre-shows at Lumpinee and Rajadamnern. This is something that still happens, though it seems to a lessor degree in the last year. Fighting at Lumpinnee or Rajadamnern in many of these cases was a bit like having your little league team play at Yankee Stadium in the off-season. These largely were not fights involving ranked fighters. A young western kid from our gym here in Pattaya just fought at Lumpinee, yes Lumpinee, someone with almost no real fighting skill to speak of, in the pre-card. This is not "fought at Lumpinee Stadium" in any real sense of the phrase.

Somewhat in the same vein, I've seen Muay Thai fighters I really like, I mean people I really like, winning a WBC belt of some kind. And then the excitement flows naturally into celebration for the "Green Belt", a belt that is famous the world over for how it stands for boxing excellence. Muhammad Ali wore the Green belt in his victory in 1974, the Rumble in the Jungle:

371BBC4800000578-3734670-Ali_wearing_the

 

I'm just really torn about this. Fighters find themselves such a precarious position. They fight for promotions, and in a certain way when winning belts of any kind they have a responsibility to respect and promote the achievement. And, there is an overall responsibility to Muay Thai itself to represent it as having champions that have achieved something notable, even something great. You have to rise to the hype in a way. But there is just something fundamentally wrong about this. You - or really with perhaps rare exception, most any Muay Thai fighters - don't have The Green Belt even though the WBC itself pushes the "green belt" phrase in its instagram and twitter accounts. I say this as someone who stared at Chatchai Sasakul's WBC belt as he held it in front of me, somewhat in awe. Even though you might be an awesome fighter and human being Muay Thai itself just isn't there. We can't just be giving out belts left and right, belts with the right letters on them, and pretend that we are simply forwarding Muay Thai by doing so. This is an incredibly inflationary exercise. And it is not just the WBC, its all the sanctioning bodies. Why I'm writing this is that it feels like someone, or some people, have to at least talk about it because sometimes it feels like everyone is forced to be "in" on the deception. We become bad folks who aren't team players, tearing down fighters if we put question marks next to achievement descriptions. We all have to pretend that a "World Title" is because of its name some amazing feat. We all have to pretend that the MSG Theater is more or less where Ali fought. We all have to pretend that fighting at Lumpinee is an epic achievement, no matter your opponent. Everyone in these events, even making these achievements, knows in the back of their mind it isn't the case. Keeping silent creates a kind of group shared guilt I think, which just pushes everyone onto the next hyped up achievement. It's not "The Emperor has No Clothes", it's "We All Have No Clothes". It's only going to stop when fighters themselves speak more soberly about their achievements, for the sake of Muay Thai itself. 

I think something of this same shared guilt is what kept so much of "fighting in Thailand" under wraps. People would come here and be totally unprepared for how dubious, or how haphazard the fight scene was. Some of them would fight only a few fights (no video) and be kind of embarrassed at their opponent, who perhaps they visibly outweigh. For decades "fighting in Thailand" was the mark of authenticity, but many, many fighters did so under the cloak of "what happens in Thailand stays in Thailand". Much of this was fueled by the Phuket scene (which I have no first hand account of, but which I've read about). Fighters would come back from a handful of fights, several months in Thailand, and open gyms, or become instructors, often with that as the rock of their authority. There would be no talk of the quality of those fights. No video. Instead, everyone kind of shared a group shame or responsibility to the image of fighting in Thailand. You could not speak the truth about it without taking away from your own credibility. It feels like it was a similar dynamic to the one we have with belts and world titles. It's just best not talked about, for everyone. There indeed were very hard fights being fought in the country, but nobody really would speak to the reality that very often there were mismatches.

In the last 5 years, or even 10 some of this spell of silence was broken. The image of the "tuk-tuk driver" fight rose up, and in certain sectors fighting in Thailand became quite dubious. People, especially in hearing stories out of Phuket (but also elsewhere), started coming to Thailand fearing a mismatch. We've gotten to I think a mix of feelings about fighting here, especially as fighters have started putting up video of their fights, and western vs Thai matchups have gotten more exposure in the age of social media. This is also why Sylvie has made it a principle to put video of every single fight she's fought. She's had the distinct fortune of being very small, so the usual guilt of being given a big size advantage is something she's very lucky to have not faced. The video is not there to say: "Hey! Look how great I am.", it's to say "Hey, this is what it is really like, fighting a ton in a commercial center like Chiang Mai, or in festival fights, or on tv cards, as a female". All the fight video is deflationary. We have to ground where Muay Thai is, and a lot of what Sylvie has done in her writing and fighting and filming is to sober things up.

Sylvie's also been lucky in the sense that she doesn't have to be part of a western fight promotional world, she does not depend on a system of achievement-marking that reinforces itself. She is not fighting for or winning belts in an ecosystem of inter-related events and promoters. She's just flying out on her own arc. This makes the ethics simpler. She also is not an instructor, or a gym owner that needs to qualify her authority. These kinds of pressures are real financial burdens. It is not easy to make a living as an instructor/gym owner, and so inflating or at the very least self-celebrating becomes a real and serious requirement. If you don't celebrate yourself, especially as a woman in sport, no-one will.

But what I really call for is that we all try to come together in our appreciation of some sort of real Gold Standard. You can't have everything representing "Gold". It is great for business as people strive for intra-gym prajet, or shorts, or for regional belts of every kind. But ultimately this the slippage of meaning is not good for Muay Thai itself. We cannot be blurring the line so badly that an "International Pro Muay Thai Fighter" (with one fight in Thailand) is the same as a "Lumpinee Fighter" (fighting on pre-cards, sometimes with almost no experience), as a "Madison Square Garden" fighter, as a WBC Champion. We have to create a bottom to all this, otherwise we are just making up and printing money. It becomes meaningless.

Right now, in the pro female Muay Thai world, let's just admit that there is no such thing as a World Champion. The reason for this is that there are no rigorous, regularly updated rankings that reflect quality fighters from around the world. It does not exist. World Championship belt fights, at least in Thailand, are pretty much "another hard fight" between two good opponents. Nothing more. And that isn't even always the case. These are really nice promotional bobbles. No ranking system, or string of victories has produced this matchup. At least in Thailand "World Champion" among women just means: Is probably a good fighter in the pool of fighters around at the time. It also tends to mean: trains at a gym with strong promotional contacts. Let's start with the sober view. That is the only way to get Muay Thai to actually develop beyond the "let's hype the next promotion as much as we can" stage. If we are representing things in a way that confuses others, and make Muay Thai seem far more progressed than it is, let's try to deflate it a little, just so we keep our feet on the ground. No, the fight was not at the Madison Square Garden Arena where Ali fought, but it was at the Theater which is pretty fucking good! No, this isn't a WBC green strap anywhere near the famed green straps of historic boxing, but it was against a very good opponent at a wonderful WBC promoted event. Hey, it was just a pre-card Lumpinee fight, not a very big deal, but it was super cool to even fight where the best fighters in the world fight. Let's speak our experiences. Why do this? We do this for the next generation of female fighters (and maybe all fighters), and then the generation after that too. By refusing to blur the hype we might get to a point where real and rigorous professional rankings become a marketable, significant thing to create. Only when we start to want, and really need rankings are they going to develop. If we keep over-hyping our achievements then there is no need for rankings, no way to create a landscape for real, generational greatness. It means we are depriving the next ladies (and men) of what they can achieve.

Now let me be clear, I'm not calling anyone "out". In fact some of the fighters that triggered this entry are people I really respect, and in fact I have great sensitivity to the pressures or even pleasures that lead to a certain way of talking. It's not even always talk by the fighter, but talk of their passionate supporters, or by earnest promoters. But I also say: Let's be secure in ourselves enough that we can go forward with less a need to hype, or blur the boundary between where we are and where we would dream to be. Let's not make "Gold" every shiny thing. Let's keep it what it is, Gold. Lets keep it remote and seldom reachable. And let's keep our feet on the ground so we can get somewhere.

Sylvie-Muay-Thai-Belts-e1495967083278.jp

An example from my life. Above are 3 belts that we keep in the apartment. Belts in Thailand, generally, when won are not kept, so you have to pay to have them made for you by official sources, and are pretty expensive. These are a belt given by Master K, Sylvie's original teacher in the US, a belt that he had hung on his wall for many years, representing his gym team, Suriyasak. He had a student bring it to Sylvie, all the way to Thailand, a special moment for her. There is also a Chonburi Buffalo Race annual festival belt, the first "belt" she ever won in Thailand, bench-marking that experience. And then there is the Muay Siam Northern 105 lb belt, which she won, and then was stripped of because she is a westerner, in a bit of politics. The only western fighter to fight for and win such a belt. These are three special belts. Not because they indicate greatness, but rather because they reflect relationships. They are indicators of times in Sylvie's life. They are incredibly valuable, because of all they represent beyond their official titles. Sometimes Sylvie has to send a photo of herself with a belt to a promoter in Thailand because they crave these kinds of images, but mostly these belts just stay hidden. Maybe because they are kind of personal. For me at least there is a slight kind of shame or embarrassment about these belts, because they are somewhat generally shaped like the Lumipnee (or Rajadamnern) belt - a shiny, silver engraved shield with a colorful cloth band. These are NOT Lumpinee or Raja belts. The very proximity to the Lumpinee or Raja belts doesn't really feel right to me somehow.

Below is Namphon Nongkipahuyut's Lumpinee belt. We took this photograph of it while visiting Arjan Pramod, Namphon's old coach and kru, a few weeks after Namphon sadly died very likely of tuberculosis. That is a Lumpinee belt. The two should not be confused. The belts above, and this belt. To illustrate the vast distance between the two, consider this: We asked Arjan Pramod "Who is your favorite fighter of today?". He smiled wryly, his lion-face looking off in the distance. "Namkabuan" he said, letting his smile linger. No, he didn't misunderstand. Namphon's younger brother Namkabuan, one of the very best fighters ever, long now retired. In only one word Arjan Pramuk had said: "There are no great fighters anymore, Namkabuan was the last." He was standing there in the Nongkipahuyut "Hall of Fame". The Hall of Fame is really only a largely lost and forgotten room adjacent to the gym that no longer really trains fighters, part of the house where Arjan Pramuk lives. Its glass cases that haven't been dusted in quite a while still hold silent treasures like this belt, with its waist band tucked behind it to protect it from the dust:

DSC04522-Namphons-Lumpinee-Belt-e1495965

The distinction I feel must be maintained, even while Sylvie and others strive for historical accomplishments. We must not lose our place on the mountain, if we want to really climb the mountain. It is up to fighters themselves to express the relationships that make make certain belts or events special, but also to constantly set the distinction between what they have achieved and what there is in the world. It is up to fighters, I believe, to maintain "Gold".

DSC04540-Arjan-Pramut-Nongkipahuyut-e149

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5/30

Foreign gods. I think a great deal about the gods and dieties of Thailand. Not only do they multiple and crest across every commercial incrustation, appearing like ghosts to offerings to every Capital manifestation, from 7-11s (which can have both sleeping dogs in doorways, and food notables to the invisible on the corner) to enormous banks. There is something special about this complete and every expanding panoply. And there is something to bowing to it. Worship to a foreign god invites the foreign within you, it cracks open the hard shell of self-conception, and it also puts you in metronomic tune with the affective consciousness of so many others, with whom you do not share a language, at least to a degree. But there is a shell to these beings, a difficult lacquer to get through. Does one have to dig deep, or skate faster on the surface? They are silent, somewhat cartooned or exaggerated. They contain scripts and turns that have embedded themselves in the minds of childhood, the childhoods of others who are not foreign to them. I cannot - yet - permeate myself to their degree. There is something to the Thai mind that takes on the surface reflection, not as a superficiality, but along the lines of the comic book silhouette test. A super hero or villain has to pass the recognition by readers, even if no light is shining upon them, revealing all the internal detail. The gods and dieties of Thailand are like this. Much of social discourse is like this. It is two dimensional truth telling. We of our excited 3D mappables are missing something in this. And I suspect that I'm missing something here too. It's what keeps the lacquer, lacquer. We must flatten ourselves out for these gods.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

7/4

n-SOPHIA-LOREN-1950-628x314.jpg

This really caught my eye, "Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Ambassador" Anthony Bourdain explaining some months ago that he was relieved to stop pretending he was in a relationship with his wife, throwing out the complaint/explanation in an email about their separation that “She’s an interesting woman. I admire her choices. But I married Sophia Loren. She turned into Jean-Claude Van Damme.”

“Date night is pretty much going to a fight,” Bourdain joked to Ottavia in a 2013 column for Vice’s MMA section Fightland. “In between we watch tapes of guys wrestling each other. Romantic? Not.”

What is interesting is how softly it was Anthony Bordain who became the "ambassador" of BJJ, and not his wife, though Fightland did a very nice piece on his wife. Notably, she points out that her husband did not like how muscular her body had become:

It was Bordain, who I'll admit I'm not a fan of as a food show personality, who received the unofficial ambassadorship honor. He was a famous man, well into his 50s, starting BJJ. In this Charlie Rose segment, he talked about it, briefly:

I'm not really to judge the relationship but rather to talk from quite afar. This wasn't a story I was even following closely. It is more that in my media consumption and conversation I was somehow kind of struck by how the aura around Bourdain was of this late-in-life discovered male love of BJJ. Yes, I had heard that his wife had gotten him into it, but what really seemed to resonate with everyone was his story. When Sylvie shot a segment with food maven Andrew Zimmern people would say, wrongly: "Yeah, that BJJ guy."

Bourdain's the famous one, the one with his face on television, and the demographic skews way toward the aging Baby Boomer male, but there is something that feels just not right about the "ambassador of BJJ" saying something like: "I married Sophia Loren. She turned into Jean-Claude Van Damme."

Just as a story being told, looking back on all his video'd statements about how proud he was that his wife or his daughter (one day) could "kick everyone's ass in a bar they walk into" or "fuck someone up" (sorry, insert my eye-roll here), behind it all it feels like..."not Sophia Loren", a joke he apparently repeats and finds perhaps pleasurable irony or humor in. In her words before their separation:

It has been a transformation. My body has changed, dramatically. I have changed. My husband half-jokes that he married Sophia Loren but ended up with Jean-Claude Van Damme. But there's something to that. I'm not the same person. I'm hard now, physically and mentally. The confidence I gained is something I'm proud to share with my daughter, who, like me, has been training jujitsu for some time.

This is what I'm interested in. Bourdain was an ambassador because indeed it was a country of men, older men, that perhaps needed an ambassador, someone to translate things to make them understandable, to open up the door to an art and movement. It seems, he wasn't so much an ambassador OF Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, so much as the older "still virile" Man Ambassador TO Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Yes. And MMA, which seems as if it caught fire in the world because it inexplicably wove artfulness and male rage into a single thing, like a living Kung Fu movie. What I wonder is if the aged powers that found Sophia Lorens growing into JCVDs so interesting (to a degree), with female fighting taking more and more market share and media, will sour on the real powers that female fighting is embodying...the real changes in confidence that reflect that women are not the "same person" they were 15 or 20 years ago, no longer Sophia Lorens.

I think my point here is that these are real transformations. It's important to note that in his humor Bourdain is just passing between one fantasy and another. For his generation Sophia Loren was pretty much THE quintessential beautiful woman, exotic enough as European to Americans, full of temper and emotion, and rich romantic love. And JCVD also occupies a powerful pole to that, the man who brings his manliness to exotic lands, learns exotic arts, defeats exotic enemies, dances...exotically. What happens when, lost in your fantasy space the person you grafted your desire fantasy onto (Sophia), starts to effect the fantasy of what you want to be yourself (JCVD)? When speaking of real female power (confidence, capability, vectors of choice), it seems that that power has found a secret crease in the male fantasy space, that it slipped between the allure of Loren, and the elements that surround JCVD. It has taken advantage of the confusion it produces by its juxtaposition. Yes, rightfully women of the arts and fighting complain about the sexualization of their roles, the repeated re-territorialization of their remarkable flights, but it really is in the confusion that is produced by the juxtaposition that inroads were made. All the virtues (Latin, look it up) of the male fighter became detached properties, qualities that could adhere to other things, effecting a displacement. Lorens could suddenly produce virility, almost by its definition. You see this in sci-fi films all the time when the "hot" android suddenly shows inhuman strength...but always with the warning/fear that the android has its own programming, its own mission...almost insect like. It was this crease between Loren and Jean, into which female power began to express itself, taking on more and more of the attributes of Jean, and leaving Loren more and more behind. But it is really into this crease that female fighting still remains. It's con-fusion.

What is important here is that the qualities of "Jean" are the attributes of power, or at least of those "in" power. They are necessary to signify and also, importantly, to trigger the experiences of power in its cultural braid of meaning and instinct. They are the vestments that in a certain sense need to be put on. But this is no fantasy experiment. These are a program of affective transformation. The symbols act as vessels for a kind of transport. But you must keep your eye on the real thing. The real power. The real freedoms that are being signified and assembled. Love. 

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

7/24

I'm particularly fascinated with the MMA story of Kadyrov, the brutal dictator, Islamic ideologue, war-crime-ish cuddly Instagrammer who has embraced MMA for what it really seems to be, in the form of an absolute purity as extreme. I first ran into the story on Sherdog and here is a cleaner presentation of it on MMAfighting.com  or on Deadspin. I remember my mother, who was a Philosophy major before she became a prosecuting attorney, giving the advisement: If you want to understand the verity of an argument take it to its extreme. I was pretty young then and I wrestled with whether or not this was indeed true. I'm much older now and can see something of that taken up in this example. MMA - not the sport, but perhaps we could say the cultural phenomena - is largely revealed in its purity in Kadyrov. The outlandish fantasy of underground brutal fighting tournaments in martial arts cinema, some of my favorite films, paired with ethnic rage (it's dignity) and ultra-Nationalism, and vast resources of wealth (likely derived from elicit, widespread money-laundering activities) becomes acme'd in the arch-warrior type. Coupled to a carefully sculpted social media persona, and the west finds itself staring into a mirror reflection of itself: "Who is the fairest in all the land....?" It is mind-boggling how many threads of MMA absolutism are drawn together and amplified in Kadyrov who is simultaneously Bond villain and Mixed Martial Artist everyman, seemingly straddling the complete spectrum of the male possible. If I thought Trump was the grotesque but still utterly transfigured apogee of Capital, he is but a demi-urge to this example of manly racial rage and its proposed redemption. And what is even more incredible, the ideology of MMA (beknighted UFC fighters of the commercialized west) will be facing Kadyrov's fighter/warriors, their own hypostasis, in a real cage, in real fights. Not since Jessie Owens torched the field in the Berlin Olympics will there be such a meeting of ideology, political brutality and fantasy as athletic contest. But in this case there is no opposition, there is no nemesis. There is only a question: How deep will you go?

This is the fascinating thing. As Kadyrov harnesses the image and ethos of MMA to fuel the warrior caste fantasy, and thus his own political objectives -- and he is not the only power in the world doing so, perhaps most notably the recent rise of fighting spectacle in China, seeking a performance counterpart to real world potency - what it makes clear is that sports matter...that what is being done in the ring, the cage, the field, is not just distraction or pastime, but it draws on and banks affective powers and meanings for change. As otherwise fairly sage observers have wrongly guessed, they are not just bread and circus designed to keep the eyes of the People off of the real mechanisms of power. They are also the stuff of political meaning. It is theatricized but socially proven Good. And the Good is always tested withing the agora, both by speech and by price. To switch gears just a bit this is, in my view, what makes what Sylvie is doing in Muay Thai far more combustive than many if not all realize. There is a groundwork here, a bedrock built in gym spaces, in rings across Thailand, in digital sedimentation that goes very deep, that supposes a possibility far beyond sport in the typical sense. Fighting is where art meets flesh. And in the case of gender - and let's not lose track of how the greatest recent western outcry against Kadyrov has not been against the wider spread accusations of human atrocities, but rather specifically against his anti-gay "purifications" and denials of sexuality - fighting is where art meets flesh meets caste. Values are fighting.

Here is a good Vox video piece on Kadyrov:

The HBO experience of covering his story.

A very good 20+ minute radio interview of the Kadyrov MMA story, Karim Zidan:

And a 20+ minute radio interview of the Kadyrov MMA story, David Scott:

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

8-31

I finally have done it - I have given into my love of Muay Thai. I'm not young. I'm 50+ (you would not believe it, but I actually do not know my age...I started calculating it out and got flustered for a minute and just gave up, because it doesn't matter)...but I've finally given into my absolute love of the sport. To talk about why it's taken me so long - my Lord, I've lived here in Thailand the motherland of the art, for 5 years! - borders on criminal, if you could commit crimes against yourself, but it's an intricate weave of problems and carefulness that is telling in its own right. What this really is about, what it has to be about, is my weight. For these 5 years I've lived an almost complete and total expat's life, locked in rooms with a keyboard, making sure that we can survive financially, with clients, and with Sylvie's own social media roots growing, just pushing for new vistas in that draining world, my mental acuity, my attention span, the circuit of my creativity growing tighter and tighter, living on refresh cycles and experimentation as a consultant, all as my body ballooned, and I lost awareness of my flesh. All while I watched one of the most incredible devotions to the sport that is possible, my 100 lb wife beat her way towards 200 fights. Jesus. It's incredible. At first I cocooned myself in the apartment because I just did not want to impact Sylvie's training experiences in a Thai gym. The trainers would speak to me, not to her, when I was around. And honestly I was a very harsh influence on Sylvie herself, as she attempted to ascend in her art. It felt best that I stayed away, and let the culture of the gym, the constellation of trainers just make the most of what her heart was. I did pad Muay Thai work maybe 3 or 4 times in our first 2 years at Lanna. I took maybe a month of boxing lessons, scheduled when the gym was empty and full of heat, in the early afternoons. But mostly I just languished, and grew more and more stagnant. More and more unhealthy. Examining a digital world, as westerners feasted on the beautiful training that was only 5 minutes walk from my door.

When we moved to Pattaya, it was more of the same. It just seemed best that I let Sylvie evolve in the cultures of her gyms. I'm a strong force, I send things into orbit, so largely I have just stayed away. And cost too was a reason/excuse. I didn't want to upset the delicate balance of friendship that long term stays, and what money can mean for Thais, by including myself in that relationship. And in truth, I just became frozen. I say it was my weight, which had swelled to an incredible 278 lbs (126 kg) in these 5 years, that drove me to finally give in. But it really was my health. There is a saying: You don't see many seriously overweight old people. In the last 6 months my eyesight began to dim. My circulation grew sluggish. The climb up the stairs to our 4th floor left me breathing hard for 10 minutes or more. I was literally starting to fall apart. It could see the future. I could see that as Sylvie just now is breaking into truly uncharted territory, as a human being and a fighter, as she was poised to just rocket ship to a level that people can't even see, the foundation of these 5 years of self discovery having been laid...I simply was not going to be alive to see it. I wasn't going to be there. I wasn't going to see the person I love really doing the thing she loved, at an incredibly high level. All the excuses (nerve damage in my leg), all the reasons (what would it cost!?) they just suddenly melted away. They were but whiffs of thoughts, not even real thoughts. I was going to die, and probably sooner than anyone else thought. It was time.

Kevin-and-Sylvie-day-1-e1504173046161.jp

278 lb ginormous me, with my lovely, incredible wife Sylvie, first day in the gym on Monday, above

I'm going to say this. The first day in the gym, just standing there in the weight room, kind of milling back and forth waiting for Pi Nu get his things together for my first pad work with him, I started to cry. The tears came, exactly as they are coming as I am writing this in recollection, out of happiness. I was finally there. I was finally going to touch Muay Thai myself, seriously. The stated aim really was to lose weight, to save myself and by time, maybe even decades, to be with my wife, but right then and there it felt like something else. The real reason I'm doing this felt like it was because I love Muay Thai, and I was finally giving myself permission to touch it myself. With my own hand. It didn't matter if I was good, if I ever was going to be good. But I was going to walk up and touch it, like how you've seen an elephant 1,000 times, images of elephants, but it isn't until you touch that dusty, leathery, hair-prickle of skin, you don't know what an elephant is, or feels like. My tears maybe would make more sense if you knew that for these 5 years I've projected myself, physically ---- I say "physically", but I really mean affectively ---- into an incredible amount of Muay Thai. Not only have I been ringside for Sylvie 190 or so fights, and seen all the associated fights surrounding those events, and all the tv and youtube we have watched, so the two of us could get a handle on this incredible art, I also have affectively imagined, and recorded, endless virtual movements, affectively, in my heart, watching all of that, so I could feel my way closer to it. I've been with Sylvie when she has been with the incredible legends she has been filming with, one of a kind human beings and fighters, and I have been silently, and adoringly been downloading the shapes and forms of everything I witnessed. I put it in me. Now, this is going to sound perhaps a little strange, but despite being a very verbal, abstract philosophical, systems oriented person, everything starts for me with the body. So while I've been putting on the endless pounds, stuck behind screens, I've also been processing everything affectively....physically. Ostensibly, I've been doing this for Sylvie's good, so to find out innovative ways around the unique roadblocks she's encountered, but viscerally, and honestly, I've been doing it for love...a love of Muay Thai. I've been kind of locked away, by a screen of sorts, from something I really loved, and which I've seen my wife love, first hand. So I cried, just a few joyous sobs, before that pad work would begin.

And the pad work is amazing. Pi Nu is incredibly patient, incredibly intelligent as he starts to build you, and with me he was working with a body that was badly broken, like an old pick up totally rusted out in the field with the grass growing 6 ft in all directions. But, because my mind was so attuned to everything Sylvie had been learning, and doing, and watched the legends of her instruction so closely myself, I had and have a kind of deep understanding of what the art is supposed to be, or can be. A virtual understanding. So, here I was, a non-functioning body, a very active mind, being escorted through the powers of the art, through their forms...the very BASIC forms, seeking balance like a ship taking on water and that wants to turn and sink, the captain carefully turning its wheel to keep the course, letting the steel work its structural magic. And that was the first day. Fuck. It was unbelievable. And still is. I'm actually touching the thing I love. First week is over and my mind is blowing up. It's just the mornings, I'm making sure I don't injure myself and set myself back, but I'm moving through the gym, as a person. As a human being. Not only as a mind. All the parts are there. And it means a terrible lot.

above, a little video essay on the upper corner of the gym

So, there's a just elating romance about this. The Petchrungruang Gym is...it's hard to describe...it's just about the truest "Thai" gym that there is, that fundamentally allows and includes westerners. But, I think you'd have to know Thailand, and Thai gyms, to see why that's the case. The video above, from this morning, maybe gives a clue to how I think about the gym, this beautiful ad hoc architectures that physically grow out of a house, a family, to explode (the opposite of 'implode') in the slowest of motions around the possibilities that Thai boys might one day be stadium fighters. And, I'm in this space, right in the middle of it. I feel like as I've finally made a motion toward saving my life, I've gifted myself something unexpected. The indulgence and necessity that I touch this art. And I wish I could send it to you, whatever reader who may find this, this bottled emotion that is come from now many years of neglect, an elixir of belief, that makes the art, any art, possible. And I truly feel I could not have done this at any time prior. The stagnation, the stasis really, was a part of the love, as I just watched on, projecting myself into it. Not that what I chose was right, but it was right for this path, this creation, this possibility. Let's see what happens...

  • Like 6
Link to comment
Share on other sites

9/1

I've added the Farmer's Walk to my basic Muay Thai development. I've never been a "work out" guy, even when I was very athletic in my youth, but there is something very reassuring in the Farmer's Walk, the core naturalness of the movement, that just speaks to me. It has to do with something that I love in Muay Thai, and in particular the Muay Thai Pi Nu teaches. Very basic, balanced, efficient moves that come out of a frame. This is something I really, really love, and it feels nice to add an easy movement that has global strengthening elements that somehow mirror the ethos (please, no recommendations :).

In an odd contrast to all of this, I've already begun developing my own fighting system/style, principally on the bag, but mostly in my mind through experimentation. I know this probably sounds ridiculous, but I've been thinking theoretically about Muay Thai tactics and styles for about 7 years now, and it just tickles my brain to start building something I've been imagining out of my own un-trained flesh. So, there is a complete fascination with the pure simplicity of efficient responses contained in Pi Nu's Muay Thai, and really the Muay Thai of pretty much any fighter-oriented gym, AND also already a kind of rigorous experimentation, a creation of something that might really be new, at least to Muay Thai. What I'm working on his a ground up application of what Sylvie is calling The Armadillo Guard, a boxing guard used by some legends. Because of Thai clinch, I think the potentials in this boxing guard are quite undeveloped in Muay Thai, because at closer range a host of latches and strikes contained in it become suddenly available (against the rules of boxing).

You can see the Armadillo Guard here, in Kaensak's example:

I don't know if Sylvie will follow me on this, though she does like the guard just for what it is, a max protect flash position. But...for me it is the introduction of pure enjoyment, just spinning my mind through new angles that are not often common in Muay Thai (and some that are). It makes me really happy to play with this on the bag, and maybe it will become something one day. In research I have found some of the positions to be similar to Muay Chaiya defenses, but just a little bit.

What is interesting is that the play gives me respite for the ways my body feels weak or un-controllable as yet. My mind can play along a line of possibilities that really haven't been explored much before, in parallel to my earnest efforts to just get the basics in my body at the same time.

And Pi Nu has been incredible.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Kevin, I replied briefly on facebook but really felt like I needed to say more, because I think I can relate in a way that many of the younger folks maybe cannot. I think I can understand how hard this is, not just physically but maybe emotionally as well.

I started training when I was 45 and dropped around 35 pounds over the years, and have even fought a bit. Sylvie has provided me a lot of inspiration to try to do this because it seemed doable to me (and frankly not doable in the opinion of many others in my life), her Everest-quest for 200 was crazy 100 fights ago and now its within reach. I am fighting at 50, which is great. But the flip side of drawing that kind of inspiration is that its an impossible standard to live up to, my handful of fights at a relatively low level are slightly embarrassing to even mention in something she might read. Even in comparison to my youthful buddies, my "fight career" seems somewhat quixotic, so my mental game is about my mental game, about my Muay. Staying focused is my goal, no matter how tempting it is to dwell on the desire to be younger or to have started earlier or on some other externality. And I think a lot about something Pema Chodron wrote:

“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”

I take this to mean, be real with myself but don't be cruel with myself. Hang tough, work hard. There is only your road ahead. This old guy is cheering for you. 

  • Like 6
Link to comment
Share on other sites

9/2

Today in pad work I figured out a little trick after getting the pads smashed down onto my cross, sometimes twisting my wrist a little. I know pad holders do this just to counteract the force, and build strength, especially with big guys...and I'm a big guy...but I gotta keep my wrists going. So I just started targeting the top part of the pad, where the logo happened to be. End of pad smash, and it gave me a nice refined target to sharpen my eyes. For me, what I'm really trying to do, as my body fails me in so many ways, it's about trying to control my space, my environment. Checking the smash down was just part of that.  Mostly it is pace. Pi Nu is incredible at just drawing you into a cardio world where you cannot recover, or breathe. I've watched him do it to Sylvie so many times, and she is a cardio monster. I do know this is good for me, health wise, but I want to from the beginning be measuredly focused on controlling small elements. This is fighting. Taking control of all the small things. So I do not jump for bait when strikes are called for, I take the extra beat to be more on balanced.

But I'm in love with the ways Pi Nu is pairing strikes, how he is already teaching me the flow between natural knees and elbows, on the same side. And I'm loving the cross grab on those knees, so the elbows just right out of a very protected position, the subtle way that you can either claw down or push, as you knee, and how that becomes an elbow. Just love.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

9/29

Me-and-Sylvie-1-month-in-e1506669024657.

above, me down to 269 lbs, with my sweet

Okay, I'm resolved to not turn this into a weight loss journal, though of course it can risk becoming that. This part of my writing is really about my love of Muay Thai and that I finally have a portal to it, even though I've lived in Thailand for 5 years and have always been close to it. This month, my first, was pretty difficult. Not in terms of work, but non-work. I was coasting along really nicely in the first week. There was a real sense of groove where Pi Nu was pushing me, but not just physically. He was beginning to shape my rather crude and off-balance Muay Thai. The way he works in rounds is that he just keep drawing you out, like putting threads. A knee naturally in followed by a same side elbow, a teep follows a jab. He works his rounds pulling you through natural Muay Thai strike pathways, but also trying to drain you. If you start jumping to his next called strike you'll find yourself in Cardio Hell. I noticed this a long time ago, watching Sylvie on pads. So for me that week was just feeling those progressions, like trying to hum a tune that someone else is humming, but also staying on the right side of cardio, making sure I had my balance before striking, making sure I wasn't busting myself too far from center. Yeah, it would be great if I was an animal right off, but I was nearly 280 and not used to movement. Plus, I feel like part of being a fighter is finding your tempo sweet spot, imposing your rhythm a little. If you just chase your padholder you are mirroring. I'm not sure that is a great habit to build. So, that week was awesome. Burning my lungs a little, finding/feeling Muay Thai (I was loving the cross arm neck grab on knees, and the feel of how that connects to elbows). It was good. Then we had to go. One of the difficulties of this mission is that Sylvie and I hit the road for at least one week out of the month. This time it was 4 fights in 2 weeks, so there was a real sense of disruption. Honestly, one of my difficulties is that I'm kind of OCD about regularity. If I'm set to do something everyday, over and over at the same time I have relentless energy and commitment. A juggled schedule fucks me. I'm going to have to figure out how to work this out at a personal level (no suggestions necessary). My joy is working with Pi Nu. It makes me go.

So, there was a lot of disruption this month, and I really didn't get right back on the horse until today. We have maybe 6 more days of uninterrupted Muay Thai before Sylvie's next fight so I'm set for more digging in. I'll make this work, it's just a matter of focus, preparation and planning. The good news is that this month I did lose at least 4 kilos to find myself below 270! (122 kg, 269 lbs). Hey, that's pretty awesome. A big part of this was not only the first big week of training, it was also that Sylvie and I both took a big turn in our diets. No processed carbs, no big GI Index carbs. We noticed that carbs of all sorts were putting Sylvie in a bad frame of mind, and it made perfect sense that I should follow along with this as I'm probably per-diabetic. Yeah, it was hard to reformulate our menus, and sometimes it feels like there is nothing I want to eat, but it certainly has helped with the weight loss. Now if I can just buckle down and put my Muay Thai right along side my diet change, we'll be getting there.

As for my Muay Thai I need to get into bag work way more. I'm lacking focus (and joy) there. I gave up playing with the Amardillo Guard, which I'm still theoretically way excited about - I believe there is a whole Muay Thai fighting system buried in that guard, something no one has thought to work out because it's a boxing guard. But I also have to work on my lead leg teep which is horrendous and comical at the same time. Geez. That teep says a lot of where I'm at physically. I should make it a mission to take that teep as a symbol of my possible transformation toward the love of Muay Thai that I have. Maybe in a year I'll be writing about how incredibly my lead leg teep is. I like that idea.

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Love reading about your journey, Kevin. You really capture that "everything is amazing but SO hard" feeling you get when you start muay thai, learn something new or when you work with a new padholder who challenges you.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

  • Most Recent Topics

  • Latest Comments

    • As Thailand's Muay Thai more and more turns its face toward the World and the West increasingly those coming to Thailand to seek out, experience, train in, fight in, even commit to and honor authentic Muay Thai will have a hard time finding it. In this brief article I want to point out the two biggest areas of difficulty. Keep in mind, I'm writing this from the perspective of having witnessed my wife who has fought more times in Thailand than any non-Thai in history, coming up on 300 times, as a fighter who has steered as clear as possible from aspects of the sport which are arranged or made for you, and become perhaps the foremost documentarian of the sport and art. Everything I describe is from often repeated things we've encountered, found ourselves in, worked through, and what we've learned from the experiences of others. Importantly, pretty much everyone who has been in the country a long time has their own experience and understanding of authenticity, and this is just ours. Thai culture, and Muay Thai culture is also a very complex and woven thing, it is not homogeneous or made in one way, so these are benchmark ideas and there are many exceptions. Authenticity, that which is not made for us.   1. Increasingly Thailand's Muay Thai is made FOR you One of the first challenges is honestly that of recognition. Because Thailand is so culturally different, and Thailand gym training not that of than Western and international gyms, whatever you are experiencing is going to feel authentic. Its authenticity will come through in everything that is different. It must be authentic because I'm not used to this. And because we can only judge from our own experiences, and from what we see and read, this is difficult to overcome. After 3 months in the country you are going to feel like you have really penetrated to the heart of something really new. After a year, you really will feel like you know what's going on, and if you have gravitated toward "authenticity" you'll probably feel like you are in a pretty "real" place. My caution is: Nope. You probably don't realize how much of Muay Thai has been turned toward YOU. And if it wasn't turned towards you, you wouldn't be participating in it. This is going to sound harsh, but pretty much ALL Western/International Muay Thai experiences are something like an elephant ride. The elephant (Muay Thai) is very real, and there is great privilege and beauty in being on an elephant. You're touching a living, breathing, REAL elephant...but you are on an elephant ride, made FOR you. Now, there are all sorts of elephant rides. There is the one where they walk in a circle and you get off, and another where you bathe and then bareback like a "real mahout" would, and then maybe all the way up to 10 day safaris, trekking on elephant back (is there such a thing?). But it's still an elephant ride. You get in the ring, its real...even if its arranged for you, its intense and real. You hit the bag, you burn the kilometers in road work, its real. This isn't to say anything is inauthentic. All of Muay Thai in Thailand will change you. This is about reaching, as passionate people will, those aspects of the sport and art that are unique to Thailand itself, that may fall from view as Thailand turns its face toward you. The Rules, For You How do I mean this? The rules of the sport have been changed so that you (in a less skilled way) will win fights, or perform well in fights you might not otherwise in the traditional Thai version of the sport (there is a full spectrum of this, stretching from RWS entertainment Muay Thai to ONE smash and clash). This is a fairly recent transformation, covering perhaps the last 10 years. The sport itself has been altered for you...and, as it has been altered for you, this also has washed back onto trad Bangkok stadium Muay Thai, which has absorbed many of the entertainment qualities which are pervading social media and gambling sites. In some sense the "authentic" traditional Muay Thai of Thailand doesn't really exist in promotional fight form anywhere in the halo that tourist and adventure tourist has reached. It's just a question of degree. The issues and influences behind this in trad stadium Muay Thai are more complex than this, but it too has turned its face towards "the foreigner". Some of this is just what people like to call "progress" or "the force of the market place" or others might call the "deskilling of Capitalism", but just know that in the fights themselves, they are by degrees turned towards YOU. It really might only be in the festival fight circuits of the provinces where you will still will find the culture and aesthetics of the sport and art FOR Thais. To be sure in festival fights there can be matchups that favor a larger foreign student of a local gym, which has relationship ties with the local promoter, especially if there is no sidebet. But the EVENT isn't for you, designed around you, catering to you or people like you. You're the oddity, and the rulesets and aesthetics have been less altered if at all. The Training, For You On a deeper level, the training in gyms is also made FOR you. The traditional pedagogy of Muay Thai, the manner in which it was developed through youthful circuit sidebet fighting, the kaimuay culture of non-correction and group dynamic sharing of a grown aesthetic, has been seriously eroded, supplemented and sometimes just outright replaced. You are (likely) not learning in the manner of the Thais that produced such acute excellence so many decades ago. Yes, there will be obvious things like farang krus and padmen in some gyms (many of them quite devoted to Muay Thai, but not produced by the subculture), something that is increasing in the sport, but, subtly, even if your padman is Thai, he may not even be an experienced ex-fighter, as mid-so Thais are holding pads now in the growing commercialization. Muay Thai is experiencing a gentrification and an internationalization at the gym level. Beyond padmen, the very manner of instruction and fighter development will have been changed in some sense for you. For one, increasingly you'll notice "combo" training, memorized strike patterns, which is both a deskilling of the sport (making it easier to teach, replicate and export), but also is training that is geared towards the new Entertainment trade-in-the-pocket patterns and aesthetics, made for tourists and online fandom. The change in the rules of the sport over the last 7 years or so, also is reflected in a change in how the sport is actually taught...even in spaces that feel VERY Thai. The sport is bending to the "combo" because it is signature to Western and international fighting aesthetics, and it can be taught by less skilled/experienced coaches. Fighters did not train like that, nor did they fight like that. As the sport has become deskilled the combo has taken an increasingly important role. Added to this, gyms have had to accommodate the expectations of Westerners and other non-Thais, as the weakening of the sport economically has turned almost every gym in the tourism halo towards at least a hybrid relationship to tourism...it needs to give the Westerner something they recognize and expect...and, because tourists and adventure tourist come with all sorts of investments and motivations, on different timescales, a lower common denominator works itself into the equation. Group "classes", organized drilling of groups, increased conceptualization and rationalization of techniques involving verbal correction and demonstration, even foreign coaching, these are FOR YOU changes in the sport. Sometimes these trends and aspects will only be subtly present, sometimes they will characterize the entire process. This is an elephant ride. And often it is difficult to distinguish where the elephant ends and the ride begins. Even "Fighter Training" Isn't The Process Along these lines of hunting the "authentic" training in gyms you'll run into this difficulty. You may be in a gym full of Thai fighters, even very active Thai fighters. There aren't many combos being held for. No real "group classes". A lot of Thai culture is going on, or seems to be. You are doing the work of fighters, real fighters, right there next to you. It's by Thais its for Thais and its pretty authentic...but for these things. For one, this gym if it's not a kaimuay in the more grassroots sense, all these fighters were made somewhere else. They were bought and brought into the gym, to be part of a stable. So what you likely are seeing, and doing, isn't actually how they became what they are. They are in the polishing, or add-a-level stage. The heartbeat of what made them is elsewhere. Even if you are a developed, accomplished fighter, and you too are in the "polishing" stage, you don't have what they have, which is a very different history of training, fighting and development. They are made of a different material, so to speak, and in truth that "material" is the actual "stuff" that everyone comes to Thailand looking for, that is where the "authenticity" is in their movements, vision, rhythms, stylistics. You can do all the padwork, all the clinch rounds, all the runs, all the bagwork, all the sparring, and you'll get better, in fact a LOT better...but, you'll be missing that "authentic" piece, the thing they got before they came to this gym. To add to this, if you did seek out the kaimuay that grows fighters in the principles of the sport, and their fighting circuits, these are not economically robust spaces, they are no longer teeming with fighters, and they're not focused on the tourist. They are part of a fragmenting economy of largely provincial fighting, and in which is difficult to find one's place, especially as an adult, as they are made for youth. The best you might find are hybrid spaces, kaimuay on the low ebb, which also are run by a great kru, making room for non-Thais, but even these spaces are a kind of bricolage of culture, knowledge and practice. There is no pristine location for the "authentic". "Treated Like a Thai" A layer even further down in terms of authenticity, it's not uncommon to feel that if you've stayed a lot, trained a lot, fought a lot, that you are being (more or less) "treated like a Thai". This is a big desire in the reach for "authenticity", and that experience of being "treated like a Thai" is therefore quite meaningful. But you aren't. You are still likely on an elephant ride, in a certain regard. And that's become Thailand's traditional Muay Thai is culturally founded on intense social power disparity. It is strongly hierarchized, and hierarchies vie against other hierarchies constantly in a political struggle that the Westerner, even the Thai-speaking Westerner, largely cannot see...and if they see them, they cannot care about them in the same way a Thai does and would. This is a continuous struggle for social "position" in which the Thai fighter has almost always has almost zero power. They are bound not only by contract obligation (contract), but more significantly by strong mores of social debt and shame, and the networks of hierarchy which make up gyms, community and promotion. They are in a web with constant top-down and lateral pressures, with very limited choice, you are not. You do NOT want to be treated "just like a Thai"...and honestly, you probably can't be, even if you want to be brought into the same workouts or expectations of a fighter. The reason this is important is the almost all of the motivations you have as a fighter, to become better, to win, to be acknowledged are very, very VERY different than the Thai fighter kicking the bag right next to you...and their motivations are actually the "authentic" part of Thailand's Muay Thai. Stadium Muay Thai is not the free agent professionalism that non-Thais aspire to. It is intense social stigma straining under a culture of obligation. You can do all the work, mirror it beat for beat, but you are not in the affective position of Thai fighters, and so in some sense cannot fight like them, for their alliances and values, the things which bring the strikes out, are largely invisible to the Westerner. All these things: that they've changed the rules so Westerners can win or perform well, and will enjoy watching, that they've changed the way Muay Thai is trained, that you aren't likely exposed to the actual processes that made stadium fighters who they are today, and even that you cannot experience the disempowerment, position and dignity of Thai fighters themselves, all cut off aspects of "authenticity", much sought by those that travel in earnest. This is leaving behind all those more common internet concerns like fake fights, dives, bad match making. It's in the actual fabric of the sport itself, as Westerners reach for it, and as it has turned its face toward the Westerner, making itself for the Westerner...and others. 2. The Fighters Aren't the Same The second difficulty in reaching for "authenticity" is that even if you get through all those layers. If you shun the rehearsed combo, you identify living threads of kaimuay culture and its values and ways of life as much as possible, if you fight five round trad Muay Thai fights, don't take weight advantages when you can, if you emotionally connect with the low social position of the Thai fighter, all the things, and then make it to the ring where "authentic" Muay Thai is "happening"...it's not even happening there. I mean this in this sense. Aside from the erosion and deskilling of the sport due to new promotional motivations, tourism and market pressures, Muay Thai itself has been eroding on its own within the country. The rising economic standard out of the classes of people who traditionally fought it have changed many of the motivations and commitments of the fighters themselves, and the talent pool of fighters has dramatically decreased. I'm going to throw a wild number out, but I'm just guessing in an educated way...maybe the talent pool is 10x smaller. Leaving aside that combos and entertainment aesthetics are now working their way into more or less "Thai" gym spaces, the fighters themselves just are not that good, not as developed, complex or accomplished by the time they are in Bangkok rings. Big name gyms grab up local kaimuay talent earlier and earlier (green fruit off the tree before ripe), the developmental fighter classes (informal groups within gyms) that grow the skills are seriously on the decline. A kaimuay may have had 20 fighting boys, now may have 3? Traditionally there was a stirring of the pot that was cooking a very deep stew of skills, more and more its a process just a few ingredients heated over a short time. This is to say, even if you can get all the way to the "authentic" rings, the quality and sophistication of the Muay Thai you will be facing will lack something that "authentic" dimension that characterized the freedom and expressiveness of skill of past generations. You may in fact fight a Thai who will fight quite like a farang (as far as it goes). They may end combos with a body shot, or throw endless elbows, be unable to defend well in retreat, have a muay of one or two weapons, or be limited and simplistic in the clinch. Not only is the skillset diminished, but in new generation fighters the rhythms and shapes of fighting that are "authentic" may not be there in full force. In some ways the Westerner may encounter a dim mirror of themselves. I'm writing this because this quest for authenticity is seriously meaningful. It's meaningful to us, those of the West who love Thailand's Muay Thai, and it's also meaningful to Thais as well, who have great esteem for its legacy. The only way to significantly engage in the question of authenticity is to acknowledge that it is already substantively hybridized. You and everyone else may be on elephant rides. It's only by identifying the aspects of Muay Thai that are not made for the tourist and adventure tourist, the threads of culture and practice that developed without your presence, or others like you, and nurturing with respect those aspects, that will the authentic journey begin. You may be in a very commercial gym, full of combos and group classes, but your padman probably grew up in kaimuay culture. It's in him. It's what made him. Find ways to connect to that. There are also at times "Thai gyms" (mini-kaimuay) inside commercial gyms, which operates under a different code than the gym for customers. You may be in an Entertainment fight promotion, fight in the traditional style, try to win in the traditional style, even if the ruleset doesn't favor it. Push back against what has been made for you. Learn and identity the lineages of cultural practice that have defined Muay Thai, and connect to those purposely. In a sense, if we all realize we are on elephant rides, at a certain point you have have to love and care for the elephant itself, which is the beautiful, mysterious, almost-like-us, powerful, magical creature. This is the art of Muay Thai. And even if you aren't on the best ride, you are on a mother-effin elephant. Find the culture of the elephant. Find the elephant's history among the people. Find what the elephant needs. Find what is natural to the elephant. Protect and honor the elephant. we wrote a manifest of our values here    
    • As Capitalism deskills and enshittifies (this is pretty clear now), how come people don't realize that this is happening in Muay Thai? It is not "progress". It is the grinding down of skills and our capacity to perceive.
    • Watched this fight the other day, and as much as Wangchannoi is known as a hard-hitting Muay Maat, his hidden art is really the art of spoilage. Watch him spoil one of the great clinch attacks of the Golden Age. Among the many things that he is doing is that his punching and pinning Langsuan's collarbone on his right hand side grab (unusual for an orthodox fighter).
  • The Latest From Open Topics Forum

    • 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.
    • Yeah, this is certainly possible. Thanks! I just like the idea of a training camp pre-fight because of focus and getting more "locked in".. Do you know of any high level gyms in europe you would recommend? 
    • 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.
    • Hi, i have a general question concerning Muay-Thai training camps, are there any serious ones in Europe at all? I know there are some for kickboxing in the Netherlands, but that's not interesting to me or what i aim for. I have found some regarding Muay-Thai in google searches, but what iv'e found seem to be only "retreats" with Muay-Thai on a level compareable to fitness-boxing, yoga or mindfullness.. So what i look for, but can't seem to find anywhere, are camps similar to those in Thailand. Grueling, high-intensity workouts with trainers who have actually fought and don't just do this as a hobby/fitness regime. A place where you can actually grow, improve technique and build strength and gas-tank with high intensity, not a vacation... No hate whatsoever to those who do fitness-boxing and attend retreats like these, i just find it VERY ODD that there ain't any training camps like those in Thailand out there, or perhaps i haven't looked good enough?..  Appericiate all responses, thank you! 
    • In my experience, 1 pair of gloves is fine (14oz in my case, so I can spar safely), just air them out between training (bag gloves definitely not necessary). Shinguards are a good idea, though gyms will always have them and lend them out- just more hygienic to have your own.  2 pairs of wraps, 2 shorts (I like the lightweight Raja ones for the heat), 1 pair of good road running trainers. Good gumshield and groin-protector, naturally. Every time I finish training, I bring everything into the shower (not gloves or shinnies, obviously) with me to clean off the (bucketsfull in my case) of sweat, but things dry off quickly here outside of the monsoon season.  One thing I have found I like is smallish, cotton briefs for training (less cloth, therefore sweaty wetness than boxers, etc.- bring underwear from home- decent, cotton stuff is strangely expensive here). Don't weigh yourself down too much. You might want to buy shorts or vests from the gym(s) as (useful) souvenirs. I recommend Action Zone and Keelapan, next door, in Bangkok (good selection and prices):  https://www.google.com/maps/place/Action+Zone/@13.7474264,100.5206774,17z/data=!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x30e29931ee397e41:0x4c8f06926c37408b!2sAction+Zone!8m2!3d13.7474212!4d100.5232523!16s%2Fg%2F1hm3_f5d2!3m5!1s0x30e29931ee397e41:0x4c8f06926c37408b!8m2!3d13.7474212!4d100.5232523!16s%2Fg%2F1hm3_f5d2?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTAyOS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
  • Forum Statistics

    • Total Topics
      1.4k
    • Total Posts
      11.4k
×
×
  • Create New...