The dark horse candidate for GOAT, Chamuakpet could fight at all distances even though he was a member of the Three Kings of Muay Khao, along with teammates Dieselinoi and Panomtuanlek.
Its amazing that you can play next to Stewart and not feed off his motor, but Duren just has his own, slow idle, and motors don't really change. It doesn't mean that he can't be a very good, even dominant-at-times player. It's just that his clock doesn't click that clickety-clack way, he's not a grinder, not really an intimidator, not a scrapper. He's kind of a very physically strong Cadillac player, who is highlight explosive in moments, which makes what to pay him a difficult question. In the right roster he could be beastly...but what team has the luxury of building a roster around a player like Duren?
Not to overreact, I'm sure he's going to have some strong games in this series and even more so once they get past the Orlando trees and beef. He's best when he has physical advantages on the inside and teams aren't packing the paint. But...that motor just isn't going to be there. If Stewart's heart was inside Duren's body he'd be a Top 10 player in the game probably. As it is, they kind of instead just compliment each other.
updating a graphic I put together a few years ago, adding in Boonlai, some boxing data (not exact or complete) and a rough estimate of Thailand's Golden Age (here from 1982-1996) which could be stretched a touch one way or the other. I actually really love this data because even though we've studied the Golden Age greats its really hard to picture their careers in relationship to each other. Some fought with great longevity like Chamuakpet, Thongchai, Saenchai, Apidej, some had shorter bursts of greatness like Boonlai, Cherry or Yodkhunpon (all this data drawn from wikipedia, which has incomplete records). Also the boxing interruptions or moves are interesting to mix in.
In any case, just another way to look at the careers of these wonderful fighters.
I'm reading William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley, which is really very good (reading it mostly because I was so dissatisfied by Del Toro's version, at least the 2nd half, really having loved the Goulding 1947 film).
I'm curious what classic film lovers have gained from also reading the fiction they are influenced by. Is there something thematically different from Noir fiction of the day and their films for you? Does the fiction fill out or intensify the film versions?
Any thoughts on your experiences I'd love to hear.
Here is the playlist of Muay Thai fighters Boxing. One of the least appreciated aspects of Thailand's Muay Thai history is just how good Thai Muay Thai fighters have been dramatically outside their ruleset when moving to Western Boxing, in many instances moving to World Champion level quite quickly. Siamfightmag has this wonderful 2016 article detailing Thai Muay Thai champions who were also Western Boxing World Champions. The playlist is still in a draft stage so if anyone wants to help collaborate in adding videos contact me in DM, it would be great to make the playlist more comprehensive. There are probably many more amateur boxing bouts available as well.
One of the beautiful things about all this is that Thailand's Muay Thai has been in dialogue with Western Boxing for over 100 years. Here is an early 1936 crossover bout between the two best Muay Thai fighters in Thailand who were also top SEA circuit boxers. First British Boxing (post WW1) and then American Boxing (post WW2) became big influences, permeating military and police training, and with that a great deal of the Bangkok gyms of Muay Thai fighters. Quit apart from the internet "wisdom" that Thais don't know boxing, no combat sport has produced more high level boxers than Muay Thai. There historically there has been a natural dovetail relationship between the two sports/disciplines because of this 100 year shared dialogue. The playlist brings some of this into evidence.
To be sure a legendary and extremely influential filmmaker, with endless wonderful films to his credit, but there is something in Taxi Driver (and in Mean Streets before it, but maybe culminative in Taxi Driver, which goes over the edge in the excellent Raging Bull) that he never had again. The camera movements are so varied and beautiful, so expressive, but without breaking the naturalism, the documentary feel that we are really looking into not only the reality of what "is", but also of a character (and other characters as well), that is almost acme of what cinema is capable of. To be both artifice, but also really, really REAL. After Taxi Driver all the camera moves are there, in fact are more expertly accomplished in a directorial "vision" that is becoming even more robust, but they at least for me feel like "vision". They call attention to themselves (even if beautiful), they don't disappear. A lot of this post-Taxi-Driver development is just Scorsese's love and extreme knowledge of cinema history which comes through with increased dexterity and power, as he gains more control over his craft, but this reality edge, this sense of looking through the cinematic keyhole at "what really is" somehow is lost. We enter more "story time" after Taxi Driver. This is not even taking up the power of the characters, and the psychological insight and expression of very subtle, shifting and complex state of mind in Bickle (which was incredibly prescient of these same masculinity issues today, he gets bonus points there), and how much he was able to draw out of Schrader's amazing script in performances and camera. Just at the level of camera and story presentation alone, it feels like he never got there again. Even if I have loved many of his movies since.
How do you guys feel?
The most prolific female pro fighter on record gives her perspective on the perceived violence of traditional Muay Thai, from her numerous experiences in the ring and a Buddhist point of view. The link is time stamped to 7:47, the point where she focuses on the question. The larger context is her thoughts on vipassina meditation and the 3 day retreat she is going to, for the 4th time.
Spinoza, likely a philosopher who struggled with tuberculosis and succumbed to it eventually, also was the subject of Deleuze's DrE defense (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza) in 1968. What if 1968 was the initiation of the Philosophy of the tubercular, amid protests?
Once we realized this the film became not only so much more enjoyable - poking subtle fun at many of those who came to it hoping for a slick action/assassin film and were disappointed - it became hilarious. Fassbinder's character is constantly, arrogantly wrong and Internet meme trite in his self-talk. In the first few viewings though - its so good I've watched it many times - t I just thought it was just satirizing Melville's Le Samouraï (1967) but last night I watched The American (2010) and saw so many other touch points like the "in a great shape for a man his age" self-workout scenes (though there is certainly a nod to Brad Pitt's shirt-off moment from Fight Club too), the tourism travelog feels, and the ways The American was probably reflecting the precision-aura of Le Samouraï too. To further flesh it out the humor, as I've commented elsewhere a few months ago:
When he says that he has to wait until his heartrate beats per minute to get down to 60 (? I forget the number), but then he fires the rifle at something like 68 and misses. Listening to the Smiths Meat is Murder while attempting to assassinate someone. The way he acts like an expert on everything, just like internet commenters (but totally guessing the dog's weight and dose wrong). The rich guy taking a limo to the gym, which is a 5 minute walk away (shown by the phone). The abandoned (Unicorn Finance) WeWork office. The killer eating "keto" (just eating the burger patty from fastfood, if I recall)...The killer is a successful gig-economy worker who lives the fantasy beach house dream. But he's totally lame. Does his yoga, measures his beats-per-minute on his watch, quotes his adages, eats his keto, guesses wrong at everything. He's a very, very subtle (not over the top) Inspector Clouseau. He's a bourgeois killer, like if that ultra, ultra flexible guy in your yoga class was also an international assassin.
In any case, the satire key really unlocks this film, a correction perhaps of how many who loved Fight Club but did not realize that it was satire about Toxic Masculinity, the very thing they loved it for. And watching George Clooney's The American made it even better. It actually is posing through satire a strong critique of the hyper-Capitalism consumer "subject", opening up the notion that we are all self-satisfied, non-reflective "killers" in our lifestyle.
A recommendation: if you enjoyed The Killer and haven't seen The American, do (its a pretty good slow burn, beautiful film in its own right).
Something worth thinking about, even as a big D&G fan for decades. He's stated his case many times in subtle critique of Anti-Oedipus and the philosophy of constant productive desire that followed, and in the text above he is subtle attributing a "prefiguring cartography" to AO. But I feel he has a powerful observation of some of the unintended consequences of "anti-" Oedipus, the various ways in which it has (or neoliberal, financialized Capitalism, algorithm capture...has) lead us to precarity, possibly severing the meaning of words from affective bodies in shared physical space, as our incubation increasingly comes from screens. The above from his Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression (2024). One of the things that Berardi emphasizes in his many texts addressing D&G and applying their work to today is that the liberation sought in the 1970s-80s may not have anticipated just how much the lines of flight would be captured by financialized, tech Capitalism, cutting us off from each other even as it all "connected us" (now even further complicated by AI human language and persona simulation). He sees this has a crisis that has produced not so much the schizoid, but the Depressed (oscillating between over-stimmed "panic", and the withdrawal from desire itself in depression). How do we meaningfully "connect" when every connection is screen-and-algo mediated? How do we inform when knowledge itself and social discourse itself is shot through with AI simulation and (bias) summation?