u/kevin_v

You can read a full article on it here, but involves training with the legendary coach of Boxing Chatchai Sasakul in Bangkok and then driving over to the Muay Bouk kru Takrowlek who is not far. One hour with each, once a week. The article and film study explores how these styles have different internal dynamics, and the training puts them both together so that they inform each other, sometimes in unexpected ways. Takrowlek's Muay Bouk style is very hands heavy, forward and even Boxing influenced, but it differs from Chatchai's Western Boxing more rotational, twisting weight transfer style. There are many styles of both Boxing and Muay Thai in Thailand. This is putting two of them together.

I let time pass after its release and actually forgot it was even made, even though I had been looking forward to it. A recent interview of her called it back to mind. I thought it was going to be a small, almost quaint, artistic film that had a personal aura about it. I was not prepared for the power of the emotion, the towering presence of a depressed, removed, pencil-cracking, angry main character (performance), and especially not ready for how absolutely inspired it was in terms of filmmaking itself. A Proustian, Sound-and-the-Fury, intensive exploration of memory and trauma. Usually I resist all sorts of flashback motifs and editing techniques, but this film completely invaded me with both emotion (as if it were my own memories) and sensation. Again and again I pulled into the familiar of what I have sensed in life, in the privacy of my own being. And the treatment of abuse and its after image...it dove so deep down into it. The closest thing I could think of was Aftersun (2022) which approached suicide and depression from an oblique angle of childhood and sensation. This began in that realm, but sent me so far into the maze of what makes a person, I was pretty taken aback that Kristen Stewart could make such a film. I think it must be watched on a big screen in a dark room, right up against all that sensation and affect. You have to be swallowed by it to really get what it is doing. You have to be drowning in it, jolted by the cuts, just as she was. Felt a little bit like getting into a theatrical car accident, in how it reverberates in me far beneath the cerebral, and even emotional layers. Very impressed upon.

Fights 288, 289, 290 and 291. She's on a 10 fight win streak, these are the last four. Fights 290 and 291 vs opponents up multiple weight classes. For those that don't know her she's a very prolific Muay Khao fighter who despite her very small (100 lb) size uses clinch and knee fighting to beat bigger opponents in the old school style. She publishes full commentary versions of her fights, these clips taken from those. Complete Fight Record here. Playlist of all her fights here. We love documenting & sharing the art of the Muay Khao fighting style (the legacy of legends Dieselnoi, Panomuanlek, Langsuan, Chamuekpet, Samson, and so many more) a disappearing subart in the trad form of Muay Thai as clinch breaks come faster, rulesets & scoring down-regulates it, and the art is less frequently traditionally trained.

We've been part of the Thailand Muay Thai process now for over 13 years. We've stayed away from big gyms that can shape experiences and most big foreigner-focused promotions which comprise much of the commercial, outward-facing aspect of the sport, and then also spent a great deal of time researching and documenting the traditional history of Thailand's Muay Thai, its fighting and training styles, especially as it peaked in the Golden Age, interviewing legends and training with a great number of them. Since COVID Thailand's Muay Thai has undergone even more accelerated revisions as it leans into Soft Power, and as more of the sport is turned to the Westerner there is a small but growing desire to engage as much as possible with what is imagined as "authentic" Thailand Muay Thai - older school training methods, fight match ups, and even culturally meaningful ways of engagement. These are just my thoughts on this, as a lot of Sylvie's followers have this desire when they come to Thailand, we run into them online and in person. Also, everyone who comes to the country longer term has their own experiences, their own perspective, from the keyhole of their experience, so they can view things differently too. This is just ours grounded in more than a decade and hundreds of fights...and some reflection about it.

And as someone who is captured by everything that Thailand's Muay Thai brings that is different than what we know, what we grew up with, its important to track how it is changing, and the things that are possibly being lost, as it willingly tries to embrace the world more. Not all of the change is bad, Muay Thai is a very resilient art and sport and things move in cycles, hey even clinch in fighting is starting to bend back. These are just things to have an eye for as you travel 1,000s of miles to experience and partake in something that you otherwise never could.

Also, one thing that is wonderful about Thailand's Muay Thai, and one reasons you DO want to travel across the world for it, is that it has tremendous variety still. All kinds of gyms, all kinds of training and fighting experiences. It's just harder in some ways to maybe find what you hope for without insight. It's often a kind of hybrid fight culture space now, or at least increasingly so.

The goal is the Championship. Nothing less, because there are far fewer windows to a ring than you think there are. Injuries, chemistry, dynasties, they can all shut your window. If you have a chance, its your chance. So this going 7 vs the Cavs is the ONLY way Detroit beats the Spurs or the Thunder who just are "better" teams. In fact, going 7 vs the Knicks is probably required as well. They have to come into the finals transformed by their journey. The team has to dig deep down and find something that is the kind of thing that people talk about 20 years later...otherwise, it will be just a "playoff run" and musing about mid-level roster changes.

>Jalen Duren regular-season PPG: 19.5

>Jalen Duren playoff PPG: 10.1

>9.4 PPG falloff

>The only All-Star in NBA history to have a larger falloff (min 10 GP) is Wilt Chamberlain in 1962, who went from 50.4 PPG to 35.0 in the playoffs. Wilt was 2nd in playoff scoring that year. Duren is 79th this season.

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She made a pieced-together monster. One of the notable things about Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! (2026) is how much Deleuze (& Guattari) related concepts seem to populate its script, along with the ways in which the film itself in structure skates between genre cliches and a creative chaos which at least serve some of the same aims as his counter-narrative theories on Cinema, and evoke a sense of the virtual. I made this cut up of the film which places many of these parts in relation to each other, if only to spur on deeper thinking about just how much Gyllenhaal may be actively following Deleuze in the making of this film (a film that seems to not always have been favorably received, variously called a "mess" by some). 

Aside from the vital and heavy reference to black holes, there is first and foremost the films repeated refrain of "I would prefer not to", a Bartleby phrase that Deleuze wrote extensively on in the essay Bartley; or, The Formula (linked) in which he positioned it almost as a radically libertive viral piece of language that upon repeating unhinged all order. An ultimate use of language in revolt. There are other treatments of this phrase by philosophers, and of course Melville himself may be the main invocation, but...at the very least it also directs our attention to Deleuze and his essay.

Secondly, and no less suggestive, is the centrality of the black hole concept in the film. Frankenstein the monster is twice described a "black hole" and Dr. Cornelia Euphronious is an author of books featuring black hole terminology. Deleuze & Guattari's concept of black holes as chaos energies from which one cannot escape fit quite well in the film, suggesting even that some of the role Frankenstein "Frank" plays is an embodiment of chaos/deterritorialization with which Ida/Penny/The Bride! has entered into a relationship with, a relationship which ultimately frees her. A relationship which requires the "just the right" distance or obliqueness towards. Along with this general, philosophical sense, the black hole also seems to be taken in a more scientific analogy, that from which "nothing escapes", with something of an event horizon. When Dr. Euphronious is measuring the "radiation" off of Frank's newly dead body, this does seem in keeping with Hawking radiation, the proof that information can indeed escape a black hole, that a black hole does not swallow all that pass the event horizon. When we encounter. Mary Shelly in the beginning, dead, she indeed seems caught within the event horizon, from which nothing can get out...death being signature of the linearity of abstract "iron" time that Deleuze theorized robustly against. Cracks (see D&G on D.H. Lawrence) appear, which allow her to "slip in", composing a schizophrenia (a two-mindedness).

I read this film as a film about recovery from trauma, radical events that zero one out as if like a death, and how the transcendence of death in the film - Mary escaping her black hole, Frank born of dead parts, Ida brought back from death - in how they break with linear, determined time, of which death composes a finality, work exactly from Deleuze's own radical liberative sense of Aion Time, against Chronos Time. The way in which the film pulls from cinema cliches, both the rebellious Ida and Frank the monster too, bouncing between past manifestations (and actual films/videos/books as traces), is deepened when we see them as exploring their vituality as beings. The final act of liberation, when Ida/Penny names herself The Bride! ("forever a bridesmaid, never a bride", "hear comes the bride!", etc), not with a common personal name, but really the name of a Avatar, throwing off the Name of the Father (the Patriarchal Symbolic Order), and suspending herself before the transition to "wife", announces to me just the kinds of positioning, or lines of flight, that Deleuze prescribes.

These are just clips cut up and some cursory thoughts in hope that others might seen the lines of convergence or flight, and have ideas on how the film is invoking or expressing Deleuze philosophy. I'm not quite sure about how much it is according itself to Deleuze's cinema theories on time. I believe it is, but in a unique way (not so much in a radical avant-garde, experimentalist way), presenting the virtual of female liberty more readably. I do find her treatment of black holes and the emission (of signs/information) actually illuminating to Deleuze and Guattari's own theorization of black holes, drawing out aspects they themselves did not, fleshing out the concept.

Below are some selection from texts to add to the thought process: 

"The problem is . . . one of knowing how the individual would be able to transcend his form and his syntactical link with a world, in order to attain to the universal communication of events, that is, to the affirmation of a disjunctive synthesis beyond logical contradictions, and even beyond alogical compatibilities. It would be necessary for the individual to grasp herself as an event; and that she grasp the event actualized within her as another individual grafted onto her. In this case, she would not understand, want, or represent this event without also understanding and wanting all other events as individuals, and without representing all other individuals as events. Each individual would be like a mirror for the condensation of singularities and each world a distance in the mirror. This is the ultimate sense of counter- actualization. (Logic of Sense, 178)

"And how could we not feel that our freedom and strength reside, not in the divine universality nor in the human personality, but in these singularities which are more us than we ourselves are, more divine than the gods, as they animate concretely poem and aphorism, permanent revolution and partial action? What is bureaucratic in these fantastic machines which are peoples and poems? It suffices that we dissipate ourselves a little, that we be able to be at the surface, that we stretch our skin like a drum, in order that the “great politics” begin. An empty square for neither man nor God; singularities which are neither general nor individual, neither personal nor universal. All of this is traversed by circulations, echoes, events which produce more sense, more freedom, and more strength than man has ever dreamed of, or God ever conceived. Today’s task is to make the empty square circulate and to make pre- individual and nonpersonal singularities speak—in short, to produce sense. (Logic of Sense, 72–73)

"The “different” or “extraordinary” individual, who experiences herself as multiple, who intensely becomes, is affirmed by Deleuze not in her actual or final state, but only in her movement, in the movement of “a life” that is impersonal, intransitive, and enigmatically present in constituted individuals. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze aligns his thought on this point to Kierkegaard, who said that, when looking for the man of faith, he studied “only the movements.” In this way, Deleuze’s affirmation of experimentation is never reducible to the successes or failures of a particular experiment, a single living being, but to virtual aspects incarnate in a life." - The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

"Frankenstein’s creature himself is an assemblage of many parts, and yet he is so much more than the sum of those parts—his meaning in the novel is defined through his interactions, experiences, and actions. The novel itself can be viewed in such a manner: utilizing assemblage theory (as well as intersectionality) can result in a feminist reading of Frankenstein that closely examines the relationships, situations, and systems that guide the novel. So is Mary Shelley’s novel feminist or not? It depends. The novel, written by a young woman at a time where women’s voices were generally silenced, is a radical and dangerous critique of what a patriarchal and misogynistic culture is capable of, but it also fails to be intersectional. A feminist and  assemblage criticism of Frankenstein acknowledges these disparities, but instead of labelling them, interrogates them in hopes of learning how the many “parts” of Frankenstein work together, exist in opposition to each other, and exist in relationship to each other andthe world outside the text." - A Feminist, Assemblage Theory Reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

All things have affects, just as in Panpsychism all things think. And if so, what would be the boundary line between Panaffectism and Panpsychism?

This seems somewhat in parallel to Spinoza's (much debated) Panpsychism/(possible Panaffectism).

a redditor lightly compared these two films by Polish directors and I was surprised by how much sense it makes to put them in relationship to each other. The more I thought about it Possession reads perhaps as an answer to Repulsion, not just as a film, but also philosophically, psychologically and spiritually. Repulsion is the murderous and paranoid retreat from oppressive urban male gaze/desire on a beautiful woman - one might say - a contraction into the solitary urban apartment, and Possession reads as the opposite, the murderous, psychotic expansion in the face of domestic banality and the pressures of urban, low middle class wife-motherhood, fleeing the apartment into an affair and then ecstatic self-creation (that to me reads as a female artistic response - notably Anna fashions her "escape" out of her own body, the demon-lover made from her miscarriage, something Polanski's trapped Carol cannot do). Both are horror films, both entail the oppressive pressures on a woman and the "break" from them. Zulawski has struck me as subtly in tension or even outright animosity with the artistically embraced fellow pole Polanski. Is his Possession, as a kind of sequel, an attempt to overcome Polanski's prodigy film Repulsion with his own French cinema beauty? At the very least the question does being out some possible, deeper philosophical themes of Possession, and what it means to break free, what lines of flight are possible.