Wow! Lady Stripes, her babyface fiancé, and the dashing, brooding monster heel really went for it at the local wrestling show this weekend. The babyface fiancé won his match with the heel clean and with a different ref (yawn) but later in the show the story took a shocking turn. I can’t clip a YouTube video to save my life, but skip ahead to 11:25 to watch things play out: The only problem is that…
Author: Professor Kayla Fabienne
If I were booking the local wrestling show, I’d build the entire narrative around the female referee at this point. She’s a whole narrative universe. On the surface of it, she is a damsel in distress; in the subtext, she is a professional woman facing a moral dilemma foisted upon her by the men who depend on her. Lady Stripes found herself reluctantly thrust into the spotlight a couple months ago when her beloved babyface…
The storyline is heating up at the little wrestling promotion where I used to ring announce and am now a smarky gonzo journalist in the audience. The top referee in the company is a woman. Her love, the embattled babyface, proposed to her in the ring after a big show last month, right after he finally won the championship. As she held his hand up to affirm that he was the winner, he pulled her…
As The Spectacle of Excess revives from its slumber (it’s been a year, hasn’t it??) we are thrilled to present a new interview in our Art of Wrestling series. Lindsay’s wrestling art caught my attention because she captures so much magic with such a challenging mix of media. Spray paint, ballpoint pen, acrylic, colored pencil–it takes all this to get these paintings just so in a very nuanced and subtle way, and that’s what’s so…
I’m pleased to present our first Impact analysis, and on such an important wrestling topic: shoot trauma invading kayfabe. Thanks to Rory Garon for their shrewd insight into the perilous Eddie Edwards storyline! –Andrea You’ve probably heard about how Sami Callihan broke Eddie Edwards’s face with a baseball bat. Even people who haven’t watched a second of Impact wrestling have heard about that incident. News of injury spreads like wildfire through the world of online…
I’m pleased to present a great new find for our wrestling artist interview series! Steven Fain creates remarkable portraits of remarkable wrestlers—often in the bold medium of Sharpie on paper! Fain makes sure we know he’s an untrained (though I prefer “self-taught”) artist, but I say it takes great talent to capture such precise lights and shadows with one of these iconic but blunt, indelible markers with which I for one have messed up more…
The revolution is upon us, and I am so grateful for the first submission of AEW analysis to the Spectacle of Excess! Guest contributor Denali W. has taken a deep dive into the layers of story in the Double or Nothing Rhodes Brothers match. Take a look: All it took to sell this match to me was exactly four sentences from a four minute promo that I saw in gif form at the beginning of May:…
On January 9, 2018 at 9:00pm GMT, the Oxford English Dictionary entered the word jabroni into their grand log of linguistic posterity. My initial excitement quickly faded into what I can only describe with an Office Space gif— via GIPHY —when I realized the OED had completely phoned in their etymology, which conflates two words with a glaring missing link and neglects crucial, well known instances of its use. It’s readily apparent that the whoever’s…
It makes a busy wrestling blog proprietor’s day when a stranger shows up out of nowhere offering a shrewd critical take on the art of blading. Please enjoy this piece by new contributor Kid Mankind, and be forewarned: there is blood. There are three ways to bleed in a wrestling ring. There is an accidental split of the skin – maybe a baby face landed a lucky hit on someone’s nose, maybe the jagged edge…