Tag: audience

August 30, 2017 /

It’s early summer, 2015, and WWE is coming to Japan in a couple of months. We have tickets for one of the two shows, and to my delight, Kevin Owens, NXT champion and newly arrived on the main roster, is on the card. In preparation, I have gone to the stationary store and bought nice paper, the kind with gold threads woven into it, and a new pen. I sit down and I put the…

September 23, 2016 /

You might have noticed I haven’t posted to this blog in like three months. AJ Styles has upended my theoretical stance on everything and thus, my affairs are a shambles. I’ve had to completely rebuild my worldview and it’s taken some time. I mean, I have been doing other things and not blogging, it’s true. Life has been on an extreme trajectory as of late. But in fact this hasn’t been writer’s block, I’ve written plenty,…

August 8, 2015 /

My friend Tim Kail hit the nail on the head on The Work of Wrestling today with this essay about the flawed concept of “fake” in professional wrestling. Hopefully you’ll click on the link go read it after I tempt you with this excerpt: Yes, Ronda’s aches and pains resultant from her hard work and her righteous battles are legitimate. Rocky’s wounds are paint. Sylvester Stallone does not feel their pain. But the emotion experienced…

March 24, 2015 /

Tim Kail reads from my piece On Mankind vs. the Undertaker on the Work of Wrestling podcast this week! When Tim reads my words, I hear ideas in them I hadn’t noticed before. Have a listen to this truly stellar podcast: RT the alll-new #WorkOfWrestling #podcast w/music from @KyleandOliver & a story from @AndreaGregovich! http://t.co/D6KmWLpC6Y #WrestleMania — MAX WWE (@MaximusWrestler) March 23, 2015 Also on the podcast is Kyle & Oliver’s latest parody, a song…

December 3, 2014 /

Part of me wants to delete every post on my blog and start from scratch after listening to the CM Punk podcast. Punk’s revelations changed everything from a critical perspective. He pulled back the curtain on the company’s ugliness, which I submit we were all aware of and just didn’t know how to confront. Somehow we accepted it as part of the drama, but in fact there are real people sacrificing their bodies and being…

November 15, 2014 /

Lately I’ve been interested in examining the areas in which wrestling and the creative arts overlap, intersect, inform and inspire each other. In this realm there is no better artist to write about than Rob Schamberger. Schamberger is a Kansas City pop artist who works with a variety of mediums and techniques to create stunning and vibrant portraits that capture all that is larger than life about wrestling’s superstars, past and present. Schamberger paints legends,…