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…
Category: Art of Wrestling
You can find the Bad Dog Comedy Club and Bar on the boundary between the Christie Pits neighborhood and Little Italy in Toronto, with Koreatown slightly to the east. As you walk down the block you’ll pass a dry cleaners, an Ethiopean restaurant, a McDonalds, an income tax center, Ali Baba’s Middle Eastern Foods, a Minimart, and a sushi restaurant, all jumbled and jostling together. The comedy club itself is tucked above a post office,…
Suzuki and Liger have been feuding violently for most of the year. Suzuki is, on the surface, the furthest thing from Jyushin Liger it is possible to be, while still being a New Japan wrestler. They are, however, two sides of the same profession.
We must imagine Generico happy, no longer striving to impress audiences or wrangle opponents, no longer, we hope, hurting himself for art and entertainment. Sami Zayn is less lucky.
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…
Yoshi-Hashi doesn’t have a lot of the things wrestling stars have. He’s not beautiful like Ibushi, or charming like Taguchi, or hard like Ishii. He doesn’t have the natural charisma or athleticism of Nakamura or Okada. He’s not comfortable on mic or powerful in his crowd work. He’s pretty awkward, usually, visibly anxious and vocal about being in pain. His shoulder is always taped, and unlike other wrestlers who wear sleeves or pads or black support wraps, he just wears tape. He’s open about injury in a way most wrestlers, pretending to be gods, aren’t. He’s a good wrestler, technically, but there are lots of good wrestlers.
(Part 2 of a series putting together Sami and Kevin’s timelines in 2013-2014: Part 1 is here). Putting together the beginnings of Kevin and El Generico’s story is like assembling a crazy quilt: scraps of cloth in a dozen different colors and shapes that sometimes don’t fit together quite right anymore because some of the pieces have gone missing. So many snippets and loose ends, such a challenge to piece them together. 2013-2014 are a…