“I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure.” So J.R.R. Tolkien opened his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” and calling wrestling a kind of fairy-story may be the very rashest of adventures, but I live for danger, so here we go. I could probably write more at length about the world of wrestling as a strange kind of secondary fantasy world, with its own rules of physics and morality,…
Category: Art of Wrestling
I’m excited to be launching an ongoing series of interviews with wrestling fan artists on The Spectacle of Excess. To kick off the series, the fabulous Punkrockbigmouth has given us her wise insight about wrestling as art and art about wrestling. In that wrestling fandom is a microcosm of the bigger picture, PRBM is our great political cartoonist. I asked her five questions and to show and tell about her three favorite wrestlers to draw…
This is the preface to an interview I tried to pull together with a Las Vegas wrestler I loved dearly back in the early days of his career at the storied and funky Ultimate Wrestling Federation. My written interviews are challenging–elsewhere in my projects I have tenured professors who are still struggling to get written interviews to me a year later–so it’s no surprise to me that as busy a man as Funnybone never got…
The air is heavy with the scent of rice crackers and seaweed-wrapped rice balls, and I am grieving. It’s February 2016 in Osaka, I’m here for the New Beginning show, and three days ago Daniel Bryan announced his retirement from wrestling. The people around me are nibbling on snacks, chatting about the card in the darkened arena, waiting. Beside me, Dan is bowed over with his head in his hands. He started to get a…
Some moments in wrestling are staggeringly momentous, huge enough to fill a stadium with emotion, so titanic that the audience’s reaction becomes itself part of the moment: the Miz winning the world title; the breaking of the Undertaker’s streak. Some are smaller, more intimate, shared with a group of hundreds at a small show or a live event. Some are so fleeting and personal they may only touch a scattered handful. But whether big as…
Greetings friends! I have emerged from the abyss with the fourth in my series of posts about the art of the fabulous Punkrockbigmouth. Check parts I, II, and III if you’re interested, and be sure to check out all of PRBM’s work on punkrockbigmouth.tumblr.com. The term “cartoon satire” doesn’t structure quite right for an -ism, but let’s get over ourselves. Not all -isms can logistically take on the suffix, and I’m just making all this…
Wrestling is repetitive. At its worst, it’s a frustrating experience, full of dead ends and pointless loops, events that pile up without a story to tie them together, jolting along until they merely stop without closure. But there’s promise and potential there, too. Given enough time and patience, some luck and stubbornness and inspiration, you could put all those repeating patterns together into stories that echo and resonate off each other, like bells that never quite…
“I’m not sure I should watch this,” I say. We’ve gotten home from work and Smackdown is queued up and ready to go. I know Sami cuts a promo on Daniel Bryan and then he and Kevin win the main event together. Everyone on my timeline is thrilled. It’s the storyline I’ve been looking forward to for years. “I mean it,” I say. “I’m really not sure I should watch this.” “Aren’t you happy for…
Who are we, as wrestling fans, and what have we lost? It’s March 28, 1962, in Los Angeles, California. It’s a Wednesday night at the Grand Olympic Auditorium, just south of Downtown, the famous arena about which Charles Bukowski once wrote, “the gallery boys went ape and the fighters fought like fighters and the place was blue with cigar smoke, and how we screamed, baby baby, and threw money and drank our whiskey.” That night…