image credit: rohwrestling.com A little secret to let you in on, dear readers: I have a devastating crush on Dalton Castle. I haven’t written anything about him thus far, because where do you even begin to describe a wrestler so sublime? As you know, I’m fairly prolific on the topic of professional wrestling, but I find myself without words enough to express the feelings when someone so thoroughly steals my heart. This is not the…
The Spectacle of Excess Posts
Artwork courtesy of Punkrockbigmouth (punkrockbigmouth.tumblr.com) Another wonderful wrestling writer has stepped up to help me keep Spectacle of Excess afloat while I grind away on the novel I’m translating. Barry F. Hess offers an insightful look at the relationship between wrestling and Shakespeare here, touching on a number of concepts about the bard and the business that I never noticed before: Two of my most favorite pastimes in life are reading William Shakespeare and watching…
For my final nostalgic reblog of this Mercury Retrograde, I wanted to share this post about the classic essay that inspired this blog: “The World of Wrestling” by Roland Barthes. I felt pretty feisty when I wrote this, like I still had to defend my project of what I’m calling “wrestling theory and criticism”. I’ve finally moved past that anxiety so many of us have over thinking wrestling is important, worthy of critique, emotionally resonant,…
This little post about Eric Rowan has enjoyed a surprisingly high volume of search engine traffic since I wrote it nine months ago. Most of the search terms were something to the effect of “is Eric Rowan really that smart,” but people also googled about his artisanal grapes and wine-making, his classical guitar, and his Rubic’s Cube. In essence, everyone was thinking what I was thinking — the sheep-masked Wyatt just didn’t make any sense.…
I wrote this just a couple months after the Shield broke up, back when it was impossible not to fall madly, desperately in love with Dean Ambrose. He was the best thing ever ever ever to happen to professional wrestling, and the people who read this post at the time told me they thought so too. So much inauthentic narrative snafu would then send me into an embittered phase where I could barely even stand…
Pro wrestling will give you trust issues. The language of pro wrestling is the language of deception. Mark, work, selling, and kayfabe are little strands of carny DNA that show us wrestling’s origins — a callback to when strongmen traveled with carnivals across the United States, bilking gullible Dust Bowl Alpha Bros out of money by goading them into rigged matches. Even if one of the local hayseeds looked like he might actually win a match with the strongman, another carny (hidden…
Andrea here again. In honor of my hero defeating Ryback to become the new intercontinental champion and savior of that much embattled belt, here is a reblog of my thoughts on the ethics of Kevin Owens from May of this year. He’s done his best to be a real jerk, but I still think he’s a realist and a working class hero: I find myself with a contrary opinion in regards to the story we’re…
When Brian Pillman was announced as a playable character for the soon-to-be-released WWE 2K16 (as part of Stone Cold Steve Austin’s showcase mode), it instantly brought back memories of watching Brian Pillman on ECW when I was a kid. Here’s a guy who, even for ECW, managed to be one of the most entertainingly unhinged wrestlers on the roster (with the exception of maybe New Jack, who wasn’t so much a wrestler as a feral human who…
From Andrea: Mercury Retrograde is a time to do stuff that begins with the prefix re-: relax, reorganize, recycle, that sort of thing. Blogging is one of the things that goes off the rails for me when Mercury stops, so I thought I’d use this one as an opportunity to showcase some of the posts I’m proud of here at Notes on the Spectacle of Excess. I’ll be *re*blogging something every couple days for the…