Sometimes strangers roll up and ask if they can write something for the Spectacle of Excess. I always say yes, but mostly they don’t deliver. No shade for them, by the way! It’s quite challenging to write something that clicks in the niche of the old Spectacle here. Now, often these submissions need revisions and edits. The English teacher in me says this one could use some tidying and tightening, but the unhinged mystic in…
The Spectacle of Excess Posts
I was thrilled when my old friend Tim Kail of the Work of Wrestling podcast said he wanted to write another essay for the Spectacle of Excess. Tim and I were pioneers of blogging about wrestling as art (in our minds, at least!) in the mid twenty-teens, and he wrote another great piece about the virtue of spectacle for this blog way back then. This jumble of wrestling concepts and how we navigate them—entertainment, art,…
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…
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…
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,…
Part 5 and conclusion of the Road to R-Evolution: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 On November 25, 2019, almost five years after his WWE debut, Kevin Owens cut a promo on Seth Rollins where he summarized his bedrock continuity across the years: “I have known who I am since the moment I first laced up a pair of wrestling boots, twenty years ago!” he said, looking into the camera–not just at Rollins, but at…
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…