If you’ve just stumbled across Notes on the Spectacle of Excess, welcome! I’ve been swamped lately so I’m taking a hiatus from blogging about wrestling until mid-November, when I’ll have a few major projects and events out of the way. Maybe Randy Orton will turn face by then? A girl can hope. Until then, here are a few older posts for you to check out: On Mankind vs. The Undertaker On Bray Wyatt On Thinking…
The Spectacle of Excess Posts
This Week’s Notes: Regular readers of this blog will know that I am generally more sympathetic than not toward John Cena’s plight. But nights like tonight he just strikes me as smarmy. I find myself wanting him to learn his lesson, get his ass handed to him for his hubris, which becomes more and more apparent every show. It is very interesting that he is resisting ceding the alpha role to crowd darling Dean Ambrose.…
It is a curious state of affairs and a reflection on the liminal nature of kayfabe that WWE feels it must apologize to the people of Russia about Big Show’s satirical disrespect to their flag on RAW this week. Recall that WWE readily apologized about Lana’s mention of the Malaysian Airlines plane in Eastern Ukraine, while Lana herself dismissed the kerfuffle about what she said as “blah, blah, blah… propaganda.” These apologies are calculated —…
No Myth in Wrestling There’s always talk of legends in wrestling. Never of myth. Because all of wrestling is a myth, and yet what is legendary is a particular actor-athlete’s portrayal of the myth. Legendary are the men, not the wrestlers. Wrestling is ultimately a form of American mythology, and yet like with any cultural mythology a small part of us maintains that it is “real”. The Glory of #Bunnymania Don’t discount the fact that…
I once had a secret little email friendship with a cute wrestler who went by the name Tekniq. His regular gimmick was kind of a mini-Matt Hardy: black t-shirt and stylishly-flared white pants, mildly alternative but relatively clean cut. He had icy blue laser beam eyes, and sometimes also wrestled in a yellow luchador mask as “Papi Chulo”. Oh yeah, Tekniq’s finishing move was a “619” (but it was Vegas so we called it a…
Night of Champions didn’t bore me once. Every match was solid, interesting, worthwhile to watch and played an important role in its narrative thread. (Except maybe Randy Orton vs. Chris Jericho— that conflict seemed like a last minute idea somebody had and figured we wouldn’t notice it came out of nowhere because they called RAW last week a “season premiere”. But it was still a good match to watch.) Most impressively for me, though, was…
JBL was in rare form tonight. Some highlights: “He comes out with a dancing cheese burger, and there’s nothing wrong with him?” “The bunny’s taken out The Gator! Titus used to be tough!” “How does a referee ignore a bunny hopping across the ring?” “A flying bunny!” And the rest of my Evening Notes: #Bunnymania was an satire on the legendary blind spots of wrestling’s referees. Adam Rose has reintroduced a Fellini-esque element into…
The folks at New Pop Lit added an interview with me as an afterword, if you will, to my short story about indy wrestling, “The Unshakable Kayfabe of Tommy Rage”. An interview with little old me! If you’re interested in wrestling, Russian literature, MFA programs and cowboys neglected by history, take a look.
A couple days ago somebody looked at my post about John Cena and Paul Heyman after having performed the following Google search: “will pual hymen bring john cena thug in 2014” A drunk and possibly high wrestling fan was contemplating the John Cena problem and Google offered me as relevant source material. I’m not being silly when I say this: I couldn’t be more proud. This is exactly why I write the things I do.…