From week to week, Bray Wyatt is increasingly an Iago. From RAW, 5/24/14: “He’s got the whole world in his hands, he’s got the whole wide world in his hands. He’s got the whole world in his hands, he’s got the whole world in his hands. We’re sharing something right now. Something real. I want you to share this with me, brothers and sisters, sing with me – He’s got the whole world in his…
The Spectacle of Excess Posts
Oh, my dear blog. Life got away from me these past few weeks. I’ve been watching wrestling and taking notes, but the focused time to craft my posts has been hard to find, and my mind has been a thousand places. There are so many things to say — about Lana the post-modern nationalist heel, about Stephanie, the most brilliant McMahon yet, about my thug heartthrob Dean Ambrose — and wrestling keeps charging ahead as…
I didn’t mean to let my beloved lit-smark blog go dormant the past couple weeks. I’ve just had my mind blown by Lana and her flashing of Vladimir Putin’s big head across the jumbotron, and her talking about Edward Snowden and sanctions. Lana as a WWE nationalist heel is a Soviet era cartoon stereotype, a throwback to the era of wrestling that coincided with the cold war. A petite bombshell in a power suit with…
“Sing! Sing! Love! Love! All power in this world is measured by how much love you have. Whether you love to bring joy or suffering, you cannot deny that love is a delectable experience. It is a ravenous wildfire with beautiful flames. It is a divine wine that brings warmth to those who drink it and it cannot be defined. You have to live it! You have to feel it! Get them to love you,…
I once heard a piece of internet folklore from some chick in a random internet forum, not wrestling related, could it have even that feminist message board I used to haunt? Anyway, she swore this was true. Once her dad went into a Denny’s to eat. He’s on the road, traveling, it’s that kind of Denny’s. And he’s got with him to read of all things Gravity’s Rainbow. And who just happens to be sitting…
Back around junior high I was mesmerized by Ultimate Warrior’s energy and his epic hero-sounding soliloquies, like Henry V or somebody, only older, more tribal, a Beowulf or Gilgamesh, or maybe or one of those young upstarts in Greek Mythology who charges in to fight the monster and conquers despite all odds. For his gimmick was, on the face of it, a little difficult to take seriously. But what of it? He fucking shook those…
“Over” is interesting. “Over” is what happens when you finally get there. You’re over when you succeed, when you’ve won the support of the crowd. Triple H, who my smark friends think is killing wrestling, has actually worked “over” into his gimmick. He’s called “The Game”, and his entrance video says “Game Over”, inverting that phrase into a new definition, away from its video game, Aliens 2 meaning of “Game over, man! Game over!” As…
A couple of months after 9/11, I lined up for over an hour in Times Square at “The World” (then WWF’s now defunct restaurant) to get Diamond Dallas Page’s autograph during a period when my markish zeal was burning particularly hot. Cute boy Christian (back then still working on his solo gimmick, trying to get over by throwing hissy fits in the ring if somebody kept kicking out of his pin) had actually been the…