I’m excited for this new addition to our artist interview series! Darius Chanthavong creates compelling portraits in multiple medias that have been catching my eye all year, most notably this bloody yet determined Roman Reigns piece called Fortitude. Darius answered our questions just a few days before Roman Reigns’ heartbreaking leukemia announcement, but instead of asking for an update, I thought it poignant to read the thoughts of an authentic fan and talented artist written…
The Spectacle of Excess Posts
I’m in the front row. I’m also in the back row. I’m in The Row. DDT Pro shows in my town are held in municipal sports centers, in rooms small enough that along one side of the ring there’s only space for a single row of chairs, and that’s where Dan and I are sitting. The Row is my favorite place to sit at DDT Pro shows, because my view of the ring is completely…
I’m not quite sure what I expected when I sat down in the movie theater to watch “My Dad is a Heel Wrestler,” the new movie starring Hiroshi Tanahashi and a host of other NJPW wrestlers. Considering it had NJPW’s official stamp of approval, I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be pulling the curtain aside to show wrestlers calling their matches and bookers deciding who was going over whom. And it was a children’s movie,…
I reach out and rest my hands on the barricade in front of me. Dan and I are in Brooklyn for SummerSlam 2018, and we’re in the very front row, on the end, right at the stairs to the ring. The crowd roars and rustles around me, and I cheer with delight as Seth Rollins wins the Intercontinental championship, groan with disappointment as the Bludgeon Brothers retain their titles. There’s a lot on the card…
It’s August 1, 2018, on Smackdown, and Daniel Bryan is in the ring, staring up at the Titantron. The Miz’s face looms in the massive screen as the two of them cut a promo on each other, setting up their match at SummerSlam. The promo manages to touch on the key points in their history and to sum up their feud–though “feud” is hardly the right word for something both so slow-moving and so inevitable.…
Few professional wrestlers today embody the word “contradiction” more than Darby Allin. Indeed, Darby’s two-year journey into the world of independent professional wrestling is best understood as a series of contradictions between, on one side, his personal wrestling aesthetic and accompanying skater culture-infused world-view, and on the other, the wrestling business’s well-established rules and conventions. These puzzling contradictions, held together in dialectical tension, shape and inform exciting possibilities about what independent professional wrestling can be. Perhaps,…
My first love in wrestling was John Morrison. No, that’s not strictly correct. My first love was Starship Pain, his finisher: a flashy split-legged corkscrew moonsault, the first move I ever learned the name of. But over time I realized that it wasn’t the flashiness of it that I loved. When you took away the extra twists and the split-legged flip, the bells and whistles and glitz and glitter, what I loved at the heart…
(Note: You click on any of the art to see a full-size version, and you can click on the link in the caption to go to the artist’s page!) He grew up an orphan on the mean streets of Tijuana. He learned his fighting skills protecting other children from bullies and thugs. He fled Mexico after he injured a man with a brainbuster gone wrong. We don’t know these facts about El Generico’s life from…
It’s December 2016, and I’m at my second New Japan show. I know barely anything about any of the wrestlers, it’s all a buzz of new names and styles. The main event is a tag match, and the first wrestler to the ring is someone who goes by EVIL (in English, in all caps), carrying a scythe and wearing a purple and black velour robe. He is quite possibly the most extra wrestler I have…
Wrestling exists in a constant state of tension between dependence and independence, with storylines that are constantly playing out that anxiety, running through the options over and over. When is it wise to rely on others and when is it smart to walk away on your own? Seth Rollins betrays his brothers to achieve the pinnacle of success, but later admits the victory is hollow. Even worse, there’s the nagging suspicion he only traded in…