There’s a notorious moment in wrestling history called the “Finger Poke of Doom.” It’s the culmination of months’ worth of feud between two warring factions of the WCW, led by Kevin Nash and Hulk Hogan respectively. At the climax of the conflict, Nash and Hogan finally face each other, glowering, in the ring. There’s a long, tense moment. And then Hogan reaches out and pokes Nash in the chest with one finger, lightly, and Nash…
The Spectacle of Excess Posts
Telling a story in wrestling is basically like writing a play. Except that each scene is performed in front of a different audience, days or weeks or months apart. And you only get to do each scene once—there are no second takes. And there are no understudies, each role must be played by one and only one person; you can’t say “Oh, Sami sprained his knee, so this week the role of Sami Zayn will…
Let me tell you a story. This is a story about Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens, Daniel Bryan, and Shane McMahon. Like most stories, it has a hero. But wrestling narrative is weird, because the supporting character of one story will be the hero–or the villain–of the next, so all four of these characters could be the main character, depending on how you look at it. So let’s try an experiment. What happens if we make…
The next artist in our interview series creates beautiful, mesmerizing wrestling portraits and T-shirt designs. After you read insight from Alex Mahoney, please take a look at the first wrestling artist two interviews (here & here) as well, as now that we are on number three, we are really start to see the range of aesthetic and purpose in wrestling fan art . . . Spectacle of Excess: Why is wrestling art? And why does…
Wrestling is palimpsestic, which is a fantastic and utterly useless word to know. In ancient Greece and Rome, a palimpsest was a wax tablet that people wrote on over and over, smoothing the wax to erase the writing before. However, the marks of the previous writings would remain slightly visible, persisting beneath the new writing like a ghost or an echo. Now it gets used in literary theory to describe texts where previous versions–that can…
For the second interview in our fan artist series, cruiserweight aficionado and all around awesome gal Justine Colla (who you may perhaps know on Twitter as @pastasauca) answers our questions about art and wrestling, and talks about some of her favorite pieces. This series will read best, I think, if you’re admiring the dramatic contrast of aesthetics and approaches from one artist to the next, so be sure, also, to check out our first interview with Punkrockbigmouth and…
“I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure.” So J.R.R. Tolkien opened his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” and calling wrestling a kind of fairy-story may be the very rashest of adventures, but I live for danger, so here we go. I could probably write more at length about the world of wrestling as a strange kind of secondary fantasy world, with its own rules of physics and morality,…
I’m excited to be launching an ongoing series of interviews with wrestling fan artists on The Spectacle of Excess. To kick off the series, the fabulous Punkrockbigmouth has given us her wise insight about wrestling as art and art about wrestling. In that wrestling fandom is a microcosm of the bigger picture, PRBM is our great political cartoonist. I asked her five questions and to show and tell about her three favorite wrestlers to draw…
This is the preface to an interview I tried to pull together with a Las Vegas wrestler I loved dearly back in the early days of his career at the storied and funky Ultimate Wrestling Federation. My written interviews are challenging–elsewhere in my projects I have tenured professors who are still struggling to get written interviews to me a year later–so it’s no surprise to me that as busy a man as Funnybone never got…
Русев Удря, Русев Мачка. I just noticed the original post about it turned three years old last month. That might have been the day I fell on the icy driveway, I don’t know. In other words, I was thinking about other things. Death and such–I was in quite the Bray Wyatt mood all month. But it’s a day worth noting for The Spectacle of Excess. It’s the post that got us on the IWC map.…