tomk

Yeah being an Eddie tribute wrestler instead of being his own man really hurt him. Also when was the Kidman injury? But honestly you look at his stuff with Matt Borne and I can't think of anyone else in the WWE who could have pulled off that kind of heel getting over Bourne act.

Underwhelming year? I thought people liked his performances in the matches opposite Miz, Killings, and Punk ( I haven't seen the Del Rio matches yet). I mean yes Cena's been booked horribly and ridiculously weak (and I'm not sure when exactly he was booked well) , and yes the WWE is a fucking mess where the booking goal is still to build shows around getting HHH over instead of protecting their top star....but when Cena has been put in matches where he has to deliver this year I thought he delivered. In 2011, he's a guy who I actively look forward to seeing wrestle (similar to how I felt during that 96 Edge, Kevin Federline, Umaga, Khali, Michaels, Lasley run). In the May 2008 issue of the Observer Meltzer wrote: In the same issue Meltzer wrote about Cena v JBL being an undercard match on the PPV where after the match you could see people get up and leave. Mcmahon/Helmsley want desperately to create a product where they can tell someone that no person makes a difference but the reality is that Cena makes a difference. Meltzer said something similar this year about how they have to keep coming back to Cena because he is the only person who actually works. Loss' comparison with late 80s/90s Flair is an apt one. The bookers desperately want to have someone else on top, but they are begrudgingly forced to return to him.

Probably next to man don the Max Moon I mean Sin Cara suit: Kinda funny replacing the guy who failed for steroids with a bigger guy. Hillarious that they are talking about replacing Mistico with Mystico de la Juarez.

Awesome. Nitro was the number one wrestling show on TV for how many weeks with the Living Legend on commentary? How much credit do I have to give him?

Is this the match with the kind of capture arm ddt finish? I think Han and Naruse matched up more than once, I always liked the way they worked with each other (did a nice job of doing junior v heavyweight in this context). He was in Battlarts for a bit and then went to New Japan where he had an IWGP jr title run, a match with Bass Ruten and the Kikuchi/Kanemaru v El Samurai/Naruse match from NOAH in 2002.

What? Laurinitis was surprisingly effective. I walked away from that episode wishing that for storyline purposes he had been put in charge of the WWE instead of HHH. Laurainitis came off super comfortable in the role of stoogeing managerial heel,the perfect mix of campy General Takada in Hustle and a David Simon style evil middle magnager (more Klebanow than James Whiting but he felt like he had the potential to go full on Lieutenant Marimow). Since everyone else is fantasy booking this angle, I'm saying they should drop the whole Helmsley aspect (have him blow out his knee) and bring in George Hines to back Laurainitis up.

1)Pfefer taking over the booking of MSG in 59 seems like it should be a giant story. Especially given how well he drew. How exactly did that happen? Was he booking, managing talent, or did he take over promoting? Why? Did the changes in MSG effect the rest of territory and how? How did Mcmahon get it back? etc. http://wrestlingclassics.com/.ubb/ultimate...2993;p=1#000000 As people die, we are getting little pieces of the story in obits. But it feels like their are really detailed accounts of promotional wars and coups in Georgia, but I've never seen anything written to explain this kind major change in MSG? 2) Anyone who reads lots of SE ring results has run into the "colored girls circuit": Ethel Johnson/Lulu Mae Provo/Babs Wingo, etc. http://wrestlingclassics.com/.ubb/ultimate...2348;p=1#000000 My sense is that several of these women are still alive. Given the kind of "Wow this is a neat piece of social history" coverage that "Lipstick and Dynamite" and Jeff Lean's Mildred Burke biography got, you would think that the "colored girls " circuit would be something that would get more attention.

Here is post show interview with the Freak http://wrestleheat.com/the-southpaw-scoop-...ly-darkmon=6511 My sense from that is that Chavo senior ran a clinic and Roberts was also there (and there are photos of both from event) although neither listed in Dave's report. I remember seeing a youtube clip with Karl Killer Kox so he was definately contacted about at minimum making a video where he would claim to be there. Don't know about Hansen, Bockwinkle, Reed or Booker but I can't imagine Mantell lied about contacting Jerry Oates. The majority of the folks in the tourney seem to be Tugboat Taylor, Mantell, Youngblood or Awesome Kong trainees... if it wasn't for Jazzfest and well I guess if i didn't go to that I was thinking about Austin Psychefest that weekend. But if I didn't go to either, this feels like it might have been entertaining third option.

He wanted to do his job and get paid, wasn't interested in being a celebrity. Jody Hamilton could've prepared him:

It's been 40 years since "Let It Be" came out. I was a highschool freshman in 89, approximately 40 years after Bing Crosby put out his first Christmas albulm. I wouldn't have called any of my highschool classmates douches because they didn't have more than a passing familiarity with Crosby.

It's unclear to me that this discussion is built on any clear definiton of what self-promotion means, or that at least the definition is different from Loss' original one. Self-promotion=marketing oneself outside of wrestling. Self-promotion=marketing what you accomplished in wrestling to the outside world. Self-promotion=marketing self inside of world of wrestling (in which case I think marrying daughter of biggest promoter in the world gets you on top). Self-promotion=marketing oneself to the world of wrestling fans sheets. these aren't the same thing.

Not just a woman, the same thing is done with guys missing their family (wives, kids, cancer stricken parents) all the time. Pretty standard reality show trope. If someone is being eliminated and the shows editors haven’t already given the character a story arc, they need to give the audience a reason to care, so last minute they have the person talk about their family. “Contestant mentions family=contestant going home” is a reality show cliché. It is such a cliché; that at this point the reality shows that have become efficient streamlined machines (Top Chef franchise, the Abrego but not the Salsero produced Vh-1 reality shows) use contestant talking about missing their family as a red herring to throw off audience.

I didn't even know Keith still had a web presence. Is there any reason anyone would go to his blog?

There is Jesse Ventura too. I don't think Jericho is a bad candidate. I do think it's worth mentioning that from the world of wrestling, we look positively on the reality show and commentator (on variations of World's dumbest) circuit that Jericho works. But while in the wrestling world it is seen as increased media exposure, for most of the rest of the world it is considered a fall . Maria and Goldberg get more mainstream media exposure on The Celebrity Apprentice than they did during their wrestling careers. But the majority of the other contestants are LaToya, Sinbad, and Brett Michaels: washed up guys struggling to remind the audience and agents that they still exist and convince them that they are still relevant.

There are more matworkish Maeda or Takada v Fujiwara matches than the ones I listed, Those are worked again less back and forthish than the Kido/Malenko match. Those are worked with one guy having more strength or fire or something else (guy from above v below): not evenly. The matches I pulled out of Phil's list are ones where opponent does less matwork than you get in average Akiyama match.

Phil's Complete and Accurate list is here: http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2009/08/c...-of-all-of.html Fujiwara v Kido is always neat because they do work as equals, but that makes it unusual and not the norm. Majority of his matches v technicicans aren't worked as though both guys are equal. The majority of the matches that Phil lists as EPIC tend to be Fujiwara v a striker. Yoshiaki Fujiwara v. Super Tiger UWF 9/7/84-EPIC Yoshiaki Fujiwara v. Super Tiger UWF 9/11/85- EPIC Yoshiaki Fujiwara v. Akira Maeda NJ 1/10/86 - EPIC Yoshiaki Fujiwara v. Akira Maeda NJ 2/5/86- EPIC (this is more techniciany) Yoshiaki Fujiwara v. Riki Choshu NJ 6/9/87- EPIC Yoshiaki Fujiwara v. Kazuo Yamazaki UWF 7/24/89 - EPIC Yoshiaki Fujiwara v. Nobuhiko Takada UWF 2/27/90- EPIC Yoshiaki Fujiwara v. Masakatsu Funaki PWFG 7/26/91-EPIC Yoshiaki Fujiwara v. Minoru Suzuki PWFG 11/3/91-EPIC Yoshiaki Fujiwara v. Yusuke Fuke PWFG 2/24/92-EPIC Yoshiaki Fujiwara v. Shinya Hashimoto NJ 6/1/94 -EPIC

I assumed he had just misspelled Ark-Angel de la Muerte. But beyond the question of Kurt Angle being a guy who doesn't meet these criteria (...and I doubt most thinking Lesnar, Steamboat, Michaels, Nakamura or Mutoh fans would see those guys as meeting that set of criteria either), is does a fed actually need someone that meets all those criteria? Or why would they?

British wrestling seems to me to be less about elaborate hold/counterhold and more about elaborate escapes and escapes from escapes. But that's really an overgeneralization. Still this is list of matches that Ohtani's jacket watched, not all built around matwork http://z11.invisionfree.com/wrestling_ko/i...c=2555&st=0

Watts comes in late in 92. You have the Kip Frey period before him, which is probably some of the bst TV wrestling you can watch.

Argentina Rocco most famously. Curtis Hughes when wrestling as Big Cat. Chris Jericho used what Ross correctly called the "Atlantis style backbreaker" during his feud with Rey. Masao Inoue and I can't remember which joshi stars.

Somewhere in Belgium (if my memory is right) a group of artists taught a group of mentally/developmentally disabled people how to make linocuts and then showed them a Jean Claud Van damme movie and Hogan v Goldberg and let them make linocuts which were later pieced together as a comic book and art exhibit. Remember the results being better and less exploitative than that sounds. Been looking for it for days and it's not easy to find that kind of thing on the web when you can't read or write french and Jerome maybe able to correct me on any of that but I think this is the website for that project: http://www.fremok.org/site.php?type=P&id=80

I was offline for most of March and missed both this and the Tiger mask thread (which are kind of interconnected). Interesting threads that spin off into multiple tangents a couple of which I wanted to add something to. I will try to avoid getting caught up in any argument as to whether if you want to avoid diseased vagina, you should really stop going out with women who insist on going by the title “ladies”. But there are a bunch of other things that I think are worth revisiting. Yeah of course this has happened, changing perspective is what keeps history alive. Yes of course things have changed. As they should. I don’t remember if it was Jasper Johns or William De Kooning who when asked “which of the old masters influences “ him, famously answered “They don’t inspire me, I inspire them”. But the point (beyond the sheer joy of being a cocky asshole) is that is how history (especially art history) works. We look at the past from the perspective of what is going on today (what are the questions of contemporary life). This is especially important in the arts as it is how we keep the “old masters” relevant. If they aren’t historically relevant they end up being nostalgia curiosities. From jdw 96 piece on Tijuana: Things do change. Would anyone other than Flair make that list today? Why ? Why wasn’t Hansen in that top four then? What was going on that made people overlook Hansen? Why does the current wrestling fan not overlook Hansen? Childs It is a really weird analytical blind spot because it is something that he does every week. Fuck look at how Inoki importance has evolved in Meltzer’s esteem as MMA has grown. I mean one of the odd things about Meltzer is that on the one hand he is a guy who is probably the most important secondary resource for what happened in wrestling over the last thirty years; while on the other hand he doesn’t seem to use the Observers for that purpose. When Elizabeth Taylor dies, the New York Times already has had her obit pre-written (and constantly updated) thirty years in advance. The obit writer will use the New York Times art sections as resource for writing that obit. When Meltzer writes a historical piece or an obit, you get the sense that he is doing all the research fresh. Not going through his old observers but starts from scratch calling contacts. He has written numerous pieces on the history of national expansion. Each time they are really different pieces, written from a series of different perspectives depending on what is going on now. When he writes about Vince’s expansion today it is framed more by his contemporary observation of Dana White, than it is by what was written in the Observer’s during the 80s. It was framed differently three years ago. And framed differently than it was five years ago or a month before that. There are times where I find that aspect of Meltzer to be very appealing as he is constantly revisiting the same stuff from different angles. There are other times where it is frustrating. There are times where it feels like he lucked into writing about a business where people die young (so there are lots of resources/people to contact) and that guys who actually make it into there old age (where there are fewer people he can contact) get short shrift. When Meltzer writes about the HOF he makes a big deal of what the contemporary people in the biz think vis a vis veterans. Dick Murdoch gets a ton of support from his contemporaries but isn’t someone who is seen as important to the modern generation. Moolah gets less support from her contemporaries but is someone whose legend has grown with the current generation. One of the things that makes Meltzer’s rollerderby pieces more interesting than most rollerderby writing that you find elsewhere is that he has the historical perspective of wrestling. So he writes in terms of what are the historical lessons. What he writes are historical pieces where other rollerderby writers merely write pieces celebrating nostalgia. That history v nostalgia is the difference between looking at the past through standards which have evolved and trying EL-P style to hold on to positive memories of Tanaka. For someone who is critical of looking back with historical perspective, Meltzer does it all the time. Loss says 1) This is a second huge blindspot. Dave's assumption that intention of performer should govern how we interpret something. I know watching Iron Sheik v Slaughter that their goal was to keep an audience made up of lowest common denominator entertained, and to scope out which rat they wanted to double team that night. Entertaining audience is pretty much the motivation behind the development of all popular and vernacular forms of entertainment. Saying that one shouldn't analyze any cultural product that isn't "fine art" ( where artist is supposedly motivated by pure artistic/aesthetic principles or Angle matches where he claims to be motivated by desire to have "five star match") goes against everything that we do as a society. 2) And well we do know that future audiences do watch these matches. Why should we pretend that they don't? We know that the WWE just put out a DVD of the top 100 wrestlers. How influential will that DVD be? There are a bunch of people here who have traded with Danielson and a bunch of your recent indy/WWWF/TNa workers. The OVW workers watched and studied a set of tapes. The Deep South and Florida WWF guys watched a different set. The past is being revisited with new cannons created constantly. Loss again 1)Footage available is important one. 2)The packaging of footage also matters. The first time I heard people really start talking about Fujiwara was when the NIFTY folks (the online source of NOAH matches that took place that week) put together a best of Fujiwara matches thing and people started talking “Hey this is something worth watching”. 3)I think what guys are doing currently also affects what people watch. After the NOAH/AJ split when Fuchi was elevated as heavyweight there were a bunch of people who asked “What should we go back and watch that this guy was doing as a junior, back when we ignored AJ juniors?”. 4)I think there has been a major change over the last decade about how people approach clipped matches, where people are much less willing to praise wrestlers who we don’t have unclipped footage of. Some of that is result of ECW. Some is result of classics (especially All Japan Women classics). He was an 80s New Japan heavyweight. No one in any critical circle was paying attention or cared about 80s New Japan heavyweights .. I also think the ascent of actual MMA is something that has effected the way his stuff looks.

I'm pretty sure Mayweather/Big Show came after the Coach as wrestler period.

Dean from the Smackdown workrate report: Given that the post match had Cena and Red Dog beating up Bling Bling Buchanon, I really don't see how there could have been any talk of giving Cena/B2 a tag run.

Wouldn't that just be Rock followed by Hogan?