JerryvonKramer

It's a mixture of things, but there is no way Heyman is a 10 in that category. A 10 is Vince Sr faced with the hottest wrestler on the planet in 1978, who'd sold out MSG a ton of times, in Billy Graham and refusing to turn him face and giving the belt to Backlund REGARDLESS. AND still getting Backlund over, selling out MSG, etc. It's Baba faced with Kenta Kobashi in 1992-3 and saying to both him and the crowd, "no kid, you have to wait your turn. And I'm going to make you wait". And the fans essentially accepting that their will was overturned.

Hogan-Sid 92 Luger 93 Rocky Maivia Shawn-Sid 96 If a dog begs for a bone and I give him a bone and then he loves me for it, and then tomorrow the same thing happens, is it mastery?

Booker ratings: In light of recent convserations, thought I'd have a bit of fun with this. I have taken some well-known promoters and rated them out of ten in six areas. Let me run through the six criteria: Mastery over crowd: How much did they dictate to the crowd vs. how much did they let the crowd dictate to them where the former is 10 and the latter is 0. Innovation: How many new ideas did they bring to the mix? Angles: What was their record like at booking legendary angles and feuds? Quality of Cards: What was the quality of wrestling on their cards generally like? Finances: How good were they are watching the bottom line and making money? Talent spotting / New stars: How good were they are spotting new talent and making new stars? Take a look at these and feel free to add your own! Vince Sr. Mastery over crowd: 10 Innovation: 0 Angles: 8 Quality of Cards: 2 Finances: 8 Talent spotting / New stars: 2 Bill Watts Mastery over crowd: 8 Innovation: 7 Angles: 10 Quality of Cards: 7 Finances: 6 Talent spotting / New stars: 10 Giant Baba: Mastery over crowd: 10 Innovation: 2 Angles: 6 Quality of Cards: 10 Finances: 7 Talent spotting / New stars: 9 Vince Jr. / Pat Patterson (80s) Mastery over crowd: 10 Innovation: 10 Angles: 10 Quality of Cards: 4 Finances: 10 Talent spotting / New stars: 6 Vince Jr. (90s) Mastery over crowd: 7 Innovation: 10 Angles: 10 Quality of Cards: 6 Finances: 7 Talent spotting / New stars: 10 Vince Jr. (00s-present) Mastery over crowd: 0 Innovation: 3 Angles: 4 Quality of Cards: 9 Finances: 10 Talent spotting / New stars: 7 Verne Gagne Mastery over crowd: 5 Innovation: 0 Angles: 6 Quality of Cards: 4 Finances: 6 Talent spotting / New stars: 1 Jim Crockett Jr / Dusty Rhodes Mastery over crowd: 4 Innovation: 9 Angles: 8 Quality of Cards: 9 Finances: 0 Talent spotting / New stars: 6 Eric Biscoff Mastery over crowd: 3 Innovation: 7 Angles: 4 Quality of Cards: 8 Finances: 2 Talent spotting / New stars: 0 Paul Heyman Mastery over crowd: 6 Innovation: 9 Angles: 8 Quality of Cards: 3 Finances: 3 Talent spotting / New stars: 8 ---- Let's leave it there. Add your own!

I think the thesis is more "we were all ironic then", and that wrestling failed to move on or offer something new. X-Factor is a funny one. Sometimes it feels like genuine heat, sometimes pantomime booing/cheering. And X-Factor has its own band of smarks, analysing and critiquing it all - just check out the Sofabet site. Or any number of conversations among normal people querying the tragic backstories or wondering about the motives behind sending people home. Right, but Cowell and co never let those smarks take over the show. I mean X-Factor has always been able to get over despite it being obvious to virtually everyone that it is a work. No one can seriously suggest that there's no cross over between the X-Factor audience and the WWE crowd.

If you look at things like X-Factor though, the crowds there are hardly ironic, especially as the competition moves into the final stages. If anything, the level of a earnest sentimentality is gauche to a point that it should make the ironic-minded man vomit into his own mouth. I just think the thesis that "we are ironic now" is vastly overstated. I mean Simon Cowell is basically a heel, and seems to have no problem getting genuine heat.

This is really interesting to me. I'm 33, and definitely a product of the 90s. I mostly teach 18-21 year olds and, yes, they are FAR FAR more sincere and earnest than I am. Now, partly, that is because 18-21 years olds, just finding their feet in the world and figuring out their basic stances, are generally are more earnest and serious than older people. But it's also quite interesting. As well as a New Sincerity, I also think there's a New Moralism, which has quite a hardline stance on matters of political correctness especially as regards gender, race and sexuality -- here, there is little scope for irony or even humour. I have often thought to myself that it is my generation -- 30-somethings now -- who lived in the *most* post-ironic, post-modern moment. We are primed for it -- more cine-literature and pop-literate than both our parents' generations and indeed the internet kids (whose frames from reference are actually narrower than they should be). I find this stuff pretty fascinating. ----- On wrestling, you're right that it is always behind the times, but I still see its systematic problems largely as the result of booking direction rather than culture forcing it one way or the other. Pretend for a second that since he had the monopoly, Vince had stuck to his old-school booking guns a whole lot more. That rather than being a workrate promotion, ROH from the get-go had been a Cornette-back-to-traditional-values promotion. That all the bookers had followed the Bill Watts line of rejecting the smart culture rather than embracing and trying to appeal to it. And that ECW rather than being romanticised was essentially buried. Don't you think the wrestling landscape would be a bit different? Is there any particular reason why a generation of "more ironic" people should necessarily lead to bookers abandoning fundamanetal principles? The problem, I think, is that too many of them weren't proper wrestling people. They were guys like Russo. One huge difference, also, between the old territories, and the indies is that they tend to be run by guys whose wrestling backgrounds didn't go deep. We're talking about the difference between Eddie Graham and Gabe, or even the difference between The Sheik and Dixie Carter. Why did this happen? 1. WCW execs, Biscoff, the corporitasation of wrestling in general, the idea of "writers" which led to less "true" wrestling guys as bookers in general. 2. Death of the territories in general. We went from literally Verne Gagne and Bill Watts to fringe figures like Dennis Coralluzzo and Herb Abrams, the huge gulf between those two types of men partly explains how the whole trajectory started. Agree? Disagree?

I mean, if we want to get all funkdoc, you could make a real argument that the trend over the past 10 years or so in popular culture has been towards the creation of fully immersive virtual worlds. Hence, RPG games that take 800+ hours to complete. Film franchises all set in the same universe. Box sets that take a full week to watch in real time. So rather than irony and "meta meta", you could make a real case that the trend is towards TOTAL INVESTMENT. WWE has a "universe", but can anyone really argue that they've booked towards total investment? Which promotions have? For that you need a certain strength of vision and conviction, and I'm not sure I see that.

This has nothing to do with pro-westling. TV series/cinema analogy just don't work. You can't have it both ways. You can't say "this is something that comes out of a change in culture", and then say when someone points back to that culture say "oh that has nothing to do with wrestling, that analogy doesn't work".

Overbooked, just a quick question, how do you account for the enormous success of things like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones in this "self-referential post- meta-" world? I think the idea that kids these days are just far too sophisticated to get fully invested and immersed in anything is completely overblown. I mean, it helps that Game of Thrones is "fantastically booked", but people buy into that because it believes in its own world. It has a vision and pursues it with conviction, something wrestling has failed to do for many years. I believe that in a world where Game of Thrones can get over, wrestling served totally straight can also get over. (I'm also a little disconcerted that people seem to think irony was invented in the 90s.)

I think you mean in 91. I'm not sure if that's remotely comparable. Specific circumstances. Baltimore was probably second only to Philly for snarky crowds, maybe Chicago third? And look at the booking: they didn't pander to it, they didn't play to it, and fans weren't chanting We Want Flair during the Dangerous Alliance angle in late 91 or in 92. There were obvious dick elements in the WCW hardcore crowd. They booed The Fantastics and the Rock n Roll Express. They booed Johnny Ace and Shane Douglas. They booed Marcus Alexander Bagwell, and obviously shit all over Erik Watts. The booking never let them get a foothold or take over the product.

I'm going to try to keep this short so it can't be misunderstood: - I blame the bookers entirely because they failed to control the crowds and pandered to their worst instincts. To be clear: - I believe that crowds in any generation had the potential to behave like crowds do now. For example, Philly crowds in the early 80s could have gone this way if Vince Sr hadn't been such a man of complete conviction. And: - The "Death of Kayfabe" was nothing to do with fans believing or not, and everything to do with bookers and workers pandering to smart culture. It's Gabe screaming about a "5 star classic" that he booked himself. It's Heyman doubling down on a hardcore base. It's Russo's worked shoots. All of these things encourage fans to think about BOOKING rather than about investing in characters and their actions. WWE didn't help matters because: 1. Building up mythos of ECW in 00s. 2. The way they booked Punk and Bryan made them "indie martyrs", which created its own phenomena and basically made the problem 10 times worse. 3. The troll-y booking of Roman Reigns, a ham-fisted attempt at captialising on this "phenomena" and taking back control, actually ended up giving a clear message to the fans that they could sabotage their shows. It's kind of far too late now. I do blame the bookers for not being stronger. The crowds are their Frankenstein's monster.

What is "meta-based entertaminment"? Something like Community? You-Tube videos like this one? I'm just wondering what you think the causal connection is between that and twats chanting "we are awesome" at wrestling shows.

Parv will shit on modern wrestling instead of seeking out modern wrestling where crowds don't act like snoby anglosaxon reddit users while the majority of modern wrestling he decides to even give a chance is still the one where you're most likely to have those types of crowds. If you watch those shows it's pretty clear those crowds don't take wrestling more seriously than people today. In fact a New Japan crowd even TODAY probably acts more seriously than All Japan crowds those days did because they've been conditioned to do so after decades of New Japan, well, not being a total joke like it is today. And that is with all the american BS Gedo does currently. Yet Parv's reaction to watching a little bit of modern New Japan was "what is this post-modern BS". He is a gimmick after all.What? I'm not a gimmick, I genuinely hate the phenomenon of the post-modern crowd and I blame bookers for pandering to them and workers for not sticking to their guns instead of giving in to them. It's too late now, it's happened. I've said modern NJPW seems computer game-y and oddly sterile. I haven't seeked out any modern wrestling, the vast majority of stuff I've watched has been pimped stuff for GWE purposes. And some PPV's of WWE and NXT to ensure that my Network subscription wasn't being used entirely to watch WCW shows I already own and have already seen. I cancelled the Network. There is great wrestling going on all over the place and there has been for the past decade. But I'm not a fan who just watches for great matches. I need the total package, and how many hours of my life do you want me to waste looking for it in 2016 when I've got God knows how many DVDs here of stuff from when it was presented in a way that I actually enjoy? Fucking gimmick, what a cheek.

Pedantic to the last. Sometimes, I resent having to explain things that should be obvious: I didn't mean they actually thought they were Dave Meltzer. I was talking about them all thinking they are "smart" with a particular sense of hubris and snark. This really is obvious from the things I've said. But, it's alright, opt instead to take the comment literally. Fuck's sake. And Meltzer certainly was an influence on all of them.

Time to wheel this post out:

That's the Meltzerian history you're refering too. The one of "official good work". The "workrate history", in essence. Just saying.

They might look at 70s and 80s AJPW crowds as an example of an audience that can be respectful while also maintaining the capacity to lose their shit, laugh, or whatever else. I mean there are other models too, but within a wrestling context, that's probably the closest to ideal I could think of for a product that has severely downplayed the face / heel divide, and which foregrounds the matches and wrestling. It's kind of a shame that when Bryan and co were taking their cues from Misawa and co, the crowds who worshipped them didn't also take their cues from the AJPW crowds who worshipped the pillars.

I suspect he was raising valid points in that interview too. Guys in the late 70s, and during the 80s, forgot how to wrestle. Which is to say, some of those older guys would look at your typical MSG match and think that the workers didn't know "a wristlock from a wristwtach". That older guard from the Thesz-led generation valued mat-wrestling fundamentals. In fact, Backlund was probably one the last guys who could really do it properly, and even he worked a kind of strong-man graceless style. He wasn't Verne Gagne. Actually, ironically, Flair could do a lot of that stuff, as a Gagne-trainee, but his OWN wrestling tastes tended towards athleticism and showmanship, and he didn't really like spending too much time down on the mat, and so over the years he increasingly de-emphasised it. If you have the mindset of a Thesz or a Rogers, from the older generation, it's a valid knock on why those guys did away with the fundamentals and focused so much on strikes and throws. I think the older generation AREN'T just being grumpy old men, they are raising valid points. They worked to a certain set of principles and then saw them violated, and naturally complained. And so the eternal tension between respecting tradition and pioneering innovation. It is a mistake to assume that ANY artform is in constant evolution, it isn't. It's more complicated. And we who think critically need to cut through all of that and try to work out, well, are some ideas basically sound? And are others not basically sound? Did Johnny Valentine's philosophy of wrestling have anything -- intrinsically -- to recommend it? Did Flair's? Did Daniel Bryan's? Does Ospreay's? Often history tells us the answer. We don't look back to the 70s and valorise Big John Studd, we tend to look at Jack Brisco. We don't look back to the 80s and champion Hercules, we look at Flair and Funk. And so it will be in 20 years time when fans look back on the 2010s and -- much like some of us look back and wonder how in the fuck Chief Jay Strongbow got monster pops at MSG every month -- will wonder why the fans are losing their shit for the firework flippy-do midgets. Or they might look back and say "well, hmmm, maybe that guy was right to do fifteen backflips in this match, THAT's work". Of course, they'd be wrong, but that's the heart of it. Smarky post-modern self-aware crowds still suck though because ... well, smarky post-modern crowds suck in general, whatever the medium. Admitting it is a problem in the first place would be a start. If you hold that it isn't a problem, then I guess we fundamentally disagree. I am not for moving on the issue now, ten years ago, or in ten years time. I just hate that variety of crowd, always have, always will. And I won't watch modern wrestling until they are purged.

See also, Kenta Kobashi vs. Stan Hansen.

Since you've now stooped into the depths of ad hominem, throwing around phrases like "pseudo-intellectual" as if you are in a position to do so, it is best if we resolve theory into practice. I think that means you go off to watch TNA or whatever and I go off to watch old Terry Funk matches. Toodle pip.

If you engage in knock-down arguments for the sake of the knocking down, you end up losing understanding and nuance. El-P's "reply" here is a classic example. I shall demonstrate: Here this is some real verbal slight of hand and some slippage. I argued: "Austin and other anti-heroes primarily stood for an American concept of liberty, broadly they are libertarian". I also argued: "Bookers need to control their crowds, not let crowds control them." And as an ancillary point: "The people in general don't know their arses from their elbows, as proven by recent history, and indeed pointed out by Machiavelli". Notice how in El-P's lazy flash reply, in which he is seeking not really to make any substantial arguments but rather to "knock down" mine, and in-so-doing perhaps score points with the peanut gallery, he ends up conflating these two obviously distinct arguments. It is a poor piece of argumentation by him. If you knew your history, you'd know that both Crusher and Dick the Bruiser started out as beer-guzzling heels and over time were embraced by the crowds. I think we probably need to distinguish between "libertarian" as it is understood in the narrow frame of contemporary American politics, and in the broad frame of moral philosophy. My usage is the latter. This should clear up any further complaints along these lines. Libertarianism has a long history. As a Frenchman, you should know that. The good ol' crowds and chants you are talking about are 100% better than "fight forever" or any other such weak post-modern self-congratulatory bullshit. It comes down to the question -- not of politics, not of morality -- but of authenticity. There is, in fact, a brutal and visceral sense of anthropological insight in seeing cultural prejudices being exposed pretty nakedly in wrestling crowds. As 2,000 angry people in a high school gym in Oklahoma during the mid-80s openly chant "sissy" at Jim Cornette while baying for his blood. Here we get a glimpse into something real, into something that actually existed under-or-close-to-the-surface of the culture bubbling up and boiling over. There's a genuine point of interest there. It throws back ethical questions our way. It makes us think. It makes us see how the world may or may not have changed. It makes us ruminate on the relationship between cultural values and individual belief. "Fight forever" can't do any of that. It's a facile, empty chant in a self-referential loop meaningless to anything outside of itself. It is, in essence, the opposite to a "point of interest".

Part 2: The people need to be tamed, or else they do stupid shit like vote for Brexit and decimate the UK economy ... Or ruin wrestling by putting themselves over ... for ... No particular reason at all. The people en masse are a great hazard, a great irrational beast. Machiavelli has a good passage on this somewhere. See Discourses on Livy, Book 1, Chapter 29: "Which is more ungrateful: a people or a prince?" Or, indeed, the entirety of The Prince. ---- Incidentally, and this is disconnected from the rest of my post and the argument I've been laying out in this thread: he also has a good passage on the overall topic of this thread in the Discourses (Book 2, Preface), although on this, ever the pragmatist, he would disagree with my stance: Here's the kicker: If there's any argument to be made against the things I've said, this is surely it.

For some reason, the forum software is not letting me quote Parties, so I can't quite make the post I wanted to. You'll have to imagine the relevant bits of his post I want to quote. "Stuff" Those bookers should never have been allowed within an inch of the wrestling business in the first place. And that "cheeky self-aware eye" is the most pernicious thing ever to afflict pro wrestling. "Stuff" This is why wrestling isn't as good now as it was before. What sort of lilly-liveried Epicurean sauce is this? "Stuff" Fred Blassie is turning in his grave. "Stuff" That's why so many of us are still talking about those weirdos thirty, in some cases forty or fifty years on. They are interesting, unique, and not like normal people. "Stuff" If they didn't stand for the moral foundation of Liberty, what did they stand for? "Stuff" I don't believe not even for a second that more than a quarter of those fans in attendance that night had even seen Nakamura before that night. So if they don't care what we think, why were they doing everything in their power to come across as of Nakamura was a living diety to them? "Stuff" "Fight forever, fight forever" No amount of beer ever consumed can justify that shit.

I think we should all ruminate on the exceptionally dark moral compass of David Crockett. It has occurred to me many times that Tully is more or less in the right for much of that feud. My original point was that Magnum, Austin and Bruiser were all libiterian heroes. They stand up mainly for freedom, and a particular understanding of freedom at that (see Isaiah Berlin, negative liberty). They were anti-heroes designed to appeal to men who could live vicariously through their exploits. They could do things that these men -- perhaps brow-beaten at work, or pussywhipped by their wives -- would likely not dare to in their own lives. I do not think this type of hero is a uniquely 90s thing, or that it came out of smart fan culture or dick fan crowds.

I don't want to live in a world in which Regal is defending that.