Embrodak

Cena was obviously a better “Top Guy”, but Bret is very obviously the better wrestler and performer. He didn’t have Cena’s gift of gab, but his promos have actually aged much better and are a lot more credible than most of Cena’s.

I think Jericho at his peak was a much better, smoother, more athletic worker than Punk at his best, without question. Cornette described young Jericho as being like a gazelle, and that’s accurate. Even at his best, Punk has always been sloppy and awkward, because he’s an athlete by necessity, not by nature. Punk is a better psychologist and has a much stronger persona, as shown by the fact that his “reinvention” is basically just him modulating various characteristics that are present at all times in every incarnation. He made it look somewhat credible-ish that he was fighting pre-Beast Brock despite having one of the worst physiques in wrestling; he had one of the better Streak matches against Undertaker; he was one of Cena’s best opponents; he had the best feud in AEW history, and the matches did deliver, even if they weren’t top-shelf. He hasn’t needed gratuitous props like jackets or The List or fireballs, hasn’t needed to dress in goofy outfits, hasn’t needed a thousand nicknames, hasn’t needed clout vampirism, and hasn’t claimed to have been abducted by aliens to throw his wife off the scent of obvious infidelity. Jericho’s promos haven’t aged as well, either. Yeah, Punk has an all-time cringe line with “Phil Brooks talking to Paul Levesque”, but Jericho’s got way more low-level cringe, on the whole.

Conversely, I strongly dislike “Carry On My Wayward Son” for The Elite. It has nothing to do with them! An underrated theme is Jake Roberts’s heel theme “Trust Me”, a piece of music just dripping in atmosphere.

If Sammy isn’t doing coke he’s even more of an idiot for the dangerous shit he does in the ring. I can almost forgive it all as the excesses of a nose candy habit.

Redoing Ali vs Inoki, but so nobody gets hurt.

I think Punk is gonna be in the Punk-verse and won’t sniff the top title again. He doesn’t need it, and it creates way too much bad blood. Featured headliner on the secondary weekend show is perfect for him.

I think there will be smartly deployed crossover.

Jungle Boy and Darby are both bad on the mic, but Darby has a persona and a working style that can save him. Jungle Boy is the Dolph Ziggler of AEW, except he’s reliant on other people carrying him to success rather than being the guy with a versatile skill set that can carry other people to success.

My dad is from New Jersey and he liked the WWWF heels.

This is just silly. If you can throw somebody such that their momentum takes them all the way to the springy ropes, they might bounce off a step or two, if they haven’t reclaimed their momentum by that point. But in reality, at least some of the time, Irish whips were a gamble on *regaining* momentum, on hitting the ropes, turning around, and trying to check the guy that threw you. It wasn’t *always* that, certainly, but there’s absolutely a plausible kayfabe explanation of at least some instances of that little ritual. Moreover, though, you are simply forgetting the distinction between absolute and relative plausibility. Even if one grants that neither have any basis in reality, a fucking Irish Whip *could* look plausible to somebody without firsthand knowledge or a strong internal sense of the relative physics of the bodies and the ring structure. All wrestling is cooperative, all of it entails some degree of implausibility, but a wrestling where those things are not even *attemptedly* hidden is just qualitatively *different*, on a fundamental level, such that you really can’t say the performers are doing the same thing. That’s what makes your contention that the craft of wrestling is stronger than ever simply incommensurable to my sense of it, because prior to the last 20 years or so, the craft of wrestling was as much in hiding the cooperation and artifice as it was in what the bodies in the ring were actually doing. I have any number of outlets to watch bodies doing amazing things; what makes *wrestling* different is in seeing people looking like they’re hurting each other more than they actually are and telling a plausible story of interpersonal physical struggle while they’re doing it. Random MSW TV matches from the early 80s are way more compelling and skillful-looking to me than most of what AEW puts out, for example. For all that AEW wants to be a WWE alternative, it often strikes me as the ultimate actualization of what he himself started, just from a different angle.

I think it’s a combination of wrestling stepping down from the central mystique that allowed normie buy-in, Vince McMahon and his weird fucking tastes becoming the only purveyor of any note, diversification of the media market to allow people to pursue more niche entertainment interests, real pro wrestling (MMA) becoming a thing, the creeping desensitization of the fans toward the spectacular element, and (maybe primarily) oversaturation and diminishing returns. People were tired of wrestling in 1995 after a decade of it being all over the fucking place and doing the same stories and finishes all the time, so I think it’s probably more instructive to think of the Monday Night Wars and Attitude Era as an anomalous interruption of a decline in popular interest that started earlier than as the baseline we should be lamenting the fall from.

“Look like you’re having a struggle for victory while adhering to a heightened but intuitively plausible sense on the audience’s part of what the human body in a fight could reasonably endure” was the basic schema of ring psychology in North America, Europe, and Japan, at a minimum, with local stylistic and conventional differences in what the latter could comprise and what performers were willing to do to achieve it. (I’m unfamiliar with early lucha libre and so cannot comment on it, though I would be surprised if there hasn’t been a similar drift in plausibility and spectacle.) I already said in my first post that wrestling was a spent force at the end of the 90s and that I do not begrudge the drift by the indies toward violations of that basic schema over the last 20 years, but it’s just silly to pretend that an Irish Whip or a suplex are the same level of implausible as what is happening now, *especially* given those same performers are doing Irish whips and suplexes, aka adding implausibilities on top of implausibilities, aka change in quantity amounting to a qualitative shift in the dialectic, Mr. “Ring Psychology is just an emergent dialectical agreement between performers and audience”. It’s fair to point out that there has always been a segment of fans that resent additional implausibilities and contrivances that are introduced for the sake of performative variety, but that doesn’t mean there *isn’t* a plausible and meaningful dividing line between 20th and 21st century wrestling. Many wrestlers ceasing to even try to hide the artifice is a big, big change! Artistically, it’s even a logical progression, but I simply don’t think wrestling has enough ontological content to make it worth doing, unless and until we get the wrestling equivalent of a Sergio Leone or a Kurt Vonnegut or whoever.

I’m pretty sure people who say they would rather people work smart and with ring psychology mostly know what they mean by that.

If you want to have the weights even put it should be Punk and Larry.

If TK had fired Punk, I guarantee Punk would have sued and created a huge clusterfuck. Not worth it for anyone involved tbh.

I’m not a Hegel guy, but the quantity turning into quality aspect of the dialectic applies here.

I just don’t care for the highly cooperative flippy-doos, brother. I’m going to write a long-ass essay for my friend’s lit mag tying together the new Riesman book with Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”, as well as whatever dilettantish commie and Marxy nonsense I have floating around in my head, but the long and short of it is I see a lot more to like in the eras where the wrestlers generally tried to make it look legit and had credibility with the general populace than the current one where many don’t. I don’t begrudge it, wrestling by the end of the 90s was a tired and worn-out thing that simply could not survive mass adoption of the internet and personal cameras and streaming technology, not to mention the fact of actual pro wrestling (MMA) becoming a thing, but I would be lying if I said I had the same respect for and interest in it.

I don’t think it’s absurd. Even if Josie Riesman is right and kayfabe was just a myth that promoters used to enthrall the performers, not something that had mass audience buy-in at any point after the early 1900s or so (fucking Evan Lewis and Farmer John got called out faking it in like 1895 for fuck’s sake), the fact that the *performers* took it seriously made it easier to lose yourself and really buy in to the drama. Junkyard Dog really looked like he got caustic chemicals in his eyes because the performers planned it out in a meticulous way that you have to work hard to see through the seams of. I think the Bill Watterson quote about the delicacy of newspaper comics is applicable to wrestling, too. There’s a reason most old-timers hated VKM playing for the cheap seats with an even cartoonier version of wrestling than his old man put on, and there’s a reason that wrecking kayfabe only created a boost that lasted four years or so, followed by a steady and ongoing decline in the popularity of the art. It makes more money now than ever because of changes in the media market, and there might be as many or more total viewers globally as there were in America in 1999 because of international streaming, but at this point, let’s be real, it’s just a particularly inglorious branch of nerd culture writ large. Any specific version of it - The Elite’s postmodern spectacle wrestling, CMFTR’s neo-Bretism, WWE’s house main event style that is somewhere in between the two, outright comedy wrestling, deathmatch wrestling, lucha libre - probably can’t survive on their own in America, though any particular element can probably be excised; altogether, they sustain just enough of a market to keep things going, but for my tastes, they really do clash in a way that makes it hard for me to ever lose myself in what is happening, especially when there is no coordination to make sure that, say, a match that really needs blood isn’t having the audience desensitized to it by a totally gratuitous use of blood in an earlier match. Lucha libre in Mexico is at least consistently fantastical, such that the cooperative spots and unreality don’t really jump out at you as much.

With Punk, it’s mainly that people don’t want the drama. I’m a Punk mark, he was the only consistently watchable part of AEW for me, but I would totally get “We can’t have this guy that half the locker room won’t work with and hates” as a rationale for leaving him out. That said, if TK is like, “I’m paying this guy a million+ per year, of course I’m going to use him if it’s at all feasible”, then these people that would be making a fraction of what they’re making in a TK-less world need to get the fuck over themselves and appreciate that maybe their dream job might have a coworker they don’t like. (And these absolute dullards appropriating abuse language need to shut the hell up.)

I didn’t mean anybody would stop watching AEW, just that people would turn away from his segments, thus nullifying the ratings boost.

He’s not, but I’m sure WBD would like Punk back on the show, too. What I think TK is prob failing to consider is there’s now a sizable chunk of the audience that wants nothing to do with Punk, so he may drive as many away as he brings, but that’s something only empirical testing can prove.

I think if the ratings were consistently better, there would be less of a push toward bringing Punk back, but they’re just not. Rampage has outright mediocre to bad ratings, even for its time slot, and they’re on the cusp of launching a *third* show. Punk wasn’t a *huge* ratings boost, but a 10-15% increase is nothing to sneeze at when you’re working with the fickle margins AEW is. I also sense that the drama with regard to Punk exists in pockets and is not a general locker room phenomenon, hence why there seems to be a sense that keeping Punk to the third show and not booking certain people with him might massage all this away. We’ll see if it works, I guess.

Tony Khan is the real problem, it must be said. Say what you will about the abusive or manipulative environment of any locker room in the past, this kind of pissy factional bullshit is something that bookers and promoters with real experience in The Business clamp down on fairly quickly. As ever, the looseness and fluidity of modernity reveals why the shitty practices of the past developed as they did.

It’s a solid read. If you’ve read Rick Perlstein’s work, there’s a reason they got him to blurb it, but it’s not as dense and meticulous because it’s about one guy, not a whole sociopolitical order and culture. She sometimes has nice turns of phrase, but she also has a proclivity for leaden cliches and stating the obvious - especially at chapter ends, where it’s particularly glaring. Certain choices, like really expanding on the time where Vince got super shitfaced with the boys as sort of a farewell to his “normal” self, are inspired, and the parts focusing on his boyhood are interesting. Ends rather abruptly in 1999, which she says is because of word limits by the publisher. Not enough economics, not enough sociological analysis of wrestling, but solid, if slight, book. I was disappointed because I thought it would be more thorough, but it’s a good jumping off point.

Also the guy who goes yeeeeeesssss on The Simpsons.