Embrodak

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.

People know Iron Sheik is saying “baba”, not “bubba”, right?

The thing is, Evans is working from the same public sources as the rest of us. Josie Riesman (she’s come out as trans, mind your pronouns, folks) at least did some leg work to find some childhood friends and estranged relatives to say that Vince is full of shit when he portrays himself as a wild child and bad boy. What will flesh him out is texts, emails, and letters between Stephanie, Shane, Linda, Trips, Prichard, Patterson, Laurinaitis, etc, as well as those from the man himself to whoever, and those may never see the light of day. Modern day obelisk!

The thing about that framing is it’s basically unfalsifiable. Any Punk/Elite feud is going to be a worked shoot thing, and one cannot really know in that context what someone was “really doing” with this or that context. I hope at least Punk is creative enough to *avoid* some stale Russo retread, though.

What's especially weird is that there was a fake pic of the supposedly mustachioed Vince floating around a few weeks ago, and everyone roasted it and said it looked stupid and then got scolded for falling for a fake, and his actual mustache is not just exponentially but logarithmically worse than the one in the fake pic. The most stilted, fastidious man on the planet disappears for 10 months and then reappears looking like a Madame Tussaud's Caesar Romero statue that got left in the sun for a few hours.

“Ringmaster” was pretty disappointing, fwiw. Ending with the Higher Power promo and encapsulating the last 22 years in as many pages is a massive L for a book with that subtitle. I hate to be a weird Commie reactionary pedant, but the story of Vince requires Cornette’s attendance figures for pre-Vince territory wrestling, requires discussion of Vince as a rentier and not a capitalist, requires discussion of how Vince both prefigured and followed the Silicon Valley model, requires his descent into madness over the last 15 years or so. It’s a fine encapsulation of Vince for a general audience who prob stopped paying attention in 1999, which is probably what it’s really for, but it does not really achieve what it sets out to. The definitive Vince biography may not even be possible until long after anybody cares; if WWE persists as an entity, you better believe they ain’t giving his personal papers to any historian with any hostility to them whatsoever.

Let’s be honest, the mustache and dye job are more out of character for Vince than making Rita Chatterton suck his dick in a limo outside of a Denny’s. One is disgusting and awful and worthy of ostracizing if we actually had any social leverage to apply, one is weird and difficult to understand, and attention drifts naturally toward the latter because of how human attention bias works, sad though it may be in practice.

I’m reading the Vince book right now, and I’m put in mind of Vince aggressively lobbying for the deregulation of wrestling so he could save on the taxes and fees, as well as just his general resentment at control of any form. For as much as AEW and Indy wrestling are marketed as “WWE alternatives”, they sure don’t shy away from swimming in the pool that Vince built. Even if the athletic commissions were kind of a joke, they were at least a scaffolding on which some protections of these people (including from themselves) could have been built.

I said it was a free form discussion *of a specific thing*, dude. Telling you to shut up because you’ve turned the whole thread into a litigation of your badly-argued and mostly incoherent points, points that aren’t even relevant to this thread’s (admittedly sometimes loose) main focus, is *more* on topic than anything you’ve been talking about for pages now. You know we’re all far left because we told you your opinions are bad and aren’t particularly interested in a granular discussion of why; we know you’re conservative because you developed a persecution complex over something asinine in the course of like a day. Suck it up and move on. Go read Norman Finkelstein’s “The Holocaust Industry” if you want actually intelligent engagement with the political motivations and economic incentives that organizations like the Auschwitz Museum consciously and unconsciously operate from; this ain’t an example of it.

I was actually probably being too mean to Corny, his cohost is Jewish and wouldn’t stand for this foolish line of discussion, but nevertheless.

Dude, please just shut the fuck up and let it go. The topic of the thread is whether the WWE has intrinsic problems that will undermine its seeming dominance, as well as a free form discussion of the various backstage happenings and dramas that may or may not be indicative of such, not whether your rants are being read charitably enough by the woke mob of PWO. Everybody understands your weird positions, you’re not converting anybody to them, and nobody gives a shit that the mods are censoring you. Go join the Jim Cornette Facebook group if you want to have weird Boomer arguments about whether the Auschwitz Museum is acting proportionally and in good faith. (No hate to Corny, for the record, but I cannot imagine a less attractive corner of the IWC than an official Facebook group for him started in 2023.)

That Dante Martin bump was so depressing, honestly. The only potentially viable alternative wrestling company in America, and you’re having/letting a promising young talent do *that*? On a program where it doesn’t even stand *out* because your guys are doing ridiculous, dangerous stunts all the time?

On the topic of this thread, I have a weird feeling that wrestling is still operating on borrowed time, despite this Wrestlemania’s success and the sale. TV is only going to continue to decline over the next few decades, and rights fees are going to slowly dry up as a revenue source, especially if the advertising industry falls off the cliff I’ve seen whispers it may be heading for. Streaming hasn’t really proven itself economically viable as an alternative media ecosystem, and even if it does, part of wrestling’s weird longevity and viability is the *live* nature of it, which is more difficult to generate a sizable premium on in a streaming context. All of which suggests that wrestling may reach an impasse where it’s dependent primarily on ticket sales to fund itself once again, and it seems very questionable to me whether that is even possible anymore, at least on anything like the scale and with the production quality we’re used to. Idk, between this sale and AEW doing Wembley, there are real “JCP is doing so great that we bought an expensive private plane” vibes in the ether.

I really think there’s a lot of overthinking going on here. A clip of Auschwitz as synonymous with prison is not something the white supremacist far right really vibes with. These are, by and large, people who have convinced themselves that the Nazis never attempted to liquidate the Jews and that every bit of evidence of that is a Jewish psyop. Far more likely is that it was saved in some repository of stock footage they asailed wwe public domain under an inconspicuous file name and pulled ignorantly from there. Not good, but the racist right doesn’t even *like* Trump anymore, mostly because he listed way too much to Jared in his first term. The notion that Vince’s friendship with him is an infinite proof of any and all assumptions of racism is just wishful thinking more than anything.

Did Bron Brekker turn heel? Saw a gif of him giving Carmelo the Mark Henry salmon suit special.

I understood that he was joking, my point is that there is genuine tension between the desire for Justice on social and political problems and the fact that certain aspects of the legal system, like presumption of innocence and standards of evidence, were introduced for good reasons, too. It’s a tricky problem.

The first 10% or so of the Vince book is good. Not greatly-written, kinda dime store Perlstein, but well-researched. Excited to read the rest. Vince really is a Rosetta Stone for contemporaneity.

The justice system is shit, but I also don’t think a coherent, morally satisfactory vision of a post-liberal system of justice has been articulated, either.

Vince hates his facial hair and carries an electric shaver around with him to eliminate five o’clock shadow, what in the CTE fuck convinced him that the moment of arguably his greatest triumph (or at least his personal apotheosis) was the time to whip out the worst mustache in wrestling history? Even judging him in a purely “beyond good and evil” sense, it’s like Caesar celebrating his post-Civil War Triumph with a toupee that doesn’t match his hair color.

I really think people are overthinking this. I just listened to that Tim Hornbaker “Death of the Territories” book and JCP, at the height of its powers, put off massive payoffs for the sake of stringing the audience along and trying, fruitlessly, to get bigger returns by extending stories beyond their natural life cycle. Trips is a JCP mark, this is just him letting his inner Dusty run wild, if it’s not Vince being a weirdo.

Really depends how you structure your list, I think, whether it's based on concrete achievement or on a perceived abstraction drawn from said achievements, or on a combo of the two. For example, Roman has had the benefit of being at the top of the card for a long time and having had a lot of thought and craft put into his matches by the most experienced and talented agents his company has. I'm sure he'd do well if you just plopped him down in a ring and told him to go, probably much better than a meticulous planner like a Kenny Omega, but I think there are probably a lot of wrestlers, historically and contemporarily, that could have done so better but don't have as many great matches to their name. After the obvious point that people disagree about the relative merits of various matches, I would imagine that where one sits in the concrete/abstract XY plane is a large source of variation in how individual lists get made; it's a big reason why Macho Man ranks highly on some lists and is low or absent on others, for example.

Laughing to myself at the idea of Cody escaping the Codyverse, only for it to follow him like Michael Myers and merge with the WWE right at the moment when he was supposed to win the big one.