My Message To the Pro-Wrestling Journalists & Podcasters Of The Future

At the end of 2016 my weekly podcast, The Work of Wrestling, will go on hiatus. During that hiatus I plan on restructuring the show so that, in the future, it will be distributed in a highly focused, seasonal format. I do not yet know how long that hiatus will be and I do not yet know how long those seasons will be, but I am excited about the prospect of reinvention and return.

While I still plan to continue writing about wrestling whenever the mood strikes, it feels like a good time to offer a "see you later" (rather than a goodbye) to The Pro-Wrestling Community, particularly to the younger writers & podcasters currently honing their crafts. You are the ones who will take up this mantle, push it into the 21st Century and beyond, and change the way people think about professional wrestling (for the better). Your passion, your ingenuity, and your progressive perspectives will be needed for our Community to ever grow up.

The Art Of My Way

This song, and the "My Way" vignette that helped build Rock & Austin's fateful main event encounter at WrestleMania 17, was so effective that it is permanently embedded in the minds of the wrestling fans who witnessed it.

I cannot separate my own adolescence from The Rock & Steve Austin's feud, and particularly the song that helped define it. It plays on a permanent loop in the hallowed halls of teenaged angst in my mind, recollections of doing things "My way!" because The Rock & Steve Austin did things their way, giving and taking Rock Bottoms and Stunners to my brothers (on mattresses, of course), walking through my high school purposefully locked away in my own little world of catchphrases and iconic gestures, a Rock-like twitch to my neck and a bad-mother-fucker bravado to my stride.

WORK OF WRESTLING - EP79 - MISSY KEEN

While I spend most of my time these days writing arts criticism related to professional wrestling, at heart I'm a fiction-writer. That's what I've done my whole life, and that's what I'll continue to do long after I've written or said my last word on pro-wrestling. While I love the writing process itself, I am not enamored with the "literary world".

Readings, wine-tastings, workshops, conferences, literary-networking, talking about books, waiting six months for a response...all of it interests me a lot less than working on something and then sharing it directly with you free of charge.

WORK OF WRESTLING - EP78 - RICOCHET vs WILL OSPREAY

This week on The Work of Wrestling podcast I weigh in on the recent "controversial" match between Ricochet and Will Ospreay in New Japan Pro-Wrestling which sparked a debate in the wrestling community; do synchronized acrobatics undermine the credibility of wrestling?

Is this match pro-wrestling at all?

WORK OF WRESTLING PODCAST - EP75 - WYATT MANNOX

This week I'm joined by my friend Brian Ariotti to discuss the intersection between the art of comedy and the art of professional wrestling.

In addition to sharing stories about working at Ringside Collectibles, Brian talks about his top five favorite wrestlers (which includes The Boogie Man), how he feels about maturing into adulthood, and he shares some useful insights on how to avoid becoming jaded and how "life experience" can positively affect the way we consume art.

THE ART OF BELIEVABILITY IN PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING

Professional wrestling (even the WWE's spectacle-based version dubbed Sports Entertainment) is most effective when it's believable. Believable does not necessarily mean "realistic". As works of fantasy and science-fiction often demonstrate, believability has less to do with real-world characters and real-world situations and more to do with establishing a clear relationship between cause and effect.

One of the clearest examples of this principle in action is when a wrestler pulls their opponent's tights. If a pro-wrestler pulls the tights of another wrestler during a pin, it's understood by the audience that doing so gives that wrestler an unfair amount of leverage on their opponent and almost always guarantees a victory.

THE RAW REVIEW

I only have so many sentences left.

Even if I live a long life, every time I finish writing a sentence, I’m getting closer and closer to the last one I’ll ever write.

Put like that, I can’t help but question why I would ever devote an extensive amount of time writing about a television show I regard as inescapably terrible. Whether or not it’s terrible for anyone else isn’t important to me when considering if I should go on writing a weekly RAW REVIEW. For me, the one who writes this, Monday Night Raw is a terrible television show that exhibits no real sign of genuine improvement and hasn’t in the four years I’ve been writing about it. Genuine improvement would mean a creative overhaul. A creative overhaul means an entirely different creative team with entirely different ideas from the ones currently making it on our television screens. Creative overhaul means never seeing another “invasion” angle or another “collusion” angle or anything anyone could easily identify as an “angle”. Creative overhaul means reconditioning the audience to be an actual audience rather than a cult of greedy, ignorant, self-important blog-babies who think summary-writing qualifies as writing and repeatedly using the word “nuance” is an indicator of intelligence and that the art pro-wrestling is a “choose your own adventure” young adult novel.

ON THE ART OF PRO-WRESTLING COMMENTARY: OR "VETERAN INSTINCTS" IN THE WWE

On the April 18th, 2016 episode of Monday Night Raw, Chris Jericho fought Sami Zayn in the opening match.

The match itself, given the basic setup, was a good contest that played to the strengths of both performers. And from a pro-wrestling fan's point of view, Jericho vs Zayn is an incredibly enticing, almost surreal match-up; an exemplar from pro-wrestling's past taking on the bright beacon of pro-wrestling's future. If the two were feuding it's a match that could easily headline a pay-per-view with the proper build.

THE RAW REVIEW

Imagine we’re by a campfire; you, me, and a few other campers. We’ve been hiking all day, and now we’re sitting down together to eat and drink and talk. The moonlight splinters against the forest canopy, falling to the dirt like strands of silk. Twigs and leaves snap and rustle in the dark beyond our campsite, reminding us that we’re not really alone. The campfire-light holds us in a warm, orange bubble, as we pull apart bits of jerky and laugh as gram crackers and marshmallows and chocolate dissolve in our mouths. A bottle of Jack passes from mouth to mouth, and that’s when the stories start.

THE RAW REVIEW

“Was RAW good?” my wife asked when she noticed RAW fade to black on my laptop. I could hear the hope in her voice, the earnest desire of any good spouse to know their partner is happy.
“I don’t know,” I sighed. She laughed in reply, accustomed to the sometimes indescribable angst any episode of Monday Night Raw inspires in me.

THE RAW REVIEW

Pro-wrestling is storytelling.

Everything that goes on in a pro-wrestling show is symbolic, a literal representation of something figurative (like theater, film, television etc). The simulated combat of a pro-wrestling match, while resulting in very literal pain, is a metaphor for a real-world sport, a personal conflict, a war, a familial struggle, an identity crisis, or (often in WWE’s case) corporate negotiations. Because pro-wrestling is storytelling, the medium’s symbolism and iconography can be incredibly powerful. Over time, audiences are conditioned to associate maneuvers, phrases, gestures, expressions, and even objects with particular performers or scenarios. The best professional wrestlers tend to be those who use their symbolic power to their advantage, manipulating the audience to incredibly intense Moments of Pop.

THE RAW REVIEW

First impressions are important.

That first encounter can even come to define your relationship with that person. Over time, your initial assessment of their character might prove to be incorrect, but it’s impossible to be wrong about how you feel. “I like this person” or “I don’t like this person” isn’t connected to anything objective about the person who inspires those feelings. You might hate someone who is a “good person” and you might love someone who is a “bad person”.

The same holds true for artists and their works of art.

The Writings

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