internationalobject.com

www.internationalobject.com.

New Site Design Coming

I’ve taken the last week or so off from updating, and for that I apologize. Between the Jarrett-Angle soap opera, ZZ Top hosting Raw for whatever reason, and Lucha Libre taking over Toronto with severe positive reactions, there certainly hasn’t been a lack of wrestling stuff to talk about. But I wanted to concentrate all the free time I had to work on the new site design.

I really thought WordPress would fit the needs of this site. It was simple, it could be updated anywhere, and I had a little capability in design decisions. The problem comes when one begins to think about typography. I’m importing lots of exported material into this blog, and the formatting leaves tons to be desired. Entire essays look terrible. Links sometimes look like they’re not links. Once I’ve pasted a quote in, the rest of the entry then follows the formatting of the quote and not the body. Being someone who typesets for a living, this sort of shit troubles me to no end.

So, I’m building a new site. I’m building it with Rapidweaver, and it’s going to look awesome. More importantly, it’ll be incredibly easy to read, digest, and push. Navigation will be twice as fast, and the type will be consistent. More importantly, it’ll be flexible, meaning the columns change based on your browser. The default size of the type is bigger, too.

Why should this matter? Isn’t this just a blog about pro wrestling? Well, yes and no. First off, I’m not writing about wrestling because I just love pro wrestling soooo much. I’m writing because I have serious concerns about mass culture, because I feel that pro wrestling can be a force of creative and cultural good, and that its very art is being squeezed to death by the status quo of what people expect. The way I’ve chosen to do that is to write more essays on professional wrestling than anyone has done in years. I’ve put out over two dozen essays regarding several arguments about the art of pro wrestling, all for free. In between the release of these essays, I’ve commented on the goings-on of the wrestling world, often with curation towards viewing the spectacle as an art form-cum-business anomaly. I do not and will not ever treat wrestling as a sport, as something to be “reported on.” People don’t report on interpretive dance exhibitions. People don’t post rumours about Cirque Du Soliel. Pro wrestling shares so much more with these art forms and others than it does with any real exhibition of sport, and I want to spread this idea.

I’m fairly certain my website is the only professional wrestling website that is regularly updated that doesn’t feature tons of circa-1999 pop up ads and terrible graphics or antiquated pay methods. It’ll always stay that way.

Anyways, the new site will be up soon. I’m buying the domain this week. In the meantime, I just released my novel as a variety of free ebooks. Stick with me. I’m going to push this as hard as I can.

on UFC 100

From Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports:

After bludgeoning Frank Mir to retain the Ultimate Fighting Championship heavyweight championship at the hyped UFC 100, the former pro wrestling star decided to put on a real show.

Lesnar ran around the octagon flipping off the Mandalay Bay Events Center crowd with both middle fingers. He shouted at Mir as the challenger sat on a stool trying to regain his equilibrium. Mir stood up and they went sort of nose-to-broken nose before Lesnar cackled with laughter.

In the post-fight interview, Lesnar encouraged the booing fans to “keep going” before continuing to taunt Mir.

No one and nothing was spared. Lesnar even turned his attention to the UFC itself, which paid him an estimated $3 million for the fight, pointing at the giant Bud Light advertisement in the middle of the octagon.

“I’m drinking a cooler full of Coors Light, Coors Light because Bud Light won’t pay me anything.”

Anything for the children at home, big guy?

“Hell, I might even get on top of my wife tonight.”

The fans of UFC might have been surprised to see such a flagrant display of heel chicanery, but those of us who watched and enjoyed Lesner in his 2002-2004 run in WWE can view this as a remarkable return to form. Lesner was great at being the bully. A beast of a man, Lesner dominated WWE simply because he appeared dominating. 

Dana White, the president of UFC, apparently had to calm Lesner down after the fight and talk him into being more of a “team player.” UFC has enjoyed a several-year run of legitimate coverage and respect by the mainstream for cleaning up their act, and no doubt they don’t want their prize attraction acting like he still works for “sports entertainment.” One of the ways UFC has gone out of its way to handle its legitimization is the downplay of “characters” as they had in the 90s and focus on regular men who have worked incredibly hard to be where they are. They have no interest in changing their game to suit Lesner, which explains White’s backstage talk. 

Here’s the interesting part, however. This is:

A villain was born and there isn’t an obvious superhero in sight. The UFC brought Brock Lesnar over from the WWE for just this kind of a sensation. And the big man has delivered – the good, the bad and the embarrassing.

Sports writers are already painting a story around Lesner, as if they can’t help but rein him into a narrative. UFC took several steps this weekend towards “sports entertainment,” and it will be interesting to see if they can successfully stay away from it. 

WE CAN LEARN NOTHING FROM THE PAST

The problem with looking back on professional wrestling is that everyone has their own definition of when wrestling was “good.” This period of time is, without a doubt, the period of time when the person found themselves drawn to the show week in and week out. It occurs usually twice in life, once as a child, another as a social event with friends in their late teens. Ask just about anyone in their mid-30s, and they’ll tell you they watched pro wrestling as a kid. As anyone in their 40s, and they’ll say the same thing (and say the wrestling ten years later was awful). People tend to outgrow wrestling and eventually come to think of it only as a bygone fad, like a pet rock or a tamigotchi.

Since everyone has their own sense of when it was “good,” the only real way of defining the good times of pro wrestling was when it was objectively very popular and figuring out exactly what they were doing right. Do this, and in theory one unlocks potential to repeat the past and bring popularity and influence back to the art.
There have been three periods in North America when pro wrestling held the public’s attention as viable entertainment. The first boom happened in the 1950s with the burgeoning popularity of television and a more animated cast of characters. At the time, wrestling appeared harmless as a family-oriented event a family could watch together. Evil characters reflected the xenophobia of the cold war: communists, japanese, nazis, and indians held top villain spots. Heroes were often blue-collar Americans. They had families to feed and believed in the American dream to no end. Wrestling took inspiration from comic books in taking real world headlines, flattening them into a digestible two dimensions, animating the performers into caricature to provide some distance from real life, and have their serious problems completely solved within a single episode.
It made for quality fantasy, but the same tactics could not be used today. Treating the world’s problems as episodic trivialities might seem possible, but one only needs to look at the various attempts to portray Mohammad Hassan in 2005 to see how this doesn’t work today. The character, a frustrated villain sick of being portrayed as a “terrorist,” entered the WWE with the desire to punish xenophobes. It was a terrible concept; Hassan came across as paranoid, and everyone he fought came across as borderline racist. Worst of all, WWE scrapped the character and fired the wrestler portraying him following the London 7/7 terrorist attacks in 2005. Not only was WWE failing in delivering a dialogue about racism involving athletes of middle eastern descent (a huge opportunity wasted), but they killed the character the second he became actually controversial.
In many ways, there is really no room for two dimensional stereotypes in professional wrestling.(That doesn’t mean they don’t still try their hardest. 2008 might have been the year where caricatures made a solid comeback, first with the Domino brothers and then with the “Diva” title replacing “woman” on the women’s championship.) With the rise of the internet and the widespread knowledge of a pro wrestlers’ inner life (thanks in part to the wrestling industry) we can no longer distance our viewing of a character from that of a real person (much in the same way we know that Brad Pitt has a house somewhere with three dozen kids to feed). The days of fans challenging a foreign wrestler out in the parking lot (or running them out of the arena with pitchforks) is long over. The villains of the current era are often indistinguishable from the heroes in terms of action and character. Almost no lessons can be learned from 1950s wrestling.
The next period of pro wrestling popularity was with the rise of Hulkamania in the mid-80s. Much like the Mario Brothers in the video game industry, Hulk Hogan’s psycho-All American rose the waters for all boats. The popularity of the WWF at the time was immense and is still being felt today. This era gave us the term “sports entertainment,” an idea so insane that everyone bought it for 20 years. (Aren’t all popular sports entertaining to an extent?) This was the genius of the marketing at the time; the WWF was at last everything to everyone. The show delivered human characters for the first time; Randy Savage, Ricky Steamboat, and Roddy Piper were all cartoons, but more genuine humanity came through their personas than anyone had ever seen from a wrestler before. We were given stories about infidelity, faith, politics, greed, and humility. The period between 1986 and 1990 was packed so tightly with important moral tales I’m surprised it never came out as a book of fables.
All of it was coated with the All-American ethics of a 4th of July celebration. Wrestlers were the greatest athletes in the world, and wrestling fans were the best people. This period gave us Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior, The Iron Sheik, and so many others that still define pro wrestling in the minds of the general public. This is, however, no longer a good thing. It is the image of the steroid-riddled Warrior that leads to so much ridicule about wrestlers being terrible role models; it is the xenophobia attached to the Iron Sheik that shows us as being a racist group of people; it is the Hollywood cheese of Hulk Hogan that makes us fans look like devotees of d-level has-been celebrities.
What little value there is is telling a moral tale flies straight out the window when the players have all largely been found out to be incredibly immoral people. Insider knowledge travels faster than real news these days, and the steroid and drug abuse alone would destroy the ability for pro wrestlers to tell a moral story.
This acceptance that wrestlers are the bane of society is, ironically, how wrestling became insanely popular in the late 90s. By letting otherwise evil people deliver justice to the corrupted heroes in a hope of destroying the status quo, pro wrestling briefly tapped into counterculture and punk sensibilities.
The people running the show in the late 90s realized one very important lesson; wrestlers were human beings, and allowing them to feel and act human on stage led to greater emotional reaction. This led to two important things; the rise of the anti-hero, and the elimination of any semblance that “wrestling is real.”
The stars of this generation are in fact still considered stars to this date. The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Goldberg, “Hollywood” Hogan, HHH, Shawn Michaels, and Mick Foley are often the wrestlers still associated with pro wrestling, even though only three of them are still working for any wrestling company. This has stopped being a great marketing tool (come to see Mick Foley and the rest of the TNA stars!) and begun to be a sign that newer wrestlers have been completely looked over by the mainstream vision of wrestling. (The exception to this rule is Chris Jericho, a fantastic performer whose talents include music and acting. Whenever there is a mainstream story about pro wrestling, Jericho is almost always the one being interviewed, as he is seen by just about everyone to be well-spoken and a great face for the art, even though he only ever wins the world title has a scheming bastard.)
But the problem with the late 90s period of pro wrestling was not its over-famous icons. It was, somewhat ironically, that it revealed wrestling to be an ugly place. In a purposeful move to distance itself from its own past, pro wrestling became more realistic than ever before. Brutal violence defined the appeal, largely thanks to “Hardcore” influence from underground wrestling organizations. The reality of it was that wrestling was just as scripted as ever, but the attempt to portray itself as “more real than other wrestling” forced its performers to put on more realistic matches. There was even a small period where ultimate fighters and boxers were given spots on the show to exhibit their skills. They were often the least watchable aspects of any show. It took many people many years to realize this point, but the point has been since clearly proven: wrestling fans don’t actually want reality. They want the art of professional wrestling, and in retrospect the late 90s delivered very little of this.
Unfortunately, the past delivers few messages of hope for those trying to make pro wrestling important again. The rules appear to change every generation, with fans demanding something different every time.

Matt Hardy is right about us

From Matt Hardy:

Anybody who writes about me, whether good or bad, but especially bad.. I couldn’t care less. I just say thanks for keeping me in the news.” Guys and gals, this quote is directed toward internet writers, haters, and bogus pro wrestling journalism-no one loves & respects their TRUE casual fans more than I do! Anyone who has met me over the course of the last 15 years knows that. So basically, when a “keyboarder” looks to be “witty” by making a joke surrounding myself of Jeff, I’m indifferent towards it. Same goes for any supposed ”pro wrestling expert” who compliments me.. It’s nice to hear, but it’s not anything I take too seriously. I’m all about making my true fans happy, along with my peers and superiors at work-because they’re the people that keep me in business.

I’m going to refrain from saying anything good or bad about Matt Hardy (since he won’t listen anyway) and point out just how right he is about professional wrestling journalism. Pro wrestling is in and of itself a ridiculous circus, but pro wrestling journalists have done themselves absolutely no favours in the history of their craft by treating it like a real sport. I cannot remember a single publication or website on wrestling that hasn’t either appeared to be a sports rag, or is is a sports rag that also includes wrestling. The inclusion of MMA reporting on pro wrestling websites has just made things worse.

Regardless of experience, regardless of age, and regardless of journalism qualification, every single writer on professional wrestling should take one piece of advice and infuse every single sentence they write with it: wrestling is not a sport. Don’t write about it like it is. It’s not helping the wrestlers, it’s not helping potential fans, and it’s most certainly not helping you.

Only then can we begin to be taken seriously by the talent, by fans, and by the real world.

Joey Styles and Twitter

From Ryan Clark:

Joey Styles was told outright to make no more Twitter posts talking about politics. While it was noted that some in the company loved what he said since most in WWE are very conservative, there was said to be a lot of heat on Styles from the corporate side for fear of an advertiser backlash.

This is of course in reference to Joey Styles’ controversial Twitter post a few weeks ago. I can’t say I’m surprised that he got a talking to. WWE is too big a company to risk personal politics (regardless of what the top brass believe in) affecting revenue streams.

WWE Injuries

Injuries are an expected risk in professional wrestling. There isn’t a single professional wrestler on any major roster who hasn’t taken some time off to heal either nagging minor injuries of shelved for months over a major one. The news of Edge’s latest major injury yesterday evidently is going to shelve him until next year. This marks another in a long series of major injuries in the WWE main event scene in the past year. Randy Orton, Batista, HHH, and John Cena have all been out of action for periods of time due to one injury or another, with Shawn Michaels and the Undertaker taking extended leaves to properly heal. Really, the only top-tier character in WWE who hasn’t taken time off this year is Chris Jericho, who has managed to stay injury-free since returning in 2007.

Needless to say, there is something seriously wrong with how top talent is being handled in WWE. The demanding schedules, the increased trips overseas, and the constant demand to one-up one another have all lead to an increase of injuries.

Contrast this to TNA’s roster, and consider that the only major injury in the last year was Samoa Joe in December (and this is a roster that includes both Scott Steiner and Kevin Nash, two incredibly injury-prone wrestlers). TNA may book their shows in an asinine manner, but their wrestlers are clearly in a better situation in regards to their health. Perhaps its time for WWE to take a cue from TNA’s smaller business model.

It’s somewhat ironic to think about, since the major criticism of both WWE and TNA is that they don’t show enough wrestling during their programs, but what needs to happen is to reduce both the amount of ring time and match expectations.

Issue 5: The Past, Present & Future

International Object is a continual journal of essays on professional wrestling written by K Sawyer Paul.

Issue 5, entitled The Past, Present & Future, contains three essays that focus on discussions regarding time, space, and lessons learned in regards to the future of the art.

WE CAN LEARN NOTHING FROM THE PAST: An essay in search of answers on how to improve pro wrestling by looking at its racist, barely-athletic, underachieving past.

WHAT PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING MEANS TODAY: A macro discussion on what one can take from the current work. (this essay will be published July 16)

SOME OPEN QUESTIONS REGARDING THE REINVENTION OF PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: A dramaturgical list of things that have always bothered me and need to be addressed. (this essay will be published July 23).

TNA Is Pro-Wrestling, WWE Is Entertainment

Right from the mouth of the maw, during an interview with indiantelevision.com:

How do you view competition like TNA which airs on another sports channel?

All forms of entertainment are competition for WWE as we compete for the public’s attention and entertainment dollar. For any sports or entertainment company, whether you are Manchester United, U2 or WWE, the biggest concern is the enormous proliferation of content in the market.

However, WWE is a significant force within entertainment and pop culture. Within our specific entertainment genre, we clearly are the industry leader. While TNA is pro-wrestling, WWE is entertainment.

How do you view competition like TNA which airs on another sports channel?
All forms of entertainment are competition for WWE as we compete for the public’s attention and entertainment dollar. For any sports or entertainment company, whether you are Manchester United, U2 or WWE, the biggest concern is the enormous proliferation of content in the market.

However, WWE is a significant force within entertainment and pop culture. Within our specific entertainment genre, we clearly are the industry leader. While TNA is pro-wrestling, WWE is entertainment.

People criticize Apple for creating a reality distortion field in regards to their products, but WWE destroys them head over foot. WWE is a company with “wrestling” in the title, where the main activity performed on the program is “wrestling,” where the company employs “wrestlers” to “wrestle.” But they aren’t a wrestling company. They’re an entertainment company. This claim assumes that people inherently find wrestling entertaining, since that’s what WWE delivers. However, TNA is just a wrestling company, which means it isn’t entertaining, even though WWE’s own internal logic states that it could be just as entertaining as WWE.

John Cena’s seven year anniversary

Is today. He fought Kurt Angle in his debut match on Smackdown, June 29, 2002. Seems like a long time ago, but it’s important to remember that you can splice his career into two entirely distinct portions. The character he currently portrays debuted roughly around Wrestlemania 21 in 2005, when he won his first world title. Before then, Cena was a young up and comer who rapped whenever he spoke and was somewhat respected by the internet and boo’d as a successful comedic heel. Only after he won the first title would he become the polarized hero; cheered by the masses, boo’d by the people who supposedly know better.