Category: professional wrestling

My Year in Hobbies 2019: October!

October 2019:

Professional wrestler Kris Statlander, a woman with white skin and brown hair, wearing powder blue wrestling gear with purple trim and "KS" written on her tank top, yells for the crowd at a Beyond Wrestling show in Worcester, MA.
Professional wrestler Kris Statlander, a woman with white skin and brown hair, wearing powder blue wrestling gear with purple trim and “KS” written on her tank top, yells for the crowd at a Beyond Wrestling show in Worcester, MA.

What’s up, Kris Statlander?

I started out the month at the Season 2 premiere of Beyond Wrestling‘s “Uncharted Territory” TV series, which airs on Internet Wrestling Television. Yes, I really was this close to the action, as everyone who wants to be is at Beyond events. (I could’ve actually been even closer, but I grabbed a second row seat instead of a first row seat so I didn’t end up with any flying human beings in my lap.)

Beyond is one of the best independent professional wrestling promotions in the world, and chances are, if you’ve watched WWE, AEW, New Japan Pro-Wrestling, Ring of Honor, Impact, MLW or any of the other somewhat major wrestling promotions over the past decade, you’ve seen a whole bunch of Beyond alumni. Their shows are available on the aforementioned IWTV streaming service, which is some of the most fun you can have watching television and only $10 a month. I don’t work for Beyond or IWTV, but with the future of every small business in jeopardy right now (along with, well, everything and everyone else), I have to represent for them, because a great chunk of my last year has been spent enjoying their offerings. Please consider signing up for IWTV, buying some merch from Beyond on their site, or hitting an event (if and when events happen again) if you’ve ever got the means.

Here are a few more pictures from the Beyond show I went to…

Professional wrestler Lance Archer, a shirtless man with white skin and a red "murderhawk" hairstyle, stands at the back end of a wrestling ring and prepares to attack fellow pro wrestler Josh Briggs, a man with white skin and brown hair in black wrestling trunks and various knee and shoulder braces, laying prone at the front of the wrestling ring, at a Beyond Wrestling show in Worcester, MA.
Professional wrestler Lance Archer, a shirtless man with white skin and a red “murderhawk” hairstyle, stands at the back end of a wrestling ring and prepares to attack fellow pro wrestler Josh Briggs, a man with white skin and brown hair in black wrestling trunks and various knee and shoulder braces, laying prone at the front of the wrestling ring, at a Beyond Wrestling show in Worcester, MA.

Hey, remember Lance Archer from the New Japan show in September? He came to Beyond a few days later, too! This is him getting ready to maul Josh Briggs (and he did).

Professional wrestler Orange Cassidy, a man with white skin, red hair, and brown aviator sunglasses, wearing a light blue jean jacket and a white t-shirt, looks directly at the camera from a distance in front of a maroon curtain at a Beyond Wrestling show in Worcester, MA, as a photographer to his right tries to get a picture of him.
Professional wrestler Orange Cassidy, a man with white skin, red hair, and brown aviator sunglasses, wearing a light blue jean jacket and a white t-shirt, looks directly at the camera from a distance in front of a maroon curtain at a Beyond Wrestling show in Worcester, MA, as a photographer to his right tries to get a picture of him.

Orange Cassidy totally caught me taking a picture of him when he walked through the curtain. He’s doing better after his encounter with The Boogeyman, though he’s had a few run-ins with PAC and the Lucha Bros recently that haven’t been great for him.

Assuming life is anywhere near normal for the foreseeable future, you can see Kris Statlander, Lance Archer and Orange Cassidy on All Elite Wrestling‘s shows these days. (See what I mean about everyone passing through Beyond?) They run Wednesday nights on TNT in the States, and on YouTube.

I visited Keene, New Hampshire for the first time in October, and can heartily recommend both Bull Moose (a small regional chain of entertainment media stores packed with things I like to spend money on) and The Toadstool Bookshop, if you’re in the area. Both are great places to browse, and both will probably need your business when things open back up. (Notice a new, recurring theme here?) Keene, in general, is like a lot of mid-sized New England towns with a Main Street, fun to walk around. Enjoyed my time there. Almost ready to forgive the place for the Pumpkin Festival Riot of 2014 and the town’s handling of it.

a plastic and rubber bendable action figure of a white skeleton lays on a scanner bed.
a plastic and rubber bendable action figure of a white skeleton lays on a scanner bed.

It took me a couple of years, but I finally got ahold of one of the Mego-scale skeletons that they sell at Target around Halloween. I’d get a picture of it with the usual group shot, but we’re running late here, so this is the skeleton on a scanner bed, which looks kinda weird and cool.

I got, and played a fair amount of Stardew Valley for Playstation 4, but I wanna start over, as I totally had no idea what I was doing before I kinda backed my character into a corner. If you like games like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, but also like them to be a little less…Nintendo…this is a great game for that.

On the last flea market trip of the year, I saw this beauty of a Soundesign stereo…

A beige 1980s-era Soundesign stereo system sits on a flea market table.
A beige 1980s-era Soundesign stereo system sits on a flea market table.

No, I didn’t buy it. From my past experience owning a Soundesign (my first stereo was one), albeit one that wasn’t quite as beige, I was afraid to even touch it (those cassette deck buttons will snap on you as soon as look at you).

I did buy this on that trip, though…

A copy of Lou Reed's "Transformer" album plays on a turntable, with the album cover (featuring a black and white picture of Lou Reed, wearing makeup, and holding a guitar while standing at a microphone) standing on top of the turntable cover.
A copy of Lou Reed’s “Transformer” album plays on a turntable, with the album cover (featuring a black and white picture of Lou Reed, wearing makeup, and holding a guitar while standing at a microphone) standing on top of the turntable cover.

Lou was a mess, but he was one of the greatest messes.

Television seasons binge-watched in October 2019 (2): The End Of The Fucking World Season 2 (enjoyable television based on Charles Forsman‘s comics; Chuck and TEOTFW show-runner Jonathan Entwistle have Chuck’s I Am Not OK With This on Netflix now, too…), Scott Kelly: A Year In Space (this was an amazing thing to watch, even if it was done like a pretty hardcore NASA propaganda film).

First-run movies watched in August 2019 (1): El Camino (fun little TV movie, but they need to give Huell Babineaux his own spin-off now).

My Year in Hobbies 2019: July!

July 2019:

July 2019 can be summed up in two images…

An animated GIF of actor Joe Keery, a young man with white skin and brown hair, portraying character Steve Harrington from the television series "Stranger Things", in his red, white and blue Scoops Ahoy sailor-ish work uniform, saying "Ahoy" on a loop, with the word "Ahoy" written below him in white lettering.
An animated GIF of actor Joe Keery, a young man with white skin and brown hair, portraying character Steve Harrington from the television series “Stranger Things”, in his red, white and blue Scoops Ahoy sailor-ish work uniform, saying “Ahoy” on a loop, with the word “Ahoy” written below him in white lettering.
Logo for New Japan Pro-Wrestling's G1 Climax 29 wrestling tournament, sponsored by Heiwa, whose logo floats above the G1 Climax 29 logo. G1 Climax 29 logo is grey stone texture, black and white lettering, and gold trim, with a gold starburst in the center, and New Japan's logo (small) at the top of the G1 Climax 29 logo.
Logo for New Japan Pro-Wrestling’s G1 Climax 29 wrestling tournament, sponsored by Heiwa, whose logo floats above the G1 Climax 29 logo. G1 Climax 29 logo is grey stone texture, black and white lettering, and gold trim, with a gold starburst in the center, and New Japan’s logo (small) at the top of the G1 Climax 29 logo.

We’ll get back to Mr. Harrington in a bit.

New Japan Pro-Wrestling?

Professional wrestling?

OK, a detour that has little to do with 2019, but everything to do with why I used a lot of my time the way I did in 2019.

I’ve watched on and off since I was 10 years old, when Cyndi Lauper was a gateway drug to it pre-Wrestlemania I, though there’s been a lot of “off”. My mom took me to a closed-circuit live screening of Wrestlemania II at Convention Hall in Asbury Park (Thanks, mom!), I got a bunch of action figures (Really wish I still had all of the Remco AWA figures I had initially, and the wrestling ring, rather than just some and no ring), I read a bunch of the Apter mags, and I ended up watching, through the magic of cable competition, wrestling from WWF, pre-WCW Jim Crockett Promotions (when they were calling it the National Wrestling Alliance, before Eazy-E and crew made those initials stand for something else), AWA, World Class Championship Wrestling, and even Championship Wrestling from Florida when my local cable access station picked it up for a bit (though I did not get to see the Bruiser Brody/Lex Luger cage match until many years later).

I’m not sure why I stopped watching initially, in ’87, not too long after Wrestlemania III, but it may have been a combo of my inability to afford pay-per-views, and my annoyance as still-basically-a-kid at the Andre/DiBiase/Hebner brothers screwjob on Hogan, not even so much because I was a huge Hogan fan, more that screwjob endings never made anyone happy except a promoter.

A video game (WCW/nWo World Tour for Nintendo 64) got me back into it in late ’97, and had me watching and caring about WCW, WWF (eventually WWE), the little bit of ECW I was able to see, a tiny bit of Impact (which used to be TNA back then), and here and there, thanks to the Internet and weird grey-at-best-market sources, I saw some stuff from Japan for the first time during this stretch, which included me being blown away by the Tiger Mask vs. Dynamite Kid series from ’82-’83, and having my idea of what pro wrestling should look like changed forever. I made it to a few live wrestling cards around this time, all independent promotions, but saw people like Gangrel, Steve Corino, and Christopher Daniels when they were still relatively new to the sport (and yes, it is definitely a sport, even if success isn’t quite measured in conventional wins and losses), and hadn’t gotten much, if any national attention yet. (Daniels was already being acknowledged as probably the best independent wrestler in the world when I saw him in ’02, but was still relatively new. He’s still working 17 years later in AEW.)

What got me to tune out again? In a name, Randy Orton. I REALLY didn’t like Randy Orton, and, as he was being pushed to the moon by Vince McMahon on some of the only viable television left after Vince bought WCW and ECW, he pretty much single-handedly caused me to lose interest for many years.

What got me to tune back in? Sort of unfortunately, it was a Vince McMahon product (albeit one run by his son-in-law), NXT. I’d first heard from a friend that the stuff happening in NXT was actually very good, and I was told about a woman wrestling there called Blue Pants, which I of course thought was a great name, and then I saw her and saw that she could actually really work, as could whoever I saw her wrestle against (this was at least 4 years ago now, probably closer to 5, and it’s been kind of hectic in my life lately, so while I wish I remember which one of Leva’s matches I saw and who her opponent was, I don’t). Not too long after that, I heard something, probably on Deadspin, about a Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Sami Zayn match (NXT Takeover Dallas 01/04/16, just under 4 years ago) that was off the charts, and I did, in fact, enjoy the hell out of it when I saw it.

That sort of opened the door, but then, about a year later, the door got blown the hell open a year later when I saw Kazuchika Okada fight Kenny Omega for the first time. And the second. And then the third. And finally, the fourth. At that point, I knew that the best wrestling in the world was in Japan, but it was just starting to try to inch its way across the ocean, and I had a bunch of other stuff going on, so I didn’t get to it right away.

In the meantime, I dealt with as much WWE as I could until the WWE in Saudi Arabia deal happened and made it completely unpalatable to do any kind of business with the McMahons once and for all (it was always bad, but that was next-level disgusting), and also found out about a bunch of different indie wrestlers who were doing great work and entertaining people a bunch like Keith Lee (now with WWE, alas), Marko Stunt and Orange Cassidy, so they kept me busy until I could clear time on the schedule. It took me until this July, after a bunch of urging from a friend because the G1 Climax was about to start, to order NJPW World, New Japan’s streaming service.

So, that brings us here. What is the G1 Climax? It is a month long pro wrestling tournament in New Japan Pro-Wrestling, where (at present) 20 of the world’s best wrestlers fight each other to see who the best one is. If that doesn’t set you on fire, or you don’t quite grasp the drama of all of that from 1 sentence, you can watch these English-language instructional videos on it, hosted by Kevin Kelly (at present, he’s the best play-by-play guy in wrestling), which go over the history (and pre-history) of the tournament!

And, as 54 hours of pro wrestling is a LOT to catch up on, if you’d like to be brought up to speed on how things went in this year’s G1 Climax (or “G1 Climax…TWENTY-NINE!”, as their lead announcer, Baron Yamazaki, so dramatically enunciated it this year), the video below is an hour-long recap of the tournament, complete with English subtitles.

G1 Climax 29 is widely considered to be the best edition of the tournament in history, even without Kenny Omega participating (he left to help form AEW in January), and watching it live at odd hours of the morning (as it was held near-entirely in Japan, and there’s some time zone differences there) was one of the most rewarding experiences of not just my time watching wrestling or sports in general, but my time watching television. It was incredible, and everything that’s followed since has been incredible.

Television seasons binge-watched in July 2019 (1): Stranger Things Season 3 (Oh, and Stranger Things was pretty good, too. Nah, it was my second favorite season so far, the “Hero’s Journey” of Steve Harrington is amazing, and then there’s that bit with the song toward the end…)

Comic books cancelled or ending in July 2019 (2): Assassination Nation (Image Comics) and Shuri (Marvel Comics). Assassination Nation was, I believe, Erica Henderson’s first book post-The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and while it was decidedly NOT as all-ages as Squirrel Girl, it was a lot of fun. I thought it was supposed to be an ongoing series, and that might’ve been the plan initially, but they dialed it back to one story arc. Shuri was also a lot of fun (I especially enjoyed the amount of shade thrown between characters), and Nnedi Okorafor is a writer to watch, both in comics and sci-fi/fantasy novels, if those are your thing. (My spouse has been reading Nnedi’s books for a while, and loves them.)