hand-painted letter layers
left to be lost to progress
made in other parts of world
Friday, March 31
[HH3os] The Only Born 4 Cuban Nothing trio
(2nd round match-up 3 of 9)
THIS PROJECT IS ALREADY TOO DIFFICULT BECAUSE THE REDBUDS
HAVE BLOSSOMED SO IT IS SCREWED & CHOPPED SPRINGTIME ALREADY (Allahu
akbar!) BUT I AM LISTENING TO CRAP ASS RAP MUSIC FROM SEVEN YEARS AGO BECAUSE
OF IDIOT OPINIONS OF CONSUMER CULTURE AT LARGE BUT PITCHFORK SPECIFICALLY. I
would prefer my pitchforks be of the “red pitchfork green field” fierce rural
socialist resistance to colonial overlordery, tbh. But hey, this is Amerikkka
in our year of consumption 2017, so instead I will listen to horrible rap music
while I drive back-and-forth to my horribly unfulfilling job, all so I can
write unnecessary self-ordained expert opinions into the endless sea of futile
uselessness that is the internet. One love!
Wale – The Mixtape About Nothing
(released May 30, 2008; #36 on 2008 Pitchfork Albums of the
Year list)
As I said would be the method for these 2nd Round matches,
here is snippet from the original Pitchfork review:
On The Mixtape About Nothing, Wale emerges fully-formed as a rapper and as a thinker, a lightning-witted, irreverent guy blessed with both an infectious swagger and a sound moral compass-- twin gifts that enable him to accomplish some of the mixtape's most audacious feats.
Though there was a funnier and much-dated quote about how
Wale rapped “an iPod mind to you Walkman guys” (lolol IT’S ONLY BEEN 9 YEARS
AND YET THIS SOUNDS LIKE IT’S FROM 50 YEARS AGO AND THE POLICE WERE MURDERING
BLACK PEOPLE AND RACISM WAS STILL THE RULE OF THE LAND PRE-CIVIL RIGHTS… oh
wait, maybe that’s a bad example), I chose this one because it painfully drives
home the parallel I suddenly realized in my dumb Amerikkkan pop culture soaked
brain while listening to this mixtape again (and again)… Wale is the hip hop
equivalent to RG3 for DC.
I’m a few hours way from DC, but have lived in its cultural
footprint most of my life. Grew up in southside Virginia (a hopeless
drug-infested shithole that got Redskins games on the TV) and now live in what
is probably central VA, though I consider it the fringes of southside still for
psychological reconciliation purposes. I don’t consider myself a part of DC,
but we did used to drive up there for drugs back in the day, and it’s where one
would’ve went to see shows which wouldn’t come close to our stick ass back
roads existences. But I grew up a Washington football fan, and was up through
RG3’s first season.
RG3’s first regular season was, for all intents and
purposes, Wale’s The Mixtape About Nothing, because it was amazing, fluid, and
confirmed all the promise we’d been hyping ourselves for. There were so many
slick moments of transcendence you couldn’t help but get into what was going
on.
And yet, that first year of RG3 ended in tragedy (as
expected if you knew the Wash. R-words under Dan Snyder). In this analogy I’m
establishing, the NFL post-season would be a music industry actual record
release. RG3 fucked his knee up on shoddy turf being play-called to plow
head-first into oblivion, and the Redskins did not win a single playoff game
with their franchise savior RG3.
Wale never had an actual album come close to touching the
tight cleverness of material and theme that this mixtape did. It’s probably why
he’s released multiple works since which attempt to rehash this mixtape in one
way or another. Wale plays for the Cleveland Browns now. In fact, I saw just
this very morning that there is some event wrapped around Wrestlemania called
Walemania where you pay $15 to watch a fucking podcast happen live, where
wrestling personalities of various obscurities are interviewed right before
your eyes, and then there is a Wale performance too. This is certainly the hip
hop equivalent of being engaged to an Estonian woman and hoping to have a shot
at competing for the Browns back-up QB position in a couple months. The sadness
of humane ebbs and flows of potential/promise and actual end results never
fails to make me feel melancholy.
And yet, good for Wale. If he loves professional wrestling,
and loves rapping still, and has somehow managed to figure out a way to hang
out with a bunch of wrestling dorks and get paid off it, to continue hustling
non-traditional means of money-making, then that is beautiful too. Sometimes
our individual promise and potential misleads us into believing we deserve more
than we will ever get, and if one can adjust from that into a happy lane in
life at lower crescendo, then bless that motherfucker who does so.
Still though, this mixtape is amazing. SIX STARS!
DOOM – Born Like This
(released March 24, 2009; #48 on 2009 Pitchfork Albums of
the Year list)
From Pitchfork, in a good exhibit of internet
gentrification:
The overall subject matter can get grimier than Madvillainy converts are used to. "Absolutely" envisions a widely organized revenge plot against the entire legal system-- from snitches to police to judges-- where offending parties get their lattes poisoned and their tongues ripped out. "Rap Ambush" compares his M.O. to an insurgent attacking troops with guerilla tactics. And "Batty Boyz" features more concentrated homophobia than damn near any hip-hop track I've heard this decade…
Here is the thing about gentrifying personalities – they want
to be part of something they are not born unto (haha, ties into the Born Like
This aspect), but don’t want to fully accept it. Now granted this review was
done back in 2009, and mainstream consciousness is way more synchronized to
revolutionary philosophy than it used to be. But at the same time,
revolutionary potential is still quickly diverted by proper channeling of mass
streams of consciousness into shit like hashtag resistance or #NotMyPresident.
Gentrifying personalities will consume underclass anger and the violence that
comes with that, as a tea kettle release for their own feelings of inadequacy,
but outright assaults on the entire system are a little too much. I mean,
America is already great, right?
The early call-out on the homophobic nature of “Batty Boyz”
lyrics is classic gentrifier high-brow way of being able to call out segments
of the underclass for being too ignorant to be saved, but in a way that does
not use racial or economic classifications to do so. Only problem is, it can
still pretty much be applied in such ways when you see who is judge as
unworthy. This is how hashtag resistance movements are able to pretend to be
saviors of The People, all while writing off a large chunk of them as being too
fucking ignorant to be worth saving. This is all just collateral damage to the
geopolitical gentrifying personalities.
Anyways, despite it being *problematic*, fuck anybody who
doesn’t realize this album is A THOUSAND STARS great. The IRL antidote to the
*problematic* principle is that age old asphalt adage, “Real recognize real.”
Your actions speak louder than your words. Yeah, your words get too stupid, we
not gonna try to even see what your acts are gonna do, but still, SO MANY
FUCKING PEOPLE IN THIS AGE think just because they say all the right things,
they deserve respect. Fuck that. A lot of y’all are still fake motherfuckers
pretending to be righteous. Gentrifying personalities, trying to convince
everybody (probably including yourself) how fucking true you are. But you don’t
even recognize the reality of everything. And it’s not really your fault – you can’t
recognize something you don’t know. “Real recognize real” but also if you don’t
know it, nothing gives you that knowledge other than getting thrown into it.
You can’t tip-toe into the fringes of real, pick out the parts you like, edit
out the pieces you don’t, and pretend you’re real now. (And yes, that last sentence
is meant to read exactly like what gentrification does to physical spaces.)
Raekwon – Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II
(released September 8, 2009; #5 on 2009 Pitchfork Albums of
the Year list)
From the Pitchfork review at the time:
The last time a Wu-Tang record came together with this kind of personnel and succeeded under a grand conceptual vision, we got Fishscale, and calling Cuban Linx II Raekwon's equivalent to it isn't out of the question. Like Ghostface's modern classic, this album defies hip-hop's current atmosphere of youthful cockiness and aging complacency: instead, it's driven by the sometimes celebratory, sometimes traumatized sense of stubborn survival and perseverance, a veteran mindset that can no longer picture success without having to defend it.
I do not disagree with any of this, and in fact my
description of Rae’s win in the 1st round of this idiotic project stated that
this was one of the truest returns to Wu-fundamentalism you could find in the
late Wu canon. It’s weird though that we all still expect Wu to be true to some
sort of Wu-morality from a quarter century ago. And yet it’s pretty obvious, in
those unexplainable gut intuitive ways things can be obvious. RZA doesn’t feel
as Wu-true a lot of times any more, even if he’s the official business head of
the whole thing. Rae and Ghost tend to seem like the grizzled old Orthodox
ministers of Wu-fundamentalism, and though I’m ranking this album second time
through less than a thousand stars (closer to THIRTY SIX STARS), I am thankful
I was forced by my stupid desire to create content for nobody (The Content for
Nobody website) to visit this album, which I always assumed would just make me
feel sad for the lost innocence of unpolished early Wu.
THE WINNER: Obviously, a thousand stars beats anything
lesser. A night sky of a thousand stars, as limited as that might seem to those
who lay outside at night IRL, is still a pretty great number for pop cultural
review purposes inside the digital realm (which could really use more laying
outside at night imo). So Doom and Born Like This moves on deeper into another
level of self-constructed nonsense. THANKS FOR PLAYING!
always eyeing escape routes...
always eyeing escape routes,
even while idling outside
the Fas Mart in minivan
back to Earth, back to rust, back...
back to Earth, back to rust, back
to dirt, back to dust, back to
worthless nothing unfenced Earth
Thursday, March 30
ghost pipe oracle shadow...
ghost pipe oracle shadow
dweller offers no opinion
on streaming current events
picking mimosa flowers...
picking mimosa flowers,
drunk off the honeybee buzz,
tingle to my fingertips
Wednesday, March 29
Re-Analyzing Smoky Mountain Wrestling in the Era of President Trump - March 1992/2017
[Trash Culture Anthropology series are me doing whatever the fuck it is I do. These are supported by the Patreon I have set up. Feel free to contribute, but don’t feel obligated in order to read further. Thank you to my four patrons.]
Attaching this project to the President Trump era is
fatiguing, because this era is fatiguing. I think that would be the case
regardless of who was elected, but Trump definitely compounds the disinterest.
Both parties now seem to be synchronized to constant manufacturing of outrage
to their base of smart marks, and social media and 24-hour news cycles of
digital world enable that perfectly. Thus, I’ve got (like many) psychic adrenal
fatigue. (Is there a psychic gland like adrenal? Is that what pineal is supposed
to be? Whatever it is, mine feels over-taxed.) On top of this, the real world
is starting to function with an internet foundation, meaning people are
treating the real world as they would the internet, thus any sense of
separation between IRL “in real life” and the digital version of yourself is
quickly being blurred (fogged).
Exhibit to this effect: a few weeks back my eldest kid
turned 18, and we were going to celebrate by the whole family (my ol’ lady, me,
the three kids) all meeting up at her favorite Indian restaurant downtown
Charlottesville for lunch. She has long community college day on Mondays (which
it was), and I’m gainfully employed and shit, so I caught the free bus over,
she was driving over on break, and the ol’ lady was bringing the other two kids
along. After standing around waiting forever, my wife and the two youngest
showed up, visibly bothered. You see, there is a “free speech” wall on the
downtown pedestrian mall in Charlottesville where you can write shit in chalk,
and in passing they had witnessed writing in big bold letters “THANKS ICE” in
support of immigration enforcement. The ol’ lady thought this was bullshit, so
wrote above or around or something some added commentary about fascism or
whatever, but this triggered some old dude into coming over and asking if he
could make a comment on her comment. She told him no, he insisted, and at some
point attempted to speak directly to my 9-year-old daughter about what she was
writing separately from this whole thing, talking around my wife. This of
course caused my wife to yell at the dude and rail on him in public.
As my wife was relaying all this info to me, another lady
stopped by with her stroller – strangers to us – and told my wife how in the
right she was for yelling at that fucker, and telling my daughter, “Don’t let
people like that bother you, or scare you, because they are on their way out.”
And my 9-year-old was kinda shook by the whole thing, to be honest, not in any
over the top way, but why was this old fuckin’ dude she ain’t know trying to
tell her how her mom was wrong?
Well, Indian restaurant was closed on Mondays, so I couldn’t
go for the ride to another restaurant for lunch because I had to get back to
work, but lucky for me (and the quickly grown chip on my shoulder) the bus
station was right by the free speech wall. So I went that way, saw the “THANKS
ICE” post, and wrote directly above it how they were enforcing fascism or some
momentarily clever bullshit like that. You know, a meme, but IRL. Then I went
and chilled 20 feet away.
I saw the obvious perpetrator of thanking ICE – an old
fucker with corn syrup pear belly of eating more than enough but hunger never
satisfied. (This is partially due to our current food sciences, but also
partially due to dominant spirit of his type of people.) I was texting my wife,
because I could see the guy looking at what I wrote, but then also looking at
me and sizing up whether this was a discussion he should have or not, what with
me looking the way I looked. For the self-alpha like him (which makes up an
obese chunk of Trump’s most vocal support), it is easy to go correct college
kids or women or children or those who look easily dominated, but you have to
pick your battles with people above that. I mean, it’s easy to call people cucks
and snowflakes online, but the real world lacks a logout button if shit gets
real.
Just as I thought the old fucker wasn’t gonna come over, he
came over, and said, “Do you mind if I make a comment on your comment?” He
decided to login.
“Actually yeah I do, because I just came from talking to my
9-year-old daughter, who was upset because some grown man was trying to talk
around her mom to tell her what to think about something…” and this was just
the beginning of a fairly pointless back-and-forth (like the internet, but in
real life). But I did feel it important to make it clear that I was an old
school fucker from small southern town, and he was out of line, and legal or
not, I was willing to let him know that. These fuckers always go to the “But
freedom of speech is legal” or some sort of defense hiding behind the law, all
while complaining about how government has of recent tradition been entirely
corrupt. In fact, at one point after he said he goes by the law, I laughed and
was like, “You trust the government? Really?” This of course caused conflict in
his belief systems – to distrust the government while using the law as a basis
for defense of his public assholery, and we sort of came to the impasse that we
weren’t quite sure whether my belief to act on what’s right and wrong
(regardless of legal backing) or his faith in the law (regardless of government
corruption) was gonna back down first.
It was at this point in our pointless discussion (like the
internet), that he insinuated there was more going on with my wife in their
encounter than I was aware, suggesting she was either at fault in starting the
situation or wasn’t being entirely honest with me. “If we wasn’t in a public
space, you would’ve just caught one upside your head,” I said. “No you wouldn’t
have,” he said, in the obvious goading response of the troll. And though the
blur between online and real life should’ve been more clear to me, his natural
troll nature became so obvious at that point, there was no longer any chance of
violence on my end, because that would’ve just affirmed him in his trollness,
and he would’ve pressed charges and tried to get the news story about “angry
liberal punches old guy at free speech wall” trending on whatever dumbass
message boards he posts on.
“Do you got a wife?” I asked him.
“That’s none of your business.” Obviously a sore spot.
“Yeah, well it was none of your business what my kid was
writing when you tried to correct her around her mother, was it?” And then any
point he went to his standard troll talking points, I just asked again, “Do you
got a wife?” Finally he said, “I will tell you I have two daughters, both
grown.”
“Yeah, well I got three daughters, and I gotta raise them in
a predatory ass world. And you – a complete stranger of an old man who they
never met or know, tried to talk around my wife to my 9-year-old daughter. In
this predatory ass world.”
Old fucker’s face turned a little, not much but enough he
did apologize for that, saying he shouldn’t have addressed my daughter, but
goddamn, it almost took fisticuffs and a goddamned 17-minute version of Yung
Uncle Jesse from the Dukes of Hazzard type performing Socratic method on his
old upper middle class bourgeoisie brainwashed white male ass to get to that
point. And if I wasn’t a big bearded ass regarded-as-white dude, I probably
wouldn’t have been given half that conversation. I don’t know.
But that’s the level of discourse, all around. Trump
Presidency is a symptom of larger cultural issues, not just the abominable act
which requires resistance.
Wait, this is about Smoky Mountain Wrestling, right? Yeah,
it is. You see, Trump acts as if he is working for the crowd of a Smoky
Mountain Wrestling show, as if he has the inherent goodness of heart of
Commissioner Bob Armstrong (or any face authority figure from any small
southern wrestling promotion), but in actuality Trump is WWE – corporate-based
performative folksiness. It’s the same corruption as ever, just less nuanced
and without all the education to launder the corruption behind intelligent
theories.
The entire month of March 1992 Smoky Mountain Wrestling was
taped in Knoxville, Tennessee. Now Knoxville has the added benefit of the
University of Tennessee to keep it plugging along even as economic struggle
started to metastasize in the smaller towns within driving distance. And to
hear Trump talk, this began very precisely around 2008, and can easily be
solved. But in real world actuality, a lot of what started choking the small
towns was occurring in the 1980s, under the de-regulation era of Ronald Reagan.
This was when America started making the move from bonafide small businesses to
corporate models, where suburbs – which had been sprawling in death spirals
around major metropolises for decades, started to become the double dropkick
along with big box store clusters in commercial centers, which not only
continued to kill cities (but make way for gentrification!) but also pull the
most valuable human resources away from all the small towns, to leave them
dying worse than before. (This is all trash culture anthropological theory… I
have no second-tier degree or shit like that, BUT I READ A LOT MOTHERFUCKER!)
Perhaps the perfect example of this would be Wal-Mart, which expanded at
aggressive rate into newer markets, priced out the smaller businesses which were
already in place, until it had lockdown on the retail market, and could
fluctuate prices as it saw fit, all while keep wages deflated (and without much
benefit). Believe it or not, this is EXACTLY how Vince McMahon took over the
wrestling industry around that same era. As Vince McMahon choked out the
smaller businesses, he’d still bring WWE around for spot big show or occasional
house show to the major markets, so places like Knoxville, or Richmond, VA,
(where I grew up near) would still get a wrestling show, albeit very
sporadically, and generally nothing more than a glorified merchandise stand
with little actual relative wrestling narrative involved. (Noted in advance:
wrestling has always been a business, just looking to sell shit, but the older
model at least engaged the local marks to a more involved level than just
coming around once or twice a year and counting on people being excited to see
famous folks live.)
The difference is obvious – the old model had weekly shows
in Knoxville (or monthly in Richmond, for little nasty dirtgod watching TV in
his localized life), but the new corporate wrestling model came around rarely,
as it pleased, to skim cash off the remaining wrestling fans.
Obviously, Jim Cornette had been burned by that with the WCW
version of corporate wrestling which had attempted to be the Pepsi to Vince
McMahon’s Coca-Cola. So this was a big influence on Cornette running Smoky
Mountain Wrestling, perhaps naively hoping that the old way of things wasn’t
completely dead already.
In people’s minds, it’s not. And that is why Trump has been
so successful in convincing people he’s all about Making America Great Again,
even though he lives in an apartment literally plated in gold.
In these dying towns, the talk of jobs played well because,
well, jobs are kinda shitty nowadays. Even when Obama (and Bush before him, and
now Trump too) touted how high employment rates were and how many jobs were
created, those not deep inside the bubble (most of us) knew that these were
mostly shitty jobs. Even the good ones are shitty compared to what a good job
meant 30 years ago. None of us are going to work 35 years at the same place and
get a gold watch when we retire. NONE OF US.
The myth of meritocracy still plays hard though, and due to
this, if you are someone of any reasonable amount of talent or potential, and
you are from some shithole like an hour and ten minutes out of Knoxville or
Richmond, you are going to end up leaving home to get one of those good jobs.
(Trust me, I know, firsthand knowledge on this one.) This depletes all these
little hometowns into a cycle of diminishing returns. And those who are left,
as the economic opportunities become even sparser, are told, “Well, if you want
to succeed, then maybe get more education and move to where the job
opportunities are.” Move up the pyramid behind the meritocracy myth.
(Oddly, in 1992 as this month of Smoky Mountain was airing,
Bill Clinton was taking the lead in the Democratic primaries, which led to him
being able to ride a post-Soviet, unchallenged world, to usher in the very age
of global neo-liberalism we still have all the powerful progressive fuckfaces
trying to shove down our throats. They pass “free trade” agreements which
benefitted employers but not employees. Corporations outsourced and off-shored
as much as they could, because it was okay now. There was no (hashtag)
resistance to stop it.
Not so oddly, most of these dying hometowns have seen the
hypocrisy in that model when it comes to keeping local small town lives stable,
and those folks didn’t exactly jump out their late model hoopties to go vote
for Bill Clinton’s better half.)
Here’s the thing about small towns and/or rural life – not
everybody gives a fuck about moving to the top of the economic pyramid. Here’s
the thing about small businesses, too – not all of them are motivated by
franchising and expanding and becoming the Wal-Mart of whatever the fuck it is
they do. Many people are simply motivated to build simple but stable lives –
nothing more, nothing less. They are America’s version of jobbers, and they
want nothing more necessarily, and there’s not a goddamned thing wrong with
that.
Smoky Mountain TV example A from March 1992: Barry Horowitz.
Horowitz was a career jobber, who enhanced the talent in WWE when it was WWF,
in WCW when it was owned by Turner, and even though he had trickled down to SMW
at this stage in his career, he was content to remain a jobber. It’s what he
did. He performed as a wrestler well enough to validate whoever he was
wrestling, but never took enough shine to himself to let ego cause him to
demand more. He was, by all appearances, happy in his role.
Smoky Mountain TV example B from March 1992: Hustler Rip
Rogers. Rogers had been a prominent wrestler in some earlier territories, but
in SMW he was essentially glorified jobber. But Rip Rogers the real life man
was a noted fitness freak, who had been workout pals with Macho Man Randy
Savage back in the day, feeding each other into competitive frenzy of physique
and stamina building. But where Savage was bound for bigger and better things,
Rogers remained Hustler Rip Rogers, who never broke into the big time.
But you couldn’t deny his fitness. In fact, one episode of
this month’s run of Knoxville tapings exemplified that fact, and also helped do
what a jobber is supposed to do – make somebody else look better than they
actually are. You see, Tim Horner was being booked as the hometown babyface and
trying to receive an upper-level star push in early SMW. The one thing working
hardest against this was the fact Tim Horner was about as exciting as watching
deck wood cure, and on the mic cut promos that didn’t help a fucking lick. He
was kinda horrible to be honest.
So in episode 6 of Smoky Mountain Wrestling, Hustler Rip
Rogers is out early in the program, bragging about how fit he is, how he could
do squats for days. He was challenged on this by Horner, so promised he’d do
squats the entire hour TV show, without stopping, and they bet on it. Easy
money for the Hustler. So throughout the entire hour-long program, Bob Caudle
and Dutch Mantell check back in on Rip Rogers from time to time, and he’s just
squatting along, using a steel chair back to do so. Nothing to it. As we get to
the end of the show, Tim Horner comes back out, after having dealt and heard
Rogers’ shit talking the whole hour, is watching him do his squats, asks Bob
Caudle how much time is left, and as Caudle goes to check his watch on the
announcer’s desk, kicks Rogers’ chair out so Rogers falls to the ground. Horner
wins the bet (though he cheated), Rogers looks like a dick (despite being as
fit as he claimed), and everybody’s happy. The crowd is behind Horner, because
honestly fuck Rip Rogers. He’s too cocky, and wears pink.
(At the same time, getting a heel push was Hollywood Bob
Holly, who also wore pink, considered himself above the Smoky Mountain locals
because he was a movie star and dated Julia Roberts, and condescended to
everyone in sight. Jim Cornette’s own team – the Heavenly Bodies – had not even
shown their faces yet on TV at this point, despite multiple vignettes in March,
where they were always swarmed over by adoring women who had never seen such
attractive men in these Smoky Mountains. The crowd had been booked as born
losers, obviously, in these instances, and unfortunately for the crowd, one is
usually booked in a way that at least partially resembles who they really are.)
This set up a rematch the following week between Horner and
Rip Rogers, and Rogers is a great worker – not only in the jobber sense but
also in the smart mark wrestling sense. He performed well, and you could
definitely see similarities betwixt him and Randy Savage. They had a perfectly
wonderful television main event which made the guy who’s not the star seem
competent enough to be on TV in a decent capacity moving forward, and it made
the star guy going over (winning) look good. So when Horner won, the losers in
the crowd see him in a better light. (And fuck man, the camera was scrolling
through some old school ass looking people in the crowd.)
And to see the larger picture, there’s also Smoky Mountain
TV example C from March 1992: The Dirty White Boy, who at this point still
legitimately calls himself The Dirty White Boy (and being this is the partially
chaotic wonderland of the internet still, with the actual Dirty White Boy
classic rock construction crew ready to get drunk on a Thursday afternoon theme
song, not some piped over post-WWE purchase studio pretend theme ripped by Rick
Derringer’s second guitar tech who lives near the overdub studio in
Connecticut). Tony Anthony debuts this month, and there’s nothing about him
that would ever allow one to imagine he’d be a corporate wrestling superstar.
His body shape is very specifically barroom brawler, and his wrestling style is
similar. Yet in a rural-based Southern wrestling promotion, this made perfect
sense, and fit in wonderfully with the east Tennessee local wrestling history.
Of course it made even more sense for him to be the guy who Mr. Ron Wright
takes on to manage to try and get his operations. Tony Anthony remained a top
performer in SMW, and was in fact it’s top heel for many periods of Smoky
Mountain’s existence. Whenever this happens, wherever it happens, eventually
corporate wrestling will come buy the guy out, regardless of whether they can
do anything with them or not. WWE did so with Anthony.
The problem here is Tony Anthony as The Dirty White Boy in
Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky backwaters makes sense. It fits
the target demographic, as a majority of people in attendance are gonna know a
guy like The Dirty White Boy. He was an entirely relatable character. This
perhaps is not so much the case in Boston or Seattle or Anaheim or all the
major arenas that WWE would be more likely to tour. So they have to come up
with some other sort of gimmick for Tony Anthony. So they made him a plumber. A
wrestling plumber. This, of course, failed miserably. (After Anthony was
below-the-radar for a while, he did a get a second run on the WWE stage, as
“Uncle Cletus” the stereotypical rural dimwit manager for the Godwinns, a tag
team who were wrestling hog farmers. Wrestling hog farmers.
But all this speaks to that failed belief that everybody
wants to have a gold-plated house and be King of the World. There are many
places where ambition is directed at a simpler life, with family, perhaps
religion, perhaps fishing, perhaps playing Spades at an old table in the
backyard all Saturday afternoon long. But due to America the government giving
full support to corporate America, much of the off-the-beaten-path places in
this country lost their small economic base. People became inclined to drive 50
minutes to visit the Wal-Mart on a Friday night after payday instead of buying
shit at the seemingly off-brand local stores (like my neighbors across the
road, who also fly two variations of the confederate flag with a spotlight on
them). Local IGAs got replaced by indistinguishable Food Lions. And in the
shadows where Wal-Mart reach didn’t overlap thoroughly, Dollar General plugged
the gaps, so you didn’t have to drive 50 minutes just to get laundry detergent
and a new phone card because your 30 days was up.
So the media pundit consensus is these places all leaned
towards Trump, and they are his people. But much has been made of how many of
these overlooked “flyover” places also leaned Obama previously. Mostly, these
people have been booked as losers for a long time, long enough they’re not
gonna get a fresh push in America as something new. They know they’re losers
now. So they’ll get behind anybody who will get on the mic and call bullshit on
the system. But just as obviously, Trump is more Vince McMahon than any old
school Southern promotion, and all these people are just Tony Anthony to Trump.
They’re not his equal, just trash who’ll sit there and be attentive like you want
them to so long as you say all the right things “which play well in the sticks.”
See? It’s a fucking cliché. “It plays
well in the sticks.” And for now, they’re still sitting there, watching the
show, even though they’ve been booked as losers. But all it’s gonna take is one
large personality in the crowd to throw the first chair at the performers in
the political ring, and the riots will finally break out.
And with that we end our second month of Re-Analyzing Smoky Mountain Wrestling in the Era of President Trump. To paraphrase Bob Caudle, that’s it for this month, and until next month fans, so long for now!
[And consider supporting more online trash culture anthropological ridiculousness like this through my Patreon. I am launching a Patreon-only "podcast" in the next two weeks. Please note: it will not be a normal podcast, so don't expect that stupid shit.]
And with that we end our second month of Re-Analyzing Smoky Mountain Wrestling in the Era of President Trump. To paraphrase Bob Caudle, that’s it for this month, and until next month fans, so long for now!
anti-cybertron scribbles...
anti-cybertron scribbles
of true and living doctor
of lounge boogie brown (fly child)
I see in myself more trash...
I see in myself more trash,
more waste and wasted minutes
than anything of value
juxtaposition of plant...
juxtaposition of plant
shadow and chicken coop with
its barbaric wire window
Tuesday, March 28
contemplating outstanding...
contemplating outstanding
warrants from mountaintop chill
while crows caw freebird lyrics
freestyle sonnet #083: CONTEMPLATING THE NAVIGATED MINE FIELD
Surviving the mine field, navigating waste lands
of "my mans" & "moms" with little guidance other
than blind perseverance & unseen helping hands
perhaps ancestral, or gods, chance, or another
unexplainable means to still be here, alive...
Surviving the suicides, both instant triggered
as well as slow ferment of self-destructive drive.
Somehow outlasting the lottery math figured
as solid foundation for generations, plus
in-laws of diminishing returns compounding
the madness. Building bridges with hardscrabble truss
piecemealed from the rubble, all while self-doubt's sounding
fraud syndrome warnings (complete with riffs from "Freebird") -
to believe sense can be made of this mess? Absurd.
Monday, March 27
[HH3os] The Son of Bastard: Thank Me Left Foot Later trio
(1st round match-up 10 of 27)
Internet fucking around with opinionz for u really is played
the fuck out now that economic realities of reality don’t match economic
realities of mythology, and the shinefaces channeled all the paid gigs through
their channels, and even that shrunk so now the only people who can afford to
freelance gig it are mostly shineface, so we get the diminishing returns of
elite points of view, and somehow if you’re unlucky enough to, you stumble into
obscure 1998 blogspot corner of the internet and hear some dumbass expound on
some dumb shit from back in the day but not even back in the day but after the
real back in the day, leading up to now, which is entirely fucked.
Tyler, the Creator – Bastard
(released December 25, 2009; #32 on 2010 Pitchfork Albums of
the Year list)
When I was young, I would’ve loved Odd Future, and I
actually did love Odd Future a bit, and still do certain portions of what once
was OFWGKTA, but as time has gone on, the novelty of shock rap loses its shock.
Also it’s like Battlestar Galactica the new version – once you gone through it
once, you know the trick endings, so ain’t no need to keep fucking with it.
Like, you’re not gonna go back and revisit Tyler having rape fantasies (unless,
like I said, you’re young, and perhaps a nihilistic white teenager). As you
age, that youthful nihilism is suddenly replaced by a more realistic and
Earth-based “fuck all y’all” which has no time for rape fantasies played out
over dope beats. In fact, the shit sounds boring. (But the beats are great!)
ONE STAR!
Drake – Thank Me Later
(released June 15, 2010; #42 on 2010 Pitchfork Albums of the
Year list)
No need to talk shit about Drake, as that’s been done to
death. Yet somehow, he still exists, and is considered a rapper, and when he
drops something new (as he recently did), the culture as seen manufactured
within digital realm pretends it is noteworthy.
I posit the same poison culture which has given us Donald
Trump as President gives us Drake the relevant rapper, though. There’s nothing
about him which has earned relevance. (Record sales are irrelevant to being a
rapper; that’s the realm of marketing alone.) This album (was it his first? I
don’t know) is pure trash, but it is a type of trash that could be marketed to
tween girls as a way for them to feel down and hardcore. OMG! He says curses!
OMG! He’s not scary-looking! OMG! Drake! This I feel, is the entire essence of
Drakehood – a maxipad commercial for those on the cusp of actually needing
tampons, but maybe not quite there just yet. He is a starter package, which
hopefully led to tween white girlz (even if boys, or not white, but you know
what I mean) get into better (meaning actual) rap music, although I have been
alive for 44 years, so I know how fucked a poison culture Amerikkka is, so more
than likely there are former tween girlz all growed up, getting married, who
special request the DJ play a radio version of old Drake song in between their
white ass family doing some white ass dabs and white ass whipping of nay nays.
Fuck. This. Poison. Culture. Zero stars.
Big Boi – Sir Lucius Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
(released July 6, 2010; #4 on 2010 Pitchfork Albums of the
Year list)
I never fucked with this album much, which is sad, because
it’s pretty good. The beats are on-point – that weird experimental but strip
club-safe style that Dungeon Family really locked down in later years. I never
really paid attention to how wild Big Boi’s style got, too, because Andre 3000’s
crazy ass always stood out, wearing zoot suits with Chief Wahoo McDaniel
head-dresses and shit, but Big Boi is a weird fucker with his linguistics as
well.
Example: The “You Ain’t No DJ” song, featuring Yelawolf. The
best is kinda crazy, yet completely appropriate in shitty rundown strip club
where you don’t feel safe having the dancers touch you, but you get drunk and
lose your fear. (Imagine what they’ve been through to lose their fear of you.)
And in terms of delivery, Big Boi is wild. I never realized until this song got
repeated like 19 times (by me, driving home from Lowe’s with plywood stuffed
into an old minivan to finish building a composting outhouse because YOU KNOW
HOW WE DO) how much Yelawolf’s style, when dialed in, is direct result of
listening to a shitload of Outkast. I don’t mean that as a derivative sounding
diss either, because when Yelawolf is dialed in, he’s pretty fucking great.
Sadly, all that realizing made me bummed out too, because
Griselda Records got signed to Shady Records, meaning Westside Gunn and Conway
got signed. Like all aging heads, I love me some Westside Gunn, but fuck, if
you think about pre-Shady deal Yelawolf dropping Trunk Muzik, and then
everything he dropped since then (which has mostly been trash), it makes one
worry. That’s the fucked up thing about Art (with capital “a”) – you want your
favorites to get paid, because we are trained to believe we are rewarded for
how good we do shit by getting paid, but all too often in Art, when someone
gets paid, their Art loses its capitalness, and becomes lower case as fuck.
Which takes us all the way back around to Outkast, and this Big Boi record,
which – though no-five star classic all-time banger – is still pretty fucking
good, long after Big Boi had to really give a shit to be good. Despite
conventional wisdom, that’s not so easy to do. THREE STARS (and honestly he
could’ve just read old notes from high school science class and beat these
other two albums… well, maybe not Bastard, but definitely Drake).
THE WINNER: Duh, Big Boi.
freestyle sonnet #082: DREAMS OF COMPOUND EXPANSION
Dream situation with expanded compound means
labyrinth laid out with native white quartz from vein
running beneath feet; means medicinal herb screens
hung from more hooks to dry out; means hard-to-explain
connection to direction without "smart" device
of electronic nature is strengthened; means paths
to walk piedmont foothills following imprecise
yet perfect track of the wild grows; means space for maths
to be calculated which existed pre-English;
means palpitations of anxious domesticated
heart can calm for breath or two, to help extinguish
fight-or-flight fires "civilized" arson created;
means taking just care of land just as land takes care
of you through acts of biospherical welfare.
(The Bird Tribe - meaning my family - currently got a GoFundMe going to try and purchase the land surrounding our compound, to work into the compound and make a plant sanctuary for my ol' lady's herbal practice, and an extension of my illegitimate arts, and also to keep from being broken into tiny plots of power gridlock. Please visit the page, and drop five on it if you can.)
Sunday, March 26
Saturday, March 25
Friday, March 24
Thursday, March 23
freestyle sonnet #081: CONTEMPLATING NAS, FINANCE, & THE WHEEL OF TIME
Nas wrote, "That buck that bought a bottle could've struck
the lotto" in '94... 'Til infinity
I will likely grapple with my feelings of stuck
in financial traps (plus ruts). Masculinity
of toxic nature sprayed on my insides so that
not being able to provide without asking
is seen as weak (plus embarrassing). All this fat
of the land has been skimmed (it seems)... multi-tasking
with skilled proficiency no longer gets ahead
(plus chokes heart), so dreams tend to die on psychic vines.
Oh well... walk this life with safety net in the red
(and underwater), and wait for Wheel of Time's tines
to turn the meek to surface, and superficial
beneath... Wheel of Time remains most judicial.
Wednesday, March 22
freestyle sonnet #080: BUILDING SANCTUARY AGAINST ABSTRACT MATH
Manmade math mostly builds off abstract foundation,
thus land lacks value unless fractured/fragmented
into parts and parcels - complex exploitation
of raw (wild) into refined (planned), represented
by bank's co-sign to development but never
to leave alone. And yet land (Earth) best left alone
helps those broken by subtraction or dissever
from Earth, who also have no abstract value known
(thus "broke" as well), to reconnect with larger whole,
and hopefully find wholesome larger than any
lump sum. The biosphere's not pieces to control,
but intertwined place where peace is - vast and plenty,
for those working to cultivate sanctuary,
(while manmade divisions work to the contrary).
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