pro wrestling as art and spectacle

Originally written Dec 23, 2020

Full confession: I stayed up until 3:30 watching wrestling-related stuff on Youtube, namely, the Sting v. HHH match from a few years ago. Drawn to it like a magnet, and I don’t really understand why, so this article will mainly try to get to the bottom of things.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of pro-wrestling as art, and why shouldn’t it be? If we take the root of the word art to be artifice, there’s no better way to describe pro wrestling (This isn’t to say it’s “fake”. That debate, once contentious, has been settled mostly by calling wrestling entertainment). By artifice, I mean that it is a representation of something, similar to a play, a dance, or yes, even a work of art. On the surface, this sounds pretentious, to call something that involves grown people (mostly men) smacking each other with chairs and hammers, but this does a disservice to what other currents may be working beneath the surface, and what it represents about ourselves, specifically me (who is apparently losing sleep over it).

To give a full analysis of the spectacle is something beyond my (sleep deprived) ability at this time. But what I do notice is how I watch matches is not too different from how I appreciate another piece of art. Wrestling of course has deep ties to drama and to less extent film, but what’s interesting to me is that the performance of a match also has a lot in common with the fine arts, specifically sculpture.

If you ask a wrestling fan, they will probably be able to list a handful of their favorite matches, or the best matches ever. Maybe it’s Rock v. Austin, Hogan v. Andre, Shawn Michaels v. The Undertaker, and they will tell you the things that make those matches great. Maybe it was the moves, the athleticism, or maybe even the storytelling behind the match. They could also tell you the flaws. But the main thing is that they are engaged with the work as singular, flawed pieces of performance

I think the work that wrestling has the most similarities with is theater. And it’s true, the matches that most would agree are the “greatest in history” have one thing in common, and it’s not the athleticism, it’s the storytelling (although athleticism definitely helps). But fans don’t recall these matches by the storylines usually, they recall it by the match. So if a storyline is similar to the theater of wrestling, the match is the individual piece of art. And in that way, it has the ability to be appreciated in a different sense than individual parts of theater.

Of course everyone remembers “alas poor yorick” as a singular element. Throughout history, artists have been capturing singular moments within theater and even epic poetry. It’s a font of inspiration. Will we see a bronze of Bret Hart putting Shawn Michaels in a Sharpshooter? Maybe. Will it become as popular as David? Nope.

In the end maybe wrestling wiggles its way out of the sleeperhold of analysis, free to stand still as its own thing, and maybe that’s ok. Maybe we don’t need to have a thorough and vigorous criticism of it. For once, a work of art can be free to do as it pleases (and maybe bash everyone else with a steel chair.)

Exploring the ruins of FFXIII

I don’t have any issues with the linearity of FFXIII, if anything I enjoy the hallway grind. But one area that does particularly well with this is Ourban. Similar to other areas, it’s fairly linear in progress (although it has drumroll a fetch quest!), but it does one thing that is a little special: it allows you to inspect a wide range of items from desks and school supplies to a dorm room with empty bottles. This does something that the mazes, caves and towers of the game don’t: storytelling.

For most of the game, any story that is not driven narratively is told through the game’s datalogs. While I don’t have any problem with having this extra information and lore available, it’s unconnected with the world around it. Consider Metroid Prime. One of the most interesting aspects of the game was discovering things through the scan visor, and adding parts of the story together yourself. Then, if you wanted to go back through those logs and put the pieces of the story together, you had something in the game to tie it back to.

In FFXIII, this would seem like a relatively simple thing to do, since the mechanic is already present in the game, as we see in Ourban, Hope’s dad’s house, and the beach town. It would not be that hard to add into other places, say an inscription on the wall of the frozen ruins, or discovering some hidden lore in the tower that would make it feel more than just a crawl.

walking. cities. music.

Whenever I get stuck in life, whether it’s work, or general anxiety, my first reaction is usually to go for a walk (weather permitting). Accompanying me on this walk is usually a pair of headphones and some kind of music. My headphones have changed over the years, although I still have a phone that allows for wired ones, which is good, because I lose them frequently. My music tastes have also changed.

In earlier times, I didn’t have a music player to take with me on my walks, so it would just be whatever songs I had from memory. There was a lot of Smashing Pumpkins, the Verve, a sort of late 90’s alternative mix constantly playing in the back of my head. But there were still walks, lots of them. My preferred walks were late at night, empty streets. Looking back, it was such a ridiculous privilege, being a white kid who didn’t have to worry about dealing with getting the cops called. And feeling relatively safe in those neighborhoods. I was lucky. But I still walked, and I worked through a lot of the problems I had at the time, being a still closeted kid trying to understand what they were, in a world where that wasn’t acceptable.

Later I got the headphones, and an mp3 player, and it absolutely blew my mind, the concept of being able to listen to music while going to other places. It almost felt like too much for me, like I was being spoiled by having music so readily accessible.

I don’t remember the music I had on that mp3 player. In many ways, this memory was a casualty of the times, that time being the early 2000’s. Music, or really I should say music listening habits were going through a rapid evolution. Many of us had just figured out Napster before it got ceremoniously shut down. Then AudioGalaxy, then Kazaa, then LimeWire. In the meantime, CDs were still being bought, ripped, uploaded. My music tastes at that time felt like they were still transitioning not just in style, but also in medium. I still had this notion that I was trying to cultivate a music “library” and this library was *my* library. In grade school, I had taken pride in my shelf of 10 CDs, which grew into 15. Then it was stored in CD cases, first a 24 holder, then a 48, where most of them got ceremoniously scratched, dinged, chipped, cracked. But it was still my library.

When things moved to mp3, the library’s first role was to take the place of that cd case. I was obsessed with the management of my tracks, mostly done through iTunes. Whenever I downloaded new music or ripped a CD, I was eager to classify it, give it the right genre, the right number of stars so I could make the right mixes. If I wanted a 5 star mix, I could make one. If I wanted hip-hop, I could make a hip-hop mix. Sometimes, I’d go through the trouble of finding the right album artwork, if it was an album and not just a random song.

Problems arose. What if a song was both indie and hip-hop? What if I wanted to label it as 90’s? Much of the labeling and categorization got tedious, and I don’t miss it. I also don’t remember what those songs were that I got so obsessed about. What were their names, their stories? It’s a clichéd answer at this point, but I really believe in the tangibility of music. Vinyl is still the gold standard to which music as tangible object is held, but I still believed in the power of the jewel case, the fold-out liner notes, the weird photography, the underlying theme that went along with a well-designed album. So maybe it’s no surprise I have an easier time remembering albums I liked from the late 90s over the early noughties.

But I digress. Regardless of method, listening to music while walking is still one of my biggest go-to modes of existence. I love the way music merges with setting, whether it’s a hype track in the middle of a traffic-filled busy day, or a more lowkey chill electronic track that blends in with the shade of the tall buildings around me. It’s a sort of lifeblood, a background pulse.

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Taiwan (photographed above) has it’s own sort of rhythms and vibe. At times, it’s hectic, insanely so, with a type of traffic that follows its own rules. At other times, it can be still, introspective, with varied forms of architecture that grow in tight spaces.

And the music I listen to seems to gel with it. Lately, I’ve been listening to an electronic music group I recently stumbled onto called Lali Puna, and their muted beats seems to add to the atmosphere, molding itself around the buildings and traffic as I walk and dodge things on the streets and sidewalks.

I rarely find myself on empty streets these days (Taiwan is much too busy for that), but music has still proved to be one of my best friends, helping me through both joyful memories and difficult ones, as I continue to learn how to navigate the world around me.

writing as a game

I play games a lot—it’s sort of my longest running hobby—and it gives me something to relate to with my students. Naturally, a lot of this leaks into my writing (or I guess I should say, informs it), but here’s one of my bigger questions: Is writing itself a game?

What do I mean by that? Well, I’ll start with the technical side of it. My preferred writing tool, a laptop, is a sort of gaming interface (and yes, I actually use it to game as well sometimes). It has a screen and buttons. If I sit in front of it for too long, I get tired. So the way in which I write stories is very physically similar to how I would play a game.

On the surface, that is where the similarities end. The relationship between a “game” and a “player” is seemingly different from “writer” and “story”. For one, games are usually proprietary, closed pieces of code. Even in games where one is encouraged to create, such as Dreams, Mario Maker or even something as simple as Mario Paint, the work still remains part of the designers proprietary code; it is not the player’s.

Writing tends to be more solipsistic, with the writer’s content belonging only to the writer (and even this relationship is somewhat troublesome; can we even say writing “belongs” to a writer?).

Beyond fraught questions of ownership, there’s the obvious: There is no representation of a game being played, no sprites or figures representing the author—at least literally.

We can see the lines begin to blur when we consider text-based games such as Zork, AI Dungeon, and Radical Dreamers. The game becomes a sort of abstraction, where the gamer must imagine most of the action taking place. Here, the created content still mostly lies with the developer. The gamer is choosing specific paths which have been previously designed. In the case of AI Dungeon, the gamer is creating those paths along with an AI-generated story, but the AI is still created by the developer.

To say that writing is another form of gaming simply takes this one step further. Rather than have an external AI writing the story, the writers themselves take the role of “AI” and player. So for example, I start with a prompt:

Look around

And then I write a little based on that prompt:

You look around your surroundings. Unfortunately, there’s not much to see, just some dilapidated buildings with cool signage. An older person is sweeping the ground near the entrance of a dark alleyway.

Now based on that prompt, I could enter another command based on this information, such as “enter the alleyway,” “talk to the older person,” etc. It’s basically one-player AI dungeon.

Although for me, this inspiration comes mostly from gaming roots, it isn’t without precedent in the world of writing. Haruki Murakami has famously said that a good story writes itself. Automatic Writing also has a long history. In the 90’s, the hypertext novel briefly rose to fame, and since the 2000’s, the cell phone novel has risen in popularity, especially in East Asia

My question lately has been more concerned with where I can take this writing form, how can I explore it further. Using markdown as my primary writing tool has been helpful in keeping consistent styles, even blurring the line between writing a program and writing a story. However reading the back and forth between a user and a program isn’t exactly exciting. Or is it? Time will tell if this medium can evolve, and if the story will be written (or played).

writing as work

I’m antiwork. Antiwork in the sense that we shouldn’t labor for less than we’re worth under capital. That said, as a human being, I have responsibilities to take care of (read: bills to pay). I also have things that I enjoy doing: Taking walks, sleeping, reading. Vegging out on my phone.

But another thing I enjoy is writing. Do I enjoy it more than those other things? No, not if you consider it by how much time I spend doing it – I maybe write total for 2–3 hours a week. And yet, it’s part of my routine at this point. Wake up, stretch, go to the coffee shop and put down words for about 30 mins to an hour before preparing for my classes. It feels like there’s a motivation there. Definitely not a financial one; technically I’m paying to do this, and yet it still feels like something that nourishes and supports me.

Would I prefer to get paid for this? The short answer is, “no.”

“B-but!” The good millennial voice in my head says… “What happened to do what you love, love what you do?” My reply would be that the answer is more complicated than that.

In this world, there are many modes of work. Some work for companies, and are considered “full-time”. Some work “part-time” some are “freelance”. Most in my generation are some mix of the latter two, as am I. Some are by choice, most are not. At first, those of us who followed the DWYLLWYD (do what you love love what you do) mentality saw it as an alternative to “full time,” a choice of freedom. Later, many of us realized that it was a capitalist’s fever dream to get us out of health insurance and benefits, but I digress. One way or another, we live in this system, and so we have to find ways to exist in it, and so, “work,” and the thing that goes along with it, “compensation.”

Concerning writing, I do love it. But I don’t want to get paid for it. I want it to continue to be something I love doing, something I enjoy waking up for. Not feeling the pressure of writing too much or too little. Not being forced to write poetry. Or essays. Or fiction. If I want to wake up and write something different, I’m free to do it.

That being said, my work is now adjacent to my writing. After a series of jobs, I now work as an ESL (English as Second Language) teacher. It’s not perfect work, and I would not say that I am “doing what I love.” I teach mostly kids. Kids are stressful. They are demanding. But it has taught me not to take language for granted. It has taught me to see words (specifically here the English language) as not an abstract thing, but a physical material, a thing that can be molded, shaped, worked with, changed. My “paying work” is now what feeds my “non-paying work”.

This situation may not always be tenable. Teaching gives me anxiety, and because of that, I cannot do it for long hours, and my pay remains low. Things may change. That being said, I can observe that this is what the situation is now: two things supporting each other, and while it is imperfect, it provides complexity, depth, and the impetus to understand language and develop further. That, for now, is enough for me.