The Meaning of Life

I am 42 today.

Happy Birthday me!

The Road (Trip) to Hell is Paved

The Road Trip to Hell is Paved With Good Intentions

I went on a road trip from Montreal to Ottawa on Saturday. The C*4 Wrestling promotion's last show of their "Season Two" Crossing the Line II saw them crown their first champion (Kevin Steen) Good show, a little long for my tastes, but it had great matches and some absolutely hilarious moments that I will write about in the comings days.

Our topic of the moment is how I got there. I wasn't planning on going to the show until Pat Laprade offered me a ride to Ottawa and agreed to drop me in Morin-Heights at my parents on the way back. Little did I know that I was agreeing to the Road Trip to Hell!

In the car: Me, Pat Laprade (driving), James Stone, Bakais and Pat's cousin, Maxime.

On the basic principle of saying some nice things about the drive, before I get to the good stuff, I reluctantly admit that the drive was not a total disaster:

• We did arrive in Ottawa before the doors opened.


• Miraculously with all limbs and organs intact.


• I did get dropped off by my parents safely.


• As James Stone discovered, Put Me, Laprade and Bakais in a car together and we will completely rebook your life, your promotion and your career, including booking James Stone's heel turn "But I'm not turning Heel!?!" in an angle that we called: Red Lips, Black List. Which would be a great title for a blog by the way.


• There is nothing better than letting Pat Laprade say something stupid and then James Stone and I spending fifteen minutes tag-teaming him as we prove point by point that he has no idea what he is talking about.


• Like James and I patiently explaining to Pat that HDNet is owned by Mark Cuban who invented streaming video and has more money than Vince McMahon and Donald Trump combined, so while the fact that HDNet got booted off Time Warner Cable in a contract dispute is not great news for ROH, it is also not the apocalyptic doomsday that Pat and other Chicken Littles are predicting. Heck Nickelodeon got booted off Time Warner Cable last year for a weekend in a contract dispute. Getting kicked off Time Warner Cable is practically a badge of honour.


• Or James and I explaining that while the Kevin Steen who succeeded in 2007 in ROH was certainly a better wrestler than the Kevin Steen who did not succeed in 2005, the biggest difference between the two runs was that Kevin was given a chance to succeed in 2007 that he was never given in 2005. There is a huge difference between being given the Briscoes as opponents and told to show off what you can do and being sent out in a five minute match. Patrick tried to counter by listing moves that Kevin did in 2007 that he never did in 2005. James and I patiently explained that these were moves that Kevin had used well before 2005, but that they were moves inappropriate to five minute matches which is why you never saw Kevin using them in ROH until 2007. In any case, it is a silly argument because the biggest difference between Kevin Steen 2005 and Kevin Steen 2007 wasn't his move-set, but his maturity in the ring and backstage, a better understanding of when and how to use that move-set and a better opportunity to do so.


• I had heard of Kevin Steen standing up to CM Punk backstage at ROH in 2005, but I had never heard of the 2007 postscript to that story where CM Punk came back to ROH for a show in 2007 and Kevin Steen walked up to him, held out his hand and said, "Hi, let me introduce myself. I'm Kevin Steen." As though the two men had never met and that is HILARIOUS.
  

So enough of the namby-pamby polite stuff, let's start really dishing the dirt shall we?

At the risk of ending up as an entry in James Stone's soon to be infamous Black List, it came as a complete shock to me and Pat Laprade and I suspect Bakais that James Stone is the most bitter, sad-sack, miserable excuse for a human being that I have ever been trapped for three hours in a car with. And I say this as a man who once drove from Montreal to Philadelphia and back with PCP Crazy F'N Manny, the IWS photographer Technical Diffulties and Chris Mergle whose idea of luxury is camping out in a burned-out wreck in the middle of an otherwise empty field somewhere in the Laurentians. Seriously James Stone hates EVERYTHING. He makes misanthropes like Dick Cheney, Conrad Black and Lex Luthor look like Mother Theresa by comparison.

The only halfway negative thing that I can say about Bakais is that the man can choose a monster bag of potato chips, pay for it, open the bag, inhale its contents and begin complaining that he ate too much as a prelude to the emission of toxic gases in the amount of time that the rest of humanity would still be looking back and forth trying to choose between Salt and Vinegar or Barbecue.

The rest of the problems of the trip: All Pat Laprade's fault.

1. He started the trip by locking the car with the keys inside it.


2. Despite normally calling or IMing me so much that he legally qualifies as a stalker, Pat waited to call me to tell me that he was picking me up until he was two blocks away from my office.


3. My office is on Sherbrooke and Metcalfe. Despite plenty of parking spots on Metcalfe, Pat drove two blocks further West to park on Stanley. Not that I mind walking but we were already late because of 1)


4. Pat is apparently allergic to driving with both hands on the wheel for any length of time whatsoever.


5. When stopping for gas, Pat feels compelled to inform his passengers that while he is filling up the car, they are now free to exit the vehicle and purchase refreshments, because apparently up until then, we were his prisoners.


6. Pat waited until we were circling Ottawa on the auto-route to inform us that he had no idea where the venue was.


7. Prior to telling us this, Pat spent about fifteen minutes programming his GPS with his right hand while searching the Internet on his Blackberry with his left hand for the venue address despite the fact that Bakais was sitting in the back seat with a perfectly useful iPhone. And yes, Pat was driving at the time.


8. Worst of all, Pat knew that Bakais had an iPhone because we had just spent a half-hour arguing as to what the most useless iPhone app is with half the car picking the "pouring a virtual beer" app and the other half arguing for the "light a virtual lighter" app. For the record, I was arguing that the virtual beer was more useless. At least the virtual lighter you can hold up at rock concerts.


9. Finally there is the small matter of Pat's GPS which is no doubt the infernal device handed out during your initial orientation on your first day in Hell.

Design Flaws of Pat's GPS
Note that some if not all of these problems may be due to operator failure rather than equipment failure

• It takes half an hour to program the damn thing by which point you are either already at your destination or you have already missed your exit.
• For some bizarre reason, despite how long it takes to set-up, Pat always begins by asking you what address to enter and then after asking for the address, telling you not to give him the information that he just asked you for because he is still programming his GPS.
• It has a disconcerting tendency to tell you to turn left while you are in the middle of an intersection.
• Because it apparently gets its signal from an Albanian spy satellite that was no doubt launched into a wobbly partial orbit by a giant sling-shot, the only way that Pat's GPS device can acquire and retain a signal is if Pat holds the device in his right hand and slowly waves the device around the car while driving with his left hand.
• It threatens to run out of battery power when you in the exact middle of nowhere.

Despite all of this Pat Laprade calls the Tom-Tom GPS, a brand of GPS other than the infernal device he currently uses, a piece of shit.

...

So what are the odds that I can continue to weasel out of paying my share of the gas money?

Mark Evanier Squirrels Llakor

It has been a surreal two weeks for me.

-I set up an interview with Kevin Nash for Tim Baines of the Ottawa Sun.
This led to:
Kevin Nash calling me at my office.
A full page article in the Ottawa Sun, reprinted in SLAM! Wrestling.
A full page article in the Journal de Montreal liberally translated from Tim Baines article.
The Journal de Montreal tabloid has the most widely read sports in a rabid sports market, so getting a full page article from them was huge.

-The Xth Anniversary show was a huge success. We had the second biggest crowd at the Medley ever and because of the Kevin Nash vs. PCO match with its controversial finish, wrestling fans all over the world are talking about us, including a full page review of the show on SLAM! Wrestling written by Pat Laprade.
And always a bonus, no one got seriously hurt despite Manny and Phantom's best attempt to kill each other.

Plus I got name-checked on the internet three times in less than a week.

-Bryan Alvarez of the Wrestling Observer called my press release for the IWS Xth Anniversary "Fantastic". The Wrestling Observer is the oldest and most reliable of the wrestling newspapers or "dirt sheets".

-Chris Sims of The Invincible Super-Blog name-checked me in his review of Inter-Species Wrestling's Slamtasia 2.

-Mark Evanier of News From Me name-checked me on his blog.

WHUH? Mark Evanier?

There are a lot of reasons to like Mark Evanier. He writes a blog that I read obsessively; he is an expert on ton of things that I care deeply about - comics, cartoons, cartoon voices, broadway musicals, Las Vegas, magic and more; he writes faster than I read and I read fast seriously, he writes fast enough that I suspect that he was standing nest to Barry Allen when the lightning hit the chmicals only in Marks' case the lightning and chemicals hit just his hands; he has either met, worked with, interviewed or been mistaken for everyone worth knowing; and, perhaps most importantly, he is one of my favourite comics book writers ever.

I would say that even if all he did was write the dialogue for Sergio Aragones' brilliantly funny Groo. But Mark is also responsible along with artist Dan Spiegle for the criminally underrated Crossfire. It falls into a category of comics that I love, protagonists who fight crime wearing a costume, when there is no real reason for them to need a costume. This includes Will Eisner's The Spirit, CC Boyer's Masked Man, and I would argue Bob Roazakis' 'Mazing Man.

Today the pitch for Crossfire is easier. It's Dog the Bounty Hunter fights crime in Hollywood. Back in the Eighties when I was buying comics at Wilkie's Wonderful World in Halifax from Ken Hwang before I started running the Wilkie's Dartmouth branch in 1990 it was a harder sell.

"You should buy Crossfire."

"What's it about?"

"Bounty hunter who fights crime in Hollywood."

"Don't all bounty hunters fight crime?"

"Well, yes."

"Why is he wearing a costume? Isn't he a bounty hunter? Aren't all bounty hunters supposed to catch crooks? Why does he need to hide his identity?"

"It's a Spirit thing."

"Nice try, you're not going to convince me to buy this book, just so that you can convince me to buy a book that was published in the 1940's. Who's the girl?"

"Rainbow. She's a member of the DNAgents."

"What are the DNAgents?"

"Sort of a cross between The Metal Men and the X-Men."

"The Metal Men?"

"Series by Robert Kanigher, remember he did The Haunted Tank war series that I convinced you to buy back issues of? The idea of Metal Men is that they are intelligent robots built by a mad scientist with powers based on the metal that they are designed from. Lead is strong and heavy, Gold is the leader, Mercury is liquid at room temperature. And because they are robots, they pretty much get destroyed at the end of each and every adventure."

"OK, as awesome as that sounds, before you send me scrambling to collect another old DC series that will take me years to complete, explain what the DNAgents are like without making abscure references to series that aren't published anymore."

"Well, they are like the X-Men in that they have different super-powers because of a genetic mutation. Unlike the X-Men though it wasn't an accidental mutation. They were made in a lab."

"That I will buy."

Cue Llakor banging his head. Note that in the Eighties, without cheap Showcase reprints, back issues were the only way to know about books like the Metal Men or Haunted Tank, The Spirit was available in reprints from Kitchen Sink, but convincing people to buy them was a struggle.

Since Mark Evanier ALSO wrote DNAgents only with Will Meugniot on art instead of Dan Spiegle he did better no matter what, but it always drove me crazy that I couldn't sell the series that I loved, but I could accidentally sell the related title that I honestly was kind of MEH about.

All of which explains why in a store that would sell 100 copies of X-Men a month, they would also sell 40 copies of DNAgents, but only 3 copies of Crossfire.

Long story short. Too Late. I am a big fan of Mark Evanier's writing. I have e-mailed him about stuff that he has written before and never gotten a response. Wasn't expecting one, he probably gets gobs of e-mails, but a recent post of his about Jesse Ventura prompted me to write to him.

The first time I saw Jesse Ventura lecturing people about truth and integrity, I did a double-take that would have seemed excessive on The Benny Hill Show. The man's first claim to fame was in professional wrestling, an occupation where you can't utter five sentences without lying in at least two of them. But he parlayed the skills from that profession into a brief career in politics, where I suppose they came in handy...

Now Jesse Ventura has always been a bit of a hero of mine. If for no other reason, no one has ever encapsulated the philosophy of the Heel as succintly as him, "Win if you can. Lose if you must. But always cheat!"

That sentence probably doesn't sound like much of a contradiction to what Mark is saying, except that when Jesse Ventura says that he is doing so as part of a performance. Because as I will argue at any opportunity, wrestling is a story-telling art form.

So, I wrote to Mark expressing thoughts along those lines and he decided to quote me in full and verbatim.

Here is what I said:

I am not going to try and convince you of the merits of professional wrestling. Speaking as someone who writes about it and for it and helps promote shows in Montreal, it can frequently be a sordid world where the talent is ruthlessly taken advantage of by the promoters putting on the shows, much like the rest of show business in fact except without even the fig-leaf of union protection that writers and performers like you have.

And this is why you are wrong about Jesse Ventura, specifically about this: "The man's first claim to fame was in professional wrestling, an occupation where you can't utter five sentences without lying in at least two of them.

OK, yes technically this is correct, the same way that it is true of any actor. Unless you would like to suggest that June Foray is in fact a flying squirrel? Would you have said the same thing about Norm MacDonald?

Jesse Ventura played a role on camera. His famous line was "Win if you can; Lose if you must; But always Cheat!" But that character was not him.

(Sure wrestling had a huge advantage of other show business professions that the suspension of disbelief is easier if people believe from the outset that what they are watching is real, an advantage that wrestling no longer has. And you may not necessarily believe this, but wrestling is a story-telling art form. Like any such art form it can be brilliant or wretched.)

From all that I have heard from wrestlers of that time period, Jesse Ventura was a gentleman backstage. Opinionated with an ego like any star, he nonetheless was one of the few wrestlers to stand up to promoters famously with Vince McMahon to argue for the protection of all wrestlers not just the well-paid stars. That the promoters should provide health care and other benefits for the wrestlers and that they should allow the wrestlers to form a union. Rare among his peers, he said this publicly and openly while he was a star and in fact Vince fired him from the WWF as a result. (He landed another gig with WCW soon after.) Unfortunately, wrestlers are as hard to organize as cats and no one has ever been successful at organizing a wrestler's union, but no one ever risked as much when they were a star to try and bring one about.

One quick note, I didn't mean Norm MacDonald. I meant Al Franken whose race and never-ending recount for the Senate seat in Minnesota both Mark and I have been following closely. And yeah, Al Franken and Norm MacDonald are so much alike. The lesson as always: I'm an idiot.

Mark's response:

Having once produced a special for CBS with a cast of pro wrestlers (and Vince McMahon as exec producer), I know a fair amount about that world...and all you say about working conditions is true. All you say about Mr. Ventura's rabble-rousing to improve them is also probably true. But when I wrote about wrestlers lying, I was referring to one key part of their job and it's where your analogy to June Foray or Norm MacDonald doesn't work.

There is no one alive who thinks June is really a flying squirrel and if you ever asked her, she'd tell you that every line she utters that suggests that is fiction. On the other mitt, there are actually people on this planet who think that the outcome of most pro wrestling matches is not predetermined...or at least think the games are a lot less scripted than they are. And whenever I've seen someone ask Jesse Ventura if his old wrestling matches were rigged or planned or fixed, he changes the subject, attacks the questioner, and generally fudges the truth as baldly as any politician he condemns for the same kind of tap-dancing.

Now, granted: Lying about whether a wrestling match was rigged is nowhere near the same sin as lying about C.I.A. intelligence or the circumstances of war. And I suppose a case could be made that since Jesse's wrestling days are behind him, he's just trying to not piss on his old livelihood and perhaps disminish it for those still working in those salt mines. My point was just that his old job afforded plenty of practice at avoiding the truth and fighting dirty...two skills that come in handy when one runs for elected office.

I like Jesse in a way. I don't always agree with him and I don't feel qualified to say if he was as poor a governor as the polls in Minnesota would seem to indicate. But I like that he's not out there parroting Talking Points or hedging his views to protect his political options. I also think it's great to have a few loud Libertarians out there, especially of the kind that don't compromise their views of the Constitution for the sake of personal expediency or gain. He adds a lot more to the public debate than any dozen Democrats or Republicans...even when I think he's wrong. I just think that back in his wrasslin' days, he did an awful lot of fibbing.

A few thoughts:

1. Getting into a name-dropping contest with Mark Evanier would be like trying to out-stare a cat. Vince McMahon? Oh yeah, I wrote a CBS Special he executive produced.

2. Bringing up June Foray was a bit of a cheap shot, a bit like flicking a towel on a lion's nose to get his attention. That said, I imagine that every time June Foray makes an appearance and is announced as the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, there is at least one person in attendance who freaks out because Rocky's a Girl?!?

3. I probably would have been better off comparing wrestlers to magicians. They both come from a carny background. They both are protective of their secrets. The difference of course is that magicians may not be willing to explain their trick, they do at least acknowledge that there is a trick involved. The problem for wrestlers is that the biggest secret is that there is a secret; the biggest trick is that there is a trick.

4. As Mark does mention above, "Lying about whether a wrestling match was rigged is nowhere near the same sin as lying about C.I.A. intelligence or the circumstances of war."

I think that I would go further than that. Lying about wrestling is an almost harmless lie, designed to preserve an illusion for those who want the illusion to be preserved. It is on par with Disneyland insisting that their animators stay in character until they are out-of-sight of the general public. Mickey does not take his head off in front of the kids.

Leave aside the CIA. Mark lives in a town populated by people whose only problem with lying is that they sometimes forget which lie that they are telling. No lie, no performance that Jesse Ventura has ever hoodwinked the public with can compare with one of those pit vipers. Wrestling fans want Jesse Ventura to lie to them. I am fairly confident that neither James Garner nor Jack Klugman are impressed with the magic trick where NBC and Universal hid the profits of The Rockford Files in Quincy and the profits from Quincy in The Rockford Files, somehow managing to turn two profitable series into two money-losing series in the process.

Or as William Gibson says in Spook Country:

People who didn't know the music industry, Inchmale said, believed that the movie business was the ne plus ultra of vicious, asshole-chewing, hyena-like behavior.

Remarkably accurate description of music executives, wrestling promoters or Hollywood executives, probably one that Gibson earned through bitter experience. Not that having your best ideas ripped off (in films like The Matrix) or having one of your best short stories (Johnny Mnemonic) turned into the very definition of puerile crap should make anyone bitter or anything!

Jesse Ventura's level of mendacity simply doesn't seem proportional to what Mark encounters on a regular basis. Not that I am going to win an argument with Mark Evanier. Nice to be invited to spar with him publicly though.

When We Were Marks: The Foul King

When We Were Marks
The Foul King
Retro Column February 2006

Where Llakor Got His Avatar: The Foul King

Those of you who stumble across this blog, may be asking yourself: Where did Llakor get his avatar?

It's from the greatest (non-documentary) wrestling film ever (prior to The Wrestler) a Korean wrestling movie called The Foul King.

(The runner-up is a Japanese film called The Calamari Wrestler about a Japanese (heel) wrestling champion who is challenged from beyond the grave by his ex-partner whom he betrayed in the ring (and then stole his wife/girl friend outside of the ring) This ex-partner died, but was then reincarnated as a Human/Calamari hybrid. Honest to God. I couldn't make this shit up. It's by the same director Minoru Kawasaki who did Executive Koala, about a salaryman who is also a Giant Koala, The Rug Cop, about a hardboiled Japanese cop who takes down crooks by throwing his toupee at them, and Kawasaki's only real mis-step The World Sinks Except Japan, a apocalyptic satire about the rest of the world being covered by the rising seas except for Japan and the weird chaos that ensues.)

The story of the Foul King is pretty simple. The main character is a mild-mannered banker who gets pushed around by everyone around him: his co-workers, the commuters on the subway with him, the punks who hassle him and mug him on the way home, and his disabled Dad who browbeats him at home.

(One thing about Korean and Japanese subways is that they are so crowded that there are subway employees called Push Men whose only job is to literally cram the passengers into the cars so that they are as filled up as possible. There is a hilarious sequence where our hero is trying to get out of the subway at his stop and literally can't partly because the subway car is too crowded, partly because the other passengers are being ass-holes and mostly because our hero is too damn polite.)

One night, our hero is running from the local hoodlums and ends up hiding inside a local warehouse which turns out to be a small wrestling dojo. Attracted by the owner's daughter and convinced that wrestling will solve all his problems, our hero tries to convince the old and cranky owner of the dojo to train him. This takes a lot of convincing because the owner is suspicious of someone who literally just stumbled in out of the rain.

The training is mostly done by the owner's daughter who naturally knows more about wrestling than any one in the country other than her Dad.

It turns out that the grouchy owner wrestled under a hood as the cheating heel Foul King. (Possibly also called Tiger Mask.) When the time comes for our hero to be finish his training and choose a gimmick, the owner's daughter conspires for him to become the new Foul King.

The thing on his chest is not just his wrestling symbol and a fancy chest protector. It is hollow and inside there are all the "international objects" as Gordon Solie used to call them that a cheating wrestler would want - powders, rope, but especially a fork. There is a great sequence when our hero is presented with his wrestling fork and all the wrestlers gather around in respect and someone says reverently "Abdullah" and all the wrestlers nod.

(When I originally saw it, at this point, I was literally dying with laughter and about 500 non-wrestling fans in the theatre with me at Fantasia were looking at me like I was some kind of mutant. I think the only other guy in the theatre who understood the reference was the film programmer who organizes the El Santos films and the Godzilla movies.)

The new Foul King does a tour of the Korean countryside and becomes more and more popular. At which point, the Korean Vince McMahon approaches the dojo owner and former Foul King to put his new Foul King into the main event of the big Seoul show for the year which will be a tune-up match for the Korean champion before the Tokyo Dome show in Japan.

(In and of itself, there is an interesting display of hierarchy here as the wrestling dojo is lower on the totem pole in Korea than the big Korean fed, which is lower on the totem pole than Japan.)

Naturally, the former Foul King is suspicious and protests that his student is not yet ready for the main event of a Seoul super-card, but he allows himself to be convinced.

Admiral Ackbar: It's a trap!

The Korean Vince McMahon's plan is not just for his champion to have a tune-up match before Tokyo, it's to settle some scores that he has with the old Foul King by humiliating his student and to kill the Foul King character dead Dead DEAD by unmasking him.

And we all know what happens when you try and unmask a masked wrestler. SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE.





...

...

...

That was probably more information that you needed.

Point is Foul King is a fricking amazing wrestling film. Hilarious with all kinds of references and jokes that you have to be a wrestling fan to get, but at the same time non-wrestling fans aren't alienated.

I should point out that I saw the film three maybe four years before I originally wrote this review in 2006, possibly longer. It was the summer before I saw my first IWS show, when Jericho won the indisputed title, so 2001? I haven't rewatched it since, so I am writing this from memory. Now, okay admittedly I am the guy with the freakish memory a la Archie Goodwin, still for a film to engrave itself into my memory for me to be able to literally quote scenes from it - it has to be a fricking incredible film. There are films that I saw within the last month where I would have to search my memory HARD just to remember the title, but this film is as fresh for me as if I saw it yesterday.

If the film has a weakness/weaknesses there are two - one the film is filled with clichés and two the hero goes from trainee to main event waaaaay too fast. But to its credit, the film is aware of these weaknesses and does its best to address them. For instance, while the film follows the structure of the 98 pound weakling at the beach comic book ads, it does make it clear that the problem is not the hero's physique, it is his reluctance to use his size and strength, his refusal to be assertive.

In terms of the speed with which our hero goes from trainee to main event, the film does document the various steps that a wrestler has to go to to get from one stage to another. One of the standard techniques of drama is to compress events to heighten drama which explains the pace. And the film does make it clear that normally there would be a longer "paying your dues" process.

...

To answer the original question...

I use the Foul King avatar, because it's an amazing film; because it's an avatar about wrestling and I love wrestling especially masked wrestling; because it's an avatar about cinema and I love cinema especially foreign cinema and especially especially Asian cinema; because it's an avatar about Korea and I am rather fond of Korea even if I have never been there, the combination of Asia and Catholicism is irresistible to me; and finally, because I adore obscure pop culture references and you don't get much more obscure than a Korean comedy about a masked wrestler.

How's that for a run-on sentence? (And a run-on answer?)

First Post

Well, we will see how long and regular I can keep this up. CRZ has always said that I should keep a blog, if only to keep me from clogging up the-W with useless posts that he cares nothing about.

Fair warning, this blog will likely feature a lot of SHILL~!ing for the International Wrestling Syndicate for whom I have been head writer slash publicist slash SHILL~! since December of 2003, as well as for Inter-Species Wrestling for whom I am the Worst Ring Announcer in the Multiverse since 2005 and Commissioner since Rotchy and Twiggy randomly named me Commissioner during live commentary for Love Hurts in February of 2007.

I will also be talking about the YoungCuts Film Festival for whom I have been Festival Director since March of 2007.

In wrestling, my main claim to fame is that I am one of five people who can take credit for creating the El Generico gimmick, the most important being the man who wears the mask, a man that I am proud to call a friend.
(And yes, despite claims by some to the contrary, it has always been the same guy.)
I am also Kevin Steen's official biographer. I would say that I was also Steen's friend, except that Steen (from choice) has no friends with the possible exception of El Generico and Steen kicks his ass on a regular basis.

I sporadically publish a column about wrestling history called When We Were Marks, hence the blog title. When I get around to writing them, I always release these on Wednesday for obsessive reasons.

Wednesday is named after Odin, the king of the Norse Gods. (Thor's dad.) Perched on his shoulder are two ravens, Huginn "Thought" and Muninn "Memory". In Norse mythology, Odin sacrificed one eye to gain the loyalty of these two ravens who fly the span of the Earth every day and return to whisper into Odin's ears the things that he should know and, more importantly, the things that he should remember.

Note that this is ORAL memory and ORAL storytelling that we are talking about. Not the memory that we keep in books, but the memory that is passed from one storyteller to another. Memory that takes up certain forms and rituals to protect the information from twisting and changing as it passes from one set of lips to another set of ears.

John Ford's ode to Oral Memory
Many stories relate that Odin sacrificed his eye to gain Huginn and Muninn's loyalty. Few relate that he did so by gouging out his own eye and then feeding it to his Don't call them pets! ravens. Even fewer and darker are the stories which tell us that the price for Huginn and Muninn's loyalty was not one eye, but TWO!
One eye right away... and the other later.

When I do write my When We Were Marks columns, I am aiming for Odin. For that combination of myth, of personal sacrifice, of self-mutilation, of knowledge and oral memory represented by the combination of One-Eyed Odin and his ravens Huginn and Muninn. I won't promise to have a new column up every week, but I have enough old ones that I plan on rewriting and republishing that there should be something new up at least every Odin's Day.

The rest of the time, I will be talking about less serious wrestling stuff, about films, about comics and all the other pop culture junk that bounces around my empty skull. I will probably also post up some examples of films from the YoungCuts Film Festival from time to time. And I may even take requests.