A cry for help

Well, the post didn't emerge on time, as I did the work (and I did too! Amazing...) at home. As of tomorrow we should have the net here at 106 too, which is nice. But for now possibly the last disk imported post, which is in danger of lowering people's opinions of me. But confessions must be made...

There are a few things I do too much in life. I drink too much Coke. I've gotten unacceptably drunk too many times. I tend to get out slashing at deliveries that aren't really there to cut. But far, far more disturbing than any of these is the amount of hours I've spent of late watching none other than the WWE.

I'm not sure exactly how this descent into the dark side happened. Even back at intermediate school when the then WWF was enjoying crazy levels of popularity, (All the cool kids were like: "Save the panda! Powdered rhino horn is no more an aphrodisiac than Ben Allan!" Oh wait, wrong WWF.) I didn't give a damn about it, (I was a member of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fanclub, however) and I continued to not give a damn about it for the next 13 years, except perhaps to offer the occasional derisive snort in its direction. I regarded it even at the age of 12 as stupid and its devotees as a sad bunch...

I guess I could trace the problem back to various damn wrestling shows (there seem to about 27 of the things) being on up to 3 times a week on Sky 1, at a time (between 1-4am variously) when for some reason I'm up ( here I blame Armourguard and a thesis lifestyle). One or the other of my brothers would often be here and up too, and we would flick between whatever crap was on Sky Movies (they only seem to put really crappy movies on overnight these days) and the wrestling, and sit there mocking it and its pretence at total realism. We would never watch it for more than about 10 minutes at a time. However, Dan and Josh moved out, and I found myself up by myself at 2am and tending to leave the TV on as background noise. For a while things stayed the same. I would channel surf distractedly while reading a book and giggle away to myself at the total idiocy of the white trash fans believing the wrestling was actually real. But then things started to go somehow wrong.I started leaving the program on for longer periods of time. I was morbidly fascinated. I started to pay attention to who the wrestlers were. I began to wonder what was going to happen next.

Suddenly and horribly last week, I realised I could identify many of the wrestlers by their entry music.

I can't explain it. I am not your typical wrestling fan. I don't want to be associated with your typical wrestling fan. I am not about to go ordering my Stone Cold Steve Austin t-shirt online. I know it's not real. I know the ring floor is basically a big springy trampoline and it's all choreographed beforehand and the winners are predetermined and the tables they smash are made of balsa wood and it's all a big stunt show in which no-one gets really hurt. But that's not the point. The point is it's like this totally insane white-trash soap opera I've become inexplicably interested in. It's so completely ridiculous it's somehow entertaining. It is totally mad. They build up these cornball inter-character rivalries. They have these rules which they ignore completely because whenever someone breaks them the referee is always looking in the opposite direction. Then they schedule special matches without rules like it makes a difference. Wrestlers supposedly sidelined with injury emerge from the audience to attack rivals with their crutches. Anyone addressing the audience with a microphone from the ring is inevitably interrupted by someone running in and hitting them with something. 'Evil' wrestlers 'beat up' the girl wrestlers, as well as the ostensible girlfriends of 'good' wrestlers, or at least threaten them, until some other 'good' wrestler runs in and throws them onto a table. The management staff wrestle. The administrative staff wrestle. The commentators wrestle. Rebel wrestlers get into 'fights' with the owners/business managers of the league and get 'suspended without pay', at least until the next show where they show up and somehow get reinstated (normally by hitting someone with a chair). I re-emphasise, it is completely mad.

Tonight so far for example, after the American national anthem, during which there was special emphasis from the singer on, and wild cheering by the crowd at, the lines 'And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air' (Yay, war! Akin in some ways to wrestling, which is our lives!) Stone Cold Steve Austin was escorted from the building by 12 'police officers' because he was in violation of a restraining order taken out on him by the general manager (who he beat up last week) and is now hanging outside in his pickup truck, and the relatively stringy looking fellow called Jeff Hardy who looked to be about to kiss the crowd favourite female wrestler, (or 'WWE Diva', if you will) Trish, was stopped when the boyfriend wrestler of the chick she had just been wrestling (baddy girl Victoria, women's champion) tackled him, and then some other female wrestler came on and kicked everyone in the vicinity in the face...and I believe coming up next, The Rock is going to come on and play his guitar to the audience. I'm betting Steve Austin is going to come in in 'open defiance of the law' and break it over his head. Keeping this particular couple of hours of television even more surreal is the fact that every single ad break seems to somewhat incongruously contain a push for the American version of Antiques Roadshow. I am not making this up. (Still, if life of late is going to be surreal, why shouldn't TV try and keep up?)

Ah, here's Kane, who has been known to set 'stage hands' alight by shooting lightning from his fingertips. Oh my God, WHY DO I KNOW THAT?

I suppose it could be worse. At least I'm still using quotation marks. At least I'm not saving up to pay for the 4 hour pay-per-view special (but I'm mighty curious, there are going to be some big matches, and apparently a special appearance by the Miller Light Catfight Girls, whoever or whatever the hell they are), I'm not recording the thing, I'm still not even sure when it's on, I don't care if I miss it, and I don't consider myself open to criticism from regular watchers of any of the following: American Idol, Survivor, Fear Factor, or Shortland Street (you know who you are). But try and understand, I have so many questions that need answering! Why is there a guy called 'Coach' who doesn't actually coach anyone but just interviews people? Why does Jeff Hardy paint his arm blue-green? Is Hulk Hogan like 80 now? Why do all of them acquire about 5 nicknames (Scott Steiner is called 'Freakzilla', but also 'Big Poppa Pump', for some random reason)? Why does The Rock have a guitar signed by Willie Nelson? Why do I care???

Pity me, people. I was once like you.

Stone Cold got a fellow enemy of The Rock (The Hurricane - also stringy, superhero themed) to drive his pick-up in to the arena as a distraction to police while he hid under a tarpaulin in the back. The police left with The Hurricane, and then Stone Cold emereged and tackled The Rock off his chair mid-song. After taking a brief pummelling, The Rock ran away. Stone Cold has thoroughly destroyed The Willie-Nelson-signed-guitar. The Rock is pissed off. I am dumber for having watched this.

While I sit here turning my brain to mush in the small hours over recent weeks, there has been the chance to enjoy more cerebrally challenging fare. Call me generalising stereotyper if you will, (or just Gensterry if you're being informal) but I think as far as crowd dynamics, life attitudes and what have you goes, I don't think there can be two crowd bodies as typically polemically opposite as your average Texas wrestling audience and your average Ben Harper concert. (A far reaching lead-in to be sure, but a lead-in nonetheless.)

The concert was very cool, apart from a couple of songs degenerating at times into loud electronic squealing, which is not a personal favourite of mine, but didn't really detract from the whole 'really good' aspect. It was started off in a nicely low-key fashion when Jack Johnston ambled out with his guitar by himself and sat down and started playing like he was singing around a camp fire with a few buddies. Being a rock star - both phenomenonally difficult and strangely easy to achieve. Jack's songs translated well live. Ben Harper himself came across as a cool guy, and The Innocent Criminals were a great bunch of musos who backed up in excellent fashion and seemed to be having fun onstage - the whole sound was very tight and some of the solos on bass and bongos were especially cool. Just a shame Ben (him, not me) got drowned out a couple of times by unnecessarily tuneless amplified guitar screeching. If I was to have any other minor gripes, it would be that waiting interminably is annoying and encores as they have evolved are stupid. There were two of them, and it seemed like a totally unneccesary wait both times, especially when the house lights were not turned up either time, and they played as their last song of the second encore the biggest single from their latest album - you know they're always going to play that, the crew obviously knew they were going to play it, so why pretend that it's the end of the concert when it clearly isn't? So we can stand around some more? Great, like we don't get enough of that turning up at the time on the ticket which is an hour before the actual start of the concert. I'm not a fan of this repetitive trend - rock concerts never start within cooee of any time they tell you. If you go to a concert by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, you don't turn up and wait for an hour before tuba players and cellists shamble their way onto the stage from the session they've just been having, and you don't pay extra ticket money for the joy of hearing a couple of C-grade chamber groups performing because they're contractually obliged by their record label before things really get started. You are there on time or late. Not that I equate Jack Johnston with a C-grade chamber group or anything, he was great, but I'd love to know where this traditional format came from - not every concert has to be a mini rock festival. I think the younger, more radical demographic at rock concerts means that this standing around aspect is part of some grand CIA conspiracy plan to study the group behaviour of today's youth (possibly to see if we pose any threats to their plans to bomb small children. And yes, I know this is relatively speaking a wildly inaccurate claim, but remember my friends call me 'Gensterry'.) They're testing us people...if you're at a concert and have been standing around waiting 4 or 5 days for the main act to actually show, and you see a slightly suspicious looking man dressed in fashion that's 4 to 6 months out of date, and he's trying to incite a riot, be extremely wary - he's probably a plant trying to create an excuse for them to test their new nerve gas on us.

How come my blog entries tend towards conspiracy theories? Oh well.

In the weekend Dan and I took in Brotherhood of the Wolf. Like the WWE, it was (barking, ha!) mad. Those crazy French people. Few movies in history have featured, as Dan summed up so nicely, psycho papist ninja gypsies. But it was thoroughly entertaining. It is a hard movie to sum up. It's a bit like Jaws on land in 18th century France with er, a good deal more martial arts, (hard to put your kung-fu skills into practice against a shark after all) with many similar elements of The Advocate thrown in for good measure, if anyone's seen that (a pretty funny / interesting Colin Firth movie, well worth a look, certainly for students of medieval social history like myself). But it was great. It must also be the movie with the most shots of things splashing or spraying in slow motion. Blood, muddy water, leaves - they were flying artfully everywhere. Go see it.

Last Tuesday Teens and I went to The Pianist which was also excellent, and made me want to immediately play the game Medal of Honour specifically so I could shoot Nazis, with luck in the groin. Like many WWII films of late it was extremely depressing, but also as an amazing tale of survival incredibly uplifting as well. It also highlighted the difference between those in the Third Reich who really were horrible callous Nazis and those who were just Germans forced to fight. I don't think the true Nazis have a historical claim to nationhood, or even human being status. I don't like to think of them as German anymore. They were something else, there's something that happened to certain people in that war. Last night Dad and I were watching the first episode of a documentary series called 'Hell in the Pacific' that was about the Pacific theatre in the war, and they were intreviewing these old Japanese soldiers who were in tears trying to explain the attrocities they had committed - they couldn't reconcile their lives now with their actions then. A whole nation brainwashed to regard other nations as less than human. One wizened veteran had nightmares every night for 20 years about a Chinese farmer in Nanking who had pleaded for his life, and told the officer of his wife and children - he beheaded him anyway, but was sufficiently affected at the time to miss his neck and chop into the base of his skull 3 or 4 times first. The nightmares stopped when he went to China to visit the village where it had happened. There was also this hardcase old Cockney guy who was telling jokes about he and his friends being constantly shot up from the air on the retreat back to Singapore, but then broke down when the documentary crew took him back inside the hospital there where he ended up after being wounded. He told of the Japanese arriving after the surrender of the city and bayonetting all of the wounded, for some reason passing him and a few others by. They bayonetted some guy on the operating table, and shot his surgeons. American marines as well admitted to killing surrendering forces, and firing on women and children too towards the end of the island hopping campaign, uncertain if there were enemy forces among them, and wanting above all to survive. It's kind of hard to think of people cheerfully doing this in such large numbers. I guess it's largely a culture and upbringing thing, and as such a product of that period in history, but when you see the Iraqis put a pregnant woman in a suicide bomb car just the other day so the Americans wouldn't shoot at it, and then blew her and 4 soldiers up, it seems like there's a switch in everyone's head that in certain conditions you just need to flick to turn them into a monster. This makes you wonder if people could flick it in your head today, or at least if they could have flicked it if you were living back then, and are forced to conclude 'probably'. Excellent. War, despite the opportunities it provides for heroism, is not something that illustrates mankind's better aspects. That's why we should sodding well avoid it whenever possible for as long as possible George Bush, you bloodthirsty son of a bitch.

Good film anyway. Also a good distraction from the news I received just prior to seeing it, which had me uttering Eh!!?? Wha...? Snuh? Uh..fuh...guhbuh? and other such pithy witticisms.

Also interesting for entirely different reasons to see bits of the other week on TV was The Slums of Beverly Hills. On previous occasions certain people have accused me of reccommending this movie to them, although I knew I had never seen it before - I don't forget movies (must make a list of all the ones I have seen when I'm stuck in a snow cave or something some time). Seeing what I did of it channel flicking, the answer became painfully clear: Warwick and Bhumi were obviously wandering aimlessly around the video store, and Warwick went 'How about this?', and then they watched the film, and then he desparately needed someone to blame for his choice, and I was the unfortunate victim of this sad deception. Pitiful really Waz. Real men admit their mistakes, they don't blame them on their absent friends who have considerably more taste than that, said the man who just admitted he watches wrestling. For shame, sir.

Hmm, better post this puppy. It's become somewhat long. I'm sure I had another subject to muse upon but can't for the life of me remember what it was. Oh well, now we are to have the net at home I can post my most random meaningless thoughts at any time of the day or night, so I'm sure everybody's looking foward to that. All for now however.

Right then amigos, box on.