#but weird kids and fistfuls of bedlam

[ketavinsky]

pros of returning to nz for my weird kids research trip: lots of awesome material, i finally feel at home in my home country again, i missed the bush, i missed the rain, i finally have a complete arc for carver, rasmussenisms, made peace with the rage, got to see the family cat even if he doesnt remember me, my childhood bed, my childhood stuffies, great inspiration for plot and setting, new horror devices

cons: the sweet spot in my childhood home is about 10 days and day 12 im going fucking crazy

[closetofanxiety]

Show Review: Blitzkrieg Pro Wrestling, “Time Bomb,” 8-26-17

Hey, it’s the the northern Connecticut promotion that Cody Rhodes will SHOOT HARD on! It’s their two-year anniversary! It’s a show in which a bunch of guys didn’t turn up, the card got scrambled, and Marty Jannetty was drunk off his ass! Let’s take a look, shall we? 

(All photos in this post by Chris Marion of the good ole Springfield Republican newspaper, or whatever it’s called nowadays)

The time: Saturday, August 26, 2017, 7 p.m. (the poster has the wrong bell time, in a classic indie fed move)

The place: The former Enrico Fermi High School in Enfield, Conn. They closed this high school a few years ago, but you’d never know it: the trophy cases in the hallways are still full, and there are still pictures everywhere of students doing student activities. I bet those kids are either almost done with college now. Or, since this is Enfield, in the military. Sobering.

The crowd: 300-ish? Hard to tell. Not nearly as many people as were there the last time they ran this building. They should have done this show in their normal venue, a banquet hall above a Polish bakery. 

Show notes: Al Snow, “Cowboy” Bob Orton, and Marty Jannetty were in attendance, but only signing autographs. It’s kind of a miracle Marty was able to sign anything. When I got there, the two women working the door pointed him out to me: he was hitting on the young woman who sings the national anthem in the most sloppy-drunk way possible. “He’s been chasing her around all night,” they said. “She’s desperate to get away from him.” Fun! Orton and one of the Blitzkrieg “office” people had to carry Marty out to his car to sleep it off. Blitzkrieg is this weird mixture of local guys, very young guys who want to make a go of it, indie stars, and “legends,” which makes shows sort of strange and unpredictable. Like this one! I missed a couple of matches because they were last minute adds to the card (Juan Francisco de Coronado, the Proletarian Boar, and another guy were all no-shows, so they had to juggle the card) and they weren’t that good. One was a six-man scramble match and the other featured a guy from Stafford Springs who was VISIBLY from Stafford Springs, which is a reference that not many people outside northeastern Connecticut will get, but is true nonetheless. 

Three-Way Trios Match: The Breakfast Club (Francis “Kip” Stevens and The Abominable CPA) vs Massage NV (VSK and Dorian Graves) vs The Closers (Brad Hollister and Justin “Hammer” Tunis)

Not a bad match. One of the things I love about Massage NV is that despite their plainly ludicrous gimmick - wrestling masseurs - they are both really proficient wrestlers. Hollister is also a dude who can really go, and who has adopted a comedy gimmick (he likes bacon or, possibly, he is made of bacon). The Breakfast Club - two guys with nerd gimmicks - are hugely over with the crowd, which also hates the Closers and is not sure what to make of Massage NV. This is basically chaos interspersed with comedy moments, but when Massage NV and the Closers square off, it’s possible to get a glimpse of a potentially fun feud. The Breakfast Club win, to the delight of Enfield. 

Rating: Three Closed High Schools

Mia Yim vs Skylar

Skylar is a huge fan favorite here; I believe she used to hostess at the Chili’s in town, which for Enfield people is the equivalent of being a local celebrity. Mia Yim, previously popular with the fans here, came out as the bad guy, and really got into her role. “I’m a former Knockouts champion, I’m a participant in the Mae Young Classic, so what am I doing in this town?” she asked. Minus the wrestling credentials, this is something I asked myself every morning for nearly two years when I worked here. Skylar will stand up for the honor of Carpet City in this match!

We really only get about five minutes of a match here because Mia Yim’s evil allies, the Batiri, come out and help her cheat to win. But Commissioner Tim Jensen is having none of it! Despite having been a heel authority figure for the last 18 months, he runs out and announces that the main event will be Yim and the Batiri vs Skylar and the East Coast Bastard Crew (minus Rude Boy Riley, obvs, who is in something of a legal system pickle). The crowd cheers. I guess Jensen is a good guy now?

Rating: Not going to rate this, I’d like to see a proper match between these two.

Chris Dickinson vs. Bob Holly

Bob Holly in 2017 is a trip. He looks like the result of a science experiment where they attached a 60-year-old man’s head to the body of a 28-year-old man. He even has bad tribal tattoos, it’s wild. Bob made his pro wrestling debut in 1987, which is the year Chris Dickinson was born. We’re here in an abandoned high school and this is America.

This could have been a nasty-off between two hard-hitting dudes who love to mix it up, but it turned out to be half “dudes having fun out there” and half “dudes chopping the absolute piss out of each other.” I enjoyed it, but I couldn’t help but think of what could have been, you know? Holly seemed like he was in a good mood, at least by Holly standards, and Dickinson was doing the “I’m a goofy heel” thing. 

After the match (Holly won with the Alabama slam, of course), Holly got the microphone and said this will probably be his last year in pro wrestling. He also said he is not the guy we’ve heard about from the Internet, that he’s actually a decent, caring dude. He even said, “That’s the real me. You meet me tonight, you’re not even meeting Bob Holly, you’re meeting Robert Howard, that’s my real name,” and somewhere at a Louisville-area Wendy’s, Jim Cornette screamed in agony. 

Rating: Three Closed High Schools

Blitzkrieg Pro Bedlam! Championship: Sasha Jenkins (c) vs “Smart” Mark Sterling w/Sidney Bakabella

The company’s only title has a rule that it can’t be defended in a standard one on one match. There has to be some kind of stipulation for the Bedlam! championship to change hands, and in this case that stipulation was special guest referee Johnny Idol, a local favorite for many years. OK. Jenkins is a guy who is going to be really good, just very athletic and has a lot of the psychology down already, and Sterling is a decent old-school heel: his gimmick is that he is intelligent, so of course the Enfield crowd hates him. HOW DARE YOU HAVE COLLEGE DEGREES, YOU FANCY SON OF A BITCH.

This is a decently worked match. Jenkins is the better performer, but Sterling is rock solid on the fundamentals, and makes a great foil. This features one of the best missile dropkicks I’ve ever seen in a wrestling match, just impeccable. Sterling keeps cheating with the help of Bakabella, lots of distractions, Johnny Idol is a piss-poor ref, etc. Idol ends up accidentally clobbering Jenkins with the title belt, which allows Sterling to get the pin and become YOUR NEW Blitzkrieg Pro Wrestling Bedlam! Champion. The crowd lustily boos him.

Rating: Three Closed High Schools.

Maxwell Jacob Friedman vs Josh Briggs

In terms of actual wrestling, this was the match of the night. MJF is already good, but he is going to be So Fucking Good before too long, and Briggs is making a lot of progress. He already looks better than the last time I saw him, which I think was in June. He’s angling for the spot, vacated by Dijak, of the Very Tall Man Who Is Shockingly Agile. They brawl around the crowd, and Briggs puts MJF through a table, much to the delight of the crowd. Back in the ring, MJF gets the upper hand thanks to his superior speed and heel-ish rulebreaking. Seriously, MJF is a powerhouse. If he were a British guy we’d already be sick of people talking about him. Briggs, though, is too much for MJF, and gets the win after a gloriously nasty big boot.

Rating: Three and a Half Closed High Schools. 

Mia Yim and The Batiri vs Sklar and the East Coast Bastard Crew

So, a bit of inside baseball here: Jeremy Leary, one half of the ECBC, is also the owner of the company, and Skylar’s boyfriend. This prompted a bit of drama on the Blitkrieg Instagram page, as some fans complained that ECBC and Skylar are being booked too strong, and Mia Yim should have gone over Skylar. A few points: 1) it’s wrestling, who cares who wins; and 2) Yim actually pinned Skylar in their one-on-one. But hey, drama!

This match lasted about half an hour, and was a lot of fun. It started with wild brawling through the crowd, as Yim basically spent five minutes running away from Skylar and throwing chairs at her while the Batiri and the ECBC traded fists. It felt like, with all the card changes, they just said, “Fuck it, let’s just do whatever,” and it was fun and loose. Yim really played the heel well, and when she finally got her comeuppance from Skylar, the crowd popped huge. The Batiri are also solid workers capable of putting on good-to-really-good matches, and while I wouldn’t rank them among my favorites, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them have a genuinely bad match. The night ends with Obariyon submitting to Skylar’s finisher. WAY TO BOOK YOUR GIRLFRIEND MAN!!!

Rating: Three and a half closed high schools. 

Here are some of Chris’ photos:

I’m glad Chris got a shot of this guy, he is the loudest and most obnoxious fan I’ve ever encountered at a wrestling show, and he goes to all the Blitzkrieg shows. He pretends to be Jesse Ventura and screams the nastiest shit at people. It’s always the least funny people who think they’re comedians:

[ketavinsky]

anyways, being in nz to write weird kids is mega wack. ive had horrible extremely symbolic nightmares about my parents for the 4 months leading up to the trip and now that im here i really do realise that i would have killed myself if i hadnt moved to australia. 2019 was a fucked up year and i withdrew from so many people i cared about because i was so horrified and ashamed of what i came from and in 2020 i had to really reckon with the consequences of that but thank god now i can funnel it all into weird kids, the appetiser to The Worst Series Ever

[closetofanxiety]

Show Review: Blitzkrieg Pro, “Ruby Soho”

This is what I did on Saturday. Let’s get at it.

When: Saturday, March 26, 2017

Where: The Former Enrico Fermi High School, Enfield, Conn., USA

Who: “Hundreds” of fans, according to the Springfield, Mass. newspaper; I would estimate between 350-400, but keep in mind I’m notoriously bad at crowd counts. Blitzkrieg is unique-ish in having its own crew of uniformed men to lead the fans’ chants; the Full-Throttle Wrecking Crew is four middle-aged guys in red shirts and leather vests, banging chains on a table throughout the matches. It’s actually not a terrible idea; at least there’s noise during bad matches.

Juan Francisco de Coronado vs. Mr. USA Tony Atlas

This is about what you’d expect for an opening match between a comedy foreigner from Chikara and the 62-year-old Atlas. Lot of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” chants directed against Coronado, who is from Ecuador, that longtime rival of the United States. Atlas wins with a series of arm drags, and then cuts a long, rambling promo about the greatness of America and the need to restore prayer to public schools. The building we’re in used to be a public school, but now it’s closed, and I don’t know what Enfield uses it for. To host wrestling events? It’s possible. Enfield is that kind of town. Rating: One and a Half Leather Vests.

Four Corners Tag Team Match: The Breakfast Club vs. The Batiri vs. The Throwbacks vs. The East Coast Bastard Crew

This is kind of your archetypal Blitzkrieg Pro match, in that there are a lot of guys in the ring and it’s basically chaos. Heavy on the comedy, as you’d expect from a match involving the Breakfast Club and a bunch of Chikara guys; at one point, they played a game of mime baseball. Harley Race would die on the spot just so he could turn in his grave. I don’t mind a little comedy, but this match went a full 20 minutes, which felt over-indulgent. The Breakfast Club won, to a decent cheer from the crowd. Rating: Two Leather Vests.

Isaiah Rex vs. Narciso Rex

These are the former members of Jurassic Era, briefly my favorite local tag team, because their gimmick was that they came from Pangaea and weighed 200 metric tons, and the way they visually represented the concept of unfathomably primeval non-human beings is they wore jean shorts and face paint. They’re not really good at wrestling, though, although Isaiah - the face in the feud - is a bit better than Narciso. The highlight of this match was maybe when the Springfield newspaper identified Narciso in print as “Cecil.” There was a ref bump and interference from the Full-Throttle Wrecking Crew, which Isaiah joined after winning the match. This is another weird Blitzkrieg booking quirk: they always stack the deck against the heels, inadvertently making them the underdogs. I don’t know what that says about Enfield. Rating: One Leather Vest.

Skylar vs. Penelope Ford

Skylar (or “Sklya” in the mangled rendering of the Springfield paper) has been wrestling for just a year. She shows promise, but is pretty green. Penelope Ford, Joey Janela’s sidekick, is really good at taking insane bumps but is still learning the rest of the wrestling business. This was a bit awkward and clunky, but the crowd loved Skylar and hated Penelope, and that goes a long way toward making a match enjoyable. Skylar wins via submission. Rating: Two Leather Vests.

Blitzkrieg Pro Bedlam Championship Match: Flex Rumblecrunch (c) vs. Sasha Jenkins vs. Justin “Hammer” Tunis

First of all, I was upset that this match began with Tunis firing his manager, the wonderfully odious heel Joey DeNucci. DeNucci is an insanely good heat magnet at these shows, and without him Tunis is just a guy who claims, erroneously, to look like Jesus. Rethink this, Tunis! Jenkins and Rumblecrunch are both good wrestlers, and Tunis did a fine job of making the crowd hate him, but the match never really felt like it got into gear. Three-way matches are kind of clumsy by definition, unless it’s Super Crazy vs. Tajiri vs. Little Guido or something. This was not that. In a surprise, Jenkins won the title because Rumblecrunch was handcuffed to a turnbuckle. The crowd, solidly pro-Rumblecrunch, was not thrilled with this development. At least the Springfield paper spelled everyone’s name right. Rating: Two Leather Vests.

INTERMISSION

There was a meet and greet with Cody! Roads somewhere in the high school. People had to line up at the door and be escorted to it, just like high school kids going to a presentation on driving safety in the auditorium. On a personal note, I used to work for a newspaper (not the Springfield paper) that covered this town, and I spent about 18 or 19 months commuting to an office here. It was weird to be inside a building where I had once covered budget hearings, for the purpose of watching pro wrestling. Also, one thing I hadn’t noticed before: Enrico Fermi High’s sports teams (the Falcons; they really should have been the Atoms or the Fugitive Physicists or something) were apparently not that great at sports apart from volleyball and golf. Golf! No basketball or football banners in the gym. Enfield High (the Raiders) must have won all of those. Anyway, there’s a planetarium in Fermi High, at least generations of kids had that going for them.

Joey Janela vs. “Cold Steel” Chuck O’Neil 

I was pretty excited for this match, as Joey Janela is one of my favorite wrestlers in the world at this moment. But this was his first trip to Blitzkrieg, and Joey Janela is very much an acquired taste; there are audiences that Just Don’t Get Him. Enfield is one of those audiences, despite his best efforts to insult us (”I hate Connecticut! I hate your families!”). Chuck O’Neil, meanwhile, has done something horrifically shocking to his hair, so that he now looks like a background character in the bar scene in “Star Wars.” Just very distracting; “focus pulling,” as they say in TV news. This was a decent match but got nothing, zero, from the crowd, a good portion of which was still somewhere in the bowels of Enrico Fermi High School, posing for pictures with Cody! Roads. Rating: Three Leather Vests.

Six-Man Scramble: Anthony Greene vs. Scotty Wild vs. Xavier Bell vs. Zachary Pierre Beaulieu vs. Danger Kid vs. Josh Briggs

This is kind of a mini-rumble, where a new guy comes out every minute, with the last man in the ring who hasn’t been pinned, submitted, or thrown over the top rope the winner. It was mostly fun. Greene is a real talent, Scotty Wild is my favorite type of wrestler (athletic fat guy), Zachary Pierre Beaulieu is such a ludicrous caricature of a French person that you can’t help but laugh, and the eventual winner was a giant who I think was introduced as Danger Kid, but it was hard to tell because the ring announcer shouted his name in a way that was almost impossible to make out. I like a good ring-clearing monster. Rating: Three Leather Vests.

Chris Dickinson vs. Missile Assault Man

I was pretty excited for this. I wanted to see the Dirty Daddy demolish some twee Chikara guy, and that is what I got. The crowd liked Dickinson and were perplexed and annoyed at his opponent, who kept yelling “Missile! Assault! Man!” in between moments when Dickinson was kicking the hell out of him. This was fun. Rating: Three and a half Leather Vests.

Eight Man Tag Team Elimination Match: J George, Just Neph, Johnny Torres, and Ryan Malice vs. The 19th Hole (Marshall McNeil, Johnny Idol, Top Shelf Troy Nelson, and Smart Mark Sterling)

The people of Enfield sit on their hands for the brilliance and artistry of Joey Janela, but they pop like Christmas crackers for Marshall McNeil, who, in fairness, ran track at Fermi High in the 1990s. I learned during this match that McNeil graduated from high school three years after I did; I would have guessed he was at least five or six years older than me. Soon the grave, my friends. Anyway, this was a mess. The 19th Hole is an uneasy partnership between faces (McNeil and Idol) and heels (Nelson and Sterling), and their opponents are all guys who have been managed by Joey DeNucci, conspicuous by his absence. WE PAID TO SEE DENUCCI. Or at least I did. The good guys won. Are you kidding? Marshall McNeil is not going to lose in his old high school, home of so many great volleyball and golf triumphs. Rating: Two Leather Vests.

Cody! Roads vs. Donovan Dijak

I wrote about this earlier, but this was a hot damn match. They started off with a bit of comedy, doing competitive cartwheels, but once they settled into the match it was a great story, with Dijak using his superior size and strength to basically beat the piss out of Cody. The crowd was nuts for the whole thing, with lots of Dijak fans, a nice sign of the distance he’s come here since we saw him in December 2015 and were the only ones cheering for him. Cody looked fine, and I assumed he was going to win because that’s how he’s been booked basically everywhere since leaving the WWE, and in fact I was writing in my head the complaint I would make here about the Internet wrestling smarks being snookered into believing he’s the second coming of Bruiser Brody, but then Dijak won. Dijak won! I was so happy. I cheered and pumped my fists. The finish totally sucked the air out of the crowd, BUT I DID NOT CARE. I had a lot of fun. As we left, they announced their April 29 show featuring .... Shane Douglas. Oh boy. Rating: Four Leather Vests.