On Demand
DVD

The show starts out, uniquely enough, without a match. As it turns out, there’s a huge blizzard going on and the ring doctor hasn’t arrived yet, so the fans in attendance have to sit on their hands for a while and wait. To warm up the crowd, the Order of the Neo-Solar Temple arrive along with referee Bryce Remsberg, who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else. Accompanied by UltraMantis Black and Crossbones, we see that Hydra is wearing a blue bathrobe for some reason and is straining to drag a chair towards the ring. Bryce gives him a hand by easily picking it up.

Upon entry, UltraMantis announces the return of the Hydralock Challenge (occasionally pronounced “hydraulic”). Remember how Chris Masters used to do his Masterlock Challenge in mid-00’s WWE? Hydra’s decided to take it to another level. UltraMantis takes a second to rail at the crowd for being stupid enough to come to a wrestling show in such terrible weather and then has Hydra remove the robe. What a specimen.

The last time they did this bit, they made a teenage girl tap out (or should I say, UltraMantis tickled her and claimed her giggle was a sign of surrender). This time, he wants a challenger with more panache. When he’s about to announce the prize, a fan asks, “A bathrobe?” Angrily, UltraMantis calls him a rapscallion and shows that the winner will get $50,000, as shown in the roll of cash in his hand that he swears is not just a bunch of singles. A handful of fans raise their hands to volunteer, but UltraMantis refuses to acknowledge them. Then Robbie Ellis shows up, poses a little and volunteers to see if he can withstand Hydra’s “unbreakable” full nelson.

My favorite little fan moment in this is when he sits down and flexes, someone in the crowd yells, “He’s bringing sexy back!” and gets a good laugh from some of the others. Hydra does a lot of stalling, but finally secures the Hydralock. In an instant, Ellis taps out. UltraMantis boasts at how unstoppable Hydra is while slipping Ellis the wad of cash behind his back. Ellis smirks for a bit until inspecting the money and seeing that it isn’t the amount they agreed on. Ellis’ partners Mitch Ryder and Larry Sweeney run in, offended at the Neo-Solar Temple for trying to swindle a legend like Ellis. Ryder cuts a promo about respect and then makes a challenge for a pose-down: Sweeney vs. Hydra.

Hydra accepts. To his own theme song, he rubs oil on himself and does some lackluster posing. Then it’s Sweeney’s turn. He turns to referee Bryce and says, “You always walk around with a bottle of oil on you, right?” He does! Oiled up, Sweeney poses to cheers despite being a rudo. UltraMantis insists that it’s a draw and ups the challenge to a 6-way pose-off. The Fabulous Three oblige and flex their guns. Realizing they’re sunk, UltraMantis leads his henchmen to cheese it, declaring, “You planted this audience!”

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Starting September 14th and ending September 16th, CHIKARA Pro, my favoritest wrestling organization, is holding their 6th annual King of Trios tournament. I’ve discussed CHIKARA at length before and even wrote up a primer guide to explain it to new folks. It’s an independent wrestling company and wrestling school headed by Mike Quackenbush, focusing on international styles, incredibly strong storytelling, over-the-top gimmicks and a lot of inspired comedy.

The King of Trios is an evolved version of CHIKARA’s previous big tournament, Tag World Grand Prix. Tag World, which occurred three times before being shelved and then coming back once again in 2008, was a massive tag team tournament filled with CHIKARA students, CHIKARA regulars, teams from other organizations and even other countries. In 2006, the team of Chris Hero and Claudio Castagnoli won, crowning them the first ever Campeones de Parejas (tag team champions). The company decided to move forward on the concept. The tag tournament was cool, but not exactly too out there. They needed to go further and really grasp the company’s unique identity.

And so, in 2007, from February 17th to 19th, CHIKARA started off their sixth season with the King of Trios tournament. Three days long, the tournament featured sixteen teams of three battling it out for supremacy. Teams were put together based on friendship, experience, style or being part of the same outside organization. It was a strong show and every tournament since has been a highlight to the company. As I’ve said before, it’s less about being a wrestling event and more about celebrating wrestling in general.

I’m going to this year’s show, being my fourth King of Trios weekend. To hype it up a bit, I’m going to be doing a daily series of articles about the show’s history. For each year, I’ll spend one day getting caught up on the card and then an article for each night of the show. Then a little finale to talk about this year’s tournament, meaning 21 days worth of stuff.

All King of Trios shows are available at Smart Mark Video in the forms of DVD ($15), mp4 ($12) or streaming ($10). They’re all worth checking out.

So let’s start off with 2007.

The Story Thus Far…

Season 5 ended with the Kings of Wrestling (Chris Hero and Claudio Castagnoli) losing the Campeonatos de Parejas to their protégés FIST (Icarus and Gran Akuma). Hero blamed Claudio, who was also leaving the company due to signing with the WWE. Hero and FIST turned on Claudio and attacked him until Mike Quackenbush and the other tecnicos came to the rescue. Quack gave Claudio a nice sendoff, but unfortunately, Claudio’s WWE career ended before it could even begin due to some contract snafu.

The Young Lions Cup tournament was won by Arik Cannon, who defended the trophy regularly until a surprise loss to “Canadian Dynamite” Max Boyer. Cannon, in a fit of rage, attacked the referee and got suspended indefinitely. Boyer continued to defend the trophy and remained unbeaten.

During the Tag World Grand Prix tournament, Hallowicked’s partner UltraMantis Black was injured and a random draw replaced him with the ever-lovable madman Delirious. The two made for quite the team and became known as Incoherence, with Delirious turning Hallowicked fully to the tecnico side of the good/evil spectrum. UltraMantis hated this and started a new group to combat them called the Order of the Neo-Solar Temple. Along with CHIKARA veteran Blind Rage, they went to war with Incoherence. Incoherence joined forces with fan-favorite duo Cheech and Cloudy (Up in Smoke) and defeated the Order at the season finale.

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Just a few weeks away…

Tomorrow I’m starting up my extensive look at King of Trios, the annual 3-day event held by my favorite indy wrestling federation (well, favorite wrestling federation in general), CHIKARA. Before I do any of that, I thought I’d take a look at some history. Not the history of CHIKARA itself, as I’ve covered that already. I mean how things began with me as a fan.

During 2006/2007, I was only into WWE. TNA never did anything for me and the whole independent wrestling scene was completely alien to me. I hadn’t tried looking into it and wouldn’t have even known where to start. It wasn’t until the internet introduced me to Human Tornado that I started paying the indy scene any attention. Human Tornado, now retired, was a skinny and uncannily charismatic skinny wrestler with an afro and a pimp persona. I didn’t so much watch any matches with him as I was shown this fantastic little music video from the early days of YouTube.

Now, Tornado has never performed in CHIKARA, but that’s not my point. This video opened my eyes at the inventive and more intimate world of indy wrestling. This guy would never see the inside of a WWE ring due to his physique, but is that really the worst thing in the world? He’s still out there and presumably, I could have seen him live. The idea that out there was a flippy black dude with invincible testicles and the ability to backhand a fiend across the ring opened up my universe.

There’s another video with him that’s grainy as hell, but also brilliantly sells him as someone worth paying attention to. When wrestling Scorpio Sky (now Mason Andrews in TNA), a Test of Strength causes them to pop-lock against their will. They step back, try again and this time “Beat It” by Michael Jackson blares over the speakers as the two get into a knife fight and break into a dance sequence. This continues until Scorpio Sky has enough and clotheslines Tornado.

I never did follow up on any of this in any meaningful way, like trying to follow Pro Wrestling Guerilla, where they both performed. I didn’t get another taste of the indies until catching MTV’s ill-fated Wrestling Society X. That show featured them both, as well as a bunch of other supposed big names I had never heard of. The cheesy half-hour show wasn’t exactly perfect. A lot of the matches were just cool moves being done back and forth until someone won. The thing is, the show was self-aware and allowed itself to be over-the-top in ways the more mainstream stuff couldn’t. There were fights involving dunking your opponent’s head in a piranha tank or Tombstoning them into an exploding casket.

My favorite little thing in there is how a scene involved a fireball being thrown into the champion Vampiro’s face. This is a classic wrestling stunt that’s nothing more than lighting a piece of flash paper on fire and flicking it into the guy’s face. MTV took offense to this and pulled the episode for a couple weeks. When they aired it, they made it look like some kind of Dragonball Z super attack that caused Vampiro’s unconscious body to ripple before our very eyes. Somehow, their stupid censorship made things BETTER.

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I wrote a thing for ComicsAlliance about Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, and John Romita’s take on Spider-Man. It’s the most amazing piece of writing about comics you’ll ever see in your entire life, even if you live to be two hundred years old. It’s life-affirming and revitalizing. It’s incredible. It’ll make your teeth whiter and clear up your skin. Here’s an excerpt that I’m going to use to spring off into few more thoughts. Prepare yourself — I don’t want you to get hurt when you fall out of your chair in amazement after reading this.

But it makes sense. I figure somewhere around 50% of you out there remember being a teenaged boy. Do you remember that thirst for being seen as a man? Being seen as self-sufficient, cool, and intelligent? Showing the world that the you inside your shell was just as cool as the coolest guy in school, if not cooler? That’s where Spider-Man begins, from that position of deep longing and thirst. He wants to be seen a certain way.

You can see it in how Spider-Man behaves. Keep in mind that Peter Parker was a teenager when he became a hero. He doesn’t know how to be a man. He simply hasn’t had the experience yet. But, he suits up anyway, and he pointedly takes the name Spider-Man, which is a statement in and of itself. And how does Peter Parker, 15-year-old boy, act when he pulls on the red’n’blues?

He acts like a hero. He doesn’t show fear, not usually. He treats his villains, a surprising number of which are double or triple his age, like peers. He condescends to them. He quips. He acts like a man. And he saves the day. He’s acting like a hero, he’s emulating his heroes. He’s pretending, back in those early days. He’s not Spider-Man yet. Spider-Man isn’t the true Peter Parker. It’s just a face he wears sometimes.

I really dig this aspect of Spider-Man’s origin, the idea of superhero as performance. It reminds me of masculinity as performance, and of how rappers amp up what’s perceived as real in an attempt to keep it real. But it also reminds me of my other favorite Marvel dude who started out pretending to be a hero, Mister Carl “Welcome to Harlem, where you welcome to problems” Lucas, better known as Luke “I get the boosters boosting, I get computers puting” Cage. Here’s his superhero origin:

The stuff about Spidey playing a role is an implication, something I can read into the text fifty years later. I have no idea if it’s Lee & Ditko’s intended reading or not, but it works out shockingly well thematically and mechanically. But with Cage, well, the acting is explicit. “Yeah! Outfit’s kinda hokey… but so what? All part of the superhero scene. And this way when I use my powers, it’s gonna seem natural.”

I love that Cage only ever put on a costume because it’d let him do what he needed to do, not because he wanted to be a cape. Cage became a superhero not because it was the right thing to do, but because it’d let him live his life how he wanted to. It’d let him get revenge on William Stryker and use his powers in public. Doing good wasn’t an afterthought, but it definitely wasn’t the first thing on his mind. He needed a way to fit in first, right? So he appropriates superhero iconography to buy legitimacy and freedom.

It reminds me of a couple other things: code-switching and protective reactions to racism. Code-switching is maybe easiest described as the difference between how you talk to your friends and how you talk to your parents. Or you can just read this bit from Dave Chappelle’s episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio, which I edited from a transcript of the episode:

Lipton: Now don’t make fun of me– that when you play white dudes, your speech is pitch perfect, which led me to realize that either one of you could, if you wished, speak that way all the time. In other words, is it a matter of choice?

Chappelle: Every black american is bilingual, all of ’em. We speak street vernacular, and we speak job interview. There’s a certain way I gotta speak to have access.

I had a conversation with someone the other day about baby names. I was trying to figure out a nickname for a certain name, and I tossed one out there. She said that sounds “a little hood.” Her logic was that “hood names allows people to perform preconceived ideas.” I rejected that idea on the basis of the fact that people will form preconceived ideas about you even if your name is John Smith if you don’t look a certain way, so why not make your own way from top to bottom?

I tend to think of code-switching as a negative, a way to fit into a society that doesn’t like you. What’s cool about this Cage origin is that it uses code-switching not just as a way to fit in, but to get over. Cage knows that he’s behind the eight ball in more ways than one. He’s a fugitive from the law, but there were also only so many opportunities for black dudes of a certain type.

So what’s a fella with newly-hardened brown skin to do? The only thing you can do: you find some way around the rules. If you can’t use your powers in plain clothes or get a straight job, then you do something that lets you do that. In the Marvel Universe, you throw on a costume and you come up with a gimmick. You find something that’ll let you get by. More generally, or maybe more specifically from a black American point of view, you find something that’ll let you get by in a white man’s world. (Crack rock, wicked jump shots, telling jokes, putting on a dress and making million-dollar comedies, rapping, underground railroad, enlisting, whatever.) You do what you have to do.

I like this aspect of Cage, though I can’t remember if it was ever tackled explicitly after this scene. But I always liked the idea that Cage just kinda fell into superheroing, instead of setting out to become the next Captain America or Black Power Man. It lends a certain flavor to Cage that isn’t there for a Spider-Man or Captain America, an edginess and realness that I can appreciate and recognize. It feels like a real life phenomenon heightened and translated for a superhero audience.

It’s cool to look at this and then check out Cage these days, where he’s almost completely eschewed the visual trappings of superherohood and just does his job like he wants to. Cage reached the point where he doesn’t have to act a certain way to get access or dance for his dinner. He can just do what he wants, when he wants, and his stature is large enough that nobody can hold him back.

I said years ago that Luke Cage is the American Dream. Still true.

Ah, what a difference a year makes. Last year, I was scrambling to try and get the Summerslam Countdown done in time for the big show that I was so excited to see (I failed that deadline, natch). This year, I chose to watch 21 Jump Street with my brother instead of checking it out. From what I understand, I didn’t miss much other than Antonio Cesaro/Claudio Castagnoli winning the US title on the internet pre-show. At the same time, I don’t feel like DVRing tomorrow’s Raw and I paid money to watch last week’s TNA PPV. Crazy times.

This week my backup include Was Taters, Jody, Gaijin Dan, Space Jawa and Nawid.

Amazing Spider-Man #691
Dan Slott, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Mario Del Pennino

Avengers Academy #35
Christos Gage and Andrea DiVito

Avengers vs. X-Men #10
Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Jonathan Hickman and Adam Kubert

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Sunday Sunday Sunday! We’re going to have a weekly chat about Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. I buy mine off Amazon, so I’m usually a day behind, but every Sunday around showtime I’ll post an open thread. I’ll probably start linking the Breaking Bad podcasts and trailers and whatnot

If you haven’t seen Breaking Bad, you should. You can find Breaking Bad:
-On AMC, Sundays at 10 eastern
–Seasons 1-4 on Netflix
–on DVD
–on Amazon Instant Video (my preferred method)

Rules:
-Don’t be a dick
-No spoiler warnings, so don’t come in unless you’ve seen the latest episode
-Feel free to hyperlink and youtube it up
-Liveblogging is cool, just be specific so we know why you’re going “WHOA DUDE WHOA WHOA BRO”
-Make sure your speculation is reasonable

This week is “Buyout,” written by Gennifer Hutchison and directed by Colin Bucksey. Two episodes left!

Sneak peek for this week:

I’m still working on my needlessly gigantic CHIKARA King of Trios article series, which should be going up later in the week. In the meantime, here’s something cute that I thought I’d share.

The presentation for this year’s King of Trios is based on WWF Wrestlefest, one of the greatest arcade games in arcade game history, which has recently been updated and ported to smartphones. I haven’t played the new version, but I hear that it’s ass.

Over the past few months, the official CHIKARA site has been announcing the 16 teams for September’s tournament. We have a team of old ECW guys, some nostalgic 80’s and 90’s WWF teams, some female wrestlers from Japan, the usual CHIKARA suspects, visitors from other feds, mishmashed teams of CHIKARA regulars who are forced together against their will and a group of guys who performed so terribly in 2009 and got jeered so hard that they’ve all banded together out of revenge against the fans.

On the site, each announced team would get a filename of “KOT12_#.jpg”. So the 13th team announced is “KOT12_13.jpg”. Obviously, there’s going to be somebody wanting to look forward by typing “KOT12_14.jpg” with hopes of seeing the next team to be revealed. Kind of like how people figured out the roster of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 long before they were meant to. Each time, the CHIKARA website has been messing with the fans trying to do this by putting in a fake team.

Unfortunately, I didn’t save all of them, but here’s a bunch.

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On the night my tub flooded, after I’d bailed out most of the water and ruined every towel I own, I went for a walk. It was maybe 0200, if not a little later. I’d re-bought Brandy’s Brandy a few days earlier, since it was on sale and I hadn’t heard it since the ’90s. It was part of my Recently Added playlist, but I’d thrown my iPod onto shuffle.

“I Wanna Be Down” came up around when I hit the outskirts of Japantown, and I nearly drowned in the barest hint of a memory. It messed up my pace, and I stumbled as I tried to pull the memory into focus while walking home.

All I thought about for several blocks was Brandy, “I Wanna Be Down,” and the ’90s. It took forever to think it through. Someone — maybe my cousin, maybe my aunt — had the album on a CD, but the only one of us that owned a boombox CD player was my grandmother. She was protective of it, since it was a big purchase at the time, and we had to be very careful with it.

The memory I had wasn’t a specific point in time so much as a spectrum of time. It was a collection of feelings and tactile memories. The slide of the disc coming out of the sleeve in the albums. The fat zip of the binder opening and shutting. The feel of the button that opened the CD player. (It was top-loading, and pressing a button, I think in the front and on top, lifted the lid.) The weak resistance the CD player gave up when you closed it, the quiet click when the hinge latched. The hollow hiss that signified the CD beginning to spin and the weird spiral of electronic noise that it played when you changed tracks.

There are a few other albums I consciously associate with certain places, times, or moods (Atmosphere’s God Loves Ugly and depression, Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein and high school, Aesop Rock’s “None Shall Pass” was my alarm clock for a couple years which makes the song nearly unlistenable now), but I can’t remember feeling anything like that before. In fact, I’ll go a step farther and say that I’ve never had that happen to me before. It was weird, simultaneously pleasurable and devastating. It felt like 1995 or 1996 or whenever it was I spent a summer listening to Brandy and swimming in a pool, but it was a hard memory to take hold of. I was maybe more open to it, more vulnerable after having had a catastrophically bad night in the middle of an incredibly frustrating year, but it stopped me dead in my tracks.

Good stuff this week. I’m helped out by Gaijin Dan, Jody, Was Taters and Space Jawa.

In completely unrelated news, this Thursday is Rifftrax Live, where the MST3K guys will do a live performance that will be broadcast to movie theaters around the country. The movie in question? Manos: Hands of Fate, with a completely new set of riffs.

You should totally check it out. For the Master.

Meanwhile, panels.

Archer and Armstrong #1
Fred Van Lente and Clayton Henry

Barrage #10
Kouhei Horikoshi

Batman #12 (Jody’s pick)
Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Becky Cloonan and Andy Clarke

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Sunday Sunday Sunday! We’re going to have a weekly chat about Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. I buy mine off Amazon, so I’m usually a day behind, but every Sunday around showtime I’ll post an open thread. I’ll probably start linking the Breaking Bad podcasts and trailers and whatnot

If you haven’t seen Breaking Bad, you should. You can find Breaking Bad:
-On AMC, Sundays at 10 eastern
–Seasons 1-4 on Netflix
–on DVD
–on Amazon Instant Video (my preferred method)

Rules:
-Don’t be a dick
-No spoiler warnings, so don’t come in unless you’ve seen the latest episode
-Feel free to hyperlink and youtube it up
-Liveblogging is cool, just be specific so we know why you’re going “WHOA DUDE WHOA WHOA BRO”
-Make sure your speculation is reasonable

This week is “Dead Freight,” written & directed by George Mastras. This is his first stab at directing an episode, but he co-wrote “Crawl Space” and eight other episodes over the course of the series.

Last week on Breaking Bad:

Sneak peek for this week: