El-P

Hey now all that money I used to spend on shipping actual fucking VHS tapes to and from my house back in the day was totally worth it. I threw some money down the drain. No idea what to do with those NTSC VHS nowadays.

No-sell comeback + piledriver. Punches amounted to shit since it wa 95% of his offense. But anyway, I never bought in the Lawler hype as this GOAT candidate and miracle worker. I like Lawler quite a bit, I think he's very good and I love some of his feuds. I guess it's not enough.

Offense = punch. Defense = punch. Comeback = punch. At some point, do something else. Like, anything else, even basic stuff. Please. It's just lazy now. Plus at some point, if you throw a terrific looking punch but at the end of the day you can't punch out your opponent for good, you're actually a shitty puncher kayfabe-wise, no matter how good it looks. But the killer is the no-selling comeback a-la Hogan. Wait, Lawler hasn't showed up yet ? My bad. (I voted for Lawler. But in the lower end of my top 100)

Luckily we're past the workrate mentality that included wisdom like "chops=great tehnical wrestling" and pretended amount of moves used is a valid criteria to judge wrestlers on.Personally I still like that some people talk about 'limited movesets' because I take those 2 words as a code that means 'ignore everything I say about wrestling' The criticism for "throwing a gazillion punches" has nothing to do with limited moveset actually. I'm a Choshu guy, so, moveset, really...

Throwing a gazillion punches per match really betrays you as a not so great worker anyway. Oh wait...

I just noticed that I voted for Takako Inoue. Who wasn't nominated. That sucks. She was my #60.

They look like shitty open slap. Still look better than Cena's.

Dusty in the top 100 isn't a good news at all. Neither are Kerry von Erich, Hulk Hogan, Undertaker...

Like John Cena's you mean ?

Yeah ! Backlund makes it !

34 down. The fact Oz, Takada (although expected), Maeda, Yokota and Kyoko don't make the top 100 seems absurd to me considering some names who are left. I regret voting for my #34. I feel like, apart from a few huge favourites of the last decade (Lawler, both Fujis, Rose), the top 100 will seem pretty conservative compared to the 2006 one.

And The Rock misses the top 100. Damn... Hogan... I must say I began enjoying The Rock during the 2006 poll.

I'm shocked Larry Z. did so well. Good for him. Waltman was my #69. Maeda my #53. The shoot-style kings are taking a beatdown. Couldn't care less about these other guys dropping.

Slaughter... Ok, that's all I can think of.

PPV 37 Not a good show, but enough interesting stuff to hold my interest at least. It has to be said that Glen Gilberti does a rather decent job as the new serious leader of SEX. Sure, the stable sucks, but he’s really a decent promo. Jerry Lynn doesn’t get his X-division title shot week 6. Yeah, I know it’s probably been forgotten, but I’m gonna be consistent about it. Someone has to. So he finally gets Konnan and has a watchable Nitro match with him, which is an accomplishment in itself. Meanwhile, AJ Styles (who called Disco a « faggot », which makes him de facto a babfyface in TNA I guess. BTW, BJ James has disappeared and he’s not missed at all) gets the best Mike Sanders match possible too. Interesting how the two X-div aces get to show their talent this week. Another surprisingly good match, but this time actually good, D-Lo Brown vs Chris Harris. Sprint, but nicely done, I never thought Harris had this in him, while D-Lo looks even better than I remembered, although I’m not that familiar with his post 99 work. Overbooked finish because Disco is protecting D-Lo as he wants him to beat Jarrett and join SEX, as told in a three way promo segment in which Jarrett sounded the worst of the three. And really, they should stop reminding everyone that D-Lo was basically a jabronie in WWE by talking about him being European champ, it makes the TNA championship look like crap if he gets a title match. Oh, and they teased a AMW slip coming up already with Harris wanting to go solo a little bit. Yawn. The whole Second Generation stuff isn’t working at all and isn’t going anywhere. Even Jarrett buries Eric Watts as irrelevant in his promos. What a babyface. Plus, David Flair vs Dusty in a two minutes bunkhouse brawl. No, really, Dusty was cool for a one week appearance with the Road Warriors. But let this die, please. In the cool debut segment of the show, Alexis Laree teams up with Amazing Red vs Kid Kash & Trinity. Mostly fun because I like Mickie James and she was already showing a lot of personnality, slapping Kash like a bitch he is. Match itself was a bit clusterfucky as soon as the women got involved, as James was still green and Trinity can’t do much more than a moonsault, which she did here BTW. Kash is pissed. Are we really going toward Kash vs Trinity ? Because that would not be too good. Some violence against women, Athena again, because Russo is still writing the show. And an overbook cluster of a main event with an interesting yet stupid gimmick in which you can only pin a guy who’s bleeding. Made things confusing for Elix Skipper. So, it was XXX (Skipper & Daniels) & Harris vs Brian Lee & Slash & Sandman (who opened himself before the match with a beer so he can get pinned right away) & Perry Saturn ! Hey ! Saturn ! He was the workhorse of the match too, having good exchange with Daniels. Complete cluster with guys confused about the rule, although the fact it was supposed to be a Church gimmick kinda made sense since the Church guys went for the blood as soon as they got on top. So it turned out ok,especially for a DOA dream match of sorts. Plus we got Ron Killings turning back babyface (WHAT ?) and bringing fucking He-was-called-Mabel-then-Viscera to the ring ! Ah, we were not yet in the days of « we know who this is » because of copyrights, but the feeling for there. Post match was completely ridiculous with everybody involved and Jarrett actually hitting D-Lo with a chair for no good reason. Jarrett is such a shitty babyface. 2003/03/26 D-Lo Brown vs Chris Harris

FWIW, the most fun I had watching Hogan work (hell, the only time I really had fun, although I do like some of his WWF work) was during his Hollywood Hogan era, when he had his working shoes on and was really good playing heel, even making one-hip Piper look good and looking better than Ric Flair was at the same time.

"the myth that Hogan was good in Japan" was probably a quote from me. And yeah, I still stand strong about it. The idea that Hogan was somewhat much better in Japan came from the fact he used to show a little bit more and that he didn't Hulk up, but after a while you realize he was just doing the same crappy looking routine that looked cool the first time you see it because it's unexpected. Hogan in the 80's didn't strike me as much better, the Inoki matches are painfull. Yeah, Stan Hansen beats him up to one of his best matches over there, but then again, Stan is a #1 contender for best ever. I hope Hogan drops today.

Funny thing is that I never cared much for the classics, neither in movies nor in music. It has to follow a personnal path. Watching a classic because it's a classic just feels like homework to me and I usually don't care that much at the end. That's why I can understand the importance of "Breathless" but I won't get much out of it. I have no particular interest in Bob Dylan's music so I couldn't care less about listening to his stuff. Maybe I'm missing out. Probably not, life is short. Then again, the day I got into free jazz, I felt the need to listen to "The shape of jazz to come" and loved it (although it took a while because, ya know, free jazz). So there are the classics I care about and the ones I don't. Anyway, this is drifting away from PWO.

It has also been put in question as it as happening by the Positif review, and it's pretty much recognized now that they were *wrong* on several issues. Plus the auteur theory has done its share of damage to the mentality of producers/filmmakers too. Andre Bazin also critiqued it at the time and he was their mentor as you know. One of his criticisms was that a true auteurist would automatically find a second-rate film by an auteur to be superior to a first-rate film by a non-auteur, which he thought to be nonsense. I think that was in retaliation to Eric Rhomer "demolishing" John Houston, a director whom Bazin admired. To tie this back to the GWE, since many of us apply an auteurist approach to wrestling, I wonder how many of us are guilty of Bazin's criticism. Is that second-rate Dibiase match truly better than a first-rate Shawn Michaels match? Yeah. Chabrol also said later that they demolished movies that didn't deserve it and were actually really good (aka, the Takada's ). Plus, just like PWO, it's not like they all agreed. They were very different people with very different tastes, but they had common disdain for the same stuff. Your exemple doesn't work though because first-rate DiBiase isn't nearly as good as first rate Michaels to begin with. But yeah, I agree. The whole "Flair's good matches are better than most workers great matches", which is of course ridiculous. Then again, at this point, I'd rather watch a really good Choshu match than a great Liger match for instance.

Exploring and discovering new things is great. But more often than not, what's pimped as better than the old boring picks in these discoveries end up being, well, not really better at all and only pimped that hard because it's new and exciting and exotic. When I listen to Anatolian Pop, I won't say everything is awesome and better than every classic I've ever listened to because I'm excited about it. I try to keep an objective ear. Sure, Elektronik Türküler by Erkin Koray and the first Selda LP's are indeed masterpieces, and there are other great stuff there and I'd rather listen to this than any Bob Dylan or Rolling Stone classic stuff (but I really don't listen to either Dylan or the Stones to begin with). But there are also some stuff that just aren't as good yet are pimped as awesome and important by vinyl collectors and hipsters because it's the new thing and cool labels are re-releasing it. Bunalim's compilation is good, with a few great tracks, but it's a *good* overview of a footnote of a band, not an amazing album. Anyway, dunno why I went on a tangent here. Probably because I'm been immersed on this stuff for a while now. All I want to say is that discovering new things is awesome and super fun but it doesn't mean the classics are now boring. In the end, you'll always come back to it. That's what makes them classics I guess. Or maybe not, as a guy who'd rather listen to minor albums or minor bands sometimes, maybe Dan is absolutely right after all.

Your tastes were so much better then, Dylan.

I'm glad the links don't work. I absolutely don't want to see some probably idiotic stuff I said back then ! Plus I was probably a much bigger asshole than I am now.

It has also been put in question as it as happening by the Positif review, and it's pretty much recognized now that they were *wrong* on several issues. Plus the auteur theory has done its share of damage to the mentality of producers/filmmakers too.

Me too. And honestly, that's so lame if that's the case (not Flair winning, although it is in a way, but Flair winning because of this).

I kinda remembered it was brutal, but I forgot all of this !