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Lock it in and fuhgeddaboudit with an annual subscription to Culturedarm, which supports the site while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:

• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
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• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .

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Albums

Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Muslim Shaggan – Asar

Over the populous span of South Asia, a region...

Dave Sewelson, Gabby Fluke-Mogul, George Cartwright, Anthony Cox and Steve Hirsh – Murmuration

The Arkansas free jazz outpost Mahakala Music says that...

Klein – thirteen sense

For her last album marked the South London maverick...

Behind the Song

Behind the Song: David Bowie – ‘Subterraneans’

'Subterraneans' is the closing song on what has become perhaps David Bowie's most critically acclaimed album: Pitchfork placed Low at number 1 on their 'Top 100 Albums of the 1970s', on Q's list of the '100 Greatest British Albums Ever' Low was Bowie's highest entry at number 14, and while...

Behind the Song: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’

Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 1, Op....

Behind the Song: Chuck Berry – ‘You Can’t Catch Me’

'You Can't Catch Me', one of Chuck Berry's early singles, proved an unexpected commercial flop. It failed to chart upon its release at the onset of 1957 - despite being given prominence by the fledgeling rock and roll feature Rock, Rock, Rock!, which had opened in cinemas the previous month...

Behind the Song: Animal Collective – ‘Summertime Clothes’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxhaRgJUMl8 Animal Collective's eighth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was...

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

Beginning her career in pop music at the age...

Tracks of the Week

Tracks of the Week 19.01.25

Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...

Tracks of the Week 12.01.25

Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...

Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...

Tracks of the Week 17.08.24

Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...

Tracks of the Week 10.08.24

David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...

At the Movies

We’re the Millers (2013)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In what sounds like a riff on an old joke, a drug dealer, a stripper, a runaway, and a nerd climb into a camper van south of the border. David Clark (Jason Sudeikis) is a low-level marijuana dealer who finds himself beholden to his supplier, the sleazy businessman Brad Gurdlinger (Ed Helms), when a couple of street hoods make off with his stash. To cover the debt with a little added compensation, David reluctantly agrees to smuggle a 'smidge' of weed from Mexico...

Enola Holmes (2020)

★★ (2 out of 4 stars) - Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown), the youngest sibling in the illustrious Holmes family, grew up for all intents and purposes as an only child. At the lavish country house which is now on the cusp of being consumed by nature, she was home-schooled by her mother, who provided an unorthodox education encompassing everything from word games, chess, and jujitsu to chemistry, botany, and lawn tennis played indoors...

The Assassin (2015)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - In 9th century China, the weakened Tang Dynasty struggles to retain control over its militarised province of Weibo. Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) has been trained by the nun Jiaxin (Fang-Yi Sheu) to assassinate corrupt government officials, but though she possesses all of the art, she cannot bring herself to kill a man as he sits cradling his sleeping son. So Jiaxin, who has raised Yinniang from the age of ten, sets her charge a more personal task...

Amazing Grace (2018)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - At the height of her powers, Aretha Franklin went to church: to the New Temple Missionary Baptist in Los Angeles for two nights in January 1972, where she intended to return to her roots with a live recording of gospel music. The ensuing double album, Amazing Grace, would go double platinum, and it remains the best-selling record of her long and storied career. The acclaimed film director Sydney Pollack was tasked with shooting the performance for a feature...

How to Steal a Million (1966)

★★½ (2.5 out of 4 stars) - Nicole Bonnet (Audrey Hepburn) is the daughter of an art forger, who has gathered so many supposed masterpieces in his private collection that he has won considerable renown in the world of art. Approached by the Kléber-Lafayette Museum, he proudly loans to the illustrious Paris institution (which for the sake of the film occupies the building of the real-life Musée Carnavalet) his most prized possession, his Cellini 'Venus'...

World Cinema

Parasite (2019)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A family of four live in a cramped and roach-infested banjiha, a semi-basement apartment in Seoul. They crib free Wi-Fi from unsuspecting neighbours and a nearby coffee shop, and their only source of income, procured by the mother Chung-sook via WhatsApp, comes from the folding of pizza boxes for a local delivery service, a task at which they are only moderately successful...

Don Jon (2013)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In Japan grown adult men - thirty, forty, fifty years old or more - lie prostrate in their childhood bedrooms, which they never leave, as their ageing parents push parcels of food beneath the door. On their beds they clutch plush life-sized cartoon figures, somehow prepubescent but boasting ginormous boobs, and between the heaving and moaning they not only cry but orgasm into their pillowcases...

Young Adult (2011)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), a 37-year-old ghostwriter for a series of young adult novels soon to be cancelled, returns to her small Minnesota hometown, angling to hook up with her old high school flame, who is married and has just become a father. Her attempts at seduction are already inappropriate, but prove much grosser than this, culminating in a blowout at a birthday party...

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) owns a warehouse which manufactures and sells novelty goods - toilet plungers with supposedly non-breakable handles and so on - but channels all of his hopes into one venture: having carried out his research diligently, and as far as the vagaries of the promotion will allow, he has come to understand that by purchasing gross quantities of Healthy Choice pudding...

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - The hotly anticipated follow-up to what has already become a cult classic, in John Wick: Chapter 2 our eponymous hero goes to Rome, as the series curiously begins taking cues from Dan Brown and all things Da Vinci. There's a dash of Underworld mixed in there too: this is a world where neon store fronts, modern art installations, subways and the original film's streamlined desire for vengeance butt up against cobbled streets and catacombs...

Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Turtle Bay neighbourhood on the east side of Midtown Manhattan was a 'riverside back yard' for the city of New York. Imposing brownstones and squalid tenement housing butted up against the breweries, gasworks, and slaughterhouses which lined the waterfront. Eventually the waterfront would be reshaped by the United Nations headquarters, with dozens of diplomatic missions...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene

One of the most influential horror movies of all-time,...

Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford and The League That Got Away

In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...

Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne

In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...

Poetry

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

When the first issue of Others: A Magazine of...

Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’

Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...

Emily Dickinson – ‘I Can Wade Grief’ (1862)

Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in...

‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev

Silentium! Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal the way you dream,...

James Joyce

Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce

With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...

The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov and Homer in Maps

When Ulysses was published on 2 February, 1922, it was the...

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...

Obituaries

Brazilian Architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha Dies at the Age of 92

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NidZvaQQrsA The Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha died on...

Toots Hibbert, Reggae Pioneer and Lead Vocalist of the Maytals, Dies Aged 77

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErQ2UB44k-o Toots Hibbert, the pioneering reggae musician who imbued his...

Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the Influential Producer and Dub Pioneer, Dies at the Age of 85

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTNam6GbJYg Lee 'Scratch' Perry, the charismatic producer and restless pioneer...

Dean Stockwell, Star of Blue Velvet and Quantum Leap, Dies at 85 Years Old

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhPosL3UAN8 The actor Dean Stockwell died of natural causes on...

Culturedarm

Subscribe to Culturedarm

A monthly subscription supports Culturedarm while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:

• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .

Lock it in and fuhgeddaboudit with an annual subscription to Culturedarm, which supports the site while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:

• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .

placeholder text
3
25
0

Albums

Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Muslim Shaggan – Asar

Over the populous span of South Asia, a region...

Dave Sewelson, Gabby Fluke-Mogul, George Cartwright, Anthony Cox and Steve Hirsh – Murmuration

The Arkansas free jazz outpost Mahakala Music says that...

Klein – thirteen sense

For her last album marked the South London maverick...

Behind the Song

Behind the Song: Chuck Berry – ‘You Can’t Catch Me’

'You Can't Catch Me', one of Chuck Berry's early singles, proved an unexpected commercial flop. It failed to chart upon its release at the onset of 1957 - despite being given prominence by the fledgeling rock and roll feature Rock, Rock, Rock!, which had opened in cinemas the previous month...

Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9Ro9pP2gc In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

Beginning her career in pop music at the age...

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Behind the Song: Charles Mingus – ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’

Charles Mingus wrote 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' as an elegy for the pioneering jazz saxophonist Lester Young, who died in March 1959, two months prior to the recording sessions for what would become Mingus Ah Um. A darkly elegant ballad with a lone dissonant note full of pathos...

Tracks of the Week

Tracks of the Week 19.01.25

Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...

Tracks of the Week 12.01.25

Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...

Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...

Tracks of the Week 17.08.24

Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...

Tracks of the Week 10.08.24

David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...

At the Movies

Young Adult (2011)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), a 37-year-old ghostwriter for a series of young adult novels soon to be cancelled, returns to her small Minnesota hometown, angling to hook up with her old high school flame, who is married and has just become a father. Her attempts at seduction are already inappropriate, but prove much grosser than this, culminating in a blowout at a birthday party...

Rams (2015)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Ageing, unmarried, and unkempt, brothers Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) work side by side as sheep farmers in a cold and desolate valley in Iceland's northeast. Each the master of their own flock, they have not spoken for forty years owing to a dispute over their father's inheritance: considering Gummi the more conscientious worker, their father left him the whole of the land...

Paris, Texas (1984)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) was introduced against a backdrop of blue skies and sandstone buttes, but his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) wears a yellow Stetson cap and stands in front of a commercial tower block, which turns out to be painted. He sells billboard signs for a living, but agrees to travel to Terlingua, South Texas, to pick up his brother...

Little Women (2019)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Greta Gerwig imbues the seventh film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's classic coming-of-age novel with deft characterisation and heady momentum, across and finally through the screen. Each scene bustles with gesture and intonation even when its components aren't rushing headlong through the streets of Manhattan, idling about the parks of Paris, or swirling the ballrooms and striding fields and beaches in the vicinity of Boston, Mass...

October Sky (1999)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - October Sky is a quaint coming-of-age picture utterly characteristic of this period in American cinema: polished but earnest, overtly sentimental, full of local colour, ostensibly presenting some hard-hitting themes without ever straying from the steely confines of quaint. It's in the same mould as films like The Cider House Rules and especially Billy Elliot, which it preceded by more than a year...

World Cinema

The Rules of the Game (1939)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Instead Renoir produced a bawdy comedy with French airs and graces, which seems to share much in common with so many American films of the late thirties with their loose morals, gender distortions, and hedonistic flushes of romance. The inspirations may have been Marivaux and Beaumarchais, but in style and temperament The Rules of the Game rubs up equally alongside The Philadelphia Story and the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks.

Tully (2018)

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - Tully is the third collaboration between director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, following on from Juno (2007) and Young Adult (2011). All three films deal with the role of women as child-bearers, looking in turn at teenage pregnancy and adoption, miscarriage, and postpartum depression, which in this case borders on psychosis...

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - Five teenagers take a road trip to visit an old family homestead in the musty heart of Texas. The radio plays the news, a grim recitation of industrial and environmental disasters and acts of wanton violence. They discuss astrology, retrograde planets and the malevolent influence of Saturn; stop off at the gravesite of a deceased grandfather amid reports of grave robbing; and after passing a slaughterhouse for beef cattle, they pick up a hitchhiker...

Midsommar (2019)

★ (1 out of 4 stars) - Through a few snapshots of comforting mundanity - the boys' scenes could be from a Judd Apatow movie, minus the laughs - we come to learn of Dani and Christian, a young American couple whose long-term relationship has started to crack. Spurred on by his friends, who find her too needy, Christian has already begun separating himself from Dani, for her part made anxious by her bipolar sister...

The Blind Side (2009)

★ (1 out of 4 stars) - The Blind Side purports to tell the real-life story of Michael Oher, depicted here as a poor oversized black kid from the ghetto. He's in and out of foster homes thanks to an absentee father and a drug addict mother, until the father of one of his friends - on whose couch he has been sleeping - brings him to the attention of the football coach of a local Christian school...

Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Turtle Bay neighbourhood on the east side of Midtown Manhattan was a 'riverside back yard' for the city of New York. Imposing brownstones and squalid tenement housing butted up against the breweries, gasworks, and slaughterhouses which lined the waterfront. Eventually the waterfront would be reshaped by the United Nations headquarters, with dozens of diplomatic missions...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene

One of the most influential horror movies of all-time,...

Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford and The League That Got Away

In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...

Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne

In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...

Poetry

Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’

Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

When the first issue of Others: A Magazine of...

Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore’ (1912)

Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of...

Pierrot Through the Arts

Pierrot, the sad clown in white face and loose...

James Joyce

The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov and Homer in Maps

When Ulysses was published on 2 February, 1922, it was the...

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce

With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...

Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita

With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of...

Obituaries

Biz Markie, the Clown Prince of Hip Hop, Dies at 57 Years Old

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aofoBrFNdg The rapper, DJ, and record producer Biz Markie died...

Charles Grodin, Star of The Heartbreak Kid and Midnight Run, Dies Aged 86

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT6HIfhwtKo The actor, author, and talk show host Charles Grodin...

Michael K. Williams, Actor Who Illuminated the Lives of Marginal Black Men, Dies Aged 54

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50RJhOFDmiA Michael K. Williams, the actor who became known for...

Kenzo Takada, the Japanese Designer Who Revolutionised French Fashion, Dies at 81

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7E4bITT4t8 With the wet weather and surging coronavirus already putting...

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Blowout at WWE Battleground 2015

Taker 1

After a more than passable first half of WWE Battleground, which took place on Sunday night at the Scottrade Center in St. Louis, Missouri, upon the final two matches the event fell apart. Given their magnitude – for these were the two matches given the most substantial builds since last month’s Money in the Bank, featuring WWE’s biggest names, with first the United States and then the World Heavyweight titles at stake – the fate of Battleground really rested on these climactic bouts, and the sense of frustration come the close of the show was immense.

Sheamus vs. Randy Orton is probably from WWE’s perspective an ideal opener: two wrestlers who absolutely look the part, and who have storied careers in WWE behind them, with many title reigns to their names. This encounter stemmed from the duo’s participation in the Money in the Bank contract ladder match, which saw Sheamus emerge victorious, and take the briefcase allowing him a future shot at the WWE World Heavyweight Championship. Though Sheamus battled most prominently with Neville during that ladder match, the issue negotiated over the following weeks proved between him and Orton, with both wrestlers interfering in each other’s matches.

While Sheamus’s current look has given the fans a point of engagement with his character – his orange mohawk and braided beard compelling cries of ‘You look stupid!’ – it will be difficult to win them over for any push towards the main event. Orton on the other hand has managed to avoid becoming too stale thanks to his edgy personality, his movement across the card, and his finisher, the RKO, which he can spring from any position, and which alone would keep his matches exciting until the end. But Sheamus and Orton are thoroughly accomplished all-round workers, and this was a good match, with Sheamus on the back foot in the opening stages, then dominating the middle via a string of backbreakers and big knees – in spite of Orton’s attempts to mount some offense inside and outside the ring.

As Orton regained some momentum, Sheamus twice escaped an impending RKO – on the second occasion almost rolling his opponent up for the pinfall. Orton kicked out of a Brogue Kick, then took an age to escape the Cloverleaf – a questionable moment in the match given the role submissions would play later on in the show. Finally, Orton managed to surprise Sheamus with an RKO to gain the victory.

2c6f6118710f78163b6f81519b1ec328_crop_north

The highlights of the match for the WWE Tag Team Championships took place beyond the confines of the wrestling action. The New Day delivered an amusing heel promo on their way to the ring, with all three members proudly expressing themselves and their confidence towards retaking the tag belts. And with Big E and Kofi Kingston the two challengers, Xavier Woods was verbose watching on from the outside, giddy over every New Day achievement, and reserving special praise for Big E’s ‘tricep meat’.

The match was pretty entertaining too: Titus O’Neill seems to be embracing more fully a power style, and he was able to get the crowd going as The Prime Time Players made their comeback, Titus’s sitout spinebuster seeing them retain the titles which they won from The New Day last month. Still, with Kidd/Cesaro out of the picture, WWE desperately need to elevate more teams if the tag division isn’t to fade once more into irrelevancy; and in the short term The New Day will surely recover their gold.

Bray Wyatt vs. Roman Reigns was another strong affair, lagging a little at the start and stuttering at the finish, but for the most part telling a compelling story. Wyatt dominated Reigns with some rugged grappling on the outside of the ring, manoeuvring him into the steel steps and following up with a series of novel and hard-hitting moves onto the ring apron. Reigns kept coming back, fighting his way out of a couple of Sister Abigail attempts, and nailing a sitdown powerbomb and a Superman punch – but only getting a two count.

As with Sheamus and Orton, this match had been built only over the past month, developing out of the Money in the Bank contract ladder match, which saw Wyatt flick the lights and emerge to cost Reigns victory. As Wyatt again took matters to the outside, Reigns seized the advantage and seemed to stall for time, meaninglessly tossing several steel chairs into the ring. But before he could use them – in a manner which would surely have caused his disqualification – a hooded figure appeared and threw him into the ringpost, allowing Wyatt to rolls Reigns up for the 1-2-3.

Luke-Harper-Roman-Reigns-Bray-Wyatt

The hooded figure was revealed as Luke Harper, suggesting a reunited Wyatt Family. That this received scant reception from the St. Louis audience is unsurprising: for a start, the crowd was behind Reigns, with Wyatt, usually something of a tweener, consigned to the role of heel. But more there is the feeling that both Wyatt and Harper could have had successful solo runs, if there had been sufficient focus on devising and developing storylines for the two wrestlers. Without this, it would have been better never to split the Wyatt Family in the first place. Restoring the cult aspect gives Wyatt’s character a sense of direction which has been sorely lacking; yet it isn’t always easy to interestingly retread old ground.

Stephanie McMahon brought ‘revolution’ to the Divas division on the RAW before Battleground, introducing to the main roster NXT Women’s Champion Sasha Banks, and NXT’s Charlotte and Becky Lynch. While the three-team angle the newcomers have moved into fits uneasily with goings-on in NXT – and their arrival brings into question both the ‘Divas’ epithet and the futures of some of the current roster, although Paige and the Bellas should continue to prove mainstays of the division – it is a joy to see these three women competing at WWE’s premier events.

Becky Lynch is dynamic, with a wide array of moves in her repertoire; Charlotte is athletic, and possesses a rough, suitably old-school style; but Sasha Banks is arguably the most complete superstar in WWE, man or woman. She exudes charisma in the ring, she is agile and good-looking, and at the same time she can construct a match of the highest quality, drawing in the crowd through outstandingly detailed, well-told storytelling. Her character remains consistent and engaging in every gesture, in every moment: from her walk to the ring, to her attitude post-match, to the manner and content of her backstage interviews.

Sasha excelled in this triple-threat tag match, with some devastating moves in the corner, and later a dive through the ropes to the collected competitors on the outside. Charlotte impressed too; and though they receive some stick, the Bellas work hard and rarely look out of place, even if they lack the same wrestling instincts. Charlotte earned the victory for her team courtesy of her bridging ‘figure-eight’ leglock, which forced Brie Bella to submit.

e569543ea59e89c6c14ec040b8508c5d_crop_north

The first match between Kevin Owens and John Cena, which took place at Elimination Chamber at the end of May, was mediocre at best: hugely overstated, it was little more than a standard WWE ‘big match’, an insensible slog featuring too many big moves and finisher kick-outs. Their second engagement, at Money in the Bank, was much better, more nuanced and fluent even though it saw Cena restore parity, picking up the win after a third Attitude Adjustment.

Unfortunately this third – and perhaps final – encounter was more of a piece with their first, poorly structured, with Cena in particular out on his feet after only a few rest holds and Irish whips, and showing a reliance on spots rather than well-navigated wrestling. There were prolonged lulls, and the tired conceit of Owens stealing Cena’s signature moves. Alas, the conclusion was the worst conceivable, as Cena – persevering when locked in Owens’ version of his STF – forced Owens to tap out. So Cena again defended his United States title, while after such a promising debut Owens – on the back of his loss to Finn Balor in Tokyo – finds himself without a belt and wondering where to turn.

Owens strikes me as a well-rounded, but fairly generic heel; with surprising agility in the ring and a diverse range of moves, including some remarkable leaps from the top rope, but wrestling at an even pace which never seems to build much momentum. I’m still not entirely buying into the character; though at the same time I have pondered whether Owens is simply playing a sound heel who – rather than revelling as someone the fans love to hate – aggravates steadily via his resolute sternness.

There still seems something too tidy about Owens’ presentation; but there is no doubting that, as a relative newcomer to WWE, he has lots of potential, and WWE desperately needs to build stars. Bray Wyatt and Rusev – more complete packages at this stage in their respective careers – have endured similar feuds with Cena over the past year and a half, and they both emerged worse off, picking up token victories, but ultimately ending defeated, forlorn, and lacking in all direction. To submit to Cena at such a decisive moment severely threatens Owens’ future prospects.

There is no use pretending that a submission constitutes a reasonable finish in today’s WWE, at least not between men wrestling high-up on the card: it cannot be a reasonable finish, because beyond all reason WWE’s top face is impervious to all submission holds. We have been shown again and again for more than a decade that John Cena cannot be made to tap out. More, we have been told incessantly that Cena will ‘never give up’; and that this constitutes his show of support for all of the sick children he visits outside of wrestling, through organisations such as Make-A-Wish.

The result is that submission moves no longer fit within a wrestling context: they are no longer perceived as holds applying such pressure to certain joints that, at some stage, one must inevitably either tap out or face tears or breakages. Instead, submissions are all about will power and courage and compassion, and John Cena possesses these qualities in abundance, while his challengers clearly do not. It isn’t a matter of succumbing to the better man on the night; it is a matter of core values and strength of character, to the extent that submitting in a John Cena match means the utter debasement of your worth as a private person and as a public figure.

20150719_CenaOwens_Article

The Miz is awesome, and should be one of the figureheads of WWE. A natural heel, he is conceivably the most charismatic heel in wrestling since the heyday of The Rock. He has so much going for him: a great look, with an impeccable line in heel clothing; mainstream recognition; and he is also well capable in the ring. However stuck to old conceptions regarding what makes a wrestler, and apparently lacking conviction in their own business, WWE’s use of Miz is pitiful: reducing him to a bit-part in-ring role, and to minor duties as a programme host. After cutting a fantastic promo at Battleground, we had to witness the unedifying spectacle of Big Show taking Miz out with a single punch. With the Intercontinental Champion Ryback out injured, this was a fill-in segment preceding the main event.

In general WWE today is a paradox, in so far as inside the ring, the company has rarely boasted such a fit, athletic, and knowledge roster. The men and women who come up through NXT tend to be acutely aware of wrestling history, and they often look like superstars in the making. What they arguably lack is the sort of experience which can only be gained wrestling in front of large crowds, and with veterans willing to pass on first-hand their understanding of what it takes to engage an audience. NXT can replicate this to a degree, through its live shows and the mentorship of legends like Dusty Rhodes and William Regal. More, many NXT wrestlers have put in extensive time on the independent circuit.

What really hampers the development of the next generation of superstars is the static, over-legislated, and child-friendly environment on WWE’s main shows. Seemingly intent on catering predominantly for the under-10s, this doesn’t manifest itself in bold, colourful, larger-than-life characters. Rather it serves to strip away all excesses and elaborations, subduing character development, and rendering too many wrestlers too similar. It is hard to portray a subtle and realistic cultist, for instance, when the target audience is barely literate; impossible to develop an authentic wild side when your words are written by someone else. There are other issues too: again the rigid big-match template which emphasises toughness at the expense of intuition and experimentation; and notably WWE’s inability to conceive of a heel who isn’t fundamentally a coward. There can be a useful difference between a coward and a cheat.

With WWE failing radically to establish its young talents as legitimate, long-term main event players, it frequently makes matters worse by resorting with indecent haste to part-time legends of the squared circle. What could have been a great match between Seth Rollins – ostensibly WWE Champion – and Brock Lesnar eventually amounted to nothing more than a throwaway.

As expected, Brock dominated from the outset of the main event, taking Rollins to ‘suplex city’ with a mass of german suplexes – though this gimmick is already growing tired, asks too much of Lesnar’s opponents, and isn’t always conducive to a dynamic and meaningful match. Lesnar’s selling is underrated, and in general he can do more than simply toss his opponents about. The nicest and craftiest facets of the main event saw Rollins repeatedly wriggle free of the F5; then target Brock’s knee, a tactic which brought some success, and which could have been developed had the match been allowed to continue.

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Instead, after less than ten minutes, Brock landed an F5 and covered a seemingly defeated Rollins – only for the arena to go dark, as The Undertaker made his return. Squaring up to a visibly stunned Lesnar, a flurry of strikes saw him win the upper hand, before he dismantled Lesnar with a chokeslam and two Tombstone Piledrivers. Dropping to one knee and posing in the ring, as The Undertaker steadily and glaringly made his way to the back, Lesnar was left lying as Battleground went off the air.

On Monday night’s RAW – which was built around the issue between Taker and Lesnar, the entirety of the WWE roster being called upon to keep the two men apart – The Undertaker explained his actions as spurred by the boasting of Lesnar and his manager Paul Heyman, always keen to remind the WWE universe that they were the ones who broke The Undertaker’s WrestleMania streak.

That is still a thin explanation for all of the questions posed by The Undertaker’s interference on Sunday. Namely, given the prestige of the streak, and the fact that The Undertaker himself confronted Lesnar to instigate their WrestleMania XXX match, does Taker really have sufficient grounds for his sudden upset? After all, he wrestled on the show at WrestleMania 31 in March, a year removed from the events of WrestleMania XXX; and on that occasion chose not to sabotage Lesnar’s title bout, despite it being on the biggest stage that wrestling has to offer. Battleground by contrast is a relatively minor affair, so that The Undertaker’s return appears somewhat fickle.

The main event of Battleground was poorly timed: finishing ten minutes early, there was no reason not to give Rollins/Lesnar another five minutes, and Rollins more fractions of offense. Rollins’ title reign has been thoroughly mismanaged to this point, demeaning both the wrestler and the championship, and the horrible prospect of a match with John Cena at SummerSlam seems to be on the horizon. In all – despite the good work earlier in the show, a standout contest between Sheamus and Randy Orton, and the captivating progress being made by WWE’s women – in the course of just two matches, WWE managed to marginalise its future in favour of an already fading past.

Christopher Laws
Christopher Lawshttps://www.culturedarm.com
Christopher Laws is the writer and editor of Culturedarm, currently based in Umeå, Sweden.

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