CULTURE

I was on the CULTURE podcast again last night discussing the build up to last night ep of Dynamite. Topics include…

• WWE's movies have really bad network drama style acting

• Keeping AEW and other territories fresh by rotating wrestlers in and out

• The most recent Impact PPV.

• Defy doing streaming with Pluto TV.

• AEW's Dark Elevation show doing early 1990s WCW style six person tags.

• AEW Dark Elevation having wrestlers from New Japan and DDT this week. Also how they keep the crowd from knowing who is wrestling to get big reactions for those shows.

• DC indie wrestling

• Triplemania this weekend

Books Read 2021

• Green Arrow: A Celebration of 75 Years

• Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold

• Palestine: A Socialist Introduction by Sumaya Awad

• Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America by Russ Baker

• Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

• Small Magic: Short Fiction, 1977-2020 by Terry Brooks

• The Last Druid by Terry Brooks

• I Remember Death By Its Proximity to What I Love by Mahogany L. Browne

• Star Trek: Alien Spotlight by John Byrne

• The Watcher and Other Stories by Italo Calvino

• Into The War by Italo Calvino

• The Road To San Giovanni by Italo Calvino

• Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino

• Under The Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino

• If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish

• Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas by Henry Dumas

• Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas by Henry Dumas

• Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd

• Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice by Jesse Hagopian

• Ibsen's Selected Plays by Henrik Ibsen

• They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie Jones-Rogers

• We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Abolitionist Papers) by Mariame Kaba

• Transformers: The Manga Volume Three by Masumi Kaneda

• Eternals: The Complete Collection by Jack Kirby

• The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists by Naomi Klein

• Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

• Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language by Seth Lerer

• Legends of Localization: The Legend of Zelda by Clyde Mandelin

• Transformers: All Hail Megatron Volume 1 by Shane McCarthy

• Transformers: All Hail Megatron Volume 2 by Shane McCarthy

• Transformers Historia by Chris MxFeely

• Thick: And Other Essays by Tressiue McMillan Cottom

• The Wrestling Observer Yearbook '93: The Year of Major Beginnings and Major Endings (Wrestling Observer Newsletter) by Dave Meltzer

• The Wrestling Observer Yearbook '97: The Last Time WWF Was Number Two by Dave Meltzer

• The Major Works by John Milton

• Strong In The Rain: Selected Poems by Kenji Miyazawa

• Milky Way Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa

• Night On The Galactic Railroad and Other Stories by Kenji Miyazawa

• Night On The Milky Way Train by Kenji Miyazawa

• Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa by Kenji Miyazawa

• Growing Up with Manos: The Hands of Fate: How I was the Child Star of the Worst Movie Ever Made and Lived to Tell the Story by Jackey Newman

• Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams by Robert Peterson

• River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey by Sister Helen Prejean

• Straight Edge: A Clear-Headed Hardcore Punk History by Tony Rettman

• Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing by Stuart Schrader

• The Monsters and the Critics: And Other Essays. J.R.R. Tolkien

• Star Trek: Way Point by Dayton Ward

• Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism by Jillian York

• Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Worth Reading: February

• A nice feature about Nyla Rose in Sports Illustrated.

• Olympia Kiriakou on precode comedies and female stardom.

• Brady Langmann on the gross CGI resurrections of characters on Star Wars shows.

• Tressie McMillan Cottom interviews The Williams Sisters for Harpers.

Episode 90: Super Mario World

We covered Super Mario World in a holiday episode years ago, but there are no rules! We can do whatever we want, so here is an expanded episode on the game.

Worth Reading In December/January

• David Roth in Defector on the late, great, John Madden.

• Brian Brems in Vague Visages on the 1971 Noir film Klute.

• Chris McGreal in The Guardian on Desmond Tutu’s solidarity with Palestine.

• Chelsea Barabas in Real Life Magazine on the surveillance of minority students in schools.

CULTURE!

I was on the CULTURE! podcast this week discussing AEW, Jon Moxley's return, how territory wrestling in the eighties worked so much better than what WWE does now, 90s Joshi wrestling, and a bit about "the forbidden door."

You can listen to it here.

Episode 89: 500 Words About King of the Monsters

Kaiju films meets wrasslin’ in 1991’s King of the Monsters for the Neo Geo and some other systems. This is a fun game and I offer some thoughts on it in our latest 500 Words episode.

• Retronauts on Godzilla related games

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