312: Macho Man Randy Savage RIP

Macho Man Randy Savage

15/11/1952 – 20/05/2011

Wrestling’s old-school king of over-the-top, explosively ridiculous cartoon pageantry is dead; long live the king Ooh yeah!  Killed in a car crash probably caused by the thing that kills most wrestlers, the ubiquitous heart attack.  Another great piece of my childhood (and quite possibly yours too) has gone, and will be missed by many.

I suppose this is supposed to be an arts blog of sorts, and the sport of American-style Pro-Wrestling can, in the right hands, be one of the most exciting, intuitive, visceral and expressive art-forms; a raw art brut scream of humanity at its basest.  This is not the post for explaining the virtues of wrestling; Roland Barthes already wrote that in 1957, The World of Wrestling.  This is the post for remembering the real-life weirdo-super hero Macho Man Randy Savage.

Let’s start with a video...

...of Savage doing what he did best.  At Wrestlemania III way back in 1987 he defended his year-long reign as Intercontinental Champion against Ricky the Dragon Steamboat.  The pair performed magnificently, and the largest audience ever at a North American indoor sport event (93,173 wrestling fans) were eating out of their hands; hear them roar and cheer.  The fact that Savage loses his belt is of course immaterial; a year-long story arch reached a major peak.  He played a major role in the development of wrestling story-telling and the art of the high flier.

As well as his incredible matches he will also be remembered for his incredible interviews:

“Unbelievable.  Time distortion; space is the place, Mean Gene Okerlund.  Going down that lonesome highway, yeah.  But don’t be hypnotised, no.  Reincarnation doesn’t have to be.  You can concentrate and you can telepathy <...> I’m the greatest professional wrestler that ever lived and I’m living now, yeah.  I can’t sing and I can’t dance but I can make romance, yeah.  Right there the fork in the road.  I said go right, Elizabeth said go left.  I went right, and then, and then I understand what the situation was.  I went over the bridge, and then, yeah, when I crossed that bridge I found out that I was on the right side, and I said Elizabeth follow me.  Yeah, because I’m going straight to the top.  The stars, yeah, the stars....”

Savage there putting it better than I ever could.  Not only was he a wonderful orator, he also dressed better than I could ever have a need to.  While Hulk Hogan was always a ripped t-shirt/yellow panties man, and most other wrestlers just toed the functional leotard line,  Macho Man Randy Savage was this guy:

Then for no reason whatsoever he became this guy – rapper trying to start a beef with Hulk Hogan; Be A Man, Hulk.  Not to mention the fact that he actually fought Spiderman for real.

And there you have the strange life of Randy Mario Poffo aka Randy Savage, played out on the strange stage of professional wrestling.  He will be missed by anyone with a sense of what is worth missing.  Rest in peace you crazy, crazy man.

286: Be a man

Homemade tattoos; DIY tattoos; prison tattoos: image searches for these terms reveal some disgusting and depressing sights, including a shark mouth tattooed onto an arm stump, a lad whose friends tattooed i suck big dick onto his forehead, an eyeball tattoo (actually on an eyeball), and a man removing tats from his fingers using a belt sander.  Then of course a search for fail tattoos reveals the disastrous pictures of facial tats, spelling mistakes, and hideous portraits of loved ones.  It’s amazingly addictive, scrolling gormlessly through this archive of unbelievable stupidity.

As I got on the bus this morning an elderly gentleman was stepping off.  Not sure exactly how old, but he was getting on; perhaps about 65 seems like an accurate guess.  He was wearing short sleeves and clearly had a range of homemade tattoos on his arms and neck.  There was a man with a lot of time on his hands, and an unbearable urge to fashion rudimentary tattooing equipment out of a guitar string and a biro.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he had at some point made a shank out of a toothbrush.  Unfortunately I wasn’t granted time to study his primitive body art, or to figure out if the stuff on his left arm was better quality than the stuff on his right (or vice versa).

I was lucky enough to catch his masterpiece.  In bold blotchy, blurred, bleeding (I mean the colour was bleeding; he wasn’t actually bleeding) blue, stretching almost from elbow to wrist on his right arm was the word man, followed by a crude stick man, then the words dad and sex.  As you can see I have faithfully and accurate rendered this in stylish bitmap via the medium of MS Paint.

Curiosity is consuming me.  What does he himself think about this fantastic mess?  Is he proud of it; does he think it fetching?  He obviously felt no need to cover it up, and was not shy about displaying it.  Does it represent his sexual preferences; I am tempted to google image search the phrase man dad sex and see what hellishly disturbing scenes are thrown forth, to burn my retinas.  It’s purely for research purposes.  Also if I ever see this guy again I could tell him he should google it.  Ok, time to bite the bullet, forgive me lord for what I am about to do.  Oh god.  I initially planned to put an active link to that search, but forget it.  If I ever see him again, I’ll tell him not to google it.  Either that or I just won’t mention it at all.

Or it could be that the phrase man dad sex is a kind of micro-essay; a biography; a summation of what he considers valuable.  The title of the essay is simply man – this is what he deems the most important thing; being seen as a real man man.  Lorry drivers ask for his help reversing, everyone knows not to fuck with him in his local, his shit stinks, he talks football and tits with the working classes, beats his wife, and never sees his kids.  Then a diagram of what a man should be shows us the shaved head and the simple, non-poofy clothes.  The body and conclusion of the essay are condensed into the two words dad and sex.  Through being a dad and having sex one achieves manhood.

The final stage in being a man man, is making sure everyone knows you are a proper man man.  One way to do this is to talk too loudly; indeed to shout at people even when they are standing right next to you.  There are other obvious signifiers such as farting, belching, spitting in public, drinking more than ten pints on a regular basis, occasionally punching someone.  You can have a bit of fun with it; pick and choose your own combinations, or you can even come up with ideas for yourself.  If you want to really show everyone how manly you are perhaps you too are ready for the homemade man dad sex tattoo.  Just remember, be original, have fun with it, and above all, be a man.