Greatest Book You'll Ever Hurt Yourself Carrying
posted by Dick Septic on September 14, 2001
Mike Kelley edited this beast. There's a forward by Roland Barthes. The book is about 18" x 24" and weighs 80lbs. Inside you'll find beautiful pictures of large sweaty Polish men next to babelicious housewives from the 60's wrestling nude in wonderfully non-descript motel rooms.
A snippet of the Barthes forward:
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.* Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight; this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrongly called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema. Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.
Ahhh. Chief Jay Strongbow. You go, boy!