Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #874189 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781550228274
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Let the tortillas fly!!!
I'm not your average book reviewer but this book is beyond average, It's amazing! I can clearly remember seeing Incredibly Strange Wrestling at the Warped Tour in 2001. I've never had more fun at a wrestling event. Before the matches even started, they handed out tortillas to throw at the wrestlers. It was so much fun. The charachters are hilarious, such as El Homo Loco, a gay luchador would carry a milk jug filled with cum. There was also El Pollo Diablo, who was a wrestler in a full chicken suit, much like a sports mascot. There was no way you could deny the pure entertainment that ISW brought to the masses that day. As I said before, I've never forgot ISW and my friend recently told me about this book, Beer Blood & Cornmeal, wrote by the ISW announcer/wrestler Count Dante. I couldn't wait to find a copy and I haven't been able to put the book down. The Count was a master of the microphone and he really put together a great read. I would highly recommend this book to any fan of wrestling. It recounts the beginning of ISW in San Francisco and covers the entire 7 year run of the fabulous company. I hope that this book helps more people discover the greatness that was Incredibly Strange Wrestling and maybe one day they will make a comeback. I know that I would be first in line at the show with a bag full of tortillas.

Incredibly Awesome Reading
If you have ever stepped foot in San Francisco, seen these wrestlers in the ring, been to a punk rock show, or lived through this time in the past, you should read this book. You should read this book even if you've done none of those things. It's more than a memoir, more than an autobiography and filled with all of the drama and excitement you would expect -- in and out of the wrestling ring -- from the show and more. So much more.

I lived in San Francisco during the era that this book covers and worked at The Transmission Theater as a bartender for many of Incredibly Strange Wrestling's shows. Bob Calhoun covers this spectacle in such depth and with such precision and detail, it was almost like being in the 90s again, except this time I am a fly on the wall privy to bits and pieces that I never would have known about until reading.

Triumph, sorrow, and tortillas
In this fine punk-wrestling memoir, combining aspects of punk tour diary, independent wrestling reportage, and cultural critique, Calhoun deploys his satirical gifts upon himself, his fellow grapplers, San Francisco hipsterism, and the country at large, always to hilarious and thought-provoking effect.
As the book opens in early 90's San Francisco, Calhoun, fed on an intellectual diet of Marvel comics, monster movies, and pro wrestling, is a striving loser whose stated ambitions are for nothing more than local celebrity - some color to brighten the drab modern American existence of commuting and wage-earning. He leads a band in the persona of a mail-order martial arts huckster from comic book ads, works his way through the San Francisco club scene, and in time falls in with a crowd of urban niche hipsters, the punk/greaser retro-gearhead founders of Incredibly Strange Wrestling. Conceived partly as a tribute to/ripoff of Mexican-style pro wrestling, ISW grows over the years into a local and regional nightclub attraction, gradually incorporating more of Calhoun's non-sequitur concepts. Not content with the scuzzily rarefied, insiders-only vibe of early ISW and SF hipsterdom in general, Calhoun and others in his camp use the ISW platform to stage increasingly bizarre, satirical, and transgressive spectacles. Scientologists, organized religion, and white rappers all get the treatment. In a process mirroring the evolution of independent rock toward the mainstream, ISW edges closer to a material success which confounds everyone involved. Personality conflicts multiply, and the efforts and rewards involved are not always evenly distributed.
As is appropriate in a story about pro wrestling, the psychology of obsession is laid bare here. While Calhoun's ambitions may have been modest at the start, ISW coaxes the instinctive showman out of him. A different process occurs with Calhoun's friend and fellow wrestler Tom Corgan. Another regular guy pulled by his love of pro wrestling into the orbit of ISW, Corgan suffers from an eventually tragic lack of perspective on the silliness and sublimity of wrestling in a Bigfoot costume. Corgan begins disturbingly to wear his Macho Sasquatcho costume to parties and family skiing trips, but he also has a deep insight into the pre-rational aspects of pro wrestling- it is Corgan who promotes the introduction to ISW of "blading" (wrestlers' surreptitiously cutting themselves with hidden razor blades to add real blood to the show) during a grueling European tour before increasingly hostile crowds.
Of course, by the time of those tense European dates, the US was gearing up for a deeply unpopular war in Iraq. When Beer Blood & Cornmeal begins, there is barely an internet on which to list ISW's shows. By the end of the book, the country, and the Bay Area in particular, has been transformed, by the internet and then by Bush's America and the war on terror. Among the very least of the results, SF rock clubs close their doors in the face of astronomical dot com rents; punk goes corporate with Clearcom-sponsored package tours.
Calhoun doesn't presume to explain how youth cultures obsessed with nostalgia and the veneration of the junk art of the past can ever have come to grips with the seismic changes of the 90s and 00s; but our culture's gradual evolution away from one which has room for the outsider and the self-destructive smartass is a subject never far from his mind. This is a deeply funny and sad tale told with insight, originality, honesty, and humanity.