Wrestling fanzine review: The Atomic Elbow #11- Nostalgia, the iron claw of death

Get a copy here:
http://theatomicelbow.blogspot.co.uk/

Click here for a very funny pro wrestling nostalgia podcast:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/old-school-wrestling-podcast/id334529079?mt=2

Click here for my favourite song about the death that is nostalgia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMMkXvzTvYA



When the entertainment of your youth enters the realms of commercial nostalgia you know it’s day in the sun has passed. It has become little more than a replay, a spectral apparition for the comfortably numb.

Nostalgia is a box set for the suburb dwelling masses. The silently complicit who pay their taxes for war and slavery whilst not getting involved in the world around them, a world they support through their quiet, apathetic resignation and comfortable, selfish cowardice.

Nostalgia digs up a corpse for this moribund sofa dwelling generation. Look at how it moves when we shake its fleshless limbs. Look at how it smiles when we stretch its toothless jaws. Buy the special edition programme, the T-shirt, the autographed photograph of the dead star. Is that what pro wrestling has now become?

Perhaps there is a new generation of young fans who are going to revive the corpse, but at the moment it appears (at least to my eyes and ears) that those still paying attention to modern pro-wrestling are only doing so for their own personal, nostalgic reasons and because it gives them a creative outlet, with an in-built (and sadly declining) audience they wouldn’t have if they were blogging/podcasting on other, more serious, relevant and contemporary subject matters.

‘The Atomic Elbow’ is one of those creative outlets. A fanzine in the style of the much loved old fanzines that I myself used to subscribe to many decades ago. Full of spelling errors and stream of consciousness thoughts about pro-wrestling put together in an A3 black and white, folded and stapled down the middle, made in the bedroom and local library style. That’s exactly what The Atomic Elbow is. A nostalgic blast back into my past, with the big difference being that the people writing in the fanzine are not, as they were twenty odd years ago, talking about what is happening today, they are talking about what happened in the past. A vehicle of nostalgia, in form and content, this fanzine is not bringing the corpse back to life, it’s keeping it dead, driving the stake deeper, making sure the beast does not stir.

To be fair, there are a couple of brief moments of life in AE11. The Undertaker’s streak being broken is mentioned, but the discussion is more about how they are ruining future nostalgic opportunities, rather than what is most exciting for the wrestling product of today. Dolph Zigler is the favourite wrestler of a lapsed, now back into it female fan. She watches the WWE today with her husband. This is not the fanzine writer that I grew up with. A female, and married? No way, not happening mate. Where are the basement dwelling, anti-social young men? The girl repellent, obsessive compulsive King geeks who wear ECW T-shirts and write reams and reams of over the top prose about the latest five star matches from Japan? Where have they all gone? Suicide, homelessness, career or marriage? I miss those guys. I miss the early days of ECW, the fanzines, the independent shows, the laughing at Adam Bomb and King Mabel, the times before the death that is nostalgia kicked in.

That’s not to say that AE11 is a complete waste of time, because it isn’t. There is enjoyment to be had, but it’s death enjoyment, nostalgia sprinkled with sadness at recognition that most of the wrestlers you are reading about didn’t have a happy ending. The best article is about World Class Championship wrestling, and the Von Erich family. Need I say more? But still, I enjoyed the article. It’s written in a carefree, funny style that, again, reminds me of the old fanzines, plus it gave me some new information on a wrestling event that featured the Ultimate Warrior before he nailed down his gimmick. How did his story end? We know, and it’s sad. That’s nostalgia for you. You cannot live in the past, and if you try it will end up killing you.

So was this just a sad affair then? Another case of going back to the past because the present offers nothing, but when you go back all you find is dead memories and dead people?  It kind of was. The sadness is not in the nostalgia itself, but in the fact that life still goes on, and if you don’t find something new to cling onto, the past becomes a skeletal claw from the grave, tempting you closer, closer, until it grabs, and pulls you into the abyss.

Rating: Look, but don’t linger.