Some action from last year’s Halloween show
Just like last year, I rolled up with an enthusiastic posse to watch some rasslin’ at the Kiwi Pro Wrestling’s Halloween Howl extravaganza.
Highlight, of course, was seeing the redoubtable Doctor Diablo open the night trying to bring down the fearsome Brute, but even a spectacular moonsault off the top rope did not avail the man with a PhD in Pain!
After that fight I’d shouted myself hoarse already so I was left just gesturing for the rest of the night. It was heaps of fun.
I think once a year is about my speed for these things, but I fully intend to be back again next Halloween. Hooooo!
(Also, big news: the KPW lads and lasses have announced an upcoming series on free-to-air Prime TV called Off The Ropes! Looking forward to that – Sunday November 15!)
Month: November 2009
Day of the Dead
It was getting cold as we wound our way up the hill. We didn’t have a place to stay, and intended to stay up all night, as most of the Mexicans were clearly planning. In the cemetery, a small flat space chunked out of the hillside and crowded with plots, locals were starting to gather at gravesides, raising big wreaths of flowers and lighting candles.
– my trip to Patzcuaro for el Día de los Muertos.
Read the rest of that visit here.
The pic above is a (never-before-revealed!) picture of my travel buddies at the time getting some food on the island at about 3am. The stone street whose steps we are sitting on is the one that winds all the way up the island to its peak.
Had a good Halloween, too. The knifeman brought the party, like he does every single year. Some unexpected faces there too, great to see them. Mostly I like Halloween. My reservations are entirely due to the fact it doesn’t quite fit here in NZ – the time of year is all wrong, for a start – and it isn’t integrated into our culture in any meaningful way. There’s a lot of suspicion, in particular, as to this “trick or treat” business where children proceed from house to house and ask for sweets! AND THEY DON’T EVEN NEED TO WORK FOR THEM! The logic of trick or treating is founded in ritual, not production-based education, and that’s a bit of a hard sell around these parts – we’re leery of the rituals we do own, and adopting new ones doesn’t come easy. Nevertheless, I like trick or treating in principle. If you want to bind communities together and encourage neighbourliness, dressing little kids as monsters and giving them treats seems like a pretty fun way to do it.
Then again, I mostly learned about Halloween from Peanuts. “I got a rock.”