By Bart Barry-
Editor’s note: A year ago, bereft of ideas for his weekly column, Bart Barry interviewed himself again about the state of the craft. That went so well, we asked him to do it this week.
BB: Looking better, kid.
BB: It’s the fasting.
BB: Really?
BB: Doubtful.
BB: Yet it persists.
BB: Fasting, Kundalini, cold showers – they’re all of a piece, wethinks. Something gets read about these things’ benefits so they get tried suffered through. Month laters their effect be nighnil, but by now it’s a question of discipline or will.
BB: Fasting –
BB: Breaks up the monotony. Not eating on Mondays or Thursdays makes the week compelling. Half of two days spent under the illusion a bite of food can solve every problem. Their successors followed by ambivalence.
BB: This solved nothing, and it’s wonderful to be free to eat again?
BB: Yes!
BB: No more boxing gym.
BB: Not for quite a while. Miss it not slightly.
BB: What do you miss the least?
BB: The heat the heat. San Fernando that damn heater.
BB: Barbaric.
BB: Fighters make weight, they don’t lose it. Look at Duran.
BB: Is he the purest manifestation of –
BB: Yes.
BB: How goes the craft?
BB: Easier.
BB: Because the quality of subject improved?
BB: Not noticeably but maybe.
BB: Then it’s a venue change?
BB: Not a change of venue but venues changing. As this city grows denser there’s less space less time that makes everyone tenser. Even in the South Texas heat there seem more heels tapping more nervousness more suspense less time less space.
BB: That helps the writing?
BB: Helps the boredom.
BB: When did boredom surpass wordlessness as top concern?
BB: One doesn’t mark these things but it must’ve been when we started writing the column at coffeeshops instead of using them as rewards for having written the column. You write in a hermetically sealed space when you’re afraid you’ll stop because you can’t fill the blank page.
BB: Now it’s a matter of its being unamusing?
BB: But it is exactly amusing. Sunday trips to the coffee shop are the weeks’ best parts that are predictable.
BB: Who excites you the most right now?
BB: David Benavidez.
BB: Why?
BB: There’s something perishable there. An originality, too. I didn’t realize how much I liked him till you asked.
BB: Is it a Phoenix thing?
BB: No nostalgia. In a dozen years there never felt a Phoenix thing – not in the way there’s a San Antonio thing or a Silicon Valley thing or a Boston thing.
BB: When you think of Phoenix boxing, Arizona boxing even, you think of Benavidez?
BB: No. I think of Norm, I think of Desert Diamond Casino, I think of the late Don Smith.
BB: Lately.
BB: February I sat next to him in Corpus.
BB: You conflate him with the Colorado matchmaker?
BB: Invest each with the other. Was a Top Rank card – Zurdo Ramirez. We didn’t recognize each other till we started talking about Norm and the Brothers Benavidez, Jose on the undercard. There’s a guy down here with a local chapter of Veterans for Peace, reminds me of both Don Smiths.
BB: A name you say like a single word.
BB: Like an alias.
BB: Excited about GolovCanelo 2?
BB: No.
BB: Should be a good fight.
BB: Yup. Don’t care about either guy. Both good men. Professionals. Talented. All that. No sense of character with either of them. Their first fight was two good fighters making a good fight.
BB: The fight wasn’t great. They aren’t great.
BB: It feels business cycle more than boxing cycle. We’ve got a redhead Mexican can fight a bit. HBO loves the Soviet Bloc. Golden Boy needs money. Golovkin can’t be the second coming of Hagler till he beats his Hearns. The fight has to be made because it can’t be made. Before anyone can settle into addressing how historically average both guys are we get keelhauled with revenue projections.
BB: And that’s the story.
BB: It’s a reflexive trick sort of halfassed bullying: You don’t know what you’re talking about because look at how much money it’ll make!
BB: What’s the rebuttal to that?
BB: There isn’t one because it’s a different conversation. The person who makes that argument doesn’t want the original conversation or wasting cycles to persuade you or you him.
BB: You wrestle him back?
BB: Nah. He has the energy. You sidle away. What’s the difference?
BB: What are we reading?
BB: Mitochondria.
BB: Why?
BB: No idea.
BB: Here’s a go. There’s a theory out there mitochondria was a predatory bacterium that eventually found symbiosis with a eukaryote, and cancer is a reversion by mitochondria to its original predatory state –
BB: And since Mom just passed away from cancer –
BB: This is a tribute of sorts.
BB: But it isn’t, really, not even a weak one.
BB: Then why do it?
BB: This week?
BB: Aside from calendar, boxing or general.
BB: It goes back to “Las Meninas” by Velazquez, painted, as you know, 41 years after Cervantes writes the second volume of “Don Quijote” in the same city. Cervantes has his fictional characters reading about themselves. Then Velazquez paints himself painting himself. Both do it a little messily, with irony.
BB: In the sense of not-sanitized?
BB: Cervantes is satirizing imposters. Velazquez pretends to be just painting something, that you later discover is a portrait of some royal couple, that you later discover isn’t that at all. The technical mastery is obvious and beside the point.
BB: This is neither.
BB: Neither, yes. This isn’t even Picasso cynically looping and looping till you’re so confused he must be a genius.
BB: Then do it for the ease.
BB: Easier than mailing-in a preview of a Pacquiao fight you don’t honestly care about.
BB: And because of Vermeer.
BB: You determined to make this a two-parter?
BB: If you are.
BB: Across the room from the wood-mounted print of “Las Meninas” is a wood-mounted print of “The Art of Painting” – as you know.
BB: Again.
BB: It’s the crown-thingy on the model’s head. Notice the artist is painting it differently on the canvas than Vermeer painted it on his canvas.
BB: Because of the angle of the artist’s painting.
BB: A tie-in with what Velazquez and Cervantes are up to. Vermeer is painting himself painting a model differently from how Vermeer is painting that same model.
BB: You don’t see any of this in boxing?
BB: Almost. Sometimes. Nearly. Chocolatito hanging the jab near his opponent’s right shoulder so his opponent’s counter, a right cross naturally, bangs his shoulder into Chocolatito’s glove, which bangs into his opponent’s chin.
BB: Punching himself for trying to punch Chocolatito, or Vazquez pinning –
BB: Yes, kinda, Vazquez pinning Marquez’s right arm to Vazquez’s left shoulder to pull Marquez into a right uppercut. Mijares making an opponent miss so wildly so often he injures his shoulder. Marciano and Valero punching their opponents’ arms. Rigondeaux rehearsing a combination, in full, before he throws it.
BB: What about Lomachenko?
BB: He has the timing and space to do it, but where’s the irony? He’s sensational. Technically transcendent. But he’s like what happens in the middle of Vermeer’s studio, where he’s got easel legs and chair legs and the artist’s legs and tiles all juxtaposing so successfully you have to believe him, and know you couldn’t pull it off, and suspect no one else could either.
BB: But is it joyful?
BB: But is it joyful.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
