The Mysteries Of Chessboxing
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Okay, I don't know where to start on this one... it's actually not that weird here, making the news and whatnot, but this all started when a performance artist took Enki Bilal too seriously and we took him too seriously. Thus chessboxing was born; thus 400 Germans stuffed themselves into an arena to watch two scholar-warriors face off for the WCBO title. One of them was Andreas Dilschneider, Ben's friend, and so we passed through the doors under the aegis of the Ex-Berliner and tried to see what the fuss was about. They kicked things off with some female boxing (no chess) and grandmaster chess (no boxing). I went light on the chess photos because, you know, it's chess. The announcer was smarmy in any language. The venue was this abandoned warehouse. Just like American fights, the entries were stagey. Each fighter had shitty Eminem-in-20-years rappers big upping them. I'll spare you those photos. Check out the announcer: he's apparently being assumed into heaven. Cameras from the big three networks They had these redhaired models announcing the rounds, which sent Ben and I down fanciful paths. The dude Andreas was fighting was a fucking Snatch brute, and Andreas had told us that he was a better chess player too. He had beaten Gary Kasparov in one of those 5-against-1 online matches. but Andreas was sticking and moving
The problem was, Andreas was taking way too long with his chess, which was speed and timed, and which I didn't take too many pictures of for aforementioned reasons. Well, here's one. Andreas was down to eight seconds, and had to resign alas hero For some reason, Andreas was all sanguine and hi-de-ho for the press conference. No doubt building, on the bricks of his failure, his future successes! |