More Mora

Remember when I said that this guy was something special? To mark my words, he was going to blow up? Well, it turns out that the day after I said that, he did. (Seriously watch that.) It was the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona. The whole day was hailed as a disappointment except for David Mora. 


He was gored twice. Once in the thigh and once in the armpit.  And it made me genuinely frightened. I actually thought, "What if I lose him!?"-- as though I actually knew him. But that's just the thing: I feel like I do. 


Despite my many conflicting emotions about the corrida, ('fight'-- bullfight, bullfighter-- 'fight' has never been the right word and never the word they themselves use) David Mora makes you reconsider the whole thing. Much like Enrique Ponce was for AL Kennedy while she was writing On Bullfighting, watching David Mora is the closest the corrida gets to a religious experience. (Enrique Ponce, as it turns out, was David Mora's sponsor in his alternativa.) And I think religion is an appropriate way to discuss it. Because I was raised Buddhist, so I don't have an attachment to the deeply ceremonial aspects of, say, Catholicism. But there are some churches, some cathedrals, and some sermons that I have heard by some priests and some reverends that make believe and understand. 


David Mora is someone who makes you love something that repelled you, and see something by seeing it the way he sees it. 


Without needing to know anything about cape work or rules, you can see-- even I could see!-- from the very first, that he was just plain better than everyone else. Listen to the audiences. Even in the last year or two, he's banished from himself those last flourishes of ego, of strutting. He's all business, and all love. Even with his ass hanging out, even when he went up against the Miura bull, his grace makes everyone else around him look like a hack, like a strutting peacock. Anytime I see a clumsy step or pass, a scurry, I know it's not my David.


Odd, I know. To say "mine." But as soon as I made him Aries Brio, he became mine. 


I can't tell you how many videos I've watched, how many websites I've translated. I feel like I could spot his work anywhere. Turns out, matadors are sort of difficult to get in touch with. But I really want to interview him. Like really. I found out his agent is Antonio Tejero, but haven't figured out a way to contact that guy. Anyone know? Can anyone help? (Bernardo Cubria, I mean you!) 


Watch for yourselves and see. 

David Mora by dtoros