Posts Tagged ‘chess’

Pandemic tip: Disinfect your keyboard, especially after you flame me

Posted: March 29, 2020 in music
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Hello, fellow pandemicians. I know you were all stunned by the decision on March 26 to stop the Candidates Tournament for the Men’s World Chess Championship. I certainly was. The games were exciting and one of the Russians got so cranky and insulted so many people that he was briefly trending on Twitter.

How weird is it that the last sporting event on earth was chess? See, I’ve been right all my life.

I hope you’re doing OK, and that you’re getting your facts from the World Health Organization or the Centers for Disease Control and not from uncredentialed idiots. Tying garlic around your neck or balloons to your ankles or eating 44 tons of plankton a day will not protect you.

Here in Oregon, I’m working from home, which I don’t like – work is work and home is home, and I prefer that they not meet – but at least I still have work. I have my wife and my dog. I’m learning how to talk to them and not just walk absently past them. I’m planning my July retirement party – we’ll be on Zoom or GoToMeeting, each with our own cake. This is not my idea of a good time, but I do like the idea of my own cake. Assuming anyone will be baking cakes.

It’s my task to distract you and help you find alternatives to chess, so here’s a movie I made starring a bird. Here’s the DJ whose live stream is boosting my morale. If he’s not on the air – his hours are unpredictable – here’s a recording of his show at the Slam! Quarantine Festival. This is whom I want to be when I grow up. That is the correct use of “whom.”

Let’s return to 1989, a year when the only things we had to worry about were invading Panama and finishing the World Series following the Loma Prieta earthquake, and listen to some music you older teenagers paid good money for.

Depeche Mode, Depeche Mode 101 (1989)

This double-record set gives us Depeche Mode on the night they ruled the universe, their 1988 concert at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena before 60,000 mesmerized DeModers. It took the Seattle Mariners 12 years to pull 60,000 fans into the Kingdome – and that was the day in 1989 when they promoted the teenaged Ken Griffey, Jr., from the minors.

It took me a long time to engage Depeche Mode in a committed relationship, which seems counterintuitive given my status as a synth-pop artifact. In fact, I panned Depeche Mode 101 in this blog in 2016: “…the songs don’t budge a centimeter from the studio versions. Sorry, boys, but a concert is more than a crowd screaming with joy because you blew up a firecracker. AC/DC would’ve fired a cannon out of a bagpipe.”

But I wrote that after enduring the third Star Trek reboot, which made me angrier than the Hulk trying to play toilet paper bride during a pandemic. Further spins of 101 have given me a different perspective. Sure, Depeche Mode (a former co-worker innocently called them Pesh de Mode) take few chances on these tracks, but overall the drumming is much more muscular and the songs generate far more revolutions per minute.

The audience eats this stuff up – this is the concert where the show ends with the fans still singing the chorus to “Everything Counts” 30 seconds after the band stopped playing. The effect is electrifying, but to give anti-Depeche Mode voices some space here, I’ll quote another former co-worker: “If I went to a show and the band stopped playing and they expected me to sing, I’d want my money back.”

I give Depeche Mode credit for including in their set list one of their earliest hits, “I Just Can’t Get Enough,” from their salad days playing bright poppity pop-pop-pop. That was when the band still had Vince Clarke, who left early on rather than be vacuumed into the gloom machine envisioned by Martin Gore. Clarke did pretty well for himself, founding Yaz (“Situation”) and Erasure (“Chains of Love,” “Who Needs Love Like That?”). By 1988, “I Just Can’t Get Enough” didn’t sound anything like Depeche Mode, but on their big night they played it, and they played it well.

Yaz Fact! The band was called Yazoo in Clarke’s native England, but in the U.S. they were Yaz in honor of former Boston Red Sox left fielder Carl Yastrzemski.

I also give Depeche Mode credit for transforming “Pleasure Little Treasure” – a song with a subtle message: If you’re looking for a reason to live, I’ve got one right here for ya – from filler into a dark, howling rocker.

I love this disc now, but there’s an odd moment when someone in the band asks the audience, “Are you having a good time?” This strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of what they’re selling and why people are buying it. Listening to Depeche Mode, you can have an epiphany. You can have an emotional release. You can have a nervous breakdown. But to have something as light-hearted as a good time, what you have to have is Yaz or Erasure.

King me

Posted: February 19, 2016 in music, Record reviews
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I can’t bid adieu to Scotland without bringing to your attention the Scotch influence on one of the world’s most popular games.

Not golf, Mr. Spock. Checkers.

The modern history of the game we North Americans call checkers began a thousand years ago on the Iberian Peninsula, where the Moors (the illegal immigrants of that era) and the Spanish (who wanted to build a wall and make the Moors pay for it) spent centuries fighting over which of them would one day oppress the Basques.

The Moors had brought with them a board game they called el-quirkat. The Spanish called it alquerque (pronounced like Albuquerque, minus the third and fourth letters). You played with a 12-man army and captured by jumping. The board was divided into 64 squares as plain as graph paper. The pieces sat on the intersections, not within the squares.

The Spanish passed alquerque to the French, who colored in half the squares and moved the pieces off the intersections. Now all they needed was a new name.

Back up a minute
When chess came to Europe from the Middle East, it had no queen. It had a counselor (in Persian, the fers) who moved one square at a time and captured by jumping. When the Europeans were handed checkers, they already had chess, and the checkers men moved like the fers, so they called checkers ferses. As soon as they did they agreed it was a dumb name.

Also, people were stealing ferses from chess sets and using them for the men in checkers. Nothing makes a chess player angrier than hunting around for a coin or a bobbin or a Monopoly token to stand in for a missing chess piece. That’s like using somebody’s sweater for second base.

Sometime in the 1300s or 1400s, the Europeans fired the counselor from chess and hired the queen – in French, the dame. The French extended this transformation to checkers. Now instead of 12 fers you had 12 queens. When a queen reached the last rank in this new form of checkers, she became a he – a king. He was then paid 25% more.

The French took one look at all those broads on the board and renamed the game dames. This name followed the game as it spread across Europe; in Turkey, for example, checkers is called dama.

The English say no to the European Union
The English refer to checkers as draughts, pronounced “drafts.” But in some rural parts of England, the name draughts took a long time to catch on. People in those areas called it checkers because of the checkered board. This includes the Pilgrims, who landed on Plymouth Rock carrying the Mayflower Compact and institutional racism. Oh, and a checkers set.

What about the Scots, then?
Hold your tartans, laddie, I’m getting there. The Scots got checkers not from their enemies, the English, but from their employers, the Dutch. Many Scotsmen served in Dutch armies in the 1600s. The Dutch called checkers damen. The kilted mercenaries who brought it home called it dams.

The first book written in English on checkers was published in 1756. Somebody smuggled a samizdat copy into Scotland, where it created a sensation (and deep-sixed the name “dams”). For the next hundred years, the Scots owned checkers, bitches. They were still producing world champions in the 1920s.

The Scots also named most of the opening systems. In chess, you have the Queen’s Gambit, the King’s Indian, and the Sicilian Defense. In checkers, there’s the Edinburgh, the Glasgow, and the Bonnie Dundee, as well as the Will-o-the-Wisp, the Laird & the Lady, and the Ayrshire Lassie.

Today, the ultimate checkers player is a computer from Canada, and the game may in fact have been solved. But you’ll never separate the Scotch from the checkers.

Thus ends my tour of all things Scottish. As my ancestor William Wallace cried in Braveheart, Alba gu bràth! (Gaelic for “It’s your turn. Would you move already?”)

Random Pick of the Day
Jimmy Witherspoon, The Concerts
1989
Combines Jimmy Witherspoon at the Monterey Jazz Festival (1960) and At the Renaissance with the Gerry Mulligan & Ben Webster Quintet (1959)

Two live sets from Checker Records artist Jimmy Witherspoon, though neither set was released on Checker and this comp appeared on yet another label. These records are a good look at genres of music (blues, R&B, jazz) that were fading from the pop mainstream.

On the first eight tracks, recorded in an outdoor space where it’s difficult to hear the crowd, the blues shouter holds your attention even as he holds back on the shouting. He delivers a slow “C.C. Rider” that makes you listen as if you’ve never heard this before.

Tracks 9-15 were recorded indoors, and we have the pleasure of hearing the man full-blast with some major-league jazzmen behind him. Witherspoon, having spent the evening singing about dicey women and trouble in general, introduces a special guest: “For the first time in her life, one of the greatest persons in my life is in here tonight to hear me sing. My mother. Let’s give her a big hand.” He then ignites a soulful version of “Ain’t Nobody’s Business.” Was he sending Mom a message or was it just next on the set list? Maybe it was the family theme song.

Pack Jimmy Witherspoon, The Concerts for a long car trip.

 

Don’t put those birds on it

Posted: November 13, 2011 in music, Record reviews
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“Pictures of You”
The Cure
1989

“Space Age Love Song”
A Flock of Seagulls
1982

I coach a chess club at a local school, grades 3-8. My toughest challenges are not explaining how to castle or how the knights move. It’s not the 4th-grade belching contests or the two 5th-grade boys I had to separate because they were fighting over the good-behavior trophy. The real problems are the 12- and 13-year-old girls.

One year, Madison, a 6th-grade girl, came to the club in a torn denim jacket and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. Trying to bond with her, I said that I’d seen Led Zep in concert. Madison rolled her eyes and I suddenly saw myself as she saw me: an old man, claiming to know something about her music! The following year she showed up with black hair, black lipstick, black fingernail polish, and a Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me Cure T-shirt. I could’ve told her that I’d seen The Cure, too, but I’m a nice guy. I didn’t want to ruin another band for her.

The Cure have been around long enough to draw pensions. They (“they” meaning Robert Smith) are best known for being gloomy. Right up my alley! I’ve already written about my favorite Cure song, “Pictures of You,” a ballad of lost love that is 278 words long. That’s like a Dickens novel in rock ’n’ roll years.

Let’s instead move on to A Flock of Seagulls (affectionately known as A Flock of Haircuts). Loyal Reader Julius questions their existence. My apologies, Loyal Reader. No ’80s dance party would be complete without their two biggest hits, “I Ran (So Far Away)” and “Space Age Love Song.”

There’s not much to say about “I Ran (So Far Away)” that the song doesn’t say itself:

And I raaaaaaan.
I ran so far away.
I just raaaaaaan.
I ran all night and day.
I couldn’t get away.

“Space Age Love Song” is a simply structured number that moves from start to finish in an unvarying line. Sort of like an object in space. It was in constant rotation on MTV in 1982. As Springsteen put it, “57 Channels (and Nothing On).” It is exactly 73 words long, of which 15 are “I was falling in love” and 12 are “Falling in love.” Pithy. “I saw your eyes/and you made me smile,” the Haircuts sing in stanza 1, which is sweet, but the next line is “For a little while,” which is ungrateful. What have you done for me lately, person with eyes? In stanza 2, the narrator sees the eyes again, and this time “you touched my mind.” Cool. Telepathy. No wonder you fell in love.

Don’t take my word for it. Here are A Flock of Haircuts at the height of their powers.

A few years ago in chess club we had a boy who loved Culture Club. When I made the mistake of telling him that I didn’t, he started singing “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” By the end of the school year my answer was yes. Music from the 1980s can heal us – or it can be weaponized. Madison understood this when she adopted The Cure as a lifestyle. I’m sure it was her defense against the world and her rebellion against her parents. In the early ’70s I did the same thing to my parents with The Doors (minus the drugs, alcohol, and multiple sex partners).

You wouldn’t think these issues would arise in a roomful of kids playing chess, but they do. Adult themes play out in miniature, just as we play this miniature substitute for war. All you can do with these children is be patient, try to put yourself in their place, and don’t let on that you know anything about their music. Kids need to rebel, and The Cure are a good ally in a rebellion. Or The Doors. But not A Flock of Seagulls.