Previous post tagged chess
A major element of fun in games, said Goffman (in the essay of that name) is that “the outcome or pay-off has a good chance of remaining unsettled until the end of play.” But what happens if in fact contenders are in fact equally matched in strategic ability and stamina?
In the 2018 World Chess Championships between defender Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana there were twelve consecutive draws.
National Express waiting room, Heathrow, August 2017
Over the last several years, I’ve found it harder to read in the evenings. The cause is partly biological (and helped by reading glasses) but partly or even mainly social. The lights are actually going out. In hostels and hotels, in buses and coaches, in waiting rooms and interstitial spaces of all kinds, bright incandescent lights have been replaced by dim LEDs with greyish spectrums. In some places the light is tinted to inhibit intravenous drug shootups, creating the illumination equivalent of the spiked park bench. Pub or subpub lighting is becoming a norm.
(more…)“The 19th century was a strange century because the interior empires were beginning to decline, slowly but surely, while the exterior empires, the colonial empires, were still being constructed by the French, the British, the Dutch, the Belgians, throughout Africa and in large parts of Asia, if not all of it. On one hand there were liberation movements and on the other hand, at the same time, other peoples saw themselves brutally subjugated.”
*
“Years passed. In the summer of 1972 I went to Beirut for what I thought would be a brief visit, and stayed about three years. It was there that I met up with my old friend S and found a job: I became the culture section editor for a French newspaper in Beirut. I talked to S about the valise, but I continued to put off the day when I would come to collect it and bring it home. The Lebanese civil war broke out and S and I left for California … Around 1980 we made a visit to Beirut. When we got there I promised myself that this time I would visit the Xs and retrieve my belongings. I had made the decision. It was, let us say, a Monday, and I said, “This Friday, for sure, I will go. We will go.” Two days later, on Wednesday, we were on Bab El Driss, a street I knew well. We were walking down the sidewalk when all of a sudden the three X sisters appeared …”
– Excerpts from À propos de la fin de l’empire Ottoman, Etel Adnan (Galerie Lelong 2015), back translation mine since the volume is a translation of a leporello written in English and no English text has been published.
Tapestry, carpet, stained glass window, mosaic, kaleidoscope are some of the metaphors that come to mind in viewing the work of the Ottoman-born artist Fahrelnissa Zeid. Her dominant tones were modulations of primary colors – tomato red, denim blue, Girl Scout green. A lover of great cities, especially Paris, she preferred a big, crowded canvas, with some geometric and tonal regularity. She varied the way she wrote her name, on her work and off, through her career: Fahrünissa, Fahr-El-Nissa, Fahrelnissa Z, FZ. Most of her work lives in private collections, including those of her family, and in the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art.
Works to spend time with include Third Class Passengers, which seems to layer dancers, subway straphangers, prostrate prayergivers, and families lounging on their rugs; Loch Lomond, where revelers and boats form a net of 45 and 60-degree triangles that melt into abstraction at the top; the rippling, Escheresque panorama of My Hell and the beaded city map of The Octopus of Triton. Abstract Parrot is the culmination of her stained-glass type. The three open page spreads from her sketchbooks tantalized with a bright watercolor-and-ink mountain landscape, writing (“pourquoi la mort m’appelait …”), and a stunning self-portrait. Her portraits of others, displayed in the last room, were deliberately naive, if not actually bad.
There were a few callouts to England. London (“The Firework”) is a blurred futuristic cityscape filtered through yellow-red light and then through a network of orthogonal brushstrokes that recall lattic
ed window screens. Someone from the Past is a self portrait with, Zeid wrote, Persian hand attitudes, Byzantine dress, Cretan face and “Oriental” eyes. What it also resembles is formal portraits of Elizabeth I, if she had posed crownless wearing kohl and earrings.
This Tate Modern retrospective, supported by Deutsche Bank, moves to Berlin after 8 October. Zeid lived there in the mid-1930s while her husband was the Iraqi ambassador, and even took tea with Hitler. Fifty years later she asked Donald Trump if she could paint his portrait, and did so from a photograph, according to the exhibition catalog. The result is not to be seen here.
That one time I took a Sylvia Plachy picture.
I read the Village Voice every week of the seven years I lived in New York. Every single week. If I was out of town, I bought it at the nearest big newsstand, for it was distributed nationally. It cost $1 an issue when I moved there, and it always had a page of free or cheap things to do each day, some of which I did. During the years I lived in a 7 x 11 foot room in a single-room occupancy hotel, ten percent of the usable floor (ca $50 a month in rent) was devoted to stacks of the Voice [1]. It was an excellent use of space.
Because of the Voice, I regularly read long essays by black and Latinx writers on race and ethnicity, as well as reported articles on communities I would otherwise not have seen.
Because of the Voice (and Katha Pollitt of The Nation), I kept up with feminism through the dark years of “I’m not a feminist, but …”
I remember Paul Cowen’s first-person piece on dying of leukemia, which he was thought to have contracted covering Three Mile Island.
I remember a long article on drag balls, even before Paris Is Burning if I’m not mistaken.
I remember another long article on backup singers, decades before Twenty Feet from Stardom. I loved that article so much I probably still have it here in my file boxes.
I remember not understanding a damn word Robert Christgau wrote, or rather I understood all of the words but none of the propositions.
I remember not getting a single reference in Michael Musto’s gossip column (“La Dolce Musto”), even in the non-blind items, and not caring because it was so much fun.
I remember going to see films from Brazil and Iceland and a performance art festival featuring Penny Arcade because the Voice wrote about them.
I remember reading about the AIDS epidemic in some depth, before And the Band Played On was published and certainly before it was available in paperback.
I remember a review of rapper Schoolly D that was written in hiphop, more or less. This must have been about 1988.
I remember Murray Kempton and somebody else, Jack Newfield or Wayne Barrett or LynNell Hancock, alternating an inside-baseball column on city politics. I remember that the Voice covered low income housing and homelessness like the tenants and non-tenants were human, when nobody else seemed to. I remember the very nerdy quarterly book review supplement. I remember being impressed that the Voice writers were organized by the United Auto Workers when hardly any journalists were union members any more. I remember reading the listings in the back every week and feeling like I could become an air courier or move to Brooklyn or actually go on one of those Wildman Steve Brill tours to forage food in Central Park and it would all be all right.
That’s a great newspaper. I can’t believe it’s gone.
[0] Also, the Voice had the best comics. Not just Jules Feiffer and his annual “A Dance to Spring”, which I already knew about because my parents did. It was the golden age of Matt Groening’s pre-Simpsons Life in Hell, Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek, Mark Alan Stamaty, and Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies (“All Dialogue Guaranteed Overheard”). (This is a standalone endnote.)
[1] And its shorter-lived uptown sibling, 7 Days. 7 Days was decried as fluff at the time, but compared with today’s promotion press it was the Whole Earth Review of middle-class Manhattan. Laurie Colwin wrote her cooking column there. Peter Schjeldahl covered art (is “Up the Damn Ramp” a great title for a piece about the Guggenheim or what?). It was Joan Acocella’s first big stage for her dance writing. For a while, New York actually had three strong alternapress weeklies, for there was New York Press as well, which was more of a self-conscious hipster editor-publisher production but did have great front-page essays.
[2] Yes, I know, it continues as a website. That’s like a well-served train line continuing as a “rail replacement” bus. (This too is a standalone endnote.)
3. Some favorite paintings:
orado River in rich reds.Trinny puts seventeen different moisturizers on her face and takes us shopping, but not both in the same episode. She likes to wear things that are made of silver parachute material or have sleeves that flare out like medieval costumes, but not both in the same garment. She prefers to layer them. She secretly films herself trying on things in shops and then says the shopkeepers are trying to throw her out. We don’t know why they would. People watch her and afterwards they go and buy the things she tries on. Women watch her, to judge from the messages she displays on the screen, but surely men too. She talks to her viewers when she sees their messages on the screen. “Hello Elly, hello Amanda,” she says in her commanding voice. “Is it sunny in Brighton? It’s very grey here.” Sometimes her assistants hold the cameraphone and relay the messages. “Trinny, they want to know what the name of that concealer is.” She puts on her spectacles and reads them the name on the package. The assistants are European and Trinny has viewers all over the world to judge from her shout-outs. “Good morning, Auckland! You’re up late, my god, what time is it there? Hello, Istanbul!”
Some products I have learned about from Trinny: long gilets made of soft cashmere, metallic trainers, Vitamin C serum, apricot hued skintone corrector, rouge that is also lipstick, electric facial massagers, a little roller which sticks pins into your skin like a yogi’s pillow. “What it’s great for, ladies, is stimulating the collagen,” Trinny says in her voice that could close a prizegiving or open Parliament. Trinny finds something great in almost every product she talks about. Sometimes she will say a skin or makeup product is not exciting and she does not like it as well as the seven she is about to show us. We take that as proof of her honesty. All the products in the same category look the same when she puts them on, but most of the time she is able to find differences between them. If she can’t find any difference or the difference is only something transient like smell, that means the cheaper one is a bargain and she is letting us in on a secret. Still, how things smell is important to Trinny. If a handbag is leather, she snuffs it like a dog. If it is not leather, she snuffs it anyway and talks about it as good value and long wear.
Trinny lets us see her at home, in her bathroom with its library of skin and makeup products, and her bedroom with its clothing archive that takes up an entire wall. The kitchen she keeps private. Sometimes she has a clearout and gives away a few things. “Yes, they want it,” the assistant says as soon as she offers a spare blouse or tube of beauty balm. Trinny shares a lot with her ladies. We have seen her jogging in her underwear while she brushes her teeth. We have seen her with her hair full of color foils. We have seen her with threads scissoring whiskers off her face. We have seen her, from the waist up, getting a colonic. Trinny shows us what she is getting everyone for Christmas: her daughter, her goddaughters, her assistants who have to leave the room when she gets to their presents. A jacket with metal sequins like coins, a pashmina, rose and violet creams, a drone. “What’s great about this drone is it can go to any height and you can control it from your phone.” Nobody is going to disagree when she says it like that. It probably smells divine as well. She is our mad posh aunt and we cannot stop watching her.
Break in the book summaries for an actual handwritten letter from 65 years ago, found in the attic last year. They don’t write ’em like this anymore. I have H’s full name, but not T’s.
Jan 14 51
Dear T…,
Your royal Christmas present arrived a few days ahead of time and I didn’t have to rattle it to make sure it was what I’d hoped it was. Thanks ever so much, T—! I’m lingering it out for the whole month.
I got knocked over on the 5th with a touch of pneu. which wasn’t too bad, but all these fancy drugs they shot me full of have left me feeling rather sour since. I’m hoping to get in town tomorrow for a short session and be on my way again.
Julianne DeVries. (1933) The Campfire Girls Flying Around the World. Cleveland: World Syndicate Publication.
In 1972 my mother’s family sent us a box of children’s books that had belonged to her and her niece Molly, among them four or five from the 1930s Campfire Girls series. These are in the mold of the Famous Five: a gang of children who perform heroic feats and are celebrated for them, in one volume even being invited to Mrs. Roosevelt’s White House. The series is similar to New Girl books in its project of writing heroines relatively unhobbled by gender, and resembles Nancy Drew in the wholesome setting of Glendale with its malt shops and roadsters.
The Campfire Girls offered broader scope for identification than other girls’ books of the period, where diversity typically manifested as one blonde, one pale-skinned brunette, and one redhead, all with Anglo-Saxon names. Here there were five: Alice (shy spice), a police sergeant’s daughter which comes in handy when the girls are solving mysteries: Lenore (sporty spice), Anita (neutral spice), Dolores (Spanish spice, but not Latina spice, as her father was born in Barcelona), and Mabel (fat jolly prankster spice and the only one with a real personality). In loco parentis is their “pretty, young” leader Mrs. Evans (old spice).
This book sees the members of the Wa-Wan-Da Camp called by the national organization, run by Miss Hannah Rosenfeld in New York (kosher spice, we are led to infer), to take a glamorous, expenses-paid trip around the world, instructing local organizers on how to build the movement.
But what was the movement? Camp Fire Girls was a hippie alternative to Girl Scouts, founded during the Progressive era by environmentalist health experts in Maine who were enamored of Native American culture. The groups “emphasized camping, outdoor activities, and preparing women for work outside the home.” OF COURSE exporting a girls’ scouting club built on faux American Indian symbolism and Red Pioneer neckerchiefs is going to save the world in 1933.
(more…)
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (2000) A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Though I don’t have time to finish this 530-page first volume of memoirs by the historian and Kennedy advisor, it is good enough to save for later. Schlesinger is a great summarizer of his times and their texts and communities, at least the elite communities. The paean to the years in the Yard that is obligatory for all Harvard men is divided into “Harvard College: What I Did,” “Harvard College: What I Enjoyed,” and “Harvard College: What I Learned.” The first of these chapters begins with the following technical description (108-112), which I have cut for length and palatability; although keen to distance himself from contemporary attitudes to “Negroes” and Jews, Schlesinger is less modern on gender and sexual orientation.
Let me recall superficialities of life in the Thirties. Daily routines were more complicated then. When we went to bed at night, we had to wind our watches; the battery-powered watch was still to come. When we dressed in the morning, some began by putting on BVDs, a form of one-piece underwear now extinct; the more advanced turned to shorts and undershirts, though, after seeing Clark Gable in It Happened One Night in 1934 most of us discarded the undershirt …
When we bought a suit, two pairs of pants came with the jacket and vest. After putting on pants (no khakis or jeans), we had to button our flies; the zipper did not appear till the late Thirties … Garters still held up socks, and we had to lace our shoes; the loafer or moccasin was not yet acceptable …
When we wanted sandwiches, we had to use a knife to slice the bread; sliced bread was still in the future. When we went outdoors, we put on hats – gray felt in winter, soft panama in summer. Hatless John Kennedy killed the hat craze in 1960, much to the chagrin of his powerful supporter in New York, Alex Rose, the head of the Hatters Union and boss of the Liberal party. On cold days in the year 2000 I wear a cap; in the Thirties the cap was strictly a proletarian taste …
(more…)
One of my vacation tasks is to sort through the junk in my parents’ attic, which is dominated by books accumulated from years of library book sales for as little as a dollar a box. Old books as such became a near-worthless commodity in late 20th century America, well ahead of the Internet, and more space for books had of course been one of the attractions of the house. Once we had an attic and could no longer see the whole collection, stockpiling and duplication were inevitable.
Categories we are very long on include British political and military biographies (my mother’s favorites), books with science in the title (my father), foreign language (me), essays and journalism (again me), philosophy (especially existentialism, I don’t know why – possibly my brother was a secret Sartre fan), architecture (my brother), sociology, murder mysteries, scifi, Judaica, Australiana, poetry, drama, art and museum catalogs, modern and ancient classics, humor, printing and typography, machine and electronics manuals, one-volume encyclopedias and textbooks of all kinds. In other words, most of the interesting categories that show up at bulk book sales for Friends of the Library in any Massachusetts town. I was fortunate to grow up bathed in books and even if most of them were not the right books or the right books for me, some of them were.
Every day that I visit the public library where we got most of these books, I have deposited a few volumes to be recycled in their future sales, beginning with the duplicate and triplicate copies of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Demetrios, Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower, and Stephen Birmingham’s Our Crowd, the pedantic musings of Edwin Newman and William Safire, and proceeding through lesser-loved singletons such as the two-volume life of the Earl of Sandwich, which will never be read by any family member still living. (more…)
