Chess ain't nothing but murder and bullshit

Cherchez le chesseur

First it was Alexander Pichuskin (aka the Bitsevsky Maniac) in Moscow, then it was Michel Fourniret somewhere or other in France (Fact: All Serial Killers Play Chess). Yesterday came the news that Zhang Yongming has been getting busy in Southern China. Chessing mass murderers: there certainly seem to be a lot of them about.

“Chinese teenagers fall prey to chess-playing serial killer”. That was the headline in the paper version of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. It’s enough to get you switching on the Bat Signal and calling for Ray (Somebody Dial 999?; Times Chess Man cracks ‘missing woman’ riddle; Ray Could Soothsay; Nightmare over for The Ridler). Well it would be, were it not for the lingering feeling that – just like all the others - it would only take the merest hint of an investigation for the alleged chess connection to evaporate leaving the whole thing exposed as a giant pile of cobblers.

Tenuous connection to chess? Bullshit dressed up as fact? Sounds like something right up Tim Woolgar’s street, don’t you think?

Actually Tim, if you’re reading, I’ve got a proposition for you (from your output as ECF Director of Marketing I’m assuming you’ve still got a bit of time on your hands). Let’s invent a whole new business: The ChessMurdering Organisation.

The intellectual challenge of chess combined with the solid aerobic workout of trying to bludgeon somebody to death with a mallet. What’s not to like? We already know that the media have an insatiable appetite for it.

If Messrs Pichuskin, Fourniret and Zang are now otherwise detained and not available for the inaugural World Championship tournament that is a matter of regret, but surely Chess Murdering is the future. I expect official recognition from Sport England to come soon. Within six months, in fact.

The Great Chessboxing Swindle: within the next six months

Remember this?

Following Tim Woolgar's claim that his chessboxing circus was "on course for official recognition by Sport England within the next six months" I emailed Sport England and discovered that in fact Sport England had received no application for recognition from chessboxing at all. This was not wholly consistent with what Mr Woolgar had said. Though, come to think of it, what is?

In the minutes of the ECF AGM held the day after that blog post, we read:

TW stated that Sport England had been approached but that it was a time-consuming process.

I'm sure it was. I'm sure it is. Though the same gentleman making this observation had, when applying for the Marketing Director post, said that the amount of time likely to be consumed was to be measured at six months.

Shortly after that meeting, with their memories still fresh, a couple of attendees offered their own recollections of Mr Woolgar's explanations. One stated:

The Marketing Director [presumably actually the candidate for that post at the time of speaking - pedantic ejh] responded that he had preliminary discussions with Sport England and was informed that it was necessary to have two years' certified accounts. Chess Boxing did not have this, but he felt the effort was justified, and will complete the requirement this year.

Another added:

To be precise, he said that he first spoke to Sport England 2 years ago, and they explained the process which he has been following and recognition will follow in 6 months.

I am not sure quite what that means, but I am sure what "within the next six months" means, to use the phrase Mr Woolgar chose to use. It means "within the next six months".

Those six months now having expired - actually, having expired some time back - I looked up Sport England's list of recognised sports confidently expecting to see Chessboxing taking its place between Caving and Chinese Martial Arts, with Mr Woolgar's organisation identifed as the governing body. Yet, remarkably, it was not so.

Quelle surprise. Well, I thought I ought to check, so once again I emailed Richard Clarkson at Sport England.

From: Justin Horton
Sent: 21 May 2012 11:45
To: richard.clarkson@sportengland.org
Subject: Chessboxing applications

Dear Richard

Sorry to bother you. About eight months ago I wrote to you and asked whether Sport England had received any recognition applications in respect of chessboxing. You were kind enough to reply and inform me that you had not. I am now writing to you again to find out whether that remains the case, or whether any such applications have since been received.

Yours

Justin Horton

Huesca province, Spain

Mr Clarkson was kind enough to reply promptly. His reply said exactly what you think his reply said, but for the record, here it is:

From: From: Richard Clarkson (richard.clarkson@sportengland.org)
To: Justin Horton
Sent: 21 May 2012 12:03
Subject: RE: Chessboxing applications

Dear Justin

Thank you for your email. I can confirm that we've not received any applications to date.

Richard

Of course. It was never going to be anything other than that. The whole thing is an absolute nonsense. It was a nonsense from the start.

Now I have to say that personally I don't give a monkey's, in principle, whether or not Mr Woolgar and his freak show make a futile* application for recognition from Sport England. They can make one to the United Nations for all I care. It's an entirely trivial matter. Except that Mr Woolgar has a liking for making claims that don't stand up, even in the most trivial matters. It is almost as though it were a habit.

Besides, it was Mr Woolgar who chose to make the claim and to make something of it. He has only himself to blame when it turns out to be, like so many of his claims, a load of old rubbish.

But I don't give a monkey's about the application per se. I do give a monkey's when people persistently say things that we cannot believe, especially when such persons are nevertheless given house room and more by the chess community. I've written here and elsewhere on this subject and will no doubt do so again (and again) but to cut a long blog post short, English chess seems generally incapable of recognising a wrong 'un. Especially when there's any thought that the wrong 'un might promote, or put money into, chess. (Also see de Mooi, CJ and any number of others.)

Because Tim Woolgar is obviously a wrong 'un. He is not a person in whose statements one can put any trust. We would do well to do better. We would find it hard not to do better. In Mr Woolgar's case, rather than appoint him, rather than promote him and his freak show, we would do better by doing nothing at all.

He's ringmaster and clown in his own circus, and welcome to it. But his association with chess is neither to our benefit nor our credit. The chess columnists who promote him, not to mention the people who approached and nominated him for an ECF post, do not, in the end, promote chess by doing so. All they do is to add to, and reinforce, the all-pervasive spivviness of English chess.


[* Sport England rejected the recognition of chess in September 2008, making it hard to see why they would recognise chessboxing instead]

[Thanks to Angus French]
[Chessboxing index]

Just Barely Got Something to do with chess IV

[World Championship tie-in: your opponent chucks his/her queen in.  You win the game.  Is that lucky?]

It was not terribly cool, but another thing that I did when I was injured was to take up backgammon. There are lots of things I like about backgammon: the aesthetic appeal of the board, the sound of the dice and the retro feel of the game.

But there were, I think, deeper reasons for being drawn to the game. With many backgammon moves, the dice do the thinking for me. Sometimes, of course the various options present a challenging decision. But often choice is limited because there is obviously a right decision that has been determined by the way the dice landed. There is certainly an element of skill, but you devolve the greater part of the game to luck. In that sense, backgammon is the opposite of chess, where the range of options is vastly more sophisticated and the role of chance negligible.

Fifteen years ago I would have laughed at the idea that I would ever derive much pleasure from a game where the result was heavily influenced by the random throw of the dice. But now, handing over such a degree of control to pure chance suits me perfectly. Why? Because I usually play backgammon after dinner, winding down after work. I have made enough difficult decisions for one day and I'm mostly happy for chance to make the remaining ones on my behalf. Backgammon fits the bill: you can enjoy a measure of competition and fun without having to think too much.

... to do with chess Index

Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions

I've had clinical depression since age 14. It's not really a secret.

When you're trapped in the misery of your own head, unable to see a way out, there are many ways to proceed. Some find a perverse pleasure in delving further, eking out the vestiges of the psyche, challenging themselves to face the worst realities. Others find a quiet corner and hide away, hoping that the world will pass them by. Some mould their troubles into forms of expression; poetry, literature, music. Others lash out. And many give up.

I've done the majority of these things at some point or other. At times, chess has been enormously beneficial and, at other times, it's worn me out even further and been a massive hindrance. However, I wouldn't play if I didn't still enjoy it; I've become quite skilled in the art of self-preservation. Simply the fact that I love every second means that, on occasion, I'm going to be in a particularly low place when I play. The act of playing doesn't improve my mood; it just means I'm doing something reasonably productive. I'm sure I've come across as cold after a game when I've turned down a post-mortem; sometimes I just don't want to interact with anyone longer than I have to.

Introspection. And not about to jump, I promise.

Depression has certainly shaped my style of play. When your head isn't a very pleasant place to be, you want to spend as little time as possible thinking concretely. I play quickly, aggressively and instinctively, and I spend a lot of time away from the board. My recent retirement from the 4NCL was partly influenced by a desire to streamline my chessplaying into short sessions only; it's no coincidence that I've only ever won one game that lasted over 5 hours. Evening league chess suits me.

Another reason for the way I play is that I rarely get stuck. I might be completely lost but, if it's been an open game, it's likely there's a fun resource somewhere. If I felt like I was going nowhere a lot of the time, that would be far too reminiscent of real life. Much like Makepeace - Daly, Dublin, 2011.

 10... g5!

White is probably already lost. Physical symptoms have cropped up over the years, and the sensation of not being able to move is thoroughly unpleasant. It exacerbates whatever's going on in your head.

Last week, I promised an explanation. I'll give the position again.

I have a small edge, by virtue of my superior minor pieces. The best move is 17... cxb4 followed by 18...b6 when the rook recaptures. 

I'd been way off form for around 2 years and I wasn't sure if I was ever going to break the pattern. Then I saw 17... Bf3. I checked it, re-checked it and barely concealed a grin as I played it. After a long time playing unimaginatively and on an uninspired autopilot, my confidence was back.

Getting to a place where you recognise yourself again is an important part of the coping and recovery process. Andrew Green came up to the board after the game finished and said "Only Phil Makepeace would play Bf3." It was even more pleasing that other people could still recognise me.

Chess in Art Postscript: Now and Here

Chess in Art. It's happening for real. In Moscow. The World Championship match in an Art Gallery! Top marks to FIDE (and no quips about watching paint dry, please; game 3 was really quite interesting). But nul points for the infuriating commercial breaks in the live chess commentary. And anywhere else the art analysis would be treat. But not NOW! Not HERE!

Talking of galleries: I think I'm right in saying that none of the works in ejh's original Chess in Art sequence (which spawned these Postscripts) was on display, at the time, in a gallery near you. Not near me, anyway; which is the flimsy pretext for checking out a couple of bits of chess-art which are, by contrast, on display right now, and here, in London.

First let's go to one of our favourite public galleries, Tate Britain, which excels with three concurrent and absorbing exhibitions, two of which feature visitors to these shores. Picasso & Modern British Art demonstrates how, on his many trips to England, the great style-vaulting iconoclast influenced so many local artists; right up to and including David Hockney, who, following his recent Royal Academy blockbuster show has been elevated to the status of National Treasure. But, alas, there’s no chess here, even though Picasso did a chess painting in 1911 in his cubist phase. Dommage, but we’ll look at Les Échecs another time.

There’s no chess either in the psychogeographic collation, Patrick Keiller's The Robinson Institute installed with droll humour in the Duveen Gallery upstairs. There you may undertake your very own Debordian dérive, if you will. Self must be disengaged so that you may ruminate, dream-like, on the exhibits selected, cross-referenced and annotated by Keiller’s alter-ego, Robinson. Cruise so, in your reverie, and you'll eventually discover yourself again at Migrations, an exhibition that features work by artists who have found their way to our shores over the past four or five hundred years.

From the four corners they came to this green and pleasant land, and for all manner of reasons: patronage, fortune, asylum, study, survival, and occasionally to paint the scenery; and Migrations documents the consequential enrichment of this country’s culture - a by-product of our Imperialist past and post-colonial present.

The artist who produced Chessmen One (1961) is a case in point.

Chessmen One (1961)
Anwar Jalal Shemza (1929-1985)
Tate Gallery

Anwar Jalal Shemza was born in 1929 in the part of India that was to become Pakistan where, in progressive circles, he developed a presence as an artist and novelist. He came to London, and married an English woman; they tried Pakistan but, frustrated, came back to Blighty. They lived and worked in the Midlands and he died in Salford. That’s Migration indeed.

His cultural heritage, infused with the Islamic tradition of decorative (which is not, in this context trivial, or superfluous) calligraphy, is brought to bear on an array of ornate chessmen: “pieces” mostly, with maybe one pawn. They have a rhythmic and cumulative quality, as if the artist is exploring, register by register, musical chords, pushing to see how far he can press before complexity drowns out clarity.

Unfortunately, no other works from Shemza’s Chessmen series seem to be available on-line, but this work from 1959 looks like a precursor, starting with the white pieces on the black notes.

An essay (linked here) by Iftikhar Dadi (to which my comments on Shemza's biography are indebted), explores the term “calligraphic abstraction” applied to Shemza's style, and explains that in the late 50s he studied, and was influenced by, the work of Paul Klee; which connection provides a more substantial justification for this Postscript than we were able to offer at the top of this blog, namely that two Chess in Art works by Klee were featured in number XIV in ejh's series. They are worth looking at again and comparing with Anwar Jalal Shemza’s work. We have in fact reprised them before, and here is one of them again, waltzing before our eyes:

Überschach

Paul Klee (1937)

Paul Klee was a "Master" at the German Bauhaus which is now on show at the Barbican, and that’s where we can see some more chess-art. Actually, chess-design to be precise. From 1919 to 1933 the Bauhaus was a hothouse for cutting-edge art, craft and design. Form should follow function was their mission statement – and it has come down to us as part of our architectural-cum-design heritage, still influential today, not least because when the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus in 1933 as degenerate and left-wing many Bauhaus luminaries fled abroad, including to England. One or two of them pop up in Migrations back at Tate Britain.

Staying with Paul Klee for a moment: his work is nicely represented in the exhibition. As mentioned, we are familiar with Klee's cerebral form of pictorial whimsey, where he famously "takes a line for a walk" as if he, too, was partial to a psychogeographical ramble. But the phalanx of scary puppets he made for his kids was a new one on me.

Paul Klee hand puppet (1916)
Klee Centre, Bern

Contrived from scraps of cloth and other detritus, and looking like the cast of a demented überGoth Punch and Judy show, they would surely have spooked his Kinder - enough to alert Social Services I'd have thought. They suggest a fault line in his character: the GrößMeister, apparently so benign, did indeed have a dark side, and feet of Klee.

What makes this exhibition particularly engaging is that it shows us what they got up to at the Bauhaus by way of extra-curricula activities, and it reveals that before the Nazis put the boot in the Bauhausistas had a whale of time. It wasn’t all earnest dialectics, axonometric projections, and D.I.Y. fabrication; it was also party, party, party! (And given the influence of the KPD, that might also be: Party!) And the more fancy the dress, the better! And the music! And the games! And, as if to fill a gap in their repertoire of divertissements, they designed, and made, their own chess sets. Design, Make, Play!

More than one chess set, in fact. This is Josef Hartwig’s 1922 creation – on show at the Barbican - though we are almost over-familiar with it by now.

It's easy to see that the design of each piece embodies its move. This early version does so with squat economy, all the more to facilitate convenient storage. A later edition, below, asserts its functional form with sturdy hauteur – it stands proud, on a sympathetically crafted inlaid wooden board.

Bauhaus-Schachspiel (Modell XVI), 1924

As photography is verboten at the Barbican I found the picture above on the web. It looks the same as the set in the exhibition, although it appears to be labelled slightly differently. In truth the Bauhaus chess set has gone through many variations, both at the time, and subsequently in what should more accurately be called "Bauhaus-style" - enough to alert Trading Standards I'd have thought. In a way it's a tribute to the design's success: its Euclidean rigour makes it eternal, if rather straightforward to imitate. The version above, an original, looks simply beautiful and, compared with those fiddly Stauntons must be so much easier to clean.

Talking of chess art in the Capital, don't forget Eye To The Ground: now to 16 June (Wed-Sat 12 noon - 6 pm); here: R O O M Gallery, London . We blogged about it last Saturday.

Acknowledgments.
The Green Cardamom Gallery seems to be A. J. Shemza's principal representative.
Pic of Hartwig 1922 chess set comes from here
Pic of Bauhaus Modell XVI 1924 comes from here

Chess in Art Index

Just Barely Got Something to do with chess III

'The Watergate affair makes it quite plain,' Marshall Mcluhan wrote in 1974, 'that the entire planet has become a whispering gallery, with a large portion of mankind engaged in making its living by keeping the rest of mankind under surveillance.

The paranoid style exemplified by Nixon and Wilson - and Madame Mao and Harry Caul, Idi Amin and Bobby Fischer, the Rev. Jim Jones and the Baader-Meinhof gang, Taxi Driver and Gravitiy's Rainbow - saturated the 1970s. Conservatives feared that the very fabric of the state was under imminent threat - whether from Communists, gays, dope-smokers or even rock stars. (Elvis Presley warned Nixon that the Beatles had been 'a real force for anti-American spirit'; John Lennon was duly added to the President's 'enemies' list' and put under surveillance by the FBI.) In Britain, retired generals formed private armies to save the country from anarchy, industrial moguls plotted coups against the government and malcontents in the security services bugged and burgled their way across London in a quest for proof that the Prime Minister was employed by the KGB.

... to do with chess Index

PJM's Favourite Moves I

Ego is a necessary element of a sporting contest. Even if there is the strongest respect between competitors, it is not possible for both sides to emerge totally satisfied. Therefore, I hope you will forgive me for starting my own favourite moves series with one of my own, which drew admiration from my opponent's teammates and gave me great satisfaction.

Macgregor - Makepeace, Glorney Cup, Dublin, 2007

17... Bf3!?

As is evident in the game, the bishop cannot be taken. Black should only have a small edge after the accurate 18. Qd2. 

I'll explain on Monday just why this move, which wasn't even the best available, pleased me so much. The context will become clear in light of what I have to say.