27 May 2010

A bit of history

I got involved in a discussion yesterday on the Chess.com message boards. Someone started a thread titled, “Is Chess Racist?” The guy was asking if racism is the reason that the White pieces always move first. The answer is no, though certainly people are free to interpret things however they like. And I thought the story of how this tradition started might interest some of you, so I’m reporting it here.
Most people, of course, came on the thread and told the OP (original poster) that he was an idiot for even asking the question, or saying that the people calling the OP an idiot were idiots themselves (whenever the word racism is used publicly this happens). A few people replied thoughtfully, though. One guy in particular seemed to be carrying the day before I got there. He had responded that, no, it isn’t racist, since the game was invented in India, modernized (to a great extent) in Persia, and introduced to Europe by the invading Moors. All these people were darker than Europeans, so it wouldn’t make sense for racism to be behind this tradition. This argument sounds pretty good if you don’t know the history of the game, but unfortunately it’s invalid. See, the Persians etc. had no tradition of White always moving first. That tradition is only about two hundred years old, and it originated in Europe, in the earliest chess clubs of London and Paris. This sounds bad for folks who don’t want the tradition to be racist, but hear me out before you judge.
See, here’s what happened. You know how, before a football game, there’s a coin toss, right? Most people think that the team that wins the toss automatically gets the ball first, and then the losing team chooses which goal to defend, but that isn’t true. The winning team can either choose to kick off or receive, or choose which goal to defend. The losing team then gets to choose on the other option. But since almost everyone always chooses to receive the opening kickoff, it’s easy to assume that winning the toss=having the ball first, and losing the toss=choosing the direction.
In those early Continental clubs, something similar happened. Before a game, the players would toss a coin, just like football teams. The winner of the coin toss could either go first, or choose which set to play with. Now, going first is a much bigger advantage in chess than in football. The player who goes first starts off with initiative. He’s always one step ahead, unless the player moving second is clever enough to wrest control of the board from him. It takes more work to win, in other words, as the second player. Given that, you would expect the winner of the coin toss to always elect to go first.
However, that isn’t what happened, for two reasons. First, the Black pieces were considered lucky; it was a very prevalent superstition at the time among this small group of players. Second, the theory of the game was more primitive at the time than it is today, and going first wasn’t quite the overwhelming advantage it is now. So, many times the winner would grab up the lucky darker set, leaving the loser to go first. Even if the winner of the toss did elect to go first (the savvier move, obviously), the loser would then “even the odds” by taking the lucky black pieces. So, in practically every game, White went first. And eventually, realizing this, they just streamlined matters by making that a rule: one player would have the privilege of the first move, balanced by using the “inferior” white set; the other player, using the “superior” black set, would start off on the defensive.
So, the White pieces go first because they were actually considered less desirable. And these were the people who gave us the game we play today. They would eventually form FIDE, the international governing body of chess, and they would hold the first-ever World Championship tournaments. Even though there weren’t very many of them, their influence is widely felt, because we still play by the rules they set up (the FIDE rulebook is still the standard), including this silly, superstitious one. Whether the players involved were racist or not is an open question; the rules themselves, however, aren’t racist at all.

26 May 2010

Everybody Draw Muhammad Day

So, the first annual “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” was a few days ago. I had my entry ready, but what I forgot was that I have no way to digitize it, so I had to wait ‘til I went out to Mama’s so I could use the scanner at her library. Also, I had no art supplies, because I’ve been broke for so long, and did it in twenty minutes with a four-for-69-cents ballpoint pen. So, it’s crap and it’s late, but here it is:

In case you missed all the news about this for the past three weeks or so, it all started when those jackasses at South Park decided to include Muhammad in an episode. Now, of course, it is forbidden under Sharia for anyone to make any visual representation of the Prophet (in fact, if you want to get right down to it, Muslims aren’t supposed to make visual representations of any living thing whatsoever), so Parker and Stone got around this by dressing him in a bear costume. Yeah, I didn’t ask.
Anyway, there were the predictable death threats and people acting crazy and Comedy Central ended up editing him out of the episode. A cartoonist in Seattle was offended by this censorship and declared May 20th “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.” Then she chickened out after she got some death threats (actually, to be fair, “chickened out” is the way most people would react in that situation) but the idea had taken on a life of its own, and so it kept going in her absence.
It isn’t really about the religion itself, but about censorship and the particularly bloody and ludicrous version of it practiced by Muslims. All Americans should hate censorship (though I’m fully aware that not enough actually do). Since that was the battle being fought, most participants tried not to be disrespectful in their representations. They just drew, you know, a guy in a keffiyeh and beard. Their point is that if you’re offended enough by that to threaten to kill someone you are being unreasonable, and they’re right.
I’ve been going back and forth on this, about whether I should be placatory or not, and although I can see the point of the organizers, I finally decided to be offensive. Not as offensive as I could be, but frank and contentious. I know I am trying to be a better person and maybe I made the wrong decision, but before you judge me I ask you to remember this: we’re not talking about the censorship practiced by ignorant school board members, odious as that is. We’re talking about the censorship practiced by the people who killed Theo Van Gogh, the people who have hounded Ayaan Hirsi Ali around the world, the ones who set fire to girls’ schools and keep the firemen away ‘til everyone inside has burned to death. In my opinion those people deserve to be offended, every minute of every day, until they either stop doing stupid shit or brighten the world by leaving it. I’m doing my part.

16 May 2010

Doors close and I'm looking for windows

I mentioned that I am applying at the Valentine (see the last post). Fact is, I’ve been dropping applications and résumés all over town, because Assanté’s is no longer a viable job.
When I first started working at the pizza place I was working nights, as you’ll remember. The shifts were ten to twelve hours long, which sucked, and the place was crazy busy, and at the end of the night I’d be beat to shit. But, I also made crazy money, and three shifts a week would give me more than enough to live on, and four in effect made me rich, by my own standards (which I admit are not very high).
I wanted to work days, though. First, the place manages to do great business in large part because we deliver to neighborhoods that other places refuse to deliver to. Some of these places are pretty dangerous, and in fact last week two drivers were robbed at night, in separate incidents. Also, although days do sometimes get quite busy, they generally aren’t enough to make me crazy, whereas at night I’m crazy pretty much from the moment I walk in the door.
I managed to convince Chef, the old GM, to switch me exclusively to days. I was working four days a week; obviously I would prefer to work only three, but day shift drivers work shorter shifts, so we need more of them. If you work four day shifts, you can kind of scrape by. I haven’t spent money on anything but groceries and bills since I moved into 1644, but I’ve been making it.
We have a new GM now, though. The new guy is keeping me on days, but he’s only giving me three shifts a week. There’s another day shift driver who used to get two shifts, but she has convinced him to give her another, so I’ve lost one. I noticed yesterday that she was asking him for a fourth day, so I might possibly lose another shift.
By my calculations, I need to make $284 per week in order to eat, drink, smoke, and pay my bills. I would like to make more, so that I have money to buy DVDs and things to furnish my lovely new apartment, but that’s the baseline that I need just to survive. Working three days I make only about $250 a week, and that’s only if business is good and folks are tipping; on slow weeks (like this past one) it ends up being closer to $200. That obviously is not going to work, so I’ve been looking for a new job. I haven’t made a judgment as to whether I want something I can do a couple of days a week, between driving shifts, or something full-time so I can quit the joint altogether. I might be restricted by what jobs are available and what hours they want to give me.
I’ve been a few places this past week, and nothing has looked particularly promising. However, I did get an application for a video store, just a few blocks from my apartment. A job in a video store would be perfect for me, given how much I love movies. I love working in libraries because I’m surrounded by books all day, and being surrounded by movies would be equally groovy. Also, my extensive knowledge of lesser-known pictures would let me recommend things to people that they wouldn’t have seen otherwise, so I would be as good for the place as it would be for me. I’m going to take the application and turn it in tomorrow.
I hope that the same woman is there that was there when I got the application. She is, I would guess, a year or two older than me, attractive, and seemed very charming. She was slender and graceful and dark with just a few strands of grey, and her eyes were lively and merry, and maybe she loves movies as much as I do. I will try to be very charming myself, because I need the job, but also because I really just want to charm her. I will wear a button-down shirt, because I don’t want to look like a bum, but I will wear it open with one of my many B-movie shirts visible under it, to advertise my love of the obscure, the overlooked gems and diamonds-in-the-rough of independent film. I would be happy to work there five or six days a week, but at the least I’m hoping that I can wrangle a shift or two. Even if I got the job at the Valentine, I would want to be able to put in a few hours at the video store.
I am hoping for the best on a couple of fronts, you see. Once again, wish me luck!

05 May 2010

An appreciation: Lance Henriksen

It’s likely, dear reader, that you won’t recognize the name “Lance Henriksen.” He is not the world’s most famous actor, but he is one of its more interesting ones.
He dropped out of school and left home when he was 12. He hitchhiked across the country, making his way as best he could. He was illiterate ‘til he taught himself to read at age 30 by studying movie scripts. A few years later he started turning up in “small but important” roles in some pretty well-regarded movies. He appeared in Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Right Stuff, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then he turned in a good performance as Sergeant Neff in Damien: The Omen II and seems to have realized, “Hey, it’s cooler to have big parts in small movies than to have small parts in blockbusters.”

He’s perfect for the Bs. He is not stereotypically handsome but striking, compelling, with a gravelly voice and drawn face with eyes that seem impossibly deep, eyes that you cannot lie to, because they see every part of you. He could never be a “leading man” type because Hollywood is stupid, but he has a tremendous screen presence that demands your attention. As soon as he appears on screen he adds depth, dignity, and honesty to whatever he’s in, and more often than not, whatever he’s in has desperately needed plenty of all three.
It’s by appearing in cult films and shows that he’s made his name, as a homicide detective in The Terminator (the title role was actually written for him, but Arnold Schwarzenegger ended up being cast instead), as the android Bishop in Aliens (he’s the only actor besides Sigourney Weaver to appear in more than one of those films), and as the sociopathic leader of a gang of manhunters in Hard Target, one of the many modern adaptations of “The Most Dangerous Game.” He also has many TV credits, including most notably a three-year star turn as the semi-psychic investigator Frank Black in the TV show Millenium, a sort of spinoff of The X-Files that the critics loved and nobody else but me watched.
Of course, for each of these projects there’s been a Piranha 2: The Spawning or a Stone Cold or a Man’s Best Friend. He’s played more than 150 parts on the big screen and the small, sometimes in classics, mostly in pieces in which he was the only thing worth watching.

Take his role as Ed Harley in Pumpkinhead, one of the more memorable 80s B-horror pictures. Harley is a small-town storekeeper whose young son is killed in a hit-and-run accident by a bunch of idiot teenagers vacationing from the big city (it is, after all, a B-horror from the 80s). He turns to the creepy-ass local witch for help, and she summons Pumpkinhead, a demonic spirit of vengeance, to punish the kids. But once the demon starts its rampage Harley realizes the horror he’s unleashed and brings the monster down, saving the kids (well, some of them) at the cost of his own life.
It was a pretty clever idea for a movie, plus which it was a welcome non-slasher in the heyday of the slasher film (I love slashers, but sometimes you like a little variety). Still, it was cheaply made, not terribly well-written, and had a less-than-stellar cast outside of Henriksen. But he really elevates the whole picture. His grief, his determination, and his integrity are a physical reality to you as you watch him. He demands that you take his little movie seriously, and in the end you do. As I say, it’s a memorable picture, but really only because of him.
That’s the way he is. Like Boris Karloff before him he is a professional who treats every movie as if it matters. No matter what he’s in, no matter whether it’s any good or not, he shows up to work every day and gives everything he’s got, and that really comes through on screen. He does his job as well as it can be done, no matter what it is, and really that’s about the highest compliment you can pay a man in any line of work.
Anyway, Henrikson turned 70 today. I hope that wherever he is (and wherever he is, you can be sure he’s working) he had an excellent day. Everybody, raise a glass.