the blog quebecois

I'm a fairly good amateur chess player. I'm not rated, but I guess that I'd be 1900, 2000 on a good day on the FIDE scale. Masters and Grandmasters are about at 2400 and up. Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer are currently rated at 2838 and 2780 respectively.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to my favorite TV show, The West Wing.

Not that I watch it often, but I occasionally click through the channels and come across it and am compelled to observe, the way that you in spite of your better judgment stare at a bad car crash.

It's not just the eternal struggle of virtuous and shiny Democrats versus evil, sweaty (and badly dressed) Republicans.

It's not just the lazy ping-pong dialogue of Aaron Sorkin and his co-writers, which aims at busyness and insouciance but serves mainly to chew up airtime:

"Is it?"

"Is it what?"

"Is it here?"

"Is it where?"

(I suppose it depends on what the definition of "is" is.)

It's not just the conceit that President Bartleby is a doughty battler for civil rights, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and a furtive smoker to boot. My God, is there no end to the complexity of this man?!

It's when an arrogant crackhead like Sorkin runs his mouth and pisses all over a game I love. Which brings us back to chess. (You knew I'd tie this all together, eventually.)

I don't know why it is, but when movie or TV-makers want to depict an "intellectual" they invariably picture him as hunched over a chessboard, plotting out his next nefarious move.

This is bullshit, basically. The chessplayer only demonstrates his intellect in a very narrow subset of intelligence, namely the attempt to "corner a wooden King in the corner of a wooden board."

Which brings us back to West Wing. (I'm starting to get dizzy.)

President Familiar Quotations is of course a world-class chessplayer, who between solving the Oooga Booga crisis and sternly looking into the camera at strategic moments finds the time to deliver unto his staff crushing defeats over the chessboard.

Anyway, one night I stumbled upon President Bartvinnik preparing to trounce the bald-headed, bearded guy (his name escapes me), but first, to hammer home the point, he barks at his secretary:

"Tell the Rob Lowe character (like I said, I don't watch the show that often) that he's checkmated in ten...(gazing into the distance), no, twelve...

"No. Fifteen moves."

Cut to the Rob Lowe character, in shock at his chessboard, realizing that President Bartakower's awesome command of the game means he is doomed, doomed.

Is this great or what? He can solve the Oooga Booga crisis and play blindfold chess. Hell, I'd vote for the guy.

Problem is, as any serious chessplayer will tell you, the Hollywood image of an omniscient giant mind prowling over the board, calculating each and every move from start to finish is, uh, a Hollywood image.

As Max Euwe, the Danish grandmaster (and true polymath) quipped when asked how many moves he "looked ahead," said, "One, if I'm lucky."

It's true that chessplayers "look ahead," but only in certain situations, like exchanges or sacrifices or in the endgame, with limited pieces on the board.

What chessplayers do look at are patterns. At a glance they pick up on things like X-rayed Royalty or impacted Rooks.

My personal obsession is with Pawn structure. Give me a game against someone with doubled or isolated Pawns and I'll start to probe and poke and prod his defence, until I get slaughtered by a long-range Bishop attack I didn't quite anticipate. Ah, well.

Back to President Bartburne and the bald-headed bearded guy:

Bald-headed bearded guy makes first move.

President Bartablanca strokes chin and says something like:

"Aha! The Evans Gambit!"

Bald-headed bearded guy says:

"The Evans Gambit? There's no such thing!"

President Bartzowitsch replies:

"Yes, the Evans Gambit. It's a derivation of the Giuoco Piano opening, developed in the 19th century..."

I really wish I could have transcribed it better, but I was laughing so hard by this point I was in danger of losing precious bodily fluids.

Mr. Sorkin. I know the Evans Gambit. I've played the Evans Gambit. You apparently know squat about the Evans Gambit.

President Bart-bart-ba-BART-BART (sorry, that's my attempt at "Hail To
The Chief") was correct in general terms.

The Evans Gambit was introduced in 1824 by Captain William Evans and soon became a favorite of the slashing, attacking masters of the Romantic period. It fell out of favor when the suffocating tactics of Emanuel Lasker seemed to counter it, but lately it's had something of a renaissance among younger players, especially the Russians.

It is also indeed an offshoot from the ancient Giuoco Piano opening.

I've enjoyed dropping it on unsuspecting opponents and I've rattled some good players with it.

This, though, is what makes it funny:

White     Black
--------------------
1. e4          e5
2. Nf3       Nc6
3. Bc4       Bc5  <-- This is the bare bones of the Giuoco Piano.
4. b4                     <-- This is where the Evans Gambit starts.

And on it goes. If you're interested, I would recommend the latest edition of Modern Chess Openings, where it's discussed in exhaustive (and I do mean exhaustive) detail.

But I (and the editors of MCO) am humbled by the utter brilliance of President Bartulyubov, and his ability to discern the Evans Gambit upon the first move of the bald-headed, bearded guy.

The match ended, as all Hollywood chess matches seem to end, with tight closeups of the participants shouting:

"Check!"

"Check!"

"Check!"

"Checkmate!"

With nary a glimpse of the board, which leads me to believe that between them they're playing with eight Queens, or possibly they're just pretending.

Guess who won the game. (Hint -- it wasn't the bald-headed, bearded guy.)

The West Wing. You just can't buy comedy this good.

In the tradition of Vodkapundit, I have decided to treat my reader(s) with timely recipies, drink mixes, etc., when I can't think of a damned thing to blog about.

Now that summer's on the horizon, people often ask me (actually, they don't, but play along): "gnotalex, what is a refreshing refreshment that I might enjoy while sitting under the deceased elm tree in my backyard?"

An excellent query. I am partial to those non-alcoholic coolers. True, they too often have that nasty chemical aftertaste, but I think I've discovered the cure for it; or at least, after two or three, you won't notice anymore.

1) Open non-alcoholic cooler.

2) Pour half of it down the sink.

3) Fill remainder with gin (the cheaper, the better).

4) Serve over crushed ice (shaken, not stirred) or neat (swill directly from bottle).

Enjoy!

I'm not a big NBA fan. I didn't grow up playing basketball, so the game doesn't strike the same chords for me as hockey or baseball.

Nonetheless I'll watch it if nothing else is available.

Occasionally I'll peek past the computer screen and get hypnotized with the artistry and flash of it. It is by far the toughest aerobic workout you'll ever have if you ever play against

good players.

But I don't love it the same way I love the perfectly struck soccer ball or the slapshot that crashes across the rink at 6:00 a.m.

Everyone says it's bad to lie.

But what about the person who's hiding Jews
in Nazi Germany who lies about it to the Nazis?

Is that wrong?

Or how about the reverse -- what if you lie to
the Nazis and say that you're hiding Jews, when
in fact you aren't?

"Ja, Kapitan! The Rosenweigs are up in the attic.
Frankly, the folk dancing is driving me nuts."

Then the Nazis could clump around upstairs with their
jackboots, in its own way as awful as folk dancing.

Call it Volk dancing, ha, ha.

So you nail the attic trapdoor shut: but what then
when the Jewish Resistance knocks on your door and
asks if you're hiding any Nazis in your attic?

Oy vey! What would Jesus do?

"Go right on up, fellas. They've been expecting you."

"Oho! Jews!"

"Aha! Nazis!"

And thus the cycle of violence continues, not to
mention the cycle of cliches, of which the "cycle
of violence" is surely paramount. I am so weary of
the "cycle of violence" that if I ever find it, I'm
going to let the air out of its tires, loosen its
handlebars, and hacksaw the chain securing it to the
bikerack of repression.

Barb Tarbox died last night and good riddance.

If you're not in Alberta you've probably not previously heard of her, though she was the second item on the CBC national news tonight.

She was a 41-year-old woman who contracted lung cancer after 29 years of smoking, up to two packs a day. Upon learning of her fate, she decided to preach the gospel to schoolchildren, which slots neatly into the governmental jihad on tobacco.

Tobacco: deadlier than plutonium, but more profitable. Especially to the government, which rakes in 800% more than what the tobacco companies get from it.

But don't let that foolish inconsistency hobble your inner goblin.

Graham Greene wrote that "A man chooses his death as surely as he chooses his suit."

That's probably a paraphrase, and don't ask me where or when or what I read it in.

Also, the feminists are probably at this very moment cranking up their latest argument:

"It's not faaaaaiiiiiirrrrr!!! Men get to choooooose!!!"

Well, women get to choose, too, and Ms Tarbox (if biology is destiny, then nomenclature comes a close second) chose to smoke heavily even though her own mother died of the same disease. Can we say: genetic predisposition?

To cancer. To addiction. To celebrity.

Because that's what Barb Tarbox became in the last months of her life. An addicted cancer celebrity who did the Scared Straight routine before shocked, tearful ninth-graders -- whipping off her hat to show her chemo-scalped skull, hectoring them with the awful details of her illness. It was all very dramatic, and from the TV clips that I've seen, she was good at it, a veritable Tony Robbins of non-smoking hip-hip-hooray.

The New Puritans. At least the old ones promised heavenly reward for earthly scraping; the new ones promise earthly reward for building a tower to God.

We all know how that turned out.

The eternally-perky Wendy Mesley at the end of CBC's National tonight:

"And in the coming days, we'll be bringing you this documentary, The Scars of War.

Young woman: "I was just a child when my aunts and grandfather were arrested and we went to see them in prison. I just wanted to hug them. I would put my hands through the bars so that my grandfather could kiss them."

Voiceover: They were executed by the Hussein government. How does a nation learn to heal itself?

I dunno, Wendy. Probably a 2000-pound JDAM dropped on Saddam's head was a good way to kickstart the discussion.

The scars of war? It wasn't George Bush who tore that man from his granddaughter.

It wasn't Tony Blair who raped and tortured her aunts.

It was Saddam, and he's lately joined the bleedin' choir invisible.

You know, that icky thing called "regime change."

I awoke on the morning of May 23 and did my ritual ablutions and fired up the computer and checked the stats for this blog.

5 hits.

No. Wrong category. More coffee!

11 hits.

Something suspicious was going on. I consider it a good day when I get one hit.

So I checked back to where they were coming from. Colby Cosh.

He'd put me in his blogroll a couple of weeks ago, and I'd had three or four hits off it.

Then the deluge. All of 30 glorious hits.

The proximate cause, as near as I can figure, was Colby Cosh deciding to call attention to one of my pieces.

You stupid sheeple! You'll click through on anything that Colby Cosh recommends!

Which is why I must pay him reciprocal attention. If you've somehow stumbled in here from some other search, leave immediately, and go to Colby Cosh.

Yes, his picture in the header is, ah, somewhat goofy.

Nevertheless he's a terrific writer who will get you interested in things you had no idea you could be interested about.

Also I got a hit from Moxie. Moxie!.

gnotalex and Moxie
sitting in a tree
kayeiiessseyeengee!

Cough. She's a glittering LA photographer who has a very stylish blog and I am hopelessly in love with her.

She hasn't returned.

I fear that Moxie has fallen under the malign spell of Ken Layne or Instapundit. Or Tim Blair, that sawed-off Aussie.

My only hope is to outsmart them, outwrite them, and swoop down on Moxie and sweep her to safety and wedded bliss.

Or failing that, she might throw me a pity fuck.

I've decided to shut notalexironix down and transfer its pieces here. It wasn't getting any traffic anyway, and this site is getting . . . some.

Most of notalexironix was humor, or tried to be. There's some time-sensitive stuff, which I'll appropriately back-date.

But the larger humor pieces I'll just post as is. This will make me look as if I'm just beavering away, coughing up these comic gems one after the other as though they sprang into existence one fevered afternoon.

I wish. There's one piece that went through 57 drafts and I'm still not entirely happy with it. Maybe one more rewrite will do the trick.

In the meantime, for your delectation:

In the summer of 2000 I was desperately trying to derail Hillary Clinton's run for the Senate.

I don't know why. I just hate the bitch, and I was probably drunk, too.

So it occurred to me, why not mercilessly mock her by rewriting a famous T.S. Eliot poem?

You slap your forehead and exclaim: "Yes! What a great idea!"

But that's with the benefit of hindsight. Remember, I thought of it first. And I was probably drunk.

You'd think the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy would have gobbled it up, but alas, there was no market for a 2500-word poetic exegesis on Mizz Rodham's shortcomings.

With a coldly critical eye some years later I see now that it likely wouldn't have changed the result of the election, but hey.

It's too clever by half in some places, and I'll admit, even I scratch my head at some of the references -- Richard Lazio? -- oh, yeah, her Republican opponent.

More importantly, though, I realized that I could publish it right here, right now.

And no one can do a damned thing to stop me.

Mwahahahahahah.

---------------------

The Love Song of H. Rodham Clinton
(with apologies to Eliot)

S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Voi fookinza Jiuliani bastardo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like Vince Foster etherized upon . . .

Whoa. Bad memories there.
Let us instead go to happy place happy place
happyplacehappyplacehappyappyappyplace

haaaapyyyplaaaaacehaaaapyyyplaaaaace...

Like a Republican eviscerated upon an autopsy slab;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in four-starlet hotels
Our Chappaqua digs in suburban Hell:
Streets that follow like a toedyous consultant
Of libidinous intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "WhuzaaaaaAAAAAUP?"
Let us go and make Dick Morris shuddup.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Richard Lazio.

The yellow peril, er, fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow horde, um, smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the loot that falls from the Chine...chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft contributor night,
Curled once about the House, and fell asleep.

[The above should in no way be seen as metaphorically
soliciting illegal campaign contributions from the
People's Liberation Army. I am, however, open to offers.]

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow . . . smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a case to beat the cases that impede;
There will be time to purr and litigate
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a subpeona on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of the Fifth.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Richard Lazio.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and pose for Vanity Fair
With that hairband thingy in the middle of my hair --
[They will say: "How that hairband thingy is growing thin!"]
My pantsuit, my breastplate mounting firmly to the chin,
My hairband thingy plain and modest, for the peasantry to win
[They will say: "But how her charms are so, so . . . Jacobin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a jury might reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with Arkie goons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the banjo from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the lies already, known them all --
The lies that fix you in an unfortunate phrase,
But when I am interrogated, stalling with spin,
When I am grim, yet giggling under it all
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the scuttlebutt of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the ho's already, known them all --
Ho's who are beretted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, furred with thick brown hair!]
Is it DNA on a dress
That makes me so digress?
Ho's who dally under a desk, or lurk along the Mall.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?
Who were lied to by Big Tobacco.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
Or maybe President of
the World Bank.
Pretty much the same thing,
though I understand
the pension plan's better.

. . . . .

And into the afternoon, the evening, creeps the lewinsky!
Or some improved thong-slinger,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should we, after I invoice the vices
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and plotted, wept and brayed,
Though I have seen my husband's thingy [browned lightly, or scalded] brought in upon
a platter,
I am no prophet -- and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Prosecutor hold my quote, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the trumpets, the motorcades, the vast conspiracy,
Amid the legerdemain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the master with a smile,
To have squeezed the perverse into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lorenazus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" --
If one, settling a pillow by his head,
Should say: "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is,
y'all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the summits and the scorecards; the spattered reign illiquid.
After the gavels, after the dustups, after the flirts that snail
along the floor --
And this, and so much more? --
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
Which is why I call no press conferences.
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, wielding a pillow or throwing a magic lantern
And turning toward the microphone, should say:
"Ooooh! Long-lost billing records!"

. . . . .

No! I am not the Prince formerly known as Hamlet
(nor the Artist formerly known as Prince),
nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To smell a Congress; pitch a hissy-fit or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous
(Quite a bit like Stephanopolous);
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous --
Almost, at times, the Fool.

One word, just ONE word, and I will kill you.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,
Depending on the polls.
Do they tint her hair bright lime? Do they dare to taint him peach?
I shall wear quite banal trousers, and walk upon the beach,
for suitable photo-ops.
And I'm still not calling a press conference.
I have heard the pundits zinging, each to each.

I do not think that they will zing for me.

I have seen them riding CNNward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the Robert Novak
While that windbag blows the water; whitewater and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the DNC
With 'cy wonks wreathed in repartee red and brown
'til hummin' Rolls Royces wake us -- oh, frown!

Tit for tat: All this for that --
the Dowager Queen of Hymietown.

Andrew Stuttaford in The Corner yesterday:

This week’s New Yorker includes an interesting – and, in one respect, somewhat unusual – review of a new show at the Guggenheim featuring the work of Kazimir Malevich, the father, if that’s the term, of suprematism.

Normally the story of the early 20th Century Russian avant-garde is told as a fairly simple morality tale (I wrote on a related topic here ). These artists were, we are told, the heralds of a new world, who found themselves allied with Lenin in a brave, doomed, attempt to build Utopia. Ultimately, the legend goes, the revolution was betrayed by Stalin. With the ideals and the idealists of 1917 dead or dispersed, the free spirits of the avant-garde found that they were no longer acceptable to the regime. And it wasn’t only their art that was in danger of annihilation. Dull socialist realism (all those farm workers, factories and Red Army men) replaced innovation, and the squares, blocks and jagged montages of those adventurous early years were consigned to the scrap heap, final proof that the once bright Soviet dawn had turned dark.

The truth, of course, is very different. Stalin didn’t betray Lenin’s legacy, he enshrined it, enforced it and enabled it to endure. And as for those freethinking artists? Well, they were content enough to collaborate with communism amid the corpses and jailhouses of the early Soviet state, and they were also quite prepared to shut out those artists who did not conform with the ‘progressive’ notions of the revolutionary era.

Malevich was a genius, but the fact of that genius should not be allowed to obscure his role as a propagandist for, and accomplice in, a system that was barbaric from the beginning. He was no more “just an artist,” than Leni Riefenstahl “was just a photographer”. The New Yorker’s reviewer (Peter Schjeldahl) at least begins to touch on the awkwardness presented by the (all too often ignored) historical record:

“Artists who transformed all given modes of visual art …could hardly avoid hubris. They had an unfortunate habit of scheming against one another, as well as against any artists whom they deemed outmoded….”

And then here:

“The Revolution was dining on its children, just slowly enough to make them, in desperation, compromise their principles one by one.”

It’s a start, but it still lets Malevich off too lightly – as he himself would well have understood. For me, his finest work dates from the late 1920s (and is not, alas, featured in the Guggenheim show). A native of Kiev, Malevich knew about the havoc that was descending on the Ukranian countryside. His response was oblique, in code as, almost certainly, it had to be. He painted a series of images of peasants. So far, so Soviet, you might think, but look more closely. Beneath the bright colors there is a sense of unease or something even worse. The images themselves are faceless, haunting. These are portraits of the doomed, anonymous, archaic, finished, victims of a system that Malevich had once served all too well.

Here's one of those images.

I entirely agree with Stuttaford's analysis, and I'm grateful for him pointing to Malevich, a painter I previously didn't know.

However, a second interpretation.

Maybe he couldn't paint faces.

Picasso at the age of 14 could do photographically perfect studies of human nudes with faces, fingers and toes.

Toes usually aren't a big problem. They're typically encased in shoes, or tucked under the body. When you must show them, a flat trapezoid hinted at generally suffices, except for foot fetishists, I guess.

Fingers are enormously tricky to draw. You'll recognize the clumsy amateur by his female nude with her hands and feet coincidentally pinioned out of view.

Like some bondage pose. Heh.

Not that I would ever draw anything like that.

Faces. Ugh. I once did a very good sketch of a National Geographic photo of a Spanish town with narrow, winding cobblestone streets. I put a few watercolor washes on it, and I should have quit while I was ahead of the game.

I decided to detail the faces of the villagers, and they all turned out like Mammy and Pappy Yokum.

Toes. Fingers. Faces. Malevich. Me.