Levenger chess set

As a once-serious chess player, I cannot look away when a catalogue depicts a game in progress. The first thing I check: whether the board is properly positioned, with a white square at h1.¹ Next: whether the position shown is at all plausible. The latest Levenger catalogue has a pretty startling game in progess, also available online. This is your chess set on drugs:



The board is properly positioned, but even a beginner should be able to recognize that this game is a mess. The position is, I suspect, an impossible one: I cannot see how White’s bishop could have made it to its present square, nor can I see how White’s missing bishop went missing. But there’s more. Here’s an aerial view of the damage:



Yes, the person responsible for setting up this board has confused kings and queens. But straightening out that problem does nothing to make the position more plausible:



Hey, Levenger catalogue: it’s enough to show a board with all thirty-two pieces nicely lined up for play. Or if you must show a game in progress, choose a recognizable position from a standard opening. Chess players will like that. Keep it simple, or you run the risk of creating something ridiculous. Imagine a photograph of a notebook whose pages are filled with fugiad diughiuwr (that is, gibberish). That’s what this chess game looks like.

*

3:56 p.m.: The position on the corrected board can be achieved, though the moves required are a comedy of errors: 1. e3 d5 2. Bd3 c6 3. b3 Bg4 4. c3 e5 5. f4 Nd7 6. Nf3 f5 7. fxe5 Nxe5 8. Bxf5 Bh5 9. Kf2 Nf6 10. Rg1 Bd6 11. d3 Qb6 12. Ba3 Kf7 13. g3 Rhe8 14. Nxe5 Bxe5 15. Qd2 Bd6 16. Qc2 Bxa3 17. Qd2 Bd6. I used no drugs in working out these moves.

Related posts
From the Levenger catalogue
Levenger Pocket Briefcase, revised
Tools for serious readers?

¹ That’s algebraic notation. The square is also known as KR1.

[I used the Apronus Online Interactive Chessboard to make the diagrams.]

Ravi Shankar (1920–2012)

From the New York Times obituary:

Mr. Shankar, a soft-spoken, eloquent man whose performance style embodied a virtuosity that transcended musical languages, was trained in both Eastern and Western musical traditions. Although Western audiences were often mystified by the odd sounds and shapes of the instruments when he began touring in Europe and the United States in the early 1950s, Mr. Shankar and his ensemble gradually built a large following for Indian music.

Shankar’s 1967 Monterey Pop Festival performance of “Dhun (Dadra and Fast Teental)” with Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty must be one of the most exciting moments of music on film, preserved in Monterey Pop (dir. D. A. Pennebaker, 1968).

Frank O’Hara, Yeats, and others

From the short film USA: Poetry: Frank O’Hara:

John [Ashbery] and Kenneth [Koch] and I, and a number of other people later, found that the only people who were interested in our poetry were painters, or sculptors. You know, they were enthusiastic about different ideas, and they were more inquisitive. They had no — being non-literary, they had no parti pris about academic standards, attitudes, and so on. So that you could say “I don’t like Yeats,” and they would say “I know how just how you feel. I hate Picasso too.” [Laughs.]

In the poem “Fresh Air,” Koch refers to “Yeats of the baleful influence.” T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats still ruled when I was an English major in the late 1970s. To not like Yeats, to express reservations about, say, his loftiness, his mythiness, his self-regard, would have meant exile from the hall of poetry, or at least from the hallways of the buildings in which I took classes.

I like what the poet David Schubert wrote in 1938, in a letter to a friend: “I’m going to buy my edition of Yeats tomorrow, for he does belong to the ages although he knows it too well.”

Related posts
Breakfast with William B. and Edna St. V.
David Schubert, TR5-3718
Six lines from Auden

[Parti pris: “a preconceived view; a bias,” from the French “side taken” (New Oxford American Dictionary). The Schubert letter appears in David Schubert: Works and Days, the 1983 Quarterly Review of Literature volume devoted to his work.]

StatCounter is the best

For many years I’ve used the free version of StatCounter to count visits to Orange Crate Art. This morning I noticed a minor problem with my stats and posted a message to the StatCounter help forum. Half an hour later there was a reply from Aodhan Cullen acknowledging the problem. Another half hour later, a second reply let me know that the problem was fixed. My (few) other experiences with StatCounter support resemble the one I’ve described here, so I will be upgrading to a paid account as soon as I finish typing these sentences. I’m happy to support a company so responsive to its customers.

Music for voices, forks, and cello

“What else are you going to do on Saturday afternoon?” A performance of “Stand by Me” with voices, forks, and cello.

Frank O’Hara on film

A short film by Richard Moore from 1966, made just weeks before O’Hara died: USA: Poetry: Frank O’Hara. My favorite scene: FOH typing a film script while talking on the telephone.

Mississippi John Hurt: Sing Out!

[Sing Out! February/March 1967. Photograph of Mississippi John Hurt by David Gahr. Click for a larger view.]

I ordered this back-issue of Sing Out! as a teenager. As you can see, I still have it.

Mississippi John Hurt, Discovery

Mississippi John Hurt, Discovery: The Rebirth of Mississippi John Hurt (Spring Fed Records, 2011)

Cow Hookin’ Blues : Interview: John & Jessie Hurt (by Tom Hoskins) : Nobody’s Business : Casey Jones : Stack O’Lee : Richland Woman Blues : Coffee Blues : Do Lord, Remember Me : Take My Hand : Candy Man : Waiting for You : Conversation : A Song for Mr. Clark : Got the Blues : Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me : Ain’t Nobody But You : Pallet on the Floor : Spike Driver Blues : Preaching on the Old Campground / Glory Glory : Louis Collins / End of session

Recorded March 3, 1963, Avalon, Mississippi
Playing time 68:17

John Smith Hurt (1892–1966), Mississippi John Hurt, was a guitarist and singer from the hamlet of Avalon, Mississippi. Recommended to a recording agent by the fiddler Willie Narmour, Hurt recorded thirteen sides for Okeh Records in 1928, twelve of which were issued. He then returned to life as a farm laborer in Mississippi. Harry Smith included two of Hurt’s 1928 recordings, “Frankie” and “Spike Driver Blues,” in Folkways’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), the rich and strange compendium of pre-WWII rural black and white revenants that would shape the folk boom of the 1960s. (Listening to the Anthology, it is impossible to believe that its musicians lived on the same planet as, say, Bing Crosby and Kate Smith, much less in the same country.) Hurt’s two Anthology sides contain, in a curious way, the twin appeals of his music for later audiences: “Spike Driver Blues” is a piece that might make any fairly competent player think I can do that, while “Frankie” is the work of a master guitarist. The one recording puts the music of the past within fairly easy reach; the other puts the would-be performer to a task that, if accomplished, will dazzle. The story goes that Andrés Segovia, listening to “Frankie,” believed it to be the work of two guitarists.

Hurt was rediscovered in 1963. “Rediscovery” was a curious phenomenon of the early 1960s (and a crucial part of my musical education). The word describes the efforts of record collectors who found, against long odds, some of the great blues musicians of the 1920s and ’30s, men whose scantly documented lives would seem to have defied any possibility of retrieval. “Rediscovery” was a phenomenon with troubling implications: in some cases, the finders became keepers, tying rediscovered musicians to publishing and recording contracts of dubious merit. The words of Hurt’s “Avalon Blues” — “Avalon’s my hometown, always on my mind” — and an old map led Tom Hoskins to Hurt’s shotgun shack on March 2, 1963. The rest was musical history: several years of modest fame for Hurt followed, along with deep affection from young folk audiences. And hundreds if not thousands of guitarists figured out how to fingerpick by listening to Hurt’s recordings. The elements of his style — solid, unvarying bass, lightly syncopated figures on the upper strings — are everywhere.¹

These recordings give us John Hurt in the circumstances in which he must so often have made music — in a parlor, singing for, and sometimes with, family members (present are Hurt’s wife and ex-wife, his ex-wife’s sister, and two grandchildren). Hurt didn’t own a guitar at the time; playing Hoskins’s Gibson, he is is a bit plodding and insistent, not nearly as nimble as he would be on later recordings. His attempt at “Candy Man” falters: the chops just aren’t there yet. He is in good voice despite a cold: there must have been much singing in this house through the years, guitar or no guitar. To listen to these recordings is to hear Hurt in two worlds at once: the one a world of private jokes and laughter and the occasional rooster, the other a world in which he was hardly at ease but, it seems, game. The recording ends with talk of having to go feed Mr. Perkins’s cows. Less than five months later, Hurt was playing the Newport Folk Festival.

My debt to John Hurt’s music is large and unpayable. To hear these recordings, now available for the first time, is to discover that music all over again.

Related posts
Mississippi John Hurt
Mississippi John Hurt for Chevy

¹ Listen, for instance, to the Beatles’ “Julia” with Hurt in mind.

“Tot 50” “gag line” contest winner

The “Tot 50” “gag line” contest has a winner. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Stapler contest that began on Monday ends today, in just a matter of hours, really, as time marches on

The end is near. If you’d like to win a c. 2003 shiny red Swingline “Tot 50” stapler and 1,000 miniature staples, still in the blister pack, enter now. This contest ends today at 6:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time. (In the American heartland, that’s noon Central Standard Time.) I’ll announce the winner on Monday.