Watches, especially the high-end ones, have a very posh image. They’re supposed to be for the distinguished gentleman, evoking images of a quiet British club somewhere, with people in smoking discussing economics in an exceedingly polite fashion. “Wait a moment!” someone must have said in a meeting somewhere “That’s just like chess!” and lo! a new advertisement campaign was born. Chess and watches: could this be a match made in heaven? Let’s find out!
One sure sign of an author’s lasting success is when his phrases and his words become common parlance. Very few authors have achieved this in the English language1 , but one of those lucky few is George Orwell: big brother, newspeak, doublethink, have by now earned a permanent place in the vocabulary.2 Hell, even Orwellian is a word now. Of course, with an author this popular, movies3 abound. One of those is 1984 from. It features a chess scene (which I don’t remember from the book, but it’s been ages since I read that) as you probably guessed from the fact that there is a post about it on this blog.
Guust Flater, or Gaston Lagaffe in the original French, is probably the most popular anti-hero of the Franco-Belgian school of comic books. The series, written and drawn by Franquin, features the various mishaps of the titular character, who terrorises his colleagues in the offices of the Spirou magazine with chemical experiments, cacophonic eruptions on his Gaffophone, and other types of typical office shenanigans. There is, as far as I recall, one panel featuring chess in the series, which you can see below. It comes from what might possibly be something like volume 5 of the series, but the entire series is the most chronologically confusing thing ever,1 so let’s just talk about chess.
Chess, due to its symbolical connotations, is a popular motive for book covers, even if the book itself has nothing whatever to do with it. The idea is, no doubt, to invoke visions of scheming minds and intricately interwoven plots. Usually, this is restricted to an empty chess board or a single piece somewhere but sometimes there is a bit more to it. This week we’re going to talk about a few of the more interesting examples I know of. No, that does not include Breaking Dawn.1
Obscure engravings, highly local comics series – the ‘popular’ in the name of this blog has become somewhat spurious lately. High time, I think, to go back to more well-known things. Things like Tintin. The famous reporter that does no reporting can be seen playing chess a few times in the series. The most famous instance is probably in Tintin in Tibet, where our eponymic hero is playing captain Haddock in a Swiss hotel. Unfortunately, we don’t get a good view of the board there, so instead we go back to Tintin’s first visit to South America in volume 51 of the series: The broken ear. Tintin has been made colonel and aide-de-camp of general Alcazar. Together they can be seen trying to solve the myriad problems a successful revolution faces.
Kiekeboe is a family adventure comic series which is hugely popular in Flanders and, to some extend, the Netherlands. The series has been running for more than four decades and well over a hundred volumes. Especially in the beginning of the series, the stories were often inspired by whatever happened to be in the news. In those days, that meant things like Idi Amin Dada, the Bermuda triangle, or the Karpov vs. Korchnoi world championship matches. The plot of the fourteenth volume is about a grandmaster trying to lay his hands on the chips of a supposedly unbeatable computer. Unsurprisingly, things do not go as smoothly as he hopes, and while his goons are desperately trying to get the blasted things, he’s playing the first games of his match.
As you might already have deduced from this site and its title, I have a slight interest in history. Yet in this blog, I haven’t gotten further than the seventies. Impermissible! Unfortunately, one hundred years ago, movies and television series were comparatively rare and the chances of finding a computer game from Victorian times seem quite slim. What to do, what to do? Well, there are still the graphic arts, of course – and chess features heavily in those. Take the following image, for example. It1 is quoted as being called checkmate the king and is claimed to be from around 1475. It shows an engraving of some king or other playing chess against death. Some online sources attribute it to Israhel Van Meckehem, but from what I understand his name is more or less the default for engravings of this time. (I must admit, though, that I don’t understand a whole lot.)
The X-men, as most of you doubtlessly know, are an American team of superheroes. They get their name from their mentor, professor Xavier, and the fact that the X is the most x-treme letter of the alphabet. The team is composed of a number of powerful mutants like Wolverine, a super-regenerating strongman with retractable bone claws, Storm, who can fly and control the weather, and Cyclops, who can shoot energy beams out of his eyes. There are any number of comic books, cartoons, and computer games about the X-men, but we will talk about the 2000 movie, for there is something about it that strikes me as somewhat implausible. Allow me to demonstrate.
After dealing with comic books, television series, a computer game, and a commercial I feel it’s high time I tackled a movie. And what better movie to start with than John Carpenter’s The Thing from 1982? It’s about a bunch of scientists stuck on Antarctica that find something nasty in the ice.1 Something which absorbs living creatures and camouflages itself as them. The film is at the time of writing in the imdb top 250 and I can confirm that it is indeed very good. At the beginning of the movie, before things go pear-shaped, we can spot a smirking Kurt Russell2 playing a helicopter pilot by the name of MacReady and a leisurely game of chess against a computer. Let’s dive right in, because there’s a lot to talk about.
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CIPC #14: Knight moves
Fourteenth instalment! Finally a nice round number!1 That deserves something special, I’d say. Something very special indeed: I’m going to watch a movie. More specifically, I’m going to watch Knight moves, an obscure 1992 film about a chess grandmaster getting mixed up in a serial killer case, and am going to write my impressions along the way. Clearly, there will be a good deal of chess to discuss, but this time I’ll try to pay attention to the plot as well. The main stars are Christopher Lambert, fresh from the enormous success2 of Highlander II, and one of the lesser Baldwins. What could go wrong? Let’s find out…
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