I wrote a post last year about my father’s professional chess career in the ’50s and ’60s and his connection to Bobby Fischer. At the end of that post, I mentioned that he’s spent many years working on a big, definitive book about blindfold chess—the art of playing without sight of the board or the pieces. It’s an extraordinary intellectual feat that has a long, colorful history, and it’s deeply related to my father’s other main lifelong interest, psychology. (He retired from Indiana University in the mid-’90s after many years as a distinguished professor of psychology.) The book, which my father wrote with a co-author, John Knott, is now in the final stages of publication, and it should be out by the end of the year. I’ve designed a teaser site, blindfoldchess.net, that features a summary of the book and links where you can preorder a copy. I pushed the site live yesterday. Check it out.

When the book comes out, I’ll be posting an in-depth Q&A with my father about the rich intellectual and psychological history of this amazing skill.

Here’s a reprint of the book summary from the site:

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Last month I went to Tucson, Arizona, to help my father, Eliot Hearst, celebrate his 75th birthday. After retiring from his job as a distinguished professor of psychology at Indiana University, he moved to New York for three years and then re-retired to Arizona in 1998. He was born in Manhattan and grew up in Chelsea, long before the neighborhood’s gentrification.

During my Tucson visit, I spent an afternoon making scans of some highlights from his photo collection, and I was finally able to digitize the most treasured image from the Hearst family archive: a photograph of my father playing a casual game of chess with Bobby Fischer in August 1962. This is no novelty shot; my father was one of the top players in the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s, eventually earning the title of Life Senior Master. Both he and Fischer spent time at the Marshall Chess Club, which is still located on West 10th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, as it was back then.

My dad’s on the right:

At the time the photo was taken, my father was about to serve as the captain of the 1962 U.S. Olympic chess team; Bobby was the squad’s star player. It would be ten more years before Bobby’s cold-war proxy battle with Boris Spassky in Rejkjavik made him the most famous chess player in the world.

My father was a columnist for Chess Life for several years in the 1960s. After the 1962 Olympiad, which took place in Varna, Bulgaria, he wrote a column about the tournament, and his column was accompanied by this illustration of the team. My dad’s in the center, Bobby’s at upper right:

Here’s a list of all the chess luminaries in the illo, from left to right: Larry Evans, Pal Benko, Edmar Mednis, Eliot Hearst, Robert Byrne (the chess columnist for The New York Times from 1972 to 2006), Bobby Fischer, Donald Byrne.

My father beat Fischer in a tournament game in 1956, a mere three rounds after young Fischer defeated Donald Byrne in what became known as The Game of the Century. At chessgames.com, you can play through the game where my father defeated Fischer.

For many years my father and a co-author have been writing a huge book about the history and psychology of blindfold chess. At this point he’s clearly one of the world’s top experts on the subject. He recently completed work on all but the smallest details, and the book is scheduled to be published sometime next year. I’ll definitely be posting more info when the time comes.

My old pal Rob Harrell—whom I wrote about in this post and this post and this post—is scheduled to be featured in a CBS Evening News segment tomorrow or Thursday, and it’s not just because he’s talented.

Rob and I have been friends since we met in the sixth grade at Binford Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana, our hometown. Even in the sixth grade, he was a precocious illustrator and artist, and he went on to get two or three art degrees. These days he is, among other things, the creator, writer, and illustrator of Big Top, a daily comic strip from Universal Press Syndicate—the company that distributes Doonesbury, The Boondocks, and many other nationally prominent strips. Big Top appears in about 40 papers around the country, including the Boston Herald and the Detroit Free Press. In 2004, The Onion’s culture section had this to say about Big Top: “Rob Harrell possesses a classicist’s sense of comic timing … using panel space as well as any comics-page humorist since, yes, Berkeley Breathed.”

Rob moved with his wife, Amber, to Austin last year, after having lived in Indianapolis since college. A few months ago, he was experiencing constant headaches and some unusual pain behind his right eye, so he went with Amber to have some tests done. Eventually the doctors determined that he had a malignant tumor behind his right eye. Did I mention he’s only 37?

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Happy new year, and apologies for the extended break. I was both busy and lazy during the holidays, and now I’m waist-deep in my first-ever New York apartment search. I’ve lived in New York since 1987, but this is the first time I’ve ever actually had to look for a place. After a decade in a rent-stabilized 400-square-foot studio on a great Upper West Side block a few yards from Riverside Park, I’m planning to move downtown in the next month or two, probably to the East Village. I spent most of the weekend racing around looking at apartments in a few downtown neighborhoods, and I actually found a couple of places that I’d be happy to live in. I’m hoping to score one of those places in the next few days.

I have a big backlog of cool links and other material that I’ve been meaning to post. I’m going to be swamped this week, too, but I’m planning to get back to a more regular posting schedule by next weekend.

I’ve got apartments on the brain, so for now I’ll leave you with a link to Architecture of Density, an amazing series of Hong Kong images by the photographer Michael Wolf. Here’s a brief description of the project from Wolf’s site:

One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in flats in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings’ facades.

The photographs are on display through February 26 at Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.

I began playing guitar in 1984, and I’ve gone through long periods where I’ve played hours and hours every week. I’ve hardly played at all in the last six months or a year; I’ve been busy with other things. But for several years beginning in mid-1998, I spent much of my free time writing and recording music in my apartment. Thanks to the inexpensive digital-recording technologies (audio sequencers, software synthesizers, drum-loop editors) that were just then becoming available, I started working with electronic textures and elaborate song structures. Most of my music from this period involves electric and acoustic guitars combined with looped beats, atmospheric synths, and historical voice samples from people like Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, and J. Edgar Hoover. (I don’t sing, so the samples were partly a way to add human voices to my recordings.) I was listening a lot to this guy and these guys at the time, and their influence on some of those tunes is pretty evident.

I finished about an album’s worth of tracks during that phase. Here are a couple of them (they’ve now been added to the other tracks on my music page):

“Zero Sum,” from 1999, is one of the more elaborate tracks from that period. I used this and this to create the swooping octave shifts in the first solo, about halfway through the track; I used this (again) and this for the growly, synthlike solo in the progtastic final section.

“Trained Assassin,” from 2001, is sort of a futuristic spy theme. My then-girlfriend lent her voice for the whispered sample at the beginning. Once again, the solo is this combined with this.

In late 2001, I got my hands on one of these awesome gadgets and a couple of these awesome gadgets. Before long, I moved away from doing intricate, highly composed studio recordings and began doing extemporaneous live looping routed through analog filters and other effects. A few tracks from that period can be found on my music page.

I got out of work at 3 on Friday and had no plans for the rest of the afternoon, so I wandered down to Union Square to catch a 4:40 showing of The Aristocrats, which I’d been meaning to see for weeks. It’s hilarious. If you like movies in which famous comedians tell stories about parents fisting their children and entire families wallowing naked in their own bodily fluids, this is the film for you.

Anyway, about 15 or 20 minutes in, there’s a short scene in which five or six Onion writers sit around a conference room and analyze the dirty joke that is the subject of the film. As the scene begins, the camera is focused on a pile of stuff on the conference table. One of the most prominent things on the pile is the front page of an issue of The Onion. As I watched the slow pan up the table, it took me a second or two to realize that the Onion issue onscreen was the very issue whose cover story—“Non-Controversial Christ Painting Under Fire From Art Community”—I posed for several years ago. I’m right there onscreen for a good three or four seconds before the camera pans up from the table. Here’s the picture that accompanied the story; that’s me in front, wearing an ill-fitting jacket that makes me look twice as big—okay, maybe one and a half times as big—as I actually am.

And so I take my rightful place alongside comedy geniuses like Jon Stewart, Eric Idle, Sarah Silverman, and Taylor Negron.

Here is a video file of the South Park version of the Aristocrats joke as it appears in the film. Completely and utterly not safe for work, so take any appropriate precautions.

I follow sports about as much as I follow, say, the shenanigans of Paris Hilton—which is to say, very little. But between the ages of nine and roughly thirteen, I was a typical baseball-obsessed American boy. I watched This Week in Baseball every weekend during the season, and I also loved a goofy kids’ show called The Baseball Bunch, which was hosted by Johnny Bench and the San Diego Chicken. The San Diego Chicken!

In 1981, at the height of my Fernando Valenzuela-stoked baseball fixation, a singer named Terry Cashman had a minor hit with a novelty song called “Talkin’ Baseball (Willie, Mickey and the Duke),” a nostalgic ode to Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider, and 1950s baseball in general. I’m sure I would find this song deeply irritating if I heard it today, but back then I loved it. I wanted to own a copy of the 45, but I couldn’t find it in any local stores.

At the time I was an enthusiastic subscriber to Baseball Digest, a compact little magazine stuffed with profiles, predictions, and statistical analysis; much of the content was syndicated from various major and midsize newspapers. I wrote to the magazine to ask the editors if they could help me locate a copy of the Cashman disc. When I opened up the April 1982 issue, I discovered that my excellent letter was in it.

I’m not sure if the incorrect restrictive comma before the song title was my fault or theirs, but the same error exists in their response, too, so I’m going to blame it on them.

Here’s the cover of that issue:

Much to my surprise, Baseball Digest still exists. I have a box filled with all my old issues from the late ’70s and early ’80s; if I still cared about baseball, I’m sure they’d be fun to look through, but, um, I don’t really care.

A 1992 episode of The Simpsons featured a parody of Cashman’s song called “Talkin’ Softball,” and it was sung by Cashman himself. You can listen to it here.

In 1985, when I was a sophomore at Bloomington High School South in Bloomington, Indiana, my English teacher gave us one of those assignments that all students dread: an oral report. I was 16 then, with long, Allman Brothers-style hair and a potentially tinnitus-causing obsession with playing loud rock guitar. Sometimes I’d drive home at lunch, five minutes each way, just to play my guitar at bone-crushing volume for 15 minutes before heading back to my boring classes.

My English teacher’s assignment was an oral report on a book of our choice. I had no trouble selecting a book, because I had just read the definitive work on one of my favorite topics: Led Zeppelin. Stephen Davis’s cheesy Led Zep biography, Hammer of the Gods, had just been published, and I probably read it front to back the day it came out. (I still have my copy, and it’s a first edition!)

To make my report more entertaining—and, possibly, to deflect some of my anxiety about having to speak in front of my classmates, when I might accidentally get, I don’t know, a boner or something—I showed up to school that day with a boombox and a cassette of Led Zeppelin II cued to the first track. When it was my turn to stand before the class, I walked to the front of the room, pressed play on the boombox, and delivered my report to the sounds of “Whole Lotta Love.” I even paused my reading during the guitar solo so everyone could listen to it. Was I a dork? Yes, yes, I was. Did I like to get the Led out? Yes I said yes I did Yes.

My report was a big hit with the class. I still have my hard copy of it, all creased and faded and dog-eared. A couple of times in the last few years I’ve re-created that English-class performance in front of audiences here in New York, complete with the “Whole Lotta Love” accompaniment. The first performance was at one of the great John Hodgman’s Little Gray Book Lectures; the second was at Lindsay Robertson’s inaugural Ritalin Reading in March 2004.

I’ll post the text of the report after the jump.

The picture below was taken in late 1986, during auditions for my school’s battle of the bands. My group was a power trio, and I was the singer and guitarist. We did three songs at that battle of the bands: “Scuttle Buttin’” and “Lovestruck Baby” by Stevie Ray Vaughan (my hero) and “Red House” by Jimi Hendrix. Guess what: We won the damn thing, and there was actually some decent competition. I have this performance on videotape, and it is fun to watch. Don’t ask me to tell you the name of that band, because I won’t tell you. It’s too embarrassing. Anyway, don’t I look like a ROCK STAR? Check out the Led Zep shirt I’m wearing.

A few friends who’ve seen this picture tell me that my haircut is a mullet, but I have to disagree. The sides aren’t short enough for it to qualify as a mullet. Am I right, people? I am so right.

(Here is what I look like now, and here is what some of my guitar playing sounds like now.)

[Continue reading "Jimmy Page Was My Co-Pilot"...]

Children of the 1970s who read this site: Did any of you make plates like this in art class? You drew a picture on a circular piece of opaque paper, and then your parents or your teacher sent the drawing off to a company that pressed the drawing into a plastic plate. A week or two after you sent off the drawing, the plate arrived in the mail. I ate off this plate every night for years:

To help the art historians who, decades from now, will be devoting themselves to analyzing the history and motivations behind my artistic output, I will record some background about this drawing—no, this “sculptured culinary tool.” I created this piece in 1976, when I was a seven-year-old kindergarten student. I was still flush with excitement from my recent trip to Australia with my family. There is a boastful, almost preening quality to this piece, as if I am trying to say, “Hey, look at me! I just went to AUSTRALIA! On a AIRPLANE!!!!!” Less-forgiving critics might use the words “sloppy” and “unrealistic” to describe, respectively, the colored line work and the questionable deployment of perspective; I prefer the terms “kinetic” and “imaginative.” Yes, it’s true, one could argue that my placement of my signature in the CENTER of the piece betrays some sort of narcissistic personality disorder, but I would argue that I was merely trying to save people from having to spend time figuring out who created the work. Why not be up front about it? I have never been one for willful obscurity, and this is evident even in my earliest works.

Careful observers will notice that the top instance of “TWA” is spelled backwards. When I was working on this piece, I was so cocky about my ability to write upside down that I didn’t bother to sketch the letters in pencil before finalizing them with magic marker. By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. This error will surely increase the potential value of this unusual, one-of-a-kind work of art.

UPDATE: Apologies to future historians: I may have given the wrong date for this work. It seems that I must have created it in 1975, or possibly even 1974. I think it was 1975. My college friend Peter, who is the same age as I am, wrote to offer this observation: “Seven-year-old Kindergarten student? Was that some Indiana thing? You date the plate to 1976. Personally, in the 1975-76 school year, I was in the first grade, and in the 1976-77 year, the second grade. Art historians and Hearst-ologists may be trying to clear up the date/grade correspondence for years to come.”

UPDATE II: Wait! Check this out! We have confirmation! In my files I found a notebook I kept during my Australia trip. This notebook proves that the Australia trip took place in February 1975, the month I turned six. The handwriting appears to be my mother’s, not mine. She must have served as the transcriptionist for my muse:

I can now say with great confidence that I created The TWA Plate sometime in March or April of 1975, soon after I turned six.

As Gawker noted in November, the American Gentrifier cover below appears on the flip side of the Winter 2005 issue of Stay Free!, the lefty cultural mag edited by the brilliant and hilarious Brooklyn resident Carrie McLaren. That’s me holding the baby; it was the first time I’d ever worn a Baby Bjorn, and it may well be the last. (The wife and baby are models too.)

I had nothing to do with the concept or design of this cover; I simply showed up at the photographer’s studio and did my best imitation of an emasculated Park Slope husband. The issue is being distributed free throughout Brooklyn at cafes and other establishments. If you’re rarely or never in Brooklyn, you can buy the issue for $2.95 at a number of bookstores around the country, including one of my favorites, Manhattan’s St. Mark’s Bookshop. The issue is also available via the Stay Free! website.

Carrie apparently thinks I look like the archetypal clueless yuppie, because this is the second time she’s enlisted me as a model for one of the parodies that appear on her magazine’s back cover. Four or five years ago, I appeared on the back of Stay Free! in an anti-S.U.V. parody:

Don’t you love how my belt doesn’t match my shoes? Carrie just marched me around the streets of SoHo posing me in front of parked S.U.V.s. They were everywhere. I was surprised to discover just how many of them there are. I have a driver’s license, but I rarely drive, so I’d never really had cause to notice them.

Carrie had this ad made into postcards, which you can buy on the Stay Free! website.