As I mentioned late last year, my father, Eliot Hearst, recently published a book called Blindfold Chess: History, Psychology, Techniques, Champions, World Records, and Important Games. He spent many years writing the book with help from a co-author, John Knott, and it now stands as the definitive work about the topic. Blindfold chess is the art of playing without sight of the board or pieces—an extraordinary intellectual feat that has a long, colorful history.

I recently designed a full-fledged website for the book; this new site superseded the placeholder site I created last fall. You can now read the entire introduction, which gives a great overview of the psychology and history of blindfold chess, including the record-setting simultaneous exhibition performed by the legendary Miguel Najdorf in 1947. In that astonishing performance, Najdorf played 45 games at once without ever looking at a board.

My father just posted a blog item about Bobby Fischer’s skill at playing blindfolded. As I explained in a post of my own in 2007, Bobby and my father were friends on the professional chess circuit in the ’50s and ’60s. My father’s blog post about Bobby begins like this:

In our book Bobby Fischer is only rarely mentioned and, strangely enough, never in any direct connection with blindfold chess. This omission was mainly due to Bobby’s failure to play any serious, formal blindfold games or exhibitions. However, friends were familiar with his playing without sight of any board and pieces in all kinds of informal settings: taking a walk, riding on a train or plane, having dinner, partying, or relaxing on a day off in a tournament. His master opponents often had no chess set available, either. Virtually none of the scores of those many games were recorded for posterity. But, to no one’s surprise, Bobby was a formidable blindfold player.

For more about my father’s book, visit blindfoldchess.net.

In November, I roped my pal Clive Thompson into joining me for one of the two AC/DC shows at Madison Square Garden. Though I wasn’t a huge AC/DC fan back when I was a guitar-playing, classic-rocking adolescent, I’ve become sort of obsessed with them in the last few years. Their rhythm section is one of the tightest, most rocking ever—viva Malcolm Young!—and their devotion to pure rock form hasn’t wavered in 35 years. Their new album, Black Ice, is pretty fine, and the lead track, “Rock ’n’ Roll Train,” is one of their best since the early-’80s glory years with producer Mutt Lange, who focused the band’s raw power and shaped the rhythm section into an incredibly tight, earth-shaking combo.

Clive and I didn’t have tickets to the show, which was sold out, and neither of us wanted to pay face value, about $90 each. So we planned to try our luck with the scalpers outside. If we failed, we’d just go drink beer somewhere in the neighborhood. We showed up outside the arena an hour after the doors opened, figuring that scalpers would be eager to get rid of any unsold tickets by then. Our price goal: $60 each. We didn’t know if this was realistic, but we weren’t too worried about it, because drinking beer was a pretty good backup option.

And that’s how we came to buy two counterfeit tickets. First I’ll tell the story of how and why we bought them, and then I’ll show you the ticket.

Neither Clive nor I had been to an arena-rock show in years. We knew we’d have to be on the lookout for ripoffs and scams, but we weren’t sure we’d be able to detect a professionally forged ticket. For all we knew, recent advances in printing technologies had led to a mishmash of ticket styles, with different appearances generated by different printing systems: at the arena, at a record store, at Ticketmaster outlets, and so forth. Had increased computerization led to greater standardization of ticket appearance, or less? We didn’t know. We also wondered whether scalpers had enough design talent to forge tickets convincingly.

[Continue reading "The Unbearable Lightness of a Counterfeit AC/DC Ticket"...]

With a gigantic mob of revelers preparing to descend upon Washington for Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20, tickets to the handful of official inaugural balls will be extraordinarily hard to come by. There are usually about 10 or 12 official balls, and they’re organized around groups of states. Barring some sort of magic back-channel connection I haven’t discovered yet, I won’t be suiting up for an Obama ball this year. But I may head down to D.C. anyway, just for the fun.

I was lucky enough to attend presidential inaugural balls in both 1993 and 1997:

In late 1992 I began dating a woman who was working for the Clinton/Gore campaign here in New York. At the beginning of January, the Clinton whirlwind plucked her from Manhattan and deposited her in Washington at a job with the Department of Health and Human Services. A couple of weeks later, I traveled down to D.C. to attend Clinton’s inauguration and one of the presidential inaugural balls, which my girlfriend had scored us tickets to. I think it was the first time I’d ever worn a tux. It was an incredibly exciting 24 hours, heightened by everyone’s glee over the official end of 12 years of Reagan and Bush.

At the beginning of 1997, I was a few months into a yearlong stint at an editing job in D.C. A friend of mine easily scored us tickets to Clinton’s second round of inaugural balls. It wasn’t anywhere near as exciting as 1993, but it was still a swank and memorable night.

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:

[Continue reading "New Teaser Site for My Father’s Upcoming Book About Blindfold Chess"...]

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?

[Continue reading "Something Cool Comes From Cancer"...]

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.