Zeus, Golden Goose Fischer
For those of us who started chess in 1972 (yes, I am that OLD), in my case, literally watching the Fischer-Spassky WCC match on television, growing up in a part of New Jersey ostensibly metro New York
(where even as a high school student I could simply hop on a bus, and in 0:50 minutes be standing in one of the worlds greatest cities),
we recieved the broadcast on what is now PBS or then channel 13 of the now famous live Shelby Lyman broadcast of the match, with a demonstration board. Imagine this as a 14 year old, sitting in a kitchen watching a small tv, and never having played chess but instantly becoming hooked. "Fischer has just played 11...Nh5!" in his famous benoni, allowing white to take 12. Bxh5. What a memory! I can feel electricity in my spine just seeing this memory in the top of my skull, that key moment of the third game.
Two years latter, I was literally at the Montclair Chess Club, when President Nixon resigned. They had the television on IN THE club when he did so. I can still see his gaunt, tragic, defeated face. I can see the monitor, just feet from our chess boards, the late day sun in the window behind the television, like an image from the Twilight Zone ...
This is after Kennedy was shot, Martin Luther King shot, Bobby Kennedy shot, Menachem Begin shot, the Viet Nam War every night on tv, Woodstock, the Man on the moon (I was that too, live, as a mere boy)... these are all heart felt black and white images. My mother had three kids. We were poor. 'They' were going to shut our electrity off, but she sold her piano instead. My grandfather was a concert piantist, and, yes, she could play. He played in Carnegie Hall.
So when I tell you, to see these videos of Fischer is a very, very, very, very deep experience for me, you will understand that I am not exaggerating in the slightest. I don't so much feel tears, as the sweep of what for me seems like fifty years of history, concentrated on the Golden Goose, the goose who laid the golden egg: Robert Fischer.
I wished the contributor of these four videos posted at youTube allowed them to be embeded directly, but unfortunately does not. Doubtless they do not wish to allow farsical behavior encouraged related to such special content. I have watched these four videos several times, and I still get chills. I get a chill saying that I get chills (just felt the vital Kundalini shiver from my crown down my arms). This is amazing stuff. Truly amazing.
Without further ado:
Video One:
link
Video Two:
link
Video Three
link
Video Four
link.
May you all watch all four, and enjoy it. What do YOU feel? This is so deep. Kissinger, the Soviet Union, Bottvinnik, the Russian Chess School, Fischer from Brooklyn New York, his mother a physicist from Europe, the end of the 60's which, for me, really existed in 1976 chess I got an apartment in New York City, alone, at age 17... when I thought that I knew so much and knew SO little. Shocking memory.
Love dk
Addendum: If any of you don't have a swallow in your throat by now (from viewing any of those videos), then perhaps one more video will do it. While there is some small duplication of clips already shown in the first video to start off , such brief duplication might be forgiven for perhaps the most emotively hardest hitting of them all:
It seems to portray the edge of something giving way. At about the 2:34 point, it seems to paint psychological disIntegration with sound ...
(where even as a high school student I could simply hop on a bus, and in 0:50 minutes be standing in one of the worlds greatest cities),
we recieved the broadcast on what is now PBS or then channel 13 of the now famous live Shelby Lyman broadcast of the match, with a demonstration board. Imagine this as a 14 year old, sitting in a kitchen watching a small tv, and never having played chess but instantly becoming hooked. "Fischer has just played 11...Nh5!" in his famous benoni, allowing white to take 12. Bxh5. What a memory! I can feel electricity in my spine just seeing this memory in the top of my skull, that key moment of the third game.
Two years latter, I was literally at the Montclair Chess Club, when President Nixon resigned. They had the television on IN THE club when he did so. I can still see his gaunt, tragic, defeated face. I can see the monitor, just feet from our chess boards, the late day sun in the window behind the television, like an image from the Twilight Zone ...
This is after Kennedy was shot, Martin Luther King shot, Bobby Kennedy shot, Menachem Begin shot, the Viet Nam War every night on tv, Woodstock, the Man on the moon (I was that too, live, as a mere boy)... these are all heart felt black and white images. My mother had three kids. We were poor. 'They' were going to shut our electrity off, but she sold her piano instead. My grandfather was a concert piantist, and, yes, she could play. He played in Carnegie Hall.
So when I tell you, to see these videos of Fischer is a very, very, very, very deep experience for me, you will understand that I am not exaggerating in the slightest. I don't so much feel tears, as the sweep of what for me seems like fifty years of history, concentrated on the Golden Goose, the goose who laid the golden egg: Robert Fischer.
I wished the contributor of these four videos posted at youTube allowed them to be embeded directly, but unfortunately does not. Doubtless they do not wish to allow farsical behavior encouraged related to such special content. I have watched these four videos several times, and I still get chills. I get a chill saying that I get chills (just felt the vital Kundalini shiver from my crown down my arms). This is amazing stuff. Truly amazing.
Without further ado:
Video One:
link
Video Two:
link
Video Three
link
Video Four
link.
May you all watch all four, and enjoy it. What do YOU feel? This is so deep. Kissinger, the Soviet Union, Bottvinnik, the Russian Chess School, Fischer from Brooklyn New York, his mother a physicist from Europe, the end of the 60's which, for me, really existed in 1976 chess I got an apartment in New York City, alone, at age 17... when I thought that I knew so much and knew SO little. Shocking memory.
Love dk
Addendum: If any of you don't have a swallow in your throat by now (from viewing any of those videos), then perhaps one more video will do it. While there is some small duplication of clips already shown in the first video to start off , such brief duplication might be forgiven for perhaps the most emotively hardest hitting of them all:
It seems to portray the edge of something giving way. At about the 2:34 point, it seems to paint psychological disIntegration with sound ...
posted by transformation at 12:43 PM
9 Comments:
david, those are GREAT!!! thanks for posting the links. historical, informative, entertaining. wonderful stuff, thank you.
Brilliant!
You are old, my foot.
I started chess in 1937.
I watched a few BEFORE
having watched and rooted for
Tal vs. Botvinnik... U R a baby.
Call me for that dinner!
Micha
I've seen those videos before, and I'm also a huge fan of Fischer. Not primarily his games (as I prefer the more "intuitive" games of Smyslov and Capablanca), but his achievement is really great. All that by himself (almost), against that much opposition.
Hmm... I see My Hero page needs updating. I had those four videos embedded and i see they no longer are. Thank's for bringing it to my attention.
This Fischer video gives me the chills.
Take care ;-)
Dear Edwin, i survive off naps, especially after ten of the last eleveen days at work...
as i was just ready to doze off for fifteen minutes (enough energy for chess study, this entire night, after dinner with Dr. Mirsky),
i thought with a 'start', 'i need to write Edwin, to tell him that of all the bloggers, i feel that he above all will understand the feeling of these video the most'...
of course, i know you have RSS feeds, etc, but wanted you to know that i thought of you and still do.
my god, those years, and all since, and the prefiguring of the history the tens years all before in Fischer, or the Berlin Wall latter, we all have our own triggers. May god bless you this day, warmly, david
ps, i added the last video that you reference hours after the initial post, but think it was there at the end, before your comment, but thank you... i didnt want to start with too long a video, as the four together are extensive.
pss, i somehow wish that Grischuk won today, to just jazz things up some more, but Anand in no way undeserving, but more struggle is great in chess... I am sure that Michael Marin Annotates will tell us if there was a win, somebody said Rc5 or Rc5+ was it... at ICC but it is past now...
xy
as you rightly suggest, yes--many have seen them, but all nicely in context with last post on the quantitative analysis, but this set far more emotional or epical perhaps.
the next post will be a five star one that builds on this one and also reproduces the work of others, i hope, to the enjoyment of many.
stay tuned, soon!
thank you, dk
the best day today!!
first, i went back to Trader Joes to get some groceries, and Sonya was there with a smile, and gave me her email, and says she is free next Thursday after class. She cannot be older than 23, is half Tlingit and Inuit, or native American Indian, from Alaska, aka as an Eskimo, but looks like an Italian. She is very interested in nutrition.
Yes, she is very attractive, but so, so nice, i really, really like her and feel good just next to her. what if...
Lydia wants to meet me for lunch the week after next, when she doesnt have her son. Can I say more?
Tonight I met Dr. Mirsky, who told me how he played Tal on a train in Russia, when the latter was TOTALLY DRUNK AND COULDNT SEE THE BOARD, and beat him (Tal beat him) in 18 moves. Mike can play at 1800...
he even knows Mig Greengard of Chess Ninja, calling him a strange man. "How so? Not him?" "David, I mean it in the best sense of the word".
Here at the house for dinner in the last few hours, told me how he met the highly regarded Dr. Anthony Saidy, IM and journalist in Los Angelis in 1983 and became good friends,
and from there met Serper, GM Ivanov, IM Donaldson, Borris Gulko, and Gregory Kaidanov. If you heard the latter at ICC today, you know how fresh and affable he is! How the latter played Taimionov, and of course Gulko played all the greats, in the Soviet Chess Macine era... and, from there, was introduced to Yasser by Saidy... "Tell him that i am still his friend even though i have not seen him forever".
"Of all of them, who was the best PERSON?"
well, you know the answer: "Yasser, by far the best of them all". And we are not even talking chess yet.
Mike had Germans bombing him on top of a train, and how many died, the guy next to him, his friend blown up... and shrapnell exploded or ripped past him, and took the pack off his own back but did not kill him, only taking part of his check off, and had it reattached or such.
talk about survival, Israel, Esonian, Los Angelis, Russian, Ukranian, German, French, etc...
A sweet man.
warmest, dk
ps, and forgot to mention, my heuristical model combining sentiment and momentum and consolidating the two indicates global stock markets to go down, very likely, so i bought forteen puts against the nasdaq 100 or QQQQ and, volla, the entire market feel today, its always nice to start right!
And four great games at icc in Mexico City, and my coach won at the Miami open, next to the likes of Nakamura, etc. I am so proud of Charles Galofre.
as the Fischer video discussion spills BACK to edwinO or ookwelbekendalsemc (he had the videos long before i did), he had a post reminding us of his big
f_ck the US video, with rich discussion following. thank you ookkwelbsaid.
liqiid egg product, here [
http://dutchdefence.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/talk-about-chills/
] made a wry comment about the only thing missing was Santa Claus (from my BIG preceeding comment), and here is my response:
"Santa Claus is the compressed symbol of our need for magical charm, and all the endless delay in living a better life, the one that we want. Few of us have not so much the energy as the will or true desire to live the life that we truly want, and to the extent that Santa points us blindly away toward material things he is not such evil as a terribly misleading emphasis, put to little smaller humans who have not even had the chance to develop discrimination, all with the purpose of loitering the coffers of multinational toy manufacturers, technology consumer goods makers, media outlets, and large scale megalith financial repositories of credit. And so chess is--if not a fit distraction--an elegantly cogent and clear and highly codified and chronicled basket of beauty and wonder and bold imagination, and, Fischer is our greatest symbol of that not only in his play but his irrepressible boldness and devil may dare form of intrapsychic communication that, of course, some find highly disturbing presaging or intimating the tip of a unmetabolised cave or iceberg of hidden pain, that he at least acknowledges, and, for that can be canonized twice, not once."
i have not even had my coffee yet and just starting my day. :)
David,
These videos were marvelous and reminded me of the strong emotions I felt watching the progress of the match at the time. Fischer was indeed eloquent at the chessboard; I have always been sad that he was unreachable on a more human level. For an individual whose intellect could produce such original tactics, he was woefully inadequate at expressing himself verbally. The most telling comment in the series was his own observation that "the only thing I can do is play chess....But I do that rather well." Thanks for making this available to us.
Bob (ranknfile273)
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