We live in schizophrenic, photo-op, Photoshop times. Cameras roll inside tiny cell phones, music plays, the private box sways, even as sub-atomic messages pour out of a galactic arrangement we cannot describe with words alone. But, ready or not, so much can be imagined on a green screen, one might think it is the very gods and godessess who cause all this magic to happen. In Hollywood, anything is possible. In the mirror world of chess, the mathematical possibilties are just as astounding

Here in Hollywood, or wherever camera action rolls, everything doubles for something or someone else. There may be nothing new under the sun or the stage lights of today's Globe save for new technology. The mirror is the same - only its reflected images are now digital. Hard physics projects its science beyond the laboratory onto entertaining displays of sound, colour, light and motion - but the formula is always the same. In Hollywood a massive chessboard reproduces theatrical art that imitates life through the lives of those who live to imitate the imaginable and the surreal - while outside Hollywood, documentaries attempt to capture what is real in real time. Where does material reality begin and the world of pretend end? Or, on the other side of the coin, how can we separate one from the other? Those are simply two aspects of the same question people have been asking themselves since the dawn of time.

In any case, this Oscar year was a great one for schizoid feature films pretending to be documentaries, documentaries pretending to be entertaining, actors pretending to be royalty, politicians pretending to be truthful and Oscar recipients pretending to be unpretentious. That's no easy stretch for denizens of the intergalactic Kingdom of Planet Hollywood, but they are hoping we take the bait. Obviously, producers and directors hope we will be royally amused when they decide to lure us into theatres with a mish-mash of history, histrionics, hysteria, hyperbole and politics. It's a confusing ball of yarn - more than the average Hollywood therapist could ever hope to diagnose in a lifetime of achievement. As such, the problem of separating celluloid from living tissue appears to be as viral and pandemic as the self-absorbed cult that cultivates and recombines in the Petrie dishes of Hollywood culture.

Cell by cell, Hollywood has a gifted knack for displacing artifactive realities with representational reflections of the original. Its successes and failures congregate around such intangibles as content management, sheer volume of network distribution, popularity with the public and the resulting consensus of opinion that may generally ensue. It also has a particular gift for instigating mania, a factor that either Jungian or Freudian analysis might explain as the marked ability to manifest, manipulate and motivate archetypal drives and energies latent within the human psyche. In order to accomplish this task, touchstone technologies must operate though a maze of symbolic clusters both ancient and novel. The proof of its impressive strength arises though demonstrated social outcomes and we see in Hollywood many of the cultic aspects that were, in much earlier times and places, forged from within the crucibles of ancient animism, polytheistc cult figures, figurines and other game-like contraptions that, during the course of their rise, fall and occasional resurrection, imbued meaning, practical values and momentum to leading social and religious ideals while helping reinforce or even dissolve the various pillars of an artfully sterotyping ediface we casually refer to as "civilized culture".

Holllywood and Bollywood share a common stake in iconic construction, displacement, dissolution and reconstruction similar to the interchangable types of chessmen that have historically appeared and disappeared from various well known forms of Indian, Persian, Arabic, Islamic and Western chess. Either phenomena play and prey upon individual weaknesses born somewhat out of human reluctance to mediate reality independently beyond the range of a socializing collectivity and the compelling nature of group consciousness. In some individuals, pressurizations created by encroaching social forces express themselves dramatically through isolationist extremes of hermetic withdrawal, escapist flights of fantasy or a combination of both - a make or break state of self-recreation that can have both positive or negative outcomes upon the fundamental sanity and well as the creative output of those who chose cultural abstenance over Dionosic revelry. As ever, art and insanity tread a fine line that cannot always be easily distinguished among its players or even among participant observers who attempt, in their own way, to measure individual genius and ingenuity by various rules of thumb that are, in their own right, subject to critical discussion.

On the reverse side of this problem, when so many hearts and minds follow an asylum of stand-ins and stand-ups - often assuming they are somehow just as "real" as the historical figures they are supposed to represent, or somehow more impressive than the cutups and cutouts we can easily produce at home on our PC's, the human desire to detach from mundane "reality" flexes a different set of superhero muscle and supermodel glamour the mainstream of many societies find irresistable. Clearly, Hollywood's success relies as much on modern technology for reproducing contemporary visions of reality as it does upon the smoke and mirrors of a near hallucinatory participation mystique. In parallel fashion, the ongoing appeal of chess and other complex board games relies upon many of the same factors implicit in Hollywood scripting mechanisms and it seems no accident that Hollywood playrights, producers and directors refer to chess as a pardigmatic expression of their craft. Compunding this analogy. electronic gaming and cartoon culture has, more recently, dictated the kinds of entertainment being produced for large, small and even hand-held screens the world over.

I suppose it's as difficult to rage against a Hollywood machine that rages right back at us, as it is to expect competitive parity between real human chessplayers and the Gargantua of computer chess. No matter on which side of the stage or the mirror we stand, there is enough Deep Blue colourizing land sea and sky to engulf us completely - with Cinerama and Sense-surround merely adding to the overall effect of being held captive in a magic box. And so it seems the eternal fate of pawns both large and small that we inevitably find ourselves caught between the two sides of a single coin that is always spinning new versions of far too many things to keep all of them separate during the real life adventures of our daily lives. Meanwhile, the dizzying result produces new waves of actors, directors, politicians, financiers and pundits - none of which are really new at all - just contemporary reflections of ancestors past who we may reasonably expect will leave their trademarks upon future generations.

Solon to the Rescue:

"... Solon's opinion of fiction. Moved by curiosity he went to see the first play, acted by Thespis. After it was over he called Thespis aside and asked him if he were not ashamed to tell so many lies before so many people. Thespis said there was no harm to do so or say so in play. Solon struck his staff vehemently on the ground; said "If we honor and commend this in play we shall soon find it in our business." (1)

Prophetic words indeed - and a clear hint with regard to the power of abstract thinking and the way the limial world of ancient games and what they represented provided the same cinegraphic effect upon the minds of ancient players as ancient theatre. Has Star Trek really taken us that much further - or - are the Outer Limits of human consciousness basically unaltered despite apparently vast differences of time, technology and cultural space?

In Hollywood, size, scale and keeping up with the technological Joneses over at NASA pit matter against mind in order to create impressive illusions. Past, present and future are being continually harvested and refined for movie miracles and from either the producer or the consumer's point of view, there is no point in asking for a way to take politics out of Hollywood or Hollywood out of politics. You ask, like Solon, for a Hollywood climate that makes the play inside each play "fair and balanced? Dream on, little pawn. Hollywood is all about about spin and spin offs and few can resist the inertia of its drive without getting flung to the four corners of the Universal back lot. Even Chaplin would openly admit that.

From tiny board games to multiplex Frankenstein, theatres, arcades and casinos continue to evolve and expand like the cosmos itself. It may be difficult to imagine how not so long ago or far away it might have been easier coping with big box Hollywood escapism. Limited to theaters near you, during those early salad days, Hollywood's deus ex-machina was a little like the old vizier in chess or early Vaudeville acts. Both had screens they liked to hide behind. Both offered a big bang for the buck and kept upping the ante until, with the advent of colour film technology, the instant Glinda's bubble descended upon Oz and put ruby slippers on Dorothy's feet, audiences everywhere knew they were in for a colourful and wild ride. How did this cinemagic come to be? Physics! What turns a mouse into a Hollywood star? Physics! What did the ancient Chinese game of liubo require to make it such a compelling pastime? Physics!

The Courage to Know:

Cowardly Lion: Courage! What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the "ape" in apricot? What have they got that I ain't got?

Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman: Courage!

The courage to confront and attempt to understand the non-physical basis of "reality" is as much a part of Solon's dialogue with Thespis as it is the foundation of random dice, divination and board games strategies. From within the chaos of primordial matter, ancient "elements" and number theory, new things constantly emerge and games as well as their players become midwives to a creative process that is virtually without any definitive beginning or end. Now it may seem more than passing strange that Ancient Egyptians game players would have immediately recognized the spiral road to Oz as something very much akin to their wild and wooly game of mehen. Not only that, the spiralling cyclotronic chambers used to refine modern day particle analysis does look remarkably like a mehen game board. Is there anything really new under the sun? Maybe not - but while we are schooled to keep pace with novelty, it is not always easy to see how yesterday, today and tomorrow meet at the cross roads and in the crosshairs of the human imagination. Are we imagining things? Yes we are! All the time! Is this something we need to be particularly wary about? Undoutedly.

To Solon, and others like him, there can be no question that we need to deal with the greatest possible tact and discrimination in order not to get carried away by flights of fantasy that may just as easily lead to a genuine Eureka moment, as it can a very dead end. In chess, that selfsame checkmate may amount to one and the same thing, with the philosophical difference being that while a king cannot be killed, the kind of curiosity that provokes young childern to test their Superman powers has been known to end in tragedy. Ancient game players have left behind many signs that while recreation served to transport them into "other worlds" and "alternate realities", the light heartedness of such activity was couched in seriously abstract, often profoundly animistic religious paradigms the players themselves may not have always been fully aware of. Even so, motion picture animation and animism share a stake in this much mythologized form of social grounding - a culture game with prehistoric beginnings and ritual endings that include a final "blow" or unexpected conclusion to a plot that must keep people guessing in order to secure involvement and attention all the way to its theatrical climax.

With the proliferation of electronic mass media, opportunities for mass uncertainty and social disconnection have never been greater, more involving. complex and attractive than they are today. Through the magic of Hollywood, the possibility for sedation and sedition has gotten insanely out of hand, although it's not simply because there are presently so many different types of drummers barging into our livingrooms and making such a ballyhoo about everything these days. Publicity has always played a major role in entertainment, politics, science and religion - grand old culture games that never did allow for much silence or serenity once they made it out into the public square. So, although the mental on-off switch presents a viable option and there remains an elective aspect to every form of personal involvement, the decision to play or not to play is continually offset by the town cryer - the procurers of human interest, their games and the way we chose to consume what is being offered by them at any given time.

As Solon suggests, the social mania for fads and keeping up with the times and the Joneses may not always serve our best interests. In fact, during the European middle ages, when it was not suffering religious censorship, the popular game of chess was critqued as being culture mania, gambling fetish and faddish waste of time. Centruies before "Banned in Boston" became an American byword, "Banned in Barcelona" probably applied to the Spanish game. Taking a long leap into the more recent past, even when the cinematic chessboard was totally silent, knowing which movies were worth attending and which were not made for difficult, self preoccupying choices. Word of mouth? Sometimes good, sometimes not so good and yet, like chess, when considering whether or not we might actually want to participate in a game of Hollywood Squares, the expert pitchman and publicist have always been helpful in tipping the balance.

To see or not to see? That has always been the question and so, in order to give answer to our curiosity, like Solon, we still have to venture forth and risk something of ourselves in order to taste the hootch, touch the hem, see the sights, hear the sounds and smell the popcorn at first hand. Nothing new about that. You can't expect other people to watch your films, read your books, cast your Hollywood ballot, or play your chess for you.

Unlike simple board games however, Hollywood pitchmen often go to generous extremes in order to entice us into accepting the buffet they have laid out for a passive crowd. Loss leaders, freebies, contests, cast parties and merchandise sales are all part of the seductive action required to generate even more action at the box office. Beyond that point, once we pays our money and takes our chances, our only voluntary act is to select a seat and merge with a faceless mass. I suspect that to most it's all ice cream, fizzy drinks and eye candy - and yet, somehow this heady sensorial mix of many different flavours, colours, textures and sounds help us lose sensitive awareness of mainstreaming forces that attracted us in first place.

So, we line up and file in like sitting ducks, eager to consume whatever bonbons Hollywood choses to launch at us from the executive screen behind the silver screen. Indeed, this tactical ability to distribute yummies from afar through the acts of dummies and decoys we may actually yearn to love and adore is very much like the "vizier's game". Thus it bears continual repeating that the Donalds who sit behind the "curtain of appearances" hold a number of important Trump that the average fan has always had difficulty anticipating, much less reading. Though reliable, honest, well coiffed and pearly toothed he may appear to be, the possibilty that our impressions of reality are being intentionally guided and distorted through second, third, forth and fifth party filtering literally screams risk - and on the whole, the audience seldom shouts back. Far be it from us to holler "fire" in a crowded theatre - especially after we have paid for the exclusive priviledge of possibly being badly burned by medium and message alike.

Only a genuinely critical view, such as the one Solon exemplified may be capable of holding Hollywood in check - and like Solon, such voices are exceptionally rare in the media wilderness which, to rephrase the old 60's T.V. nugget, has, for the most part, become a multi-media wasteland. So we must exercise caution on our own behalf, for checked or unchecked, like it or not, the post-modern dream machine is as capable of devouring and regurgitating a distorted view of the past as it is proficient in supplying the public with suggestive thoughts about where the immediate future can or will be heading. Thus, the questions and caveats involved in deciperhing whatever facts Hollywood choses to suppress or amplify at any given moment lap at intellect and emotion in ways that not all persons are equipped, as Solon was, to understand and counter effectively. In no uncertain terms, while may we think we are playing a social game, the game is really playing us.

Lions and Tigers and Bears
Stange to think that in some old board games like Egyptian senet or Chinese Chess, the water hazard was among the most feared obstacle of pawns en route to Oz and the prospect of an illustrious promotion. How easy it is to plunge headlong in a reflective pool of illusion and how simple a matter it is to lose one's way in the vizier's Hollywood labyrinth. Perhaps coping with the Hopes and Dreamgirls of chess or Hollywood was never as straightforward and innocent a pastime as our common ideas about escapist "entertainment" and "recreation" have led us to assume. Certainly, the morality projected through either Hollywood films or Cessolis' writings about the allegedly "innocent" pastime of medieval European chess often take a back seat to culturally entrenched biases that are, in and of themselves, neither easily detected nor entirely innocent of manipulative intent.

Serious critics and intellectual strongmen are often publically chided for talking seriously about a supposed "virtual" world of pretend. Nonetheless, they are important to us, for, without their thoughtful interjections, the random infusion of seditious messaging becomes more difficult to detect, question and deflect. Mixed messages and the "massage" of public perception were rampant again this Oscar year, as Ellen Degeneres played Bob for the audience - giving comedic "Hope" to marginalized minorities even as the bubble machine that is Hollywood's entertainment industry passed for politics and history as much as politics and history seen strutting across the awards stage passed for intoxicating entertainment.

Back and forth through the osmotic mirror we, the public, oscillate at an increasingly rapid, electronically charged rate. Meanwhile, over at the reality coat check, Oscar made more Oscar history and "feel good" PC politics won more Oscars. Now it enters into my thoughts that both Oscar and some of the messages that get tagged and checked at Oscar time are rather like the "pfander's" in gambling houses you can read about in M.C. Romero's article here at Goddesschess. If "the medium is the message" - it is not to difficult to understand how Oscar, hospitable tavern owners, clever politicians, actors and and caged songbirds blend to form one enormous ocean of talent. They are true stakeholders in the modern inundation that takes place during Oscar night awards. We may be entitled to love or hate them - and yet, there is little we can do to escape their tidal pull. All this to say that, we should never accept any of what Oscar represents at face value, much less take his background presence in the game for granted. Like the pfander's of medieval chess, or the vizier's of Persian chess, he exists for a purpose that is anything but benign.

Sniffing the profit motive, Roseanne Barr, a fat lady known for her razor tongue and a knack for expressing what Hollywood angels fear to say, considers Hollywood pfanders the true pimps of Hollywood pimp culture. Coming from a woman who has passed though the Hollywood star maker machinery, she is probably right on the money about the colour and context of Hollywood's money mill. As usual, it takes sages, fools, outcasts and little children to show us how the Hollywood mirror prefers to look narcissistically at itself through Jack Nicholson's rose-coloured shades and does everything it can to promote that "healthy" Botox impression.

As surely as yesterday's "pfander" is today's FIDE, the corporate instincts that allowed chess wagering to move from taverner's quarter's to major Las Vegas attraction mimic the development of Hollywood's growth from music hall entertainment to the corporate big screen. Like those who currently thrive on chess, it is the job of all who enable Hollywood illusion to sell mirror images by the yard and so, on Oscar's night of nights, it's not uncommon to see kings and queens decked out in elaborate rented costumes and borrowed jewels. Of course, as every well heeled gambler knows, elegant appearances and polished manners often cloak actual intentions from the public eye just long enough to separate a mark from his money. To insiders who have played hardball with either game, a naked Hollywood or a naked FIDE are not exactly pretty sights to behold.

Hollywood Queens: Cheerful Pretenders, vs. the Real McCoy
Hollywood thrives on illusion in almost in the same fashion winning chess requires large doses of deception in order for players to succeed in high level competition. And so, it is a simple matter to conclude that illusions produced both on and off the chess board make for plenty of confusion in the minds of all but those who are adept at constructing and delivering a convincing gambit. This year's Oscar awards created a great confusion over queens - Queen Lateefa being perhaps the closest thing to a genuine queen Oscar night presented. At least her Hollywood name was not in doubt. Apparently nothing to apologize for there... apparently... although we must wonder if she chose her name or if it was actually bestowed upon her by other Hollywood royalty. Like the Horus name of ancient Egyptian pharaohs and mannish queens such as Hatshepsut, ("Foremost of Noble Ladies") this attachment to a "real" screen name seemed to give "Lateefa" secure entitlement - credibilty of a kind that may have been only slightly less strained when it came to naming this year's "gold star" Hollywood queen.

While I still can't decide whether I should be amused, confused or even angry, I suppose some indecision is understandable considering what and who "The Queen" was all about this year. And yet, I can't help coupling this Hollywood coup with the way in which Washington has been reaching out to Great Britain and London to Washington these last few years. In any case, to Helen Mirren's credit, she did all an actor could to have us suspend judgement for a crucial hour or two. Wooden queens? Somehow they manage very well in chess, though not in Hollywood, where it takes more to capture stage, screen, contracts, hearts and minds than just a simple trot down a checkered aisle.

Considering legendary differences in quality, Liz Taylor's wooden "Cleopatra" comes quickly to mind. As a case in point, although costumes and special effects lent enchantment to one of the great Hollywood flops of all time, perhaps the only good thing one could say about Liz and Dick's sword and sandal disaster is that it lowered standards in ways that allowed future epics to trive on diminished audience expectations while winning over whatever slice of a captive audience has habitually chosen starpower over quality features. Cleopatra needed starpower to pimp and pump at the box office. On the other hand, one could say that Helen's performance was all the more elaboarate considering she starred in a studio gambit involving a living Queen. How this was negotiated we can only guess, although it would be naive to assume that "The Queen" did not necessitate a real life approach to number of actual scenarios requiring the greatest empathy, tact, diplomacy and image polishing.

Indeed, Elizabeth II's modest response to "The Queen" appears politically guarded, although, while accepting an Oscar for her performance as a living legend, Mirren seemed to know exactly which "bells" to ring in the castle tower. Could that have been the result of sheer coincidence? I very much doubt it. In fact, Mirren's "gold star" metaphor appears to have been carefully "calibrated" towards sonorous projection of a deeply symbolic message. Both because of and despite the crypic nature of this comment, to Elizabeth II and any other onlooker who might have detected the meaning implied by the actresses' use of "gold star" imagery, the implication of how grace under pressure may bring out the kings and queens in all of us is not purely a pat line. Laden as it is with equal amounts treasure and treacherous inhibition, it probably took some courage and perhaps even some coaching for Helen Mirren to draw the gold star from her collection of bon mots. If Solon, Cleopatra, or better still, Hatshepsut, had been present to comment on what this gold star actually symbolizes, they would have had no problem pointing to several well known cultural signposts of their day and age as being the very picture of either a rising Venus or, from the Egyptian perspective a rising Sothis.

Somehow the king's "grace" remains in the cards, playbills, dice and distant stars we find dealing out hands of modern day chess to all of us. I suppose all I can say on these matters is that there appears to be a magic Bacon number connecting chess with Hollywood and the crowned heads of state, though, at this stage in my game of connect the crowns, I seem to notice a mixed bag of blessing. Small wonder, that considering all the distractions that occur on Oscar night. Even so, I could begin by mentioning how, like Elizabeth II's speaches and most of those given on Oscar night, chess games are often tell-tale, if not always long and boring - or, if I should so chose, by making a quick leap of inference in order to deal with the fact, that like usurped or undeserved nobility, Hollywood and Oscar might as well be a mountebank's chess - that is to say, a chess that gives the dynamic appearance of being an utterly rational, democratic game, but is couched in figurative imagery that tells us it is actually anything but. To mangle a little Shakespeare, "Two truths are told..." even as the play is always thing whereby we capture the conscience as well as the Janus consciousness of the symbolic chess king.

Either way, the tactical winds that blow behind the scenes of a many layered game help erect the scaffolding and the cloak for whatever games and non-games we see being stage managed before our very eyes. Fiction thrives on the appearance of truth and ultimately, the integral labyros of particle physics and DNA holding all the complimentary bits and pieces together appears to of be greater primary importance than the games of form and function we elicit from the Pandora's box of Lego we call "life, the universe and everything". Yes, at times it does appear that all these intelligible things may be just a part of an even bigger game - something that allows us deeper passage into manifold suspicions that indicate how reality is basically both shared halucination and non-local event after all. Where does the dream end and the "reailty begin"? Perhaps only our greatest mystics know and can express the liminality of what it means to cross back and forth over the "scared line" with deeper certainty, while the mountebank and pfander merely capitalize on a form of higher knowledge that can be conveniently distorted to suit any number of base agendas.

Living Large and Small Our Stage
It's no easy task comparing wooden chessmen to a Hollywood that plays living chess with real live pawns and avatars and yet, we know how throughout the world, living chess, pachisi and wei qi have provided engrossing moments of entertainment for players and audiences alike - so engrossing in fact, that when we engage these games on a coffee table, our sense of ego-self often tends to momentarily dissolve in the heat of activity. And who exactly are these "people" - both real and imaginary - these entertainers and the entertained - if not willing groups of pawns, avatars and the inevitable crowned heads who invariably preside over and participate within so many canonized versions of board game and drawing board reality? It seems that considerations drawn from a massive collection of human and holographic archtypes may be a prime question for any Hollywood drawing board and yet, I recall the enlightened French composer and chessmaster, Philidor, describing pawns as "the life of the game". This may be a formal mistake - a rational, though non-empirical assumption easily made by mistaking the particular for the gold general. However, when the curtain falls to momentarily reveal the commonality of all existing people, places and things, we must ask more than the question "who's life is it anyway"?

Pawns certainly are the initial point of contact where all the good juices and wicked poisons ebb and flow along the Martian canals of Planet Hollywood's complex chess board. Indeed, our classic pawns. Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Beppo, always seem to be animated by the prospect of participating in a victorious farce full of unlikely promotions and nifty deceptions. The bowing, scraping and kow-towing of Hollywood pawns? I am not so certain that is entertainment fit for kings, but it is all very stagey, somewhat comedic and, where we see all this and so much more tacked onto Nick Bottom's role in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", the drawn down side of the pawn's Charley Chaplin routine currys favour without disturbing the decorum of any real kings or queens. In the end, however, Shakespeare is saying something very witty but also very cruel about the insulated, self-adulating life of a royal retinue that has been specially cultivated to act as though the sun, moon and stars shine only for them.

Unlike kings and their immediate confidants, although they too dwell in cloisters, unpromoted pawns are not anywhere as insulated or as insular as the inner court and its executive class, nor do they have the luxury of knowing what the king might know until the moment of promotion is struck and the pawn transforms into something more enagaging and princely. Thus, if we care to see the pawn's transformation in a mystical light, the multiple ironies of Nick Bottom's character represent not only comical distraction, but are furthermore symbolic of a successfully threaded theatrical moment taking place both within and without our normalized, all to rationalistic, Westernized view of what constitutes a universal theatre of promotional chess events - one that places allegedly "virtual" laurels upon the heads of mere commoners - and one that the Chinese "promotional game" copied as a means of extracting the mystic's view from the promotional aspect.

Pawn promotion is a place where we find an actual "physics" infusing human life with the capacity to alter itself in chorus with an already accomplished set of board game "helpers" - though maybe "mystics" supplys a more appropriately humane context for all the light bending contortions a pawn must undergo in order to become a something more akin to Tamerlane's board game prince. Needless to say, this matriculation is always is a secretive affair - an act accomplished behind the vizier's magic curtain - and as we inspect traditional rules of the senet pawn's flight to celebrity status and a secure place among the Council of 30 Shienit Chiefs, neither the opening part of the journey nor the ultimate reward are spoken of except in fractured and often deliberately oblique reference to such things as pentagonal "gold stars" - or, as we may surmise from a coherent blend of Venusian and Sothic superimpositions, the "bright morning star" of latter day Christianity. Thus, if a promoted pawn should happen to glance in the mirror and see in it the parental reflection of an accomplished Egyptian vizier or a silver queen, they are probably not mistaken - nor would any king of quality deny that the malleable terracotta of pawns is not in some way related to the star-stuff that composes their own bejewelled body.

Sentimentally attached to the rulers of all nations, pawn's are like the troubadors of old. If they do happen to appear solo in any engagement, a quick end can usually made of any graceless approach to the far side of the board, or, conversely, a rapid rise to celebrity if they actually do succeed in their perilous run for the roses and the rosettes. Of course, beginner pawns in chess are not expected to demonstrate the kind of diplomatic subtlety of a Solon, nor do they become preoccupied with the type of tragedy Octavian Augustus brought down upon Cicero's head the moment he felt his chief vizier had crossed him. And yet, like all those who gather at chess, they are subject to the "royal touch" and can be sacrificed or saluted for any number of reasons. So the message of tact, or tactlessness - as the case may be - allows us to say that chess pawns and Hollywood stars on the rise are all about traditional societal rules of engagement. And yet, as with physics, the real heart of the matter seems to beat in places far more profound than any king's hand might grasp or manipulate for personal advantage. In fact, it is an historical rule of thumb guided by ancient Sumerian precepts governing the office of kings that a deep sense of humilty in the face of higher powers is what preserves the source of absolute authority all legitimate kings are compelled to witness and transmit despite whatever primal longings and selfish ambitions might tempt them to do otherwise.

Given the high order of ethical constraints apparent in ancient promotional games, no doubt it was not a simple pawn whose untutored experiences gave impetus to either senet, mehen, moksha patamu, liubo, chaturanja, chess, Hollywood, or the insitution of monarchy for that matter, but rather, a promoted one, or, as some imagine, a long series of them who evolved the game in measured strides intended to keep pace with the developing scientific and social complexity of successive developmental stages in the history of civilization. Some important sense of continuity remains vital to all these games, and it is undoubtedly a curious feature of chess history that shows how yesterday's promoted senet pawn bears striking resemblance to tomorrow's bishops and viziers. This appers to be more than coincidental because as we look more closely into the combined religious and political aspects associated with coronation rites, kings are generally prohibited from placing crowns upon their own heads. Here again, the vizer or Perisan "mantri" helps define the monarch just as he does the pawn. While coming to resemble the true power behind the throne it is therefore not unexpected that viziers find it necessary to retreat behind every available curtain if they do not wish to be singled out as the conspiratorial authors of issues that made theocracy, divine right and Camelot so attractive on one hand yet so unppealing to Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th Century on the other - a conflicting state of affairs that served to draw hard science beyond the canonic grasp of a later breed of vizier who often sought to subvert it. So, as things sieve out through the historical cyclotron, an uncertain though attestable amount of subversion exits on both sides of a matrialist - spiritualist divide that probably does not need to exist - or more likely does not exist except through compulsive repetitions of empirical fallacies and other politicized illusions that split off from an unmitigated, if improperly mediated quest for hegemonic dominance so characteristic of "war game" analogies and other inappropriate fantasies that infuse our modern day opinion of what the great elasticity of chess was actually meant to represent in the first place. Of course it will be difficult convincing anyone of higher intentions as long as all levels, sides and appendages of the body politic - pawns, kings, queens, knights and viziers included - remain trapped in the fray of materialistic propaganda. Yet, the recreational "war game" aspect is so riddled with improbable chinks and historical lacunae that we may be fully entitled to conclude, as Pavle Bidev states, that the game we think we know represents only the lowest common denominator of what chess and chaturanja actually set out to become.

In practical day to day affairs, despite whatever appearances of bouyancy project confidence through the process ascribed to either games or so called "real life", a well suppressed "sixth sense" sniffs its way across religious and scientific compounds, while showing us that proper cloaking of human abilities that at one time seemed normal and natural has become an important aspect of the kind of credibilty we presently require for everyday survival. Out of this discounted post modern version of what is really a very ancient dynamic, chess pawns entertain their own and their opposites' possibilties with forked tongues that may serve as security in the midst of a game in which they find themsleves starting off at the highly vulnerable lower end of pecking orders and food chains. For pawns and actors alike, it's who you know today that may spell the difference between sudden death and a sudden rise to fame and fortune. Without exceptionm unlike botched acting careers and failed generals, even mishandled pawns - failed entities are taken into preserved algebraic account and so, for the most part we can reconstruct a who's who and what's what from an exhaustive number of chess annals and analyses. In Hollywood, however, as in real life, the situation is less defined, Not only is it virtually impossible to predict who or what some actors might become tomorrow, there are many insignificant amateurs who remain the sole collectors of a few yellowed press clippings that will probably not survive beyond a limited date. However, that disturbing concept applies not only amateurs but to well known celebrities as well - who, like the rest of us, are temporally and temporarily duty bound to seek lasting achievement according to the professional sense of how their careers may unfold, And so, despite their varied roles and many facets, Hollywood actors are typically compelled by the ambitious desires of their handlers and have indeed been schooled to behave with deference to their chess masters both on and off the stage.

Of course, popular consensus helps define not only the actor but the agent's role. Appeal is everything - and so, in Hollywood, it is quite normal for actors to envision what it might be like to act like royalty while retaining their Bacon connection to a humble past. Therein, a common touch mingles with the royal touch while exposing the secret of most successful rulers, politicians and celebrities, as well as the possible change of birthright all unpromoted pawns do well to keep fixed firmly in mind. So, come to think of it, beginning life as an ambitious, flexible pawn reflects upon not only the nature of ensemble acting and how you play your cards in Hollywood but also the vulnerable nature of career destinies as well. Think again and it becomes possible to understand how, with so may shaded sets of circumstance pulling strings and sharpening knives from behind every post and pillar, Hollywood must be a Godfather's game - a game of "dons" and "vizier's" - filled from top to bottom with artful dogders, gambits, outcomes and audience reactions. Of course, manufacture of consensus leads to agreements and disagreements that, in turn produce socializing agents which, in all cases, rely heavily upon public perceptions for their effectiveness.

Again, suspension of Solon's critical awareness can allow inroads into human consciousness that are almost indetectable except to the game's innermost circle of GMs IMs and erstwhile puppetmasters. The effect of a carefully implanted message supported by public opinion further amplifies the need to be aware of incipient dangers posed by the mirror worlds of virtual and actual happenstance. On either side of this mirror, feudal obligation to authoritative - if not absolutely authoritarian dispatches - inevitable leads to polarizations, bifurcations and unclear moments of many types. Ah yes, what would chess or Hollywood be without its "wizards", it's Godfathers or it's willing Munchkin pawns? Are things ever so purely black and white as competitive chess, Hollywood, mass media and many heads of state insist they often are?

The play is the thing. So play it again Sam...

Achieving objective consensus in chess is what holds the game together. Arriving at consensus in Hollywood may require the same skill sets, but the difference seems to be that in chess one has the formal opportunity to uncover strategies and tactics that lead to a more academic, if leisurely understanding of who is wagging what, where, when and why. In Hollywood, it's hard to catch site of who wags the wags and to be sure, some old Hollywood Godfathers and actors slip back and forth between the pawn's public stage, privileged audience seats, golden screens and select places behind the curtain with disturbing ease. Taking cues from many possible angles at once, all these moves are more or less "hidden in plain sight", which is how all the best kept secrets seem to follow in the footsteps of the highest paid actors, whether we find them operating though the medium of chess, politics, mass media or the public stage.

It was perhaps little different in Shakespeare's day. Stars will be stars after all and the mesmerizing light they project on stage, off stage, or behind it has not really changed very much over the ages. Their glitter and glamour presents one good excuse for wearing sunglasses on Oscar night. But, there may be other reasons for wearing shades and motion picture sickness or even a voluntary sense of remaining blind to so much that does go on behind the scenes could have something to do with so much serious hide and seek.

Covering all the angles at once in Hollywood or professional chess is not a job for everyone and unlike Shakespearean actors and Broadway stage types who can spend years learning and playing just a few select roles, Hollywood pawns and avatars are seen constantly moving to and fro across the casting board in Tinsel Town, changing hats, rapidly morphing into new marketing aspects of themselves and delivering new character portrayals that make them seem totally mercurial in our eyes. On the great special effect screen, this has become commonplace and maybe just a little habit forming. No wonder this year, even the "I's" who played the part of the royal "we" appear almost as confused as the rest of us! Even so, they are well paid to act as though they are in command of their situation. Such is the nature of all memorable "command" performances in Hollywood movies, at the Oscars, or in chess and in either medium the crucial difference between confusing fakery and polished mimicry begs public witness, expert eyes and private soul searching both before and after the fact of any performance.

Describing Hollywood or chess as fishbowl events does not accurately account for all the different species involved in any given production. And exactly which Hollywood egos truly represent the "we" part of the Hollywood picture? Reality is so plastic and elastic, how can we be sure that people who make a career out of bending it can be relied upon to say who and what they actually are, much less confirm what we, the audience, are encouraged to think they are in relation to ourselves. Since we all face the same problem of sincerity at some time or another in our lives, I suppose it is permissible to ask how much of Hollywood is really "us"?

And, by the way, who do YOU think YOU are for entertaining any notion that actors and politicians might not be what and whom they say they think they are? Confusing isn't it? Just like on the chessboard, intent is sometimes very difficult to prove. But what is worse, by asking that dreadful question I have given you the equally dreadful right to ask who I think I am, to which I might answer:

"Today I imagine myself a cat with nine lives, nodding, winking and saying all these things from a remote perch in a fantasy tree that only little girls who dream of becoming Hollywood queens can see. Tomorrow i might become a dog. It all depends."

Not a very satisfactory answer to be sure - but at least it rhymes a bit and aside from being an Oreo cookie attemping my best to display something of my own illusive inner nature by tuning everything else inside out, that's the best and only thing I can say for myself today. Tomorrow? Well, I am getting better at this...

"Chances are, if I should wear a funny grin..."
Yes, right now, on our stage, all I will say about theatrical transformations is that, once upon a very long time ago, there arrived a mirror in Wonderland one could call upon to calm whatever seas of doubt semed to always congregate around the citidels of our most precious "precious". As a result of constantly impending disasters, peoples of all times and places learned how to step through this mirror in order to experience a magical world filled with cunning beasts, cunning thoughts and cunning paradoxes. Perhaps all it did was to displace existential anxieties and stuff them in a pretty box. Either way - it seemed to work and so that mirror still exits for good or ill, and people still set foot though it for all the same reasons, although total escape from cares and worries may not be one of them.

Although some might think that in today's much more scientifically accomplished world our simple magic mirror may have become outmoded, tarnished and maybe a little obtuse, perhaps it always was a bit of all these things. Nonetheless we know that it did serve the pupose of reflecting reality back into the eyes of the beholder or even dazzling and confusing the eyes of enemies and opponents.The only way to sure way of handling this magic mirror solution? Experience, my friend, is always the best teacher and unlike the dazzling distortions leaping out of Hollywood, chess is one way of gaining a foothold on mirror symmetries, assymmetries, tesselations, sub atomic cracks, atomic clocks and other aspects of the great divide while building bridges between virtual and real aspects of our universe that run through anything and anyone we can name. Though board games we can reconstruct Bridges to Babylon, Egypt, China, Persia, Greece, as well as the stars, planets and Platonic elements as ancient eyes once saw, explored and named them.

How old is the tale I tell? Only recently, I read how China's immortal Yellow Emperor somehow learned to imprison evil djinn inside a magic mirror and that, by way of liubo, this led directly to the development of chess in China. I am also told that the great Egyptian god, Amun Ra, dreamed all his best dreams while imagining himslef as a yellow tom cat. I like that dream very much. It was not even a very large cat - not a, MGM lion, but, by some accounts, pound for pound the fiercest, most determined and incorrigible of all felines. Idi Amin? Amun Ra? Now exactly who did that Ugandan gold general think he was fooling when he tried to imprison an entire nation inside his political mirror?

And what am I thinking? Could there be a yellow tom - a cat in my hat - trying to get out? Can I trade it in for a golden ass? Is that trade actually fair? I mean, could they be essentially the same gold star animal? Why yes, but for a few cosmetic differences, I do believe they are and what is more, that assumption is what also makes Queen Alice, Nick Bottom the Golden Ass, Neo, Frodo and Luke Skywalker and many others virtually the same character. Like the writers who give them life and perhaps also those who exercised some intercessory influence upon the careers of gifted people like Solon and Bobby Fischer, all these stellar objects tumble in and out of the vizier's mirror and it seems they only have to do this once, after which, few, if any, will not be so easily fooled by crass appearances as may have been the case in previous incarnations of their unpromoted selves. In a profoundly mythopoetical sense, that is how gold stars come to be earned in this world and as some would say, quite cautiously and metaporically I might add, that seems to be how they come to be recognized in what some call the next. As a yellow tom, I am of the opinion that this world and the "next" or "other" world are all One World. But of course, a yelow tom would say that - and after all who would be crazy enough to trust a cat?

Behind The Media Matrix - Holloween and Oscar
But, for a fact that can't in any way be objectively proven, when it comes to Hollywood, chess, awards, politicians, royalty and changeling pawns, my inquiring wind gathers in a storm even as flags go up and down, and people stand passively in attention taking in the entire spectacle as though nothing much out of the ordinary could possibly be happening. When such things occur, I understand I may be undergoing a silent state of siege from some uncertain direction. Call it a paranormal sonar - or what have you - although I will say that a peculiar kind of alert waxes and warbles whenever this fool spies another coming through the "wry". It can happern even in conjunction with the talking mirror most homes have plugged into regular house current. So, when I say, it takes a fool to to catch one in the act of playing others for fools, I am not just whistling Dixie Chicks. And no, it does not take a master of mirrors to spot the signs and symbols Hollywood blurts and blabs with sly blinks, nods, smiles and innocent sounding code words. But, if, like Nick Bottom, we are all born fools and would be actors, just who is fooling who, or trying to? Better still, why do some even bother?

Oscar time is a bit like Halloween, with masked marvels appearing from somewhere over the Hollywood rainbow all doing their best to trick and treat us. Granted, on Oscar's Night, with literally dozens of our favourite trick or treaters knocking on our TV screen all at once, some clownish half-wits are bound to sneak past the threshold of personal consciousness virtually undetected. Part of the problem may be because the big screen fits so neatly into the small one. At times all we can be certain of is that somewhere inside both of them there's a whole lot of moving, shaking and mutual trading off going on. So, when iot comes to mass media cross overs, all we may detect is that an elborate game of multi-chess is being played in the Outer Limits and that only when the game is done and the final credits are rolling, do the network viziers hand control of our screens back to us and vacate the premisies in order to repair to their dens, where preparation for the next game will begin shortly thereafter.

Love' em or hate 'em, on Oscar night, Hollywood bogeys stage a long distance assault upon common and uncommon sense fit for clowns, but primarily directed at "everyman". It's a barrage and a banquet too rich for the average person to deal with at a single sitting. Time, patience and our own abilty to freeze frames, hit "pause" and reflect and compare seem to be the only advantage "we, the little people" have over Hollywood and with that thought fixed firmly in mind, I'd like to take a serene moment to shish-ka-bab a few of these little hobgoblins now they have already passed though my soapbox screen. Most of the more pernicious are still hiding out in the pantry somewhere. So, perhaps we can begin skewering them after the fact, starting with Oscar himself, then moving on to Liz and Idi - who are not to be mistaken for Steve and Edie, but probably will be anyway.

American Idols
But alas, I find myself charmed and drifting far afield from the real essence of Oscar, who is, at the very least, a much perfumed American Idol. And we do like to know where our idols come from, don't we? We read the tabloids in order to find out everything about them. That is why we buy the T-shirts and drink the free drinks they offer down to the very last dregs. And oh, how we do very much like to consume the forbidden liquors of the gods, all the while possibly knowing that the oddest thing about Oscar is that he pretends to be Oscar when he could easily be acting out another role - one most people are unlikely to suspect him of playing. Somehow that and the patina of a polished gold finish work out well for him and I suppose the real question about Oscar has more to do with how people are encouraged to see him as he wants us to rather for what he really is. Indeed, we must ask ourselves how and why we come to drink, eat sleep and breathe Oscar, knowing full well that his world is all about pretending to be someone special.

He is a great pretender, our Oscar - and I think it is also important to ask what causes so many of us to suspend judgement for the sake of whatever dreams a very few distill under the big top of the Hollywoo circus. It is odd that so few people seem to understand how somewhere in the process of recreating and consuming "reality", the drink most people think is geniune has already passed though an assembly line of editorial strainers and spiggots before it gets into our glass and that adulteration of some kind or another is practically guaranteed? What kind of Mickey Finn has Oscar been serving us all these years? Dont ask, don't tell and don't look now, because there is a bridge and a toll booth up ahead with Balrogs standing guard over Hollywood's imperial exchequer.

If only these questions and issues we have about Hollywood and Oscar were Mickey Mouse. But as we already know from watching too much Disney, not even an "R" rating tempers the flow Hollywood hootch. No matter what intellectual age we pretend to, prohibition does not seem to exist in the Hollywood we tend to believe we are consuming "voluntarily". Even though editorial censorship exists in spades behind the scenes and on the political stage, in reality, the stuff that thrills and kills always seems to be out there for the asking and the taking. And sho 'nuff, adults know from their own hard experience with addiction what bad dreams may come. Yet, we down what we already know can be dangerous, sometimes carelessly, enthusiastically - conspicuously - as though it was our cultural and religious duty to do so. And bravado - since we call whatever gets us cheering entertainment as oftens as we call it "patriotism" - or the "right" way of doing things. This we do while hardly suspecting there may be residual elements of a stupefying, if not deadly nature mixed in with our movieland concoctions of ritual choice.

Hollywood moonshine? It's like the colour of money isn't it? And aren't mainstream movies just another brand of money drink? Flowing from the cistern down into the taproot of everyday life, I suppose most Hollywood promotors have already learned for themselves how to milk mass media and the public as though it was a petty cash cow. Taking cues from those bad guys in The Matrix, while trading in hallucinations, they offer the public a golden opportunity to forfeit its milk money for the sake of idle moments spent watching, then chattering idly about Hollywood, NASCAR and too many other things that really have little bearing on where the real money is actually coming from, going to or why.

Diversion? Of course that part of the reason for a Hollywood that has made an industry out of selling booze to us indians, usually with the harder stuff cleverly hidden behind items we know are harmless and strictly diversioanary. But, once the real poison settles into the social bloodtream, Hollywood corn mash deposits hard social currency we share with friends while marking time in some endless ticket waiting line packed with other pawns. How easily the stuff of dreams passes down a picket fence, jumping from one pawn, who shares it with adjacent others and so on down the rank and file! Like cheap wine, trash culture and politics have that "ripple" effect. And haven't we all played the picket fence game often and earnestly over the years - so often, in fact, that, at times, the currency seems to wear a little thin? And doesn't Hollywood know when people are becoming bored of the ringtones and long waiting lines? And doesn't it respond to flagging consumption with mass infusions of brighter, shinier baubles, bangles, blings, bills and billboards - more better booze - whatever it takes to get a good media buzz happening again and again?

For old money's sake and new money's shareholder options, Hollywood has always sensed the limits of its coming and going attractions and tries it's best to up the ante every year. They want to get us feeling just as drunk and delirious this year as we might have felt in "The Summer of '42". So I guess you could say that this year, Oscar time was looking for a Viagra boost to get our postmodern heartbeats up and running once again. And while there is nothing wrong with feeling young at heart or even acting that way, there is a healthy limit to how long we can suspend reality without doing some real damage to ourselves. So, I guess the real problem with mass media has plenty to do with how it encourages consumption habits and strange addictions on a 24/7 basis. Nor do I doubt that there are even some among us who find old hat chess as addictive as Nintendo, movies, magazines or television, although I presume the crucial difference is that chess boosts mental and moral character in ways that passive types of media do not.

Thanks for the memes...

Cultural addictions? It has been exclaimed in Hollywood - "The Girl Can't Help It!" That might be a good description of Miss America contestants, but what about Mr. Universe? Well, that's right. Blame the girl for leading everyone astray. Always the girl. But I guess it doesn't matter who really holds the purse strings, wears the pants or buys the Viagra in most households. It doesn't matter because Oscar-time binges have come to be regarded as a kind of cultural panacea and misery, like ecstasy, loves company.

Because Oscar is Halloween, Christmas, New Year's Eve and so many other memorable things rolled up into one big tail gate party, it seems hardly come by chance that we tend to yoke pleasant or even unpleasant moments with ephemeral Hollywood theme songs, scenes and sound bites, all the while choosing to believe that the people who follow Oscar around as a career are really following the days and nights of our lives with remarkable empathy and compassion. So, it is with great anticipation that we tune into the annual rebirth of the Oscar godlet, perhaps hoping for a replay of some memorable moment we might have lived at some romanic stage in our lives. That kind of giddy expectation is not always rewarded, but sure as there's a heaven above, Alfie, we do get to see actors clapping Oscar to their chests and making long acceptance speeches about how great is Oscar, Hollywood, God, America and the Academy of Motion Pictures.

Now remember, these folks - mere actors, mind you - and Oscar winners especially, all hold it within their power to become the instant psychopomps of an otherwise remote motion picture paradise. Remember too, that they are bought and sold like expensive race horses because of their ability to perform up to Hollywood expectations. A a common result, it takes only a little consent at the big league race track before any one of them can and will run away with our personal treasures - our hearts, minds, souls and maybe too much of our spirit also. Certainly they are paid ridiculously high salaries to do what they have been trained to do - which is lay hold of the collective consciousness as though it was the reins of Ben Hur's chariot and like any number of folks working at Disney, they can take all of us for a ride and influence our thinking permanently if we allow that to happen.

And what would we do without them dragging us in the direction of a topped off glass or an old fashioned Hollywood run for the roses? The Oscar racetrack? The jockeys? The breeders? The bartenders? The brands? Some call it a culture and as long as we are having a good time, gasoline stays cheap and drinks are on the house, does anyone really want to ask what aperitifs or main courses are being served, for what real purpose and by whom? Thanks for the memes, Mr. and Mrs. Hollywood - but these are toughening times and with them comes an era of critical circumspection that even the sedatives of politics and Hollywood are having difficulty quelling. Waterworld, Mad Max and Wag the Dog now figure more prominently in the public consciousness than ever before and that is not Hollywood's doing - that is reality calling.

So, please forgive me if I begin to imagine how much Oscar and Hollywood remind me of the phantom bartender in "The Shining". Forgive me, because I cannot help but think our dear Oscar does his stand up bit for a living too while accepting gratuities from influential donors tied to focusing Hollywood's trend-sniffing powers of persuasion and translating everything towards big budget binges. Oscar? Isn't that the same pfander who refuses our money in The Shining, but still finds a way to drain our sanity? I see him there sitting tightlipped on the podium, accepting all the applause, fame and fortune that go along with being an Oscar winner. Right up front on center stage he takes it all in with customary dignity, humility, grace, charm, wit - and the same type of affable integrity that suits Hollywood hotel bartenders, bootleggers and culture barons to a "T".

And a very good living it is for cultivated Oscar - the golden boy with a bright future always ahead of him. And isn't it also true that no matter in whose hands Oscar winds up on Oscar night, he knows, as do we, that he will soon experience the luxurious privilege of sitting in someone's expensive parlor cabinet somewhere over the rainbow - inside impressive Hollywood mansions nestled in expensive gated subdivisions on the manicured outskirts of magnificent cities that make owning expensive American real estate on the most expensive planet in the known universe a very expensive proposition indeed. So, there he sits, along with all the expensive chess sets, vases, and crystalwares that are almost too pretty to be touched by mortal hands, much less serve a utilitarian function.

Living a life of luxurious ease, our Oscar never fails to get the best seats in the best houses. So, no wonder some people will gamble everything for a future with Oscar, while others fawn and beg to touch him as though good luck and great fortune will somehow magically rub off on their fingertips. Oscar's uncommonly golden touch... Oscar, the greatest pawnshop curio in Hollywood... Oscar, the lucky ducky born on third base and waiting for some actor to hit him home... Oscar, the silent partner... Oscar, the pandered pfander... Oscar, the bartender standing behind the stars and bars and the golden thrones of Oscardom... Oscar, the Midas boy who sees all, says nil and still manages to affect millions... Oscar the suave, who, from his place inside expensive curio cabinets, gets to see the private comings and goings of the very rich and famous whom we adore and envy.

Now, if Oscar could only speak, just imagine how much richer the tabloids would be for all his bartender's confidences?

"Midnight and a rendez vous..."
And so, what if Oscar turned out to be better than a deaf and dumb pawn - had ears, eyes, nose and a mouth and used them? If that were the case, would he propose any kind of threat to himself or others? Well, let us not forget that to actors and politicians alike, there is no such thing as "bad" publicity. Therefore, in light of what that may mean to one and all - I give you "Oscar" as I found him on the Internet - apparently receiving some kind of award for distinguished silence in talking pictures and obviously ready, willing and able to spill the beans on Hollywood!

But WAIT a minute! That guy's not Oscar! And if it isn't, who exactly is this familiar looking imposter?

Well... some (but certainly not I) would quickly point out that this "Oscar" is a really a statuette of the Egyptian creator god Ptah. That makes him a 5000 year old hood ornament for Egypt's royal coaches and patron saint of Egypt's legendary craftspersons - those very old souls among whose mummified remains we find much evidence of Ptah, but few signatures telling us who might have actually owned or fashioned him. However, I believe that in most cases, Ptah was considered the mummy's real owner, rather than the other way around. As for how he came to own and operate the entire Egyptian studio, that is information you will have to dig up for yourself - that is - if you really do want to bring too many cultural illusions crashing down on your skull at once. Suffice to say, the Egyptians who drew and molded him probably didn't care if they were the world's first cartoonists and scriptwriters. Along with Ptah, they seem to have had other things in mind more precious and eternal than gold - but nonetheless synonymous with an Egyptian gold standard of some sort. How times have changed! Or have they? Oscar owns Hollywood, does he not?

Now I suppose the next logical question would be: "Does Ptah own Oscar?". Could envy of Ptah's creative strengths actually be the lettuce at the bottom of an Egyptian bowl that eventually made it into Hollywood's salad days? Oscar a lousy remake?! Could a rip off an Egyptian feature be how Oscar got his Vaudeville start? Probably. Old Egypt gets ripped off for more than just Oscar. And while we're at it, it may be good time to mention that some very astute historians deeply suspect that Indian, Persian and Chinese chess got their start in the very same way. Along with this observation comes several overlays of strenuous denial and most likely, an overabundance of historical obfuscation going far back in time. So, in the eyes of some, at least, this whole Oscar scandal is really small potatos by comparison, although the burial of Egyptian culture under Western potato peelings is most certainly not.

Needless to say, (as if it is ever "needless" to say anything) the art of substitutions, doubles, stand ins and carefully re-costumed actors is very old, as is the history of those who think it is better to keep "oyster" about about all of this. In some crucial instances, silence speaks louder than words. So too, a cryptic kind of "gold star" language seems to have resulted from the long held reluctance of Egyptian royalty to cast pearls before swine as well as their preference for dishing out medals and "cultured" pearls. And, as any queen, queen mother, prince, princess, actress, artists, king, actor, viceroy, politician or royal script writer knows, to say less about what these genuine pearls are or why some people consider it in their best interest and everyone else's to keep them out of sight, out of mind or at the very best, sheltered in expensive glass houses, is to avoid complicity in matters that could prove embarrassing, if not fatal, to the crown.

Some crowned princes have actually lost their heads for speaking plainly about the actual source of so much power, prohibition and cryptic code words. Be this as it may, with truthful exposure comes the peril of self-incrimination. Thus, the string of pearls that eventually connects past with present have a tendency to produce a hangman's noose, mountains of illusion to cover molehills of harmful facts, graveyards out of cities and headless corpses trying tell why all this cryptic silence is anything but golden. So, there is really nothing new under Oscar's sun. Inasmuch as concealments and deceptions have occurred in the name of Ptah and many other gods through a succession of kings, queens - but more likely their chief viziers - deception becomes a Machiavellian golden rule administered mostly by who has the gold.

As for the kings and queens who publicly cannot or will not dare to say how close to the gods they or anyone else might actually stand, or even attempt to explain why a purported need for silence surmounts our human need "to know", it's not hard to connect them with Priscillian assumptions that, since Egyptian times, have remained dangerous exceptions in need of a gag, shutting up in towers, or worse. During any day or age, preservation of artificial barriers separating inner from outer court appears at the root of many evils and despite that the democratic spirit we assume remains protectively encased in such things, the common spirit incipient in the dedications of Ptah and Oscar "listeth where it will" and is no respector of high walls or imperial justice. Only under imperial rules of law and culture do songbirds get caged and people led astray to places where they are robbed of birthrights that puts the Helen Mirrens of this world on the same footing as Elizabeths I or II. Only by order of the state and its religious co-defenders does justice stoop low enough to protect the needs and greeds of a pretentious, powerful and insecure few. Need I say more?

I suppose I have already said enough, but in cases like this, less is not more, nor are words alone adequate to undo the culture spells that bind us to disempowering sets of widespread illusions. Nor, with words alone, can we undo barriers to meta-realities even the great and powerful Ozs of Hollywood can neither truly nor truthfully explain except by analogy, metaphor and parable. The fact that those who stand behind the curtain of culture exist in awe of what carefree winds blow their balloon is something seldom spoken of in Hollywood, since the appearance of control is vital to their media contraption. Nor do we get from them any inking of how procreating wealth recreates anything of inestimable value for the common person that they also cannot control down to the last detail and farthing. No, we seldon hear of this because frank disclosure detracts from the bloodmoney game that is constantly afoot at Caesar's Palace. Avoiding attraction of public attention to both themselves and their stock and trade drives the Oz's of our planet into hilarious, if not humiliating pretzel shapes and if, after all these years, you really do need a punchline for the batos and patos that accompanies Solon's idea of a politically colourized Thespis, I can supply you with one you can build a joke around if you choose.

The punchline is that I can imagine Ptah, or something very much like what he was intended to represent, feeding everyone their lines and liquor since time immemorial and that certain people found a way to tap into his wine jug as a way of creating profit out of religious rapture. As bartender to Egyptian pharoahs and a full line up of culture gods, delivering life itself along with rapture, ecstacy and "primodial gnosis" was his chief occupation. Moreover, and despite how this may shock the orthodox masses, being the Egyptian creator god of a polytheistic culture does not automatically make him consummately evil, nor is hemlock the type of drink Ptah preferred. We leave that to the sycophants of every cultural era, for as surely as they made others drink their poison in real life, there will be a price to pay, if not the price of a clear conscience, then perhaps some other type of restitution. All is one and if we must let fall the curtain of appearances, we would have to say that like great good and great beauty, great evil dwells in the eye of the same beholder and perfection of either appears to be the just reward for knowing both at once. On the other hand chosing one path over the other in this great mirror game of chess we call life makes for either a clear or guilty conscience and unfortunately there are those who can't seem to tell the difference between the two.

First causes and secondary outcomes arrive in many shapes, sizes and disguises. So, like chessmen do in their own unassuming way, Oscar and Ptah are simply saying something about the path to perfection. This is something extremely important that is also encoded into the promtotion of chess pawns in chess and the pawns of many other games both old and new. After that, there is not much more to say except - "Honit soit, qui mal y pense." or maybe "Let the buyer beware" - for, as Frodo learned for himself, reckoning with the powerful is something that comes at a price, as all great pearls of wisdom apparently do.

So - you see how things cross over and double back through the magic mirror in Hollywood... Good - evil - evil - good - there is no telling how a strory will end. Or rather, you see, but maybe you don't see while the plot is in play. On the other hand, the climax says that one man's return to Oz or introduction to Oscar is always purchased at a premium and yet, the real source of moral justice - the actual experience - is utterly free - as free as any chess board choice we might consider making. It's really only a matter of how much time, reflection and dedication one puts into the game. Equally though, there has to be something quite imperfect about the various ways in which currency exchange and mark up on new intellectual diversions cause us to pay and pay again for the privilege of being tricked and treated to the same shams. An Oscar who is allowed to speak would tell us that old bones will do just as well as the new and that fools gold is to be expected on the road to Oz

In consideration of the high levels of imaginative craftsmanship exhibited by many ancient cultures, Ptah's v old bones do just as well as Oscar's new ones with the exception perhaps that the commerical price tag on Hollywood wares has inflated beyond the comfortable reach of the average pocketbook and cost of extravaganzas have actually driven what used to be a pleasant opportunity for social gatherings at the local theatre into the pay per view vacuum of private homes - a sign of the frenzied consumerist times it seems and the all part of the fable of cultural obsolescence Hollywood has cultivated over the years. That goes hand in hand with the idea that Hollywood pyrotechniques and distribution networks actually improve on the best that classical literature, theatres, librarys and music conservatories have to offer. Like the pfander, commercial aspects of Hollywood carney barker still banks on the P.T. Barnum maxim of a fool born every minute. On the other side of the coin, whenever Hollywood pushes the envelope of profit over that of high quality productions, we have an opportunity to get wise. As a result of past abuses, many born fools ahve already found themselves disapponted by the predatory aspects of commercial film in general - ones who might seek their entertainment elsewhere and find it, often cased in old bones, gameboards and bookbindings.

If for instance, I had to purchase a complete new set of chessmen after the end of every game, just as though they were a new DVD or a round of drinks at the bar, I might soon switch to rocks, pebbles and water. In the process, I might also discover for myself how the pleasure of chess is still commendable. Aside from the illusion of a die having already been cast to favour industries based upon overconsumption and easy diversion, the prospect of having to make do with less might prod at least some of us into trading rare sets of Staunton chessmen for stones. Not that humble materials offer any means of avoiding the status trap, but at least they do help bring us down to earth and closer to it on occasion.

As for the sparkling stones Oscar night puts in our soup, Hollywood bartenders and waiters can and will bring us an endless supply of doubles, until we get fed up with Mummy II and Mummy III and demand a glass of water or a mirror that does not distort our view of what lies both within and without. From such things we may learn to talk to each other again about who we think we really are, what we think the world insists we are, where we might be heading and how we might prepare to get to where we want to go without the noise machine of mass media trig to get a leg up on us. Who knows what we may find in old bones? Who knows if coloured pictures streaming from distant yesterdays may not come to resemble the true wrappings of all Egyptian Mummies and chess as well?

So, how comes it that our own human mass and volume can be so neatly re-manufactured and looped back to us in ways that entice us into believing we are only good as the gold we wear, when even Shakespeare knew how everything about us actually resolved into a dew? How comes it that even today, when we absolutely know how every aspect of our flimsy, filmy selves and the universe add up to no more than a collection of subatomic particles and waves we call light? Obviously, there is a very schizophrenic, make-believe detachment from some original gold-star realities going on here, there and everywhere - and yet, we are supposed to believe in Oscar's durability and originality? Ptah, I say! Believe what you want, but the real reality of make believe says "Anything Goes" in Hollywood Squares, quantum physics or chess for that matter. Hollywood sound and lights? Call it a trick of shade and substance designed to tempt coddle and cajole. Call it representative of some truth, but don't call it "truth", for as soon as a particle of truth is spoken into existence, it has already begun morphing into something slightly different - just like this essay, which is not the same piece of work I began the day after Oscar - and certainly not like the churches, politicians and moviemakers who like to freeze us into their frames of reference for many dubious reasons even as the flux they help create in our social frames of reference carries most of us down a magic carpet ride that leaves a majority gasping for personal ideas about what may or may not be enduring "truths".

Could some of the proof lie in the Oscar pudding? I don't doubt that it does, although to believe what actors say is true rather than rely more purposefully on what our lying eyes and ears may tell us is not the real name of the game. It is not chess. And frankly, if it is not our names we hear being called at Oscar time, anything of deeper value Oscar might have to say to this and future generations will escape us and we may be tempted to plunge again into endless rounds of escapism. Oh yes, you are entitled to take your precious cues and scripts wherever they become available and go through all the classic trails of learning them by heart, but it may be wise to remember that this will not be your heart speaking truth to itself or extemporizing over the dialogue you may be having with your own Oscar. So let's at least come to some agreement over how the wool gets pulled, who does the pulling and how we can become complicit in this act if we elect to savour life through vicarious pleasures rather than indulge in them directly. This we must risk on our own behalf, even if we don't fully understand all the whys and wherefores of a real life motion picture that is, in many respects, more virtual and holographically interconnective than solidly "real".

Certainly, what Oscar represents is not a chunk of gold we can bite into or hold up to a worldwide audience for all to see and be saved. And, while we're at it, let's not forget the ages old question of "who profits" from all the old patchwork some call the Emperor's clothes - this aptly named "golden fleece"? Also, let's not forget to ask why not all rewards at Oscar time are entirely monetary. Power? Who can weigh that on a banker's scale? Fame? How fleeting! Knowledge? Ah! What light through yonder window breaks? Now we may be getting somewhere! So the answer to Oscar has something to do with knowing something about something after all and 'tis a great pity that we have to wring that out of him by threatening Hollywood with a powerful Egyptian double - a great light that once shone with clalrity from the mystic east but which has since been buried under the rubble of human forgetfulness and torn apart by enchanters eager for the gold rather than its true meaning.

What ho? Ptah to Queen Mirren's Oscar! And checkmate! So let it be known that somewhere floating above all the graft, greed and envy of Oscartime, a cloud of love, peace, morality and maybe even great prospects for immortality beg to differ with politicians who see only money, political opportunity and not much else in our message based coin of the realm. Your soul or mine? Toss a coin, because what Hollywood says and does with souls is very two faced, pari-coloured and not always on the square. And that, my friends, is one of the longest running punchlines seen or heard in movies anywhere. Beyond that point, I know for a fact that takes a real "Depp" - a real German fool - to understand why this is so. That much said...

Here's Johnny!

"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies..."

Johnnys dark and Johnnys light... I guess that's entertainment! That certainly is the entertainment industry and chess all rolled up in Cleopatra's magic red carpet. So, while we are busy entertaining all possible worlds, here are some of this year's award winners - among them, a white queen and a black knight, who, by the way, does not bear much resemblance to any "Last King of Scotland", (he still has his head, after all) but, given the chance, could probably do a nice imitation of Othello...

"My sister told me that all kids love to get gold stars, and this is the biggest and the best gold star that I have ever had in my life," Mirren said. "I want to share my gold star with my fellow nominees, the brilliant, brilliant actresses who gave such amazing performances this year."

"When I was a kid, the only way I saw movies was from the back seat of my family's car at the drive-in and it wasn't my reality to think I would be acting in movies," Whitaker said. "So receiving this honour tonight tells me that it's possible. It is possible for a kid from East Texas, raised in South Central LA and Carson, who believes in his dreams, commits himself to them with his heart, to touch them, and to have them happen," he said.

I believe in these new Oscar kings and queens. I believe in their personal adventures and the stories they can tell. I believe that, like Othello, Whitaker's promotion to excellence was well deserved. I also sense that, unlike Othello, there are no Iagos waiting for him in the Academy wings. He has, for once and all time, been publicly acclaimed and crowned. Too late for treachery and too late for him to turn back now! So, long live the newly promoted Oscar king! And thank you Hollywood, Oscar and that lucky star for providing people like this the opportunity to promote.

Aside from a very passionate and sincere speech, the proof of Whitaker's determination is written all over his picture and I neither saw nor sensed any sign of cue card coaching while he delivered his acceptance speech. My feline instincts tells me, not only is he a real gold star actor, he's a real gold star person too and as they sing in Hollywood - "No no - they can't take that away from me..."!

The character he played to win this role? Well, since I never met the man, I refuse to judge Idi Amin on Hollywood films alone - nor is it my place to judge anyone in my Bacon number book of addresses with whom I am not personally well acquainted. On the other hand, I reserve a cynical eye for home grown politicians who pretend to acquaint themselves with me through my vote, will kiss my babies at election time and then kiss other parts of other people's anatomy afterward. I also prefer to resist that rather loathsome part of Hollywood I see reaching out from behind the screen in some half concealed attempt to adjust the dials on my moral and intellectual compass. My only regret is that good people - skilled actors and other legtimate talents - can be manipulated into providing the kind of relief required to relax our minds into thinking that everything we see coming at us on the screen is pure gold. Mixed messages and black and white relief - that's how fool's gold and counterfeit achieves it's ugly reputation by comparison and we have to learn how to tell the real from the unreliable at every turn of the way or somehow content ourselves with the rule of Trinculos and other poor fools. Illegiimate kings, half truths, deceptions and outright lies sprout like weeds among the lilies and orchids. In that process of discriminating natural selection, games of chess are lost and won. So it goes for hearts, minds, souls and spirits as well.

Movies? Once they are made, they do not change and any man woman or child can pick and choose their reality according to what they see lined up at Blockbuster. Politics and politicians do not offer quite the same variety of free choices as entertainers. Maybe that's because their directors and sponsors offer them little leeway to pick and choose for themselves - a sour note which might explain the different lines they speak and the different types of character parts they play before and after being elected. As for Idi Amin, like many a Gold General who would be king, despite that they can became synonymous with evil incarnate, his heart and soul may have been in the right place at one time or another. Who can say? Who would dare? Why do some always dare to say too much about what is impossible to judge and not enough about what is either tenuous or questionable about the facts as they choose to represent them - much less the things that are of most immediate importance to our own critical abilities?

That is perhaps how Hollywood attempts to pander to our weaknesses and how it profits from posing absolute evil against absolute good, ignoring the murky middle ground in favour of dramatic license. However, on the global stage, things are far more complicated than Hollywood would have us believe and much more so than in chess. What pushes men and women over the edge or wards them from it does not always show up on the balance sheet or in the ballot box of consensually constructed histories and there are no chessmen that ever slip their gyros or take the plunge into madness that would send them careening off the deep end of board. Frozen Hollywood perspectives and great distances from events can give us enchanting views - but who is to say if these very same views are not also some form of attempted enchantment?

Even so, what we can gather together of Idi Amin's frame by frame history offers us a glimpse into the kind of slow boil in Stygian waters poor Jack Nicholson played out in "The Shining". These kinds of things do happen to people and while we can see some of their descent into maddess framed in movies, I recognize there is no real heroism involved in condemning those who have, for reasons we can only speculate upon, suffered profound degredation of character at some turn of events or for some other unpopular reasons, were given no other choice but to make the passing their poison to others their point of contact with political history and the Midas touch of unbridaled political power.

Now, Al Gore says that global issues offer a moral rather than a political opportunity. That may well be the case, but it is not the full reality of issues he brought forward on Oscar night. Also, it may be saying something about his brand of perfumes and poisons, or how one man's passion from the podium can stirr pawns to uncritical opinions and reflex actions. Take it or leave it, by offering only one view of our impending ecosystem reality and gaining endorsement from Oscar, the outcome is noting more than a crooked game of chess - the mountebank's game of offering what seems to be a straightforward problem and then pulling in the fish as they fall for the entire trap, hook line and sinker.

The strategy of bait and switch is a politican's favourite passtime and they get help with this from their varrious backers. So what are we fools to believe when so many things are being spun in so many conflicting directions at once, or when Hollywood lays a hand on the board and decides to spin it in a particular direction? I do not pretend to know what makes the world go round, but I do know how mental fatigue can be induced by continual shock and awe, until we stop trying to make sense of what is happening around us and just lie down and let the tanks of Tienamin roll over us.

Tanks for the rhetoric and spoon fed memes... but no tanks, Big Al. Nor do I feel inclined to go into the tank just because Hollywood lights a certain way and does this without also lighting the way to the more diverse sources of its political and social conscience. Suffice it to say, I did not like everything or everyone my TV screen delivered into my home on this most recent Oscar night. I did not appreciate the all the agenda. On the other hand, I never met an honest game of chess I didn't like.

Queen Takes Oscar!

As for The Queen... Is not caesar's wife always beyond suspicion? And therefore, is she not also the source of many deep suspicions? Ah Hollywood! - the stuff of virginity, virgin dreams...golden boys and girls - and gold stars too! Was Helen Mirren playing the part of Queen Elizabeth I or II when she made mention of her gold star? We may never know and frankly, it does not matter. What matters is that we do know what she said and can harbour a pretty good guess at why she might have said it. There is something too in the way she decided to share her accolade with all those other "brilliant, brilliant actresses" whom she edged out for this year's Oscar throne. A queen, is a queen, is a queen. So, what of it? Graciousness in the light of victory is both the most and the least the victorious can offer and people with only one genuine gold star in their collection probably care less about Oscar, Hollywood crowns or even Holyrood than what lies above and beyond in the immovable kingdom of one fatefully wandering star.

The human quest for immortality is what that star is all about, and has been for thousands of years. According to Oscar, public immortalization is just a game we play among ourselves while biding time in this nutshell dream of a body. According to Ptah, it is not a game, but a gold star reality - something the heart can count on to pull us through the mirror of life during times of crises and renew us in ways that cannot be explained by words alone. We pass from place to place, role to role and rung to rung on a ladder leading to and from the stars. No doubt the connection between this ladder, pawns and royalty holds the same view towards reincarnation and transformation as Indian chess. As for Oyster watches, pearls and pawns, or cabbages made kings and preisdents - to paraphrase Lewis Carroll...

"Oh Oscars, come and walk with us!"

Mirren's Elizabeth I	Mirren's Elizabeth II

The time has come, the tabloids say... but tabloids will write what they will write and say what they will say, while truth goes hungry and crying out in the street. I know less than nothing of Buckingham or Hollywood and I make a habit of staying as far away from Access Hollywood as I can. However, I can say that Mirren's virtual throne arrived without any background of personal want, starvation and bloodshed. Not so the chair Elizabeth I claimed at the expense of Mary, Queen of Scots, much less many of the male suitors who seem to have lost their heads over her while she, herself, was loosing her heart over them. And not so Elizabeth II, who as a child, knew only too well the odious trials of war, local poverty, power politics and senseless loss of lives. These are legacies few actors or actresses have to endure and while such individuals as Elizabeth II help sustain the aloofness of queens and kings, for good or ill, their conscience and not that of Hollywood or tabloid scavengers, will say what it has to say about them and when the time comes for a final reckoning of the balance, that moment will not be filmed.

Of course the tabloids will go on tattling what is advantageous to their publishers and paparazzi and like Hollywood, they will be judged accordingly. Since I have nothing to gain or lose in this entire equation, knowing that I have done only my best to keep this papyrus a civil one, I can say from the heart that I suspect much deeper and richer purple hovering in the background lights of rich and poor, famous and infamous alike than Hollywood can capture. Like the rooks Old England keeps in London Tower, these may represent many of the hidden things that make the circumstantial weight of crowns heavy or light, but like the poor who look up to them, they are not the playthings of the royalty who come to bear them much less the Hollywood that tries to snare them.

Winners and losers... sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Tables turn on Oscar night and next year new royalty will be elected. How odd that is! An elected royalty? Perhaps it's better not to say who is who and what is what too loudly or too often. Careers have been forfeited like crowns for calling spades spades and in Hollywood or Holyrood, that's the name of that tune.

I Need to Wake Up (Melissa Etheridge)

Have I been sleeping?
I've been so still
Afraid of crumbling
Have I been careless?
Dismissing all the distant rumblings
Take me where I am supposed to be
To comprehend the things that I can't see

I'm not sure if I personally need to wake up Melissa Etheridge, but I'll let the typo stand for now, knowing full well that when you wish upon a star in Hollywood, as elsewhere, there is no telling how it may rise or fall suddenly, much less what that hidden star of destiny might signify to some. There is one star that never fails, however, and by the trail of footprints leading all the way from Egypt to Hollywood's Walk of Fame, we know a little about who may have dreamed and worn it like a crown. They are not always born to the manner or the manor and the weight of acquisition is said to be lighter on some than others. As for the crowns of England and Egypt. these are very curious objects in their own right. The closer we get to them, all the more "Curiouser and curiouser" they become. But, as with all things black and white, female or male, up or down, virtual or virtually real, if there was ever man in need of a consort, it is poor, lonely Oscar.

So then, if I were to supply him with the girl of his dreams - one to match the incredible gift for disguise and love of fashion that blend him with the stars of destiny, given Mirren's speech, among the many I could choose, this one in particular is a kind of standout.

And it gives me great pleasure to offer the tinkling Hollywood brass a gold star statuette fit for female actors of any day and age..

Behold! I give you - Oscarina!

A mannish appearing Sopdet with Sothic gold star crown of Egypt, Isis and every Cleopatra who ever was, or will be... In ancient Egypt, Sothis might double as Seba - the great golden star of divine destiny. Here we see Helen's gold star employed upon the calipers of absolute precision, royal justice and artistic excellence. Ah! - to see Helen in the brow of Egypt! Now that is a slice of Shakespeare I myslef would like to see Helen perform.

Afterthoughts on Dreaming Gods, Gold Stars, Oscar, Oscarina
and the Inbetween World of Shemale Paradox, Divine Irony and Chess

Liberace - self styled queen of charisma	Ellen and friend	Meslissa pointing to gold star

Now, there are Queens and queens and queens. There are even legendary British Music Hall and Hollywood entertainers who would be queens - are, in a sense "queens" - but who, like Oscar, are a little like themselves and a little unlike what they appear to be at first glance. There is, of course, no accounting for taste, DNA, candid appearances or how the star stuff of the universe assembles itself from primordial opportunities no mortal man, woman, or child can truly fathom. Grace be with and upon them all.

And so it is said that among their rank and file, famous Hollywood queens ignite a paradox that neither the icons of chess nor those of Hollywood seem capable of addressing - even though these queens have been given ample opportunity to address Hollywood and millions of Hollywood fans. They are, as a rule of thumb, attracted to pianos, costumes, make up, mehem and the same sex. Sometimes their appearance alone is enough to drive us mad, mad, mad. And "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", isn't it? To quote the Chessshire cat - "We're all mad here".

On the arch conservative side of our tragic mirror, a vocal and well represented majority are, also as a rule, most grateful that these oddest of the universe's many oddities keep their more oddball instincts secreted in pretty closets and cabinets, along with the Moet and Chardon. On the other hand - and there always is another hand - it makes some very sad to think that we have no better language for them than words that make "oddball" sound almost generous. It is probably a bad idea that mainstream lifetyles continue to drive these rare orchids into twilight zones, pressure them to hide their love away and thereby help create grotesque Idi like distortions where and whenever otherwise harmless flowers implode upon themselves and transform into carnivorous flytraps.

Once again, who can say how much stays under wraps or how much of the real flower exposes itself where, when, to whom and for what purpose? We know only of instances and innuendo and although there are some cowardly lions among us who would make madames Etheridge and Degeneres pay to play the game of life, it is good, fair, just and kind that Oscar can allow them the opportunity to show their winning form on a wider Cabaret stage. Perhaps this means there is still some hope that Oscar night is not the pimping, lionizing sham it appears to be at times and that diversity can claim its rightful place on the international stage just as it does in the gardens of the natural world. I am, of course, being very optimistic with that statement - but the ideal is one that gives all of us something to hope and strive towards.

Much the same may be hoped for in the mostly patriarchal microcosm of chess. But, we are trying to improve. All our chess senses tell us it's not just a man or a woman's world into which pawns achieve their promotion. And, it is very true that while too many of the world's social climates could stand a little change, in many ways, the deeply symbolic social climate of chess remains an anchor dragging bottom. Hollywood gives us all a little changing room, but really, the world at large offers everyone a great big changing room and a mirror. We should all know by now that it is one thing to sympathize with individuals as individuals and another to buy into the causes they chose or have been chosen to promote. Hollywood seems to take advantage of every emotion-stirring situation to sell its wares, but at least the ideal that gets pronounced at Oscar time allows diversity and sharing on the board and one might also assume that the queen and Oscar's democratic entourage of pawns makes paradox and a sense of divine irony available to more than just a few shrewd chessplayers.

Click the pic for "Killer Queen" (MP3)

The same eccentricities that made British Music Hall performers and American Vaudevillians so temperamental, make the type of Oscar or Oscarina they should be handed a bit difficult to figure come awards time. There will be no clear solutions and a certain sense of volatility will persist as long as the problem is allowed to define itself according to the arch conservative black and white world of chess. Mingling black and white on a chessboard does, however, allow us the opportunity to see the game as it is played in third party shades of grey. Now, that is chess as it is, not chess as bigots define it and desire it to be seen and appreciated by others. So the play is always the thing whereby we capture the complete conscience of whatever shade of sorcery hails our own. In other words, Mini Me is really the result of Dr. Evil's mini max rather than a stirring act of legitimate creation and maybe only the Neo's, Jack Sparrows and Helen Mirren's of this world can truly understand why some people play constructive chess, while others use the game as a weapon of mass deception.

What is more classical still may be imagined as a kind of game within a game and the Killer Queens of chess know how to roll the bones, rock a chessboard or the Albert Hall. Now that we know how many pips make up a die, or how many holes it takes to fill a Hollywood chessboard, it can be said that if you give even an old queen a little too much dressing room, hair, makeup or sound equipment, they will take their mullet to some stellar heights and let it down like a ladder - on 42nd Street. Hear that beat?

All the Queen's Men is a movie yet to be made, even though many theme songs have already been penned. To conclude this unceremonious literary engagement, on behalf of Goddesschess, I take great pleasure in bringing you one of this website's many possible theme songs and the one most appropriate to an unabridged "History of Chess".

Are you listening H.J.R. Murray? The fairer sex, the inbetween sex, Africa, Egypt and people of good conscience everywhere have it in for you and your colonialist history of war games. We are coming after you with sound and lights and a lazer beam - gunpowder and gelatine. We are the champions of a better world and we will rock you even though you pretend to lie sleeping with Bollywood Oscar and the fishes. And you know how much we Cats like fishes... Leviathan, Gargantuan, Hollywood, Bollywood - the bigger fish, the better...