The art of the cover

"Chess"     Seijikat

WOW !!! CAKE5 IS BACK !!!

"Still Standing Straight"     Lennuk

"Gost of a Chess Player"    Semideus

"Chess Queen"   Kennetkatze

"Chess Set"   5

"Chess"     Oorka

Monterey Chess Center, aren't these just the coolest chess club tables ever!? 

Hope you enjoy these latest selections.  Have a great weekend everyone!

"Chess Titans"    SoldierofGOD357

"Chess"     cookiethekiller

"Chess"    capers

The Meeting.

Cool !!!

"Play Chess"   Astral Phoenix

"Chess 2"    Yo K

                     Sleeping in the Forest

                      I thought the earth
                    remembered me, she
          took me back so tenderly, arranging
                her dark skirts, her pockets
                of lichens and seeds.  I slept
                   as never before, a stone
                   on the riverbed, nothing
       between me and the white fire of the stars
             but my thoughts, and they floated
             light as moths among the branches
                of the perfect trees.  All night
           I heard the small kingdoms breathing
           around me, the insects, and the birds
      who do their work in the darkness.  All night
          I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
             with a luminous doom.  By morning
            I had vanished at least a dozen times
                      into something better.

                           Mary Oliver

"Chess King"        Rocksham

                    Towards the Primeval Lightning Field 

The old chronological towers are ash, are prisms of disfigurement, symbolic of a world cancelled by consumptive inmelodias. As for alchemical transition, we face the raising of new sea walls, of banished and re-engendered electorates, trying to cope with new intensities of weather, as the anomalous hypnotically increases with the power of inverse subjective.
    The body is now weighed on a broken axial cart, its blood conjoined as it rises within a nuclear darkness of ravens. So as Piscean chronology now shatters, dawn becomes an unclaimed resurrection, a tumultuous eikon of skin no longer formed around its old dendritic artifacts. The calendar of draconian enfeeblement with its integers of the past 20 centuries, erased, its linear Babels darkened by the extreme necessity for a new perpendicular burst, transmuting in demeanour, with history consumed in a roll of flaming aural dice, with its wizardry of tools subsumed in arcane vibration, turned into a power of splendiferous scorpions. The psychic wounds of the past eclipsed in this new millennium by the power of smelted dragon's blood.
    And so, I speak of a new being of symbols, of lucid catacombs and spirals, its language being spun in fabulous iguana iridium. Now, with the decayed constitutional stages exploded by telepathy, by invulnerable oneiric intuitives, the mental axis transmutes, like a reddened swan, with a new cosmic skeletal reprieve, afloat amongst the forces of the primeval lightning field, taking on the dharma of the great sustained emotion of eternity.

                            Will Alexander

Still adicted to the chess thread !!!!

I didn't know Monterey even had a chess center.  I need to go the next time I'm there.  I think Monterey would be a very fun place to play chess.

[Update:  Now I think I'm seeing that the Monterey Chess Center may no longer exist.  I hope I'm wrong about that.  What a "clean, well-lighted place for chess" it seemed to be.  It was lovely, and I hope it still is.]

I'm wondering if Robert Louis Stevenson played chess.  If he did, I'll bet he played in Monterey.  Somehow I like to imagine that.

[Update:  Stevenson did play chess.  Here's a quote from his Vailima letters (from Samoa, though, not Monterey):

Have had a swingeing sharp attack in Sydney; beating the
fields for two nights, Saturday and Sunday. Wednesday was
brought on board, TEL QUEL, a wonderful wreck; and now,
Wednesday week, am a good deal picked up, but yet not quite a
Samson, being still groggy afoot and vague in the head. My
chess, for instance, which is usually a pretty strong game,
and defies all rivalry aboard, is vacillating, devoid of
resource and observation, and hitherto not covered with
customary laurels.]

I love this thread !  Thanks to everyone contributing, especially you, phishcake.

Thanks qixel.  I kind of got the impression that the Monterey Chess Center is no longer as well.  Never played there but from what I've seen it looks like it was a nice space for a club (thought the go-ke and go-ishi were a really nice touch in the photograph included here).

If we ever lost you joaoporto it would probably mean its time to stop.