Vancouver sculptor Robert Chaplin has a new piece he's showing around these days. It is a travel chess set made of Lego. The board is assembled in standard Lego pieces, which are then glued together permanently. The chessmen are unpacked from their storage compartment and mounted to the board, fitting tightly together in a dense thicket. You move them with a little tool (also made of Lego, of course) that allows you to grip the head of each piece and reposition it on the playing surface.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think the whole city would be improved if people stopped more often in the middle of whatever they were doing to play chess with a stranger.
Mr. Chaplin's set is only the most recent product of his endlessly inventive imagination, an irrepressible creative energy I very much associate with Vancouver's emerging Gastown art zone, where he has his studio. I've seen (and coveted) a number of his art objects over the years, not coming across them in galleries or shows, just whenever I run into Mr. Chaplin on the street.
Like those bear and bull carvings I mentioned in a previous column. Or the obsidian figurine Raven Turning into a Lawyer. Or a solid gold Brussels sprout, or a silver-plated CN railway spike engraved with hobo script, or even the world's first nano-scale book called Teeny Ted From Turnip Town, based on a text written by his brother, Malcolm Chaplin, which Mr. Chaplin etched on a silicon wafer. (He read it aloud to me, from memory of course, since you could hardly see the thing.)
Still, among all these eccentric gems, the Lego travel chess set has really caught my attention, no doubt because I've been travelling so much lately. Too much, really. In the past month I've been away more than I've been at home. London, Las Vegas, Toronto, Minneapolis. ... When I got home last Thursday - in time for Canada Day barbecues, hurray! - I swear I would have got down and kissed the tarmac except, of course, you never get anywhere near the tarmac at modern airports.
But all this moving around has also had another effect. It has exposed me to the culture of business travel, immersing me in the social ecology of security checkpoints and departure lounges, breezeways, ramps, taxis, hotel lobbies and an endless landscape of restaurants.
In this professionalized environment, the travel chess set is highly anachronistic. From the era of Atlantic crossings and six-week visits to Venice for the air, the travel chess set was intended to give strangers a way to bridge the long gaps that used to arise while travelling: gaps in time created by inevitable delays, and the social gap between strangers, which could be bridged politely and enjoyably over a game.
That whole construct seems antiquated today.
There are still delays, of course. Every business traveller will have a horror story or two. But the much more common experience is that everything pretty much unfolds according to the e-mailed itinerary: Flight on time. Baggage at the carousel. Reservation in place at the hotel. With everything working so well, there's hardly any opportunity to sit down over a travel chess board.
In a way, a parallel can be drawn between that new world of business travel and the way we all move through our own city.
I don't know about you, but I'm not hearing a lot of chat between strangers in Vancouver.
It's not like we're particularly rude; I don't think we are. But just as in an airport, chat between strangers in the modern city is difficult when everybody is running from place to place in accordance with itineraries and schedules, reservations and bookings, the whole time wired into BlackBerrys and cellphones.
I guess it is pointless to ask people to slow down. But check out this travel chess set and ask yourself what it must have been like to live in an era when such a diversion was necessary and desirable.
I think that is probably why I have responded so strongly to Mr. Chaplin's latest work. Yes, it is a nod to the more leisurely travel of another era. But I think of it also as a double double entendre on the topic of gaps between strangers. The game that nobody has the time to play. The visual memory of childhood, via those intensely familiar Lego shapes and textures, a time when games were the whole business of life.
Mr. Chaplin's travel chess sets are a finished idea in one sense. You can buy one, if you want.
But the work is unfinished in the sense that Mr. Chaplin's ultimate goal is to give one, as a gift, to Garry Kasparov. He will meet Mr. Kasparov anywhere, he insists. He will fly to any airport in the world through which the greatest chess player in history might be travelling and hand over the travel chess set.
He only wants a photo of himself and Mr. Kasparov in return.
I met Mr. Kasparov in connection with another story, and have agreed to try to put Mr. Chaplin in touch. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, I'm not going anywhere. I'm just going to bask in the pleasure of being home. Go to a barbecue. Maybe play some chess with a stranger.
Happy Canada Day, everyone.
Timothy Taylor is a novelist
and journalist based in Vancouver. His latest book is the novel Story House.
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