Whenever I find myself in a conversational lull–say, in an elevator, at a distant cousin’s wedding, or perhaps even admist the strum und drang of my chosen work environment–I bring up Lou Reed. He never fails me. People start finger popping, mumbling about walking on wild sides, or alternatively searching for a vein in their arm to puncture. The astute ones will make Laurie Anderson references, and others will try to pick apart Reed’s greater cultural impact. Sure, they’ll say, the Velvet Underground has attained deification, and rightfully so. But what about Reed’s solo work? Is “Sex With Your Parents (Motherfucker) Part II” really Guggenheim material?

Chess, as a sport, has never attracted heavy television coverage. The focused intensity of former NASA engineers and fashion-starved mensa kids does not project the kind of sex appeal provided by a pair of 34C’s bouncing their way through, well, any kind of environment you can imagine. Chess is not in the movement; it is the spaces in between, the slowly honed strategy emerging from the mists of muscle-less rigor, the quick, agile hand darting across the serious white and brown squares of the playing field.

“Tricky Dick won. Close, but no squeaker. Carlos threw a bash. His mock-Roman suite, mobsters and Mormons, election returns on TV. Call girls told I-blew-JFK stories. Farlan Brown said [President Nixon] was no headman. He was more like an S&M slave. He’d get stinko and bomb some Third World shit-hole. He’d fry some kids and get all misty then. He’d bring in a sick chick with a whip to retool him.”

- James Ellroy, Blood’s a Rover

The question is: have we reached a point in our collective human evolution where we want to try and marshal our instincts to create a more ‘just’ society, or do we risk negating what it is that makes us human? Is greed inherent to being human, or is there a system that can weed this out?