The Watergate Scandal game (1973)

Following up the recent post on Irish Free State Monopoly here’s another game with historic resonance preserved for posterity. The Watergate Scandal dates from 1973 and cost a less than scandalous $2.99 at the time. It is a card game with political points made in a mild satirical fashion. 

The cast of characters

The penalties

Strictly Confidential Instructions: Enhanced by playing in an echoey carpark

Made in 1970s paranoid USA

This (Washington) post is dedicated to Alfie Dennen, creator of Evil Corps game, which features thinly veiled portraits of the likes of the current owner of the Washington Post. A post on the excellent Evil Corps will follow shortly. 

As with the vintage Irish Monopoly set, this card game also features in Google Arts & Culture thanks to The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. 

For the youngsters among us, a brief reminder of what the Watergate Scandal was all about. It was the mother of modern political scandals, unravelling in Washington DC from 1971 to 1974. So it was ongoing when this game came out. It took down the grim administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon and led to his resignation.

The scandal was rooted in the administration’s hopelessly inept attempts to cover up its involvement in a break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building in D.C. on 17th June 1972. The five burglars were arrested and then the press (noticeably Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post) and the Justice Department connected the cash found on the perpetrators to the Nixon re-election campaign committee. Witnesses at the subsequent Senate Watergate hearings testified that Nixon had approved plans to cover up administration involvement in the break-in and that there was a voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office hence all the tapping/bugging references in the game.

Later in 1973 the House commenced an impeachment process against Nixon. The Supreme Court ruled that the President had to release the Oval Office tapes to government investigators. The tapes cooked Nixon’s goose. The House Judiciary Committee charged him with obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress. Nixon resigned on 9th August 1974 before the house could impeach him and the Senate remove him from office. Tricky Dicky remains the only U.S. president to have resigned.

The name Watergate came to stand for a variety of clandestine and illegal activities by the Nixon administration, from bugging the offices of political opponents through ordering investigations of activist groups to using the FBI, CIA and IRS as political tools. Between Nam and Watergate the good ol’ US of A lost its trust and became the cynical and conspiracy-crazy place we know & love today.

Inspired by fork-tongued Nixon, The Watergate Scandal is basically a game of lying and bluffing (like many card games – and political activities). To see how to play it, this recent episode of Game Board Archaeology featuring Hunter and Rob Mattison captures it pretty well.

The game was produced in Illinois in Elk Grove Village, 20 miles northwest of Chicago, next to O’Hare International Airport. Its current population is some 35,000. Its original population were Potawatomi, speakers of an Algonquin language. They were booted off their land in the 1830s and relocated to Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. Stepping into the void created by men right up there with Tricky Dicky on the evil stakes came pioneer farmers from New England. Their civilisation reached its zenith when Elk Grove became the largest industrial park in the United States. The Watergate Scandal card game was the jewel in the crown of that mighty industrial estate.

Three years after the game we got the real silver lining of Watergate, William Goldman (scr.) and Alan Pakula’s (dir.) All The President’s Men, a film practically guaranteed to turn young viewers into journalists. 

All the President’s Men (1976) Dustin Hoffman & Robert Redford and a typewriter (youngfolk, it’s like a PC & printer, just no screen and often no electricity and if you get it wrong you just have to start all over again)

Musical Blind Spots

Am I blind or have I just closed my eyes?

This is a spin-off music game/chat from Magical Music Moments picking up on Doug Miller’s idea (did I mention his new book is available  from Amazon and all good bookshops which pay UK Corporation Tax now? – and I make an appearance in it alongside grander folk like Olympic gold medal rower Greg Searle). So here’s the game as set up by Doug:

Musicians for which you have a complete blind spot. My nominations – Bruce Springsteen, Otis Redding, Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro.

Of course the other half of the game is to persuade us we’re idiots for having these musical blind spots and why.

I’ll start with Tom Waits – great in Martin McDonagh‘s new movie Seven Psychopaths, wonderful in Rumblefish, but goddarn his ‘singing’ voice bugs the shit out of me. It always feels so artificial and inauthentic. I was listening to an old Inheritance Tracks podcast (BBC Radio 4) on my jog this morning, on which Ralph McTell played a Robert Johnson record he was given in lieu of pay at a gig in the 60s – that voice is everything Tom Waits would like to be – but ain’t.

Over to y’all…

Not an ounce of soul in her voice and often out of tune

Magical Music Moments

I’m just moving this parlour game over from the Inheritance Tracks post to its own space here.

The Game:

You have to pinpoint a transcendent moment in a track which constitutes a magical music moment. Provide URL of track in YouTube or similar and pinpoint the precise second the magic happens.

Moment #1 (Adam Gee)

This first one is based on a performance at the Royal Dublin Showgrounds – an uplifting moment when I realised Springsteen is at his best as a gospel/soul voice and got carried away on it.
My City of Ruins (Bruce Springsteen)
The moment is 4:07 but is indivisible from the build up 3:03-4:06
“With these hands With these hands With these hands With these hands”

Moment #2 (Adam Gee)

The second one is a massive cliche but no less powerful for that – it is one of The Great Rock Moments
Stairway To Heaven (Led Zeppelin)
4:18 at which point every fibre of you so needs those drums to come in (to deliver fully at 06:22 and 06:42)

Moment #3 (Doug Miller)

Yusef Lateef (Number 7)

One of the great live jazz albums is ‘Live at Peps’ by Yusef Lateef (Vols 1 and 2 are both great). The track is called ‘Number 7′. It’s got a great feel to it. You can hear the chat in the audience and the drinks being served behind the bar. Everything a great jazz club should be. There are two great changes – the first at 6.49 when a trumpet catches you unawares. The second a few seconds later when the piano comes in at the perfect moment and plays the blues. The audience responds and it’s recorded so well that you imagine yourself as an audience member. Yusef is now 92 and still playing. His album ‘Eastern Sounds’ is one of the great jazz albums – one of my top 10. But that’s another game.

More to follow…

The Northern Line Game

‘The Northern Line Game’ was one of three street games I played with my friends in my 20s. ‘Secret & Obvious’ involved sitting at a cafe table with Stuart and first saying what was obvious about any selected passer-by and then revealing a secret of theirs (perhaps derived from clues in their appearance, perhaps belying how they project themselves). ‘The Name Game’ involved sitting on some steps with Katherine, usually in The City, and guessing the names of passers-by i.e. formulating rather fanciful handles inspired by their appearance. ‘The Northern Line Game’ was also played with Katherine, a fellow Northern Line native with a similar sensibility, now moved on from the shadow of Edgware Castle to Aspen, Colorado. You get on the black line in town and travel out to the suburbs, guessing exactly where each person will get off. The distinction between say a Hendon Central and a Colindale is a fine one but she was masterful in her judgments. Here’s a first stab at mapping out who is where on the Northern line these days. If you can help refine or improve the station names please feel free to add your thoughts below and I’ll amend the map. Also if you can help with the southern stretch which is out of my range…

Parents Screw You Up – Adam Gee Archive #3

I commissioned this one around 2003 for Channel 4’s Family site. It was written by Tim Wright, my collaborator on MindGym. The title and aspects of the design are derived from an anti-drugs campaign of the late 70s or early 80s (Heroin Screws You Up) via a cover article in a university magazine when I was at college by novelist-to-be Wendy Holden, a contemporary of Tim’s and mine at university and fellow Girton girl. Plus of course a tip of the hat to Larkin. This light interactive offered you a route as a parent or as a child. It was commissioned at the same time as The Showbiz Baby Name Generator.

How much did you get screwed up?

How much are you screwing up your off-spring?

The pay-off

One of a pair

Archive #1
Archive #2
Archive #0

I’m Feeling Lucky – The Story 3

To Thine Own Self Be True (Tom Watson)

I was in Rottingdean the other day with the Enfants Terribles when we passed a small shop called Serendipity. I asked them whether they knew what it meant and I ended up explaining it in terms of the Google ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button (which I have to admit I’ve never quite got and always struck me as a bit of a lack of imagination on the part of the presser – it really isn’t difficult in the era of the Web to go on your own random or serendipitous journey).

The Wikipedia entry for Serendipity (which Google freakily informs me Aleks Krotoski shared on tumblr.com on 29 Apr 2011, Aleks having appeared at The Story #1 in February 2010) is one of its more charming entries:

“Serendipity means a “happy accident” or “pleasant surprise”; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The word has been voted one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. ^{[prime wikispam]} However, due to its sociological use, the word has been exported into many other languages. Julius H. Comroe once described serendipity as : to look for a needle in a haystack and get out of it with the farmer’s daughter.”

Meanwhile, over on the other side of Brighton… towards Hove/Portslade my former colleague at Channel 4, Matt Locke, was busy putting the finishing touches to his The Story conference, like the programme for the day which was etched into bars of dark chocolate. When Matt started this one day gathering in 2010 it was a labour of love alongside his day job at C4. I thoroughly enjoyed that first iteration and recorded 4 things I learned from it on Simple Pleasures part 4. It’s interesting looking back at that entry today: the first thing I learnt was:

1) The best conferences (like this one) have only two outputs – Inspiration and catalysing Connections between people.

The same held good for #2 last year featuring the likes of a controversial Adam Curtis, writer Graham Linehan and photographer Martin Parr. I think I was too indolent to write up last year’s.

Connections, inspiration and creativity are the meat and two veg of this blog and what the Web is wonderful at catalysing. Straight after exiting Conway Hall yesterday I met up with Karyn Reeves who was waiting just outside, a statistician from Perth, Australia who specialises in analysing mathematical patterns around AIDS infection. Karyn is only the second person I’ve met in real life through having made contact online. The first was Sandra, a street art aficionado from Jaffa. Karyn writes a lovely blog about vintage Penguin books, which she collects and reads weekly, and I came across her in the wake of reading an old Penguin I picked up at random in my local bookshop, Black Gull, about the trial of Roger Casement. By chance Casement’s defence lawyer, I read, had his chambers at 4 Raymond Buildings from where my best friend now operates. What a tangled Web we weave. So Karyn and I headed back from The Story 3 to Black Gull where she picked up a few more P-p-p-enguins.

Meanwhile back at the start of the day… Meg Pickard of The Guardian, with whom I got into a lively online discussion at one of the earlier two The Story s about where The Guardian should gather their user-generated photos of Antony Gormley’s One and Other  (which we were discussing here and he was explaining here), kicked off the proceedings with a quick update from The Ministry of Stories, the excellent local children’s literacy project based in a Monsters Supplies shop in Hoxton and championed by the likes of Nick Hornby. Part of the ticket price for The Story goes to the now thriving, volunteer-driven project. It’s great to see such a thing burgeoning in Hoxton – when I was a teenager my step-dad would drive me past there on the way to Petticoat Lane where I worked on the market stall outside his shop, he’d point past some grim Victorian estate and say ” ‘Oxton, arse-hole of the universe, never go there, son.” How it has come on over the years…

Next up was Matt Sheret of LastFM in discussion with producer Simon Thornton of Fat Boy Slim fame about telling stories through the album form. Simon was the fella behind the brilliant remix of Brimful of Asha (way better than the original) as well as the marvelous Turn On Tune In Cop Out by Freakpower. The whole debate about the patterns of music consumption in the Web/On Demand age and the relationship between albums and single tracks is a fascinating one still, and particularly for me at the moment as I’m working on a development to do with a classic album with Bob Geldof’s gang at Ten Alps and Universal Music, very much shaped around a carefully constructed sequence of 9 great songs which may or may not now be a thing of the past (I take Simon’s side, but I would wouldn’t I).

At this point Channel 4 wove back in in the form of artist Jeremy Deller, currently setting up his one-man show at the Hayward on the South Bank and the prime mover of Artangel’s The Battle of Orgreave, commissioned and funded by C4. He sees the ’84-’85 miners’ strike as a critical moment in British history (it gets  its own room in his soon-to-open retrospective) and that programme/artistic re-enactment as a way of “exhuming a corpse to give it a proper post-mortem”. He spoke about how everyone of our generation remembers where they were when the miners took on ‘The Iron Lady’ (in spite of the fact I’d voted for her [Streep not Thatch] Meryl Streep’s apology [in the Miltonian sense of explanation/justification] for the strange politics of that movie at the BAFTAs the other night is still bugging me)  – my other half was up in Ayrshire making her graduation film about the miners’ wives with a dodgy old University of Ulster camera, while I was visiting my oldest friend at Baliol where a furious debate about how to support the strike was erupting in their common room, featuring toffs in donkey jackets as well as more grown-up, committed people than me, who was still relying on the likes of Joe Strummer and Elvis Costello to give me some political insight). Deller’s still- image only presentation was one of the highlights of the day for me, centred on one iconic photograph of a miner father and his glam rock showbiz son.

Next up, blogger Liz Henry who told the fascinating story of A Gay Girl in Damascus, a murky tale of hoaxing and fictional blogging (an area I find fascinating as an emerging writing form and which formed a substantial part of the now traditional annual Story lunch with Tim Wright and Rob Bevan, the former in particular much interested in this territory [and the person who taught me the value of the image-only presentation when I helped host the launch of his outstanding In Search of Oldton project at Channel 4 HQ a few years ago]).  I learnt a lovely new word too ‘Sockpuppeting’ – to comment on your own blog both positively and negatively as a way of stimulating interest/activity. One of the interesting facts that emerged was that The Guardian published the initial story without establishing proper (off-line) sources based on people who had actually met the Gay Girl in question in real life (shades of Karyn above and Tom/Emily below).

Late on Thursday afternoon, the eve of The Story, I met for the first time Anthony Owen, Head of Magic (arguably the best job-title in the business) at Objective TV, home of Derren Brown. We were kicking off a project to do with consumerism. Lo and behold within 18 hours he’s up on stage before me doing a magic trick and explaining the role of narrative within that art/entertainment form. Particularly interesting for me as the youngest Enfant Terrible has recently become obsessed with performing magic, daily learning tricks off of YouTube and practising them with his chums over Skype (before posting them back on YouTube and Facebook). Anthony singled out the quality of encapsulating “something we’d love to have happen” (e.g. being psychic, becoming immortal, etc.) as the defining characteristic of a great trick – so sawing a woman in half only to reunite the two still living ends is a story about immortality which also has the key quality of being sum-upable in a sentence.

Coincidence and serendipity came to the fore again in the afternoon when Emily Bell, formerly of The Guardian online and now teaching at Columbia (who I first had the pleasure of hanging out with on the panel of judges she lead at The Guardian Student Journalism Awards a few years ago, in The Ivy so clearly a former era) interviewed Tom Watson MP about the phone-hacking scandal whilst: Meanwhile across town… in Wapping Rupert Murdoch was entering the newsroom of the Currant Bun and sticking two Aussie fingers up at the British establishment and public, who momentarily humiliated him last summer, by announcing the impending launch of The Sun on Sunday. The audience was riveted by the recounting of events from both the MP and Guardian perspectives, and the interview typified the rich and perfectly balanced mix of contributions making up the day’s programme. Watson predicted that there was a massive PC/Data hacking dimension to the scandal still to break.

Vying with Deller for highlight of the day was Scott Burnham. The last time I met Scott was in the back of a Nissan Cube in which he was filming me spouting on about why I love London. At this year’s The Story he spoke vibrantly about design in the city and urban play through a classic tale of 7 Coins, the last vestiges of a beautiful public art project in Amsterdam. He told of the construction of a Stefan Sagmeister piece made up of 250,000 one cent pieces and its subsequent thoughtless destruction by dumb cops who were trying to protect the raw cash (still held as evidence in the police station). His conclusion was that we’ll always have Paris… I mean, we’ll always have Amsterdam… he means, we always have the story if not the creation itself. He took the 7 coins, painted blue on one side, out of his pocket to show me and the Royal College of Art’s Bronac Ferran as we chatted outside the hall during the tea break.

Also up in contention as a highlight was artist Ellie Harrison, author of Confessions of a Recovering Data Collector. She started her work focused on gathering everyday data on her life or ‘life tracking’ at Nottingham Trent university art school and then later at  Glasgow School of Art (where our host Matt once studied). An early such work was ‘Eat 22’ in which she recorded everything she ate for a year  in 1,560 photos. At the start of her talk she positioned herself firmly as a Thatcher’s Child (a resonant link back to Deller’s earlier session) and was sporting a Bring Back British Rail T-shirt (a campaign she champions, also resonant as my aforementioned best-friend above worked on that Kafkaesque privitisation). So food and beyond, Ellie’s obsession and the thread through her work seems to be with Consumption – she spoke about her development with great humour and insight (including into her own compulsions). From ‘Eat 22’ she went on to record all her everyday actions in a spreadsheet, in turn converted to colour-coded graphs, which is when the addiction kicked in. I was sitting in a brainstorm at an indie production company a couple of weeks ago discussing mental health and happiness when a colleague I have know a long time revealed he’s been keeping a numerical record of his mood on a precise scale of 1 to 100 every day for well over a decade, with the last five years available likewise in Excel form. So art/fiction are no stranger than life.

Preloaded I have known since they were born, as I worked with founder Paul Canty, as well as Rob Bevan and Tim Wright, on a game called MindGym way back when. Paul’s colleague,  Phil Stuart, and writer Tom Chatfield talked us through the game of self-discovery, death and philosophy they made for Channel 4 Education – The End.  This rounded off a fine day, alongside Karen Lubbock and Jeremy Leslie on mags and Karen magazine in paricular, ‘a magazine made out of the ordinary’, and a lively turn from Danny O’Brien on josticks, hacking, anarchy and the universe. And where can you go from there…

Among these 250,000 are 7 coins with a story

It smells like …victory

I’m getting into the swing of the lovely Twitter-based word game Artwiculate – born in Belfast, thought of and designed by atto, improved and realised by Johnston North.

Diaphanous was one of my first gos at Artwiculate. I tried one a couple of nights earlier but it was only 5 minutes before the end of the 24 hours and it didn’t register – the word was Quagmire. “I admire a good quagmire, something you can really get stuck into”

The challenge of writing well in 140 characters is something else you can really get stuck into – it has something of the unities of classical drama about it. Some people really seem to shine at it like Russell no T Davies of Wired UK.

I came across Artwiculate because I’m always on the look-out for inspirational word stuff in my capacity as a non-exec (NED – another word game I indulge in is collecting TLAs) of Wordia, the video dictionary which is a quagmire in itself once you immerse yourself in all those lovely words and definitions like Vibrato, Neologism and Flannel.

Update 12.01.10

Some of my recent Artwiculate entries:

A John Osborne one…

The Avocado Bathroom Suite – a drama by Kitsch N. Sink. Jimmy looks back in anger on a miserable visit to Habitat with posh cow Alison.

A Steely Dan one…

Yesterday’s Ephemeral is today’s Ephem: no static at all

An Evelyn Waugh/Men at Arms one…

Lissome up, men, I want this march lithe, quick and graceful – by the left, lithe, quick and graceful march! left, right, left, right…