Two Minutes Hat

Hat Week has arrived, and Northwestern is poised to take on Illinois in the high-stakes Battle for the Land of Lincoln Trophy, the Champaign-Urbana Campaign-Urbana, the Uproarial at Memorial, The Donnyzook against the Fistgerald.

I can only use Don King language to express the pugnaciosity of the
hatritude of these two teams. Incidentally, a cursory google image search
for pictures of Don King reveals that apparently he now makes public
appearances only in air-brushed patriotic jackets, although the image to
the right from a Spanish-language version of his wikipedia page
demonstrates perhaps Don King's most audacious publicity strategy yet

One of the first BYCTOM posts expressed the thesis that the Northwestern-Illinois rivalry (then contested for the Sweet Sioux Tomahawk) was the wost rivalry in all of college football. Things have apparently gotten a bit more intense in recent years. One reason for the ratcheting of tensions between the Illini and the Wildcats is the national attention from the Wrigley Field game. Of course, most of that attention stemmed from the setting of the game at the Friendly Confines and because eleventh hour safety concerns caused the creation of the Forbidden End Zone. People tuned into that game for the novelty and to see if straying near the Forbidden End Zone would trigger some sort of Indiana Jones trap that would cover center field with an array of impaled corpses, impossibly disgusting Hollywood insects, and an unnecessary Kate Capshaw musical number made entertaining only by the presence of the guy who has some sort of modified tommy gun that only fires when he is also maniacally cackling.

Despite any recent intra-nois feuding between the two teams, this is a rickety shell of a rivalry game for a number of important reasons. For one, the Illinois-Northwestern game, as far as I can tell, has never had any bearing on the Big Ten title, at least not since college football has abandoned archaic rules such as the Musket Point or the Falconry Circle. Nor has a loss for one team been catastrophic enough to knock them out of any serious contention, with the exception of maybe the last Big Ten slot in a bowl game so lacking in prestige that it was the undercard to an illegal monkey wrestling championship.

"The saber pierced the monkey's liver. He howled for a minute
then lay on the ground, done for. Jake was also done for. He had
1300 pesetas on the big one. The one called El Apuñalador. Jake
swallowed his whiskey. He stopped only to punch his monkey-
minder on the way out of the door. 'Bad advice,' Jake said."
Hemingway ended up cutting the entire monkey stabbing
scene from the The Sun Also Rises.

A college football rivalry should stir up inexplicable passion in both fanbases. There should be the feeling that a crappy season can at least be salvaged a victory over your team's rival. As a Northwestern fan, I do not really get that feeling about the Illini, who I tend to support in Big Ten games out of Big Ten former cellar-dweller solidarity. And I'm certain that no fan of a team in the Big Ten has ever uttered the phrase "at least we beat Northwestern" to console themselves because Northwestern, despite its recent run as a respectable college football team is still historically the worst team in the history of big-time college football, and Big Ten teams are still reeling in disbelief that they can lose to Northwestern under any circumstance, even blatant Northwestern chicanery such as surreptitiously replacing the offensive line with farming equipment or switching out an opponent's regular hypnotist with an evil hypnotist.

There are some sources of rising tensions between the teams and fans (I enjoy using the diplomatic reporters' phrase "rising tensions" when I'm talking about something as hilariously inconsequential as college football, as if Zook has given some sort of saber-rattling speech on the steps of the Illinois athletic department announcing a tariff on crew cuts or Fitz has recognized the Illinois backup as their legitimate quarterback and will only agree to play defense against him). On this Champaign-area radio show, for example, the co-hosts play a clip of Illinois coach Paul Petrino complaining about Pat Fitzgerald's description of Northwestern recruits followed by one of the hosts heroically attempting to get angry about Northwestern (the callers, for their part, don't seem to share his enmity about Northwestern and are mostly cautiously optimistic about the 4-0 Illini in a shocking display of reasonableness by callers to a sports talk radio show). Chicagoland Illini players led by Martez Wilson seem to take exception to Northwestern's "Chicago's Big Ten Team" slogan after the 'Cats's marketing strategy has successfully managed to make Northwestern a household word in Chicagoland households filled with Northwestern alums or fans of a Big Ten team that is currently playing Northwestern.

An Illini fan takes exception to the self-proclaimed
"Sausage King of Chicago" noting that there are
representatives from the finest Midwestern sausage
factories all throughout the Chicagoland area

I'm always fascinated by athletes such as Wilson applying ex post facto bulletin board material to their wins. After all, it takes an exceptional amount of skill, dedication, and focus to become a college athlete. I'm assuming that Martez Wilson would have played well even if Northwestern's athletic department had marketed the team as the Mewling Feeblemen of the Big Ten because he's Martez Wilson and he tends to play well in football games because he is a very good football player. This effect, however, permeates football on all levels. Perhaps the most dramatic examples come from the Patriots episodes of NFL Films's excellent America's Game Superbowl retrospectives. Patriots players constantly talk about getting motivated by slights such as a team packing its luggage to the next playoff game. In one hilariously melodramatic scene before the 2005 Super Bowl, Bill Belichick's pregame speech consists of reading out the Eagles' planned parade route. The players claimed in interviews how much this speech motivated them, although I suspect that most of their impetus to win came from their life-long dedication to excelling in football culminating in the most important game in their professional lives. What I find great about these slights is that players and coaches are apparently furious about foresight and logistics more than anything, as if Boston did not have plans for a championship parade and at the last minute just found a bunch of cars and ticker tape sitting unused in a basement in Faneuil Hall.

A respectful lack of preparation left Boston
desperately lacking festive implements for
the Patriots' championship parade left
players triumphantly waving around
artifacts such as Gouveneur Morris's leg
stump

Another factor weighing against this inconsequential rivalry game is the Land of Lincoln Trophy, which I've taken to calling The Hat. This is clever because the trophy is literally a hat. But in a college football world littered with hat-based trophies, it is the worst of all possible trophy hats. The Land of Lincoln trophy is a hat trophy permanently attached to a base. This is disastrous. If your team is saddled with a hat trophy, the least you can do is go whole hog and make it into an actual hat that you can put on your head in triumph. Instead, all players can do with this trophy is hold it up or, more satisfyingly, rip it violently from its base and then parade around with it in all of its goofy hat trophy glory while yelling Lincoln slogans such as "A hat trophy divided against itself can be worn." On the other hand, at least it is not as ridiculous as the trophy ideas up for vote for the Iowa-Nebraska LEGENDS DIVISION showdown.

Options include a corn bowl FILLED WITH REAL CORN or a corn cob shyly
waving a husk arm

Of course, possibly of more interest to Northwestern fans is how the team rallies around all-everything quarterback Dan Persa. If Persa can return to last year's impressive form, the Wildcats could be a factor in the Big Ten, but if it sputters against the impressive Illini defense, it may be a short season.

AMERICA'S GAME FOR AMERICANS

If you do choose to check out the America's Game retrospectives, I highly recommend watching the 1976 Raiders episode. It captures the essence of the 1970s raiders: a fully functioning Al Davis in his prime, John Madden calling refs "jerks" before succumbing to the sweet life of luxury buses and multi-fowl meat concoctions, players alighting from buses wearing full-length mink coats, and this guy.

Raiders announcer Bill King spent the 1970s nearly indistinguishable from a
Get Smart villain called the Groovy Guru

I would say that the 2000 Ravens one is also notable for Trent Dilfer's appearance and the comical discrepancy between the amount of credit he gives himself for the Ravens' victory versus everyone else in the entire universe, but now you can watch ESPN and get the same effect with the unfortunate omission of Shannon Sharpe soliloquies.

CLASSICAL MUSIC RIOT

Hopefully the spirited rivalry between Northwestern and Illini fans will remain in check this weekend and no major riots will ensue. Of course, while a Wildcat-Illini imbroglio seems relatively unlikely, there are all sorts of triggers to incite crowds, such as operas and ballets. Wikipedia has helpfully compiled a list of classical music riots, although the writer of the page serves as a wet blanket to the whole thing by noting that "the usual respectful and sedate manner of classical music audiences means that any sort of rough behavior, ranging from catcalls to shoving, can be seen as a comparative 'riot'."

Probably the most famous of these disturbances is from the Paris premier of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The combination of the music and Vaslav Najinsky's choreography apparently stunned the crowd, who reportedly began yelling, and inevtiably descended into fisticuffs in the aisles, as one does. There is even a disputed account of French composer Camille Saint-Saëns taking umbrage at the use of the bassoon and storming out. The most influential opera riot is certainly the 1830 performance of Daniel Auber's La Muette de Portici, which ignited national sentiment and spurred opera lovers into the streets to rebel against their iron-fisted Dutch overlords.

This 1831 Jacobus Schoemaker Doyer
painting depicts Dutch ship captain Jan
Van Speyck detonating his gunboat before it
can be captured by Belgian rebels. Van
Speyck can't believe it either

Few of the other riots seem as dramatic. For example, one of these riots involves a 1927 performance of George Antheil's Ballet Méchanique, a piece that utilized mechanical sounds, such as fans simulating airplane propellers. According to the wikipedia page, "the fans were positioned to blow into the audience, upsetting the patrons." Another ended poorly for composer Erik Satie. His surrealistic ballet Parade involved collaboration with Picasso who built the sets, and Serge Diaghilev Ballets Russes company. Satie took exception to a poor review and sent an angry postcard to the reviewer. The reviewer then sued him and, again, as whoever wrote this wikipedia page put it "at the trial Cocteau was arrested and beaten by police for repeatedly yelling "arse" in the courtroom. Satie was given a sentence of eight days in jail."

LESS CHAT, MORE HAT

They're coming for the Hat, Illinois. You'd better be prepared because when Fitz knows there's hat on the line, he's going all out. All out for the hat. For weeks, he's thought of nothing but hat. And now it is upon him. Him and the team. Two coaches. Two teams. One state. One hat. The entire nation is watching, and they only want to know one thing: at the end of the day, who is going home with the hat? Nothing else matters other than the hat.



Hat.

Hoops Hindered

With the football team squaring off against cross-border rivals to determine bowl position, Wildcat basketball players have been going down like the chimps in Project X, only instead of radiation poisoning through shady government flight simulators, they have been suffering from battered tendons that come from playing basketball.

Carmody calls Northwestern's newest play this season, the call for the
ambulance. Hopefully the call will not be answered by Hemingway as it would
expose players to inadquate World War I-era concepts, such as brandy as a
legitimate medical technology, short, terse tourniquets, and the possibilities
of face-punching wholly inconsistent with the mission of the Red Cross

Northwestern lost its best player in Kevin "Mantis" Coble who seems like the only player in college basketball who could actually play on one leg if his teammates carried him Leftwich-like up and down the court and let him heave weird-looking jumpers off of a single spindly limb as he leans awkwardly in any number of possible directions and continues to score. Jeff Ryan also went down leaving Jeremy Nash as the only senior, although he has been struggling with a troubling heart issue that he thankfully has under control.

Henry "Poo" Yee demonstrates the southern praying mantis
style of Kung Fu, showing clearly that while the horrible
Coble injury may have been a serious blow to Northwestern
Hoops, it will almost certainly spare readers of this blog
any more allusions this season to the Mantis nickname and
then the inevitable run-on sentence somehow justifying it
as the sentence balloons up like a giant dwarf star before
violently exploding and engulfing every bit of sense in its
meager orbit and by the way since we're already in the middle
of a sentence that apparently has no beginning, middle, or
end anywhere in sight I might as well mention that
according to "Poo" Yee, "in the southern praying mantis
system, circles are everything and everywhere" so in case
anybody pulls your sleeve on the street asking you which
simple shape best fits into southern praying mantis kung-fu,
you can you know what let's just end this right here before
somebody blows out an ACL

On the one hand, Northwestern's season has gotten a lot more bleak, and pre-season hopes of finally getting to the promised land of the NCAA tournament have dwindled. On the other hand, this season is all about watching young players develop, especially sophomore center Kyle Rowley who will hopefully do to Big Ten frontcourt players what the USC marching band did to Ricardo Montalban at the end of The Naked Gun.

MOVING THE CHESSPIECES: A WINTER OF BASEBALL

Baseball's winter rumor mill is in full swing as a nation recovers from the joyless inevitability of another Yankee title. No doubt the Cubs brain-trust is hard at work peering over a giant baseball field and pushing little plastic players around with instruments used only by croupiers and four-star generals.

Jim Hendry scans the playing field for free agents
and bargain trades. Incidentally, this picture is not
only notable for inexpicably being the second Bill
and Ted reference on BYCTOM in as many posts, but
also for being part of a series of Bill and Ted trading
cards as referenced on this site. In case you are
curious, the back side, instead of having Napoleon's
risk statistics or maximum water-slide speed, lists
this crucial plot point: "While Bill and Ted continue to
round up subjects for their report, Deacon entertains
Napoleon. Napoleon devours the ice cream and wins the
Ziggy Piggy award"

Job number one for the Cubs is getting rid of cantankerous right fielder Milton Bradley. Bradley's power did not come around, he hit a paltry .257 for the year, and his defense in right bordered on comical, climaxing in his memorable posing and throwing the ball into the stands then watching helplessly as baserunners unsportingly took advantage of his temporary lack of knowledge about the exact number of outs. On the other hand, Bradley managed to finish with a .378 on-base percentage for the season, which is fairly remarkable considering his batting average. He was also extraordinarily entertaining, wearing a Bluto-style beard, coming up with umpire conspiracies, feuding with combustible manager Lou Piniella, complaining about fickle Cub fans, and bludgeoning reporters with the phrase "what else you got" to the point where the Cubs were forced to suspend him for insubordination, truculance, and redundancy. Obviously, Bradley has to go from an everybody in the organization hates him standpoint, but from a baseball standpoint, Bradley was an effective offensive player who was starting to put up scary numbers towards the end of last season and is going to rebound into a nice year unless he disappears into the Los Angeles underground during the offseason and becomes a soldier of fortune.

John Grabow, the least terrifying lefty out of the pen, will be back, while the reviled Aaron Heilman gets to ply his dark arts for the Arizona Diamondbacks in exchange for reliever Scott Maine and outfielder/first baseman Ryne White, who Hendry compared favorably to journeyman slugger and 2003 MLB wing-eating champion Matt Stairs, disguising his attempt to placate testy Cubs fans by getting another Ryne into the Cubs's system.

In other Cubs news, Carlos Zambrano won his third Silver Slugger award as the best hitting pitcher in the National League and presumably all of baseball unless the American Leagues are lying in wait for some sort of terrible turning of the tables. Carlos Zambrano is the reason why the National League should continue to exist without a designated hitter. There are few things more riveting during a baseball game, especially a baseball game where the Cubs are playing and therefore actively stomping on the dreams of an either desperate or drunken fanbase, than a Zambrano at-bat. The possiblilities are tantalizing: a launch onto Waveland or Sheffield, a base hit followed by an ill-advised head-first dive into second, a swing-related injury, a strikeout followed by an assault on a bat (purists will note that Zambrano's wrath at Gatorade-dispensing products is limited to poor pitching performances), charging the mound, throwing his helmet to reveal an ill-conceived Zambrano hairstyle such as blond frosted tips or a jheri curl or even a blond jheri-curl, running out into center field and lighting a giant Z on fire, grabbing the home plate umpire and lashing his wrist to the official and initiating a mutual thrusting at each other with butterfly knives while a handful of shirtless vest-wearers come out of the bullpen to idle in the background; I'd much rather watch Zambrano strike out on three straight pitches with runners in scoring position than watch the likes of Aaron Miles pick up a bat in the general vicinity of the batter's box.

The myriad potential consequences of a Zambrano at-bat

SPECULATION SEASON

Saturday marks the end of the football regular season, but marks the beginning of endless bowl speculation, back-biting, and preparing for conference championship games for those conferences burdened with unnecessary features such as even numbered teams, divisions, and occasionally titles that accurately reflect the number of teams in said conference. Not for the Big Ten, an ascetic conference where the season's conflagrations on the muddy midwestern gridirons settle the championship except most years when they don't and it's a festive conucopia of various Big Ten teams, some of whom will lose in lucrative BCS bowls. But hopefully the 'Cats will prevail in a stadium sure to be painted with the crimson hues of the fearsome badger.

Orson Welles vs. Ernest Hemingway: Who was the greatest bearded inebriate?

Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles stood at the top of their respective mediums. Revered as geniuses in their lifetimes, they lived at a time where artistic accomplishment mingled with celebrity in a nascent age of mass media as evidenced by these fantastic Salvador Dalí commercials. Both responded in the only reasonable way: by growing beards and lashing out upon the world through heroic acts of drunken derring-do. But which man can truly be called the twentieth century's greatest bearded inebriate?

FUCK YOU, I CAN TALK TO BEARS

Hemingway moved around an awful lot, including stops in Paris, Toronto, Key West, and Cuba, occasionally returning to the U.S. to punch somebody in the face. His time in Paris is of course chronicled wonderfully in A Moveable Feast where he delves into the Paris literary expatriate community including the acerbic Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, whose relationship can best be described as a grandiose celebration of dysfunction, Ezra Pound, and gaping-mouthed gadfly Ford Madox Ford, who Hemingway describes as "breathing heavily through a heavy, stained mustache and holding himself upright as an ambulatory, well clothed, up-ended hogshead."

Ford Madox Ford, in fact, seemed be photographed only with his mouth agape, not unlike a muppet or the type of fish that sucks the muck off of aquarium walls. This posture fascinates me, since it did not appear to stop him from having a somewhat rakish reputation. I've done some cursory searching to see if Ford Madox Ford suffered from some sort of condition that gave him this unique expression or if he wore it as a sort of bizarre affectation of perennial mouth-breathing surprise. Barbara Bedford, author of A Female Rake, a biography of his lover Violet Hunter with whom he had a ten-year affair, describes him as "tall and thin and fair-haired, with a blond mustache that failed to conceal defective front teeth and a mouth that always hung open," and contemporary Wyndham Lewis flatteringly called him a "flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at a zoo inviting buns - especially when ladies were present," but neither offered a reason.

The slackened jaw of Ford Madox Ford remained a staple of the Paris literary world

The greatest hagiography of Hemingway comes from his close friend and acolyte A.E. Hotchner in Papa Hemingway. Hotchner befriended Hemingway in the late 1940s on an assignment from Cosmopolitan magazine when it aspired to literary ambition instead of serving as a glossy clearinghouse for makeup tips and an apparently inexhaustible number of ways to bring out the animal in your man. Hotchner quickly joined Hemingway's intimate circles and fell under his drunken, bearded spell as the author regaled him with his considerable macho resumé and introduced him to the pre-Castro Cuban world of fishing, drinking, and a large array of bloodsports. My favorite passage involves Hotchner's trip with Hemingway to the circus:

We went around to a side entrance on Fiftieth Street and Ernest banged on the door until an attendant appeared. He tried to turn us away but Ernest had a card signed by his old friend John Ringling North, which stated that the bearer was to be admitted to the circus at any time, any place...

Ernest became fascinated with the gorilla; although the keeper was nervous as hell and warned him not to stand too close, Ernest wanted to make friends with the animal. He stood close to the cage and talked to the gorilla in a staccato cadence and kept talking, and finally the gorilla, who appeared to be listening, was so moved he pickedup his plate of carrots and dumped it on top of its head; then he started to wimper; sure signs, the keeper said, of his affection...

"I should get through to him," Ernest said, staying with the polar bear, "but I haven't talked bear talk for some time and I may be rusty."...He began to speak to the bear in a soft muscial voice totally unlike his gorilla language, and the bear stopped pacing. Ernest kept on talking amd the words, or should I say sounds, were unlike any I had ever heard. The bear backed up a little and grunted, and then it sat on its haunches and, looking straight at Ernest, it began to make a series of noises through its nose, which made it sound like an elderly gentleman with severe catarrh.

"I'll be goddamned!" the keeper said.

In fact, Hemingway's prowess with bears becomes almost a minor theme in the book. Earlier, Hotchner refers to an incident where Hemingway got out of his car and confronted a snarling black bear by calling it a "miserable-son-of-a-bitch" and insulting its place on the grand bear pecking order and instilled in it a fear of cars. Later on, he describes an anecdote where Hemingway claimed to have killed three grizzlies single-handedly with a rifle, ostensibly because he did not want to wash bear blood off of his knuckles.

Unlike modern Grizzly Man Timothy Treadwell who saw nature as
benign and harmonious, Hemingway saw the common character of the
universe as not harmony, but hostility, chaos, and murder

LIFE IS BUT A BEAR-BAITING

Hotchner's book is full of Hemingway's accounts of his past heroics some of which do not specifically involve bears, including his famous claim that he led the liberation of Paris while serving as a journalist in the Second World War and that he had narrowly avoided a duel with General Modesto during the Spanish Civil War over his wife because the republican partisans did not have enough money for a monument customarily given to all dead generals.

Hotchner and Hemingway at a bullfight (Hotchner is on the right) and after
hunting where undoubtedly those son-of-a-bitch pheasants planned to show
them the business end of their beaks and claws until Hemingway shot them in
the nick of time except for the big one, the smart one, that he hunted down and
clubbed to death with the butt of his shotgun for its goddamn impudence

Naturally, being a Hemingway book, Hotchner describes in great detail a 1954 trip to Spain where Hemingway could soak up as much bullfighting and booze as he could handle, having developed a considerable tolerance for both. Bullfighting was Hemingway's favorite bloodsport, although in Cuba he settled for cockfighting, and presumably in Hong Kong he would go to the Kumite to see a vicious battle featuring nature's greatest predator: man. I do not recommend reading Death in the Afternoon before attending a bullfight unless you are fully prepared to accept that the courage and artistry that Hemingway so painstakingly describes in the matadorical arts on closer inspection turns out to be a bunch of guys in Liberace costumes slowly stabbing a bull to death and ramming it with armored horses and then parading the carcass around the ring while accompanied by jaunty bullfighting music serving as a festive counterpoint to the gruesome spectacle.

Hemingway favorite Antonio Ordoñez doin' work in the 1950s. Ordoñez had a rivalry
with Luis Miguel Dominguin and they squared off in series of what Hotchner
describes as "deadly combats" known as mano a manos where two bullfighters attempt
to one-up each other. The mano a manos ended somwhat anticlimactically as Dominguin
got badly gored in the groin and soon after Ordoñez was wounded which, as Hotchner
mournfully reflects, "really put the quietus on our bullfight plans, and the intricately
worked-0ut itinerary had to be discaded."

Hotchner's account gives us everything you'd want in a literary lion: world-traveling bloodsport tourism, rambling violent anecodotes of questionable veracity, constant dropping of pithy epigrams, all fueled by a mainline of wine, whiskey, and anything else on hand.

WITHOUT ATTACKING PLANES, I THINK IT WOULD BE NICE TO PUT IN A WORD FOR THE GOOD OLD CHOO-CHOO

Welles, much like Hemingway, spent much time abroad in Europe. Of course, while Hemingway chose the life of the expatriate, Welles found himself blacklisted from the Hollywood establishment, mainly thanks to the steely-eyed vengeance of William Randolph Hearst, establishing a good rule of thumb in Hollywood not to make movies satirizing powerful media magnates with a penchant for declaring enemies as communists and sending a number of governmental goons to prevent them from working and forcing them to assert specifically why they are against communism in HUAC meetings.

Hearst did not shy away from attacking his enemies with his contacts in the
FBI and the secret of the ooze

One of Welles's projects abroad was a BBC travel show entitled Around the World with Orson Welles, a series of documentaries highlighting quirky aspects of Europe including, in a particularly Hemingway-esque touch, Spanish bullfighting. Here, for example, is a clip from the show, with Welles giving a short speech about the joys of train travel that starts out scripted but then rambles off into his own stream-of-consciousness narrative about trains without attempting to short-change the venerable airlines, an effect not unlike a far more articulate James Brown rattling off dance moves as they come to him in a bout of inspiration from the James Brown song that he is dancing to.


Thanks to the internet, there is also a portion of his documentary on Basque country available here, which is put together more effectively, although it is somewhat disappointing that the entire series is not just him ruminating on whatever mode of transportation happens to be available to him including fan boats, monorails, and zeppelins, mules, and Ferris wheels.

HERE UNDER PROTEST IS BEEF BURGERS

Of course, Around the World with Orson Welles does not really count in the standings for greatest bearded inebriate. Welles in the above clips is entirely clean shaven and at least apparently sober. Welles's greatest period of bearded inebriety came with his return to the U.S. in the late 1960s.

Much like Hotchner and Hemingway, Joseph McBride fell in with Welles during his older years and became a member of his circle. And, like Hotchner, McBride published a celebratory defense of Welles entitled Whatever Happened to Orson Welles, although his account is less personal than Hotchner's and written with a clearer agenda of showing Welles as a viable filmmaker through his later years despite his unfinished projects.

McBride became involved with Welles playing Mister Pister, a satire of a nerdy film critic in his epically unfinished The Other Side of the Wind. This film rivals his Don Quixote for his greatest abandoned project spanning years, although the impossibility of finishing a Don Quixote film has essentially become an iron law of Hollywood.

Joseph McBride and Orson Welles, with Peter Bogdanovich on the set of The
Other Side of the Wind (right). Welles is wearing a linen suit stolen from the
set of Fantasy Island originally designed to hold upwards to two Ricardo
Montalbans

McBride is up against a lot of Welles ridicule as he blearily starred in terrible movies, made guest appearances on ridiculous seventies television shows, and, of course, appeared in countless ads. Unlike Hemingway, Welles's body of embarrassing work was filmed and is now readily available on the internet. For example, his wobbly Long John Silver from a Spanish version of Treasure Island can be seen here, although it is missing Welles's dubbing into a voice that McBride describes as "mumbled into his beard in a strange pseudo-Cockney accent that sounds like Falstaff with a terrible hangover" because he "dubbed the entire part in a Roman studio one night while guzzling through a bottle of white wine."

Welles's commercial disasters are already legendary including the frozen peas spot and the "mwah-ha the French" outtakes from a Paul Maisson wine commercial in which Welles is comically blotted into oblivion past the point of coherence. My favorite Welles moment is his appearance at a roast of Dean Martin notable for him emerging from behind the dais like a tuxedoed mountain of humanity and then taking a number of highbrow potshots at Don Rickles.


Probably the most ridiculous role of Welles's career was his last, playing the voice of Unicron in the 1986 Transformers movie as a planet-sized transformer that devours other heavenly bodies possibly in search of their liquor cabinet or as Welles describes: "I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that change from one thing to anther...all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then, I'm destroyed...I tear myself apart on the screen." On the other hand, McBride relates in the same paragraph that Welles thankfully turned down a part in Caligula.

McBride gives various portraits of working with Welles, who stemmed from playful to wrathful on his actors. For example, he quotes John Houseman, who described Welles's Mercury Radio rehearsals:

Sweating, howling, disheveled, and singlehanded, he wrestled with chaos and time--always conveying an effect of being alone, traduced by his collaborators, surrounded by treachery, ignorance, sloth, indifference, incompetence, and--more often than not--downright sabotage.

This image gets only funnier if you read it in a John Houseman voice that you can get a flavor of in this inexplicable commercial featuring him squaring off with an impudent Teddy Ruxpin. By the 1970s, Welles had mellowed a bit, as McBride describes him as "often in a playful mood. He liked to direct in a purple or white bathrobe that gave him a regal air, waving his cigar like a sceptre, with a can of Fresca always nearby."

WHO IS THE GREATEST DRUNKEN INEBRIATE

Let us summarize already in this already interminable post what we have already learned in order to determine an outcome:

BEARS: Hemingway gets the edge because as far as I can tell, Welles never lifted a hand against any bear whereas Hemingway basically lived with them and spent his life battling them in deadly ursine combat.

BLOODSPORT: Again, Hemingway leads in this category, although Welles did make a documentary on Spanish bullfighting. We need more information on his predilection for cockfights.

FISTICUFFS: Hemingway gets this one as well because of his record against literary antagonists.




BEARD: Welles is identifiable beardless, his unbalanced Old Testament prophet look defeats Hemingway's grizzled prospector with a lexicon of authentic frontier gibberish.




DRUNKENNESS: Hemingway was more consistently drunk, almost drunk enough to qualify for a British imperial post where men were essentially hooked up to IVs of gin, but Welles occasionally rises to the occasion, promising us no wine before its time.

Result: I'll allow this anecdote from McBride to settle the score:

Welles recorded the narration Hemingway wrote for Joris Ivens's documentary feature on the Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Earth. When Welles and Hemingway met at a preliminary screening, Welles suggested eliminating some lines and letting the pictures speak for themselves. Hemingway snarled "Some damn faggot who runs an art theater thinks he can tell me how to write narration." Welles put on a mocking swish act ("Oh, Mr. Hemingway, you think because you're so big and strong and havae hair on your chest..."), and they had a fistfight in front of the images of people fighting and dying on-screen...

Welles and Hemingway were able to laugh about their fight over a bottle whiskey after the screening, beginning a long if sometimes strained friendship.