The Spread

UMASS, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. U-MASS. The lips taking two steps to bleat out and hiss on the second syllable U MASS.

Imagine Orson Welles saying the word UMASS in the middle of a dyspeptic ad read for the university over the typical college commercial of eager kids staring at beakers through safety goggles, sketching things, and high-fiving the school mascot which in the case of UMASS is a guy with cartoon lockjaw in a tricorner hat who looks like Purdue Pete's cousin who drives a trans-am.
 
I don't know who the first person was to render a macot that 
is a person into a plush cartoon nightmare person, but they 
probably belong to an Ancient Society

Northwestern played UMASS in football and absolutely flattened them. After toggling between heartbreaking last-second field goal losses and losses where Northwestern’s broad football strategy mirrored the guy who breaks a beer bottle on a bar and tries to menace Steven Seagal with it, the Wildcats found a win against a profoundly bad football team.

The win did not come easy. For much of the first quarter, Northwestern struggled to move the ball and allowed UMASS to drive into range to kick field goals or ineptly turn the ball over in the a classic commedia dell’arte tradition. Northwestern went down 6-0 before scoring on of all things a blocked field goal return before subsequent UMASS drives ended with punts, turnovers on downs, and a broad misunderstanding involving the Barone’s precious scrolls, the underhanded machinations of the Visconte and his flunkies who mistook the young Gianni for the famed highwayman The Blue Skull of Umbria and a complicated mess involving counterfeit scrolls that required several minutes of explanation from the stock “referee” character.
 
Crossing route

The most compelling subplot of this game involved delving into the seedy underbelly of sports gambling. I am not by nature a gambler because I dislike losing money, because the only way to come out marginally ahead requires the mastery of tedious math or some other system that takes all of the visceral thrill of extravagantly losing money on roulette or craps or baccarat, and because the most fun thing for me to do in gambling and any other situation is do to a bunch of really stupid shtick that is a lot less fun if you are losing more than the price of a Heath bar, but the implications of gambling and people rooting for dumb things in otherwise meaningless games can occasionally transcend the game and enter the realm of the sublime. This is what happens when some bookmaker has decided to give 40 points to the 2019 Northwestern Wildcats.

In the second half, Northwestern’s offensive line had realized that even if the team is struggling this season they are still anthropomorphic trucks and could easily shove the UMASS defenders around enough for a freshman running back named Evan Hull to zip past them, and the Wildcats began approaching the Gambling Number.  At one point, late in the fourth quarter and with a commanding lead, Northwestern somehow accidentally sort of onside kicked it and recovered; at this point anyone who had bet on UMASS would begin sweating in an incredibly funny situation that they can only admit they had brought upon themselves by betting money on this obscure and wretched football game.  I know that it is 2019, that sports gambling is legal in many places, and the internet will allow you to bet on almost anything from the comfort of one's own home, but I am also sure that spiritually you should not be allowed to gamble on a Northwestern-UMASS game without going through a dungenous basement with one of those heavy doors that have a sliding peephole mechanism and speaking to a bookie with a name like "Todd the Dentist." 

At any rate, Northwestern won by 39 against a 40 point spread, the funniest possible outcome to this profoundly stupid game.
 
THE ROWBOAT APOTHEOSIS

Well, the maniac did it.  P.J. Fleck, the psychotically energetic sloganeer who has never managed to express a thought without turning it into a tortuous backronym that requires a five minute explainer video, has broken through.  The Golden Gophers are legitimate contenders.  They upset an excellent Penn State team, managed to stay undefeated until last week, and lead a satisfyingly insane West division where Wisconsin has already lost to what appears to be a very good Illinois team.  Fleck is driving his team towards a de facto West Division Paul Bunyan Championship Game and all that stands in the way is Northwestern. As Fleck himself might say: S.H.I.T.

I've made fun of Fleck a lot at this blog because he cuts a somewhat ridiculous figure.  To be fair to him, his job requires an embrace of absurdity.  Every college football coach is some combination of huckster and rage maniac or harbors some other sort of insane anti-social behavior that comes from the fact that the job asks its practitioners to spend their time alternately huddled in tape caves mastering a bizarre strategic argot and charismatically selling themselves to recruits, boosters, and television personalities-- it's like asking someone to be a general, chessmaster, and televangelist at the same time while being allowed to do as much unhinged screaming as possible.  All college football coaches are insane because only an insane person would want to do a job where they get fired every two years and are subject to the machinations of boosters named "Bale" Cronston the Feed King of the Greater Mump Junction Area and a hail of nonstop criticism from angry fans.  It is a job completely bereft of dignity. It probably should not exist.

Fleck's goofy Harold Hill routine was funny when Minnesota was mediocre.  Fleck swept into town with his Row the Boat catchphrase that he brought over from Western Michigan only after a legal settlement, came up with a bunch of dopey catchphrases, and sort of floundered around the Big Ten West like most Big Ten West teams.  He appeared in the conference doing a bunch of flashy sword swinging techniques and the Big Ten just sort of lazily shot him.  But Fleck obviously knows what he is doing.  He loaded the Gophers with talented players and bided his time before turning them into a powerhouse.  It is genuinely enjoyable to see any Big Ten team from the fraternity of ass-kicked cellar-dwellers to rise up and challenge for an opportunity to get mowed down by Ohio State in Indianapolis.  Northwestern has a chance to see a team that, like them, does not often get a chance to shine in the conference and implode their season like the Metrodome.

This is where Northwestern is right now: their chances to play in the "Big Boy" Bob's Lasertag and Go Kart Franchises of Northwest Pensacola Bowl have evaporated, they have yet to defeat a Big Ten team, they have only recently started scoring touchdowns.  Their main goals now are to be so bad that merely hanging close to a Big Ten opponent could cause them to plummet in the rankings-- an upset over Minnesota would force the Gophers to forfeit their final games to just think about what has happened for awhile until another Big Ten West team goes to find them a few years from now for one last job.  That and the battle to keep the Hat that looks so improbable that it is too depressing to think about, Lovie raising the Hat to the heavens as his beard transfers to the trophy before engulfing the entire Chicago area in triumphant beard for an entire year in an event known as The Hattening.
 
As much as Illinois is the Hated Rival of Northwestern and the Hat must 
not be lost at any cost, who doesn't like Lovie Smith?  Please sign my change.org 
petition The Illini Must Hire a Lunatic Doofus Specifically For Blogging Purposes

Meanwhile, Northwestern, despite the Wildcats' famous victory over the University of Mass, seems to be in more trouble than ever.  The injuries continue to pile up for the 'Cats, and they appear to be running out of available quarterbacks to the point where they need to start running out of obsolete formations like the Kaiser's Wedge or the Gruntback Option that require the entire team to grow mustaches.  Minnesota are heavy favorites and it seems unlikely that Northwestern will be able to score the massive upset and go out on a positive note from an otherwise wretched season on senior day. 

On the other hand, never tell me the odds-- unless Northwestern is favored by 40 points, then I absolutely need to know about those odds.     

Nonconference Update

Sometimes, time moves really fast and you wake up and realize that Northwestern is 4-0 against a challenging non-conference slate of mostly FBS teams, quarterback Dan Persa is looking like the best Northwestern signal caller since Otto Graham, and people in the nineteenth century continue to have comical facial hair.

A lot can happen when you're not paying attention

Northwestern survived a nailbiter against Vanderbilt, crushed Illinois State, dominated Rice, and played fairly decently against MAC powerhouse Central Michigan. It was very clear in each of those games that Coach Fitz and Mick McCall wanted to embrace the running game and it became clearer that running the ball might fall by the wayside alongside other foiled plans such as the Concert of Europe or reliable '80s movie villain William Atherton co-opting Val Kilmer's talent with lasers.

Viscount Castlereagh (left), a major voice in the development of the
post-Waterloo Congress system managed to survive a minor political
scandal when he shot rival and fellow cabinet minister George Canning
(the saucily-posed man at right) in a duel in a more civilized age when
politicians were able to cut through the red tape of political disagreement
with firearms. Much like Northwestern's non-conference schedule,
Castlereagh wisely chose an opponent that he could reasonably handle as
Canning had never before fired a pistol; likewise, Northwestern has not only
added ancient rival Chicago Dental back to its non-conference schedule but
is also scheduled to take on a local haberdashery and leading
representatives of the Bull Moose Party at Ryan Field next season.

GAME PREVIEW: MINNESOTA

Obviously the big story for Minnesota is whether or not the Gophers will rally around embattled coach Tim Brewster-- actually, I don't think the unnecessarily martial cliche "embattled" is strong enough for Brewster's position; "besieged" seems more appropriate or alternately "approximating the college football coaching version of the four seconds before a wild-eyed Mola Ram rips out one's heart in an underground amphiteater conveniently located above a giant pit of lava."

Mola Ram thought he got a good deal on Pankot Palace until he realized the upkeep cost
on miles of underground tunnels and shoddy plank bridges

From all accounts, Brewster's style is relentlessly positive, but he might have to assert himself more in order to prove to the school that he still has control of the locker room. Perhaps he can model himself after legendary Paraguayan General Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco who became known as El Supremo Dictador of Paraguay 1814 (from a time in the nineteenth century when it was perfectly acceptable to fashion oneself formally as a dictator and have it printed on nineteenth century business cards that one hands out while taunting other leaders at international conferences). According to his Wikipedia page, Francia's reign followed the modern dictator playbook to a T: becoming instrumental in tearing the country from the yoke of Spanish oppression, declaring oneself head of the national Church, closing the borders, antagonizing neighbors, and then coming up with increasingly spectacular demands such as personally conducting all weddings, declaring war on dogs, and demanding that citizens tip their hats to him when he passed or, if hatless, carry a hat brim for tipping purposes. Francia remained in power until 1840.

El Supremo assures you that if he
was not a dictator, he would not
have gotten away with that

The 'Cats will be hoping to take advantage of a discombobulated Minnesota squad on the cusp of a coaching coup and Gopher fans hope that they'll be able to turn around their disastrous start in conference play with a win.

MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS OF INTEREST

I recently stumbled upon the miraculously thorough Sword Swallower's Hall of Fame, chronicling the greatest practitioners of this noble art. I have no proof, but I'm willing to wager that if it happened in sword swallowing in the last several hundred years, it appears on that website, with sections for performers with fantastic names like "Veno the Electric Sword Swallower," "The Yankee Yogi," and, tantalizingly, an entry referencing an 1867 work entitled "Bizarre Medical Abnormalities."

An 1899 poster of sword swallower
Chevalier Cliquot found on the Hall of Fame
website. As the poster demonstrates, the
Cliquot act evidently consisted of
swallowing multiple swords, balancing rifles
on his face, and modeling what I'm anxiously
hoping will soon become acceptable attire for
high-stakes business meetings or international
summits

Finally, readers need to be aware of this lost footage of a sadly abandoned Orson Welles project entitled "Orson Welles: the One Man Band" in which he plays a number of elderly and certainly gout-ridden members of a bygone London club. There's no audio on the club scene and I'm having trouble deciding whether that makes this more or less horrifying:


BIG TEN FOOTBALL

Northwestern will be hoping to start of Big Ten play with a big win in the Gopher state, avenging last year's loss and paving the way for a not entirely implausible shot at going 6-0 against the reeling Gophers and knee injury-ravaged Boilermakers. Even with a weak non-conference schedule, that would be quite a coup by Fitz and the team, one worth tipping one's cap or Francia-approved hat substitute to.

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.