Baseball has the great capacity to transcend politics. People on the right love it. (Think George Will, the columnist who finds himself at the center of a hot controversy this week). The same holds true for folks on the left. One leftist with a deep and abiding love for baseball is Fidel Castro. Before he seized power in 1959, Castro spent some time on the diamond. Baseball-Reference.com tells us that Fidel likely “pitched in intramural competition in college for the University of Havana law school.” But “he was not good enough to pitch on the college’s varsity team.” Nor is the long-standing myth true that “Castro tried out for either the New York Yankees or Washington Senators and failed to impress enough to sign a contract.” He was never going to have a big league career. That’s for sure. But once Castro actually rose to power, no one was going to stop him from hitting or pitching in a 1959 charity game. (Watch above.) As they say, sometimes “it’s good to be the king.” Just ask Vladimir Putin, who recently scored 6 goals, and made 5 assists, in a hockey game.
If you come to the first film production of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel The Hobbit expecting anything like a reverent rendition of the story, prepare yourself for disappointment. Produced in 1966, the 12-minute animated short takes elements of the classic work of fantasy and adapts—or corrupts—them to fit a different story, one with a dragon, a hobbit, a wizard, and an Arkenstone, to be sure, but with a great many odd liberties taken with Tolkien’s world. Instead of the great Smaug, we have a dragon named “Slag.” Instead of pillaging The Lonely Mountain, he steals the treasure of the village of Dale. Instead of a troupe of dwarves, we have one General Oakenshield, a princess named “Mika,” and an unnamed watchman. Trolls and goblins become “Groans” and “Grablins,” and Gollum appears as “Goloom.”
Is this some off-brand knock-off, you may ask? Not exactly. Producer William Snyder became the first person to acquire rights to Tolkien’s book, and he originally intended a feature length film. The project failed, but when the novel’s popularity soared, Snyder contracted Prague-based comic illustrator and animator Gene Deitch to create the short film you see above. Snyder’s motives, it seems, were mercenary: he wanted to extend his license, which he then sold back to Tolkien’s publishers for $100,000. But the film itself has a certain charm, despite the narrative butchery. Deitch hired Czech illustrator Adolf Born for the project, and he renders the story in the colorful, folk-art style of Eastern Europe (some of the drawings remind me of the lurid caricatures of German artist George Grosz, some of Rocky and Bullwinkle).
If Deitch’s Hobbit short fails to move you, consider it at least a minor entry in the career of a fascinating character in the world of comics, animation, and folk music. Deitch produced cartoons for Columbia, 20th Century Fox, MGM, and Paramount (including some Tom and Jerry and Popeye shorts) and made recordings of John Lee Hooker and Pete Seeger, as well as the recently re-discovered wonder Connie Converse. He also wrote the popular guide How to Succeed in Animation and fathered three cartoonist sons, the most well-known of whom, Kim Deitch, holds a special place in the history of underground comics. But I offer none of this information to excuse the flaws of Deitch and Snyder’s Hobbit short. Fans of comic art may love it, Tolkien purists not at all. Deitch tells the full story of the “Hollywoodized” short film’s slapdash making on his blog, and it is well worth a read. The film itself can be found in the Animation section of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
For another, much more faithful—albeit wordless—illustrated take, see Anna Repp’s Endless Book Project (screen shot above). A Metafilter user describes it as “one continuous scroll, with new artwork added almost every week.” Each panel has a unique look—some in the intricate style of German Renaissance engraving, some resembling woodcuts, some inkwash drawings. And of course, you cannot go wrong with Tolkien’s own original illustrations for The Hobbit, some published in the first edition, and many more lately discovered among the author’s papers. See Tolkien’s drawing of The Lonely Mountain at night below, and visit Brainpickings for more.
To paraphrase an acquaintance’s tribute to Rik Mayall (legendary British comedian who died yesterday at age 56), the cult comedy The Young Onesturned a generation of American misfits into Anglophiles before they’d ever set foot in Britain. I was one of those kids, staying up late to catch the riotously slapstick show about four slacker roommates who mercilessly abused each other to insane degrees while attending “Scumbag College.” Featuring musical appearances by British alternative heroes like Madness, Dexys Midnight Runners, Motörhead, and The Damned, the show only ran for 12 episodes, but it had an enormous influence on both sides of the Atlantic as a Monty Python for absurdist post-punk 80s brats.
Mayall co-created and co-wrote the show, and his anarchic gallows humor permeated every episode. He later went on to write and/or star in sitcoms Bottom and The New Statesman, and had a beloved, if brief, role in the Rowan Atkinson comedy Blackadder. Shortly before his death, Mayall voiced the animation above, “Don’t Fear Death,” for Channel 4. Written and produced by Louis Hudson and Ian Ravenscroft, this perfect vehicle for Mayall’s snide sensibilities explores “the benefits of being dead,” including never having to “waste one more single, soul-crushing hour in your mindless dead-end job.” Luckily for his fans, Mayall avoided that horrible fate and instead created some of the most memorably obnoxious characters in British comedy history, although writer Laurence Marks tells the BBC he was “the antithesis” of those characters, “a quiet, polite, caring gentleman.”
See Mayall below do an early version of his Young Ones character in a classic 80s stand-up routine .
Few public figures of the 20th century are as dear to the hearts and minds of Latin America as Chilean poet Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto — AKA Pablo Neruda. He became famous for his writing before he was 20 years old and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. In between, he wrote surrealist poems, Whitmanesque epics and political manifestos. Fellow Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Marquez called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.”
Yet Neruda was known almost as much for his politics as for his writing. After Franco’s forces executed his friend Federico García Lorca during the Spanish Civil War, Neruda shifted hard to the left. In the 30s and 40s, he publically supported Joseph Stalin at a time when his triumphs were obvious and his crimes were hidden. Neruda even wrote a couple odes to the strongman. When Neruda was stationed as a diplomat in Mexico City, he reportedly helped muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros flee the country after he led an assassination attempt against Stalin’s rival Leon Trotsky.
So it isn’t surprising that Neruda’s politics would make him unpopular in some corners of Washington. He was officially barred from coming to the United States and he was reportedly at the center of a CIA smear campaign. But, in 1966, the poet was invited to the International PEN conference in New York City by Arthur Miller. When the playwright beseeched the White House, President Johnson, displaying far more political courage than is imaginable today, granted Neruda a visa.
The poet was treated like a rock star. He gave a reading of his poems with translation, at the 96th St. Y. in Manhattan to a packed audience on June 11th of that year. You can listen to it above, or download the audio here. After an introduction by Archibald MacLeish, Neruda begins speaking at the 9:00 mark.
When the New York Times asked what he thought of America, he said, “Your country – how shall I say it? – seems more prepared for peace than for war. Peace and poetry…”
Neruda died in 1973, twelve days after a CIA-backed coup in Chile overthrew Neruda’s political ally Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
Even if you don’t hail from one of the world’s many soccer-loving countries (you know, the ones that don’t call it “soccer”) surely you can get on board for the World Cup. Here in the United States, I often hear “I just watch it for the ads” said about the Super Bowl. And if that game’s breaks showcase some pretty cool spots, then its non-American football equivalent offers an even higher level of promotional spectacle. Last year, we featured Brazil and 12 Monkeys auteur Terry Gilliam’s two ventures into the form of the World Cup commercial, “The Secret Tournament” and “The Rematch,” the first of which you can watch at the top of the post. They came commissioned by Nike in 2002, and six years later the formidable shoe manufacturer put a presumably decent chunk of its marketing budget behind another feature filmmaker with a vision: Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch director Guy Ritchie. The result, “The Next Level,” appears below:
“The entire film is seen as if through the eyes of an amateur footballer fast-tracked into the big time,” says the web site of The Mill, the advertising agency behind the spot. “We see what he sees in the thick of the action, on and off the pitch: the footwork, the fouls, the goals and the girls. Filming in London, Manchester and Barcelona with perhaps the world’s smallest camera (SI 2K) took a month. The Mill pushed post production to the extreme, venturing into some unchartered FX territory, setting up a new data pipeline for the camera (used here for the first time in commercial production) and to track shots previously considered impossible.” These hyperkinetic, celebrity footballer-filled two minutes certainly do take the wish-fulfillment aspect of sports fandom to the next level, or at least a more literal one. The Mill and Nike would then step up to a three-minute production with Alejandro González Iñárritu, he of Amores Perros and Babel, for 2010’s “Write the Future,” a meditation on how, in sports as elsewhere, one good move might lock in a destiny, or one bad move might shatter it:
The Mill calls it “one of our biggest jobs to date,” with “a staggering 236 VFX shots made up of 106 football shots which included a CG stadium complete with flags and banners, crowd replication using Massive, grass clean up and replacement, and full rotoscope of all the players.” Impressive, sure, but some surely feel that such a degree of labor and attention placed on advertising during televised matches takes away from the beauty of the Beautiful Game itself. “Soccer is a lie,” says the disappointed would-be footballer protagonist of Eduardo Sacheri’s new novel Papers in the Wind. “It’s all a farce … And yet … somehow … there’s still a ‘but.’” You may also consider the advertising enterprise a lie, but when it can bring together rare talents from cinema as well as the rest of the cultural world for high-impact moments like these, well, somehow… there’s still a “but.” Just think back twenty years to another Nike ad, the one with the classic turn by none other than William S. Burroughs:
Published back in 2011, Go the F–k to Sleep, the playful children’s storybook meant for adults, became a big besteller. It topped Amazon’s bestseller list for a while. And, before you knew it, celebrities were giving public readings of the book. Perhaps you’ll recall Werner Herzog’s fun reading at The New York Public Library.
Samuel L. Jackson did the honors when the book was released in its official audio format. Now that reading is free to download thanks to Audible.com. Unabridged, it runs a mere 6 minutes. To download the audio, you will need to register with Audible. We hope you’ll get a good laugh out of it.
[PS: If you’re interested in other ways to download a free audio book from Audible, be sure to see their a 30-day free trial program. We have more info on that here.]
If you came of age during the 1980s, you might associate Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” with junior high school dances — an awkward phase of life you’d just as soon forget. For me, it’s hard to think of “Stairway to Heaven” and not cringe. But if you first heard the song in 1971 (when it was released) or soon thereafter, perhaps you have better associations. That’s what filmmaker Cameron Crowe was partly trying to get across in this deleted scene from his 2000 film Almost Famous. In the clip, a high-school boy tries to coax his mother (played by the great Frances McDormand) into letting him write for Rolling Stone. Central to his pitch is the idea that rock music is intellectual, that “Stairway to Heaven” is based on the literature of Tolkien — something that has been debated by critics and scholars. As for why the scene didn’t make it into the movie, you’d think that it’s because of the song’s length. 8 minutes is a long time for a film to go without any dialogue. But apparently it came down to permissions. Crowe told Coming Soon.Net: “Led Zeppelin had already given us four songs at a nice price but they said, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ we’re not going to give to anybody, and we had already shot a scene that was to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ so what was great was we ended up putting the scene on the DVD and saying ‘Put your record on NOW and score it yourself.’ ” You can try that at home and see if it changes your thoughts on “Stairway to Heaven,” for better or for worse.
In the pages of The New York Times, David Brooks reeled off a list of Really Good Books. He prefaces the list with this: “People are always asking me what my favorite books are. I’ve held off listing them because it seems self-indulgent. But, with summer almost here, I thought I might spend a couple columns recommending eight books that have been pivotal in my life.” [He actually recommends more than 8 in the end.] Some of the books will help you think about living a life of “civilized ambition.” Others will nurture your inner spirit. And still others will help you think more intelligently about writing and politics. Along the way, he adds a quick caveat about what these books “can’t do.” “They can’t carve your convictions about the world. Only life can do that — only relationships, struggle, love, play and work. Books can give you vocabularies and frameworks to help you understand and decide, but life provides exactly the education you need.”
The list was published in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2. In each installment, Brooks explains why he selected each work. Where possible, we have provided links to texts available online. You can also find them listed in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.
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