It’s well known that hugely influential French artist Marcel Duchamp, after basically introducing the world to the category of “conceptual art,” abandoned the art world for a new obsession, chess, in his early thirties. He qualified as a chess master by achieving a draw in the Third French Chess Championship in 1925 (for which he designed the poster, below).
 

 
Duchamp’s wife became so consternated at his obsession with the game that she glued his pieces to his board. He designed a handsome chess set, which, as far as I can tell, has never been mass-produced (meanwhile, editions of Man Ray’s minimalist chess set fetch prices of $200 and up).
 

 
At the MakerBot.Thingiverse website, Scott Kildall and Bryan Cera have generated a 3D-printable version of Duchamp’s chess set, with the witty title “Readymake” (all of Duchamp’s most famous artistic interventions were called “readymades”):
 

Readymake: Duchamp Chess Set is a 3D-printed chess set generated from an archival photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s own custom and hand-carved game. His original physical set no longer exists. We have resurrected the lost artifact by digitally recreating it, and then making the 3D files available for anyone to print.

Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s readymade—an ordinary manufactured object that the artist selected and modified for exhibition—the readymake brings the concept of the appropriated object to the realm of the internet, exploring the web’s potential to re-frame information and data, and their reciprocal relationships to matter and ideas. Readymakes transform photographs of objects lost in time into shared 3D digital spaces to provide new forms and meanings.

 

 
Here’s a lovely French-language documentary (with English subtitles) about Duchamp called “Jeu d’échecs” (A Game of Chess) that covers both his extravagantly impressive artistic resume as well as his interest in chess: 
 

 
The FIFA World Cup 2014 moves into the last sixteen this week with many of the expected teams qualifying (Brazil, Mexico, Holland, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica) and some unexpected early knock-outs (previous winners Spain, Italy, England). Amongst the surprise successes have been the USA (who may qualify depending on the result of their game against Germany), Nigeria, Greece and Algeria—teams that have all performed better than their odds.

While nations put their hope in eleven men on the pitch, a large swathe of Brazilians have been demonstrating over the cost of the whole tournament—money that may have been better spent on helping the poor, as one demonstrator put it:

“The party in the stadiums is not worth tears in the favelas,”

2014 marks the twentieth World Cup and it’s the second time the competition has been played in Brazil. These are the posters for all twenty tournaments from the first held in Uruguay 1930.
 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Graphic Design Junction and Vintage Everyday.
 
More soccer posters after the jump…
 

 
Two of the greatest home-grown American inventions—indeed, grassroots institutions—are jazz and baseball. The consensus greatest practitioners of both pastimes—Louis Armstrong and Babe Ruth, respectively—were in their prime at the exact same time, the 1920s, and both men were raised in orphanages. Shit, it’s jazz and baseball, I’ve just accidentally named two Ken Burns PBS series, that’s how freaking iconic those two things are. You can tell the story of America through baseball, or through jazz. They’re both rich mines of meaning.

And if you have something that combines the two, well, that’s something I want to know about. Smithsonian Magazine recently came up with some truly remarkable footage, dating from around 1941, of the legendary jazz bandleader and composer Duke Ellington playing a little bit of baseball during an off moment with a few of his bandmates, namely cornetist Rex Stewart and valve trombonist Juan Tizol. For the record, that’s the Duke pitching and then swinging the bat from about 0:15 to 0:30. (That’s tenor sax man Ben Webster in the bathrobe at the end, clearly communicating something along the lines of “You guys can play out there if you want, I’m hung over and I’m staying right here.”)
 

 
This fantastic image actually has nothing to do with the footage. That picture was taken sometime in the mid-1950s—the massive slogan on the bus, “Mr. Hi-Fi of 1955,” in addition to being my own future nickname if I have anything to say about it, surely puts us pretty close to that year. The appearance of the neon word “Colored” at left certainly suggests that this little game of pickup ball took place somewhere in the South.
 

 
It don’t get a whole lot better than this. Many people have seen that news story from the 1970s of Guided By Voices frontman Bob Pollard throwing a no-hitter in college. Quite recently we posted a pic of a newspaper article about Stephen Malkmus, later of Pavement, from his high school days describing his exploits of playing in a punk band and also playing soccer for the high school team.
 

 
But it turns out that Gibson “Gibby” Haynes of the Butthole Surfers was a star forward for his basketball team when he attended Trinity University in San Antonio. That’s right: The mastermind behind Locust Abortion Technician and Rembrandt Pussyhorse averaged 11.5 points a game and 4.7 rebounds as the starting forward on Trinity’s team. As we can see, Gibby was an “Accounting and economics major,” which makes sense given that he once landed a gig at a top accounting company in the area. Note that he also made the Dean’s List—kids, stay in school and you too can become as upstanding a citizen as Gibson Haynes!
 
Below, the full Blind Eye Sees All live concert video, shot in Detroit in 1985.
 

 
via WFMU and Marc Masters

 
Oh dear. I’ve been able to avoid exercise for so long with the excuse, “sports aren’t punk.” Now I’m not entirely sure how I’ll defend my slothly blogger physique. It appears Joe Strummer was quite the athlete. The photo above is from the 1983 London Marathon, where Strummer ran for leukemia with a team from The Sun newspaper(???). He even purportedly finished with a time of four hours and 13 minutes! (I know that’s impressive because I Googled it.)

Strummer also claimed to have ran in the Paris Marathon, but there seems to be some doubt as to whether he was just pulling our leg. When ticket sales to support Combat Rock were faltering, he “disappeared” to Paris to up the publicity of the album. Below is a clip from the documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, where he casually mentions running the Paris Marathon, in passing. I tend to believe he ran it, but I also don’t fault anyone else for being skeptical—the man was known to stretch the truth. A journalist once asked about his training regimen and he balked until finally offering this questionable advice:

Okay, you want it, here it is: Drink 10 pints of beer the night before the race. Ya got that? And don’t run a single step at least four weeks before the race … But make sure you put a warning in this article, ‘Do not try this at home.’ I mean, it works for me and Hunter Thompson, but it might not work for others. I can only tell you what I do.

Maybe he didn’t think sports were too punk either? Don’t worry all you punk athlete kids out there, they can call you a jock, but they can’t take away your leather jacket! Keep running, I’ll be cheering you on from the couch!
 

 
In 1981, the Louis Malle-directed My Dinner with Andre was released to instant and lasting acclaim. The daring film had almost no conventional narrative, and revolved entirely around a lengthy and intense dinner conversation between old friends played by theater director Andre Gregory and the absolutely wonderful actor/playwright Wallace Shawn. (If for nothing else, you surely know him as “Vizzini” in The Princess Bride. If you haven’t read his work, maybe consider giving his Essays collection a whirl, for starters. He is quite brilliant.) Thanks to the charm of the two performers and the compelling content of the conversation, this risky and limited conceit worked.

Given its massive critical success and utterly distinctive character, the film has been parodied and used as a punchline countless times across all media. A favorite of mine was a throwaway sight gag in a 1993 Simpsons episode which showed the effete Martin Prince character playing a My Dinner with Andre arcade game.
 

 
But perhaps the very first parody/homage/whatever to emerge was the Andy Kaufman gem My Breakfast With Blassie. Where Andre featured a perceptive meaning-of-life debate between two patrician theater mavens in an elegant Manhattan restaurant, My Breakfast with Blassie presented two wrestlers—Kaufman, who was immersed in his bizarre late-career wrestling phase at the time (thus the neck brace), and actual legendary wrestling world figure “Classy” Freddie Blassie—spending an hourlong and oft-interrupted chat burnishing their own egos and griping about germs and the banality of small-talk over greasy food in a noisy, homely diner. You also get to see Blassie totally beat Dr. Atkins to the low-carb punch. The film was released direct to videocassette in late 1983, only months before Kaufman’s death from cancer. It’s been reissued on DVD twice, once in 2000, bundled with the I’m From Hollywood documentary about Kaufman’s wrestling exploits, and on its own in 2009. It turned up on YouTube last week, so you can see it right here if you like, but you might want to watch it soon, in case it gets yanked.
 

 
After the jump, Kaufman and Blassie talking about the project on Late Night with David Letterman...

“I’m speechless. I just don’t know what to say.”

At some point during the 1980s, it made sense that MTV would try do something to take advantage of the pop culture juggernaut that was the World Wrestling Federation and some perceived rock/wrestling crossover that probably just boiled down to Cyndi Lauper’s dad being played by Captain Lou Albano in her “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video and little else.

“The War to Settle the Score” was a series of WWF matches with a storyline that involved Albano, Lauper and her manager David Wolff (I won’t bother to explain it in detail, but Albano was a manager and Wolff and Lauper are trying to steal clients.) “Rowdy” Roddy Piper got pissed off about the whole MTV connection and this brought another “feud” into the storyline, but also in real life.

Piper was disqualified from the championship match against Hulk Hogan and a brawl erupted.  At one point, Cyndi Lauper, who had rushed the ring with Mr. T to support Hogan, was kicked in the head.

Since the event was live, MTV had cameras set up backstage to interview Hogan, Lauper, Mr T and Albano afterwards, but Andy Warhol apparently opened the wrong door and was pulled into an impromptu interview with “Mean Gene” Okerlund.

You’ll notice that Okerlund refers to the Pope of Pop as a “one of the greatest wrestling fans” at the end.
 

 
So it turns out that the owner of the L.A. Clippers, Donald T. Sterling, is a loathsome racist who told his girlfriend V. Stiviano that recent photographs of her and Magic Johnson bothered him “a lot, that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people.” Naturally the media jumped on this and Sterling has been ridiculed and denounced just about everywhere. In racist Amerikkka, it’s nice to have such a clear-cut, undeniable example of racism so that even the “somewhat” racist crowd have an opportunity to prove how not-racist they are.

In addition to harboring these loathsome views, Sterling has committed some other unpardonable sins, first and foremost being just about the nastiest thing I could ever think to call anyone, a West Coast version of Donald Trump. Attentive readers of the L.A. Times will be familiar with these bizarre advertisements sprinkled about occasionally in which Sterling is touting not so much any enterprise he’s associated with, but Donald T. Sterling himself.

Here’s Irvine resident and astute blogger Kevin Drum describing the horror:
 

He gives away lots of money, and when he does he makes sure everyone knows about it. Ads thanking Sterling for his good deeds simply litter the Times. ... They’re all the same: they have terrible, amateur production values; they all use the exact same cutout portrait of Sterling; and they all feature photos of the people honoring Sterling that look like they were taken with a 60s-era Instamatic. These ads appear multiple times a week. Sometimes multiple times a day. Sterling is constantly being honored for something or other, and every single honor is an occasion for him to advertise the fact in the LA Times. And always with the exact same cutout photo of himself. It’s kind of creepy.

 
Here’s an example, taken from Sunday’s paper:
 

 
Here are a couple other examples of the light Sterling touch, always with the same stupid photo:
 

 

 
While we’re cataloguing the bizarre workings of Sterling’s brain, I have to mention quickly this amazing thing that Josh Marshall at TPM caught over the weekend. In 2003 Sterling sued a former mistress of his to get back the house he once gave her. Asked to identify his own handwriting, Sterling answered as follows (the questioner’s follow-up is just about the funniest thing ever):
 

 
By the way, apparently Sterling’s racist views have been public knowledge for quite a while now. In addition to this helpful Deadspin guide to Sterling’s racism going back decades, here’s comedian/rapper/entrepreneur Nick Cannon on ESPN nine months ago having difficulty defending the owner of his favorite basketball team (jump to the 1:30 mark):
 

“Sometimes pro football is like the Bermuda Triangle…. strange and unusual things happen that can’t be explained.”

Although it tries to come off like the Mondo Cane of NFL football or something, the Vincent Price-hosted Strange But True: Football Stories, a direct to VHS home video release from 1987 is basically just tales of uncanny victories, player superstitions and dumb luck. A few stories are more amusing than others, but all in all, one has to wonder just how desperate Vincent Price was for a paycheck at this stage of his career by agreeing to host this In Search Of meets the NFL lameness. I want to believe he shot this piece of crap in a day to underwrite the purchase of an expensive painting or a bottle of fine wine. It’s basically stories of unlikely wins with scary music and Price showing up every once in a while. He doesn’t come off as much of a football fan, does he?

From the back of the VHS box:

Travel off the beaten path with Vincent Price as he unearths the strange plays and bizarre players who have inhabited the NFL for the past half century.

Step right up and see for yourself the one-eyed quarterback who led the NFL in passing one year. Meet the player whose diet consisted of blood and raw meat. See weird team rituals. The strangest games. Discover the fattest achievers who ever played. And relive such out-of-this-world plays as “the Holy Roller,” “The Immaculate Reception” and “The Miracle of the Meadowlands.

So enter, if you dare, into the weird, wild and wacky world of the NFL. This is one fantastic voyage you won’t want to miss.”

That’s pretty debatable unless you’re a glutton for punishment. But it tries so hard…
 

 
More supernatural sports with Vincent Price after the jump…

 
“Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, it’s off the cliff I go!”

I literally clenched my ass cheeks the entire time I watched this batshit POV helmet cam filming a bonkers downhill mountain bike competition. From what I understand, this was part of a Red Bull Rampage tournament. Good lord, how much adrenaline does one need? One false move or wrong turn would put you in a wheelchair for life, right?!

This is one crazy motherfucker.

 
Via reddit