Of Time and the Wine

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Don,
Satori, at last!  All questions not so much answered as--decanted.  *Vast waistband* is 
brilliant, the apotheosis of the inflated figure.  What are the titles of some of those 
shoestring European films (are you sure you didn't mean shoestring potatoes)? Are they 
good? Can I rent them at my local Blockbuster?  Was his MACBETH one of those?  Your 
obviously learned, laid back, and sincere appreciation for Welles forces me to reconsider 
some of my ideas about him. Maybe it's been the parallel universe Welles I've been 
dissing all these years!  By the way, since you make the Eliot connection so cogently, how's 
about that Whitman--you know, *I am large, I contain multitudes*?
 But still, was he ever better than as General Dreedle in CATCH-22?

john (whose waistband needs some watching itself) m



>
>John wonders:
>" But now, you do something for me:         
>tell me
>what breakthrough  significance I (must have) missed in that late work of Welles
>--I mean
>that series of vignettes, we might call them *commercials* where he stentoriousl
>y
>informs us that: PAUL MASSON WILL SELL NO WINE BEFORE ITS TIME!
> 
>john m
>PS will the Pynch end up this way too?  Doing commercials, or better, infomercia
>ls,
>maybe?  What products would he endorse?"
>
>
>Ah!  A true, unrecognized element of The Genius's Art.  For the Dionysian 
>associations of wine and their conflation in the vegetation rituals of
>ancient Greece tie us to an *agon* that stretches from the shores of the
>Aegean to Eliot's denatured Wasteland.
>
>Welles playfully works on the element of wine to tie Eliot's Wasteland to 
>Newton Minnow's vision of TV as a "Vast Wasteland" which must inevitably
>raise the connotations of Welles's own Vast Waistband so abundantly on
>display in those ads.
>
>Welles, then, presents himself as a conflated figure: the New Dionysus (or
>maybe more appropriately, Silenus--the perpetual Barney Gumbel at the 
>Bacchanal) but also the Harvest King--lord of fertility who becomes the
>victim of Hollywood's ritual sacrifice of those who replenish the medium.
>
>U.S.W.  ;-)
>
>
>Somewhat more seriously, it was those ads and the bits in bad movies and
>scale pay for appearances with Johnny and Mike and Merv that allowed him to
>live in Europe and keep making films on an almost literal shoestring budget.
>
>Pynchon, on the other hand, has that MacArthur and sales from the members
>of this list to keep him going!
>
>Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)
>