[ 56 ] VINOUS TEMPORALITIES Paul Cohen ‘... A bum holding a cheap pint of wine walked up to me and said, ‘It’s all rushing away. Can’t you feel it? ... Time, it got uncorked. Tere’s no stopping it now. It’s like the wind in my hair ... It’ll be all over soon.’ James Tate, ‘Cement’ 1 A mericans old enough to have been in broadcast television’s cathode thrall in the late 1970s and early 1980s will remember a series of television commercials for Paul Masson wines. Orson Welles, with few other ofers and in serious need of cash to fnish his flm Te Other Side of the Wind, had accepted half a million dollars a year to be the spokesman for one of California’s biggest producers. ‘Some things can’t be rushed,’ intoned Welles as he gazed out at the viewer, a glass in hand. ‘What Paul Masson himself said nearly a century ago is still true today. We will sell no wine before its time.’ Te absurdity of one of the greatest fgures of the American stage and screen fogging a mass-market wine label, his stentorian voice pronouncing a jejune slogan with solemn pace, the tales of his contemptuous contentiousness during shooting, and the outtakes of a visibly inebriated Welles stumbling over his lines all make this a legendary chapter in the history of advertising. It was hard not to see in the great Welles, fghting to maintain ironic distance as he hammed it up for the camera, an ambivalent commentary on consumer capitalism. But what precisely did Welles mean when he assured wine drinkers that Paul Masson wouldn’t put any product on the market ‘before its time’? Like any great work of art, Welles explained, good wine can’t be made quickly. As he declared in one commercial, ‘Te writing of a great book, or the making