8/8/2019 Fluxus-danto http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/fluxus-danto 1/6 30 Nation. 29, 1999 duced to transient quartersin a hotel and in desperate straits, he wrote to Furst, “I find it hard enough to read a book, even in Ital- ian.. . I don’t even know where to keep the books. There’s no room for them in the hotel and at the office they’re stolen. When I go home, if you can call it that, I have to be a nurse, not reader.” Thus the celebrated poet entreated the obscure Americasi to rescue him, and Furst, fluent in French and German as well as English and Italian, agreed to grind out reviews of authors as radically different as Joyce Cary and Ivy Compton-Burnett, Julien Green and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also produced critical evaluations in Ital- ian of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. In fact, Furst was so learned Mon- tale had to caution him to tone it down a notch or two. “Don’t display too much knowledge of English and American lit- erature,” Montale wrote him. “You should show an average knowledge which could be attributed to me.” Although Montale paid Furst for his efforts, he never publicly acknowledged him, never granted him the recognition hat might have made his “negro” a full citizen in the republic of letters. What’s worse, Montale appears to have been two-timing Furst. As it was in his romantic life, so it was in his literary life; he just couldn’t re- mainmonogamous. He had a second ghost- writer, a woman, who translated English- languagebooks into Italian and let Montale sign his name to them. he Collected contains an essay on “Reading Montale,” but it does not mention the contretemps that erupted a decade ago when the novelist and T ilmmaker Mario Soldati, friend to both Montale and Furst, published a book de- tailing their relationship. In his volume of reminiscences, (“Barren Branches”),Soldati excoriated Montale for his failure to credit Furst. At the same time, I1 of Milan published several letters from Montale to Furst that corrobo- rated the story and divided opinion in Ital- ian arts and letters. Marco Vallora noted in that both Alexandre Dumas and Luigi Pirandello had followed similar ghostwriting practices; Albert0 Moravia wrote in Corriere della that ‘‘itis difficult to justifl Montale’s conduct, whatever the circumstances in which he found himself.” Many might object that this debate is an inconsequential sidebar. But nobody appears to have seriously researched the subject by following up journalistic reve- lations a decade old. In a detailed chronol- ogy, Galassi notes that Montale often aver- aged a hundred articles annually, a flabber- gasting number for a deadline-phobicpoet. It wouldn’t simplybe interesting, t would be intellectuallyresponsible to determine exactly how much of Montale’sprose Furst produced. Moreover, publication of Galassi’s landmark volume of translations invites a reassessment of Montale’s own transla- tions. Surely anyone who translated Shake- speare, Yeats, Eliot and Faulkner deserves close reading. How good was Montale’s work? How,good and how much was ac- tually his ghostwriter’s work? Even assuming that Montale wrote every word of every poem published in his name; scholars should do a textual analysis and set this issue to rest. Why don’t the worker bees in what Richard Howard refers to as the “academic cottage industry” of Montale criticism compare the great man’s verse with the poetry of his obscure friend? 1 Correspondance School Art ARTHUR C. DANTO f we think of a historical period as defined by what the French have usefully designated a mentaliti-a shared set of attitudes, practices’and beliefs-then periods end when one mentaliti’gives way to another. Something like this hap- I ened in 1962, when Abstract Expressionism came to an end-not necessarily becausethe movement was internally ex- hausted but because a new artistic talit6 was in place. And these tend to rewrite he history of artin their own image. So Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, who would at best have been marginal to the Modernist aesthetic to which Abstract Expressionism subscribed,became the gen- erative figures of the new period. Picasso, who had cast so daunting a shadow over Modernist artistic practice, was now es- teemed primarily for having invented col- lage. Not everyone, of course, crossed the boundary into the new at once. There were many in the art world-artists as well as critics-who continued to frame the meaning of art in terms of the in which they had grown up. They were in, one might say, but not of the new period. It is possible that the new artistic mentality was but part of a larger one-that of the sixties. If that is true, then the transform- ing forces hat explain he uprisings of 1968 must already have been operative in artis- tic precincts in the early years of the decade. Although 1968 s often explainedwith ref- erence to a revulsion against the Vietnam War, this reverses the direction of causal- ity: That revulsion is explained by the new (What explains the itself? I have no idea!) The new surfaced in 1962, when the artisticpractices of a loosely struc- tured group of American, European and Japanese artists began to be referred to as Fluxus. The name was invented by George Maciunas, the prophet if not the founder of the movement, and it expressed a dis- satisfaction with the kind of compartmen- talization of artistic endeavors made ex- plicit in the writings of Clement Greenberg. Under Modernist imperatives, Greenberg claimed in a famous essay, each medium must aspire to a pure state of itself, ex- punging any borrowings from other media. Fluxus works, by exuberant contrast, dis- regarded the borderlines between music, writing, theater and the visual arts, so that every work of Fluxus art was in principle a kind of And the idea of artistic purity was not the only erst- while value demoted by Fluxus. Its art was ephemeral and irreverent, often trivial and typically took the form of a joke. What Maciunas designated proto- Fluxusworks were createdin he late fifties, when Abstract Expressionism was at its peak, so the art existed before its practition- . ers were conscious of themselves as form- ing a movement. The two co- existed for some years. The difference in attitude and practice, however, would have made it difficult o imagine that the concept of art was wide and elastic enough to ac- commodate the characteristic expressions of them both. The paradigm Abstract Ex- pressionist work would be a large, heroic canvas aflirming the agony of creation and the tragic view of life, such as BamettNew- man’s painting
Transcript
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30 Nation. 29, 1999
duced to transient quarters in a hotel and indesperate straits, he wrote to Furst, “I findit hard enough to read a book, even in Ital-ian.. . I don’t even know where to keepthe books. There’s no room for them in thehotel and at the office they’re stolen. WhenI go home, if you can call it that, I have tobe a nurse, not reader.”
Thus the celebrated poet entreated theobscure Americasi to rescuehim,and Furst,fluent in French and German as well asEnglish and Italian, agreed to grind outreviews of authors as radically differentas Joyce Cary and Ivy Compton-Burnett,Julien Green and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Healso produced critical evaluations in Ital-ian of Oscar Wilde and George BernardShaw. In fact, Furst was so learned Mon-tale had to caution him to tone it down anotch or two. “Don’t display too muchknowledge of English and American lit-
erature,” Montale wrote him. “You shouldshow an average knowledge which couldbe attributed to me.”
Although Montale paid Furst for hisefforts, he never publicly acknowledgedhim,never grantedhim the recognition hatmight have madehis “negro” a full citizenin the republic of letters. What’s worse,Montale appears to have been two-timingFurst. As it was in his romantic life, so itwas in his literary life; he just couldn’t re-mainmonogamous. He had a second ghost-writer, a woman, who translated English-
language books into Italian and let Montalesign hisname to them.
he Collected contains an essayon “Reading Montale,” but it does notmention the contretemps that erupteda decade ago when the novelist andT ilmmaker Mario Soldati, friend to both
Montale and Furst, published a book de-tailing their relationship. In his volumeof reminiscences, (“BarrenBranches”), Soldati excoriatedMontale forhis failure to credit Furst. At the same time,I1 of Milan published severalletters from Montale to Furst that corrobo-rated the story and divided opinion in Ital-ian arts and letters. Marco Vallora noted in
that both Alexandre Dumasand Luigi Pirandello had followed
similar ghostwriting practices; Albert0Moravia wrote in Corriere della that‘‘it is difficult to justifl Montale’s conduct,whatever the circumstances in which hefound himself.”
Many might object that this debate isan inconsequential sidebar. But nobodyappears to have seriously researched the
subject by following up journalistic reve-lations a decade old. In a detailed chronol-
ogy,Galassi notes that Montale often aver-aged a hundred articles annually, a flabber-gasting number for a deadline-phobicpoet.It wouldn’t simply be interesting, t wouldbe intellectually responsible to determineexactly how much of Montale’s prose Furstproduced.
Moreover, publication of Galassi’s
landmark volume of translations invitesa reassessment of Montale’s own transla-tions. Surely anyone who translated Shake-speare, Yeats, Eliot and Faulkner deserves
close reading. How good was Montale’swork? How,good and how much was ac-tually his ghostwriter’s work?
Even assuming that Montale wroteevery word of every poem published inhis name; scholars should do a textualanalysis and set this issue to rest. Whydon’t the worker bees in what Richard
Howard refers to as the “academic cottageindustry” of Montale criticism comparethe great man’s verse with the poetry ofhis obscure friend? 1
Correspondance SchoolArtARTHUR C. DANTO
f we think of a historical period as defined by what the French have usefully
designated a mentaliti-a shared set of attitudes, practices’and beliefs-then
periods end when one mentaliti’givesway to another. Something like this hap-Iened in 1962, when Abstract Expressionism came to an end-not necessarily
becausethe movement was internally ex-hausted but because a new artistictalit6 was in place. And thesetend to rewrite he history of art in theirownimage.SoMarcel Duchamp and John Cage,who would at best have been marginal to
the Modernist aesthetic to which AbstractExpressionism subscribed,became the gen-erative figures of the new period. Picasso,who had cast so daunting a shadow overModernist artistic practice, was now es-teemed primarily for having invented col-lage. Not everyone, of course, crossed theboundary into the new at once.There were many in the art world-artistsas well as critics-who continued to framethe meaning of art in terms of thein which they had grown up. They were in,one might say, but not of the new period.It is possible that the new artistic mentalitywas but part of a larger one-that of thesixties. If that is true, then the transform-ing forces hat explain he uprisings of 1968must already have been operative in artis-tic precincts in the early years of the decade.Although 1968 s often explained with ref-erence to a revulsion against the VietnamWar, this reverses the direction of causal-ity: That revulsion is explained by the new
(What explains theitself? I have no idea!)
The new surfaced in 1962,when the artistic practices of a loosely struc-
tured group of American, European andJapanese artists began to be referred to as
Fluxus. The name was invented by GeorgeMaciunas, the prophet if not the founderof the movement, and it expressed a dis-satisfaction with the kind of compartmen-talization of artistic endeavors made ex-plicitinthe writings of Clement Greenberg.
Under Modernist imperatives, Greenbergclaimed in a famous essay, each mediummust aspire to a pure state of itself, ex-punging any borrowings from other media.Fluxus works, by exuberant contrast, dis-regarded the borderlines between music,writing, theater and the visual arts, so thatevery work of Fluxus art was in principlea kind of And the ideaof artistic purity was not the only erst-while value demoted by Fluxus. Its artwasephemeral and irreverent, often trivial andtypically took the form of a joke.
What Maciunas designated proto-Fluxus works were createdin he late fifties,when Abstract Expressionism was at itspeak, so theartexisted before its practition-.ers were conscious of themselves as form-ing a movement. The two co-existed for some years. The difference inattitude and practice, however, would havemade it difficult o imagine that the conceptof art was wide and elastic enough to ac-commodate the characteristic expressionsof them both. The paradigm Abstract Ex-pressionist work would be a large, heroiccanvas aflirming the agony of creation and
the tragic view of life, suchasBamett New-man’s painting
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29,1999 Nation. 31
(195 l}.A not untypical Fluxwork would beRobe rt Watts’s (circa1966}, display ing ap atc h of silk-screenedpubic hair and worn by performers in aFluxconcert irrespective of gender. The s it-uation more or less resembled a marvelousscene in Richard Strauss’s aufNaxos, in w hich .the tragic heroine shares
an island with comm edia dell’artebuffoonswho try o snap her out of her grief by mak-ingfaces and performing cartwheels.
Fluxus objects raised in an acute waywhat Abstract Expressionism took forgranted-the philosoph ical question of thenature of art.Ducham p had raised this ques-tion through his ready-mades, which is whyhe was counted a proto-Fluxus master. AndCage brought to Fluxus a certain Zen dis-regard for sharp boundaries. Ben Vautier,a Swiss who joined the movement in 1962,declared that is art and began
signing whatever cam e to hand. (W arhol,too, once s aid he would sign anything.}Zen, in the form in wh ich the deeply in-fluential Dr. Suzuki expounded it, sawno distinction between sacred objects-like a statue of Buddha-and anythingelse. The avant-garde of 19 62 was accord-ingly driven by concerns that could noteasily be translated back into the prob-lems of Modernism, in part because theformalism that had come to define Mod-ernist aesthetics had no app lication o, say,
luxus was defined less by a style ofobject than by a sense ofperform ance.Fluxus objects were more or less propsfor art as a system of performances,rather than focuses of aesthetic con-
templation. I was once shown a roomfulof Fluxworks, acquired from a collectorby the Getty Research Institute in LosAngeles. What they had in common wasmainly the fact that they would not havebeen seen as even in candidacy for thestatus of art before 1962, and the fact thatitwas almost mpossible o understand whatthey we re about without art-historicalref-erence to the actions to w hich they testi-fied. One can get a good idea of suc h anaggregate from a n illustration in
kind of ofthe Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxuscollection in Detroit-which shows a workof 1965 by W illem de Ridder, calledEuro-
1965.Valises and toyboxes-and a hair-brush-are piled up together with books,journals an d posters, with FLUXUS printedon them. T he c ritic Robert Pincus-Witten
writes that while “the lion’s share of Fluxuswork’assu mes he form o f transient pieces
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of paper-handbills and broadsides orboxed thematic accumulations,”
Fluxus is an art ammed chock-a-block
with minute containers ofall shapes and
sizes, little wooden and plastic boxes
found in the “for sale” streetside cartons
of the Canal Street supply houses-cor-
rugated cardboard, mailing tubes, scrapsof paper, plastic indecencies from the
local joke or tourist shop, miniaturized
Pop gewgaws of prepossessing verisi-
militude--cucumbers, fried eggs-ball-
bearing puzzles that tax manual skill,
articulated plastic and wooden take-apart
puzzles and games, meaningless gadgets
displaced from household and hobbyist
needs, the tiny paraphemalia of the home
workshop and playroom.
They are the leavings-behind of an art thatdid not somuch make these objects as ends
’in themselves but use them as a means ofcommunicationwith otheP artists who par-ticipated in the Fluxus
ay Johnson’s work, now on view atthe Whitney Museum of AmericanArt(ui~tilMarch 21), has somewhat he lookof a Fluxshop’s inventory, arrayed indisplay cases and consisting of post-
cards, letters, collages, drawings, enclo-sures and attachments, and envelopes, toand from what Johnson described in 1969as “several hundred New York Corre-spondance School International artist andwriter ‘members.’”The deliberatespelling “correspondance” is characteris-tic of the ludic spirit of The New York Cor-respondance School, understood, in Fluxusterms, as a verb rather than a noun-as away of interacting rather than the meansby which interaction is achieved. And theidea of a “New York CorrespondanceSchool” may have been a jokey transformof “New York School,” the term coinedby Robert Motherwell as a label for thosewho did what Greenberg-hating “actionpainting” as a term-simply called “New
York-style painting.” If The New YorkCorrespondance School was not itself aFluxus work, it expressed the spirit ofFluxus, whose membership, like the net-work of New York Correspondance, wasin constant, well, flux. Johnson may havebeen a Fluxus alumnus, like so manyartists who participated in its eccentricmanifestations-Joseph Beuys and NamJune Paik, for example; Yoko Ono (and,through her, John Lennon), Claes Old-enburg, Allen Kaprow (the inventor ofHappenings) and Christo, all of whoseworks are grounded on Fluxus premises.
The movement had no pope, the way Sur-realism had Breton, empowered to say
who was’orwas not a member. So artistscame and went.
Most :of the Correspondance Schoomembers are fairly obscure (as were, forthat matter, most members of Fluxus). Theartist John Willenbecher identified forme the exceedingly obscure Jeter Stalcup“which only a few initiates might know
was the name of someone Bill Wilson’smother, May, found in an early computergenerated dating service shortly before shemoved to New York in her 70s.” The lettersoRen ornamented by simple drawings or bystick-ons, usually instructed the recipientto perform some fairly simple action. TheCorrespondance School was a networkof individualswho were axtists by virtue ofplaying the game. Some of them were whatWillenbecher erms “initiates” by virtue ofsharing-or at least appreciating-John-son’s sense of humor: a readiness to re-
spond to a certain kind of joke or pun, vi-sual or verbal; to taketrivialthings as monu-mentally important; and to profess a fan’sdedication to certain borderline celebritieslike Anna May Wong or Ernie Bushmillerwho drew the comic strip Nancy.
ne of the activities of the Correspon-dance,School consisted in calling meet-ings of fan clubs. In one of the displaycases there is a flier,on cheap red paper,announcing an Anna May Wong club
meeting at the New York Cultural Centerto take place on June 3 of the year it was
sent, from 1 o 3 PM. On it Johnson drewa number of cartoon bunny heads, lookingmuch alike but, in deference o Anna MayWong herself, all with slanted eyes. Thebunny head was Johnson’s logo, and sincethe bunny heads on the flier all look alike,the implication of a common isgraphically conveyed. The heads desig-nated the putative members of the fanclub-fifty-two by my count. I think of itas a kind of class picture of the school’smore faithful members. I know -or knowof-perhaps eighteen.I suppose hat what
one did at such a club meeting was to com-pare Anna May Wong’s roles with oneanother. Or is it possible that no one turnedup at the center, and the meeting consistedin just its own announcement?
I expect that every letter Johnson eversent was part of the New York Corre-spondance School archive, but the char-acteristic communicationwould have beenaddressed-in all senses of the word-toan individual who could be counted on toperform the simple task the letter enjoined(which sometimes consisted n sending theletter on> to omeone else) or to connect
the dots in such a way as to reveal the oke.Sometimes the letter is generic, implying,
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29,1999 The Nation. 33
with qualification, a bulk mailing. In oneletter-to someone named “George”-Johnson described spillingboiling wateronhimself, causing him to take a tetanus shotat the emergency clinic. He asks George tophotocopy the page, “sending one copyto Andy Warhol at 33 Union Square, NewYork City. I could use about forty-fourXerox pages for N.Y.C.S. mailing.” It issigned with a bunny logo, interestinglyrotated, as in Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbitpuzzle. One can see the quality of John-son’s wit when one considers hat the hor-izontal ears make the logo look like thetwo-fingeredvictorysignturnedon its side.Not unexpectedly, he writes “Peace” justabove the logo. The letter is dated April22,1969, so the rotated bunny is a mutedpolitical gesture. Johnson’s basic form ofperception consisted in seeing what Witt-genstein called “aspects’-the duck in the
rabbit (or vice versa), the peace sign in thevictory sign rotated, the way “PALS” andSLAP'^ are anagrams, as if there were somedeep truth about friendship hidden in thisfact. To appreciate the disclosure of thesemeanings qualified one as a member ofthe NYCS. To continue the play requiredthat one didnot suffer, to use an expressionWittgenstein associated with the ducl-rabbit, “aspect blindness.”
It fits my historical schematism to per-fection hat Johnson should have begun theCorrespondanceSchool in 1962. Others be-fore him had certainly modified postcardsand letters in ways that would be appreci-ated-perhaps uniquely appreciated-bytheir intended recipients; Mallarmk, forexample, found witty ways of addressingenvelopes. But suchpoetic spilloverswouldnot have been seriously considered.as artuntil the concept of art was transformed-by Fluxus, among others. It also fits mysense of Fluxus that The New York Cor-respondance School belongs only inciden-tally to what came to be known as “mailart” later on . At one time Ida Applebroogprintedup anumber ofpamphletlikebooks,
which she mailed to various persons in theartworld. She called them “performances,”and they typically consisted of an imagerepeated several times, like a comic bookin which every panel shows the same thing.
(1979), the samemanis shownseated in the same way, frame after frame.After three frames, there is a subtitle:
There follow fourframes exactly like the last one-thoughthe words now enable us to describe theman as looking at someone he humiliatesthrough his gaze. The subtitle transformsthe iterated frames into a narrativ-it re-moves our aspect blindness. they havethe structure of NYCS jokes. Applebroog
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34 Nation. . 29,1999
had an address list, but she did not havea network. The booklets were, so to speak,self-advertisements, giving her a way ofgetting recognition until her work was ac-cepted by a gallery. Though Johnson hadgallery shows-and was exhibited at theWhitney in 1970-he would not have re-garded the galleryashis destined locus. TheNew York Correspondance School was notintended as a means to anything beyondits own continuation-though it was sointegrally expressive of Johnson’s artisticpersonality that no one appears to havesucceeded him after his death.
he work tends to split the Whitneyshow’s viewers into two classes. Oneclass consists of those “hundreds ofartists and writers” who received lettersT and did whatever they were asked to do,
whose lives were infused by the sensibility
the letters express. The other class consistsin the rest of us, who must take what pleas-ure we can from what remains public andaccessible in the assembled letters andcollages. I am impressed that most of theessays intended for the catalogue of theshow were written more or less as remi-niscences of Ray Johnson by people whowere, or might have been, members of theAnna May Wong Fan Club. That meansthere are not as yet real Johnson specialists,who have done research time in the scrap-boxes of Johnson’s studio n Locust Valley,New York, and are able to annotate theletters, identify the recipients, tellus fromwhat issue of what magazine a given pic-ture was scissored out, draw to our attentionhidden meanings that have inexplicablynot been noticed by the learned ProfessorXin his definitive (ha!) catalogue.
Perhaps because I once held the John-sonian chair in philosophy at ColumbiaUniversity, I received a few mailings @omThe New York Correspondance School,which I dutifully modified and returned-though I have no idea what Johnson wouldhave wanted done with them. I did not es-
pecially share the prerequisite sensibility,though when we met we found we had cer-tain things in common. We both grew up inDetroit, where we discovered the DanishSportsman’s Club as a neat place to drink,and we had moved to New York in the sameyear.I did not hear fromhim or many yearsafter that, until a piece of mail arrived latein 1994. It was a drawing of a facelesswoman. We were (I am certain I was notthe only recipient) to answer the question“Who is this curator?’-and were givensome of the letters of her name. I quicklysaw that it was Donna De Salvo, a curator
of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Co-lumbus, Ohio, who in fact curated this
fascinating show at the Wtney . The pressopening for it took place on January 14,1999-almost four years to the day after theartist’s suicide by drowning in the chillwaters off Sag Harbor, Long Island. A sui-cide note would have been too portentousfor the New York CorrespondanceSchool.There are, however, a number of what maybe clues if we want tothinkof the drowningas a last performance-a way of communi-cating with everyone hrough the obituary
pages of the major newspapers. The Corre-spondance School is a Fluxus masterpiece,if that makes any sense. But its countlessscraps and scribbles merely express itsspirit, which can hardly be put on view in avitrine. Spinoza made a distinction betweennatura naturata andnatura naturans-be-tween the world as a system of objects andthe world as a system ofprocesses.What wesee in the display cases isJohnson ohnso-nata. Theartwas Johnson ohnsonans.
Too Many CigarettesSTUART KLAWANS
200 SUNDAY
onday: Screening of Garry Marshall’s The which seems to be
about a goldfish.Whenever the characters have to make a decision,the film
cuts to a close-up of the cute little fella swifnming in his bowl. Since theM icture was photographed by Dante Spinotti, the background pebbles are
of a blueso luscious as to be edible. Butdis-
tractions multiply, keeping me from enter-ing into a meditative union with the fish.Snatches of pop music keep drifting onto
the soundtrack and off again, as if someoneon the set had been having trouble tuninga radio. And then there’s the plot.
The Other Sister claims o be concemedwith a plucky young woman named Carla(Juliette Lewis), who is determined o leada full life despite being (in the currentphrase) mentally challenged.,While ttend-ing a technical college in San Francisco,she meets and falls in love with Danny(Giovanni Ribisi), who is similarly chal-lenged. He also faces a second hurdle: Un-like Carla, whose family rolls in money,Danny is scraping by. I think this is a finesubject for a film-but by Fassbinder, notGarry Marshall. Given his emphatic style,you’d think Carla and Danny were not justthe protagonists but also the intended au-dience. I wonder what they’d make of allthose goldfish shots.
I also wonder what they’d think of therole of Carla’s mom, which has been fixedon Diane Keaton like a curse. During theearly scenes, Mom is so cold, commanding,heartless and manipulative, you keep ex-pecting her to offer Carla a poisoned apple;and at the climax, when (for comic effect)
she’s doused by the sprinkiers on the coun-try club’s golf course, the only thing miss-
ing is a strangled cry of‘?’m melting! Con-sidering he movie’s nonstop lectures aboutgranting people their dignity, perhaps Mar-shall might have reined in his get-Mom
urges. He also might have granted somedignity to the black people in the movie,who exist solely as background, exceptwhen they step forward, minstrel-style, toentertain Carla and Danny.
Instead of leaving with an inwardprom-ise to respect the mentally challenged, Igo out brooding on the Return of the Strut-ting Negro.
Tuesday: Screening of 8MM. Thesoundtrack hrobs with Arab music, laid onto lend an atmosphere of spice and dangerto what the press notes call the “garish red-light distiict in Hollywood.77 s the notesgo on to say, ‘“there s no such district.” Butwhat the hell-what are set designers andArabs for, if not this?
I find I can mull over that question,watch Nicolas Cage stroll through entirebasements full of Threatening Negroes,Mexicans and Filipinos, and still haveplenty of leisure to review the history offilm criticism. It was in the fifties, as I re-call, that certain critics adopted he habit ofinterpreting films as the self-dramatizationsof their directors. Where exactly would wediscover Joel Schumacher in 8MM?
There’s a clue in those invaluable pressnotes. Nicolas Cage describes the character
