Bugsy Siegel is a fascinating character, and Warren Beatty did an incredible job of portraying him, especially for a gentile. Annette Bening is amazing as his love interest, and she is even more cruel and insane than he is.
What a bizarre episode in American history. Jewish gangsters, exiled to LA by anti-semitism, build Las Vegas. I think the reason Jews finally made it out of the ghetto is because they are brilliant at understanding the secret desires of white people. Secret, often shameful desires: money, sex, power, fame...just look at Al Goldstein or Howard Stern. Like Siegel, they realize that people will do anything to satisfy their guilty pleasures. And the creation of institutions or monuments to filth and excess creates, in turn, demand for such things.
Here's a beautiful, hilarious snippet from Wikipedia:
Siegel lost patience with the rising costs [of building the Flamingo Hotel], and his notorious outbursts unnerved his construction foreman. Reputedly, Siegel told him, "Don't worry — we only kill each other."
What's the aesthetic consequence of iPhone culture? A culture of text messages, tweets, one night stands, one year marriages, CEO turnovers, volatile stocks... You might want to say these phenomena lead necessarily to anarchy, total disorder, total breakdown. And speed does kill. But there are, also, ways of adapting to brevity. The culture of the mixtape, of rapping over someone else's beat, often leads to songs which are unusually short, and we will begin to see an increase of songs produced to be the same length, which somehow fit within a smaller frame.
If the hip hop song can support itself without needing a hook, the dance performance can shorten itself as well. From London one might think that things in the arts are better in the states, considering the enormous government cuts and the privileging of 'hard' (erect?) subjects like engineering. But non-Americans may not realize that the American arts have never, really, had the public-funding advantage that they've had in Europe for several decades. There are very, very few public grants available, so artists like the Turf Feinz are compelled to shorten their performances and distribute them over a broader cultural terrain.
The brevity of "Respiration" may have to do with the shooting location. The atmosphere, the car lights and the metal bars, the street lights and the dilapidated buildings add a sense of heaviness. It is moving you toward the pressure of East Oakland, an area which, although it is right next to the bay, feels landlocked, because it has been so reduced by economic drought. Driving or taking the bus through it, one realizes how enormously sprawling it is, how it was designed as a place of retreat for white families, a suburb. Now it has entered the suburban winter, the white people have fled decades ago, to suburbs further removed, and then, recently, returned, to other neighborhoods.
"Respiration" stresses that even in less than two minutes, a meditative moment is not only possible but crucial. To breathe again, to prevent an asthma attack, you need to take a minute or two, and even that small increment is enough to release some of the pressure. After a puff of smoke, Dreal touches his heart. At 22 seconds, the production itself breathes as he drags his foot forward after a backflip. This foot drag is synchronized exactly with a syncope in the song, to borrow a phrase from Catherine Clement: the music itself is cut, its consciousness goes under, its heart stops, and in the background you hear the faintest synth whose ominous minor key evokes Mel-Man's production on The Chronic 2001. Dreal displays the incredible ability of the human body to engage with technology, to deliver itself into a machinic operation. At 40 seconds, the film looks modified: he has appropriated a filmic device. His feet levitate as he shifts weight from one to the other.
There's so much to say about this essay--I would just highlight these passages:
"Africa is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its subjectivity."
and "[Africa is seen] as headless figure threatened with madness and quite innocent of any notion of center, hierarchy, or stability…a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of a tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed: a mixture of the half-created and the incomplete…in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos"
For this latter passage he cites Christopher Miller's brilliant text, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French, in which Miller, in direct homage to Said, draws the outline of an "Africanism" which is parallel to Orientalism, although it is more obsessed with notions of nothingness and vacuity.
1) Mladen Dolar, "The Metaphysics of the Voice" from A Voice and Nothing More
2) Lacan, "The resonances of the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique", Part III of "The Function and Field of Speech and Language" in Ecrits
3) Jacques Derrida, "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing" from Of Grammatology
4) Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice"
5) Luce Irigaray, "The Dialogues" and "Plato's Hysteria" in Speculum: of the Other Woman
6) Kaja SIlverman, "Disembodying the Female Voice: Irigaray, Experimental Feminist Cinema, and Femininity" from The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
7) Sherry Turkle, "The Flight From Conversation" (New York Times article) and Franco Berardi, "Info-Labor and 'Precarization" from Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation
8) Mikhail Yampolsky, "The Voice Devoured: Artaud and Borges on Dubbing"
9) Professor Barker, "Barker Speaks" and William Burroughs, "Cross the Wounded Galaxies"
10) Avital Ronell, "The Deaf" in The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia and Electric Speech
11) Michel Chion, "Raising the Voice" and "The Voice that Seeks a Body" from The Voice in Cinema
12) Freya Jarman-Ivens, "'I Feel A Song Coming On': Vocal Identification and Modern Subjectivity"
13) Susan McClary, "This is not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson"
14) Ian Penman, "The Shattered Glass: Notes on Bryan Ferry" from Angela McRobbie ed, Zoot Suits and Secondhand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music
15) Kodwo Eshun, "Inner Spatializing the Song" and "Programming Rhythmatic Frequencies" from More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction
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