The Vietnam war and the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Last night, I really enjoyed watching a documentary on BBC Four entitled HOW VIETNAM WAS LOST.

The film focused on one week in 1967, where two very different occurrences began to change American opinion on the Vietnam War. On one hand, an American battalion was ambushed by the Vietcong, resulting in 61 casualties. The focus here seemed to reveal a drastic misjudgement by the commanding officers, and media cover up in portraying the battle as a step toward victory rather than the defeat it was. The other even were the local police attacking students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where a sit-in was staged to precent Dow Chemical (the manufacturer of napalm) from making a recruiting visit on campus.

As a student of U Wisconsin in 1989-1992, it was very interesting for me to see the footage of the Commerce Building, and hear interviews with the policemen and students involved. The students were pretty brutally beaten with lack of prior warning, as the police cleared the building. I was struck by the vast differences in opinion and perception between the two groups, which one policeman described very clearly in terms of the very different social backgrounds of the students from the police, who came from farm families and had little contact with the university. The police expressed quite a strong animosity against the student protestors. Sociologist Maurice Zeitlin (a UW staff member present, but now at UCLA) gave some very interesting comments about patriotism and civic cuty in the very different contexts of soldiers drafted into the war and the students involved in protest.

Similarly, the film interviews the Vietcong commanders and some soldiers involved in the same battle. Its very rare to hear all sides of such issues.

In sum, a very focused, but revealing view on American attitudes toward Vietnam.

Tool Concert - London

Earlier this week, I went to see the band Tool at the Hammersmith Apollo (the second of two London shows, on June 14, 2006). The show was one of the best rock concerts I have seen in years -- certainly one of the all-time best that I have seen. I think any rock music concert is a real challenge to deal with huge obstacles of audience expectations, bad sound in acoustically challenged spaces, the band being tired and worn down on the road, and the like. This night, the band negotiated the space admirably, and things came together with rare grace. My seat was a bit far from the stage, high in the upper balcony. But the acoustics were largely good, apart from some very low electronic or synthesized bass notes in two or three short places in the show, which masked out the rest into indistinguishable mush!

The drummer Danny Carey particularly amazed me. I read that another musician had called him "the Billy Cobham of his generation" and I think its an apt comparison of his power and grace. He plays the inventive Mandalla Drum, which really takes electronic percussion up a notch in terms of its flexibility and expressiveness:

http://synesthesiacorp.com/home.html

Tool played a great set, and stretched out on some well known compositions. On Schism, the band added a double-tempo middle section that was amazing. From here, I really settled into deep listening of the middle of their set. One of my favorite aspects of Tool's music is the way that they subtley dispense with traditional verse-chorus song structures, which are the coffin of rock music. Their songs are more like taking a long journey through darkness and light, circling and revisiting themes, but always moving to the future. Lateralus is an excellent example. I appreciate how the band plays on-stage in half darkness and lets the power of the music and abstract film images take you ... "Spiral out, keep going."

SETLIST --Stinkfist,The Pot, Forty Six & 2, Jambi, Schism, Right In Two, Rosetta Stoned, Sober, Lateralus, Vicarious, Ænema.

Amazing!

R.Fripp Churchscapes at St.Paul's

On Tuesday afternoon, I had the honour of visiting St.Paul's Cathedral and hearing a 30 minute performance by Robert Fripp, an extraordinary guitarist. The performance was part of Fripp's 'Churchscapes' tour of England, which as I understand it, aims to present his guitar soundscapes in spaces that are (hopefully) outside the realm of commercial expectations associated with music today. Not having visited St.Paul's for many many years, I really enjoyed how such a sacred place also had an atmosphere of a working environment where art and ideas were also being tested out and communicated in a very informal way. So as R.Fripp played, tourists, priests and conscience members of the audience intermingled, sat or walked past, and the music formed part of the sorroundings in ways which, at times, demanded one's attention and at times seemed to support attention toward other things in the space, such as the ceiling of the Dome or religious pictures or our thoughts.

I am really enjoying R.Fripp's current soundscape material, and the way it combines soaring and floating waves of sound, which pass like clouds, with the minimalistic melodic sketches based on a very direct, unprocessed guitar tone, used throughout the recent Fripp&Eno release "The Equatorial Stars". Simply wonderful, especially as the music scaled the heights of St.Paul's Dome.

Another take on the music comes from Sid Smith.

I was happy to have the chance to bring the family along, and observed how both children stretched themselves out over a few chairs, listened and rested without becoming restless.

The rest of the afternoon was spent scaling the heights of the Dome, by foot that is:

The day ended with a bit of interesting karma. The day before, my wife had gently tapped into a parked car while turning around and surpringly left a dent in the others' car door. No one saw the event and in fact no one was around at all, but she went to some lengths to find the owner of the car and report it. "Am I being stupid?" Or doing the right thing? The next day at St.Paul's, she mysteriously misplaced her wallet. After racing back from the Tube in a panic, sure enough it was returned to the guards with all contents intact. Two acts that were individually irrational, and yet without these, society could not exist.

English Summer

"For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary" (Thomas Hobbes, 1651, Leviathan, Chap 13)

The English weather, as Hobbes knew well, comes close to a condition of war. So much more magical are the moments of sunlight, and their fleeting radiance which have been painted in magical pinks and oranges by Turner and others.

Here, a sampling from the garden window at sunset:



Or from the kitchen:



Or from upstairs:



The sun almost fading: