Arts of War on the Web

On August 4, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced to the American public that North Vietnamese gunboats had attacked U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The subsequent Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed by Congress (and signed buy LBJ, above) provided him with a de facto Declaration of War, setting in motion the big buildup of American troops and eight years of the American war in Vietnam.

“August 4, 1964″ is the name of a new “secular oratorio” by composer Steven Stucky, with a libretto by Gene Scheer, which the Dallas Symphony performed September 18th to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of LBJ’s birth. “The piece,” critic Chris Shull wrote in the Fort Worth Star Telegram “is coherent, dramatically gripping, thematically relevant and musically accessible.”

“August 4, 1964″ also deals with another event that happened that day–the discovery of the bodies of three slain civil rights workers in Mississippi. The oratorio does so using a combined orchestra, large chorus and four vocal soloists conducted by Jaap van Zweden.

“August 4, 1964″ “deserves to be performed again and again,” Shull said. “It is American music, speaking on American history. It touches the American soul.”

“The work lived up to its outsize ambitions,” The New York Times’s James R. Oestrich said in his review, “and Mr. van Zweden led a beautifully prepared and dynamic performance.”

It’s 41 years old and headed back to Broadway, where it all began. Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock-Musical, will be back on the Great White Way sometime after the first of the year. Hair had a very successful run this summer in a production staged by New York’s Public Theatre at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. A few days before it closed on September 14, the announcement was made about the move back to Broadway.

“The success of Hair has been thrilling, proving that this show speaks as powerfully today as it did 40 years ago,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, said last week. “We are moving the show indoors, but the celebratory joy of this production will remain intact.”

Hair’s world premiere at the Public Theatre came in 1967 during the height of the Vietnam War. The upbeat musical, which centers on a tribe of hippies dealing with one of them being drafted into the Army, moved to Broadway in 1968, where it ran for more than 1,800 performances.

Wallace Terry, known to his many friends as Wally, was an award-winning journalist, news commentator and best-selling author who made his professional reputation covering the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement for Time magazine. Terry, who died in 2003, is best-known for his internationally acclaimed book, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans, which came out in 1985 and remains a classic in the Vietnam War nonfiction literary canon. Bloods was named Best Book of the Year by The Baltimore Sun, a Notable Book by The New York Times, was honored by 52 cities and states and by the U.S. Congress and by Vietnam Veterans of America, with the President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1989.

Wally Terry was a good friend of Vietnam Veterans of America. A strong VVA supporter and a regular contributor to The VVA Veteran, he also was the primary organizer of VVA’s stellar academic conference, Rendezvous With War, which was held at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia in 2000.

You can learn more about Wally Terry’s memorable life and fascinating career at a brand new website, http://wallaceterry.com

British artist Meirion Edwards is putting together a project that he hopes eventually will consist of a series of multimedia images from more than 1,000 slides, negatives and photographs taken by serving soldiers, airmen, Marines, and sailors in Vietnam. The images, he says, will cover “in country as well as R and R, everything from Bob Hope and Raquel Welch to village scenes of everyday life.”

Edwards says he will be put the photographs together “with quotations and illustrations to construct visually stimulating images.” His main goals, he says, are “to bring to a new audience images of the Vietnam War by those that were there, and to sell the work and, after the expenses are covered, to donate a percentage to an organization supporting Vietnam veterans.”

If you’d like to help or have any ideas, Edwards would like to hear from you. His email is meirion507@btinternet.com If you contact, him please mention your read about it here at Vietnam Veterans of America’s Arts of War on the Web.

Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived, a newly released documentary film directed and edited by Koji Masutani, takes on the unanswerable what-if of its subtitle. The film, which opened in New York City September 17, portrays John F. Kennedy as a dove on escalating the Vietnam War, positing that if he had not been assassinated in November of 1963, the big escalation under LBJ in the next two years wouldn’t have taken place.

It’s an argument that has raged since the end of the war. And, despite the message of this film, that argument is unprovable either way.

The New York Times’ reviewer, Manohla Dargis was not impressed, calling the film “speculative, provocative, frustrating and finally unpersuasive historical gloss” that “races quickly and all too lightly over the major political crises that” JFK faced around the world.

The “Birthday Twins Project,” a new documentary series currently in production for Belgian National TV is looking at what life would have been like for Belgian folks if they had been born in another part of the world. “To be able to answer this question, we have selected about 20 Belgian participants for our project,” the show’s producer told us. “For those Belgians, we are looking for people worldwide who were born on the exact same day and who have the same gender, the so-called ‘birthday twins.’”

That’s where you come in. The producers would love to include an American Vietnam veteran among the group of birthday twins. If they find someone who would like to be part of the show, they would introduce him (or her) to his (or her) Belgian counterpart. “Together they can discover to what extent their surroundings, habits, and culture have influenced their lives and what the resemblances or differences are,” the producers say. “We would like to immerse the Belgian person in the daily life of his/her foreign twin and film that experience during a couple of days.”

Here’s the list of birthdays for our generation. If yours is on there and you’d like to take part in the show, email Annelore De Donder at adedonde@woestijnvis.be and tell her where you read about it.

Men:

18 July 1948
19 July 1948
25 September 1949
11 February 1952
18 January 1956
5 May 1956

Women
5 April 1943
2 May 1950

Ten years ago I was bowled over by the Coen Brothers’ crazy dark comedy The Big Lebowski, which since then has become a pop cultural icon, complete with fan websites and an annual Lebowski Fest. The latest event in Lebowski land: the recent release of “The Big Lebowski: 10th Anniversary Edition” DVD.

Why mention The Big Lebowski in a space that deals with the arts and the Vietnam War? Simple: Walter, one of the three main characters (played to a tee by larger-than-life John Goodman—above, center), is a big-hearted, big-mouthed Vietnam veteran.

Here’s what I had to say about Walter in my mini-review, which appeared in the April-May 1998 issue of The VVA Veteran:

In this strange but engrossing film, Walter constantly prattles on about his war days. It’s the early nineties, yet he goes around wearing jungle boots, cut-off fatigue shorts and dog tags. Walter also has a wicked temper, and is not hesitant to brandish a firearm or resort to physical violence.

Okay, Walter is another cinematic Nam vet nutcase. Still, the movie is played for laughs, and Walter is pretty damn funny. And how can you get upset with a guy who confronts a transgressing fellow bowler by bellowing:

“This is not Vietnam, this is bowling. There are rules!”

“Saturday Night”

The evocative original painting that graces the cover of the current issue (September-October) of The VVA Veteran is the work of John Phelps (below), an artist and sculptor from Wyoming who is a U.S. Navy veteran of the Vietnam War. Phelps, who was born and raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming, went to the University of Wyoming, then joined the Navy. After he returned from Vietnam, Phelps worked as a guide for elk and bighorn sheep hunters in Fremont County, Wyoming. He has lived in Dubois, Wyoming, for twenty-five years.

Phelps’ painting and sculpture hones in on the history of the Great American West, including the terrain, the fur trade, mountain men, the cowboy, ranching and rodeo. You can get a good look at his work at Phelps’ web site, www.johnphelps.com

The 2008 American Veterans Conference will be held November 6-8, the weekend before Veterans Day, in Washington D.C. This is the 11th annual conference put on by The American Veterans Center. The headliner this year is Lt. General Hal Moore (above), the hero of the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, who received a VVA Excellence in the Arts Award for his book We Were Soldiers Once and Young. Among other things, the conference will feature a panel called “Baseball Goes to War,” featuring an array of ballplayer veterans including Hall of Famer Bob Feller.

For registration information and the schedule of events http://www.americanveteranscenter.org/AVC_conference-schedule.html For more information email Tim Holbert tholbert@americanveteranscenter.org or call 571-480-4152

The opening reception for a new show of more than 100 new works by Shepard Fairey (above), who has been called the “godfather of urban art,” will take place on Saturday, September 13 at 7:00 p.m. at the White Walls Gallery in San Francisco. The show, entitled “The Duality of Humanity,” opens that evening, and runs through October 4.

Fairey has taken the name of the show from the antics of Private Joker, the iconoclastic anti-hero of Gustav Hasford’s Vietnam war novel, The Short-timers ,and the movie it spawned, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Several of the pieces in the show are informed by Fairey’s belief that there is a strong parallel between the Vietnam War and the current war in Iraq. That includes a work depicting a child with a gun in his hand and a flower in his hat. Also, the theme of soldiers and weapons bearing peace signs, or peace signs comprised of military effects, runs through many pieces in the show.

The White Walls Gallery is located at 835 Larkin Street. Phone: 415-931-1500.

Here’s the surreal “duality of man” dialogue from Full Metal Jacket, the part of the film that gave Fairey his title, and one of the parts of the movie that shows Joker at his sarcastic best:

Colonel: Marine, what is that button on your body armor?
Private Joker: A peace symbol, sir.
Colonel: Where’d you get it?
Joker: I don’t remember, sir.
Colonel: What is that you’ve got written on your helmet?
Joker: “Born to Kill,” sir.
Colonel: You write “Born to Kill” on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?
Joker: No, sir.
Colonel: You’d better get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you.
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Now answer my question or you’ll be standing tall before the man.
Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.
Colonel: The what?
Joker: The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.
Colonel: Whose side are you on, son?
Joker: Our side, sir.
Colonel: Don’t you love your country?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Then how about getting with the program? Why don’t you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Son, all I’ve ever asked of my marines is that they obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. It’s a hardball world, son. We’ve gotta keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.
Joker: Aye-aye, sir.