Slightly P: Ken Burns//The Vietnam War

[Keith Davis]

I’m up to episode 5. There’s good information and it’s interesting enough, but it is the Burns formula, and I agree the music seems a little cliche.
I’m still going to keep watching.

Www.innergroovemusic.com

> On Oct 1, 2017, at 2:56 PM, L E Bryan <lebryan at sonic.net> wrote:
> 
> Interesting review.
> 
> https://www.truthdig.com/articles/vietnam-myopia-50-years-later/
> 
> Lawrence
> 
>> On Oct 1, 2017, at 11:34 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Burns' use of music has been a major annoyance--i find his work informative yet formuliac. 
>> 
>> i'm not shocked by much about Vietnam anymore considering the lessons we failed to learn less than 30 years after its 'end'. i am only grateful for men like the helicopter pilot who was instrumental in stopping the killing at My Lai. i think he passed recently
>> 
>> rich
>> 
>>> On Sun, Oct 1, 2017 at 6:35 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It should not allow emotional equanimity--and doesn't. You put your whole self in. And feel. 
>>> 
>>> "Dramatized actuality" as a great documentarian defined such. Burns does this: gives slices of 'both sides' as history YET, 
>>>  the right 'interpretative' words, the right straightforward presentation of deception, of actively chosen lies, with the repetition--a theme is what is steadily repeated in variations in the work, said someone, maybe Susan Sontag--of the horror truths of death and suffering and incompetence, it becomes one the the best anti-war movies/tragedies made. 
>>> 
>>>> On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 9:11 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>>> I am not able to watch, cable is needed where we live to get tv and don’t like tv that much. I am glad it is having such a strong impact on you and specifically inducing sympathy toward the Vietnamese. My only other contact with a local person, who is not a close acquaintance, watching the series. He seemed to see it as a thrilling story of american courage and cool scenes of war. I hope the series will wear away this bizarre enthusiasm.
>>>>    The Nick Turse article was not a scathing put down or anything like that. He seemed to think the series pretty decent and thorough. He spent a decade writing a book about Vietnam and brought to light via FOIA many atrocities that had been histoorically suppressed. I hope the series has more the effect it is having on you than it did on this person I mentioned( a political centrist electrician in his early 50s). I cried enough tears at the time and fought with the war mania at home, in school and elsewhere. I could never watch it with any emotional equanimity.
>>>> > On Sep 30, 2017, at 9:33 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> >
>>>> > I am not even going to bother to read it to say IT DOES NOT!....I have NOT been able to get the repeated huge numbers out of my head--because I, hating to even read about war, had NO IDEA they were so high---with scene after scene of massive numbers
>>>> > of dead Vietnamese...When we see that bombing and extrapolate--how else can it be done?--and see the deaths and extrapolate......THE HORROR, THE HORROR....
>>>> >
>>>> > and they come up in EVERY discussion I have had--and I am in a discussion group about it in my soft liberal bourgeois town.
>>>> >
>>>> > "Sometimes simply seeing what is on front of one's eyes is the hardest thing"---G. Orwell, surely paraphrased.
>>>> >
>>>> > On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 9:21 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>>> > This is a brief article by Nick Turse who wrote an important recent book on Vietnam.
>>>> > https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/29/ken-burns-vietnam-war-documentary-glosses-over-devastating-civilian-toll
>>>> >
>>>> 
>>>> -
>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>> 
>> 
> 
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