The Rag Blog: A World Premiere from Larry Piltz

23 September 2008

A World Premiere from Larry Piltz

Just Got Back (From Iraq and Nam)

"Just Got Back", an unprecedented Music Video, uses stunning unaired original photos from the Vietnam War, of Vietnam Veterans protesting 1972 Republican convention in Miami, of 1990s war-devastated Iraq, and of a modern thriving 2008 Vietnam, to show that life does return to normal in a land invaded and occupied by an aggressive military empire once that empire's military adventurism is finished and its armies have long been withdrawn. Also depicted is the plight of the empire's indentured conflicted soldiery.

"Just Got Back", the song, uses humor and irony, soaring idealism and practical expressionism to point the way to how to immediately improve the world - simply abandon military adventurism, a peaceful pragmatism.

The video was put together independently by someone else, with only my initial loose coaching, and I'd be curious to know if it makes sense to you. I get it, but I think that could partly be because I really really want to. Even so, I see the narrative as both effective literally in a good number of places, but with a huge subliminal subcontext that's necessary to hold the whole thing together - the challenge having been to make a 'story' using widely disparate photos from across four decades, and then make them conform to symbolic and literal prose imagery embedded in lyrics mostly written in 1984. It's only a rough cut with a smoother and less zoomy version to follow.

Rag Blog would get the worldwide exclusive as far as I know (though I suppose there could be a tribe somewhere in Utter Phlegmland that has erected a fetish genuflection cult around it; hmm, wonder if I'd get royalties for that).

Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog

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23 September 2008

A World Premiere from Larry Piltz

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