Open MIC (Military Industrial Complex) with 3 Viet Bros
A podcast audio blog by Anthony Le
An audio blog about:
Open MIC (Military Industrial Complex) by Anthony Le
“A Man of Two Faces” by Viet Thanh Nguyen
“Old Glory” by Ocean Vuong
AI Transcript:
Hey, it’s Ant. Christmas is coming up. And it used to be my most hated holiday. I just find it quite annoying. But now I think Thanksgiving is it. It's like kind of worked out that we didn't really make a plan for Thanksgiving, but it's just. I don't know. It feels so weird to celebrate it and like, it just kind of reminded me a lot of our memory and like, culture, you know, culture can just conveniently sweep memory in a way with nostalgia and this emotional appeal.
And I just finished A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen, and I'm going to play a clip from his only a book related and I do love this book I actually got that book for my siblings for Christmas because they they really spoke to this awakened rage frankly that I feel about the war going on and Palestine and like just the American influence of that.
And you know how the military industrial complex has really, really controlled a lot of things and it's just so easy for us to forget that, you know, it's like I think but if you think of the United States government as the largest organization in the world, largest, richest, and, you know, a third or almost a half or whatever of their budget is spent on, uh, on the industry of war.
And then in a man of two faces, he talks about how refugees are made. You know, they're not just immigrants. Something happened to them. And, you know, this ties into the, you know, the American war, the war in Vietnam and, you know, the diaspora. And, you know, I guess all the way to me. So I made this painting called Open Mike recently, and I was looking I just got this book from four works by Tetsuya Ishida, a Japanese painter who died in 2005.
And they like to include their own self image into machinery and like vehicles of capitalism and, and the rest of that. And so many inspired this painting, which is like of me lying in bed and I'm kind of holding my Washington Monument with a lovely missile that comes out. Stinger missile, maybe, I think. And then I've got like this like floating figure of actually this like cloud or or something above.
Similarly with Stinger missiles. And then there's like these scenes of memories of DC kind of like beautiful pictures or posters behind us. And it's just so easy for, for me, who is in DC to forget that the business of this city is very much tied to, you know, it's an industrial complex and of course we can become a state, you know, we can't get representatives.
But, you know, that's the reality of, of all these, you know, politicians and whoever in our city, in my city. And so just thinking about how that the repercussions of that and made this diasporic experience, I also have like a red stool and a little envelope, red envelope there kind of a reference and a little and little when you call those persimmon wallpaper to kind of tie in my own little Vietnamese cultural heritage.
And so yeah, so I'm thinking about that a lot right now. And, and Ocean Vuong poem Old Glory also comes to mind. And I'm going to play you a clip of that. I and it just really because I'm also investigating a patriarchy in my work and I guess everyone is post Barbie and it really connects this you know connect nexus connection between military industrial complex war superiority, masculinity, patriarchy in a way that I think is brilliant.
So okay, I'm going to play you first, Old Glory by Ocean Vuong and then a segment from A Man With Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Another Audio Blog:
Is identity a springboard or burden in art? #1: A podcast listening (audio-only) party by Anthony Le
Anthony Trung Quang Le (he/they) is a DC-based multidisciplinary artist and identifies as Vietnamese, American and Queer. They work in painting, video, sculpture, printmaking, performance, writing and curation, exploring the joy of nonconformity. View Anthony's work atAnthonyLeArt.com and follow@AnthonyLeArt.