Fighting the lurgie seemed the right time to read Tim Page’s book on train trips in Vietnam 20 years after his war photo stint – the Dennis Hopper character in the Coppola film “Apocalypse Now” was based on him – at the Directors Cut Premier I had a freebie ticket* and sat with Tim and his assistant, who woke him up for ‘his’ scenes. Page died in August this year. The book is a travelogue by someone who knew their way around and/or was really just out and about to have a look for himself. There’s a link to a Tiếng Việt article here and one to an article by Sarah McLean who, until it closed approx 2010, ran the Indochina memorial media foundation Page helped set up here.
* I’d got in late I think as a wait list ‘return’ ticket, which I now imagine might have been his ‘plus one’ that he was not bothered to fill as its, frankly, a shoddy film whose only redeeming feature is that it exposes the insanity of US revisionist film history, and he’d have known that before I had.
Trinketization 