NOT FOR CASUAL VIEWING (OR LISTENING)

Dan Neil's column in this past Sunday's Los Angeles Times Magazine talks about the many "moments of ironic fallout" included on "Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security," which he describes as "a darkly amusing collection of songs, civil defense messages and short films [which] takes us to a zany yet oddly familiar land of galloping paranoia, where shadows are etched in concrete and happiness is a warm bomb shelter."

Neil writes that his favorite moment is this one:

A man returning from the ice cream parlor sees a blinding light, the mighty spark of an atom bomb. He comes to in a burning, irradiated ruin. Dazed and bleeding, he looks around desperately until, with a sigh of relief, he finds his smoldering fedora. It's the end of the world, but by all means, don't forget your hat.

That moment is a long, long way from the real thing, which is not for casual viewing. There was no irony when, on Aug. 6, 1945, "lessons [began] at the National Technical University on the outskirts of downtown Hiroshima, as always, at 8 a.m. ... and Keijiro Matsushima [was] gazing out the window, bored."

Suddenly, a gleaming light fills the classroom. A "reddish-orange flash" bright "as the sun" prompts him to dive beneath his desk. He places his hands over his eyes and his thumbs into his ears -- doing exactly what he has been told to do to protect himself in an air raid.

But nothing can protect him against what happens next.

Many artists have addressed what happened next. Most recently, the new John Adams-Peter Sellars opera "Doctor Atomic," which has been getting wide attention, treated it as the legend of a modern Faustus. But has any artist faced the subject more directly than Abbie Conant?

What happened next -- literally, not symbolically or mythologically -- is the subject of "Rachel's Lament," a music-video piece documenting Conant's response -- her "inner emotional experience," as she terms it -- to "the dropping of the first atomic bombs." (You'll need a broadband connection and RealPlayer to see and hear it.) Conant performed it this past summer in Santa Fe, N.M., "in the ancient spirit of the lament -- a woman weeping for the dead," on the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For more about what happened, have a look at this three-part "Remembering Hiroshima" series:

1) The Bomb That Was Meant for Hitler;
2) "My God, What Have We Done?"
3) The Cold War Heats Up.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands