Author Archives: Niran Somasundaram

lthough I’m sure this will lose me some major indie credibility, I had never heard of Chief or Crystal Antlers before I went to see both bands perform at the free concert held Friday night by the Student Committee for the Arts. Nevertheless, the two local bands put on a very entertaining and musically solid show that ranks among some of the best I have seen in my short life.

There are few things in this world that are as cruel as having to wait in a standby line to get into a concert that has already started. Unfortunately, that was the exact circumstance I found myself in at 7 p.m. as I waited in the cold outside Kerckhoff Hall with a few of friends and heard Chief begin its set.

It seems that any time I attend an on campus student production, I am wowed by the talent that exists at UCLA. Tuesday’s second annual Pi Kappa Phi Acoustic Coffee House, a benefit for Pi Kappa Phi’s national philanthropy, Push America, was no exception.

As I was casually reading through my friend’s Facebook statuses on the afternoon of Jan. 12, my heart stopped when I saw Tom Morello, guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, arguably the greatest political band ever, was to be speaking for free at Hammer Museum.

Thirty minutes later, I was standing in line at the Hammer Museum box office waiting to get tickets to the event. As I rushed into the auditorium to grab a front-row seat, it dawned on me that in my hurry to get to the museum, I had neglected to actually find out exactly what the Harvard-educated Morello would be speaking about.

As it turns out, I had found my way into the latest incarnation of the Hammer Museum’s Hammer Conversations, in which two high-profile thinkers discuss a variety of topics. This particular conversation was between Tom Morello and Sam Durant, a visual multimedia artist and California Institute of the Arts professor whose work focuses on cultural, social and political issues.