Back in 2011, Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés published the mock children’s book, Go the F**k to Sleep. And it gained national attention when pirated PDF copies circulated on the internet, and a reading by Werner Herzog made the rounds on YouTube, both of which turned the book into a #1 bestseller on Amazon. Now, three years later, Mansbach is back with a sequel, You Have to F–king Eat. The print edition went on sale today, and, even better, the audio edition, narrated by Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston, can be downloaded for free over at Audible.com. The irreverent, 4‑minute NSFW reading will remain free through 12/12/14. You can hear a sample above.
Americans say that they love creativity but in fact they don’t. As Jessica Oliennotes in Slate, thinking outside the box tends to freak people out. Studies show that teachers favor dull but dutiful students over creative ones. In the corporate world, suggestions made by creative workers routinely get ignored by their superiors. As art critic Dave Hickey succinctly notes, “Everybody hates it when something’s really great.”
This is probably as good a way as any to understand Orson Welles’s stunted career. Here was a man of such genius that he radically transformed just about every creative medium he touched. His 1937 production of Julius Caesar, set in contemporary Fascist Italy, was the toast of Broadway. His notorious radio adaptation of War of the Worlds was so effective in creating a sense of unfolding calamity that it caused an actual public panic. And his masterpiece Citizen Kane was so original that it perplexed audiences when it came out. Now, of course, Kane is widely considered one of the best movies ever made. In spite of Welles’s terrific natural talents – he made Kane at age 25 – he consistently found himself shut down by the powers that be. The studio butchered Welles’s follow up movie The Magnificent Ambersons, and he struggled with studios and financiers for artistic control of just about every movie since.
In the 1950s, Welles tried to transform another medium – television. As Dangerous Minds recently unearthed, Welles made a pilot for The Orson Welles Show in 1956, an anthology series backed by Lucille Ball’s production company Desilu. The series was never picked up ostensibly because it was (and still is) nothing like what you’ve ever seen on TV. Welles incorporated noirish lighting, rear projection, photo stills, in-camera set changes and a host of other techniques borrowed from radio and the stage. Though the network dashed all hope of a series, NBC ultimately did air the pilot episode — “The Fountain of Youth” — on its Colgate Theater in 1958.
The story itself is a deliciously ironic fable adapted from a short story by John Collier. Dressed in a tuxedo and with a perpetual wry smirk on his face, Welles narrates. (Welles also wrote, directed, set designed the show along with arranging its music.) The less said about the story, the better, but it involves a self-obsessed actress, an equally narcissistic tennis star and an embittered scientist who claims to have discovered the secret to eternal youth. Watch it above and think about the fascinating road TV could have traveled.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Worry not, students of thought, for Adamson has continued these past few years, still regularly and gaplessly, to provide “the ideas and lives of the major philosophers as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition.” Just this past weekend, he put up a twenty-minute episode on the Carolingian Renaissance. If you haven’t kept up with the show since we last posted about it, you’ve got a great deal of intellectually rich catching up to do. You will find more than 100 new podcasts, featuring short talks on Latin Platonism, Aristotelian philosophy’s “Baghdad school,” philosophy’s reign in Spain, Illuminationism, and women scholars and Islam. If you’ve wanted to learn the entire history philosophy in the most convenient possible manner, now’s the time to jump aboard. If you planned on waiting until Adamson gets to, say, Derrida, I fear you’ll have a bit of a daunting backlog on your hands — not to mention your ears and brain.
Note: This article was first published in November, 2014. As of February, 2016, there are 247 episodes in this series. The title of the post has been updated to reflect that.
You thought video games were a waste of time? Well, think again. These 8‑bit video games can teach you philosophy. Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche, Derrida and the rest. Created by Napkin Note Productions, 8‑Bit Philosophy attempts to “communicate even the most complex of philosophical concepts in a fun, easy-to-understand way.”
The most recent episode explores the philosophy of Jacques Derrida using scenes from the 1987 beat’ em up video game, Double Dragon. Does that game ring a bell? It didn’t for me either. Until I googled it and suddenly remembered wasting countless hours and quarters on it, almost three decades ago. It’s all coming back to me now.
Try to imagine a world without The Ramones. Just close your eyes and try…. Okay, maybe you can do it, but I can’t. Poof! Several dozen scuzzy punk bands that played the soundtrack to my adolescence suddenly vanish. The Queens, NY band’s bratty take on 50s girl group pop and doo wop—played at double and triple speeds, harmonies chanted more than sung—saved rock and roll from its bloated, delusional self. They made dumb music for smart people, and if they tended toward self-parody in their later years, including the sad spectacle of Dee Dee’s abortive rap career, they can and should be forgiven.
In a disdainful swipe at seventies progressive rock, critic Robert Christgau once attributed to Chuck Berry the words “beware of middlebrows bearing electric guitars.” Catty, but it’s true that when budgets swelled and the music business boomed, rock went full-on MOR; The Ramones provided the perfect antidote. With songs like “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” and “I Don’t Wanna Be Learned/I Don’t Wanna Be Tamed” they proclaimed themselves defiant lowbrows and proud of it. Both tunes show up on their first demo record, above (at 10:40 and 18:22), a gloriously fuzzy, lo-fi affair featuring a few cuts that didn’t appear on their self-titled 1976 debut.
Recorded in 1975—and some perhaps as early as ’74—these recordings capture the band at their most raw and unmediated. The blog Ramones: Humming a Sickening Tune has an excellent breakdown of each demo song, and sums up this precious artifact nicely: “[The early demo recordings] offer a fascinating alternative insight into how the eventual debut album might have otherwise sounded. Their dense, primal sound reveals the surprising amount of dilution that the first record’s somewhat conceptual mix wrought upon the quartet’s fundamental power.”
The increasing professionalization of the Ramones, and their gradual transition to almost-pop, has served to obscure the truly hypnotic, pounding, buzzsaw drone they made as complete amateur unknowns. Dare I say I like their early work better? If only because they made a sound every lo-fi DIY band from my youth, including my own high school garage outfit, strove mightily to emulate, whether they could actually play their instruments or not. None of this praise is meant to diminish the brilliance of Ramones, which cannot be called a traditional studio rock record by any stretch. Recorded for Sire Records in seven days on a $6,400 budget, the band’s first album is as lean and scrappy as major label product gets. But the demos above show us that they could do just as well, maybe better, with almost nothing but their instruments and sui generis genius. Or as blogger BuncombeShinola puts it: “crunchy and charged, these recordings make the six grand spent on The Ramones seem like a dubious extravagance.” Indeed.
Songs you can hear above include:
1. 53rd & 3rd Demo
2. I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend Demo
3. Judy Is A Punk Demo
4. Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue Demo
5. I Can’t Be Demo
6. I Don’t Wanna Be Learned I Don’t Wanna Be Tamed Demo
7. You Should Never Open That Door Demo
You may have heard that podcasting has a renaissance going on. As a podcaster since the beginning stages of the medium — and one slightly surprised to find that the medium has now reached ten years of age — I can only welcome the news, though I never knew podcasting had gone into a dark age. New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose tells the story of the appearance of Apple’s iPod, followed by a flowering of “podcasts about politics, sports, literature, comedy,” “podcasts that sounded like NPR, and ones that sounded like Rush Limbaugh,” some that “lacked polish,” but most possessed of “a kind of energy to them that suited their audiences well.” But then, “sometime around 2009 or 2010, the podcast scene seemed to wither. The stalwarts (This American Life, Radiolab) stayed around at the top of the iTunes charts, but there wasn’t much else happening. Download numbers fell. Interest waned.” But ah, in this year of our Pod 2014, things have changed: “Today, a very different problem exists: There are too many great podcasts to keep up with.”
Roose, and hundreds upon hundreds of other people on the internet, recommends first and foremostSerial(iTunes — RSS — Soundcloud), “the true-crime drama hosted by This American Life producer Sarah Koenig,” a show sometimes credited with reviving podcasting itself. The New Yorker’s Sarah Larson calls it “the podcast we’ve been waiting for” in a piece giving a look into the reasons behind its success. Roos also gives special mention to another new show involving a name you might recognize from the This American Life orbit: Alex Blumberg’s StartUp(iTunes — RSS), a running document of the creator’s attempt to launch a podcasting business, the kind of venture that sounds less quixotic all the time. And Roose also names a personal favorite of mine, the well-known podcast about architecture and design — but Really, About Life Itself — 99% Invisible(iTunes — RSS).
If you feel like getting into this podcast renaissance, or if you’ve spent years as a podcast listener and just need some new material in your rotation, you could do much worse than starting with the three shows above. To add to that list, I can suggest no podcast more suited to the interests of Open Culture readers than In Our Time (iTunes — RSS), the long-running BBC Radio 4 program about the history of ideas wherein veteran broadcaster Melvyn Bragg interviews groups of Oxbridge experts on subjects like nuclear fusion, the Haitian revolution, Rudyard Kipling, the Battle of Talas, and the female pharaoh Hatshepsut — just in the past month. Personally, I so enjoy In Our Time that I went to interview Melvyn Bragg on my own podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture earlier this year.
Interviews and comedy have proven two of the most durable forms of content in podcasting, and anyone who hasn’t dipped into comedian Marc Maron’s in-depth and introspective interview show WTF (iTunes — RSS) — not that many haven’t at this point — has missed out on a sterling example of the kind of listening experiences podcasting, and only podcasting, has made possible. (You might consider also listening to my interview with Maron on The Los Angeles Review of Books podcast.) And while not necessarily comedy, I can’t imagine Open Culture readers not getting a laugh, and all other kinds of intellectual stimulation besides, out of the podcasting of Benjamen Walker. Walker, formerly the host of Too Much Information on the beloved independent radio station WFMU, recently launched a new show called Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything(iTunes — Soundcloud), a show of personal stories that explores all things to which those stories connect.
True, one complaint about podcasting in its early years held that the shows podcasters made went too personal — the old charge of “two or three guys sitting in basement talking about nothing” — but now that this decade-old medium has found more mature forms, the personal has become its art and its craft. I never hesitate to promote XO(iTunes — RSS), a show by Keith McNally, a podcast auteur whom I believe has done more to master the creative personal-story podcast than almost anybody, and he began doing it earlier. (As with Bragg, I went to his hometown of Toronto to interview him too.) But enough about my favorite podcasts; which ones do you tirelessly champion? Make your recommendations, and we’ll round them up in a post soon.
Most people know that Mark Twain wrote about Jim and Huckleberry Finn navigating down the Mississippi. Less well known is that he occasionally dabbled in the burgeoning genre of science fiction. His 1898 short story “The Great Dark” is about a ship that sails across a drop of water on a microscope slide. His novel Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is one of the first to explore time travel. And, in a short story called “From The ‘London Times’ in 1904,” Twain predicted the internet. In 1898. Read it here.
Set five years into the future, the story starts off as a crime mystery. Clayton, a quick-tempered army officer, is accused of murdering Szczepanik, the inventor of a new and promising device called the Telelectroscope. The tale’s unnamed narrator describes it like this:
As soon as the Paris contract released the telelectroscope, it was delivered to public use, and was soon connected with the telephonic systems of the whole world. The improved ‘limitless-distance’ telephone was presently introduced and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues.
That sounds a lot like social media. Mark Twain dreamed up Twitter and Youtube during the Grover Cleveland administration.
Facing the hangman’s noose, Clayton asks for, and receives, a telelectroscope for his cell. As the narrator describes Clayton’s telelectroscopic revelry, it sounds uncannily like a bored cubicle dweller surfing the web at work.
…day by day, and night by night, he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people, and realized that by grace of this marvelous instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air, although a prisoner under locks and bars. He seldom spoke, and I never interrupted him when he was absorbed in this amusement. I sat in his parlor and read, and smoked, and the nights were very quiet and reposefully sociable, and I found them pleasant. Now and then I would hear him say ‘Give me Yedo;’ next, ‘Give me Hong-Kong;’ next, ‘Give me Melbourne.’ And I smoked on, and read in comfort, while he wandered about the remote underworld, where the sun was shining in the sky, and the people were at their daily work.
The story itself is an admittedly minor work by the master of American fiction. In its last third, the story abruptly turns into a surprisingly sour satire about the sad state of our legal system. As Clayton is getting marched to the gallows, the narrator spots the guy Clayton supposedly murdered on the telelectroscope screen, standing in a crowd for the coronation of the new “Czar” of China. Even though no crime took place, Clayton is still sentenced to hang.
“From The ‘London Times’ in 1904” contains two long-running themes in Twain’s work and life. One is the absurdity of the courts – see, for example “The Facts in the Great Landslide Case.”
And the other is a fascination with technology. In spite of his folksy image, he was, as they say now, an early adopter. He was the first in his neighborhood to get a telephone. He may or may not have been the first major author to use a typewriter to write a novel. He lost his shirt investing in a Victorian-era start up hawking an exceedingly complex printing press called the Paige Compositor. And he allowed himself to be filmed by Thomas Edison in 1909, a year before his death.
One wonders what he would have thought of his telelectroscope in action.
Note: The character Szczepanik mentioned above was clearly named after a Polish inventor, Jan Szczepanik, who talked about creating a “telectroscope,” in the late 19th century. However, if you read a report in The New York Times in 1898, it becomes apparent that Szczepanik’s “telectroscope” wasn’t as visionary as what Twain had in mind.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
After retiring for personal reasons from prog-rock giants Genesis, Peter Gabriel went on to record a total of four solo records entitled Peter Gabriel, distinguished from each other by references to their cover art (“Car,” “Scratch,” “Melt”) and an alternate title insisted upon by his label (“Security”). This intensive focus on the eponymous perhaps bespeaks of ego, perhaps humility. It also maybe signifies the deceptively straightforward presentation Gabriel would offer the world—shorn of the makeup and costumes of his Genesis days, he might appear to have become another earnest, balladeering singer/songwriter. (See our post on classic Gabriel-era Genesis from yesterday.) Yet that first, 1977, solo outing was as imaginative, baroque, and gleefully experimental as his previous work. His expansive musical vocabulary gave the first Peter Gabriel what Stereogum calls “a purposefully eclectic, anything-flies approach to songcraft” that sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t.
Some of the unevenness of the first solo album is due to what Gabriel himself felt was overproduction on the part of Bob Ezrin, particularly on the song “Here Comes the Flood.” He would thereafter perform this song solo on piano—re-recording it thus in 1990. At the top of the post, you can hear him play it as the opener for his first ever solo show at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey.
The March 5, 1977 concert kicked off the tour for the first Peter Gabriel, for which he assembled an all-star band, some of whom had featured on the album, including King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp (appearing under the name “Dusty Rhodes” and apparently playing offstage behind the curtain). After “Here Comes the Flood” is “On the Air,” and just above, hear the weird, wobbly “Moribund the Burgermeister” from that night. Below, in four parts, hear the remaining songs in the set (see the full setlist here). Over the audio in each Youtube clip, see montages of still images—some presumably from the tour, some of album and promo artwork.
While Gabriel may have ditched the flamboyant onstage personae, he never abandoned his visual flair, as we know from those groundbreaking music videos. Witness the artistic pedigree on display in the cover art of Peter Gabriel (Car)—a photograph by Throbbing Gristle member and artist Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson of Gabriel slumped in a car owned by famed album cover designer Storm Thorgerson.
But the new Peter Gabriel, the solo artist, had—as he put it in the first album’s big single “Solsbury Hill”—“walked right out of the machinery” of Genesis’ excessive presentation. That song, still one of his most memorable, has been covered by everyone from Lou Reed to Erasure. Speaking to his strength as a songwriter, the tune with perhaps the broadest appeal is also one of his most personal—purportedly about his decision to leave Genesis. Hear it live in Part 5 below.
Though he may have left behind the band that made him famous, he still pays tribute to them in his first solo concert’s finale. At the close of the set, below, he ends with a Genesis song, “Back in N.Y.C.,” from the last, double concept album he recorded with them. It doesn’t feel out of place at all, proving perhaps that, even without the makeup—as Allmusic writes—Peter Gabriel was “undeniably the work of the same man behind The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.”
If you’re of a certain vintage—let’s just say old enough to bore millennials to death with nostalgic rants about how MTV used to play music videos, man—then you will remember Peter Gabriel’s visually stunning “Sledgehammer” video from his award-winning 1986 album So. You will have had your heartstrings tugged by his “In Your Eyes” and its pitch-perfect appropriation in Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything. And you will know—though maybe not as well as Patrick Bateman—the sounds and images of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.” This music may not have aged as well as those of us who grew up hearing it (or vice versa), but it left an indelible impression on a generation and defined 80s pop culture as much as Michael Jackson or The Bangles.
But if you are of a slightly earlier vintage, you will remember these fine musicians for an entirely different reason. Before the catchy dance-pop silliness of “Sussudio” and “Big Time,” there was the arty, high-seriousness of Genesis, as fronted in its heyday by Gabriel, with Collins pounding the drums. Though the band persisted well into the 80s and 90s after Gabriel’s 1975 departure, melding funk, soul, and pop in innovative ways as Collins took the lead, die-hard Genesis fans swear by its classic configuration, with its surreal concept albums and stage shows rivaling Wall-era Pink Floyd or Bowie’s Stardust phase. If you’re none too keen on later Genesis, the slick synth-rock hit machine, and if the aforementioned flamboyant productions are your cup of English prog-rock tea, then we have a treat for you.
Just above is a fully restored concert film of a 1973 performance at England’s Shepperton Studios, “perhaps,” writes Dangerous Minds, “the single best representation of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis on film.” Though the concert precedes the band’s Gabriel-era swan song—double concept album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway—it does showcase the strongest material from their two previous records, Foxtrot and the truly excellent Selling England by the Pound. Prominently on display are the eccentricities that sharply divided critics and enamored fans: the odd time-signatures and abrupt tempo changes, virtuosic musicianship, literate, esoteric lyrics, and Gabriel’s theatrical makeup and costuming. The effect of it all is sometimes a bit like Rush in a production of Godspell, and while This is Spinal Tap took a lot of the air out of this sort of thing three decades ago, the film remains an impressive document even if the performances are hard to take entirely seriously at times. See below for a full tracklist:
“Watcher of the Skies” (8:04)
“Dancing with the Moonlit Knight” (9:02)
“I Know What I Like” (5:46)
“The Musical Box” (11:39)
“Supper’s Ready” (23:59)
The story of the film’s restoration is intriguing in its own right. The Shepperton footage was rescued by a small group who pooled resources to buy it in a New York estate sale. Since then, Youtube uploader King Lerch and his confreres have upgraded the original restoration to the HD version you see above.
Once upon a time, a handsome man was trapped in a tower overlooking the sea. To amuse himself, he built a magical instrument. It was constructed of wood and metal, but sounded like something one might hear over loudspeakers at the Tate, or perhaps an avant-garde sound installation in Bushwick. The instrument was lovely, but so cumbersome, it was impossible to imagine packing it into a taxi. And so the man gigged alone in the tower overlooking the sea.
Wait. This is no fairy tale. The musician, Görkem Şen, is real, as is his instrument, the Yaybahar. (Its name remains a mystery to your non-Turkish-speaking correspondent. Google Translate was no help. Perhaps Şen explains the name in the patter preceding his recent TEDxReset performance…music is the only universal here.)
The Yaybahar looks like minimalist sculpture, or a piece of vintage playground equipment. It has fretted strings, coiled springs and drum skins. Şen plays it with a bow, or a wrapped mallet, nimbly switching between spaced out explorations, folk music and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”.
It’s also possible that Şen enlisted a couple of pals to help him muscle the Yaybahar down the steps, crying out when they bumped the precious instrument into the walls, struggling to get a decent grip. No good deed goes unrewarded.
At last, they left the confines of the tower. Görkem Şen lifted his face toward the Turkish sunshine. The Yaybahar stood in the sand. A noblewoman whom an evil sorceress had turned into a dog hung out for a while before losing interest. The instrument reverberated as passionately as ever. The spell was both broken and not.
You can hear more sound clips of Şen playing the Yaybahar below:
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Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
If you feel the need for tips on developing a writing style, you probably don’t look right to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ journal Transactions on Professional Communications. You certainly don’t open such a publication expecting such tips from novelist Kurt Vonnegut, a writer with a style of his own if ever there was one.
But in a 1980 issue, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Jailbird, and Cat’s Cradledoes indeed appear with advice on “how to put your style and personality into everything you write.” What’s more, he does it in an ad, part of a series from the International Paper Company called “The Power of the Printed Word,” ostensibly meant to address the need, now that “the printed word is more vital than ever,” for “all of us to read better, write better, and communicate better.”
This arguably holds much truer now, given the explosion of textual communication over the internet, than it did in 1980. And so which of Vonnegut’s words of wisdom can still help us convey our words of wisdom? You can read the full PDF of this two-page piece of ad-ucation here, but some excerpted points follow:
Find a subject you care about. “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.”
Keep it simple. “As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. ‘To be or not to be?’ asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story ‘Eveline’ is this one: ‘She was tired.’ At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.”
Sound like yourself. “English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench. [ … ] No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue. I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have?”
Say what you mean. “My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.”
While easy to remember, Vonnegut’s plainspoken rules could well take an entire career to master. I’ll certainly keep writing on the subjects I care most about — many of them on display right here on Open Culture — keeping it as simple as I can bear, saying what I mean, and sounding like… well, a rootless west-coaster, I suppose, but one question sticks in my mind: which corporation will step up today to turn out writing advice from our most esteemed men and women of letters?
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