July 30, 2006
A new play by A. R. Gurney now in previews at 59 E 59 offers a wonderful window into conservative Buffalo shortly after World War II. Gurney channels his alternately rebellious and conformist views in Indian Blood through the two teenage characters, Eddie (Charles Socarides) and Lambert (Jeremy Blackman). The play begins with Eddie's narration, and quickly segues into his suspension from school for drawing a naughty picture. Eddie constantly declaims his Seneca blood as a cause for his hotheadedness, especially vis-a-vis his cousin Lambert, a goody two shoes.
With so many parlor scenes, you might think of a comedy of manners, but you may also be reminded of the film Buffalo '66 for its discussion of the initial decay of that vast wilderness known to us as Upstate. For entwined with this coming of age story is the loss of industrial power that causes Buffalo to become eclipsed from the 6th-largest to 13th-largest city in America. John McMartin as Eddie's grandfather utters several eloquent perorations—through his lens as president of a powerful local bank—about the city's decline and lack of various ethnic groups to miscegenate. Eddie's conservative father (Matthew Arkin) powerfully delivers endless commentaries on family life and one's proper place in society, the sort of hoary admonitions that infuriate every young teen, occasionally tempered by his mother's more liberal attitudes.
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59e59, buffalo, gurney, indian blood
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Posted on 7/30/2006
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July 25, 2006
All four exhibits currently at the International Center of Photography are well worth your attention, beginning with the superb oversize chromogenic prints of Atta Kim. These extended exposures on display—ranging from Midtown Manhattan to Buddhist poses in his Mandala series—appear both lush and tantalizing, challenging the visitor to consider various aspects of a scene over time. The endless stream of headlights and taillights on cars racing through the city's avenues as well as the ever-illuminated walk and don't walk signs give rise to the notion that the city's fixed structures remain a steadfast bulwark despite our constant rush in every direction. Meanwhile, the charged sexual energy of various tantric poses in the Mandala series underscore various aspects (and mudras) often misunderstood and mischaracterized in the West. Seeing a couple in certain poses atop a lotus throne rather nicely captures this evanescent notion of what the Tibetans call yab yum. Our fleeting connection with this concept as depicted by Kim perhaps reminds us that everything is transitory. Certainly his "Ice Mao" pictures remind us of that, depicting Mao's head, melting. Also don't miss the many portraits of Tibetan men and women, yet another facet of Kim's multitalented photographic abilities. But it is Kim's superb chromogenic portraits of the Last Supper that seem to get the most visitors' attention in this show, and rightfully so.
Moving downstairs, we pass by the stunning Weegee show for a brief look at Eugène Atget's historic photographs of Paris, augmented with some more recent shots by Christopher Rauschenberg. This show was curated by the George Eastman House, which has many superb Atget prints in its collection. Just as John Stow's Survey of London was an extraordinary encomium of late 16th-century London, so too was Atget's Paris a phenomenal visual account of Paris 300 years after Stow surveyed London. Rauschenberg has brilliantly followed in Atget's footsteps, rephotographing some of Atget's most well-known scenes, documenting how the city of light has certain ageless qualities—in addition to the obvious technological advances.
In the next room, Marianne Brandt's Bauhaus photomontages curated in a show called "Tempo, Tempo" provide a stunning surprise, a great look back at the creative edginess of the Weimar Republic. It's especially interesting to view her work in conjunction with the Dada show at MoMA. (Hot tip: cool off with Il Laboratorio's gelato in MoMA's sculpture garden after you have struggled past all the tourists circling the Dada exhibit vulture-like.)
Finally we come to the Unknown Weegee show, although for those who know his work, some of these prints seem quite familiar. Although ICP has 20,000 Weegee prints in its archive, the great Arthur Fellig was a master photographer of low life, a great depicter of drunks, crooks, B-starlets and the seamier side of life in general. Particularly noteworthy and haunting are images such as "DRUNKS arrested M-20 on Bowery": in his own handwriting written hastily below the image, the child-like scrawl and cross-outs underscore what a marvelous chronicler of human life Weegee was. So busy shooting and cataloguing his images of urban life and its underpinnings, writing this caption perhaps was an afterthought, or at least something for which there was little time or consideration.
"Slumber-time in a mission...it's Christmas" (circa 1942) also brilliantly captures the essence of Weegee's oeuvre: A disheveled man asleep on the floor, hat and shoes aside his head. The man sleeps on the New York World Telegram newspaper, the headline of which screams "YANK FLIERS BLAST REICH," a sharp contrast to the astounding crispness of the tinsel on the Christmas tree in the background. And the casual observer, filled with pity for the man, must also wonder: was this somehow posed? Several prints in the series "Three Women Trampled to Death in Excursion-Ship Stampede" (1941) capture the horrific scene, the grief, the grisliness of the event, as does the infamous event at Luna Park in Coney Island “Fire Destroys the ‘World’s Largest Railway’ at Coney Island,” (1944). Seeing this show—a psycho here, a dead body there, men sleeping in doorways, assorted accidents, and a framed check from Time Inc. for "TWO MURDERS - $35"—one is constantly reminded that the beat photographer's footsteps are quite enormous and impossible to follow in. Perhaps only Berenice Abbott and Helen Levitt came anywhere close to chronicling New York life of decades ago as did Weegee.
(photo: Marianne Brandt, Circus [Zirkus], 1926, © 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)
Tags:
arthur fellig, atta kim, bauhaus, christopher rauschenberg, dada, eugene atget, icp, international center of photography, marianne brandt, weegee
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Posted on 7/25/2006
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July 19, 2006
The dynamic duo dating back to before the tenth century has received more press in the past month than possibly at any other time in the past millennium. And for good reason: a number of intriguing pieces, both on stage and off, have recently paid homage to this extraordinary Anglo-Saxon saga. In the interest of full disclosure, I have not trekked to the Quad Cinema to see the recent movie "Beowulf & Grendel" as I found the trailer rather nauseating, even despite a number of Scandinavian names in the cast.
Instead, I headed to the Lincoln Center Festival to hear the final performance of the much-ballyhooed production of "Grendel" that came not from Geatland, but from Los Angeles. Then two nights later I attempted to recalibrate my Old English sensibility—much affected by all that operatic Sturm und Drang—by attending Benjamin Bagby's performance of "Beowulf" at the LaGuardia Drama Theater.
What a difference two days make! For even now I am still trying to make sense of "Grendel," this Elliot Goldenthal production directed by Julie Taymor loosely based on the 1971 John Gardner book. It seemed to combine the most wild elements of rock opera (think Ian Gillan's "Jesus Christ Superstar") with Basil Twist's underwater puppet version of "Symphonie Fantastique" along with the City Opera debut of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's "Die Soldaten" 15 years ago. It was, in short, everything and nothing. Spoken were both Anglo-Saxon and modern English, as well as riffs on speaking Anglo-Saxon, and shape-shifting Grendel shifting his own diction as his three shadows shifted in and out of the — shadows. Was this perhaps rather tired, pretentious and hokey, as Anthony Tommasini wrote in his New York Times review? Was it a whole lot of nothing, a visual extravaganza akin to what one finds any evening on French television, or what Mark Swed wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "The opera accomplishes little through words or music, but there is quite a bit to look at." Was the house packed because of that enormous and clunky stage set, which likely has five variants from old Wagner productions in cold storage buried deep in the bowels of the Metropolitan Opera? Or was it all the nimble dancers in various ravishing costumes gyrating wildly with swords, in flowing dresses and chain mail? Did the thunderous standing ovations—several of which obviously were in recognition of the light-hearted, campy moments of the production—signal this was a work of monumental achievement? Or mere joy that the near-deafening percussive moments of the final act had drawn to a close?
I'm not sure. But armed with this foreknowledge, I secured a seat in the first row so I might observe the orchestra and conductor Steven Sloane at work. For as a fan of modern opera, I am always curious to see how the orchestra reacts to rather awkward moments, of which there are many in "Grendel". Some knowing smirks, a few whispered barbs, and other peculiar gesticulations could be observed throughout the performance, and for good reason: Goldenthal and Taymor depict Grendel's emotional roller coaster-ride in so many ways that ultimately the score (and libretto) suffer from schizophrenia. And just as George Bush's whispered vulgarity to Tony Blair in Russia a few days ago seemed weirdly off-kilter, so too do Grendel's occasional outbursts of modern vulgarity. After all, we know this monster is angry.
Let me state that I do much admire Eric Owens, the powerful bass in the lead role who in his constricting monster costume and at times perched in odd places managed to consistently sing this overwhelming role heartily with tremendous bravado. But while it was amusing enough to hear Grendel respond to and mock Anglo-Saxon diction in modern English, it was even weirder when Grendel had his private audience with the dragon. Their at times light-hearted and at other times cosmic exchange certainly amuses the audience, but the scene seemed to exist in a temporal world somewhere between "Little Shop of Horrors" and "Porgy and Bess". Denyce Graves' virtuoso performance was additionally tempered by her three assisting dragonettes seen dangling from on high. It was as if Goldenthal and Taymor wanted to tell us they have every device (and secure funding) in their millennium-device bag of tricks; they succumbed to the old Vaudeville trick that if something works once, then the multiplicative effect works even better!
In short, this production was very Los Angeles. Which somehow seems a pity, because the score and music do at times work so very well. Swed does not exaggerate when he wrote in his review that "It is the most ambitious, spectacular and successful new opera yet from Los Angeles Opera." The problem is: the collective ear for dialogue—and for vibrato and timbre. Somehow mine ears did protest at the rapid-fire shifts; perhaps some anti-spasmodic medications could be passed out to the audience before future performances?
In contrast, Benjamin Bagby's spoken and sung Beowulf, with solely a medieval harp as accompaniment, was a treat. Performed in front of a simple scrim that at times appeared to undulate at the dreadful little LaGuardia Drama Theater, Bagby regaled the audience with his emotional and dramatic rendering of the first third of the Anglo-Saxon epic. With clever supertitles to assist, the audience seemed generally at rapt attention throughout the nearly two-hour performance, punctuated only by short breaks so the bard could sip from a modest glass of water. Having only heard one world epic performed in a traditional setting—by an itinerant soothsayer outside the holiest monastery in the Himalayas—I haven't got much to compare this rendition of Beowulf with. Yet I found it appropriate that the lights were dimmed, that Bagby wore dark clothing, and the setting was sedate. At other times, the lighting shifted to highlight the locale and intensity of the narrative. In other words, nothing detracted from the rhythm of the Singspiel and harp, which helped tremendously in focusing on the action and tonality of the Old English. In particular, Bagby mimicked Unferth's drunkenness when challenging Beowulf's defeat in a swimming contest of lore. And Bagby was most impressive narrating the surprise of Grendel's arm being torn off by the legendary Geat, whose physical prowess was beautifully depicted by Bagby's increasingly deep resonance.
In this world of many Beowulfs—I recall finding a wonderful 1970s comic version at a Housing Works store last year for a mere dollar—much has been made of how every era adapts Beowulf and Grendel to its own needs. In fact, Charles McGrath's July Fourth article "Politically Aware 'Beowulfs' May Miss an Ancient Delight: Terror" nicely elucidates the heart of the matter: "The Beowulf story is so strange, so elemental, that it has spun off a surprising number of satellite versions...." Indeed, it is perhaps not least because the original Anglo-Saxon version is so remote and inaccessible that the spawn of Grendel has been so lavish. Yet many these old tales—whether in Finnish (The Kalevala), Akkadian (Gilgamesh), Tibetan (Ling of Gesar)—remain vibrant today both because of the tremendous imagery and moral homilies they serve up. McGrath finds that these retellings of Beowulf lack much of the terror and violence of the original. Yet listening to Bagby's magnificent narration last night, so much of the evil and wanton savagery could be gleaned from his dazzling voice. Perhaps film production companies would be wise to hire him, rather than sink millions into elaborate sets that fail to capture this medieval horror.
Tags:
benjamin bagby, beowulf, charles mcgrath, city opera, denyce graves, elliot goldenthal, eric owens, grendel, john gardner, julie taymor, lincoln center festival, los angeles opera, mark swed
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Posted on 7/19/2006
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July 16, 2006
After enjoying the wonderful Dada show at the Museum of Modern Art, head for the fascinating "Artist's Choice" exhibit curated by noted Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. Do note that in addition, the New York Public Library hosts an intriguing event about the exhibit this Wednesday at 6:30 pm at the mid-Manhattan library.
This is the seventh in the series Artist's Choice—though the first featuring architects—in which MoMA invites artists to select, juxtapose, and comment on works from the Museum’s collection. As one might expect from this dynamic pair, they have created a fascinating multimedia exhibit in which the visitor is confronted with a wide selection of works from the permanent collection, yet challenged to observe them in vastly different ways.
Upon entering the exhibit, it is no coincidence they have installed 15 flatscreen monitors on the ceiling, best viewed with a series of mirrors laid out on plain wooden benches. These film fragments, stretching from Fargo (1996) to Apocalypse Now (1979) to Andy Warhol's Flesh (1968) share the common themes of violence, sex and much drama. This darkened room seems both retrograde and avant-garde, both very Swiss and American, both fascinating and frightening. For those plain wooden benches contrasting with a busy and colorful ceiling recall the famous, remote, and unique St. Martin's church in Zillis, where the intricate imagery on the ceiling is best viewed while seated at a plain wooden pew with a mirror in one's hand. Zillis' 900-year-old ceiling, a tour de force that remains one of the most fascinating churches in all of Europe, both sparks memory and also strains the neck: some pain mixed with visual pleasure. Flash-forward to today's degenerating landscape of violent imagery, and it's not much of a stretch of the imagination to see how Herzog & de Meuron conceptualize the vast American topography as Richard Slotkin has in his books such as Gunfighter Nation and Regeneration Through Violence, a panorama featuring the eternally-recurring fighting man. Whereas the tableau depicted at Zillis—a very important place for the Swiss—reminds the European mind of two millennia of Christian history, this ceiling at MoMA evokes a typically Western European conception of America as the young country of nonstop sex and violence.
Or maybe not; perhaps they are just cleverly vying for the observer's attention. For they do admit: The problem facing the Museum is not a lack of first-rate art but rather a lack of perceptive attention on the part of museum visitors, despite the spectacular galleries in the new extension. Shock value? In other words, maybe because we are visually challenged in visiting a museum of art given this new-media atmosphere of instantaneous and everpresent visual rewards (think video games and online pornography), can the museum's vast smorgasbord of visual imagery challenge us to give any work more than a moment's attention? Even with the assistance of an audio guide, or by dialing a number on our cellphones to learn more about an artwork, or with a Podcast? It's no coincidence that at the Herzog & de Meuron-designed de Young Museum in San Francisco you can do all three of those things. Just plug in and focus. But especially in the case of MoMA, where the galleries are both compact and packed with artwork, when the museum is crowded it's rather difficult to experience much of anything without getting jostled or feeling cramped.
So how do Herzog & de Meuron focus the visitor on the sedate objects d'art after viewing this visual American pantheon seen overhead? By unleashing one of their beloved architectural forms: restraining perception. In challenging MoMA's classical six divisions, they have placed three reorganized departments—shall we say compartments—around their film and media presentation. Each of these chambers features a smallish rectangular slot through which you can attempt with some difficulty to view the objects therein—Architecture and Design, Photography, and Painting and Sculpture. For Herzog and de Meuron, their challenge seems to be creating a new form of visual storage—obscured in part, making it more complicated and thus more enticing to view the objects—as well as a new methodology of organizing these objects. For the repeat MoMA visitor, to whom it is quite obvious that the flow of people through the galleries is both rather complicated and rather bizarre, Herzog and de Meuron offer a compact mini-MoMA. What a contrast from vitrines or the endless and overwhelming and floor-to-ceiling glass storage at the three Henry Luce centers at the Met, Brooklyn Museum, or the 40,000 items at the New-York Historical Society. Or even from looking at Jeff Koons' playful and brilliant vaccum cleaners in a vitrine: rather than starting through glass, here you stare through a slot. Especially at a time when the second-floor contemporary galleries are closed, this restrained view of 110 objects from the collection provides both a nice teaser of MoMA's vast collection as well as Herzog and de Meuron's spatial conceptions and organization, which are, of course, very Swiss. These objects are laid out with precision, in close proximity, and with maximum effect to tantalize the observer. The Architecture and Design selections seem almost like a modern-day German Wunderkammer, which instead of featuring exotic animals dangling from the ceiling of a wood-paneled room instead offers more sedate yet luxurious items from the past century: the 1972 Jensen-designed Bang & Olufson turntable, for example. Or the seminal Josef Hoffmann Wiener Werkstätte flatware from 1905. And then you start to imagine: That Philippe Starck cake server and the Josef Hoffmann liqueur glasses nicely offset the Tupperware popsicle molds and tumblers. What do the artists say about this? They rather slyly and disingenuously claim: The choice does not reflect the artistic taste of Herzog & de Meuron; it simply confirms an undeniable shift in imagery that has taken place in recent years. Fair enough, you might think, yet with so many objects d'art to choose from, every choice implies a conscious selection—as well as loss, a loss of the objects not selected. And yet these innovative objects do receive so little attention today. Who thinks about that Bang & Olufson turntable, or those popsicle molds, or that charming Viennese flatware? Certainly not when Netflix, Grand Theft Auto, and the Internet are such big players in our new world of visual imagery.
A pro pos this new world of visual imagery, their photographic selections are equally fascinating. For when the artist's greatest fantasy comes true ("You can choose almost whatever you want from our collection"), it seems that their choices are most meaningful especially in photography. (Or maybe my thoughts on photography are just too overly shaped by the dogmatic writings of Ad Reinhardt, Susan Sontag and John Berger.) So many natural wonders depicted here—especially the vast American landscape—do hearken back to those 15 film clips projected on the ceiling. Modernization? The rape of the American landscape? The frightening big city? The rural gunfighting cowboy? De Niro and Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver? As though Travis Bickle curated an exhibit on nature, filtered through the cabbie's world-view? Hardly. Yet their thought-provoking combinations of items from the permanent collection are tantalizing. How could we possibly pick out the gems when we only have gems to choose from? ask the architects. In response, look at their selections of painting and sculpture, from Matthew Barney to Josef Beuys, from Giacometti to Calder, Robert Gober and Donald Judd. They present an homage of homages, along with Picasso and Andy Warhol thrown in for good measure. As the visitor goes peeping around this room, staring into the three rectangular slots that open up onto panoramas of Architecture and Design, Photography, and Painting and Sculpture, it seems just too challenging, and most visitors just give up after staring briefly at the ceiling, wandering a bit, and gazing into the three slots.
Thus, Herzog and de Meuron succeed in their endeavor to delineate how The moving image with explicit reference to violence, drama, and sex has received growing attention while traditional artistic mediums require special exhibitions with blockbuster potential in order to be perceived at all. And yet observing the flow of the masses into the museum commencing at precisely 10:30 am this Sunday, as they greedily were admitted en masse, as they climbed escalators to the sixth floor to flood the Dada exhibit, one sees the ultimate paradox in visiting MoMA that Herzog and de Meuron clearly understand (and understood when designing the de Young): The MoMA visitor seeks out wonders, yet confronted with those wonders has trouble perceiving. While the Dada exhibit is packed, Herzog & de Meuron's is not. While the fifth and sixth floors of MoMA have a startling number of visitors, parts of the third and fourth floors are largely void of patrons. While Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon always draws a crowd, why does the similarly fortuitously-placed Boccioni Unique Forms of Continuity in Space not? While some paintings seem orphaned and seldom-visited in those back staircases, the Bell Helicopter remains fascinating and popular as it always was. Because it's huge? Or uniquely American? Or simply great design? And even in the packed blockbuster Dada exhibit, people seem lost, for there is so much there with so few referents. So many scraps from a giant feast of languages (mostly German), cut with the kitchen knife and pasted together—i.e. the Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch collages—yet so obviously foreign to a generation that has little connection to the events transpiring in Germany 80 or so years ago. The entry points—the Zürich and New York rooms—seem sedate enough, but the additive effect of all the Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, and Paris objects appear to just overwhelm; think visual clutter rather than visual depiction or visual storage.
Herzog and de Meuron clearly understand this. Perhaps that's why two of the most popular spots in their San Francisco museum appear to be the ninth-floor observatory (where few are looking at the fascinating perforated copper façade but instead simply enjoy the views of the city) and the outdoor café (where they can focus on the food rather than that perforated copper façade engulfing them—even from above—or the nearby playful sculpture garden). The visual challenges of MoMA, in contrast, are entirely with the design: the white walls (many of which by now have ugly smudges and scuffs here and there) and the constricting and at times asphyxiating galleries. So by presenting these ever-more constrained views of the permanent collection, Herzog and de Meuron actually achieve a tour de force: they reveal not just their Mercurial curatorial genius, but also that they are simply better architects than MoMA's Yoshio Taniguchi.
photo: © Herzog & de Meuron, 2006
Tags:
dada, de meuron, de young, herzog, museum of modert art, Yoshio Taniguchi
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Posted on 7/16/2006
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July 03, 2006
On this holiday Monday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has special opening hours, and it would be a great time to catch up on the myriad special exhibtions, such as Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings. While I've written previously about AngloMania, the Cai Guo-Qiang on the roof as well as the Susan Sontag show, Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings has received accordingly little attention. In a city with hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over Central America, the gauge of general interest in the great civilizations from Chaco to the Olmec and Maya remains startlingly low. It's also rather unfortunate that the New York Times dispatched Holland Cotter to review the show, because his usual rambling, discursive and at times downright hoky tone does little to highlight or explicate the fascinating objects on view. For example, why write: Certain items — a jadeite model of a pointed tool used for ritual self-mutilation — are just strange. We know from scholarly research of the past 30 years that ritual objects such as these played a very important role in Mayan society, particularly where the upper monarchy was concerned. And I am reminded of my grandmother when I read: Once you introduce the strange and the unbeautiful to a treasures show, you create some confusion; you upset expectations, ruffle the aesthetic pleasure principle. I do pity the poor fellow, for his aesthetic sensibility has apparently been jaded by this jade.
But let's get serious. The show was organized by LACMA curator Virginia Fields, and more than 70 pieces are on display for the first time in the United States. Throughout the reign of the Maya in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras, the notion of divine kingship was all-pervasive. Consequently, ritual objects should very much be part of such an exhibit. Who could imagine an exhibit of sacred Tibetan relics, for example, without a bejeweled ritual dagger that depicts fierce deities on multiple sides? While Cotter's reviews of Himalayan art also tend to be chatty and superficial, it cannot be overlooked that a certain level of ethnocentrism exists in American scholarship about arts of the Americas that we Americans have to confront. It cannot suffice to sum one's sensibilities with: But the Maya show feels far less like a stroll past Bergdorf's than like a visit to an archaeological dig. That's simply denigrating, if not appalling. Even jaded art reporters on deadline ought to do better. One does indeed need to think about the context, and while a previous journey to the Yucatan peninsula surely assists many in visualizing this context, one could also make the journey on the Internet to explore these ancient city-states. Especially on the eve of the 230th anniversary of this country's revolution, we would be wise to examine the rise—and fall—of previous civilizations in our midst.
photo: Commemorative Monument (Stela 11), 200–50 B.C. Guatemala, Kaminaljuyu
Granite; 76 x 26 3/4 x 7 1/8 in. (193 x 67.9 x 18.1 cm) Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, Guatemala City
Tags:
AngloMania, belize, cai guo qiang, chaco, guatemala, honduras, maya, met, mexico, olmec, susan sontag, yucatan
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Posted on 7/3/2006
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