March 2004

Existential polarity and hillbillies

Filed under: Imported

"What are you doing in Baker?" he said. "Didn't you get my telegram?"

"What? Fuck telegrams. I'm in trouble."

"You're supposed to be in Vegas," he said. "We have a suite at the Flamingo. I was just about to leave for the airport..."

I slumped in the booth. It was too horrible. Here I was calling my attorney in a moment of terrible crisis and the fool was deranged on drugs--a goddamn vegetable! "You worthless bastard," I groaned. "I'll cripple your ass for this! All that shit in the car is yours! You understand that? When I finish testifying out here, you'll be disbarred!"

"You brainless scumbag!" he shouted. "I sent you a telegram! You're supposed to be covering the National District Attorneys' Conference! I made all the reservations...rented a white Cadillac convertible...the whole thing is arranged! What the hell are you doing out there in the middle of the fucking desert?"

Suddenly I remembered. Yes. The telegram. It was all very clear. My mind became calm. I saw the whole thing in a flash. "Never mind," I said. "It's all a big joke. I'm actually sitting beside the pool at the Flamingo. I'm talking from a portable phone. Some dwarf brought it out from the casino. I have total credit! Can you grasp that?" I was breathing heavily, feeling crazy, sweating into the phone.

"Don't come anywhere near this place!" I shouted. "Foreigners aren't welcome here."

I hung up and strolled out to the car. Well, I thought. This is how the world works. All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him. He knew. He knew all along. It was He who sacked me in Baker. I had run far enough, so He nailed me...closing off all my escape routes, hassling me first with the CHP and then with this filthy phantom hitchhiker...plunging me into fear and confusion.

Never cross the Great Magnet. I understood this now...

--From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas : A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, by Hunter S. Thompson

American music at its finest speaks to the kernel truth of our existence in this strange land: as long as you look and act like you know what you're doing, and you're doing what you're supposed to, you can get away with anything. The root of Libertarian is Liberty, and the founding fathers of this country had well honed trigger fingers for all of life's tangible enjoyments. God and guilt were for Sunday...Monday through Saturday he could mind his own goddamned business.

For good or ill, I bark into a microphone every Saturday about alt country and why it's for me and for others, for the forgiveness of Nashville's sins. Every now and then, a record crosses the threshhold of the Mighty 1220 that is Processional, Epistle, Communion, and Recessional in 12 tracks and 4-part harmony.

I've read a few scattered stories of this wild-eyed hillbilly they call Joe West, but I think it all comes down to the distinct possibility that he and I were separated at birth. Our gift and our achilles heel is that we can both talk or sing about everything and nothing all at once, and the most that can be said about either of us is that folks who know us like to have us around for the shock value. During full moons I've been known to jump into the phone booth and come out as Super Jack, and South Dakota HairDo just might be our hero's new soundtrack:

I'm a media mogul
and a macro biotic
I'm a yoga instructor
and a little neurotic
I soak it like a sponge
and I leak like a sieve
cuz I've come to accept
the truth is...relative
and i love to feel the oil
come across the sea
and i love to feel their coming
to comfort me
and i just made it through
security, cuz
I'm a survivor, I'm a survivor
I got mafia connections
I got corporate ties
I get off on the smell of your twist tied too fly
Just a poor boy doin' what I can
I'm a 21st century garbage man

--From "21st Century Garbage Man"

Maybe you've been force fed a pre-packaged American existence, with paved roads from your doorstep to your final destination. But there are people like Joe West in places like Santa Fe, New Mexico, singing songs about desperate South Dakotans with dirt under their nails and vacant expressions more indicative of fatigued guile than slow wit. I don't know Joe West's mother, but if she had been an old music groupie from back in the day, it would be hard to tell whether Lou Reed or Townes Van Zandt was Joe's daddy. I mean that as a compliment and a put down, all at once. When he comes to Lee's Liquor Lounge on Thursday, May 27th, I fully expect him to shake my hand, then punch me in the nose.

Posted by Jack Sparks at March 29, 2004 11:20 PM

Kiss My Ass

Filed under: Imported

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time--and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

...You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...

And that, I think, was the handle--that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

--From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas : A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, by Hunter S. Thompson

Robbie Fulks is very 1998. I don't mean that in a mean or overly critical way, either. In my own fight against the forces of Old and Evil, it has become painfully obvious that the bad guys are winning. The greedy knuckleheads who run mainstream country radio stations, and their criminal counterparts in collusion in Nashville are sucking the life out of the music. The problem is, there's so much money involved, money that they're generating from their poorly directed efforts, that they have come to believe their own bullshit, and are now convinced that they indeed saved country music, instead of ruined it.

Let me explain to you how they think, and why Robbie Fulks' show at The 400 Bar Friday night is a prime example of how these assholes are destroying my music.

There's a certain amount of arbitrariness to Arbitron's radio surveys. But, for good or ill, their rating system can paint an accurate enough picture to help various industry folks set advertising rates for radio air-time. Here in our own fair city, there's an interesting situation with respect to country music. First, KEEY, K102, has absolutely no competition for the country audience. When WIXK, with its classic country satellite feed, went off the air, it gave the knuckleheads at Cheap Channel a practical monopoly on the format.

Minneapolis has a pretty sizable country listening population, but, no matter how you slice it, K102's numbers haven't really gone too far one way or the other since WIXK went off the air. In the big picture of it all, adults 25-54 have neither turned the station on in droves, nor turned it off in droves. You'd think with no competition and no progress, some jobs would be in jeopardy at the worst country station in America. But that simply isn't the case, because you have to drill down into Arbitron's numbers. It's illegal to quote those numbers without Arbitron's permission, but, you could just do a random survey if you liked and find out what the chimps who run that station know already, and point to, when charging their advertisers: the station is more or less number 1 in the Twin Cities with women who make household budget decisions, the Oprah crowd.

The corollary to this little phenomenon is that those same chimps are so focused on delivering to that demographic that they simply don't care about anyone outside of it. Think about that, if you aren't a woman between about 27 and 45, you don't count to them. They're essentially saying, "You aren't a country music fan, at least, you're not the ones we seek, so we're not going to program anything--music, commercials, contests, or on-air talent--geared toward making you a listener."

It's an all-in bet in poker. As a result, they can't diverge from that programming in their great "synergistic" nightmare, or they might upset the apple-cart in the cube farms of their media empires.

So Robbie Fulks played the 400 Bar the other night to about 50 people, most of them males between 22 and 50; there were about 6 women there. It makes such statistical, painful sense, that I almost started crying. Women who enjoy what has been marketed to them as country simply don't know about outstanding talents like Robbie Fulks. He's been marginalized; not in any sort of malicious way, but purely in a businesslike and economical way. The whole thing darkened my mood so much, that I walked out on the show at about midnight. Robbie was dead-on, picking the shit out of his guitar, singing his goofy songs, bouncing around and telling jokes just like he always does. But the mainstream country machine has been so efficient at creating an environment where he has no chance of cracking the barriers that there just wasn't any fun in it for me. Does that make sense? There's no window to rebel because no one knows there's a rebellion going on. The rebellion died in 1998, or maybe even 1988.

People ask me why I care so much. Maybe I'm a kook, I'm not sure. But it really boils down to this: I'm kind of a regular, 40-hour a week, hard working guy. I like football, fishing, and doing the two-step. I don't have one single fucking thing in common with some phony shithead in a big black cowboy hat singing to me about what he thinks Jimmy Buffet was singing to me about, while a bunch of girls who don't eat, hop around in shrunken tank tops behind him on some tropical beach. Goddammit you Clear Channel assholes, I'm a country fan too, and I like my music with a cock and some balls. I want to hear songs about murder and God and murdering God; you know, Johnny Cash--who you played on your station for about 24 total hours after his death and then went back to wall-to-wall pussy-ass Kenny Chesney. Robbie Fulks is a wild-eyed hillbilly from West Virginia with a degree from Columbia University in New York, who has about 6 inches and 40 pounds on the diminutive Chesney. He lives out in the wilds of rural Illinois, near the Wisconsin border, where he can howl at the moon in the fine traditions of his ancestors. Chesney and his business manager spend a lot of time in board rooms having product positioning meetings, big pow-wows over where all the logos should appear in the videos to maximize revenue. Hank Williams died on the side of the road in the back seat of his Cadillac. Just try to connect the dots in that coloring book.

If you care about listening to worthwhile country, go get yourself a copy of Open House by Eric Athey from Lancaster, PA. Eric's a daytime lawyer, nighttime crooner who enlisted the fabulous Boquist brothers to choke the shit out of their various stringed instruments for this record. There's a kind of general purpose honkytonk feel to this record that prevents pegging influences. At times he chokes up the desperation of Jeff Tweedy; others, he swaggers like Steve Earle; and still others, he adds lyrical complexity to the simple, like Tom T. Hall. This record doesn't sound just like one thing, because he understands, like everyone else who isn't a woman between 27 and 45, that there are a lot of different kinds of country people, and that the music itself is and can be a very rich tapestry. As I type this paragraph, I'm listening to "Poison," track 8, and he sounds kinda like Joe Strummer or Paul Westerberg; lots of bendy steel guitar and big punky power chords. Fuckin' A what a great record.

If you aren't a chickenshit mainstream country radio programmer, you may want to add O.C.M.S. by the Old Crow Medicine Show to your collection too. The cover photograph of the band on this disk looks like a cast shot from the hit TV show "Jackass." You can imagine these guys driving around on rural roads at midnight with their headlights off looking for things to shoot. When you put the disk in, you can really imagine these guys driving around on rural roads at midnight with their headlights off looking for things to shoot. There's so much energy in the manic way that they play that you can really get a case of the white knuckles, gripping your furniture on your first pass through. Even the slow songs sound intense. These are young men translating the frustrations of hillbilly existence into infectious twang catharsis. The only way they'd sing about a car brand is if they hot-wired one out in front of the old folks' home and left it in the ditch where they wrecked it.

Posted by Jack Sparks at March 21, 2004 10:23 PM

back to bidness...

Filed under: Imported

Juarez, By Terry Allen
Terry Allen's music fills up a room, it's 3-dimensional. As his weird, old, Texas uncle voice comes howling out of your speakers, it transforms any space you're in into a scene in a Peckinpah movie, written by Larry McMurtry starring You, Terry, and Slim Pickens. He's so fearless about combining narrative and music, that you find yourself in a Hillbilly Narnia, saying "no thank ye..." to more Shiner Bock from the evil witch who has pulled up in her camaro with a cooler full of it in the trunk, as you came through the forest, just past the wardrobe doors. Juarez (pronounced WAR-ez) is a desperate tale of murder and love, that casually and maliciously wafts across you through Allen's almost lazy, yet impassioned voice. Sugar Hill Records should be given 5 gold fucking stars for re-releasing this 1976 record.
Sweet lyric:

It's four o'clock in the morning
An' I feel like I'm in prison
'Cause I'm sittin' here in darkness...all alone
There's a pistol in the drawer
The bed it's still made-up
I'm drinking whiskey from a bottle on the floor
An' there's a lonely neon flashing
Crashing through my window
Making darkness all the worse...between the glow
An' there ain't no God at all
Just some jukebox down the hall...playing the blues
An' trying to lay me low

Tangled in the Pines, BR5-49
This is BR549! was the most disappointing album I've ever been subjected to as a follower of the many forms of Alt Country. Quite frankly, the people who run or ran Sony Nashville could NOT fuck up a wet dream, because it takes basic motor skills to do that, and there is absolutely no proof that anyone over there has any. Somehow, this "anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglogdytes" almost single-handedly ruined the careers of BR5-49, The Derailers, Charlie Robison, and Jack Ingram. Luckily, the artists in question were talented, popular, intelligent, and strong enough to recover from the greasy fingers of these evil bastards and somehow, right the ships. Tangled in the Pines reminds me of the crisp talent of the "Phone" record, coupled with the energy of the Live At Robert's EP. There are your obligatory "swing yer girl" numbers that few bands do like BR5-49; but there are also some surprisingly modern attempts at social criticism and commentary in "No Friend of Mine," "Movin' the Country," and the title track. Dual Tone Records' signing of the boys might be the 2004 equivalent of New West's grab of the Drive By Truckers last year.
Sweet lyric:

There's a man in D.C. and he speaks for me
But all he cares about is his Texas tea
Well I don't know what he will say
But I'll bet money that I'm gonna pay

The Graceful Ghost, by Grey De Lisle
You ever watch one of them horror pichurs where the character is sleeping in an old house in some old chair and blood just starts to run out of nowhere all over him or her, even though there's no one else there and the morning sunshine is beaming through the shutters and he or she has survived the night...(inhale)...there's a real spooky quality to this record, I'm guessing that's why she called it The Graceful Ghost. It's like your dead grandma's 20 year old ghost is singing songs to you about hard-scrabble farming and fried chicken picnics before the Great Depression. It's easy to close your eyes and wiggle your toes to this disk.
Sweet lyric:

My back is nearly broken by the time my day is through
My dirty hands are empty when I bring them home to you
So remember that I warned you when our soil turns to sand
It's a sorry life to live, lovin' a sharecroppin' man

Long Way Back Home, by The Gibson Brothers
I knew I was going to have to have a copy of this record after the The Minnesota Bluegrass & Old-Time Music Association brought the boys to Minneapolis to play at Armatage Elementary school down south and they did "Satan's Jewel Crown." The wild-eyed drunk Louvin brother would have challenged them to a fight and told them to stop stealing thunder had he ever heard it. The goddamned Gibson Brothers should be absolute goddamned stars of Country Music, but gutless cowards who run mainstream country stations like K102 don't have the fucking brains to add them to their playlist and watch their career take off. The singularly great thing about this group is how modern the songs are, without ditching the traditional authenticity of the instrumentation. Songs like "Mountain Song," "Ophelia," and "It's All Right With Me," are exactly why bluegrass took off in the 40's: it was traditional and poignant, without being anachronistic. If you run a country station, and you do phoners that say people don't want to hear these guys on your station, you're calling the wrong goddamned people.
Sweet lyric:

Just look at my face
As you tell me good-bye
You'll see what I'm after
By the look in my eye
Just walk away
And leave me alone
It's a long way back home

Posted by Jack Sparks at March 10, 2004 9:54 PM

A Cry Against Revisionism

Filed under: Imported

'Tis too much proved--that with devotion's visage
And pious action we do sugar o'er
The devil himself.

--Polonius, Act III, Scene i, Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments -- most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

--From Hunter S. Thompson's obituary of Richard Nixon

For a generation of people just older than I, Richard Nixon was the absolute devil of American civilization. Spiffy Young Republicans in the 90's tried to revamp his image in the giant vaccuum of disgrace created at the White House by the filthy philanderer from Hope, Arkansas, but the negative comparison is a red herring. Nixon--like Clinton--was an unrepentant scumbag who ruined American politics and almost ruined America. He should have gone to prison for the rest of his life and been forced to wash dishes for 63¢ a day in an orange jumpsuit.

But those washing devices are what make America great, aren't they? Witness if you will, the soon-to-be-released Movie, Home on the Range, featuring songs by k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, and Tim McGraw. Just from the trailers I've subjected myself to, it seems Disney has inked up a feel-good family flick about a herd of cows out to save the family farm from evil corporate greed.

Let's examine this. ABC/Disney, a monstrous corporation that has enjoined a never-ending battle with its evil step-sister Clear Channel Communications to homogenize radio and music in this country, has taken the side of the underdog, apparently. Without arguing the economics of the situation behind corporate efficiency in American food production, it's a rock-bottom fact that the disappearance of the family farm in this country is the direct result of ruthless corporate efficiency and practices driving the product prices so far down that only very large interests could absorb the losses. It's very much like what ABC/Disney and CC are doing to mom-and-pop radio stations across America: Loss-leading them out of the business. The results are similar too; just like the family farm way of life is disappearing, all of the creativity is being sucked out of radio.

Now, before any of you junior league all-stars get your undies in a bunch about the apple pie wholesomeness of Walt Fucking Disney, realize that I realize that this cartoon will probably be quite funny and entertaining and a great alternative to proactive parenting for at least 2 hours on a Saturday afternoon. What I'm asking you to do is examine the true message here. The economic quality of life in America is certainly a benefit of our model corporate efficiencies. However, we've paid a great cultural price. And, this movie is a prime example of the massive hypocrisy of our way of life. Don't get me wrong, I'm one of the hypocrites, I take advantage of low low prices everyday like the rest of you. But this shit really sucks. Fuck you Michael Eisner.

One last note: there are few groups more akin to the beleaguered family farmer than independent musicians. Instead of using corporate label drones like Tim McGraw on this soundtrack, why not hold an off-the-record "contest" for some of the best independent country artists to get a shot at this bit? It's because these evil bastards are taking advantage of a sympathetic issue in this country and masking themselves as people who care about it. Tim McGraw singing some huggy-kissy-smoochy song on a "movin' pichur' cartoon" will make girls from 25 to 45 tune back into shit holes like KEEY, K102, Minneapolis' worst country and swoon in between the Tide commercials. It happens over and over and over again, and you have to ask yourself if you care, then act accordingly.

Posted by Jack Sparks at March 8, 2004 10:22 PM

Oh say can you see?

Filed under: Imported

From the Associated Press:

INDIANAPOLIS -- Call it a case of reefer hubris.

Indiana state police stopped a pickup truck so overloaded with marijuana that a temporary license plate in the rear window was blocked.

"It was piled up in big bags," said Indiana State Trooper William Etter. "Once you first stopped it, it was obvious - you could smell it."

The pot nearly filled the bed of the truck, and a drug-sniffing dog responded immediately to the scent, police said. About 900 one-pound bricks of pot were recovered during the Monday traffic stop.

Officers arrested the driver and another two men who face preliminary charges of marijuana possession.

And:

Juarez, the Characters:

Sailor: A Texas boy just returned from duty with the Navy in the Pacific. Is on leave in the port of San Diego.
Spanish Alice: A Mexican prostitute working the bars in Tijuana, looking for ways into the USA.
Jabo: A Juarez born pachuco living in Los Angeles decides to go home by way of a joy ride up into Southern Colorado.
Chic Blundie: Jabo's L.A. girlfriend, an enigma, rock writer and occasionally, Jabo himself.

A simple story:

Sailor meets Alice in a Tijuana bar.
They get drunk, fuck, cry-to-believe together and get married.
They cross the border and travel by car, probably a Buick, from San Diego to Cortez, Colorado.
They honeymoon in a small, run down mountain trailer.
And at exactly the same time
Jabo appeals to and persuades Chic to leave L.A., probably by motorcycle, for Juarez by way of Cortez.
They go North to get South.
In Cortez the two couples meet, argue, fight, resulting in Sailor and Alice lying dead on the trailer floor.
Jabo and Chic, objects of a massive statewide search, escape by car, probably the Buick, and flee to Juarez as planned.
In Juarez, they part.

--From track 2 of the re-release of Juarez, by Terry Allen

Sometimes, the only thing harder to believe about the 70's in America is that we're still living in the same general geographical space occupied by free spirits like Terry Allen back then. Terry Allen's art has all the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, the heater don't work but the tires are good desperation of a high-speed, 900 pound pot run across the State of Indiana. Had it been the 70's, Trooper William Etter would know that those 3 guys were just doing their jobs, much like he was when he stopped them. There were no puritanical rages over the dangers of self-destructive behavior. "Hey man," he would have quipped, "you're busted."

2004, though only two months old, has been a foul year for mass psychosis over morality, and cliché ideas about what makes good Americans, good families, and good business. People seem to forget that the brilliant and enigmatic Thomas Jefferson, possibly the single greatest Patriot in our country's history, liked to have a go at the help every now and then. The architect of possibly the most radical philosophic moment in world history had urges just like Ernest T. Bass, and if a rock went flying through the winduh at Monticello every now and then, well, it was his house, wasn't it? So friends, as prominent "Americans" parade themselves up and down I-35 and across I-70 in the next few months, just keep old Thom, Terry, and those 3 patriots with their 900 pounds of geef in the back of your mind. This country has many layers, and everyone has a lie in his back pocket somewhere.

Luckily, the transition from the arid year of 2003 into the slimy one of 2004 has been a high water mark for roots music. Centers of cotton candy fluff music, like Los Angeles, New York, and Nashville are sliding sideways into lawsuits over downloading, bootlegging, and People's Court antics like dragging flea market vendors before Judges who still refer to calculators with green LED displays as "grandpa's computer." Needless to say, I wouldn't walk across the street to piss on these CD's if they were in a pile outside the gated community where Kenny Chesney lives, in a great fire. Whose American dream is rock hard abs, an expensive car, and three, six, or twelve super models dancing behind you to a song that was ripped almost note-for-note off of some Bellamy Brothers album from 1977? All I need is a comfortable pair of jeans, 4 wheels that work, a girl, just like the girl, who married dear old dad, and a song lilting across the night sky, illuminated by the cherries of 2 or 3 lit cigarettes, that inspires the telling of a story that took place when the narrator was young or in jail in Laredo or young and in jail in Laredo.

Jack's Ten Disks You Should Own by Now, or Soon, or hey man, when you get to it:

1. Juarez, by Terry Allen
Almost every song Terry Allen ever wrote could be about 3 guys driving 900 pounds of dope across Indiana in a pickup truck.

2. Wishbones, by Slaid Cleaves
Slaid Cleaves would thank the officer for arresting him.

3. Virginia Creeper, by Grant-Lee Phillips
Grant-Lee might be the guy who convinces the female cop at the station to undo the cuffs and then to help him escape, ending up eloping just across the border in Kentucky.

4. Decoration Day by The Drive By Truckers
The cop's dead. Shot once through the chest with a sawed-off shotgun and then driven over once just to make sure.

5. Famous Anonymous Wilderness, by Graham Lindsey
The cop is part of a gruesome "Everyday People" exhibit in the basement, right next to the body of the dead mother propped up in her favorite rocking chair.

6. Graceful Ghost, by Grey De Lisle
The cop lets her go, lighting her joint for her before she leaves.

7. Bona Fide, by The Gibson Brothers
The cop is their cousin and the arrest causes a fistfight at the next family picnic.

8. Post to Wire, by Richmond Fontaine
The band's never heard from again, abducted and forced to chop wood, cook food and do laundry for a "Rapture" cult that's taken over an abandoned summer camp in the Mountains, the cop known only as "Scout" to his brothers and sisters in the order.

bah...ten is so rigid and base 10. Eight's a good round number with a great history.

Posted by Jack Sparks at March 3, 2004 11:43 PM

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