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A CHILD OF THE FIRST PEOPLE
Samye Sampsel Burrus is an internationally recognized artist. She was an award-winning painter, sculptor, muralist, designer and an illustrator and author of many children's books. Above all, she was a Cherokee woman and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
Arthur Danin Adler | Octber 2019
LIGHTING THE CANDLE
As each year goes by, more and more people realize what film artists
have known since the 1960’s... he was and remains singular among
the handful of unique filmmakers in the 20th century.
Arthur Danin Adler | September 2019
CASTLE KEEP...REVISED
Obama, Barry Obama of Harvard, was a political naïf, a talker not a doer,
a caretaker who minded eight years as they went by and made certain
he would be a "historical" president, the great chalk mark
on the historical list marking the 1st Black president.
Arthur Danin Adler | August 2019
A BRIEF ANORECTIC HOMILY ON TIME
Who are we? Where are we? What are we doing?
The answers merge like sperm into ovum and give birth to
the pregnant question of Why?.
Arthur Danin Adler | July 2019
FOUR VIRGINS AND A SPOONS
Some things are better left undone, better left unsaid, better left unknown, better left alone. Pithless naysayings that keep the fear pot bubbling. The latter one precipitates an endless stream of pungent doeth nots.
Arthur Danin Adler | June 2019
LIFE AMONG THE SPECIES
A persistent tribute to and an icon for superstition and fear, a stupidly designed structure with an ugly exterior that denied Greek and Roman engineering and beauty… the angry-god cathedral, Notre Dame, burned down.
Arthur Danin Adler | May 2019
THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT
Suppose you stop eating anything for a few weeks or so. You’ll end up unsurpisingly thin, very thin, and probably dead. For proof just visit a refugee camp in Yemen or parts of Africa. Arthur Danin Adler | April 2019
ASIA THROUGH A THAI LOOKING GLASS…REDUX
It is the rampage of the corporate colonial powers that divides and sub-divides the Asian world–and they don't need flags with marching bands. In fact, colonialism never left, it just changed its clothes. Arthur Danin Adler | March 2019
ANONYMOUS DAYS
The one gut-driving, mind massaging, thought enhancing, evolutionary perpetrating influence has been the writings of Shakespeare. The words are in every head, every language, every mathematical thought. | February 2019
BODY AND SOUL REDUX
At 22, she was a woman, not a teeny bopper, not a hip-hopper., not a "who am I? girl-gone-wild", not a single girl who can't wait to grow up and yet can't disrobe from her over-the-head hand-clapping teeny-tweeny costume. | January 2019
3:10 TO YUMA
I’m sitting on a veranda on The Peak in Hong Kong overlooking the harbor late in the afternoon, musing that image. The shimmering blue and glimmering gold of the waters are fading into the smiling grey and black of evening. | December 2018
CIGARILLO
Today’s “awakening” is only beginning to scratch the surface as it reveals the layers of human patriarchal history. It reveals men smothering women, other men, other species, including we addicts. | November 2018
THE DESERT ROSE
A powerful, confrontational eye-to-eye challenge to both the actor and the director. Screw with his dialogue, screw with his vision of the staging, and the production is screwed! | October 2018
AS TIME BRIEFLY GOES BY
The perspective of history is a guide-thread in the web of human knowledge.
It is the memory in that perspective that defines who we are, where we are,
and what it is we are doing. | September 2018
THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY
No scientist to date has ever proved that the species Actorus Necessarus exists or has ever existed. There is no fossil record and Charles Darwin blatantly ignored the rumor and myth of this lost mammalian link. | August 2018
AFTER MIDNIGHT
How could you possibly love someone else’s life more than your own? The open
heart of your own life lying in someone else’s hands, helpless, beating, unafraid.
How is that possible? | July 2018
WINTER HEAT
In the Ancient World, that time before Judeo-Christian morality and the steam engine, Art was not usually segregated from the days and nights of journeying through life. | June 2018
SCENE 5
I cannot remember one day of my life in which I did not interact with an animal, usually a pet. A pet, pet… what a word, what a gratuitous, self-hubris-licking
word. | May 2018
BILLIE HOLIDAY'S MAGIC
I saw her twice during my lifetime (and hers) live! Once at the old Metropole in Manhattan’s jazz district, and at the CBS television studios in New York, one Sunday afternoon, during a live broadcast. | April 2018
PnP
In these weinsteinian days of sexual harassment and inappropriateness, prostitution (pay to play) is a banner that is spreading over more than sex industry workers. | March 2018
ME TOO
There isn't a male on this planet who hasn't stood beneath the banner of Patriarchy, who hasn't harassed or bullied or oppressed a woman casually or intentionally. | February 2018
CASTLE KEEP
What is this all about, over 40 years ago, when there were few personal computers, no internet, no social media, no mobile phones. | January 2018
ALL THE KING’S MEN
If they don't deliver, give me the hammer and I'll do it.
Nail em up! Nail em up! Nail em up! Nail em up! | December 2017
SOUNDS THAT BECKON
For the life of me, I cannot throw away a book, no matter how insipid,
or useless, or decrepit. | November 2017
TWO FOR THE ROAD
Recently I turned away to the ingratiating slouch of the tube through which I experienced "Star Trek Discovery" and "The Vietnam War". | October 2017
¡OLÉ!
I fell in love with Flamenco, I fell in love with Lorca, I eventually came to understand what the Spaniards revered in the ancient ritual of corrida de toros. September 2017
FAKES AND FORGERIES
The driving motive is outsourcing, shadow contracting, tempered with compulsive consumption and no small amount of greed. | August 2017
FIFTEEN MINUTES BACKSTAGE
This practice was so prevalent, it became (as it usually does backstage) a superstition. Never start on time! To this day, there are managers who swear by it. | July 2017
2 PICKLES AND 20 PIECES OF GARLIC
Someone once said, "everything is 90% about sex and 10% about nothing else." Fair enough... better than if that were reversed. | June 2017
SLEEPING ALONE
I love to fall asleep with someone. I love to wake in the morning with someone. But, now, how long can I sleep with someone? | May 2017
WINDTALKING
We're inundated with children who cannot write with their prehensile thumbs and who mumble-speak through their numbed noses. | April 2017
BITS&PIECES: LALA IN LA LA LAND
Not having the vision to see a pig fly, a cat's ninth life, a unicorn's breath, an
omni-gendered human being, and a trans-human. | March 2017
AS THE WHEEL TURNS AND TURNS
A provocative, controversial, insider's look into the Hollywood "circus", the American political system, civil rights and the abuses of law enforcement. | February 2017
AWAKE WITH ANTHONY HOPKINS
In the new tv series, Westworld, his portrayal of a lead character offers a perception of a Master Actor at work regardless of the circumstances. | January 2017
WORDS FOR WORDS
He had a wonderful sense of humor and a zest for life, the cultures of the world and… baseball! A passionata passion for baseball. | December 2016
TENDERIZED GENDERIZED JAZZ
It's only the music, the lyricism of the music, the song of it all that matters. Something that most rock, most country, all rap and Bob Dylan never understood. | November 2016
WRITER
Since I can remember, even before I knew how to write,
I wanted to be a writer | October 2016
BITS & PIECES
Marrying the Merrisome Jane Eyre, About Horses
and A Bridge in Paris | September 2016
HILLARY IN THE MOVIES
In 1964 the idea of a Woman President
was as threatening as the idea of a woman's vote | August 2016
TOUJOURS L'AMOUR
A prose(d) poem or a poesied story | July 2016
SPACE
Why don't they call us? If you were they, would you? | July 2016
DAISY, DAISY
Give me your answer do! I'm half crazy All for the Love of You, | June 2016
C(Q)UE THE BORGIAS
The harvest from 1500-years Christian usurption of the glory and putrefaction of the Roman Empire | May 2016
ON THE BEACH
There is still time brother! | April 2016
2016 DÉ JÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN
What I saw was a revelation that took my breath into my head, one of many that awakened me that year. | March 2016
BODY AND SOUL
There is a price to be paid for the necessary rise of feminism. It is the loss of femininity. | February 2016
ANDREA DWORKIN
She was and remains one of the most important women, one of the most important voices in the twentieth century. | January 2016
WISHING YOU
Fundamentalism derived from and integral to all religions, is the most virulent blank- stare terror of the plague. | January 2016
THE BLACKLIST
The Blacklist really never ended. It changed Hollywood (and other creative areas) forever. It unleashed an inherent strain of paranoia, xenophobia and bigotry . | December 2015
REMEMBERING IRIS CHANG
She was a diligent and perceptive historian who was also a gifted writer | November 2015
HIM ON STAGE
I don't want just a voice I want Him on stage not on the screen, on stage in real time. | November 2015
CONVERSATIONS SELDOM OVERHEARD - "ALIEN ILLICIT"
In a loft, in San Francisco, above the fog. Listen, in exactly three minutes the telephone is going to ring. That's the time to finish our little test.
You answer it. | October 2015
ONCE MORE WITH FEELING
The prevailing art-form of the 20th century is expanding like the universe into an amorphous stew. | October 2015
PEBBLES AND POTATOES
We're inundated with children who cannot write with their prehensile thumbs and mumble through their numbed noses. | September 2015
THE LION IN WINTER
At least 90% of the humans on this planet have never seen or touched a painting. | July/August 2015
MR. KANE & MR. WELLES
Seventy-four years ago, Orson Welles created 'Citizen Kane' and it remains the zenith, the apex of filmmaking | June 2015
SECOND REUNION
The Jew In The Box.. | May 2015
SCENE FROM AMERICAN SKYPER
Based on a true story. There are many truths in true stories. February 2015
MANIC DEPRESSIVE
It was boring. It was flaccid. It was the Academy Awards. | March 2015
REMEMBRANCE
He saw it all, heard it all. He had seen it all and heard it all before.. | April 2015
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CATS PART 3
An ongoing history project sponsored by the Felines Forever Foundation. You can contribute your facts, opinions, fears and misinformation. Please do not send us photos, fur, stuffed animals or your pets. | January 2015
A BRIEF HISTORY OF COPYRIGHT PART 1
Possession is 9/10ths of the law and 10/10ths of possession. Notice of copyright has been found in the earliest writings including the hands in ancient cave paintings. | January 2015
HEAVEN
Ladies and Gentlemen and adolescents of all ages everywhere, good wishes for the coming year. | January 2015
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CATS PART 3
An ongoing history project sponsored by the Felines Forever Foundation. You can contribute your facts, opinions, fears and misinformation. Please do not send us photos, fur, stuffed animals or your pets. | December 2014
A BRIEF HISTORY OF COPYRIGHT PART 1
Possession is 9/10ths of the law and 10/10ths of possession. Notice of copyright has been found in the earliest writings including the hands in ancient cave paintings. | December 2014
ON COPYRIGHT AND CATS
I don't know what is happening. And frankly, I don't care. | December 2014
WHAT'S NEW?
Google, a money-printing, identity-shifting video game. | November 2014
TORCH SONG
The burning heart - loneliness from love lost. | October 2014
NAKED TIZZY - KRINSKI'S "NUDITY"
Explicitly about sex and love but more of a mind's journey through life. | September 2014
DÉ JÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN
Our universe is expanding infinitely and Ridley Scott isn't planning to die. | May 2014
DARWIN MISSED HOLLYWOOD
What Michael Cimino wrought in 1980 is de rigueur today. | August 2014
$12 MILLION, $46 MILLION, SOLD!
I find it difficult to write about temporal things that don't matter. | June 2014
AND IN THE BEGINNING
Brothers and Sisters here is my homily for today. April 2014
SANTAYANA AND STAR TREK
Welcoming the future. Respecting the past. | February 2014
HOLLYWOOD POLITIQUE
The American film industry, especially Hollywood, is a montage of "Arts&Politics" and "Politics&Arts". It all began with the flood of immigration toward the end of the 19th century. | January 2014
HOLLYWOOD'S GREATEST SHAME: THE BLACKLIST
About a man who refused to genuflect to the authorities who persecuted and prosecuted him. | December 2013
WAR FILMS AND NOVEMBER 22
What will we see through the distant window when America's most arrogantly insane war fades. | November 2013
MILLIONAIRES AND HOOKERS
Pay-for-sex is almost as old as human history. As someone once said, everything is 90% about sex and 10% about nothing else. | October 2013
HONG KONG NIGHTS AT 4:30 PM
Tricky little title isn't it? Comes from a remorseful Mekong Whiskey-Beaujolais hangover driven ditty written in a sweat-dripping room on The Peak. | August 2013
JOHN GARFIELD AND HAZEL BROOKS
John Garfield was a movie star in the 1940's and 50's, a counterpoint to Humphrey Bogart, a poster-man for the joyous angst, the bewildering urban stew of New York and its steaming boroughs. | July 2013
OF VIVALDI AND WOMEN
What do you know about self-possessed loneliness? Bone-aching, silent, time standing-still loneliness. An aloneness that the titillation of television or drugs or music, even suicide holds out no hands of hope. | June 2013
THE JEW IN THE BOX
He sat propped up against the back wall, one of his legs twisted away from him like a puppet's limb. His reddish and blue face was a mask smoothed and scrambled by the plastic bag over his head. | May 2013
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS BUT ONE REDUX
I'll keep it short with cloudy details because I haven't retold it much and I'm uncertain as to the outcome of the events and the relevance or danger of the facts today. | April 2013
BLUE EYES AT NIGHT
Two questions, seemingly unrelated and then again, not. What If This Is All There Is? and Whatever Happened To Martin Brest? | March 2013
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS BUT ONE
This is a story that was told to me by a college chum of mine who later became an intelligence operative for the American government. | December 2012
ACTOR? LET'S SEE YOUR LICENSE
For our own quality assurance, we try to license everything that is important to us, except giving birth to and raising children, of course. | November 2012
FIVE REASONS WHY CINEMA IS DYING
Well it's not really dying. Rather, the prevailing art-form of the 20th century is expanding like the universe into an amorphous stew. | October 2012
SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED
Something momentous has happened. It should have been shouted in large black type across the front page of the New York Times and other news media around the world. It wasn't. | July 2012
ON THE STREET
Perspectives: IMAGES - Glyphs | On The Street | July 2012
THE STRANGER
Perspectives: WRITINGS - Monologues | The Stranger | There is a sadness that floats on the sea in the afternoon. It has always seemed that way to me. | July 2012
CONVERSATIONS SELDOM OVERHEARD - THE ACTOR
Perspectives: Writings - Dialogues | Conversations Seldom Overheard - The Actor | A director and his lead actor in the wings just before curtain rise. | June 2012
MEMORIAL DAY - A TIME TO LOVE, A TIME TO HATE-REDUX
The challenge of True Believers, of Fundamentalism, all Fundamentalism, Christian, Jewish, Islamic is its mindless, degrading nostalgia. | June 2012
A FABLE FROM THE 'WAR ON WOMEN'
Perspectives: Writings - Dialogues | On a lazy, warm, cloudy, summer's afternon a boy and a girl play hide-and-seek. | May 2012
THE DANCER INTO POET
Selena Zachai | Lorca took everything into his mouth and his nose and his eyes and his tongue. He is the most sensual poet of the 20th century. If he were alive I would smash my way to lie with him to hear him breathe and sing. | May 2012
SEA FIRE
Perspectives: Writings - Monologues | From The Lyriana Nocturnes - April 2012
CONVERSATIONS SELDOM OVERHEARD
Perspectives: Writings - Dialogues | Salvation | April 2012
THE APPARENT EUGENE O'NEILL
The Apparent Eugene O'Neill | Only in America. | April 2012
LIMA PERU NOT OHIO
In my arrogant Manhattan innocence, I had made a naive mistake and so did my editor. I went to Lima in April, on a Friday, Good Friday, which provided a challenging scenario. | April 2008
YO-YO MA AND VIVALDI
I have seen and heard the magnificent Yo-Yo Ma play Vivaldi live at Carnegie Hall. And now I hear him again as I sit spinning on the cd, drinking in the laser light. What he and Vivaldi accomplish is the carrying of music as close to the edge of merged media experience without betraying its purity. | July 2007
CONVERSATIONS SELDOM OVERHEARD
Perspectives: Writings - Dialogues | Shadowtalk | March 2012
TRIPTYCH: "THE 99%"
Perspectives: Writings - Glyphs | Triptych: The 99% | March 2012
FADE TO WHITE
I point you to David Mackenzie's Perfect Sense, a beautifully crafted but seriously disturbing film about losing the arts of life. It fades to white before it fades to black.. | March 2012
ARTEM SECUNDUM SUUM CUIQUE
There is no obscenity in the arts. There is only a perspective that deems and labels out of ignorance, fear, politics, financial gain, and severe self-displeasure. Obscenity is in the mind of the beholder. | January/February 2012
SINGERS OF SONGS
A continuous dimension I travel through is music. It is the balance to my visual world and a purveyor of intimate and relentless privacy. In that dimension, of all the singers I have ever heard, seen, enjoyed, opera, theatre, jazz, pop, only two linger and hover above all the other voices. Both are American. | December 2011
THE Q FACTOR
George Santayana and others aphoristically proclaimed that to ignore history is to be doomed to repeat it. True? Perhaps, with this caveat: the human species is a collective of behavior, habitual, ritual, repetitive behavior, not doomed to repeat its history, rather self-programmed to recycle itself and its history. | November 2011
FROM ROME TO BANGKOK - ITALIAN STYLE
Festival review. | July 2011
MINE VAGANTI
Film review. | July 2011
UP THE CARRIAGE TRADE !- REDUX
I'll take the lower class audiences, they make a playwright's writing-agony worth agonizing over, they make an actor's performance worth its salt and they don't give a damn about directors and dramaturgs and all the other frou-frou functionaries who get in between them and the live bodies on stage. On with the show! And I'll take the upper class audiences too, of course. | October 2011
ORSON WELLES
Seventy years ago, Orson Welles created Citizen Kane and it remains the zenith, the apex of filmmaking. It completed the migration of theatre into cinema. No film before or since defined the nucleus of cinema, the art form of the 20th century, as this seminal 1941 masterpiece did. | September 2011
THE STORY OF BLUE
Alan Blue didn't die last week. He probably will, soon. He isn't old and he isn't young. He has been a wayfarer through his life, one who never changed. He was an errand boy, a clerk, a waiter, an actor, not a husband nor a father or a relative. | August 2011
THE ACADEMY AWARDS
To many people, worldwide, the American Academy Awards is the most important and prestigious event of its kind. Important? No question an Academy Award is worth a small fortune, before and after taxes. Prestigious? Define prestigious. | March 2011
KUBRICK REMEMBERED REDUX
As each year goes by, more and more people realize what film artists have known since the 1960's: he was and remains singular among the handful of unique filmmakers in the 20th century. | Fenruary 2011
THE LOSS OF SILENCE/EAT AND BE HAPPY
This, then, is the holiday season that closes the first decade of the 21st century. It is also the 100th anniversary of one of the most glorious years in Western history, 1910, a year of exciting promise, breathtaking art, panoramic smiles. 2010 is not like that. | December 2010
VISAGE
I live in an ugly country. not the latent, panoramic beauty of America's countryside, rather it's cities and towns. Unlike many places in Europe or Asia, American cities, for the most part, have no center, no town plaza or square. | November 2010
THROUGH THE MYTH-MAKING GLASS LIGHTLY
In America, the art of cooking has nothing to do with survival, it's a key therapy in mental healthcare, it's entertainment. Americans do not eat to survive, they eat to consume, and they are consumptive. | August 2010
MINDING BOOKS
In a Thai village, a few years ago, I sat in a little, outdoor bar in the heat of the afternoon, drinking a cold beer. Sitting next to me, a villager, a farmer, taking a break.Between my broken Thai and his fractured English, we managed a reasonable conversation. At one point, he reached into his shoulder pack to get a cigarette and a book fell out. It was a paperback, yellowed and dog-eared. | July 2010
FIRST THINGS LAST
The reason I collect these works of art and non-art is because they are part of my time continuum. They exist with me in the present, spread out in all space/time directions, and they are my friends. | May 2010
THE QUIVERING MUSE OF CUISINE
Journeying into a cuisine is an addiction, seldom a curse, mostly a delight. I've had as many addictions as you've had, probably more. | June 2010
THE PASSING OF A LIFE
Earlier this year, a friend and colleague, Julius Krinski died at 81, in Jomtien, Thailand. A Hungarian/Australian expatriate, he was a remarkable man - an author, a Bon Vivant, and a world-class lover. With a poignant sadness, I remember an interview with him in 2005. | April 2010
VIEWINGS AND AN ACTOR'S LAMENT
I decided not to avoid the timely viewings of as many of this year's Oscar nominees that I could take. I took the five leading contenders: The Hurt Locker, District 9, Inglourious Basterds, Avatar and Crazy Heart. The first four can be categorized in a simple phrase: they are video games. | March 2010
THE A****R
Time to turn to The Animating Life Giver. Time to create a new actor, a shape-shifting anthropamorphoid with no baggage, who doesn't have to pee no matter how long a rehearsal lasts. | February 2010
DEATHWATCH REVISITED
As I prepare to plunge back into the real-time of theatre, I'm drawn to an acting experience which left me with an immutable rock to stand on. At its core, an understanding, a truth that is as clear today as when I first perceived it. | December 2009
IN SEARCH OF HEAVEN'S GATE
It is the worst film ever made and released. Worse than any of the spewings of Quentin ("the only way to cut a film is with a bread knife") Tarantino, or Martin ("how do you tell a story?") Scorcese, or Steven ("isn't directing just like producing?") | October 2009
A TRADITION OF ONE
I wrote the following column, some years ago, as an ode to young dreams and happy times and in small part to capture the image of the young and happy Niko and I offer it again in his memory. | November 2008
THE TERROR OF THE FADING BOOK - AN UPDATE
The hope of galloping technology that I described a year ago, though not so immediately galloping, continues to emerge. It is the great black & white hope. | September 2009
AROUND MIDNIGHT WITH MANFREDO FEST
Midnight was the time when I slid into a deliciously dark, smokey jazz club in Chicago and was bewitched by a blend of music I hadn't heard before. | June 2009
CABBAGES AND KINGS
They babble. Incessantly. Text messages and emails and voices into little mobiles stuck in their ears and blogs and twitters and facebooks and youtubes and newscasts and talk shows and press conferences. | April 2009
GOING TO THE MOVIES... REDUX
With all of the laughter, cheers, boos, singing, and, yes, chit-chat, rather than a disturbing distraction, it all became one engaging, live experience. | February 2009
ARS-EXITUS ACT PROBAT AND KURT WEILL
January 2009 | Special Issue
OWNING PICASSO
I have a friend who owns a Picasso... and not much else. Which one? Don't ask, don't tell. He acquired this painting via less than legal and righteous means. | December 2008
REALITY: STAGE IT AND CAGE IT
An 'avatar', a virtual creature who embodies the above-described reality of Reality in the media... the candidate for the Vice-Presidency, Sarah Palin. | October 2008
LESTER COLE
He was a New York playwright, a prolific screenwriter during Hollywood's golden years, a leader and the most vehement member of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten. | September 2008
THE AGE OF ATLANTIS... REDUX
For those of you who have written to me from time to time about the 'lady from atlantis', i have some sad news: she died last week at the age of 79. The last time i saw and spoke with her earlier this year. | December 2007
JULIET AND HER ROMEO - REDUX
Earlier this year, I met Tariz, again, in Bangkok. Her company was in Singapore and she was up north at a festival of international artists. They had not returned to the U.S. since the time I saw them. | May 2005
FAKES, FORGERIES AND THE MADNESSES OF CROWDS
Fakes, Forgeries and The Madnesses of Crowds | October 2007
AN ESSENCE OF ACTING |
An Essence of Acting | April 2007
INGMAR BERGMAN
The Music of Saraband | June 2007
ACTORS AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN
Actots And Intelligent Design | | September 2005
KRAKATOA, EAST OF JAVA
Krakatoa, East of Java | January 2005
VITA BREVIS, ARS LONGA|
Vita Brevis, Ars Longa and Anything Goes means a distinctive
View of the Arts. | January 2007
CORRIDA OF ACTORS
Corrida of Actors | March 2007
ANTHONY HOPKINS UNWIRED!
December 2006
'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE |
Cinderella and the Marquis de Sade, a delirious idea. | November 2006
RIDLEY SCOTT
The Kingdom of Heaven with Ridley Scott | September 2006
BILLIE HOLIDAY
Billie Holiday | July 2006
SOMEWHERE IN TIME
November 2005
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