Best Alt.Country Musicians: 9 Essential Artists

Lucinda Williams 

"The musicians who came to define the alt.country boom of the late 80s and 90s believed themselves to be outside of the country music establishment and its ethos of the time. As Lucinda Williams, one of the best alt.country musicians of the era, put it, 'I definitely don’t feel a part of what I call the straighter country music industry of Nashville. I’m definitely not connected with that world. I guess I’m sort of considered an outlaw here, along with Steve Earle.' The term alt.country (sometimes dubbed “insurgent country”) describes a number of musicians who eschewed the pop-infused country music that had begun to take hold in the late 70s and 80s. ... Though its roots reach back to country music icons such as Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson, the most direct relevant forerunners to alt.country are Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers, who were playing a mix of traditional country music and rock from the late 60s. ..."


Gram Parsons
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The Hotel Chelsea’s iconic neon sign heading to auction

"The Chelsea Hotel in New York is auctioning off pieces of its history, including the iconic neon sign that has hung on the outside of the building since 1949. For culture fans with money to spend, there is a chance to own one of the letters are they are set to b sold one-by-one. In any photo of the hallowed hotel, its neon sign proudly proclaims its name. It became an iconic symbol for an establishment that has housed so many icons. Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, especially, the Chelsea was home to some of the more influential names in music, literary and cinematic history.  ..."

Far Out (Video)

2010 October: Hotel Chelsea, 2014 January: Arena Hotel Chelsea, 2019 August: The Chelsea Affect - Arthur Miller, 2022 July:  ​‘Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel’ Review: Bohemia’s Holdouts, 2022 November: Stop and admire the Chelsea Hotel’s beautiful iron balconies

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Futuristic Dereliction - Alphaxone & Onasander (2024)


"In a meeting of the minds, Alphaxone and Onasander (Mehdi Saleh and Maurizio Landin, respectively) begin Futuristic Dereliction with dramatic pianoforte waves that are eventually joined by a background drone and synthesized beat structures. This first track sets forth the tone of the overall album – desolate post-apocalyptic soundscapes in which echoes of advanced technologies reverberate throughout the ruins. To that point, the second track, titled Time Fracture, employs rapid sequencer runs atop bassy drones. The following pieces, all in the 6-8 minute range, continue to use low frequencies to evoke haunting images of buildings in collapse and the metal-on-metal of failing machinery. Sculpted static, acousmatic sounds, and/or field recordings accentuate the mix. An overall dark airiness permeates the mood. ..."
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Black Sun Press


"The Black Sun Press was an English-language press noted for publishing the early works of many modernist writers including Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, and Eugene Jolas. It enjoyed the greatest longevity among the several expatriate presses founded in Paris during the 1920s, publishing nearly three times as many titles as did Edward Titus under his Black Manikin Press. American expatriates living in Paris, Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse Crosby (American inventor of the modern bra) founded the press to publish their own work in April 1927 as Éditions Narcisse. ... They enjoyed the reception their initial work received, and decided to expand the press to serve other authors, renaming the company the Black Sun Press, following on Harry's obsession on the symbolism of the sun. They published exclusively limited quantities of meticulously produced, hand-manufactured books, printed on high-quality paper. During the 1920s and 1930s Paris was at the crossroads of many emerging expatriate American writers, collectively called the Lost Generation. ..."



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Here Are Cases of Trump Rivals Who Were Subject to Investigation


"Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have suggested that his constant threats to prosecute rivals and perceived enemies if he is elected again should not be taken literally. 'His vengeance is going to be by winning and making America great again, not going after his political opponents,' Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, told CNN. But as president, Mr. Trump tried repeatedly to use the powers of the federal government to investigate or penalize those he considered foes. While a few of them had engaged in conduct that made them legitimate targets of inquiry, there was no legal basis for the investigation of many. None were ultimately put behind bars, but they had to fend off criminal investigations, civil suits brought by the Justice Department and other forms of government pressure. The decisions to pursue Mr. Trump’s rivals cannot always be traced back to a direct, formal order from him, but they are consistent with public or private pressure he exerted. Here are some of the more prominent examples from his time in office. ..."



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Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein (1914)

"Tender Buttons is a 1914 book by American writer Gertrude Stein consisting of three sections titled 'Objects', 'Food', and 'Rooms'. The short book consists of multiple poems covering the everyday mundane. Stein's experimental use of language renders the poems unorthodox and their subjects unfamiliar. Stein began composition of the book in 1912 with multiple short prose poems in an effort to 'create a word relationship between the word and the things seen' using a 'realist' perspective. She then published it in three sections as her second book in 1914. Tender Buttons has provoked divided critical responses since its publication. It is renowned for its Modernist approach to portraying the everyday object and has been lauded as a 'masterpiece of verbal Cubism'. ..."

Wikipedia 



Archive: Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein (1914)

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Deities and disciples: Patti Smith at St. Paul’s Cathedral


"Before Patti Smith came on stage at St. Paul’s Cathedral, after everyone had milled about utterly awed by the surroundings, the priest came out and told us all to put our phones away; no videos, no photos until the end. This is my recollection, realistically more for me than for you. When I was about 14 or so, there was a book in HMV on sale for £4, and I liked the cover. All black with one single polaroid image, titled Just Kids. I bought it, and I read it. It sounds embarrassing, but every writer ends up having to say it: I’ve always been a writer. There has never been a moment in my life where I thought about doing anything else, but when I prepped to start GCSEs and actually began zoning in on a path, that singular desire was starting to feel like a curse as the confidence of childhood disappeared into a teenage doubt that maybe I’d amount to nothing and all of it would be a waste. ..."


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7 Beautiful Places for Fall Foliage That Aren’t in New England

The South Santiam River along the McKenzie Pass-Santiam Pass Scenic Byway, in central Oregon.

"Every fall, visitors seeking out fall colors throng to hot spots like the Green Mountains of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. But North America is vast and rich in forests, so why does New England get so much love? According to Prof. William Keeton, a forest ecosystem scientist at the University of Vermont, the region’s diverse array of trees — including beech, birch, maple and oak — produces a wide variety of colors when the leaves begin to change. Add to this, Dr. Keeton said, a mix of elevations, as well as slopes that face in different directions, producing climate variation, and you have a wide range of colors and stages of revealing. OK, sure, New England is beautiful, but stunning autumn colors don’t belong to any one region: Picture the deep orange dogwood trees of the Pacific Northwest, the golden shimmer of the aspens in Colorado and the rusty red of swamp chestnut oak in West Virginia. ..."


The South Santiam River in the Cascade mountains of Oregon.
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Radical playfulness: The abstract music compositions of Marcel Duchamp


"What else is there to do when you’ve already fucked with just about every art tradition going? The mission to disrupt the art world never ends. Abstractism demands no surrender; a rule-breaker could never just return to making pretty pictures and fitting in with the crowd; they must keep marching forward into new, weirder, wilder places. Marcel Duchampmarched right around the typical parameters of what art is and wandered right into the neighbouring realm of music. But really, to him and his class of radical creatives, the words ‘art’, ‘music’ or any other categorisation meant nothing. They were on a mission to destroy those lines and smash through any and all borders so that all that was left was a kind of vague yet huge question of 'What does all this mean?' ..."
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‘Money Jungle’: Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus And Max Roach’s Revelatory Summit


"First released in 1962 via the United Artists label, Duke Ellington’s collaboration with bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach, Money Jungle, was a momentous jazz summit. Though often seen as the moment where the old guard (Ellington) squared up to jazz music’s young lions (Mingus and Roach), the generational differences between its three participants are often exaggerated. Certainly, Ellington was entering his twilight years – he had just turned 63 – but Mingus, then aged 40, and the 38-year-old Roach were hardly wet behind the ears when the album was recorded. Perhaps a more accurate way of looking at the trio’s musical marriage is to see Ellington as a revered establishment figure pitted against modernist revolutionaries. Ultimately, though, the result of their collaboration wasn’t a confrontational face-off but a joyous celebration of jazz created by three unlikely kindred spirits. ..."







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Inside a West Village passageway leading to a hidden courtyard and 1820s backhouse


"One is the Village of cobblestone streets, enchanting houses, and sidewalk cafes. The other is the secret Village behind brick walls, embowering trees, iron fences, and horsewalk doorways. But sometimes you find a portal into this secret West Village. ... Under the arched entrance is a locked gate, which leads to a slender outside passageway that takes you to a small courtyard and a second house. This backhouse, as it’s called, feels right out of a fairy tale—with rounded windows, decorative ironwork on the fire escape, and rustic wood shutters. Backhouses aren’t unusual in downtown neighborhoods; an estimated 75 of them still stand in Greenwich Village, according to a 2002 New York Times article. ..."


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Sardines - Apollo Brown & Planet Asia (2023)


"... The names Apollo Brown and Planet Asia evoke a rarefied set of expectations. The raps are as hard as galvanized steel. The syllable placement is meticulous and intricate. The beats bang: simmering in a soulful but warped inferno. They are maestros of raw and unalloyed hip-hop: full of as much grit and craftsmanship as anyone to ever incinerate a microphone or master an MPC. After all, high standards are essential. ... Press play and the wind starts to howl and you hear glass shattering somewhere outside. This is hip-hop as hard-bodied wizardry. Apollo cauterizes soul samples offering new alchemy out of old spells. Planet Asia spits acid rain. ..."





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Lady Pink Paints Berlin Facade as 'Love Letters to the City'

Lady Pink. Detail. WIP. Urban Nation Museum Berlin. Love Letters To The City.

"'Love Letters to the City is a homage to the city, the idea of the universal city,' curator Michelle Houston reflects while seated at a picnic table outside a Thai restaurant in Berlin’s Schöneberg neighborhood. As final installations are taking place in Urban Nation, Houston’s gazes upward at the new mural on its façade being painted by OG train writer Lady Pink on a cherry picker at the museum. This mural is part of Houston’s upcoming show, 'Love Letters to the City.' ... The museum’s exhibition features a diverse array of works, including full-scale three-dimensional installations and sculptures. A significant portion of the pieces are borrowed from the museum’s permanent collection, while others are newly commissioned from both national and international artists. ..."

Brooklyn Street Art

Lady Pink. Detail. WIP. Urban Nation Museum Berlin. Love Letters To The City.

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10 Homemade Musical Instruments That Rocked The World

Close-up of Bo Diddley's Gretsch Guitar 

"From Bo Diddley to Björk, musicians have often created their own homemade musical instruments. Such bespoke pieces of equipment may sometimes be bizarre, but they’ve helped artists realize the sounds in their head when nothing else on earth could. Here we present 10 of the most iconic and interesting homemade musical instruments of all time. Let us know in the comments if there are any other favorites you like. ... The Cigar-Box Guitar: When The Beatles arrived in the United States, in 1964, John Lennon was asked, 'What are you most looking forward to seeing here in America, John?' He replied instantly, 'Bo Diddley!' Diddley, who had hits for Chess Records in the 50s, fashioned homemade guitars from cigar boxes (something sharecroppers had done to make a cheap instrument), an old blues tradition that gave his signature instrument its distinctive rectangular shape. ..."

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Over Man: On Nietzsche and our crisis of masculinity


"Like many others, I first read Friedrich Nietzsche as a teenage boy. In the fall of 2001, at the age of fifteen, I learned that I was to have brain surgery, and I needed reading material for the recovery period. In preparation for a month or so spent largely in bed, I browsed the Barnes & Noble philosophy shelves and selected Plato’s Symposium and Republic and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These texts were my first foray into philosophy. Post-surgery, when I could do little but read, Plato and Nietzsche competed for my affection. Nietzsche won. Plenty of authors had been presented to me as radical or revolutionary voices, but only with Nietzsche did the act of reading itself feel thrillingly subversive. ..."
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A Digital Archive Features Hundreds of Audio Cassette Tape Designs, from the 1960s to the 1990s


"Audio cassette tapes first appeared on the market in the early nineteen-sixties, but it would take about a decade before they came to dominate it. And when they did, they’d changed the lives of many a music-lover by having made it possible not just to listen to their albums of choice on the go, but also to collect and trade their own custom-assembled listening experiences. By the eighties, blank tapes had become a household necessity on the order of batteries or toilet paper for such consumers — and just as with those frequently replenished products, everyone seemed to have their favorite brand. ... Somewhat improbably, in this age where even home CD-burning has been displaced by near-instantaneous streaming and downloading of digital music, the cassette tape has made something of a comeback. The near-mythological allure of the mixtape has only grown in recent years, during which artists both minor and major have put out cassette releases — and in some cases, cassette-only releases.  ..."


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Guillaume de Machaut: Remede de Fortune - Blue Heron (2022)


"From Cicero to Shakespeare to the television game show Wheel of Fortune, the figure of Lady Fortuna—the ancient Roman goddess of luck and chance—has been an enduring literary and cultural symbol for over two millennia. In Guillaume de Machaut’s (1300-1377) long-form narrative poem, Le remède de fortune (The Remedy for Fortune), the Lady personifies capricious love, a force which, like luck, subjects those in its orbit to the mercy of unseen forces. Machaut’s dit, including its seven lyric poems set to music, is now a collaborative project between two of America’s leading historically informed ensembles, Blue Heron and Les Délices. The partnership has resulted in a captivating new album, Remede de Fortune, released on the Blue Heron label. ..."




Ci commence Remede de Fortune’ (Illustration from Machaut MS C, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France)
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When Art Evolves, We Evolve: The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront


"Cisco Bradley's The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (2023) chronicles a vital and now-vanished facet of American musical and cultural history in New York City from the mid-1980s to 2015. The book investigates how, amid hypercommercialism and mutating audio technologies, bold musicians, expert and amateur alike, impelled by a big-hearted DIY ethos, made new, imaginative music as public, independent, and free as possible by exploiting urban niches and cultural interstices, using dive bars, loft spaces, garages, warehouses, restaurants, and cafés as musical laboratories for experiments in sound, installation, and performance. A densely layered, kaleidoscopic musicological treatise, Williamsburg draws on hundreds of interviews, articles, essays, and recordings to describe the historical impact of a daunting array of musicians, ensembles, musical genres, stylistic innovations, and movements, and the Northern Brooklyn locales that fostered them. It was a singular era propelled by a relentless quest for the new and different—and by musicians’ struggles to survive the vicissitudes of the marketplace. ..."



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The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas - Lukas De Clerck


"... Lukas de Clerck explores a niche of archaeological research in music; the aulos is a historical Greek instrument that Lukas analyzed and reinterpreted by a luthier in modern times—navigating this impression as an artwork or living sculptural object, as there is an absence of historical partitions or written information about how to recreate technique on the instrument. Lukas de Clerck has interpreted information from the rare archaeological resources and visual art of the classical period to recreate both playing technique and possible sound timbres with the instrument. With his contemporary approach to drone, post-minimalist music, and contemporary folk, we find a deeply satisfying and compelling, even playful set of songs, timbral exercises and compositions. ..."





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Literary World: New York publishing in the late-aughts


"... Late at night, staring out at the rooftop skyline of the magazine offices at 666 Broadway—Lewis Lapham's magazine— I felt like I could catch a glimmer of the romantic previous world, the world of cluttered bookshelves and small offices and sincere, tweedy editor-intellectuals—Malcolm Cowley's world, Horace Greeley's world. It was in the process of disappearing as I arrived, but a little bit of it was still there. What did I want exactly? To become a real writer, a real literary person. I wanted to get out of the inbred, low-expectations punk-zine world and transition into the high-stakes, high-expectations world of capital-M Magazines and real books. I made literary zines, zines that people liked—strangers wrote me endless handwritten letters, spilling their guts. But it wasn't enough. I wanted more. ..."

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The filmmakers Steve Buscemi considers his favourite to work with


"Perhaps it’s the physical specificity of Steve Buscemi that has led him to acquiring such unique roles in the world of cinema and television. However, despite the striking look of the New York City-born actor, he certainly wouldn’t have achieved his undoubted success were it not for his actual prowess and talent as a performer. A handful of early roles in Parting Glances and Mystery Train well Buscemi well on his way, but it was his effort in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs that announced him as a serious talent. Before long, Buscemi was highly sought after and began delivering some of the most memorable character turns in contemporary cinema. ..."

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How the Weimar Republic’s Hyperinflation Transformed Gender Relations in Germany

Otto Dix, Metropolis (1928). 

"One of the social dividends of post-war inflation in Weimar Germany was greater independence for women. It’s no coincidence that the locus for this was on the dance floor. The dance-hall clientele now included a type of customer who had never been seen before: unaccompanied women. Most of these were young shorthand typists and secretaries who visited the clubs alone or with girlfriends. To the puzzled observer from more conservative circles, or indeed from the provinces, this type of behavior was unheard of, and seemed dangerously close to prostitution. Many girls came from the provinces to Berlin, eager to breathe the balmy air of freedom. ..."




Georg Scholz, War Veterans' Association (1922)
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A House That Memorializes a Vanished New York

A Lawrence Weiner text painting across the facade of what was once the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks’s Manhattan townhouse. 
 
"In October 1976, the artists Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian Buczak met at a SoHo loft party. Hendricks, then 45, was associated with the Fluxus movement, a loose affiliation of 1960s conceptual artists, including Joseph Beuys, John Cage and Yoko Ono, who rejected traditional practices like abstract painting in favor of elaborate performances. Five years earlier, he’d co-starred in a notable one: In the summer of 1971, Hendricks and his wife of 10 years, the artist Nye Ffarrabas (then Bici Forbes), who were both gay, staged a piece called 'Flux Divorce,' which involved taking a chain saw to their marriage bed and dividing the entryway to their home with barbed wire. ..." 

NY Times

Phillip Ward, the executor of the actor and writer Quentin Crisp’s estate, now resides in what was once Hendricks’s children’s room.
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BSA Images Of The Week: 09.01.24

Joe Iurato and Logan Hicks. Detail. Wooden Walls Project. Asbury Park, NJ.

"In the past two decades, Asbury Park, New Jersey, has undergone a dramatic transformation, evolving from a struggling, economically challenged city into a pleasantly eclectic one. This shift, driven by gentrification, has attracted a wealthier demographic, including professionals and artists from nearby New York City, drawn by affordable housing, a revitalized waterfront, and the promise of a burgeoning cultural scene. For many, it has become a trendy, artistic destination. The Wooden Walls Project, launched in 2015, has been central to its evolution, thanks to Jenn Hampton and Porkchop of Parlor Gallery. A slew of artists—officially and unofficially curated— have regaled Asbury Park with many large-scale murals and street art installations. ..."
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Solastalgia - Altus (2024)


"Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher, coined the term 'solastalgia,' which he defines as 'the homesickness we feel while still at home.' It is best described as the lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change—the agony and desire we experience when we realize the world around us is changing. Solastalgia ventures deep within Altus' emotive, cinematic work intermixed with ambient and modern classical motifs, akin to City of Ashes (2009) and Hidden Realms and Vacant Spaces (2022). ..."


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Intifada: On Being an Arabic Literature Professor in a Time of Genocide


"This is a line of poetry by the Arab poet al-Harith ibn Hilliza, composed more than 1400 years ago. This is the tradition to which Palestine and Palestinian literature belong. Life, never easy for the noble and the just, is not worth living without dignity, he tells us. The line has been ringing in my ears for the past ten months. How difficult and treacherous our paths are, always, within this country and its institutions. We who strive to study Arabic literature with integrity. We who refuse to distort ourselves into the roles assigned to us by the racist tokenizing system of American academia. We who are perpetual guests in our fields of expertise, native informants, colorful faces to revamp the image of the colonial enterprise. We, the ceaselessly other, the continuously suspect. ..."





The First Intifada in the Gaza Strip, 1987. 
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A Scientist’s Quest to Decode Vermeer’s True Colours


"When Frederik Vanmeert stands in front of a Johannes Vermeer painting, the temptation to go close is irresistible. In Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, where he works as a heritage scientist, it’s not hard to satisfy this craving for intimacy; patrons are free to get personal with the art. Viewers of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch can approach within a metre of the canvas, while the museum’s four Vermeers, hanging nearby, offer an even more intimate experience. Viewers may, if the moment moves them, lean in within centimetres, though the security guard posted nearby will likely wag a disapproving finger. Still, even millimetres are an interminable chasm for Vanmeert. He’s seen Vermeer’s work in finer detail than most—at the microscopic level, down to the crystal latticework of the pigments that structure the language of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter’s artistic vision. ..."
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Lêkê


"Lêkê are a type of plastic sandals popular in Ivory Coast, including as footwear for amateur soccer games. Lêkê are considered the national shoes of Ivory Coast, worn by people of all ages, including school children and adults. Amateur soccer players wear lêkê for their practicality on sandy pitches and dusty surfaces, citing their lightness, better fit, and comfort. The popularity of lêkê in Ivory Coast extends beyond sports, being worn at parties and other social events. While luxury brands like Gucci and Prada have created their own versions of jelly shoes, lêkê remain popular in Ivory Coast for both stylistic and practical reasons. ... In Ivory Coast, lêkê are not only worn for soccer but also represent a cultural symbol, with specific colors associated with national pride. Sales of Ivorian flag-colored lêkê sandals increased during the Africa Cup of Nations, but they saw a decline after the national team faced losses. 




Young players wearing lêkê in Abidjan, where worn soles and scars from the sandals’ metallic clasps are a point of pride.
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