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theleaveswant) wrote2009-08-24 12:33 am
theleaveswant) wrote2009-08-24 12:33 am
Entry tags:
This Land Is Whose Land?
This Land Is Whose Land?
Race, Place and Genre: Situating “Folk” in Folk Festivals 1
It's been over a month since this year's Winnipeg Folk Festival, and I still have a stack of other things I Should Probably Be Working On, but if I leave this any longer it's not going to get written, and I need to write it.
Bird's Hill Provincial Park, 30some km NE of Winnipeg. A beautiful summer night on the Canadian prairies; stunning crayon-box sunset giving way to night's chill and stars almost as numerous as the mosquitoes (but theorizing “nature” and materiality of place is another conversation). It's getting near the end of the Mainstage concert, Thursday night at the 36th annual Winnipeg Folk Festival.2 I'm sitting at my grandparents' tarp, next to the mid-audience sound tower. King Sunny Adé and His African Beats have just left the stage, and I'm already mentally blogging (a couple of people on my friendslist had recently posted about size positivity, and apropos of that discussion I wanted to salute the two beautiful women dancers/hand percussionists whose enthusiastic performances were definitely a highlight of his set and possibly the whole weekend). Then, while the stage crew sets up for night's headliner Xavier Rudd, Vance Gilbert comes out to do a short set (in festival patois, a “'tweener”) and comments after his first song about how kind it was of the festival organizers to put all the Negroes on the same night. There's an audible hiss as thousands of hippies and seasonal wannabes draw a shocked breath. I wince, not because I'm scandalized by the suggestion but because I'd been thinking along similar lines when I read the schedule a few days earlier. It's not technically true, this year (Oumou Sangaré was on Mainstage the following night and Burning Spear on Saturday), but it's far from a spurious accusation.
There are few things dearer to my heart than the Winnipeg Folk Festival. It's a major event in my year, a major part of my life. I've attended it every year since I was born, volunteered for the past seven, tattooed a version of the logo on my hip and this year endured 32 hours on a Greyhound bus to get there from my current home in Toronto. I love it—enough to bitch it out when I think it's doing wrong. There is a problem of racial exclusion at the Festival, and I don't specifically fault the artistic or executive directors or anyone else complicit in the execution of the event (volunteers, performers, vendors, sponsors, media delegates or audience members) for the fact that it exists, but I do hope and advocate that they, we, will do something about it.
Looking at the photos and bios in the official program, I'd estimate that just under a quarter of this year's listed live performing units include individuals who present or self-identify as people of colour or people of indigenous ancestry—this is a sketchy survey technique, I know, but it seemed appropriate to the available resources. The ratio stays more or less constant whether you're looking at all performers or specifically those with sets on Big Blue@Night (“alternative stage”), the Folk School tent (interactive lessons) or the Chickadee Big Top (“family area”); the exceptions are Mainstage performers (already low among headliners, dragged way down when you include 'tweeners—and most of them were on Thursday) and Mainstage hosts (all men, this year, but only one out of three white). Numbers-wise, that's actually not terrible—there's room for it to be worse, anyway—but numbers don't tell a complete story.
Folk festivals, like any other media field such as television, film or comics, not to mention the music industry more broadly, have their genre conventions, their tropes, niches and stereotypes. Historically (i.e. according to my impressions of previous years), the places you're most likely to find performers of colour at night at the WFF are in Mainstage “show” bands, with big groups, bright lights, high-energy easily danceable rhythms and/or exotic instruments, matching uniforms or “traditional” costume, and practiced choreography, or flashing street cred and social consciousness (recent e.g.s Michael Franti, K'naan, Kinnie Starr; Richie Havens and Buffy Sainte-Marie have longer track records), or bringing a club/rave/hipster vibe to the alternative stage. By day, it's in particular themed workshops, specifically either blues, gospel and, in this post-Oh Brother epoch, “old time” (white people play bluegrass), or (what a concept) “world”.3 2009 was no different. All this, to me, raises the usual intertwining questions: how did this situation become entrenched, and how can we change it for the better?
I want to stress that I'm no expert here. I'm not a music historian and this is not my primary research area. What my background as a long-time volunteer/festival-goer and a sociocultural anthropology grad student suggests to me is that this is an issue of territoriality rooted in (or routed through) a presumed isomorphism of culture, people, space and place.4 That is, we tend to take for granted that a particular territory (which may be a nation or a neighbourhood) embodies a particular culture (in its autochthonous “original” or as a diasporic satellite) to the extent that territory becomes an adjective: Nigerian culture, Canadian society. Land equates to culture equates to inhabitants: the Nuer live in Nuerland. Co-incidence becomes prescription; living in a place becomes both evidence and aetiology for a person's having/belonging-to “a particular culture”, “biology” gets entangled through an essentializing approach to inheritance, blood and soil, and it all gets bundled up in tidy (discrete) packages. Education in musical “styles” or “traditions” is read as mark and consequence of cultural (racial) belonging; culture is territorialized, music is territorialized (and territory musicalized).
How does this play out at Folk Fest? My impression (and it may only be my impression—I could be talking entirely out of my ear) is that there are two kinds of “Folk” at the festival: “us-here folk” and “them-there folk”. These categories are subjective, purely utilitarian and not at all static, and the correlation with race is not one-to-one. What I'm calling “us-here” is defined by the segment of the audience who, by dint of numbers and political-economic power, constitute a hegemonic majority, and the artists who feel more like “self” to them (me) because they're relatively unmarked in terms of race, language and/or territorial affiliation. That is, mostly white and speaking English within a particular range of regional inflections and class/education-associated registers. Musically, this group has the privilege of playing just-plain “folk”, a tradition or culture-genre genealogically affinitive to the singer-songwriters who characterized the genre at the time of the WFF's founding, as well as subsequent hybrids and permutations of folk-rock, folk-pop, indie, alt-country, etc., if they so choose.
What I'm calling “them-there” folk is music played by Others; most blatantly people of colour but also performers who are marked and marginalized by language (including, potentially, white North American and European performers who are mono- or polylingual in tongues other than English), geography (anyone politically peripheral, “too rural”, etc.), or other indicators of “cultural” difference. This marking effects an obstacle, compounded across multiple dimensions, to playing “unmarked” music, and pressures its victims into a situation where Otherness becomes novelty, gimmick, exotic appeal, and codifies difference into genres: reggae, gospel, “world” (a meaningless label, almost as dismissive as “miscellaneous”). Othered performers become further marked by genre, which is taken as a sign of cultural affiliation, segregated into playing another kind of “folk” music, the music of “their” respective cultures, and rewarded for accessorizing with -lore, -dances and native dress. Hence, the pattern of incarceration of performers of colour at the Winnipeg Folk Festival within particular niche contexts observed above connects to larger theoretical and political issues concerning the very definition and enactment of “culture”.
This problem stops being theoretical and takes on a pragmatic urgency when we consider the livelihoods of performers. Genre segregation makes “them-there” performers interchangeable, fungible. It reduces them to tokens, a quota of diversity which may be filled by minimal margins. If one Malagasy orchestra sounds just like another, then one is enough—whereas those musicians who play our kind of folk are each as precious and unique as snowflakes and we should book a whole drift's worth. This applies at the level of audience selection as well as booking. I get the impression that a lot of audience members enjoy listening to “world” music at the festival but don't take it home with them. I'm one of them. My CD collection is dominated by English-speaking singer-songwriters—not because they're English-speaking singer-songwriters but because something about these specific artists makes something in me do a happy twisty thing—but I won't deny that taste has political consequences. It's all well and good for festival patrons to pat ourselves on the back for our cultural sophistication, but how many people dance and holler to Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 doesn't matter the same way as how many buy their records.
It's a bit late to bring this up, but the emphasis in the preceding discussion on the identities of performers is by no means intended to overshadow the significance of the majority segment of the festival population: all the people NOT on stage. I can remember festivals, not not even ten years ago, where it felt like the only people of colour at the entire event were all wearing performers' passes (or vendor passes, but that's a dimension of the festival I've chosen not to dwell on in this essay).5 I felt really encouraged this year by how many people of colour I saw in the audience and wearing volunteer t-shirts backstage and up front, but it was still disproportionate to either the performer ratios or the population of Winnipeg—not to assume that everyone in Winnipeg would want to go to the festival, but trying to take away barriers to those who might.
So what do we do about it? Again, I'm no expert, and I have no genius plan for how to Fix Everything. I just feel like something's got to move.
One step, subtle but significant, is to recognize that the problem is not one of contact “between” or “across” cultures, because “cultures” in this view do not exist. There is no pure, untouched, isolated unit and there never was; the outside, the other, is always created in the moment, but difference is a correlate of always-already-existing communication, not a barrier to or even a precondition for it. The whole world is made of borderlands, not interstices between ontologically independent entities but an everywhere-margin without stable centres. To translate from academic wankerese into practical (if not easily practiceable) action, we need to stop packaging performers so neatly according to culture-genres, because culture-genres were never an adequate proxy for performers' lived realities. We especially need to get rid of “world,” if all it means is “Other.” I recognize that this is a problem, not just for folk festivals, because artists need to identify themselves somehow in order to attract an audience, and how else can you do that without the shorthand “sounds like ___” of the genre code?
Perhaps more short-term feasible, people responsible for workshop schedules need to stop matching artist-tokens together because it would be 'neat' to mix these “different traditions” (putting people together because they're from the “same tradition” is maybe just as bad) and start recognizing individuals with unique perspectives and histories, considering what beautiful new harmonies might happen if we attend to the resonances of other experiences, similar and diverging. Apply this logical shift to the festival as a whole: give the audience lots of music with difference, not lots of music from “different” cultures. I am NOT saying that either race or culture-genre should be disregarded, let alone willfully ignored. I'm saying the conversation should never stop there. I'm personally going to make more of an effort next time to listen to performers I don't otherwise get much opportunity to, to attune my ear so that I can appreciate them as unique artists rather than representatives of genre “type”.
The solution to racial exclusion at the WFF isn't quotas, or a concerted effort to book people like Joan Armatrading and Alejandro Escovedo, artists of colour whose music is “accessible” to “us-here” (no slight intended to them or anyone else who fits this category, I'd love to see them back); it's a recognition that even “harmless” segregations like genre can evict and oppress and a re-thinking of what the hell constitutes “folk music”, culture and territory, until the festival is a safe and welcoming space for everyone. Only then will the anthem be realized: this land was made for you AND me.
1. This post is specifically concerned with deployments of race and “ethnic culture” at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, and the underrepresentation of people of colour among performers, volunteers and audience members. I claim no special expertise on this subject beyond subjective observations gleaned by attending the WFF for 25 consecutive years (including seven as a volunteer; I've also attended the Canmore, Edmonton and Trout Forest folk music festivals at least once each) and scattered conversations with other volunteers, audience members and performers. I'm leaving out issues of gender, sexuality, ability, and many others not because they're not relevant but because this is not my Master's thesis.
2. The WFF usually runs Thursday Mainstage concert, Friday-Sunday daytime workshops (currently six smaller stages, running concurrent concerts and themed round-robin and/or jams of a handful of artists each) and Mainstage, plus “family area” entertainment during the day and, in recent years, an evening “alternative stage” featuring film shorts, DJs, video/light artists, indie rockers who didn't get Mainstage slots, and other “non-traditional” entertainment. This year there was an extra Mainstage Wednesday night; scuttlebutt explanation is that Elvis Costello agreed to play but couldn't do the usual weekend and rather than un-book him the AD took advantage of the rare opportunity. Unclear whether they'll repeat the experiment.
3. Titles of “world” workshops almost invariably include the words “global”, “world”, “nation”, “gateway,” “groove”, “beat” or a pun on the performers' places of origin; eg “Pacifically Speaking”or “Maliable Syncopations”. Then again, ALL the workshops have cute, 'clever' or completely supercilious names which are often re-used from year to year—“Songs of the 49th Parallel”, “Easy Like Sunday Morning”, ”One String Leads to Another”, etc.
4. See A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, 1992, Beyond “culture”: Space, identity and the politics of difference, Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6-23—and look, I'm still on task! In the sense that this is part of what the paper I'm supposed to have finished months ago is about, not that I'm actually getting that paper done.
5. There've been “ethnic” food concessions at the WFF for as long as I can remember and South Asian mehndi artists have been a staple of the artisan's village since the mid-1990s. Some weird phenomena here: Taste of Sri Lanka has two concessions, one of which serves pancakes and hamburgers, and the mehndi “flash” catalogues are full of Chinese characters and Pokemon.
double-posted from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thegiantkiller
Race, Place and Genre: Situating “Folk” in Folk Festivals 1
It's been over a month since this year's Winnipeg Folk Festival, and I still have a stack of other things I Should Probably Be Working On, but if I leave this any longer it's not going to get written, and I need to write it.
Bird's Hill Provincial Park, 30some km NE of Winnipeg. A beautiful summer night on the Canadian prairies; stunning crayon-box sunset giving way to night's chill and stars almost as numerous as the mosquitoes (but theorizing “nature” and materiality of place is another conversation). It's getting near the end of the Mainstage concert, Thursday night at the 36th annual Winnipeg Folk Festival.2 I'm sitting at my grandparents' tarp, next to the mid-audience sound tower. King Sunny Adé and His African Beats have just left the stage, and I'm already mentally blogging (a couple of people on my friendslist had recently posted about size positivity, and apropos of that discussion I wanted to salute the two beautiful women dancers/hand percussionists whose enthusiastic performances were definitely a highlight of his set and possibly the whole weekend). Then, while the stage crew sets up for night's headliner Xavier Rudd, Vance Gilbert comes out to do a short set (in festival patois, a “'tweener”) and comments after his first song about how kind it was of the festival organizers to put all the Negroes on the same night. There's an audible hiss as thousands of hippies and seasonal wannabes draw a shocked breath. I wince, not because I'm scandalized by the suggestion but because I'd been thinking along similar lines when I read the schedule a few days earlier. It's not technically true, this year (Oumou Sangaré was on Mainstage the following night and Burning Spear on Saturday), but it's far from a spurious accusation.
There are few things dearer to my heart than the Winnipeg Folk Festival. It's a major event in my year, a major part of my life. I've attended it every year since I was born, volunteered for the past seven, tattooed a version of the logo on my hip and this year endured 32 hours on a Greyhound bus to get there from my current home in Toronto. I love it—enough to bitch it out when I think it's doing wrong. There is a problem of racial exclusion at the Festival, and I don't specifically fault the artistic or executive directors or anyone else complicit in the execution of the event (volunteers, performers, vendors, sponsors, media delegates or audience members) for the fact that it exists, but I do hope and advocate that they, we, will do something about it.
Looking at the photos and bios in the official program, I'd estimate that just under a quarter of this year's listed live performing units include individuals who present or self-identify as people of colour or people of indigenous ancestry—this is a sketchy survey technique, I know, but it seemed appropriate to the available resources. The ratio stays more or less constant whether you're looking at all performers or specifically those with sets on Big Blue@Night (“alternative stage”), the Folk School tent (interactive lessons) or the Chickadee Big Top (“family area”); the exceptions are Mainstage performers (already low among headliners, dragged way down when you include 'tweeners—and most of them were on Thursday) and Mainstage hosts (all men, this year, but only one out of three white). Numbers-wise, that's actually not terrible—there's room for it to be worse, anyway—but numbers don't tell a complete story.
Folk festivals, like any other media field such as television, film or comics, not to mention the music industry more broadly, have their genre conventions, their tropes, niches and stereotypes. Historically (i.e. according to my impressions of previous years), the places you're most likely to find performers of colour at night at the WFF are in Mainstage “show” bands, with big groups, bright lights, high-energy easily danceable rhythms and/or exotic instruments, matching uniforms or “traditional” costume, and practiced choreography, or flashing street cred and social consciousness (recent e.g.s Michael Franti, K'naan, Kinnie Starr; Richie Havens and Buffy Sainte-Marie have longer track records), or bringing a club/rave/hipster vibe to the alternative stage. By day, it's in particular themed workshops, specifically either blues, gospel and, in this post-Oh Brother epoch, “old time” (white people play bluegrass), or (what a concept) “world”.3 2009 was no different. All this, to me, raises the usual intertwining questions: how did this situation become entrenched, and how can we change it for the better?
I want to stress that I'm no expert here. I'm not a music historian and this is not my primary research area. What my background as a long-time volunteer/festival-goer and a sociocultural anthropology grad student suggests to me is that this is an issue of territoriality rooted in (or routed through) a presumed isomorphism of culture, people, space and place.4 That is, we tend to take for granted that a particular territory (which may be a nation or a neighbourhood) embodies a particular culture (in its autochthonous “original” or as a diasporic satellite) to the extent that territory becomes an adjective: Nigerian culture, Canadian society. Land equates to culture equates to inhabitants: the Nuer live in Nuerland. Co-incidence becomes prescription; living in a place becomes both evidence and aetiology for a person's having/belonging-to “a particular culture”, “biology” gets entangled through an essentializing approach to inheritance, blood and soil, and it all gets bundled up in tidy (discrete) packages. Education in musical “styles” or “traditions” is read as mark and consequence of cultural (racial) belonging; culture is territorialized, music is territorialized (and territory musicalized).
How does this play out at Folk Fest? My impression (and it may only be my impression—I could be talking entirely out of my ear) is that there are two kinds of “Folk” at the festival: “us-here folk” and “them-there folk”. These categories are subjective, purely utilitarian and not at all static, and the correlation with race is not one-to-one. What I'm calling “us-here” is defined by the segment of the audience who, by dint of numbers and political-economic power, constitute a hegemonic majority, and the artists who feel more like “self” to them (me) because they're relatively unmarked in terms of race, language and/or territorial affiliation. That is, mostly white and speaking English within a particular range of regional inflections and class/education-associated registers. Musically, this group has the privilege of playing just-plain “folk”, a tradition or culture-genre genealogically affinitive to the singer-songwriters who characterized the genre at the time of the WFF's founding, as well as subsequent hybrids and permutations of folk-rock, folk-pop, indie, alt-country, etc., if they so choose.
What I'm calling “them-there” folk is music played by Others; most blatantly people of colour but also performers who are marked and marginalized by language (including, potentially, white North American and European performers who are mono- or polylingual in tongues other than English), geography (anyone politically peripheral, “too rural”, etc.), or other indicators of “cultural” difference. This marking effects an obstacle, compounded across multiple dimensions, to playing “unmarked” music, and pressures its victims into a situation where Otherness becomes novelty, gimmick, exotic appeal, and codifies difference into genres: reggae, gospel, “world” (a meaningless label, almost as dismissive as “miscellaneous”). Othered performers become further marked by genre, which is taken as a sign of cultural affiliation, segregated into playing another kind of “folk” music, the music of “their” respective cultures, and rewarded for accessorizing with -lore, -dances and native dress. Hence, the pattern of incarceration of performers of colour at the Winnipeg Folk Festival within particular niche contexts observed above connects to larger theoretical and political issues concerning the very definition and enactment of “culture”.
This problem stops being theoretical and takes on a pragmatic urgency when we consider the livelihoods of performers. Genre segregation makes “them-there” performers interchangeable, fungible. It reduces them to tokens, a quota of diversity which may be filled by minimal margins. If one Malagasy orchestra sounds just like another, then one is enough—whereas those musicians who play our kind of folk are each as precious and unique as snowflakes and we should book a whole drift's worth. This applies at the level of audience selection as well as booking. I get the impression that a lot of audience members enjoy listening to “world” music at the festival but don't take it home with them. I'm one of them. My CD collection is dominated by English-speaking singer-songwriters—not because they're English-speaking singer-songwriters but because something about these specific artists makes something in me do a happy twisty thing—but I won't deny that taste has political consequences. It's all well and good for festival patrons to pat ourselves on the back for our cultural sophistication, but how many people dance and holler to Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 doesn't matter the same way as how many buy their records.
It's a bit late to bring this up, but the emphasis in the preceding discussion on the identities of performers is by no means intended to overshadow the significance of the majority segment of the festival population: all the people NOT on stage. I can remember festivals, not not even ten years ago, where it felt like the only people of colour at the entire event were all wearing performers' passes (or vendor passes, but that's a dimension of the festival I've chosen not to dwell on in this essay).5 I felt really encouraged this year by how many people of colour I saw in the audience and wearing volunteer t-shirts backstage and up front, but it was still disproportionate to either the performer ratios or the population of Winnipeg—not to assume that everyone in Winnipeg would want to go to the festival, but trying to take away barriers to those who might.
So what do we do about it? Again, I'm no expert, and I have no genius plan for how to Fix Everything. I just feel like something's got to move.
One step, subtle but significant, is to recognize that the problem is not one of contact “between” or “across” cultures, because “cultures” in this view do not exist. There is no pure, untouched, isolated unit and there never was; the outside, the other, is always created in the moment, but difference is a correlate of always-already-existing communication, not a barrier to or even a precondition for it. The whole world is made of borderlands, not interstices between ontologically independent entities but an everywhere-margin without stable centres. To translate from academic wankerese into practical (if not easily practiceable) action, we need to stop packaging performers so neatly according to culture-genres, because culture-genres were never an adequate proxy for performers' lived realities. We especially need to get rid of “world,” if all it means is “Other.” I recognize that this is a problem, not just for folk festivals, because artists need to identify themselves somehow in order to attract an audience, and how else can you do that without the shorthand “sounds like ___” of the genre code?
Perhaps more short-term feasible, people responsible for workshop schedules need to stop matching artist-tokens together because it would be 'neat' to mix these “different traditions” (putting people together because they're from the “same tradition” is maybe just as bad) and start recognizing individuals with unique perspectives and histories, considering what beautiful new harmonies might happen if we attend to the resonances of other experiences, similar and diverging. Apply this logical shift to the festival as a whole: give the audience lots of music with difference, not lots of music from “different” cultures. I am NOT saying that either race or culture-genre should be disregarded, let alone willfully ignored. I'm saying the conversation should never stop there. I'm personally going to make more of an effort next time to listen to performers I don't otherwise get much opportunity to, to attune my ear so that I can appreciate them as unique artists rather than representatives of genre “type”.
The solution to racial exclusion at the WFF isn't quotas, or a concerted effort to book people like Joan Armatrading and Alejandro Escovedo, artists of colour whose music is “accessible” to “us-here” (no slight intended to them or anyone else who fits this category, I'd love to see them back); it's a recognition that even “harmless” segregations like genre can evict and oppress and a re-thinking of what the hell constitutes “folk music”, culture and territory, until the festival is a safe and welcoming space for everyone. Only then will the anthem be realized: this land was made for you AND me.
1. This post is specifically concerned with deployments of race and “ethnic culture” at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, and the underrepresentation of people of colour among performers, volunteers and audience members. I claim no special expertise on this subject beyond subjective observations gleaned by attending the WFF for 25 consecutive years (including seven as a volunteer; I've also attended the Canmore, Edmonton and Trout Forest folk music festivals at least once each) and scattered conversations with other volunteers, audience members and performers. I'm leaving out issues of gender, sexuality, ability, and many others not because they're not relevant but because this is not my Master's thesis.
2. The WFF usually runs Thursday Mainstage concert, Friday-Sunday daytime workshops (currently six smaller stages, running concurrent concerts and themed round-robin and/or jams of a handful of artists each) and Mainstage, plus “family area” entertainment during the day and, in recent years, an evening “alternative stage” featuring film shorts, DJs, video/light artists, indie rockers who didn't get Mainstage slots, and other “non-traditional” entertainment. This year there was an extra Mainstage Wednesday night; scuttlebutt explanation is that Elvis Costello agreed to play but couldn't do the usual weekend and rather than un-book him the AD took advantage of the rare opportunity. Unclear whether they'll repeat the experiment.
3. Titles of “world” workshops almost invariably include the words “global”, “world”, “nation”, “gateway,” “groove”, “beat” or a pun on the performers' places of origin; eg “Pacifically Speaking”or “Maliable Syncopations”. Then again, ALL the workshops have cute, 'clever' or completely supercilious names which are often re-used from year to year—“Songs of the 49th Parallel”, “Easy Like Sunday Morning”, ”One String Leads to Another”, etc.
4. See A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, 1992, Beyond “culture”: Space, identity and the politics of difference, Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6-23—and look, I'm still on task! In the sense that this is part of what the paper I'm supposed to have finished months ago is about, not that I'm actually getting that paper done.
5. There've been “ethnic” food concessions at the WFF for as long as I can remember and South Asian mehndi artists have been a staple of the artisan's village since the mid-1990s. Some weird phenomena here: Taste of Sri Lanka has two concessions, one of which serves pancakes and hamburgers, and the mehndi “flash” catalogues are full of Chinese characters and Pokemon.
double-posted from
thegiantkiller