NonAlignment Pact

Strange Bedfellows

Mercygiver — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 06:44:14 +0000

Music in film. I won’t research it, but I have to imagine this topic has been covered in the NAP more than once. I don’t think bringing it up would belabor it, either, and unless you’re some sort of creepy NAP completist (which I am), who also happens to have a flawless memory (which I don’t), then this is where we’re heading today. In particular, I want to talk about the music and sound used in two specific horror films.

I began thinking about this topic just two days ago as I was giving every last bit of attention I could into trying to finally watch Phantasm in one sitting. Boy, cinematically speaking, that movie does not give you a lot to work with. In fact, that thing is a calamity pretty much from the start clear through to the moment at which I threw in the towel. I worked with it. I took breaks. I wept. I had a snack. I downed several bloody marys. I just don’t have it in me. It’s kind of like the cultural antithesis to Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ve worked that bitch over a few times too, and still can’t finish it.

Now hear me out. I love difficult work. I buried Gravity’s Rainbow. Loved it. I even read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, all 1600 plus pages of it. It was riveting. Granted, not a tough read content-wise, just real goddamn long. Crime and Punishment. Check. Godel, Escher, & Bach, in the can. Phantasm? It’s beyond me.

And quite frankly I am actually feeling pangs of guilt over this. And I think that’s because there is a lot going for it.

For one thing, it’s totally weird in a good way. Grave-robbing hunchbacked midget monster aliens, led by a very tall and insanely creepy old dude who says little more than “Boy,” invade a small town by running the local funeral home just so they can execute their plan to steal all of earth’s corpses to bring back home and force into slave labor.

Oh sure, okay.

Fortunately, this kid named Mike (who looks a little too much like I did at that age) tosses a wrench into the works.

Hijinks ensue.

That’s the plot.

Oh yeah, there’s also this orb thing that flies through the air and implants itself in the skulls of its hapless victims and then pumps all their blood out the back end like a garden hose.

Hey, why not?

And then there’s the music and the sound design.

I thought that both of these elements are what propel Phantasm directly past almost any other schlock/horror movie of its era. Truly. The sound effects, while ridiculous, also paint a fairly uneasy feeling throughout the whole thing. They pretty much lay the groundwork for what you’re seeing, basically being akin to a really crazy dream. And underlying the scraping and dragging and clicking noises that never really stop is the music. The music is a weird mix of atonal electronic swells and washes which actually manage to not sound dated at all, and it’s actually not something I would laugh at were I to catch someone creating it on stage today. There’s also this odd, percussive ambiance mixed in which reminds me of tabla playing, though much more subtle. Still, the non-western influence is definitely there, which is really cool considering how American Phantasm seems to be in virtually every other way.

And then you have the theme track, which is basically a riff on John Carpenter’s theme from Halloween (which happens to be possibly my second favorite piece of movie music next to Popol Vuh’s soundtrack theme for Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: the Wrath of God). It’s kind of a creepy organ sound, which is good. And, like the Halloween music, it’s a small pattern that is basically repeated, reiterated, broken down, and rebuilt throughout the movie.

So, I felt guilty when I simply couldn’t take it anymore. It’s always at the same spot, too. It’s the bit where the kid is fighting with the finger he cut off the Tall Man. He puts it in a box, where it bleeds milky yellow crap and won’t stop wiggling. Eventually, for no apparent reason, the finger turns into a sort of insect that looks as real as those rubber spiders you can buy at Walgreens. Okay, it looks worse even that that. Honestly. It does. The kid throws his shirt over it, and then he and his brother work real hard at looking like they aren’t throwing a shirt around as if something is in it when obviously they are just horrifically untalented actors. That scene is so bad in such a bad way that I give in and turn the movie off.

And the second movie I want to mention is E Elias Merhige’s Begotten. I find it a soothing counterpoint to the more, uh, accessible charms of Coscarelli’s Phantasm. Begotten is a grainy, scratchy tone piece (literally, as it turns out, as the half-tones have been bled out in post-production) which has to be seen to be believed. It’s been compared to Eraserhead, which is really kind of lazy. Sure, you could say they are both strange, black-and-white, and impossible to fully grasp, but beyond that, they have almost nothing in common. But, to be fair, when you are dealing with films of this sort, there’s really not a shit ton of stuff that you can hold next to it in comparison. Watching Begotten is like watching a snuff film nightmare from hell, times a million. I won’t bother going into the plot. There really isn’t one; which is to say, there is one, but it’s rather open-ended. It’s basically a sort of riff on the biblical myth of creation told through the almost-certainly deeply subjective and deeply personal point of view of the director. You know, just like Phantasm!

And while there really isn’t music to speak of in the soundtrack, there is a litany of very uncomfortable sound effects that etch their way onto your brain from the get go. Underlying the entire soundtrack is a chorus of chirping crickets. This never stops. Then there is the constant rumble of scratches, rubbing sounds, guttural vocalizations, and other delightful and nuanced stuff of the sort. In the end, it actually does all add up to be a musical experience. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that I find the sound design of Begotten to bear more than a passing resemblance to the sound design of Phantasm. As it turns out, seeing both films back-to-back left a fairly cool world of sound buried at the bottom of my sleep-deprived brain — albeit from almost polar opposite ends of the horror spectrum.

I Guess We’re Back to Three Things

Justin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:42:51 +0000

Taking a break from thinking about ktru, this week I bring you three covers.

Neil Diamond

Outkast

Gary Numan

That last one takes requests for covers, which is an idea I can get behind. She also does a mean version of 4’33″.

Albums that still act like albums

jdenkmire — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 19:21:05 +0000

On one hand, the brevity of a single song – how compact it is, how succinctly complete it can be – can be a blessing.

06 Anything You Want 2

On the other hand, my longing lately has been more for the kind of long-form goodness only available to those bands that still care about an album-length work. These works leave transitions in place between songs – make one song reference another – indicate a song’s place within a broader framework. Witness this example from what would be the beginning of Baths’ Cerulean album:

08 You’re My Excuse to Travel

09 Rain Smell

The transition from one track to the other is the loud-soft dynamic in slow motion, one moment showing the strain of long-distance relationships, the next showing the aftermath of the strain, the comedown period. They work exceedingly well together and mostly because they are together and because the artist hasn’t de-emphasized the relationship. This is a coherent pair of songs within a coherent collection of tracks on an album that represents itself as a long-form work. It’s too rare this happens.

But it seems to happen more often with these L.A. hip-hop beat-centric folks:

09 Mmmhmm

with the scat lead-in to

10 Do The Astral Plane

and the bass riffage

02 Pickled!

followed by more bass riffage, which annoyed me at first until I understood the cohesion plus the metallic edge on this one

14 Dance Of The Pseudo Nymph

Frankly, I’ve had just about enough of The Suburbs or I would talk about the references within that album. I think everyone else has had enough of it, too, but I think the point for me is that I must be entering into a get-off-my-lawn phase. Whereas singles seemed to represent the future for me at one point, and whereas I was once OK with that, I am feeling a lot more pride in the parts of my collection that extend beyond 3-4 minutes, the ones where artists have taken the time to compile a theme and create variations on or delve into aspects of that theme. It’s considerably more interesting to me. For someone who likes brevity in other things as much as I do, this is an exceedingly unexpected development. But I suppose it’s time to turn off the shuffle and go back to albums that act like, well, albums.

Rambling About Radio

RamonLP4 — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 19:20:51 +0000

Is radio dead?

I don’t know but Houston surely is doing its best to kill the medium. My car’s radio simply keeps the FM presets at four stations (KUHF, KPFT, KTRU, and KTSU). That is a pretty narrow selection of stations for such a huge market and one of those, KTRU, is currently threatened with being killed off unilaterally by a paternalistic and contemptuous Rice Administration.

One thing I’ve noticed in all this KTRU business is the attitude of younger music listeners to radio and my gut tells me they aren’t that enamored with the format. They have satellite radio, smart phones, and computers to deliver what they want, when they want it, and where they want it; radio is just not the first choice and it’s likely the last. And why should it? Commercial radio has sucked so bad for so long that hyping its value is the equivalent of saying they should go out an buy the next Van Halen album. A 2007 Arbitron commissioned survey seemed to agree:

“Radio is often relegated to a secondary media choice…In some of the interviews, radio is a nonfactor until the required trip to the car. Radio’s lack of CVC (control, variety, and choice), combined with perceptions of excessive commercials and being “old school”—often drops its status among other media. … Portability has been usurped by personal MP3 players, in-home radio listenership is overshadowed by myriad gadgets, and even in-car listening is being challenged by current and future MP3 connectivity.”

Whose fault is that? Part of it is technology but a large part of it is radio itself. Commercial Radio has long relied on consultants at the expense of real Disc Jockeys and today they are reaping their rewards. Freeform DJ’s used to be what bloggers are now – they would cull through music and play whatever they wanted and get you to some good stuff that reflected their tastes. Perhaps that still happens in other markets but here in Houston DJs are merely there as a bumper between the music and the commercials or the traffic reports – their connection with the music is incidental. Compare Commercial Radio to KTRU’s Blues in Hi-Fi or the Mutant Hardcore Flower Hour and you will see the difference. One is corporate and cold and the other still has a soul. Not that all commercial radio is devoid of soul – you can hear it in Little Steven’s Underground Garage but that’s more a fluke because soul isn’t something you can poll. Instead, research shows that people want Katy Perry and the Beeb.

You can almost hear them bragging, “Research baby! It’s all in the research. We know what we’re doing, we did the numbers! How else would you explain crap like the Buzz still operating in 2010? No real DJ would play that playlist. That’s Bob – he’s our statistician. Kind of quiet but, whoa, you should have seen him at the Christmas party….”

So, will the “kids” come back to broadcast radio? I don’t know, but having real DJ’s may be a start and sadly one of the last bastions of real DJs in Houston is fighting for its life. Until then enjoy this Justin Bieber video.

Dead Confederate and the Myth of Southern Rock

Mee — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 04:50:09 +0000

Sorry for the late post. My car decided to kick the bucket in Houston and all my mental energy was spent dealing with that this week.

But anyway, last week I got the new album by a band from Georgia called Dead Confederate. The album is called Sugar. Now, imagine that you are about to listen to this record. Simply based on the name of the band and the album, what would you think it would sound like?

Right? OK, well here’s a sample of what Dead Confederate actually sounds like:

“Quiet Kid,” by Dead Confederate

This record has absolutely not the Southern rock jam that the title suggests. They’re a loud indie-rock band. In a not-very-flattering review, Pitchfork actually holds it against Dead Confederate that they don’t “sound like Georgia.” Coming from Georgia myself, I began to wonder if anyone thinks the following bands sound like their home states:

Jet By Day, from Atlanta, GA

Deerhunter, from Atlanta, GA

My Morning Jacket, from Louisville, KY

The Riff Tiffs, from Houston, TX

UME, from Houston/Austin, TX

. . . And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, from Austin, TX

More than anything else, Dead Confederate’s music actually reminds me of Trail of Dead, who, to be fair, got their start in Hawaii and Portland, not Austin.

So these few Southern indie-rock bands don’t sound particularly Southern. Well, that doesn’t prove anything. Plus they’re all from the the big city anyway.

Polvo, from Chapel Hill, NC

Man or Astro-Man, from Auburn, AL

Paramore, from Franklin, TN (WARNING: I endorse this music only insofar as it serves my point)

Surfer Blood, from West Palm Beach, FL

Neutral Milk Hotel, from the middle of fucking nowhere, LA

Erm. . . OK, well, what about these guys?

The Black Keys, from Akron, OH

The White Stripes, from Detroit, MI

Earl Greyhound, from Brooklyn, naturally

And of course, John Fogerty, from Berkeley, CA, who may very well have never seen a bayou in his life before writing this song

Where am I going with this? I guess I’m trying to say that expecting a band from the South to sound “Southern” is silly. This kind of music has been divorced from location since the first time a teenager in Oregon or Pennsylvania tried his hand at imitating Elvis. The bands from the South that DO sound that way frequently do it self-consciously, to make fun of it (Southern Culture, who toss fried chicken at their audience), comment on it (The Drive-By Truckers, who have an album called Pizza Deliverance), or pander (any band that makes use of rebel flag iconography). Southern rock has no geographic component. Given that, Southern bands that play indie rock, a particularly cosmopolitan genre to begin with, certainly have no reason to sound like the place where they happened to grow up. Of course, naming your band Dead Confederate is bound to give some people the wrong idea.

My Current State of Reference Music Access

Found in the Alley — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:45:05 +0000

I finally yanked the Nakamichi 200 CD player out of the home stereo line up. It just never ever gets used. Next to go is the dual cassette player. They are destined for the basement –although we are mumbling about possibly having a garage sale.

I did take the time to rip some of the cd’s. This led me to think about upgrading my mp3 player.

We recently came back from a two week road trip on which I used my Neuro 30HD digital music player extensively. It still works pretty well although I’ve gotten lazy about installing the sync software on the last few generations of computers laying around the house. So before the trip I just dumped a bunch of mp3′s on to the Neuro’s hard drive. You can still play music using the file browser. The thing keeps on ticking but it’s getting awfully hacky and Mad Max-ish.

I bought the Neuro probably over five years ago. It was a little less expensive than the iPod but it had some big bonuses. For starters, and the main reason I bought the thing, you can record analog straight into it with a 1/8″ stereo chord or using the built-in mic. That works pretty darn sweet. I used it to record all the performances on three separate little road trips when I was playing with THE LATEST and then churchbus. I used it for an art collaboration with my wife where we recorded a ridiculous amount of visual/sonic data on a 10,000 mile road trip across the entire Northern section of the US. In short, it’s served me well –though we got off to a very rocky start. I had to send it back for a replacement three times within the first two months of ownership. Neuro’s quality control was that shitty.

I remember really laying into the tech guy on one call, even though (being that I got into software development through the first-rung tech support gig myself) I’m usually pretty nice to tech people. I know how to hurt too. I wasn’t yelling or calling him names. Besides, with three returns in two months, I had a lot on my side. But the dude was so sincere. So bummed by my call. And so earnest about wanting to see his company succeed that he is probably the reason I stuck with it. Now many many years of abuse later, this Neuro is still going.

Not so sure about Neuro the company which is (or was) based in Chicago. They had a damn hard time competing with Apple. They dropped the mp3 game, started doing video stuff. Then Internet on TV stuff…then I’m not sure. Tough world; but I sure wish more local players could play in that sand box and survive. I’m so bored by Apple and all the stupid electronics that have to work on these ridiculous telephone networks.

That being said, we had a brown out last night and I was grateful for my cell phone in order that I could set an alarm for an early work meeting.

Anyway, maybe I won’t get the new mp3 player just yet after all.

Besides now that the 200 CD player is gone I can take all these cd’s out to the car in that big useless CD jacket we have.

The 5 cd player in our 2003 Ford doesn’t have a jack for mp3 players. That seems sucky for 2003. It also means I don’t really want to look around for another car stereo just so I can plug my new mp3 player into it. Because I would want to do that.

The Neuro has a built-in fm transmitter (another awesome thing that the iPod had not). It works great for road trips –and really that’s just about the only time I use the thing if I’m not using it as a recording device. It doesn’t work so great though for big city driving. If I got a new player, I’d want it to work in the car. That’s definitely gonna add to the cost.

We’ll take it slow.

In other updates to the state of my reference music access, my basement flooded. Not connected? Sure it is. This meant two boxes of old cassette tapes got wet even though they were in a big plastic box. That’s because something mysterious happens when stuff floats around in rooms not particularly arranged for floating stuff. Some how it got tipped over; filled with water that turned tan as tea; and sank.

These are old cassettes I recorded on. Old stuff I bought going back to high school. Demos. Goodies from ancient SXSW and CMJ conferences. Bootleg cassettes I bought in the Middle East. In other words junk.

But MY junk!

I put them out on the porch and let them dry for weeks. We had a BBQ party last weekend. I smoked some meat. Had lots of free time. So I stuck a cassette in the old jam box out on the porch which has sat out there for five years and hasn’t been played in almost as many. The cassette was the Police’s Ghost in the Machine. The ghost in the machine started to eat the tape. Pulled it out and tapped it on a healthy chunk of apple wood. Worked great after that.

That night I also played the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Junior Brown. However it was surprising how many cassettes I had no interest in even after all these years.

Nevertheless they have a new home on the porch next to the dusty jam box just waiting for some meats to get smoked.

We’ll take it slow.

SoCal Soliloquy

Mercygiver — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 06:34:45 +0000

Pretty much the last thing I remember was turning that last curve. I guess it was Avenue A at Esplanade. That’s what the papers said, anyway. Vince was driving his Pantera. I was pretty far gone, I know that much. Not only that, Vince, who still managed convincing me he was good to drive (not only that, but, to the liquor store of all places), was way beyond my state of inebriation. And to think that it all happened because we had a few days off thanks to Michael and his fucked ankle. “Fucking bring the party to my place,” I believe were Vince’s exact words. And really, who turns down the opportunity to party at the singer of Motley Crue’s house? Not me, anyway.

I mean, my chances at birth were pretty limited. If I hadn’t been adopted, God knows what might have happened to me. Let’s just say there aren’t too many tickets out of Royal Leamington Spa, if you catch my drift.

Fuck it all. We were right there, man, right on the fucking beach. Making a turn and the bastard loses his handle. He was turning to me and punctuating a particularly, uh, let’s say ribald little joke. I remember turning to catch the punchline, seeing Vince looking at me, grinning like a right fuck, and then he just let it go. The damn thing slipped right out and we went over the median and . . .

I was pronounced dead at hospital, and that was that.

I was gonna leave a mark on the world in a fucking Finnish glam band. Not an easy task. We were on a major, on our first tour of the U.S. Things were fucking peaches and cream. All this, and then some, and it all crashes to a stop on the beach.

So yeah, now my name is immortalized, but it doesn’t really matter a whit; I mean, I don’t get to enjoy the fruits of Vince’s labors.

Am I bitter? Fuck, who knows, I’m dead. It doesn’t even matter at this point. Watching the chaps as they moved on, I can’t say their future would have been even half as bright as it has been were it not for my spectacular checking out. Fuck, those blokes owe me, big time. Shit, we would almost certainly have gone the way of countless other marginally successful glam/hair bands of my time.

Seriously, who really gives a shite about guys like Danger Danger? Jetboy? Tora Tora? That’s what I thought. No one. That could have been our fate had Vince been able to handle a punchline and a wheel at the same time.

Things change so fucking fast in real life. You can try your hardest to stay for the ride, but that’s maybe when your grip is the weakest. Maybe you just have to let go and hope for the best. Maybe when you finally learn to let go, maybe only then can you finally get what you previously worked so hard to grab. Stupid, right? Listen to me, all high and mighty, like death has brought with it a sense of wisdom. Really, it’s nonsense. It’s more a perspective from an insulated distance. Eternity will do that to you. Sorry to crash the party — so to speak. But look at it this way — if anyone personifies this theory, it’s Vince fucking Neil.

Who is still moving forward, despite epic setbacks? Despite scandal after scandal. Despite breakups, and repeated visits to rehab. Despite endless fucking chances, this guy still breathes like Juggernaut. He’s unstoppable. And it’s got fuck all to do with some sort of nefarious nether dealings. No, the chap is just plugged in. He’s living it, out on a fucking rock, in the sunset, shirt off, and making it fucking happen. It’s a thing of beauty, really. At least I can say I got to die at his pudgy little crotch-scented hands.

Me? I didn’t get to live the life, no, I had to die for it, and that’s a major fucking difference. And that is where I found meaning. On a lush California beach, at night, on top of the world. Until, that is, I wasn’t.

Keep The Radio Undead

Ghost of the Machine — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:40:57 +0000

Sorry, I’ve been a bit distracted lately.

Know The Rock Underground

Kill Thrill Recreational Users

Kinfolk True Revival Upstanding

Way too heavy?

jdenkmire — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:10:22 +0000

How many people in a band is too many? To me, it is simply a question of how well you can pull it off live. Use as many instruments as you want within the recording process, but when you bring 10 people on the road, please make it rock.

So the music works better for Lambchop when there are more involved. But the energy is, well, probably what you’d expect from Lambchop.

Local band Jacob and the House of Fire put on a great show – and there are 10+ of them at any given time. They seem to have the idea of an intense and frenzied performance thought out quite well.

Did anyone else ever think “Wow, George Clinton and P-Funk are dull.” Talk about misuse of a cast of thousands.

If you’re going to bring more than 10 people with you, one way to keep people interested is to beat the shit out of anything in sight.

The Post Where I Talk About ktru

Justin — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 18:50:32 +0000

There’s no way this will come out as well as I want it to, but I feel like I should write something here about ktru because it’s pretty likely that if it weren’t for the seventeen years that I was a DJ, Ramon wouldn’t have thought of me when he was shopping around for people to dupe into a long-term writing commitment. Because, with the possible exception of Alley, I wouldn’t know most of you if it weren’t for ktru. Which makes sense, I guess. When you spend a long time in one place, most of the people you know are going to be associated with that place. If you spend seventeen years, those people become like family. True, I should probably get out more, but when Rice announced that it had decided to sell off part of my family, I was speechless.

I wasn’t a Rice student, but one of my college roommates was and one of his former roommates was the general manager of ktru in 1990. In the summer it’s hard for them to find DJs to fill their schedule because so many students leave town, so I found myself with a midday radio show on the 650 watt radio station that I couldn’t really pick up very well until I got right next to Rice campus.

I was so nervous that I couldn’t sit down for my first several shifts. I would have little panic attacks and walk around the console or look through the stacks of records to calm myself down. Fortunately, there were always people at the station and they were always friendly and helpful, so nothing ever went terribly wrong and my fears were mostly unfounded. I gradually started feeling more confortable with being on the air. Even the nausea went away. Mostly.

I was there when the transmitter power was increased to 50,000 watts. The station manager told us not to talk about it with anybody. If people called in to ask about ktru’s suddenly clearer signal, we were instructed to tell the caller that it was probably just the weather–or possibly sunspots. I fielded lots of phone calls from surprised listeners for the first few weeks before ktru finally made the official announcement. Houston Press ran an article about the transition and the photographer they sent to get pictures of the station happened to show up during my shift, resulting in a full page photo of me in the Press. People I hadn’t spoken to in years called me to ask me about it, as if I knew anything more than what they read in that article.

“Where did they get the resources for a 50,000 watt transmitter?”
“Won’t that make them a target?”
“Whose idea was the deal?”

“I don’t know. Sunspots, probably.”

I overcompensated for not being a student by doing more work at ktru than necessary. I helped plan concerts. I ran sound at those concerts. I had live bands on my radio show every week. I designed and maintained the application the DJs use to input their setlists into the computer. All for free. All because I wanted ktru to succeed. All because I wanted more people to have more access to see and hear how awesome ktru is.

Now when Rice’s president goes on about how the $9.5 million they are getting from the sale of ktru is going to benefit students with a new cafeteria, I want to send him an invoice for my years of work. Because, while the value of that FM license is really just an accident of being in a tight radio market where there is a shortage of radio frequencies to go around, you can’t just sit on the frequency doing nothing with it while hoping its value appreciates. The FCC requires that you serve the community where you are broadcasting and you have to produce content to do that. And that’s what DJs of all stripes did at ktru did for forty years.

Ktru is many things to many people, but importantly, as a DJ it is whatever you want it to be. This is also why so many people complain about not liking what they hear on ktru. Most people’s tastes don’t jibe. That’s okay. I don’t have to like everything I hear on ktru to like ktru. It’s worth it for the things I do like and sometimes I come around on the ones I don’t.

Won’t ktru be the same on the internet? In the short run, yes. In the long run, though, interest in the station will decline as it fights to compete with tens of thousands of other internet “radio” options, many with better access to resources than ktru has. It will lose its connection to the community because its primary focus will no longer be the few miles that it broadcasts to. And its music library will stagnate as fewer music labels send ktru promotional albums in the hope that they can get their music played over the airwaves in a major market. It will be a slow death, but death nonetheless.

That’s disappointing. It’s not disappointing because I won’t be able to hear ktru anymore–that is a sad thought, but I live in another city, so I don’t get a chance to listen much anyway–it’s disappointing because people won’t be able to get the kind of ktru experience that so many have gotten over the years. It’s the experience of having the autonomy to be able to create something valuable from nothing. That’s not the sort of thing you can get just anywhere and it makes you want to defend the place you got that experience when somebody threatens it.

When news of ktru’s sale got out, suddenly people from several generations of ktru, living all over the world materialized to speak out against it. Why is that? Put simply: ktru changes lives. How do you put a price on that?