'Mappy Holidays'

strangemaps.wordpress.com is brilliant

Green

Sound of 2009

The Airing of Grievances

Belbury Penguins

This recent advert for WWF's Adopt a Wild Penguin scheme features music, specially comissioned for it, by Ghost Box magus Belbury Poly.

Squeekwel

70 minute long review of The Phantom Menace - worth every second

Ooo Laa

The Kooks' Luke Pritchard once remarked that he was 'a hit factory' - clearly he had never heard of Desmond Child. A Victorian Workhouse of pop production, the man has churned out of some of the biggest hits of the last 30 years, yet remains virtually unheard of outside the industry.

First coming to the attention of Paul Stanley in the late 70's, Desmond co-wrote the faux disco romp of'I Was Made For Loving You' - a pivotal moment for the band who unsurprisingly chose sucess before anything else. Yet the next decade would be even more lucrative for Desmond.

Think Bon Jovi write popular songs? Think again: Livin' On A Prayer, You Give Love A Bad Name, Keep The Faith - All Desmond

Alice Cooper's short time stadium rock comeback, Poison? You Guessed it, Desmond

Aerosmith's longer stadium rock comeback? Probably wouldn't have been as succesful without Crazy and Dude Looks Like Lady.

But the hits don't end with 80's hair metal, Desmond has worked with some of pop music's biggest international stars (Michael Bolton?).

Ricky Martin practically owes his career to the guy, penning Living La Vida Loca AND She Bangs - both cementing his celebrity in pop culture and even convincing the world for a time that he was straight.

Even Robbie Williams managed to wring a hit out of him in 1997.

But Desmond hasn't stopped this side of the 21st Century: working with Shakira, Mika, Hanson and The Jonas Brothers. Plus writing the banger that is Waking Up In Vegas for Katy Perry this year.

Some pop duds want a song for their album? Look no further: Hilary Duff, Lindsay Lohan and Rhydian. In fact the list of credits for his awful pop back catalogue could go on and on (Michelle Mcmanus, Lean Rhymes, The Rock Star Soundtrack)

Yet 'Dezzy' still keeps it real, helping out on occasion The Rasmus, Tokio Hotel and err... Dream Theater to stay metal with thier chops.

But if that list hasn't impressed you or even thinking about the sheer number of people who have sang along and/or danced to his songs at at least one point in their life doesn't either - He co-wrote Thong Song

Desmondchild.com

Danish Dreams

Clunge

Directed by Patrick Bergh

Life Imitates Ballard

Boy with aspergers rides train for 11 days straight

Azurre

www.peopleinpizzaslicecostumesbecomingpizzas.com"

NY

Saxon

Who would have thought a bear with no hair could be so completely terrifying? Surprisingly though "Dolores", here, isn't alone.

Cesky

Orson Welles' The Trial set to Josef K

Rus

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Moscow's street dogs have started living on and off the cities public transport system in ever more ingenious ways - sleeping in carriages, getting off at correct stations, startling passers-by into dropping their food and melting ladies hearts into giving them theirs. Info, pictures and videos here.

Actually was this on someone's facebook not too long ago? Apologies if it was.

Rus

Rus

82°06′S 54°58′E is the most inaccessible point in Antarctica, the farthest from the ocean and the coldest place in the world.

It's also where you'll find a bust of Lenin with his head facing towards Moscow.

Dig down 20 feet and you’ll uncover an old Soviet research hut, with a golden visitors’ book to sign.

A-Z

The guy from Not Not Fun has given away a link to loads of free music - it's good.

Yacht Rock

Christopher Cross with the Roots performing Ride Like The Wind on the Jimmy Fallon Show in America last month. Look out for the special guest appearance from another Yacht Rock legend not too far in.

...

The heroes over at Vigilant Citizen, who brought you the excellent 'Beyonce to Sasha Fierce: Symbolic Occult Rebirth' are back with the insightful 'Lady Gaga, The Illuminati Puppet' . Bonafide classic written all over it.

23 Skidoo

23 Skidoo, American slang phrase, refers to leaving quickly or being forced to leave quickly. Popular usage in the 1920s, exact origins uncertain.



Some may scoff at the notion of Canadian film. To those I recommend watching Atom Egoyan's The Adjuster, David Cronenberg's The Fly, Vincenzo Natali's Cypher, Don McKellar's Last Night and Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. Canadian cinema is generally more auteur- than star-driven, having more in common with that of Europe than its counterpart south of the border. If you're still scoffing, leave now. I direct those who have stayed to the website of the National Film Board of Canada, which hosts an archive of documentaries, animations and 'alternative dramas'. One such archived film is Julian Biggs' 23 Skidoo, made in 1964. The film is composed of footage of a deserted downtown Montreal, where objects and sounds echo the presence of recently-departed inhabitants.



Formed in London in 1979, 23 Skidoo were an post-punk band in the vein of This Heat and Cabaret Voltaire. It is surprising that their place in musical history is not as recognised as it should be, given their meld of industrialisms and pan-global influences (funk, dub, hip-hop, afrobeat, gamelan), which saw them being proteges of Genesis P-Orridge while also appearing at the first WOMAD Festival (a set which is documented on one side of The Culling Is Coming LP). It is widely held that Block Rockin' Beats by the Chemical Brothers pilfered the bassline from 23 Skidoo's Coup, as played by 'Sketch' Martin (who according to some internet sources, is the uncle of 'The British Will Smith'-turned-bankrupted goon Richard Blackwood).

It Begins

Designer Albert Exergian has created a series of minimalist posters for classic tv shows from Lost to Friends and beyond






Full gallery on tumblr

ReBoot

Just a quick broadcast to announce a reboot here at The Crystal World. Don't worry dear reader, you still have the pleasure of my company, and hopefully now a far less sporadic company at that. The main thing is to introduce a co-conspirator, Bobby of The Lepanto League infamy.

Obsession is the deadliest desire

The jury of the 62nd Cannes Film Festival has just bestowed a number of honours upon films screened at the festival, with the coveted Palme d'Or picked up by The White Ribbon by Austrian auteur Michael Haneke. This pleases me greatly as a fan of Haneke's work, particularly since his last film, an English-language shot-for-shot remake of his own Funny Games, was of little interest to me (I have yet to see it), partly since the original is my least favourite of his films (those who have seen it but little else of his other work may be puzzled to hear this is mainly because I find the film too 'warm'). Many have noted that the President of this year's jury, the singular Isabelle Huppert, has featured in two Haneke films, The Piano Teacher (2001) and The Time of the Wolf (2003) (winning a second Best Actress at Cannes for the former, her second after for Claude Chabrol's Violette Noziere (1978)), though many had thought this may have been a hurdle for Haneke. Few have noted, however, that this year's controversial choice for Best Actress, Charlotte Gainsbourg (whom all are obliged to point out is the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin) for Lars Von Trier's Antichrist (which frankly sounds bonkers), is not the first whose award-winning performance featured a scene of genital self-mutilation. The previous one? Huppert in The Piano Teacher.

Every film distributor would love to use an award given by the Jury (or other panels at the Festival) to help sell their film. However, there are two Cannes award-winning films which also picked up an award that was unlikely to sit alongside the Palm on the poster. The two films in question are Canadian: the 1994 FIPRESCI Prize winner, Exotica, and the 1996 Special Jury Prize winner, Crash. Apparently, both won Best Alternative Adult Film at the Adult Video News (AVN) Awards, the so-called "Oscars of porn".



Crash is, of course, David Cronenberg's adaptation of the 1973 novel of the same name by the dearly departed J. G. Ballard (much can be said about this man- I direct you in the meantime to a post by my brother). Cronenberg had already accidentally made a Ballard semi-adaptation in the form of his first feature, Shivers (1975) - think High-Rise meets Night of the Living Dead by way of a parasite that is both phallic and faecal. The form of Crash is close to that of a pornographic film, with the plot largely structured around a series of sex scenes. However, in Cronenberg's world, these sex scenes are not there for titillation- if they were they would hands down fail on that count, as the scenes are clouded in distinctly cold anti-passion. Cronenberg in fact left one sex scene out that he found to be too warm. Ballard himself admitted he would have considered his book a failure had he ever had an erection whilst writing. If Cronenberg's Crash (and it is Cronenberg's - Iain Sincliar's BFI Reader on Crash points out a Borgesian relationship between the author and auteur, Cronenberg the Menard to Ballard's Cervantes) is pornography, then it is pornography for the mind, not the phallus. On a side note, in an earlier film, Rabid, cast a pornographic actress (the also sadly recently-departed Marilyn Chambers), with a plot the porn industry may rather forget (zombie-like epidemic as metaphor for STDs).



Atom Egoyan's masterful Exotica seems on the face of it a standard erotic thriller from its central setting, the titular strip club, to its tagline ('In a world of temptation, obsession is the deadliest desire.') And yet Exotica turns out instead to be more of an elegant filmic puzzle, owing much to a European arthouse tradition. By his own admission, Egoyan structured the film like a striptease, removing layers gradually to reveal the bigger picture, eventually offering food for thought rather than arousal. Unlike Crash, Exotica has no sex scenes, the closest thing being the strip dances performed within the environment of the club. As the film progresses, these teases take on far more depth than they would in a by-numbers softcore thriller, no small thanks to a standout performance from Mia Kirshner, showing an acting maturity beyond her then 18 years (across-the-board the cast are accomplished yet underappreciated Canadian actors, including Elias Koteas, who also appears in Crash as the deranged Vaughan). At the conclusion, the viewer may well feel implicit guilt for their part in the voyeurism.

The awarding of Best Alternative Adult Film to both these films seems rather misplaced, neither one is successful pornographically, though this is because neither one strives to be. Yet, with a more naïve reading of its title, adult as in intended for adults, the winning of this prize by two intellectual filmmakers can make more sense.

Geometry of Circles

Rock In Opposition: A Primer

Prog, it seems is a four-letter word. I often feel sheepish when declaring I love it even in its more mainstream form. Yes and ELP are great in the right forms and doses (Close To The Edge, the Tarkus suite) partly because they are ludicrously overblown, but this makes them largely intellectually unsatisfying and poe-faced. The majority of the best work of the genre took place on its fringes, in the so-called 'Avant-Prog' subgenre, which is itself usually broken down into three main subgenres: Zeuhl, a set of bands linked to or influenced by the sublime Magma; Canterbury Scene, a rather self-explanatory collecting of bands such as Soft Machine, Caravan and Gong; and Rock In Opposition.

In actuality, Rock In Opposition is not strictly a genre (or subgenre), rather a movement. When dropped by Virgin, British band Henry Cow decided to continue outside of the mainstream, and to celebrate this they invited four bands they had encountered on tours of Europe to appear on a festival bill with them in London. Those four bands were Belgium's Univers Zero, Italy's Stormy Six, France's Etron Fou Leloublan and Sweden's Samla Mamma Mannas, and that festival took place on 12th March 1978, under the name Rock In Opposition.

While all could be considered Avant-Prog, the festival was not a collection of stylistically similar bands - Univers Zero's gloomy Stravinsky-inspired chamber-rock differs greatly from Etron Fou's mischievous Dadaist music - rather, they were, as the festival's flyer puts it, "five rock groups the record companies don't want you to hear."

By the end of 1978, the success of the festival inspired the participating bands to form an organisation under the same name. Three bands were added to the collective: France's Art Zoyd, Belgium's Aksak Maboul and Henry Cow-offshoot Art Bears (Henry Cow had disbanded by this point). Further festivals and meetings took place between the bands the following year, but by the end of the decade the organisation was no longer functioning.

Despite the diversity of the groups involved, the term Rock In Opposition has since been applied to a subgenre of bands in the spirit of or inspired by the original set, such as the American bands Thinking Plague and 5uu's.

Ten great RIO albums


Henry Cow with Slapp Happy - In Praise Of Learning
While Prog generally had little room for women, thankfully this does not hold for RIO. Cow already featured reeds player amongst their ranks, but their best work came when Dagmar Krause joined the group on its collaboration with her band Slapp Happy, with her atypical vocals complementing the instrumental mindset of the rest of the band.


Univers Zero - Ceux du Dehors
Placed alongside its predecessor Heresie, Ceux du Dehors is almost playful, but that is to say it is ominous rather than funereal. The Belgians' music, woodwind-laden and heavily influenced by 20th century masters Bartok and Stravinsky, exhibits masterful interplay here through its dizzying, shifting rhythms.


Etron Fou Leloublan - Batelages
Etron Fou Leloublan's (roughly translating to 'Crazy Shit, The White Wolf') debut exudes naivety, a surrealist sense of humour (fluency in French not needed to realise this) and a disdain for conventional structure on a par with Godard's Weekend. Yet this doesn't hide the group's talented musicianship, particularly of its rhythm section - Ferdinand Richard (bass) and Guigou Chenevier (drums) - who would become the band's core.


Samla Mammas Manna - Klossa Knapitatet
Samla Mammas Manna were already on the fringes of an anti-commercial movement in Sweden, called Progg, but their humourous nature jarred with the more political bands of the movement. Their music is simultaneously bravura and silly, while encompassing fusion, folk and circus influences.


Art Bears - Hopes & Fears
When composing new material for a Henry Cow album, some members were dissatisfied with the more song-oriented pieces being written by drummer Chris Cutler and guitarist Fred Frith. These 'songs' formed the basis of the first Art Bears album, with Cutler and Frith being joined by Dagmar Krause. Even when it veers into rockist, The Who-influenced territory, it remains far from conventional. Not to be confused with an album by a wet indie band.


Aksak Maboul - Onze Danses Pour Combattre la Migraine
It's hard to identify this and its successor, Un Peu de l'Ame des Bandits, as the work of the same band, but the same can be said of pairings of songs on the same album. Flitting between classical, ethnic music and jazz, the album's electronic passages seemingly foretell 8-bit video game background music.


Art Zoyd - Génération Sans Futur
A French band in the Univers Zero vein, Art Zoyd take that band's dissonance and portent and use sporadic vocals and trumpet stabs and squalls to give it a more visceral, confrontational edge. Later work has seen the band focus on creating new soundtracks for German Expressionist classics.


Present - High Infidelity
RIO continues to produce great music beyond its original temporal bounds, as evidenced by this 2001 effort from a reformed Present, who originally formed in 1979 when guitarist Roger Trigaux left Univers Zero. The album's stunning centrepiece is the six-part, 28-minute Souls For Sale, built upon violent, brutal, hypnotic repetition.


Fred Frith - Gravity
This solo album, inspired by 'dance music' of multiple cultures, sees the Henry Cow/Art Bears guitarist backed by Samla Mannas Manna on side one, and Americans The Muffins on side two, with further input from Aksak Maboul man Marc Hollander. Frith and his collaborators expertly craft an album that is as joyous as it is complex.


Thinking Plague - In Extremis
A band heavily inspired by the Henry Cow/Art Bears strand of RIO (most obviously through the presence of unconventional female vocals, though supplemented by strange male vocals), Thinking Plague take this and other influences (Fripp, circus, klezmer) into more cinematic territory.


[EDIT: Some interesting responses have been made by Alex and Dave.]

Yacht Prog

I can't get enough of the Alan Parsons Project at the moment, yet I feel the band's profile these days is best summed up through this joke from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me...



It's a terribly flat joke, not least because Scott's explanation seems to be more to a majority of the audience rather than Dr. Evil. Most people now just wouldn't know what the Alan Parsons Project is.

The Alan Parsons Project was formed in 1975 by Alan Parsons, an audio engineer who had worked on Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon, and vocalist Eric Woolfson. Their best albums tend to follow a similar formula: concept albums (Poe, robots, Pyramids) usually beginning with an instrumental, followed by a mixture of slick, often smooth pop-rock songs and slick, sometimes smooth symphonic-rock songs, featuring a plethora of guest vocalists. The concepts often don't work: Tales of Mystery and Imagination lacks a sonic sense of the macabre to satisfactorily match Poe, with the reading of A Dream Within A Dream by Orson Welles on the re-release failing to better German synthpop band Propaganda's take on the same poem (nicely played here over footage from Powell & Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death- June! June!)



These days the Project is probably best known for the opening instrumental from Eye In The Sky, Sirius. Much like Michael Nyman's Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds is the quintessential Country House music, Sirius sits alongside Eye of the
Tiger in being quintessential sports build-up music, thanks largely to its use by the unstoppable Chicago Bulls team of the 1990s, but also a number of other teams, including, of late, Manchester City.



So, why is the Project less appreciated these days? That they dropped their first album in 1976, arguably after the heyday of popular Prog Rock, doesn't help: many a history of the genre would not posit them as being overly significant in its development.

The band may be better viewed through a post-ironic filter by labelling them Yacht Prog, alongside Duke-era Genesis and perhaps Nude-era Camel. Noting that they are insufficiently avant-garde and often too over-produced (unsurprising given Parsons' producer as band member role) to be praised on artistic merit alone, they did produce enjoyable vaguely proggy pop numbers. Using this Yacht Prog tag we can then accept the music, much like Italo-Disco, through its uncool/cool and crap/good dualities.

Man On Ledge

Two of my favourite films of last year were Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg and James Marsh's Man On Wire.



Guy Maddin is a fairly unique voice in cinema. He has long been going to painstaking lengths to ensure his films echo the style of early cinema - taking clear influence from film noir, Eisenstein's agit-prop and German Expressionism. He was hauntological before the term existed. Others may have recently borrowed this retrofied style, see for example Esteban Sapir's enjoyably pulpy La Antena, but Maddin takes his films into the bizarre and psychosexual - one only need look at Careful, his incestuous take on the German mountain movie.

Recently Maddin has delivered a series of semi-autobiographical works, the latest of which is My Winnipeg, a docu-fantasia looking at his hometown. The film sees Maddin (appearing through voiceover) trying to escape Winnipeg. He decides to film his way out of the city- subletting his old home and hiring actors to play his siblings in order to recreate childhood events with his 'real' mother (played by the late Ann Savage, best-known for her femme fatale role in Edgar G. Ulmer's low-budget noir Detour). All the while, using stock and created footage, Maddin discusses events and landmarks in the history of the city. Some details are clearly true - when the city's NHL side the Jets moves to the more wintry climes of Phoenix (becoming the Coyotes), the team's former home, the historic Winnipeg Arena, is made redundant by the erection of a new ice arena, the MTS Centre, on the site of the beloved Eaton's department store, but this new arena apparently has too small a capacity to entice back an NHL franchise. Other events seem more flights of fancy - the winter when horses froze in the lake, with only their heads protruding; or the public baths consisting of three stacked, segregated swimming pools. However, with Maddin's seamless blending of footage, and further of fact and fiction, it is often hard to tell which parts are actually true. While this might come across as a problem in less capable hands, Maddin is so witty and inventive that, real or not, his Winnipeg is the one you want to believe in.



Man On Wire is a documentary about the high wire walk performed between the Twin Towers in 1974 by Philippe Petit. Carried out without consent, Petit enlisted a group of friends to help him achieve the feat he had dreamed up before the Towers had been constructed. Combining both real and recreated footage, the plot is played out in the film like a heist, gripping you in spite of its well-known conclusion. However, no footage of the wire walk itself exists. This compares interestingly with My Winnipeg: one 'recreates' footage of imagined events, while the other cannot do this for its central, real event. And yet, this is no flaw: understandably it is impossible to recreate the event for real, and no amount of trickery would do it justice. Instead, by simply using still photographs, the vertiginous moment is given a strange air that borders on the surreal, recreating the wonder of the onlookers (or, rather, 'uplookers'), trying to believe the unbelievable.

The one issue I have with the film is in its use of the music of Michael Nyman, culled mainly from the films of Peter Greenaway. Having seen these films, I so strongly associate the music with them, that they evoke strong senses of Englishness (particularly Chasing Is Best Left To Shepherds, as mentioned in a previous post) that seem at odds with the tale of a Frenchman in New York.

Much of the enjoyment of the film though comes directly from the extraordinary personality of its protagonist, which was perfectly illustrated when Man On Wire picked up the award for best documentary at this year's Oscars.

Today, I didn't die.

One of the films I'm most looking forward to at the moment is Crank: High Voltage, the sequel to the Jason Statham film, Crank. For those that haven't seen it, here is the trailer for the first film.



So, the Stath plays Chev Chelios, a hitman. At the beginning he wakes up groggy with a DVD nearby, on which a gangster informs him he has been injected with the 'Beijing Cocktail'. This will kill Chelios if he cannot keep his adrenaline above a certain level. This is essentially Speed with Statham being the bus. But whereas that film simply required the bus to stay at a high speed, Crank uses many methods for Chev to keep himself alive, played out in real-time. Herein lies the stupendous brilliance of the film, you struggle to keep your jaw off the floor as Chev headbutts a succession of hoodlums, shouts "Al-Qaeda!" at Arab cab drivers and practically rapes his girlfriend in a bustling Chinatown street. However, the conclusion of the film sees (SPOILER ALERT!) Chev fighting his enemy in a helicopter at a great height and then in freefall. Chev has sufficient time on his way to the ground to snap the gangster's neck, and then phone his girlfriend and apologise to her. The impact upon hitting the ground would be more than enough to kill anyone, but not our Chev, as two heartbeats are heard before the end credits roll. So now we have a sequel:



Thankfully they have managed to come up with an even more absurd premise for Chev to put himself through hyper-strenuous ordeals: Chev must shock himself with jolts of electricity to keep ticking the mechanical heart which the gangsters replaced his natural one with. Fairly recently there have been two bizarre/intriguing additions to the credits. Firstly, slick-haired, wacky-vocals man Mike Patton is to score the film. This is probably a good thing, one only need look at Fantomas' The Director's Cut album to see he is a man of good cinematic taste, and an aficionado of fine soundtracks (Mancini, Herrmann, Rota, Morricone, Badalamenti, Komeda). More importantly though, Geri Halliwell has apparently been cast as a "chavvy mother" (her words). One only need look at her previous acting credits (Spice World, Sex and the City, the acclaimed film-adaptation of the Viz comic strip Fat Slags) to see that her performance will be a surefire shoe-in come next year's awards season.

Commercial break

Once upon a time (1999/2000), you couldn't get away from Moby. His music was perpetuated through adverts, since every song on his album Play had been licensed for commercial use, and as a result buyers practically knew the whole album before they'd picked it up off the shelf. Nowadays, however, you're hard pushed to see any adverts using one of those songs. This prevalence is perhaps a sign of how dated the material is.

The same cannot really be said for the music of folk-minimalists Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Their music is often found in television programmes and adverts, many have heard them without consciously knowing it, often producing an "Oh, this is that music!" response. And yet it is 20-30 years since these pieces were recorded and 12 since the group ended after the passing of leader Simon Jeffes. This likely stems from their timeless nature; they seem like arrangements of traditional pieces despite being original compositions, and they are never used as part of a period aesthetic.

First up, Music For A Found Harmonium, as performed here on a BBC broadcast in 1989. A Celtic-leaning cover of this by Patrick Street has been used recently on MFI adverts, and a BBC advert used the abhorrent dance remix by Steve Mac, a producer-of-choice for Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh.



From the same broadcast, Perpetuum Mobile, which has been used for Hewlett-Packard, Knorr and HP sauce.



And finally, Telephone and Rubber Band (here played over reversed footage from Fritz Lang's excellent Metropolis), which seemed destined for use by One2One/T-Mobile.



As a postscript, here is another piece of music that is also unconsciously familiar to many. If we think of big country houses onscreen, the music we hear is inevitably Michael Nyman's Chasing Sheep Is Best Left To Shepherds from the Peter Greenaway film The Draughtsman's Contract.

Father Brian Eno

In an era of library music blogs and Trunk Records, there's an odd obscuro music fan to note in Father Ted's Father Dougal McGuire, who ticks the idiot box for the sterotype of an Irish man, who appears in a plethora of jokes with his brethren from across the Irish Sea.

We first encounter this music taste in the Song For Europe episode, when, admittedly, Dougal has, as Ted puts it, less of a record collection and more of a record. That record is by Nin Huugen and the Huugen Notes, which earned them fifth place in Song For Norway in 1976. The pair then shamelessly look to steal the tune for their own attempt at earning the right to represent Ireland in Europe's premier song contest, My Lovely Horse.

However, Dougal has apparently expanded his record to a collection by the time of the later episode, Chirpy Burpy Cheap Sheep, in which he is listening to BBC Sound Effects Volume 4. He also goes to the local shop to see if he can get Volume 5, without luck (this seemingly minor plot point then plays back into the main plot in a manner that befits Seinfeld).

Perhaps Dougal has fleshed his record out with, recent production for bland mega-sellers aside, records from the esteemable guest who appeared in the last episode of Father Ted.

Alka Seltzer

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