¤ milky moon ¤

Btw, I don't know what I was smoking when I posted that last comment.

I agree with the whole fairy thing being kind of offensive,
but this kind of thing is essentially what critics do all the time, categorize artists by the most obvious aspect of their work. Joanna Newsom is a fairy princess, PJ Harvey is angry all the time, etc., and some people just have problems seeing past these false stereotypes.

But it's still relatively early in Joanna's career, she's growing even more as an artist still and there is time to prove herself and to attract a wider audience where she may only be confusing people now.

And Joni was a fairy princess, then angry all the time!

Hmm... perhaps it's a tradition for all "serious" women songwriters to end up being categorised as "angry feminists" as they age and write on more topical subjects (Bjork is included in this as well). Maybe we can expect a Dog Eat Dog out of Joanna at some point in the future? (God I hope not)

This is an excellent article by the way and a great read

@Jordan great post! It is very interesting that there was little music you listened to before Joanna. Perhaps our fatigue with conventional pop is what intensifies the devotion with which we latch onto anything different. I know that the trajectory of my own musical discovery has been like a series of dislocations and relocations, where I'm ardently fanatic about one singular band, tire completely, then transfer the fanaticism onto something more mature or complex. I think I've reached the stage where there's fairly comprehensive mass of musicians I respect and adore, though (at the centre of which, of course, lies Joanna).

By the way, I would argue that gay folk do have to deal with gender politics, albeit in a different way. We're still brought up with certain notions on what men and women should be, and there's still gender conventions that affect our relations (penetration = domination, butch/femme paradigm etc), but whatever sexual need there is to repress and stereotype women isn't there, as our interactions with them are different. I think our most basic, juvenile convictions about women are still going to determine how we view them. Anyway, representations of realistic homosexual gender dynamics are completely absent from popular culture, so we're often forced into accepting heterosexual stereotypes as the default.

Andrew wrote:@Jordan great post! It is very interesting that there was little music you listened to before Joanna. Perhaps our fatigue with conventional pop is what intensifies the devotion with which we latch onto anything different. I know that the trajectory of my own musical discovery has been like a series of dislocations and relocations, where I'm ardently fanatic about one singular band, tire completely, then transfer the fanaticism onto something more mature or complex. I think I've reached the stage where there's fairly comprehensive mass of musicians I respect and adore, though (at the centre of which, of course, lies Joanna).

It wasn't even fatigue, so much - I'd just never really noticed much music before. Then again, I think perhaps neither do most people ever really notice music: I know a lot of people who call themselves fans of more artists than I think it's possible to be simultaneously fanatical about. Unless you've been moved to tears (or the personal equivalent) by the beauty of something - not because it evoked something or resonated with your experience, but purely because it was beautiful - I don't think you can say you've ever appreciated art. I sometimes wonder if a lot of people when they say they like an artist mean that they can tolerate them, or when they say that they love them mean that they like them. There are plenty of artists I can tolerate, whom I don't mind having on, whose music I don't dislike (and plenty I can't tolerate), but I would reserve saying that I'm a fan or that I really like or love an artist's work for something that I felt really passionate about. Then again, maybe I live in a cloud of weltschmerz and I'm too jaded and emotionally cynical to feel the way about more than two artists that most people do about twenty.

Andrew wrote:By the way, I would argue that gay folk do have to deal with gender politics, albeit in a different way. We're still brought up with certain notions on what men and women should be, and there's still gender conventions that affect our relations (penetration = domination, butch/femme paradigm etc), but whatever sexual need there is to repress and stereotype women isn't there, as our interactions with them are different. I think our most basic, juvenile convictions about women are still going to determine how we view them. Anyway, representations of realistic homosexual gender dynamics are completely absent from popular culture, so we're often forced into accepting heterosexual stereotypes as the default.

Oh, yeah, but the sub/dom paradigm is far less strict. It's by no means binary - most people are switch, if anything, and the two axis system of sub/dom and top/bottom, which is fairly widely acknowledged, violates the penetration = domination rule - there's an acknowledgement that the penetrator can be submitting. And you don't need to be a dom or a sub or a top or a bottom or a switch - being 'not fussed', or having it depend on your mood, is perhaps even more common than being switch. If we took sub and dom as analogues to heterosexual gender dynamics, we'd still be significantly better off - how many straight people get no stick in their spaces and communities for identifying as male or female depending on how they're feeling?

Partly for that reason, and also because the same dynamic increasingly exists in mainstream gender dynamics (there's a sort of nascent acknowledgement of the existence of straight, feminine, dominant women and straight, masculine, submissive men, now), I don't think that the sub/dom dynamic is analogous to the male/female dynamic. There was a period when it wasn't uncommon to hear questions like, "So who's the woman?", but that was generally either a result of straight people encountering a more liberated gay subculture for the first time and trying to understand it in terms that made sense to them, or gay people aping their confusion (in the manner of camp).

I'd conceive of that dyamic as one of something other than gender, and I'd say it relates back more to Greek pederasty than it does to heterosexual relationships. The erastes (dom)/eromenos (sub) paradigm is a much closer fit, once you dispel the notion that the eromenos was a child.¹ A younger, passive partner is courted by an older, active partner and expected to be coy. I don't mean to say that that paradigm was passed down directly to the present, though it has probably been in the background in Europe during its long suffering under Christianity: contemporaneous western European accounts of homosexuality in Mediaeval Russia describe something similar centred around the Russian bathhouses, but could have been influenced by classical literature; Florence's Renaissance gay subculture had age-structured relationships. Rather, I would suggest that it may be influenced by the residues of that paradigm (such as the Russian and Florentine 'scenes'), but that it was neoclassically revived during society's secularisation and liberalisation, being the most prominent historical example of how a gay relationship works. That is to say, I think the sub/dom paradigm is a revival of the Greek erastes/eromenos paradigm, rather than an imitation of the gender structure of heterosexual relationships.

The fact that that paradigm has no heterosexual equivalent in western culture is I think what allowed it to diversify and loosen. In Greece, there was a very clear notion of the proper behaviour of an erastes or an eromenos, and more than one writer complained that the eromenoi were being too flirtatious in their era as evidence of society's moral decay (as promiscuous women or effeminate men might have been pointed to as a sign of moral decay in the modern era). Because that structure was part of their society's mainstream culture, it was as rigid and binary as the dichotomy between masculine and feminine. When it was adopted by a much later culture in which it was not only not mainstream, but proscribed, it was already necessarily countercultural and had no traditional basis for role prescription, hence the blossoming of identities from that common origin (look at the numerous models for bears' relationships, alone - they can be structured along numerous lines, age being only one of them). That buffet of self-identifications is the primary reason for which I say that being gay is liberating.

It's the fact that gender expectations for straight people are so incredibly black and white that I think makes them so oppressive. Being gay, you're hardly faced with a situation where you're forced to be a certain way because of something unrelated², as a woman is forced to be feminine or a man is forced to be masculine - you get to choose; no one's going to say, "What? You're not a dom, you're a sub! Stop acting like that!"

There's an interesting argument to be had there about 'integration', i.e. normalising homosexuality till there is no gay subculture, it's just part of mainstream culture. In some ways that would be a good thing, in others I think it would be tragic. It would be far better that a distinct gay subculture remained and was tolerated, in my view - it provides a community, something that's more 'yours' to identify with, and enables the different and less restrictive set of customs and norms that I'm arguing we enjoy. Joining the mainstream would be positive if the mainstream adopted a less binary view of sexual/gender identity; if, on the other hand, gay subculture was encultured to the mainstream's strictly binary view, that would be a very negative thing.



¹ Eromenoi are described as paides; paides could serve in the Athenian military, making them of citizenship age, i.e. declared to be older than 18 by more than one witness, and in art they tend to have well-defined bodies and facial/body hair, not at all characteristic of a prepubescent teenager. See James Davidson, Greek Love and the Greeks.

² By other gay people, I mostly mean - you still need to deal with people's expectations about what a gay person is like, but those are still a lot less loose than people's expectations about what a male or a female is like. People in tolerant communities are usually at least a little aware of the plurality of identities within gay subculture, so while they might default to assumption that a gay person is camp if male or butch if female, they don't cling to it or insist on it.



...

I accidentally wrote an essay in this thread on a subject I said wasn't a subject for this thread. Oops!

Interesting! I wouldn't have instinctively said that the whole pederastic relationship dynamic could have been replicated in mainstream modern gay culture, but it seems like a logical conclusion after reading that. While I certainly agree that make/female dynamics, if they even exist at all, are very fluid in gay relationships (at least, more so nowadays), I still think that even gay subcultures are going to hold certain views on what men and women should be. I don't think that gay 'community' is quite as aware of gender as it seems to think it is - I think there are still prevalent negative attitudes towards the transgendered, particularly transsexuals, for example - but that's mostly based on my personal experiences with it.

How do you think gay men, as a general group, are influenced in their attitudes toward women?

Hehe, fanaticism takes dedication - I've spent more time seriously and critically thinking about and doing research on Joanna's music than just about anybody else's. It'd probably be too exhausting to be fanatic about more than a few! It's always been kind of strange to me, though, that 'moved to tears' seems to be, for most people, the primary criterion for appreciating art. Art has many functions, and beauty takes many forms! It's just a shame that I can't really physically cry at anything, no matter how much emotion it stirs. I do feel that overwhelming, bumblebee-belly sense of beauty when I listen to Joanna, though (not so much its physical beauty - what tends to affect me most are those perfect momentary musical and poetic expressions of loneliness or disconnectedness), so perhaps that's a form of internal crying. As a side note (and out of curiosity), who's the artist you admire most, other than Joanna?

I really like your little Have One On Me graphic by the way...

Andrew wrote:Interesting! I wouldn't have instinctively said that the whole pederastic relationship dynamic could have been replicated in mainstream modern gay culture, but it seems like a logical conclusion after reading that. While I certainly agree that make/female dynamics, if they even exist at all, are very fluid in gay relationships (at least, more so nowadays), I still think that even gay subcultures are going to hold certain views on what men and women should be. I don't think that gay 'community' is quite as aware of gender as it seems to think it is - I think there are still prevalent negative attitudes towards the transgendered, particularly transsexuals, for example - but that's mostly based on my personal experiences with it.

How do you think gay men, as a general group, are influenced in their attitudes toward women?

Oh, yeah, certainly - I'm talking about perceptions of gender within the gay subculture, rather than the gay subculture's perceptions of gender in the mainstream culture. I think the gay subculture's predominant view of gender roles/structures/etc. in normative relationships is likely to be the same as that of mainstream culture - i.e., quite binary. I would guess, but I have no data to back it up, that there's a higher proportion of gay people than of straight people who don't subscribe to that view, based on the fact that gay people aren't participants in its enforcement: the chauvanist bravado and 'battle of the sexes' that seems to be compulsory for straight people. On the other hand, there's not really as much impetus for gay people to think about normative relationships and their gender dynamics, since we're never going to be in one and we are, I'm arguing, somewhat removed from them, and for that reason it may be easier for a gay person to receive the predominant mainstream view without questioning it. It'd be interesting to study.

I don't mean to say that the gay subculture as a bastion of solidarity among the oppressed; mostly I'm talking about its liberation of its own members, and even that is compromised. I think bisexuals get quite a hard time of it, for instance, because they break a comfortable division between the normative, heterosexual relationships of the mainstream and the alternative, homosexual relationships of the gay subculture - from both sides, they're faced with an uncertainty about where they fit in, almost to the extent of "What side are you on?"

What were you talking about, specifically, when you mentioned negative attitudes towards transsexuals/transgendered individuals? My personal experience in that area is limited and almost certainly not representative, since by far most of my gay friends are very politically and socially conscious and consequently view gay liberation as part of a wider struggle involving women, the rest of the LGBT movement and often the working class. Or, more succinctly, I don't have much non-academic knowledge of gay people outside of an ivory tower.

Andrew wrote:Hehe, fanaticism takes dedication - I've spent more time seriously and critically thinking about and doing research on Joanna's music than just about anybody else's. It'd probably be too exhausting to be fanatic about more than a few!

Exhausting and... unnecessary? Surplus to requirement? I don't know, I've got the artists I love and that's enough for me! I don't really need to listen to anyone else and no one else gives me adequate reason to listen to them, anyway. I could listen to all the musicians, but why would I when I can just listen to the ones who give me the most pleasure? Which makes me wonder if other people live in a state of constant musical bliss, turning on the radio and having a religious experience to every piece of assembly line pop and gimmicky electrical noise assault it offers, or if all music is mundane and unfulfilling to them but they don't know any better.

Andrew wrote:It's always been kind of strange to me, though, that 'moved to tears' seems to be, for most people, the primary criterion for appreciating art. Art has many functions, and beauty takes many forms! It's just a shame that I can't really physically cry at anything, no matter how much emotion it stirs. I do feel that overwhelming, bumblebee-belly sense of beauty when I listen to Joanna, though (not so much its physical beauty - what tends to affect me most are those perfect momentary musical and poetic expressions of loneliness or disconnectedness), so perhaps that's a form of internal crying.

That's why I say "or personal equivalent". I know some people just aren't criers, but I mean the intense emotional experience that results in crying rather than the act of crying itself. And yeah, when I say "beauty" I'm including those little non-sensory (or not quite non-sensory - quasi-sensory?) moments. I love Joanna's music so much because even if she were just singing, "Na na na, na na na na na," it'd still be beautiful music, but that beautiful music is only the biscuit layer in a trifle of heartfelt emotional sincerity and perfect expression and breathtaking poetry and all those little ephemeral things like the play between the harp and the voice and the other instruments and the harmony of the meaning of a word and the way it's sung. Not everyone becomes a blubbering mess when something makes them a blubbering mess.

Andrew wrote:As a side note (and out of curiosity), who's the artist you admire most, other than Joanna?

Streetlight Manifesto. Especially Tomas Kalnoky - it's great, because he's hot and male, so I get to have a major crush on him, too. Not to denigrate the rest of the band: they play the brass, and that's the best bit. I suppose there are artists who are less similar to Joanna, but there's not really an obvious connection. In the first post in this thread that you quoted, I suggested that the thing they might have in common is an "audience-be-damned" quality, which is probably what it is. I like a self-indulgent artist. There's nothing wrong with indulging yourself when the result sounds like that.

Andrew wrote:I really like your little Have One On Me graphic by the way...

Thanks! I made it myself with my limited Photoshop skills. The lips are Lola Montez's, from the painting Ludwig I had commissioned of her for his Schönheitengalerie (Gallery of Beauties) in the Nymphemburg Palace in Munich.

For some reason, I had not seen this thread before, and so have only just read Jordan~'s long posting of 28 August.

Thereafter, it has veered into territory that I dare not treat, but while I was reading the thread, a few random comments came to mind (wouldn;y it be nice to have a 'scratch pad' off to the side, to jot these down as you scroll through each page of the thread. And this is only a 2-pager, so far).

The initial thought I had when reading Jordan's ideas about Joanna's shifting 'image' across her three albums was ... "David Bowie". I don;t know enough about him, or the chronology of his releases to expand better upon that though, but I just wanted to put it out there.

Next I enjoyed Jordan's 'admission' about his prior listening habits, which also caught Andrew's eye:

@Jordan great post! It is very interesting that there was little music you listened to before Joanna. Perhaps our fatigue with conventional pop is what intensifies the devotion with which we latch onto anything different.

I can very much identify with Jordan's listening, although it worries me that my musical intake is not wider.

The word "elfin" came in for consideration, too. It's fair to say that in England (in my experience, at least), it's a word that is linked only to two people: Nadia Comăneci and Olga Korbut. (It isn't true, by the way, that the latter is Ronnie's even-littler sister).

Finally, and relating to both gender and my listening habits, I wonder if you could consider my attitude as sexist (though in the opposite way to which the term is usually applied). It's a bit hard to define, and first of all requires a simplistic split of "Music" into two "Kingdoms" in the way that living things used to be divided into Plants and Animals. The distinction is blurry at the edges, and has now been refined, but most people would understand what is meant by it. In the case of Music, one of these Kingdoms would be termed "Classical": a misleading term for sure, as it can include anything from Gregorian chants, to full orchestral symphonies composed in the 'classic age' to modern avant-garde pieces, to film-scores, whilst there are plenty of artists with a foot half in and half out of this Kingdom. Then we are faced with the "other" Kingdom, which does not even have a name worthy of use: "Pop" would certainly do for some acts, but would certainly be seen as belittling by lovers of 'rock', 'punk', various categories of dance, and dozens of other genres which probably deserve a better title than 'Pop', especially as many of them are far from POPular. Perhaps I should just call the Kingdoms 'C' and 'P' respectively, and lose the connotations of old-ness and mainstream-ness that the fuller versions imply.
Anyway - that diversion was only to say that my next comment is restricted only to 'P' music.
I actually find it much easier to relate to the more 'serious' end of the P-music spectrum when it is performed by female artists. Looking into my had (or heart) to analyse why this should be, I can only suggest that perhaps I subconsciously see women as the more emotionally complex, and more 'in tune' with their emotions, so that when singing (or playing) about topics relating to emotions, the sensations come through as purer and less forced or 'processed' than when a male tries to do the same thing.
I would have to study my list of favourites more closely to see whether I'd find that the best (in my personal opinion) songs by males were about topics were not priarily emotional, and that the converse was true of my preferred songs by female artists.
It's also probably a dreadful gender stereotype on my part, but if I was inventing a new language, and was told that it had to follow the 'gender' system common throughout European languages (but mercifully almost extinct in English), I would certainly assign the noun "song" to the ranks of the "eine" [feminine] gender, and almost certainly "music" would join it.

Now you are free to go ahead and call me a dinosaur, and snatch away that "nice guy" tag that I so enjoyed, even if only for a few hours...

Steve wrote:Anyway - that diversion was only to say that my next comment is restricted only to 'P' music.
I actually find it much easier to relate to the more 'serious' end of the P-music spectrum when it is performed by female artists. Looking into my had (or heart) to analyse why this should be, I can only suggest that perhaps I subconsciously see women as the more emotionally complex, and more 'in tune' with their emotions, so that when singing (or playing) about topics relating to emotions, the sensations come through as purer and less forced or 'processed' than when a male tries to do the same thing.
I would have to study my list of favourites more closely to see whether I'd find that the best (in my personal opinion) songs by males were about topics were not priarily emotional, and that the converse was true of my preferred songs by female artists.
It's also probably a dreadful gender stereotype on my part, but if I was inventing a new language, and was told that it had to follow the 'gender' system common throughout European languages (but mercifully almost extinct in English), I would certainly assign the noun "song" to the ranks of the "eine" [feminine] gender, and almost certainly "music" would join it.

Now you are free to go ahead and call me a dinosaur, and snatch away that "nice guy" tag that I so enjoyed, even if only for a few hours...

I don't know that that's sexist, necessarily - more likely it's a response to the fact that you live in a sexist - or stringently gender normative, it might be better to say - society. There's a concept of 'kyriarchy' in gender egalitarianism (the broader church expanded from feminism) that holds that we all oppress eachother in various different ways. It's a response to the feminist notion of patriarchy, normally coming from the left, that challenges that it's not men or women who oppress men or women, it's the ruling class who oppress the workers and they use their cultural hegemony to enlist our help in doing so in various ways. As such, men oppress women but women also oppress men, or more broadly, every group oppresses every other group, albeit to different degrees.

This pertains to what you're saying about attitudes towards emotional expression because it's an example of the two-way street of kyriarchy. Women, on the one hand, are assumed to be emotional, hysterical, silly, frivolous, etc.; on the other hand, they're generally free to express their emotions however they please without being judged for it. Men are assumed to be rational, strong, calculating, sensible, etc.; on the other hand, a man who cries is judged as weak and castigated for showing emotion. In this way, gender stereotyping and the enforcement of strict gender normativity hurt both sexes, and both men and women engage in the oppression of both men and women.

So, the odds are that, having grown up in a society where men are judged for emotional expression and consequently try to avoid being emotionally expressive in public, you've internalised the view that men aren't as emotional, the other edge of which sword is that women are frivolous. At one moment, that sword could be wielded in a "let the men decide, darling" way, in the next a "must hold in the tears" way, in the next in a "what a pansy, I'll stop listening" way - exaggerated extremes in the present day, but as you say, it's subconscious rather than conscious. You may feel, as a result of empathy, embarrassed or awkward upon hearing a man being emotionally expressive, and project that on to the emotional expression itself, when really it's a consequence of your fear that, were you being emotionally expressive, you would be judged for it.

The neutral view, that people vary in the intensity of their emotions and their emotional expression regardless of other personal attributes, would make none of your own emotions or any emotionally expressive behaviour socially unacceptable (liberating you and other men) and would not assume that women are universally less capable of remaining calm under stress or making decisions not influenced by their whims (liberating women), while still permitting the existence of strong, rational men and flighty, emotional women. Essentially, adopting that view, personal variation is a matter of personal variation, rather than a matter of universal laws of attribution to irrelevant other factors. Were that view predominant, it wouldn't occur to you to think that a man might not be as capable or that a woman might be more capable of expressing emotions.

So, I don't think that acknowledging a subconscious bias is necessarily sexist. In fact, those biases need to be acknowledged to be beaten - if they remain unspoken they're immune to analysis and criticism, they can't be deconstructed while they're hidden. Exposing them is important. Rather, whether or not it's sexist depends on your response to that bias. Being aware that you've internalised it, you can look out for it and make sure it doesn't lead you astray until it goes away (not sexist and self-liberating), or you can rationalise and attempt to enforce it on reality (sexist and self-oppressing). I don't mean to sound judgemental or patronising - you don't seem like the sort to do the latter.

Regarding the "classical"/"pop" divide: there is one thing that the genres under the umbrella of "pop" there have in common: they're descended from African music, whereas the diverse genres categorised as "classical" aren't. This isn't your dichotomy, of course: it's very common; prevalent, even. Factor in that "pop" is short for "popular", literally "of the people" rather than "enjoying widespread popularity", and consider that "classical", then, is understood to mean "not of the people but of their rulers", and "classical music" becomes "powerful rich white male music" and "pop music" becomes "powerless poor black female music", with the former being set above the latter; that is, it becomes a model of the cultural hegemony of the ruling class.

If you consider the equivalent distinctions between types of music in the run up to and during the 19th century, you'll see something similar. There's the high, refined art of the clergy and the nobility, then there's nouveau riche art, which is gaudy and crude: a poor imitation. A good example is opera, which was looked down on when it first emerged. The ultimate form of that latter category, in every sense of the word, is romanticism. Romanticism becomes the artistic movement of liberal philosophy, which ultimately overthrows the upper class (the nobility and the powerful clergy) and establishes the bourgeoisie as the new ruling class. Romanticism then becomes the basis of the bourgeoisie's cultural hegemony, providing the necessary national myths, traditions and the sense of legitimacy the new social order required. Because the bourgeoisie has defeated the upper class, it can claim the upper class's art as its own, and the notion of "classical" music is born. That's when working class countercultures emerge to challenge the bourgeoisie's cultural hegemony, heralding the birth of popular music - the music of the people, not of their rulers.

I've probably posted this before, because it's one of my favourite quotes from the whole of antiquity, but go back further and you see the same thing:

Plato wrote:"Our music was once divided into its proper forms ... It was not permitted to exchange the melodic styles of these established forms and others. Knowledge and informed judgment penalized disobedience. There were no whistles, unmusical mob-noises, or clapping for applause. The rule was to listen silently and learn; boys, teachers, and the crowd were kept in order by threat of the stick. ... But later, an unmusical anarchy was led by poets who had natural talent, but were ignorant of the laws of music ... Through foolishness they deceived themselves into thinking that there was no right or wrong way in music, that it was to be judged good or bad by the pleasure it gave. By their works and their theories they infected the masses with the presumption to think themselves adequate judges. So our theatres, once silent, grew vocal, and aristocracy of music gave way to a pernicious theatrocracy...the criterion was not music, but a reputation for promiscuous cleverness and a spirit of law-breaking."

Laws 700-701a.

What's Plato speaking about, here, if not the emergence of a countercultural style of music? The contrast between "listen silently and learn" and "clapping for applause" is the same contrast as the one between "clapping for applause" and screaming and wooping, pogo dancing, moshpits, or whatever. The highlighted phrases scream "punk rock" to me, and could apply just as easily to any previous or successive countercultural movement.
I could (and almost did) write a long comparison of Plato's thinking and the decline of Athens to fascism and the decline of the West after the First World War, but I think I'm officially filibustering now. The point of it would have been that simplistic musical dichotomies aren't as harmless or as simple as they appear and should be given greater consideration before they're assumed. Such things are the vessels of cultural hegemony, Trojan Horses that bear it concealed into your mind where it can burst out and take over: it seems intuitive to accept the horse without inspecting it, which is what makes it so dangerous.

That was very insightful, Jordan, both on a personal level and on the subject of musical taxonomy (which I find fascinating, even if I don't know very much about it). And I am extremely impressed that you came up with a well argued and pertinent 1000+ word posting in response to my message of only about 2 hours earlier!