This exchange was among the milder critiques to emerge from the free, communal viewing of “Three Films about the Middle East,” sponsored by the Southside Hub of Production last Saturday. The attendees had trudged through the bleak, dank November evening to pile into a combination ornate sitting room and modern art gallery.

The full house for the screening was, for the most part, a middle-aged, straight-laced crew. Waiting for the films to begin, one couple chatted seriously about the Republican presidential race while another gentleman, immaculately dressed, perpetually stroked his goatee while perusing the Wall Street Journal.

Calling everyone together, the organization’s film director reminded the audience that the event was more topical than they had planned. The news of the day was the renewed brutality in Tahrir Square, where an army that had helped end one dictator’s crimes had begun to do some beating of its own.

It was, therefore, more than slightly surreal to travel with documentary-maker Pamela Nice back to 2003 when the news roiling Egypt was the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The short documentaries are the fruit of Nice’ s several sojourns to the Middle East.

They record the reactions of Egyptians to an American invasion and the aspirations of several Moroccan teenagers. Then, in a cringe-inducing coda, Nice turns the camera back on the United States.

The films have their faults. Nice gives some nice shots of inchoate Cairo avenues, but often confines her interviews to Egyptian academics and journalists with flawless and erudite English. Her second film is an improvement and altogether rougher on the heartstrings. In a stunning contrast, she recounts the desperation of an unemployed youth detained for illegally immigrating to Spain and an uplifting account of optimistic students craving PhDs from the West.

The footage she produces—young people talking about Islam as a religion of peace—is shown in opposition to the words of a suit we see later in a Minnesotan coffee shop, who calls the entire region “backward and inhumane.”

Americans, in these films, are the ones that consistently come off as backward.

As java-seeking customers promptly surrender when asked to identify basic Middle Eastern countries on a map, you flinch. When an Egyptian man recounts the number of times he’s been asked by Americans if he lives in a pyramid, you want to weep.

At the evening’s close, a petition was passed around protesting the $1.3 billion in munitions we’re still providing to the military government in Egypt. Afterwards, Beshara treated viewers to an original ode he made to the crisis, built around the refrain, “The Situation is Fucked Up!” Confronted with this profane techno ditty, the goateed gentleman stared pointedly into the floorboards. It was clear, however, that no one disagreed.

Courtesy of South Side Projections

It’s a typically warm July evening and the chairs at the South Side Community Arts Center are filled with strange bedfellows. Sixty-year-old former gang members.  Twenty-something film geeks from the North Side. A state senator. Given a casual glance, this is the kind of scene that improv games and creative writing prompts are made of. For organizer Michael W. Phillips Jr., though, this ragtag attendance is validation for his latest endeavor, a roving film series called South Side Projections.

“This is what I want to do,” he says excitedly. “Bring these really interesting groups together in a situation where they might never [have] come together before.” Phillips has years of experience working in the nonprofit world, but his quirky graphic tee and worn jeans place him firmly in a younger demographic. Phillips is thoughtful and amiable—two traits that easily explain his ability to drop the names of dozens of connections in the Chicago arts and nonprofit scenes.

Before starting South Side Projections, Phillips spent six years working at the Bank of America Cinema on the North Side. When the theater unwound its final reel in December of last year, he decided to turn his gaze towards his home neighborhood of Hyde Park. Working with the Hyde Park Alliance for Jazz and Culture, Phillips projected jazz films from neighborhood spaces. He remembers, “It was really fun to sit in a storefront with this clattering projector and show 70-year-old movies. I decided I wanted to expand that, so without any idea what the hell I was doing, I started a nonprofit.” The initial events engaged attendees and reimaging of an ordinary space impassioned Phillips into starting South Side Projections, spurring him to commit the next six months of his life into showing great films in unexpected places.

South Side Projections has all of the trappings of a typical movie theater—except, of course, the theater itself. This isn’t an accident—it is how the organization was designed to work. In its day-to-day operations, South Side Projections is a one-man show. While the organization has a small board of directors, Phillips does most of the work: booking speakers, managing press, setting up the screen and projector. The series banks on the existence of other enthusiastic but tight-budgeted non-profit organizations willing to give its screenings a home. So far, South Side Projections hasn’t been lacking for willing hosts. Phillips describes the process with elegant simplicity: “I find an interesting film that I want to show, and then I find an organization with space.”

Previous collaborations have included screening a film about the Chicago Vice Lords street gang at the aforementioned South Side Community Arts Center and showing a series of documentary shorts about the civil rights movement on the site of the historic Pullman railcar factory. Phillips argues that while these venues occasionally pose technological challenges, the viewing experience is brought to life by the meaningful spaces and company. Recalling a friend’s reaction to an event, Phillip says, “Being there with people who lived through it was so much more effective than just watching something on your TV.”

Others seem to agree, as the turnout has steadily increased. Each of the organization’s events has managed to do what plenty of other community groups struggle to achieve: bring together an audience that is representative of the diverse heritage of the South Side.

The heterogeneous crowd that attends South Side Projections screenings is no doubt due—at least in part—to Phillips’ keen eye for selecting films. While a film buff at heart, Phillips’ taste in movies has more in common with that of “Transformers” director Michael Bay than any be-tweeded professor. “I’m not going to show Ken Burns-style documentaries with people sitting in front of, like, bookcases. Slow pans across photographs—I hate that so much,” he explains with passion. “If your title has a colon in it, rethink it. I’m not interested in watching someone’s dissertation.”

Admission to all of South Side Projections’ events is currently give-what-you-want, and while the organization has low operating costs, money can still be an issue. Currently, Phillips is using proceeds from a city arts grant to submit South Side Projections for federal 501(c)(3) non-profit status. This recognition, he hopes, will allow the organization to apply for grants and to accept corporate sponsorships. “But I don’t want like ‘Nike presents,’” he clarifies.

Phillips’ ultimate vision for South Side Projections isn’t too far from what he already has. “I wouldn’t build a theater,” he says. After a pause he adds, “I don’t think I’d expand beyond what I’m already doing. More of a budget would mean that I could do this more often. That I could pay people to help me do it. And maybe pay myself.”

Though a personal paycheck isn’t off the table, it really does appear that Phillips is sincere in his simple goal to bring good film events to the South Side. “I’ve got a movie and I’ve got people to come and speak and I’ll handle press and I’ll bring my own projector and I’ll bring my own screen, and all you have to do is unlock the door,” he says, mimicking the pitch he provides to the non-profits with which South Side Projections collaborates.

The blonde woman had grown up in an all-white neighborhood near Marquette Park, and attempted to explain that the film everyone had just watched—filmmaker Tom Palazzolo’s footage of local Nazi party members preparing to combat a civil rights march on the park in 1976—did not give a full picture of the terrifying violence blacks faced if they dared to enter the neighborhood. Many in the audience, however, knew exactly how bad it was—they lived through it. And the documentaries were no talking-head montages; the powerful cinema verité-style footage brought viewers brutally close to the events and people that otherwise would fade into the community’s fuzzy collective memory or be loosely approximated by history books.

Etta James’ “At Last” played as projectionists from the Chicago Film Archives set up, and an American flag hung on the wall. Michael Phillips, director of South Side Projections (no relation to the Tribune critic), prefaced the first film—footage of a 1966 Cicero March led by Robert Lucas, who was in attendance—with a warning: “You feel like you’re going to get hit by a rock when you’re watching it.” The cameraman filmed from within the mob of black men and women protesting restrictive covenants. The camera jerked sideways as angry neighborhood residents jostled the filmmaker, then slowly receded from a police officer shaking a club at the lens.

The second film’s portrayal of the party members delivered a shock, not with violence, but with the banality of their hateful campaigning. With an intensity that bordered on the absurd, leader Frank Collin stood on a soapbox, swastika-emblazoned flag waving in the background, announcing a party member’s bid for Congress and proclaiming, “this territory will remain white and not fall to the black invasion.” Phillips put it best when he said, “just seeing them go about their business is more terrifying than almost anything,” even while Collin’s followers were making Monty Python jokes and accepting donations in a glass jar.

The last film—a chat from 2000 between Lucas and Bronzeville Historical Society president Sherry Williams, who was also in attendance—wasn’t as immediately striking, but it was the beginning of a conversation about the movement’s legacy. Eleven years later, the conversation continued, on the screen and in the seats.

This was Huyghe’s second appearance at the UofC. In 2000, the Renaissance Society exhibited one of Huyghe’s first major installations in the United States. Since then, he has emerged as one of the hottest new figures on the conceptual art scene, with works appearing at the Venice Biennale and in the Tate Modern Gallery. And with a spot in the upcoming 2012 Documenta festival in Germany, Huyghe certainly has the accolades to be anything but reasonable.

Yet Huyghe happily adjusted the evening’s schedule to present photo stills of a few of his earlier works, hoping to translate the mood of his forbidden film into an ad hoc slideshow. With passion and enthusiasm, he beckoned the audience into his wildly transposable spaces of reality and fantasy. “There is a protocol of fiction embedded in any condition,” he explained, “and I wish to intensify the coefficient of that fiction, not so much to live in it, but to catch a moment, reinvent it, and create a crystal.”

But each of Huyghe’s crystals is part of a larger lattice system: each piece is interrelated with another, and art breeds more art. “L’expédition scintillante/A musical” is a three-act journey climbing the floors of a museum—passing by a tugboat made of ice (melting over time) to a display of colorful curls of smoke to a black ice-skating rink on the final level. This wild quest was the genesis of a frozen tundra-themed series of works, inspiring “A Journey That Wasn’t,” which involved reconstructing an Antarctic island in the middle of New York’s Central Park. Not content to simply build a model of the icy isle, Huyghe gathered geographic data from the actual landmass and translated them into musical notes, which were played by an orchestra on site.

While he couldn’t play the actual film, to the audience’s delight, Huyghe closed the show with a screening of a ten-minute “making-of” documentary of “The Host and the Cloud.” The video clip showed scenes in a Parisian museum unfolding uncontrolled: outrageous theatrics, pumpkin carvings, and a model solo on her runway.

“I simply put the conditions for narrative, an hypothèse, so that the narrative can happen,” he said, commenting on his role as the orchestrating artist. “I aim to produce a supplement of reality. I know that sounds a little bit pretentious, but well…” Here he cut off, embracing the laughter of the crowd before him.

Courtesy of the Renaissance Society

“Hair” is doing a lot of public relations work for the Renaissance Society these days. The 1967 musical’s  upper-register anthem proclaims and repeats the name of the gallery’s newest exhibition, “The Age of Aquarius.” With the words,”This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, the age of Aquarius!” ringing in your head, images of bell-bottomed hippies dancing atop the University of Chicago’s Cobb Hall can’t help but come to mind. This is a fanciful image for what initially seems to be a fanciful exhibit—after over 40 years of artistic fascination with the 1960s (the oft-called “Age of Aquarius”) it would seem as if there is not much left to be said about the period that doesn’t come across as ridiculous, trite, or inauthentic.

“Quadrangle,” a 17-minute documentary by filmmaker Amy Grappell, tells the story of a marriage in the early 1970s. “Everything is a tragedy. Everybody has a tragedy,” begins the film. “You think your tragedy is the only tragedy? Everyone has a tragedy. Everyone has an interesting life.” Already, the opening lines of the film—the first impression most visitors receive after walking into the gallery—border on the melodramatic. Despite the extravagant words, the voice sounds honest and unscripted. There are no over-dramatic musical flourishes, only a woman from New York City, driving her car and telling her story.

Gradually, the woman is revealed to be Grappell’s mother, Deanna, who, with her husband Paul, entered into an open relationship with another married couple in the early ’70s. The story is told by Deanna and Paul in separate interviews, masterfully edited together by Grappell to create the illusion that the two of them—who, until the film was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, had been separated for 30 years—are telling the story together, engaging each other in conversation.

Over the course of the short film, Deanna and Paul recount how after months of being in a foursome (a “quadrangle”), the couples ultimately divorced and married the opposite spouses. The film ends here, leaving viewers to form their own judgments about a relationship change that was intended to save a failing marriage.

“I’ve been carrying this story for a really long time,” said Grappell in a phone interview. “I don’t think it was very good for us, as kids, but in a way, them saying [the foursome] was an alternative to divorce, that ‘we’re all going to be honest about it,’ there’s something very idealistic about it…as a culture we just don’t have that kind of energy right now, or that kind of optimism, to try things. And maybe that was just a moment in time in our history, but there is something about that moment in time…I feel nostalgic for that.”

Although perhaps less direct in their approach, the other artists in the exhibition evoke the essence of the era no less effectively. A four-by-eight foot plinth in the corner of the gallery supports Carol Bove’s “The Difficult Crossing,” a piece consisting of over ten interconnected objects that include a piece of coral and concrete, a folk art bust, and a photograph of New Age icon Gerald Heard. On the wall is a tapestry of peacock feathers, another installation by Bove that toes the line between the garish and the beautiful. With its kaleidoscopic swirls of blue and green the peacock feathers are easily the most psychedelic piece in the gallery. Hundreds and hundreds of feathers hang together on the wall in an almost painfully flashy display that is more freakish than groovy.

One of the exhibit’s more striking pieces is David Noonan’s series of eight flat, life-size figures of dancers placed around the gallery floor. Taken from period photos of dance and theater performances, the frozen, black-clad figures look tribal and even fanciful in their various positions, one with its head down and hands shaking in the air, another appearing to be in the middle of a handclap, spinning on one foot. In their different positions each seems to tell a different story, and the variety of their appearances—even though all are dressed in the same black outfit—evokes a variety of emotions: amusement at the spinning figure, curiosity at the hand shaking figure and what it is he’s trying to do.

The ’60s are prone to oversimplification, perceived as either an idealistic time we should return to or an idealistic time that we should strive never to repeat. The exhibit succeeds by refusing to make these claims about the Age of Aquarius. The pieces evoke feelings of joy and sadness, hope and disillusionment, but rather than demanding a specific understanding from the viewer, they demand only to be experienced.

The Renaissance Society. Cobb Hall 418, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Through May 1. Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. (773)702-8679. renaissancesociety.org

Such ambiguities reflect the democratic agenda of WHPK’s annual collaboration with the Film Studies Center, “Pictures and Sounds.” With talent drawn from the deliciously obscure Midwestern avant-noise/free music scene, “Pictures and Sounds” revisited the live soundtrack tradition of early silent film. The musicians selected short films and performed to them live as they watched along with the audience.

Playing first was Chicago’s own Chris Bush, better known as Flower Man, who earned a name for himself as the proverbial better-half of the psychedelic retro-electronics outfit Caboladies, and later entered more minimalist territory with his solo work. Alongside the first film selection, a short from Midnight Star Media, Bush dealt out sparse blips and reeling peals, expertly punctuating the anxious, repetitious hallucinations caught on video. Daniel Dlugoseilski (Bodymorph) of Detroit chose to take his performance in the other direction: rather than trying to blend in with the abstract visuals, Dlugoseilski’s music was a visceral reimagination of Stanley Kubrick’s 1955 film-noir, “Killer’s Kiss.” Accompanied only by agoraphobic saxophone yelps, even the most frantic chases and scenes of combat took on a new futile pallor. Next up was Frank Rosaly, perhaps the most renowned of the performers—if not for his percussive agility then for his numerous and wide-ranging collaborations in the world of noise. Although scheduled to accompany a new film by his friend Derek Welte, complications led to the screening of “Jeux des Reflets et de la Vitesse,” a French experimental film from the ’20s of first-person travel footage. Rosaly’s sound-barrage renewed the disorienting aspect of this otherwise age-tempered footage. The last act was Second Family Band, an offshoot/resurrection of famed Madison music collective Davenport. Weaving their characteristic tapestry of American psychedelic folk-drone, they achieved a remarkable, though not exactly harmonious, counterpoint to the excerpts from Sergei Parajanov’s 1968 tour de force, “The Color of Pomegranates.”

“Pictures and Sounds” was certainly a demonstration of some of the tremendous talent that the Midwest has to offer in the way of experimental artists. In the end, though, it was the fallibility of the performers that gave the presentation its charming, inspiring character. Great communion was made afterwards with the sharing of flasks, swapping of emails, and purchase of—what else?—cassettes.

Courtesy Dream Theater

Did you suck your thumbs as a child? Even if you didn’t, imagine being a thumb-sucking child. Then, imagine seeing images of other thumb-suckers having their thumbs brutally removed from their hands and devoured.  If you were a character in Dream Theatre’s upcoming play, “Devilish Children and the Civilizing Process,” this would be your fate.

Less than a week before opening night, the interior of Dream Theatre was beginning to resemble a 19th century nightmare. The theater, normally left as-is for productions, had been made over to be a very different  space. Rotting brown “curtains” lined the sides of the arena, leaving no images of pleasantry to the imagination.

Flash back to 19th century Germany, where a psychiatrist named Heinrich Hoffmann is teaching his son manners. Being of a creative bent, Hoffmann decides to write his son a book. The book is a collection of gruesome cautionary tales geared towards children: a boy who goes outside during a storm is swept away to his doom when wind catches his umbrella, a healthy boy who will not eat his soup wastes away and dies, etc. These tales were extremely well received by Hoffmann’s son and the German public.

“Devilish Children” is loosely based on these tales. Rather than staging Hoffman’s stories individually, the play weaves them together into a Dickensian drama. Dream Theatre has been converted into a school for naughty children—the theater stage has become the schoolyard. Set at Christmas, the story follows a three-year-old boy named Karl who, like many other children, is left at the school because of what his parents consider to be extraordinarily bad manners—he is a thumb-sucker who cries, doesn’t listen to his parents, and gets into a fight with another boy. There, the “devilish children” who run the schoolyard teach him what will happen to him if he keeps up his nasty habits by acting out plays based on Hoffman’s tales.

Dream Theatre is known for their philosophy of breaking the fourth wall and including audience members in their plays. This play is no different. To add to the experience, the entire play was written in verse that is reminiscent of nursery rhymes. According to Jeremy Menekseoglu, the writer and director of “Devilish Children,” entering the theater will be like “walking into a haunted house…[and] being left in there.”

“Devilish Children” is part puppet show, part fairy tale, part pantomime, with some melodrama thrown in, as described by Menekseoglu. “We take you down as deep into hell as we can,” he says, “and then we see if we can come back.” The play features elements of a horror show, but the audience is promised more than  “just images of torture and death” although those will not be absent from the play.

On the surface, “Devilish Children” may appear to be a typical Halloween spectacle—after all, it has all of the elements of a Tim Burton film. But when taken as a whole, “Devilish Children” is a fable about innocence, learning, and forgiveness. The children in the play are abandoned; their parents leave them in what is essentially an orphanage for minor offenses. The play shows the extremes of parents and children at odds, a theme that everyone can relate to, even if they haven’t been subjected to torture.

There will “not [be] a moment of safety” for audience members once they enter the theater, says Menekseoglu. Watch out for the ventriloquist ticket taker’s murderous puppet on your way in.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, the internationally renowned Russian conceptual artists, married couple, and the subjects of the film, were seeing it for the first time as well. They were at the University as fellows in the Artspeaks series, and had spoken the previous night at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Nestled together in the middle of the small theater, they too had comments to offer. When asked to comment on the clips themselves, Emilia told Wallach, “We will talk later. It’s very good, but…”

The clips themselves were beautiful and intriguing, but didn’t form a coherent film, a fact which audience members kept bringing up. There was a disjunction between Wallach’s attempts to talk about the movie she is hoping to make and the audience’s persistent discussion of the clips they had just seen. Wallach struggled most to reconcile her desire to present the Kabakovs’ installation art in a comprehensive way with the knowledge that one cannot really experience the pieces through a film.

What was on display of the Kabakovs personally, however, was far more satisfying. The clips conveyed Emilia’s forceful character and her thoughtfulness for Ilya. The film will revolve around Ilya’s decision to return to Moscow for an exhibition after living in the U.S. since the late ‘80s. Clips of Ilya pacing through an empty garage-turned-gallery alternate with more interesting scenes, including an excerpt of the show’s opening in which reporters, critics, and photographers leer menacingly over the unassuming Ilya. Certainly, the screening brought to life the artist’s aching nostalgia for a Soviet utopia that never existed. Emilia’s voice ran over various pieces of the installations, exemplifying this longing: “The moment you lose your roots, you are in the air. You never, ever put your roots in another soil.”

Screenshot from "Studs in a Soapbox" (courtesy of Media Burn)

Most college students grew up around camcorders and YouTube, but there was a time when no one outside of the major networks was able to inexpensively shoot video or easily broadcast it. On Thursday, May 6th, the Fund for Innovative Television (FITV) gave a screening at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center of documentary clips from their expansive archive of tapes from early expeditions into independent television. FITV founder Tom Weinberg, executive director Sara Chapman, and UofC film professor Judy Hoffman led an informal and democratic discussion in the spirit of the original videos. The two-hour event was well received by the audience, who indulged Weinberg and Hoffman’s request for interruption with enthusiastic questions.

In 2003, FITV started the Media Burn archive, a not-for-profit that works both to preserve quickly degrading tapes and to share their invaluable and unique footage with the world through a free website (mediaburn.org) with a large selection of documentary video. In a modest basement on the Northwest Side, a 6,000-plus video archive spans three decades, the entire country, and beyond. Most of these tapes come from Weinberg’s work with public television to broadcast non-traditional documentary video in programs such as “The 90s,” a national show that assembled short clips to capture the new decade, and “Image Union,” a weekly show that began in 1972 and still takes submissions of short films for its program every Saturday night. The advent of independent television came with the invention of the Sony Video Portapak, a relatively inexpensive and portable device that freed the medium from the major stations. Weinberg and Hoffman spoke with nostalgia as they remembered the time of video revolution, when they were, as Weinberg put it, “turning the cameras around on the media.”

The screening began with a lighthearted clip of Muddy Waters performing at the old Checkerboard Lounge in 1981. But the presentation quickly moved on to more politically charged work, such as “The World’s Largest TV Show” and “Four More Years,” which, respectively, covered the 1972 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. A team of videographers was able to get onto the floors of the conventions in order to interview both the attendees and the media outlets that were covering them, as well as to document the emotionally intense anti-war demonstrations being staged outside. Other notable clips included Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel (who donated his own footage to Media Burn).

Though Weinberg and Hoffman certainly have personal investment in the project—many of their own tapes are in the collection—they strongly advocate the use of the footage for historical research. The videos are primary sources that speak to a history ignored by the popular media. For instance, Media Burn screened “Jane Byrne’s Easter at Cabrini” from 1981, in which Byrne, the first and only female mayor of Chicago, defeated in 1983 by Harold Washington, attended a rally at Cabrini Green as part of her campaign to clean up the public housing development, an area notorious for gang activity, crime, and violence.

She was conspicuously out of place, awkwardly singing as she received the words to a hymn through her earpiece, and causing a good deal of dissatisfaction within the crowd. No mainstream media attended; Media Burn has the only video record of the event.

The objective of Media Burn is difficult to describe because their purpose is not in a specific mission, but in video itself. The grainy image, the shaky shot, the disfigured audio—aspects that our technology-savvy generation might condemn as signs of “low quality”—are essential to the aesthetic, social, and cultural mission of independent television. The videos were not shot under a major network. No extra lighting was used. They had no narrators in their documentaries, presenting only what Weinberg calls a “video scrapbook.”

We, like the original independent television makers of the seventies, are in a time of major technological change, with the internet as a tool for the spread of information and video. Media Burn has taken advantage of this progress by making available to the public their sometimes political, always captivating mixture of Chicago history, Americana, and the quotidian.

Through the stories of 26 men and women, “Word is Out” showed the contradictions of LGBT life in the ‘70s. Nearly a decade after the Stonewall Riots and Harvey Milk’s successful political campaign, homosexuality was still a crime across the country, and the police regularly raided gay bars. One individual in the film commented on the prevailing popular attitude towards homosexuals—that they were “criminal, sick, or wicked.” Two interviewees who had been institutionalized because of their sexual orientation described being forced to undergo shock treatments. One man was surprisingly calm as he commented on his near brush with castration. He estimated that he had received “somewhere between ten and twenty… probably around twenty-five [shock treatments].”

The subjects of the documentary were incredibly diverse, from a bouffanted blond Southern woman to a gay activist, business suits to pride parades. All of the people interviewed in the film struggled with issues that we still struggle with today: discrimination, gender roles, and the fight for wider acceptance.
The most beautiful aspect of the film was how firmly it was set in its historical context. “Word is Out” managed to show how difficult it was to be gay in the ‘70s while capturing the joy of honest, real-life love stories. In one interview, a man describes how finally falling in love “meant I was a real person…I was using a part of myself that I never felt before.”