Dr. Doolittle for the Defense?

So, once upon a time in France, this happened:

In the fall of 1457, villagers in Savigny, France witnessed a sow and six piglets attack and kill a 5-year-old boy. Today, the animals would be summarily killed. But errant 15th-century French pigs went to court. And it wasn’t for a show trial—this was the real deal, equipped with a judge, two prosecutors, eight witnesses, and a defense attorney for the accused swine. Witness testimony proved beyond reasonable doubt that the sow had killed the child. The piglets’ role, however, was ambiguous. Although splattered with blood, they were never seen directly attacking the boy. The judge sentenced the sow to be hanged by her hind feet from a ‘gallows tree.’ The piglets, by contrast, were exonerated.

That was not a unique occurrence. It was at least somewhat common at the time in Europe. What, precisely, was going on in a trial like that? There are some theories, of course:

The dominant explanation from legal scholars and historians is that, in a society of people who believed deeply in a divinely determined order of being, with humans at the top, any disruption of God’s hierarchy had to be visibly restored with a formal event. Another hypothesis is that animal trials may have provided authorities an opportunity to intimidate the owners of animals—especially pigs—who ran roughshod through the commons. A sow hanging from the gallows was, in essence, a public service announcement saying, Control your pigs or they’ll die sooner than you hoped.

Another theory, floated by the author of the linked piece at Slate, is that people in those days had a closer connection to the animals with which they worked every day and endowed them with more moral agency than we do today. That seems more like a modern-day animal rights theory overlaid on the past, given (as many commentators point out) the rather poor way that animals were otherwise treated in that era. Personally, I like the due process/warning to owners theory.

But regardless of why these folks were trying animals for acting like, well, animals, I’m more intrigued by the idea that these weren’t “show trials.” Particularly, I’m wondering about the role of the defense attorney. I’ve represented difficult clients in my lifetime, but never one that was of a different species. At the very least we could talk to each other (whether they would listen, of course, is a whole other story).

I’m not just being flip, either. Being able to converse with one’s attorney is a key feature of what it means to be competent to stand trial. Whether a defendant is competent, according to the Supreme Court, involves determining:

whether he has sufficient present ability to consult with his lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding-and whether he has a rational as well as factual understanding of the proceedings against him.

Incompetence at the time of trial isn’t like an insanity plea – it’s a complete bar on being prosecuted, at least until competency is “restored.”

It’s not as if the concept of incompetence didn’t exist back in the middle ages, at least across the channel in England:

Medievil English law required the defendant to enter a plea before the criminal trial could proceed. If the defendant remained mute, increasingly heavy weights were placed on the defendant to induce a plea so that the trial could continue. But defendants who were mute because of mental disorder or physical infirmity (i.e., mute by visitation of God) instead of by choice (i.e., mute of malice) were spared this ritual.

Fictional naturalists and the odd saint aside, who can talk with a pig? I’ve never tried, of course, but if my conversations with Maia and Uzume are any indication it wouldn’t be very productive. At the very least, they don’t talk back and tell me anything useful (aside from an affectionate lick on the nose, which I don’t want any client to ever try), which can be kind of important when it comes to building a defense.

Which is what makes me think these animal trials were less about the critters themselves than the people who owned them. After all, there’s no evidence that the pig in the case mentioned above testified in its own defense or had any kind of idea what was going on. But you can damned sure bet that the pig’s owner, to whom the swine probable represented a substantial hunk of his property, got the message.

In the end, then, they really were show trials. Maybe not in the sense we think about them today (or the Cardassians), in which the outcome is preordained ahead of time, but in the sense that the object of derision and judgment has little, if any, say in or understanding of the result. It’s sort of like The Trial, only with a good barbeque at the end!

Right Answer, Wrong Reason – Try Again

Remember in school, when you’d have to “show your work” to get full credit for an answer? Usually it was in math class, but the same principle applies wherever. I think the theory behind teachers doing that was to keep people from cheating, but it also serves the important purpose of assuring that people get the right answers for the right reasons. Random guesses pulled out of one’s ass may produce a right answer now and then, but not with any consistency.

Consider the following, in which a confused young woman contacts a television show and asks for advice from its sage host:

I buy a lot of clothes and other items at Goodwill and other secondhand shops. Recently my mom told me that I need to pray over the items, bind familiar spirits, and bless the items before I bring them into the house. Is my mother correct? Can demons attach themselves to material items?

The elderly host provided the correct answer, which is “no.” However, said host was Pat Robertson, pontificating on his TV show, so his reasoning is a bit off:

Can demonic spirits attach themselves to inanimate objects? The answer is yes. But I don’t think every sweater you get from Goodwill has demons in it. [Laughs.] But in a sense, your mother’s just being super cautious so hey, it isn’t gonna hurt you any to rebuke any spirits that happen to have attached themselves to those clothes.

*Bzzzt* Sorry, Pat, but thanks for playing. The correct reasoning, of course, is that demons don’t exist and thus can no more attach themselves to things than leprechauns or jackalopes. Not that I’d expect any better from Pat. He’s failed Reality 101 for decades now.

And while Pat’s right that it certainly won’t do the caller any damage to “rebuke any spirits” of her secondhand clothes – whatever the hell that means – she will be wasting time and mental energy she might better spend in other pursuits. Not to mention that living in fear of superstitious nonsense is hardly a good way to go through life.

I might suggest she read a book about how the world around her really works, but I suspect she might think it was infested with demons, too.

Friday Review: 9012Live

In honor of the release of Side Effects (which is pretty good, for what it is), acclaimed writer/director Steven Soderbergh is retiring from the biz. Given that milestone, I thought it was a good time to take a look back at where it all began for Soderbergh. You might think of Sex, Lies, and Videotape (which is also pretty good), and while that was his big breakthrough, it wasn’t his first cinematic rodeo. Rather, Soderbergh’s first gig was a small project for a group of aging English rockers struggling to stay relevant in the early 1980s.

Said rockers at the time were Yes, although they weren’t originally supposed to be. Cinema had coalesced around ex-Yesmen Alan White and Chris Squire, along with South African guitarist Trevor Rabin. Demos lingered and eventually fellow Yesman/garden gnome Jon Anderson came into the fold. The band got renamed (much in the same was as their contemporaries, Discipline, morphed back into King Crimson), added another Yes alum in Tony Kaye, and released a new album. To the surprise of many, it was a hit.

90125 (named after the catalog number from the record company) was produced by another ex-Yesman, Trevor Horn, and veritably screamed out its modernity. From its sound to its oh-so-early-80s digital artwork (made “utilizing Apple IIe 64K RAM Micro-computer”!).

I doubt any Yesfans will claim 90125 is their best work, but it’s not their worst, either. As an attempt to reshape their sound for the new decade, it came out at sort of the midpoint of similar efforts from the band’s 70s colleagues (nowhere near the aforementioned Discipline, not quite as good as Signals or Grace Under Pressure, but better than the self-titled Genesis and Civilian). And it did produce the band’s biggest hit, “Owner of Lonely Heart.” Once the tour started it must have seemed as good a time as any to make a similarly modern concert film.

Enter Soderbergh, fresh out of film school. Rather than follow the footsteps of Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense and go for a “you are there on stage” effect, Soderbergh went completely the opposite direction, mixing concert footage with outtakes from 1950s educational films (at least one of which eventually made its way to Mystery Science Theater 3000). Some are given day-glow colorization that bounces off the very 80s look of the band on stage.

Does the effect work? Certainly lots of people are put off by all the cross cutting. It is a concert film, after all, so what’s up with the extraneous shit? But it’s also what makes 9012Live unique. Nothing else I’ve ever seen looks quite like it. Besides, since that’s how I first saw it lo many years ago on MTV so maybe my brain’s hardwired to expect it. However, if you’re one of those people who can’t stand the non-concert stuff be consoled by the fact that in its current DVD version you can watch only the concert itself, without any extra visual stimuli.

Well, not the entire concert. Only a little over an hour was released, relying heavily on tracks from 90125, plus a couple old favorites from The Yes Album (“Roundabout” appears as a bonus track on the DVD). The band’s in pretty good shape and most of the album material is better here than in the studio. The old stuff even comes off well, with more muscular takes on the tracks than the band trotted out on tour during most of the 70s. No, Rabin is not Steve Howe, but he knows that and plays his own way. Give the man credit for hewing to his own skill set.

As it happened, the careers of Soderbergh and the band he chronicled have gone in opposite directions since 9012Live. Soderbergh, of course, went on to great critical acclaim as one of the most prolific directors of our time (seriously, he’s made 29 feature-length movies since!). Yes never hit the commercial heights of 90125 again and this variant of the band dissolved in 1994. They’ve done good work musically since, although they’ve recently sunk to nearly parodic levels of lineup changes and being the headliner on a prog-themed cruise.

Soderbergh’s retirement may not be permanent, but if it is he can at least be assured of going out while on top of his game. That might be a good lesson to learn for other aging artsy types.

The Details
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9012Live
Released 1985
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Featuring Trevor Rabin, Jon Anderson, Chris Squire, Alan White, and Tony Kaye (plus another keyboard player under the stage, IIRC)

How Not to Make a Point

I’ve never heard of writer Akram Aylisli, nor do I know whether his books are any good. But I want to go buy one, just to honk off the authoritarians in his native Azerbaijan.

Aylisli’s latest work is a novella called Stone Dreams, which deals with an uncomfortable part of Azerbaijan’s recent history, it’s war with Armenian over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the country (in which a majority of folks were ethnic Armenians). The war was bloody, lasted more than six years, and led to allegations of atrocities perpetrated by both sides.

Aylisi’s novella examines the issue of atrocities and shows some sympathy for the Armenians:

Aylisli, who could not be reached Tuesday, told Radio Liberty two weeks ago that he dwelt on Azeri atrocities in ‘Stone Dreams’ because that was his responsibility as an Azerbaijani writer. Let Armenian authors, he said, write about the atrocities of their side — notably, a 1992 massacre in the town of Khojaly, the memory of which has become a major rallying point for aggrieved Azeris.

Sounds reasonable to me. After all, art is frequently about confronting people with the uncomfortable parts of their past, not just to make such things known, but to force people to think about where they came from and what they’re doing going forward. People may not want to read it, of course, but that’s the market for you.

Not in Azerbaijan, however, where Aylisli has had a price put on his head, or at least one part of it:

Azerbaijan’s troubled efforts to portray itself as a progressive and Western-oriented country took a beating this week with the announcement by a pro-government political party that it will pay $12,700 to anyone who cuts off the ear of a 75-year-old novelist.

But wait, as they say – there’s more. Aylisli has been stripped of the title “People’s Writer,” his books have been burned, and his son lost his job. In addition, the parliament has called for a DNA test to see if Aylisli is really Azerbaijani. None of those things screams “civilized,” but for pure tone deafness, this is hard to top:

But on Monday the head of the Modern Musavat party, Hafiz Hajiyev, told the Turan Information Agency that the time has come for Aylisli to be punished for portraying Azerbaijanis as savages.

‘We have to cut off his ear,’ Hajiyev said.

‘cause nothing says “we’re not savages” like cutting of some guys ear because he wrote a book you don’t like.

Make no mistake, if you don’t like something a writer says, by all means, say that. Organize protests. Hell, organize a boycott for all I care. The correct response to speech you don’t like is more speech, not cutting off body parts. That should go without saying. That it doesn’t in the 21st Century makes me want to crawl into a fetal position and weep for a bit.

Friday Review: The Exorcist

Yes, I know, I’m 39 years old and I’m only just getting around to seeing The Exorcist. In my defense, I’m not much of a horror movie fan in the first place. Plus, I do own a copy of Tubular Bells, purely for its musical exploits. That must count for something, right?

This is a hard movie to evaluate with a fresh eye in 2013. It’s become so much a part of the culture, referenced and riffed upon so many places, that it’s difficult to separate expectation from the movie itself. I had a similar problem with The Godfather – by the time I got to it I’d seen so much of it elsewhere that it didn’t land much of an impact on me.

I’ll not go so far as this review, written in 2000 when this “version you’ve never seen” was released in theaters:

It's good stuff but, basically, "The Exorcist" is a museum piece, something to be enjoyed for its historical value, its datedness and its almost quaint shock value. It's so low-tech! Those once-vaunted special effects, in which Regan apparently levitates into the air, were done by hidden pulleys and cords. Nowadays, that would all be achieved by computer-generated effects.

Sad to say, various crucial moments in the film made me think if comedic connections instead. The actual exorcism scenes bring to mind the Saturday Night Live parody. The demon involved, Pazuzu, leads me to Futurama. Even the famous “spider walk” scene, added for this 2000 version, brings to mind not abject horror, but rather Family Guy (Fonzie be praised!).

What makes the film still worth watching today, even if the effects creak with age and things sometimes verge on parody, is that it takes its own sweet time setting up the characters involved. As a result, although it’s nominally a horror flick, it doesn’t fall into the usual horror flick trope of having gory things happen to a bunch of cutouts you don’t really give two shits for. That’s particularly true of Father Karras, the young priest who first investigates the possession and then aids in dispatching poor Pazuzu. He’s a deeply conflicted, interesting character wrestling with his own demons (ha!) who has to be dragged into the central conceit of the movie, rather than rushing into it with enthusiasm and something to prove. If anything, in spite of the collar, he’s more Scully than Mulder.

Just yesterday I was writing about resisting the need to change nonfiction works just because the facts reported in them have been called into question. Likewise, it can be tempting for purveyors of fiction to go back and “fix” things in a finished work. Based on Roger Ebert’s review of the 2000 version, several of the changes, particularly the ending, were for the worse. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m lukewarm about The Exocist.

Still and all, it’s worth a watch. Even after all these years.  Is it the scariest movie of all time?  No, but there is nothing wrong with that.

The Details
------------------------
The Exorcist
Released 1973, "Version You've Never Seen" in 2000
Written by William Peter Blatty
Directed by William Freidkin
Starring Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Linda Blair, et. al.

Changing Facts, Not Changing Histories

This will not come as a shock to most people, but things change. More than that, our perceptions of things change. That’s particularly true of historical events, things that happen at a particular point in time. First impressions are often shaped by incomplete reporting, faulty eyewitness testimony, and the modern journalistic need to get the story right the fuck now, before the bastards down the street get it. It’s only after some time has passed, when the situation is examined comprehensively and with more distance that we get a better idea of what actually happened.

Take, for example, the unfortunate fate of Kitty Genovese.

In the early morning hours March 13, 1964, Genovese was returning from work in New York City. She was attacked, raped, and stabbed to death near her apartment building. As sad, brutal, and horrific as Genovese’s death was, that’s probably not why the name means anything to you these days (if it does at all).

Genovese’s name became widely known thanks to a reporter named A.M. Rosenthal:

It was a gruesome story that made perfect tabloid fodder, but soon it became much more. Mr. Rosenthal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who would go on to become the executive editor of The New York Times, was then a new and ambitious metropolitan editor for the paper who happened to be having lunch with the police commissioner 10 days after the crime. The commissioner mentioned that 38 people had witnessed the murder, and yet no one had come to Ms. Genovese’s aid or called the police.

Mr. Rosenthal quickly mapped out a series of articles centered around a tale of community callousness, and then followed in June with his quick-turnaround book, published by McGraw-Hill. National and international interest in the issue spiked, and soon the Kitty Genovese case became a sociological phenomenon studied intensely for clues to behavioral indifference.

Rosenthal turned his reporting into a book, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case, which was published only three months after the murders. It was a hit and became the go-to reference for information about the case.

Over the years, as we’ve learned more about the Genovese case, we’ve learned that a lot of the initial sensational claims about the “38 witnesses” probably isn’t true:

But over time the basic facts were called into question. As early as 1984 The Daily News published an article pointing to flaws in the reporting. In 2004 The Times did its own summation of the critical research, showing that since Ms. Genovese crawled around to the back of the building after she was stabbed the first time (her assailant fled and returned) very few people would have seen anything.

The article quoted among others Charles E. Skoller, the former Queens assistant district attorney who helped prosecute the case and who also has written a book on it. ‘I don’t think 38 people witnessed it,’ said Mr. Skoller, who had retired by the time of the interview. ‘I don’t know where that came from, the 38. I didn’t count 38. We only found half a dozen that saw what was going on, that we could use.’ There were other mitigating factors as well; it was a cold night, and most people had their windows closed.

‘Maybe only five people were in the position to hear her calls, if even that many, and knew what was going on,’ said Kevin Cook, an author who is currently researching the case for a book of his own and trying to determine exactly who knew what.

In and of itself, that’s no problem. Our understanding of history changes all the time, revision in light of new evidence is a good thing. But in the modern era, it brings to mind a potential problem – what should be done with books like Rosenthal’s when they are reprinted?

The issue arises because Rosenthal’s book is being reissued in digital formats without any kind of correction or updating:

Dennis Johnson, the publisher of Melville House, said he knew about the controversy but decided to stand behind Mr. Rosenthal’s account. ‘There are, notably, works of fraud where revising or withdrawing the book is possible or even recommended, but this is not one of those cases,’ he said. ‘This is a matter of historical record. This is a reprint of reporting done for The New York Times by one the great journalists of the 20th century. We understand there are people taking issue with it, but this is not something we think needs to be corrected.’

I tend to agree with Johnson. There’s no need to change books, particularly nonfiction ones, simply because the information in them becomes outdated. Not only does that carry some nasty Orwellian overtones, but it also ignores the value of such books as historical and archaeological objects. Future readers, whether amateurs or scholars, need access to original works in the state in which they were originally consumed in order to assess their impact on a particular time period or to use as a case study in how the understanding of an event changes over time. It’s worth noting, as Johnson hints, that regardless of whether Rosenthal’s initial reporting was wrong, it wasn’t fraudulent in the sense that he made it up out of whole cloth. He used imperfect information to produce what is, in hindsight, an imperfect work.

So I don’t think publishers have an obligation to make changes to an outdated work. It would be helpful to new readers and the general understanding of the public if, perhaps, a foreword or afterword were added explaining developments since the original book was published. After all, nobody who went out to buy a copy of Plato’s Republic would spend good money on one that just contained the original text, or even an old translation. You’d expect some context and analysis, apart from the work itself.

It’s an interesting question, but hardly a new one. We don’t expect the works of Josephus to be as accurate as more modern works on the same subjects written with two millennia worth of new information. It doesn’t mean they’re worthless. But it does make the artifacts and readers need to realize that.

Bottom line – always check the publishing date. You never know how much more you have to learn about something if you don’t.

Cola Wars, Color Wars

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s war on big soda has drawn a lot of fire. Not surprisingly, the makers of said sodas, including Coke, have come out against it. What might be more surprising is one of Coke’s allies in the fight, the NAACP. Why might the NAACP throw in with a major corporation on an issue like that? As with so many things, history provides some potential insight.

UVa history prof Grace Elizabeth Hale, writing in the New York Times over the weekend, explored what in history might cause the NAACP to line up with the cola companies to fight Bloomberg’s ban. It goes back to the very beginning, before even the days of Coca-Cola:

[John Pemberton’s] first, an 1884 invention called French Wine Coca, was a copy of a popular French wine that contained cocaine. But in November 1885, just as the product began to sell, Atlanta outlawed alcohol sales.

Across the nation, support for prohibition was often tied to the desire by native whites to control European Catholics, American Indians, Asian-Americans and, especially in the South, African-Americans. It gave police officers an excuse to arrest African-Americans on the pretext of intoxication.

Pemberton shifted focus to a “temperance drink” that would have “medicinal” effects – Coca-Cola. Things got sticky in 1899, when he shifted to pushing the cocaine-infused drink as “refreshing” in its new signature curved bottles:

Anyone with a nickel, black or white, could now drink the cocaine-infused beverage. Middle-class whites worried that soft drinks were contributing to what they saw as exploding cocaine use among African-Americans. Southern newspapers reported that ‘negro cocaine fiends’ were raping white women, the police powerless to stop them. By 1903, Candler had bowed to white fears (and a wave of anti-narcotics legislation), removing the cocaine and adding more sugar and caffeine.

Hale then goes on to explain how Coke basically neglected the African-American market, giving rival Pepsi a wedge to help grow its market share, albeit not for very long:

The campaign was so successful that many Americans began using a racial epithet to describe Pepsi. By 1950, fearing a backlash by white consumers, Pepsi had killed the program, but the image of Coke and Pepsi as ‘white’ and ‘black’ drinks lingered.

Not long after, perhaps seeing the business error of its ways, Coke quietly began to market to African-Americans. Eventually, part of Coke’s strategy was to support African-American organizations, forming the basis of its relationship with the N.A.A.C.P.

Hale doesn’t allege that the NAACP is only paying back Coke for its previous support – although there’s something to be said for standing by those who’ve helped you out in the past. She concludes:

the New York State N.A.A.C.P. may have a legitimate complaint against the soda restriction as a threat to minority business. And it may be fair to see the proposal, as some observers have intimated, as an instance of middle-class whites trying to control the behavior of working-class minorities — just as they did under Prohibition. But to understand the real story behind this unexpected alliance, we first have to understand its tangled history.

That’s not just true in this situation. No issue that grips public discussion – gun control, the War on (Some People’s) Drugs, foreign policy – erupts out of nowhere, nor does it exist in a vacuum. It has a history, often a “tangled” one (often involving race, too), that we’d do better to understand if we hope to deal with them in a constructive way.

Friday Review: Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie

It’s impossible to look and the broad swath of progressive rock and pinpoint one instrument as the one that defines the genre. After all, prog is all about pushing boundaries, which includes incorporating non-traditional (for a rock setting) instruments and combinations thereof. But if there’s a candidate that might fit the bill, it’s the Mellotron.

The Mellotron is a primitive, analog sampler. Press a key on the keyboard and a tape is triggered. Not a loop, but an 8-second piece of tape. On the tape is whatever sound has been recorded to it, but the most used sounds were strings and choirs, although there is a pretty wide array of tapes out there (I have a virtual Mellotron, made by GForce, which uses files taken from original tapes). Perhaps most famous of all, however, are the Mellotron flute tapes, as heard here:

Mellodrama is the story of the Mellotron, from its fairly humble beginnings as home entertainment product, through its ascent in the 1970s, to its slide into oblivion in the age of digital samplers, and through its more recent resurrection. Most interesting, to me, is the early history of the instrument.

I knew that the Mellotron shared a lot in common with a similar instrument, the Chamberlin. What I didn’t know was that the Chamberlin came first and the Mellotron was essentially a knock off built by a British company based on samples pawned off by a Chamberlin sales rep as his own design. But even with that common ancestor, the instruments built and sold by the two companies diverged in interesting ways (they worked out a deal whereby only Chaberlains were sold in the United States, with Mellotrons sold in Europe). The Chamberlin used tapes that used higher quality recordings and produced “cleaner” samples, whereas the Mellotron was built more robustly and had fewer issues with reliability and staying in tune (although they’re still notoriously difficult beasts to wrangle).

Mellodrama deftly covers all of that history, mostly through the use of various talking head interviews. There’s some vintage interview footage with Harry Chamberlin himself (sort of the Bob Moog of the Mellotron) and recent discussions with David Kean, who began rehabbing Mellotron’s back in the 1980s. A whole lot of the interviews are with musicians, as you might expect. Usual suspects appear, such as Mike Pinder of The Moody Blues and Tony Banks of Genesis, but so do others I wouldn’t have thought had a part to play, such as Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick (who was, at one time, a would-be Mellotron importer).

As cool as the interviews are, they also highlight the film’s main weakness. For some reason, which I’m assuming has to do with budgetary limitations, we don’t hear very much of the music that these guys talk about. Banks, for example, tells of how the massive opening of “Watcher of the Skies” actually involved jamming the Melltron’s tapeheads between two sets of tapes, so the resulting sound was a mix of the two taped instruments and the white noise/hiss from in between. Hearing the result of that tinkering right after the description would have been very effective.

But that’s a minor quibble. And I’ve got no problem with the film’s original soundtrack, filled as it is with ‘tronny goodness from the likes of Anglagaard’s Mattias Olsson.

In the end, Mellodrama succeeds in doing what it sets out to do – tell the story of a unique instrument and its influence in modern music. It’s not a personally focused film like Moog, so don’t expect that kind of compelling central character to carry you through. But, if you’re interested in music technology and the history of that kind of stuff, by all means check it out. And if you’re a prog fan and you want to see how part of the “prog sound” came to be, likewise, check it out.

The Details
------------------------
Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie
Released 2009
Directed by Dianna Dilworth
Featuring Mike Pinder, Ian McDonald, Tony Banks, Brian Wilson, et. al.