Ten Surprising People Associated with KISS

Bob Dylan

Back in 1992, Simmons arranged to spend time with Dylan and work on some material, namely so he could say, “I worked with Bob Dylan.” Simmons took what was done and later created a song he initially titled “Laughing When I Want to Cry.” When working on his 2004 solo album, Asshole, he brought in the song for possible recording. It was reworked into “Waiting for the Morning Light” for the album.

Lou Reed

Another famous singer-songwriter, who had first won notice in the band the Velvet Underground. Bob Ezrin produced Reed’s controversial Berlin album in 1973 and was asked to help throw around some ideas during the recording of Music from “The Elder.” Reed came up with the title for “A World Without Heroes” and worked a bit on the song. Supposedly there is also video of Reed in the studio singing the song. Reed also co-wrote “Mr. Blackwell” with Simmons for the album as well as some additional lyrics to be used if there was to be a second album in the series. Speaking of Reed . . . .

Read Part I here.  Part II there.

JMB:  KISS and Mötley Crüe are touring together this year, when’s the last time you went to a show?

CK:  I’ve seen KISS tons of times, the Crüe maybe a handful.  They really vary in quality.  Some shows Vince doesn’t seem very interested to be there.  I saw one show where Tommy was clearly trying to illustrate how unhappy he was to be forced to tour.  KISS always play hard and they always deliver.  I’ve never seen a bad KISS show.

In Part I we discussed KISS’ Love Gun Tour as first man on the moon, Paul Stanley’s sackfuls of cash, Frankenstein Dynasty, and psychoanalysis and personality theory as it pertains to the downfall/saving grace of Coca-Cola KISS.  Read it here.

I just finished writing a book filled with suicide, psychosis and the elusive meaning of life.  I turned it in and spent three solid weeks lying on my living floor, watching old metal videos and trying to untangle my brain.

My writer sort-of-mentor friend called while Judas Priest was ripping through “Diamonds & Rust”.

“Did you know that for at least one night in Memphis, K.K. Downing was the King of Rock and Roll?” I said when I picked up the phone.

“What?” she said.

“Never mind,” I told her, stabbing the TV mute.

I catch the fall on my lips.
Jaw opens loud into the asphalt.

First the sound of plates breaking,
cringe of blood, teeth splinter
like a shattered cabinet of china.

You arrive to see me on a stiff bed
covered in towels, smaller,
jagged nerves exposed.

I cover my mouth with my hands.
I can only imagine how purple,
unkissable, the lips, two oven mitts,
the teeth, just gone.

But you’re not screaming; your breath
makes the air in this half-room warmer.
Still I cry, mumble something
about taking prettiness for granted
as if pronouncing words will help.

I started and finished Jesus Angel Garcia’s new book, badbadbad, on a flight from Baltimore to California.  In those six hours, I read more sex scenes than I’ve read in the past five years.  It’s one of those books that will keep you from putting on your headphones and watching the lamely re-edited in-flight movie (something I’d never even heard of was playing on this flight).  Music runs through the novel  (go to www.badbadbad.net for the playlist) in a way that makes the book feel like a loud, thrilling, invigorating concert. A concert about sex, religion, music and violence.

The Happy Time Page was a kick in the balls for a kid like me.

On any given Sunday afternoon, 10 year old Joe Daly would have enjoyed building a Lego fortress and defending it against Cold War adversaries, watching the Boston Red Sox find a new and eye-watering way to lose, or listening to KISS albums on the little turntable in his bedroom.

Tragically, that was not how 10 year old Joe Daly spent his Sundays.

No, in those formative years, Sunday afternoons were reserved for the soul-whipping agony of writing for The Happy Time Page.

It was my mother’s idea.

The Happy Time Page was a feature in our local Sunday paper, wherein kids were encouraged to submit essays or poems on a generic subject that changed each week.  The front page featured winning essays and poems, as well as the results of the weekly drawing competition that would make a guy like Ted McCagg head straight for the bourbon. Think of it as a print-version of The Nervous Breakdown, but without all the drugs, sex, travel, and introspection.

The best works were displayed on the front page of the section, with the author’s name prominently displayed beneath each piece.  This is what everyone was shooting for- publication.

The only requirements for the essays were that they be on topic and at least fifty words.  Fifty words.  That’s where I hit the wall.

With a gun to my head (or the threat of television privileges being revoked), I could probably come up with twenty five words about baseball, spring, or some other subject like that.  But fifty words?  That was a whole afternoon, shot all to hell.

See, I had zero ambition to write.  I was as motivated to write fifty words as a heroin addict would be to take a spinning class.  I could speak relatively well for my age, but transcribing my thoughts with pencil and paper (I made too many mistakes for a pen) was a Herculean challenge for both my young mind and my tired hands.

Nonetheless, at my mother’s insistence, I would spend Sunday afternoons slogging through fifty word essays with the speed of climate change.  It would take me upwards of two to three hours to churn out one of those pieces, with my mother requiring me to sit at the dining room table and write until I had a finished product.

During those two hours, after finishing each sentence, I would count the words on the entire page, praying that I had just completed the sentence that brought me past fifty words.  On the odd occasion when I would allow myself to finish a thought even after reaching the fifty word minimum, I would expect the type of recognition generally reserved for Nobel Prize recipients, and would be baffled and resentful when such accolades were not received.

My mother would proofread each essay and returning each to me with several suggestions, all of which I would adopt without debate, simply to see the exercise come to a close.  Although my mother’s own schooling ended at the age of sixteen, she had a great sense of the written word and she would coach me on finding concise and at times, even elegant ways of re-stating my thoughts.

Most of the time she would just ask me what I meant when I wrote a particular sentence.  I didn’t realize it then, but the way we would discuss each sentence and the different ways of expressing a single idea gave me a new approach to writing.  I’m not saying that I enjoyed it, but as the process evolved, churning out fifty words became a less odious task.

When the essay was finished, she would proofread it a final time and direct me to write out a new copy in pen, which she would then drop in the mail the following morning.

I stopped submitting pieces for The Happy Time Page as soon as I reached the maximum age requirement.  I think my mother was bummed.

***

I ignored writing as a form of anything other than homework for the next twenty years.  My first real publication came in law school, when I wrote an article for my law school’s IT Journal.  If my article was approved by the editorial board, I would not only receive academic credit, but more importantly I could add the distinction of “Law Review” to my transcript and resume.

Articles were either accepted or rejected, with a select two or three being published in the school’s law journal, alongside the works of prominent judges, scholars, and attorneys.

To my surprise, I enjoyed the hell out of the process of writing my paper.  Weighing in at a couple hundred pages, the format required that I submit two pages of footnotes for every single page of original thought.  I had an editor who, unlike my mother, received quite a bit of resistance in matters of style and tone.  It was exhilarating to feel passionate about something I wrote.

My friend Michelle also wrote for the Law Review and we agreed that if one of us were published, the other would have to buy a pair of cowboy boots for the lucky writer.  More than anything, we both just wanted our papers to be accepted so we could collect the credit and graduate on time.

When the articles were reviewed by the editorial staff, we were stunned to discover that we were both nominated for publication.   A week later, on a sunny Saturday afternoon on Chicago’s west side, we went boot shopping together.

Here’s how I earned those cowboy boots.

***

The first true labor of love that I published was an article about a band from San Diego called The Rugburns.

I spent colossal chunks of free time on AOL’s music message boards in the mid-nineties, becoming a regular on the boards for The Rugburns after hearing their anthem, “Me and Eddie Vedder.”  Ironically, one of the people whom I met on those discussion boards would, years later, draw my attention to Brad Listi’s blog, and eventually to The Nervous Breakdown.

I found immense pleasure in writing about music on those discussion boards- especially where I would write a lengthy essay on an interpretation of a song or how certain music made me feel.  My posts were pompous and at times self-important, but gradually I learned to discuss music in a way that allowed me to express my point of view without insisting that others agree.  Writing about songs and artists flowed very easily for me, and the writing skills that I acquired in law school helped me present those ideas with clarity and in some cases, persuasion.  I loved the challenge of finding creative ways to express my feelings about music.  Talking about music was a passion, but writing about it was a rush.

One day a girl contacted me about The Rugburns.  She had read some of my posts about the band and wondered if I would be interested in submitting an article for a zine she had just launched called “Lunatic Fringe.”

I agreed and a couple months later, I published my first piece about music.

***

Even after I began practicing law in 1994, music was always my number one passion.  I would much rather be listening to Soundgarden bootlegs than working weekends to impress my bosses.  In 1996, I spent a week touring around the midwest with The Rurburns.  It was one of the most significant experiences of my life.  So much so that when I returned to Chicago, I quit my job as a lawyer and began immersing myself in all aspects of music.  I took up guitar, I expanded my musical tastes into new genres, and at the suggestion of an entertainment attorney, I began studying how the music industry worked.  I had amassed a number of contacts in the music business- artists, managers, and quite a few contacts at some pretty big record labels, and I soon found myself writing promotional biographies for bands.  When a band was in the final stages of preparing to release a new album, their label or management would pay me to write a short biography of the band that would be included with the CD and press kit that was sent out to radio stations all over the country.

The pay was lousy, but money mattered little to me in that regard.  I did it for the sheer enjoyment, although at times it was a character-building experience.  I received a request to do a bio for a solo artist, and without much guidance, submitted a first draft to the artist and label.   The artist’s PR agent ripped the draft apart so ferociously and so personally, that I took almost a year off from writing any other music bios.

Another time a label hired me to do a biography on a band whose music I could not relate to at all.  It was a hard rock band and I’m a hard rock guy, but I just could not get there from here.  Still, I had to sit down with the band and find out what made them tick.  The following exchange actually happened:

I asked, “So what are you guys trying to convey when you play live?”

“Dewd, we just like, want to like, try to you know, like, get people with jobs and shit to like totally forget their day, you know?  It’s like, some guy works like forty hours, you know, and we just want him to come to our show and like, forget about his week.  If we can make just one person forget about their week, then it’s all worth it, dewd, you know?”

“But they could just stay at home and get drunk to forget about their week.  We need to highlight what makes you guys different.  They should forget their week not because they’re drunk, but because your music is memorable.  Does that make sense?”

“Exactly, dude!  See, you get it.  Alcohol only makes our music sound better!”

On the other hand, I had the privilege of writing biographies for some fascinating artists who were releasing jaw-droppingly good music.

To this day, I still take on the odd band bio, although an inflexible requirement is that I actually like the music.

***

SPIN Magazine is, depending on the reader, either a pretentious conclave of indier-than-thou hipsters, or a vital alternative to the commercially-savvy and creatively bankrupt Rolling Stone.  While SPIN can sometimes trip over its own emo-ness, overall it gives exposure to bands and music that other mainstream publications might ignore.

Other than reading the magazine occasionally, my first real connection to SPIN was sleeping on the floor of their suite at the Driskill Hotel during the South By Southwest music festival in 1997.  My college roommate Dan was interning for SPIN, doing a lot of hustling for the magazine for little or no pay.  In return, we received a place to crash, a great view of the main stage, and we got to smoke pot in the suite with The Supersuckers.

Dan went on to secure the best job in the world- making mix tapes to send to college radio stations for the magazine.  He spent his days listening to new (and free) CDs and making mix tapes of his favorite songs. Thirteen years later, I have yet to hear anyone describe a better job.

As Dan became more plugged in at SPIN, he made many connections, one of whom oversaw the magazine’s online column, “It Happened Last Night.”  IHLN featured reviews of notable concerts and events across the country.  They kept a list of writers and photographers in major cities across the country so that when a cool show was happening that they wanted to feature, they would reach out to the local writer and get him or her to the gig.

One day, while literally stepping onto a plane in Cabo San Lucas after an entirely undeserved vacation, I received a text from Dan.  SPIN needed a San Diego writer.  Black Francis (The Pixies, Frank Black) was playing a solo show there that they wanted to review.  They had seen one of my artist bios and wondered if I might cover the event for the magazine.

A couple weeks later, I published my first music article for a major publication.  I remember sitting backstage with Black Francis and Warren Zanes (The Del Fuegos), talking about our favorite pizza joints in Cambridge, MA (where I used to live), and thinking how awesome it would be if this were my actual job.

***

My friend Dana had been a Brad Listi junkie for quite some time.  After hearing her incessantly raving about his writing, I began following his blog, and eventually The Nervous Breakdown.  I instantly fell in love with TNB.  The authors were talented, down-to-earth, and they wrote about subjects to which I could easily relate.  Also, the comment culture was fun and people seemed to actually support each other, with fascinating conversations occurring along with the featured articles.  I chose to lurk rather than participate in any of the conversations.

Dana would pepper me with entreaties to apply to write for TNB, which I resisted for a number of reasons.  Mainly, as someone who had neither published a book, nor had any sort of platform, I was worried that I would have nothing to offer the site.  I am grateful that she persisted because sometime at the end of 2009, I submitted an application.  A month later I received a welcome letter from TNB with instructions on how to get started.  The only thing left to do was write.

I agonized over my first article for two weeks, starting and scrapping ideas for three or four different columns.  Finally I chose to write about my first band back in Chicago, and on a Saturday morning in February, 2009, I began writing.  I finished that evening and spent the next 48 hours proofreading the piece ad nauseam.  Each time I started to publish it, I chickened out and proofread it again.

Finally I threw caution to the wind and hit the “Publish button.”  J.M. Blaine left me my first comment.  As the day wore on,  I began receiving and replying to comments from the very people I had always read and admired.  Nine months later, I have met many of these authors in person and I am in contact with several on a regular basis.  TNB is my online home.

***

As I published articles on TNB, I would post links to each piece on Facebook, asking my friends to take a look if they were interested.  One day after posting a link, I received a note from a college friend whom I had not seen or heard from in close to twenty years.  He had read some of my work on TNB and said he enjoyed them- especially the pieces about music.  He wondered if I might be interested in talking about book ideas.  As fate would have it, he was a literary agent.

***

In July, 2010, I was laid off from my job.  Instead of jumping right into a job search, I decided to see what it would feel like to write for awhile.

I am now in the process of completing a proposal for my first book.  It might never see the light of day, but in the course of the past month, it has been the most fulfilling work I have ever done.  I sit at my laptop in my kitchen or at a local coffee shop, and with the sounds of Sigur Ros, Dead Confederate, or The Stone Roses wafting from my headphones, I write about things that matter to me.  I laugh out loud, I research obscure details about bands and music, and I occasionally run upstairs to sift through papers and photographs to jog my memory as I write.

When people now ask what I do, I really have no answer.  I clumsily say something like, “Well, I’m out of work now, and just writing to make use of the time…”

But once in awhile I boldly answer, “I’m a writer.”

It feels fucking awesome.

***

My mother would have been 77 years old next week had she not succumbed to cancer in 1989.  The older I get, the greater the clarity I have with my past, and especially my time with my mother.  As I look back on those Sunday afternoons in the dining room, wishing I were doing anything but writing for The Happy Time Page, I now see the gift that she has left me.

I am both humbled and grateful.

Thanks, Mom.

Mark

My brother Mark had moved into a small house with a friend shortly after the house fire. He had just graduated high school and was cooking at a hotel restaurant. People thought the hotel was kind of fancy because it was on a piece of land that jutted out into the Columbia River. It was called Clover Island.

Some people still believed he had something to do with the house fire but nothing was ever proven.

Every time I went to the new house that he lived in, it smelled of thick pot smoke and thin beer. Mark was also becoming more interested in motorcycles at this time. I thought this combination of things added up to being a Hells Angel or something. Dad didn’t like me going over there because he probably knew what was going on.

One night though, I made up some kind of story and went over there to watch a KISS concert on HBO. There were other people there, most of them sitting on the floor as Mark and his roommate tried to figure out how to hook up the stereo speakers to the TV. About halfway through the concert, Gene Simmons began an ominous bass refrain between songs and then started spitting fake blood out of his mouth. But he wasn’t really spitting. It was more like he was just letting it gurgle out of his lips and down his chin. When he was done, he stuck his long tongue out and gave a devious look as the band started into “God of Thunder.” Everyone watching the concert totally loved this, except me. I thought it went too far and I was afraid I might have nightmares about the bloody face. Someone said it was a trick, that Gene kept a packet of goat’s blood in the back of his mouth until it was time to bite down on it. The person who explained this said it was easy to hide stuff in your mouth. He pulled at the corner of his mouth with a finger and showed us a wad of gum stuck to one of his stained wisdom teeth.

I always liked Paul Stanley, the star-eyed guitar player and singer, better than Gene. I liked the pucker of his lips, the androgynous superhero quality that he had. Plus he owned a certain cool quality the rest of the band lacked. He would never stoop to spewing blood.

Later on, when Peter Criss stepped out from behind the mammoth cluster of drums and sat at the edge of the stage to sweetly serenade the fans with their unlikely hit “Beth,” one of the floor sitters nodded at me and said something to Mark. “He’s cool,” Mark said. Then suddenly there was a joint being passed around.

Being “cool,” I wasn’t sure what was expected of me. I was maybe eleven or twelve and I hadn’t even puffed a cigarette yet. When the joint was offered to me I simply passed it on to the next person. By the end of the ballad, it was so small that someone had put a tiny clamp on the thing. I started to think that the whole getting stoned thing was looking pretty desperate.

Dad never found out that I went over there to watch the concert but he did give me a disappointed shake of the head a few months later when I got a t-shirt with a KISS picture ironed on it. We were out at Skipper’s for our Friday night fish dinner and he said, “Do you know what that means? It means Kids in Satan’s Service.”

Fried fish was the only food I liked with ketchup. I squirted the thick red goo into the little paper cups and thought about the bloody face as we waited for our dinner.

My introduction to the concept (in the mathematical sense) of chaos theory was Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. I read it as a kid; as a kid my favourite part was when Nedry got his at the wrong end of a dilophosaurus. I immediately liked the character of Ian Malcolm, the mathematician who wore nothing but black and gray, accurately predicted the collapse of seemingly impervious systems at every turn, and  manfully restrained himself from punching the air and yelling ‘QED, bitches!’ every time a velociraptor gutted a secondary character. I was young, so I didn’t understand a lot of what he was saying, but that hardly mattered by the time the film came out. Jeff Golfblum played Malcolm as warm and funny, as only Goldblum can, and that was enough for me¹.

In the novel, and in brief, Malcolm explains some of the basic ideas behind chaos theory, most specifically the pop-culture touchstone of the butterfly effect. As Malcolm tells it, to determine where a cannon ball – once fired from a cannon – will land should be a simple business; if you calculate the force of the propulsion involved and the trajectory the cannonball will take, based on the elevation of the cannon, and apply these factors to the weight of the ball itself, then you should be able to make a pretty accurate prediction of where the arc of the ball. This is what’s known as a linear system; a system where the calculations involved remain the same and you simply plug in new values to get different results. Isaac Newton loved them, and if you’re looking to understand things like mechanical motions, electrical circuits, or sound waves, then linear equations are your go-to guys.

But chaos theory concerns itself with non-linear systems; systems defined by, among other things, their high sensitivity to initial conditions. This is where the butterfly comes in – weather being just such a non-linear system. Because the development of weather systems is so complex and dependent on previous iterations of the system, tiny changes at the onset – say, something as small as the flap of a butterfly’s wings – can alter the entire course of the day. The butterfly flaps its wings and you and your family enjoy a sunny, cloudless day. The butterfly doesn’t flap and tornadoes devastate the Midwest.

Figuratively.

My own personal knowledge of chaos theory and related topics is entirely abstract and hugely general, with no basis in physics or mathematics, and, really, more gaps than knowledge. Thanks to Wikipedia and lunch hours at work, I understand the concepts of cascading failure (ie, for want of a nail), black swans (ie, surprise!), and fractals (ie, best friend of stoned college students). I understand these things in my humanities background kind of way, and I take a vague comfort in knowing that there is such a thing as chaos control, the idea that points exist where a chaotic system can be knocked back into some semblance of predictability.

Knowing these things, I try to look at storms differently. There are clouds overhead right now, and from one perspective – on the surface of things – the term ‘storm’ merely refers to rain and lightning and thunder and the need to shut the window if I want to avoid getting my computer wet. From a more quantum-oriented perspective the thunderhead rolling over is really wheels within wheels within wheels; energy and matter and physics and electricity and the breaking of the sound barrier, interacting and interplaying according to the moments that have preceded them, cause and effect going back in time and space to the initial development of the storm and something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings; an air current that went one way instead of any one of a hundred others.

Which may not seem to make that big of a difference, but, when you think about it, you wouldn’t be reading these words right now if a girl named Leah hadn’t wanted to kiss me when I was 17.The steps go like so:

1. Leah wanted to kiss me (also, yes, I wanted to kiss Leah).

2. Because Leah wanted to kiss me (and I wanted to kiss Leah) we sat and made awkward small talk in the backyard of a friend’s house at a high school party.

3. Because we sat and talked, I told her I needed to find a job.

4. Because I told her this, she found me a job at the club she worked at.

5. Because I worked at the club, I ended up going on a short-lived reality TV show.

6. Because I went on that show, I became friends with the host (on MySpace).

7. Because I was MySpace friends with the host, I became friends with Zoe Brock (on MySpace).

8. Because I was MySpace friends with Zoe Brock, I decided that when I was going to move to the States, I would move to San Francisco, where I at least vaguely knew some people.

9. Because I moved to San Francisco, I met Zoe in person.

10. Because I met Zoe, I ended up writing for TNB.

Abracadabra.

It’s important to remember that these events in time and space aren’t set up in ranks of patiently-waiting dominos. There’s more to the world than action:reaction, stimulus: response. Movement through life is through a vast – and vastly complex – interplay of events and non-events. It’s impossible to pick a definitive starting point for any one situation and draw a thread of causality from one moment to another².

And people are more complicated than weather systems, it’s true, but they do have their similarities. They’ll rain on your parade, storm out of the room, bring some sunshine into your day… even blow you, if you’re lucky.

Just as we can’t fully map weather systems, it would take an intelligence and a perspective far greater than human to pick a single event that’s occurred in the life of any given person, capture and draw it out of time like a blood sample on a slide and then reverse-engineer it, step by step, and say: ‘That’s where, ultimately, this started.’ At birth? Sure. That’s a beginning for a person, depending on how you want to apply the label ‘beginning’ to a mass of molecules and energy movements moving from one position to another. But any given birth necessitated that two parents moved through the world until they came to that precise moment of conception that led to that birth, and that’s also true for those parents, and for the parents of those parents, and so on and so on, all the way back to the start of time. And maybe if one of those parents in that long line had been caught in the rain on the way over to their lover’s house, everything that followed from that divergent point would have been entirely different.

Here and now, we are all the accumulation of all that has gone before us, everything that has happened, or hasn’t happened, to bring us to this point. Right now I’m writing this because someone somewhere decided that working on a Sunday was to be avoided, so I don’t have to go to work today, affording me the time I need to write this article. I’m also writing this now because a car didn’t hit and kill me yesterday as I went to meet my friend Jay for coffee. And I’m writing this right here and now and as the person I am because of every single experience and event that has come before 7:23pm, January 17, 2010.

I mentioned kissing in the title.

When two people kiss, two worlds – separate in some ways, connected in others – meet. When you (the individual you, the general you, me, my neighbours, your neighbours, anyone and everyone) kiss someone else, it’s not just your lips on theirs; it’s everything, everything that has preceded it coming together, because every single thing shaped that precise moment. If I kiss someone (it happens, sometimes), then that moment, and that person, is connected to every single thing that makes me, me, and forevermore will be.

The physics that Orville and Wilbur Wright put to work to shake the hold of the earth in the Kitty Hawk in 1903 are present in me, because they led to me crossing the Pacific³. Running down a back street in Templestowe, flanked by five other frantic teenage guys, holding a flaming, gasoline-doused pizza box – that moment is there too. The rain on my grandfather’s face, the rain that followed complex chaotic rules that my grandfather, to my knowledge, never even dreamed of – that too played a part, however small, in who I am. My personal history, the personal histories of my friends and family, of the people I’ve met… they’re all here in the effect they’ve had. Moments of doubt, or pain, or triumph, or love, or laughter; moments when physics I’ll never be able to understand were at work, moments that I will never, ever be aware of, all of them combine and inter-react to bring me here, now. And if and when I kiss someone, those have brought me to that place too.

At the same time, it’s also just a kiss.

So, do me a favour. Make out with someone – anyone you like – and bring a little more connection into the world. Be the butterfly that flaps its wings and maybe alters the course of everything; if they need some convincing, just direct them to this piece and let them know that they’ll be acting as part of a wonderful, chaotic, complex system of cause and effect that took millennia to bring them to today.

And tell them I say, what up. Because I want to go back to San Francisco, and apparently, people making out is how that works.

¹ This was before I’d a) seen The Fly and b) realised that Goldblum had spoiled my chances at a shot with Geena Davis.

² despite the fact that yes, that is precisely what I have just done in this example.

³ I’m also amused that they subsequently had a debate with the Smithsonian Institute about the precise details of that.