There’s nothing quite like a high-minded literary smackdown, and that’s exactly what Exeunt Magazine editor Alice Saville offers in her review of David Mamet’s ripped-from-the-Harvey- Weinstein-headlines play Bitter Wheat.
The review unfolds across a series of “drafts” filed to a patient yet persistent editor who urges Saville to elaborate on her original review, which simply reads, “It was boring. I didn’t like it.” From there, Saville helpfully adds, “It was boring. I didn’t like it. My editor has asked me to expand on this response but I don’t see why I have to do edits when David Mamet clearly hasn’t.”
A third draft clarifies a few things:
It was boring. I didn’t like it. It was just a mish-mash of vaguely comedic scenes about a thinly veiled version of Weinstein exploiting a young female actor, plus some ‘ironic’ racism and a bit where a terrorist showed up with a gun. The Weinstein guy is called ‘Barney Fein’, which insults my fingers in the typing. The marble floor is quite nice. The end.
Eventually, Saville does expand in a more traditional form about her issues with the play. The Harvey Weinstein stand-in, played by John Malkovich, “offers a comic summation of his operating methods, not a look at why he’s compelled to act the way he does.”
The woman he’s tormenting, played by Ioanna Kimbook, Saville writes, gives “no sense of the degradation that an actor must feel when she spends her whole life dreaming and training for her career, only to see her future rest on her willingness to give a blowjob.”
Saville has praise for the production’s actors, who she praises for doing the best they can with the material on hand, but she ultimately has nothing but contempt for Mamet’s “underwritten… intellectually lazy” script and production.
It had this unbearable stench of waste emanating from its artfully painted marble floors, and wafting through its unpardonably long, elaborate scene changes. It was short, and it dragged. The whole thing feels like the mega high-budget, theatrical equivalent of clickbait: the producers presumably know that negative reviews can be styled out as ‘post #MeToo controversy’, and even then it’ll still shift more tickets than ten feminist plays.
It’s almost as if the right person to reflect upon the dangers of rich, powerful, connected Hollywood white guys was not a rich, powerful, connected Hollywood white guy.
You can read the entire, scathing review at Exeunt Magazine. You could also, one supposes, go see Bitter Wheat at London’s Garrick Theatre, although it seems like everyone else hates it just as much as Saville.
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89 Comments
The most disappointing thing here is that John Malkovich is involved in this. WTF John? Just remake In the Line of Fire, with your character as the hero.
Still, whatever keeps him off Billions is fine with me.** “Steel, whatevyur keyeps heem off Beel-yons ees feyehn weeth mee.” ~ Grigor Andolov (John Myalk Oveech), Beel-yons
Geev dat myan his ryekomend styar.
In Russia, we have a saying: when in doubt, channel Mickey Rourke’s performance in Iron Man 2.*Een Rushya, we heve seying- whin een doubt, chiannel Meeki Rououourkhe’s pearformance from Irohn Mehn 2.
Nyet Styeve Cyrell yeen Deespeecyble Meeye?
So, he’s basically doing the same accent he did in Rounders? I kind of want to see the show now.
Check.
I don’t even get this, but it made me laugh, so A++!
Between this and “I Love You, Daddy”, Malkovich reeeeeally needs to fire his agent.
Isn’t Malkovich a hard-right libertarian? I remember something about him saying he wanted to shoot people who were protesting the Iraq war a while back. And he was in that one weird-ass Louis CK movie.
You’re breaking my fucking heart. Why does almost everyone I like turn out to be a reich wing asshole?
but the title is So Artsy!
Which title? Bitter Harvest, or the play’s actual title Bitter Wheat?
If you click the link in the first line you get Hughes’s earlier post about the play, which he calls Bitter Harvest, too.
Oh, man, I thought it was Butter Harvest and I was like, that sounds delicious.
That reminds me of that Graham Greene play Bull Butter Harvest
And more like something Harvey Weinstein would eat.
I prefer the sequel, Bitter Wheat And Wheat By-Products.
It’s possible that Gabe has a gluten sensitivity.
The man’s political leanings didn’t bode well for the topic. Another Boomer icon bites the dust. Have fun in Irrelevant Land Dave. I’ll always love “coffee is for closers.”
Even as “cookies are for closers”?
Especially.
House of Games is also quite good, as well as featuring the incomparable Ricky Jay (and many other fine actors).
jesus fuck, guys, it’s spelled “Exeunt”
Either they shot all the editors, or the author hasn’t really read many plays, especially not Shakespeare. Mamet’s hobbyhorses ride him when his mind wanders, so I doubt I would like the play. But I absolutely despise the incompetence of a critic who reviews themselves, which is what “boring” means. Being bored is a feeling, and criticism (honest criticism at least,) is about explaining why you think you’re bored.
And it is worth noting that he created an absolute classic about power and gender dynamics in Oleanna. The kind of play so finely wrought in its nuance that audiences end up slit in half about which of the two characters is the protagonist.
The subtext of that one was Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill so I have to wonder if the critics are missing something
That was also the last time Mamet staged anything of value.
Boston Marriage and Cryptogram are both quite good.
He also created it in 1992, and he’s no less susceptible to the diminution of his creative talent over time than any other artist.
What does that have to do with what I said?
But I absolutely despise the incompetence of a critic who reviews themselves, which is what “boring” means. Being bored is a feeling, and criticism (honest criticism at least,) is about explaining why you think you’re bored.
I feel like you didn’t click through and read the review? The conceit is that it starts out as a one line review (“it was boring”) and then eventually expands to explain why the reviewer found it boring.
And using this format shows how much the reviewer thought the play wasn’t worth anyone’s time. Seems like this commenter who was so much on his high horse about things didn’t get it!
The format is about wasting space while avoiding real criticism, which is the part you didn’t get.
Man, you REALLY didn’t get it, even after it was explained to you. I bet you got in a lot of arguments with your community college professor over stuff you ended up being wrong about.
Your experience is not mine.
Good call on the “I know you are but what am I?” response. Clearly a master of intellect.
The last paragraph excerpted does a very poor job “explaining” anything, especially since it ends with open contempt for theater goers who will buy more tickets for this than ten feminist plays. You identify with the reviewer who despises people for things their prophetic powers tell them what the filthy masses will do. Good for you.
Good thing it’s just an excerpt and not the entirety of the review which you clearly haven’t read before whining about.
Amazed that anybody would excerpt the bad parts, and amazed anybody would think that’s a good idea.
How does it do a poor job? It explains it very clearly. Maybe you didn’t just read closely enough?
Since you write as an alleged close reader, you know the “it” I refer to is the last paragraph excerpted. “It had this unbearable stench of waste emanating from its artfully painted marble floors, and wafting through its unpardonably long, elaborate scene changes. It was short, and it dragged. The whole thing feels like the mega high-budget, theatrical equivalent of clickbait: the producers presumably know that negative reviews can be styled out as ‘post #MeToo controversy’, and even then it’ll still shift more tickets than ten feminist plays.” The phrase “stench of waste” doesn’t actually mean anything. It hints, maybe, at the idea that anything that gives Harvey Weinstein is unacceptable, but this isn’t a genuine criticism of the play. Better to hint than to openly call for censorship, I suppose.It’s not clear how the reviewer sees the “floors” of a stage production, and it’s even less clear why being artfully painted is a bad thing. If you try to make sense of all this in context, the unbearable stench turns into a reference to the paint, which the context implies was wet. This is really stupid. On the principle of charity, I conclude the reviewer is handicapped by wanting to blast the play but not wanting to condescend to actually review it, instead of just being a bad writer bereft of a good editor.Long scene changes may be tiresome, but is this truly “unpardonable?’ What’s next, unpardonable theater curtains? Saying it was short sounds like a complaint of not getting the time for the money, which is not sophisticated reviewing. I think the OP meant to write “It was short, but it still dragged,” but lost their grasp on the conjunctions. In either case, rephrasing “I’m bored” is still a review of the reviewer, not the play.
And that is the end of even pretending to review the play. The rest is a negative review of what the reviewer thinks audiences will do, excoriating the filthy masses for being inferior to the reviewer. You believe in the reviewer’s prophetic powers, but those of us who don’t found the rest to be worthless.Either you don’t know what an explanation is? Or you correctly read the OP as an invitation to vilify instead of think?
Hey, maybe r-e-a-d the actual r-e-v-i-e-w?
Any intelligent person would have excerpted the best parts, some at least. It’s quite clear—if you r-e-a-d my comment the last paragraph which was supposed to clearly explain, doesn’t. You waste your time on worthless crap, no one else is obliged to be so foolish.
Better to hint than to openly call for censorship, I suppose.Ah, shit, Dave. You just gave yourself away. Are there not enough small theaters to sue for having Oleanna Talkbacks that you have to come troll.I’m sorry. If you’re not, in fact, Mr. Mamet, you are a good facsimile.
As multiple commenters have already pointed out, the bits excerpted here aren’t the full review. Gabe Worgaftik probably just took the parts he found most biting, since the premise of the AV Club post was “read this brutal review someone else wrote.” The paragraph you’re obsessing over appears in the middle of the full review, after a more straightforward explanation of the problems the critic had with the play and before the actual conclusion. It’s not the best paragraph to explain the issues with the play since that wasn’t really the point of this post, and if you think that’s stupid that’s on Gabe Worgaftik, not the critic.I hope you were joking about thinking the paragraph was talking about wet paint?? Even without the context of the full review, you could guess that the “stench of waste” meant the metaphorical stench of the waste of talent, waste of a good premise, waste of everyone’s time and money, or all of the above. Or maybe it’s a roundabout way of calling the play shitty. The bit about the floors is a callback to the earlier “draft” included here where the most glowing thing the critic could say was that the marble floors in the set design looked nice (i.e., the floors being artfully painted is not a bad thing). These are all things I thought before I clicked the link to the piece.I don’t want to spend time countering all your nitpicks because they can mostly be addressed with, “This is one paragraph of seven. This is not the crux of her critical argument.” The rest of the review (it’s weird you’re calling one sentence “the rest of the review”) is not attacking theatergoers and does provide an explanation of why exactly she didn’t like it: mainly that the characters are thinly drawn and the play doesn’t really have anything insightful to say. Since you don’t seem to want to actually click the link to read the whole thing, here’s an excerpt that is what I’d consider the full, actual review of the play:Barney Fein, the protagonist of Bitter Wheat, is an all-powerful movie mogul who threatens to destroy actor Yung Kim Li’s career if she doesn’t have sex with him. He traps her in his office, denies her food, continually misidentifies her as Chinese (she’s of Korean heritage, raised in Kent), bribes her with false promises of future stardom, and tries to force her to massage his shoulders, all the while threatening to kill the distribution of Dark Waters, the film she stars in.Mamet shows a superficial level of interest in the mechanisms of power and manipulation. Fein explains that he’s the business equivalent of a wild game hunter, who finds out where the animals go to eat, and then shoots them. But a more apt metaphor would be a hawk tamer, who uses a combination of treats and deprivation to get a bird eating from his hand. He has a host of powerful allies who he sweetens with free tickets to the ballet, with internships for their children, or with sexual favours from actors who are under his control.This is where the psychological insight ends. John Malkovich has a lot of fun with the role of Fein, a man whose dialogue loops in surreal circles, who barracks and wheedles the women around him, or tumbles around the floor like a malevolent teddy bear. But Mamet’s text only offers a comic summation of his operating methods, not a look at why he’s compelled to act the way he does. There’s not a chink of real feeling or vulnerability under all the bluster, which makes this play unsatisfyingly morally straightforward. Ioanna Kimbook’s performance as Yung Kim Li is strong; she quickly sees through Fein, and shows courage in the ways she stands up to and defies him. But what’s lacking is a real sense of how she feels, and Fein’s secretary Sondra (Doon Mackichan) is still more underwritten: she’s seemingly untroubled by her role in Fein’s abuses, lacking either real affection for him or any kind of underlying guilt. Mamet is writing about abuses of power, but there’s no point in doing so without showing their emotional impact – the layers of shame and fear and compulsion. There’s no sense of the degradation that an actor must feel when she spends her whole life dreaming and training for her career, only to see her future rest on her willingness to give a blowjob.Pasting an easy target like Bitter Wheat could be fun, but honestly it just makes me feel weary. It didn’t make me feel angry or offended – just childishly fed up. It was boring. I didn’t like it.It had this unbearable stench of waste emanating from its artfully painted marble floors, and wafting through its unpardonably long, elaborate scene changes. It was short, and it dragged. The whole thing feels like the mega high-budget, theatrical equivalent of clickbait: the producers presumably know that negative reviews can be styled out as ‘post #MeToo controversy’, and even then it’ll still shift more tickets than ten feminist plays.At the end of Bitter Wheat, Yung Kim Li forgives Fein for assaulting her and ruining her career. She gives him a rhinestone-studded copy of his favourite guide to doing business. She’s the only one that understands him, he says. He tells her that he’ll make her a star, for real this time, once he’s out of jail and rehabilitated. It’s this glib, complacent conclusion that finally made me feel the frustration I’d been burying. How dare Mamet scrawl out an ending that’s basically a rip-off of The Producers, how dare he style Fein as an incorrigible, forgivable, comedy rogue who’ll go on working in showbiz until he’s cold and stiff in his suit?The programme of Bitter Wheat features an interview with its two female actors, who talk glowingly about the creative process, and about working with David Mamet. It’s an ironic move. The whole point about industry abuses of power is that women can’t speak out against their employers for fear of losing their jobs. Although this discussion may well be the full and unvarnished truth of their feelings about Bitter Wheat, it’s hardly a frame in which they could offer any feminist criticisms. It’s typical of a play that feels consistently intellectually lazy. A provocation, given some vague and insubstantial feminist trappings on its journey to a stage and a West End that would be better off without it.
I don’t live in a town where I will ever see a play. Thus, there’s no reason to read a review of a play I won’t see for anything except insight into art, which the OP’s excerpts did not display. The insistence that I must read the whole thing for re-education because I got annoyed at having nonsense passed off as a joyous experience to be shared, needs some justification. But you seem to be actually interested in why, not just scoring points from the shooting gallery, so I will trouble you with some extended comments on the excerpts you kindly offered.The opening of the review is still “It was boring. I didn’t like it.” That still is a self-review. And it’s still stalling, putting off actually saying anything substantial about the play. According to you the OP just picked the most biting parts, but the parts excerpted don’t bite deep. The parts picked are shallow cuts, if they land at all. If that still comes across to you as a criticism of the OP, more than the review itself, you may be right.
Still, if we wish self-review in lieu of criticism of a play, we can at least critique the self-review. When the reviewer claims not to be angry or offended, merely weary and childishly fed up, bored, we don’t really learn anything about the play. What we learn is the kind of play the reviewer wanted. The notion that the motivations of Weinstein need be anything other than the thrill of winning, that some sort of hitherto occult monstrousness should be displayed, really seems like a plea to depict Weinstein as a monster. I think a true criticism would be the off-hand assumption that Weinstein is all-powerful. Really? That seems to me to be genuinely thin characterization. Worse, the insistence that the woman should display her shame and degradation and emotional vulnerability to the person abusing her seems like insisting she be reduced to victim. Again, that’s what seems like thin characterization. There may or may not be much art in a tableau of monster delighting in the agonies of victim, but it won’t be in characterization. I think you could object that to really show the story you need scenes with the victim away from her tormentor, pointing out a structural flaw. But I’m putting words in her mouth.
Then suddenly we discover that the reviewer actually is extremely unbored, irate, frustrated. How dare Mamet do this and that. The review is so badly written is not at all obvious in what way the ending is The Producers. I think the reviewer is actually upset that Mamet writes the woman as forgiving Weinstein. I suspect somebody else might have made a case for this being a wrong choice, but it’s not this reviewer, who can’t even reliably report their own feelings. Better to say it’s boring at the beginning, to pan it. Then contradict yourself later where only the non-tl;dr crowd is still with you. At any rate, I’m not so sure that the ending wasn’t meant to suggest Weinstein is incorrigible, but left to interpretation because ambiguity is supposed to be artful or something. Obviously I could be wrong, because the review is so uninformative.As to the suggestion that the stench was clearly meant as a metaphor, I was trying to be charitable to the reviewer. The point of the ill-chosen “metaphor” was the play should not have been written at all. Personally I feel the same way about whole genres, but reviewing anything against the standard of what you thought should be made is always a tricky business, and needs real explanation. There isn’t any. There is one point I have to flatly disagree with you, which is that the snide comment about shifting tickets isn’t aimed at the audience. There is always a sly assumption that the reader and the writer are somehow together, looking down at the fools. There is an invitation to complicity. I think when the reviewer is shilling their superior sensitivity, they include most of us among the philistines.
How did you interpret “There’s not a chink of real feeling or vulnerability under all the bluster, which makes this play unsatisfyingly morally straightforward,” as the critic pleading for the Weinstein stand-in to be depicted as a monster? She’s saying the opposite, that he is depicted as a straight up monster, whose lack of deeper characterization presumably means he’s uninteresting and unsympathetic despite being the protagonist.Where does she specify that the woman needs to show emotional vulnerability to her abuser? It’s clear from the context of this being a review of a play that she means there’s a lack of emotional vulnerability shown by the character to the audience by way of the character’s actions, dialogue, whatever. That could’ve been shown in a monologue or in conversation with another character. She doesn’t need to be crying and broken but it would be realistic to at least have her grapple with the emotional impact of the incident. So this character doesn’t have an internal life either.Which is why it is reasonable that the critic is obviously upset by the play ending with the woman forgiving “Weinstein.” He’s an unsympathetic, cartoonish villain being forgiven by the woman he abused, a character who is also lacking in depth so we’re not given any hints as to why she’s doing this or what their connection is. It’s just people doing things without a deeper examination of them, so it’s boring because it doesn’t present anything insightful.The insistence that you read the whole thing is because you were criticizing like three paragraphs as if that were the whole piece. I probably shouldn’t have spent time writing this because you seem so fixated on this being a badly written review to the point of willfully misinterpreting things to support your argument, but the combination of haughtiness and nonsensical interpretations bothered me.
Being all-powerful is monstrous, but that’s not perceived as a problem for the characterization. . Weinstein in jail fantasizing about making her a career after he gets out is vulnerability, but the review doesn’t see that, offering a red herring about The Producers instead. The reviewer plainly wants something other that what was claimed. The plea for revealing the perversion that compels him is a plea for showing a warped soul, not a more complex human being, a pathology not a person. The review is really bad. It may be the problem with the woman character is that she was never tempted, which would tend to make this basically a horse race, about who wins, rather than a drama about what people choose. The review doesn’t say that, though. I suspect possibly because the reviewer couldn’t abide the thought, because that’s not really the objection. Is this a play about a woman who says no, loses her career, then speaks to Weinstein in jail? Is this about a woman who says no, and loses her career but sends him to jail? Is this about a woman who forgives Weinstein because she needs to move on and suffering agonies of shame prevent that? Is the book irony? The review is terrible.
You’d think they’d at least know “Exeunt” as the fourth book in the “Divergent” series.
Actually. I think it’s spelled “Excrement”
Gesundheit.
“underwritten… intellectually lazy”That’s the only comment I got on my dissertation.
-The A.V. Club
Is it bad that all these reviews recently started a conversation with friends today about going to see the play? It’s clearly not great but one doesn’t get the most chances ever to see John Malkovich do his thing live. Plus it sounds curiously messy
I hope to hell it never comes to the States. I’m sick of Mamet getting an automatic Broadway slot when his plays have been garbage for years.Hopefully the LA Times and NYT scathing reviews will help keep it from coming here.And also hopefully this means Malkovich has been bitten by the theater bug again and will grace our stages in something else soon.
Variety hated it too, if that helps. Like you, I hope Bitter Wheat dies a swift death and is then consigned to the dustbin of history, never to make its ways to our shores.
That’s a whole lotta money for a hate-watch.
This really doesn’t pertain exactly to this posting but I was driving down Olympic Blvd. here in the City of Angels and listening to NPR as old people do and all of a sudden from the radio “Sharp Objects now eligible for all Emmy categories. AV CLUB calls it a masterpiece” and at that moment my Jeep Cherokee Classic stalled in the middle of Sawtelle in 5:15 rush hour traffic.Fortunately two women helped push the jeep off to the side while I steered. Never underestimate the power of public radio.
Olympic is one of my favorite streets. It’s so wide for so much of its length! I spent a lot of time driving around the west side (Century City and environs especially) as a youngster and taking Olympic was always a great way to get around.
This is the Kinja version of that SNL skit The Californians.
Oh I never, never, NEVER underestimate the power of public, and certainly not community radio. The Mysterious Hooded Figures beat that out of me ages ago.
Dude I live on Sawtelle just south of this! That… is not an intersection I’d want to stall out in. Hope it went ok!
It’s like you saw this place from the outside of itself and the cognitive dissonance created the stallYay for those two women. The people who help me when my car breaks I feel such gratitude to
That is a truly great LA vignette.
He only brought it up because he actually helped Weinstein get away with it
Given that you spent years helping Weinstein get away with this behavior I can see why you’d change the subject so fast
My Jeep Cherokee Classic stalled in the middle of Sawtelle in 5:15 rush hour traffic.
– the AV Club.
“Exuent”. “Bitter Harvest”. Can’t you take 2 minutes to proof-read your work?
The AV Club gets a lot of shit for clearly not having a competent editor on staff, and usually I’m not one to jump on board with that.But when you do an article about a review of a play that features a back-and-forth with an editor in the text, and you somehow manage to fuck up both the name of the website AND the play it’s reviewing, you’re honestly bringing it on yourself.
Most of us prob didn’t notice, tbh.
I read the headline as Harvey Fierstein and was very confused.
Ha ha! What a rube, says the person who definitely didn’t also do that, wondering what in the hell brought those two guys together.
Why are you doing a summation of someone else’s review? And then you don’t even put any of your own thoughts to it. This is a trash way to “make” an article. I don’t know who’s more lazy, the reviewer or Gabe.
Welcome to GJ,I!
Screw this. If you’re going to write a review, write a review. Don’t write some stupid, meta “WHAT IF THE REVIEW WAS A PLAY” review. I thought we grew out of that after the early 2000’s. If you want to write a play, write a play. If you want to write a review, write a review. Stupid.
“WHAT IF THE REVIEW WAS A PLAY”That’s not…what the review is…
When you write a review like this you’re basically saying this is a play that isn’t worth a serious review.
Yes.
I’m curious at the lack of emphasis this article puts on the fact the person who wrote this review as if it was a conversation between herself and the editor… is herself the editor.Seriously. Does nobody else think this is just the most bizarre thing? She writes her review as if she is a misbehaving freelancer, she accuses “my editor” of silencing her response (a joke, but still)……and yet she herself is the editor?I try to avoid memes as much as I can but I really do honestly feel like I’m taking crazy pills here.
It’s something called humor, I think.
This concept of humor… Explain it to me.
It is, but you can’t just fling “humor” around like it works in all contexts. If you are the editor and you write about how the editor is suppressing your free speech or whatever, you need to slip the reader a wink that you’re aware you’re doing it to yourself.
I mean…you know she’s the editor…it’s almost like that’s the joke…
I mean, it’s noted here that she’s the editor and if you click the link it says right at the end of the piece, “Alice is editor of Exeunt.” Even before that point, I think most people aren’t so gullible that they think these are truly the unedited communications between the writer and her editor, and would get that she’s just being cheeky. If anything, you could read it as dialogue between what the impulsive side of her wants to write and what the editor side of her knows she should write.Also, Exeunt has published unconventionally styled reviews before.
I wonder if she’ll get any grief for spoiling the ending. Not that I blame her, since it’s a genuinely horrific choice on Mamet’s behalf and easily enough to make the whole enterprise a joke.
Fuck Hollywood. And fuck the USA by extension. Y’all a bunch of… yeah, a word hasn’t yet been invented for it.
The proper pull quote from the review would’ve been:Why can’t I just toss off my opinions in whatever form I see fit, and then air them in front of a wide and surprisingly receptive audience, preferably one primed with quotes from the New York Times proclaiming my genius?But then one must assume even a brief awareness of Mr. Mamet’s output for the last 20 years, so it might’ve been too obvious to state.
And this one… At the end of Bitter Wheat, Yung Kim Li forgives Fein for assaulting her and ruining her career. She gives him a rhinestone-studded copy of his favourite guide to doing business. She’s the only one that understands him, he says. He tells her that he’ll make her a star, for real this time, once he’s out of jail and rehabilitated. It’s this glib, complacent conclusion that finally made me feel the frustration I’d been burying. How dare Mamet scrawl out an ending that’s basically a rip-off of The Producers, how dare he style Fein as an incorrigible, forgivable, comedy rogue who’ll go on working in showbiz until he’s cold and stiff in his suit?Assumed this was just a lazy Oleanna overlay on current events.Apparently not. It’s somehow worse. Somehow worse than China Doll. And there should be nothing worse than that nightmare.
Dave Mamet has become the Joe Biden of the American Stage. Go home, Dave.