Asian Geographic, October 2010

Deep in the Gobi desert there is a sculpture of a Silk Road messenger astride a galloping horse, 150 metres from nose to tail, built from vivid white rocks across the undulating browns and yellows of the desert topography.

On a hillside outside Kurunegala, Sri Lanka, a lion has been built from stone, stark against the black rock beneath it and the jungle around it.

And in Cappadocia, Turkey, 10 stone and basalt sculptures, made from 10,500 tons of material and seven kilometres of rock wall between them, stretch more than two kilometres down a limestone valley: a grinding wheel, a horse, a griffin.

These spectacular visions – and many more besides from Bolivia to Iceland, Israel to Nepal – are the creation of Melbourne-based sculptor Andrew Rogers. For a decade now, his medium has been the geoglyph: drawings upon the earth, in the tradition of the Nazca Lines of Peru, or Australia’s Maree Man. They all form part of one overall project called The Rhythm of Life: 40 sculptures built by 5500 pairs of hands on five continents (and work is underway on a sixth, in Kenya, as you read this).

Rogers is motivated by several central themes. “These geoglyphs can be contemplated from many viewpoints, but they are not about the physical structure, they are about an idea,” he says. “We are carried over great time and space from distant cultures when we contemplate these contemporary ruins. It’s an exploration of meanings and powers from the past and their meaning for the future. These structures are for people to walk through and contemplate what is important in life.”

Living up to these ideals requires a few certain ground rules. To the greatest extent possible, the sculptures must be built using local materials – stones found on site, using dry stone building techniques rather than cement. “We try to use local natural materials, and local methods to build,” he says. “In Nepal, we used mud with granite. In Chile, birds droppings with clay. Wherever we can find a local technique that’s successful and stood the test of time, we use it.”

This relates to Roger’s other rule: that the sculptures must be built using local people, and in most cases reflect local symbols or ideas.

Partly, this is pragmatic. “First of all, the work wouldn’t get done if you didn’t involve local people, that’s the practical outcome,” he says. “You can’t bring 1,000 people from around the world.” But it’s also important that there is a local connection between people and the sculptures. “These projects are about their history and their heritage, and helping them overcome stereotypes in terms of opportunity,” he says. “That’s why we try to employ women as well as men, pay them proper rates, and given them better working conditions than they normally receive.”

Building on this scale is, after all, a vast logistical challenge; the Cappadocia sculptures took four and a half years from the first phone call to their formal unveiling in May, much of it spent getting the appropriate permits from various land authorities. The building part, though surprisingly swift – a huge sculpture visible from space can be completed in as little as a few days provided enough people are involved – is highly labour intensive, and many of Rogers’s installations in Asia have involved a local workforce of as many as a thousand people.

Do they understand exactly what they’re working on? “When I start working with them it’s a fairly abstract concept for people who work on the site. But by the end of the process, they are very much involved and understand.” Consequently, long after Rogers has left, local people tend to take responsibility for maintaining the sculptures. “Most of them are interested in what they’ve created and adopt it as their own. You often hear them say: I would like to show my grandchildren I have helped build this.”

Local communities are engaged in deciding what to build in the first place. In some cases this involves local village elders; in others, local people or civic leaders. In Sri Lanka it was suggested that Rogers build a lion, based on an old stucco rendition within a nearby temple, a symbol of strength and of pride. In China, local villagers chose the image of a messenger so important to desert life and history.

Working within local cultures brings challenges too. Paying men and women equally is not considered normal in many places Rogers builds. “Often the reaction is surprise,” he says. “Sometimes it’s a reaction of more than surprise.” In Turkey, several men walked off the job in protest at the very idea. In India and Sri Lanka, the problem was that far more people wanted to work on the project than could be accommodated. “We tried to spread the work around and rotate people so they all had opportunities,” Rogers says, though he has also spoken of “trying to stop fights between two to three hundred people” on the India project. China was particularly unusual because the country graciously provided him with an army – “a very diligent workforce,” Rogers remarks. Other challenges come from terrain and conditions: the heat of deserts, altitude in Bolivia, humidity and wildlife in Sri Lanka.

At the time of writing Rogers was working with 1,000 Masai warriors to create sculptures out of volcanic rock in Kenya, and he says he continues to receive invitations to build in new places. Part artist, part architect, part engineer and part bull-headed logistical piledriver, his work requires a range of skills to get to the finish line. “I’ve basically found out you can build anywhere, in the most difficult situations of terrain and labour, as long as people want it,” Rogers says. “You just have to be very tenacious and driven. Fortunately I’m both of those things.”

The Australian Way, August 2010

On a glorious limestone hillside in Turkey’s Cappadocia, Andrew Rogers is supervising a team of 50 local carvers hewing the steps of an amphitheatre out of the earth. Beneath them, workers with a crane are hoisting a pillar of rock the height of a four-storey building off the back of a groaning truck. These are the final stages of a vast artistic endeavour four and a half years in the making, and you can see it all from the amphitheatre’s steps: 10 stone-wall and basalt sculptures extending two and a half kilometres down the valley, so big you can see them from space.

This is Time and Space, a collection of geoglyphs, or land art, and it is creativity on an epic scale. The installation in Cappadocia is big – 10,500 tons of stone, seven kilometres of rock walls – but not unique, for this is the 12^th location in which Melbourne-based Rogers has worked: 40 sculptures built by 5,500 pairs of hands on five continents, from Iceland to Slovakia, Bolivia to the Gobi Desert, Chile to Geelong. In sum, it is easily the largest contemporary artistic installation in the world.

See this article is it ran here: qa0810_Landscape.indd

When you are an artist on this sort of canvas, the vision is just the start: it’s an exercise in logistics, engineering, staff management and architecture. It requires a character that is not just creative but driven, patient and stubborn. “I’ve basically found out you can build anywhere, in the most difficult situations of terrain and labour, as long as people want it,” Rogers explains as we bounce around the site in a van. “You just have to be very tenacious and driven. Fortunately I’m both of those things.”

The road to this vast undertaking in Cappadocia really began in Israel more than a decade ago, when Rogers was teaching in an architecture faculty there. On a trip to a desert area in the south his colleagues told him they wanted to create something to attract tourism, and he suggested a giant sculpture. A year later, he walked back into the desert to create the first of four artworks there.

“In those days I wasn’t trained as an artist,” he says. “I was trained as an economist.” He had no idea of techniques that might make life easier. “I didn’t realise you could use surveyors. So we used to stand there in 40 degree heat for four weeks at a time and triangulate everything, making points in sand to lay out the sculpture.” Today, the same process takes three to five days.

Next he found himself doing the same thing in the Atacama desert in Chile, the world’s driest, having been inspired by the Nazca lines in Peru. “I thought, what a great idea, why don’t we draw some things across the whole of the earth instead of just one place? That’s the idea behind the whole project. A connected series of drawings on the earth.”

As for Cappadocia, Rogers first visited the region 27 years ago; like anyone who comes here, he was struck by its odd, spiky beauty. He always wanted to come back, and everything about the place suited his purposes. “Each time I decide there should be something of special significance that is inherent to the topography. Here, it’s amazing: the limestone formations that have been caused by nature are quite remarkable and unique. And it is impregnated with thousands of years of history.”

Like any colossal journey it started with a single step – or a phone call, to a sister of a friend in the local travel industry in 2006. “I asked who I could talk to and it went from there.” Then negotiations began. “Getting the permits is always the hardest part,” he says.  How do people feel when approached for something so unusual? “Most of them have never thought about it. It’s like Kleenex tissues: until they were invented nobody thought they needed them. But everybody is interested in preserving their history and heritage and fostering memories for the next generation.”

“You’ve got to find the person that’s interested, or the municipal authority or the elders who believe in the project,” he adds. In Cappadocia this required the support of two successive mayors to chase and approve permits, as well as numerous Turkish and western business leaders to provide funding. People like this need to be free-spirited sorts themselves. “He thinks what I do is quite normal,” says Rogers, impressed, of a local backer, “which is unlike a lot of people.”

For the art itself, Rogers tends to use a mixture of images based around central themes. “We perceive our existence in space and time,” he says. “In this world where technology is constantly advancing, human nature is not; it is often the values of the past that are most relevant today.” This theme, inherent to his work, comes through in many of his sculptures: A Day on Earth features 22 words such as memory, compassion and heritage carved in English and Turkish on basalt columns. Others take forms basic to life and culture – a grinding wheel, a palm tree, a horse – or reflect local myth, such as a Griffin and a double-bodied lion.

Common to every installation he has completed around the world is The Rhythm of Life, which started out as a bronze sculpture 17 years ago and whose original now resides in the National Gallery in Canberra. Rogers describes that original as “a dynamic structure in space, a series of points connected which make a line. It’s like life: all the connected influences we all have, friends, family, activities. It’s an optimistic symbol about life and regeneration.”

Then there’s construction, which began in 2007. Material is key to Rogers. “Stone has been intrinsic to civilisation forever,” he says. “It’s great to touch and feel rock and stone; it brings you back to the fundamentals about the earth, about what’s important.” The stone must be local and where possible nothing foreign is brought onto the site. “In Nepal we used mud with granite. In Chile, bird droppings with clay. Wherever we find a local technique that’s successful and stood the test of time, we use it.”

He has also always insisted on indigenous labour – a rule breached only once, when constructing in the Gobi desert in China, when the authorities decided the best way of getting things done was to give him an army to do the building. (“They don’t normally build sculptures and I don’t normally command an army,” he says.) In Cappadocia, almost a thousand local people were involved. Do they understand what they are working on? “They understand after they’ve worked on it. When they start, it’s a totally abstract concept.”

Relatively speaking, Turkey has been an extremely smooth project; the greatest controversy came with his insistence on paying men and women labours equally, which caused a minor revolt among some of the men. “They’re all challenging for different reasons,” he says. “In Bolivia we worked at 4300 metres, gasping for oxygen all the time. In some of the deserts we’ve been working in 45 degrees. Then you have people issues: too many workers wanting to work in India, and stopping fights between 300 people.”

There’s still a certain rustic approach to producing the art: Rogers judges levels by eye, then marks the pattern each metre with a peg in the ground. But with the workforce engaged, the building is in some sense the easiest part. Unbelievably, the Rhythm of Life sculpture in Cappadocia – whose walls, at the highest point, are two and a half metres high and hundreds of metres in length – was built in just 10 days, by a team of 380 stonemasons. The stones were simply picked up from the ground around the valley, passed hand to hand along lines of people; there’s no cement, no mortar, yet the dry stone walls are pristine three years after their completion.

So why build big? Does it change the meaning of a sculpture to make it writ large? “It doesn’t add anything to its meaning, but scale always adds another dimension,” Rogers says. “It’s more confronting for people. It’s taking the ruins out of being just a material into the realms of speculation.”

‘Visibility from space’ isn’t a casual claim either: Rogers commissions satellites to photograph the sculptures from 280 miles (450km) up. To help with visibility, he coats them, although the material varies with what is local; from place to place it has included cactus juice and bird droppings.

Even as Rogers opened his installation in Turkey on May 29, he was active elsewhere; the next step is Kenya. “It’s all set to go,” he says. “We have 1,000 Masai warriors who will come and camp around the site and build the structure.” It will bring its own challenges and quirks. “They don’t use stone for anything so it will be very interesting. It’s a totally abstract idea for them: they only use thatch.” The structures – which elders have requested include a lion’s paw and traditional markings from a shield, as well as the Rhythms of Life motif – will be made on a volcanic lava plain from deposits around the edges. “It’s going to be fascinating.”

As an installation on a sixth continent, this completes the objectives he originally had for his project. But one senses that it won’t stop here. “I have lots of invitations and if they are interesting places and interesting people I wouldn’t say no. It’s about getting an idea.”

SIDEBAR: Cappadocia

Cappadocia is perfect travel: stunning scenery; history; towns with accommodation and restaurants set up well for tourism without yet being ruinous; and a focus for unusual activities like hot-air ballooning.

The area is filled with curious limestone conical towers that have become known as fairy chimneys, and over the centuries many of them have become homes – or, more recently, hotels. Some have been used to carve churches out of the rock, magnificently painted inside. People have lived here for at least 4,000 years since the Hittites settled the region, followed by the Persians, Romans, Christians, Seljuk and Ottomans.

It is also one of the world’s best places to go hot-air ballooning, blessed with a rare combination of favourable wind and flying conditions and extraordinary topography to see from the air. Skilled pilots can not only navigate the balloons over the region’s most beautiful valleys but descend deep into them, just metres from the rock formations. Other balloons – there may be as many as 40 in the air – add to the extraordinary sight.

In Göreme, Cappadocia’s main travellers’ centre, is the World Heritage-listed Open-Air Museum, a clutch of rock-hewn churches and monasteries. Pay the extra TL8 (A$6) to enter the Karanlık Kilise, or Dark Church, painted inside with vividly colourful biblical scenes.

Elsewhere you can see underground cities, as many as eight levels deep, excavated in the sixth and seventh centuries to give an escape route for Christians fearing Persian and Arabic armies. 10,000 people lived in one of them, Derinkuyu, staying there for months, their air shafts disguised as wells.

More than anything, Cappadocia is a place to walk around, enjoy the scenery, eat well in excellent and friendly restaurants, and sit back with a glass of wine to watch the sunset from a hotel terrace. For many people it is the highlight of a trip to Turkey.

Turkey’s asset management industry is awaiting a seismic shift. A proposed new law, likely to take effect next year, has the potential to transform this industry, increasing competition and bringing the likely advent of open architecture. It will also make it a more attractive country for foreign institutions.

Turkey today has a sophisticated mutual fund industry, dating back over 20 years: its Capital Markets Law was passed in 1981, with the first communiqué on mutual funds appearing in 1986, and the first fund launched later that year. In aggregate, the fund industry has about US$25.5 billion under management in 2009, down from a peak of US$28.1 billion in 2007.

While Turkey’s asset management industry has grown considerably – six times over between 2002 and 2005 – it is still not a large proportion of addressable assets. HSBC says the allocation of savings in late 2008 was 79% deposits, 7% mutual funds, 6% treasuries and 5% equities, with a few other investments making up the remainder; it says the Turkish fund industry represents only 3.5% of 2007 GNP. A leading local investment group, AK Portfoy, puts mutual funds at just 3% of addressable assets, and points out that Turkey’s 70 million people have between them 90 million deposit accounts, 25 million credit card clients but just 2.7 million mutual fund investors – of whom well over 2 million are only in money market funds.

Turkey’s mutual fund industry is in many ways quite different from others. Ever since 1996, mutual funds have been split into two classifications, Type A and Type B. Type A funds must invest at least 25% of their funds in equities issued by Turkish companies. Type B funds have no such restrictions. In practice, Type A funds are typically equity products, and Type B, fixed income or money market.

The distinction used to exist for tax reasons but has little relevance today; industry bodies are seeking to abolish this archaic separation in favour of more globally accepted fund classifications. But the more relevant point is this: it’s the latter camp, Type B, that is the vast majority of the industry. According to AK Portfoy, B type funds – fixed income and money market – have US$18.5 billion under management, and A type $526 million (although the number of funds is much closer – 120 Type A versus 179 Type B, according to data from the Turkish Institutional Investor Managers Association). Equities accounted for just 2% of the industry as of November 30 2008; fixed income, 12%; and money market products some 86% of the industry, despite the fact that there are less than half as many funds (51) as there are equity funds. One could argue whether these money market funds are mutual funds in the traditional sense at all – often they are used as cash accounts, with bill payments coming in and out of them.

Why don’t Turkish investors like equities? Because there are better alternatives elsewhere. Deposit accounts offer extraordinarily high rates of return with limited risk: well over 20% was commonplace in products of one to three month duration at the end of last year. Since then the Turkish Central Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee has cut the country’s policy rate by 50 basis points from 9.25% to 8.75%, bringing deposit rates down accordingly, but they are still very high.

In that situation, there is little incentive to go into mutual funds, and almost none to go into equity funds. What’s the sense in equity risk when one can attain around 20% with minimal risk in a short term product? (Strangely, the shorter end of the curve has tended to offer the best returns lately, due in part to Turkey’s history of inflationary pressure.)

The allure of mutual funds is hardly assisted by extraordinarily high fees. Typically the up-front and management fee are bundled together – which means, effectively, customers are paying the up-front fee not just once but annually. Fees of 3-5.6% a year are common on equity funds, of which a large chunk goes towards distribution. Even in money market funds, fees of 4 to 5% are not uncommon. These are some with lower fees, but they then tend to add an exit fee.

Another oddity of the fund management system today is that fund managers can’t, independently, launch funds themselves – they have to be launched by the distributors, who are banks, pension companies and securities companies (in 90% of cases, it’s the banks). Consequently, banks sell their own products, and the biggest players in the industry by far are asset management companies connected to the banks: each of Yapi Kredi, Is, AK, Garanti and Ziraat, the top five members of the 22-strong asset management industry who between them control 79.6% of total assets, are 100% subsidiaries of large retail banks.

The new law proposed by the Capital Markets Board of Turkey proposes many changes, but this is probably the biggest: after the law is approved, asset managers will be able to establish and distribute their own funds. There are other elements to it too – greater compliance with EU standards and UCITS directives, gathering capital market instruments under a single notion of financial assets, and constructing open-ended investment companies – but it’s this rule on the founders of funds that will have the broadest impact. It is expected to increase competition, improve the quality and diversity of services, reduce fees, increase specialization through the widespread use of outsourcing, and bring about open architecture in marketing channels. Fund sizes are expected to increase, on average, while it is also expected that foreign asset management companies will have more incentive to invest in Turkey and foreign investors will be more inclined to seek exposure to Turkish funds.

For the first time, then, we may see an avenue for international fund managers to sell product in Turkey, since it will be easier to negotiate distribution arrangements in a more open architecture environment. Persuading investors there is any sense in taking global equity risk will be a bigger challenge, but there is certainly an opportunity.

In fact, foreign entrants do already have a strong presence in Turkey, although frequently it is indirect. HSBC and ING operate directly as asset managers in Turkey under their own names, but in fact 15 of the 22 investment companies in Turkey have foreign shareholders somewhere in their ownership structure. Most frequently this is because they have a stake in the retail bank that owns the fund manager: this is the case in Yapi Kredi (part owned by Italy’s Unicredito), Garanti (part owned by GE Money), TEB (BNP Paribas), Oyak (ING), Deniz (Dexia), AK (Citi, indirectly, and without influence on the asset management business), Bender (Deutsche) and FinansBank (NB Greece). In theory one could argue that foreigners are involved in about 55% of assets under management in Turkey, but in terms of direct hands-on ownership it’s really only HSBC and Fortis who are highly active in their own name in asset management.

While the new law will make significant changes in Turkey, there have in fact been major developments in recent years, chiefly the development of the pension industry. This dates from the introduction of a private pension scheme in 2003, under an arrangement where pension products are launched by retirement companies but managed by asset management companies. From US$31 million in 2003, this industry had grown dramatically to US$4.89 billion in 2009 – avoiding a decline in 2008, unlike most areas of asset management worldwide – and is the area many asset managers are most excited about. It has a more obvious appeal to investors since no income tax is levied on gains (although it is applied at varying levels when an individual leaves the system), and follows a defined contribution, voluntary participation model. Given the length of time involved in a pension, Turkish investors seem more willing to consider committing capital to risk-bearing assets.

Pension fund allocation looks a little different from mutual funds, with equities up to 8% – more than mutual funds but still tiny by world standards. Fixed income is the dominant asset class in this area, accounting for 69% of the market. YapiKredi said that in late 2008, there were 114 pension funds available, with 4.97 million customers.

Another interesting area of development has been structured funds, which were only permitted to be launched in 2007. Four funds had been launched by December of that year, and by November 2008, the number was up to 21. In the main these are capital protected or capital guaranteed products. These funds have struck a chord because they shift the risk/reward equation in a way that makes them more interesting for Turkish investors. Since they have previously been able to access high returns in deposits with low risk, there has been little need to consider other products that do carry risk. Once a capital guarantee is introduced, the picture looks more attractive.

At the time of writing, development in this area was on hold while asset management companies wait for new legislation governing an umbrella structure for the establishment of structured funds. This new legislation has just been approved by the Capital Markets Board and should take effect shortly; in its wake, all major fund managers are expected to establish new umbrella funds, and within them, new structured products.

Turkey also supports a nascent discretionary portfolio industry, and modest corporate mandates. Sponsors are now permitted to launch hedge funds, though in practice few have bothered to do so yet. By the end of 2008 three banks and one brokerage had received approval to establish these funds, known locally as free investment funds or FIFs, but none had yet done so, though Yapi Kredi, Is and Garanti were believed to have them under development.

Hasan is a masseur in the Cemberlitas Hamami, one of the oldest and most famous Turkish baths – or Hamams, as they are known locally – in Istanbul. The Turks didn’t invent the steam bath: it came to them from the Romans via the Byzantines. But they do it best, and that’s why the idea bears their name the world over.

I have chosen Cemberlitas as my debut hamam because of the wonderful building in which it is housed. It’s not obvious from the road, amid jewellers and other modern stores in Istanbul’s Sultanhamet area, but once within it’s clear that this is a piece of true history: built in 1584 and commissioned by a sultan’s wife. It was designed by the incomparable architect Minar Sinan, whose signature work is the wonderful Sulaymanie Camii. And if you think I’m getting a bit heavy on the superlatives, keep in mind that Sinan’s patron went by the name of Suleyman the Magnificent; bombast was in ready supply in those days.

There’s a strict sequence of events involved in a Turkish bath. First of all, you are sent to a room or locker to get changed. In Cermberlitas, this is called a camekan; a host of little rooms over a number of floors where you strip off, and put on a wrap called a pestemal.

Next you walk downstairs again and meet your masseur. This is where Hasan and I become acquainted: a sturdy man with an evident strength that’s obvious well before he tries to pull my head off in the name of relaxation.

Hasan then ushers me into the main area, called a sicaklik, and this is where the choice of location is everything. It’s truly a different world: an ancient dome with a cluster of holes cut in the ceiling letting the light   through (but, having been glassed in, no fresh air); an intense, deeply humid heat; a central podium called a gobektasi with numerous men lying on it, some being soaped, pummelled and generally manhandled by the masseurs. There is a lot of sweat.

Turks justly hate the Alan Parker movie Midnight Express and the terrible impression it gives of Turkish culture (or Turkish jails, at the very least); it’s an awful image to give the world of a friendly and generous people. But there’s no denying, as the door slams shut behind me with a sonorous, echoing boom, that there’s a certain sweaty sense of imprisonment in that room.

Hasan explains the form: first I must lie on that podium, which turns out to be intensely heated. For a few minutes this is pleasant, warming. Then it becomes hot and sweat starts to pour off me. By 10 minutes in I can no longer stay lying down, front or back, and have to sit up. Round about now, Hasan comes back in, beckons me to the edge of the podium, and at this point chucks the first of many pink buckets of water over my head. The restorative effect is so welcome I want to give him a hug, but that doesn’t seem terribly sensible and still less hygienic.

Hasan takes to me with a scourer. “Skin!” he shouts triumphantly. He is right: it’s coming off me in such quantities I think I’ve lost weight. There are rolls of it: I’m not so much being cleaned as eroded.

Next is the massage, and Hasan regrettably proves as enthusiastically capable at this as I had imagined. I live in Singapore and am no stranger to the borderline sadism of Chinese masseurs, the wilful seeking out of the pressure points to dig an elbow into them; my wife, who loves this sort of thing, refers to her favourite masseuse as “Violent Eve”. But this is something else. There’s a lot more of Hasan than there is of the lethal Chinese woman from the Singapore malls, and he brings his bulk to bear on the task in hand. He rearranges my stomach muscles; crushes my shoulders; attempts to remove my foot. “Good!” he shouts.  It’s not so much a question as a statement. “Very good!” he cheers, as my fingers cracks with such force and volume I am aware of a distinct echo off the distant domed ceiling.

Next come the soap suds, which are quite a sight in themselves, as you disappear in about a foot of bubbles. Some get into my eye. It stings. I think about mentioning it. The idea doesn’t seem to fit with the masculinity of the situation. I manfully grin and bear it. And then, flattened and soaped and scoured and rearranged, it is time to have several more buckets of water thrown over my head.

It’s not the end: there’s time still for Hasan to lead me to a different room, a sogukluk, to wash my hair and – I’d feared this – crack my neck. You don’t even need me to tell you about that. Six farewell buckets in the face and then I’m sent off to shower and get changed.

For all the heat and general abuse of the process, there’s absolutely no denying that shortly afterwards I feel like a different man. Actually for a short while I believe I am a different man as some sort of evolutionary quirk appears to have taken place: for an hour later, every time I put my sunglasses on, they spontaneously steam up. But I am rejuvenated by the process, undeniably cleaner, probably lighter and quite possibly taller.

“You like Istanbul?” Hasan had asked, timing his question for a moment when he was holding me in a headlock trying to disconnect my skull. I couldn’t answer him, on account of being unable to breathe or speak, but now I know what I think the answer should have been: I do. Now hit me with another bucket of water.