title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Meloni voted in favour of the 2011 military intervention in Libya; in 2019, she criticized the French rationale for the intervention, stating it was because of Muammar Gaddafi's opposition to the CFA franc. She is critical of Italian relations with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, stating that these countries "systematically and deliberately spread fundamentalist theories that are the main causes of the growth of Islamic fundamentalism". She opposed the decision to host the Supercoppa Italiana final in Saudi Arabia, and stated that Italy should actively raise the issue of human rights in Saudi Arabia. However, upon taking office, Meloni reversed her position, with her government stating it was "keen to maintain the excellent relationship with Saudi Arabia". Meloni advocated for the expulsion of the Indian Ambassador to Italy as a result of the Enrica Lexie case, and she urged Alessandro Del Piero to refuse to play in the Indian Super League until the detained Italian marines were returned. Following the Asia Bibi blasphemy case, Meloni criticized what she called the "silence of the West" and advocated a stronger stance by the international community against human rights violations in Pakistan.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, she was in favour of better relations with Russia and supported lifting sanctions on the Russian Federation in 2014. In 2018, she congratulated Vladimir Putin for his re-election as president in 2018. In her 2021 biography book, she wrote that Russia under Putin defends European values and Christian identity. She has since condemned the invasion and pledged to keep sending arms to Ukraine, and moved towards Atlanticism. She is supportive of NATO, although she maintains Eurosceptic views towards the EU, having also previously advocated a withdrawal from the eurozone. She rejects the Eurosceptic label, favouring the Eurorealism of a confederal Europe of sovereign nations. A critic of China, she is a supporter of closer ties between Italy and Taiwan. She is a controversial figure in Croatia due to her Italian irredentist statements in which she claimed Dalmatia and Istria, and for being opposed to Croatian entry into the EU due to the unresolved dispute concerning properties of exiled Italians after World War II from these two Croatian regions.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Meloni has exhibited support for vaccine hesitancy, such as not vaccinating her daughter during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy because "it's not a religion". She has been criticized due to her statements on vaccines and COVID-19, stating the probability of someone aged 0–19 dying from COVID-19 was the same as being struck by lightning. After her party won the 2022 Italian general election, they pledged to review the positions taken by the Italian government during the COVID-19 pandemic and end the COVID-19 vaccine mandate in place for health care workers.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Meloni has expressed statements that generated controversy. In an interview to the French newscast when she was 19, she praised Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as "a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy", and as the best politician of the last 50 years. In January 2020, there was some controversy after Meloni and the of Verona supported naming a street after Giorgio Almirante; Meloni and the also supported giving Liliana Segre, a Holocaust survivor and senator for life, honorary citizenship. Segre said that she and Almirante are incompatible and the "comune" had to make a choice. In May 2020, Meloni praised Almirante as a "great politician", as well as "a patriot". He was the co-founder of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), who had a long post-war political career until retiring in 1987. During World War II, he was a wartime collaborator as a civil minister of the Italian Social Republic (RSI), a Nazi puppet state, as well as editor-in-chief of the antisemitic and racist magazine , which published the "Manifesto of Race" in 1938. As a minister in 2009, Meloni visited Yad Vashem in Israel, and she has also said as FdI party leader that her party "handed fascism over to history for decades now" and it "unambiguously condemns the suppression of democracy and the ignominious anti-Jewish laws".


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In November 2018, Meloni declared that the celebration of the Liberation Day, also known as the Anniversary of Italy's Liberation from Nazi-Fascism on 25 April, and , which celebrates the birth of the Italian Republic on 2 June, should be substituted with the National Unity and Armed Forces Day on 4 November, which commemorates Italy's victory in World War I. She said that Liberation Day and are "two controversial celebrations". Meloni has tried to distance herself from her close ties to Roberto Jonghi Lavarini, a far-right Milanese politician and entrepreneur known as the "Black Baron".


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: After the formation of FdI in 2012, she decided to add the tricolour flame to the party flag, a neo-fascist symbol associated with the MSI, which derived its name and ideals from the RSI as a "violent, socializing, and revolutionary republican" variant of Italian fascism established as a Nazi German puppet state by Mussolini in 1943. The tricolour flame is said to represent Mussolini's remains, where a flame is always burning on his tomb in Predappio. Heading into the 2022 general election, Segre told "Pagine Ebraiche" that Meloni should remove the tricolour flame from the party's logo. FdI's co-founder Ignazio La Russa rejected this view, and Meloni ignored the request, keeping the tricolour flame.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Observers, including historians Ruth Ben-Ghiat, David Broder, and Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, said that Meloni and FdI have been ambiguous about their fascist past, at times rejecting it and at other times minimizing it, and that this has helped to rebrand both herself and her party. Responding to the 2021 Fanpage report, she minimized the investigation and refused to remove openly neo-fascist members of FdI. In December 2021, FdI's Alfredo Catapano and Luigi Rispoli were among former MSI members who did a Roman salute, which was condemned by the ANPI. Rispoli told Fanpage: "I believe in the new right and in the efforts Giorgia Meloni is making in Brothers of Italy. It makes me wonder, frankly, this clamour." Shortly before the 2022 general election, she sacked a member that openly praised Adolf Hitler. FdI had also distanced itself from the Ascoli Piceno party section after it celebrated the anniversary of the March on Rome in 2019.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: On 25 October 2022, on the occasion of the vote of confidence of the Parliament at the government, Meloni in her speech before the deputies said: "Freedom and democracy are the distinctive elements of contemporary European civilization in which I have always recognized myself. And therefore, despite the instrumental argument of my opponents, I have never had sympathy for undemocratic regimes. For any regime, including fascism. Exactly as I have always considered the racial laws of 1938 the lowest point in Italian history, a shame that will mark our people forever".


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Meloni has a daughter, Ginevra, with her partner Andrea Giambruno, a journalist who works for Silvio Berlusconi's Mediaset TV channel. She is a Roman Catholic and has used her religious identity in part to help build her national brand. In a 2019 speech to a rally in Rome, she said: "I am Giorgia. I'm a woman, I'm a mother, I'm Italian, I'm Christian." Despite her Christian beliefs and championing traditional family values, Meloni defended herself not being married to her child's father. In September 2022, she reportedly continued to embrace the old Italian fascist slogan "God, fatherland and family". She has said she resents being linked to Italy's fascist past.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Meloni is an avid fan of fantasy, particularly J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings". As a youth activist with the Italian Social Movement (MSI), she attended the Camp Hobbit festival and sang along with the far-right folk band , named after "The Fellowship of the Ring". Later, she named her political conference Atreju, after the hero of the novel "The Neverending Story". Meloni told "The New York Times": "I think that Tolkien could say better than we can what conservatives believe in." Apart from Tolkien, she is fond of British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton and has said: "If I were British I would be a Tory." In addition to her native Italian, she speaks English, French and Spanish.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Federico Fellini (; 20 January 1920 – 31 October 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked highly in critical polls such as that of "Cahiers du Cinéma" and "Sight & Sound", which lists his 1963 film "" as the 10th-greatest film.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Fellini's best-known films include "La Strada" (1954), "Nights of Cabiria" (1957), "La Dolce Vita" (1960), "8½" (1963), "Juliet of the Spirits" (1965), the "Toby Dammit" segment of "Spirits of the Dead" (1968), "Fellini Satyricon" (1969), "Roma" (1972), "Amarcord" (1973), and "Fellini's Casanova" (1976).


title: Federico Fellini

text: Fellini was nominated for 16 Academy Awards over the course of his career, winning a total of four in the category of Best Foreign Language Film (the most for any director in the history of the award). He received an honorary award for Lifetime Achievement at the 65th Academy Awards in Los Angeles. Fellini also won the Palme d'Or for "La Dolce Vita" in 1960, two times the Moscow International Film Festival in 1963 and 1987, and the Career Golden Lion at the 42nd Venice International Film Festival in 1985. In "Sight & Sound"s 2002 list of the greatest directors of all time, Fellini was ranked 2nd in the directors' poll and 7th in the critics' poll.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Fellini was born on 20 January 1920, to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. On 25 January, at the San Nicolò church he was baptized Federico Domenico Marcello Fellini. His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family's vehement disapproval, she had eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola. A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later.


title: Federico Fellini

text: The couple settled in Rimini where Urbano became a traveling salesman and wholesale vendor. Fellini had two siblings, Riccardo (1921–1991), a documentary director for RAI Television, and Maria Maddalena (m. Fabbri; 1929–2002).


title: Federico Fellini

text: In 1924, Fellini started primary school in an institute run by the nuns of San Vincenzo in Rimini, attending the Carlo Tonni public school two years later. An attentive student, he spent his leisure time drawing, staging puppet shows and reading "Il corriere dei piccoli", the popular children's magazine that reproduced traditional American cartoons by Winsor McCay, George McManus and Frederick Burr Opper. (Opper's "Happy Hooligan" would provide the visual inspiration for Gelsomina in Fellini's 1954 film "La Strada"; McCay's "Little Nemo" would directly influence his 1980 film "City of Women".) In 1926, he discovered the world of Grand Guignol, the circus with Pierino the Clown and the movies. Guido Brignone's "Maciste all'Inferno" (1926), the first film he saw, would mark him in ways linked to Dante and the cinema throughout his entire career.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Enrolled at the Ginnasio Giulio Cesare in 1929, he made friends with Luigi "Titta" Benzi, later a prominent Rimini lawyer (and the model for young Titta in "Amarcord" (1973)). In Mussolini's Italy, Fellini and Riccardo became members of the "Avanguardista", the compulsory Fascist youth group for males. He visited Rome with his parents for the first time in 1933, the year of the maiden voyage of the transatlantic ocean liner "SS Rex" (which is shown in "Amarcord"). The sea creature found on the beach at the end of "La Dolce Vita" (1960) has its basis in a giant fish marooned on a Rimini beach during a storm in 1934.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Although Fellini adapted key events from his childhood and adolescence in films such as "I Vitelloni" (1953), "" (1963), and "Amarcord" (1973), he insisted that such autobiographical memories were inventions:


title: Federico Fellini

text: In 1937, Fellini opened Febo, a portrait shop in Rimini, with the painter Demos Bonini. His first humorous article appeared in the "Postcards to Our Readers" section of Milan's "Domenica del Corriere". Deciding on a career as a caricaturist and gag writer, Fellini travelled to Florence in 1938, where he published his first cartoon in the weekly "420". According to a biographer, Fellini found school "exasperating" and, in one year, had 67 absences. Failing his military culture exam, he graduated from high school in 1939.


title: Federico Fellini

text: In September 1939, he enrolled in law school at the University of Rome to please his parents. Biographer Hollis Alpert reports that "there is no record of his ever having attended a class". Installed in a family "pensione", he met another lifelong friend, the painter Rinaldo Geleng. Desperately poor, they unsuccessfully joined forces to draw sketches of restaurant and café patrons. Fellini eventually found work as a cub reporter on the dailies "Il Piccolo" and "Il Popolo di Roma", but quit after a short stint, bored by the local court news assignments.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Four months after publishing his first article in "Marc'Aurelio", the highly influential biweekly humour magazine, he joined the editorial board, achieving success with a regular column titled "But Are You Listening?". Described as "the determining moment in Fellini's life", the magazine gave him steady employment between 1939 and 1942, when he interacted with writers, gagmen, and scriptwriters. These encounters eventually led to opportunities in show business and cinema. Among his collaborators on the magazine's editorial board were the future director Ettore Scola, Marxist theorist and scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, and Bernardino Zapponi, a future Fellini screenwriter. Conducting interviews for "CineMagazzino" also proved congenial: when asked to interview Aldo Fabrizi, Italy's most popular variety performer, he established such immediate personal rapport with the man that they collaborated professionally. Specializing in humorous monologues, Fabrizi commissioned material from his young protégé.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Retained on business in Rimini, Urbano sent wife and family to Rome in 1940 to share an apartment with his son. Fellini and Ruggero Maccari, also on the staff of "Marc'Aurelio", began writing radio sketches and gags for films.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Not yet twenty and with Fabrizi's help, Fellini obtained his first screen credit as a comedy writer on Mario Mattoli's "Il pirata sono io" ("The Pirate's Dream"). Progressing rapidly to numerous collaborations on films at Cinecittà, his circle of professional acquaintances widened to include novelist Vitaliano Brancati and scriptwriter Piero Tellini. In the wake of Mussolini's declaration of war against France and Britain on 10 June 1940, Fellini discovered Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", Gogol, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner along with French films by Marcel Carné, René Clair, and Julien Duvivier. In 1941 he published "Il mio amico Pasqualino", a 74-page booklet in ten chapters describing the absurd adventures of Pasqualino, an alter ego.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Writing for radio while attempting to avoid the draft, Fellini met his future wife Giulietta Masina in a studio office at the Italian public radio broadcaster EIAR in the autumn of 1942. Well-paid as the voice of Pallina in Fellini's radio serial, "Cico and Pallina", Masina was also well known for her musical-comedy broadcasts which cheered an audience depressed by the war.


title: Federico Fellini

text: The apolitical Fellini was finally freed of the draft when an Allied air raid over Bologna destroyed his medical records. Fellini and Giulietta hid in her aunt's apartment until Mussolini's fall on 25 July 1943. After dating for nine months, the couple were married on 30 October 1943. Several months later, Masina fell down the stairs and suffered a miscarriage. She gave birth to a son, Pierfederico, on 22 March 1945, but the child died of encephalitis 11 days later on 2 April 1945. Masina and Fellini had no other children.The tragedy had enduring emotional and artistic repercussions.


title: Federico Fellini

text: After the Allied liberation of Rome on 4 June 1944, Fellini and Enrico De Seta opened the Funny Face Shop where they survived the postwar recession drawing caricatures of American soldiers. He became involved with Italian Neorealism when Roberto Rossellini, at work on "Stories of Yesteryear" (later "Rome, Open City"), met Fellini in his shop, and proposed he contribute gags and dialogue for the script. Aware of Fellini's reputation as Aldo Fabrizi's "creative muse", Rossellini also requested that he try to convince the actor to play the role of Father Giuseppe Morosini, the parish priest executed by the SS on 4 April 1944.


title: Federico Fellini

text: In 1947, Fellini and Sergio Amidei received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of "Rome, Open City".


title: Federico Fellini

text: Working as both screenwriter and assistant director on Rossellini's "Paisà" ("Paisan") in 1946, Fellini was entrusted to film the Sicilian scenes in Maiori. In February 1948, he was introduced to Marcello Mastroianni, then a young theatre actor appearing in a play with Giulietta Masina. Establishing a close working relationship with Alberto Lattuada, Fellini co-wrote the director's "Senza pietà" ("Without Pity") and "Il mulino del Po" ("The Mill on the Po"). Fellini also worked with Rossellini on the anthology film "L'Amore" (1948), co-writing the screenplay and in one segment titled, "The Miracle", acting opposite Anna Magnani. To play the role of a vagabond rogue mistaken by Magnani for a saint, Fellini had to bleach his black hair blond.


title: Federico Fellini

text: In 1950 Fellini co-produced and co-directed with Alberto Lattuada "Variety Lights" ("Luci del varietà"), his first feature film. A backstage comedy set among the world of small-time travelling performers, it featured Giulietta Masina and Lattuada's wife, Carla Del Poggio. Its release to poor reviews and limited distribution proved disastrous for all concerned. The production company went bankrupt, leaving both Fellini and Lattuada with debts to pay for over a decade. In February 1950, "Paisà" received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay by Rossellini, Sergio Amidei, and Fellini.


title: Federico Fellini

text: After travelling to Paris for a script conference with Rossellini on "Europa '51", Fellini began production on "The White Sheik" in September 1951, his first solo-directed feature. Starring Alberto Sordi in the title role, the film is a revised version of a treatment first written by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1949 and based on the "fotoromanzi", the photographed cartoon strip romances popular in Italy at the time. Producer Carlo Ponti commissioned Fellini and Tullio Pinelli to write the script but Antonioni rejected the story they developed. With Ennio Flaiano, they re-worked the material into a light-hearted satire about newlywed couple Ivan and Wanda Cavalli (Leopoldo Trieste, Brunella Bovo) in Rome to visit the Pope. Ivan's prissy mask of respectability is soon demolished by his wife's obsession with the White Sheik. Highlighting the music of Nino Rota, the film was selected at Cannes (among the films in competition was Orson Welles's "Othello") and then retracted. Screened at the 13th Venice International Film Festival, it was razzed by critics in "the atmosphere of a soccer match". One reviewer declared that Fellini had "not the slightest aptitude for cinema direction".


title: Federico Fellini

text: In 1953, "I Vitelloni" found favour with the critics and public. Winning the Silver Lion Award in Venice, it secured Fellini his first international distributor.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Fellini directed "La Strada" based on a script completed in 1952 with Pinelli and Flaiano. During the last three weeks of shooting, Fellini experienced the first signs of severe clinical depression. Aided by his wife, he undertook a brief period of therapy with Freudian psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Fellini cast American actor Broderick Crawford to interpret the role of an aging swindler in "Il Bidone". Based partly on stories told to him by a petty thief during production of "La Strada", Fellini developed the script into a con man's slow descent towards a solitary death. To incarnate the role's "intense, tragic face", Fellini's first choice had been Humphrey Bogart, but after learning of the actor's lung cancer, chose Crawford after seeing his face on the theatrical poster of "All the King's Men" (1949). The film shoot was wrought with difficulties stemming from Crawford's alcoholism. Savaged by critics at the 16th Venice International Film Festival, the film did miserably at the box office and did not receive international distribution until 1964.


title: Federico Fellini

text: During the autumn, Fellini researched and developed a treatment based on a film adaptation of Mario Tobino's novel, "The Free Women of Magliano". Set in a mental institution for women, the project was abandoned when financial backers considered the subject had no potential.


title: Federico Fellini

text: While preparing "Nights of Cabiria" in spring 1956, Fellini learned of his father's death by cardiac arrest at the age of sixty-two. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and starring Giulietta Masina, the film took its inspiration from news reports of a woman's severed head retrieved in a lake and stories by Wanda, a shantytown prostitute Fellini met on the set of "Il Bidone". Pier Paolo Pasolini was hired to translate Flaiano and Pinelli's dialogue into Roman dialect and to supervise researches in the vice-afflicted suburbs of Rome. The movie won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 30th Academy Awards and brought Masina the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her performance.


title: Federico Fellini

text: With Pinelli, he developed "Journey with Anita" for Sophia Loren and Gregory Peck. An "invention born out of intimate truth", the script was based on Fellini's return to Rimini with a mistress to attend his father's funeral. Due to Loren's unavailability, the project was shelved and resurrected twenty-five years later as "Lovers and Liars" (1981), a comedy directed by Mario Monicelli with Goldie Hawn and Giancarlo Giannini. For Eduardo De Filippo, he co-wrote the script of "Fortunella".


title: Federico Fellini

text: The Hollywood on the Tiber phenomenon of 1958 in which American studios profited from the cheap studio labour available in Rome provided the backdrop for photojournalists to steal shots of celebrities on the via Veneto. The scandal provoked by Turkish dancer Haish Nana's improvised striptease at a nightclub captured Fellini's imagination: he decided to end his latest script-in-progress, "Moraldo in the City", with an all-night "orgy" at a seaside villa. Pierluigi Praturlon's photos of Anita Ekberg after an evening spent with the actress in a Rome night club provided further inspiration for Fellini and his screenwriters.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Changing the title of the screenplay to "La Dolce Vita", Fellini soon clashed with his producer on casting: The director insisted on the relatively unknown Mastroianni while De Laurentiis wanted Paul Newman as a hedge on his investment. Reaching an impasse, De Laurentiis sold the rights to publishing mogul Angelo Rizzoli. Shooting began on 16 March 1959 with Anita Ekberg climbing the stairs to the cupola of Saint Peter's in a mammoth décor constructed at Cinecittà. The statue of Christ flown by helicopter over Rome to St. Peter's Square was inspired by an actual media event on 1 May 1956, which Fellini had witnessed.


title: Federico Fellini

text: "La Dolce Vita" broke all box office records. Despite scalpers selling tickets at 1000 lire, crowds queued in line for hours to see an "immoral movie" before the censors banned it. At an exclusive Milan screening on 5 February 1960, one outraged patron spat on Fellini while others hurled insults. Denounced in parliament by right-wing conservatives, undersecretary Domenico Magrì of the Christian Democrats demanded tolerance for the film's controversial themes. The Vatican's official press organ, "l'Osservatore Romano", lobbied for censorship while the Board of Roman Parish Priests and the Genealogical Board of Italian Nobility attacked the film. In one documented instance involving favourable reviews written by the Jesuits of San Fedele, defending "La Dolce Vita" had severe consequences. In competition at Cannes alongside Antonioni's "L'Avventura", the film won the Palme d'Or awarded by presiding juror Georges Simenon. The Belgian writer was promptly "hissed at" by the disapproving festival crowd.


title: Federico Fellini

text: A major discovery for Fellini after his Italian neorealism period (1950–1959) was the work of Carl Jung. After meeting Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Ernst Bernhard in early 1960, he read Jung's autobiography, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" (1963) and experimented with LSD. Bernhard also recommended that Fellini consult the "I Ching" and keep a record of his dreams. What Fellini formerly accepted as "his extrasensory perceptions" were now interpreted as psychic manifestations of the unconscious. Bernhard's focus on Jungian depth psychology proved to be the single greatest influence on Fellini's mature style and marked the turning point in his work from neorealism to filmmaking that was "primarily oneiric". As a consequence, Jung's seminal ideas on the "anima" and the "animus", the role of archetypes and the collective unconscious directly influenced such films as "" (1963), "Juliet of the Spirits" (1965), "Fellini Satyricon" (1969), "Casanova" (1976), and "City of Women" (1980). Other key influences on his work include Luis Buñuel, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Roberto Rossellini.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Exploiting "La Dolce Vita"s success, financier Angelo Rizzoli set up Federiz in 1960, an independent film company, for Fellini and production manager Clemente Fracassi to discover and produce new talent. Despite the best intentions, their overcautious editorial and business skills forced the company to close down soon after cancelling Pasolini's project, "Accattone" (1961).


title: Federico Fellini

text: Condemned as a "public sinner", for "La Dolce Vita", Fellini responded with "The Temptations of Doctor Antonio", a segment in the omnibus "Boccaccio '70". His second colour film, it was the sole project green-lighted at Federiz. Infused with the surrealistic satire that characterized the young Fellini's work at "Marc'Aurelio", the film ridiculed a crusader against vice, interpreted by Peppino De Filippo, who goes insane trying to censor a billboard of Anita Ekberg espousing the virtues of milk.


title: Federico Fellini

text: In an October 1960 letter to his colleague Brunello Rondi, Fellini first outlined his film ideas about a man suffering creative block: "Well then – a guy (a writer? any kind of professional man? a theatrical producer?) has to interrupt the usual rhythm of his life for two weeks because of a not-too-serious disease. It's a warning bell: something is blocking up his system." Unclear about the script, its title, and his protagonist's profession, he scouted locations throughout Italy "looking for the film", in the hope of resolving his confusion. Flaiano suggested "La bella confusione" (literally "The Beautiful Confusion") as the movie's title. Under pressure from his producers, Fellini finally settled on ", a self-referential title referring principally (but not exclusively) to the number of films he had directed up to that time.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Giving the order to start production in spring 1962, Fellini signed deals with his producer Rizzoli, fixed dates, had sets constructed, cast Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, and Sandra Milo in lead roles, and did screen tests at the Scalera Studios in Rome. He hired cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo, among key personnel. But apart from naming his hero Guido Anselmi, he still couldn't decide what his character did for a living. The crisis came to a head in April when, sitting in his Cinecittà office, he began a letter to Rizzoli confessing he had "lost his film" and had to abandon the project. Interrupted by the chief machinist requesting he celebrate the launch of ", Fellini put aside the letter and went on the set. Raising a toast to the crew, he "felt overwhelmed by shame… I was in a no exit situation. I was a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers. And lo and behold, at that very moment everything fell into place. I got straight to the heart of the film. I would narrate everything that had been happening to me. I would make a film telling the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make". The self-mirroring structure makes the entire film inseparable from its reflecting construction.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Shooting began on 9 May 1962. Perplexed by the seemingly chaotic, incessant improvisation on the set, Deena Boyer, the director's American press officer at the time, asked for a rationale. Fellini told her that he hoped to convey the three levels "on which our minds live: the past, the present, and the conditional — the realm of fantasy". After shooting wrapped on 14 October, Nino Rota composed various circus marches and fanfares that would later become signature tunes of the maestro's cinema. Nominated for four Oscars, "" won awards for best foreign language film and best costume design in black-and-white. In California for the ceremony, Fellini toured Disneyland with Walt Disney the day after.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Increasingly attracted to parapsychology, Fellini met the Turin antiquarian Gustavo Rol in 1963. Rol, a former banker, introduced him to the world of Spiritism and séances. In 1964, Fellini took LSD under the supervision of Emilio Servadio, his psychoanalyst during the 1954 production of "La Strada". For years reserved about what actually occurred that Sunday afternoon, he admitted in 1992 that


title: Federico Fellini

text: ... objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to my self. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Fellini's hallucinatory insights were given full flower in his first colour feature "Juliet of the Spirits" (1965), depicting Giulietta Masina as Juliet, a housewife who rightly suspects her husband's infidelity and succumbs to the voices of spirits summoned during a séance at her home. Her sexually voracious next door neighbor Suzy (Sandra Milo) introduces Juliet to a world of uninhibited sensuality, but Juliet is haunted by childhood memories of her Catholic guilt and a teenaged friend who committed suicide. Complex and filled with psychological symbolism, the film is set to a jaunty score by Nino Rota.


title: Federico Fellini

text: To help promote "Satyricon" in the United States, Fellini flew to Los Angeles in January 1970 for interviews with Dick Cavett and David Frost. He also met with film director Paul Mazursky who wanted to star him alongside Donald Sutherland in his new film, "Alex in Wonderland". In February, Fellini scouted locations in Paris for "The Clowns", a docufiction both for cinema and television, based on his childhood memories of the circus and a "coherent theory of clowning." As he saw it, the clown "was always the caricature of a well-established, ordered, peaceful society. But today all is temporary, disordered, grotesque. Who can still laugh at clowns?... All the world plays a clown now."


title: Federico Fellini

text: In March 1971, Fellini began production on "Roma", a seemingly random collection of episodes informed by the director's memories and impressions of Rome. The "diverse sequences," writes Fellini scholar Peter Bondanella, "are held together only by the fact that they all ultimately originate from the director's fertile imagination." The film's opening scene anticipates "Amarcord" while its most surreal sequence involves an ecclesiastical fashion show in which nuns and priests roller skate past shipwrecks of cobwebbed skeletons.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Over a period of six months between January and June 1973, Fellini shot the Oscar-winning "Amarcord". Loosely based on the director's 1968 autobiographical essay "My Rimini", the film depicts the adolescent Titta and his friends working out their sexual frustrations against the religious and Fascist backdrop of a provincial town in Italy during the 1930s. Produced by Franco Cristaldi, the seriocomic movie became Fellini's second biggest commercial success after "La Dolce Vita". Circular in form, "Amarcord" avoids plot and linear narrative in a way similar to "The Clowns" and "Roma". The director's overriding concern with developing a poetic form of cinema was first outlined in a 1965 interview he gave to "The New Yorker" journalist Lillian Ross: "I am trying to free my work from certain constrictions – a story with a beginning, a development, an ending. It should be more like a poem with metre and cadence."


title: Federico Fellini

text: Organized by his publisher Diogenes Verlag in 1982, the first major exhibition of 63 drawings by Fellini was held in Paris, Brussels, and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. A gifted caricaturist, he found much of the inspiration for his sketches from his own dreams while the films-in-progress both originated from and stimulated drawings for characters, decor, costumes and set designs. Under the title, "I disegni di Fellini" (Fellini's Designs), he published 350 drawings executed in pencil, watercolours, and felt pens.


title: Federico Fellini

text: On 6 September 1985 Fellini was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 42nd Venice Film Festival. That same year, he became the first non-American to receive the Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual award for cinematic achievement.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Long fascinated by Carlos Castaneda's "", Fellini accompanied the Peruvian author on a journey to the Yucatán to assess the feasibility of a film. After first meeting Castaneda in Rome in October 1984, Fellini drafted a treatment with Pinelli titled "Viaggio a Tulun". Producer Alberto Grimaldi, prepared to buy film rights to all of Castaneda's work, then paid for pre-production research taking Fellini and his entourage from Rome to Los Angeles and the jungles of Mexico in October 1985. When Castaneda inexplicably disappeared and the project fell through, Fellini's mystico-shamanic adventures were scripted with Pinelli and serialized in "Corriere della Sera" in May 1986. A barely veiled satirical interpretation of Castaneda's work, "Viaggio a Tulun" was published in 1989 as a graphic novel with artwork by Milo Manara and as "Trip to Tulum" in America in 1990.


title: Federico Fellini

text: For "Intervista", produced by Ibrahim Moussa and RAI Television, Fellini intercut memories of the first time he visited Cinecittà in 1939 with present-day footage of himself at work on a screen adaptation of Franz Kafka's "Amerika". A meditation on the nature of memory and film production, it won the special 40th Anniversary Prize at Cannes and the 15th Moscow International Film Festival Golden Prize. In Brussels later that year, a panel of thirty professionals from eighteen European countries named Fellini the world's best director and "" the best European film of all time.


title: Federico Fellini

text: In early 1989 Fellini began production on "The Voice of the Moon", based on Ermanno Cavazzoni's novel, "Il poema dei lunatici" ("The Lunatics' Poem"). A small town was built at Empire Studios on the via Pontina outside Rome. Starring Roberto Benigni as Ivo Salvini, a madcap poetic figure newly released from a mental institution, the character is a combination of "La Strada"s Gelsomina, Pinocchio, and Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Fellini improvised as he filmed, using as a guide a rough treatment written with Pinelli. Despite its modest critical and commercial success in Italy, and its warm reception by French critics, it failed to interest North American distributors.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Fellini won the "Praemium Imperiale", an international prize in the visual arts given by the Japan Art Association in 1990.


title: Federico Fellini

text: In July 1991 and April 1992, Fellini worked in close collaboration with Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew to establish "the longest and most detailed conversations ever recorded on film". Described as the "Maestro's spiritual testament" by his biographer Tullio Kezich, excerpts culled from the conversations later served as the basis of their feature documentary, "" (2002) and the book, "".


title: Federico Fellini

text: In April 1993 Fellini received his fifth Oscar, for lifetime achievement, "in recognition of his cinematic accomplishments that have thrilled and entertained audiences worldwide". On 16 June, he entered the Cantonal Hospital in Zürich for an angioplasty on his femoral artery but suffered a stroke at the Grand Hotel in Rimini two months later. Partially paralyzed, he was first transferred to Ferrara for rehabilitation and then to the Policlinico Umberto I in Rome to be near his wife, also hospitalized. He suffered a second stroke and fell into an irreversible coma.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Fellini died in Rome on 31 October 1993 at the age of 73 after a heart attack he suffered a few weeks earlier, a day after his 50th wedding anniversary. The memorial service, in Studio 5 at Cinecittà, was attended by an estimated 70,000 people. At Giulietta Masina's request, trumpeter Mauro Maur played Nino Rota's "Improvviso dell'Angelo" during the ceremony.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Five months later, on 23 March 1994, Masina died of lung cancer. Fellini, Masina and their son, Pierfederico, are buried in a bronze sepulchre sculpted by Arnaldo Pomodoro. Designed as a ship's prow, the tomb is at the main entrance to the cemetery of Rimini. The Federico Fellini Airport in Rimini is named in his honour.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Fellini was raised in a Roman Catholic family and considered himself a Catholic, but avoided formal activity in the Catholic Church. Fellini's films include Catholic themes; some celebrate Catholic teachings, while others criticize or ridicule church dogma.


title: Federico Fellini

text: While Fellini was for the most part indifferent to politics, he had a general dislike of authoritarian institutions, and is interpreted by Bondanella as believing in "the dignity and even the nobility of the individual human being". In a 1966 interview, he said, "I make it a point to see if certain ideologies or political attitudes threaten the private freedom of the individual. But for the rest, I am not prepared nor do I plan to become interested in politics."


title: Federico Fellini

text: Despite various famous Italian actors favouring the Communists, Fellini was opposed to communism. He preferred to move within the world of the moderate left, and voted for the Italian Republican Party of his friend Ugo La Malfa as well as the reformist socialists of Pietro Nenni, another friend of his, and voted only once for the Christian Democrats in 1976 to keep the Communists out of power. Bondanella writes that DC "was far too aligned with an extremely conservative and even reactionary pre-Vatican II church to suit Fellini's tastes."


title: Federico Fellini

text: Apart from satirizing Silvio Berlusconi and mainstream television in "Ginger and Fred", Fellini rarely expressed political views in public and never directed an overtly political film. He directed two electoral television spots during the 1990s: one for DC and another for the Italian Republican Party (PRI). His slogan "Non si interrompe un'emozione" ("Don't interrupt an emotion") was directed against the excessive use of TV advertisements. The Democratic Party of the Left also used the slogan in the referendums of 1995.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Personal and highly idiosyncratic visions of society, Fellini's films are a unique combination of memory, dreams, fantasy and desire. The adjectives "Fellinian" and "Felliniesque" are "synonymous with any kind of extravagant, fanciful, even baroque image in the cinema and in art in general". "La Dolce Vita" contributed the term "paparazzi" to the English language, derived from Paparazzo, the photographer friend of journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni).


title: Federico Fellini

text: Contemporary filmmakers such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Emir Kusturica, and David Lynch have cited Fellini's influence on their work.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Polish director Wojciech Has, whose two best-received films, "The Saragossa Manuscript" (1965) and "The Hour-Glass Sanatorium" (1973), are examples of modernist fantasies, has been compared to Fellini for the sheer "luxuriance of his images".


title: Federico Fellini

text: "I Vitelloni" inspired European directors Juan Antonio Bardem, Marco Ferreri, and Lina Wertmüller and influenced Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" (1973), George Lucas's "American Graffiti" (1974), Joel Schumacher's "St. Elmo's Fire" (1985), and Barry Levinson's "Diner" (1982), among many others. When the American magazine "Cinema" asked Stanley Kubrick in 1963 to name his ten favorite films, he ranked "I Vitelloni" number one.


title: Federico Fellini

text: "Nights of Cabiria" was adapted as the Broadway musical "Sweet Charity" and the movie "Sweet Charity" (1969) by Bob Fosse starring Shirley MacLaine. "City of Women" was adapted for the Berlin stage by Frank Castorf in 1992.


title: Federico Fellini

text: ' inspired, among others, "Mickey One" (Arthur Penn, 1965), "Alex in Wonderland" (Paul Mazursky, 1970), "Beware of a Holy Whore" (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971), "Day for Night" (François Truffaut, 1973), "All That Jazz" (Bob Fosse, 1979), "Stardust Memories" (Woody Allen, 1980), "Sogni d'oro" (Nanni Moretti, 1981), "Parad Planet" (Vadim Abdrashitov, 1984), "La Película del rey" (Carlos Sorin, 1986), "Living in Oblivion" (Tom DiCillo, 1995), "Women" (Peter Greenaway, 1999), "Falling Down" (Joel Schumacher, 1993), and the Broadway musical "Nine" (Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit, 1982). "Yo-Yo Boing!" (1998), a Spanish novel by Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi, features a dream sequence with Fellini inspired by '.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Fellini's work is referenced on the albums "Fellini Days" (2001) by Fish, "Another Side of Bob Dylan" (1964) by "Bob Dylan" with "Motorpsycho Nitemare", "Funplex" (2008) by the B-52's with the song "Juliet of the Spirits", and in the opening traffic jam of the music video "Everybody Hurts" by R.E.M. American singer Lana Del Rey has cited Fellini as an influence. His work influenced the American TV shows "Northern Exposure" and "Third Rock from the Sun". Wes Anderson's short film "Castello Cavalcanti" (2013) is in many places a direct homage to Fellini. In 1996, "Entertainment Weekly" ranked Fellini tenth on its "50 Greatest Directors" list. In 2002 MovieMaker magazine ranked Fellini No. 9 on their list of "The 25 Most Influential Directors of All Time". In 2007, "Total Film" magazine ranked Fellini at No. 67 on its "100 Greatest Film Directors Ever" list.


title: Federico Fellini

text: Various film-related material and personal papers of Fellini are in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives, to which scholars and media experts have full access. In October 2009, the Jeu de Paume in Paris opened an exhibit devoted to Fellini that included ephemera, television interviews, behind-the-scenes photographs, "Book of Dreams" (based on 30 years of the director's illustrated dreams and notes), along with excerpts from "La dolce vita" and "".


title: Federico Fellini

text: In 2014 the weekly entertainment-trade magazine "Variety" announced that French director Sylvain Chomet was moving forward with "The Thousand Miles", a project based on various Fellini works, including his unpublished drawings and writings.


title: Les Claypool

text: Leslie Edward Claypool (born September 29, 1963) is an American musician, best known as the founder, lead singer, bassist, primary songwriter, and only continuous member of the rock band Primus. Frequently considered one of the best bass players of all time, his playing style is well known for mixing tapping, flamenco-like strumming, whammy bar bends, and slapping.


title: Les Claypool

text: Outside of Primus, Claypool has also been involved in a number of side projects, including the supergroups Oysterhead alongside Trey Anastasio (Phish) and Stewart Copeland (The Police), and Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains (C2B3), alongside Buckethead, Bryan Mantia (Primus) and Bernie Worrell (P-Funk). He also fronted the experimental rock projects Frog Brigade and Fancy Band. He has also self-produced and engineered several solo releases from his own studio, Rancho Relaxo. In 2006, a full-length feature film, "", written and directed by Claypool, was released, as well as his debut novel "South of the Pumphouse". Most recently, he has been involved in several duos, including Duo de Twang with Brian Kehoe (M.I.R.V.), and The Claypool Lennon Delirium with Sean Lennon (The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger).


title: Les Claypool

text: Leslie Edward Claypool was born September 29, 1963, in Richmond, California, and was raised in El Sobrante, California, in a working-class family of auto mechanics. Claypool decided to become a bass player, pursuing the instrument from the age of fourteen. Claypool has cited Larry Graham, Chris Squire, Tony Levin, Roger Waters, Geddy Lee, Paul McCartney, Geezer Butler, Bootsy Collins, Stanley Clarke, John Paul Jones, and the Residents as his musical influences. He went to school with and was a friend of guitarist Kirk Hammett, later of Metallica fame. Before forming Primus, Claypool learned various blue collar trades and worked as a carpenter.


title: Les Claypool

text: In 1986, after the death of Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, Hammett encouraged Claypool to audition for Metallica as Burton's successor. In Metallica's "Behind the Music", Claypool said that he jokingly asked the others if they wanted to "jam on some Isley Brothers tunes" during the audition, a reference to his limited experience in the thrash metal scene. Metallica frontman James Hetfield remarked that Claypool was not offered the job because "he was too good" and "should do his own thing." In a 2014 interview with Boing Boing, Claypool said that Hammett had given him a copy of "Ride the Lightning" (1984) which he enjoyed, but overall "wasn't a big metal guy" and "didn't realize how big Metallica were, to tell you the truth" until he arrived at the audition. In retrospect, Claypool admitted "I wasn't the right guy" and characterized himself as a "weirdo" and furthermore believed that Hetfield was "being nice" in saying Claypool was too good for Metallica.


title: Les Claypool

text: Primus began as "Primate" in the mid 1980s, with Claypool on bass, Todd Huth on guitar, and various drummers, most notably Jay Lane, though Huth and Lane left shortly thereafter to pursue other projects. Claypool replaced them with guitarist Larry LaLonde and drummer Tim Alexander.


title: Les Claypool

text: Claypool is considered to be the leader of the band, as well as the driving force behind its blending of funk with other genres. Claypool frequently utilizes the slap-bass technique, prominent in funk music, and is the only member of Primus who comes from a funk background. Because of Claypool's strong funk influence, Primus is often described as "thrash-funk" or funk metal, though Claypool dislikes these labels, stating: "We've been lumped in with the funk metal thing just about everywhere. I guess people just have to categorize you."


title: Les Claypool

text: From 1989 to 2000, Primus was one of the most unusual bands to gain significant mainstream airplay, headlining Lollapalooza in 1993, appearing on "Late Show with David Letterman" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" in 1995, and even appearing at Woodstock '94, where they performed their "Pork Soda" hit "My Name Is Mud" and were consequently pelted with mud by the audience, much to the band's displeasure, even driving Claypool to stop playing, and telling the audience "the song's called My Name is Mud, but keep the mud to yourself you son of a bitch". In 1991, the band was featured in the movie "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey", performing "Tommy the Cat" live. Claypool and Tom Waits first recorded on each other's records in 1991 and have continued to do so since. In 1997, Primus was asked to play and record the theme song for the animated television show "South Park". In 1999, he allowed Activision's use of the song "Jerry Was a Race Car Driver" in the popular video game "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater". Primus went on hiatus in 2000.


title: Les Claypool

text: In mid-2003, Claypool reunited with former Primus drummer Tim Alexander and guitarist Larry LaLonde to record a DVD/EP called "Animals Should Not Try to Act Like People". In October of the same year, the band embarked on a two-month tour in which two sets were performed per show, the second set consisting of their 1991 release "Sailing the Seas of Cheese" being performed in its entirety. Primus continued touring into 2004, performing their 1990 release "Frizzle Fry" as their second set, as documented on the DVD "Hallucino-Genetics: Live 2004".


title: Les Claypool

text: On October 17, 2006, Primus released both their first greatest hits album, "They Can't All Be Zingers", and their third DVD, "Blame It on the Fish", subtitled "An Abstract Look at the 2003 Primus Tour De Fromage." The band toured in 2006 on their Primus: The Beat a Dead Horse Tour 2006, and played at a small number of festivals in 2008.


title: Les Claypool

text: In 2010, Alexander, who had left the band for the second time due to lack of interest, was replaced by Jay Lane, who had not played with the band since 1988. The band subsequently resumed touring after the free "June 2010 Rehearsal" was released later that year, and a studio album, "Green Naugahyde", was released in 2011.


title: Les Claypool

text: In 2013, Lane left Primus for the second time to focus on his other band RatDog, who were coming off hiatus at the time, and was replaced again by Alexander. Primus' eighth studio album, "Primus & the Chocolate Factory with the Fungi Ensemble", a re-imagining of the soundtrack from the 1971 film "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory", was released in October 2014.


title: Les Claypool

text: In 2017, Primus released "The Desaturating Seven", an album that is based on a bedtime story published by Italian author Ul de Rico, which is about a group of rainbow eating goblins. They then began a tour with "Mastodon" through most of 2018.


title: Les Claypool

text: In 1988 Claypool started a short-lived alternative/funk rock band featuring Todd Huth on guitar and Jay Lane on drums. The group released their first album in April 1994 "Riddles Are Abound Tonight" by Prawn Song Records, and did a few short tours and opened for groups such as Helmet, Rollins Band, and Slayer. The band reunited for a show on December 31, 2019, opening for The Claypool Lennon Delirium and have not returned since.


title: Les Claypool

text: In 1996, Claypool produced, engineered and released a solo album, "Les Claypool and the Holy Mackerel presents" "Highball with the Devil". Claypool is credited with bass, drums and vocals on several tracks as well as guitar. Also on the album are Mark "Mirv" Haggard, Adam Gates, Jay Lane, Joe Gore, Charlie Hunter and Henry Rollins. The accompanying tour included Haggard and Gates on guitars with Bryan Mantia on drums. It was announced during the Holy Mackerel tour that Mantia had been chosen to become the next Primus drummer.


title: Les Claypool

text: In April 2000, Claypool collaborated with Trey Anastasio (of Phish) and Stewart Copeland (of the Police) to form a supergroup called Oysterhead. Claypool and Anastasio had been looking for an opportunity to collaborate. Each had a mutual interest in playing with Copeland who had been a rock idol of their teen years. Plus, Claypool and Copeland already had an established friendship. Oysterhead were originally intended as a one time performance during Jazz Fest in New Orleans. Though timid of the band's sudden and surprising popularity they eventually decided to record and tour. They released one studio album, "The Grand Pecking Order", and toured before disbanding in 2001. They re-united in 2006, at the Bonnaroo Music Festival. In 2016 Les tried to reunite the group, but ended up releasing an album with The Claypool Lennon Delirium. Fortunately, they re-united once again in 2020 for two shows at the 1stBank Center in Broomfield, Colorado, with the rest of their tour cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Les Claypool

text: In May 2000, Claypool formed Les Claypool's Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, an experimental rock group. Claypool was asked to put together a band for the Mountain Aire Festival in Angels Camp, California. The band "of the most incredible guys (he) could possibly find" debuted that Memorial Day weekend and played a number of other festivals including moe.down. Originally he was going to call the band "Les Claypool's Thunder Brigade". Claypool states:


title: Les Claypool

text: I originally was going to do the two drummer thing with Herb and Jack Irons, so I was gonna call it the Les Claypool Thunder Brigade. Michael Bailey from Bill Graham Presents said to me that it may sound a bit too heavy for the Mountain Aire crowd and to perhaps try something a little different that had to do with the event itself. Since it was home of the Calaveras County Frog Jump... hence the Frog Brigade and then it evolved into Colonel Les Claypool's Fearless Flying Frog Brigade.


title: Les Claypool

text: The Primus hiatus allowed him to return to his musical roots, playing songs by bands such as Pink Floyd, King Crimson, and the Beatles. Claypool has called the Frog Brigade his "mid-life crisis band". From a set of October shows recorded at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, Claypool released two Frog Brigade live albums, one being a cover of Pink Floyd's "Animals". The line-up included Todd Huth, Eenor, Jeff Chimenti, Jay Lane, Skerik and Claypool.


title: Les Claypool

text: The Frog Brigade is also noted for Claypool's being accepted into the jam band scene. "Live Frogs Set 1" won "Best Live Album" at the second annual Jammys. Jay Lane and Jeff Chimenti are both members of Bob Weir's band Ratdog. Claypool performed with the Rat Brigade when opening for Ratdog once in 2000 and again in 2007. The Rat Brigade includes Claypool, drummer Lane and keyboardist Chimenti, with guest appearances by saxophonist Kenny Brooks and Bob Weir.


title: Les Claypool

text: In 2002, Claypool released a studio album of the Frog Brigade, "Purple Onion". Musicians on multiple tracks for "Purple Onion" include Warren Haynes (Gov't Mule) Eenor, Mike Dillon, Skerik, Jay Lane, Ben Barnes and Sam Bass (Dillon and Skerik were both from Critters Buggin while Barnes and Sam Bass were from Deadweight). This album includes "Whamola" which later appeared as a remix for the theme of South Park .


title: Les Claypool

text: Also in 2002, Claypool collaborated with guitarist Buckethead, Parliament-Funkadelic/Talking Heads keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and former Primus drummer Bryan Mantia under the name Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains (stylized "C2B3," which is to be pronounced as "C Squared, B Cubed"). Their concerts pushed the improvisational envelope by preparing no material and not rehearsing beforehand. At one of their shows they prepared sandwiches onstage for the audience to eat.


title: Les Claypool

text: C2B3 re-united in 2004 to record "The Big Eyeball in the Sky", an album with equal parts instrumental and vocal songs. The band began an 18-state tour of the US on September 24, 2004. Aux TV was dismissive of Claypool's effort, but when the tour landed back in Northern California where Claypool lives, the local press gave a very positive review.


title: Les Claypool

text: The album features only one guest, the childlike multi-instrumentalist Gabby La La (noted as Gabby Lang on Les Claypool's Frog Brigade's Purple Onion) on vocals and sitar. She also opened on every show (sometimes to scathingly negative reviews) during the 2004 tour as a solo act, and sometimes with members of C2B3. Claypool also produced and performed on Gabby La La's first album, "Be Careful What You Wish For...". Gabby La La is the first artist Les has signed to his label since Charlie Hunter in 1993. He has performed select shows with her (including the 2005 Bonnaroo Music Festival) and added her to his then new touring band, Les Claypool & His Fancy Band. The 2005 Fancy Band line-up also included Skerik, Dillon and Lane.


title: Les Claypool

text: At the end of 2005, Claypool released "5 Gallons of Diesel", a video retrospective of all of his work away from Primus.


title: Les Claypool

text: Claypool's first attempt at a feature-length film, "", was shown on various film festivals in the late spring of 2006. The movie is a spoof of the jam band scene centered on the fake band, Electric Apricot, in the mockumentary tradition of "This Is Spinal Tap". The group performed low-key shows in the California area (most recently High Sierra Music Festival) for the filming of the movie. The members of the band are characterized as Steve Hampton "Aiwass" Trouzdale (Adam Gates) on bass and vocals, Steve "Gordo" Gordon (Brian Kehoe) on guitar and vocals, Herschal Tambor Brillstien (Jonathan Korty) on keyboards and vocals, and of course Lapland "Lapdog" Miclovik (Les Claypool) on drums and vocals. The film debuted on March 15. During a question and answer session at the Tiburon Film Festival where the film debuted Claypool said that the yet unreleased DVD would have an accompanying soundtrack CD. The film has won other awards as well including Best Feature (audience choice) at the Malibu Film Festival. Claypool also said that the band would possibly perform a few select shows, but a tour is unlikely as Adam Gates has a job at Pixar which makes touring difficult. Other cameos in the film include Arj Barker, Dian Bachar, Seth Green, Warren Haynes, Mike Gordon, Matt Stone, Sam Maccarone and Bob Weir.


title: Les Claypool

text: On May 30, 2006, Claypool released a solo album, "Of Whales and Woe", with guest appearances by Skerik, Mike Dillon and Gabby La La. This album includes the song "Robot Chicken", which is the theme song of the popular Adult Swim show of the same name. His son Cage and his daughter Lena even make a special appearance on the song "Back Off Turkey". The release was followed by a tour of the U.S. with the following lineup:


title: Les Claypool

text: This lineup is called Les Claypool's Fancy Band and did national tours in both 2006 and 2007. A live DVD, "Fancy", recorded from the 2006 tour was released in 2007. The audio track includes a mix of both soundboard and taper recordings. A song from the album, "One Better", was used in in a fight scene between Preston Lacy and Lee Majors.


title: Les Claypool

text: Claypool's first book, "South of the Pumphouse", was released on July 1, 2006, by Akashic Books. Copies of the book were sold during Claypool's 2006 tour of the U.S. following the release of "Of Whales and Woe". The book is a dark, clever tale of brothers, murder, drugs, and fishing, and it has been likened to the work of Hunter S. Thompson. Claypool gave his first interview about the book on May 11, 2006.


title: Les Claypool

text: Besides touring in the Summer of 2007 nationally with the Fancy Band, Claypool performed that October with a version of the band, dubbed the Fancy Trio. The trio consisted of Claypool, Skerik on saxophone, and Mike Dillon on drums, vibraphone and percussion. They played at The Echo Project, an inaugural ecologically minded 3-day festival in Fairburn, Georgia on the Boukeart family farm. The set was similar to that of the Fancy Band's tours, culling from Claypool' solo and Frog Brigade albums, as well containing a cover of "One Step Beyond" by Madness and teases of other songs, including several Primus tunes, throughout their improvisational jams.


title: Les Claypool

text: For many years Claypool has done a New Year's Eve show at The Fillmore in San Francisco. More recently the New Year's Eve show has been an Annual New Year's Eve Hatter's Ball featuring a hat contest. December 31, 2007, was the 3rd such annual event.


title: Les Claypool

text: In 2008, a United States tour spanned from February 29 to April 5. It kicked off at the Neighborhood Theatre in Charlotte, North Carolina and ended at The Warfield in San Francisco. The 2008 tour was a quartet featuring Claypool, Dillon, Skerik and Baldi.


title: Les Claypool

text: During the year Claypool also performed several shows with Primus at festivals across America and Canada.


title: Les Claypool

text: "Pig Hunt" is a film directed by James Isaac released in 2008. Claypool contributes previously unreleased material and plays the role of "The Preacher".


title: Les Claypool

text: On December 31, 2008, Claypool rang in the New Year with his annual New Year's Eve show. It was at the San Francisco Opera House with Zappa Plays Zappa sharing the bill and playing first.


title: Les Claypool

text: Claypool was also a judge for the 7th annual Independent Music Awards. His contributions helped assist upcoming independent artists' careers.


title: Les Claypool

text: Claypool's second solo album, "Of Fungi and Foe", was released on March 17, 2009. The album consists of expanded material of the music from the "Mushroom Men" game, as well as the "Pig Hunt" motion picture, and features a guest appearance by Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hutz.


title: Les Claypool

text: In 2009, Claypool toured with Matisyahu, performing as a 'double-feature' set, as well as appearing together on stage.


title: Les Claypool

text: On March 28, 2010, Claypool performed a rendition of Rush's "The Spirit of Radio" for their induction into the Canadian Songwriter's Hall of Fame.


title: Les Claypool

text: From May 2010 to July 2013, Claypool toured extensively with Primus, alongside Larry LaLonde, and the return of former Primus drummer, Jay Lane. On September 6, 2012, a new side project was revealed as an acoustic band called Duo de Twang. Featuring Claypool and originally Marc Haggard. After two shows, Haggard was replaced with Bryan Kehoe. Both guitarists play together in the associated band "M.I.R.V."


title: Les Claypool

text: On September 25, 2013, it was announced Jay Lane had left Primus to rejoin the Bob Weir group RatDog. His replacement was declared to be Tim Alexander. Claypool and "Dean Ween" are currently working together for a reality TV show called Musishermen, and Duo de Twang is preparing for the release of their debut album, Four Foot Shack.


title: Les Claypool

text: On February 4, 2014, Duo de Twang released their debut album "Four Foot Shack" and began touring in late February. In the last part of the 2014 Spring Tour, Primus's drummer, Tim Alexander, had a small heart attack which rendered him unable to play. Luckily instead of canceling the September shows, they were able to use their close friend Danny Carey for the late shows.


title: Les Claypool

text: On January 19, 2016, it was announced that The Claypool Lennon Delirium, a collaboration between Claypool and Sean Lennon, would debut at Bonnaroo 2016. Claypool has spoken fondly of the collaboration, stating, "Sean is a musical mutant after my own heart. He definitely reflects his genetics – not just the sensibilities of his dad, but also the abstract perspective and unique approach of his mother. It makes for a glorious freak stew."


title: Les Claypool

text: On March 21, 2016, it was announced that the duo would release their debut album, entitled "Monolith of Phobos", on June 3, 2016. Their second album, "South of Reality", was released February 22, 2019.


title: Les Claypool

text: In 2016 Claypool formed a group with Sean Lennon of The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, Paulo Baldi of Cake, and João Nogueira of Stone Giant. Les met Sean in 2015 when he was on tour with Primus, The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, and Dinosaur Jr. Les stayed in touch with Sean and the group released their first album "The Monolith Of Phobos" in 2016. On their first tour they switched out their keyboardist Money Mark of


title: Les Claypool

text: Beastie Boys for Pete Drungle. In 2017, The Delirium returned with their EP "Lime And Limpid Green" and released their second album "South Of Reality" in 2019, this time with João on Keys.


title: Les Claypool

text: Claypool was a special guest star in a "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" episode with the most celebrities on Cartoon Network in 1996.


title: Les Claypool

text: Claypool is famous for his wacky sense of humor and eccentric personality. He is also known for his cannabis use, and is quoted as saying, "Please don't throw your shit at me... unless that shit resembles a bag of marijuana." Although his use of marijuana was public knowledge, it is alleged he grew tired of smoking it for a brief period between 2003 and 2004. He is quoted saying "wine over weed" by an unidentified source during an unaired taping of "Fly Fishing the World" in late 2004.


title: Les Claypool

text: Starting in 2007, Claypool began a wine-making project that turned into a boutique business. Claypool Cellars makes wines from grapes grown in the Russian River Valley. The wines have names based on his music like "Purple Pachyderm" and "Pink Platypus".


title: Les Claypool

text: June 12, 2018, was declared "Les Claypool Day" in Cincinnati, Ohio by mayor John Cranley. The declaration was presented to Claypool during Primus' show that night at the Riverbend Music Center by members of the Cincinnati USA Music Heritage Foundation alongside Claypool's friend, influence, and Cincinnati native Bootsy Collins.


title: Les Claypool

text: Claypool is well known for his distinctive bass-playing, which aside from being quite dominant in the majority of his music also includes the use of several unusual techniques, such as Flamenco-style strumming, tapping, slapping and guitar-like chording. Claypool has also made prominent use of a Kahler "bass tremolo" vibrato system, as well as effects such as fuzz boxes and envelope filters. For most of his career Claypool has played four-stringed basses, but has experimented with extended-range basses, most notably six-stringed models, as heard on songs like "Jerry Was a Race Car Driver", which features Claypool tapping the main melody on a fretless six-string bass.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle and one of the best known in the English-speaking world. He is typically portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg, though he is not explicitly described as such. The first recorded versions of the rhyme date from late eighteenth-century England and the tune from 1870 in James William Elliott's "National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs". Its origins are obscure, and several theories have been advanced to suggest original meanings.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: Humpty Dumpty was popularized in the United States on Broadway by actor George L. Fox in the pantomime musical "Humpty Dumpty". The show ran from 1868 to 1869, for a total of 483 performances, becoming the longest-running Broadway show until it was surpassed in 1881 by "Hazel Kirke". As a character and literary allusion, Humpty Dumpty has appeared or been referred to in many works of literature and popular culture, particularly English author Lewis Carroll's 1871 book "Through the Looking-Glass", in which he was described as an egg. The rhyme is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index as No. 13026.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: It is a single quatrain with external rhymes that follow the pattern of AABB and with a trochaic metre, which is common in nursery rhymes. The melody commonly associated with the rhyme was first recorded by composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott in his "National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs" (London, 1870), as outlined below:


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: The earliest known version was published in Samuel Arnold's "Juvenile Amusements" in 1797 with the lyrics:


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: William Carey Richards (1818–1892) quoted the poem in 1843, commenting, "when we were five years old ... the following parallel lines... were propounded as a riddle ... Humpty-dumpty, reader, is the Dutch or something else for an egg".


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: A manuscript addition to a copy of "Mother Goose's Melody" published in 1803 has the modern version with a different last line: "Could not set Humpty Dumpty up again". It was published in 1810 in a version of "Gammer Gurton's Garland". (Note: Original spelling variations left intact.)


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: The modern-day version of this nursery rhyme, as known throughout the UK since at least the mid-twentieth century, is as follows:


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: According to the "Oxford English Dictionary", in the 17th century, the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale. The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person. The riddle may depend upon the assumption that a clumsy person falling off a wall might not be irreparably damaged, whereas an egg would be. The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known. Similar riddles have been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such as "Boule Boule" in French, "Lille Trille" in Swedish and Norwegian, and "Runtzelken-Puntzelken" or "Humpelken-Pumpelken" in different parts of Germany—although none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: The rhyme does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg, possibly because it may have been originally posed as a riddle. There are also various theories of an original "Humpty Dumpty". One, advanced by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930 and adopted by Robert Ripley, posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted as humpbacked in Tudor histories and particularly in Shakespeare's play, and who was defeated, despite his armies, at Bosworth Field in 1485.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: In 1785, Francis Grose's "Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue" noted that a "Humpty Dumpty" was "a short clumsy person of either sex, also ale boiled with brandy"; no mention was made of the rhyme.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: "Punch" in 1842 suggested jocularly that the rhyme was a metaphor for the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey; just as Wolsey was not buried in his intended tomb, so Humpty Dumpty was not buried in his shell.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: Professor David Daube suggested in "The Oxford Magazine" of 16 February 1956 that Humpty Dumpty was a "tortoise" siege engine, an armored frame, used unsuccessfully to approach the walls of the Parliamentary-held city of Gloucester in 1643 during the Siege of Gloucester in the English Civil War. This was on the basis of a contemporary account of the attack, but without evidence that the rhyme was connected. The theory was part of an anonymous series of articles on the origin of nursery rhymes and was widely acclaimed in academia, but it was derided by others as "ingenuity for ingenuity's sake" and declared to be a spoof. The link was nevertheless popularized by a children's opera "All the King's Men" by Richard Rodney Bennett, first performed in 1969.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: From 1996, the website of the Colchester tourist board attributed the origin of the rhyme to a cannon recorded as used from the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall by the Royalist defenders in the siege of 1648. In 1648, Colchester was a walled town with a castle and several churches and was protected by the city wall. The story given was that a large cannon, which the website claimed was colloquially called Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the wall. A shot from a Parliamentary cannon succeeded in damaging the wall beneath Humpty Dumpty, which caused the cannon to tumble to the ground. The Royalists (or Cavaliers, "all the King's men") attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall, but the cannon was so heavy that "All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty together again". Author Albert Jack claimed in his 2008 book "Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes" that there were two other verses supporting this claim. Elsewhere, he claimed to have found them in an "old dusty library, [in] an even older book", but did not state what the book was or where it was found. It has been pointed out that the two additional verses are not in the style of the seventeenth century or of the existing rhyme, and that they do not fit with the earliest printed versions of the rhyme, which do not mention horses and men.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: Humpty Dumpty has become a highly popular nursery rhyme character. American actor George L. Fox (1825–77) helped to popularise the character in nineteenth-century stage productions of pantomime versions, music, and rhyme. The character is also a common literary allusion, particularly to refer to a person in an insecure position, something that would be difficult to reconstruct once broken, or a short and fat person.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: Humpty Dumpty appears in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass" (1871), a sequel to "Alice in Wonderland" from six years prior. Alice remarks that Humpty is "exactly like an egg," which Humpty finds to be "very provoking" in the looking-glass world. Alice clarifies that she said he looks like an egg, not that he is one. They discuss semantics and pragmatics when Humpty Dumpty says, "my name means the shape I am," and later:


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'""But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected."When "I" use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.""The question is," said Alice, "whether you "can" make words mean so many different things.""The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, "I" can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what "I" say!"


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: This passage was used in Britain by Lord Atkin in his dissenting judgement in the seminal case "Liversidge v. Anderson" (1942), where he protested about the distortion of a statute by the majority of the House of Lords. It also became a popular citation in United States legal opinions, appearing in 250 judicial decisions in the Westlaw database , including two Supreme Court cases ("TVA v. Hill" and "Zschernig v. Miller").


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: A. J. Larner suggested that Carroll's Humpty Dumpty had prosopagnosia on the basis of his description of his finding faces hard to recognise:


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: "That's just what I complain of," said Humpty Dumpty. "Your face is the same as everybody has—the two eyes,—" (marking their places in the air with his thumb) "nose in the middle, mouth under. It's always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance—or the mouth at the top—that would be "some" help."


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: James Joyce used the story of Humpty Dumpty as a recurring motif of the Fall of Man in the 1939 novel Finnegans Wake. One of the most easily recognizable references is at the end of the second chapter, in the first verse of the Ballad of Persse O'Reilly:


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: Robert Penn Warren's 1946 American novel "All the King's Men" is the story of populist politician Willie Stark's rise to the position of governor and eventual fall, based on the career of the infamous Louisiana Senator and Governor Huey Long. It won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize and was twice made into a film in 1949 and 2006, the former winning the Academy Award for best motion picture. This was echoed in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book "All the President's Men", about the Watergate scandal, referring to the failure of the President's staff to repair the damage once the scandal had leaked out. It was filmed as "All the President's Men" in 1976, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: In 1983, an advert for Kinder Surprise featuring a realistic version of the Humpty Dumpty character (designed by Mike Quinn, who worked at the Jim Henson’s Creature Shop) and directed by Mike Portelly, was banned shortly after release, due to being highly unsettling. The advert aired only on ITV and its franchises.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: In 2021, American band AJR released a song titled "Humpty Dumpty" on their album "OK Orchestra". The song uses the nursery rhyme as a parallel for hiding one's true emotions as things, typically unpleasant, happen to the singer.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: Jasper Fforde's 2005 British novel "The Big Over Easy" is an exercise in absurdity, in which Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty III has been murdered and Detective Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division is set the task of solving the mystery.


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: Taylor Swift references it in her song "The Archer", the fifth track on her album "Lover", modifying it slightly and turning it into "all the king's horses, all the king's men, couldn't put me together again".


title: Humpty Dumpty

text: Humpty Dumpty has been used to demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics. The law describes a process known as entropy, a measure of the number of specific ways in which a system may be arranged, often taken to be a measure of "disorder". The higher the entropy, the higher the disorder. After his fall and subsequent shattering, the inability to put him together again is representative of this principle, as it would be highly unlikely (though not impossible) to return him to his earlier state of lower entropy, as the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: Freetown Christiania, also known as Christiania ( or '), is an intentional community, commune and micronation in the Christianshavn neighbourhood of the Danish capital city of Copenhagen, Christinia, Christianshavn, Copenhagen K, Island of Amager. It began in 1971 as a squatted military base. Its Pusher Street is famous for its open trade of cannabis, which is illegal in Denmark.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: Christiania is considered to be the fourth largest tourist attraction in Copenhagen, with half a million visitors annually.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: The residents of Christiania are called "Christianit", or "Christianshavner and Amagerkaner" because Christiania is located on the island of Amager. The 1976 protest song ("You cannot kill us"), written by Tom Lunden of flower power rock group Bifrost, became the unofficial anthem of Christiania. The flag of Christiania is a red banner with three yellow discs representing the dots in each "i" in "Christiania".


title: Freetown Christiania

text: Within Christiania itself no private cars are allowed. Residents with cars park on the streets surrounding the Freetown. After negotiating with city authorities, Christiania has agreed to establish parking areas for residents' own cars on its territory. As of 2005, parking space for only 14 cars had been established within the area.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: Christiania is an intentional community and commune of about 850 to 1,000 residents, covering in the borough of Christianshavn in the Danish capital city of Copenhagen on the island of Amager.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: The area of Christiania consists of the former military barracks of Bådsmandsstræde and parts of the city ramparts. The ramparts and the borough of Christianshavn (then a separate city) were established in 1617 by King Christian IV by reclaiming the low beaches and islets between Copenhagen and Amager. After the siege of Copenhagen during the Second Northern War, the ramparts were reinforced during 1682 to 1692 under Christian V to form a complete defence ring. The western ramparts of Copenhagen were demolished during the 19th century, but those of Christianshavn were allowed to remain. They are today considered among the finest surviving 17th century defence works in the world.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: The outermost defence line, Enveloppen, has been renamed "Dyssen" in Christiania language (except for the southernmost tip of it which was not annexed by Christiania). It is connected to central Christiania by a bridge across the main moat or can be reached by the path beginning at Christmas Møllers Plads. Four gunpowder storehouses line the redans. They were built in 1779–1780 to replace a storage in central Copenhagen, at Østerport, which infamously exploded in 1770, killing 50 people. The buildings are renamed , , ('the Fakir School') and ('Cosmic Flower') and have, although protected, been slightly altered from their historical state.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: In 2007, the National Heritage Agency proposed protection status for some of the historic military buildings now in Christiania, some of which were altered after Christiania's takeover.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: After bitter negotiations that temporarily resulted in the area being sealed off to the public, in June 2011, the residents of Christiania agreed to collectively set up a fund to formally purchase the land. The community made its first payment in July 2012, officially becoming legal landowners.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: On 26 September 1971, Christiania was declared open by Jacob Ludvigsen, a well-known provo and journalist who published a magazine called ('The main paper'), which was intended for and successfully distributed to mostly young people. In the paper, Ludvigsen wrote an article in which he and five others explored what he termed 'The Forbidden City of the Military'. The article widely announced the proclamation of the free town, and among other things he wrote the following under the headline "Civilians conquered the 'forbidden city' of the military": Although Christiania enjoyed an initial blind eye from the authorities, The Ministry of Defence brought a legal case against Christiania on April 1, 1976, which was upheld by the Supreme Court on February 2, 1978, who ruled that Christiania should be cleared immediately. However, despite the ruling, immediate action was not taken and that same year the Folketing decided that a development plan should be drafted first.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: In addition to these external problems, pressure was building internally as well: Following the death of 10 residents in the space of one year from overdoses, in 1979 the residents of Christiania began the "Junk Blockade". For 40 days and nights, residents patrolled the buildings where hard drugs were sold and sought to push the dealers out of the community while offering aid to the addicts.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: During the 1980s, motorcycle gangs fought their way into Christiania, seeking to gain control over the drug market. One gang in particular, the "Bullshit gang" or "Bullshitters", managed to fight off a chapter of the Hells Angels to establish sole control of the drugs market by 1984. In 1987, after police found the dismembered body of a man under the floorboards of a Bullshitter bike shop inside Christiania, the Bullshitters were broken up and cleared from the area following a combined response from the community, the police and reprisals from the Hells' Angels. From that point on, biker jackets were banned from the Freetown.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: In April 2005, a gang shot and killed a man in Christiania and injured three others in an incident related to Christiania's cannabis trade.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: On 14 May 2007, workers from the governmental Forest and Nature Agency, accompanied by police, entered Christiania to demolish leftovers of the small, abandoned building of ('the cigar box'). They were met by angry and frightened Christianites, fearing that the police also intended to demolish other houses. The residents built roadblocks, but the police eventually entered the Freetown en masse and were met by resistance. Residents threw stones and shot fireworks at police vehicles. They also built barricades in the street outside Christiania's gate. The police used tear gas on the residents and a number of arrests were made. One activist sneaked behind the police commander and poured a bucket of urine and faeces upon him before being immediately arrested. The trouble continued into the early morning hours. In all, over 50 activists from both Christiania and outside were arrested. Prosecutors demanded they be imprisoned on the basis that they might otherwise participate in further disturbances in Copenhagen (which prosecutors claimed was "in a state of rebellion").


title: Freetown Christiania

text: On 24 April 2009, a 22-year-old man had part of his jaw blown off by a hand grenade thrown into the crowds seated at Cafe Nemoland. Four others had minor injuries.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: On 31 August 2016, a person believed by police to be carrying earnings from cannabis sales shot two police officers and a civilian after being stopped. The injuries of one of the officers who was shot in the head were life-threatening (he survived, but needed a long period of rehabilitation), while the injuries of the other victims were less serious. Police sealed off the entire neighbourhood and located the perpetrator in Kastrup a few hours later. During a brief shootout with Politiets Aktionsstyrke (a special intervention police unit) he was seriously wounded and later died from his injuries in the hospital. The perpetrator, a 25-year-old Danish citizen of Bosnian descent (he arrived in Denmark as a child with his family), was well known to the police for violence and involvement in cannabis sales. Although known to be a sympathiser with Islamic extremism, this is not considered to have played a role in his actions. Police officers very rarely receive life-threatening injuries during encounters with criminals (at the moment of the Christiania shooting, the last police officer to be killed by a criminal in Denmark was in 1995) and the incident was widely condemned.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: In a communal meeting consisting of Christiania residents, it was decided that the stalls in Pusher Street (by far the site of the largest cannabis sale in Denmark) should be removed, which happened the following day, 2 September 2016. Local residents also urged people who were friends of the neighbourhood to help by not buying cannabis in Christiania. About two months later, it was estimated that the "de facto" practice of cannabis sales within Christiania had dropped by about 75%.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: Christiania has a number of street food stands, as well as two breweries, Christiania Bryghus and Christiania Bryg.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: Since its opening, Christiania has been famous for its open cannabis trade, taking place in the centrally located Pusher Street, although named "Green Light District" by the Christianian council. Although the hash trade is illegal, authorities were for many years reluctant to forcibly stop it. Proponents thought that concentrating the hash trade at one place would limit its dispersion in society, and that it could prevent users from switching to 'harder drugs'. Some wanted to legalise hash altogether. Opponents thought the ban should be enforced, in Christiania as elsewhere, and that there should be no differentiation between 'soft' and 'hard' drugs. It has also been claimed that the open cannabis trade was one of Copenhagen's major tourist attractions, while some said it scared other potential tourists away and the cannabis sale is actually also forbidden on Christiania's area. Even though the police have attempted to stop the drug trade, the cannabis market has generally thrived in Christiania. When local residents removed the Pusher Street stalls in 2016, it was estimated that the cannabis sale dropped by about 75%.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: In 2002, the government began aiming to make the cannabis trade less visible. In response, the cannabis sellers covered their stands in military camouflage nets as a humorous reply. The open cannabis trade returned to Pusher Street after police raids in 2004, but the stalls were again torn down by Christiania's residents after the 2016 shooting.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: In September 2007, the representatives of Christiania and Copenhagen's city council reached an agreement to cede control of Christiania to the city over the course of ten years for the purposes of business development. Also, as of May 2009, the Eastern High Court upheld a 2004 Act of Parliament which reaffirmed the state's legal claim to control of the base. This rule is confirmed in February 2011 by the Supreme Court. The state has now full right of disposal of the Christiania area. In June 2011, the State signed an agreement with Christiania stating that the Christiania area will be transferred to a new foundation, the Foundation Freetown Christiania.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: The most contentious part of this process has been to force the residents naturally opposed to the whole idea of ownership to buy the piece of land they have been occupying for more than 40 years. In July 2012, they made the first payment, and the Christianites went from squatters to legal landowners. A foundation, run by residents, was set up to raise funds and apply for a bank loan. Christianites were able to buy about 19 acres of the initial 84-acre plot.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: In his January 2013 book "In the Name of the People", Ivo Mosley cited Christiania as one of the few examples of communities run on truly democratic lines that exist in the world. Six months later, the laws governing Christiania changed. In July 2013, the legislative proposal L 179 for the repealing of the Christiania Law was adopted by all parties in the Danish Parliament with the exception of the Danish People's Party. From that moment, the same legislative rules that apply to the rest of Denmark apply to Christiania.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: Christiania has countered the government's plans for normalisation with its own community driven planning proposal, which after eight months of internal workshops and meetings gained consensus at the common meeting before being published in early 2006.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: Christiania's own development plan was awarded the Initiative Award of the Society for the Beautification of Copenhagen in November 2006.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: Christiania native Lukas Forchhammer of the Danish pop band Lukas Graham wrote the 2016 song "Mama Said" about his experience growing up in the community.


title: Freetown Christiania

text: Freetown Christiania featured prominently in the script for the third episode of the 2016 "Trailer Park Boys" spinoff "Out of the Park: Europe".


title: Freetown Christiania

text: Episode 5 of the 2022 Netflix drama "Clark" portrays Clark Olofsson plotting a bank robbery with members of the Red Army Faction while hiding in Christiania after escaping incarceration in Sweden.


title: Bumblebee

text: A bumblebee (or bumble bee, bumble-bee, or humble-bee) is any of over 250 species in the genus Bombus, part of Apidae, one of the bee families. This genus is the only extant group in the tribe Bombini, though a few extinct related genera (e.g., "Calyptapis") are known from fossils. They are found primarily in higher altitudes or latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, although they are also found in South America, where a few lowland tropical species have been identified. European bumblebees have also been introduced to New Zealand and Tasmania. Female bumblebees can sting repeatedly, but generally ignore humans and other animals.


title: Bumblebee

text: Most bumblebees are social insects that form colonies with a single queen. The colonies are smaller than those of honey bees, growing to as few as 50 individuals in a nest. Cuckoo bumblebees are brood parasitic and do not make nests or form colonies; their queens aggressively invade the nests of other bumblebee species, kill the resident queens and then lay their own eggs, which are cared for by the resident workers. Cuckoo bumblebees were previously classified as a separate genus, but are now usually treated as members of "Bombus".


title: Bumblebee

text: Bumblebees have round bodies covered in soft hair (long branched setae) called 'pile', making them appear and feel fuzzy. They have aposematic (warning) coloration, often consisting of contrasting bands of colour, and different species of bumblebee in a region often resemble each other in mutually protective Müllerian mimicry. Harmless insects such as hoverflies often derive protection from resembling bumblebees, in Batesian mimicry, and may be confused with them. Nest-making bumblebees can be distinguished from similarly large, fuzzy cuckoo bees by the form of the female hind leg. In nesting bumblebees, it is modified to form a pollen basket, a bare shiny area surrounded by a fringe of hairs used to transport pollen, whereas in cuckoo bees, the hind leg is hairy all round, and they never carry pollen.


title: Bumblebee

text: Like their relatives the honeybees, bumblebees feed on nectar, using their long hairy tongues to lap up the liquid; the proboscis is folded under the head during flight. Bumblebees gather nectar to add to the stores in the nest, and pollen to feed their young. They forage using colour and spatial relationships to identify flowers to feed from. Some bumblebees steal nectar, making a hole near the base of a flower to access the nectar while avoiding pollen transfer. Bumblebees are important agricultural pollinators, so their decline in Europe, North America, and Asia is a cause for concern. The decline has been caused by habitat loss, the mechanisation of agriculture, and pesticides.


title: Bumblebee

text: The word "bumblebee" is a compound of "bumble" and "bee"—'bumble' meaning to hum, buzz, drone, or move ineptly or flounderingly. The generic name "Bombus", assigned by Pierre André Latreille in 1802, is derived from the Latin word for a buzzing or humming sound, borrowed from Ancient Greek ().


title: Bumblebee

text: According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term "bumblebee" was first recorded as having been used in the English language in the 1530 work "Lesclarcissement" by John Palsgrave, "I bomme, as a bombyll bee dothe." However the OED also states that the term "humblebee" predates it, having first been used in 1450 in "Fysshynge wyth Angle", "In Juyll the greshop & the humbylbee in the medow." The latter term was used in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" () by William Shakespeare, "The honie-bags steale from the humble Bees." Similar terms are used in other Germanic languages, such as the German (Old High German ), Dutch or Swedish .


title: Bumblebee

text: An old provincial name, "dumbledor", also denoted a buzzing insect such as a bumblebee or cockchafer, "dumble" probably imitating the sound of these insects, while "dor" meant "beetle".


title: Bumblebee

text: In "On the Origin of Species" (1859), Charles Darwin speculated about "humble-bees" and their interactions with other species:


title: Bumblebee

text: However, "bumblebee" remained in use, for example in "The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse" (1910) by Beatrix Potter, "Suddenly round a corner, she met Babbitty Bumble--"Zizz, Bizz, Bizzz!" said the bumble bee." Since World War II "humblebee" has fallen into near-total disuse.


title: Bumblebee

text: The bumblebee tribe Bombini is one of four groups of corbiculate bees (those with pollen baskets) in the Apidae, the others being the Apini (honey bees), Euglossini (orchid bees), and Meliponini (stingless bees). The corbiculate bees are a monophyletic group. Advanced eusocial behaviour appears to have evolved twice in the group, giving rise to controversy, now largely settled, as to the phylogenetic origins of the four tribes; it had been supposed that eusocial behaviour had evolved only once, requiring the Apini to be close to the Meliponini, which they do not resemble. It is now thought that the Apini (with advanced societies) and Euglossini are closely related, while the primitively eusocial Bombini are close to the Meliponini, which have somewhat more advanced eusocial behaviour. Sophie Cardinal and Bryan Danforth comment that "While remarkable, a hypothesis of dual origins of advanced eusociality is congruent with early studies on corbiculate morphology and social behavior." Their analysis, combining molecular, morphological and behavioural data, gives the following cladogram: