title: Volkswagen Golf Mk7

text: The Golf line is available in all the relevant drive systems: the Golf TSI, including GTI, is petrol-powered; Golf TDI, including GTD, is diesel-powered; the Golf TGI is powered by compressed natural gas (CNG); the e-Golf is powered by electricity; and Golf GTE is a plug-in hybrid. The use of a modular transverse matrix assembly kit enables the manufacturing of Golf models with gasoline, diesel, natural gas, electric and hybrid drives from bumper to bumper at Volkswagen factories. Retail deliveries of the e-Golf in Germany began in the second quarter of 2014. U.S. sales started in selected markets during the fourth quarter of 2014. The Golf GTE was launched also in the fourth quarter of 2014.


title: Volkswagen Golf Mk7

text: The Golf Sportsvan or Golf SV is a five-door compact MPV which was designed and produced by the German automaker Volkswagen between 2014 and 2020. Previewed as the Volkswagen Sportsvan concept at the 2013 Frankfurt Motor Show and positioned below the three-row Touran, it is derived from the Golf Mk7 and based on the MQB platform, and was also assembled at the Wolfsburg plant alongside the standard Golf hatchback. At 4,338 mm long, the new SV is 134 mm longer than the Golf Plus that it replaces, 83 mm longer than the Golf hatchback, and 224 mm shorter than the Golf Estate.


title: Volkswagen Golf Mk7

text: Compared with the boot of its predecessor, the capacity is increased by 76 litres to 500 litres with the back seats at their rear-most position (versus the Golf's 380 litres and the Estate's 605 litres). Moving the rear seats forwards increases the luggage capacity to 590 litres, while folding the rear seats liberates up to 1,520 litres of room. The front passenger seat can also optionally fold fully forward, creating a load space which is up to 2,484 mm long.


title: Volkswagen Golf Mk7

text: Like the Golf, the Golf SV comes with many standard and optional safety systems. These include a standard automatic post-collision braking system, which automatically brakes the vehicle after a collision to reduce kinetic energy significantly and thus minimise the chance of a second impact, and a PreCrash system (Proactive Occupant Protection) which, on detecting the possibility of an accident, pre-tensions seatbelts and closes the windows and sunroof, leaving just a small gap, to ensure the best possible protection from the airbags.


title: Volkswagen Golf Mk7

text: A first for the Golf SV is a blind spot monitor, dubbed Side Scan, with an assistant for exiting parking spaces. This monitors the area behind and to the sides of the vehicle, ensuring easier and safer egress when reversing from a parking bay. It will be packaged as an option together with Lane Assist.


title: Volkswagen Golf Mk7

text: Powering the SV is a range of petrol and diesel engines, all of which incorporate Stop/Start and battery regeneration systems. There are two turbocharged 1.2-litre petrol engines with 85 and 105 PS; two 1.4-litre turbocharged petrol engines with 125 and 150 PS; and three turbodiesels: a 2.0-litre 150 PS, a 1.6-litre 90 PS and a 1.6-litre 110 PS. When fitted in the Golf SV BlueMotion, this last engine is expected to return fuel economy of 76.3 mpg and emit 95 g/km of . All engines apart from the 1.2-litre TSI 85 PS can be ordered with a DSG gearbox.


title: Peanut butter

text: Peanut butter is a food paste or spread made from ground, dry-roasted peanuts. It commonly contains additional ingredients that modify the taste or texture, such as salt, sweeteners, or emulsifiers. Peanut butter is consumed in many countries. The United States is a leading exporter of peanut butter and one of the largest consumers of peanut butter annually per capita. January 24 is National Peanut Butter Day in the United States.


title: Peanut butter

text: Peanut butter is a nutrient-rich food containing high levels of protein, several vitamins, and dietary minerals. It is typically served as a spread on bread, toast, or crackers, and used to make sandwiches (notably the peanut butter and jelly sandwich). It is also used in a number of breakfast dishes and desserts, such as granola, smoothies, crepes, cookies, brownies, or croissants. It is similar to other nut butters such as cashew butter and almond butter.


title: Peanut butter

text: The earliest references to peanut butter can be traced to Aztec civilization, who ground roasted peanuts into a paste. However, several people can be credited with the invention of modern peanut butter and the processes involved in making it.


title: Peanut butter

text: The US National Peanut Board credits three modern inventors with the earliest patents related to the production of modern peanut butter. Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, obtained the first patent for a method of producing peanut butter from roasted peanuts using heated surfaces in 1884. Edson's cooled product had "a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment" according to his patent application which described a process of milling roasted peanuts until the peanuts reached "a fluid or semi-fluid state". He mixed sugar into the paste to harden its consistency.


title: Peanut butter

text: A businessman from St. Louis named George Bayle produced and sold peanut butter in the form of a snack food in 1894. By 1917, American consumers used peanut products during periods of meat rationing, with government promotions of "meatless Mondays" when peanut butter was a favored choice.


title: Peanut butter

text: John Harvey Kellogg, known for his line of prepared breakfast cereals, was an advocate of using plant foods as a healthier dietary choice than meat. He was issued a patent for a "Process of Producing Alimentary Products" in 1898, and used peanuts, although he boiled the peanuts rather than roasting them. Kellogg's Western Health Reform Institute served peanut butter to patients because they needed a food that contained a lot of protein that could be eaten without chewing. At first, peanut butter was a food for wealthy people, as it became popular initially as a product served at expensive health care institutes.


title: Peanut butter

text: Although often credited with its invention, George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter. By the time Carver published his document about peanuts, entitled "How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing it For Human Consumption" in 1916, many methods of preparation of peanut butter had already been developed or patented by various pharmacists, doctors, and food scientists working in the US and Canada.


title: Peanut butter

text: Early peanut-butter-making machines were developed by Joseph Lambert, who had worked at John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanatorium, and Dr. Ambrose Straub who obtained a patent for a peanut-butter-making machine in 1903.


title: Peanut butter

text: "In 1922, chemist Joseph Rosefield invented a process for making smooth peanut butter that kept the oil from separating by using partially hydrogenated oil; Rosefield "...licensed his invention to the company that created Peter Pan peanut butter" in 1928 and in "...1932 he began producing his own peanut butter under the name Skippy". Under the Skippy brand, Rosefield developed a new method of churning creamy peanut butter, giving it a smoother consistency. He also mixed fragments of peanut into peanut butter, creating the first "chunky"-style peanut butter. In 1955, Procter & Gamble launched a peanut butter named Jif, which was sweeter than other brands, due to the use of "sugar and molasses" in its recipe. A slang term for peanut butter in World War II was "monkey butter".


title: Peanut butter

text: In South Africa, one of the countries where peanut butter is produced and consumed, the first peanut butter was produced in 1926 by Alderton Limited in Mokopane (then called Potgietersrus), presumably under the brand name Black Cat. The product proved so popular that Tiger Brands (then Tiger Oats Company) took over the manufacture of Black Cat. The company still produces peanut butter under the brand name Black Cat. In Afrikaans, (peanut butter) is also colloquially called (kitten butter); it is undetermined if Black Cat is the basis for the latter name.


title: Peanut butter

text: A related dish named "pinda-käse" (peanut cheese) existed in Suriname by 1783. This was more solid than modern peanut butter, and could be cut and served in slices like cheese. "Pinda bravoe", a soup-like peanut based dish, also existed in Suriname around that time. Modern peanut butter is still referred to as ""pindakaas"" (peanut cheese) in Dutch for this reason, Suriname having been a Dutch colony at that time. When peanut butter was brought onto the market in the Netherlands by Calvé in 1948, it was not allowed to do so under the name "peanut butter". The name "butter" was specifically defined for real butter, to avoid confusion with margarine.


title: Peanut butter

text: Among the types of peanut butter are "conventional" peanut butter, which consists of up to 10% salt, sugars, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. "Crunchy" peanut butter conains some coarsely-ground peanut fragments included to give extra texture. The peanuts in "smooth" peanut butter are ground uniformly, possibly with the addition of corn syrup and vegetable oil, to create a thick, creamy texture like butter.


title: Peanut butter

text: "Natural" peanut butter normally contains only peanuts and salt and is sold without emulsifiers that bind the peanut oils with the peanut paste, and so requires stirring after separation to recombine the ingredients before consumption. "Organic" and "artisanal" peanut butters are available, but their markets are small. Artisanal peanut butter is usually preservative-free, additive-free, and handmade in a cottage industry-style setup used first around 1970.


title: Peanut butter

text: Due to weather conditions, peanuts are usually planted in spring. The peanut comes from a yellow flower that bends over and penetrates the soil after blooming and wilting, and the peanut starts to grow in the soil. Peanuts are harvested from late August to October, while the weather is clear. This weather allows for dry soil so that when picked, the soil does not stick to the stems and pods. The peanuts are then removed from vines and transported to a peanut shelling machine for mechanical drying. After cropping, the peanuts are delivered to warehouses for cleaning, where they are stored unshelled in silos.


title: Peanut butter

text: Shelling must be conducted carefully lest the seeds be damaged during the removal of the shell. The moisture of the unshelled peanuts is controlled to avoid excessive frangibility of the shells and kernels, which in turn, reduces the amount of dust present in the plant. After, the peanuts are sent to a series of rollers set specifically for the batch of peanuts, where they are cracked. After cracking, the peanuts go through a screening process where they are inspected for contaminants.


title: Peanut butter

text: The dry roasting process employs either the batch or continuous method. In the batch method, peanuts are heated in large quantities in a revolving oven at about . Next, the peanuts in each batch are uniformly held and roasted in the oven at for about 40 to 60 minutes. This method is good to use when the peanuts differ in moisture content. In the continuous method, a hot air roaster is employed. The peanuts pass through the roaster whilst being rocked to permit even roasting. A photometer indicates the completion of dry roasting. This method is favored by large manufacturers since it can lower the rate of spoilage and requires less labor.


title: Peanut butter

text: After dry roasting, peanuts are removed from the oven as quickly as possible and directly placed in a blower-cooler cylinder. There are suction fans in the metal cylinder that can pull a large volume of air through, so the peanuts can be cooled more efficiently. The peanuts will not be dried out because cooling can help retain some oil and moisture. The cooling process is completed when the temperature in the cylinder reaches .


title: Peanut butter

text: After the kernels have been cooled down, the peanuts will undergo either heat blanching or water blanching to remove the remaining seed coats. Compared to heat blanching, water blanching is a new process. Water blanching first appeared in 1949.


title: Peanut butter

text: Peanuts are heated by hot air at for not more than 20 minutes in order to soften and split the skins. After that, the peanuts are exposed to continuous steam in a blanching machine. The skins are then removed using either bristles or soft rubber belts. After that, these skins are separated and blown into waste bags. Meanwhile, the hearts of peanuts are segregated through inspection.


title: Peanut butter

text: After the kernels are arranged in troughs, the skin of the kernel is cracked on opposite sides by rolling it through sharp stationary blades. While the skins are removed, the kernels are brought through a one-minute hot water bath and placed on a swinging pad with canvas on top. The swinging action of the pad rubs off the skins. Afterward, the blanched kernels are dried for at least six hours by hot air at .


title: Peanut butter

text: After blanching, the peanuts are screened and inspected to eliminate the burnt and rotten peanuts. A blower is also used to remove light peanuts and discolored peanuts are removed using a color sorting machine.


title: Peanut butter

text: After blanching the peanuts are sent to grinding to be manufactured into peanut butter. The peanuts are then sent through two sizes of grinders. The first grinder produces a medium grind, and the second produces a fine grind. At this point, salt, sugar and a vegetable oil stabilizer are added to the fine grind to produce the peanut butter. This adds flavor and allows the peanut butter to stay as a homogeneous mixture. Chopped peanuts may also be added at this stage to produce "chunky" peanut butter.


title: Peanut butter

text: Before packaging, the peanut butter must first be cooled in order to be sealed in jars. The mixture is pumped into a heat exchanger in order to cool it to about . Once cool, the peanut butter is pumped into jars and vacuum-sealed, a process which removes air and deoxygenates the peanut butter to inhibit its oxidation. The jars are then labeled and set aside until crystallization occurs. The peanut butter jars are then packaged into cartons distributed to retailers, where they are stored at room temperature and sold to consumers.


title: Peanut butter

text: A 2012 article stated that "China and India are the first and second-largest producers, respectively", of peanuts. The United States of America "...is the third-largest producer of peanuts (Georgia and Texas are the two major peanut-producing states)" and "more than half of the American peanut crop goes into making peanut butter."


title: Peanut butter

text: According to Jon Krampner’s 2013 book on peanut butter, per capita consumption of peanut butter in Canada and the Netherlands the largest consumer per capita in Europe exceeded that in the United States. In March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, retail sales of peanut butter in the United States increased by 75% over the level in March 2019.


title: Peanut butter

text: In a 100 gram amount, smooth peanut butter supplies 597 Calories and is composed of 51% fat, 22% protein, 22% carbohydrates (including 5% dietary fiber), and 1% water (table). Both crunchy and smooth peanut butter are sources of saturated and monounsaturated fats (mainly oleic acid) as 25% of total serving amount, and polyunsaturated fat (12% of total), primarily as linoleic acid).


title: Peanut butter

text: Peanut butter is a rich source (20% or more of the Daily Value, DV) of dietary fiber, vitamin E, pantothenic acid, folate, niacin, and vitamin B (table, USDA FoodData Central). Also high in content are the dietary minerals manganese, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, copper, and sodium (added as salt during manufacturing). Peanut butter is a moderate source (10–19% DV) of thiamin, riboflavin, iron, and potassium (table).


title: Peanut butter

text: For people with a peanut allergy, peanut butter can cause a variety of possible allergic reactions, including life-threatening anaphylaxis. This potential effect has led to banning peanut butter, among other common foods, in some schools.


title: Peanut butter

text: Peanut butter is included as an ingredient in many recipes: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, peanut butter cookies, and candies where peanut is the main flavor, such as Reese's Pieces, or various peanut butter and chocolate treats, such as Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and the Crispy Crunch candy bar.


title: Peanut butter

text: Peanut butter's flavor combines well with other flavors, such as oatmeal, cheese, cured meats, savory sauces, and various types of breads and crackers. The creamy or crunchy, fatty, salty taste pairs very well with complementary soft and sweet ingredients like fruit preserves, bananas, apples, and honey. The taste can also be enhanced by similarly salty things like bacon (see Peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich), especially if the peanut butter has added sweetness.


title: Peanut butter

text: One snack for children is called "ants on a log", with a celery stick acting as the "log". The groove in the celery stick is filled with peanut butter and raisins arranged in a row along the top are "ants".


title: Peanut butter

text: Plumpy'nut is a peanut butter-based food used to fight malnutrition in famine-stricken countries. A single pack contains 500 calories, can be stored unrefrigerated for two years, and requires no cooking or preparation.


title: Peanut butter

text: Peanut butter inside a hollow chew toy is a method to occupy a dog with a favored treat. A common outdoor bird feeder is a coating of peanut butter on a pine cone with an overlying layer of birdseed.


title: Brad Bird

text: Phillip Bradley Bird (born September 24, 1957) is an American film director, animator, screenwriter, producer, and voice actor. He has had a career spanning forty years in both animation and live-action.


title: Brad Bird

text: Bird was born in Montana and grew up in Oregon. He developed an interest in the art of animation early on, and completed his first short subject by age 14. Bird sent the film to Walt Disney Productions, leading to an apprenticeship from the studio's Nine Old Men. He attended the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, and worked for Disney shortly thereafter.


title: Brad Bird

text: In the 1980s, he worked in film development with various studios; he wrote the screenplay for "*batteries not included", and developed two episodes of "Amazing Stories" for Steven Spielberg, including the influential "Family Dog". Afterwards, Bird joined "The Simpsons" as creative consultant for eight seasons. He directed the 1999 feature "The Iron Giant", adapted from a book by poet Ted Hughes; though critically lauded, it was a box-office bomb. He moved to Pixar where he wrote and directed two movies, "The Incredibles" (2004) and "Ratatouille" (2007) that were worldwide critical and financial smash hits; both earned Bird two Academy Award for Best Animated Feature wins and Best Original Screenplay nominations. He transitioned to live-action filmmaking with 2011's similarly successful "", but his 2015 effort "Tomorrowland" significantly underperformed. He returned to Pixar to develop "Incredibles 2", which was released in 2018 and became the second highest-grossing animated picture of all-time.


title: Brad Bird

text: As a filmmaker, Bird has been considered an auteur; he is known to supervise his projects to a high degree of detail. The bulk of Bird's filmography has attracted widespread acclaim; with the exception of "Tomorrowland", all of his movies have high aggregate scores from viewers and critics. His films' themes have been subject to interpretation by commentators due to their parallels with novelist Ayn Rand's Objectivism philosophy, an analysis Bird has dismissed. He is known as an advocate for creative freedom and the possibilities of animation, and has criticized its stereotype as children's entertainment, or classification as a genre, rather than art.


title: Brad Bird

text: Brad Bird was born in Kalispell, Montana, the youngest of four children to Marjorie A. (née Cross) and Philip Cullen Bird. His father worked in the propane business, and his grandfather, Francis Wesley "Frank" Bird, who was born in County Sligo, Ireland, was a president and chief executive of the Montana Power Company. Bird's fascination with filmmaking began at an early age. He started drawing at age three, with his first cartoons clear attempts at sequential storytelling. He was particularly enamored with animation after a screening of "The Jungle Book" (1967), and a family friend who had taken animation classes explained how the medium worked. Bird's father found a used camera that could shoot one frame at a time, and helped him setup the device for making films. He began animating his first short subject at age 11; that same year, his family connection introduced him to composer George Bruns, who set him up a tour of Walt Disney Productions in Burbank, California. Bird met the Nine Old Men—the animators responsible for the studio's earliest and most celebrated features—and proclaimed he would join them one day.


title: Brad Bird

text: Bird has characterized his parents as generous and supportive of his interests. His mother once made a rainy drive two hours each way to the only theater playing a reissue of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" for Bird's education. After two years, Bird had completed his first short, a fifteen-minute adaption of "The Tortoise and the Hare". On his parents' advice, to "start at the top and work your way down", he sent the film to his idols at Disney. The studio responded with an open invitation for Bird to stop by whenever in town, which led him to make several visits to the studio's California headquarters in the ensuing years. This opportunity—an "unofficial apprenticeship" of sorts—was "never offered" to anyone previously. He worked closely with Milt Kahl, whom he considered a hero. He began another film, titled "Ecology American Style", which was more ambitious and in color, but the workload was intense. Instead, Bird focused on other interests in his high school years, including dating, athletics, and photography. "Animation is the illusion of life, and you can't create that illusion convincingly if you haven't lived it," he later remarked. The family relocated to Corvallis, Oregon in his youth, and he graduated from Corvallis High School in 1975.


title: Brad Bird

text: That year, he was awarded a scholarship by Disney to attend the newly formed California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, California; Bird has joked he was a "retired" animator by the time he received this offer. Instead, he considered attending the acting program at Ashland University. After a three-year break, Bird chose CalArts and moved down south. Bird's classmates included prominent future animators such as John Lasseter, Tim Burton, and Henry Selick. Like many students, they were dazed by the special effects in "Star Wars" (1977); both Lasseter and Bird agreed these feats were possible in animation. First-year students met in the room labeled A113—a small, sterile classroom with no windows. Bird later used A113 as an Easter egg in his films; it has since become a fixture of media made by the school's alumni. The first use of A113 was in the pilot episode for the short-lived television series Family Dog (1993). The pilot episode was a part of the series Amazing Stories (1985-1987), which aired February 16, 1987, and was titled "Family Dog." He used it for the license plate number on a van. The first Disney movie he used it in was The Brave Little Toaster (1987), in which he was an animator.


title: Brad Bird

text: Within two years, Bird accepted a job as an animator at Walt Disney Productions. Bird arrived at the studio in the midst of a transition: much of the studio's original creative staff were retiring, leaving the studio to a new generation of artists. What was left of the original staff got along with the newcomers, but Bird clashed with the middlemen in charge. While animating at Disney, he became a part of a small group of animators who worked in a suite of offices inside the original studio called the "Rat's Nest". There, Bird openly criticized the state of the studio, and characterized senior leadership as unwilling to take risk. He felt as though he was standing behind the studio's original principles. This volatile attitude prompted his firing by animation administrator Edward Hansen. He left Disney after only two years; he received credits on "The Small One" (1978) and "The Fox and the Hound" (1981), and went uncredited on "Mickey's Christmas Carol" (1983) and "The Black Cauldron" (1985).


title: Brad Bird

text: Bird was dispirited with the state of the American animation industry, and he considered his departure from Disney as the end of his long-held love of the form. Still, he pulled together funds to make "A Portfolio of Projects", a demo reel of potential animated projects, ones he felt the medium was capable of. Bird was hopeful of receiving financial backing from other studios, but ended up frustrated by Hollywood's development system: "for every good project I've made, I've got equally good projects that are sitting [un-produced by] various studios," he said in 2018. He relocated to the Bay Area, eager to become a part of its burgeoning film scene, which birthed films like "Apocalypse Now" and "The Black Stallion". He tried for several years to adapt Will Eisner's comic book "The Spirit" to feature animation, but studios declined, unwilling to take a risk given Disney's dominance. He briefly attempted a computer-animated film at Lucasfilm with Ed Catmull, presaging his later work with Pixar. "He had all these ideas for making animated movies, but he didn't have a technical bone in his body and he didn't have any tolerance that you would need to have at the time to put up with some of the awfulness of the early technology," said Alvy Ray Smith. Bird's next credit was as an animator on the dark animated drama "The Plague Dogs" (1982); he was also fired by the film's director, Martin Rosen, during its production.


title: Brad Bird

text: One piece from his test reel was "Family Dog", which attracted the attention of director Steven Spielberg. "Family Dog" is centered on a pet's perspective of his dysfunctional suburban family, and its original pencil test featured designs by Bird's classmate Tim Burton. Bird had hoped to develop the concept into theatrical shorts, like those from the golden age of American animation, but the market simply no longer existed. Instead, Bird moved back to Los Angeles and joined Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, and became involved with his television program "Amazing Stories", an anthology series which debuted in 1985. He co-wrote the screenplay for "The Main Attraction", the show's second episode, with Mick Garris. Spielberg enjoyed the script, and invited Bird to pitch other ideas. Bird storyboarded another "Family Dog" segment, which was decided to be adapted into an episode of "Amazing Stories". The episode, which aired in 1987, was a ratings success. The experience was exciting for Bird; "Not only was Steven one of my favorite filmmakers, but he was powerful enough to clear space that allowed us creative freedom," he later remarked. "Family Dog" was later spun-off into its own half-hour sitcom, against Bird's urging and without his involvement, as he felt the idea would not work. He was also perturbed to see Burton's role in designing the characters overshadow his deeper contributions to the concept.


title: Brad Bird

text: He was later brought on to co-write the screenplay for "*batteries not included" (1987), a comic sci-fi film that stemmed from an "Amazing Stories" outline. The film opened in fourth place domestically, and was overall a box office hit, generating $65.1 million on its $25 million budget. Bird also helped with "Captain EO", 3-D short film starring Michael Jackson viewed at Disney theme parks. These successes brought Bird more opportunity, but he continued to spend many years in development hell with studios. He grew irritated with notes from middle management: executives he felt "would analyze your work and dictate everything you'd need to do to make it 'more pleasing to an audience'—and in the process would only make stories smaller and more like everything else," he complained. In his personal life, he wed Elizabeth Canney, an editor on "*batteries not included". In 1989, Bird's sister Susan, with whom he was very close, was killed by her estranged husband in a murder-suicide. The event was traumatic for Bird; he felt emotionally "kind of gone in that period. I don't really have a lot of memories from it." He had enough funds to support himself for a time, so he simply rested: "I just kind of didn't do anything," he confessed.


title: Brad Bird

text: Bird's cinematic sense of visual storytelling with "Family Dog" was uncommon in television animation to that point, mainly due to budgetary restrictions. Most television productions retained a rudimentary style, with frequent abuse of standard close-ups, medium angles, and establishing shots to move the story along. In contrast, Bird favored using more filmic techniques, utilizing extreme angles, long panning shots, quick camera cuts, pushed perspective, and so on. Bird's work on "Family Dog" caught the eye of producers James L. Brooks and Sam Simon, who with Matt Groening were developing "The Simpsons", the first prime time animated sitcom in decades for Fox. In 1989, he was invited to join Klasky Csupo (and later Film Roman), where he served as executive consultant for the show. The role required Bird oversee the script-to-animation pipeline 2–3 days per week.


title: Brad Bird

text: Bird worked on the show for its first eight seasons, and directed the episodes "Krusty Gets Busted" (1990) and "Like Father, Like Clown" (1992). He also designed the character Sideshow Bob. In his role, he pushed the show's artists to visualize episodes as miniature films, taking inspiration from the work of Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles. In the 1990s, Bird also contributed to other episodic animated sitcoms like "The Critic" and "King of the Hill", both of which took cues from this established template. Bird called his work at "The Simpsons" a "golden opportunity," recognizing that the material was more to his sensibility than the work he had done for Disney. On a personal level, the job was deeply fulfilling; he attended weekly read-throughs which he found delightful, and he considered the gig the only bright spot in the years following his sister's passing. His last credit on the show came with the episode "Lisa the Simpson", which aired in 1998. The show's crew hoped to get Bird to direct its later 2007 film adaptation, but he was too busy by that point.


title: Brad Bird

text: Animation had a commercial and creative renaissance in the U.S. during the 1990s, with Hollywood studios eager to capitalize on the success of Disney's "The Lion King" (1994). Bird continued to shop around film ideas to studios throughout the decade, but grew frustrated with his lack of progress in his dream of directing a feature. He was momentarily signed to direct a live-action comedy, "Brothers in Crime", at New Line Cinema, but it did not pan out. In addition, his growing family gave rise to other concerns. "I had anxiety about devoting my energy to work that was meaningful and spending time with my family, which was also meaningful to me. If I did one, would I fail at the other?" he worried. He pored these themes into a screenplay for "The Incredibles", which he pitched to studios beginning in 1992. He also developed an original sci-fi feature titled "Ray Gunn", with a script co-written by Matthew Robbins. Its futuristic story centered on a private detective in an Art Deco world of humans and aliens. Bird signed a production deal with Turner Feature Animation in January 1995, but the studio felt "Ray Gunn" would be too intense for its target demographic of young children. The following year, Turner merged with Time Warner, which contained the last three months of Bird's contract.


title: Brad Bird

text: Warner executives set up a meeting, and made it clear they had no interest in "Ray Gunn". Instead, they offered Bird several in-development projects, including a musical version of poet Ted Hughes' book "The Iron Man", first envisioned by rocker Pete Townshend. Bird read the novel and felt "enchanted" by it; he felt drawn to Hughes' rationale for writing the story, which was to comfort his children after the death of his wife, Sylvia Plath. Bird connected with its themes, relating it to his sister's passing from gun violence. He significantly revised the entire story to center on a central question: "What if a gun had a soul?" Warner leadership was sold and Bird signed the contract to direct "The Iron Giant" in December 1996. Bird penned the screenplay with Tim McCanlies, which centers on a young boy named Hogarth Hughes, who discovers and befriends a giant alien robot during the Cold War in 1957.


title: Brad Bird

text: He was quickly faced with assembling a team with little time to spare; most big-budget animated films of the era were workshopped for years, whereas Bird only had two. Adding to the pressure was Bird's frequent disagreements with the film's co-producer, Allison Abbate. In a trade-off, the crew received significant creative freedom to make the film they wanted to make, though Bird occasionally fielded suggestions from executives to make the film more merchandisable or kid-friendly. The film scored highly on test screenings, but Warner neglected to secure prominent promotion for the movie. "The Iron Giant" opened in August 1999 to rave reviews from critics, but very low ticket sales; theater owners discarded the picture after only a few weeks. Altogether, the movie grossed $31.3 million worldwide against its $50 million budget, which was considered a significant loss for Warner. Upon its arrival on home video, the film took on a cult following. Bird was disappointed by the failure of "Giant"; he visited multiple cineplexes only to view the film in empty auditoriums. Afterwards, he was briefly attached to direct a "Curious George" adaptation for Universal, but he instead set his sights toward another animation studio: Pixar.


title: Brad Bird

text: In the late 1990s, Bird reconnected with old friend John Lasseter, who went on to work for Pixar, the computer hardware maker that had recently moved into animation. The company released the first fully computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story", in 1995. Bird was stunned by the film, and in 1997, the two began to negotiate Bird joining Pixar. In March 2000, Bird went to Pixar's Emeryville, California campus and pitched his ideas, including "The Incredibles", to Lasseter. The studio announced a multi-film contract with Bird in May of that year, making Bird the first outside voice for the studio, which previously required talent to rise through the ranks. He was excited to return to the Bay Area, where had lived intermittently two decades prior. He purchased a home in Tiburon, across the bay from Pixar's Emeryville headquarters. He grew comforted by the "creative and supportive" atmosphere at Pixar, unlike many of the L.A. studios he had worked for; he convinced a core team to join him up north, including artists Tony Fucile, Teddy Newton, and Lou Romano, all of whom had contributed development artwork for "The Incredibles" for much of the past decade.


title: Brad Bird

text: "The Incredibles" the film follows Bob (Craig T. Nelson) and Helen Parr (Holly Hunter), a couple of superheroes, known as Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl, who hide their powers in accordance with a government mandate, and attempt to live a quiet suburban life with their three children. Bob's desire to help people draws the entire family into a confrontation with a vengeful fan-turned-foe, Syndrome. Bird also provides the voice of costume designer Edna Mode. As an inside joke, the character Syndrome was based on Bird's likeness (as was Mr. Incredible) and according to him, he did not realize the joke until the movie was too far into production to have it changed. The animation team was tasked with creating computer animation's first an all-human cast, which required creating new technology to animate detailed human anatomy, clothing, and realistic skin and hair. Michael Giacchino composed the film's orchestral score, marking the first in a series of collaboration between the two men. "The Incredibles" was Bird's first global critical and box-office smash, grossing $631.4 million, making it the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2004. Bird won his first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and his screenplay was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. It was the first animated film to win the prestigious Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.


title: Brad Bird

text: Bird's next project was "Ratatouille" (2007), which follows a rat named Remy, who dreams of becoming a chef and tries to achieve his goal by forming an alliance with a Parisian restaurant's garbage boy. The film was developed by Jan Pinkava, who worked on the concept for many years. By the time the project was slated to enter the animation process, Pixar leadership became concerned it was not ready. Bird was hired on in July 2005 to assess the mistakes and turn the project around in a short time. He disliked having to take over Pinkva's passion project: "It was a rough position to be in because I always come down on the side of the creator," he later said. However, he was also in position with Pixar as a member of their "brain trust"—a group of individuals who critique and help each other—so he felt the role came naturally. When Bird took over, much of the design work had been completed, but Bird wrote an entirely new script that eschewed much of its original dialogue. Giacchino returned to compose the Paris-inspired music for the film. Upon release, "Ratatouille" was another huge hit for Pixar; the film grossed $623.7 million and earned widespread critical acclaim. It won the Best Animated Feature award at the 2008 Golden Globes; it was also nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Animated Feature, which it won.


title: Brad Bird

text: Midway through the aughts, Bird was attached to direct an adaption of James Dalessandro's novel, "1906", which chronicles the tumultuous earthquake that struck San Francisco a century prior. Due to the size and scale of such a project, three studios were to finance its making—Pixar, Disney, and Warner Bros.—but the project stalled. He paused when Pixar management asked he take over "Ratatouille", and returned afterward. He attempted to re-write "1906" to work within the confines of a feature's length, but struggled. Instead, Bird helmed the next installment of the action spy series "Mission Impossible", starring Tom Cruise.


title: Brad Bird

text: Bird's foray into live-action filmmaking after a major career in animation had little precedent, according to critics. Cruise had been impressed by the style and storytelling of "Incredibles", and urged Bird to contact him should he venture into the live-action sphere. The idea of combining the commercial aspects of a franchise—this was the third "Mission" sequel—and more artistic tones challenged Bird, who signed on to direct in May 2010. In the picture, Cruise reprises his role of Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt, who with his team race against time to find a nuclear extremist who gains access to Russian nuclear launch codes. "Ghost Protocol" was shot on location partially in Dubai, and includes a memorable scene when Cruise scales the newly erected Burj Khalifa. Upon release in December 2011, it became the highest-grossing film in the series up to that point, with $694 million worldwide. It was the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2011 as well as the second-highest-grossing film starring Cruise.


title: Brad Bird

text: Though he was asked to direct "", Bird turned down the opportunity to focus on his new project: the sci-fi film "Tomorrowland", named for the futuristic themed land found at Disney theme parks. Bird co-wrote the screenplay with Damon Lindelof. In the film, a disillusioned genius inventor (George Clooney) and a teenage science enthusiast (Britt Robertson) embark to an intriguing alternate dimension known as "Tomorrowland," where their actions directly affect their own world. The film ended up being a box-office bomb, losing Disney $120–150 million, and attracting a mixed critical response.


title: Brad Bird

text: Bird was long open to the idea of "Incredibles" sequel, should the story suffice. Over the years, he mentioned its possibility in interviews, and these suspicions were confirmed when an official sequel was announced in 2014. Bird began writing its screenplay in earnest the next year; he attempted to distinguish the script from the breadth of superhero-related content released since the first film, focusing on the family dynamic rather than the superhero genre. The story follows the Incredibles as they try to restore the public's trust in superheroes while balancing their family life, only to combat a new foe who seeks to turn the populace against all superheroes. Though scheduled for release on June 21, 2019, the film was completed on an accelerated production schedule, as it was farther ahead in production than "Toy Story 4", which required more development and was later released on that day; the two simply swapped years, with "Incredibles 2" debuting in theaters on June 15, 2018. Giacchano returned to compose the score.


title: Brad Bird

text: "Incredibles 2" was a huge smash hit for Disney/Pixar: it made $182.7 million in its opening weekend, setting the record for best debut for an animated film, and grossed over $1.2 billion worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing animated film in general, the highest-grossing Pixar film, and the fourth-highest-grossing film of the year. "Incredibles 2" was named by the National Board of Review as the Best Animated Film of 2018. The film was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 76th Golden Globe Awards and 91st Academy Awards, but lost both awards to "".


title: Brad Bird

text: Bird has expressed interest in developing an animated Western or horror film. In 2019, Bird announced he was working with frequent collaborator Michael Giacchino on an original musical film that will contain about 20 minutes of animation in it. In 2022, it was announced that Bird will revive his long-dormant project "Ray Gunn" for Skydance Animation.


title: Brad Bird

text: Bird says he was influenced by dozens of filmmakers, singling out early moviemakers Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd, to mid-twentieth century auteurs like David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney, and Akira Kurosawa. More contemporary directors like Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Hayao Miyazaki, and the Coen brothers have inspired Bird as well. His passion for the medium was evident even in his college years; friend John Lasseter remembered, "Brad would hang out all night talking about Scorsese and Coppola and how he could do what they did in animation." Bird's career trajectory has been considered somewhat unusual: he did not direct his first film until he was in his forties. Bird himself has observed that his career was "very long, very delayed and full of disappointment," mainly because he aspired to "lofty" self-set expectations.


title: Brad Bird

text: He has been characterized as controlling with an exquisite attention to detail. His "demanding, often punishing" direction which has prompted some to consider him difficult to work with. Bird is outspoken about the potential of the art of animation, and has asked the public not refer to his films as cartoons. In the audio commentary for the home release of "The Incredibles", Bird joked he would fight the next person to refer to animated movies as a "genre", as opposed to art form.


title: Brad Bird

text: He has also taken exception to the classification of modern animated fare as solely for children or families; suggesting it discriminatory and belittling. He has expressed a love for hand-drawn animation and lamented its current absence from the industry.


title: Brad Bird

text: Many critics have analyzed his films and suggested they reflect Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand's Objectivism philosophy, which Bird vehemently denies, suggesting it a monumental misreading of his work. Though he claims he was drawn to Rand's work in his younger years, he offers, "Me being the Ayn Rand guy is a lazy piece of criticism." He stated that a large portion of the audience understood the message as he intended whereas "two percent thought I was doing "The Fountainhead" or "Atlas Shrugged"." "Tomorrowland" plot line—a group of geniuses form a utopia to sequester themselves from the world—has been considered reminiscent of "Atlas Shrugged" and its Galt Gulch enclave. In "The Incredibles", father Bob Parr complains of what he feels is society's increasing celebration of mediocrity, and later in the film, its villain Syndrome asserts that "when everyone's super, no one will be." Analysts suggested these lines a reflection of views shared by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. One writer distilled "Ratatouille" down to "if you don't have talent, you should get out of the way of people who do." David Sims at "The Atlantic" has suggested Bird's films are instead "stories about the frustrations of unbridled creativity [...] In each film, there's an indelible recurring image: the frustrated genius, locked away in a dusty closet, obsessing over the talents he has to hide." Likewise, IndieWire's Eric Kohn called Bird a "pivotal figure in exploring the American dream through the vernacular of popular culture."


title: Brad Bird

text: Bird and his wife Elizabeth (m. 1988) have three sons; Nicholas, who voiced Squirt in the Pixar film "Finding Nemo", Rusty McAllister, who voiced Rusty the bike boy in "The Incredibles" and Michael, who voiced Tony Rydinger in "The Incredibles" and its sequel. Bird maintains properties in Tiburon, California, and Los Feliz, California.


title: Brad Bird

text: Upon criticism that "The Incredibles" exhibited a right-wing bias, Bird demurred, noting, "I'm definitely a centrist and feel like both parties can be absurd."


title: Brad Bird

text: In addition to his Academy Award, BAFTA Award and Saturn Award wins, Bird holds the record of the most animation Annie Award wins with eight, winning both Best Directing and Best Writing for each of "The Iron Giant", "The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille", as well as Best Voice Acting for "The Incredibles". His eighth Annie was the 2011 Winsor McCay Award for lifetime contribution to animation.


title: Motomami

text: Motomami (stylized in all caps) is the third studio album by Spanish singer Rosalía, released on 18 March 2022 through Columbia Records. Rosalía enlisted producers Noah Goldstein, Michael Uzowuru, Dylan Wiggins and Pharrell Williams as well as longtime colleague El Guincho to create a concept album about her feelings during the past three years, including troubled times with fame, homesickness and isolation in the form of a collage of the singer's musical influences, especially in Latin music. Separated in two parts, it features guest vocals from the Weeknd and Tokischa, and is presented as Rosalía's "most personal and confessional album so far."


title: Motomami

text: The album's release was preceded by three singles along with "Hentai" as a promotional single. "La Fama" was released on 11 November 2021 as the album's lead single, attaining both critical and commercial success. The song peaked at number two on the US Hot Latin Songs chart and reached the top ten in France, El Salvador, Spain and Panama. "Saoko" and "Chicken Teriyaki" were released as the second and third singles, respectively, both reaching the top twenty in Spain. Other promotional initiatives included a "Grand Theft Auto Online" radio station and a performance on "Saturday Night Live", becoming the first Spanish solo act to serve as the show's musical guest. Rosalía embarked on the Motomami World Tour from July to December 2022, traveling around Europe and the Americas. A deluxe edition of the album, titled "Motomami +", was released on 9 September featuring five additional tracks, including the hit single "Despechá".


title: Motomami

text: Upon its release, "Motomami" received universal acclaim from music critics, many of whom praised the experimentation and genre-bending sounds. It later became the best reviewed and most discussed album of the year on Metacritic. Commercially, the album entered twenty-two charts in nineteen countries and reached the top ten in seven countries. "Motomami" entered major market charts, reaching the top forty in both on the UK Albums Chart and the "Billboard" 200. In Spain, it peaked atop the PROMUSICAE chart for six consecutive weeks. It also became the second most-streamed female album of the year worldwide.


title: Motomami

text: At the 23rd Annual Latin Grammy Awards, "Motomami" won Album of the Year, Best Alternative Music Album, Best Engineered Album and Best Recording Package, making Rosalía the first woman to win Album of the Year twice, whilst "La Fama" was nominated for Record of the Year and "Hentai" for Song of the Year and Best Alternative Song. It also received a nomination for Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards.


title: Motomami

text: In November 2018, Rosalía released her second studio album "El Mal Querer" to critical acclaim and commercial success. The concept album, inspired by the 13th-century anonymous Occitan "Romance of Flamenca", launched the singer into mainstream stardom. The album received critical acclaim for its avant-garde production, which fused flamenco music with pop and urbano. "El Mal Querer" was listed in many year-end publications as well as in "Rolling Stone"'s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It was also awarded Album of the Year at the 20th Annual Latin Grammy Awards and Best Latin Rock, Urban or Alternative Album at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards.


title: Motomami

text: Recording sessions for the singer's next project began in Los Angeles as early as 2019. While on tour that year, Rosalía released a collection of singles. In March, the first of eight, "Con Altura", featuring J Balvin and el Guincho, was released on digital platforms. It topped the charts in Argentina, Venezuela, Spain and Colombia among others and was the second most-watched music video released in 2019 on YouTube as well as the most-watched female music video that year. May saw the release of "Aute Cuture" whereas "Milionària" and "Dios Nos Libre del Dinero" were released in July. In August, a collaboration with Ozuna, "Yo x Ti, Tu x Mi", was released to great commercial success. The singer continued releasing standalone singles such as "A Palé", "Dolerme" and "Juro Que" throughout 2019 and 2020. Rosalía also collaborated twice with Travis Scott; first on the remix of his track "Highest in the Room" alongside Lil Baby and then on "TKN", the latter of which became her first entry on the "Billboard" Hot 100.


title: Motomami

text: When Dutch radio station "3voor12" asked the singer through a Zoom press conference about a possible single compilation or box set, Rosalía expressed total rejection to the idea explaining that "I don't really enjoy records that are just a collection of singles. I usually enjoy records that tell a story and that are alive and involve a lot of thinking." She also revealed that she was "trying really hard to release a new project in 2020" but all of the independent singles released so far wouldn't be included. She continued by saying that "as a musician I feel the responsibility to release a cohesive album, one that makes sense; one in where the songs are linked and share an essence". Rosalía was later seen in the recording studio with Michael Uzowuru, Mike Dean, the Neptunes and Playboi Carti among others.


title: Motomami

text: During 2021, Rosalía released more standalone singles such as "Lo Vas a Olvidar" and "Linda" alongside Billie Eilish and Tokischa, respectively. In May, talent manager Rebecca León confirmed that Rosalía wouldn't release an album in 2021. In August, the singer revealed to Santiago Matías that the album "was already taking shape" yet the number of songs was still unknown. In October, the singer teased on TikTok that the project would be released "soon" and premiered 30 seconds of the album's lead single. During a fan meet and greet in Mexico in partnership with Exa FM, Rosalía revealed that her new album would be "very different" from its predecessor and that the lead single would be released in November.


title: Motomami

text: "Motomami" was officially announced on 2 November 2021, the third anniversary of "El Mal Querer", along with a 15-second trailer directed by Daniel Sannwald which contained a snippet of the title track as well as a tentative 2022 release date. Sannwald also pictured the album cover, which was revealed on social media on 31 January 2022. On 8 November 2021, Rosalía announced the album's lead single, "La Fama" featuring the Weeknd. It was released on 11 November.


title: Motomami

text: Rosalía began work on "Motomami" in January 2019 and finished in August 2021. However, during the first year of production, she was still promoting her sophomore album on El Mal Querer Tour and was still figuring out the direction she wanted to go in. Rosalía had begun thinking of several ideas for the album before "El Mal Querer" was released in November 2018. The confection of the album went through many stages as Rosalía was once convinced of making "four projects at the same time" differencing a flamenco record, a piano ballad one, a dark pop one, and an alternative reggaeton record. The singer ended up "finding a purport within chaos", committing to a color palette at the sound level. The production on "Motomami" distinguishes six elements that get used in almost every track: "aggressive" drums, filters that "make the music seem distant", a nude voice (no use of vocal harmonies or reverbs), the use of vocal chops, and a repeated minimalist production. During the album's creation, Rosalía drew influences from artists of all disciplines such as Héctor Lavoe, Nina Simone, Patti Smith, Bach, Michèle Lamy, Ocean Vuong, Yayoi Kusama, Ricardo Bofill and Andrei Tarkovsky. On 25 April 2022, she shared a seven-hour Spotify playlist of music that she was inspired by, dubbed "Inspo$ Motomami", which included artists such as Daddy Yankee, Madonna, David Bowie, Björk, Snoop Dogg, Manuel Molina, Carla Bruni etc.


title: Motomami

text: The majority of the album was recorded between 2020 and 2021. The process was registered on the singer's private Instagram account 'holamotomami', which she made public in December 2021. During tour season in 2019, Rosalía suffered from writer's block as she was constantly releasing new material and performing live, with isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic and partly moving with Frank Ocean to New York City helping the process flow despite being homesick. Rosalía didn't leave the United States until June 2021 due to fear that she could not go back due to travel restrictions during the pandemic. During her time in the States, she had "twelve-to-sixteen hour long" sessions almost every day, whether at her rented home in Miami (dubbed as Motomami House) or at recording studios in Hollywood and Manhattan, where she recorded upwards of nearly 30 songs for the album. Rosalía had troubled time with deadlines, pushing the album's release a couple times. The mixing and mastering process of "Motomami" took nine months, being completed on 15 April 2021. "Saoko" was the last song Rosalía wrote for the album and "La Combi Versace" the most modified as she "changed the arrangement completely right before she was going to turn in the album" as well as the featured artist, which was originally Tego Calderón.


title: Motomami

text: Primarily, "Motomami" is an experimental pop and alternative reggaeton record that also explores bachata, hip-hop, flamenco, art pop, chiptune, bolero, electropop and dembow as well as mambo and funk carioca in its expanded edition. In an interview with Diego Ortiz for "Rolling Stone", Rosalía described the album as a "brave" record that is heavily influenced by reggaeton. She then expressed that the album is the "most personal and confessional album that I've made so far", revolving around lyrical themes of transformation, sexuality, heartbreak, celebration, spirituality, self-respect and isolation. "Motomami" is largely inspired by the Latin music she danced to with her cousins as a child, and encountered again traveling the world as a budding pop star.


title: Motomami

text: Critics compared "the degree of lyrical, rhythmic and sonic experimentation" to Beastie Boys' "Ill Communication" (1994) and Moby's "Play" (1999), and found similarities in Lorde's "Pure Heroine" (2013) and Nine Inch Nails' "The Downward Spiral" (1994) and in the works of Frank Ocean and Kanye West.


title: Motomami

text: "Motomami" begins with "Saoko", an alternative reggaeton and experimental track with industrial and avant-jazz elements. The song features heavy synthesizers, distorted pianos and traditional reggaeton drums; while its lyrics celebrate transformation and change. The reggaeton sounds continue into its "slow-building" second track "Candy", where Rosalía sings about a broken relationship over "shimmering" synthesizers. Its third track, "La Fama" featuring Canadian singer-songwriter the Weeknd, is a midtempo bachata influenced by electropop that details the downsides of fame. Rosalía returns to her flamenco background in the fourth track "Bulerías", which sees her defending her position as a celebrity over communal chants. The fifth track "Chicken Teriyaki" has been described as a "TikTok dance-ready" reggaeton track where Rosalía raps about a trip to New York City. The song is highlighted for its use of "ironic" and humorous lyricism. The sixth track "Hentai" is a "delicate" piano ballad with pulsing electronic beats that explores the pleasures of sexual intercourse and female sexuality. The seventh track "Bizcochito" is a chiptune track that's "so playful it sounds like an ice cream truck rolling through the neighborhood." Rosalía sings about isolation and homesickness during her time in the United States within the pandemic in "G3 N15" as she also delivers a pessimist point of view of Los Angeles in between piano melodies. It features a voice message of her maternal grandmother in Catalan. Followed up by the title track, "Motomami" serves as an interlude. The tenth track, "Diablo", lays Rosalía's pitch-shifted vocals over ominous electronica and an off-kilter reggaeton beat. It features uncredited guest vocals by Leyvan and James Blake. The eleventh track "Delirio de Grandeza" reimagines Justo Betancourt's 1968 track of the same name, adding a sample from Soulja Boy's remix of "Delirious" by Vistoso Bosses. The twelfth track "Cuuuuuuuuuute" is a clattering cyberpunk and deconstructed club song that suddenly switches to piano balladry and back again. It draws inspiration from Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights". The thirteenth "Como Un G" is a piano ballad about an unrequited, ephemeral love. The following track "Abcdefg" serves as an interlude. It features a voicenote in which Rosalía recites the alphabet. Rosalía and featured artist Tokischa describe having fun dressed in Versace in "La Combi Versace", a minimalist dembow/neoperreo track. The sixteenth track "Sakura" is an "emotionally authoritative" closing track that sounds like it was recorded live in an arena as it features audience cheers recorded during the El Mal Querer Tour. In "Sakura", Rosalía compares her time as a pop star to the brief life of a cherry blossom.


title: Motomami

text: During an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1, Rosalía described "Motomami" as a loose concept album that paints a self-portrait. She also revealed that the album is more playful than her previous albums, explaining: "I feel like I haven't done that in the other albums. Also, they were much more serious if that makes sense. And I think that in this one, I was like, 'I really want to find a way to allow my sense of humor to be present.'"


title: Motomami

text: About the title, Rosalía has stated that she chose to name it "Motomami" in honor of her mother, Pilar Tobella, who used to ride Rosalía around town on a motorcycle. The singer also told "Brut" that the 'Motomami' noun was indeed by her friend Maite back in high school, who used it in her Hotmail address. It also references the company her mother runs, Motomami S.L., which she created in 2018 to administrate activities around artist representation. Rosalía shared that she chose the name "Motomami" because it's "structured in binaries, two types of contrasting energy." The album is separated into two parts; "Moto" is the divine, experimental, frictional and the strongest part of the album, while "Mami" is the genuine, personal, confessional and vulnerable one. Rosalía also stated that "feminism is implicit in the intention. It is very much present in some songs, and maybe not some much in some others, because in the end, it's all the emotional journey of the ups and downs an artist can take. There's a lot of my day-to-day life that's why this vindication of women and femininity are implicit." Rosalía hopes "Motomami" "provides a feminist counterbalance to misogyny in music".


title: Motomami

text: The album was issued on 18 March 2022, by Columbia Records, Rosalía<nowiki>'s first to be released under the label. The standard edition was released on CD, vinyl, digital download and streaming. The vinyl was released on a red coloured vinyl. A premium boxset containing a red 12"</nowiki> vinyl, a zine photographic shot by Carlota Guerrero in Mallorca and thank you note from Rosalía was sent to selected fans, personal friends and celebrities. The deluxe edition of the album, "Motomami +", was released on streaming platforms on 9 September 2022. It contains five additional tracks, a remix of "Candy" featuring Chencho Corleone, a thank you voice message and a live version of "La Fama" recorded at Palau Sant Jordi, in Barcelona on 24 July 2022 during the Motomami World Tour.


title: Motomami

text: Rosalía's executive team chose "La Fama" as the album's lead single, released on 11 November 2021. The song, which features vocals by Canadian singer the Weeknd, was met with great critical reception for its neo form of classical bachata, and achieved commercial success in Europe and Latin America. It became the singer's eighth number one single in Spain as well as her best performing song in France, peaking at five. Columbia released the accompanying music video, directed by Director X, on the same day. Inspired in "From Dusk till Dawn" (1996), it takes place in a cabaret and features a cameo appearance from actor Danny Trejo. "Saoko" was released as the second single on 4 February 2022 to universal critical acclaim. Valentin Petit directed its music video, which premiered the afternoon of the single release, and showcases a motorcycle-flipping spectacle around Kyiv. Petit and co-editor Jon Echeveste would go on to win the MTV Video Music Award for Best Editing for their work. "Chicken Teriyaki" was released as the album's third single twenty days later, featuring a music video directed by Tanu Muino and mixed reviews from music critics.


title: Motomami

text: Two days ahead of "Motomami"'s scheduled release, Rosalía released "Hentai" as a promotional single. "Hentai" had already been teased via TikTok in January, sparking negative backlash due to its sexual content and "plain, explicit, vulgar" lyrics. Nevertheless, once released, it received positive comments from the general public. "Candy" was accompanied with a music video on release day, directed by Stillz and heavily inspired in the 2003 film "Lost in Translation". Despite the lack of radio promotion, it became the singer's ninth number one single in Spain, while also entering the charts in Argentina, Portugal and Switzerland and reaching the top seventy on the "Billboard" Global 200. A music video for "Motomami", directed by Daniel Sannwald, premiered on YouTube on 18 April 2022 to promote the album's accompanying tour. A music video for "Delirio de Grandeza", directed by Mitch Ryan, also premiered on YouTube on 11 May 2022 after it was announced on social media one day prior.


title: Motomami

text: Promotional strategies for the "Motomami" rollout started in November 2021, with the album's announcement and the release of its lead single. Catalogued as "brilliant", the marketing campaign behind this third album mixed physical promotional banners, radio singles, magazine features, social media interaction and an extensive use of TikTok to tease future content. Rosalía first teased the lead single "La Fama" on the platform in October and formally announced its release on 8 November. The singer would continue teasing her new material through TikTok, later advancing "Saoko", "Hentai" and "Chicken Teriyaki". With the lead single impacting radio stations and with the album's title and tentative '2022' date revealed, Rosalía covered the December edition of "Rolling Stone en Español" with an article written by Diego Ortiz narrating the recording process of "Motomami". The singer would later grace the cover of "GQ, El País", "Vogue Italia" and "I-D." The recording process of "Motomami" was also shared through a private Instagram page, 'holamotomami', which she made public in January 2022. This action created engagement with fans and consumers and showed "the best of both worlds" while creating a musical body.


title: Motomami

text: During Art Basel week in December 2021, various promotional graffitis of "Motomami" started to appear in the streets of Miami Beach. This kind of banners were later exported to other cities including Barcelona, Buenos Aires, New York City, Madrid, Mexico City, Milan, Seoul and Tokyo. These ones included unreleased lyrics of upcoming songs. Light in the dark Spotify-sponsored billboards were placed in central public spaces in Madrid, Mexico City and Milan upon the album's release.


title: Motomami

text: Starting 27 February, Rosalía posted daily on Twitter about the characteristics of the 'motomami', the fictional concept she adopted for the album, transforming it into an identity. The twenty-tweet series was completed on release day. The technique was popularized within her fanbase and the general public. Several brands and associations (mainly in Spain), such as AliExpress and FC Barcelona, referenced it. Rosalía embraced the mixed reviews and backlash she received for her "kitsch" lyrics after teasing "Hentai" and "Chicken Teriyaki" on TikTok, reversing the initial negative idea through self-referential and self-deprecating humor.


title: Motomami

text: As for radio and television, Rosalía gave interviews to Zane Lowe from Apple Music, Leila Cobo from VP Latin, Amelia Dimoldenberg, Los 40, RTVE, Cadena SER, RAC 1, Catalunya Ràdio and Exa among others. The singer made her US late night debut on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" on 10 March, performed "Chicken Teriyaki" and "La Fama" on "Saturday Night Live" two days later, and was interviewed on "El Hormiguero" on 17 March. An album-signing party sponsored by Fnac was held in Madrid on 18 March. Rosalía later appeared in various shows in France such as "Quotidien" and NRJ. On 7 April, Spanish musician and YouTuber Jaime Altozano analyzed "Motomami" the same way he did in 2018 with "El Mal Querer," this time featuring direct notes from the singer.


title: Motomami

text: On 15 December 2021, a new radio station in "Grand Theft Auto Online", "Motomami Los Santos", premiered as a result of a partnership between the singer and Rockstar Games. Curated by Rosalía and Arca, it includes personal favorite songs of both artists as well as songs from their own catalogue. It includes tracks from Camarón de la Isla, Daddy Yankee, Caroline Polachek and Aventura among others as well as an unreleased track by Bad Gyal. Kaydy Cain and Rosalía's older sister Pilar also make speaking cameos. Coinciding with the release of the radio station, Los Santos' Eclipse Boulevard displayed many billboards promoting Rosalía's upcoming studio album.


title: Motomami

text: On 28 February, Rosalía announced a TikTok concert, titled "Motomami Live", filmed in Barcelona and directed by Stillz, to celebrate the album's release. The singer played on the video platform on March 17 and 18. The pre-show included thirty minutes of informal interviews with Brittany Broski, Camilo, Ibai Llanos, Lele Pons, Pabllo Vittar, Pharrell Williams, and Rauw Alejandro. The show attracted four million viewers and featured eleven debut performances of tracks off the album. It is nominated for a Latin Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video and a Grammy Award for Best Music Film.


title: Motomami

text: In October 2021, in the mark of the BIME Pro music conference, tour manager Agustín Boffi revealed that Rosalía will embark on a "world tour in 2022" that has been being prepared "for over a year". Boffi also revealed that the tour crew will be expanded to "over 150 people" compared to the 40 people that were working on her previous concert cycle. On April 18, 2022, the tour dates were revealed. The forty-six-date long concert series began on July 6 in Almería and is set to end on December 18, in Paris. It met great commercial reception, selling over 135,000 tickets in a single day in Spain only.


title: Motomami

text: "Motomami" was met with widespread acclaim from music critics, who often commended the album's experimentation and genre-bending sounds. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from professional publications, the album received an average score of 94 based on 17 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim", making it the site's highest-rated album of 2022 and placing it as their 16th best album of all time. Aggregator AnyDecentMusic? gave it 8.5 out of 10, based on their assessment of the critical consensus.


title: Motomami

text: In a five-star review, Diego Ortiz of "Rolling Stone en Español" wrote that "Motomami" "redefines the concept of the mainstream with its abstract sound exploration, where borders and genres are completely blurred. Undoubtedly, it is one of the boldest and most daring productions of recent years and which in turn paves a new path of almost infinite possibilities." Brittany Spanos of the same outlet's American edition characterized its sounds as "innovative" and "daring". Mark Richardson of "The Wall Street Journal" agrees, writing, "...for Rosalía, this future-forward strain of pop is swirled together with rap, the Caribbean style reggaetón, dance, and, of course, flamenco—here, folk guitars collide with otherworldly digital processing. She's a visionary in the mode of M.I.A. or Madonna, one who uses her mainstream perch to push music in new directions." Thom Jurek of AllMusic described the record as "provocative and risky as it is creative. It showcases Rosalía as a master, twisting together the contradictory strands of Latin and Anglo pop with traditional and vanguard forms and fresh sounds into a gloriously articulated radical approach that makes for obsessive listening." Nathan Evans of "The Quietus" wrote that "Motomami" "darts away from the angelic image of Rosalía's previous work, stirring the cauldron to create an outlandish, genre-hopping revision of herself."


title: Motomami

text: "Pitchfork" crowned "Motomami" with its "Best New Music" honor, with Julianne Escobedo Shepherd writing, "It feels rare to hear an album that's so experimental, that aspires to stretch itself out across genres and play with form, and that attains exactly what it sets out to achieve. Rosalía was already a formidable singer, but here she also sounds like she learned that with global superstardom comes the freedom to set her own agenda."


title: Motomami

text: "Motomami" received a nomination for the Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards. However, its omission in the Album of the Year category was dubbed a "glaring absence that shows that the Recording Academy still has a lot to learn about music in other languages" by "Rolling Stone"s Brittany Spanos. Other outlets considered the omission surprising or a "snub" as well, including "The New York Times", "Yahoo! Entertainment", and "W".


title: Motomami

text: In the United States, "Motomami" debuted at number 33 on Billboard 200 with 17,000 equivalent album units sold in its first week. It achieved the largest opening week for a Latin pop album in 2022, so far. The album also opened at number one on Top Latin Pop Albums, becoming her second album to reach the top spot.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (, ; 2 April 1725 – 4 June 1798) was an Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice. His autobiography, ("Story of My Life"), is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of information about the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: As was not unusual at the time, Casanova, depending on circumstances, used more or less fictitious names, such as baron or count of Farussi (the maiden name of his mother) or Chevalier de Seingalt (). He often signed his works as "Jacques Casanova de Seingalt" after he began writing in French following his second exile from Venice.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: He has become so famous for his often complicated and elaborate affairs with women that his name is now synonymous with "womanizer". Many of his exploits would be considered predatory by modern standards, however, including affairs with the emotionally vulnerable as well as the underaged. He associated with European royalty, popes, and cardinals, along with the artistic figures Voltaire, Goethe, and Mozart. He spent his last years in the Dux Chateau (Bohemia) as a librarian in Count Waldstein's household, where he also wrote the story of his life.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725 to actress Zanetta Farussi, wife of actor and dancer Gaetano Casanova. Giacomo was the first of six children, being followed by Francesco Giuseppe (1727–1803), Giovanni Battista (1730–1795), Faustina Maddalena (1731–1736), Maria Maddalena Antonia Stella (1732–1800), and Gaetano Alvise (1734–1783).


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: At the time of Casanova's birth, the city of Venice thrived as the pleasure capital of Europe, ruled by political and religious conservatives who tolerated social vices and encouraged tourism. It was a required stop on the Grand Tour, traveled by young men coming of age, especially men from the Kingdom of Great Britain. The famed Carnival, gambling houses, and beautiful courtesans were powerful drawcards. This was the milieu that bred Casanova and made him its most famous and representative citizen.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: His grandmother Marzia Baldissera cared for him while his mother toured about Europe in the theater. His father died when he was eight. As a child, Casanova suffered nosebleeds, and his grandmother sought help from a witch: "Leaving the gondola, we enter a hovel, where we find an old woman sitting on a pallet, with a black cat in her arms and five or six others around her." Though the unguent applied was ineffective, Casanova was fascinated by the incantation. Perhaps to remedy the nosebleeds (a physician blamed the density of Venice's air), Casanova, on his ninth birthday, was sent to a boarding house on the mainland in Padua. For Casanova, the neglect by his parents was a bitter memory. "So they got rid of me," he proclaimed.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Conditions at the boarding house were appalling, so he appealed to be placed under the care of Gozzi, his primary instructor, who tutored him in academic subjects, as well as the violin. Casanova moved in with the priest and his family and lived there through most of his teenage years. In the Gozzi household, Casanova first came into contact with the opposite sex, when Gozzi's younger sister Bettina fondled him at the age of 11. Bettina was "pretty, lighthearted, and a great reader of romances. ... The girl pleased me at once, though I had no idea why. It was she who little by little kindled in my heart the first sparks of a feeling which later became my ruling passion." Although she subsequently married, Casanova maintained a lifelong attachment to Bettina and the Gozzi family.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Early on, Casanova demonstrated a quick wit, an intense appetite for knowledge, and a perpetually inquisitive mind. He entered the University of Padua at 12 and graduated at 17, in 1742, with a degree in law ("for which I felt an unconquerable aversion"). His guardian's hope was that he would become an ecclesiastical lawyer. Casanova had also studied moral philosophy, chemistry, and mathematics, and was keenly interested in medicine. ("I should have been allowed to do as I wished and become a physician, in which profession quackery is even more effective than it is in legal practice.") He frequently prescribed his own treatments for himself and friends. While attending the university, Casanova began to gamble and quickly got into debt, causing his recall to Venice by his grandmother, but the gambling habit became firmly established.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Back in Venice, Casanova started his clerical law career and was admitted as an after being conferred minor orders by the Patriarch of Venice. He shuttled back and forth to Padua to continue his university studies. By now, he had become something of a dandy—tall and dark, his long hair powdered, scented, and elaborately curled. He quickly ingratiated himself with a patron (something he was to do all his life), 76-year-old Venetian senator Alvise Gasparo Malipiero, the owner of Palazzo Malipiero, close to Casanova's home in Venice. Malipiero moved in the best circles and taught young Casanova a great deal about good food and wine, and how to behave in society. However, Casanova was caught dallying with Malipiero's intended object of seduction, actress Teresa Imer, and the senator drove both of them from his house. Casanova's growing curiosity about women led to his first complete sexual experience, with two sisters, Nanetta and Marton Savorgnan, then 14 and 16, who were distant relatives of the Grimanis. Casanova proclaimed that his life avocation was firmly established by this encounter.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Scandals tainted Casanova's short church career. After his grandmother's death, Casanova entered a seminary for a short while, but soon his indebtedness landed him in prison for the first time. An attempt by his mother to secure him a position with Bishop Bernardo de Bernardis was rejected by Casanova after a very brief trial of conditions in the bishop's Calabrian see. Instead, he found employment as a scribe with the powerful Cardinal Acquaviva in Rome. On meeting Pope Benedict XIV, Casanova boldly asked for a dispensation to read the "forbidden books" and from eating fish (which he claimed inflamed his eyes). He also composed love letters for another cardinal. When Casanova became the scapegoat for a scandal involving a local pair of star-crossed lovers, Cardinal Acquaviva dismissed Casanova, thanking him for his sacrifice, but effectively ending his church career.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: In search of a new profession, Casanova bought a commission to become a military officer for the Republic of Venice. His first step was to look the part:


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: He joined a Venetian regiment at Corfu, his stay being broken by a brief trip to Constantinople, ostensibly to deliver a letter from his former master the Cardinal. Finding his advancement too slow and his duty boring, he managed to lose most of his pay playing faro. Casanova soon abandoned his military career and returned to Venice.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: At the age of 21, he set out to become a professional gambler, but losing all the money remaining from the sale of his commission, he turned to his old benefactor Alvise Grimani for a job. Casanova thus began his third career, as a violinist in the San Samuele theater, "a menial journeyman of a sublime art in which, if he who excels is admired, the mediocrity is rightly despised. ... My profession was not a noble one, but I did not care. Calling everything prejudice, I soon acquired all the habits of my degraded fellow musicians." He and some of his fellows, "often spent our nights roaming through different quarters of the city, thinking up the most scandalous practical jokes and putting them into execution ... we amused ourselves by untying the gondolas moored before private homes, which then drifted with the current". They also sent midwives and physicians on false calls.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Good fortune came to the rescue when Casanova, unhappy with his lot as a musician, saved the life of a Venetian patrician of the Bragadin family, who had a stroke while riding with Casanova in a gondola after a wedding ball. They immediately stopped to have the senator bled. Then, at the senator's palace, a physician bled the senator again and applied an ointment of mercury—an all-purpose but toxic remedy at the time—to the senator's chest. This raised his temperature and induced a massive fever, and Bragadin appeared to be choking on his own swollen windpipe. A priest was called as death seemed to be approaching. However, despite protests from the attending physician, Casanova ordered the removal of the ointment and the washing of the senator's chest with cool water. The senator recovered from his illness with rest and a sensible diet. Because of his youth and his facile recitation of medical knowledge, the senator and his two bachelor friends thought Casanova wise beyond his years, and concluded that he must be in possession of occult knowledge. As they were cabalists themselves, the senator invited Casanova into his household and became a lifelong patron.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: For the next three years under the senator's patronage, working nominally as a legal assistant, Casanova led the life of a nobleman, dressing magnificently and, as was natural to him, spending most of his time gambling and engaging in amorous pursuits. His patron was exceedingly tolerant, but he warned Casanova that some day he would pay the price; "I made a joke of his dire Prophecies and went my way." However, not much later, Casanova was forced to leave Venice, due to further scandals. Casanova had dug up a freshly buried corpse to play a practical joke on an enemy and exact revenge, but the victim went into a paralysis, never to recover. In another scandal, a young girl who had duped him accused him of rape and went to the officials. Casanova was later acquitted of this crime for lack of evidence, but by this time, he had already fled from Venice.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Escaping to Parma, Casanova entered into a three-month affair with a Frenchwoman he named "Henriette", perhaps the deepest love he ever experienced—a woman who combined beauty, intelligence, and culture. In his words, "They who believe that a woman is incapable of making a man equally happy all the twenty-four hours of the day have never known an Henriette. The joy which flooded my soul was far greater when I conversed with her during the day than when I held her in my arms at night. Having read a great deal and having natural taste, Henriette judged rightly of everything." She also judged Casanova astutely. As noted Casanovist J. Rives Childs wrote:


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Crestfallen and despondent, Casanova returned to Venice, and after a good gambling streak, he recovered and set off on a grand tour, reaching Paris in 1750. Along the way, from one town to another, he got into sexual escapades resembling operatic plots. In Lyon, he entered the society of Freemasonry, which appealed to his interest in secret rites and which, for the most part, attracted men of intellect and influence who proved useful in his life, providing valuable contacts and uncensored knowledge. Casanova was also attracted to Rosicrucianism.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: In Lyons, Casanova became companion and finally took the highest degree of Scottish Rite Master Mason.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Casanova stayed in Paris for two years, learned the language, spent much time at the theater, and introduced himself to notables. Soon, however, his numerous liaisons were noted by the Paris police, as they were in nearly every city he visited.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: In 1752, his brother Francesco and he moved from Paris to Dresden, where his mother and sister Maria Maddalena were living. His new play, , now lost, was performed at the Royal Theatre, where his mother often played in lead roles. He then visited Prague and Vienna, where the tighter moral atmosphere of the latter city was not to his liking. He finally returned to Venice in 1753. In Venice, Casanova resumed his escapades, picking up many enemies and gaining the greater attention of the Venetian inquisitors. His police record became a lengthening list of reported blasphemies, seductions, fights, and public controversy. A state spy, Giovanni Manucci, was employed to draw out Casanova's knowledge of cabalism and Freemasonry and to examine his library for forbidden books. Senator Bragadin, in total seriousness this time (being a former inquisitor himself), advised his "son" to leave immediately or face the stiffest consequences.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: On 26 July 1755, at age 30, Casanova was arrested for affront to religion and common decency: "The Tribunal, having taken cognizance of the grave faults committed by G. Casanova primarily in public outrages against the holy religion, their Excellencies have caused him to be arrested and imprisoned under the Leads." "The Leads" was a prison of seven cells on the top floor of the east wing of the Doge's palace, reserved for prisoners of higher status as well as certain types of offenders—such as political prisoners, defrocked or libertine priests or monks, and usurers—and named for the lead plates covering the palace roof. The following 12 September, without a trial and without being informed of the reasons for his arrest and of the sentence, he was sentenced to five years imprisonment.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: He was placed in solitary confinement with clothing, a pallet bed, table, and armchair in "the worst of all the cells", where he suffered greatly from the darkness, summer heat, and "millions of fleas". He was soon housed with a series of cellmates, and after five months and a personal appeal from Count Bragadin, was given warm winter bedding and a monthly stipend for books and better food. During exercise walks he was granted in the prison garret, he found a piece of black marble and an iron bar which he smuggled back to his cell; he hid the bar inside his armchair. When he was temporarily without cellmates, he spent two weeks sharpening the bar into a spike on the stone. Then he began to gouge through the wooden floor underneath his bed, knowing that his cell was directly above the Inquisitor's chamber. Just three days before his intended escape, during a festival when no officials would be in the chamber below, Casanova was moved to a larger, lighter cell with a view, despite his protests that he was perfectly happy where he was. In his new cell, "I sat in my armchair like a man in a stupor; motionless as a statue, I saw that I had wasted all the efforts I had made, and I could not repent of them. I felt that I had nothing to hope for, and the only relief left to me was not to think of the future."


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Overcoming his inertia, Casanova set upon another escape plan. He solicited the help of the prisoner in the adjacent cell, Father Balbi, a renegade priest. The spike, carried to the new cell inside the armchair, was passed to the priest in a folio Bible carried under a heaping plate of pasta by the hoodwinked jailer. The priest made a hole in his ceiling, climbed across and made a hole in the ceiling of Casanova's cell. To neutralize his new cellmate, who was a spy, Casanova played on his superstitions and terrorized him into silence. When Balbi broke through to Casanova's cell, Casanova lifted himself through the ceiling, leaving behind a note that quoted the 117th Psalm (from the Latin Vulgate): "I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord".


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: The spy remained behind, too frightened of the consequences if he were caught escaping with the others. Casanova and Balbi pried their way through the lead plates and onto the sloping roof of the Doge's Palace, with a heavy fog swirling. The drop to the nearby canal being too great, Casanova prised open the grate over a dormer window, and broke the window to gain entry. They found a long ladder on the roof, and with the additional use of a bedsheet "rope" that Casanova had prepared, lowered themselves into the room whose floor was 25 feet below. They rested until morning, changed clothes, then broke a small lock on an exit door and passed into a palace corridor, through galleries and chambers, and down stairs, where, by convincing the guard they had inadvertently been locked into the palace after an official function, they left through a final door. It was 6:00 in the morning and they escaped by gondola. Eventually, Casanova reached Paris, where he arrived on the same day (5 January 1757) that Robert-François Damiens made an attempt on the life of Louis XV. (Casanova would later witness and describe his execution.)


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Thirty years later in 1787, Casanova wrote "Story of My Flight", which was very popular and was reprinted in many languages, and he repeated the tale a little later in his memoirs. Casanova's judgment of the exploit is characteristic:


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: He knew his stay in Paris might be a long one and he proceeded accordingly: "I saw that to accomplish anything I must bring all my physical and moral faculties in play, make the acquaintance of the great and the powerful, exercise strict self-control, and play the chameleon." Casanova had matured, and this time in Paris, though still depending at times on quick thinking and decisive action, he was more calculating and deliberate. His first task was to find a new patron. He reconnected with his old friend de Bernis, now the Foreign Minister of France. Casanova was advised by his patron to find a means of raising funds for the state as a way to gain instant favor. Casanova promptly became one of the trustees of the first state lottery, and one of its best ticket salesmen. The enterprise earned him a large fortune quickly. With money in hand, he traveled in high circles and undertook new seductions. He duped many socialites with his occultism, particularly the Marquise Jeanne d'Urfé, using his excellent memory which made him appear to have a sorcerer's power of numerology. In Casanova's view, "deceiving a fool is an exploit worthy of an intelligent man".


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Casanova claimed to be a Rosicrucian and an alchemist, aptitudes which made him popular with some of the most prominent figures of the era, among them Madame de Pompadour, Count of Saint-Germain, d'Alembert, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So popular was alchemy among the nobles, particularly the search for the "philosopher's stone", that Casanova was highly sought after for his supposed knowledge, and he profited handsomely. He met his match, however, in the Count of Saint-Germain: "This very singular man, born to be the most barefaced of all imposters, declared with impunity, with a casual air, that he was three hundred years old, that he possessed the universal medicine, that he made anything he liked from nature, that he created diamonds."


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: De Bernis decided to send Casanova to Dunkirk on his first spying mission. Casanova was paid well for his quick work and this experience prompted one of his few remarks against the and the class on which he was dependent. He remarked in hindsight, "All the French ministers are the same. They lavished money which came out of the other people's pockets to enrich their creatures, and they were absolute: The down-trodden people counted for nothing, and, through this, the indebtedness of the State and the confusion of finances were the inevitable results. A Revolution was necessary."


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: As the Seven Years' War began, Casanova was again called to help increase the state treasury. He was entrusted with a mission of selling state bonds in Amsterdam, Holland being the financial center of Europe at the time. He succeeded in selling the bonds at only an 8% discount, and the following year was rich enough to found a silk manufactory with his earnings. The French government even offered him a title and a pension if he would become a French citizen and work on behalf of the finance ministry, but he declined, perhaps because it would frustrate his "Wanderlust". Casanova had reached his peak of fortune, but could not sustain it. He ran the business poorly, borrowed heavily trying to save it, and spent much of his wealth on constant liaisons with his female workers who were his "harem".


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: For his debts, Casanova was imprisoned again, this time at For-l'Évêque, but was liberated four days afterwards, upon the insistence of the Marquise d'Urfé. Unfortunately, though he was released, his patron de Bernis was dismissed by Louis XV at that time and Casanova's enemies closed in on him. He sold the rest of his belongings and secured another mission to Holland to distance himself from his troubles.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: This time, however, his mission failed and he fled to Cologne, then Stuttgart in the spring of 1760, where he lost the rest of his fortune. He was yet again arrested for his debts, but managed to escape to Switzerland. Weary of his wanton life, Casanova visited the monastery of Einsiedeln and considered the simple, scholarly life of a monk. He returned to his hotel to think on the decision, only to encounter a new object of desire, and reverting to his old instincts, all thoughts of a monk's life were quickly forgotten. Moving on, he visited Albrecht von Haller and Voltaire, and arrived in Marseille, then Genoa, Florence, Rome, Naples, Modena, and Turin, moving from one sexual romp to another.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: In 1760, Casanova started styling himself the Chevalier de Seingalt, a name he was to use increasingly for the rest of his life. On occasion, he would also call himself Count de Farussi (using his mother's maiden name) and when Pope Clement XIII presented Casanova with the Papal Order of the Éperon d'or, he had an impressive cross and ribbon to display on his chest.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Back in Paris, he set about one of his most outrageous schemes—convincing his old dupe the Marquise d'Urfé that he could turn her into a young man through occult means. The plan did not yield Casanova the big payoff he had hoped for, and the Marquise d'Urfé finally lost faith in him.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: Casanova traveled to England in 1763, hoping to sell his idea of a state lottery to English officials. He wrote of the English, "the people have a special character, common to the whole nation, which makes them think they are superior to everyone else. It is a belief shared by all nations, each thinking itself the best. And they are all right." Through his connections, he worked his way up to an audience with King George III, using most of the valuables he had stolen from the Marquise d'Urfé. While working the political angles, he also spent much time in the bedroom, as was his habit. As a means to find females for his pleasure, not being able to speak English, he put an advertisement in the newspaper to let an apartment to the "right" person. He interviewed many young women, choosing one "Mistress Pauline" who suited him well. Soon, he established himself in her apartment and seduced her. These and other liaisons, however, left him weak with venereal disease and he left England impoverished and ill.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: He went on to the Austrian Netherlands, recovered, and then for the next three years, traveled all over Europe, covering about 4,500 miles by coach over rough roads, and going as far as Moscow and Saint Petersburg (the average daily coach trip being about ). Again, his principal goal was to sell his lottery scheme to other governments and repeat the great success he had with the French government, but a meeting with Frederick the Great bore no fruit and in the surrounding German lands, the same result. Not lacking either connections or confidence, Casanova went to Russia and met with Catherine the Great, but she flatly turned down the lottery idea.


title: Giacomo Casanova

text: In 1766, he was expelled from Warsaw following a pistol duel with Colonel Franciszek Ksawery Branicki over an Italian actress, a lady friend of theirs. Both duelists were wounded, Casanova on the left hand. The hand recovered on its own, after Casanova refused the recommendation of doctors that it be amputated. From Warsaw, he traveled to Breslau in the Kingdom of Prussia, then to Dresden, where he contracted yet another venereal infection. He returned to Paris for several months in 1767 and hit the gambling salons, only to be expelled from France by order of Louis XV himself, primarily for Casanova's scam involving the Marquise d'Urfé. Now known across Europe for his reckless behavior, Casanova would have difficulty overcoming his notoriety and gaining any fortune, so he headed for Spain, where he was not as well known. He tried his usual approach, leaning on well-placed contacts (often Freemasons), wining and dining with nobles of influence, and finally arranging an audience with the local monarch, in this case Charles III. When no doors opened for him, however, he could only roam across Spain, with little to show for it. In Barcelona, he escaped assassination and landed in jail for 6 weeks. His Spanish adventure a failure, he returned to France briefly, then to Italy.