title: Woody Strode

text: Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode (July 25, 1914 – December 31, 1994) was an American athlete and actor. He was a decathlete and football star who was one of the first Black American players in the National Football League in the postwar era. After football, he went on to become a film actor, where he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in "Spartacus" in 1960. Strode also served in the United States Army Air Corps during World War II.


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode was born in Los Angeles. His parents were from New Orleans; his grandmother was African-American and "part Cherokee" and his grandfather was an African-American who claimed his own grandmother was Creek.


title: Woody Strode

text: He attended Thomas Jefferson High School in South East Los Angeles and college at UCLA, where he was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. His world-class decathlon capabilities were spearheaded by a plus shot put (when the world record was ) and a high jump (the world record at time was ).


title: Woody Strode

text: "I got a cultural education—majored in history and education," he said in a 1971 interview. "Never used it, but I could walk into the White House with it now."


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode posed for a nude portrait, part of Hubert Stowitts's acclaimed exhibition of athletic portraits shown at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (although the inclusion of black and Jewish athletes caused the Nazis to close the exhibit).


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode, Kenny Washington, and Jackie Robinson starred on the 1939 UCLA Bruins football team, in which they made up three of the four backfield players. They became famous nationally as "the Gold Dust gang".


title: Woody Strode

text: Along with Ray Bartlett, there were four Black Americans playing for the Bruins, when only a few dozen at all played on other college football teams. They played eventual conference and national champion USC to a scoreless tie with the 1940 Rose Bowl on the line. It was the first UCLA–USC rivalry football game with national implications.


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode made his first appearance in "Sundown" (1941) playing a native policeman. He had a small role in "Star Spangled Rhythm" (1942), as a chauffeur of Rochester (Edward Anderson) and could be glimpsed in "No Time for Love" (1943).


title: Woody Strode

text: When World War II broke out, Strode was playing for the Hollywood Bears in the Pacific Coast Professional Football League. He was drafted at age 27 and soon joined the United States Army Air Corps and spent the war unloading bombs in Guam and the Marianas, as well as playing on the Army football team at March Field in Riverside, California.


title: Woody Strode

text: After the war, he worked at serving subpoenas and escorting prisoners for the L.A. County District Attorney's Office. Strode and Kenny Washington were two of the first African-Americans to play in major college programs and later the modern National Football League (along with Marion Motley and Bill Willis, who signed with the contemporary rival All-America Football Conference), playing for the Los Angeles Rams in 1946. No black men had played in the NFL from 1933 to 1946. UCLA teammate Jackie Robinson would go on to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball (in fact, Robinson, Strode, and Washington had all played in the semi-professional Pacific Coast Professional Football League earlier in the decade).


title: Woody Strode

text: When out on the road with the team, Strode had his first experience with racism, something he wasn't aware of growing up in Los Angeles. "We were unconscious of color. We used to sit in the best seats at the Coconut Grove (a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel) listening to Donald Novis sing. If someone said, 'there's a Negro over there,' I was just as apt as anyone to turn around and say 'Where?'" He also said, "On the Pacific Coast there wasn't anything we couldn't do. As we got out of the L.A. area we found these racial tensions. Hell, we thought we were white."


title: Woody Strode

text: In 1948 he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the AAFC, but was released before the season started, whereupon he joined the Calgary Stampeders of the Western Interprovincial Football Union in Canada, where he was a member of Calgary's 1948 Grey Cup Championship team before retiring due to injury in 1949. He broke two ribs and a shoulder. "It was like I had fought Joe Louis," he recalled.


title: Woody Strode

text: In 1941, Strode had dabbled for several months in professional wrestling. Following the end of his football career in 1949, he returned to wrestling part-time between acting jobs until 1962, wrestling the likes of Gorgeous George.


title: Woody Strode

text: In 1952, Strode wrestled almost every week from August 12, 1952, to December 10, 1952, in different cities in California. He was billed as the Pacific Coast Heavyweight Wrestling Champion and the Pacific Coast Negro Heavyweight Wrestling Champion in 1962. He later teamed up with both Bobo Brazil and Bearcat Wright.


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode's acting career was re-activated when producer Walter Mirisch spotted him wrestling and cast him as an African warrior in "The Lion Hunters" (1951), one of the Bomba the Jungle Boy series.


title: Woody Strode

text: They wanted him to shave his head. He was reluctant until they offered him $500 a week. “I said, ‘All right, where are the pluckers?’" Then Strode realised, “I was out in the world market with a bald head. Trapped for life. Finally, it became way of life.”


title: Woody Strode

text: He had roles in "Bride of the Gorilla" (1951), "African Treasure" (1951) (another Bomba film), an episode of "Dangerous Assignment" (1952), "Caribbean" (1952), and "Androcles and the Lion" (1952), playing the lion, "the toughest job I ever had" he said later.


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode was in "City Beneath the Sea" (1953) directed by Budd Boetticher, and "The Royal African Rifles". Also, he appeared in several episodes of the 1952–1954 television series "Ramar of the Jungle", where he portrayed an African warrior.


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode was a gladiator in "Demetrius and the Gladiators" (1954) and was in "Jungle Man-Eaters" (1954), a Jungle Jim film. He could be seen in "The Gambler from Natchez" (1954), "Jungle Gents" (1954) a Bowery Boys movie set in Africa, and "The Silver Chalice" (1954).


title: Woody Strode

text: He was in a TV adaptation of "Mandrake the Magician" (1954), a pilot for a series that was not picked up, and had small parts in "Son of Sinbad" (1955), "Soldiers of Fortune" (1955), and "Buruuba" (1956) a Japanese film set in Africa.


title: Woody Strode

text: He appeared once on Johnny Weissmuller's 1955–1956 syndicated television series "Jungle Jim" and was in an episode of "Private Secretary".


title: Woody Strode

text: Cecil B. DeMille cast him in "The Ten Commandments" (1956) as a slave at $500 a week for five weeks. They were unable to find anyone to play the Ethiopian king so Strode was given that role too.


title: Woody Strode

text: He had a support role in "Tarzan's Fight for Life" (1958) and a small part in "The Buccaneer" (1958). In 1959 he portrayed the conflicted, some would say cowardly, Private Franklin in "Pork Chop Hill", which brought him critical acclaim. He called it "the first dramatic thing that I had done."


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode was next cast in "Spartacus" (1960) as the Ethiopian gladiator Draba, in which he has to fight Spartacus (played by Kirk Douglas) to the death. Draba wins the contest, but instead of killing Spartacus, he attacks the Roman military commander who paid for the fight. He is killed and his death sparks a gladiator rebellion.


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode had an excellent support part in "The Last Voyage" (1960) playing a heroic stoker, though he was only billed fifth.


title: Woody Strode

text: While making "Pork Chop Hill" he became a close friend of director John Ford. Ford gave Strode the title role in "Sergeant Rutledge" (1960) as a member of the Ninth Cavalry, who is greatly admired by the other black soldiers in the unit and is falsely accused of the rape and murder of a white woman.


title: Woody Strode

text: "The big studios wanted an actor like Sidney [Poitier] or [Harry] Belafonte," recalled Strode. "And this is not being facetious, but Mr. Ford defended me; and I don't know that this is going on. He said, "Well, they're not tough enough to do what I want Sergeant Rutledge to be."


title: Woody Strode

text: "That was a classic," he later said. "It had dignity. John Ford put classic words in my mouth... You never seen a Negro come off a mountain like John Wayne before. I had the greatest Glory Hallelujah ride across the Pecos River that any black man ever had on the screen. And I did it myself. I carried the whole black race across that river."


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode had difficulty maintaining the momentum of these roles. He was in "The Sins of Rachel Cade" (1961) and guest starred twice on "Rawhide", playing an Australian aboriginal in one episode and a buffalo soldier in the other. Ford used him again in "Two Rode Together" (1962) but it was only a small part, as an Indian. He had a bigger role in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962) for Ford, playing Pompey, John Wayne's hired hand. In the film, Strode’s character recites the Declaration of Independence but apologizes for forgetting the phrase “all men are created equal,” a poignant line for the 1962 audience.


title: Woody Strode

text: Pompey/Strode physically carries and thereby saves a drunken, suicidal John Wayne from his burning home.


title: Woody Strode

text: In 1963, he was cast opposite Jock Mahoney's Tarzan as both the dying leader of an unnamed Asian country and that leader's unsavory brother, Khan, in "Tarzan's Three Challenges". He guest starred on "The Lieutenant", "The Farmer's Daughter" and "Daniel Boone" and had roles in the features "Genghis Khan" (1965) and "7 Women" (1966), the latter the last film he made for Ford. Strode was very close to the director. "He treated me like a son," said Strode. "I had a certain amount of crudeness that went back a hundred years, and that's what he liked."


title: Woody Strode

text: During Ford's declining years Strode spent four months sleeping on the director's floor as his caregiver, and he was later present at Ford's death.


title: Woody Strode

text: In the late 1960s, he appeared in several episodes of the Ron Ely "Tarzan" television series. Strode's other television work included a role as the Grand Mogul in the "Batman" episodes "Marsha, Queen of Diamonds" and "Marsha's Scheme of Diamonds".


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode landed a major starring role as an expert archer and soldier of fortune in the 1966 Western "The Professionals". His name was the only one of the four "professionals" that was left off of the movie poster; nevertheless, the film was a major box-office success that established him as a recognizable star.


title: Woody Strode

text: His 1968 starring role as a thinly-disguised Patrice Lumumba in "Seduto alla sua destra" (released in the U.S. as " Black Jesus") garnered Strode a great deal of press at the time, but the film is largely forgotten now.


title: Woody Strode

text: He was an Indian in "Shalako" (1968) and played a gunslinger in the opening sequence of Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968). He decided to stay in Europe. "I had five pairs of blue jeans, I was lonely, and I didn't speak the language," he said. "But the producers answered, 'Not necessary. You ride horses.' "


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode was in "Che!" (1969) and supported Terence Hill and Bud Spencer in "Boot Hill" (1969) shot in Italy. He stayed in Europe to make another Western "The Unholy Four" (1970) and went back to Hollywood to do a TV movie "Breakout" (1970) and two Westerns "The Deserter" (also known as "The Devil's Backbone") (1971), and "The Gatling Gun" (1971). The scripts for these were variable but Strode later said "Me, I didn't care. If the money was right, I'd play Mickey Mouse.”


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode went to Europe to make "Scipio the African" (1971) and did some more Westerns: "The Last Rebel" (1971), and "The Revengers" (1972) (a "regular knockdown, drag‐out western” said Strode). He later said his salary in Italy went up to $10,000 a week.


title: Woody Strode

text: "Race is not a factor in the world market," he said in 1981. "I once played a part written for an Irish prize fighter. I've done everything but play an Anglo-Saxon. I'd do that if I could. I'd play a Viking with blue contact lenses and a blond wig if I could. My dream is to play a Mexican bandit in the international market."


title: Woody Strode

text: He was also in "Key West" (1973), "Loaded Guns" (1975), "The Manhunter" (1975), "We Are No Angels" (1975), "Winterhawk" (1975), "Keoma" (1976), episodes of "The Quest" (1976) and "How the West Was Won" (1977), "Oil" (1977), "Martinelli, Outside Man" (1977), "Kingdom of the Spiders" (1977), "Cowboy-San!" (1978), "Ravagers" (1979), "Jaguar Lives!" (1979), and an episode of "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" (1979).


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode's later appearances included "Cuba Crossing" (1980),"The Dukes of Hazzard " (1980), "Scream" (1981), "Fantasy Island" (1981), "Vigilante" (1982), "Invaders of the Lost Gold" (1982), "" (1983), "The Black Stallion Returns" (1983), "The Violent Breed" (1984), "Jungle Warriors" (1984), "The Cotton Club" (1984), "The Final Executioner" (1984), "Lust in the Dust" (1985), "On Fire" (1987), and "A Gathering of Old Men" (1987).


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode was in "Storyville" (1992), and "Posse" (1992), working with director Mario Van Peebles. His last film was "The Quick and the Dead" (1995), which starred Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Russell Crowe. The closing credits dedicate the film to Strode, who died shortly before its release.


title: Woody Strode

text: In 2021, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.


title: Woody Strode

text: His first wife was Princess Luukialuana Kalaeloa (a.k.a. Luana Strode), a distant relative of Liliuokalani, the last queen of Hawaii. "You'd have thought I was marrying Lana Turner, the way the whites in Hollywood acted," he later said.


title: Woody Strode

text: With her he had two children, television director Kalai (a.k.a. Kalaeloa, 1946-2014), and a daughter, June. They were married until her death in 1980 due to Parkinson's disease. In 1982 at the age of 68, he wed 35-year-old Tina Tompson, and they remained married until his death of lung cancer on , 1994, in Glendora, California, aged 80. He is buried at Riverside National Cemetery in Riverside, California.


title: Woody Strode

text: Strode was a dedicated martial artist under the direction of Frank Landers in the art of Seishindo Kenpo.


title: Woody Strode

text: Sheriff Woody of the "Toy Story" series of animated films is named after Strode, as was the recurring character of the Santa Barbara Coroner in the television series "Psych".


title: Snake (video game genre)

text: Snake is a video game genre where the player maneuvers a line, typically called a snake, that grows bigger after eating something, typically apples, making the snake a primary obstacle to itself. The concept originated in the 1976 two-player arcade game "Blockade" from Gremlin Industries, and the ease of implementation has led to hundreds of versions (some of which have the word "snake" or "worm" in the title) for many platforms. 1982's "Tron" arcade game, based on the film, includes snake gameplay for the single-player Light Cycles segment. After a variant was preloaded on Nokia mobile phones in 1998, there was a resurgence of interest in snake games as it found a larger audience.


title: Snake (video game genre)

text: The player controls a dot, square, or object on a bordered plane. As it moves forward, it leaves a trail behind, resembling a moving snake. In some games, the end of the trail is in a fixed position, so the snake continually gets longer as it moves. In another common scheme, the snake has a specific length, so there is a moving tail a fixed number of units away from the head. The player loses when the snake runs into the screen border, other obstacle, or itself.


title: Snake (video game genre)

text: The "Snake" design dates back to the arcade game "Blockade", developed and published by Gremlin in 1976. It was cloned as "Bigfoot Bonkers" the same year. In 1977, Atari, Inc. released two "Blockade"-inspired titles: the arcade game "Dominos" and Atari VCS game "Surround". "Surround" was one of the nine Atari VCS launch titles in the US and was sold by Sears under the name "Chase". That same year, a similar game was launched for the Bally Astrocade as "Checkmate".


title: Snake (video game genre)

text: The first known home computer version,which is titled "Worm", was programmed in 1978 by Peter Trefonas for the TRS-80, and published by "CLOAD" magazine in the same year. This was followed shortly afterwards with versions from the same author for the Commodore PET and Apple II. A clone of the "Hustle" arcade game, itself a clone of "Blockade", was written by Peter Trefonas in 1979 and published by "CLOAD". An authorized version of "Hustle" was published by Milton Bradley for the TI-99/4A in 1980. The single-player "Snake Byte" was published in 1982 for Atari 8-bit computers, Apple II, and VIC-20; a snake eats apples to complete a level, growing longer in the process. In "Snake" for the BBC Micro (1982), by Dave Bresnen, the snake is controlled using the left and right arrow keys relative to the direction it is heading in. The snake increases in speed as it gets longer, and there is only one life.


title: Snake (video game genre)

text: "Nibbler" (1982) is a single-player arcade game where the snake fits tightly into a maze, and the gameplay is faster than most snake designs. Another single-player version is part of the 1982 "Tron" arcade game, themed with light cycles. It reinvigorated the snake concept, and many subsequent games borrowed the light cycle theme.


title: Snake (video game genre)

text: Starting in 1991, "Nibbles" was included with MS-DOS for a period of time as a QBasic sample program. In 1992, "Rattler Race" was released as part of the second "Microsoft Entertainment Pack". It adds enemy snakes to the familiar apple-eating gameplay.


title: Snake (video game genre)

text: In 2017, Google released a version of the game as an easter egg, whenever the phrases "snake", "play snake", "snake game" and "snake video game" are typed.


title: Snake (video game genre)

text: In 1996, "Next Generation" ranked it number 41 on their "Top 100 Games of All Time", citing the need for both quick reactions and forethought. In lieu of a title they listed it as "Snake game" in quotes.


title: Snake (video game genre)

text: On November 29, 2012, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City announced that the Nokia port of Snake was one of 40 games that the curators wished to add to the museum's collection in the future.


title: Amores perros

text: Amores perros is a 2000 Mexican psychological drama film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (in his feature directorial debut) and written by Guillermo Arriaga, based on a story by them both. "Amores perros" is the first installment in González Iñárritu's "Trilogy of Death", succeeded by "21 Grams" and "Babel". It makes use of the multi-narrative hyperlink cinema style and features an ensemble cast. The film is constructed as a triptych: it contains three distinct stories connected by a car crash in Mexico City. The stories centre on a teenager in the slums who gets involved in dogfighting; a model who seriously injures her leg; and a mysterious hitman. The stories are linked in various ways, including the presence of dogs in each of them.


title: Amores perros

text: The title is a pun in Spanish; the word "perros", which literally means "dogs", can also be used to refer to misery, so that it roughly means 'bad loves' with canine connotations. The film was released under its Spanish title in the English-speaking world, although it was sometimes translated as "Love's a Bitch" in marketing. The soundtrack includes songs by Latin American rock bands including Café Tacuba, Control Machete, and Bersuit Vergarabat.


title: Amores perros

text: "Amores perros" premiered on May 14, 2000 at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival and went on a Mexican release on June 16, 2000. "Amores perros" was a Mexican commercial and critical success and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2000 and won the Ariel Award for Best Picture from the Mexican Academy of Film. "Amores perros" has been considered one of the best Mexican films by many. Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve praised "Amores perros" as one of the best films of the 21st century.


title: Amores perros

text: The film is constructed from three distinct stories linked by a car crash that brings the characters briefly together.


title: Amores perros

text: Octavio (Gael García Bernal) is in love with his brother's wife Susana (Vanessa Bauche) and dislikes the way she is abused by his brother Ramiro (Marco Pérez). Octavio tries to persuade her to run away with him. Local thug Jarocho, happy after winning in a dog fight, lets his dog loose on some strays and is threatened by a vagrant wielding a machete. Eventually, Jarocho sics his dog on Octavio's rottweiler, Cofi, but his own dog is killed instead. Octavio and his friend Jorge, realising Cofi's potential, become involved in the dogfighting scene. Octavio makes enough money to flee with Susana, and pays Mauricio, the owner of the dogfighting venue, to get Ramiro beaten up. Afraid, Ramiro steals the money and leaves with Susana. Struggling financially, Octavio accepts a challenge by Jarocho to participate in a private dogfight, with no outside bets. Cofi is about to win, but Jarocho shoots him. The infuriated Octavio stabs Jarocho in the stomach. Pursued by Jarocho's thugs, Octavio finds himself in a car chase with Jorge and the wounded Cofi. A collision follows; Jorge dies and Octavio is badly injured.


title: Amores perros

text: Magazine publisher Daniel (Álvaro Guerrero) leaves his family to live with his lover Valeria (Goya Toledo), a Spanish supermodel. On the day they move in together, Valeria's leg is severely broken in Octavio's car crash and she is unable to continue working as a model. As Valeria is recuperating in Daniel's apartment, her dog Richie disappears under a broken floorboard and becomes trapped. The missing dog triggers tension and arguments for the couple, leading to doubts about their relationship on both sides. Trying to rescue the dog, Valeria again injures her leg; Daniel finds her hours later. Valeria's new leg injury results in severe arterial thrombosis and eventually gangrene. Her leg is amputated. While she is in the hospital, Daniel finally rescues Richie from the floorboards. When she returns, Valeria drives her wheelchair through the torn-up lovenest and looks out of the window expecting to see a billboard bearing her likeness, only to find it has been removed.


title: Amores perros

text: The vagrant occasionally seen in Octavio's story is revealed to be a professional hitman called El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría). He is a former private school teacher who was imprisoned after committing terrorist acts for guerrilla movements. He is trying to make contact with his daughter, Maru, whom he abandoned when he began his guerrilla involvement and who believes that he is dead. He is about to perform a hit on a businessman when Octavio's car crash interrupts him. During the chaos at the car crash, he steals Octavio's money and takes the wounded Cofi to his warehouse hideout to nurse the dog back to health. One day, while El Chivo is out, Cofi kills the other mongrel dogs El Chivo is caring for. He is about to kill Cofi, but decides against it. Meanwhile, Octavio's brother Ramiro is shot and killed during an attempted bank robbery.


title: Amores perros

text: At Ramiro's funeral, Octavio meets Susana, and again attempts to convince her to run away with him, but she angrily rejects the notion. A few days later, Octavio is shown waiting at the bus station for Susana. She never shows up, and Octavio does not board the bus. El Chivo learns that his client and his intended victim are half-brothers. He leaves both men alive and chained to separate walls with a pistol within reach between them, their fate left uncertain. He then breaks into his daughter Maru's house and leaves her a large bundle of money along with a message on her answering machine explaining what happened to him. When he is about to tell Maru that he loves her, the answering machine stops recording. He then goes to an autoshop, where he sells the client's SUV. The mechanic asks him the dog's name, and El Chivo calls him "Negro" ("Black"). After El Chivo receives the money for the car, he and Negro walk away, disappearing into the horizon.


title: Amores perros

text: Each of the three tales is a reflection on the cruelty of humans towards both animals and other humans, showing how humans may live dark or even hideous lives. But the film's theme is loyalty, as symbolized by the dog, "man's best friend". Dogs are important to the main characters in each of the three stories, and in each story various forms of human loyalty or disloyalty are shown: disloyalty to a brother by trying to seduce the brother's wife, disloyalty to a wife by keeping a mistress with subsequent disloyalty to the mistress when she is injured and loses her beauty, loss of loyalty to youthful idealism and rediscovered loyalty to a daughter as a hit-man falls from and then attempts to regain grace.


title: Amores perros

text: Dogfighting is banned in all Latin American countries but exists as an element of the underground economy. Although violent, dogfighting provides an opportunity for Octavio to make money. This is true to life in the sense that participating in the underground economy gives people in the lower class the ability to make money and experience mobility. González Iñárritu was heavily criticized for his inclusion of dogfighting in the film but has claimed that although it is horrible, dogfighting is one of the harsh realities of Mexico City.


title: Amores perros

text: The three overlapping stories all take place in Mexico City, but because of class division, there is severe segregation of economic classes with El Chivo squatting on the outskirts of town, Octavio living in a working-class neighborhood, and Valeria living in a luxurious high-rise apartment. If not for the car crash, these three characters would never interact. The upper class is victimized in "Amores perros" even when they are the ones perpetuating crime. For instance, El Chivo is hired to kill a man's business partner and eventually decides to leave both men to fight it out themselves. Although Ramiro works at a grocery store, he also participates in the underground economy by committing robberies. Octavio and El Chivo participate in the underground economy as well, in order to secure untaxed income and bring stability to their lives.


title: Amores perros

text: "Amores perros" contains domestic violence, gun violence, and animal cruelty. The domestic violence is evident in the relationship between Ramiro and his wife, Susana, when Ramiro beats his younger brother Octavio with a metal rod while Octavio takes a shower, as well as in Valeria and Daniel's relationship as they both begin to become verbally and physically aggressive after Valeria becomes depressed. Gun violence is seen from the beginning of the film in a frantic car chase until the very end when El Chivo hands the gun to the two business partners, leaving them to fight their own battle. Lastly, animal cruelty is quite visible in the dog fights Octavio attends in order to make money off of his dog, Cofi. The dog owners show no empathy toward their dogs.


title: Amores perros

text: The DVD of "Amores perros" has a commentary track, by the director and the screenplay writer. A controversial aspect of the film is the dog fighting sequences. González Iñárritu explains that no dogs were harmed during the making of "Amores perros". In the scenes where dogs are apparently attacking each other, they were actually playing. Their muzzles were covered with fine fishing line, so that they were unable to bite another dog. In the shots where dogs are apparently dead or dying, they were sedated (under supervision of the Mexican SPCA). The grittiness of the scenes is amplified by quick cuts and sound effects. Another unusual aspect of the production of "Amores perros" was the danger to the cast and film crew while filming in the poor parts of Mexico City. The director and some of the crew were actually robbed by street gangs.


title: Amores perros

text: The Director cut includes a cameo from the veteran Japanese singer Kazuyo Togawa singing A cappella, credited as "Fat Lady".


title: Amores perros

text: The film was critically acclaimed and received many nominations and awards. Review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes reports that 92% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 118 reviews, with an average score of 7.75/10, making the film a "Certified Fresh" on the website's rating system. The consensus reads "The brutality of "Amores Perros" may be difficult to watch at times, but this intense, gritty film packs a hard wallop". On Metacritic, it has a score of 83 out of 100 based on 31 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".


title: Amores perros

text: "Amores perros" drew widespread attention to and condemnation of the practice of dog fighting in Mexico. Lead actress Vanessa Bauche has supported animal advocates' anti-dogfighting campaign. Dog fighting was finally outlawed in Mexico on 24 June 2017.


title: Low-level programming language

text: A low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture—commands or functions in the language map that are structurally similar to processor's instructions. Generally, this refers to either machine code or assembly language. Because of the low (hence the word) abstraction between the language and machine language, low-level languages are sometimes described as being "close to the hardware". Programs written in low-level languages tend to be relatively non-portable, due to being optimized for a certain type of system architecture.


title: Low-level programming language

text: Low-level languages can convert to machine code without a compiler or interpreter—second-generation programming languages use a simpler processor called an assembler—and the resulting code runs directly on the processor. A program written in a low-level language can be made to run very quickly, with a small memory footprint. An equivalent program in a high-level language can be less efficient and use more memory. Low-level languages are simple, but considered difficult to use, due to numerous technical details that the programmer must remember. By comparison, a high-level programming language isolates execution semantics of a computer architecture from the specification of the program, which simplifies development.


title: Low-level programming language

text: Machine code is the only language a computer can process directly without a previous transformation. Currently, programmers almost never write programs directly in machine code, because it requires attention to numerous details that a high-level language handles automatically. Furthermore, it requires memorizing or looking up numerical codes for every instruction, and is extremely difficult to modify.


title: Low-level programming language

text: True "machine code" is a stream of raw, usually binary, data. A programmer coding in "machine code" normally codes instructions and data in a more readable form such as decimal, octal, or hexadecimal which is translated to internal format by a program called a loader or toggled into the computer's memory from a front panel.


title: Low-level programming language

text: Although few programs are written in machine languages, programmers often become adept at reading it through working with core dumps or debugging from the front panel.


title: Low-level programming language

text: Example: A function in hexadecimal representation of 32-bit x86 machine code to calculate the "n"th Fibonacci number:


title: Low-level programming language

text: Second-generation languages provide one abstraction level on top of the machine code. In the early days of coding on computers like TX-0 and PDP-1, the first thing MIT hackers did was to write assemblers.


title: Low-level programming language

text: Assembly language has little semantics or formal specification, being only a mapping of human-readable symbols, including symbolic addresses, to opcodes, addresses, numeric constants, strings and so on. Typically, one machine instruction is represented as one line of assembly code. Assemblers produce object files that can link with other object files or be loaded on their own.


title: Low-level programming language

text: Example: The same Fibonacci number calculator as above, but in x86-64 assembly language using AT&T syntax:


title: Low-level programming language

text: In this code example, hardware features of the x86-64 processor (its registers) are named and manipulated directly. The function loads its input from "%edi" in accordance to the System V ABI and performs its calculation by manipulating values in the EAX, EBX, and ECX registers until it has finished and returns. Note that in this assembly language, there is no concept of returning a value. The result having been stored in the EAX register, the RET command simply moves code processing to the code location stored on the stack (usually the instruction immediately after the one that called this function) and it is up to the author of the calling code to know that this function stores its result in EAX and to retrieve it from there. x86-64 assembly language imposes no standard for returning values from a function (and in fact, has no concept of a function); it is up to the calling code to examine state after the procedure returns if it needs to extract a value.


title: Low-level programming language

text: This code is very similar in structure to the assembly language example but there are significant differences in terms of abstraction:


title: Low-level programming language

text: These abstractions make the C code compilable without modification on any architecture for which a C compiler has been written. The x86 assembly language code is specific to the x86 architecture.


title: Low-level programming language

text: During the late 1960s, high-level languages such as PL/S, BLISS, BCPL, extended ALGOL (for Burroughs large systems) and C included some degree of access to low-level programming functions. One method for this is Inline assembly, in which assembly code is embedded in a high-level language that supports this feature. Some of these languages also allow architecture-dependent compiler optimization directives to adjust the way a compiler uses the target processor architecture.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: Unusual place names are names for cities, towns, and other regions which are considered non-ordinary in some manner. This can include place names which are also offensive words, inadvertently humorous or highly charged words, as well as place names of unorthodox spelling and pronunciation, including especially short or long names. These names often have an unintended effect or double-meaning when read by someone who speaks another language.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: A number of settlements have names that are offensive or humorous in other languages, such as Rottenegg or Fucking (renamed to Fugging in 2021) in Austria, or Fjuckby in Sweden, where the name can be associated with the word "fuck". Although as a place name "Fucking" is benign in German, in English the word is usually vulgar. Similarly, when they hear of the French town of Condom, English speakers will likely associate it with condoms. Hel, Poland is a Polish seaside resort on the Hel Peninsula while Hell, Norway, comes from the old Norse word "hellir", which means "overhang" or "cliff cave". In modern Norwegian the word "" means "hell", while the Norwegian word "hell" can mean "luck".


title: Place names considered unusual

text: Conversely, a number of place names can be considered humorous or offensive by their inhabitants, such as the Italian town of Bastardo ("Bastard") and Troia ("Slut", literally the female of the pig; the same name is used in Italian for the ancient city of Troy), the German towns Affendorf ("Monkey Village"), Faulebutter ("Rancid Butter"), Fickmühlen ("Fuck Mills"), Himmelreich ("Kingdom of Heaven"), which appropriately lies at the edge of the Höllental ("Hell's Valley"), Katzenhirn ("Cat Brain", nearest to Mindelheim), Lederhose ("Lederhosen", leather trousers), Neger ("Negro"), Plöd ( means "stupid", renamed in 2009), Regenmantel ("Raincoat"), and Warzen ("Warts"), or the Swedish villages of "Porrarp" (in which "porr" translates to "porn"), "Mensträsk ("Menstruation lake"), "Fittja" ("Fitta" translates to "cunt"), and "Rövhålet" ("Asshole"). The Austrian municipality Unterstinkenbrunn and the cadastral community Oberstinkenbrunn ("Lower Stinking Well" and "Upper Stinking Well" respectively) can also be considered offensive by residents. In the Czech Republic, there are villages called Šukačka ("Fucking") and Onen Svět ("The Other World"), which are located 2 kilometres from each other. In Hong Kong, place names containing the words "shi" (屎 - shit) and "niu" (尿 - piss) are common, and there are a number of place names actually containing profanities along the coast such as Gau Tau (lit. "penis head"), Ham Lun Kok (含倫角 - lit. "oral sex corner" which the character 倫 is a substitute of the profanity word 𡳞 meaning dick) which the common name has since been changed to Shek Ngau Chau (石牛洲) and Yau Lung Kok (游龍角) respectively. The name Kau Shi Wai (狗屎圍 in Cantonese - in which 狗屎 means "dog shit") was changed as it was indecent and could cause embarrassment. In the US, the name of the town of Effingham, Illinois contains a minced oath for "fuck".


title: Place names considered unusual

text: Some place names are deemed to be offensive or unacceptable, often through historic semantic changes in what is tolerated.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: An example of this would be the once common English street name Gropecunt Lane, whose etymology is a historical use of the street by prostitutes to ply their trade. During the Middle Ages the word "cunt" may often have been considered merely vulgar, having been in common use in its anatomical sense since at least the 13th century. Its steady disappearance from the English vernacular may have been the result of a gradual cleaning-up of the name; Gropecunt Lane in 13th-century Wells became Grope Lane, and then in the 19th century, Grove Lane. In the city of York, Grapcunt Lane ("grāp" being the Old English word for "grope") was renamed Grope Lane and is now called Grape Lane.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: A similar case was in the town of Sasmuan, Pampanga, in the Philippines, formerly known as "Sexmoan" based on attempts by Spanish friars to transcribe "Sasmuan"; it was unanimously changed into Sasmuan in 1991 because of negative sexual connotations associated with the place name.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: In Canada, the town of Swastika, Ontario, founded in 1908, adopted its name years before the Nazi Party adopted the swastika as a symbol.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: In Spain, a municipality was named Castrillo Matajudíos ("Jew-killer Camp") from 1627 to 2015. Matamoros (Moor killer), however, remains a common place name, surname, and even the name of several businesses in Spanish-speaking countries.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: A few place names in the United States and Canada historically used the word "nigger", a derogatory term for black people. Over the course of the 20th century, many of these place names were changed because of the racist connotations of the word. One example is Dead Nigger Creek in Texas (named to commemorate the Buffalo Soldier tragedy of 1877) which was changed to Dead Negro Draw in 1963, then to Buffalo Soldier Draw in 2020. Another is Niggerhead Mountain near Malibu, California, which was changed to Negrohead Mountain in the 1960s and finally to Ballard Mountain in 2010 for an early African American settler. In Canada, Quebec decided in 2015 to rename 11 places within the province that contained the word "nigger" or the French equivalent, "nègre". In 2016 New Zealand renamed three locations which were found to be offensive, Niggerhead, Nigger Hill, and Nigger Stream.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: Likewise there is pressure to remove the word "squaw" from place names, a traditional term for a Native American woman now considered derogatory. In 2003, Squaw Peak in Phoenix, Arizona, was renamed to Piestewa Peak, after Specialist Lori Ann Piestewa, killed in action during Operation Iraqi Freedom.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: Kindai University in Osaka, Japan, changed its English-language name from Kinki University (pronounced kinky) in 2014, which, in the English language, has a provocative meaning. The Japanese-language name of the university, , was left unchanged. The change was globally reported, though since its founding in 1949, the original name was not a problem within Japan. However, with the dramatic globalization of Japanese universities in recent decades, including the presence of hundreds of foreign students, staff, faculty, and visiting scholars on campus, the leadership of the university made the change in 2016, after deciding to do so in 2014.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: Waters, Arkansas, changed its name to Pine Ridge, Arkansas, after it became known that the fictional town Pine Ridge in the radio sitcom "Lum and Abner" was based on Waters. Now a sparsely populated and no longer incorporated community, Pine Ridge is home to a Lum and Abner museum.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, changed its name from Hot Springs in 1950, after the host of the radio program "Truth or Consequences" promised free publicity to any town willing to change its name to that of the show. Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, changed its name from Mauch Chunk in honor of the famous athlete when his widow agreed to allow his remains to be buried there.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: In 1999, the town of Halfway, Oregon, changed its name to Half.com for one year after the e-commerce start-up of the same name offered 20 computers, as well as $110,000 for the school, and other financial subsidies.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: Saint Augusta, Minnesota, was for a short time named Ventura after the then-governor Jesse Ventura (whose ring name was in turn named after the city of Ventura, California) to draw attention in avoiding annexation by the nearby city of Saint Cloud. The name was reverted to the original name after the crisis passed.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: In the late 1990s, the town of Granville, North Dakota, agreed to change its name temporarily to McGillicuddy City as part of a promotion for Dr. McGillicuddy's schnapps.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: In March 2010, Topeka, Kansas, temporarily changed its name to Google, after the technology company, in an attempt to secure the installation of Google Fiber in the city.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: Unorthodox spelling or pronunciation, particularly short or long names, and names derived from unusual sources are often seen as unusual, especially by people outside the culture which named them. The Welsh village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll changed its name to the longer Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch ("The church of [St.] Mary (Llanfair) [of the] pool (pwll) of the white hazels (gwyn gyll) near [lit. "over against"] (go ger) the fierce whirlpool (y chwyrn drobwll) [and] the church of [St.] Tysilio (Llantysilio) of the red cave") in the 1860s for publicity reasons. At 58 letters, it has the longest place name in the UK. The body of fresh water in Webster, Massachusetts, that has historically (since at least 1921) borne the apparently Native American 45-letter/fourteen-syllable name Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg is usually shortened, for instance on road maps, to using only the final six syllables from its "long form"; as Lake Chaubunagungamaug, or even more simply to "Webster Lake". The longest single-word place name in the world is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, a hill in New Zealand.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: Conversely, there are several settlements whose name consists of only one letter. A number of Norwegian towns are named "Å". The name often comes from the Old Norse word "Ár", meaning small river. Examples include: Å, Åfjord; Å, Meldal; Å, Lavangen; and Å, Tranøy (also compare rivers named Aa). A village in northern France has been called Y since the 13th century. The Netherlands has "IJ (Amsterdam)", formerly spelled "Y". The Dutch digraph IJ, although typed using two characters, is sometimes considered a ligature, or even a single letter in itself.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: There are a number of place names that seem unusual to English speakers because they do not conform to standard English orthography rules. Examples include the Welsh towns of Ysbyty Ystwyth and Bwlchgwyn which appear to English speakers to contain no vowel characters, although "y" and "w" represent vowel sounds in Welsh. Aioi, Japan; Eiao, Marquesas Islands; Aiea, Hawaii; Oia, Greece; Oia, Spain; Aia and Ea, Spanish Basque Country; Ae, Scotland; Eu, France and Ii, Finland, on the other hand, contain only vowels and no consonants. Triples of any letter in English are considered rare; although the French Polynesian commune Fa'a'ā and its airport Faa'a International Airport both appear to contain a triple "a", the apostrophes represent glottal stops in Tahitian.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: Unusual names may also be created as a result of error by the naming authority. An example is Rednaxela Terrace in Hong Kong, which is believed to be the name Alexander but erroneously written right-to-left (the normal practice for writing Chinese in the past); the name has stayed and even been transcribed back to Chinese phonetically.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: As a result of increased notoriety, road signs are commonly stolen in Fucking, Austria, as souvenirs – the only crime which has been reported in the village. It cost some 300 euros to replace each stolen sign, and the costs were reflected in the taxes that local residents pay. In 2004, owing mainly to the stolen signs, a vote was held on changing the village's name, but the residents voted against doing so. Tarsdorf municipality's mayor Siegfried Höppl stated that it was decided to keep the name as it had existed for 800 years, and further stated that "everyone here knows what it means in English, but for us Fucking is Fucking – and it's going to stay Fucking."


title: Place names considered unusual

text: In November 2020, the council of Tarsdorf voted to have the village's name officially changed to "Fugging" (pronounced the same as "Fucking" in the dialect spoken in the region), effective 1 January 2021.


title: Place names considered unusual

text: In 2010, the inhabitants of Shitterton, Dorset, purchased a 1.5-ton block of Purbeck stone to place at the entrance to Shitterton, carved with the hamlet's name to prevent theft. A truck and crane were hired by volunteers to put the stone in place at a total cost of £680.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: William Moulton Marston (May 9, 1893 – May 2, 1947), also known by the pen name Charles Moulton (), was an American psychologist who, with his wife Elizabeth Holloway, invented an early prototype of the lie detector. He was also known as a self-help author and comic book writer who created the character Wonder Woman.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and their polyamorous life partner, Olive Byrne, greatly influenced Wonder Woman's creation.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Marston was born in the Cliftondale section of Saugus, Massachusetts, the son of Annie Dalton (née Moulton) and Frederick William Marston. Marston was educated at Harvard University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and receiving his B.A. in 1915, an LL.B. in 1918, and a PhD in Psychology in 1921. While a student at Harvard, Marston sold his first script, "The Thief", to filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché, who directed the film in 1913. After teaching at American University in Washington, D.C., and Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, Marston traveled to Universal Studios in California in 1929, where he spent a year as Director of Public Services and taught at the University of Southern California.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Marston had two children each with both his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston and partner Olive Byrne. Elizabeth gave birth to a son, Pete, and a daughter, Olive Ann. Olive Byrne gave birth to two sons. Elizabeth supported the family financially while Olive Byrne stayed home to take care of all four children. Marjorie Wilkes Huntley was a third woman who occasionally lived with them, and who would go on to become office executive under H. G. Peter.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Marston was the creator of the systolic blood pressure test, which became one component of the modern polygraph invented by John Augustus Larson in Berkeley, California. Marston's wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, suggested a connection between emotion and blood pressure to William, observing that, "[w]hen she got mad or excited, her blood pressure seemed to climb".


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Although Elizabeth is not listed as Marston's collaborator in his early work, Lamb, Matte (1996), and others refer directly and indirectly to Elizabeth's own work on her husband's research. She also appears in a picture taken in his laboratory in the 1920s (reproduced by Marston, 1938).


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Marston set out to commercialize Larson's invention of the polygraph, when he subsequently embarked on a career in entertainment and comic book writing and appeared as a salesman in ads for Gillette Razors, using a polygraph motif. From his psychological work, Marston became convinced that women were more honest than men in certain situations and could work faster and more accurately. During his lifetime, Marston championed the latent abilities and causes of the women of his day.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Marston was also a writer of essays in popular psychology. And he published a 1928 book "Emotions of Normal People," a defense of many sexual taboos, using much of Byrne's original research she had done for her doctorate. He dedicated the work to her, Holloway, his mother, his aunt, and Huntley. It received almost no attention from the rest of the academic community other than a review, written by Byrne herself, under her alternate name Olive Richard in "The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology".


title: William Moulton Marston

text: "Emotions of Normal People" also elaborated on the DISC Theory. Marston viewed people behaving along two axes, with their attention being either passive or active, depending on the individual's perception of his or her environment as either favorable or antagonistic. By placing the axes at right angles, four quadrants form, with each describing a behavioral pattern:


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Marston posited that there is a masculine notion of freedom that is inherently anarchic and violent and an opposing feminine notion based on "Love Allure" that leads to an ideal state of submission to loving authority.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: On October 25, 1940, an interview conducted by his partner Olive Byrne (under the pseudonym "Olive Richard") was published in "The Family Circle" (titled "Don't Laugh at the Comics"), in which Marston said that he saw "great educational potential" in comic books. (A follow-up article was published two years later in 1942.) The interview caught the attention of comics publisher Max Gaines, who hired Marston as an educational consultant for National Periodicals and All-American Publications, two of the companies that would later merge to form DC Comics.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: In the early 1940s, the DC Comics line was dominated by superpower-endowed male characters such as the Green Lantern and Superman, as well as Batman, with his high-tech gadgets. According to the Fall 2001 issue of the Boston University alumni magazine, it was the idea of Marston's wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, to create a female superhero. Marston recommended an idea for a new kind of superhero, one who would conquer not with fists or firepower, but with love. "Fine," said Elizabeth. "but make her a woman."


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Marston introduced the idea to Max Gaines, co-founder with Jack Liebowitz of All-American Publications. Given the go-ahead, Marston developed Wonder Woman, basing her character on the unconventional, liberated, powerful modern women of his day. Marston's pseudonym, Charles Moulton, combined his own and Gaines's middle names.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: In a 1943 issue of "The American Scholar", Marston wrote: "Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman."


title: William Moulton Marston

text: In 2017, a majority of Marston's personal papers arrived at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; this collection helps to tell the backstory of "Wonder Woman," including his unorthodox personal life with two idealistic and strong women, Olive Byrne and Elizabeth Marston, with a connection to Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Marston's character was a native of an all-female utopia of Amazons who became a crime-fighting U.S. government agent, using her superhuman strength and agility, and her ability to force villains to submit and tell the truth by binding them with her magic lasso. Her appearance was believed by some to be based somewhat on Olive Byrne, and her heavy bronze bracelets (which she used to deflect bullets) were inspired by bracelets worn by Byrne.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: After her name "Suprema, the Wonder Woman" was replaced with simply "Wonder Woman," which was a popular term at the time that described women who were exceptionally gifted, the character made her debut in "All Star Comics" #8 in December 1941. Wonder Woman next appeared in "Sensation Comics" #1 (January 1942), and six months later, "Wonder Woman" #1 debuted. Except for four months in 1986, the series has been in print ever since. The stories were initially written by Marston and illustrated by newspaper artist Harry Peter. During his life Marston had written many articles and books on various psychological topics, but his last six years of writing were devoted to his comics creation.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: William Moulton Marston died of cancer on May 2, 1947, in Rye, seven days before his 54th birthday. After his death, Elizabeth and Olive continued to live together until Olive's death in 1990, aged 86; Elizabeth died in 1993, aged 100.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: In 1985, Marston was posthumously named as one of the honorees by DC Comics in the company's 50th anniversary publication "Fifty Who Made DC Great".


title: William Moulton Marston

text: William Moulton Marston's philosophy of diametric opposites has bled into his design of his Wonder Woman mythology. This theme of diametrics took the form of his emphasis on certain masculine and feminine configurations as well as dominance and submission.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Marston's "Wonder Woman" is an early example of bondage themes that were entering popular culture in the 1930s. Physical and mental submission appears again and again throughout Marston's comics work, with Wonder Woman and her criminal opponents frequently being tied up (or otherwise restrained), and her Amazonian sisters engaging in frequent wrestling and bondage play. These elements were softened by later writers of the series, who dropped such characters as the Nazi-like blond female slaver Eviless completely, despite her having formed the original Villainy Inc. of Wonder Woman's enemies (in "Wonder Woman" #28, the last by Marston).


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Though Marston had described female nature as being more capable of submission emotion, in his other writings and interviews, he referred to submission as a noble practice and did not shy away from the sexual implications, saying:


title: William Moulton Marston

text: One of the purposes of these bondage depictions was to induce eroticism in readers as a part of what he called "sex love training." Through his Wonder Woman comics, he aimed to condition readers to becoming more readily accepting of loving submission to loving authorities rather than being so assertive with their own destructive egos. About male readers, he later wrote: "Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they'll be proud to become her willing slaves!"


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Marston combined these themes with others, including restorative and transformative justice, rehabilitation, regret and their roles in civilization. These appeared often in his depiction of the near-ideal Amazon civilization of Paradise Island, and especially its "Reform Island" penal colony, which played a central role in many stories and was the "loving" alternative to retributive justice of the world run by men. These themes are particularly evident in his last story, in which prisoners freed by Eviless, who have responded to Amazon rehabilitation and now have good dominance/submission, stop her and restore the Amazons to power.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Some of these themes continued on in Silver Age characters, who may have been influenced by Marston, notably Saturn Girl and Saturn Queen, who (like Eviless and her female army) are also from Saturn, are also clad in tight, dark red bodysuits, are also blond or red-haired, and also have telepathic powers.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Stories involving the latter have been especially focused on the emotions involved in changing sides from evil to good, as were stories from Green Lantern's "Blackest Night" with its Emotional Spectrum which was likely influenced by Marston's research into emotions. Wonder Woman's golden lasso and Venus Girdle in particular were the focus of many of the early stories and have the same capability to reform people for good in the short term that Transformation Island and prolonged wearing of Venus Girdles offered in the longer term. The Venus Girdle was an allegory for Marston's theory of "sex love" training, where people can be "trained" to embrace submission through eroticism.


title: William Moulton Marston

text: Marston's life is depicted in "Professor Marston and the Wonder Women", a 2017 biographical drama also portraying Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Olive Byrne, and the creation of Wonder Woman. Marston is portrayed in the film by Welsh actor Luke Evans.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Gioachino Antonio Rossini (29 February 1792 – 13 November 1868) was an Italian composer who gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano pieces, and some sacred music. He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring from large-scale composition while still in his thirties, at the height of his popularity.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Born in Pesaro to parents who were both musicians (his father a trumpeter, his mother a singer), Rossini began to compose by the age of 12 and was educated at music school in Bologna. His first opera was performed in Venice in 1810 when he was 18 years old. In 1815 he was engaged to write operas and manage theatres in Naples. In the period 1810–1823 he wrote 34 operas for the Italian stage that were performed in Venice, Milan, Ferrara, Naples and elsewhere; this productivity necessitated an almost formulaic approach for some components (such as overtures) and a certain amount of self-borrowing. During this period he produced his most popular works, including the comic operas "L'italiana in Algeri", "Il barbiere di Siviglia" (known in English as "The Barber of Seville") and "La Cenerentola", which brought to a peak the "opera buffa" tradition he inherited from masters such as Domenico Cimarosa and Giovanni Paisiello. He also composed "opera seria" works such as "Otello", "Tancredi" and "Semiramide". All of these attracted admiration for their innovation in melody, harmonic and instrumental colour, and dramatic form. In 1824 he was contracted by the Opéra in Paris, for which he produced an opera to celebrate the coronation of Charles X, "Il viaggio a Reims" (later cannibalised for his first opera in French, "Le comte Ory"), revisions of two of his Italian operas, "Le siège de Corinthe" and "Moïse", and in 1829 his last opera, "Guillaume Tell".


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Rossini's withdrawal from opera for the last 40 years of his life has never been fully explained; contributary factors may have been ill-health, the wealth his success had brought him, and the rise of spectacular grand opera under composers such as Giacomo Meyerbeer. From the early 1830s to 1855, when he left Paris and was based in Bologna, Rossini wrote relatively little. On his return to Paris in 1855 he became renowned for his musical salons on Saturdays, regularly attended by musicians and the artistic and fashionable circles of Paris, for which he wrote the entertaining pieces "Péchés de vieillesse". Guests included Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Giuseppe Verdi, Meyerbeer and Joseph Joachim. Rossini's last major composition was his "Petite messe solennelle" (1863). He died in Paris in 1868.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Rossini was born in 1792 in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic coast of Italy that was then part of the Papal States. He was the only child of Giuseppe Rossini, a trumpeter and horn player, and his wife Anna, "née" Guidarini, a seamstress by trade, daughter of a baker. Giuseppe Rossini was charming but impetuous and feckless; the burden of supporting the family and raising the child fell mainly on Anna, with some help from her mother and mother-in-law. Stendhal, who published a colourful biography of Rossini in 1824, wrote:


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Giuseppe was imprisoned at least twice: first in 1790 for insubordination to local authorities in a dispute about his employment as town trumpeter; and in 1799 and 1800 for republican activism and support of the troops of Napoleon against the Pope's Austrian backers. In 1798, when Rossini was aged six, his mother began a career as a professional singer in comic opera, and for a little over a decade was a considerable success in cities including Trieste and Bologna, before her untrained voice began to fail.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: In 1802 the family moved to Lugo, near Ravenna, where Rossini received a good basic education in Italian, Latin and arithmetic as well as music. He studied the horn with his father and other music with a priest, Giuseppe Malerbe, whose extensive library contained works by Haydn and Mozart, both little known in Italy at the time, but inspirational to the young Rossini. He was a quick learner, and by the age of twelve he had composed a set of six sonatas for four stringed instruments, which were performed under the aegis of a rich patron in 1804. Two years later he was admitted to the recently opened Liceo Musicale, Bologna, initially studying singing, cello and piano, and joining the composition class soon afterwards. He wrote some substantial works while a student, including a mass and a cantata, and after two years he was invited to continue his studies. He declined the offer: the strict academic regime of the Liceo had given him a solid compositional technique, but as his biographer Richard Osborne puts it, "his instinct to continue his education in the real world finally asserted itself".


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: While still at the Liceo, Rossini had performed in public as a singer and worked in theatres as a répétiteur and keyboard soloist. In 1810 at the request of the popular tenor Domenico Mombelli he wrote his first operatic score, a two-act operatic "dramma serio", "Demetrio e Polibio", to a libretto by Mombelli's wife. It was publicly staged in 1812, after the composer's first successes. Rossini and his parents concluded that his future lay in composing operas. The main operatic centre in north eastern Italy was Venice; under the tutelage of the composer Giovanni Morandi, a family friend, Rossini moved there in late 1810, when he was eighteen.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Rossini's first opera to be staged was "La cambiale di matrimonio", a one-act comedy, given at the small Teatro San Moisè in November 1810. The piece was a great success, and Rossini received what then seemed to him a considerable sum: "forty "scudi" – an amount I had never seen brought together". He later described the San Moisè as an ideal theatre for a young composer learning his craft – "everything tended to facilitate the début of a novice composer": it had no chorus, and a small company of principals; its main repertoire consisted of one-act comic operas ("farse"), staged with modest scenery and minimal rehearsal. Rossini followed the success of his first piece with three more "farse" for the house: "L'inganno felice" (1812), "La scala di seta" (1812), and "Il signor Bruschino" (1813).


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Rossini maintained his links with Bologna, where in 1811 he had a success directing Haydn's "The Seasons", and a failure with his first full-length opera, "L'equivoco stravagante". He also worked for opera houses in Ferrara and Rome. In mid-1812 he received a commission from La Scala, Milan, where his two-act comedy "La pietra del paragone" ran for fifty-three performances, a considerable run for the time, which brought him not only financial benefits, but exemption from military service and the title of "maestro di cartello" – a composer whose name on advertising posters guaranteed a full house. The following year his first "opera seria", "Tancredi", did well at La Fenice in Venice, and even better at Ferrara, with a rewritten, tragic ending. The success of "Tancredi" made Rossini's name known internationally; productions of the opera followed in London (1820) and New York (1825). Within weeks of "Tancredi", Rossini had another box-office success with his comedy "L'italiana in Algeri", composed in great haste and premiered in May 1813.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: 1814 was a less remarkable year for the rising composer, neither "Il turco in Italia" or "Sigismondo" pleasing the Milanese or Venetian public, respectively. 1815 marked an important stage in Rossini's career. In May he moved to Naples, to take up the post of director of music for the royal theatres. These included the Teatro di San Carlo, the city's leading opera house; its manager Domenico Barbaia was to be an important influence on the composer's career there.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: The musical establishment of Naples was not immediately welcoming to Rossini, who was seen as an intruder into its cherished operatic traditions. The city had once been the operatic capital of Europe; the memory of Cimarosa was revered and Paisiello was still living, but there were no local composers of any stature to follow them, and Rossini quickly won the public and critics round. Rossini's first work for the San Carlo, "Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra" was a dramma per musica in two acts, in which he reused substantial sections of his earlier works, unfamiliar to the local public. The Rossini scholars Philip Gossett and Patricia Brauner write, "It is as if Rossini wished to present himself to the Neapolitan public by offering a selection of the best music from operas unlikely to be revived in Naples." The new opera was received with tremendous enthusiasm, as was the Neapolitan premiere of "L'italiana in Algeri", and Rossini's position in Naples was assured.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: For the first time, Rossini was able to write regularly for a resident company of first-rate singers and a fine orchestra, with adequate rehearsals, and schedules that made it unnecessary to compose in a rush to meet deadlines. Between 1815 and 1822 he composed eighteen more operas: nine for Naples and nine for opera houses in other cities. In 1816, for the Teatro Argentina in Rome, he composed the opera that was to become his best-known: "Il barbiere di Siviglia" ("The Barber of Seville"). There was already a popular opera of that title by Paisiello, and Rossini's version was originally given the same title as its hero, "Almaviva". Despite an unsuccessful opening night, with mishaps on stage and many pro-Paisiello and anti-Rossini audience members, the opera quickly became a success, and by the time of its first revival, in Bologna a few months later, it was billed by its present Italian title and it rapidly eclipsed Paisiello's setting.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Rossini's operas for the Teatro San Carlo were substantial, mainly serious pieces. His "Otello" (1816) provoked Lord Byron to write, "They have been crucifying "Othello" into an opera: music good, but lugubrious – but as for the words!" Nonetheless the piece proved generally popular, and held the stage in frequent revivals until it was overshadowed by Verdi's version, seven decades later. Among his other works for the house were "Mosè in Egitto", based on the biblical story of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt (1818), and "La donna del lago", from Sir Walter Scott's poem "The Lady of the Lake" (1819). For La Scala he wrote the opera semiseria "La gazza ladra" (1817), and for Rome his version of the Cinderella story, "La Cenerentola" (1817). In 1817 came the first performance of one of his operas ("L'Italiana") at the Theâtre-Italien in Paris; its success led to others of his operas being staged there, and eventually to his contract in Paris from 1824 to 1830.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Rossini kept his personal life as private as possible, but he was known for his susceptibility to singers in the companies he worked with. Among his lovers in his early years were Ester Mombelli (Domenico's daughter) and Maria Marcolini of the Bologna company. By far the most important of these relationships – both personal and professional – was with Isabella Colbran, prima donna of the Teatro San Carlo (and former mistress of Barbaia). Rossini had heard her sing in Bologna in 1807, and when he moved to Naples he wrote a succession of important roles for her in "opere serie".


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: By the early 1820s Rossini was beginning to tire of Naples. The failure of his operatic tragedy "Ermione" the previous year convinced him that he and the Neapolitan audiences had had enough of each other. An insurrection in Naples against the monarchy, though quickly crushed, unsettled Rossini; when Barbaia signed a contract to take the company to Vienna, Rossini was glad to join them, but did not reveal to Barbaia that he had no intention of returning to Naples afterwards. He travelled with Colbran, in March 1822, breaking their journey at Bologna, where they were married in the presence of his parents in a small church in Castenaso a few miles from the city. The bride was thirty-seven, the groom thirty.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: In Vienna, Rossini received a hero's welcome; his biographers describe it as "unprecedentedly feverish enthusiasm", "Rossini fever", and "near hysteria". The authoritarian chancellor of the Austrian Empire, Metternich, liked Rossini's music, and thought it free of all potential revolutionary or republican associations. He was therefore happy to permit the San Carlo company to perform the composer's operas. In a three-month season they played six of them, to audiences so enthusiastic that Beethoven's assistant, Anton Schindler, described it as "an idolatrous orgy".


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: While in Vienna Rossini heard Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony, and was so moved that he determined to meet the reclusive composer. He finally managed to do so, and later described the encounter to many people, including Eduard Hanslick and Richard Wagner. He recalled that although conversation was hampered by Beethoven's deafness and Rossini's ignorance of German, Beethoven made it plain that he thought Rossini's talents were not for serious opera, and that "above all" he should "do more "Barbiere"" "(Barbers)".


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: After the Vienna season Rossini returned to Castenaso to work with his librettist, Gaetano Rossi, on "Semiramide", commissioned by La Fenice. It was premiered in February 1823, his last work for the Italian theatre. Colbran starred, but it was clear to everyone that her voice was in serious decline, and "Semiramide" ended her career in Italy. The work survived that one major disadvantage, and entered the international operatic repertory, remaining popular throughout the 19th century; in Richard Osborne's words, it brought "[Rossini's] Italian career to a spectacular close."


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: In November 1823 Rossini and Colbran set off for London, where a lucrative contract had been offered. They stopped for four weeks "en route" in Paris. Although he was not as feverishly acclaimed by the Parisians as he had been in Vienna, he nevertheless had an exceptionally welcoming reception from the musical establishment and the public. When he attended a performance of "Il barbiere" at the Théâtre-Italien he was applauded, dragged onto the stage, and serenaded by the musicians. A banquet was given for him and his wife, attended by leading French composers and artists, and he found the cultural climate of Paris congenial.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: At the end of the year Rossini arrived in London, where he was received and made much of by the king, George IV, although the composer was by now unimpressed by royalty and aristocracy. Rossini and Colbran had signed contracts for an opera season at the in the Haymarket. Her vocal shortcomings were a serious liability, and she reluctantly retired from performing. Public opinion was not improved by Rossini's failure to provide a new opera, as promised. The impresario, Vincenzo Benelli, defaulted on his contract with the composer, but this was not known to the London press and public, who blamed Rossini.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: In a 2003 biography of the composer, Gaia Servadio comments that Rossini and England were not made for each other. He was prostrated by the Channel crossing, and was unlikely to be enthused by the English weather or English cooking. Although his stay in London was financially rewarding – the British press reported disapprovingly that he had earned over £30,000 – he was happy to sign a contract at the French embassy in London to return to Paris, where he had felt much more at home.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Rossini's new, and highly remunerative, contract with the French government was negotiated under Louis XVIII, who died in September 1824, soon after Rossini's arrival in Paris. It had been agreed that the composer would produce one grand opera for the Académie Royale de Musique and either an "opera buffa" or an "opera semiseria" for the Théâtre-Italien. He was also to help run the latter theatre and revise one of his earlier works for revival there. The death of the king and the accession of Charles X changed Rossini's plans, and his first new work for Paris was "Il viaggio a Reims", an operatic entertainment given in June 1825 to celebrate Charles's coronation. It was Rossini's last opera with an Italian libretto. He permitted only four performances of the piece, intending to reuse the best of the music in a less ephemeral opera. About half the score of "Le comte Ory" (1828) is from the earlier work.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Colbran's enforced retirement put a strain on the Rossinis' marriage, leaving her unoccupied while he continued to be the centre of musical attention and constantly in demand. She consoled herself with what Servadio describes as "a new pleasure in shopping"; for Rossini, Paris offered continual gourmet delights, as his increasingly rotund shape began to reflect.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: The first of the four operas Rossini wrote to French librettos were "Le siège de Corinthe" (1826) and "Moïse et Pharaon" (1827). Both were substantial reworkings of pieces written for Naples: "Maometto II" and "Mosè in Egitto". Rossini took great care before beginning work on the first, learning to speak French and familiarising himself with traditional French operatic ways of declaiming the language. As well as dropping some of the original music that was in an ornate style unfashionable in Paris, Rossini accommodated local preferences by adding dances, hymn-like numbers and a greater role for the chorus.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Rossini's mother, Anna, died in 1827; he had been devoted to her, and he felt her loss deeply. She and Colbran had never got on well, and Servadio suggests that after Anna died Rossini came to resent the surviving woman in his life.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: In 1828 Rossini wrote "Le comte Ory", his only French-language comic opera. His determination to reuse music from "Il viaggio a Reims" caused problems for his librettists, who had to adapt their original plot and write French words to fit existing Italian numbers, but the opera was a success, and was seen in London within six months of the Paris premiere, and in New York in 1831. The following year Rossini wrote his long-awaited French grand opera, "Guillaume Tell", based on Friedrich Schiller's 1804 play which drew on the William Tell legend.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: "Guillaume Tell" was well received. The orchestra and singers gathered outside Rossini's house after the premiere and performed the rousing finale to the second act in his honour. The newspaper "Le Globe" commented that a new era of music had begun. Gaetano Donizetti remarked that the first and last acts of the opera were written by Rossini, but the middle act was written by God. The work was an undoubted success, without being a smash hit; the public took some time in getting to grips with it, and some singers found it too demanding. It nonetheless was produced abroad within months of the premiere, and there was no suspicion that it would be the composer's last opera.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Jointly with "Semiramide", "Guillaume Tell" is Rossini's longest opera, at three hours and forty-five minutes, and the effort of composing it left him exhausted. Although within a year he was planning an operatic treatment of the Faust story, events and ill health overtook him. After the opening of "Guillaume Tell" the Rossinis had left Paris and were staying in Castenaso. Within a year events in Paris had Rossini hurrying back. Charles X was overthrown in a revolution in July 1830, and the new administration, headed by Louis Philippe I, announced radical cutbacks in government spending. Among the cuts was Rossini's lifetime annuity, won after hard negotiation with the previous regime. Attempting to restore the annuity was one of Rossini's reasons for returning. The other was to be with his new mistress, Olympe Pélissier. He left Colbran in Castenaso; she never returned to Paris and they never lived together again.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: The reasons for Rossini's withdrawal from opera have been continually discussed during and since his lifetime. Some have supposed that aged thirty-seven and in variable health, having negotiated a sizeable annuity from the French government, and having written thirty-nine operas, he simply planned to retire and kept to that plan. In a 1934 study of the composer, the critic Francis Toye coined the phrase "The Great Renunciation", and called Rossini's retirement a "phenomenon unique in the history of music and difficult to parallel in the whole history of art":


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: The poet Heine compared Rossini's retirement with Shakespeare's withdrawal from writing: two geniuses recognising when they had accomplished the unsurpassable and not seeking to follow it. Others, then and later, suggested that Rossini had retired because of pique at the successes of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Fromental Halévy in the genre of grand opéra. Modern Rossini scholarship has generally discounted such theories, maintaining that Rossini had no intention of renouncing operatic composition, and that circumstances rather than personal choice made "Guillaume Tell" his last opera. Gossett and Richard Osborne suggest that illness may have been a major factor in Rossini's retirement. From about this time, Rossini had intermittent bad health, both physical and mental. He had contracted gonorrhoea in earlier years, which later led to painful side-effects, from urethritis to arthritis; he suffered from bouts of debilitating depression, which commentators have linked to several possible causes: cyclothymia, or bipolar disorder, or reaction to his mother's death.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: For the next twenty-five years following "Guillaume Tell" Rossini composed little, although Gossett comments that his comparatively few compositions from the 1830s and 1840s show no falling off in musical inspiration. They include the "Soirées musicales" (1830–1835: a set of twelve songs for solo or duet voices and piano) and his Stabat Mater (begun in 1831 and completed in 1841). After winning his fight with the government over his annuity in 1835 Rossini left Paris and settled in Bologna. His return to Paris in 1843 for medical treatment by Jean Civiale sparked hopes that he might produce a new grand opera – it was rumoured that Eugène Scribe was preparing a libretto for him about Joan of Arc. The Opéra was moved to present a French version of "Otello" in 1844 which also included material from some of the composer's earlier operas. It is unclear to what extent – if at all – Rossini was involved with this production, which was in the event poorly received. More controversial was the "pasticcio" opera of "Robert Bruce" (1846), in which Rossini, by then returned to Bologna, closely cooperated by selecting music from his past operas which had not yet been performed in Paris, notably "La donna del lago." The Opéra sought to present "Robert" as a new Rossini opera. But although "Othello" could at least claim to be genuine, canonic Rossini, the historian Mark Everist notes that detractors argued that "Robert" was simply "fake goods, and from a bygone era at that"; he cites Théophile Gautier regretting that "the lack of unity could have been masked by a superior performance; unfortunately the tradition of Rossini's music was lost at the Opéra a long time ago."


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: The period after 1835 saw Rossini's formal separation from his wife, who remained at Castenaso (1837), and the death of his father at the age of eighty (1839). In 1845 Colbran became seriously ill, and in September Rossini travelled to visit her; a month later she died. The following year Rossini and Pélissier were married in Bologna. The events of the Year of Revolution in 1848 led Rossini to move away from the Bologna area, where he felt threatened by insurrection, and to make Florence his base, which it remained until 1855.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: By the early 1850s Rossini's mental and physical health had deteriorated to the point where his wife and friends feared for his sanity or his life. By the middle of the decade it was clear that he needed to return to Paris for the most advanced medical care then available. In April 1855 the Rossinis set off for their final journey from Italy to France. Rossini returned to Paris aged sixty-three and made it his home for the rest of his life.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Gossett observes that although an account of Rossini's life between 1830 and 1855 makes depressing reading, it is "no exaggeration to say that, in Paris, Rossini returned to life". He recovered his health and "joie de vivre". Once settled in Paris he maintained two homes: a flat in the rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, a smart central area, and a neo-classical villa built for him in Passy, a commune now absorbed into the city, but then semi-rural. He and his wife established a salon that became internationally famous. The first of their Saturday evening gatherings – the "samedi soirs" – was held in December 1858, and the last, two months before he died in 1868.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Rossini began composing again. His music from his final decade was not generally intended for public performance, and he did not usually put dates of composition on the manuscripts. Consequently, musicologists have found it difficult to give definite dates for his late works, but the first, or among the first, was the song cycle "Musique anodine", dedicated to his wife and presented to her in April 1857. For their weekly salons he produced more than 150 pieces, including songs, solo piano pieces, and chamber works for many different combinations of instruments. He referred to them as his "Péchés de vieillesse" – "sins of old age". The salons were held both at Beau Séjour – the Passy villa – and, in the winter, at the Paris flat. Such gatherings were a regular feature of Parisian life – the writer James Penrose has observed that the well-connected could easily attend different salons almost every night of the week – but the Rossinis' "samedi soirs" quickly became the most sought after: "an invitation was the city's highest social prize." The music, carefully chosen by Rossini, was not only his own, but included works by Pergolesi, Haydn and Mozart and modern pieces by some of his guests. Among the composers who attended the salons, and sometimes performed, were Auber, Gounod, Liszt, Rubinstein, Meyerbeer and Verdi. Rossini liked to call himself a fourth-class pianist, but the many famous pianists who attended the "samedi soirs" were dazzled by his playing. Violinists such as Pablo Sarasate and Joseph Joachim, and the leading singers of the day were regular guests. In 1860, Wagner visited Rossini via an introduction from Rossini's friend Edmond Michotte who some forty-five years later wrote his account of the genial conversation between the two composers.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: One of Rossini's few late works intended to be given in public was his "Petite messe solennelle", first performed in 1864. In the same year Rossini was made a grand officer of the Legion of Honour by Napoleon III.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: After a short illness, and an unsuccessful operation to treat colorectal cancer, Rossini died at Passy on 13 November 1868 at the age of seventy-six. He left Olympe a life interest in his estate, which after her death, ten years later, passed to the Commune of Pesaro for the establishment of a Liceo Musicale, and funded a home for retired opera singers in Paris. After a funeral service attended by more than four thousand people at the church of Sainte-Trinité, Paris, Rossini's body was interred at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. In 1887 his remains were moved to the church of Santa Croce, Florence.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: The writer Julian Budden, noting the formulas adopted early on by Rossini in his career and consistently followed by him thereafter as regards overtures, arias, structures and ensembles, has called them "the Code Rossini" in a reference to the Code Napoléon, the legal system established by the French Emperor. Rossini's overall style may indeed have been influenced more directly by the French: the historian John Rosselli suggests that French rule in Italy at the start of the 19th century meant that "music had taken on new military qualities of attack, noise and speed – to be heard in Rossini." Rossini's approach to opera was inevitably tempered by changing tastes and audience demands. The formal "classicist" libretti of Metastasio which had underpinned late 18th century "opera seria" were replaced by subjects more to the taste of the age of Romanticism, with stories demanding stronger characterisation and quicker action; a jobbing composer needed to meet these demands or fail. Rossini's strategies met this reality. A formulaic approach was logistically indispensable for Rossini's career, at least at the start: in the seven years 1812–1819, he wrote 27 operas, often at extremely short notice. For "La Cenerentola" (1817), for example, he had just over three weeks to write the music before the première.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Such pressures led to a further significant element of Rossini's compositional procedures, not included in Budden's "Code", namely, recycling. The composer often transferred a successful overture to subsequent operas: thus the overture to "La pietra del paragone" was later used for the "opera seria" "Tancredi" (1813), and (in the other direction) the overture to "Aureliano in Palmira" (1813) ended as (and is today known as) the overture to the comedy "Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville)". He also liberally re-employed arias and other sequences in later works. Spike Hughes notes that of the twenty-six numbers of "Eduardo e Cristina", produced in Venice in 1817, nineteen were lifted from previous works. "The audience ... were remarkably good-humoured  ... and asked slyly why the libretto had been changed since the last performance". Rossini expressed his disgust when the publisher Giovanni Ricordi issued a complete edition of his works in the 1850s: "The same pieces will be found several times, for I thought I had the right to remove from my fiascos those pieces which seemed best, to rescue them from shipwreck ... A fiasco seemed to be good and dead, and now look they've resuscitated them all!"


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Philip Gossett notes that Rossini "was from the outset a consummate composer of overtures." His basic formula for these remained constant throughout his career: Gossett characterises them as "sonata movements without development sections, usually preceded by a slow introduction" with "clear melodies, exuberant rhythms [and] simple harmonic structure" and a "crescendo" climax. Richard Taruskin also notes that the second theme is always announced in a woodwind solo, whose "catchiness" "etch[es] a distinct profile in the aural memory", and that the richness and inventiveness of his handling of the orchestra, even in these early works, marks the start of "[t]he great nineteenth-century flowering of orchestration."


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Rossini's handling of arias (and duets) in "cavatina" style marked a development from the eighteenth-century commonplace of recitative and aria. In the words of Rosselli, in Rossini's hands "the aria became an engine for releasing emotion". Rossini's typical aria structure involved a lyrical introduction (""cantabile"") and a more intensive, brilliant, conclusion (""cabaletta""). This model could be adapted in various ways so as to forward the plot (as opposed to the typical eighteenth-century handling which resulted in the action coming to a halt as the requisite repeats of the "da capo aria" were undertaken). For example, they could be punctuated by comments from other characters (a convention known as ""pertichini""), or the chorus could intervene between the "cantabile" and the "cabaletta" so as to fire up the soloist. If such developments were not necessarily Rossini's own invention, he nevertheless made them his own by his expert handling of them. A landmark in this context is the "cavatina" ""Di tanti palpiti"" from "Tancredi", which both Taruskin and Gossett (amongst others) single out as transformative, "the most famous aria Rossini ever wrote", with a "melody that seems to capture the melodic beauty and innocence characteristic of Italian opera." Both writers point out the typical Rossinian touch of avoiding an "expected" cadence in the aria by a sudden shift from the home key of F to that of A flat (see example); Taruskin notes the implicit pun, as the words talk of returning, but the music moves in a new direction. The influence was lasting; Gossett notes how the Rossinian "cabaletta" style continued to inform Italian opera as late as Giuseppe Verdi's "Aida" (1871).


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Such structural integration of the forms of vocal music with the dramatic development of the opera meant a sea-change from the Metastasian primacy of the aria; in Rossini's works, solo arias progressively take up a smaller proportion of the operas, in favour of duets (also typically in "cantabile-caballetta" format) and ensembles.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: During the late 18th-century, creators of "opera buffa" had increasingly developed dramatic integration of the finales of each act. Finales began to "spread backwards", taking an ever larger proportion of the act, taking the structure of a musically continuous chain, accompanied throughout by orchestra, of a series of sections, each with its own characteristics of speed and style, mounting to a clamorous and vigorous final scene. In his comic operas Rossini brought this technique to its peak, and extended its range far beyond his predecessors. Of the finale to the first act of "L'italiana in Algeri", Taruskin writes that "[r]unning through almost a hundred pages of vocal score in record time, it is the most concentrated single dose of Rossini that there is."


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: Of greater consequence for the history of opera was Rossini's ability to progress this technique in the genre of "opera seria". Gossett in a very detailed analysis of the first-act finale of "Tancredi" identifies several the elements in Rossini's practice. These include the contrast of "kinetic" action sequences, often characterised by orchestral motifs, with "static" expressions of emotion, the final "static" section in the form of a caballetta, with all the characters joining in the final cadences. Gossett claims that it is "from the time of "Tancredi" that the caballetta ... becomes the obligatory closing section of each musical unit in the operas of Rossini and his contemporaries."


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: With extremely few exceptions, all Rossini's compositions before the "Péchés de vieillesse" of his retirement involve the human voice. His very first surviving work (apart from a single song) is however a set of string sonatas for two violins, cello and double-bass, written at the age of 12, when he had barely begun instruction in composition. Tuneful and engaging, they indicate how remote the talented child was from the influence of the advances in musical form evolved by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven; the accent is on cantabile melody, colour, variation and virtuosity rather than transformational development. These qualities are also evident in Rossini's early operas, especially his "farse" (one-act farces), rather than his more formal "opere serie". Gossett notes that these early works were written at a time when "[t]he deposited mantles of Cimarosa and Paisiello were unfilled" – these were Rossini's first, and increasingly appreciated, steps in trying them on. The Teatro San Moisè in Venice, where his "farse" were first performed, and the La Scala Theatre of Milan which premiered his two-act opera "La pietra del paragone" (1812), were seeking works in that tradition; Gossett notes that in these operas "Rossini's musical personality began to take shape ... many elements emerge that remain throughout his career" including "[a] love of sheer sound, of sharp and effective rhythms". The unusual effect employed in the overture of "Il signor Bruschino", (1813) deploying violin bows tapping rhythms on music stands, is an example of such witty originality.


title: Gioachino Rossini

text: The great success in Venice of the premieres of both "Tancredi" and the comic opera "L'italiana in Algeri" within a few weeks of each other (6 February 1813 and 22 May 1813 respectively) set the seal on Rossini's reputation as the rising opera composer of his generation. From the end of 1813 to mid-1814 he was in Milan creating two new operas for La Scala, "Aureliano in Palmira" and "Il Turco in Italia". Arsace in "Aureliano" was sung by the "castrato" Giambattista Velluti; this was the last opera role Rossini wrote for a "castrato" singer as the norm became to use contralto voices – another sign of change in operatic taste. Rumour had it that Rossini was displeased by Velluti's ornamentation of his music; but in fact throughout his Italian period, up to "Semiramide" (1823), Rossini's written vocal lines become increasingly florid, and this is more appropriately credited to the composer's own changing style.