title: Wind tunnel

text: In wind engineering, wind tunnel tests are used to measure the velocity around, and forces or pressures upon structures. Very tall buildings, buildings with unusual or complicated shapes (such as a tall building with a parabolic or a hyperbolic shape), cable suspension bridges or cable stayed bridges are analyzed in specialized atmospheric boundary layer wind tunnels. These feature a long upwind section to accurately represent the wind speed and turbulence profile acting on the structure. Wind tunnel tests provide the necessary design pressure measurements in use of the dynamic analysis and control of tall buildings.


title: Llanelli

text: Llanelli ("St Elli's Parish"; ) is a market town and the largest community in Carmarthenshire and the preserved county of Dyfed, Wales. It is located on the Loughor estuary north-west of Swansea and south-east of the county town, Carmarthen. The town had a population of 25,168 in 2011, estimated in 2019 at 26,225. The local authority was Llanelli Borough Council when the county of Dyfed existed, but it has been under Carmarthenshire County Council since 1996.


title: Llanelli

text: The anglicised spelling “Llanelly” was used until 1966, when it was changed to Llanelli after a local public campaign. It remains in the name of a local historic building, Llanelly House. It should not be confused with the village and parish of Llanelly, in south-east Wales near Abergavenny.


title: Llanelli

text: Llanelly in Victoria, Australia was named after this town of Llanelli, using the spelling current at that time.


title: Llanelli

text: The beginnings of Llanelli can be found on the lands of present-day Parc Howard. An Iron Age hill fort once stood which was called "Bryn-Caerau" (hill of the forts). Evidence suggests there were five hill forts from Old Road to the Dimpath. During the Roman conquest of Wales it is unknown whether the area of Llanelli was part of the Silures tribe or the Demetae tribe. There is evidence of a Roman camp near St Elli shopping centre but it is unknown when it was built, and it was completely abandoned shortly after construction either due to the Romans thinking the area was completely worthless or due to a raid by either rebellious local Britons or an Irish raid. During the post-Roman period, the area of Llanelli would be under the Cydweli cantref in the Ystrad Tywi ruled by local warlords. There is also evidence of Irish settlement, as there is a hidden Ogham Stone near the coastal path of Pwll. During the early medieval period, it is said a saint named Elli, or Ellyw, who in legend is the son or daughter of King Brychan, established a church on the banks of the Afon Lliedi. The original church would have been a wooden or partly stone, thatched structure. According to early Welsh transcripts, the church of Carnwyllion, i.e the mother church of the cwmwd, was at Llanelli. The current St Elli's Church dates from the 14th century although extensive restorations were completed in 1911.


title: Llanelli

text: According to the Red Book of Hergest during the Norman invasion of Wales Rhys Ieuanc and his uncle Maelgwn ap Rhys took the allegiance of all the Welsh of the Kingdom of Dyfed apart from one region. Cemais would not pay allegiance and thus Rhys Ieuanc and his uncle, Maelgwn ap Rhys, attacked and pillaged the area moving on to attack the castles at Narbeth and Maenclochog. At this time Rhys Ieuanc moved against Cedweli and Carnwyllion with his forces besieging and burning Carnwyllion Castle in 1215.


title: Llanelli

text: Llanelli was industrialised in the early 19th century as the global centre for tinplate production. Lying near the Western fringe of the South Wales Coal Field, Llanelli played an important role in industry, with coal exported through three small docks along with the copper and tin produced within the town itself. Although Llanelli is not located within the South Wales valleys, coal from the Gwendraeth and the Loughor Valleys was transported to Llanelli for export. The Stepney Family and other prominent families (including the Raby family, Howard family and Cowell family), played an important role in the development of the town. Aside from industry, Llanelli is also renowned for its pottery, which has a unique cockerel hand-painted on each item. A collection of this pottery can bee seen at the Llanelli Museum in Parc Howard.


title: Llanelli

text: Llanelli people are sometimes nicknamed "Turks", for uncertain reasons. One theory is that many Turkish sailors once called at the port on their voyages.


title: Llanelli

text: In the mid-20th century, Llanelli was the world's largest town in which more than half the inhabitants spoke a Celtic language. It is ranked as the seventh largest urban area in Wales. According to the 2011 UK Census returns, 23.7 per cent of Llanelli town residents habitually spoke Welsh. However, the area around Llanelli is a Welsh stronghold, in which 56 per cent do so in communities such as Llwynhendy and Burry Port.


title: Llanelli

text: During the 1950s, Trefor and Eileen Beasley campaigned to get Llanelli Rural Council to distribute tax papers in Welsh by refusing to pay taxes until their demand was met. The council reacted by sending in the bailiffs and selling their furniture to recover the money owed. The Beasleys' neighbours bought the furniture and returned it to them. The council finally reversed its policy in the 1960s, giving Welsh equal status with English.


title: Llanelli

text: In 1991 Llanelli was a distinct travel to work area, but a 2001-based revision has merged it into a wider one of Swansea Bay.


title: Llanelli

text: Several firms, including Tata Steel Europe tinplate at Trostre and Dyfed Steels, are based in the Llanelli area and service the automotive industry. The Technium Performance Engineering Centre was developed at Llanelli Gate as a business incubator for businesses in the automotive, motor sport and aerospace sectors.


title: Llanelli

text: The traditional industries of Llanelli have gradually declined in recent decades. Local government has responded by seeking to attract tourism with developments such as the Machynys Golf Course, retail parks at Trostre and Pemberton, and the Millennium Coastal Park. The core shopping area has now moved largely from the town centre to the Trostre/Pemberton area.


title: Llanelli

text: Rev. James Buckley was an ordained Methodist minister, born in Oldham, Lancashire in 1770, who after moving to Llanelli towards the end of the 18th century became involved in establishing a small brewery. After the death of the owner, Buckley gained possession of the brewery and changed its name to Buckley's. In 1998, the brewery was bought by Brains Brewery, which transferred production to its facility in Cardiff. However, Brains continues to produce "The Reverend James", a bitter named in Buckley's memory. Since then the Llanelli brewery has been partly demolished.


title: Llanelli

text: In the past decade, the longstanding emphasis on heavy industry has shifted towards the tertiary sector employment in leisure and tourism. Ongoing developments include the new Llanelli Scarlets rugby stadium, the Old Castle Works leisure village (see below) and a National Hunt racecourse at Ffos Las near Trimsaran. Machynys Ponds, a Site of Special Scientific Interest notable for its dragonfly population, lies a mile to the south.


title: Llanelli

text: From the early 19th to late 20th centuries, Llanelli was a major centre of Welsh nonconformism. At the end of the Second World War there were 22 chapels in the town of Llanelli, and their history was chronicled in a volume by the BBC journalist Huw Edwards. Many of the chapels have now closed and others are in sharp decline, with only two or three likely to survive as functioning chapels in the 2020s.


title: Llanelli

text: The most well known of Llanelli's chapels is probably Capel Als, where David Rees was a minister for many years in the 19th century. Llanelli had seven other Independent (Congregationalist) chapels, namely Tabernacle, Lloyd Street, Siloah, Soar, Ebenezer, Dock Chapel, and Park Church (the only chapel where services were conducted in English).


title: Llanelli

text: The Tabernacle Chapel built in 1872–1873 by John Humphreys of Morriston overlooks the Town Hall. There is a prominent four-pillared Corinthian arcade at the entrance. The building was Grade II* listed in December 1992. It is used as a venue by the Llanelli Choral Society. Other listed chapels include Bethel Baptist Chapel in Copperworks Road, Park Congregational Chapel, Zion Baptist Chapel at Island Place, and Hall Street Methodist Church.


title: Llanelli

text: Situated on Waunlanyrafon, across the road from the police station, is the local Catholic Church, Our Lady Queen of Peace Church.


title: Llanelli

text: The parish church of St Elli has a medieval tower. The body of the church was rebuilt by G. F. Bodley in 1905–1906. It is a Grade II* listed building. Several other churches in the town are also listed buildings, but made redundant by the Church in Wales and now in private ownership. They include All Saints' and St Alban's.


title: Llanelli

text: The town's rugby union teams – the Scarlets competing in the Pro14, and Llanelli RFC in the Principality Premiership – play at "Parc y Scarlets", which opened in November 2008 in Pemberton. Previously they had played at Stradey Park, home to Llanelli RFC for over 130 years and one site used for the 1999 Rugby World Cup, hosting the Argentina v Western Samoa game on 10 October. Stradey Park is being redeveloped.


title: Llanelli

text: The Welsh folk song "Sosban Fach" (Little Saucepan) is mostly associated with Llanelli RFC. Many rugby clubs have notable scalps collected from touring international sides, but on 31 October 1972, Llanelli claimed perhaps the greatest by beating the New Zealand All Blacks. The Scarlets side emerged 9–3 winners at Stradey Park.


title: Llanelli

text: There is a strong junior rugby core, including club sides such as Felinfoel, New Dock Stars, Llangennech and the Llanelli Wanderers. In 2005, Coedcae School won the Inter-Schools Cup of Wales with an 8–5 victory over Brynteg Comprehensive.


title: Llanelli

text: Llanelli's West Wales Raiders play in the Rugby Football League's League 1 competition. The club is based at Stebonheath Park.


title: Llanelli

text: Stebonheath Park is the home of football club Llanelli A.F.C., which plays in the Cymru South. The town has many active local teams and tournaments such as the 2018 Challenge Cup, where West End United beat Trostre Sports AFC.


title: Llanelli

text: Llanelli hosts the annual Llanelli Open Bowls Tournaments, the oldest and most prestigious of which, the Roberts-Rolfe Open Singles event, has been run since 1926 and has a first prize of £600. The contests are held from July to September in Parc Howard.


title: Llanelli

text: The Llanelli area has two golf courses: the Machynys Peninsula Golf & Country Club which hosted the Wales Ladies Championship of Europe from 2005 until 2008, and Glyn Abbey Golf Club, which was named Welsh Golf Club of the Year 2009.


title: Llanelli

text: Llanelli is the birthplace and home of Terry Griffiths OBE, snooker world champion in 1979 and runner up in 1988. Now a coach and snooker commentator, he runs The Terry Griffiths Matchroom in the town centre.


title: Llanelli

text: Llanelli is home to Tinopolis, one of Britain's largest independent media producers. It has subsidiaries that produce over 2,500 hours of broadcast television, including English language programmes such as "Question Time" for the BBC and Welsh-language television programs such as "Wedi 7" for S4C.


title: Llanelli

text: Coverage of local affairs appears in two papers, the "Llanelli Star" founded in 1909 and Llanelli Herald launched in 2015. Online coverage is found on "Llanelli Online". The main county-wide radio station is Radio Carmarthenshire. Other radio stations covering the area are The Wave, Greatest Hits Radio South Wales, Easy Radio, Radio BGM, which serves the Prince Philip Hospital and the local community online, and regional station Heart South Wales.


title: Llanelli

text: The Ffwrnes Theatre opened in late 2012, replacing the Theatr Elli, which was part of the Llanelli Entertainment Centre. A multi-screen cinema opened in October 2012. Much is being spent on regenerating the central shopping district.


title: Llanelli

text: Llanelli is linked with the M4 motorway via the A4138 and with Swansea via the Loughor Bridge on the A484. It is served by regular bus services between Swansea and Carmarthen and a National Express service to London.


title: Llanelli

text: Services from Llanelli railway station on the Great Western Crescent south of the town centre connect with Fishguard Harbour and Swansea along the West Wales Line. It is the terminus of the Heart of Wales Line for Craven Arms and Shrewsbury. There are daily Great Western Railway services with London Paddington and regular services with Cardiff Central and Manchester Piccadilly. The district is also served by stations at Bynea, Llangennech, Pembrey & Burry Port and Kidwelly.


title: Llanelli

text: Llanelli is connected to the National Cycle Network from the north on NCR 43, and along the coast from the east and west on NCR 4. These routes link with a cycle path to the town centre.


title: Llanelli

text: The nearest passenger airport is Cardiff Airport, away, although Pembrey, , provides air charter services.


title: Llanelli

text: The first Welsh-medium primary school, Ysgol Gymraeg Dewi Sant, was founded in Llanelli in 1947. The English-medium secondary schools are St John Lloyd, Bryngwyn and Coedcae; the only Welsh medium secondary school is Ysgol y Strade. St Michael's School is a private school for ages 3–18. Ysgol Heol Goffa is a special school for pupils with disabilities.


title: Llanelli

text: Coleg Sir Gâr (Carmarthenshire College), with its main campus at Graig near Pwll, provides a college education for most of the town's further education students and some vocational undergraduate degrees through the University of Wales. There are sixth form colleges at Ysgol Gyfun y Strade (Welsh medium) and St Michael's (English medium).


title: Llanelli

text: Prince Philip Hospital has a postgraduate centre for medical training run by Cardiff University's School of Postgraduate Medical and Dental Education.


title: Llanelli

text: Llanelli is in the Llanelli parliamentary constituency, currently represented by the Labour party member Nia Griffith Member of Parliament (MP), and by the Senedd constituency of Labour's Lee Waters MS. Llanelli is run on a community level by Llanelli Town Council and Llanelli Rural Council (depending on the area of town) and Carmarthenshire County Council at local government level. Llanelli Rural Council addresses some part of the town, but mainly the Llanelli Rural community. Llanelli's politics has been Labour-dominated for decades. Its geographical location has led to a sense of exceptionalism in relation to the rest of Carmarthenshire, which is dominated by Plaid Cymru. In reaction to this, there have been calls to reinstate the local government district of Llanelli either as a county or as the City of Llanelli.


title: Llanelli

text: The community of Llanelli is bordered by those of Llanelli Rural, Llanrhidian Higher and Llanrhidian Lower, the last two being in the City and County of Swansea. Llanelli Borough Council, based at Llanelli Town Hall, was the area local authority until Carmarthenshire County Council became the unitary authority in 1996.


title: Llanelli

text: Llanelli Waterside, a joint venture between Carmarthenshire County Council and the Welsh Assembly Government, aims to transform the waterfront into a business, leisure and residential community. There are two seafront housing developments under construction. Pentre Nicklaus Village, located on the Machynys Peninsula has been criticised for being above the price range for local people. Pentre Doc Y Gogledd (North Dock Village) in the historic North Dock area is nearing completion by the firm of David McLean.


title: Windows API

text: The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of application programming interfaces (APIs) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. The name Windows API collectively refers to several different platform implementations that are often referred to by their own names (for example, Win32 API); see the versions section. Almost all Windows programs interact with the Windows API. On the Windows NT line of operating systems, a small number (such as programs started early in the Windows startup process) use the Native API.


title: Windows API

text: Developer support is available in the form of a software development kit, Microsoft Windows SDK, providing documentation and tools needed to build software based on the Windows API and associated Windows interfaces.


title: Windows API

text: The Windows API (Win32) is focused mainly on the programming language C in that its exposed functions and data structures are described in that language in recent versions of its documentation. However, the API may be used by any programming language compiler or assembler able to handle the (well-defined) low-level data structures along with the prescribed calling conventions for calls and callbacks. Similarly, the internal implementation of the API's function has been developed in several languages, historically. Despite the fact that C is not an object-oriented programming language, the Windows API and Windows have both historically been described as object-oriented. There have also been many wrapper classes and extensions (from Microsoft and others) for object-oriented languages that make this object-oriented structure more explicit (Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC), Visual Component Library (VCL), GDI+, etc.). For instance, Windows 8 provides the Windows API and the WinRT API, which is implemented in C++ and is object-oriented by design.


title: Windows API

text: The Internet Explorer (IE) web browser also exposes many APIs that are often used by applications, and as such could be considered a part of the Windows API. IE has been included with the operating system since Windows 95 OSR2 and has provided web-related services to applications since Windows 98. Specifically, it is used to provide:


title: Windows API

text: The classic Windows Multimedia API is placed in winmm.dll and contains functions to play sound files, to send and receive MIDI messages, to access joysticks, and to facilitate all other features of the so-called "MCI" subsystem of Windows, which originates from the "Multimedia Extensions" available for Windows 3.0 separately and as an integral part of the operating system since Windows 3.1, at which time they were located in mmsystem.dll.


title: Windows API

text: Apart from that, as part of every Windows version since Windows 95 OSR2, Microsoft has provided the DirectX APIs—a loosely related set of graphics and gaming services, which includes:


title: Windows API

text: The Windows API is designed mostly for the interaction between the operating system and an application. For communication among different Windows applications, Microsoft has developed a series of technologies alongside the main Windows API. This started out with Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), which was superseded by Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) and later by the Component Object Model (COM), Automation Objects, ActiveX controls, and the .NET Framework. There is not always a clear distinction between these technologies, and there is much overlap.


title: Windows API

text: The variety of terms is basically the result of grouping software mechanisms that relate to a given aspect of software development. Automation specifically relates to exporting the function of an application or component (as an application programming interface (API)) so that it can be controlled by other applications instead of by human users only, .NET is a self-contained general methodology and technology to develop desktop and web applications written in a variety of just-in-time (JIT) compiled languages.


title: Windows API

text: Windows.pas is a Pascal/Delphi unit which contains the Windows-specific API declarations. It is the Pascal equivalent to windows.h, used in C.


title: Windows API

text: Various wrappers were developed by Microsoft that took over some of the more low level functions of the Windows API, and allowed applications to interact with the API in a more abstract manner. Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC) wrapped Windows API functionality in C++ classes, and thus allows a more object-oriented way to interact with the API. The Active Template Library (ATL) is a template oriented wrapper for COM. The Windows Template Library (WTL) was developed as an extension to ATL, and intended as a smaller alternative to MFC.


title: Windows API

text: Most application frameworks for Windows (at least partly) wrap the Windows API. Thus, the .NET Framework and Java, likewise any other programming languages under Windows, are (or contain) wrapper libraries.


title: Windows API

text: The Windows API has always exposed a large part of the underlying structure of the Windows systems to programmers. This had the advantage of giving them much flexibility and power over their applications, but also creates great responsibility in how applications handle various low-level, sometimes tedious, operations that are associated with a graphical user interface.


title: Windows API

text: For example, a beginning C programmer will often write the simple "hello world" as their first assignment. The working part of the program is only a single printf line within the main subroutine. The overhead for linking to the standard I/O library is also only one line:


title: Windows API

text: The Windows version was still only one working line of code but it required many, many more lines of overhead. Charles Petzold, who wrote several books about programming for the Windows API, said: "The original hello world program in the Windows 1.0 SDK was a bit of a scandal. HELLO.C was about 150 lines long, and the HELLO.RC resource script had another 20 or so more lines. (...) Veteran programmers often curled up in horror or laughter when encountering the Windows hello-world program."


title: Windows API

text: Over the years, various changes and additions were made to Windows systems, and the Windows API changed and grew to reflect this. The Windows API for Windows 1.0 supported fewer than 450 function calls, whereas modern versions of the Windows API support thousands. However, in general, the interface remained fairly consistent, and an old Windows 1.0 application will still look familiar to a programmer who is used to the modern Windows API.


title: Windows API

text: Microsoft has made an effort to maintain backward compatibility. To achieve this, when developing new versions of Windows, Microsoft sometimes implemented workarounds to allow compatibility with third-party software that used the prior version in an undocumented or even inadvisable way. Raymond Chen, a Microsoft developer who works on the Windows API, has said: "I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure."


title: Windows API

text: One of the largest changes to the Windows API was the transition from Win16 (shipped in Windows 3.1 and older) to Win32 (Windows NT and Windows 95 and up). While Win32 was originally introduced with Windows NT 3.1 and Win32s allowed use of a Win32 subset before Windows 95, it was not until Windows 95 that widespread porting of applications to Win32 began. To ease the transition, in Windows 95, for developers outside and inside Microsoft, a complex scheme of API thunks was used that could allow 32-bit code to call into 16-bit code (for most of Win16 APIs) and vice versa. "Flat thunks" allowed 32-bit code to call into 16-bit libraries, and the scheme was used extensively inside Windows 95's libraries to avoid porting the whole OS to Win32 in one batch. In Windows NT, the OS was pure 32-bit, except parts for compatibility with 16-bit applications, and only generic thunks were available to thunk from Win16 to Win32, as for Windows 95. The Platform SDK shipped with a compiler that could produce the code needed for these thunks. Versions of 64-bit Windows are also able to run 32-bit applications via WoW64. The SysWOW64 folder located in the Windows folder on the OS drive contains several tools to support 32-bit applications.


title: Windows API

text: Almost every new version of Microsoft Windows has introduced its own additions and changes to the Windows API. The name of the API, however, remained consistent between different Windows versions, and name changes were kept limited to major architectural and platform changes for Windows. Microsoft eventually changed the name of the then current Win32 API family into Windows API and made it into a catch-all term for both past and future API versions.


title: Windows API

text: The Wine project provides a Win32 API compatibility layer for Unix-like platforms, between Linux kernel API and programs written for the Windows API. ReactOS goes a step further and aims to implement the full Windows operating system, working closely with the Wine project to promote code re-use and compatibility. DosWin32 and HX DOS Extender are other projects which emulate the Windows API to allow executing simple Windows programs from a DOS command line. Odin is a project to emulate Win32 on OS/2, superseding the original Win-OS/2 emulation which was based on Microsoft code. Other minor implementations include the MEWEL and Zinc libraries which were intended to implement a subset of the Win16 API on DOS (see List of platform-independent GUI libraries).


title: Windows API

text: Windows Interface Source Environment (WISE) was a licensing program from Microsoft which allowed developers to recompile and run Windows-based applications on Unix and Macintosh platforms. WISE SDKs were based on an emulator of the Windows API that could run on those platforms.


title: Windows API

text: Efforts toward standardization included Sun's Public Windows Interface (PWI) for Win16 (see also: Sun Windows Application Binary Interface (Wabi)), Willows Software's Application Programming Interface for Windows (APIW) for Win16 and Win32 (see also: Willows TWIN), and ECMA-234, which attempted to standardize the Windows API bindingly.


title: Windows API

text: To develop software that uses the Windows API, a compiler must be able to use the Microsoft-specific DLLs listed above (COM-objects are outside Win32 and assume a certain vtable layout). The compiler must either handle the header files that expose the interior API function names, or supply such files.


title: Windows API

text: For the language C++, Zortech (later Symantec, then Digital Mars), Watcom and Borland have all produced well known commercial compilers that have been used often with Win16, Win32s, and Win32. Some of them supplied "memory extenders", allowing Win32 programs to run on Win16 with Microsoft's redistributable Win32s DLL. The Zortech compiler was probably one of the first stable and usable C++ compilers for Windows programming, before Microsoft had a C++ compiler.


title: Windows API

text: For certain classes of applications, the compiler system should also be able to handle interface description language (IDL) files. Collectively, these prerequisites (compilers, tools, libraries, and headers) are known as the "Microsoft Platform SDK". For a time, the Microsoft Visual Studio and Borland's integrated development system were the only integrated development environments (IDEs) that could provide this (although, the SDK is downloadable for free separately from the entire IDE suite, from Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4).


title: Windows API

text: , the MinGW and Cygwin projects also provide such an environment based on the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), using a stand-alone header file set, to make linking against the Win32-specific DLLs simple. LCC-Win32 is a C compiler maintained by Jacob Navia, freeware for non-commercial use. Pelles C is a freeware C compiler maintained by Pelle Orinius. Free Pascal is a free software Object Pascal compiler that supports the Windows API. The MASM32 package is a mature project providing support for the Windows API under Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM) by using custom made or converted headers and libraries from the Platform SDK. Flat assembler FASM allows building Windows programs without using an external linker, even when running on Linux.


title: Windows API

text: Windows specific compiler support is also needed for Structured Exception Handling (SEH). This system serves two purposes: it provides a substrate on which language-specific exception handling can be implemented, and it is how the kernel notifies applications of exceptional conditions such as dereferencing an invalid pointer or stack overflow. The Microsoft/Borland C++ compilers had the ability to use this system as soon as it was introduced in Windows 95 and NT, however the actual implementation was undocumented and had to be reverse engineered for the Wine project and free compilers. SEH is based on pushing exception handler frames onto the stack, then adding them to a linked list stored in thread-local storage (the first field of the thread environment block). When an exception is thrown, the kernel and base libraries unwind the stack running handlers and filters as they are encountered. Eventually, every exception unhandled by the application will be dealt with by the default backstop handler, which pops up the Windows common crash dialog.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: Dreams is a game creation system video game developed by Media Molecule and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for the PlayStation 4 in February 2020. Players can create and play user-generated content in the forms of games, audiovisual experiences and game assets, which can be shared or remixed to be used in other players' creations.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: "Dreams" includes several games developed using the game itself by Media Molecule, including "Art's Dream", "Ancient Dangers: A Bat’s Tale", and several virtual reality mini-games.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: In "Dreams", players control an "imp", which is used to interact with the game's world and interface like a mouse cursor, create new items and characters, and manipulate objects by grabbing and pulling them. Players move the imp by moving and rotating the DualShock 4 or PlayStation Move controllers. The imp is customizable, and can possess characters featured in a dream, allowing players to take direct control of these characters.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: "Dreams" consists of six main sections: DreamSurfing, DreamShaping, Highlights, Profile, Community Jam, and Homespace. It also features a game made in Dreams by Media Molecule known as "Art's Dream".


title: Dreams (video game)

text: DreamSurfing can be thought of as the traditional "play" section where a player can browse "Dreams" that have been made and published to the "Dreamiverse" by other players, or as the game calls them, "Dreamers". These Dreams can be for example games to play, audiovisual experiences, and showcases of Elements such as sculptures and art to view and music to listen to. Many Dreams contain collectable "Prize Bubbles" which unlock Elements for players to use in their own creations, functioning similarly to Prize Bubbles in the "LittleBigPlanet" series.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: DreamSurfing is divided into playlists of different kinds of Dreams, such as "Mm Picks", "New Trending Dreams", and "New Recommendations For You". At the top of the page there are banners with "Dreams"-related news and videos. "Art's Dream" can be found in this section. Players can give feedback on a Dream by giving it a "thumbs up" or leaving a comment. There is an option called "Autosurf" that presents the user with random Dreams to play within a playlist.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: DreamShaping is the "create" section where players can create and publish games, audio-visual experiences and showcases known as "Dreams", as well as "Scenes", the connected environments and levels that make up Dreams, "Elements", the various assets that make up Scenes, and "Collections", sortable groups of Dreams, Scenes, Elements and other Collections.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: "Edit Mode" is the editor for scenes and elements. In Edit Mode, there are several modes available for creation. Each mode has many tools which can be used to manipulate Scenes and Elements. In Assembly Mode, users can quickly search the Dreamiverse for pre-made Elements and stamp them in their Scene. In Assembly Mode and Sound Mode, there are also many "Gadgets" available which can be used for logic, animation, lighting, sound, global settings, and more. Gadgets can be linked to other Gadgets and items such as sculptures using wires. In "Dreams", Gadgets essentially form the gaming logic and game mechanics. Users can publish their creations online to the "Dreamiverse" for others to play or experience, and optionally they can make it re-mixable which allows other creators to use it in their creations, build upon it or tweak it. Cooperative multiplayer is featured in the game, allowing players to create and manipulate their creations together.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: Community Jam is a themed contest, where creators create content based on a theme, for example "Spring Season" and "Pirates", and others vote on their favourites. The winners and runners-up get a badge on their creation's page. There is a new Community Jam with a new theme every few weeks, for example "Spring Season" and "Pirates".


title: Dreams (video game)

text: Outside the user-generated creations, "Dreams" itself takes place in the Dreamiverse, a surreal universe made out of dreams and ideas. The Dreamiverse is presided by the Dream Queen, a being who helps the player learn about each aspect of "Dreams". New players use the Dream Queen's Homespace before unlocking their own. The Dreamiverse is also inhabited by the Architect and Designer, two experts who teach the player about DreamShaping through in-game tutorials, and Imps, the player-controlled creatures who manipulate objects and possess characters. Every creation in "Dreams" exists in the Dreamiverse, and the term "Dreamiverse" also refers to the catalogue of creations available for players to browse and use in their own creations.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: Media Molecule's creation "Art's Dream" "follows a former jazz musician Art as he dreams about his life, past and present, and realises he needs to make amends with his fellow bandmates. The journey takes him through a series of dream-like situations involving him and a whole cast of wonderful fantasy characters, such as D-Bug, a helpful little robot with an electric personality and Frances, a hammer wielding teddy bear."


title: Dreams (video game)

text: "Art's Dream" follows three connected stories: The Dream Gardens, The Blues City, and The Meridian Forest. Each story has a different genre as well as different characters, visuals, music and gameplay. They each relate to different parts of Art's mind and connect to the past, present and future respectively. All three stories converge at the end of the game. Throughout "Art's Dream", the Imp is used to interact with the world and possess characters. The game also has many prize bubbles to be collected, letting players make their own creations with the elements used in "Art's Dream".


title: Dreams (video game)

text: "Dreams" has similarities to Media Molecule's previous game "LittleBigPlanet", the focus being "play, create, share". They aimed to merge the three aspects into one experience without separating them. Alex Evans and David Smith are the two technical directors; Mark Healey and Kareem Ettouney are creative director and art director respectively. "Dreams" uses a custom engine called BubbleBath that renders objects with particles called "Flecks" rather than polygons. The engine was named by the community.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: In 2015, Evans said that the game would be "defined" by players instead of the developer. To help new players get into the game, a story campaign is featured to help players adapt to the gameplay mechanics. Studio director Siobhan Reddy added that the campaign is used to kickstart a community, and creation is the primary goal of the game.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: According to Evans, one of Media Molecule's goals is to reinvent creativity. As a result, they re-imagined "Dreams" into something as simple as sketching. This led the game to feature an impressionist art-style and implement the PlayStation Move motion-based controller. Many art styles and technical solutions were attempted before arriving at the final style and solution. The team used dreams as the game's setting, as they believed that it allows players to have their own styles, and inspires players to create something "artistic" and "incredible".


title: Dreams (video game)

text: Accessibility is a priority for Media Molecule with "Dreams". The goal is to make "Dreams" more accessible so as many people with as many different requirements as possible are able to play.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: In an October 2019 interview, Ettouney said they plan to give creators commercial ownership of their creations and publish them elsewhere. In March 2020, creators could apply to a beta evaluation program to sell their work "off PlayStation".


title: Dreams (video game)

text: At Gamescom 2012, Media Molecule announced that they were working on two different projects, with one being "Tearaway". "Dreams" was revealed at PlayStation Meeting 2013, with Evans showing a technical demo onstage, involving three players creating an in-game band. A teaser for the game was released in July 2014. The game was officially announced at Sony Interactive Entertainment's press conference at E3 2015. A beta for the game was originally set to be released in 2016, however, it was delayed to 2017 and then to 2018. The beta ran from 19 December 2018 until 4 February 2019. The game was made available via early access on 16 April 2019, a first for a Sony game, before being officially released on 14 February 2020. An update that added support for PlayStation VR was announced on 30 June 2020 and was released on 22 July 2020. Online multiplayer is set to be released for the game sometime post-launch.


title: Dreams (video game)

text: "Dreams" received "generally favorable reviews" according to Metacritic, a review aggregator. Vice compared it to Newgrounds, a website historically hosting Adobe Flash based media "oddities".


title: Caminito del Rey

text: El Caminito del Rey (The King's Little Path) is a walkway pinned along the steep walls of a narrow gorge in El Chorro, near Ardales in the province of Málaga, Spain. Its name derives from the original name of Camino del Rey (King's Pathway), abbreviated locally to "el caminito". The walkway was constructed in the early 20th century, but by the early 21st century, it had fallen into disrepair and was partially closed for over a decade. After four years of extensive repairs and renovations, it re-opened in 2015. It has been described as the "world's most dangerous walkway" following five deaths in 1999 and 2000.


title: Caminito del Rey

text: The walkway was built to provide workers at the hydroelectric power plants at Chorro Falls and Gaitanejo Falls with a means to cross between them, to provide for transport of materials, and to help facilitate inspection and maintenance of the channel. The construction began in 1901 and was finished in 1905. King Alfonso XIII crossed the walkway in 1921 for the inauguration of the dam Conde del Guadalhorce, and it became known by its present name. The walkway is in width and rises over above the river below.


title: Caminito del Rey

text: The original path was constructed of concrete and rested on steel rails supported by stanchions built at approximately 45 degrees into the rock face. It deteriorated over the years, and there were numerous sections where part or all of the concrete top had collapsed. The result was large open-air gaps bridged only by narrow steel beams or other supports. Few of the original handrails remained, although a safety wire ran the length of the path. Several people died on the walkway and, after two fatal accidents in 1999 and 2000, the local government closed both entrances. Even so, in the four years leading up to 2013, four people died attempting to climb the gorge.


title: Caminito del Rey

text: The regional government of Andalusia and the local government of Málaga agreed in June 2011 to share costs of restoration (including car parking and a museum) of €9 million. The project took approximately three years to complete. Many of the original features remained in place.


title: Caminito del Rey

text: In March 2014, the cornerstone of the rehabilitation project was laid by specialized alpinists. The walkway reopened on 29 March 2015, and "Lonely Planet" listed it in the best new attractions for 2015. The new pathway offers a walk of 2.9 km along the side of the gorge.


title: Caminito del Rey

text: In the film "Scent of Mystery" released in 1960, also known as "Holiday in Spain" there is a chase scene towards the end of the film that takes place on the Caminito del Rey where the hero (Denholm Elliott) and his cohort (Peter Lorre) are chased by the antagonist (Paul Lucas). At the end of the chase Paul Lucas is run down by a train in a tunnel that is also part of the Park complex.


title: Caminito del Rey

text: Some of the final scenes of the 1965 film "Von Ryan's Express" were shot at the confluence of the gateway and the railway.


title: Caminito del Rey

text: In the film, they stand for the Italian-Swiss border. Some of the area's deterioration is directly attributable to the crashing of planes into the cliffs during the filming.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch. It is one of the watershed plays in Augustan drama and is the only example of the once thriving genre of satirical ballad opera to remain popular today. Ballad operas were satiric musical plays that used some of the conventions of opera, but without recitative. The lyrics of the airs in the piece are set to popular broadsheet ballads, opera arias, church hymns and folk tunes of the time.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: "The Beggar's Opera" premiered at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre on 29 January 1728 and ran for 62 consecutive performances, the second-longest run in theatre history up to that time (after 146 performances of Robert Cambert's "Pomone" in Paris in 1671). The work became Gay's greatest success and has been played ever since; it has been called "the most popular play of the eighteenth century". In 1920, "The Beggar's Opera" began a revival run of 1,463 performances at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, London, which was one of the longest runs in history for any piece of musical theatre at that time.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: The piece satirised Italian opera, which had become popular in London. According to "The New York Times": "Gay wrote the work more as an anti-opera than an opera, one of its attractions to its 18th-century London public being its lampooning of the Italian opera style and the English public's fascination with it." Instead of the grand music and themes of opera, the work uses familiar tunes and characters that were ordinary people. Some of the songs were by opera composers like Handel, but only the most popular of these were used. The audience could hum along with the music and identify with the characters. The story satirised politics, poverty and injustice, focusing on the theme of corruption at all levels of society. Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly Peachum, became an overnight success. Her pictures were in great demand, verses were written to her and books published about her. After appearing in several comedies, and then in numerous repetitions of "The Beggar's Opera", she ran away with her married lover, Charles Powlett, 3rd Duke of Bolton.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: Bertolt Brecht (working from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann) adapted the work into "Die Dreigroschenoper" ("The Threepenny Opera") in 1928, sticking closely to the original plot and characters but with a new libretto, and mostly new music by Kurt Weill.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: The original idea of the opera came from Jonathan Swift, who wrote to Alexander Pope on 30 August 1716 asking "...what think you, of a Newgate pastoral among the thieves and whores there?" Their friend, Gay, decided that it would be a satire rather than a pastoral opera. For his original production in 1728, Gay intended all the songs to be sung without any accompaniment, adding to the shocking and gritty atmosphere of his conception. However, a week or so before the opening night, John Rich, the theatre director, insisted on having Johann Christoph Pepusch, a composer associated with his theatre, write a formal French overture (based on two of the songs in the opera, including a fugue based on Lucy's 3rd act song "I'm Like A Skiff on the Ocean Toss'd") and also to arrange the 69 songs. Although there is no external evidence of who the arranger was, inspection of the original 1729 score, formally published by Dover Books, demonstrates that Pepusch was the arranger.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: The work took satiric aim at the passionate interest of the upper classes in Italian opera, and simultaneously set out to lampoon the notable Whig statesman Robert Walpole, and politicians in general, as well as such notorious criminals as Jonathan Wild, the thief-taker, Claude Duval, the highwayman, and Jack Sheppard, the prison-breaker. It also deals with social inequity on a broad scale, primarily through the comparison of low-class thieves and whores with their aristocratic and bourgeois "betters."


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: The airs of "The Beggar's Opera" in part allude to well-known popular ballads, and Gay's lyrics sometimes play with their wording in order to amuse and entertain the audience. Gay used Scottish folk melodies mostly taken from the poet Allan Ramsay's hugely popular collection "The Gentle Shepherd" (1725) plus two French tunes (including the carol "Bergers, écoutez la musique!" for his song "Fill Every Glass"), to serve his hilariously pointed and irreverent texts. Macheath's satire on modern society ("The modes of the court so common are grown") is also sung to Henry Purcell's Lillibullero. Pepusch composed an overture and arranged all the tunes shortly before the opening night at Lincoln's Inn Fields on 28 January 1728. However, all that remains of Pepusch's score are the overture (with complete instrumentation) and the melodies of the songs with unfigured basses. Various reconstructions have been attempted, and a 1990 reconstruction of the score by American composer Jonathan Dobin has been used in a number of modern productions.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: Gay uses the operatic norm of three acts (as opposed to the standard in spoken drama of the time of five acts), and tightly controls the dialogue and plot so that there are surprises in each of the forty-five fast-paced scenes and 69 short songs. The success of the opera was accompanied by a public desire for keepsakes and mementos, ranging from images of Polly on fans and clothing, playing cards and fire-screens, broadsides featuring all the characters, and the rapidly published musical score of the opera.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: The play is sometimes seen to be a reactionary call for libertarian values in response to the growing power of the Whig party. It may also have been influenced by the then-popular ideology of John Locke that men should be allowed their natural liberties; these democratic strains of thought influenced the populist movements of the time, of which "The Beggar's Opera" was a part.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: The character of Macheath has been considered by critics as both a hero and an anti-hero. Harold Gene Moss, arguing that Macheath is a noble character, has written, "[one] whose drives are toward love and the vital passions, Macheath becomes an almost Christ-like victim of the decadence surrounding him." Contrarily, John Richardson in the peer-reviewed journal "Eighteenth-Century Life" has argued that Macheath is powerful as a literary figure precisely because he stands against any interpretation, "against expectation and illusion." He is now thought to have been modeled on the gentleman highwayman, Claude Duval, although interest in criminals had recently been raised by Jack Sheppard's escapes from Newgate.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: "The Beggar's Opera" has had an influence on all later British stage comedies, especially on nineteenth century British comic opera and the modern musical.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: Peachum, a fence and thief-catcher, justifies his actions. Mrs Peachum, overhearing her husband's blacklisting of unproductive thieves, protests regarding one of them: Bob Booty (the nickname of Robert Walpole). The Peachums discover that Polly, their daughter, has secretly married Macheath, the famous highwayman, who is Peachum's principal client. Upset to learn they will no longer be able to use Polly in their business, Peachum and his wife ask how Polly will support such a husband "in Gaming, Drinking and Whoring." Nevertheless, they conclude that the match may be more profitable to the Peachums if the husband can be killed for his money. They leave to carry out this errand. However, Polly has hidden Macheath.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: Macheath goes to a tavern where he is surrounded by women of dubious virtue who, despite their class, compete in displaying perfect drawing-room manners, although the subject of their conversation is their success in picking pockets and shoplifting. Macheath discovers, too late, that two of them (Jenny Diver, Suky Tawdry) have contracted with Peachum to capture him, and he becomes a prisoner in Newgate prison. The prison is run by Peachum's associate, the corrupt jailer Lockit. His daughter, Lucy Lockit, has the opportunity to scold Macheath for having agreed to marry her and then broken this promise. She tells him that to see him tortured would give her pleasure. Macheath pacifies her, but Polly arrives and claims him as her husband. Macheath tells Lucy that Polly is crazy. Lucy helps Macheath to escape by stealing her father's keys. Her father learns of Macheath's promise to marry her and worries that if Macheath is recaptured and hanged, his fortune might be subject to Peachum's claims. Lockit and Peachum discover Macheath's hiding place. They decide to split his fortune.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: Meanwhile, Polly visits Lucy to try to reach an agreement, but Lucy tries to poison her. Polly narrowly avoids the poisoned drink, and the two girls find out that Macheath has been recaptured owing to the inebriated Mrs Diana Trapes. They plead with their fathers for Macheath's life. However, Macheath now finds that four more pregnant women each claim him as their husband. He declares that he is ready to be hanged. The narrator (the Beggar), notes that although in a properly moral ending Macheath and the other villains would be hanged, the audience demands a happy ending, and so Macheath is reprieved, and all are invited to a dance of celebration, to celebrate his wedding to Polly.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: "The Beggar's Opera" was met with widely varying reactions. Its popularity was documented in "The Craftsman" with the following entries:


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: "This Week a Dramatick Entertainment has been exhibited at the Theatre in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, entitled The Beggar's Opera, which has met with a general Applause, insomuch that the Waggs say it has made Rich very Gay, and probably will make Gay very Rich." (3 February 1728)


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: "We hear that the British Opera, commonly called "The Beggar's Opera", continues to be acted, at the Theatre in Lincoln's-Inn Fields with general Applause, to the great Mortification of the Performers and Admirers of the Outlandish Opera in the Haymarket." (17 February 1728)


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: Two weeks after opening night, an article appeared in "The Craftsman", the leading opposition newspaper, ostensibly protesting at Gay's work as libellous and ironically assisting him in satirising the Walpole establishment by taking the government's side:


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: It will, I know, be said, by these libertine Stage-Players, that the Satire is general; and that it discovers a Consciousness of Guilt for any particular Man to apply it to Himself. But they seem to forget that there are such things as Innuendo's (a never-failing Method of explaining Libels)… Nay the very Title of this Piece and the principal Character, which is that of a Highwayman, sufficiently discover the mischievous Design of it; since by this Character every Body will understand One, who makes it his Business arbitrarily to levy and collect Money on the People for his own Use, and of which he always dreads to give an Account – Is not this squinting with a vengeance, and wounding Persons in Authority through the Sides of a common Malefactor?


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: The commentator notes the Beggar's last remark: "That the lower People have their Vices in a Degree as well as the Rich, and are punished for them," implying that rich People are not so punished.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: Criticism of Gay's opera continued long after its publication. In 1776, John Hawkins wrote in his History of Music that due to the opera's popularity, "Rapine and violence have been gradually increasing" solely because the rising generation of young men desired to imitate the character Macheath. Hawkins blamed Gay for tempting these men with "the charms of idleness and criminal pleasure," which Hawkins saw Macheath as representing and glorifying.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: In 1729, Gay wrote a sequel, "Polly", set in the West Indies: Macheath, sentenced to transportation, has escaped and become a pirate, while Mrs Trapes has set up in white-slaving and shanghais Polly to sell her to the wealthy planter Mr Ducat. Polly escapes dressed as a boy, and after many adventures marries the son of a Carib chief.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: The political satire, however, was even more pointed in "Polly" than in "The Beggar's Opera", with the result that Prime Minister Robert Walpole leaned on the Lord Chamberlain to have it banned, and it was not performed until fifty years later.


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: As was typical practice of the time in London, a commemorative "score" of the entire opera was assembled and published quickly. As was common, this consisted of the fully arranged overture followed by the melodies of the 69 songs, supported by only the simplest bass accompaniments. There are no indications of dance music, accompanying instrumental figures or the like, except in three instances: Lucy's "Is Then His Fate Decree'd Sir" – one measure of descending scale marked "Viol." –; Trape's "In the Days of My Youth", in which the "fa la la chorus is written as "viol."; and the final reprieve dance, Macheath's "Thus I Stand Like A Turk", which includes two sections of 16 measures of "dance" marked "viol." (See the 1729 score, formerly published by Dover).


title: The Beggar's Opera

text: The absence of the original performing parts has allowed producers and arrangers free rein. The tradition of personalised arrangements, dating back at least as far as Thomas Arne's later 18th century arrangements, continues today, running the gamut of musical styles from Romantic to Baroque: Austin, Britten, Sargent, Bonynge, Dobin and other conductors have each imbued the songs with a personal stamp, highlighting different aspects of characterisation. The hornpipe tune to which Nancy Dawson danced between acts in "The Beggar's Opera" in the mid-1700s is now used for "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush". Following is a list of some of the most highly regarded 20th-century arrangements and settings of the opera.


title: Troubadour (West Hollywood, California)

text: The Troubadour is a nightclub located in West Hollywood, California, United States, at 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard just east of Doheny Drive and the border of Beverly Hills. Inspired by a visit to the newly opened Troubadour café in London, it was opened in 1957 by Doug Weston as a coffee house on La Cienega Boulevard, then moved to its current location shortly after opening and has remained open continuously since. It was a major center for folk music in the 1960s, and subsequently for singer-songwriters and rock. In 2011, a documentary about the club, "Troubadours: Carole King / James Taylor & The Rise of the Singer-Songwriter," was released.


title: Troubadour (West Hollywood, California)

text: The Troubadour played an important role in the careers of Hoyt Axton, Jackson Browne, the Byrds, Neil Diamond, Elton John, Eagles, Carole King, Love, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, J. D. Souther, James Taylor, Tom Waits, and other prominent and successful performers, who played performances there establishing their future fame.


title: Troubadour (West Hollywood, California)

text: In October 1962, comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges for using the word "schmuck" on stage; one of the arresting officers was Sherman Block, who would later become Los Angeles County Sheriff. Michael Nesmith sometimes worked as an M.C. at the club in the 1960s, before the formation of the music group the Monkees. Buffalo Springfield debuted at the club in 1966, and Randy Newman started out there as well.


title: Troubadour (West Hollywood, California)

text: On August 25, 1970, Neil Diamond (who had just recorded his first live album at the Troubadour) introduced Elton John, who performed his first show in the United States at the Troubadour. Comics Cheech & Chong and Steve Martin were discovered there in the early 1970s. In 1974, John Lennon, Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr were ejected from the club for drunkenly heckling the Smothers Brothers. That same year, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band performed third on the bill with ex-Byrd Roger McGuinn headlining, going on stage at 1:45 in the morning. In 1975, Elton John returned to do a series of special anniversary concerts. In November 2007, James Taylor and Carole King played a series of concerts commemorating the nightclub's 50th anniversary and reuniting the two from their 1970 performance.


title: Troubadour (West Hollywood, California)

text: The Troubadour featured new wave and punk in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Bad Religion, Flipper, The Meat Puppets, Napalm Death, and Redd Kross. L.A. residents and proto-grunge band Melvins have played the Troubadour stage 24 times and counting as of November 2019, including live tapings for Carson Daly in 2012 and 2015.


title: Troubadour (West Hollywood, California)

text: In the 1980s the club became associated with glam metal bands such as Candy, Cinderella, Guns N' Roses, L.A. Guns, Mötley Crüe, Poison, Ratt, Warrant, NEWHAVEN and W.A.S.P. Guns N' Roses played their first show at the Troubadour, and were also discovered by a David Geffen A&R representative at the club. During the glam and metal years, Gina Barsamian was the primary booking agent for the club. It continued to attract non-glam metal acts through this time and into the 1990s such as Fiona Apple, Steve Earle, Mudhoney, Silverchair and Radiohead.


title: Troubadour (West Hollywood, California)

text: In the 21st century, the venue is well known for promoting artists as diverse as Arctic Monkeys, Bastille, Billy Talent, Coldplay, Franz Ferdinand, Kina Grannis, Ray LaMontagne, Lawson, the Libertines, Melt Banana, Metz, Joanna Newsom, and Orville Peck. Rise Against filmed at the club five nights in a row for a DVD, "Generation Lost". On April 1, 2016, it saw the first show of Guns N' Roses since Slash and Duff McKagan had rejoined the band. Busted's first show as a reformed band in America was performed at the Troubadour in June 2017. The first concert of Grace VanderWaal's first national tour was held at the Troubadour on November 5, 2017. 2006 Sheriff Dept was called against BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT as feedback echoed from Soundbooth. Stone Temple Pilots' first live performance with their newest singer Jeff Gutt was held in November 2017.


title: Troubadour (West Hollywood, California)

text: Like many small businesses and music venues, the Troubadour has struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic; it launched a GoFundMe page in May 2020, which raised $70,000. In August, Elton John celebrated his 50th anniversary of playing the venue, and expressed his concern about the survival of the nightclub. The comedian Bill Burr has hosted two of his Monday Morning Podcasts from the venue to raise money during the pandemic by selling limited edition signed posters.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: Fellini Satyricon, or simply Satyricon, is a 1969 Italian fantasy drama film written and directed by Federico Fellini and loosely based on Petronius's work "Satyricon", written during the reign of Emperor Nero and set in Imperial Rome. The film is divided into nine episodes, following Encolpius (Martin Potter) and his friend Ascyltus (Hiram Keller) as they try to win the heart of a young boy named Gitón within a surreal and dreamlike Roman landscape.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: "Fellini Satyricon" was entered into the 30th Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Pasinetti Award for Best Italian Film. It received acclaim from international critics, with particular praise toward Fellini's direction and Danilo Donati's vivid production design. The film earned Fellini his third Oscar nomination for Best Director, and the film was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: The film opens on a graffiti-covered wall with Encolpius lamenting the loss of his lover Gitón to Ascyltus. Vowing to win him back, he learns at the Thermae that Ascyltus sold Gitón to the actor Vernacchio. At the theatre, he discovers Vernacchio and Gitón performing in a lewd play called the "Emperor's Miracle": a slave's hand is axed off and replaced with a gold one. Encolpius storms the stage and reclaims Gitón. On their return to Encolpius's home in the Insula Felicles, a Roman tenement building, they walk through the vast Roman brothel known as the Lupanare, observing numerous sensual scenes. They fall asleep after making love at Encolpius's place. Ascyltus sneaks into the room, waking Encolpius with a whiplash. Since both share the tenement room, Encolpius proposes they divide up their property and separate. Ascyltus mockingly suggests they split Gitón in half. Encolpius is driven to suicidal despair, however, when Gitón decides to leave with Ascyltus. At that moment, an earthquake destroys the tenement.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: Encolpius meets the poet Eumolpus at the art museum. The elderly poet blames current corruption on the mania for money and invites his young friend to a banquet held at the villa of Trimalchio, a wealthy freeman, and his wife Fortunata. Eumolpus's declamation of poetry is met with catcalls and thrown food. While Fortunata performs a frantic dance, the bored Trimalchio turns his attention to two very young boys. Scandalized, Fortunata berates her husband, who attacks her then has her covered in gizzards and gravy. Fancying himself a poet, Trimalchio recites one of his finer poems whereupon Eumolpus accuses him of stealing verses from Lucretius. Enraged, Trimalchio orders the poet to be tortured by his slaves in the villa's huge kitchen furnace. The guests are then invited to visit Trimalchio's tomb where he enacts his own death in an ostentatious ceremony. The story of the Matron of Ephesus is recounted, the first story within a story in the film. Encolpius finally leaves the villa, helping the limping, beaten Eumolpus to drink water from a pool in a tilled field. In return for his kindness, Eumolpus bequeaths the spirit of poetry to his young friend.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: The next morning Encolpius, Gitón, and Ascyltus are imprisoned on the pirate ship of Lichas, a middle-aged merchant; they are part of a consignment of attractive young men being delivered for the titillation of the reclusive Roman emperor. Lichas selects Encolpius for a Greco-Roman wrestling match and quickly subdues him. Smitten by his beauty, Lichas takes Encolpius as his spouse in a wedding ceremony blessed by his wife, Tryphaena. After a long voyage the ship arrives at the emperor's private island, only to find it overrun by soldiers in the service of a usurper. The teenage emperor kills himself, and the soldiers board the ship and behead Lichas under Tryphaena's satisfied gaze. While "new Caesar" holds a fearsome victory parade back in Rome, Encolpius and Ascyltus escape the soldiers and make their way inland. They discover an abandoned villa, whose owners have freed their slaves and committed suicide to escape the new emperor. Encolpius and Ascyltus spend the night on the property and make love with an African slave girl who has stayed behind. Fleeing the villa when soldiers on horseback arrive in the courtyard to burn the owners' corpses, the two friends reach a desert. Ascyltus placates a nymphomaniac's demands in a covered wagon while Encolpius waits outside, listening to the woman's servant discuss a hermaphrodite demi-god reputed to possess healing powers at the Temple of Ceres. With the aid of a mercenary, they kill two men and kidnap the hermaphrodite in the hope of obtaining a ransom. Once exposed to the desert sun, however, the hermaphrodite sickens and dies of thirst. Enraged, the mercenary tries to murder his two companions but is overpowered and killed.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: Captured by soldiers, Encolpius is released in a labyrinth and forced to play Theseus to a gladiator's Minotaur for the amusement of spectators at the festival of Momus, the God of Laughter. When the gladiator spares Encolpius's life because of his well-spoken words of mercy, the festival rewards the young man with Ariadne, a sensual woman with whom he must copulate as the crowd looks on. Impotent, Encolpius is publicly humiliated by Ariadne. Eumolpus offers to take him to the Garden of Delights where prostitutes are said to effect a cure for his impotence but the treatment—gentle whipping of the buttocks—fails miserably. In the second of the stories within a story in the film, the owner of the Garden of Delights narrates the tale of Oenothea to Encolpius. For having rejected his advances, a sorcerer curses a beautiful young woman: she must spend her days kindling fires for the village's hearths from her genitalia. Inspired, Encolpius and Ascyltus hire a boatman to take them to Oenothea's home. Greeted by an old woman who has him drink a potion, Encolpius falls under a spell where his sexual prowess is restored to him by Oenothea in the form of an Earth Mother figure and sorceress. When Ascyltus is murdered in a field by the boatman, Encolpius decides to join Eumolpus's ship bound for North Africa. But Eumolpus has died in the meantime, leaving as his heirs all those willing to eat his corpse. Encolpius hasn't the stomach for this last and bitter mockery but is nonetheless invited by the captain to board the ship. In a voice-over, Encolpius explains that he set sail with the captain and his crew. His words end in mid-sentence, as does Petronius's book, when a distant island appears on the horizon and the film cuts abruptly to frescoes of the film's characters on a crumbling wall.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: Petronius's original text survives only in fragments. While recuperating from a debilitating illness in 1967, Fellini reread Petronius and was fascinated by the missing parts, the large gaps between one episode and the next. The text's fragmentary nature encouraged him to go beyond the traditional approach of recreating the past in film: the key to a visionary cinematic adaptation lay in narrative techniques of the dream state that exploited the dream's imminent qualities of mystery, enigma, immorality, outlandishness, and contradiction. In "Comments on Film", Fellini explained that his goal in adapting Petronius's classic was "to eliminate the borderline between dream and imagination: to invent everything and then to objectify the fantasy; to get some distance from it in order to explore it as something all of a piece and unknowable." Critic Christopher Sharrett observes that Fellini's "adaptation also reveals the paucity of the source, the kitschiness of the 'big ideas' from literary history. Genre film is a comfortable vehicle for the critical agenda undertaken, as Fellini piles up genre tropes as a way of showing the inherent generic contrivance, the 'trashiness,' that is basic to all such representation."


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: The most important of the narrative changes that Fellini makes to Petronius's text is the addition of a battle between Encolpius and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth thereby linking Encolpius to Theseus and the journey into the unconscious. Other original sequences include a nymphomaniac in a desert caravan whose despondent husband pays Ascyltus and Encolpius to couple with her, and a hermaphrodite worshipped as a demigod at the Temple of Ceres. Abducted by the two protagonists and a mercenary, the hermaphrodite later dies a miserable death in a desert landscape that, in Fellini's adaptation, is posed as an ill-omened event, none of which is to be found in the Petronian version.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: Though the two protagonists, Encolpius and Ascyltus, appear throughout, the characters and locations surrounding them change unexpectedly. This intentional technique of fragmentation conveys Fellini's view of both the original text and the nature of history itself, and is echoed visually in the film's final shot of a ruined villa whose walls, painted with frescoes of the scenes we have just seen, are crumbling, fading and incomplete. Fellini's interest in Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious is also on display with an abundance of archetypes in highly dreamlike settings.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: Fellini's project saw competition from another film titled "Satyricon", released the same year. Producer Alfredo Bini had registered the "Satyricon" title in 1962. When Fellini and his producer Alberto Grimaldi started work on their film, Bini contracted Gian Luigi Polidoro to direct his own version. Grimaldi sued Bini to halt the competing film, but lost; as a result, Fellini's picture was titled "Fellini Satyricon" to distinguish it.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: Filming took place primarily at Cinecittà Studios, on sets designed by Danilo Donati, who also designed the production's costumes. The film also used exteriors locations at Fiumicino, Latina, and the Pontine Islands. The cavern sequences were filmed below the Roman Colosseum. Co-screenwriter Bernardino Zapponi noted that Fellini used a deliberately jerky form of dubbing that caused the dialogue to appear out of sync with the actors' lips. This was in keeping with his original intention of creating a profound sense of estrangement throughout the film.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: "Fellini Satyricon" was released on VHS by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment on 7 September 1999. The film was then released on DVD by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Home Entertainment on 10 April 2001, for Region 1 and on 15 May 2005, for the German market.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: On 24 February 2015, The Criterion Collection released the film, newly restored through a 4K digital transfer, on Blu-ray and DVD for Region A and Region 1 respectively. The restoration was supervised by the film's cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno. Both of the editions include the film's original trailer, an audio commentary of Eileen Lanouette Hughes's memoir "On the Set of "Fellini Satyricon": A Behind-the-Scenes Diary", Gideon Bachmann's hour-long documentary "Ciao, Federico!", archival interviews with the film's director Federico Fellini, a new interview with Rotunno done in 2011, a new exclusively made documentary titled "Fellini and Petronius" featuring discussions between classicists Luca Canali and Joanna Paul about the film's adaptation of "Satyricon", a new interview with Mary Ellen Mark, a photographer for "Look" magazine, about her experiences on the film's set taking photographs of the shoot, a gallery of ephemera related to the film, a newly made English subtitle translation, and a leaflet containing a new essay by author and film scholar Michael Wood. Exclusive to the Blu-ray edition is the addition of an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. The new Blu-ray and DVD cover and interior poster was illustrated by Edward Kinsella and designed by Eric Skillman. On 27 April 2015, Eureka Entertainment released the film on Blu-ray in the United Kingdom as part of the Masters of Cinema series, using as a foundation the 4K digital transfer done for the Criterion release. This release includes a 36-page booklet and the film's original trailer.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: First screened at the 30th Venice Film Festival on 4 September 1969, "Fellini Satyricon" received generally positive reviews by critics writing in "stunned bewilderment". "Time" reported that the "normally reserved press corps gave the film a five-minute ovation ... the Venice showing was so wildly popular that festival tickets, normally 2,000 lire ($3.20), were being sold on the black market at 60,000 lire (about $100) apiece". Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich noted that there were "no outright negative reactions. The rampant moralizing of ten years ago seems to have passed out of fashion". In his favorable "Corriere della Sera" review, Giovanni Grazzini argued that "Fellini's Rome bears absolutely no relationship to the Rome we learned about in school books. It is a place outside historical time, an area of the unconscious in which the episodes related by Petronius are relived among the ghosts of Fellini ... His "Satyricon" is a journey through a fairytale for adults. It is evident that Fellini, finding in these ancient personages the projection of his own human and artistic doubts, is led to wonder if the universal and eternal condition of man is actually summed up in the frenzied realization of the transience of life which passes like a shadow. These ancient Romans who spend their days in revelry, ravaged by debauchery, are really an unhappy race searching desperately to exorcise their fear of death".


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: Kezich saw the film as a study in self-analysis, stating: "Everything seems to be aimed at making the viewer feel ill at ease, at giving him the impression that he is watching for the first time scenes from a life he never dreamed could have existed. Fellini has described his film as 'science fiction of the past', as though the Romans of that decadent age were being observed by the astounded inhabitants of a flying saucer. Curiously enough, in this effort of objectivity, the director has created a film that is so subjective as to warrant psychoanalysis. It is pointless to debate whether the film proposes a plausible interpretation of ancient Rome, or whether in some way it illustrates Petronius: the least surprising parts are those that come closest to Petronius's text or that have some vague historical significance..."


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: The film was selected as the Italian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 42nd Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. The following year, Fellini was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director.


title: Fellini Satyricon

text: As co-producers keen to recoup their investment, executives at United Artists made certain that Fellini received "a maximum of exposure" during his American promotional tour of the film by organizing press and television interviews in New York and Los Angeles. For Vincent Canby of "The New York Times", "Satyricon" was "the quintessential Fellini film ... a travelogue through an unknown galaxy." Roger Ebert, while recanting his original statement that the film was a masterpiece (he ranked the film 10th in his "10 Best Films of 1969" list), nonetheless gave it a high retrospective rating and wrote, "It is so much more ambitious and audacious than most of what we see today that simply as a reckless gesture, it shames these timid times." For Archer Winston of the "New York Post", the film's classical background in Petronius was fused into "a powerful contemporary parallel. It is so beautifully composed and imagined that you would do yourself a disservice if, for any reason, you allowed yourself to miss it". Fellini biographer Parker Tyler declared it "the most profoundly homosexual movie in all history".


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: Tintin in the Congo (; ) is the second volume of "The Adventures of Tintin", the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper for its children's supplement , it was serialised weekly from May 1930 to June 1931 before being published in a collected volume by Éditions de Petit Vingtième in 1931. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who are sent to the Belgian Congo to report on events in the country. Amid various encounters with the native Congolese people and wild animals, Tintin unearths a criminal diamond smuggling operation run by the American gangster Al Capone.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: Following on from "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets" and bolstered by publicity stunts, "Tintin in the Congo" was a commercial success within Belgium and was also serialised in France. Hergé continued "The Adventures of Tintin" with "Tintin in America" in 1932, and the series subsequently became a defining part of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition. In 1946, Hergé re-drew and coloured "Tintin in the Congo" in his distinctive "ligne-claire" style for republication by Casterman, with further alterations made at the request of his Scandinavian publisher for a 1975 edition.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: In the late 20th century, "Tintin in the Congo" became increasingly controversial for both its racist colonial attitude toward Congolese people and for its glorification of big-game hunting. Accordingly, attempts were made in Belgium, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States to either ban the work or restrict its availability to children. Critical reception of the work has been largely negative, with commentators on "The Adventures of Tintin" describing it as one of Hergé's lesser works.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy travel to the Belgian Congo, where a cheering crowd of native Congolese greet them. Tintin hires a native boy, Coco, to assist him in his travels, and soon thereafter Tintin rescues Snowy from a crocodile. A criminal stowaway tries to kill Tintin, but monkeys throw coconuts at the stowaway that knock him unconscious. A monkey kidnaps Snowy, but Tintin saves him by disguising himself as another monkey. That night, the stowaway escapes.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: The next morning, Tintin, Snowy, and Coco crash their car into a train, which the reporter fixes and tows to the village of the Babaorum tribe. He meets the king, who invites him to a hunt the next day. A lion knocks Tintin unconscious, but Snowy rescues him by biting off its tail. Tintin gains the admiration of the natives, making the Babaorum witch-doctor Muganga jealous. With the help of the criminal stowaway, Muganga accuses Tintin of destroying the tribe's sacred idol. The enraged villagers imprison Tintin, but then turn against Muganga when Tintin shows them footage of the witch-doctor and the stowaway conspiring to destroy the idol. Tintin becomes a hero in the village: when he cures a man using quinine, he is hailed as a "Boula Matari" ("Breaker of rocks") and a local woman bows down to him, saying, "White man very great! Has good spirits ... White mister is big juju man!" Angered, Muganga starts a war between the Babaorum and their enemies, the M'Hatuvu, whose king leads an attack on the Babaorum village. Tintin outwits them, and the M'Hatuvu cease hostilities and come to idolise Tintin. Muganga and the stowaway plot to kill Tintin and make it look like a leopard attack, but Tintin survives and saves Muganga from a boa constrictor; Muganga pleads mercy and ends his hostilities.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: The stowaway again attempts to kill Tintin, binding him and hanging him from a tree branch over a river to be eaten by crocodiles, but he is rescued by a passing a Catholic missionary, who invites Tintin to go on an elephant hunt. Then, disguised as a missionary, the stowaway captures Tintin again, leaving him tied up in a boat set to go over a waterfall, but the Catholic priest once again saves him. Tintin confronts the stowaway and they fight over a cliff, where the latter is eaten by crocodiles. After reading a letter from the stowaway's pocket, Tintin finds that someone called "A.C." has ordered his elimination. Tintin captures a criminal who tried to rendezvous with the stowaway and learns that "A.C." is none other than the American gangster Al Capone, who is trying to gain control of African diamond production. Tintin and the colonial police arrest the rest of the diamond smuggling gang and after having a few more adventures with different animals, Tintin and Snowy return to Belgium.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: Georges Remi—best known under the pen name Hergé—was the editor and illustrator of (""The Little Twentieth""), a children's supplement to (""The Twentieth Century""), a staunchly Roman Catholic, conservative Belgian newspaper based in Hergé's native Brussels. Run by the Abbé Norbert Wallez, the paper described itself as a "Catholic Newspaper for Doctrine and Information" and disseminated a far-right, fascist viewpoint. According to Harry Thompson, such political ideas were common in Belgium at the time, and Hergé's milieu was permeated with conservative ideas revolving around "patriotism, Catholicism, strict morality, discipline, and naivety".


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: In 1929, Hergé began "The Adventures of Tintin" comic strip for , a series about the exploits of a fictional Belgian reporter named Tintin. Following the success of "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets", serialised weekly in "Le Petit Vingtième" from January 1929 to May 1930, Hergé wanted to send Tintin to the United States. Wallez insisted he write a story set in the Belgian Congo, then a Belgian colony and today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Belgian children learned about the Congo in school, and Wallez hoped to encourage colonialist and missionary zeal in his readership. He believed that the Belgian colonial administration needed promotion at a time when memories "were still fairly fresh" of the 1928 visit to the colony by the Belgian King Albert and Queen Elisabeth. He also hoped that some of his readers would be inspired to work in the Congo.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: Hergé characterised Wallez's instructions in a sarcastic manner, saying Wallez referred to the Congo as "our beautiful colony which has great need of us, tarantara, tarantaraboom". He already had some experience in illustrating Congolese scenes; three years previously, Hergé had provided two illustrations for the newspaper that appeared in an article celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Henry Morton Stanley's expedition to the Congo. In one of these, Hergé depicted a native Congolese bowing before a European, a scene that he repeated in "Tintin in the Congo".


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: As in "Land of the Soviets", where Hergé had based his information about the Soviet Union almost entirely on a single source, in "Tintin in the Congo" he used limited source material to learn about the country and its people. He based the story largely on literature written by missionaries, with the only added element being that of the diamond smugglers, possibly adopted from the ""Jungle Jim"-type serials". Hergé visited the Colonial Museum of Tervuren, examining their ethnographic collections of Congolese artefacts, including costumes of the Leopard Men. He adopted hunting scenes from André Maurois's novel "The Silence of Colonel Bramble", while his animal drawings were inspired by Benjamin Rabier's prints. He also listened to tales of the colony from some of his colleagues who had been there, but disliked their stories, later claiming: "I didn't like the colonists, who came back bragging about their exploits. But I couldn't prevent myself from seeing the Blacks as big children, either".


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: "Tintin in the Congo" was serialised under the French title of "Tintin au Congo" in "Le Petit Vingtième" from 5 June 1930 to 11 June 1931; it was syndicated to the French Catholic newspaper "Cœurs Vaillants". Drawn in black and white, it followed the same formula employed in "Land of the Soviets", remaining "essentially plotless" according to the Hergé specialist Michael Farr, and consisting of largely unrelated events that Hergé improvised each week. Hergé later commented on the process of writing these early adventures, stating: "The came out on Wednesday evening, and I often didn't have a clue on Wednesday morning how I was going to get Tintin out of the predicament I had put him in the previous week". The strip's visual style was similar to that of "Land of the Soviets". In the first instalment of "Tintin in the Congo", Hergé featured Quick and Flupke, two young boys from Brussels whom he had recently introduced in another "Le Petit Vingtième" comic strip, in the crowd of people saying goodbye to Tintin.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: Like "Land of the Soviets", "Tintin in the Congo" was popular in Belgium. On the afternoon of 9 July 1931, Wallez repeated the publicity stunt he had used when "Soviets" ended by having a young actor, Henry de Doncker, dress up as Tintin in colonial gear and appear in Brussels and then Liège, accompanied by 10 African bearers and an assortment of exotic animals hired from a zoo. Co-organised with the Bon Marché department store, the event attracted 5,000 spectators in Brussels. In 1931, Brussels-based Éditions de Petit Vingtième collected the story together into a single volume, and Casterman published a second edition in 1937. By 1944 the book had been reprinted seven times, and had outsold each of the other seven books in the series. The series' success led Wallez to renegotiate Hergé's contract, giving him a higher salary and the right to work from home.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: In the 1940s, after Hergé's popularity increased, he redrew many of the original black-and-white Tintin stories in colour using the ("clear line") drawing style he had developed, so that they fitted in visually with the newer "Adventures of Tintin" that he had produced. Hergé first made some changes in this direction in 1940, when the story was serialised in the Dutch-language "Het Laatste Nieuws".


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: At Casterman's prompting, "Tintin in the Congo" was subsequently fully re-drawn, and the new version was published in 1946. As a part of this modification, Hergé cut the page length from 110 plates to the standard 62 pages, as suggested by the publisher Casterman. He also made several changes to the story, cutting many of the references to Belgium and colonial rule. For example, in the scene where Tintin teaches Congolese school children about geography, he states in the 1930–31 version: "My dear friends, today I'm going to talk to you about your country: Belgium!" whereas in the 1946 version, he instead gives them a mathematics lesson. Hergé also changed the character of Jimmy MacDuff, the owner of the leopard that attacks Tintin, from a black manager of the Great American Circus into a white "supplier of the biggest zoos in Europe".


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: In the 1946 colour version, Hergé added a cameo appearance from Thomson and Thompson, the two detectives that he had introduced in the fourth Tintin story, "Cigars of the Pharaoh" (1932–34), which was chronologically set after the Congolese adventure. Adding them to the first page, Hergé featured them in the backdrop, watching a crowd surrounding Tintin as he boards a train and commenting that it "Seems to be a young reporter going to Africa ..." In the same frame, Hergé inserted depictions of himself and his friend Edgar P. Jacobs (the book's colourist) into the crowd seeing Tintin off.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: When "Tintin in the Congo" was first released by the series' Scandinavian publishers in 1975, they objected to page 56, where Tintin drills a hole into a live rhinoceros, fills it with dynamite, and blows it up. They asked Hergé to replace this page with a less violent scene, which they believed would be more suitable for children. Hergé agreed, as he regretted the scenes of big-game hunting in the work soon after producing it. The altered page involved the rhinoceros running away unharmed after accidentally knocking down and triggering Tintin's gun.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: Although publishers worldwide had made it available for many years, English publishers refused to publish "Tintin in the Congo" because of its perceived racist content. In the late 1980s, Nick Rodwell, then agent of Studios Hergé in the United Kingdom, told reporters of his intention to finally publish it in English and stated his belief that publishing the original 1931 black and white edition would cause less controversy than releasing the 1946 colour version. After more delay, in 1991—sixty years after its original 1931 publication—it was the last of "The Adventures of Tintin" to see publication in English. The 1946 colour version eventually appeared in English in 2005, published in Britain by Egmont.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: Hergé biographer Pierre Assouline believed that Hergé's drawing became more assured throughout the first version of the story without losing any of its spontaneity. He thought that the story began in "the most inoffensive way", and that throughout the story Tintin was portrayed as a Boy Scout, something he argued reflected Hergé's "moral debt" to Wallez. Biographer Benoît Peeters opined that "Tintin in the Congo" was "nothing spectacular", with some "incredibly cumbersome" monologues, but he thought the illustrations "a bit more polished" than those in "Land of the Soviets". Believing the plot to be "extremely simple", he thought that Tintin's character was like a child manipulating a world populated by toy animals and lead figurines. Michael Farr felt that, unlike the previous Tintin adventure, some sense of a plot emerges at the end of the story with the introduction of the American diamond-smuggling racket. Philippe Goddin thought the work to be "more exciting" than "Land of the Soviets" and argued that Hergé's depiction of the native Congolese was not mocking but a parody of past European militaries. By contrast, Harry Thompson believed that ""Congo" is almost a regression from "Soviets"", in his opinion having no plot or characterisation; he described it as "probably the most childish of all the Tintin books". Simon Kuper of the "Financial Times" criticised both "Land of the Soviets" and "Tintin in the Congo" as the "worst" of the "Adventures", opining that they were "poorly drawn" and "largely plot-free".


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: Farr saw the 1946 colour version as poorer than the black and white original; he said it had lost its "vibrancy" and "atmosphere", and that the new depiction of the Congolese landscape was unconvincing and more like a European zoo than the "parched, dusty expanses of reality". Peeters took a more positive attitude towards the 1946 version, commenting that it contained "aesthetic improvements" and "clarity of composition" because of Hergé's personal development in draughtsmanship, as well as an enhancement in the dialogue, which had become "more lively and fluid".


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: In his psychoanalytical study of the series, Jean-Marie Apostolidès highlighted that in the Congolese adventure, Tintin represented progress and the Belgian state was depicted as a model for the natives to imitate. In doing so, he argued, they could become more European and thus civilised from the perspective of Belgian society, but that instead they ended up appearing as parodies. Opining that Tintin was imposing his own view of Africa onto the Congolese, Apostolidès remarked that Tintin appeared as a god-figure, with evangelical overtones in the final scene. Literary critic Tom McCarthy concurred that Tintin represented the Belgian state, but also suggested that he acted as a Christian missionary, even being "a kind of god" akin to the character of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (1899). McCarthy compared the scene where Tintin exposes Muganga as a fraud to that in which the character of Prospero exposes the magician in William Shakespeare's "The Tempest".


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, several campaigners and writers characterised "Tintin in the Congo" as racist due to its portrayal of the Congolese as infantile and stupid. According to McCarthy, Hergé depicted the Congolese as "good at heart but backwards and lazy, in need of European mastery". There had been no such controversy when originally published, because it was only following the decolonisation of Africa, which occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, that Western attitudes towards indigenous Africans shifted. Harry Thompson argued that "Tintin in the Congo" must be viewed in the context of European society in the 1930s and 1940s, and that Hergé had not written the book to be "deliberately racist". Thompson argued that the story reflected the average Belgian view of Congolese people at the time, one that was more "patronising" than malevolent. Apostolidès supported this idea, as did Peeters, who asserted that "Hergé was no more racist than the next man". After meeting Hergé in the 1980s, Farr commented, "You couldn't have met someone who was more open and less racist."


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: Contrastingly, Assouline stated that in 1930s Belgium, Hergé would have had access to literature by the likes of André Gide and Albert Londres that was critical of the colonial regime. Assouline claimed that Hergé instead chose not to read such reports because they conflicted with the views of his conservative milieu. Laurence Grove—President of the International "Bande Dessinée" Society and an academic at the University of Glasgow—concurred, remarking that Hergé adhered to prevailing societal trends in his work, and that "[w]hen it was fashionable to be a colonial racist, that's what he was". Comic book historian Mark McKinney noted that other Franco-Belgian comic artists of the same period had chosen to depict the native Africans in a more favourable light, citing the examples of Jijé's 1939 work "Blondin et Cirage" ("Blondy and Shoe-Black"), in which the protagonists are adopted brothers, one white, the other black, and "Tif et Tondu", which was serialised in "Spirou" from 1939 to 1940 and in which the Congolese aid the Belgians against their American antagonists.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: Farr and McCarthy stated that "Tintin in the Congo" was the most popular Tintin adventure in Francophone Africa. According to Thompson, the book remained hugely popular in the Congo even after the country achieved independence in 1960. Nevertheless, government figures in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have criticised the book. In 2004, after the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs Karel De Gucht described President Joseph Kabila's provisional DRC government as incompetent, Congolese Information Minister Henri Mova Sakanyi accused him of "racism and nostalgia for colonialism", remarking that it was like ""Tintin in the Congo" all over again". The South African comics writer Anton Kannemeyer has parodied the perceived racist nature of the book to highlight what he sees as the continuing racist undertones of South African society. In his "Pappa in Afrika" (2010), a satire of "Tintin in the Congo", he portrays Tintin as an Afrikaner with racist views of indigenous Africans.


title: Tintin in the Congo

text: In August 2007, Congolese student Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo filed a complaint in Brussels, claiming that "Tintin in the Congo" was an insult to the Congolese people that should be banned. Public prosecutors initiated a criminal case although the matter was transferred to a civil court in April 2010. Mondondo called the comic "racist and xenophobic," while his lawyers argued that it amounted to "a justification of colonisation and of white supremacy". Alain Berenboom, lawyer for both Moulinsart, the company which controls Hergé's estate, and Casterman, the book's publisher, argued that the cartoonist's depiction of the Congolese "wasn't racism but kind paternalism". Berenboom said that banning it would set a dangerous precedent for the availability of literature by other historical authors, such as Charles Dickens or Jules Verne, which also contain stereotypes of non-white ethnicities. In February 2012 the court ruled that the book would not be banned, deciding that it was "clear that neither the story, nor the fact that it has been put on sale, has a goal to ... create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, or humiliating environment", and that it therefore did not break Belgian law. Belgium's Centre for Equal Opportunities warned against "over-reaction and hyper political correctness".