title: Skylarking

text: All of the basic tracks were recorded in the same order as they appear on the album, as were the drum overdubs that followed. The recording sessions took place in early 1986 largely at Rundgren's Utopia Sound Studios in Woodstock, New York. Partridge described Utopia Sound—a two-story building located on the edge of a forest—as "a glorified log cabin". The band stayed at a nearby guest house, while Rundgren lived in the "main house" up the road. They arrived without rehearsing the material because of the expectation that Rundgren would change the song structures anyway. In Moulding's recollection, "That was the problem with the whole record. ... everybody kept saying, 'There's no point in rehearsing!' ... I realized, 'I don't know "any" of these songs!' [laughs] 'Nobody's told me the chords! What'll we do?'" The project consumed only three reels of tape: one for side one, another for side two, and a third for extras and leftover tracks. Moulding remembered that "one track ran into another. No edits. Todd had a very unorthodox way of recording—15 ips. ... and done very quickly. Second takes were uncommon, but it was all charming in a way. Partridge considered these methods a "money-saving ruse", and believed that Rundgren "didn't wanna spend out on reels of tape".


title: Skylarking

text: Rundgren played a large role in the album's sound design and drum programming, providing the band with string and brass arrangements, as well as an assortment of gear that included a Fairlight CMI, Yamaha DX7, E-mu Emulator, pre-MIDI LinnDrum, and a Prophet-10 bought especially for the album. The only instruments the band had brought with them to the US were "about eight guitars". Gregory repaired a neglected Chamberlin that had become infested with mice. They spent the first week planning and setting markers for the tape space they needed. Another three weeks were spent programming percussion and other sequences on a Fairlight. For the first run of sessions at Woodstock, the group used the LinnDrum as a placeholder for percussion, which Gregory said "sounded very stiff and lifeless". Real drums were overdubbed at Sound Hole Studios in San Francisco by the Tubes' Prairie Prince. Gregory said "it was only then that the album started coming to life".


title: Skylarking

text: While in San Francisco, the band stayed at a condominium a few blocks away from Rundgren's apartment. Partridge instructed Prince how to play his parts, although Prince occasionally suggested his own ideas. Prince later praised Partridge's "sense of rhythm ... that guy is just amazing. I'm not sure if I've actually ever heard him sit down and play a set of drums, but I think that he probably could do an excellent job. I know he's done some great drum programming." Moulding recalled that nothing apart from "some percussion" was recorded for the album until the band arrived in San Francisco to lay the drum tracks. Initially, Rundgren wanted Moulding to track his bass parts before the drums were recorded, but Moulding objected to this method. The orchestral arrangements were recorded at Sound Hole, as well as a couple of Moulding's bass tracks. Prince recalled that the group adopted "this big project calendar ... with all the instruments and vocal parts they wanted to add. As things got recorded, they would check them off and make notes about what takes they were happy with." Afterward, the band returned to Woodstock to record the rest of the album. When recording was complete, the band left Rundgren with a handmade book of mixing instructions, which he followed.


title: Skylarking

text: The original sleeve design was to depict close-up shots of human pubic regions with flowers fitted into the hairs, female on the front and male on the back. Photo sessions were held, but record shops informed the label that they would not carry the album with that artwork, and so the idea was discarded. Partridge had also considered the rejected design for the cover of the "Grass" single.


title: Skylarking

text: As a last minute alternative, Partridge said, "I stole this very tasteful print from a classics concert in 1953 done by a chap called Hans Erney . I changed a few things on the drawing. I think on the original one the boy had a guitar and the girl had a flute, but we gave them both flutes. So it really was a tasteful alternative to the original sleeve, which really would have been suicide to put out."


title: Skylarking

text: On the back cover, the group are depicted wearing schoolgirl uniforms. Partridge's intention was to have the group dressed in Quaker outfits looking "really disapprovingly". The reason why they wear schoolgirl outfits instead was due to a miscommunication made when Partridge ordered the outfits.


title: Skylarking

text: "Summer's Cauldron" is an extension of an original poem Partridge wrote called "Drowning in Summer's Cauldron". It is introduced with the sound of a bee that pans across the stereo channels. Rundgren provided the sample, along with other "summer sounds" such as crickets and barking dogs. The track emphasizes droning sounds and a "wobbly" chorused organ, the latter of which reminded Partridge of summer and the Beatles' "Blue Jay Way" (1967). Rundgren played melodica, Partridge recalled, "and "we" got to bully "him"! It was "great"." Prairie Prince was encouraged to play "spastic" drum fills in the style of Jethro Tull's "Sweet Dream" (1969). "Summer's Cauldron" segues seamlessly into the next track, an effect that was achieved in an unconventional manner. "When we said, 'How are we going to get from 'Summer's Cauldron' to 'Grass'?,' he [Rundgren] said, 'Well, you just put your hand on your instruments and stop the strings ringing and then we punch in the start of 'Grass.'"


title: Skylarking

text: "Grass" is sometimes mistaken to be about cannabis, but was actually written about Coate Water, a parkland in Swindon. Moulding composed it on an open E-tuned guitar and found its harmonic changes by playing the chord shapes of Thunderclap Newman's "Something in the Air" (1969). The mixing of violin and guitar was an idea lifted from John Lennon's "How Do You Sleep?" (1971). Rundgren added a tiple to the blend. Moulding originally sang the song with a deeper voice. He said Rundgren voiced concern that the effect was too close to "a molester", and so Moulding "did the Bowie thing and added an octave above it". The track bookends "Summer's Cauldron" with a reprise of its "insect chorus".


title: Skylarking

text: "The Meeting Place" is built on a "circular" guitar motif that reminded Moulding of the children's programme "Toytown". He characterised it as "a childish, nursery-rhyme, bell-like, small town riff. As if you were looking down on Toytown, and it was me in the landscape, meeting my wife beside the factory or something, in our teens." The industrial noises at the beginning were samples sequenced on a Fairlight, one of which was the sound of the Swindon Works hooter, which was used as a signal for its workers. Swindon Works closed within a year of the song's recording. Among influences on the song, Moulding cited Syd Barrett, the Rolling Stones' "Factory Girl" (1968), and Billie Jo Spears' Blanket on the Ground" (1975).


title: Skylarking

text: "That's Really Super, Supergirl" is a guitar pop song that references the DC Comics character Supergirl, although Partridge stated the "Supergirl" in the song "isn't one girl -- it's an amalgam of all the women who had better things to do than be around me. .. there's a facetious part of it, a little sarcasm in it." Its lyrics also mention kryptonite and Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Rundgren contributed the keyboard part but was left uncredited. Gregory: "We really didn't know what to do with it. It was just a 'B' side, and he could obviously see possibilities in it. One afternoon, we just left him to it." The snare was sampled from the Utopia album "Deface the Music" (1980). Because of recording logistics, Prince and Moulding were forced to play around the beat. The guitar solo was played by Dave Gregory on Eric Clapton's psychedelic Gibson SG the Fool, then owned by Rundgren. Gregory spent hours rehearsing the solo. Years after the fact, he realised that he had subconsciously lifted the "little five-note runs" heard in the trumpet line of "Magic Dragon Theatre" from the Utopia's "Ra" (1977).


title: Skylarking

text: "Ballet for a Rainy Day", lyrically, is a portrait of a rainy town and its raincoats, fruits, and collapsing hairdos. Partridge: "The one thing I remember about the rain as a child was my mother cursing that her new hairdo was going to get ruined." There was an argument over the lyric "silent film of melting miracle play". Rundgren was unaware that "Miracle Plays" were biblical performances from the Medieval times, and thinking that Partridge was mistaken, requested that it be changed to "passion play". Partridge refused because he wanted to maintain the alliteration in "melting miracle". "Tickets for the front row seats up on the rooftops" is an homage to the Blue Nile's "A Walk Across the Rooftops" (1984). According to music critic Joe Stannard, "Ballet" and the two following tracks "distil the flawless orch-pop of "Smile" and "Abbey Road" into a handy three-song suite."


title: Skylarking

text: "1000 Umbrellas" is a more somber reflection on a rainy day and the second song about being "dumped" by a woman. Gregory spent weeks working on its string arrangement using a Roland MSQ-100 sequencer and a string patch on his Roland JX-P. He said: "It was a rather doomy, miserable little thing with all those descending chromatic chords, and I thought, 'Oh dear, how can l cheer this miserable song up?'" Rundgren had not originally considered it for the album, since the demo consisted solely of Partridge on acoustic guitar, but was convinced to include it once he heard Gregory's arrangement. Partridge recalled that at one point, Gregory "took me on one side and said, 'I know what you mean by that lyric, 'How can you smile and forecast weather's getting better, if you've never let a girl rain all over you.' And I thought, 'How very enigmatic of you, Gregsy.'"


title: Skylarking

text: "Season Cycle", in its basic form, came to Partridge while walking his dog. The song was prominently influenced by the Beach Boys, but was not initially planned as a pastiche of the band, he said, "in fact, it started out very much like a folk song, very strummy. And just to kind of tie things up, I tried to do some other things going on at the same time, 'cause we're cross-melody maniacs in this band, but I thought it would be fun. Then I thought, 'Shit, this really does sound like the Beach Boys. Yeah, I'll make it sound a bit more like the Beach Boys!'." He felt that the end result was "nearer to Harpers Bizarre than the Beach Boys personally." In another interview, he stated that he was consciously inspired by the Beach Boys album "Smiley Smile" (1967) to write a song that appeared to be made up of many disparate musical sections. Gregory took issue with the dissonance in the second bridge, but Rundgren sided with Partridge on the view that it made the harmonic development more interesting. Rundgren, however, taunted Partridge for the lyric "about the baby and the umbilical".


title: Skylarking

text: "Earn Enough for Us" is a power pop song with subject matter similar to Partridge's previous "Love on a Farmboy's Wages". He wrote "Earn Enough" about his former days working at a paint shop. The lyric "I can take humiliation and hurtful comments from the boss" refers to the shop's owner, Middle Mr. Turnley. "He'd come into the shop and go, 'Snort! snort! Look at ya, you fuckin' useless little cunt, snort! snort! You got a fuckin' girl's haircut, ya little cunt, snort!'" The opening riff was invented by Gregory after some persuasion from Rundgren. Moulding temporarily left the group after a dispute over the bass line, which Partridge felt had been going in a direction that was too "bluesy".


title: Skylarking

text: "Big Day" is about marriage and was dedicated to Moulding's teenage son Lee. It was first offered for "25 O'Clock" but his bandmates thought it was too good for the Dukes project. Partridge envisioned the song as a single.


title: Skylarking

text: "Another Satellite" is about Erica Wexler, a fan that caused tensions between Partridge and his then-wife. He previously wrote about Wexler for "The Big Express" songs "Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her" and "You're the Wish You Are I Had". Rundgren had initially rejected "Another Satellite", but it was included at the insistence of the band's A&R executive at Virgin, Jeremy Lascelles. Partridge expressed regret releasing the song since it was hurtful to Erica, although "the story had a happy ending" once they rekindled a relationship in the 1990s. The "mordant, chiming rebuke" of the song, according to Stannard, "signals a shift into darker, more personal areas."


title: Skylarking

text: "Mermaid Smiled" is a "jazzy" song inspired by a board book Partridge owned as a child. The title means "getting back in touch with the child in you. And the key to that is something as frivolous as a smile on a mermaid." It was composed in D tuning (D–A–D–A–B–F) and came about when he discovered a riff that he felt had an underwater quality to it. He wrote a poem containing some of the lyrics, called "Book Full of Sea", but could not remember if it was before or after he had the "Raga-mama-Raga" guitar motif: "I started to throw my hands around the fretboard and discovered some great-sounding stuff – all simple chords. They're just straight barres or real simple shapes. It just sort of said rock pools and mermaids and breakers crashing." Rundgren arranged the song in the style of Bobby Darin. The track features tabla, bongos, muted trumpets, and sampled vibraphones from a Fairlight; the latter two are reflected in the lyrics "from pools of xylophone clear" and "compose with trumpeting shell". Partridge found that the percussion gave the song an Indian feel and tried expanding upon it by singing flattened quarter notes, an idea that Rundgren rejected.


title: Skylarking

text: "The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul" is an existentialist beatnik song that "just says you're born, you live, and you die," Partridge explained. "Why look for the meaning of life when all there is is death and decay." The melody was inspired by the Nat King Cole version of "Nature Boy" (1948). Rundgren's arrangement was based on the music of 1960s spy films, which happened to be in an idiom similar to "Mermaid Smiled". Partridge: "I had in my head that I really wanted to out-do 'Mack the Knife' — the Bobby Darin version. ... [and] it sounded like a spy film title to me. So I thought, 'It'd be great to do sort of a John Barry secret-agent soundtrack thing.' ... I said to Todd, 'Ideally, make it like a Beatnik existential spy movie soundtrack. Can such a thing be done?' And literally, he went away overnight and came back with charts for this stuff." Partridge instructed Prince to drum like a "jazz junkie drummer". On his performance, Prince surmised that he may have unconsciously "channeled" the influence of big band drummer Gene Krupa.


title: Skylarking

text: "Dear God" is about a struggling agnostic who writes a letter to God while challenging his existence. The song was conceived in a skiffle style but while playing the Beatles' "Rocky Raccoon" (1968), Partridge was inspired to move "Dear God" closer to that song's direction. "Dear God" was not included on original pressings of "Skylarking", but it was always intended to be on the album.


title: Skylarking

text: "Dying" was inspired by an elderly neighbor of Moulding's named Bertie. It was wrongly assumed to be about his father, Charlie Moulding, who had died of a heart attack in 1983. Colin had recently purchased a house in the Swindon countryside: "We didn't see him [Bertie] for the first six months and thought he might be dead. But people in the village said that he'd recently lost his wife and had become very quiet and sad. ... He used to get these attacks and be very short of breath. But he loved to talk about the old ways." The sampled clarinet solo was played on a Chamberlin.


title: Skylarking

text: "Sacrificial Bonfire" attempts to set the scene of an Iron Age ritual. Moulding started with a pagan-sounding guitar riff: "There was a touch of 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' and a bit of Arthur Brown's 'Fire' in it, I suppose. But I wasn't moralizing. It was just that this was an evil piece of music and good would triumph over it." Rundgren contributed a string arrangement, something Moulding had not envisioned for the song. He said "it made the last two bars of the album more optimistic, which I think fitted into his original "Day Passes" concept. It was the dawn of another day." Partridge concurred: "It was a good ending to the album, fading deep into the night. It just leaves you in blackness with the slightest hint that dawn is coming."


title: Skylarking

text: "Let's Make a Den", according to Partridge, is about "the idea that you play all these games and then do it in real life. First it's a den and then it's a real house. I had finally got my own home and didn't like the idea of losing it because England might get caught up in a war caused by Ronald Reagan's 'Star Wars' sabre rattling." The song was in Rundgren's original concept of "Skylarking", but he wanted Partridge to change the time signature from to . Partridge fought over this detail, "I wanted this keenness and childish joy which you get from the seven/four meter. I also wanted the rhythm track to have banging Coke cans and stuff, the things that kids would do." Prince was a witness to Rundgren and Partridge's arguments regarding the song: "I thought it was cool, but then Todd ... said, 'You know, I really don't like this song, I don't think it fits with the whole scheme of this album.' And that's when they started arguing -- Andy was saying, 'Well, why not?' He gave some long explanation why it should, and Todd just kind of put his foot down, and didn't want to do it."


title: Skylarking

text: "Extrovert" is Partridge's rumination on overcoming his shyness. Its more aggressive and bombastic tone contrasts significantly with the other "Skylarking" songs. The song was recorded as a single B-side and was the last tracked for the sessions. Partridge sang the lead vocal while inebriated. After the band returned to England, they agreed to Rundgren overdubbing some brass samples, although he ultimately got the chords wrong. "Terrorism", "The Troubles", and "Find the Fox" were all rejected by Rundgren on the grounds that they did not fit in the album's concept, and they were never tracked for the sessions.


title: Skylarking

text: Lead single "Grass", backed with "Dear God" in the UK, was released in August 1986. "Skylarking" followed on 27 October 1986. It spent one week on the UK album charts, reaching No. 90 in November. In the US, radio stations were sent a promotional disc, "Skylarking with Andy Partridge", which featured interviews with the group and Rundgren. A second single, "The Meeting Place", was issued in 1987. Demos of "Let's Make a Den", "The Troubles", "Find the Fox", and "Terrorism" were remixed at Crescent Studios and released as bonus tracks to the singles. Both "Grass" and "The Meeting Place" reached No. 100 on the UK Singles Chart.


title: Skylarking

text: Tim Sommer of "Rolling Stone" praised the album as "the most inspired and satisfying piece of Beatle-esque pop since ... well, since the Beatles" and drew favourable comparisons to the Beatles ("Revolver", "Rubber Soul"), the Beach Boys ("Pet Sounds") and the Kinks ("Village Green Preservation Society"). "Creem" Karen Schlosberg dubbed it a "masterpiece" and a "somewhat baroque and ethereally-textured collection". She lamented that it was unlikely the album would receive much radio play, "since the lads' sound is probably too different to sit well with contemporary radio programming standards. Another irony, since XTC is constantly being compared to one of the most successful groups in pop history, the Beatles." "Billboard" reviewed: "The overall tone here is less hard-edged than in past work; the band never takes the easy way out, however, employing unique sounds and unexpected melodic twists to wonderful effect."


title: Skylarking

text: Robert Christgau awarded the record an A− with his only criticism being "when the topics become darker and more cosmic ... they clutter things with sound and whimsy". Also from "Rolling Stone", Rob Tannenbaum's 1987 review said the album's craftsmanship was "a remarkable achievement", but decried: "This trading of the acute modernism that marked such classics as 'This Is Pop' and 'Making Plans for Nigel' for domestic solitude dampens the band's punk-roots energy and also limits its emotional spectrum. ... Partridge complains. But then he apologizes to his ex for being "rude" to her. Being rude is the "point" of breakup songs, and a shot of rudeness is just what XTC could use now."


title: Skylarking

text: Promotional videos were created for "Grass" and "Dear God" (both directed by Nick Brandt). The Channel 4 music program "The Tube" also produced videos for "The Meeting Place" and "The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul" filmed in Portmeirion with the band wearing costumes from "The Prisoner". The music video for "Dear God" received the 1987 "Billboard" Best Video award and was nominated for three categories at the MTV Video Music Awards.


title: Skylarking

text: Early sales were hampered by the omission of "Dear God" from the album's original pressings. It was left off because Jeremy Lascelles was concerned about the album's length and advised that the song may upset American audiences. Partridge recalled: "I reluctantly agreed because I thought I hadn't written a strong enough take on religion. I thought I'd kind of failed." Rundgren had a different recollection, and said that Partridge demanded that the song be pulled because "He was afraid that there would be repercussions personally for him for taking on such a thorny subject... I called them and said, 'This is a mistake.'" Partridge denied such accusations: "if you can't have a different opinion without them [people upset by the song] wanting to firebomb your house then that's their problem."


title: Skylarking

text: "Dear God" was ultimately released as the B-side to the UK lead single "Grass", but due to its popularity with American DJs, the album was reissued in the US, with "Mermaid Smiled" removed and "Dear God" cross-faded into the following track, "Dying", giving the second edition of the US album a revised track sequence. Partridge commented: "I got backed into a corner on that. They said that we had to take something off to put this one on 'cause of the limitations of vinyl and such. I think I wanted to take off 'Dying' and part of me said no, lyrically it's very honest and good, and so 'Dying' stayed."


title: Skylarking

text: In June 1987, the A-sided "Dear God" single was released in both markets, reaching No. 99 in the UK, and No. 37 in the US Mainstream Rock chart. Some controversy broke out over the song's anti-religious lyrics, which inspired some violent incidents. In Florida, a radio station received a bomb threat, and in New York, a student forced their school to play the song over its public-address system by holding a faculty member at knife-point. Nonetheless, the commercial success of "Dear God" propelled "Skylarking" to sell more than 250,000 units, and it raised the band's profile among American college youth. In the US, the album spent 29 weeks on the "Billboard 200" album charts and reached its peak position of No. 70 in June 1987.


title: Skylarking

text: On the request of XTC and Virgin Records, Rundgren submitted three different mixdowns of the album before quitting the project. The first mix was believed to be lacking in dynamics, while the second was rejected for containing numerous pops, clicks, and digital dropouts. According to Partridge, both the label and the band were dissatisfied with the final mix; "We all thought [it was] poor and thin ... There was no bass on it, no high tops, and the middle sounded muddy." Gregory similarly recalled that it was badly recorded.


title: Skylarking

text: Decades later, it was discovered that the album's master tapes were engineered with an improper sound polarity. Mastering engineer John Dent, who discovered the flaw in 2010, attributed it to a wiring error between the multitrack recording and stereo mixing machines, which would not have been aurally evident until after the tapes left Rundgren's studio. Dent was able to correct the issue, and his master was released by Partridge's APE House label exclusively on vinyl that same year. Rundgren commented: "I think it's total bullshit. But if such a thing existed, it's because they changed the running order on it and had to remaster it – which I had nothing to do with." The master with corrected polarity was eventually issued on CD as well.


title: Skylarking

text: Upon release "Skylarking" received universal acclaim and is now considered one of the greatest rock albums of all time. "Skylarking" became XTC's best-known album and generally regarded as their finest work. Dave Gregory recalled that two years after its release, he learned that XTC's recent work was "hugely influential" in the US. Music journalist Michael Azerrad wrote that with "Skylarking", the band had become "deans of a group of artists who make what can only be described as unpopular pop music, placing a high premium on melody and solid if idiosyncratic songcraft." "Mojo"s Ian Harrison wrote that regardless of the "businesslike-to-hostile rather than chummy" relationship between Rundgren and the band, "the results were sublime". "PopMatters"s Patrick Schabe cited it as the album where XTC "blossomed into full maturity", while "Uncut"s Joe Stannard called it "the album that tied up everything great about Swindon's finest into one big beautiful package of perfect pop".


title: Skylarking

text: Moulding said of the album: "Perhaps it lacked the polish of some of the other recordings we had made, but it was the character that was sewn into the record which was its strength. ... Positively naive at times." Gregory called the finished product "probably my favourite XTC album", expressing appreciation of how Rundgren handled the songs. In a promotional insert included with their album "Nonsuch" (1992), Partridge wrote "Musician and producer Todd Rundgren squeezed the XTC clay into its most complete/connected/cyclical record ever. Not an easy album to make for various ego reasons but time has humbled me into admitting that Todd conjured up some of the most magical production and arranging conceivable. A summer's day cooked into one cake."


title: Skylarking

text: In 1989, "Skylarking" was listed at number 48 on "Rolling Stone" magazine's list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s. The staff at "Pitchfork Media" placed the album at 15 on their 2002 list of the "Top 100 Albums of the 1980s". Site contributor Dominique Leone felt that Rundgren's production added warmth to the band's "clever-but-distant" songs. "Slant Magazine" listed the album at 67 on its list of the "Best Albums of the 1980s", It was voted number 830 in Colin Larkin's "All Time Top 1000 Albums" (2000). The album was also included in the book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die".


title: Skylarking

text: "Skylarking" was originally issued without the track "Dear God". After 1987, "Mermaid Smiled" was removed and "Dear God" was inserted. After 2001, track listings included both "Dear God" and "Mermaid Smiled".


title: Skylarking

text: In 2016, an expanded CD and Blu-ray edition of "Skylarking" was issued on Partridge's Ape House label. It included new 2.0 stereo and 5.1 surround sound mixes by Steven Wilson.


title: Skylarking

text: The sleeve credits "the Beech Avenue Boys" with "backing vocals". They are actually XTC under a pseudonym. The credit is an inside joke referencing the Beach Boys and a street in Swindon. Special thanks were given to the Tubes, "who let us use their amplifiers", and the Dukes of Stratosphear, "who loaned us their guitars".


title: Chandi

text: Chandi (, ) or Chandika () is a Hindu deity. Chandika is another form of Mahadevi, similar to Durga. Chandika is a powerful form of Mahadevi who manifested to destroy evil. She is also known as "Kaushiki", "Katyayani", "Asthadasabuja" "Mahalakshmi" and "Mahishasuramardini".


title: Chandi

text: or is the name by which the Supremely divine is referred to in Devī Māhātmya. Chandi represents the killer of Chanda. "Chanda" and Munda were Ashur's strong army generals. The word Chandi also refers to the fiery power of anger of the Brahman. Bhaskararaya, a leading authority on matters concerning Devi worship, defines Chandi as 'the angry, terrible or passionate one'. While scholars debate whether an old Goddess was Sanskritized or a suppressed Goddess was reclaimed, the fact remains that since the very early days, the Devi was worshiped in the subcontinent regardless of whether she appears as a supreme deity in Brahminic texts. Scholars who trace her tracks show that she was very much a part of an early theistic impulse as it was being crystallised in the Indic mind. C. Mackenzie Brown writes:


title: Chandi

text: "Hymns to goddesses in the late portions of the great Mahabharata epic and in the Harivamsa (AD 100-300) reveal the increasing importance of female deities in Brahminical devotional life.… The re-emergence of the divine feminine in the Devi-Mahatmya was thus both the culmination of centuries-long trends and the inspirational starting point for new investigations into the nature of feminine transcendence."


title: Chandi

text: When she does appear in "Markandeya Purana", in the section known as Caṇḍī Pāṭha or Devī Māhātmya, she proclaims her preeminence:


title: Chandi

text: This text recounts the tale of male demons and their destruction by the Great Goddess and traces its lineage through the Devīsūkta in the "Rigveda" and also connects with the Samkhya Prakriti to establish itself as a canonical text for the Shaktas.


title: Chandi

text: Chandi, the fiercest form of the Goddess, is the main deity of the famous Devi Mahatmya, a great poem of seven hundred verses (also called Durga Saptashati or Chandi Patha) which celebrates how she fights and destroys the greatest demons. As Chandi, the destroyer of opposition, she can be invoked for removing obstacles, to allow us to attain Puruṣārtha, the four goals of human life.


title: Chandi

text: The designation of Chandi or Chandika is used twenty-nine times in the Devi Mahatmya, which is agreed by many scholars to have had originated in Bengal, the primary seat of the Shakta or Goddess tradition and tantric sadhana since ancient times. It is the most common epithet used for the Goddess. In Devi Mahatmya, Chandi, Chandika, Ambika and Durga have been used synonymously.


title: Chandi

text: The basis for Chandi worship is found in the Devi Bhagavata as well as in the Markandeya Purana containing the well-known Saptashati. This narrates the three tales of Chandika fighting and destroying the evil forces in the forms of Madhu & Kaitabha, Dhumralochana, Chanda and Munda, Raktabeeja, Shumbha & Nishumbha, and Mahishasura. These stories are narrated in thirteen chapters in the form of seven hundred stanzas or half stanzas. Each of these is considered as an independent mantra, by repeating which one attains profound benefits.


title: Chandi

text: Goddess Chandi is associated with the nine-lettered Navakshari mantra that has its basis in the Devi Upanishad, one of the five Atharva Shirsha Upanishads. It is also called Navarna Mantra or Navavarna Mantra. Besides the Sri Vidhya mantras, it is one of the principal mantras in Shakti worship. It is customary to chant this mantra when chanting the Devi Mahatmya. She is supposed to live in a place called Mahakal, which is close to Kailasa


title: Chandi

text: Named after the goddess is the city of Chandigarh (literally: 'fort of Chandi'), the joint capital of the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana.


title: Chandi

text: Chandika is an avatar of Durga. The three principal forms of Durga worshipped are Mahagauri, Chandika and Aparajita. Of these, Chandika has two forms called Chandi and Chamunda who is created by the goddess Kaushiki for killing demons Chanda and Munda.


title: Chandi

text: She is known as the supreme goddess Mahishasuramardini or Durga who slayed the demon Mahishasura. She has been affiliated with and also considered as Katyayini, Kaushiki or Ambika who killed Shumbha, Nishumbha and their fellow demons. "The great Goddess was born from the energies of the male divinities when the devas became impotent in the long-drawn-out battle with the asuras. All the energies of the Gods became united and became supernova, throwing out flames in all directions. Then that unique light, pervading the Three Worlds with its lustre, combined into one, and became a female form."


title: Chandi

text: "Devi projected overwhelming omnipotence. The three-eyed goddess was adorned with the crescent moon. Her multiple arms held auspicious weapons and emblems, jewels and ornaments, garments and utensils, garlands and rosaries of beads, all offered by the gods. With her golden body blazing with the splendour of a thousand suns, seated on her lion vehicle, Chandi is one of the most spectacular of all personifications of Cosmic energy."


title: Chandi

text: In other scriptures, Chandi is portrayed as "assisting" Kali in her battle with the demon Raktabīja. Chandi wounded him, but a new demon sprang up from every drop of his blood that fell on the ground. By drinking Raktabīja's blood before it could reach the ground, Kali enabled Chandi to first destroy the armies of demons and finally kill Raktabīja himself. In Skanda Purana, this story is retold and another story of Mahakali killing demons Chanda and Munda is added. Authors Chitralekha Singh and Prem Nath says, "Narada Purana describes the powerful forms of Lakshmi as Durga, Kali , Bhadrakali, Chandi, Maheshwari, Lakshmi, Vaishnavi and Andreye".


title: Chandi

text: Chandi Homa is one of the most popular Homas in Hindu religion. It is performed across India during various festivals, especially during the Navaratri. Chandi Homa is performed by reciting verses from the Durga Sapthasathi and offering oblations into the sacrificial fire. It could also be accompanied by the Navakshari Mantra. Kumari Puja, Suvasini Puja also form a part of the ritual.


title: Chandi

text: The dhyana sloka preceding the Middle episode of Devi Mahatmya the iconographic details are given. The Goddess is described as having vermilion complexion, eighteen arms bearing string of beads, battle axe, mace, arrow, thunderbolt, lotus, bow, water-pot, cudgel, lance, sword, shield, conch, bell, wine-cup, trident, noose and the discus (sudarsana). She has a complexion of coral and is seated on a lotus. In some temples the images of Maha Kali, Maha Lakshmi, and Maha Saraswati are kept separately. The Goddess is also portrayed as four armed in many temples.


title: Chandi

text: As Purnachandi, she is visualised as both the essence as well as transcendence i.e. the Brahman; who is beyond Laghu Chandika, who is of the combined form of Parvati, Lakshmi and Saraswati as represented in Durga Saptashati of Markandeya Purana. As Purnachandi, she sports with her sixteen hands, sword, arrow, spear, shakti, chakra, mace, rosary, khartal, phalaka, karmuka, nagapasha, axe, damaru, skull, boon gesture and protection gesture.


title: Chandi

text: Chandi is one of the most popular folk deities in Bengal, and a number of poems and literary compositions in Bengali called "Chandi Mangala Kavyas" were written from 13th century to early 19th century.These had the effect of merging the local folk and tribal goddesses with mainstream


title: Chandi

text: Hinduism. The "Mangal kavyas" often associate Chandi with goddess Kali or Kalika and recognise her as a consort of Shiva and mother of Ganesha and Kartikeya, which are characteristics of goddesses like Parvati and Durga. The concept of Chandi as the supreme Goddess also underwent a change. The worship of the goddess became heterogeneous in nature.


title: Chandi

text: Chandi is associated with good fortune. Her auspicious forms like "Mangal Chandi", "Sankat Mangal Chandi", "Rana Chandi" bestow joy, riches, children, good hunting and victory in battles while other forms like "Olai Chandi" cure diseases like cholera, plague and cattle diseases.


title: Chandi

text: These are almost all village and tribal Goddesses with the name of the village or tribe being added onto the name Chandi. The most important of these Goddesses is Mongol Chandi who is worshipped in the entire state and also in Assam. Here the word "Mongol" means auspicious or benign.


title: Lost in Random

text: Lost in Random is an action-adventure video game developed by Zoink and published by Electronic Arts. Part of the EA Originals program, the game was released for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S in September 2021.


title: Lost in Random

text: In the Kingdom of Random, the fate of all individuals is decided by a cursed black die when they reach the age of 12. Even's sister, Odd, is abducted by the wicked Queen of Random. As Even journeys across the six realms of Random to rescue her sister, she meets Dicey, a sentient dice who has lost nearly all of its pips. In a world which is governed by game rules, Even will slowly understand the randomness of life with the help of Dicey.


title: Lost in Random

text: "Lost in Random" is an action-adventure game played from a third-person perspective. Combat happens in arenas that look like a game board. Players must roll Dicey in order to progress and Even will only be safe when she reaches the final piece on the board. In combat, the player can use Even's slingshot. While it does not damage enemies, opponents hit by her slingshot drop energy cubes which fuel Dicey. Once Dicey is fully fueled, players can roll it and time will be temporarily stopped. During this period, players can select the card they want to use, which is the only way to deal damage to enemies. There are five different types of cards (Weapon, Damage, Defense, Hazard, and Cheat), offering different gameplay advantages and combat abilities. For instance, one of the cards turns Dicey into an explosive cube, while another allows players to place traps. Cards can be earned through collecting coins. As players progress, new cards will be earned and they will recover Dicey's lost pips, which would enable Even to roll higher numbers during combat.


title: Lost in Random

text: The game also features light role-playing game elements. When Dicey and Even are exploring the Kingdom of Random, they will meet various non-playable characters. The game features a dialogue wheel which allows players to select dialogue options while conversing with NPCs.


title: Lost in Random

text: The game is developed by Swedish developer Zoink. According to Olov Redmalm, the game's creative director, "Lost in Random" was a homage to "dark fairy tales" and stop-motion animation. During the game's production, the team inspected the works of animation studio Laika, movies directed by Tim Burton, "Grimms' Fairy Tales", and the "Oddworld" series for inspirations. Each realm features its own visual design, with art style inspired by "The Nightmare Before Christmas", "Over the Garden Wall", and the works of Australian artist Shaun Tan. The game was penned by Ryan North, who had previously worked on "The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl" and the "Adventure Time" TV series. The game's soundtrack was composed by British composer Blake Robinson, who had previously worked on "Portal Knights" and "The Stanley Parable".


title: Lost in Random

text: Publisher Electronic Arts, which had partnered with Zoink previously with "Fe" (2017), announced the game at EA Play 2019. The game was an "EA Originals", a segment of EA's publishing aimed to help indie developers with financing and publishing of their titles to reach a wider audience without EA being as involved in the game's development, thus allowing the studio to take more of a share of sales revenues. The game competed for the inaugural Tribeca Games Award and was included as an official selection. The game was released on 10 September 2021 for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X and Series S.


title: Lost in Random

text: "Destructoid" praised each of the six realms, feeling that they were distinct from each other in non-visual ways, "Zoink does a good job of theming each world after its numerical, dice-based namesake. There’s an amusing logic to how each realm operates. Seeing those quirks play out as Even, a total newcomer, is pretty entertaining". "Rock Paper Shotgun" liked the atmosphere of Random's world, noting its Burtonian influences, "Everyone teeters on long spindly limbs, and they're either gremlins with upside down faces, or withered trees wearing top hats. They're all amusing too, with a few sending you on more original and fun side quests to break up the linear ride. I traded complicated words with an auntie catfish, for instance". "Game Informer" enjoyed how the combat system mixed real-time action with deck-building, feeling it was a completely unique take on both genres, "The system is genuinely creative, smoothly executed, and every layer works in tandem to create a unique experience". While criticizing the length of combat encounters, "IGN" felt the characters helped plot become more memorable, "Incredibly memorable characters like Mannie Dex, Seemore, Herman, Ooma, The Nanny, and so many others make moving to the next world kind of like watching the next movie in a 20-hour series of timeless holiday classics".


title: Lost in Random

text: "Kotaku" liked the game's side-quests, stating they often were hilarious, "I had a great time just poking my head into every nook and cranny of the various realms, looking for characters to talk to and side-quests to complete... The range of dialogue options and the ways in which they impact the game are yet another reason I had such a good time exploring and talking to everyone I met". "Nintendo World Report" disliked how long quests and combat encounters took to complete, "The biggest hurdle in Lost in Random is the pacing of the game. It frequently drags out quests and missions to a point where it can feel simply tedious to walk all the way across the town again to find a specific item".


title: Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score

text: Protein digestibility-corrected amino acid score (PDCAAS) is a method of evaluating the quality of a protein based on both the amino acid requirements of humans and their ability to digest it.


text: The PDCAAS rating was adopted by the US FDA and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations/World Health Organization (FAO/WHO) in 1993 as "the preferred 'best'" method to determine protein quality.


text: Using the PDCAAS method, the protein quality rankings are determined by comparing the amino acid profile of the specific food protein against a standard amino acid profile with the highest possible score being a 1.0. This score means, after digestion of the protein, it provides per unit of protein 100% or more of the indispensable amino acids required.


text: The formula for calculating the PDCAAS percentage is: (mg of limiting amino acid in 1 g of test protein / mg of same amino acid in 1 g of reference protein) x fecal true digestibility percentage.


text: The PDCAAS value is different from measuring the quality of protein from the protein efficiency ratio (PER) and the biological value (BV) methods. The PER was based upon the amino acid requirements of growing rats, which differ significantly from those of humans. The PDCAAS allows evaluation of food protein quality based on the needs of humans as it measures the quality of a protein based on the amino acid requirements (adjusted for digestibility) of a 2- to 5-year-old child (considered the most nutritionally demanding age group). The BV method uses nitrogen absorption as a basis. However, it does not take into account certain factors influencing the digestion of the protein and is of limited use for application to human protein requirements because what is measured is maximal potential of quality and not a true estimate of quality at requirement level. Nevertheless, BV can be used to assess requirements of protein derived from foods with known quality differences and measure the proportion of absorbed nitrogen which is retained and presumably used for protein synthesis as an accurate indicator for protein measurement.


text: The FDA gave two reasons for adopting the PDCAAS in 1993: 1) PDCAAS is based on human amino acid requirements, which makes it more appropriate for humans than a method based on the amino acid needs of animals. 2) The Food and Agricultural Organization/World Health Organization (FAO/WHO) had previously recommended PDCAAS for regulatory purposes.


text: Amino acids that move beyond the terminal ileum in the body are less likely to be absorbed for use in protein synthesis. They may pass out of the body or become absorbed by bacteria, thus appearing to have been digested instead of being present in the feces. The PDCAAS takes no account of where the proteins have been digested.


text: Similarly, amino acids that are lost due to antinutritional factors present in many foods are assumed to be digested according to the PDCAAS.


text: The PDCAAS method may also still be considered incomplete, since human diets, except in times of famine, almost never contain only one kind of protein. However, calculating the PDCAAS of a diet solely based on the PDCAAS of the individual constituents is impossible, because one food may provide an abundance of an amino acid that the other is missing, in which case the PDCAAS of the diet is higher than that of any one of the constituents. To arrive at the final result, all individual amino acids would have to be taken into account, though, so the PDCAAS of each constituent is largely useless.


text: For example, grain protein has a PDCAAS of about 0.4 to 0.5, limited by lysine. On the other hand, it contains more than enough methionine. White bean protein (and that of many other pulses) has a PDCAAS of 0.6 to 0.7, limited by methionine, and contains more than enough lysine. When both are eaten in roughly equal quantities in a diet, the PDCAAS of the combined constituent is 1.0, because each constituent's protein is complemented by the other.


text: A more extreme example would be the combination of gelatine (which contains virtually no tryptophan and thus has a PDCAAS of 0) with isolated tryptophan (which, lacking all other essential amino acids, also has a PDCAAS of 0). Despite individual scores of 0, the combination of both in adequate amounts has a positive PDCAAS, with the limiting amino acids isoleucine, threonine, and methionine. Further, according to a 2000 study by Gerjan Schaafsma, "The questions about the validity of the amino acid scoring pattern and the application of the true fecal rather than the true ileal digestibility correction, as well as the truncation of PDCAAS values warrant a critical evaluation of PDCAAS in its current form as a measure of protein quality in human diets." Also, the scientific community has raised critical questions about the validity of PDCAAS (the validity of the preschool-age child amino acid scoring pattern, the validity of the true fecal digestibility correction and the truncation of PDCAAS values to 100%).


text: In addition, the fact that four proteins, all with different amino acid profiles, receive identical scores of 1.0 limits its usefulness as a comparative tool. Since they have different compositions, it is natural to assume that they perform differently in the human body and should have different scores. In short, this method, however, gives no distinction of their performance relative to each other, because after they pass a certain point, they are all capped at 1.0 and receive an identical rating. This is because in 1990 at a FAO/WHO meeting, it was decided that proteins having values higher than 1.0 would be rounded or "leveled down" to 1.0 as scores above 1.0 are considered to indicate the protein contains essential amino acids in excess of the human requirements.


text: This reference pattern is based on the essential amino acid requirements for preschool children aged 1–3 years as published in Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids (2005). Adults aged 18+ will have slightly lower requirements.


text: A PDCAAS value of 1 is the highest, and 0 the lowest. The table shows the ratings of selected foods. (others)


title: André Masséna

text: André Masséna, Prince of Essling, Duke of Rivoli (born Andrea Massena; 6 May 1758 – 4 April 1817) was a French military commander during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. He was one of the original 18 Marshals of the Empire created by Napoleon I, with the nickname (the Dear Child of Victory).


title: André Masséna

text: Many of Napoleon's generals were trained at the finest French and European military academies, however Masséna was among those who achieved greatness without the benefit of formal education. While those of noble rank acquired their education and promotions as a matter of privilege, Masséna rose from humble origins to such prominence that Napoleon referred to him as "the greatest name of my military empire". His military career is equaled by few commanders in European history.


title: André Masséna

text: In addition to his battlefield successes, Masséna's leadership aided the careers of many. A majority of the French marshals of the time served under his command at some point.


title: André Masséna

text: André Masséna was born in Nice, which was then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, on 6 May 1758. He was the son of shopkeeper Jules Masséna (Giulio Massena), who became a wine merchant, and his wife Marguerite Fabre. André's father died in 1764, and after his mother remarried, he was sent to live with his father's relatives.


title: André Masséna

text: At the age of thirteen, Masséna became a cabin boy aboard a merchant ship. He sailed in the Mediterranean Sea and on two extended voyages to French Guiana. In 1775, after four years at sea, he returned to Nice and enlisted in the French Army as a private in the Royal Italian Regiment. By the time he left the service in 1789, Masséna had risen to the rank of warrant officer, the highest rank a non-noblemen could achieve. On 10 August that year, he married Anne Marie Rosalie Lamare, daughter of a surgeon in Antibes; they lived together in her home town. After a brief stint as a smuggler in Northern Italy, he rejoined the army in 1791 and was made an officer, rising to the rank of colonel by 1792.


title: André Masséna

text: When the French Revolutionary Wars broke out in April 1792, Masséna and his battalion were deployed to Piedmont along the Italian border. Masséna prepared his battalion for battle in the hope that it would be incorporated into the regular army. That October, a month after the occupation of Nice, the battalion was one of four volunteer battalions that became part of the French .


title: André Masséna

text: Masséna distinguished himself in battle and was quickly promoted, attaining the rank of (brigadier general) in August 1793 and (divisional general) that December. He was prominent in every campaign on the Italian Riviera over the next two years, including the attack on Saorgio in 1794 and the Battle of Loano in 1795. When Napoleon Bonaparte took command in March 1796, Masséna was commanding the two divisions of the army's advance guard.


title: André Masséna

text: During the campaign in Italy from 1796-1797, Masséna became one of Bonaparte's most important subordinates. He played a significant role in the battles of Montenotte and Dego in the spring, and took a leading role at the battles of Lonato, Castiglione, Bassano, Caldiero and Arcola in the summer and fall, as well as the Battle of Rivoli and the fall of Mantua that winter.


title: André Masséna

text: When an Austrian relief army was sent to aid Mantua in January 1797, the French forces were overrun near Rivoli, while other enemy columns advanced on Verona and Mantua. At 5:00 P.M. on 13 January, Masséna was ordered to march from Verona to Rivoli, fifteen miles away. Following a forced night march across the snow-covered roads, the first of his troops reached the battlefield at 6:00 A.M. Bonaparte deployed them on the left flank when the battle began. They were shifted to strengthen the sagging center and then deployed to crush an Austrian flanking maneuver. Masséna's troops played a decisive role in the victory. The next day, with very little rest, Masséna and his troops marched 39 miles in 24 hours to intercept a second Austrian army advancing to relieve Mantua. At "La Favorita", he closed the pincer on the Austrian army, forcing their surrender. In the space of five days, Masséna's division played a major role in an operation that left over 35,000 Austrian soldiers either dead or captured. Two weeks later, the 30,000-man garrison at Mantua surrendered. With his final victory complete, Napoleon praised Masséna with the name . The president of the Directory in Paris, Jean Rewbell, was also congratulatory: "The Executive Directory congratulates you, citizen general, for the new success that you have obtained against the enemies of the Republic. The brave division that you command has covered itself with glory in the three consecutive days that forced Mantua to capitulate, and the Directory is obliged to regard you among the most capable and useful generals of the Republic."


title: André Masséna

text: In 1799, Masséna was granted an important command in Switzerland, replacing General Charles Edward Jennings. As Russian reinforcements marched to support the Austrian armies in Italy and Switzerland, the Directory consolidated the remnants of the French armies under Masséna's command. With a force totaling approximately 90,000 men, Masséna was ordered to defend the entire frontier. He repulsed Archduke Charles's advance on Zurich in June, but retired from the city and took up positions in the surrounding mountains. He triumphed over the Russians under General Alexander Korsakov at the Second Battle of Zurich in September, then, aware of the advance of Russian general Alexander Suvorov toward St. Gotthard, quickly shifted his troops southward. General Claude Jacques Lecourbe's division delayed the Russians' entrance into Switzerland at Gotthard Pass, and when Suvorov finally forced his way through, he was met by units of General Jean-de-Dieu Soult's French division blocking the route at Altdorf. Unable to break through the French lines and aware of Korsakov's disastrous defeat, the Russian general turned east through the high and difficult Pragel Pass to Glarus where he was dismayed to find other French troops awaiting him on 4 October. In waist-deep snow, his troops attempted six times to break through the French lines along the Linth river, but each attack was beaten back. Suvorov had no alternative but to make his escape across the treacherous Panix Pass, abandoning his baggage and artillery and losing as many as 5,000 men. This, among other events, led to Russia's withdrawal from the Second Coalition.


title: André Masséna

text: In 1800, Masséna was besieged at Genoa in Italy by the Austrians, while Bonaparte marched with the Army of the Reserve to Milan. By the end of May, plague had spread throughout Genoa and the civilian population was in revolt. Negotiations were begun for the exchange of prisoners early in June, but the citizens and some of the garrison clamored for capitulation. Unknown to Masséna, the Austrian general Peter Ott had been ordered to raise the siege because Bonaparte had crossed Great St Bernard Pass and was now threatening the main Austrian army. Describing the situation at Genoa, Ott requested and received permission to continue the siege. On 4 June, with one day's rations remaining, Masséna's negotiator finally agreed to evacuate the French Army from Genoa. However, "if the word capitulation was mentioned or written", Masséna threatened to end all negotiations. Two days later, a few of the French left the city by sea, but the bulk of Masséna's starving and exhausted troops marched out of the city with all their equipment and followed the road along the coast toward France, ending the siege of almost 60 days. The siege was an astonishing demonstration of tenacity, ingenuity, courage, and daring that garnered additional laurels for Masséna and placed him in a category previously reserved for Bonaparte alone.


title: André Masséna

text: By forcing the Austrians to deploy vast forces against him at Genoa, Masséna made it possible for Bonaparte to cross Great St Bernard Pass, surprise the Austrians, and ultimately defeat General Michael von Melas's Austrian army at Marengo before sufficient reinforcements could be transferred from the siege site. Less than three weeks after the evacuation, Bonaparte wrote to Masséna, "I am not able to give you a greater mark of the confidence I have in you than by giving you command of the first army of the Republic [Army of Italy]." Even the Austrians recognized the significance of Masséna's defense; the Austrian chief of staff declared firmly, "You won the battle, not in front of Alessandria but in front of Genoa." Masséna was made commander of French forces in Italy, though he was later dismissed by Napoleon. Despite the praise, Napoleon also criticized Massena for capitulating too early in his memoirs, contrasting his actions with those of the Gauls under Vercingetorix when besieged by Julius Caesar in the Battle of Alesia.


title: André Masséna

text: Not until 1804 did Masséna regain Napoleon's trust. That year, he was made a Marshal of the Empire in May. He led an independent army that captured Verona and fought the Austrians at Verona and later, on 30 October 1805, Caldiero. Masséna was given control of operations against the Kingdom of Naples, and commanded the right wing of the Grand Army in Poland in 1807. He was granted his first ducal victory title as chief of Rivoli on 24 August 1808.


title: André Masséna

text: In 1804, he participated in the reorganization of French Freemasonry and became, in November, "grand representative of the grand master of the Supreme Council"; in this capacity, he is one of the negotiators of the concordat established between the Grand Orient de France and the Supreme Council. Under the Empire, he was a member of the Sainte Caroline lodge in Paris. He is also "worshipful of honor" in various Masonic lodges, such as "Les Frères Réunis" in Paris, "La Parfaite Amitié" in Toulon, "L'Étroite Union" in Thouars or "Les Vrais Amis Réunis" in Nice.


title: André Masséna

text: In 1808, Masséna was accidentally shot during a hunting expedition with the imperial suite. It is unclear as to whether he was shot by Napoleon himself or by Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier, but he lost the use of one eye as a result.


title: André Masséna

text: It was not until 1809 that he returned to active service, this time against the forces of the Fifth Coalition. At the beginning of the campaign, Masséna led the IV Corps at the battles of Eckmühl and Ebersberg. Later in the war, when Napoleon tried to cross to the north bank of the Danube at the Battle of Aspern-Essling, Masséna's troops hung onto the village of Aspern through two days of savage fighting. He was rewarded on 31 January 1810 with a second, now princely, victory title, Prince of Essling, for his efforts there and in the Battle of Wagram.


title: André Masséna

text: During the Peninsular War, Napoleon appointed Masséna as Commander of the Army of Portugal in 1810. Masséna captured Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida after successful sieges, but suffered a setback at the hands of the Duke of Wellington's Anglo-Portuguese army at Buçaco on 27 September. Pressing on, he forced the allies to retreat into the Lines of Torres Vedras, where a stalemate ensued for several months. Finally forced to retreat due to lack of food and supplies, Masséna withdrew to the Spanish frontier, allegedly prompting Napoleon to comment, "So, Prince of Essling, you are no longer Masséna." After suffering defeats at the battles of Sabugal and Fuentes de Oñoro, he was replaced by Marshal Auguste de Marmont and did not serve again, becoming a local commander at Marseille.


title: André Masséna

text: Masséna retained briefly his command after the restoration of King Louis XVIII until he was removed for his background. When Napoleon returned from exile the following year, Masséna took Napoleon's side once again, and was awarded as a Peer of France but remained as a local commander. The day after Napoleon's second abdication on 22 June 1815, he was named head of the National Guard in Paris by the Provisional Government, but was soon replaced upon the return of the Bourbons. He was disinclined to prove his royalist loyalties after the defeat of Napoleon, and was also a member of the court-martial that refused to try Marshal Michel Ney. Masséna died in Paris in 1817 and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery, in a tomb he shares with his son-in-law Honoré Charles Reille.


title: André Masséna

text: Masséna's wife stayed at their home in Antibes during his campaigns. Their first child, Marie Anne Elisabeth, was born on 8 July 1790, but died only four years later. Their first son Jacques Prosper, born 25 June 1793, inherited his father's title as 2nd Prince of Essling on 3 July 1818. Victoire Thècle was born on 28 September 1794 and married Honoré Charles Reille on 12 September 1814. François Victor, born on 2 April 1799, became 2nd Duke of Rivoli, 3rd Prince of Essling, and married Anne Debelle on 19 April 1823.


title: André Masséna

text: Masséna is the namesake of one of the Boulevards of the Marshals that circle Paris, having also a bridge named after him.


title: André Masséna

text: The village of Massena in New York was settled by French lumbermen in the early 19th century and named in Masséna's honor. Massena, Iowa, also in the United States and in turn named for the community in New York, honors Masséna with a portrait of him in Centennial Park. His birthplace, Nice, is the location of Place Masséna, also named after him.


title: Village Roadshow

text: Village Roadshow Limited is an Australian company which operates cinemas and theme parks, and produces and distributes films. Before being acquired by private equity company BGH Capital, the company was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and majority owned by Village Roadshow Corporation, with members of founder Roc Kirby's family in the top roles.


title: Village Roadshow

text: Village Roadshow originally started operations as Village Drive-Ins (later known as "Village Drive-ins and Cinemas" before becoming today's "Village Cinemas" brand), in 1954, when founder Roc Kirby began running one of Australia's first drive-in cinemas in the Melbourne suburb of Croydon. The drive-in was adjacent to a shopping strip called "Croydon Village"; hence the company adopted the "Village" name. The company later expanded into traditional cinemas in major areas, though it still operates the "Coburg Drive-In" in Coburg, Melbourne.


title: Village Roadshow

text: In the 1960s, the company expanded to start its film distribution business (once a 50-50 joint venture with Greater Union) and moved into film production in the 1970s. The original cinema chain now became one of several businesses the company was involved in.


title: Village Roadshow

text: In the 1980s, Village Roadshow was one of the leading forces in creating state of the art multiplex cinema complexes. Innovations brought in during this period included using stadium-style seating, sophisticated sound systems and the latest in projection technologies. The cinemas of that era were the forerunners to the multiplexes of today. It was expanded ibn 1987 when it signed a partnership with rival cinema chain Greater Union to see 200 screens expanded to their circuits by 1990 and having both companies to develop $100 million in their equipment.


title: Village Roadshow

text: The venture was expanded in September 1987 when Roadshow and Greater Union agreed to combine the existing Roadshow Distributors theatrical branch with Greater Union's own theatrical branch, Greater Union Film Distributors to set up new separate-branding labels, Roadshow Greater Union Distributors and Greater Union Distributors, and RGUD continue to handle the existing suppliers, which included Warner Bros, Orion Pictures and New World Pictures.


title: Village Roadshow

text: In 1988, Village Roadshow took over De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, which brought on a change of name: Village Roadshow Limited. This allowed the company to raise more capital to fund further expansion.


title: Village Roadshow

text: In the 1990s, the company diversified into complementary media and entertainment businesses. This included the purchase and development of theme parks, the purchase and integration of the Triple M and Today radio networks to create Austereo, the creation of Roadshow Music, the creation of Village Roadshow Pictures, and the commencement of a co-production deal with Warner Bros.


title: Village Roadshow

text: Village Roadshow has scaled back its international cinema markets to Australia and Singapore. The company merged its Village Roadshow Pictures arm with Concord Music Group to form a Los Angeles-based diversified entertainment division, Village Roadshow Entertainment Group.


title: Village Roadshow

text: In 2003, the company formed a joint venture, Australian Theatres, with Amalgamated Holdings Limited, owners of Greater Union and several other cinema brands. The original founding business, Village Cinemas, is part of the joint venture.


title: Village Roadshow

text: In 2008, Village Roadshow and Concord Music Group, co-owned by television producer Norman Lear, said they had completed a merger forming a new company to exploit their film and music assets. Investors in the new company include Lambert Entertainment and private equity firms Tailwind Capital Partners and Clarity Partners. However, on 25 March 2013, Wood Creek Capital led investor group purchased Concord Music Group from Village Roadshow Entertainment Group.


title: Village Roadshow

text: In late 2019, company veteran Graham Burke stepped down as CEO and became a non-executive director, with Clark Kirby his successor as CEO.


title: Village Roadshow

text: In 2020, Village Roadshow was in talks with private equity firm BGH Capital about a takeover offer. The offer was lowered after the COVID-19 pandemic closed theme parks and cinemas.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: The Ruwenzori, also spelled Rwenzori and Rwenjura, are a range of mountains in eastern equatorial Africa, located on the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The highest peak of the Ruwenzori reaches , and the range's upper regions are permanently snow-capped and glaciated. Rivers fed by mountain streams form one of the sources of the Nile. Because of this, European explorers linked the Ruwenzori with the legendary Mountains of the Moon, claimed by the Greek scholar Ptolemy as the source of the Nile. Virunga National Park in eastern DR Congo and Rwenzori Mountains National Park in southwestern Uganda are located within the range.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: The mountains formed about three million years ago in the late Pliocene epoch and are the result of an uplifted block of crystalline rocks including gneiss, amphibolite, granite and quartzite.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: This uplift divided the paleolake Obweruka and created three of the present-day African Great Lakes: Lake Albert, Lake Edward, and Lake George.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: The range is about long and wide. It consists of six massifs separated by deep gorges: Mount Stanley (), Mount Speke (), Mount Baker (), Mount Emin (), Mount Gessi () and Mount Luigi di Savoia (). Mount Stanley has several subsidiary summits, with Margherita Peak being the highest point.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: The mountains are occasionally identified with the legendary "Mountains of the Moon", described in antiquity as the source of the Nile River. Modern European explorers observed the range beginning in the late nineteenth century, with Samuel Baker reporting what he called the "Blue Mountains" looming in the distance in 1864, and Henry M. Stanley visiting the range in 1875 and 1888, when he recorded the name as "Ruwenzori".


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: In 1906, the Duke of Abruzzi mounted an expedition to the Ruwenzori, the account of which was subsequently published by Filippo De Filippi. The expedition scaled the highest peaks of the range, several of which were named by the duke, while Mount Luigi di Savoia was named in his honour. Accompanying the duke was photographer Vittorio Sella, who had previously visited the mountains. His photographs of the glaciers and moraines of the Ruwenzori demonstrated that the glaciers were already in retreat. Sella's photographic work is conserved at the Museo Nazionale della Montagna in Turin and at the Istituto di Fotografia Alpina Vittorio Sella in Biella, both in Italy. The Makerere University, Uganda, also has a selection of his images.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: The first traverse of the six massifs of the Ruwenzori was done in 1975, starting on 27 January and ending on 13 February. The traverse was done by Polish climbers Janusz Chalecki, Stanisław Cholewa and Leszek Czarnecki, with Mirosław Kuraś accompanying them on the last half of the traverse.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: Since Uganda's independence from the British Empire, the Rwenzori Mountains have repeatedly become sanctuaries to rebel groups. The secessionist Rwenzururu movement fought an insurgency in the mountains in the 1960s. In course of the Ugandan Bush War, the Rwenzururu movement reemerged and continued its struggle until signing a peace deal with Ugandan President Milton Obote's government. In the Bush War's later stages, the National Resistance Army (NRA) rebel force operated in the mountains. After the NRA seized power in Uganda in 1986, another civil war broke out. This time, the Rwenzori Mountains hosted the bases of the National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU) and the "Partie de Liberation Congolaise" (PLC), an anti-Mobutu rebel group. In the early 1990s, a Congolese rebel group known as the National Council of Resistance for Democracy ("Conseil National de Résistance pour la Démocratie", CNRD) led by André Kisase Ngandu began to wage an insurgency against Mobutu from the Rwenzori Mountains.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: Militias aligned with the old Rwenzururu movement's ideology occupied the Rwenzori Mountains from 1997 to June 2001. In 2020, after being defeated across the border by the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, some elements of the Allied Democratic Forces moved into the Rwenzori Mountains.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: The Ruwenzori are known for their vegetation, ranging from tropical rainforest through alpine meadows to snow. The range supports its own species and varieties of giant groundsel and giant lobelia and even has a tall heather covered in moss that lives on one of its peaks. Most of the range is now a World Heritage Site and is covered jointly by Rwenzori Mountains National Park in southwestern Uganda and the Virunga National Park in the eastern Congo.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: There is no water shortage in the Ruwenzori; yet, several members of the afro-alpine family resemble species that normally thrive in desert climates. The reason lies in their similar water economy. Water is not always readily available to the afroalpine plants when they need it. In addition, nightly frosts affect the sap transport in the plants and the intake of water by its roots. As the day begins, the air temperature and radiation level rise rapidly, putting strenuous demands on the exposed parts of the plants as they try to meet the transpiration demands of the leaves and maintain a proper water balance. To counter the effects of freezing, the afro-alpine plants have developed the insulation systems that give them such a striking appearance. These adaptations become more prominent as the elevation increases.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: There are five overlapping vegetation zones in the Ruwenzori: the evergreen forest zone (up to ); the bamboo zone (); the heather zone (); the alpine zone (); and, the nival zone (). At higher elevations, some plants reach an unusually large size, such as lobelia and groundsels. The vegetation in the Ruwenzori is unique to equatorial alpine Africa.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: An ongoing concern is the impact of climate change on the Ruwenzori's glaciers. In 1906, forty-three named glaciers were distributed over six mountains with a total area of , about half the total glacier area in Africa. By 2005, less than half of these were still present, on only three mountains, with an area of about . Recent scientific studies, such as those by Richard Taylor of University College London, have attributed this retreat to global climate change and have investigated the impact of this change on the mountain's vegetation and biodiversity. In 2012 Klaus Thymann lead an expedition with the environmental charity Project Pressure creating comparative photographs to visually document the glacier recession, the findings were published in global media including The Guardian.


title: Rwenzori Mountains

text: The alteration can be seen in comparative images. As the temperature rises and the glaciers recede, vegetation slowly creeps up the mountain.


title: Across 110th Street

text: Across 110th Street is a 1972 American action-crime film directed by Barry Shear and starring Yaphet Kotto, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Franciosa and Paul Benjamin. The film is set in Harlem and takes its name from 110th Street, the traditional dividing line between Harlem and Central Park that functioned as an informal boundary of race and class in 1970s New York City.


title: Across 110th Street

text: Focusing on a heist, murder and a subsequent investigation, "Across 110th Street" takes inspiration from both the blaxploitation films of the 1970s as well as the film noir genre. "Across 110th Street" is remembered in part for its soundtrack, which features a classic song of the same name by Bobby Womack.


title: Across 110th Street

text: Jim Harris goes with his partners to steal $300,000 from a Mafia-controlled policy bank in Harlem, disguised as police officers. The robbery goes wrong and results in the deaths of seven men — three black gangsters, two members of the Mafia, and two police officers. Lieutenant William Pope, a straitlaced black police officer is assigned to work the case with aging Captain Frank Mattelli, a streetwise but aging Italian-American cop.


title: Across 110th Street

text: Although Lieutenant Pope works strictly by the book and states that he is in charge of the investigation, he struggles to restrain Mattelli, who receives money from Doc Johnson, the leader of black organized crime in Harlem. Over the course of roughly twenty-four hours, Pope and Mattelli race to get to the criminals before they can be hunted down by the Mafia, which is also searching for Harris’ crew. The Italians are led by Nick DiSalvio, a savage capo who plans to torture the robbers, when he finds them, to deter others from trying what they did.


title: Across 110th Street

text: Anthony Quinn, who also served as executive producer, originally wanted John Wayne and then Kirk Douglas for the lead role of Captain Mattelli. Both passed, as did Burt Lancaster, leaving Quinn to take the part. Additionally, he hoped to get Sidney Poitier to play Lt. Pope. Upon hearing the news, Harlem residents disagreed with the choice, claiming Poitier was too Hollywood and not urban enough for the role. Quinn relented, and Yaphet Kotto was chosen to play Pope.


title: Across 110th Street

text: When planning the film, director Barry Shear was adamant that only by filming in real locations could he bring a suitably raw and genuine feel to its themes of gang warfare and bloody street violence. Hollywood colleagues warned him that New York was the worst city in which to film, due to labor costs and permit nightmares, and Harlem the worst part of New York, due to its status at that time as the most lawless ghetto in the US. Undeterred, Shear took on Fouad Said, an unrivalled expert in location shooting, as a co-producer.


title: Across 110th Street

text: Said had cut his teeth as a cameraman on the TV series I Spy, which broke new ground for American television by mixing studio work with location footage shot all over the world; a feat made possible by abandoning the ubiquitous but unwieldy Mitchell cameras of the day in favor of the lightweight Arriflex 35 IIC. Said found out during principal photography that the first production model of the much-anticipated and groundbreaking Arriflex 35BL camera had just arrived in New York. Having established a long and successful relationship with ARRI over the I Spy years, Said persuaded Volker Bahnemann, at that time Vice President of the ARRI division in America, to allow his Across 110th Street crew one week to try out the 35BL, the first time the camera was used on a motion picture.


title: Across 110th Street

text: The camera immediately revolutionized what they were able to achieve on the streets of Harlem. It was self-blimped and featured a dual-compartment coaxial magazine positioned at its rear, for perfectly shoulder-balanced handheld shooting. “It’s a real winner,” affirmed cinematographer Jack Priestley ASC at the time. “It’s as quiet as a church mouse and has great flexibility, especially as it weighs only 33 lbs. I don’t know what I would have done in a lot of spots without it, especially in those small rooms where we often had to shoot. You put it on your shoulder and walk around, bend down, sit down, hold it in your lap—everything. I think it’s going to help the film industry tremendously.”


title: Across 110th Street

text: One week with the 35BL proved it to be such a valuable tool that Said negotiated keeping the camera for the last four weeks of filming. Camera operator Sol Negrin, later to become a respected cinematographer and ASC member, reported of the 35BL: “It was used in major sound sequences shot in confined quarters where it was impossible to use a large camera, but where we needed portability and quietness. We also used it on the rooftops of buildings in Little Italy—buildings that had no elevators. The low noise level of the Arriflex 35BL permits shooting sound sequences in confined quarters, thus eliminating the post-dubbing of dialogue that is usually necessary under such conditions.”


title: Across 110th Street

text: A combination of Fouad Said's radical location skills and ARRI's groundbreaking technology allowed Shear's dream of a realistic backdrop for his story to be accomplished. A staggering 95% of the movie was shot at a total of 60 different interior and exterior locations in Harlem.


title: Across 110th Street

text: The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time when racial tensions ran deep, and often exploded into riots. In the summer of 1964, a riot erupted in Harlem after a white off-duty police officer shot and killed an armed black teenager in Yorkville, Manhattan. The “hot summer” of 1967 saw riots rip through the country, in major cities throughout the West and the North, as black communities responded in anger to poverty and police brutality. In 1968, just three years before the release of "Across 110th Street", numerous businesses and storefronts in Harlem were set on fire as residents reacted in frustration and grief after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.


title: Across 110th Street

text: The 1970s were also a time when feelings of black power were everywhere in African-American communities across the United States. The black power ethos seeped even into the underworld of organized crime, as evident in "Across 110th Street", where black gangsters like Doc Johnson are coming to believe that black people should control the organized crime circuits within their neighborhoods rather than the racist Mafia bosses.


title: Across 110th Street

text: "Across 110th" Street portrays New York City of the 1970s, a decade when crime, drug use and poverty was at an all-time high. The city economy was broke, its infrastructure crumbling and pimps and prostitutes filled Times Square. Harlem itself was a place of little opportunity. Middle class residents fled the neighborhood in large numbers, leaving the poor to abandoned buildings and empty storefronts. Burned out buildings were visible on nearly every block of Harlem's major avenues, 24% of the area's population was living on welfare, and between 1976 and 1978 the population of east and central Harlem fell by almost a third. In 1971, an estimated 60% of Harlem's economic activity depended on cash flow from gambling — the illegal “numbers” racket controlled by organized crime.


title: Across 110th Street

text: During a potent scene in the film, Jim Harris explains to his girlfriend why he was forced to turn to robbery to make ends meet. As a middle-aged black man, formerly incarcerated, with a health problem and no formal education or highly-paid skills, Harris’ only options are to work a demeaning, low-paying job with no future or to turn to crime. Even the cop Mattelli justifies the bribes he receives as supplemental income for his meager wages as a police officer.


title: Across 110th Street

text: Among contemporary reviews, Roger Greenspun of "The New York Times" wrote "It manages at once to be unfair to blacks, vicious towards whites and insulting to anyone who feels that race relations might consist of something better than improvised genocide ... By the time it is over virtually everybody has been killed—by various means, but mostly by a machine gun that makes lots of noise and splatters lots of blood and probably serves as the nearest substitute for an identifiable hero." "Variety" wrote that the film "is not for the squeamish. From the beginning it is a virtual blood bath. Those portions of it which aren't bloody violent are filled in by the squalid location sites in New York's Harlem or equally unappealing ghetto areas leaving no relief from depression and oppression. There's not even a glamorous or romantic type character or angle for audiences to fantasy-empathize with."


title: Across 110th Street

text: Gene Siskel gave the film one-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote "The film breaks no new ground, remaining content to combine familiar elements from 'In the Heat of the Night' (modern black cop vs. traditional white cop) and at least a half-dozen urban melodramas in which Italians and blacks go at each other with guns and mouths blazing." Gary Arnold of "The Washington Post" slammed the film as "a crime melodrama at once so tacky and so brutal that one feels tempted to swear out a warrant for the arrest of the filmmakers." Kevin Thomas of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote that the film "self-destructs by consistently selling out to stomach-churning displays of unrelieved violence... that the grisliness depicted so graphically in 'Across 110th Street' is true to life is undisputable; it's the manner and extent of its depiction on the screen that's deplorable."


title: Across 110th Street

text: In 1973, veteran black Chicago journalist Lu Palmer opened his alternative newspaper "Black X-Press Info Paper" with a review of "Across 110th Street". He reflected that the film was particularly thoughtful and well-acted compared to many other low-budget blaxploitation pictures of the era and noted that “this flick ought to be carefully studied — again, for its images and messages.”


title: Across 110th Street

text: The soundtrack of "Across 110th Street" reflects the mood and historical context of the film. The songs were written and performed by Bobby Womack, while the score was composed and conducted by J. J. Johnson. Made up of gritty and brooding funk, the soundtrack echoes the dark themes and imagery of the film.


title: Across 110th Street

text: The critically praised title song was a No. 19 hit on the "Billboard" Hot Soul Singles chart in 1973 and was later featured in Quentin Tarantino's 1997 blaxploitation homage "Jackie Brown". Its lyrics reflect the broader themes of impoverishment and desperation in the film, where characters feel beaten down by poverty and must do whatever it takes to stay alive.


title: Paul Celan

text: Paul Celan (; ; 23 November 1920 – c. 20 April 1970) was a Romanian-born German-language poet and translator. He was born as Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Cernăuți (German: Czernowitz), in the then Kingdom of Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), and adopted the pseudonym "Paul Celan". He became one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era.


title: Paul Celan

text: Celan was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernăuți, Bukovina, a region then part of Romania and earlier part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (when his birthplace was known as Czernowitz). His first home was in the Wassilkogasse in Cernăuți. His father, Leo Antschel, was a Zionist who advocated his son's education in Hebrew at the Jewish school "Safah Ivriah" (meaning "the Hebrew language").


title: Paul Celan

text: Celan's mother, Fritzi, was an avid reader of German literature who insisted German be the language of the house. In his teens Celan became active in Jewish Socialist organizations and fostered support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. His earliest known poem is titled "Mother's Day 1938".


title: Paul Celan

text: Paul attended the Liceul Ortodox de Băieți No. 1 (Boys' Orthodox Secondary School No. 1) from 1930 until 1935, Liceul de Băieți No. 2 în Cernăuți (Boys' Secondary School No. 2 in Cernăuți) from 1935 to 1936, followed by the Liceul Marele Voievod Mihai (Great Prince Mihai Preparatory School, now Chernivtsi School No. 5), where he studied from 1936 until graduating in 1938. At this time Celan secretly began to write poetry.


title: Paul Celan

text: In 1938 Celan traveled to Tours, France, to study medicine. The Anschluss precluded his study in Vienna, and Romanian schools were harder to get into due to the newly imposed Jewish quota. His journey to France took him through Berlin as the events of "Kristallnacht" unfolded, and also introduced him to his uncle, Bruno Schrager, who was later among the French detainees murdered at Birkenau. Celan returned to Cernăuţi in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages.


title: Paul Celan

text: Following the Soviet occupation of Bukovina in June 1940, deportations to Siberia started. A year later, following the reconquest by Romania, Nazi Germany and the then-fascist Romanian regime brought ghettos, internment, and forced labour (see Romania in World War II).


title: Paul Celan

text: On arrival in Cernăuți in July 1941, the German SS "Einsatzkommando" and their Romanian allies set the city's Great Synagogue on fire. In October, the Romanians deported a large number of Jews after forcing them into a ghetto, where Celan translated Shakespeare's sonnets and continued to write his own poetry. Before the ghetto was dissolved in the fall of that year, Celan was pressed into labor, first clearing the debris of a demolished post office, and then gathering and destroying Russian books.


title: Paul Celan

text: The local mayor, Traian Popovici, strove to mitigate the harsh circumstances, until the governor of Bukovina had the Jews rounded up and deported, starting on a Saturday night in June 1942. Celan hoped to convince his parents to leave the country so as to escape certain persecution. While Celan was away from home, on 21 June 1942, his parents were taken from their home and sent by train to an internment camp in Transnistria Governorate, where two-thirds of the deportees eventually perished. Celan's father likely perished of typhus and his mother was shot after being exhausted by forced labour. Later that year, after being taken to a labour camp in Romania, Celan would receive reports of his parents' deaths.


title: Paul Celan

text: Celan remained imprisoned in a work-camp until February 1944, when the Red Army's advance forced the Romanians to abandon the camps, whereupon he returned to Cernăuţi shortly before the Soviets returned. There, he worked briefly as a nurse in the mental hospital. Friends from this period recall Celan expressing immense guilt over his separation from his parents, whom he had tried to convince to go into hiding prior to the deportations, shortly before their deaths.


title: Paul Celan

text: Considering emigration to Palestine, Celan left Cernăuţi in 1945 for Bucharest, where he remained until 1947. He was active in the Jewish literary community as both a translator of Russian literature into Romanian, and as a poet, publishing his work under a variety of pseudonyms. The literary scene of the time was richly populated with surrealists – Gellu Naum, Ilarie Voronca, Gherasim Luca, Paul Păun, and Dolfi Trostand it was in this period that Celan developed pseudonyms both for himself and his friends, including the one he took as his pen name. Here he also met with the poets Rose Ausländer and , elements of whose works he would reuse in his poem "Todesfuge" (1944–45).


title: Paul Celan

text: A version of Celan's poem "Todesfuge" appeared as "" ("Death Tango") in a Romanian translation of May 1947. Additional remarks were published explaining that the dancing and musical performances evoked in the poem were images of realities of the extermination camp life.


title: Paul Celan

text: On the emergence of the communist regime in Romania, Celan fled Romania for Vienna, Austria. It was there that he befriended Ingeborg Bachmann, who had just completed a dissertation on Martin Heidegger. Facing a city divided between occupying powers and with little resemblance to the mythic capital it once was, which had harboured the (now) shattered Austro-Hungarian Jewish community, he moved to Paris in 1948. In that year his first poetry collection, "Der Sand aus den Urnen" ("Sand from the Urns"), was published in Vienna by A. Sexl. His first few years in Paris were marked by intense feelings of loneliness and isolation, as expressed in letters to his colleagues, including his longtime friend from Cernăuţi, Petre Solomon. It was also during this time that he exchanged many letters with Diet Kloos, a young Dutch singer and anti-Nazi resister who saw her husband of a few months tortured to death. She visited Celan twice in Paris between 1949 and 1951.


title: Paul Celan

text: In 1952, Celan's writing began to gain recognition when he read his poetry on his first reading trip to Germany where he was invited to read at the semiannual meetings of Group 47. At their May meeting he read his poem "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"), a depiction of concentration camp life. When Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom Celan had an affair, won the group's prize for her collection "" ("The Extended Hours"), Celan (whose work had received only six votes) said "After the meeting, only six people remembered my name". He did not attend any other meeting of the group.


title: Paul Celan

text: In November 1951, he met the graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange, in Paris. He sent her many love letters, influenced by Franz Kafka's correspondence with Milena Jesenská and Felice Bauer. They married on 21 December 1952, despite the opposition of her aristocratic family. During the following 18 years they wrote over 700 letters; amongst the active correspondents of Celan were Hermann Lenz and his wife, Hanne. He made his living as a translator and lecturer in German at the École normale supérieure. He was a close friend of Nelly Sachs, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature.


title: Paul Celan

text: Celan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris. Celan's sense of persecution increased after the widow of a friend, the French-German poet Yvan Goll, unjustly accused him of having plagiarised her husband's work. Celan was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960.


title: Paul Celan

text: The death of his parents and the experience of the Shoah (The Holocaust) are defining forces in Celan's poetry and his use of language. In his Bremen Prize speech, Celan said of language after Auschwitz that:


title: Paul Celan

text: Celan also said: "There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German."


title: Paul Celan

text: His most famous poem, the early "Todesfuge", is a work of great complexity and power, which may have drawn some key motifs from the poem "ER" by , another Czernovitz poet. The characters of Margarete and Sulamith, with their respectively golden and ashen hair, can be interpreted as a reflection of Celan's Jewish-German culture, while the blue-eyed "Master from Germany" embodies German Nazism.


title: Paul Celan

text: In later years his poetry became progressively more cryptic, fractured and monosyllabic, bearing comparison to the music of Anton Webern. He also increased his use of German neologisms, especially in his later works "Fadensonnen" ("Threadsuns") and "Lichtzwang". In the eyes of some, Celan attempted in his poetry either to destroy or remake the German language. For others, he retained a sense for the lyricism of the German language which was rare in writers of that time. As he writes in a letter to his wife Gisèle Lestrange on one of his trips to Germany: "The German I talk is not the same as the language the German people are talking here". Writing in German was a way for him to think back and remember his parents, particularly his mother, from whom he had learned the language. This is underlined in "" (Lupin), a poem in which Paul Celan addresses his mother. The urgency and power of Celan's work stem from his attempt to find words "after", to bear (impossible) witness in a language that gives back no words "for that which happened".


title: Paul Celan

text: In addition to writing poetry (in German and, earlier, in Romanian), he was an extremely active translator and polyglot, translating literature from Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, and English into German.


title: Paul Celan

text: Based on the reception of his work, it could be suggested that Celan, along with Goethe, Hölderlin and Rilke, is one of the most significant German poets who ever lived. Despite the difficulty of his work, his poetry is thoroughly researched, the total number of scholarly papers numbering in the thousands. Many contemporary philosophers, including Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer and others have devoted at least one of their books to his writing.


title: Paul Celan

text: Celan's poetry has been translated into English, with many of the volumes being bilingual. The most comprehensive collections are from John Felstiner, Pierre Joris, and Michael Hamburger, who revised his translations of Celan over a period of two decades. Susan H. Gillespie and Ian Fairley have released English translations.


title: Paul Celan

text: About translating David Rokeah from Hebrew, Celan wrote: "David Rokeah was here for two days, I have translated two poems for him, mediocre stuff, and given him comments on other German translation, suggested improvements ... I was glad, probably in the wrong place, to be able to decipher and translate a Hebrew text."


title: Emerging power

text: An emerging power or rising power is a state or union of states with significant rising influence in global affairs. Such a power aspires to have a more powerful position or role in international relations, either regionally or globally, and possess sufficient resources and levels of development that such goals are potentially achievable.


title: Emerging power

text: There are few available conceptualizations of the term "emerging power". Therefore, there is no standard or agreed method to decide which states are emerging powers. However, a fundamental characteristic of an emerging power is that it is also an emerging economy, being that economic development is necessary and preliminary to political and military emergence. It has been argued that while a country may be an emerging power, it is above anything else an emerging economy with only the potential or hope of increasing their global influence. This is because of several limiting factors, largely the seven dimensions of state power: geography, population, economy, resources, military, diplomacy, and national identity. Traditionally, only great powers or superpowers have succeeded in all seven dimensions of state power.


title: Emerging power

text: The BRICS are often cited as being emerging powers, but at varying stages of development and of varying degrees of potential. For example, Russia, which was once a superpower, is now re-emerging in some aspects of state power following the fall of the Soviet Union. China and India are emerging as potential superpowers, while Brazil is emerging as a possible great power.


title: Emerging power

text: Although there is no exact and agreed upon definition of what constitutes an emerging power, the term has sometimes been also applied to the following other countries:


title: Misha and the Wolves

text: Misha and the Wolves is a 2021 documentary film written and directed by Sam Hobkinson. The film examines the fraudulent 1997 Holocaust memoir of Misha Defonseca.


title: Misha and the Wolves

text: The film premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on January 31, 2021. On August 11, 2021, it became available on Netflix.


title: Misha and the Wolves

text: After Defonseca's memoir, titled "", became a global success, her publisher began to question its veracity.


title: Misha and the Wolves

text: The website's critics consensus reads, "A stranger-than-fiction account of a too-incredible-to-be-true story, "Misha and the Wolves" is an engaging documentary wrapped in a thrilling mystery."