title: Stanley Donen

text: While living in England, Donen became an admirer of the British stage revue "Beyond the Fringe" and wished to work with two of the show's participants, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. The resulting film was "Bedazzled" (1967), an updated version of the Faust legend. It was written by Cook with music by Moore, and also starred Eleanor Bron and Raquel Welch. Moore plays a lonely young man whose unrequited love of his co-worker (Bron) drives him to attempt suicide. Just then the devil (Cook) appears and offers him seven wishes in exchange for his soul. The film's fun-loving association with the Swinging London of the 1960s divided critics, but Roger Ebert called its satire "barbed and contemporary ... dry and understated", and overall, a "magnificently photographed, intelligent, very funny film." On the other hand, "Time" magazine called it the feeblest of all known variations on the Faust theme. The film was a hit and was especially popular among American college students. Donen considered it a favorite among his own films and called it "a very personal film in that I said a great deal about what I think is important in life." It was remade as "Bedazzled" (2000) by director Harold Ramis.


title: Stanley Donen

text: "Staircase" (1969) is Donen's adaptation of the autobiographical stage play by Charles Dyer with music by Dudley Moore. Rex Harrison and Richard Burton star as a middle-aged gay couple who run a London barber shop and live together in a "bad marriage". The film was shot in Paris for tax purposes and was not a financial success. It received poor reviews upon release, but was re-evaluated by film critic Armond White in 2007. He called the film "a rare Hollywood movie to depict gay experience with wisdom, humor and warmth", and "a lost treasure".


title: Stanley Donen

text: After Donen's marriage to Adelle Beatty ended, he moved back to Hollywood in 1970. Producer Robert Evans asked Donen to direct an adaptation of the beloved children's book "The Little Prince" first published in 1943. Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe wrote the music and screenplay and filming was done on location in Tunisia. "The Little Prince" (1974) stars Steven Warner in the title role, with Richard Kiley, Bob Fosse, Gene Wilder and Donna McKechnie. It was Donen's first musical film since "Damn Yankees!" Although it contained very little dancing, Fosse choreographed his own dance scenes as the snake. Lerner stated that Donen "took it upon himself to change every tempo, delete musical phrases at will and distort the intention of every song until the entire score was unrecognizable". It was released in 1974 and was a financial disaster.


title: Stanley Donen

text: Donen's next film was "Lucky Lady" (1975), starring Liza Minnelli, Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds. Minnelli plays a Prohibition era bootlegger who smuggles alcohol from Mexico to California with the help of Hackman and Reynolds, who both compete for her affection. Donen stated that he "really cared about [the film] and gave three years of my life to it ... I think it's a very good movie." It went over budget and was unsuccessful at the box office. Most critics were unenthusiastic; however, Jay Cocks praised the film for having "the glistening surface and full-throttle frivolity that characterized Hollywood films in the 1930s."


title: Stanley Donen

text: Nostalgia for old Hollywood movies would be a theme of Donen's next film: "Movie Movie" (1978), produced by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment and scripted by Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller. The film is actually two shorter films presented as an old fashioned double feature, complete with a fake movie trailer and an introduction by comedian George Burns. It starred George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Red Buttons, Michael Kidd and Eli Wallach and premiered in competition at the 29th Berlin International Film Festival in 1978. The first of the two films is "Dynamite Hands", a black and white tribute to boxing – morality films. The second film is "Baxter's Beauties of 1933", a tribute to the extravagant musicals of Busby Berkeley. Like Donen's previous two films, it was unsuccessful both financially and critically.


title: Stanley Donen

text: Donen made the science fiction film "Saturn 3" (1980), starring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel. Donen first read the script when its writer (and "Movie Movie"s set designer) John Barry showed it to him, prompting Donen to pass it along to Lew Grade. Donen was initially hired to produce, but Grade asked him to complete the film when first-time director Barry was unable to direct. According to Donen "only a tiny bit of what Barry shot ended up in the finished film." It was a critical and financial disaster and initially Donen did not want to be credited as director. In the early 1980s, Donen was attached to direct an adaptation of Stephen King's "The Dead Zone" and worked with writer Jeffrey Boam on the script. Donen eventually dropped out of the project and David Cronenberg directed the film a few years later. Boam stated that Donen was initially attracted to making the film because he wanted to "connect with contemporary youthful audiences" and that the script that they worked on together was "very close to the script that David wound up making."


title: Stanley Donen

text: Donen's last theatrical film was the May – December romance "Blame It on Rio" (1984). The film is a remake of the Claude Berri film "Un moment d'égarement" (1977) and was written by Gelbart and Charlie Peters. It stars Michael Caine, Joseph Bologna, Michelle Johnson, Valerie Harper and Demi Moore and was shot on location in Rio de Janeiro. Caine and Bologna play wealthy executives on vacation with their families in Rio, where Caine has an affair with Bologna's teenage daughter (Johnson). It received poor reviews, but was a modest success financially.


title: Stanley Donen

text: In 1986, Donen produced the televised ceremony of the 58th Academy Awards, which included a musical performance of the song "Once a Star, Always a Star" with June Allyson, Leslie Caron, Marge Champion, Cyd Charisse, Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Ann Miller, Jane Powell, Debbie Reynolds, and Esther Williams. Also in 1986 Donen directed a musical sequence for an episode of the popular TV series "Moonlighting" and directed the music video for Lionel Richie's song "Dancing on the Ceiling". In 1989 Donen was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the University of South Carolina. In his commencement address, Donen stated that he thought he was unique in being the first tap dancer to be a doctor and then tap danced for the graduates. At around the same time Donen taught a seminar on film musicals at the Sundance Institute at the request of Robert Redford.


title: Stanley Donen

text: In 1993, Donen was preparing to produce and direct a movie musical adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" starring Michael Jackson. After allegations that Jackson had molested young boys at his Neverland Ranch became a tabloid scandal, the project was abandoned. Later that year Donen directed the stage musical "The Red Shoes" (based on the Powell and Pressburger film) at the Gershwin Theatre. He replaced the original director Susan Schulman just six weeks before the show opened. It closed after four days.


title: Stanley Donen

text: Donen's last film was the television movie "Love Letters", which aired on ABC in April 1999. The film starred Steven Weber and Laura Linney and was based on the play by A. R. Gurney. Weber plays a successful U.S. Senator who finds out that his long lost love (Linney) has recently died. The two had only corresponded through mail over the years, and Weber remembers Linney through his collection of old love letters. Donen had wanted to make a theatrical film version of the play, but was unable to secure financing from any major studio and instead took the project to ABC. In 2002 Donen directed Elaine May's musical play "Adult Entertainment" starring Danny Aiello and Jeannie Berlin in Stamford, Connecticut. In 2004 he was awarded the Career Golden Lion at the 61st Venice International Film Festival.


title: Stanley Donen

text: Donen made a host of critically acclaimed and popular films. His most important contribution to the art of film was helping to transition movie musicals from the realistic backstage settings of filmed theater to a more cinematic form that integrates film with dance. Eventually film scholars named this concept "cine-dance" (a dance that can only be created in the medium of film), and its origins are in the Donen/Kelly films. Film scholar Casey Charness described "cine-dance" as "a melding of the distinctive strengths of dancing and filmmaking that had never been done before" and adds that Donen and Kelly "seem to have elevated Hollywood dance from simplistic display of either dancing or photographic ability into a perception that incorporates both what the dancer can do and what the camera can see ... [They] developed a balance between camera and dancer that ... encouraged both photographer and choreographer to contribute significantly to the creation and final effectiveness of dance."


title: Stanley Donen

text: When "talkies" began to gain momentum in the film industry, the Hollywood studios recruited the best talent from Broadway to make musical films, such as "Broadway Melody" and Berkley's "42nd Street". These films established the backstage musical, a subgenre in which the plot revolves around a stage show and the people involved in putting it on. They set the standard for the musical genre, placing their musical numbers either within the context of a stage performance or tacked on and gratuitous, without furthering the story or developing the characters. Donen stated that he disliked them and that his own films were "a reaction against those backstage musicals." Donen credited producer Freed as the driving force behind the transition, adding that Freed "had some sort of instinct to change the musical from a backstage world into something else. He didn't quite know what to change it into, just that it had to change." Kelly stated that Donen was the only person he knew that understood how musicals could progress and better suit the film medium.


title: Stanley Donen

text: Donen and Kelly's films set new standards for special effects, animation, editing and cinematography. Their first collaboration "Cover Girl" firmly established their intentions, particularly in the "Alter Ego" dance sequence. It employed a special effect that could not be achieved with a live take, while advancing the story and revealing the character's inner conflict. Donen and Kelly tested the limits of film's potential with the Jerry the Mouse dance in "Anchors Aweigh", one of the first films where a live action character dances with an animated one.


title: Stanley Donen

text: By the time they made "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" they had perfected what Martin Rubin called an "indication of changing trends in musical films" which differed from the Berkeley spectacles towards "relatively small-scale affairs that place the major emphasis on comedy, transitions to the narrative, the cleverness of the lyrics and the personalities and performance skills of the stars, rather than on spectacle and group dynamics." Rubin credits Donen and Kelly with making musicals more realistic, compared to Berkeley's style of a "separation of narrative space from performance space" "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" was Berkeley's last film as a director and today can be viewed as a passing of the torch. Both Donen and Kelly found working with Berkeley difficult, and the director left before the film's completion.


title: Stanley Donen

text: When Donen and Kelly released "On the Town", they boldly opened the film with an extravagant musical number shot on location in New York with fast-paced editing and experimental camera work, thus breaking from the conventions of that time. Their most celebrated film "Singin' in the Rain" is appropriately a musical about the birth of the movie musical. The film includes a musical montage which Donen said was "doing Busby Berkeley here, only we're making fun of him." Charness stated that "Singin' in the Rain"'s references to Berkeley "marks the first time the Hollywood musical had ever been reflexive, and amused at its own extravagant non-dancing inadequacy, at that" and that Berekeley's "overhead kaleidoscope floral pattern is predominantly featured, as is the line of tap-dancing chorines, who are seen only from the knees down." Charness also stated that the film's cinematography "moves the audience perspective along with the dance."


title: Stanley Donen

text: Charness singled out the film's famous title number and states, "it's a very kinetic moment, for though there is no technically accomplished dance present, the feeling of swinging around in a circle with an open umbrella is a brilliantly apt choice of movement, one that will be readily identifiable by an audience which might know nothing kinesthetically of actual dance ... Accompanying this movement is a breathless pullback into a high crane shot that takes place at the same time Kelly is swinging into his widest arcs with the umbrella. The effect is dizzying. Perhaps the finest single example of the application of camera know-how to a dance moment in Donen-Kelly canon." He also complimented Donen's direction in the "Moses Supposes" number, including "certain camera techniques which Donen had by now formularized ... the dolly shot into medium shot to signify the ending of one shot and the beginning of another." Although Donen credits earlier musicals by René Clair, Lubitsch and Astaire as "integrated", he also states that "in the early musicals of Lubitsch and Clair, they made it clear from the beginning that their characters were going to sing operatically. Gene and I didn't go that far. In 'Moses Supposes', he and Donald sort of talk themselves into a song." Donen's "Royal Wedding" and "Give A Girl A Break" continued to use special effect shots to create elaborate dance sequences.


title: Stanley Donen

text: Donen's relationship with Gene Kelly was complicated and he often spoke bitterly about his former friend and mentor decades after they worked together. Kelly was never explicitly negative about Donen in later years. However, Silverman has asserted that Kelly's comments were often condescending and demonstrated "a long-standing attempt to diminish Donen's contributions to their collective work." The reasons for their conflict were both personal (both men married dancer Jeanne Coyne) and professional (Donen always felt that Kelly did not treat him as an equal). They disagreed over who deserved more credit for their joint projects: three films as co-directors and four as co-choreographers.


title: Stanley Donen

text: At age 7 Coyne enrolled in the Gene Kelly Studio of Dance in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and developed a schoolgirl crush on him In her twenties she was cast in "Best Foot Forward", where she reconnected with Kelly and first met Donen, later moving to Hollywood with them. She and Donen eloped in 1948, but their marriage became strained. They separated in 1950 and divorced in 1951. During their marriage Donen confided to Coyne his frustration with Kelly while making "On the Town", only to find that she immediately took Kelly's side. Coyne worked as Kelly's personal assistant on several films while married to Donen and continued assisting Kelly until her death. Rumors held that Kelly and Coyne were having an affair both during and after Coyne's marriage to Donen, as well as that Donen was in love with Kelly's first wife Betsy Blair. Blair's autobiography makes no mention of an affair between Kelly and Coyne nor of any romantic relationship with Donen. However, she does state that Donen's marriage to Coyne was unhappy and that Donen was very close to both her and Kelly.


title: Stanley Donen

text: Kelly said that Donen's impulsive marriage to Coyne showed an emotional immaturity and lack of good judgment, and stated that "Jeannie's marriage to Stanley was doomed from the start. Because every time Stanley looked at Jeannie, he saw Betsy, whom he loved; and every time Jeannie looked at Stanley, I guess she saw me. One way or another it was all pretty incestuous." Kelly's marriage to Blair ended in 1957, after which he moved in with Coyne. They married in 1960 and had two children together. Coyne died of leukemia in 1973. In November 2012 the musical "What a Glorious Feeling" depicted both the making of "Singin' in the Rain" and the love triangle among Donen, Kelly and Coyne.


title: Stanley Donen

text: Donen and Kelly's relationship has been described as similar to that of the characters Don Lockwood and Cosmo Brown in "Singin' in the Rain", with Kelly as the star performer and Donen as his trusted sidekick. Kelly described Donen as being like a son to him and Donen initially idolized Kelly while finding him "cold, egotistical and very rough." Although Donen credited Kelly for "jump-starting his career as a filmmaker", he said that MGM producer Roger Edens was his biggest promoter.


title: Stanley Donen

text: Many people believe that Donen owed everything to Kelly, and Kelly biographer Clive Hirschhorn described Donen as having "no particular identity or evident talent ... and was just a kid from the south who wanted to make it in show business." Donen stated that he moved to Hollywood of his own accord; other sources state that he followed Kelly, who then helped him get his first job. Kelly sometimes embarrassed and patronized Donen in public, such as berating him for not being able to keep up with his dance steps during the rehearsals for "Cover Girl". Donen admitted that he did not consider himself to be a great performer. Despite Donen's growing resentment of Kelly, he was able to contain his feelings and professional attitude during their collaborations. Tensions between the two exploded on the set of "It's Always Fair Weather". After Donen's recent hits "Deep in My Heart" and "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" he did not want to make another film with Kelly. They fought on the set for the first time, with the now more confident Donen asserting himself. Donen almost quit the film, and his friendship with Kelly ended.


title: Stanley Donen

text: Other tensions included Donen's hit films as compared to Vincente Minnelli's "Brigadoon" (which Kelly was closely involved in and had wanted to direct) and Kelly's own ambitious film "Invitation to Dance", both of which were financially unsuccessful. During the shooting of "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers", Donen often complained about his budgetary constraints, while "Brigadoon" had a much larger budget. Around this time Kelly's attempts at dramatic acting with "The Devil Makes Three" (1952) and "Seagulls Over Sorrento" (1954) flopped, and his marriage to Betsy Blair was coming to an end.


title: Stanley Donen

text: In later years, Donen would state that he had nothing nice to say about Kelly. At a 1991 tribute to Comden and Green, Kelly said in a public speech that Donen "needed [him] to grow up with" but added "I needed Stanley at the back of the camera." He also described Donen as being thought of as his whipping-boy at MGM. Although Donen often complained that Kelly never gave him enough credit for their work, Kelly did credit him for the Jerry the Mouse and "Alter Ego" dance sequences. In 1992 Donen said "I'm grateful to him, but I paid back the debt, ten times over. And he got his money's worth out of me." Betsy Blair claimed to be "surprised and bemused" about Donen's bitterness towards Kelly.


title: Stanley Donen

text: The relative importance of the two men's contributions has been debated by critics. David Thomson wrote about "the problem in assessing [Donen's] career: who did what in their collaboration? And what is Donen's real standing as a director?" Thomson remarked that "nothing in his career suggests that Gene Kelly could have filmed himself singing in the rain with the exhilaration of Donen's retreating crane shot." However set reports state that Kelly rode the camera boom between shots and during camera set-ups. Donen stated that "by the time you hash it through from beginning to end ten million times, you can't remember who did what except in a few instances where you remember getting an idea." Composer Saul Chaplin said that "Gene was the prime mover and Stanley an eager and talented pupil." During the shooting of "On the Town", all memos and correspondence from MGM to the production were addressed exclusively to Donen and not to Kelly.


title: Stanley Donen

text: However, actress Kathleen Freeman stated that when people visited the set of "Singin' in the Rain" to relate their experiences during the silent era, they would ask to speak with Kelly. "Singin' in the Rain" art director Randall Duell stated, "Gene ran the show. Stan had some good ideas and worked with Gene, but he was still the 'office boy' to Gene, in a sense, although Gene had great respect for him." Kelly became more involved with the "Singin' in the Rain" script during its third draft, which was when its structure began to resemble the final version. Comparing Donen and Kelly's films as solo directors, Donen's were usually more critically acclaimed and financially successful than Kelly's films. Kelly's film "Hello, Dolly!" (1969) is credited with effectively killing the Hollywood musical.


title: Stanley Donen

text: Donen married and divorced five times and had three children. His first wife was dancer, choreographer and actress Jeanne Coyne. They married on April 14, 1948, and divorced in May 1951. Donen's second wife was actress Marion Marshall, who had been the girlfriend and protégé of Howard Hawks and later married actor Robert Wagner. Donen and Marshall had two sons together: Peter Donen (1953–2003) and Joshua Donen, born in 1955. The boys' first names put together provided the name for Cary Grant's character in the 1963 movie "Charade". Donen and Marshall were married from 1952 to 1959. They had a lengthy custody battle over their sons after Marshall married Wagner and Donen moved to England. Donen's third wife was Adelle, Countess Beatty. She had previously been the second wife of the 2nd Earl Beatty. They married in 1960, had one son (Mark Donen, born 1962), and lived together in London. They separated in 1969 and divorced in 1971. Donen's fourth wife was American actress Yvette Mimieux. They were married from 1972 to 1985, but remained close friends after their divorce. Donen's fifth wife was Pamela Braden, 36 years his junior. Donen proposed to her four days after having met her. They were married from 1990 to 1994.


title: Stanley Donen

text: In the early 1940s, Donen dated actress Judy Holliday while working on Broadway. He also dated Elizabeth Taylor for a year between his first and second marriages. In his final years Donen's longtime companion was writer and director Elaine May, whom he dated from 1999 until his death and claimed to have proposed marriage to "about 172 times."


title: Stanley Donen

text: Donen's eldest son, Peter Donen, was a visual effects artist who worked on such films as "Superman III", "Spaceballs", "The Bourne Identity", and "The Truth About Charlie". He also designed the title credits for "Blame It on Rio". He died of a heart attack in 2003 at age 50. Donen's second son, Joshua Donen, is a film producer who worked on such films as "The Quick and the Dead" and "Gone Girl". Mark Donen, Stanley's third son, worked as a production assistant on "Blame It on Rio".


title: Stanley Donen

text: In 1959, Donen's father, Mordecai, died at 59 in Beaufort, South Carolina. His mother, Helen, died in 1989 at 84 in South Carolina, and Donen delivered the eulogy at her funeral.


title: Stanley Donen

text: With the deaths in the 2000s of Billy Wilder, George Sidney, Elia Kazan, Robert Wise, and Jules Dassin, Donen became the last surviving notable film director of Hollywood's Golden Age. In his final years he occasionally appeared at film festivals and retrospectives and continued to develop ideas for film projects. He was the subject of the 2010 documentary "Stanley Donen: You Just Do It".


title: Stanley Donen

text: In December 2013 it was announced that Donen was in pre-production for a new film co-written with Elaine May, to be produced by Mike Nichols. A table reading of the script for potential investors included such actors as Christopher Walken, Charles Grodin, Ron Rifkin and Jeannie Berlin. In celebration of Donen's 90th birthday in 2014, a retrospective of his work, "A Lotta Talent and a Little Luck: A Celebration of Stanley Donen", was held from July to August in Columbia, South Carolina. It included a tour of Donen's childhood neighborhood, a lecture by Steven Silverman and film screenings at the Nickelodeon movie theater Donen frequented as a child.


title: Stanley Donen

text: On February 21, 2019, Donen died at age 94 from heart failure in New York City. In addition to May, he is survived by two sons and a sister.


title: Stanley Donen

text: During his career Donen's biggest rival was Vincente Minnelli, to whom he is often compared. Like Donen, Minnelli was a contract director at MGM known for the musicals he made for the Freed Unit. According to Donen's biographer Stephen M. Silverman, critics tend to "express a distinct preference for Donen's bold, no-nonsense style of direction over Minnelli's Impressionist visual palette and Expressionist character motivations", while most film directors are said to prefer Minnelli's work. Michael Kidd, who worked with both directors early in his career, describes Minnelli as being much less open to collaborative suggestions than Donen. The two directors' camera work differs in that Minnelli often used forward and backwards tracking shots while Donen preferred horizontal tracking shots and crane shots. Silverman said film critics consider Donen's approach to be better suited for dance sequences.


title: Stanley Donen

text: In 1998, Donen was chosen to receive the Honorary Academy Award at the 70th Academy Awards "in appreciation of a body of work marked by grace, elegance, wit and visual innovation." Film director Martin Scorsese was chosen to present the award to Donen. Scorsese gave tribute to Donen speaking about his career and his impact on film before playing a montage of his work in the movies from "Singin' in the Rain", and "Funny Face", to "On the Town" and "Charade". In Donen's acceptance speech he danced with his Oscar statue while singing Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek", a song first popularized by his boyhood idol Fred Astaire.


title: Stanley Donen

text: David Thomson dismisses most of his later comedy films, but praises him for leading "the musical in a triumphant and personal direction: out of doors ... Not even Minnelli can rival the fresh-air excitement of such sequences. And few can equal his integration of song, dance and story." Andrew Sarris dismisses Donen as being without a personal style of his own and as being dependent upon his collaborators on his better films. Debbie Reynolds downplayed his contributions to "Singin' in the Rain", stating that "Stanley just operated the camera, because Stanley didn't dance."


title: Stanley Donen

text: Among Donen's admirers are film directors Woody Allen, Pedro Almodóvar, Lindsay Anderson, Charlie Chaplin, Damien Chazelle, Jules Dassin, Guillermo del Toro William Friedkin, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, Christopher McQuarrie, Karel Reisz, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, François Truffaut, and Edgar Wright. Donen's skill as a director has been praised by such actors as Cyd Charisse, Mitzi Gaynor and Audrey Hepburn. Donen's work influenced later directors of film musicals Bill Condon, Rob Marshall, and Baz Luhrmann The 2011 film "The Artist" pays tribute to "Singin' in the Rain" (among other films), and Donen praised the film after attending its Los Angeles premiere.


title: Stanley Donen

text: "Singin' in the Rain" is Donen's most revered film and it was included in the first group of films to be inducted into the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in 1989 and has been included on "Sight & Sound"s prestigious list of "Top Ten Films" twice, in 1982 and in 2002. Chaplin and Truffaut were among its earliest admirers. Billy Wilder called the film "one of the five greatest pictures ever made."


title: Juglans nigra

text: Juglans nigra, the eastern American black walnut, is a species of deciduous tree in the walnut family, Juglandaceae, native to North America. It grows mostly in riparian zones, from southern Ontario, west to southeast South Dakota, south to Georgia, northern Florida and southwest to central Texas. Wild trees in the upper Ottawa Valley may be an isolated native population or may have derived from planted trees.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Black walnut is an important tree commercially, as the wood is a deep brown color and easily worked. Walnut seeds (nuts) are cultivated for their distinctive and desirable taste. Walnut trees are grown both for lumber and food, and many cultivars have been developed for improved quality wood or nuts. Black walnut is susceptible to thousand cankers disease, which provoked a decline of walnut trees in some regions.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Black walnut is anecdotally known for being allelopathic, which means that it releases chemicals from its roots and other tissues that may harm other organisms and give the tree a competitive advantage. There is not, however, solid scientific consensus that allelopathic chemicals in black walnut are the primary source of its competitive growth in an area.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Black walnut is more resistant to frost than the English or Persian walnut, but thrives best in the warmer regions of fertile, lowland soils with high water tables, although it will also grow in drier soils, but much more slowly. Some soils preferred by black walnut include Alfisol and Entisol soil types. Black walnut grows best on sandy loam, loam, or silt loam type soils but will also grow well on silty clay loam soils. It prefers these soils because they hold large quantities of water, which the tree draws from during rainless periods.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Visually, black walnut is similar to the butternut ("Juglans cinerea") in leaf shape, and the range also overlaps significantly. The fruits are quite different, and their presence makes an identification easy, as black walnut fruits are round (spherical) and butternuts are more oval-oblong shaped. When a fruit is not available, two species can be differentiated based on the leaf scars, or the place where the leaf meets the stem: butternut has a leaf scar with a flat upper edge and with a velvety ridge above that flat part, but black walnut has an indented leaf scar with no hairy ridge.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Black walnut is primarily a pioneer species similar to red and silver maple and black cherry. Because of this, black walnut is a common weed tree found along roadsides, fields, and forest edges in the eastern US. It will grow in closed forests, but is classified as shade intolerant; this means it requires full sun for optimal growth and nut production.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Black walnut's native range extends across much of the eastern US. It is absent from the coastal plain south of North Carolina as well as the Mississippi Valley, and does not occur in the northern tier of the eastern US, where the frost-free season is too short for the nuts to develop. Its western range extends all the way to the eastern Great Plains, after which climate conditions become too dry for it.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Black walnut is one of the most abundant trees in the eastern US, particularly the Northeast, and its numbers are increasing due to epidemics that have affected other tree species, including emerald ash borer, chestnut blight, butternut canker, wooly hemlock adelgid, dogwood anthracnose, Dutch elm disease, and Gypsy moth infestations. Widespread clear-cutting of oaks due to Gypsy moth damage in the 1970s-80s particularly aided in the tree's spread. The aggressive competitive strategy of black walnut such as its fast growth, alleopathic chemicals, and rodent-dispersed seeds, have also contributed.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Where the range of the eastern black walnut overlaps that of the Texas black walnut ("J. microcarpa"), the two species sometimes interbreed, producing populations with characteristics intermediate between the two species. "J.nigra" and "J. cinerea" often grow in the same range as well but they do not hybridize naturally.


title: Juglans nigra

text: The tree's roots often form endomycorrhizal relationships with fungi in the genus "Glomus". Some endomycorrhizal relations improve the plant's growth.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Species often associated with "J. nigra" include yellow-poplar ("Liriodendron tulipifera"), white ash ("Fraxinus americana"), black cherry ("Prunus serotina"), basswood ("Tilia americana"), American beech ("Fagus grandifolia"), sugar maple ("Acer saccharum"), oaks ("Quercus" spp.), and hickories ("Carya" spp.). Near the western edge of its range, black walnut may be confined to floodplains, where it grows either with American elm ("Ulmus americana"), common hackberry ("Celtis occidentalis"), green ash ("Fraxinus pennsylvanica"), and boxelder ("Acer negundo"), or with basswood and red oak ("Quercus rubra") on lower slopes and other favorable sites.


title: Juglans nigra

text: While its primary native region is the Midwest and east-central United States, the black walnut was introduced into Europe in 1629 and is also cultivated in Hawaii. It is cultivated there and in North America as a forest tree for its high-quality wood. Black walnut plantings can be made to produce timber, nuts, or both timber and nuts. Patented timber-type trees were selected and released from Purdue University in the early 1990s. These trees have been sporadically available from nurseries. Varieties include Purdue #1, which can be used for both timber and nut production, though nut quality is poor compared to varieties selected specifically as nut producers.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Grafted, nut-producing trees are available from several nurseries operating in the U.S. Selections worth considering include Thomas, Neel #1, Thomas Myers, Pounds #2, Stoker, Surprise, Emma K, Sparrow, S127, and McGinnis. Several older varieties, such as Kwik Krop, are still in cultivation; while they make decent nuts, they would not be recommended for commercial planting.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Pollination requirements should be considered when planting black walnuts. As is typical of many species in Juglandaceae, "Juglans nigra" trees tend to be monoecious, i.e.. produce pollen first and then pistillate flowers or else produce pistillate flowers and then pollen. An early pollen-producer should be grouped with other varieties that produce pistillate flowers so all varieties benefit from overlap. Cranz, Thomas, and Neel #1 make a good pollination trio. A similar group for more northern climates would be Sparrow, S127, and Mintle.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Sometimes black walnut is planted as part of reclaiming mines. When growing young trees weed control is critical for healthy establishment of the trees, without weed control the young trees are harmed significantly in their growth rate.


title: Juglans nigra

text: "J. nigra" is also grown as a specimen ornamental tree in parks and large gardens, growing to tall by broad. It has gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Black walnut nuts are edible and shelled commercially in the United States. About 65% of the annual wild harvest comes from the U.S. state of Missouri, and the largest processing plant is operated by Hammons Products in Stockton, Missouri. NPR affiliate KCUR stated in an article that “Ralph Hammons began the company in 1946 with a nut cracking machine acquired from Tennessee.” The Stockton "Black Walnut Festival", which has been held annually since 1961, “brings the community together for a 3-day event jam-packed with activities including a carnival, tractor pull, nut roll and 2-hour parade,” stated Alexa Hodges in a VOX article. The nutmeats provide a robust, distinctive, natural flavor and crunch as a food ingredient. Popular uses include ice cream, bakery goods and confections. Consumers include black walnuts in traditional treats, such as cakes, cookies, fudge, and pies, during the fall holiday season. The nuts' nutritional profile leads to uses in other foods, such as salads, fish, pork, chicken, vegetables and pasta dishes.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Tapped in spring, the tree yields a sweet sap that can be drunk or concentrated into syrup or sugar that is not unlike the sap of sugar maple.


title: Juglans nigra

text: The extraction of the kernel from the fruit of the black walnut is difficult. The thick, hard shell is tightly bound by tall ridges to a thick husk. Rolling the nut underfoot on a hard surface such as a driveway is a common method; commercial huskers use a car tire rotating against a metal mesh. Some take a thick plywood board and drill a nut-sized hole in it (from one to two inches in diameter) and smash the nut through using a hammer. The nut goes through and the husk remains behind. American pioneers let the nuts dry in the sun, then removed the husks and let the kernels dry—making them less bitter.


title: Juglans nigra

text: The shell itself is thicker than that of the English walnut, and there are additional, thick internal walls tightly surrounding the nutmeat. Walnuts are too tough and too large to be opened with a standard nutcracker, but simply cracking the shell open with a rock results in smashed and shattered nutmeats mixed with shell, unless done with some care and skill—and it is still nearly impossible to extract an intact half this way. As a result, a number of home walnut-cracking devices have been produced, involving vices, cams, or levers.


title: Juglans nigra

text: While the flavor of the "Juglans nigra" kernel is prized, the difficulty in preparing it may account for the wider popularity and availability of the English walnut.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Black walnut kernels are 5% water, 59% fat, 24% protein, and 10% carbohydrates (table). In a 100 gram reference amount providing 619 calories, the kernels supply several dietary minerals in rich content (20% or more of the Daily Value, DV), including manganese (186% DV) and phosphorus (73% DV) among others, and the B vitamins, B6 (45% DV) and pantothenic acid (33% DV) (table). Black walnut kernels are a moderate source of vitamin E (14% DV).


title: Juglans nigra

text: Analysis of black walnut fat content in its oil showed the most prevalent fatty acids are linoleic acid (33.8%), followed (in the same units) by oleic acid (15.3%), linolenic acid (2.7%), palmitic acid (1.9%), and stearic acid (1.5%) (USDA table).


title: Juglans nigra

text: Black walnut drupes contain juglone (5-hydroxy-1,4-naphthoquinone), plumbagin (yellow quinone pigments), and tannin. These compounds cause walnuts to stain cars, sidewalks, porches, and patios, in addition to the hands of anyone attempting to shell them.


title: Juglans nigra

text: The brownish-black dye was used by early American settlers to dye hair. According to Eastern Trees in the Petersen Guide series, black walnuts make a yellowish-brown dye, not brownish-black. The apparent confusion is easily explained by the fact that the liquid (dye) obtained from the inner husk becomes increasingly darker over time, as the outer skin darkens from light green to black. Extracts of the outer, soft part of the drupe are still used as a natural dye for handicrafts.


title: Juglans nigra

text: The tannins present in walnuts act as a mordant, aiding in the dyeing process, and are usable as a dark ink or wood stain.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Walnut shells are often used as an abrasive in sand blasting or other circumstances where a medium hardness grit is required. The hard black walnut shell is also used commercially in abrasive cleaning, a filtering agent in scrubbers in smoke stacks, cleaning jet engines, cosmetics, and oil well drilling and water filtration.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Black walnut is highly prized for its dark-colored, straight grained, true heartwood. It is heavy, strong, shock resistant and yet can be easily split and worked. Along with cedars ("Thuja spp."), chestnut ("Castanea spp".), and black locust ("Robinia pseudoacacia") black walnut is one of the most durable hardwoods in the US. The wood can be kiln dried and holds its shape well after seasoning, which makes this wood even more attractive for wood working.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Walnut wood has historically been used for gun stocks, furniture, flooring, paddles, coffins, and a variety of other wood products. Due to its value, forestry officials often are called on to track down walnut poachers; in 2004, DNA testing was used to solve one such poaching case, involving a 55-foot (16-m) tree worth US$2,500. Black walnut has a density of 660 kg per cubic meter (41.2 lb/cubic foot), which makes it less dense than oak.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Maggots (larvae of "Rhagoletis completa" and "Rhagoletis suavis") in the husk are common, though more a nuisance than a serious problem for amateurs, who may simply remove the affected husk as soon as infestation is noticed. The maggots develop entirely within the husk, thus the quality of the nutmeat is not affected. However, infestations of maggots are undesirable because they make the husk difficult to remove and are unsightly. Maggots can be serious for commercial walnut growers, who tend to use chemical treatments to prevent damage to the crop. Some non-chemical controls also exist, such as removing and disposing of infested nuts.


title: Juglans nigra

text: The walnut weevil ("Conotrachelus retentus") grows to long as an adult. The adult sucks plant juices through a snout. The eggs are laid in fruits in the spring and summer. Many nuts are lost due to damage from the larvae, which burrow through the nut shell.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Black walnut is affected by European canker ("Neonectria galligena"). The infection spreads slowly but infected trees eventually die.


title: Juglans nigra

text: The walnut caterpillar ("Datana integerrima") and fall webworm ("Hyphantria cunea") are two of the most serious pests, they commonly eat the foliage in midsummer and continue into autumn.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Important leaf sucking insects include species of aphids and plant lice including ("Monellia" spp. and "Monelliopsis" spp.), which suck the juices from leaves and often deposit a sticky substance called "honey-dew" on the leaf surface that may turn black and prevent photosynthesis; and the walnut lace bug ("Corythucha juglandis"), which causes damage when the adults and nymphs suck the sap from the lower surfaces of walnut leaflets.


title: Juglans nigra

text: A disease complex known as thousand cankers disease has been threatening black walnut in several western states. This disease has recently been discovered in Tennessee, and could potentially have devastating effects on the species in the eastern United States. Vectored by the walnut twig beetle ("Pityophthorus juglandis"), a fungus, "Geosmithia morbida", spreads into the wood around the galleries carved by the small beetles. The fungus causes cankers that inhibit the movement of nutrients in black walnut, leading to crown and branch dieback, and ultimately death.


title: Juglans nigra

text: While black walnut is considered allelopathic, meaning it excretes chemicals into its environment that harm competition, research over the past decade has questioned whether this long-held belief holds up to scientific rigor. Many publications that have repeated black walnut allelopathy, cite a very limited set of dated research literature, which has not held up to scientific scrutiny. Anecdotally, records of walnut toxicity to other plants have been observed as far back as the first century when Pliny the Elder wrote: "The shadow of walnut trees is poison to all plants within its compass."


title: Juglans nigra

text: Like other walnuts, the roots, inner bark, nut husks, and leaves contain a nontoxic chemical called hydrojuglone, when exposed to air or soil compounds it is oxidized into juglone that is biologically active and acts as a respiratory inhibitor to some plants. Juglone is poorly soluble in water and does not move far in the soil and will stay most concentrated in the soil directly beneath the tree. Even after a tree is removed the soil where the roots once were will still contain juglone for several years after the tree is removed as more juglone will be released as the roots decay. Well drained and aerated soils will host a healthy community of soil microbes and these microbes will help to break down the juglone.


title: Juglans nigra

text: Symptoms of juglone poisoning include foliar yellowing and wilting. A number of plants are particularly sensitive. Apples, tomatoes, pines, and birch are poisoned by juglone, and as a precaution, should not be planted in proximity to a black walnut.


title: Juglans nigra

text: The US national champion black walnut is on a residential property on Sauvie Island, Oregon. It is diameter at breast height and tall, with a crown spread of .


title: Juglans nigra

text: The tallest black walnut in Europe is located in the Woluwe Park in the city of Sint-Pieters-Woluwe, Brussels, Belgium. It has a circumference of , height of exactly (measured by laser), and was planted around 1850 (± 10 years).


title: Juglans nigra

text: The largest black walnut in Europe is located in the Castle Park in the city of Sereď, Slovakia. It has a circumference of , height of and estimated age of 300 years.


title: Kernel (image processing)

text: In image processing, a kernel, convolution matrix, or mask is a small matrix used for blurring, sharpening, embossing, edge detection, and more. This is accomplished by doing a convolution between the kernel and an image.


title: Kernel (image processing)

text: where formula_2 is the filtered image, formula_3 is the original image, formula_4 is the filter kernel. Every element of the filter kernel is considered by formula_5 and formula_6.


title: Kernel (image processing)

text: The origin is the position of the kernel which is above (conceptually) the current output pixel. This could be outside of the actual kernel, though usually it corresponds to one of the kernel elements. For a symmetric kernel, the origin is usually the center element.


title: Kernel (image processing)

text: Convolution is the process of adding each element of the image to its local neighbors, weighted by the kernel. This is related to a form of mathematical convolution. The matrix operation being performed—convolution—is not traditional matrix multiplication, despite being similarly denoted by *.


title: Kernel (image processing)

text: For example, if we have two three-by-three matrices, the first a kernel, and the second an image piece, convolution is the process of flipping both the rows and columns of the kernel and multiplying locally similar entries and summing. The element at coordinates [2, 2] (that is, the central element) of the resulting image would be a weighted combination of all the entries of the image matrix, with weights given by the kernel:


title: Kernel (image processing)

text: The other entries would be similarly weighted, where we position the center of the kernel on each of the boundary points of the image, and compute a weighted sum.


title: Kernel (image processing)

text: The values of a given pixel in the output image are calculated by multiplying each kernel value by the corresponding input image pixel values. This can be described algorithmically with the following pseudo-code:


title: Kernel (image processing)

text: If the kernel is symmetric then place the center (origin) of the kernel on the current pixel. The kernel will overlap the neighboring pixels around the origin. Each kernel element should be multiplied with the pixel value it overlaps with and all of the obtained values should be summed. This resultant sum will be the new value for the current pixel currently overlapped with the center of the kernel.


title: Kernel (image processing)

text: If the kernel is not symmetric, it has to be flipped both around its horizontal and vertical axis before calculating the convolution as above.


title: Kernel (image processing)

text: Kernel convolution usually requires values from pixels outside of the image boundaries. There are a variety of methods for handling image edges.


title: Kernel (image processing)

text: Normalization is defined as the division of each element in the kernel by the sum of all kernel elements, so that the sum of the elements of a normalized kernel is unity. This will ensure the average pixel in the modified image is as bright as the average pixel in the original image.


title: Kernel (image processing)

text: 2D convolution with an "M" × "N" kernel requires "M" × "N" multiplications for each sample (pixel). If the kernel is separable, then the computation can be reduced to "M" + "N" multiplications. Using separable convolutions can significantly decrease the computation by doing 1D convolution twice instead of one 2D convolution.


title: Gravity hill

text: A gravity hill, also known as a magnetic hill, mystery hill, mystery spot, gravity road, or anti-gravity hill, is a place where the layout of the surrounding land produces an optical illusion, making a slight downhill slope appear to be an uphill slope. Thus, a car left out of gear will appear to be rolling uphill against gravity. Hundreds of gravity hills are recognized worldwide.


title: Gravity hill

text: The slope of gravity hills is an optical illusion, although sites are often accompanied by claims that magnetic or supernatural forces are at work. The most important factor contributing to the illusion is a completely or mostly obstructed horizon. Without a horizon, it becomes difficult for a person to judge the slope of a surface, as a reliable reference is missing. Objects which one would normally assume to be more or less perpendicular to the ground, such as trees, may be leaning, offsetting the visual reference.


title: Gravity hill

text: A 2003 study looked into how the absence of a horizon can skew the perspective on gravity hills, by recreating a number of antigravity places in the lab to see how volunteers would react. As a conclusion, researchers from Universities of Padova and Pavia in Italy found that without a true horizon in sight, the human brain could be tricked by common landmarks such as trees and signs.


title: Gravity hill

text: The opposite phenomenon—an uphill road that appears flat—is known in bicycle racing as a "false flat".


title: Everett McGill

text: Everett McGill (born Charles Everett McGill III, October 21, 1945) is an American actor, who rose to prominence for his portrayal of a caveman in "Quest for Fire" (1981). He went on to have prominent roles in the films "Dune" (1984), "Silver Bullet" (1985), "Heartbreak Ridge" (1986), "Licence to Kill" (1989), "The People Under the Stairs" (1991) and "" (1995).


title: Everett McGill

text: On television he appeared as "Big" Ed Hurley in "Twin Peaks" (1990–1991). He retired from acting in 1999, but returned for the revival of "Twin Peaks".


title: Everett McGill

text: McGill was born Everett Charles McGill III in Miami Beach, Florida. He graduated from Rosedale High School in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1963.


title: Everett McGill

text: McGill has a relatively short filmography and has made something of a career of playing sadistic military types or terrorists. He managed to garner some level of fame by appearing in films such as "Brubaker" starring Robert Redford. McGill's roles include Chad Richards on the soap opera "The Guiding Light" in 1975 and 1976. After coming into the public eye in 1981 for his role as the rugged caveman leader Naoh in "Quest for Fire", McGill appeared in "Silver Bullet", a 1985 werewolf film inspired by a Stephen King short story; the Korean War battle epic "Field of Honor" and the Clint Eastwood war film "Heartbreak Ridge" in 1986; and in the 1989 installment of the James Bond franchise "Licence to Kill". In 1988, McGill played the titular role in "Iguana" directed by Monte Hellman. In 1990-91, he appeared in the television series "Twin Peaks". In 1991, McGill reunited with his "Twin Peaks" co-star Wendy Robie; the two appeared as the villains of the Wes Craven feature "The People Under the Stairs". In 1996, he starred in the film "My Fellow Americans" with his co-stars James Garner and Jack Lemmon.


title: Everett McGill

text: He has worked on a number of occasions with director David Lynch. McGill first worked with Lynch in the 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's "Dune", in which he played Fremen leader Stilgar. McGill later appeared as Ed Hurley on Lynch’s television series "Twin Peaks". McGill also appeared in Lynch's 1999 film "The Straight Story".


title: Everett McGill

text: After Lynch searched for him in his country home, the actor and director reunited, and McGill decided to come out of retirement specifically to reprise the role of Big Ed Hurley, in the 2017 revival of "Twin Peaks".


title: Mammoth WVH

text: Mammoth WVH is an American rock band founded and fronted by Wolfgang Van Halen, initially as a solo project while he was still a part of Van Halen prior to their .


title: Mammoth WVH

text: Wolfgang Van Halen's musical talents started at a young age. In 2006, when Wolf was 15 years old, his father Eddie Van Halen stated on "The Howard Stern Show" that his son had unmatched musical talent, stating: "Wait 'til you hear this kid play bass, guitar and drums. He can do anything I do on guitar...the name 'Van Halen', the family legacy is gonna go on way after I'm gone 'cause this kid is just a natural."


title: Mammoth WVH

text: Wolfgang Van Halen became an official member of Tremonti, guitarist Mark Tremonti's own band (aside from lead guitar and writer for Alter Bridge and Creed) in 2013, replacing previous bassist Brian Marshall, who also plays for Alter Bridge. Wolfgang appears on Tremonti's 2015 studio album "Cauterize" and its 2016 follow-up "Dust".


title: Mammoth WVH

text: In a February 2015, Eddie announced that his son Wolfgang had started working on a solo project album. Recording took place at 5150 Studios, and lasted until 2017. Release of the debut album was delayed, as Wolfgang chose to spend time with his father, whose health was declining. In June 2019, Wolfgang appeared as a guest on his mother Valerie Bertinelli's Food Network television show, and announced that he had finished recording the album.


title: Mammoth WVH

text: The first single "Distance" was released on November 16, 2020, as a tribute to his father, who died from a stroke on October 6, 2020, after years of battling lung cancer. Wolfgang later revealed that he began work on the song years prior as a coping strategy, while his father's health was declining, stating that he knew there would be an eventual death of his beloved parent, bandmate, and best friend.


title: Mammoth WVH

text: In February 2021, Wolfgang announced that Mammoth WVH's self-titled debut album would be released on June 11 of the same year. Later that month, Wolfgang stated that Mammoth WVH will move forward as his primary project, confirming that while it started off as a solo project, he considers the lineup a band. The musician has additional plans with them including a tour. When asked why he recorded the entire album himself, he stated that he wanted to challenge himself and referred inspiration from Dave Grohl's work as the sole member of the early years of Foo Fighters.


title: Mammoth WVH

text: In June 2021, Wolfgang described the debut album as "personal" and "therapeutic", while acknowledging influence taken from his father's career. In developing the overall sound and style for the project, Wolfgang stated that while "I'll always be there to champion my father and his legacy...I definitely made a choice to not sound directly like Van Halen...I think that would be boring if I was a carbon copy of my dad."


title: Mammoth WVH

text: Wolfgang Van Halen chose the band's name to be Mammoth WVH, as a derivative of his father's first band named , which eventually evolved into the legendary Van Halen. The younger Van Halen stated that the concept for the name came from a combination of inspirations. As a child, Wolfgang grew up hearing the name of his father's former band believing, "That's the coolest name! When I grow up, I want to call my own band that." The younger Van Halen admired that Eddie had a multi-faceted role including serving as the original lead singer of Mammoth, and with his intentions to solely write, perform, and produce the album, he settled on the name. Upon settling on the title, he presented his idea to his father who responded to it with immense positivity and gave blessing.


title: Mammoth WVH

text: The debut album "Mammoth WVH", was released on June 11, 2021. It was met with reviews from music critics ranging from overall positive to acclamation. "Music Talkers" complimented that the album "has its own distinct sound...no two tracks feel the same." "Sonic Perspectives" declared that while the musician was initially met with doubt and criticism, the album "would make [his father] proud" and to "expect to hear his name in this business for many years to come." While "Riff Magazine" criticized the calculated technique and perceived lack of risk-taking, they praised his musical technicality and acknowledged that "he can go in just about any direction he wants, not only because of his last name, but because he really is that good." "Consequence Heavy" stated that while the diversity of songs creates a lack of cohesion, it is a "deeply personal and musically rewarding debut" while declaring the musicianship to be "virtuosic".


title: Mammoth WVH

text: "Ultimate Classic Rock" similarly praised the musical technicality praising the "disciplined focus" and stating: "It's going to be fascinating to hear how Wolfgang's music evolves on future albums." "Louder Sound" gave the album 4/5 stars, calling it "high-tech, energetic, relentless and thrilling" with "Metal Planet Music" similarly praising the album by classifying it as a "tour de force." Wolfgang commented on the album and its success, saying: "I’m so thankful that my father was able to listen to, and enjoy the music I made. I’m really proud of the work I’ve done and nothing made me happier than seeing how proud he was that I was continuing the family legacy."


title: Mammoth WVH

text: After the release of the debut album, Van Halen added Frank Sidoris, Jon Jourdan, Ronnie Ficarro, and Garrett Whitlock to the lineup in preparation for an upcoming tour and for future albums. In early 2022, the band embarked on a co-headlining tour with Dirty Honey called the Young Guns tour. The tour ended in April.


title: Mammoth WVH

text: During an interview with Eddie Trunk on February 26, 2022, Wolfgang stated that he hoped to begin recording a second album in 2022 following a tour in support of the debut album, citing that he has enough material to record, as well as leftover tracks from the debut album to look at. On October 4, 2022, Wolfgang confirmed that the recording for the second studio album had begun.


title: Khaali Peeli

text: Khaali Peeli is a 2020 Indian Hindi-language masala film starring Ishaan Khatter, Ananya Panday and Jaideep Ahlawat. "Khaali Peeli" is directed by Maqbool Khan and produced by Ali Abbas Zafar, Zee Studios and Offside Entertainment. The story was written by Yash Keswani and Sima Agarwal.


title: Khaali Peeli

text: Principal photography begun on 11 September 2019 and shoot wrapped up in March 2020. The film's initial release on 12 June 2020 was deferred due to COVID-19 pandemic. "Khaali Peeli" is released digitally on Zee Plex with pay-per-view model on 2 October 2020.


title: Khaali Peeli

text: It is about a couple who go to find a key which costs 7,00,00,000.On reaching there they come to know about Don Babban who is a criminal who is actually the couple's landlord.


title: Khaali Peeli

text: The film's music was composed by Vishal–Shekhar, while lyrics were written by Kumaar and Raj Shekhar.


title: Khaali Peeli

text: The song "Beyonce Sharma Jaayegi" was criticised online for lyrics that some found racist. The song has been contrasted with Beyoncé's "Brown Skin Girl", as "Rolling Stone India" pointed out how on one hand, Beyoncé is working towards the racial empowerment through her song, but the Bollywood song, names her, and says she will be "embarrassed of fairskined Ananya Panday's dancing skills". "HuffPost India" wrote "What's a bit of racism sprinkled over the regular dose of sexism". News18 India said "It seems despite the Black Lives Matter movement, the hashtags and the social media outrage, Bollywood hasn't learned much about racism". After receiving heavy backlash online, the director Maqbool Khan apologised. On 13 September, the producers changed the spelling of the title, from "Beyoncé" to "Beyonse". News18 India reported that Jay-Z trademarked and protected the name "Beyoncé" and it therefore cannot be used without their permission. The title was subsequently changed again, to "Duniya Sharma Jayegi". However, despite the name change, the video received 1 million dislikes within its first week on YouTube.


title: Khaali Peeli

text: "Khaali Peeli" was originally scheduled to be released worldwide on 11 June 2020 in cinemas, before the COVID-19 pandemic led to its postponement owing to cinemas shutdown. In August 2020, the makers sold its rights to new PVOD platform Zee Plex. "Khaali Peeli" was released there on 2 October 2020, coinciding with Gandhi Jayanti. It was simultaneously released in drive-in theatres of Gurugram and Bengaluru.


title: Khaali Peeli

text: The film released on the Zee Plex platform alongside Ka Pae Ranasingam. Devansh Sharma from "Firstpost" wrote, "After Beyond The Clouds and Dhadak, Khatter puts on display yet another side of his multifaceted personality. Khaali Peeli is his most 'commercial' film yet, a la Ranveer Singh in Rohit Shetty's Simmba. But rather than mimicking his idols, Khatter invents his style in conformity with a Mumbai taxi driver on a steady diet of Bollywood films for years — and makes a meal of it. Soumya Srivastava from "Hindustan Times" stated "Khaali Peeli is a concoction that can only be brewed in the belly of Bollywood. With one chase sequence following on the tails of another, director Maqbool Khan ensures not a single moment is without its adrenaline dialled up to an 11. But it’s quite shocking how easily one can grow bored of craziness as well"


title: Khaali Peeli

text: Shubra Gupta from "The Indian Express" said, " Khaali Peeli knows that it needs to refresh the tropes it is up against, and manages to do so only some of the time in its two-hour duration" Uma Ramasubramanian from "Mid-Day" wrote "Khaali Peeli is the perfect package for Khatter, who gets to showcase his dancing skills, action, drama, romance, comedy and biceps. Known for his love for offbeat films — Majid Majidi's Beyond the Clouds (2017) and forthcoming A Suitable Boy (2020) — the wonder boy is equally crackling in a typical Bollywood entertainer. Panday, though she carries the role efficiently, doesn't deliver authenticity to the character"


title: Form I-9

text: The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) required employers to verify that all newly hired employees presented facially valid documentation verifying the employee's identity and legal authorization to accept employment in the United States. The I-9 form, or more properly the Employment Eligibility Verification Form, is provided by the federal government for that purpose.


title: Form I-9

text: Every employee hired after November 6, 1986 must complete an I-9 form at the time of hire. Employees must complete Section 1 of the form upon commencing employment. The employer must complete Section 2 within three days of the employee's starting date at work. The employer is responsible for ensuring that the forms are completed properly and in a timely manner.


title: Form I-9

text: The I-9 is not required for unpaid volunteers or for contractors. However, a company could still find itself liable if it contracts work to a contractor it knows either is or employs unauthorized workers.


title: Form I-9

text: Multiple versions of Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, have been issued since the form was first introduced in 1987; not all versions are valid for use. Currently, only forms showing the following revision date are valid: "Rev. 07/17/2017 N*".


title: Form I-9

text: If an employee cannot read or cannot write in English, a translator or preparer may complete the form and sign it on behalf of the employee. The form also requires the employee's own signature.


title: Form I-9

text: In completing form I-9, prospective employees attest, under penalty of perjury, that they are in one of the following categories:


title: Form I-9

text: With the form, prospective employees must provide documents that prove their eligibility to work. A variety of documents are acceptable. The prospective employee must provide either:


title: Form I-9

text: Documents that may be used under "List A" of the I-9 form to establish both identity and employment eligibility include:


title: Form I-9

text: For individuals under the age of eighteen, the following documents may be used to establish identity:


title: Form I-9

text: Employees who supply an item from List B (to establish identity) must also supply an item from List C (to establish employment eligibility).


title: Form I-9

text: U.S. citizens who have lost their social security card can apply for a duplicate at the Social Security Administration.


title: Form I-9

text: Employees who supply an item from List C (to establish employment eligibility) must also supply an item from List B (to establish identity).


title: Form I-9

text: Employers must update or reverify certain ID documents at or prior to their expiration date. This does not apply to already presented and accepted non-expired U.S. Passports or Permanent Resident Cards when they reach their expiration date, nor to any List B documents (e.g., state driver's licenses and state IDs). The USCIS website, in the Employer section, Employer Bulletins, lists the limited requirements and allowed instances for reverification.


title: Form I-9

text: For U.S. citizens, I-9s are valid continuously unless a break of more than a year of employment occurs. International employees on F-1 (student), H-1B (specialty occupation), or J-1 (exchange visitor) visas must have their I-9 reverified each time their visa has expired with a new work authorization permit (renewed visa with work authorization, EAD, Permanent Residence Card, etc.).


title: Form I-9

text: Employers must retain a Form I-9 for all current employees. Employers must also retain a Form I-9 for three years after the date of hire, or one year after the date employment ends, whichever is later. Employers must show their employees' I-9 form any time the immigration or labor authority requests it.


title: Form I-9

text: The Immigration Reform and Control Act which introduced the requirement leading to the promulgation of the I-9 form also included anti-discrimination provisions. Under the Act, most U.S. citizens, permanent residents, temporary residents, asylees or refugees who are legally allowed to work in the United States cannot be discriminated against on the basis of national origin or citizenship status. This provision applies to employers of three or more workers and covers both hiring and termination decisions. In addition, an employer must accept any valid document or combination of documents specified in the I-9 form as long as the documents appear genuine.


title: Form I-9

text: For example, an employer could not refuse to hire a candidate because his I-9 revealed that he was a non-citizen (such as a permanent resident or a refugee) rather than a U.S. citizen. For this reason some immigration lawyers advise companies to avoid requiring an I-9 until a candidate is hired rather than risk a lawsuit. As another example, a company could not insist that an employee provide a passport rather than, say, a driver's license and social security card. Another anti-discrimination provision requires that employers must enforce I-9 compliance in a uniform manner. For example, an employer must not require some employees to complete an I-9 before being hired, but allow others to complete the form after starting employment.


title: Form I-9

text: Employers must not assume that the employee is unauthorized to work just because the individual either could not bring the proof of employment authorization or has brought the unaccepted documents until the start date of the employment. Instead, employers should encourage that employee to bring the acceptable documents which are under the List A, B and C. Employers may terminate the employment only if the employee cannot attest the person's work authorization by bringing the proof after the start date.


title: Form I-9

text: The Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices ("OSC") is a section within the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division that enforces the anti-discrimination provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act ("INA"). The OSC can help workers by calling employers and explaining proper verification practices and, when necessary, by providing victims of discrimination with charge forms. Upon receipt of a charge of discrimination, OSC investigations typically take no longer than seven months. Victims may obtain various types of relief including job relief and back pay.


title: Form I-9

text: OSC also has an extensive outreach program. It provides staff to speak at outreach events throughout the country, and has free informational brochures, posters and tapes for distribution.


title: Form I-9

text: The OSC investigates the following types of discriminatory conduct under the anti-discrimination provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. § 1324b:


title: Form I-9

text: With respect to hiring, firing, recruitment or referral for a fee by employers with four or more employees, employers may not treat individuals differently because they are or are not U.S. citizens or work-authorized individuals. U.S. citizens, recent permanent residents, temporary residents, asylees and refugees are protected from citizenship status discrimination. However, permanent residents who do not apply for naturalization within six months of eligibility are not protected from citizenship status discrimination. Citizenship status discrimination which is otherwise required to comply with law, regulation, executive order or government contract is permissible by law.


title: Form I-9

text: With respect to hiring, firing, recruitment or referral for a fee by employers with more than three and fewer than fifteen employees, employers may not treat individuals differently because of their place of birth, country of origin, ancestry, native language, accent or because they are perceived as looking or sounding foreign. All U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents and work authorized individuals are protected from national origin discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has jurisdiction over employers with fifteen or more employees.


title: Form I-9

text: Relating to verifying the employment eligibility of employees, employers may not request more or different documents than are required to verify employment eligibility, reject reasonably genuine-looking documents or specify certain documents over others with the purpose or intent of discriminating on the basis of citizenship status or national origin. U.S. citizens and all work authorized individuals are protected from document abuse.


title: Form I-9

text: Individuals who file charges with OSC; who cooperate with an OSC investigation; who contest action that may constitute unfair documentary practices or discrimination based upon citizenship, immigration status, or national origin; or who assert their rights under the INA's anti-discrimination provision are protected from retaliation.


title: Form I-9

text: The IRCA includes penalties for I-9 noncompliance. Federal law provides for imprisonment or fines for making false statements or using false documents in connection with the completion of the I-9. An employer who hires an unauthorized worker can be fined between $250 and $5,500 per worker. In addition, such an employer can be barred from federal government contracts for a year. An employee who knowingly accepts fraudulent documentation can also be criminally prosecuted under other immigration laws.


title: Form I-9

text: An employer who fails to keep proper records that I-9s are properly filed can be fined $110 per missing item for each form, up to $1100 per form, even if the employee is legally authorized to work in the United States. Since 2009, Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted over 7,500 audits and imposed over $80 million in fines. In 2011 alone, ICE conducted 2,740 audits and assessed over $7 million in fines.


title: Form I-9

text: An individual who knowingly commits or participates in document fraud may be fined between $375 and $3,200 per document for the first offense and between $3,200 and $6,500 per document for subsequent offenses.


title: Form I-9

text: Recent Employee Bulletins by the USCIS explain many questions and concerns that employees have had over the years about the I-9 process, such as the limitation of an employer's ability to discern from the many old ID's, the many various forms of ID, discovery of possibly questionable ID, etc.:


title: August Strindberg

text: Johan August Strindberg (, ; 22 January 184914 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his "The Red Room" (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.


title: August Strindberg

text: The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, "Master Olof", in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays "The Father" (1887), "Miss Julie" (1888), and "Creditors" (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established (opened 1887). In "Miss Julie", characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to "Miss Julie", the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.


title: August Strindberg

text: During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of apparent psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 (referred to as his ""Inferno" crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult". In 1898 he returned to play-writing with "To Damascus", which, like "The Great Highway" (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His "A Dream Play" (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his play-writing career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardt's , that staged his chamber plays (such as "The Ghost Sonata").


title: August Strindberg

text: Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg (a shipping agent) and Eleonora Ulrika Norling (a serving-maid). In his autobiographical novel "The Son of a Servant", Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect". When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city. A year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan. He attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year. In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. As a child he had a keen interest in natural science, photography, and religion (following his mother's Pietism). His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence. She died when he was thirteen, and although his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealized maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson. According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies. He passed his graduation examination in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.


title: August Strindberg

text: Strindberg spent the next few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for examinations and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits. As a young student, Strindberg also worked as an assistant in a pharmacy in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He supported himself in between studies as a substitute primary-school teacher and as a tutor for the children of two well-known physicians in Stockholm. He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. In May 1869, he failed his qualifying chemistry examination which in turn made him uninterested in schooling.


title: August Strindberg

text: Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays. It was at this time that he first learnt about the ideas of Charles Darwin. He co-founded the Rune Society, a small literary club whose members adopted pseudonyms taken from runes of the ancient Teutonic alphabet – Strindberg called himself Frö (Seed), after the god of fertility. After abandoning a draft of a play about Eric XIV of Sweden halfway through in the face of criticism from the Rune Society, on 30 March he completed a one-act comedy in verse called "In Rome" about Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he had begun the previous autumn. The play was accepted by the Royal Theatre, where it premièred on 13 September 1870. As he watched it performed, he realised that it was not good and felt like drowning himself, though the reviews published the following day were generally favourable. That year he also first read works of Søren Kierkegaard and Georg Brandes, both of whom influenced him.


title: August Strindberg

text: Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse. During the Christmas holiday of 1870–71, he re-wrote a historical tragedy, "Sven the Sacrificer", as a one-act play in prose called "The Outlaw". Depressed by Uppsala, he stayed in Stockholm, returning to the university in April to pass an exam in Latin and in June to defend his thesis on Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger's Romantic tragedy "Earl Haakon" (1802). Following further revision in the summer, "The Outlaw" opened at the Royal Theatre on 16 October 1871. Despite hostile reviews, the play earned him an audience with King Charles XV, who supported his studies with a payment of 200 riksdaler. Towards the end of the year Strindberg completed a first draft of his first major work, a play about Olaus Petri called "Master Olof". In September 1872, the Royal Theatre rejected it, leading to decades of rewrites, bitterness, and a contempt for official institutions. Returning to the university for what would be his final term in the spring, he left on 2 March 1872, without graduating. In "Town and Gown" (1877), a collection of short stories describing student life, he ridiculed Uppsala and its professors.


title: August Strindberg

text: Strindberg embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm. He was particularly excited at this time by Henry Thomas Buckle's "History of Civilization" and the first volume of Georg Brandes' "Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature". From December 1874, Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library. That same month, Strindberg offered "Master Olof" to Edvard Stjernström (the director of the newly built New Theatre in Stockholm), but it was rejected. He socialised with writers, painters, journalists, and other librarians; they often met in the Red Room in Bern's Restaurant.


title: August Strindberg

text: Early in the summer of 1875, he met Siri von Essen, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who, by virtue of her husband, was a baroness – he became infatuated with her. Strindberg described himself as a "failed author" at this time: "I feel like a deaf-mute," he wrote, "as I cannot speak and am not permitted to write; sometimes I stand in the middle of my room that seems like a prison cell, and then I want to scream so that walls and ceilings would fly apart, and I have so much to scream about, and therefore I remain silent." As a result of an argument in January 1876 concerning the inheritance of the family firm, Strindberg's relationship with his father was terminated (he did not attend his funeral in February 1883). From the beginning of 1876, Strindberg and Siri began to meet in secret, and that same year Siri and her husband divorced. Following a successful audition that December, Siri became an actress at the Royal Theatre. They married a year later, on 30 December 1877; Siri was seven months pregnant at the time. Their first child was born prematurely on 21 January 1878 and died two days later. On 9 January 1879, Strindberg was declared bankrupt. In November 1879, his novel "The Red Room" was published. A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. While receiving mixed reviews in Sweden, it was acclaimed in Denmark, where Strindberg was hailed as a genius. As a result of "The Red Room", he had become famous throughout Scandinavia. Edvard Brandes wrote that the novel "makes the reader want to join the fight against hypocrisy and reaction." In his response to Brandes, Strindberg explained that:


title: August Strindberg

text: Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880. Buoyant from the reception of "The Red Room", Strindberg swiftly completed "The Secret of the Guild", an historical drama set in Uppsala at the beginning of the 15th century about the conflict between two masons over the completion of the city cathedral, which opened at the Royal Theatre on 3 May 1880 (his first première in nine years); Siri played Margaretha. That spring he formed a friendship with the painter Carl Larsson. A collected edition of all of Strindberg's previous writings was published under the title "Spring Harvest". From 1881, at the invitation of Edvard Brandes, Strindberg began to contribute articles to the "Morgenbladet", a Copenhagen daily newspaper. In April he began work on "The Swedish People", a four-part cultural history of Sweden written as a series of depictions of ordinary people's lives from the 9th century onwards, which he undertook mainly for financial reasons and which absorbed him for the next year; Larsson provided illustrations. At Strindberg's insistence, Siri resigned from the Royal Theatre in the spring, having become pregnant again. Their second daughter, Greta, was born on 9 June 1881, while they were staying on the island of Kymmendö. That month, a collection of essays from the past ten years, "Studies in Cultural History", was published. Ludvig Josephson (the new artistic director of Stockholm's New Theatre) agreed to stage "Master Olof", eventually opting for the prose version – the five-hour-long production opened on 30 December 1881 under the direction of August Lindberg to favourable reviews. While this production of "Master Olof" was his breakthrough in the theatre, Strindberg's five-act fairy-tale play "Lucky Peter's Journey", which opened on 22 December 1883, brought him his first significant success, although he dismissed it as a potboiler. In March 1882 he wrote in a letter to Josephson: "My interest in the theatre, I must frankly state, has but one focus and one goal – my wife's career as an actress"; Josephson duly cast her in two roles the following season.


title: August Strindberg

text: Having returned to Kymmendö during the summer of 1882, Strindberg wrote a collection of anti-establishment short stories, "The New Kingdom". While there, to provide a lead role for his wife and as a reply to Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" (1879), he also wrote "Sir Bengt's Wife", which opened on 25 November 1882 at the New Theatre. He moved to Grez-sur-Loing, just south of Paris, France, where Larsson was staying. He then moved to Paris, which they found noisy and polluted. Income earned from "Lucky Peter's Journey" enabled him to move to Switzerland in 1883. He resided in Ouchy, where he stayed for some years. On 3 April 1884, Siri gave birth to their son, Hans.


title: August Strindberg

text: In 1884 Strindberg wrote a collection of short stories, "Getting Married", that presented women in an egalitarian light and for which he was tried for and acquitted of blasphemy in Sweden. Two groups "led by influential members of the upper classes, supported by the right-wing press" probably instigated the prosecution; at the time, most people in Stockholm thought that Queen Sophia was behind it. By the end of that year Strindberg was in a despondent mood: "My view now is," he wrote, "everything is shit. No way out. The skein is too tangled to be unravelled. It can only be sheared. The building is too solid to be pulled down. It can only be blown up." In May 1885 he wrote: "I am on my way to becoming an atheist." In the wake of the publication of "Getting Married", he began to correspond with Émile Zola. During the summer he completed a sequel volume of stories, though some were quite different in tone from those of the first. Another collection of stories, "Utopias in Reality", was published in September 1885, though it was not well received.


title: August Strindberg

text: In 1885, they moved back to Paris. In September 1887 he began to write a novel in French about his relationship with Siri von Essen called "The Defence of a Fool". In 1887, they moved to Issigatsbühl, near Lindau by Lake Constance. His next play, "Comrades" (1886), was his first in a contemporary setting. After the trial he evaluated his religious beliefs, and concluded that he needed to leave Lutheranism, though he had been Lutheran since childhood; and after briefly being a deist, he became an atheist. He needed a credo and he used Jean-Jacques Rousseau nature worshiping, which he had studied while a student, as one. His works "The People of Hemsö" (1887) and "Among French Peasants" (1889) were influenced by his study of Rousseau. He then moved to Germany, where he fell in love with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Prussia status of the officer corps. After that, he grew very critical of Rousseau and turned to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies, which emphasized the male intellect. Nietzsche's influence can be seen in "The Defence of a Fool" (1893), "Pariah" (1889), "Creditors" (1889), and "By the Open Sea" (1890).


title: August Strindberg

text: Another change in his life after the trial is that Strindberg decided he wanted a scientific life instead of a literary one, and began to write about non-literary subjects. When he was 37, he began "The Son of a Servant", a four-part autobiography. The first part ends in 1867, the year he left home for Uppsala. Part two describes his youth up to 1872. Part three, or "The Red Room", describes his years as a poet and journalist; it ends with his meeting Siri von Essen. Part four, which dealt with the years from 1877 to 1886, was banned by his publishers and was not published until after his death. The three missing years, 1875–1877, were the time when Strindberg was wooing von Essen and their marriage; entitled "He and She", this portion of his autobiography was not printed until 1919, after his death. It contains the love letters between the two during that period.


title: August Strindberg

text: In the later half of the 1880s Strindberg discovered Naturalism. After completing "The Father" in a matter of weeks, he sent a copy to Émile Zola for his approval, though Zola's reaction was lukewarm. The drama revolves around the conflict between the Captain, a father, husband, and scientist, and his wife, Laura, over the education of their only child, a fourteen-year-old daughter named Berta. Through unscrupulous means, Laura gets the Captain to doubt his fatherhood until he suffers a mental and physical collapse. While writing "The Father", Strindberg himself was experiencing marital problems and doubted the paternity of his children. He also suspected that Ibsen had based Hjalmar Ekdal in "The Wild Duck" (1884) on Strindberg because he felt that Ibsen viewed him as a weak and pathetic husband; he reworked the situation of Ibsen's play into a warfare between the two sexes. From November 1887 to April 1889, Strindberg stayed in Copenhagen. While there he had several opportunities to meet with both Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard Brandes. Georg helped him put on "The Father", which had its première on 14 November 1887 at the Casino Theatre in Copenhagen. It enjoyed a successful run for eleven days after which it toured the Danish provinces.


title: August Strindberg

text: Before writing "Creditors", Strindberg completed one of his most famous pieces, "Miss Julie". He wrote the play with a Parisian stage in mind, in particular the Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887 by André Antoine. In the play he used Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest and dramatized a doomed sexual encounter that crosses the division of social classes. It is believed that this play was inspired by the marriage of Strindberg, the son of a servant, to an aristocratic woman.


title: August Strindberg

text: In the essay "On Psychic Murder" (1887), he referred to the psychological theories of the Nancy School, which advocated the use of hypnosis. Strindberg developed a theory that sexual warfare was not motivated by carnal desire but by relentless human will. The winner was the one who had the strongest and most unscrupulous mind, someone who, like a hypnotist, could coerce a more impressionable psyche into submission. His view on psychological power struggles may be seen in works such as "Creditors" (1889), "The Stronger" (1889), and "Pariah" (1889).


title: August Strindberg

text: In 1888, after a separation and reconciliation with Siri von Essen, he founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen, where Siri became manager. He asked writers to send him scripts, which he received from Herman Bang, Gustav Wied and Nathalia Larsen. Less than a year later, with the theatre and reconciliation short lived, he moved back to Sweden while Siri moved back to her native Finland with the children. While there, he rode out the final phase of the divorce and later used this agonizing ordeal for the basis of "The Bond and the Link" (1893). Strindberg also became interested in short drama, called Quart d'heure. He was inspired by writers such as Gustave Guiche and Henri de Lavedan. His notable contribution was "The Stronger" (1889). As a result of the failure of the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, Strindberg did not work as a playwright for three years. In 1889, he published an essay entitled "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre", in which he disassociated himself from naturalism, arguing that it was petty and unimaginative realism. His sympathy for Nietzsche's philosophy and atheism in general was also on the wane. He entered the period of his "Inferno crisis," in which he had psychological and religious upheavals that influenced his later works.


title: August Strindberg

text: August Strindberg's Inferno is his personal account of sinking deeper into some kind of madness, typified by visions and paranoia. In "Strindberg och alkoholen" (1985), James Spens discusses Strindberg's drinking habits, including his liking for absinthe and its possible implications for Strindberg's mental health during the inferno period.


title: August Strindberg

text: After his disenchantment with naturalism, Strindberg had a growing interest in transcendental matters. Symbolism was just beginning at this time. Verner von Heidenstam and Ola Hanson had dismissed naturalism as "shoemaker realism" that rendered human experience in simplistic terms. This is believed to have stalled Strindberg's creativity, and Strindberg insisted that he was in a rivalry and forced to defend naturalism, even though he had exhausted its literary potential. These works include: "Debit and Credit" (1892), "Facing Death" (1892), "Motherly Love" (1892), and "The First Warning" (1893). His play "The Keys of Heaven" (1892) was inspired by the loss of his children in his divorce. He also completed one of his few comedies, "Playing with Fire" (1893), and the first two parts of his post-inferno trilogy "To Damascus" (1898–1904).


title: August Strindberg

text: In 1892, he experienced writer's block, which led to a drastic reduction in his income. Depression followed as he was unable to meet his financial obligations and to support his children and former wife. A fund was set up through an appeal in a German magazine. This money allowed him to leave Sweden and he joined artistic circles in Berlin. Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne theatre premiered some of his famous works in Germany, including "The Father", "Miss Julie", and "Creditors".


title: August Strindberg

text: Similar to twenty years earlier when he frequented The Red Room, he now went to the German tavern The Black Porker. Here he met a diverse group of artists from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany. His attention turned to Frida Uhl, who was twenty-three years younger than Strindberg. They were married in 1893. Less than a year later, their daughter Kerstin was born and the couple separated, though their marriage was not officially dissolved until 1897. Frida's family, in particular her mother, who was a devout Catholic, had an important influence on Strindberg, and in an 1894 letter he declared "I feel the hand of our Lord resting over me."


title: August Strindberg

text: Some critics think that Strindberg suffered from severe paranoia in the mid-1890s, and perhaps that he temporarily experienced insanity. Others, including Evert Sprinchorn and Olof Lagercrantz, believed that he intentionally turned himself into his own guinea pig by doing psychological and drug-induced self-experimentation. He wrote on subjects such as botany, chemistry, and optics before returning to literature with the publication of "Inferno" (1897), a (half fictionalized) account of his "wilderness years" in Austria and Paris, then a collection of short stories, "Legends", and a semi-dramatic novella, "Jacob Wrestling" (both printed in the same book 1898). Both volumes aroused curiosity and controversy, not least due to the religious element; earlier, Strindberg had been known to be indifferent or hostile to religion and especially priests, but now he had undergone some sort of conversion to a personal faith. In a postscript, he noted the impact of Emanuel Swedenborg on his current work.


title: August Strindberg

text: "The Powers" were central to Strindberg's later work. He said that "the Powers" were an outside force that had caused him his physical and mental suffering because they were acting in retribution to humankind for their wrongdoings. As William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Honoré de Balzac, and William Butler Yeats had been, he was drawn to Swedenborg's mystical visions, with their depictions of spiritual landscape and Christian morality. Strindberg believed for the rest of his life that the relationship between the transcendental and the real world was described by a series of "correspondences" and that everyday events were really messages from above of which only the enlightened could make sense. He also felt that he was chosen by Providence to atone for the moral decay of others and that his tribulations were payback for misdeeds earlier in his life.