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Talk:Fiat 126

There is a problem with the link on the cinquecento.

What's that Soviet steel rust scandal ? Ericd 21:25, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * A rumour that has as much validity as the "Hellenic Quest" urban legend. So far, I have NEVER seen the slightest evidence for it, however it keeps being propagated even by so-called "prestigious" newspapers and magazines. I wouldn't be surprised if this claim was part of That's Life! presenter Esther Rantzen's and tabloid Daily Mirror's libelous campaign of the early '80s. See the July 2007 issue of Classic & Sports Car magazine for a good debunking of this ridiculous myth. Urban legends and false statements have no place in Wikipedia, since they are unfounded. Elp gr (talk) 10:37, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

The picture is crap, someone get a proper picture of a 126, preferably one WITH wheels.

Merge
It definitely should be merged with Polski Fiat 126p - it was the same car. Pibwl ←« 20:09, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Polglish
The chapter Political connotation is a bit Polglish, not written in proper English. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.114.146.98 (talk) 16:50, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Subject, Fiat 126, not Polish history
The article talks about the Polski Fiat too much, and there is a separate article for that. It's all very nice that the blasted thing was called a Maluch, but that was not the Fiat 126 we have here in Italy. As for the 'bambino' remark: in my native Holland the car was marketed as the Fiat 126 Bambino P4, where P stood for Personal because you can actually cram 4 people into it. Maybe someone can find a source for that, I have it out of a book. Yes, the car is too small for that long name, I know :-) RvK, Rende (CS) Italy —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.3.119.8 (talk) 16:52, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Horse Power should be added. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.53.232.153 (talk) 21:53, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
 * What horse power? :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Azarien (talk • contribs) 00:18, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Length
120 inches seems a bit long if the wheelbase is 72. Could someone check whether the length and/or wheelbase need correcting? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.7.83.3 (talk) 20:50, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Maybe a section on humour would be welcome?
In the communist bloc there were a large amount of jokes about the (Polski) FIAT 126p micro-car and a good part of them concerned having sex or the lack thereof, within such a confined space, e.g.

- Of all cars, only the Fiat 126 received Pope John Paul II's blessing, but why? - Because it is impossible to fornicate in such a small space!

- Maternity ward nurse tells pregnant woman in labour: For best comfort, position your body similar to how the baby was conceived. - Women: Right foot in the glove compartment, left leg through the door window?

The Fiat 126 also had a reputation for often being driven by ladies, with corresponding jokes that made fun of the lesser sex's lacking chaffeur abilities. 82.131.210.163 (talk) 14:29, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

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Hungarian nickname translations
I don't like the English translation of the Hungarian nicknames. I'm a native speaker of Hungarian, who has been living in the USA for 17 years. "Kispolszki" doesn't really mean "Little Polish" as that would be "Kis Lengyel", Lengyel being the Hungarian word for Polish. In fact the Hungarian nickname uses the foreign (to Hungarians) name "Polszki" with phonetic Hungarian spelling. I would translate it as "Little Polski". In fact, as a child, I didn't even know "Polszki" meant "Polish" (Lengyel). To me, Polszki was the car.

Similar translation problem exists with the name "Kispolák", which should be translated, frankly, as "Little Polack", as polák is basically an ethnic slur in Hungarian, just like "Polack" in English (maybe not quite as derogatory, but it is hard to tell).

I'll wait for input here, and I'll make the changes if there is no objection after a while. Csab (talk) 04:31, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

 * Hungarian is not widely understood or written in the more wiki-active corners of the anglosphere.  If you check the number of people who looked at the Fiat 126 page over the last year and try and infer from that how many of them (1) are likely to be reasonably fluent in Hungarian and (2) care enough about the Fiat 126 to look when they get a flag to indicate that someone has written something on the Fiat 126 talk page .... well, I suspect you may get to a number comfortably <1.   According to a wiki-tool which I am (very cautiously) inclined to trust, this Fiat 126 talk page received 12 hits in the last 90 days.   BUT if someone reading this knows I am wrong, feel free to contribute.   Meantime, if Csab is reasonably confident of what you write - and you appear to be - then please go ahead and improve those translations.   Accuracy and precision are good (even where they can often be elusive!)   If you "wait for input here"   .....  well, that often turns into an excuse for wandering off to get another coffee.   and then the phone goes.   and then .... nothing involving wikipedia.   Success Charles01 (talk) 08:34, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

Rear-engined small cars still being made in Europe
Various Smart models are rear-engined, small and manufactured in Europe as of this posting, long after the last 126p. Unless I'm missing something here. CrinklyCrunk (talk) 13:07, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

Engine details
The article is vague about engines.

The Original FIAT 126 had an air-cooled engine. In order to provide the boot space in a hatchback version the engine needed to be mounted sideways. It's entirely possible to do with the air cooled engine as the 500 Station Wagon showed.

However, for reasons unknown, the 126p/126bis was fitted with a completely new engine - a water cooled one. Which would not have been a problem had they mounted the radiator at the front so as the cars speed increased, so did the cooling. But no, the only cooling was a small rear mounted radiator with a tiny electric fan. The upshot was these engines seemed unable to go more than a couple of thousand kilometres without overheating and needing a new head gasket.

And again.

And again.

I would humbly submit that the real reason the cars never took off has nothing to do with "rear engines being out of favour" and everything to do with the fact that they were spectacularly unreliable. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheNoBrainer (talk • contribs) 10:06, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

 * Your statement is incorrect. The water-cooled engine was only fitted in the 126 BIS, produced for only four years. The air-cooled 126p model enjoyed popularity long before and long after the BIS. --Krótki (talk) 18:51, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Why maluch
The entry seems to go to extents to explain why the car was called in Polish "maluch", i.e. the little one. The real reason is, however, that Poland at that time licensed two cars from FIAT: the more expensive (and bigger) FIAT 125 and the cheaper (and much smaller) FIAT 126. Accordingly, and quite naturally, these two vehicles were called "the big FIAT" (Polish: duży FIAT) and "the small FIAT" (Polish: mały FIAT), respectively.

These nicknames were used daily at large scale instead of the real brand names. Because FIAT 126 was much more popular (being cheaper), it got the popular name of endearment "maluch" (= the small one), which is directly derived from "mały FIAT", as opposed to "duży FIAT", i.e. FIAT 125.

By the way, the same happened before WW2: Poland then licensed two cars, FIAT 518 and FIAT 508. The former got to be called "the big FIAT" and the latter "the small FIAT". 84.10.23.2 (talk) 19:34, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

title: Talk:Fiat 126


text:
Talk:Ladonia

I think it is sad Ladonia in Sweden does not get a place here on this web page!

From 1 of 15,000 Ladonian citizens I say! That sucks!

http://www.ladonia.net

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Ladonia


text: Talk:Conscious Party

title: Talk:Conscious Party


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Talk:Swaption

Lingo
"Swaptions are relatively vanilla instruments in today's financial markets", I like the financial lingo. - Jerryseinfeld 00:19, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

"Bermudan"
Not sure if that is correct. The proper adjectival form of "Bermuda" is "Bermudian", so if it's the adjective you want, that's the correct spelling. Noel (talk) 20:11, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Bermudan is the correct adjective.

Zaire
Zaire is since 1997 The Democratic Republic of the Congo, but I guess it doesn't matter for the example.

Swaps vs. Swaptions
The two examples fail to clarify the reason why one would want an option on a swap vs. just a swap - there's a cash flow mention in the first example, and none in the second. The swap hedges the interest-rate contingency - what is the option itself hedging?

Also - these examples suggest that swaps themselves are just bets on interest rate directions. Swaps aren't necessarily pure bets on the direction of interest rates - they are also used to hedge interest-rate-sensitive liabilities without requiring the purchase of large quantities of underlying fixed- or variable-rate assets. Gary 15:21, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. This example does not illustrate the true use of swaptions. A better (but more complicated example) would be to point out how a large portfolio of mortgages is inherently short optionality (to the homeowner who can prepay or refinance their mortgage) and how this property causes difficulty when hedging the interest rate exposure ("duration") of said portfolio, especially as rates change. While the owner of these mortgages is compensated with an increased yield over similar bonds which are not short optionality, the owner may wish to sacrifice some of this increased yield ("carry") by purchasing swaption straddles. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.171.18.72 (talk) 02:46, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Why only rates?
Swaptions are available for all kinds of underlying instruments, not just interest rates. 199.50.29.40 20:18, 30 January 2007 (UTC)Desi

Agreed, swaptions are also available for credit defaults, for instance. The definition should definitely be changed to option on a swap, not necessarily interest rate swap.Dnpurdy 14:57, 8 February 2007 (UTC)dnpurdy

I disagree - the term swaption usually means that the underlying is an interest rate swap. An option on a credit default swap is called a CDS option

Bermudan and Europeran swaptions were removed by an anonymous user
Bermudan and Europeran swaptions were removed by an anonymous user. I wasn't able to find any explanation of this action, but this guy's edits on Wikipedia are pretty pointless (also on this article he changed Congo with Mexico). Also now the page is incorrect, as it mentiones three swaption types but lists only the American one. 212.123.204.91 14:32, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

First Known Swaption
Is there a source for the claim that the first swaption was executed in 1983 by William Lawton? If not this should be deleted

Quoting convention
What is the quoting convention for swaptions, e.g. MxN? Is it the same for forward rate agreements? Finnancier (talk) 12:18, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

The quoting convention for swaptions is expiry then tenor, ie an option to pay or receive (a straddle) on 5y swap rate that expires in 3 months is called "3 month 5 year", normally written as "3m5y". When inquiring about this structure a trader might say "Where is your 3m5y market?". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.171.18.72 (talk) 02:39, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Examples
The examples given are unrealistic. Individuals do not use swaptions in this manner. The section should be rewritten giving institutional examples

Valuation
The Valuation section needs rewriting; it is poorly written but also doesn't make sense. Market standard practice is to price European Swaptions with Black Model using an implied volatility surface. Lattice models and other interest-rate models are used to price Bermudans and other exotics, and typically calibrated to the European Swaption prices. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RomQuant (talk • contribs) 09:15, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

title: Talk:Swaption


text:
Quincy Market

Quincy Market is a historic building near Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. It was constructed between 1824 and 1826 and named in honor of mayor Josiah Quincy, who organized its construction without any tax or debt. The market is a designated National Historic Landmark and a designated Boston Landmark in 1996, significant as one of the largest market complexes built in the United States in the first half of the 19th century. According to the National Park Service, some of Boston's early slave auctions took place near what is now Quincy Market.

As the central building of Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Quincy Market is often used metonymically for the entire development. By the mid-20th century it was badly in need of repair, and it was redeveloped into a public shopping and restaurant area in the early 1970s and re-opened in 1976. Today, this includes the original Quincy Market buildings, the later North Market and South Market buildings that flank the main Quincy Market, the historic Faneuil Hall lying at the west end, and two smaller curved buildings, added later to the eastern end.

History

By the time Boston was incorporated as a city in 1822, downtown commercial demand had grown beyond the capacity of Faneuil Hall. To provide an expansion of shop space Quincy Market was built, as an indoor pavilion of vendor stalls.

Designed by Alexander Parris, the main building was built immediately east of and "behind" Faneuil Hall which at the time sat next to the waterfront at the town dock. In an early example of Boston's tendency for territorial growth via landfill, part of the harbor was filled in with dirt to provide a plot of land for the market. The commercial growth spawned by the new marketplace led to the reconstruction or addition of six city streets.

From its beginning, the Market was largely used as a produce and foodstuff shopping center, with various grocers of such goods as eggs, cheese, and bread lining its inside walls. Digging performed for the expansion of the market in the late 1970s uncovered evidence of animal bones, suggesting that butchering work was done on-site. In addition, street vendors took up space outside the building in its plazas and against its outside walls. Some surviving signs of early food and supplies merchants hang today in the upstairs seating hall.

Design
The market is two stories tall, 535 ft long, and covers 27000 sqft of land. Its exterior is largely granite, with red brick interior walls, and represents the first large-scale use of granite and glass in post-and-beam construction. Within, it employs innovative cast iron columns and iron tension rods. The east and west facades exhibit a strong Roman style, with strong triangular pediments and Doric columns. In contrast, the sides of the hall are more modern and American, with rows of rectangular windows. The building's shape is a long rectangle, providing for a long hallway down its center line. On the roof are eight evenly spaced chimneys, and a copper-based dome in the center of the building, which covers an open common seating area and the major side entrances.

The main building is flanked on either side by $4 1/2$-story brick and granite buildings, called the North Market and South Market. Part of the market's original development, these buildings have been more extensively altered than the main building. The entire complex was designated a National Historic Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. The central domed building was designated a Boston Landmark by the Boston Landmarks Commission in 1996. The North and South Market buildings are currently pending Boston Landmarks.

Faneuil Hall Marketplace
In 1969, the department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the city of Boston approximately $2 million for market stabilization and restoration of roof lines and facades back to their 1826 appearance. The restoration project team included : Architectural Heritage Inc., Roger Webb; Stahl/Bennett Architects. Frederic A. Stahl, Principal in Charge; Roger Lang, Project Manager; James H. Ballou, Consulting Architect; and William LeMessurier, Structural Engineer. By the early 1970s, Boston's meat and produce had moved to larger, more modern facilities and Quincy Market was decaying. Using a combination of public and private funds, architectural firm Benjamin Thompson and Associates and the developer Rouse Company developed a new building form, the festival marketplace. The new Faneuil Hall Marketplace, incorporating Quincy Market, opened in 1976. In 1977, it received the Harleston Parker Medal and in 2009, the AIA's Twenty-five Year Award.

The main Quincy Market building continues to be a source of food for Bostonians, though it has changed from grocery to food-stall, fast-food, and restaurants. It is a popular and busy lunchtime spot for downtown workers. In the center, surrounding the dome, is a two-story seating area.

Further street vending space is available against the outside walls of the building, especially on the south side, under a glass enclosure. Most stalls in this space sell trinkets, gifts, and other curiosities. A few restaurants also occupy fully enclosed spaces at the ends of this enclosure.

More conventional retail space is provided on the second floor and in the basement level. The Comedy Connection, one of Boston's two largest comedy clubs, only recently vacated one of the second-floor spaces, and bars and restaurants occupy space on the basement levels.

Flanking the main building in the marketplace are two equally long buildings (North Market and South Market) that expand the market space for more restaurants, specialty shops, and office spaces. Two further concave market buildings enclose a circular plaza at the market's east end.

The open spaces at both the east and west ends of the marketplace are a common venue for various street performers, as well as street vendors. Most daytime visits to Quincy Market will encounter a large circular crowd of people standing around a juggler or other act.

title: Quincy Market


text:
George Tabori

George Tabori ( György Tábori; 24 May 1914 – 23 July 2007) was a Hungarian writer and theatre director.

Life and career
Tabori was born in Budapest as György Tábori, a son of Kornél (Cornelius) and Elsa Tábori. He was raised as a Catholic, and was only told about his Jewish origin when he was seven years old. His father Kornél was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944, but his mother and his brother Paul Tabori (writer and psychical researcher), managed to escape the Nazis. As a young man, Tabori travelled to Berlin but was forced to leave Nazi Germany in 1935 because of his Jewish background. He first went to London, where he worked for the BBC and received British citizenship. In 1947 he emigrated to the United States, where he became a translator (mainly of works by Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch) and a screenwriter including Alfred Hitchcock's movie I Confess (1953).

His first novel, Beneath The Stone, was published in America in 1945. In the late 1960s, Tabori brought his own and the work of Brecht to many colleges and universities. At the University of Pennsylvania he taught classes in dramatic writing which resulted in Werner Liepolt's The Young Master Dante and Ron Cowen's Summertree. His play The Niggerlovers debuted in 1967 starring Morgan Freeman and Stacy Keach. Two of Tabori's plays in English -- The Cannibals and Pinkville—were produced by Wynn Handman at the American Place Theatre in New York City from 1968 through 1970. His play The Prince was filmed by John Boorman as Leo the Last (1970) with Marcello Mastroianni and Billie Whitelaw; the film won the Director's Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in that year.

During his period in America, Tabori married Viveca Lindfors. In addition to his own child, Lena, with Lindfors, Tabori adopted Lindfors' two sons (from her marriage to film director Don Siegel), John and Kristoffer. Kristoffer later became an actor and Lena a publisher.

In 1971, Tabori moved to Germany, where his new emphasis was theater work, and mainly worked in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. His 1991 Goldberg Variations is a satirical farce based on Biblical stories which end in disaster.

He died in Berlin, aged 93.

Plays

 * Flight into Egypt (1952)
 * The Emperor's Clothes (1953)
 * Brou Ha Ha (1958).
 * Brecht on Brecht: An Improvisation (1960)
 * The Niggerlovers (1967)
 * The Cannibals (1968)
 * The Prince (1970)
 * Pinkville (1971)
 * My Mother's Courage (1979)
 * Jubilee (1983)
 * Goldberg Variations (1991)
 * Mein Kampf (1993)

Novels

 * Beneath The Stone (1945)
 * Companions of The Left Hand (1946)
 * Original Sin (1947)
 * The Journey (1958), novelisation of his screenplay of the film of the same name.
 * The Caravan Passes (1960)
 * The Good One (1960)
 * Son of a Bitch (1984)
 * Tod in Port Aarif (1995)

Screenplays

 * Thunder in the East (1951, based on the novel The Rage of the Vulture by Alan Moorehead)
 * I Confess (1953, based on the play Nos deux consciences by Paul Anthelme Bourde)
 * The Young Lovers (1954)
 * The Journey (1959)
 * No Exit (1962, based on the play No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre)
 * Secret Ceremony (1968, based on the short story Ceremonia secreta by Marco Denevi)
 * Parades (1972)

Other

 * Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George  (2022) Edited by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz - essays on Tabori

Film adaptations

 * Crisis (1950, based on the short story The Doubters)
 * Leo the Last (1970, based on the play The Prince)
 * My Mother's Courage (1995, based on an autobiographical story)
 * Dawn of Evil: Rise of the Reich (2009, based on the play Mein Kampf)

Awards and honors

 * 1983 Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis
 * 1990 Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis
 * 2001 Kassel Literary Prize
 * 2001 Nestroy Theatre Prize for Lifetime achievement

Marriages

 * Hannah Freund (1942–1954; divorced)
 * Viveca Lindfors (1954–1972; divorced); 1 stepson (Kristoffer Tabori)
 * Ursula Grützmacher-Tabori (1976–1984; divorced)
 * Ursula Höpfner (1985–2007; his death)

title: George Tabori


text:
Larry Wu-tai Chin

Larry Wu-tai Chin (August 17, 1922 – February 21, 1986) was a Chinese Communist spy who worked for the United States Government for 37 years (1944–1981), including positions at the U.S. Army and the CIA, while secretly being a mole for the Chinese Communist Party's intelligence apparatus from the very beginning. He kept passing classified documents and secret information to the People's Republic of China even after his retirement, until he was finally exposed in 1985.

Chin was one of China's most valuable foreign intelligence agents of the entire Cold War period; he supplied the PRC with top-secret information on American foreign policy initiatives relating to China, as well as biographical profiles of CIA agents. In 1970, he passed CIA documents to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai regarding President Richard Nixon's desire to open relations with the PRC; Mao therefore knew about Nixon's intentions well in advance of his diplomatic overtures, which allowed him to alter his policy (such as the volume of anti-American rhetoric in the state-controlled Chinese press) in order to extract the maximum political concessions from the Americans. Chin was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Early life
Born as Chin Wu-tai in Peking, Republic of China, in 1922, he attended Yenching University.

Chin was recruited by the Chinese Communist intelligence apparatus (then called the Central Social Affairs Department, or SAD) in 1944, during World War II. He was specifically directed to find employment in an American government agency (at the time, the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek was working closely with the Americans against Japan). Chin, who spoke good English, was hired by the United States Army, and was appointed to work as a translator of Chinese language at the U.S. Army Liaison Office in the city of Fuzhou.

From 1945 to 1949 Chin was a translator for the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai, and from 1949 to 1950 for the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong (then under British rule). During this time, he passed countless classified documents to the Chinese Communist intelligence service directed by Li Kenong during the early years of the PRC and was named first the Liaison Department and later the Central Investigation Department. Chin was regularly and highly paid for his services.

Korean War
Chin served as a Chinese translator in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, helping to debrief Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war. He misrepresented the intelligence that he was translating from captured Chinese soldiers resulting in the loss of U.S. forces and missed tactical opportunities. Many of these Chinese soldiers intended to defect to South Korea. He also provided the Chinese government with the names of captured Chinese soldiers who were revealing information or declared themselves opposed to Communist Party rule and intended to defect. The Chinese then specifically requested these soldiers by name to be released back to China before the armistice negotiations could take place. This delayed the negotiations process for over a year.

Penetrating the CIA
Following his U.S. Army service, Chin applied to and was accepted by the CIA. He was assigned as a Chinese language translator and analyst of the Chinese Communist press at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), where he continued his espionage for China. He was posted in Okinawa (1952–61), Santa Rosa, California (1961–71) and Rosslyn, Virginia (1971–81). According to No Kum-Sok, the North Korean pilot who defected with a MiG-15, Larry Chin was one of his CIA handlers after his defection.

As an FBIS analyst and one of the CIA's few fluent Chinese linguists, Chin was able to pass along such information as Intelligence Information Reports (IIRs) on China and East Asia, biographical profiles and assessments of fellow CIA employees, and the names and identities of the Agency's covert agents. He was also in a position to provide information about recruited deep-cover agents in China. Due to the CIA's policy of internal compartmentalization, Chin did not know their real names or identities; however, based on the intelligence they provided, he could infer such things as their locations, employers, and levels of access. Chinese counterintelligence could then attempt to identify them by determining who had access to what information. Once the agents were identified, they would routinely be arrested and executed, or, alternatively, fed false information to be communicated to the CIA. Most significantly, in 1970 Chin provided to the Maoist leadership in Beijing CIA documents that revealed the plans of President Richard Nixon to engage China in order to form a tactical alliance against (and put pressure on) the Soviet Union. Mao, knowing in advance of American designs and objectives, could squeeze maximum concessions from the Nixon administration.

Reveal
Only five years later did any allegation of espionage arise. In 1985, Yu Qiangsheng, a high-ranking Chinese intelligence official, defected to the United States and exposed Chin's espionage identity. On November 23, 1985, Chin was arrested. He was held at the Prince William County, Virginia jail, as the United States Marshal's Service typically places espionage suspects in Washington, DC-area county jails.

The first espionage count accused Chin of having conspired with Chinese intelligence agents to transmit defense-related documents potentially damaging to U.S. interests or advantageous to those of China. The second espionage count charged Chin specifically with having transmitted to a foreign agent in 1952 information about the location of prison camps in Korea where Chinese prisoners were held.

Death
On the day of his sentencing, when guards arrived at Chin's cell in the Prince William-Manassas Regional Adult Detention Center to transport him to court, they found him lifeless with a garbage bag over his head. An autopsy concluded that Chin had committed suicide in his cell. Shortly prior to his suicide, the Chinese consul made an authorized visit and informed him that the Chinese government would provide for the needs of his family if he died without revealing his secrets. His body was buried in Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, California.

A cenotaph believed to be for Chin was found in Fragrant Hills in Beijing by a visitor passing by in 2017.

Impact
Chin was one of China's most important foreign intelligence assets of the Cold War era. Due to his services, the Chinese government was able to extract the maximum political concessions from Richard Nixon in return for a tactical alliance against the Soviet Union. The majority of CIA agents in China were compromised and executed, or fed false information to be reported back to the Agency, and the Chinese leadership could have determined how accurate were U.S. intelligence assessments concerning the PRC's intelligence, political, economic, and military infrastructures.

title: Larry Wu-tai Chin


text:
Robert I, Count of Artois

Robert I (25 September 1216 – 8 February 1250), called the Good, was the first Count of Artois. He was the fifth (and second surviving) son of King Louis VIII of France and Blanche of Castile.

Life
He received Artois as an appanage, in accordance with the will of his father (died 1226) on attaining his majority in 1237 (aged twenty-one). In 1240 Pope Gregory IX, in conflict with Emperor Frederick II, offered to crown Robert as emperor in opposition to Frederick, but the French count refused to pretend to such a title.

Marriage
On 14 June 1237 Robert married Matilda, daughter of Henry II of Brabant and Marie of Hohenstaufen.

They had two children:

 * Blanche (1248–1302)
 * Robert II (1250–1302), who succeeded to Artois.

Death
While participating in the Seventh Crusade, Robert died while leading a reckless attack on Al Mansurah, without the knowledge of his brother King Louis IX. After fording a river, he and a group of Knights Templars charged a Mamluk outpost, during which the Mamluk commander, Fakhr-ad-Din Yusuf, was killed. Emboldened by his success, Robert, the Templar knights, and a contingent of English troops charged into the town and became trapped in the narrow streets. According to Jean de Joinville, Robert defended himself for some time in a house there, but was at last overpowered and killed.

title: Robert I, Count of Artois


text:
Heroes and Villains

"Heroes and Villains" is a song by the American rock band the Beach Boys from their 1967 album Smiley Smile and their unfinished Smile project. Written by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, Wilson envisioned the song as an Old West-themed musical comedy that would surpass the recording and artistic achievements of "Good Vibrations". The single was Brother Records' first release. While it failed to meet critical and commercial expectations, it was a hit record, peaking at number 12 in the U.S. and number 8 in the UK.

The song was Wilson and Parks' first collaboration. Parks characterized the song as "historically reflective" and a "visual effort" that was meant to match the ballads of Marty Robbins. He said the lyrics were based on the early history of California, including references to the involvement of the Spanish and American Indians. Some accounts suggest that the song developed partly from a Wilson reworking of the standard "You Are My Sunshine". Early versions included sections with lyrics about farm animals ("Barnyard") and physical health ("I'm in Great Shape").

"Heroes and Villains" had the most complex making of any song in the band's history. Recording spanned virtually the entire Smile sessions as Wilson experimented with at least a dozen versions of the track, some of which ranged in length from six to eight minutes. Wilson discarded almost everything that was recorded, with expenses totaling around $40,000 (equivalent to $0 in ). Most of the final composite was produced in three days at his makeshift home studio. The chorus featured a theme that was cannibalized from another Smile track, "Do You Like Worms?".

Wilson's bandmates and associates later voiced dissatisfaction with the released version, believing that the mix was vastly inferior to his earlier, lengthier edits. Commentators blame the record's failure on the esoteric lyrics, the "muddy" sound quality, and the late timing of the release. It remains one of the lesser-known songs in the Beach Boys' catalog. For Wilson, the single's failure came to serve as a pivotal point in his psychological decline, and he adopted the song title as a term for his auditory hallucinations. In 2004, Wilson remade the song and its related pieces for Brian Wilson Presents Smile. In 2011, The Smile Sessions was released with an entire disc devoted to the song's original recording sessions.

Background
Wilson had been working on "Heroes and Villains" for some time before he asked Parks to be his lyricist in mid-July 1966. Al Jardine surmised that the song derived in part from the group's improvised scat singing exercises from early in the band's existence. In a 2000 interview, he stated, "We all became instruments for Brian's barbershop concept. He said, 'Let's all do this, let's sing this idea.' Carl would be one instrument, I'd be another. Mike would be another instrument. [...] With none of us really being players, we would just scat in the car going to a show or something or going to school, anywhere." Musician Al Kooper, writing in his 2008 autobiography, recalled that Wilson played him a rough mix of "Heroes and Villains" shortly after the release of Pet Sounds. Kooper remembered that the song had "evolved, I believe, from a Wilson revamping of 'You Are My Sunshine.'"

"Heroes and Villains" was the first song that Wilson and Parks wrote together. As with the others that they wrote for the Smile album, Parks wrote the words while Wilson composed the music. When presented the descending melody at the initial writing session, occurring a few days after their first meeting, Parks was reminded of the Marty Robbins' 1959 song "El Paso" and immediately conceived the opening line: "I've been in this town so long that back in the city I've been taken for lost and gone and unknown for a long, long time."

Wilson told Parks that he had thought of the Old West when conceiving the melody. Journalist Domenic Priore speculated that Wilson may have based the verses on Phil Spector's productions of "River Deep - Mountain High" and "The Bells of St. Mary's" – particularly the former's bass line. Asked in 2004 about the influence of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on the recurring melodies and themes on Smile, Wilson responded: "A little bit, not much. It influenced 'Heroes & Villains' and a couple of others." He credited Parks with some of the music and arrangement on "Heroes and Villains".

In Parks' recollection, all but one section of "Heroes and Villains" was written entirely "in one sitting". The success of the pair's collaboration led to them writing more songs with an Old West theme, including "Barnyard" and "I'm in Great Shape". It became an integral track for the Smile project and, later, was often called the album's "centerpiece". Wilson envisioned "Heroes and Villains" as a three-minute musical comedy that would surpass his achievements with "Good Vibrations". In a 1977 radio interview, he offered an anecdote in which he told his father, Murry that he was going "'to make a record that's better than 'Good Vibrations', something that you could never do. I don't know why in the hell I said that."

In a self-penned 1969 article, former band associate Michael Vosse wrote that, during one night at Wilson's home, Wilson played a past-tense variation on "You Are My Sunshine" on piano that deviated into "this weird little riff". Vosse said, "And it hit him, man, right then that he wanted a barn yard—he wanted Old MacDonald's farm—he wanted all that stuff. So he immediately got Van Dyke over and they did a chart for 'You were my sunshine'". Although Vosse admitted that his memory may be wrong, since Wilson "changed things so much", he recalled that the arrangement then "developed into an instrumental thing with barnyard sounds—people sawing—he had people in the studio sawing on wood—and Van Dyke being a duck—and it was marvelous." Asked about Wilson's rendition of "You Are My Sunshine" in 2004, Parks could not remember having been involved with it.

Lyrics
There are conflicting reports regarding who came up with the title. Wilson credited Parks with naming the song, but Parks denied this, saying that he wrote the lyrics around the title that Wilson had suggested. Wilson's then-wife Marilyn commented: "There are so many screwed-up people in the music industry. The good guys and the bad guys [...] That's one thing Brian had in mind when they did 'Heroes and Villains. Biographer Peter Ames Carlin interpreted the song as Wilson projecting "all of the feelings sensed inside of himself [...] into vibrantly colored, abstract glimpses into another parallel world."

In Carlin's interpretation, the song describes "a lawless boomtown somewhere out on the fringes of the Old West" as told from the perspective of a narrator who "speaks as a man who has become a part of the scene, but not of it, exactly, because he's still so thrilled and terrified by everything he sees." At the song's conclusion, the protagonist "has aged and seen his children grow to adulthood" without knowing if his experiences have turned him into a hero or a villain.

Alternate versions of the song tell a different narrative, as Stylus Magazine's Ed Howard writes, "'Heroes & Villains' told a story, though the actual narrative changed depending on what sections were being added or discarded at any given time." In reference to "I'm in Great Shape", Parks commented: "it's interesting how [in the lyrics] there was, all of a sudden, this turning to eggs and grits. It's because it had something to do with the thought of a barnyard, and that related to that place we were trying to come up with in 'Heroes And Villains'. All those lyrics were visual efforts."

Contrary to a popular rumor, the song was not written about the nascent war in Vietnam. Parks said the lyrics were actually centered around an American Indian "thing" in which he and Wilson "were trying to exculpate our guilt, to atone for what we had done to the aborigines of our own place. There's a lot of things about belief in Smile, and its very question of belief is what was plaguing Brian at that time. What should we keep from the structure that we had, the hard-wiring that we had with religion?" Historian Keith Badman speculated that the "you're under arrest" line from an earlier version of the song may have been inspired by Wilson witnessing an attempted burglary of his Rolls-Royce.

Artist Frank Holmes, who designed the Smile cover artwork, created an illustration that was inspired by the song's lyrics: "The rain of bullets that eventually brought her down". Along with several other drawings, it was planned to be included within a booklet packaged with the Smile LP. Holmes shared a summary of his design choices in Domenic Priore's 2005 book Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson's Lost Masterpiece. Holmes recalled of the illustration, "the poultry in the right corner is saying, 'Dude'll do,' a reference to a line in the original lyrics: 'She was unafraid of what a dude’ll do in a town full of heroes and villains.' Van Dyke tells me that Brian saw that image and actually got the other Beach Boys to change their singing to ‘Dude’ll do’, based on this. So there's a case of the drawing definitely influencing the work."

Overview
"Heroes and Villains" had the most complex making of any song in the band's history, with dozens of sections and themes recorded for the track. Approximately 30 session dates were devoted to the song. Recording spanned virtually the entire Smile sessions, with the total production costs estimated at around $40,000 (equivalent to $0 in ), a sum that was possibly three to four times greater than that for "Good Vibrations". Wilson also worked on and revised "Heroes and Villains" more than any other track for the LP. He experimented with myriad versions of the song, some of which ranged in length from six to eight minutes. Numerous rough mixes were completed, including at least four substantially different versions. It is the only track on Smile in which Wilson recorded vocals before the different sections of the song was assembled. Wilson said it was also the only song he ever produced in which the bass drum was the backbeat. "Great boom boom. People across the street were saying, 'Hey—whatever you're doing sounds great!' Thank you very much!"

Some sections that were recorded for "Heroes and Villains" were, at one point, slated to be dedicated songs of their own. In the 1970s, Wilson told biographer Byron Preiss that there was intended to be a piece called the "Barnyard Suite", which would have been "four songs in four short pieces, combined together, but we never finished that one. We got into something else." The only consistent element among the many versions of "Heroes and Villains" was that the song began with the "I've been in this town ..." verse. From there, the rest of the track was constantly revised. Journalist Peter Doggett commented, "The shifts of melody and tempo are so dramatic that virtually anything could have been considered part of that song; in Brian Wilson's mind, virtually anything was."

Vosse recalled that "there must have been a dozen versions. The best version I heard, which was never completed, but at least I could see the form of it, was an A side B side version lasting about six minutes. It was a beautifully structured work; and Van Dyke was still very involved." Wilson later denied that he had ever planned to issue the song in this form. In 2006, Carlin reported that a rumored 11-minute edit had yet to be found. In 2013, an acetate containing an early mix of the song was discovered. It indicated that Wilson had experimented with incorporating recorded sections of "I'm in Great Shape" into the projected "Heroes and Villains" single.

One of Wilson's "Heroes and Villains" recording experiments was, according to journalist Nick Kent, directly inspired by his emerging struggles with auditory hallucinations. Kent wrote that, during a session, Wilson attempted to recreate a "ghoulish" voice in his head by "taking a tape of some acappella Beach Boys vocal horse-play and slowing it down until it was just this vast swamp-like groan of terror. It was the scariest sound of anything he created for Smile ..." In the September/October 1967 issue of Crawdaddy!, journalist and magazine founder Paul Williams wrote that the song "originally had a chorus of dogs barking, cropped when Brian heard Sergeant Pepper, and was in many ways - the bicycle rider - a far different song."

Early sessions (May–November 1966)
On May 11, Wilson went into Gold Star Studios and recorded an instrumental take of "Heroes and Villains" with a 2:45 runtime. According to Badman, the session was conducted as an experiment and was not a full-fledged recording. It is one of the many recordings of the songs that have since been presumed missing or lost. According to journalist Domenic Priore, this early take may have included a section that quoted "You Are My Sunshine". Engineer Chuck Britz told Preiss that "Heroes and Villains" was "as big if not bigger than 'Good Vibrations' in its original form. I thought it was a fantastic song, a great, rich full sound. [...] We had our basic unit-an organ, drums, basses, and guitars. Mostly everything we did had the same amount of basic instrumentation. I think there was a harpsichord in the back of the room and a harp played by Mike’s sister, Maureen."

"Barnyard" and the backing track verses of "Heroes and Villains" were both recorded on October 20, 1966 at Western Studio. "Barnyard" featured animal noises roared by Wilson's Smile coterie, including singer Danny Hutton and his girlfriend June Fairchild. A session for "I'm in Great Shape" followed on October 27. On the recording, Wilson experimented with a tape delay effect that looped the audio signal back into itself cumulatively at a high gain level to create an "explosion" of sound. On November 4, Wilson recorded a piano demonstration of "Heroes and Villains" that included "I'm in Great Shape" and "Barnyard" as sections of the song. Parks and KHJ DJ Humble Harve Miller are also featured on this recording – the former providing animal sounds.

On November 14, Wilson recorded "My Only Sunshine", a medley of the standards "The Old Master Painter" and "You Are My Sunshine". The renditions are relatively short. In 2005, Wilson wrote that the rendition of "The Old Master Painter" was brief because he could not remember the full song. During the recording, Wilson remarked that the session players should play as though they're far away, as the lyric suggests. Reflective of the spiritual themes recurring throughout the Smile songs, "The Old Master Painter" is a song that evokes God in its lyrics. "You Are My Sunshine" ends with a string section descending to a low discordance where Brian used the adjectives "snappy" and "draggy" to instruct session players. The master take for "You Are My Sunshine" was spliced out of the original reel so that Dennis Wilson could add a lead vocal. In 1968, a mono mixdown of the tape was created, but as of 2004, the original master had gone missing from the band's archives.

Delays and further recording (December 1966 – March 1967)
Smile was first projected for a December 1966 release date. On December 15, Wilson informed Capitol A&R director Karl Engemann that the album and its lead single "Heroes and Villains" would probably be delivered "some time prior to January 15". He attempted to ease Capitol's concerns over the album's delay by delivering a handwritten note that contained an unordered, preliminary track listing. "I'm in Great Shape" and "The Old Master Painter" were both listed as a separate track from "Heroes and Villains". Capitol delayed the release date of Smile and "Heroes and Villains" to March 1967. Possibly due to their insistence on a ready single, Wilson returned to work on "Heroes and Villains" on December 19, 1966 after which he halted work on most of the album's other tracks until April 1967. According to former band associate David Anderle, in December 1966, Wilson was unable to decide if "Heroes and Villains" should be the single.

By the start of 1967, the Smile recording sessions were marked by tension, a contrast from the joyous atmosphere that began the project. In one section of "Heroes and Villains", Wilson instructed his bandmates to crawl on the floor of the studio and make pig-like snorting sounds. Jardine remembered, "You hear a bunch of snorting and swining... It was like being trapped in an insane asylum. I was emotionally depressed by a lot of that stuff ..." On January 3, a module of "Heroes and Villains" called "Do a Lot" was recorded. A surviving tape of this session includes a remark from Wilson saying, "If there's not anymore cooperation of this, I'm splitting, I mean it. We better get back into the groove, you know?" "Do a Lot" was later reconfigured as "Mama Says" and briefly as a section of "Vega-Tables". Similarly, on January 27, a section called "All Day" was recorded. Also known as "Love to Say Dada", it later evolved into "Cool, Cool Water". At some point, Wilson began considering "Bicycle Rider", a module from "Do You Like Worms?", for inclusion in the structure of "Heroes and Villains".

On February 10, Wilson completed a mix of "Heroes and Villains", later known as the "Cantina" version, that ended with a coda extracted from "My Only Sunshine". Wilson soon discarded this version and the master tape was later lost, leaving just a safety copy of the mix. On February 16, Richard Goldstein reported in the Village Voice that the forthcoming single had "five movements, each with a distinct melodic and rhythm line." On February 18, journalist Tracy Thomas reported in the NME that "Heroes and Villains" would be released once Wilson decides on the contents of the single's B-side. She quoted Wilson as saying that he wanted to "keep as much of Smile a surprise as possible. I may end up just recording me and a piano. I tried it last night in the studio. It would be an interesting contrast, anyway."

Work on the song continued throughout February and March. At the end of February, the band launched a lawsuit against Capitol that sought neglected royalty payments and a dissolution of their contract with the label. Following this, Wilson announced that the album's lead single would be "Vega-Tables", a song that he had yet to start recording.

Parks' departure and hiatus (March–May 1967)
On March 2, 1967, after a session for "Heroes and Villains", Wilson and Parks ran into disagreements, possibly over lyrics, and temporarily dissolved their partnership. On March 18, KMEM in San Bernardino conducted a radio survey that reported that Wilson was busy preparing "Heroes and Villains" and Smile, "and he's informed the Capitol bosses that he doesn't intend to 'hold back' on these projects." On March 21, band publicist Derek Taylor reported in his weekly column for Disc & Music Echo, "Only a scoundrel would dispute the claim that 'Heroes and Villains' is the most famous single not yet recorded. [...] it is a fact that the single, at the time of writing, is not completed and many people here are troubled. But Brian Wilson is not one of them."

In April, Wilson paused work on "Heroes and Villains" to focus on "Vega-Tables" for two weeks. Parks' last recorded appearance on the album's sessions was for a "Vega-Tables" date on April 14, after which Wilson took a four-week break from the studio.

On April 29, Taylor announced in Disc & Music Echo that "All the 12 songs for the new Beach Boys album are completed and [...] there are plans to release the album on a rush-schedule any moment." That same day, a Taylor-penned press release, published in Record Mirror and NME, revealed that "Heroes and Villains" was delayed due to "technical difficulties". On May 6, Taylor announced that Smile had been "scrapped" by Wilson. On May 11, Wilson returned to work on "Heroes and Villains" for a single session. On May 14, Carl Wilson stated at a press conference in Holland that "Vega-Tables" would probably be released as a single instead of "Heroes and Villains".

Smiley Smile remake (June–July 1967)
By June, Brian had declared to his bandmates that most of the material recorded for Smile was now off-limits and that he wanted to rerecord "Heroes and Villains" from scratch. Vocal and instrumental tracking on the song lasted from June 12 to 14 at Wilson's makeshift home studio, representing a dramatic contrast from his previous working methods. According to the group's statements to the press, they abruptly dropped out of headlining the Monterey Pop Festival that weekend because of commitments to deliver the "Heroes and Villains" single to Capitol.

Biographer Steven Gaines wrote that "Heroes and Villains" was the only track prepared for the forthcoming Smiley Smile album that Wilson "really cared about". Jim Lockhert, the engineer for the Smiley Smile sessions, recalled: "We had the complete song, but they just wanted to use part of it. Brian wanted to change what had been done on the rest of it. I think he wanted instrumentally and vocally to make it more complex. I think he wanted to finish the song, it was a challenge to him." Like many of the other tracks on Smiley Smile, Wilson used his recently acquired Baldwin theatre organ on the track. On some parts of the recording, the band used Wilson's swimming pool as an echo chamber.

The final overdubs were recorded around late June or early July. On July 22, Mike Love played a version of "Heroes and Villains" for NME's Keith Altham, who reported, "His particular tape ran for about six minutes. The harmonies and melodies are as intricate as one would expect. The number sounds like a combination of 'Good Vibrations', 'God Only Knows' and 'I Just Wasn't Made for These Times'."

After a brief period spent re-mixing and editing the song, the record was completed with a runtime of three minutes and 36 seconds. The only remnant of the earlier Smile recordings that made it into the final edit was portions of the backing track that had been recorded in October 1966. The final edit featured a complex vocal arrangement, unusual formal juxtapositions, tempo changes, and other novel elements. It starts at a fast tempo, alternates between a slower chorus, and at the end, shifts to an out-of-tempo a capella section that leads abruptly into the chorus fade-out.

The chorus featured a theme that was cannibalized from "Do You Like Worms?". According to Jardine, the "most important part of the song" was the change from E minor to A major, "The choruses repeat and you’d hear the theme repeated and repeated in the song. That’s very similar with what classical composers used to do, and that’s what I liked. I really enjoyed the recurring themes with different arrangements."

Release
Wilson held onto the final mix of the song for about a month. On the evening of July 11, 1967, he was told by his astrologer (a woman named Genevelyn) that the time was right for the record to be heard by the public. Without informing Capitol, Wilson called his bandmates and, accompanied by producer Terry Melcher, traveled by limo to personally deliver a vinyl cut of the record to KHJ Radio. According to Melcher, as Wilson excitedly offered the record for radio play, the DJ refused, citing program directing protocols. Melcher recalled: "Brian almost fainted! It was all over. He'd been holding onto the record [and] had astrologers figuring out the correct moment. It really killed him. Finally they played it, but only after a few calls to the program director or someone, who screamed, 'Put it on, you idiot!' But the damage to Brian had already been done."

"Heroes and Villains" was among the most highly publicized singles in the history of rock music. Issued on July 24, it was the first release on the Beach Boys' Brother Records and failed to match the commercial success of "Good Vibrations" by a considerable degree. It debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 81 on August 6, peaked at number 12 around September 4, and dropped off the charts one week later. In Britain, the single was issued on August 18 and reached number 8 on the UK Singles Chart.

Filmmaker Peter Clifton compiled a music video of "Heroes and Villains" set to footage of surfers riding waves for the BBC. The clip aired on the network's Top of the Pops on August 31. On September 2, the BBC hired a film crew to shoot an official music video of the song that featured the group at Brian's home. The film was scheduled to air on Top of the Pops around September 21 but was later scrapped. On September 18, Smiley Smile was released with "Heroes and Villains" as the opening track. It was one of the album's two elaborately-produced tracks (the other being "Good Vibrations").

Contemporary critical response

Critical reaction to the single was mixed. David Anderle later said that whatever new fans the group had brought with Pet Sounds were "immediately lost with the release of 'Heroes of Villains.'" In reference to the song, Jimi Hendrix told Disc & Music Echo: "Don’t particularly like the Beach Boys. Makes me think of a psychedelic barbershop quartet!" Billboard reviewed it as "clever off-beat rock material with an arrangement that encompasses barbershop harmony and jazz!" Cash Box called it a "creatively delivered conglomeration of sounds that run the gamut from amusement park hooplah to barbershop harmony" and said that the lyrics "pose some interesting questions." Record World called it "a strange, appealing, harmonious song."

Bruce Johnston witnessed the record's debut at The Speakeasy Club in London. He recalled, "Everyone really got up to dance. But when the tempo changed, I knew we'd blown it with that record." Among British reviewers, Disc & Music Echo's Penny Valentine lamented that while she appreciated certain aspects of the song on repeated listens, "the record as a whole [...] is disappointing. [...] one has, perhaps, just come to expect too much from the Beach Boys. And this isn't it!" In his review for Melody Maker, Nick Jones praised the song as "another masterpiece of production from Wilson and another move in his flowery progression." New Music Review's critic described the song as "weirdly fascinating".

In an editorial published in December, Rolling Stone founding editor Jann Wenner referred to the song as "pointless" and a weak follow-up to "Good Vibrations". Music journalist Jules Siegel, who was present throughout the Smile sessions, reported in Cheetah that while it seemed like "the Beatles had outdistanced the Beach Boys" during the previous summer, "some people think ['Heroes and Villains'] is better than anything the Beatles ever wrote." At the end of the year, French radio listeners selected "Heroes and Villains" as the "Record of the Year".

Impact on Wilson's decline
"Heroes and Villains" came to be cited as a factor in Wilson's professional and psychological decline. Badman stated that the dismal reception was the direct cause of Wilson's withdrawal from the public eye, while Howard offered that the pressure to follow up "Good Vibrations" with "an equally ingenious hit" likely contributed to the collapse of the Smile project. Doggett called the "saga" of the song's recording a "microcosm of the entire Smile tragi-comedy".

Jack Rieley, who managed the band in the early 1970s, stated that the failure of the single "shook [Brian] to the foundations of his being and self-respect. [...] this is when he started disappearing into his bedroom for a long time. This is when he ate himself into a state where he became horrendously fat." Marilyn said that Brian did not perform the song for anybody in the years following its release. In the 1998 documentary Endless Harmony, Love referred to "Heroes and Villains" as the last dynamic moment in Wilson's music. Journalist David Bennun concurred, "In a way, Love is right. Brian Wilson would never again generate something as thrilling as Heroes And Villains, or any of the other, numerous, breathtaking tracks he had constructed for the band in their so far brief career."

Wilson would sometimes refer to the voices in his head as "heroes and villains". Darian Sahanaja, a member of Wilson's supporting band since the 1990s, said that, "When I first met Brian, you couldn't even mention the words 'Heroes and Villains'; he’d turn around and walk away or he’d say, 'I don’t want to talk about it.'"

Retrospective assessments

Despite its relatively high chart placement, "Heroes and Villains" remains one of the lesser-known songs in the Beach Boys' catalog. It was one of the last Beach Boys singles to break the US top 20 until "Rock and Roll Music" in 1976. Jardine told an interviewer that Parks felt his contributions destroyed the band's commercial momentum: "Y’know, he actually apologized to me - for 'ruining my career.' I said, 'Van Dyke, not only did you not ruin it but you enhanced it! You enhanced our knowledge just by being there."

Wilson's bandmates did not feel that his final edit was as good as his earlier versions, and according to biographer David Leaf, "all those who heard the original" believed that the released version was missing crucial sequences that Wilson originally intended for the song. Jardine expressed dissatisfaction with the mix, describing it as "a pale facsimile" of Wilson's original vision, and suggested that Wilson deliberately sabotaged the song at the last minute. He blamed the record's lack of "sonic energy" on the limited recording equipment and felt that the mastering was probably engineered improperly, commenting, "I could hear the difference. I could hear the edge was gone." Parks was not involved with the making of the final edit and later said that he was "astonished" by its structure and production quality when he heard it on the radio.

Howard opined that the song was "more fractured" and "arguably more inspired" than "Good Vibrations", likening it to a "pocket opera" (a reference to the term "pocket symphony"). Eric Luecking of NPR said that while "Heroes and Villains" was more adventurous than "Good Vibrations", listeners could not relate to the song's lyrics, which obscured the single's legacy. Academic Larry Starr explained that the Wild West-themed subject matter "lacked any context whatsoever in the cultural environment of popular music in 1967, an environment immersed in the emerging counterculture and one that tended to prize lyrics with marked personal or social 'relevance.'" Doggett felt that while the song was "beautiful and intriguing", it was "nowhere near as commercial as 'Good Vibrations'."

Some commentators blame the shifts in contemporary pop culture for the record's failure. Starr disputed the suggestion; instead, the song's "relatively limited appeal may be ascribed to two factors that remained problematic, or sometimes even disappointing, in the Beach Boys’ output for the remaining years of the 1960s: the lyrics, and the production values." Considering the rich orchestrations of Pet Sounds, Starr concluded that "the source of biggest disappointment for listeners, however, may well have been the overall quality of the sound." Stebbins said that while the arrangement was "generously filled with fantastic Beach Boys vocal harmonies and genius musical twists and turns", the record's "disturbingly muddy sound quality [...] undoubtedly hurt its commercial appeal."

Despite some commentators criticisms of the song, "Heroes and Villains" has ranked highly in lists of the Beach Boys' greatest songs, and in some rankings of the greatest songs of all time. Mojo magazine named the song the 7th greatest by the Beach Boys, while the French edition of Rolling Stone ranked it 8th. Crawdaddy! founder Paul Williams listed it as one of the 100 greatest rock singles of all time in his 1993 book Rock and Roll: The 100 Best Singles.

1967 – Lei'd in Hawaii
Before the release of Smiley Smile, the Beach Boys attempted to make a live album known as Lei'd in Hawaii. Due to technical difficulties, they decided to record the album at Wally Heider's Studio 3 on September 11, a session which included a runthrough of "Heroes and Villains". A surviving audio tape of this performance features an overdubbed spoken-word monologue, given by Mike Love, in which he ridicules the song. Carlin writes that the track was likely not intended for release as Love's rant shifts from "mock-serious to bitterly sarcastic" and "becomes even more barbed as he goes on". He surmised that another laughing voice in the audio belonged to Wilson, and that Wilson may have coordinated the recording himself.

The 2017 compilation 1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow includes this version of "Heroes and Villains", albeit with Love's monologue omitted. The band's concerts in Hawaii marked the last time Wilson sang "Heroes and Villains" before a public audience until 2001, when he performed the song at a Radio City Music Hall tribute concert held in his honor.

2004 – Brian Wilson Presents Smile
Wilson's 2004 solo album Brian Wilson Presents Smile included new rerecordings of "Gee", "Heroes and Villains", "Barnyard", "The Old Master Painter", and "I'm in Great Shape". In this version, the discarded "Cantina" section was restored in "Heroes and Villains". Sahanaja recalled that the group had "already been performing a version of the song that incorporated the 'Cantina' section, and so Brian wanted to go with that structure for the recording."

An instrumental arrangement of "Cantina", written by Sahanaja, was added as an introduction to "I'm in Great Shape", the song which begins the album's third movement. This time, the "explosion" tape delay effect was created with a digital plug-in. According to Sahanaja, the placement of "I'm in Great Shape" in the running order "was probably a performance decision. I always felt that this song building into a feedback frenzy and breaking into 'I Wanna Be Around' and 'Workshop” was the disoriented, reality defying portion of the performance. Shaking things up and slightly derailing before getting back on track–as if a metaphor for life. It seemed to fit for those reasons."

2011 – The Smile Sessions

Released in 2011, The Smile Sessions compilation included a hypothetical version of the original album that was based on Wilson's 2004 version, albeit with a few changes in the sequencing. Among these revisions was the placement of "I'm in Great Shape", which became sandwiched between "Do You Like Worms?" and "Barnyard". Asked about this change, Sahanaja responded: "the tape session research shows that ['I'm in Great Shape'] was definitely part of the 'Heroes and Villains' variations, and so the decision [with The Smile Sessions] was to keep it within that context." The box set edition was packaged with two 7-inch vinyl records, one of which was a two-part edit of "Heroes and Villains" stretched across both sides. The edit was created by compilers Mark Linett and Alan Boyd.

Prior to the release of The Smile Sessions, in 1990, the "Cantina" mix was included on a "two-fer" reissue of Smiley Smile and Wild Honey. Many unreleased sections of the song were also compiled for the 1993 box set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys.

Cover versions

 * 1976 – The Residents, The Third Reich 'n Roll (as part of "Swastikas on Parade")
 * 1997 – Forms, Smiling Pets
 * 2000 – Malcolm Ross, Caroline Now!
 * 2000 – Gary Usher, Add Some Music to Your Day: 1970 Symphonic Tribute to Brian Wilson (as "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter / Good Vibrations / Heroes and Villains")
 * 2002 – Phil Madeira, Making God Smile
 * 2004 – Geraint Watkins, Dial W for Watkins
 * 2011 – Salyu, s(o)un(d)beams+ (as "Our Prayer ~ Heroes And Villains")

In popular culture
In 2009, "Heroes and Villains" was used in Wes Anderson's animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox and also appeared on the soundtrack album.

Personnel
Per band archivist Craig Slowinski.

Single edit
The Beach Boys
 * Al Jardine – backing and harmony vocals
 * Bruce Johnston – backing and harmony vocals
 * Mike Love – co-lead, backing, and harmony vocals
 * Brian Wilson – lead, backing, and harmony vocals, tack piano (chorus), overdubbed harpsichord, sandpaper percussion (uncertain credit), Baldwin organ, overdubbed electric harpsichord
 * Carl Wilson – backing and harmony vocals
 * Dennis Wilson – backing and harmony vocals

Guest
 * Van Dyke Parks – tack piano (verse)

Session musicians (later known as "the Wrecking Crew")
 * Gene Estes – slide whistle, shaker (uncertain credit), "clank" (uncertain credit)
 * George Hyde – French horn
 * Jim Gordon – drums
 * Carol Kaye – acoustic rhythm guitar (uncertain credit)
 * Bill Pitman – Danelectro bass
 * Lyle Ritz – upright bass

Partial sessionography
The details in this section are adapted from The Smile Sessions liner notes, which includes a sessionography compiled by band archivist Craig Slowinski. and from Keith Badman.

 * May 11, 1966 – Gold Star (this session was taped over, and no copy of the recording from this date survives)
 * Hal Blaine – drums
 * Frank Capp – percussion and bells
 * Al Casey – electric guitar
 * Jerry Cole – electric guitar
 * Carol Kaye – Fender bass (uncertain credit)
 * Bill Pitman – Danelectro bass (uncertain credit)
 * Lyle Ritz – upright bass
 * Al De Lory – keyboards
 * Larry Knechtel – keyboards
 * Jim Horn – flute, tenor saxophone
 * Bill Green – clarinet, tenor saxophone
 * Jay Migliori – tenor saxophone, bass saxophone
 * Steve Douglas – tenor saxophone

 * October 20, 1966 - Western ["Verse" and "Barnyard"] (this session produced the master take of the verse instrumental, and the discarded "Barnyard" section)
 * Gene Estes – slide whistle ("Verse", timpani on earlier takes), shaker ("Barnyard")
 * Jim Gordon – drums ("Verse"), conga with stick ("Barnyard")
 * Carol Kaye – acoustic rhythm guitar ("Verse", uncertain), lead guitar ("Barnyard", uncertain credit)
 * George Hyde – French horn
 * Tommy Morgan – bass harmonica
 * Van Dyke Parks – tack piano, animal sounds (uncertain credit)
 * Bill Pitman – Danelectro bass (uncertain credit)
 * Lyle Ritz – upright bass (arco in "Verse")
 * Brian Wilson – wordless vocals, animal sounds

 * October 27, 1966 - Western ["I'm in Great Shape"] (this session produced the instrumental recording later used on The Smile Sessions)
 * Jay Migliori – tenor saxophone
 * Van Dyke Parks – piano with taped strings (celeste on earlier takes)
 * Dorothy Victor – harp
 * Brian Wilson – overdubbed Fender bass

 * November 14, 1966 – Gold Star ["My Only Sunshine"] (this session produced the recording later used on The Smile Sessions)
 * Arnold Belnick – violin
 * Norman Botnick – viola
 * Joseph DiTullio – cello
 * Jesse Ehrlich – cello
 * Jim Gordon – drums, sticks (shaker on early takes)
 * Carol Kaye – acoustic rhythm guitar
 * Raymond Kelley – cello
 * Leonard Malarsky – violin
 * Tommy Morgan – harmonica
 * Alexander Nelman – viola
 * Jay Migliori – saxophone, clarinet
 * Bill Pitman – Danelectro bass
 * Diane Rovell – additional vocals (part two)
 * Joe Saxon – cello
 * Brian Wilson – lead vocal (part two)
 * Dennis Wilson – lead vocal (part one)
 * Marilyn Wilson – additional vocals (part two)

 * January 3, 1967 - Columbia ["Do a Lot", "Bag of Tricks", "Mission Pak", "Bridge to Indians" "Part 1 Tag", and "Pickup to 3rd Verse"] (series of unused early modules recorded, "Do a Lot" eventually became a module of "Vega-Tables" and later "Mama Says")
 * Brian Wilson – vocals, upright piano ("Do a Lot" and "Bag of Tricks"), tack piano, overdubbed handclaps ("Part 1 Tag"), overdubbed grand piano ("Do a Lot"), overdubbed whistling ("Do a Lot", uncertain credit), overdubbed guiro, "choo-choo train" recorder, steam engine percussion, duck quack, noise maker, whistles, bells ("Bag of Tricks")
 * Dennis Wilson – vocals, overdubbed thump percussion ("Do a Lot", uncertain credit), bass drum and jug with mallet ("Bag of Tricks"), overdubbed handclaps ("Part 1 Tag"), overdubbed guiro, "choo-choo train" recorder, steam engine percussion, duck quack, noise maker, whistles, bells ("Bag of Tricks")
 * Carl Wilson – vocals, overdubbed handclaps ("Part 1 Tag"), overdubbed guiro, "choo-choo train" recorder, steam engine percussion, duck quack, noise maker, whistles, bells ("Bag of Tricks")
 * Mike Love – vocals, overdubbed guiro, "choo-choo train" recorder, steam engine percussion, duck quack, noise maker, whistles, bells ("Bag of Tricks")
 * Al Jardine – vocals, overdubbed guiro, "choo-choo train" recorder, steam engine percussion, duck quack, noise maker, whistles, bells ("Bag of Tricks")
 * Bruce Johnston – vocals, overdubbed guiro, "choo-choo train" recorder, steam engine percussion, duck quack, noise maker, whistles, bells ("Bag of Tricks")
 * unknown - french horn (early takes of Bag of Tricks)
 * unknown - french horn (early takes of Bag of Tricks)

 * January 27, 1967 - Columbia ["Children Were Raised", "Part 2", "Whistling Bridge" and "All Day"] ("All Day" evolves into "Love to Say Dada" and later "Cool, Cool Water")
 * Brian Wilson – lead and backing vocals, thigh slap, overdubbed tack piano ("Children Were Raised"), tack piano ("Part 2"), vocals ("Bag of Tricks"), whistling ("Whistling Bridge", uncertain credit), piano with strings taped ("All Day")
 * Dennis Wilson – backing vocals, "brillo pad" percussion ("Children Were Raised") vocals ("Bag of Tricks"), whistling ("Whistling Bridge", uncertain credit)
 * Carl Wilson – backing vocals ("Children Were Raised"), vocals ("Bag of Tricks"), whistling ("Whistling Bridge", uncertain credit)
 * Mike Love – backing vocals ("Children Were Raised"), vocals ("Bag of Tricks")
 * Al Jardine – backing vocals ("Children Were Raised")
 * Bruce Johnston – backing vocals ("Children Were Raised")

 * February 7, 1967 - Columbia ["Cantina"]
 * Gene Gaddy – "You're under arrest!" voice
 * Al Jardine – laughter and backing vocals
 * Bruce Johnston – laughter and backing vocals
 * Mike Love – lead vocals, laughter and backing vocals
 * Tommy Tedesco – overdubbed mandolins
 * Brian Wilson – lead vocals, laughter and backing vocals, tack piano
 * Carl Wilson – laughter and backing vocals
 * Dennis Wilson – laughter and backing vocals

 * February 15, 1967 - Western ["Prelude to Fade" and "Piano Theme"] (main chorus theme, previously written as part of "Do You Like Worms", tracked for "Heroes and Villains" for the first time, "Prelude to Fade" used as the ending of the edit featured on The Smile Sessions)
 * Brian Wilson - tack piano ("Piano Theme")
 * Van Dyke Parks - piano with strings taped ("Prelude to Fade") tack piano ("Piano Theme")
 * Carol Kaye – acoustic rhythm guitar ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Ray Pohlman - fender bass ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Bill Pitman - danelectro bass ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Lyle Ritz - upright bass ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Hal Blaine - drums ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Gene Estes - temple blocks ("Prelude to Fade", played bicycle horn, bicycle bells, and siren on earlier takes)
 * Tommy Morgan - harmonica ("Prelude to Fade")
 * George Hyde - french horn with flutter ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Sid Sharp - violin ("Prelude to Fade")
 * William Kurasch - violin ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Jerome Reisler - violin ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Ralph Schaeffer - violin ("Prelude to Fade")
 * John (Vidor) Vidusich - violin ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Walter Wiemeyer - violin ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Norman Botnick - viola ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Alexander Nieman - viola ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Jesse Ehrlich - cello ("Prelude to Fade")
 * Joseph DiTullio - cello ("Prelude to Fade")

 * February 20, 1967 - Columbia ["Gee"]
 * Al Jardine – vocals
 * Mike Love – vocals
 * Brian Wilson – vocals
 * Carl Wilson – vocals
 * Dennis Wilson – vocals

 * March 1, 1967 - Western ["Verse Remake" and "Organ Waltz"] (discarded remake of the verse backing track and intro)
 * Gene Estes – temple blocks ("Verse Remake", rehearsals only) overdubbed recorder, whistle, slide whistle, buzzer, noise maker ("Organ Waltz")
 * Hal Blaine – drums ("Verse Remake")
 * Carl Wilson – electric rhythm guitar ("Verse Remake")
 * Carol Kaye – acoustic rhythm guitar ("Verse Remake", uncertain)
 * Ronald Benson – baritone ukulele with stick ("Verse Remake")
 * Van Dyke Parks – tack piano ("Verse Remake") hammond organ, overdubbed recorder, whistle, slide whistle, buzzer, noise maker ("Organ Waltz")
 * Bill Pitman – Danelectro bass ("Verse Remake") overdubbed recorder, whistle, slide whistle, buzzer, noise maker ("Organ Waltz")
 * Chuck Berghofer – arco upright bass ("Verse Remake")
 * Brian Wilson – organ bass pedals, grand piano, overdubbed recorder, whistle, slide whistle, buzzer, noise maker ("Organ Waltz")
 * Diane Rovell - overdubbed recorder, whistle, slide whistle, buzzer, noise maker ("Organ Waltz")

 * June 12-14, 1967 - Bel Air ["Chorus Vocals", Children Were Raised Remake" and "Barbershop"] (most of the final single edit of the song recorded over these three days, including fragments originally intended for "Do You Like Worms")
 * Brian Wilson – backing and harmony vocals ("Chorus Vocals"), lead and backing vocals, electric harpsichord, overdubbed baldwin organ ("Children Were Raised Remake"), lead vocals ("Barbershop")
 * Dennis Wilson – backing and harmony vocals ("Chorus Vocals"), backing vocals ("Children Were Raised Remake")
 * Carl Wilson – backing and harmony vocals ("Chorus Vocals"), backing vocals ("Children Were Raised Remake")
 * Mike Love – backing and harmony vocals ("Chorus Vocals"), backing vocals ("Children Were Raised Remake"), lead vocals ("Barbershop")
 * Al Jardine – lead vocals ("Chorus Vocals"), backing vocals ("Children Were Raised Remake")
 * Billy Hinsche – backing and harmony vocals ("Chorus Vocals")

title: Heroes and Villains


text:
Houn Jiyu-Kennett

Hōun Jiyu-Kennett (Japanese: 法雲慈友ケネット, 1 January 1924 – 6 November 1996), born Peggy Teresa Nancy Kennett, was a British roshi most famous for having been the first female to be sanctioned by the Sōtō School of Japan to teach in the West.

Early years
Hōun Jiyu-Kennett was born as Peggy Teresa Nancy Kennett in St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, England on January 1, 1924. As a young woman she found herself questioning gender roles in society and grew to become disillusioned with Christianity. She studied medieval music at Durham University and then received a scholarship to Trinity College of Music in London, England. Though attracted to Buddhism, she felt during this period that she was called to serve the Church of England as a priest. However, church policies at the time did not allow women to be ordained, and this enhanced her previous disillusionment with Christianity.

Training at Sojiji

She first became interested in Theravada Buddhism during this period of questioning and searching, joining the London Buddhist Vihara. In 1954 she joined the London Buddhist Society, where she continued her Buddhist studies and lectured. While there, she met the scholar D.T. Suzuki, and developed a strong interest in Rinzai Zen Buddhism. In 1960, when chief abbott Kōho Keidō Chisan Zenji of Sojiji in Japan came to the society, she was asked to make the arrangements for his stay. Koho asked if she would consider becoming his student back in Japan. She accepted the offer, and two years passed before she arrived at Sojiji to study Soto Zen Buddhism under him.

In January 1962, Kennett traveled to Malaysia to accept an award she had been honored with for setting a Buddhist hymn, "Welcome Joyous Wesak Day" by Sumangalo, to music. Before leaving for Japan, Kennett was ordained a novice nun by Venerable Seck Kim Seng (釋金星; Shì Jīnxīng) in the Linji Chan school and given the Buddhist name Jiyu (慈友, Cíyou in Chinese, Jiyu in Japanese) meaning compassionate friend.

Jiyu-Kennett arrived in Japan in 1962, where she was also ordained in the Soto-school, and trained at Sōjiji from 1962 to 1963. Formally, Kōho Keidō Chisan Zenji was her teacher, but practically, one of Keido Zenji's senior officers, Suigan Yogo roshi, was her main instructor, because 'Keido Zenji was often preoccupied with administrative affairs. She received Dharma transmission twice, from Kōho Keidō Chisan Zenji on May 28, 1963, but also from Suigan Yogo.

While training at Sōjiji, Kōho Keidō Chisan let her take care of westerners who were interested in Zen training, mostly from American military bases, and she "developed a regular programme of teaching and meditation to nurture their growing interest in Zen." Eventually, she received the official title of "Foreign Guest Hall Master" from Keido Chisan.

Jiyu-Kennett continued her institutional career by becoming an Oshō, i.e. "priest" or "teacher." Her Zuise ceremony was conducted in public in Japan. Previously, women's ceremonies were held in private, but Koho had decided that the practice of holding private ceremonies for women and public ceremonies for men was wrong. According to Jiyu-Kennett's account, "I have never done a ceremony with more terror inside me than that one with twelve men down each side, each one with curtains drawn as if to say 'I'm not here.' Those were the witnesses. Try that sometime! That can be pretty scary—in a foreign country, in a language you're not one hundred percent sure of, with a lot of people who are hating your guts. And the reason Koho Zenji did it—and I've got it on tape—was for the benefit of women in his country."

Following her Zuise ceremony, Jiyu-Kennett was installed as shinzan (head priest) of Unpukuji temple in Mie prefecture.

Return to the west
After the death of Chisan Koho, in November 1967, the Soto Administration Section became ambivalent to her, and "Kennett’s title of Foreign Guest Hall Master was deleted from the list of Sojiji office appointments." Nevertheless, according to Jiyu-Kennett, she "received a certificate asking me to become the official pioneer missionary of the Soto Sect in America" just before she left Japan for a lecturing tour the US in November 1969, At this time Jiyu-Kennett was not in good health, as during her time in Japan she had experienced many illnesses.

In 1969 Jiyu-Kennett founded the Zen Mission Society in San Francisco, and in 1970 Shasta Abbey in Mount Shasta, California, the first Zen monastery in the United States to be established by a woman. In 1972, Jiyu-Kennett's British chapter of the Zen Mission Society established Throssel Hole Priory in Northumberland, England. In 1978 Jiyu-Kennett changed the name of the Zen Mission Society to the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives.

Illness and visions
In 1975 Jiyu-Kennett was stricken with illness yet again, and this time she became bedridden. In 1976, worn out and convinced death was near, she resigned from her position as abbess of Shasta Abbey and went into retreat in Oakland, California. Still rather ill, of unknown causes, she had her student Daizui MacPhillamy with her often to tend to her care. Following a kensho experience he had, she conferred Dharma transmission to him at her bedside in 1976.

During this retreat, Jiyu-Kennett had a prolonged religious experience, including a series of visions and recalling past lives. She regarded these experiences as "a profound kensho (enlightenment) experience," constituting a third kensho, and published an account of these visions, and an elaborate scheme of stages of awakening, in How to Grow a Lotus Blossom. Her interpretations, which parallel Christian mysticism, were controversial, and rejected by some as makyo ("illusion"). Stephen Batchelor describes these episodes, "The visions lasted for 12 months, until 26 January 1977, the first twelve occurring in Oakland, the rest at Shasta, where she returned on 25 October. Each vision unfolded as a dream-like episode, charged with Western and Buddhist religious symbolism, superimposing itself on whatever she saw around her. She compared the series of visions to an elaborated contemporary version of the classical Zen images of the ten 'ox-herding' pictures. By the time the final vision faded, she was cured. She interpreted the experience as that of a 'third kensho.'""

Around four months into her 'third kensho', Jiyu-Kennett regained her health and again assumed her position as Abbess of Shasta Abbey for the next 20 years until her death on November 6, 1996. According to Jiyu-Kennett, her experiences are not uncommon, but are rarely spoken of; she regarded publishing her own experiences as a way to acknowledge the existence and validity of such experiences, which, according to her, may contribute to further insight after initial awakening. She acknowledged the risks and potential for controversy in publishing her account, but felt that the benefits of releasing such information outweighed the risks.

According to Kay, "Kennett’s visionary experiences – and also her ambivalence about the status of their content – are not unprecedented within the Zen tradition. Soto literature includes numerous accounts, as noted especially by Faure (2000) Visions of power, described by the founders of Soto Zen, Dogen and Keizan. Dogen and Keizan "also both warned against seeing visions or unusual spiritual experiences as the goal of practice." but were clear that such things can occur along the way.

Teachings
According to Jiyu-Kennett the accumulation of insight happens in three stages of kensho, along with a fourth that can occur at the time of death: The third stage can include a "Zen sickness", best known from Hakuin Zenji's account in Yasen kanna, translated into English under the title Wild Ivy 『夜船閑話』 (Quiet conversations on an evening boat)
 * 1) "initial glimpse" kensho, or "great flash of deep understanding," that most Zen practitioners eventually experience, and that are often used in the Soto-tradition as the later basis for qualification for Dharma Transmission;
 * 2) "On-Going Fūgen Kensho," or in D.T. Suzuki's words, "the little moments that make one dance," experienced by practitioners with a continual, stable practice;
 * 3) based on her personal experience with visions, Jiyu-Kennett postulated a third stage which involves the recalling of past life experiences, profound spiritual visions, and deep awakening experiences, that bring great clarity to aspects of the Dharma and practice, and go beyond what is experienced in the first kensho;
 * 4) parinirvana, experienced by rare practitioners who achieve Buddhahood upon time of death.

Teaching style
Jiyu-Kennett had a commanding presence about her, both intellectually as well as physically. Of a rather husky build, she had a tremendous laughter and was known to be gifted at storytelling. In accordance with Shakyamuni Buddha's teaching and practice of upaya/Skill in Means, Koho Zenji directed her to adapt Soto Zen to Western needs, and not stick with Japanese practice. She frequently used Western sayings, songs, and stories as koans.

According to the book The Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, "Her adaptation of Zen for Westerners has been likened to Japanese Soto Zen with a flavor of the Church of England, for she had been taught that Zen in North America should adopt Western monastic dress and liturgical forms. For example, she set the traditional Buddhist liturgy to music based on Gregorian chants.""

Jiyu-Kennett was an advocate for equality between the sexes, as was Great Master Dogen.

Dharma heirs

 * Haryo Young (Head of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives)
 * Meian Elbert (Abbess of Shasta Abbey)
 * Daishin Morgan (Former Abbott of Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey)
 * Daizui MacPhillamy

Among many others...

Legacy
The Order of Buddhist Contemplatives, founded by Jiyu-Kennett, now has chapters in the United States, the Netherlands, Canada, the West Indies, the United Kingdom and Germany. It has long maintained translation and publishing activities, focused on the writings of Dogen Zenji and Keizan Zenji, initially in print, and more recently in electronic form.

title: Houn Jiyu-Kennett


text:
Blanche of Artois

Blanche of Artois (Blanka; c. 1248 – 2 May 1302) was Queen of Navarre and Countess of Champagne and Brie during her marriage to Henry I of Navarre. After his death she became regent in the name of their infant daughter, Joan I. She passed on the regency of Navarre to Philip III of France, her cousin and her daughter's prospective father-in-law, but retained the administration of Champagne. She later shared the government of Champagne with her second husband, Edmund, until her daughter reached the age of majority.

Queenship
Blanche was the elder child and only daughter of Robert I, Count of Artois, and Matilda of Brabant. A fraternal niece of King Louis IX of France, Blanche was probably born in 1248. By February 1269, having received a papal dispensation, she was married to Henry, the brother of King Theobald II of Navarre. The ceremony took place in Melun near Paris. Her brother-in-law, in turn, was married to her cousin, Isabella of France. Henry was governing his brother's realm when King Theobald and Queen Isabella left to join the Eighth Crusade. When the king died in December 1270, followed by his widow within a few months, Blanche's husband became King of Navarre and Count of Champagne.

King Henry and Queen Blanche were a young couple with a son, Theobald, and the future of the House of Blois seemed bright. In 1273, however, they lost their son in an accident when the young Theobald was dropped by his nurse over the castle battlements. A daughter named Joan, born the same year, remained the royal couple's only child and was recognized as heir presumptive by the King and the Estates. The following year, on 22 July, King Henry himself died. The death of two kings within five years and accession of an infant queen, the first woman to rule Navarre and Champagne alike, triggered a political crisis.

Regency
Now queen dowager, Blanche became regent for her daughter. Her regency in Champagne was preceded by several long regencies of widowed mothers, but this was the first regency for a female ruler. The neighbouring kingdoms of Castile and Aragon moved to exploit the precarious situation. Both Alfonso X of Castile and Peter III of Aragon wanted to secure Navarre for their respective houses either by marriage with Joan or by force. While Peter contemplated a marriage with a cousin of Joan, Alfonso moved his army to Navarre and started besieging Viana. The citizens loyally defended the city, for which Queen Blanche thanked them by granting special privileges.

Blanche remained in Pamplona at least until 14 April, but then fled the kingdom, taking Joan with her, on the pretext of visiting her daughter's fiefs in the north of France. In reality, she sought protection from her cousin, King Philip III of France. In November, she paid homage to him for her daughter's French possessions. The almost immediate departure of both the monarch and the regent only complicated the situation in Navarre. In May 1275, Queen Blanche signed the Treaty of Orléans, by which she promised Joan's hand in marriage to one of the older two sons of the King of France, either Louis or Philip. The elder died within a year, and Philip was left as both heir to the French throne and Joan's bridegroom. Blanche administered Joan's territories from Paris, appointing governors for Navarre. Later this role was taken over by Joan's prospective father-in-law, while Blanche retained the administration of Champagne and Brie.

English marriage
Between 28 July and 29 October 1276, in Paris, Blanche became the second wife of Edmund Crouchback, brother of King Edward I of England. The marriage was orchestrated by the dowager queen of France Margaret of Provence, who wished to secure a wealthy bride for her nephew. There are also reports, however, that the two married out of mutual attraction. Edmund joined Blanche in administering Champagne and Brie. Edmund and Blanche had four children: Mary, who died young, Thomas, Henry and John.

When Joan became old enough to marry and take full control of her inheritance, in 1284, Blanche and Edmund had to give up the counties. They were compensated by Blanche's dower, a hefty sum of money and the right to use the palace of the Navarrese kings in Paris. The following year, Philip III died and was succeeded by Blanche's son-in-law, Philip IV.

When hostilities broke out between England and France in 1293, Edmund and Blanche left Paris and moved to England. They returned to France in 1296 but resided in King Edward's continental possessions, where Edmund served as lieutenant of Gascony. Blanche was widowed again in June the same year when Edmund died during the siege of Bordeaux. She returned to her brother-in-law's court in November but did not stay in England for long. She received her dower, consisting of one third of all of Edmund's lands and all his rights in the earldom of Ferrers, and in 1298 she was back in France. She founded a Franciscan abbey in Nogent-l'Artaud in 1299, dedicated to Saint Louis IX of France, and declared her wish to be buried there rather than with her second husband in London or with her first husband in Provins. Queen Blanche's body is buried at the Cordeliers Convent in Paris, where her daughter was later buried beside her.

title: Blanche of Artois