Filmmaker Neil McFarland’s description of the erotic video on the Super Furry Animals DVD:

“The lightning illuminates the arrival of the time lord. In the strobing darkness he stumbles toward the humble house. Inside the woman who is to become the mother of Merlin, sorcerer of myth and legend , senses the strange presence and flees the apparent demon. The Doctor Who , the ‘demon’ of Tom Baker shape enters, to her pagan senses the benevolent force seems otherworldly and dark to the lone woman yet when she feels his sensitive touch……..Lost in time and lust the pair join in epic and legendary union, neither knowing their offspring shall guide the coming great kings of old Albion.

We see this awesome consummation through a veil of a modern visual language. In outlines and spot illumination, in suggestive forms and abstract metamorphosis the vision hugs the erotic horror pulsation of the climactic music. From the black canvas neon lines and seductive colour fields bleed the sensuous
descriptions of the conception of Merlin. And as mysteriously as he arrives the Time Lord leaves, leaving
behind only a legend.

I’d like it mentioned that the track has changed slightly since I made the animation. There is a sequence
where you see a lone mouth moving rhythmically, at this point on the track I received there was the sound of a lady moaning in pleasure which I synchronised the mouth to. After the band remixed for surround sound the panting appears to have been dropped leaving the mouth looking a bit out of place. Damn those meddlers !!

I moved house recently and threw away the few drawings that there were for the animation. I work in Flash using a Wacom drawing tablet to trace in sketches or simply draw straight into Illustrator and Flash. The surviving sorry little sketch (click on the front screen) shows the story board for the opening sequence. After this drawing I stopped story boarding and made it up as I went along.

Yours Sincerely,

Neil McFarland.

Neil was raised by old women in other peoples houses on a steady diet of sugar and TV. He loves all the worlds flora and fauna, especially girls and has a robust head of hair. This animation was competed in 2.5 weeks with lots of cereal and Earl Grey tea.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW:

‘The Myth of Ownership’: Challenging the Rhetoric of Tax Cutting

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

THE MYTH OF OWNERSHIP
Taxes and Justice.
By Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel.
228 pp. New York: Oxford
University Press. $25.

When President Bush, promoting tax cuts, says people’s incomes belong to them and not the government, the authors of this book say he is using fuzzy logic.

Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, professors of law and philosophy at New York University, argue in the ”The Myth of Ownership” that Mr. Bush’s rhetoric is emblematic of a tax debate that focuses on the wrong issues because it lacks a moral foundation.

They assert that a naive philosophy of ”everyday libertarianism” infects American politics with a ”robust and compelling fantasy that we earn our income and the government takes some of it away from us.” This popular myth ”results in widespread hostility to taxes, and a political advantage to those who campaign against them and attack the I.R.S.”

This fantasy grows from the acceptance by all sides in the tax debate that gross, or pretax, incomes are presumptively just and therefore the proper moral base line to begin debate. The authors say pretax incomes are morally insignificant, an idea they confess is hard to sell. They argue that ”individual citizens don’t own anything except through laws that are enacted and enforced by the state,” because without government there would be anarchy, an endless war of all-against-one that would diminish incomes and wealth, not to mention life itself. Thus it is after-tax incomes that people are entitled to own. These ideas will encounter a hostile reception from partisans in the debate of the past quarter-century, in which the prevailing political rhetoric characterizes taxes as sheer waste, an unfair drag on the most productive people and an evil.

The thoughts in this book deserve examination, especially the views of Nagel and Murphy on the self-interest each taxpayer reasonably has in the social justice purchased by hard-earned
money….

The practical problem here is that gross incomes are commonly seen as just

rewards for one’s commitment
to work, as well as one’s willingness to take
investment risks. But that
belief assumes that the market rewards each endeavor

according to its value,
an assumption that collapses under scrutiny, as the

manipulations at Enron and
Global Crossing remind us. Government enacts rules on

employment, influences interest
rates, allows widely different qualities of

education in school districts
and imposes countless policies that distort

distribution of pretax incomes
— compared with what they might be in a

libertarian world of voluntary
contracts and no government. Pretax incomes are

presumed just, the authors
posit, for the same reason slavery was once the law

of the land: pervasiveness
makes legal inventions appear to be natural law.

Murphy and Nagel say using
pretax incomes as the basis of debate defies logic,

since ”one can neither
justify nor criticize an economic regime by taking as an

independent norm something
that is, in fact, one of its consequences.” To them,

acceptance of pretax income
as a moral base line means that ”serious public

discussion of economic justice
has been largely displaced by specious rhetoric

about tax fairness,” resulting
in a ”radical climate” of tax proposals

favoring the rich.

Taxes, they write, need to
be examined in the context of government spending so

that one sees both costs
and benefits. The constitutional mandate to ”promote

the general welfare” should
guide tax policy, not theories about lowering

marginal tax rates and favors
for savers. They even argue that it may be

reasonable to tax people
with similar incomes differently if that achieves a

social good. The measure
of justice and fairness in tax, they emphasize, should

be the outcomes of tax policy,
especially whether each newborn gets enough of

society’s resources to have
a fair shot at success in life. They argue that

poverty is bad for rich
and poor alike, and that the poor, especially when it

comes to educating children,
have one of the strongest moral claims on tax

dollars.

They object to a myopic focus
in the tax debate on how tax burdens are

distributed among income
classes. In this they ignore a simple truth: for the

public such measures are
much easier to assess than is determining government’s

success in promoting the
general welfare.

The authors call the current
policy of forgiving capital gains at death ”an

outrage.” When combined
with other tax breaks for those with assets, it is,

they say, ”an egregious
injustice in the current tax scheme,” because it

perpetuates inequity and
lavishes rewards on those who are fortunate in their

ancestry but may contribute
nothing useful to society. Their solution would be a

fundamental reform: make
recipients of large inheritances and gifts pay taxes,

just as wage earners must.

Nagel and Murphy give too
little attention to the role of taxes in creating

wealth. Peace is a boon
to hoteliers, Conrad Hilton pointed out in his will.

Without vast taxpayer investments
in keeping the peace, as well as in building

roads and airports, his
fortune would have been much smaller. Many modern

billionaires owe much of
their wealth to the taxpayers for investing in

education, and the scientific
advancements on which their products depend.

Murphy and Nagel do not
examine whether it would be just to look on such big

economic winners as successful
investments of tax dollars, and then taxing these

winners to insure that society
has sufficient resources to invest in each new

generation.

Murphy and Nagel offer ideas
that would improve the national debate over how we

should tax ourselves, even
if their views never gain popular acceptance….

David Cay Johnston, a reporter
for The Times, won a Pulitzer Prize last year for

his reports on inequities
in the American tax system

‘The way that school seemed to me was that there was an overt curriculum – reading, writing and arithmetic – and a covert curriculum, which was more or less punctuality, obedience and the acceptance of monotony? In a lot of cases it seemed that school was like aversion therapy. It wasn’t there to teach you knowledge, it was there to put you off learning. You’d associate learning or reading with work and you’d associate work with drudgery. This is why most people are happy to just sit down in front of the television at night. “I’m not actually doing any work, therefore I must be having a perfect time.”‘

Real messages in the Queen Mother Book of condolences!!!!!

“I think that the Queen Mum and Princess Diana are our very own Twin Trade Towers. At last we can look the people of New York in the face”.

L.Ward, Mansfield.

 “When Diana died I swore I would never smile again, but eventually I did. Now the Queen Mum has gone I cannot image that I will ever smile for the rest of my life, but I will probably break that one too”.

 A.Christie,Hendon.

“She was one of the old school,
all the remaining royals are shít”

 J.Clement. Grantham.

“I thought she would never
die, she has let us all down very  badly”

D.Holmes, Somerset.

“She was a trooper and she
never gave up. I remember one time she

 was visiting a school
and I asked her if she would like to make a

visit to the cloakroom before
she left. ‘No’ she replied, ‘I didn’t give in

to the Nazis and I won’t
give in to the bladder’. That’s how she was, a

fighter, who refused to
be beaten by anything. She píssed herself

later though, it was sickening”.

B. Forrester, North Yorkshire.

“She was a marvelous woman,
and a wonderful lover”.

L. J.Worthington, Penrith

“I am absolutely devastated,
at least we could have got the

dayoff”.

S.Wilson, Bristol.

 “How refreshing to
be able to mourn the death of a member of the

Royal family without being
accused of being homosexual”.

J. Fletcher, High Wycombe.

“Her death should act as
a warning to others who think it is cool

to experiment with drugs”.

E. Franks, Cheshire.

 “On behalf on all blacks,
I send the sincerest condolences”.

T.Watson, Ilford.

 “Perhaps if we automated
her old golf buggy it could still drive

 around The Mall on
its own and bring pleasure to the tourists”.

Y. Howell, Slough.

 “Once again the Queen
is not upset enough for my liking, the woman

should have a bit more compassion,
how would she feel if it was her

 mother?”

W.Waugh, Richmond.

“It is such a loss, God has
shat on our heads”.

 K. O’Neil, Inverness.

“I am sure the Queen Mum
will not let this setback put an end to

her public duties”.

N. Wallace, Swansea.

 “I hold Princess Margaret
in no small way responsible for this

terrible event”

E. Thompson, West Lothian.

“Bomb Iraq for us Tony, its
the only thing that will make us feel

better”

P.McGregor, Southampton.

“We must do all we can, send
blankets, food parcels,

jumpers, anything to help
these brave souls who are queuing up to

walk past her coffin”.

R. Thompson, Bath.

“I have been unable to masturbate
for five days, and will not do

so again until her majesty
is buried”

E. Gorman, Derbyshire.

“Good God, who is next, Geri
Halliwell?”.

R. Combes, Romford.

“No matter how she felt,
no matter the situation, she always wore

a smile. just like a retard”

G. Hollins, East Sussex.

“I remember she came to visit
us in the East End one time. She was

so kind, so generous and
so sweet. She whispered softly in my ear,

‘you know its not true’
she said, ‘you don’t smell of shít’. She

was a wondrous person”.

E.Collier, London.

“Whichever way you look at
it, it just is not as exciting as

Diana”.

G.Williams, West Midlands.

 “She was one of us,
and by that I don’t mean she

perpetrated insurance fraud
or lied about expense claims. She was

like us in a good way. God
bless you ma’am”.

L. Weller, Harlow.

 “If only I could get
my hands on that fish bone right now, you

Heartless bástard!”

J. Hedges, Cowdenbeath.

 “She had such a difficult
life, always battling against

 adversity and misfortune.
Let us hope that if there is a next time

 round she is given
a life of privilege and comfort”

 T.D.Wainwright, Hastings.

COURTESY OF THE LADY M!

16 APRIL 02: ANOTHER
BUSH ADMINISTRATION FOREIGN POLICY OUTRAGE.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/16/international/americas/16DIPL.html

April 16, 2002

Bush Officials Met With Venezuelans
Who Ousted Leader

By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS

WASHINGTON, April 15 ˜ Senior
members of the Bush administration met several times in recent months with
leaders of a coalition that ousted the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez,
for two days last weekend, and agreed with them that he should be removed
from office, administration officials said today.

    But administration
officials gave conflicting accounts of what the United States told those
opponents of Mr. Chávez about acceptable ways of ousting him.

    One senior
official involved in the discussions insisted that the Venezuelans use
constitutional means, like a referendum, to effect an overthrow.

    “They
came here to complain,” the official said, referring to the anti-Chávez
group. “Our message was very clear: there are constitutional processes.
We did not even wink at anyone.”

   
But a Defense Department official who is involved in the development of
policy toward Venezuela said the administration’s message was less categorical.

   
“We were not discouraging people,” the official said. “We were sending
informal, subtle signals that we don’t like this guy. We didn’t say, `No,
don’t you dare,’ and we weren’t advocates saying, `Here’s some arms; we’ll
help you overthrow this guy.’ We were not doing that.”

    The disclosures
come as rights advocates, Latin American diplomats and others accuse the
administration of having turned a blind eye to coup plotting activities,
or even encouraged the people who temporarily removed Mr. Chávez.
Such actions would place the United States at odds with its fellow members
of the Organization of American States, whose charter condemns the overthrow
of democratically elected governments.

    In the
immediate aftermath of the ouster, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer,
suggested that the administration was pleased that Mr. Chávez was
gone. “The government suppressed what was a peaceful demonstration of the
people,” Mr. Fleischer said, which “led very quickly to a combustible situation
in which Chávez resigned.”

    That
statement contrasted with a clear stand by other nations in the hemisphere,
which all condemned the removal of a democratically elected leader.

    Mr. Chávez
has made himself very unpopular with the Bush administration with his pro-Cuban
stance and mouthing of revolutionary slogans ˜ and, most recently, by threatening
the independence of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos
de Venezuela, the third-largest foreign supplier of American oil.

   
Whether or not the administration knew about the pending action against
Mr. Chávez, critics note that it was slow to condemn the overthrow
and that it still refuses to acknowledge that a coup even took place.

    One result,
according to the critics, is that in its zeal to rid itself of Mr. Chávez,
the administration has damaged its credibility as a chief defender of democratically
elected governments. And even though they deny having encouraged Mr. Chávez’s
ouster, administration officials did not hide their dismay at his restora
tion.

    Asked
whether the administration now recognizes Mr. Chávez as Venezuela’s
legitimate president, one administration official replied, “He was democratically
elected,” then added, “Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just
by a majority of the voters, however.”

    A senior
administration official said today that the anti-Chávez group had
not asked for American backing and that none had been offered. Still, one
American diplomat said, Mr. Chávez was so distressed by his opponents’
lobbying in Washington that he sent officials from his government to plead
his case there.

    Mr. Chávez
returned to power on Sunday, after two days. The Bush administration swiftly
laid the blame for the episode on him, pointing out that troops loyal to
him had fired on unarmed civilians and wounded more than 100 demonstrators.

    Mr. Fleischer,
the White House spokesman, stuck to that approach today, saying Mr. Chávez
should heed the message of his opponents and reach out to “all the democratic
forces in Venezuela.”

    “The
people of Venezuela have sent a clear message to President Chávez
that they want both democracy and reform,” he said. “The Chávez
administration has an opportunity to respond to this message by correcting
its course and governing in a fully democratic manner.”

    On Sunday,
President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, expressed
hopes that Mr. Chávez would deal with his opponents in a less “highhanded
fashion.”

    But to
some critics, it was the Bush administration that had displayed arrogance
in initially bucking the tide of international condemnation of the action
against Mr. Chavez, who was democratically elected in 1998.

    Arturo
Valenzuela, the Latin America national security aide in the Clinton administration,
accused the Bush administration of running roughshod over more than a decade
of treaties and agreements for the collective defense of democracy. Since
1990, the United States has repeatedly invoked those agreements at the
Organization of American States to help restore democratic rule in such
countries as Haiti, Guatemala and Peru.

    Mr. Valenzuela,
who now heads the Latin American studies department at Georgetown University
here, warned that the nations in the region might view the administration’s
tepid support of Venezuelan democracy as a green light to return to 1960’s
and 1970’s, when power was transferred from coup to coup.

    “I think
it’s a very negative development for the principle of constitutional government
in Latin America,” Mr. Valenzuela said. “I think it’s going to come back
and haunt all of us.”

    Administration
officials insist that they are firmly behind efforts at the Organization
of American States to determine what happened in Venezuela and restore
democratic rule. The secretary general of the O.A.S., César Gaviria,
left today for Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, and the organization is
scheduled to meet in Washington on Thursday.

    Still,
critics say, there were several signs that the administration was too quick
to rally around the businessman Pedro Carmona Estanga as Mr. Chávez’s
successor.

    One Democratic
foreign policy aide complained that the administration, in phone calls
to Congress on Friday, reported that Mr. Chávez had resigned, even
though officials now concede that they had no evidence of that.

    And on
Saturday, the administration supported an O.A.S. resolution condemning
“the alteration of constitutional order in Venezuela” only after learning
that Mr. Chávez had regained control, Latin American diplomats said.

   
One official said political hard-liners in the administration might have
“gone overboard” in proclaiming Mr. Chávez’s ouster before the dust
settled.

    The official
said there were competing impulses within the administration, signaling
a disagreement on the extent of trouble posed by Mr. Chávez, who
has thumbed his nose at American officials by maintaining ties with Cuba,
Libya and Iraq

“Audiences do become part of the music in their own way, they’re breathing it with you, they’re receiving
what you experience or perceive, but they also give. And then you find out you’re not just playing a solo, you’re not playing for yourself, it’s for everybody. We talked earlier about John’s idea: it’s for all people
for all the time, for the universe itself, for God. Sometimes people put themselves very deeply into sound–so deep into it that they give up everything. It’s like they renounce everything at that moment just to live those moments of music. And that I’ve seen several times.” – Alice Coltrane

FROM  THE WIRE 218, INTERVIEW BY EDWIN POUNCEY

Interim head of Venezuela named after Chavez resignation [read: military-petrobusiness
coup]

April 12, 2002 Posted: 10:09
AM EDT (1409 GMT)

CARACAS, Venezuela (CNN)
— The head of Venezuela’s largest business association was named leader
of an interim government Friday, following the resignation of Venezuela’s
President Hugo Chavez.

    The new
leader, Pedro Carmona Estanga, is the president of the Federation of Chambers
of Commerce and Industry. He was one of the most visible leaders of the
opposition movement.

    Chavez
has been detained at the army’s general headquarters in Caracas, the nation’s
capital. It was not clear why Chavez was detained.

    Estanga
appeared on television, flanked by all of the top military commanders,
saying one of his first acts in office would be to reinstate the workers
from state oil company fired by Chavez, which led to deadly protests Thursday.

    The inspector
general of Venezuela’s armed forces, Lucas Rincon Romero, announced Chavez’s
resignation at 3:25 a.m. Friday. He asked the people of Venezuela to “remain
calm” and reiterated that Venezuela’s armed forces have control of the
country.

    The armed
forces demanded Chavez’s resignation Thursday after a day of violent demonstrations
in which 12 people were killed and dozens more were wounded, according
to local television reports. Members of the government — including Chavez
— are expected to be investigated for their roles in the deaths.

    The protesters
opposed what they said was Chavez’s authoritarian regime and the decisions
made by his top officials, especially the appointment of a new administration
for the oil industry.

    A senior
U.S. official traveling with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in Israel
said the United States is “following very closely what is happening” in
Venezuela.

    Pedro
Carmona Estanga leaves the military base of Fort Tiuna Friday after accepting
an offer to lead a transitional government.

“Our interests are in democracy
and democratic institutions,” the official said.

    Around
300 to 400 people gathered early Friday outside the Carlota Air Base, chanting
and singing in celebration of Chavez’s resignation.

    Local
radio reports said armed Chavez supporters plan to confront the demonstrators.
So far, there have been no reports of violence Friday.

    The resignations
mentioned in the statement left the path open for the army to name a new
government.

    Chavez,
47, took office in 1999 after a sweeping election victory in December 1998.
Upon taking office, he promised constitutional reform, an end to corruption
and the redistribution of oil wealth.

    Chavez
— a former army paratrooper who led a bloody 1992 failed coup attempt
— enjoys wide support from Venezuela’s poor, many of whom believe Chavez
has addressed issues facing them.

    However,
Chavez has been unable to shake his image as a dictator-in-waiting. Critics
feared Chavez would use the constituent assembly to dissolve the other
two branches of government and change the law so he could stay in office
up to 14 years.