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 sychronised
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 acceptence 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 televsion at night. "I'm not
actually doing any work,
therefore I must be having a perfect time."'
