“Geometry of Circles” is a series of unnumbered animation pieces created for Sesame Street in 1979 with music by Philip Glass.
The shorts consist of the movement of six circles (each with a different color of the rainbow) that are formed by and split up into various geometric patterns. Glass’s music underscores the animation in a style that closely resembles the “Dance” numbers and the North Star vignettes written during the same time period as his Einstein on the Beach opera.
More of the “Geometry of Circles” shorts after the jump…
“There will be milk deliveries unmade. Transportation services will be greatly impaired by the absence of Christian motormen… House work will be left undone by Christian maids going to a higher realm.”
Yup, “The Rapture” was imminent even back in 1941, when this short film was made. The film’s vintage makes a belief in the Rapture in 2011 seem especially silly. Because it is.
Quite a bit of this film appears in Diane Keaton’s fab Heaven documentary.
Animated precis of the Jehovah’s Witnesses reality tunnel. It seems especially kooky when explained with cheesy 60s cell animation. It’s as convoluted as Scientology’s or Mormonism’s foundation myths. I’m converting now, who’s with me?
If things weren’t serious enough for Julain Assange, the Guardian reports that the Wikileaks founder could be at “real risk of the death penalty or detention in Guantánamo Bay if he is extradited to Sweden on accusations of rape and sexual assault, his lawyers claim.” According to the report:
In a skeleton summary of their defence against attempts by the Swedish director of public prosecutions to extradite him, released today, Assange’s legal team argue that there is a similar likelihood that the US would subsequently seek his extradition “and/or illegal rendition”, “where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantánamo Bay or elsewhere”.
“Indeed, if Mr Assange were rendered to the USA, without assurances that the death penalty would not be carried out, there is a real risk that he could be made subject to the death penalty. It is well known that prominent figures have implied, if not stated outright, that Mr Assange should be executed.”
The 35-page skeleton argument was released by Mark Stephens, Assange’s lawyer, following a brief review hearing this morning at Belmarsh magistrates court.
The WikiLeaks founder, who is on conditional bail while his extradition case is being considered, appeared for no more than 15 minutes in the dock, while supporters including Jemima Khan and Bianca Jagger looked on and waved support from the public gallery.
He later emerged to give a brief statement to a large number of reporters, saying: “Our work with WikiLeaks continues unabated. We are stepping up our publications for matters relating to Cablegate and other materials.
“These will shortly be available through our newspaper partners around the world – big and small newspapers and human rights organisations.”
The skeleton argument outlines seven points on which Assange’s lawyers will contest his extradition, which was sought by the Swedish DPP, Marianne Ny, following accusations from two women that he had sexually assaulted them in separate incidents in August.
One accusation, that Assange had sex with one of the women while she was asleep, would amount to rape under Swedish law if proven. Both women had previously had consenting sex with Assange.
The other points of argument include:
• That the European arrest warrant (EAW) is not valid, because Ny is not the authorised issuing authority, and it has been sought for an improper purpose – ie “simply in order to question him and without having yet reached a decision on whether or not to prosecute him”. This, they argue, would be in contravention of a well-established principle “that mere suspicion should not found a request for extradition”.
• That there has been “abuse of process” as Assange has not had full disclosure of all documents relating to the case, in particular text messages sent by one of the women, in which she allegedly said she was “half asleep” (ie not fully asleep) at the time they had sex, and messages between the two women in which they allegedly spoke of “revenge”.
• That the “conduct” of the Swedish prosecutor amounts to abuse of process. Assange’s lawyers cite the fact that the rape allegations were initially dismissed and then reopened by a second prosecutor, that the prosecutor has refused Assange’s offers of interview, and that it has not made documents available to Assange in English. They also cite the leak of part of the prosecution case to the Guardian as “a breach of Mr Assange’s fair trial and privacy rights”.
• That the alleged offences would not be considered crimes in the UK, and therefore, they argue, an EAW between the two countries would not be valid.
• That the extradition attempt is politically motivated, and that his trial would be prejudiced because of his political opinions or because, they argue, of his gender.
Assange’s team will make their case on 7 and 8 February, when Assange will return to court for the full extradition hearing. The case for his extradition is being argued by the Crown Prosecution Service on behalf of the Swedish prosecutor; the full prosecution case is not expected to be released before that date.
District Judge Nicholas Evans agreed at this morning’s hearing to ease the terms of his bail conditions, which require Assange to wear an electronic tag and report daily to a police station close to the stately home on the Suffolk/Norfolk border where he is staying. For the nights of 6 and 7 February Assange will be permitted to stay in London.
Hello Dangerous Minds. It’s time for a quick introduction - I’m the Niallist, a music maker and blogger based in the UK, and I’m going to be posting regularly about music on here in 2011. This will hopefully compliment the posts already here while presenting a different perspective. “Netlabels” is an on-going series where I will write about the best and most interesting Internet-based record labels, and for the first installment I’m gonna block my ears to cries of nepotism and cover our own netlabel, Little Rock Records.
So, as the name would suggest, a netlabel is a record label set up on the Internet, that primarily distributes its music digitally. There is an ever growing community of netlabels around the globe, so much so that they coalesce around sites like netlabels.org, and congregate at festivals like Netaudio. Music is (generally) released on a copyleft basis, and most of it is for free. People with no-to-very-little budget being able to release any music they please, particularly experimental work that majors and large indies would never touch. This can lead to claims of “it’s not good enough to sell” (which is justified in some cases) but as anyone who has had experience dealing with the music industry can testify, music is very rarely sold simply on how good it is. At least with netlabels artists don’t have to worry about financial returns, fitting in with trends and complying to certain label-based agendas.
Team Little Rock in our Glasgow office.
The best netlabels, in my opinion, carry on the ideals of previous generations of indies (split releases, ltd edition pressings, representing local artists, etc) but now have even lower outgoings, a much faster (almost instant) production schedule, and a truly global reach. Growing up heavily immersed in the music press, I was constantly told of how much punk-rock changed music and the industry. Sadly by the Nineties those changes already felt like just another set of rules to conform to. Sure, punk shook things up, but it never democratized music the way the internet and digital technology of the last decade has. To release music nowadays you don’t need a band, a studio, an engineer, a manager, a pressing plant, a distributor, or a promoter - all you need is an idea, a computer and an internet connection.
As an artists who has worked with labels that have either folded or changed priorities, I found the idea of running a netlabel to be hugely liberating. Little Rock Records launched in Glasgow on 07-07-07 with 7 digital 7 inches (a direct copy of the format of pioneering netlabel Jahtari, who I will be covering in the next netlabels post). At the moment there’s about 75 releases in the catalog. Some of this is stuff that would not be able to see the light of day legally, some of it is stuff that has been rejected by larger labels, some of it has been recorded specifically for us. I’m not gonna lie to you folks, some of this stuff is pretty experimental, but if you think your ears can handle it, I invite you to check it out.
The ending to B. S. Johnson’s film Fat Man on a Beach proved rather prophetic, as the author walked fully clothed into the sea, until he disappeared. It was the last sequence filmed for his documentary, and recalls the opening scene to the BBC comedy The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, and, more significantly, Stevie Smith’s poem “Not Waving but Drowning”. Three weeks after filming this scene, in 1973, B. S. Johnson killed himself.
I’ve liked Johnson since I first read him as a teenager, and he is one of the many authors whose books I still return to all these years later. Although I like his work there is something about Johnson that reminds me of the well-kent story of Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman during the making of Marathon Man, where each actor approached their role through their own discipline. Olivier had learnt his technique from treading the boards and performing Shakespeare alongside John Gielgud; Hoffman was a different breed, his muse was Method Acting, where motivation is key. When Hoffman’s character was supposed to have been without sleep, Hoffman decided to stay up all night in order to perform the scene. When Olivier heard the length to which Hoffman had gone to interpret his role, the aging Lord, said, “Have you tried acting, dear boy?”
There was something of the Hoffman in Johnson, or at least, in the shared need to have the experience before creating from it. What Johnson did not do was write fiction - or so he claimed. He saw stories as lies, citing the term “telling stories” as a childish euphemism for telling lies. Johnson did not believe in telling lies, he believed in telling the truth. And it was this that would ultimately destroy him. For once one has abandoned imagination, there is no possibility of escape, or creative freedom.
In 1965, Johnson wrote a play called You’re Human Like the Rest of Them - a grim, unrelenting drama, later made into an award-winning short film in 1967. In it, the central character Haakon realizes his own mortality and the inevitability of death.
We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that? / You just can’t ignore these things, you just can’t!
For Haakon, and so for Johnson, from “the moment of birth we decay and die.” An obvious proposition, as Jonathan Coe, pointed out in his excellent biography on Johnson Like a Fiery Elephant, one which any audience would have understood before watching. Not so for Johnson the realist - death is the final answer to life’s question, and once realized nothing else is of significance. You can see where this is heading, and how Johnson started to unravel. Though he did go on to write three of his greatest novels after this: Trawl, about life on a fishing vessel; The Unfortunates the episodic tale of a friend’s death from cancer; and the brutally comic Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, in which the titular hero becomes a mass murderer and succumbs to a sudden death form cancer; you can see the pattern, all three were shadowed with death. However, each is so brilliantly and engagingly written their dark heart is often overlooked.
There is a key moment in Fat Man on a Beach, when Johnson described a motorcycle accident in which the cyclist was diced by a barbed-wire fence, like “a cheese-cutter through cheese.” He explained the story as a “metaphor for the way the human condition seems to treat humankind,” then digressed and said, life is:
“...really all chaos…I cannot prove it as chaos any more than anyone else can prove there is a pattern, or there is some sort of deity, but even if it is all chaos, then let’s celebrate chaos. Let’s celebrate the accidental. Does that make us any the worse off? Are we any the worse off? There is still love; there is still humor.”
This in essence is what is so marvelous about Johnson and Fat Man on a Beach, as Jonathan Coe later wrote as an introduction to the film:
One evening late in 1974, the TV listings announced that a documentary about Porth Ceiriad was to be broadcast. It was being shown past my bedtime (I was 13), but was clearly not to be missed. After News at Ten, we settled down to watch en famille.
Instead of a tourist’s-eye view of local beauty spots, what we saw that evening was baffling. A corpulent yet athletic-looking man, bearing some resemblance to an overweight Max Bygraves, ran up and down the beach for 40 minutes gesticulating, expostulating, reciting strange poetry and chattering away about the randomness of human life, his quasi-mystical feelings about the area and, most passionately, the dishonesty of most modern fiction and film-making. With disarming bluntness, the programme was called Fat Man on a Beach. We could not make head or tail of it.
And yet memories of this film, so unlike anything seen on television before or since, stayed with me, and 10 years later, when I was a post-graduate student, I stumbled upon a reissued paperback novel by someone called B. S. Johnson and realised that this was the same person. Amazingly, it came with a puff from Samuel Beckett, someone not known as a regular provider of jacket quotations. Encouraged by this, I bought the novel, which was called Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, devoured it in a matter of hours (it’s less than 30,000 words long) and realised that I had found a new hero.
When I thought about the film that we had watched in a daze of collective bewilderment all those years before, I remembered the sense of fierce engagement, combined with a spirit of childish fun, that had characterised BS Johnson’s virtuoso monologue to camera. I remembered his strange, unwieldy grace - the sort of fleet-footed grace you find unexpectedly in a bulky comedian such as John Goodman or Oliver Hardy. And I remembered the wounded eyes that stared at you almost aggressively, as if in silent accusation of some nameless hurt. It was impossible not to recognise the pain behind those eyes. Even so, I had not realised at the time that I had been looking at a dead man.
The writer David Quantick has uploaded this and some other excellent films by Johnson onto You Tube, which I hope will provide a stimulus to reading his exceptional books.
