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?
 

 
Via Jesse Merlin

 
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.

 
Via The Guardian
 

 
Talk about timely. Within a day and a half of Sheriff Clarence Dupnik famously speaking truth to the far right’s moral abyss on the Tuscon massacre, Steve Stein—a.k.a. Steinski, probably the most influential producer in hip-hop cut & paste—posted up a tribute to the man.

Notes the great Stein:

My apologies in advance to Sheriff Dupnik. May you always speak your mind as clearly as you did on this occasion, sir.

No apologies needed. Here’s “Soul Searching (Sheriff Dupnik’s rmx).” Download it here.
 

 
Get: Steinski - What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 [CD]

 
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.
 

 
Previously on DM

 
More form ‘Fat on a Beach’ after the jump…
 

 
Stop me if you’ve received one of these before…

Ballofwool says, “So my mate got fired from work a while ago and i convinced him to allow me to post this.”

Well, I’m sure glad his buddy allowed him to post this priceless termination letter. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Ballofwool!

(via Reddit)

 
Odd Mark E. Smith Special Edition Fabric Doll by Flickr user MAINMIN. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear Mr. Smith is available for purchase.

Below The Fall’s “Dresden Dolls.”

 
(via Fuck Yeah The Fall)

 
YES! A freakin’ chrome cop lamp! I would so totally own this if it weren’t for the estimated price ($400 - $600).

The auction for this fine specimen starts Friday, January 14, 9AM.

Check out all the details here.

(via BB Submitterator)

 
You knew it was coming. Rev. Fred Phelps has made a statement about the shooting in Arizona and he says “Thank God for the violent shooter.” Appointed by God himself! Repent or perish! Yawn. (But God spared the Phelps family from a similar fate?)

The Phelps family just can’t seem to help themselves, can they? The berserk “us vs. everyone else in the entire world” attitude of the Phelps clan is impressive, isn’t it? I mean how unlikely is it that there would be so few defectors from their insane ranks? You’d think that a need to procreate outside of their gene pool alone would prompt one of them to wake up at some point or another to the fact that 99.9% of anyone who’s every been exposed to them would be happy to piss on their graves one day.

Fascinating that there is a genetic component to all of this insanity, though, I must say. This is one crazy, fucked up family.
 

 
Christian crazy lady, Cindy Jacobs has a new video. Cindy’s a (self-proclaimed) prophet and shit, right? So her followers have asked been her exalted prophetship: “Hey, Cindy, what’s with all of these bird deaths? Does this mean it’s like the end of days or something?” And this is what she spake unto them: It wuz teh gayz! And Bill Clinton!

According to biblical principles, marriage is between a man and a woman , so we have to say “what happens when a nation makes a decision that’s against God’s principles?” Well, often what happens is that nature itself will begin to talk to us – for instance, violent storms, flooding. And you know there are actually some patterns that you can see where a nation will make a decision that is contrary to the principles of God and after that there is some kind of answer that God gives, being the God of creation, the God who created nature, but we don’t always understand what He’s saying.

Well, there’s something interesting we have been watching – let’s talk about this Arkansas pattern and say, could it be a pattern? We’re going to watch and see. But the blackbirds fell to the ground in Beebe, Arkansas, well the Governor of Arkansas’ name is Beebe. And also, there was something put out of Arkansas called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by a former Governor, this was proposed, Bill Clinton. As so, could there be a connection between this passage [Hosea 4] and now that we’ve had the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell where people now legally in the United States have broken restraints with the Scripture because the Scripture says in Romans 1 that homosexuality is not allowed.

It could be because we have said it’s okay for people who commit these kinds of acts to be recognized in our military for the first time in our history, there is a potential that there is something that actually happened in the land where a hundred thousand drum fish died and also where these birds just fell out of the air.

The way I see it, the only thing that could explain the unlikely situation that there are people out there who give a shit what Cindy Jacobs thinks is that must be plenty of people out there even dumber than Cindy herself. That’s pathetic, almost impossible. She’s a flaming idiot.

Hey Cindy, do some more of your “blaggah, blaggerbah hoolio como sunumfry” talk. I love it when you do your “speaking in tongues” routine. Shit cracks me up!
 

 
Via Right Wing Watch

 
Here’s a gorgeous and beautifully edited fan-made video for NASA by YouTube user damewse. Damewse says he made this video because “NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks. Seriously.”

There ya have it.

 
(via TDW)

Dacia Duster (not actual size).

Dutch production company Artcore created this hugely politically incorrect commercial for the Romanian automobile manufacturer Dacia to promote the Duster SUV which Dacia describes as being “simple, robust and functional.”

I can’t imaging this ad running on television in any country in the world. Perhaps that was the intention. If it goes viral on the internet, it could potentially be seen by far more people than had it aired on TV. Welcome to new era of advertising: creating campaigns with the purpose of being banned.
 

 
Via copyranter

 
Dangerous Minds is happy to announce that we’re now a featured blog on Pulse, the popular news reader app for i-devices! Pulse lets users compile customized news feeds with a great graphic interface. We extremely pleased to see our content alongside that of web heavyweights like Huffington Post, GOOD, Gizmodo, Salon, Fast Company, Techcrunch and others. Pulse’s easy to use interface will make DM available to readers on the go and we’re excited at how our content is displayed, too. Pulse is the most feature-laden new reader app out there, and it’s FREE!

Meet Pulse. A beautiful application that makes reading news fun and engaging. Pulse takes your favorite websites and transforms them into a colorful and interactive mosaic. Tap on an article, and you will see a clean and elegant view of the story. Sharing the story via Facebook, Twitter, Email or Instapaper is as easy as two taps. So good, the app was featured in the App Store Hall of Fame!

Over 2000 users have given Pulse a 4.5 star rating at the iTunes store. Get Pulse here for FREE! Available for iPad, iPhone and Android. See Pulse in action in the clip below:
 

 
An incredibly powerful colorized image of Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thích Quảng Đức, burning himself to death. I have no words for this.

Born Lâm Văn Tức (1897 – 11 June 1963) was a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at a busy Saigon road intersection on 11 June 1963. Thích Quảng Đức was protesting against the persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam’s Ngô Đình Diệm administration. Photos of his self-immolation were circulated widely across the world and brought attention to the policies of the Diệm regime. Malcolm Browne won a Pulitzer Prize for his iconic photo of the monk’s death, as did David Halberstam for his written account. After his death, his body was re-cremated, but his heart remained intact. This was interpreted as a symbol of compassion and led Buddhists to revere him as a bodhisattva, heightening the impact of his death on the public psyche.

The original black and white photo can be viewed here.

(via Nerdcore )

The very charming Cherry Vanilla discusses her new memoir, Lick Me: How I Became Cherry Vanilla, a book with far more sex, drugs and rock-n-roll per page than probably any book you will ever read! Topics include her role as “Amanda Pork” in Andy Warhol’s Pork in 1970; working for David Bowie during the Ziggy Stardust/MainMan era; her punk backing band (young Sting and The Police) and, of course, being a rock super groupie.

 
Peter Yates has died. Along with his many accomplishments as a film maker, Yates will be fondly remembered among action fanatics for his groundbreaking direction of one of the baddest badass car chases in the history of cinema. Watch the clip from Bullit below and be amazed.

Yates directed two of my alltime favorite films: Breaking Away and The Friends Of Eddie Coyle. When he was on his game, he was among the best.

4-time Oscar nominee Peter Yates—who helmed such celebrated and dissimilar films as Bullitt, The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, Breaking Away, Suspect, and The Dresser—has passed away in London after a long illness. He was 82. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he was a stage actor before working as an assistant director for Tony Richardson. Yates’ feature directorial debut was the early 1960s low-budget Summer Holiday (1963) with Cliff Richard And The Shadows. He soon graduated to the 1967 crime thriller Robbery, a fictionalized version of Britain’s The Great Train Robbery. It was a short jump to his first American film, Bullitt (1968), starring Steve McQueen in one of the definitive cop movies of all time thanks to that car chase through the streets of San Francisco. Other films he directed included John and Mary (1969), Murphy’s War (1971), The Hot Rock (1972), For Pete’s Sake (1974), The Deep (1977), Eyewitness (1981), The Dresser (1983), Krull (1983), Eleni (1985), Suspect (1987), The House on Carroll Street (1988), An Innocent Man (1989), Year of the Comet (1992), Roommates (1995), and Curtain Call (1999). He earned two Oscar nominations (director and producer) for Breaking Away, and another two (director and producer) for The Dresser.

For a fascinating inside look on how the car chase in Bullitt was created click here.
 
Bullitt starring Steve McQueen. No CGI, just great cinematography, editing and stunt driving.