Financial Times on Almodovar's "La Mala Educacion":
We know what to expect from the unerring hand of Pedro Almodóvar: a cinema steeped in emotional extremes that delights in tricks and contradiction and that coaxes us into the moral quicksand of contemporary life with such dexterity we barely notice our feet getting damp.
How does he manage it? The melodramatic plot twists, the reckless celebration of sexuality in all its shapes and forms, the garish colours - it should be a recipe for the most ghastly exercise in high camp.
Yet, it invariably works: the melodrama hums with authenticity, the pan-sexual cavortings resonate with feeling, the primary hues shimmer stylishly, in perfect empathy with the vivid entanglements cast before us.
So when we hear that Bad Education is an emotional triangle, we are duly forewarned. We know it will be more of a psycho-sexual, three-dimensional dodecahedron of head-spinning complexity and brutal frankness; and yet, we will care.
True, there is a triangle at the heart of the tale, one involving a Catholic priest and two under-age boys - nothing too controversial there, then. But Almodóvar structures his story with such understated cleverness, shifting time frames, stories within stories, that we are never quite sure of our ground.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Sunday, May 16, 2004
IHT presents an argument against the widespread over-simplification that Congress' victory is due to the growing "rural-urban" divide:
In India, unlike China, it is not self-evident that the poor rural areas subsidize the rich urban ones. To the contrary, Indian government heavily subsidizes the agricultural sector while imposing numerous "luxury taxes" on the urban rich. While it is true that India's agriculture needs further investment to improve it's land productivity, this year, in any case, rural areas were mostly prospering, albeit perhaps temporarily, from a combination of good crops and stable to higher farm prices.
So why were the poor unhappy with the BJP ?
I think the argument offered by most commentators regarding access of TV in villages bringing a "rich-poor" divide to their huts is over-simplification.
Given the complexity of the regional, caste and class interest parties that make up India’s body politic, no simple explanation of electoral events is possible. In northern India in particular, rural voters are divided more by caste than united by demand for more resources.
An increasingly predictable feature of the latest result was the defeat of incumbent governments, both Congress and BJP led ones, in the states as well as at the center. The Congress Party team governing Karnataka, was defeated as surely as that in neighboring Andhra Pradesh, whose chief minister, Naidu, was a high-profile technology promoter aligned with the BJP. It seems more likely that these two state governments lost because they were incumbents than because they did not pay sufficient attention to rural needs.
At the national level, Congress may have been helped by a rejuvenation of the Gandhi name by a new generation of the family (Rahul & Priyanka) and rejection of the ‘‘foreign’’ label that the BJP had tried to pin on Sonia Gandhi.
But more broadly the election may simply show that:
a) voters still exercise their rights
b) they take a suitably cynical view of politicians
c) do not believe their promises
d) unwilling to let any of them stay in office too long.
Indonesian voters seemed to deliver a rather similar verdict last month to the two main parties as well as to President Megawati Sukarnoputri. There, as in India, rural voters predominate, but in crowded Java, at least, the geographical divide between town and country is less clear and everywhere ideological, regional and religious affiliations transcend any politics based on rural issues. In the Philippines, the urban poor are as numerous as their rural cousins. Economics might demand that agriculture receive much more attention. But electoral politics is all about personalities and avoids policy issues. Rural issues barely get lip service.
Perhaps surprisingly, it is in more developed Thailand and Malaysia that rural voters are a better defined electoral class. In Thailand, where rural voters are still the majority and the gap between Bangkok and the countryside is very wide, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra triumphed in the last election partly because of a promise of rural handouts and debt reduction for farmers. In Malaysia, rural voters matter because they are mostly Malays in areas where the battle for the Malay soul between the governing UMNO and Islamist opposition is most intense. In the recent election, sky high palm oil prices were worth a lot of votes for UMNO but they were not the substance of the political debate. Rural voters still predominate in most of Asia and they decide elections. But they do not define the political issues, least of all as an urban-rural divide.
In India, unlike China, it is not self-evident that the poor rural areas subsidize the rich urban ones. To the contrary, Indian government heavily subsidizes the agricultural sector while imposing numerous "luxury taxes" on the urban rich. While it is true that India's agriculture needs further investment to improve it's land productivity, this year, in any case, rural areas were mostly prospering, albeit perhaps temporarily, from a combination of good crops and stable to higher farm prices.
So why were the poor unhappy with the BJP ?
I think the argument offered by most commentators regarding access of TV in villages bringing a "rich-poor" divide to their huts is over-simplification.
Given the complexity of the regional, caste and class interest parties that make up India’s body politic, no simple explanation of electoral events is possible. In northern India in particular, rural voters are divided more by caste than united by demand for more resources.
An increasingly predictable feature of the latest result was the defeat of incumbent governments, both Congress and BJP led ones, in the states as well as at the center. The Congress Party team governing Karnataka, was defeated as surely as that in neighboring Andhra Pradesh, whose chief minister, Naidu, was a high-profile technology promoter aligned with the BJP. It seems more likely that these two state governments lost because they were incumbents than because they did not pay sufficient attention to rural needs.
At the national level, Congress may have been helped by a rejuvenation of the Gandhi name by a new generation of the family (Rahul & Priyanka) and rejection of the ‘‘foreign’’ label that the BJP had tried to pin on Sonia Gandhi.
But more broadly the election may simply show that:
a) voters still exercise their rights
b) they take a suitably cynical view of politicians
c) do not believe their promises
d) unwilling to let any of them stay in office too long.
Indonesian voters seemed to deliver a rather similar verdict last month to the two main parties as well as to President Megawati Sukarnoputri. There, as in India, rural voters predominate, but in crowded Java, at least, the geographical divide between town and country is less clear and everywhere ideological, regional and religious affiliations transcend any politics based on rural issues. In the Philippines, the urban poor are as numerous as their rural cousins. Economics might demand that agriculture receive much more attention. But electoral politics is all about personalities and avoids policy issues. Rural issues barely get lip service.
Perhaps surprisingly, it is in more developed Thailand and Malaysia that rural voters are a better defined electoral class. In Thailand, where rural voters are still the majority and the gap between Bangkok and the countryside is very wide, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra triumphed in the last election partly because of a promise of rural handouts and debt reduction for farmers. In Malaysia, rural voters matter because they are mostly Malays in areas where the battle for the Malay soul between the governing UMNO and Islamist opposition is most intense. In the recent election, sky high palm oil prices were worth a lot of votes for UMNO but they were not the substance of the political debate. Rural voters still predominate in most of Asia and they decide elections. But they do not define the political issues, least of all as an urban-rural divide.
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Notes from conversation with Luis on MP3 compatible CD players:
CD-DA follows what is known as the "red book" format. Samples 16 bits at 44.1 Khz. (Human audible freq. are ~6Khz - ~ 20Khz, so 44.1Khz meets Niquist's law). This is also precisely what wav format is.
MP3 is an audio compression format, which approximates "cd quality" by selectively extracting most human discernable samples from wav.
.Wav files can be written to CD in their original CD-DA format.
.Mp3 files can be written to CD in either ISO-99* format, which is an audio filesystem format, or written as CD-DA (if your CD player doesn't recognize ISO-99*. Remember, this doesn't get you back the original wav quality - the quality is still mp3).
Input to an mp3 converter is (usually?) wav files. The "stream rate" decides how much of the original CD-DA quality is maintained.128kb(its)ps is a common stream rate. Obviously, the more the stream rate, the less the compression.
A standard 700MB CD can store around 10 hours of MP3 or about 1 hour of wav ! Hence the market for CD MP3 players.
New formats in the market:
Super Audio - samples ~32 bits at ~ 90Khz. Most CD players don't recognize this format
Quicktime audio - compresses wav to half the song's original size, without compromising audio ! (?)
Video CD - audio format recognized by most DVD players
CD-DA follows what is known as the "red book" format. Samples 16 bits at 44.1 Khz. (Human audible freq. are ~6Khz - ~ 20Khz, so 44.1Khz meets Niquist's law). This is also precisely what wav format is.
MP3 is an audio compression format, which approximates "cd quality" by selectively extracting most human discernable samples from wav.
.Wav files can be written to CD in their original CD-DA format.
.Mp3 files can be written to CD in either ISO-99* format, which is an audio filesystem format, or written as CD-DA (if your CD player doesn't recognize ISO-99*. Remember, this doesn't get you back the original wav quality - the quality is still mp3).
Input to an mp3 converter is (usually?) wav files. The "stream rate" decides how much of the original CD-DA quality is maintained.128kb(its)ps is a common stream rate. Obviously, the more the stream rate, the less the compression.
A standard 700MB CD can store around 10 hours of MP3 or about 1 hour of wav ! Hence the market for CD MP3 players.
New formats in the market:
Super Audio - samples ~32 bits at ~ 90Khz. Most CD players don't recognize this format
Quicktime audio - compresses wav to half the song's original size, without compromising audio ! (?)
Video CD - audio format recognized by most DVD players
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