The New Delhi Biscuit Company

2010-04-25T19:16:00.000-07:00

Keshtzar haye sepid, 2009

[The White Meadows]

Mohammad Rasoulof

2009-09-07T20:22:00.000-07:00

Oh! Soo-jung, 2000

Hong Sang-Soo

2009-09-07T19:01:00.000-07:00

Er shi si cheng ji, 2008

[24 City]

Jia Zhang-ke

2009-09-07T18:17:00.000-07:00

Gururi no koto, 2008

[All Around Us]
Ryosuke Hashiguchi

2007-03-04T23:56:00.000-08:00

Chain, 2004
Jem Cohen

2007-03-04T23:44:00.000-08:00

Iklimler, 2006
Nuri Bilge Ceylan

2007-01-21T22:40:00.000-08:00

Kangwon-do ui him, 1998
[The Power of Kangwon Province]
Hong Sang-Soo

Hong Sang-Soo in CinemaScope Issue 29:

...it’s my response to the locations and the actors. If I chose a different actress or actor, I might have come up with a different ending. I have some of the details, and then I shoot this person, and my response to this person and what she gives me makes up the next day’s storyline. One important factor contributing to that particular ending is who she is in real life. If you have too much conceptualization, the options in terms of where you get details are restrained, because of this strong outline. Of course we need some kind of outline, but I really like to pick up details from other places beyond the main dramatic points. For me, those dramatic points are not the centre. It’s up to you how you connect them. The details come from an unusual place and make a pattern, but patterns don’t necessarily have a symbolic meaning. That’s not my intention. My job is just to make a complex pattern so people can feel something that is alive. I can think of a person [points at a woman]—let’s say you and I met her and after two hours you can talk about her this way and I can talk about her that way. Because she is a living being, we can say different things about her. That’s as far as I want to go, rather than telling you what to feel.

2007-01-21T22:29:00.000-08:00

Wassup Rockers, 2005
Larry Clark

2006-03-29T13:07:00.000-08:00

Notable selection from 2006 SFIFF:

Play, Alicia Scherson
Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel
The Sun , Alexander Sokurov
Three Times, Hou Hsiao-hsien
Workingman's Death , Michael Glawogger
The Wild Blue Yonder , Werner Herzog
The Heart of Guy Maddin , Guy Maddin
Into Great Silence, Philip Groening
A Perfect Couple , Nobuhiro Suwa
Brothers of the Head, Keith FultonLouis Pepe
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, Peter Tscherkassky
Cycling Chronicles:Landscapes The Boy Saw, Koji Wakamatsu

2006-01-11T09:29:00.000-08:00

Kôhî jikô, 2003
[Café Lumière]
Hou Hsiao-hsien

2006-01-07T08:49:00.000-08:00

Me and You and Everyone We Know, 2005
Miranda July

Miranda July summarizes

2005-04-24T23:40:00.000-07:00

Parapalos, 2004
Ana Poliak

The film opens with an extended shot of a naked man casually sitting on an hospital stretcher, waiting for, presumably, a physical examination. The shot is framed in a dark doorway and serves as an underlying metaphor for the film's examination of the hopeless, mundane routine of the poor and their objectifization (rather comoditization) as the sum of their body parts for their unaware (or indifferent) patrons.
The role of the protagonist is really one of a good, amiable, disarming listener. He curiously listens to his colleagues tell their story (which might be a window to his own future). Not many, though, are curious about his own life.

Notes from Interview with Ana Poliak, May 2004:

I wanted to talk about light, in the two senses of the word. The light of the sun and the interior light of a person. I wanted to show a character that had an interior light in order to think about how much a human being can be pushed and pressured in a job and how much he can resist thanks to his own light. These are questions, and I don’t have any answers for them....I think that my social class doesn’t have that capacity, that light...the main character, who’s almost mute, to work as a mirror; a character who, from his own light, is eager to listen to others, in whom who he awakens the need to talk and tell their life stories. He is curious about what the other people keep inside... I attempted to achieve a piece that was ...luminous and simple. I didn’t think of it as a recipe, but I did want it to be simple.

2005-04-24T00:55:00.000-07:00

Los Muertos, 2004
Lisandro Alonso

Opens with a sublimely beautiful shot of the camera exploring trees in some wilderness, occasionally going out of focus, generating a dream-like effect. Two (?) bodies of children are briefly seen.
Vargas begins his journey in the boat, but briefly hesitates (he disembarks from the boat and heads back to the shore, hesitates and then decides to continue anyways). Is he afraid of himself, of his inherent primitivism, that has killed once and can kill again? (Or did he, perhaps, want to kill the fisherman who gave him the boat?) Was the first scene really the end of the film? (Alonso’s use of ‘opening credits’-like closing-credits insinuate at that).
Vargas' primitive instincts are alive when he is freed from jaill – in his love for his daughter, in his interaction with the hive, in his killing of the goat, etc. His peculiarities include his walk, his manner of washing his face head downwards and and his cluelessness about his daughter’s possible age (buying candies without realizing that she would be much older).
Camera used as a dramatic element in the long shot of Vargas rowing and receding from the scene, eventually disappearing, with the camera taking a life of its own, moving deliberately, with a rower’s exertion, in the opposition direction and, eventually, away from him (with only the sound of wilderness and Vargas' rowing in the background). The very same exertion returns at the very last scene of the film when the camera remains intently focussed on the toys (with incomprehensible sounds of slashing in the background). Is it the children, the goat, or himself (or just the audience) ?
Beautiful, long expressions of "stillness" with sudden disturbances (reminded me of fade-out to black narrative ellipses in Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs: Bleu )
Relationship between nature and the human race, and the inherent, but latent, violence in both. The hive, the constant sound of bees/flies are indicative of nature's intense upredictability. Unpredictability exists in us all.
There is a beautiful part in the film when Vargas gets rid of his shirt (he has also got rid of most of his money), and we now find him dressed akin to his grandson. It is him coming home and accepting that he is now home. Previously, Alonso shows how Vargas is retracing many steps of his past (undoubtedly spent in the jungle), and his meeting his grandson brings a finality to his new found freedom.

2005-04-10T19:19:00.000-07:00

Mondovino, 2004
Jonathan Nossiter

Jonathan Nossiter uses the battle for the soul of wine as a metaphor for how "crypto-fascism" in the new "globalized" world order is destroying small-scale enterprises.. This is aided by a rampant complicity between the big companies and its' (so called) critics, in this case, wine producers and (so called) wine journalists. (Similar to the collusion that exists between film and film critics, politicians and political journalists, etc.)
Not infrequently, the poet is greater than the object of his verse. Nossiter's absorbing documentary is in sharp contrast to the influential wine critics who assign numeric scores, while advising the very same vineyards on how to confirm to their 100-dollar-a-bottle "new oak" palates.
This seemingly innocuous "homogenization of taste" is really a form of fascism where subversion of terroir is really a subversion of individual expression -- and affects (and reflects) both how we live today and what of ourself we pass onto the future...when our unique and defining imperfections (the very imperfections that make human beings human) are destroyed by economic greed.

Notes from Who is killing the great wines of Europe ? - Jonathan Nossiter on Mondovino by Mark Peranson (CinemaScope, Spring 2005) :

"I'd like to send every filmmaker on a three-month stint working for a good winemaker with a sense of terroir...I'm deeply moved by the Burgundian notion of terroir as expressed by Hubert de Montille, which is that you express your personality in everything you do, in any activity, from a dry cleaner to a filmmaker. The Burgundian argument is that individuality is a given, stop fretting about what you're personally bringing to something, think instead about what you are able to bring out from something else..."
"What I'm most interested in cinema is what I'm most interested in wine, which is what I'm most interested in people: the veins of imperfection that create idiosyncrasy and individuality. To me this is the highest form of beauty...And I think that in cinema we live in a world in which the way films are shot ... is becoming extremely plasticized, standardized ...The camera movement in Mondovino is never a premeditated aesthetic gesture. I hope that it becomes aesthetic because of human needs: the camera moves in relation to what I felt was being felt and being exchanged, and the moves were spontaneous. Organic. And I think that, by and large, a sensitive audience generally can feel when a camera is moving gratuitously, and for aesthetic effect, and for the glory of director's ego, and when it's moving out of human and dramatic necessity...it's filmed with a kind of ebullience, vitality, and playfulness, and that's how I felt making it and cutting it...Whatever technical imperfections, which are constant, are transformed by the vitality of the camera's curious eye and the vitality of its life within the frame."
"With Robert and Michael Mondavi, that was absolutely formal interview, demanded by them, and I tried to frame it exactly like an interview, which I hope would take away from the interview aspect. And i think it did."
"Whether you're talking about a wine, a book, or a human being, the moment we say we all agree on what faults are and how to eliminate them is the moment we have completely capitulated to fascism."
"Making a film of any kind is a Sisyphean enterprise. Unless you feel deeply moved, and at some point unless you're in love."
"I see documentaries as the tension between two people in any given scene (the director and the co-director - the person in front of you) - which is why for me Michael Moore is not interesting because I don't feel the other [co-]director present, there's only some big guy with a sledgehammer. Obviously, I'm using the camera to my advantage, the cards are stacked in my favour. When it's like that, the worst thing to do both ethically and aesthetically is to play a heavy hand. ...I showed some moments he [Rolland] wouldn't allow me to see, because that is part of the tension. And in his scenes, he is the screenwriter. As the editor and director, I don't literally interpret the screenplay, otherwise I wouldn't be a director. Any screenplay that is interpreted directly by its director is a dead film by nature."
"If I'd done a film about the pharmaceutical industry, politics, or something that matters, I would never have got any sense of the human dimension....Precisely because wine is so irrelevant, ... I simply had access to everyone, and everyone was off their guard, even with their masses of press attaches."
"The Mondavis, or Bush, or Parker live with a mixture of belief and layers of cynicism that they won't acknowledge at any conscious level. They live in a culture that allows them to believe in their delusions. This is personal jet-lag - the French have a word for it, decalage, which means "displaced", but it's an internal displacement."

2005-03-31T22:56:00.000-08:00

Ren xiao yao, 2002
[Unknown Pleasures]
Jia Zhang-ke

The in-construction Datong-Beijing highway is symbolic of a bright future, but Xiao Ji's motorcycle is going nowhere fast.
The recurrent presence of the amusingly self-absorbed, operatic singer speaks volumes about cultural disconnection.

Notes from Lost In An Open Society by Dennis Lim (CinemaScope, Spring 2003):

[An] empathetic tale of alienated youth, characterized by an unresolved mood of corrosive [almost bitingly sarcastic] statis.
Trapped in disused, emptied-out spaces, Jia's characters find themselves constantly chafing against something - a feeling literalized in burts of repetition: Bin Bin awkwardly fending off a masseuse; a tearful Qiao Qiao being restrained by her mobster boyfriend; Qiao San's cronies slapping Xiao Ji to the pulse of disco strobes.
Jia: "I feel strongly about maintaining an unbroken relationship between the audience and the characters, both with respect to time and space (and maintain a unity of time and space). From the perspective of the spectator, the feeling of the passage of time is extremely important. Even those long scenes where nothing is happening and it seems like everything has stopped, even those scenes are important. It's possible that nothing at all happens over a long period of time; it's also possible that a lot of things are happening simultaneously in the same space, and I love that juxtaposition. In my films, i never want to use an all-knowing time as if God knows what's happening. I want this feeling of waiting and of not being able to anticipate what's going to happen"

2005-03-30T20:19:00.000-08:00

Notable selection from 2005 SFIFF:

Must Watch:

The Forest for the Trees [Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen], Maren Ade
The Hero [O herói], Zézé Gamboa
L’Intrus, Claire Denis
Kings and Queen [Rois et reine], Arnaud Desplechin
Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July
Los Muertos, Lisandro Alonso
Saraband, Ingmar Bergman
Tokyo Magic Hour & The Year of Living Vicariously, Amir Muhammad
Pin Boy [Parapalos], Ana Poliak
The World [Shijie], Jia Zhang-ke

Should Watch:

Delamu, Tian Zhuangzhuang
The Holy Girl [La niña santa], Lucrecia Martel
Little Sky [El cielito] , María Victoria Menis
The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, Adam Curtis
10th District Court: Moments of Trials [10e chambre: instants d’audiences], Raymond Depardon
A Social Genocide, Fernando E. Solanas
Ronda Nocturna, Edgardo Cozarinsky

ps: some notable omissions that i feel like cribbing about: there is practically nothing from all the remarkable work coming out of Japan this year, the absence of both Hou's Cafe Lumiere and Tsai's The Wayward Cloud, Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight , blah, blah, blah, ...

2005-03-24T23:29:00.000-08:00

Ni neibian jidian, 2001
[What Time is it There?]
Tsai Ming-liang

Technique:

Slender and patient narrative made abstract by using very limited dialogue and camera movement.
Remarkable rendition of a tourist's loneliness as Shiang-chyi, unable to speak any French, wanders alone through a cold Paris' cafes and cemeteries.

Notes from Time Traveller by Jason McBride and Mark Peranson (CinemaScope, December 2001)

Tsai entwines the narrative threads, interweaving the events in Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-kang's irregular, yet quotidian, lives, moving towards a denouement that is equally cathartic and enigmatic.
Opening scene shows Miao Tien sitting, waiting and smoking. But in a sudden cut, Miao's ashes are being transported through a long, dark tunnel.
We're made to anticipate when someone will actually speak; anticipation of what a rare pan or track will reveal beyond the edge of the frame. But the anticipation burns in the characters as well, who wait, usually in silence, for relief to come in the form of a kiss, a proposition, a voice, a hand, or the return of a deceased loved one. (Hsiao-kang waits, we presume, for Shang-chyi to return, as his mother waits for her husband's reincarnation. Shiang-chyi just waits for someone to talk to.)
But this anticipation is muted in the film. For most of the film, the anticipation that something will happen is replaced by the mourning for what has occurred.
Cyclical ending, both literally and metaphorically (the symmetrical shot of the giant wheel, surreally resembling a clock) attests to the influence of Buddhism in Tsai's films: path to reincarnation involves suffering. Perhaps What time is it there ? can be considered a reincarnation of Tsai's oeuvre ?

Notes from Peter Bradshow writing in the The Gaurdian:

The whole thing has such gentleness, reticence and intelligence...

2005-03-24T23:13:00.000-08:00

Akarui Mirai, 2003
[Bright Future]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Technique:

Lack of 'depth' in DV (distance between the characters and the camera) compensated by placing objects (columns of chairs leading up to the camera; a green plant close-up on one side with characters further away) between the characters and the camera.
Extensive use of subdued lighting in interior shots interleaved with bright natural light in 2-way dialogues.
The long takes sometimes register a slight hand-held tremble.
Colours are sometimes halucinogenically saturated (a bowling alley of rich blues and greens; and shiny red balls)
Use of lowlight grain.
Exterior shots are bleached.
Overhead shots reveal streets webbed with phone lines and power cables.
Evening exterior shots, in natural light, of people looking inside lit houses where characters swim in yellow light.
Stark contrast of protagonists' radical sense of fashion with that of the banausic world around them.
Establishing shots mislead and demand to be recontextualised in retrospect: a dank cafe interior is shot through light when a 90-degree shot reveals it to be outside, on the street.

Notes from Ambivalent Future, Affirmative Nihilism - Notes on Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Indeterminacy Principle by B. Kite (CinemaScope, Winter 2003)

The glowing jellyfish is as a good emblem as any for freedom, Kurosawa-style: deadly, diaphanous and mutable.
Kurosawa Kiyoshi's films are a series of fluctuations between rigid and chaotic elements, grids in which emphasis is place variously on the lines and the spaces.
The lines: a) hard angles of this long-take long shots sectioning the screen in balanced but asymmetric compositions; b) the confines of genre; c) habitual codes of consensual reality.
The spaces:unexpected activations of elements within those strict compositions
Kurosawa: "I think that most humans live with deeply repressed rage and hate. We are repressed by such things as conventions and morality."
Critics seem to think that Kurosawa perversely abandons control at some point in his films and allows promising situations to dribble away into incoherence. I think the aim is somewhere else: combining traditional elements in unexpected ways to transcend habitual response to the ocean of conflicted and unnamed thought/feeling that lies beyond.
The film returns at the end to a gang of teens, earlier rhymed with the fleeing jellyfish through an overhead shot of the group drifting , illumined by their glowing headsets. The Che Guevara shirts resonate on indeterminate frequencies: revolutionary sympathy or commodification of rebellion ?
The extent to which indeterminacy is a guiding force at every stage of Kurosawa's artistic process is exhibited when he expresses an almost Bressonian refusal to either create psychologically defined figures ("I can't invent a character...with a reason for everything") or help actors find their way into a role ("I'm terrified that the more we talk, we'll clarify motivations, which I hate"). He searches, he says, for the proper balance between "freedom and form", so it's easier to make films "in and out of the conventions of genre."
Much to the irritation of viewers expecting tidy twists on favourite formulas, Kurosawa's heroes move fluidly between positions, refusing to treat actions as blocks in a prefabricated narrative architecture. Any given occurrence functions as a pivot, opening new directions for movement.

2005-03-09T23:52:00.000-08:00

Notes from Introducing Hou Hsiao-Hsien : A Deeper Shot by Phillip Lopate (Cinema Scope, Spring 2000)

American scriptwriters are taught to make one point per scene and move on. With Hou, you feel your way into a scene, sorting as you go the characters' relationships and objectives. After a while you abandon your quest for the "key action" and surrender to the perplexing, multifarious life unfolding before you. In a sense, Hou's work is not difficult at all: you need only slow down your metabolism and submit to the pace, the images, the information onscreen. What he offers, finally, is a plenitude of life as it accumulates in the moment; the screen fills with being like water in a fish tank.

2005-03-07T00:10:00.000-08:00

Depuis qu'Otar est parti..., 2003
[Since Otar Left]
Julie Bertuccelli

Shot in the town of Tblisi in the new republic of (post-communist, modern-day) Georgia.

2005-02-28T22:11:00.000-08:00

Le Pays des sourds, 1992
[In the Land of the Deaf]
Nicholas Philibert

Can the deaf feel music ? How much does the sense of hearing define mental traits of rationality, logic and reason ? To what extent do the deaf attempt confirmity to the hearing world and to what extent do the hearing accommodate ?
A moving and convincing portrait of society's misapprehension (and misconception) of the (often isolated, sometimes forcibly so) world of the deaf community.
Philibert provides a compelling comparison between Jean-Claude Poulain, a brilliantly articulate (and addictively entertaining) deaf professor whose expression via French sign language is compared to a formalist 'oralism' teacher who develops speaking skills in children through repetitive exercises. ( A child playing the 'pacman' video game via modulated voice response is a memorable scene)
The irony between painstaking attempts of the deaf to adapt to the hearing world, and the hearing world's facile efforts (and sometimes, facile tears) - readily manifested and often lacking sincerity or depth - is provocatively brought out.
In the Q&A session, Philibert indicated that apart from making an effort to understand the world of deaf by being with them, filming for 9 months, he was drawn to the similarities between sign language and film. A scene well-articulated in sign language could well be an effective set of picture boards. A screenplay in sign language.

2005-02-27T13:35:00.000-08:00

Film Watch

A Fei jing juen, 1991
[Days of Being Wild]
Wong Kar-Wai

Spare compared to some of his later work like Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love in terms of colour, music and camera angles.
Characters trying to transcend the mundane sorrow of their lives via their quest for acceptance.
Utlimately unconvincing, almost catalectic. Perhaps blinded by love for the thematic strength of it's screenplay ?
Nothing in Yuddy's character inspires chemistry (love, anger, hope, hatred, etc.) between him and the characters he interacts with (Yuddy & Su Lizhen, Yuddy & his adoptive mother, Yuddy & Tide).
Attempt to create a melancholic atmosphere to depict characters' sense of incompletion with low lighting, rain and lack of colour contrast. But there is no intensity in the depicted melancholy, perhaps due to the colours used. Compare this to melancholy and longing beautifully realized in Kieslowski's La Double Vie de Veronique (sepia overlay) and Trois Couleurs: Bleu (blue imagery).
Technique:

Repeated scene of the slow moving, blue filtered landscape of the (Filipino ?) countryside.
Interestingly, Tony Leung mysteriously appears in the last scene.

2005-02-24T09:50:00.000-08:00

Mar adentro, 2004
[The Sea Inside]
Alejandro Amenábar

Convincing premise and visuals, but a contrived resolution.
Technique:

Lyrical, fluid sequences depict Ramon's dreams. Extended, mobile aerial shot of the lush-green mountanious terrain, climaxing with a deliberate arrival at the sea shore.

2005-02-24T09:37:00.000-08:00

The Bed You Sleep In, 1993
John Jost

The contradictions between the striking, natural beauty of the almost desolate Oregon countryside with the desolate, depleted lives of it's inhabitants, interspersed with prolonged, disaffecting scenes in a lumber mill, creates an immense and persistent atmosphere of foreboding ill.
Quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Every violation of the truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society". Parallelizes the transgression between father and daughter with the transgression between human society and the environment. A telling portrait of inherent contradictions in US society.
Technique:

Coloured (occasionally dis-coloured) still shot of Ray driving his car juxtaposed with high-contrast (over-exposed or bleached), almost black and white, mobile up-angle sequence of receeding trees and the sky (shot from a moving car) - such that edges of Ray's pale white face merge with the bleached sky.
Conversation frame with two characters: tilted angle shot with one character in the mirror along with down-tilted-angle shot of the other character.
Conversation frame with two characters: extreme closeup shot with one character to the left and the other behind to the right, at a distance. Focus shifts between characters midway the conversation.

2005-02-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

Hwa yang nian hua, 2000
[In the Mood for Love]
Wong Kar-Wai

Use of slow motion scenes juxtaposed with waltz music (by Michael Galasso) in the background.
Intensely compelling portrait of claustrophobia, both external (crowded apartments and nosy neighbours) and internal (dread of failure of their illusory hope of the inviolability and invincibilty of thier marital relationships), using vivid contrast of bright colours. On the other hand, complete isolation of Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen during their direct encounters -- no other character is present when they meet, even in restaurants, signifies both their isolation from society and their shared attribute of loneliness.
Reflection of the growing insignificance of the spouses in their prevaling lives using only the former's voices.
Technique:

Shot in episodic, fade-out, fade-in fragments which aids the (occasional) elliptical narration.

Stylized camerawork:

2-way dialogues in Chow Mo-wan's office shot in uncommon angles (sideways and overhead)

2005-02-22T07:35:00.000-08:00

Cinemarati critic Gabriel Shanks interviews critic Acquarello:

... I’m ...[making an]... argument ...[for]... how and why the film works, at least on a personal level. At the same time, I’m also trying to catalogue the films that I do find meaningful because it helps me remember the experience of them. So for me, the most efficient way to accomplish that is by dissecting the film and assembling the facts and detail observations in a kind of more clinical, scientific method application that removes the author’s personality from the equation. I think the approach also helps the readers to decide if it’s a film that will be meaningful for them as well, without insinuating your own personal filters too much into the reading. It’s certainly not a format that suits everyone, but neither is the subject matter.

...And I know it's cliché, but I'm still drawn to films about longing, and quite a few contemporary Asian filmmakers have turned this theme into an art form, most notably Tsai Ming-liang from Taiwan, Park Ki-yong from Korea, and Wong Kar-wai from Hong Kong.

2005-02-19T01:50:00.000-08:00

Hai shang hua, 1998
[The Flowers of Shanghai]
Hou Hsiao-hsien

Technique:

Entirely filmed in the interior with low lighting:

Subdued lighting on characters surrounded by opulence (costumes, architecture, etc.) depicts the dichotomy between their illusory life as entertainers (or their patrons) and the artificiality and fallacy behind their act. In a stunning form of visual dichotomy, one that uses the camera as a key dramatic element, the lighting functions as a transluscent veil that helps 'illuminate' the flower girls' internality (to the audience).

Typical for Hou, filmed in extended takes that limits human actions and interactions to the business of day-to-day living.

2005-02-12T10:35:00.000-08:00

La Mala Educación, 2004
[Bad Education]
Pedro Almodóvar

Quintessentially Almodóvar :

Almodóvar has reached a level of visual refinement where he can be both bold and elegant (with carefully cultivated subtlety) at the same time.
Life continues in his films in it's primal innocence - the bold, primal colours, the bold, primal characters and their bold, primal sense of humour.
Overall construction is so sensual that it appeals to the senses like the lush sounds of some orchestra (as opposed to fertile/thriving/characterized by abundance/prosperous/plentiful)
Full of ironical and whimsical double entendres.
Surreal humor (having the intense irrational reality of a dream)
Pulp narrative, usually complex like unusual interconnection between characters, films within a film etc. Very definition of 'pulp' in the truest sense of the word: lurid (shocking/melodramatic/sensational/causing revulsion) - subject matter with often shocking subjects portrayed as non-shocking.
One is, still, not repulsed by the characters commiting lurid crimes. One doesn't see them as victims either, but accepts them as they are.

2005-02-11T20:11:00.000-08:00

Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, 1972
[The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie]
Luis Buñuel

Compelling portrait of the hyprocrisy of the rich.
Technique:

Repeated scene of the guests walking on a deserted road in the desolate countryside depicts the quotidian drabness of their, almost regimented yet aimless, lives that is isolated from reality of the common masses.

2005-02-11T20:00:00.000-08:00

Film Watch

Chong qing sen lin, 1994
[Chungking Express]
Wong Kar-Wai

Chase sequences depicted using stroboscopic motion.
Wong Kar-Wai's fascination with time, a charateristic he shares with Hou Hsiao-Hsein, creates an interest in duration as an essential element of film. Juxtaposition of accelerated surrounding 'life' with slow motion sequences of characters reflects their (contemplative) emotional state. Wong frequently uses music or dispassionate voice-over narration by characters (instead or along with time) to the same effect.

2005-02-06T23:19:00.000-08:00

Film watch

Vivre sa vie, 1962
[My Life to Live]
Jean-Luc Godard

Technique:

Stylized camera angles:

The credits show Anna Karina's face and profile.

Conversation between Nana and Paul shot at an angle showing their backs with the characters seated at the same table at a distance reflecting the distance in their relationship.
Silent film intertitles are sometimes used for Nana, much like the film she is moved by - Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.
Characters use windows overlooking streets/buildings as backdrop in many interior scenes. (Note particularly the 'interior-exterior' dialogue between Nana and Paul in front of the video overlooking the street in a video game parlour)
Amazingly fluid camera movement as the bouyantly happy Nana dances around the snooker table. As critic Arquello points out "Godard's revolutionary camerawork serves as a cinematic extension of Nana's soul."

2005-02-05T09:01:00.000-08:00

Stanford based Grade The News gave abysmal scores to bay area newssources, especially TV ones

Their grading criteria has 7 yardsticks that seem sensible:

1. NEWSWORTHINESS is based on two factors: 1) whether the story topicis "core" or "peripheral," and 2) whether the story is likely to havea direct and lasting (six months or more) informational impact on awide audience (at least 10,000 people).

2. CONTEXT measures the number of sources, and independent expertsources, in the day's top stories. An average of four regular sourcesor two experts merits an A.

3. EXPLANATION means big-picture reporting (about issues and thematictreatment of events) as opposed to episodic reporting (micro-view newsof isolated events that focus only on the event itself).

and others ...

It's cheaper and easier to fill a newspaper or newscast with reportsof seemingly random violence, fires, parades, reunions or evenfisticuffs between politicians than to treat a problem as an issue.All the sources necessary to harvest such a story are at the scene. Areporter can complete the story in several hours. And the drama or spectacle will draw readers or viewers across the region.

But such reporting leaves us mostly afraid, sad or perhaps feelinglucky to have avoided harm -- not informed of causes, effects andpossible solutions. Reporting violence episodically cultivates a sensethat nothing can be done.

2005-01-30T23:02:00.000-08:00

Film Watch

Notre Musique, 2004
Jean-Luc Godard

2005-01-30T22:58:00.000-08:00

Film Watch

Der Handler der vier Jahreszeiten, 1972
[The Merchant of Four Seasons]
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Technique:

Reflection of uneasy relations using continuous, extended, panning shot of Hans having dinner with his family, with his sister at the head of the table - appearing literally and metaphorically out of the norm.

2005-01-09T23:47:00.000-08:00

Film Watch:

In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 1978
[In a Year of 13 Moons]
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Critic Arquello:

Fassbinder's familiar imagery of framing characters through rectangular passageways (particularly vestibules and doorways) that underscore their isolation is further magnified in the idiosyncratically hermetic image of Elvira traversing the corridor of a near vacant office building in search of Saintz that reinforces her profound, inescapable isolation. It is this image of the "outsider among outsiders" - a theme similarly explored in Fassbinder's earlier film 'Fox and His Friends' - that invariably underpins the desperate, inarticulable tragedy of the film: the systematic disembodiment of humanity and suppression of personal identity in the desolate reality of primal survival, pleasure seeking, material gain, and unthinking conformity.

2004-12-20T01:18:00.000-08:00

Film Watch

Nan guo zai jian nan guo [Goodbye South Goodbye]
Taiwan

Critic Arquello:

Hou encapsulates the fluidity of movement as a visual metaphor for the escapism and drug induced haze of the aimless protagonists. Through the characters' repeated pursuit of oblivion, Hou captures the transience and generational disconnection of contemporary Taiwanese from their traditional and cultural past.

2004-11-28T13:25:00.000-08:00

Nigel Andrews reviews I ♥ Huckabees :

Every artist is allowed a failure or two. The writer-director David O. Russell uses up his entire allowance with I ♥ Huckabees. A laboriously zany plot about two "existential detectives" sucks up half a dozen themes - environmentalism, protest politics, capitalism, religion, space, time - while spitting out fluff, paperclips and carpet tacks like a bad vacuum cleaner on a bad day.

Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings made us believe that Russell was infallible, a pope of antic comedy who delivered knee-slapping encyclicals about America at play, work, love, war. His style, all riffs and rubato, coaxed new rhythms from actors whose range we thought we knew (Ben Stiller, George Clooney). But even zaniness needs discipline. Laisser-faire comic brainstorming leaves a messed-about landscape, with audiences crowding up the evacuation route to saner states.

2004-11-25T17:48:00.000-08:00

Gaspar Noe , who directed the controversial Irreversible, in an interview:

(The film begins at the end and works its way back to the beginning, presenting scenes in reverse chronological order.)

The camera spins like a drunk fighting to keep his balance, a discordant soundtrack assaults the ears, stroboscopic lights flash. It is difficult to follow what is happening, though there is an overwhelming air of violence. "My aim was to make you feel out of your minds," explains Noe. He succeeds.

Irreversible continues to backtrack, to a bland love story, but rarely has blandness seemed so welcome.

While viewers will no doubt continue to walk out, Noe maintains there are others for whom the film becomes an "obsession", continually returning to it, looking for something new.

Dialogue was improvised and Noe insists (though I did not notice) that at one point Cassel says his name is Vincent, though his character is called Marcus.

2004-11-21T18:56:00.000-08:00

Mohsen Makhmalbaf will shoot his next film India:

"My film will have nothing in common with popular Indian cinema," he says.

[Popular Indian cinema], he feels, does not reflect reality. "It showcases an imaginary, sanitised world meant for enjoyment, not introspection," says Makhmalbaf.

"I have visited India several times, but my understanding of the land comes primarily from Mahatma Gandhi's writings and Satyajit Ray's films," says the director, who also runs a project for Afghan refugees in Iran, a school for aspiring filmmakers and a production outfit.

Makhmalbaf is particularly impressed with India's thriving democracy.

"Iran has a lot to learn from this country," he says.

"India's democracy recognises and accommodates a multiplicity of cultures, languages, religions and views. In Iran, we have only one language, one religion and one power system."

His faith in Gandhian non-violence emerged rather late in life.

"Today I am a citizen of the world. When I think of Mahatma Gandhi, I feel I belong to India as much as I do to Iran," he says.

Makhmalbaf does not, however, expect any trouble with censors in India. "I love India far too much to ever project it in a negative light," he says.

2004-11-21T16:47:00.000-08:00

Film Watch

Macario
Mexico, 1958
This Day of the Dead fable blends traditional folktale with Buñuelian social satire as it follows a luckless woodcutter's struggles against God, Satan, Death, and that deadliest of all beasts, the State.

Nazarín
Mexico, 1958
Gabriel Figueroa's cinematography lends stark beauty to an unforgiving landscape in this Buñuel classic about a priest whose Christlike charity is his undoing. “Marks Buñuel's creative peak in his Mexican period.”—Village Voice

2004-11-18T13:43:00.000-08:00

Film Watch

Untitled for Several Reasons

Mortal Tissue: Beirut’s Cinema of the Vulnerable Body

These works on mortality, of the body and the image, happen to all come from Lebanon, where people are intimately familiar with the fragility of bodies and the impermanence of things.

In Untitled for Several Reasons (2003, 8 mins, Text in English, Video), Roy Samaha asks which is more real: what we see, or what our eyes feel? Received mass media images layer and thicken into pixelline matter. Sound, edited from the image feed, pushes this haptic image into the body.

Performed, shot, and edited with exquisite sensitivity, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joriege's Ashes (Ramad) (2004, 26 mins, In Arabic with English subtitles, 35mm) embodies the process of mourning. A young man returns from abroad to bury his father. The choreographed formality of a wake contrasts with the gestural life of the bereaved, as though mourning were an occasion to celebrate the fact that we still have bodies.

Mohamad Soueid's experimental documentary Civil War (2002, 85 mins, In Arabic with English subtitles, Video) investigates the mysterious death of cinematographer Mohamad Douiabes in 1999. The body of the deceased, found too late for a proper burial, haunts the memories of his friends. Soueid's irreverent tenderness connects this mortal fact to the schizophrenic life of postwar Lebanon, where the trauma of an unfinished war shows up even in people's dental hygiene.

2004-11-17T20:49:00.000-08:00

Vijay Joshi, writing in the Financial Times:

Myth of India's outsourcing boom

1. Growth of industry, as portion of GDP, between 1960 and 2002:

China, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and Thailand: from 20% to 40% of GDP.
India: from 20% to 27% of GDP.

2. "Jobless" industrial growth in the past 10 years: The consequences for employment have been dire. In the past 10 years, employment in the organised manufacturing sector has fallen; in services, it has barely changed. Total employment, which includes informal, unorganised jobs, has done somewhat better and has risen by about 1 per cent per year in the last decade.

3. Existing industry jobs not productive whereas labour force is growing:
there remains a large amount of unemployment and low-productivity employment, and b) labour force is projected to grow by 2 per cent (8m people) per year for the next 25 years while the composition of the population shifts towards adults of working age (and much of the rise will occur in backward states). They require industrial blue-collar work with most training received on the job. This "demographic bonus" could boost growth but only if the rapidly growing labour force is productively employed.

4. Share of GDP and growth:

Agriculture(20%,2%),Industry(30%,6%),Services(50%,8%)

5. Services as "jobless" as industrial growth: which suggests that it has been skilled-labour intensive. IT-related output is currently less than 1 per cent of GDP. More significantly the sector employs less than 1m people. This could increase by another million by 2010.

6. IT growth hence pales into insignificance when one considers that India's labour force will rise by 40m by 2010 to an estimated 450m people (and much of the rise will occur in backward states).

7. The only plausible, quantitatively significant, potential source for this demand is labour-intensive exports.

8. An opportunity : East Asian countries, including China, now face higher labour costs and are moving up the ladder of comparative advantage. That gives India the opportunity to kick-start an export boom, especially as textile quotas are to be abolished in 2005.

9.Solution:
a) Small-scale industry reservations must be phased out.
b) Labour laws that hinder employment must be reformed.
c) Delivery of primary education must be enhanced.
d) Direct foreign investment should be welcomed in labour-intensive industries.
e) Power and transport facilities, essential for international competitiveness, must be drastically improved.
f) Trade liberalisation must be extended.
g) Special export zones should be put in place.
h) And adjustment assistance should be devised to cushion any adverse short-term effects of the above policies.

2004-11-10T01:12:00.000-08:00

Peter Aspden on artistic truth:

Picasso's "Guernica" - played with the idea depicting a face so racked with pain that it seems physically to fall apart on the canvas.

During his country's civil war, he was quick to translate the sense of exhausted anarchy into a remarkable image.

Resulting from the discomfiting battle unfolding inside him because of his three lovers, were the extraordinary studies of weeping women; desolate images of anguish that capture with violent veracity the primal sense of breakdown that occurs when our emotions are wrenched beyond control.

More current work skims surfaces. It skates rather than plunges. It fulfills easy ambitions instead of setting itself impossible tasks.

The celebration of simulation and ambiguity has replaced the near-murderous drive to arrive at a moment of artistic truth.

2004-11-09T23:58:00.000-08:00

Mr. Manmohan Singh in his interview to the Financial Times:

1. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” (watch how i act, not my soft look)

2. "Few countries in the developing world have been able to implement such far-reaching reforms within the framework of a parliamentary democracy." (Don't compare us with China)

3. “Public debate and dissent is a source of strength for us, not of weakness . . In the long run a reform programme that has the widest possible social and political support is more enduring.” (China will collapse sooner or later)

4. “Commissions are only a means to generate wisdom,” he said. “We don't have to wait for the reports to take corrective and remedial action.” (I can't avoid red tape, but will work around it)

5. “Even if we are to retain units in the public sector we would like many of these to have their shares traded on the stock exchange. There would be a market test: If they are not performing well, it will be caught by the market.” (I'll let the underperforming working-class fire itself)

6. “It is very worrisome,” said Mr Singh. “One would have hoped that six years in office would convince the BJP's leadership that India's best interests are safeguarded through the strengthening of [democratic] institutions. But recent signals that have been made at BJP meetings are not very welcome.” (If I don't learn lessons during my stint as PM, BJP will be back)

2004-11-09T23:26:00.000-08:00

South Korea's "Every citizen is a reporter" news website.

http://english.OhMyNews.com

2004-11-05T22:53:00.000-08:00

Nigel Andrews, FT's chief Film and Television critic, offers some of the same arguments as he tuned in to watch the presidential election coverage. Not available online yet. Some salient points:

1. The Democratic contender won all three debates and lost the campaign. The programming of the half-dozen main TV news channels, whatever their overt political sympathies (Fox is the only crudely partisan network) is so relentlessly cut up by the ad breaks and so blatantly pressured by the need to capture viewers during *other* channels' ad breaks that they subscribe without shame to the soundbyte/sightbite culture that keeps a George W. Bush on his political ventilator. Honourable exceptions such as the C-Span channel only highlight the tyranny of the trend.

2. This would be a scandal if it were not, by now, just an everyday truth of "Infotainment USA". More shocking, at least to a visiting limey, is the failure of America's TV interviewers to go after
America's politicians as Britain's do. There is no equivalent of Britain's Jeremy Paxman or John Humphrys to probe a fallible candidate's credibility, to shine the laser light of logic on the tired catchphrases of whistle-stop populism or makeweightmanifestos.

3. Even on CNN or CNBC, much of the airtime is franchised out totriviality - did you know that Bush supporters like mustard while Kerry voters prefer ketchup ? - when it is not hammering the same headline over and over, rolling around each hour, on the hour.

4. Nuance ? It does not come under "news". Nor does a patient exploration of the complexities and possibly plural perspectives, underlying bullet-point political issues. Nor does the questioning of the use and meaning of phrases such as "moral values" from a president who sends hundreds to their deaths in war but cannot abide the notion of gay marriages. Television in America is not a solution to, or even a proper commentary on, the crisis that is US democracy today. It is part of the problem. It may even be the main problem.

>>>

As an aside...

TV frontpersons hector, joke, gossip, pontificate. They wear beards, braces or stern looks if men, and cheerleader smiles and fashion-statement hairdos if women. At election nights they try to make s long night seem entertaining, but there is a frightening sense of fear that history will outpace them even as it is being made, fear that the rivals are getting the big new first.Meanwhile they flash up tickertape statistics remorselessly and stroboscopically.

In the US, democracy - or the freedom to choose democratically at voting time - is wasted on the free.

Bush : a cuddly uncle sprinkling quips and cornball wisdoms when not incarnating a tongue-tied, just-one-of-us folksiness.
Kerry: resembles a waxwork effigy of Abraham Lincoln, greyed up, de-bearded and wheeled in to do set stump speeches or peddle word-perfect speeches that unfortunately need a brain-perfect audience.

2004-10-22T22:09:00.000-07:00

Sun-Woo Jang on his Gojitmal (Lies,1999):

1. I seek to get rid of the distinction between good and evil, between beauty and ugliness. This story centers around life and love. But love is not so terrific. It's usually beautified in films. However, it only takes a small change of angle to see love as absurb or hopeless.

2. This film is also about a dream of living, eating and f without having to work. Social orthodoxy prescribes that everyone should work hard and live a decent life - especially now that the Korean economy is under the IMF. It strikes me as amusing to insolently express a contrary point of view.

3. I wanted the film to show the lives of the characters in graffiti-like terms to make the distinction between pornography and enlightenment disappear. The same goes for the spectator's senses of empathy and isolation. I wanted the notions of good and evil to lose all meaning, but still have a film rich in a kind of pathos.

4. I hope one can get past the desire to make such distinctions. What are we judging anyway ? Let's throw away the impulse to pass judgement. Let's just play. After all, it's all a game.

2004-09-13T02:23:00.001-07:00

On CSPAN, i have seen Mr. Kerry address the black caucas, Mr. Cheney eat custard in Wisconsin and Mr. Bush screw up at the Journalists of Color Convention. Barring few exceptions, they were either addressing a handpicked crowd of "true believers" (miners, mill workers, born again christians in swing states, etc.) or, especially in Mr. Bush's case, an often compliant press corps. This, I find highly disturbing and extremely unhealthy, indeed illegitimate, in a democracy. It, in my opinion, has the following repercussion:

The "she-said , he-said" comes in the picture because candidates neither talk face to face nor are asked tough questions. The press reports sound bytes and the readers/viewers *loose track* of what the dis-agreement is all about, indeed where the argument began in the first place. (Main reason why many voters see little or no difference between Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush)

Instead (and here is where the media comes in), the media presents spiced-up, juicy, prime-cuts of mudslinging in soap-opera like episodes. Take the popular swift-boat veterans episode, for example (now in its second season). Here, a decorated soldier is being questioned the validity of his awards !! 35 years later ! Even if you disregard the irony of an awol like Mr. Bush questioning Mr. Kerry, the very episode is *insane* and deserves absolutely *no* press coverage. Can any decorated soldier use his miliitary triumphs to stand for President from now on ? ( In a remarkable and unpredictably twisted response, disgraceful excuse-for-a-journalists like Mr. Dan Rather have begun to dig up twice buried dirt on Mr. Bush. )

This reminds me of a sign i saw in a restroom is San Francisco this weekend: "Do not throw the garbage on the floor" - an unusually blunt sign compared to the public politeness I am used to in the US. But, then again, i thought, this is exactly what the US media has been doing to the American voters nowadays. There is so much garbage thrown by the media on the floor that the voters aren't even educated about the real issues. Like America's energy dependence on the middle-east, mounting budget deficit and poor public health-care system. Issues that, i believe, are most important to these voters in the long-run. And issues that they are blissfully unaware of, unless they read political scientists or a few well-heeled columnists like Thomas Friedman.

Its a catch-22, really. Media produces no debate. No debate produces a numbed, confused voting populace. A populace that understands only easily digestable sound bites. So, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush deliver, yes, easily digestable sound bites. Including:

Mr. Kerry: "scrap NAFTA", "tax outsourcing companies" -- economists would (many in the FT) will attest to the supreme stupidity of such broad and unqualified statements. Yet, the unemployed, numbed in Ohio would find a song they like in such travesty.

Mr. Bush: "saddam gassed his own people. he supported terrorists" -- two sentences with no relation to each other. Indeed, there are more terrorists in Iraq now than there were under Mr. Hussain.

2004-07-28T14:15:00.000-07:00

H. Coleridge

"She is not fair to outward view"

SHE is not fair to outward view,
As many maidens be;
Her loveliness I never knew
Until she smiled on me.
Oh, then I saw her eye was bright,
A well of love, a spring of light.

But now her looks are coy and cold,
To mine they ne'er reply,
And yet I cease not to behold
The love-light in her eye:
Her very frowns are fairer far
Than smiles of other maidens are.

2004-07-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

Traditional Mandarin & Politicians:

Lord Butler's traditional Mandarin vs Blairite dictum that the government "needed to say what we mean and mean what we say".

Traditional Mandarin's complex sentence structure is as follows:

Allows exponents to leave readers with a clear sense of what is being said, even though the literal analysis of the text would allow the author to deny ever having suggested such a thing.

A favoured technique is to place at the beginning of a sentence an avowed denial of everything that follows.

Classical example:

Traditional Mandarin(TM): Without any implied criticism of the present or past chairman,,,we see a strong case for the post of chairman being held by someone with experience of dealing with ministers in a very senior role and who is demonstrably beyond influence and thus probably in his last post.
Modern English(ME): The chairman was clearly too junior, too inexperienced in the ways of ministers and too eager to toady to his political masters to secure his next job.

TM: We do not suggest that there is - or should be - an ideal or unchangeable system of collective government, still less that procedures are in aggregate less effective now than in earlier times. However, we are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the government procedures . . . reduces the scope for informed collective political judgment
ME: The changes to the style of government instituted by Tony Blair helped cause this cock-up. Things were much better in my day

TM: It may be worth considering the appointment of a distinguished scientist to undertake a part-time role as adviser to the cabinet office
ME: For God's sake, let's get someone who knows what he's talking about

TM: he JIC, with commendable motives, took responsibility for the dossier
ME: In trying to help, the JIC really screwed up.

But it is when Lord Butler raises the prospect of Mr Scarlett's being forced out of his new job - while making clear that he is calling for no such thing - that one sees the true subtleties of the dialect in the hands of a master.

TM: We realise that our conclusions may provoke calls for Mr Scarlett to withdraw from his appointment as the next chief of SIS. We greatly hope he will not do so.

ME: There is more than enough in this report to prompt calls for his resignation but don't try pinning it on me. And besides, as a former head of the civil service, I'm reluctant to draw too direct a link between error and accountability

2004-06-29T22:16:00.000-07:00

Aid worker Marcus Prior travelled with the World Food Programme (WFP) to visit the Darfur refugees:

In the absence of television, thank heavens for my satellite radio - live commentary on England versus Portugal in the Euro 2004 quarter-finals. Whoever coined the phrase "it's a small world" got it wrong. Tonight, miles from anywhere, the world feels bigger than ever.

Sudan's desert, with its golden sand streaked with red, broken only by the odd village, would be breathtaking were it not for the dark shadow of human rights abuses that hangs over it.

I went to visit a small, inadequate shelter that had become home to a mother and her four children. The eldest is clearly severely mentally ill. As we talked, she stopped to reach for a small plastic bowl filled with water and poured some of it into a cup. It was all she had - but with the temperature at over 45C, she offered it to us. It was hard to know which way to look.

2004-06-20T22:36:00.000-07:00

Debate between Financial Times' chief music critic Andrew Clark and Arts writer Peter Aspden.

Question: Has the proliferation of festivals devalued their concept?

Mr. Clark: Yes.

Festivals are now commonplace. In today's cultural environment, the word has become meaningless. All the world's a festival. We have too much choice. Culture has a become an industry, a commodity to be sold. The modern festival takes the process to the extreme: it is sort of supermarket where the paying public is persuaded to bulk-buy processed culture.

They used to inspire a sense of pilgrimage.

They celebrated interculturism, the rare, the exotic. They offered things that were otherwise not available.

What should be the purpose of a festival?:
- a source of renewal, a break from routine
- a forum for open-minded discussion
- a time for inquiry
- everyone, on both sides of the stage apron, is motivated to stop and think; to ask questions about what is being performed, why it needs to be performed and what the performer and the witness can bring to it in this place alone, under these unique circumstances. Make the artist-audience relationship more of a conversation, less of a transaction by, for example, celebrating the identity of the host city.

Seeking enlightenment through a series of artistic challenges that stimulate and stretch the mind and senses.

The problem with today's cultural landscape is that there's overprovision of what people can buy, and underprovision of space where people can engage in creative dialogue. It celebrates narcissism and the economics of art. Its trick is to flat-pack what is already available. It's only distinction lies in being more conservative, more expensive and more exclusive than your average season-to-season promotion.(Such purism could indeed be romantic conceit)

The problem comes when art is used as a tool of social inclusion. Addressing the quotidian concerns of humanity are all very well, but it encourages a definition of artistic merit by popularity, not excellence. That's audience manipulation, not art.

Too many promoters get away with passing off mediocre as special, often with a hefty premium on the ticket.

Mr. Aspden: No.

They create an irresistable sense of event - providing the medium by which tens of thousands get the arts bug.

They are a vital tool for cross-fertilization, breaking down barriers between high and low,popular and classical,new and old.

Appreciation for arts must be seen in a wider context. It should take its place among all our other reasons for living, not put itself above them. The trouble over obsessing over expressing the inexpressible is that you fail to perceive or express anything real at all.

Art has simply become too arrogant, too isolated from the quotidian concerns of humanity. Culture, in an environment free from the pressures of everyday life, is arid escapism. Art should be embedded in fabric of everyday life. The idea that we need some kind of idyllic retreat to engage better with the handiwork of humanity's greatest imagination is monasticism.

Most art performed in front of public is neither transcendent nor execrable, but somewhere in the middle. And it's fine for people to enjoy that, without feeling the need to be radically challenged. And the last thing they want is some professional critic pissing on their parade because they should have been at the avant-garde love-in(no food or drink provided) down the road.

2004-06-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

Model for making it big in small town India. Using the internet.:

Now if only this idea could be applied even more usefully:

1. Getting discounted village-wide fertilizer orders.
2. ?

2004-05-20T13:56:00.000-07:00

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.

2004-05-16T16:33:00.000-07:00

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.

2004-05-04T16:34:00.000-07:00

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