If you’re rooting for Sony to pull through recent tough times, it’s still a cliffhanger, according to its latest earnings report. On the plus side, PS4 sales have been stellar, up 83 percent over last year at 310 billion yen ($2.8 billion). The good…
It looks as though the Xbox One store is well on track to receive a major revamp of its user interface and overall cosmetic look, especially when next month’s Xbox One system update arrives. I am quite sure that there will be a fair share of people who are curious to see as to what is about to be released, or how it will look like, but our hats off to players in the Xbox Preview Program for making it possible for us to have a sneak peek at what it will look like today.
NeoGAF member R dott B is the one behind the capture of what you see above, where the spanking new interface would open up the door for featured games to be shifted to the right-hand side of the screen. Along with that, there are new text prompts located on the left, so that one is able to browse through the likes of All Games, Add-ons, Use A Code and Search in a jiffy. It does seem, however, that Xbox One store will still continue to show off various versions of each title in a separate manner.
Hopefully these improvements will be agreeable to everyone, and that users are then able to hunt down content in a far quicker manner than before.
Xbox One Store Receives A Revamp
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There is nothing quite like the wallet – in there, some of us store plenty of personal and private information, not to mention a line of credit, be it in the form of cash as well as other instruments such as cheques as well as the all important credit cards. Well, when you live in a digital world with the likes of Google Wallet and Apple Pay in the scene, things do change a bit as the cashless revolution goes through another change. Google Wallet cannot be used at just about everywhere just yet, but if you happen to be a user who performs semi-regular transfers from your bank, then the latest update would certainly jive with you, since one can now activate recurring bank transfers.
Apart from that, one is also able to select just the right amount as well as the schedule of when one would want to perform an automatic transfer to another account. This particular feature does have its fair share of advantages, where one right off the bat would be in a case where one is highly dependent on the physical Wallet card, which will spend the said amount of that balance each time it is charged. Assuming you have an NFC-enabled Android phone or have the preference to tap, and do most of your transactions through credit, then you also have the choice to program the app in order to inform you whenever you start to run low on cash reserves. These features are available to both iOS and Android users, but the tap-and-pay option is available only if the NFC-enabled handset you use runs on Android 4.4 KitKat or higher. [Press Release]
Google Wallet Allows Auto-Withdrawal From Banks
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TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s central bank expanded its asset purchases in a surprise move Friday to shore up sagging growth in the world’s No. 3 economy.
The Bank of Japan said it would increase its asset purchases by between 10 trillion yen and 20 trillion yen ($90.7 billion to $181.3 billion) to about 80 trillion yen ($725 billion) annually. The Nikkei 225 stock index jumped 5 percent and the dollar rose 1.2 percent against the yen after the unexpected decision.
Japan’s economic recovery remained in the doldrums in September, as household spending fell, inflation edged lower and unemployment ticked up, according to data released Friday, as the BOJ held its policy meeting.
The central bank’s announcement highlights divergent fortunes among major economies.
The U.S. Federal Reserve earlier this week announced it was ending its own extraordinary program of asset purchases, known as quantitative easing, which it instituted after the global recession to help the U.S. economy recover.
As that $4 trillion program wound down, Japan’s central bank has come under pressure to increase stimulus to support growth as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe weighs approval of another sales tax hike next year.
The central bank’s decision may encourage Abe to push ahead with the politically difficult choice. Surveys show more than 70 percent of the public are opposed to raising the tax, which is needed to help tame Japan’s swollen government debt.
A sales tax hike in April, from 5 percent to 8 percent, slowed the recovery that began in late 2012. Abe is due to decide before the end of this year whether to raise the sales tax by another 2 percentage points to 10 percent.
In addition to stepping up asset purchases, the central bank said it would triple its purchases of exchange-traded funds and real estate investment trusts.
It said the monetary loosening would continue as long as needed to attain an inflation target of 2 percent.
The bank’s main decisions on expanding the scope of monetary easing passed by a 5-4 majority, indicating differences of opinion among members of the bank’s policy board.
The BOJ said in a statement it “will examine both upside and downside risks to economic activity and prices, and make adjustments as appropriate.”
The central bank’s announcement caught most analysts by surprise.
“We had expected the bank to announce additional stimulus only in 2015,” Marcel Thieliant, an economist with Capital Economics, said in a commentary.
Abe and the central bank have sought to spur inflation as a way of encouraging consumers and businesses to spend more and thus support faster growth.
Core inflation, excluding volatile food prices, was at 3.0 percent in September, down from 3.1 percent in August. Unemployment rose to 3.6 percent from 3.5 percent.
The government reported that household spending fell 5.6 percent from a year earlier in September, though it rose 1.5 percent from August. Household incomes, meanwhile, fell by 6 percent from a year earlier in real terms, excluding inflation.
When the increased costs from the tax hike are figured in, inflation remains below the target rate of 2 percent. For Japan, which relies heavily on imports of crude oil and natural gas, a moderation in oil prices has helped reduce some price pressure. But the data released Friday showed inflation, excluding both food and energy prices, has remained flat at 2.3 percent since June.
The tax increases are needed to help counter Japan’s huge public debt, but the hike is opposed by a majority of the public.
For those of you living in the US, the very idea of actually packing your bags and uprooting yourself so that you end up in Europe can be an exciting experience, or a terrifying one, depending on your personality as well as the direction in which you are heading. Having said that, here is one reason to be in Europe if you have not quite made the effort to go there even for a visit – apparently, the final sticker price for boxed versions of Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes has received a reduction. Not only that, this particular price reduction is said to be a permanent one in the Old Continent.
Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes will now cost £19.99/€19.99 on the PlayStation 3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, where before the 33% price cut, it used to cost £29.99/€29.99. For those who prefer to ditch the physical version and fall back upon the digital edition, you will be able to bring home the Xbox One version for £15.99 a pop, while the Sony PS4 version will cost you £24.99. PC gamers will have to be a little bit more patient, since the PC version of Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes will only arrive on Steam right before Christmas – that is, December 18.
Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes Price Permanently Reduced In Europe
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Two probing views of obsessive love spelled success for the marriage of inconvenience between Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. Their double-bill opening Saturday at the Chandler Pavilion marked the LA Opera’s second collaboration with wave-making Australian stage director Barrie Kosky. It also heralded the promise of a long-term relationship.
Chief Director of Berlin’s Komische Oper from 2012, Kosky debuted here last year with a spoofy Mozart’s Magic Flute that looked like a silent movie. As with that production, this sparely staged pairing originated in Europe, but that’s where their resemblance ends. Change-ups are a habit of the chameleon-like director.
Two and a half centuries span the two tragedies of Dido and Bluebeard, one with a lot of fun, the other with none. When Kosky teases in an interview before the opening that the works have little in common, you can count on seeing as many parallels as lanes on the freeway you took to the Music Center. He spins an enigmatic few of them in the printed program: “Arrival and departure, departure and arrival, a woman and a man, a man and a woman, a lost Eden, a forgotten Eden and a remembered Eden.”
The protagonists of these tales are fodder for a psychiatrist’s couch. Except for her brief amatory union with Aeneas, Dido’s clinical depression keeps her so withdrawn from her court she heeds neither cheering up nor sinister plots. Duke Bluebeard’s guarded split personality is a fatal attraction to obsessive new wife Judith, who, against his will and her own safety, makes him reveal his lethal all.
However linked the psycho-atmospherics may be, their respective stagings sharply contrast. Katrin Lea Tag’s spare scenery, slow-rising curtains, and vivid costumes (owing much to Julie Taymor and Germany’s Pina Bausch) evoke radically different landscapes, historic time zones, and sound-worlds. The use of unscripted whispers in both works heightens the drama and helps span their stylistic discontinuities.
Dido and Aeneas
Dido is bathed in bright lights and dressed in (mostly) pastel-infused but freakish period clothing. Its drama unfolds on the outer edge of the stage proscenium, barricaded from behind by an accordion-shaped screen. The narrowly defined space emphasizes the wafer-thin superficiality of the courtiers, and probably also Dido’s hold on power. A long white bench stretches across the stage to seat the retinue: a collection of nit-wits, sycophants and nasty plotters, who by turns ape the droopy sentiments of their queen or trot off to bizarre and brazen behaviors.
All the while they sing nicely to Purcell’s delicate score. (“If you drop it will break” was Kosky’s earlier characterization.) The music was realized with great fluency in the large hall, aided in projection by the forward placed screen. The modest-sized baroque orchestra was peppered with period instruments (wood bassoon, oboe and flute, with a continuo of organ, harpsichord and theorbos) and conducted to precision by Steven Sloane.
As Dido’s sister Belinda, soubrette soprano Kateryna Kasper is the court’s excitable teenybopper. Her “To the hills and the vales” shimmered with youthful enthusiasm as sung to an enchanted audience from the outer edge of the orchestra pit.
Outlandish comedy comes from the combo of a sorceress and two witches sung by an improbable assemblage of three African-American countertenors, led by recent Operalia winner John Holiday (the sorceress) with G. Thomas Allen and Darryl Taylor. Dressed in pitch black and suggesting a trio of harping crows, they were the conspirators against Dido who pranced and danced and shook their jowly cheeks in celebration of their own wickedness. Holiday even changed into a mock Dido dress as he spitefully employed an imposter Mercury to order Aeneas’ departure for Rome. This has the intended effect of fatally demoralizing his queen. The sketch leveled the audience with laughter.
Handsome Liam Bonner’s Aeneas, en route from Troy to Rome, is presented more as feckless wanderer than purposeful hero. His plush baritonal colors lent plummy hues to his bass region and a tenorial gleam higher up. After Dido’s fragile state of mind dismisses him for even thinking of leaving her, Aeneas stomps off stage and down to the the audience seating area, slamming a side door on his way out. Temper, temper.
Dido is the only role treated as serious, and the contrast of her demeanor with that of the others enhances her isolation. In her local debut as the sole holdover from European productions, Irish mezzo Paula Murrihy’s aristocratic poise and pearly voice captured Dido’s exquisite melancholy, furious anger, and, in her famous lament “When I am laid in earth” and its aftermath, her grisly end-of-life journey of shocking gasps and sighs. As she dies, orchestra members and courtiers, who earlier had migrated from stage to pit, depart one by one, so that when Dido finally expires in a slump, she is left alone to commune with eternity. The scene touchingly recollected the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson of not so many years ago singing Bach’s “Ich habe genug.”
Bluebeard’s Castle
The mood of Bluebeard’s Castle after the interval grows even darker and much heavier. It unfolds on a large empty disc sitting in the Chandler’s cavernous backstage, blackened but otherwise unadorned. The two protagonists, also draped in black, rotate on this disc in a glacially slow but intense dance of death. The spatial infinity suggests the bottomless pit of Bluebeard’s concealed and bloody marital history and also Judith’s morbid curiosity. The use of people in lieu of sets, which was suggested in Dido, here becomes literal. Traditional productions employ seven actual doors, which Judith coaxes Bluebeard to open, but in this instance three sets of supernumeraries stand in for the chambers containing his former wives. Former iterations of the Duke himself stream gold dust, leafy vines, and water in a dystopian Garden of Eden made fearsome and fatal after the fall.
Claudia Mahnke as Judith and Robert Hayward as Bluebeard act out their Hungarian rendition of Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf, forcing open the doors to each other’s personalities. If, due to unrelieved narratives, their vocal tours de force can’t quite keep us engaged for the hour-long layer-peeling intensity, their joint efforts earn points for honesty and sheer perseverance.
Bartók’s score is an expressionistic time bomb. Its massive modern orchestra can be compared in size and sonority, also artistic importance, to those of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Berg’s Wozzeck. Each morbid revelation in the opera is accompanied by an ever more splendid soundscape, the most dramatic being the brass ensemble that depicts the castle’s magnificent gardens in a kind of post-Wagnerian grandeur. Steven Sloane and his instrumental charges bridged the huge stylistic chasm after Purcell’s light textures to realize superbly this musical Mount Everest.
Apropos and worthy of note, the heavy costs of this joint production were not in sets but in musicians, and thanks for that.
Left in the mind’s eye after the performances was Dido’s white claustrophobia and Bluebeard’s black infinity, like the eternally clinging teardrops in a yin-yang.
—ooo—
Performances continue through November 25. Contact: LA Opera
Photos are by Craig Matthew for the Los Angeles Opera
Top: Paula Murrihy and Liam Bonner as Dido and Aeneas
Bottom: Claudia Mahnke as Judith and Robert Hayward as Duke Bluebeard
Rodney Punt can be contacted at Rodney@ArtsPacifica.net
Thanks to a settlement in a long-running class-action lawsuit, Intel is now offering fifteen shiny dollars to anyone who bought a Pentium 4-powered PC almost fifteen years ago. One dollar per year of lying and misery that you’ve had to suffer.
Not only it produces me great pleasure to watch this bartender preparing an awesome Rum Martínez—complete with a tingling in my spine from listening to the sounds— but it whets my thirst to now end. How can you not want to drink this magic potion?
One thing is for sure – interest in the world of wearable technology is definitely on the uptrend, and the Microsoft Band which was just released earlier today for $199 a pop is now sold out, not to mention having lines forming over at retail stores, now how about that? What makes this all the more remarkable is how Microsoft Band actually crept up and made its way into the scene, since there was nary a press event (apart from a leak) beforehand to have it build up hype for the overall release. It seems that taking the “ninja” route this time around has paid off handsomely for Microsoft.
Plenty of Microsoft Stores have experienced queues for the Microsoft Band, and taking into consideration how Microsoft Stores are not exactly jam packed with people all the time, this is a massive win for Microsoft this time around. Apart from brick and mortar locations, the online store, too, has been flooded with pre-orders so much so that the device is fully sold out over on the Microsoft site – regardless of the size that you would want to pick. Of course, patience does have its virtue, since you can still opt to sign up and be notified of when the product will be made available to the masses. With all the interest surrounding the Microsoft Band, will you be picking one up anytime soon?
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This has not been a good year for the peace process (whether one considers Vladimir Putin’s aggressive actions against the Ukraine or the most recent flareup of tensions between Israel and Palestine), Wherever war rules the land and people operate on the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” there’s bound to be trouble.
Two new dramas offer stark and disturbing depictions of specific flavors of hell on earth that crush the soul and, on occasion, tear the body to shreds. Whether above ground or below, whether the battle is fought with guns and bombs or fear and manipulation, there are no winners.
* * * * * * * * * *
One of the more provocative entries screened at the 2014 San Francisco International Film Festival was an Estonian drama entitled Tangerines. Written and directed by Zaza Urushadze, the action takes place in a rural corner of Abkhazia in 1992 where the local Estonians are struggling to break free from Georgia.
Although most of their friends have fled to safety, Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak) and Margus (Elmo Nüganen) have remained behind to harvest their sizable crop of tangerines. Ivo keeps himself busy making wooden crates for the tangerines but his peace is soon disrupted by a military clash between Georgians and some North Caucasians who are backed by Russian forces.
Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak)is an Estonian trapped by war in Tangerines
At first, Ahmed (Giorgi Nakashidze) seems to be the sole survivor of the shootout. A Chechen mercenary determined to kill any Georgian who crosses his path, he is carried back to shelter by Ivo and Margus. Once inside Ivo’s home, he is bandaged and allowed to sleep.
Nika (Misha Meskhi) is a wounded Georgian in Tangerines
However, as Ivo and Margus work to bury the dead, they discover a severely wounded Georgian and bring him back to Ivo’s house. As soon as Ahmed is well enough to realize that one of his enemies is under the same roof, he swears to kill Nika (Misha Meskhi) as soon as he gets a chance. Ivo quickly makes Ahmed swear that no harm will come to the other injured soldier while the two men recuperate in his home.
Despite Ahmed’s threats to kill Nika if he so much as steps outside the house, as Ivo and Margus nurse the two wounded men back to health, all four men begin to bond in a way that transcends their personal prejudices and the enmity of war. Unfortunately, their healing is short-lived, climaxing in a senseless tragedy which makes Margus’s tangerine harvest an exercise in futility.
Urushadze’s film delivers a powerful anti-war statement which, considering all the tensions that remain in the world, seems like an anguished and nearly hopeless plea for peace. Here’s the trailer:
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The program for Dracula Inquest contains a curious quote from Bram Stoker: “I sometimes think we must all be mad and that we shall wake to sanity in straight-waistcoats.” If one uses this statement as the basis for the thrilling two-hour mixture of melodrama and terror-drama provided by Central Works in its latest “organic” creation, one comes up with a horrifically intense theatrical event that is all too rare.
Detective Sly (John Flanagan) tries to reason with
Dr. Seward (Kenny Toll) in a scene from
Dracula Inquest (Photo by: Jim Norrena)
The action takes place in the year 1895 in the bowels of an insane asylum in the seaside town of Whitby (which sits on the Yorkshire coast of England). As playwright Gary Graves explains:
“Bram Stoker didn’t invent the legend of monstrous blood-sucking creatures, the ‘Un-dead’ who live, eternally, off the blood of their victims. But he perhaps did more than anyone else to popularize the idea with his remarkable novel — and its archetypal title character — Dracula. Reading the book for the first time last year, I was struck by its fascinating, post-modern (ahead of its time) structure, the fragmented narrative voice that moves from one character’s perspective on the story to the next, and by its wonderful Victorian language. I wanted to find a way to put as much of Stoker’s marvelous dialog in the book directly into the play. And I wanted to try and come at the myth as a skeptic, to change everything the book asks us to accept. Is Stoker’s Dracula a code for something else? Is it a Freudian projection of repressed sexual fantasies? Is it a xenophobic tract warning of the corrupting influence of foreigners from the East? What is hiding, lurking beneath the pages of Stoker’s horror masterpiece?”
Jonathan Harker (Joshua Schell) describes his ghastly experience
in Transylvania during Dracula Inquest (Photo by: Jim Norrena)
In an era when film and television have been overrun by hunky vampires ranging from Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Antonio Banderas (in 1994’s Interview With A Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles) to Robert Pattinson’s portrayal of Edward Cullen (in the Twilight series of vampire films), perhaps the greatest challenge is to scare the bejesus out of an audience without ever letting them actually see a vampire. It takes an exceptional level of skill to make this happen in a 50-seat theatre with three-quarter round seating.
Thankfully, the artistic team at Central Works has an abundance of tricks up their sleeves, ranging from the brilliantly theatrical writing of Gary Graves to the other-worldly sound design by his long-time collaborator, Gregory Scharpen. Under Jan Zvaifler’s astute direction, the final 15 minutes of the world premiere production of Dracula Inquest had some terrified members of the audience wishing they reeked of garlic.
Mina Harker (Megan Trout) starts acting out in front of Detective Sly
(John Flanagan) in Dracula Inquest (Photo by: Jim Norrena)
The ensemble that worked to create this production features several veterans of the Central Works process working side-by-side with newcomers.
Dr. Seward (Kenny Toll), Professor von Helsing (Joe Estlack),
Jonathan Harker (Joshua Schell) and Mina Harker (Megan Trout)
have all had close encounters with a vampire in Dracula Inquest
(Photo by: Jim Norrena)
As Detective Sly (the only member of the cast who gets to wear shoes), John Flanagan is determined to remain in control of the inmates he is questioning (until the gates of hell open wide and he realizes that it’s too late for any such foolishness).
Jonathan Harker (Joshua Schell) accuses his ex-wife,
Mina (Megan Trout), of being “one of them” in
Dracula Inquest (Photo by: Jim Norrena)
Whether you crave good theatre, have an unhealthy interest in vampires, or simply like to get scared shitless, this production was about as good as it gets!
To read more of George Heymont go to My Cultural Landscape
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