The Eternal City seems like a paradise to outsiders. Art, food, beauty. But “it is virtually impossible to earn a living. To live here with a minimum of dignity (renting a small flat, eating out occasionally, but no car and no proper holidays), you need a good 3,000 euros a month pre-tax, say 1,800 euros post-tax (roughly £2,100 and £1,250 respectively). However modest this seems, it is not what you will get. While in the Anglo-Saxon world most adults expect to be able to live independently off their salaries, in Italy most don’t. They stay with their families. Indeed, a staggering 70 per cent of single Italian men between the ages of 25 and 29 live in subsidised comfort at home, where their meagre earnings do very nicely as pocket money.”
Month: August 2003
Behind Doors At Covent Garden
Sir Colin Southgate steps down as chairman of Covent Garden after a tumultuous five years. “In February 1998, when Southgate was parachuted in by Chris Smith, the Culture Secretary, it seemed unlikely that there would be a Royal Opera House left for anyone to visit. The builders had been in for almost two years, their costs were soaring towards £214 million and the imposition of a businessman outsider was generally believed to be the Government’s last throw before merging Covent Garden with English National Opera and disbanding the orchestra.”
London’s New Asian Influence
Asian actors have more of a presence on London stages than ever before. “Two major West End productions with all-Asian casts wouldn’t have happened even five years ago.” But some worry about the kinds of roles Asians are landing.
Edinburgh’s “Golden Age”
The Edinburgh Festivals are in a “golden age” and sold more than a million tickets this year for the first time. “The figures capped an exceptional month for the organisers, who have overseen one of the most vibrant events for years, and witnessed a growing acceptance among politicians of the need to consider strategic public investment in it.”
What Happens If You Just Give Education Away?
“When MIT announced to the world in April 2001 that it would be posting the content of some 2,000 classes on the Web, it hoped the program – dubbed OpenCourseWare – would spur a worldwide movement among educators to share knowledge and improve teaching methods. No institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary, or as daunting. MIT would make everything, from video lectures and class notes to tests and course outlines, available to any joker with a browser. The academic world was shocked by MIT’s audacity – and skeptical of the experiment. At a time when most enterprises were racing to profit from the Internet and universities were peddling every conceivable variant of distance learning, here was the pinnacle of technology and science education ready to give it away. Not the degrees, which now cost about $41,000 a year, but the content. No registration required. It’s a profoundly simple idea that was not intuitive.”
10 Commandments – Go Forth And Multiply
What’s up with all the monuments to the Ten Commandments around America? How come there are so many of them? “In the 1950s, Cecil B. DeMille teamed with the Fraternal Order of Eagles to kick off donations of 4,000 6-foot granite tablets depicting the Ten Commandments to municipalities nationwide. For DeMille, this was great advertising for his epic movie ‘The Ten Commandments.’ The Eagles, which kept the program going at least into the 1960s, declared it a way to fight juvenile delinquency.”
The New Museums
Museums have been monuments to the past. But they’re evolving. “We have once again begun to see museums as our forebears did: as palaces of edification and delight, buildings that enhance the cultural life of cities and the intellectual lives of their inhabitants. Technology is playing a huge part in this revitalisation. Audio guides, animatronics, oral reconstructions, video, computer graphics, interactive displays, computers that recreate the sights, sounds and even smells of days gone by, all feature increasingly heavily in the museums of today.”
The Tools Of Music
“There’s definitely something science fiction-like about a lot of experimental musical instrument building, but perhaps that is because we still fully don’t have a language to describe many of the new sonorities these instruments produce. When many of the instruments we’re used to nowadays were brand new, they probably seemed just as incomprehensible. The reverse is also true. Playing on an older version of a familiar instrument can feel like being greeted by someone on the street in Anglo-Saxon…”
Defining The Hirshhorn
“For many years the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, a part of the Smithsonian museum empire, has been identity-free. The Hirshhorn has never equaled the National Gallery of Art’s prestige and has never become as beloved as the Phillips. It’s long been a humdrum museum bunkered in an abominable Gordon Bunshaft building, with a so-so collection and a so-so exhibition schedule. Still, the Hirshhorn has always had great promise…”
Opera Boot Camp
Eighty-six promising young opera singers gather in Israel for an opera boot camp. “Survival in the dicey world of opera — which can demand more years of preparation than brain surgery, without the guaranteed payoff — was a subtext during the 17th summer of the Israel Vocal Arts Institute’s program. Participants have a four-week schedule of one-on-one voice, diction and role coaching, and almost nightly performances, with public master classes, concerts and eight fully staged productions.”