IBM has started a program to financially back any of its employees who want to go into teaching. “The goal is to help fill shortfalls in the nation’s teaching ranks, a problem expected to grow with the retirement of today’s educators. Math and science are of particular concern to companies in many U.S. industries that expect to need technical workers but see low test scores in those subjects and waning interest in science careers.”
Tag: 09.18.05
How The Internet Is Revitalizing The Music Business
“The indie-rock surge has been ushered in by an Internet community of music connoisseurs who trade MP3 files and gather to talk music and champion favored bands on blogs and Web sites such as Myspace.com, and write for e-zines such as Pitchforkmedia.com. ‘The Internet’s role is important because there aren’t as many gatekeepers. You can put the music on a Web Site, or on Myspace or the blogosphere and let the fans find it, talk about it and analyze it before radio or MTV even knows it exists. The fans get it first, and that gives them a sense of ownership’.”
Career Choice – Singing The Blues
Being a singer is not a good career choice these days. “The expansion of higher education conflicts exponentially with the contraction of the classical music business, leaving more aspirants chasing fewer opportunities and smaller budgets. Fees have barely shifted in the past decade, and what might look quite good on paper – £500-£1,000 per performance – is pitiful when you’ve deducted all the expenses, including 15 per cent agent’s commission. And even if you do make it big, time is short: if you manage 20 years, you’re doing better than most.”
Hollywood ’05: The New Misogyny
The good news is that there are plenty of roles for women in the new fall TV season. The bad news is that most of them involve women being beaten, killed, tortured by aliens, impaled, bloodied, assaulted, and kidnapped. Oh, and while they’re still alive, the women of TV tend to be naked, or nearly so. “Trying to get [the Hollywood men who create these delightful female roles] to discuss the Season of Die, Women, Die! can be difficult. Because the men who made the shows, and the suits who ordered them, while not timid about slicing and dicing up the female characters in these drama series, go shy all over when asked about the trend.”
The Great And Mysterious Garbo
Greta Garbo would have been 100 today, and you don’t have to look far to find the celebrations of America’s most elusive diva. “Few personalities are cultural signposts. But in her heyday, Garbo inspired Cole Porter, who sang of her munificent salary in You’re the Top. Madonna paid tribute to Garbo’s giving good face in Vogue. Even fewer personalities become adjectives; Garboesque has come to mean aloof, mysterious, remote… Garbo left the screen in her prime (like Marilyn Monroe, who died at 36), thus the popular image we have of her is radiant, forever young.”
Jones Takes On A ‘National Malaise”
Choreographer Bill T. Jones seemingly exists to make people angry, and some in the dance world believe that Jones’s sort of controversy is exactly the sort of visceral content the genre needs to engage a public distracted by the juggernaut of pop culture. “Mr. Jones has carried himself through the rarefied world of dance with an air of enlivened majesty: speaking out, speaking often and, when speaking of himself, occasionally speaking in the third person. His comportment may partly explain why, during his more than 25-year career, his creative efforts have repeatedly been considered transgressive. But that term mischaracterizes him as an artist and perhaps even as a man, a point rendered clearly in this newest work.”
Reverse Course
It used to be that America’s East Coast-based stage actors toiled at their craft for little money and less recognition in the vague hope that their efforts would eventually earn them a trip to Hollywood, there to become true stars making real money. These days, the march of the actors seems to be going in the exact opposite direction, as many of Hollywood’s biggest names beat a path to New York to “legitimize” themselves on Broadway stages.
Hollywood To Get Family-Friendly
The theme of the season for Hollywood seems to be a return to family, if the crop of films slated for release between now and Christmas are any indication. “Often when Hollywood pursues a trend, it’s to the detriment of filmgoers. It’s glut, rut or both. So such an energetic return to hearth and home, moms and pops, might suggest a bottom line-inspired recoil from the world’s rough challenges. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time cinema used the American family as a barricade erected to protect our fantasies of security and fidelity. But many of the films in this bumper crop don’t signal retreat, but a willful engagement. And not a limited one – but an opening-wide one.”
New Era Begins In St. Louis
David Robertson has officially arrived as the new music director of the Saint Louis Symphony, and the city may never have seen a conductor more eager to get started. “On Monday, Robertson threw out the first ball at the Cardinals game… On Tuesday, he heard auditions. On Wednesday, he held his first rehearsal as music director, and then charmed the audience at a ‘town hall’ meeting in [suburban] Des Peres.” Robertson’s biggest task may be restoring the orchestra to its place among the top American ensembles after years of crippling deficits, high-profile labor disputes, and organizational malaise.
Big Dreams In South Florida
Miami’s glittering new performing arts center will open a year from now, albeit without a primary tenant, and backers are hoping that its arrival will herald a new and better era for South Florida’s often scattered arts scene. Some proponents are even draw comparisons to Washington, D.C.’s Kenedy Center, which opened in 1971 and sparked a cultural renaissance in the city.