The occasion was a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Italian unity, and the encore was the crowd's protest against arts cuts and the country's general state of turmoil, Mr. Muti explained afterward, comparing the event to "something out of the Visconti film 'Senso,' " thereby confirming that for Italians life has come to imitate fiction.
We've all heard that old axiom about life imitating art, but one specific part of our lives has come to imitate a singular type of art.
It is the closest a Jets news conference ever came to imitating "The Patty Duke Show".
In the nearest Britain came to imitating the student riots in Paris, Essex was briefly declared a free university.
For one thing, it would help explain why chimpanzees -- mankind's close cousins -- are adept at learning forms of sign language and notorious failures when it comes to imitating human speech or even controlling their own cries.
But as art imitated life, so life came to imitate art.
Sequences in Bond movies and the action movies that came to imitate them - Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Jack Ryan movies and everything since - are as tenuously joined to each other as theme-park rides, separate, intense experiences strung together with the merest soupçon of plot coherence or narrative plausibility, just like NXNW's famous crop-dusting sequence.
When art comes to imitate life it can become dangerous, because while these young men act out filling the shoes of their infamous heroes, they do so with out having walked in these shoes to prison cells or worse.
However, when it comes to humans imitating hobbits, many archaeologists aren't yet convinced.
No other writer has ever come close to imitating this special narrative voice.
