How do you open a successful new indy bookstore in a town where such storefronts have been closing by the dozens? Well, you could convince Garrison Keillor to be the owner. The “Prairie Home Companion” host and author has announced plans to open just such a store in St. Paul’s historic Cathedral Hill neighborhood. Rumors of Keillor’s interest in such a project had been floating around the Twin Cities for some time.
Tag: 09.15.06
Who’s To Blame When Students Don’t Graduate On Time?
“About 50 colleges across the country have a six-year graduation rate below 20 percent. Many of the institutions serve low-income and minority students. Such numbers have prompted a fierce debate… in national education circles about who is to blame for the results, whether they are acceptable for nontraditional students, and how universities should be held accountable if the vast majority of students do not graduate.”
John Drummond, 71
A short-tenured but highly influential director of the Edinburgh International Festival has died. John Drummond, who ran the legendary fest from 1979 to 1983, was credited with turning “what had been a rather formal presentation of classical music into a kaleidoscopic celebration of many arts. [He] diversified the festival’s programs to include an assortment of ethnic musicians, dance performances, book fairs, art exhibits, a film festival and what he called ‘street happenings.'”
Books In Brooklyn. You Gadda Problem Wid Dat?
What better place for a festival celebrating the great tradition of literature than… um, Brooklyn? “Is there such a thing as a Brooklyn aesthetic? A Brooklyn voice? You could make an argument for it, though the Brooklyn voice has evolved… For more than a century Brooklyn was, for writers, a place where fractured English constituted the lingua franca.”
Hard Work + Luck = Cheap Tix
Broadway tickets are impossibly expensive and hard to find, so you might as well not bother, right? Wrong. “Broadway is also one of New York’s great bargain districts, with a range of incentives and discount programs — some well known, some obscure — to lure bodies into seats. It is still possible to attend even the most in-demand shows at remarkably good prices, but it’s not easy.”
Cost Of Restoration Proves Too High
Plans for the renovation of an old Philadelphia movie palace into a theater capable of hosting touring Broadway shows have been scrapped after construction costs began to rise at “an alarming pace.” Local preservationists have been working to save the Art Deco-style Boyd Theater for four years, but its future as the anchor of a newly refurbished neighborhood is now in doubt.
Tanglewood Dips, Thanks To Mother Nature
Ticket sales at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony’s summer home in the Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts, were down nearly 3% this year, a drop BSO officials attribute to an uptick in rainy days (much of the Tanglewood audience sits on the lawn outside the main shed.) Another factor may have been that perennial Tanglewood superstar James Taylor only played one concert this summer instead of his customary two: one more sellout would have pulled ticket sales even with last year.
Toronto: Politics And Empty Gift Rooms
Political films have dominated this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Also: “The gift lounges are reportedly eerily unpopulated this year, ever since the IRS announced that stars must declare gifts from award shows – which sometimes total thousands of dollars in swag – as taxable income.”
Richard Serra On How Public Sculpture Is Challenging Architecture
“Public sculpture used to have a code. There was a given iconography written into the way we worshiped our heroes. Public sculpture had to do with the depiction of a historical time or event. Once the work came down from its pedestal and became organized in relation to its present time and space, it began to challenge architecture in a way that it hadn’t before.”