Since Governor Steve Beshear proposed his state budget this week, there have been cries of discontent across the state. Leaders in the arts are finding this budget could put their organizations and plans in financial peril. WFPL’s Elizabeth Kramer reports.
HomeGrown Visits the Louisville Zoo
Special information about horticulture at the Louisville Zoo, and the meaning of the term “ectotherm,” is the menu of HomeGrown this week. Bob and Jeneen visit the Zoo in person and speak with Assistant Director Mark Zoeller about horticulture and landscaping in specialized settings. Later they visit with ectotherm curator Bill McMahan at the Herpaquarium to learn about salamanders, reptiles, and amphibians that careful observers might find in their local landscapes.
In the 16th century, Shakespeare wrote “all the world’s a stage.” The statement takes on new meaning for a present-day troupe of local thespians who are making its stage in unusual parts of Louisville, as WFPL’s Elizabeth Kramer reports.
“Jay, Boxes, IMAM, Holiday, Bear, Glass, Balloon, Vote. Everybody Got that,” says Randy Pease. “For those of you who are in those plays…”
Pease is talking to a group of people in the Stark’s Building downtown and he has their complete attention. He is a stage manager with the Specific Gravity Ensemble. Tonight, he is leading them in a rehearsal for this troupe’s latest performance — “Elevator Plays: Beyond the Norm.”
The collection of plays takes place in the Stark’s Building’s elevators. The duration of each is about 90 seconds. One play is performed during the 90-second ride up to the 15th floor, and another is presented during the return to the ground floor.
Specific Gravity actually broke onto the Louisville theater scene last year with its first group of elevator plays, which was the idea of company cofounder Rand Harmon. At Centre Collage in the early ‘80s, some friends had mounted an art exhibit in an elevator. It gave him the idea of using the same space for theater, but he didn’t act on it until Specific Gravity formed in 2006. Rand Harmon.
¼br> “We were sitting around my dining room table,” he says. “And I looked at Randy and said, ‘Well, why don’t we do these elevator plays we’ve been talking about doing?”
“And ‘boom’,” Pease chimes in. “It was an instant ‘Let’s do this.’”
Harmon searched for elevator space at six buildings before visiting Mendel Hertz of The Hertz Group, which owns the Starks Building. Hertz remembers his reaction.
“‘You want to do what? You want to have two minute plays in my elevators?’” Hertz recalls asking.
“But he’s very clever,” he says of Harmon. “He started complimenting the Starks Building elevators.
Hertz says he saw an opportunity to showcase the building and make creative people aware of it.
By February, the production had brought attention to the theater company — which sold-out almost every performance and extended the production’s run.
Back in rehearsal in one of the elevators, Pease is giving directions. “You’re turning it off, right? No. Here’s our stop,” he tells a stagehand. “You point at Erin and she turns it off.”
This scene shouldn’t lead you to think that Specific Gravity is limiting itself to performing in elevators. The company’s mission is to produce primarily new plays in non-traditional spaces. Last year, it produced “Macbeth” in a warehouse and a new play in a gallery.
This type of theater is often referred to as site-specific theater. Actors Theatre has produced such work in a Butchertown warehouse and in a downtown nightclub.
But the recognized pioneer of this kind of drama is Anne Hamburger. She ran En Garde Arts in New York City for 13 years. During the 1990s, it staged plays on the streets of the Meatpacking District and on a pier on the Hudson River.
Today, Hamburger is an executive at Walt Disney where she develops its major shows for its parks. She saw how site-specific theater helped revitalize New York when crime was high and moral was low.
“I think it made a statement that New York City was safe, that it was a wonderful place to go,” she says. “I think En Garde’s work highlighted some beautiful historic landmarks.”
Most of all, she values those who stage this kind of drama for growing new audiences.
“I think people who do site-specific work can expose if not tens of millions, it’s tens of hundreds — and in elevators its tens of tens — it’s wonderful, you know, to be able to expose people to theater who ordinarily don’t go and to get them to see their environment in a new way,” she says.
At the Stark’s Building, property-owner Mendel Hertz agrees and hopes more people in Louisville will showcase all kinds of art around town.
“Art belongs everywhere,” he says. “I mean, it belongs in the parks. It belongs outside. It belongs in your home. It belongs — Why not? Why not? — in the building.”
The elevator plays start tonight and run through Feb. 17.
Independent booksellers nationwide faced a slew of setbacks last year. They included an early 2006 slump in book sales and the news that Americans are reading less for pleasure, as the National Endowment for the Arts spelled out in a report released in November. Rather than ceding to these challenges, many independents are capitalizing on the technologies offered by the World Wide Web to reach their communities. WFPL’s Elizabeth Kramer reports.
On Lexington’s south side, Joseph Beth Booksellers is more than a mere book store. There are kids playing in an area downstairs and adults sipping warm drinks in a café complete with a fireplace on the main floor. Talk to someone amid the stacks here, and you’ll likely find customers who maintain their rapport with this bricks-and-mortar establishment by visiting the store’s Web site more often than they visit the store itself.
One is Alicia Hart, who lives about 20 miles north in the town of Midway.
“I’m a member of a book club that meets here once a month,” she says. “I do like to check out the Web site to see if there are going to be writers here reading their works or signing their books or anything, if it’s something that my book club has read or would be interested in reading.”
While polling several people here, I find that they use the site to learn about more than events. They purchase gift cards, join awards programs, read staff recommendations, and even check out the café’s menu. Store manger Gary Cremeans tells me these functions harness the passion and expertise of the company’s sales staff and give people reasons to ultimately come to the store.
Using the Web in this way is not new, but only in recent years have local brick-and-mortar stores begun to embrace specific Web tools that drive foot traffic and strengthen customer loyalty. Charles Steinfield is a communications professor at Michigan State University. He’s has studied how brick-and-mortar businesses are using e-commerce. He says booksellers, along with restaurants and malls, are brick-and-mortar industries that have experimented the most with Internet capabilities to enhance their services. He says putting the Internet to good use is vital for today’s brick-and-mortar retailers.
“You have to manage for a multi-channel retail process.” he says. “You can’t just assume it’s going to work by itself.”
Many in the independent bookselling community share Steinfield’s views. One indication is the attention the American Booksellers Association gives to the subject. This week when 500 members from 300 stores meet in Louisville for its winter conference there will be sessions on Web-site development, online social networking and printing books on demand.
¼br> One of those attending is Dave Weich, who is director of marketing for the behemoth independent bookseller Powell’s Books in Oregon. For the past ten years Weich has worked to develop Powell’s dot com so that it draws people nationwide to purchase books on the Web site and get locals in the Portland area to frequent its six stores there. Its site has search engines, blogs, contests, e-books and more. But Weich is quick to point out that these features aren’t just bells and whistles.
“Inevitably the work that we do has to generate a return.” he says. “That return does not necessarily have to be strictly a sales measure but it has to be customer loyalty, media attention. I mean there has to be something to justify dedicating resources to it.”
Weich readily admits resources are scarce in the book-selling business, with its small profit margins. Still, he says that experimenting on the Web and constantly evaluating those efforts are crucial to staying alive. That means maintaining current readers and cultivating new ones in the marketplace where the younger generation is so engaged by technology.
It’s an outlook that isn’t lost on Michel Link who works out of Joseph Beth Booksellers’ executive office in Cincinnati.
“We look at the interests and the values of this coming generation and how we can best get reading front and center for them,” he says. “Because that’s ultimately our goal is to provide the discourse that happens in books.”
That discourse could provide people with the inspiration to read in a time when Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 spend almost two hours of their daily leisure time watching TV and only seven minutes reading.
Wisconsin Artisan Cheese & The Park Seed Company
Cheese and seed are the boutique-sounding subjects on HomeGrown this week. Madison, Wisconsin, cheese store owner Ken Monteleone has the inside information on the tasty artisan cheese operations of the midwest, and Claire Kuhl of Park Seed tells all about the catalogs and history of this venerable company that has helped keep American gardens in bloom for 140 years.
A greener lifestyle is within reach. Or at least… that’s what the latest magazines, cable shows, and radio programs are selling. WFPL’s Kristin Espeland reports.
“You’re listening to Lime, healthy living with a twist…”
If you subscribe to Sirius radio…you can tune in to this 24-hour green lifestyle channel. Lime radio calls itself a community of people seeking a healthier…greener…more balanced life. People like Josh Dorfman, who hosts a daily talk show called “The Lazy Environmentalist.”
“One of the challenges with the environment, is that, it just still, you know, we think about going green, it always sounds like it’s so complicated, you know?”
Then Dorfman simplifies it for you: “going green” is essentially about using less. And since Lime launched in 2005, programs like “The Lazy Environmentalist,” “Organic World,” and “Meet the Planet” have been promoting that idea.* It’s part of an explosion of “green media.” Over the past few years, we’ve seen major magazines like Vanity Fair and Businessweek run green issues. A week of green coverage from NBC. Nearly 2000 green-themed stories in the country’s top 10 newspapers in 2007 alone….up from less than 200 in 2000 according to the National Center for Business Journalism. But several outlets have placed their faith…and their dollars…specifically behind green lifestyle media properties. Mark Spellum launched one of those properties… a magazine called Plenty…in 2004. He says it’s because he noticed something new taking root in society.
“People were responding to the problem of global warming, they were looking to lessen their footprint they had on the earth. And also businesses were doing the same. There was this whole sort of green business and cultural revolution and it didn’t seem like anyone was writing about it.”
Plenty’s media kit tells potential advertisers that its pages are all about hip green living. Its reader demographics tell them there’s big money to be made….their median household income is around a hundred thousand dollars and they’re willing to pay for a greener lifestyle. It might look like a gold rush on green. But Spellum believes it’s no fad.
“I think it’s hardly a fad… I mean part of the problem is, I mean, if you buy into global warming, which most scientists do, this is, you know we have to change the way we makes things and go about our lives. This really isn’t going away.”
Proof positive: this year… Plenty will be on the racks at every Target… Office Depot… and Office Max around the country. Green-minded consumers can also tune in to even more green lifestyle programming on television. Max Mead produces Building Green TV, a show that teaches viewers how to make their homes friendlier to the environment. The first season just aired on PBS and season two is in production. Mead says the topic is going mainstream.
“Producers and publishers are really starting to feel their way around and starting to figure out how they’re going to work with green themes, and to what extent they should have dedicated programming or if they should integrate the theme into existing shows. That’s where there still a bit of head scratching and confusion still.”
Discovery Channel executives got past the head scratching stage. They’ve invested 50 million dollars to launch what they’re calling the first 24-hour TV network dedicated to the green lifestyle. It’s called Planet Green. You can’t watch it yet… the network goes live later this summer. But not all green lifestyle producers and publishers are new kids on the block. Doug Moss launched E the Environmental Magazine 18 years ago.
“I think back then we were ahead of our time but right now obviously we’re right on time.”
Moss says it’s the buzz about global warming… and Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth that put green in the spotlight. And made the media world take note.
“I think that a lot of publishers are jumping on board now because they see there’s so much public interest it’s something they can do, viable, as a business.”
But Moss looks askance at some of all this bandwagon jumping… especially since he’s been publishing for nearly two decades. He questions the substance in it.
“You know, when you’re out there in the trenches, telling people a lot of things they often don’t want to hear. It’s very difficult compared to taking the warm fuzzy approach of supermodels biting an apple on your cover.”
Indeed….the message of green lifestyle media is often that going green is easy…painless…and certainly stylish. But that’s only part of the picture, of course. To live in a way that protects the planet often requires a little bit of work, doing things differently, and it’s not always stylish. But Moss says despite the trendy tone of some green media… interest in living a more sustainable life can only be a good thing.
*Update: Sirius Satellite Radio retired its “Lime” channel on February 13, 2008. No reason is given on their Web site. But the Lazy Environmentalist, Organic World Media, and Meet the Planet still operate, mostly as multi-platform media companies, distributing “green” content.
Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear has asked all state Universities to cut their current budgets by three percent. For Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, that’s about same amount it costs to fund a year-old program for gifted high school students.
“I’d really like to go to U-C Berkley,” says high school junior Jenny Ludden as she reads a physics textbook in a dormitory lounge. Down the hall, her classmates are taking a college-level astronomy course.
Ludden and the others are students at the Carol Martin Gatton Academy of Math and Science. Like other high school students, they’re thinking of the future. Academy director Tim Gott says most students here are applying to “Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Brown.”
“We’ve got students interested in the University of Chicago and Tulane and Florida and Florida Institute of Technology. MIT and CalTech,” says Gott.
Gatton Academy is giving gifted high school juniors and seniors from around Kentucky an advanced education, including college classes. Part of the appeal of similar programs is that the students stay in their home state after graduation. Gott predicts about half of the academy students will go to college in the commonwealth. He says they’ll have little to no trouble getting in. The average ACT score of this year’s class is 27, and the average GPA is 3.9.
That ACT score is more than 6 points higher than the state average. But despite its exclusivity, Gatton isn’t a private school.
Students live and study here at no additional charge to the family. The state spends just over $23.3 thousand per Gatton Academy student. Comparatively, about $8,700 is spent on every other public school student.
“How many physics teachers can you buy with that, how many chemistry teachers can you get with that?” says Gott. “How many advanced math teachers can you get with that? By pooling the money and putting it into one focus, we’re able to have the top math and science curriculum in the state in a place and time when it’s difficult to find even one physics teacher for all the special needs out there.”
“It’s something that I have worked on for more than ten years,” says Kentucky Speaker of the House Jody Richards. “To have a math and science academy.”
Richards’ legislative district includes Gatton. He was instrumental in getting the academy funded.
“The general assembly provided a special appropriation to make this academy a reality. We have 2.8 million in state funding,” he says.
Western Kentucky University chief financial officer Ann Mead says that appropriation came in 2006, with the money to be used exclusively for Gatton.
Now the governor is asking Western to cut 3% of its total budget, which is slightly less than the total cost of the academy.
Mead says the academy is not in danger of closing, but will have to bear its own budget cut of up to three percent.
And Richards says there’s still some unfinished business regarding Gatton that will come up in the current General Assembly. New legislation will make Gatton a full graduating school. Right now, the academy is not authorized to award official diplomas. In the meantime, they’ve made a deal in which the students’ hometown high schools award diplomas students who complete their coursework at Gatton.
So when Jenny Ludden graduates, she’ll get a diploma from Adair County High School, 80 miles away from Gatton Academy.
