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Amanda Palmer is doing a play...at her old high school. How cool is that?

Yup. Back from a solo performance at Coachella (left), the Dresden Dolls singer/pianist and Lexington High School grad Amanda Palmer has been tweeting about spending her days back at LHS:

lunch break at LHS rehearsal: people are playing guitar, evil dodgeball & we're listening to "more than a feeling" on the stereo. in love.

Palmer is providing the music for a student play based on the 1998 Neutral Milk Hotel album "In The Aeroplane Over the Sea." The play, developed through improv, invokes Anne Frank and art's power. Palmer told Pitchfork she's there because "My high school theater director, Steven Bogart, is one of my biggest artistic mentors and I've been trying to get back there since I left." 

Palmer talks a lot more about her original LHS student theater experience with Bogart in "an explanation" on her blog: this was my HIGH SCHOOL THEATER DEPARTMENT. and that was only my FRESHMAN FUCKING YEAR. my jaw hit the floor. this was an adult - a teacher - who was treating the teenagers like they were adults. there was no patronizing. there was real art. we were digging into ourselves and finding real things. my heart exploded.

Performances are May 7-9. I have a feeling it's gonna be a hot ticket. Bonus funny part: NPR thought the whole story was a prank. (Thanks to Mike Benning for the Coachella pic!)

Nevermoah! Menino to name square for Edgar Allen Poe

There's an interesting article in the latest New Yorker reminding what a sad-ass screwup Edgar Allen Poe was. It says that before the author of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Raven" died, aged just 40, "Poe, drunk and delirious, seems to have been dragged around Baltimore to cast votes, precinct after precinct, in one of that city’s infamously corrupt congressional elections, until he finally collapsed." In other words, his death was collateral damage from big-city ballot fraud. So it is with some amusement I note that Mayor Tom Menino yesterday announced he'll run for a fifth term as mayor, and next Monday at 11 a.m. Hizzoner will dedicate the new Edgar Allen Poe Square near the Common. Menino will rename the intersection of Boylston Street and Charles Street South in honor of the Bicentennial Anniversary of Poe’s Jan. 19, 1809, birth nearby at at 62 Carver Street. The decision comes at the behest of Boston College English Professor Paul Lewis, who is crusading for greater recognition of Poe's Hub ties. In December, Lewis will curate a Poe exhibit tentatively titled “A Raven in the Frog Pond,” scheduled to run through March at the Boston Public Library.

MORE: Listen to an NPR report on the effort by Lewis and his students. And check the first comment below for some news that apparently escaped the organizers - there's already an E.A. Poe Square in the neighborhood. (Photo illustration: Boston College.)

EarthFest goes back to the future, and more morning reads

The lineup for the Radio 92.9 EarthFest at the Hatch Shell on May 30 includes two of my favorite bands ... of 1993. The headliners are Soul Asylum and the Lemonheads, along with Shawn Mullins and Seven Mary Three, with the winner of a local-bands showdown opening. The site says the Lemonheads have a covers collection coming out in June. ... Check out movie blog Meet In The Lobby for tips on enjoying the Indie Film Festival Boston. ... The Boston Athenæum has extended the very cool “Vanderwarker’s Pantheon: Minds and Matter in Boston,” photo exhibit by Peter Vanderwarker until May 9, 2009. It's free! Details: www.bostonathenaeum.org. Right: John Hancock Tower, 2006. © Peter Vanderwarker

Boston Cyberarts Festival 2009: Interview with founder George Fifield

George Fifield founded the Boston Cyberarts Festival back in 1999, and he's still in charge for the 2009 edition, running April 24-May 10 around Eastern Mass. and online. Virtual reality and visual art, electronic music and the legacy of dance's Merce Cunningham are among many topics explored explored more than 60 exhibitions, performances and workshop. I interviewed Fifield (right) by email over the last week or so, on topics from the economy to Shepard Fairey and the computer virus as art.

HubArts: How has the Cyberarts Festival been affected by the economic downtown, as an event and an organization? And how is the economy reflected in the work you'll be presenting?

Fifield: The structure of the Cyberarts Festival is a large collaboration of arts and educational organizations all producing, within their own mission and budget, exhibitions or performances or events about artists working with new technologies. In fact it's the largest collaboration of arts organization in New England. So we have been very lucky that many organization have agreed again this year to do an exhibition or performance for the Festival and its as big as ever. Of course our own fundraising has been hit as have everyone else's.

But the economy has certainly provided grist for some of the art. One is Children of Arcadia (left), which is a virtual reality work that will be up at the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery. It a living 17th-century Baroque painting you can explore, which combines the physical world of downtown Manhattan with a virtual environment called Arcadia. It is continually reading real world data from the internet on the health of the U.S. through stock market and other indices and translates this data into either a utopia or apocalypse. In other words, when the country is doing well, the virtual skies are clear and the birds are singing, but when the country is doing poorly the skies are overcast or lightning and thundering and the buildings are falling into ruin. So if you want to know how the country's doing, head on over to the Cambridge Arts Council.

Partners In Preservation voting update

Apparently I'm not the only one with fond memories of Paragon Park. Here's the latest on the frontrunners in the Partners in Preservation program voting for $1 million in grants from American Express: The Paragon Carousel is tops with 11 percent of the votes cast, and Salem Old Town Hall is second with 10 percent, the only other site in double figures. The Twitter campaigners at the New England Aquarium are in ninth  place with 5 percent, and our neighbors at Lowell's Boat Shop are in 11th place with 4 percent. In 25th and last place is the Norfolk Grange Hall, with zero percent of the vote, which makes me a little sad. Read our original post on the PiP program, run by Amex and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Weekend reading

Great get for Big Red & Shiny: Shepard Fairey prosecutor works at bar exhibiting the artist's work. You can't make this stuff up. ... Also: Fun with film festivals. ... And I'm never going back to my old j-school.

Want to run ArsenalARTS?

Now here's a first: A request to post an ad for a big arts job on HubArts. I'd like to think that's a compliment to you readers out there. How can I say no? But I'm only doing executive directors and above, OK?

Click to the jump for the ad, which is for the executive director position at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown, home to the New Rep and other groups. They're looking for people who are already within commuting distance. If you apply for the job, tell 'em you saw it on HubArts...

ArtsBoston.org charts course for arts online

Add me to the list of people recommending the new ArtsBoston.org. Countless syllables have been spilled dissecting the future of arts and the media in the fast-changing world of ever-shrinking newspapers, thriving blogs and Twitter. ArtsBoston.org isn't intended as journalism, but it's not exactly advertising either. It's a mashup of the old newspaper arts listings with social media and links and multimedia. And while I'm wary of the slow blurring of journalistic boundaries online - BY THE WAY, PLEASE CLICK ON OUR SPONSORS OVER THERE TO THE RIGHT - it seems to me that ArtsBoston Director of Marketing Charles McEnerney and the rest of his crew are getting it mostly right. That's what I told him yesterday, anyway, when we spent an hour on the phone walking through the beta site and talking about the possibilities.

The site revamp came about in part because ArtsBoston heard from its member arts organizations that they were "looking for help selling regular price tickets as well as the half-price offers" through ArtsBoston's BosTix program. The other big factor for those arts groups was the steady shrinkage in arts listings in the mainstream media, as the Globe, Herald and other outlets cope with their own, partly internet-induced economic challenges. "A handful of groups said this is what is lacking," McEnerney said.

Still being tweaked byArtsBoston staff and their partners at Artsopolis Network in San Jose, CA, the site offers a ton of entry points on the front page, from featured events to category listings, as well as video. Each listing, in turn, includes ticket details, other media and both "citizen reviews" and "media reviews." (McEnerney said they're still figuring out where bloggers fit.) The initial information comes from the arts groups, who fill out an online form, and it's then approved by staff before posting. The featured spots on the bright and colorful home page are reserved for ArtsBoston's 170-and-growing membership. The aim, McEnerney said, is to give "a comprehensive sense of what's happening in Boston in the arts."

I think they're a good way down the road to doing that, although we talked about a bunch of little tweaks. Among the moves I suggested was putting the @artsboston Twitter feed on the side of the home page in a widget. Other bloggers have also been doing focus groups with McEnerney. "Social media," of course, can be translated as "one hand washes the other," and while McEnerney is looking for good blog reviews of the new site, I'm looking for links back to HubArts. And of course there's a BosTix ad OVER THERE TO THE RIGHT. When old-media refugees like me say journalism on the web brings a whole new set of dilemmas, that's what we mean. But most of today's online audience is either cynically savvy about such concerns or just doesn't give a damn. We live in interesting times, and a lot of new solutions are needed. ArtsBoston.org looks like one.

BSO season announced: Read the full schedule

James Levine spilled the beans on the 2009-10 Boston Symphony Orchestra season back in February and you read it here. His plans include a complete cycle of Beethoven's symphonies over four weeks in the fall and an opening night  tribute to retiring longtime BSO harpist Ann Hobson Pilot, as well as our minimum daily requirement of Elliot Carter. The symphony announced full season details yesterday, embargoed for this morning, and the full release with all the dates and details and guests is after the jump. The biggest BSO news this week, though, was broken by Geoff over at The Exhibitionist: The orchestra has canceled its plans for a swing through Europe next year due to the economy and the "resulting uncertainty."

Lowell's Boat Shop offers boat for votes

Rememeber yesterday I told you about the Partners In Preservation program coming to Massachusetts? The program is a collaboration of American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation and will kick in $1 million for renovation and preservation to be divided between the winning site, as chosen by online voting, and an undetermined number of the other hopefuls. The lobbying began almost as soon as the contest was announced, but Lowell's Boat Shop in Amesbury, just up the river from HubArts World Headquarters, is going full steam ahead. They're putting up one of their famous hand-crafted wooden skiffs to be randomly awarded to one of the people who vote for them. The money would go to roof, window and exterior repairs - and a heating system. Go to Lowell's web site for details.