The Shame of Bishop Carroll High School vs. the Jubilance of an Arts Community UPDATED

Okay, so about a million years ago I went to a then-newfangled high school where there were no scheduled classes, just "learning centres," "unit packages" and an unerring emphasis on the use of a day planner and time management.

Sometimes I think that, much as the school--Calgary's Bishop Carroll, if you must know--was pitched as a centre for Olympic-class athletes (of which I was most decidedly not one) it was also, unintentionally, a training ground for future freelancers. Instead of coffee and beer, we had slurpees and fries, but most everything else was the same. Well, sort of.

In any case, I felt the shame of Bishop Carroll High School weighing on my shoulders last night as a forgotten, non-daytimered deadline sprang up out of nowhere to prevent me from attending the Toronto Town Hall meeting on the arts at the Theatre Centre, posted here previously.

Luckily, there were other brighter minds on the ball who are filling me in today about how things went:

• Cultural blogger Timothy Comeau has kindly posted an MP3 of the whole event over at his Goodreads site
• Someone has posted a vid of Naomi Klein's talk at the Town Hall on Youtube (via simpleposie and Sally and LM)
• Art blogger Andrea Carson has posted her own report on the Town Hall over at her View on Canadian Art
• The Toronto Star does a more general-newsy report on the event in today's paper
• And notably, the group that organized the Town Hall, now more formally organized as the cheekily titled team Department of Culture has their own website where arts supporters can sign up to help the cause

All exciting stuff! 

UPDATE Here's a few more links that came in this afternoon in reaction to the arts cuts

• The always interesting Terence Dick over at Akimbo surveys reaction from prominent Canadian artists to the cuts
• More videos of the Town Hall are now posted at Department of Culture's website including speeches from Claire Hopkinson, Greg Elgstrand, and Darren O'Donnell.
• Also, Laura Sutula at Torontoist did a nice report on the evening and says there's an upcoming organizing meeting at 10am on Saturday, location TBD

Image of an unblemished, unblamable day planner from the Day Timer website