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Published: June 25, 2009
■ Paul McCartney, 67, is coming to Atlanta for a concert to benefit the city's historic Piedmont Park.
The Piedmont Conservancy that cares for the park said yesterday that McCartney, a former Beatle, will perform in the park on Aug. 15. The show is expected to dwarf the conservancy's 2007 Dave Matthews Band and The Allman Brothers Band show that attracted 50,000. Money raised goes to maintaining and expanding the sprawling and heavily used park in the shadow of Midtown Atlanta's skyscrapers. The park dates back to a private club founded in 1887.
■ The Academy Awards will once again have 10 films vying in the best-picture category, Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Sid Ganis said yesterday. "After more than six decades, the Academy is returning to some of its earlier roots, when a wider field competed for the top award of the year," Ganis said in Beverly Hills. "The final outcome, of course, will be the same -- one best-picture winner -- but the race to the finish line will feature 10, not just five, great movies from 2009." During the Academy's earlier years, the best-picture category welcomed more than five films; for nine years, there were 10 nominees. The 16th Academy Awards in 1943 was the last year to include a field of that size. Casablanca was named best picture.
■ Seinfeld star Jason Alexander told a crowd yesterday in Jerusalem that the search for an Israeli-Palestinian solution and the "show about nothing" that launched him to fame have one thing in common -- neither seemed destined to succeed. But just as the show managed to bounce back with comedy, he said, a solution might be found for Mideast troubles if people write and laugh with one another. "We were canceled, we were gone, we were a distant memory and somehow we came back and eventually everybody caught on and started paying attention," he said. "Other than that, we shed no wisdom." Alexander, 49, is a creator of "Imagine: 2018," a project that asked Israeli and Palestinian high-school students to write stories about what the world might look like 10 years down the road if an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement was signed in 2008.
Deaths
Philip Simmons, a renowned blacksmith from South Carolina who created hundreds of ornamental iron gates and fences in more than 50 years at the forge, on Monday, at 97. Simmons, of Charleston, died in his sleep, said Gippon Boags, the director of Harleston-Boags Funeral Home. Simmons started work as a blacksmith when he was a young man, and eventually created more than 500 pieces. His work can be seen throughout Charleston, at the Smithsonian and internationally. He received several awards, including the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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