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(Photo by E.J. Greenblat) “AIM HIGH AND BE BOLD”: Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman spoke of “the spirit of Bob Goheen and his beloved Princeton” as she said goodbye to the Class of 2008 Tuesday. “His strengths as a leader were embedded in the qualities we hope to have instilled in each of you.” Excerpts from the speech follow the Commencement story.

Area Police Clamping Down on Truck Traffic

Ellen Gilbert

Lawrence Police Officer Bryce Dowers was describing a recent exchange he had with a truck driver. “‘I’m heading back to Montreal,’” he quoted the driver as saying. “Then what are you doing on Route 206?” was the officer’s response.

Borough to Make Public Parking Garage Financials; Comment Invited Tonight

Dilshanie Perera
Linda Arntzenius

The substance of Princeton Borough Council’s long series of private negotiations with its developer, Nassau HKT Urban Renewal Associates LLC., concerning Phase II of the development of the downtown area bounded by Tulane and Spring streets will be brought before the public tonight at 7:30 p.m. in Borough Hall, along with a presentation of the costs of remediation of the basement of the Spring Street parking garage that was a part of Phase I of the development project.

Pres. Tilghman Honors Pres. Goheen at University’s 261st Commencement

Addressing approximately 7,000 Commencement Day guests on the front lawn of Nassau Hall Tuesday, Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman paid tribute to her late predecessor Robert Goheen’s ability to “lead change when it mattered most” while transforming the University at “a critical time in her history.”

Record Review

Venturing in the Slipstream With Van Morrison and Johnny Depp

Stuart Mitchner

“There was a redemptive element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work.”

This is an anniversary year both for Johnny Depp, who turns 45 next Monday, and for the album that changed his life, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, which was recorded 40 years ago this fall. Though he came of age a decade later, Depp absorbed the “compassion,” “beauty,” and “mystical awe” Lester Bangs heard in this music created in the heart of the 1960s, and it’s the spirit of that decade, enriched by the influx of forces from the 1950s like Jack Kerouac and James Dean, that shaped and expanded his character as a performer. Johnny Depp is an actor capable of being a genre unto himself, a possibility Murray Pomerance raises in his book Johnny Depp Starts Here (Rutgers 2005). What Depp discovered in the brave new world of Astral Weeks helped him to become, to use Pomerance’s words, an actor “whose selection of roles, whose infusion into the roles he plays, whose depth of commitment to his performance, whose subtlety of expression, whose range of athleticism and grace, whose physical plasticity and immense vocal range, contribute in sum to a performance style that is at once surprising, brilliant, unparalleled, unrepeated, and unrepeatable.”