Arizona Public Media :: Cue Sheet, Archives June 2006

RETURN OF THE SUCCUBI

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, June 30th 2006 at 8:04

The latest steaming pile of manure from the public radio system’s Radio Research Consortium is a series of cowpie reports collectively called Audience 2010, masterminded by audience researchers George Bailey (of Walrus Research) and David Giovannoni. The first thing you have to remember is that these guys and their ...

THE BUZZ AT GASLIGHT

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, June 29th 2006 at 6:41

Gaslight Theatre has revived one of its better, funnier, more coherent shows, and it makes for a fun night out:

Holy leotard, Batman! Those evil geniuses at the Gaslight Theatre have taken your life's work and turned it into a musical parody called Gnatman! But even though the faithful ...

CULTURE ON PHOENIX RADIO

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, June 28th 2006 at 7:38

Here's a news item of interest to folks in Phoenix, rather than Tucson, but what I find unusual is that the program in question airs on the city's liberal talk-radio station rather than its classical-music outlet:

NEW WEEKLY RADIO SHOW ABOUT PHOENIX ARTS ON 1480AM
Ken LaFave, Cathy ...

SEARCH, FIND, SORT

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, June 28th 2006 at 7:30

While checking out an Internet rumor at the invaluable and entertaining snopes.com, I thought I’d search the site for debunkings of urban legends and phony photos involving my instrument, the cello. But the word “cello” apparently appears nowhere on the snopes site, meaning perhaps that the instrument is ...

THE SHREW UNTAMED

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, June 26th 2006 at 8:53

On Friday night, I plopped myself down on the Reid Park grass (allergies be damned), and much to my surprise thoroughly enjoyed the Parks & Rec community theater production of The Taming of the Shrew. This was the first time in its 19 years I had attended one of these “Shakespeare ...

LAUGH, LAUGH, LAUGH

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, June 22nd 2006 at 6:33

Three surprisingly good comedy productions opened in Tucson last week. Oddly, each one gets laughs from potential violence: Neil Simon in boot camp, old ladies poisoning old men, Israelis and Palestinians doing what comes naturally:

Neil Simon is prolific and popular, but he's written only three first-rate plays, together ...

AYES ON THE PRIZE

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, June 21st 2006 at 16:00

Stephen Elton, an excellent local actor and the man behind Beowulf Alley Theatre, has this response to my post against arts prizes:

While I agree that arts prizes can ultimately be meaningless, they do have a tremendous value in publicity. Every year people gather for the Academy Awards and have ...

RETURN OF THE PRODIGALS

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, June 21st 2006 at 13:23

Bob Schneider sends this note:

After 6 years away,most of it based in the Turkish Republc of Northern Cyprus, violinist Beth Ilana Gould and guitarist Matt Gould, better known as Duo46, are moving back to Arizona. They miss those many sunny days.
Duo46 was established in 1994 when Matt ...

CONTRA KEILLOR

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, June 19th 2006 at 7:48

In Slate last week, Sam Anderson tried to figure out the appeal of Garrison Keillor:

He has come to represent a crucial schism in the national taste—the Great Continental Divide between sarcasm and earnestness, snark and purity, the corrupt and the wholesome. The mere sound of Keillor's voice ...

SHAKE YOUR BOOTY

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, June 19th 2006 at 7:44

Terry Teachout questions the relevance and reliability of arts awards and prizes:

Of the giving of prizes there is no end, and it’s hard to think of a single one, however ostensibly prestigious, that hasn’t been devalued by the promiscuity and/or lack of discrimination with which it ...

COMING ATTRACTIONS

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, June 15th 2006 at 6:51

Two items from me in the current Tucson Weekly: a preview of Invisible Theatre's Sizzling Summer Sounds cabaret series, and a preview of Dirty Story, the late show opening at Live Theatre Workshop this weekend. The company is opening its latest mainstage production this weekend, too, so I'm ...

LIGHT EDITING

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, June 12th 2006 at 7:54

Earlier this year, I spent almost every waking hour I wasn’t here at KUAT or off reviewing some play or scrambling to meet some magazine deadline hacking away at somebody else’s 285,000-word book manuscript. That’s about the length of two normal non-fiction books. A publisher for whom I do editing and proofreading asked me to turn this ungainly thing—a memoir by someone who is not a professional writer, I might add—into something that could go onto the fall list with some expectation of selling without causing hernias among readers nationwide. Fortunately, it’s a compelling book written in a distinctive voice on a topic of high current interest. (OK, I’ll stop being coy; it’s the career story of a retired U.S. Customs agent named Lee Morgan, to be issued this fall under the title The Reaper’s Line.) I had to professionalize the writing without muting the voice, reduce the Deadwood-like frequency of colorfully used expletives, and, above all, chainsaw the thing into submission. I wound up getting it down to about 205,000 words, which is still a fat, gray book, but it’s already getting some good advance interest, so I am well pleased with the outcome.
This has belatedly reminded me of a column I wrote back around 1998 or so for an e-zine called The Whole Wired Word, or TW3. The references to “recent” novels are obviouisly dated (and no, eight years later, I still have not read the books I mention, except for the very last one), I of course no longer work at the newsaper I mention, the guidebook I refer to is mercifully out of print, and there are a couple of inside references to the site that you won’t understand (John Bancroft was the e-zine’s editor, and Fred Thomas was a columnist who wrote about print magazines). But there might be enough here to distract you while I take a few days off from blogging in order to write a radio script, catalog 30 new CDs for the station, and finally catch up on a few things I neglected when I was working on Reaper’s Line.

A HOME FOR OLD RECORD MAGAZINES?

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, June 9th 2006 at 5:10

A listener sent me the following note:

I've got nearly all the back issues of Fanfare with the exception of a few issues in the first year or two. None of my heirs will want them. I'm pretty much out of the CD acquisition mode. (I should be ...

STRETCH

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, June 8th 2006 at 7:07

In the latest Tucson Weekly, I offer an update on a former UA cello professor:

Cellist Nancy Green has performed all over the world, her recordings have gotten exceptionally positive reviews, her extroverted style is often compared to that of Jacqueline du Pré, and she had a secure job on ...

LABELS AND PIGEONHOLES

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, June 8th 2006 at 7:06

By coincidence, two bloggers in the past couple of days have addressed the issue of categorizing composers past and present. Kyle Gann, a composer himself associated with the Downtown set (a group easier to describe by what it is not than by the many things it is), considers his position ...

BLOGGING FRANKLY

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, June 7th 2006 at 7:32

Opera singer turned opera marketer Rich Russell has left the blogosphere, citing “a bit of a conflict of interest and the inability to speak freely or usefully.” He hasn’t posted regularly since becoming Sarasota Opera’s marketing director last fall; I assumed he was devoting most of his time ...

TRANSGRESSIONS

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, June 6th 2006 at 7:40

So I’m sitting here playing a recording of the Symphonic Scherzo by Arnold Bax, and the Infamous Bax Quote comes to mind: "You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing." I wanted to check the precise wording, so I Googled “incest and ...

DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, June 5th 2006 at 6:53

In all the blogging about how to save classical music from extinction, this is the most sensible comment I’ve seen so far:

I think we are what we are. I think it's a good idea to try new things, but it's a bad idea to try new ...

QUALITY VERSUS QUANTITY

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, June 5th 2006 at 6:52

Only now have I caught up with an article from last February in Current, public broadcasting’s trade journal. It tells us that “weak audience and income [are] blamed in classical fade” from public radio. As I’ve pointed out before, if we want to attract lots of listeners and ...

DREAMING OFF KEY

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, June 2nd 2006 at 8:02

Concert pianist Jeremy Denk, Joshua Bell’s frequent recital partner, hates it when his friends narrate their not-so-fascinating dreams, but he can’t help recounting one he just had, a colorful performer’s nightmare. Denk is particularly well read; I wonder if he’s ever encountered Kazuo Ishiguro’s The ...

DESIRE

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, June 1st 2006 at 7:40

All the local critics seem to like the bilingual play at Borderlands Theater very much, including me:

The stage is a large, white circle, perhaps of fabric, like a bedsheet. Across it stretches a long, red, rectangular cloth. A man takes up one end of it, a woman the other ...