The KUAZ schedule will be modified Friday to allow for live coverage of the first presidential debate. Here's what to expect:
5:30 p.m. Arizona Spotlight
6:00 p.m. Presidential Debate (from NPR)
8:00 p.m. National Listener Party (call-in show from NPR)
9:00 p.m. JazzSet
(Arizona Spotlight moves up one half-hour. Marketplace (evening) is pre-empted.)
Many of the people who discuss ways to attract new audiences to classical concerts advocate ending the “snooty” practice of prohibiting applause between movements. But the fact that a movement has ended doesn’t mean that the whole thing is over. Premature applause can break a spell created by the music just heard, or at the very least delay getting on with the rest of the piece. I don’t even like internal applause at jazz concerts after solos, because the clapping covers part of the solo that comes next. Public spectacles of all sorts—concerts, movies, plays during which an admirable scenic design first appears—would be greatly improved if audiences spent more time sitting on their hands. As a fellow blogger writes, “I know there is no rule saying no applause between movements. But, by the same token, there is no rule saying wind should not be broken by members of the audience during the performance.” That’s Pliable, a fellow of extraordinarily wide musical and social interests, who presides over On An Overgrown Path.
If you were unable to attend last Friday's live edition of NPR's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday, you can catch a short video of it online.
The show originated from the University of Arizona's Mars Science Operations Center and the UA's PR office (UA News) caught some of the action on video, which you can see here. You'll need the QuickTime player plug-in to watch it.
English writer on music Norman Lebrecht can’t be trusted when he makes pronouncements on the state of the classical recording industry (for him, the decline of the major labels means the end of the world, ignoring the fact that small labels are taking up the task with greater competence and elegance than the majors). But he does opine intelligently on other matters, and his little essay on the death of conductor Vernon Handley is well worth reading. Lebrecht bemoans the demise of specialist conductors who could do a few things magnificently; they’ve been replaced by generalists who do everything at a level of basic competence but nothing with special insight. See what Lebrecht has to say here.
In a week of seemingly nothing but bad news about the economy, NPR is trying to help you understand it all.
The network has gathered some background information and blogs about the current financial crisis and all of the late-breaking money news. A special economic blog also includes a podcast, because it's hard to cram all that bad news into a two-hour magazine-type show.
It’s Thursday, which means I have new spew in the Tucson Weekly. This time, a review of two plays and a restaurant. First, the theater story:
Two musicals are running on the eastside right now, and both of them are about people who create things with their hands. All right, that's stretching the point of the Gaslight Theatre show, a spoof of Frankenstein. More straightforward is what just opened by the Da Vinci Players: the mostly blue-collar musical called _Working_. The show is adapted from a 1972 book for which Studs Terkel recorded dozens of people musing about the work they did. Later in the decade, it was turned into a concept musical by Stephen Schwartz, who was then fresh from triumphs as the composer of _Godspell_ and _Pippin_; he is now best-known for _Wicked_. On _Working_, though, Schwartz has had a lot of help from his friends, especially as the show has continued to evolve, updating itself to accommodate the development of computers and barcode scanners. … The characters in _Working_ may have their troubles and disappointments, but all in all, they take pride in what they do. So should the Da Vinci Players. "Pride" is not the first word that comes to mind when the subject is the Gaslight Theatre, a company dedicated to the belief that any prideful character should undergo a pratfall. Gaslight's latest spoof is called _Frankenstein Lives, or the Jolt's on You_. It has less to do with the Mary Shelley novel than the 1930s Boris Karloff movies, and the gravest danger to a show like this is that Mel Brooks created the subject's definitive parody with the film _Young Frankenstein_. To his credit, writer-director Peter Van Slyke has stitched together his own version without seeming at all beholden to Brooks (other than the thunderclaps whenever somebody says "house of Frankenstein," which calls to mind the horses' terror at the mention of Frau Blücher).
You’ll find the full review here, after which you can move along to the Chow section:
A couple of years ago, I heard a rumor that a New York Indian restaurant had sent a headhunter to Tucson in an effort to lure chefs from our city's Indian restaurants. Apparently, it was just too difficult to find good Indian chefs in NYC, but they were easy to come by here. Until this year, all of Tucson's Indian restaurants had been modest family-style places, decorated with depictions of Hindu gods and gurus and sites like the Taj Mahal, and all serving intensely flavorful cuisine from the subcontinent. A few months ago, something different opened in Oro Valley: Saffron Indian Bistro. The food is similar to that already available here, if less spicy, confirming that restaurant heat increasingly dissipates as Tucson diners travel north.
The rest of the review awaits you here.
