OUT WITH SCROOGE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Talk about donning gay apparel …

    A gruff, aging man sits alone in front of his television on Christmas Eve. He's too cheap to pay for premium channels, so he flips irritably through the usual offerings: It's a Wonderful Life. How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Humbug, all of it.
    The joke is that this man is a 21st-century version of Ebenezer Scrooge, and he inhabits one of the hoariest Christmas tales of all: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Yet we find this "Ben" Scrooge not in Victorian England, but in contemporary America. He's a bitter, self-loathing interior designer. He's gay. And so is nearly every other character in Joe Godfrey's A Queer Carol, being presented by the Alternative Theatre Company.
    Godfrey's treatment of the Dickens story doesn't actually stray too far from the original. True, it's updated and queered, but it remains a serious-minded account of how one man's soul gradually withers but is revived by ghostly visitations on Christmas Eve.

    You can find my full Tucson Weekly review here.

BAD NEWS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    NPR News is heavily playing the story of Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota undergoing surgery after an apparent stroke. This is valid national news—control of the Senate hinges on Johnson’s health, because his state’s Republican governor could replace him with a Republican—but to what purpose did NPR play a recording just now of Johnson becoming disoriented when the stroke hit during a conference call? You could call this a number of things; I’d start with “tasteless.” NPR News producers should be ashamed of themselves.

MUCHO PIN8

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Radio announcer conundrum of the week: How to pronounce the last name of dead-at-last Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet? The answer, according to Slate’s Andy Engber, is that you can find a justification for just about anything. Engber finally dug up a video of the man pronouncing his own name, though, and it came out “pee-no-chay.” You can read the whole pronunciation saga here. That's where you'll also learn how to pronounce the title of this post.

DEM BONES

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Courtesy of oboeinsight, here’s a link to a human-interest item that supports your parents’ notion that nobody with any good sense becomes a professional musician. This trombonist, at least, suffers an obvious sense deficit. It’s hard to resist an article that begins like this:

    Paolo Esperanza, bass-trombonist with the Simphonica Mayor de Uruguay, in a misplaced moment of inspiration decided to make his own contribution to the cannon shots fired as part of the orchestra's concert. In complete seriousness he placed a large, ignited firecracker, which was equivalent in strength to a quarter stick of dynamite, into his aluminium straight mute and then stuck the mute into the bell of his quite new Yamaha in-line double-valve bass trombone.
    Later, from his hospital bed he explained to a reporter through bandages on his mouth …

    Alas, this story is entirely apocryphal, right down to the conductor being blasted into the front rows of the auditorium. But what does it tell us about trombonists that it sounds like the sort of thing one of them would do?

DRAW EARLY, SHOOT SELF IN FOOT

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    The University of Arizona is going after nearly all the Rio Nuevo tax increment financing money earmarked for development west of the freeway—money that’s supposed to cover a lot of things that have nothing to do with the UA’s museums. Get a load of this, from today’s Arizona Daily Star:

    Its request of $166 million for the Science Center and $62 million for the new state museum total $228 million in Rio Nuevo money—more than the city had suggested it intended to spend on the entire West Side.
    Alexis Faust, executive director of the UA's Flandrau Science Center, said the funding request demonstrates the UA's commitment to Rio Nuevo because the university would pay $10.6 million in operating costs per year on both structures. On a per-year basis, Faust added, the operating costs are more than the city's cost to build the structures.
    The request also said that if the UA pulled out, the attendance at West Side museums would fall about 30 percent to 40 percent.
    "We need to fully fund the West Side campus and museums," Faust said. "The Science Center is like an anchor, like a Nordstrom is at a mall. You really need the anchor tenant in a redevelopment."
    [City Manager Mike] Hein called the UA's Friday request "poor political brinkmanship." He said he was "stunned they would take such an aggressive approach so early in the process" and suggested Faust is trying to "either stir the pot or corner the market."
    "The biggest impediment to the UA Science Center succeeding seems to be the UA Science Center staff," Hein said.

    Read the Star story, and then take a look at an article I wrote on the subject for this month’s Downtown Tucsonan.
    UA officials have never really understood how despised the university is in some corners of the community. Nearby residents hate the UA for eating neighborhoods and treating their blocks as a dump for overflow parking and partying student residents. Some taxpayers think the UA is full of lazy, unproductive professors who pursue useless research (especially in the humanities), teach way too few students on their own and leave the real work to underpaid grad students. Grad students think they’re underpaid and overworked. Undergrads grumble that undergraduate education is neglected in favor of graduate programs and faculty research support. These opinions are by no means universal, nor are they necessarily fully supportable, but they are common. And the UA isn’t making any points with the community with what looks like an attempt to blackmail the city into funding its off-campus development program.
    Whatever may or may not be wrong with the UA, one thing is certain: Its leaders are dreadfully out of touch with the community, except when it comes to major fundraising campaigns. Speaking of which, it might be a good time to launch a campaign for the new cultural campus west of the Santa Cruz, because Mike Hein obviously isn’t going to stand for what looks like the university’s attempt at extortion.

DEAD AIR

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Read what the New Yorker’s Alex Ross has to say about the impending death of classical radio in our nation’s capital.