SCRAMBLED SCHEDULE

posted by James Reel

    I woke up in the middle of the night with a blog post in mind inspired by my half day back at the helm of the Tucson Weekly; it was a rant about losing the useful distinctions of language that make English so rich and versatile, but now all I can remember is a complaint about how people misuse “backyard” and “backseat” as nouns (even in a beautifully written Pulitzer-winning novel like The Known World by Edward P. Jones), whereas their one-word forms should be employed only adjectivally. No doubt you would have found it thrilling.
    Instead, I’ll focus my attention on a couple of interviews I need to chase down in preparation for magazine articles. Late this morning I’m supposed to call the cellist of the Kodály Quartet and talk about the group’s recently completed Schubert cycle, which I alluded to in an earlier post. During the few minutes I was home yesterday afternoon, I got a call from the quartet’s host on the east coast hoping that we could do the interview later in the evening, but things didn’t work out (my fault; I dallied too long dining with friends). I’ve already spoken to the cellist, György Éder, once this morning, so there shouldn’t be any snags with the next call. Tomorrow, I’ll need to rendez-vous somehow with violinist Terje Tønnesen while he’s in town with his Camerata Nordica for a concert presented by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music. To do that, I presume I’ll be making a long-distance call to a Norwegian cell phone in the hands of a person sitting no more than three miles from me. All this after I got ambushed on Saturday by Murray Horwitz, calling me unexpectedly to do an interview we’d never quite scheduled in advance of his performance of An Evening with Sholom Aleichem for Invisible Theatre.
    Conducting interviews on the fly like this makes me extremely uncomfortable. My schedule is loose enough to accommodate them, sometimes, but tight enough that doing so is not entirely convenient. Besides, I’m the sort of methodical person who likes to know exactly what’s going to happen when. That love of precision serves me well in the often unforgiving world of radio; I know down to the second when something is supposed to occur. This Tchaikovsky symphony I’m playing now, for example, will end at 9:59:20. You can set your clock to it.

NO REST FOR THE WICKED

posted by James Reel

    The last word in the title of this post should be pronounced “wick’d.” As in someone affected by Wick Communications, the owner of, among other things, the Tucson Weekly. As in someone like me. When Weekly editor Jimmy Boegle sails off on one of his cruises, he talks me into going back to take over for him, sitting at my old desk (now somewhat worse for wear) and making sure there’s still a Weekly when Jimmy gets back from sipping margaritas and gazing at whales, or whatever he’s doing off the coast of Mexico.
    Because Jimmy lines up everything before he goes, I have no control over the issue’s content. I merely process copy and seeing that the page layouts conform to good practices; basically, I spend my time making sure the writers who end sentences with parenthetical insertions place the period where it belongs, outside the parentheses (like this). (Why are freelancers suddenly getting this wrong? It’s bad enough that they didn’t learn the proper American sequence of periods and quotation marks in elementary school, but putting the period inside the parentheses violates common sense and is a mark of utter proofreading incompetence, except when the parenthetical remark is a self-contained sentence, like this one.)
    Can you tell that I’m already getting surly at the thought of two very long days, 5-11 a.m. here at KUAT and then straight over to the Weekly until 5 p.m. today and 7 tomorrow?
    What I dislike about going back to the Weekly is not fixing other people’s sloppy writing, which is one thing I do for a living, but making the trek out to that soulless office in a business park near the airport. It’s difficult to get into the alt-weekly mindset in a facility that looks so much like an insurance office. Things were much better and more freewheeling in the dark, labyrinthine old building across from the Cushing Street Bar where the paper was based when I was lured to the editor’s job five years ago. I hated that facility at first, but I gradually came to appreciate its character, not to mention its downtown location.
    Anyway, I’d better think about writing my review of Fuddy Meers, which I saw very late Saturday night at Live Theatre Workshop. If I don’t get it done soon, my editor will yell at me.

THE TRUTH ABOUT RADIO FUNDRAISING

posted by James Reel

    As I write, we’re in the second day of our blessedly abbreviated autumn membership campaign. We’re supposed to sound happy and excited about it on the air, and we actually are … part of the time. But, in truth, our enthusiasm rises and falls through a predictable cycle.
    Describing only my own feelings, I admit that when management reminds us that a pledge drive is coming, my first response is dismay. The schedule gets a lot more hectic than usual, as we work the music around a set of strictly timed fundraising breaks. Besides expecting more hectic shifts, I also anticipate … boredom. These campaigns usually go on for several days (this one lasts only two); I’m sitting here for six hours a day, exposed to the same set of arguments and incentives over and over and over again.
    But then the campaign begins, and it’s actually fun. It’s a break from our usual routine, we get to speak to you in a more personal way, and we can interact with our colleagues and visitors (the radio business is usually quite solitary). It feels like we’re doing something that’s both special and necessary, and we really don’t spend that much time out of every year doing it.
    And then comes the next phase: fatigue. What is initially fun and fresh gets old within a few days, and we start wondering why each of you listeners can’t just stop what you’re doing, take 90 seconds to call in a pledge, even just a little pledge, and let us get back to the music schedule—now. The dead spots of the day (midmorning, midafternoon) become predictable, and depressing. Several years ago, Mike Serres pretended to sob in despair on air during a particularly dreary Saturday afternoon.
    Finally, it’s over. Jubilation! We’ve got some money in the bank, or at least on its way, and work gets back to normal. And, in retrospect, nobody suffered all that much during the campaign. In fact, the change of pace was rather enjoyable. In a bizarre twist of psychology, we anticipate the next drive, some months hence, with something resembling … pleasure. We are sick, sick people.

ROGUES AND SPIRITS

posted by James Reel

    Oops—almost forgot to post links to my theater reviews in the current Tucson Weekly. First, a new company deserves plaudits for its ambition, even if the final product leaves a bit to be desiered:

Rogue Theatre's ambitious first production, The Balcony, announces a company of serious purpose, high artistic aspirations, courage and refreshingly perverse intellectual tastes. If this production falls just short of the ideal, it's first because of playwright Jean Genet's own lack of artistic self-control, and second because the company hesitates to indulge Genet fully in his worst excesses.

When Arizona Theatre Company produced Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit in 1997, even a psychic would have sensed a vast emptiness on the stage. Coward's little farce evaporated and floated away, the actors dwarfed by the set, the script seeming to be annoyingly insubstantial. Blithe Spirit works far, far better in the tight confines of Live Theatre Workshop, where it opened last weekend and still proves to be insubstantial, but now amusingly so.

FAN MAIL

posted by James Reel

    Some time ago I found in my mailbox an envelope holding a letter I’d written to a listener in response to a question she’d posed about a piece of music; at the bottom of the letter, she’d jotted an appreciative little note. What’s striking about this letter—aside from the shameless and excessive way I misused “which” in restrictive clauses back then—is that I wrote it in 1984, and the listener still had it!
    She’d written to me (I was KUAT’s music director then) for information on obtaining a recording of something she’d recently heard us play, Auber’s hour-long ballet Marco Spada. I regretted to inform her that the disc we’d broadcast was out of print and no other recording was available, but I gave her some tips on where she might find used copies and cutouts. I also mentioned that I’d scheduled the ballet again for a particular afternoon two months later. Turns out she taped that broadcast, and folded up my letter and tucked it into the cassette case.
    The lesson here is that our listeners are inquisitive, tenacious, grateful, and have very, very long memories. It’s good to have friends like these … as long as we behave ourselves, because we could just as easily turn tenacious people with long memories into enemies for life.

BREVITY

posted by James Reel

    To see my advice on how to fake a classical concert review put to use in the real world, look at this coverage of last weekend’s Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra performance. In a 447-word review, only 132 words—two paragraphs near the end—discuss the musical aspects of the concert in a meaningful way. Might as well just run a photo with those 132 words as the caption.