PLAZA SUITE

posted by James Reel

    Last week, I attended a KUAT staff meeting in which we brainstormed ideas for our new mission and vision statements. (Whatever one thinks of such exercises, there’s no denying that an organization—or an individual—needs to have a clearly articulated reason for being.) An especially popular concept was KUAT as a “plaza,” a place where members of the community can meet and exchange ideas.
    That’s a lovely thought, but I don’t see how it can be true. Broadcasting is a one-way activity. Now, of course, listeners can call me for information on something they’ve heard, they can badger the music director to play some favorite piece, they can complain to the station manager about this or that, and in public broadcasting they can phone in pledges. On rare occasions, a few people can participate in some broadcast as part of a studio audience. And a few people get interviewed for news and public affairs program. But for KUAT to be a “plaza,” for it to be a center of “community” (the big buzzword since the popularization of the Internet a decade ago), it must be truly interactive, and radio and television aren’t equipped for meaningful, large-scale interactivity. (Conducting an audience survey solicits information, but it isn’t really an example of free interactivity.)
    There’s always the Internet, and KUAT is gradually bolstering its online presence. Even in cyberspace, though, we encounter limits to the benefits of interactivity. From the beginning, my own blog has disabled the “comments” feature, not because I don’t want to hear from readers, but because I’m protecting readers and myself from the spammers and off-topic ranters who monopolized online forums. (Does anybody read Usenet newsgroups anymore? Spammers and wackos drove me away from Uselessnet by the late 1990s.) If you want to engage me in dialog, great. Click the “send me an e-mail” link in the panel on the right. I post comments that go beyond the nice “attaboy” level, even if commenters object to what I’ve written. But new-media freaks will object that this isn’t fully interactive, because I filter the responses. Well, I’m an old-media guy, and I believe in editing and sorting.
    One of my former employers, the Arizona Daily Star, was only the third American newspaper to have a meaningful Web presence when it launched StarNet on May 5, 1995. I was there, and it was exciting, but a lot of it didn’t pan out. Film and art critic turned Web guru Bob Cauthorn had a grand vision; not only did StarNet put newspaper articles online, but the Star became a full-fledged Internet Service Provider to compete locally with AOL, and, among other things, it established a big bunch of local-interest newsgroups. Most of those newsgroups went unused, though, and the comparatively popular ones were ruined by flamers and bullies. So much for building community.
    How could a radio station truly become a center of community conversation? By nature and design, radio is a conduit of carefully structured entertainment and information that flows from us to you. Listener-request shows don’t work in a classical format, because the popular pieces are so long that not many people would have a chance to participate. If somebody requests Carmina Burana, that shoots a whole hour. We could air call-in talk shows about the arts, but wouldn’t you really be far more interested in hearing music?
    Do you have any ideas about how KUAT could become a real community plaza? I’m stumped.

MORE ON RECORDED NEWSCASTS

posted by James Reel

    KUAT/KUAZ newsman Nelson Warnell protests being lumped among the people who record their newscasts a few minutes before air time:
    "FYI, I ALWAYS do my newscasts live (except for the 5:04 because Bill Pitts feels more comfortable having it in the audio vault). I feel it is a great disservice to our listeners to do otherwise. I can think of hundreds of times I've changed a newscast at the last minute because of a breaking story."
    Indeed, I can second this comment from Robert Rappaport:
    "You (James) personally have witnessed, on numerous occassions, how I had to literally throw a local story in the air after NPR ran the same story in the last position of the network newscast. One always has to listen to prevent a flub, such as a repeated story. Unfortunately NPR newscasts air first, so a repeat is OUR mistake."

THE O.C., CLASSICAL DIVISION

posted by James Reel

    A couple of months ago, the blogosphere welcomed a new online journal by Timothy Mangan, the Orange County Register’s classical music writer, critic and resident trombone player. It’s well worth exploring; he calls it “Classical Life.”

GORDON EPPERSON

posted by James Reel

    Retired University of Arizona cello professor Gordon Epperson died Tuesday. I interviewed him for a newspaper article several years ago, and I didn’t know him personally, but he did immediately strike me as a very nice, genial person, and that impression is supported by the testimony of those who knew him. My own cello teacher, Harry Clark, studied with Epperson as a kid; yesterday, Harry praised Epperson as somebody who “could talk about anything, not just cello,” which aptly describes Harry, too. Obviously, Gordon Epperson influenced his students in many ways, not just musically. Early this morning I played Fauré’s Elegy for cello as a little tribute to Gordon Epperson.
    He was ably eulogized in both the Star and the Citizen, but I was amused to see this item in the latter’s obit:

Among his proud possessions when he came here was a 1665-vintage Amati cello, a rare Italian instrument. He prized it so highly that when he traveled, he paid full airline fare for a second seat for the instrument.

    Actually, that’s standard operating procedure for cellists, especially those with valuable instruments. No matter how bomb-proof a cello case may be, it can’t be trusted to protect an Amati or a Strad or some other old Cremonese instrument from baggage handlers and the vagaries of pressure and temperature in a plane’s cargo hold. Even the trunk of a car is hard on a string instrument. Only yesterday, after a 40-minute drive across town, I took my cello out of the fairly toasty trunk of my car to discover that almost all the pegs had popped, presumably because of the change in temperature from my 72-degree house to my 100-degree car (although I never had this problem last summer). Because of the complicated mechanism for attaching the strings to the tailpiece, it took Harry and me nearly half an hour of collaborative effort to get the instrument restrung and retuned. If a little car trip can be this hard on a cello, you don’t have to prize your instrument unusually highly to buy it a plane ticket.

GOLDEN POND

posted by James Reel

    I've got just one review in the slender arts section of the latest Tucson Weekly:

    Over the past couple of months, old movies have unspooled all over Tucson stages. The UA offered the original theatrical version of The Philadelphia Story; another troupe mounted Deathtrap, and now Live Theatre Workshop revives the stage version of Ernest Thompson's On Golden Pond.
    The best thing about LTW's production is that it takes the script on its own terms, never mimicking the Henry Fonda/Katharine Hepburn movie (or at least what I remember of the movie, which I haven't seen since it was released 25 years ago).
    Director Jeremy Thompson (no relation to the author) emphasizes the abundant comic elements of the script and downplays the potential weepiness at the end. We follow elderly Norman and Ethel Thayer through their 48th summer at their cabin at Golden Pond, Maine; Norman is forgetful, and his heart is giving out, and at the end, it looks quite likely that he won't have a 49th summer on the lake. Actually, that seems evident rather early on. But this is no teary two-hour farewell, and it's not even much of a sentimental journey. It's a study of two people who've managed to have a good marriage for a long, long time, and how Norman comes to terms not so much with his impending death as with his semi-estranged daughter and her soon-to-be stepson.

    Read the rest here.

NEWS OF THE DAY

posted by James Reel

    NPR can be as bad as any cable TV channel about hammering non-stories to death all through the day, but this morning the news division did a nice job of mixing items from hour to hour, getting new details on the stories being followed in every newscast, passing along the latest dismal developments in Iraq without obsessing on the usual trivia, and so on. It’s nice that with all the money it’s inherited from the Widow Kroc, NPR news can still sometimes put a little effort into its broadcasts.
    Locally, morning newsman Robert Rappaport pulled some ligaments in his shoulder a couple of nights ago, and Bill Mortimer is filling in, grumbling about the early hour as he arrives with the dawn. Robert is the only KUAT/KUAZ newscaster who always does his stints live; the others, including Bill, record their newscasts just a few minutes before air time. That way, they can start over if they make any big mistakes, and work on getting the timing exactly right (the KUAT-FM newscasts simultaneously fit into a tight slot on KUAZ). Sometimes I worry about using recorded newscasts. What if something newsworthy happens before air time? But hey, this is Tucson, where (despite the false urgency of live TV remotes) newsy events tend not to “break” like Derby horses. They just amble out, and there’s plenty of time for reporters to catch up.